His Mr Smirke, or the Divine in Mode ... (1676) was a defence of Herbert Croft, bishop of Hereford, against the criticisms of Dr Francis Turner, master of St John’s College, Cambridge. A far more important work was An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, more particularly from the Long Prorogation of Parliament ... (1677). This pamphlet was written in the same outspoken tone as the verse satires, and brought against the court the indictment of nursing designs to establish absolute monarchy and the Roman Catholic religion at the same time. A reward was offered for the author, whose identity was evidently suspected, and it is said that Marvell was in danger of assassination. He died on the 16th of August 1678 in consequence of an overdose of an opiate taken during an attack of ague. He was buried in the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields, London. Joint administration of his estate was granted to one of his creditors, and to his widow, Mary Marvell, of whom we have no previous mention.
As a humorist, and as a great “parliament man,” no name is of more interest to a student of the reign of Charles II. than that of Marvell. He had friends among the republican thinkers of the times. Aubrey says that he was intimate with James Harrington, the author of Oceana, and he was probably a member of the “Rota” club. In the heyday of political infamy, he, a needy man, obliged to accept wages from his constituents, kept his political virtue unspotted, and he stood throughout his career as the champion of moderate and tolerant measures. There is a story that his old schoolfellow, Danby, was sent by the king to offer the incorruptible poet a place at court and a gift of £1000, which Marvell refused with the words: “I live here to serve my constituents: the ministry may seek men for their purpose; I am not one.” When self-indulgence was the ordinary habit of town life, Marvell was a temperate man. His personal appearance is described by John Aubrey: “He was of a middling stature, pretty strong set, roundish faced, cherry cheeked, hazel eyed, brown haired. In his conversation he was modest and of very few words.” (“Lives of Eminent Persons,” printed in Letters ... in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 1813).
Among Marvell’s works is also a Defence of John Howe on God’s Prescience ... (1678), and among the spurious works fathered on him are: A Seasonable Argument ... for a new Parliament (1677), A Seasonable Question and a Useful Answer ... (1676), A Letter from a Parliament Man ... (1675), and a translation of Suetonius (1672). Marvell’s satires were no doubt first printed as broadsides, but very few are still extant in that form. Such of his poems as were printed during his lifetime appeared in collections of other men’s works. The earliest edition of his non-political verse is Miscellaneous Poems (1681), edited by his wife, Mary Marvell. The political satires were printed as A Collection of Poems on Affairs of State, by A—— M——l, Esq. and other Eminent Wits (1689), with second and third parts in the same year. The works of Andrew Marvell contained in these two publications were also edited by Thomas Cooke (2 vols., 1726), who added some letters. Cooke’s edition was reprinted by Thomas Davies in 1772. Marvell’s next editor was Captain Thompson of Hull, who was connected with the poet’s family, and made further additions from a commonplace book since lost. Other editions followed, but were superseded by Dr A. B. Grosart’s laborious work, which, in spite of many defects of style, remains indispensable to the student. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Andrew Marvell, M.P. (4 vols., 1872-1875) forms part of his “Fuller Worthies Library.” See also the admirable edition of the Poems and Satires of Andrew Marvell ... (2 vols., 1892) in the “Muses’ Library,” where a full bibliography of his works and of the commentaries on them is provided; also The Poems and some Satires of Andrew Marvell (ed. Edward Wright, 1904), and Andrew Marvell (1905), by Augustine Birrell in the “English Men of Letters” series.
[1] There is an allusion to this escapade addressed by another anxious parent to the elder Marvell in the Hull Corporation Records (No. 498) [see Grosart, i. xxviii.]. The document is without address or signature, but the identification seems safe.
[2] This poem has been highly praised by Goldwin Smith (T. H. Ward’s English Poets, ii. 383 (1880)). It was first printed, so far as we know, in 1776, and the only external testimony to Marvell’s authorship is the statement of Captain Thompson, who had included many poems by other writers in his edition of Marvell, that this ode was in poet’s own handwriting. The internal evidence in favour of Marvell may, however, be accepted as conclusive.
MARX, HEINRICH KARL (1818-1883), German socialist, and head of the International Working Men’s Association, was born on the 5th of May 1818 in Trèves (Rhenish Prussia). His father, a Jewish lawyer, in 1824 went over to Christianity, and he and his whole family were baptized as Christian Protestants. The son went to the high grammar school at Trèves, and from 1835 to the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He studied first law, then history and philosophy, and in 1841 took the degree of doctor of philosophy. In Berlin he had close intimacy with the most prominent representatives of the young Hegelians—the brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer and their circle, the so-called “Freien.” He at first intended to settle as a lecturer at Bonn University, but his Radical views made a university career out of the question, and he accepted work on a Radical paper, the Rheinische Zeitung, which expounded the ideas of the most advanced section of the Rhenish Radical bourgeoisie. In October 1842 he became one of the editors of this paper, which, however, after an incessant struggle with press censors, was suppressed in the beginning of 1843. In the summer of this year Marx married Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a high government official. Through her mother Jenny von Westphalen was a lineal descendant of the earl of Argyle, who was beheaded under James II. She was a most faithful companion to Marx during all the vicissitudes of his career, and died on the 2nd of December 1881; he outliving her only fifteen months.
Already in the Rheinische Zeitung some socialist voices had been audible, couched in a somewhat philosophical strain. Marx, though not accepting these views, refused to criticize them until he had studied the question thoroughly. For this purpose he went in the autumn of 1843 to Paris, where the socialist movement was then at its intellectual zenith, and where he, together with Arnold Ruge, the well-known literary leader of Radical Hegelianism, was to edit a review, the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher, of which, however, only one number appeared. It contained two articles by Marx—a criticism of Bruno Bauer’s treatment of the Jewish question, and an introduction to a criticism of Hegel’s philosophy of the law. The first concluded that the social emancipation of the Jews could only be achieved together with the emancipation of society from Judaism, i.e. commercialism. The second declared that in Germany no partial political emancipation was possible; there was now only one class from which a real and reckless fight against authority was to be expected—namely, the proletariate. But the proletariate could not emancipate itself except by breaking all the chains, by dissolving the whole constituted society, by recreating man as a member of the human society in the place of established states and classes. “Then the day of German resurrection will be announced by the crowing of the Gallican cock.” Both articles thus relegated the solution of the questions then prominent in Germany to the advent of socialism, and so far resembled in principle other socialist publications of the time. But the way of reasoning was different, and the final words of the last quoted sentence pointed to a political revolution, to begin in France as soon as the industrial evolution had created a sufficiently strong proletariate. In contradistinction to most of the socialists of the day, Marx laid stress upon the political struggle as the lever of social emancipation. In some letters which formed part of a correspondence between Marx, Ruge, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Mikhail Bakunin, published as an introduction to the review, this opposition of Marx to socialistic “dogmatism” was enunciated in a still more pronounced form: “Nothing prevents us,” he said, “from combining our criticism with the criticism of politics, from participating in politics, and consequently in real struggles. We will not, then, oppose the world like doctrinarians with a new principle: here is truth, kneel down here! We expose new principles to the world out of the principles of the world itself. We don’t tell it: ‘Give up your struggles, they are rubbish, we will show you the true war-cry.’ We explain to it only the real object for which it struggles, and consciousness is a thing it must acquire even if it objects to it.”
In Paris Marx met Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), from whom the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher had two articles—a powerfully written outline of a criticism of political economy, and a letter on Carlyle’s Past and Present. Engels, the son of a wealthy cotton-spinner, was born in 1820 at Barmen. Although destined by his father for a commercial career, he attended a classical school, and during his apprenticeship and whilst undergoing in Berlin his one year’s military service, he had given up part of his free hours to philosophical studies. In Berlin he had frequented the society of the “Freien,” and had written letters to the Rheinische Zeitung. In 1842 he had gone to England, his father’s firm having a factory near Manchester, and had entered into connexion with the Owenite and Chartist movements, as well as with German communists. He contributed to Owen’s New Moral World and to the Chartist Northern Star, gave up much of his abstract speculative reasoning for a more positivist conception of things, and took to economic studies. Now, in September 1844, on a short stay in Paris, he visited Marx, and the two found that in regard to all theoretical points there was perfect agreement between them. From that visit dates the close friendship and uninterrupted collaboration and exchange of ideas which lasted during their lives, so that even some of Marx’s subsequent works, which he published under his own name, are more or less also the work of Engels. The first result of their collaboration was the book Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik, gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten, a scathing exposition of the perverseness of the high-sounding speculative radicalism of Bauer and the other Berlin “Freie.” By aid of an analysis, which, though not free from exaggeration and a certain diffuseness, bears testimony to the great learning of Marx and the vigorous discerning faculty of both the authors, it is shown that the supposed superior criticism—the “critical criticism” of the Bauer school, based upon the doctrine of a “self-conscious” idea, represented by or incarnated in the critic—was in fact inferior to the older Hegelian idealism. The socialist and working-class movements in Great Britain, France and Germany are defended against the superior criticism of the “holy” Bauer family.