BR TO LUCY M. DONNELLY, 29 JULY 1903
BRACERS 58438. ALS. McMaster. Auto. 1: 170
Edited by Maria Forte. Proofread by K. Blackwell

Friday’s Hill
Haslemere.
July 29. 1903

Dear Lucy

It is impossible to tell you how glad I am that our letters have been a help to you. It is the great reward of losing youth that one finds oneself able to be of 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 hearing them, and to thinking about them.

The story of Maud Potts and her boy is quite unusually terrible. Slow tragedies are so much worse; and the poor boy has such an inevitable Fate over him. It reminds me of nothing so much as La Mort de Tintagiles.1 She must be a very weak woman — requiring the love of God and the love of man both is too much — many of us would be glad of either, but drag on somehow without them. Yes, the way people regard intimacy as a great opportunity for destroying happiness is most horrible. It is ghastly to watch, in most marriages, the competition as to which is to be torturer, which tortured; a few years, at most, settle it, and after it is settled, one has happiness and the other has virtue. And the torturer smirks, and speaks of matrimonial bliss; and the victim, for fear of worse, smiles a ghastly assent. Marriage, and all such close relations, have quite infinite possibilities of pain; nevertheless, I believe it is good to be brought into close contact with people. Otherwise, one remains ignorant of much that it is good to know, merely because it is in the world, and because it increases human comradeship to suffer what others suffer. But it is hard not to long, in weak moments, for a simple life, a life with books and things, away from the misery of human sorrow. I am amazed at the number of people who are wretched almost beyond endurance. “Truly the food man feeds upon is Pain”. One has to learn to regard happiness, for others as well as for oneself, as more or less unimportant — but tho’ I keep on telling myself this, I do not yet fully and instinctively believe it.

I am glad to hear that Helen is getting rested. It has been no surprise not hearing from her; but tell her not to forget me, and to write again when she is able. Seeing Grace just before her departure, the other day, seemed to bring America nearer. Usually when I write to you or Helen, I feel almost as if I were writing to dead people whom I have read about in books — the whole place seems so remote, so plunged in memories of an utterly different person who occupieda my body seven years ago, that I can hardly believe it to be real or inhabited by real people. But when you come over in the autumn, I shall doubt whether you have really been in America all this time.

The last four months, I have been working like a horse, and have achieved almost nothing. I discovered in succession seven brand-new difficulties, of which I solved the first six. When the seventh turned up, I became discouraged, and decided to take a holiday before going on. Each in turn required a reconstruction of my whole edifice. Now I am staying with Dickinson; in a few days I shall go to town and plunge into the Free Trade question (as a student only). We are all wildly excited about Free Trade; it is to me the last piece of sane internationalism left, and if it went I should feel inclined to cut my throat. But there seems no chance whatever of Chamberlain’s succeeding — all the brains are against him, in every class of society.

Alys had a tiresome accident to her leg, as you will have heard. But it is now almost well. She goes to F’s H. while I take my 10 days’ holiday. Love to Helen, and best wishes to yourself.b

Yrs very sincerely
B. Russell.

• 1

  La Mort de Tintagiles  By Maurice Maeterlinck (1894).

Textual Notes

• a

  occupied above deleted inhabited

• b

  Alys … yourself. BR instructed this paragraph to be omitted in the typing.