In the fall of 1842, when Marx was editing the Rheinische Zeitung, a highly intelligent young man who had been contributing to the paper came to see him. The son of a Rhineland manufacturer, he had just been converted to communism. He was passing through Cologne on his way to England, whither he was going with the double object of learning his father’s business in Manchester and of studying the Chartist movement.
Karl Marx, who was only beginning to read the communists and who as yet knew little or nothing about Manchester, received him with the utmost coldness. He was then in the midst of one of those feuds with former associates which were to be a recurrent feature of his life. The result of the all-powerful reaction had been to cause the young Hegelians in Berlin to recoil into a theoretical intransigence; and since their position of pure atheism and pure communism, which made no contact with actual society, excluded all possibility of affecting the course of events by ordinary agitation, they had resorted to a policy of clowning not unlike that by which the Dadaists of our own post-war period attempted, in a similar fashion, to shock a world of which they totally despaired and which they could only desire to insult. Karl Marx hated the clowning and considered the intransigence futile: he was trying to make his paper a practical political force. He had been cutting and refusing to publish the contributions of his friends in Berlin; and it was to be increasingly characteristic of Marx that he passed readily from a critical mistrust, based on sound intellectual grounds, to an unhealthy and hateful suspicion. In this case, he assumed that the young traveler was an emissary from his enemies in Berlin, and he sent Friedrich Engels away without ever finding out what there was in him or understanding what he was up to.
Engels was two and a half years younger than Marx, but he had already some reputation as a writer. He had been born (November 28, 1820) in the industrial town of Barmen, where good stone houses lined a well-paved street. Between the houses one sometimes got a glimpse of a clear little river called the Wupper, which flowed away into the Rhine between softly rolling banks, with green bleacheries, red-roofed houses, gardens, meadows and woods. So he described it in a pseudonymous letter—written when Engels was eighteen, and written remarkably well—for a paper which Gutzkow was editing. But on the opposite bank of the Wupper, he wrote, one found the narrow and characterless streets of Elberfeld, where the first spinning machine in Germany had been set up; and the river, as it ran through the double town, was flanked by the textile factories and muddied with purple dye. Friedrich Engels was already aware that “the fresh and vigorous popular life, which existed almost all over Germany,” had disappeared in his native town. One never heard the old folk-songs in Elberfeld-Barmen: the songs that the mill-workers sang were invariably smutty and low—and they sang them howling drunk in the streets. Drinking beer and Rhine wine, he reflected, had once been a jolly affair; but now that cheap spirits were being sent in from Prussia, the tavern life was becoming more and more brutal. The workers got drunk every night; they were always fighting and sometimes killed one another. When they were turned out of their grog-shops at closing time, they would go to sleep in the haylofts or stables or fall down on people’s dungheaps or front steps.
The reasons for this, Engels wrote, were quite plain. All day they had been working in low-ceilinged rooms, where they had been breathing more dust and coal smoke than oxygen; they had been crouching above their looms and scorching their backs against the stove. From the time that they had been six years old, everything possible had been done to deprive them of strength and the enjoyment of life. There was nothing left for them but evangelism and brandy.
Young Friedrich Engels’ father was in the textile business himself, and he was strong for the evangelism, if not for the brandy. He had factories both in Manchester and in Barmen. His grandfather had founded the business in the last half of the eighteenth century, and was said to have been the first manufacturer to build up a permanent industrial community by giving homes to those of the workers, a floating population at that date, who had commended themselves through industry and conduct, and subtracting the cost from their wages. Friedrich’s father was progressive in the sense that he was the first manufacturer of the Rhineland to install English machines in his mills; but he was a pillar of the most rigorous party of the Calvinism that dominated the locality, and a bigot of the most crushing kind.
Friedrich Engels, with his natural gaiety and his enthusiasm for literature and music, grew up in a cage of theology, from which it took him a long time to escape. For the “Pietism” which his father professed, righteousness meant unremitting work; and work meant his own kind of business. He would not allow novels in the house; and young Friedrich hoped to be a poet. Old Caspar, who felt that the boy needed steadying, sent him to Bremen to live with a pastor and to work in an export office. There Strauss’s Life of Jesus set in motion for Friedrich the machinery of rationalist criticism. Yet for months he still declared himself a “supernaturalist”; and the truth was that his religious instincts were not to be extinguished but rather fed by the new doctrine with which he now became preoccupied. He was to find his lost God again in the Absolute Idea of Hegel.
He wrote notices of theater and opera, travel sketches, mythological stories; poems on oriental subjects in the manner of Freiligrath: the old rebuke from the brave faraway to the dismal and pedestrian present. He adored and translated Shelley; and he wrote revolutionary rhapsodies of his own to the freedom which was surely coming and which was apparently to make all Germany as good-natured and laughter-loving and frank as an ideal unindustrialized Rhineland: the new sun, the new wine, the new song!
The young Engels is an attractive figure. He was tall and slender, with brown hair and bright and piercing blue eyes. Unlike the obdurately brooding Marx, he was flexible, lively and active. In Bremen he loved to fence, loved to ride; swam the Weser once four times at a stretch. He was observant and filled his letters with drawings of the people he saw: broad brokers who always began everything they said with “According to my way of thinking—”; young men with dashing mustaches, heavy fringes of beard, and foils; a queer old party who got drunk every morning and came out in front of his house and slapped himself on the chest and declared to the world: “I am a burgher!”; wagoners riding without saddles and bargemen loading coffee at the docks; seedy-looking Weltschmerz poets, one of whom Engels insists is writing a book on Weltschmerz as the only sure way of getting thin. He himself seems to have written verse almost as easily as prose; and he picked up languages with marvelous facility: one of the things that seems chiefly to have pleased him at the young business men’s club that he frequented was the variety of foreign papers. He loved good wine and did an immense amount of drinking: one of the most amusing of his incidental drawings depicts a disgusted elderly connoisseur who has just tasted some sour wine, contrasted with the urbane and cheerful countenance of the traveling salesman who has just induced him to buy it. He liked music, joined a singing society and composed some choral pieces for it. He writes his sister that Liszt has just given a concert in Bremen, and that Liszt is a wonderful man: the ladies have been swooning all over him and keeping the dregs from his tea in cologne bottles, but the master had left them cold and gone out to drink with some students, and he had run up a bill in the public house of no less than three thousand thaler—let alone what he’d put away in other places!
What is to be noted in Engels from the beginning is his sympathetic interest in life. Marx’s thinking, though realistic in a moral sense and though sometimes enriched by a peculiar kind of imagery, always tends to state social processes in terms of abstract logical developments or to project mythological personifications; he almost never perceives ordinary human beings. Engels’ sense of the world is quite different: he sees naturally and with a certain simplicity of heart into the lives of other people. Where Karl Marx during his years at the university seems to have written to his family rarely and then only to tell them of his ambitions, Engels continues through imagination and feeling to participate in the life of his, even after he has gone to Bremen. Whenever he writes to his sister, he is able to see his own experience through her eyes—from the day in 1838 when he describes to her in such accurate detail a hen with her seven little chickens, one of which is black and will eat bugs off your hand, to the day in 1842 when he tells her about his new spaniel, which has “displayed a great talent for tavern life” and goes the rounds of the tables to be fed, and which he has taught to growl in the most savage manner when he says, “There’s an aristocrat!” And he can see them all there at home; he sends his sister a little scene in dramatic form depicting current goings-on in the household—a large well-to-do middle-class family; evidently, in spite of old Caspar’s relentless Bible-reading, pretty cultivated, good-humored and lively. He follows Marie in imagination to her boarding-school, returns with her to Barmen when she leaves and sees her entering on her new young lady’s life of freedom. He writes her a mocking and charming set of verses about a lame student she has met at Bonn, whom she is supposed to have found more attractive than more aristocratic and prepossessing beaux.
One day he went down to the docks to visit a ship that was sailing for America. The first cabin was “elegant and comfortably furnished, like an aristocratic salon, in mahogany ornamented with gold”; but when he descended to the steerage, he found the people “packed in like the paving-stones in the streets,” men, women and children, sick and well, dumped together among their baggage, and he pictured them to himself in a storm, which would churn them all around in a heap and compel them to close up the porthole through which they had had their only ventilation. He saw that they were good strong honest Germans, “certainly by no means the worst that the Fatherland produces,” who had been bedeviled by the feudal estates between serfdom and independence till they had decided to abandon their fatherland.
From Bremen he removed to Berlin in the autumn of 1841 to put in his year of military service. He had chosen Berlin on account of the university: he had had no academic training, and he wanted to study Philosophy. There he fell in with the same set of young Hegelians who had had so stimulating an effect on Marx. It was the year of the publication of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, which for Engels performed the service of setting him free from theology and standing him firmly in the world of human action; and it was also the year of The European Triarchy, a book by a man named Moses Hess, the son of a Jewish manufacturer, who had traveled in England and France and who had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to eliminate the hatreds between nations without getting rid of commercial competition. Hess seems to have been the first German writer to canalize the current of Saint-Simonism into the mainstream of German thought, and when the young Engels met him later at Cologne, Hess quickly converted him to communism.
The next November Friedrich Engels went to England and remained there for twenty-two months. It was a period of economic depression of unprecedented severity for the English. The cotton mills of Manchester were standing idle; and the streets were full of unemployed workmen, who begged from the passers-by with the threatening demeanor of rebels. The Chartist movement for universal suffrage and representation of the working class in Parliament had come to a climax the summer before in a general strike of the whole North of England, which had only been broken when the constabulary had fired on one of these formidable crowds. The next May there was a strike of the brickmakers, which resulted in a bloody riot. In Wales the impoverished peasants were destroying the tollkeepers’ houses.
Friedrich Engels brought to the city of Manchester the comprehensive and anatomizing eye of a highly intelligent foreigner. He explored it till, so he said, he had come to know it as well as his own town. Elberfeld-Barmen had given him the clue to it. He studied the layout of the city and saw its commercial center surrounded by a girdle of working-class sections, and, outside the working-class girdle, the villas and gardens of the owners merging pleasantly with the country around; and he saw how the owners had arranged it so that it was possible for them to travel back and forth between the Exchange and their homes without ever being obliged to take cognizance of the condition of the working-class quarters, because the streets by which they passed through these sections were solidly lined with shops that hid the misery and dirt behind them. Yet it was impossible to walk through Manchester without encountering people strangely crippled, people with knock-knees and crooked spines: reminders of that suppressed and stunted race whose energies kept Manchester going.
This race Engels carefully observed. He was having a love affair with an Irish girl named Mary Burns, who worked in the factory of Ermen & Engels and had been promoted to run a new machine called a “self-actor.” She seems to have been a woman of some independence of character, as she is said to have refused his offer to relieve her of the necessity of working. She had, however, allowed him to set up her and her sister in a little house in the suburb of Salford, where the coal-barges and chimneys of Manchester gave way to the woods and the fields. There he had already begun that strange double life which was to be kept up through the whole of his business career. While maintaining a lodging in town and going to his office during the day, he spent his evenings in the society of the Burns sisters, working on the materials for a book which should show the dark side of industrial life. Mary Burns was a fierce Irish patriot and she fed Engels’ revolutionary enthusiasm at the same time that she served him as guide to the infernal abysses of the city.
He saw the working people living like rats in the wretched little dens of their dwellings, whole families, sometimes more than one family, swarming in a single room, well and diseased, adults and children, close relations sleeping together, sometimes even without beds to sleep on when all the furniture had been sold for firewood, sometimes in damp, underground cellars which had to be bailed out when the weather was wet, sometimes living in the same room with the pigs; ill nourished on flour mixed with gypsum and cocoa mixed with dirt, poisoned by ptomaine from tainted meat, doping themselves and their wailing children with laudanum; spending their lives, without a sewage system, among the piles of their excrement and garbage; spreading epidemics of typhus and cholera which even made inroads into the well-to-do sections.
The increasing demand for women and children at the factories was throwing the fathers of families permanently out of work, arresting the physical development of the girls, letting the women in for illegitimate motherhood and yet compelling them to come to work when they were pregnant or before they had recovered from having their babies, and ultimately turning a good many of them into prostitutes; while the children, fed into the factories at the age of five or six, receiving little care from mothers who were themselves at the factory all day and no education at all from a community which wanted them only to perform mechanical operations, would drop exhausted when they were let out of their prisons, too tired to wash or eat, let alone study or play, sometimes too tired to get home at all. In the iron and coal mines, also, women and children as well as men spent the better part of their lives crawling underground in narrow tunnels, and, emerging, found themselves caught in the meshes of the company cottage and the company store and of the two-week postponement of wages. They were being killed off at the rate of fourteen hundred a year through the breaking of rotten ropes, the caving-in of workings due to overexcavated seams and the explosions due to bad ventilation and to the negligence of tired children; if they escaped catastrophic accidents, the lung diseases eventually got them. The agricultural population, for its part, deprived by the industrial development of their old status of handicraftsmen and yeomen who either owned their own land and homes or were taken care of with more or less certainty by a landlord on whose estate they were tenants, had been transformed into wandering day laborers, for whom nobody took responsibility and who were punished by jail or transportation if they ventured in times of need to steal and eat the landlord’s game.
It seemed to Engels that the mediaeval serf, who had at least been attached to the land and had a definite position in society, had had an advantage over the factory worker. At that period when legislation for the protection of labor had hardly seriously gotten under way, the old peasantry and hand-workers of England, and even the old petty middle class, were being shoveled into the mines and the mills like so much raw material for the prices their finished products would bring, with no attempt even to dispose of the waste. In years of depression the surplus people, so useful in years of good business, were turned out upon the town to become peddlers, crossing-sweepers, scavengers or simply beggars—sometimes whole families were seen begging in the streets—and, almost as frequently, whores and thieves. Thomas Malthus, said Engels, had asserted that the increase of population was always pressing on the means of subsistence so that it was necessary for considerable numbers to be exterminated by hardship and vice; and the new Poor Law had put this doctrine into practice by turning the poorhouses into prisons so inhuman that the poor preferred to starve outside.
All this brought a revelation to Engels. He saw the pressure of labor conditions in Parliament, where debate on the Poor Relief Bill and the Factory Act had recently crowded into the background the middle-class movement against the Corn Laws, and he came to the conclusion that “class antagonisms” were “completely changing the aspect of political life.” He now clearly understood for the first time the importance of economic interests, which had hitherto been assigned by the historians either a trifling role or no role at all. Engels concluded that, under modern conditions at any rate, these were undoubtedly a decisive factor.
In London he found a city of more people than he had ever seen together before, but they seemed to him a population of atoms. Were they not, “the hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past one another,” all nevertheless “human beings with the same facilities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not in the end to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and as if their only agreement were the tacit one that each shall keep to his own side of the pavement, in order not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it never occurs to anyone to honor his fellow with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest, becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are herded together within a limited space.”
This conception of the individual in modern society as helpless, sterile and selfish was one of the main themes of nineteenth-century thought, and in our own time it has been felt, if possible, even more intensely. We have seen how the historian Michelet, writing at the same moment as Engels, was tending increasingly to interpret the world in terms of an anti-social egoism opposed to an ideal of solidarity, how he succeeded by a return to the past in escaping from that sinister solitude by identifying himself with the French nation, and how he later tried to find reassurance against the antagonisms that he felt in society through a mystical belief in “the People.” We have seen how one of the first ideas of the young Marx was that there was a danger in egoistic interests if preferred to the service of humanity. With Saint-Simon, the disintegration of Catholicism and the feudal system with which his heredity connected him, had caused him, in the years of disorder that followed the Revolution, to elaborate a new system of hierarchies which should win unity and order for the future. The utopian socialists like Fourier, who found competitive society intolerable, were protecting themselves in a similar fashion against the feeling of isolation from their fellows by imagining a new kind of coöperation.
The further advance of industrial civilization created more murderous conflicts; and an intimate contact with it sharpened the conviction of the need for a new reconciliation. To Engels, in his early twenties, it seemed that a society so divided must be headed straight for civil war and for the consequent abolition of the system of competition and exploitation. The middle class in England was swiftly being absorbed from both sides, and there would soon be nothing left of English society but a desperate proletariat confronting an overrich owning class. From this owning class it appeared to him impossible to expect even a working arrangement: they seemed to him determined to ignore the situation. On one occasion when he had come into Manchester in the company of an English bourgeois, he had spoken of the terrible misery and said he had “never seen so ill-built a city”; the gentleman had quietly listened and then remarked at the corner when they were parting: “And yet there is a great deal of money made here; good morning, sir.”
It seemed to Engels that the “educated classes,” whose sole education consisted in having been annoyed with Latin and Greek in their school days, read nothing but Biblical commentaries and long novels. Only Carlyle in his just-published Past and Present had shown anything approaching a consciousness of the seriousness of English conditions; and Carlyle was unfortunately full of the wrong kind of German philosophy: the intoxication with ideas about God which prevented people from believing in mankind. What the English badly needed, Engels declared, was the new kind of German philosophy, which showed how man could at last become his own master.
But in the meantime the English workers would certainly demand their rights in a revolt that would make the French Revolution look gentle; and when the workers had come to power, they would certainly establish the only kind of regime that could give society a real coherence. Engels imagined a consummation in communism not very much different from that which Saint-Simon had proclaimed before his death; but for the first time he conceived this consummation as the consequence of something other than a vague spontaneous movement: it was to be the upshot of definite events. Engels was sure that he saw it already in the slogan evolved by the Chartists: “Political power our means, social happiness our end.”