ful, as appears from the following extract from the Bulletin, Glasgow, May 10,
1921: ‘I remember meeting Mrs Bertrand Russell at a civic reception
or something of the kind (was it a reception to temperance delegates?) in
Edinburgh twenty odd years ago. She was at that time one of the mostbeautiful women it is possible to imagine, and gifted with a sort of imperial
stateliness, for all her Quaker stock. We who were present admired her so
much that in a collected and digni?ed Edinburgh way we made her the
heroine of the evening.’ She was more emancipated than any young woman I
had known, since she was at college and crossed the Atlantic alone, and was,
as I soon discovered, an intimate friend of Walt Whitman. She asked
me whether I had ever read a certain German book called Ekkehard, and it
happened that I had ?nished it that morning. I felt this was a stroke of luck.
She was kind, and made me feel not shy. I fell in love with her at ?rst sight. I
did not see any of the family again that summer, but in subsequent years,
during the three months that I spent annually with my Uncle Rollo, I used to
walk the four miles to their house every Sunday, arriving to lunch and staying
to supper. After supper they would make a camp ?re in the woods, and
sit round singing Negro spirituals, which were in those days unknown in
England. To me, as to Goethe, America seemed a romantic land of freedom,
and I found among them an absence of many prejudices which hampered me
at home. Above all, I enjoyed their emancipation from good taste. It was at
their house that I ?rst met Sidney Webb, then still unmarried.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whom I knew intimately for a number of years,
at times even sharing a house with them, were the most completely married
couple that I have ever known. They were, however, very averse from any
romantic view of love or marriage. Marriage was a social institution designed
to ?t instinct into a legal framework. During the ?rst ten years of their
marriage, Mrs Webb would remark at intervals, ‘As Sidney always says, mar-
riage is the waste-paper basket of the emotions’. In later years there was a
slight change. They would generally have a couple to stay with them for the
week-end, and on Sunday afternoon they would go for a brisk walk, Sidney
with the lady and Beatrice with the gentleman. At a certain point, Sidney
would remark, ‘I know just what Beatrice is saying at this moment. She
is saying, “As Sidney always says, marriage is the waste-paper basket of the
emotions”.’ Whether Sidney ever really did say this is not known.
I knew Sidney before his marriage. But he was then much less than half
of what the two of them afterwards became. Their collaboration was quite
dove-tailed. I used to think, though, this was perhaps an undue simpli?ca-
tion, that she had the ideas and he did the work. He was perhaps the most
industrious man that I have ever known. When they were writing a book on
local government, they would send circulars to all local government o?cials
throughout the country asking questions and pointing out that the o?cial in
question could legally purchase their forthcoming book out of the rates.
When I let my house to them, the postman, who was an ardent socialist, did
not know whether to be more honoured by serving them or annoyed at
having to deliver a thousand answers a day to their circulars. Webb was
engagement 65originally a second division clerk in the civil service, but by immense
industry succeeded in rising into the ?rst division. He was somewhat earnest
and did not like jokes on sacred subjects such as political theory. On one
occasion I remarked to him that democracy has at least one merit, namely,
that a Member of Parliament cannot be stupider than his constituents, for
the more stupid he is, the more stupid they were to elect him. Webb was
seriously annoyed and said bitingly, ‘That is the sort of argument I don’t like’.
Mrs Webb had a wider range of interests than her husband. She took
considerable interest in individual human beings, not only when they could
be useful. She was deeply religious without belonging to any recognised
brand of orthodoxy, though as a socialist she preferred the Church of
England because it was a State institution. She was one of nine sisters, the
daughters of a self-made man named Potter who acquired most of his for-
tune by building huts for the armies in the Crimea. He was a disciple
of Herbert Spencer, and Mrs Webb was the most notable product of that
philosopher’s theories of education. I am sorry to say that my mother, who
was her neighbour in the country, described her as a ‘social butter?y’, but
one may hope that she would have modi?ed this judgement if she had
known Mrs Webb in later life. When she became interested in socialism
she decided to sample the Fabians, especially the three most distinguished,
who were Webb, Shaw and Graham Wallas. There was something like the
Judgment of Paris with the sexes reversed, and it was Sidney who emerged as
the counterpart of Aphrodite.
Webb had been entirely dependent upon his earnings, whereas Beatrice
had inherited a competence from her father. Beatrice had the mentality of
the governing class, which Sidney had not. Seeing that they had enough to
live on without earning, they decided to devote their lives to research and to
the higher branches of propaganda. In both they were amazingly successful.
Their books are a tribute to their industry, and the School of Economics is a
tribute to Sidney’s skill. I do not think that Sidney’s abilities would have been
nearly as fruitful as they were if they had not been backed by Beatrice’s
self-con?dence. I asked her once whether in her youth she had ever had any
feeling of shyness. ‘O no,’ she said, ‘if I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was
going into a room full of people, I would say to myself, “You’re the cleverest
member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest
nation in the world, why should you be frightened?”.’
I both liked and admired Mrs Webb, although I disagreed with her about
many very important matters. I admired ?rst and foremost her ability, which
was very great. I admired next her integrity: she lived for public objects and
was never de?ected by personal ambition, although she was not devoid of it.
I liked her because she was a warm and kind friend to those for whom she
had a personal a?ection, but I disagreed with her about religion, about
the autobiography of bertrand russell 66imperialism, and about the worship of the State. This last was of the essence
of Fabianism. It led both the Webbs and also Shaw into what I thought an
undue tolerance of Mussolini and Hitler, and ultimately into a rather absurd
adulation of the Soviet Government.
But nobody is all of a piece, not even the Webbs. I once remarked to Shaw
that Webb seemed to me somewhat de?cient in kindly feeling. ‘No,’ Shaw
replied, ‘you are quite mistaken. Webb and I were once in a tram-car in
Holland eating biscuits out of a bag. A handcu?ed criminal was brought into
the tram by policemen. All the other passengers shrank away in horror,
but Webb went up to the prisoner and o?ered him biscuits.’ I remember
this story whenever I ?nd myself becoming unduly critical of either Webb
or Shaw.
There were people whom the Webbs hated. They hated Wells, both
because he o?ended Mrs Webb’s rigid Victorian morality and because he
tried to dethrone Webb from his reign over the Fabian Society. They hated
Ramsay MacDonald from very early days. The least hostile thing that I ever
heard either of them say about him was at the time of the formation of the
?rst Labour Government, when Mrs Webb said he was a very good substitute
for a leader.
Their political history was rather curious. At ?rst they co-operated with
the Conservatives because Mrs Webb was pleased with Arthur Balfour for
being willing to give more public money to Church Schools. When the
Conservatives fell in 1906, the Webbs made some slight and ine?ectual
e?orts to collaborate with the Liberals. But at last it occurred to them that as
socialists they might feel more at home in the Labour Party, of which in their
later years they were loyal members.
For a number of years Mrs Webb was addicted to fasting, from motives
partly hygienic and partly religious. She would have no breakfast and a very
meagre dinner. Her only solid meal was lunch. She almost always had a
number of distinguished people to lunch, but she would get so hungry that
the moment it was announced she marched in ahead of all her guests and
started to eat. She nevertheless believed that starvation made her more spirit-
ual, and once told me that it gave her exquisite visions. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘if you
eat too little, you see visions; and if you drink too much, you see snakes.’ I am
afraid she thought this remark inexcusably ?ippant. Webb did not share the
religious side of her nature, but was in no degree hostile to it, in spite of the
fact that it was sometimes inconvenient to him. When they and I were staying
at a hotel in Normandy, she used to stay upstairs in the mornings since she
could not bear the painful spectacle of us breakfasting. Sidney, however,
would come down for rolls and co?ee. The ?rst morning Mrs Webb sent a
message by the maid, ‘We do not have butter for Sidney’s breakfast’. Her use
of ‘we’ was one of the delights of their friends.
engagement 67Both of them were fundamentally undemocratic, and regarded it as the
function of a statesman to bamboozle or terrorise the populace. I realised
the origins of Mrs Webb’s conceptions of government when she repeated to
me her father’s description of shareholders’ meetings. It is the recognised
function of directors to keep shareholders in their place, and she had a similar
view about the relation of the Government to the electorate.
Her father’s stories of his career had not given her any undue respect for
the great. After he had built huts for the winter quarters of the French armies
in the Crimea, he went to Paris to get paid. He had spent almost all his capital
in putting up the huts, and payment became important to him. But, although
everybody in Paris admitted the debt, the cheque did not come. At last he met
Lord Brassey who had come on a similar errand. When Mr Potter explained
his di?culties, Lord Brassey laughed at him and said, ‘My dear fellow, you
don’t know the ropes. You must give ?fty pounds to the Minister and ?ve
pounds to each of his underlings.’ Mr Potter did so, and the cheque came
next day.
Sidney had no hesitation in using wiles which some would think
unscrupulous. He told me, for example, that when he wished to carry some
point through a committee where the majority thought otherwise, he would
draw up a resolution in which the contentious point occurred twice. He
would have a long debate about its ?rst occurrence and at last give way
graciously. Nine times out of ten, so he concluded, no one would notice that
the same point occurred later in the same resolution.
The Webbs did a great work in giving intellectual backbone to British
socialism. They performed more or less the same function that the
Benthamites at an earlier time had performed for the Radicals. The Webbs and
the Benthamites shared a certain dryness and a certain coldness and a belief
that the waste-paper basket is the place for the emotions. But the Benthamites
and the Webbs alike taught their doctrines to enthusiasts. Bentham and
Robert Owen could produce a well-balanced intellectual progeny and so
could the Webbs and Keir Hardie. One should not demand of anybody all the
things that add value to a human being. To have some of them is as much as
should be demanded. The Webbs pass this test, and indubitably the British
Labour Party would have been much more wild and woolly if they had never
existed. Their mantle descended upon Mrs Webb’s nephew, Sir Sta?ord
Cripps, and but for them I doubt whether the British democracy would have
endured with the same patience the arduous years through which we have
been passing.
When I mentioned at home that I had met Sidney Webb, my grandmother
replied that she had heard him lecture once in Richmond, and that he was
‘not quite....’ ‘Not quite what?’ I persisted. ‘Not quite a gentleman in mind
or manners,’ she ?nally said.
the autobiography of bertrand russell 68Among the Pearsall Smiths I escaped from this sort of thing. Among them I
was happy and talkative and free from timidity. They would draw me out in
such a way as to make me feel quite intelligent. I met interesting people at
their house, for instance William James. Logan Pearsall Smith indoctrinated
me with the culture of the nineties – Flaubert, Walter Pater, and the rest. He
gave me rules for good writing, such as ‘Put a comma every four words;
never use “and” except at the beginning of a sentence’. I learned to make
sentences full of parentheses in the style of Walter Pater. I learned the right
thing to say about Manet, and Monet, and Degas, who were in those days
what Matisse and Picasso were at a later date.
Logan Pearsall Smith was seven years older than I was, and gave me much
moral advice. He was in a state of transition between the ethical outlook of
Philadelphia Quakerism and that of Quartier-Latin Bohemia. Politically he
was a socialist, having been converted by Graham Wallas, one of the founders
of the Fabian Society (who, however, at a later date reverted to Liberalism).
Logan tried to adapt the philanthropic practice of the Quakers to the socialist
creed. In sexual morality he was at that time very ascetic, in fact almost
Manichaean, but in religion he was agnostic. He wished to persuade free-
thinking young people to preserve a high standard of personal discipline and
self-denial. With this object, he created what he called humorously ‘The
Order of Prigs’, which I joined, and whose rules I obeyed for several years.
1
With each year that passed I became more devoted to Alys, the unmarried
daughter. She was less ?ippant than her brother Logan, and less irresponsible
than her sister, Mrs Costelloe. She seemed to me to possess all the simple
kindness which I still cherished in spite of Pembroke Lodge, but to be devoid
of priggery and prejudice. I wondered whether she would remain unmarried
until I grew up, for she was ?ve years older than I was. It seemed unlikely but,
I became increasingly determined that, if she did, I would ask her to marry
me. Once, I remember, I drove with her and her brother to Leith Hill to visit
Judge Vaughan Williams, whose wife wore an Elizabethan ru? and was
otherwise surprising. On the way they elicited from me that I believed in love
at ?rst sight, and cha?ed me for being so sentimental. I felt deeply wounded,
as the time had not yet come to say why I believed in it. I was aware that she
was not what my grandmother would call a lady, but I considered that she
resembled Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett. I think I was conscious of a certain
pleasurable broadmindedness in this attitude.
I came of age in May 1893, and from this moment my relations with Alys
began to be something more than distant admiration. In the following month
I was Seventh Wrangler in the mathematical Tripos, and acquired legal and
?nancial independence. Alys came to Cambridge with a cousin of hers, and I
had more opportunities of talking with her than I had ever had before.
During the Long Vacation, she came again with the same cousin, but I
engagement 69persuaded her to stay for the inside of a day after the cousin was gone. We
went on the river, and discussed divorce, to which she was more favourable
than I was. She was in theory an advocate of free-love, which I considered
admirable on her part, in spite of the fact that my own views were somewhat
more strict. I was, however, a little puzzled to ?nd that she was deeply
ashamed of the fact that her sister had abandoned her husband for Berenson,
the art critic. Indeed, it was not till after we were married that she consented
to know Berenson. I was very much excited by her second visit to Cambridge,
and began to correspond regularly with her. I was no longer spending the
summers at Haslemere, because my grandmother and my Aunt Agatha did
not get on with my Uncle Rollo’s second wife. But on the 13th of September,
I went to Friday’s Hill for a two days’ visit. The weather was warm and
golden. There was not a breath of wind, and in the early morning there were
mists in the valleys. I remember that Logan made fun of Shelley for speaking
of ‘golden mists’, and I in turn made fun of Logan, saying there had been a
golden mist that very morning, but before he was awake. For my part I
was up and about early, having arranged with Alys to go for a walk before
breakfast. We went and sat in a certain beech-wood on a hill, a place of
extraordinary beauty looking like an early Gothic cathedral, and with
a glimpse of distant views through the tree trunks in all directions. The
morning was fresh and dewy, and I began to think that perhaps there might
be happiness in human life. Shyness, however, prevented me from getting
beyond feeling my way while we sat in the wood. It was only after
breakfast, and then with in?nite hesitation and alarm, that I arrived at a
de?nite proposal, which was in those days the custom. I was neither
accepted nor rejected. It did not occur to me to attempt to kiss her, or even
take her hand. We agreed to go on seeing each other and corresponding, and
to let time decide one way or the other. All this happened out-of-doors, but
when we ?nally came in to lunch, she found a letter from Lady Henry
Somerset, inviting her to the Chicago World’s Fair to help in preaching
temperance, a virtue of which in those days America was supposed not to
have enough. Alys had inherited from her mother an ardent belief in total
abstinence, and was much elated to get this invitation. She read it out
triumphantly, and accepted it enthusiastically, which made me feel rather
small, as it meant several months of absence, and possibly the beginning of an
interesting career.
When I came home, I told my people what had occurred, and they reacted
according to the stereotyped convention. They said she was no lady, a baby-
snatcher, a low-class adventuress, a designing female taking advantage of my
inexperience, a person incapable of all the ?ner feelings, a woman whose
vulgarity would perpetually put me to shame. But I had a fortune of some
￡20,000 inherited from my father, and I paid no attention to what my
the autobiography of bertrand russell 70people said. Relations became very strained, and remained so until after I was
married.
At this time I kept a locked diary, which I very carefully concealed from
everyone. In this diary I recorded my conversations with my grandmother
about Alys and my feelings in regard to them. Not long afterwards a diary
of my father’s, written partly in shorthand (obviously for purposes of con-
cealment), came into my hands. I found that he had proposed to my mother
at just the same age at which I had proposed to Alys, that my grandmother
had said almost exactly the same things to him as she had to me, and that
he had recorded exactly the same re?ections in his diary as I had recorded
in mine. This gave me an uncanny feeling that I was not living my own
life but my father’s over again, and tended to produce a superstitious belief
in heredity.
2
Although I was deeply in love, I felt no conscious desire for any physical
relations. Indeed, I felt that my love had been desecrated when one night
I had a sexual dream, in which it took a less ethereal form. Gradually,
however, nature took charge of this matter.
The next occasion of importance was on January 4, 1894, when I came up
from Richmond for the day to visit Alys at her parents’ house, 44 Grosvenor
Road. It was a day on which there was a heavy snow-storm. All London was
buried under about six inches of snow, and I had to wade through it on
foot from Vauxhall. The snow brought a strange e?ect of isolation, making
London almost as noiseless as a lonely hill top. It was on this occasion that I
?rst kissed Alys. My only previous experience in this direction was with the
housemaid mentioned in an earlier chapter, and I had not foreseen how great
would be the ecstasy of kissing a woman whom I loved. Although she still
said that she had not made up her mind whether to marry me or not, we
spent the whole day, with the exception of meal-times, in kissing, with
hardly a word spoken from morning till night, except for an interlude during
which I read Epipsychidion aloud. I arrived home quite late, having walked the
mile and a half from the station through a blizzard, tired but exultant.
Throughout my next term at Cambridge, there were alternations in her
feelings. At some moments she seemed eager to marry me, and at other
moments determined to retain her freedom. I had to work very hard during
this time, as I was taking the second part of the Moral Sciences Tripos in one
year, but I never found that love, either when it prospered or when it did not,
interfered in the slightest with my intellectual concentration. When the Easter
Vacation came, I went ?rst with my Aunt Maude to Rome to stay with my
uncle the Monsignor. And from there I went to Paris, where Logan had an
apartment, and his mother and Alys were staying close by. It was my ?rst
experience of the life of American art students in Paris, and it all seemed to
me very free and delightful. I remember a dance at which Alys appeared in a
engagement 71dress designed by Roger Fry. I remember, also, some rather unsuccessful
attempts to instil culture into me by taking me to see Impressionist pictures
in the Luxembourg. And I remember ?oating on the Seine at night near
Fontainebleau with Alys beside me, while Logan ?lled the night with
unbending cleverness. When I got back to Cambridge, James Ward spoke to
me gravely about wasting my last vacation on the Continent when I ought to
have been working. However, I did not take him seriously, and I got a First
with distinction.
About the time that I ?nished with Triposes, Alys consented to become
de?nitely engaged to me. At this, my people, who had never ceased from
opposition, began to feel that something drastic must be done. They had
no power to control my actions, and their strictures on her character had
naturally remained without e?ect. Nevertheless, they found a weapon which
very nearly gave them the victory. The old family doctor, a serious Scotsman
with mutton-chop whiskers, began to tell me all the things that I had dimly
suspected about my family history: how my Uncle William was mad, how
my Aunt Agatha’s engagement had had to be broken o? because of her insane
delusions, and how my father had su?ered from epilepsy (from what medical
authorities have told me since, I doubt whether this was a correct diagnosis).
In those days, people who considered themselves scienti?c tended to have a
somewhat superstitious attitude towards heredity, and of course it was not
known how many mental disorders are the result of bad environment and
unwise moral instruction. I began to feel as if I was doomed to a dark destiny.
I read Ibsen’s Ghosts and Bj?rnson’s Heritage of the Kurts. Alys had an uncle who
was rather queer. By emphasising these facts until they rendered me nearly
insane, my people persuaded us to take the best medical opinion as to
whether, if we were married, our children were likely to be mad. The best
medical opinion, primed by the family doctor, who was primed by the
family, duly pronounced that from the point of view of heredity we ought
not to have children. After receiving this verdict in the house of the family
doctor at Richmond, Alys and I walked up and down Richmond Green
discussing it. I was for breaking o? the engagement, as I believed what the
doctors said and greatly desired children. Alys said she had no great wish for
children, and would prefer to marry, while avoiding a family. After about half
an hour’s discussion, I came round to her point of view. We therefore
announced that we intended to marry, but to have no children. Birth control
was viewed in those days with the sort of horror which it now inspires only
in Roman Catholics. My people and the family doctor tore their hair. The
family doctor solemnly assured me that, as a result of his medical experience,
he knew the use of contraceptives to be almost invariably gravely injurious to
health. My people hinted that it was the use of contraceptives which had
made my father epileptic. A thick atmosphere of sighs, tears, groans, and
the autobiography of bertrand russell 72morbid horror was produced, in which it was scarcely possible to breathe.
The discovery that my father had been epileptic, my aunt subject to delusions,
and my uncle insane, caused me terror, for in those days everybody viewed
the inheritance of mental disorders superstitiously. I had sensed something of
the kind, though without de?nite knowledge. On July 21, 1893 (which I
subsequently learnt to be Alys’s birthday), I dreamed that I discovered my
mother to be mad, not dead, and that, on this ground, I felt it my duty not to
marry. After the facts had been told to me, I had great di?culty in shaking o?
fear, as appears from the following re?ections, which I showed to nobody,
not even Alys, until a much later date.
July 20–21 (1894). Midnight. This night is the anniversary of my dream
about Alys, and also of her birth. Strange coincidence, which, combined with
the fact that most of my dream has come true, very strongly impresses my
imagination. I was always superstitious, and happiness has made me more so;
it is terrifying to be so utterly absorbed in one person. Nothing has any worth
to me except in reference to her. Even my own career, my e?orts after virtue,
my intellect (such as it is), everything I have or hope for, I value only as gifts
to her, as means of shewing how unspeakably I value her love. And I am
happy, divinely happy. Above all, I can still say, thank God, lust has absolutely
no share in my passion. But just when I am happiest, when joy is purest, it
seems to transcend itself and fall suddenly to haunting terrors of loss – it
would be so easy to lose what rests on so slender and unstable a foundation!
My dream on her birthday; my subsequent discovery that my people had
deceived me as in that dream; their solemn and reiterated warnings; the
gradual discovery, one by one, of the tragedies, hopeless and unalleviated,
which have made up the lives of most of my family; above all, the perpetual
gloom which hangs like a fate over ??,
3
and which, struggle as I will, invades
my inmost soul whenever I go there, taking all joy even out of Alys’s love; all
these, combined with the fear of heredity, cannot but oppress my mind. They
make me feel as though a doom lay on the family and I were vainly battling
against it to escape into the freedom which seems the natural birthright of
others. Worst of all, this dread, of necessity, involves Alys too. I feel as tho’
darkness were my native element, and a cruel destiny had compelled me,
instead of myself attaining to the light, to drag her back with me into the gulf
from which I have partially emerged. I cannot tell whether destiny will take
the form of a sudden blow or of a long-drawn torture, sapping our energies
and ruining our love; but I am haunted by the fear of the family ghost, which
seems to seize on me with clammy invisible hands to avenge my desertion of
its tradition of gloom.
All these feelings of course are folly, solely due to chocolate cake and
sitting up late; but they are none the less real, and on the slightest pretence
engagement 73they assail me with tremendous force. Painful as it will necessarily be to
them, I must for some time avoid seeing more than a very little of my people
of ??, otherwise I really shall begin to fear for my sanity. ?? is to me like a
family vault haunted by the ghosts of maniacs – especially in view of all that I
have recently learnt from Dr Anderson. Here, thank heaven, all is bright and
healthy, my Alys especially; and as long as I can forget ?? and the ghastly
heritage it bequeaths to me I have no forebodings, but only the pure joy of
mutual love, a joy so great, so divine, that I have not yet ceased to wonder
how such a thing can exist in this world which people abuse. But oh I wish I
could know it would bring joy to her in the end, and not teach her further,
what alas it has already begun to teach her, how terrible a thing life may be
and what depths of misery it can contain.
The fears generated at that time have never ceased to trouble me sub-
consciously. Ever since, but not before, I have been subject to violent
nightmares in which I dream that I am being murdered, usually by a lunatic.
I scream out loud, and on one occasion, before waking, I nearly strangled
