194 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 195 AN UNUSUAL FRIENDSHIP cruiting and leading an army that was to revolutionize the world.
If it is true that the style is the man, we must also note their differences as writers. Each in his way was a master of language, a linguistic genius, with a mastery of many foreign languages and even of individual dialects. In this field, Engels was even more remarkable than Marx, but whenever writing in his mother tongue, even in his letters, and of course in his writings, he exercises a most austere care to keep the language free from all foreign admixture of word and phrase, without falling, however, into the vagaries of the patriotic linguistic purists. He wrote with ease and lucidity, always in a style so pellucid, that you looked right down to the bottom of the current of his animated speech.
Marx style was at once more careless and more difficult. In his youthful letters there is still apparent, as in those of Heine, a condition of struggle with the language, and in the ters of his later years, particularly after his settlement in England, he began to make use of a picturesque jargon of German, English and French, all mixed up. In his published writings, also, there is an over liberal use of foreign words, and there is no lack of Gallicisms and Anglicisms, yet he is so distinctly a master of the German language that he cannot be translated without serious loss. Once when Engels had read a chapter by Marx in a French translation, even after Marx had revised the translation, it seemed to Engels that all the vigor and sap and life had disappeared. Goethe once wrote to Frau von Stein: In metaphors am ready to stand comparison with the proverbs of Sancho Panza. Marx could easily bear comparison with the greatest of the world adepts in figures of speech, with Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, so full of life and vigor is his language.
He had fully absorbed Lessing statement that a perfect representation requires a fusion of image and conception, as closely joined as man and woman, and the university pedants have gotten square with him for this, from Father Wilhelm Roscher down to the youngest fledgeling of a Privatdozent, by accusing him of being incapable of making himself understood except in an extremely vague way, patched up with a liberal use of figurative language. Marx never exhausted the questions which he attacked beyond the point of enabling the reader to begin a fruitful train of thought; his speech is like the dancing of the waves over the purple depths of the sea.
Engels always saw in Marx a superior spirit; he never wished to play anything but second fiddle by his side. Yet he never was a mere intepreter and assistant, but always a collaborator of independent activity, a kindred spirit, though not of equal size. In the early days of their friendship, Engels played, in one important field, rather the role of a giver than of a receiver, and twenty years later Marx wrote to him: You know that all ideas come to me too late, and that, in the second place, always follow in your tracks. With his somewhat light equipment, Engels was able to move about more freely, and even though his glance was sharp enough to distinguish the decisive features of a question or of a situation, it did not penetrate far enough to review at once all the conditions and corollaries with which even the scantiest decision is often burdened. For a man of action this defect is even an advantage and Marx never made a political decision without first calling upon Engels for advice, and Engels was usually able to hit the nail on the head.
Accordingly the advice which Marx asked from Engels was not as satisfactory in questions of theory as in questions of politics. In theory Marx usually was the better of the two.
And he was absolutely inattentive to such advice as Engels would often give him, in order to impel him to terminate his labors on his great scientific masterpiece. Be a little less severe on yourself in the matter of your own productions; they are far too good for the public. The main thing is to have it finished and to get it out; the defects that you still see the asses will never discover. It was a characteristic bit of Engels advice, and it was just as characteristic of Marx to ignore it.