The Project Gutenberg eBook of Regeneration
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Regeneration
A reply to Max Nordau
Author: A. Egmont Hake
Author of introduction, etc.: Nicholas Murray Butler
Release date: September 3, 2025 [eBook #76803]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1896
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REGENERATION ***
REGENERATION
A REPLY TO
MAX NORDAU
WITH INTRODUCTION BY
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
Professor of Philosophy and Education
in Columbia College in the City of New York
New York
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
London: ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO.
1896
Copyright, 1896
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New Rochelle, N. Y.
INTRODUCTION
Max Nordau is perhaps the most daring toreador of recent years. He
challenged Modern Civilization to mortal combat in the presence of
assembled thousands. Had the customs of the Roman arena prevailed, the
thumbs of the interested spectators would doubtless have been extended
or pressed down in about equal numbers, when the huge beast lay
momentarily stunned by his blow. That Nordau had ingeniously tormented
the monster was apparent; had he earned the right to put an end to
its existence? The shrill cries of the excitable and easily moved
predominated for a moment, but they were soon drowned by the insistent
demands of the sober-minded for a calm consideration of the fairness of
the blows that had been struck, as well as of the permissibility of the
weapons that had been used. Yet the contest, whether fair or unfair,
had been exciting; and it was not without its uses.
It stimulated thought among the habitually unthinking. The habit of
reflective analysis, like letter-writing and other accomplishments that
require much leisure, is slipping away from us under the pressure of
our complex modern life. The newspaper, with its surges of insensate
passion and unreasoned opinion, thinks for large portions of the
community; and its thinking, like the amusements of the nursery,
expresses itself in ways that appeal chiefly to the eye and to the
ear. Information about things is too often mistaken for knowledge of
things. Highly specialized activities on the one hand, and the task of
adjusting our part in the struggle for existence to economic conditions
wholly new in the world’s history, on the other, mark off our
civilization from any that have preceded it. The activities of modern
men are so numerous, so varied, and so interesting, that we often omit
to ask on what principles they are based and whither they are tending.
Apparent success has led us to forget sometimes that all sound practice
has a reason behind it, and reasons are seldom asked for or given.
To say the least, then, it is somewhat surprising to be stopped on
the street corner and assured, with due emphasis and the appearance
of authority, that nineteenth-century men and women are absorbed in
interests that mark a diseased type of mind, and are given over to a
literature, an art, and a music that, themselves produced by madmen,
are rapidly reducing us all to the mad-house level; in other words,
that we and our boasted civilization are degenerates.
There is, as I have said, a certain use in this brutal proceeding, for
it causes us to stop and think. It shatters our conceit and shakes our
confidence. If we pause only for a moment, yet pause we must. The mere
daring of the attack forces this. So it has come about that Nordau’s
_Degeneration_, quite apart from its intrinsic merits or demerits, has
been widely read and much talked of throughout the civilized world. It
has provoked some anger, not a little amusement, and a fair measure
of contempt. Yet in a certain subtle way it has set us to examining
the reasons that lead most of us to deny the essential viciousness and
abnormality of some of the most salient and striking characteristics of
contemporary culture.
If Nordau’s indictment be classed as pessimism, it at least has the
merit of novelty of statement. From Homer’s time to the present poets
and philosophers have not forgotten, even in moments of highest
exaltation, to remind man that his life has a dark and hopeless side.
Our own century has listened to Leopardi, who envied only the dead,
and to Schopenhauer, who called man both the priest and the victim of
nature. And yet we have not been altogether unhappy.
But Nordau is no ordinary pessimist. He does not lead us to despair
through the by-paths of metaphysical subtlety, nor does he take
advantage of the awful mystery of pain to perplex and distract us.
Rather he drags us into the laboratory and, stretching us on a table
of definitions made for the purpose, proceeds to measure our faces
and our skulls, our teeth, the lobes of our ears, and our palates;
we pay the penalty of our individuality in being found to be “morbid
deviations from an original type,” and are therefore degenerate. Next
comes an examination of a selected group of man’s newer interests. The
music of Wagner, the dramas of Ibsen, the romances of Zola, the art of
the pre-Raphaelites, the mystics, the symbolists, the Parnassians—who
but a “decadent” would treat all these alike?—are passed in review
and pronounced to be proofs of the decadence of mankind even more
conclusive than those based upon physical measurements. All this is
done in the name of Science, which, reversing the procedure of Saturn,
thus hastens to devour the parent that begot it, Modern Civilization.
A long chapter might be written on the credulity of men of science.
The hypotheses that they have chased out of the door complacently fly
in at the window. Many scientists, fresh from apparently important
discoveries in narrow fields, need to be reminded of the lesson
contained in the legend of St. Augustine, who when walking on the shore
one day, absorbed in meditation, suddenly perceived a child that with
a shell was ladling the sea into a hole in the sand. “What are you
doing, my child?” asked St. Augustine. “I am emptying the ocean,” was
the reply, “into this hole.”—“That is impossible.” “Not more impossible
than for you to empty the universe into your intellect,” said the
child, and vanished. Nordau is particularly prone to regard the small
achievements of a certain school of alienists as having supplied him
with a conclusive test of all excellence. Indeed, no part of his
diatribe is more open to criticism than the use he makes of Science.
If modern science is demonstrating any one thing more clearly than
another, it is that the insights of the seers of our race as to the
highest human aspirations and the deepest needs of the human spirit,
meet not with contradiction but with support as knowledge of the cosmos
becomes more extensive and more accurate. Nordau has neglected to
reckon with the profound truth that finds expression in the celebrated
saying of Lotze:
“The more I myself have laboured to prepare the way for acceptance of
the mechanical view of Nature in the region of organic life—in which
region this view seemed to advance more timidly than the nature of the
thing required—the more do I now feel impelled to bring into prominence
the other aspect which was equally near to my heart during all these
endeavours.... It is in such mediation [between the two aspects] that
the true source of the life of science is to be found; not indeed in
affirming now a fragment of one view and now a fragment of the other,
but in showing how _absolutely universal is the extent_, and at the
same time how _completely subordinate is the significance, of the
mission which mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of the world_.”
There is also hidden from Nordau’s view that noble conception of the
place and significance of Science to which Tyndall gave expression in
the eloquent peroration of his Belfast address more than twenty years
ago:
“Science itself not unfrequently derives motive-power from an
ultra-scientific source. Some of its greatest discoveries have been
made under the stimulus of a non-scientific ideal.... The world
embraces not only a Newton, but a Shakspere—not only a Boyle, but a
Raphael—not only a Kant, but a Beethoven—not only a Darwin, but a
Carlyle. Not in each of these, but in all, is human nature whole.
They are not opposed, but supplementary—not mutually exclusive, but
reconcilable. And if, unsatisfied with them all, the human mind, with
the yearning of a pilgrim for his distant home, will still turn to
the Mystery from which it has emerged, seeking so to fashion it as to
give unity to thought and faith, so long as this is done, not only
without intolerance or bigotry of any kind, but with the enlightened
recognition that ultimate fixity of conception is here unattainable,
and that each succeeding age must be held free to fashion the
mystery in accordance with its own needs—then, casting aside all the
restrictions of Materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for the
noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faculties, may
be called the creative faculties of man.”
Why, then, should not literature and art and music enter and occupy
the very field that the apostles of Science assign to them, without
being exposed to the alienists’ sneers for their symbolism and their
mysticism? The truth is that Nordau is the slave of one idea, and that
the logical outcome of his definition and conception of abnormality.
Ribot described such a case perfectly when he said that “nothing is
more common or better known than the momentary appropriation of the
personality by some intense and fixed idea. As long as this idea
occupies consciousness, we may say without exaggeration that it
constitutes the individual.” Degeneration constitutes Nordau. He is
himself an abnormality and a pathological type. Every large hospital
for the insane knows his representative—the one sane man in a world of
lunatics.
To perceive the true direction and to estimate the relative force of
a large human movement requires a long interval of time. Caught in
an eddy of the moment, we may seem to be drifting backward, when in
reality to the spectator on the shore we are being swept onward with
great rapidity. The same world of experience seemed to Parmenides to
exclude by its very nature all motion, and to Heraclitus to derive its
only reality from its perpetual change. It is the standard and the
point of view that control such judgments, and we are entitled to ask
of any standard or point of view, _Quid juris?_ Nordau, however, has
not asked himself that question. Seizing upon some partially completed
anthropological investigations, with their half-speculative inferences,
he has fashioned for himself a yard-stick with which to measure
civilization. Aristotle long ago pointed out that the true difference
between the poet and the historian is to be found in the fact that the
former relates what may happen, the latter what has happened. One might
similarly distinguish the man of science, who applies what has been
proved, from the charlatan, who seeks to apply what has not been proved.
As a result of dissenting from Nordau’s premises, method, and
conclusions, it is by no means necessary to be forced to defend all the
phases of modern civilization that he attacks. Some of them, no doubt,
are unwholesome, but for reasons other than those which this critic
adduces. Many of them are mere fleeting phenomena, confined within
the narrowest limits, and the world at large first heard of them from
Nordau’s pages. It is only a lack of humour that can elevate such
traits and tendencies into the position of powerful forces in human
culture, such as Platonism, Humanism, or Christianity. The old Sophist
was right when he commended humour as the test of gravity.
The author of _Regeneration_ is successful in turning the flank of
Nordau’s attacking forces at more points than one. He is able at times,
without over-exertion, to convict Nordau not only of lack of knowledge,
but of what is far worse—knowledge of things that are not true. His
view of life is more sane and better-balanced than that of Nordau,
despite an anti-Teutonic tendency that perhaps partakes of the nature
of an argument _ad hominem_. The judgment of the average man who knows
the history of the past two centuries will sustain him in holding that
“there are a host of indications in all civilized countries pointing
to an increase in intellectual power, moral strength, and æsthetic
refinement.” Those to whom Lincoln applied the affectionate designation
of “the plain people” have advanced and are advancing by tremendous
strides in knowledge and refinement. They, and not a group or two of
men and women in each of the capitals of Europe, are the real index
to the degeneracy, or the contrary, of modern life. If democracy is
to establish itself more widely and more efficiently as a form of
government, it must rest upon the common sense of the plain people.
So far from being influenced by the tendencies that Nordau exploits
with so much vigour, it is not improbable that even the names of the
representatives of most of those tendencies are unknown to them.
Progress in education, in philanthropy, in commerce and industry, and
in the comforts of life, has developed a seriousness and a sense of
responsibility that have brought into many an English and American face
the lines that distinguished the countenance of the typical Senator
of Rome. The higher altruism of our time believes that life is not
only worth living, but worth working for. Long ago Mr. Herbert Spencer
remarked that the current conception of progress is vague, and that it
is in a great measure erroneous. It takes in, he said, not so much the
reality of progress as its accompaniments—not so much the substance
as the shadow. Nordau, with all of the superficiality, the absence of
any sense of proportion, and the lack of humour that so often mark the
extreme specialist, has hardly come in sight of even the shadow.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER.
Columbia College,
_January, 1896._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
Who is the Critic? 1
CHAPTER II
Dusk or Dawn! 27
CHAPTER III
Mysticism and the Unknowable 44
CHAPTER IV
The Bankruptcy of Science 73
CHAPTER V
Symbolism and Logic 94
CHAPTER VI
The Light of Russia 108
CHAPTER VII
The Real Ibsen 132
CHAPTER VIII
Richard Wagner 183
CHAPTER IX
The Religion of Self 230
CHAPTER X
An Ethical Inquisition 241
CHAPTER XI
Vigorous Affirmations 258
CHAPTER XII
Regeneration 290
REGENERATION
CHAPTER I
_WHO IS THE CRITIC?_
Voltaire said that if all the celestial bodies are inhabited, our earth
must be the mad-house of the universe. To us who know the era of the
great cynic only as recorded by the history of Dryasdusts, and the
flippant memoirs and autobiographies of his contemporaries, his biting
sarcasm cannot be considered undeserved. But, with regard to our own
times, most of us would probably hesitate to brand our present state of
culture, our modern civilization, as a fool’s paradise.
It is a truism that an historical epoch can only be correctly studied
at a distance in time, as the outlines of a mountain can only be
studied at a distance in space. The actor in a piece, though intimately
acquainted with his own part and the accessories with which he comes
in contact, cannot form a just idea of the impression which the play,
with its more or less successful rendering, its scenery, and other
spectacular effects, produces on the mind of the average spectator. A
super who is ignorant of stage management and of the precise results
the manager aims at might deem many things going on behind the stage
both foolish and ridiculous. To him the frantic efforts of some actor,
or scene-shifter, to produce some ordinary effect might well appear as
lunacy.
The judgment we form concerning the time we live in runs a great risk
of being biassed by the narrowness of the vista we can command. The
interdependence of causes simultaneously at work, the co-operation of
impulses active at a great distance, the peculiarities of circumstances
surrounding each leading phenomenon, the real intentions of leading
characters, secret motives in groups and parties—all this represents so
many sealed books to the contemporary to be gradually opened only by
future historians.
There are no doubt many facilities ready to hand for the man who in
modern times desires to study his own epoch, which were not available
in the past. Distances are practically suppressed, the whole of
civilized humanity has been placed in intimate connection, a highly
developed Press records daily events everywhere in a minute fashion,
to the making of books there is no end, and in every direction an
elaborate mechanism is established for the obtaining of rapid and
precise information. In fact, the _Kammergelehrte_, who, like Kant,
would study the world-phenomenon without leaving his native town, would
in our days stand a better chance of obtaining completer and exacter
information than any philosopher before him.
But, despite the quasi-ubiquitousness the modern philosopher enjoys, he
would indulge in self-deception were he tempted to believe that he had
secured all the data requisite to judge the contemporaries of his race
as they act, live, feel, and think during the closing years of this
century.
For, against the easy access to information, must be placed the mass
of intricate problems that arise with every step of progress, the
multitude of ideas which strive for realization, the bewilderment
which ensues on crumbling systems and religions, new discoveries,
new theories, new and complicated associations of ideas, new and
hazy aspirations, sympathies, and yearnings—for all of which words
cannot be coined fast enough. Every day we witness political, social,
economic, and psychological phenomena, the explanation of which would
demand not only an enormous amount of knowledge, but reasoning powers
and a freedom from bias seldom blended in one human mind. Facts,
circumstances, theories, human actions, and human ideas, change and
intermingle so constantly and so rapidly as to produce bewilderment
capable of misleading any philosopher who attempts to gauge them with
the instruments of the past and in conformity with the doctrines of the
school to which he belongs.
What renders it still more difficult to appraise any epoch, and
especially the present one, is the intimate interdependence of all
the phenomena to be observed. The idiosyncrasies of a sovereign, or
of a minister, influence legislation, legislation influences public
institutions, public institutions influence the upper classes, and the
upper classes influence the masses. But legislation, institutions,
the upper classes, and the people are influenced from a great number
of other directions, while they again influence the sovereign and
the minister. Thus it would be impossible to attribute with accuracy
a given number of effects to special causes: for every cause is the
effect of another cause, and every effect produces other effects.
For instance, art and literature may strongly influence men in power
as well as the masses, while no one will deny that men in power, as
well as the political and social condition of the masses, exercise
a strong influence on art and literature. And then, on top of it
all,—as if worse to confound the confusion of the man with a system,
trivial incidents intervene and bring about a new series of causes
and effects evidently destined to operate as long as humanity lasts.
So interdependent are the actors in the human drama, so complete is
the intricate and sensitive mechanism of causes and effects, and so
overcharged with energy are the social dynamos, that any fool, any
child, any trivial accident, may move one of the countless points
arranged by circumstances, and thus hurl the engine of events in new
and dangerous directions.
These and many other difficulties encountered by the student of his own
time are largely responsible for his opinions, often savouring as much
of his idiosyncrasy, his professional and national prejudices as of an
independent inquiry. In order to choose between the maze of highways
and by-ways, in order to judge whether he moved forwards, backwards,
or in a circle, he gropes for some kind of a compass and naturally
clutches at that which his idiosyncrasy proffers. When we therefore
meet with an appraiser of his own epoch, it behooves us to bear in mind
the standpoint from which he has contemplated the world-phenomenon,
and with what bias and prejudice his views have been coloured. The old
Greek story of the sandal-maker who became prejudiced against a work
of art because the artist had made a mistake in the arrangement of the
sandal-strings, points its moral. The prejudices arising from trade,
personal interests, and many other palpable sources are not difficult
to trace and to evade, but where is the man whose views have not been
influenced by his nationality, his religion, his favourite science or
art, his love, his hatred, or his ambition?
It is to such influences, often considered by the influenced as so many
advantages and seldom sufficiently noticed by his critics, that we
often owe the apparent profundity and exhaustiveness of an appreciation
which in reality is one-sided.
Education, and, still more, an intense study of one special branch
of knowledge, rich in important and striking results, naturally tend
to strengthen the student’s faith and his belief in the capabilities
of his favourite science. The brain-cells, influenced by the will,
and habitually becoming stimulated by presentations—emanating from
the subject on which the student has concentrated his attention—adapt
themselves gradually to the perception of such presentations, and by
re-acting on other cells render the whole organism disposed to seek
such presentations. In plain language, the specialist in one science
has a great aptitude for discovering such causes and such effects
as his favourite science has best elucidated, while he is tempted
to overlook other causes and other effects which may be of equal or
greater importance.
The specialist attains to a mastery of his own subject, and often
acquires a strong bias regarding other subjects, because he pursues his
inquiries somewhat after the same fashion as the dog follows the scent
of the game. By training, the dog is familiar with the smell of the
animal pursued, and, bent on following the trail, he pays no attention
to any other scents or smells that he encounters in his course. In
the same way the specialist rapidly perceives and minutely studies
any phenomena, however slight, with which his favourite science has
rendered him familiar, while he is apt to disregard phenomena demanding
fresh studies and threatening to be inexplicable by investigation
confined to the lines which he prefers to follow.
Thus, if a law-student were to write a treatise on our epoch, he would
endeavour to show that the jurisprudence, the law, and the courts—in
fact, the whole legal mechanism—is the most important feature in our
civilization, and that on which progress or retrogression most depends.
As remedies for our evils, he would propose simpler or more complicated
forms of procedure, more or less enactments, according to his own
idiosyncrasies.
A military man would consider a development on military lines as true
progress. He would yearn to draft the whole nation into the army! He
would favour universal conscription, as Lord Wolseley does, and might,
like Count Moltke, look upon war as a healthy bracing, an epuration, of
a race, and as an indispensable corrective to over-population. He would
cite the expansion of the chest in Germany as a proof of the power of
military training to further physical development, and would look upon
strict military discipline as the means of establishing moral order in
a country.
A theologian would point to the immense influence exercised by
Christianity upon humanity, and would insist upon the religious aspect
of every question, and, like Mr. Drummond, would see in every new
discovery a confirmation of his peculiar dogmas. His remedy would be
more ritualism, or more liberal doctrines, or more emotion in religion,
according to his High Church, Broad Church, or Low Church creed.
Philosophical religionists, like Mr. Benjamin Kidd and others who
pin their faith to the development of the altruistic feeling in
human beings, would endeavour to reconcile all phenomena under their
observation with their theory of social evolution.
If therefore we wish to form a correct judgment of our own time and
our own contemporaries, we must not allow ourselves to be guided
exclusively by a scientist of one specialty. We ought to be all the
more on our guard, as the great erudition and the profound study which
each modern specialist has brought to bear on his subject gives to his
theories a striking plausibility, a savour of exact science to such an
extent as to sway our opinions in favour of the latest treatise we have
read.
Politicians, sociologists, economists, biologists, theologians, and
the æsthetes have had their say and have each in their turn exercised
a periodical spell over the public mind. It is now the turn of the
alienists. Dr. Max Nordau has by his book entitled _Degeneration_
produced no small sensation throughout the world, and not least
in this country. Though his work may not have made the stir of a
sensational novel read by the millions, there can be little doubt
that it has imposed itself on every educated mind in the country. It
is no exaggeration to say that, like a sharp trumpet-blast, it has
awakened the educated classes from the lethargy consequent upon the
din of clashing opinions and contradictory systems. This volume has
once more roused us to the fact that we, as individuals, as a nation,
as a race, are travelling at comet-speed towards a goal of which we
have no inkling. It sternly suggests that we are on the wrong road and
that a fate of a most horrible description is rapidly befalling us—an
affliction in most people’s view worse than annihilation. Madness is
shown to be insidiously invading our minds, and by its contagious
nature threatening to prove Voltaire’s biting sarcasm a stern prophecy.
It is no wonder that his work has become as it were a nightmare
to millions of minds. If its diagnosis and its conclusions are as
irrefutable as to most people they appear to be, we indeed live in a
fool’s paradise: our leaders, our authorities, our men of genius,
are not the beacons we have held them to be, but will-o’-the-wisps
luring us into the bottomless quagmires of lunacy; the progression we
vaunted is a slippery plane sliding us back to bestiality; our means
for raising the masses are so many slashes at the bonds of moral
order and decency, calculated to unloose the brutish Loke of modern
democracy; unbridled animal appetites threaten to take the place of
law and religion; all social order is being undermined; and the vilest
instincts press for gratification in lust, rapine, and murder. With
all the solemnity, moral persuasiveness, and scientific authority of
a medical practitioner, Max Nordau tells us that a mortal disease is
invading our race, and that with the end of the century the “dusk” of
humanity begins.
Before we accept the views of Max Nordau, before we have recourse
to the drastic remedies he seems to recommend, it is right that we
should subject his theories to the closest investigation. If his work
were one of exact science, there would be no necessity to refer to
the personality of the author, to his peculiar point of view, and to
his predilections. But, as his work partakes largely of the nature
of special pleading, as his methods of reasoning are those of the
enthusiastic specialist, and as his postulates are strongly coloured
by racial, national, and professional bias, the more we know of him
the more easily shall we follow him in his progress on the highways of
logic and in his deviations from them. Human language is not so perfect
as to allow us to dispense with the additional light on expressed
ideas which may be derived from one’s knowledge of the speaker who
gives utterance to them. To study the author as well as his work is
all the more permissible, as this volume is not intended as a complete
refutation of Max Nordau’s conclusions, but rather aims at separating
the dross from the gold and at giving him, as well as his work, their
right place and their true value as telling factors in the development
of our race. Indeed, this is exactly the method adopted by Max Nordau
in his study, not to say dissection, of his contemporaries.
It must be clearly understood however that there is no intention of
going to the length to which Max Nordau has gone in speaking of men of
the day—an abuse of literature which recalls the literary squabbles
of past generations. The gross vituperation and the coarse calumny
he levels against those he denounces will certainly not enhance his
popularity or inspire confidence in his methods in England. In fact,
his frequent indulgence in personalities would have prejudiced his work
enormously were it not for the overwhelming testimony it offers of the
fact that its author’s mind is conspicuously devoid of the sense of
the ridiculous. Had it not been for this peculiar mental defect, his
treatment of his opponents could not have failed to remind him of the
disputing doctors in Molière’s _Malade Imaginaire_.
Here we have to do not with the man, but with the author,—not with his
relations to his private surroundings, but with his relation to the
presentations he receives, the ideas he elaborates, and the conclusions
he proclaims.
In _Degeneration_ Max Nordau evidently strives to take a cosmopolitan
standpoint. Only in three or four places does he speak of Germany as
his own country, while he displays a remarkable erudition in foreign
literature, but only a superficial knowledge of foreign circumstances.
Unconsciously however he constantly betrays his German nationality.
To say that he is a typical German involves by no means any slur upon
his views, has nothing to do with the fact that the Germans are at
this moment—for reasons entirely independent of German worth—rather
unpopular in this country. It is his book that clearly announces him
as a German, just as the books of Drummond and Benjamin Kidd announce
them to be English. In other words, his methods, his views, his
predispositions, his standards, his ideals, are thoroughly German.
Few countries have so strong a power of inspiring love for their
institutions and their characteristics as Germany. Not only is the
German spell over those who are born and bred in the country, but
foreigners who reside there any length of time generally become
thoroughly Germanized. Even English people, whose characteristic it is
to create a little England around them wherever they go, are remarkably
susceptible to German influence when living in the country.
Despite the propensity of many Germans, complained of by Max Nordau in
his book, to imitate French art and literature, the German people have
strongly pronounced characteristics, opinions, feelings, and views.
We, here in England, have ample opportunity of observing the tenacity
of the German bias. We sometimes meet with Germans who have conquered
their native propensities and thoroughly assimilated themselves with
the English nation. But, on the other hand, many Germans, when settled
among us, continue to look on everything through German spectacles,
and utterly fail to grasp, or even superficially to understand, the
English spirit. This refers, of course, only to those who are actually
born in Germany. The second generation is invariably more English
than the English. We often meet with Teutons who have come young to
England, gained a position here, married English wives, brought up a
large family of English children, and who yet remain as German as any
_Spiesbürger_ in Berlin. They do not appear so to the casual observer.
Their business relations, their acquaintances, their wives, and their
children, being all English, expect them to be English. They therefore
assume an English outward garb, but as soon as circumstances allow them
to drop their English character the German characteristics of these
“tame Englishmen” come out as strong as ever. These facts are elicited
in no critical spirit, but simply as proofs of the tenacity of the
German bias.
The practical result of this bias is an open or secret contempt for
English views, a distrust in English institutions, a want of sympathy
with the English race, and doubts about the future of the British
Empire.
If we wish Max Nordau’s nationality to throw light on the working of
his mind, we must realize what are the most essential traits of the
average German.
Not yet completely freed from feudal institutions, it is natural that
the German people should associate moral and political order, good
administration, and personal protection, with feudal institutions.
Hence an immense respect for those in authority and a contempt for
the masses, even on the part of the masses. Democratic government and
individual liberty inspire the German with great distrust, because he
considers that the introduction into Germany of such features would
mean a social upheaval in which the meagre advantages which now each
individual enjoys might be lost.
As in Germany all initiative belongs to the authorities, the people
have become accustomed to bend to superiors, and where an Englishman
would attempt to establish a Free Order, the Germans can conceive
nought but discipline. A great number of enlightened Germans submit
tacitly to all kinds of authorities because they are morally convinced
that this is best for themselves and their country; but a large part
of the masses, having always found that the authorities gain their
ends by the use of police and military force, submit only because they
are obliged. Hence a deep-rooted feeling of discontent in a nation
constantly compelled to do the bidding of others. This discontent has
engendered a hatred against the upper classes similar to that which in
France paved the way for the first Revolution. The fear of the outbreak
of this hatred gives, in the eyes of the German middle-class, an extra
halo to authority.
The love of following authorities, instead of standing alone, is in
Germany not confined to the domain of politics. While Englishmen, down
to the wage-earning labourer, have, or believe they have, their own
opinions about politics, administration, religion, social affairs, and
even scientific problems, the Germans have an accepted authority in
each of these branches. Were we to question, say, a hundred Germans
in a _Bierhalle_, or any other public place, as to their opinions on
the above-named subjects, the replies would be simply an enumeration
of their authorities in each branch of knowledge. Though this
characteristic is a misfortune to Germany, to the Germans it savours
of a quaint reasonableness. A German Socialist, asked why he blindly
accepted Liebknecht’s views, replied: “I should be both silly and
conceited if I, a scantily educated man, with no leisure and means for
study, could believe myself capable of forming a better opinion than
Herr Liebknecht, who has brought a remarkable mind and great knowledge
to bear on political questions.”
This reasoned self-depreciation, this blind faith in authorities,
accounts for much in Germany which would be impossible in England. The
way, for example, in which the youths of the country are forced into
the ranks of the army against their will and inclination would be out
of the question with us. Here, the great majority of young men would
simply refuse, and to coerce them by military executions would involve
a wholesale slaughter against which the whole nation would revolt.
There have been young men in Germany who, on principle, have resisted
the compulsory service, but brutal punishment has quickly dissuaded
those of their comrades who secretly admired them from following their
example. Nothing could be more unjust to the German people than to
attribute to cowardice this lamb-like submission. German youths are
as brave as those of any other nation, and what to us English might
appear a want of both moral and physical courage is simply the powerful
influence of the German bias.
Enough has been said to show that German education and German
surroundings tend to foster in the human mind veneration for authority
and aristocracy, contempt for the plebeian, distrust of liberty, a firm
belief in the unquenchable power of man’s lowest instincts, a nervous
demand for authoritative repression of human passions, contentment with
a prosaic existence, small resources, and poor prospects.
It is natural that a nation whose mind is moulded in such a form
should despair of the practical realization of its ideals; that the
aspirations of the German race for liberty, enjoyment, and romance
should seek an outlet in the realms of the imagination; and that the
Germans should be a sentimental race. In this they differ diametrically
from our nation. The young German, when his humdrum work-day is over,
will plunge into books of poetry, romance, and adventure. He will
worship and eagerly follow his pet heroes, but to emulate them in
practical life, as a rule, does not occur to him.
His romantic admiration of female beauty, and his sentiment of love,
have nothing to do with his marriage. He postpones, as a rule, the
taking to himself a wife until he is fairly successful in life, when
pure romantic love has ceased to exercise any spell over him, and
he expects that his marriage should improve his social position and
procure him a circle of desirable friends. His poetical notions of love
do not interfere with the choice of a wife. What he looks for is a
young woman with practical qualities, likely to be a useful _Hausfrau_,
and when he has found her, he loses no time in suppressing all her
poetical notions and soon reduces her to a submissive drudge.
No suspicion of inconsistency enters the mind of an average German
when he reads or writes romances of love and chivalry in which the
hero shows the most refined courtesy, commits deeds of self-abnegation
and daring in honour of his lady-love, and exercises the utmost tact
in shielding her from every harsh and unpleasant impression, and at
the same time treats his wife as one devoid of all claims upon his
consideration. He will exact from her such small menial services as the
slave performs for his master. He will expect her to work constantly
for him, the family, and the house. He will not allow her enough
time or money for her toilet, for pleasure, for book, and social
intercourse. He will not stir to save her trouble or fatigue. He will
come to the table in dressing-gown and slippers, and coolly look for
special dishes for himself, while his wife and children have to content
themselves with cheap garbage.
Germans of the middle-class who come to England frequently express
their amazement at the way in which English husbands constantly pay
attention to their wives. They call it undignified for the breadwinner
and master of the house, on return from a day of professional work, to
“dance attendance” on his wife, whose duty it is to serve her husband.
The German, prior to marriage, allows his poetical notions to be
disturbed as little by his sexual emotions as by his marriage plans.
In a methodical and business-like way he gratifies the former
in police-supervised establishments, and what he looks upon as
“constitutional sprees” are never allowed to interfere with the course
of his affairs. After a night of debauch he will turn up in his studio,
his office, or his home, smiling and happy as if nothing had happened.
We record these observations with no desire to criticise or to
underrate the German character. Nor do we wish to insinuate that
hypocrisy and profligacy are non-existent in England. We simply wish
to show that the development of the German race has induced them to
conceive ideals entirely unrealizable, and to dream of aims so far off
in time as to render them unattainable.
It will be evident to all who have read _Degeneration_ that Max Nordau
is under the influence of a strong German bias. As we proceed, we shall
have occasion to point out how in many instances this bias has warped
his perceptions, his reasoning, and his conclusions.
From characteristics revealed in his work, the observant reader will,
no doubt, conclude that Max Nordau belongs to the Jewish race. The view
he takes of the disgraceful Jew-baiting tendencies now prevailing in
Germany is based on exactly the same mistakes committed by the Jews
themselves, as we shall have an opportunity of verifying later on. He
is evidently a free-thinking Jew, a type which we meet with everywhere,
and against which as few objections can be raised as against any
other type of man. The free-thinking Jew is generally clever,
well-instructed, moral, and cheerful. His good qualities however
do not prevent him from having his peculiar characteristics, which
naturally influence his perceptions and his feelings. He has generally
a cut-and-dried life-philosophy based on science and common-sense as
well as on Jewish authorities. He distrusts democracy, especially
Christian democracy, and feels never quite safe except under laws and
institutions which allow him to assume such ascendancy as his mental
qualifications can secure for him, and those who think with him. He
does not seek for primary causes, and sets up no spiritual ideals.
Though he may not be religious, he has yet retained something of the
monotheist creed, the predilection for worldly affairs, and the habit
of looking forward to a future life rather in his descendants than in
a heaven—a view which always characterized his race. His philosophy is
nothing if not practical. His aims are immediate, and, as a rule, he
eagerly embraces all the teachings of the materialist scientists.
Max Nordau is a modern scientist. He is not a pioneer in science, but
a most persevering and plodding student of the works of others. He
belongs to that class of _savants_ who spend almost all their time and
all their energy in reading up the authorities. So vast an erudition
as he has acquired cannot be attained to without some sacrifice in
other directions. The constant absorption of other peoples’ opinions
and theories compels the judgment to lean more and more on authorities,
and this unfits it, to some extent, for independent action. It is the
indefatigable readers who most blindly follow authorities, and it
suffices to glance at Max Nordau’s dedication to Professor Lombroso
to understand to what an extent he is subject to the influence of
“Masters.”
The pride taken by a scientist in his science, and the great practical
results achieved by scientific investigations, naturally tend to
foster an implicit confidence in its tenets. This has been especially
the case during the last decades, so remarkable for religious
tolerance. As the faith in old dogmas has receded, science has
advanced, and in many cases taken its place. That such has been the
case has naturally flattered the votaries of science, and tempted them
to become prophets as well as investigators. They have come to look
upon systems as dogmas, speculations as absolute truths, and in this
fashion scientific superstition tends to take the place of religious
superstition.
The scientifically superstitious man is an example of the dangers
of a little knowledge. Not that our men of science, including the
superstitious scientists, are defective in such knowledge as is
attainable at our present stage, but the sum total of all human
knowledge is still, and is probably destined ever to be, only partial
and extremely superficial. Compared with the knowledge in the past,
modern science represents an immense progress, but as to throwing light
on the great secret of the Universe, far from having done anything of
the sort, it has, on the contrary, revealed more and more inexplicable
wonders, and placed us face to face with more insoluble problems.
Though trite, the aphorism that the more we learn the more we realize
our ignorance is truer to-day than ever. It is natural and excusable
that devotees of a science which to them has revealed wonderful
results should raise abnormal expectations with regard to its future
possibilities, and also that vanity, a weakness often co-existent with
vast knowledge, should prompt a scientist to extol and glorify science
far beyond the bounds of reason; for any worship offered to science
rebounds necessarily on its high priests. This impossibility to realize
the limits in which science moves, and the yearning for admiration, lie
at the base of scientific superstition.
The scientifically superstitious man believes that science has
adequately replied to those great questions which humanity has been
asking itself for the last five thousand years. How was creation
originated? For what purpose did it come into existence? What is man?
What does the scheme of humanity involve? Have we existed before our
birth? Shall we live after death? What is the origin of evil? What
is eternity? What is boundlessness in space? What is reason? What is
instinct? and so on.
If his excessive study has not seriously impaired his independent
reasoning powers, the superstitious scientist may confess that these
questions have not been replied to by science, but there will still
lurk in his mind the belief that one day science will answer them.
He does not distinguish between nomenclature, registration, and
classification on the one hand, and explanation on the other. When he
has named any newly-discovered substance, force, or phenomenon, he
imagines that he has explained them. He believes that he has accounted
for what is called matter when he has evolved the atom, and that he has
unveiled the secret of life when he has discovered the protoplasm or
the cell.
All scientists are not affected by scientific superstition. They
generally suffer from it in an inverse ratio to the actual knowledge
they have acquired. The pioneer in science generally exhibits less of
this weakness than those who simply act as commentators and elaborators
of other men’s discoveries.
The votaries of certain sciences are less apt to indulge in scientific
superstition than those of other branches. Thus, astronomers rarely
exhibit any such symptoms, while biologists are more apt to do so, and
psychologists are more scientifically superstitious than any other
class of scientists. It might be hazardous to attempt an explanation
of this fact, but may it not be found in the obviousness of outward
infinity, and the impalpability of inward infinity?
Later on we shall have ample occasion to show to what an extent Max
Nordau’s mind has been clouded by scientific superstition.
Finally, it must be pointed out that Max Nordau is an enemy to France.
It is only human in any German. The stupendous armament of France
is ostentatiously promoted with the object of revenge upon Germany.
France, in her sulks over the lost provinces, takes every opportunity
of showing animosity, and this despite the conciliatory attitude of her
Government.
Though nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed since the disastrous
war between Germany and France, the bad feeling between the two
nations has unfortunately been kept up. France cannot forget the loss
of her provinces, and, though the attitude of the French Government
is conciliatory, outbursts of a feeling of hatred against Germany,
accompanied by provocative language on the part of irresponsible men,
constantly occur.
The German people, with a vivid recollection of the French invasion
early in the century, and perhaps taking the expressions of the
war-party in France too seriously, look upon the French nation as
their arch-enemies. By the celebration of anniversaries painful to the
French, and other means, the German Government keeps the animosity
between the two nations alive, and impresses the people with the
opinion that the heavy taxes it has to pay for armaments are made
indispensable by the enmity of France. It, is therefore, natural that
hatred against France should prevail in Germany.
We understand that Max Nordau for a considerable time was the Paris
correspondent of German papers, and we may take for granted that he
would not have been able to please his German readers had he not been
strongly biassed in favour of Germany against France—a fact to which
his work bears ample witness.
Such is, then, the man who, in his undaunted faith in his science and
in himself, in the name of truth and the welfare of humanity, and
undeterred by the penalties of the Great Council and Hell Fire, has
said to his brethren,—to the one, “You are Raca!” and to the other,
“Thou fool!”
CHAPTER II
_DUSK OR DAWN!_
Nordau’s theory is that the educated classes of the world are
degenerating; that the peculiarities in passions, tastes, pastimes, and
moods, bear witness to such degeneration; that the cause must be found
in the physical condition of the brains of such authors and artists as
for the time being have the ear and the eye of the public; that the
remedy against degeneration may be found in a moral quasi-compulsory
supervision on the part of the non-degenerate over degenerate authors
and artists. If we are not entirely exact in this summary of his
postulates and conclusions, it is to a great extent Nordau’s fault,
because nowhere does he give any decided statement of the scope of his
book.
In his first chapter he goes out of his way in order to protest against
the misconception which represents him as having insinuated that the
whole of humanity exhibited signs of decay, and he declares that his
remarks apply exclusively to the educated classes. Were this absolutely
true, there would have been but small occasion for his remarkable
work. But over and over again in the pages of _Degeneration_ he speaks
of the masses as partly affected by degeneration, and of the danger of
the contamination spreading from the educated classes to the masses. He
mentions the extreme Socialists and the Anarchists as the victims of
the mental disease he investigates. And yet he flatters himself that
the proletariat is not as the upper classes are, and bases his opinion
on the fact that they appear satisfied with the old forms of art and
poetry, that they prefer George Ohnet’s novels to the works of the
symbolists, and Mascagni’s music to that of Wagner.
These statements evidently emanate from one who has mingled little with
the people. The truth is that the newest books, the newest music, the
newest pictures, only slowly reach the working classes, and when such
works are the outcome of temporary fashion and mood, they might not
reach them at all. But this by no means proves that the working classes
do not experience the impulses which prompt the predilections of the
upper classes.
If Nordau’s views of the proletariat in general were confirmed by
actualities prevailing among the German proletariat, a heavy load would
be lifted from the shoulders of the German Government. But, judging
from the German Press—the official Press as well as the Socialistic—or
from the speeches of so high an authority as the Emperor himself,
there exists but little of the Philistine contentment with the present
order of things of which the author speaks. On the contrary, the
Emperor complains that the discontented working classes are losing
their respect for things that used to be sacred to them, such as
patriotism, feudal loyalty, religion, etc.
Does Nordau mean to tell us that the pornographic novels of certain
French authors, that the works of Émile Zola and other realists, are
not read by the masses in France? Who then pays for the enormous
editions issued after millions have read them in _feuilleton_? Or does
he wish us to believe that only the aristocracy and the upper classes
in France have been affected by the mysticism which finds its outlet in
the pilgrimage to Lourdes?
As to the working classes in the English-speaking countries, which, by
the way, signify so little to Nordau that he not even once mentions
them in his work, are they not children of their time, and do they
not reflect every tendency, every virtue, and every vice in the
upper classes? Not only would Nordau find, were he to investigate
the matter, that those stigmata of degeneration which he refers to
as such—Individualism and Anarchism—are making big strides among the
English-speaking working classes, but that the taste for criminal and
realistic literature is growing in popularity. He would even find
Wagner’s music intensely applauded by audiences recruited from the
working class.
Far from developing ethically in different directions, the upper and
the lower classes in this country move together, each simultaneously
influencing the other. While the lower classes follow the upper classes
in many things—for example, politics, dress, etc.—the upper classes
obtain their comic songs, their humorous stories, and most of their fun
from the lower classes.
The impartial observer cannot fail to notice the kinship which exists
between the proclivities of the two extremes of English society—the
wealthiest nobility and the poorest labourers. Both these classes are
intensely fond of sports, both degrade sport by betting, both are given
to lavish expenditure, both pride themselves on physical force and
pluck above everything. Both are prone to disregard the sanctity of
marriage. Both indulge freely in the pleasures of eating and drinking.
Individuals of both classes get on together better than they do with
the middle classes. And both are only superficially religious.
Perhaps this remarkable community of tastes and views may account
for what has always been an inexplicable enigma to foreigners,—the
conservative working man.
Nordau classes, among the indications of decay, the yearning for
freedom from outward control and for complete personal independence. It
is true he takes for granted that such yearnings for individual liberty
aim at the realization of bestial propensities now, according to him,
kept in check only by law, police, and public opinion. We shall, later
on, find that he has completely misunderstood the attempts to shake
off all shackles which he has noticed. Here it suffices to point out
that the longing for individual freedom, which manifests itself in a
thousand ways unobserved by Nordau, and in the upper classes takes
the shape of a revolt against conventionality, is conspicuous among
the working classes of Great Britain. This year’s elections have
proved beyond doubt that the tendency towards State Socialism which
characterized the Liberal policy is fast becoming distasteful to the
rank and file of voters. The tyranny, which, in the name of Socialism,
was exercised by the Trades Unions, will soon be a thing of the past.
When at its height of development the Trades Unions hardly comprised
one-fifth of the working classes, and now already the movement is in
full retrogression. The Free Labour Association, though only lately
called into existence, meets with increasing support, and may no doubt
be looked upon as an expression of our working classes’ new-born love
of freedom.
This change of mind, or, as Nordau would call it, this degeneration,
also accounts for the present halt in the advance of the Socialistic
propaganda and the rapid spread of moderate but decisive Anarchist
opinions which in no small degree contributed to the recent
Conservative victory at the polls.
What is here stated regarding the British working classes is true
regarding the working classes of all the English-speaking countries.
Everywhere we find a strong yearning for freedom from control. The
remarkable point about the expressions of this yearning is that, though
the votaries of the revolt against State tyranny have so far not been
able to formulate any complete or practical scheme for the life of
a State, or community, governed by the best instincts of the human
being instead of by law, their views are rapidly gaining ground. This
is especially the case in the United States, where Mr. Tucker, the
editor of a little journal called _Liberty_, is steadily extending his
influence.
The author of _Degeneration_ distorts reality when he supposes that
the upper classes of a country can be corrupt and degenerate, while
the masses conform to that German Philistine ideal—a very poor one
indeed—which Nordau would fain hold up to them. This is proved by the
fact that it is in their relations with the masses that the corruption
of the upper classes becomes conspicuous, and that only through
response from the masses can many forms of such corruptions become
possible.
It would take us too far to record all the proofs that actualities
furnish of this fact. We shall simply point out one of the many
conditions in the masses which promote corruption in the educated
classes, namely, poverty. The appalling, demoralizing, brutalising
poverty in the large modern cities—this poisonous fungus grown out of
modern government and political corruptions, not only kills the sense
of self-respect and decency in its victims, but renders prostitution,
through sheer hunger and suffering, the trade of millions. It is
poverty among the masses which undermines the artistic feeling of the
nation, stands in the way of applied art, and compels the caterer of
popular amusements to appeal to low passions and brutal instincts. Our
epoch is not the first example in history where masses of destitute
people exercise all their ingenuity in corrupting the wealthy citizens
in the hope of snatching some crumbs of their wealth.
Dire poverty it is, with its hovels, its rags, and its diseases, which
gives riches their immense value in the eyes of the people. It creates
a thirst for gold. No man thinks himself safe from falling into the
abyss of modern poverty until he has amassed a large fortune and placed
himself in the position of amassing more. The love of wealth corrupts
Literature, Art, the Press. It is at the base of all financial,
political, administrative scandals. It is responsible for mercenary
marriages, which fill the law courts, pollute society, and contaminate
the home.
The poverty of the masses paralyses the efforts of honest industries,
honest trades, and honest professions. The men who succeed are not
those who benefit their fellow-men, but those who ruthlessly trample
them under foot in their heedless race for gold. It is a well-known
fact that the upper classes are not prolific, and would die out were
they not recruited from the ranks; if therefore the state of the masses
is such as to allow its worst element to rise to influential positions
in society, demoralization of the masses must inevitably produce
demoralization of the classes.
We will leave it to the thinking public to consider to what extent
other conditions of the masses, besides poverty, react in all countries
on the upper classes—what the effects are, first on the masses, and
then on the classes, of corrupt and retrograde churches, compulsory
service in the army, police tyranny, bad and unjust laws, tutelage
under pragmatical Philistines, caste institutions, official newspapers,
State-regulated arts and entertainments, administrative favouritism,
etc.
But Nordau takes no heed of such all-powerful causes of corruption.
He sees degeneration only in the upper classes, and, placing the cart
before the horse, he regards what he considers the degenerated author
and artist as the cause of a state of affairs of which they are the
very last products.
There are many passages in his book that strongly suggest that he is
not completely sincere in his one-sided view. The savage blows he
sometimes deals at the Anarchists bear witness that this form of—as he
would call it—degeneration among the masses caused him a considerable
amount of uneasiness. Judging by the similarity of his language and
that of the Emperor of Germany, he might well be commissioned to brand
both Socialists and Anarchists as wild beasts. Be this as it may, his
few allusions to the corruption of the masses serve to enhance the
untrustworthiness of the signs of degeneration which he points out in
the upper classes.
Among these figure prominently—who would believe it?—modern female
toilets. And why? Not because they are indecent, as they have often
been in other periods, but because they are eccentric. Is there then a
normal dress for ladies? Or what code is there in existence to which
Nordau can appeal? Is it a sign of degeneration to hold that one of the
chief objects of toilets is to be beautiful and to enhance the beauty
of the wearer? And ought a lady who dresses according to this principle
to be put down as a dweller on the border-land of madness? If women
love to dress well, and men love to behold them well-dressed, would it
not be madness to adopt ugly and monotonous toilets?
It is, of course, not difficult to see that the author’s standard of
female toilet is the plain and ugly dress of the German housewife, and
that he has never realized the delight which an Englishman takes in
seeing his wife richly dressed, and in a way that suits her face and
form. If Nordau’s standard of female dress is the severe draperies of
the antique, he does not say so. But, if it be, we must remind him that
the beauty of the classic draperies was borrowed from the beauty of the
forms they revealed or partly displayed.
With the best will, we could not in northern Europe emulate the
Greeks in dress. There are two objections: the climate, which
demands warm covering; the sense of may-be false modesty, inherited
from the early Christian ages, which prevents the display of human
forms. The time will no doubt come when humanity is sufficiently
pure-minded—sufficiently degenerated, as Nordau would probably say—to
dress in clinging draperies, to expose the form more freely indoors
and in warm weather; and who would say that morality would not be
the gainer? A movement in this direction is already apparent. The
skirt-dance represents one stage. The appearance of an actress without
shoes or stockings might well herald a return to sandals, and the
abandonment of the barbarous fashion of cramping children’s feet in
pointed shoes.
But to call the women of European society degenerate because, under the
present circumstances, they do not go about in light tunics, displaying
their feet, their arms, and one leg, is hardly fair.
Our great alienist is very severe on the men of society as well, more
especially for the manner in which they trim their beards. We cannot
help sympathizing with men who wear a double-pointed beard when they
are told that they are on the high road to lunacy because they ape
Lucius Verrius, a gentleman whose portrait they have probably never
seen. Such stigmata of folly could have been pointed out only by a man
whose mind is completely devoid of a sense of the ridiculous.
To anybody who has not a special point to prove at all cost, it will be
patent that throughout the whole course of history educated men never
dressed more soberly than now. In this matter English fashion governs
the world, and the ruling ideas in Englishmen’s dress are durability,
comfort, and adaptability to the occasions on which it is worn.
Continental men may not adhere so strictly to these ideas, but there is
good reason to believe that in a short time they will do so.
Modern room and house decorations are, according to Nordau, so many
indications of degeneration and decay. That there are many rooms
and houses eccentrically furnished and decorated throughout the
civilized world no one would deny. But compared with the number of
houses and rooms chastely furnished and decorated in a manner which
is incomparably more pleasant and attractive than the average rooms,
especially in Germany and England thirty years ago, these abodes of
eccentrics sink into insignificance. As to the decoration of public
halls and places of amusement, we surely notice an improvement which
could not point to degeneration. Hardly in any European town would such
wall decorations be now permitted as disfigured the walls of public
places of amusement and dancing-halls in Germany some thirty years
ago—the Apollo Saal of Hamburg, to wit, the walls of which represented
hell in the worst taste possible.
Here, again, Nordau gives us no standard to go by. He does not tell
us what the house or the room of a rational being should be like, or
to what extent a wealthy man may indulge in a freak, or amuse his
friends by grotesque furniture and bizarre decorations, without being
degenerated.
The enjoyments of society especially present symptoms which cause our
psychologist to tremble for the sanity of the upper classes. Under this
head, we expected him to say something of the increasing taste for
healthy games and sport, for travel, and the amateur practice of the
arts for amusement’s sake. Had he been willing to look at the question
from both sides, he might have said something about the increasing love
of science, especially social science; of good books as well as bad
ones; of the high prices fetched by the paintings of the old masters,
even those not belonging to the pre-Raphaelite period, consequently
real works of art according to Nordau. He might have acknowledged
the improved tone in social gatherings and the marked diminution in
convivial drunkenness.
While sitting in judgment upon the upper classes of Europe, why
should he not have noticed the more serious side of their lives as
well as their enjoyments, as manifested in subscriptions to hospitals
or orphanages, and institutes of every description; sick-nursing
establishments, where ladies of high rank and wealth give their
personal services, sacrifices of time and comfort in the endeavour
to brighten the lives of the poor, to save fallen women, to assist
released prisoners, to protect children and even animals from cruelty?
We say, purposely, nothing of all the charitable work done in
connection with churches, because Nordau and his admirers might not
recognise any results of religious feeling as a proof of sanity.
But all these emphatic and unmistakable indications of the state of
society—at least as valuable as the manifestations of vice, hysteria,
and eccentricity—are ignored. On the other hand, he makes much of the
attempts which here and there have been made, especially in Paris,
with representations appealing to many senses at once; for instance,
pictures exhibited with music, musical recitals in darkened rooms,
etc. Such cases are not only extremely rare, but simply are another
combination of many arts hardly more complicated than that represented
by operas, in which dance[,] music, poetry, and painting are mingled in
order to please.
In what recorded period, and in what nation, have there not been
attempts to create new sources of enjoyment? Why should not attempts
be made at advance in amusements as well as in any other feature of
our civilization? That many of these experiments appear silly, and
end in utter failure, ought to surprise nobody, and scientists the
least. Any one who has tried to invent something new, to ascertain by
experiments some scientific fact, or to solve a physical or mechanical
problem, ought to know that a very large number of experiments are
bound to fail before success is achieved. It is strange to find in
our days a scientist condemning, as the beginning of folly, that
dissatisfaction with existing things which is the primary motor of all
progress and all knowledge. By doing so he ranges himself on the side
of those Philistines who burnt the apostles of progress as heretics and
imprisoned the pioneers of science as madmen.
The unrest which our psychologist notices in the educated classes
exists as well among all the lower classes of Europe, though among them
it reveals itself in other manifestations. It springs however from
the same source—a strong instinctive feeling, largely corroborated by
judgment, that human life in all spheres is, in the present epoch,
utterly out of harmony with nature, with our irresistible instincts,
and all those noble aspirations, on the realization of which our
self-respect, our ease of mind, and our happiness alone can be based.
It is not alone the present feeling of incongruity which disturbs
humanity, but the fast-ripening conviction that we are moving in a
wrong direction inspires despair, pessimism in some, and a desire for
hazardous new departures in others.
This sense of unrest, this craving for change, far from being symptoms
of degeneration, are the first faint indications of renewing vitality.
If decay there be, it is simply the fermentation which precedes
germination.
Two opposing principles, two different systems, two classes of
antagonistic institutions, cannot exist in the same place and at the
same time. When therefore old things have been tried _ad nauseam_ and
constantly found wanting, any unprejudiced man, nay, even an animal,
must experience a desire to destroy them. This feeling naturally
becomes strongest in the man with an imaginative and aspiring mind:
for besides the general disgust of old things, he sees in them the
chief obstacles to better and higher things. The axe must precede the
plough, because the forest cannot co-exist with the wheat-field. The
growing enmity against old dogmas, old authorities, old forms among
the educated and artistic classes, the kindling rage of the masses
against existing institutions, signal the clearing of the rank jungle
and the pestilential swamps prior to cultivation. The leading features
of modern culture have up till now been submission to authorities,
violation of nature, sacrifice of individual liberty, and progression
on Collectivist lines. What wonder then that those who keenly feel the
present degradation of man, achieved under old conditions, should turn,
against these and clamour for liberty, nature, and self?
Nordau, with his German-Philistine ideas, with his head crammed
full of authoritative teaching, and biassed by the clap-trap of the
commonest Collectivism, has utterly misunderstood the phenomena which
he has only partially observed. He does not allow for the mistakes,
the exaggerations, and the eccentricities committed by men who try to
give expression to their feelings, their yearnings, their aspirations,
unhampered by traditional bonds. He is bewildered because a movement
springing entirely from feeling and instinct does not follow a fixed
programme, or some dry philosophical system. He under-estimates the
value of an ethical revolution, because so far it has not reached
its constructive stage; and because the new apostles of liberty,
intoxicated by their self-liberation, run amuck indiscriminately
against all old things, be they good or bad; because the movement is in
the hands of extremists, enthusiasts, and sentimentalists, and still
awaits the guiding hand of the unbiassed logician, the cool-headed
sociologist and economist, capable of harmonizing it with practical
life and moral order.
Nordau, by his book, has forfeited his claim to be one of these.
CHAPTER III
_MYSTICISM AND THE UNKNOWABLE_
Of the good things contained in Nordau’s book which should secure for
it a place in the study of every educated man, his fourth chapter
entitled “Etiology” figures conspicuously. He deals here with the
causes—not the primary economic and sociological causes, but the
immediate causes—of the increasing bodily debilities and mental
derangements characteristic of our epoch. Such facts, or generally
assumed facts, as that the average term of human life is extending;
that the average stature of man has increased since the middle ages,
rendering the armour of mighty men of those days too small for
middle-sized men of our generation; that the average chest-measure
in the German army is expanding; that personal beauty of children,
women, and men is in the ascendant; that many men attain to a great
age without the slightest sign of diminished mental power;—all these
facts might appear so many contradictions to Nordau’s assertions in the
chapter alluded to.
But, though the consideration of them might induce him to modify
some of the minor points, they are not completely inconsistent with
his general reasoning. He warns us that the excessive consumption of
spirits and tobacco, the use of opiates and poisons in general, produce
debility and premature death. Bad food, bad air, bad dwellings, and a
great number of other disadvantages which town dwellers, especially
the poor, must endure, are no doubt at least as harmful to body and
mind as he proves. He rightly attributes a great number of nerve
diseases to the prostration and fatigue consequent upon over-exertion
and over-excitement, which seems inevitable in an epoch of railways,
telegraphs, and machinery.
The whole of his chapter “Etiology,” however, dealing as it does with
the degeneration of the masses, seems to contradict what he says in
his first chapter about the upper classes only being affected by _fin
de siècle_ degeneration, while the masses experience only a more or
less slight touch of it. It also seems to disprove his theory that
degenerate authors and artists are the chief cause of degeneration
among the upper classes, a view which leads him to overlook the
most palpable and most powerful causes for the production of those
psychological phenomena throughout civilized humanity which he notices
only among the upper classes.
In discussing degeneration it is of the utmost importance to know how
the affliction progresses—whether certain authors and artists were
degenerated, and then affected the upper classes—or whether the upper
classes were degenerated and thus produced the degenerated authors
and artists. Nordau seems to vacillate between the two opinions, or
he considers the pernicious influence to have been reciprocal. It
is however clear that he regards these authors and artists, as well
as those members of the upper classes who sympathize with them, as
dwellers on the border-land between sanity and madness. The stigmata,
or the signs of distorted minds, he divides—as they necessarily must be
divided—into bodily stigmata and mental stigmata. The bodily stigmata
are of course malformations of the head, and he lays particular stress
on the conformation of the ear, its more or less projecting position,
the shape of the lobe, or its clinging to the head. It would have
been charity and justice on his part to have explained that, while
these stigmata are frequently found on lunatics and idiots, there are
probably millions of people who bear them without being demented, or
even eccentric.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that there are thousands of
lunatics who possess well-shaped heads and ears.
He relies however but little on the bodily stigmata, and finds them
only on a few of his subjects. He deals, of course, chiefly with the
mental stigmata, and among these he gives mysticism a prominent place.
He quotes from Legrain to the effect that “mystical thoughts are to
be laid to the account of insanity and degeneration,” but Legrain
adds at once that they are observable in two states—in epilepsy and
in hysterical delirium. According to his authority we consequently
know that those who suffer from epilepsy and delirium are apt to be
mystical. But Legrain would probably be the first to object to the
conclusion that all those who are mystically inclined suffer from
epilepsy and delirium.
In his definition of mysticism Nordau says that “the word describes a
state of mind in which the subject imagines that he sees or divines
unknown and inexplicable relations amongst phenomena, discerns in
things hints at mysteries, and regards them as symbols.” But he adds,
“by which dark powers seek to unveil, or, at least, to indicate all
sorts of marvels which he endeavours to guess, though generally in
vain.”
We have divided his definition into two parts, because placed in one
sentence it seems an incorrect and unfair definition, the former part
of which might be used as a proof of degeneration in a perfectly sound
mind, while the latter part is the essential of the whole definition.
As we have already pointed out, science and all researches have utterly
failed to furnish replies to all questions regarding the origin,
aim, plan, and final destiny of the universe and of humanity. Under
such circumstances, the world around us, that which has preceded
it, that which will follow it, as well as ourselves, necessarily
remain mysteries. Can then any one who perceives or divines unknown,
and to us now inexplicable, relations between phenomena and who
discerns mysteries be regarded as a degenerate? All the scientific
facts of which we are now in possession were mysteries before they
were discovered, and the scientists who, guided by slight hints and
sometimes by guesses, have unravelled the marvels of nature, could not
surely be put down as lunatics. It is therefore evident that the phrase
“dark power” is a most essential part in Nordau’s definition, and
that a man can behold mysteries, dwell on them, study them, sometimes
unravel them, and remain a perfectly sane man, and that he only who is
mystical and deals with mysteries in an irrational way is a degenerate.
Nordau says as much in his illustration of the peasant who is a
mystic in his religion and in his belief in the weather-witch, but a
matter-of-fact man in his farming and in his business. But he is not so
lenient to the exponents of the mystic school in art and literature.
With regard to these, he is rather prone to determine the state of
their mind according to that part of a quotation from Morel which he
has italicised in his book, “_a morbid deviation from an original
type_.” The word morbid alone would have sufficed, but he seems to
attach more importance to the other part of the sentence and to regard
all who deviate from an original type as degenerate. He does not allow
for extenuating circumstances in the authors and artists as he does in
the case of the peasant. If he did, he could not class any of these, or
their admirers, among the degenerates, unless he could also prove that
they were irrational in their daily life and their business relations.
He acknowledges that the emotional nature of man has played a more
important part in the world than his intellect, and yet he seems
to have before his eyes an original type consisting exclusively
of intellect and devoid of emotions. If man’s destiny, his moral
condition, his education, his happiness, and his usefulness in the
world, were to be determined chiefly by his intellectual power, the
progress of the race would have been infinitely more slow than it has
been, and the bulk of individuals now alive would be far less removed
from the animal than they are.
It might be contended that, if not all, at least a large number of
religions have brought with them many evils, but, taking a broad view
of the work accomplished by them in comparison, not with what they
would have done had they been more perfect, but with that state which
would have prevailed had they never existed, no unprejudiced historian
will deny that civilization and the progress of our race have been
considerably accelerated through the influence of religions.
No religion is based on logic, and hardly ever were religious precepts
and dogmas accepted exclusively on intellectual grounds. Faith and
reasoning, considerably modified by emotion, have always formed the
basis of religious beliefs.
Not only in connection with religious matters, but in every event and
every development in human affairs, emotion has played an active and
prominent part. Such feelings as love, friendship, ambition, lust,
gratitude, hatred, revengefulness, patriotism, loyalty, chivalry, etc.,
are the great motive powers in the human drama, and when the intellect
steps in it is as their counsellor and their servant.
It is therefore legitimate and reasonable for those who wish to sway
human beings, who wish to educate them, elevate them, to address
themselves to their emotional nature. In the position in which man
is placed—living on a cosmic grain of sand, moving in space by an
inexplicable power at an inconceivable speed, without knowing who he is
and why he is—the mystical must perforce have a great attraction for
him. To be easily impressed by the mystical is therefore one of his
natural conditions, be it good, bad, or indifferent. When the emotional
nature of human beings is appealed to it is as rational for artists and
poets to address themselves to the love of the mystical as to the love
of the beautiful, and therefore there should be a legitimate place for
mysticism in art and poetry.
It is almost inconceivable that an educated, well-balanced mind
should never dwell on those immensities still unexplored, and the
innumerable enigmas still unsolved or insoluble, and content itself
with lingering over those comparatively insignificant truths which
science so far has revealed. To what an extent a man remains satisfied
with quasi-explanations of scientific research depends on the strength
of his imagination. It is pardonable if alienists should look upon
imagination as a doubtful blessing; but though it may appear a
dangerous gift in their patients, there can be little doubt that it is
an indispensable attribute to a well-equipped mind. It is the mental
faculty which most distinguishes man from the animals—the one on which
he could with the greatest appearance of legitimacy base his claim to
divine origin. Dogs may dream and horses may see ghosts, but their
hallucinations are vastly different from the imagination of man, which
allows him to receive and retain almost any number of presentations,
to elaborate them into new combinations, thus reconstructing pictures
of the past and daring conceptions of the future, capable of easy
realization. A powerful imagination is essential not only to the
poet and the artist, but to the engineer, the mechanician, the
statesman,—in fact, to all who set themselves a practical task or a
distinct ideal.
It is the imaginative strength of the scientist which renders him
a pioneer and a discoverer, and without it he is to his science
what the performer of music who cannot compose is to music. From
everyday experience we are justified in believing that the cramming
of the memory, much reading for examinations or other purposes,
and a developed habit of relying on authorities tend to weaken the
imagination in a man. This seems to be confirmed by the theory of
psychologists: that desuetude of a faculty tends to its decay; and
might well be the explanation of the often-confirmed fact that great
discoverers and inventors have seldom emerged from the ranks of the
omnivorous readers of the universities.
In the same manner we may explain what we have before called the
scientific superstition discernible in so many scientists. The more
they are satisfied with their systems, the more they take nomenclature
and classification for adequate explanation, the less they are
attracted by the spheres into which science has not penetrated or
cannot penetrate. There is this similarity between the scientifically
superstitious and the theologically superstitious—that they both
believe that they have explained all, and they thereby place themselves
beyond the possibility of being right; for the mass of unexpected
facts revealed by science, eclipsing as they do the wildest flight of
the imagination, renders it possible for any man to be right in his
speculations on the secrets of the universe save those men who say that
they know all.
It is therefore not surprising that a scientist by erudition, and
especially an alienist, who, by dint of studying the mechanism which
connects what some call the soul, and others designate as the trinity
of the consciousness, the judgment, and the will, with the body, has
persuaded himself that there is nothing beyond nerves, cells and the
gray matter, should look with contempt on imagination, and yet more
so on the love of the mystical, and that his ideal man, his “original
type,” should possess so little imagination as to remain unaffected by
the mystical.
Lack of information and of observation has caused the multitude to
regard a great number of men—distinguished in the eyes of the world
exclusively by their intellectual powers—as non-mystics to such a
degree as to class them as atheists. The majority of such men, though
distinctly at variance with the dogmas and views of established sects,
have been and are, in their inner consciousness, both mystics and
religionists. When in public they have seemingly attacked religion
and mysticism, they have in reality only attacked churches and
superstition. In the judgment of a great many intelligent men the
controversy between Professor Huxley and Dr. Martineau goes far to
confirm this view. When humanity, including scientists, learns to
distinguish between religion and churches, it will be understood that
almost all men in the past and present who have deservedly been called
great, have been religionists, and therefore mystics.
Let us instance Faraday. He belonged all his life to a sect which must
be classed among the mystics, and he died a believer in its creed.
Are we then to class this keen observer, accurate investigator, and
brilliant logician, this daring pioneer of science, this ingenious
unraveller of nature’s secrets, among the degenerates? If we do, where
should we class average scientists, including Nordau? Or should we
place ourselves in the position of the common-sense German Philistine,
and declare that mysticism is not mysticism when it takes the shape of
the belief of a sect tolerated by the police?
But is not Faraday’s mysticism perfectly compatible with a sound mind?
He was one of those scientists with unclouded reasoning powers, whose
knowledge—gained by investigation, not from authorities—had taught him
how little he knew of the great mysteries of creation. He recognised
that our emotional cravings cannot be satisfied by science in its
present stage, but only by emotional realization. Hence his religious
attitude towards the great mysterious power of which he knew nothing,
but whose work became more and more manifest as his investigation
proceeded. What wiser course could a man adopt, who was so capable
of distinguishing essence from form, than to give that form to his
religion which had gratified his emotional nature as a child?
If sound minds may be mystically inclined, if our emotional nature can
be reached by mysticism in poetry and art, and if our emotions are
acknowledged to be receptive to elevating and pleasing impressions,
the pre-Raphaelites could not all have been as degenerate as Nordau
would have us believe. They were, no doubt, emotionalists, mystics,
and even symbolists, and they frankly claimed the right to be regarded
as such. They considered themselves as having a mission, and the fact
that a man throws himself heart and soul into his mission is no sign of
degeneration.
Now, there are walks in life, callings, missions, which involve no risk
to those who undertake them; there are others that involve great risks.
Some callings expose a man to bodily harm, others to mental harm.
Nothing could be more uncharitable and cruel than to revile a man,
to attack his reputation, to wound his feelings, and to lower his
self-esteem, because he returns maimed and invalided after having
fought the good fight.
A shopkeeper, a shoemaker, an author of sensational books, runs but
little risk of damaging either his body or his mind. The sailor, the
miner, the leader of a revolution, exposes himself to great bodily
danger. The man who acquires a vast erudition may dull his imagination
and his judgment; the man who strains his brain to the utmost, who,
perhaps, overstrains it, in the solution of difficult problems, the
man whose mission lies in the domain of the emotions, exposes his mind
to injury. If there be truth in this, mysticism in poetry and art may
cause degeneration in the poet’s or the artist’s mind, especially if it
be a weak one; but to conclude from this that mysticism in art springs
from diseased minds is to confound cause with effect.
If we accept Nordau’s Philistine definition of art and his views as
to its mission, mysticism would have no place in art or in poetry.
He would certainly exclude it, but in doing so he would contradict
himself glaringly. We have already complained that he does not explain
his standards, and that he does not give his ideals. But from his work
before us, it is evident that the standard by which he would measure
poetry is the work of Goethe and Shakespeare, especially the former.
Goethe owes his fame largely to his _Faust_—a mystical work if ever
there was one. The prologue is religious mysticism, the first part is
diabolism, the second part is arch-mysticism, which so far has resisted
all attempts at interpretation. In the same manner _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_,
and other plays of Shakespeare derive their great charm and their
artistic value largely from mysticism.
All this however does not prove that either irrational or dishonest
mysticism is acceptable, and much that Nordau says regarding
pre-Raphaelitism should be taken to heart by the camp-followers of
the movement. In this term we include, of course, those painters
who, unable to draw and paint, try to force their pictures upon the
market by sheer bounce; and empty-headed critics who insolently
assume a mental, or, as they would call it, a spiritual, superiority
by writing obscure, unintelligible rigmaroles in praise of pictures
which attract attention by means of nought but their eccentricity.
This class of people cannot be considered as representing the
pre-Raphaelite movement, nor can they be called degenerate in the
sense Nordau means, for there is a method in their degeneracy which
yields pounds, shillings, and pence. We also include in this category
a class of people whose conceit may border on degeneracy, and who
believe that any one who cannot draw and paint is qualified for a
pre-Raphaelite painter, and who sincerely assume and enjoy the position
as misunderstood geniuses.
As to the crowds in the exhibitions that gather before an
incomprehensible eccentricity made conspicuous by the log-rolling
process, they surely do not all deserve the epithet of degenerates.
Many are drawn there by sheer curiosity; others damn with faint praise,
in order to escape the wrath of the fanatic. There are also, of
course, many who, for the purpose of giving themselves airs, admire
traits of beauty which they really fail to see. The behaviour of these
hypocritical æsthetes is, of course, deplorable, but they yield to a
weakness not confined to the end of our century. Andersen’s story of
the king’s clothes, inspired by a very old German tale, is one of many
evidences of the antiquity of such folly.
The sincere pre-Raphaelites deserve the sympathy of every thinking man,
though they may be guilty of many imperfections. According to Nordau,
the mission of the painter is to serve as a vehicle of beautiful
impressions to the public. A man who fulfilled this mission might
indeed be called an artist, and his painting might be the limits of
painting as such. But this does not prevent a picture from containing
a story, a moral, or the expression of an emotion, if the painter be a
good story-teller, a true poet, and a sound teacher. If a work of art
can thus fulfil two high purposes instead of one, everybody is a gainer
by it, and the fact that it is the embodiment of two arts instead of
one cannot reasonably be made an objection. The artist who succeeds in
thus blending two arts should surely not be called a degenerate.
Ruskin did not, as Nordau confesses, advocate any neglect in the art
of painting as such, but he warned artists not to waste their time on
unworthy subjects. He is a philanthropist as well as a writer on art,
and feels aggrieved when the artist neglects so good an opportunity of
teaching as a well-executed painting offers, and yet more when he sees
art abased in order to gratify sensuality or morbid cravings for the
horrible.
That Ruskin did not so absolutely disregard beautiful pictures which
have no story to tell and no teaching to impart becomes incontestable
when we remember his panegyrics of Turner.
Victor Hugo in his _Notre Dame de Paris_ makes Claude Frollo say,
when he has a book in his hand and the old cathedral before him, that
the one will kill the other, meaning, of course, that books were
predestined to supersede symbolism in buildings and other arts. Nordau
takes for granted that this has already been done. He sees no good
in works of art giving expression to ideas and emotions which could
so much better be described and more clearly defined in books. But
is there not a great inconsistency in first admitting that art keeps
within its rational limit when it presents the beauties of nature to
the public in such a manner as to make them more evident, which is
equal to teaching that nature is beautiful, and then to say that art
oversteps its limits when it teaches, or attempts to teach, anything
else?
If we survey all the means available to humanity for the conveyance
of thoughts and emotions, they present a scale which begins by speech
and ends with music. Though it must be acknowledged that speech only
with difficulty lends itself to the expression of one or a considerable
number of interdependent and intertangent complex ideas perfectly
clear in a sound mind, it is however the best means we possess for
lucid expression. Written prose has the same merit as speech, and may
be used to express the driest mathematical facts, as well as the most
poetical imaginings. Verse, we think it will be generally allowed,
is better calculated to convey poetical ideas and expressions, as it
admits of greater liberty, more stirring language, bolder metaphors,
and because rhythm and rhyme, in virtue of their musical qualities,
appeal to the imagination and stir the emotions.
When to poetry melody is added, it becomes song, a mode of expression
which appeals fully as much to our emotional nature as to our
intellect. When instrumental music is added to song, to evoke emotion
becomes the cardinal object, and intellect receives hardly any
impression. Music without words is the mode of conveying emotions—and
possibly ideas, too subtle, so to say, too spiritual to be analysed by
the intellect—in so distinct a way that the emotions of the composer,
and may be of the performer, are faithfully reproduced in the hearers.
A mutual understanding is thus established between them as clearly as
any understanding arrived at through exhaustive verbal explanation.
Scientists have endeavoured to explain on materialist lines the charm
exercised by music over us, but their explanations obviously never
touch more than the mechanical motion of the sound-waves and the
receptive mechanism of the ear and the brain. Their dogmatizing is
moreover so dry, halting, and one-sided as to convince musical people
that their attempt at explanation is hopeless. Music belongs to the
sphere of emotions, which lie beyond the ken of science, and will be as
long as scientific progression is hampered by the materialist bias.
And yet the most unimaginative scientist will not deny that all the
methods of conveying ideas and emotions enumerated in the above scale,
including instrumental music, are legitimate arts. Why then should
there not be the same latitude allowed to the arts appealing to us
through the sight as to those appealing to us through the hearing? If
the architect, sculptor, or painter, or two of them, or even three of
them, combined in collaboration, wishing to convey an impression, or
to evoke an emotion, why should they not be allowed to do so by any
of the means which fall within their sphere? If they should wish to
evoke emotions similar to those evoked by music, and they can do so by
choosing a certain subject, by introducing certain symbols, or even by
recalling sentiments of the past—the time of our first love, our youth,
or even our childhood,—why should they not be free to do so?
The pre-Raphaelites claim the freedom to thus expand the scope of
pictorial art, to sanctify it, and to make it appeal to the inmost
recesses of our emotional nature; and as the movement was started at
a time when art was in decadence and tended to become subservient,
abroad to pruriency, and at home, to abominable Philistinism, the
pre-Raphaelites deserve a better treatment than they have received at
the hands of Nordau.
That they should commit mistakes was inevitable. It is probable that
they had not realized completely to themselves the exact results to be
aimed at. Like the composer of music, they wished to convey to others
such of their own emotions as they deemed legitimate, beautiful, and
ennobling, and had to grope in the dark, or to trust to momentary
inspiration, for the means. Being, and wishing to be emotional, they
may have neglected their intellectual powers, forgetting that even
when emotion reigns supreme it can express itself truly only by the
aid of intelligence. Vivid emotions and powerful imaginations are not
in themselves stigmata of degeneration, but rather the signs of a rich
mind, so long as they remain under the control of the intellect. It is
only when they run riot, unheeding the criticism of intellect, that the
balance of the mind is imperilled.
In their desire to emphasize the spiritual meaning and the emotional
nature of their works, the pre-Raphaelites may have committed the
mistake of neglecting execution, truthfulness to nature, and the laws
of optics. Finding pictures appreciated by the public in virtue of the
subject and the conception, despite faulty treatment, many of them no
doubt have been induced to realize their ideas and emotions on canvas
before they had sufficiently trained their eye and their hand.
Every educated Englishman will understand that Nordau somewhat distorts
facts and conveys wrong impressions in the account he gives of the
movement. Though the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was dissolved, the
movement has not been so devoid of results as he insinuates. Though the
first exhibition of the Brotherhood was also the last one, pictures
by the same artist have been constantly exhibited, and some of them
have fetched fabulous prices. He says that Millais, amongst others,
has retained that characteristic of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
consisting of minuteness in details, draperies, and backgrounds. Any
one who has seen Millais’ striking portraits, his “Cherry Ripe,”
“Bubbles,” “Caller Herrings,” and other pictures could not possibly
make such an assertion. We must, of course, allow for the circumstance
that Nordau’s knowledge of the pictures he criticises is second-hand.
It is evident that he has not seen Millais’ latest pictures. Had he
done so, he would not have jeopardized his whole system of reasoning
by holding Millais up as an example of degeneration. Here, as in many
other cases, Nordau, while exhibiting an enormous erudition, reveals a
remarkable want of logic. To call Millais degenerate is a desperate way
out of a dilemma in which he has landed himself by asserting, on the
one hand, that those who paint pictures such as Millais painted years
ago are people with degenerate brains, and, on the other, that people
who produce pictures such as Millais paints now are people of sound
mind. If degeneration is the first step towards a high, normal, and
sound development, Nordau has been guilty of much ado about nothing.
Had he ever beheld Holman Hunt’s “Shadow of the Cross” even in an
engraving, he could not in his description of it have committed the
mistakes he has unless his mind is impervious to pictorial impressions.
He says that “the shadow of his (Christ’s) body falling on the ground
shows the form of a cross.” This is not true. The shadow of Christ’s
body falls on the wall, where a tool shelf and suspended tools simulate
a cross. Nordau’s erroneous description will certainly prejudice those
who have not seen the picture against Holman Hunt.
It is natural that the materialist, the pseudo-scientifically
superstitious, and the Philistine tendencies of our age, so eminently
embodied in the mind of Nordau, and against which the pre-Raphaelite
school is a protest, should militate against a fair appreciation of the
tentative departure of these innovators.
The essence of their mysticism and their symbolism is their belief
in what, for lack of a better term, has been called their spiritual
life—the belief that the mind is not a condition of matter, but
that our thinking _Ego_ might have existed before it was incarnated,
and that it will live after our body has decayed. Could our earthly
existence be proved finite with certainty, could any future existence
be proved a vain dream, incompatible with reason, then indeed would
pre-Raphaelitism be the beginning of folly, as, in fact, would most of
the things which now tend to lighten and beautify our lives. We shall
not here endeavour to determine the five-thousand-year-old discussion
regarding eternal life. We shall simply point out that the proofs on
which the so-called materialists base their conclusions are not so
absolutely convincing as to stigmatize their opponents as lunatics.
Any one who has glanced at the development of science from old times
up to the present is well aware of that weakness in the mind of
scientists—especially the non-pioneer scientists—which induces them
to believe that the conclusions they have arrived at, generally in
opposition to predecessors, are the whole truth and nothing but the
truth. For thousands of years it has been the same. For each step
that science has climbed upwards, its votaries, with a few brilliant
exceptions, have believed themselves to be at the top, and have with
scorn rejected, as sheer folly, any suggestion that the step on which
they stand is rotten and that there are sounder steps higher up. The
scientists of other days in their turn looked upon Columbus, Galileo,
and Tycho Brahe as fools. A hundred years ago the scientists would have
laughed to scorn any one who had told them that their senses deceived
them with regard to light, darkness, colours, silence and sound,
and that all these presentations received by our senses were simply
movement or manifestations of energy. The theory which regarded atoms
as minute subdivisions of matter is quite a modern dogma, and yet it is
already tottering to its fall. More rational scientists already speak
of atoms as centres of force, an expression which twenty years ago was
regarded as rank heresy. If the theory that atoms are centres of force
is accepted, with all its consequences, science is on the threshold of
a new departure which may cause the materialists to look small indeed;
for if what to our senses appears as matter is a condition of force,
instead of force being a condition of matter, a vista entirely opposite
to that of the materialists is open to science—a vista disclosing
possibilities before which we might well stand in awe.
Though it is incontestable that invention and discovery have been
enormously accelerated by often apparently wild suggestions by the
imagination, by emotion, and by instinct, it is especially such
suggestions which are visited by the most furious onslaughts on the
part of the superstitious scientists. When these reject as utter folly
imaginings prompted by faith or any other emotions, it is because such
suggestions are not only entirely out of harmony with the scientific
ideas of the moment, but because they appear so extraordinary, so
utterly destructive to the views familiar to them. They would be
less positive in face of suggestions and speculations justified by
emotion, if they did not constantly forget that every scientific
discovery reveals facts which are not only diametrically opposed to
opinions previously held, but also so marvellous as to baffle human
understanding. Bearing recent scientific discovery in mind, no one
will deny the folly of the man who a hundred years ago would have
prophetically declared: “What we now have proved true and reasonable
will in a hundred years be proved error and folly, and what to us now
appears as sheer madness and rank impossibility will then be scientific
truth.”
Any contemporary scientist, unaffected by scientific superstition,
would unhesitatingly acknowledge the probability of present scientific
dogmas being declared errors, and that what would now appear as the
hallucinations of an overheated imagination may become scientific truth
a century hence.
Though the narrow-minded scientist who takes up his stand on the so
far explored speck of the universe has no right to blame the artist or
poet who, guided by emotion and faith, plunges his imagination into
the surrounding abyss of the mystical, which no well-balanced mind
can ignore, it would be both unjust and absurd to blame the prosaic
and plodding scientist who concentrates his whole mind on scientific
details, and, to use a happy metaphor of Nordau himself, is building a
bridge, arch by arch, out into the unknown. It is good that the Alpine
climber should concentrate his attention on the steps he hews in the
ice and the safe resting-point he can find for his feet, and not allow
his mind to wander in the dark precipice below him or among the lofty
peaks he hopes to reach. Man being two personalities, one emotional,
the other intellectual, stands in need of the services of both the
logical scientist and the emotional artist and poet.
Once it has been recognised that the emotions may be conveyed by
pictorial art, we cannot quarrel with the _raison d’être_ of the
pre-Raphaelites, though we might disagree with them as to the means
they are using. They can however justly demand that those who criticise
their means of expression should show the possibility of better ones.
Holman Hunt has aimed at evoking by his pictures a feeling of respect
and admiration for religion, and in many cases has succeeded; and
the means he has employed are a reverential treatment, a style of
old associated with religious representations and suggestions of the
supernatural. Burne Jones, whose object seems to be to emphasize the
higher significance of our spiritual being over our bodily, does so
by giving us pictures of maidens whose beauty is of a kind devoid of
all those attractions which coquetry, roguishness, animal spirits,
and exuberance of health may confer. Their vacant and inward look
suggests a contemplative mood and a yearning to see the invisible. As
if to still further quicken the sluggish imagination of the masses, he
cloaks his figures in draperies and surrounds them by objects which of
old have been used in representing holy people. He comes as near as
possible to the representation of wingless angels, without presenting
anything that could not be seen in reality.
Such pictures may not appeal to everybody, but we have overwhelming
evidence that they do appeal to a great number; and if the belief
in a superiority over animals, in a spiritual personality, in a
responsibility for our development, and in a future life contributes
to our happiness and exercises an ennobling influence on our race, the
pictures of Burne Jones cannot be the work of a degenerate aiming at
the degeneration of others.
What by many is considered Rossetti’s masterpiece, “Dante’s Dream,”
would by a painter, in his capacity of craftsman, be found to contain
many defects, and only one great merit—exquisite colouring. The
conception is eccentric, the surroundings are symbolic and mystical,
and the anatomy is incorrect. There are faults of perspective, some
of them glaring. For instance, the left shoulder of the angel of
love who stands on the left hand of Beatrice, facing her and bending
over her, is partly hidden by Beatrice’s right shoulder, which could
not be possible in reality unless the two figures had only two
dimensions—height and breadth, with no thickness. And yet this picture
has been bought by the Corporation of Liverpool for a large sum, and is
considered as a thing of joy and beauty by a mass of people among whom
Nordau could detect but a few with malformations of the heads and the
ears, and who in the whole of their life have given abundant proof of
practical rationalism far greater even than that of the superstitious
peasant he instances as having a sound mind.
The charm of the picture does not lie in the execution, but in the
conception. It is probable that it evokes exactly the same emotion felt
by Rossetti while painting it. The subject being a dream, the many
symbols tend to throw the spectator into the mood in which the picture
should be contemplated. There is an atmosphere of Sabbath—presentiment
of bliss—which is produced by the introduction of such presentations
which in our youth or childhood have been associated with that day.
The artist has succeeded in intensifying the belief in the sacredness
of love and the consolations which, amid the troubles of life, may be
drawn from the faith in a spiritual existence.
The conceiving and representing of pictures like this, the outcome of
intense emotion, might well endanger the balance of the painter’s mind,
but the soothing influence they exercise on the spectator would surely
assuage rather than excite any restless mind which, deprived of a
profound philosophy and a far-reaching scientific knowledge, must needs
cling to faith.
The painter who produces on the canvas a beautiful scene from nature,
beautiful flowers, or other beautiful objects, pleases and elevates
the beholders of the picture. Nordau admits as much. But he does not
analyse the methods by which this result is accomplished. He would
probably not deny that one of the feelings which such a picture calls
forth is a sympathy with nature and the Creator, and that this sympathy
favours the conception of the distinct idea that the great power of the
universe suggested by natural beauties—as the painter is suggested by
the picture—loves the beautiful, and consequently the good.
The signification of the pre-Raphaelites in the progress of art is
that they strive to teach, in the production of groups and figures,
similar emotions and thoughts to those produced by the representation
of natural beauties. They have therefore contributed considerably
to the elevation of art so far as aims and subjects go. If they
believe that a purpose can be attained only by the imitation of the
unskilled pre-Raphaelite painters, by violating nature, by eliminating
perspective, and by apotheosizing ugliness, they do not further that
regeneration which we believe they are striving for. But there is every
reason to hope that modern art will come out ennobled from the crisis
into which it has been plunged, and that rising painters will see their
way to paint reverently and realize their noblest aims and highest
ideals, represented in naturally beautiful forms, painted with the
greatest skill of a painter proud of his craft.
Whether this hope be realized or not, it seems to us that a
regeneration of art would be impossible without the attempts at new
departure which Nordau has mistaken for degeneration.
CHAPTER IV
_THE BANKRUPTCY OF SCIENCE_
In his chapter entitled “Symbolism” Nordau seeks confirmation for his
theory of degeneration in the tendency, more or less perceptible all
the world over, on the part of contemporary artists and poets, to
have recourse to symbols in giving expression to ideas and emotions
impossible to convey in ordinary language. Every one who has had to
do with intricate syntheses of ideas, even of the driest and the most
clearly definable kind, is well aware that language often appears
inadequate to convey such syntheses from one mind to another. How
much more difficult then must it be to convey in exact language a
presentation conjured up from the imagination, an artistic conception,
a poetical mood, a strong emotion, or a chord of emotions, to use an
expression that may in itself serve as an illustration. The use of
symbols, as we have just used the word chord, has not only enormously
widened the capability of language, but has rendered it far more lucid,
laconic, and agreeable.
A modern orator, or writer, could not possibly dispense with symbols,
for without them his speeches or his books would be intensely wordy,
tiresome, and difficult to comprehend. Language is constantly being
enriched by new symbols, either invented and introduced by authors, or
taken from such literary works as have become classic. Often an author
creates a character or an idea which typifies characters and situations
frequently met with, and for which symbols have long been needed. Thus,
for instance, Andersen’s _Ugly Duckling_ became a symbol largely used
as soon as his fable was published, and when Ibsen’s _Doll’s House_ was
played for the first time in London, one newspaper, which, by the way,
took Nordau’s view of Ibsen and declared his characters impossible, in
another article, if we remember aright, on the subject of marriage,
used with great effect Ibsen’s Nora as a symbol.
But such symbols are as old as language, and the new tendency of
_littérateurs_ who call themselves, or who are called, symbolists,
is not to invent and to use symbols that stand for well-known and
perfectly undisputed characters and situations, but such as represent
new ideas, difficult to define, or undefinable, because incomplete, and
concerning emotions. The same authors are also prone to use symbols
for things, beings, and powers, the existence of which has not been
ascertained by the senses, but simply guessed at, or evolved from
consciousness.
Many such symbols were not symbols when first introduced into the
language, but nouns that stood for things, or beings, supposed to be
perfectly real. Thus, for instance, the word “devil,” which in olden
times stood for a satanic majesty, adorned with horns and tail, has
now become a convenient symbol, a thing only too real, but covering
such immense ground, and presenting such innumerable aspects, that a
symbol expressing the whole conception is extremely convenient. Nothing
is commoner than to hear a clergyman use the words “the devil” in his
sermon, though it be part of his creed and of his teachings that God is
so omnipresent throughout the universe that there is not a square inch
for a personal devil to place his foot on.
It is this kind of symbolism which Nordau is bent on crucifying as
degeneration. As we have already said, there is a general tendency
among artists to indulge in it, in order to produce moods and suggest
emotions. Thus, for example, in the picture spoken of in our last
chapter, “Dante’s Dream,” an atmosphere of love is represented by red
birds, and sleep is represented by poppies strewn on the floor. In
Rossetti’s picture Nordau would have taken objection to such symbols,
though he seems reconciled to the symbols used by Raphael and his
school, and would probably not object to those of German allegorical
painters and sculptors.
It is significant that the symbolism which he most vehemently holds up
as a stigma of degeneration, is that of the modern French poets who
have made religious symbolism their speciality. It is not difficult to
see why these have been chosen as the scapegoats for the symbolism of
every art and every country. It is true they boldly call themselves
symbolists. But this would not be enough to elicit from Nordau a
chapter of forty-five pages. Besides calling themselves symbolists,
they have the audacity to be French. Their symbolism is religious, and,
what is worse, is Roman Catholic, and, what is worst of all, it is
antagonistic to science.
Though the now prevailing love for symbols does not always manifest
itself in a religious way, it is natural for it to find its widest
application in speeches and writings on religion. Religion avowedly
deals with things not of this earth, is based not on knowledge and
investigation, but on faith, and appeals not to our intellect, but to
our emotional nature.
The French symbolists have created greater sympathy with their
religious views than might have been expected in our rational times
because, unlike the Catholic clergy of the past, they treat as symbols
what before were considered as representations of actual facts. They
are not orthodox; and if the Church of Rome is anxious, as it seems
to be, to turn this neo-Catholicism into a means of resuming its
influence, it can only do so by enormously modernizing its fundamental
ideas. It will be interesting to see whether the Church of Rome will
accept the symbolists as co-operators, or finally spurn them as
heretics.
What especially rouses the animosity of Nordau against the symbolists
is the fact that the new movement is based on the supposition that
science is bankrupt, or, in other words, that it has failed in all its
promises to humanity; that it has usurped the throne of religion under
false pretences; and that its incapacity to supplant religion has been
demonstrated by the latest scientific discoveries. According to the
idea underlying the French symbolist movement, science has during the
present century aimed at the destruction of religion, and has caused
religion to be neglected, discredited, and scorned.
Such a movement founded on such premises and aiming at such aims must
be of the greatest interest to any man who watches attentively the
development of our race. To study its true cause, its real nature, and
its real aims should be the desire of every earnest investigator; and
if Nordau falls back on obloquy, indelicate insinuations, and blunt
accusations, after the fashion of the militant _literati_ of the past,
the reason of his animosity is easily explained.
Nordau, like many scientists before him and with him, has taken sides
in the absurd fight—the _querelle allemande_—between science and
religion, which has done so much to discredit both. To the unprejudiced
observer, any scientist who joins in the fray is induced to do so
by his inability to distinguish between religion and church, and
consequently to realize that the whole progress of science during the
present century has had the result, amongst many others, of justifying
such an attitude of mind towards God, the original cause, universal
energy, or whatever scientists choose to call it, which religion
implies.
Whoever distinguishes between church and religion will at once
understand that an ascendency of religious views throughout the world
may be perfectly compatible with the decay of sectarian dogmas, and
that therefore many phenomena which appear to indicate the decay of
religious views—such as church-going, for example—may in reality mean a
deeper religious life. If we take a comprehensive view of that progress
in religious views which has been accelerated by science, we shall find
that church-going, the rosary, and the images of the saints indicate
the preliminary stages of a religious evolution which in its later
development requires truer expressions.
So long as we have such a number of sects and churches, many of which
differ essentially, and all of which differ to some extent, it cannot
affect any one’s feelings to be told that church is not religion.
It is this truth that science has accentuated, and the inevitable
consequence has been that the churches, though they at first might
have vehemently opposed certain scientific facts, and yet more certain
rash speculations founded on them, have afterwards quietly striven to
modify their views and their dogmas so that they should not clash with
absolute scientific truths. That many such attempts at reconciliation
between science and churches have been feeble and absurd does not
disprove, but confirms, the existence of the above tendency. Though
perhaps it would be difficult to give a true definition of religion
as distinguished from church, the conception which every thinking man
forms of it is probably clear enough to allow him to realize that some
churches are farther from the ideal than others.
If it be true that the progress of science has been instrumental in
impelling the development of churches in the direction of a future
religion of ideal beauty and ideal truth, and that such a religion must
necessarily be in complete harmony with scientific facts, then the
animosity of science and religion is to a sound mind incomprehensible.
Yet Nordau unhesitatingly takes for granted that religion and science
are naturally antagonistic. He takes very seriously the assumption of
the French neo-Catholics that henceforth science will have to make
room for religion. Had he any sense of humour, he would not have thus
betrayed how _jalousie de métier_ animates him to no small extent. He
mixes up science and the scientists in a most amusing manner when he
compares the neglected scientist with the idolized saint, and asks,
“What saintly legend is as beautiful as the life of an enquirer who
spends his existence bending over the microscope?” Does our alienist
aspire to go down to posterity with a halo around his head? He regrets
the good old time when the daily Press of that date said, “We live in
a scientific age,” when “the news of the day reported the travels and
the marriages of scientists, the _feuilleton_ novels contained witty
allusions to Darwin, etc.”
Nordau completely denies that there is any foundation for the assertion
of the French symbolists that science has become bankrupt—that it has
not fulfilled its promises to humanity. In order to refute it, he gives
us the long list of scientific achievements to which scientists who
militate against religion have accustomed us, beginning with spectrum
analysis and finishing up with instantaneous photography. He demands
for science the respect and trust of humanity, not only on the ground
of what science has accomplished, but also on the ground of what it
will accomplish.
His faith in his mission deserves sincere admiration, and proves him to
be one of those earnest enthusiasts who alone can advance humanity. But
he does not see that his prophecies regarding future achievements are
not science, but faith and religion—based, it is true, on reasonable
grounds, but still faith and religion.
Nor does he see that his proud asseveration of the achievements of
science, and his prophecy with regard to its future, do not constitute
a refutation to the cry of the symbolists that science is bankrupt.
The promises which the symbolists refer to as being dishonoured by
science, are not of the kind that could possibly be redeemed by the
achievements referred to in Nordau’s splendid list. They allude to
promises not really made by science, but by rash and prejudiced
scientists. These have over and over again proclaimed that religion had
been supplanted by science, and that science could, or else soon would,
explain all those mysteries which religion claimed to explain or to
symbolize, such as first causes, final aims, existence or non-existence
before birth and after death, the origin of evil, the essence of
morality, and so on. Science, according to them, was not only to
bring about perfect serenity in man’s mind regarding himself and the
universe, but to satisfy the mysterious longings and the uncontrollable
emotions, either hereditary, or part of man’s nature, which hitherto
religion alone had satisfied. Science was also to supply rational
motives for purity, morality, self-sacrifice, and all the virtues
and exertions which are indispensable to the elevation of our race.
Finally, science was to transform us into an ideal race, living in an
ideal manner, thus substituting a terrestrial heaven for humanity, for
the spiritual heaven which religion promised for the individual.
Nordau cannot blame the scientists who made these promises; for the
whole of his book shows that he is in entire sympathy with them.
There was a time when the educated world believed in the arrogant
promises of the scientists; when it confidently expected that
mysteries, so far unexplained, would be cleared up within a reasonable
time, and that systems and speculation, which were to take the place
of religion, would gradually be so amended as to become capable of
fulfilling so great an object.
But the rapid scientific discoveries which followed one upon each
other, far from tending to fulfil the promises of the scientists, had
the effect of persuading the world that science was not going to keep
any of these promises. For each mystery it unravelled revealed a series
of new mysteries behind it, and the explanatory task of science grew
with its own progress. In fact, while the explanations increased by
simple arithmetical progression, the mysteries rose up in geometrical
progression.
At the same time better schools, public lectures, and innumerable
periodicals initiated the masses into the secrets of the scientific
freemasonry, and people began to perceive that what they, in their
awe of science, believed to be perfect knowledge of the very essence
of the world-phenomenon was only a series of acute observations, an
intelligent classification, backed by arbitrary speculations and the
superstitious faith in the omnipotence of science, culminating simply
in a barren religion of humanity.
As to eternity and infinity of space, all that science could do
was to tell the masses not to trouble their heads about them; as
to causality, they were asked to regard it simply as “a form of
thought which had nothing to do with the phenomena.” As to morality,
the religion of humanity seemed extremely untrustworthy: for the
removal of all personal responsibility, and the certainty of complete
annihilation after death, seemed to give the strong-minded and clever
people the strongest possible inducement to make their fellow-beings
tools for their own happiness. The promised earthly paradise was not
only thousands of years ahead in time, but was to be constituted on
principles which even a superficial knowledge of economy and sociology
was bound to expose as an Inferno.
It was natural then that a great number of people, unable to climb to
the height of abstract and unsatisfactory reasoning of the kind that
the scientists had attained to, and whose emotional nature utterly
rebelled against a progression which was intended constantly to violate
their best instincts, should spurn science, which offered them no other
compensation than freedom from personal responsibility.
It was not only the hollow arrogance of the scientists and the failure
of science to fulfil the promises of its superstitious votaries which
had created disgust with scientific atheism: the practical results of
the anti-religious tendencies became alarmingly apparent; experience
began to prove that the discarding of all personal responsibility did
not produce the _ultra_ man—_der Uebermensch_—of which the scientists
claimed to be the prototypes.
Many of them had been in the habit of speaking scornfully of those
selfish natures who live irreproachable lives, and who devote
themselves to the promotion of the good of their fellow-men under the
impression that in a future state they would reap their reward. The
atheist-scientist represented himself as a man of different metal: he
was fully as moral as the religionist; he spent his life in serving
humanity, well knowing that his self-control and self-sacrifice
would bring him no reward; he did his duty, not induced by any mean,
religious consideration, but because he was a perfect man.
The lesser mortals, those from whose ranks the symbolists are
recruited, began to entertain doubts of the infallibility of these
first-fruits of the religion of humanity. The very arrogance of these
perfect men told against them. If they disbelieved in the rewards of a
future life, they were not averse to the rewards in this, and eagerly
accepted the money and the distinction their works brought them. There
was especially this about them: they unhesitatingly attacked that
which the masses could alone rely on for moral guidance, equanimity,
consolation, and encouragement—religion—while the religion of humanity
was thousands of years in the future, and thus left the people a prey
to mental bewilderment, doubt, and unrestrained passions. The scientist
stood accused of acting like a man depriving a cripple of his only
crutch, against the promise of supplying his remote descendants with
better ones.
But atheism had a far worse effect on ordinary mortals, who had not
to sustain a reputation as apostles of the new scientific creed.
Convinced that no personal responsibility attached to them, and caring
little for what would happen to the next generation, or still less to
generations thousands of years hence, they tried to persuade themselves
that conscience was an inherited weakness, developed by evolution, or
a product of wrong religious teaching. Wishing to rise above such a
weakness, they did their best to silence conscience, and to live for
self-gratification. In this manner selfishness, if not Egomania, was
strongly developed.
Capitalists and politicians strove to acquire wealth and power,
regardless of other people’s rights, of their own conscience, and of
their sense of honour, so long as their dishonour was known only to
themselves. Society became frivolous, and exhibited the same stigmata
of degeneration noticed before in decaying commonwealths. Art became
lascivious and corrupting; literature became realistic and offensive.
In fact, a host of clever men who ought to have been benefactors of
their race cared not to what extent they ruined and demoralized their
fellow-beings so long as they safeguarded their own health, their own
future, and their social position.
The working classes being told by men, far superior to them in
intellect and education, that their only chance was in their lives here
on earth, and that death was annihilation, began to sympathize with
violent Nihilists and Anarchists, and were less averse to risk their
lives, if it were only to avenge themselves on those who deprived them
of their terrestrial happiness.
But it was not only in the effect on their fellow-beings that the
neo-Catholics, the symbolists, and their sympathizers all over
the world beheld the results of scientific atheism. Many of these
themselves became “frightful examples” of these results. Nordau commits
a great mistake in studying the French symbolists as authors and poets.
It is as children of their times that they should be studied. He looks
upon them as causes of the symbolist movement, whereas we should
have regarded them as the indicators of a remarkable stage in the
development of our race.
It was inevitable that the theories of the scientists should have been
accepted more widely in France than in any other civilized country. In
the English-speaking countries the Churches and sects had not assumed
the same uncompromising attitude with regard to the mediæval doctrines
as the Church of Rome. They had gradually receded from one contested
point after another and many of their old forms and texts were given
a more liberal interpretation. Urged on by the example of the Broad
Church, the Congregationalists, and especially by the Unitarians, the
clergy and the ministers ceased their opposition to any established
scientific facts, though they rejected scientific speculations. The
influence of the scientists in the English-speaking countries tended
therefore to modernize religion, instead of bringing it into contempt.
In Germany, where the people are slow to oppose any authority, and
where they are extremely shy of their real religious opinions,
scientific atheism simply encouraged the free-thinkers existing there
of old and induced a mass of young men to masquerade as free-thinkers
who in reality held no opinions at all, and who were destined to become
devout in their old age.
In Italy and Spain the teachings of the scientists only somewhat
strengthened the hands of the Liberals, but produced no effect on the
Ultramontanes. In Russia, where the nobility and the middle classes
had for a long time been free-thinkers, or perhaps non-thinkers, in
regard to religious questions, the religion of humanity affected only
that portion of the people which was already under the influence of
Nihilism, and tended to render them more reckless.
In France however, and perhaps in such countries as are
directly influenced by French views—for instance, Belgium and
Switzerland,—circumstances were different. The atheism which broke out
with the first French Revolution had begun to subside, the nobility
and the upper classes were the allies of Rome partly by conviction
and partly from policy. In the country districts the _curés_ had
resumed their influence over the peasantry, but the labouring class
in the towns was divided into two camps, the free-thinkers and the
Ultramontanes; and the difference between them was emphasized by the
circumstance that the Ultramontanes were generally conservative in
siding with the powers that be, while the free-thinkers were more or
less extreme Republicans, Socialists, or Communists.
Such was the situation in France when the influence of the scientists
on religious opinion began to make itself felt there. The materialist
views were eagerly taken up by the Bohemians of Paris and by the
extreme wing of the Republican Press. The upper classes read, or
skimmed, the English scientists, and up to the beginning of the
Franco-German war the German philosophers were much in vogue amongst
the upper classes and in literary circles. In this fashion the Church
of Rome had to face an attack differing widely from the French
Revolution. Then the corruption, and the siding of the Church with
those who were regarded as the enemies of the country, exposed it
to open violence prompted by strongly roused passions. During the
latter days of the Second Empire it was assailed in its dogmas with
arms borrowed from scientific research and speculation. The latter
attack was by far the more dangerous. The discontent with the Imperial
Government did much to draw the urban working classes into the ranks
of the free-thinkers, where the theories of the scientists confirmed
them in their new atheism. Parisian society had become atheistic, and
the whole male population of the middle class prided themselves on
their freedom from all religious prejudices. What remained of religion
in France was represented by the old nobility, who had a political
interest in being religious; by the peasants, who were supposed to be
too stupid to grasp the new scientific truths; by old men, who had not
the courage to face the grave without the consolation of religion; and
by the women, to whom, it was confessed even by the most debauched
_roués_, religion gave an extra charm.
When the Third Republic was launched it had a strong atheistic
character, and the working classes in all the cities, the sincere
free-thinkers, patriots, and philanthropists, hoped that under
a Republican form of government the religion of humanity of the
scientists would at last have a fair trial. But they were destined to
bitter disappointment. The new Republic turned out to be _bourgeois_
in the worst sense of the word. Politics passed into a profession.
Politicians and administrators became corrupt. Scandals multiplied.
Even the Press was unable to show clean hands. Wealth became
all-powerful, and the plutocrats acquired an enormous influence which
they did not hesitate to use to their own advantage. Speculators
and adventurers pulled the strings of the home, and especially of
the colonial, policy, and in order to further private interests the
indebtedness of the State was carried to such a point as to threaten
the most gigantic financial catastrophe the world has ever witnessed.
In the meantime the working classes and even the agriculturists
naturally suffered from the result of a system of government which
disregarded their interests. The proletariat of the cities grew, labour
troubles became frequent, wages fell, and poverty rapidly increased.
While this growing penury invaded the homes of the working and
lower middle class of a nation which has only partially realized
the happiness and healthy influence flowing from decent and moral
homes, scientific atheism took possession of the minds of the people,
especially of the men. It urged them to make the most of their lives,
and enticed them into a whirlpool of dissipation.
Scientific atheism was bound to produce a vast increase in immorality
in a country like France, where the Church of Rome, in order to enhance
its influence over the people, favours unhappy relations between the
sexes. The clergy do all they can to estrange the sexes prior to
marriage, and thus prevent pure love and love-marriages, while they
encourage _mariages de convenance_. They are animated no doubt by the
best intentions, but, living themselves in enforced celibacy, have no
idea to what an extent they thus undermine the morality of the people.
As love counts for little in the tying of the matrimonial knot, and the
_dot_ counts for much, French unendowed girls stand a poor chance of
ever getting married. This exclusion of an enormous number of the best
women from the marriage market explains, to a large extent, the many
irregular households to be met with in France. The fact that lovable
and high-souled women accept the position of mistresses has largely
tended to multiply mock marriages. The refusal on the part of the
Church of Rome to permit divorce, and the lovelessness of the regular
alliances, tend in the same direction. The sum total of all this is
that a majority of Frenchwomen have to choose between an unhappy
married life without love, and an immoral one with it. Those who are
forced into the former in a great many cases seek consolation in an
illicit _liaison_; those who drift into the latter become debauched.
While thus the young, respectable, and pure-minded girls are relegated
to schools and nunneries and excluded from all association with
young men, among these licentious pleasure often takes the place of
romantic love. Hence physically and morally unhealthy lives, absence of
happiness, craving for excitement, morbid passions, pessimism, contempt
for life, depraved tastes, hysteria.
Scientific atheism had however only aggravated a state of things
created by sacerdotal influence on social habits. But it was only
natural that a nation, so biassed in social questions as France, should
ascribe the decay of morality and of so many other virtues to the
weakening of that influence which for centuries had proclaimed itself,
and had been considered by the masses as the only check upon wickedness
among great and small alike.
Hosts of young men who entered life with noble aspirations to fight for
high ideals, soon perceived, when left to shift for themselves, that
the society around them irresistibly opposed the realization of their
hopes. They found it difficult, almost impossible, to reconcile success
with self-esteem, love with morality, and their poetical aspirations
with their manner of living. Many, in despair of happiness and success,
or in order to forget their crumbled illusions, threw themselves into
a feverish quest for excitement, in which health of body and mind were
jeopardized.
Awakening to the full consciousness of the depth of their fall, they
could not fail to see that the social system under which they lived
was largely responsible for their miseries. In looking back over
their wasted lives they saw nought but shattered hopes. What they had
forfeited were a happy and vigorous youth, transports of romance, the
love of a pure-minded woman, a strong and active manhood, a chivalrous
fight for the good, the pure, the true, and the beautiful, the respect
of their fellow-men, an ideal home.
The social conditions which they held responsible for their miserable
career, and even for the regret they experienced, could not be laid at
the door of an Emperor or a dynasty: for their country was governed by
universal suffrage. Finding government, legislation, institutions, and
social conditions vitiated, they had to blame Society. They found that
Society was atheistic, and was deprived of the only check and guide
that came within their ken—religion. They were filled with an intense
longing to destroy the atheism which science had created, and to return
to a belief which would re-endow Society with moral order, health,
romance, love, purity, and beautiful emotions.
Science was the enemy, as under the Empire the priest was the enemy.
To discredit it was the first essential step. When therefore the
actual power of science, its actual possibilities, became popularized,
and each successive scientific discovery rendered the prophecies of
the superstitious scientists more and more preposterous, the French
symbolists took up the cry that science was bankrupt.
CHAPTER V
_SYMBOLISM AND LOGIC_
The French symbolists, and all poets and artists who move in the
world of emotions, are invited by Nordau to “take their place at the
table of science, where there is room for all.” Were they to accept
the invitation, how would the emotional nature of our race find
expression? Would it be possible, or wise, to ignore emotions in face
of the fact that our lives are essentially emotional? Or does Nordau
push his scientific superstition to such a point as to believe that
human emotions can ever be investigated by means of the lancet, the
microscope, and the thermometer? In spite of his sneer at Rossetti’s
remark regarding his indifference as to whether the sun turned round
the earth or the earth turned round the sun, he cannot fail to
acknowledge that what humanity yearns for is beautiful and pleasing
emotions, not scientific facts. The glorious sunshine, the balmy
breeze, the radiant flowers, the inscrutable attractions of woman, her
love, her esteem, her faith, the affection of children, the confidence
of our fellow-beings, our trust in the good, our struggle against
evil—such are the elements of life and happiness. Science acquires all
its importance from being the means by which beautiful and pleasing
emotions are safeguarded, and unpleasant emotions are avoided. When
science mistakes its mission, when it attempts to distort and vilify
their expressions, it has become unreal and fatal.
Nordau wishes us to regard science—progressing as it has done by
replacing old errors of our senses by new errors of our senses—as
embodying all facts worth noticing, and to disregard emotions which are
eternally unchangeable.
To turn our back upon emotions and to take our place at the table of
science means to ignore all that is beautiful, lovable, ennobling, and
hopeful, to shut our eyes to the charms of form, colour, motion, and
our ears to music, and to concentrate our attention upon the repast
spread on the table of science: the pleasure of discovering bacteria in
human tissue, the curiosity of counting the throbs of a frog’s heart
after being torn from the living body, the sensation of ascertaining
the effect of the gastric juices on the foot of a living rabbit
inserted into a living dog’s stomach.
We take no side in the question of vivisection, or any other scientific
methods, but without in the least minimizing the great services
rendered, and to be rendered, by science to humanity, we must express
our astonishment that any sound mind, knowing what scientific methods
are, and must be, can seriously suggest that scientific investigation
should supersede art and poetry. If we believed in degeneration, such
opinions would be the first examples of it we should quote.
Poets and philosophers who deal with emotions, so to say with
immaterial phenomena, impalpable to every one of our senses, but
demonstrated as eternally real by their effects, must needs make use
of symbols, or, to be more exact, of more symbols, vaguer symbols,
and bolder symbols than those which naturally enter into language. To
deny them this right is equal to denying the mathematician the use
of the letter _X_, which stands for unknown quantities, and which is
handled by him as dexterously as if it were the most familiar object
in the world. If human beings were not allowed to speak about what
their imagination conjures up, what their feelings prompt, and what
irresistible instincts point to, they would be brought alarmingly near
to the level of the beast.
The French symbolists being poets, might not have formulated into
distinct thoughts what we have said above, but they have certainly
felt it all, and much more. They have felt themselves surrounded by
undefined and undefinable _X’s_ of far greater moment to their lives,
to their happiness, and to their best instincts, than all the known
and half-known quantities of science. In attempting to give expression
to their feelings and to their thoughts regarding the all-important
unknown, and to evoke among their fellow-beings an interest in them,
they have found themselves justified in using any means, including
symbolism, for their purpose.
Nordau has entertained no such considerations in dealing with the
French symbolists. In obedience to his professional prejudices, he
looks for no other causes, no other influences, than those that can be
found in the mechanism of their brains. This is all the more amazing
as he over and over again recognises that external circumstances,
conditions of life and habits, exercise a strong influence on the
brain, or, in other words, that the mechanism which connects the _Ego_
with matter may be influenced by the _Ego_. The result of his criticism
presents therefore a want of fairness which to the English mind is
especially objectionable.
The manner in which he pries into the private life and antecedents
of Paul Verlaine, and the indelicate manner in which he refers to
the personal appearance of the poet, impress us English people as so
many unfair means of giving plausibility to his conclusions. When a
hunchback is good-humoured enough to make fun of his own deformity,
those of gentle feelings sympathize all the more with his misfortune,
and become all the more anxious not to refer to it. When a poet, in
his love of truth and in his anxiety to rouse a certain emotion, makes
confessions, when he instances his own sad experiences and failings,
when he, so to say, throws himself into the flames on the altar of
truth, we in England count it indelicate and unfair to base criticism
on facts thus revealed. Had Nordau read Verlaine’s poetry with an
unbiassed mind, he could not have failed to be struck by the extent to
which the poet typifies the movement going on around him: his failings,
his errors, and, maybe, his bad habits—all this is the fate of millions
who have been induced by the materialist tendencies of recent times
to disregard personal responsibility, and who, after rejecting such
guides as the nobler instincts of humanity had proffered, attempt to
follow the dictates of the lower instincts and animal impulses. His
terrible remorse and despair, while he is still unmoved by religion,
bear witness to aspirations which the materialist would fain deny.
His instinctive groping for the consolations of religion shows to
what an extent he attributes his failings to an irreligious life, and
that he experiences within him yearnings for a happiness which the
gratification of the senses, prompted by atheism, has never afforded
him.
Nordau would object to this expression—the gratification of his senses
prompted by atheism—and would tell us that atheism ought to have
implanted into Verlaine the religion of humanity, and that he should
have sacrificed all his inclinations for the future happiness of his
race. But, surely, it would require a good dose of hypocrisy for a
man, sincerely convinced that death puts him personally beyond any
consequences of his life, to persuade himself that he is practising
a life-long abnegation for the good of posterity. Is it not much
more likely that in so frank a nature as Verlaine’s the disbelief in
personal responsibility would turn him into a devil-may-care vagabond
until he learned in the school of experience the dangerous mistakes of
materialism? Does Nordau not recognise the logic and the frankness in a
young man who, in the exuberance of his animal life, when convinced of
personal irresponsibility, lives up to the motto of a “short life and a
merry one”?
The need of love and affection—a need generally so strongly felt by
all poets—Nordau is pleased to call eroticism, and when the poet finds
that he has profaned love, implanted in his soul by God, Nordau fancies
he has discovered in Verlaine that blending of religious fervour and
morbid eroticism which, when irrational, is a sign of lunacy.
When Paul Verlaine invokes the Virgin Mary, a form of religious
expression which millions of sane people indulge in daily, Nordau at
once imagines he has discovered another trace of insanity. In order to
show that we are not unfair to our alienist, we will quote one of the
poems of Verlaine he refers to, and the conclusions he draws from it,—
Et comme j’étais faible, et bien méchant encore,
Aux mains lâches, les yeux éblouis des chemins,
Elle baissa mes yeux, et me joignis les mains,
Et m’enseigna les mots par lesquels on adore.
“The accents here quoted,” says Nordau, “are well known to the clinics
of psychiatry. We may compare them to the picture which Legrain gives
of some of his patients. ‘His speech continually reverts to God and the
Virgin Mary, his cousin.’ [The case in question is that of a degenerate
subject who was a tramway conductor.] ‘Mystical ideas complete the
picture. He talks of God, of heaven, crosses himself, kneels down, and
says that he is following the commandments of Christ.’ [The subject
under observation is a day-labourer.] ‘The devil will tempt me, but I
see God who guards me. I have asked of God that all people might be
beautiful,’ etc.”
So far Nordau.
Because a mad tramway conductor thinks he is cousin of the Virgin
Mary, Verlaine, who symbolizes in the Virgin Mary the power that draws
him towards the good, is on the road to madness! From this it follows
that, if a mad tramway conductor were to believe himself the cousin
of Professor Lombroso, Nordau’s quasi-worship of that authority would
indicate degeneracy in Nordau’s mind.
One of Nordau’s characteristics is a weak or dull logical faculty,
often to be observed in those who over-study for examination and in
specialists fanatically inclined. Without this peculiarity he could
not possibly have omitted to ask himself the question, “How about
all other worshippers of Christ?” when he concludes that Verlaine’s
mind is degenerate because he speaks devotedly of the Virgin Mary,
while a lunatic labourer says that he follows the commandments of
Christ. Nordau does not see that in this manner he completely gives
himself away, and lets us perceive that it is not the symbolist whom
he considered degenerate, but the whole Christian populations of the
world that have existed during two thousand years, and that still
exist. Only his lack of a sense of the ridiculous, already pointed out,
has prevented him from remembering that the man in his cups considers
himself the only sober man of the company.
The verses which Verlaine has written in praise of a vagabond life
Nordau holds up as a sure sign of lurking lunacy. Are then all poets
who write in praise of a vagabond life degenerates? Is not the true
secret of Nordau’s conclusion to be found in the fact that he entirely
misses the satire against our modern system which underlies Verlaine’s
and other writers’ poems on this same subject? He does the same with
regard to Verlaine’s poem addressed to the demented king, Louis II. of
Bavaria. When we behold the follies of reigning sovereigns, who are
supposed to be in the full enjoyment of their faculties, making such
poor use of their opportunities, degrading and ruining their people,
rousing a hatred against themselves and their dynasty, or striving at
low _bourgeois_ aims, or even, to use Nordau’s own expression, selling
their royalty for a big cheque; when we read of the monarchs of the
past, of their crimes and their meanesses, how can we wonder that the
unfortunate King Louis should inspire sympathy in a poet, and that he
should satirize the so-called reasonable monarchs by eulogizing the
demented one?
Nordau makes much of that form of mental weakness which manifests
itself in echolalia, or the mania of repeating for no reason the
same words and the same sentences. But to deny the poet, who aims at
conveying an emotion and for that purpose wishes to create a certain
mood in his listeners, the use of choruses, refrains, and cadenced
repetitions, he runs counter to the oldest literary tradition in the
world. He would surely not object to repetitions in verses intended to
be sung; and if we are right in placing poetry half way between speech
and music in the list of the vehicles of thought, as we have done in a
previous chapter, euphonies, musicalities of words, and repetitions are
both permissible and rational.
Many poetical emotions may be quickened by reminiscences from
childhood; and a style of writing, or the use of words or sounds,
reminding us of early days, might be the most effective methods
of expression. Thus, for instance, a drowsy repetition of
pleasant-sounding words may be very telling in a lullaby, even if
they convey no scientific meaning, or do not contribute to the sense
of the poem, and so long as they do not distort it. The examples of
repetitions from degeneracy in Verlaine are chosen so unhappily
as to place Nordau in the wrong and Verlaine in the right in the
judgment of unbiassed persons; the one is a serenade, and the other
is entitled “Chevaux du Bois,” in which the sensation of a child on
a merry-go-round is suggested. Another is supposed to be sung by, or
suggests, Pierrot Gamin, that is a young idiot. When Verlaine wishes to
qualify a noun in a manner which is difficult to express in ordinary
adjectives, he, like millions of his fellows, has recourse to the
method of giving a new, or symbolic, signification to an old adjective,
and this, according to Nordau, is a sign of mental degeneration. To
prove his case he quotes such terms as “a narrow and vast affection,”
“a slow landscape,” “a slack liqueur,” “a gilded perfume,” “a terse
contour,” etc. He does not seem to know that the paucity of language
renders such expressions not only legitimate but extremely useful in
many professions and trades, let alone poetry. Has he never heard
of a warm colour, a lively tint, a cold tone, etc.? Are the French
wine-growers mad when they say that wine is heavy, light, full, dead,
alive, slack, round, green, angular, smooth, velvety, etc.?
We are glad to see that he recognises Verlaine’s ability as a poet and
does not find fault with some of his poems. Thus he says of “Chanson
d’Automne” that “there are few poems in French literature that can
rival” it. While rejoicing at the fairness that Nordau here displays,
we must however point out the eccentricity of his logic. He desires
to warn us against degeneration, and therefore points to a poet
whose degeneracy has not prevented him from writing a masterpiece of
literature. It should also be noticed that the “Chanson d’Automne,”
which meets with such ample praise from Nordau, is on the same theme
which underlies other pieces of poetry quoted in his work as examples
of legitimate and sane poetry. When he does intimate that a poet might
burst into song over flowers, trees, books, and twittering birds, but
not over the sympathy he feels in his consciousness with the powers
that have called them forth, simply because science has not so far been
able to analyse and classify those powers, he only shows that he is
illogical enough to proffer his limited view of what is poetical as an
infallible standard of the poetry of the world.
Nordau blames Verlaine and other symbolists for dealing with moods
instead of with definite ideas. But is there a single poet in the
past or the present who did not largely deal in moods, and who did
not labour to give the world an impression of his own feelings?
Nordau’s ideal author—Goethe—has gone further. He wrote a whole novel,
_Werther’s Leiden_, which is little else than a lengthy description of
his hero’s moods.
Another symbolist, Stephane Mallarmé, who in France as well as in
England enjoys a reputation as a poet, or rather as an authority on
poetry, is attacked by Nordau in a manner which suggests other motives
than fair criticism. He gibes at the symbolists and at all who consider
Mallarmé a poet, because he has produced only a few original works and
translations. As our alienist cannot very well put this down as a sign
of degeneration, having treated those who write much as graphomaniacs,
he gives us no other reasons for placing Mallarmé among the examples
of degeneration than that he has “long, pointed, faun-like ears,” a
fact which he seems not to have noticed personally but which he has
obtained, like most of his facts, from a book.
He distinctly insinuates that the admiration for Mallarmé’s poetical
gift indicates degeneration, especially as Mallarmé has written so
little. We meet here again with a striking example of his curious
logic. He imagines that he strengthens his case by quoting from
Lessing, who in _Amelia Galotti_ makes Conti say that Raphael would
have been the greatest genius in painting, even if he had unfortunately
been born without hands. From this, English readers who happen to know
nothing of Lessing or Conti would conclude that either Lessing was
a lunatic or that his character, Conti, was mad. But neither is the
case, and the quotation consequently tells against Nordau. Whoever
would deny that a man cannot be a poet and an authority on poetry
without publishing verse must attach an extremely narrow meaning to
the word poet. If Lessing, or Conti, means by the word painter, not
the craftsman, but the man with the painter’s soul, the symbolist may
surely be allowed to call Mallarmé a poet. Has Nordau never met with
mute poets, blind painters, and deaf musicians? One of the greatest
musicians of the world composed marvellous music while stone-deaf.
Now if we suppose that Beethoven had lost his hearing before he had
mastered the technicalities of music, would he therefore not have
remained a musician?
Nordau is very severe on several other symbolists and certainly does
his best to represent them in an unfavourable light. In order to show
that Charles Morice, the author of _La Littérature de tout à l’heure_
is literally insane and a graphomaniac, he quotes Morice’s rhapsodical
conception of God, which he pretends to take as an exact definition in
order to reduce it to twaddle. To any unprejudiced reader it is evident
that Morice intended to convey by this wild attempt at description how
impossible it is to define God. Nordau’s prejudice against the French
nation becomes palpable when speaking of the fact that the French
language lends itself badly to blank verse and that a freer treatment
of it in French poetry is a comparatively modern departure which by
other countries was taken long ago. He says: “But to any one but a
Frenchman, they merely make themselves ridiculous when they trumpet
their painful hobbling after the nations who are far in front of them,
as an unheard-of discovery of new paths and opening up of new roads
and as an advance inspired by the ideal into the dawn of the future.”
This gratuitous insult of a whole nation gives us a vivid insight into
the working of his mind. He would not have penned a sentence of such
bad taste, and so marked by the echolalia he condemns in others, had he
not been prompted by feelings stronger than his judgment.
CHAPTER VI
_THE LIGHT OF RUSSIA_
With regard to the Russian novelist, Count Leo Tolstoi, Nordau pursues
the same mode of criticism as he employed against other writers. He
also aims at the same object, firstly, to show that authors suffer
from mental aberration; and, secondly, that the public who read their
books do not do so on account of their literary merit, but because the
readers are mentally afflicted in the same way as the authors.
To prove this against Tolstoi and his admirers is no light enterprise,
and Nordau does not acquit himself of his self-imposed task without a
great deal of shuffling.
He allows nothing for Tolstoi’s surroundings, the social condition
of the country in which he lives, and the life he has led, but lifts
him out of all that tends to interpret this ultra-Russian writer, and
regards him as one who has evolved some extraordinary notions in a
studio far from his native land.
He who says Russia says a great deal: for the expression denotes a vast
empire, consisting of many nationalities and races, held together
by a strong pressure, which seems, like the gravitation of huge
heavenly bodies, to be determined by the size of the body from which
it emanates. The inclusion of so many elements does not prevent Russia
from remaining a great and powerful State, provided its Government soon
becomes to some extent rational. The predominant nationality is made up
of genuine Russians, whose characteristics are such as to render them
capable of being, according to their rulers in the immediate future, an
imminent danger to Europe, or a model nation to be followed by the rest
of the world.
The Russian is good-tempered, patient, loyal, generous, kind-hearted,
and superstitiously religious. He is extremely emotional and dangerous
when aroused. His easy-going manners, his immense self-esteem, and his
intense vitality render him an easy victim to the numerous temptations
which aliens are not slow to hold out to him. He is straightforward
and strongly averse to hypocrisy, and when he is convinced that duty
demands from him that he should assist in filling a trench with his
dead body for the artillery to pass over, or to throw a bomb at the
Czar, he will do it without a murmur.
His passiveness, his loyalty, and long-suffering have been cruelly
taken advantage of by a long succession of Governments, chiefly
consisting of aliens. In Russia the most powerful bureaucracy in the
world, composed chiefly of a German element, has taken possession
of the power, and holds to it in a quasi-unconscious fashion, like a
bull-dog unable to relax his hold.
The Government, with such legislation as exists, has gone on for
centuries with scarcely any regard for the well-being of the people,
and the inevitable results are slowly but surely manifesting
themselves, and point to some terrible catastrophe.
The emancipation of the serfs, from which sanguine people, unacquainted
with Russian circumstances, hoped so much, shook the old institutions
to their very foundations, but brought only momentary relief to the
suffering people. The _mir_-eaters, or village usurers, have swallowed
up the land of the peasants, their cattle, and their implements, and
compelled large hordes of people to move about the country in search
of work. Employment is scarce and labour ill paid. The tax-collectors
are as implacable and the Government officials as corrupt as ever.
The tendency—to be observed all over the civilized world—of dividing
humanity into two classes, the wealthy and the poor, has nowhere
developed to the same extent as in Russia. The rich, comparatively
few in number, are becoming extremely rich, but the great mass of the
people miserably poor.
Extreme poverty, intensified by the pressure of the tax-gatherer and
the inhuman methods of the money-lender, has a gnawing effect on a
people living in an intensely rigorous climate, in miserable villages
sparsely scattered over vast monotonous plains.
The Russians being a sentimental people, it is natural that their
forlorn condition should cause them to brood over their sad lives
during the long and lonely winter nights, or that they should be driven
to drown their consciousness in _vodka_.
Such is the stage on which alone a character like Leo Tolstoi can
become intelligible.
But it is not only the powerful influences from external circumstances
which give that direction to Tolstoi’s mind which Nordau insists in
interpreting as a sign of degeneracy. The mode of life and the sphere
of action he has adopted, in pursuance of the large and noble traits
of his character, must have been powerfully conducive to his peculiar
mood and ideas. Nobody who has read his works, even if only those works
Nordau holds to be of the smallest literary merit and fullest of signs
of degeneracy, would ever conceive the idea that Tolstoi’s mind was
weak or distorted. But if this novelist had been driven to lunacy,
it would have been extremely irrational to account for his mental
aberration without considering the outward circumstances that would
have produced it.
Tolstoi’s sympathies were roused, as those of every noble-minded man
would have been roused, by the miserable existence of a people who
possess all the elements of a great nation. In Russia no such ways
are open to the reformer as in free States. There is no Parliament, no
organized political parties, no free Press. A political career is out
of the question, except in the form of a consistent toadying of those
in power, and of a blind obedience to those who crush the people. Any
opposition to Government, or even proffered suggestions, would lead to
exile in Siberia, and abruptly cut short any man’s activity. Tolstoi
had therefore only two courses open to him: either to expatriate
himself and to thunder forth in a foreign Press against the abuses of
the Russian Government, unheard and unheeded by his own censor-ridden
compatriots or to adopt the line of action he did.
In the cities, where the alien element prevails, and where the scum of
the Russian nation congregates, he would be out of contact with his
people. His emotional nature would have revolted against the police
tyranny and spying rampant in the cities, and he would soon have been
landed in the clutches of the authorities. He therefore elected to live
among the peasants as one of them, convinced both by his feelings and
his reason that he would thus directly benefit his surroundings by his
example and form that leaven by which the whole mass might in time be
leavened; while his writings simultaneously appealed to those of his
countrymen who read books, and those who, outside Russia, sympathize
with the Russian people.
We do not pretend to know Tolstoi’s secret thoughts and his ultimate
hopes, but we believe it possible that he may, without being an
irrational enthusiast, or even a dreamer, have reckoned on his writings
and opinions reaching the highest personages in the Russian empire
through being read by all the upper classes of the world. He may have
hoped that, after establishing his reputation throughout the literary
world, and after having become the pride of his own nation, he would
one day dare to speak such words to the rulers of all the Russians as
might save him and his nation.
Whatever may have been his expectations, there can be little doubt that
he has met with dire disappointment, not so much in his personal career
as in his hopes for his fellow-countrymen.
To the framers of paper constitutions and to theoretical
revolutionists, it may seem easy to introduce a new form of Government
and to regenerate a nation, but, to one who, like Tolstoi, is in close
contact with the masses to be regenerated, who has daily experienced
all the frailty of the material he has to work with, who alone tries to
swim against overwhelming currents,—to him, the uplifting of a nation
or a race is a herculean task impossible to approach with the clap-trap
of the modern agitator.
Tolstoi, finding that it is the _morale_ of the people he has to work
upon, that it is in the religious tendencies of his fellow-men that
their strength lies, concludes, with the full consent of his emotional
being, that religious conceptions, different from the Russian orthodox
Church and from the western university theology, must be the foundation
on which he has to build. What therefore is more rational than that he
should plunge into religious speculation, and thus expose himself to
the mistake of adopting religious views which are prompted as much by
the needs of the situation, the circumstances, his own and his people’s
characteristics, as by logical deductions. Greater men than he—Moses,
Mahomet, and others—had done so before him.
Besides, as the postulates he starts from do not spring from exact
knowledge, but from faith and emotion—as all religious postulates
necessarily must do,—and as these, his postulates, are diametrically
opposed to those which Nordau would pre-suppose, Tolstoi’s conclusions
must be the opposite of his; but to differ from Nordau is to be
degenerate.
It is no wonder then that Tolstoi’s books should be more than novels.
He had a higher purpose in view than gathering in royalties and
entertaining his readers. His books are jam with a considerable amount
of powder in them. If, despite this, they have been widely read
throughout the world, ordinary minds would conclude that in creating
them their author has accomplished tasks which alone a mind of a high
order could hope to perform. Our alienist, determined to come to no
such conclusion, supposes that all those who read Tolstoi’s works are
degenerates, and that the large sale of his books is consequently a
confirmation of Tolstoi’s degeneracy.
Would Nordau apply the same kind of reasoning with regard to the sale
of his own works? He would probably; but instead of starting with the
supposition that contemporary readers of books are incipient lunatics,
he would very likely take for granted that the readers who approve of
his works are highly intelligent, and that the great sale they have
attained proves the soundness of his own mind.
In support of his view, Nordau, who fairly acknowledges the great
qualities of Tolstoi as a writer of fiction, has the audacity to
assert that it is not this great quality of his works that has secured
him his world-wide fame, but that it is due to his mysticism, which
a degenerate race prefers to a literary and moral value. The only
semblance of proof he gives for this view is that Tolstoi’s best
works have not contributed to his reputation so much as the _Kreutzer
Sonata_, “an inferior creation, which in the public opinion of the
western nations placed him in the first rank of living authors.” But
who has decided that the _Kreutzer Sonata_ is inferior to Tolstoi’s
other works? Only Nordau, whose opinion runs counter to the “western
nations.” If therefore there is any value in Nordau’s argument it rests
entirely on the astounding fact that the “western nations” are all
degenerate and Nordau alone is sane.
Nordau, like most German bookworms, evidently believes that references
to an authority, however obscure, are enough to prove any assertion. He
has manifestly worked with any number of “conversations-lexicons” and
encyclopedias about him, in quest of some printed confirmation of the
extraordinary opinion that the _Kreutzer Sonata_ is a poor book, and
that the preceding works of Tolstoi alone contain those grand qualities
which Nordau recognises. He finds that Franz Bornmüller, an author of
a biographical dictionary, said in 1882 of Tolstoi: “He possesses no
ordinary talent for fiction, but one devoid of due artistic finish, and
which is influenced by a certain one-sidedness in his views of life and
history.”
It should be noticed that Nordau gives this quotation in order to
show that Tolstoi had not attained any European fame in 1882, that
is, before the _Kreutzer Sonata_ was written; but with that amazing
want of logic characterizing his whole work, he does not see that this
Franz Bornmüller thinks very little of the early works of Tolstoi. He
consequently differs from Nordau, and shows every sign of sharing the
opinion of the “western nations.”
Nordau makes a sharp distinction between Tolstoi’s novels as such
and the philosophy they enforce. He is thereby enabled to give some
plausibility to the sophistical assertion that it is not Tolstoi’s
novels, but his philosophy, which brought him popularity. This
philosophy, which is supposed to prove that Tolstoi’s mind is not
sound, Nordau sums up in the following way: “The individual is nothing,
the species is everything, the individual lives in order to do his
fellow-creatures good; thought and inquiry are great evils; science is
perdition; faith is salvation.” Among these items there is only one
which differs from the views of the bulk of humanity—from that ordinary
common-sense which Nordau so often takes as a standard of sanity, even
in the superstitious peasant. We refer to the item in which he says
that thought and inquiry are great evils. Nowhere in Tolstoi’s writings
can such a nonsensical phrase be found. It is one of those little
touches that Nordau so dexterously applies, or which his prejudice
causes him to apply, in order to strengthen his case in his readers’,
or perhaps in his own, eyes. He appears to ignore such works as _My
Confession_, _My Faith_, _A Short Exposition of the Gospel_, and _About
my Life_, all works built up by elaborate thoughts. The whole life of
Tolstoi has been one of “thought and inquiry,” and all his literary
work is an invitation to think and to inquire. Tolstoi objects only
to such thought and inquiry as vainly attempt to carry the methods of
inductive science into spheres where the observation of our senses
is of no avail, and where their failure tempts us to believe in the
non-existence of that all-important portion of the universe into which
faith alone can penetrate.
That Tolstoi should distrust science, after the presumptuous attitude
which scientists have taken up, will surprise nobody who has read
what we have said about this bankruptcy of science. Many scientists,
including Nordau, have in their gratuitous attacks on religion so
recklessly mixed up scientific fact with scientific speculation, that
they must blame themselves if people use the term “science” when it
would be more correct to employ that of “unscientific speculations.”
That a thinker, who is at the same time the instructor of the ignorant
masses, should look upon faith as a means of salvation, is not new, and
cannot be considered as a sign of mental aberration; for millions of
sane common-sense men have for thousands of years held this opinion.
Even if we apply the word salvation exclusively to society in general,
to the race, or to one nation, leaving out any references to individual
salvation in another world, faith of some kind is the only source from
which it could spring. Scientists of Nordau’s type seem unable to
understand that science means the knowledge of absolute facts which,
while quite capable of undermining and destroying the foundations
on which a more or less primitive religion rests, cannot possibly
come into collision with faith in the widest sense of the term. When
a scientist and a religionist differ about things which have not
come under scientific inquiry—such as the final aim of the scheme of
humanity, for example—the dispute is not between science and faith, but
between two different faiths. Science therefore cannot regulate our
conduct, determine our views, or save a nation. This alone can be done
by faith, be it based on science, on tradition, or emotion. A great
scientific knowledge might be degraded into an excuse for, and a means
of, an irresponsible, selfish, and wicked life; or it might ennoble the
mind, intensify the sense of responsibility, and serve as the means of
rendering great services to humanity. All depends on the faith of the
scientist.
The end of what we may call the era of scientific atheism, now at hand,
presents most deplorable results, as we have already pointed out, of
removing the only foundations of a moral balance available to those who
have not had any opportunity of drawing from scientific studies that
strength of character, and those noble aspirations to be met with in
scientists who have a genuine faith—a faith in their science and in
humanity, if in nothing else. Tolstoi, who, like every thinking man of
our time, had seen the disastrous effects which scientific atheism had
produced, cannot possibly be regarded as of weak intellect because he
rejected scientific superstition and proclaimed faith as the true basis
of conduct and character.
Nordau finds traces of degeneracy in Tolstoi’s question, “Wherefore
am I alive?” and in the manner in which Tolstoi finds a reply to that
question. It seems however that Nordau too has asked, himself that
question, for in his book _Degeneration_ (page 149) he replies to it
in a close, well-reasoned, passage, which deserves to be read to its
full extent. We shall quote only a part of it in order to compare the
reply he himself obtains with the reply obtained, by Tolstoi. After
having shown that the aim of a man’s life is necessarily involved in
the greater question—the aim of the universe—and that such an aim
cannot exist objectively in time or space, he says: “But if it is not
objective, if it does not exist in time and space, it must, in order
to be conceivable, exist somewhere, virtually, as idea, as a plan
and design. But that which contains a design, a thought, a plan, we
name consciousness; and consciousness that can conceive a plan of the
universe, and for its realization designedly uses the forces of nature,
is synonymous, with God. If a man however believes in a God, he loses
at once the right to raise the question, ‘Wherefore am I alive?’ since
it is in that case an insolent presumption, an effort of small, weak
man to look over God’s shoulder, to spy out God’s plan, to aspire to
the height of omniscience. But neither is it in such a case necessary,
since a God without the highest wisdom cannot be conceived; and if
He has devised a plan for the world, this is certain to be perfect,
all its parts are in harmony, and the aim to which every co-operator,
from the smallest to the greatest, will devote himself is the best
conceivable. Thus man can live in complete rest and confidence in the
impulses and forces implanted in him by God, because he, in every case,
fulfils a high and worthy destiny by co-operating in a, to him, unknown
Divine plan of the world.”
We here notice his words: “that which contains a design, a thought,
a plan, we name consciousness.” Now, nobody knows better than the
scientists that so far all scientific discovery has revealed plan,
method, and purpose, in the smallest thing and the smallest phenomena
in the universe. Is it then necessary to be degenerate to believe in
a self-conscious Providence? John Stuart Mill observes that the fact
that we find in nature, especially in human and animal bodies, physical
and mechanical problems solved in the same way as engineers had solved
them long before they knew of such solutions in nature, points not only
to the existence of an intelligent Creator, but to a similarity of His
intelligence to that of human beings.
According to the passage from Nordau, then, the planning in nature
proves a conscious force, a conscious force is synonymous with God, and
the man who believes in God can live in complete rest in his faith.
Tolstoi obtained a reply to his question in a manner which he describes
in the following words:
“It was quite the same to me whether Jesus was God or not God; whether
the Holy Ghost proceeded from the one or the other. It was likely
neither necessary nor important for me to know how, when, and by whom
the Gospels, or any one of the parables were composed, and whether
they could be ascribed to Christ or not. What to me was important was
that the light which for eighteen hundred years was the light of the
world is that light still; but what name was to be given to the source
of this light, or what were its component parts, and by whom it was
lighted, was quite indifferent to me.”
The difference in the two replies is one of words only. If therefore
Nordau acknowledged that a sensible man could ask such a question, and
if the reply of Nordau we have just quoted is recognised by him as his
own opinion, he and Tolstoi would stand very much in the same category.
But Nordau does not think that a perfectly sane mind would ask such
a question; and if it was asked, he has another reply. This reply is
however far from being so clear as the other. “If,” he says, “on the
other hand, there is no belief in a God, it is also impossible to form
a conception of the aim, for then the aim existing in consciousness
only as an idea, in the absence of a universal consciousness, has no
locus for existence; there is no place for it in nature.” From this it
ought to follow that, if a man does not believe in God, there is no
God, and consequently there can be no aim. He then proceeds to argue
that, if there be no aim, it is useless to ask the question, “Wherefore
am I alive?” but that we can ask the question, “Why do we live?”
His reply to this is characteristic: “We live in obedience to the
mechanical law of causality, which requires no plan and no universal
consciousness.”
It is curious to behold how Nordau cannot perceive that his question,
“Why do we live?” implies the question, “Whence the mechanical law of
causality?” and that his reply is simply, “We live because we live.”
Once he has accepted this self-delusion as a solid foundation, his
reasoning again becomes rational, and does not bear on the point before
us. The most astounding part of it is that Nordau considers Tolstoi,
and all others whose instinct, whose emotion, and whose immutable
reasoning point to a cause behind Nordau’s home-made mechanical law of
causality, as thereby showing signs of mental degeneration.
Nordau, in order to prove the confusion existing in Tolstoi’s ideas,
seems to take for granted that the tendency towards Pantheism,
perceptible in the Russian’s reasoning, is utterly at variance with
Christianity. We would simply point out that Tolstoi has his own
Christianity, framed on his own interpretation of the Gospels, and not
any previously existing Christianity, and is therefore at liberty to
proclaim a creed which has a Pantheistic tendency without exposing
himself to the reproach of being inconsequent. But we consider it more
important to notice the fact that the Gospels, far from laying down any
dogmas, are the record of the life of a man—divine or not divine—whose
mission it was to protest against dogmas. He called God “Father,” in
order to speak of universal consciousness only in its relations to man,
leaving it to the doctrinaires and the philosophers to agree as best
they could on the question of Pantheism or no Pantheism. Besides, the
Gospels certainly emphasize the omnipresence of the Creator; and if
this Pantheistic tendency had not existed among the disciples, it is
not likely that St. Paul would have said, “In Him we live, we move, and
have our being.”
The shallow, superficial manner in which Nordau treats Tolstoi’s
ethics is certainly unworthy of him, and amounts simply to a quibble.
These ethics, correctly summed up, “Resist not evil, judge not, kill
not,” which correspond precisely with the teachings of Christ, Nordau
does not regard as ethics, but proceeds solemnly to test them as
expediencies in peculiar cases, and comes to the conclusion that they
are ridiculous.
Must we then conclude that Nordau has no such ethics, but that he
believes it right to return evil for evil,—_vendetta_ fashion,—that
he objects to suffer wrong for a good cause, and that he revels in
indiscriminate murder? Tolstoi’s ethics, as ethics should do, hold
up the ideal for which we should strive, and as a practical test of
them we must consider not the murder and plunder of one good man by
a bad one, but the state which would ensue if all men conformed to
them. The practical moral we ought to draw from them is not that laws
and law courts should be abolished, but that laws should be framed
and law courts should be managed in such a way as to favour a general
acceptance of such ethics. Here again Nordau indulges in illogical
reasoning, and in contradictions of himself. He takes for granted
that humanity is so utterly depraved that if “the fear of the gallows
did not prevent it, throat-cutting and stealing would be the most
generally adopted trade.” This means that Nordau in one place in his
book declares human beings are too good, too noble, too honest to need
any belief in a hell, but in another place declares that they are far
too depraved to do without the fear of the gallows. He forgets that
good ethics have sprung from the good instincts of our race, and that
crime has largely been fostered by bad laws, bad law courts, and bad
institutions.
In one of his stories, entitled _From the Diary of Nechljudow_,
Tolstoi’s hero, Prince Nechljudow, is a most eccentric character,
created probably for the purpose of showing the absurdity of
indiscriminate charity and other impulsive actions of the erratics of
our day. Nordau gives an account of one of the instances in which the
Prince’s selfish way of practising charity is forcibly brought out.
He evidently does this in order that the Prince’s action should be
accepted as an illustration of what Tolstoi means by charity. This is
both absurd and unjust. It amounts to an identification of the author
with the character he represents—a way of insinuating degeneracy in
authors who simply hold it up in their characters as a warning. To thus
mix up authors with their characters is a mistake frequently committed
by unintelligent readers, but it is surprising to find that with Nordau
it is an habitual method.
With regard to the character Pozdnyscheff, Nordau does the same thing.
He takes for granted that the opinions expressed by this character are
those of the author. The passages he extracts from _Short Expositions_,
in which Tolstoi’s own opinions are expressed, in no wise justify such
a supposition.
Nordau’s explanation of the enormous success Tolstoi’s books have
achieved is that it is due to general degeneration among the upper
classes throughout the world. If he could personally meet the hundreds
of thousands of English people who have read Tolstoi’s works, he would
be able to form an idea of the immensity of his mistake. He would find
that the majority of these people belong to a middle class, consisting
of persons who are not overworked and who indulge in none of the vices
of the continental aristocracies. Their muscles and their nerves have
been strengthened and fortified by a healthy education, and by a love
of bodily exercise, sport and even danger, and by a moral life. They
live in a country where the authorities have found that to proscribe
any licentious book is to promote its sale, and where consequently
there is hardly any check upon morbid literature. Yet there is not a
country where less of it is circulated than in England. It is true
that these readers of Tolstoi have not attained to that height of
intellectual development which would permit them to accept Nordau’s
“mechanical causality” as a satisfying explanation of the universe;
but, on the other hand, it would be difficult to find a people so
religiously inclined, and yet so free from superstition and fanaticism.
Some of them may like Rossetti’s pictures, and many of them Burne
Jones’s, but as a rule they have an equal admiration for Raphael,
Tintoretto, Correggio, and others. They cannot be classed among the
mystics on that account. As few of them write books, they cannot be
called graphomaniacs. Nor do they show any signs of being egomaniacs.
Nor have they any physical stigmata of degenerates. The heads of this
class are generally beautifully shaped, and the ears of the women
are by all foreigners who visit this country proclaimed to be the
finest and daintiest ears in the world. Personal beauty among this
class is decidedly on the increase; for each generation seems to be
better-looking, and the youngest is generally the most beautiful. The
latter fact, we may mention, is no doubt due to the increasing tendency
of the upper and middle classes in England to beautify their homes and
to surround themselves with exquisite objects, as well as to a more
intellectual education, pastimes, pleasures, and arts.
Why then must these readers of Tolstoi’s works be classed as degenerate?
It is not denied that in England there are people who exhibit signs
of mental degeneration, but they are to be found more in literary
and political circles than in the close ranks of the upper and
middle classes. We would not undertake to class them under the
headings established by the alienist, and it would be difficult even
for Nordau to do so. Perhaps they are not sufficiently advanced in
degeneracy to be so classed. Such signs as they exhibit are some of
them as old as the hills, and others are clearly the manifestations
of that intellectual and moral daze which generally follows on the
destruction of the religious foundations of belief involved in the
acceptance of belief in scientific atheism. But the most prevalent
form of degeneracy is that which is palpably the result of financial
depression, felt not only in financial but artistic and literary
circles. For reasons which we leave to the economists to explain,
England’s commerce and agriculture seem to have come to a dead-lock.
The result seems to be diminished incomes all round. Many artists,
_littérateurs_, and politicians are at their wits’ end how to make
an income, and there can be little doubt that this has fostered a
certain amount of demoralization. Extraordinary attempts are made
to produce sensational pictures, to write eccentric poetry, to send
forth books that will shock, and to treat of risky subjects on the
stage. Politicians are obliged to make politics a profession, and, as
popularity is indispensable to it as a profitable profession, they
worship majorities. Any one who is acquainted with London cannot doubt
for a moment that these forms of demoralization spring entirely from
a necessity of making a living. Artists, authors, and politicians
of this class are no more inclined to lunacy than the vast class of
people who do distasteful work, as well as those who have to appear
before the public in dangerous but not much esteemed performances. If
the financial depression is destined to disappear, there can be little
doubt that the majority of these signs of demoralization will also
disappear.
There are in this country, as everywhere else, real degenerates, people
who have weakened their brains and moral faculties by drink, debauch,
overwork, or persons who have inherited mental debility. There are
also among us, we regret to say, an alarming number of destitute people
who have been driven into mental derangement by those terrible pangs
that misery inflicts. But all these degenerates care as little for
Tolstoi’s novels as they do for Rossetti’s or Burne Jones’s pictures.
Though English circumstances are vastly different from continental,
there can be no doubt that the causes which have rendered Tolstoi’s
novels popular are the same here as in other countries. The scientific
atheists have introduced into literature a materialist, selfish,
sceptical, pessimistic, and cynical tone which was tolerated by the
public for a long time. On the continent they had Zola and his wretched
imitators, whose books found their way among us, while England has
produced a crop of neurotic storytellers, playwrights, and versifiers,
made up for the most part of masculine women and effeminate men, who
have exploited to the utmost the atheistic vein.
The noble spirit which atheism was to bring to the front somehow did
not take to literature, and the reading classes of the world began to
miss those pure joys which reading used to afford them. The books of
the day offended their religious feelings, their sense of decency,
their loftiest conceptions of the world, and their self-esteem, without
amusing them. The whole literature of fiction had become stilted, and
the morbid and pessimistic authors departed so widely from nature
and evinced so many signs of utter insincerity that the reading world
longed to be face to face with a man who spoke his innermost thoughts.
The world was therefore ready for a new departure in literature.
What wonder then that Tolstoi’s works were well received. They bore
witness to consummate ability, a close study of human nature. They
presented a true picture of social Russia. They afforded an insight
into the Russian mind. His readers experienced the intellectual treat
offered by few books,—that of feeling the presence of a master-mind,
and of following the thoughts of a thoroughly sincere writer, free from
the cheap ready-made materialist philosophy—a man who devotes both his
life and his work, with almost superhuman energy, to the regeneration
of his race.
CHAPTER VII
_THE REAL IBSEN_
In reading Nordau’s chapter on Ibsen, one cannot help wondering why
our alienist has given his book the form he has. The feeling which
the preceding contents of his work have more or less inspired—that
there is a discrepancy between the apparent plan of the work and its
execution—almost ripens into conviction on the perusal of his chapter
on Ibsen.
He says in his dedication to Professor Lombroso: “Now I have undertaken
the work of investigating the tendencies of the fashion in art and
literature, of proving that they have their source in the degeneracy
of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for
manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility,
and dementia.” He also says that he “ventures to fill a void in your
[Lombroso’s] powerful system.” From what he says higher up on the same
page about the power of books and works of art to influence the masses,
and his many hints in other parts of the book, as, for example, in its
concluding pages, we must understand that his great object is to do
what he can to arrest the downward movement of human intelligence.
He thus assumes that there is a degenerating process going on
throughout civilization, but attentive readers of his book feel the
whole time that this assumption, far from being proved to be correct,
rests on data supplied by Nordau, which strongly warn his readers to
accept them only with a grain of salt.
On the other hand, there are a host of indications in all civilized
countries pointing to an increase in intellectual power, moral
strength, and æsthetic refinement. Some of these indications would
probably not be undervalued by Nordau himself: the rapid progress of
science, the increasing education among the masses, the large number of
newspapers and periodicals dealing intelligently with various branches
of knowledge, professions, and trades, the wider application of
scientific methods to industry, wonderful inventions, not the outcome
of discovery, but of intelligent induction, the decay of superstition,
love of investigation, etc. Nordau, having allowed that the test of
a sound mind is its ability to attend rationally to one’s business,
ought to recognize that the growth of intellectual power is manifest in
improved business methods, skill, manufacturing, complicated and daring
financial schemes, ingenious co-operative systems, well-managed and
disciplined trades’-unions, nay, even cleverly laid plots to defraud.
An increasing moral strength is proved by the growth of the altruistic
feeling, the devotion with which the cause of humanity, morality, and
progress is served by people who, thanks to scientific scepticism,
expect no reward in another world; the greater sincerity observable in
all religious bodies, the magnitude of charitable institutions, the
magnificent heroism displayed by captains and crews on sinking ships,
by our life-boat men in attempting to save the shipwrecked, by our
colliers’ efforts to rescue the victims of explosions, etc. The great
victories of the Germans over the French and the complete success
of the commanders’ daring tactics have been largely, and probably
correctly, ascribed to the moral qualities of the German army, while
the utter defeat of the French cannot be ascribed to the want of moral
qualities, but to bad leadership. A quarter of a century has elapsed
since the Franco-German war, but there is no reason to believe that the
moral qualities of the German army have degenerated. That no degeneracy
has taken place in the English, French, and Italian armies has been
proved by the Chitral expedition, by the French war with Madagascar,
and by the Italian operations in Africa.
If, despite these manifest signs of growing intellectual power and
moral strength, Nordau’s deep insight into psychological matters
has revealed to him a mental degeneracy in the civilized world, his
way of investigating such decay, his mode of dealing with it, and
especially the causes he attributes to it, are too vacillating, too
contradictory, and too biassed to inspire confidence. While sometimes,
as in his chapter entitled “Etiology,” he refers to such causes as
the increase in the consumption of spirits and tobacco, the factory
system, overwork, overcrowding—all causes palpable to all who have
given any attention to social questions,—in the rest of his book he
seems to regard certain popular writers and artists as the great
cause of general degeneration who should be specially noticed. This
contradiction cannot be explained away on the plea that his book is
only part of a wider investigation which has already been made, or
might be made, regarding the causes of degeneration, and that, so long
as his work is intended to treat of the influence of literature and
art, his ignoring of other causes is legitimate. If an effect is first
attributed to one cause and then to another, we may be sure that there
is something wrong with the reasoning. We cannot prove first that
the tendency to hysteria, so common in people engaged in a certain
class of business, is due to overwork, and afterwards prove that the
same tendency in the same people is due to Rossetti’s pictures or to
Swinburne’s poems.
Nordau never furnishes an explanation of the enormous importance
he attaches to the influence of writers and artists, and the small
importance he attaches to the more palpable causes of degeneration,
of the existence of some of which he is aware. Nor does he tell us
how he reconciles the two facts, alternately insisted upon by him,
that degeneration in artists is the cause of degeneration in their
surroundings; and again, that the degeneration of their surroundings is
the cause of degeneration in artists and authors.
If such artists and authors as Nordau believes to be degenerate are
the effect of degeneration all round, they are surely the smallest and
least deplorable results, and it was certainly not worth while to write
so bulky a volume about them. Nordau mentions about a score; and what
is a score compared to the mass of humanity, or to the five hundred
million people included in western civilization? A degeneration that
would not have other results than that of producing twenty degenerate
men, who, though they are in many respects a source of enjoyment to
many, may have a grain of insanity in their brains, would not be worth
noticing. If, on the other hand, these supposed degenerates are not
what, to the ordinary mind, they decidedly appear to be—the children of
their time—but the actual causes of such serious psychological effects
which statistics seem to reveal, we are face to face with a phenomenon
which surely demanded a different method of investigation.
The real connection between the causes and the effects should have been
ascertained. For instance, the most alarming feature of degeneration
in England—that weak-mindedness which leads to drunkenness—should
have been connected with the mystical painters and poets, and should
have been proved not to have been the result of those causes which
seem palpable to every man. Then the influence of individuals on the
masses in general should have been ascertained. History offers a wide
field for such an investigation. If it had been found that authors
and artists exercise less influence than other individuals, such as
sovereigns, statesmen, prophets, reformers, revolutionary leaders,
discoverers, explorers, and others, the influence of these should have
at first been studied, and what could not be attributed to them might
have been laid at the door of artists and authors.
In examining history, old and new, we are struck with the extremely
slight effects which have been produced by _littérateurs_ and
artists, and the enormous, all-powerful influence exercised by other
individuals. Books have influenced books, poets have influenced
poets, painters have influenced painters, but the political, social,
intellectual, moral, and æsthetical development of a nation has over
and over again been completely determined by men who have been neither
artists nor authors.
In modern times the same fact is palpable. Has ever the world been
influenced more than by such men as Cavour, Prince Bismarck, Mr.
Gladstone, Napoleon III.? and how might not the fate of humanity
be determined in the near future by such men as, for example, the
Emperor of Germany and the Czar of Russia? On the mental qualities
of the Emperor of Germany depends largely whether Germany is to be
crushed under the army system; whether it is to be ruined by financial
blunderings; whether there shall be peaceful development of its
resources, or war to the knife between its classes; whether healthy
reforms shall gradually clear away its social anomalies, or whether a
revolution of unprecedented atrocity shall uproot its very foundations;
whether its inhabitants shall develop those characteristics to which
peace and happiness are conducive, or those which would inevitably be
fostered if Germany were made the battle-field of modern armies.
On the mental qualities of the Czar depend directly the destiny of a
hundred million people, and indirectly the peace of the world. Russia
is only too willing to progress under an imperial leader. On the
occasion of his accession to the throne and his marriage, millions
of people anxiously scanned his portrait and tried to read in his
features the fate of Europe. The presence of lines supposed to indicate
weak character produced prophecies of clerical domination, opposition
to progress, and death to Russia; while a kindly expression of the
eyes inspired many with hopes of a new era for Tolstoi’s unfortunate
countrymen.
It is not only personages of high rank and sovereign power whose mental
state is of utmost importance to humanity. The political situation
in most countries is capable of producing at any moment a man who,
without being either an author or an artist, might be able to change
the destiny of nations. It is not the opportunity that is wanting,
it is the men. France is panting for a man. The working classes in
America and in England stand in need of a good leader. In Germany
Liebknecht threatens to divide the power with the Emperor. A political
Tolstoi might, at the head of the Russian people, sweep the recreant
bureaucrats from his Fatherland.
It is then sovereigns, politicians, and popular leaders whose
mental state is of the utmost importance, and whose influence may
overwhelmingly determine the mental and moral development of humanity.
An answer to the question whether they are degenerates, or whether
they are of mentally or morally sound mind, is momentous to the whole
civilized world, especially if it be admitted that the minds of the
race are so susceptible of being moulded by the minds of influential
men.
But who are the men whom Nordau blames for the degeneracy for which
he finds the proof in statistics? Poets and artists, whose very names
are known only to the educated classes, and who for the most part
supply what the market demands, or simply reflect the society around
them. The most surprising of all is that he himself denies any power
or any talent in some of these men, calling them—to omit his worse
epithets—such names as drivelling idiots, weak-minded graphomaniacs,
etc.
One condition seems however necessary before a man can receive the
compliment of being called names by Nordau—he must have attracted
public attention. We have therefore said, and repeat it, that his
desperate attempt to make out Ibsen to be a degenerate renders it
impossible to form a clear idea of his object, or of his reasons, for
the methods he has adopted.
Henrik Ibsen aims not at being a prophet, a teacher, or a regenerator
of mankind either by literary or scientific methods. No one can
detect in his works special ethics, or particular religious or social
views. It is characteristic of his pieces—and according to many of
his opponents a great fault in them—that he points no moral, that the
questions involved remain at the end of the piece exactly where they
were at the beginning, that his heroes and heroines are no heroes and
no heroines, and cannot serve as models of conduct. His opponents and
admirers alike complain that they cannot get at his meaning, and that
he will not explain himself. It is therefore surprising that there
should be so much talk about the influence he exercises, and that
Nordau himself should speak about “Ibsen’s dogmas,” “Ibsen’s code of
morals,” and about Ibsen himself as a “reformer.”
Those who speak about Ibsen’s influence on the ethics of our time
cannot, as a rule, give any explanation of their meaning which can
justify the importance they attach to it. They are apt to point to
his influence on the English drama and blame him for certain of its
objectionable features. But to those who understand his pieces it is
perfectly clear that he has not been followed by English dramatists in
such things as have made him famous and popular. They have contented
themselves with imitating certain situations and with referring to some
objectionable feature in modern society, which Ibsen does reluctantly,
compelled to do so by the situation, and in order to emphasize types of
character which are only too common in every civilized country, but are
so closely draped in hypocrisy as to require the great dramatist’s lens
to show them up. His imitators however exemplify entirely exceptional
cases and conjure up characters the prototypes of which it would be
extremely hard to find. He aims at presenting stern reality; they aim
at producing risky situations. Indeed, his imitators cannot be said to
have been influenced by him more than has his brilliant parodist, Mr.
F. Anstey.
In Germany, as in the Scandinavian countries, complaints are sometimes
raised against Ibsen’s influence on women, especially young women.
Our daughters are getting Ibsenized, is the cry raised by a number of
Philistine parents. It is perhaps natural that Ibsen’s influence on
women in those countries, where the staging of Ibsen’s pieces recalls
more familiar presentations should be greater than in England, where
the Norwegian manner of life is but little known. But too much weight
might easily be attached to the difference in acquaintance with Norway.
There is a far more powerful reason why Ibsen’s so-called influence
should appear to be more marked on German and Norwegian women than on
English women.
With the exception of the United States, there is no country in the
world where respectable women are better treated than in England. An
old adage says, with a great deal of truth, that the wife of the German
is his slave, the wife of the Frenchman is his mistress, and the wife
of the Englishman is the queen of his house. The German woman certainly
has of old held a position in her home which might well lead her to
envy the English woman, and as the Scandinavian countries have been
largely affected by Germany in their social manners and habits, the
women of these countries have ample cause for dissatisfaction. Since
the time of Frederika Bremer, a woman’s revolt has been brewing in
the Scandinavian countries, and the aspirations for more liberty, a
more natural life, and more happiness have been constantly becoming
stronger, and were highly developed before Ibsen’s first piece
appeared. Besides, the spread of English fiction in Germany and in the
northern countries of Europe has shown the women of those countries
that a happier life is quite possible.
The road to the realization of such aspirations was however barred by
custom and the selfish view of the question taken by the men. They
had no objection to high-spirited, talented, well-dressed, and lively
women, whose attractions could evoke in them romantic and ardent
feelings; and a great many knew well enough that leisure, exemption
from hard work, good food, plenty of exercise, suitable friends,
artistic surroundings, good books, a fair amount of pleasure, and
considerate treatment were required to transform a young woman into
that feminine ideal which they worshipped in their imagination. But
they repudiated entirely the idea of having such ideals in their wives.
It would have clashed far too much with the traditional type of a good
wife, and to marry one deviating from this type would have set the
whole circle of acquaintances talking. Besides, a wife conforming to
the ideal was considered an expensive luxury, leading to waste of money
which could be much better employed.
Mothers of girls, well acquainted with the marriage market,
consequently exerted all their energy to form their daughters for
the positions they were expected to occupy. House-cleaning, washing,
cooking, darning, etc.,—this was what they had to learn. A demure
demeanour was what they had to practise. The society of men was what
they had to avoid. Romantic ideas had, above all, to be suppressed,
and only such love as would come after marriage, or at least after
betrothal, was considered legitimate and decent.
A great feature in their education was to closely observe the evils and
troubles which followed upon poverty, and how much more comfortable
life would be with a prosperous though unattractive husband than with a
beloved man who might not succeed in the world. The idea of refusing a
proposal of marriage from a well-to-do man, however old and prosy, was
regarded as preposterous, and any respectable girl dreaming of such a
thing would have been considered as a romantic, ungrateful hussy.
As the men seldom married young, the girls were taught to ask no
questions about their past, and were trained to sacrifice all their
ideals of purity, their dreams of love, what a free woman would call
her self-respect, their future happiness, their healthful youth, on the
altar of Philistine respectability.
There are other ways of degrading women besides yoking them with an
ox to a plough, and that they were degraded and de-naturalized the
thinking German and Scandinavian women had felt long before Ibsen
wrote plays. The struggle for better treatment was however extremely
weak and the progress towards emancipation extremely slow. Just
as oppressive government, with its police persecution, gags open
discontent and drives the forces of revolt under ground, so the tyranny
over the German and Scandinavian women—when tradition and prejudice
prevented open manifestations—developed in the hearts of women,
especially among the most gifted, a dangerously strong spirit of revolt.
Already at the time when Ibsen began to write there were numerous
but isolated outbreaks. The old treatment, which generally resulted
in turning the married woman into a dull, despondent house-slave, a
soured invalid, a nagging scold, or a gossiping zany, began to produce
scoffing Aspasias, neurotic adventuresses, and here and there avenging
furies.
This tendency to revolt among the women was stronger in Norway than in
the other countries, because it developed parallel with that ethical
awakening—the new _Aand_[1]—which during the latter part of this
century has taken possession of so many Norwegian minds; also because
the strongly imaginative and contemplative character of the Norwegian
people, and the intensely emotional nature of their women, led them
to brood over their wrongs in a thoroughly Norwegian fashion. Better
education and wide reading tended in the same direction.
[Footnote 1: _Aand_, the Norwegian for spirit, inspiration.]
Ibsen has therefore not Ibsenized the Scandinavian ladies. He has
simply seized upon a social phenomenon and, understanding its gravity,
has held it up to his contemporaries for a study and a warning.
Nordau, having committed the egregious mistake of believing that Ibsen
has invented whereas he has in reality only copied, and that a social
phenomenon which is natural to intellectual and moral progress is a
result of Ibsen’s writings, is, in his capacity of the most German of
Germans, naturally wroth with Ibsen for representing as a social evil
what a normal sound-minded common-sense German—the very type of the
non-degenerate—would consider as a useful and comfortable arrangement.
There are several excuses for Nordau’s belief that Ibsen misrepresents
reality. The improvement in woman’s status in society has no doubt
advanced more in Germany than in the Scandinavian countries. It is
possible that the Dowager Empress’s influence as an Englishwoman has
not been so great as is generally supposed, but there can be little
doubt that English novels, from Charlotte Bronté’s _Jane Eyre_ upwards,
have considerably furthered justice towards German women. The close
business connections between Germany and England, the numerous Germans
who have had a long experience of English life, have no doubt done much
to spread English social views in Germany.
The German women may therefore now have less cause for discontent and
revolt than the Scandinavian women, and it is excusable if the Germans
consider that they treat them fairly and well.
To observing Englishmen who visit Germany it is however clear that the
whole Philistine idea of the housewife is still prevailing in that
country. A great number of husbands consider it a distinct advantage
to be able to throw off all restraint in their own homes and to compel
their wives to accommodate themselves as well as they can to their
whims, their habits, their indulgences. That exasperating type, the
house-tyrant, which is found in all countries, and not seldom in
England, is especially prevalent in Germany.
German men are well aware that their wives have nothing in common
with the fascinating ideal woman of their imagination, and they are
quite satisfied that it should be so. Their work, their studies, their
profession, or their business demands all their attention, and they
could not dream of dismissing them from their minds when they enter
their homes. A woman who would distract her husband’s attention from
such important subjects would be an impediment to his success, while
the typical housewife, by her cares and ministrations, furthers it.
Like most men, Germans have chivalrous leanings, and enjoy a courteous
intercourse with ladies, but it is generally not their wives who reap
the advantages of this taste. It is the other ladies, those they
meet in society, and not seldom do they muster all their powers of
gallantry, all their means of pleasing, and all their faculty to amuse
in the company of women of light character, often in every respect
inferior to their wives.
It is those German women who feel that their happiness and their
lives have been sacrificed, not for their husbands, but to a vicious
conception of married life, who sympathize with the women of Ibsen, and
have thus contributed largely to the fame of that dramatist in Germany.
Ibsen has not Ibsenized the German ladies, but his pieces have revealed
the existence of a grudge long harboured by German women.
It is only just to record that, though Englishwomen, especially those
who live and are treated up to the English ideal, as we mentioned
before, live under much happier circumstances as children, girls,
_fiancées_, and wives, there are many of our countrywomen whose
marriages have been a cruel disillusion. Many Englishmen marry too
young, before they know their own minds, and under the feverish
impulse of a first love. When such young husbands are thoughtless,
selfish, or when they have made a bad choice, a miserable married
life is the result. In a great number of young households happiness
prevails, thanks to the strong-mindedness and tact of the young wife,
who can take care of herself and of her husband also. But thousands of
marriages turn out utter failures, not for want of love, but from the
husband’s utter ignorance of how to take care of his wife’s health,
beauty, and happiness.
Though it is the fashion in this country not to adapt but to translate
literally Ibsen’s pieces, there would be no difficulty to so adapt them
as to render them exact representations of the state of many an English
home. And this is sufficient to explain his fame in England. Here,
as on the continent, it is the selfish, mean, bullying husbands who
cannot find any sense in Ibsen’s pieces, and who are extremely shocked
at what they consider Ibsen’s perversion in attempting to enlist, by
inexplicable devices, the sympathies of the audience for the erring
wife, when these should be vouchsafed to the husband, who appears to be
such a respectable, common-sense man.
When Ibsen thus calls attention to the importance and the gravity of
the feeling of revolt which has long rankled in the minds of thinking
women all over the world, and which manifested itself long before
Ibsen’s pieces were known outside Norway, he cannot fairly be said
to be responsible for the growing discontent. In reality, he has
rendered the world a great service: for the new views and aspirations
of modern educated women can neither be suppressed nor ignored without
considerable danger to society.
In order to understand that the demand for the purification of
marriage is not a transitory whim, it will suffice to consider who
made the marriage laws, and, what is more important, who inaugurated
the traditional views concerning them. Men alone did. Not the young
men, who would be largely swayed by the yearning for true love and
by chivalrous considerations, but the law-makers of old; that is to
say, elderly men of influence and fortune. In the olden times, when
the foundations of social customs were laid, the rights of women
were considerably less respected than in our days; and under such
circumstances the law-makers did not feel called upon to consider woman
to any large extent, but made laws and introduced customs which suited
themselves. What they wanted was, firstly, to marry young and beautiful
wives, despite all objections that might be raised against their
age, their looks, or their characters, and without much troublesome
courtship; and, secondly, to keep their young wives in subjection by
sheer force and legal compulsion.
It is not reasonable to suppose that the fair sex should submit for
ever to such treatment, and, as the women in the English-speaking
countries have already gained large concessions, it is natural that
their sisters in the rest of the civilized world should struggle for
reform.
It is therefore difficult to see why Nordau should consider Ibsen’s
influence so dangerous to society as to deem it necessary to hold him
up as a degenerate. The enigma becomes more puzzling when we find that
Nordau frankly allows that Ibsen has great merits and great talents.
He says, for instance: “Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and
power.” “He has the gift of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike
and impressive manner that which has excited his feelings.” “He has
the capacity for imagining situations in which the characters are
forced to turn inside out their inmost nature, in which abstract ideas
transform themselves into deeds, and moods of opinion and of feeling,
imperceptible to the senses but potent as causes, are made patent to
sight and hearing in attitudes and gestures, in the play of feature,
and in words.” “He knows how to group events into living frescoes
possessing the charm of significant pictures... not like Wagner, with
strange costumes and properties, architectural splendour, mechanical
magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with penetrating vision into the
background of souls and the conditions of humanity.... But he does not
allow the imagination of the spectator to run riot in mere spectacles;
he forces them into moods, he binds them by his spell in circles of
ideas, through the pictures which he unrolls before them.” “The power
with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches a situation, an
emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much higher than his
skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time... Each of the terse
words which suffice him has something of the nature of a peep-hole,
through which limitless vistas are obtained. The plays of all peoples
of all ages have few situations at once so perfectly simple and so
irresistibly affecting.”
Further on he again says: “It must be acknowledged that Ibsen has
created some characters possessing a truth to life and a completeness
such as are not to be met with in any poet since Shakespeare... None
the less no poet since the illustrious Spanish master (Cervantes) has
succeeded in creating such an embodiment of plain, jolly, healthy
common-sense, of practical tact without anxiety as to things eternal,
and of honest fulfilment of all proximate, obvious duties without a
suspicion of higher moral obligations, as this Gina.... Hjalmar also
is a perfect creation, in which Ibsen has not once succumbed to the
cogent temptation to exaggerate, but has exercised most entrancingly
that ‘self-restraint’ in every word which, as Goethe says, ‘reveals the
master.’”
We have quoted somewhat lengthily from this eulogy of Ibsen in order
to render justice both to him and to Nordau. There is no passage in
Nordau’s book which displays more insight into dramatic art and a more
intelligent appreciation of some of the subtle but marvellous merits of
Ibsen’s plays. We should not have thought it possible that so keen an
appreciation could have been formed without seeing Ibsen’s pieces acted
in the original language. This eulogy becomes all the more valuable
when we remember that it emanates from one of Ibsen’s opponents—from
a man who would fain restrain Ibsen from writing at all, and who
evidently has not paid any attention to the slow but important social
struggle which Ibsen so frequently illustrates.
Most people who have read these and other acknowledgments on the part
of Nordau of Ibsen’s talent, will be struck with the reckless manner
in which Nordau defeats his own object. He wishes to warn the world
against “degenerates” of Ibsen’s type, and at the same time praises him
as few writers have been praised, seemingly without considering that in
this manner he inspires thousands of young writers with the ambition to
be degenerates as Ibsen is.
To the average reader Nordau suggests the idea of the impossibility
of reconciling so much power, genius, talent, and craftsmanship with
decayed mental faculties. This all the more as Ibsen’s pieces are
financial successes, and he consequently shows a solid capacity for
the management of his own affairs, which, as Nordau has already told
us, and every alienist would tell us, is the safest test of a sound
brain. The conclusion seems inevitable that Nordau is either utterly
wrong when he sees all these merits in Ibsen’s work, or else when he
considers him to be degenerate.
In examining the grounds on which Nordau strives to establish his
theory of degeneracy we shall no doubt find that the latter alternative
is the true one.
Nordau first impeaches Ibsen’s reputation for realism, but takes
this term in its most literal sense. The stage has its limitations,
and the dramatist must have a certain licence in the creating of
his situations. Ibsen is not called a realist because all that he
represents on the stage is in closer conformity with reality than the
representations of practically any other dramatist ever were, but
because his characters, besides being individually true to nature, are
types—strongly coloured types, it may be, but not too strongly coloured
to be understood by an average audience. In a piece not intended to be
played the characters may be more delicately moulded, but when they
are to be grasped in a few flashes before the footlights they must,
like the statue intended for an elevated position, be hewn in bold
proportions.
In order to show how unreal Ibsen is, Nordau asks whether it is
probable that the joiner, Engstrand (in _Ghosts_), wishing to open
a tavern for sailors, should call upon his own daughter to be the
odalisque of his “establishment.” By using the word “odalisque,” and
by placing the word “establishment” between inverted commas, he gives
a distorted idea of the tavern Engstrand is going to open. It is a
question of a real tavern, not of an “establishment.” Girls in similar
taverns in Norway are of course exposed to temptations and sometimes to
insults, but they are by no means necessarily unchaste. In selecting
the employment in the tavern, Ibsen succeeds in giving an insight into
the Philistine character of Engstrand, who for the sake of money would
risk his daughter’s reputation, but who could always fall back on the
excuse that he did not intend to ruin her.
Nordau may be right when he says that no Paris doctor would have told
Oswald Alving in _Ghosts_ that he had softening of the brain. But Ibsen
does not say “softening of the brain”; he makes Alving say “a kind
of softening of the brain,” an expression which might very well be
Oswald’s interpretation of what the doctor had told him in very guarded
words. Moreover it is not as an alienist that Ibsen has gained his
fame; it is as a dramatist.
Nordau quotes as another example of unreality, the sense in which the
term “society” is used by the characters in the _Pillars of Society_.
This is an error into which Nordau has evidently been led by reading
a bad German translation of the piece. Ibsen’s characters do not
mean “social edifice,” as Nordau pedantically will have it, but the
well-to-do people in the community.
Again, he thinks that excuse very unreal which Berneck gives to his
foreman, whom he has not taken into his confidence. But this unreality
is precisely what Ibsen wishes the public to see, and he has evidently
not accentuated the unreality sufficiently, as this has escaped even
Nordau. Nordau does not find the speech of Pastor Rörlund realistic
enough. The fact is that the speech is a delightful parody, in no way
exaggerated, of those addresses which toadying sycophants all the world
over are in the habit of delivering to a magnate whom they desire to
propitiate. Any one who has heard such a speech in Norway will be
amusedly surprised by its comic realism.
It would be tiresome to go minutely into the proofs of unreality
Nordau finds in Ibsen’s pieces, and the bare mention of the following
examples will suffice to show the futility of his attempt. He considers
it impossible for a man of forty-three to inspire love, and this in
Norway, where people develop and ripen so slowly. He thinks it unreal
for an excitable girl to describe as a storm on the sea the passion
which induces her to encourage her rival’s suicide, and then when
the rival is out of the way patiently to devote a year and a half
to gaining the love for which her sin was committed. Our alienist,
who displays throughout his book an utter lack of the sense of the
ridiculous, finds the scene between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger
in _The Lady from the Sea_ ridiculous, a scene which thousands of
audiences have followed in breathless silence and with deep emotion.
The puzzle is why Nordau is so anxious to show that Ibsen is not a
realist, and how his not being a realist can possibly be construed into
an argument in favour of his insanity. Are then all the people who, as
a matter of taste or as a matter of business, supply the public with
unrealistic dramas to be considered more or less demented? If this is
the case, what becomes of the mental sanity of Nordau’s great model,
Goethe, the author of the intensely unreal _Faust_?
Referring to the theory of heredity, frequently alluded to in Ibsen’s
works, Nordau says he cannot preserve his gravity when Ibsen displays
his scientific or medical knowledge. Here again we are tempted to refer
to the sandal-maker and the sandal-strings; but there is actually no
occasion to do so, because Ibsen displaying his medical knowledge is a
picture conjured up by Nordau’s own imagination. We do not know what
Ibsen does in his private life, but in his dramatic works he does not
display his medical knowledge. What suits Nordau’s purpose to give
as Ibsen’s opinions are the opinions of his characters, who, being
true to nature, speak as their prototypes in reality speak. It suits
Ibsen’s dramatic purposes to make use of certain views on heredity,
and he is all the more entitled to do so as such opinions are very
prevalent nowadays, and not without exercising a considerable influence
on people’s minds. Ibsen may have exactly the same opinion as his
characters give expression to, or he may think the very opposite,
but those who thoroughly understand Ibsen’s method will be convinced
that he would not commit the mistake, so common among dramatists, of
allowing his characters to reflect the author’s personality. When
Regina, in _Ghosts_, in reply to Mrs. Alving, who is harping on
heredity, says, “What must be, must be... I take after my mother I dare
say,” she does not express Ibsen’s opinion about heredity, but that
fatalistic notion which is unfortunately extremely common among women,
especially when in trouble or at fault, and a reference to her mother
is only a confirmation of her fatalistic belief, at which she clutches
that she may rid herself of her responsibility.
If we must look for a tendency in Ibsen’s works, it might be found in
his attempt to show up this generally prevailing weakness in will and
character which Nordau himself finds everywhere and which he calls
degeneration. Regina, as well as Oswald, are “frightful examples” of
this weakness, and in placing them on the stage Ibsen has the same
object as Nordau, namely, to exhibit a deplorable defect in modern
society. Ibsen may therefore be looked upon as Nordau’s co-operator,
and even precursor, because Ibsen’s characters are types of that very
degeneration which Nordau desires to combat. In fact, the importance
that our alienist attaches to Ibsen’s characters suggests the idea
that if there were no Ibsen there would be no Nordau. By the aid of an
extremely confused and distorted reasoning, he condemns Ibsen for that
very weakness which he, like Nordau, has discovered in modern society
and incarnated in his characters as a warning to his contemporaries.
If we had not a strong objection to the _tu quoque_ argument, and were
not resolved to avoid it, we could here say a great deal about Nordau’s
condemnation of Ibsen’s supposed illogical references to heredity,
while Nordau himself yields to the temptation of using the absurdest
logic in order to discover supposed proofs in favour of his own pet
theories.
Even supposing that Ibsen did believe in heredity, is he not in harmony
with his time? One does not require to be an alienist or a biologist
to understand that the Darwinian theory of evolution is the theory of
heredity; and one does not require to be very old to have observed
that the characteristics of parents often repeat themselves in their
children. In his criticism of Ibsen, Nordau seems to go too far when
he casts discredit on the theory of heredity, with regard to which he
himself goes to an extreme when he attributes to heredity the lurking
belief in a personal God in the inmost recesses of the consciousness of
certain scientists. The manner in which he refers to little Hedwig’s
blindness will certainly induce his readers to infer that he himself
does not believe in cases of hereditary blindness—an affliction
which has however come within the knowledge of many. Nordau, in his
purposeless eagerness to tear Ibsen down from his pedestal, seems to
imagine that he would further his object if he could show that Ibsen
is influenced by the religion of his childhood, of his youth, and of
his country. To be influenced by such religion has been the case with
many sane people of strong mind, especially in countries where the
morality implanted in young children is based entirely on religious
instruction. Even when a man ceases to believe literally all that has
been taught him, it is natural that his religious thoughts should mould
themselves on the early impressions, which then become symbols instead
of fact. This is especially natural with people whose walk in life has
precluded them from giving that absorbing attention to psychology and
biology which to a sound mind is indispensable before it can master,
or believe, the scientists’ theories of “mechanical causality,” and
the annihilation of the conscious _Ego_. Nordau, like many other
scientific enthusiasts, seems to labour under the impression that all
the loud-voiced people, who affect complete irreligiosity, and who pose
as free-thinkers, are really convinced that the scientific discovery
of yesterday, which might be upset by the discovery of to-morrow,
sufficiently explains the world and themselves. This is far from being
the case. How often when we scratch the atheist do we not find the
superstitiously devout. How many men could be found in the world who
are so capable of satisfying all their curiosity regarding the unknown
by scientific theories that they might be quoted in support of the
artificiality of religious instincts? They would certainly number very
few. And yet scientists of Nordau’s stamp are apt to regard such men as
the only really sane ones, and the rest of humanity as to some extent
degenerate.
But how does Nordau know anything about Ibsen’s religious opinions? He
simply studies the characters in Ibsen’s pieces and takes for granted
that Ibsen must necessarily hold the same opinions as his characters.
This absurd assumption, indispensable to his purpose, leads him
sometimes into ridiculous dilemmas from which he escapes in a not less
ridiculous manner. When he finds that Ibsen has _dramatis personæ_ of
diametrically opposed opinions and beliefs, he does not know which
of them represents Ibsen’s opinions and Ibsen’s beliefs. Determined
not to notice the simple fact that none of them represent Ibsen’s
views, he falls back on the expediency of declaring that, because his
characters differ, Ibsen does not know his own mind, a fact which in
our alienist’s view points to degeneracy.
He quotes copiously from Ibsen’s pieces in order to show that those
characters who have committed evil deeds, without having resigned
themselves to being utterly bad, yearn for confession. From this
we must conclude that Nordau considers a longing for confession in
those who have sinned as an obsession and as pertaining to stigmata
of degeneration. To make capital out of this, Nordau sticks hard to
his assumption that Ibsen’s object is to preach some kind of creed by
proclaiming his own opinions through his characters. Few people in the
world really know what Ibsen’s final object and real aims are; but his
immediate object, it will be granted, is to show his contemporaries
what they really are, and so sternly and so cogently does he pursue
this object that, while other dramatists show their spectators the
defects of others, Ibsen lays bare their own.
In showing sinners’ yearnings for confession, Ibsen could not therefore
be wrong unless a longing for confession in sinners is unreal or
unusual. Far from being unusual, we find it in almost every human
being, from the innocent child down to the brutal criminal. The police
and law-court reports in England frequently relate cases in which
men and women confess crimes which would never have been discovered,
simply to satisfy a conscience yearning for confession. We have nothing
to do here with the question as to whether this first step towards a
better life is longed for in obedience to an instinct implanted in the
emotional nature of man by a Creator, or whether it is the consequence
of an inherited tendency originated by religious teaching and moral
civil laws. We have only to deal with the fact that the conscience of
all evil-doers, and especially of those who are willing to abandon
evil and return to good, prompts them to confess. Nordau has only to
consult a Catholic priest in order to learn how strong and general this
yearning is.
It must also be remembered that confession, if not to priests yet to
God, is part of the Lutheran creed prevailing in Norway, and that
consequently confession is regarded by the people as the test of
true repentance. Though auricular confession is not a sacrament in
the Lutheran Church, the Norwegian ministers could tell Nordau how
often sinners and criminals ease their consciences by confessing to
them. It is hardly possible to write a serious dramatic piece without
representing a struggle between good and evil. And how then could Ibsen
write dramas true to Norwegian life, without instancing that yearning
for confession which is the outward sign of the inward struggle between
good and evil?
Nordau instances the French assassin Avinain, who before being
guillotined gave out as his life’s motto “Never confess,” as an example
of a strong and healthy mind—or, at least, he regards this motto as one
which only a strong and healthy mind can follow. On the other hand, he
regards confessing men as men “in whom the mechanism of inhibition is
always disordered, and who therefore cannot escape from the impulse to
confess when anything of an absorbing or exciting character exists in
their consciousness.”
In this comparison Nordau omits the chief factor—the religious opinion,
or the philosophy which necessarily determines whether the confession
is a sign of strength or weakness. If the murderer Avinain was a
confirmed atheist, and if his emotional nature was such as to glorify
murder, then he had no impulse to confess, and consequently required no
strength of mind to resist confession. If the man who glories in what
is good—or, to use an expression of Nordau’s, who has social instincts,
and consequently believes that confession is his duty and an heroic
action—should shun the ordeal and prefer to spend the rest of his life
as a self-despising hypocrite, this would be weak-mindedness. Of course
Nordau may always argue that to believe in the good and in personal
responsibility is in itself a sign of degeneration. But this would be
simply to place the question on another plane, where we have already
discussed it.
What is said here about confession applies equally to what Nordau says
about redemption. It is not, as he states, an obsession of Ibsen’s, but
a symbol very natural to a people of strong religious feelings. His
characters could not possibly express their ideas and their emotions
in any other way than that in which they have been in the habit of
thinking all their lives.
Nordau cannot rid himself of the obsession that the dramatist must
necessarily take a side in the squabble between religion and science,
and between the devotees of different social panaceas, and seems
exasperated because he cannot get at Ibsen’s real opinion on such
questions. When he persists in his egregious error of taking the
opinions of Ibsen’s characters as those of Ibsen, his mind gets into
a maze, which leads him to the conclusion that it is Ibsen’s mind,
not his own, that has got into a confused state. It is very common to
find a man, who, by dint of study or by natural talent, has become an
authority on one subject, so far losing his power of self-criticism as
to believe himself a universal genius, capable of dogmatizing on every
subject under the sun. It is this conceit that induces successful
men to imagine that their natural specialty is not that one which has
rendered them famous, but some other specialty for which in reality
they have no aptitude whatever. A successful comedian believes himself
to be hardly dealt with because he is not acknowledged as a tragedian.
A musician considers himself an authority on the drama. The poet thinks
he ought to have been a politician. Biologists imagine they would shine
as social reformers.
It is because Ibsen has not yielded to this weakness, because he has
not the conceit to lay down the law on questions outside his own
province, but simply aspires to be a dramatist, that Nordau complains
so bitterly of Ibsen’s omission to express a distinct opinion on all
sorts of subjects on which Nordau burns to break a lance with him. He
tilts against the opinions expressed by Ibsen’s characters with the
wasted fury of Don Quixote attacking windmills.
We are at a loss to account for the contradictions of which Nordau
appears to be guilty. Much of what he says in the latter part of his
essay on Ibsen is in direct contradiction to what he says in the
earlier part, where his praise of Ibsen’s talents and abilities is
conspicuous. We will give an example of what we mean. He says at the
beginning of his chapter: “Each of the terse words which suffice him
[Ibsen] has something of the nature of a peep-hole, through which
limitless vistas are obtained.” Towards the end of it he says: “Thus
Ibsen’s drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny bazaar. When one
looks through the peep-hole, one sees at each shaking of the cardboard
tube new and parti-coloured combinations. Children are amused at this
toy, but adults know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass,
always the same, inserted haphazard and united into mystical figures by
three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of the expressionless
arabesque.”
Can this contradiction be the result of his great trust in authorities,
and has he made use of two that clash, or does he write for writing’s
sake, differently each day according to the mood he happens to be in?
When Ibsen’s characters give expression to their yearnings for greater
personal liberty, for a revolt against social traditions which threaten
to wreck their lives, and which they have beheld wrecking the lives of
hundreds around them, they are intended by the dramatist to show what
is going on in modern society. Nordau of course concludes that Ibsen is
an egomaniac who resents any bonds on his worst instincts. Supposing
that Ibsen shares personally that same longing for more individual
freedom which Nordau so warmly deprecates, it is evident that they
differ simply because Nordau starts from the supposition that men’s
instincts are necessarily bad, and Ibsen from the supposition that they
are good.
The fundamental difference in opinion mainly springs from the different
circumstances amongst which the two men have been born and brought up.
The German, who has all his life been impressed with the necessity of
officialism and police government, who has lived under the impression
that his castle would be attacked by a lower caste when free to follow
its inclinations, would naturally attach great importance to existing
institutions. If he at the same time be illogical enough to sap at the
root of that great order-producing institution—religion—and beholds
that this safeguard is becoming more and more unreliable, he naturally
looks for something to take its place.
The German social system, so unjust to the working classes, has
naturally embittered the people and enlisted a number of working men
into the revolutionary parties, and this growing army of so-called
enemies to society naturally alarms the German middle-class man and
prejudices him against the proletariat. Passions and destructive
instincts, instilled by long suffering, he is apt to regard as human
nature from which the worst must be expected. This explains many
of Nordau’s contradictions. He wishes to abolish religion because
its abolition would glorify science, but he wishes to retain the
marriage laws because he fears that without them an unspeakable state
of immorality would ensue. He denies a divine plan in creation which
might account for the moral instinct in man, but he does not believe
that morality has sprung from the only remaining source, namely, man’s
experience of the advantages of morality. His habit of bowing to
authorities causes him to believe that morality and a pure family life
are the result of the marriage laws, and not that the marriage laws are
the result of man’s love of morality and of a pure family life.
The Norwegian is born and brought up in a country where liberty has
been the basis and safeguard of moral order; where few police are found
in the cities, and where, throughout vast tracts of country, man’s good
instincts are the only police; where the peasant and working classes
have no desire or intention to attack the wealthy; where the people
are religious because they are honest and not honest because they
are religious; where self-esteem and justice would take the place of
religion were it to crumble. The Norwegian has noticed that the poor
are more generous than the rich, that the people are more honest than
their officials, that the free man and woman are more moral than the
tied ones, and that liberty elevates and oppressive laws degrade. If
the Norwegian seems to attach little importance to legal marriage, it
is because, in cleansing it from mercenary considerations and other low
motives, he hopes to base it on such foundations as moral instinct,
love, self-respect, honour, and possibly on religious belief, and
thereby make it a life-long reality. It is not to gratify low instincts
and licentious passions, as Nordau would have it, that he wishes for
reform. He may be mistaken in his motives, but this is no excuse for
attributing vile motives to him.
Nordau is not the only one who is puzzled by the many peculiarities
of Ibsen’s plays. Like him, many English theatre-goers wonder why
his best types and his leading characters, as a rule, are so void of
nobility, fine feeling, and high principles; why he always places his
scenes in small towns, and not among the romantically wild country
and the picturesque peasants, as Björnsen and Jonas Lie have often
done; why he represents the so-called respectable and official classes
in so unfavourable a light; why his women seem to be morally and
intellectually superior to his men.
In order to elucidate these questions and many other peculiarities
in Ibsen’s plays and characters, as well as some of the reasons why
a German critic should disapprove of Ibsen, it should be remembered
that in Norway two cultures have met and struggled—the German and
Scandinavian—but have not blended.
Of the Scandinavian nations, the Norwegians may be considered as the
extreme type. While they differ from the Danes and Swedes considerably,
they differ still more from the Germans. Their characteristics arise
not only from race, but largely from surroundings and modes of life.
The genuine Norwegian people have of old lived scattered over a vast
area of country, separated by high fjelds and broad fjords, foaming
torrents and dense woods, only sparingly communicating with each other,
and still less with strangers, and hearing little of the outside world,
they have grown into a silent, thinking, and deep-feeling nation.
They have inherited from the old Viking times an unquenchable love of
liberty, and all their institutions, their customs, their principles,
have developed in freedom, and such virtues as they have and of
which they are most proud, are the outcome of personal independence.
Accustomed to personal danger on the snow-clad mountain-paths, in the
vast forests, and in small open boats upon the stormy fjords, they
have acquired an extraordinary degree of self-reliance. Unused to,
and distrustful of, foreign ways, and seldom successful in foreign
countries, they harbour an intense love of Norway and for anything
Norwegian; and while they may conceitedly think that everything that
is Norwegian is great and noble, they certainly endeavour to put a
stamp of nobility and greatness on everything that is Norwegian. They
are proud, generous, loyal, hospitable, and can never be persuaded
that lowly circumstances or poverty could possibly be an excuse for an
unroyal conduct.
Born and bred amid snow-capped mountains, deep valleys, perpendicular
rocks, a jagged, stormy coast—the whole wearing an air of solemn
and lonely grandeur—the Norwegians are a meditative and highly
imaginative people. The stirring natural phenomena peculiar to the
country cannot fail to stimulate their imagination. The snow-storms,
the ice-avalanches, the light summer nights, the brilliant moonlight
diffused over the abrupt mountains, the dark forests and the glittering
fjords, the raging storms from the Atlantic, the flaming midnight
winter skies, the sunsets which so wondrously illumine the whole
coast-line—such scenes, such pictures, sink into their minds and
quicken their emotions.
What wonder, then, if they are full of folk-lore and the supernatural
has for them an irresistible charm? They are superstitious, and believe
that their actions and lives are influenced by gnomes, fairies, and
trolls. Old heathen ceremonies for the propitiation of the spirits are
still in vogue. They are deeply moved by music and poetry, and have a
strong predilection for all that is heroic and great.
It is not surprising that in German translations of Norwegian
writings—for which Nordau blames Ibsen’s degeneracy—adjectives should
have taken a new meaning; for in Norway they have been influenced by
nature’s grandeur. When Norwegians say “great,” they mean great as the
fjeld, great as the boundless ocean; when they say “silent,” they mean
silent as the wood in the short summer night. Consequently, when a
man, an action, a thing, is described to them, they are apt to measure
it by the standard of nature’s extremes around them. They are always
disappointed when they behold the wonders of civilization described to
them as great and wonderful. They would call the ruins of the Coliseum
mean, and think no more of the pyramids than of ant-hills. Their ideas
of a great man could probably never be realized, and their wonder is
considerable at finding the mighty lords of England so unlike demi-gods.
It was the Hanseatic League that brought this stern and haughty people
into contact with German culture. This remarkable federation of
enterprising German merchants discovered that profits could be made out
of the rough products of Norway, and they founded a German colony in
Bergen, which rose to considerable importance. German traders gradually
settled in all the other important Norwegian centres, and the whole
commercial life of Norway became more or less Germanized.
At the time Germany was far ahead of Norway in everything appertaining
to industry, and was already then bent on doing business with foreign
countries by offering them a mass of German manufactured goods of
attractive appearance, but of little value, and not indispensable
to a people like the Norwegians. Competition was already severe in
Germany, money had acquired an immense importance, success in life
was most easily attained by intense application to business, saving,
and grinding. The German traders stood in the same relation to the
Norwegians as that in which English traders stand to the native races
whom they first approach for business purposes. The traders and agents
who went as far as Norway—a long distance before the days of steamers
and railways—were daring and reckless men, bent upon making money,
just as the pioneers of British commerce were and are in Africa. What
interested them was not the great and noble aspect of the Norwegian
character, but the desire on the part of these people to buy gewgaws,
and the facility with which they parted with their money and their
goods.
Though Norway is a poor country, it yielded to the not over-ambitious
Germans a satisfactory harvest, and a great number of them settled
permanently in the Norwegian towns. They became sufficiently numerous
and influential to impress a German stamp on Norwegian urban life, on
the people who worked and lived with them; and these became Germanized
to no small extent.
These middle-class Germans were no doubt excellent, respectable people
in their way, but they had little in common with the Norwegian country
folk. They were better educated, they had more worldly wisdom, their
experience in their own cities had trained them to subject their
emotional nature to their intellect. In order to push on to success in
their German communities, where antagonistic and powerful magnates left
but little scope for daring and straightforwardness, they had learned
to value diplomacy and discretion.
They had no sympathies with the natives, whom they regarded as
semi-barbarians, and all their intercourse with them was diplomatic and
insincere, and their sole motive was profit. The honesty, the pride,
the generosity of the Norwegian peasantry were well known to them, but
they took advantage of these characteristics, which they regarded as
expensive luxuries.
The cities however became the seats of the educational establishments,
and the Norwegian youth who were intended for the professions came to
the cities and mingled there with the German element. On the other
hand, the sons of the citizens went into the country in professional
capacities and created there a middle class strongly impregnated with
German culture. In this manner a sharp line of demarcation arose
between the upper and middle classes on the one hand and the peasantry
on the other, the former being strongly influenced by German culture,
the latter clinging tenaciously to the Norwegian.
It is no slur on the German character and German culture to say that it
involved degeneration in no small degree. It partook of the drawbacks
of our civilization, and what happened in Norway has happened in every
country where modern civilization has come into contact with nations
whose virtues and noble qualities have rested as much on ignorance and
the absence of temptation as on inborn worth. Thanks to the historical
development we have indicated, the Norwegian upper and middle
classes, as well as the whole of the urban populations, developed
characteristics which drew upon them the contempt of the peasants.
Their eagerness for profit, their love of money, their indifference
to the great, the noble, and the beautiful, their cringing attitude
towards authorities and towards the wealthy, their sacrifice of public
interests to private welfare, their susceptibility to the influence of
foreign fashion, manners, and vices,—all this tended to lower the upper
and middle classes in the eyes of the peasants.
When the phenomenon witnessed in all civilized countries—the
impoverishment of the masses—made its appearance, public-spirited
men began to inquire as to the causes. It was in the middle of this
century, when a spirit of revolution and reform was abroad, that the
yearning for a better state of things began to manifest itself. There
were no aristocracy, no established Church, and no privileged class to
blame for the unsatisfactory state of the country, and consequently
the investigators turned their attention to the ethical condition of
the people themselves. Comparison between the olden and the modern
times was instituted. The discrepancy between the two classes became
striking, and the corrupting influences were traced to the towns. A
strong desire to revive and strengthen the old culture took possession
of many men and women, who, though educated, had a keen sympathy with
the peasants. To found the future development of Norway on the basis of
the old Norwegian culture became the object of a new national party,
including some of the best elements of the Norwegian nation. These
enthusiasts found their expression in composers like Tjerulf, and in
the writings of men like Björnstjerne Björnsen, Jonas Lie, and Ibsen.
The greatest mistake of these writers—the one that has entirely escaped
Nordau—is their belief that a nation can realize its best aspirations
by methods that have utterly failed in the celestial empire of China.
The hope of preserving the grand feature of the old Norwegian culture
by exclusiveness, by isolating Norway, and by offering a stubborn
resistance to foreign influence, be it good or bad—in this they
have set themselves an impossible task. A thorough national life and
development produced by such artificial means would, even if attended
by the highest degree of success, partake of a theatrical nature. The
more it succeeded, the more it would attract foreigners, and features
which in olden times sprang from the character of the people and from
natural circumstances, would fall into the line of carnivals organized
at the expense of the municipalities and of railways to Alpine summits.
These Norwegian enthusiasts have yet to learn that though foreign
tourists, foreign literature, and foreign art place temptations in the
way of their single-minded nation, there are in every country large
numbers of people who fight for progress as sedulously as themselves,
and whose co-operation would outweigh the dangers of European
modernity. In the old culture, in the past life of nations, especially
in nations like Norway, there are great virtues and noble features
which may well serve as a goal. But to again render them a reality, to
base them on lasting foundations, a people must pass through the fiery
trials of modern temptations, and, instead of yielding plastically to
outward circumstances, must shape their destiny through sheer strength
of character. What Norway has of good and noble she should give to
other nations, and freely accept their best from them. This is an
exchange which, like mercy, blesses both giver and receiver.
Though the struggle against degeneration is, in Norway, hampered by the
national prejudices of the leaders, it is still progressing. Ibsen’s
mission in the fight is to ruthlessly expose the stagnant pools of
corruption. He finds them in the cities and among the middle class,
where the old German Philistine features have been most distinctly
preserved. Many of his characters bear German names, and those who
take the part of the traditional villain wear often the garb of that
respectable, common-sense, matter-of-fact, self-absorbed German whom
Nordau would exempt from any stigma of degeneration.
Thorvald Helmer, in _The Doll’s House_, has, or would have, the
sympathies of millions, not in Germany alone, but in England and
everywhere, of people whose emotional nature, whose love for the high
and noble, has been compressed by that worldly wisdom which in our
large crowded cities becomes prudence, and to obey which is often a
duty—people who are not aware that it is not only possible, but even
easy, to be both diplomatic and discreet in obedience to noble emotions
and exalted aspirations, and that to root these out of our nature is
degeneration.
Helmer, in his sleek reasonableness, is an excellent type of meanness,
and his character is brought out in a consummately artistic way. It
exasperates Nordau that this man, who comes so near his standard of
sound-mindedness, should inspire in audiences all the world over,
especially in the female element, a sense of aversion, apparently
without any effort on the part of the author. Helmer has a keen eye
for the main chance. His reputation and his position have his first
consideration. He trembles at the idea of fighting the world without
them. His love of his wife is the quintessence of selfishness. He
loves her in the two only ways which Nordau thinks reasonable in a
human being, as a companion, as a pleasant thing to toy with; and as
the female of his race, at such periods when he, as the normal man of
Nordau, is actuated by animal impulses—for example, under the influence
of champagne. Of the pure love for a woman which in a man’s heart
remains as a spring of living water, giving him a pang of joy each
time his thoughts revert to her, and which casts a rosy tint of poetry
over life, nay even over death—of such love Helmer is as incapable as
Nordau’s normal man.
Nora yearns for the higher, nobler love, and her lack of experience in
character-study has left her in doubt, though in hope, regarding her
husband. The moment comes when she gains certitude; and when Helmer
reveals himself in his Philistine hideousness, her spirit revolts.
Though of course exaggerated for the sake of dramatic effect, she
is a good type of an intelligent and emotional Norwegian woman.
Norwegian girls receive a great deal of instruction, and as they have
no professions to prepare for, their education is more literary and
artistic than that of the men. They read voraciously the Norwegian
modern writers, and sympathize consequently more than the men with
the extreme nationalists. They are often strongly possessed by the
_Aand_—that indefinable yearning for all that is great and noble—in
Norwegian culture already alluded to. They have a fair knowledge of
foreign literature, and read a great many English novels. With their
admiration for English pure love, for English home life, grafted on the
grand aspirations which the new _Aand_ fosters, they may well appear
uncanny and troll-like to the prosaic German.
We trust that the struggle between the Norwegian and the German
cultures, of which we have endeavoured to give an idea, will make it
easier for students of Ibsen to understand his characters. It is in
_The Doll’s House_ where the two inimical cultures are most clearly
personified, the old Norwegian culture being represented by the
uncompromising, impulsive, and intense Nora, and the imported German
culture by the pedantic, commonplace, and animal Helmer.
If our interpretation is right, it is impossible that Ibsen’s work
could in any way indicate degeneration. It ought, on the contrary,
to be evident that his pieces, rendering objective as they do
the struggle for a higher and better life, based not on pedantic
considerations of immediate and unworthy advantages, but on the noble
impulses of a strong and healthy nation, are at once a summons to rise
higher, and signals pointing the way.
CHAPTER VIII
_RICHARD WAGNER_
We all have met with people who, without being degenerates to any
great extent repeat stories of their own invention so persistently,
that they end by believing in them. In this kind of folly, if folly
it be, there is a great deal of method when indulged in by people
who are anxious, for some reason or another, that their views should
_nolens volens_ be accepted by others. When one comes to deal with the
intellectual development of a nation or a race, and wishes to prove
certain forms of progress or retrogression, it is half the battle
to bring your opponent to believe in the existence of some special,
well-defined psychological phenomenon or social tendency, and to give
it a high-sounding name. What would astrology have been without the
horoscope, or alchemy without the philosopher’s stone? What would
modern statecraft be without such terms as “foreign competition” and
“international jealousy”? What would German socialism be without the
term “revolutionary socialism”? What would bi-metallism be without
the phrase, “the stability of the currency”? And what would Nordau’s
theory of degeneration be without the “mystic movement”?
He takes for granted that there is such a thing as mysticism, as well
as that it constitutes a movement, and then endeavours to explain
everything as partaking of or resulting from it. According to him,
Wagnerism is the reappearance in Germany of that romanticism which
originated there, and afterwards travelled through France and England.
It reappeared, according to him, through Wagner’s degeneration, and
spread in virtue of the degeneration of his contemporaries. He says
that he finds in Wagner a greater abundance of degeneration than in
all the other degenerates put together. “The stigmata of his morbid
condition,” he says, “are united in him in the most complete and most
luxuriant development.”
This is a bold assertion, and will appear bolder yet to any one who
has read his chapter in _The Richard Wagner Cult_. Wagner’s dislike
of the Jews, which Nordau calls anti-semitism, and his views on
social questions, which our alienist calls Anarchism, are pointed
out as unfailing stigmata of degeneration. One of the methods of our
alienist is to notice and make much of certain extreme opinions in
people who are actually made, or who have made themselves, intensely
objectionable, and then to point out that similar opinions and ideas
are present in the mind of some celebrity, and then to draw the
conclusion that this celebrity must be on the road to madness. Either
he does not see himself, or he trusts his readers will not see, that
by such methods every man in the world might be proved to some extent
deranged. He forgets that exaggerated virtues become vices, and that
some of the most prominent men in the world have had idiosyncrasies
to which they have even given considerable play without at all coming
within the range of degeneration.
The anti-semitism in Germany, which Nordau ascribes to
degeneration—probably with the approval of the majority of Jews—in that
country, as well as in Russia, France, and the United States, springs
from causes so patent, that no man who aspires to be considered an
acute observer of his time should ignore them.
Let us instance Russia first—a country where the latest wave of
anti-semitism first took a violent form. Can any one who is acquainted
with the typical financial history of the Russian villages wonder
that the Jews in Russia should be looked upon as a scourge? What has
happened in thousands of such villages is this. An energetic, clever
Jew settles amongst the Russian _moujiks_, who combine thriftlessness
and love of an easy life with many of the good qualities and innocence
of primitive races. The Jew is bent on making money, and caring little
about the opinion the community may form of him, and too brave to fear
their enmity, he has no hesitation in taking up any kind of business,
however unpopular it may render him. He willingly becomes a publican,
a pawnbroker, a land-grabber, and, in combination with other Jews, a
speculator and cornerer. His attention to business, his self-denial,
his hardheartedness to his customers, his knowledge of the tricks of
trades and finance, the ready support he gets from his co-religionists
in other districts in carrying out his purposes, however derogatory
they may be to the community—all this soon renders him the master of
the situation. The stranger, who at first in such a friendly spirit
invited his customer to drink his _vodka_ and borrow his money, is soon
transformed into a harsh tyrant who, by hook or by crook, came into
possession of all the belongings of the villagers, and calmly makes
use of their destitution to extort from them their future earnings.
The Jews, as a rule, on the one hand, and the Russians on the other,
form diametrically opposite views on this social phenomenon. The Jews
say, and Nordau evidently sides with them, that this successful village
tyrant has done nothing to deserve blame. He has only been more frugal,
more thrifty, and more intelligent than the Russians, who were bound by
their inferior character to go to the wall; and that if Russia hates
the Jews, it is with that hatred against successful men common in
human failures.
The ruined Russian peasants simply know that the Jew who came among
them is rich and they are poor, that what used to be their possessions
form his wealth, and that the means he has used to obtain it would not
have been used by them under any circumstances. They think they have
been robbed, and that they and their descendants would be robbed by
the Jew and his descendants if they cannot be freed from him. Hence
anti-semitism in Russia.
Nordau has no right to call the anti-semitists degenerate, even
though they be wrong in their logic, because he is wrong himself, and
he cannot point to ruined homes and wrecked lives as a substantial
foundation for his opinion.
In Germany the Jews play the same part, though under modified
conditions. Though bad, German laws and German officialism are better
than those of Russia, and the German people do not so easily fall a
prey to the strong-minded Jew. But, on the other hand, the Jews make
themselves obnoxious in other ways, both in Germany and Austria. Here
they act everywhere as trade-spoilers. The Jew undersells everybody. He
stops short of nothing, save breaking the law, to extend his business.
He is obsequious to those in power and in wealth, but relentlessly
hard to competitors and to creditors. Many of them will take the
greatest possible advantage of other people’s, especially Christians’,
misfortunes, and will gain their end by deliberately wounding other
people’s feelings. It is the Jews who generally pay the lowest wages,
and who are found in the ranks of the sweaters.
We hasten to state that there are in Germany a great many exceptions to
the types here referred to. But either they are not numerous enough, or
the Jew must possess some inability to show his better qualities, for
no one acquainted with the circumstances in Germany would deny that the
Jew-haters there look upon their enemies in exactly the light we have
described.
But this is not all. Accusations are levelled against the Jews which
are partly untrue, or else vastly exaggerated, and those who make them
should be called upon to prove their statements. Whether they may be
able to do this or not, the fact remains that the Jew-hating Germans
believe that the Jews have formed one vast conspiracy, the object of
which is to secure for the Jews large advantages at the expense of the
Christians. It is alleged that the methods employed are as follows: The
Jews are supposed to meet in secret conclave, in which those of them
who desire to accomplish any special aim state it to their brethren,
who then combine in assisting them. Such aims may be the possession
of a house or a shop in the hands of a Christian, the ruin of some
obnoxious competitor, the miscarriage of some public auction of goods
coveted by some Jew, and so on. With such ideas prevailing, how is it
possible to ascribe Jew hatred to degeneracy? Such logic is all the
more surprising as it remains a palpable fact that the fortunes of the
Jewish houses are growing apace, that Jews seem to succeed no matter
what they undertake, that they certainly are more charitable to their
co-religionists than to Christians, and for that matter than Christians
are to Christians, while at the same time poverty and misery are on the
increase among the Christian masses.
Nordau does a bad service to the Jews of Germany when he attempts
to lay the blame for anti-semitism exclusively at the door of the
Christians and calls them degenerates, while he entirely exempts the
Jews. This partiality, coupled with his contempt for the masses and his
belief in government by the more strong-minded men, points to a future
state in Germany in which the Jews should be the ruling aristocracy.
His unfairness thus, instead of abating the persecution against the
Jews, might easily be construed into an excuse for a more bitter
anti-semitism.
This error of his is due to his besetting habit of taking his
postulates from doubtful authorities and of drawing illogical
conclusions. It is a common thing for men who have been successful
in one branch of knowledge, and who are regarded as authorities in
a specialty by others, to jump at rash conclusions with regard to
subjects on which authorities differ or do not exist. This is exactly
what Nordau does when he comes to consider facts which cannot be
rightly understood without a clear insight into sociology and other
social sciences. He then evinces impossible opinions, and gives us to
understand that he has a ready-made scheme for reconstructing society
on a new and perfect plan.
It is not difficult to see what this plan is. It is quasi-Collectivism
and Communism. He wishes the State to become the universal heir
of all fortunes and the universal benefactor. The absurdity and
impracticability of this scheme—which, by the way, is always the very
one that first enters the head of a young student who tackles social
science for the first time—are obvious. As however he does not insist
upon his scheme in his volume _Degeneration_, it would be out of place
to explain its hollowness here. We have referred to it simply to show
that his superficiality regarding the anti-semitic question is not
incidental. It will be evident to anybody who tackles this question
with an unprejudiced mind that the Christians in Russia and Germany are
utterly at fault when they believe that they can escape from their
troubles by persecuting Jews, and also that the Jews are utterly at
fault when they attribute anti-semitism to the jealousy and wickedness
of the Christians. Both these parties, as well as Nordau himself,
allow their feelings instead of their intelligence to determine these
questions. But they are not necessarily degenerate.
The true explanation of the imbroglio is as follows: The Jewish race,
which might have acquired a few unpleasant characteristics by no fault
of their own but through a cruel and unjust persecution for centuries,
is a highly-gifted one, distinguishing itself by strong-mindedness,
great will-power, remarkable powers of endurance, morality, and
singleness of purpose. Deprived, in a great number of countries
of social rights and the privileges of citizenship, they have for
centuries found only one way open to them by which they could attain to
independence, security, and consideration—the accumulation of wealth.
In modern times, when social institutions and laws tend to render
wealth almost omnipotent, its acquisition has become to this people of
greater importance than ever. Success in a business, however small,
may mean millions in the future, while failure may result in life-long
misery. Consequently, the Jews apply themselves to their trades or
professions with an energy and assiduity such as few races can command.
They therefore represent a power in the development of humanity
which is bound to produce far-reaching effects. Whether these will
constitute a blessing or a curse to the nations among whom the Jews
live and work depends entirely on the institutions and the laws of
those countries. If these are such as to render the oppression of the
poor, the workers, the borrowers, the tenants—in fact, all the sections
of society on which the Jews now batten,—a condition for the thriving
of the capitalists, the employers, the lenders, the tenants, and the
fortunate classes in general—if the laws are of this description, then
the Jews will be conspicuous as the oppressors of others. But if, on
the contrary, the laws and institutions of the countries are such as to
render the success of the upper classes and leaders of trade, industry,
and finance dependent on the welfare of the workers, then the Jews will
be the most liberal lenders, the most generous employers, and the most
accommodating landlords. In fact, the question resolves itself simply
into one of demand and supply; as long as there is a greater demand
for Jews’ services than the Jews are able to supply, the latter will
dominate; but when there are more services offered on the part of the
Jews than the people can avail themselves of, these can dictate terms
to the Jews. And this relation of demand and supply depends on laws and
institutions.
Even if Nordau’s prejudices prevented him from taking this view of
the anti-semitic question—which is not only the correct one but which
greatly facilitates the solution of the question, and thus would
prevent the disgraceful persecution which in many countries threatens
to become more serious—he might have found, by simply looking at the
actualities, in the different countries that anti-semitism prevails
in an inverse ratio to good government. He could not have asked for
a better proof of the fact that laws and institutions are at fault
and not the Jews or the Christians. To take only the two extremes:
in Russia, where the Government, from the people’s point of view,
is probably the worst in Europe, anti-semitism is most vehement; in
England, where the Government is more influenced by the consideration
of the good of the people than in any other country, there is scarcely
any animosity against the Jews, and this in spite of the efforts of
certain politicians to promote it.
The reception of Dr. Stöcker, when he attempted to address a public
meeting in London in favour of anti-semitism, would have convinced
Nordau, had he been present, what a poor chance anti-semitism has
in a country where the working classes are free to follow those
instincts which Nordau fears so much. We may relate that hardly had
the proceedings begun when the hall was filled by labourers, who,
contrary to their habit on such occasions, had not changed their dress,
and who hooted Dr. Stöcker, stormed the platform, overpowered the
anti-semitists, and cleared the hall.
In face of the fact that anti-semitic questions turn so entirely on
prejudices and mistakes, one cannot surely accuse Wagner of madness
because he sided with what may be called a national party, and approved
of a movement the object of which was to stay the progressive influence
of an alien race over the destiny of the Fatherland.
In several places in his work Nordau insists upon considering the
anarchist tendencies of our age as among the stigmata of degeneration.
If he were right, we should be face to face with a calamity likely to
end in the brutalization or the annihilation of our race. For Anarchism
in some form of other is certainly spreading rapidly. That there is
Anarchism and Anarchism seems of little importance to our alienist
in his eagerness to draw his preconceived conclusions. He reasons
as usual. Starting from the hypothesis that some of the criminal
Anarchists were, to some extent, mentally deranged and morally weak,
he arrives at the conclusion that Wagner was a degenerate, because he
shared to some extent with the Anarchists the hatred of our present
social system and of the injurious effects it produces on the masses of
the people.
Though Nordau dwells far more lengthily on poetry, and art, and cognate
subjects than on the graver question of Anarchism, there is no point on
which it behoves us better to set him and his readers right than that
of the relation between Anarchism and degeneration.
The Anarchist is not a cause. He is an effect. There is a feeling in
the consciousness of almost every human being, be he a believer in a
divine religion or in Nordau’s religion of humanity, that our race is
destined to a high degree of development, and to a far larger sphere
of happiness than now falls to the lot of most of us. This yearning
for happiness, for elevation, is not only a feeling but a conviction
consequent upon our knowledge of the past stages of the development of
man.
There was a time when fervent religious beliefs induced patience and
resignation under suffering, and when our future destiny was left in
the hands of Providence. But the French encyclopædists, and after them
the modern scientists, have done their best to undermine this belief
and to show us that the destiny of future generations will largely
depend upon us and themselves, that science is placing in our hands an
ever-growing control over the forces of nature, and that if humanity
suffers it is because the present generation has not the moral courage
to throw off religious scruples and boldly shape their own destiny.
These doctrines, in unison with the general progressive spirit of
the age, led to revolutions and political reforms. In the absence
of a providence the nations shifted their faith to constitutional
governments. But the new faith did not last long. The more democratic
the governments were the more they applied the principles of
Collectivism—they yielded to those instincts which Nordau calls the
social instincts. Under the pretext of exercising paternal kindness
towards the people, the governments demanded paternal rights.
Communistic and socialistic ideas spread among the masses, who, well
aware that a providence without power would be no providence at all,
wanted to render the State omnipotent. When however socialistic
features were introduced into the constitutions, matters did not mend,
but the freedom of the individual was more and more infringed.
When detailed schemes of further socialistic development were made
public, a great many freedom-loving men and women beheld with terror
that the chief cause of the favour with which the progressing socialism
was regarded was to be found in the plan of complete subjection of the
individual under government.
This discovery naturally caused a reaction in favour of liberty. Those
who became Anarchists felt keenly the claws of the State upon them, and
they foresaw that more socialism would aggravate their grievances. They
took for granted that humanity had now tried all forms of government
and that they had all failed, and that the salvation of the race could
only be found in absolute personal freedom.
The first extreme Russian Nihilists paved the way for the Anarchist
movement in Europe. They, like their first followers in France, had
only one idea, that of destroying at all costs the present order of
things, and thus clearing the ground for a new system to grow up
free from the tyranny of governments, aristocracies, militarism,
landlordism, and capitalism.
They saw that an immense mass of poor, hard-working, honest people
with but a small chance of happiness for themselves, but imbued with a
strong desire to see the whole of humanity happy, were oppressed by a
small number of selfish people who arrogated to themselves the lion’s
share of the good things of life. They found that this band of selfish
people attained to their immense power by a social system of slow and
gradual growth. Tracing all the troubles to the few egotists whom they
regarded as criminals, they imagined that by destroying them and the
system, the unselfish and humanitarian aspirations of the masses would
blossom forth free and unvitiated.
The Anarchists were thus the backbone of the religion of humanity, only
their faith was stronger than that of Nordau, for they were willing to
sacrifice all, including life, for the good of the race.
If these people were, and are, degenerate, then every mistake in
reasoning is a sign of degeneration, and faith in humanity and its
destiny is the beginning of madness.
When Nordau designates Wagner as an Anarchist, he evidently ignores
the fact that there are two kinds of Anarchists, the violent ones just
described, and the moderate or constitutional ones. The latter call
themselves simply Anarchists. Their numbers are growing rapidly in
France, as well as in England, and in both these countries Nordau would
be surprised at their moderation and common sense. The movement they
represent is a reaction against the socialistic tendencies, and their
programme is not violence and destruction, but the gradual abolition of
all harmful and useless legislation. It is true that so far they have
no precise policy. But such special measures as are advocated—partly
in France, partly in England, and partly in the United States—seem to
be founded on clear and thorough reasoning, and when their leading
principle is compared with the shallow chatter of Socialists and
Communists of every school it appears as wisdom itself.
What all these people believe, what they long for, and what they hope
for, is exactly what Wagner believed, longed for, and hoped for. He
saw in Philistinism, in official tyranny, in police government, and in
legal trammels standing in the way of trades, industries, and arts,
so many impediments to the realization of the best instincts and the
highest aspirations of humanity. Whatever opinions he held, they can
only be judged by the few exasperated exclamations he gave vent to with
regard to the corruption of modern society. It is not likely that he,
with such immense works on hand, should have given sufficient attention
to social questions to allow him to express himself in learned terms.
But what he said and wrote on the subject shows clearly that the
foundation of his social views was trust in humanity, in the sanctity
of nature, and in the ennobling power of liberty. Can any one with a
true love of art imagine an artist without such a creed?
What was more natural than that, fêted and praised as he was, he should
have a good opinion of his own talent and consider himself a great man?
If for this he deserved to be suspected of megalomania, what are we to
say about other celebrities, mediocrities, and nonentities, who imagine
themselves demi-gods because they happen to be the sons of their
fathers, to be born in purple, or to have a title attached to their
name?
Nordau is extremely hard on those who have sung the praises of Wagner,
and insinuates that they have been actuated by base motives when they
have not been absolutely degenerated. According to him, admiration
for Wagner’s works is a sure sign of mental unsoundness. And yet this
same Nordau finds reasons for praising Wagner’s genius which a host of
his panegyrists have overlooked. He says: “Wagner, as a dramatist is
really an historical painter of the highest rank.... This [a fresco
painter] he is in a degree never yet attained by any other dramatic
author in the whole world of literature. Every action embodies itself
for him in a series of most imposing pictures, which, when they are
composed as Wagner has seen them with his inner eye, must overwhelm
and enrapture the beholder. The reception of the guests in the hall of
Wartburg; the arrival and departure of Lohengrin in the boat drawn by
the swan; the gambols of the Rhine maidens in the river; the defiling
of the gods over the rainbow-bridge towards the castle of Asgard;
the bursting of the moonlight into Hunding’s hut; the ride of the
Walküre over the battle-field; Brunhilde in the circle of fire; the
final scene in ‘Götterdämmerung,’ where Brunhilde flings herself on to
her horse and leaps into the midst of the funeral pyre, while Hagan
throws himself into the surging Rhine, and the heavens are aflame with
the glow from the burning palace of the gods; the love-feast of the
knights in the castle of the Grail; the obsequies of Titurel and the
healing of Amfortas—these are pictures to which nothing in art hitherto
approaches.”
It is strange that Nordau in his love for authorities should quote
Nietzsche—a German author whom, in another part of his book, he makes
out to be a hopeless degenerate and charlatan—in support of his views
of Wagner! But Nietzsche has written a book called _Der Fall Wagner_,
and that suffices. This Nietzsche calls Wagner a comedian, but Nordau
insists upon his being a painter, and that “if he had been a healthy
genius, endowed with intellectual equilibrium, that is what he would
undoubtedly have become. His inner vision would have forced the brush
into his hand, and would have constrained him to use it on canvas by
means of colour.”
When Nordau says a painter, he evidently restricts the meaning of the
word to its narrowest sense, and makes it difficult to at all class a
man who, like Wagner, evolved and produced pictures of such grandeur
and such beauty as those our alienist so well describes. The fact that
the artist uses actual perspective, real draperies, living people,
actual fire, that he selects his own light, and personally arranges
this mass of objects so as to exactly reproduce the daring conception
of his mind—all this should surely not be cited as so many proofs
of the unhealthiness of his genius. Would he have been a greater, a
sounder genius, had his ability been restricted to sketching and
colouring his conceptions on cardboard or canvas? Should then a
painter’s genius be confined to the production of pictures suitable
only to decorate Philistine houses and official galleries? Because
Nordau’s pedantic tendencies have formed such a Philistine idea about
the art of painting, is it right to deny true genius to a man who has
produced unapproachable pictures on a colossal scale, not by the means
of brushes and pigments, but by materials infinitely more difficult to
handle?
But these masterpieces of painting do not alone bear witness to
Wagner’s powers. His paintings are not fixed; they are movable. They
represent actually an enchanting succession of pictures. The true
genius _à la_ Nordau gives us the pictures of figures in motion that
never move, and tires us with a Quintus Curtius suspended in mid-air
half way down a chasm, until we wish him at the bottom of it. Such a
moving picture of Wagner’s is not thrust upon us suddenly in the manner
of gallery pictures, but is presented to us as the fit illustration
of a beautiful poem, and often as the climax of a series of other
pictures which explain it, relieve it, and work up our emotions for its
reception.
To this must be added that the same painter-genius, the same dramatist,
the same poet, has created the wondrous and enchanting music which
accompanies the poem and the pictures. And because he has done all
this, because he has not followed the routine of other German painters,
because he has dared to and succeeded in transporting his audiences
into the highest possible region of imagination, and given them a
glimpse of real creative powers, he is to be classed as a degenerate;
to rank among those of whom humanity is ashamed, and whose degraded
state is to warn us of the coming decay of our race.
Can any one with a grain of humour read Nordau’s attacks on Wagner
without imagining an irascible toy-terrier barking at the moon?
Nordau probably feels that Wagner’s anti-semitism, his Anarchism,
and his ability to create transcendentally beautiful pictures are
stigmata which hardly any of his readers would accept as such, and
consequently feels impelled to make much of what it pleases him to
call Wagner’s eroticism. Here, as everywhere in his book, in order
to impress his readers he counts on the mystical effect which the
use of a high-sounding scientific word generally produces upon
unscientific readers. A favourite expression of his, when speaking of
some psychological phenomenon, is that science knows all about it,
and he calls it megalomania, graphomania, echolalia, or some such
name. With people who have only a superficial knowledge of science,
and who stand in awe of its achievements, such nouns stand for a
special definite thing, thoroughly investigated and explained. They
do not know that these scientific names have been invented, not in
order to designate something real and palpable, but simply for the
purpose of bringing order into an arbitrary classification, invented
so that the exchange of ideas may be facilitated on the subject thus
treated. Such scientific terms might even be classed among mystical
symbols, in so far as they often stand for something of which hardly
anything is known, but at the same time serve the same useful end
as algebraical figures. Psychologists are prone to speak of a man’s
consciousness, though scarcely two scientific men would agree as to
what it is. But this does not prevent them from dividing consciousness
up into divisions and sub-divisions, all with their special names, in
order to be able to express their ideas in words. The unscientific
reader should bear in mind that consciousness has never been under
the microscope, or in the crucible, and that the classification of
the scientists has no counterpart in consciousness itself, and that
this remains the impalpable and indivisible _Ego_, with its infinite
number of attributes inseparably commingled. All the different states,
conditions, faculties, perfections, and defects of the _Ego_ are
of course known only by the results they produce in the physical
world, and it is by these results that they have been classified.
It is evident that such methods of classification should leave an
immense margin for those who wish, or feel impelled by their own
idiosyncrasies, to misuse scientific terms designating psychological
phenomena.
Nordau indulges in this misuse of scientific terms to the fullest
extent, in a way not to be easily discovered by the non-scientific
reader. The word “eroticism” used by him so frequently, with all the
pomposity of a scientific term, is coined from the word “erotic,” a
literary term which again is derived, as we all know, from Eros, the
Greek god of love. It is an adjective which means pertaining to or
expressive of love-passion. Such an adjective necessarily finds an
enormously wide application, considering that love in one sense is the
leading principle in organic creation, and, in a more psychological
sense, the motive power in the human drama. We may say that we
ourselves, the outcome of love, regulate our whole life, and sometimes
base our hopes of a future state on love. Consequently there is hardly
anything in our lives that is not covered by the adjective “erotic.”
The alienists having adopted the word “eroticism” in order to designate
a state of mind which certain actions reveal to them, and which state
of mind, when its existence is corroborated by other facts, may be
considered as a disease, it is evident that, while they may apply the
word “eroticism” to almost anything in the organic world and in human
society, it is better for their purpose to apply it only to a certain
form of a diseased mind. While a strictly logical and careful alienist
might deem it irrational and confusing to use the term “eroticism,” or
even the adjective “erotic,” outside a clearly defined case of mental
disease, it cannot be considered absolutely wrong to apply such terms
whenever the love-passion is in question, even a love-passion of a most
legitimate kind.
We shall now show how Nordau manages to slip over the border
within which scientific terms should be used, and applies them
indiscriminately to everything; and how he, in this manner, tries to
establish that Wagner suffers from erotic madness, because he looks
upon love as one of the chief motors in the human drama and the tree of
knowledge for good or evil.
Nordau, in a flippant criticism, which he endeavours to render funny,
of the behaviour of Wagner’s characters on the stage, forgets his
self-criticism to such an extent as to liken them to mad tom-cats—a
simile which probably no sane man would accept as true. Having once
conceived the idea of mad tom-cats, it at once becomes an obsession
in his mind, and suggests presentations of real cases of erotic fury.
He consequently, according to his habit, takes for granted that the
actors on the stage must necessarily represent the exact state of mind
of the author, and cries out that this state of the author’s mind
(which he has persuaded himself is that of a mad tom-cat) is well known
to science, and is called sadism. Then, with a regret at having to
touch upon subjects in order to make his readers understand Wagner’s
real mental condition, he gives a disgusting example of a maniac whose
erotic madness has brought him below the level of the brute.
This is a fair sample of Nordau’s logic. For the sake of clearness,
we recapitulate the logical _tour de force_ he has been compelled
to exercise in order to arrive at such an absurdity: Wagner, like
all poets and dramatists before him, creates a love scene. Love is
an erotic emotion. Eroticism is a disease of the mind. Tom-cats are
erotically influenced. The characters on the stage remind Nordau of
tom-cats. The obsession of a “tom-cat in convulsions over a root of
valerian” suggests a raving madman. Consequently Wagner is mad.
Such is the use a scientist is tempted to make of his science when he
throws self-criticism overboard.
When Nordau says of Wagner that he has been all his life an erotic, he
is fair enough to add in parentheses, “in a psychiatric sense.” But
this is not enough. The word “psychiatric” is a strictly scientific
word, not to be found in any ordinary English dictionary; and the
ordinary reader might easily conclude that, instead of removing
Wagner’s eroticism into the deep recesses of his soul, it might have
been used by the author, as so many scientific words have been used, in
order to aggravate his charge.
In order to justify his opinion with regard to Wagner’s erotic madness,
he says: “The most ordinary incitements, even those farthest removed
from the province of sexual instincts, never fail to awaken in his
consciousness voluptuous images of an erotic character.” Why “sexual
instincts”? Why not love-instincts, an expression which had so much
better fitted in with the scenes Wagner represents? But, as it suits
Nordau’s purpose to keep his reader’s mind upon love in its lowest,
most animal form, we shall let it pass. We must however express our
astonishment at the example he gives in order to show how incitements,
“far removed from the province of sexual instincts,” caused Wagner’s
mind to revert to voluptuous images. The “farthest removed incitements”
which Nordau quotes is the description by Wagner of a ballet—a _pas de
trois_—evidently intended to represent the blending of the beautiful
with love, to give Wagner’s own words, “love and life, the joy and
wooing of art.” What on earth, then, would more arouse such eroticism
that might be found in a man than a ballet representing love and
life? And this especially when we consider the modern freedom with
regard to the costume of ballet girls. In order to show what Nordau
considers to be the outcome of erotic madness in Wagner’s choregraphic
representation of love, life, and art, we give _in extenso_ the passage
from _Art-Work of the Future_, to which he refers:
“In the contemplation of this ravishing dance of the most genuine
and noblest muses of the artistic man, we now see the three arm in
arm lovingly entwined up to their necks, then this, then that one,
detaching herself from the entwinement, as if to display to the others
her beautiful form in complete separation, touching the hands of the
others only with the extreme tips of her fingers; now the one, entwined
by a backward glance at the twin forms of her closely entwined sisters,
bending towards them; then two, carried away by the allurements of the
one, greeting her in homage; finally all, in close embrace, breast to
breast, limb to limb, in an ardent kiss of love, coalescing in one
blissfully living shape. This is the love and life, the joy and wooing
of art,” etc.
When Nordau wishes to traduce the love scenes in Wagner’s operas into
arguments of the musician’s erotic madness, he forgets many things. He
forgets what he himself has given as a test of a sound mind, namely,
the ability to look after one’s own business. Even if Wagner had
produced scenes on his stage of an utterly corrupt character in order
to gain money and popularity, he having succeeded completely in such
objects could not possibly be called mad by a critic who has made
material success in life a test for sound-mindedness, and who declares
the belief in personal responsibility reaching beyond the grave to
be a sign of madness. But he also forgets, what is more important,
that there is no line of demarcation drawn to indicate how far the
representation of human passions may be carried on the stage.
Even Nordau does not seem to have discovered an authority on this
subject. He himself will not serve as an authority, because he has
shown himself too apt to fall into the error of newspaper critics,
that of judging a work or a piece, not according to its merits, but
according to the author who has produced it. He would praise in Goethe
what he would condemn in Wagner. If we were to indiscriminately ask
people how far we may go in representing human passion on the stage,
we should get a mass of replies all differing according to the bias of
the respondents. The Ultramontane abbé, the zealous Methodist, would
differ enormously from the Bohemian artist; the prudish old maid would
differ from the poet. Nay, even two artists, both painters of the nude,
or two ballet girls appearing in the same costume, might hold almost
opposite opinions on this subject. How then shall we judge? By leaving
out of court all the extremists—those who object to theatres, ballets,
and nature in art—as well as those who would clamour for indecent
and obscene representations, we might considerably narrow the ground
for inquiry, and elicit certain rules likely to meet the suffrage of
the majority within these limits. It might be argued that emotions,
playing by far the most important _rôle_ in the human drama, and lying
as they do at the root of all our actions, educational agencies,
and amusements, ought to be appealed to by the arts. Also that art,
in affording us opportunities of giving expression to our emotions,
elevates and ennobles our lives: consequently, that the passive,
objective contemplation of human emotions which the stage affords us
helps us to study our own emotions and to bring them into harmony with
our noblest aspirations, our future happiness, our judgment, and our
will. In order to accomplish their mission, such representations should
be as true to life as possible, whether they be beautiful or not. On
this plea, it would be legitimate to represent on the stage erotic
emotions in the full strength in which we meet with them in reality
among sound-minded people. A good deal of exaggeration may be permitted
to the actor as he is under the difficulty of having to convey by
actions, gestures, or facial expression a distinct representation of
emotions which may rage in the consciousness of a human being without
betraying themselves in physical signs.
From this it must be concluded that the purity of the stage depends
more on what is acted than how it is acted. The author who does not
wish to desecrate the drama is therefore bound to represent emotions
which are the outcome of natural life, and acted upon by incidents such
as we see around us and to avoid the representation of, even if he
cannot avoid the reference to, emotions which spring from a diseased
mind or a morbid moral state.
Love, being an emotion to which every sound-minded being may be
subject, there would be no objection to represent it in the most
intense manner on the stage so long as we understand under the name
of love that strong degree of affection which sometimes people of the
opposite sex may conceive for each other apart from sexual emotions.
What makes Nordau’s reasoning plausible is that he does not admit that
this kind of love exists. He distinguishes only two degrees, or two
categories, of love, comradeship or friendship on the one hand, and
the animal instinct on the other. But no one who has gone through life
with open eyes can possibly deny the reality of what we here, for want
of a better expression, would call pure love. Everywhere we meet with
manifestations of it. Even young children, who might have no idea of
sexual emotion, often love each other with a genuine passion which
sometimes lasts through life. Adults may be so absorbed in love for
each other as to prefer death to separation, and yet never experience
any sexual emotion in each other’s company. Men and women lovers who
have been separated have wasted away from sheer love of each other,
and yet been remarkably chaste in character. In the English-speaking
countries, where the relations between the sexes are free and natural,
we find any number of proofs of the reality of pure love. Those cases
alone which have ended tragically, and therefore come before the
public, more than suffice to prove it. Even in countries like France,
for example, where the sexual instincts are apt to become morbid from
the one-sided education of the young, it is not difficult to find
examples of pure love. It is even to be found where least expected, as,
for instance, between a licentious man and a fallen woman. It is true
that when pure love runs its usual course it gets, so to say, inflamed
by animal passion, but this is generally the case only as a result of
the demonstrations by which pure love tries to manifest itself. It may
also be true that there exists a mysterious, that is to say a so far
unexplained, connection between the purest love and sexual instinct
even in loving couples to whom sexuality may be an abomination. But
all this does not disprove that, speaking from a practical and ethical
point of view, there is such an emotion as pure love, and that this
emotion is a powerful motor in the human drama.
If it then be a fact that this yearning to love and to be loved with
a pure love exists, and ought to exist, in rational human beings,
and that in running its natural course it will manifest itself
in demonstrations extremely likely to rouse animal passions, the
question arises how far a love scene on the stage may display those
demonstrations which, while they are the only possible means of
expressing pure love, at the same time suggest sexual emotions.
Here then is the point where the difference will arise, and where we
may well be careful whose decision we accept. Can we do better than
Wagner did—leave the audience to decide?
Wagner’s German audiences, described by Nordau as including wives and
daughters, have, to his great bewilderment, given the verdict in favour
of Wagner’s most passionate scenes. “How unperverted,” Nordau cries
out, “must wives and maidens be, when they are in a state of mind to
witness these pieces without blushing crimson, and sinking to the earth
for shame!” No. They have not blushed in following calmly and serenely
the objective representations of passions which by nature have been
implanted in every breast. The very vehemence, the very naturalness of
the scenes inspire that awe and reverence which great natural forces
always do, and the young girl in the audience does not for a moment
revert to any impure representations or animal promptings which might
have come within her experience, because she is æsthetically and not
sexually excited. But if Nordau could watch her when she reads the
above quoted passage in his book, he would see her blush deeply, not at
the memory of Wagner’s scenes, but at the feeling of having the first
seed of degeneration sown in her heart.
Among the phrases used by Nordau in order to inculcate his readers with
the idea that Wagner, instead of being the very essence of an artist,
one of the greatest practically creative geniuses of the world, is a
mere erotic maniac, is this one—“all his ideas revolve about woman.”
While this phrase may lead the unwary reader astray, it throws a vivid
light on the extent to which Nordau’s opinion with regard to the
relation of the sexes has been influenced by his continental bias. This
ought to be made clear to his readers. Such expressions, if of any use
at all in Nordau’s reasoning, pre-suppose that it is quite an unusual
thing for the ideas of poets, dramatists, and writers of fiction to
revolve about woman. For our alienist does not refer to Wagner’s
private life. He is speaking only of Wagner the author. The actual
fact, of course, is that love and women have from times immemorial been
the subject of legends, fairy tales, troubadour songs, poems, romances,
novels, and dramas. Thus, according to the gospel of our alienist, all
the past and present poetical authors of the world must have been, and
are, “subject to erotic madness,” like Wagner.
There are, of course, men who, like Faust, devote their lives to
intellectual pursuits and expend all their energy in forcing nature to
yield up her secrets. But such men are not only exceptions—they may be
looked upon as degenerates. This is what Faust at last discovered. He
recognised that life was essentially emotional, and that by having
crushed out his emotional nature he had failed to live his life.
Whether Goethe intended to impart the lesson his _Faust_ teaches us may
be doubtful, but we can thus read it: we may suppress our emotional
nature for a long time, but it will one day claim its rights, and,
in its explosive escape from unnatural bondage, avenge itself on the
suppressor, and hurl him to perdition. The emotions, Faust regrets, are
all those inspired by women.
But the great majority of men do not suppress the emotions inspired by
women, but, on the contrary, allow their whole lives to be influenced
by them. To find confirmation of this fact in countries like France
and Germany might not be so easy as in the English-speaking countries.
Wherever the sexes are separated in youth, and where conventional
marriages are the rule, the erotic impulses become over-stimulated and
lead to the excitement of animal passion. The love of the beautiful,
all the æsthetic aspirations, the yearning for the society of women,
the love of excitement, the chivalrous leanings, and the craving for
pure love—all these are thrown as so much fuel into the furnace of
sexual love. It is then that the struggle arises between the terrible
demoniac love and pure love—a struggle so frequently depicted in
Wagner’s operas and which determines the lives of so many men on the
continent.
Part of the struggle of the continental man is to avoid the influence
of women altogether, or else to look upon them after the manner of the
Mahommedans. In countries therefore where pure love is left but little
or no scope, the influence of women is not very marked, and certainly
not acknowledged, because for a man to acknowledge it would be to avow
himself an “erotic madman.”
To understand the immense influence which a woman exercises over man’s
destiny and how closely men’s minds “revolve about women,” we must
study the English-speaking countries where pure love has, if not free
scope, freer scope than anywhere else, and where few healthy-minded men
are ashamed to avow the value they place upon woman, her love, and her
influence.
Despite the fact that Englishmen do not display towards women of
all classes that engaging politeness which favourably distinguishes
Frenchmen, a stranger who visits England cannot fail soon to perceive
in what high estimation woman is held. Her name is seldom taken in
vain. There is no trace of that gross satire upon women which so
often disfigures continental prints; she may be represented as sharp,
worldly, extravagant, but rarely as immoral, unfaithful, or ugly. Some
of the lower-class papers are strongly influenced by French views, but
they never indulge in adaptations without some modification, and such
papers as have been started in order to emulate the fast journals of
Paris have always been extremely short-lived.
The same respect for women is manifest in fiction as well as on the
stage. Here again in consequence of French influence we meet with
women who have sinned, and women with a past, but they never play such
degraded parts as they often do in French novels and plays. Ladies
are allowed an extensive liberty, and they are rarely insulted; and
obtain, even under trying circumstances, a respectful treatment at the
hands of the lowest class of labourers. We have unfortunately amongst
us ruffians who beat their wives, but in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred these are drunken and debauched human failures. The average
working man treats his wife and his daughter with as much consideration
as a nobleman could his, and their home is kept morally pure and as
comfortable for the women as his resources allow. He is not ashamed to
carry parcels, burdens, the children, or to perambulate the baby in
public places in order to spare his wife the trouble.
The men most reluctantly suspect a woman of immorality, and generally
not until there seems a strong case against her. Indecent words and
allusions are entirely excluded in the presence of ladies, and if a
woman in her innocence inadvertently makes a risky remark, it passes
unheeded and without producing a smile.
The average Englishman’s life brings him into constant contact with
women, and he is perfectly aware that he owes to them much that is
bright and happy in his existence. Already as a child he is the trusted
protector of his sisters, and often the cavalier of their friends.
Early in life he loves some young woman, and his long courtship is to
him a happy time. When he works hard, when he risks his life on the sea
or in dangerous climes, it is generally with a view to marrying the
girl he loves. When he is married, he wishes to succeed that he may
gain his wife’s approval, beautify her home, and make her life happy;
while at the same time he never remains insensible to the admiration
of other women. While his wife is yet young, his daughters grow up and
become important features in his life and his happiness.
It may therefore be said of the men of the English-speaking countries
that their “ideas revolve about women,” and it will be difficult to
persuade us Englishmen that respect, admiration, and love for women
are the signs of a degenerate mind. Coleridge well expresses the
English feeling—a feeling which, under circumstances similar to those
prevailing in England, would be universal:
“All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.”
Wagner’s music, which may be said to have been the delight of millions
of people, is not approved of by Nordau. He condemns it on the usual
ground that it is novel, and that it differs from the standards
accepted before Wagner. According to him, it is the music of an unsound
mind, because it contains no distinct ideas in the shape of melodies.
He objects to the _Leit-motiv_ and to the unending melody, but it is
difficult to harmonize what he says against the one with what he says
against the other. Speaking of the _Leit-motiv_, he says: “To express
ideas is not the function of music. Language provides for that as
completely as could be desired. When the word is accompanied by song
or orchestra, it is not to make it more definite, but to reinforce it
by the intervention of emotion. Music is a kind of sounding-board in
which the word has to awake something like an echo from the infinite.”
Later on he says about melody: “It is a regular grouping of notes in a
highly expressive series of tones. Melody in music corresponds to what
in language is a logically constructed sentence distinctly presenting
an idea, and having a clearly marked beginning and ending.”
Music being an art which exclusively appeals to emotion, it is not
surprising that any attempt to measure its value by a reasoning process
should result in utter failure. But this is no excuse for an author to
contradict himself so flatly as Nordau does in the above passages. To
say on one page that “_to express ideas is not the function of music_,”
and on another page to say that melody is indispensable to music,
because it “corresponds to a logically constructed sentence _distinctly
presenting an idea_.” Again he says: “Melody may be said to be an
effort to say something definite,” and how can this harmonize with
the other mission of music: “to awake something like an echo from the
infinite.” The latter expression is not only a true definition of the
mission of music, but also an exact description of the aim of Wagner’s
music.
Nordau feels that his scientific reasoning about music will affect no
one who has heard the music of Wagner, and that those who admire it
will be slow to believe that an unsound mind could have accomplished
such complicated, intricate, and complete work. To prepare his reader’s
mind for his rash conclusion, he once more goes to the lunatic asylum
for his arguments, in order to show that a man may be a lunatic and yet
be a good musician. But here again he is strangely blind to the fact
that such arguments tell directly against his theory. He cites cases of
lunatics who “improvised on the piano,” who “sang very beautiful airs
and at the same time improvised two different themes on the piano...
who composed very beautiful, new, and melodious tunes.”
The remarkable thing about the music of his maniacs is that it is tuny
and melodious, and consequently the only rational music, according to
Nordau, while Wagner’s music is condemned by him, and Wagner himself is
held up as a lunatic because his music is not like that of acknowledged
lunatics! It stands to reason that a weak mind could follow and repeat
a style of music which it has heard for years, but that it requires a
strong and sound mind to break a new road in the domain of music with
the full approval of millions of musical people.
Nordau also feels the necessity of backing up his opinion by
authorities. He sees a conclusive proof of Wagner’s inferiority in
the criticism of professional musicians and composers. He might as
well form his opinion of an actress on the criticism of her by her
most dangerous rival. It seems that Hiller and Schumann would not
acknowledge Wagner’s musical endowment, but attributed his success to
the _libretti_ written by himself. Regarding this Nordau exclaims:
“The same old story: musicians regard him as a poet, and poets as a
musician.” This means that our alienist is, or pretends to be, so
utterly innocent of humour and satire as to accept this very common way
of minimizing the talent of a rival as a trustworthy judgment. It is
the commonest thing in the world for a man to deny his rival’s talent
in his own specialty, and then, in order to strengthen the effect of
his opinion and to give it the colour of impartiality, to acknowledge
in him talents outside that specialty. Practical men, when they hear
one musician run down another musician, generally conclude that the
latter has a dangerous talent. Voltaire, in speaking of a writer none
of whose works were in existence, said that he must have been a man of
genius judging from the savage attacks made upon him by another writer.
Hiller and Schumann are the only authorities whom Nordau can point to
in support of his views, and he himself raises some doubts whether
their dislike of Wagner’s music was not due to the difficulty of
immediately appreciating a tendency so novel as Wagner’s. Our alienist
is only able to add that Rubinstein can only make some important
reservations, and that it was some time before Hanslick struck his
colours. In view, then, of the enormous literature that has grown
up around Wagner and Wagnerism, Nordau’s habit of referring to
authorities in this instance simply has the effect of showing that he
stands unsupported in his opinion by all musical authorities. It is
irresistibly comic to notice how Nordau regrets that the brochure—_Der
Fall Wagner_—in which Nietzsche attacks Wagner, is quite as “insanely
delirious” as another brochure written by the same writer twelve years
before in deification of Wagner. Had it not been for this awkward
circumstance, Nordau, it seems, would have been only too glad to exalt
Nietzsche—the man whom in another part of his work he strenuously
endeavours to prove an imbecile—to the rank of an authority. His
amazing lack of logic prevents him from seeing that a certificate of
lunacy issued by a lunatic is really a certificate of sanity, in virtue
of the logical axiom that two negatives are equal to one affirmative.
Such faults and defects as may be found in Wagner’s prose writings have
little importance in relation—and are almost irrelevant—to the question
of his supposed degeneracy. He had to deal with subjects which,
though intensely real to our emotional nature, can only be treated
inadequately in words. Whatever we may think of Wagner’s style, there
can be little doubt that he has succeeded in making himself understood
by a great number of people whose emotional nature sympathizes with
that of Wagner, and whom even Nordau would not undertake to prove to
be mentally deranged or morally degenerate. Wagner’s writings have the
defect, very general among German writers, and conspicuous in Nordau,
of being verbose. They all make us crave for “Der langen Rede, kurzen
Sinn.”
The fundamental idea in Wagner’s great work—_The Art-Work of the
Future_—is that the arts should co-operate, and that each individual
art should attain to its perfection in conjunction with other arts.
Nordau in no way disproves the soundness of this view by saying that
“Goethe’s lyric poetry and the _Divina Commedia_” need no landscape
painting, that “Michael Angelo’s ‘Moses’ would hardly produce a deeper
impression surrounded by dancers and singers,” and that “the ‘Pastoral
Symphony’ does not require a complement of words in order to exercise
its full charm.”
With that logic peculiar to Nordau, he quotes a passage from
Schopenhauer in which this thinker mildly deprecates such co-ordination
of the arts as was to be found in the operas of his time, and our
alienist wishes us to accept this as a proof of insanity in Wagner’s
admiration for the opera. He forgets the important fact that
Wagner’s greatness is proved by the way in which he has succeeded in
obliterating at least the worst defects of the opera as it existed
before him, and that he has rendered it a complete and harmonious
expression of combined and elevated arts. The quoted passage from
Schopenhauer could be no condemnation of Wagner’s operas as it was
written before they saw the light. In the operas, as they used to be,
there was much that tended to disturb the imagination and even to
arouse laughter. The most exasperating incongruities were indulged
in. An exciting hunting chorus would be played and sung while two
rows of lady supers would walk in from each side of the wings in
Indian file, each bearing as a hunting implement a yard-long piece
of wood surmounted by a piece of tin. The impossible dresses, the
demure demeanour, the solemn faces, the absurd lances—carried like
candles in a nuns’ procession—all this clashed so terribly with the
music and the theme as to suggest a burlesque. A band of conspirators
afraid of being detected, yet shouting at the top of their voices some
compromising chorus; a man with a deadly wound rising to his feet and
singing a lively and complicated aria; a messenger in the hottest haste
delivering a message in a slow and long-drawn recitative; an intensely
modern consumptive lady dying amid ancient surroundings, trilling in
her last gasps musical complexities, during a quarter of an hour,
with a marvellously strong and healthy voice—such, and many other
absurdities, disfigured the opera before Wagner and Gounod, and well
deserved the condemnation of Schopenhauer.
Wagner’s assertion that the natural evolution of each art leads to
the surrender of its independence and to its fusion with other arts
is looked upon by Nordau as delirious. To prove this he falls back on
biology, and points out that nature develops from the simple to the
complex, that originally similar parts develop into separate organs
of different structure and independent functions. Why on earth should
there necessarily be an analogy between the growth of plants and
animals, and between the development of the arts? Any other writer who
had been unfortunate enough to indulge in such profound mysticism would
certainly have been condemned by Nordau to the lunatic asylum. Even
if we admit the analogy as permissible, he gains very little by it:
for when he speaks of nature as always proceeding from the simple to
the complex he describes exactly the development of the arts into the
opera—music, poetry, and dancing representing each the simple, and the
opera representing the complex. What would Nordau think of a mad doctor
who based his verdict of insanity on such reasoning?
The attentive student of Nordau’s impeachment of Wagner cannot fail
to see that, despite all his efforts to brand him as a degenerate, he
has only succeeded in throwing the grand power of that genius into
bolder relief. Instead of inducing us to look upon Wagner as a sign
of degeneration, he has impressed us with the fact that Wagner’s work
constitutes an awakening from the slumber in which Philistinism and
conventionalism have so long enwrapped humanity, and opened a new vista
for the ennobling mission of the arts.
While we must reject Nordau’s clinging to that pedantry and
conventionalism which limit the mission of the arts to the production
of isolated pictures for public galleries and the salons of
modern Mæcenases, statues for public places, and compositions of
_Kammer-musik_ for drawing-rooms, we at the same time do not believe
that the opera, even as regenerated by the genius of a Wagner, is
the highest expression of the arts. There will come a day when the
illusions of the stage will be realities, when we shall dispense with
the dusty sceneries, the garish footlights, the painted faces, the
prudish trappings, which go to make up the mirage which heralds an
ideal future. The arts, instead of being relegated to the nursery in
order to make room for science, as Nordau prophesies, will become
its aim. When science has given us health, strength, and beauty, an
extended power over nature’s forces, when it has solved the terrible
social problem on the basis of liberty and progress, then will science
be the handmaiden of the arts. Then will the answer be granted to the
poet’s prayer:
“Oh! for a muse of fire that shall ascend
The highest heaven of invention;
A kingdom for a stage; princes to act;
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!”
The arts, after having demonstrated in the opera their solidarity and
their independence, will leave that artificial shelter and take up
their abode in our homes and in our civic buildings, in our streets,
and in our public places, in our arenas and in our temples.
A new renaissance lies ahead of us, and we are all struggling to reach
it. The man who thinks and writes, the artist who paints or composes,
the peasant at the plough, the miner in the bowels of the earth, all
are contributing to further the advent of a new era when the life,
the work, the pleasure, and the worship of a regenerate race shall be
exalted by the arts, and present a realization of what Wagner dreamed
while he created.
CHAPTER IX
_THE RELIGION OF SELF_
The term egomania is a welcome present from the scientists, which
enriches our language with a verbal representation of a psychological
condition which is certainly characteristic of our time. We trust that
Nordau’s diagnosis of the disease will be carefully studied by its
victims, especially by those who are in the stage where it appears as
egoism, self-sufficiency, indifference to others, to society, to the
State, and as that fashionable and superior pessimism which despairs
of self as an excuse for despairing of others. For, though Nordau
goes very minutely into the psychological aspect of egomania without
indicating its origin or the remedies against it, he evidently does
not reject the theory, which seems constantly to be confirmed by
actualities, that mental diseases may be fostered and aggravated both
by those who suffer from them, as well as by surrounding circumstances.
Putting his opinion as a psychologist together with that of others,
we seem authorized to hope that when our egotistical pessimists have
learned that the aristocratic characteristic on which they pride
themselves is the beginning of a mental disease, they will fly to such
remedies as may be found in the study of useful science and healthy
work.
Such authors as Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Rollinat, and others
attract especially Nordau’s attention; but he deals with them in order
to show that they individually had degenerated into egomaniacs, and
he does not once try to realize the relation between their so-called
degeneracy and the general tendencies of our time. Had he done so, he
might have felt inclined to be less hard on these exponents of _fin de
siècle_ corruption. Speaking of the hints which this school of poets
and writers sometimes throws out that they are not quite serious,
Nordau comes very near to discovering their significance when he says
about Baudelaire that perhaps “he sought to make himself believe that,
with his Satanism, he was laughing at the Philistines.” But Nordau does
not follow up the cue he has thus accidentally dropped upon, but adds a
sentence revealing the one-sidedness of his inquiry, when he says: “but
such a tardy palliation does not deceive the psychologist, and it is of
no importance for his judgment.”
That may be so. But it is of the utmost importance to humanity. That
the yielding to the promptings of “unconsciousness,” to the dictates of
instincts bad or good, was on the part of the so-called Parnassians
an experimental plunge in the dark—a challenge to those who pretended
to know better to show them that they were wrong—cannot be denied by
any one who has read their writings with some knowledge of the French
character.
These men took up literature at a time when the world began to perceive
that science could not satisfy its emotional aspirations, that it could
not explain the mysteries of the Universe, or bring about that balance
between our emotional and intellectual natures on which a healthy
life depends. But this was not the only disillusion which humanity
experienced at that time. All the hopes which the altruistic feeling
had prompted us to base on democratic governments and scientific
political economy had vanished. When the Utopias of the economists
turned out to be a _fata morgana_, instead of the solid ladder leading
up to the material heaven promised by the religion of humanity of the
scientists, a Babylonian confusion arose among the people who had first
been told to worship at the shrine of religion, then at the shrine
of science, and now stood without any shrine whatsoever. In France,
more than in any other country, we meet with people whose minds are
too subtle and whose emotions are too genuine to permit them to dwell
contented in that Philistinism which leans on the one side towards
the scientific creed or absence of creed, in order to appear modern,
and, on the other side, on religion, in order to be safe, but whose
real shrine is the money-safe. These French people, mostly authors and
artists, had studied both the religious and the scientific theories,
and had found the causes of their miscarriage.
The Church had said: “Nature is vile, man is naturally bad, instincts
are prompted by the devil, and knowledge is one of the snares of hell.”
But the Roman Church had not only failed in its mission to keep up the
faith and render humanity virtuous and happy, but was responsible for
great social troubles, superstitions, and obstacles to progress. It
had good intentions, but the way in which it tried to carry them out
rendered them valueless. It required power first, much power, complete
power over everything, and the acquisition of power did more harm than
the Church could do good when ever so powerful. The Protestant Churches
in France were gloomy, prudish, anti-artistic, and appealed with
difficulty to any French character. Their dogmas seemed incompatible
with scientific truth, and their mission appeared to be rather to
persuade their members that they were perfect than to render them
perfect. Besides, a great many minds throughout the world, accredited
with scientific accomplishments, had mercilessly opposed dogmatic
religion.
Science, in its turn, when asked, Where is truth? Where is the ideal?
could only point to a pile of facts laboriously built up like a brick
wall, and had to confess that what it wished to give instead of
religion was mere speculations. The ultimate conclusion it pointed
to was selfishness, personal irresponsibility, and a mere animal
existence. It failed entirely to satisfy the great moving power in
the scheme of humanity—emotions—and could not therefore satisfy human
yearnings and aspirations.
The postulates of religion—the wickedness of nature and of man—were
rejected as groundless, and the guidance of intellect and science was
spurned because they were powerless to influence the emotions.
Finding themselves in the plight of a ship driving about in the ocean
without compass or rudder, the Parnassians, the Decadents, and many
others thought it was time to try a desperate course. Perhaps, after
all, they thought, nature is good, perhaps human instincts may be
trusted; let us be natural and follow our instincts. There was much to
encourage the new departure. It had often been found that the purest
joys were the most lasting, that the good was the most beautiful, that
lives and actions prompted by the altruistic feelings best satisfied
selfish yearnings, that vice was disappointing, unhealthy, degrading,
and joy-killing; that virtue improved life, increased the capacity for
enjoyment, and beautified mind and body. These observations encouraged
the belief in the religion of self. The _Ego_ was not bad; but it
required freedom to develop itself.
Like all founders of systems and philosophies, the Parnassians and
Decadents sought for confirmation of their theories in the possibility
of a Utopia. In imagining a state of things under which the self should
have unlimited latitude for self-realization, where man could satisfy
his highest aspirations and enjoy the greatest possible happiness under
the guidance of his altruistic promptings, where his instincts should
be so sharpened and developed as to unfailingly select the greatest and
the most lasting, and therefore the noblest, pleasures—in imagining
such a state of things these experimentalists perceived that society,
such as it was around them, offered thousands of obstacles to every
attempt at practical realization of their theories. They thus came to
look upon themselves as at war with society, its old standards, its
prejudices, its religions, and its morals.
Their writings were at once weapons, challenges, rallying-cries. They
were intended to deride, to shock, and to draw attention to the new
philosophy. The distinction between good and bad was obliterated. The
artist and the poet should henceforth express their true feelings and
nought else. Instinct should take the place of principles. The devil
might be worshipped as well as God. Art should have no other object
than art. Nature might be abhorred as well as loved. And so on.
From this moral chaos the self was to rise in all its glory. For the
present it was distorted by surrounding circumstances. The ugliness and
morbidness of the subjects they wrote about and the distortion of their
own feelings were the proofs of the decayed state upon which humanity
had entered. Characters such as Huysman’s Duc des Esseintes were
intended to illustrate what the present state of society was, and what
its present tenets would lead to. He is intended to represent the final
result of our civilization, and to show that disgust of our race may be
so great as to inspire a man with the belief that by fostering evil and
creating criminals he does a good action in so far as he accelerates
the destruction of society.
The Parnassians and the Decadents have no proclaimed creed or any
programme, and their own opinion of their philosophy is of the haziest
kind. We are therefore far from asserting that we have here interpreted
them as they would interpret themselves. Whatever may be said of their
style and their writings, they have, at least, the merit of being
frank and unsophisticated, and we think it must be recognised that,
whether they know it or not, they hold themselves up as the “frightful
examples” of the chaotic state into which creeds, principles, morals,
are falling at the end of this century. To us the moral, both of their
existence and of their writing, is that the world, and especially
France, stands in sore need of better churches, of a better system of
philosophy, and better principles of government. These authors have
rendered a great service in tearing away the hypocritical mask which
society is so anxious to maintain, and thus demonstrating the great
need of regenerating agencies.
Of late, England has been considerably influenced by France, and the
æsthetic revolt just referred to naturally affected the English, but
merely as a faint echo.
When Nordau, who correctly points out the connection between the
Decadents in France and the extreme æsthetes in England, insinuates
that the whole of English society is affected by it, he labours under a
wrong impression. We have had here—and we speak purposely in the past
tense—a knot of people who have believed, as Nordau states, that a work
of art is its own aim, that it may be immoral. But, as he himself has
stated, the æsthetic awakening in England has forced art almost in the
opposite direction. We have had poets who have imitated Baudelaire and
other writers of the same class, but these imitators have, by imitating
many others, displayed a weakness which debars them from any great
influence. There was a time with us when a thoroughly immoral decadence
had a spell of influence and created a sickly literature. But the
influence of this sham æstheticism is fast vanishing, since its essence
has been mercilessly exposed.
While the influence of the Parnassians and Decadents in France was only
small, in England the circumstances which produced them have been in
existence among us and have produced effects to some extent similar.
The struggle between science and religion, the distrust of both, the
failure of social panaceas, and the irresistible pushing of the working
class against old social barriers have produced in a great number of
educated men a peculiar state of mind which we wish that Nordau had
noticed. Whether he would have placed those thus affected among his
degenerates as egomaniacs it is impossible for us to decide, but there
can be little doubt that egoism is the chief characteristic of a new
religion or a new mental disease, which has made large inroads among
educated men. It becomes manifest in their pessimism and in their
indifferentism. They believe that everything is bad, that the classes
are bad, that the masses are bad, that the country is in a bad state,
and that everything will finish badly. At the same time they do not
care. They will do nothing to avert the coming evils. They hope that
none will think them foolish enough to make themselves martyrs. They
wish it to be clearly understood that they care only for themselves
and that they take no heed of what happens to others. They loathe
the working class, and affect a desire to crush them out of existence
at one blow. They belong to the few Englishmen who suspect women of
vile things, except of course their mothers, sisters, _fiancées_, and
wives. They think life hardly worth living, and certainly not worth any
special exertions, but their main preoccupation is the state of their
health. They study nothing save their own inclinations and cravings
and certain excrescences of the most modern literature. Their capacity
for hatred is stupendous in its scope but meek in its expression. They
claim to enjoy all the benefits of social life without considering
themselves obliged to perform any of its duties. They manage to be
spendthrifts without being generous, and to be mean without being
economical.
But we are strongly averse to classing these social phenomena among
the hopeless egomaniacs. They exaggerate their egotism to such an
extent as to suggest that they are rather following a foolish fashion
than undergoing moral decay, and that the existence of pinchbeck
patriots, political charlatans, sham enthusiasts, and professional
philanthropists has frightened them from showing their best side and
using their best abilities, and causes them to flout their pessimism
and selfishness in every one’s face lest they should be taken for one
of these.
In spite of their infatuated posing as degenerate egomaniacs, we
believe that many of them may be counted upon as part of those
elements from which the future regeneration may spring, when the cloud
of scepticism has cleared away, and a goal worthy to strive for is
discernible.
CHAPTER X
_AN ETHICAL INQUISITION_
A very large part of the sum-total of the work accomplished by
Nordau in _Degeneration_ consists in describing scientifically the
psychological phenomena which underlie the idiosyncrasies of certain
authors and artists: in giving scientific names to their weaknesses,
and in setting forth the relations in which such weaknesses stand to
madness. These idiosyncrasies, these weaknesses, and their relations to
madness were well known to observant people long before Nordau’s book
was written, and to these his work is simply the technical explanation
of familiar phenomena. In another chapter we shall dwell at greater
length on the difference of views which Nordau tends to bring about.
Here we wish to point out that, in spite of the mass of scientific
phraseology employed by Nordau, and in spite of the difference of
views he endeavours to bring about, in what seems to be his main
object, he is entirely in accord with millions of sound-minded people
in this country. We English deplore, as deeply as any one can, the
existence of artists and works of so-called art which appeal rather
to the morbid than to the healthy mind; of poetry, novels, and dramas
calculated to flatter the corrupt, instead of stimulating in all a
desire for elevation. We especially deplore the diabolical work done by
pornographic artists and authors.
Owing to this accord in aims with Nordau, his work has been read, and
is being read, by thousands in this country, in the hope that his
vaunted science and his strong mind would show us the right remedies.
But in this respect we have been sorely disappointed; for instead
of meeting with that complete grasp of the subject to which English
scientists have accustomed us, we meet in his proposal of remedies with
that dazed and superficial logic which throughout his work clashes so
strangely with his power of perceiving and of marshalling his facts.
The way he proposes to treat the “mystics, but especially egomaniacs
and filthy pseudo-realists,” forcibly reminds us of the solemn
resolution of the rats to bell the cat. He says:
“Society must unconditionally defend itself against them. Whoever
believes with me that society is the natural organic form of humanity,
in which alone it can exist, prosper, and continue to develop itself
to higher destinies; whoever looks upon civilization as a good, having
value and deserving to be defended, must mercilessly crush under
his thumb the anti-social vermin. To him who, with Nietzsche, is
enthusiastic over the ‘freely-roving, lusting beast of prey,’ we cry:
‘Get you gone from civilization! Rove far from us! Be a lusting beast
of prey in the desert! Satisfy yourself! Level your roads, build your
huts, clothe and feed yourself as you can! Our streets and our houses
are not built for you; our looms have no stuffs for you; our fields are
not tilled for you. All our labour is performed by men who esteem each
other, have consideration for each other, mutually aid each other, and
who have to curb their selfishness for the general good. There is no
place among us for the lusting beast of prey; and if you dare to return
to us, we will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs.’”
All this sounds very well; but if Nordau believes that in this passage
he has given us the true method of how to defend society against its
literary and artistic enemies, he labours under a delusion with regard
to his own achievements that savours somewhat of megalomania. His big
words, his righteous indignation, and his manifold signs of exclamation
are not a magic wand, are not a Saint Patrick’s mitre, with power to
banish toads and serpents from the country.
When he says that society should be defended, we can understand him.
But when he says that society must defend itself, he drops into
the mist of commonplace and meaningless generalities. The word
“society” stands for one of those things which will serve very well
as the object of an activity, but not as a subject because, while
its smallest component part may be affected, action is only possible
through an organized co-operation of all its parts. To a German who
has never witnessed the attempt of a free democratic community to
launch out into collective activity, this difference in the active
and passive positions of society may never have occurred. To him
the activity of society seems an easy matter, because in his mind
society is represented by a concentrated, powerful, and pragmatical
administration. If Nordau had said “government should defend,” instead
of “society should defend,” he would at least have been logical; but
this he could not do, because, though an enemy to personal liberty, he
has seen enough of German forms of government to reject the postulate
of the Socialists regarding the infallibility of the central power;
while at the same time he has a healthy contempt for the judgment of
the continental police. He therefore says that society must defend
itself, and thus gives us a gratuitous piece of advice which is
thousands of years old.
He calls upon all those who share his views to tell the enemies of
their race to be gone from civilization. But will they go? Why should
they be more obedient than the spirits from the vasty deep? The
administration of society would have to be completely centralized,
and the central Government would have to be absolutely despotic, in
order to compel such an exodus. Even with such a Government it might
be extremely difficult to accomplish. The most despotic Government in
the world—the Russian Government—have encountered enormous difficulties
in trying to expel the Jews, and this despite the fact that in this
endeavour they had the sympathies of the majority of the Russian
people, and could easily ascertain who were Jews and who were not.
A Government, in England for example, that would attempt to expel
pernicious authors and artists would have none of these facilities.
They would first have to pass an Act of Parliament—the Graphomaniac,
Egomaniac, Pornographomaniac Authors and Symbolist Artists Expulsion
Act—and at least twenty Governments would be turned out before it could
get passed. But let us suppose that Parliament had decided on such an
expulsion of these offenders, then the real difficulties would begin,
namely, to decide who should be expelled and who should not. As to
killing the returning ones with clubs, this mode of execution being
abolished among us, hanging would have to be resorted to—an extremely
difficult operation in our days, when the abolition of capital
punishment is more and more being considered as one of the first steps
towards better ethics.
Nordau admits that judges and the police cannot help us. The reason
which he gives with regard to Germany—the public contempt in which
the judges and police there stand—does not apply in England, where our
judges are beyond reproach, and the police is a highly respected body,
in consequence of being less pragmatical than any police force in the
world. Experience in England has given us far stronger reasons for not
using the law and the police force against authors and artists. Each
time it has been done, the very works intended to be suppressed have
gained a popularity and a circulation a thousand-fold greater than if
they had been left alone.
Instead of tribunals and police, Nordau suggests a body similar to an
association in Germany bearing the name “Association of Men for the
Suppression of Immorality.” As he often deals with his authorities, so
he here deals with his model tribunal. He turns round and shows that
they are no good. “This association, it seems, pursues disbelief more
than immorality,” he says. Alas! such is the way with associations
of frail men. They are apt to leave undone those things which they
ought to have done, and to do those things which they ought not to
have done. Nordau here ranges himself with the crowd of sentimental
Socialists who are so angry with the world because it cannot see
how easily the regeneration of humanity would become by means of an
infallible and almighty Government. He and they cannot see that this
infallible and almighty Government is the very thing beyond our reach.
If he had inquired logically into the causes of the disappointing
results produced by the “Association of Men,” he could not have
failed to notice that the latter were more logical than himself. This
“Association of Men,” wanting to suppress vice by forcible action,
exactly as Nordau would, were sensible enough to strike at the
causes and not at the effects. They had found that atheism, and even
free-thinking, generally coincided with immorality; and that on the
other hand religious men were generally moral. Consequently, atheism
was found to produce immorality, and religion morality. In upholding
religion, therefore, they were upholding morality in a most effective
way, because morality without religion, or at least without expressed
religion, is found only in men of great intellectual powers and
scientific attainments; and to educate the mass of the people to that
point is, and will for a long time be, out of the question. Religion,
therefore, was the only choice of Nordau’s “Association of Men”; and,
if it was right to coerce people into morality, it was surely right to
coerce them into religion. From this it should be clear that the fault
does not lie in the reasoning of this “Association of Men,” but in the
postulate which Nordau has approved—namely, the coercion of anybody by
an “Association of Men.”
He expects the new “Society for Ethical Culture” in Berlin to do
better, and wishes it to constitute itself as the voluntary guardian
of the people’s morality. What an extraordinary idea! One set of
men guarding the morality of another set of men—a small minority,
unauthorised, unrecognised, and devoid of all physical power, to guard
the morality of the great majority! The London authorities could tell
Nordau a great deal about the effects of such attempts, even when the
guardians of morality have the law and police at their back. But he
need not come to London to learn what guarded morality is worth, and
what the results of such guardianship are. The history of every country
teems with illustrations of the fact that every attempt to coerce
the people, morally or physically, into a moral life has invariably
brought about more hypocrisy, more secret corruption, and a tone of
greater immorality. If he distrusts universal experience, then he ought
to know, as a psychologist, that, so long as the human mind and the
human emotions are what they are, repression, supervision, and outside
interference with personal liberty must demoralize.
The composition of his society would be no guarantee whatever
against deplorable effects. He proposes that it should consist of
instructors, professors, authors, members of Parliament, judges, and
high functionaries. To begin with, authors could not be included,
because they could not judge and be judged at the same time; and if the
qualification of authors were sufficient, what would prevent authors
of the Zola type from predominating in the association? Here, as with
regard to original causes, Nordau fancies that he has struck solid
ground when he has removed the difficulty a stage farther back. The
association is simply an instrument. All depends upon who forges it. Of
this he says not a word. He evidently expects it to arise as a miracle,
like the infallible Government of the Socialists. Were the German
Emperor to select the members of the association—which in Germany he
would have to do directly or indirectly—he would take upon himself an
enormous responsibility, for the fulfilment of which he would have to
acquire the necessary information and the necessary means. He would
simply be to ethics what the Pope is to the Catholic religion.
Nordau boldly asserts that such an association would have “the power
to exercise an irresistible ‘boycot.’” Why? He evidently thinks so
because his association would be an influential one. He clearly does
not know what ought to be an axiom to any one who meddles with social
questions—namely, that the circulation of a condemned book increases
in an inverse ratio to the respect which the condemning authorities
enjoy. Thus, if his association were to consist of nobodies and were to
condemn a book, the condemnation would only increase the circulation
a little; but if it were to consist of the leading men of the German
Empire, the condemned book would be read all over the world. In
the matter of public censors nothing is of any avail that is not
absolutely despotic. By allowing Government and police to exercise
all kinds of violence, isolated newspaper paragraphs and leaders can
be suppressed before they are published, and the open circulation of
condemned books may be prevented. But once the public get hold of the
contents of an article and the name of a book, a secret circulation
at once sets in. Eyewitnesses who were in France when the French
Government confiscated and prohibited Edmond About’s _La Question
Romaine_ can relate the eagerness with which this book was read, and
tell of the numbers of copies circulated secretly. We cite this example
from the continent, as it corroborates what always happens in England.
Nordau fondly imagines that the judgment of his association would
absolutely “annihilate” not only the book, but the author. The
contrary would happen. As long as there is a grain of love of liberty
in humanity, the condemnation by an authority of a man’s book will
make him the object of public sympathy. When Nordau says that “no
respectable bookseller would keep the condemned book, no respectable
paper would mention it,” his meaning entirely depends on his standard
of respectability—one of those standards he absolutely refuses to
give us. Every one knows that there are respectable booksellers and
papers, and that there are non-respectable booksellers and papers.
But who could undertake to draw the line of demarcation between the
two categories? In a small German town where there are only one or
two booksellers this line is easily drawn. But how about places like
Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Vienna, and London? Besides, a bookseller and
a newspaper might be highly respectable, but differ diametrically from
an association which would have Nordau’s approval. Surely he would not
push his mania so far as to deny a respectable character to all the
booksellers and newspapers who, for instance, refuse to boycot Ibsen?
Nordau also thinks that the specialists in insanity should come out of
their shells and publicly denounce the degenerate authors and artists.
In England, for example, he thinks that Maudsley could exercise a
healthy influence. But he would be surprised at the small number of
people in England, outside the profession, who read works on mental
disease. _Degeneration_ has been widely read; but this is because it
levels startling accusations against well-known authors and artists,
and because it purports to give a novel scientific interpretation of
familiar phenomena, with the purpose of turning our opinions with
regard to some branches of art and literature topsy-turvy. It is
not to science alone that it owes its wide circulation, but to the
clever—conscious or unconscious—sophistries it contains. English
psychologists and specialists in insanity could not afford to launch
out after the manner of Nordau. They might secure a certain number
of readers; but they would lose their patients. A specialist who came
before the public with Nordau’s artless and ill-considered scheme
for the defence of society against its enemies, could not hope to be
taken seriously by an English public. In England we have had a too
large experience of books with a tendency, of log-rolling, of veiled
advertisement, and of sly party thrusts, to be influenced by such a
suggestion of lunacy against political opponents as is contained in
the following sentence from Nordau: “A Maudsley in England, a Charcot,
a Magnan in France, a Lombroso, a Tonnini in Italy, have brought to
vast circles of people an understanding of the obscure phenomena in
the life and the mind, and disseminated knowledge which would make it
impossible in those countries for pronounced lunatics with the mania
for persecution to gain an influence over hundreds of thousands of
citizens.”
It is impossible for us to imagine an English specialist in insanity
attributing the absence of anti-semitism in England to his own
writings, or those of other psychologists, as Nordau does in this
sentence. If the German electors can believe such a wild party
distortion, they are not the men we take them for. We have already
explained the causes of the existence of anti-semitism in Germany,
and of its absence in England. We do not expect that Nordau will
acknowledge our view to be right. For had he not been so entirely the
creature of prejudice on this, as on many other subjects outside his
specialty, he would, unassisted, have discovered so obvious a truth.
Englishmen are not less anxious than he to defend society against its
enemies; but only the most inexperienced and illogical Englishman would
recommend such remedies as our alienist seems to consider as the height
of wisdom. Though we have been slow about it, we seem at last to have
grasped the not very hidden truth that if society—that is to say, the
people—is moral enough to elect an association capable of acting as
an ethical censor over art and literature, we believe the people also
capable of exercising that censorship directly, instead of indirectly
through an association. This censorship by the people themselves has
the immense advantage of working unostentatiously and silently, and
without advertising the very work that should be suppressed.
We think it futile to condemn, or even to suppress, a work; and on
grounds of expediency only, regardless of principle, to club the
sinning author. The source from which the condemned work sprang would
yield more such works, and the circumstances which had produced the
objectionable author would produce more objectionable authors. These,
as well as their works, are the symptoms of a social malady, and we
should treat them as such. We have ceased to apply to society the old
methods, long since abandoned by the medical profession, of curing an
evil by means of violent suppression of the symptoms—methods adhered to
by Nordau with regard to society, but, let us hope, not with regard to
his patients.
We leave the symptoms alone: for they allow us to diagnose the evil,
and we go for the causes. In looking for them, we try to keep our
minds free from such prejudices as influence Nordau’s logic. We
should not cry out for new ethical standards, for new and impossible
moral authorities, while we ruthlessly destroy a standard and an
authority—religion—the practical usefulness of which could not be
replaced for centuries by any new standard or authority, even if
invented now.
Recognising the truth in Voltaire’s flippant saying, that if God did
not exist we should have to invent Him, we do not, as the superstitious
scientists do, first abolish Him and then re-invent Him in the clumsy
form of a “mechanical causality.” We let the holders of the ominous
rings—of which Nathan der Weiser told Saladin—do their utmost to prove
by virtue and happiness that they hold the magic ring conferring these
privileges. It matters little to us whether the genuine ring be the
Christian one, the Jewish one, or the scientists’, so long as the
belief in the holders of each of the rings stimulates them to prove
its genuineness. We would not tell the great majority who pin their
faith to the Christian ring—even if we believe it to be spurious—that
we can prove it to be worthless, and that the scientists’ ring alone
will bring salvation: for we know that this ring is beyond the reach of
most of them, and that, handled in the wrong way, it will work curses
instead of blessings. We limit ourselves to telling them that the rings
held by the others must not be despised until the Great Competition is
adjudicated.
In our quest for the causes of degeneration, we do not begin by trying
to discover traces of lunacy in a small number of prominent citizens.
We bear in mind that these are either isolated cases, or types of a
generally prevailing tendency. In the first case, we leave them alone;
in the second, we search for the cause of this tendency. If we find
that the tendency, let us say, toward hysteria, or egomania, in the
upper classes is being produced by a craving for excitement, unhealthy
pleasures, or artificial sensations, and by a frivolous and empty life,
we set about to discover the causes of this craving and this empty life.
If we again discover that the cause is found in the decay of the
beliefs in personal responsibility, in the importance of philanthropy,
morality, and patriotism, we try to discover why these beliefs have
decayed. If it be found that they have decayed simultaneously with
and in consequence of the decay of the authority of the Church, we
try either to strengthen the influence of the Church by purifying and
reforming it, or we replace its dogmas and its doctrines by a healthy
and moral philosophy.
Should we find, on the other hand, that the deplorable state among the
poorer classes—their suffering, their degradation, and their joyless
lives, co-existing with large fortunes, and irremediable under present
laws and institutions—leads to the conclusion that the altruistic
feelings of the wealthy are useless, and thus prompt among the upper
classes selfishness and egomania, and the determination to drown
their higher emotions in a giddy life, and in the poorer classes to
foster destructive tendencies and the desire for revenge, we turn our
attention to social remedies.
No one can turn his attention to the social state of the working class
in England, and throughout the world, without discovering a host of
motors active in the production of dire misery, and all the mental
and moral degradation that follows in its train—a degradation which
aggravates the misery, and reacts, as we have shown, on the upper
classes. Nothing will more actively stay the progress of any mental
degeneration which might be going on than the removal of the causes of
the awful misery suffered by such an alarming proportion of civilized
humanity. Nordau’s warning against mental decay and progression towards
folly will, we hope, quicken, if not the higher emotions, at least the
sense of self-preservation among the leading classes throughout the
world. But it must be regretted that he, not only in his suggestion of
remedies, but in many other parts of his work, displays a lack of logic
and a want of clear perception as soon as he quits the narrow precincts
of his special science and the teachings of his manifold authorities,
and falls back on his own reasoning powers. Had he prevented his
prejudices from colouring his views, and had he not sacrificed logic
for brilliancy, his work would have been of no slight assistance to
those who are helping on humanity in its staggering onward movement.
CHAPTER XI
_VIGOROUS AFFIRMATIONS_
It has come to our knowledge that a great number of people in this
country who have read through the whole of Nordau’s bulky volume have
carried away an impression far from pleasant. Indeed, there are few
men or women in a country like England who might not, on some plea or
another, come under the suspicion of mental degeneration, if all that
Nordau says were, regardless of his contradictions, accepted as true.
In this country education and morality are based entirely on religious
principles, and most of the inhabitants are, either by faith or by
dint of sincere philosophical inquiry, to some extent religionists.
All these might think themselves included among those whom Nordau
stigmatises as degenerates. There are also a great number who admire
intensely Burne Jones, Rossetti, and many other painters of the same
school, and all these have been told, with somewhat brutal frankness,
that they are on the road to lunacy. The pieces of Ibsen have a great
number of admirers who have welcomed with pleasure the additional
intelligence and interest which he has infused into the drama, and who
consequently have been pointed out as degenerate imbeciles.
In the light of these facts there remain few educated persons among
the upper classes of this country about whose intellectual soundness
Nordau’s work might not raise doubts. This all the more so as his
few reservations with regard to people who have demonstrated their
sanity by practical ability to conduct their own affairs, sink into
insignificance among his voluminous and wholesale accusations,
especially as such reservations are forgotten almost as soon as they
are made.
This wholesale issue of certificates of madness would not have mattered
so much if his work did not carry with it a certain power of conviction
which tells especially with the weak, uninstructed mind, and with
people who have not read his work with special attention. In fact, we
know cases of people of sensitive mind who imagine that, thanks to
Nordau’s book, their friends will look upon them as on the road to
lunacy.
There can be little doubt that the strong impression the book has made,
sometimes in one way and sometimes in another, is largely due to the
style adopted by its author. The secret of this style is revealed in
the chapter “Prognosis,” where he describes with somewhat elephantine
humour the effects in the twentieth century of the present progressing
degeneration. He says, among other things, that companies of men will
be formed who “by vigorous affirmations are charged to tranquillize
persons afflicted with the mania of doubt, when taken by a fit of
nervousness.”
Such a piece of prophecy could only enter the head of a man who has had
practical experience of the great effect produced on nervous people by
vigorous affirmations, and, having had this experience, Nordau fills
his volume with such “vigorous affirmations.” His method has succeeded
all the better as he evidently belongs to that class of powerful and
strong-willed men who, when once they have formed an opinion, hold to
it tenaciously, and count as nothing any conviction against their will.
Having followed Nordau through his vigorous crusade against that score
of people whom he regards as dangerous enemies to humanity, and having
pointed out a host of his logical errors, erroneous perceptions,
unsound postulates, and exaggerated representations, we propose before
closing this volume to examine some of the reasoning methods which give
him his apparent strength.
It is to him of great moment that his readers shall not believe in the
existence of the thinking and feeling _Ego_ as a person, apart from
the organic mechanism which conveys impressions and presentations to
the _Ego_. He uses all the arguments which that school of thinkers to
which he belongs has piled up in order to show that mind is a condition
of matter. He says nothing about the arguments on the other side, but
treats them as the science of the past. He takes for granted, without
showing a vestige of doubt, that human beings are nothing but organic
mechanisms. He does not even refer to, or allow that there is, anything
beyond the present scientific discoveries, and scornfully ignores the
existence of what less prejudiced scientists call the Unknowable. He
thus treats a question which still trembles in the balance as if it
were already decided in favour of his pet theories.
The attitude which biologists and psychologists take up as such, and
with the special purpose of proceeding in their investigations with
perfectly unbiassed minds, Nordau assumes as a philosopher, and tries
to persuade himself and others that he has taken his stand on absolute
facts. Science proceeds on the supposition that only that is true
which has been proved so by demonstrations to our senses, or through
deductions from such demonstrations. This, of course, is a postulate
the illogicality of which most scientific men are aware of, and is
adopted mostly for the purpose, as it were, of clearing the ground. To
assume, apart from their investigating attitude, that there is nothing
more to know than what is already known, would be an utterly absurd
assumption, as it would, if acted upon, preclude further investigation.
Nordau does not, and would not, deny that there is more to learn,
but he persists in the view that all future knowledge will be on the
lines of our present knowledge, and never contradictory to the present
prevailing scientific dogmas. He remains under this impression, because
he forgets that science has progressed, progresses, and, as far as we
see now, always will progress through investigations by our senses,
and that this fact brings two important truths conspicuously into
relief. The first, that our senses are liable to deceive us, and that
consequently the difference between primitive views—the result of
imperfect observation—and the scientific opinions of the day is not one
of kind, but simply one of degree. In olden times the senses deceived
us very much, and nowadays they deceive us less. But to what an extent
they deceive us now the future alone can reveal. The second, that
science with the present methods cannot investigate anything that does
not appeal to our senses.
To deny the existence of anything that does not appeal directly to our
senses is absurd, because we should have to deny all the forces of
nature. The existence of these can only be detected by their effects.
The more science teaches us about forces, the more the view gains
adherence that the forces are not a state of matter, but a thing apart,
if matter is not a state of force. Even if this view should prove to be
correct, the error it would dispel, that force is a state of matter,
would be pardonable, as force only has come within the perception of
our senses through its effect on matter.
Psychology has to some extent succeeded in tracing and in describing
certain forces which are at work in our nerves and our brains, such
as, for example, reveal themselves in the reception and elaboration
of presentations. But within every human being there are well-known
phenomena which tell of forces—or of one general force—which so far
have escaped all investigation. These phenomena are emotion, judgment,
will.
Attentive readers of Nordau’s books will have noticed that, in
his scientific dissertations on the actions of the brain, these
factors—emotion, judgment, will—turn up suddenly without the slightest
explanation as to whence they come and what they are, though they seem
to completely determine the action of the whole organism. It is with
this enormous gap in their chain of reasoning that some scientists,
with more learning than logic, jump to the conclusion that the thinking
and feeling _Ego_ is only a state of matter.
Nordau, being anxious, as we have already mentioned, to magnify the
importance of his psychological theories by undermining his readers’
belief in the existence of anything unscientifically called “soul” or
“spirit,” renders his task easier by attacking religion, of which the
belief in the existence of the spiritual _Ego_ is a vital part. He
knows that if he can compass the rejection of the idea of religion
he kills two birds with one stone. He gets rid of the personal _Ego_
as well as the belief in eternal life, both of which, if admitted to
be realities, would strongly point to an intelligent Providence the
existence of which would be a colossal impediment to the glorification
of science and of scientists.
The way in which he strives to undermine religious belief is ingenious
and often effective. He trusts chiefly to the historical argument. He
goes back to primitive man in order to show that he, in his ignorance
of nature, attributed those natural phenomena which strongly impressed
him to some man mightier than himself. Nordau tries to show that out
of this belief arose what he would call superstition, the several
forms of religion. He here of course appeals to feeling more than to
reason. People do not like to feel that they have remained in the
depth of ignorance of the primitive savage, and might feel disposed
to join the glorious company of the apostles of science. But if we
use our reasoning powers we cannot fail to perceive that science has
merely taught us the methods by which, and the laws according to which,
nature works, and that as to the forces behind the laws of nature the
scientist is as ignorant as the primitive savage.
Nordau also pursues that diplomatic course—or commits the error—as
we have already pointed out, of confounding religion with the
Churches. It is easy to inspire distrust in religion if it be permitted
to consider Pope Borgia, Ignatius Loyola, and Dr. Stöcker as its
inevitable results. By analyzing, to some extent distorting the essence
of ritual, Nordau seeks to point out that Christian worship is not only
sheer imbecility, but also an insult to the supposed God. He never
notices such discrepancies between the Churches and religion as are,
for example, revealed by the anti-semitist movement in Germany, which
naturally he keenly resents. From the defects, the shortcomings, the
superstitions, the antiquated dogmas of the Churches, he tries to draw
the sweeping conclusion that a belief in an intelligent Providence, in
the existence of a soul, and in a spiritual life independent of the
body is the outcome of degenerate mental powers.
The views that by such means he endeavours to impose upon his readers
mean that man, being an organic mechanism, ceases to exist when he
dies. If this be so, there is no personal responsibility, and only that
man would be wise, rational, undegenerate, who so arranges his life
that he may live long, keep in good health, and enjoy all the pleasures
that he desires, be they noble or ignoble. To test, then, whether a man
who is, who believes he is, or merely poses as, a disbeliever in future
responsibility, we ought to examine how he regulates his life. Only in
this manner can we discover to what an extent he is influenced—to use
Nordau’s own language—by the inherited tendencies to worship lurking
somewhere in the innermost recesses of his consciousness, or, to use
our own language, by the instinctive feeling of personal responsibility
which has characterized humanity in every stage of barbarism and
civilization.
The fact that a great many scientists, including Nordau, do not live
as if they were perfectly convinced of the non-existence of personal
responsibility beyond the grave, requires quite a different kind of
explanation than that generally afforded, before we abandon the belief
that they are self-deceivers. The moral scientists themselves have
found the necessity of some explanation, and this is what they say,
though perhaps in other words: “We do not believe in any responsibility
beyond the grave, but we do what we think our duty to humanity. We
should be sorry and ashamed to be actuated by a fear of punishment or
the desire for reward, and not to do what is right and good for the
sake of the right and the good.”
This sounds very beautiful, but too boastful almost to be accepted
as the bare truth. Some of them who are aware of this, or who are
genuinely too modest to thus stand forward as demi-gods, add: “In
living and acting as we do, and wanting others to live and to act in
the same way, we are not more unselfish, nor morally better, than
others. We are only wiser; in fact, more intellectually selfish. And
all we desire of other people is that they should be intellectually
selfish. In exercising self-control and devotion to others, we do not
deprive ourselves of pleasures and enjoyments, because most of these
come to us from our surroundings and from society at large. For what
we do for our wives and families, we get love in return; for what we
do for society and the race, we get two rewards: firstly, esteem and
reputation, perhaps money; and, secondly, all the social advantages
which are valuable to us in the same proportion as society is in a
healthy state.”
This seems highly convincing, but it does not by far cover the whole
ground. Whoever has studied our times well knows that a man can secure
for himself, and even for his family and friends, enormous advantages
by disregarding and violating the interests and moral rights of others,
and also that, when wholesale rascality succeeds, when it is productive
of great wealth, great social and political power, it also secures
esteem and reputation. There are, of course, men in positions, the
stock-in-trade of which consists in honesty and even philanthropy; but
there are others, and millions of them, who could, under the present
social systems of the world, amass fortunes and rise to distinction by
systematic robbery. Thousands of cases could be stated in proof of the
fact that, in the absence of the belief in responsibility after death,
selfishness will prompt men to hurt their fellow-beings and society in
order to secure money, power, and reputation for themselves. Take the
case of a poor labourer who, in the usual course, will work and suffer
during his whole life and die in poverty. To escape such a destiny
many roads are open to him if he have courage, exceptional ability,
and no belief in a hereafter. He could commit a variety of crimes in
order to give him a start in life without the slightest chance of
being detected, and without experiencing the smallest inconvenience
during his lifetime. He might even avoid violent and vulgar crimes,
and operate in a safer manner. He might blackmail a rich man. He
might in war betray his country. He might sell himself to a corrupt
political party. He might join the army of some selfish sovereign bent
on conquest and plunder, and gain a high position. Or he might pursue
yet safer methods. He might turn first a usurer, then a financier. He
might keep a degrading public-house, or a gigantic immoral place of
amusement. He might issue a debasing newspaper, write corrupting books
and dramatic pieces. Provided he does not expose himself to the hatred,
contempt, and even the unfavourable criticism of his fellow-beings,
or injure his health, there is positively nothing to prevent him from
adopting all these courses to the great detriment of humanity, so long
as he is perfectly sure that he shall not be called to account after
death.
What some of our scientists forget is that very few people are in
the same position as they themselves are, where respectability and
quasi-philanthropy pay; but, on the contrary, that the great majority
live under the constant temptation to secure wealth, health, esteem,
and reputation by means which are injurious to society. To such
arguments they can only reply that the man, however successful, who
attains his success by anti-social means runs a risk of ruining the
happiness of his life by loss of self-respect.
But, if the man has a conscience,—and he could not lose his
self-respect without one,—it could not trouble him so long as he was
convinced that he had done the best for himself. By bringing the
conscience at all into the discussion, the scientists fall back on an
emotion which has been always intimately associated with the sense of
personal responsibility, and which they themselves have been compelled,
in order to protect their theories, to deny absolutely as an instinct
or to represent as the result of religious education.
For this reason, Nordau would not call that instinct in man which
prompts him to live and act morally—an instinct which is the original
motor of all moral progress—conscience. He would probably prefer to
call it the social instinct. But names matter little. The essential
point is, that there exists in man’s consciousness a strong instinct
which cannot be reasoned away. This instinct is intimately connected
with another, without which it would never have produced the results
we see around us—namely, the instinct that the _Ego_ is imperishable.
No one would deny the universal existence of this instinct, but plenty
of scientists, while acknowledging it as an inherited tendency, would
deny it any value as an argument in favour of the immortality of the
_Ego_, on the ground that a hazy, unreasoned, and utterly inexplicable
yearning need not have a distinct goal.
The instinct of human beings is a subject which has been very much
neglected by science, and for the good reason that, whatever instincts
may be natural to man, they have been carefully smothered by teachings,
examples, and experience, all appealing to his reason from infancy
upwards. He never uses, never tries, and never suspects the existence
of his instincts, and when accidentally they lead him right, he
regards the fact as a delusion, and even avoids mentioning it from
a fear of being laughed at. This has however not prevented men, and
often remarkable men, from being guided by their instincts; only it
is called feeling, taste, luck. There are examples of men who owe the
greater part of their success to instinctive feeling, and who have
committed great mistakes by having trusted too much to it. Besides it
is generally believed that women’s instincts are clear and trustworthy,
and many men consider themselves to have been largely benefited by
consulting them.
But, in order to get at a true appreciation of the value and power of
instincts, we must go to the animals. What else but instinct could we
call the feeling which allows the carrier-pigeon to find its way from
London to Paris in an atmosphere of darkness and fog which would render
it impossible for the most experienced mariner to distinguish between
north and south. It is a well-known fact that dogs and even cats that
have been left behind by their owners have followed them at great
distances, though the owner has gone by rail or water and the animal
has had to find its way across country. In face of such facts and
considerations, no man who has not a strong bias would suggest that an
instinct that is general to humanity need not be heeded.
The instinct of personal responsibility cannot be re-christened
social instinct and then minimised by the assertion that the social
instinct is the outcome of reason, the sense of self-preservation, and
intelligent selfishness: for in that case the poor labourer who wanted
to become wealthy and famous, as instanced above, could be as evil as
he liked so long as he was successful, and could not be restrained by
the social instinct, but only by conscience, or in other words, the
feeling of unlimited personal responsibility.
Atheistic scientists who lead a moral and useful life cannot hold
themselves up as a pattern of results produced by social instincts,
because in the great majority of men, placed differently, these
instincts would permit them to injure society to an enormous extent.
Nor does the assertion of these scientists bear the stamp of sincerity
when they say: “Behold us, we have no belief in personal responsibility
beyond the grave. And yet we labour and run risks for the good of
humanity. We sacrifice our time, our money, our health for others,
and we remain poor while we could be rich. Our life is the outcome of
intelligent selfishness.”
They would have a better chance of convincing us if they said: “Life
after death is impossible. We prove by our lives that we believe this.
Our moral lives and our humanitarianism are sheer hypocrisy which we
practise in order to get esteem and fame. The books we write are not
true, but they bring us money, and we do not care how much evil we
inflict on humanity by ripping away the only foundation on which its
morality and happiness can be built, while the substitute which we
supply is worthless. We might have averted an immense amount of vice
and degradation by leaving old religions alone until the Religion of
Humanity was perfect enough to replace them. But we attack them now
because in this way we make money and fame.”
It is not the well-meaning, plodding scientist, striving to arrest
disease, lessen pain, and dispel superstition, that can bounce us into
the belief in personal irresponsibility. This could only be done by
real flesh-and-blood Ducs des Esseintes, men like the hero in Huysman’s
novel, _A Rebours_. This author, whom Nordau classes among drivelling
imbeciles, has shown that he has a clearer idea than our clever
alienist what type of men the certitude of personal irresponsibility
could produce. We are fully convinced that Nordau is no Duc des
Esseintes at heart, masquerading as a benefactor of humanity, and,
if he boasts a little of his good intentions and not at all of his
wickedness, it is because he believes that what he does is right,
and does it because he is prompted by that strong sense of personal
responsibility which his scientific prejudices and his lack of logical
power cause him to deny.
Having striven by “vigorous affirmations” to implant the belief in
his readers’ minds that they have no _Ego_ independent of their body,
and that they consequently are fatally doomed to become what their
defective brains and nerves are bound to make them, he proceeds with
another series of “vigorous affirmations,” that degeneration is on the
increase, that it is characteristic of the end of the century, that
the men whom we take for geniuses are mattoids, and finally, that the
whole of our western civilization is degenerate. We have, in preceding
chapters, tried to show how he has neglected to pay any attention to
the many signs all over the civilized world indicating an increase in
mental and moral powers; how he endeavours to overwhelm his readers by
comparisons between the symptoms in real degenerates, or lunatics, and
similar symptoms—accompanied however by perfect rationality and great
intelligence—in authors and artists, and concludes that they are as mad
as the madman. He tries to force this conclusion on the unwary reader
by simply ignoring all other grounds for eccentricity that would have
been taken into account by an unbiassed enquirer.
Let us instance the way in which he judges Zola. He never for an
instant regards him as a free agent, but speaks of him as a patient
suffering from erotic madness and other brain and nerve affections,
which compel the novelist to write, and to write exactly in the vein he
does.
The very idea that human beings should be thus subjected to all kinds
of irresistible impulses produces the same gruesome impression as
the old stories of demoniacal possession. Nordau might as well have
described Zola as a man hating above all things the writing of novels,
with a natural repugnance for anything savouring of the obscene,
compelled by a demon in possession of his body and his soul to write
the history of the Rougeon-Maquarts and other distasteful works. On
the careful reader the impression would have been precisely the same.
But no number of “vigorous affirmations” would have induced even the
most weak-minded of readers to have accepted the demon, while Zola’s
eroticism and his mischievous olfactory nerves may have imprinted
themselves upon the minds of some by dint of scientific dissertation.
While it would seem to most people rational to study Zola’s character
and the state of his mind, in order to form a correct idea of the
objects he has in view, Nordau, by his method of supposing that a
writer is not a free agent, but is compelled to exhibit for the readers
of his works the innermost recesses of his consciousness, proceeds in
the opposite manner: he evolves the characters of writers from the
characters of their books. From what he says about Zola, one feels
inclined to conclude that this author devotes the large amounts he
makes by his writings to the gratification of bestial lusts, living in
a kind of harem of degraded women, rapidly destroying by debauch every
spark of intelligence left in his tottering brain. We do not know M.
Zola personally, but from what we hear, he seems to live a quiet and
laborious life with his wife in a peaceful country house, and far from
spending his earnings in riotous living, he banks them as a reserve
for old age, which he seems likely to attain. When however a man’s
private life and rational attention to his own business seem to clash
conspicuously with Nordau’s diagnoses, his serenity and self-confidence
are not in the slightest degree disturbed, because he has given his
description to the man’s tendency in a “psychiatric sense,” and has
referred to the man’s actual life. But the discrepancy between the
author’s actual life and the life he, according to Nordau, ought to
lead, is not an extenuating circumstance in the eyes of so harsh a
judge as our alienist. On the contrary, it aggravates the sentence, for
if the accused author is not in reality the monster he ought to be, it
is simply because his attenuated physique does not allow of it, and
drives him through all his debaucheries in his imagination.
We do not admire such literature as Zola has put forth, and do not
believe that it has accomplished one iota of the good at which
its author, according to his admirers, aims. But all rational men
should bear in mind that such books are sure indications that there
is something rotten in the State. To ascertain to what an extent
the circumstances surrounding the author are capable of inducing a
sound-minded man like Zola to write such books, before jumping to the
conclusion that such authors are lunatics, would be the method adopted
by sincere searchers after truth.
A rapid survey of the circumstances under which Zola began to write
will at once show that the inborn eroticism and even coprolalia which
Nordau tries to foist upon Zola were not the only influences to which
he was subjected. In Paris, as in all great capitals, there is a
host of young ambitious _littérateurs_ who compete for the attention
not only of the public but of the publishers. It is far from certain
that the books which most please the public would be most acceptable
to the publishers, and the latter are, therefore, to a great extent
responsible for the state of literature. Nordau says that M. Alphonse
Lemerre was able to make Parnassians, as the editor, Cotta, in the
first half of the century, made German classics; and he is right. A
Parisian publisher has the power to make pornographic authors just
as well as Parnassians. He is a business man, and of course wishes
to obtain a large circulation for his books, and, therefore, is on
the look-out for authors who are sensational one way or another. At
the time Zola began to write, the obscene novel was beginning to be
fashionable. Paul de Kock and his imitators had become old-fashioned,
and the corruption of the Third Empire, as well as the spread of
scientific atheism, had created a demand for something racier than the
peccadilloes of light-hearted _viveurs_. Besides, pessimism was in the
ascendant, and erotic literature had to be morbid instead of gallant
and gay.
Several authors of great ability, but strongly influenced by the
pessimism of the time, and with the field of their ethical studies
limited to the Parisian boulevards and the Quartier Breda, had paved
the way for that false realistic literature of which Zola’s writing may
be called the climax. The publishers, knowing their market, were eager
to accept books of an obscene character, provided they were serious
and written in a philosophical spirit. Zola may have seen his way to
eclipse anything written in that style, and being himself a child of
his time,—materialist, and nervously inclined to exaggeration,—may have
seized upon the chance of making money and fame, though he probably
foresaw that his first novels would expose him to the execration of the
Philistines and the respectable world. He might also have foreseen that
one day he would be able to establish a sufficient fame to be received
by English _littérateurs_ as a genius of his time. If, therefore,
Zola’s object was to push himself to the front in the manner we here
suppose him to have done, he has certainly succeeded—a fact which
could not establish his intellectual degradation. He simply yielded to
a tremendous temptation, and if he did so under the impression that
the scientists had completely proved the non-existence of personal
responsibility, Nordau should be the last to blame him.
But there is not the slightest necessity to assume—nor do we
assume—that Zola yielded to any temptation at all. On the contrary, it
is perfectly possible that, in writing the books he has, he sincerely
believed that he was serving some good purpose. Knowing how many other
Frenchmen feel in this respect, we might well suppose that he reasoned
somewhat in the following manner: Religion is wrong, and a fraud
practised by the clever on the simple-minded. The control which the
Church has assumed over the relations of the sexes is one of the means
by which it retains its power, and is fraught with immense unhappiness
to the people. The separation of the sexes, and the devout decency
which refrains from openly speaking or writing about sexual subjects,
distort the people’s ideas, inflame their imagination, and tempt them
into unhealthy vice. Nature is not sinful. It is either the only
divinity we have, or it is created by the Almighty, and in this case it
is holy. To yield rationally to its dictates is therefore no sin. Books
should therefore be written to prove this point, and at the same time
accustom the people to look upon nature and its laws without shame,
without hypocrisy, and without running the risk of being overpowered by
wild passions. In this way humanity may be elevated, because it will
be frank and natural, and religion, which science has proved to be
inimical to humanity, will lose its influence.
We are not saying that Zola’s ideas ran in this groove, only that it is
possible that they did. If they did, he would have been utterly wrong;
but he would not have been the first nor the last man whose views have
been influenced by his interests. No man who knows both France and
England better than Nordau seems to do could for one moment doubt that
had Zola been born and educated in England, where the surroundings are
so vastly different to those of France, he would have written books
of quite a different character, and probably free from obscenity.
If this be true, it constitutes another reason why the surrounding
circumstances of an author should be considered before it is asserted
that inborn degeneration is alone responsible for the blemishes of his
work.
Nordau himself points out that the fashion which brought Zola to the
front is on the decline, and that his influence is on the wane. If so,
it only proves how limited the influence of such supposed degenerates
really is, and that—at least with regard to Zola—Nordau’s book is out
too late, and those who have been deeply impressed by his “vigorous
affirmations” about the mental decay of the race need not despond.
Over and over again civilization and society have been threatened
by new and apparently dangerous tendencies, but they have generally
culminated in absurd exaggerations, and have thus lost their potency.
Who knows whether Zola, through the wisdom that the years bring, will
not change his opinions, and with them his vein of writing? We feel
morally certain that he is now engaged on some novel entirely free from
those erotic allusions which Nordau says he cannot avoid—a book as
pure as the first part of _La Joie de Vivre_; and if he does, what will
become of Nordau’s imperious dogmas?
Another of those features of Nordau’s work which strongly impresses
his readers is seriousness. He speaks throughout in that grave and
solemn tone—the So-spake-the-Lord style—which never yet failed to
impress superficial readers. He is anxious to convey the impression
that if he has to say unpleasant things it is because his teachings are
momentous to humanity, and not because he wishes to be sensational. He
condescends to speak about poetry, drama, and music, but he plainly
shows it to be his opinion that all these are vanities, and hardly
worthy to occupy a great man’s thoughts. He aims at crushing with his
contempt both artists and poets, the whole herd who have neglected
science, and who try to divert the attention of humanity from this
all-important subject. He would scare us with the threat that, when
science has elevated humanity for a little longer, such frivolities as
poetry, music, and dancing will be relegated to the nursery. Grown-up
men and women, who now indulge in such pastimes, are made to feel
that they belong to degenerates, and that they only prove their folly
if they look upon themselves with any self-respect. He endeavours to
deprive love between persons of the two sexes of its poetical reality,
and to wrap it in a gloomy scientific misconception by regarding it as
a feeling of comradeship grown out of habit, or as the same sexual
instinct as in animals. The pure and real love which permeates life,
which gives to man his manhood, and to woman her true womanhood, which
has created the home and therefore the State—this love he denies, and
expects serious-minded readers to look upon the world-phenomenon and
the drama of humanity deprived of their chief elements—light, heat, and
motion. He speaks of the tendency in men and women to take their own
life when its burdens out-balance its pleasures as calmly as if suicide
were the usual exit from our earthly existence.
Nordau thus obtains part of his success by the same methods as those so
freely adopted by the gloomy, anathematising preachers—rapidly becoming
types of the past—who, by threats of the devil and hell-fire, aim at
compelling their hearers to turn their attention from this world in
order to brood exclusively on dismal dogmas. He would fain banish from
our minds all that appeals to what is truest within us—our imagination
and our emotions,—as the kill-joy fanatics in the pulpit have banished
from our villages the maypole, the dance on the green, and the forfeit
game.
He is much mistaken if he believes that by such means he can in our
days produce a lasting impression on the common-sense and intensely
human English mind. Here and there he may drive some clouded soul into
neo-Catholicism, and augment the ranks of the Symbolists and the
Decadents, but he will only make the morbid more morbid, or morbid in
a different mood. The hard-working and enlightened Englishman does not
apply himself savagely to his business for business’ sake. Nor does he
encourage scientific progress for the sake of science.
When he considers himself, and is considered by others, an eminently
practical man, it is because he knows what he aims at, and uses,
studies, and encourages the most effective and promptest means to
attain his ends. But the secret and the essence of this English
practicality lies in the fact that his aims, so clear and so precise,
are determined by his imagination, his emotions, and his instincts.
Unlike the German who despairs of realizing his ideal, the Englishman
has it in his imagination as clearly before him as the architect has
the plans, elevations, and sections of the palace he is going to build.
He does not begin to build until he is convinced that every detail is
correct. Nothing discourages him more than the spoiling and blurring of
his ideals; he stops his work, as does the builder when his drawings
are lost, or found impracticable.
It is vain for Nordau to try to persuade the average Englishman, be
he educated or not, that the enjoyments which enchant him in his
youth shall not cast their roseate hue over the rest of his days.
Poetry, music, the drama, are part and parcel of the pleasures the
English people look forward to when business has supplied them with
the means of enjoying them in the expensive form in which, with us,
unfortunately, they are alone obtainable in perfection.
It is not only such enjoyments as educated people of all ages
appreciate which for an Englishman retain a life-long charm. Even
his boyish tastes give zest to his life, so long as he retains his
faculties. At ten years of age he reads, raves, and dreams about horses
and dogs; at seventy he rides to hounds, and at a still more advanced
age he partakes in all the excitements of the racecourse. As a boy he
reads about travels and adventures; at middle age, or even later, we
find him travelling all over the world in quest of big and small game.
Cricket, football, boating, and athletics in general represent the life
of English boys, and far into old age they can seldom refrain from
glancing at the sporting columns of their paper, which to a foreigner
appear as interesting as the dullest of dull market reports; while
athletic sports are witnessed by ever-growing crowds of people of all
ages, who watch the proceedings with a zest as intense as that of the
Spaniard watching a bullfight.
And to people who thus enjoy their lives, Nordau would say: “You are
degenerates, because you enjoy childish things. Put them behind you,
and rise to my level. Take a seat at the table of science, where we
will show you by dissection, and by vivisection, the minutest details
of the entrails of those creatures which, in the fulness of their life,
in the beauty of their form, afford you a childish delight.”
If such be the road to regeneration, only the weak-minded among
the English people will enter upon it. Thousands might momentarily
experience a depression—a gloom similar to that produced by the
fulminating and damnation-dealing preacher one meets with in country
districts. The dismal appearance of the orator, his description of
hell, of an accursed world, of the narrow way to salvation, as well
as the scared faces in the dark and dank little church, may evoke
a gruesome mood while the sermon lasts. But on coming out into the
summer air, into the midst of the revivifying sunshine, of the rustling
trees, radiant flowers, singing birds, dancing butterflies, and softly
humming bees, the healthy-minded of the congregation experience a sense
of relief and joy; for the uncharitable condemnation of the ascetic
preacher is powerfully contradicted by the direct and unmistakable
language in which nature appeals to man’s emotions.
The depressing effect of Nordau’s book is enhanced by his ostentatious
display of knowledge, and by the absolute faith he himself has in
it. He follows the methods of wily political speakers. These have a
way of piling proofs upon proofs in order to demonstrate the truth
of such points as are almost self-evident; and when they have thus
established among their audience a confidence in their logic, they
slur over the weak points, take for granted that everything is proved,
and draw a plausible conclusion devoid of any direct connection with
the arguments. A postmaster-general, for example, does not wish to be
bothered with the reduction of postage, and, in order to resist such
a proposal, he will deliver a lengthy harangue to show that the work
of the post-office is useful to the public, that it cannot be well
administered without sufficient revenue, the necessity of keeping a
complete staff, the impossibility of reducing wages and salaries, and
many other points which are perfectly clear without demonstration.
He will then suddenly conclude that the post-office works at present
with very small means, and that, if those means are further reduced,
disorganization and disorder may ensue. To be able to draw this
conclusion, he has to take for granted that the reduced postage would
mean reduced income to the post-office, while in reality it may mean
the very contrary.
In the same way Nordau gives us pages upon pages in order to show us
such facts as psychological science has established, and then boldly
elicits supposed facts which science never has and may never be able
to prove. We have already given plenty of instances of this, and they
need not be referred to again. His careful minuteness in psychological
matters often induces the unwary reader to accept his unproved
statements purporting to represent facts drawn from other branches
of knowledge. Thus, for example, he speaks of matters pertaining to
sociology, economy, administration, and politics, as if he were a
universally acknowledged authority on these subjects. It will suffice,
however, to read his plan for arresting the spread of degeneration to
understand at once on what feeble foundations his apparent omniscience
rests. His idea of an ideal social order is an impossible amalgamation
of socialistic as well as communistic fallacies. While he retains
the absurd postulate of the Socialists, that a perfect Government
could be established, distributing all the wealth of the nation among
individuals, he indulges heedlessly in the communistic delusion that
those who accumulate under the present system would continue to
accumulate wealth at the same rate when the Government confiscates all
fortunes left by deceased individuals. He does not see that people
under such a system would take very good care to dispose of their
property before they die, a course which even the German police could
not prevent.
He does not insist on these errors, but they come out distinctly
as indispensable links in the association of ideas, underlying his
views regarding the anti-semitist movement, the dangers of individual
liberty, the bestial propensities of the masses, and the necessity
of a Government composed of strong-minded scientific men. It is
only too easy to see that in all his suggestions of working out the
terrestrial paradise of humanity,—which one day, according to him,
will be the outcome of science,—he is guided entirely by prejudice
and feeling. In summing up what he has said on this subject, his
ideal social order presents itself to our minds as unfree, completely
subjected but well-cared-for masses benevolently governed by senates of
strong-minded, scientifically educated men—the Jews.
The gloom and unrest called forth by Nordau’s work in nervous minds no
doubt gain in strength from the apparently powerful personality behind
it. But it suffices, as we have shown, to divest this imposing giant
of his assumed power in order to escape from his influence. Nordau,
had he not done so before, reveals himself unmistakably in the very
last sentence of his book as one largely beset by human frailties
when, in self-glorification, he quotes the words of him whose work he
so strenuously attempts to undermine and oppose. In order to assure
his readers that his object, as a scientist, is to benefit humanity,
to lead it farther on the road on which religion, so much contemned
by him, has already taken it some distance, he quotes Christ’s words:
“Think not that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets; I have
not come to destroy, but to fulfil.”
We here refrain from the temptation to write half a dozen pages in
order to show, in Nordau’s own manner, how, by quoting from the
Scriptures, by appealing to faith and emotion, by comparing himself
to Christ, he is symbolic with Paul Verlaine, he is mystical with the
neo-Catholics, he is emotional with Rossetti, he is an egomaniac with
the Diabolists, and a megalomaniac with Wagner. But we refrain, and
only say that he is human.
CHAPTER XII
_REGENERATION_
If the manifold discussions which have raged around the question of
human progress have failed to establish a consensus of opinion, it
is largely due to the absence of any exact definition of the term
progress. There can be no doubt about our advance in science. The trite
references to the use we make of steam, of which the ancient sages knew
so little as to call it smoke, establishes this beyond the possibility
of denial. But, on the other hand, our advance in literature and art
has been crab-like; for it has been accomplished with our face turned
towards antiquity. To set up ideals out of the actualities of the past
involves the recognition that we, as a race, stand lower than we have
done before, or at least at one time we have slided backwards and not
yet retrieved the lost ground.
The progress of humanity, with all its deviations and backslidings,
may appear as one decided march onwards, if we look upon our ideals,
plucked from the past, as so many pegs thrown out into the distant
future demarcating the ground to be occupied by the road of
civilization. The Greeks showed us, as in a flash, and within a limited
space, ideals of poetry and art, and since the time of the Renaissance
we have been striving to attain them. Christ has been the moral ideal
held up to us for well-nigh nineteen hundred years; but this we are so
far from having realized, as to be filled with doubt whether, in our
awkward groping, with our faces turned towards Calvary, we move in the
right direction.
There are many circumstances which render it difficult to decide
whether we have progressed or not. How are we to determine which
represents the greater advance, the high degree of æsthetic
civilization in a small group of the human family, and all the
rest plunged in barbarian darkness; or a lower degree of æsthetic
civilization uniformly spread among all the peoples of the world? We
have, thus, to consider not only the degrees of progress, but the
nature—whether æsthetic or moral—and its extension, before we can
decide whether we have progressed or not. But this is not all. We must
agree, or at least have clearly determined in our minds, towards what
goal the progression is supposed to move. If it be to bring the whole
of humanity up to an ideal beauty, perfect health, and a maximum of
strength and agility, our civilization in our present stage certainly
tends in the other direction. If, on the other hand, the goal be the
conquest of Nature’s forces, we are certainly moving rapidly towards it.
In face, then, of the complexity of the question, whether humanity is
progressing or not, the best method of replying to it rationally is
to take one feature of human development only, but one in which the
others are included, or on which they depend. To select for such a
test-feature the psychological conditions of civilized humanity, at
a certain period as manifested in literature and art, might at the
first glance appear as the most rational course, because with strong
and sound minds, with well-balanced psychological faculties, a nation
is most likely to shape its destiny in such a fashion as to secure
excellency in all the domains of its existence.
But there are strong objections to this method of gauging human
progress. The fashionable writers and artists may not represent the
mass of their contemporaries, but may be the exponents of a temporary
mood in a small uninfluential clique. Features of literature and
art may, as we have already pointed out, convey the impression of
retrogression simply because they reflect the unrest and confusion
which prevail in the majority of minds at periods when new ideas and
new views, healthy in themselves, trample out the old ones. Art and
literature do not always reflect the ethics of a nation at a given
period. The nation may be intellectually strong and morally sound, but
political events, economic troubles, may momentarily goad it into
abnormal moods and drive it, by sheer necessity, into a course which,
under normal circumstances, it would shun. A despot with æsthetic
leanings, and his nobility, might be instrumental in causing art and
literature to blossom forth most vigorously, while the people at large
might be sunk in the deepest depths of demoralization and misery in
order to furnish the means for the maintenance of a brilliant court.
History and actualities afford ample confirmation of the fact that
art and literature may flourish while the people degenerate. When
the culture of Greece was at its zenith, a large proportion of the
people—the slaves—had fallen so low as actually to afford object
lessons to the young citizens, in order to deter them from the
horrors of vice and degradation. During the Renaissance in Italy the
courts were corrupt, and the Church had sunk to its deepest stage of
demoralization. While the “Roi Soleil” was developing literature and
art in the hothouse of his royal patronage, the immorality of the
nobles and the degradation of the people were unprecedented.
Nor are there wanting examples of how a nation may be in a vigorous
state of progression without developing any remarkable features in art
and literature. Switzerland was for a long time the leading nation
in Europe in the matter of government, legislation, administration,
civic virtues, and education, but has never distinguished itself
æsthetically. During the period in which America was most progressive,
its people were too busy with practical affairs to give much attention
to the arts. If, therefore, we were to judge the progress of a nation
by its arts and literature, we might feel disposed to conclude that
these two blossoms of civilization sprout forth in the same ratio as
the people degenerate. But this would be absurd, for it would be to
give the palm of civilization to the Esquimaux, or to the pigmies in
the dark forests of Africa. The idea, therefore, of judging whether a
nation, or a race, is rising or degenerating by the state of its arts,
must be rejected as utterly misleading.
The political and social institutions of a nation are surely the
features that best lend themselves to the test of the stage it has
attained in progressive development, or degeneration. If laws and
institutions are such as to give every inhabitant the best chances
of attaining to a high degree of civilization, of morality, and of
happiness, and such laws and institutions emanate from the people
themselves, and are not imposed by another nation and not by the freak
of a despot, that nation is in a progressive state. It is difficult
to imagine a country with good laws and good institutions without
corresponding healthy conditions in all the other features of its
existence. History offers no example of a community, or of a people,
that has given itself laws and institutions equally beneficial to all
the individuals, and yet exhibiting signs of decay in any domain of
its culture. It is true that in a free, healthy, progressive State,
especially a thoroughly democratic one, literature and art may not
attain that hectic florescence so often co-existent with bad laws and
bad institutions. But it has never been found that art and literature
in such healthy nations are in a degenerating state.
It is true that different minds hold different opinions as to the
attributes of good laws and institutions. A man who believes that human
beings are essentially wicked and brutal would call a government good
only when it possessed power enough to keep the people in subjection;
while he who has discovered that the good qualities in human beings
spring from a natural instinct, and the bad ones from unfavourable
conditions and corrupt surroundings, would only call that form of
government good which afforded to each individual the greatest possible
liberty consistent with the same degree of liberty in others. But there
can be no hesitation as to what constitutes good government and good
institutions, if we appeal to the only authority capable of judging
with full knowledge of the case, namely, the individuals themselves.
We often meet with people who look with distrust upon institutions
and systems of government based on liberty, but this does not affect
our assertion that the great mass of individuals would personally,
and for themselves, claim as much liberty as they could obtain. Those
who advocate authoritative administration and the subjection of the
people to a class, or an elected body, behold in such constitutions the
means not of reducing their own liberty, but of extending it beyond
legitimate boundaries, and at the expense of the liberty of others.
It is hardly possible to imagine a nation that has given itself, and
is living under, a system of personal liberty, and is at the same
time degenerate. A degenerate man fears liberty, he prefers to lean
on others; he feels not ashamed to live on charity, and would abuse
his liberty in order to satisfy his base instincts. A sound-minded
and morally healthy man needs no compulsion to respect the right and
liberties of others. He trusts and respects others, because he trusts
and respects himself. He would assist no man in his attempts and
intrigues to injure others. He would, therefore, uphold his own, as
well as the liberty of others.
Such bad results as Nordau fears from institutions based on liberty
can only arise out of oppression. We have shown how the anti-semitic
movement, which he erroneously regards as an outcome of too much
liberty, is the result of oppression exercised by the Jewish
capitalists and employers in virtue of bad legislation, and no one
will deny that the anarchistic tendencies spring from the same cause.
From these reasons we may fairly conclude that, if we wish to form an
opinion of the intellectual soundness and moral strength of a nation,
we cannot do better than examine to what an extent it has attained to
good institutions based on personal liberty.
If civilized mankind is actually degenerating, we must find a tendency
among the people in the countries under examination to give themselves,
or to accept under compulsion, laws and institutions which rob them of
their personal liberty.
In gauging the present epoch by this standard, we might first be
inclined to side with Nordau. Those great nations which may fairly
be looked upon as the leaders of civilization present spectacles of
political corruption and retrogression, which might well suggest
the idea that, instead of developing into a race intellectually and
morally strong enough to live free, they show a marked willingness to
place themselves under control of some kind—to abandon their divine
attributes and to assume those of domesticated animals. But a correct
opinion about so important a question cannot be formed on a superficial
glance. In no branch of knowledge are appearances so deceptive as
in sociology. Apparently the same effects are often produced by two
opposite causes, and under slightly different circumstances the same
cause may produce two opposite effects. Thus, a man may vote for a
measure because he is corrupt and selfish, and with the object of
benefiting himself at the expense of his fellow-men; while another
man may vote for the same measure because he does not happen to be
in possession of certain special knowledge which would enable him to
understand the nugatory character of his action.
There are nations in Europe at this moment presenting such a mass
of anomalies as to render it extremely difficult to decide whether
they are bent on improving their laws and institutions, or on making
them worse. Much, for example, that has happened in Germany has been
pronounced as a decided forward movement. The German army has displayed
physical and mental qualities which bear witness to healthy development
rather than degeneration. The unification of the German States into
one Empire had for some time before the last war been the goal towards
which the nation aspired. When it was reached, patriotic Germans
expected it to be made the starting-point of a new departure for
further progress. But the very accomplishment of national unification
involved features which clearly pointed to retrogression. The mediæval
principle of conquest was revised. The future peace and good-will
among the nations was destroyed by the annexation of the two provinces
conquered from France. Standing armies for Germany became more than
ever necessary, and the nation was called upon to make enormous
sacrifices in order to ward off the consequences of retrogression in
foreign politics. The heaviest burdens were laid upon the working
class, and their struggle for existence became desperate. They have
shown many signs of discontent, and these have led to the consolidation
of repressive measures. Thus Germany now presents the spectacle of a
curious amalgam of mediæval and modern features.
At the head of this great empire we find a young Emperor who, though
not a despot in the widest sense of the word, possesses, as an
indispensable feature of the system, sufficient power to plunge not
only the whole of Germany, but all Europe, into unspeakable misery.
The individuals of the nation sink into insignificance before him.
They plainly feel that their destiny is in his hands as much as that
of their ancestors was in the hands of their mediæval emperors. And
yet the people are highly civilized, well educated, and show, in their
different walks of life, intelligence, strength of character, moral
worth.
Here, then, is a people which, judged collectively by our standard,
would stand at a low point of development, because their laws and
institutions are not based on personal liberty. If we consider
the direction in which they are moving, the verdict becomes as
unfavourable. The country is torn by two divergent tendencies, neither
of them aiming onwards. The one represented by the Emperor, the
official bodies, the plutocrats, and men who think as Nordau, who wish
to keep a keener watch on the destitute classes; the other represented
by the Socialists, who clamour for the destruction of the present
system, not for the purpose of securing personal liberty, but of
wresting what little is left of it from the people, and of establishing
complete State tyranny.
If the standard we are applying be trustworthy, neither of the two
currents of development noticeable in Germany run in the direction
of a high degree of civilization. At the present moment it seems
difficult to discover whence, within Germany, could come the impulse
for such general mental and moral progress as would be manifested by
good and free institutions. If the present conditions could prevail
indefinitely, and gradually improve so as to safeguard, or at least not
impede, the development of the individuals, Germany might look forward
to the future with equanimity.
But, unfortunately, actualities in that country confirm only too
well the trustworthiness of our standard. The result of the present
system cannot fail to exercise degenerating effects on the people,
but whether these effects will influence the present generation
only, or by heredity be perpetuated in the nervous systems and the
brains of the race, is a question for psychologists to settle. The
stupendous standing army, the heavy taxation, and a host of bad
laws have undermined, and are still undermining, the welfare of the
people. The immediate results are, among the working classes: extreme
penury, hopeless lives, low morals, intense hatred of the wealthy
class, a growing sympathy with the destructive programme of the
advanced Anarchists, decay of religious belief without any growth of
the religion of humanity of science. Among the commercial class, the
results are: intense competition, small profits, nervous application
to business, a thirst for gold and recklessness with regard to the
means of satisfying it. Among the bureaucratic classes the dread of
reduced and retarded advancement has caused discipline and absolute
submission to take the place of religion and philosophy. The landed
aristocracy, seeing their incomes threatened by the deplorable state of
agriculture, plot and plan how to recoup themselves at the expense of
the people, and have even shown an inclination to resist the Emperor
himself when their interests require it. This state of affairs is more
than sufficient to account for such signs of degeneration as Nordau
has noticed in his own country. What wonder that artists and writers,
menaced by misery and actuated by the general thirst for gold, should
consult their market rather than their inspiration, and that they
should copy successful authors and artists in France and elsewhere,
rather than take the trouble and the risk to do original work. A
comparison between German literature of to-day and that of decaying
Rome could not fail to impart important lessons.
Everything in Germany points to a coming catastrophe. Even if we
consider only one of the directions from which the first alarm
may come—that is, the Finance Department—it seems impossible that
the system can last much longer. The heavy taxation unfortunately
undermines its own basis, namely, the ability of the people to pay,
and the much-strained credit of the State is likely to collapse at the
very moment it will be most needed. It is, therefore, not premature
to consider what will happen in that country at about the end of this
century, when the financial resources, the patience of the people, and
the confidence of the army may be exhausted.
Two alternatives are possible. The crisis which seems bound to come
may be a violent one, arising from below; or it may be a peaceful
one, taking its origin from above. In the one case, there will be
a momentary social chaos; for all the military and bureaucratic
institutions, all systems, theories, prejudices, will be cast into the
furnace. At what time and under what conditions Germany will emerge
from the crisis will depend on the number, and the strength of mind, of
those Germans who understand that good institutions based on liberty
are the cardinal attributes of a sound-minded and morally strong nation.
The other case—the crisis coming from above—does not seem possible just
now, because the Emperor himself would have to take the initiative. It
is not likely that he would give up his power, his military tastes and
pastimes, in order to render Germany a free and happy nation, living in
peace with other free nations. For a sovereign to conceive such an idea
would be almost supernatural, and to carry it out successfully would
require the highest degree of human intelligence, because it could not
be done except in harmony and in co-operation with the other European
States.
From whatever direction the crisis comes, there is much in the
Germans to warrant a final successful issue. We cannot believe, with
Nordau, that such signs as we see of degeneration spring from moral
and intellectual weakness. In the external circumstances, we find
sufficient cause for far more demoralization than actually exists;
and the Germans, taken as individuals, show themselves to possess
plenty of those mental and moral qualities which are the only possible
foundations of a healthy State. They bear witness to the fact that,
despite unfavourable outward circumstances, the race is not decaying;
and that the present corruption and demoralization may be decay only of
one stage of human development, from which in obedience to some strong
impulse a new regenerating era may arise.
In order to elucidate the apparent state of degeneration which
characterises civilization at the close of this most remarkable
century, as well as its causes, we have instanced Germany—the
country where Nordau has studied and written, and where he seems
to have received his most vivid impressions. The circumstances
and tendencies of other countries, especially in those governed
more or less on despotic principles, are akin to those in Germany.
Everywhere increasing penury, discontent among the destitute classes,
a rapidly growing power among the plutocrats, national indebtedness,
financial corruption, the decay of all religious belief, and general
demoralization. But the similarity does not end here. In every country
there are numbers of people striving and hoping to bring about a better
state of things, even at the cost and sacrifice of some of the leading
features of our civilization. There is a mass of evidence, including
those peculiar features of modern society on which Nordau has dwelt so
largely, showing that a deep unrest has taken hold of humanity. The
feeling is not only that we are in a wrong position, but that we are
moving in a wrong direction. The general fear is not that degeneration
has set in, but that, moving on the road that we do, we cannot escape
it.
The most striking characteristic of our time is that in no nation do
we find, on either side of the Atlantic, any distinct indication of
the road which can lead us past the Slough of Despond. The moral state
of the civilized world is like a nation preparing for revolt against
a tyrant: gloomy, discontented, and excited men are encouraging one
another with secret signs and passwords, mustering and drilling in
secret places, to be ready for action, but without any trustworthy
leaders, without any plans for the future, without even any tactics
for the first struggle. In some countries the cry is for leaders; but
the old faith that the situations will bring out the men seems to have
been utterly falsified: for everywhere mediocrity, prejudice, and
corruption hold the helm. The cry in England and other countries is not
for leaders, but for more light. We want a higher philosophy, nobler
arts, a loftier literature, sounder principles of legislation, a purer
religion.
No nation holds a higher responsibility than the English. Its vast
possessions all over the globe, its financial and commercial supremacy,
its ethical influence over all the English-speaking countries, mark
it out as the standard-bearer of civilization. Nothing great can
happen among us without re-echoing in the remotest corners of the
earth, and any step onward taken by us will send a thrill throughout
humanity. Degenerate Englishmen may still wish to meekly follow other
nations, but our mission is to be the practical, energetic, daring
pioneers heading the march of progress. By using its great power and
influence, the British nation can render invaluable service to humanity
in the present crisis. On England must therefore rest our hopes for
the practical solution of the grave questions on which progress and
retrogression depend. From England alone can proceed that electrifying
impulse of which the bewildered nations stand in need, that they may
marshal the forces and focus the goal of progress.
In our political circles, in the ranks of literature, and throughout
all the strata of society there are already unmistakable signs that the
period of scepticism, selfishness, and rant will end with the century;
that scientific superstition and sickly Collectivist chimeras are
doomed; and that the nation is sternly entering upon the mission of
leading humanity towards good laws and institutions based on liberty,
and thus inaugurating a universal movement which by its glorious
results shall demonstrate that the alarming symptoms of degeneration,
revealed by the psychologists, are the first symptoms of regeneration.
INDEX.
About’s (Edmond), _La Question Romaine_, 250
Anarchism, rapid spread of, 194;
causes of, 195-7
Andersen, Hans, 58
Andersen’s _Ugly Duckling_, 74
Angelo, Michael, 224
Anstey, F., 141
Anti-semitism in Germany and elsewhere, 185 _ff._
Armies, English, French, and German, no degeneracy is proved by
recent events, 134
Art, 56 _ff._;
does not necessarily reflect the ethics of a nation, 292
Artists and symbolism, 73 _ff._
Arts, the, and science, future harmony of, 228, 229
Association of Men for the Suppression of Immorality, 246 _ff._
Atheism, effect of, upon morals, 85, 90 _ff._;
upon religion, 86 _ff._
Auricular confession, 162-4
Austria, causes of anti-semitism in, 187 _ff._
Avinain, French assassin, 164
Baudelaire, Charles, 231, 237
Beethoven, Ludwig, 106
Bismarck, Prince, 137
Björnsen, Björnstjerne, 170, 177
Borgia, Pope (Alexander VI), 265
Bornmüller, Franz, 116;
his estimate of Tolstoi, 116
Brahe, Tycho, 66
Bremer, Frederika, 142
Bronté’s _Jane Eyre_, 146
Cavour, di, Count Camillo Benso, 137
Cervantes, Miguel, 152
Chitral, British expedition to, 134
Church and religion, the, distinction between, 77 _ff._
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 219
Columbus, Christopher, 66
Communism, absurdity and impracticability of, 190
Confession of wrong-doing, the yearning for, 162-5
Consciousness of man, 204
Correggio, Allegri, 127
Cotta, Johann Friedrich, 277
Dante’s _Divina Commedia_, 224
Darwinian theory of evolution, 159
Degeneration, the causes of, 255 _ff._
Dishonesty as a means of acquiring wealth, 267-9
Drummond, Henry, 8, 12
Drunkenness in England, 136, 137
Egoism, 260 _ff._
Egomania, 230
England, degeneracy in, 136, 137;
estimation of women in, 142, 217-9;
æsthetic revolt in, 237;
high moral responsibility of, 305, 306
English army, no degeneracy in, 134
Ethical Culture, Berlin Society for, 247, 248
Eroticism, 205 _ff._
Faraday, Michael, 54
France, marriage in, 90, 91;
æsthetic revolt in, 234 _ff._
Free Labour Association, the, 31
French army, no degeneracy in, 134
French hatred of Germany, 24, 25
French symbolists, the, 76 _ff._, 94
Galileo, 66
Gautier, Théophile, 231
Germans, submission of, to discipline, 15 _ff._;
their treatment of women, 18-19;
ideas concerning marriage, 19;
hatred of France, 24, 25
Germany, marriage in, 18, 19;
army system in, 138;
position of women in, 142 _ff._;
influence of, upon Norway, 173 _ff._;
causes of anti-semitism in, 187 _ff._;
the development of the empire, 298;
burdens upon the working people in, 298, 299;
despotic rule of the Emperor, 299;
bad effect of present system of government, 300-2;
the coming catastrophe, 301-3
Gladstone, William Ewart, 137
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 56, 152, 224
Goethe’s _Werther’s Leiden_, 104;
_Faust_, 157, 216
Gounod, Charles François, 226
Hanseatic League, the, 173
Heller, Ferdinand, 222, 223
Heredity, 159, 160
Hugo’s _Notre Dame de Paris_, 59
Human instincts, 270-2
Humanity, the religion of, 232
Hunt, Holman, 64, 68
Huxley, Professor Thomas Henry, 54
Huysman, Joris Karl, 236
Huysman’s _A Rebours_, 273
Ibsen, Henrik, 132 _ff._, 140 _ff._, 177, 258;
influence of, upon women, 142
Ibsen’s _Ghosts_, 154, 155, 158;
_Pillars of Society_, 155, 156;
_The Lady from the Sea_, 157;
_The Doll’s House_, 74, 179-81
Immorality, Association of Men for the Suppression of, 146 _ff._
Immoral literature, impossibility of prohibiting the circulation of,
249-51
Instinct in human beings, 270-2
Italian army, no degeneracy in, 134
Jew, the free-thinking, characteristics of, 20, 21
Jews, the, Wagner’s dislike of, 184;
hatred of, in Russia, 185;
in Germany and Austria, 187 _ff._;
inherent good qualities of, 191, 192
Jones, Burne, 68, 127, 130, 258
Kant, Immanuel, 3
Kidd, Benjamin, 8, 12
Kock, de, Charles Paul, 277
Legrain, 46, 47
Lemerre, Alphonse, 277
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 105
Lessing’s _Amelia Galotti_, 105
_Liberty_ (periodical), 32
Liebknecht, Herr, 16, 139
Lie, Jonas, 170, 177
Literature does not necessarily reflect the ethics of a nation, 292
Lombroso, Dr. Cesare, 21;
Nordau’s dedication to, in _Degeneration_, 132
Love, the purity of, 213, 214
Loyola, Ignatius, 265
Lutheran Church and confession, the, 163
Marriage laws, how inaugurated, 150
Marriage relations in Germany, 18-19;
in France, 90, 91
Mallarmé, Stephane, 104 _ff._
Martineau, Dr. James, 54
Maudsley, Dr. Henry, 251
Millais, John E., 63, 64
Molière’s _Malade Imaginaire_, 12
Moltke, Count Helmuth Karl Bernard, 7
Morel, Dr. B. A., 48
Morice, Charles, author of _La Littérature de tout à l’heure_, 106
Music, the influence of, 60, 61, 220 _ff._
Mysticism, 44 _ff._;
definition of, 47
Napoleon III, 138
Neo-Catholicism and the Church of Rome, 76
Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 138
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 201, 223, 243
Nietzsche’s _Der Fall Wagner_, 223
Nihilists, Russian, 197
Nordau, Max, influence of his book _Degeneration_, 9;
importance of closely investigating his theories before accepting
them, 10;
intemperance of his methods, 11;
a typical German, 12;
his German bias, 17;
an enemy to France, 24;
his attitude toward art, 56 _ff._;
his animosity against the symbolists, 77 _ff._;
views upon the poetry of Paul Verlaine, 99 _ff._;
denunciation of Tolstoi, 108 _ff._;
estimate of Ibsen, 132-82;
attack upon Wagner, 183;
judgment of Zola, 274 _ff._
Norway, position of women in, 145 _ff._
Norwegians, national characteristics of, 171 _ff._
Ohnet’s (George) novels, 28
Poets and symbolism, 73 _ff._
Pre-Raphaelitism, 55 _ff._
Raphael, Sanzio, 75, 127
Religion, influence of, upon civilization and progress, 49, 50;
and the Church, distinction between, 77 _ff._;
relation of, to science, 232 _ff._
Rollinat, Maurice, 231
Roman Church and neo-Catholicism, 76
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 127, 130, 135, 258
Rossetti’s masterpiece, “Dante’s Dream,” 69, 70, 75
Rubinstein, Anton, 223
Ruskin, John, 58, 59
Russia, causes of anti-semitism in, 185-7
Russian, characteristics, 109;
government, 110;
serfs, 110, 111;
nihilists, 197
Scandinavia, position of women in, 145 _ff._
Science, the unsolved problems of, 22, 23;
the bankruptcy of, 73 _ff._;
and the arts, future harmony of, 228, 228 [sic];
relation of, to religion, 232 _ff._
Scientific atheism, 90 _ff._
Scientists, dogmatic attitude of, 65 _ff._;
influence of, upon religion, 86 _ff._
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 225, 226
Schumann, Robert, 222, 223
Self, the religion of, 230-40
Serfs, emancipation of, in Russia, 110, 111
Shakespeare, William, 56, 152
Society for Ethical Culture (Berlin), 247, 248
Sound mind, the test of, 133
Stage, the, purity of, 211
Stöcker, Dr., anti-semitic agitator, reception of, in London, 193,
194, 265
Swinburne, Algernon C., 135
Symbolists, the French, 76 _ff._
Tintoretto, Giacomo, 127
Tjerulf, Norwegian composer, 177
Tolstoi, Count Leo, 108 _ff._
Tolstoi’s _Kreutzer Sonata_, 115, 116;
_My Confession_, 117;
_My Faith_, 117;
_A Short Exposition of the Gospel_, 117, 126;
_About my Life_, 117;
_From the Diary of Nechljudow_, 125
Trades unions, 31
United States, the, treatment of women in, 142
Verlaine, Paul, 97 _ff._;
his poem addressed to Louis II of Bavaria, 101;
his “Chevaux du Bois” and “Chanson d’Automne,” 103, 104
Victoria, Dowager Empress of Germany, 146
Voltaire, Arouet, 1, 9, 223, 254
Wagner, Richard, 28, 29, 151, 184 _ff._, 194, 198 _ff._
Wagner’s _Art Work of the Future_, 209, 224
Wealth, dishonesty in the acquisition of, 267-9
William II, Emperor of Germany, 138, 299
Wolseley, Lord, 7
Women, position of, in the United States, England, and other
countries contrasted, 142 _ff._
Zola, Émile, 29, 130, 274 _ff._
Zola’s _La Joie de Vivre_, 281
Transcriber's notes:
This book was published anonymously and is now attributed to
Alfred Egmont Hake.
One "[sic]" has been placed in the index, and a presumed missing comma
in the original is indicated with "[,]".
The book contains a single footnote, which is placed below the relevant
paragraph.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REGENERATION ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
