KARL MARX—THE MAN

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 17, 21 January 1939, Page 23

KARL MARX—THE MAN

. To Duckworth's "Great Lives" series has recently been added a volume on Karl Marx,- by C. J. S. Sprigge. This is an, excellent little book which succeeds in its aim of separating the personality of Karl Marx from the argument which has grown up around his writings. It was a very remarkable, personality. Marx was the son of a Rhineland .lew who had become both Lutheranised and Prussianised. A comfortable official career lay in front of him, and he himself made his prospects brighter by falling in love with the daughter of' a local aristocrat. What is more, she married,him, and the marriage turned out well. Marx cannot have been an easy person to live with —even Engels, who -financed him, occasionally rebelled against his selfishness—but his out-at-elbows domestic life was curiously happy. In other relationships his conduct was as intolerant as his thought. He broke up the First International sooner than endure Bakunin as a rival near his throne. As a politician it is to his credit that he used all his influence to prevent the wastage of working-class enthusiasm in sporadic and futile insurrections. On the other hand, he misread the trend of events, support-j ing Prussia in XB7O, then, rallying to the French Republic, and finally backing the Commune after he had done his best to prevent an outbreak. Its; failure combined with the collapse of the International took him out of politics and led him to spend his last years in dealing with the huge mass of written material which he did not live to reduce to final order.