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important element is work." This is what Karl Marx believed ("With–
out work a man is no more than an ox."), and probably it is what
Eleanor Marx believed ("I think 1 could do something.... The chance
of independence is very sweet."). But Eleanor Marx's work, dictated by
financial need or by the demands of others, was in the end not enough
to
validate her life.
Neither was Woolf's work a sufficient safeguard. But whatever the
immediate cause of her suicide, there seems no lack of achievement in
the life itself. Eleanor Marx seems never to have had that consolation.
She was driven to take her life by the discovery that Aveling, whose first
wife had died some years before, had secretly married a young protegee
who had been performing with him at socialist benefits. This outra–
geous gesture (for he married under his stage name) was preceded by
several attempts to break away; and whether he was held by illness or
lack of money, Tussy herself seems
to
have made frantic efforts to keep
him. The marriage was the final evidence of her desertion; it must have
set off overwhelming terrors of abandonment, convictions of worthless–
ness, of being "unlovable." Yet one wonders whether her unquestion–
ing allegiance to her father, her role as a spokesman for international
Marxism, according to Kapp her chief strength, was not at the root of
her emotional dependence on Aveling. She never really struck out on
her own, intellectually or emotionally; she was unable to free herself
from guilt at her father's death, unable to face the truth of Aveling's
character.
Five-volume diaries and thousand-page biographies inevitably
raise questions about the intrinsic interest of the life thus minutely
unrolled to view. How are we to assess the lives of these two women?
Woolf's stature as an artist is assured; her influence on twentieth–
century literature as a critic and stylist is substantial. But above all her
writing gives pleasure. She went about London in the years of the First
World War "making up phrases and incidents to write about," and it is
for the beautifully turned phrase, the flashing perception, that we read
the
Diary.
"The West End of London fills me with aversion; 1 look into
motor cars and see the fat grandees inside, like portly jewels in satin
cases.... The afternoons now have an elongated pallid look, as if it
were neither winter nor spring....
It
struck me that age consists not in
having a different point of view, but in having the same point of view,
faded."
Where does Eleanor Marx's interest lie? Her dedicated work in the
British labor movement hardly altered the course of labor history; and
her own brand of socialism lost out in England
to
the work of the
