Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

tail of the great liberal party, i.e. their enslavers, the capitalists'.117 And Engels, in spite of his temporary enthusiasm for working-class radicals such as Joseph Cowen, had to warn Bernstein that 'there is here at the moment no real working-class movement in the continental sense'.1 18 Nevertheless, Marx persisted in his view that in Britain a peaceful transition to socialism was possible.

My party [he wrote in 1880] considers an English revolution not necessary, but - according to historic precedents - possible. If the unavoidable evolution turn into a revolution, it would not only be the fault of the ruling classes, but also of the working class. Every pacific concession of the former has been wrung from them by 'pressure from without'. Their action kept pace with that pressure and if the latter has more and more weakened, it is only because the English working class know not how to wield their power and use their liberties, both of which they possess legally.119

Particularly after the Commune, Marx began to be better known in English society. During the Eastern crisis of 1877, he claimed to have placed many unsigned pieces in 'the fashionable London press' attacking Gladstone's Russian policy, all through the agency of Maltman Barry, his old acquaintance from the International. He was also using Barry to work on Members of Parliament who 'would hold up their hands in horror if they knew that it was really the "Red-Terror-Doctor", as they like to call me, who was whispering in their ears'.120 In early 1879, the 'Red-Terror- Doctor' attracted the attention of no less a person than Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, who was married to the German Crown Prince. She requested Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, a liberal MP who had been UnderSecretary for India, to meet Marx and give her his opinion of him; accordingly, he arranged a lunch with Marx at the Devonshire Club in St James's Street. Grant Duff's general impressions, as he related them to the Crown Princess, were as follows:

He is a short, rather small man with grey hair and beard which contrasts strangely with a still dark moustache. The face is somewhat round; the forehead well shaped and filled up - the eye rather hard but the whole expression rather pleasant than not, by no means that of a gentleman who is in the habit of eating babies in their cradles - which is I daresay the view which the police take of him. His talk was that of a wellinformed, nay learned man - much interested in Comparative Grammar which had led him into the Old Slavonic and other out-of-the-way studies and was varied by many quaint turns and little bits of dry humour, as when speaking of Hezechiall's 'Life of Prince Bismarck' he always referred to it, by way of contrast to Dr Busch's book, as the Old Testament.

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It was all very positif, slightly cynical - without any appearance of enthusiasm - interesting, and often, as I thought, showing very correct ideas when conversing on the past and the present, but vague and unsatisfactory when he turned to the future.121

They talked for three hours - of Russia where Marx expected 'a great but not distant crash' and of Germany where there seemed to him a strong possibility of mutiny in the army. Marx further explained that the socialist revolution could be a very long-term affair and expressed his relief that the German Emperor's would-be assassin, Nobiling, had not, as he planned, visited him in London beforehand. Grant Duff's general conclusion was: 'It will not be Marx who, whether he wishes it or not, will turn the world upside down.'1 22

T h e English socialist with whom Marx had the closest contact in his later years was H. M. Hyndman, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation, and a man of considerable private means.125 Having read the French version of Capital on a voyage to America he was eager to meet Marx, to whom he was duly introduced by Karl Hirsch early in 1880.124 Regularly during the following year Marx, accompanied by Eleanor, would go to dine with Hyndman in his elegant house in Devonshire Place; and I lyndman would in turn call on him (revering him as 'The Aristotle of die nineteenth century')125 and talk for hours - both men striding up and down in Marx's study. Hyndman believed in a peaceful revolution in England and some of his views were distinctly jingoistic; but at least he understood (to some extent) the labour theory of value; and he was also violendy anti-Russian, which provided one of the most powerful links

Empire in which reform would preferably be introduced by the rich and the powerful. T h e two chapters in the book dealing with labour and capital drew extensively on Capital and he duly acknowledged in the Preface his debt here 'to the work of a great thinker and original writer"2 6 - but did not mention Marx by name. T h e book was distributed at the foundation meeting of the Democratic Federation. Marx was angry that Hyndman bad not made more specific acknowledgement of his work and was also annoyed that his ideas had appeared in a book with whose general approach he found himself out of sympathy. When Hyndman excused himself on the grounds that many Englishmen would have less sympathy lor the ideas if they knew they were Marx's and that anyway Englishmen did not learn easily from foreigners, Marx was even angrier and wrote - with great pleasure - a stinging rebuke which ended their association.127

and written by Ernest Belfort Bax, a Positivist and journalistic friend of Hyndman's. There were many mistakes in Marx's biography and in the account of his economic ideas but it was nevertheless 'the first English publication imbued with real enthusiasm for the new ideas and boldly presenting them to the British philistines'.128 And he was pleased with the publicity given to it on the placards of London's West End and the joy it brought to Jenny two days before her death. Yet paradoxically Marx remained little known in the country where he had lived and worked

few years was extremely meagre. It is not surprising that Marx's last recorded words on Britain were: 'To the devil with the British'.129

With the departure of the Longuet family in February 1 8 8 1, Marx began the lonely last two years of his life. T h e separation was extremely painful: for Marx his grandchildren were 'inexhaustible sources of life and joy'1 3 0 and for weeks after their departure, so he wrote to Jenny, 'I often run to the window when I hear the voices of children . .. unaware, for a moment, that they are the other side of the Channel."3 1 He had less and less time for outside company and felt that 'it is awful to be so "old" that we can only foresee instead of see', particularly when the newborn 'have before them the most revolutionary period with which men were ever confronted'.132 Jenny's health continued to deteriorate although Marx called in the best doctors in London. She still had the strength to go to the theatre occasionally but spent long periods in bed clinging despairingly to a life she knew to be ebbing. In July Marx took her to Eastbourne for

to pay a long visit to Jenny, who was herself suffering from asthma. After three weeks, however, news reached Marx that Eleanor was suffering from a serious nervous depression and he returned immediately to London, followed a few days later by Jenny and Lenchen.

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A full six months before her death in December 1881 it was clear that Marx's wife was dying. He himself had a serious setback in October. For two months he lay in bed with bronchitis. Engels feared he might die and Eleanor sat by his bedside through many nights. Jenny was in the

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adjacent room but for three weeks Marx could not visit her. Eleanor wrote later:

It was a terrible time. Our dear mother lay in the big front room, Moor in the small room behind. And the two of them, who were so used to one another, so close to one another, could not even be together in the same room. Our good old Lenchen . . . and I had to nurse them both Never shall I forget the morning when he felt strong enough to go into Mother's room. When they were together they were young again - she a young girl and he a loving youth, both on the threshold of life, not an old man devastated by illness and an old dying woman parting from each other for ever.133

ever'.134 T h e last word she spoke to her husband was: Good. His doctor

On partially recovering from his illness, Marx felt himself to be doubly crippled, 'morally through the loss of my wife, and physically through a thickening of the pleura'.137 He decided to go once more to the seaside and in January 1882 took Eleanor with him to Ventnor. His coughing and bronchial catarrh continued unabated and Eleanor proved a poor companion: she had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown since the previous summer following a proposal of marriage from the Russian Populist Leo Hartmann. She was in the throes of breaking off her engagement to Lissagaray and despairing of ever having the chance to establish herself on the stage. When her friends in London learnt of her state, Dollie Maitland rushed to Ventnor to assist. It was not a success. Apart from being quite unable to amuse herself alone, Dollie fed unending gossip to Marx, who was hurt that his daughter should have turned to others for help and anxious that she should not 'be sacrificed on the family altar as the "companion" of an old man'.138 Eleanor certainly got the impression that her father did not appreciate her mental stress and considered her to be indulging her illness at the expense of her family.

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

Disillusioned by Eleanor and Ventnor, with Jenny too busy with her babies to help him and Laura too selfish, Marx gave in to the pressure of Engels and his doctor and went to Algiers. He was the readier to leave London as he found Engels' boisterous company intolerable. 'Good old Fred', he wrote to his daughter Jenny, 'may easily kill someone out of love.'1 19 Marx spent two and a half lonely months in Algiers in a small hotel overlooking the bay. T h e season was exceptionally cold and wet; his thoughts were 'to a great part absorbed by reminiscence of my wife, such a part of my best part of life!'140; and all his letters to Engels and his daughters are full of elaborate details about his health and the weather

of orthography and grammar - a result of the 'clouding of the mind'1 41 produced by Jenny's death and his illness. Marx left Algiers in M a y 1882 and went to Monte Carlo where he stayed a month, but his pleurisy and bronchitis showed no signs of abating.

On 6 June he left for Argenteuil to stay with Jenny for the next three months, seeking rest in 'the noise of children, this "microscopic world" that is much more interesting than the "macroscopic".142 Jenny's household, however, was far from being able to provide the peace for which Marx was looking. She was expecting yet another baby in mid-September and found no support in her husband, whom she bitterly criticised: the little time that Longuet spent at home he spent in bed, being preoccupied with his political activities in Paris which Marx considered as futile as those of Lafargue. Longuet was also tactless enough to invite to Argenteuil Roy (the French translator of Capital)-, in view of Marx's opinion of his capacities, this naturally caused great embarrassment.

During the summer of 1882 the other members of the Marx family gravitated towards Paris: Lenchen came in June to help Jenny, and both Eleanor and Laura came shortly afterwards. While Laura was still in London, Marx had written telling her it was her 'duty to accompany the old man of the mountains' when he went to Vevey in Switzerland in September. Laura consented and while there Marx promised her all his documents of the International for her to write its history and broached

daughter. Quite unlike her relations with Laura, Eleanor got on well with Jenny and developed in Argenteuil capacities that had lain quite dormant in London. But she, too, left at the end of August and took Jenny's eldest son, Johnny, back to England where for several months she acted with exemplary firmness as a second mother to him.

On his return from Switzerland Marx felt that he could burden Jenny