One might expect Marx to have been bored out of his wits with the shallow, narrow society of health resorts, but he soon became an aficionado. There were further vacations at Carlsbad in 1875 and 1876; after that, when Germany’s new anti-socialist laws made the journey too perilous, he transferred his affections to the insuperably bourgeois Isle of Wight, favoured watering-hole of Queen Victoria and Lord Tennyson. Wherever he went, fellow guests were amazed to find that the terrifying communistic bogeyman was in fact the life and soul of the house party. During his 1875 visit to Carlsbad a Viennese newspaper described him as the most popular raconteur in town:
He always has to hand the mot juste, the striking simile, the suddenly illuminating joke. If you share his society accompanied by a woman of evident wit – women and children are the best agents provocateurs in conversation and, because they appreciate the general only in relationship to the personal, constantly summon one into the cosy arbour of personal encounters – then Marx will bestow on you with full hands the rich and well-ordered treasure of his memories. He then prefers to direct his steps back into past days when romanticism was singing its last free woodland song, when … Heine brought poems into his study with the ink still wet.
Tellingly, the same newspaper recorded that ‘Marx is now sixty-three years old’; in fact he was fifty-seven. Three years later, an interviewer from the Chicago Tribune noted that ‘he must be over seventy years of age’. Though still working on the next two volumes of Capital when his doctors permitted, it was as if he had tacitly accepted defeat and settled down to benign anecdotage, content to observe and reminisce. The years of passionate engagement – pamphlets and petitions, meetings and manoeuvres – were over.
With the two older daughters married and settled elsewhere in Hampstead, the villa on Maitland Park Road had become too spacious for the requirements of his shrunken ménage. In March 1875 the remaining members of the household – Karl, Jenny, Eleanor, Helene – moved a hundred yards down the street to number 44, a four-storey terraced property which was slightly smaller and far cheaper. He stayed there for the rest of his life.
As he grew older, Marx’s domestic habits became more regular and temperate. He no longer had the stamina for pub-crawls up the Tottenham Court Road, epic chess games or all-night sessions at his desk. Rising at a conventional hour he would read The Times over breakfast, just like any other middle-class gent, and then retire to his study for the day. At dusk he put on his black cloak and soft felt hat (looking, as Eleanor said, ‘for all the world like a conspirators’ chorus’) and strolled through the streets of London for an hour or so. He was very short-sighted by now: on his return from these excursions he sometimes returned to a neighbouring front door by mistake, discovering his error only when the key didn’t fit.
Sundays were devoted to the family: a roast-beef lunch (cooked to perfection by Helene) followed by long walks over the Heath with Laura, Jennychen and her sons. August Bebel, one of the founders of German Social Democracy, was ‘pleasantly surprised to see with what warmth and affection Marx, who was described everywhere in those days as the worst misanthrope, could play with his grandchildren and what love the latter showed for their grandfather’. When little Edgar Longuet was eighteen months old he was caught biting at a raw kidney which he thought was a piece of chocolate – and which he continued to chew despite the mistake. Marx promptly nicknamed the lad ‘Wolf’, though this was later amended to ‘Mr Tea’ because of his insatiable thirst.
Except on Sunday, callers were discouraged during the hours of daylight, but since Marx’s doctor (and indeed his wife) had banned him from working in the evenings he was happy to play the genial host at dinner, dispensing wine and anecdotes to foreign pilgrims who came to make the great man’s acquaintance. ‘He was most affable,’ the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Morozov reported. ‘I did not notice in him any of the moroseness or unapproachableness that somebody had spoken to me about.’
Everyone who visited Maitland Park Road made the same startling discovery: under that leonine mane was a playful, purring pussy-cat. ‘He spoke in the quietly detached tones of a patriarch, quite the opposite of the picture I had formed of him,’ the German journalist Eduard Bernstein reported. ‘From descriptions that originated, I must admit, from his enemies, I had expected to meet a fairly morose and very irritable old gentleman; yet now I saw opposite me a white-haired man whose laughing dark eyes spoke of friendship and whose words contained much that was mild. When a few days later I expressed to Engels my surprise at having found Marx so very different from expectations, he asserted, “Well, Marx can nevertheless get most awfully stormy”.’
Another German socialist, Karl Kautsky, arrived at Maitland Park Road almost catatonic with anxiety, having heard plenty of stories about these tempests. He was terrified of making a fool of himself like the young Heinrich Heine – who, on meeting Goethe, was so intimidated that he could think of nothing better to talk about than the delicious sweet plums that could be found on the road from Jena to Weimar. But Marx wasn’t nearly so distant or forbidding as old Goethe: he received Kautsky with a friendly smile and asked if he took after his mother, the popular novelist Minna Kautsky. Not at all, Kautsky replied cheerfully – little guessing that Marx, who had taken an instant dislike to this bumptious youth, was silently congratulating Frau Kautsky on her good fortune. ‘Whatever Marx might have thought of me,’ Kautsky wrote many years later, ‘he nowhere betrayed the slightest sign of ill-will. I left him highly satisfied.’ Since Marx privately considered Karl Kautsky to be a ‘small-minded mediocrity’, his forbearance proves how much the Jupiter Tonans had mellowed.
He no longer bothered to correct libels or inaccuracies from his enemies. ‘If I denied everything that has been said and written of me,’ he told an American interviewer in 1879, ‘I would require a score of secretaries.’ A tendentious ‘biography’ issued by a publisher in Haarlem was loftily ignored. ‘I do not reply to pinpricks,’ he explained, when invited by a Dutch journal to review this slipshod portrait. ‘In my younger days I sometimes did some hard hitting, but wisdom comes with age, at least in so far as one avoids useless dissipation of force.’ Age conferred eminence, too: even the English, who had ignored the giant in their midst for thirty years (when not blackguarding him as an assassin), now began to show a certain curiosity and respect. In 1879 no less a figure than Crown Princess Victoria, daughter of the English Queen and wife of the future German Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm, asked a senior Liberal politician what he knew of this Marx fellow. The MP, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, had to plead ignorance but promised to invite the ‘Red Terrorist Doctor’ to lunch and report back.
To judge by Sir Mountstuart’s subsequent letter to the Princess, Marx was on his best behaviour throughout their three-hour meeting in the ornate dining-room of the Devonshire Club, St James’s:
He is a short, rather small man with grey hair and beard which contrast 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 takes of him.
His talk was that of a well-informed, 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 …
Having exhausted the conversational possibilities of Slavonic grammar, Marx turned to politics. He expected a ‘great and not distant crash’ in Russia, starting with reforms from above and culminating in the collapse of Tsarism; there would then be a revolt against ‘the existing military system’ in Germany. When Grant Duff suggested that the rulers of Europe might forestall revolution by agreeing to reduce their spending on armaments, thus lightening the economic burden on their people, Marx assured him that ‘all sorts of fears and jealousies’ would make this impossible. ‘Th
e burden will grow worse and worse as science advances,’ he predicted, ‘for the improvements in the art of destruction will keep pace with its advance and every year more and more will have to be devoted to costly engines of war.’ Very well, Grant Duff conceded, but even if a revolution did occur it would not necessarily realise all the dreams and plans of the communists. ‘Doubtless,’ Marx replied, ‘but all great movements are slow. It would merely be a step to better things as your Revolution of 1688 was.’ Touché!
Although unaware that his comments would be written down, Marx had enough caution and common sense to sidestep the little traps laid by his wily interrogator. As Sir Mountstuart told the Princess:
In the course of conversation Karl Marx spoke several times both of your Imperial Highness and of the Crown Prince and invariably with due respect and propriety. Even in the case of eminent individuals of whom he by no means spoke with respect there was no trace of bitterness or savagery – plenty of acrid and dissolvent criticism but nothing of the Marat tone.
Of the horrible things that have been connected with the International he spoke as any respectable man would have done …
Altogether my impression of Marx, allowing for his being at the opposite pole of opinion from oneself, was not at all unfavourable and I would gladly meet him again. It will not be he who, whether he wishes it or not, will turn the world upside down.
In gloomier moments, Marx himself sometimes feared as much. He found an exact description of his anxieties in Balzac’s novel The Unknown Masterpiece, the story of a brilliant artist so obsessive in his perfectionism that he spends many years refining and retouching the portrait of a courtesan to achieve ‘the most complete representation of reality’. When he shows the masterpiece to his friends, all they can see is a formless mass of colour and random lines: ‘Nothing! Nothing! After ten years of work …’ He hurls the worthless canvas on to the flames – ‘the fire of Prometheus’ – and dies that very night.
However, Karl Marx’s unknown masterpiece did have at least one famous and appreciative reader – or so he thought. In October 1873, a few months after publication of the second German edition of Capital, he had received the following letter:
Downe, Beckenham, Kent
Dear Sir:
I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep & important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin
Marx and Darwin were the two most revolutionary and influential thinkers of the nineteenth century; and since they lived only twenty miles apart for much of their adult lives, with several acquaintances in common, the temptation to search for a missing link is hard to resist. Even as Marx’s coffin was being lowered into the earth of Highgate cemetery, Engels was already making the connection. ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in human nature,’ he declared, ‘so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.’ The small group of mourners at the graveside included Professor Edwin Ray Lankester, an intimate friend of both Marx and Darwin, who apparently had no objection to this attempted marriage of the evolutionist and the revolutionist. The one man who might have protested, Marx himself, was in no position to do so.
His first reaction to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1860, might seem to justify Engels’s posthumous judgement. ‘Although it is developed in the crude English style,’ he wrote in December 1860, ‘this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.’ A month later, he told Lassalle that ‘Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history’. But this initial enthusiasm was modified and diluted over the next few years: though the Darwinian ‘struggle for life’ might be applicable to flora and fauna, as an explanation of human society it led to the Malthusian fantasy that over-population was the motive force of political economy.
Marx’s loathing of Malthus led him to take refuge in an even wackier theory, proposed by the French naturalist Pierre Trémaux in 1865. In his book Origine et Transformations de l’Homme et des Autres Êtres, Trémaux postulated that evolution was governed by geological and chemical changes in the soil. The idea attracted little attention at the time and is now entirely forgotten, but for a few weeks Marx could think of little else. ‘It represents a very significant advance over Darwin,’ he wrote. ‘For certain questions, such as nationality etc., only here has a basis in nature been found.’ The ‘surface-formations’ of the Russian landscape had tartarised and mongolised the Slavs, just as the secret of how ‘the common negro type is only a degeneration of a far higher one’ could be found in the dusty plains of Africa. Engels, who usually phrased his rare criticisms of Marx as mildly and respectfully as possible, didn’t trouble to hide his belief that the old boy had gone barmy. Trémaux was quietly removed from the Marxist pantheon soon afterwards, and Darwin rehabilitated. The edition of Capital which he sent out in 1873, inscribed to ‘Mr Charles Darwin on the part of his sincere admirer Karl Marx’, included a footnote referring to the ‘epoch-making’ effect of On the Origin of Species.
The history of the Marx – Darwin partnership might have ended there but for another letter, which was discovered seventy years ago and has misled countless Marxian scholars ever since. It is dated 13 October 1880:
Downe, Beckenham, Kent
Dear Sir:
I am much obliged for your kind letter & the Enclosure.—The publication in any form of your remarks on my writings really requires no consent on my part, & it would be ridiculous in me to give consent to what requires none. I shd prefer the Part or Volume not to be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as this implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.—Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.—I am sorry to refuse you any request, but I am old & have very little strength, & looking over proof-sheets (as I know by present experience) fatigues me much.—
I remain Dear Sir
Your faithfully,
Ch. Darwin
This was first published in 1931 by a Soviet newspaper, Under the Banner of Marxism, which hypothesised that the ‘Enclosure’ must have been two chapters from the English edition of Capital dealing with the theory of evolution. Palpable nonsense, of course, since the book was not translated into English until 1886, three years after Marx’s death.
Isaiah Berlin then added to the confusion. In his hugely influential study of Karl Marx, published in 1939, he claimed that it was the original German edition which Marx had wished to dedicate to Darwin, ‘for whom he had a greater intellectual admiration than for any other of his contemporaries’. According to Berlin, ‘Darwin declined the honour in a polite, cautiously phrased letter, saying that he was unhappily ignorant of economic science, but offered the author his good wishes in what he assumed to be their common end – the advancement of human knowledge.’ Berlin thus managed to fuse the two letters into one while entirely overlooking the fact that Capital – with its dedication to Wilhelm Wolff – appeared in 1867, a full thirteen years before Marx supposedly offered ‘the honour’ to Darwin.
Since the Second World War, all authors on Marx (and many on Darwin) ha
ve accepted the legend of the rebuffed dedication, differing only on the question of which particular version of the book it concerned. ‘Marx certainly wished to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin,’ David McLellan wrote in his 1973 biography, an assertion that is still there in the most recent paperback (1995). This is no more plausible than Isaiah Berlin’s theory: Volume Two was assembled by Engels from various notes and manuscripts only after Marx’s death. Darwin could not have been asked to ‘look over proof-sheets’ in 1880 since no such sheets existed. Besides, Engels’s introduction to the second volume confirmed that ‘the second and third books of Capital were to be dedicated, as Marx had stated repeatedly, to his wife’.
Everything about that second ‘letter to Marx’ rings false. Why should Darwin fret about ‘attacks on religion’ if he had been sent a work on political economy? Yet no quizzical eyebrow was raised until 1967, when Professor Shlomo Avineri argued in Encounter magazine that Marx’s misgivings about the political application of Darwinism made it ‘quite unthinkable’ for the great communist to have sought the great evolutionist’s imprimatur. How then to explain the 1880 letter? ‘Marx’s dedication of Capital to Darwin,’ he proposed, rather lamely, ‘was evidently made tongue in cheek.’
Avineri’s scepticism – if not his conclusion – struck a chord with Margaret Fay, a young graduate student at the University of California, when she came across the Encounter article seven years later. ‘My gut-feeling persisted in taking me on repeated and rather aimless trips to the Biology library,’ she wrote, ‘where I wandered around dipping into biographies of Darwin and Marxist interpretations of his theory of evolution to see if, after all, there was perhaps some political significance in Darwin’s work which had escaped me.’ Instead, and quite by chance, she found a slim volume called The Students’ Darwin. The contents were unremarkable enough, simply a rather schoolmasterish exposition of evolutionary theory. But what caught her eye was the publication date, 1881, and the name of the author – Edward B. Aveling, later to be the lover of Eleanor Marx. What if Darwin’s second letter had not been addressed to Marx at all, but rather to Aveling?
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