[Draft] 

[London,] 26 March 1885 

Dear Sir, 

I hardly imagine that I would be capable of acceding to your 
request. *7* You might, it is true, be able to produce a fairly clear 
portrait of Marx the man from all the activities, both literary and 
political, Marx engaged in; information on these activities is 
of course freely available to the world at large, with the single excep- 
tion of Germany, most of the requisite material having appeared 
abroad. On the other hand, a character sketch by me would neces- 
sarily be brief, hence not only inadequate but +* dogmatic and 
likewise ‘belletristic’, hence worse than nothing at all. Besides I can- 
not presume that my assessment should be taken by you for gospel, 
and so could not tell what would ultimately become of my contribu- 
tion, even having regard to your indisputable bona fides. If, how- 
ever, you proceed on the assumption that Marx was the exact op- 
posite of the German philistine in every conceivable respect, you 
can’t go far wrong. 

Whether this is now the precise moment for a critique of Marx, 

4 more or less 

what with the 2nd book of Capital due to appear in a month or 
two and with work proceeding on the 3rd, is for you to decide. 
At all events you are right in saying that criticism and so-called 
‘scholarship’ have disclosed nothing hitherto save a ‘general lack 
of judgment’, and no one was more amused by that than Marx 
himself. I can still see him laughing over the despairing sighs of 
Mr Schaffle who had studied Capital for ten years and still hadn’t 
understood it. *