Page:Zelda Kahan - The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels (1920).pdf/53

 of Friedrich Engels in good health, fresh, lively, and in good spirits, and he has a great relish for his beer, especially if it is Viennese."

That he was often wrong in his judgment of men, that he had no patience with anyone whom he suspected of the least intellectual dishonesty, or of dilettantism, that he was not as polite, as tolerant, or as the Germans would call it, as “höflich," to those for whom he had no regard, of that we can have little doubt; nevertheless, the strictures passed on him by Hyndman in his memoirs are quite undeserved.

That his estimate of Hyndman personally was unjust and too harsh, we readily admit. Both Engels' and Marx’s judgment on Lassalle and others was also far from accurate always, but after all we cannot say that Engels was so far wrong when he said of the Social Democratic Federation that it had made a dogma of Marxism which it wished to force down the throats of the workers, that its leaders were trying to make a sect of the party instead of making it a real Labour movement—that it was better to have a real proletarian movement, although it may at times make grievous mistakes, than to be a sect which hugs correct theories but knows not how to apply them, and, therefore, does nothing, and so comes "from nothing through nothing to nothing."

We can now see that had the early leaders of the S.D.F. not held the party outside the Labour movement, had the party been allowed to work with and through it, both the party and the movement would not have presented the sorry spectacle they did present for so long a time.

Mehring tells us that Engels himself once said that in England Hyndman and the men of the S.D.F. understood the Marxian theory the best. What Engels attacked was their application of the theory.

From a different point of view, and with quite equal justice, he attacked the leaders of the Fabians, with their mortal fear of revolution, and of the Independent Labour Party. But throughout he had faith in the rank and file of both the S.D.F. and the I.L.P., and of the Labour movement in general. And on the whole his faith has not proved to have been misplaced. In Engels, as in Marx, there was no trace of the philistine. Engels could be, and was, exceedingly friendly and considerate to his friends, but to an opponent or what he considered to be a false friend, an enemy to the cause he had at heart, he could be merciless and even rude. His relations with Marx were throughout life of a most affectionate and sincere nature. To this not only their interchange of letters testify, but also the way in which Mrs. Marx and her daughter Eleanor refer to him. It is interesting to note that before Marx's second daughter Laura would consent to a formal engagement with Lafargue, so Marx wrote, she insisted on having Engels' consent to it. So again later on when Marx was anxious about Lissagaray's attachment to his youngest daughter Eleanor it is with Engels he talks matters over. He was a real intimate of the whole family, and