A PHILOSOPHER’S FRIENDS

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28128, 17 November 1956, Page 3

A PHILOSOPHER’S FRIENDS

Portraits from Memory, and Other Essays. By Bertrand Russell. Allen and Unwin.. 227 pp.

Bertrand Russell, now more than 80, writes with more of the advantages than the disadvantages of an old man’s outlook. An occasional crusty remark betrays the man whose home is in the liberal tradition of last century, but we are aware of the years mainly as they have added richness and experience to the writer’s memory.

The main interest in this book is in the biographical sketches of men Russell has known personally. One of his richest tributes is somewhat surprisingly to Conrad with whom in “something very fundamental” he felt “extraordinarily at one.” He sawlittle of Conrad but some letters were exchanged. A remark of Conrad’s in one of them is well worth preservation. He says that though man has taken to flying, “he doesn’t fly like an eagle, he flies like a beetle.”

Other sketches deal with Shaw, Wells, and Webbs. Cambridge dons and fellow philosophers. There is also a sketch of a brief and hectic acquaintance with D. H. Lawrence. This is a deft presentation of a character —or of two characters, because he does not spare himself, rather naively yielding at first to the spell of Lawrence’s ideas. In a few sure strokes he builds the unpleasant picture which is his view of Lawrence. Perhaps as a portrait of Lawrence it is incomplete, but as a portrait of an acquaintanceship between two incompatible people it is memorable. The “other essays” of the title deal mainly with philosophical and political subjects. The outstanding intellectual development which equips him for the former is less certainly advantageous in the latter. Santayana says that “even where Russell’s insight is keenest, the very intensity of his vision concentrates it too much . .

he sees one thing at a time . . . and the vivid realisation of that element blinds him to the rest.” In particular he sees the intellectual skeleton of political problems but underrates human emotion. For a race of reasonable men who did not feel very intensely his analyses would be very apt. He is at his best making his historic speech on the H-bomb, here reprinted, where the emotive element cannot be overlooked and would be too strong for a less steady mind. But he is never very far from the mathematician and logician, and always at an opposite pole from the poet. It is odd that Lady Ottoline Morrell thought that he and Lawrence might be friends.