b42
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
elderly, ailing and by now virtually canonized John Stuart Mill: "Do
you mind god-mothering my little
boy.
.. ."
She went on: "We hesitated
to ask such a favor of Mr. Mill otherwise I wish he too cd. have
been god-father for there is no one in whose steps I wd. rather see a
boy of mine following in ever such a humble way, than Mr. Mill's."
Helen Taylor not only assented to be the god-mother herself but added
the great news: "Mr. Mill says if you wish it he does not think it would
conflict with his opinions to enter into that relation. .. ." Later the
customary cup, suitably inscribed, arrived in the Amberley household,
making official the apostolic succession: Bertrand Russell god-son to
John Stuart Mill. [These facts are not includ€d in the
Autobiography ;
they come from Packe's
Life of Mill.]
No doubt Mill would not have approved of everything his god–
son was to do in a long, and often tempestuous, life, but he would have
seen with satisfaction that the great tradition of rationalism and reform
that had its inception in the eighteenth century and that was passed
on in England from Bentham to J ames Mill to John Stuart Mill had
found in Bertrand Russell an eminently worthy champion, in ma .1)"
ways the most doughty and intransigent of all. Russell himself h::ls, of
course, always been aware of this and rightly considers himself the last
Victorian. Early on at Cambridge when he first came
in
contact with
a younger generation, such as Strachey and Keynes, he said, "We were
still Victorians; they were Edwardians. We believed in ordered progress
by means of politics and free discussion."
So this is the first volume
( 1872-1914)
of the autobiography of the
last of the big men of the nineteenth-century ethos.
It
should be said
first that Bertrand Russell's life has been so long, so varied and so
r ich, and his own account of it is so good and so lucidly and cogently
written, except for a few purple passages, that a reviewer can only lay
down his arms and say: read the book, for one cannot possibly do it
justice within the confines of a review. The vignettes alone are worth
the price of admission : Russell as a boy trapped as the only "man" at
the table when the ladies left the room, alone, in utter terror, with Mr.
Gladstone, and the great man saying only, "This is very good port they
have given me, but why have they given it to me in a claret glass" ; or
conversational gambits, such as the one from his maternal grandmother,
who was of the eighteenth century, rationalistic and witty, and who
pooh-poohed Victorian prudery; "Nobody can say anything against
me,
but I shall always say that it is not so bad to break the 7th command–
ment as the 6th, because at any rate it requires the consent of the
other party."
