Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

three being dedicated to Jenny von Westphalen who, according to Sophie Marx, 'wept tears of delight and pain'64 on receiving them. She kept them carefully all her life, though her daughter Laura related that 'my father treated those verses with scant respect; each time that my parents spoke of them, they laughed outright at these youthful follies'.65 According to the social-democrat historian Mehring, these poems, with one exception, were all love lyrics and romantic ballads. He had had the opportunity of reading them before the great majority were lost and judged them 'formless in every sense of the word'.66 They were full of gnomes, sirens, songs to stars and bold knights, 'romantic in tone without the magic proper to romanticism'.67 They were, said Marx,

in accordance with my attitude and all my previous development, purely idealistic. My heaven and art became a Beyond as distant as my love. Everything real began to dissolve and thus lose its finiteness, I attacked the present, feeling was expressed without moderation or form, nothing was natural, everything built of moonshine; I believed in a complete opposition between what is and what ought to be and rhetorical reflections occupied the place of poetic thoughts, though there was perhaps also a certain warmth of emotion and desire for exuberance. These are the characteristics of all the poems of the first three volumes that Jenny received from me.68

Most of the few surviving poems are those written during the first half of 1837, together with fragments of a dramatic fantasy and a comic novel. Marx tried to publish some of these poems and sent them to Adelbert von Chamisso, editor of the annual Deutscher Musenalmanacb, but the issue had already gone to press. Although dedicated to his father, the poems were not much to his taste and Heinrich Marx even encouraged his son to attempt an ode which 'should glorify Prussia and afford an opportunity of praising the genius of the Monarch .. . patriotic, emotional and composed in a Germanic manner'.69 Marx's models, however, were Heine, Goethe and Schiller, and his verses contained all the well-known themes of German romanticism, with the exception of political reaction and nationalism. They were full of tragic love and talk of human destiny as the plaything of mysterious forces. There was the familiar subjectivism and extreme exaltation of the personality of the creative artist isolated from the rest of society, while seeking, at the same time, for a community of like-minded individuals. As a result of his love for Jenny,

With disdain I will throw my gauntlet

Full in the face of the world,

And see the collapse of this pigmy giant

Whose fall will not stifle my ardour.

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K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y

Then I will wander godlike and victorious

Through the ruins of the world

And, giving my words an active force,

I will feel equal to the creator.™

Other poems display a longing for something infinite and a love of death a la Novalis, while still others consist entirely of a dream world of mystical imagination. To the aesthetic idealism of these poems was added a series of typically romantic ironical attacks on 'Philistines', people like doctors and mathematicians, who followed utilitarian professions based on an ordered and rational approach to problems.

To help him in his composition, Marx had copied out large extracts from Lessing's Laokoon, Solger's Erwin, and Winckelmann's History of Art. Marx's habit of making excerpts from all the books he was reading (and sometimes adding comments of his own) stayed with him all his life, and those notebooks that remain form a valuable guide to the development of his thought.71 He also wrote a few chapters of a comic novel, 'Scorpion and Felix', in the style of Sterne and then gave that up to compose the first scene of 'Oulanem', a contemporary comic thriller whose hero was a feeble copy of the ageing Faust. 'Oulanem', too, never got beyond an immensely long first act which contained frenzied reflections on love (in all its forms), death, destruction and eternity.72 Finally there was an interesting series of epigrams on Hegel, whom Marx accused of being arrogant and obscure. In the first epigram, he says:

Because my meditations have discovered the highest of things and also the depths,

I am as crude as a god and cloak myself in darkness as he does, In my long researches and journeys on the wavy sea of thought, I found the word and remain firmly attached to my find.75

The second epigram had the same theme, opening:

I teach words that are mixed up in a devilish and chaotic mess.74

The most interesting was the last epigram:

Kant and Fichte like to whirl into heaven

And search there for a distant land,

While my only aim is to understand completely

What - I found in the street.75

The point of this epigram is totally misunderstood if it is taken to be Marx himself speaking.76 As in the former epigrams, it is 'Hegel' who is speaking, criticised by Marx, the subjective romantic, for being too

attached to day-to-day reality. The whole tenor of Marx's poems makes this an obvious criticism of Hegel, and it was a common one among romantic writers.

In general Marx's first contact with Berlin University brought about a great change in the views he had expressed in his school-leaving essay. No longer was he inspired by the thought of the service of humanity and concerned to fit himself into a place where he might best be able to sacrifice himself for this noble ideal; his poems of 1837, on the contrary, reveal a cult of the isolated genius and an introverted concern for the development of his own personality apart from the rest of humanity.77

Marx's penchant for romantic poetry was undoubtedly increased by the strain of his relationship with Jenny and the uncertainty of his future. While their engagement was still a secret from her parents, she refused to correspond with her fiance at all. 'I have gained the complete confidence of your Jenny,' Heinrich Marx wrote to his son, 'but the good, kind girl is continually tormenting herself, she is afraid of hurting you, of making you overstrain yourself, etc., etc. She is oppressed by the fact that her parents know nothing or, as I think, don't want to know anything. She cannot understand how she, who considers herself to be such a rational being, could let herself get so carried away.' He advised his son to enclose a letter for Jenny 'full of tender, devoted sentiment. .. but taking a clear view of your relationship' and definitely 'not a letter distorted by the fantasies of a poet'.78

Eventually it was decided that Marx should send a letter to the Baron declaring his intention and should give his own family a week's notice of its arrival so that his father could do his best to secure a favourable reception. Jenny herself, even when the engagement was accepted by her father, continued to be extremely apprehensive, being already past the age when most girls of her class were married. 'She has the idea', Heinrich Marx reported, 'that it is unnecessary to write to y o u . . . But what does that matter? You can be as certain as I am (and you know that I am hard to convince) that even a Prince would not be able to steal her affections from you. She is attached to you body and soul.. .'79 Jenny herself explained her state of mind:

That I am not in a condition to return your youthful romantic love, I knew from the very beginning and felt deeply even before it was explained to me so coldly, cleverly and rationally. Oh, Karl, my distress lies precisely in the fact that your beautiful, touching passionate love, your indescribably beautiful descriptions of it, the enrapturing images conjured up by your imagination, that would fill any other girl with ineffable delight, only serve to make me anxious and often uncertain. If I gave myself over to this bliss, then my fate would be all the more

frightful if your fiery love were to die, and you were to become cold and unwilling .. . You see, Karl, that is why I am not so completely grateful, so thoroughly enchanted by your love as I ought to be; that is why I am often mindful of external things, of life and reality, instead of holding fast, as you would like, to the world of love, losing myself in it and finding there a higher dearer spiritual unity with you enabling ine to forget all other things.80

Occasionally even Heinrich Marx began to regret that he had sanctioned the engagement and was full of sound advice that his son was obviously not in a position to follow:

Your exalted and exaggerated love cannot bring back peace to the person to whom you have entirely given yourself and you run the contrary risk of entirely destroying her. Exemplary conduct, a manly and firm desire rapidly to raise yourself in the world without thereby alienating people's goodwill and favour: this is the only way of creating a satisfactory state of affairs and of both reassuring Jenny and raising her in her own eyes and those of the world . . . She is making an inestimable sacrifice for you and gives evidence of a self-denial such as only cold reason can fully appreciate . . . You must give her the certainty that in spite of your youth you are a man who merits the respect of the world and can earn it.8'

Under the impact of his father's advice and the general atmosphere of the university, Marx's romantic period did not survive long. Poetry, even during his first year at Berlin, was not his only concern. He also read widely in jurisprudence and felt compelled to 'struggle with philosophy'.82 In the Berlin Law Faculty, the progressive Hegelian standpoint was represented by Eduard Gans, whose lectures Marx attended during the first term. Gans was a baptised Jew, a liberal Hegelian who in his brilliant lectures elaborated on the Hegelian idea of a rational development in history by emphasising particularly its libertarian aspects, and the importance of social questions. Gans approved of the French Revolution of 1830, advocated a British style of monarchy, was impressed by the ideas of Saint-Simon and was eager to find solutions to overcome 'the struggle of the proletarians with the middle classes'.85 The opposing school of thought, known as the Historical School of Law, was represented by Karl von Savigny, whose lectures Marx also attended. The Historical School claimed to find the justification for laws in the customs and traditions of a people and not in the theoretical systems of lawgivers. This point of view linked law closely to history but had necessarily reactionary overtones in that it looked to the past to reinforce its prin- l iples of organic development.84 There being no open political discussion m thePrussia of that time, the conflict between the principles of the

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French Revolution and those of the reaction that succeeded it was fought out in such disputes as then existed in the Law Faculty.

It is not, therefore, surprising that Marx should have been led, through his legal studies, to engage in philosophical speculation. The two were, in his mind, closely connected and he tried to work out a philosophy of law. He prefaced this with a metaphysical introduction and the whole grew to a work of three hundred pages before he gave it up. The particular problem which he was unable to overcome in the metaphysical introduction was the conflict between what is and what ought to be, 'the hallmark of idealism which gave rise to its dominating and very destructive features and engendered the following hopelessly mistaken division of the subjectmatter: firstly came what I had so graciously christened the metaphysics of law, i.e. first principles, reflections, definitions distinct from all actual law and every actual form of law - just as you get in Fichte, only here more modern and with less substance'.85 It was precisely this gap between what is and what ought to be that Marx later considered to have been bridged by the Hegelian philosophy. Marx's second objection to the metaphysical system he had constructed was its 'mathematical dogmatism'. According to Marx, the systems of Kant and Fichte, which were the inspiration for his own ideas at this time, were open to this objection: they were abstract systems that, like geometry, passed from axioms to conclusions. In contrast, 'in the practical expression of the living world of ideas in which law, the state, nature and the whole of philosophy consist, the object itself must be studied in its own development, and arbitrary divisions must not be introduced'.86 Marx then outlined the complicated schema of his philosophy of law that comprised the second part of his treatise. The main reason for his dissatisfaction with this classification seems to have been that it was essentially empty - a desk, as he put it, into whose drawers he later poured sand.

When he got as far as the discussion of material private law, he realised that his enterprise was mistaken:

At the end of material private law I saw the falsity of the whole conception (whose outline borders on the Kantian but when elaborated veers completely away), and it again became plain to me that I could not get by without philosophy. So I was forced again with a quiet conscience to throw myself into her arms, and composed a new basic system of metaphysics at the end of which I was forced to realise the perversity of this and that of all my previous efforts.87

This brought Marx to the end of his first semester and he sought refuge from his philosophical problems in writing the poetry discussed above: