Letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath, January 25, 1859

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 25 January 1859


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXV, Moscow 1934
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


ENGELS TO FERDINAND FREILIGRATH[1]

IN LONDON

[Draft]

Manchester, 25 January 1859

Dear Freiligrath,

The bloody boy who was to have got the POST OFFICE ORDER yesterday idled away the time instead, which is why the 22/- will only arrive today. Many thanks for your trouble and for the outlay.

As to the Neueste Rheinische Zeitung, due provision has been made, never fear. We have in the meanwhile learnt a great deal and forgotten nothing,[2] and that's more than the others can say. Of this you could find no better illustration than the Hermann (clearly a misprint for Gottfried, otherwise the title's meaningless[3] ), which you recently described as the Rheinische Zeitung's John the Baptist. It's a long time since I've read rubbish as insipid, namby-pamby, tail-wagging, lavish of compliments, conciliatory, propitiatory and atrociously written as is found in this, the latest product of the pseudo-noble sometime Maikäfer[4] which, to judge by its style and content, is aimed solely at and tailored to the tastes of the Cambeiwell philistines and the German ditto in the City. The man has even forgotten what little he managed to pick up in 1848 and has become a real bourgeois windbag. Now, since it was you who brought up the topic of this cheery customer,

presently touting round his 'grief, I will not conceal from you the fact that I have recently been asked by various philistines how it is that you have formed such a bond of friendship with Monsieur Kinkel. T h o u g h an exaggeration, this placed me, as you can imagine, in something of a quandary. Needless to say, I attributed it largely to the malicious exaggeration with which Kinkel and clique had seized on what was a mere encounter with you and blazoned it in all the papers as an offensive and defensive alliance—directed against us—and this I roundly denied. As for your social intercourse with the worthy citizen, all I could do was crack bad jokes, such as that, since poets live in a world apart,

Kinkel could only pass himself off as a poet by citing his intercourse with you, etc. Suffice it to say that, although a poor diplomat, I succeeded well enough in defending the party's position. Moreover, it eventually transpired that one of the Jewish females who patronised the gentle Gottfried when he was last u p here, had said: 'Ah, just let Kinkel, the naughty man, visit Manchester again—he seduced a girl of good family in London and keeps her as his mistress, and that's the reason why his wife....'[5]

  1. ↑ This draft of Engels' letter to Freiligrath was enclosed by Engels in his letter to Marx of 27 January 1859 (see this volume, p. 373). As follows from that letter, a three-page fair copy was sent to Freiligrath on 26 January. Neither the fair copy nor the other draft versions which Engels made while writing the letter have been preserved.—370
  2. ↑ Engels paraphrases the dictum 'They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing', which during the restoration of the Bourbons (1815-30) was often applied to their conservative supporters who had failed to draw any lessons from the French Revolution. The dictum was first used, also in referring to the French extreme royalists, by Rear Admiral Chevalier de Panât in a letter to the journalist Mallet du Pan in 1796. In later years it was often attributed to Charles Talleyrand.—370
  3. ↑ An allusion to Gottfried Kinkel's weekly Hermann.
  4. ↑ The handwritten weekly Der Maikäfer, eine Zeitschrift für Nicht-Philister (May-Bug, a Journal for Non-Philistines) was founded by Gottfried Kinkel and Johanna Mockel in Bonn in 1840, at the time when the literary May-Bug Club was set up. With the outbreak of the revolution in Germany in 1848, both the journal and the club ceased to exist. Marx and Engels gave an ironic characterisation of the periodical and the club in the pamphlet The Great Men of the Exile (see present edition, Vol. 11, p. 244).—370
  5. ↑ The manuscript breaks off here.