CB 417 
 .N9 S5 
 1919 
 Copy 1 
 
 BERNARD SHAW 
 
 THE SANITY OF ART 
 
Pass OB 4- H 
 Book_iJ9<fi^ 
 

THE SANITY OF ART 
 
 BY 
 
 opor^ BERNARD SHAW 
 
 BOISTI AND LIVERIGHT 
 
 PUBLISHERS N E W YORK 
 

 Copyright, 1895, by 
 G. BERNARD SHAW 
 
 Z#?L 
 
 S^> 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The re-publication of this open letter to 
 Mr. Benjamin Tucker, places me, not for 
 the first time, in the difficulty of the jour- 
 nalist whose work survives the day on 
 which it was written. What the journalist 
 writes about is what everybody is thinking 
 about (or ought to be thinking about) at 
 the moment of writing. To revive his 
 utterances when everybody is thinking about 
 something else ; when the tide of public 
 thought and imagination has turned ; when 
 the front of the stage is filled with new 
 actors ; when many lusty crowers have 
 either survived their vogue or perished with 
 it ; when the little men you patronized 
 have become great, and the great men you 
 attacked have been sanctified and pardoned 
 
by popular sentiment in the tomb : all 
 these inevitables test the quality of your, 
 journalism very severely. 
 
 Nevertheless, journalism is the highest 
 form of literature ; for all the highest lite- 
 rature is journalism. The writer who aims 
 at producing the platitudes which are "not 
 for an age, but for all time " has his re- 
 ward in being unreadable in all ages ; 
 whilst Plato and Aristophanes trying to 
 knock some sense into the Athens of their 
 day, Shakspear peopling that same Athens 
 with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwick- 
 shire hunts, Ibsen photographing the local 
 doctors and vestrymen of a Norwegian par- 
 ish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursu- 
 la exactly as if she were a lady living in 
 the next street to him, are still alive and 
 at home everywhere among the dust and 
 ashes of thousands of academic, punctilious, 
 
archaeologically correct men of letters and 
 art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding 
 the journalist's vulgar obsession with the 
 ephemeral. 
 
 I also am a journalist, proud of it, de- 
 liberately cutting out of my works all that 
 is not journalism, convinced that nothing 
 that is not journalism will live long as lite- 
 rature, or be of any use whilst it does live. 
 I deal with all periods ; but I never study 
 any period but the present, which I have 
 not yet mastered and never shall ; and as 
 a dramatist I have no clue to any histori- 
 cal or other personage save that part of 
 him which is also myself, and which may 
 be nine tenths of him or ninety-nine hun- 
 dredths, as the case may be (if, indeed, I 
 do not transcend the creature), but which, 
 anyhow, is all that can ever come within 
 my knowledge of his soul. /The man who 
 
writes about himself and his own time is 
 the only man who writes about all people 
 and about all timer. The other sort of 
 man, who believed that he and his period 
 are so distinct from all other men and peri- 
 ods that it would be immodest and irrele- 
 vant to allude to them or assume that they 
 could interest anyone but himself and his 
 contemporaries, is the most infatuated of all 
 the egotists, and consequently the most un- 
 readable and negligible of all the authors. 
 And so, let others cultivate what they call 
 literature : journalism for me ! 
 
 The following remnant of the journalism 
 of 1895 will, I hope, bear out these prelim- 
 inary remarks, which are none the less val- 
 id because they are dragged in here to dis- 
 mount the critics who ride the high horse 
 of Letters at me. It was undertaken under 
 the following circumstances. In 1893 Doc- 
 
tor Max Nordau, one of those remarkable 
 cosmopolitan Jews who go forth against 
 modern civilization as David went against 
 the Philistines or Charles Martel against the 
 Saracens, smiting it hip and thigh without 
 any sense of common humanity with it, 
 trumped up an indictment of its men of 
 genius as depraved lunatics, and pled it (in 
 German) before the bar of Europe under 
 the title Entartung. It was soon translated 
 for England and America as Degeneration. 
 Like all rigorous and thorough-going sallies 
 of special pleading, it has its value ; for 
 the way to get at the merits of a case is 
 not to listen to the fool who imagines him- 
 self impartial, but to get it argued with 
 reckless bias for and against. To under- 
 stand a saint,, you must hear the devil's ad- 
 vocate ; and the same is true of the artist. 
 Nordau had briefed himself as devil's advo- 
 
8 
 
 cate against the great artistic reputations of 
 the XIX century ; and he did his duty as 
 well as it could be done at the price, inci- 
 dentally saying many more true and im- 
 portant things than most of the counsel on 
 the other side were capable of. 
 
 Indeed counsel on the other side mostly 
 threw up their briefs in consternation, and 
 began to protest that they entirely agreed 
 with Dr. Nordau, and that though they had 
 perhaps dallied a little with Rossetti, Wag- 
 ner, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Nietzsche and the rest 
 of the degenerates before their true charac- 
 ter had been exposed, yet they had never 
 really approved of them. Even those who 
 stood to their guns had not sufficient vari- 
 ety of culture to contradict the cosmopoli- 
 tan doctor on more than one or two points, 
 being often not champions of Art at large, 
 but merely jealous fanciers of some particu- 
 
9 
 
 lar artist. Thus the Wagnerians were 
 ready to give up Ibsen; the Ibsenites were 
 equally suspicious of Wagner ; the Tolstoy- 
 ans gave up both ; the Nietzscheans were 
 only too glad to see Tolstoy catching it ; 
 and the connoisseurs of Impressionism in 
 painting, though fairly impartial in music 
 and literature, could not handle the technics 
 of the case for them. Yet Dr. Nordau's 
 case was so bad, and his technical utter- 
 ances on painting and music so much more 
 absurd than Captain Lemuel Gulliver's nau- 
 tical observations, that I, being familiar 
 with all the arts, and accustomed to the re- 
 volutionary climate of Jewish cosmopolitan- 
 ism, looked on at his triumph much as Na- 
 poleon looked on at the massacre of the 
 Swiss, thinking how easy it would be to 
 change the rout into the cheapest of victor- 
 ies. However, none of our silly editors had 
 
10 
 
 the gumption to offer me the command ; 
 so, like Napoleon, I went home and left 
 them to be cut to pieces. 
 
 But Destiny will not allow her offers to 
 be completely overlooked. In the Easter of 
 1895, when Nordau was master of the field, 
 and the newspaper champions of modern 
 Literature and Art were on their knees be- 
 fore him, weeping and protesting their inno- 
 cence, I was staying in the wooden hotel on 
 Beachy Head, with a select party of Fabi- 
 ans, politicians, and philosophers, diligently 
 trying to ride a bicycle for the first time in 
 my life. My efforts set the coastguards 
 laughing as no audience had ever laughed 
 at my plays. I made myself ridiculous with 
 such success that I felt quite ready to begin 
 on somebody else. Just then there arrived 
 a proposal from Mr. Benjamin Tucker, phi- 
 losophic Anarchist, and editor of an Ameri- 
 
11 
 
 can paper called Liberty, which, as it was 
 written valiantly up to its title, was having 
 a desperate struggle for existence in a coun- 
 try where every citizen is free to suppress 
 liberty, and usually does so in such mo- 
 ments as he cares to spare from the pursuit 
 of money. Mr. Tucker, seeing that nobody 
 had answered Dr. Nordau, and perceiving 
 with the penetration of an unterrified com- 
 monsense that a doctor who had written 
 manifest nonsense must be answerable tech- 
 nically by anybody who could handle his 
 weapons, was of opinion that I was the 
 man to do it. Accordingly, said Mr. 
 Tucker, I invite you, Shaw, to ascertain the 
 highest price that has ever been paid to 
 any man, even to Gladstone, for a maga- 
 zine article ; and I will pay you that price 
 for a review of Degeneration in the columns 
 of Liberty. 
 
12 
 
 This was really great editing. Mr. 
 Tucker got his review, as he deserved, and 
 sent a copy of the number of Liberty con- 
 taining it (now a collector's treasure), to 
 every paper in the United States. There 
 was a brisk and quick sale of copies in 
 London among the cognoscenti. And De- 
 generation was never heard of again. It is 
 open to the envious to contend that this 
 was a mere coincidence — that the Degenera- 
 tion boom was exhausted at that moment ; 
 but I naturally prefer to believe that Mr. 
 Tucker and I slew it. I may add that the 
 slaughter incidentally ruined Mr. Tucker, as 
 a circulation among cognoscenti does not 
 repay the cost of a free distribution to the 
 Philistines ; but Mr. Tucker was always 
 ruining himself for Liberty and always re- 
 trieving the situation by his business abil- 
 ity. I saw him this year in London, as 
 
13 
 
 prosperous looking a man as I could desire 
 to dine with, and eager for fresh struggles 
 with the courts and public departments of 
 the United States. 
 
 It may now be asked why, if the work 
 of my essay be done, I need revive it after 
 twelve years of peaceful burial. I should 
 answer : partly because Mr. Tucker wishes 
 to reproduce his editorial success in a more 
 permanent form, and is strongly seconded 
 by Messrs. Holbrook Jackson and A. R. 
 Orage in England, who have piously pre- 
 served a copy of Liberty and desire to 
 make it the- beginning of their series of 
 pamphlets in connection with their paper 
 The New Age and their pet organization, 
 The Arts Group of the Fabian Society ; 
 partly because on looking through it myself 
 again, I find that as far as it goes it is 
 still readable and likely to be helpful to 
 
14 
 
 those who are confused by the eternal strife 
 between the artist-philosophers and the 
 Philistines. 
 
 I have left the essay substantially as it 
 first appeared, the main alteration being an 
 expansion of the section dealing with the 
 importance of the mass of law which lies 
 completely outside morals and religion, and 
 is really pure convention : the point being, 
 not that the course prescribed by such law 
 is ethically right, or indeed better in any 
 sense than its direct opposite (as in the rule 
 of the road, for example), but that it is 
 absolutely necessary for economy and 
 smoothness of social action that everybody 
 should do the same thing and be able to 
 count on everybody else doing it. I have 
 appropriated this from Mr. Aylmer Maude's 
 criticism of Tolstoy an Anarchism, on which 
 I am unable to improve. 
 
15 
 
 I have also, with the squeamishness of 
 advancing years, softened one or two ex- 
 pressions which now shock me as uncivil to 
 Dr. Nordau. In doing so I am not offer- 
 ing him the insult of an attempt to spare 
 his feelings : I am simply trying to mend 
 my own manners. 
 
 Finally, let me say that though I think 
 this essay of mine did dispose of Dr. Nor- 
 dau's special pleadings, neither the plead- 
 ings nor the criticism dispose of the main 
 question as to how far genius is a morbid 
 symptom. I should rather like Dr. Nordau 
 to try again ; for I do not see how any 
 observant student of genius from the life 
 can deny that the Arts have their criminals 
 and lunatics as well as their sane and hon- 
 est men (they are more or less the same 
 men too, just as our ordinary criminals are 
 in the dock by the accident of a single 
 
16 
 
 transaction and not by a difference in na- 
 ture between them and the judge and jury), 
 and that the notion that the great poet and 
 artist can do no wrong is as mischievously 
 erroneous as the notion that the King can 
 do no wrong or that the Pope is infallible 
 or that the power which created all three 
 did not do its own best for them. 
 
 In my last play, The Doctor's Dilemma, 
 I have emphasized this by dramatizing a 
 rascally genius, with the disquieting result 
 that several intelligent and sensitive persons 
 have passionately defended him, on the 
 ground, apparently, that high artistic fac- 
 ulty and an ardent artistic imagination en- 
 title a man to be recklessly dishonest about 
 money and recklessly selfish about women 
 just as kingship in an African tribe entitles 
 a man to kill whom he pleases on the most 
 trifling provocation. I know no harder 
 
17 
 
 practical question than Jiow much selfishness 
 one ought to stand from a gifted person for 
 the sake of his gifts or on the chance of 
 his being right in the long run. The Su- 
 perman will certainly come like a thief in 
 the night, and be shot at accordingly ; but 
 we cannot leave our property wholly unde- 
 fended on that account. On the other 
 hand, we cannot ask the Superman simply 
 to add a higher set of virtues to current 
 respectable morals ; for he is undoubtedly 
 going to empty a good deal of respectable 
 morality out like so much dirty water, and 
 replace it by new and strange customs, 
 shedding old obligations and accepting new 
 and heavier ones. Every step of his pro- 
 gress must horrify conventional people ; and 
 if it were possible for even the most supe- 
 rior man to march ahead all the time, 
 every pioneer of the march towards the Su- 
 
18 
 
 perman would be crucified. Fortunately 
 what actually happens is that your geniuses 
 are for the most part keeping step and 
 marking time with the rest, an occasional 
 stumble forward being the utmost they can 
 accomplish, often visibly against their own 
 notions of propriety. The greatest possible 
 difference in conduct between a genius and 
 his contemporaries is so small that it is 
 always difficult to persuade the people who 
 are in daily contact with the gifted one 
 that he is anybody in particular : all the 
 instances to the contrary (Gorki scandalizing 
 New York, for example) being cases in 
 which the genius is in conflict, not with 
 contemporary feeling in his own class, but 
 with some institution which is far behind 
 the times, like the institution of marriage in 
 Russia (to put it no nearer home). In 
 really contemporary situations, your genius 
 
19 
 
 is ever 1 part genius and 99 parts Tory. 
 Still, especially when we turn from con- 
 duct to the expression of opinion — from 
 what the man of genius dares do to what 
 he dares advocate — it is necessary for the 
 welfare of society that genius should be 
 privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to 
 outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful 
 mind, and, generally, to scandalize its 
 uncles. But as such license is accordable 
 only on the assumption that men of genius 
 are saner, sounder, farther sighted and 
 deeper fathoming than the uncles, it is idle 
 to demand unlimited toleration of appar- 
 ently outrageous conduct on the plea* that 
 the offender is a genius, even when by the 
 abnormal development of some specific tal- 
 ent he may be highly skilled as an artist. 
 Andrea del Sarto was a better draughtsman 
 and fresco painter than Raphael ; but he 
 
20 
 
 was a swindler all the same ; and no hon- 
 orable artist would plead on his behalf that 
 misappropriating trust money is one of the 
 superiorities of that very loosely defined 
 diathesis which we call the artistic tempera- 
 ment. If Dr. Nordau would make a serious 
 attempt to shew us exactly where we are in 
 this matter by ascertaining the real stig- 
 mata of genius, so that we may know 
 whom to crucify, and whom to put above 
 the law, he will place the civilization he 
 attacks under an obligation which will wipe 
 out the marks of all the wounds (mostly 
 thoroughly deserved) he has dealt it. 
 London, July, 1907. 
 
THE SANITY OF ART. 
 
 My dear Tucker : 
 
 I have read Max Nordau's Degeneration at 
 vour request: two hundred and sixty thou- 
 sand mortal words, saying the same thing 
 over and over again. That is the proper 
 way to drive a thing into the mind of the 
 world, though Nordau considers it a symptom 
 of insane "obsession" on the part of writers 
 who do not share his own opinions. His mes- 
 sage to the world is that all our characteristi- 
 cally modern works of art are symptoms of 
 disease in the artists, and that these diseased 
 artists are themselves symptoms of the nervous 
 exhaustion of the race by overwork. 
 
 To me, who am a professional critic of art, 
 and have for many successive London seasons 
 had to watch the grand march past of books, 
 
22 
 
 of pictures, of concerts and operas, and of 
 stage plays, there is nothing new in Dr. 
 Nordau's outburst. I have heard it all before. 
 At every new wave of energy in art the same 
 alarm has been raised; and as these alarms 
 always had their public, like prophecies of the 
 end of the world, there is nothing surprising 
 in the fact that a book which might have 
 been produced by playing the resurrection 
 man in the old newspaper rooms of our public 
 libraries, and collecting all the exploded 
 bogey-criticisms of the last half-century into 
 a huge volume, should have a considerable 
 success. To give you an idea of the heap of 
 material ready to hand for such a compila- 
 tion, let me lay before you a sketch of one or 
 two of the Reformations I have myself wit- 
 nessed in the fine arts. 
 
23 
 
 IMPRESSIONISM 
 
 When I was engaged chiefly in the criticism 
 of pictures, the Impressionist movement was 
 struggling for life in London; and I sup- 
 ported it vigorously because, being the out- 
 come ,of heightened attention and quickened 
 consciousness on the part of its disciples, it 
 was evidently destined to improve pictures 
 greatly by substituting a natural, observant, 
 real style for a conventional, taken-for- 
 granted, ideal one. The result has entirely 
 justified my choice of sides. I can remember 
 when Mr. Whistler, in order to force the pub- 
 lic to observe the qualities he was introducing 
 into pictorial work, had to exhibit a fine 
 drawing of a girl with the head deliberately 
 crossed out with a few rough pencil strokes, 
 knowing perfectly well that if he left a 
 woman's face discernible the British Philistine 
 would simply look to see whether she was a 
 
pretty girl or not, or whether she represented 
 some of his pet characters in fiction, and pass 
 on without having seen any of the qualities of 
 artistic execution which made the drawing 
 valuable. But it was easier for the critics to 
 resent the obliteration of the face as an in- 
 solent eccentricity, and to shew their own 
 good manners by writing of Mr. Whistler as 
 Jimmy, than to think out what he meant. It 
 took several years of " propaganda by deed " 
 before the qualities which the Impressionists 
 insisted on came to be looked for as matter of 
 course in pictures; so that at last the keen 
 picture-gallery frequenter, when he came face 
 to face with Bouguereau's Girl in a Cornfield, 
 could no longer accept it as a window-glimpse 
 of nature, but saw at a glance that the girl is 
 really standing in a studio with what the 
 house agents call a good north light, and that 
 the cornfield is a conventional sham. This 
 advance in the education of our art fanciers 
 was effected by persistently exhibiting pictures 
 which, like Mr. Whistler's girl with her head 
 
25 
 
 scratched out, were propagandist samples of 
 workmanship rather than complete works of 
 art. But the moment Mr. Whistler and his 
 party forced the dealers and the societies of 
 painters to exhibit these studies, and, by do- 
 ing so, to accustom the public to tolerate what 
 appeared to it at first to be absurdities, the 
 door was necessarily opened to real absurd- 
 ities. It is exceedingly difficult to draw or 
 paint well: it is exceedingly easy to smudge 
 paper or canvas so as to suggest a picture just 
 as the stains on an old ceiling or the dark 
 spots in a glowing coal-fire do. Plenty of 
 rubbish of this kind was produced, exhibited, 
 and tolerated at the time when people could 
 not see the difference between any daub in 
 which there were aniline shadows and a land- 
 scape by Monet. Not that they thought the 
 daub as good as the Monet: they thought the 
 Monet as ridiculous as the daub; but they 
 were afraid to say so, because they had discov- 
 ered that people who were good judges did 
 not think Monet ridiculous. 
 
26 
 
 Then, besides the mere impostors, there 
 were certain unaffected and conscientious 
 painters who produced abnormal pictures be- 
 cause they saw abnormally. My own sight 
 happens to be M normal " in the oculist's 
 sense: that is, I see things with the naked eye 
 as most people can only be made to see them 
 by the aid of spectacles. Once I had a dis- 
 cussion with an artist who was shewing me a 
 clever picture of his in which the parted lips 
 in a pretty woman's face revealed what seemed 
 to me like a mouthful of virgin snow. The 
 painter lectured me for not consulting my eyes 
 instead of my knowledge of facts. " You 
 don't see the divisions in a set of teeth when 
 you look at a person's mouth," he said: " all 
 you see is a strip of white, or yellow, or pearl, 
 as the case may be. But because you know, 
 as a matter of anatomic fact, that there are 
 divisions there, you want to have them repre- 
 sented by strokes in a drawing. That is just 
 like you art critics &c, &c." I do not think 
 he believed me when I told him that when I 
 
n 
 
 looked at a row of teeth, I saw, not only the 
 divisions between them, but their exact shape, 
 both in contour and in modelling, just as well 
 as I saw their general color. Some of the 
 most able of the Impressionists evidently did 
 not see forms as definitely as they appreciated 
 color relationship; and, since there is always 
 a great deal of imitation in the arts, we soon 
 had young painters with perfectly good sight 
 looking at landscapes or at their models with 
 their eyes half closed and a little asquint, 
 until what they saw looked to them like one 
 of their favorite master's pictures. 
 
 Further, the Impressionist movement led to 
 a busy study of the atmosphere, convention- 
 ally supposed to be invisible, but seldom 
 really completely so, and of what were called 
 values; that is, the relation of light and dark 
 between the various objects depicted, on the 
 correctness of which relation truth of effect 
 largely depends. This, though very difficult 
 in full out-door light with the various colors 
 brilliantly visible, was comparatively easy in 
 
28 
 
 gloomy rooms where the absence of light re- 
 duced all colors to masses of brown or grey of 
 varying depth. Whistler's portrait of Sara- 
 sate, a masterpiece in its way, would look like 
 a study in monochrome if hung beside a por- 
 trait of Holbein; and the little bouquets of 
 color with which he sometimes decorates his 
 female sitters, exquisite as the best of them 
 are, have the character of enamel, of mosaic, 
 of jewelry: never of primitive nature. His 
 disciples could paint dark interiors, or figures 
 placed apparently in coal cellars, with admir- 
 able truth and delicacy of values whilst they 
 were still helplessly unable to represent a 
 green tree or a blue sky, much less paint an 
 interior with the light and local color as clear 
 as they are in the works of Peter de Hooghe. 
 Naturally the public eye, with its utilitarian 
 familiarity with local color, and its Philistine 
 insensibility to values and atmosphere, did not 
 at first see what the Impressionists were driv- 
 ing at, and dismissed them as mere perverse, 
 notoriety-hunting cranks. 
 
29 
 
 Here, then, you had a movement wholly 
 beneficial and progressive, and in no sense 
 insane or decadent; Nevertheless it led to the 
 public exhibition of daubs which even the 
 authors themselves would never have pre- 
 sumed to offer for exhibition before; it be- 
 trayed aberrations of vision in painters who, 
 on the old academic lines, would have hidden 
 their defects by drawing objects (teeth for in- 
 stance) as they knew them to exist, and not 
 as they saw them; it set clear-sighted students 
 practising optical distortion, so as to see 
 things myopically and astigmatically ; and it 
 substituted canvasses which looked like en- 
 largements of under-exposed photographs for 
 the familiar portraits of masters of the hounds 
 in cheerfully unmistakable pink coats, 
 mounted on bright chestnut horses. All of 
 which, and much else, to a man who looked 
 on without any sense of the deficiencies in con- 
 ventional painting, necessarily suggested that 
 the Impressionists and their contemporaries 
 were much less sane than their fathers. 
 
30 
 
 WAGNERISM 
 
 Again, my duties as a musical critic com- 
 pelled me to ascertain very carefully the exact 
 bearings of the controversy which has raged 
 round Wagner's music-dramas since the mid- 
 dle of the century. When you and I last 
 met, we were basking in the sun between the 
 acts of Parsifal at Bayreuth ; but experience 
 has taught me that an American may appear 
 at Bayreuth without being necessarily fonder 
 than most men of a technical discussion on 
 music. Let me therefore put the case to you 
 in a mercifully intelligible way. Music is 
 like drawing, in that it can be purely decor- 
 ative, or purely dramatic, or anything between 
 the two. A draughtsman may be a pattern- 
 designer like William Morris, or he may be a 
 delineator of life and character, like Ford 
 Madox Brown. Or he may come between 
 these two extremes, and treat scenes of life and 
 
character in a decorative way, like Walter 
 Crane or Burne- Jones: both of them consum- 
 mate pattern-designers, whose subject-pictures 
 and illustrations are also fundamentally fig- 
 ure-patterns, prettier than Madox Brown's, 
 but much less convincingly alive. Do you 
 realize that in music we have these same al- 
 ternative applications of the art to drama and 
 decoration? You can compose a graceful, 
 symmetrical sound-pattern that exists solely 
 for the sake of its own grace and symmetry. 
 Or you can compose music to heighten the 
 expression of human emotion; and such music 
 will be intensely affecting in the presence of 
 that emotion, and utter nonsense apart from 
 it. For examples of pure pattern-designing 
 in music I should have to go back to the old 
 music of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fif- 
 teenth centuries, before the operatic movement 
 gained the upper hand; but I am afraid my 
 assertions that much of this music is very 
 beautiful and hugely superior to the stuff our 
 music publishers turn out to-day would not be 
 
32 
 
 believed in America; for when I hinted at 
 something of the kind lately in the American 
 Musical Courier, and pointed out also the 
 beauty of the instruments for which this old 
 music was written (viols, virginals, and so 
 on), one of your leading musical critics re- 
 buked me with an expatiation on the superior- 
 ity (meaning apparently the greater loudness) 
 of the modern concert grand pianoforte, and 
 contemptuously ordered the Middle Ages out 
 from the majestic presence of the nineteenth 
 century.* You must take my word for it 
 that in England alone a long line of com- 
 posers, from Henry VIII to Lawes and Pur- 
 cell, have left us quantities of instrumental 
 music which was neither dramatic music nor 
 descriptive music, but was designed to affect 
 the hearer solely by its beauty of sound and 
 grace and ingenuity of pattern. This is the 
 art which Wagner called absolute music. It 
 
 * Perhaps by this time, however, Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch has 
 educated America in this matter, as he educated London and 
 educated me. 
 
33 
 
 is represented to-day by the formal sonata and 
 symphony; and we are coming back to it in 
 something like its old integrity by a post- 
 Wagnerian reaction led by that greatly gifted 
 absolute musician and hopelessly commonplace 
 and tedious homilist, Johannes Brahms. 
 
 To understand the present muddle, you 
 must know that modern dramatic music did 
 not appear as an independent branch of mu- 
 sical art, but as an adulteration of decorative 
 music. The first modern dramatic composers 
 accepted as binding on them the rules of good 
 pattern-designing in sound; and this absurd- 
 ity was made to appear practicable by the 
 fact that Mozart had such an extraordinary 
 command of his art that his operas contain 
 numbers which, though they seem to follow 
 the dramatic play of emotion and character 
 without reference to any other consideration 
 whatever, are seen, on examining them from 
 the point of view of the absolute musician, to 
 be perfectly symmetrical sound-patterns. But 
 these tours deforce were no real justification 
 
34 
 
 for imposing the laws of pattern-designing on 
 other dramatic musicians; and even Mozart 
 himself broke away from them in all direc- 
 tions, and was violently attacked by his con- 
 temporaries for doing so, the accusations lev- 
 elled at him (absence of melody, illegitimate 
 and discordant harmonic progressions, and 
 monstrous abuse of the orchestra) being 
 exactly those with which the opponents of 
 Wagner so often pester ourselves. Wagner, 
 whose leading lay characteristic was his enor- 
 mous common-sense, completed the emancipa- 
 tion of the dramatic musician from these laws 
 of pattern-designing; and we now have 
 operas, and very good ones too, written by 
 composers like Bruneau, who are not musi- 
 cians in the old sense at all: that is, they are 
 not pattern-designers ; they do not compose 
 music apart from drama ; and when they have 
 to furnish their operas with dances, instru- 
 mental intermezzos or the like, they either 
 take themes from the dramatic part of their 
 operas and rhapsodize on them, or else they 
 
turn out some perfectly simple song or dance 
 tune, at the cheapness of which Haydn would 
 have laughed, and give it an air of momen- 
 tousness by orchestral and harmonic fineries. 
 If I add now that music in the academic, 
 professorial, Conservative, respectable sense 
 always means decorative music, and that 
 students are taught that the laws of pattern- 
 designing are binding on all musicians, and 
 that violations of them are absolutely 
 " wrong " ; and if I mention incidentally that 
 these laws are themselves confused by the sur- 
 vivals from a still older tradition based on the 
 Church art, technically very highly special- 
 ized, of writing perfectly smooth and beautiful 
 vocal harmony for unaccompanied voices, 
 worthy to be sung by angelic doctors round 
 the throne of God (this was Palestrina's art), 
 you will understand why all the professional 
 musicians who could not see beyond the 
 routine they were taught, and all the men and 
 women (and there are many of them) who 
 have little or no sense of drama, but a very 
 
36 
 
 keen sense of beauty of sound and prettiness 
 of pattern in music, regarded Wagner as a 
 madman who was reducing music to chaos, 
 perversely introducing ugly and brutal sounds 
 into a region where beauty and grace had 
 reigned alone, and substituting an incoherent, 
 aimless, formless, endless meandering for the 
 old familiar symmetrical tunes like Pop Goes 
 the Weasel, in which the second and third 
 lines repeat, or nearly repeat, the pattern of 
 the first and second ; so that any one can 
 remember and treasure them like nursery 
 rhymes. It was the unprofessional, fe unmu- 
 sical " public which caught the dramatic clue, 
 and saw order and power, strength and san- 
 ity, in the supposed Wagner chaos; and now, 
 his battle being won and over won, the pro- 
 fessors, to avert the ridicule of their pupils, 
 are compelled to explain (quite truly) that 
 Wagner's technical procedure in music is 
 almost pedantically logical and grammatical; 
 that the Lohengrin and Tristan preludes are 
 masterpieces of the form proper to their aim ; 
 
37 
 
 and that his disregard of w false relations," 
 and his free use of the most extreme discords 
 without " preparation," are straight and sen- 
 sible instances of that natural development of 
 harmony which has proceeded continuously 
 from the days when common six-four chords 
 were considered w wrong," and such free use 
 of unprepared dominant sevenths and minor 
 ninths as had become common in Mozart's 
 time would have seemed the maddest 
 cacophony.* 
 
 The dramatic development also touched 
 purely instrumental music. Liszt tried hard 
 
 * As I spent the first twenty years of my life in Ireland I am, 
 for the purposes of this survey of musical art, at least a century 
 and a half old. I can remember the sensation given by the 
 opening chord of Beethoven's youthful Prometheus overture. 
 It sounded strangely strong and momentous, because the use of 
 the third inversion of the chord of the dominant seventh with- 
 out preparation was unexpected in those days. As to exploding 
 undiminished chords of the ninth and thirteenth on the unsus- 
 pecting ear in the same way (everybody does it nowadays) , one 
 might as well have sat down on the keyboard and called it 
 music. The very name of the thirteenth was inconceivable : a 
 discreetly prepared and resolved suspension of "four to three " 
 was the only form in which that discord was known. I can re- 
 member, too, the indignation with which Macfarren, after cor- 
 recting his pupils for unintentional consecutive fifths all his life, 
 
38 
 
 to extricate himself from pianoforte ara- 
 besques, and become a tone poet like his 
 
 found himself expected to write an analytic program for the 
 performance at a Philharmonic concert of an overture by a 
 composer (Goetz) who actually wrote consecutive sevenths 
 intentionally because he liked them. 
 
 However, I do not insert this note for the sake of my reminis- 
 cences, but because, since writing the text above, a composer of 
 the first order (Richard Strauss) has become known in London, 
 and has been attacked, just as Wagner was, by the very men 
 who lived through the huge blunder of anti-Wagnerism. This 
 cannot be accounted for by the superstitions of the age of 
 decorative music. Every critic nowadays is thoroughly inured 
 to descriptive and dramatic music which is not only as indepen- 
 dent of the old decorative forms as Strauss's, but a good deal 
 more so ; for Strauss lives on the verge of a barcarolle and sel- 
 dom resists a nursery tune for long. The hostility to him may 
 be partly due to the fact that by his great achievement of rescu- 
 ing music from the realm of tights and wigs and stage armor in 
 which Wagner, with all his genius, dwelt to the last, and bring- 
 ing it into direct contact with modern life, he was enabled in 
 his Heldenleben to give an orchestral caricature of his critics 
 which comes much closer home than Wagner's medievally dis- 
 guised Beckmesser. But Strauss is denounced by men who are 
 quite capable of laughing at themselves, who are sincere advo- 
 cates of modern realism in other arts, and who are sufficiently 
 good judges to know, for instance, that the greater popularity 
 of Tchaikowsky is like the popularity of Rossini nearly a cen- 
 tury ago ; that is, the vogue of a musical Byron, who, though 
 very pleasant in his lighter vein, very strenuous in his energetic 
 vein, and at least grandiose in his sublime vein, never attains, 
 or desires to attain, the elevation at which the great modern 
 musicians from Bach to Strauss maintain themselves. Anti- 
 Straussism is therefore accounted for neither by the old anti- 
 
39 
 
 friend Wagner. He wanted his symphonic 
 poems to express emotions and their develop- 
 
 Wagnerian confusion nor by the petulance of the critic who is 
 beaten by his job. 
 
 I conclude that the disagreeable effect which an unaccus- 
 tomed discord produces on people who cannot divine its resolu- 
 tion is to blame for most of the nonsense now written about 
 Strauss. Strauss's technical procedure involves a profusion of 
 such shocks. But the disagreeable effect will not last. There is 
 no longer a single discord used by Wagner of which the resolu- 
 tion is not already as much a platitude as the resolution of the 
 simple sevenths of Mozart and Meyerbeer. Strauss not only 
 goes from discord to discord, leaving the implied resolutions to 
 be inferred by people who never heard them before, but actu- 
 ally makes a feature of unresolved discords, just as Wagner 
 made a feature of unprepared ones. Men who were reconciled 
 quite late in life to compositions beginning with dominant 
 thirteenths fortissimo, find themselves disquieted now by 
 compositions ending with unresolved tonic sevenths. 
 
 I think this phase of protest will soon pass. I think so be- 
 cause I find myself able to follow Strauss's harmonic procedure ; 
 to divine the destination of his most discordant passing phrases 
 (it is too late now to talk of mere " passing notes ") ; and to 
 tolerate his most offhand ellipses and most unceremonious omis- 
 sions of final concords with enjoyment, though my musical en- 
 dowment is none of the acutest. In twenty years the com- 
 plaints about his music will be as unintelligible as the similar 
 complaints about Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner in 
 the past. 
 
 I must apologize for the technical jargon 1 have had to use in 
 this note. Probably it is all obsolete by this time ; but I know 
 nothing newer. Stainer would have understood it thirty years 
 ago. If nobody understands it to-day, my knowledge will seem 
 all the more profound. 
 
40 
 
 ment. And he defined the emotion by con- 
 necting it with some known story, poem, or 
 even picture: Mazeppa, Victor Hugo's Les 
 Preludes, Kaulbach's Die Hunnenschlacht, or 
 the like. But the moment you try to make 
 an instrumental composition follow a story, 
 you are forced to abandon the decorative 
 pattern forms, since all patterns consist of 
 some form which is repeated over and over 
 again, and which generally consists in itself of 
 a repetition of two similar halves. For exam- 
 ple, if you take a playing-card (say the five of 
 diamonds) as a simple example of a pattern, 
 you find not only that the diamond figure is 
 repeated five times, but that each side of each 
 pip is a reversed duplicate of the other. 
 Now, the established form for a symphony is 
 essentially a pattern form involving just such 
 symmetrical repetitions; and, since a story 
 does not repeat itself, but pursues a continu- 
 ous chain of fresh incident and correspond- 
 ingly varied emotions Liszt, had either to find 
 a new musical form for his musical poems, or 
 
41 
 
 else face the intolerable anomalies and absurd- 
 ities which spoil the many attempts made by 
 Mendelssohn, Raff and others, to handcuff the 
 old form to the new matter. Consequently he 
 invented the symphonic poem, a perfectly 
 simple and fitting common-sense form for his 
 purpose, and one which makes Les Preludes 
 much plainer sailing for the ordinary hearer 
 than Mendelssohn's Melusine overture or 
 Raffs Lenore or Im Walde symphonies, in 
 both of which the formal repetitions would 
 stamp Raff as a madman if we did not know 
 that they were mere superstitions, which he 
 had not the strength of mind to shake off as 
 Lizst did. But still, to the people who would 
 not read Liszt's explanations and cared no- 
 thing for his purpose, who had no taste for 
 symphonic poetry, and consequently insisted 
 on judging the symphonic poems as sound- 
 patterns, Liszt must needs appear, like Wag- 
 ner, a perverse egotist with something funda- 
 mentally disordered in his intellect: in short, 
 a lunatic. 
 
42 
 
 The sequel was the same as in the Impres- 
 sionist movement. Wagner, Berlioz, and 
 Liszt, in securing tolerance for their own 
 works, secured it for what sounded to many 
 people absurd; and this tolerance necessarily 
 extended to a great deal of stuff which was 
 really absurd, but which the secretly-bewil- 
 dered critics dared not denounce, lest it, too, 
 should turn out to be great, like the music of 
 Wagner, over which they had made the most 
 ludicrous exhibition of their incompetence. 
 Even at such stupidly conservative concerts as 
 those of the London Philharmonic Society I 
 have seen ultra-modern composers, supposed 
 to be representatives of the Wagnerian move- 
 ment, conducting pretentious rubbish in no 
 essential superior to Jullien's British Army 
 Quadrilles. And then, of course, there are 
 the young imitators, who are corrupted by 
 the desire to make their harmonies sound like 
 those of the masters whose purposes and prin- 
 ciples of work they are too young to under- 
 stand, and who fall between the old forms and 
 
43 
 
 the new into simple incoherence. 
 
 Here, again, you see, you have a progress- 
 ive, intelligent, wholesome, and thoroughly 
 sane movement in art, producing plenty of 
 evidence to prove the case of any clever man 
 who does not understand music, but who has 
 a theory which involves the proposition that 
 all the leaders of the art movements of our 
 time are degenerate and, consequently, 
 retrogressive lunatics. 
 
44 
 
 IBSENISM 
 
 There is no need for me to go at any great 
 length into the grounds on which any de- 
 velopment in our moral views must at first 
 appear insane and blasphemous to people who 
 are satisfied, or more than satisfied, with the 
 current morality. Perhaps you remember the 
 opening chapters of my Quintessence of Ibsen- 
 ism, in which I shewed why the London press, 
 now abjectly polite to Ibsen, received him four 
 years ago with a shriek of horror. Every 
 step in morals is made by challenging the 
 validity of the existing conception of perfect 
 propriety of conduct; and when a man does 
 that, he must look out for a very different 
 reception from the painter who has ventured 
 to paint a shadow brilliant lilac, or the com- 
 poser who ends his symphony with an unre- 
 solved discord. Heterodoxy in art is at 
 worst rated as eccentricity or folly: hetero- 
 
45 
 
 doxy in morals is at once rated as scoundrel- 
 ism, and, what is worse, propagandist scoun- 
 drelism, which must, if successful, undermine 
 society and bring us back to barbarism after a 
 period of decadence like that which brought 
 imperial Rome to its downfall. Your func- 
 tion as a philosophic Anarchist in American 
 society is to combat the attempts that are con- 
 stantly being made to arrest development by 
 using the force of the State to suppress all de- 
 partures from what the majority consider to 
 be " right " in conduct or overt opinion. I 
 dare say you find the modern democratic 
 voter a very troublesome person, chicken- 
 heartedly diffident as to the value of his opin- 
 ions on the technics of art or science, about 
 which he may learn all that there is to be 
 known, but cocksure about right and wrong 
 in morals, politics, and religion, about which 
 he can at best only guess at the depth and 
 danger of his ignorance. Happily, this cock- 
 sureness is not confined to the Conservatives. 
 Shelley is as cocksure as the dons who ex- 
 
46 
 
 pelled him from Oxford. It is true that the 
 revolutionist of twenty-five, who sees nothing 
 for it but a clean sweep of all our institutions, 
 finds himself, at forty, accepting and even 
 clinging to them on condition of a few re- 
 forms to bring them up to date. But he does 
 not wait patiently for this reconciliation. He 
 expresses his (or her) early dissatisfaction 
 with the wisdom of his elders loudly and irre- 
 verently, and formulates his heresy as a faith. 
 He demands the abolition of marriage, of the 
 State, of the Church ; he preaches the divinity 
 of love and the heroism of the man who be- 
 lieves in himself and dares do the thing he 
 wills; he contemns the slavery to duty and 
 discipline which has left so many soured old 
 people with nothing but envious regrets for a 
 virtuous youth. He recognizes his gospel in 
 such utterances as that quoted by Nordau 
 from Brandes: "To obey one's senses is to 
 have character. He who allows himself to be 
 guided by his passions has individuality." 
 For my part, I am not at all afraid of this 
 
47 
 
 doctrine, either in Brandes's form or in the 
 older form: " He that is unjust, let him be 
 unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be 
 filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him 
 be righteous still; and he that is holy, let 
 him be holy still. " But Nordau expresses his 
 horror of Brandes with all the epithets he can 
 command; "debauchery, dissoluteness, de- 
 pravity disguised as modernity, bestial in- 
 stincts, maitre de plaisir, egomaniacal An- 
 archist," and such sentences as the following: 
 
 It is comprehensible that an educator who turns the 
 school-room into a tavern and a brothel should have 
 success and a crowd of followers. He certainly runs 
 the risk of being slain by the parents if they come to 
 know what he is teaching their children ; but the pu- 
 pils will hardly complain, and will be eager to attend 
 the lessons of so agreeable a teacher. This is the ex- 
 planation of the influence Brandes gained over the 
 youth of his country, such as his writings, with their 
 emptiness of thought and unending tattle, would cer- 
 tainly never have procured for him. 
 
 To appreciate this spluttering, you must 
 know that it is immediately followed by an at- 
 tack on Ibsen for the weakness of a obsession 
 
48 
 
 by the doctrine of original sin." Yet what 
 would the passage I have just quoted be with- 
 out the doctrine of original sin as a postulate? 
 If " the heart of man is deceitful above all 
 things, and desperately wicked," then, truly, 
 the man who allows himself to be guided by 
 his passions must needs be a scoundrel; and 
 his teacher might well be slain by his parents. 
 But how if the youth thrown helpless on his 
 passions found that honesty, that self-respect, 
 that hatred of cruelty and injustice, that the . 
 desire for soundness and health and efficiency, 
 were master passions: nay, that their excess is 
 so dangerous to youth that it is part of the 
 wisdom of age to say to the young: " Be not 
 righteous overmuch : why shouldst thou de- 
 stroy thyself? " I am sure, my dear Tucker, 
 your friends have paraphrased that in vernac- 
 ular American often enough in remonstrating 
 with you for your Anarchism, which defies 
 not only God, but even the wisdom of the 
 United States Congress. On the other hand, 
 the people who profess to renounce and ab- 
 
49 
 
 jure their own passions, and ostentatiously 
 regulate their conduct by the most convenient 
 interpretation of what the Bible means, or, 
 worse still, by their ability to find reasons for 
 it (as if there were not excellent reasons to be 
 found for every conceivable course of conduct, 
 from dynamiting and vivisection to martyr- 
 dom), seldom need a warning against being 
 righteous overmuch, their attention, indeed, 
 often needing a rather pressing jog in the 
 opposite direction. 
 
 Passion is the steam in the engine of all re- 
 ligious and moral systems. In so far as it is 
 malevolent, the religions are malevolent too, 
 and insist on human sacrifices, on hell, wrath, 
 and vengeance. You cannot read Browning's 
 Caliban upon Setebos, or, Natural Theology 
 on the Island without admitting that all our 
 religions have been made as Caliban made 
 his, and that the difference between Caliban 
 and Prospero is not that Prospero has killed 
 passion in himself whilst Caliban has yielded 
 to it, but that Prospero is mastered by holier 
 
50 
 
 passions than Caliban's. Abstract principles 
 of conduct break down in practice because 
 kindness and truth and justice are not duties 
 founded on abstract principles external to 
 man, but human passions, which have, in 
 their time, conflicted with higher passions as 
 well as with lower ones. If a young woman, 
 in a mood of strong reaction against the 
 preaching of duty and self-sacrifice and the 
 rest of it, were to tell me that she was deter- 
 mined not to murder her own instincts and 
 throw away her life in obedience to a mouth- 
 ful of empty phrases, I should say to her: 
 " By all means do as you propose. Try how 
 wicked you can be: it is precisely the same 
 experiment as trying how good you can be. 
 At worst you will only find out the sort of 
 person you really are. At best you will find 
 that your passions, if you really and honestly 
 let them all loose impartially, will discipline 
 you with a severity which your conventional 
 friends, abandoning themselves to the me- 
 chanical routine of fashion, could not stand 
 
51 
 
 for a day." As a matter of fact, we have 
 seen over and over again this comedy of the 
 " emancipated " young enthusiast flinging 
 duty and religion, convention and parental 
 authority, to the winds, only to find herself, 
 for the first time in her life, plunged into 
 duties, responsibilities, and sacrifices from 
 which she is often glad to retreat, after a few 
 years wearing down of her enthusiasm, into 
 the comparatively loose life of an ordinary 
 respectable woman of fashion. 
 
52 
 
 WHY LAW IS INDISPENSABLE 
 
 The truth is, laws, religions, creeds, and 
 systems of ethics, instead of making society 
 better than its best unit, make it worse than 
 its average unit, because they are never up to 
 date. You will ask me: w Why have them at 
 all?" I will tell you. They are made neces- 
 sary, though we all secretly detest them, by 
 the fact that the number of people who can 
 think out a line of conduct for themselves 
 even on one point is very small, and the num- 
 ber who can afford the time for it still smaller. 
 Nobody can afford the time to do it on all 
 points. The professional thinker may on oc- 
 casion make his own morality and philosophy 
 as the cobbler may make his own boots; but 
 the ordinary man of business must buy at the 
 shop, so to speak, and put up with what he 
 finds on sale there, whether it exactly suits 
 him or not, because he can neither make a 
 
53 
 
 morality for himself or do without one. This 
 typewriter with which I am writing is the best 
 I can get; but it is by no means a perfect in- 
 strument; and I have not the smallest doubt 
 that in fifty years time authors will wonder 
 how men could have put up with so clumsy a 
 contrivance. When a better one is invented 
 I shall buy it: until then, not being myself an 
 inventor, I must make the best of it, just as 
 my Protestant and Roman Catholic and Ag- 
 nostic friends make the best of their imperfect 
 creeds and systems. Oh, Father Tucker, wor- 
 shipper of Liberty, where shall we find a land 
 where the thinking and moralizing can be 
 done without division of labor? 
 
 Besides, what have deep thinking and mor- 
 alizing to do with the most necessary and 
 least questionable side of law? Just consider 
 how much we need law in matters which have 
 absolutely no moral bearing at all. Is there 
 anything more aggravating than to be told, 
 when you are socially promoted, and are not 
 quite sure how to behave yourself in the cir- 
 
54 
 
 cles you enter ibr the first time, that good 
 manners are merely a matter of good sense, 
 and that rank is but the guinea's stamp: the 
 man's the gowd for a' that? Imagine taking 
 the field with an army which knew nothing 
 except that the soldier's duty is to defend his 
 country bravely, and think, not of his own 
 safety, nor of home and beauty, but of Eng- 
 land ! Or of leaving the traffic of Piccadilly 
 or Broadway to proceed on the understanding 
 that every driver should keep to that side of 
 the road which seemed to him to promote the 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number. 
 Or of stage-managing Hamlet by assuring the 
 Ghost that whether he entered from the right 
 or the left could make no difference to the 
 greatness of Shakespear's play, and that all" 
 he need concern himself about was holding 
 the mirror up to nature! Law is never so 
 necessary as when it has no ethical signifi- 
 cance whatever, and is pure law for the sake 
 of law. The law that compels me to keep to 
 the left when driving along Oxford Street is 
 
55 
 
 ethically senseless, as is shewn by the fact that 
 keeping to the right answers equally well in 
 Paris; and it certainly destroys my freedom to 
 choose my side; but by enabling me to count 
 on everyone else keeping to the left also, thus 
 making traffic possible and safe, it enlarges 
 my life and sets my mind free for nobler is- 
 sues. Most laws, in short, are not the expres- 
 sion of the ethical verdicts of the community, 
 but pure etiquette and nothing else. What 
 they express is the fact that over most of the 
 field of social life there are wide limits within 
 which it does not matter what people do, 
 though it matters enormously whether under 
 given circumstances you can depend on their 
 all doing the same thing. The wasp, who can 
 be depended on absolutely to sting you if you 
 squeeze him, is less of a nuisance than the 
 man who tries to do business with you not ac- 
 cording to the customs of business, but ac- 
 cording to the Sermon on the Mount, or than 
 the lady who dines with you and refuses, on 
 republican and dietetic principles, to allow 
 
56 
 
 precedence to a duchess or to partake of food 
 which contains uric acid. The ordinary man 
 cannot get through the world without being 
 told what to do at every turn, and basing 
 such calculations as he is capable of on the 
 assumption that everyone else will calculate on 
 the same assumptions. Even your man of 
 genius accepts a hundred rules for every one 
 he challenges; and you may lodge in the 
 same house with an Anarchist for ten years 
 without noticing anything exceptional about 
 him. Martin Luther, the priest, horrified the 
 greater half of Christendom by marrying a 
 nun, yet was a submissive conformist in count- 
 less ways, living orderly as a husband and 
 father, wearing what his bootmaker and 
 tailor made for him, and dwelling in what 
 the builder built for him, although he would 
 have died rather than take his Church from 
 the Pope. And when he got a Church made 
 by himself to his liking, generations of men 
 calling themselves Lutherans took that 
 Church from him just as unquestioningly as 
 
57 
 
 he took the fashion of his clothes from his 
 tailor. As the race evolves, many a conven- 
 tion which recommends itself by its obvious 
 utility to everyone passes into an automatic 
 habit, like breathing. Doubtless also an im- 
 provement in our nerves and judgment may 
 enlarge the list of emergencies which indi- 
 viduals may be trusted to deal with on the 
 spur of the moment without reference to regu- 
 lations; but a ready-made code of conduct for 
 general use will always be needed as a matter 
 of overwhelming convenience by all members 
 of communities. 
 
 The continual danger to liberty created by 
 law arises, not from the encroachments of 
 Governments, which are always regarded with 
 suspicion, but from the immense utility and 
 consequent popularity of law, and the terrify- 
 ing danger and obvious inconvenience of an- 
 archy; so that even pirates appoint and obey 
 a captain. Law soon acquires such a good 
 character that people will believe no evil of 
 it; and at this point it becomes possible for 
 
58 
 
 priests and rulers to commit the most perni- 
 cious crimes in the name of law and order. 
 Creeds and laws come to be regarded as ap- 
 plications to human conduct of eternal and 
 immutable principles of good and evil; and 
 breakers of the law are abhorred as sacrile- 
 gious scoundrels to whom nothing is sacred. 
 Now this, I need not tell you, is a very seri- 
 ous error. No law is so independent of cir- 
 cumstances that the time never comes for 
 breaking it, changing it, scrapping it as obso- 
 lete, and even making its observance a crime. 
 In a developing civilization nothing can make 
 laws tolerable unless their changes and modi- 
 fications are kept as closely as possible on the 
 heels of the changes and modifications in so- 
 cial conditions which development involves. 
 Also there is a bad side to the very conveni- 
 ence of law. It deadens the conscience of in- 
 dividuals by relieving them of the moral re- 
 sponsibility of their own actions. When this 
 relief is made as complete as possible, it re- 
 duces a man to a condition in which his very 
 
59 
 
 virtues are contemptible. Military discipline, 
 for example, aims at destroying the individ- 
 uality and initiative of the soldier whilst 
 increasing his mechanical efficiency, until he 
 is simply a weapon with the power of hearing 
 and obeying orders. In him you have legal- 
 ity, duty, obedience, self-denial, submission to 
 external authority, carried as far as it can be 
 carried; and the result is that in England, 
 where military service is voluntary, the com- 
 mon soldier is less respected than any other 
 serviceable worker in the community. The 
 police constable is a free civilian who has to 
 use his own judgment and act on his own re- 
 sponsibility in innumerable petty emergencies, 
 and is by comparison a popular and esteemed 
 citizen. The Roman Catholic peasant who 
 consults his parish priest instead of his con- 
 science, and submits wholly to the authority 
 of his Church, is mastered and governed 
 either by statesmen and cardinals who despise 
 his superstition, or by Protestants who are at 
 least allowed to persuade themselves that they 
 
60 
 
 have arrived at their religious opinions 
 through the exercise of their private judg- 
 ment. The moral evolution of the social in- 
 dividual is from submission and obedience as 
 economizers of effort and responsibility, and 
 safeguards against panic and incontinence, to 
 wilfulness and self-assertion made safe by rea- 
 son and self-control, just as plainly as his 
 physical growth leads from the perambulator 
 and the nurse's apron-string to the power of 
 walking alone, and from the tutelage of the 
 boy to the responsibility of the man. But it 
 is useless for impatient spirits (you and I, for 
 instance) to call on people to walk before 
 they can stand. Without high gifts of reason 
 and self-control: that is, without strong com- 
 mon-sense, no man dare yet trust himself out 
 of the school of authority. What he does is 
 to claim gradual relaxations of the discipline, 
 so as to have as much liberty as he thinks is 
 good for him, and as much government as he 
 thinks he needs to keep him straight. If he 
 goes too fast, he soon finds himself asking 
 
61 
 
 helplessly w What ought I to do?"; and so, 
 after running to the doctor, the lawyer, the 
 expert, the old friend, and all the other 
 quacks for advice, he runs back to the law 
 again to save him from all these and from 
 himself. The law may be wrong; but at 
 least it spares him the responsibility of choos- 
 ing, and will either punish those who make 
 him look ridiculous by exposing its folly, or, 
 when the constitution is too democratic for 
 this, at least guarantee that the majority is on 
 his side. 
 
 We see this in the history of British- Amer- 
 ican Christianity. Man, as the hero of that 
 history, starts by accepting as binding on 
 him the revelation of God's will as inter- 
 preted by the Church. Finding his confi- 
 dence, or rather his intellectual laziness, 
 grossly abused by the Church, he claims a 
 right to exercise his own judgment, which the 
 Reformed Church, competing with the Unre- 
 formed for clients, grants him on condition 
 that he arrive at the same conclusions as it- 
 
62 
 
 self. Later on he violates this condition in 
 certain particulars, and dissents, flying to 
 America in the Mayflower from the prison of 
 Conformity, but promptly building a new jail, 
 suited to the needs of his sect, in his adopted 
 country. In all these mutinies he finds excel- 
 lent arguments to prove that he is exchanging 
 a false authority for the true one, never dar- 
 ing even to think of brazenly admitting that 
 what he is really doing is substituting his 
 own will, bit by bit, for what he calls the will 
 of God or the laws of Nature. These argu- 
 ments so accustom the world to submit au- 
 thority to the test of discussion that he is at 
 last emboldened to claim the right to do any- 
 thing he can find good arguments for, even to 
 the extent of questioning the scientific ac- 
 curacy of the Book of Genesis, and the valid- 
 ity of the popular conception of God as an 
 omniscient, omnipotent, and frightfully jeal- 
 ous and vindictive old gentleman sitting on a 
 throne above the clouds. This seems a giant 
 stride towards emancipation ; but it leaves 
 
63 
 
 our hero, as Rationalist and Materialist, re- 
 garding Reason as a creative dynamic motor, 
 independent of and superior to his erring pas- 
 sions, at which point it is easy for the 
 Churches to suggest that if Reason is to de- 
 cide the matter perhaps the conclusion's of an 
 Ecumenical Council of learned and skilled 
 churchmen might be more trustworthy than 
 the first crop of cheap syllogisms excogitated 
 by a handful of raw Rationalists in their sects 
 of " Freethinkers " and c< Secularists " and 
 " Positivists * or w Don't Knowists " 
 (Agnostics). 
 
 Yet it was not the churches, but that very 
 freethinking philosopher Schopenhauer who 
 re-established the old theological doctrine 
 that reason is no motive power; that the true 
 motive power in the world is will (otherwise 
 Life) ; and that the setting-up of reason above 
 will is a damnable error. But the theolo- 
 gians could not open their arms to Schopen- 
 hauer, because he fell into the Rationalist- 
 commercial error of valuing life according to 
 
64 
 
 its profits in individual pleasure, and of course 
 came to the idiotic pessimist conclusion that 
 life is not worth living, and that the will 
 which urges us to live in spite of this is neces- 
 sarily a malign torturer, or at least a bad 
 hand at business, the desirable end of all 
 things being the Nirvana of the stilling of the 
 will and the consequent setting of life's sun 
 " into the blind cave of eternal night." Fur- 
 ther, the will of the theologians was the will 
 of a God standing outside man and in au- 
 thority above him, whereas the Schopen- 
 hauerian will is a purely secular force of na- 
 ture, attaining various degrees of organiza- 
 tion, here as a jelly-fish, there as a cabbage, 
 more complexly as an ape or a tiger, and at- 
 taining its highest (and most mischievous) 
 form so far in the human being. As to the 
 Rationalists, they approved of Schopenhauer's 
 secularism and pessimism, but of course could 
 not stomach his metaphysical method or his 
 dethronement of reason by will. Accord- 
 ingly, his turn for popularity did not come 
 
65 
 
 until after Darwin's, and then mostly through 
 the influence of two great artists, Richard 
 Wagner and Ibsen, whose Tristan and Em- 
 peror Or Galilean shew that Schopenhauer 
 was a true pioneer in the forward march of 
 the human spirit. We can now, as soon as 
 we are strong-minded enough, drop the Nir- 
 vana nonsense, the pessimism, the rationalism, 
 the supernatural theology, and all the other 
 subterfuges to which we cling because we are 
 afraid to look life straight in the face and see 
 in it, not the fulfilment of a moral law or of 
 the deductions of reason, but the satisfaction 
 of a passion in us of which we can give no 
 account whatever. 
 
 It is natural for man to shrink from the 
 terrible responsibility thrown on him by this 
 inexorable fact. All his stock excuses vanish 
 before it: K The woman tempted me," "The 
 serpent tempted me," K I was not myself at 
 the time," K I meant well," " My passion got 
 the better of my reason," " It was my duty to 
 do it," "The Bible says that we should do 
 
66 
 
 it," " Everybody does it," and so on. 
 Nothing is left but the frank avowal: " I did 
 it because I am built that way." Every man 
 hates to say that. He wants to believe that 
 his generous actions are characteristic of him, 
 and that his meannesses are aberrations or 
 concessions to the force of circumstances. 
 Our murderers^ with the assistance of the jail 
 chaplain, square accounts with the devil and 
 with God, never with themselves. The con- 
 vict gives every reason for his having stolen 
 something except the reason that he is a thief. 
 Cruel people flog their children for their chil- 
 dren's good, or offer the information that a 
 guinea-pig perspires under atrocious torture 
 as an affectionate contribution to science. 
 Lynched negroes are riddled by dozens of su- 
 perfluous bullets, every one of which is offered 
 as the expression of a sense of outraged justice 
 and chastity in the scamp and libertine who 
 fires it. And such is the desire of men to 
 keep one another in countenance that they 
 positively demand such excuses from one an- 
 
67 
 
 other as a matter of public decency. An 
 uncle of mine, who made it a rule to offer 
 tramps a job when they begged from him, 
 naturally very soon became familiar with 
 every excuse that human ingenuity can invent 
 for not working. But he lost his temper only 
 once; and that was with a tramp who frankly 
 replied that he was too lazy. This my uncle 
 described with disgust as fr cynicism." And 
 yet our family arms bear the motto, in Latin, 
 K Know thyself." 
 
 As you know, the true trend of this move- 
 ment has been mistaken by many of its sup- 
 porters as well as by its opponents. The in- 
 grained habit of thinking of the propensities 
 of which we are ashamed as w our passions," 
 and our shame of them and our propensities 
 to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory 
 department called generally our conscience, 
 leads us to conclude that to accept the 
 guidance of our passions is to plunge reck- 
 lessly into the insupportable tedium of what 
 is called a life of pleasure. Reactionists 
 
68 
 
 against the almost equally insupportable 
 slavery of what is called a life of duty are 
 nevertheless willing to venture on these terms. 
 The revolted daughter, exasperated at being 
 systematically lied to by her parents on every 
 subject of vital importance to an eager and 
 intensely curious young student of life, allies 
 herself with really vicious people and with 
 humorists who like to shock the pious with 
 gay paradoxes, in claiming an impossible 
 license in personal conduct. No great harm 
 is done beyond the inevitable and temporary 
 excesses produced by all reactions; for, as I 
 have said, the would-be wicked ones find, 
 when they come to the point, that the indis- 
 pensable qualification for a wicked life is not 
 freedom but wickedness. But the misunder- 
 standing supports the clamor of the opponents 
 of the newest opinions, who naturally shriek 
 as Nordau shrieks in the passages about 
 Brandes, quoted above. Thus you have here 
 again a movement which is thoroughly bene- 
 ficial and progressive presenting a hideous 
 
69 
 
 appearance of moral corruption and decay, 
 not only to our old-fashioned religious folk, 
 but to our comparatively modern scientific 
 Rationalists as well. And here again, be- 
 cause the press and the gossips have found 
 out that this apparent corruption and decay 
 is considered the right thing in some influen- 
 tial quarters, and must be spoken of with re- 
 spect, and patronized and published and sold 
 and read, we have a certain number of pitiful 
 imitators taking advantage of their tolerance 
 to bring out really silly and rotten stuff, 
 which the reviewers are afraid to expose, lest 
 it, too, should turn out to be the correct 
 thing. 
 
70 
 
 NORDAITS BOOK 
 
 After this long preamble, you will have no 
 difficulty in understanding the sort of book 
 Nordau has written. Imagine a huge volume, 
 stuffed with the most slashing of the criticisms 
 which were hurled at the Impressionists, the 
 Tone Poets, and the philosophers and drama- 
 tists of the Schopenhauerian revival, before 
 these movements had reached the point at 
 which it began to require some real courage 
 to attack them. Imagine a rehash not only 
 of the newspaper criticisms of this period, but 
 of all its little parasitic paragraphs of small- 
 talk and scandal, from the long-forgotten 
 jibes against Oscar Wilde's momentary at- 
 tempt to bring knee-breeches into fashion 
 years ago, to the latest scurrilities about " the 
 New Woman." Imagine the general staleness 
 and occasional putrescence of this mess dis- 
 guised by a dressing of the terminology in- 
 
71 
 
 vented by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and all 
 the latest specialists in madness and crime, to 
 describe the artistic faculties and propensities 
 as they operate in the insane. Imagine all 
 this done by a man who is a vigorous and ca- 
 pable journalist, shrewd enough to see that 
 there is a good opening for a big reactionary 
 book as a relief to the Wagner and Ibsen 
 booms, bold enough to let himself go without 
 respect to persons or reputations, lucky 
 enough to be a stronger, clearer-headed man 
 than ninety-nine out of a hundred of his 
 critics, besides having a keener interest in 
 science: a born theorist, reasoner, and busy- 
 body; therefore able, without insight, or even 
 any very remarkable intensive industry (he is, 
 like most Germans, extensively industrious to 
 an appalling degree), to produce a book 
 which has made a very considerable impres- 
 sion on the artistic ignorance of Europe and 
 America. For he says a thing as if he meant 
 it; he holds superficial ideas obstinately, and 
 sees them clearly; and his mind works so im- 
 
72 
 
 petuously that it is a pleasure to watch it — 
 for a while. All the same, he is the dupe of 
 a theory which would hardly impose on one of 
 those gamblers who have a system or martin- 
 gale founded on a solid rock of algebra, by 
 which they can infallibly break the bank at 
 Monte Carlo. " Psychiatry " takes the place 
 of algebra in Nordau's martingale. 
 
 This theory of his is, at bottom, nothing 
 but the familiar delusion of the used-up man 
 that the world is going to the dogs. But 
 Nordau is too clever to be driven back on 
 ready-made mistakes: he makes them for 
 himself in his own way. He appeals to the 
 prodigious extension of the quantity of busi- 
 ness a single man can transact through the 
 modern machinery of social intercourse : the 
 railway, the telegraph and telephone, the post, 
 and so forth. He gives appalling statistics of 
 the increase of railway mileage and shipping, 
 of the number of letters written per head of 
 the population, of the newspapers which tell . 
 us things (mostly lies) of which we used to 
 
73 
 
 know nothing.* " In the last fifty years," he 
 says, " the population of Europe has not 
 doubled, whereas the sum of its labors has 
 increased tenfold: in part, even fiftyfold. 
 Every civilized man furnishes, at the present 
 time, from five to twenty-five times as much 
 work as was demanded of him half a century 
 ago."f Then follow more statistics of " the 
 constant increase of crime, madness, and sui- 
 cide," of increases in the mortality from dis- 
 
 * Perhaps I had better remark in passing that, unless it were 
 true — which it is not — that the length of the modern penny 
 letter or halfpenny post-card is the same as that of the eigh- 
 teenth-century letter, and that the number of persons who 
 know how to read and write has not increased, there is no rea- 
 son whatever to draw Nordau's conclusion from the postal 
 statistics. 
 
 t Here again we have a statement which means nothing 
 unless it be compared with statistics as to the multiplication of 
 the civilized man's power of production by machinery, which in 
 some industries has multiplied a single man's power by hun- 
 dreds and in others by thousands. As to crimes and disease, 
 Nordau should state whether he counts convictions under mod- 
 ern laws — for offences against the Joint Stock Company Acts, for 
 instance — as proving that we have degenerated since those Acts 
 were passed, and whether he regards the invention of new 
 names for a dozen varieties of fever which were formerly 
 counted as one single disease as an evidence of decaying health 
 in the face of the increasing duration of life. 
 
74 
 
 eases of the nerves and heart, of increased 
 consumption of stimulants, of new nervous 
 diseases like " railway spine and railway 
 brain," with the general moral that we are all 
 suffering from exhaustion, and that symptoms 
 of degeneracy are visible in all directions, 
 culminating at various points in such hysteri- 
 cal horrors as Wagner's music, Ibsen's dra- 
 mas, Manet's pictures, Tolstoy's novels, Whit- 
 man's poetry, Dr. Jaeger's woollen clothing, 
 vegetarianism, scepticism as to vivisection and 
 vaccination, Anarchism and humanitarianism, 
 and, in short, everything that Dr. Nordau 
 does not happen to approve of. 
 
 You will at once see that such a case, if 
 well got up and argued, is worth hearing, 
 even though its advocate has no chance of a 
 verdict, because it is sure to bring out a cer- 
 tain number of interesting and important 
 facts. It is, I take it, quite true that with 
 our railways and our postal services many of 
 us are for the moment very like a pedestrian 
 converted to bicycling, who, instead of using 
 
75 
 
 his machine to go twenty miles with less labor 
 than he used to walk seven, proceeds to do a 
 hundred miles instead, with the result tl at the 
 ''labor-saving" contrivance acts as a mnans 
 of working its user to exhaustion. It is- also 
 true that under our existing industrial s /stem 
 machinery in industrial processes is rega % ded 
 solely as a means of extracting a larger ] to- 
 duct from the unremitted toil of the actual 
 wage-worker. And I do not think any j er- 
 son who is in touch with the artistic profes- 
 sions will deny that they are recruited largely 
 by persons who become actors, or painters, or 
 journalists and authors because they are in ca- 
 pable of steady work and regular habits, o * 
 that the attraction which the patrons of thr 
 stage, music, and literature find in their fa 
 vorite arts has often little or nothing to do 
 with the need which nerves great artists to the 
 heavy travail of creation. The claim of ai t 
 to our respect must stand or fall with the 
 validity of its pretension to cultivate and n ■ 
 fine our senses and faculties until seeing, 
 
76 
 
 hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting become 
 highly conscious and critical acts with us, 
 protesting vehemently against ugliness, noise, 
 discordant speech, frowzy clothing, and re- 
 breathed air, and taking keen interest and 
 pleasure in beauty, in music, and in nature, 
 besides making us insist, as necessary for com- 
 fort and decency, on clean, wholesome, hand- 
 some fabrics to wear, and utensils of fine ma- 
 terial and elegant workmanship to handle. 
 Further, art should refine our sense of char- 
 acter and conduct, of justice and sympathy, 
 greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self- 
 control, precision of action, and considerate- 
 ness, and making us intolerant of baseness, 
 cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficiality 
 or vulgarity. The worthy artist or craftsman 
 is he who serves the physical and moral senses 
 by feeding them with pictures, musical com- 
 positions, pleasant houses and gardens, good 
 clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, 
 essays, and dramas which call the heightened 
 senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable 
 
77 
 
 activity. The great artist is he who goes a 
 step beyond the demand, and, by supplying 
 works of a higher beauty and a higher inter- 
 est than have yet been perceived, succeeds, 
 after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in 
 adding this fresh extension of sense to the 
 heritage of the race. This is why we value 
 art: this is why we feel that the iconoclast 
 and the Philistine are attacking something 
 made holier, by solid usefulness, than their 
 own theories of purity and practicality : this 
 is why art has won the privileges of religion ; 
 so that London shopkeepers who would 
 fiercely resent a compulsory church rate, who 
 do not know Yankee Doodle from Luther's 
 hymn, and who are more interested in photo- 
 graphs of the latest celebrities than in the Ve- 
 lasquez portraits in the National Gallery, 
 tamely allow the London County Council to 
 spend their money on bands, on municipal 
 art inspectors, and on plaster casts from the 
 antique. 
 
 But the business of responding to the de- 
 
78 
 
 mand for the gratification of the senses has 
 many grades. The confectioner who makes 
 unwholesome sweets, the bullfighter, the 
 women whose advertisements in the American 
 papers are so astounding to English people, 
 are examples ready to hand to shew what the 
 art and trade of pleasing may be, not at its 
 lowest, but at the lowest that we can speak of 
 without intolerable shame. We have drama- 
 tists who write their lines in such a way as to 
 enable low comedians of a certain class to give 
 them an indecorous turn; we have painters 
 who aim no higher than Giulio Romano did 
 when he decorated the Palazzo Te in Mantua; 
 we have poets who have nothing to versify but 
 the commonplaces of amorous infatuation ; 
 and, worse than all the rest put together, we 
 have journalists who openly profess that it is 
 their duty to "reflect " what they believe to 
 be the ignorance and prejudice of their 
 readers, instead of leading and enlightening 
 them to the best of their ability : an excuse 
 for cowardice and time-serving which is also 
 
79 
 
 becoming well worn in political circles as 
 " the duty of a democratic statesman." In 
 short, the artist can be a prostitute, a pander, 
 and a flatterer more easily, as far as external 
 pressure goes, than a faithful servant of the 
 community, much less the founder of a school 
 or the father of a church. Even an artist 
 who is doing the best he can may be doing a 
 very low class of work : for instance, many 
 performers at the rougher music-halls, who get 
 their living by singing coarse songs in the 
 rowdiest possible way, do so to the utmost of 
 their ability in that direction in the most con- 
 scientious spirit of earning their money hon- 
 estly and being a credit to their profession. 
 And the exaltation of the greatest artists is 
 not continuous: you cannot defend every line 
 of Shakespear or every stroke of Titian. 
 Since the artist is a man and his patron a 
 man, all human moods and grades of develop- 
 ment are reflected in art; consequently the 
 iconoclast's or the Philistine's indictments of 
 art have as many counts as the misanthrope's 
 
80 
 
 indictment of humanity. And this is the 
 Achilles heel of art at which Nordau has 
 struck. He has piled the iconoclast on the 
 Philistine, the Philistine on the misanthrope, 
 in order to make out his case. 
 
81 
 
 ECHOLALIA 
 
 Let me describe to you one or two of his 
 artifices as a special pleader making the most 
 of the eddies at the sides of the stream of pro- 
 gress. Take as a first specimen the old and 
 effective trick of pointing out, as " stigmata 
 of degeneration " in the person he is abusing, 
 features which are common to the whole hu- 
 man race. The drawing-room palmist aston- 
 ishes ladies by telling them " secrets " about 
 themselves which are nothing but the inevit- 
 able experiences of ninety-nine people out of 
 every hundred, though each individual is 
 vain enough to suppose that they are peculiar 
 to herself. Nordau turns the trick inside out 
 by trusting to the fact that people are in the 
 habit of assuming that uniformity and sym- 
 metry are laws of nature : for example, that 
 every normal person's face is precisely symmet- 
 rical, that all persons have the same number 
 
82 
 
 of bones in their bodies, and so on. He 
 takes advantage of this popular error to claim 
 asymmetry as a stigma of degeneration. As 
 a matter of fact, perfect symmetry or uni- 
 formity does not exist in nature. My two 
 profiles, when photographed, are hardly rec- 
 ognizable as belonging to the same person by 
 those who do not know me; so that the cam- 
 era would prove me an utter degenerate if my 
 case were exceptional. Probably, however, 
 you would not object to testify that my face is 
 as symmetrical as faces are ordinarily made. 
 Another unfailing trick is the common one of 
 having two names for the same thing, one 
 abusive, the other complimentary, for use ac- 
 cording to circumstances. You know how it 
 is done : " We trust the Government will be 
 firm " in one paper, and " We hope the ob- 
 stinate elements in the Cabinet will take 
 warning in time " in another. The following 
 is a typical specimen of Nordau's use of this 
 device. First, let me explain that when a 
 man with a turn for rhyming goes mad, he 
 
83 
 
 repeats rhymes as if he were quoting a rhym- 
 ing dictionary. You say " Come " to him, 
 and he starts away with " Dumb, plum, sum, 
 rum, numb, gum," and so on. This the doc- 
 tors call echolalia. Dickens gives a specimen 
 of it in Great Expectations, where Mr. Jag- 
 gers's Jewish client expresses his rapture of 
 admiration for the lawyer by exclaiming: 
 "Oh, Jaggerth, Jaggerth, Jaggerth! all 
 otherth ith Cag-Maggerth : give me Jag- 
 gerth! " There are some well-known verses by 
 Swinburne, beginning, " If love were what the 
 rose is," which, rhyming and tripping along 
 very prettily, express a sentiment without 
 making any intelligible statement whatsoever; 
 and we have plenty of nonsensically inconse- 
 quent nursery rhymes, like Ba, ba, black 
 sheep, or Old Daddy long legs, which please 
 sane children just as Mr. Swinburne's verses 
 please sane adults, simply as funny or pretty 
 little word-patterns. People do not write 
 such things for the sake of conveying infor- 
 mation, but for the sake of amusing and 
 
84 
 
 pleasing, just as people do not eat strawber- 
 ries and cream to nourish their bones and 
 muscles, but to enjoy the taste of a toothsome 
 dish. A lunatic may plead that he eats kit- 
 chen soap and tin tacks on the same ground; 
 and, as far as I can see, the lunatic would 
 completely shut up Nordau by this argument; 
 for Nordau is absurd enough, in the case of 
 rhyming, to claim that every rhyme made for 
 its own sake, as proved by the fact that it 
 does not convey an intelligible statement of 
 fact of any kind, convicts the rhymer of echo- 
 lalia. He can thus convict any poet whom 
 he dislikes of being a degenerate by simply 
 picking out a rhyme which exists for its own 
 sake, or a pun, or what is called a burden in a 
 ballad, and claiming them as symptoms of 
 echolalia, supporting this diagnosis by care- 
 fully examining the poem for contradictions 
 and inconsistencies as to time, place, descrip- 
 tion, or the like. It will occur to you proba- 
 bly that by this means he must bring out 
 Shakespear as the champion instance of poetic 
 
85 
 
 degeneracy, since Shakespear was an incorri- 
 gible punster; delighted in burdens (for in- 
 stance, " With hey, ho, the wind and the 
 rain," which exactly fulfils all the conditions 
 accepted by Nordau as symptomatic of insan- 
 ity in Rossetti's case) ; and rhymed for the 
 sake of rhyming in quite a childish fashion; 
 whilst, as to contradictions and inconsistencies, 
 A Midsummer Night's Dream, as to which 
 Shakespear never made up his mind whether 
 the action covered a week or a single night, is 
 only one of a dozen instances of his slips. 
 But no : Shakespear, not being a nineteenth- 
 century poet, would have spoiled the case for 
 modern degeneration by showing that its 
 symptoms existed before the telegraph and the 
 railway were dreamt of; and besides, Nordau 
 likes Shakespear, just as he likes Goethe, and 
 holds him up as a model of sanity in contrast 
 to the nineteenth-century poets. Thus Wag- 
 ner is a degenerate because he made puns; 
 and Shakespear, who made worse ones, is a 
 great poet. Swinburne, with his w unmean- 
 
86 
 
 ing " refrains of " Small red leaves in the mill 
 water," and " Apples of gold for the King's 
 daughter," is a diseased madman; but Shake- 
 spear, with his " In spring time, the only 
 merry ring time, when birds do sing hey ding 
 a ding ding " (if this is not the worst case of 
 echolalia in the world, what is echolalia?), is 
 a sober master mind, Rossetti, with his 
 Blessed Damozel leaning out from the gold 
 bar of heaven, weeping though she is in para- 
 dise, which is a happy place; describing the 
 dead in one line as " dressed in white " and in 
 another as " mounting like thin flames "; and 
 calculating days and years quite otherwise 
 than commercial almanacks do, is that dan- 
 gerous and cranky thing, a mystic; whilst 
 Goethe (the author of the second part of 
 Faust, if you please) is a hard-headed, ac- 
 curate, sound, scientific poet. As to the list 
 of inconsistencies of which poor Ibsen is con- 
 victed, it is too long to be dealt with in de- 
 tail. But I assure you I am not doing Nor- 
 dau less than justice when I say that if he 
 
87 
 
 had accused Shakespear of inconsistency on 
 the ground that Othello is represented in the 
 first act as loving his wife, and in the last as 
 strangling her, the demonstration would have 
 left you with more respect for his good sense 
 than his pages on Ibsen, the folly of which 
 goes beyond all patience.* 
 
 When Nordau deals with painting and 
 music, he is less irritating, because he errs 
 through ignorance, and ignorance, too, of a 
 sort that is now perfectly well recognized and 
 understood. We all know what the old-fash- 
 
 * Perhaps I had better give one example. Nordau first quotes 
 a couple of speeches from An Enemy of the People and The 
 Wild Duck: 
 
 Stocemann: I love my native town so well that I had rather 
 ruin it than see it flourishing on a lie. All men who live on lies 
 must be exterminated like vermin. (An Enemy of the People.) 
 
 Relling: Yes, I said, illusion [lie]. For illusion, you know, is 
 the stimulating principle. Rob the average man of his life 
 illusion and you rob him of his happiness at the same time. 
 (The Wild Duck.) 
 
 Nordau proceeds to comment as follows; 
 
 " Now, what is Ibsen's real opinion? Is a man to strive for 
 truth or to swelter in deceit? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or with 
 Relling ? Ibsen owes us an answer to these questions or, rather, 
 he replies to them affirmatively 7 and negatively with equal ardor 
 and equal poetie power." 
 
88 
 
 ioned critic of literature and science who culti- 
 vated his detective logic without ever dreaming 
 of cultivating his eyes and ears, can be relied 
 upon to say when painters and composers are 
 under discussion. Nordau gives himself away 
 with laughable punctuality. He celebrates 
 "the most glorious period of the Renaissance" 
 and "the rosy dawn of the new thought " with 
 all the gravity of the older editions of Mur- 
 ray's guides to Italy. He tells us that " to 
 copy Cimabue and Giotto is comparatively 
 easy: to imitate Raphael it is necessary to be 
 able to draw and paint to perfection." He 
 lumps Fra Angelico with Giotto and Cima- 
 bue, as if they represented the same stage in 
 the development of technical execution, and 
 Pollajuolo with Ghirlandajo. " Here," he 
 says, speaking of the great Florentine paint- 
 ers, from Giotto to Masaccio, u were paintings 
 bad in drawing, faded or smoked, their color- 
 ing either originally feeble or impaired by the 
 action of centuries, pictures executed with the 
 awkwardness of a learner . . . easy of imita- 
 
89 
 
 tion, since, in painting pictures in the style of 
 the early masters, faulty drawing, deficient 
 sense of color, and general artistic incapacity ', 
 are so many advantages." To make any 
 comment on these howlers would be to hit a 
 man when he is down. Poor Nordau offers 
 them as a demonstration that Ruskin, who 
 gave this sort of ignorant nonsense its death- 
 blow in England, was a delirious mystic. 
 Also that Millais and Holman Hunt, in the 
 days of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, strove 
 to acquire the qualities of the early Florentine 
 masters because the Florentine easel pictures 
 were so much easier to imitate than those of 
 the apprentices in Raphael's Roman fresco 
 factory. 
 
 In music we find Nordau equally content 
 with the theories as to how music is composed 
 which were current among literary men fifty 
 years ago. He tells us of" the severe discip- 
 line and fixed rules of the theory of composi- 
 tion, which gave a grammar to the musical 
 babbling of primeval times, and made of it 
 
90 
 
 a worthy medium for the expression of the 
 emotions of civilized men," and describes 
 Wagner as breaking these fixed rules and re- 
 belling against this severe discipline because 
 he was " an inattentive mystic, abandoned to 
 amorphous dreams." This notion that there 
 are certain rules, derived from a science of 
 counterpoint, by the application of which 
 pieces of music can be constructed just as an 
 equilateral triangle can be constructed on a 
 given straight line by any one who has mas- 
 tered Euclid's first proposition, is highly 
 characteristic of the generation of blind and 
 deaf critics to which Nordau belongs. It 
 is evident that if there were fixed rules by 
 which Wagner or anyone else could have 
 composed good music, there could have been 
 no more severe discipline in the work of com- 
 position than in the work of arranging a list 
 of names in alphabetical order. The severity 
 of artistic discipline is produced by the fact 
 that in creative art no ready-made rules can 
 help you. There is nothing to guide you to 
 
91 
 
 the right expression for your thought except 
 your own sense of beauty and fitness; and, as 
 you advance upon those who went before you, 
 that sense of beauty and fitness is necessarily 
 often in conflict, not with fixed rules, because 
 there are no rules, but with precedents, which 
 are what Nordau means by fixed rules, as far 
 as he knows what he is talking about enough 
 to mean anything at all. If Wagner had 
 composed the prelude to Das Rheingold with 
 a half close at the end of the eighth bar and 
 a full close at the end of the sixteenth, he 
 would undoubtedly have followed the prece- 
 dent of Mozart and other great composers, 
 and complied with the requirements of Messrs. 
 Hanslick, Nordau and Company. Only, as it 
 happened, that was not what he wanted to do. 
 His purpose was to produce a tone picture of 
 the mighty flood in the depths of the Rhine; 
 and, as the poetic imagination does not con- 
 ceive the Rhine as stopping at every eight feet 
 to take off its hat to Herren Hanslick and 
 Nordau, the closes and half closes are omitted, 
 
92 
 
 and Nordau, huffed at being passed by as if 
 he were a person of no consequence, complains 
 that the composer is "an inattentive mystic, 
 abandoned to amorphous dreams." But, 
 even if Wagner's descriptive purpose is left 
 out of the question, Nordau's general criticism 
 of him is an ignorant one; for the truth is 
 that Wagner, like most artists who have great 
 intellectual power, was dominated in the tech- 
 nical work of his gigantic scores by so strong 
 a regard for system, order, logic, symmetry, 
 and syntax, that when in the course of time 
 his melody and harmony become perfectly 
 familiar to us, he will be ranked with Handel 
 as a composer whose extreme regularity of 
 procedure must make his work appear drily 
 mechanical to those who cannot catch its 
 dramatic inspiration. If Nordau, having no 
 sense of that inspiration, had said: "This fel- 
 low, whom you all imagine to be the creator 
 of a new heaven and a new earth in music out 
 of a chaos of poetic emotion, is really an ar- 
 rant pedant and formalist," I should have 
 
93 
 
 pricked up my ears and listened to him with 
 some curiosity, knowing how good a case a 
 really keen technical critic could make out for 
 that view. As it is, I have only to expose 
 him as having picked up a vulgar error under 
 the influence of a vulgar literary superstition. 
 For the rest, you will hardly need any 
 prompting of mine to appreciate the absurdity 
 of dismissing as " inattentive " the Paris 
 journalist, the Dresden conductor, the designer 
 and founder of the Bayreuth enterprise, the 
 humorous and practical author of On Con- 
 ducting, and the man who scored and stage- 
 managed the four evenings of The Niblung's 
 Ring. I purposely leave out the composer, 
 the poet, the philosopher, the reformer, since 
 Nordau cannot be compelled to admit that 
 Wagner's eminence in these departments was 
 real. Striking them all out accordingly, 
 there remain the indisputable, objective facts 
 of Wagner's practically professional ability 
 and organizing power to put Nordau's diag- 
 nosis of Wagner as an amorphous, inattentive 
 
94 
 
 person out of the question. If Nordau had 
 one hundredth part of the truly terrific power 
 of attention which Wagner must have main- 
 tained all his life almost as easily as a com- 
 mon man breathes, he would not now be so 
 deplorable an example of the truth of his own 
 contention that the power of attention may be 
 taken as the measure of mental strength. 
 
 Nordau's trick of calling rhyme echolalia 
 when he happens not to like the rhymer is re- 
 applied in the case of authorship, which he 
 calls graphomania when he happens not to 
 like the author. He insists that Wagner, 
 who was a voluminous author as well as a 
 composer, was a graphomaniac ; and his proof 
 is that in his books we find " the restless repe- 
 tition of one and the same strain of thought 
 . . . Opera and Drama, Judaism in Music, 
 Religion and the State, Art and Religion, and 
 the Vocation of Opera are nothing more than 
 the amplification of single passages in The 
 Art- Work of the Future." This is a capital 
 example of Nordau's limited power of atten- 
 
95 
 
 tion. The moment that limited power is con- 
 centrated on his theory of degeneration, he 
 loses sight of everything else, and drives his 
 one borrowed horse into every obstacle on the 
 road. To those of us who can attend to more 
 than one thing at a time, there is no observa- 
 tion more familiar, and more frequently con- 
 firmed, than that this growth of pregnant sin- 
 gle sentences into whole books which Nordau 
 discovers in Wagner, balanced as it always 
 is by the contraction of whole boyish chapters 
 into single epigrams, is the process by which 
 all great writers, speakers, artists, and think- 
 ers elaborate their life-work. Let me take a 
 writer after Nordau's own heart, a specialist 
 in lunacy, one whom he quotes as a trust- 
 worthy example of what he calls " the clear, 
 mentally sane author, who, feeling himself 
 impelled to say something, once for all ex- 
 presses himself as distinctly and impressively 
 as it is possible for him to do, and has done 
 with it " : namely, Dr. Henry Maudsley. Dr. 
 Maudsley is a clever and cultivated specialist 
 
96 
 
 in insanity, who has written several interesting 
 books, consisting of repetitions, amplifications, 
 and historical illustrations of the same idea, 
 which is, if I may put it rather more bluntly 
 than the urbane author, nothing less than the 
 identification of religious with sexual ecstasy. 
 And the upshot of it is the conventional scien- 
 tific pessimism, from which Dr. Maudsley 
 never gets away; so that his last book repeats 
 his first book, instead of leaving it far behind, 
 as Wagner's State and Religion leaves his Art 
 and Revolution behind. But now that I have 
 prepared the way by quoting Dr. Maudsley, 
 why should I not ask Herr Nordau himself to 
 step before the looking-glass and tell us 
 frankly whether, even in the ranks of his 
 " psychiatrists " and lunacy doctors, he can 
 pick out a crank more hopelessly obsessed 
 with one idea than himself? If you want an 
 example of echolalia, can you find a more 
 shocking one than this gentleman who, when 
 you say " mania," immediately begins to gab- 
 ble Egomania, Graphomania, Megalomania, 
 
97 
 
 Onomatomania, Pyromania, Kleptomania, 
 Dipsomania, Erotomania, Arithmomania, 
 Oniomania, and is started off by the termina- 
 tion u phobia " with a string of Agoraphobia, 
 Claustrophobia, Rupophobia, Iophobia, Noso- 
 phobia, Aichmophobia, Belenophobia, Crem- 
 nophobia, and Trichophobia? After which 
 he suddenly observes: "This is simply philo- 
 logico-medical trifling," a remark which looks 
 like returning sanity until he follows it up by 
 clasping his temples in the true bedlamite 
 manner, and complaining that " psychiatry is 
 being stuffed with useless and disturbing 
 designations," whereas, if the psychiatrists 
 would only listen to him, they would see that 
 there is only one phobia and pne mania: 
 namely, degeneracy. That is, the philologico- 
 medical triflers are not crazy enough for him. 
 He is so utterly mad on the subject of degen- 
 eration that he finds the symptoms of it in the 
 loftiest geniuses as plainly as in the lowest 
 jailbirds, the exceptions being himself, Lom- 
 broso, Krafft-Ebing, Dr. Maudsley, Goethe, 
 
98 
 
 Shakespear, and Beethoven. Perhaps he 
 would have dwelt on a case so convenient in 
 many ways for his theory as Coleridge but 
 that it would spoil the connection between 
 degeneration and " railway spine." If a 
 man's senses are acute, he is degenerate, 
 hyperesthesia having been observed in asy- 
 lums. If they are dull, he is degenerate, 
 anaesthesia being the stigma of the craziness 
 which made old women confess to witchcraft. 
 If he is particular as to what he wears, he is 
 degenerate: silk dressing-gowns and knee- 
 breeches are grave symptoms, and woollen 
 shirts conclusive. If he is negligent in these 
 matters, clearly he is inattentive, and therefore 
 degenerate. If he drinks, he is neurotic : if 
 he is a vegetarian and teetotaller, let him be 
 locked up at once. If he lives an evil life, 
 that fact condemns him without further 
 words: if on the other hand his conduct is 
 irreproachable, he is a wretched " mattoid," 
 incapable of the will and courage to realize 
 his vicious propensities in action. If he 
 
99 
 
 writes verse, he is afflicted with echolalia; if 
 he writes prose, he is a graphomaniac ; if in 
 his books he is tenacious of his ideas, he is 
 obsessed; if not, he is " amorphous " and " in- 
 attentive." Wagner, as we have seen, con- 
 trived to be both obsessed and inattentive, as 
 might be expected from one who was "himself 
 alone charged with a greater abundance of 
 degeneration than all the other degenerates 
 put together." And so on and so forth. 
 
 There is, however, one sort of mental weak- 
 ness, common among men who take to science, 
 as so many people take to art, without the 
 necessary brain power, which Nordau, with 
 amusing unconsciousness of himself, has 
 omitted. I mean the weakness of the man 
 who, when his theory works out into a fla- 
 grant contradiction of the facts, concludes: 
 "So much the worse for the facts: let them be 
 altered," instead of: " So much the worse for 
 my theory." What in the name of common- 
 sense is the value of a theory which identifies 
 Ibsen, Wagner, Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Victor 
 
100 
 
 Hugo with the refuse of our prisons and luna- 
 tic asylums? What is to be said of the state 
 of mind of an inveterate pamphleteer and 
 journalist who, instead of accepting that iden- 
 tification as a reductio ad absurdum of the 
 theory, desperately sets to work to prove it by 
 pointing out that there are numerous resem- 
 blances; that they all have heads and bodies, 
 appetites, aberrations, whims, weaknesses, 
 asymmetrical features, erotic impulses, fallible 
 judgments, and the like common properties, 
 not merely of all human beings, but all verte- 
 brate organisms. Take Nordau's own list: 
 " vague and incoherent thought, the tyranny 
 of the association of ideas, the presence of 
 obsessions, erotic excitability, religious enthu- 
 siasm, feebleness of perception, will, memory, 
 and judgment, as well as inattention and in- 
 stability." Is there a single man capable of 
 understanding these terms who will not plead 
 guilty to some experience of all of them, espe- 
 cially when he is accused vaguely and unscien- 
 tifically, without any statement of the subject, 
 
101 
 
 or the moment, or the circumstances to which 
 the accusation refers, or any attempt to fix a 
 standard of sanity? I could prove Nordau to 
 be an elephant on more evidence than he has 
 brought to prove that our greatest men are 
 degenerate lunatics. The papers in which 
 Swift, having predicted the death of the sham 
 prophet Bickerstaff on a certain date, did, 
 after that date, immediately prove that he was 
 dead, are much more closely and fairly rea- 
 soned than any of Nordau's chapters. And 
 Swift, though he afterwards died in a mad- 
 house, was too sane to be the dupe of his own 
 logic. At that rate, where will Nordau die? 
 Probably in a highly respectable suburban 
 villa. 
 
 Nordau's most likeable point is the freedom 
 and boldness with which he expresses himself. 
 Speaking of Peladan (of whose works I know 
 nothing), he says, whilst holding him up as a 
 typical degenerate of the mystical variety : 
 " His moral ideal is high and noble. He 
 pursues with ardent hatred all that is base 
 
102 
 
 and vulgar, every form of egoism, falsehood, 
 and thirst for pleasure; and his characters are 
 thoroughly aristocratic souls, whose thoughts 
 are concerned only with the worthiest, if some- 
 what exclusively artistic, interests of society. " 
 On the other hand, Maeterlinck is a " poor 
 devil of an idiot"; Mr. W. D. O'Connor, for 
 describing Whitman as " the good grey poet," 
 is politely introduced as " an American drivel- 
 ler" ; Nietzsche " belongs, body and soul, to 
 the flock of the mangy sheep"; Ibsen is " a 
 malignant, anti-social simpleton"; and so on. 
 Only occasionally is he Pharisaical in his 
 tone, as, for instance, when he becomes vir- 
 tuously indignant over Wagner's dramas, and 
 plays to Mrs. Grundy by exclaiming ironic- 
 ally: "How unperverted must wives and 
 readers be, when they are in a state of mind 
 to witness these pieces without blushing crim- 
 son and sinking into the earth for shame! " 
 This, to do him justice, is only an exceptional 
 lapse: a far more characteristic comment of 
 his on Wagner's love-scenes is "The lovers in 
 
103 
 
 his pieces behave like tom-cats gone mad, roll- 
 ing in contortions and convulsions over a root 
 of valerian." And he is not always on the 
 side of the police, so to speak; for he is as 
 careless of the feelings of the " beer-drinking " 
 German bourgeoisie as of those of the 
 aesthetes. Thus, though on one page he is 
 pointing out that Socialism and all other 
 forms of discontent with the existing social 
 order are " stigmata of degeneration," on the 
 next he is talking pure Karl Marx. For ex- 
 ample, taking the two sides in their order: 
 
 Ibsen's egomania assumes the form of Anarchism. 
 He is in a state of constant revolt against all that ex- 
 ists. . . . The psychological roots of his anti- social 
 impulses are well known. They are the degenerate's 
 incapacity for self-adaptation, and the resultant dis- 
 comfort in the midst of circumstances to which, in 
 consequence of his organic deficiencies, he cannot 
 accommodate himself. " The criminal," says Lom- 
 broso, "through his neurotic and impulsive nature, 
 and his hatred of the institutions which have punished 
 or imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political rebel, 
 who finds in insurrection the means, not only of satis- 
 fying his passions, but of even having them counte- 
 nanced for the first time by a numerous public." 
 
104 
 
 Wagner is a declared Anarchist. ... He betrays 
 that mental condition which the degenerate shares 
 with enlightened reformers, born criminals with the 
 martyrs of human progress : namely, deep, devouring 
 discontent with existing facts. ... He would like to 
 crush "political and criminal civilization,' ' as he calls 
 it. 
 
 Now for Nordau speaking for himself: 
 
 Is it not the duty of intelligent philanthropy and 
 justice, without destroying civilization, to adopt a 
 better system of economy and transform the artisan 
 from a factory convict, condemned to misery and 
 ill-health, into a free producer of wealth, who enjoys, 
 the fruits of his labor himself, and works no more than 
 is compatible with his health and his claims on life ? 
 
 Every gift that a man receives from some other man 
 without work, without reciprocal service, is an alms, 
 and as such is deeply immoral. 
 
 Not in the impossible " return to Nature" lies heal- 
 ing for human misery, but in the reasonable organiza- 
 tion of our struggle with nature — I might say, in uni- 
 versal and obligatory service against it, from which 
 only the crippled should be exempted. 
 
 In England it was Tolstoy's sexual morality that ex- 
 cited the greatest interest ; for in that country 
 economic reasons condemn a formidable number of 
 girls, particularly of the educated classes, to forego 
 marriage ; and, from a theory which honored chastity 
 as the highest dignity and noblest human destiny, and 
 
105 
 
 branded marriage with gloomy wrath as abominable 
 depravity, these poor creatures would naturally derive 
 rich consolation for their lonely, empty lives and their 
 cruel exclusion from the possibility of fulfilling their 
 natural calling. 
 
 So it appears that Nordau, too, shares " the 
 degenerate's incapacity for self-adaptation, 
 and the resultant discomfort in the midst of 
 circumstances to which, in consequence of his 
 organic deficiencies, he cannot accommodate 
 himself." Is he not, indeed, the author of 
 Conventional Lies of Civilization? But he 
 has his usual easy way out of the dilemma. 
 If Ibsen and Wagner are dissatisfied with the 
 world, that is because the world is too good 
 for them; but, if Max Nordau is dissatisfied, 
 it is because Max is too good for the world. 
 His modesty does not permit him to draw the 
 distinction in these exact terms. Here is his 
 statement of it : 
 
 Discontent shows itself otherwise in the degenerate 
 than in reformers. The latter grow angry over real 
 evils only, and make rational proposals for their 
 remedy which are in advance of the time : these reme- 
 
106 
 
 dies may presuppose a better and wiser humanity than 
 actually, exists ; but at least they are capable of being 
 defended on reasonable grounds. The degenerate, on 
 the other hand, selects among the arrangements of 
 civilization such as are either immaterial or distinctly 
 suitable, in order to rebel against them. His fury has 
 either ridiculously insignificant aims, or simply beats 
 the air. He either gives no earnest thought to im- 
 provement, or hatches astoundingly mad projects for 
 making the world happy. His fundamental frame of 
 mind is persistent rage against everything and every- 
 one, which he displays in venomous phrases, savage 
 threats, and the destructive mania of wild beasts. 
 Wagner is a good specimen of this species. 
 
 Wagner was named because the passage 
 
 occurs in the almost incredibly foolish chapter 
 
 which is headed with his name. In another 
 
 chapter it might have been Ibsen, or Tolstoy, 
 
 or Ruskin, or William Morris, or any other 
 
 eminent artist who shares Nordau's objection, 
 
 and yours and mine, to our existing social 
 
 arrangements. In the face of this, it is really 
 
 impossible to deny oneself the fun of asking 
 
 Nordau, with all possible good humor, who he 
 
 is and what he is, that he should rail in this 
 
 fashion at ffreat men. Wagner was discon- 
 
107 
 
 tented with the condition of musical art in 
 Europe. In essay after essay he pointed out 
 with the most laborious exactitude what it was 
 he complained of, and how it might be reme- 
 died. He not only shewed, in the teeth of the 
 most envenomed opposition from all the dun- 
 derheads, pedants, and vested interests in Eu- 
 rope, what the musical drama ought to be as a 
 work of art, but how theatres for its proper 
 performance should be managed — nay, how 
 they should be built, down to the arrangement 
 of the seats and the position of the instruments 
 in the orchestra. And he not only shewed this 
 on paper, but he successfully composed the 
 music dramas, built a model theatre, gave the 
 model performances, did the impossible ; so 
 that there is now nobody left, not even Hans- 
 lick, who cares to stultify himself by repeating 
 the old anti- Wagner cry of craziness and Im- 
 possibilism — nobody, save only Max Nordau, 
 who, like a true journalist, is fact-proof. 
 William Morris objected to the abominable 
 ugliness of early Victorian decoration and 
 
108 
 
 furniture, to the rhymed rhetoric which did 
 duty for poetry from the Renaissance to the 
 nineteenth century, to kamptulicon stained 
 glass, and, later on, to the shiny commercial 
 gentility of typography according to the 
 American ideal, which was being spread 
 through England by Harper's Magazine and 
 The Century, and which had not, like your 
 abolition of " justification " in Liberty, the ad- 
 vantage of saving trouble. Well, did he sit 
 down, as Nordau suggests, to rail helplessly 
 at the men who were at all events getting the 
 work of the world done, however in artisti- 
 cally? Not a bit of it: he designed and man- 
 ufactured the decorations he wanted, and 
 furnished and decorated houses with them; 
 he put into public halls and churches tapes- 
 tries and picture-windows which cultivated 
 people now travel to see as they travel to see 
 first-rate fifteenth-century work in that kind; 
 the books from his Kelmscott Press, printed 
 with type designed by his own hand, are 
 pounced on by collectors like the treasures of 
 
109 
 
 our national museums, all this work, remem- 
 ber, involving the successful conducting of a 
 large business establishment and factory, and 
 being relieved by the incidental production of 
 a series of poems and prose romances which 
 placed their author in the position of the 
 greatest living English poet. Now let me re- 
 peat the terms in which Nordau describes this 
 kind of activity. " Ridiculously insignificant 
 aims — beating the air — no earnest thought to 
 improvement — astoundingly mad projects for 
 making the world happy — persistent rage 
 against everything and everyone, displayed in 
 venomous phrases, savage threats, and de- 
 structive mania of wild beasts." Is there not 
 something deliciously ironical in the ease with 
 which a splenetic pamphleteer, with nothing 
 to shew for himself except a bookful of blun- 
 ders tacked on to a mock scientific theory 
 picked up at second hand from a few lunacy 
 doctors with a literary turn, should be able 
 to create a European scandal by declaring 
 that the greatest creative artists of the cen- 
 
110 
 
 tury are barren and hysterical madmen? I 
 do not know what the American critics have 
 said about Nordau; but here the tone has 
 been that there is much in what he says, and 
 that he is evidently an authority on the sub- 
 jects with which he deals. And yet I assure 
 you, on my credit as a man who lives by art 
 criticism, that from his preliminary descrip- 
 tion of a Morris design as one "on which 
 strange birds flit among crazily ramping 
 branches, and blowzy flowers coquet with 
 vain butterflies " (which is about as sensible 
 as a description of the Norman chapel in the 
 Tower of London as a characteristic specimen 
 of Baroque architecture would be) to his 
 coupling of Cimabue and Fra Angelico as 
 primitive Florentine masters; from his un- 
 ashamed bounce about " the conscientious ob- 
 servance of the laws of counterpoint " by 
 Beethoven and other masters celebrated for 
 breaking them, to his unlucky shot about " a 
 pedal bass with correct harmonization " (a 
 pedal bass happening to be the particular in- 
 
Ill 
 
 stance in which even the professor-made rules 
 of " correct harmonization '' are suspended), 
 Nordau exposes his sciolism time after time as 
 an authority upon the fine arts. But his 
 critics, being for the most part ignorant lit- 
 erary men like himself, with sharpened wits 
 and neglected eyes and ears, have swallowed 
 Cimabue and Ghirlandajo and the pedal bass 
 like so many gulls. Here an Ibsen admirer 
 may maintain that Ibsen is an exception to 
 the degenerate theory and should be classed 
 with Goethe; there a Wagnerite may plead 
 that Wagner is entitled to the honors of Beet- 
 hoven; elsewhere one may find a champion of 
 Rossetti venturing cautiously to suggest a sus- 
 picion of the glaringly obvious fact that Nor- 
 dau has read only the two or three popular 
 ballads like The Blessed Damozel, Eden 
 Bower, Sister Helen, and so on, which every 
 smatterer reads, and that his knowledge of 
 the mass of pictorial, dramatic, and decorative 
 work turned out by Rossetti, Burne-Jones, 
 Ford Madox Brown, William Morris, and 
 
112 
 
 Holman Hunt, without a large knowledge and 
 careful study of which no man can possibly 
 speak with any critical authority of the pre- 
 Raphaelite movement, is apparently limited to 
 a glance at Holman Hunt's Shadow of the 
 Cross, or possibly an engraving thereof. But 
 in the main he is received as a serious author- 
 ity on his subjects; and that is why we too, 
 without malice and solely as a matter of 
 public duty, are compelled to take all this 
 trouble to destroy him. 
 
 And now, my dear Tucker, I have told you 
 as much about Nordau's book as it is worth. 
 In a country where art was really known to 
 the people, instead of being merely read 
 about, it would not be necessary to spend 
 three lines on such a work. But in England, 
 where nothing but superstitious awe and self- 
 mistrust prevents most men from thinking 
 about art as Nordau boldly speaks about it; 
 where to have a sense of art is to be one in a 
 thousand, the other nine hundred and ninety- 
 nine being either Philistine voluptuaries or 
 
113 
 
 Calvinistic anti-voluptuaries, it is useless to 
 pretend that Nordau's errors will be self-evi- 
 dent. Already we have native writers, with- 
 out half his cleverness or energy of expression, 
 clnmsily imitating his sham scientific vivisec- 
 tion in their attacks on artists whose work 
 they happen to dislike. Therefore, in rivet- 
 ing his book to the counter, I have used a 
 nail long enough to go through a few pages 
 by other people as well; and that must be my 
 excuse for my disregard of the familiar edi- 
 torial stigma of degeneracy which Nordau 
 calls Agoraphobia, or Fear of Space. 
 
innnX 0F C0 NGRESS 
 
 022 211 871" 2