Fact and Fiction

Bertrand Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135195243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

First published in 1961, Fact and Fiction is a collection of Bertrand Russell's essays that reflect on the books and writings that influenced his life, including fiction, essays on politics and education, divertissements and parables. Also broaching on the highly controversial issues of war and peace, it is in this classic collection that Russell states some of his most famous pronouncements on nuclear warfare and international relations. It is a remarkable book that provides valuable insight into the range of interests and depth of convictions of one of the world's greatest philosophers.

Part I
Books that Influenced Me in Youth¹

1
THE IMPORTANCE OF SHELLEY

I am beginning a series of talks on books that influenced me when I was young—that is to say, broadly speaking, from the age of fifteen to the age of twenty-one. I have not found in later years that books were as important to me as they were when I was first exploring the world and trying to determine my attitude to it. In those days a book might be a great adventure, expressing ideas or emotions which one could absorb and assimilate. In later life one has more or less decided upon a fundamental outlook that seems congenial and only something very rare can effect an important change.

But when the great books of the world were new to me, when Ifirst learnt what had been thought and felt and said by men who had thought and felt profoundly, there was a great liberation in the discovery that hopes and dreams and systems of thought which had remained vague and unexpressed for lack of sympathy in my environment had been set forth in clear and shining words by men whom the world acknowledged to be great. From books I derived courage and hope and freedom in arduous endeavour.

DESIRE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD

In my adolescence, as is not uncommon, a number of very strong emotions jostled each other in my feelings, and in spite of apparent incompatibility none yielded to any of the others. I liked a number of books of very different kinds because I found in them expressions of the different kinds of feelings that tossed me hither and thither on contending waves. I cared for beauty, especially in poetry and in nature. I wanted some kind of vivid hope for the destiny of mankind. I was filled with revolt against what Blake calls ‘mind-forged manacles’. Underneath all these emotional attitudes and more compelling than any of them was the desire to understand the world, which I hoped to do as far as was possible by means of mathematics and science.

Here I propose to speak about poetry. My education in this respect had been old fashioned even for that time. When I began reading poetry for myself I was at first somewhat circumscribed by this upbringing. I read Shakespeare and Milton and all Byron’s longer poems except Don Juan; I read Tennyson, but was repelled by his sentimentality; and then one day I came upon Shelley, whose very name was unknown to me. I took out from a shelf the Golden Treasury volume of selections from Shelley and opened it at Alastor or the Spirit of Solitude. I read on and on entranced. Here, I felt, was a kindred spirit, gifted as I never hoped to be with the power of finding words as beautiful as his thoughts.

It was only at a later time that I became interested in Shelley the political rebel; it was Shelley the lyric poet who attracted me. He attracted me as much by what I now consider his weaknesses as by what I still consider his merits. I learnt most of his shorter love-poems by heart, and longed to experience the emotions they expressed even when they were painful. I liked his despair, his isolation, his imaginary landscapes that seemed as unreal as scenery in sunset clouds. He did not offend my intellectual taste by accepting conventional beliefs for which there seemed to be no good evidence.

COMPLETE OUTLOOK OF A ROMANTIC

My friend and collaborator Whitehead, not without some consciousness of paradox, used to praise Shelley for scientific accuracy and cited a line in Prometheus Unbound in which Earth says: ‘I spin beneath my pyramid of night.’ It would not be difficult to find many other instances, but I will give only one, from Hellas:

• Worlds on worlds are rolling ever,
  From creation to decay,
  Like the bubbles on a river,
  Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

This might be a poetic paraphrase of any modern scientific treatise on the stars. But what attracted me most to Shelley was what made him a typical romantic, for I myself, in adolescence, had the complete outlook of a romantic. I agreed passionately when he said:

• I love waves and winds and storms,—
  Everything almost
  Which is Nature’s and may be
  Untainted by man’s misery.

The scenery in Alastor I should now feel might be criticized for its vagueness, which is like that of scenery in dreams, but at that time it suited me completely. I liked the ‘lone Chorasmian shore’, and had no wish to know where it was on the map. One thing that now seems to me somewhat surprising is that like many adolescents I had a very vivid sense of a happy past now lost, and of this I found many expressions in Shelley, such as, ‘Like the ghost of a dear friend dead is time long past’. I revelled in his romantic gloom, and welcomed the poetic despair of his little poem called Time:

• Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
  Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
  Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
  Thou shoreless flood which in thy ebb and flow
  Claspest the limits of mortality,
  And sick of prey yet howling on for more,
  Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore!
  Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
  Who shall put forth on thee,
  Unfathomable Sea?

I shuddered with mingled awe and sympathy as I read his sonnet:

• Lift not the painted veil which those who live
  Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
  And it but mimic all we would believe
  With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
  And Hope, twin Destinies, who ever weave
  Their shadows o’er the chasm sightless and dread.
  I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
  For his lost heart was tender, things to love
  But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
  The world contains the which he could approve,
  Through the unheeding many he did move
  A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
  Upon this gloomy scene, a spirit that strove
  For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

If I were writing about anybody but myself, I should treat the youthful emotions aroused by this sonnet with kindly sympathy; but as the emotions were mine I will say only that they now seem to me somewhat absurd. I should be unjust to my adolescent self, however, if I were to omit other things that struck me in my reading of Shelley. I noticed the similarity and difference between Shelley’s ‘The flower that smiles today Tomorrow dies’; and Herrick’s ‘And this same flower that smiles today, Tomorrow will be dying’. I noticed that although one is tragic and the other gay, the difference is wholly one of rhythm.

As I was already anxious to learn to write well I noted the effect of rhythm in whatever good literature I read, more especially in Milton. It was largely the jingling, mechanical metres of Byron that prevented me from admiring that poet. I loved Shelley for his rhythm as much for his sentiment. It was not only Shelley’s despairs that I liked among his sentiments but also his apocalyptic hopes. The vision of a world suddenly transformed when ‘the banded anarchs fled’ entranced me, and I was enraptured by the chorus at the end of Hellas, of which I will quote the first stanza:

• The world’s great age begins anew,
  The golden years return,
  The earth doth like a snake renew
  Her winter weeds outworn:
  Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
  Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

I have never quite overcome this point of view. Although I am intellectually convinced that any great improvement in human life must be gradual, I still find my imagination dominated by the hope of a general change of heart.

Shelley dominated my imagination and my affection for many years. When I went to Italy in 1892 my first place of pilgrimage was Casa Magni, where Shelley spent the last months of his life. I loved him not only for the reasons I have already mentioned but also for an extraordinary quality of light, like sunshine after a storm. I have spoken of his landscapes as unreal, but this same quality is to be found in some actual landscapes, especially those on eastern shores of the Atlantic. I have found it in Cornwall, in Connemara, and on the mountains of Skye, and sometimes in north Wales: a magical, transfiguring beauty which seems not of this world but like a glimpse of an imagined heaven. It was this transfiguring quality in Shelley’s poetry that I found intoxicating. In this respect, I do not know of any other poet to equal him.

Although I have learnt reluctantly to admit some weaknesses in Shelley, he has remained important to me for the purity of his passion, the intensity of his love of beauty, and the scope of his constructive imagination. I wondered in adolescence whether I should have the good fortune to meet someone like him. I still feel that if this had happened it would have been a supreme event in a not uneventful life.

2
THE ROMANCE OF REVOLT

Turgenev, who will be my subject, had a profound influence upon me in various different ways. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky I did not read until some years later, and although both seem to me now to have more genius than Turgenev had, neither of them ever influenced me greatly. Turgenev was my first contact with anything Russian, and I found his novels at once immensely impressive and immensely attractive. Some of his books excited me as poetic love-stories at a time when I knew of love only through literature. His characters, both those whom he loved and those whom he hated (for he did not pretend to any detachment), seemed to me to be both more interesting and more delicately portrayed than those of English novelists. I read him in German because Mrs Garnett’s translation did not yet exist, and his novels impressed me as few books of literature have done.

My grandmother had often spoken to me of some Russian friends in the Russian diplomatic service in Paris who called themselves, and whom she called, Tourgeneff. I asked her whether she knew of the novelist and whether he was related to her friends. She replied that they had mentioned having a cousin who wrote novels, and, indeed, she had once met him and he had given her one of his books, but she had never read it and did not know what sort of books he wrote.

EAGER AND HOPEFUL YOUNG PEOPLE

I found in Turgenev, first of all, a society of eager and hopeful young people such as I could have loved if I had known them, and infinitely more sympathetic to me than any young people whom I knew before I went to Cambridge. They combined hope and indignation in proportions which were entirely congenial to me. They were oppressed or seduced by cynical aristocrats who made me shudder. They attempted heroic tasks, and came to grief heroically. They won my heart and retained it down to the moment of their final defeat by the Bolsheviks.

Romantic rebellion inspired the young and some of the old throughout the generations from 1789 to 1918. Throughout this long period many of the most talented people in every country of Europe and the western hemisphere believed that the cruelties and oppressions existing in many parts of the world were due to small cliques of wicked men against whom, sooner or later, the people would rise in noble wrath and establish a heaven on earth. One generation after another was disappointed, but new crops of young men perpetually took the place of the ‘Lost Leaders’.

This long procession of romantic rebels began with the French Revolution. Wordsworth, after he had been disillusioned, recounted the emotions of his youth, which he recollected in very complete tranquility. They are to be found in the sonnet with the somewhat unpromising beginning: ‘Jones! As from Calais southwards you and I went pacing side by side …’ and more poetically in the well-known lines: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven.’ The guillotine and the Reign of Terror obscured in men’s memories the hopes inspired by the first years of the French Revolution, but the romantic tradition survived and was kept alive by romantic facts.

AMERICA—A LAND OF PROMISE

Tom Paine was preserved from Pitt’s minions by the judicious advice of Blake, and embarked at Dover twenty minutes before those who had come to arrest him arrived. He had been elected by Calais as its representative in the Convention and was hailed by the French with a frenzy of acclamation. He survived the hatred of Pitt, Washington, and Robespierre, all of whom wished him dead. But though they failed to kill him they succeeded in killing his hopes.

Nonetheless, America remained a land of promise for lovers of freedom. Even Byron, at a moment when he was disgusted with Napoleon for not committing suicide, wrote an eloquent stanza in praise of Washington. Admiration of America as the land of democracy survived through the greater part of the nineteenth century. Richard Cobden, who was in most respects the opposite of a romantic, cherished illusions about the United States: when admirers presented him with a large sum of money he invested it in the Illinois Central Railroad and lost every penny. When my parents visited America in 1867 it still had for them a halo of romance. This survived even for me through Walt Whitman, whose house was the first place that I visited when I went to America.

But except for Walt Whitman the New World was not the favourite of the poets. In the time of Byron and Shelley Greece was the country that inspired the Muse, and the Turk was the symbol of tyranny. After Greece had won independence it was the turn of Italy. Browning and Swinburne sang the praises of Italian patriotic exiles, of whom Mazzini was the most eminent symbol. It was the abomination of the Neapolitan régime that finally turned Gladstone from a Peelite into a Liberal. Mazzini’s history was very typical: he inspired the enthusiasm which created united Italy; but Cavour harnessed this enthusiasm to the House of Savoy, and the result was profoundly disgusting to the man who had done so much to bring it about.

There was nothing peculiar to Italy in this series of events. In one country after another the old régime was overthrown, and the momentum which produced the overthrow was generated and at first led by romantic idealists. Everywhere the régime which emerged from successful revolution was disillusioning to the idealists. But their hopes did not wholly die; they only travelled on to some new land where present oppression was certain and future glory still seemed possible.

When I was young it was the Russian revolutionaries, above all, who were the inheritors of the tradition of romantic revolt. Czarist Russia was viewed with shuddering horror by Liberals throughout the world. The very word ‘Siberia’ froze their blood. Ever since the Decembrists in 1825 heroic Russians had struggled to overthrow the régime. No Liberal doubted that they would succeed some day and that the result would be a splendid growth of freedom in regions where the human spirit had hitherto been enslaved. I shared these hopes; and I found in Turgenev’s books imaginative portraits of the men who were to create the new world.

Political revolutionaries are the subject-matter of Virgin Soil, a book by which I was greatly moved. But the best of Turgenev’s books, and the one which affected me most, was Fathers and Children. The hero of this book, Bazarov, is not much concerned with politics, but is a rebel of every other imaginable sort. He calls himself a Nihilist, a word which Turgenev invented in this book, and which was afterwards universally adopted as a symbol of hope to some and terror to others. Bazarov professes to believe in nothing at all, but has, in fact, a somewhat reluctant belief in science. He is training to be a doctor and tells everybody that medicine is all nonsense, but he works assiduously to acquire all the medical knowledge available. He carries his dislike of humbug and his cult of sincerity to a point which makes him brutal and unfeeling in his conversation even with those who love him deeply. He has a disciple, an aristocratic young man named Arkady, who is amiable and kindly and finds Bazarov’s pronouncements delightfully horrifying.

DID TURGENEV BETRAY THE LIBERALS?

When I read the book I read it with the feelings of Arkady. I had grown up in a world in which good manners were regarded as of supreme importance, and in which very grave social evils remained rampant because any mention of them was repugnant to good taste. When Bazarov behaved like a boor, I supposed that this was really very admirable, but in spite of the worst intentions I remained much more like Arkady: I admired ruthlessness but could not bring myself to practise it. Much subsequent experience of Bazarov’s imitators has made me more tolerant of politeness than I was when it still held me in a kind of prison. It is natural to groping youth to admire opinions too extreme to command complete agreement.

For example, I admired but did not share Bazarov’s ethical destructiveness when he says: ‘There are no general principles—you’ve not made out that even yet! There are feelings. Everything depends on them. I, for instance, take up a negative attitude by virtue of my sensations; I like to deny—my brain’s made on that plan, and that’s all about it! Why do I like chemistry? Why do you like apples?—by virtue of our sensations. It’s all the same thing. Deeper than that men will never penetrate.’ When Bazarov begins to get tired of Arkady, he says: ‘You’re a capital fellow; but you’re a sugary, Liberal snob for all that.’ I trembled at the thought that Bazarov might consider me a ‘sugary, Liberal snob’, which I thought very probable. Bazarov dies of blood-poisoning acquired in dissecting a corpse. The grief of his parents, who adore him, is one of the most affecting things that I know in literature.

Turgenev was taken to task by Liberal Russians for representing Bazarov as a typical revolutionary. They said he was a caricature. They said that it was a soft heart and not a hard head that made them revolutionary. They felt that he had betrayed the cause, and attacked him with great bitterness. He defended himself with vigour. I quote from Edward Garnett’s introduction to his wife’s translation of a passage from a letter of Turgenev to a Russian lady: ‘What, you too say that in drawing Bazarov I wished to make a caricature of the young generation. You repeat this—pardon my plain speaking—idiotic reproach. Bazarov, my favourite child, on whose account I quarrelled with Karkoff; Bazarov, on whom I lavished all the colours at my disposal; Bazarov, this man of intellect, this hero, a caricature! But I see it is useless to protest.’

No one at that time foresaw the Russian future with any accuracy, but it must be said that those who emerged victors in the Russian revolution bore more resemblance to Bazarov than to his critics. Perhaps, nevertheless, Bazarov, if he had survived, would have felt about the victors as I did.

3
REVOLT IN THE ABSTRACT

Ibsen, who is the subject of this talk, presents for me a difficulty which did not exist in the cases of Shelley and Turgenev. The difficulty is that I no longer admire him except to a very limited extent, and that it is only by an effort that I can recall what he meant for me at one time. I first heard of him from a friend of my family, a Unitarian minister named Philip Wicksteed, whom I admired for his work on economics.

I next came upon the name of Ibsen through Shaw’s laudatory writings on him. The third thing that predisposed me in his favour was a hostile criticism in the Cambridge Review, a periodical mainly designed (or so I thought then) to keep dons feeling comfortable....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• PART I Books that Influenced Me in Youth
• PART II Politics and Education
• PART III Divertissements
• PART IV Peace and War
• NOTES