careful about everything that Germaine did and about the company she
kept. On the other hand, the daughter, who in the city of Calvin had
been rather dull and quiet in her ways, launched out into a gaiety such
as she had never known in Switzerland. Mother and daughter, in fact,
changed parts. The country beauty of Geneva became the prude of Paris,
while the quiet, unemotional young Genevese became the light of all the
Parisian salons, whether social or intellectual.
The mother was a very beautiful woman. The daughter, who was to become
so famous, is best described by those two very uncomplimentary English
words, "dumpy" and "frumpy." She had bulging eyes--which are not
emphasized in the flattering portrait by Gerard--and her hair was
unbecomingly dressed. There are reasons for thinking that Germaine
bitterly hated her mother, and was intensely jealous of her charm
of person. It may be also that Mme. Necker envied the daughter's
cleverness, even though that cleverness was little more, in the end,
than the borrowing of brilliant things from other persons. At any rate,
the two never cared for each other, and Germaine gave to her father the
affection which her mother neither received nor sought.
It was perhaps to tame the daughter's exuberance that a marriage was
arranged for Mlle. Necker with the Baron de Stael-Holstein, who then
represented the court of Sweden at Paris. Many eyebrows were lifted when
this match was announced. Baron de Stael had no personal charm, nor any
reputation for wit. His standing in the diplomatic corps was not very
high. His favorite occupations were playing cards and drinking enormous
quantities of punch. Could he be considered a match for the extremely
clever Mlle. Necker, whose father had an enormous fortune, and who
was herself considered a gem of wit and mental power, ready to discuss
political economy, or the romantic movement of socialism, or platonic
love?
Many differed about this. Mlle. Necker was, to be sure, rich and clever;
but the Baron de Stael was of an old family, and had a title. Moreover,
his easy-going ways--even his punch-drinking and his card-playing--made
him a desirable husband at that time of French social history, when the
aristocracy wished to act exactly as it pleased, with wanton license,
and when an embassy was a very convenient place into which an indiscreet
ambassadress might retire when the mob grew dangerous. For Paris was now
approaching the time of revolution, and all "aristocrats" were more or
less in danger.
At first Mme. de Stael rather sympathized with the outbreak of the
people; but later their excesses drove her back into sympathy with
the royalists. It was then that she became indiscreet and abused the
privilege of the embassy in giving shelter to her friends. She was
obliged to make a sudden flight across the frontier, whence she did
not return until Napoleon loomed up, a political giant on the
horizon--victorious general, consul, and emperor.
Mme. de Stael's relations with Napoleon have, as I remarked above, been
among her few titles to serious remembrance. The Corsican eagle and the
dumpy little Genevese make, indeed, a peculiar pair; and for this reason
writers have enhanced the oddities of the picture.
"Napoleon," says one, "did not wish any one to be near him who was as
clever as himself."
"No," adds another, "Mme. de Stael made a dead set at Napoleon, because
she wished to conquer and achieve the admiration of everybody, even of
the greatest man who ever lived."
"Napoleon found her to be a good deal of a nuisance," observes a third.
"She knew too much, and was always trying to force her knowledge upon
others."
The legend has sprung up that Mme. de Stael was too wise and witty to
be acceptable to Napoleon; and many women repeated with unction that the
conqueror of Europe was no match for this frowsy little woman. It is,
perhaps, worth while to look into the facts, and to decide whether
Napoleon was really of so petty a nature as to feel himself inferior to
this rather comic creature, even though at the time many people thought
her a remarkable genius.
In the first place, knowing Napoleon, as we have come to know him
through the pages of Mme. de Remusat, Frederic Masson, and others, we
can readily imagine the impatience with which the great soldier would
sit at dinner, hastening to finish his meal, crowding the whole ceremony
into twenty minutes, gulping a glass or two of wine and a cup of coffee,
and then being interrupted by a fussy little female who wanted to
talk about the ethics of history, or the possibility of a new form of
government. Napoleon, himself, was making history, and writing it in
fire and flame; and as for governments, he invented governments all over
Europe as suited his imperial will. What patience could he have with
one whom an English writer has rather unkindly described as "an ugly
coquette, an old woman who made a ridiculous marriage, a blue-stocking,
who spent much of her time in pestering men of genius, and drawing from
them sarcastic comment behind their backs?"
Napoleon was not the sort of a man to be routed in discussion, but
he was most decidedly the sort of man to be bored and irritated by
pedantry. Consequently, he found Mme. de Stael a good deal of a nuisance
in the salons of Paris and its vicinity. He cared not the least for her
epigrams. She might go somewhere else and write all the epigrams she
pleased. When he banished her, in 1803, she merely crossed the Rhine
into Germany, and established herself at Weimar.
The emperor received her son, Auguste de Stael-Holstein, with much good
humor, though he refused the boy's appeal on behalf of his mother.
"My dear baron," said Napoleon, "if your mother were to be in Paris
for two months, I should really be obliged to lock her up in one of the
castles, which would be most unpleasant treatment for me to show a lady.
No, let her go anywhere else and we can get along perfectly. All Europe
is open to her--Rome, Vienna, St. Petersburg; and if she wishes to write
libels on me, England is a convenient and inexpensive place. Only Paris
is just a little too near!"
Thus the emperor gibed the boy--he was only fifteen or sixteen--and made
fun of the exiled blue-stocking; but there was not a sign of malice in
what he said, nor, indeed, of any serious feeling at all. The
legend about Napoleon and Mme. de Stael must, therefore, go into the
waste-basket, except in so far as it is true that she succeeded in
boring him.
For the rest, she was an earlier George Sand--unattractive in person,
yet able to attract; loving love for love's sake, though seldom
receiving it in return; throwing herself at the head of every
distinguished man, and generally finding that he regarded her overtures
with mockery. To enumerate the men for whom she professed to care would
be tedious, since the record of her passions has no reality about it,
save, perhaps, with two exceptions.
She did care deeply and sincerely for Henri Benjamin Constant, the
brilliant politician and novelist. He was one of her coterie in Paris,
and their common political sentiments formed a bond of friendship
between them. Constant was banished by Napoleon in 1802, and when Mme.
de Stael followed him into exile a year later he joined her in Germany.
The story of their relations was told by Constant in Adolphe, while Mme.
de Stael based Delphine on her experiences with him. It seems that he
was puzzled by her ardor; she was infatuated by his genius. Together
they went through all the phases of the tender passion; and yet, at
intervals, they would tire of each other and separate for a while, and
she would amuse herself with other men. At last she really believed that
her love for him was entirely worn out.
"I always loved my lovers more than they loved me," she said once, and
it was true.
Yet, on the other hand, she was frankly false to all of them, and hence
arose these intervals. In one of them she fell in with a young Italian
named Rocca, and by way of a change she not only amused herself with
him, but even married him. At this time--1811--she was forty-five, while
Rocca was only twenty-three--a young soldier who had fought in Spain,
and who made eager love to the she-philosopher when he was invalided at
Geneva.
The marriage was made on terms imposed by the middle-aged woman who
became his bride. In the first place, it was to be kept secret; and
second, she would not take her husband's name, but he must pass himself
off as her lover, even though she bore him children. The reason she gave
for this extraordinary exhibition of her vanity was that a change of
name on her part would put everybody out.
"In fact," she said, "if Mme. de Stael were to change her name, it would
unsettle the heads of all Europe!"
And so she married Rocca, who was faithful to her to the end, though she
grew extremely plain and querulous, while he became deaf and soon lost
his former charm. Her life was the life of a woman who had, in her own
phrase, "attempted everything"; and yet she had accomplished nothing
that would last. She was loved by a man of genius, but he did not love
her to the end. She was loved by a man of action, and she tired of him
very soon. She had a wonderful reputation for her knowledge of history
and philosophy, and yet what she knew of those subjects is now seen to
be merely the scraps and borrowings of others.
Something she did when she introduced the romantic literature into
France; and there are passages from her writings which seem worthy of
preservation. For instance, we may quote her outburst with regard to
unhappy marriages. "It was the subject," says Mr. Gribble, "on which she
had begun to think before she was married, and which continued to haunt
her long after she was left a widow; though one suspects that the word
'marriage' became a form of speech employed to describe her relations,
not with her husband, but with her lovers." The passage to which I refer
is as follows:
In an unhappy marriage, there is a violence of distress surpassing all
other sufferings in the world. A woman's whole soul depends upon the
conjugal tie. To struggle against fate alone, to journey to the grave
without a friend to support you or to regret you, is an isolation of
which the deserts of Arabia give but a faint and feeble idea. When
all the treasure of your youth has been given in vain, when you can no
longer hope that the reflection of these first rays will shine upon the
end of your life, when there is nothing in the dusk to remind you of
the dawn, and when the twilight is pale and colorless as a livid specter
that precedes the night, your heart revolts, and you feel that you have
been robbed of the gifts of God upon earth.
Equally striking is another prose passage of hers, which seems less the
careful thought of a philosopher than the screeching of a termagant. It
is odd that the first two sentences recall two famous lines of Byron:
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
'Tis woman's whole existence.
The passage by Mme. de Stael is longer and less piquant:
Love is woman's whole existence. It is only an episode in the lives
of men. Reputation, honor, esteem, everything depends upon how a woman
conducts herself in this regard; whereas, according to the rules of
an unjust world, the laws of morality itself are suspended in men's
relations with women. They may pass as good men, though they have caused
women the most terrible suffering which it is in the power of one human
being to inflict upon another. They may be regarded as loyal, though
they have betrayed them. They may have received from a woman marks of
a devotion which would so link two friends, two fellow soldiers, that
either would feel dishonored if he forgot them, and they may consider
themselves free of all obligations by attributing the services to
love--as if this additional gift of love detracted from the value of the
rest!
One cannot help noticing how lacking in neatness of expression is this
woman who wrote so much. It is because she wrote so much that she wrote
in such a muffled manner. It is because she thought so much that her
reflections were either not her own, or were never clear. It is because
she loved so much, and had so many lovers--Benjamin Constant; Vincenzo
Monti, the Italian poet; M. de Narbonne, and others, as well as young
Rocca--that she found both love and lovers tedious.
She talked so much that her conversation was almost always mere personal
opinion. Thus she told Goethe that he never was really brilliant until
after he had got through a bottle of champagne. Schiller said that to
talk with her was to have a "rough time," and that after she left him,
he always felt like a man who was just getting over a serious illness.
She never had time to do anything very well.
There is an interesting glimpse of her in the recollections of Dr.
Bollmann, at the period when Mme. de Stael was in her prime. The worthy
doctor set her down as a genius--an extraordinary, eccentric woman in
all that she did. She slept but a few hours out of the twenty-four, and
was uninterruptedly and fearfully busy all the rest of the time. While
her hair was being dressed, and even while she breakfasted, she used to
keep on writing, nor did she ever rest sufficiently to examine what she
had written.
Such then was Mme. de Stael, a type of the time in which she lived, so
far as concerns her worship of sensibility--of sensibility, and not
of love; for love is too great to be so scattered and made a thing to
prattle of, to cheapen, and thus destroy. So we find at the last that
Germaine de Stael, though she was much read and much feted and much
followed, came finally to that last halting-place where confessedly
she was merely an old woman, eccentric, and unattractive. She sued her
former lovers for the money she had lent them, she scolded and found
fault--as perhaps befits her age.
But such is the natural end of sensibility, and of the woman who
typifies it for succeeding generations.
THE STORY OF KARL MARX
Some time ago I entered a fairly large library--one of more than two
hundred thousand volumes--to seek the little brochure on Karl Marx
written by his old friend and genial comrade Wilhelm Liebknecht. It was
in the card catalogue. As I made a note of its number, my friend the
librarian came up to me, and I asked him whether it was not strange
that a man like Marx should have so many books devoted to him, for I had
roughly reckoned the number at several hundred.
"Not at all," said he; "and we have here only a feeble nucleus of the
Marx literature--just enough, in fact, to give you a glimpse of what
that literature really is. These are merely the books written by Marx
himself, and the translations of them, with a few expository monographs.
Anything like a real Marx collection would take up a special room in
this library, and would have to have its own separate catalogue. You
see that even these two or three hundred books contain large volumes
of small pamphlets in many languages--German, English, French, Italian,
Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish; and here," he
concluded, pointing to a recently numbered card, "is one in Japanese."
My curiosity was sufficiently excited to look into the matter somewhat
further. I visited another library, which was appreciably larger, and
whose managers were evidently less guided by their prejudices. Here were
several thousand books on Marx, and I spent the best part of the day in
looking them over.
What struck me as most singular was the fact that there was scarcely
a volume about Marx himself. Practically all the books dealt with his
theory of capital and his other socialistic views. The man himself, his
personality, and the facts of his life were dismissed in the most meager
fashion, while his economic theories were discussed with something
that verged upon fury. Even such standard works as those of Mehring and
Spargo, which profess to be partly biographical, sum up the personal
side of Marx in a few pages. In fact, in the latter's preface he seems
conscious of this defect, and says:
Whether socialism proves, in the long span of centuries, to be good or
evil, a blessing to men or a curse, Karl Marx must always be an object
of interest as one of the great world-figures of immortal memory. As
the years go by, thoughtful men and women will find the same interest in
studying the life and work of Marx that they do in studying the life
and work of Cromwell, of Wesley, or of Darwin, to name three immortal
world-figures of vastly divergent types.
Singularly little is known of Karl Marx, even by his most ardent
followers. They know his work, having studied his Das Kapital with the
devotion and earnestness with which an older generation of Christians
studied the Bible, but they are very generally unacquainted with the
man himself. Although more than twenty-six years have elapsed since the
death of Marx, there is no adequate biography of him in any language.
Doubtless some better-equipped German writer, such as Franz Mehring or
Eduard Bernstein, will some day give us the adequate and full biography
for which the world now waits.
Here is an admission that there exists no adequate biography of Karl
Marx, and here is also an intimation that simply as a man, and not
merely as a great firebrand of socialism, Marx is well worth studying.
And so it has occurred to me to give in these pages one episode of his
career that seems to me quite curious, together with some significant
touches concerning the man as apart from the socialist. Let the
thousands of volumes already in existence suffice for the latter. The
motto of this paper is not the Vergilian "Arms and the man I sing,"
but simply "The man I sing"--and the woman. Karl Marx was born nearly
ninety-four years ago--May 5, 1818--in the city which the French call
Treves and the Germans Trier, among the vine-clad hills of the Moselle.
Today, the town is commonplace enough when you pass through it, but when
you look into its history, and seek out that history's evidences, you
will find that it was not always a rather sleepy little place. It was
one of the chosen abodes of the Emperors of the West, after Rome
began to be governed by Gauls and Spaniards, rather than by Romans and
Italians. The traveler often pauses there to see the Porta Nigra, that
immense gate once strongly fortified, and he will doubtless visit also
what is left of the fine baths and amphitheater.
Treves, therefore, has a right to be termed imperial, and it was
the birthplace of one whose sway over the minds of men has been both
imperial and imperious.
Karl Marx was one of those whose intellectual achievements were so great
as to dwarf his individuality and his private life. What he taught
with almost terrific vigor made his very presence in the Continental
monarchies a source of eminent danger. He was driven from country to
country. Kings and emperors were leagued together against him. Soldiers
were called forth, and blood was shed because of him. But, little by
little, his teaching seems to have leavened the thought of the whole
civilized world, so that to-day thousands who barely know his name are
deeply affected by his ideas, and believe that the state should control
and manage everything for the good of all.
Marx seems to have inherited little from either of his parents. His
father, Heinrich Marx, was a provincial Jewish lawyer who had adopted
Christianity, probably because it was expedient, and because it enabled
him to hold local offices and gain some social consequence. He had
changed his name from Mordecai to Marx.
The elder Marx was very shrewd and tactful, and achieved a fair position
among the professional men and small officials in the city of Treves.
He had seen the horrors of the French Revolution, and was philosopher
enough to understand the meaning of that mighty upheaval, and of the
Napoleonic era which followed.
Napoleon, indeed, had done much to relieve his race from petty
oppression. France made the Jews in every respect the equals of the
Gentiles. One of its ablest marshals--Massena--was a Jew, and therefore,
when the imperial eagle was at the zenith of its flight, the Jews in
every city and town of Europe were enthusiastic admirers of Napoleon,
some even calling him the Messiah.
Karl Marx's mother, it is certain, endowed him with none of his gifts.
She was a Netherlandish Jewess of the strictly domestic and conservative
type, fond of her children and her home, and detesting any talk that
looked to revolutionary ideas or to a change in the social order. She
became a Christian with her husband, but the word meant little to her.
It was sufficient that she believed in God; and for this she was teased
by some of her skeptical friends. Replying to them, she uttered the only
epigram that has ever been ascribed to her.
"Yes," she said, "I believe in God, not for God's sake, but for my own."
She was so little affected by change of scene that to the day of her
death she never mastered German, but spoke almost wholly in her native
Dutch. Had we time, we might dwell upon the unhappy paradox of her life.
In her son Karl she found an especial joy, as did her husband. Had the
father lived beyond Karl's early youth, he would doubtless have been
greatly pained by the radicalism of his gifted son, as well as by his
personal privations. But the mother lived until 1863, while Karl was
everywhere stirring the fires of revolution, driven from land to land,
both feared and persecuted, and often half famished. As Mr. Spargo says:
It was the irony of life that the son, who kindled a mighty hope in the
hearts of unnumbered thousands of his fellow human beings, a hope that
is today inspiring millions of those who speak his name with reverence
and love, should be able to do that only by destroying his mother's hope
and happiness in her son, and that every step he took should fill her
heart with a great agony.
When young Marx grew out of boyhood into youth, he was attractive to all
those who met him. Tall, lithe, and graceful, he was so extremely dark
that his intimates called him "der neger"--"the negro." His loosely
tossing hair gave to him a still more exotic appearance; but his eyes
were true and frank, his nose denoted strength and character, and his
mouth was full of kindliness in its expression. His lineaments were not
those of the Jewish type.
Very late in life--he died in 1883--his hair and beard turned white,
but to the last his great mustache was drawn like a bar across his
face, remaining still as black as ink, and making his appearance very
striking. He was full of fun and gaiety. As was only natural, there soon
came into his life some one who learned to love him, and to whom, in his
turn, he gave a deep and unbroken affection.
There had come to Treves--which passed from France to Prussia with
the downfall of Napoleon--a Prussian nobleman, the Baron Ludwig von
Westphalen, holding the official title of "national adviser." The baron
was of Scottish extraction on his mother's side, being connected with
the ducal family of Argyll. He was a man of genuine rank, and might have
shown all the arrogance and superciliousness of the average Prussian
official; but when he became associated with Heinrich Marx he evinced
none of that condescending manner. The two men became firm friends, and
the baron treated the provincial lawyer as an equal.
The two families were on friendly terms. Von Westphalen's infant
daughter, who had the formidable name of Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von
Westphalen, but who was usually spoken of as Jenny, became, in time, an
intimate of Sophie Marx. She was four years older than Karl, but the two
grew up together--he a high-spirited, manly boy, and she a lovely and
romantic girl.
The baron treated Karl as if the lad were a child of his own. He
influenced him to love romantic literature and poetry by interpreting
to him the great masterpieces, from Homer and Shakespeare to Goethe and
Lessing. He made a special study of Dante, whose mysticism appealed to
his somewhat dreamy nature, and to the religious instinct that always
lived in him, in spite of his dislike for creeds and churches.