The King Of Snark

“It must have cost a man as amiable as Engels a considerable conscious effort to keep up with Marx’s relentless misanthropy. We feel it in reading their correspondence. Marx had the satanic genius of the satirist: his sneers are the true expression of his nature, and for this reason they are often effective: but Engel’s sneers seem off-key. Though he can be humorous, he cannot be deadly: he simply commits faults of bad taste. Poor Engels, who had done what Marx had not: repudiated the bourgeois family–had sacrificed more by his bohemian life than it is easy today to understand.”

— Edmund Wilson in To The Finland Station