14 Cheyne WalkChelsea, S.W.December 12, 1902Dear GilbertIt will suit us very well indeed to see you on Monday for luncheon and asearly before it as you can manage to arrive. I shall expect you about 11-45.But it seems Miss Harrison will be gone; we have been urging her to stay, butshe asserts (at present) that it is impossible. She begs you instead to go on tosee her later, as soon after luncheon as you can manage, at an address whichI do not know, but which she will no doubt divulge in due course. It will beperfectly delightful to see you, and I look forward to it very much; but I amsorry you will not ?nd Miss Harrison. She has turned the tables on me byproducing your poem in print; do bring me a copy on Monday. Could younot spend Monday night here? We shall be delighted to put you up, in casemy Aunt Rosalind does not come to town; but we shall be dining out. Londonis a weary place, where it is quite impossible to think or feel anything worthyof a human being – I feel horribly lost here. Only the river and the gulls aremy friends; they are not making money or acquiring power. Last night wemade the acquaintance of the MacCails, which we were very glad of. Howbeautiful she is! I had heard so much about his balance and judgment thatI was surprised to ?nd him a fanatic. But he is too democratic for me – he saidhis charwoman was more in contact with real things than anybody else heknew. But what can a charwoman know of the spirits of great men or therecords of fallen empires or the haunting visions of art and reason? All thisthe autobiography of bertrand russell 152and much more I wished to say; but the words stuck in my throat. Let us notdelude ourselves with the hope that the best is within the reach of all, or thatemotion uninformed by thought can ever attain the highest level. All suchoptimisms seem to me dangerous to civilisation, and the outcome of a heartnot yet su?ciently morti?ed. ‘Die to Self ’ is an old maxim; ‘Love thy neigh-bour as thyself’ is new in this connexion, but also has an element of truth.From heaven we may return to our fellow-creatures, not try to make ourheaven here among them; we ought to love our neighbour through the loveof God, or else our love is too mundane. At least so it seems to me. But thecoldness of my own doctrine is repellent to me; except at moments when thelove of God glows brightly.Modern life is very di?cult; I wish I lived in a cloister wearing a hair shirtand sleeping on a cruci?x. But now-a-days every impulse has to be keptwithin the bounds of black-coated Respectability, the living God.Yours everBertrand RussellI Tatti, SettignanoFlorenceDecember 28th, 1902Dear GilbertOur crossing and journey were uneventful and prosperous, and the beautyhere is overwhelming. I do wish you had been able to come. We have had dayafter day of brilliant sunshine – hoar frosts in the morning, warmth thatmade sitting out agreeable in the day. Just behind the house is a hill-sidecovered with cypress and pine and little oaks that still have autumn leaves,and the air is full of deep-toned Italian bells. The house has been furnished byBerenson with exquisite taste; it has some very good pictures, and a mostabsorbing library. But the business of existing beautifully, except when itis hereditary, always slightly shocks my Puritan soul – thoughts of the EastEnd, of intelligent women whose lives are sacri?ced to the saving of pence, ofyoung men driven to journalism or schoolmastering when they ought to doresearch, come up perpetually in my mind; but I do not justify the feeling, assomeone ought to keep up the ideal of beautiful houses. But I think onemakes great demands on the mental furniture where the outside is so elabor-ate, and one is shocked at lapses that one would otherwise tolerate.... I amglad you abandoned your plan of reading a mathematical book, for any bookon the Calculus would have told you lies, and also my book is (I fear) notworth while for you to read, except a few bits. What general value it may haveis so buried in technicalities and controversies that it really is only ?t for thosewhose special business it is to go in for such things. The later mathematicalvolume, which will not be ready for two years or so, will I hope be a work of‘principia mathematica’ 153art; but that will be only for mathematicians. And this volume disgusts me onthe whole. Although I denied it when Leonard Hobhouse said so, philosophyseems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business. I do not know how tostate the value that at moments I am inclined to give it. If only one had livedin the days of Spinoza, when systems were still possible....Yours everBertrand Russell14 Cheyne WalkChelsea, S.W.March 21st, 1903Dear GilbertYour doctrine on beauty does not repel me in the least, indeed I agree withit strongly, except the slight sneer at specialists. Specialising is necessary toe?ciency, which is a form of altruism, and however narrow the specialistbecomes, we ought to pardon him if he does good work. This I feel strongly,because the temptation to be interesting rather than technically e?ective is adangerous one.I shall be more glad than I can say when you come back; though I shallhave nothing to give you in the conversational way. I have been merelyoppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothingstirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thingthat I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as pos-sible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These timeshave to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.Yours everB. RussellTo Lucy Martin Donnelly:The Mill HouseGrantchester, CambridgeTelegrams, TrumpingtonMay 23, 1902Dear Lucy...You will wonder at my writing to you: the fact is, I ?nished today mymagnum opus on the principles of Mathematics, on which I have beenengaged since 1897. This has left me with leisure and liberty to rememberthat there are human beings in the world, which I have been strenuouslystriving to forget. I wonder whether you realise the degree of self-sacri?ce(and too often sacri?ce of others), of sheer e?ort of will, of stern austerity inrepressing even what is intrinsically best, that goes into writing a book of anythe autobiography of bertrand russell 154magnitude. Year after year, I found mistakes in what I had done, and had tore-write the whole from beginning to end: for in a logical system, onemistake will usually vitiate everything. The hardest part I left to the end: lastsummer I undertook it gaily, hoping to ?nish soon, when suddenly I cameupon a greater di?culty than any I had known of before. So di?cult it was,that to think of it at all required an all but superhuman e?ort. And long agoI got sick to nausea of the whole subject, so that I longed to think of anythingelse under the sun; and sheer fatigue has become almost incapacitating. Butnow at last all is ?nished, and as you may imagine, I feel a new man; for I hadgiven up hope of ever coming to an end of the labour. Abstract work, if onewishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one’s humanity; one raises amonument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, oneslowly inters oneself. But the thankless muse will not share her favours – sheis a jealous mistress. – Do not believe, if you wish to write, that the currentdoctrine of experience has any truth; there is a thousand times more experi-ence in pain than in pleasure. Artists must have strong passions, but theydeceive themselves in fancying it good to indulge their desires. The wholedoctrine, too, that writing comes from technique, is quite mistaken; writingis the outlet to feelings which are all but overmastering, and are yet mastered.Two things are to be cultivated: loftiness of feeling, and control of feeling andeverything else by the will. Neither of these are understood in America as inthe old countries; indeed, loftiness of feeling seems to depend essentiallyupon a brooding consciousness of the past and its terrible power, a deepsense of the di?erence between the great eternal facts and the transient drossof merely personal feeling. If you tell these things to your ?ne-writing class,they will know less than if you hold your tongue.Give my love to Helen. My advice to anyone who wishes to write is toknow all the very best literature by heart, and ignore the rest as completely aspossible.Yours everBertrand RussellN.B. – This letter is not for Carey!Trinity College, CambridgeJuly 6, 1902Dear LucyMany thanks for your very interesting letter, and for the excellent accountof Harvard and Barrett Wendell. What a monstrous thing that a Universityshould teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respectfor the ?lthy multitude is ruining civilisation. A certain man had the impu-dence to maintain in my presence that every student ought to be made to‘principia mathematica’ 155expound his views to popular audiences, so I lifted up my voice and testi?edfor a quarter of an hour, after which he treated me with the kind of respectaccorded to wild beasts. – I suppose Wendell is better than his books: I wasdisappointed in his American literature. For, though I agree with him thatAmerica, like the Australian marsupials, is an interesting relic of a bygone age,I care little for the great truth that American writers have all been of goodfamily, and that Harvard is vastly superior to Yale. And his failure to appreci-ate Walt Whitman to my mind is very damaging. He talks of Brooklyn ferryand so on, and quite forgets ‘out of the cradle endlessly rocking’, and ‘whenlilacs last in the door-yard bloomed’. This seems to me to show a deplorableconventionality, both in taste generally, and in judgment of Whitmanspecially.When my book was ?nished, I took ten days’ holiday. Since then I havebeen working as usual, except during four days that I spent with my AuntAgatha at Pembroke Lodge. A strange, melancholy, weird time it was: wetalked of merriment long since turned to sadness, of tragedies in which all theactors are gone, of sorrows which have left nothing but a fading memory. Allthe life of the present grew to me dreamy and unreal, while the majestic Past,weighed down by age and ?lled with unspeakable wisdom, rose before meand dominated my whole being. The Past is an awful God, though he givesLife almost the whole of its haunting beauty. I believe those whose childhoodhas been spent in America can scarcely conceive the hold which the Past hason us of the Old World: the continuity of life, the weight of tradition, the greateternal procession of youth and age and death, seem to be lost in the bustlingapproach of the future which dominates American life. And that is one reasonwhy great literature is not produced by your compatriots.At present, I am staying in College by myself: none of my friends are up,and when work is over, I have a great deal of leisure left for meditation. I havebeen reading Maeterlinck’s works straight through: alas, I have nearly cometo the end of them. Le Temple Enseveli seems to me very admirable, both asliterature and as morality. I am simpleminded enough, in spite of MissGwinn and Mr Hodder’s grave man’s world (being I suppose, not a graveman) to think it unnecessary for literature to have an immoral purpose. I hatethis notion of being true to life! Life, thank God, is very largely what wechoose to make of it, and ideals are unreal only to those who do not wishthem to be otherwise. Tell Miss Gwinn, with my compliments, that everyword of St Augustine’s Confessions is true to life, and that Dante’s love forBeatrice is a piece of unadulterated realism. If people will not realise this, theyare sure to lose out of life its ?nest, rarest, most precious experiences. But thisis too large a theme!...Yours very sincerelyBertrand Russellthe autobiography of bertrand russell 156Friday’s HillHaslemereSeptember 1, 1902Dear LucyVanity in regard to letter writing is not an emotion to encourage! One’sfriends are sure to be glad of one’s news, even if it is not told in the mostgorgeous diction. But as a matter of fact I found your letter very interesting.Yes, one’s people are very trying: they are a living caricature of oneself, andhave the same humiliating e?ect that is produced by the monkeys in the Zoo:one feels that here is the unvarnished truth at last. To most people, theirfamily is real in a higher sense than any later acquaintance, husband or wifeeven. You may notice that with Carlyle – his people in Annandale existed forhim in a way in which his wife never existed till she was dead. People are lesscased in Self as children, and those associated with childhood have a vividnessthat becomes impossible later – they live in one’s instinctive past. This is afrequent source of trouble in marriage. – I haven’t read the Elizabethans sinceI was an undergraduate; as I remember them, their chief merit is a very richand splendid diction. The old drama is not a gospel to regenerate you, itsworld is too hopelessly unreal. Your own life, naturally, is a paper life, as yousay, a life in which experience comes through books, not directly. For thisdisease, more books are not the remedy. Only real life is the remedy – but thatis hard to get. Real life means a life in some kind of intimate relation to otherhuman beings – Hodder’s life of passion has no reality at all. Or again, reallife means the experience in one’s own person of the emotions which makethe material of religion and poetry. The road to it is the same as that recom-mended to the man who wanted to found a new religion: Be cruci?ed, andrise again on the third day.If you are prepared for both parts of this process, by all means take to reallife. But in the modern world, the cross is usually self-in?icted and voluntary,and the rising again, to the hopes of new cruci?xions, requires a considerablee?ort of will. It seems to me that your di?culty comes from the fact thatthere are no real people to speak of in your world. The young are never real,the unmarried very seldom. Also, if I may say so, the scale of emotion inAmerica seems to me more frivolous, more super?cial, more pusillanimous,than in Europe; there is a triviality of feeling which makes real people veryrare – I ?nd in England, that most women of 50 and upwards have gonethrough the experience of many years’ voluntary endurance of torture,which has given a depth and a richness to their natures that your easy-goingpleasure-loving women cannot imagine. On the whole, real life does notconsist, as Hodder would have you believe, in intrigues with those who arealready married. If one wants uncommon experiences, a little renunciation, alittle performance of duty, will give one far more unusual sensations than all‘principia mathematica’ 157the ?ne free passion in the universe. But a life in books has great calm andpeace – it is true that a terrible hunger for something less thin comes overone, but one is spared from remorse and horror and torture and the madden-ing poison of regret. For my part, I am constructing a mental cloister, inwhich my inner soul is to dwell in peace, while an outer simulacrum goesforth to meet the world. In this inner sanctuary I sit and think spectralthoughts. Yesterday, talking on the terrace, the ghosts of all former occasionsthere rose and walked before me in solemn procession – all dead, with theirhopes and fears, their joys and sorrows, their aspirations and their goldenyouth – gone, gone into the great limbo of human folly. And as I talked,I felt myself and the others already faded into the Past and all seemed verysmall – struggles, pains, everything, mere fatuity, noise and fury signifyingnothing. And so calm is achieved, and Fate’s thunders become mere nursery-tales to frighten children. – Life here is always, in the summer, a strangephantasmagory: we had yesterday Grace, the Amos’s, Miss Creighton, theKinsellas, the Robinsons and J. M. Robertson, the man on whom Bradlaugh’smantle has fallen. Miss Creighton had to be rescued, because Robertson beganto discuss whether God was made of green cheese or had whiskers – in?nitefor choice.We have all been reading with great pleasure James on ReligiousExperience – everything good about the book except the conclusions. I havebeen re-reading the most exquisite of all bits of history, Carlyle’s DiamondNecklace. He is the only author who knows the place of History among theFine Arts.Love to Helen.Yours very sincerelyBertrand Russell14 Cheyne WalkChelsea S. W.November 25, 1902Dear LucyMany thanks for your letter. I am grateful to you for writing about yourself:after all, people can tell one nothing more interesting than their own feelingtowards life. It is a great comfort that you are so much better, and able to enjoylife again. All that you write about the little most people get out of experienceis most true: but I was not thinking when I wrote, of ‘experiences’, but of theinward knowledge of emotions. This, if one is rightly constituted, requires anabsolute minimum of outward circumstances as its occasion; and this it is thatis required for the development of character and for certain sorts of writing.But there is no pro?t in feeling unless one learns to dominate it and imper-sonalise it. – For people like you and me, whose main business is necessarilythe autobiography of bertrand russell 158with books, I rather think experience of life should be as far as possiblevicarious. If one has instinctive sympathy, one comes to know the true historyof a certain number of people and from that one can more or less create one’sworld. But to plunge into life oneself takes a great deal of time and energy, andis, for most people, incompatible with preserving the attitude of a spectator.One needs, as the key to interpret alien experience, a personal knowledge ofgreat unhappiness; but that is a thing which one need hardly set forth to seek,for it comes unasked. When once one possesses this key, the strange, tragicphantasmagoria of people hoping, su?ering, and then dying, begins to su?cewithout one’s desiring to take part, except occasionally to speak a word ofencouragement where it is possible.I have not been reading much lately: Fitzgerald’s letters have interested me,also the new Cambridge Modern History, where one gets a connected viewof things one has read before in a very fragmentary fashion. Gilbert Murray’stranslations of Euripides are out, and I recommend them to you (publishedby George Allen). I have been trying to be interested in Politics, but in vain:the British Empire is unreal to me, I visualise the Mother Country and theColonies as an old hen clucking to her chickens, and the whole thing strikesme as laughable. I know that grave men take it seriously, but it all seems tome so unimportant compared to the great eternal facts. And London people,to whom the Eternal is represented by the Monthlies, to which they rise withdi?culty from the daily papers, strike me as all puppets, blind embodimentsof the forces of nature, never achieving the liberation that comes to manwhen he ceases to desire and learns at last to contemplate. Only in thought isman a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.Yours very sincerelyBertrand RussellLucy Donnelly’s life had for many years centred about her friendship for Helen Thomas. WhenHelen became engaged to Dr Simon Flexner, Lucy su?ered profoundly. The following letter was anattempt to comfort her.14 Cheyne WalkChelsea, S.W.7th February, 1903Dear LucyI have just heard of Helen’s engagement and for her sake I am glad – it hasalways seemed to me that she ought to marry and that College life wasdistinctly a second-best for her. But for you, I know, it must be hard, very hard.It is a dangerous thing to allow one’s a?ections to centre too much in oneperson; for a?ection is always liable to be thwarted, and life itself is frail. Onelearns many things as year by year adds to the burden of one’s life; and I think‘principia mathematica’ 159the chief of all is the power of making all one’s loves purely contemplative. Doyou know Walt Whitman’s ‘Out of the rolling ocean the crowd’? One learnsto love all that is good with the same love – a love that knows of its existence,and feels warmed to the world by that knowledge, but asks for no possession,for no private gain except the contemplation itself. And there is no doubt thatthere are real advantages in loss: a?ection grows wider, and one learns insightinto the lives of others. Everyone who realises at all what human life is mustfeel at some time the strange loneliness of every separate soul; and then thediscovery in others of the same loneliness makes a new strange tie, and agrowth of pity so warm as to be almost a compensation for what is lost.Phrases, I know, do not mend matters; but it makes unhappiness far morebearable to think that some good will come of it; and indeed the facing of theworld alone, without one’s familiar refuge, is the beginning of wisdom andcourage.Forgive my writing so intimately; but the world is too serious a place, attimes, for the barriers of reserve and good manners.We shall hope to see a great deal of you when you come to England, asI hope you will do. And I shall be very glad to hear from you whenever youfeel inclined to write.Yours very sincerelyBertrand RussellChurt, FarnhamApril 13, ’03Dear LucyIt is impossible to tell you how like sunshine it was to me to hear that myletter had been a comfort. But alas! it is easier to see what is good than topractise it; and old as this observation is, I have not yet got used to it, or madeup my mind that it really is true. Yet I have seen and known, at times, a life at afar higher level than my present one; and my precepts are very greatlysuperior to anything that I succeed in achieving.Yes, the logic of life is a wonderful thing: sometimes I think of making up aset of aphorisms, to be called ‘Satan’s joys’; such as: Giving causes a?ection,receiving causes tedium; the reward of service is unrequited love. (This is thebiography of all virtuous mothers, and of many wives.) Passions are smirchedby indulgence and killed by restraint: the loss in either case is inevitable. Andso on. But these bitter truths, though they deserve to be recognised so far asthey are true, are not good to dwell upon. Wherever one ?nds oneselfinclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure; a larger heart and agreater self-restraint, would put a calm autumnal sadness in the place of theinstinctive outcry of pain. One of the things that makes literature so consol-ing is, that its tragedies are all in the past, and have the completeness andthe autobiography of bertrand russell 160repose that comes of being beyond the reach of our endeavours. It is a mostwholesome thing, when one’s sorrow grows acute, to view it as having allhappened long, long ago: to join in imagination, the mournful company ofdim souls whose lives were sacri?ced to the great machine that still grindson. I see the past, like a sunny landscape, where the world’s mourners mournno longer. On the banks of the river of Time, the sad procession of humangenerations is marching slowly to the grave; but in the quiet country of thepast, the tired wanderers rest, and all their weeping is hushed.But as for me, I have felt no emotions of any kind, except on rare occasions,for some time now; and that is a state of things most convenient for work,though very dull. We are living a quiet country life: Alys is well, except nowand then for a day or two. We read Montaigne aloud: he is pleasant andsoothing, but very unexciting. To myself I am reading the history of Rome inthe middle ages, by Gregorovius, a delightful book. Gilbert Murray, who isour near neighbour, has been telling me about Orphic tablets, and theirdirections to the soul after death: ‘Thou wilt ?nd a cypress, and by the cypressa spring, and by the spring two guardians, who will say to thee: who artthou? whence comest thou? And thou wilt reply: I am the child of earth andof the starry heaven; I am parched with thirst, I perish.’ Then they tell himto drink of the fountain; sometimes the fountain itself speaks. Certainly abeautiful mysticism.Yours very sincerelyBertrand RussellFriday’s HillHaslemereJuly 29, 1903Dear LucyIt is impossible to tell you how glad I am that our letters have been a helpto you. It is the great reward of losing youth that one ?nds oneself able to beof use; and I cannot, without seeming to cant, say how great a reward I feel it.You need not mind bringing a budget of problems; I look forward to hearingthem, and to thinking about them....Yes, the way people regard intimacy as a great opportunity for destroyinghappiness is most horrible. It is ghastly to watch, in most marriages, thecompetition as to which is to be torturer, which tortured; a few years, atmost, settle it, and after it is settled, one has happiness and the other hasvirtue. And the torturer smirks and speaks of matrimonial bliss; and thevictim, for fear of worse, smiles a ghastly assent. Marriage, and all such closerelations, have quite in?nite possibilities of pain; nevertheless, I believe it isgood to be brought into close contact with people. Otherwise, one remainsignorant of much that it is good to know, merely because it is in the world,‘principia mathematica’ 161and because it increases human comradeship to su?er what others su?er. Butit is hard not to long, in weak moments, for a simple life, a life with booksand things, away from human sorrow. I am amazed at the number of peoplewho are wretched almost beyond endurance. ‘Truly the food man feeds uponis Pain.’ One has to learn to regard happiness, for others as well as for oneself,as more or less unimportant – but though I keep on telling myself this, I donot yet fully and instinctively believe it.I am glad to hear that Helen is getting rested. It has been no surprise nothearing from her; but tell her not to forget me, and to write again when she is