D. H. Lawrence's Letters to Bertrand Russell

Edited by Harry T. Moore

THE antagonistic friendship of D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell endured for a little more than a year. Not long after they met, early in 1915, the two men planned to give a series of lectures together in London. Roth of them hated war, particularly the one then going on in Europe, but instead of establishing a common front against it, they involved themselves in a little war of their own. Its story is told in the letters Lawrence wrote Russell between February, 1915, and March, 1916, of which half a dozen are here reproduced, for the first time, with only unimportant, small deletions.

Before the correspondence with Russell, Lawrence had been principally a lyric and romantic writer. These letters indicate a swing to the prophetic. During the year in which he wrote them, Lawrence was going through a tormenting spiritual crisis that was intensified by the prolongation of the world war. He was distressed not only because of the war’s inevitable brutality and horror, but also because of his wife’s nationality: a few weeks before hostilities began, he had married a high-born German, Mrs. Frieda Weekley, born von Richthofen.

In the autumn of 1915 Lawrence received a cruel shock when his novel The Rainbow, which he considered the most important book he had yet written, was suppressed. Two years before, Sons and Lovers had brought him better luck and many admirers. Some of them were even the equivalent of patrons and patronesses, with the latter in the majority. Most of Lawrence’s friends during the first years of the war were aristocrats. With the exception of John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, Lawrence’s principal correspondents in 1915 and 1916 were Lady Ottoline Morrell, who presided over a great estate at Garsington Manor, near Oxford; Lady Cynlhia Asquith, daughter-inlaw of the Prime Minister; and Bertrand Russell, heir to an earldom. Lawrence, the coal miner’s son married to a baroness, learned to move with self-assurance among people of high descent; particularly with Russell he felt that he could assume the “You and I are intellectuals together” attitude.

The Lawrences were living in one of the Meynell family’s cottages at Greatham, in Sussex, when the correspondence with Russell was begun. Some of the statements Lawrence made in his first letter foreshadowed later developments in his thinking.

12 Feb 1915
DEAR MR RUSSELL,
We have had E. M. Forster here for three days. There is more in him than ever comes out. But he is not dead yet. I hope to see him pregnant with his own soul. We were on the edge of a fierce quarrel all the time. He went to bed muttering that he was not sure we — my wife & I — were n’t just playing round his knees; he seized a candle & went to bed, neither would he say good night. Which I think is rather nice. He sucks his dummy — you know, those child’s comforters — long after his age. But there is something very real in him, if he will not cause it to die. He is much more than his dummysucking, clever little habits allow him to be.
I write to say to you that we musi start a solid basis of freedom of actual living—not only of thinking. We must provide another standard than the pecuniary standard, to measure all daily life by. We must be free of the economic question. Economic life must be the means to actual life. We must make it so at once.
There must be a revolution in the state. It shall begin by the nationalising of all industries and means of communication, & of the land — in one fell blow. Then a man shall have his wages whether he is sick or well or old — if anything prevents his working, he shall have his wages just the same. So we shall not live in fear of the wolf— no man amongst us, & no woman, shall have any fear of the wolf at the door, for all wolves are dead.
Which practically solves the whole economic question for the present. All dispossessed owners shall receive a proportionate income — no capital recompense— for the space of, say fifty years.
Something like this must be done. It is no use saying a man’s soul should be free, if his boots hurt him so much he can’t walk. All our ideals are cant & hypocrisy till we have burst the fetters of this money. Titan nailed on the rock of the modern industrial capitalistic system, declaring in fine language that his soul is free as the Oceanies that fly away on wings of aspiration, while the bird of carrion desire gluts at his liver, is too shameful. I am ashamed to wrile any real writing of passionate love to my fellow men. Only satire is decent now. The rest is a lie. Until we act, move, rip ourselves off the rock. So there must be an actual revolution, to set free our bodies. For there never was a free soul in a chained body. That is a lie. There might be a resigned soul. But a resigned soul is not a free soul. A resigned soul has yielded its claim on temporal living. It can only do this because the temporal living is being done for it vicariously. Therefore it is dependent on the vicar, let it say what it will. So Christ, who resigned his life, only resigned it because he knew the others would keep theirs. They would do the living, & would later adapt his method to their living. The freedom of the soul within the denied body is a sheer conceit.
Forster is not poor, but he is bound hand & foot bodily. Why? Because he does not believe that any beauty or any divine utterance is any good any more. Why? Because the world is suffering from bonds, and birds of foul desire which gnaw its liver. Forster knows, as every thinking man now knows, that all his thinking and his passion for humanity amounts to no more than trying to soothe with poetry a man raging with pain which can be cured. Cure the pain, don’t give tin’ poetry. Will all the poetry in the world satisfy the manhood of Forster, when Forster knows that his implicit manhood is to be satisfied by nothing but immediate physical action. He tries to dodge himself—the sight is pitiful.
But why can’t he act? Why can’t he take a woman and fight clear to his own basic, primal being? Because he knows that self-realisation is not his ultimate desire, His ultimate desire is for the continued action which has been called the social passion — ihe love for humanity — the desire to work for humanity. That is every man’s ultimate desire & need. Now you see the vicious circle. Shall I go to my Prometheus and tell him beautiful talcs of the free, whilst the vulture gnaws his liver? I am ashamed. I turn my face aside from my Prometheus, ashamed of rm vain, irrelevant, impudent words. I cannot help Prometheus. And this knowledge rots the love of activity.
If I cannot help Prometheus — and I am also Prometheus &edash; how shall I be able to take a woman? For I go to a woman to know myself, and to know her. And I want to know myself, that I may know how to act for humanity. But if I am aware that I cannot act for humanity — ? Then I dare not go to a woman.
Because, if I go, I know I shall betray myself & her & everything. It will be a vicious circle. I go to her to know myself, & I know myself—what? — to enjoy myself. That is sensationalism — that I go to a woman to feel myself only. Love is, that I go to a woman to know myself, & knowing myself, to go further, to explore in to the unknown, which is the woman, venture in upon the coasts of the unknown, and open my discovery to all humanity. But if I know that humanity is lame & cannot move, bound and in pain and unable to come along, my offering it discoveries is only a cynicism. . .
If I know that humanity is chained to a rock, I cannot set forth to and it new lands to enter upon. If I do pretend to set forth, I am a cheating, false merchant, seeking my own ends. And I am ashamed to be that. I will not.
So then, how shall I come to a woman? To know myself first. Well and good. But knowing myself is only preparing myself. What for? For the adventure into the unexplored, the woman, the whateverit-is I am up against. — Then the actual heart says “No no — I can’t explore. Because an explorer is one sent forth from a great body of people to open out new lands for their occupation. But my people cannot even move — it is chained — paralysed. I am not an explorer. I am a curious, inquisitive man with eyes that can only look for something to take back with him. And what can I take back with me? Not revelation — only curios — titillations. I am a curio hunter.”
Again, I am ashamed.
Well then, I am neither explorer nor curio hunter. What then? For what do I come to a woman? To know myself. But what when I know myself? What do I then embrace her for, hold the unknown against me for? To repeat the experience of self discovery. But I have discovered myself—I am not infinite. Still I can repeat the experience. But it will not be discovery. Still I can repeat the experience. — That is, I can get a sensation. The repeating of a known reaction upon myself is sensationalism. This is what nearly all English people now do. When a man takes a woman, he is merely repeating a known reaction upon himself, not seeking a new reaction, a discovery. And this is like self-abuse or masterbation [Lawrence’s spelling. — H.T.M.]. The ordinary Englishman of the educated class goes to a woman now to masterbate himself. Because he is not going for discovery or new connection or progression, but only to repeat upon himself a known reaction.
When this condition arrives, there is always Sodomy. The man goes to the man to repeat this reaction upon himself. It is a nearer form of masterbation. But still it has some object — there are still two bodies instead of one. A man of strong soul has too much honour for the other body — man or woman — to use it as a means of masterbation. So he remains neutral, inactive. That is Forster.
Sodomy only means that a man knows he is chained to the rock, so he will try to get the finest possible sensation out of himself.
This happens whenever the form of any living becomes too strong for the life within it: the clothes are more important than the man: therefore the man must get his satisfaction beneath the clothes.
Any man who takes a woman is up against the unknown. And a man prefers rather to have nothing to do with a woman than to have to slink away without answering the challenge. Or if he is a mean souled man, he will use the woman to masterbate himself.
There comes a point when the shell, the form of life, is a prison to the life. Then the life must either concentrate on breaking the shell, or it must turn round, turn in upon ifself, and try infinite variations of a known reaction upon itself. Which produces a novelty. So that “The Rosary “ is a new combination of known reactions — so is Gilbert Cannan’s “Young Earnest” — so is the cinematograph drama & all our drama & all our literature.
Or, the best thing such a life can do, that knows it is confined, is to set-to to arrange and assort all the facts & knowledge of the contained life. Which is what Plato did & what most of our writers are doing on a mean scale. They know that they are enclosed entirely by the shell, the form of living. There is no going beyond it. They are bound down.
Now either we have to break the shell, the form, the whole frame, or we have got to turn to this inward activity of setting the house in order & drawing up a list before we die.
But we shall smash the frame. The land, the industries, the means of communication & the public amusements shall all be nationalised. Every man shall have his wage till the day of his death, whether he work or not, so long as he works when he is fit. Every woman shall have her wage till the day of her death, whether she work or not, so long as she works when she is fit — keeps her house or rears her children.
Then, and then only, shall we be able to begin living. Then we shall be able to begin to work. Then we can examine marriage and love and all. Till then, we are fast within the hard, unliving, impervious shell.
You must have patience with me & understand me when my language is not clear.
D. H. LAWRENCE

It is regrettable that the Lawrences, who never had a permanent base during all their years of restless travel, did not save Russell’s side of the correspondence. But some of his replies may be deduced from these letters of Lawrence which Russell preserved; for example in Lawrence’s second letter, written two weeks after his first, he says that Russell’s response was kind and that it made him feel as if his own letter had been a bit impertinent. The former provincial and suburban schoolmaster who was planning to visit Russell and meet other members of the Cambridge faculty wrote: —

“I don’t want you to put up with my talk, when it is foolish, because you think perhaps it is passionate. And it is not much good my asking you about your work. I should have to study it a long time first. And it is not in me . . . You must put off your further knowledge and experience, & talk to me my way, & be with me, or 1 feel like a babbling idiot and an intruder. My world is real, it is a true world, and it is a world I have in my measure understood. But no doubt you also have a true world, which I can’t understand. It makes me very sad, to conclude this. But you must live in my world, while I am there. Because it is also a real world. And it is a world you can inhabit with me, if I can’t inhabit yours with you.”

Lawrence afler his visit there wrote Russell that he thought Cambridge was stagnant and that it would do Russell good to be hounded out of Trinity College — as in time he actually was.

2 June 1915
DEAR RUSSELL, I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps. What does it mean, really — Integer Vitae Scelerisque purus? But before what tribunal? I refuse to be judged by them. It is not for them to exculpate or to blame me. They are not my peers. Where arc my peers? I acknowledge no more than five or six — not so many — in I he world. But one must take care of the pack. When I hey hunt together they are very strong. Never expose yourself to the pack. Be careful of them. Be rather their secret enemy, l he secret enemy, working to split up & dismember the pack from inside, not from outside. Don’t make attacks from outside. Don’t give yourself into their power. Don’t do it.
And whoever dies, let us not die. Let us kill this hydra, this pack, before we die.
I shall be glad to see you again. I shall give you my philosophy.
Hillaire [Lawrence’s spelling. — H.T.M.] Belloc says, peace in two months. All the Bellocites are convinced. I am not. I think like you, more death, & ever more death, till the fire burns itself out. Let it be so— I am willing. But I won’t die. Let us remain & get a new start made, when we can get a look in.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Russell went to Greatham for the week-end of June 19—20, and he and Lawrence hit upon their scheme of appearing on the platform together.

Lawrence told Lady Ottoline Morrell, “We think to have a lecture hall in London in the autumn, and give lectures: he on Ethics, I on Immortality: also to have meetings, to establish a little society or body around a religious belief.”

Soon afterward Russell sent Lawrence a synopsis of his lectures, and Lawrence complained to Lady Ottoline on July 9 that Russell still needed to break away from the shore of “this existing world” in a boat “and preach from out the waters of eternity.” Lawrence’s first reaction to Russell’s lecture ideas seems mild enough. Some days later he wrote Russell more dogmatically.

Friday 15 July
In your lecture on the State, you must criticise the extant democracy, the young idea. That is our enemy. This existing phase is now in its collapse. What we must hasten to prevent is this young democratic party from getting into power. The idea of giving power to the hands of the working class is wrong. The working man must elect the immediate government, of his work, of his district, not the ultimate government of the nation. There must be a body of chosen patricians. There must be women governing equally with men, especially all the inner half of life. The whole must culminate in an absolute Dictator, & an equivalent Dictatrix. There must be none of your bourgeois presidents of Republics. The women’s share must be equal with the men’s. You must work this out in your own way. But you must do it.
Can’t you see the whole state is collapsing. Look at the Welsh strike. This war is going to develop into the last great war between labour & capital. It will be a ghastly chaos of destruction, if it is left to Labour to be constructive. The fight must immediately be given a higher aim than the triumph of Labour, or we shall have another French Revolution. The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality & Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent. You must have a government based upon good, better & best. You must get this into your lectures, at once. You are too old-fashioned. The back of your serpent is already broken.
A new constructive idea of a new state is needed immediately. Criticism is unnecessary. It is behind the times. You must work out the idea of a new state, not go on criticising this old one. Get anybody & everybody to help — Orage, Shaw, anybody, but it must be a new State. And the idea is, that every man shall vote according to his understanding, & that the highest understanding must dictate for the lower understandings. And the desire is to have a perfect government perfectly related in all its parts, the highest aim of the government is the highest good of the soul, of the individual, the fulfilment in the Infinite, in the Absolute.
In a fortnight I shall come & take account of you.
D. II. L.

A month later Lawrence was telling Lady Cynthia Asquith that Russell’s lecture outlines were “pernicious,” and that Russell’s vanity was piqued because Lawrence said the lectures “ must be different. He cannot stand the must. . . .” Lawrence failed to mention that when he used that imperative, in the July 15 letter (“You must work out the idea of a new state . . .”), he underlined the brusque little word fifteen times.

Bertrand Russell was at this time forty-three years old; Lawrence was twenty-nine. The differences between them, in belief and in temperament, were so extreme that it is a wonder their plans for the lectures made any headway whatever.

The deepest cause of their ultimate break was a fundamental issue, one that may be simplified as the quarrel between emotion and mind — or, somewhat more technically, between instinct (or intuition) and reason (or intellect). Lawrence after writing Sons and Lovers had begun to work out his blood-consciousness theories, which were to become the principal feature of his philosophy, and he had said in a letter: “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.” Russell in his 1914 lectures in America on the scientific method in philosophy had attacked intuition on the ground that “quick unanalyzed convictions are least deserving of critical acceptance.” He was also the enemy of the kind of mysticism Lawrence was heading into, and in 1918 was to publish Mysticism and Logic, a book that showed tolerance of some phases of mysticism though opposing it as a creed. A few years after the war, when William Gerhardi asked Russell if he ever resorted to mysticism, Russell said, “Yes, when I am humiliated.”

After receiving Lawrence’s letter of July 15, Russell evidently accused him of wanting to establish a tyranny. Lawrence was obviously annoyed, but kept his temper down as he explained his position. Some of his ideas on leadership, which were to flourish in his later work before he finally renounced them, receive their earliest expression here.

26 July 1915
DEAR RUSSELL,
I rather hated your letter, & am terrified of what you are putting in your lectures. I don’t want tyrants. But I don’t believe in democratic control. I think the working man is fit to elect governors or overseers for his immediate circumstances, but for no more. You must utterly revise the electorate. The working man shall elect superiors for the things that concern him immediately, no more. From the other classes, as they rise, shall be elected the higher governors. The thing must culminate in one real head, as every organic thing must — no foolish republics with foolish presidents, but an elected King, something like Julius Caesar. And as the men elect & govern the industrial side of life, so the women must elect & govern the domestic side. And there must be a rising rank of women governors, as of men, culminating in a woman Dictator, of equal authority with the supreme Man. It is n’t bosh, but rational sense. The whole thing must be living. Above all there must be no democratic control — that is the worst of all. There must be an elected aristocracy.
D. H. LAWRENCE

We must have the same general ideas if we are going to be or to do anything. I will listen gladly to all your ideas: but we must put our ideas together. This is a united effort, or it is nothing — a mere tiresome playing about, lecturing & so on. It is no mere personal voice that must be raised: but a sound, living idea round which we all rally.

The Lawrences left Greatham at the beginning of August and took a flat in the Hampstead section of London. In mid-September, Lawrence began quarreling with Russell again and sent him a blistering accusatory letter headed: On “The Danger to Civilization ” (the title of one of Russell’s essays).

14 Sept 1915
DEAR RUSSELL,
I’m going to quarrel with you again. You simply don’t speak the truth, you simply are not sincere. The article you send me is a plausible lie, and I hate it. If it says some true things, that is not the point. The fact is that you, in the Essay, are all the time a lie.
Your basic desire is the maximum of desire of war, you are really the super-war-spirit. What you want is to jab and strike, like the soldier with the bayonet, only you are sublimated into words. And you are like a soldier who might jab man after man with his bayonet, saying “this is for ultimate peace.” The soldier would be a liar. And it isn’t in the least true that you, your basic self, want ultimate peace. You are satisfying in an indirect, false way your lust to jab and strike. Either satisfy it in a direct and honorable way, saying “I hate you all, liars and swine, and am out to set upon you,” or stick to mathematics, where you can be true— But to come as the angel of peace — no, I prefer Tirpitz a thousand times in that role.
You are simply full of repressed desires, which have become savage and anti-social. And they come out in this sheep’s clothing of peace propaganda. As a woman said to me, who had been to one of your meetings: “It seemed so strange, with his face looking so evil, to be talking about peace and love. He can’t have meant what he said.”
I believe in your inherent power for realising the truth. But I don’t believe in your will, not for a second. Your will is false and cruel. You are too full of devilish repressions to be anything but lustful and cruel. I would rather have the German soldiers with rapine and cruelty, than you with your words of goodness. It is the falsit y I can’t bear. I wouldn’t, care if you were six times a murderer, so long as you said to yourself, “I am this.” The enemy of all mankind, you are, full of the lust of enmity. It is not the hatred of falsehood which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood. It is a perverted, mental blood-lust. Why don’t you own it.
Let us become strangers again, I think it is better.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Russell finally gave his own series of lectures. The correspondence resumed in mid-November, and Lawrence told Russell that he wanted his friendship: “After all, my quarrelling with you was largely a quarrelling with something in myself, something I was struggling away from in myself.”

Later in November, Lawrence and Russell met again when they were among ihe guests at Garsington Manor. In December, Lawrence wrote Lady Ottoline that he again had hopes for “Bertie,” who was “growing much better” and was “going to become young and new.” In a letter to Russell at this time, Lawrence returned to his blood-consciousness philosophy, giving Russell a comprehensive sermon on the subject. However antagonizing this may have been to Russell, it is one of the great Lawrence letters, and an important statement of the doctrine he was developing.

Some critics have confused Lawrence’s philosophy with that of Nazism because of certain undeniable resemblances: the blood-consciousness and the search for leadership. But in actuality Lawrence would not have liked a police state, with its brutality and its muzzling of people like himself.

8 Dec 1915
DEAR RUSSELL,
I have been reading Frazer’s Golden Bough and Totemism & Exogamy. Now I am convinced of what I believed when I was about twenty — that there is another seat of consciousness than the brain & the nerve system: there is a blood-consciousness which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness, which depends on the eye as its source or connector. There is the bloodconsciousness, with the sexual connection holding the same relation as the eye, in seeing, holds to the mental consciousness. One lives, knows, and has one’s being in the blood, without any reference to nerves and brain. This is one half of life, belonging to the darkness. And the tragedy of this our life, and of your life, is that the mental and nerve consciousness exerts a tyranny over the bloodconsciousness and that your will has gone completely over to the mental consciousness, and is engaged in the destruction of your blood-being or blood-consciousness, the final liberating of the one, which is only death in result. Plato was the same. Now il is necessary for us to realise .that there is this other great half of our life active in the darkness, the blood-relationship: that when I see, there is a connection between my mental-consciousness and an outside body, forming a percept; but at the same time, there is a transmission through the darkness which is never absent from the light, into my blood-consciousness: but in seeing, the blood-percept is perhaps not strong. On the other hand, when J take a woman, then the blood-percept is supreme, my blood-knowing is overwhelming. There is a transmission, I don’t know of what, between her blood & mine, in the act of connection. So that afterwards, even if she goes away, the bloodconsciousness persists between us, when the mental consciousness is suspended; and I am formed then by my blood-consciousness, not by my mind or nerves at all.
Similarly in the transmission from the blood of the mother to the embryo in the womb, there goes the whole blood consciousness. And when they say a mental image is sometimes transmitted from the mother 1o the embryo, this is not the mental image, but the blood-image. All living things, even plants, have a blood-being. If a lizard falls on the breast of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood-being of the woman, and is transferred to the foetus, probably without intervention either of nerve or brain consciousness. And this is the origin of totem: and for this reason some tribes no doubt really were kangaroos: they contained the blood-knowledge of the kangaroo. And blood knowledge comes either through the mother or through the sex — so that dreams at puberly are as good an origin of the totem as the percept of a pregnant woman.
This is very important to our living, that we should realise that we have a blood-being, a bloodconsciousness, a blood-soul, complete and apart from the mental & nerve consciousness.
Do you know what science says about these things? It is very important: the whole of our future life depends on it.
D. H. LAWRENCE

At the end of 1915 the Lawrences moved to Cornwall. They planned to establish a colony in Florida with some young writers and painters and musicians, but the authorities would not permit the outspoken Lawrence and his German wife to leave England. Russell was also denied a passport in 1916, after he had been invited to give a lecture course at Harvard University. The Lawrences were later to be expelled from Cornwall — they were regarded as undesirable residents on a coast visited by enemy submarines — and ordered to report at intervals to the police in whatever inland district they moved to. Russell was likewise treated roughly after he was cast out of Trinity College in 1916: his library was seized when he could not pay a fine levied against him for issuing a pamphlet on conscientious object ion, and he was given a jail sentence in 1918.

Russell continued answering Lawrence’s letters in the early months of 1916. On February 15 Lawrence told Lady Ottoline Morrell that he had just received a letter from Russell, who sounded miserable. His lectures were financially successful but not influential. Russell wondered why he went on living and said that only pride and obstinacy kept him alive.

Lawrence replied sjashingly, but with “love to you.” He gave Russell some more Lawrcncean advice, then in ihe middle of the letter said: “Oh, and I want to ask you, when you make your will, do leave me enough to live on. I want you to live for ever. Rut I want you to make me in some part your heir.” This is an example of the outrageous coyness with which Lawrence could occasionally ask for money.

Lawrence’s correspondence with Russell broke off in March, 1916, with Lawrence writing from Zennor, Cornwall, using ihe formal “My Dear Russell” salutation and asking whether Russell is “still cross with me for being a schoolmaster and for not respecting the rights of man? Don’t be, it isn’t worth it.”Russell seems never to have answered, and the two men drifted apart forever.

One malicious echo of the Lawrence-Russcll relationship comes at second hand (or second car) from an anecdote. William Gerhardi, who had written a clever little novel called The Polyglots, was introduced around British literary circles in ihe 1920’s as a bright young man, and he met both Lawrence and Russell. He tells in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Polyglot, of talking with Russell during a weekend at H. G. Wells’s Easton Glebe: —

“Bertrand Russell, whose eyes gleamed lovingkindness, answered my discreet inquiries into the realm of the Mind with the utmost willingness and lucidity. Only when I mentioned D. H. Lawrence’s theories did the look of serenity fade in his large wise eyes, and a note of intellectual fastidiousness crept into his voice, and he said ‘Lawrence has no mind.’ He referred to the letters Lawrence wrote to him during the war, and how, of course, he, Bertrand Russell, was not going to be instructed in wisdom by D. H. Lawrence. A week later, meeting Lawrence, I told him how enchanted I had been by ihe lucidity, the suppleness and pliability of Bertrand Russell’s mind. He sniffed. ‘Have you ever seen him in a bathing-dress? ‘ he asked. ‘Poor Bertie Russell! He is all Disembodied Mind!’”

These two statements, “Lawrence has no mind” and “Poor Bertie Russell is all Disembodied Mind,” epitomize the differences between the two men and provide the most effective epitaph to the disenchanted relationship of the mystagogic poet and the mathematic logician.