BRACERS Record Detail for 58428
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On the past.
BR TO LUCY M. DONNELLY, 6 JULY 1902
BRACERS 58428. ALS. Auto. 1: 164–5
Edited by Maria Forte. Proofread by K. Blackwell
Trin. Coll.
Cambridge1, 2
July 6. 1902
Dear Lucy
Many thanks for your very interesting letter, and for the excellent account of Harvard and Barrett Wendell. What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilization. A certain man had the impudence to maintain in my presence that every student ought to be made to expound his views to popular audiences, so I lifted up my voice and testified for a quarter of an hour, after which he treated me with the kind of respect accorded to wild beasts. — I suppose Wendell is better than his books: I was disappointed in his American literature. For, though I agree with him that America, 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 good family, and that Harvard is vastly superior to Yale. And his failure to appreciate Walt Whitman to my mind is very damaging. He talks of “Brooklyn Ferry” and so on, and quite forgets “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking”, and “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed”.a This seems to me to show a deplorable conventionality, both in taste generally, and in judgment of Whitman specially.
When my book was finished, I took ten days’ holiday. Since then I have been working as usual, except during four days that I spent with my Aunt Agatha at Pembroke Lodge. A strange, melancholy, weird time it was: we talked of merriment long since turned to sadness, of tragedies in which all the actors are gone, of sorrows which have left nothing but a fading memory. All the life of the present grew to me dreamy and unreal, while the majestic Past, weighed down by age and filled with unspeakable wisdom, rose before me and dominated my whole being. The Past is an awful God, tho’ he gives Life almost the whole of its haunting beauty. I believe those whose childhood has been spentb in America can scarcely conceive the hold which the Past has on us of the Old world: the continuity of life, the weight of tradition, the great eternal procession of youth and age and death, seem to be lost in the bustling approach of the future which dominates American life. And that is one reason why 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 have been reading Maeterlinck’s works straight through: alas, I have nearly come to the end of them. Le Temple Enseveli seems to me very admirable, both as literature and as morality. I am simple-minded enough, in spite of Miss Gwinnc and Mr. Hodder’s grave man’s world [being, I suppose, not a grave man] to think it unnecessary for literature to have an immoral purpose. I hate this notion of being true to life! Life, thank God, is very largely what we choose to make of it, and ideals are unreal only to those who do not wish them to be otherwise. Tell Miss Gwinn, with my compliments, that every word of St. Augustine’s Confessions is true to life, and that Dante’s love for Beatrice is a piece of unadulterated realism. If people will not realize this, they are sure to lose out of life its finest, rarest, most precious experiences. But this is too large a theme!
Alys was at Friday’s Hill with me last Sat. to Monday, and seemed better. She is now in Switzerland, and on the 25th, when she returns, I shall be allowed to join her at last. — Do write to me again, and let me know your news, internal as well as external. Love to Helen.
Yours very sincerely
Bertrand Russell
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[document] Proofread against the original letter. BR edited it for a typed omission.
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[envelope] Miss Lucy Donnelly | Low Buildings | Bryn Mawr | Pa. | U.S.A. Redirected in the U.S.
