Brentano vs Marx, Engels 1891
Here ends the first act of our song and dance. Mr. Brentano, mysterious though not yet a privy councillor, [Play on words: "geheimnisvoll" -- mysterious, "Geheimrat" -- privy councillor.-- Trans] had achieved what he could scarcely have hoped to achieve. Admittedly, things had gone badly enough for him regarding the sentence allegedly "lyingly added"; and in fact he had dropped this original charge. But he had sought out a new line of defence, and on this line -- he had had the last word, and with that you can, in the world of German professordom, claim you have stood your ground. And with this he could brag, at least amongst his own, that he had victoriously repelled Marx's onslaught, and slain Marx himself in the literary world. The luckless Marx, however, never heard a dying word about his slaughter in the Concordia; on the contrary, he had the "impudence" to live on for another eleven years, eleven years of mounting success for him, eleven years of uninterrupted growth in the numerical strength of his supporters in all countries, eleven years of constantly growing recognition of his merits.
Mr. Brentano and consorts wisely refrained from freeing the blinded Marx of his self-deception, or making it clear to him that he had actually been dead for a long time. But after he really did die in 1883, they could no longer contain themselves, their fingers itched too much. And now Mr. Sedley Taylor appeared on the scene, with a letter to The Times (Documents, No. 8).
He provoked things himself, if he or his friend Brentano, as it almost appears, had not actually concocted it with M. Émile de Laveleye [see É. de Laveleye, "To the Editor of The Times, Liège, November 16". The Times, No. 30987, November 26, 1883. -- MECW Ed]. In that stilted style which betrays a certain recognition of his dubious cause, he states that it appears to him
"extremely singular that it was reserved for Professor Brentano to expose, eight years later, the mala fides" of Marx.
And then begin the vainglorious phrases about the masterly conduct of the attack by the godlike Brentano, and the speedily ensuring deadly shifts of the notorious Marx, etc. What things were like in reality our readers have already seen. All that fell into deadly shifts was only Brentano's claim about the lying addition of the sentence in question.
And finally in conclusion:
"On Brentano's showing, by a detailed comparison of texts, that the reports of The Times and of "Hansard" agreed in utterly excluding the meaning which craftily isolated quotation had put upon Mr. Gladstone's words, Marx withdrew from further controversy under the plea of want of time!"
The "detailed comparison of texts" is simply farcical. Anonymous Brentano quotes only Hansard. Marx supplies him with the Times report, which includes verbatim the controversial sentence missing in Hansard. Mr. Brentano now also quoted the Times report, and this three lines further than Marx quoted it. These three lines are supposed to show that The Times and Hansard fully agree, and thus that the sentence allegedly "lyingly added" by Marx is not in the Times report, although it stands there word for word; or at the very least, if it should stand there, that it then means the opposite of what it says in plain words. Mr. Taylor calls this daredevil operation a "detailed comparison of texts".
Further. It is simply not true that Marx then withdrew under the plea of want of time. And Mr. Sedley Taylor knew this, or it was his business to know it. We have seen that before this Marx delivered proof to the anonymous godlike Brentano that the reports in The Morning Star and The Morning Advertiser also contained the "lyingly added" sentence. Only after this did he declare that he could waste no more time on Anonymous.
The further polemic between Mr. Sedley Taylor and Eleanor Marx (Documents, Nos 9, 10 and 11) showed in the first place that he did not try for a moment to maintain the original charge about the lying addition of a sentence. He went so far as to claim that this was "of very subordinate importance." Once again the direct disavowal of a fact which he knew, or which it was his business to know.
In any case we take note of his admission that this charge does not hold water, and congratulate his friend Brentano on this.
So what is the charge now? Simply that of Mr. Brentano's second line of defence that Marx had wished to distort the sense of Gladstone's speech -- a new charge of which, as we have noted, Marx never knew anything. In any case, this brings us to a completely different field. What was concerned to begin with was a definite fact: did Marx lyingly add this sentence or not? It is now no longer denied that Marx victoriously rebuffed this charge. The new charge of distorted quotation, however, leads us into the field of subjective opinions, which necessarily vary. De gustibus non est disputandum. [There can be no argument about taste. -- MECW Ed.] One person may regard as unimportant -- intrinsically or for the purpose of quotation -- something which another person declares to be important and decisive. The conservative will [never] quote acceptably for the liberal, the liberal never for the conservative, the socialist never for one of them or both of them. The party man whose own comrade is quoted against him by an opponent regularly discovers that the essential passage, the passage determining the real sense, has been omitted in quotation. This is such an everyday occurrence, something permitting so many individual viewpoints, that nobody attaches the slightest significance to such charges. Had Mr. Brentano utilised his anonimity to level this charge, and this charge alone, against Marx, then Marx would scarcely have regarded it as worth the trouble of a single word in reply.
In order to accomplish this new twist with that elegance peculiar to him alone, Mr. Sedley Taylor finds it necessary to repudiate thrice his friend and comrade Brentano. He repudiates him first when he drops his originally sole charge of "lying addition", and even denies its existence as original and sole. He repudiates him further when he summarily discards the infallible Hansard, to quote exclusively from which is the "custom" of the ethical Brentano, [Play on words: "Sitte" -- custom, "sittlich" -- ethical.-- MECW Ed.] and uses instead the Times report, which the selfsame Brentano calls "necessarily bungling". Thirdly, he repudiates him, and his own first letter to The Times into the bargain, by seeking the "quotation in dispute" no longer in the Inaugural Address but in Capital And this for the simple reason that he had never laid his hand upon the Inaugural Address, to which he "had the hardihood" to refer in his letter to The Times!
Shortly after his controversy with Eleanor Marx he vainly sought this Address in the British Museum, and was introduced there to his opponent, whom he asked whether she could not obtain a copy for him. Whereupon, I sought out a copy amongst my papers, and Eleanor sent it to him. The "detailed comparison of texts" which this enabled him to make apparently convinced him that silence was the best reply.
And in fact it would be superfluous to add a single word to Eleanor Marx's retort (Documents, No. 11)