BR TO LUCY M. DONNELLY, 1 SEPT. 1902
BRACERS 58430. ALS. McMaster. Auto. 1: 165–7
Edited by Maria Forte. Proofread by K. Blackwell

Friday’s Hill,
Haslemere.1^, 2
Sep. 1. 1902.

Dear Lucy

Vanity in regard to letter-writing is not an emotion to encourage! One’s friends are sure to be glad of one’s news, even if it is not told in the most gorgeous diction. But as a matter of fact, I found your letter very interesting. Yes, one’s people are very trying: they are a living charicature of oneself, and have the same humiliating effect that is produced by the monkeys in the Zoo: one feels that here is the unvarnished truth at last. To most people, their family is real in a higher sense than any later acquaintance, husband or wife even. You may notice that with Carlyle — his people in Annandale existed for him in a way in which his wife never existed till she was dead. People are less cased in Self as children, and those associated with childhood have a vividness that becomes impossible later — they live in one’s instinctive part. This is a frequent source of trouble in marriage. — I haven’t read the Elizabethans since I was an undergraduate; as I remember them, their chief merit is a very rich and splendid diction. The old drama is not a gospel to regenerate you, its world is too hopelessly unreal. Your own life, naturally, is a paper life, as you say, a life in which Experience comes through books, not directly. For this disease more books are not the remedy. Only real life is the remedy — but that is hard to get. Real life means a life in some kind of intimate relation to other human beings — Hodder’s life of passion has no reality at all. Or again, real life means the experience in one’s own person of the emotions which make the material of religion and poetry. The road to it is the same as that recommended to the man who wanted to found a new religion: Be crucified, and rise again on the third day. If you are prepared for both parts of this process, by all means take to real life. But in the modern world, the cross is usually self-inflicted and voluntary, and the rising again, to the hope of new crucifixions, requires a considerable effort of will. It seems to me that your difficulty comes from the fact that there 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 in America seems to me more frivolous, more superficial, more pusillanimous, than in Europe; there is a triviality of feeling which makes real people very rare. I find in England, that most women of 50 and upwards have gone through the experience of many years’ voluntary endurance of torture, which has given a depth and a richness to their natures that your easy-going pleasure-loving women cannot imagine. On the whole, real life does not consist, as Hodder would have you believe, in intrigues with those who are already married. If one wants uncommon experiences, a little renunciation, a little performance of duty, will give one far more unusual sensations than all the fine free passion in the universe. But a life in books has great calm and peace — it is true that a terrible hunger for something less thin comes over one, but one is spared from remorse and horror and torture and the maddening poison of regret. For my part, I am constructing a mental cloister, in which my inner soul is to dwell in peace, while an outer simulacrum goes forth to meet the world. In this inner sanctuary I sit and think spectral thoughts. Yesterday, talking on the terrace, the ghosts of all former occasions there rose and walked before me in solemn procession — all dead, with their hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows, their aspirations and their golden youth — 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 very small — struggles, pains, everything, mere fatuity, noise and fury signifying nothing. And so calm is achieved, and Fate’s thunders become mere nursery-tales to frighten children. — Life here is always, in the summer, a strange phantasmagory: we had yesterday Grace, the Amos’s, Miss Creighton, the Kinsellas, the Robinson’s, and J.M. Robertson, the man on whom Bradlaugh’s mantle has fallen. Miss Creighton had to be rescued, because Robertson began to discuss whether God was made of green cheese or had whiskers — infinite for choice.

We have all been reading with great pleasure James on Religious Experience — everything good about the book except the conclusions. I have been re-reading the most exquisite of all bits of history, Carlyle’s Diamond Necklace. He is the only author who knows the place of History among the Fine Arts.

Love to Helen.

Yours very sincerely
Bertrand Russell.

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