Karl Marx; his life and work

Hamburg, September 21, 1844.

“ Dearest Marx: I am again suffering from my fatal eye- malady, and it is with great difficulty that I am scribbling these lines to you. However, whatever I have of importance to tell


JOURNALISM — POLITICS — SOCIALISM 79

you, I can tell you orally in the beginning of next month, for I am preparing to depart owing to anxiety caused by a hint from the powers that be — I have no desire to permit myself to be captured; my bones are not particularly adapted to wear iron rings, as Weitling wore them. He showed me the marks. They suspect that I had taken a greater part in the Vorwarts than I can boast of, and I must confess that this paper has the greatest faculty for provocation and compromising. What are we coming to when even Maurer hedges! — more of this when we meet. If only no treachery is spun in Paris 1 My book is published, but it will not appear before ten or fourteen days, in order not to sound the alarm at once. I am sending to you, under separate cover, the advance sheets of the part dealing with politics, as well as of my great poem, for three reasons. Namely, in the first place, that you may amuse yourself; secondly, that arrangements may be made whereby the book should get into the German press; and thirdly, that you may, if you think it advisable, have the first part of the new poem printed in the Forwarts.

“ I believe that the poem can be reprinted up to the end of the sixteenth part, but you must bear in mind that the parts which treat of Collen — namely, stanzas 4, 5, 6 and 7 —must not be printed separately, but should appear in the same issue. The same should be observed in the case of the part which concerns Rothbart — namely, stanzas 14, 15 and 16—-which should also be printed in one number. Please write a word of introduction to these extracts. The first part of the book, which contains only romances and ballads, and which will please your wife, I shall bring to Paris with me. (Kindly give my friendliest greetings to your wife; I am glad that I shall see her soon again. I trust that the coming winter will be a happier one for us than the last.)

“ Campe is making still another reprint of the poem, in which the censor had stricken out several lines, and I have written a very frank explanation. I have thrown down the gauntlet to the ‘ Nationalists ’ with great determination. I shall send you this later, as soon as it is printed. Please write to Hess (I do not know his address) that as soon as he receives my book he should do everything in his power to work the press along the Rhine, should the ‘ wolves ’ attempt to devour it. I beg of you also to enlist Jungh to write a favourable article. In

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KARL MARX

case you sign your name to the introduction in the Vorimrts, you may say that I just sent you the advance sheets. You will of course understand why, under different circumstances, I should prefer to withhold this statement. I wish you would try to find Weil and tell him in my name that I have just to-day received his letter, which had gone to the wrong Henri Heine (there are many of them here). I shall see him again in person within fourteen days, and, in the meantime, he should not permit anything to be published about me, especially with reference to my new poem. I should like to write him before my departure if my eyes permitted me. Kindliest regards to Bernays. I am glad to get away. I have already sent my wife to France, to her mother, who is on her deathbed. Keep well, my friend, and excuse my scribbling. I cannot read what I have written — but, surely, we do not require many signs in order to understand each other.

“ Cordially,

“(Signed) H. Heine.”¹

, A fortnight later Heine returned to Paris and at once resumed his old habit of making a daily call upon Marx and I his wife. These were not social calls merely, the poet was leaning heavily upon the critical judgment of his two friends, and scarcely one of his verses at this period escaped their polishing influence. The poet would bring a new poem, a new stanza, or even a new line, and read it to his friends, who would dissect and criticize, suggest changes or applaud and approve as the case might be. They would go over a verse or a line an almost incredible number of times, weighing word- values, making experimental changes until all three were satisfied and the work pronounced worthy of the poet.

. The admiration of Jenny Marx for the poet was even more I ardent than that of her husband. He fascinated her because, as she said, he was “ so modern,” while Heine was drawn to her because she was “ so sympathetic.” Marx, as we know, was nothing if not critical, and there were times when the se-

¹ From Die Neue Zeit, 14. Jahrgang, Erster Band. Stuttgart, 1896.


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verity of his criticisms hurt the feelings of the supersensitive poet, even when he recognised their justice. At such times he turned with childlike appeal for sympathy to the austere critic’s gentler wife, whose affection and good sense always restored him to good humor. Sometimes the hurt came from other quarters, and then Marx joined his wife in pouring the soothing balm of friendship upon the poet’s wounds. On more than one occasion the attack of some obscure journalist brought the poet to his friends weeping and disconsolate. Then husband and wife joined in the work of consolation, and Marx revealed that tender and lovable side of his nature which only his most intimate friends ever saw. “ Marx is the tenderest, gentlest man I have ever known,” Heine is reported to have said on one occasion.

A story is told of Heine at this period which will interest all lovers of the great poet. It is said that soon after his return from Hamburg he called at the Marx home one day and found both his friends weeping with wild despair. With the faithful Helene Demuth they were anxiously waiting for a physician to come and helplessly watching their firstborn, little Jenny, then only a few months old, in the tortures of a violent cramp. Heine, so the story goes, took in the whole situation at a glance, declared that the child needed a hot bath, and at once prepared it with his own hands. Skilfully and tenderly he took the suffering infant and bathed it, while the parents looked on with admiration and gratitude. When the doctor came the child was sleeping peacefully and needed no further treatment. Heine’s action, the physician declared, had saved the child’s life. So runs the story, and it is a pity that it lacks verification and is probably greatly exaggerated, if not altogether apocryphal.

The hint in Heine’s letter of treachery which he feared might be hatched in Paris was no phantom of a frightened mind. In January, 1845, M. Guizot, the French Prime Min-1 ister, at the request of the Prussian government, suppressed the •


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\ Vorwarts and ordered the immediate expulsion of almost the whole staff, Marx among the number. It is said that the request for the expulsion of the troublesome journalists was made by the celebrated philosopher, Alexander von Humboldt, whose 1 intimate friendship with Louis Philippe and his own monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, made him an ideal person to carry out many a delicate diplomatic mission.

, As soon as he was expelled from France, Marx betook himself to Brussels with his wife and their child, Jenny, then eight . months old, and was soon afterwards joined by Friedrich

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Engels. In Brussels he found Ferdinand Freiligrath, “ the
poet of rhymed hatred,” who had lived there in exile since the
suppression of the Rhenische Zeitung. He visited Freiligrath
for a week or more, and a letter from the poet to a friend,
written at the time, says: “ For the last week or so we have

had Marx here with us. He is a very interesting and promising young man.” The friendship thus begun lasted many years, even when Freiligrath, in 1870, published his Hurrah Germania! and became the war-poet, to the dismay and disgust of his former companions in the revolutionary movement.

Possibly because of a keen memory of the days when he himself wrestled with the muses, and hoped to become a great poet, Marx was always very tolerant and charitable in his judgments of poets. Inconsistencies which in ordinary mortals he would have condemned with all his powers of satire and invective, he tolerated in poets, treating them lightly with indulgent excuses. When, for example, some of his friends bitterly arraigned Heine for some inconsistency, he told them: “ You cannot measure a poet by the standard of humanity at large, nor even that of exceptional individuals. He stands out, in a class all by himself.” Was he not speaking from experience — remembering the bitter struggle and the isolation of those days when he wrote love songs to his beloved Jenny?

? Marx remained in Brussels for three years — until the pro- 1 yerbial “ long arm of the Prussian government ” once more


Heinrich Heine

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reached him and forced him again to wander. The second child, Laura, now Madame Lafargue, was born there, in September, 1845, and, probably in 1847,1 the hoy, Edgar, whose early death was such a cruel blow to Marx and his devoted wife. Taken all in all, those three years were among the most important and eventful of his life.

¹ I say “ probably in 1847 ” because Madame Lafargue, the only child now living, prefers it. The exact date of the child’s birth is not known.

V

THE BIRTH CRY OF MODERN SOCIALISM

. Marx had been poor enough in Paris, and naturally the ! cost of moving to Brussels and establishing himself there was a burden he was ill-equipped to bear. He had not been in Brussels long before he received a letter from Engels, written from Barmen and dated February 22, 1845, a substantial and welcome remittance. The letter is of interest to us, not merely as throwing light upon the affairs of Marx, but also because it reveals the warm and generous nature of his friend and gives us a picture of the Communist activities at this transitional stage:

“ Dear Marx: I have just succeeded in getting your ad

dress from Cologne, after long writing for it hither and thither, and I at once sit down to write you a letter. As soon as the news came of your expulsion I felt it necessary to get up a subscription immediately, in order to secure that the extra cost to yourself should be borne by us all in common. This has made good progress. I do not know whether this will be enough to complete your household arrangements in Brussels, but it is of course understood that my first English fee, which I hope soon ‘to get paid, at any rate in part, is most gladly at your disposal. I can do without it for the moment; my father must help us to that extent. At all events, the brutes shall not have the satisfaction of bringing you into pecuniary straits through their infamy.

“Now not another word about the whole contemptible business. Kriege will be with you by the time you receive this. The fellow is a famous agitator and he will tell you a great deal about Feuerbach. I had a letter from Feuerbach on the day after you left here; I had written him beforehand. He says he must first abolish the religious residue entirely before ' 84


BIRTH CRY OF MODERN SOCIALISM 8£

he can touch the question of Communism in the way of advocating it in his writings. At Baiern he is too much shut away from life in general to be able to come out very far. Even if he is a Communist, the question remains as to how he could act upon that belief. But if possible he is coming to the Rhine this summer, and then if he gets near Brussels we will soon bring him along.

“ Here in Elberfeld wonders have come to pass. Yesterday we held our third Communist meeting in the largest hall and first hotel in the town. The first numbered 40, the second 130, the third 200 persons. The whole of Elberfeld and Barmen were represented, from the bankers to the grocers, scarcely excluding the proletariat even. Hess gave a lecture; poems from Muller and Piittmann were read, with selections from Shelley; and even the article on the communal colonies already existing in Biirgerbuche. The discussion afterwards lasted till one o’clock. The thing was a colossal success. People are talking of nothing but Communism, and each day brings us more supporters. In the Wupperthal Communism is a fact; it will soon be a power. You can have no idea what favourable soil it has found here. How long it may take to get any results, I do not know; but the police are in any case entirely baffled, not knowing what to do about it; and the Chief Commissioner is gone to Berlin. But even under prohibition, we could easily evade it; and in any case we have made such a stir that everything that is published in our interest will be eagerly read.”

Another picture of the same kind is contained in a letter dated February 26, in which Engels writes:

“ Yesterday morning the Mayor prohibited Frau Obermayer from holding any meeting on her premises; and warned me that if in spite of this a meeting should be held, an arrest and prosecution would follow. We have, of course, carried out our programme and must wait and see whether we are arrested, which I hardly think likely, for we were sharp enough to give them no handle, so that the whole affair could only end in a complete fiasco for the Government. Moreover, the public prosecutors and the whole county court were present, and the Chief Procurator himself took part in the discussion.”

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KARL MARX

On the 20th of January Engels had written:

“ The latest idea is that Hess and I should bring out a monthly magazine, from April ist onward, to be published by Messrs. Thieme & Batz, at Hague. In this Gesellschaft- spiegel the social miseries and bourgeois rulers are to be shown up. Prospectus, etc., shortly. The thing can be edited with very little trouble. As for material, we shall find collaborators enough; we have some work by us, and can easily do more to fill the sheet.”

The Gesellschaftspiegel “ died aborning.” On the 7th of March, Engels wrote again:

j “ The Critical Critique is not yet here. The new title, The I Holy Family, will involve me still farther in family difficulties I with my already exasperated parents. Naturally you could not know this. In the advertisement you have put my name first — why? I have done next to nothing towards it, and everybody will recognize your style.”

In the middle of March, The Holy Family appeared and Engels wrote once more, protesting that his friend’s generosity had placed him in rather a false position, since he could not fairly be regarded as part-author, as that term is usually understood. Then, at the beginning of April, he joined Marx in Brussels, having abandoned the plan of going to Bonn University of which he had written a month previously, as well as the commercial career which his father had intended him to pursue. He could not tolerate the “ atmosphere ” of Bari men, he said, at which we shall not wonder if we remember that Barmen was regarded as a very “ pious ” city, and that his family was very orthodox and highly conservative and respectable. It was hardly an agreeable place for a young man who entertained ultra-radical views!

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The two friends at once began to make plans for the organi-
zation of such a working class movement as Marx in the
Deutsche-Franzosisiche Jahrhiicher, and Engels in his criticisms

of the English working-class movement, had foreshadowed.

BIRTH CRY OF MODERN SOCIALISM 87,

Marx had, so Engels has told us, fully worked out his theory of the materialistic interpretation of history by this time, and some work was done upon the more elaborate critique of the post-Hegelian philosophy which they had planned in Paris the previous year. This was interrupted, however, by a six weeks’ 1 visit to England.

Engels had to attend to some business affairs in England and ' arrange for the removal of his library, and was accompanied by Marx. It was then, in the summer of 1845, that Marx made his first acquaintance with the economic writings of the English radicals of the Ricardian School which exercised such < a profound influence upon his thought and work. Engels, it> will be remembered, had already conceived the idea of writing an elaborate criticism of English political economy, and had published an introductory essay to such a study in the German- French Year Book. Marx read during the English visit the extracts which Engels had made for that study, and a great many things contained in his friend’s fine library and other libraries in Manchester and elsewhere. Always an omnivorous r reader, he read during the whole of this period with almost | feverish intensity. “ He gorged himself with the passion of an insatiable glutton,” was the way Engels described it many years later in conversation with a friend. To what purpose he read was revealed two years later by his crushing reply to Proudhon.

Returning to Brussels in the early autumn of 1845, the two ? friends set to work to complete their criticism of the post-He- ,j gelian philosophy. When at last it was completed — two big octavo volumes — the manuscript was sent to a Westphalian publisher who had undertaken to bring it out. It remained with the publisher a long time and then the authors received word that altered conditions forbade its publication. The publication of the book was postponed indefinitely. “ We abandoned the manuscript to the stinging criticism of the mice,” says Marx, “ the more readily because we had accomplished

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our main purpose — the clearing of the question to ourselves.”

Meantime they were working earnestly upon the task which j had for so long lain upon their hearts. They established connections with the radical democrats of the city, Marx becoming svice-president of the Democratic Society. They organized a jGerman Workingmen’s Club, a sort of labor union, and secured !;the editorial control of the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung, a radical weekly paper published by German radicals. They had already a fairly numerous following among the “ Intellectuals ” of France and Germany, but, as Engels once wrote, it was important that they should win to their views the proletariat of Europe in general, and of Germany in particular.

It is difficult to present a connected and convincing picture t of their activity at this time. Both wrote for the Deutsche | Brusseler Zeitung and other organs of the German proletariat, as well as for the French socialist paper, Reforme, edited by Flocon, with whom Marx had been on intimate terms during ■ his stay in Paris. Marx devoted much time to economic studies, carried on an extensive correspondence with the radical leaders of half Europe, lectured occasionally, and taught classes of workingmen the elements of political economy.

He was a born teacher. Not only was he wonderfully patient and kindly, contrary to the accepted view, but he possessed to a degree that was quite remarkable the ability to make the most abstract and abstruse matters clear and interesting to the ordinary untrained mind. He insisted upon small classes of earnest and industrious students. No one could hope to be tolerated if he shirked the work required by the teacher; every student must by hard work prove himself worthy. But if he was severe in this respect, true teacher that he was, no trouble was too great for him to take for the benefit of his pupils. By the aid of a blackboard, and the use of simple, non-technical terms, he succeeded in making himself understood, even by unskilled laborers, men who had been denied educational ad

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vantages. He was not a popular lecturer, and rather shrank from addressing large audiences as a severe ordeal, but occasionally he did so with good effect. One of his lectures, the Discourse Upon Free Trade, is still widely circulated as a pamphlet in various countries, although more than sixty years have elapsed since it was delivered.

Among the members of the Brussels German Workingmen’s s Club was the celebrated Wilhelm Weitling, “ the Communist J tailor.” Weitling was a man of great natural talent, one of the most remarkable agitators of the nineteenth century. Born in 1808 in humble circumstances, he was almost entirely selfeducated. Early in the thirties he became a Communist, his conversion being due, it is said, to the activities of Albert Brisbane, the brilliant friend and disciple of Fourier. During a visit to Berlin, Brisbane distributed copies of a French Communistic newspaper, Le Globe, and a copy of the paper fell into the hands of Weitling. In 1838 this poor tailor published, through a secret revolutionary society in Paris, his first book, The World As It Is, and As It Might Be, proclaiming his Communistic theories, a medley of Fourierism and Saint- Simonianism.