No thinker in the nineteenth century has had so direct, deliberate and powerful an influence upon mankind as Karl Marx. Both during his lifetime and after it he has exercised an intellectual and moral ascendancy over his followers, the strength of which was unique even in that golden age of democratic nationalism, an age which saw the rise of great popular heroes and martyrs，romantic, almost legendary figures, whose lives and words dominated the imagination of the masses and created a new revolutionary tradition in Europe. Yet Marx could not, at any time, be called a popular figure in the ordinary sense: certainly he was in no sense a popular writer or orator. He wrote extensively, but his works were not, during his lifetime, read widely; and when, in the late eighteen seventies, they began to reach the immense public which several among them afterwards obtained, the desire to read them was due not so much to a recognition of their intrinsic qualities as to the growth of the fame and notoriety of the movement with which he was identified.
Marx totally lacked the qualities of a great popular leader or agitator, was not a publicist of genius like the Russian democrat Alexander Helen, nor did he possess Bakunin's marvelous eloquence; the greater part of his working life was spent in comparative obscurity in London, at his writing-desk and in the reading-room of the British Museum. He was little known to the general public, and while towards the end of his life he became the recognized and admired leader of a powerful international movement, nothing in his life or character stirred the imagination or evoked the boundless devotion, the intense, almost religion, worship, with which such men as Kossuth, Mazzini, and even Lassalle in his last years, were regarded by their followers.
His public appearances were neither frequent nor notably successful. On the few occasions on which he addressed banquets or public meetings, his speeches were overloaded with matter, and delivered with a combination of monotonousness and brusqueness, which commanded the respect but not the enthusiasm of his audience. He was by temperament a theorist and an intellectual, and instinctively avoided direct contact with the masses, to the study of whose interests his entire life was devoted. To many of his followers he appeared in the role of a dogmatic and sententious German schoolmaster, prepared to repeat his theses indefinitely, with rising sharpness, until their essence became irremovably lodged in his disciples' minds. The greater part of his economic teaching was given its first expression in lectures to working men: his exposition under these circumstances was by all accounts a model of lucidity and conciseness. But he wrote slowly and painfully, as sometimes happens with rapid and fertile thinkers, scarcely able to cope with the speed of their own ideas, impatient at once to communicate a new doctrine, and to forestall every possible objection; the published versions were generally turgid, clumsy, and obscure in detail, although the central doctrine is never in serious doubt. He was acutely copious of this and once compared himself with the hero of Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece, who tries to paint the picture which has formed itself in his mind, touches and retouches the canvas endlessly, to produce at last a shapeless mass of colors, which to his eye seems to express the vision in his imagination. He belonged to a generation which cultivated the emotions more intently and deliberately than its predecessors, and was brought up among men to whom ideas were often more real than facts, and personal relations meant far more than the events of the external world; by whom indeed public life was commonly understood and interpreted in terms of the rich and elaborate world of their own private experience.
1.What kind of person was Karl Marx according to the passage?
2.How could you describe the age when Marx lived according to the passage?
3.What did the author think of Marx’s popularity?
4.Why was the audience not enthusiastic about Marx’s speeches?
5.For what purpose was Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece mentioned?
