Karl Marx: A Biography

38

KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

Then I will wander godlike and victorious

Through the ruins of the world

And, giving my words an active force,

I will feel equal to the creator.™

Other poems display a longing for something infinite and a love of
death a la Novalis, while still others consist entirely of a dream world
of mystical imagination. To the aesthetic idealism of these poems was
added a series of typically romantic ironical attacks on 'Philistines', people
like doctors and mathematicians, who followed utilitarian professions
based on an ordered and rational approach to problems.
To help him in his composition, Marx had copied out large extracts
from Lessing's Laokoon, Solger's Erwin, and Winckelmann's History of
Art. Marx's habit of making excerpts from all the books he was reading
(and sometimes adding comments of his own) stayed with him all his life,
and those notebooks that remain form a valuable guide to the develop-
ment of his thought.^71 He also wrote a few chapters of a comic novel,
'Scorpion and Felix', in the style of Sterne and then gave that up to
compose the first scene of 'Oulanem', a contemporary comic thriller
whose hero was a feeble copy of the ageing Faust. 'Oulanem', too,
never got beyond an immensely long first act which contained frenzied
reflections on love (in all its forms), death, destruction and eter-
nity.^72 Finally there was an interesting series of epigrams on Hegel,
whom Marx accused of being arrogant and obscure. In the first epigram,
he says:

Because my meditations have discovered the highest of things and also

the depths,

I am as crude as a god and cloak myself in darkness as he does,

In my long researches and journeys on the wavy sea of thought,

I found the word and remain firmly attached to my find.^75

The second epigram had the same theme, opening:

I teach words that are mixed up in a devilish and chaotic mess.^74

The most interesting was the last epigram:

Kant and Fichte like to whirl into heaven

And search there for a distant land,

While my only aim is to understand completely

What - I found in the street.^75

The point of this epigram is totally misunderstood if it is taken to be
Marx himself speaking.^76 As in the former epigrams, it is 'Hegel' who is
speaking, criticised by Marx, the subjective romantic, for being too