Letters of Marx and Engels
By E. H.
CARR
THE correspondence of Marx and Engels* is an important source-book for European nineteenth-century history. Its enormous bulk makes anything like a- complete English translation out of the question ; and we may therefore welcome the Selected Correspondence just issued by Messrs. Martin Lawrence. But even this stout volume of more than 500 pages only represents an occasional and rather random dip into the lucky tub. Of the 1,500 extant letters exchanged between Marx and Engels, less than 10 per cent. appear at all in this translation. Even of this fraction few are printed in full. In most cases only brief extracts are given, the omissions being occasionally, though seldom, indicated by dots. The volume also includes some ninety letters, or extracts from letters, written by Marx and Engels to other persons—once more a tiny'proportion of those which have been preserved. Fairly good historical notes are attached to most of the letters ; and I have noticed only one mishap 1" mismade " for " bequeathed " on page 181) in the excellent translation.
The first impulse of the reviewer of an anthology is to criticize the selectors ; and it is, at any rate, his duty to indicate at the outset on what principle the selection appears to have been made. It was the late Lord Rosebery who remarked that what most English people want to know about Napoleon is whether he was a good man. If there is any Englishman today harassed by a desire for similar knowledge about Karl Marx, the present volume will not help him. The selection has been made in Moscow, where undue curiosity about the prophet's personal life and character is frowned on as a bourgeois affectation. Of Marx's many surviving letters to his daughters few have yet been published at all, and only one is translated here. We miss Marx's pathetic letter to Lassalle on the death of his son Musch, as well as the famous exchange of letters with Engels on the death of Mary Burns—the one momentary rift which ever occurred in this historic friendship. More remarkable still, we have searched in vain for a single one of those graphic descriptions of financial need and urgent appeals for financial assistance which formed the constant burden of Marx's letters of the 'fifties and early 'sixties.
No less significant is the discretion which has omitted from this selection almost all those expressions of personal bitterness and hostility in which Marx was so fond of indulging. There is not a word of those quarrels with his compatriots in exile—Willich, Kinkel, Vogt and Freiligrath —which inspired so many spirited and libellous passages in his letters to Engels in the 'fifties. Lassalle comes in for a fairer share of his due, though here too the worst lines are missing. Palmerston, Marx's principal whipping-boy among English politicians, whom he freely accused of being " sold to Russia," gets only one incidental mention. The English reader who depended on this volume for his knowledge of Marx could have no conception of his peculiarly savage and contemptuous enmity towards those whose opinions he did not share, and still less of the deep family affection which persisted in face of appalling material conditions.
To draw attention to these omissions is not mere captious criticism. Private correspondence is an intensely personal affair ; and if, for purposes of publication, you serape away the flesh and blood of human idiosyncrasy and emotion, the dry bones are apt to be very dry indeed. But nourishment there is—even for those who do not enjoy the advantage of a cast-iron Marxist digestion. Anyone who wishes to grasp wherein Marxism differs from the doctrines of other so-called
*Karl Mars and Friedrich Engels. Selected Correspondence.
1846-1895. (Martin -Lawrence. 12s; 6(1.-) - -
socialists and revolutionaries of the nineteenth century cannot do better than read Marx's letter to Annenkov on page 5 about Proudhon—a devastating piece of destructive criticism—and Engels' letter to Cuno on page 819, which explains lucidly and succinctly the fundamental antithesis between Marx, who believed that the abolition of capital would bring about the disappearance of the payer of the State, and Bakunin who preached the destruction of the State as the first step towards the extermination of capitalism.
But for the general reader the most rewarding letters are probably those which deal with current events. In 1800 Marx discovered that " the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America, started by the. death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia." In 1866 he already foresaw the coining of the German Reich, and opined that " before very long the German-Austrian provinces will also fall to this empire." Within a month of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, he was writing that the " lust for Alsace-Lorraine " would be " the greatest misfortune which could befall Europe and above all Germany " ; and during the Russo-Turkish War he was looking forward with precipitate optimism to the Russian revolution.
"Rassia (he wrote to an American correspondent) has long been standing on the threshold of an upheaval . . . The upheaval will begin secunduin anent with some playing at constitutionalism and then there will be a fine row."
Pages have been written by critics and biographers about the relationship between Marx and Engels without adding much to the simple truth that Marx was a man of genius and Engels of an infinite capacity for taking pains. But the extraordinary uniformity of this correspondence is a striking proof how far the lesser man succeeded in taking the mould
of the greater. Among the most interesting letters in the book are some written by Engels in the decade after Marx's death. Here we get the neat description of the Fabians as " an ambitious group here in London who have understanding enough to realize the inevitability of the social revolution, but who could not possibly entrust this gigantic task to the rough proletariat alone and are therefore kind enough to set themselves at the head." But most remarkable of all perhaps is the following :
" A war, on the other hand, would throw us back for years, Chauvinism would swamp everything, for it would be a fight for existence. Germany would put about five million armed men into the field, or 10 per cent, of the population, the others 4 to 5 per cent., Russia relatively less. But there would be from ten to fifteen million combatants. I should like to see how they are to be fed ; it would be a devastation like the Thirty Years' War. And no quick decision could be arrived at, despite the colossal fighting forces. For France is protected on the north-eastern and south-eastern frontiers by very extensive fortifications and the new constructions in Paris are a model. So it will last a long time, and Russia cannot be taken by storm either. If, therefore, every- thing goes according to Bismarck's desires, more will be demanded of the nation than ever before and it is possible enough that partial defeats and the dragging out of the decisive war would produce an internal upheaval. But if the Germans were defeated from the first or forced into a prolonged defensive, then the thing would certainly start. If the war was fought out to the end without internal dis- turbances a state of exhaustion would supervene such as Europe has not experienced for two hundred years. American industry would then conquer all along the line and would force us all up against the alternatives : either retrogression to nothing but agri- culture for home consumption—American corn forbids anything else—or social transformation."
That was written a quarter of a century before August 1st, 1914. But except for the exaggerated confidence in the Value of fortifications and in the longevity of Bismarck, there is scarcely a word in it to which history has given the
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