ANCIENT GLITTERING EYES

WINSTON CHURCHILL'S EIGHTIETH birthday, an English journal of opinion sent felicitations to “the second greatest living Englishman.” The panache and impertinence of the compliment lay in the omitted premise. But to logicians and radicals the missing name rang clear: it was that of Bertrand Russell. And the implicit judgment may stick. Indeed, it may reach well beyond English life. It looks as if the presence of Russell will come to inform the history of intelligence and feeling in European civilization between the eighteen-nineties and the nineteen-fifties as does that of no other man. As no single presence has, perhaps, since Voltaire’s.

The parallel is both obvious and deep. It springs from the actual wrapper of this handsome book, “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell” (Little, Brown), with its portrait of Russell made in 1916. His hair is close-folded in the manner of an eighteenth-century wig, the nose is beaked and Voltairean, the lips are sensuous but faintly mocking. Like Voltaire, Russell has lived long and made of this fact a statement of values both festive and stoical. His published work has been immense, an outrage to the sparsities of the modern manner; it comprises some forty-five books. His correspondence has been even larger. Like Voltaire’s, it has touched directly on every nerve of its century. Russell has debated philosophy with Wittgenstein and fiction with Conrad and D. H. Lawrence, he has argued economics with Keynes and civil disobedience with Gandhi, his open letters have provoked Stalin to a reply and Lyndon Johnson to exasperation. And, like Voltaire, Russell has sought to make of language—his prose is as supple and lucid as the finest of the classic age—a safeguard against the brutalities and mendacity of mass culture.

It may be that Russell’s range is ampler than Voltaire’s, although no single work he has produced crystallizes a whole sense of the world as does “Candide.” Only logicians and philosophers of science are qualified to assess the contribution of Russell’s “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy” and of “The Principles of Mathematics,” which he completed in 1903. Together with the “Principia Mathematica,” published in collaboration with Whitehead between 1910 and 1913, these books retain a commanding vitality in the history of modern logical investigation. They anticipate many of the notions that are proving most fruitful in contemporary symbolic logic and information theory. Pure logicians are a rare species. In his capacity for sustained analytic calculation, in his ability to use codes of significant order less encumbered than is ordinary speech by the waste and opacities of customary life, Russell is a peer of Descartes and Kurt Gödel.

Russell’s “History of Western Philosophy,” much in the forefront when he received a Nobel Prize in literature in 1950, is haute vulgarisation in the best sense. It marches briskly from Anaxagoras to Bergson. It brims with an implicit confidence in the mortality of nonsense. Russell’s book on Leibnitz is dated but remains interesting for the comparisons it invites between his own appetite for omniscience and that of the great polymath and rival of Newton. “Our Knowledge of the External World,” based on the Lowell lectures Russell delivered in Boston in 1914, remains perhaps the best introduction to his philosophic style, and sinuous empiricism. The problems raised are as old as Plato; this means that attempted solutions are less vulnerable to fashion than in other branches of philosophy. We are an epistemological animal, asking both whence and whither but knowing neither, unable to prove that we do not inhabit a long dream. Russell beautifully charts the strangeness of our condition. He does so again, though less incisively, in “The Analysis of Mind.” Had he produced nothing but these books of philosophic argument and history of ideas, his place would be distinctive.

But the shock of world war and radical changes in his own personality greatly extended and complicated Russell’s natural range. Since 1914 there have been few areas of social policy, of international relations, of private ethics that he has not dealt with. His critique of our mores begins in the world of William Morris and Tolstoy; it outlives that of Shaw and Freud; it is active and more irritant than ever in that of Stokely Carmichael. He has sought to plan “The Conquest of Happiness”—whatever the title of the particular discourse or tract. He has spoken as warmly as Montaigne “In Praise of Idleness” and reverted time and again, with the sense of a riddle unsolved, to “Marriage and Morals.” He has given the world notice of “Why I Am Not a Christian” but written with a poetic tact alien to Voltaire of the claims of mysticism, of that abrupt logic of the human spirit when it is in a state of rapture. Russell’s more immediately political studies and pamphlets would fill a shelf. He inquired early into the “Practice and Theory of Bolshevism” and addressed his uneasy sympathies to “The Problem of China” (another interest shared with Voltaire) long before the present crisis. His study of the “Prospects of Industrial Civilization” relates him to the thought of R. H. Tawney, while his repeated pleas for passive resistance and universal disarmament ally him to that of Danilo Dolci. The dreamer and the engineer have also been present in Russell’s genius. He is a Utopian of the short term, a man waking, even at ninety-five, from the simplicities of his dreams and refusing to believe that these cannot bring instant melioration to the morning. The title of one of Russell’s tracts, “Has Man a Future?,” sums up his quest. The mark of interrogation stands for a persistent skepticism, for a streak of resigned sadness. But the old fox’s entire life, marvellous in its diversity and power of creation, has been a striving for a positive answer.

Russell seems to have kept a close record of that life almost from the start—certainly from the moment he went to Cambridge, in October of 1890, and realized that he possessed gifts out of the ordinary. Like Voltaire, Russell has seen his own person move into the light of the historical; time and eminence have in part taken him from himself, and he has watched over the process with ironic precision. “My Philosophical Development” remains an intensely readable record of his passage from Kantian idealism to a kind of transcendental empiricism that I would call Pythagorean (“I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux”). The “Portraits from Memory,” which resembles and at times completes Keynes’s “Essays in Biography,” tells of some of the luminous encounters in Russell’s career, and recaptures, so far as any book can, the casual ceremony of intellectual life in the Cambridge of G. M. Trevelyan and Lord Rutherford, of G. E. Moore and E. M. Forster. The formal net of autobiography has grown naturally out of a life so constantly examined. Parts of this volume were assembled and dictated in 1949, other parts probably in the early nineteen-fifties. The material dealt with extends from February of 1876, when the orphaned four-year-old younger son of Lord and Lady Amberley arrived at Pembroke Lodge, the home of his grandparents, until August of 1914, when the forty-two-year-old mathematical logician, Fellow of Trinity College and of the Royal Society, was about to opt for intransigent pacifism and break with much of the world he had adorned. The narrative consists of seven chapters, each followed by a selection of relevant letters. This Victorian device works admirably. Often the letters move subtly against the grain of a much later remembrance, and the dialogue between letter and recollection yields a caustic footnote. Thus, Russell could write to Lucy Martin Donnelly on April 22, 1906, about some of his most abstruse, fiercely taxing endeavors in mathematical logic, “My work goes ahead at a tremendous pace, and I get intense delight from it,” whereas Earl Russell, O.M., remarks, forty-five years later, that “It turned out to be all nonsense.”

Bertrand Russell was born and brought up an aristocrat. He was the grandson of a Prime Minister and cousin or nephew to a covey of military, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical worthies. Forebears who had visited Napoleon at Elba or defended Gibraltar during the American wars were animate shadows in the nursery. This was the England of espaliers and velvet lawns, of lord and servant. In these opening pages there are dizzying vistas of time. The reader of this review and the writer are, in the allowed sense of the word, contemporaneous with a man who silenced Browning at a dinner party and who, when left in tête-à-tête with William Gladstone, heard cascade upon him the dread pronouncement “This is very good port they have given me, but why have they given it me in a claret glass?” Those now living can seek out a man, still alert, whose servants and early acquaintances clearly remembered news of Waterloo. This is startling enough in itself. But in Russell’s case the fact that he came of age in a world almost totally vanished from our grasp, that he belonged to the most confident élite in modern history (the Whig aristocracy of Victorian England), is more than a virtuoso trick of long life. Russell is marked to the very limits of his later radicalism by his origins.

This memoir does nothing to soften his native hauteur. “But what can a charwoman know of the spirits of great men or the records of fallen empires or the haunting visions of art and reason?” he asked Gilbert Murray in 1902, and went on, “Let us not delude ourselves with the hope that the best is within the reach of all, or that emotion uninformed by thought can ever attain the highest level.” In February of 1904, Russell ventured “to a remote part of London” to lecture to the local Branch of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. His comment at the time was characteristic: “They seemed excellent people, very respectable—indeed, I shouldn’t have guessed they were working men.” Russell grew into one of the genuine mutineers of modern history; his fusillades against capitalism, great-power politics, and the cant of the Establishment have been fierce and prolonged. Pity for the human condition has burned in him till it has all but consumed reason: “Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.” He has gone to prison, lost academic appointments, and risked ostracism on behalf of his outraged compassion. But Russell’s Jacobinism is high Tory; it springs from the certitude that birth and genius impose both the right and the obligation of moral precept. “Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart,” says Russell. One wonders whether he is not deceiving himself; the echo chamber lies higher, the pity, like Voltaire’s, is cerebral. Fundamentally, Russell’s politics of protest seek to realize the hope, so articulate in the small, vibrant coterie of Apostles to which he belonged at Cambridge, that humanity might be elevated to a just plane of social and hygienic well-being so that the elect, the pursuers of beauty and truth, could fulfill their lives without bad conscience. American democracy, argues Russell, is egalitarian and philistine. Thus, it has made room for neither intensity nor loftiness of feeling; “indeed, loftiness of feeling seems to depend essentially upon a brooding consciousness of the past and its terrible power.” True politics are the art of securing elbowroom for the best; they will alienate the squalor in the world at large that embarrasses or dissipates the life of the mind. Russell’s pity has often been sharp-edged, a weapon against those who would crowd too near his sensibility.

This aristocratic misericord and a betraying preference of the abstract over the disorder of the personal underlie the general tone of the “Autobiography.” They are explicit in what have rapidly become its two most notorious episodes. “I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy,” writes Russell, “ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.” But the search not infrequently appears to have brought ruin to others. Russell’s first marriage, to Alys, the sister of Logan Pearsall Smith, began in exultation. Russell’s recollection of an early visit to his beloved, in January of 1894, when London lay snowbound and “almost as noiseless as a lonely hill top,” has the gentle force of Tolstoy’s autobiographical narrative of Levin’s visit to Kitty near the start of “Anna Karenina.” But the marriage was built on a weird code of sexual reticence that soon produced cruel tensions. In March of 1911, Russell fell in love with Lady Ottoline Morrell, a woman celebrated in the lives and careers of a generation of English poets and politicians. “For one night” with her Russell felt ready to pay the price of scandal and even murder. The end of his marriage to Alys is recounted thus:

I told Alys that she could have the divorce whenever she liked, but that she must not bring Ottoline’s name into it. She nevertheless persisted that she would bring Ottoline’s name in. Thereupon I told her quietly but firmly that she would find that impossible, since if she ever took steps to that end, I should commit suicide in order to circumvent her. I meant this, and she saw that I did. Thereupon her rage became unbearable. After she had stormed for some hours, I gave a lesson in Locke’s philosophy to her niece, Karin Costelloe, who was about to take her Tripos. I then rode away on my bicycle, and with that my first marriage came to an end. I did not see Alys again till 1950, when we met as friendly acquaintances.

After his term at Harvard, Russell went to Chicago to stay with an eminent gynecologist and his family. He had met one of the daughters briefly at Oxford. “I spent two nights under her parents’ roof, and the second I spent with her.” It was agreed secretly that the young woman should join Russell in England. By the time she arrived, in August of 1914, world war had broken out. Again, Russell’s narrative should be quoted in full:

I could think of nothing but the war, and as I had determined to come out publicly against it, I did not wish to complicate my position with a private scandal, which would have made anything that I might say of no account. I felt it therefore impossible to carry out what we had planned. She stayed in England and I had relations with her from time to time, but the shock of the war killed my passion for her, and I broke her heart. Ultimately she fell a victim to a rare disease, which first paralysed her, and then made her insane. In her insanity she told her father all that had happened. The last time I saw her was in 1924. . . . If the war had not intervened, the plan which we formed in Chicago might have brought great happiness to us both. I feel still the sorrow of this tragedy.

There is a terrible coldness in both the style and the feelings expressed—a chill, dismissive lucidity in the Augustan manner. In some measure this may result from the detachment of an old man’s remembrance. But surely the problem lies deeper. Like Voltaire or perhaps like the Tolstoy of the later years, Bertrand Russell is a man who loves truth or the lucid statement of a possible truth better than he does individual human beings. His ego is of such turbulent richness that egotism makes a world. To it another human person, however intimate, has only provisional access. Russell has recorded at least one definite mystical experience. It took place in 1901 after he had heard Gilbert Murray read part of his translation of Euripides’ “The Hippolytus.” He traces to the formidable moment of illumination, of clear trance, that ensued a few hours later his lasting views on war, education, and the unendurability of human loneliness. He emerged convinced “that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.” The conviction was no doubt sincere, but little in this “Autobiography” bears it out. A more pertinent text would seem to be the chapter on “The Ideal” in G. E. Moore’s “Principia Ethica,” a work that profoundly influenced Russell’s early development; it is “the love of love,” which Moore commends “as the must valuable good we know.” Set beside the vividness of that realization, love for the actual beloved seems a more pallid joy.

Yet it would be unfair to consider solely what is lofty and bone-chilling in this book. The “ancient glittering eyes are gay.” Russell recalls how he read Lytton Strachty’s “Eminent Victorians” in jail: “It caused me to laugh so loud that the officer came round to my cell, saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment.” Lunacies and matching asperities out of another age, in an idiom almost extinct, abound: “When the Junior Dean, a clergyman who raped his little daughter and became paralysed with syphilis, had to be got rid of in consequence, the Master went out of his way to state at College Meeting that those of us who did not attend chapel regularly had no idea how excellent this worthy’s sermons had been.” Russell, like many English dons, is a virtuoso of the undercut. A hilarious vignette of philosophic and personal pomposities in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, of 1914 is capped by the gentle nonce that “There were limitations to Harvard culture. Schofield, the professor of Fine Arts, considered Alfred Noyes a very good poet.” A snapshot of Keynes finds him “carrying with him everywhere a feeling of the bishop in partibus.”

The ironies, moreover, are more than donnish. They deepen to a stream of doubt so erosive that it undermines Russell’s own initial values and sweeps before it the science in which he had achieved greatness and the world in which he was most at home. This demolition from within is the high adventure of the first volume (Russell is at work on a second). The labor of abstruse argument that went into the “Principia Mathematica” left Russell exhausted. He reports with absolute candor that his powers of close mathematical reasoning weakened after 1913. It was not mathematical logic alone, however, that weakened its hold. In February of 1913, Russell wrote to Lowes Dickinson a sentence that effectively dooms the criteria of elegant feeling, of academic communion that had dominated his own life until then: “But intellect, except at white heat, is very apt to he trivial.” Both the failure of his marriage and the example of Tolstoy lie behind that statement. But so does a precise local circumstance. In the same letter, Russell refers to one greater than himself in philosophy and the analysis of meaning. He reports that Ludwig Wittgenstein, a new arrival from Vienna and Manchester, has been elected to the Apostles “but thought it a waste of time. . . . I think he did quite right, though I tried to dissuade him.” The concession is momentous. As the long summer of European civilization drew to a close, Russell outgrew the luxuries of spirit he had prized most. He was to emerge from the war as one set on the road that has led to the Russell International Tribunal in Stockholm.

The myopia, the frivolous malice of many of Lord Russell’s recent political pronouncements are revolting. The changes of heart—it was Bertrand Russell who not so very long ago advocated a preventive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union—are risible. Yet even in error and garrulous simplification there is a fierce zest of life, a total gift of self to the claims of ideas and the demands of human conflict. When the whole story comes to be written, it may well appear that few men in history, certainly few in our tawdry age, have done more to dignify the image of life set down by Russell sixty-four years ago:

Often I feel that religion, like the sun, has extinguished the stars of less brilliancy but not less beauty, which shine upon us out of the darkness of a godless universe. The splendour of human life, I feel sure, is greater to those who are not dazzled by the divine radiance; and human comradeship seems to grow more intimate and more tender from the sense that we are all exiles on an inhospitable shore.