biography of Marx, two of the stalwart defenders of Zion in the
Marxist ranks failed to show even a trace of the generosity of this
great-hearted woman. They sounded the horn of moral indigna-
tion with all their might because I had made one or two observa-
tions in Die Neue Zeit ¹ concerning the relations of Marx to
Lassalle and to Bakunin without first having made the traditional
kow-tow to the official party legend.

First of all, Karl Kautsky accused me of " anti-Marxism"
in general, and of "a breach of confidence" towards Madame
Lafargue in particular, and when I nevertheless insisted on
carrying out my intention of writing a biography of Marx he
even sacrificed sixty odd pages of Die Neue Zeit, whose space was
notoriously precious, to an attack on me by D. Riazanov, in
which the latter did his best to prove me guilty of the basest
betrayal of Marx, and accompanied his efforts with a flood of
accusations whose lack of conscience was equalled only by their
lack of sense. I have permitted these people to have the last
word out of a feeling which for politeness' sake I will not call by its
real name, but I owe it to myself to point out to my readers that
I have not given way one hair's-breadth to their intellectual
terrorism and that in the following pages I have dealt with the
relations of Marx to Lassalle and to Bakunin strictly in accordance
with the exigencies of historical truth whilst completely ignoring
the official party legend. Naturally, in doing so I have again
avoided any sort of polemic.

My admiration and my criticism--and both these things must
have an equal place in any good biography--have been centred
on a great man who never said anything about himself more
often or with greater pleasure than "nothing human is foreign
to me". The task which I set myself when I undertook this
work was to present him in all his powerful and rugged greatness.

My end determined the means which I took to attain it. All
historical writing is at the same time both art and science, and
this applies in particular to biographical writing. I cannot
remember at the moment what droll fellow first gave vent to the
extraordinary idea that aesthetic considerations have no place in
the halls of historical science, and I must frankly confess, perhaps
to my own shame, that I do not loathe bourgeois society quite so
thoroughly as I loathe those stern thinkers who, in order to have
a smack at the worthy Voltaire, declare that a boring and tire-
some style is the only permissible one. In this connection Marx
himself is more than suspect with me. With the old Greeks he