1911

Every Socialist must have felt a shock when he read of the suicide of our well-known and able comrade Paul Lafargue and his wife Laura, the eldest daughter of Karl Marx. Yet why should this be? When Eleanor Marx deliberately sought death by poison at a comparatively early age, when her usefulness to the movement was becoming greater each year, that was deplorable indeed, and the circumstances which attended her passing away were terribly tragic and even horrible. To this day those who know all the facts shudder at Aveling’s cold-blooded complicity in that sad self-destruction. But this of the Lafargues was a very different matter. Paul Lafargue felt that he had done his work. He did not desire to drift into the period of decay and senility when he would marvel himself that the capacity and vigour displayed in his works had once been his. None should know him living save at his best. It was a similar feeling which inspired the great soprano Clara Novello when, retiring with her marvellous voice still full and resonant, she declared that the public should never hear Clara Novello sing badly. Lafargue was determined that the comrades who had known him and admired im in his prime should never pity him in palsied period.

He had earned the right to decide when he had had enough of life. His wife, who had stood by him, was entitled to choose for herself the manner in which she should meet her death, too.

There is nothing sorrowful, nothing regrettable, about such a departure as this. Lafargue had worked steadily for Socialism for 45 years, and he died with the full assurance, not of a life to come for himself and his wife as individuals, in the Paradise or Inferno of supernatural boredom, but of the glorious realisation of the splendid ideals for which they had striven in the days when the martyrs of the Socialist faith will he universally regarded as the heroes of humanity.

Paul Lafargue was one of the most brilliant pioneers of modern Socialism, one of the most devoted champions of the doctrines of the founder of scientific Socialism. Keen, witty, vigorous alike with pen and with tongue, an agreeable conversationist and a pleasing personality, he failed, somehow, to impress himself upon the people of Paris. What was lacking it is difficult to say. But certain it is that men of much inferior parts had greater influence even with his own Party in the French metropolis. Yet his articles, pamphlets and booklets were very bright and telling, while his addresses were assuredly not wanting in ability or vigour. His best work “Le droil de la Paresse’” (” The Right to Idle”) will remain a model for its telling irony and bitter exposure of the present system which condemns the mass of mankind to penal servitude for life and regards never-ending toil for the poor as their rightful share of the benefits of civilisation.

I knew Lafargue in London, both before and after I became a Socialist, and not unfrequently met himself and his wife in Paris and at Socialist Congresses. Like all his Guesdist comrades, he was an indefatigable propagandist, and never wearied of preaching privately as well as publicly the doctrine of material salvation. In his last writings he, in the opinion of many, pushed his purely material reasoning too far. But Lafargue did great and good work, accompanied by the mistakes which the doing of good work always entails.

He has gone from us, and his wife has gone with him. They both deserve that their memory should he cherished and honoured in our midst.

H. M. HYNDMAN.