Victorian Titan
r ., C. W . Griffin, J
Victorian Titan The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872-1914. Atlantic-Little, Brown. 356 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by C. W. Griffin, Jr. TAepending on one's point of view, Bertrand Russell is...
...in which it was scarcely possible to breathe...
...philosopher G. E. Moore was inspiring Cambridge and Bloomsbury with his esthetic quest for artistic simplicity and truth...
...TAepending on one's point of view, Bertrand Russell is either a Satanic reincarnation of Don Quixote or a beneficent Doctor Faustus...
...Like that eccentric genius of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, Russell prefers honest arrogance to hypocritical humility...
...Even for those who know Russell's work, the book has other flaws, such as inadequate annotation of the overly abundant letters...
...It was a creative outburst born of peace and prosperity and nourished by the genteel traditions of a great empire, which, thinkers like Wells and Russell hoped, would lead mankind out of its long history of tribal barbarism into a world commonweal...
...These memoirs help to explain how this ninetyfive-year-old gadfly, the last of the great Victorians, was inspired with possibly the most durable combination of mental and moral vitality the world has ever seen...
...and Russell was solving some of the most baffling technical problems of philosophy...
...What is matter...
...Readers unfamiliar with Russell's work, like Time magazine's smugly arrogant reviewer, may have some trouble with this book...
...In accordance with a prevailing superstition, he was denied fruit, which was thought to be harmful to children...
...George Bernard Shaw was gleefully smashing Victorian icons and clearing the way for reform...
...H. G. Wells was proclaiming the onward-and-up-ward faith of progress through science...
...He lived through a Golden Age rivaling that of Pericles' Athens...
...The young Russell plunged into suicidal despairs...
...He feared the scandal would ruin his effectiveness in protesting the war...
...he even had a mystic ethical experience that converted him to pacifism...
...Judged by modern child-raising theories, Russell was lucky to survive his upbringing...
...In Russell's words, his family created "a thick atmosphere of sighs, tears, groans, and morbid horror...
...These hopes were blasted, of course, by World War I. Since 1914, the fragile faith in reason has yielded to the primitive faith in power...
...So Time, apparently confusing Russell with Einstein, made the ludicrous claim that Principia Mathematica, a pioneering philosophical work on mathematical logic, somehow "superseded" Newton's Philosphiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the classic text on mechanics...
...But the often naive, always candid revelations, presented in Russell's elegant, powerful prose, and flavored with his wit, far outweigh any shortcomings...
...Russell presents his long, arduous struggle with Prin-cipia Mathematica, for example, as an exhausting mental marathon, without much explanation of its significance...
...Russell's early memoirs remind us of a supremely civilized generation that consciously sought to raise the level of human life...
...The young Russell was one of those pure, unalloyed aristocrats who, in Tocqueville's words, "feel a haughty disdain of the petty interests and practical cares of life" and whose "thoughts assume a natural greatness...
...They asked the grand questions of human destiny and answered them with the naive boldness of the classic Athenians...
...After the age of fourteen I found living at home endurable only at the cost of complete silence about everything that interested me," says Russell...
...In the slow tempo of the years before World War I, undisturbed by the daily emergencies of our frantic times, Britain's leisure-class intellectuals lived a social life of high culture...
...In his personal life he could act with the calculating, self-righteous cruelty characteristic of saints and megalomaniacs—as evidenced by his cold-blooded treatment of his first wife and his decision to jilt an American girl who had followed him to England as his mistress...
...They also reveal an egocentric personality more admirable than lovable...
...Only in retrospect did he recognize the role played by her public spirit and severe independence of mind in shaping his character...
...His wildly unconventional parents died before he was four, and his grandmother raised him, Victorian-style, as a miniature adult...
...For a man whose grandfather—a Prime Minister—knew Napoleon, and who himself met Gladstone, to be leading antiwar protests in the 1960s seems as preposterous to his admirers as it seems outrageous to his critics...
...No matter...
...As its greatest spokesman, the indomitable old man gives you hope that the free human spirit may yet triumph over the organization men, the mind-molders, and the bomb-makers...
...Associated with this youthful aristocratic snobbery was a wild, passionate temperament like Shelley's...
...As Russell admits, his youthful anguish made him overlook the admirable qualities embedded in his grandmother's austere, puritanical morality...
...Though he emerged victorious, Russell was psychologically bruised by this experience...
...Never mind...
...This first autobiographical volume, which we may fervently hope will have a sequel, tells of Russell's lonely childhood, his exhilarating escape to Cambridge's Trinity College, the idyllic start and eventual wreckage of his first marriage, and several tumultuous affairs, notably with Lady Ottoline Morrell...
...Russell was privileged not only in the fact of his aristocratic birth, but in its timing...
...A final clash of wills occurred during Russell's engagement to his first wife, the American Quaker Alys Pear-sall Smith, who failed to satisfy his grandmother's conception of a lady...
...His grandmother ridiculed his interest in metaphysics with an eternally repeated jingle: "What is mind...
...he soared to ecstatic heights...
...It ends at the outbreak of World War I, when Russell, then forty-two, was preparing for the antiwar protest that landed him in Brixton jail...
Vol. 31 • June 1967 • No. 6
