46 Gordon Square, London, 20 July 1906.
Dr. P.D. Morrison
The Fast Hotel, Jerusalem
Dear Dr. Morrison,
Your letter quite distressed me. I too have been feeling some concern for the well-being of Beatrice Campbell-Bennett in Palestine, for since her last letter, written on 17 May of this year and sent from the Jewish settlement of Zichron Ya'acov, I¡¦ve heard nothing from her, not even a reply to my letter of 1 June. Now, to learn from your letter that her mental state is so grave that her parents found it necessary to send you to Palestine especially to inquire into her activities, to persuade her to leave the squalid Arab village she has chosen to live in and return to England, and that it might even be necessary to hospitalize her - why, it's utterly astonishing!
I shall try to answer your questions to the best of my ability: I first became acquainted with Beatrice four years ago, when she was accepted to the Slade School of Art, which I too was attending. Although her paintings were not particularly original, they possessed a kind of airy transparency and were suffused with an aura of noble-mindedness.
She regularly attended the weekly meetings, held in our home, of the circle known as "the Bloomsbury Group". Yes, one might say she was an exceptional young lady. Apart from the fact that she was remarkable for her naivete - a trait not highly respected in this sophisticated group, some of whose members are confirmed cynics - her conservative views were usually not favorably received. As a devout Christian to the depths of her soul - although not the sort that observes ritual commandments - she had reservations about many of the opinions voiced in the group's discussions. She was revolted by droll remarks containing lewd insinuations - quite common in our discussions - and despised gossipy tales of adultery, which were not rare in our circle either. On the other hand, she kept an open mind with regard to novel philosophical ideas and criticism of social conventions. She occasionally made surprisingly clever remarks. I recall that during one of our discussions on ethics, in response to Lytton Strachey's question, "What common sense is there in 'the good'?" she said that there was no common sense in 'the good'. It was not a substance found in nature, and must therefore be created each time anew.
It is astonishing, therefore, that you write of “worrying signs of pathological mental disturbance”, of “delirium”, and it would never have occurred to me that she might condemn herself to isolation in some wretched Arab village, exposed to the heat of the sun and the buzz of mosquitoes, two hundred meters below sea level. (Should I infer from a certain allusion you made—“she has gone astray”—that she has become licentious there?—something I am utterly incapable of grasping!)
Is it the “holiness” of that land that has driven her mad?
I am enclosing photographic copies of her six letters to me (which I am sending to the Fast Hotel in Jerusalem, where I understand you will be staying for a while until your return to Tiberias), and hope you will succeed in “extricating” — as you put it — her journals from her, and perhaps discover in them the germ that has caused disease to spread through her mind.
I would be most grateful if you would inform me of every development regarding her fate.
Yours faithfully,
Vanessa Stephen
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