Routledge Library Editions karl marx

The lot of his genius was sad enough in all conscience, but it was raised to tragic heights by the fact that he voluntarily shouldered such torments and sufferings for decades, and steadfastly rejected every temptation to save himself in the peaceful harbour of some bourgeois career, although he mighthave done so without dishonour. His attitude he explains himself without any bombast and in simple words : “I must follow my goal through thick and thin, and I "shall not permit bourgeois




society to turn me into a money-making machine.” This time it was not the chains ofHrephestus which bound Prometheus, but his own indomitable will, which kept his course pointed unswervingly towards the greatest good for humanity with the certainty of a magnetic compass. His character was like pliant steel. It is extraordinary to experience in one and the same letter how he is apparently crushed down by the weight of petty miseries and then to find him suddenly transformed and discussing the most complicated problems with the calm judiciousness of a scholar whose brow is never furrowed by the material cares of the day.

However, Marx certainly felt the blows which bourgeois society dealt him, and he felt them deeply. It would be foolish stoicism to ask : what do such cares matter to a genius who in any case looks to his justification from the verdict of posterity ? That conceited literary ambition which would like to see its name in the papers every day, if possible, is foolish, but for all that creative forces must have elbow-room for their development and they win new strength from the echo their creations arouse. Marx was no virtuous and stilted chatterbox such as can be found in bad plays and novels, but a man like Lessing who liked to enjoy life and the world, and the mood in which the dying Lessing wrote to one of his oldest friends : “I am sure you do not regard me as a man avaricious for praise, but the coldness with which the world is accustomed to indicate to certain people that nothing they do is right, is, if not killing, at least paralysing ” was not unknown to Marx. It was the same mood in which he wrote on the eve of his fiftieth birthday : “ Half a century on my back and still a pauper ! On one occasion he wished himself a hundred fathoms under the sea rather than have to go on vegetating, and on another occasion he burst out desperately that he would not wish his worst enemy to go through what he had been going through for eight weeks with his heart suffused with anger because his intellect and working capacities were being broken by trivialities.

But for all that, Marx never became “ a damned sorry dog ”, an expression he once used mockingly to describe himself, and in this sense Engels was right when he declared that his friend never despaired. Marx has often been credited with a hard character, but the shower of blows he received on the anvil of misfortune made him harder and harder. The blue sky which had hung over his early youth gradually became covered with heavy storm- clouds and his ideas rent them like flashes of lightning. His judgments on his enemies, and often enough on his friends, developed a searing trenchancy which wounded even those




who were not unduly sensitive. Those who abuse him as an ice- cold demagogue for this are no more and no less wrong than those worthy subaltern souls who regard a great fighter and a great human being as no more than a stuffed puppet on a parade ground.

2. An Incomparable Alliance

Marx had to thank more than his own tremendous powers for the victory of his life. According to human judgment he must have gone under in the struggle in one way or the other but for the friend he had in Engels, whose self-sacrificing loyalty we are beginning to understand only now that the correspondence between the two friends has been published.

Their friendship is without equal in history, which can show many cases of famous friendships : the friendships of men whose life’s work was so closely connected that it can no longer be divided into thine and mine, and German history can show such cases also. But always there has remained some trace of wilfulness or obstinacy, or even no more than a secret objection to abandoning completely the individual personality, something which in the words of the poet is “ the highest prize of the children of this earth ”. In the last resort Luther regarded Melanchthon as the faint-hearted scholar, whilst Melanchthon regarded Luther as a raw peasant, and one must be the willing victim of obtuseness not to detect the underground note of discordancy between the great Minister of State and the little Councillor in the correspondence which passed between Goethe and Schiller. The friendship which bound Marx and Engels knew nothing of this last remnant of human pettiness. The more their thought and their development became one, the more they each remained a separate entity and a man.

In outward appearance they were very different. Engels the blond German, tall and,'as an observer has informed us, with English manners, always carefully dressed and upright as a result of discipline in barracks and office. With six clerks, he declared, he could organize an infinitely more simple and efficient administration than with sixty privy councillors, who could not even write legibly and would muck up the books to such an extent that not a soul would be able to make head or tail out of them afterwards. He was a highly respected member of the Manchester Stock Exchange and prominent both In the business and in the




pleasures of the .English bourgeoisie, its fox-hunting and its Christmas parties, but the intellectual leader and fighter had a treasure in a little house far away on the other side of the town, a child of Ireland, and in her arms he recovered his spirits when he had grown all too tired of the bourgeois pack in whose midst he was compelled to live.

Marx, on the other hand, was stocky and powerfully built, with dark, flashing eyes and a lion’s mane ofjet-black hair which indicated his Semitic origin. He held himself carelessly like the troubled father of a family with no share in the business activities of the metropolis, but he exhausted himself in intellectual labours which hardly left him time to swallow his meals, lasted far into the night and undermined his constitution. He was an indefatigable thinker for whom thought was the highest pleasure and he was a worthy successor of Kant, Fichte and particularly Hegel, whose words he often repeated with pleasure : “ Even the criminal thought of a scoundrel is loftier and more magnificent than all the wonders of Heaven,” except that Marx’s thought strained forward ceaselessly towards fulfilment in action. He was unpractical in small matters, but more than practical in great ones. Much too unpractical to manage a small household, he was incomparable in his genius for raising an army and leading it forward to change the face of the earth.

Style is said to reveal the man and they were different as authors also. Each was a master oflanguage in his own wayand each was a brilliant linguist who had mastered many languages and even dialects. In this respect Engels achieved even more than Marx, but when he used his mother tongue, even in his letters, not to speak of his books, he kept a tight hand on the reins and permitted no stumbling either to right or left into foreign pitfalls, whilst at the same time carefully avoiding the pot-holes of the Teutonist purists and language reformers. He wrote easily and with a light touch and his prose is so limpid and clear that at all times one can see through the running stream of his words to the very bottom.

Marx; on the other hand, wrote with less care and greater difficulty. In his early letters, like those of Heine, one can feel the struggle for mastery, and in the letters of his later years, particularly in those he wrote after he went to England, he uses a terrible hodge-podge of German, English and French expressions. His writings also contain more foreign words than was absolutely necessary, and even his German abounds in Anglicisms and Gallicisms, but even so, he was such a master of the German language that his works cannot be translated without grievous loss. After having read a chapter of a French translation of one




of Marx’s works, Engels declared, despite the fact that Marx himself had polished the translation with great care, that the power, sap and life of the original had gone to the devil. Goethe once wrote to Frau von Stein : “In similes I am running a race with Sancho Panza’s proverbs,” and in the striking figurativeness of his language Marx could run a race with the greatest masters of language, with Lessing, Goethe or Hegel. He had mastered Lessing’s principle that content and form must agree like man and wife in a happy marriage, and for this he was belaboured by the university wiseacres from the veteran Wilhelm Roscher down to the youngest university lecturer, who overwhelmed him with the crushing accusation that he succeeded in making himself understood only vaguely and with “ a patchwork of similes ”. Marx always dealt with questions in a way which left food for fruitful thought for his reader, and his language was like the play of the waves on the purple depths of the ocean.

Engels always recognized the superior genius in Marx, and he never aspired to play anything but the second fiddle to the other’s lead. However, Engels was never merely Marx’s interpreter or assistant, but always an independent collaborator, an intellectual force dissimilar to Marx, but his worthy partner. At the beginning of their friendship Engels gave more than he received on a very important field of their activities, and twenty years later Marx wrote to him : “ You know that, first of all, I arrive at things slowly, and, secondly, I always follow in your footsteps.” Engels wore lighter armour and was able to move more quickly. His eye was keen enough to see the decisive point of any question or any situation immediately, but he did not penetrate into things deeply enough to see all the pros and the cons of the matter at once. For a man of action such a capacity is a great advantage and Marx never made any political decision without first consulting Engels, who invariably hit the nail on the head.

In accordance with thisrelationbetween the two men, therefore, the advice which Marx sought and received from Engels in theoretical questions was not as fruitful as that he received in political matters, for in the former Marx was usually ahead of his friend. And there was one piece of advice in particular to which Marx invariably turned a deaf ear. It was when Engels tried to persuade him to finish off his scientific work quickly : “ Don’t be quite so conscientious with your work. It will be much too good for the general public in any case. The great thing is that you should finish it finally and have it published. The weak points which you may be able to see will never be discovered




by the donkeys in any case.” This advice was typical of Engels, just as the refusal to follow it was typical of Marx.

From all this we can see clearly that Engels was better able to cope with the daily publicist work than was Marx, who once described his friend as “ A positive encylopredia, ready for work at any hour of the day or night, full or sober, quick at writing and as active as the devil”. It would appear that after the Neue Rheinische Revue ceased publication in the autumn of 1850 the two friends had a new joint project in view in London. At least, Marx wrote to Engels in December 1853 : “ If we had started the English correspondence business in London in good time you would not be in Manchester now, plagued with business worries, and I should not be plagued with debts.” The fact that Engels preferred to take a job in his father’s firm rather than rely on the “ correspondence business ” was probably due to the dismal situation in which Marx found himself at the time, and in the hope that things would improve, rather than to any intention of devoting himself permanently to “ damned commerce ”. In the spring of 1854 Engels once again considered abandoning business and going to London to take up writing, but this was the last time he did so and at about this time he must have decided to bear the hated yoke permanently in order to assist his friend and at the same time to preserve the greatest intellectual force of the party. Only under such circumstances could Engels have made the sacrifice and Marx have accepted it. Both the offer and its acceptance presuppose the same degree of high-minded selflessness.

In due time Engels rose to be a partner in the firm, but until he did so his own financial situation as a simple employee of the firm was not all too rosy, but nevertheless, from the first days of his stay in Manchester he assisted Marx to the best of his ability and he never grew tired of assisting. Five-pound notes, ten-pound notes, and, later on, even hundred-pound notes, constantly went from Manchester to London. He never grew impatient even when his patience was occasionally subjected to a greater strain than was absolutely necessary by Marx and his wife, whose ideas of how a household should be run would appear to have been none too modest. Even when on one occasion Marx forgot all about his indebtedness on a bill of exchange and was extremely and unpleasantly surprised when it matured, Engels hardly showed any despair at the unpractical nature of his friend. Or when on another occasion he once again placed the family finances on a new footing and Frau Marx, out of false consideration for him, concealed a whole budget of debts in the hope of being able to pay them off herself by saving on the




household money, whereas in reality the old privations and difficulties began all over again in consequence. He left it to his friend to enjoy the somewhat pharisaical satisfaction of complaining about “ the folly of women ” who “ obviously needed to be in leading strings all the time ”, and contented himself with the good-humoured exhortation : “ see to it that it doesn’t occur again”.

Not only did Engels drudge for his friend during the day in his office and on the Stock Exchange, but he also sacrificed the greater part of his leisure hours in the evening, often working far into the night. In the beginning he did so in order to draft or translate the letters for The New York Tribune because Marx had not a sufficient command of the English language for the purpose, but when this reason was no longer valid he still continued his silent co-operation.

But all this fades into insignificance when compared with the greatest sacrifice of all, his voluntary abandonment of all hope of attaining that measure of scientific achievement which would have been his as the reward ofhis tremendous capacity for working and of his rich talents. In this case also, it is the correspondence between the two men which first gives us a real idea of the situation, even if we consider only the military and language studies which Engels pursued, partly ^cc from inclination ” and partly owing to the practical exigencies of the proletarian struggle for emancipation. Although he hated “ auto-didacticism ”—“ it is always nonsense ”, he wrote contemptuously—and although his method of scientific work was thorough, he was no more a mere arm-chair scholar than Marx, and every new piece of knowledge was doubly valuable if it could be put to use immediately in the struggle to break the chains of the proletariat.

For this reason he began to study the Slav languages, declaring that when the time for political action again arrived “ at least one of us ” must know something about the language, history, literature and social institutions of those nations with which they would immediately come into conflict. In the same way the entanglements in the Far East caused him to study Oriental languages. Arabic with its four thousand roots frightened him off, but Persian he found “ mere child’s play ”, and in three

weeks he hoped to have mastered it. And then he turned his

attention to the Germanic languages : “ I am now up to my eyes in Ulphilas.¹ I ought really to have finished with this damned Gothic long ago, but I am so,desultory in my studies. To my astonishment I have discovered that I know far more than I thought. With a good dictionary I ought to be through in about

¹ Goth bishop. T^^tated the Bible. 311^81.—Tr.




a fortnight, and then I shall go on to Old-Nordic and Old-Saxon, with which I have always had a nodding acquaintance. Up to the moment I have been working without a dictionary, just with the text and Grimm, the old fellow is really marvellous.” When the Sleswig-Holstein question became acute in the ’sixties he went in for “ a little Frisian-English-Jutish-Scandinavian philology and archreology ”, and when the Irish question flared up again he turned his attention to “ a little Keltic-Irish ”, and so on In later years his magnificent command of many languages stood him in good stead on the General Council of the International. “Engels stutters in twenty languages”, someone once declared, for when he was excited he had a slight tendency to stutter.

Owing to his even more enthusiastic and detailed study of military science he earned the nickname of “ General ”. In this case also an “ old inclination ” was encouraged by the practical necessities of revolutionary politics. He reckoned with “ the enormous importance which the partie militaire must have in the coming movement ”. Those officers who had gone over to the side of the people in the years of the revolution had not turned out to be altogether satisfactory. “ This mob of military men possesses an incredibly disgusting corps spirit,” he declared on one occasion. “ They hate each other like poison and envy each other the slightest distinction like schoolboys, but they stand together like one man against the ' civilians ’.” His aim was to master military science sufficiently to permit him to say a word or two in theoretical military matters without making a fool of himself.

He had hardly settled down in Manchester when he began “ to swot up militaria ”, beginning with “ the most ordinary and humdrum matters such as are demanded in the examinations for cadets and subalterns, things which for that reason are usually taken as read ”. He studied military organization in all its technical details : elementary tactics, the fortification system from Vauban to the most modern system of self-contained forts, bridge- building and trench-digging, the use of arms, the various types of gun-carriages and emplacements, the supply system, the hospital system, and numerous other details. And finally he turned his attention to general military history and zealously studied the Englishman Napier, the Frenchman Jomini and the German Clausewitz.

Engels never wasted the time of his readers with platitudinarian enlightenment on the moral irrationalism of war, instead he sought to lay bare the historical reasons for war, and these efforts more than once brought down the hot anger of the democratic demagogues on his head. Byron once poured burning




scorn on the leaders of the two armies which fought at Waterloo as the standard-bearers of feudal Europe and delivered the death-blow to the heir of the French Revolution, and a happy chance caused Engels to give a historical sketch ofboth Wellington and Blucher in one of his letters to Marx. Although the frame is limited the sketch is so clear and concise that even taking the great advance of military science into account it would hardly be necessary to alter as much as a line even to-day.

Engels also worked gladly and arduously on a third field, that of natural science, but here too he was fated never to put the finishing touches to his investigations during the long decades in which he performed task-work to clear the way for the intellectual labours of a still greater man.

It was a tragic fate, but Engels never whined, for sentimentality was as foreign to him as it was to his friend. He always considered it the great good fortune of his life that for forty years he was able to stand shoulder to shoulder with Marx, even at the cost of being overshadowed by the greater figure, and when for a decade and more after the death of his friend he played the leading role in the international working-class movement and his authority was undisputed it did not appear to him as a belated satisfaction. On the contrary, he always declared that he was given greater credit than was his due.

Both men gave themselves completely to the common cause, and both of them made, not the same, but an equally great sacrifice in its interests without the faintest trace of discontented grumbling or boasting, and for these reasons their friendship was an incomparable alliance of which history can show no second example.


CHAPTER NINE: THE CRIMEAN WAR AND THE CRISIS