Autobiography

Bertrand Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135223809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophenbiographien

Bertrand Russell remains one of the greatest philosophers and most complex and controversial figures of the twentieth century. Here, in this frank, humorous and decidedly charming autobiography, Russell offers readers the story of his life – introducing the people, events and influences that shaped the man he was to become. Originally published in three volumes in the late 1960s, Autobiography by Bertrand Russell is a revealing recollection of a truly extraordinary life written with the vivid freshness and clarity that has made Bertrand Russell's writings so distinctively his own.

1914–1944

8 THE FIRST WAR

The period from 1910 to 1914 was a time of transition. My life before 1910 and my life after 1914 were as sharply separated as Faust’s life before and after he met Mephistopheles. I underwent a process of rejuvenation, inaugurated by Ottoline Morrell and continued by the War. It may seem curious that the War should rejuvenate anybody, but in fact it shook me out of my prejudices and made me think afresh on a number of fundamental questions. It also provided me with a new kind of activity, for which I did not feel the staleness that beset me whenever I tried to return to mathematical logic. I have therefore got into the habit of thinking of myself as a non-supernatural Faust for whom Mephistopheles was represented by the Great War.

During the hot days at the end of July, I was at Cambridge, discussing the situation with all and sundry. I found it impossible to believe that Europe would be so mad as to plunge into war, but I was persuaded that, if there was war, England would be involved. I felt strongly that England ought to remain neutral, and I collected the signatures of a large number of professors and Fellows to a statement which appeared in the Manchester Guardian to that effect. The day War was declared, almost all of them changed their minds. Looking back, it seems extraordinary that one did not realise more clearly what was coming. On Sunday, August 2nd, as mentioned in the earlier volume of this autobiography, I met Keynes hurrying across the Great Court of Trinity to borrow his brother-in-law’s motor-bicycle to go up to London.¹ I presently discovered that the Government had sent for him to give them financial advice. This made me realise the imminence of our participation in the War. On the Monday morning I decided to go to London. I lunched with the Morrells at Bedford Square, and found Ottoline entirely of my way of thinking. She agreed with Philip’s determination to make a pacifist speech in the House. I went down to the House in the hope of hearing Sir Edward Grey’s famous statement, but the crowd was too great, and I failed to get in. I learned, however, that Philip had duly made his speech. I spent the evening walking round the streets, especially in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, noticing cheering crowds, and making myself sensitive to the emotions of passers-by. During this and the following days I discovered to my amazement that average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war. I had fondly imagined, what most pacifists contended, that wars were forced upon a reluctant population by despotic and Machiavellian governments. I had noticed during previous years how carefully Sir Edward Grey lied in order to prevent the public from knowing the methods by which he was committing us to the support of France in the event of war. I naïvely imagined that when the public discovered how he had lied to them, they would be annoyed; instead of which, they were grateful to him for having spared them the moral responsibility.

On the morning of August 4th, I walked with Ottoline up and down the empty streets behind the British Museum, where now there are University buildings. We discussed the future in gloomy terms. When we spoke to others of the evils we foresaw, they thought us mad; yet it turned out that we were twittering optimists compared to the truth. On the evening of the 4th, after quarrelling with George Trevelyan along the whole length of the Strand, I attended the last meeting of a neutrality committee of which Graham Wallas was chairman. During the meeting there was a loud clap of thunder, which all the older members of the committee took to be a German bomb. This dissipated their last lingering feeling in favour of neutrality. The first days of the War were to me utterly amazing. My best friends, such as the Whiteheads, were savagely warlike. Men like J. L. Hammond, who had been writing for years against participation in a European War, were swept off their feet by Belgium. As I had long known from a military friend at the Staff College that Belgium would inevitably be involved, I had not supposed important publicists so frivolous as to be ignorant on this vital matter. The Nation newspaper used to have a staff luncheon every Tuesday, and I attended the luncheon on August 4th. I found Massingham, the editor, vehemently opposed to our participation in the war. He welcomed enthusiastically my offer to write for his newspaper in that sense. Next day I got a letter from him, beginning: ‘Today is not yesterday …’, and stating that his opinion had completely changed. Nevertheless, he printed a long letter from me protesting against the War in his next issue.² What changed his opinion I do not know. I know that one of Asquith’s daughters saw him descending the steps of the German Embassy late on the afternoon of August 4th, and I have some suspicion that he was consequently warned of the unwisdom of a lack of patriotism in such a crisis. For the first year or so of the War he remained patriotic, but as time went on he began to forget that he had ever been so. A few pacifist MPS, together with two or three sympathisers, began to have meetings at the Morrells’ house in Bedford Square. I used to attend these meetings, which gave rise to the Union of Democratic Control. I was interested to observe that many of the pacifist politicians were more concerned with the question which of them should lead the anti-war movement than with the actual work against the War. Nevertheless, they were all there was to work with, and I did my best to think well of them.

Meanwhile, I was living at the highest possible emotional tension. Although I did not foresee anything like the full disaster of the War, I foresaw a great deal more than most people did. The prospect filled me with horror, but what filled me with even more horror was the fact that the anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population. I had to revise my views on human nature. At that time I was wholly ignorant of psycho-analysis, but I arrived for myself at a view of human passions not unlike that of the psycho-analysts. I arrived at this view in an endeavour to understand popular feeling about the War. I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the War persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity. Gilbert Murray, who had been a close friend of mine since 1902, was a pro-Boer when I was not. I therefore naturally expected that he would again be on the side of peace; yet he went out of his way to write about the wickedness of the Germans, and the superhuman virtue of Sir Edward Grey. I became filled with despairing tenderness towards the young men who were to be slaughtered, and with rage against all the statesmen of Europe. For several weeks I felt that if I should happen to meet Asquith or Grey I should be unable to refrain from murder. Gradually, however, these personal feelings disappeared. They were swallowed up by the magnitude of the tragedy, and by the realisation of the popular forces which the statesmen merely let loose.

In the midst of this, I was myself tortured by patriotism. The successes of the Germans before the Battle of the Marne were horrible to me. I desired the defeat of Germany as ardently as any retired colonel. Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess, and in appearing to set it aside at such a moment, I was making a very difficult renunciation. Nevertheless, I never had a moment’s doubt as to what I must do. I have at times been paralysed by scepticism, at times I have been cynical, at other times indifferent, but when the War came I felt as if I heard the voice of God. I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be. My whole nature was involved. As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilisation, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling, the massacre of the young wrung my heart. I hardly supposed that much good would come of opposing the War, but I felt that for the honour of human nature those who were not swept off their feet should show that they stood firm. After seeing troop trains departing from Waterloo, I used to have strange visions of London as a place of unreality. I used in imagination to see the bridges collapse and sink, and the whole great city vanish like a morning mist. Its inhabitants began to seem like hallucinations, and I would wonder whether the world in which I thought I had lived was a mere product of my own febrile nightmares.³ Such moods, however, were brief, and were put an end to by the need of work.

Throughout the earlier phases of the War, Ottoline was a very great help and strength to me. But for her, I should have been at first completely solitary, but she never wavered either in her hatred of war, or in her refusal to accept the myths and falsehoods with which the world was inundated.

I found a minor degree of comfort in the conversation of Santayana, who was at Cambridge at that time. He was a neutral, and in any case he had not enough respect for the human race to care whether it destroyed itself or not. His calm, philosophical detachment, though I had no wish to imitate it, was soothing to me. Just before the Battle of the Marne, when it looked as if the Germans must soon take Paris, he remarked in a dreamy tone of voice: ‘I think I must go over to Paris. My winter underclothes are there, and I should not like the Germans to get them. I have also another, though less important, reason, which is that I have there a manuscript of a book on which I have been working for the last ten years, but I do not care so much about that as about the underclothes.’ He did not, however, go to Paris, because the Battle of the Marne saved him the trouble. Instead, he remarked to me one day: ‘I am going to Seville tomorrow because I wish to be in a place where people do not restrain their passions.’

With the beginning of the October Term, I had to start again lecturing on mathematical logic, but I felt it a somewhat futile occupation. So I took to organising a branch of the Union of Democratic Control among the dons, of whom at Trinity quite a number were at first sympathetic. I also addressed meetings of undergraduates who were quite willing to listen to me. I remember in the course of a speech, saying: ‘It is all nonsense to pretend the Germans are wicked’, and to my surprise the whole room applauded. But with the sinking of the Lusitania, a fiercer spirit began to prevail. It seemed to be supposed that I was in some way responsible for this disaster. Of the dons who had belonged to the Union of Democratic Control, many had by this time got commissions. Barnes (afterwards Bishop of Birmingham) left to become Master of the Temple. The older dons got more and more hysterical, and I began to find myself avoided at the high table.

Every Christmas throughout the War I had a fit of black despair, such complete despair that I could do nothing except sit idle in my chair and wonder whether the human race served any purpose. At Christmas time in 1914, by Ottoline’s advice, I found a way of making despair not unendurable. I took to visiting destitute Germans on behalf of a charitable committee to investigate their circumstances and to relieve their distress if they deserved it. In the course of this work, I came upon remarkable instances of kindness in the middle of the fury of war. Not infrequently in the poor neighbourhoods landladies, themselves poor, had allowed Germans to stay on without paying any rent, because they knew it was impossible for Germans to find work. This problem ceased to exist soon afterwards, as the Germans were all interned, but during the first months of the War their condition was pitiable.

One day in October 1914 I met T. S. Eliot in New Oxford Street. I did not know he was in Europe, but I found he had come to England from Berlin. I naturally asked him what he thought of the War. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘I only know that I am not a pacifist.’ That is to say, he considered any excuse good enough for homicide. I became great friends with him, and subsequently with his wife, whom he married early in 1915. As they were desperately poor, I lent them one of the two bedrooms in my flat, with the result that I saw a great deal of them.⁴ I was fond of them both, and endeavoured to help them in their troubles until I discovered that their troubles were what they enjoyed. I held some debentures nominally worth £3,000, in an engineering firm, which during the War naturally took to making munitions. I was much puzzled in my conscience as to what to do with these debentures, and at last I gave them to Eliot. Years afterwards, when the War was finished and he was no longer poor, he gave them back to me.

During the summer of 1915 I wrote Principles of Social Reconstruction, or Why Men Fight as it was called in America without my consent. I had had no intention of writing such a book, and it was totally unlike anything I had previously written, but it came out in a spontaneous manner. In fact I did not discover what it was all about until I had finished it. It has a framework and a formula, but I only discovered both when I had written all except the first and last words. In it I suggested a philosophy of politics based upon the belief that impulse has more effect than conscious purpose in moulding men’s lives. I divided impulses into two groups, the possessive and the creative, considering the best life that which is most built on creative impulses. I took, as examples of embodiments of the possessive impulses, the State, war and poverty; and of the creative impulses, education, marriage and religion. Liberation of creativeness, I was convinced, should be the principle of reform. I first gave the book as lectures, and then published it. To my surprise, it had an immediate success. I had written it with no expectation of its being read, merely as a profession of faith, but it brought me in a great deal of money, and laid the foundation for all my future earnings.

These lectures were in certain ways connected with my short friendship with D. H. Lawrence. We both imagined that there was something important to be said about the reform of human relations, and we did not at first realise that we took diametrically opposite views as to the kind of reform that was needed. My acquaintance with Lawrence was brief and hectic, lasting altogether about a year. We were brought together by Ottoline, who admired us both and made us think that we ought to admire each other. Pacifism had produced in me a mood of bitter rebellion, and I found Lawrence equally full of rebellion. This made us think, at first, that there was a considerable measure of agreement between us, and it was only gradually that we discovered that we differed from each other more than either differed from the Kaiser.

There were in Lawrence at that time two attitudes to the war: on the one hand, he could not be whole-heartedly patriotic, because his wife was German; but on the other hand, he had such a hatred of mankind that he tended to think both sides must be right in so far as they hated each other. As I came to know these attitudes, I realised that...