BR TO GILBERT MURRAY, 23 JUNE 1951
BRACERS 52425. TLS. Murray papers, Bodleian
Edited by W. Bruneau. Proofread by A.G. Bone

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41 Queen’s Road
Richmond
Surrey
June 23rd., 1951

Professor Gilbert Murray, O.M.,
Yatscombe,
Boar’s Hall,
Oxford.

Dear Gilbert,

Thank you for your letter. I of course agree with you about Messieurs les Assassins, but I must confess that one finds some of them in the United States. Virtue, I decided long ago, is a matter of longitude. That is to say that it varies inversely as the square of the longitude. At Greenwich it is infinite, but as you depart from Greenwich, whether towards the East or towards the West, it diminishes. I would not, however, apply the formula in all its strictness to Australia. As for gloom and puritanism and fear, I was talking of them mainly in the forms in which Freudians deal with them, and also in the forms in which all the characters in Aldous Huxley suffer from them. Poor Aldous suffers a perpetual inner warfare between his Huxley grandfather and Doctor Arnold. I come more and more to the view that Doctor Arnold was one of the great forces for evil in the history of mankind. I think he invented Nazism and Rudyard Kipling and various other abominations. I love to think of him walking on the shore of Lake Como meditating on moral evil and fuming with rage because some dastardly humanitarian was trying to deprive him of the pleasure of flogging boys. I might say that what I was concerned with in my broadcast was to exorcise the Doctor Arnolds.

Yours ever,
B.R.
(Earl Russell)