day. I found her languishing alone, as he had left her at Truro, saying that he
could not face the whole day without a little walk. He arrived about ten
o’clock at night, completely exhausted, having accomplished the forty miles
in record time, but it seemed to me a somewhat curious beginning for a
the autobiography of bertrand russell 54honeymoon. On August 4, 1914, he and I walked together down the Strand
quarrelling. Since then I saw him only once, until I returned to Trinity in
1944, after he had become Master. When he was still an undergraduate he
explained to me once that the Trevelyans never make matrimonial mistakes.
‘They wait’, he said, ‘until they are thirty, and then marry a girl who has both
sense and money.’ In spite of occasional bad times, I have never wished that
I had followed this prescription.
Bob Trevelyan was, I think, the most bookish person that I have ever
known. What is in books appeared to him interesting, whereas what is only
real life was negligible. Like all the family, he had a minute knowledge of the
strategy and tactics concerned in all the great battles of the world, so far as
these appear in reputable books of history. But I was staying with him during
the crisis of the battle of the Marne, and as it was Sunday we could only get a
newspaper by walking two miles. He did not think the battle su?ciently
interesting to be worth it, because battles in mere newspapers are vulgar. I
once devised a test question which I put to many people to discover whether
they were pessimists. The question was: ‘If you had the power to destroy the
world, would you do so?’ I put the question to him in the presence of his
wife and child, and he replied: ‘What? Destroy my library? – Never!’ He was
always discovering new poets and reading their poems out aloud, but he
always began deprecatingly: ‘This is not one of his best poems.’ Once when
he mentioned a new poet to me, and said he would like to read me some of
his things, I said: ‘Yes, but don’t read me a poem which is not one of his
best.’ This stumped him completely, and he put the volume away.
The dons contributed little to my enjoyment of Cambridge. The Master
came straight out of Thackeray’s Book of Snobs. He generally began his remarks
with ‘Just thirty years ago today . . .’ or with, ‘Do you by any chance remem-
ber what Mr Pitt was doing one hundred years ago today?’, and he would
then proceed to relate some very tedious historical anecdote to show how
great and good were all the statesmen mentioned in history. His epistolary
style is illustrated by the letter that he wrote me after the mathematical
tripos in which I was bracketed seventh wrangler:
Trinity Lodge,
Cambridge,
June 13th 1893
My dear B. Russell
I cannot tell you how happy this grand victory has made us. Just 33 years
have passed since I placed the Fifth Form Prize for Latin Prose in the hands
of your dear Father at Harrow, and now I am permitted to congratulate his
son and his own Mother on a remarkable Mathematical success which will
be much appreciated in the College.
cambridge 55We knew your Mathematical ability but we knew also that you had not
given your whole mind to Mathematics but had bestowed large parts of it
on other, possibly even greater, subjects. If this had seriously spoiled your
Mathematical position I should of course have regretted it, but I should have
understood that there were solid compensations.
Now there is happily nothing but congratulation, and you will look forward
quietly to the Moral Science Tripos and the Fellowship without any misgiving
that you have left behind you a Mathematical waste.
I must give myself the pleasure of writing just a few lines to Lady Russell
and Lady Stanley. This will be a happy day for both of them.
Believe me to be,
Most truly yours,
H. Montagu Butler
(Master of Trinity)
I remember once going to breakfast at the Lodge, and it happened that the
day was his sister-in-law’s birthday. After wishing her many happy returns,
he continued: ‘Now, my dear, you have lasted just as long as the Peloponnesian
War.’ She did not know how long this might be, but feared it was longer than
she could wish. His wife took to Christian Science, which had the e?ect of
prolonging his life for some twenty years beyond what might otherwise have
been expected. This happened through her lack of sympathy with his ail-
ments. When he was ill, she would send word to the Council Meeting that the
Master was in bed and refused to get up. It must be said, however, that the
Vice-Master, Aldous Wright, and the Senior Fellow, Joey Prior, lasted almost
equally long without the help of Christian Science. I remember when I was
an undergraduate watching the three of them standing bare-headed at the
Great Gate to receive the Empress Frederick. They were already very old men,
but ?fteen years later they seemed no older. Aldous Wright was a very digni-
?ed ?gure, standing always as straight as a ramrod, and never appearing out-
of-doors without a top hat. Even once when he was roused from sleep at
three in the morning by a ?re the top hat was duly on his head. He stuck to
the English pronunciation of Latin, while the Master adopted the Continental
pronunciation. When they read grace in alternate verses, the e?ect was curi-
ous, especially as the Vice-Master gabbled it while the Master mouthed it
with unction. While I was an undergraduate, I had regarded all these men
merely as ?gures of fun, but when I became a Fellow and attended College
meetings, I began to ?nd that they were serious forces of evil. When the
Junior Dean, a clergyman who raped his little daughter and became paralysed
with syphilis, had to be got rid of in consequence, the Master went out of his
way to state at College Meeting that those of us who did not attend chapel
regularly had no idea how excellent this worthy’s sermons had been. Next to
the autobiography of bertrand russell 56these three the most important person in the College was the Senior Porter, a
magni?cent ?gure of a man, with such royal dignity that he was supposed by
undergraduates to be a natural son of the future Edward the Seventh. After I
was a Fellow I found that on one occasion the Council met on ?ve successive
days with the utmost secrecy. With great di?culty I discovered what their
business had been. They had been engaged in establishing the painful fact
that the Senior Porter had had improper relations with ?ve bedmakers, in
spite of the fact that all of them, by Statute, were ‘nec juvenis, nec pulchra’.
As an undergraduate I was persuaded that the Dons were a wholly
unnecessary part of the university. I derived no bene?ts from lectures, and I
made a vow to myself that when in due course I became a lecturer I would
not suppose that lecturing did any good. I have kept this vow.
I had already been interested in philosophy before I went to Cambridge,
but I had not read much except Mill. What I most desired was to ?nd some
reason for supposing mathematics true. The arguments in Mill’s Logic on this
subject already struck me as very inadequate. I read them at the age of eight-
een. My mathematical tutors had never shown me any reason to suppose the
Calculus anything but a tissue of fallacies. I had therefore two questions to
trouble me, one philosophical, and one mathematical. The mathematical
question had already in the main been solved on the Continent, though
in England the Continental work was little known. It was only after I left
Cambridge and began to live abroad that I discovered what I ought to have
been taught during my three years as an undegraduate. Philosophy, however,
was another matter. I knew in the country Harold Joachim, who taught
philosophy at Merton, and was a friend of F. H. Bradley. Joachim’s sister had
married my Uncle Rollo, and I used to meet him occasionally at tennis-
parties and such occasions. I got him to give me a long list of philosophical
books that I ought to read, and while I was still working at mathematics I
embarked upon them. As soon as I was free to do so, I devoted myself to
philosophy with great ardour. During my fourth year I read most of the great
philosophers as well as masses of books on the philosophy of mathematics.
James Ward was always giving me fresh books on this subject, and each time
I returned them, saying that they were very bad books. I remember his
disappointment, and his painstaking endeavours to ?nd some book that
would satisfy me. In the end, but after I had become a Fellow, I got from him
two small books, neither of which he had read or supposed of any value.
They were George Cantor’s Mannichfaltigkeitslehre, and Frege’s Begri?sschrift.
These two books at last gave me the gist of what I wanted, but in the case of
Frege I possessed the book for years before I could make out what it meant.
Indeed, I did not understand it until I had myself independently discovered
most of what it contained.
By this time, I had quite ceased to be the shy prig that I was when I ?rst
cambridge 57went to Cambridge. I remember a few months before I came into residence,
going to see my tutor about rooms, and while I waited in the ante-room I
turned over the pages of the Granta (the undergraduate newspaper). It was
May Week, and I was shocked to read in the paper that during this week
people’s thoughts were not devoted to work. But by my fourth year I had
become gay and ?ippant. Having been reading pantheism, I announced to my
friends that I was God. They placed candles on each side of me and proceeded
to acts of mock worship. Philosophy altogether seemed to me great fun, and I
enjoyed the curious ways of conceiving the world that the great philosophers
o?er to the imagination.
The greatest happiness of my time at Cambridge was connected with a
body whom its members knew as ‘The Society’, but which outsiders, if they
knew of it, called ‘The Apostles’. This was a small discussion society, contain-
ing one or two people from each year on the average, which met every
Saturday night. It has existed since 1820, and has had as members most of the
people of any intellectual eminence who have been at Cambridge since then.
It is by way of being secret, in order that those who are being considered for
election may be unaware of the fact. It was owing to the existence of The
Society that I so soon got to know the people best worth knowing, for
Whitehead was a member, and told the younger members to investigate
Sanger and me on account of our scholarship papers. With rare exceptions, all
the members at any one time were close personal friends. It was a principle in
discussion that there were to be no taboos, no limitations, nothing considered
shocking, no barriers to absolute freedom of speculation. We discussed all
manner of things, no doubt with a certain immaturity, but with a detach-
ment and interest scarcely possible in later life. The meetings would generally
end about one o’clock at night, and after that I would pace up and down the
cloisters of Nevile’s Court for hours with one or two other members. We took
ourselves perhaps rather seriously, for we considered that the virtue of intel-
lectual honesty was in our keeping. Undoubtedly, we achieved more of this
than is common in the world, and I am inclined to think that the best
intelligence of Cambridge has been notable in this respect. I was elected in the
middle of my second year, not having previously known that such a society
existed, though the members were all intimately known to me already.
I was elected to The Society early in 1892. The following letters of con-
gratulation require an explanation of some phrases which were adopted in
The Society by way of making fun of German metaphysics. The Society was
supposed to be The World of Reality; everything else was Appearance. People
who were not members of The Society were called ‘phenomena’. Since
the metaphysicians maintained that Space and Time are unreal, it was
assumed that those who were in The Society were exempted from bondage
to Space and Time.
the autobiography of bertrand russell 58c/ Hon. Sir Charles Elliott, ????,
Lieut. Gov. of Bengal, India Weds. March 9, 1892
Dear Russell
I have just heard by this morning’s mail that you have joined us – Hurrah.
It is good news indeed. I mustn’t let the mail go o? this afternoon without
a few words to say how glad I am, and how sorry not to be at Cambridge
now to give you a fraternal handshake. You will of course get your own
impressions, but it was certainly a true new life to me, and a revelation of
what Cambridge really was.
It is just time for letters to go, so I’m afraid I can’t write just now to tell
you of my experiences. Theodore will tell you how I am getting on. I was
very sorry to hear that you had not been well. Get all right quick. Don’t let
Webb2
kill you.
Excuse these hurried lines. Confound those absurd humbugs, space and
time, which have the impudence to pretend that they are now separating us.
Whereas we know that they have nothing to do with that true existence in
the bonds of which I was in the beginning am now and ever shall be
fraternally and a?ectionately
yours
Crompton Ll. D.
I haven’t time to write to Sanger a proper letter, so would you mind handing
him the enclosed scrawl?
Do write to me if you have time.
Devon St., New Plymouth,
Taranaki, New Zealand. 17th May, 1892
Dear Russell
Many congratulations on the delightful news of last February, which – with
a bondage to space and time perfectly inexplicable in apostolic matters – has
only just reached me via India.
I am most awfully glad. I hope you have been told of our brother
Whitehead’s penetration, who detected the apostolic nature of yourself and
Sanger by your entrance scholarship essays, and put us on the watch for you.
I wish I could get back for a Saturday night or so, and have it out with
Theodore about Xtianity being the religion of love – just the one thing which
it isn’t I should say. I don’t see how the ideas of a personal God and real love
can coexist with any vigour.
cambridge 59How about the Embryos?
3
I hear that the younger Trevelyan (Bob) is very
promising, and Green of Kings.
I have innumerable more letters for the mail. I hope to see you in the
middle of next January.
Yours fraternally,
(Sgd.) Ellis McTaggart
Some things became considerably di?erent in The Society shortly after
my time.
The tone of the generation some ten years junior to my own was set
mainly by Lytton Strachey and Keynes. It is surprising how great a change in
mental climate those ten years had brought. We were still Victorian; they
were Edwardian. We believed in ordered progress by means of politics and
free discussion. The more self-con?dent among us may have hoped to be
leaders of the multitude, but none of us wished to be divorced from it. The
generation of Keynes and Lytton did not seek to preserve any kinship with
the Philistine. They aimed rather at a life of retirement among ?ne shades
and nice feelings, and conceived of the good as consisting in the passion-
ate mutual admirations of a clique of the élite. This doctrine, quite unfairly,
they fathered upon G. E. Moore, whose disciples they professed to be.
Keynes, in his memoir ‘Early Beliefs’ has told of their admiration for Moore,
and, also, of their practice of ignoring large parts of Moore’s doctrine. Moore
gave due weight to morals and by his doctrine of organic unities avoided
the view that the good consists of a series of isolated passionate moments,
but those who considered themselves his disciples ignored this aspect of
his teaching and degraded his ethics into advocacy of a stu?y girls-school
sentimentalising.
From this atmosphere Keynes escaped into the great world, but Strachey
never escaped. Keynes’s escape, however, was not complete. He went about
the world carrying with him everywhere a feeling of the bishop in partibus.
True salvation was elsewhere, among the faithful at Cambridge. When he
concerned himself with politics and economics he left his soul at home. This
is the reason for a certain hard, glittering, inhuman quality in most of his
writing. There was one great exception, The Economic Consequences of the Peace,
of which I shall have more to say in a moment.
I ?rst knew Keynes through his father, and Lytton Strachey through his
mother. When I was young, Keynes’s father taught old-fashioned formal
logic in Cambridge. I do not know how far the new developments in that
subject altered his teaching. He was an earnest Nonconformist who put mor-
ality ?rst and logic second. Something of the Nonconformist spirit remained
in his son, but it was overlaid by the realisation that facts and arguments
may lead to conclusions somewhat shocking to many people, and a strain of
the autobiography of bertrand russell 60intellectual arrogance in his character made him ?nd it not unpleasant to
épater les bourgeois. In his The Economic Consequences of the Peace this strain was in
abeyance. The profound conviction that the Treaty of Versailles spelt disaster
so roused the earnest moralist in him that he forgot to be clever – without,
however, ceasing to be so.
I had no contact with him in his economic and political work, but I was
considerably concerned in his Treatise on Probability, many parts of which I
discussed with him in detail. It was nearly ?nished in 1914, but had to be put
aside for the duration.
He was always inclined to overwork, in fact it was overwork that caused
his death. Once in the year 1904, when I was living in an isolated cottage
in a vast moor without roads, he wrote and asked if I could promise him
a restful week-end. I replied con?dently in the a?rmative, and he came.
Within ?ve minutes of his arrival the Vice Chancellor turned up full of
University business. Other people came unexpectedly to every meal, includ-
ing six to Sunday breakfast. By Monday morning we had had twenty-six
unexpected guests, and Keynes, I fear, went away more tired than he came.
On Sunday, August 2, 1914, I met him hurrying across the Great Court
of Trinity. I asked him what the hurry was and he said he wanted to borrow
his brother-in-law’s motorcycle to go to London. ‘Why don’t you go
by train?’, I said. ‘Because there isn’t time’, he replied. I did not know what
his business might be, but within a few days the bank rate, which
panic-mongers had put up to ten per cent, was reduced to ?ve per cent. This
was his doing.
I do not know enough economics to have an expert opinion on Keynes’s
theories, but so far as I am able to judge it seems to me to be owing to him
that Britain has not su?ered from large-scale unemployment in recent years.
I would go further and say that if his theories had been adopted by ?nancial
authorities throughout the world the great depression would not have
occurred. There are still many people in America who regard depressions as
acts of God. I think Keynes proved that the responsibility for these occur-
rences does not rest with Providence.
The last time that I saw him was in the House of Lords when he returned
from negotiating a loan in America and made a masterly speech recommend-
ing it to their Lordships. Many of them had been doubtful beforehand, but
when he had ?nished there remained hardly any doubters except Lord
Beaverbrook and two cousins of mine with a passion for being in the minor-
ity. Having only just landed from the Atlantic, the e?ort he made must have
been terri?c, and it proved too much for him.
Keynes’s intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known.
When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom
emerged without feeling something of a fool. I was sometimes inclined to
cambridge 61feel that so much cleverness must be incompatible with depth, but I do not
think this feeling was justi?ed.
Lytton Strachey, as mentioned before, I ?rst got to know through his
mother. She and I were fellow members of a committee designed to secure
votes for women. After some months she invited me to dinner. Her husband,
Sir Richard Strachey, was a retired Indian o?cial, and the British Raj was
very much in the air. My ?rst dinner with the family was a rather upset-
ting experience. The number of sons and daughters was almost beyond
computation, and all the children were to my unpractised eyes exactly alike
except in the somewhat super?cial point that some were male and some were
female. The family were not all assembled when I arrived, but dropped in
one by one at intervals of twenty minutes. (One of them, I afterwards dis-
covered, was Lytton.) I had to look round the room carefully to make sure
that it was a new one that had appeared and not merely one of the previous
ones that had changed his or her place. Towards the end of the evening I
began to doubt my sanity, but kind friends afterwards assured me that things
had really been as they seemed.
Lady Strachey was a woman of immense vigour, with a great desire that
some at least of her children should distinguish themselves. She had an
admirable sense of prose and used to read South’s sermons aloud to her
children, not for the matter (she was a free-thinker), but to give them a sense
of rhythm in the writing of English. Lytton, who was too delicate to be sent
to a conventional school, was seen by his mother to be brilliant, and was
brought up to the career of a writer in an atmosphere of dedication. His
writing appeared to me in those days hilariously amusing. I heard him read
Eminent Victorians before it was published, and I read it again to myself in
prison. It caused me to laugh so loud that the o?cer came round to my cell,
saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment.
Lytton was always eccentric and became gradually more so. When he
was growing a beard he gave out that he had measles so as not to be seen
by his friends until the hairs had reached a respectable length. He dressed
very oddly. I knew a farmer’s wife who let lodgings and she told me
that Lytton had come to ask her if she could take him in. ‘At ?rst, Sir,’ she
said, ‘I thought he was a tramp, and then I looked again and saw he was
a gentleman, but a very queer one.’ He talked always in a squeaky voice
which sometimes contrasted ludicrously with the matter of what he was
saying. One time when I was talking with him he objected ?rst to one thing
and then to another as not being what literature should aim at. At last I said,
‘Well, Lytton, what should it aim at?’ And he replied in one word – ‘Passion’.
Nevertheless, he liked to appear lordly in his attitude towards human
a?airs. I heard someone maintain in his presence that young people are
apt to think about Life. He objected, ‘I can’t believe people think about Life.
the autobiography of bertrand russell 62There’s nothing in it.’ Perhaps it was this attitude which made him not a
great man.
His style is unduly rhetorical, and sometimes, in malicious moments, I
have thought it not unlike Macaulay’s. He is indi?erent to historical truth and
will always touch up the picture to make the lights and shades more glaring
and the folly or wickedness of famous people more obvious. These are grave
charges, but I make them in all seriousness.
It was in The Society that I ?rst became aware of Moore’s excellence. I
remember his reading a paper which began: ‘In the beginning was matter,
and matter begat the devil, and the devil begat God.’ The paper ended with
the death ?rst of God and then of the devil, leaving matter alone as in the
beginning. At the time when he read this paper, he was still a freshman, and
an ardent disciple of Lucretius.
On Sunday it was our custom to breakfast late, and then spend the whole
day till dinner-time walking. I got to know every road and footpath within
ten miles of Cambridge, and many at much greater distances, in this way. In
general I felt happy and comparatively calm while at Cambridge, but on
moonlight nights I used to career round the country in a state of temporary
lunacy. The reason, of course, was sexual desire, though at that time I did
not know this.
After my time The Society changed in one respect. There was a long drawn
out battle between George Trevelyan and Lytton Strachey, both members,
in which Lytton Strachey was on the whole victorious. Since his time, homo-
sexual relations among the members were for a time common, but in my
day they were unknown.
Cambridge was important in my life through the fact that it gave me
friends, and experience of intellectual discussion, but it was not important
through the actual academic instruction. Of the mathematical teaching I have
already spoken. Most of what I learned in philosophy has come to seem to
me erroneous, and I spent many subsequent years in gradually unlearning
the habits of thought which I had there acquired. The one habit of thought
of real value that I acquired there was intellectual honesty. This virtue cer-
tainly existed not only among my friends, but among my teachers. I cannot
remember any instance of a teacher resenting it when one of his pupils
showed him to be in error, though I can remember quite a number of
occasions on which pupils succeeded in performing this feat. Once during a
lecture on hydrostatics, one of the young men interrupted to say: ‘Have you
not forgotten the centrifugal forces on the lid?’ The lecturer gasped, and then
said: ‘I have been doing this example that way for twenty years, but you are
right.’ It was a blow to me during the War to ?nd that, even at Cambridge,
intellectual honesty had its limitations. Until then, wherever I lived, I felt that
Cambridge was the only place on earth that I could regard as home.
cambridge 634
ENGAGEMENT
In the summer of 1889, when I was living with my Uncle Rollo at his house
on the slopes of Hindhead, he took me one Sunday for a long walk. As
we were going down Friday’s Hill, near Fernhurst, he said: ‘Some new people
have come to live at this house, and I think we will call upon them.’ Shyness
made me dislike the idea, and I implored him, whatever might happen, not
to stay to supper. He said he would not, but he did, and I was glad he did.
We found that the family were Americans, named Pearsall Smith, consisting
of an elderly mother and father, a married daughter and her husband, named
Costelloe, a younger daughter at Bryn Mawr home for the holidays, and a son
at Balliol. The father and mother had been in their day famous evangelistic
preachers, but the father had lost his faith as the result of a scandal which
arose from his having been seen to kiss a young woman, and the mother had
grown rather too old for such a wearing life. Costelloe, the son-in-law, was
a clever man, a Radical, a member of the London County Council. He arrived
fresh from London while we were at dinner, bringing the latest news
of a great dock strike which was then in progress. This dock strike was of
considerable interest and importance because it marked the penetration of
Trade Unionism to a lower level than that previously reached. I listened
open-mouthed while he related what was being done, and I felt that I was in
touch with reality. The son from Balliol conversed in brilliant epigrams,
and appeared to know everything with contemptuous ease. But it was the
daughter from Bryn Mawr who especially interested me. She was very beauti-
