BR TO ALYS RUSSELL, 12 OCT. 1893
BRACERS 20373. ALS(M). Camellia Collections. SLBR 1: #13
Edited by N. Griffin. Proofread by A. Duncan and K. Blackwell

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<Trinity College crest>
Oct. 12. 1893.
10 p.m.

Dear Alys

It is tiresome not to have a letter of yours to answer and still more to think what a long time it will be before I get one from you. It is most aggravating to find that, though one can disprove the reality of space and time in a few strokes of the pen after reading a little metaphysics, it makes no apparent difference to the malignity of their operations. When Time has condescended to move as far as till you come home again I shall have grown very impatient of it; although McTaggart has given it its death-blow in an article in this month’s Mind1 it seems as vigorous as ever. — Fortunately I have no lectures on Saturdays so when I come up to town I shall be able to come in the morning. — Maud Joachim2 and I go to the same lectures now: she goes with a chaperon who sleeps peacefully through the lecture and wakes up with a start at the end. Poor thing! I believe she has been chaperoning people to the same course of lectures the last 10 or 15 years and must have grown intolerably bored to hear the old phrases and the old jokes endlessly repeated. My former coach, Webb,3 refused to coach Miss Fawcett because he thought her chaperon wouldn’t like his jokes, which certainly were of a somewhat doubtful character. Talking of jokes, I hear someone is writing a moral antidote to Dodo, called Don’t-Don’t.4 If the book is worthy of its title it ought to be amusing. — Amos, Sanger and I are all doing Moral Science now: Crompton5 says it is the first time there have been 3 Englishmen doing it at once: formerly it was confined to women and black men (excuse the collocation). He is going abroad with his sister6 who seems to have suffered for the prevailing fault of women (you must forgive me: I really mean it), over-conscientiousness; and is now knocked up with overwork and overworry. He seemed to regard her as an instance of the hopelessness of not marrying: he says he is always wishing for sympathy more than is possible for her to have and now is obliged to give up all her work for some time, to recruit her energy. I am annoyed at the utter insolubility of the problem: there seems no alternative for an educated woman but to give up marriage or to give up (for a time at least) work which may seem to bea the most important thing in life. And yet I hardly think anybody, especially any woman, can or ought to live on work alone; I am convinced myself I should find it quite impossible and should break down like Miss Llewelynb Davies, if I were to try. But I can also well understand finding it terrible to give up work, though I am much too lazy by nature to mind a bit myselfc as long as I can keep my conscience quiet. And not to marry comes sooner or later to renouncing everything but work: it is only by marriage one can form ties for the future, for old age or even in most cases for middle age. When we are young we have most of us a spring of enthusiasm and hope and self-confidence which helps us through periods of dullness: but in later life, if the dullness settles down as the normal state of things, and we realize that all the rest of life is to be colourless and cold, it must become almost impossible to preserve our energy and our generosity. And nothing on earth makes people so unsympathetic as solitude: the most sympathetic in old age I am sure are those who have had a chequered life of joys and sorrows, not those who have always had to fight against all their natural impulses and cravings. These, if they succeed in their attempt, become hard; if they fail, they become, like my aunt,7 quite incapable of anything except regret, and without the energy which would enable them to profit, as some do, by sorrow. — However I hope I believe you agree now with all I have been saying, so it was perhaps rather superfluous. But I meant to emphasize thatd the craving for sympathy, unlike many others, grows and grows by repression till finally it is apt to become an overmastering passion which nothing can control or which if it is controlled may succeed in ruining the person who controls it. If you ever condescend to read Browning I would refer to the Queen in “In a Balcony”:

There have been moments, if the sentinel,
Lowering his halbert to salute the Queen,
Had flung it brutally and clasped my knees,
I would have stooped and kissed him with my soul.

However this is Browning and I am by way of having got tired of him and never did approve of his philosophy, so I ought not to quote him. — Talking of philosophy, I have read rather more than half of Paulsen of whom I wrote before: he is very easy but very sentimental and popular: he reaches all the orthodox conclusions but by crude arguments which don’t really prove his point. Moreover he makes some extraordinary distinction between knowledge and faith which seems to me to serve absolutely no purpose: so much faith is involved in our having knowledge even of Euclid, and faith is again so much conditioned by knowledge that it seems to me only to incline to scepticism to emphasize the distinction; and further it might make one think faith was more or less arbitrary, whereas it ought to be the aim of philosophy surely to systematize it and eliminate all that is the least arbitrary. However the book is pleasantly written and is very good at giving the orthodox views in a more or less popular form.

I wonder very much what sort of crossing you have had and whether you have enjoyed it: Lady Henry Somerset must be delightful from all I have heard of her from you. Do write and tell me all sorts of things about your doings and so on: I shall expect you to have written a very long letter from the ship. I shall not write to America again as I think you said you would not get a later letter; so I shall not write till I hear you are back in England. Auf glücklichster Wiedersehen.

Ever yours
Bertrand Russell

• 1

  article in this month’s Mind “Time and the Hegelian Dialectic”, Mind (1893): 490–504. Despite the respect which Russell accorded McTaggart’s views at this time, he seems never to have been wholly convinced by any of McTaggart’s arguments for the unreality of time.

• 2

  Maud Joachim A relative of the Idealist philosopher, Harold Joachim, who was now Rollo Russell’s brother-in-law. She was taking the Moral Science tripos.

• 3

  Webb Like most students, Russell had hired a private coach to prepare him for the Mathematical Tripos. This was Robert Rumsey Webb (1850–1936), a Fellow of St John’s College.

• 4

  Dodo, called Don’t-Don’tDodo (1893) was an indiscreet society novel by E.F. Benson. The book, Benson’s first, created a minor sensation, partly because of its gossipy nature but also because it was written by the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

• 5

  Crompton Crompton Llewelyn Davies (1868–1935), Russell’s closest friend at Cambridge. He had completed part two of the Classical Tripos in 1891. He later became a lawyer and for many years handled Russell’s rather tangled legal affairs.

• 6

  his sister Margaret Llewelyn Davies (1861–1944). She became a prominent socialist and feminist.

• 7

  my aunt Agatha Russell.

Textual Notes

• a

  be above deleted indecipherable word

• b

  Llewelyn corrected from Llewellyn

• c

  myself inserted

• d

  I meant to emphasize that inserted