| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 11 October 1888 |
ENGELS TO LOUISE KAUTSKY[1]
IN VIENNA
[Draft]
London, 11 October 1888
My Dear, Dear Louise,
Immediately after our return, your letter got into Tussy's hands and then went to Schorlemmer, from whom I have only just retrieved it. Hence the lateness of my reply.
The news, which Ede had already passed on to Nimmie, left us all thunderstruck. But when I read your letter, my mind positively reeled. You must know that, ever since we first met, my regard for you has constantly augmented and you have grown ever dearer to me. But all that is as nothing by comparison with the admiration aroused by your heroic and ineffably magnanimous letter—not only in myself but in all those who have read it—Nim, Tussy and Schorlemmer. Having just been dealt the most terrible blow a woman can possibly receive—at that very moment you muster sufficient aplomb to release the man whose hand was, after all, responsible for dealing the blow. And to relinquish such a noble-minded woman after five years—one's mind reels!
You say there can be no question of guilt on Karl's part. Very well, you are the best judge of that, but it does not entitle the rest of us to do you an injustice. You speak of a divorce as the only possible solution, your characters being what they are. But if your characters had really been incompatible, this must needs have been apparent to us too and we should have long anticipated a divorce as something both natural and unavoidable. But let us suppose it to have been a case of true incompat- ibility. Karl had wooed and won you in defiance of his family and yours, he knew what you had given up for his sake and, so far as we could tell, lived with you happily for five years. That being so, he should not have allowed himself to be flummoxed by what, to use your own expression, was a momentary unpleasantness. And if he was driven to take so extreme a step by a new and sudden onset of passion, he ought not to have taken that step impetuously, and should above all have avoided the remotest semblance of doing so under the influence of those who had objected to his union with you and who, perhaps, have not altogether forgiven you for becoming his wife.
Of Karl[2] you say that, in the absence of love or passion, his personal- ity would go to pieces. If one of the traits of that personality is to require a new love every few years, he would surely be the first to admit that, in present-day circumstances, a personality of this kind has got to be kept in check if it is not to involve him and others in one long series of tragic conflicts.
So much, dear Louise, I feel it behoves me to say. Apart from anything else, our social conditions are such as to make it positively easy for a man to do a woman a gross injustice, and how many men are there who can absolve themselves from all guilt in this respect? 'Go! You are not worthy of women!' as one of our greatest men once said, with a knowledge born of experience. And in reading your letter I could only re-echo his words.
We cannot get the business out of our minds. Nim and I constantly revert to it as to something incomprehensible, impossible. One of these mornings, I told her, Karl will wake up as if out of a dream to find that he has committed the greatest folly of his life. And this is what seems to be actually happening if, as he wrote and told Ede, his new love has left him after having, within the first five days, fallen in love with his brother Hans and become engaged to him.
We had all of us so much looked forward to seeing you here again and had been correspondingly cast down when we heard through Percy while in New York that you and Karl would be staying in Vienna for the winter. But neither Nim nor I can really take in the fact that we shall never see your dear face in this house again. Yet who knows what may not happen? Who knows whether, one of these days, you may not be sitting in the same old chair where you have so often sat before? Whatever happens, of one thing I can be sure—your courage will help you to overcome all difficulties and to emerge victorious from every struggle. My own and Nim's most cordial good wishes go with you. What we can do for you, we shall gladly do—we are at your beck and call and, should fate ever bring you here again, you must in all circum- stances regard this house as your own.
Yours, from all our hearts