Famous Affinities of History Part 26

"Napoleon found her to be a good deal of a nuisance," observes a third. "She knew too much, and was always trying to force her knowledge upon others."

The legend has sprung up that Mme. de Stael was too wise and witty to be acceptable to Napoleon; and many women repeated with unction that the conqueror of Europe was no match for this frowsy little woman. It is, perhaps, worth while to look into the facts, and to decide whether Napoleon was really of so petty a nature as to feel himself inferior to this rather comic creature, even though at the time many people thought her a remarkable genius.

In the first place, knowing Napoleon, as we have come to know him through the pages of Mme. de Remusat, Frederic Ma.s.son, and others, we can readily imagine the impatience with which the great soldier would sit at dinner, hastening to finish his meal, crowding the whole ceremony into twenty minutes, gulping a gla.s.s or two of wine and a cup of coffee, and then being interrupted by a fussy little female who wanted to talk about the ethics of history, or the possibility of a new form of government. Napoleon, himself, was making history, and writing it in fire and flame; and as for governments, he invented governments all over Europe as suited his imperial will. What patience could he have with one whom an English writer has rather unkindly described as "an ugly coquette, an old woman who made a ridiculous marriage, a blue-stocking, who spent much of her time in pestering men of genius, and drawing from them sarcastic comment behind their backs?"

Napoleon was not the sort of a man to be routed in discussion, but he was most decidedly the sort of man to be bored and irritated by pedantry. Consequently, he found Mme. de Stael a good deal of a nuisance in the salons of Paris and its vicinity. He cared not the least for her epigrams. She might go somewhere else and write all the epigrams she pleased. When he banished her, in 1803, she merely crossed the Rhine into Germany, and established herself at Weimar.

The emperor received her son, Auguste de Stael-Holstein, with much good humor, though he refused the boy's appeal on behalf of his mother.

"My dear baron," said Napoleon, "if your mother were to be in Paris for two months, I should really be obliged to lock her up in one of the castles, which would be most unpleasant treatment for me to show a lady. No, let her go anywhere else and we can get along perfectly. All Europe is open to her-Rome, Vienna, St. Petersburg; and if she wishes to write libels on me, England is a convenient and inexpensive place. Only Paris is just a little too near!"

Thus the emperor gibed the boy-he was only fifteen or sixteen-and made fun of the exiled blue-stocking; but there was not a sign of malice in what he said, nor, indeed, of any serious feeling at all. The legend about Napoleon and Mme. de Stael must, therefore, go into the waste-basket, except in so far as it is true that she succeeded in boring him.

For the rest, she was an earlier George Sand-unattractive in person, yet able to attract; loving love for love's sake, though seldom receiving it in return; throwing herself at the head of every distinguished man, and generally finding that he regarded her overtures with mockery. To enumerate the men for whom she professed to care would be tedious, since the record of her pa.s.sions has no reality about it, save, perhaps, with two exceptions.

She did care deeply and sincerely for Henri Benjamin Constant, the brilliant politician and novelist. He was one of her coterie in Paris, and their common political sentiments formed a bond of friends.h.i.+p between them. Constant was banished by Napoleon in 1802, and when Mme. de Stael followed him into exile a year later he joined her in Germany.

The story of their relations was told by Constant in Adolphe, while Mme. de Stael based Delphine on her experiences with him. It seems that he was puzzled by her ardor; she was infatuated by his genius. Together they went through all the phases of the tender pa.s.sion; and yet, at intervals, they would tire of each other and separate for a while, and she would amuse herself with other men. At last she really believed that her love for him was entirely worn out.

"I always loved my lovers more than they loved me," she said once, and it was true.

Yet, on the other hand, she was frankly false to all of them, and hence arose these intervals. In one of them she fell in with a young Italian named Rocca, and by way of a change she not only amused herself with him, but even married him. At this time-1811-she was forty-five, while Rocca was only twenty-three-a young soldier who had fought in Spain, and who made eager love to the she-philosopher when he was invalided at Geneva.

The marriage was made on terms imposed by the middle-aged woman who became his bride. In the first place, it was to be kept secret; and second, she would not take her husband's name, but he must pa.s.s himself off as her lover, even though she bore him children. The reason she gave for this extraordinary exhibition of her vanity was that a change of name on her part would put everybody out.

"In fact," she said, "if Mme. de Stael were to change her name, it would unsettle the heads of all Europe!"

And so she married Rocca, who was faithful to her to the end, though she grew extremely plain and querulous, while he became deaf and soon lost his former charm. Her life was the life of a woman who had, in her own phrase, "attempted everything"; and yet she had accomplished nothing that would last. She was loved by a man of genius, but he did not love her to the end. She was loved by a man of action, and she tired of him very soon. She had a wonderful reputation for her knowledge of history and philosophy, and yet what she knew of those subjects is now seen to be merely the sc.r.a.ps and borrowings of others.

Something she did when she introduced the romantic literature into France; and there are pa.s.sages from her writings which seem worthy of preservation. For instance, we may quote her outburst with regard to unhappy marriages. "It was the subject," says Mr. Gribble, "on which she had begun to think before she was married, and which continued to haunt her long after she was left a widow; though one suspects that the word 'marriage' became a form of speech employed to describe her relations, not with her husband, but with her lovers." The pa.s.sage to which I refer is as follows:

In an unhappy marriage, there is a violence of distress surpa.s.sing all other sufferings in the world. A woman's whole soul depends upon the conjugal tie. To struggle against fate alone, to journey to the grave without a friend to support you or to regret you, is an isolation of which the deserts of Arabia give but a faint and feeble idea. When all the treasure of your youth has been given in vain, when you can no longer hope that the reflection of these first rays will s.h.i.+ne upon the end of your life, when there is nothing in the dusk to remind you of the dawn, and when the twilight is pale and colorless as a livid specter that precedes the night, your heart revolts, and you feel that you have been robbed of the gifts of G.o.d upon earth.

Equally striking is another prose pa.s.sage of hers, which seems less the careful thought of a philosopher than the screeching of a termagant. It is odd that the first two sentences recall two famous lines of Byron:

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 'Tis woman's whole existence.

The pa.s.sage by Mme. de Stael is longer and less piquant:

Love is woman's whole existence. It is only an episode in the lives of men. Reputation, honor, esteem, everything depends upon how a woman conducts herself in this regard; whereas, according to the rules of an unjust world, the laws of morality itself are suspended in men's relations with women. They may pa.s.s as good men, though they have caused women the most terrible suffering which it is in the power of one human being to inflict upon another. They may be regarded as loyal, though they have betrayed them. They may have received from a woman marks of a devotion which would so link two friends, two fellow soldiers, that either would feel dishonored if he forgot them, and they may consider themselves free of all obligations by attributing the services to love-as if this additional gift of love detracted from the value of the rest!

One cannot help noticing how lacking in neatness of expression is this woman who wrote so much. It is because she wrote so much that she wrote in such a m.u.f.fled manner. It is because she thought so much that her reflections were either not her own, or were never clear. It is because she loved so much, and had so many lovers-Benjamin Constant; Vincenzo Monti, the Italian poet; M. de Narbonne, and others, as well as young Rocca-that she found both love and lovers tedious.

She talked so much that her conversation was almost always mere personal opinion. Thus she told Goethe that he never was really brilliant until after he had got through a bottle of champagne. Schiller said that to talk with her was to have a "rough time," and that after she left him, he always felt like a man who was just getting over a serious illness. She never had time to do anything very well.

There is an interesting glimpse of her in the recollections of Dr. Bollmann, at the period when Mme. de Stael was in her prime. The worthy doctor set her down as a genius-an extraordinary, eccentric woman in all that she did. She slept but a few hours out of the twenty-four, and was uninterruptedly and fearfully busy all the rest of the time. While her hair was being dressed, and even while she breakfasted, she used to keep on writing, nor did she ever rest sufficiently to examine what she had written.

Such then was Mme. de Stael, a type of the time in which she lived, so far as concerns her wors.h.i.+p of sensibility-of sensibility, and not of love; for love is too great to be so scattered and made a thing to prattle of, to cheapen, and thus destroy. So we find at the last that Germaine de Stael, though she was much read and much feted and much followed, came finally to that last halting-place where confessedly she was merely an old woman, eccentric, and unattractive. She sued her former lovers for the money she had lent them, she scolded and found fault-as perhaps befits her age.

But such is the natural end of sensibility, and of the woman who typifies it for succeeding generations.

THE STORY OF KARL MARX

Some time ago I entered a fairly large library-one of more than two hundred thousand volumes-to seek the little brochure on Karl Marx written by his old friend and genial comrade Wilhelm Liebknecht. It was in the card catalogue. As I made a note of its number, my friend the librarian came up to me, and I asked him whether it was not strange that a man like Marx should have so many books devoted to him, for I had roughly reckoned the number at several hundred.

"Not at all," said he; "and we have here only a feeble nucleus of the Marx literature-just enough, in fact, to give you a glimpse of what that literature really is. These are merely the books written by Marx himself, and the translations of them, with a few expository monographs. Anything like a real Marx collection would take up a special room in this library, and would have to have its own separate catalogue. You see that even these two or three hundred books contain large volumes of small pamphlets in many languages-German, English, French, Italian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish; and here," he concluded, pointing to a recently numbered card, "is one in j.a.panese."

My curiosity was sufficiently excited to look into the matter somewhat further. I visited another library, which was appreciably larger, and whose managers were evidently less guided by their prejudices. Here were several thousand books on Marx, and I spent the best part of the day in looking them over.

What struck me as most singular was the fact that there was scarcely a volume about Marx himself. Practically all the books dealt with his theory of capital and his other socialistic views. The man himself, his personality, and the facts of his life were dismissed in the most meager fas.h.i.+on, while his economic theories were discussed with something that verged upon fury. Even such standard works as those of Mehring and Spargo, which profess to be partly biographical, sum up the personal side of Marx in a few pages. In fact, in the latter's preface he seems conscious of this defect, and says:

Whether socialism proves, in the long span of centuries, to be good or evil, a blessing to men or a curse, Karl Marx must always be an object of interest as one of the great world-figures of immortal memory. As the years go by, thoughtful men and women will find the same interest in studying the life and work of Marx that they do in studying the life and work of Cromwell, of Wesley, or of Darwin, to name three immortal world-figures of vastly divergent types.

Singularly little is known of Karl Marx, even by his most ardent followers. They know his work, having studied his Das Kapital with the devotion and earnestness with which an older generation of Christians studied the Bible, but they are very generally unacquainted with the man himself. Although more than twenty-six years have elapsed since the death of Marx, there is no adequate biography of him in any language.

Doubtless some better-equipped German writer, such as Franz Mehring or Eduard Bernstein, will some day give us the adequate and full biography for which the world now waits.

Here is an admission that there exists no adequate biography of Karl Marx, and here is also an intimation that simply as a man, and not merely as a great firebrand of socialism, Marx is well worth studying. And so it has occurred to me to give in these pages one episode of his career that seems to me quite curious, together with some significant touches concerning the man as apart from the socialist. Let the thousands of volumes already in existence suffice for the latter. The motto of this paper is not the Vergilian "Arms and the man I sing," but simply "The man I sing"-and the woman. Karl Marx was born nearly ninety-four years ago-May 5, 1818-in the city which the French call Treves and the Germans Trier, among the vine-clad hills of the Moselle. Today, the town is commonplace enough when you pa.s.s through it, but when you look into its history, and seek out that history's evidences, you will find that it was not always a rather sleepy little place. It was one of the chosen abodes of the Emperors of the West, after Rome began to be governed by Gauls and Spaniards, rather than by Romans and Italians. The traveler often pauses there to see the Porta Nigra, that immense gate once strongly fortified, and he will doubtless visit also what is left of the fine baths and amphitheater.

Treves, therefore, has a right to be termed imperial, and it was the birthplace of one whose sway over the minds of men has been both imperial and imperious.

Karl Marx was one of those whose intellectual achievements were so great as to dwarf his individuality and his private life. What he taught with almost terrific vigor made his very presence in the Continental monarchies a source of eminent danger. He was driven from country to country. Kings and emperors were leagued together against him. Soldiers were called forth, and blood was shed because of him. But, little by little, his teaching seems to have leavened the thought of the whole civilized world, so that to-day thousands who barely know his name are deeply affected by his ideas, and believe that the state should control and manage everything for the good of all.

Marx seems to have inherited little from either of his parents. His father, Heinrich Marx, was a provincial Jewish lawyer who had adopted Christianity, probably because it was expedient, and because it enabled him to hold local offices and gain some social consequence. He had changed his name from Mordecai to Marx.

The elder Marx was very shrewd and tactful, and achieved a fair position among the professional men and small officials in the city of Treves. He had seen the horrors of the French Revolution, and was philosopher enough to understand the meaning of that mighty upheaval, and of the Napoleonic era which followed.

Napoleon, indeed, had done much to relieve his race from petty oppression. France made the Jews in every respect the equals of the Gentiles. One of its ablest marshals-Ma.s.sena-was a Jew, and therefore, when the imperial eagle was at the zenith of its flight, the Jews in every city and town of Europe were enthusiastic admirers of Napoleon, some even calling him the Messiah.

Karl Marx's mother, it is certain, endowed him with none of his gifts. She was a Netherlandish Jewess of the strictly domestic and conservative type, fond of her children and her home, and detesting any talk that looked to revolutionary ideas or to a change in the social order. She became a Christian with her husband, but the word meant little to her. It was sufficient that she believed in G.o.d; and for this she was teased by some of her skeptical friends. Replying to them, she uttered the only epigram that has ever been ascribed to her.

"Yes," she said, "I believe in G.o.d, not for G.o.d's sake, but for my own."

She was so little affected by change of scene that to the day of her death she never mastered German, but spoke almost wholly in her native Dutch. Had we time, we might dwell upon the unhappy paradox of her life. In her son Karl she found an especial joy, as did her husband. Had the father lived beyond Karl's early youth, he would doubtless have been greatly pained by the radicalism of his gifted son, as well as by his personal privations. But the mother lived until 1863, while Karl was everywhere stirring the fires of revolution, driven from land to land, both feared and persecuted, and often half famished. As Mr. Spargo says:

It was the irony of life that the son, who kindled a mighty hope in the hearts of unnumbered thousands of his fellow human beings, a hope that is today inspiring millions of those who speak his name with reverence and love, should be able to do that only by destroying his mother's hope and happiness in her son, and that every step he took should fill her heart with a great agony.

When young Marx grew out of boyhood into youth, he was attractive to all those who met him. Tall, lithe, and graceful, he was so extremely dark that his intimates called him "der neger"-"the negro." His loosely tossing hair gave to him a still more exotic appearance; but his eyes were true and frank, his nose denoted strength and character, and his mouth was full of kindliness in its expression. His lineaments were not those of the Jewish type.

Very late in life-he died in 1883-his hair and beard turned white, but to the last his great mustache was drawn like a bar across his face, remaining still as black as ink, and making his appearance very striking. He was full of fun and gaiety. As was only natural, there soon came into his life some one who learned to love him, and to whom, in his turn, he gave a deep and unbroken affection.

There had come to Treves-which pa.s.sed from France to Prussia with the downfall of Napoleon-a Prussian n.o.bleman, the Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, holding the official t.i.tle of "national adviser." The baron was of Scottish extraction on his mother's side, being connected with the ducal family of Argyll. He was a man of genuine rank, and might have shown all the arrogance and superciliousness of the average Prussian official; but when he became a.s.sociated with Heinrich Marx he evinced none of that condescending manner. The two men became firm friends, and the baron treated the provincial lawyer as an equal.

The two families were on friendly terms. Von Westphalen's infant daughter, who had the formidable name of Johanna Bertha Julie Jenny von Westphalen, but who was usually spoken of as Jenny, became, in time, an intimate of Sophie Marx. She was four years older than Karl, but the two grew up together-he a high-spirited, manly boy, and she a lovely and romantic girl.