SELECT CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 419all far behind and beneath him; and if they should dare to forget it for a
moment, he puts them back in their place with a shameless impudence
worthy of a Napoleon.
Techow to Schimmelpfennig, in K. Vogt
Mein Prozess (Geneva, 1859 ) pp. 151 ff.The Faithful Disciple
No one could be kinder and fairer than Marx in giving others their due.
I le was too great to be envious, jealous or vain. But he had as deadly a
hatred for the false greatness and pretended fame of swaggering incapacity
and vulgarity as for any kind of deceit and pretence.
Of all the great, little or average men that I have known, Marx is one
of the few who was free from vanity. He was too great and too strong to
be vain, and too proud as well. He never struck an attitude, he was always
himself. He was as incapable as a child of wearing a mask or pretending.
As long as social or political grounds did not make it undesirable, he
always spoke his mind completely and without any reserve and his face
was the mirror of his heart. And when circumstances demanded restraint
he showed a sort of childlike awkwardness that often amused his friends.
No man could be more truthful than Marx - he was truthfulness
incarnate. Merely by looking at him you knew who it was you were
dealing with. In our 'civilised' society with its perpetual state of war one
cannot always tell the truth, that would be playing into the enemy's hands
or risking being sent to Coventry. But even if it is often inadvisable to
say the truth, it is not always necessary to say an untruth. I must not
always say what I think or feel, but that does not mean that I must say
what I do not feel or think. The former is wisdom, the latter hypocrisy.
Marx was never a hypocrite. He ./as absolutely incapable of it, just like
an unsophisticated child. His wife often called him 'my big baby', and
nobody, not even Engels, knew or understood him better than she did.
Indeed, when he was in what is generally termed society, where everything
is judged by appearances and one must do violence to one's feelings, our
'Moor' was like a big boy and he could be embarrassed and blush like a
child.
W. Liebknecht, Karl Marx. Biographical Memoirs
(Chicago, 1901 ) pp. 93 ff.
The Anarchist Opponent
We saw each other fairly often and I very much admired him for his
knowledge and for his passionate and earnest devotion to the cause of
die proletariat, although it always had in it an admixture of personal