when he began his school life, and his preparation for the university.
He had an absolute genius for study, and was no less fond of the sports
and games of his companions, so that he seemed to be marked out for
success. At sixteen years of age he showed a precocious ability for
planning and carrying out his work with thoroughness. His mind was
evidently a creative mind, one that was able to think out difficult
problems without fatigue. His taste was shown in his fondness for the
classics, in studying which he noted subtle distinctions of meaning
that usually escape even the mature scholar. Penetration, thoroughness,
creativeness, and a capacity for labor were the boy's chief
characteristics.
With such gifts, and such a nature, he left home for the university of
Bonn. Here he disappointed all his friends. His studies were neglected;
he was morose, restless, and dissatisfied. He fell into a number of
scrapes, and ran into debt through sundry small extravagances. All the
reports that reached his home were most unsatisfactory. What had come
over the boy who had worked so hard in the gymnasium at Treves?
The simple fact was that he had became love-sick. His separation from
Jenny von Westphalen had made him conscious of a feeling which he had
long entertained without knowing it. They had been close companions. He
had looked into her beautiful face and seen the luminous response of her
lovely eyes, but its meaning had not flashed upon his mind. He was not
old enough to have a great consuming passion, he was merely conscious of
her charm. As he could see her every day, he did not realize how much he
wanted her, and how much a separation from her would mean.
As "absence makes the heart grow fonder," so it may suddenly draw aside
the veil behind which the truth is hidden. At Bonn young Marx felt as
if a blaze of light had flashed before him; and from that moment
his studies, his companions, and the ambitions that he had hitherto
cherished all seemed flat and stale. At night and in the daytime there
was just one thing which filled his mind and heart--the beautiful vision
of Jenny von Westphalen.
Meanwhile his family, and especially his father, had become anxious at
the reports which reached them. Karl was sent for, and his stay at Bonn
was ended.
Now that he was once more in the presence of the girl who charmed him
so, he recovered all his old-time spirits. He wooed her ardently, and
though she was more coy, now that she saw his passion, she did not
discourage him, but merely prolonged the ecstasy of this wonderful
love-making. As he pressed her more and more, and no one guessed the
story, there came a time when she was urged to let herself become
engaged to him.
Here was seen the difference in their ages--a difference that had an
effect upon their future. It means much that a girl should be four years
older than the man who seeks her hand. She is four years wiser; and a
girl of twenty is, in fact, a match for a youth of twenty-five. Brought
up as she had been, in an aristocratic home, with the blood of two noble
families in her veins, and being wont to hear the easy and somewhat
cynical talk of worldly people, she knew better than poor Karl the
un-wisdom of what she was about to do.
She was noble, the daughter of one high official and the sister of
another. Those whom she knew were persons of rank and station. On the
other hand, young Marx, though he had accepted Christianity, was the son
of a provincial Jewish lawyer, with no fortune, and with a bad record at
the university. When she thought of all these things, she may well have
hesitated; but the earnest pleading and intense ardor of Karl Marx
broke down all barriers between them, and they became engaged, without
informing Jenny's father of their compact. Then they parted for a while,
and Karl returned to his home, filled with romantic thoughts.
He was also full of ambition and of desire for achievement. He had won
the loveliest girl in Treves, and now he must go forth into the world
and conquer it for her sake. He begged his father to send him to
Berlin, and showed how much more advantageous was that new and splendid
university, where Hegel's fame was still in the ascendent.
In answer to his father's questions, the younger Marx replied:
"I have something to tell you that will explain all; but first you must
give me your word that you will tell no one."
"I trust you wholly," said the father. "I will not reveal what you may
say to me."
"Well," returned the son, "I am engaged to marry Jenny von Westphalen.
She wishes it kept a secret from her father, but I am at liberty to tell
you of it."
The elder Marx was at once shocked and seriously disturbed. Baron
von Westphalen was his old and intimate friend. No thought of romance
between their children had ever come into his mind. It seemed disloyal
to keep the verlobung of Karl and Jenny a secret; for should it be
revealed, what would the baron think of Marx? Their disparity of rank
and fortune would make the whole affair stand out as something wrong and
underhand.
The father endeavored to make his son see all this. He begged him to go
and tell the baron, but young Marx was not to be persuaded.
"Send me to Berlin," he said, "and we shall again be separated; but I
shall work and make a name for myself, so that when I return neither
Jenny nor her father will have occasion to be disturbed by our
engagement."
With these words he half satisfied his father, and before long he was
sent to Berlin, where he fell manfully upon his studies. His father
had insisted that he should study law; but his own tastes were for
philosophy and history. He attended lectures in jurisprudence "as a
necessary evil," but he read omnivorously in subjects that were nearer
to his heart. The result was that his official record was not much
better than it had been at Bonn.
The same sort of restlessness, too, took possession of him when he
found that Jenny would not answer his letters. No matter how eagerly and
tenderly he wrote to her, there came no reply. Even the most passionate
pleadings left her silent and unresponsive. Karl could not complain, for
she had warned him that she would not write to him. She felt that their
engagement, being secret, was anomalous, and that until her family knew
of it she was not free to act as she might wish.
Here again was seen the wisdom of her maturer years; but Karl could not
be equally reasonable. He showered her with letters, which still she
would not answer. He wrote to his father in words of fire. At last,
driven to despair, he said that he was going to write to the Baron von
Westphalen, reveal the secret, and ask for the baron's fatherly consent.
It seemed a reckless thing to do, and yet it turned out to be the
wisest. The baron knew that such an engagement meant a social sacrifice,
and that, apart from the matter of rank, young Marx was without any
fortune to give the girl the luxuries to which she had been accustomed.
Other and more eligible suitors were always within view. But here Jenny
herself spoke out more strongly than she had ever done to Karl. She
was willing to accept him with what he was able to give her. She cared
nothing for any other man, and she begged her father to make both of
them completely happy.
Thus it seemed that all was well, yet for some reason or other
Jenny would not write to Karl, and once more he was almost driven to
distraction. He wrote bitter letters to his father, who tried to comfort
him. The baron himself sent messages of friendly advice, but what young
man in his teens was ever reasonable? So violent was Karl that at last
his father wrote to him:
I am disgusted with your letters. Their unreasonable tone is loathsome
to me. I should never had expected it of you. Haven't you been lucky
from your cradle up?
Finally Karl received one letter from his betrothed--a letter that
transfused him with ecstatic joy for about a day, and then sent him
back to his old unrest. This, however, may be taken as a part of Marx's
curious nature, which was never satisfied, but was always reaching after
something which could not be had.
He fell to writing poetry, of which he sent three volumes to
Jenny--which must have been rather trying to her, since the verse was
very poor. He studied the higher mathematics, English and Italian,
some Latin, and a miscellaneous collection of works on history and
literature. But poetry almost turned his mind. In later years he wrote:
Everything was centered on poetry, as if I were bewitched by some
uncanny power.
Luckily, he was wise enough, after a time, to recognize how halting
were his poems when compared with those of the great masters; and so he
resumed his restless, desultory work. He still sent his father letters
that were like wild cries. They evoked, in reply, a very natural burst
of anger:
Complete disorder, silly wandering through all branches of science,
silly brooding at the burning oil-lamp! In your wildness you see with
four eyes--a horrible setback and disregard for everything decent. And
in the pursuit of this senseless and purposeless learning you think
to raise the fruits which are to unite you with your beloved one! What
harvest do you expect to gather from them which will enable you to
fulfil your duty toward her?
Writing to him again, his father speaks of something that Karl had
written as "a mad composition, which denotes clearly how you waste your
ability and spend nights in order to create such monstrosities." The
young man was even forbidden to return home for the Easter holidays.
This meant giving up the sight of Jenny, whom he had not seen for a
whole year. But fortune arranged it otherwise; for not many weeks later
death removed the parent who had loved him and whom he had loved, though
neither of them could understand the other. The father represented the
old order of things; the son was born to discontent and to look forward
to a new heaven and a new earth.
Returning to Berlin, Karl resumed his studies; but as before, they
were very desultory in their character, and began to run upon social
questions, which were indeed setting Germany into a ferment. He took his
degree, and thought of becoming an instructor at the university of Jena;
but his radicalism prevented this, and he became the editor of a liberal
newspaper, which soon, however, became so very radical as to lead to his
withdrawal.
It now seemed best that Marx should seek other fields of activity. To
remain in Germany was dangerous to himself and discreditable to Jenny's
relatives, with their status as Prussian officials. In the summer of
1843, he went forth into the world--at last an "international." Jenny,
who had grown to believe in him as against her own family, asked for
nothing better than to wander with him, if only they might be married.
And they were married in this same summer, and spent a short honeymoon
at Bingen on the Rhine--made famous by Mrs. Norton's poem. It was the
brief glimpse of sunshine that was to precede year after year of anxiety
and want.
Leaving Germany, Marx and Jenny went to Paris, where he became known to
some of the intellectual lights of the French capital, such as Bakunin,
the great Russian anarchist, Proudhon, Cabet, and Saint-Simon. Most
important of all was his intimacy with the poet Heine, that marvelous
creature whose fascination took on a thousand forms, and whom no one
could approach without feeling his strange allurement.
Since Goethe's death, down to the present time, there has been no figure
in German literature comparable to Heine. His prose was exquisite. His
poetry ran through the whole gamut of humanity and of the sensations
that come to us from the outer world. In his poems are sweet melodies
and passionate cries of revolt, stirring ballads of the sea and tender
love-songs--strange as these last seem when coming from this cynic.
For cynic he was, deep down in his heart, though his face, when in
repose, was like the conventional pictures of Christ. His fascinations
destroyed the peace of many a woman; and it was only after many years of
self-indulgence that he married the faithful Mathilde Mirat in what
he termed a "conscience marriage." Soon after he went to his
"mattress-grave," as he called it, a hopeless paralytic.
To Heine came Marx and his beautiful bride. One may speculate as to
Jenny's estimate of her husband. Since his boyhood, she had not seen him
very much. At that time he was a merry, light-hearted youth, a jovial
comrade, and one of whom any girl would be proud. But since his long
stay in Berlin, and his absorption in the theories of men like Engels
and Bauer, he had become a very different sort of man, at least to her.
Groping, lost in brown studies, dreamy, at times morose, he was by no
means a sympathetic and congenial husband for a high-bred, spirited
girl, such as Jenny von Westphalen. His natural drift was toward a
beer-garden, a group of frowsy followers, the reek of vile tobacco, and
the smell of sour beer. One cannot but think that his beautiful wife
must have been repelled by this, though with her constant nature she
still loved him.
In Heinrich Heine she found a spirit that seemed akin to hers. Mr.
Spargo says--and in what he says one must read a great deal between the
lines:
The admiration of Jenny Marx for the poet was even more 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."
It must be that Heine held the heart of this beautiful woman in his
hand. He knew so well the art of fascination; he knew just how to supply
the void which Marx had left. The two were indeed affinities in heart
and soul; yet for once the cynical poet stayed his hand, and said no
word that would have been disloyal to his friend. Jenny loved him with a
love that might have blazed into a lasting flame; but fortunately there
appeared a special providence to save her from herself. The French
government, at the request of the King of Prussia, banished Marx from
its dominions; and from that day until he had become an old man he was
a wanderer and an exile, with few friends and little money, sustained by
nothing but Jenny's fidelity and by his infinite faith in a cause that
crushed him to the earth.
There is a curious parallel between the life of Marx and that of Richard
Wagner down to the time when the latter discovered a royal patron.
Both of them were hounded from country to country; both of them
worked laboriously for so scanty a living as to verge, at times, upon
starvation. Both of them were victims to a cause in which they earnestly
believed--an economic cause in the one case, an artistic cause in
the other. Wagner's triumph came before his death, and the world has
accepted his theory of the music-drama. The cause of Marx is far greater
and more tremendous, because it strikes at the base of human life and
social well-being.
The clash between Wagner and his critics was a matter of poetry and
dramatic music. It was not vital to the human race. The cause of Marx
is one that is only now beginning to be understood and recognized by
millions of men and women in all the countries of the earth. In
his lifetime he issued a manifesto that has become a classic among
economists. He organized the great International Association of Workmen,
which set all Europe in a blaze and extended even to America. His great
book, "Capital"--Das Kapital--which was not completed until the last
years of his life, is read to-day by thousands as an almost sacred work.
Like Wagner and his Minna, the wife of Marx's youth clung to him through
his utmost vicissitudes, denying herself the necessities of life so that
he might not starve. In London, where he spent his latest days, he was
secure from danger, yet still a sort of persecution seemed to follow
him. For some time, nothing that he wrote could find a printer. Wherever
he went, people looked at him askance. He and his six children lived
upon the sum of five dollars a week, which was paid him by the New York
Tribune, through the influence of the late Charles A. Dana. When his
last child was born, and the mother's life was in serious danger, Marx
complained that there was no cradle for the baby, and a little later
that there was no coffin for its burial.
Marx had ceased to believe in marriage, despised the church, and cared
nothing for government. Yet, unlike Wagner, he was true to the woman who
had given up so much for him. He never sank to an artistic degeneracy.
Though he rejected creeds, he was nevertheless a man of genuine
religious feeling. Though he believed all present government to be an
evil, he hoped to make it better, or rather he hoped to substitute for
it a system by which all men might get an equal share of what it is
right and just for them to have.
Such was Marx, and thus he lived and died. His wife, who had long been
cut off from her relatives, died about a year before him. When she was
buried, he stumbled and fell into her grave, and from that time until
his own death he had no further interest in life.
He had been faithful to a woman and to a cause. That cause was so
tremendous as to overwhelm him. In sixty years only the first great
stirrings of it could be felt. Its teachings may end in nothing, but
only a century or more of effort and of earnest striving can make it
plain whether Karl Marx was a world-mover or a martyr to a cause that
was destined to be lost.
FERDINAND LASSALLE AND HELENE VON DONNIGES
The middle part of the nineteenth century is a period which has become
more or less obscure to most Americans and Englishmen. At one end the
thunderous campaigns of Napoleon are dying away. In the latter part
of the century we remember the gorgeousness of the Tuileries, the four
years' strife of our own Civil War, and then the golden drift of peace
with which the century ended. Between these two extremes there is a
stretch of history which seems to lack interest for the average student
of to-day.
In America, that was a period when we took little interest in the
movement of affairs on the continent of Europe. It would not be easy,
for instance, to imagine an American of 1840 cogitating on problems of
socialism, or trying to invent some new form of arbeiterverein. General
Choke was still swindling English emigrants. The Young Columbian was
still darting out from behind a table to declare how thoroughly he
defied the British lion. But neither of these patriots, any more than
their English compeers, was seriously disturbed about the interests of
the rest of the world. The Englishman was contentedly singing "God Save
the Queen!" The American, was apostrophizing the bird of freedom
with the floridity of rhetoric that reached its climax in the "Pogram
Defiance." What the Dutchies and Frenchies were doing was little more to
an Englishman than to an American.
Continental Europe was a mystery to English-speaking people. Those who
traveled abroad took their own servants with them, spoke only English,
and went through the whole European maze with absolute indifference. To
them the socialist, who had scarcely received a name, was an imaginary
being. If he existed, he was only a sort of offspring of the Napoleonic
wars--a creature who had not yet fitted into the ordinary course of
things. He was an anomaly, a person who howled in beer-houses, and who
would presently be regulated, either by the statesmen or by the police.
When our old friend, Mark Tapley, was making with his master a homeward
voyage to Britain, what did he know or even care about the politics of
France, or Germany, or Austria, or Russia? Not the slightest, you may be
sure. Mark and his master represented the complete indifference of the
Englishman or American--not necessarily a well-bred indifference, but
an indifference that was insular on the one hand and republican on
the other. If either of them had heard of a gentleman who pillaged an
unmarried lady's luggage in order to secure a valuable paper for another
lady, who was married, they would both have looked severely at this
abnormal person, and the American would doubtless have added a remark
which had something to do with the matchless purity of Columbia's
daughters.
If, again, they had been told that Ferdinand Lassalle had joined in the
great movement initiated by Karl Marx, it is absolutely certain that
neither the Englishman nor the American could have given you the
slightest notion as to who these individuals were. Thrones might
be tottering all over Europe; the red flag might wave in a score of
cities--what would all this signify, so long as Britannia ruled the
waves, while Columbia's feathered emblem shrieked defiance three
thousand miles away?
And yet few more momentous events have happened in a century than the
union which led one man to give his eloquence to the social cause, and
the other to suffer for that cause until his death. Marx had the higher
thought, but his disciple Lassalle had the more attractive way of
presenting it. It is odd that Marx, today, should lie in a squalid
cemetery, while the whole western world echoes with his praises,
and that Lassalle--brilliant, clear-sighted, and remarkable for his
penetrating genius--should have lived in luxury, but should now know
nothing but oblivion, even among those who shouted at his eloquence and
ran beside him in the glory of his triumph.
Ferdinand Lassalle was a native of Breslau, the son of a wealthy
Jewish silk-merchant. Heymann Lassal--for thus the father spelled his
name--stroked his hands at young Ferdinand's cleverness, but he meant it
to be a commercial cleverness. He gave the boy a thorough education at
the University of Breslau, and later at Berlin. He was an affectionate
parent, and at the same time tyrannical to a degree.
It was the old story where the father wishes to direct every step that
his son takes, and where the son, bursting out into youthful manhood,
feels that he has the right to freedom. The father thinks how he has
toiled for the son; the son thinks that if this toil were given for
love, it should not be turned into a fetter and restraint. Young
Lassalle, instead of becoming a clever silk-merchant, insisted on a
university career, where he studied earnestly, and was admitted to the
most cultured circles.
Though his birth was Jewish, he encountered little prejudice against his
race. Napoleon had changed the old anti-Semitic feeling of fifty years
before to a liberalism that was just beginning to be strongly felt in
Germany, as it had already been in France. This was true in general, but
especially true of Lassalle, whose features were not of a Semitic type,
who made friends with every one, and who was a favorite in many salons.
His portraits make him seem a high-bred and high-spirited Prussian,
with an intellectual and clean-cut forehead; a face that has a sense of
humor, and yet one capable of swift and cogent thought.
No man of ordinary talents could have won the admiration of so many
compeers. It is not likely that such a keen and cynical observer as
Heinrich Heine would have written as he did concerning Lassalle, had not
the latter been a brilliant and magnetic youth. Heine wrote to Varnhagen
von Ense, the German historian:
My friend, Herr Lassalle, who brings you this letter, is a young man of
remarkable intellectual gifts. With the most thorough erudition, with
the widest learning, with the greatest penetration that I have ever
known, and with the richest gift of exposition, he combines an energy of
will and a capacity for action which astonish me. In no one have I found
united so much enthusiasm and practical intelligence.
No better proof of Lassalle's enthusiasm can be found than a few lines
from his own writings:
I love Heine. He is my second self. What audacity! What overpowering
eloquence! He knows how to whisper like a zephyr when it kisses
rose-blooms, how to breathe like fire when it rages and destroys; he
calls forth all that is tenderest and softest, and then all that is
fiercest and most daring. He has the sweep of the whole lyre!
Lassalle's sympathy with Heine was like his sympathy with every one
whom he knew. This was often misunderstood. It was misunderstood in his
relations with women, and especially in the celebrated affair of the
Countess von Hatzfeldt, which began in the year 1846--that is to say, in
the twenty-first year of Lassalle's age.