Part 50

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.