After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  On 12 March four regiments – the Volhynian, the Lithuanian, the Pavlovsky, the Semyonovsky – mutinied. The Tsar abdicated, the liberals offered his throne to his brother, but this was declined. Russia became a republic, and a provisional government, with the liberal prime minister Kerensky, was formed.1 There was a tremendous and generalized rejoicing. Soldiers at the front, and workers in the factories, believed peace would come almost at once. The Russian equivalents of Asquith and Lloyd George could, with the reins of power in their hands, lead their great country to a peaceful, democratic and prosperous future. In a Zurich boarding house, the exile Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was finishing his breakfast and preparing to go to the library, to complete another piece of prose, by turns turgid and inflammatory, on the Marxist inevitability of world revolution. A Polish comrade came bursting into the dining room – ‘Haven’t you heard the news? There’s been a revolution in Russia.’ Ulyanov, whose nom de guerre was Lenin, abandoned his idea of a day in the library, and ran out to buy the newspapers.2

  Paradoxically, it was in part the Russian military and strategic success, or at any rate courage, which contributed to the weakness of morale in 1917 previous to the Tsar’s abdication. General Alexei Brusilov had led devastating attacks on the Galician front, taking over half a million Austrian prisoners, and doing irreparable damage to both Austrian strength and morale. But the cost was ruinously high – over a million Russian casualties. Terrible, unimaginably terrible, as the sufferings of the English, French, Germans and Belgians were on the Western Front, the numbers dead and the torments endured were eclipsed by what the Russians went through. Kerensky, after he became prime minister in July, was determined to fight on. The provisional government, which had come to power with a slogan of ‘Bread and Peace’, was determined not to be defeated in the war. It gave Trotsky and Lenin their chance, secretly negotiating with the Germans to allow them into Russia with safe conduct. By the terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March 1918 after the Bolsheviks had taken power in the previous October, Russia abandoned many of its Baltic and Eastern territories.

  One of the Austrian soldiers fighting in the Ukraine in July 1917, receiving the silver medal for valour at Ldziany and recommended a little later for the Gold Medal, was an intense, raw-boned, wild-eyed Viennese named Ludwig Wittgenstein. ‘His exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism’, said one of his citations, ‘won the total admiration of the troops.’

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), the son of an immensely rich Viennese industrialist, was the youngest of eight children, three of whom were destined to commit suicide. (His brother Kurt shot himself at the end of the war when his troops refused to obey his orders.) Like many men of genius, Ludwig as a child was not deemed by schoolteachers to be especially bright. Indeed, rather than receiving a grammar school (gymnasium) education like some of his siblings, he was sent to the more technologically inclined Realschule in Linz, where for two years Adolf Hitler was his contemporary. The history master was Dr Leopold Pötsch. ‘Even today’, Hitler was to recollect in Mein Kampf, ‘I think back with gentle emotion on this grey-haired man who, by the fire of his narratives, sometimes made us forget the present; who, as if by an enchantment, carried us back into past times, and out of the millennial veils of mist, moulded dry historical memories into living reality. On such occasions we sat there, often aflame with enthusiasm, and sometimes even moved to tears.’3

  There is no evidence that Wittgenstein ever had much to do with Hitler, who, though the same age as Wittgenstein, was two years behind him (he was forced to leave the Realschule in 1904 because of his poor performance). Wittgenstein hated the place, largely for snobbish reasons. His lower-middle-class coevals teased him, which, if he was as odd in his schooldays as in later life, was not especially surprising. He then went on to the technical university, the Hochschule, at Berlin, where he read engineering for two years, before turning up to study aeronautics at the university of Manchester in the spring of 1908.

  Wittgenstein’s primary interest was in the very new business of aircraft engines. He had an idea that it would be possible to rotate the propeller by means of high-speed gases rushing from the combustion engine, a little as water pressure from a garden hose rotates a lawn-sprinkler. His plans, worked upon steadily for a couple of years at Manchester, were flawed, but the idea was adopted during the Second World War in the design of certain types of helicopter.4 The modernity of Wittgenstein’s interests was in marked contrast to the völkisch history lessons in his provincial Realschule. Vienna, the centre of the obsolescent Austro-Hungarian Empire, was the heart of a dying world. When Austria found itself on the losing side of the war, Vienna lost the raison d’être which had sustained it for centuries. No longer the centre of a polyglot and multicultural empire of 50 million subjects, it became overnight the capital of an impoverished Alpine republic of little more than 6 million Germans. When, in 1919, they voted for Anschluss, union with the rest of Germany, the victorious Allies refused their request.

  Throughout Wittgenstein’s youth, the head of state, Franz Joseph, presided over an autocracy which was in most respects unchanged since he had become Emperor in 1848. One of the reasons that Vienna became the centre of so much modern innovation was that its outer structures had become a chrysalis husk. In England and France, where reforms and changes had happened throughout the nineteenth century, there was an atmosphere much more conducive to gradualism. Vienna stepped directly from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, missing out the Victorian experiences of commercial success, bourgeois democracy, and Doubt. After the tired late rococo of late nineteenth-century decorative architecture it was Adolf Loos in Vienna who pioneered the still calm of pared-down modernist design. Whereas English Victorian novels darkly knew that boys were repressed by buried hatred of their fathers and unbelief in their Father-God, Sigmund Freud let them have it in one mouthful. Whereas Sir Arthur Sullivan could demonstrate that the traditions which bred Mendelssohn were going to hit the buffers, Alban Berg simply made the atonal revolution. Wittgenstein’s musical tastes were in fact very old-fashioned. They stopped at Brahms. But his fascination with aircraft engines, in the very dawn of aeronautics studies, should not surprise us as the subject of interest in a young Viennese.

  But it is not as an aeronautical engineer that Wittgenstein’s name is known to us – nor as an architect, though he was to design a magnificent modernist house for his sister, a building of which Loos would have approved. Wittgenstein’s name is synonymous with ‘modern philosophy’, even, or especially, among those who would find it difficult to put into words a single one of his ideas, and who know nothing of his work beyond a few aphorisms – such as ‘If a lion could talk we could not understand him’ (Philosophical Investigations) or ‘The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy’ (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).

  Among professional philosophers, there is disagreement about the significance, and influence, of his work.5 For all that – perhaps partly because he distanced himself so resolutely from so many other professional philosophers – he was destined to be one of those twentieth-century figures of emblematic stature. Such figures, like characters in medieval legendaries, enter the public consciousness, resonate, ‘stand for something’. (Machiavelli again – Gli uomini vivono in pochi e gli altri son pecorelle.) Wittgenstein stands like a lonely secular saint, a twentieth-century Mr Valiant-for-Truth, or perhaps more accurately, Mr-Irascible-and-Slightly-Mad-for-Truth. The very fact that most of his words (even or especially when translated into English) would seem unintelligible to ordinary mortals has served to enhance his reputation for profundity, just as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are revered by their most ardent disciplines for those works of theirs which most people only partially understand.

  In so far as it is possible to extrapolate simple influences from Wittgenstein’s work, influences which have filtered into the general consciousness, it is probably true to say that they are influenc
es which would make him distressed and angry. The popularity of the Verification Principle* espoused by the Vienna School is probably one reason why Wittgenstein, in the second half of his philosophical career, went so far to distance himself from it. In later life, his notion of ‘Language Games’,† his belief that all human utterance is imprisoned within its own linguistic frames of reference, has given birth to various types of ‘postmodern’ attitudes to ethics and aesthetics which Wittgenstein would equally have abominated.

  On 18 October 1911, Wittgenstein, an engineering student from Manchester University, had suddenly appeared at the rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, of Bertrand Russell, who had just completed a monumental account of the foundations of mathematics, Principia Mathematica.

  Russell (1872–1970), the diminutive grandson of the nineteenth-century statesman Lord John Russell, had a background which was different from Wittgenstein’s in every respect other than this: both were born to privilege. Whereas Wittgenstein’s family were haute bourgeoisie, Russell was a pure aristocrat. He grew up (his parents having died by the time he was four) at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, a house given for life to his grandparents by Queen Victoria. His adolescent memories included being left, as the only male at the table apart from their guest, alone at the end of dinner with Mr Gladstone, after the ladies retired. ‘He made only one remark: “This is very good port they have given me, but why have they given it me in a claret glass?” I did not know the answer and wished the earth would swallow me up.’6 At the age of eleven, he began reading Euclid, and from that period until he was thirty-eight ‘mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness’.7

  On 13 December 1894, Russell, like so many English aristocrats of the period, had married an American, Alys Pearsall Smith. In this case, however, it would seem as if he married not for money (the Russells were rather richer than Alys’s bookish, Quaker family) but for affection. At Cambridge, he began as a Hegelian Idealist like his tutor Ellis McTaggart, chiefly famed for having proved – to his own satisfaction if not that of others – that Time did not exist, and was then converted to a form of realism. Hegelians such as McTaggart taught that mathematics was true, not absolutely, but as an expression of our perception of the world. Russell believed that mathematics was true, it had an absolute reality, independent of those who perceive it: rather like Plato’s Forms. Russell’s abandonment of Idealism also sprang from his friendship with G. E. Moore, another Cambridge philosopher, whose essay The Refutation of Idealism (1903) brought to an end Cambridge’s, or at any rate Russell’s, belief in Hegel. Moore devoted much of his professional life to the analysis of propositions, and the defence of ‘common sense’ language against philosophical gobbledygook. His Principia Ethica (1903) was of huge influence in its day, taken by a whole generation, especially of the Cambridge-educated, as an agnostic guide to the Good Life – a ‘philosophy’, to use the word in its popular sense of life-view, which permeates, for example the novels of E. M. Forster, which had their unaccountable mid-twentieth-century vogue.

  Russell and Moore were both perceived, in early twentieth-century Cambridge, as having seen off Idealism and established a new approach to philosophical problems. The arrival of Wittgenstein altered this almost at once, as Russell was generous and clever enough to see. Wittgenstein was an Idealist, in the philosophical sense, as extreme as it was possible to be. Russell wrote to his new mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell:

  My German engineer very argumentative and tiresome. He wouldn’t admit that it was certain that there was not a rhinoceros in the room … He came back and argued all the time I was dressing, [1 November 1911] … He admits that if there is no Matter then no one exists but himself, but he says it doesn’t hurt, since physics and astronomy and all the other sciences could still be interpreted so as to be true.8

  Moore took almost as great a shine to Wittgenstein as had Russell and gave him the rooms in Cambridge which he would occupy, with many absences, until he retired as professor of Philosophy. Being Wittgenstein, he wanted only the very simplest furnishings. Just as his philosophical task was to pare away mercilessly at error, leaving only the bare skeleton of what might truthfully be said, so he deplored unnecessary decoration or ornamentation in domestic furnishings. None of the shops in Cambridge had anything simple enough for his taste, so he had all his furniture especially made to his own designs.9

  By the time he left Cambridge for a long period of contemplation in Norway in 1913, Wittgenstein had undermined Russell’s beliefs in the Foundation of Mathematics, and in effect made him give up the pursuit of academic philosophy. Russell embarked upon his career thereafter as a public man, and political agitator.

  While Wittgenstein joined the Austrian army, and fought with great gallantry for an imperial system in which he scarcely believed, Russell, against the personal background of professional and marital failure, threw himself into the role of public agitator for peace. The reaction of Russell’s family doctor, on hearing he wished to be married, had been discouraging. He had unfolded to Russell the extent of madness in his family. One is sometimes reminded of this fact in the pages of Russell’s autobiographical writings which have a chilly sprightliness that must be at variance with the author’s intentions. There is the moment when, bicycling along a country road near Grantchester, he suddenly realizes he no longer loves his wife. He immediately told her. As he recalls the scene, he admits to finding his earlier self repulsive,10 but one senses that even in old age he does not completely understand how strange, as well as repulsive, his behaviour seems to the reader. His subsequent love affairs are written up as affairs of the heart, but one feels no heart beating as he writes. Moreover, the logician seems entirely illogical. Not just a little, but totally illogical. ‘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.’11 Anyone can see that this is hyperbole written for effect, but since it is so plainly untrue, it is hard to see the remark having any useful application. ‘Any excuse good enough for homicide’ is simply not the same as supporting the war, especially in its early stages when most pundits believed it would be short.

  In January 1918, Russell published an article praising Lenin for having made peace with the Germans. ‘Lenin, whom we have been invited to regard as a German Jew, is really a Russian aristocrat who has suffered many years of persecutions for his opinions,’ he opined, making Lenin sound a little like a Russian version of Russell himself.

  Russell went on: ‘It is known that unless peace comes soon, there will be starvation throughout Europe. Mothers will be maddened by the spectacle of their children dying. Men will fight each other for the bare necessities of life.’ But there was something even worse than starvation round the corner: that is, the domination of Europe by America. ‘The American garrison which will by that time be occupying England and France, whether or not they will prove efficient against the Germans, will no doubt be capable of intimidating strikers, an occupation to which the American army is accustomed when at home …’12

  This article, published in the No-Conscription Fellowship’s periodical The Tribunal, had the desired effect of bringing Russell a very great deal of publicity and some ‘persecution’, albeit of a comparatively gentle kind. The military authorities interpreted the article as an incitation to British workers to strike and believed it was ‘likely to prejudice His Majesty’s relations with the United States of America’. Russell came up before the Bow Street magistrates and was sentenced to six months in prison. He was taken to Brixton gaol in a taxi. His sister-in-law Elizabeth von Arnim was allowed to furnish his cell, which was twice the normal size (he paid two and sixpence a week for the privilege). Lady Ottoline sent him fresh flowers from the garden at Garsington Manor each day. His friend Lytton Strachey sent hi
m his debunking essays Eminent Victorians, which initially made him laugh aloud; but upon reflection, he was less sure of the book’s merits. ‘At the beginning of the Victorian era starvation and ignorance were almost universal,’ he could write, the pardonable exaggeration of a man whose grandfather had single-handedly made the Irish Famine very much worse than it need have been. ‘At the end there was little starvation and much education. Our age is pursuing the opposite, and we shall need a set of Victorians to put us right.’13

  Russell looked and sounded very much like his famous prime minister grandfather: tiny, and with a very distinctive, rather ugly voice. It is astounding to think that this man who dined with Gladstone, and whose parents were friends of John Stuart Mill, should have survived into the age of the television chat show, still speaking in a rasping version of pre-1832 aristocratic English. Russell’s standing, since a devastating two-volume biography by Ray Monk was published, has never been lower than it is today. As a husband, father, grandfather, he clearly had appalling defects. His decision, from time to time, to abandon serious academic philosophy and to indulge in popularizing, journalism and public campaigning was seen by fellow academics as impure. But for many, he will always be seen primarily as a campaigner for peace. As soon as he had visited Russia in 1920 and seen the evils which Lenin had unleashed, he lost no time in denouncing them.