Men of Letters : THE SELECTED LETTERS OF BERTRAND RUSSELL / Volume 1: The Private Years (1884-1914), <i> Edited by Nicholas Griffin (Houghton Mifflin: $35; 525 pp.)</i> : SONG OF LOVE: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier (1909-1915), <i> Edited by Pippa Harris (Crown: $21; 302 pp.)</i>

Europe in the early years of the 20th Century was in a state of transformation. The old political order, based on the balance of power, was breaking up; the moral order, based on the Victorian interpretation of Christianity, was being undermined by agnosticism, Darwinism and the beginnings of socialism. Man’s idea of man was changing; his idea of woman was in turmoil.

The First World War hastened progress in some directions, impeded it in others, but the seeds of change were already planted. In the England of those years the rich may have had too little to do and the poor too little to eat, but between those extremes there existed a society so varied and so vigorous that a comparison with the 1920s and ‘30s can only show how much in the way of creativity and courage was lost on the battlefields of France.

Bertrand Russell and Rupert Brooke were very different personalities and moved in circles that overlapped without often coinciding, but both reveal in their letters up to and including 1914 something of the Edwardian appetite for life as well as the perennial intractability of love.

Bertrand Russell has been much written about, not least by himself. His “Autobiography,” and Ronald Clark’s biography, quote several of the many thousands of letters in the Russell archives. Nicholas Griffin, professor of philosophy at McMaster University in Ontario, is now in the course of editing a selection of mostly unpublished letters in such a way as to form a readable epistolary autobiography. This first volume contains much that is revealing, though it cannot compete for enjoyment with Russell’s own “Autobiography.”

Russell was not a good letter-writer; he did not set out to entertain. He sometimes strove to instruct, not always with tact, and in love his emotional needs were often so overwhelming that the effect could be wearing for the recipient. The letters reflect his unhappy first marriage, and reveal only too clearly the causes of its failure. He was too young, too intellectual, too priggish. His wife Alys, five years older and apparently more emancipated, was constrained by a depressive personality that turned easily to inferiority complex, and by an interpretation of her family’s faith (the Pearsall Smiths were Quakers from Philadelphia) that made her a good deal less capable of enjoying life than her sister Mary. Mary had at this time just left her husband to live with Bernard Berenson in Italy, and she seemed to Alys to welcome Bertie to the family with quite unnecessary warmth.

Nevertheless, the first seven years or so of the marriage were happy and productive. Russell produced his most original work on the logic of mathematics, and began the collaboration with Alfred Whitehead that culminated in the publication of “Principia Mathematica.” A crisis in the health of Whitehead’s wife Evelyn precipitated in Russell some kind of mystic revelation. He perhaps fell in love with her; at all events he seems to have felt that he had paid too little attention to the emotional side of life and to the need for sympathy with others. This had the effect of putting him out of sympathy with his wife, who withdrew more and more into depression and “rest-cures.” Realizing that he no longer loved her, Russell nevertheless persuaded himself that it would be wrong for them to part, perhaps for fear that she might kill herself. For nine years they lived together in intense unhappiness, at the end of which time Russell met and fell in love with Lady Ottoline Morrell. There followed a torrent of letters.

He was overjoyed when they became lovers, but increasingly frustrated when it appeared that the physical side of love (of which he had been starved for so long and for which, now that at 40 he had discovered it, he never lost his enthusiasm) was very much less important to her than it was to him. In addition, she had no intention of leaving her husband, a Liberal politician. Among his pleas to her comes mention in October, 1911, of the appearance in his rooms at Cambridge of “an unknown German” who wants to study under him. This was Ludwig Wittgenstein, and there followed the close collaboration which revolutionized 20th-Century philosophy.

At the same time, Russell was working up to the publication of “Principia Mathematica.” “I simply can’t stand a view limited to this earth,” he wrote to Ottoline. “I feel life so small unless it has windows into other worlds. I feel it vehemently and instinctively and with my whole being. It is what has become of my desire for worship. But I despair of making people see what I mean. I like mathematics largely because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe--because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.”

But he also wanted to be involved in politics. And he wanted children. On a visit to America, he entered into a relationship with a young woman whom he met there, and arranged for her to follow him back to England. Ottoline expressed herself delighted, but moved firmly to reestablish her own emotional hold over Bertie. So encumbered with problems, he moved toward his next adventure--opposition to the war. Succeeding volumes will have to cover the increasingly important public life.

The war killed Rupert Brooke, who died of blood poisoning after a mosquito bite on his way to fight at Gallipoli. Like Russell, Brooke had a connection both with Cambridge and with Bloomsbury, but his own group, lightly christened by someone the Neo-Pagans, tended to be young, athletic and interested in practical politics. At the heart of it were the four beautiful daughters of Sir Sidney Olivier, a colonial governor and influential Fabian socialist. Brooke was 20 when he met Noel Olivier, who was 15 and still at Bedales, a progressive boarding school. He was beginning to be known as much for his good looks as for his poetry, though the posthumous deification by his first biographer, Edward Marsh, which so surprised his friends was far in the future.

Rupert was immediately drawn to Noel, but they did not confess their mutual love until two years later. His early letters to her are mainly concerned with schemes to meet without attracting the attention of their anxious families. “Really, if you can’t see the amazing fun of madly meeting for ten minutes in an absolutely unheard of place in the middle of Essex on a mud plain, I can say no more.” “It was only that that damned (mail) went, or you’d have had an enormous and elaborate code . . . with words for every eventuality. I meant to work through all the British Poets & go on with the Cheeses. There was the elaborate seaside part--’Gorgonzola,’ I recollect, meant ‘appear on Sunday morning at 8:30 at Clacton, & bring a shrimping net.’ ” Later they become ecstatic: “And when you’re mentioned I have the most amazing feelings--like the Holy Ghost’s when he hears people talking about God, or a maggot’s, which is inside an apple, and hears the people at desert commenting on its rosy appearance--feelings of secret omniscience and an infinite calm smile.” “Imagine, most unapproachable, a little figure stumping across the illimitable fens, occasionally bowing to the sun because it reminds him of you.”

She did become unapproachable, whether because too young to know how to respond to such ardor, or too contented with her own happy family life and steady interests (she went on to become a respected pediatrician). Rupert began to see more of Ka Cox, a warm-hearted and more sexually experienced member of the group. Noel wrote that she felt everything for him short of absolute love. “And so I get worried & sorry when you look devoted and I don’t mind about Ka or German Duchesses at all, & I never feel jealous; only affraid of your loving me too much.” Spelling was never her strong point.

Rupert continued to love and write to her, but entered into an affair with Cox from which he eventually withdrew, aware of not having behaved well and full of self-doubt. He was drawn into smart society life in London, began an affair with a beautiful actress, Cathleen Nesbit, then traveled the world as a roving journalist. When the war came he volunteered immediately. “It will be Hell to be in it and Hell to be out of it,” he wrote to a friend, the painter Stanley Spencer.

Virginia Woolf describes in her diary for 1923 meeting Noel and asking her why she hadn’t married “any of those romantic young men? Why? Why? She didn’t know, said she had moods; all Oliviers are mad she said. And Rupert had . . . changed. But when she read his love letters--beautiful beautiful love letters--real love letters, she said--she cries and cries.”