4 ° TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN 41attached to day-to-day reality. The whole tenor of Marx's poems makes
this an obvious criticism of Hegel, and it was a common one among
romantic writers.
In general Marx's first contact with Berlin University brought about a
great change in the views he had expressed in his school-leaving essay.
No longer was he inspired by the thought of the service of humanity and
concerned to fit himself into a place where he might best be able to
sacrifice himself for this noble ideal; his poems of 1837 , on the contrary,
reveal a cult of the isolated genius and an introverted concern for the
development of his own personality apart from the rest of humanity.^77
Marx's penchant for romantic poetry was undoubtedly increased by the
strain of his relationship with Jenny and the uncertainty of his future.
While their engagement was still a secret from her parents, she refused
to correspond with her fiance at all. 'I have gained the complete confi-
dence of your Jenny,' Heinrich Marx wrote to his son, 'but the good,
kind girl is continually tormenting herself, she is afraid of hurting you,
of making you overstrain yourself, etc., etc. She is oppressed by the fact
that her parents know nothing or, as I think, don't want to know anything.
She cannot understand how she, who considers herself to be such a
rational being, could let herself get so carried away.' He advised his son
to enclose a letter for Jenny 'full of tender, devoted sentiment. .. but
taking a clear view of your relationship' and definitely 'not a letter dis-
torted by the fantasies of a poet'.^78
Eventually it was decided that Marx should send a letter to the Baron
declaring his intention and should give his own family a week's notice of
its arrival so that his father could do his best to secure a favourable
reception. Jenny herself, even when the engagement was accepted by her
father, continued to be extremely apprehensive, being already past the
age when most girls of her class were married. 'She has the idea', Heinrich
Marx reported, 'that it is unnecessary to write to you... But what does
that matter? You can be as certain as I am (and you know that I am hard
to convince) that even a Prince would not be able to steal her affections
from you. She is attached to you body and soul.. .'^79 Jenny herself
explained her state of mind:
That I am not in a condition to return your youthful romantic love, I
knew from the very beginning and felt deeply even before it was
explained to me so coldly, cleverly and rationally. Oh, Karl, my distress
lies precisely in the fact that your beautiful, touching passionate love,
your indescribably beautiful descriptions of it, the enrapturing images
conjured up by your imagination, that would fill any other girl with
ineffable delight, only serve to make me anxious and often uncertain.
If I gave myself over to this bliss, then my fate would be all the more