DEGENERATION
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 Uniform with this Volume. 
 
 CONVENTIONAL LIES OF 
 OUR CIVILIZATION. 
 
 PARADOXES. 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN.
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 BY 
 
 MAX NORDAU 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 CONVENTIONAL LIES OF OUR CIVILIZATION,' ' PARADOXES,' ETC. 
 
 Translated from the Second Edition 
 of the German Work 
 
 (Edition 
 
 LON DON 
 WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 
 \_All rights reftrved}
 
 First Edition February, 1895. 
 
 New Impressions, March 4, 1895 ; 
 
 March 23, 1895 ; April, 1895 ; May, 
 
 '895; 7**e, 1895; August, 1895; 
 
 November, 1895 ; (Popular Edition), 
 
 September, 1858.
 
 btaCK 
 
 Annex 
 
 geiiicaiei) 
 TO 
 
 CAESAR LOMBROSO. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AND FORENSIC MEDICINE AT 
 THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY OF TURIN, 
 
 BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR.
 
 TO 
 
 PROFESSOR C^SAR LOMBROSO, 
 
 TURIN. 
 
 DEAR AND HONOURED MASTER, 
 
 I dedicate this book to you, in open and joyful recognition 
 of the fact that without your labours it could never have been 
 written. 
 
 The notion of degeneracy, first introduced into science by Morel, 
 and developed with so much genius by yourself, has in your hands 
 already shown itself extremely fertile in the most diverse direc- 
 tions. On numerous obscure points of psychiatry, criminal law, 
 politics, and sociology, you have poured a veritable flood of light, 
 which those alone have not perceived who obdurately close their eyes, 
 or who are too short-sighted to derive benefit from any enlighten^ 
 ment whatsoever. 
 
 But there is a vast and important domain into which neither you 
 nor your disciples have hitherto borne the torch of your method the 
 domain of art and literature. 
 
 Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and 
 pronounced lunatics ; they are often authors and artists. These, 
 however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most 
 part the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned 
 anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with 
 the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of 
 with pen and pencil. 
 
 Some among these degenerates in literature, music, and painting 
 have in recent years come into extraordinary prominence, and are
 
 viii DEDICATION 
 
 revered by numerous admirers as creators of a new art, and heralds 
 of the coming centimes. 
 
 This phenomenon is not to be disregarded. Books and works of 
 art exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses. It is from these 
 productions that an age derives its ideals of morality and beauty. 
 If they are absurd and anti-social, they exert a disturbing and 
 corrupting influence on the views of a whole generation. Hence the 
 latter, especially the impressionable youth, easily excited to enthusiasm 
 for all that is strange and seemingly new, must be warned and en- 
 lightened as to the real nature of the creations so blindly admired. 
 This warning the ordinary critic does not give. Exclusively literary 
 and ccsthetic culture is, moreover, the worst preparation conceivable 
 for a true knowledge of the pathological character of the works of 
 degenerates. The verbose rhetorician exposes with more or less 
 grace, or cleverness, the subjective impressions received from the 
 works he criticises, but is incapable of judging if these works are the 
 productions of a shattered brain, and also the nature of the mental 
 disturbance expressing itself by them. 
 
 Now I have undertaken the ftork of investigating (as much as 
 possible after your method), the tendencies of the fashions in art 
 and literature; of proving that they have their source in the de- 
 generacy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers 
 is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, 
 imbecility, and dementia. 
 
 Thus, this book is an attempt at a really scientific criticism, which 
 does not base its judgment of a book upon the purely accidental, 
 capricious and variable emotions it awakens emotions depending on 
 the temperament and mood of the individual reader but upon the 
 psycho-physiological elements from which it sprang. A t the same 
 time it ventures to fill a void still existing in your powerful 
 system. 
 
 I have no doubt as to the consequences to myself of my initiative. 
 There is at the present day no danger in attacking the Church, for 
 it no longer has the stake at its disposal. To write against rulers 
 and governments is likewise nothing venturesome, for at the worst 
 nothing more than imprisonment could follow, with compensating 
 glory of martyrdom. But grievous is the fate of him who has the 
 audacity to characterize cesthetic fashions as forms of mental decay. 
 The autJwr or artist attacked never pardons a man for recognising
 
 DEDICATION ix 
 
 in him a lunatic or a charlatan ; the subjectively garrulous critics 
 arc furious when it is pointed out how shallow and incompetent they 
 are, or how cowardly in swimming with the stream ; and even the 
 public is angered when forced to see that it has been running after 
 fools, quack dentists, and mountebanks, as so many prophets. Now, 
 the graphomaniacs and their critical body-guard dominate nearly the 
 entire press, and in the latter possess an instrument of torture by 
 which, in Indian fashion, they can rack the troublesome spoiler of 
 sport, to his life's end. 
 
 The danger, however, to which he exposes himself cannot deter a 
 man from doing that which he regards as his duty. When a scientific 
 truth has been discovered, he owes it to humanity, and has no right 
 to withhold it. Moreover, it is as little possible to do this as for a 
 woman voluntarily to prevent the birth of the mature fruit of her 
 womb. 
 
 Without aspiring to the most distant comparison of myself with 
 you, one of the loftiest mental phenomena of the century, I may yet 
 take for my example the smiling serenity with which you pursue 
 your own way, indifferent to ingratitude, insult, and misunder- 
 standing. 
 
 Pray remain, dear and honoured master, ever favourably disposed 
 towards your gratefully devoted 
 
 MAX NORDAU.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 THE DUSK OF THE NATIONS j 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE SYMPTOMS - ... 
 
 1 CHAPTER III. 
 
 DIAGNOSIS . -15 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 i 
 
 ETIOLOGY - ' 34 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 MYSTICISM. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM - . . -AS 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES - ... fi _
 
 xii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 SYMBOLISM 
 
 rAf.E 
 
 1OO 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 TOI5TOISM -144 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE RICHARD WAGNER CULT ' I 7 l 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PARODIES OF MYSTICISM 2I 4 
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 EGO-MANIA. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EGO-MANIA - - 24! 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 PARNASSIANS AND DIABOLISTS 266 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 DECADENTS AND /ESTHETES - - 296 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 1BSENISM - 338 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE - ' 4 1 5
 
 CONTENTS xiii 
 
 BOOK IV. 
 
 REALISM. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAOE 
 
 ZOLA AND HIS SCHOOL - '473 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE ' YOUNG GERMAN ' PLAGIARISTS - 506 
 
 BOOK V. 
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PROGNOSIS - - 536 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THERAPEUTICS - 55
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 BOOK I. 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE DUSK OF THE NATIONS. 
 
 FiN-DE-sifecLE is a name covering both what is character- 
 istic of many modern phenomena, and also the underlying 
 mood which in them finds expression. Experience has long 
 shown that an idea usually derives its designation from the 
 language of the nation which first formed it. This, indeed, is a 
 law of constant application when historians of manners and 
 customs inquire into language, for the purpose of obtaining 
 some notion, through the origins of some verbal root, respect- 
 ing the home of the earliest inventions and the line of evolution 
 in different human races. Fin-de-siecle is French, for it was 
 in France that the mental state so entitled was first consciously 
 realized. The word has flown from one hemisphere to the 
 other, and found its way into all civilized languages. A proof 
 this that the need of it existed. The fin-de-siecle state of 
 mind is to-day everywhere to be met with ; nevertheless, it is 
 in many cases a mere imitation of a foreign fashion gaining 
 vogue, and not an organic evolution. It is in the land of its 
 birth that it appears in its most genuine form, and Paris is the 
 right place in which to observe its manifold expressions. 
 
 No proof is needed of the extreme silliness of the term. 
 Only the brain of a child or of a savage could form the clumsy 
 idea that the century is a kind of living being, born like a beast 
 or a man, passing through all the stages of existence, gradually 
 ageing and declining after blooming childhood, joyous youth, 
 and vigorous maturity, to die with the expiration of the 
 hundredth year, after being afflicted in its last decade with all 
 the infirmities of mournful senility. Such a childish anthropo- 
 morphism or zoomorphism never stops to consider that the 
 
 i
 
 3 DEGENERATION 
 
 arbitrary division of time, rolling ever continuously along, is 
 not identical amongst all civilized beings, and that while this 
 nineteenth century of Christendom is held to be a creature 
 reeling to its death presumptively in dire exhaustion, the four- 
 teenth century of the Mahommedan world is tripping along in 
 the baby-shoes of its first decade, and the fifteenth century of 
 the Jews strides gallantly by in the full maturity of its fifty- 
 second year. Every day on our globe 130,000 human beings 
 are born, for whom the world begins with this same day, and 
 the young citizen of the world is neither feebler nor fresher for 
 leaping into life in the midst of the death-throes of 1900, nor 
 on the birthday of the twentieth century. But it is a habit of 
 the human mind to project externally its own subjective states. 
 And it is in accordance with this naively egoistic tendency 
 that the French ascribe their own senility to the century, and 
 speak of fin-de-siecle when they ought correctly to say fin-dc- 
 race.* 
 
 But however silly a term fin-de-siecle may be, the mental 
 constitution which it indicates is actually present in influential 
 circles. The disposition of the times is curiously confused, a 
 compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement, 
 of fearful presage and hang-dog renunciation. The prevalent 
 feeling is that of imminent perdition and extinction. Fin-de- 
 siecle is at once a confession and a complaint. The old 
 Northern faith contained the fearsome doctrine of the Dusk of 
 -the Gods. In our days there have arisen in more highly- 
 developed minds vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations, in 
 \vhich all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind 
 with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst 
 of a dying world. 
 
 It is not for the first time in the course of history that the 
 horror of world-annihilation has laid hold of men's minds. A 
 similar sentiment took possession of the Christian peoples at 
 the approach of the year 1000. But there is an essential 
 difference between chiliastic panic and fin-de-siecle excitement. 
 The despair at the turn of the first millennium of Christian 
 chronology proceeded from a feeling of fulness of life and joy of 
 life. Men were aware of throbbing pulses, they were conscious 
 of unweakened capacity for enjoyment, and found it un- 
 anitigatedly appalling to perish together with the world, when 
 
 * This passage has been misunderstood. It has been taken to mean that 
 all the French nation had degenerated, and their race was approaching its end. 
 However, from the concluding paragraph of this chapter, it may be clearly seen 
 chat 1 had in my eye only the upper ten thousand. The peasant population, 
 and a part of the working classes and the bourgeoisie, are sound. I assert 
 only the decay of the rich inhabitants of great cities and the leading classes. 
 It is they who have discovered fin-de-sihle, and it is to them also that 
 /in-de-ract applies.
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 3 
 
 there were yet so many flagons to drain and so many lips to 
 kiss, and when they could yet rejoice so vigorously in both love 
 and wine. Of all this in the fin-de-siecle feeling there is nothing. 
 Neither has it anything in common with the impressive twilight- 
 melancholy of an aged Faust, surveying the work of a lifetime, 
 and who, proud of what has been achieved, and contemplating 
 what is begun but not completed, is seized with vehement 
 desire to finish his work, and, awakened from sleep by haunting 
 unrest, leaps up with the cry : ' Was ich gedacht, ich eu" es zu 
 vollbringen.'* 
 
 Quite otherwise is the fin-de-siecle mood. It is the impotent 
 despair of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in the 
 midst of an eternally living nature blooming insolently for ever. 
 It is the envy of a rich, hoary voluptuary, who sees a pair of young 
 lovers making for a sequestered forest nook ; it is the mortifica- 
 tion of the exhausted and impotent refugee from a Florentine 
 plague, seeking in an enchanted garden the experiences of a 
 Decamerone, but striving in vain to snatch one more pleasure 
 of sense from the uncertain hour. The reader of Turgenieff's 
 A Nest of Nobles will remember the end of that beautiful 
 work. The hero, Lavretzky, comes as a man advanced in 
 years to visit at the house where, in his young days, he had 
 lived his romance of love. All is unchanged. The garden is 
 fragrant with flowers. In the great trees the happy birds are 
 chirping ; on the fresh turf the children romp and shout. 
 Lavretzky alone has grown old, and contemplates, in mournful 
 exclusion, a scene where nature holds on its joyous way, caring 
 nought that Lisa the beloved is vanished, and Lavretzky, a 
 broken-down man, weary of life. Lavretzky's admission that, 
 amidst all this ever-young, ever-blooming nature, for him alone 
 there comes no morrow ; Alving's dying cry for ' The sun 
 the sun !' in Ibsen's Ghosts these express rightly the fin-de- 
 siecle attitude of to-day. 
 
 This fashionable term has the necessary vagueness which 
 fits it to convey all the half-conscious and indistinct drift of 
 current ideas. Just as the words * freedom,' ' ideal,' ' progress ' 
 seem to express notions, but actually are only sounds, so in 
 itself fin-de-siccle means nothing, and receives a varying signifi- 
 cation according to the diverse mental horizons of those who 
 use it. 
 
 The surest way of knowing what fin-de-siecle implies, is to 
 consider a series of particular instances where the word has 
 been applied. Those which I shall adduce are drawn from 
 French books and periodicals of the last two years. t 
 
 * ' My thought I hasten to fulfil.' 
 
 t A four-act comedy, by H. Micard and F. de Jouvenot, named Fin-de- 
 Xiccle, which was played in Paris in 1890,- hardly avails to determine the
 
 4 DEGENERATION 
 
 A king abdicates, leaves his country, and takes op his 
 residence in Paris, having reserved certain political rights. 
 One day he loses much money at play, and is in a dilemma. 
 He therefore makes an agreement with the Government of his 
 country, by which, on receipt of a million francs, he renounces 
 for ever every title, official position and privilege remaining to 
 him. Fin-de-siccle king. 
 
 A bishop is prosecuted for insulting the minister of public 
 worship. The proceedings terminated, his attendant canons 
 distribute amongst the reporters in court a defence, copies of 
 which he has prepared beforehand. When condemned to pay 
 a fine, he gets up a public collection, which brings in tenfold the 
 amount of the penalty. He publishes a justificatory volume 
 containing all the expressions of support which have reached 
 him. He makes a tour through the country, exhibits himself 
 in every cathedral to the mob curious to see the celebrity of 
 the hour, and takes the opportunity of sending round the plate. 
 Fin-de-siecle bishop. 
 
 The corpse of the murderer Pranzini after execution under- 
 went autopsy. The head of the secret police cuts off a large 
 piece of skin, has it tanned, and the leather made into cigar- 
 cases and card-cases for himself and some of his friends. Fin- 
 de-siecle official. 
 
 An American weds his bride in a gas-factory, then gets with 
 her into a balloon held in readiness, and enters on a honey- 
 moon in the clouds. Fin-de-siecle wedding. 
 
 An attache" of the Chinese Embassy publishes high-class works 
 in French under his own name. He negotiates with banks 
 respecting a large loan for his Government, and draws large 
 advances for himself on the unfinished contract. Later it 
 comes out that the books were composed by his French 
 secretary, and that he has swindled the banks. Fin-de-siecle 
 diplomatist. 
 
 A public schoolboy walking with a chum passes the gaol 
 where his father, a rich banker, has repeatedly been imprisoned 
 for fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement and similar lucrative 
 misdemeanours. Pointing to the building, he tells his friend 
 with a smile : ' Look, that's the governor's school.' Fin-de- 
 siecle son. 
 
 Two young ladies of good family, and school friends, are 
 chatting together. One heaves a sigh. ' What's the matter ?' 
 asks the other. ' I'm in love with Raoul, and he with me.' 
 ' Oh, that's lovely ! He's handsome, young, elegant ; and yet 
 you're sad ?' ' Yes, but he has nothing, and is nothing, and 
 
 sense of the word as the French use it The authors were concerned, not 
 to depict a phase of the age or a psychological ' state, but only to give an 
 attractive title to their piece.
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE c 
 
 my parents want me to marry the baron, who is fat, bald, and 
 ugly, but has a huge lot of money.' ' Well, marry the baron 
 without any fuss, and make Raoul acquainted with him, you 
 goose.' Fin-de-siecle girls. 
 
 Such test-cases show how the word is understood in the 
 land of its birth. Germans who ape Paris fashions, and apply 
 fin-de-siecle almost exclusively to mean what is indecent and 
 improper, misuse the word in their coarse ignorance as much 
 as, in a previous generation, they vulgarized the expression 
 demi-monde, misunderstanding its proper meaning, and giving 
 it the sense of fille de joie, whereas its creator Dumas intended 
 it to denote persons whose lives contained some dark period, 
 for which they were excluded from the circle to which they 
 belong by birth, education, or profession, but who do not by 
 their manner betray, at least to the inexperienced, that they 
 are no longer acknowledged as members of their own caste. 
 
 Prima facie, a king who sells his sovereign rights for a big 
 cheque seems to have little in common with a newly-wedded 
 pair who make their wedding-trip in a balloon, nor is the 
 connection at once obvious between an episcopal Barnum and 
 a well-brought-up young lad}' who advises her friend to a 
 wealthy marriage mitigated by a cicisbeo. All these fin-de-siecle 
 cases have, nevertheless, a common feature, to wit, a contempt 
 for traditional views of custom and morality. 
 
 Such is the notion underlying the word fin-de-siecle. It 
 means a practical emancipation from traditional discipline, 
 which theoretically is still in force. To the voluptuary this 
 means unbridled lewdness, the unchaining of the beast in man ; 
 to the withered heart of the egoist, disdain of all consideration 
 for his fellow-men, the trampling under foot of all barriers 
 which enclose brutal greed of lucre and lust of pleasure ; to the 
 contemner of the world it means the shameless ascendency 
 of base impulses and motives, which were, if not virtuously 
 suppressed, at least hypocritically hidden ; to the believer it 
 means the repudiation of dogma, the negation of a super- 
 sensuous world, the descent into flat phenomenalism ; to the 
 sensitive nature yearning for aesthetic thrills, it means the 
 vanishing of ideals in art, and no more power in its accepted 
 forms to arouse emotion. And to all, it means the end of an 
 established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied 
 logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something 
 of beauty. 
 
 One epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and 
 another is announcing its approach. There is a sound of 
 rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow 
 would not link itself with to-day. Things as they are totter 
 and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man
 
 6 DEGENERATION 
 
 is weary, and there is no faith that it > v ",'orth an effort to up- 
 hold them. Views that have hitherto governed minds are dead 
 or driven hence like disenthroned kings, and for their inheritance 
 they that hold the titles and they that would usurp are locked 
 in struggle. Meanwhile interregnum in all its terrors prevails ; 
 there is confusion among the powers that be ; the million, 
 robbed of its leaders, knows not where to turn ; the strong 
 work their will ; false prophets arise, and dominion is divided 
 amongst those whose rod is the heavier because their time is 
 short. Men look with longing for whatever new things are at 
 hand, without presage whence they will come or what they 
 will be. They have hope that in the chaos of thought, art 
 may yield revelations of the order that is to follow on this 
 tangled web. The poet, the musician, is to announce, or 
 divine, or at least suggest in what forms civilization will further 
 be evolved. What shall be considered good to-morrow what 
 shall be beautiful? What shall we know to-morrow what 
 believe in ? What shall inspire us ? How shall we enjoy ? So 
 rings the question from the thousand voices of the people, and 
 where a market-vendor sets up his booth and claims to give an 
 answer, where a fool or a knave suddenly begins to prophesy 
 in verse or prose, in sound or colour, or professes to practise 
 his art otherwise than his predecessors and competitors, there 
 gathers a great concourse, crowding around him to seek in 
 what he has wrought, as in oracles of the Pythia, some meaning 
 to be divined and interpreted. And the more vague and 
 insignificant they are, the more they seem to convey of the 
 future to the poor gaping souls gasping for revelations, and 
 the more greedily and passionately are they expounded. 
 
 Such is the spectacle presented by the doings of men in 
 the reddened light of the Dusk of the Nations. Massed in 
 the sky the clouds are aflame in, the weirdly beautiful glow 
 which was observed for the space of years after the eruption 
 of Krakatoa. Over the earth the shadows creep with deepen- 
 ing gloom, wrapping all objects in a mysterious dimness, in 
 which all certainty is destroyed and any guess seems plausible. 
 Forms lose their outlines, and are dissolved in floating mist. 
 The day is over, the night draws on. The old anxiously watch 
 its approach, fearing they will not live to see the end. A few 
 amongst the young and strong are conscious of the vigour of 
 life in all their veins and nerves, and rejoice in the coming sun- 
 rise. Dreams, which fill up the hours of darkness till the 
 breaking of the new day, bring to the former comfortless 
 memories, to the latter high-souled hopes. And in the artistic 
 products of the age we see the form in which these dreams 
 become sensible. 
 
 Here is the place t'* forestall a possible misunderstanding.
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 7 
 
 The great majority of the middle and lower classes is naturally 
 not fin-de-siecle. It is true that the spirit of the times is stirring 
 the nations down to their lowest depths, and awaking even in 
 the most inchoate and rudimentary human being a wondrous 
 feeling of stir and upheaval. But this more or less slight touch 
 of moral sea-sickness does not excite in him the cravings of 
 travailing women, nor express itself in new aesthetic needs. 
 The Philistine or the Proletarian still finds undiluted satisfac- 
 tion in the old and oldest forms of art and poetry, if he knows 
 himself unwatched by the scornful eye of the votary of fashion, 
 and is free to yield to his own inclinations. He prefers Ohnet's 
 novels to all the symbolists, and Mascagni's Cavalleria 
 Rusticana to all Wagnerians and to Wagner himself; he 
 enjoys himself royally over slap-dash farces and music-hall 
 melodies, and yawns or is angered at Ibsen ; he contemplates 
 gladly chromos of paintings depicting Munich beer-houses and 
 rustic taverns, and passes the open-air painters without a 
 glance. It is only a very small minority who honestly find 
 pleasure in the new tendencies, and announce them with 
 genuine conviction as that which alone is sound, a sure guide 
 for the future, a pledge of pleasure and of moral benefit. But 
 this minority has the gift of covering the whole visible surface 
 of society, as a little oil extends over a large area of the surface 
 of the sea. It consists chiefly of rich educated people, or of 
 fanatics. The former give the ton to all the snobs, the fools, 
 and the blockheads ; the latter make an impression upon the 
 weak and dependent, and intimidate the nervous. All snobs 
 affect to have the same taste as the select and exclusive 
 minority, who pass by everything that once was considered 
 beautiful with an air of the greatest contempt. And thus it 
 appears as if the whole of civilized humanity were converted to 
 the aesthetics of the Dusk of the Nations. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE SYMPTOMS. 
 
 LET us follow in the train frequenting the palaces of European 
 capitals, the highways of fashionable watering-places, the re- 
 ceptions of the rich, and observe the figures of which it is 
 composed. 
 
 Amongst the women, one wears her hair combed smoothly 
 back and down like Rafael's Maddalena Doni in the Pitti at 
 Florence; another wears it drawn up high over the temples like 
 Julia, daughter of Titus, or Plotina, wife of Trajan, in the busts
 
 8 DEGENERATION 
 
 in the Louvre ; a third has hers cut short in front on the brow 
 and long in the nape, waved and lightly puffed, after the fashion 
 of the fifteenth century, as may be seen in the pages and young 
 knights of Gentile Bellini, Botticelli and Mantegna. Many 
 have their hair dyed, and in such a fashion as to be startling in 
 its revolt against the law of organic harmony, and the effect of 
 a studied discord, only to be resolved into the higher poly- 
 phony of the toilet taken as a whole. This swarthy, dark-eyed 
 woman snaps her fingers at nature by framing the brown tones 
 of her face in copper-red or golden-yellow ; yonder blue-eyed 
 fair, with a complexion of milk and roses, intensifies the bright- 
 ness of her cheeks by a setting of artificially blue-black tresses. 
 Here is one who covers her head with a huge heavy felt hat, 
 an obvious imitation, in its brim turned up at the back, and its 
 trimming of large plush balls, of the sombrero of the Spanish 
 bull-fighters, who were displaying their skill in Paris at the 
 exhibition of 1889, and giving all kinds of motifs to modistes. 
 There is another who has stuck on her hair the emerald-green 
 or ruby-red biretta of the mediaeval travelling student. The 
 costume is in keeping with the bizarre coiffure. Here is a 
 mantle reaching to the waist, slit up on one side, draping the 
 breast like a portiere, and trimmed round the hem with little 
 silken bells, by the incessant clicking of which a sensitive 
 spectator would in a very short time either be hypnotized or 
 driven to take frantic fright. There is a Greek peplos, of which 
 the tailors speak as glibly as any venerable philologist. Next 
 to the stiff monumental trim of Catharine de Medicis, and the 
 high ruff of Mary, Queen of Scots, goes the flowing white 
 raiment of the angel of the Annunciation in Memling's pictures, 
 and, by way of antithesis, that caricature of masculine array, 
 the fitting cloth coat, with widely opened lapels, waistcoat, 
 stiffened shirt-front, small stand-up collar, and necktie. The 
 majority, anxious to be inconspicuous in unimaginative medi- 
 ocrity, seems to have for its leading style a laboured rococo, 
 with bewildering oblique lines, incomprehensible swellings, 
 puffings, expansions and contractions, folds with irrational 
 beginning and aimless ending, in which all the outlines of the 
 human figure are lost, and which cause women's bodies to 
 resemble now a beast of the Apocalypse, now an armchair, now 
 a triptych, or some other ornament. 
 
 The children, strolling beside their mothers thus bedecked, 
 are embodiments of one of the most afflicting aberrations into 
 which the imagination of a spinster ever lapsed. They are 
 living copies of the pictures of Kate Greenavray, whose love of 
 children, diverted from its natural outlet, has sought gratifica- 
 tion in the most affected style of drawing, \\herein the sacred- 
 ness of childhood is profaned under absurd disguises. Here is
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 9 
 
 an imp dressed from head to foot in the blood-red costume of 
 a mediaeval executioner ; there a four-year-old girl wears a 
 cabriolet bonnet of her great-grandmother's days and sweeps 
 after her a court mantle of loud-hued velvet. Another wee dot, 
 just able to keep on her tottering legs, has been arrayed in the 
 long dress of a lady of the First Empire, with puffed sleeves 
 and short waist. 
 
 The men complete the picture. They are preserved from 
 excessive oddity through fear of the Philistine's laugh, or 
 through some remains of sanity in taste, and, with the excep- 
 tion of the red dress- coat with metal buttons, and knee-breeches 
 with silk stockings, with which some idiots in eye-glass and 
 gardenia try to rival burlesque actors, present little deviation 
 from the ruling canon of the masculine attire of the day. But 
 fancy plays the more freely among their hair. One displays 
 the short curls and the wavy double-pointed beard of Lucius 
 Verus, another looks like the whiskered cat in a Japanese 
 kakemono. His neighbour has the barbiche of Henri IV., 
 another the fierce moustache of a lansquenet by F. Brun, or 
 the chin-tuft of the city-watch in Rembrandt's ' Ronde de 
 Nuit.' 
 
 The common feature in all these male specimens is that they 
 do not express their real idiosyncrasies, but try to present 
 something that they are not. They are not content to show 
 their natural figure, nor even to supplement it by legitimate 
 accessories, in harmony with the type to which they approxi- 
 mate, but they seek to model themselves after some artistic 
 pattern which has no affinity with their own nature, or is even 
 antithetical to it. Nor do they for the most part limit them- 
 selves to one pattern, but copy several at once, which jar one 
 with another. Thus we get heads set on shoulders not 
 belonging to them, costumes the elements of which are as 
 disconnected as though they belonged to a dream, colours that 
 seem to have been matched in the dark. The impression is 
 that of a masked festival, where all are in disguises, and with 
 heads too in character. There are several occasions, such as 
 the varnishing day at the Paris Champs de Mars salon, or the 
 opening of the Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London, 
 where this impression is so weirdly intensified, that one seems 
 to be moving amongst dummies patched together at haphazard, 
 in a mythical mortuary, from fragments of bodies, heads, 
 trunks, limbs, just as they came to hand, and which the 
 designer, in heedless pell-mell, clothed at random in the 
 garments of all epochs and countries. Every single figure 
 strives visibly by some singularity in outline, set, cut, or colour, 
 to startle attention violently, and imperiously to detain it. 
 Each one wishes to create a strong nervous excitement, no
 
 lo DEGENERATION 
 
 matter whether agreeably or disagreeably. The fixed idea if 
 to produce an effect at any price. 
 
 Let us follow these folk in masquerade and with heads in char- 
 acter to their dwellings. Here are at once stage properties and 
 lumber-rooms, rag-shops and museums. The study of the 
 master of the house is a Gothic hall of chivalry, with cuirasses, 
 shields and crusading banners on the walls ; or the shop of an 
 Oriental bazaar with Kurd carpets, Bedouin chests, Circassian 
 narghilehs and Indian lacquered caskets. By the mirror on 
 the mantelpiece are fierce or funny Japanese masks. Between 
 the windows are staring trophies of swords, daggers, clubs and 
 old wheel-trigger pistols. Daylight filters in through painted 
 glass, where lean saints kneel in rapture. In the drawing-room 
 the walls are either hung with worm-eaten Gobelin tapestry, 
 discoloured by the sun of two centuries (or it may be by a 
 deftly mixed chemical bath), or covered with Morris draperies, 
 on which strange birds flit amongst crazily ramping branches, 
 and blowzy flowers coquet with vain butterflies. Amongst 
 armchairs and padded seats, such as the cockered bodies of 
 our contemporaries know and expect, there are Renaissance 
 stools, the heart or shell-shaped bottoms of whicn would attract 
 none but the toughened hide of a rough hero of the jousting 
 lists. Startling is the effect of a gilt-painted couch between 
 buhl-work cabinets and a puckered Chinese table, next an 
 inlaid writing-table of graceful rococo. On all the tables and 
 in all the cabinets is a display of antiquities or articles ofvertu, 
 big or small, and for the most part warranted not genuine ; a 
 figure of Tanagra near a broken jade snuff-box, a Limoges 
 plate beside a long-necked Persian waterpot of brass, a bon- 
 bonniere between a breviary bound in carved ivory, and snuffers 
 of chiselled copper. Pictures stand on easels draped with 
 velvet, the frames made conspicuous by some oddity, such as a 
 spider in her web, a metal bunch of thistle-heads, and the like. 
 In a corner a sort of temple is erected to a squatting or a stand- 
 ing Buddha. The boudoir of the mistress of the house partakes 
 of the nature of a chapel and of a harem. The toilet-table is 
 designed and decorated like an altar, a prie-Dieu is a pledge for 
 the piety of the inmate, and a broad divan, with an orgiastic 
 abandon about the cushions, gives reassurance that things are 
 not so bad. In the dining-room the walls are hung with the 
 whole stock-in-trade of a porcelain shop, costly silver is dis- 
 played in an old farmhouse dresser, and on the table bloom 
 aristocratic orchids, and proud silver vessels shine between 
 rustic stone-ware plates and ewers. In the evening, lamps of 
 the stature of a man illumine these rooms with light both 
 subdued and tinted by sprawling shades, red, yellow or green 
 of hue, and even covered by black lace. Hence the inmates
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 11 
 
 appear, now bathed in variegated diaphanous mist, now suffused 
 with coloured radiance, while the corners and backgrounds are 
 shrouded in depths of artfully-effected clair-obscur, and the 
 furniture and bric-a-brac are dyed in unreal chords of colour. 
 Unreal, too, are the studied postures, by assuming which the 
 inmates are enabled to reproduce on their faces the light effects 
 of Rembrandt or Schalcken. Everything in these houses aims al ' 
 exciting the nerves and dazzling the senses. The disconnected 
 and antithetical effects in all arrangements, the constant con-i 
 tradiction between form and purpose, the outlandishness of most 
 objects, is intended to be ^bewiTaering. There must be no sen- 
 timent of repose, such as is felt at any composition, the plan o1 
 which is easily taken in, nor of the comfort attending a prompt 
 comprehension of all the details of one's environment. He 
 who enters here must not doze, but be thrilled. If the master 
 of the house roams about these rooms clothed after the example 
 of Balzac in a white monk's cowl, or. after the model of Richepin 
 in the red cloak of the robber-chieftain of an operetta, he only 
 gives expression to the admission that in such a comedy theatre 
 a clown is in place. All is discrepant, indiscriminate jumble. 
 The unity of abiding by one definite historic style counts as 
 old-fashioned, provincial, Philistine, and the time has not yet 
 produced a style of its own. An approach is, perhaps, made to 
 one in the furniture of Carabin, exhibited in the salon of the 
 Champs de Mars. But these balusters, down which naked 
 furies and possessed creatures are rolling in mad riot, these 
 bookcases, where* base and pilaster consist of a pile of guillo- 
 tined heads, and even this table, representing a gigantic open 
 .book borne by gnomes, make up a style that is feverish and 
 infernal. If the director-general of Dante's ' Inferno ' had an 
 audience-chamber, it might well be furnished with such as 
 these. Carabin's creations may be intended to equip a house, 
 but they are a nightmare. 
 
 We hayejseen how society dresses and where it dwells. We 
 shall how observe how it enjoys itself, and where it seeks 
 stimulation and distraction. In the art exhibition it crowds, 
 with proper little cries of admiration, round Besnard's women, 
 with their grass-green hair, faces of sulphur-yellow or fiery-red, 
 and arms spotted in violet and pink, dressed in a shining blue 
 cloud resembling faintly a sort of nightdress ; that is to say, it 
 has a fondness for bold, revolutionary debauch of colour. But 
 not exclusively so. Next to Besnard it worships with equal or 
 greater rapture the works of Puvis de Chavannes, wan, and as 
 though blotted out with a half-transparent wash of lime ; or 
 those of Carriere, suffused in a problematical vapour, reeking 
 as if with a cloud of incense ; or those of Roll, shimmering in 
 a soft and silvery sheen. The purple of the Manet school,
 
 12 DEGENERATION 
 
 steeping the whole visible creation in bluish glamour, the half- 
 tones, or, rather, phantom-colours of the ' Archaists,' that seem 
 to have risen, faded and nebulous, out of some primeval tomb, 
 and all these palettes of ' dead leaves,' ' old ivory,' evaporating 
 yellows, smothered purple, attract on the whole more rapturous 
 glances than the voluptuous ' orchestration ' of the Besnard 
 section. The subject of the picture leaves these select gazers 
 apparently indifferent ; it is only seamstresses and country-folk, 
 the grateful clientele of the chromo, who linger over the ' story.' 
 And yet these as they pass stop by preference before Henry 
 Martin's ' Every Man and his Chimaera,' in which bloated 
 figures, in an atmosphere of yellow broth, are doing incompre- 
 hensible things that need profound explanation ; or before Jean 
 Bdraud's ' Christ and the Adulteress,' where, in a Parisian 
 dining-room, in the midst of a company in dress-coats, and 
 before a woman in ball-dress, a Christ robed in correct 
 Oriental gear, and with an orthodox halo, acts a scene out of 
 the Gospel ; or before Raffaelli's topers and cut-throats of the 
 purlieus of Paris, drawn in high relief, but painted with ditch- 
 water and dissolved clay. Steering in the wake of ' society ' 
 through a picture-gallery, one will be unalterably convinced 
 that they turn up their eyes and fold their hands before pictures 
 at which the commoner sort burst out laughing or pull the 
 grimace of a man who believes he is made a fool of; and that 
 they shrug their shoulders and hasten with scornful exchange 
 of looks past such as the latter pause at in grateful enjoy- 
 ment. 
 
 At opera and concert the rounded forms of ancient melody 
 are coldly listened to. The translucent thematic treatment of 
 classic masters, their conscientious observance of the laws of 
 counterpoint, are reckoned flat and tedious. A coda graceful 
 in cadence, serene in its ' dying fall,' a pedal - base with 
 correct harmonization, provoke yawns. Applause and wreaths 
 are reserved for Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, and especially 
 the mystic Parsifal, for the religious music in Bruneau's 
 Dream, or the symphonies of C6sar Franck. Music in order 
 to please must either counterfeit religious devotion, or agitate 
 the mind by its form. The musical listener is accustomed 
 involuntarily to develop a little in his mind every motive 
 occurring in a piece. The mode in which the composer carries 
 out his motif is bound, accordingly, to differ entirely from this 
 anticipated development. It must not admit of being guessed. 
 A dissonant interval must appear where a consonant interval 
 was expected ; if the hearer is hoping that a phrase in what is 
 an obvious final cadence will be spun out to its natural end, it 
 must be sharply interrupted in the middle of a bar. Keys 
 and pitch must change suddenly. In the orchestra a vigorous
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 13 
 
 polyphony must summon the attention in several directions at 
 once ; particular instruments, or groups of instruments, must 
 address the listener simultaneously without heeding each other, 
 till he gets as nervously excited as the man who vainly en- 
 deavours to understand what is being said in the jangle of a 
 dozen voices. The theme, even if in the first instance it has a 
 distinct outline, must become ever more indefinite, ever more 
 dissolving into a mist, in which the imagination can see any 
 forms it likes, as in driving clouds of night. The tide of sound 
 must flow on without any perceptible limit or goal, surging up 
 and down in endless chromatic passages of triplets. If now 
 and then it delude the listener, borne along by it, and straining 
 his eyes to see land with glimpses of a distant shore, this is 
 soon discovered to be a fleeting mirage. The music must con- 
 tinually promise, but never perform ; must seem about to tell 
 some great secret, and grow dumb or break away ere to 
 throbbing hearts it tells the word they wait for. The audience 
 go to their concert-room in quest of Tantalus moods, and leave 
 it with all the nervous exhaustion of a young pair of lovers, 
 who for hours at the nightly tryst have sought to exchange 
 caresses through a closely-barred window. 
 
 The books in which the public here depicted finds its delight 
 or edification diffuse a curious perfume yielding distinguishable 
 odours of incense, eau de Lubin and refuse, one or the other 
 preponderating alternately. Mere sewage exhalations are played 
 out. The filth of Zola's art and of his disciples in literary 
 canal-dredging has been got over, and nothing remains for it 
 but to turn to submerged peoples and social strata. The van- 
 guard of civilization holds its nose at the pit of undiluted 
 naturalism, and can only be brought to bend over it with 
 sympathy and curiosity when, by cunning engineering, a drain 
 from the boudoir and the sacristy has been turned into it. 
 Mere sensuality passes as commonplace, and only finds ad- 
 mission when disguised as something unnatural and degenerate. 
 Books treating of the relations between the sexes, with no 
 matter how little reserve, seem too dully moral. Elegant 
 titillation only begins where normal sexual relations leave off. 
 Priapus has become a symbol of virtue. Vice looks to Sodom 
 and Lesbos, to Bluebeard's castle and the servants' hall of the] 
 ' divine ' Marquis de Sade's Justine, for its embodiments. 
 
 The book that would be fashionable must, above all, be 
 obscure. The intelligible is cheap goods for the million only. 
 It must further discourse in a certain pulpit tone mildly 
 unctuous, not too insistent ; and it must follow up risky scenes 
 by tearful outpourings of love for the lowly and the suffering, 
 or glowing transports of piety. Ghost-stories are very popular, 
 but they must come on in scientific disguise, as hypnotising
 
 14 DEGENERATION 
 
 telepathy, somnambulism. So are marionette-plays, in which 
 seemingly naive but knowing rogues make used-up old ballad 
 dummies babble like babies or idiots. So are esoteric novels, 
 in which the author hints that he could say a deal about magic, 
 kabbala, fakirism, astrology and other white and black arts 
 if he only chose. Readers intoxicate themselves in the hazy 
 word-sequences of symbolic poetry. Ibsen dethrones Goethe ; 
 Maeterlinck ranks with Shakespeare ; Nietzsche is pronounced 
 by German and even by French critics to be the leading 
 German writer of the day; the Kreutzer Sonata is the 
 Bible of ladies, who are amateurs in love, but bereft of lovers ; 
 dainty gentlemen find the street ballads and gaol-bird songs of 
 Jules Jouy, Bruant, MacNab and Xanroff very distingue on 
 account of ' the warm sympathy pulsing in them/ as the stock 
 phrase runs ; and society persons, whose creed is limited to 
 baccarat and the money market, make pilgrimages to the 
 Oberammergau Passion-play, and wipe away a tear over Paul 
 Verlaine's invocations to the Virgin. 
 
 But art exhibitions, concerts, plays and books, however 
 extraordinary, do not suffice for the aesthetic needs of elegant 
 society. Novel sensations alone can satisfy it. It demands 
 more intense stimulus, and hopes for it in spectacles, where 
 different arts strive in new combinations to affect all the senses 
 at once. Poets and artists strain every nerve incessantly to 
 satisfy this craving. A painter, who for that matter is less 
 occupied with new impressions than with old puffs, paints 
 a picture indifferently well of the dying Mozart working at his 
 Requiem, and exhibits it of an evening in a darkened room, 
 while a dazzling ray of skilfully directed electric light falls on 
 the painting, and an invisible orchestra softly plays the Requiem. 
 A musician goes one step further. Developing to the utmost a 
 Bayreuth usage, he arranges a concert in a totally darkened 
 hall, and thus delights those of the audience who find oppor- 
 tunity, by happily chosen juxtapositions, to augment their 
 musical sensations by hidden enjoyment of another sort. 
 Haraucourt, the poet, has his paraphrase of the Gospel, 
 written in spirited verse, recited on the stage by Sarah 
 Bernhardt, while, as in the old-fashioned melodrama, soft 
 music in unending melody accompanies the actress. Even 
 the nose, hitherto basely ignored by the fine arts, attracts the 
 pioneers, and is by them invited to take part in aesthetic 
 delights. A hose is set up in the theatre, by which the spec- 
 tators are sprayed with perfumes. On the stage a poem in 
 approximately dramatic form is recited. In every division, 
 act, scene, or however the thing is called, a different vowel- 
 sound is made to preponderate ; during each the theatre is 
 illuminated with a differently tinted light, the orchestra dis-
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 15 
 
 courses music in a different key, and the jet gives out a different 
 perfume. This idea of accompanying verses with odours was 
 thrown out years ago, half in jest, by Ernest Eckstein. Paris 
 has carried it out in sacred earnest. The new school fetch the 
 puppet theatre out of the nursery, and enact pieces for adults 
 which, with artificial simplicity, pretend to hide or reveal a 
 profound meaning, and with great talent and ingenuity execute 
 a magic-lantern of prettily drawn and painted figures moving 
 across surprisingly luminous backgrounds ; and these living | 
 pictures make visible the process of thought in the mind of 
 the author who recites his accompanying poem, while a piano 
 endeavours to illustrate the leading emotion. And to enjoy 
 such exhibitions as these society crowds into a suburban 
 circus, the loft of a back tenement, a second-hand costumier's 
 shop, or a fantastic artist's restaurant, where the performances, 
 in some room consecrated to beery potations, bring together 
 the greasy habitue and the dainty aristocratic fledgling. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 DIAGNOSIS 
 
 THE manifestations described in the preceding chapter must 
 be patent enough to everyone, be he never so narrow a 
 Philistine. The Philistine, however, regards them as a passing 
 fashion and nothing more ; for him the current terms, caprice, 
 eccentricity, affectation of novelty, imitation, instinct, afford a 
 sufficient explanation. The purely literary mind, whose merely 
 aesthetic culture does not enable him to understand the con- 
 nections of things, and to seize their real meaning, deceives 
 himself and others as to his ignorance by means of sounding 
 phrases, and loftily talks of a ' restless quest of a new ideal by 
 the modern spirit,' ' the richer vibrations of the refined nervous 
 system of the present day,' 'the unknown sensations of an 
 elect mind.' But the physician, especially if he have devoted 
 himself to the special study of nervous and mental maladies, 
 recognises at a glance, in the fin-de-siecle disposition, in the 
 tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and 
 conduct of the men who write mystic, symbolic and ' de- 
 cadent ' works, and the attitude taken by their admirers in the 
 tastes and aesthetic instincts of fashionable society, the conflu- 
 ence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he is 
 quite familiar, viz. degeneration (degeneracy) and hysteria, of 
 Avhich the minor stages are designated as neurasthenia. These 
 two conditions of the organism differ from each other, yet have 
 many features in common, and frequently occur together ; so
 
 6 DEGENERATION 
 
 that it is easier to observe them in their composite forms, than 
 each in isolation. 
 
 The conception of degeneracy, which, at this time, obtains 
 throughout the science of mental disease, was first clearly 
 grasped and formulated by Morel. In his principal work 
 often quoted, but, unfortunately, not sufficiently read* the 
 following definition of what he wishes to be understood by 
 ' degeneracy ' is given by this distinguished expert in mental 
 pathology, who was, for a short time, famous in Germany, 
 even outside professional circles.t 
 
 ' The clearest notion we can form of degeneracy is to regard 
 it as a morbid deviation from an original type. This deviation, 
 even if, at the outset, it was ever so slight, contained trans- 
 missible elements of such a nature that anyone bearing in him 
 the germs becomes more and more incapable of fulfilling his 
 functions in the world ; and mental progress, already checked 
 . in his own person, finds itself menaced also in his descendants/ 
 When under any kind of noxious influences an organism 
 becomes debilitated, its successors will not resemble the 
 $ j healthy, normal type of the species, with capacities for develop- 
 i ment, but will form a new sub-species, which, like all others, 
 possesses the capacity of transmitting to its offspring, in a 
 I continuously increasing degree, its peculiarities, these being 
 i morbid deviations from the normal form gaps in development, 
 I malformations and infirmities. That which distinguishes 
 degeneracy from the formation of new species (phylogeny) is, 
 that the morbid variation does not continuously subsist and 
 propagate itself, like one that is healthy, but, fortunately, is 
 soon rendered sterile, and after a few generations often dies 
 out before it reaches the lowest grade of organic degrada- 
 
 tion.J 
 
 Degeneracy betrays itself among men in certain physical 
 
 * Tratt^ des De'ge'ne'rescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de FEsptce 
 humaine et des Causes qui produisent ces Varie'te's maladives. Par le Dr. 
 B. A. Morel. Paris, 1857, p. 5. 
 
 f At the instigation of his mistress Ebergenyi, Count Chorinsky had 
 poisoned his wife, previously an actress. The murderer was an epileptic, 
 and a 'degenerate,' in the Morelian sense. His family summoned Morel 
 from Normandy to Munich, for the purpose of proving to the jury, before 
 whom the case (1868) was tried, that the accused was irresponsible. The 
 latter was singularly indignant at this ; and the Attorney-General also con- 
 tradicted, in the most emphatic manner, the evidence of the French alienis', 
 and supported himself by the approbation of the most prominent alienists 
 in Munich. Chorinsky was pronounced guilty. Nevertheless, only a shon 
 time after his conviction, insanity developed itself in him, and a few months 
 later he died, in the deepest mental darkness, thus justifying all the previous 
 assertions of the French physician, who had, in the German tongue, demon- 
 strated to a German jury the incompetence of his professional confreres it> 
 Munich. 
 
 % Morel, op rit n p. 683.
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 17 
 
 characteristics, which are denominated ' stigmata,' or brand- 
 marks an unfortunate term derived from a false idea, as if 
 degeneracy were necessarily the consequence of a fault, and 
 the indication of it a punishment. Such stigmata consist 
 of deformities, multiple and stunted growths in the first line 
 of asymmetry, the unequal development of the two halves 
 of the face and cranium ; then imperfection in the develop- 
 ment of the external ear, which is conspicuous for its enormous 
 size, or protrudes from the head, like a handle, and the lobe 
 of which is either lacking or adhering to the head, and the 
 helix of which is not involuted ; further, squint-eyes, hare- 
 lips, irregularities in the form and position of the teeth ; pointed 
 or flat palates, webbed or supernumerary fingers (syn- and 
 poly-dactylia), etc. In the book from which I have quoted, 
 Morel gives a list of the anatomical phenomena of degeneracy, 
 which later observers have largely extended. In particular, 
 Lombroso* has conspicuously broadened our knowledge of 
 stigmata, but he apportions them merely to his ' born criminals ' 
 a limitation which from the very scientific standpoint of 
 Lombroso himself cannot be justified, his 'born criminals' 
 being nothing but a subdivision of degenerates. Feret ex- 
 presses this very emphatically when he says, ' Vice, crime and 
 madness are only distinguished from each other by social 
 prejudices.' 
 
 There might be a sure means of proving that the applica- 
 tion of the term ' degenerates ' to the originators of all the 
 fin-de-siecle movements in art and literature is not arbitrary, 
 that it is no baseless conceit, but a fact ; and that would be a 
 careful physical examination of the persons concerned, and an 
 inquiry into their pedigree. In almost all cases, relatives 
 Avould be met with who were undoubtedly degenerate, and 
 one or more stigmata discovered which would indisputably 
 establish the diagnosis of ' Degeneration.' Of course, from 
 human consideration, the result of such an inquiry could often 
 not be made public ; and he alone would be convinced who 
 should be able to undertake it himself. 
 
 Science, however, has found, together with these physical^r 
 stigmata, others of a mental order, which betoken degeneracy * 
 quite as clearly as the former ; and they allow of an easy 
 demonstration from all the vital manifestations, and, in par- 
 ticular, from all the works of degenerates, so that it is not 
 necessary to measure the cranium of an author, or to see the 
 lobe of a painter's ear, in order to recognise the fact that he 
 belongs to the class of degenerates. 
 
 * D Uomo delinqtiente in rapporlo all' Antropologia, Giurisprudenza e alle 
 Discipline carcerarie. 33 edizione. Torino, 1884, p. 147 et seq. See also 
 Dr. Ch. Fe>e, ' La Familie nevropathique. 3 Paris, 1894, po. 176-212. 
 
 t ' La Famille nevropathique,' Archives de'Nevrologie, 1884, Nos. 19 et 20. 
 
 2
 
 18 DEGENERATION 
 
 Quite a number of different designations have been found 
 for these persons. Maudsley and Ball call them ' Borderland 
 dwellers ' that is to say, dwellers on the borderland between 
 reason and pronounced madness. Magnan gives to them the 
 name of 'higher degenerates' (degencres supcrieurs), and Lom- 
 broso speaks of 'mattoids' (from matto, the Italian for insane), 
 and ' graphomaniacs,' under which he classifies those semi- 
 insane persons who feel a strong impulse to write. In spite, 
 however, of this variety of nomenclature, it is a question 
 simply of one single species of individuals, who betray their 
 fellowship by the similarity of their mental physiognomy. 
 
 In the mental development of degenerates, we meet with the 
 same irregularity that we have observed in their physical 
 growth. The asymmetry efface and cranium finds, as it were, 
 its counterpart in their mental faculties. Some of the latter 
 are completely stunted, others morbidly exaggerated. That 
 which nearly all degenerates lack is the sense of morality and 
 of right and wrong. For them there exists no law, no decency, 
 no modesty. In order to satisfy any momentary impulse, or 
 inclination, or caprice, they commit crimes and trespasses 
 with the greatest calmness and self-complacency, and do not 
 comprehend that other persons take offence thereat. When 
 this phenomenon is present in a high degree, we speak of 
 ' moral insanity ' with Maudsley ;* there are, nevertheless, lower 
 stages in which the degenerate does not, perhaps, himself 
 commit any act which will bring him into conflict with the 
 criminal code, but at least asserts the theoretical legitimacy 
 of crime ; seeks, with philosophically sounding fustian, to 
 prove that 'good' and ' evil,' virtue and vice, are arbitrary 
 distinctions ; goes into raptures over evildoers and their deeds ; 
 professes to discover beauties in the lowest and most repulsive 
 things; and tries to awaken interest in, and so-called 'com- 
 yf prehension ' of, every bestiality. The two psychological roots 
 of moral insanity, in all its degrees of development, are, firstly, 
 unbounded egoism, t and, secondly, impjilsiyenessj i.e., in- 
 
 * See, on this subject, in particular, Krafft Ebing, Die Lehre vom 
 moralischen Wahnsinn, 1871 ; H. Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental 
 Disease, International Scientific Series ; and Ch. Fere", Dtgdntrescence et 
 Criminality Paris r 1888. 
 
 t J. Roubinovitch, HystMe mdle et DJgJnJrescence ; Paris, 1890, p. 62 : 
 'The society which surrounds him (the degenerate) always remains sirange 
 to him. He knows nothing, and takes interest in nothing but himself.' 
 
 Legrain, Du Dtlire chez les De'gtne're's ; Paris, 1886, p. 10 : ' The patient is 
 . . . the plaything of his passions ; he is carried away by his impulses, and 
 has only one care to satisfy his appetites.' P. 27 : ' They are egoistical, 
 arrogant, conceited, self-infatuated,' etc. 
 
 J Henry Colin, Essai sur l'tat nttntal des HystMques; Paris, 1890, p. 59 : 
 'Two great facts control the being of the hereditary degenerate : obsession 
 [the tyrannical domination of one thought from which a man cannot free
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 19 
 
 ability to resist a sudden impulse to any deed ; and these 
 characteristics also constitute the chief intellectual stigmata of 
 degenerates. In the following sections of this work, I shall 
 find occasion to show on what organic grounds, and in con- 
 sequence of what peculiarities of their brain and nervous 
 system, degenerates are necessarily egoistical and impulsive. 
 In these introductory remarks I would wish only to point out 
 the stigma itself. 
 
 Another mental stigma of degenerates is their emotionalism. 
 Morel* has even wished to make this peculiarity~TrTeir chlef^ 
 characteristic erroneously, it seems to me, for it is present 
 in the same degree among hysterics, and, indeed, is to be found 
 in perfectly healthy persons, who, from any transient cause, 
 such as illness, exhaustion, or any mental shock, have been 
 temporarily weakened. Nevertheless it is a phenomenon rarely 
 absent in a degenerate. He laughs until he sheds tears, or 
 weeps copiously without adequate occasion ; a commonplace 
 line of poetry or of prose sends a shudder down his back ; he j 
 falls into raptures before indifferent pictures or statues; and! 
 music especially,t even the most insipid and least com-j 
 mendable, arouses in him the most vehement emotions. 
 He is quite proud of being so vibrant a musical instrument, 
 and boasts that where the Philistine remains completely cold, 
 he feels his inner self confounded, the depths of his being 
 broken up, and the bliss of the Beautiful possessing him to th 
 tips of his fingers. His excitability appeanTto him a mark cf 
 superiority ; he believes himself to be possessed by a peculiar 
 insight lacking in other mortals, and he is fain to despise the 
 vulgar herd for the dulness and narrowness of their minds. 
 The unhappy creature does not suspect that he is conceited 
 about a disease and boasting of a derangement of the mind ; 
 and certain silly critics, when, through fear of being pronounced 
 deficient in comprehension, they make desperate efforts to 
 share the emotions of a degenerate in regard to some insipid 
 or ridiculous production, or when they praise in exaggerated 
 expressions the beauties which the degenerate asserts he finds 
 therein, are unconsciously simulating one of the stigmata of 
 semi-insanity. 
 
 Besides moral insanity and emotionalism, there is to be 
 observed in the degenerate a condition of mental weakness and 
 despondency, which, according to the circumstances of his life,! 
 assumes the form of pessimism^ a vague fear cf all men, and 01 
 
 himself; We^tphal has created for this the good term 'Zwangs-Vorstellung,' 
 t.e., coercive idea] and impulsion both irresistible.' 
 
 * Morel, 'Du Delire e'motif,' Archives generates, 6 serie, vol. vii., pp. 385 
 and 530. See also Roubinovitch, op. cit., p. 53. 
 
 f j. Roubinovitch, op. '/., p. 68 : ' Music excites him keenly
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 the entire phenomenon of the universe, or self-abhorrence. 
 ' These patients,' says Morel,* ' feel perpetually compelled . . . 
 to commiserate themselves, to sob, to repeat with the most 
 desperate monotony the same questions and words. They 
 have delirious presentations of ruin and damnation, and all 
 sorts of imaginary__faisJ 'Ennui never quits me.' said a 
 patient of this kind, whose "CaSe"Roubinovitchf describes, 
 ' ennui of myself.' ' Among moral stigmata,' says the same 
 author, J 'there are also to be specified those undefinable 
 apprehensions manifested by degenerates when they see, smell, 
 or touch any object.' And he further^ calls to notice ' their 
 unconscious fear of everything and everyone.' In this picture 
 of the sufferer frorn- melancholia,? downcast, sombre, despairing 
 of himself and the" WoTlo'TTortured by-fear of-the Unknown, 
 menaced by undefined but dreadful dangers, we recognise in 
 every detail the man of the Dusk of the Nations and the 
 fin-de-siecle frame of mind, described in the first chapter. 
 
 With this characteristic dejectedness of the degenerate, 
 there is combined, as a rule, a disjnclination^o_action of any 
 kind, attaining possibly to abhorrence (^"activity and power- 
 lessness to will (aboidia). Now, it is a peculiarity of the 
 human mind, known to every psychologist, that, inasmuch 
 as the law of causality governs a man's whole thought, he im- 
 putes a rational basis to all his own decisions. This was 
 prettily expressed by Spinoza when he said : ' If a stone flung 
 by a human hand could think, it would certainly imagine that 
 it flew because it wished to fly.' Many mental conditions and 
 operations of which we become conscious are the result of 
 causes which do not reach our consciousness. In this case we 
 fabricate causes a posteriori for them, satisfying our mental 
 need of distinct causality, and we have no trouble in persuad- 
 ing ourselves that we have now truly explained them. The 
 degenerate who shuns action, and is without will-power, has no 
 suspicion that his incapacity for action is a consequence of his 
 inherited deficiency of brain. He deceives himself into believing 
 that he despises action from free determination, and takes 
 pleasure in inactivity ; and, in order to justify himself in his 
 own eyes, he constructs a philosophy of renunciation and of 
 contempt for the world and men, asserts that he has convinced 
 ,himself of the excellence of Quietism, calls himself with con- 
 summate self-consciousness a Buddhist, and praises Nirvana 
 in poetically eloquent phrases as the highest and worthiest 
 ideal of the human mind. The degenerate and insane are 
 the predestined disciples of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, 
 
 * Morel, ' Du Ddlire panophobique des Alidnds gdmisseurs,' Annales 
 itiSdico-psychologiques, 1871. 
 f Koubmovitch, op. '/., p. 28. \ Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 66.
 
 FIN-DE-SlfcCLE at 
 
 and need only to acquire a knowledge of Buddhism to become 
 converts to it. 
 
 With the incapacity for action there is connected the pre- 
 dilection for inane reverie. The degenerate is not in a con- 
 dition to fix his attention long, or indeed at all, on any subject, 
 and is equally incapable of correctly grasping, ordering, or 
 elaborating into ideas and judgments the impressions of the 
 external world conveyed to his distracted consciousness by his 
 defectively operating senses. It is easier and more convenient 
 for him to allow his brain-centres to produce semi-lucid, 
 nebulously blurred ideas and inchoate embryonic thoughts, 
 and to surrender himself to the perpetual obfuscation of a 
 boundless, aimless, and shoreless stream of fugitive ideas ; 
 and he rarely rouses himself to the painful attempt to check or 
 counteract the capricious, and, as a rule, purely mechanical 
 associations of ideas and succession of images, and bring under 
 discipline the disorderly tumult of his fluid presentations. On 
 the contrary, he rejoices in his faculty of imagination, which he 
 contrasts with the insipidity of the Philistine, and devotes him- 
 self with predilection to all sorts of unlicensed pursuits per- 
 mitted by the unshackled vagabondage of his mind ; while he 
 cannot endure well-ordered civil occupations, requiring atten- 
 tion and constant heed to reality. He calls this ' having an 
 idealist temperament,' ascribes to himself irresistible aesthetic! 
 propinquities, and proudly styles himself an artist.* 
 
 We will briefly mention some peculiarities frequently mani- 
 fested by a degenerate. He is tormented by doubts, seeks for 
 the basis of all phenomena, especially those whose first causes 
 are completely inaccessible to us, and is unhappy when his 
 inquiries and ruminations lead, as is natural, to no result.t 
 He is ever supplying new recruits to the army of system- 
 inventing metaphysicians, profound expositors of the riddle of 
 the universe, seekers for the philosopher's stone, the squaring 
 of the circle and perpetual motion..]: These last three sub- 
 jects have such a special attraction for him, that the Patent 
 Office at Washington is forced to keep on hand printed replies 
 to the numberless memorials in which patents are constantly 
 
 * Charcot, ' Legons du Mardi a la Salpdtriere,' Policlinique, Paris. 1890, 
 2 e partie, p. 392 : ' This person [the invalid mentioned] is a performer 
 at fairs ; he calls himself "artist." The truth is that his art consists in 
 personating a " wild man " in fair-booths.' 
 
 t Legrain, op. cit., p. 73 : ' The patients are perpetually tormented by a 
 multitude of questions which invade their minds, and to which they can give 
 no answer ; inexpressible moral sufferings result from this incapacity. Doubt 
 envelops every possible subject : metaphysics, theology, etc.' 
 
 J Magnan, ' Considerations sur la Folie des He're'ditaires ou De'ge'nere's/ 
 Progres nu'dical, 1886, p. mo (in the report of a medical case) : ' He also 
 thought of seeking for the philosopher's stone, 'and of making gold.'
 
 3? DEGENERATION 
 
 demanded for the solution of these chimerical problems. In 
 view of Lombroso's researches,* it can scarcely be doubted 
 that the writings and acts of revolutionists and anarchists are 
 also attributable to degeneracy. The degenerate is incapable 
 of adapt! n^j}]ins^lfjp^jejcisdng-ciriiinstarices. This incapacity, 
 indeed, is an indication of morbid variation in every species, 
 and probably a primary cause of their sudden extinction. He. 
 therefore rebels against conditions and views of things which 
 he necessarily feels to be painful, chiefly because they impose 
 upon him the duty of self-control, of which he is incapable on 
 account of his organic weakness of will. Thus he becomes an 
 improver of the world, and devises plans for making mankind 
 happy, which, without exception, are conspicuous quite as 
 much by their fervent philanthropy, and often pathetic sincerity, 
 as by their absurdity and monstrous ignorance of all real 
 relations. 
 
 Finally, a cardinal mark of degeneration which I have re- 
 served to the last, is jiiv^ticism. Colin says :-f* * Of all the 
 delirious manifestations" "peculiar to the hereditarily-afflicted, 
 none indicates the condition more clearly, we think, than 
 mystical delirium, or, when the malady has not reached this 
 point, tHe~Beingl:onstantly occupied with mystical and religious 
 questions, an exaggerated piety, etc.' I will not here multiply 
 evidence and quotations. In the following books, where the 
 art and poetry of the times are treated of, I shall find occasion 
 to show the reader that no difference exists between these 
 tendencies and the religious manias observed in nearly all 
 degenerates and sufferers from hereditary mental taint. 
 
 I have enumerated the most important features characterizing 
 the mental condition of the degenerate. The reader can now 
 judge for himself whether or not the diagnosis ' degeneration ' 
 is applicable to the originators of the new aesthetic tendencies. 
 It must not for that matter be supposed that degeneration is 
 synonymous with absence of talent. Nearly all the inquirers 
 who have had degenerates under their observation expressly 
 establish the contrary. ' The degenerate,' says Legrain,t ' may 
 be a 4jeniusJ A badly balanced mind is susceptible of the 
 highest conceptions, while, on the other hand, one meets in 
 the same mind with traits of meanness and pettiness all the 
 more striking from the fact that they co-exist with the most 
 brilliant qualities.' We shall find this reservation in all authors 
 
 * Lombroso, ' La Physionomie des Anarchistes/ Nouvelle Revue, May 15, 
 1891, p. 227 : ' They [the anarchists] frequently have those characteristics 
 of degeneracy which are common to criminals and lunatics, for they are 
 anomalies, and bear hereditary taints.' See also the same author's Pazzi ed 
 Anomali. Turin, 1884. 
 
 f Colin, op. '/., p. 154. % Legrain, op. cit., p. u.
 
 FIN-DE-SI&CLE 23 
 
 who have contributed to the natural history of the degenerate. 
 ' As regards their intellect, they can/ says Roubinovitch,* 
 ' attain to a high degree of development, but from a moral point 
 of view their existence is completely deranged. ... A degenerate 
 will employ his brilliant faculties quite as well in the service of 
 some grand object as in the satisfaction of the basest pro- 
 pensities.' Lombrosof has cited a large number of undoubted 
 geniuses who were equally undoubted mattoids, graphomaniacs, 
 or pronounced lunatics ; and the utterance of a French savant, 
 Guerinsen, ' Genius is a disease of the nerves^' has become a 
 ' winged word? This depression was imprudent, for it gave 
 ignorant babblers a pretext, and apparently a right, to talk of 
 exaggeration, and to contemn experts in nervous and mental 
 diseases, because they professedly saw a lunatic in everyone 
 who ventured to be something more than the most ordinary, 
 characterless, average being. Science does not assert that 
 every genius is a lunatic ; there are some geniuses of super- 
 abundant power whose high privilege consists in the possession 
 of one or other extraordinarily developed faculty, without the 
 rest of their faculties falling short of the average standard. 
 Just as little, naturally, is every lunatic a genius ; most of 
 them, even if we disregard idiots of different degrees, are much 
 rather pitiably stupid and incapable ; but in many, nay, in 
 abundant cases, the ' higher degenerate ' of Magnan, just as 
 he occasionally exhibits gigantic bodily stature or the dispro- 
 portionate growth of particular parts, has some mental gift 
 exceptionally developed at the cost, it is true, of the remaining 
 faculties, which are wholly or partially atrophied.:}: It is this 
 which enables the well-informed to distinguish at the first 
 glance between the sane genius, and the highly, or even the 
 most highly, gifted degenerate. Take from the former the 
 special capacity through which he becomes a genius, and there 
 still remains a capable, often conspicuously intelligent, clever, 
 moral, and judicious man, who will hold his ground with 
 propriety in our social mechanism. Let the same be tried in 
 the case of a degenerate, and there remains only a criminal 
 or madman, for whom healthy humanity can find no use. If 
 
 * Roubinovitch, op. cit., p. 33. 
 
 f Lombroso, Genie tind Irrsinnj German translation by A. Courth. 
 Reclam's Universal Bibliothek, Bde. 2313-16. See also in particular,}. F. 
 Nisbet, The Insanity of Genius. London, 1891. 
 
 Falret, Annales medico-psychologiques, 1867, p. 76: 'From their child- 
 hood they usually display a very unequal development of their mental 
 faculties, which, weak in their entirety, are remarkable for certain special 
 aptitudes ; they have shown an extraordinary gift for drawing, arithmetic, 
 music, sculpture, or mechanics . . . and, together with those specially 
 developed aptimdes, obtaining for them- the fame of " infant phenomena," 
 they for the most part give evidence of very great deficiencies in their 
 intelligence, and of a radical debility in the remaining faculties.'
 
 >4 DEGENERATION 
 
 Goethe had never written a line of verse, he would, all the 
 same, have still remained a man of the world, of good principles, 
 a fine art connoisseur, a judicious collector, a keen observer of 
 nature. Let us, on the contrary, imagine a Schopenhauer who- 
 had written no astounding books, and we should have before 
 us only a repulsive lusus natura, whose morals would necessarily 
 exclude him from all respectable society, and whose fixed idea 
 that he was a victim of persecution would point him out as a 
 subject for a madhouse. The lack of harmony, the absence 
 of balance, the singular incapacity of usefully applying, or deriv- 
 ing satisfaction from, their own special faculty among highly- 
 gifted degenerates, strikes every healthy censor who does not 
 allow himself to be prejudiced by the noisy admiration of 
 critics, themselves degenerates : and will always prevent his 
 mistaking the mattoid for the same exceptional man who opens 
 out new paths for humanity and leads it to higher develop- 
 ments. I do not share Lombroso's opinion* that highly-gifted 
 degenerates are an active force in the progress of mankind. 
 They corrupt and delude ; they do, alas ! frequently exercise a 
 deep influence, but this is always a baneful one. It may not 
 be at once remarked, but it will reveal itself subsequently. If 
 cotemporaries do not recognise it, the historian of morals 
 will point it out a posteriori. They, likewise, are leading men 
 along the paths they themselves have found to new goals ; but 
 these goals are abysses or waste places. They are guides to- 
 swamps like will-o'-the-wisps, or to ruin like the ratcatcher 
 of Hammelin. Observers lay stress on their unnatural 
 sterility. ' They are/ says Tarabaud,t * cranks ; wrongheaded, 
 unbalanced, incapable creatures ; they belong to the class of 
 whom it may not be said that they have no mind, but whose 
 mind produces nothing.' 'A common type,' writes Legrain, 
 ' unites them : weakness of judgment and unequal develop- 
 ment of mental powers. . . . Their conceptions are never of a 
 high order. They are incapable of great thoughts and prolific 
 ideas. This fact forms a peculiar contrast to the frequently 
 excessive development of their powers of imagination.' ' If they 
 are painters,' we read in Lombroso, * then their predominant 
 Attribute will be the colour-sense ; they will be decorative. If 
 they are poets, they will be rich in rhyme, brilliant in style, 
 but barren of thought ; sometimes they will be " decadents." ' 
 Such are the qualities of the most gifted of those who are 
 
 * Nouvelle Revue, July 15, 1891. 
 
 t Tarabaud, Des Rapports de la Dginrescence mentale et de I'flystMe. 
 Paris, 1888, p. 12. 
 
 % Legrain, op. fit., pp. 24 and 26. 
 
 Lombroso, Nouvelles recherches de Psychiatric et d 1 Anthropologie 
 criminelle. Paris, 1892, p. 74.
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 25 
 
 discovering new paths, and are proclaimed by enthusiastic 
 followers as the guides to the promised land of the future. 
 Among them degenerates and mattoids predominate. The 
 second of the above-mentioned diagnoses, on the contrary, 
 applies for the most part to the multitude who admire these 
 individuals and swear by them, who imitate the fashions they 
 design, and take delight in the extravagances described in the 
 previous chapter. In their case we have to deal chiefly with 
 hysteria, or neurasthenia. 
 
 For reasons which will be elucidated in the next chapter, 
 hysteria has hitherto been less studied in Germany than in 
 France, where, more than elsewhere, it has formed a subject 
 of earnest inquiry. We owe what we know of it almost 
 exclusively to French investigators. The copious treatises 
 of Axenfeld,* Richer,f and in particular Gilles de la Tourette,t 
 adequately comprise our present knowledge of this malady ; 
 and I shall refer to these works when I enumerate the 
 symptoms chiefly indicative of hysteria. 
 
 Among the hysterical and it must not be thought that these 
 are met with exclusively, or even preponderantly, among females, 
 for they are quite as often, perhaps oftener, found among males 
 among the hysterical, as among the degenerate, the first thing 
 which strikes us is an extraordinary emotionalism. ' The lead- 
 ing characteristic of the hysterical,' says Colin, [J 'is the dispro- 
 portionate impressionability of their psychic centres. . . . They 
 are, above all things, impressionable.' From this primary 
 peculiarity proceeds a second quite as remarkable and im- 
 portant the exceeding ease with which they can be made to 
 yield to suggestion.1I The earlier observers always mentioned 
 the boundless mendacity of the hysterical; growing, indeed, quite 
 indignant at it, and making it the most prominent mark of the 
 mental condition of such patients. They were mistaken. The 
 hysterical subject does not consciously lie. He believes in the 
 truth of his craziest inventions. The morbid mobility of his 
 mind, the excessive excitability of his imagination, conveys to 
 his consciousness all sorts of queer and senseless ideas. He 
 suggests to himself that these ideas are founded on true per- 
 ceptions, and believes in the truth of his foolish inventions until 
 
 * Axenfeld, Des Nforoses. 2 vols., 2 e Edition, revue et comple'tee par le 
 Dr. Huchard Paris, 1879. 
 
 f Paul Richer, Etudes cliniqiies sur V Hyste'ro-e'pilepsie ou Grande Hysterie. 
 Paris. 1891. 
 
 J Gilles de la Tourette, TraM clinique et therapeutique de PHyste'rie. 
 Paris, 1891. 
 
 Paul Michaut, Contribution a l'iude des Manifestations de I'HystM* 
 chez V Homme. Paris, 1890. 
 
 || Colin, op. tit., p. 14. 
 
 11 Gilles de la Tourette, op. cit., p. 548 et passim.
 
 26 DEGENERATION 
 
 a new suggestion perhaps his own, perhaps that of another 
 person has ejected the earlier one. A result of the suscepti- 
 bility of the hysterical subject to suggestion is his irresistible 
 passion foe Imitation,* and the eagerness with which he yields 
 to all the suggestions of writers and artists, t When he sees a 
 picture, he wants to become like it in attitude and dress ; when 
 he reads a book, he adopts its views blindly. He takes as a 
 pattern the heroes of the novels which he has in his hand at 
 the moment, and infuses himself into the characters moving 
 before him on the stage. 
 
 Added to this emotionalism and susceptibility to sugges- 
 tion is a love qf_self never met with in a sane person in any- 
 thing like the same degree. The hysterical person's own ' I ' 
 towers up before his inner vision, and so completely fills his 
 mental horizon that it conceals the whole of the remaining 
 universe. He cannot endure that others should ignore him. 
 He desires to be as important to his fellow-men as he is to 
 himself. ' An incessant need pursues and governs the hysterical 
 to busy those about them with themselves.' | A means of 
 satisfying this need is the fabrication of stories by which they 
 become interesting. Hence come the adventurous occurrences 
 which often enough occupy the police and the reports of the 
 daily press. In the busiest thoroughfare the hysterical person is 
 set upon, robbed, maltreated and wounded, dragged to a distant 
 place, and left to die. He picks himself up painfully, and 
 informs the police. He can show the wounds on his body. 
 He gives all the details. And there is not a single word of 
 truth in the whole story ; it is all dreamt^ndjiiriagjned.. He 
 has himself inflicted his woumls~ in order for a shorT^firne to 
 become the centre of public attention. In the lower stages of 
 hystexia_this~neBd"of mating" a sensation assumes more harm- 
 less forms. It displays itself in eccentricities^ of dress and 
 behaviour. ' Other hysterical subjects are passionately fond of 
 glarmgcoTburs and extravagant forms; they wish to attract 
 attention and make themselves talked about.' 
 
 It is certainly unnecessary to draw the reader's attention in 
 a special manner to the complete coincidence of this clinical 
 picture of hysteria with the description of the peculiarities 
 of the fin-de-siecle public, and to the fact that in the former we 
 meet with all the features made familiar to us by the con- 
 sideration of contemporary phenomena ; in particular with the 
 passion for imitating in externals in dress, attitude, fashion of 
 the hair and beard the figures in old and modern pictures, 
 and the feverish effort, through any sort of singularity, to make 
 
 * Colin, op. cit., pp. 15 and 16. 
 
 f Gilles de U Tourette. op. fit., p. 493. J Ibid., p. 303. 
 
 Legrain, op. '/., p. 39.
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 27 
 
 themselves talked about. The observation of pronounced cases 
 of degeneration and hysteria, whose condition makes them 
 necessary subjects for medical treatment, gives us also the key 
 to the comprehension of subordinate details in the fashions 
 of the day. The present rage for collecting, the piling up, in 
 dwellings, of aimless bric-a-brac, which does not become any 
 more useful or beautiful by being fondly called bibelots, appear 
 to us in a completely new light when we know that Magnan 
 has established the existence of an irresistible desire among 
 the degenerate to accumulate useless trifles. It is so firmly 
 imprinted and so peculiar that Magnan declares it to be a 
 stigma of degeneration, and has invented for it the name ' onio- 
 mania,' or 'buying craze.' This is not to be confounded with 
 the desire for buying, which possesses those who are in the first 
 stage of general paralysis. The purchases of these persons 
 are due to their delusion as to their own greatness. They lay 
 in great supplies because they fancy themselves millionaires. 
 The oniomaniac, on the contrary, neither buys enormous 
 quantities of one and the same thing, nor is the price a matter 
 of indifference to him as with the paralytic. He is simply 
 unable to pass by any lumber without feeling an impulse to 
 acquire it. 
 
 The curious style of certain recent painters ' impressionists,' 
 ' stipplers,' or 'mosaists,' 'papilloteurs' or ' quiverers,' 'roaring' 
 colourists, dyers in gray and faded tints becomes at once intel- 
 ligible to us if we keep in view the researches of the Charcot 
 school into the visual derangements in degeneration and 
 hysteria. The painters who assure us that they are sincere, 
 and reproduce nature as they see it, speak the truth. The 
 degenerate artist who suffers from nystagmus, or trembling of the 
 eyeball, will, in fact, perceive the phenomena of nature trem- 
 bling, restless, devoid of firm outline, and, if he is a conscientious 
 painter, will give us pictures reminding us of the mode practised 
 by the draughtsmen of the Fliegende Blatter when they repre- 
 sent a wet dog shaking himself vigorously. If his pictures fail 
 to produce a comic effect, it is only because the attentive 
 beholder reads in them the desperate effort to reproduce fully 
 an impression incapable of reproduction by the expedients of 
 the painter's art as devised by men of normal vision. 
 
 There is hardly a hysterical subject whose retina is not partly 
 insensitive.* As a rule the insensitive parts are connected, and 
 include the outer half of the retina. In these cases the field of 
 vision is more or less contracted, and appears to him not as 
 it does to the normal man as a circle but as a picture 
 bordered by whimsically zigzag lines. Often, however, the 
 
 * Ur. Emile Berger, Les Maladies des Yeux dans leurs rapports avec la 
 Pathologic general. Pans, 1892, p. 129 efsey.
 
 28 DEGENERATION 
 
 insensitive parts are not connected, but are scattered in isolated 1 
 spots over the entire retina. Then the sufferer will have all 
 sorts of gaps in his field of vision, producing strange effects, 
 and if he paints what he sees, he will be inclined to place in 
 juxtaposition larger or smaller points or spots which are com- 
 pletely or partially dissociated. The insensitivencss need not 
 be complete, and may exist only in the case of single colours, 
 or of all. If the sensitiveness is completely lost ('achroma- 
 topsy ') he then sees everything in a uniform gray, but perceives 
 differences in the degree of lustre. Hence the picture of nature 
 presents itself to him as a copper-plate or a pencil drawing- 
 where the effect of the absent colours is replaced by differences- 
 in the intensity of light, by greater or less depth and power of 
 the white and black portions. Painters who are insensitive 
 to colour will naturally have a predilection for neutral-toned 
 painting; and a public suffering from the same malady will 
 find nothing objectionable in falsely-coloured pictures. But if, 
 besides the whitewash of a Puvis de Chavannes, obliterating 
 all colours equally, fanatics are found for the screaming yellow, 
 blue, and red of a Besnard, this also has a cause, revealed to- 
 us by clinical science. ' Yellow and blue,' Gilles delaTourette* 
 teaches us, ' are peripheral colours ' (i.e., they are seen with 
 the outermost parts of the retina) ; ' they are, therefore, the 
 last to be perceived ' (if the sensitiveness for the remaining* 
 colours is destroyed). ' These are . . . the very two colours 
 the sensations of which in hysterical amblyopia [dulness of 
 vision] endure the longest. In many cases, however, it is the 
 red, and not the blue, which vanishes last.' 
 
 Red has also another peculiarity explanatory of the predilec- 
 tion shown for it by the hysterical. The experiments of Binett 
 have established that the impressions conveyed to the brain by 
 the sensory nerves exercise an important influence on the species 
 and strength of the excitation distributed by the brain to the 
 motor nerves. Many sense-impressions operate enervatingly 
 and inhibitively on the movements ; others, on the contrary, 
 make these more powerful, rapid and active ; they are 'dyna- 
 mogenous,' or ' force-producing.' As a feeling of pleasure is 
 always connected with dynamogeny, or the production of force,, 
 every living thing, therefore, instinctively seeks for dynamo- 
 genous sense-impressions, and avoids enervating and inhibitive 
 ones. Now, red is especially dynamogenous. ' When,' says 
 Binet,J in a report of an experiment on a female hysterical subject 
 who was paralyzed in one half of her body, ' we place a dynamo- 
 
 * Traitt clinique ft thtrapeutique de I'Hysltfrie, p. 339. See also Drs. A. 
 Marie et J. Bonnet, La Vision chez Us Idiots et Us Imbeciles. Paris, 1892. 
 
 t Alfred Binet, ' Recherches sur les Alterations de la Conscience chcz le 
 Hyste'riques,' Rntue philosophique^ 1889, vol. xxvii. 
 
 J Op. at., p. 1 50.
 
 FIN-DE-S1ECLE . 29 
 
 meter in the ansesthetically insensible right hand of Amelie 
 
 Cle the pressure of the hand amounts to 12 kilogrammes. 
 
 If at the same time she is made to look at a red disc, the 
 number indicating the pressure in kilogrammes is at once 
 doubled.' Hence it is intelligible that hysterical painters revel 
 in red, and that hysterical beholders take special pleasure in 
 pictures operating dynamogenously, and producing feelings of 
 pleasure. 
 
 If red is dynamogenous, violet is conversely enervating and 
 inhibitive.* It was not by accident that violet was chosen by 
 many nations as the exclusive colour for mourning, and by 
 us also for half-mourning. The sight of this colour has a 
 depressing effect, and the unpleasant feeling awakened by it 
 induces dejection in a sorrowfully - disposed mind. This 
 suggests that painters suffering from hysteria and neurasthenia 
 will be inclined to cover their pictures uniformly with the 
 colour most in accordance with their condition of lassitude 
 and exhaustion. Thus originate the violet pictures of Manet 
 and his school, which spring from no actually observable aspect 
 of nature, but from a subjective view due to the condition of 
 the nerves. When the entire surface of walls in salons and 
 art exhibitions of the day appears veiled in uniform half- 
 mourning, this predilection for violet is simply an expression 
 of the nervous debility of the painter. 
 
 There is yet another phenomenon highly characteristic in 
 some cases of degeneracy, in others of hysteria. This is the 
 formation of close groups or schools uncompromisingly ex- 
 clusive to~ouTsiders, observable to-day in literature and art. 
 Healthy artists or authors, in possession of "minds hi a 
 condition of well-regulated equilibrium, will never think of 
 grouping themselves into ah associationTwhich may at pleasure 
 be termed a sect or band ; of devising a catechism, of binding 
 themselves to definite aesthetic dogmas, and of entering the 
 lists for these with the fanatical intolerance of Spanish 
 inquisitors. If any human activity is individualistic, it is that 
 of the artist. True talent is always personal. In its creations 
 it reproduces itself, its own views and feelings, and not the 
 articles of faith learnt from any aesthetic apostle ; it follows its 
 creative impulses, not a theoretical formula preached by the 
 founder of a new artistic or literary church ; it constructs its 
 work in the form organically necessary to it, not in that 
 proclaimed by a leader as demanded by the fashion of the day. 
 The mere fact that an artist oj: author allows himself to be 
 
 * Ch. Fe"re", 'Sensation et Mouvement,' Revue philosophique, 1886. See 
 also the same author's Sensation et Mouvsment, Paris, 1887 ; Dcgenerescenct 
 et criminality Paris, 1888 ; and ' L"E:iergie et la Vitesse des Mouvements 
 volontaires,' Revue pliilosophiquc^ 1889.
 
 33 DEGENERATION 
 
 sworn in to the party cry of any ' ism,' that he perambulates 
 with jubilations behind a banner and Turkish music, is complete 
 evidence of his lack of individuality that is, of talent. If the 
 mental movements of a period even those which are healthy 
 and prolific range themselves, as a rule, under certain main 
 tendencies, which receive each its distinguishing name, this is 
 the work of historians of civilization or literature, who subse- 
 quently survey the combined picture of an epoch, and for their 
 own convenience undertake divisions and classifications, in 
 order that they may more correctly find their way among the 
 multifariousness of the phenomena. These are, however, 
 almost always arbitrary and artificial. Independent minds 
 (we are not here speaking of mere imitators), united by a good 
 critic into a group, may, it is true, have a certain resemblance 
 to each other, but, as a rule, this resemblance will be the 
 consequence, not of actual internal affinity, but of external 
 influences. No one is able completely to withdraw himself 
 from the influences of his time, and under the impression of 
 events which affect all contemporaries alike, as well as of the 
 scientific views prevailing at a given time, certain features 
 develop themselves in all the works of an epoch, which 
 stamp them as of the same date. But the same men who 
 \subsequently appear so naturally in each other's company, in 
 historical works, that they seem to form a family, went when 
 they lived their separate ways far asunder, little suspecting 
 that at one time they would be united under one common 
 designation. Quite otherwise it is when authors or artists 
 consciously and intentionally meet together and found an 
 aesthetic school, as a joint-stock bank is founded, with a title 
 for which, if possible, the protection of the law is claimed, 
 with by-laws, joint capital, etc. This may be ordinary specu- 
 lation, but as ji rule it is disease. The predilection for form- 
 ing societies metTwItE among all the degenerate and hysterical 
 may assume different forms. Criminals unite in bands, as 
 Lombroso expressly establishes.* Among pronounced lunatics 
 it is the folie d deux, in which a deranged person completely 
 forces his insane ideas on a companion ; among the hysterical 
 it assumes the form of close friendships, causing Charcot to 
 repeat at every opportunity : ' Persons ^fhighJY^tru ng nerves 
 attract each other ;'f and finally~1iuthors found schools. 
 
 The~comrriofi organic basis of these different forms of one 
 and the same phenomenon of the folie a deux, the associa- 
 tion of neuropaths, the founding of aesthetic schools, the 
 banding of criminals is, with the active part, viz., those who 
 lead and inspire, the predominance of obsessions : with the 
 
 * Lombroso, L'Uomo delinqnente, p. 524. 
 
 f ' Les Nerveux se recherchent,' Charcot, Lemons du Mardi^ passim.
 
 FIN-DE-SlfeCLE 31 
 
 associates, the disciples, the submissive part, weakness of will 
 and morbid susceptibility to suggestion.* The possessor of 
 an obsession is an incomparable apostle. There is no rational 
 Conviction arrived at by sound labour of intellect, which so 
 completely takes possession of the mind, subjugates so 
 tyrannically its entire activity, and so irresistibly impels it to 
 words and deeds, as delirium. Every proof of the senselesness 
 of his ideas rebounds from the deliriously insane or half-crazy 
 person. No contradiction, no ridicule, no contempt, affects 
 him ; the opinion of the majority is to him a matter of in- 
 difference ; facts which do not please him he does not notice, 
 or so interprets that they seem to support his delirium ; 
 obstacles do not discourage him, because even his instinct of 
 self-preservation is unable to cope with the power of his 
 delirium, and for the same reason he is often enough ready, 
 without further ado, to suffejnartyrdom._ Weak-minded or 
 mentally-unbalanced p^TSorfsTcolnirig into contact with a man 
 possessed by delirium, are at once conquered by the strength 
 of his diseased ideas, and are converted to them. By separating 
 them from the source of inspiration, it is often possible to 
 cure them of their transmitted delirium, but frequently their 
 acquired derangement outlasts this separation. 
 
 This is the natural history of the aesthetic schools. Under the 
 influence of an obsession, a degenerate mind promulgates some 
 doctrine or other realism, pornography, mysticism, symbolism, 
 diabolism. He does this with vehement penetrating eloquence, 
 with eagerness and fiery heedlessness. Other degenerate, hys- 
 terical, neurasthenical minds flock around him, receive from his 
 lips the new doctrine, and live thenceforth only to propagate it. 
 
 In this case all the participants are sincere the founder as 
 well as the disciples. They act as, in consequence of the dis- 
 eased constitution of their brain and nervous system, they are 
 compelled to act. The picture, however, which from a clinical 
 standpoint is perfectly clear, gets dimmed if the apostle of a 
 craze and his followers succeed in attracting to themselves the 
 attention of wider circles. He then receives a concourse of 
 unbelievers, who are very well able to recognise the insanity of 
 the new doctrine, but who nevertheless accept it, because they 
 hope, as associates of the new sect, to acquire fame and money. 
 In every civilized nation which has a developed art and litera- 
 ture there are numerous intellectual eunuchs, incapable of 
 producing with their own powers a living mental work, but 
 quite able to imitate the process of production. These cripples 
 
 * Legrain, op. cit., p. 173 : 'The true explanation of the occurrence of 
 folie d deux must be sought for, on the one hand, in the predisposition to 
 insanity, and, on the other hand, in the accompanying weakness of mind." 
 See also Re"gis, La Folie d Deux. Paris, 1880.
 
 32 DEGENERATION 
 
 form, unfortunately, the majority of professional authors and 
 artists, and their many noxious followers often enough stifle 
 true and original talent. Now it is these who hasten to act as 
 camp-followers for every new tendency which seems to come 
 into fashion. They are naturally the most modern of moderns, 
 for no precept of individuality, no artistic knowledge, hindeis 
 them from bunglingly imitating the newest model with all 
 the assiduity of an artisan. Clever in discerning externals, 
 unscrupulous copyists and plagiarists, they crowd round every 
 original phenomenon, be it healthy or unhealthy, and without 
 loss of time set about disseminating counterfeit copies of it. 
 To-day they are symbolists, as yesterday they were realists or 
 pQrnographistSj, If tHey~can promise themselves fame ancPa 
 OoH sale, tEey write of mysteries with the same fluency as if 
 they were spinning romances of knights and robbers, tales of 
 adventure. Roman tragedies, and village stories at a time when 
 newspaper critics and the public seemed to demand these 
 things in preference to others. Now these practitioners, who, 
 let it be again asserted, constitute the great .majority of the 
 mental workers of the fashionable sects in art and literature, 
 and therefore of the associates of these sects also, are intellec- 
 tually quite sane, even if they stand at a very low level of 
 development, and were anyone to examine them, he might 
 easily doubt the accuracy of the diagnosis* ' Degeneration ' as 
 regards the confessors of the new doctrines. Hence some 
 caution must be exercised in the inquiry, and the sincere 
 originators be always distinguished from the aping intriguers, 
 the founder of the religion and his apostles from the rabble 
 to whom the Sermon on the Mount is of less concern than the 
 miraculous draught of fishes and the multiplication of loaves. 
 
 It has now been shown how schools originate. They arise 
 rorn the degeneration of their founders and of the imitators 
 hey have convinced. That they come into fashion, and for a 
 short time attain a noisy success, is due to the peculiarities of 
 :he^eci^ejritpubli t jia.nielv < _tp hysteria. We have seen that 
 lypersusceptibinty to^ suggestion is the distinguishing charac- 
 teristic of hysteria. The same power of obsession with which 
 ithe degenerate in mind wins imitators, gathers round him 
 adherents. When a hysterical person is loudly and unceasingly 
 assured that a work is beautiful, deep, pregnant with the future, 
 he believes in it. He believes in everything suggested to him 
 with sufficient impressiveness. When the little cow-girl, Ber- 
 nadette, saw the vision of the Holy Virgin in the grotto of 
 Lourdes, the women devotees and hysterical males of the sur- 
 rounding country who flocked thither did not merely believe 
 that the^hallucmantjiiaiden had herself segn^ the vision, but all 
 of them saw~Tfie Holy_Viigiii_with their own eyes. M. E. de
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 33 
 
 Goncourt* relates that in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian 
 War, a multitude of men, numbering tens of thousands, in and 
 before the Bourse in Paris, were convinced that they had them- 
 selves seen indeed, a part of them had read a telegram 
 announcing French victories fastened to a pillar inside the 
 Exchange, and at which people were pointing with their finger ; 
 but as a matter of fact it never existed. It would be possible 
 to cite examples by the dozen, of illusions of the senses suggested 
 to excited crowds. Thus the hysterical allow themselves without 
 more ado to be convinced of the magnificence of a work, and 
 even find in it beauties of the highest kind, unthought of by the 
 authors themselves and the appointed trumpeters of their fame. 
 If the sect is so completely established that, in addition to the 
 founders, the priests of the temple, the paid sacristans and 
 choir-boys, it has a congregation, processions, and far-sounding 
 bells, it then attaches to itself other convert:? besides the hys- 
 terical who have accepted the new belief by way of suggestion. 
 Young persons without judgment, still seeking their way, go 
 whither they see the multitude streaming, and unhesitatingly 
 follow the procession, because they believe it to be marching 
 on the right road. Superficial persons, fearing nothing so 
 much as to be thought behind the times, attach themselves to 
 the procession, shouting ' Hurrah !' and ' All hail !' so as to con- 
 vince themselves that they also are really dancing along before 
 the latest conqueror and newest celebrity. Decrepit gray- 
 beards, filled with a ridiculous dread of betraying their real age, 
 eagerly visit the new temple and mingle their quavering voices 
 in the song of the devout, because they hope to be thought 
 young when seen in an assembly in which young persons pre- 
 dominate. 
 
 Thus a regular concourse is established about a victim of 
 degeneration. TheTashlgrra'bfe coxcomb, the aesthetic '^gerl/f 
 peeps over the shoulder of the~~hysterical whose admiration has 
 been suggested to him ; the intriguer marches at the heel of the 
 dotard, simulating youth ; and between all these comes pushing 
 the inquisitive young street-loafer, who must always be in every- 
 place where ' something is going on.' And this crowd, because 
 it is driven by disejise^self^jnj^n^^ very 
 
 much more noise and bustle than a far larger number of sane 
 men, who, without self-seeking after-thought, take quiet enjoy- 
 ment in works of sane talent, and do jiolJeel obliged to shout_pu.t 
 their appreciation in the streets, and to thr^ateji with death 
 harmless passers-by who do not join in their jubilations. 
 
 * Journal des Goncourt. Derniore sdrie, premier volume, 1870-71. Paris, 
 1890, p. 17. 
 f Viennese for ' fop.' TRANSLATOR.
 
 34 DEGENERATION 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ETIOLOGY. 
 
 WE have recognised the effect of diseases in these fin-de-silcle 
 literary and artistic tendencies and fashions, as well as in the 
 susceptibility of the public with regard to them, and we have 
 succeeded in maintaining that these diseases are degeneracy 
 and hysteria. We have now to inquire how these maladies of 
 the day have originated, and why they appear with such extra- 
 ordinary frequency at the present time. 
 
 Morel,* the great investigator of degeneracy, traces this 
 chiefly to poisoning. A race which is regularly addicted, even 
 without excess, to narcotics and stimulants in any form (such 
 as fermented alcoholic drinks, tobacco, opium, hashish, arsenic), 
 which partakes of tainted foods (bread made with bad Corn), 
 which absorbs organic poisons (marsh fever, syphilis, tubercu- 
 losis, goitre), begets degenerate descendants who, if they remain 
 exposed to the same influences, rapidly descend to the lowest 
 degrees of degeneracy, to idiocy, to dwarfishness, etc. That 
 the poisoning of civilized peoples continues and increases at a 
 very rapid rate is widely attested by statistics.^ The consump- 
 tion of tobacco has risen in France from 0*8 kilogramme per 
 head in 1841 to 1*9 kilogrammes in 1890. The corresponding 
 figures for England are 13 and 26 ounces ;J for Germany, 0*8 
 and i'5 kilogrammes. The consumption of alcohol during 
 
 * TraiU des D/gtntrescences, passim. 
 
 f Personally communicated by the distinguished statistician, Herr Josef 
 Korosi, Head of the Bureau of Statistics at Budapest. 
 
 % Speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Goschen, in the House 
 of Commons, April II, 1892. 
 
 J. Vavasseur in the Econo miste fran^ais of 1890. See also Bulletin de 
 Statistique for 1891. The figures are uncertain, for they have been given 
 differently by every statistician whom I have consulted. The fact of the 
 increase in the consumption of alcohol alone stands out with certainty in all 
 the publications consulted. Besides spirits, fermented drinks are consumed 
 per head of the population, according to J. Korosi : 
 
 GREAT BRITAIN. 
 
 \Vine. Beer-and Cider. 
 
 Gall. Gall. 
 
 18301850 0-2 26 
 
 lSSo1888 0'4 27 
 
 FRANCE. 
 
 1840 1842 ., v., 23 . ... 3 
 
 1870 1872 25 6
 
 FIN-DE^SIECLE 35 
 
 the same period has risen in Germany (1844) from 5*45 quarts 
 to (1867) 6'86 quarts ; in England from 2*01 litres to 2*64 
 litres ; in France from 1*33 to 4 litres. The increase in the 
 consumption of opium and hashish is still greater, but we need 
 not concern ourselves about that, since the chief sufferers from 
 them are Eastern peoples, who play no part in the intellectual 
 development of the white races. To these noxious influences, 
 however, one more may be added, which Morel has not known 
 or has not taken into consideration residence in targ 
 The inhabitant of a large town, even the richest, wEb is 
 rounded by the greatest luxury, is continually exposed to un- 
 favourable influences which diminish his vital powers far more 
 than what is inevitable. He breathes an atmosphere charged 
 with organic detritus ; he eats stale, contaminated, adulterated 
 food ; he feels himself in a state of constant nervous excitement, 
 and one can compare him without exaggeration to the inhabi- 
 tant of a marshy district. The effect of a large town on the 
 human organism offers the closest analogy tt> that of the 
 Maremma, and its population falls victim to the same fatality 
 of degeneracy and destruction as the victims of malaria. The 
 death-rate in a large town is more than a quarter greater than 
 the average for the entire population ; it is double thst of the 
 open country, though in reality it ought to be less, since in a 
 large town the most vigorous ages predominate, during which 
 the mortality is lower than in infancy and/>ld age.* And the 
 children of large towns who are not car:, .u off at an early age 
 suffer from the peculiar arrested development which Morerf has 
 ascertained in the population of fever districts. They develop 
 more or less normally until fourteen or fifteen years of age, are 
 up to that time alert, sometimes brilliantly endowed, and give 
 the highest promise ; then suddenly there is a standstill, the 
 mind loses its facility of comprehension, and the boy who, 
 only yesterday, was a model scholar, becomes an obtuse, 
 clumsy dunce, who can only be steered with the greatest 
 
 PRUSSIA. 
 
 Quarts. 
 
 1839 I3'48 
 
 1871 17 92 
 
 GERMAN EMPIRE. 
 
 Litres. 
 
 1872 ,v ...- _... ... 817 
 
 1889 1890 90-3 
 
 * In France the general mortality was, from 1886 to 1890, 22*21 per 1,000. 
 But in Paris it rose to 23^4 ; in Marseilles to 34/8 ; in all towns with more 
 tkan 100,000 inhabitants to a mean of 28*31 ; in all places with leas than 
 5,000 inhabitants to 2174. (La Medecine moderne, year 1891.) 
 
 f Traits des Degenercs.cence$, pp. 614, 615.
 
 36 DEGENERATION 
 
 difficulty through his examinations. With these mental 
 changes bodily modifications go hand in hand. The growth of 
 the long bones is extremely slow, or ceases entirely, the legs 
 remain short, the pelvis retains a feminine form, certain other 
 organs cease to develop, and the entire being presents a strange 
 and repulsive mixture of incompleteness and decay.* 
 
 Now we know how, in the last generation, the number of 
 the inhabitants of great towns increased t to an extraordinary 
 degree. At the present time an incomparably larger portion 
 of the whole population is subjected to the destructive in- 
 fluences of large towns than was the case fifty years ago ; 
 hence the number of victims is proportionately more striking, 
 and continually becomes more remarkable. Parallel with the 
 growth of large towns is the increase in the number of the 
 degenerate of all kinds criminals, lunatics, and the 'higher 
 degenerates ' of Magnan ; and it is natural that these last 
 should play an ever more prominent part in endeavouring to 
 introduce an ever greater element of insanity into art and 
 literature. 
 
 The enormous increase of hysteria in our days is partly due 
 to the same causes as degeneracy, besides which there is one 
 cause miieh more general still than the growth of large towns 
 a caust> which perhaps of itself would not be sufficient to 
 bring about degeneracy, but which is unquestionably quite 
 enough to produce hysteria and neurasthenia. This cause is 
 the fatigue of the present generation. That hysteria is in 
 reality a conseq^uence^ofJatigjiP. Fr6 has conclusively demon- 
 strated by cOnvinCing~experiments. In a communication to 
 the Biological Society of Paris, this distinguished investigator 
 says :J ' I have recently observed a certain number of facts 
 which have made apparent the analogy existing between 
 fatigue and the chronic condition of the hysterical. One knows 
 that among the hysterical [involuntary !] symmetry of move- 
 
 * Brouardel, La Sentaine mtdicale, Paris, 1887, p. 254. In this very 
 remarkable study by the Parisian Professor, the following passage aopeurs : 
 ' What will these [those remaining stationary in their development] young 
 Parisians become by-and-by? Incapable of accomplishing a long and 
 conscientious work, they excel, as a rule, in artistic activities. If they are 
 painters they are stronger in colour than in drawing. If they are poets, the 
 flow of their verses assures their success rather than the vigour of the thought.' 
 
 t The 26 German towns which to-day have more than 100,000 inhabitants, 
 numbered altogether, in 1891, 6,000,000, and in 1835 1,400,000. Tne 31 
 English towns of this category, in 1891, 10,870.000; in 1841-, 4,590,000 ; the 
 II French towns, in 1891, 4,180,000; in 1836, 1,710,000. It should be 
 remarked that about a third of these 68 towns had not in 1840 as many 
 generally as 100,000 inhabitants. To-day, in the large towns in Germany, 
 France, and England, there reside 21,050,000 individuals, while in 1840 on:y 
 4,800,000 were living under these conditions. (Cou.municated by Heir 
 Josef Korosi.) 
 
 J Fdre", La Semainc mtdicale. Paris, 1890, p. 192.
 
 FIN-DE-SI&CLE 37 
 
 ments frequentl}' shows itself in a very characteristic manner. 
 I have proved that in normal subjects this same symmetry of 
 movements is met with under the influence of fatigue. A pheno- 
 menon which shows itself in a very marked way in serious 
 hysteria is that peculiar excitability which demonstrates that 
 the energy of the voluntary movements, through peripheral 
 stimulations or mental presentations, suffers rapid and transitory 
 modifications co-existing with parallel modifications of sensi- 
 bility, and of the functions of nutrition. This excitability can 
 be equally manifested during fatigue. . . . Fatigue constitutes 
 a true temporary experimental hysteria. It establishes a transi- 
 tion between the states which we call normal and the various 
 states which we designate hysteria. One can change a normal 
 into a hysterical individual by tiring him. . . . All these causes 
 (which produce hysteria) can, as far as the pathogenic part 
 they play is concerned, be traced to one simple physiological 
 process to fatigue, to depression of vitality.' 
 
 Now, tcT this cause fatigue which, according to Fe"re, 
 changes healthy men into hysterical, the whole of civilized 
 humanity has been exposed for half a century. All its con- 
 ditions of life have, in this period of time, experienced a 
 revolution unexampled in the history of the world. Humanity 
 can point to no century in which the inventions which penetrate 
 so deeply, so tyrannically, into the life of every individual are 
 crowded so thick as in ours. The discovery of America, the 
 Reformation, stirred men's minds powerfully, no doubt, and 
 certainly also destroyed the equilibrium of thousands of brains 
 which lacked staying power. But they did not change the 
 material life of man. He got up and laid down, ate and drank, 
 dressed, amused himself, passed his days and years as he had 
 been always wont to do. In our times, on the contrary^ steam 
 and electricity have turned the customs of life of every member 
 of the civilized nations upside down, even of the most obtuse 
 and narrow-minded citizen, who is completely inaccessible to the 
 impelling thoughts of the times. 
 
 In an exceptionally remarkable lecture by Professor A. W. 
 von Hofmann, in 1890, before the Congress of German Natural 
 Science held in Bremen, he gave, in concluding, a short 
 description of the life of an inhabitant of a town in the year 
 1822. He shows us a student of science who at that date is 
 arriving with the coach from Bremen to Leipzig. The journey 
 has lasted four days and four nights, and the traveller is 
 naturally stiff and bruised. His friends receive him, and he 
 wishes to refresh himself a little. But there is yet no Munich 
 beer in Leipzig. After a short interview with his comrades, 
 he goes in search of his inn. This is no easy task, for in 
 the streets an Egyptian darkness reigns, broken only at long
 
 $8 DEGENERATION 
 
 distances by the smoky flame of an oil-lamp. He at last finds 
 "his quarters, and wishes for a light. As matches do not yet 
 exist, he is reduced to bruising the tips of his ringers with flint 
 and steel, till he succeeds at last in lighting a tallow candle. 
 He expects a letter, but it has not come, and he cannot now 
 receive it till after some days, for the post only runs twice a 
 week between Frankfort and Leipzig.* 
 
 But it is unnecessary to go back to the year 1822, chosen 
 by Professor Hofmann. Let us stop, for purposes of com- 
 parison, at the year 1840. This year has not been arbitrarily 
 selected. It is about the date when that generation was born 
 which has witnessed the irruption of new discoveries in every 
 relation of life, and thus personally experienced those trans- 
 formations which are the consequences. This generation 
 reigns and governs to-day ; it sets the tone everywhere, and 
 its sons and daughters are the youth of Europe and America, 
 in whom the new aesthetic tendencies gain their fanatical 
 partisans. Let us now compare how things went on in the 
 civilized world in 1840 and a half-century later. "f ~^ 
 
 In 1840 there were in Europe 3,000 kilometres^bf railway; in 
 1891 there were 218,000 kilometres. The number-of~tTavellers 
 in 1840, in Germany, France and England, amounted to 
 2\ millions ; in 1891 it was 614 millions. In Germany every 
 inhabitant received, in 1840, 85 letters; in 1888, 200 letters. 
 In 1840 the post distributed in France 94 millions of letters; 
 in England, 277 millions ; in 1881, 595 and 1,299 millions 
 respectively. The collective postal intercourse between all 
 countries, without including the internal postage of each 
 separate country, amounted, in 1840, to 92 millions ; in 1889, 
 to 2,759 millions. In Germany, in 1840, 305 newspapers were 
 published; in 1891, 6,800; in France, 776 and 5,182; in 
 England (1846), 551 and 2,255. The German book trade 
 produced, in 1840, 1,100 new works; in 1891, 18,700. The 
 exports and imports of the world had, in 1840, a value of 
 28, in 1889 of 74, milliards of marks. The ships which, in 
 1840, entered all the ports of Great Britain contained 9^, 
 in 1890 74^, millions of tons. The whole British merchant 
 navy measured, in 1840, 3,200,000 ; in 1890, 9,68^,000 tons. 
 
 * See, besides the lecture by Ho r mann, the excellent book : Eine deutschf 
 Stadt TJOT 6:> Jahren, Kultur^eschiclitliche Skizze> von Dr. Otto Balir, 
 2 Auflage. Leipzig, 1891. 
 
 fin order not to make the footnotes too unwieldy, I state here that the 
 following figures are borrowed in part from communications made by Herr 
 Josef Korosi, in part from a remarkable study by M. Charles Richet : 
 1 Dans Cent Ans,' Reviie scientijique, 1891-92 ; and in a small degree from 
 private publications (such as Annuaire tie la Presse, Press Directory, etc.). 
 For some of the figures I have also used, with profit, Mulhall, and the speech 
 of Herr von Stephan to the Reichstag, February 4, 1892.
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 39 
 
 Let us now consider how these formidable figures arise. 
 The 18,000 new publications, the 6,800 newspapers in 
 Germany, desire to be read, although many of them desire in 
 vain ; the 2,759 millions of jetters must be written ; the larger 
 commercial transactions, the numerousjourneys, the increased 
 marine livTercourse,~1mply a correspondingly greater activity 
 in individuals. The humblest village inhabitant has to-day 
 a wider geographical horizon, more numerous and complex 
 intellectual interests, than the prime minister of a petty, or 
 even a second-rate state a century ago. If he do but read 
 his paper, let it be the most innocent provincial rag, he takes 
 part, certainly not by active interference and influence, but 
 by a continuous and receptive curiosity, in the thousand events 
 which take place in all parts cf the globe, and he interests 
 himself simultaneously in the issue of a revolution in Chili, 
 in a bush-war in East Africa, a massacre in North China, a 
 famine in Russia, a street-row in Spain, and an international 
 exhibition in North America. A cook receives and sends more 
 letters than a university professor did formerly, and a petty 
 tradesman travels more and sees more countries and people 
 than did the reigning prince of other times. 
 
 All these activities, however, even the simplest, involve an 
 effort of the nervous system and a wearing of tissue. Every 
 line we read or write, every human face we see, every conver- 
 sation we carry on, every scene we perceive through th 
 window of the flying express, sets in activity our sensor 
 nerves and our brain centres. Even the little shocks of rail 
 way travelling, not perceived by consciousness, the perpetua 
 noises, and the various sights in the streets of a large town, 
 our suspense pending the sequel of progressing events, the 
 constant expectation of the newspaper, of the postman, of 
 visitors, cost our brains wear and tear. In the last fifty years 
 the population of Europe has not doubled, whereas the sum of 
 its labours has increased tenfold, in part even fifty-fold. E^ery 
 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. 
 
 This enormous increase in organic expenditure has not, and 
 cannot have, a corresponding increase of supply. Europeans 
 now eat a little more and a little better than they did fifty 
 years ago, but by no means in proportion to the increase of 
 effort which to-day is required of them. And even if they 
 had the choicest food in the greatest abundance, it would do 
 nothing towards helping them, for they would be incapable of 
 digesting it. Our stomachs cannot keep pace with the brain 
 and nervous system. The latter demand very much more 
 than the former are able to perform. And so there follows
 
 40 DEGENERATION 
 
 what always happens if great expenses are met by small 
 incomes ; first the savings are consumed, then comes 
 bankruptcy. 
 
 Its own new discoveries and progress have taken civilized 
 humanity by surprise. It has had no time to adapt itself to 
 its changed conditions of life. We know that our organs 
 acquire by exercise an ever greater functional capacity, that 
 they develop by their own activity, and can respond to nearly 
 every demand made upon them ; but only under one condition 
 that this occurs gradually, that time be allowed them. If 
 they are obliged to fulfil, without transition, a multiple of their 
 usual task, they soon give out entirely. No time was left to 
 our fathers. Between one day and the next, as it were, without 
 preparation, with murderous suddenness, they were obliged to 
 change the comfortable creeping gait of their former existence 
 for the stormy stride of modern life, and their heart and lungs 
 could not bear it. The strongest could keep up, no doubt, 
 and even now, at the most rapid pace, no longer lose their 
 breath, but the less vigorous soon fell out right and left, and 
 
 .fill to-day the ditches on the road of progress. 
 
 To speak without metaphor, statistics indicate in what measure 
 the sum of work of civilized humanity has increased during the 
 half-^enfury. It had not quite grown to this increased effort. 
 It grew fatigued and exhausted, and this fatigue and exhaus- 
 tion showed themselves in the first generation, under the form 
 
 v of acquired hysteria ; in the second, as hereditary hysteria. 
 
 7 The new aesthetic schools and thsir success are a form of 
 
 Lthis general hysteria ; but they are far from being the only one. 
 The malady of the period shows itself in yet many other 
 phenomena which can be measured and counted, and thus 
 are susceptible of being scientifically established. And these 
 positive and unambiguous symptoms of exhaustion are well 
 adapted to enlighten the ignorant, who might believe at first 
 sight that the specialist acts arbitrarily in tracing back fashion- 
 able tendencies in art and literature to states of fatigue in 
 civilized humanity. 
 
 It has become a commonplace to speak of the constant 
 increase of crime, madness and suicide. In 1840, in Prussia, 
 out of 100,000 persons of criminally'responsible age, there were 
 714 convictions ; in 1888, 1,102 (from a letter communicated 
 by the Prussian bureau of statistics). In 1865, in every 10,000 
 Europeans there were 63 suicides ; in 1883, 109 ; and since that 
 time the number has increased considerably. In the last 
 twenty years a number of new nervous diseases have been 
 discovered and named.* Let it not be believed that they 
 always existed, and were merely overlooked. If they had been 
 * See G. Andr, Les nouvelles maladies nerveuses. Paris, 1892.
 
 FIN-DE-SI&CLE 41 
 
 met with anywhere they would have been detected, for even 
 if the theories which prevailed in medicine at various periods 
 were erroneous, there have always been perspicacious and 
 attentive physicians who knew how to observe. If, then, the 
 new nervous diseases were not noticed, it is because they did 
 not formerly appear. And they are exclusively a consequence 
 of the present conditions of civilized life. Many affections of 
 the nervous system already bear a name which implies that 
 they are a direct consequence of certain influences of modern 
 civilization. The terms ' railway-spine ' and ' railway-brain,' 
 which the English and American pathologists have given 
 to certain states of these organs, show that they recognise 
 them as due partly to the effects of railway accidents, partly 
 to the constant vibrations undergone in railway travelling. 
 Again, the great increase in the consumption of narcotics 
 and stimulants, which has been shown in the figures above, 
 has its origin unquestionably in the exhausted systems with 
 which the age abounds. There is here a disastrous, vicious 
 circle of reciprocal effects. The drinker (and apparently the 
 smoker also) begets enfeebled children, hereditarily fatigued 
 or degenerated, and these drink and smoke in their turn, 
 because they are fatigued. These crave for a stimulus, for a 
 momentary, artificial invigoration, or an alleviation of their 
 painful excitability, and then, when they recognise that this 
 increases, in the long-run, their exhaustion as well as their r 
 excitability, they cannot, through weakness of will, resist those j 
 habits.* 
 
 Many observers assert that the present generation ages 
 much more rapidly than the preceding one. Sir James 
 Crichton-Browne points out this effect of modern circumstances 
 on contemporaries in his speech at the opening of tiie winter 
 term, 1891, before the medical faculty of the Victoria Uni- 
 versity.t From 1859 to 1863 there died in England, of heart- 
 disease, 92,181 persons ; from 1884 to 1888, 224,102. Nervous 
 complaints carried off from 1864 to 1868, 196,000 persons ; 
 from 1884 to 1888, 260,558. The difference of figures would 
 have been still more striking if Sir James had chosen a more 
 remote period for comparison with the present, for in 1865 the 
 high pressure under which the English worked was already 
 nearly as great as in 1885. The dead carried off by heart andl 
 nerve diseases are the victims of civilization. The heart and! 
 nervous system first break down under the overstrain. Sir! 
 James in his speech says further on : ' Men and women grow] 
 
 * Legrain, op. cit., p. 251 : ' Drinkers are "degenerates ";' and p. 258 (after 
 four reports of invalids which serve as a basis to the following summary): 
 C* Hence, at the base of all forms of alcoholism we find mental degeneracy.' J 
 f Revue scientijique^ year 1892 ; vol. xlix., p. 168 et seq.
 
 42 DEGENERATION 
 
 old before their time. Old ape encroaches upon the period of 
 vigorous manhood. . . . Deaths due exclusively to old age 
 are found reported now between the ages of forty-five and fifty- 
 five. . . .' Mr. Critchett (an eminent oculist) says : ' My own 
 experience, which extends now over a quarter of a century, 
 leads me to believe that men and women, in the present day, 
 seek the aid of spectacles at a less advanced period of life than 
 their ancestors. . . . Previously men had recourse to spectacles 
 at the age of fifty. The average age is now forty-five years.' 
 Dentists assert that teeth decay and fall out at an earlier age 
 than formerly. Dr. Lieving attests the same respecting the 
 hair, and assures us that precocious baldness is to be specially 
 observed * among persons of nervous temperaments and active 
 mind, but of weak general health.' Everyone who looks round 
 the circle of his friends and acquaintances will remark that 
 the hair begins to turn gray much sooner than in former 
 days. Most men and women show their first white hairs at 
 the beginning of the thirties, many of them at a very much 
 younger age. Formerly white hair was the accompaniment 
 of the fiftieth year. 
 
 All the symptoms enumerated are the consequences of states 
 of fatigue and exhaustion, and these, again, are the effect of con- 
 temporary civilization, of the vertigo and whirl of our frenzied 
 life, the vastly increased number of sense impressions and 
 organic reactions, and therefore of perceptions, judgments, and 
 motor impulses, which at present are forced into a given unity 
 of time. To this general cause of contemporary pathological 
 phenomena, one may be added special to France. By the 
 frightful loss of blood which the body of the French people 
 suffered during the twenty years of the Napoleonic wars, by 
 the violent moral upheavals to which they were subjected in 
 the great Revolution and during the imperial epic, they found 
 themselves exceedingly ill-prepared for the impact of the great 
 discoveries of the century, and sustained by these a more 
 violent shock than other nations more robust and more capable 
 of resistance. Upon this nation, nervously strained and pre- 
 destined to morbid derangement, there broke the awful cata- 
 strophe of 1870. It had, with a self-satisfaction which almost 
 attained to megalomania, believed itself the first nation in the 
 world ; it now saw itself suddenly humiliated and crushed. 
 All its convictions abruptly crumbled to pieces. Every single 
 Frenchman suffered reverses of fortune, lost some members of 
 his family, and felt himself personally robbed of his dearest 
 conceptions, nay, even of his honour. The whole people fell 
 into the condition of a man suddenly visited by a crushing blow 
 of destiny, in his fortune, his position, his family, his reputa- 
 tion, even in his self-respect. Thousands lost their reason. In
 
 FIN-DE-SIECLE 43 
 
 Paris a veritable epidemic of mental diseases was observed, for 
 which a special name was found la folie obsidionale, 'siege- 
 madness.' And even those who did not at once succumb to 
 mental derangement, suffered lasting injur)' to their nervous 
 system. This explains why hysteria and neurasthenia are much 
 more frequent in France, and appear under such a greater 
 variety of forms, and why they can be studied far more closely 
 in this country than anywhere else. But it explains, too, that" 
 it is precisely in France that the craziest fashions in art and 
 literature would necessarily arise, and that it is precisely there 
 that the morbid exhaustion of which we have spoken became 
 for the first time sufficiently distinct to consciousness to allow 
 a special name to be coined for it, namely, the designation of 
 fm-de-siecle. 
 
 The proposition which I set myself to prove may now -be 
 taken as demonstrated. In the civilized world there obviously 
 prevails a twilight mood which finds expression, amongst other 
 ways, in all sorts of odd aesthetic fashions. All these new 
 tendencies, realism or naturalism, ' decadentism,' neo-mysti- 
 cism, and their sub-varieties, are manifestations of degeneration 
 and hysteria, and identical with the mental stigmata which the 
 observations of clinicists have unquestionably established as 
 belonging to these. But both degeneration and hysteria are the 
 consequences of the excessive organic wear and tear suffered ' 
 by the nations through the immense demands on their activity, 
 and through the rank growth of large towns. 
 
 Led by this firmly linked chain of causes and effects, every- 
 one capable of logical thought will recognise that he commits a 
 serious error if, in the aesthetic schools which have sprung up 
 in the last few years, he sees the heralds of a new era. They 
 do not direct us to the future, but point backwards to times 
 past. Their word is no ecstatic prophecy, but the senseless 
 stammering and babbling of deranged minds, and what the 
 ignorant hold to be the outbursts of gushing, youthful vigour 
 and turbulent constructive impulses are really nothing but the 
 convulsions and spasms of exhaustion. 
 
 We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by certain 
 catch- words, frequently uttered in the works of these professed 
 innovators. They talk of socialism, of emancipation of the 
 mind, etc., and thereby create the outward show of being 
 deeply imbued with the thoughts and struggles of the times. 
 But this is empty sham. The-^ratch- words in vogue are 
 scattered through the works without internal sequence, and the 
 struggles of the times are merely painted on the outside. It is 
 a phenomenon observed in every kind of mania, that it receives 
 its special colouring from the degree of culture of the invalid, 
 and from the views prevailing at the times in which he lived.
 
 44 DEGENERATION 
 
 The Catholic who is a prey to megalomania fancies he is the 
 Pope ; the Jew, that he is the Messiah ; the German, that he 
 is the Emperor or a field-marshal ; the Frenchman, that he is 
 jthe President of the Republic. In the persecution-mania, the 
 invalid of former days complained of the wickedness and 
 (knavery of magicians and witches ; to-day he grumbles because 
 fais imaginary enemies send electric streams through his nerves, 
 and torment him with magnetism. The_.degencrates_o. to-day 
 chatter of Socialism and Darwinism, because these words, 
 and-, tn-~the best case, the ideas connected with these, are in 
 current use. These so-called socialist and freethinking works 
 of the degenerate as little advance the development of society 
 towards more equitable economic forms, and more rational 
 views of the relations among phenomena, as the complaints 
 and descriptions of an individual suffering from persecution- 
 mania, and who holds electricity responsible for his disagree- 
 able sensations, advance the knowledge of this force of nature. 
 Those obscure or superficially verbose works which pretend 
 to offer solutions for the serious questions of our times, or, at 
 least, to prepare the way thereto, are even impediments and 
 causes of delay, because they bewilder weak or unschooled 
 brains, suggest to them erroneous views, and make them either 
 more inaccessible to rational information or altogether closed 
 to it. 
 
 The reader is now placed at those points of view whence he 
 can see the new aesthetic tendencies in their true light and 
 their real shape. It will be the task of the following books 
 to demonstrate the pathological character of each one of 
 these tendencies, and to inquire what particular species of 
 degenerate delirium or hysterical psychological process they 
 are related to or identical with.
 
 BOOK II. 
 MYSTICISM. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM. 
 
 WE have already learnt to see in mysticism a principal 
 characteristic of degeneration. It follows so generally in the 
 train of the latter, that there is scarcely a case of degeneration 
 in which it does not appear. To cite authorities for this is 
 about as unnecessary as to adduce proof for the fact that in 
 typhus a rise in the temperature of the body is invariably ob- 
 served. I will therefore only repeat one remark of Legrain's :* 
 ' Mystical thoughts are to be laid to the account of the 
 insanity of the degenerate. There are two states in which 
 they are observed in epilepsy and in hysterical delirium.' 
 When Federoff,t who makes mention of religious delirium and 
 ecstasy as among the accompanying feaTuf es~ of arTattack of 
 hysteria, puts them down as a peculiarity of women, he commits 
 an error, since they are at least as common in male hysterical 
 and degenerate subjects as in female. 
 
 What is really to be understood by this somewhat vague 
 term ' mysticism ' ? The word describes a state of mind in 
 which the subject imagines that he perceives or divines un- 
 known and inexplicable relations amongst phenomena, discerns 
 in things hints at mysteries, and regards them as symbols, by 
 which a dark power seeks to unveil or, at least, to indicate all 
 sorts of marvels which he endeavours to guess, though generally 
 in vain. This condition of mind is always connected with 
 strong emotional excitement, which consciousness conceives 
 to be the result of its presentiments, although it is this ex- 
 citement, on the contrary, which is pre-existent, while the pre- 
 sentiments are caused by it and receive from it their peculiar 
 direction and colour. 
 
 * Legrain, op. ?., p. 266. 
 
 t Quoted by J. Roubinovitch, Hysttrie m&le et Dt'gt'nertscence* p. 18.
 
 46 DEGENERATION 
 
 All phenomena in the world and in life present themselves 
 in a different light to the mystic from what they do to the sane 
 man. The simplest word uttered before the former appears 
 to him an allusion to something mysteriously occult ; in the 
 most commonplace and natural movements he sees hidden 
 signs. All things have for him deep backgrounds ; far-reach- 
 ing shadows are thrown by them over adjacent tracts ; they 
 send out wide-spreading roots into remote substrata. Every 
 image that rises up in his mind points with mysterious silence, 
 though with significant look and finger, to other images distinct 
 or shadowy, and induces him to set up relations between 
 ideas, where other people recognise no connection. In con- 
 sequence of this peculiarity of his mind, the mystic lives as 
 if surrounded by sinister forms, from behind whose masks 
 enigmatic eyes look forth, and whom he contemplates with 
 constant terror, since he is never sure of recognising any 
 shapes among the disguises which press upon him. ' Things 
 are not what they seem ' is the characteristic expression 
 frequently heard from the mystic. In the history of a 
 ' degenerate ' in the clinics of Magnan* it is written : ' A child 
 asks drink of him at a public fountain. He finds this un- 
 natural. The child follows him. This fills him with astonish- 
 ment. Another time he sees a woman sitting on a curb-stone. 
 He asks himself what that could possibly mean.' In extreme 
 cases this morbid attitude amounts to hallucinations, which, 
 as a rule, affect the hearing; but it can also influence sight 
 and the other senses. When this is so, the mystic does not 
 confine himself to conjectures and guesses at mysteries in and 
 behind phenomena, but hears and sees as real, things which for 
 the sane man are non-existent. 
 
 Pathological observation cf the insane is content to describe 
 this mental condition, and to determine its occurrence in 
 the hysterical and degenerate. That, however, is not the end 
 of the matter. We also want to know in what manner the 
 degenerate or exhausted brain falls into mysticism. In order 
 to understand the subject, we must refer to some simple facts 
 in the growth of the mind/f- 
 
 Conscious intellection is activity of the gray surface of the 
 brain, a tissue consisting of countless nerve-cells united by 
 nerve-fibres. In this tissue the nerves, both of the external 
 bodily surface and of the internal organs, terminate. When 
 one of these nerves is excited (the nerve of vision by a ray of 
 
 * Legrain, op. '/., p. 200. 
 
 f The scientific psychologist will perhaps read with impatience expositions 
 with which he is so familiar; but they are, unfortunately, not superfluous 
 for a very numerous class of even highly educated persons, who have never 
 bad instruction in the laws of the operations of the brain.
 
 MYSTICISM 47 
 
 light, a nerve in the skin by contact, an organic nerve by 
 internal chemical action, etc.), it at once conveys the excite- 
 ment to the nerve -cell in the cerebral cortex in which it 
 debouches. This cell undergoes in consequence chemical 
 changes, which, in a healthy condition of the organism, are 
 in direct relation to the strength of the stimulus. The nerve- 
 cell, which is immediately affected by the stimulus conveyed 
 to it by the conducting nerve, propagates in its turn the 
 stimulus received to all the neighbouring cells with which it 
 is connected by fibrous processes. The disturbance spreads 
 itself on all sides, like a wave-circle that is caused by any 
 object thrown into water, and subsides gradually exactly as 
 does the wave more quickly or more slowly, with greater or 
 less diffusion, as the stimulus that caused it has been stronger 
 or weaker. 
 
 Every stimulus which reaches a place on the cerebral 
 cortex results in a rush of blood to that spot,* by means of 
 which nutriment is conveyed to it. The brain-cells decompose 
 these substances, and transmute the stored-up energy in them 
 into other forms of energy, namely, into ideas and motor im- 
 pulses. t How an idea is formed out of the decomposition of 
 tissues, how a chemical process is metamorphosed into con- 
 sciousness, nobody knows ; but the fact that conscious ideas 
 are connected with the process of decomposition of tissues in 
 the stimulated brain-cells is not a matter of doubt. 
 
 In addition to the fundamental property in the nerve-cells 
 of responding to a stimulus produced by chemical action, they 
 have also the capacity of preserving an image of the strength 
 and character of this stimulus. To put it popularly, the cell 
 is able to remember its impressions. If now a new, although 
 it may be a weaker, disturbance reach this cell, it rouses in it 
 an image of similar stimuli which had previously reached it, 
 and this memory-image strengthens the new stimulus, making 
 it more distinct and more intelligible to consciousness. If 
 the cell could not remember, consciousness would be ever 
 
 * Mosso's experiments on, and observations of, the exposed surface of the 
 brain during trepanning have quite established this fact. 
 
 f The experiments of Ferner, it is true, have led him to deny that a 
 stimulus which touches the cortex of the frontal lobes can result in move- 
 ment. The case, nevertheless, is not so simple as Ferrier sees it to be. A 
 portion of the energy which is set free by the peripheral stimulus in the cells 
 of the cortex of the frontal lobes certainly transmutes itself into a motor 
 impulse, even if the immediate stimulation of the anterior brain releases no 
 muscular contractions. But this is not the place to defend this point against 
 Ferrier. 
 
 J A. Herzen is the author of the hypothesis that consciousness is con- 
 nected with the destruction of organic connections in the brain-cells, and the 
 restoration of this connection with rest, sleep, and unconsciousness. All we 
 know of the chemical composition of the secretions in sleeping and waking 
 points to the correctness of This hypothesis.
 
 48 DEGENERATION 
 
 incapable of interpreting its impressions, and could never suc- 
 ceed in attaining to a presentation of the outer world. Particular 
 direct stimuli would certainly be perceived, but they would 
 remain without connection or import, since they are by them- 
 selves, and without the assistance of earlier impressions, in- 
 adequate to lead to knowledge. Memory is therefore the first 
 condition of normal brain activity. 
 
 The stimulus which reaches a brain-cell gives rise, as we 
 have seen, to an expansion of this stimulus to the neighbour- 
 ing cells, to a wave of stimulus proceeding in all directions. 
 And since every stimulus is connected with the rise of con- 
 scious presentations, it proves that every stimulus calls a large 
 number of presentations into consciousness, and not only such 
 presentations as are related to the immediate external cause 
 of the stimulation perceived, but also such as are only aroused 
 by the cells that elaborate them happening to lie in the vicinity 
 of that cell, or group of cells, which the external stimulus has 
 immediately reached. The wave of stimulus, like every other 
 wave-motion, is strongest at its inception ; it subsides in direct 
 ratio to the widening of its circle, till at last it vanishes into 
 the imperceptible. Corresponding to this, the presentations, 
 having their seat in cells which are in the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood of those first reached by the stimulus, are the most 
 lively, while those arising from the more distant cells are some- 
 what less distinct, and this distinctness continues to decrease 
 until consciousness can no longer perceive them until they, 
 as science expresses it, sink beneath the threshold of conscious- 
 ness. Each particular stimulus arouses, therefore, not only 
 in the cell to which it was directly led, but also in countless 
 other contiguous and connected cells, the activity which is 
 bound up with presentation. Thus arise simultaneously, or, 
 more accurately, following each other in an immeasurably 
 short interval of time, thousands of impressions of regularly 
 decreasing distinctness ; and since unnumbered thousands of 
 external and internal organic stimuli are carried to the brain, 
 so continually thousands of stimulus- waves are coursing 
 through it, crossing and intersecting each other with the 
 greatest diversity, and in their course arousing millions of 
 emerging, waning, and vanishing impressions. It is this that 
 Goethe means when he depicts in such splendid language how 
 
 * ... ein Tritt tausend Faden regt, 
 Die Schifflein heriiber, hiniiber schiessen, 
 Die Faden ungesehen fliessen, 
 Ein Schlag tausend Verbindungen sch'agt'* 
 
 * ' One tread moves a thousand threads, 
 The shuttles dart to and fro, 
 The threads flow on invisible, 
 One stroke sets up a thousand ties.'
 
 MYSTICISM 49 
 
 Now, memory 4s a property not only of the nerve-cell, but 
 also or~tfre~~~iierve-fibre, which is only a modification of the 
 -cell. The fibre has a recollection of the. stimulus which it 
 conveyed, in the same way as the cell has of that which it has 
 transformed into presentation and motion. A stimulus will be 
 more easily conducted by a fibre which has already conveyed 
 it, than by one which propagates it for the first time from one 
 cell to another. Every stimulus which reaches a cell will take 
 the line of least resistance, and this will be set out for it along 
 those nerve-tracks which it has already traversed. Thus a 
 definite path is formed for the course of a stimulus-wave, a 
 customary line of march ; it is always the same nerve-cells 
 which exchange mutually their stimulus-waves. Presentation 
 always awakens the same resulting presentations, and always 
 appears in consciousness accompanied by them. This pro- 
 cedure is called the association of ideas. 
 
 It is neither volition nor accident that determines to which 
 other cells a disturbed cell habitually communicates its stimulus, 
 which accompanying impressions an aroused presentation draws 
 with it into consciousness. On the contrary, the linking of 
 presentations is dependent upon laws which Wundt especially 
 has well formulated. 
 
 Those who have not been born blind and deaf (like the 
 unfortunate Laura Bridgman, cited by all ps3-chologists) will 
 never be influenced by one external stimulus only, but invariably 
 by many stimuli at once. Every single phenomenon of the 
 outer world has, as a rule, not only one quality, but many ; 
 and since that which we call a quality is the assumed cause 
 of a definite sensation, it results that phenomena appeal at 
 once to several senses, are simultaneously seen, heard, felt, 
 and moreover are seen in different degrees of light and colour, 
 heard in various nuances of timbre, etc. The few phenomena 
 which possess only one quality and arouse therefore only one 
 sense, e.g., thunder, which is only heard, although with varying 
 intensity, occur nevertheless in conjunction with other pheno- 
 mena, such as, to keep to thunder, with a clouded sky, lightning 
 and rain. Our brains are therefore accustomed to receive at 
 once from every phenomenon several stimuli, which proceed 
 partly from the- many qualities of the phenomenon itself, and 
 partly from the phenomena usually accompanying it. Now, it 
 is sufficient that only one of these stimuli should reach the 
 brain, in order to call into life, in virtue of the habitual associa- 
 tion of the memory-images, the remaining stimuli of the same 
 group as well. Simultaneity of impressions is therefore a cause 
 of the association of ideas. 
 
 One and the same quality belongs to many phenomena. 
 There is a whole series of things which are blue, round, and 
 
 4
 
 50 DEGENERATION 
 
 smooth. The possession of a common quality is a condition 
 of similarity, which is greater in proportion to the number of 
 common qualities. Every single quality, however, belongs 
 to a habitually associated group of qualities, and can by the 
 mechanism of simultaneity arouse the memory-image of this 
 grpup. In consequence of^ their similarity, therefore, the 
 memory-images can be aroused of all those groups, which 
 resemble each other in some quality. The colour blue is a 
 quality which belongs equally to the cheerful sky, the corn- 
 ilower, the sea, certain eyes, and many military uniforms. 
 The perception of blue will awaken the memory of some or 
 many blue things which are only related through their common 
 colour. Similarity is therefore another cause of the association 
 of ideas. 
 
 It is a distinctive characteristic of the brain-cell to elaborate 
 a f the same time both a presentation and its opposite. It is 
 probable that what we perceive as its opposite is generally, in 
 its original and simplest form, only the consciousness of the 
 cessation of a certain presentation. As the fatigue of the 
 optic nerve by a colour arouses the sensation of the compli- 
 mentary colour, so, on the exhaustion of a brain-cell through 
 the elaboration of a presentation, the contrary presentation 
 appears in consciousness. Now, whether this interpretation 
 be right or not, the fact itself is established through the 
 ' contradictory double meaning of primitive roots/ discovered 
 by K. Abel.* Contrast is the third cause of the association of 
 ideas. 
 
 Many phenomena present themselves in the same place 
 close to, or after, one another; and we associate there, presenta- 
 tion of the particular place with those objects, to which it is 
 used to serve as a frame. Simultaneity, similarity, contrast, 
 and occurrence in the same place (contiguity), are thus, accord- 
 ing to Wundt, the four conditions under which phenomena 
 \vill be connected in our consciousness through the association 
 of ideas. To these James Sullyf believes yet a fifth should be 
 added : presentations which are rooted in the same emotion. 
 Nevertheless all the examples cited by the distinguished English 
 psychologist demonstrate without effort the action of one or 
 more of Wundt's laws. 
 
 In order that an organism should maintain itself, it must 
 be in a position to make use of natural resources, and protect 
 itself from adverse conditions of every sort. It can accomplish 
 this only if it possess a knowledge of these adverse conditions, 
 and of such natural resources as it can use; and it can do this 
 better and more surely the more complete this knowledge is. 
 
 * Karl Abel, Ueber den Gegensinn der Urworte. Leipzig, 1884. 
 f James Sully, Illusions. London. 1881.
 
 MYSTICISM 51 
 
 In the more highly differentiated organism it devolves upon 
 the brain and nervous system to acquire knowledge of the 
 outer world, and to turn that knowledge to the advantage of 
 the organism. Memory makes it possible for the brain to 
 perform its task, and the mechanism by which memory is 
 made to serve the purport of knowledge is the association of 
 ideas. For it is clear that a brain, in which a single perception 
 awakens through the operation of the association of ideas a 
 whole train of connected representations, will recognise, con- 
 ceive and judge far more rapidly than one in which no associa- 
 tion of ideas obtains, and which therefore would form only such 
 concepts as had for their content direct sense-perceptions and 
 such representations as originated in those cells which, by the 
 accident of their contiguity, happened to lie in the circuit of a 
 stimulus-wave. For the brain which works with association 
 of ideas, the perception of a ray of light, of a tone, is sufficient, 
 in order instantly to produce the presentation of the object from 
 which the sensation proceeds, as well as of its relations in time 
 and space, to group these presentations as concepts, and from 
 these concepts to arrive at a judgment. To the brain with- 
 out association of ideas that perception would only convey 
 the presentation of having something bright or sonant in 
 front of it. In addition, presentations would be aroused 
 which had nothing in common with this bright or sonant 
 something; it could form.no image of the exciter of the sense, 
 but it would first have to receive a train of further impressions 
 from several or all of the senses, in order to learn to recognise 
 the various properties of the object, of which at first only a 
 tone or a colour was perceived, and to unite them in a single 
 presentation. Even then the brain would only know in what 
 the object consisted, i.e., what it had in front of it, but not 
 how the object stood in relation to other things, where and 
 when it had already been perceived, and by what phenomena 
 it was accompanied, etc. Knowledge of objects thus acquired 
 would be wholly unadapted to the formation of a right judg- 
 ment. It can now be seen what a great advantage was given 
 to the organism in the struggle for existence by the association 
 of ideas, and what immense progress in the development of 
 the brain and its activity the acquirement of it signified. 
 
 But this is only true with a limitation. The association of 
 ideas as such does not do more to lighten the task of the brain 
 in apprehending and in judging than does the uprising throng 
 of memory-images in the neighbourhood of the excited centre. 
 The presentations, which the association of ideas calls into 
 consciousness, stand, it is true, in somewhat closer connection 
 with the phenomenon which has sent a stimulus to the brain, 
 and by the latter has been perceived, than do those occurring
 
 ja DEGENERATION 
 
 in the geometrical circuit of the stimulus-wave ; but even this 
 connection is so slight, that it offers no efficient help in the 
 interpretation of the phenomenon. We must not forget that 
 properly all our perceptions, ideas, and conceptions are con- 
 nected more or less closely through the association of ideas. 
 As in the example cited above the sensation of blue arouses 
 the ideas of the sky, the sea, a blue eye, a uniform, etc., so will 
 each of these ideas arouse in its turn, according to Wundt's 
 law, ideas associated with them. The sky will arouse the idea 
 of stars, clouds and rain ; the sea, that of ships, voyages, 
 foreign lands, fishes, pearls, etc. ; blue eyes, that of a girl's 
 face, of love and all its emotions ; in short, this one sensation, 
 through the mechanism of the association of ideas, can arouse 
 pretty well almost all the conceptions which we have ever at 
 any time formed, and the blue object which we have in fact 
 before our eyes and perceive, will, through this crowd of ideas 
 which are not directly related to it, be neither interpreted nor 
 explained. 
 
 In order, however, that the association of ideas may fulfil its 
 functions in the operations of the brain, and prove itself a 
 useful acquisition to the organism, one thing more must be 
 added, namely, attention. This it is which brings order into 
 the chaos of representations awakened by the association of 
 ideas, and makes them subserve the purposes of cognition and 
 judgment. 
 
 What is attention ? Th. Ribot* defines this attribute as 
 'a spontaneous or an artificial adaptation of the individual to 
 a predominating thought .' (I translate this definition freely 
 because too long an explanation would be necessary to make 
 the uninitiated comprehend the expressions made use of by 
 Ribot.) In other words, attention is the faculty of the brain 
 to siij^fls<i_jr>ng_part nf rh^_jTjgmorv-miaorp..q \vhirh, at each 
 excitation of a cell or group of cells, have arisen in conscious- 
 ness, by way either of association or of stimulus-wave ; and to 
 maintain another part, namely, only those memory-images 
 which relate to the exciting cause, i.e., to the object just 
 perceived. 
 
 Who makes this sdc^tipji^nTon^__the_jTiernory- images ? 
 The stimulus itself, which rouses the brain-cefts~Tnto activity. 
 Naturally those cells would be the most strongly excited which 
 are directly connected with the afferent nerves.. Somewhat 
 weaker is the excitement of the cells to which the cell first 
 excited sends its' impulse by way of the customary nerve 
 channels ; still weaker the excitement of those cells which, by 
 the same mechanism, receive their stimulus from the secondarily 
 excited cell. That idea will be the most powerful, therefore, 
 * Th. Ribot, Psychologic de V Attention. Paris, 1889.
 
 MYSTICISM ^3 
 
 which is awakened directly by the perception itself; somewhat 
 weaker that which is aroused by the first impression through 
 association of ideas ; weaker still that which the association in 
 its turn involves. We know further that a phenomenon never 
 produces a single stimulus, but several at once. If, for example, 
 we see a man before us, we do not merely perceive a single point 
 in him, but a larger or smaller portion of his exterior, i.e., a large 
 number of differently coloured and differently illuminated 
 points ; perhaps we hear him as well, possibly touch him, and, 
 at all events, perceive besides him .somewhat of his environ- 
 ment, of his spacial relations. Thus, there arise in our brain 
 quite a number of centres of stimulation, operating simul- 
 taneously in the manner described above. There awakes in con- 
 sciousness a series of primary presentations, which are stronger, 
 i.e., clearer, than the associated or consequent representations, 
 namely, just those presentations which the man standing before 
 us has himself aroused. They are like the brightest light-spots 
 in the midst of others less brilliant. These brightest light-spots 
 necessarily predominate in consciousness over the lesser ones. 
 They fill the consciousness, which combines them in a judgment. 
 For what we call a judgment is, in the last resort, nothing else 
 than a simultaneous lighting up of a number of presentations 
 in consciousness, which we in truth only bring into relation with 
 each other because we ourselves became Conscious of them at 
 one and the same moment. The ascendency which the clearer 
 presentations acquire over the more obscure, the primary pre- 
 sentations over derived representations, in consciousness, 
 enables them, with the help of the will, to influence for a time 
 the whole brain-activity to their own advantage, viz., to suppress 
 the weaker, i.e., the derived, representations ; to combat those 
 which cannot be made to agree with them ; to reinforce, to draw 
 into their circuit of stimulation, or simply to arouse, others, 
 through which they themselves are reinforced and secure some 
 duration in the midst of the constant emergence and disap- 
 pearance of representations in their pursuit of each other. I 
 myself conceive the interference of the will in this struggle 
 for life amongst representations as giving motor impulses (even 
 if unconsciously) to the muscles of the cerebral arteries. By 
 this means the bloodvessels are dilated or contracted as re- 
 quired,* and the consequent supply of blood becomes more or 
 
 * It is possible that an active expansion of the bloodvessels does not 
 take place, but only a contraction. It has been lately denied tlfet there are any 
 nerves of vascular dilatation (inter alia by Dr. Morar, La Semaine mt'dicale, 
 1892, p. 112). But the effect may be the same in both cases. For throug.'i 
 the contraction of the vessels in a single brain-circuit, the dislodged blood 
 would be driven to other portions of the brain, and these would experience % 
 greater access of blood, just as if their vessels were actively dilated.
 
 54 DEGENERATION 
 
 less copious.* The cells which receive no blood must suspend 
 their action ; those which receive a larger supply can, on the 
 contrary, operate more powerfully. The will which regulates 
 the distribution of blood, when incited by a group of presenta- 
 tions temporarily predominating, thus resembles a servant who 
 is constantly occupied in a room in carrying out the behests of 
 his master : to light the gas in one place, in another to turn it 
 up higher, in another to turn it off partly or wholly, so that at 
 one moment this, and at another that, corner of the room 
 becomes bright, dim, or dark. The preponderance of a group 
 of presentations allows them during their period of power to 
 bring into their service, not only the brain-cells, but the whole 
 organism besides ; and not only to fortify themselves through 
 the representations which they arouse by way of association, but 
 also to seek certain new sense-impressions, and repress others, 
 in order, on the one hand, to obtain new excitations favourable 
 to their persistence new original perceptions and on the 
 other hand, through the exclusion of the rest, to ward ff such 
 excitations as are adverse to their persistence. 
 
 For instance, I see in the street a passer-by who for some 
 reason arouses my attention. The attention immediately sup- 
 presses all other presentations which, an instant before, were 
 in my consciousness, and permits those only to remain which 
 refer to the passer-by. In order to intensiify these presenta- 
 tions I look after him, i.e., the ciliary and ocular muscles, then 
 the muscles of the neck, perhaps also the muscles of the 
 body and of the legs, receive motor impulses, which serve 
 the purpose only of keeping up continually new sense-impres- 
 sions of the object of my attention, by means of which the pre- 
 sentations of him are continuously strengthened and multiplied. 
 I do not notice other persons who for the time come into my 
 field of vision, I disregard the sounds which meet my ears, if 
 my attention is strong enough I do not perhaps even hear 
 them ; but I should at once hear them if they proceeded 
 from the particular passer-by, or if they had any reference 
 to him. 
 
 This is the * adaptation of the whole organism to a pre- 
 
 * When I wrote these words I was under the impression that I was the 
 sole originator of the physiological theory of attention therein set forth. 
 Since the appearance of this book, however, I have read Alfred Lehmann's 
 work, Die Hypnose und die damit verwandten normalen Zustande, Leipzig, 
 1890, and have jjiere (pp. 27 et seg.) found my theory in almost identical words. 
 Lehmann, then, published it two years before I did, which fact I here duly 
 acknowledge. That we arrived at this conclusion independently of each 
 other would testify that the hypothesis of vaso-motor reflex action is really 
 explanatory. Wundt (Hypnotismus und Suggestion, Leipzig, 1892, pp. 27-30), 
 it is true, criticises Lehmann's work, but he seems to agree with this hypo- 
 thesis which is also mine or, at least, raises no objection to it
 
 MYSTICISM 55 
 
 dominant idea ' of which Ribot speaks. This it is which gives 
 us exact knowledge of the external world. Without it that 
 knowledge would be much more difficult of attainment, and 
 would remain much more incomplete. This adaptation will 
 continue until the cells, which are the bearers of the pre- 
 dominating presentations, become fatigued. They will then 
 be compelled to surrender their supremacy to other groups of 
 cells, whereupon the latter will obtain the power to adapt the 
 organism to their purposes. 
 
 Thus we see it is only through attention that the faculty of 
 association becomes a property advantageous to the organism, 
 and attention is nothing but the faculty of the will to determine 
 the emergence, degree of clearness, duration and extinction of 
 presentations in consciousness. The stronger the will, so much 
 the more completely can we adapt the whole organism to a 
 given presentation, so much the more can we obtain sense 
 impressions which serve to enhance this presentation, so much 
 the more can we by association induce memory-images, which 
 complete and rectify the presentation, so much the more 
 definitely can we suppress the presentations which disturb it or 
 are foreign to it ; in a word, so much the more exhaustive and 
 correct will our knowledge be of phenomena and their true 
 connection. 
 
 Culture and command over the powers of nature are solelyT 
 the result of attention ; all errors, all superstition, the conse- 
 quence of defective attention. False ideas of the connection 
 between phenomena arise through defective observation of 
 them, and will be rectified by a more exact observation. Now, 
 to observe means nothing else than to convey deliberately 
 determined sense-impressions to the brain, and thereby raise a 
 group of presentations to such clearness and intensity that it 
 can acquire preponderance in consciousness, arouse through 
 association its allied memory-images, and suppress such as are 
 incompatible with itself. Observation, which lies at the root 
 of all progress, is thus the adaptation through attention of the 
 sense-organs and their centres of perception to a presentation 
 or group of presentations predominating in consciousness. 
 
 A state of attention allows no obscurity to persist in conscious- 
 ness. For either the will strengthens ev<r.ry rising presentation 
 to full clearness and distinctness, or, if it cannot do this, it 
 extinguishes the idea completely. The consciousness of a 
 healthy, strong-minded, and consequently attentive man, 
 resembles a room in the full light of day, in which the eye sees 
 all objects distinctly, in which all outlines are sharp, and 
 wherein no indefinite shadows are floating. 
 
 Attention, therefore, presupposes strength of will, and this, 
 again, is the property only of a normally constituted and un-
 
 
 56 DEGENERATION 
 
 exhausted brain. In the degenerate, whose brain and nervous 
 system are characterized by hereditary malformations or ir- 
 regularities; in the hysterical, whom we have learnt to regard 
 as victims of exhaustion, the will is entirely lacking, is possessed 
 only in a small degree. The consequence of weakness or want 
 of will is incapacity of attention. Alexander Starr* published 
 twenty-three cases of lesions, or diseases of the convolutions of 
 the brain, in which ' it was impossible for the patients to fix 
 their attention '; and Ribotf remarks : ' A man who is tired 
 after a long walk, a convalescent who has undergone a severe 
 illness in a word, all weakened persons are incapable of atten- 
 tion. . . . Inability to be attentive accompanies all forms of 
 exhaustion.' 
 
 Untended and unrestrained by attention, the brain activity 
 of the degenerate and hysterical is capricious, and without aim 
 or purpose. Through the unrestricted play of association re- 
 presentations are called into consciousness, and are free to run 
 riot there. They are aroused and extinguished automatically ; 
 and the will does not interfere to strengthen or to suppress 
 them. Representations mutually alien or mutually exclusive 
 appear continuously. The fact that they are retained in con- 
 sciousness simultaneously, and at about the same intensity, 
 combines them (in conformity with the laws of conscious 
 activity) into a thought which is necessarily absurd, and cannot 
 express the true relations of phenomena. 
 
 Weakness or want of attention, produces, then, in the first 
 place, falso judgments respecting fhe objective universe, 
 respecting the qualities of things and their relations to each 
 other. Consciousness acquires a distorted and blurred view of 
 the external world. And there follows a further consequence. 
 The chaotic course of stimuli along the channels of association 
 and of the adjacent structures arouses the activity both of 
 contiguous, of further, and of furthest removed groups of cells, 
 which, left to themselves, act only so long and with such 
 varying intensity as is proportionate to the intensity of the 
 stimulus which has reached them. Clear, obscure, and yet 
 obscurer representations rise in consciousness, which, after a 
 time, disappear again, without having attained to greater dis- 
 tinctness than they had when first appearing. The clear repre- 
 sentations produce a thought, but such a one as cannot for a 
 moment become firmer or clearer, because the definite repre- 
 sentations of which it is composed are mingled with others 
 which consciousness perceives indistinctly, or scarcely perceives 
 at all. Such obscure ideas cross the threshold of even a healthy 
 person's consciousness ; but in that case attention intervenes 
 
 * Srain, January, 1886. quoted by Ribot, Psychologie de ^Attention, p. 68. 
 f Riboc, op. .-//., pp. 106 and 1 19.
 
 MYSTICISM 57 
 
 at once, to bring them -fully to the light, or entirely to suppress 
 them. These synchronous over-tones of every thought cannot, 
 therefore, blur the tonic note. The emergent thought-phantoms 
 can acquire no influence over the thought-procedure because 
 attention either lightens up their faces, or banishes them back 
 to their under-world of the Unconscious. It is otherwise with 
 the degenerate and debilitated, who suffer from weakness of 
 will and defective attention. The faint, scarcely recognisable, 
 liminal presentations are perceived at the same time as those 
 that are well lit and centrally focussed. The judgment grows 
 drifting and nebulous like floating fog in the morning wind. 
 Consciousness, aware of the spectrally transparent shapes, 
 seeks in vain to grasp them, and interprets them without 
 confidence, as when one fancies in a cloud resemblances to 
 creatures or things. Whoever has sought on a dark night 
 to discern phenomena on a distant horizon can form an idea 
 of the picture which the world of thought presents to the 
 mind of an asthenic. Lo there ! a dark mass ! What is it ? 
 A tree ? A hayrick ? A robber ? A beast of prey ? Ought 
 one to fly ? Ought one to attack it ? The incapacity to 
 recognise the object, more guessed at than perceived, fills 
 him with uneasiness and anxiety. This is just the condition 
 of the mind of an asthenic in the presence of his liminal 
 presentations. He believes he sees in them a hundred things 
 at once, and he brings all the forms that he seems to discern 
 into connection with the principal presentation which has 
 aroused them. He has, however, a strong feeling that this 
 connection is incomprehensible and inexplicable. He combines 
 presentations into a thought which is in contradiction to all 
 experience, but which he must look upon as equal in validity to 
 all his remaining thoughts and opinions, because it originated in 
 the same way. And even if he wishes to make clear to himself 
 what is really the content of his judgment, and of what par- 
 ticular presentations it is composed, he observes that these pre- 
 sentations are, as a matter of fact, nothing but unrecognisable 
 adumbrations of presentations, to which he vainly seeks to give 
 a name. Now, this state of mind, in which a man is straining 
 to see, thinks he sees, but does not see in which a man is forced 
 to construct thoughts out of presentations which befool and 
 mock consciousness like will-o'-the-wisps or marsh vapours 
 in which a man fancies that he perceives inexplicable relations 
 between distinct phenomena and ambiguous formless shadows 
 this is the condition of mind that is called Mysticism. 
 
 From the shadowy thinking of the mystic, springs his washed- 
 out style of expression. Every word, even the most abstract, 
 connotes a concrete presentation or a concept, which, inasmuch 
 as it is formed out cf the common attributes of different concrete
 
 58 DEGENERATION 
 
 presentations, betrays its concrete origin. Language has no 
 word for that which one believes he sees as through a mist, with- 
 out recognisable form. The mystic, however, is conscious of 
 ghostly presentations of this sort without shape or other qualities, 
 and in order to express them he must either use recognised 
 words, to which he gives a meaning wholly different from that 
 which is generally current, or else, feeling the inadequacy of 
 the fund of language created by those of sound mind, he forges 
 for himself special words which, to a stranger, are generally 
 incomprehensible, and the cloudy, chaotic sense of which is 
 intelligible only to himself; or, finally, he embodies the several 
 meanings which he gives to his shapeless representations in as 
 many words, and then succeeds in achieving those bewildering 
 juxtapositions of what is mutually exclusive, those expressions 
 which can in no way be rationally made to harmonize, but which 
 are so typical of the mystic. He speaks, as did the German 
 mystics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the ' cold 
 fire ' of hell, and of the ' dark light ' of Satan ; or, he says, like the 
 degenerate in the twenty-eighth pathological case of Legrain,* 
 ' that God appeared to him in the form of luminous shadows ;' 
 or he remarks, as did another of Legrain's patients :f ' You 
 have given me an immutable evening' (soiree immtuible).$ 
 
 The healthy reader or listener who has confidence in his 
 own judgment, and tests with lucidity and self-dependence, 
 naturally discerns at once that these mystical expressions are 
 senseless, and do but reflect the mystic's confused manner of 
 thinking. The majority of mankind, however, have neither 
 self-confidence nor the faculty of judging, and cannot throw off 
 the natural inclination to connect some meaning with every 
 word. And since the words of the mystic have no definite 
 meaning in themselves, or in their juxtaposition, a certain 
 meaning is arbitrarily imputed to them, is mysteriously conjured 
 into them. The effect of the mystical method of expression on 
 
 * Legrain, op. tit., p. 177. \ Ibid., p. 156. 
 
 J In the chapter which treats of French Neomystics, I shall give a cluster 
 of such disconnected and mutually exclusive expressions, which are quite 
 parallel with the instances cited by Legrain, of the manner of speech among 
 those acknowledged to be of weak mind. In this place only one passage 
 may be repeated from the V to E. M. de Vogue\ Le Roman Russe, Paris, 1888, 
 in which this mystical author, unconsciously and involuntarily, characterizes 
 admirably the shadowiness and emptiness of mystic diction, while praising 
 it as something superior. 'One trait,' he says (p. 215), 'they' (certain 
 Russian authors) ' have in common, viz., the art of awakening series of feel- 
 ings and thoughts by a line, a word, by endless re-echoings \rsontiatuu\. . . . 
 The words you read on this paper appear to be written, not in length, but ifl 
 depth. They leave behind them a train of faint reverberations, which are 
 gradually lost, no one knows where.' And p. 227 : 'They see men and 
 things in the gray light of earliest dawn. The weakly indicated outlines end 
 in a confused and clouded " perhaps." . * .'
 
 MYSTICISM 59 
 
 people who allow themselves to be bewildered is for this reason 
 a very strong one. It gives them food for thought, as they call 
 it ; that is to say, it allows them to give way to all kinds of 
 dream-fancies, which is very much easier, n.nd therefore more 
 agreeable, than the toil of reflecting on firmly outlined pre- 
 sentations and thoughts admitting of no evasions and ex- 
 travagances.* It transports their minds to the same condition 
 of mental activity determined by unbridled association of 
 ideas that is peculiar to the mystic; it awakens in them also 
 his ambiguous, unutterable presentations, and makes them 
 divine the strangest and most impossible relations of things 
 to each other. All the weak-headed appear therefore ' deep ' 
 to the mystic, and this designation has, from the constant 
 use made of it by them, become almost an insult. Only 
 very strong minds are really deep, such as can keep the pro- 
 cesses of thought under the discipline of an extraordinarily 
 powerful attention. Such minds are in a position to exploit 
 the association of ideas in the best possible way, to impart the 
 greatest sharpness and clearness to all representations which 
 through them are called into consciousness ; to suppress them 
 firmly and rapidly if they are not compatible with the rest ; to 
 procure new sense-impressions, if these are necessary in order 
 to make the presentations and judgments predominant at the 
 time in their minds still more vivid and distinct ; they gain in this 
 way an incomparably clear picture of the world, and discover 
 true relations among phenomena which, to a weaker attention, 
 must always remain hidden. This true depth of strong select 
 minds is wholly luminous. It scares shadows put of hidden 
 corners, and fills abysses with radiant light. The mystic's 
 pseudo-depth, on the contrary, is all obscurity. It causes 
 things to appear deep by the same means as darkness, viz., by 
 reason of its rendering their outlines imperceptible. The mystic 
 obliterates the firm outlines of phenomena ; he spreads a veil 
 over them, and conceals them in blue vapour. He troubles 
 what is clear, and makes the transparent opaque, as does the 
 cuttle-fish the waters of the ocean. He, therefore, who sees 
 the world through the eyes of a mystic, gazes into a black 
 heaving mass, in which he can always find what he desires, 
 although, and just because, he actually perceives nothing at 
 all. To the weak-headed everything which is clearly, firmly 
 defined, and which, therefore, has strictly but one meaning, is 
 
 * 'It is certain that the Beautiful never has such charms for us as when 
 we read it attentively in a language which we only half understand. It is 
 the amb'guity, the uncertainty, i.e., the pliability of words, which is one of 
 their greatest advantages, and renders it possible to make an exact [!] use 
 of them.' Joubert, quoted by Charles Morice, La Litterature de toitt-H- 
 Cheure. Paris, 1889, p. 171.
 
 60 DEGENERATION 
 
 flat. To them everything is profound which has no meaning, 
 and which, therefore, allows them to apply what meaning they 
 please. To them mathematical analysis is flat ; theology and 
 metaphysics, deep. The study of Roman law is flat ; the 
 dream-book and the prophecies of Nostradamus are deep. 
 The forms assumed by pouring molten lead on New Year's Eve 
 are the true symbols of their depth. 
 
 The content of mystic thought is determined by the individual 
 character and level of culture possessed by each degenerate 
 and hysteric. For we should never forget that the morbidly- 
 affected or exhausted brain is only the soil which receives the 
 seed sown by nurture, education, impressions and experience 
 of life, etc. The seed-grains do not originate in the soil ; they 
 only receive in and through it their special irregularities of 
 development, their deformities, and crazy offshoots. The 
 naturalist who loses the faculty of attention becomes the 
 so-called ' Natural Philosopher,' or the discoverer of a fourth 
 dimension in space, like the unfortunate Zollner. A rough, 
 ignorant person from the low ranks of the people falls into the 
 wildest superstition. The mystic, nurtured in religion and 
 nourished with dogma, refers his shadowy impressions to his 
 beliefs, and interprets them as revelations of the nature of the 
 Trinity, or of the condition of existence before birth or after 
 death. The technologist who has fallen into mysticism worries 
 over impossible inventions, believes himself to be on the track 
 of the solution of the problem of a perpetuum mobile, devises 
 communication between earth and stars, shafts to the glowing- 
 core of the earth, and what not. The astronomer becomes an 
 astrologist, the chemist an alchemist and a seeker after the 
 philosopher's stone ; the mathematician labours to square the 
 circle, or to invent a system in which the notion of progress is 
 expressed by a process of integration, the war of 1870 by an 
 equation, and so on. 
 
 As was set forth above, the cerebral cortex receives its stimuli, 
 not only from the external nerves, but also from the interior 
 of the organism, from the nerves of separate organs, and the 
 nerve-centres of the spinal cord and the sympathetic system. 
 Every excitement in these centres affects the brain-cells, and 
 arouses in them more or less distinct presentations, which are 
 necessarily related to the activity of the centres from which 
 the stimulus proceeds. A few examples will make this clear, 
 even to the uninitiated. If the organism feels the need of 
 nourishment, and we are hungry, we shall not only be generally 
 conscious of an indeterminate desire for food, but there will 
 also arise in our minds definite representations of dishes, of 
 served repasts, and of all the accessories of eating. If we, from 
 some cause, maybe an affection of the heart or lungs, cannot
 
 MYSTICISM 61 
 
 breathe freely, \ve have not only a hunger for air, but also 
 accompanying ideas ot an uneasy nature, presentiments of 
 unknown dangers, melancholy memories, etc., i.e., representa- 
 tions of circumstances which tend to deprive us of breath or 
 affect us oppressively. During sleep also organic stimuli exert 
 this influence on the cerebral cortex, and to them we owe the 
 so-called somatic dreams (Leibestrdume), i.e., dream-images 
 about the functioning of any organs which happen not to be 
 in a normal condition. 
 
 Now, it is known thai: certain organic nerve-centres, the 
 sexual centres, namely, in the spinal cord and the medulla 
 oblongata, are frequently malformed, or morbidly irritated 
 among the degenerate. The stimuli proceeding from them 
 therefore awaken, in the brain of patients of this sort, presenta- 
 tions which are more or less remotely connected with the 
 sexual activity. In the consciousness, therefore, of such a 
 subject there always exist, among the other presentations which 
 are aroused by the varying stimuli of the external world, presen- 
 tations of a sexual character, erotic thoughts being associated 
 with every impression of beings and things. In this way he 
 attains to a state of mind in which he divines mysterious rela- 
 tions among all possible objective phenomena, e.g., a railway- 
 train, the title of his newspaper, a piano on the one hand, and 
 woman on the other ; and feels emotions of an erotic nature at 
 sights, words, odours, which would produce no such impres- 
 sion on the mind of a sound person, emotions which he 
 refers to unknown qualities in those sights, words, etc. Hence 
 it comes that in most cases mysticism distinctly takes on a 
 decidedly erotic colouring, and the mystic, if he interprets his 
 inchoate liminal presentations, always tends to ascribe to them 
 an erotic import. The mixture of super-sensuousness and 
 sensuality, of religious and amorous rapture, which characterizes 
 mystic thought, has been noticed even by those observers 
 who do not understand in what way it is brought about. 
 
 The mysticism which I have hitherto investigated is the 
 incapacity, due to weakness of will, either innate or acquired, 
 to guide the work of the association of ideas by attention, to 
 draw shadowy liminal representations into the bright focal circle 
 of consciousness, and to suppress presentations which are in- 
 compatible with those attended to. There exists, however, 
 another form of mysticism, the cause of which is not defective 
 attention, but an anomaly in the sensitivity of the brain and 
 nervous system. In the healthy organism the afferent nerves 
 convey impressions of the external world in their full freshness 
 to the brain, and the stimulation of the brain-cell is in direct 
 ratio to the intensity of the stimulus conducted to it. Not so 
 is the deportment of a degenerate -or exhausted organism.
 
 62 DEGENERATION 
 
 Here the brain may have forfeited its normal irritability ; it is 
 blunted, and is only feebly excited by stimuli conveyed to it. 
 Such a brain, as a rule, never succeeds in elaborating sharply- 
 defined impressions. Its thoughts are always shadowy and 
 confounded. There is, however, no occasion for me to depict 
 in detail the characteristics of its mental procedure, for in the 
 higher species of the degenerate a blunted brain is hardly ever 
 met with, and plays no part in art or literature. To the 
 possessor of a sluggishly-reacting brain it hardly ever occurs 
 to compose or paint. He is of account only as forming the 
 creative mystic's partial and grateful public. Inadequate 
 excitability may moreover be a property of the sensory nerves. 
 This irregularity lea'is to anomalies in mental life, with which 
 I shall deal exhaustively in the next book. Finally, instead of 
 slow reaction there may exist excessive excitability, and this 
 may be peculiar to the whole nervous system and brain, ui 
 only to a portion of the latter. A generally excessive excita- 
 bility produces those morbidly-sensitive natures in whom the 
 most insignificant phenomena create the most astonishing 
 perceptions ; who hear the ' sobbing of the evening glow,' 
 shudder at the contact of a flower; distinguish thrilling 
 prophecies and fearful rhreatenings in the sighing of the wind, 
 etc.* Excessive irritability of particular groups of cells of the 
 cerebral cortex gives rise to other phenomena. In the" affected 
 part of the brain, stimulated either externally or by adjacent 
 stimuli, in other words, by sense impressions or by association, 
 the disturbance does not in this case proceed in a natural ratio 
 to the strength of the exciting cause, but is stronger and more 
 lasting than is warranted by the stimulus. The aroused group 
 of cells returns to a state of rest either with difficulty or not 
 at all. It attracts large quantities of nutriment for purposes 
 of absorption, withdrawing them from the other parts of the 
 brain. It works like a machine which an unskilful hand has 
 set in motion but cannot stop. If the normal action of the 
 brain-cells may be compared to quiet combustion, the action 
 of a morbidly-irritable group of cells may be said to resemble 
 an explosion, and one, too, which is both violent and persistent. 
 With the stimulus there flames forth in consciousness a presen- 
 tation, or train -of presentations, conceptions and reasonings, 
 which suffuse the mind as with the glare of a conflagration, 
 outshining all other ideas. 
 
 * Gerard de Nerval, Le Reve et la Vie, Paris, 1868, p. 53 : 'Everything in 
 Nature assumed a different aspect. Mysterious voices issued from plants, 
 trees, animals, the smallest insects, to warn and to encourage me. I dis- 
 cerned mysterious turns in the utterances of my companions, ar.d under- 
 stood their purport. Even formless and inanimate things ministered to the 
 workings of my mind.' Here is a perfect instance of that ' comprehension of 
 the mysterious ' which is one of the most common fancies of the insane.
 
 MYSTICISM 63 
 
 The degree of exclusiveness and insistence in the predomi- 
 nance of any presentation is in proportion to the degree of 
 morbid irritability in the particular tract of brain by which it 
 is"elaborated. Where the degree is not excessive there arise 
 obsessions which the consciousness recognises as morbid. 
 They do not preclude the coexistence of healthy functioning of 
 the brain, and consciousness acquires the habit of treating 
 these coexistent obsessions as foreign to itself, and of banish- 
 ing them from its presentations and judgments. In aggra- 
 vated cases these obsessions grow into fixed ideas. The 
 immoderately excitable portions of the brain work out their 
 ideas with such liveliness that consciousness is filled with 
 them, and can no longer distinguish them from such as are the 
 result of sense-impressions, the nature and strength of which 
 they accurately reilect. Then we reach the stage of hallucina- 
 tions and delirium. Final!} 7 , in the last stage, comes ecstasy, 
 which Ribot calls ' the acute form of the effort after unity of 
 consciousness.' In ecstasy the excited part of the brain works 
 with such violence that it suppresses the functioning of all the 
 rest of the brain. The ecstatic subject is completely insensible 
 to external stimuli. There is no perception, no representation, 
 no grouping of presentations into concepts, and of concepts into 
 judgments and reasoning. A single presentation, or group of pre- 
 sentations, fills up consciousness. These presentations are of ex- 
 treme distinctness and clearness. Consciousness is, as it were, 
 flooded with the blinding light of mid-day. There therefore takes 
 place exactly the reverse of what has been noticed in the case of 
 the ordinary mystic. The ecstatic state is associated with ex- 
 tremely intense emotions, in which the highest bliss is mixed 
 with pain. These emotions accompany every strong and 
 excessive functioning of the nerve-cells, every extraordinary 
 and violent decomposition of nerve-nutriment. The feeling of 
 voluptuousness is an example of the phenomena accompanying 
 extraordinary decompositions in a nerve-cell. In healthy 
 persons the sexual nerve-centres are the only ones which, 
 conformably with their functions, are so differentiated and so 
 adapted that they exercise no uniform or lasting activity, but, 
 for by far the greatest part of the time, are perfectly tranquil, 
 storing up large quantities of nutriment in order, during very 
 short periods, to decompose this suddenly and, as it were, 
 explosively. Every nerve-centre which operates in this way 
 would procure us voluptuous emotion ; but precisely among 
 healthy persons there are, except the sexual nerve-centres, 
 none which are compelled to act in this manner, in order to 
 serve the purpose of the organism. Among the degenerate, 
 on the contrary, particular morbidly excited brain-centres oper- 
 ate in this way, and the emotions of delight which accompany
 
 6 4 DEGENERATION 
 
 their explosive activity are more powerful than sexual feelings, 
 in proportion as the brain-centres are more sensitive than 
 tne subordinate and more sluggish spinal centres. One may 
 completely believe the assurances of great ec.statics, such as 
 a St. Theresa, a Mohammed, an Ignatius Loyola, that the 
 bliss accompanying their ecstatic visions is unlike anything 
 earthly, and almost more than a mortal can bear. This latter 
 statement proves that they were conscious of the sharp pain 
 which accompanies nerve-action in over-excited brain-cells, 
 and which, on careful analysis, may be distinguished in every 
 very strong feeling of pleasure. The circumstance that the 
 only normal organic sensation known to us which resembles 
 that of ecstasy is the sexual feeling, explains the fact that 
 ecstatics connect their ecstatic presentations by way of associa- 
 tion with the idea of love, and describe the ecstasy itself as a 
 kind of supernatural act of love, as a union of an ineffably high 
 and pure sort with God or the Blessed Virgin. This drawing 
 near to God and the saints is the natural result of a religious 
 training, which begets the habit of looking on everything 
 inexplicable as supernatural, and of bringing it into connection 
 with the doctrines of faith. 
 
 We have now seen that mysticism depends upon the in- 
 capacity to control the association of ideas by the attention, 
 and that this incapacity results from weakness of will ; while 
 ecstasy is a consequence of the morbid irritability of special 
 brain-centres. The incapacity of being attentive occasions, 
 however, besides mysticism, other eccentricities of the intellect, 
 which may here be briefly mentioned. In extreme stages of 
 degeneration, e.g., in idiocy, attention is utterly wanting. No 
 stimulus is able to arouse it, nor is there any external means 
 of making an impression on the brain of the idiot, and awaken- 
 ing his consciousness to definite presentations. In less complete 
 degeneration, i.e., in cases of mental debility, attention may 
 exist, but it is extremely weak and fleeting. Imbeciles (weak 
 minds) present, in graduated intensity, the phenomenon of 
 fugitive thought (Gedankenflucht), i.e., the incapacity to retain, 
 or to unite in a concept or judgment, the representations 
 automatically and reciprocally called into consciousness in 
 conformity with the laws of association, and also that of 
 reverie, which is another form of fugitive thought, but which 
 differs from it in that the particular representations of which it 
 is composed are feebly elaborated, and are therefore shadowy 
 and undefined, sometimes so much so that an imbecile, who 
 in the midst of his reveries is asked of what he is thinking, is 
 not able to state exactly what happens to be present in his 
 consciousness. All observers maintain that the ' higher de- 
 generate ' is frequently ' original, brilliant, witty,' and that
 
 MYSTICISM 65 
 
 whereas he is incapable of activity which demands attention 
 and self-control, he has strong artistic inclinations. All these 
 peculiarities are to be explained by the uncontrolled working 
 of association. 
 
 The reader should recall the procedure of that brain which is 
 incapable of attention. A perception arouses a representation 
 which summons into consciousness a thousand other associated 
 representations. The healthy mind suppresses the representa- 
 tions which are contradictory to, or not rationally connected with, 
 the first perception. This the weak-minded cannot do. The mere 
 similarity of sound determines the current of his thought. He 
 hears a word, and feeis compelled to repeat it, once or oftener, 
 sometimes to the extent of ' Echolalia '; or it calls into his con- 
 sciousness other words similar to it in sound, but not connected 
 with it in meaning,* whereupon he thinks and talks in a series 
 of completely disconnected rhymes ; or else the words have, 
 besides their similarity of sound, a very remote and weak 
 connection of meaning ; this gives rise to punning. Ignorant 
 persons are inclined to call the rhyming and punning of 
 imbeciles witty, not bearing in mind that this way of com- 
 bining ideas according to the sound of the words frustrates 
 the purposes of the intellect by obscuring the apprehension of 
 the real connections of phenomena. No witticism has ever 
 made easier the discovery of any truth. And whoever has 
 tried to hold a serious conversation with a quibbling person of 
 weak mind will have recognised the impossibility of keeping 
 him in check, of getting from him a logical conclusion, or of 
 making him comprehend a fact or a causal connection. When 
 
 * An imbecile degenerate, the history of whose illness is related by Dr. G. 
 Ballet, said : ' 11 y a mille ans que le monde est monde. Milan, la cathe"drale 
 de Milan' (Z# Semaine medicale, 1892, p. 133). 'Mille ans' (a thousand 
 years) calls up in his consciousness the like-sounding word 'Milan,' although 
 there is absolutely no rational connection between the two ideas. A 
 graphomaniac named Jasno, whose case is cited by Lombroso, says 'la main 
 se mene' (the hand guides itself). He then begins to speak of 'semaine' 
 (week), and continues to play upon the like-sounding words 'se mene,' 
 'semaine,' and 'main' (Genie und frstttn, p. 264). In the book of a 
 German graphomaniac entitled Rembrandt als Erzieher, Leipzig, 1890 (a 
 book which I shall have to refer to more than once, as an example of the 
 lucubrations of a weak mind), I find, on the very first pages, the following 
 jrxtaposition of words according to their resemblance in sound : ' Sie 
 Vtrkiinden eine Riickkehr . . . zur Einheit und Feinheit' (p. 3). 'Je 
 ungeschiiffener Jemand ist, desto mehr ist an ihm zu schleifen ' (p. 4). ' Jede 
 rechte Bildung ist bildend, formend, sch6p*erisch, und also kiinstlerisch ' 
 (p. 8). ' Rembrandt war nicht nur ein prutestantischer Kiinstler, sondern 
 auch ein kiinstlerischer Protestant' (p. 14). 'Sein Hundert guldenblatt 
 allein konnte schon als ein Tausenugiildenkraut gegen so mancherlei 
 Schaden . . . dienen' (p. 23). ' Chribtus und Rembrandt haben . . . darin 
 etwas Gemeinsames, dass Jener die religiose, dieser die kiinstlerische 
 Armseligkek die Seligkeit der Ariuen zu . . .'Ehren bringt' (p. 25,), cic. 
 
 5
 
 66 DEGENERATION 
 
 presentations are connected, not merely according to auditory 
 impressions of simple similarity of sound, but also according to 
 the other laws of association, those juxtapositions of words are 
 effected which the ignorant designate as ' original modes of 
 expression,' and which confer upon their originator the reputa- 
 tion of a 'brilliant' conversationalist or author. Sollier* 
 cites some characteristic examples of the 'original' modes of 
 expression of imbeciles. One said to his comrade, ' You look 
 like a piece of barley-sugar put out to nurse.' Another ex- 
 presses the thought that his friend made him laugh so much 
 he could not restrain his saliva, by saying, ' Tu me fais baver 
 des ronds de chapeaux.' The junction of words which by 
 their sense have little or no relation to each other is, as a rule, 
 an evidence of imbecility, although it often enough is sensa- 
 tional and mirth-provoking. The cleverness which in Paris is 
 called blague, or boulevard-esprit, the psychologist discerns as 
 imbecility. That this condition goes hand-in-hand with artistic 
 tendencies is easy to understand. All callings which require 
 knowledge of fact, and adaptation to it, presuppose attention. 
 This capacity is wanting in imbeciles ; hence they are not 
 fitted for serious professions. Certain artistic occupations, 
 especially those of a subordinate kind, are, on the contrary, 
 quite compatible with uncontrolled association of ideas, reverie, 
 or fugitive thought, because they exact only a very limited 
 adaptation to fact, and therefore have great attractions for 
 persons of weak intellect. 
 
 Between the process of thought and movement there exists 
 an exact parallelism explicable by the fact that the elaboration of 
 presentations is nothing else than a modification of the elabora- 
 tion of the motor impulses. The phenomena of movement make 
 the mechanism of thought more easily apprehensible to the lay 
 mind. The automatic association of muscular contractions 
 corresponds to the association of ideas, their co-ordination to 
 attention. As with defective attention there ensues no intelli- 
 gent thought, so with faulty co-ordination there can be no 
 appropriate movement. Palsy is equivalent to idiocy, St. 
 Vitus's dance to obsessions and fixed ideas. The attempts 
 at witticisms of the weak-minded are like beating the air with 
 a sword ; the notions and judgments of sound brains are like 
 the careful thrust and parry of skilful fencing. Mysticism 
 finds its reflected image in the aimless and powerless, often 
 hardly discernible, movements of senile and paralytic trembling; 
 and ecstasy is, for a brain-centre, the same state as a pro- 
 longed and violent tonic contraction for a muscle or group 
 of muscles. 
 
 * Dr. Paul Sollier, Psychologic de I'ldiot et de I' Imbecile. Paris, 1891, 
 J>- 153-
 
 MYSTICISM 67 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE PRE-RAPHAELITES. 
 
 MYSTICISM is the habitual condition of the human race, and 
 in no way an eccentric disposition of mind. A strong brain 
 which works out every presentation to its full clearness a power- 
 ful will, which sustains the toiling attention these are rare 
 gifts. Musing and dreaming, the free ranging of imagination, 
 disporting itself at its own sweet will along the meandering 
 pathways of association, demand less exertion, and will there- 
 fore be widely preferred to the hard labour of observation and 
 intelligent judgment. Hence the consciousness of men is filled 
 with a vast mass of ambiguous, shadowy ideas ; they see, as a 
 rule, in unmistakable clearness only those phenomena which 
 are daily repeated in their most intimate personal experience, 
 and, among these, those only which are the objects of their 
 immediate needs. 
 
 Speech, that great auxiliary in the interchange of human 
 thought, is no unmixed benefit. It brings to the consciousness 
 of most men incomparably more obscurity than brightness. 
 It enriches their memory with auditory images, not with well- 
 defined pictures of reality. A word, whether written or spoken, 
 excites a sense (sight or hearing), and sets up an activity in 
 the brain. True ; it always arouses presentation. A series of 
 musical tones does the same. At an unknown word, at 'Abra- 
 cadabra,' at a proper name, at a tune scraped on the fiddle, 
 we also think of something, but it is either indefinite, or non- 
 sensical, or arbitrary. It is absolute waste of labour to attempt 
 to give a man new ideas, or to widen the circle of his positive 
 knowledge, by means of a word. It can never do more than 
 awaken such ideas as he already possesses. Ultimately every- 
 one works only with the material for presentation which he has 
 acquired by attentive personal observation of the phenomena 
 of the universe. Nevertheless, he cannot do without the stimulus 
 conveyed to him by speech. The desire for knowledge, without 
 any hiatus, of all that is in the world, is irresistible ; while the 
 opportunities of perception at first hand, even in the most 
 favourable circumstances, are limited. What we have not our- 
 selves experienced we let others, the dead and the living, tell us. 
 The word must take the place of the direct impressions of sense 
 for us. And then it is itself an impression of sense, and our con- 
 sciousness is accustomed to put this impression on a level with 
 others, to estimate the idea aroused by. this word equally with
 
 68 DEGENERATION 
 
 those ideas which have been acquired through the simultaneous, 
 co-operation of all the senses, through observations, and hand- 
 ling on every side, through moving and lifting, listening to, and 
 smelling the object itself. This parity of values is an error of 
 thought. It is false in any case if a word do more than call 
 into consciousness a memory -image of a presentation, which 
 it has acquired through personal experience, or a concept com- 
 posed of such presentations. Nevertheless, we all of us commit 
 this fallacy. We forget that language was only developed by the 
 race as a means of communication between individuals, that it 
 is a social function, but not a source of knowledge. Words are 
 in reality much more a source of eri;or. For a man can only 
 actually know what he has directly experienced and attentively 
 observed, not what he has merely heard or read, and what he 
 repeats ; and if he would free himself from the errors which 
 words have led him into, he has no other means than the 
 increase of his sterling representative material, through personal 
 experience and attentive observation. And since man is never 
 in a position to do this save within certain limits, everyone is 
 condemned to carry on the operations of his consciousness with 
 direct presentations, and at the same time with words. The 
 intellectual structure which is built up with materials of such 
 unequal solidity reminds one of those dilapidated Gothic churches 
 which brainless masons used to patch up with a plaster of soot 
 and cheese, giving it, by means of a wash, the appearance of 
 stone. To the eye the frontage is irreproachable, but many 
 parts of the building could not for one moment resist a vigorous 
 blow of criticism. 
 
 Many erroneous explanations of natural phenomena, the 
 majority of false scientific hypotheses, all religious and meta- 
 physical systems, have arisen in such a way that mankind, in 
 their thoughts and opinions, have interwoven, as equally valid 
 components, ideas suggested by words only, together with such 
 as were derived from direct perception. The words were either 
 invented by mystics and originally indicated nothing beyond 
 the unbalanced condition of a weak and diseased brain, or, 
 whereas they at first expressed a definite, correct presentation, 
 their proper meaning was not caught by those who repeated 
 them, and by them was arbitrarily falsified, differently interpreted, 
 or blurred. Innate or acquired weakness of mind and ignorance 
 lead alike to the goal of mysticism. The brain of the ignorant 
 elaborates presentations that are nebulous, because they are sug- 
 gested by words, not by the thing itself, and the stimulus of a word 
 is not strong enough to produce vigorous action in the brain-cells ; 
 moreover, the brain of the exhausted and degenerate elaborates 
 nebulous presentations, because in any case it is not in a condition 
 to respond to a stimulus by vigorous action. Hence ignorance is
 
 MYSTICISM 6^ 
 
 artificial weakness of mind, just as, conversely, weakness of 
 mind is the natural organic incapacity for knowledge. 
 
 Jn one part or another of his mental field of vision each of 
 us therefore is a mystic. From all the phenomena which he him- 
 self has not observed, everyone forms shadowy, unstable presen- 
 tations. Nevertheless, it is easy to distinguish healthy men from 
 those who deserve the designation of mystic. There is a sure sign 
 for each. The healthy man is in a condition to obtain sharply- 
 defined presentations from his own immediate perceptions, and to 
 comprehend their real connection. The mystic, on the contrary, 
 mixes his ambiguous, cloudy, half-formed liminal representations 
 with his immediate perceptions, which are thereby disturbed and 
 obscured. Even the most superstitious peasant has definite presen- 
 tations of his field work, of the feeding of his cattle, and of look- 
 ing after his landmark. He may believe in the weather-witch, 
 because he does not know how the rain comes to pass, but he 
 does not wait a moment for the angels to plough for him. He 
 may have his field blessed, because the real conditions of the 
 thriving or perishing of his seed are beyond his ken, but he will 
 never so put his trust in supernatural favour as to omit sowing 
 his grain. All the genuine mystic's presentations, on the con- 
 trary, even those of daily experience, are permeated and over- 
 grown with that which is incomprehensible, because it is without 
 form. His want of attention makes him incapable of appre- 
 hending the real connecting links between the simplest and 
 most obviously related phenomena, and leads him to deduce 
 them from one or another of the hazy, intangible presentations 
 wavering and wandering in his consciousness. 
 
 There is no human phenomenon in the art and poetry of the 
 century with whom this characteristic of the mystic so com- 
 pletely agrees as with the originators and supporters of the 
 Pre-Raphaelite movement in England. It may be taken for t 
 granted that the history of this movement is known at least, 
 in its outlines and that it will suffice here to recall briefly its 
 principal features. The three painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
 Holman Hunt, and Millais, in the year 1848, entered into a 
 league which was called the Pre - Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
 After the association was formed, the painters F. G. Stephens 
 and James Collinson, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner, joined 
 it. In the spring of 1849 they exhibited in London a number 
 of pictures and statues, all of which, in addition to the signature 
 of the artist, bore the common mark P.R.B. The result was 
 crushing. Hitherto no hysterical fanatic had tyrannically forced 
 on the public a belief in the beauty of these works, nor was 
 it as yet under the domination of the fashion, invented by 
 aesthetic snobs, of considering their admiration as a mark of 
 distinction, and of membership of a narrow and exclusive circle
 
 70 DEGENERATION 
 
 of the aristocrats of taste. Hence it confronted them without 
 prepossession, and found them incomprehensible and funny. 
 The contemplation of them roused inextinguishable laughter 
 among the good-humoured, and wrath among the morose, who 
 are nettled when they think themselves made fools of. The 
 brotherhood did not renew their attempt ; the P.R.B. exhibi- 
 tion was never repeated; the league broke up of itself. Its 
 members no longer added the shibboleth of initials after their 
 names. They formed no longer a closed association, involving 
 formal admission, but only a loosely-knit circle, consisting of 
 friends having tastes in common, and who were perpetually 
 modifying its character by their joining and retiring. In this 
 way it was joined by Burne Jones and Madox Brown, who also 
 passed for Pre-Raphaelites, although they had not belonged 
 to the original P.R.B. Later on the designation was extended 
 from painters to poets, and among the pre - Raphaelites, in 
 addition to D. G. Rossetti (who soon exchanged the brush for 
 the pen), were Algernon Charles Swinburne and William 
 Morris. 
 
 What are the governing thoughts and aims of the Pre- 
 Raphaelite movement? An Anglo-German critic of repute, 
 F. Hiiffer,* thinks that he answers this question when he 
 says : * I myself should call this movement the renaissance of 
 mediaeval feeling.' Apart from the fact that these words signify 
 nothing, since every man may interpret ' mediaeval feeling ' as 
 he pleases, the reference to the Middle Ages only emphasizes the 
 most external accompanying circumstance of pre-Raphaelitism, 
 leaving its essence entirely untouched. 
 
 It is true that the pre - Raphaelites with both brush and 
 pen betray a certain, though by no means exclusive, predilection 
 for the Middle Ages ; but the mediaevalism of their poems 
 and paintings is not historical, but mythical, and simply 
 denotes something outside time and space a time of dreams 
 and a place of dreams, where all unreal figures and actions 
 may be conveniently bestowed. That they decorate their un- 
 earthly world with some features which may remotely recall 
 medievalism ; that it is peopled with queens and knights, noble 
 damozels with coronets on their golden hair, and pages with 
 plumed caps these may be accounted for by the prototypes 
 which, perhaps unconsciously, hover before the eyes, of the pre- 
 Raphaelites, 
 
 Movements in art and literature do not spring up suddenly 
 and spontaneously. They have progenitors from whom they 
 descend in the natural course of generation. Pre-Raphaelitisni 
 
 * Poems ly Dante Gatritl Ktvsetti. With a memoir of the author by 
 Frani Hurier. Leipzig, 1873, P- v ">*
 
 MYSTICISM 71 
 
 is the grandson of German, and a j>on of French, Romanticism. 
 But in its wanderings through the world Romanticism has 
 suTered such alteration through the influence of the changing 
 opinions of the times, and the special characteristics of various 
 nations, that the English offspring bears scarcely any family 
 resemblance to its German ancestor. 
 
 German romanticism was in its origin a reaction against the 
 spirit of the French encyclopaedists, who had held undisputed 
 sway over the eighteenth century. Their criticism of ancient 
 errors, their new systems which were to solve the riddles of the 
 world and of the nature of man, had at first dazzled and nearly 
 intoxicated mankind. They could not, however, satisfy in the 
 long-run, for they committed a great fault in two respects. 
 Their knowledge of facts was insufficient to enable them to 
 explain the collective phenomenon of the universe, and they 
 looked upon man as an intellectual being. Proud of their 
 strictly logical and mathematical reasoning, they overlooked the 
 fact that this is a method of knowledge, but not knowledge 
 itself. The logical apparatus is a machine, which can manu- 
 facture only the material shot into it. If the machine is not 
 fed, it runs on empty and makes a noise, but produces nothing. 
 The condition of science in the eighteenth century did not allow 
 the encyclopaedists to make advantageous use of their logical 
 machine. They did not take cognizance of this fact, however, 
 and, with their limited material and much unconscious temerity, 
 constructed a system which they complacently announced as a 
 faithful representation of the system of the universe. It was 
 soon discovered that the encyclopaedists, for all their intellectual 
 arrogance, were deluding both themselves and their followers. 
 There were known facts which contradicted their hasty explana- 
 tions, and there was a whole range of phenomena of which their 
 system took no account, and failed to cover as if with too short 
 a cloak, and which peeped out mockingly at all the seams. 
 Hence the philosophy of the encyclopaedists was kicked and 
 abused, and the same faults were committed with respect to it 
 which it had perpetrated ; the methods of intelligent criticism 
 were mistaken for the results obtained by them. Because the 
 encyclopaedists, from lack of knowledge and of natural facts, 
 explained nature falsely and arbitrarily, those who were dis- 
 appointed and thirsting for knowledge cried out, that intelligent 
 criticism as such was a false method, that consistent reasoning 
 led to nothing, that the conclusions of the ' Philosophy of 
 Enlightenment ' were just as unproven and unprovable as those 
 of religion and metaphysics, only less beautiful, colder, and 
 narrower ; and mankind threw itself with fervour into all the 
 depths of faith and superstition, where certainly the Tree of 
 Knowledge did not grow, but where beautiful mirages charmed
 
 ya DEGENERATION 
 
 the eye, and the warm fragrant springs of all the emotions 
 bubbled up. 
 
 And more fatal than the error of their philosophy was the 
 false psychology of the encyclopaedists. They believed that the 
 thoughts and actions of men are determined by reason and 
 the laws of consistency, and had no inkling that the really 
 impelling force in thought and deed are the emotions, those 
 disturbances elaborated in the depths of the internal organs, and 
 the sources of which elude consciousness, but which suddenly 
 burst into it like a horde of savages, not declaring whence they 
 come, submitting to no police regulations of a civilized mind, 
 and imperiously demanding lodgment. All that wide region of 
 organic needs and hereditary impulses, all that E. von Hart- 
 mann calls the ' Unconscious,' lay hidden from the rationalists, 
 who saw nothing but the narrow circle of the psychic life which 
 is illumined by the little lamp of consciousness. Fiction which 
 should depict mankind according to the views of this inadequate 
 psychology would be absurdly untrue. It had no place for 
 passions and follies. It saw in the world only logical formulae 
 on two legs, with powdered heads and embroidered coats of 
 fashionable cut. The emotional nature took its revenge on this 
 aesthetic aberration, breaking out in ' storm and stress,' and in 
 turn attaching value only to the unconscious, the inherited 
 impulse, and the organic appetites, while it neglected entirely 
 reason and will, which are there none the less. 
 
 Mysticism, which rebelled against the application of the 
 rationalistic methods to explain the universe, and the Sturm 
 und Drang, which rebelled against their application to the 
 psychical life of mankind, were the first-fruits of romanticism, 
 which is nothing but the union and exaggeration of these two 
 revolutionary movements. That it took up with fondness the 
 form of mediaevalism was due to circumstances and the senti- 
 ment of the age. The beginnings of romanticism coincide with 
 the time of the deepest humiliation of Germany, and the suffering 
 of young men of talent at the ignominy of foreign rule gave to 
 the whole content of their thought a patriotic colouring. During 
 the Middle Ages Germany had passed through a period of the 
 greatest power and intellectual florescence ; those centuries 
 which were irradiated at one and the same time by the might 
 of the world-empire of the Hohenstaufen, by the splendour of 
 the poems of the Court Minnesingers, and by the vastness of the 
 Gothic cathedrals, must naturally have attracted those spirits 
 who, filled with di. e gust, broke out against the intellectual jejune- 
 ness and political abasement of the times. They fled from 
 Napoleon to Frederick Barbarossa, and drew refreshment with 
 Walter von der Vogelweide from their abhorrence of Voltaire. 
 The foreign imitators of the German romanticists do not know
 
 MYSTICISM 73 
 
 that if in their flight from reality they come to a halt in 
 medisevalism, they have German patriotism as their pioneer. 
 
 The patriotic side of romanticism was, moreover, emphasized 
 only by the sanest talents of this tendency. In others it stands 
 revealed most signally as a form of the phenomenon of degenera- 
 tion. The brothers Schlegel, in their AtJienceum, give this pro- 
 gramme of romanticism : ' The beginning of all poetry is to 
 suspend the course and the laws of rationally thinking reason, 
 -and to transport us again into the lovely vagaries of fancy and 
 the primitive chaos of human nature. . . . The freewill of the 
 poet submits to no law.' This is the exact mode of thought 
 and expression of the weak-minded, of the imbecile, whose 
 brain is incapable of following the phenomena of the universe 
 with discernment and comprehension, and who, with the self- 
 complacency which characterizes the weak-minded, proclaims 
 his infirmity as an advantage, and declares that his muddled 
 thought, the product of uncontrolled association, is alone exact 
 and commendable, boasting of that for which the sane-minded are 
 pitying him. Besides the unregulated association of ideas there 
 appears in most romanticists its natural concomitant, mysticism. 
 That which enchanted them in the idea of the Middle Ages was 
 not the vastness and might of the German Empire, not the 
 fulness and beauty of the German life of that period, but 
 Catholicism with its belief in miracles and its worship of saints. 
 ' Our Divine Service,' writes H. von Kleist, ' is nothing of the 
 kind. It appeals only to cold reason. A Catholic feast appeals 
 profoundly to all the senses.' The obscure symbolism of 
 Catholicism, all the externals of its priestly motions, all its 
 altar service so full of mystery, all the magnificence of its vest- 
 ments, sacerdotal vessels and works of art, the overwhelming 
 effect of the thunder of the organ, the fumes of incense, the 
 flashing monstrance all these undoubtedly stir more confused 
 and ambiguous adumbrations of ideas than does austere Pro- 
 testantism. The conversion of Friedrich SqhlegeVAdam Mu'ller, 
 Zacharias Werner, Count Stolberg, to^Catholicisnj>is just as 
 consistent a result as, to the reader who has followed the argu- 
 ments on the psychology of mysticism, it is intelligible that, 
 with these romanticists, the ebullitions of piety are accompanied 
 by a sensuousness which often amounts to lasciviousness. 
 
 Romanticism penetrated into France a generation later than 
 jnto Germany. The delay is easy of historical explanation. In 
 the storms of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the 
 leading minds of the French people had no time to think of 
 themselves. They had no leisure for testing the philosophy of 
 their encyclopaedists, to find it inadequate, reject it, and rise 
 up against it. They devoted their whole energy to rough, big, 
 .muscular deeds of war, and the need for the emotional exercise
 
 74 DEGENERATION 
 
 afforded by art and poetry, asserted itself but feebly, being 
 completely satisfied by the far stronger emotions of self-love 
 and despair produced by their famous battles and cataclysmic 
 overthrows. Esthetic tendencies only reasserted their rights 
 during the half-dormant period following the battle of Waterloo, 
 and then the same causes led to the same results as in Germany. 
 The younger spirits in this case also raised the flag of revolt 
 against the dominating aesthetic and philosophic tendencies. 
 They wished Imagination to grapple with Reason, and place 
 its foot on its neck, and they proclaimed the martial law of 
 passion against the sober procedure of discipline and morality. 
 Through Madame de Stael and A. W. Schlegel, partly by the 
 latter's personal intercourse with Frenchmen, and partly by his 
 works, which were soon translated into French, they were in some 
 measure made acquainted with the German movement. They 
 joined it perhaps half unconsciously. Of the many impulses 
 which were active among the German romanticists, patriotism 
 and Catholic mysticism had no influence on the French mind, 
 which only lent itself to the predilection for what was remote 
 in time and space, and what was free from moral and mental 
 restraints. 
 
 French romanticism was neither mediaeval nor pious. It took 
 up its abode rather in the Renaissance period as regards remote- 
 ness in time, and in the East or the realms of faerie, if it wished 
 to be spacially remote from reality. In Victor Hugo's works 
 the one drama of Les Burgraves takes place in the thirteenth 
 century ; but in all the others, Cromwell, Maria Tndor, Lucrezia 
 Borgia, Angela, Ruy Bias, Hernani, Marion Delorme, Le Rot 
 s'aunise, the scenes were laid in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries ; and his one mediaeval romance, Notre Dame de Part's, 
 can be set over against all the rest, from Han d'lslande, which 
 has for its scene of action a fancied Thule, to Les Miserables 
 and //<?J, which take place in an apocalyptic Paris and in 
 a history of the Revolution suited to the use of hashish- 
 smokers. The bent of French romanticism towards the Renais- 
 sance is natural. That was the period of great passions and 
 great crimes, of marble palaces, of dresses glittering with gold, 
 and of intoxicating revels ; a period in which the aesthetic pre- 
 vailed over the useful, and the fantastic over the rational, and 
 when crime itself was beautiful, because assassination was 
 accomplished with a chased and damascened poniard, and the 
 poison was handed in goblets wrought by Benvenuto Cellini. 
 
 The French romanticists made use of the unreality of their 
 scene of action and costumes chiefly for the purpose of enabling 
 them, without restraint, to attribute to their characters all the 
 qualities, exaggerated even to monstrosity, that were dear to 
 the French, not yet ailing with the pain of overthrow. Thus
 
 MYSTICISM 75 
 
 in the heroes of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Theophile\ 
 Gautier, Alfred de Musset, we become acquainted with the 
 French ideal of man and woman. The subtle inquiries of 
 Faust, the soliloquies of Hamlet, are not their affair. They talk 
 unceasingly in dazzling witticisms and antitheses; they fight/ 
 one against ten; they love like Hercules in the Thespidian 
 night, and their whole life is one riot of fighting, wantoning, 
 wine, perfume, and pageantry a sort of magnificent illusion, 
 with performance of gladiators, Don Juans, and Monte Christos; 
 a crazy prodigality of inexhaustible treasures of bodily strength, 
 gaiety and gold. These ideal beings had necessarily to wear 
 doublets or Spanish mantles, and speak in the tongues of un- 
 known times, because the tightness of the contemporary dress- 
 coat could not accommodate all this wealth of muscle, and the 
 conversation of the Paris salon did not admit of the candour 
 of souls which their authors had turned inside out. 
 
 The fate of romanticism in England was exactly the reverse 
 of that which befell it in France. Whereas the French had 
 imitated chiefly, and even exclusively, in the German roman- 
 ticists, their divergence from reality, and their declaration of 
 the sovereign rights of the passions, the English just as ex-, 
 clusively elaborated their Catholic and mystical elements. 
 For them the Middle Ages had a powerful attraction, inasmuch 
 as it was the period of childlike faith in the letter, and of the 
 revelling of simple piety in personal intercourse with the Trinity; 
 the Blessed Virgin, and all the guardian saints. 
 
 Trade, industry, and civilization were nowhere in the world 
 so much developed as in England. Nowhere did men work so 
 assiduously, nowhere did they live under such artificial condi- 
 tions as there. Hence the state of degeneration and exhaustion, -, 
 which we observe to-day in all civilized countries as the result I 
 of this over-exertion, must of necessity have shown itself sooner/ 
 in England than elsewhere, and, as a matter of fact, did show! 
 itself in the third and fourth decade of the century with con- 
 tinually increasing violence, In consequence, however, of the 
 peculiarity of the English mind, the emotional factor in 
 degeneration and exhaustion necessarily assumed with them a 
 religious colouring. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon race is by nature healthy and strong- 
 minded. It has therefore, in a high degree, that strong desire 
 for knowledge which is peculiar to normally -constituted 
 persons. In every age it has inquired into the why and how of 
 phenomena, and shown passionate sympathy with, and gratitude 
 to, everyone who held out hopes of an explanation of them. 
 The well-known and deeply thoughtful discourse of the Anglian 
 noble concerning what precedes and follows man's life a 
 speech which Bede has preserved for us in his account of the
 
 76 DEGENERATION 
 
 conversion of Edwin to Christianity has been cited by all 
 authors (e.g., by G. Freytag and H. Taine*) who have studied 
 the origins of the English mental constitution. It shows that 
 as early as the beginning of the seventh century the Anglo- 
 Saxons were consumed by an ardent desire to comprehend the 
 phenomenon of the universe. This fine and high-minded 
 craving for knowledge has proved at once the strength and the 
 weakness of the English. It led with them to the development 
 along parallel lines of the natural sciences and theology. The 
 scientific investigators contributed a store of facts won through 
 toilsome observation ; the experts in divinity obtained theirs 
 through systems compounded of notions arbitrarily conceived. 
 Both claimed to explain the nature of things, and the people 
 were deeply grateful to both, more so, it is true, to the theologians 
 than to the scholars, because the former could afford to be more 
 copious and confident in their teaching than the latter. The 
 natural tendency to reckon words as equivalent to facts, 
 assertions to demonstrations, always gives theologians and 
 metaphysicians an immense advantage over observers. The 
 craving of the English for knowledge has produced both the 
 philosophy of induction and spiritualism. Humanity owes to 
 them on the one hand Francis Bacon, Harvey, Newton, Locke, 
 Darwin, J. S. Mill ; on the other, Bunyan, Berkeley, Milton, the 
 Puritans, the Quakers, and all the religious enthusiasts, 
 visionaries, and mediums of this century. No people has done 
 so much for, and conferred such honour on, scientific investi- 
 gators ; no people has sought with so much earnestness and 
 devotion for instruction, especially in matters of faith, as have 
 the English. Eagerness to know is, therefore, the main source 
 of English religiousness. There is this also to be noticed, 
 that among them the ruling classes never gave an example 
 of indifference in matters of faith, but systematically made 
 religiousness a mark of social distinction ; unlike France, where 
 the nobility of the eighteenth century exalted Voltairianism into 
 a symptom of good breeding. The evolution of history led in 
 England to two results which apparently exclude each other 
 to caste-rule, and the liberty of the individual. The caste which 
 is in possession of wealth and power naturally wishes to protect 
 its possessions. The rigid independence of the English people 
 precludes it from applying physical force. Hence it uses moral 
 restraints to keep the lower ranks submissive and amenable, 
 and, among these, religion is by far the most effective. 
 
 Herein lies the explanation both of the devoutness of the 
 English and of the religious character of their mental degenera- 
 
 * Gustave Freytag, Bilder aits dtr deutschen Vergangenheit, Bd. I. : ' Aus 
 dem Mittelaher.' Leipzig, 1872, 266. H. Taine, Hisloire de la Litttraturt 
 anglaise. Paris, 1866, 2 e Edition, vol. i., p. 46.
 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 tion. The first result of the epidemic of degeneration and hysteria 
 was the Oxford Movement in the thirties and forties. Wiseman 
 turned all the weaker heads. Newman went over to Catholicism. 
 Pusey clothed the entire Established Church in Romish garb. 
 Spiritualism soon followed, and it is worthy of remark that all 
 mediums adopted theological modes of speech, and that their 
 disclosures were concerned with heaven and hell. The ' revival 
 meetings' of the seventies, and the Salvation Army of to-day, 
 are the direct sequel of the Oxford stream .of thought, but 
 rendered turbid and foul in accordance with the lower intellectual 
 grade of their adherents. In the world of art, however, the 
 religious enthusiasm of degenerate and hysterical Englishmen 
 sought its expression in pre-Raphaelitism. 
 
 An accurate definition of the connotation of this word is an 
 impossibility, in that it was invented by mystics, and is as vague 
 and equivocal as are all new word-.creations of the feeble and 
 deranged in mind. The first members of the Brotherhood 
 believed that, in the artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 
 turies, in the predecessors of the great geniuses of the Umbrian 
 and Venetian schools, they had discovered minds congenial to 
 their own. For a short time they took the methods of these 
 painters for their models, and created the designation ' pre- 
 Raphaelite.' The term was bound to approve itself to them, 
 since the prefix ' pre ' (' prae ') arouses ideas of the primeval, the 
 far-away, the hardly perceptible, the mysteriously shadowy. 
 ' Pre-Raphaelite : calls up, through association of ideas, ' pre- 
 Adamite,'* ' pre-historic,' etc. in short, all that is opened to 
 view by immeasurable vistas down the dusk of the unknown, 
 and which allow the mind to wander dreamily beyond the limits 
 of time and in the realms of myth. But that the pre-Raphaelites 
 should have lit on the quattrocento painters for the embodiment 
 of their artistic ideals is due to John Ruskin. 
 
 Ruskin is one of the most turbid and fallacious minds, and 
 one of the most powerful masters of style, of the present century. 
 To the service of the most wildly eccentric thoughts he brings 
 the acerbity of a bigot and the deep sentiment of Morel's 
 'emotionalists.' His mental temperament is that of the 
 first Spanish Grand Inquisitors. He is a Torquemada of 
 aesthetics. He would liefest burn alive the critic who disagrees 
 with him, or the dull Philistine who passes by works of art with- 
 out a feeling of devout awe. Since, however, stakes do not stand 
 within his reach, he can at least rave and rage in word, and 
 annihilate the heretic figuratively by abuse and cursing. To his 
 ungovernable irascibility he unites great knowledge of all the 
 
 * This is not an arbitrary assertion. One of D. G. Rossetti's most famous- 
 poems, of which further mention will be made, Eden Bowers, treats ol the 
 pre-Adamite Lilith.
 
 78 DEGENERATION 
 
 minutiae in the history of art. If he writes of the slopes of 
 clouds he reproduces the clouds in seventy or eighty existing 
 pictures, scattered amongst all the collections of Europe. And 
 be it noted that he did this in the forties, when photographs of 
 the masterpieces of art, which render the comparative study of 
 them to-day so convenient, were yet unknown. This heaping 
 up of fact, this toilsome erudition, made him conqueror of the 
 English intellect, and explains the powerful influence which he 
 obtained over artistic sentiment and the theoretic views concern- 
 ing the beautiful of the Anglo-Saxon world. The clear posi- 
 tivism of the Englishman demands exact data, measures, and 
 figures. Supplied with these he is content, and does not criticise 
 starting-points. The Englishman accepts a fit of delirium if it 
 appears with footnotes, and is conquered by an absurdity if it 
 is accompanied by diagrams. Milton's description of hell and 
 its inhabitants is as detailed and conscientious as that of a 
 land-surveyor or a natural philosopher, and Bunyan depicts the 
 Pilgrims Progress to the mystical kingdom of Redemption in 
 the method of the most graphic writer of travels a Captain 
 Cook or a Burton. Ruskin has in the highest conceivable degree 
 this English peculiarity of exactness applied to the nonsensical, 
 and of its measuring and counting applied to fevered visions. 
 
 In the year 1843, almost simultaneously with the outbreak of 
 the great Catholicizing movement, Ruskin began to publish the 
 feverish studies on art which were subsequently collected under 
 the title of Modern Painters. He was then a young divinity 
 student, and as such he entered upon the study of works of art. 
 The old scholasticism wished to make philosophy the ' handmaid 
 of godly learning.' Ruskin's mysticism had the same purpose 
 with regard to art. Painting and sculpture ought to be a form 
 of divine ^worship, or they ought not to exist at all. Works of 
 art were valuable merely for the supersensuous thoughts that 
 they conveyed, for the devotion with which they were conceived 
 and which they revealed, not for the mastery of form. 
 
 From this point of view he was able to arrive at judgments 
 among which I here quote a few of the most typical. ' It 
 appears to me,' he says,* ' that a rude symbol is oftener more 
 efficient than a refined one in touching the heart, and that as 
 pictures rise in rank as works of art they are regarded with less 
 devotion and more curiosity. . . . It is man and his fancies, man 
 and his trickeries, man and his inventions, poor, paltry, weak, 
 self-sighted man, which the connoisseur for ever seeks and 
 worships. Among potsherds and dunghills, among drunken 
 boors and withered beldames, through every scene of debauchery 
 and degradation, we follow the erring artist, not to receive one 
 wholesome lesson, not to be touched with pity, nor moved with 
 
 * J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, American edition, vol. i., pp. xxi. et seq.
 
 MYSTICISM 79 
 
 indignation, but to watch the dexterity of the pencil, and gloat 
 over the glittering of the hue. . . . Painting is nothing but a 
 noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of 
 thought, but by itself nothing. ... It is not by the mode of 
 representing and saying, but by what is represented and said, 
 that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer is 
 to be finally determined. . . . The early efforts of Cimabue and 
 Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the 
 stammering lips of infants. . . . The picture which has the 
 nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, 
 is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less 
 noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed. 
 . . . The less sufficient the means appear to the end the greater 
 will be the sensation of power.' These propositions were decisive 
 in determining the direction taken by the young Englishmen of 
 1843, who united artistic inclinations with the mysticism of the 
 degenerate and hysterical. They comprise the sestheticism of 
 the first pre-Raphaelites, who felt that Ruskin had expressed 
 with clearness what was vaguely fermenting within them. Here 
 was the art-ideal which they had presaged form as indifferent, 
 idea as everything ; the clumsier the representation, the deeper 
 its effect ; the devotion of faith as the only worthy import of a 
 work of art. They reviewed the history of art for phenomena 
 agreeing with the theories of Ruskin, which they had taken up 
 with enthusiasm, and they found what they sought in the archaic 
 Italian school, in which the London National Gallery is extra- 
 ordinarily rich. There they had perfect models to imitate ; they 
 were bound to take for their starting-point these Fra Angelicos, 
 Giottos, Cimabues, these Ghirlandajos and Pollajuolos. Here 
 were paintings bad in drawing, faded or smoked, their colouring 
 either originally feeble or impaired by the action of centuries ; 
 pictures executed with the awkwardness of a learner represent- 
 ing events in the Passion of Christ, in the life of the Blessed 
 Virgin, or in the Golden Legend, symbolizing childish ideas of 
 hell and paradise, and telling of earnest faith and fervent 
 devotion. They were easy of imitation, since, in painting 
 pictures in the style of the early masters, faulty drawing, deficient 
 sense of colour, and general artistic incapacity, are so many 
 advantages. And they constituted a sufficiently forcible anti- 
 thesis to all the claims of the artistic taste of that decade to 
 satisfy the proclivity for contradiction, paradox, negation and 
 eccentricity which we have learned to recognise as a special 
 characteristic of the feeble-minded. 
 
 Ruskin's theory is in itself delirious. It mistakes the funda- 
 mental principles of aesthetics, and, with the unconsciousness of 
 a saucy child at play, muddles and entangles the boundary lines 
 of the different arts. It holds of accoun.t in plastic art only the
 
 8o DEGENERATION 
 
 conception. A picture is valuable only in so far as it is a-. 
 symbol giving expression to a religious idea. Ruskin does not 
 take into consideration, or deliberately overlooks the fact, that 
 the pleasurable feelings which are produced by the contem- 
 plation of a picture are not aroused by its intellectual import,. 
 but by it as a sensuous phenomenon. The art of painting 
 awakens through its media of colour and drawing (i.e., the exact 
 grasp and reproduction of differences in the intensity of light),, 
 firstly, a purely sensuously agreeable impression of beautiful' 
 single colours and happily combined harmonies of colour ;, 
 secondly, it produces an illusion of reality and, together with 
 this, the higher, more intellectual pleasures arising from a 
 recognition of the phenomena depicted, and from a compre- 
 hension of the artist's intention ; thirdly, it shows these phe- 
 nomena as seen with the eye of the artist, and brings out details 
 or collective traits, which until then the inartistic beholder had 
 not been by himself able to perceive. The painter therefore 
 influences, through the medium of his art, only so far as he 
 agreeably excites the sense of colour, gives to the mind an 
 illusion of reality, together with the consciousness* that it is an 
 illusion, and, through his deeper, more penetrating vision, dis- 
 closes to the spectator the hidden treasures of the phenomenal 
 world. If, in addition to the presentation of the picture, ' its 
 story ' also affects the beholder, it is no longer the merit of the 
 painter as such, but of his not exclusively pictorial intelligence 
 in making choice of a subject, and in committing its portrayal 
 to his specific pictorial abilities. The effect of the story is not 
 called forth through the media of painting ; it is not based on 
 the pleasure of the spectator in colour, on the illusion of reality, 
 or on a better grasp of the phenomenon, but on some pre- 
 existing inclination, some memory, some prejudice. A purely 
 painter's picture, such as Leonardo's Mono. Lisa, charms every- 
 one whose eye has been sufficiently trained. A picture which 
 tells a story, but is not distinguished for its purely pictorial 
 qualities, leaves everyone linappreciative to whom the story in 
 itself is uninteresting, i.e., to whom it would in any case have 
 been uninteresting, had it not been executed by the instrumen- 
 tality of pictorial art, but simply narrated. A Russian eikon affects 
 a moujik, and leaves the Western art connoisseur cold. A paint- 
 ing which represents a French victory over Russian troops would 
 excite and please a French Philistine, even if it were painted in 
 the style of an Epinal. It is true, no doubt, that there is a sort, 
 of painting which does not seek to seize and awaken visual im- 
 pressions in the spectator, together with the emotions which 
 they directly arouse, but to express ideas, and in which the 
 picture is intended to affect the mind, not by itself and its own 
 consummate art, but by its spiritual significance. But this kinds
 
 MYSTICISM 8l 
 
 of painting has a special name : we call it writing. The signs, 
 which are meant to have no pictorial, but only symbolic value, 
 where we turn away from the form in order to dwell upon their 
 meaning, we call 'letters,' and the art which makes use of such 
 symbols for the expression of mental processes is not painting,, 
 but poetry. Originally, pictures were actually, no doubt, a 
 means of symbolizing thoughts, and their value as things of 
 beauty was considered of secondary importance in relation to 
 their value as means of expression. On the other hand, 
 aesthetic impressions still play in these days a subdued accom- 
 paniment to our writing, and a beautiful handwriting, quite 
 apart from its import, affects us more agreeably than one that is 
 ugly. At the very beginning of their evolution, however, the 
 kind of painting which satisfied only aesthetic needs separated t 
 itself from that of writing, which serves to render ideas per- 
 ceptible to the senses. Descriptive drawing became the hiero- 
 glyph, the demotic writing, the letter ; and it was reserved for 
 Ruskin to be the first to try to annul a distinction which the 
 scribes of Thebes had learnt to make six thousand years before 
 him. 
 
 The pre-Raphaelites, who got all their leading principles fronvr" 
 Ruskin, went further. They misunderstood his misunderstand- 
 ings. He had simply said that defectiveness in form can be 
 counter-balanced by devotion and noble feeling in the artist. 
 They, however, raised it to the position of a fundamental 
 principle, that in order to express devotion and noble feeling, 
 the artist must be defective in form. Incapable, like all the 
 weak-minded, of observing any process and of giving a clear 
 account of it to themselves, they did not distinguish the real 
 causes of the influence exercised over them by the old masters. 
 The pictures touched and moved them ; the most striking dis- 
 tinction between such pictures and others, to which they were 
 indifferent, was their awkward stiffness ; they did not look 
 further, however, than this awkward stiffness for the source of 
 what touched and moved them, and imitated with great care 
 and conscientiousness the bad drawing of the old masters. 
 
 Now, the clumsiness of the old masters is certainly touching ; 
 but why? Because these Cimabues and Giottos were sincere. 
 They wished to get closer to nature, and to free themselves from 
 the thraldom of the Byzantine school, which had become en- 
 tirely unreal. They struggled with vehement endeavour against 
 the bad habits of hand and eye which they had acquired from 
 the teachers of their guilds, and the spectacle of such a conflict, 
 like every violent effort of an individuality which sets itself to 
 rend fetters of any sort and save its own soul from bondage, 
 is the most attractive thing possible to observe. The whole 
 difference between the old masters and . the pre-Raphaelites is, 
 
 6
 
 82 DEGENERATION 
 
 that the former had first to find out how to draw and paint 
 correctly, while the latter wished to forget it. Hence, where 
 the former fascinate, the latter must repel. It is the contrast 
 between the first babbling of a thriving infant and the stammer- 
 ing of a mentally enfeebled gray-beard ; between child-like and 
 childish. But this retrogression to first beginnings, this affecta- 
 tion of simplicity, this child's play in word and gesture, is a 
 frequent phenomenon amongst the weak-minded, and we shall 
 often meet with it among the mystic poets. 
 
 According to the doctrine of their master in theory, Ruskin, 
 the decline of art for pre-Raphaelites begins with Raphael and 
 for obvious reasons. To copy Cimabue and Giotto is compara- 
 tively easy. In order to imitate Raphael it is necessary to be 
 able to draw and paint to perfection, and this was just what the 
 first members of the Brotherhood could not do. Moreover, 
 Raphael lived in the most glorious period of the Renaissance. 
 The rosy dawn of the New Thought shone in his being and 
 his work. With the liberal-mindedness of an enlightened 
 Cinquecentist, he no longer painted only religious subjects, but 
 mythological and historical, or, as the mystics say, profane, sub- 
 jects as well. His paintings appealed not only to the devotion 
 of faith, but also to the sense of beauty. They are no longer 
 exclusively divine worship ; consequently, as Ruskin says, and 
 his disciples repeat, they are devil-worship, and therefore to be 
 rejected. Finally, it is consistent with the tendency to contra- 
 diction, and to the repudiation of what is manifest, which 
 governs the thoughts of the weak-minded, that they should 
 declare as false those tenets in the history of art which others 
 than themselves deemed the most incontestable. The whole 
 world for three hundred years had said, * Raphael is the zenith 
 of painting.' To this they replied, ' Raphael is the nadir of 
 painting.' Hence it came about that, in the designation which 
 they appropriated, they took up a direct allusion to Raphael, 
 and to no other master or other portion of the history of art. 
 
 Consistency of sequence and unity are not to be expected 
 from mystical thought. It proceeds after its kind in perpetual 
 self-contradiction. In one place Ruskin says :* ' The cause of 
 the evil lies in the painter's taking upon him to modify God's 
 works at his pleasure, casting the shadow of himself on all he 
 sees. Every alteration of the features of nature has its origin 
 either in powerless indolence or blind audacity.' Thus the 
 painter should reproduce the phenomenon exactly as he sees it, 
 and not suffer himself to make the smallest alteration in it. 
 And a few pages further on :f ' There is an ideal form of every 
 herb, flower, and tree ; it is that form to which every individual 
 of the species has a tendency to attain, freed from the influence 
 * Ruskin, op. tit., p. 24. f Ibid., p. 26.
 
 MYSTICISM 83 
 
 of accident or disease.' And, he continues, to recognise and to 
 reproduce this ideal form is the one great task of the painter. 
 
 That one of these propositions completely nullifies the other 
 it is hardly necessary to indicate. The ' ideal form ' which every 
 phenomenon strives after does not stand before the bodily eyes 
 of the painter. He reads it, according to some preconceived 
 notion, into the phenomenon. He has to deal with individual 
 forms which, through ' accident or disease,' have diverged from 
 the ' ideal form.' In order to bring them back in painting to 
 their ideal form, he must alter the object given by nature. 
 Ruskin demands that he should do this, but at the same time 
 says that every alteration is an act ol ' powerless indolence or 
 blind audacity.' Naturally, only one of these mutually exclusive 
 statements can be true. Unquestionably it is the former. The 
 ' ideal form ' is an assumption, not a perception. The separation 
 of the essential from the accidental, in the phenomenon, is an 
 abstraction the work of reason, not of the eye or aesthetic 
 emotion. Now, the subject-matter of painting is the visible, not 
 the conjectural ; the real, not the possible or probable ; the 
 concrete, not the abstract. To exclude individual features from 
 a phenomenon as unessential and accidental, and to retain others 
 as intrinsic and necessary, is to reduce it to an abstract idea. 
 The work of art, however, is not to abstract, but to individualize. 
 Firstly, because abstraction presupposes an idea of the law 
 which determines the phenomenon, because this idea may be 
 erroneous, because it changes with the ruling scientific theories 
 of the day, whereas the painter does not reproduce changing 
 scientific theories, but impressions of sense. Secondly, because 
 the abstraction rouses the working of thought, and not emotion, 
 while the task of art is to excite emotion. 
 
 Nevertheless, the pre-Raphaelites had no eye for these con- 
 tradictions, and followed blindly all Ruskin's injunctions. They 
 typified the human form, but they rendered all accessories truth- 
 fully, and had neither 'the blind audacity nor powerless in- 
 dolence' to change any of them. They painted with the 
 greatest precision the landscape in which their figures stood, 
 and the objects with which they were surrounded. The botanist 
 can determine every kind of grass and flower painted ; the 
 cabinet-maker can recognise the joining and glueing in every 
 footstool, the kind of wood and varnish in the furniture. More- 
 over, this conscientious distinctness is just the same in the 
 foreground as in the extreme background, where, according to 
 the laws of optics, things should be scarcely perceptible. 
 
 This uniformly clear reproduction of all the phenomena in 
 the field of vision is the pictorial expression of the incapacity 
 for attention. In intellection, attention suppresses a portion of 
 that which is presented to consciousness (through association or
 
 8,j DEGENERATION 
 
 perception), and suffers only a dominant group of the latter to 
 remain. In sight, attention suppresses a portion of the 
 phenomena in the field of vision in order distinctly to perceive 
 only that part which the eye can focus. To look at a thing 
 is to see one object intently, and to disregard others. The 
 painter must observe if he wishes to make clear to us what 
 phenomenon has engrossed him, and what his picture is to show 
 us. If he does not dwell observantly on a definite point in the 
 field of vision, but represents the whole field of view with the 
 same proportion of intensity, we cannot divine what he wishes 
 particularly to tell us, and on what he wishes to direct our 
 attention. Such a style of painting may be compared to the 
 disconnected speech of a weak mind, who chatters according to 
 the current of the association of ideas, wanders in his talk, and 
 neither knows himself what he wishes to arrive at, nor is able 
 to make it clear to us ; it is painted drivelling, echolalia of the 
 brush. 
 
 But it is just this manner of painting which has gained for 
 itself an influence on contemporary art. It is the pre-Raphaelite 
 contribution to its evolution. The non-mystical painters have 
 also learnt to observe accessories with precision, and to re- 
 produce them faithfully ; but they have prudently avoided fall- 
 ing into the faults of their models, and nullifying the unity of 
 their work by filling the most distant backgrounds with still life, 
 painted with painful accuracy. The lawns, flowers and trees, 
 which they render with botanical accuracy, the geologically 
 correct rocks, surfaces of soil, and mountain structures, the 
 distinct patterns of carpets and wall-papers, which we find in 
 the new pictures, are traceable to Ruskin and the pre- 
 Raphaelites. 
 
 These mystics believed themselves to be mentally affiliated 
 with the Old Masters, because, like the latter, they painted 
 religious pictures. But in this they deceive themselves. Cimabue, 
 Giotto and Fra Angelico were no mystics, or, to put it more 
 precisely, they are to be classed as mystics because of their 
 ignorance, and not because of organic weakness of mind. The 
 mediaeval painter, who depicted a religious scene, was convinced 
 that he was painting something perfectly true. An Annuncia- 
 tion, a Resurrection, an Ascension, an event in the lives of the 
 saints, a scene of life in paradise or in hell, possessed for him 
 the same incontestable character of reality as drinking bouts in 
 a soldier's tavern, or a banquet in a ducal palace. He was a 
 realist when he was painting the transcendental. To him the 
 legend of his faith was related as a fact ; he was penetrated with 
 a sense of its literal truth, and reproduced it exactly as he would 
 have done any other true story. The spectator approached the 
 picture with the same conviction. Religious art was the Bible
 
 MYSTICISM 85 
 
 of the poor. It had for the mediaeval man the same importance 
 as the illustrations in the works on the history of civilization, 
 and on natural science, have in our day. Its duty was to 
 narrate and to teach, and hence it had to be exact. We know 
 from the touching stanza of Villon* how the illiterate people of 
 the Middle Ages regarded church pictures. The dissolute poet 
 makes his mother say to the Virgin Mary : 
 
 * A pitiful poor woman, shrunk and old, 
 1 am, and nothing learn'd in letter-lore ; 
 Within my parish-clois er I behold 
 A painted Heaven where hirps and lutes adore, 
 And eke an Hell whose damned folk seethe full sore : 
 One bringeth fear, the other joy to me. 
 That joy, great Goddess, make thou mine to be 
 Thou ot whom all must ask it even as I ; 
 And that which faith desiies, that let it see, 
 For in this faith I choose to live and die.' 
 
 With this sober faith a mystic mode of painting would be quite 
 incompatible. The painter then avoided all that was obscure 
 or mysterious ; he did not paint nebulous dreams and moods, 
 but positive records. He had to convince others, and could do 
 so, because he was convinced himself. 
 
 It was quite otherwise with the pre-Raphaelites. They did 
 not paint sober visions, but emotions. They therefore intro- 
 duced into their pictures mysterious allusions and obscure 
 symbols, which have nothing to do with the reproduction of 
 visible reality. I need cite only one example Holman Hunt's 
 Shadow of the Cross. In this picture Christ is standing in the 
 Oriental attitude of prayer with outstretched arms, and the 
 shadow of his body, fallirig on the ground, shows the form of a 
 cross. Here we have a most instructive pattern of the processes 
 of mystic thought. Holman Hunt imagines Christ in prayer. 
 Through the association of ideas there awakes in him 
 simultaneously the mental image of Christ's subsequent death 
 
 * ' BALLADE QUE VILLON FEIT A LA REQUESTS DE SA MERE POUR 
 
 PRIER NOSTRE DAME. 
 
 * Femuie je suis povrette et ancienne. 
 Que riens ne scay, oncques lettres ne leuz, 
 Au Monstier voy (dont suis parroissienne) 
 Paradis painct, ou sont harpes et luz, 
 Et ung enfer, ou darnnez sont boulluz, 
 L'ung me faict paour, 1'autre joye et liesse, 
 La joye avoir faictz moy (haulte deesse) 
 A qui pecheurs doivent tous recourir 
 Combley de foy, sans faincte ne paresse, 
 En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir.' 
 
 It is significant that the pre-Raphaelite Rossetti has translated this very 
 poem of Villon, His Mother's Service to Our Lady. l } oems> p. 180.
 
 6 DEGENERATION 
 
 on the cross. He wants, by the instrumentality of painting, to 
 make the association of these ideas visible. And hence he lets 
 the living Christ throw a shadow which assumes the form of a 
 cross, thus foretelling the fate of the Saviour, as if some 
 mysterious, incomprehensible power had so posed his body 
 with respect to the rays of the sun that a wondrous annuncia- 
 tion of his destiny must needs write itself on the floor. The 
 invention is completely absurd. It would have been childish 
 trifling if Christ had drawn his sublime death of sacrifice, 
 whether in jest or in vanity, in anticipation, by his shadow on 
 the ground. Neither would the shadow-picture have had any 
 object, for no contemporary of Christ's would have understood 
 the significance of the shadowed cross before he had suffered 
 death by crucifixion. In Holman Hunt's consciousness, how- 
 ever, emotion simultaneously awakened the form of the praying 
 Christ and of the cross, and he unites both presentations any- 
 how, without regard to their reasonable connection. If an Old 
 Master had had to paint the same idea, namely, the praying 
 Christ filled with the presentiment of his impending death, he 
 would have shown us in the picture a realistic Christ in prayer, 
 and in a corner an equally realistic crucifixion ; but he would 
 never have sought to blend both these different scenes into a 
 single one by a shadowy connection. This is the difference 
 between the religious painting of the strong healthy believer 
 and of the emotional degenerate mind. 
 
 In the course of time the pre-Raphaelites laid aside many of 
 their early extravagances. Millais and Holman Hunt no longer 
 practise the affectation of wilfully bad drawing and of childish 
 babbling in imitation of Giotto's language. They have only 
 retained, of the leading principles o*f the school, the careful 
 reproduction of the unessential and the painting of the idea. A 
 benevolent critic, Edward Rod,* says of them : ' They were 
 themselves writers, and their painting is literature.' This speech 
 is still applicable to the school. 
 
 A few of the earliest pre-Raphaelites have understood it. 
 They have recognised in time that they had mistaken their 
 vocation, and have gone over, from a style of painting which was 
 merely thought-writing, to genuine writing. The most notable 
 among them is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who, though born in 
 England, was the son of an Italian Carbonaro, and a scholar of 
 Dante. His father gave him the name of the great poet at his 
 -entrance into the world, and this expressive baptismal name 
 became a constant suggestion, which Rossetti felt, and has, 
 perhaps half unconsciously, admitted. f He is the most instruc- 
 tive example of the often-quoted assertion of Balzac, of the 
 
 * Edward Rod, tudes sur le XIX. Sihle. Paris et Lausanne, 1888, p. 89. 
 f Rossetti, Poems, p. 277.
 
 MYSTICISM 87 
 
 determining influence of a name on the development and destiny 
 of its bearer. Rossetti's whole poetical feeling was rooted in 
 Dante. His theory of life bears an indistinct cast of that of the 
 Florentine. Through all his ideas there runs a reminiscence, 
 faint or strong, of the Divina Commedia or the Vita Niiova. 
 
 The analysis of one of his most celebrated poems, The Blessed 
 Damosel, will show this parasitic battening on the body of 
 Dante, and at the same time disclose some of the most char- 
 acteristic peculiarities of the mental working of a mystic's brain. 
 The first strophe runs thus : 
 
 ' The blessed damozel leaned out 
 
 From the gold bar of Heaven ; 
 Her eyes were deeper than the depth 
 
 Of waters stilled at even ; 
 She had three lilies in her hand, 
 
 And the stars in her hair were seven.' 
 
 The whole of this description of a lost love, who looks down 
 upon him from a heaven imagined as a palace, with paradisiacal 
 decorations, is a reflection of Dante's Paradiso (Canto Hi.), where 
 the Blessed Virgin speaks to the poet from the moon. We 
 even find details repeated, e.g., the deep and still waters (. . . ' ver 
 per acque nitide e tranquille Non si profonde, che i fondi sien 
 persi . . .'). The ' lilies in her hand ' he gets from the Old 
 Masters, yet even here there is a slight ring of the morning 
 greeting from the Purgatorio (Canto xxx.), ' Manibus o date iilia 
 plenis! He designates his love by the Anglo-Norman word 
 'damozel.' By this means he makes any clear outlines in the 
 idea of a girl or lady artificially blurred, and shrouds the distinct 
 picture in a veil of clouds. By the word 'girl' we should just 
 think of a girl and nothing else. ' Damozel ' awakens in the 
 consciousness of the English reader obscure ideas of slim, noble 
 ladies in the tapestries of old castles, of haughty Norman 
 knights in mail, of something remote, ancient, half forgotten; 
 ' damozel ' carries back the contemporary beloved into the 
 mysterious depths of the Middle Ages, and spiritualizes her into 
 the enchanted figure of a ballad. This one word awakens all 
 the crepuscular moods which the body of romantic poets and 
 authors have bequeathed as a residuum in the soul of the 
 contemporary reader. In the hand of the * damozel ' Rossetti 
 places three lilies, round her head he weaves seven stars. These 
 numbers are, of course, not accidental. From the oldest times 
 they have been reckoned as mysterious and holy. The ' three ' 
 and the ' seven ' are allusions to something unknown, and of 
 deep meaning, which the intuitive reader may try to understand. 
 It must not be said that my criticism of the means by which 
 Rossetti seeks to express his own dreamy states of mind, and to 
 arouse similar states in the reader, applies equally to all lyrics
 
 3 DEGENERATION 
 
 and poetry generally, and that I condemn the latter when I 
 adduce the former as the emanations of the mystic's weakness 
 of mind. All poetry no doubt has this peculiarity, that it makes 
 use of words intended not only to arouse the definite ideas which 
 they connote, but also to awaken emotions that shall vibrate in 
 consciousness. But the procedure of a healthy-minded poet is 
 altogether different from that of a weak-minded mystic. The 
 suggestive word employed by the former has in itself an 
 intelligible meaning, but besides this it is adapted to excite 
 emotions in every healthy-minded man ; and finally the emotions 
 excited have all of them reference to the subject of the poem. 
 One example will make this clear. Uhland sings the Praise of 
 Spring in these words : 
 
 ' Saatengriin, Veilchenduft, 
 Lerchenwirbel, Amselschlag, 
 Sonnenregen, linde Luft : 
 Wenn ich solche Worte singe, 
 Braucht es dann noch grosse Dinge, 
 Dich zu preisen, Friihlingstag ?'* 
 
 Each word of the first three lines contains a positive idea. Each 
 of them awakens glad feelings in a man of natural sentiment. 
 These feelings, taken together, produce the mood with which 
 the awakening of spring fills the soul, to induce which was 
 precisely the intention of the poet. When, on the other hand, 
 Rossetti interweaves the mystical numbers 'three' and 'seven ' 
 in the description of his ' damozel,' these numbers signify 
 nothing in themselves ; moreover, they will call up no emotion, 
 at all in an intellectually healthy reader, who does not believe 
 in mystical numbers ; but even in the case of the degenerate 
 and hysterical reader, on whom the cabbala makes impression, 
 the emotions excited by the sacred numbers will not involve a 
 reference to the subject of the poem, viz., the apparition of one 
 loved and lost, but at best will call up a general emotional 
 consciousness, which may perhaps tell in a remote way to the 
 advantage of the ' damozel.' 
 
 But to continue the analysis of the poem. To the maiden in- 
 bliss it appears that she has been a singer in God's choir for 
 only one day ; to him who is left behind this one day has been 
 actually a matter of ten years. ' To one it is ten years of years." 
 This computation is thoroughly mystical. It means, that is, 
 absolutely nothing. Perhaps Rossetti imagined that there may 
 
 * *The springing green, the violet's scent, 
 The trill of lark, the blackbird's note, 
 Sunshowers soft, and balmy breeze : 
 If I sing such words as these, 
 Needs there any grander thing 
 To praise thee with, O day of spring 7
 
 MYSTICISM 89 
 
 exist a higher unity to which the single year may stand as one 
 day does to a year ; that therefore 365 years would constitute a 
 sort of higher order of year. The words 'year of years' there- 
 fore signified 365 years. But as Rossetti portrays this thought 
 vaguely and imperfectly, he is far from expressing it as intel- 
 ligibly as this. 
 
 ' It was the rampart of God's house 
 
 That she was standing on ; 
 By God built over the sheer depth 
 
 The which is space begun ; 
 So high that, looking downward, thence 
 
 She scarce could see the sun. 
 
 ' It lies in heaven, across the flood 
 
 Of ether, as a bridge. 
 Beneath, the tides of day and night 
 
 With flame and darkness ridge 
 The void, as low as where this earth 
 Spins like a fretful midge. 
 
 ' Heard hardly, some of her new friends, 
 
 Amid their loving games, 
 Spake evermore among themselves 
 
 Their virginal chaste names, 
 And the souls mounting up to God 
 Went by her like thin flames. 
 
 * From the fixed place of Heaven she saw 
 
 Time like a pulse shake fierce 
 Through all the worlds. . . .' 
 
 I leave it to the reader to imagine all the details of this descrip- 
 tion and unite them into one complete picture. If he fail in 
 this in spite of honest exertion, let him comfort himself by 
 saying that the fault is not his, but Rossetti's. 
 
 The damozel begins to speak. She wishes that her beloved 
 were already with her. For come he will. 
 
 * " When round his head the aureole clings, 
 
 And he is clothed in white, 
 I'll take his hand and go with him 
 
 To the deep wells of light. 
 We will step down as to a stream, 
 And bathe there in God's sight. 1 " 
 
 It is to be observed how, in the midst of the turgid stream of 
 these transcendental senseless modes of speech, the idea of 
 bathing together takes a definite shape. Mystical reverie never 
 fails to be accompanied by sensuality. 
 
 ' " We two," she said, " will seek the groves 
 
 Where the Lady Mary is, 
 With her five handmaidens, whose names 
 
 Are five sweet symphonies 
 Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, 
 
 Margaret, and Roaalys.'"
 
 90 DEGENERATION 
 
 The enumeration of these five feminine names, occupying two 
 lines of the stanza, is a method of versification characteristic of 
 the mystic. Here the word ceases to be the symbol of a 
 distinct presentation or concept, and sinks into a meaningless 
 vocal sound, intended only to awaken divers agreeable emotions 
 through association of ideas. In this case the five names arouse 
 gliding shadowy ideas of beautiful young maidens, 'Rosalys' 
 those of roses and lilies as well ; and the two verses together 
 diffuse a glamour of faerie, as if one were roaming at ease in a 
 garden of flowers, where between lilies and roses slender white 
 and rosy maidens pace to and fro. 
 
 The maiden in paradise goes on picturing to herself the union 
 with her beloved, and then : 
 
 ' she cast her arms along 
 The golden barriers, 
 And laid her face between her hands 
 And wept I heard her tears.' 
 
 These tears are incomprehensible. The blessed maiden after 
 her death lives in the highest bliss, in a golden palace, in the 
 presence of God and the Blessed Virgin. What pains her now ? 
 That her beloved is not yet with her? Ten years of mortal 
 men are to her as a single day. Even if it be her beloved's 
 destiny to live to be a very old man, she will at most have to 
 wait only five or six of her days until he appears at her side, 
 and after this tiny span of time there blossoms for them both an 
 eternity of joy. It is not, therefore, obvious why she is dis- 
 tressed and sheds tears. This can only be attributed to the 
 bewildered thoughts of the mystic poet. He imagines to him- 
 self a life of happiness after death, but at the same time there 
 dawn in his consciousness dim pictures of the annihilation of 
 individuality, and of final separation through death, and those 
 painful feelings are excited which we are accustomed to associate 
 with ideas of death, decay, and separation from all we love. 
 Hence it is that he comes to close an ecstatic hymn of immor- 
 tality with tears, which have a meaning only if one does not 
 believe in the continuation of life after death. In other respects 
 also there are contradictions in the poem which show that 
 Rossetti had not formed any one of his ideas so clearly as to 
 exclude the opposite and incompatible. Thus, at one time the 
 dead are dressed in white, and adorned with a galaxy of stars ; 
 they appear in pairs and call each other by caressing names ; 
 they must also be thought of as resembling human beings in 
 appearance, while on another occasion their souls are ' thin 
 flames ' which rustle past the damozel. Every single idea in 
 the poem, when we try soberly to follow it out, infallibly takes 
 refuge after this manner in darkness and intangibility.
 
 MYSTICISM 91 
 
 In the ' Divine Comedy,' echoes of which are ever humming in 
 Rossetti's soul, we find nothing of this kind. This was because 
 Dante, like the Old Masters, was a mystic from ignorance, not 
 from the weak-mindedness of degeneration. The raw material of 
 his thought, the store of facts with which he worked, was false, 
 but the use his mind made of it was true and consistent All 
 his ideas were clear, homogeneous, and free from internal con- 
 tradictions. His hell, his purgatory, his paradise, he built up 
 on the science of his times, which based its knowledge of the 
 world exclusively on dogmatic theology. Dante was familiar 
 with the system of his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas (he was 
 nine years old when the Doctor Angelicus died), and permeated 
 by it. To the first readers of the Inferno the poem must have 
 appeared at least as well founded on fact and as convincing as, 
 let us say, Hackel's Natural History of Creation does to the 
 public of to-day. In coming centuries our ideas of an atom as 
 merely a centre of force, of the disposition of atoms in the 
 molecule of an organic combination, of ether and its vibrations, 
 will perhaps be discerned to be just as much poetical dreams as 
 the ideas of the Middle Ages concerning the abode of the souls of 
 the dead appear to us. But that is no reason why anyone should 
 claim the right to designate Helmholtz or William Thompson 
 as mystics, because they base their work upon those notions 
 which even to their minds do not to-day represent anything 
 definite. For the same reason no one ought to call Dante a 
 mystic like a Rossetti. Rossetti's Blessed Damozel is not based 
 upon the scientific knowledge of his time, but upon a mist of 
 undeveloped germs of ideas in constant mutual strife. Dante 
 followed the realities of the world with the keenly penetrating 
 eyes of an observer, and bore with him its image down to his 
 hell. Rossetti is not in a condition to understand, or even to see 
 the real, because he is incapable of the necessary attention ; and 
 since he feels this weakness he persuades himself, in conformity 
 with human habit, that he does not wish to do what in reality 
 he cannot do. ' What is it to me,' he once said,* ' whether 
 the earth revolves around the sun or the sun around the earth ?' 
 To him it is of no importance, because he is incapable of under- 
 standing it. 
 
 It is, of course, impossible to go so deeply into all Rossetti's 
 poems as into the Blessed Damozel ; but it is also unnecessary, 
 since we should everywhere meet with the same mixture of 
 transcendentalism and sensuality, the same shadowy ideation, 
 the same senseless combinations of mutually incompatible ideas. 
 Reference, however, must be made to some of the peculiarities 
 of the poet, because they characterize the brain-work of weak 
 degenerate minds. 
 
 * Rod, op. cit., p. 67r
 
 92 DEGENERATION 
 
 The first thing that strikes us is his predilection for refrains. 
 The refrain is an excellent artistic medium for the purpose of 
 unveiling the state of a soul under the influence of a strong 
 emotion. It is natural that, to the lover yearning for his 
 beloved, the recurring idea of her should be ever thrusting itself 
 among all the other thoughts in which he temporarily indulges. 
 It is equally comprehensible that the unhappy being who is 
 made miserable by thoughts of suicide should be unable to 
 free himself from an idea which is in harmony with his mental 
 condition, say of an Armensiinderblum, or ' flower of the doomed 
 soul/ which he sees when walking at night. (See Heine's poem, 
 Am Kreuzzveg wird begraben, in which the line die Armensiin- 
 derblum is repeated at the end of both strophes with peculiarly 
 thrilling effect.) 
 
 Rossetti's refrains, however, are different from this, which is 
 natural and intelligible. They have nothing to do with the 
 emotion or action expressed by the poem. They are alien 
 to the circle of ideas belonging to the poem. In a word, 
 they possess the character of an obsession, which the patient 
 cannot suppress, although he recognises that they are in no 
 rational connection with the intellectual content of his conscious- 
 ness. In the poem Troy Town it is related how Helen, long 
 before Paris had carried her off, kneels in the temple of Venus 
 at Sparta, and, drunken with the luxuriant beauty of her own 
 body, fervently implores the Goddess of Love to send her a man 
 panting for love, where or whoever he might be, to whom she 
 might give herself. The absurdity of this fundamental idea it 
 is sufficient to indicate in passing. The first strophe runs thus : 
 
 * Heaven-born Helen, Sparta's Queen 
 
 (O Troy town !), 
 
 Had two breasts of heavenly sheen, 
 The sun and the moon of the heart's desire. 
 All Love's lordship lay between. 
 
 (O Trov's down, 
 Tall Troy's on fire !) 
 
 ' Helen knelt at Venus' shrine 
 (O Troy town !) 
 Saying, "A little gift is mine, 
 A little gift for a heart's desire. 
 Hear me speak and make me a sign ! 
 
 (O Troy's down, 
 Tall Troy's on fire !)" '* 
 
 And thus through fourteen strophes there constantly recurs, 
 after the first line, ' O Troy town !' at the end of the third line, 
 'heart's desire'; and after the fourth line, ' O Troy's down, tali 
 Troy's on fire !' It is easy to discern what Rossetti wishes. In 
 him there is repeated the mental process which we recogniseJ 
 
 * Poems, p. 1 6.
 
 MYSTICISM 93 
 
 in Holman Hunt's picture, The Shadow of the Cross. As by 
 association of ideas, in thinking of Helen at Sparta, he hits 
 upon the idea of the subsequent fate of Troy, so shall the 
 reader, while he sees the young queen in Sparta intoxicated by 
 her own beauty, be simultaneously presented with the picture 
 of the yet distant tragical consequences of her longing desire. 
 But he does not seek to connect these two trains of thought in a 
 rational way. He is ever muttering as he goes, monotonously 
 as in a litany, the mysterious invocations to Troy, while he is 
 relating the visit to the temple of Venus at Sparta. Sollier* 
 remarks this peculiarity among persons of feeble intellect. 
 ' Idiots/ he says, ' insert words which have absolutely no con- 
 nection with the object.' And further on : ' Among idiots 
 constant repetition \le rabdchage\ grows into a veritable tic' 
 
 In another very famous poem, Eden Boiver,-\ which treats of 
 the pre-Adamite woman Lilith, her lover the serpent of Eden, 
 and her revenge on Adam, the litany refrain of ' Eden Bower's 
 in flower,' and ' And O the Bower and the hour,' are introduced 
 alternately after the first line in forty-nine strophes. As a 
 matter of course, between these absolutely senseless phrases and 
 the strophe which each interrupts, there is not the remotest con- 
 nection. They are strung together without any reference to 
 their meaning, but only because they rhyme. It is a startling 
 example of echolalia. 
 
 We frequently find this peculiarity of the weak and deranged 
 mind, i.e., echolalia, in Rossetti. Here are a few proofs : 
 
 ' So wet she comes to wed ' (Stratton Water}. 
 
 Here the sound ' wed ' has called up the sound ' wet.' In the 
 poem My Sister s Sleep, in one place where the moon is spoken 
 of, it is said : 
 
 c The hollow halo it was in 
 Was like an icy crystal cup.* 
 
 It is stark nonsense to qualify a plane surface such as a halo 
 by the adjective ' hollow.' The adjective and noun mutually 
 exclude each other, but the rhyming assonance has joined 
 1 hollow ' to ' halo.' With this we may also compare the line : 
 
 'Yet both were ours, but hours will come and go' 
 
 (A New Year's Burden}, 
 and 
 
 ' Forgot it not, nay, but got it not ' (Beauty). 
 
 * Sollier, Psychologie de I' Idiot et de r Imbecile, p. 184. See also Lom- 
 broso, TJie Man of Genius (Contemporary Science Series), London, 1891, 
 p. 216. A special characteristic found in literary mattoids, and also, as we 
 have already seen, in the insane, is that of repeating some words or phrases 
 hundreds of times in the same page. Thus, in one of Passanante's chapters 
 the word riprovate (blame) occurs about 143 times. 
 
 \ Poems, p. 31.
 
 94 DEGENERATION 
 
 Many of Rossetti's poems consist of the stringing together of 
 wholly disconnected words, and to mystic readers these 
 absurdities seem naturally to have the deepest meaning. I 
 should like to cite but one example. The second strophe of 
 the Seng of the Bower says : 
 
 * ... My heart, when it flies to thy bower, 
 "What does it find there that knows it again ? 
 There it must droop like a shower-beaten flower, 
 Red at the rent core and dark with the rain. 
 Ah ! yet what shelter is still shed above it 
 What waters still image its leaves torn apart ? 
 Thy soul is the shade that clings round it to love it, 
 And tears are its mirror deep down in thy heart.'* 
 
 The peculiarity of such series of words is, that each single 
 word has an emotional meaning of its own (such as ' heart/ 
 ' bower,' ' flies,' ' droop,' 'flower,' 'rent/ 'dark/ 'lone,' 'tears/ 
 etc.), and that they follow each other with a cradled rhythm 
 and ear-soothing rhyme. Hence they easily arouse in the 
 emotional and inattentive reader a general emotion, as does a 
 succession of musical tones in a minor key. And the reader 
 fancies that he understands the strophe, while he, as a matter 
 of fact, only interprets his own emotion according to his own 
 level of culture, his character, and his recollections of what he 
 has read. 
 
 Besides Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it has been customary to 
 include Swinburne and Morris among the pre-Raphaelite poets. 
 But the similarity between these two and the head of the school 
 is remote. Swinburne is, in Magnan's phrase, a 'higher de- 
 generate/ while Rossetti should be counted among Sollier's 
 imbeciles. Swinburne is not so emotional as Rossetti, but he 
 stands on a much higher mental plane. His thought is false 
 and frequently delirious, but he has thoughts, and they are clear 
 and connected. He is mystical, but his mysticism partakes 
 more of the depraved and the criminal than of the paradisiacal 
 and divine. He is the first representative of ' Diabolism ' in 
 English poetry. This is because he has been influenced, not 
 only by Rossetti, but also and especially by Baudelaire. Like 
 all ' degenerates/ he is extraordinarily susceptible to suggestion, 
 and, consciously or unconsciously, he has imitated, one after 
 another, all the strongly-marked poetic geniuses that have come 
 under his notice, He was an echo of Rossetti and Baudelaire, 
 as he was of Gautier and Victor Hugo, and in his poems it is 
 possible to trace the course of his reading step by step. 
 
 Completely Rossettian, for example, is A Christmas Carol ^ 
 
 * Poems, p. 247. 
 
 t Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads. London : Chatto 
 and Windus, 1889, p. 247.
 
 MYSTICISM 95 
 
 * Three damsels in the queen's chamber, 
 
 The queen's mouth was most fair ; 
 She spake a word of God's mother, 
 As the combs went in her hair. 
 " Mary that is of might. 
 Bring us to thy Son's sight."* 
 
 Here we find a mystical content united to the antiquarianism 
 and childish phraseology of genuine pre-Raphaelitism. The 
 Masque of Queen Bersabe is worked out on the same model, 
 being an imitation of the mediaeval miracle-play, with its Latin 
 stage directions and puppet-theatre style. This, in its turn, has 
 become the model of many French poems, in which there is 
 only a babbling and stammering and a crawling on all fours, as 
 if in a nursery. 
 
 Where he walks in Baudelaire's footsteps, Swinburne tries to 
 distort his face to a diabolical mien, and makes the woman say 
 (in Anactorid) to the other unnaturally loved woman: 
 
 ' I would my love could kill thee. I am satiated 
 With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead. 
 I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat, 
 And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet. 
 I would find grievous ways to have ihee slain, 
 Intense device, and superflux of pain ; 
 
 . . . O ! that I 
 
 Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die 
 Die of thy pain and my delight, and be 
 Mixed with thy blood and molien unto thee.' 
 
 Or, when he curses and reviles, as in Before Dawn : 
 
 * To say of shame what is it ? 
 Of virtue we can miss it, 
 Of sin we can but kiss it. 
 And it's no longer sin.' 
 
 One poem deserves a more detailed analysis, because it con- 
 tains unmistakably the germ of the later ' symbolism,' and is an 
 instructive example of this form of mysticism. The poem is 
 The King's Daughter. It is a sort of ballad, which in fourteen 
 four-lined stanzas relates a fairy story about the ten daughters of 
 a king, of whom one was preferred before the remaining nine, was 
 beautifully dressed, pampered with the most costly food, slept 
 in a soft bed, and received the attentions of a handsome prince, 
 while her sisters remained neglected ; but instead of finding 
 happiness at the prince's side, she became deeply wretched and 
 wished she were dead. In the first and third lines of every 
 stanza the story is rehearsed. The second line speaks of a 
 mythical mill-stream, which comes into the ballad one knows 
 not how, and which always, by some mysterious influence, 
 symbolically reflects all the changes that take place as the
 
 g6 DEGENERATION 
 
 action of the ballad progresses ; while the fourth line contains 
 a litany-like exclamation, which likewise makes a running refer- 
 ence to the particular stage reached in the narrative, 
 
 1 We were ten maidens in the green corn, 
 
 Small red leaves in the mill-water : 
 Fairer maidens never were born. 
 Apples of gold for the King's daughter. 
 
 ' We were ten maidens by a well-head, 
 Small white birds in the mill-water: 
 Sweeter maidens never were wed. 
 Rings of red for the King's daughter.' 
 
 In the following stanzas the admirable qualities of each of the 
 ten princesses are portrayed, and the symbolical intermediate 
 lines run thus : 
 
 ' Seeds of wheat in the mill-water . . . White bread and brown for the 
 King's daughter . . . Fair green weed in the mill-water . . . White 
 wine and red for the King's daughter . . . Fair thin reeds in the mill- 
 v.-ater . . . Honey in the comb for the King's daughter . . . Fallen flowers 
 in the mill-water . . . Golden gloves for the King's daughter . . . Fallen 
 fruit in the mill-water . . . Golden sleeves for the King's daughter . . .' 
 
 The King's son then comes, chooses the one princess and 
 disdains the other nine. The symbolical lines point out the 
 contrast between the brilliant fate of the chosen one and the 
 gloomy destiny of the despised sisters : 
 
 ' A little wind in the mill-water ; A crown of red for the King's daughter 
 A little rain in the mill-water ; A bed of yellow straw for all the rest ; A 
 bed of gold for the King's daughter Rain that rains in the mill-water ; 
 A comb of yellow shell for all the rest, A comb of gold for the King's 
 daughter Wind and hail in ihe mill-water ; A grass girdle for all the rest, 
 A girdle of arms for the King's daughter Snow that snows in the mill- 
 water ; Nine little kisses for all the rest, An hundredfold for the King's 
 daughter.' 
 
 The King's daughter thus appears to be very fortunate, and to 
 be envied by her nine sisters. But this happiness is only on the 
 surface, for the poem now suddenly changes : 
 
 * Broken boats in the mill-water ; 
 Golden gifts for all the rest, 
 Sorrow of heart for the King's daughter. 
 
 1 " Ye'll make a grave for my fair body," 
 Running rain in the mill-water ; 
 " And ye'll streek my brother at the side of me," 
 The pains of hell for the King's daughter.' 
 
 What has brought about this change in her fate the poet 
 purposely leaves obscure. Perhaps he wishes to have us under- 
 stand that the King's son has no right to sue for her hand, being 
 her brother, and that the chosen princess for shame at the 
 incest perishes. This would be in keeping with Swinburne's
 
 MYSTICISM -97 
 
 childish devilry. But I am not dwelling on this aspect of the 
 poem, but on its symbolism. 
 
 It is psychologically justifiable that a subjective connection 
 should be set up between our states of mind for the time being 
 and phenomena ; that we should perceive in the external world 
 a reflection of our moods. If the external world shows a well- 
 marked emotional character, it awakens in us the mood corre- 
 sponding to it ; and conversely, if we are under the influence of 
 some pronounced feeling, we notice, in accordance with the 
 mechanism of attention, only those features of nature which are 
 in harmony with our mood, which intensify and sustain it, while 
 the opposing phenomena we neither observe nor even perceive.. 
 A gloomy ravine overhung by a cloudy sky makes us sad.. 
 This is one form of associating our humour with the outer world. 
 But if we from any cause are already sad, we find some corre- 
 sponding sadness in all the scenes around us in the streets of 
 the metropolis ragged, starved-looking children, thin, miserably 
 kept cab-horses, a blind beggar-woman ; in the woods withered, 
 mouldering leaves, poisonous fungi, slimy slugs, etc. If we are 
 joyous, we see just the same objects, but take no notice of them, 
 perceiving only beside them, in the street, a wedding procession, 
 a fresh young maiden with a basket of cherries on her arm, 
 gaily-coloured placards, a funny fat man with his hat on the 
 back of his head ; in the woods, birds flitting by, dancing butter- 
 flies, little white anemones, etc. Here we have the other form 
 of that association. The poet has a perfect right to make use 
 of both these forms. If Heine sings : 
 
 ' Es ragt ins Meer der Runenstein, 
 Da sitz ich mit meinen Traumen ; 
 Es pfeift der Wind, die Mdwen schrein, 
 Die Wellen, die wandern und schaumen. 
 
 * Ich habe geliebt manch schones Kind 
 Und manchen guten Gesellen 
 Wo sind sie bin ? Es pfeift der Wind, 
 Es schaumen und wandern die Wellen/* 
 
 he brings his own mournful, melancholy frame of mind with 
 him. He bemoans the fleetingness of man's life, the imperma- 
 nence of the feelings, the shadowy passing by and away of 
 beloved companions. In this state he looks out over the sea 
 from the shore where he sits, and perceives only those objects 
 
 * ' The Runic stone stands out in the sea, 
 There sit I with my dreams, 
 'Mid whistling winds and wailing gulls, 
 And wandering, foaming waves. 
 I have loved many a lovely child, 
 And many a good comrade 
 Where are they gone ? The wind whistles, 
 The waves wander foaming on.'
 
 98 DEGENERATION 
 
 that are in keeping with his humour and give it embodiment: 
 the driving gust of wind, the hurrying gulls, now seen, now lost 
 to sight, the rolling in and trackless ebbing of the surf. These 
 features of an ocean scene become symbols of what is passing 
 through the poet's mind, and this symbolism is sound and 
 founded on the laws of thought. 
 
 Swinburne's symbolism is of quite another kind. He does 
 not let the external world express a mood, but makes it tell a 
 story ; he changes its appearance according to the character of 
 the event he is describing. Like an orchestra, it accompanies 
 all events which somewhere are taking place. Here nature is 
 no longer a white wall on which, as in a game of shadows, the 
 varied visions of the soul are thrown ; but a living, thinking 
 being, which follows the sinful love-romance with the same 
 tense sympathy as the poet, and which, with its own media, 
 expresses just as much as he does complacency, delight, or 
 sorrow at every chapter of the story. This is a purely delirious 
 idea. It corresponds in art and poetry to hallucination in mental 
 disease. It is a form of mysticism, which is met with in all the 
 degenerate. Just as in Swinburne the mill-water drives 'small 
 red leaves/ and, what is certainly more curious, 'little white 
 birds,' when everything is going on well, and on the other hand 
 is lashed by snow and hail, and tosses shattered boats about, if 
 things take an adverse turn ; so, in Zola's Assommoir, the drain 
 from a dyeing factory carries off fluid of a rosy or golden hue 
 on days of happiness, but a black pr gray-coloured stream if the 
 fates of Gervaise and Lantier grow dark with tragedy. Ibsen, 
 too, in his Ghosts, makes it rain in torrents if Frau Alving and 
 her son are in sore trouble, while the sunshine breaks forth just 
 as the catastrophe is about to occur. Ibsen, moreover, goes 
 farther in this hallucinatory symbolism than the others, since 
 with him Nature not only plays an active part, but s"hows scornful 
 malice she not only furnishes an expressive accompaniment 
 to the events, but makes merry over them. 
 
 William Morris is intellectually far more healthy than Rossetti 
 and Swinburne. His deviations from mental equilibrium betray 
 themselves, not through mysticism, but through a want of 
 individuality, and an overweening tendency to imitation. His 
 affectation consists in mediaevalism. He calls himself a pupil 
 of Chaucer.* He artlessly copies whole stanzas also from 
 Dante, e.g., the well-known Francesca and Paolo episode frcim 
 Canto V. of the Inferno, when he writes in his Guenevere ; 
 
 * William Morris, Poems (Tauchnitz edition), p. 169 : 
 
 'And if it hap that . . . 
 My master. Geoffrey Chaucer, thou do meet, 
 Then speak . . . the words : 
 *' O master 1 O thou gre*at of heart and tongue !"'...
 
 MYSTICISM 99 
 
 ' In that garden fair 
 
 Came Lancelot walking ; this is true, the kiss 
 Wherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day, 
 I scarce dare talk of the remembered bliss.' 
 
 Morris persuades himself that he is a wandering minstrel of the 
 thirteenth or fourteenth century, and takes much trouble to look 
 at things in such a way, and express them in such language, as 
 would have befitted a real contemporary of Chaucer. Beyond 
 this poetical ventriloquism, so to speak, with which he seeks so 
 to alter the sound of his voice that it may appear to come from 
 far away to our ear, there are not many features of degeneracy 
 in him to notice. But he sometimes falls into outspoken 
 cholalia, e.g., in a stanza of the Earthly Paradise : 
 
 ' Of Margaret sitting glorious there, 
 In glory of gold and glory of hair, 
 And glory of glorious face most fair ' 
 
 where ' glory ' and ' glorious ' are repeated five times in three 
 lines. His emotional activity in recent years has made him an 
 adherent of a vague socialism, consisting chiefly of love and 
 pity for his fellow-men, and which has an odd effect when ex- 
 pressed artistically in the language of the old ballads. 
 
 The pre-Raphaelites have for twenty years exercised a great 
 influence on the rising generation of English poets. All the 
 hysterical and degenerate have sung with Rossetti of ' damozels ' 
 and of the Virgin Mary, have with Swinburne eulogized unnatural 
 license, crime, hell, and the devil. They have, with Morris, 
 mangled language in bardic strains, and in the manner of the 
 Canterbury Tales ; and if the whole of English poetry is not 
 to-day unmitigatedly pre-Raphaelite, it is due merely to the 
 fortunate accident that, contemporaneously with the pre- 
 Raphaelites, so sound a poet as Tennyson has lived and worked. 
 The official honours bestowed on him as Poet Laureate, his 
 unexampled success among readers, pointed him out to a part 
 at least of the petty strugglers and aspirants as worthy of 
 imitation, and so it comes about that among the chorus of the 
 lily-bearing mystics there are also heard other street-singers who 
 follow the poet of the Idylls of the King. 
 
 In its further development pre-Raphaelitism in England 
 degenerated into ' aestheticism,' and in France into 'symbolism.', 
 With both of these tendencies we must deal more fully.
 
 ioo DEGENERATION 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 SYMBOLISM. 
 
 A SIMILAR phenomenon to that which we observed in the case 
 of the pre-Raphaelites is afforded by the French Symbolists. 
 We see a number of young men assemble for the purpose of 
 founding a school. It assumes a special title, but in spite of all 
 sorts of incoherent cackle and subsequent attempts at mystifica- 
 tion it has, beyond this name, no kind of general artistic principle 
 or clear aesthetic ideal. It only follows the tacit, but definitely 
 recognisable, aim of making a noise in the world, and by attract- 
 ing the attention of men through its extravagances, of attaining 
 celebrity and profit, and the gratification of all the desires and 
 conceits agitating the envious souls of these filibusters of fame. 
 
 Shortly after 1880 there was, in the Quartier Latin in Paris, a 
 group of literary aspirants, all about the same age, who used to 
 meet in an underground cafe at the Quai St. Michel, and, while 
 drinking beer, smoking and quibbling late into the night, or 
 early hours of the morning, abused in a scurrilous manner the 
 well-known and successful authors of the day, while boasting 
 of their own capacity, as yet unrevealed to the world. 
 
 The greatest talkers among them were Emile Goudeau, a 
 chatterbox unknown save as the author of a few silly satirical 
 verses ; Maurice Rollinat, the author of Les Nivroses ; and 
 Edmond Haraucourt, who now stands in the front rank of 
 French mystics. They called themselves the ' Hydropaths,' an 
 entirely meaningless word, which evidently arose out of an 
 indistinct reminiscence of both ' hydrotherapy ' and ' neuropath/ 
 and which was probably intended, in the characteristic vague- 
 ness of the mystic thought of the weak-minded, to express only 
 the general idea of people whose health is not satisfactory, who 
 are ailing and under treatment. In any case there is, in the 
 self-chosen name, a suggestion of shattered nervous vitality 
 vaguely felt and admitted. The group, moreover, owned a 
 weekly paper Luthe, which ceased after a few issues.* 
 
 About 1884 the society left their paternal pot-house, and 
 pitched their tent in the Cafe" Francois I., Boulevard St. Michel. 
 This caft attained a high renown. It was the cradle of 
 Symbolism. It is still the temple of a few ambitious youths, 
 who hope, by joining the Symbolist school, to acquire that 
 
 * A history of the commencement of this society has been written by one 
 of the members, Mathias Morhardt. See 'Les Symboliques,' NouvelU 
 Revue du 15 Fe'vrier, 1892, p. 765.
 
 MYSTICISM ior 
 
 advancement which they could not expect from their own 
 abilities. It is, too, the Kaaba to which all foreign imbeciles 
 make a pilgrimage, those, that is, who have heard of the new 
 Parisian tendency, and wish to become initiated into its teachings 
 and mysteries. A few of the Hydropaths did not join in the 
 change of quarters, and their places were taken by fresh 
 auxiliaries Jean Moreas, Laurent Tailhade, Charles Morice, 
 etc. These dropped the old name, and were known for a short 
 time as the ' Decadents.' This had been applied to them by a 
 critic in derision, but just as the ' Beggars ' of the Netherlands 
 proudly and truculently appropriated the appellation bestowed 
 in contempt and mockery, so the ' Decadents ' stuck in their 
 hats the insult, which had been cast in their faces, as a sign of 
 mutiny against criticism. Soon, however, these original guests ; 
 of the Francois I. became tired of their name, and More"as 
 invented for them the designation of ' Symbolistes,' under which 
 they became generally known, while a special smaller group, 
 who had separated themselves from the Symbolists, continued 
 to retain the title of ' Decadents.' 
 
 The Symbolists are a remarkable example of that group-pjr"" 
 forming tendency which we have learnt to know as a peculiarity 
 of ' degenerates.' They had in common all the signs of de- 
 generacy and imbecility : overweening vanity and self-conceit, ; 
 strong emotionalism, confused disconnected thoughts, garrulity 
 (the 'logorrhcea' of mental therapeutics), and complete incapa- 
 city for serious sustained work. Several of them had had a 
 secondary education, others even less. All of them were pro- 
 foundly ignorant, and being unable, through weakness of will 
 and inability to pay attention, to learn anything systematically, 
 they persuaded themselves, in accordance with a well-known 
 psychological law, that they despised all positive knowledge, and 
 held that only dreams and divinings, only ' intuitions,' were worthy 
 of human beings. A few of them, like Moreas and Guaita, who 
 afterwards became a ' magian,' read in a desultory fashion all 
 sorts of books which chanced to fall into their hands at the bou- 
 quinistes of the Quais, and delivered themselves of the snatched 
 fruits of their reading in grandiloquent and mysterious phrases 
 before their comrades. Their listeners thereupon imagined that 
 they had indulged in an exhausting amount of study, and in this 
 way they acquired that intellectual lumber which they peddled 
 out in such an ostentatious display in their articles and pam- 
 phlets, and in which the mentally sane reader, to his amused 
 astonishment, meets with the names of Schopenhauer, Darwin, 
 Taine, Renan, Shelley and Goethe ; names employed to label the 
 shapeless, unrecognisable rubbish-heaps of a mental dustbin, filled 
 with raw scraps of uncomprehended and insolently mutilated 
 propositions and fragments of thought, dishonestly extracted
 
 102 DEGENERATION 
 
 and appropriated. This ignorance on the part of the Symbolists, 
 and their childish flaunting of a pretended culture, are openly- 
 admitted by one of them. ' Very few of these young men," says- 
 Charles Morice,* ' have any exact knowledge of the tenets of 
 religion or philosophy. From the expressions used in the Church 
 services, however, they retain some fine terms, such as " mon- 
 strance," " ciborium," etc. ; several have preserved from Spencer, 
 Mill, Shopenhauer (sic /), Comte, Darwin, a few technical terms. 
 Few are those who know deeply what they talk about, or those 
 who do not try to make a show and parade of their manner of 
 speaking, which has no other merit than that of being a conceit 
 in syllables.' (Charles Morice naturally is responsible for this 
 last unmeaning phrase, not I.) 
 
 The original guests of the Francois I. made their appearance 
 at one o'clock in the day at their caf, and remained there till 
 dinner-time. Immediately after that meal they returned, and 
 did not leave their headquarters till long after midnight. Of 
 course none of the Symbolists had any known occupation. 
 These ' degenerates ' are no more capable of regularly fulfilling 
 any duty than they are of methodical learning. If this organic 
 deficiency appears in a man of the lower classes, he becomes a 
 vagabond ; in a woman of that class it leads to prostitution ; in 
 one belonging to the upper classes it takes the form of artistic 
 and literary drivel. The German popular mind betrays a deep 
 intuition of the true connection of things in inventing such a 
 word as 'day-thief (Tagedteb) for such aesthetic loafers. Pro- 
 fessional thieving and the unconquerable propensity to busy, 
 gossiping, officious idleness flow from the same source, to wit, 
 inborn weakness of brain. 
 
 It is true that the boon companions of the caf6 are not con- 
 scious of their mentally-crippled condition. They find pet names 
 and graceful appellations for their inability to submit themselves 
 to any sort of discipline, and to devote persistent concentration 
 and attention to any sort of work. They call it ' the artist 
 nature,' * genius roaming at large,' ' a soaring above the low 
 miasma of the commonplace/ They ridicule the dull Philistine, 
 who, like the horse turning a winch, performs mechanically a 
 regular amount of work ; they despise the narrow-minded loons 
 who demand that a man should either pursue a circumscribed 
 bourgeois trade or possess an officially acknowledged status, and 
 who profoundly distrust impecuniary professions.- They glory 
 in roving folk who wander about singing and carelessly begging, 
 and they hold up as their ideal the ' commoner of air,' who 
 bathes in morning dew, sleeps under flowers, and gets his clothing 
 from the same firm as the lilies of the field io the Gospel. 
 Richepin's La Chanson des Gueux is the most typical expression 
 * Charles Morice, La Literature de tout-fr-P heure. Paris, 1889, p. 274.
 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 103 
 
 of this theory of life. Baumbach's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen 
 and Spielmannslieder are analogous specimens in German litera- 
 ture, but of a less pronounced character. Schiller's Pegasus im 
 Jock seems to be pulling at the same rope as these haters of the 
 work society expects of them, but it is only apparently so. Our 
 great poet sides not with the impotent sluggard, but with that 
 overflowing energy which would fain do greater things than the 
 work of an office-boy or a night-watchman. 
 
 Moreover, the pseudo-artistic loafer, in spite of his imbecility 
 and self-esteem, cannot fail to perceive that his mode of life 
 runs contrary to the laws on which the structure of society and 
 civilization are based, and he feels the need of justifying himself 
 in his own eyes. This he does by investing with a high signi- 
 ficance the dreams and chatter over which he wastes his time, 
 calculated to arouse in him the illusion that they rival in value 
 the most serious productions. ' The fact is, you see/ says M. 
 Stephane Mallarme, ' that a fine book is the end for which the 
 world was made.'* Morice complains -f- touchingly that the 
 poetic mind ' should be bound to suffer the interruption of a 
 twenty-eight days' army drill between the two halves of a verse.' 
 ' The excitement of the streets,' he goes on, ' the jarring of the 
 Governmental engine, the newspapers, the elections, the changi 
 of the Ministry, have never made so much noise ; the storm 
 and turbulent autocracy of trade has suppressed the love of the 
 beautiful in the thoughts of the multitude, and industry has 
 killed as much silence as politics might still have permitted to 
 survive.' In fact, what are all these nothings commerce, 
 manufactures, politics, administration against the immense im- 
 portance of a hemistich ? 
 
 The drivelling of the Symbolists was not entirely lost in the 
 atmosphere of their cafe, like the smoke of their pipes and 
 cigarettes. A certain amount of it was perpetuated, and ap- 
 peared in the Revue Independante^ the Revue Contemporaine, and 
 other fugitive periodicals, which served as organs to the round 
 table of the Francois I. These little journals and the books 
 published by the Symbolists were not at first noticed outside the 
 cafe. Then it happened that chroniqueurs of the Boulevard 
 papers, into whose hands these writings chanced to fall, devoted 
 an article to them on days when ' copy ' was scanty, but only to 
 hold them up to ridicule. That was all the Symbolists wanted. 
 Mockery or praise mattered little so long as they got noticed. 
 Now they were in the saddle, and showed at once what un- 
 paralleled circus-riders they were. They themselves used every 
 effort to get into the larger newspapers, and when one of them 
 succeeded, like the smith of Jiiterbock in the familiar fairy tale, 
 
 * Jules Hurer, Enqnete sur revolution litteraire. Paris, 1891, p. 65. 
 f Charles Morice, op. cit.^ p. 271.
 
 104 DEGENERATION 
 
 in throwing his cap into an editor's office through the crack of 
 the door incautiously put ajar, he followed it neck and crop, 
 took possession of the place, and in the twinkling of an eye 
 transformed it into the citadel of the Symbolist party. In these 
 tactics everything served their turn the dried-up scepticism 
 and apathy of Parisian editors, who take nothing seriously, are 
 capable neither of enthusiasm nor 01 repugnance, and only know 
 the cardinal principle of their business, viz., to make a noise, to 
 arouse curiosity, to forestall others by bringing out something 
 new and sensational ; the uncritical gaping attitude of the 
 public, who repeat in faith all that their newspaper gossips to 
 them with an air of importance ; the cowardice and cupboard- 
 love of the critics who, finding themselves confronted by a closed 
 and numerous band of reckless young men, got nervous at the 
 sight of their clenched fists and angry threatening glances, 
 and did not dare to quarrel with them ; the low cunning of 
 the ambitious, who hoped to make a good bargain if they 
 speculated on the rise of shares in Symbolism. Thus the very 
 worst and most despicable characteristics of editors, critics, 
 aspiring authors, and newspaper readers, co-operated to make 
 known, and, in part, even famous, the names of the original 
 habitues of the Francois I., and to awaken the conviction in 
 very many weak minds of both hemispheres that their tendency 
 governed the literature of the day, and included all the germs of 
 the future. This triumph of the Symbolists marks the victory 
 of the gang over the individual. It proves the superiority of 
 attack over defence, and the efficacy of mutual-admiration-insur- 
 ance, even in the case of the most beggarly incapacity. 
 
 With all their differences, the works of the Symbolists have 
 two features in common. They are vague often to the point 
 of being unintelligible, and they are pious. Their vagueness 
 is only to be expected, after all that has been said here about 
 the peculiarities of mystic thought. Their piousness has 
 attained to an importance which makes it necessary to consider 
 it more in detail. 
 
 When, in the last few years, a large number of mysteries, 
 passion plays, golden legends, and cantatas appeared, when one 
 dozen after another of new poets and authors, in their first 
 poems, novels, and treatises, made ardent confessions of faith, 
 invoked the Virgin Mary, spoke with rapture of the sacrifice of 
 the Mass, and knelt in fervent prayer, the cry arose amongst 
 reactionists, who have a vested interest in diffusing a belief in 
 a reversion of cultured humanity to the mental darkness of the 
 past : ' Behold, the youth, the hope, the future of the French 
 people is turning away from science ; " emancipation " is 
 becoming bankrupt ; souls are opening again to religion, and 
 the Holy Catholic Church steps anew into its lofty office, as the
 
 MYSTICISM 105 
 
 teacher, comforter, and guide of civilized mankind.' The 
 Symbolistic tendency is designedly called ' neo-Catholic,' and 
 certain critics pointed to its appearance and success as a 
 proof that freethought was overthrown by faith. ' Even the 
 most superficial glance at the state of the world,' writes Edouard 
 Rod,* ' shows us that we are on all sides in the full swing of 
 reaction.' And, further, ' I believe in reaction in every sense 
 of the word. How far this reaction will go is the secret of 
 to-morrow.' 
 
 The jubilant heralds of the new reaction, in inquiring into 
 the cause of this movement, find, with remarkable unanimity, 
 this answer, viz. : The best and most cultivated minds return to 
 faith, because they found out that science had deceived them, 
 and not done for them what it had promised to do. 'The man 
 of this century,' says M. Melchior de Vogue"^ ' has acquired 
 a very excusable confidence in himself. . . . The rational/ 
 mechanism of the world has been revealed to him. ... In the 
 explanation of things the Divine order is wholly eliminated. . . . 
 Besides, why follow after doubtful causes, when the operations 
 of the universe and of humanity had become so clear to the 
 physicist and physiologist? . . . The least wrong God ever 
 wrought was that of being unnecessary. Great minds assured 
 us' of this, and all mediocre spirits were convinced of it. The 
 eighteenth century had inaugurated the worship of Reason. 
 The rapture of that millennium lasted but a moment. Then 
 came eternal disillusion, the regularly recurring ruin of all that 
 man had built upon the hollow basis of his reason. .... He had 
 to admit that, beyond the circle of acquired truths, the abyss of 
 ignorance appeared again just as deep, just as disquieting.' 
 
 Charles Morice, the theorist and philosopher of the Symbolists, 
 arraigns Science on almost every page of his book, La Literature 
 de tout-a-F luure, for her great and divers sins. ' It is lament- 
 able,' he says in his apocalyptic phraseology, J 'that our learned 
 men have no idea how, in popularizing science, they were dis- 
 organizing it (?). To entrust principles to inferior memories, 
 is to expose them to the uncertainty of unauthorized interpre- 
 tations, of erroneous commentaries and heterodox hypotheses. 
 For the word that the books contain is a dead letter, and the 
 books themselves may perish, but the impact which they leave 
 behind them, the breath going forth from them, survives. And 
 what if they have breathed out storm and unloosed (!) darkness ? 
 But this is just what all this chaos of vulgarization has as its 
 most patent result. ... Is not such the natural consequence 
 of a century of psychological investigation, which was a good 
 training for the reason, but whose immediate and actual 
 
 * Huret, op. '/., p. 14. f V te E. M. de Vogii, op. tit., p. xix et seq. 
 
 % Morice, op. cit., pp. 5, 163, 177.
 
 106 DEGENERATION 
 
 consequences must inevitably be weariness, and disgust, ay, 
 and despair of reason ? . . . Science had erased the word 
 mystery. With the same stroke of the pen she had expunged 
 the words beauty, truth, joy, humanity. . . . And now mys- 
 ticism takes from Science, the intruder and usurper, not only 
 all that she had stolen, but something also, it may be, of her 
 own property. The reaction against the shameless and miser- 
 able negations of scientific literature . . . has taken the form 
 of an unforeseen poetical restoration of Catholicism.' 
 
 Another graphomaniac, the author of that imbecile book, 
 Rembrandt as Educator, drivels in almost the same way. 
 ' Interest in science, and especially in the once so popular 
 natural science, has widely diminished of late in the German 
 world. . . . There has been to a certain extent a surfeit of 
 induction ; there is a longing for synthesis ; the days of objec- 
 tivity are declining once more to their end, and, in its place, 
 subjectivity knocks at the door.' * 
 
 Edouara Hodf says : ' The century has advanced without 
 keeping all its promises ' ; and further on he speaks again of 
 'this ageing and deluded century.' 
 
 In a small book, which has become a sort of gospel to 
 imbeciles and idiots, Le Devoir present, the author, M. Paul 
 Desjardins,J makes continual attacks on 'so-called scientific 
 empiricism,' and speaks of the ' negativists, the empiricists, and 
 the mechanists, whose attention is wholly taken up with physical 
 and inexorable forces/ boasting of his intention ' to render 
 invalid the value of the empirical methods.' 
 
 Even a serious thinker, M. F. Paulhan, in his investigation 
 of the basis of French neo-mysticism, comes to the conclusion 
 that natural science has shown itself powerless to satisfy the 
 needs of mankind. ' We feel ourselves surrounded by a vast 
 unknown, and demand that at least access to it should be per- 
 mitted to us. Evolution and positivism have blocked the way. 
 . . . For these reasons evolution could not but show itself 
 incapable of guiding the mind, even if it left us great thoughts.' 
 
 Overwhelming as may appear this unanimity between strong 
 minds commanding respect and weak graphomaniacs, it does 
 , not, nevertheless, contain the slightest spark of truth. To 
 assert that the world turns away from science because the 
 'empirical,' which means the scientific, method of observation 
 and registration has suffered shipwreck, is either a conscious lie 
 or shows lack of mental responsibility. A healthy-minded and 
 honourable man must almost feel ashamed to have still to 
 
 * Rembrandt ah Erzieher. Leipzig, 1890, p. 2. 
 
 j* Edouard Rod, Les Icties morales du Temps present. Paris, 1892, p. 66. 
 
 J, Paul Desjardins, Le Devoir present. Paris, 1892, pp. 5, 8, 39. 
 
 $ F. Faulhan, Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p. 120.
 
 MYSTICISM 107 
 
 demonstrate this. In the last ten years, by means of spectrum 
 analysis, science has made disclosures in the constitution of the 
 most distant heavenly bodies, their component matter, their 
 degree of heat, the speed and direction of their motions ; it has 
 firmly established th~ essential unity of all modes of force, and 
 has made highly probable the unity of all matter ; it is on the 
 track of the formation and development of chemical elements, 
 and it has learnt to understand the building up of extremely 
 intricate organic combinations ; it shows us the relations of 
 atoms in molecules, and the position of molecules in space ; it 
 has thrown wonderful light on the conditions of the action of 
 electricity, and placed this force at the service of mankind ; 
 it has renewed geology and palaeontology, and disentangled the 
 concatenation of animal and vegetable forms of life ; it has 
 newly created biology and embryology, and has explained in a 
 surprising manner, through the discovery and investigation of 
 germs, some of the most disquieting mysteries of perpetual 
 metamorphosis, illness, and death ; it has found or perfected 
 methods which, like chronography, instantaneous photography, 
 etc., permit of the analysis and registration of the most fleeting 
 phenomena, not immediately apprehensible by human sense, 
 and which promise to become extremely fruitful for the know- 
 ledge of nature. And in the face of such splendid, such over- 
 whelmingly grand results, the enumeration of which could easily 
 be doubled and trebled, does anyone dare to speak of the 
 shipwreck of science, and of the incapacity of the empirical 
 method ? 
 
 Science is said not to have kept what she promised. When 
 has she ever promised anything else than honest and attentive 
 observation of phenomena and, if possible, establishment of the 
 conditions under which they occur ? And has she not kept this 
 promise ? Does she not keep it perpetually ? If anyone has 
 expected of her that she would explain from one day to 
 another the whole mechanism of the universe, like a juggler 
 explains his apparent magic, he has indeed no idea of the true 
 mission of science. She denies herself all leaps and flights, 
 She advances step by step. She builds slowly and patiently a 
 firm bridge out into the Unknown, and can throw no new arch 
 over the abyss before she has sunk deep the foundations of a 
 new pier in the depths, and raised it to the right height. 
 
 Meanwhile, she asks nothing at all about the first cause of 
 phenomena, so long as she has so many more proximate causes 
 to investigate. Many of the most eminent men of science go 
 so far, indeed, as to assert that the first cause will never become 
 the object of scientific investigation, and call it, with Herbert 
 Spencer, 'the Unknowable,' or exclaim despondingly with Du 
 Bois-Reymond, Ignorabinms. Both of -them in this respect are
 
 ic DEGENERATION 
 
 completely unscientific, and only prove that even clear thinkers 
 like Spencer, and sober investigators like Du Bois-Reymond. 
 stand yet under the influence of theological dreams. Science can 
 speak of no Unknowable, since this would presuppose that she 
 is able to mark exactly the boundaries of the Knowable. This, 
 however, she cannot do, since every new discovery thrusts back 
 that boundary. Moreover, lli^ acceptance of an Unknowable 
 involves the acknowledgment that there is something which we 
 cannot know. Now, in order to be able seriously to assert the 
 existence of this Something, either we must have acquired some 
 knowledge of it, however slight and indistinct, and this, there- 
 fore, would prove that it cannot be unknowable, since we 
 actually know it, and nothing then would justify us in declaring 
 beforehand that our present knowledge of it, however little it 
 may be, will not be extended and deepened ; or else we have no 
 knowledge, even of the minutest character, of the philosopher's 
 Unknowable, in which case it cannot exist for us. The whole 
 conception is based upon nothing, and the word is an idle 
 creation of a dreaming imagination. The same thing can be 
 said of Ignorabimus. It is the opposite of science. It is not a 
 correct inference from well-founded premises, it is not the result 
 of observation, but a mystical prophecy. No one has the right 
 to make communications with respect to the future as matters 
 of fact. Science can announce what she knows to-day ; she can 
 also mark off exactly what she does not know ; but to say what 
 she will or will not at any time know is not her office. 
 
 It is true that whoever asks from Science that she should give 
 an answer to all the questions of idle and restless minds with 
 unshaken and audacious certainty must be disappointed by her; 
 for she will not, and cannot, fulfil his desires. Theology and 
 metaphysics have an easier task. They devise some fable, and 
 propound it with overwhelming earnestness. If anyone does 
 not believe in them, they threaten and insult the intractable 
 client; but they can prove nothing to him, they cannot force 
 him to take their chimeras for cash. Theology and meta- 
 physics can never be brought into a dilemma. It costs them 
 nothing to add to their words more words, to unite to one 
 voluntary assertion another, and pile up dogma upon dogma. 
 It will never occur to the serious sound mind, which thirsts after 
 real knowledge, to seek it from metaphysics or theology. They 
 appeal only to childish brains, whose desire for knowledge, or, 
 rather, whose curiosity, is fully satisfied with the cradling croon 
 of an old wife's tale. 
 
 Science does not compete with theology and metaphysics. 
 If the latter declare themselves able to explain the whole 
 phenomenon of the universe, Science shows that these pretended 
 explanations are empty chatter. She, for her part, is naturally
 
 MYSTICISM 109 
 
 on her guard against putting in the place of a proved absurdity 
 another absurdity. She says modestly : ' Here we have a fact, 
 here an assumption, here a conjecture. 'Tis a rogue who gives 
 more than he has.' If this does not satisfy the neo-Catholics, 
 they should sit down and themselves investigate, themselves 
 find out new facts, and help to make clear the weird obscurity 
 of the phenomenon of the universe. That would be a proof of a 
 true desire for knowledge. At the table of Science there is 
 room for all, and every fellow-observer is welcome. But this 
 does not enter into even the dreams of these poor creatures, who 
 drivel about the ' bankruptcy of science.' Talk is so much 
 easier and more comfortable than inquiry and discovery ! 
 
 True, science tells us nothing about the life after death, of 
 harp-concerts in Paradise, and of the transformation of stupid 
 youths and hysterical geese into white-clad angels with rain- 
 bow-coloured wings. It contents itself, in a much more plain 
 and prosaic manner, with alleviating the existence of mankind 
 on earth. It lessens the average of mortality, and lengthens the 
 life of the individual through the suppression of known causes 
 of disease ; it invents new comforts, and makes easier the 
 struggle against Nature's destructive powers. The Symbolist, 
 who is preserved after surgical interference through asepsy from 
 suppuration, mortification, and death ; who protects himself by 
 a Chamberland filter from typhus ; who by the careless turning 
 of a button fills his room with electric light ; who through a 
 telephone can converse with someone beloved in far-distant 
 countries, has to thank this alleged bankrupt science for it all, 
 and not the theology to which he maintains that he wants to 
 return. 
 
 The demand that science should give not only true, if limited, 
 conclusions, and offer not only tangible benefits, but also solve 
 all enigmas to-day and at once, and make all men omniscient, 
 happy, and good, is ridiculous. Theology and metaphysics have 
 never fulfilled this demand. It is simply the intellectual mani- 
 festation of the same foolish conceit, which in material concerns 
 reveals itself in hankering after pleasure and in shirking work. 
 The man who has lost his social status, who craves for wine and 
 women, for idleness and honours, and complains of the consti- 
 tution of society because it offers no satisfaction to his lusts, 
 is own brother to the Symbolist who demands truth, and 
 reviles science because it does not hand it to him on a golden 
 platter. Both betray a similar incapacity to grasp the reality of 
 things, and to understand that it is not possible to acquire goods 
 without bodily labour, or truth without mental exertion. The 
 capable man who wrests her gifts from Nature, the industrious 
 inquirer who in the sweat of his brow bores into the sources of 
 knowledge, inspires respect and cordial sympathy. On the other
 
 no DEGENERATION 
 
 hand, there can be but little esteem for the discontented idlers 
 who look for riches from a lucky lottery ticket, or a rich uncle, 
 and for enlightenment from a revelation which is to come to 
 them without trouble on their part over the slovenly beer- 
 drinking at their favourite cafe". 
 
 The dunces who abuse science, reproach it also for having 
 destroyed ideals, and stolen from life all its worth. This accusa- 
 tion is just as absurd as the talk about the bankruptcy of science. 
 A higher ideal than the increase of general knowledge there 
 cannot be. What saintly legend is as beautiful as the life of an 
 inquirer, who spends his existence bending over a microscope, 
 almost without bodily wants, known and honoured by few, 
 working only for his own conscience' sake, without any other 
 ambition than that perhaps one little new fact may be firmly 
 established, which a more fortunate successor will make use of 
 in a brilliant synthesis, and insert as a stone in some monument 
 of natural science ? What religious fable has inspired with a 
 contempt of death sublimer martyrs than a Gehlen, who sank 
 down poisoned while preparing the arsenious hydrogen which 
 he had discovered ; or a Crocd-Spinelli, who was overtaken by 
 death in an over-rapid ascent of his balloon while observing the 
 pressure of the atmosphere ; or an Ehrenberg, who became 
 blind over his life's work ; or a Hyrtl, who almost entirely 
 destroyed his eyesight by his anatomical corrosive preparations ; 
 or the doctors, who inoculate themselves with some deadly 
 disease not to speak of the innumerable crowd of discoverers 
 travelling to the North Pole, and to the interior of dark conti- 
 nents? And did Archimedes really feel his life to be so worth- 
 less when he entreated the pillaging bands of Marcellus, ' Do 
 not disturb my circles ' ? Genuine healthy poetry has always 
 recognised this, and finds its most ideal characters, not in a 
 devotee, who murmurs prayers with drivelling lips, and stares 
 with distorted eyes at some visual hallucination, but in a 
 Prometheus and a Faust, who wrestle for science, i.e., for exact 
 knowledge of nature. 
 
 The assertion that science has not kept its promises, and that, 
 therefore, the rising generation is turning away from it, does not 
 for a moment resist criticism, and is entirely without foundation. 
 It is a senseless premise of neo-Catholicism, were the Symbolists 
 to declare a hundred times over that disgust with science had 
 made them mystics. The explanations which even a healthy- 
 minded man makes with respect to the true motives of his 
 actions are only to be accepted with the most cautious criticism ; 
 those proffered by the degenerate are completely useless. For 
 the impulse to act and to think originate, for the degenerate, in 
 the unconscious, and consciousness finds subsequent, and in some 
 measure plausible, reasons for the thoughts and deeds, the real
 
 MYSTICISM in 
 
 source of which is unknown to itself. Every book on suggestion 
 gives illustrations of Charcot's typical case : a hysterical female 
 is sent into hypnotic sleep, and it is suggested to her that on 
 awaking she is to stab one of the doctors present. She is then 
 awakened. She grasps a knife and makes for her appointed 
 victim. The blade is wrenched from her, and she is asked why 
 she wishes to murder the doctor. She answers without hesita- 
 tion, ' Because he has done me an injury.' Note that she 
 had seen him that day for the first time in her life. This person 
 felt when in a waking condition the impulse to kill the doctor. 
 Her consciousness had no presentiment that this impulse had 
 been suggested to her in a hypnotic state. Consciousness 
 knows that a murder is never committed without some motive. 
 Forced to find a motive for the attempted murder, consciousness 
 falls back upon the only one reasonably possible under the cir- 
 cumstances, and fancies that it got hold of the idea of murder in 
 order to avenge some wrong. 
 
 The brothers Janet* offer, as an explanation of this psycho- 
 logical phenomenon, the hypothesis of dual personality. ' Every 
 person consists of two personalities, one conscious and one 
 unconscious. Among healthy persons both are alike complete, 
 and both in equilibrium. In the hysteric they are unequal, and 
 out of equilibrium. One of the two personalities, usually the 
 conscious, is incomplete, the other remaining perfect.' The 
 conscious personality has the thankless task of inventing 
 reasons for the actions of the unconscious. It resembles the 
 familiar game where one person makes movements and another 
 says words in keeping with them. In the degenerate with dis- 
 turbed equilibrium consciousness has to play the part of an ape- 
 like mother finding excuses for the stupid and naughty tricks of 
 a spoiled child. The unconscious personality commits follies and 
 evil deeds, and the conscious, standing powerless by, and unable 
 to hinder it, seeks to palliate them by all sorts of pretexts. 
 
 The cause of the neo-Catholic movement, then, is not to be 
 sought in any objection felt by younger minds to science, or in 
 their having any complaint to make against it. A De Vogue, a 
 Rod, a Desjardins, a Paulhan, who impute such a basis to the 
 mysticism of the Symbolists, arbitrarily attribute to it an origin 
 which it never had. It is due solely and alone to the degener- 
 ate condition of its inventors. Neo-Catholicism is rooted in 
 emotivity and mysticism, both of these being the most frequent 
 and most distinctive stigmata of the degenerate. 
 
 That the mysticism of the degenerate, even in France, the 
 
 * Pierre Janet, ' Les Actes inconscients et le De'doublement de la Per- 
 sonalite,' Revue phtlosophigite, December, 1886. Paul Janet, ' L'Hystdrie et 
 3'Hypnotisme d'apres laThe'orie de la double Personnalitd,' Revue scientijique % 
 1888, i er vol., p. 616
 
 H2 DEGENERATION 
 
 land of Voltaire, has frequently taken the form of religious 
 enthusiasm might at first seem strange, but will be understood if 
 we consider the political and social circumstances of the French 
 people during the last decade. 
 
 The great Revolution proclaimed three ideals : Liberty, 
 Equality, and Fraternity. Fraternity is a harmless word which 
 has no real meaning, and therefore disturbs nobody. Liberty, 
 to the upper classes, is certainly unpleasant, and they lament 
 greatly over the sovereignty of the people and universal suffrage, 
 but still they bear, without too much complaint, a state of things 
 which, after all, is sufficiently mitigated by a prying administra- 
 tion, police supervision, militarism, and gendarmerie, and which 
 will always be sufficient to keep the mob in leash. But equality 
 to those in possession is an insufferable abomination. It is the 
 one thing won by the great Revolution, which has outlasted all 
 subsequent changes in the form of government, and has remained 
 alive in the French people. The Frenchman does not know 
 much about fraternity ; his liberty in many ways has a muzzle 
 as its emblem ; but his equality he possesses as a matter of fact, 
 and to it he holds firmly. The lowest vagabond, the bully of 
 the capital, the rag-picker, the hostler, believes that he is quite 
 as good as the duke, and says so to his face without the smallest 
 hesitation if occasion arises. The reasons of the Frenchman's 
 fanaticism for equality are not particularly elevated. The feel- 
 ing does not spring from a proud, manly consciousness and the 
 knowledge of his own worth, but from low envy and malicious 
 intolerance. There shall be nothing above the dead level ! 
 There shall be nothing better, nothing more beautiful or even 
 more striking, than the average vulgarity ! The upper classes 
 struggle against this rage for equalization with passionate 
 vehemence, especially and precisely those who have reached 
 their high position through the great Revolution. 
 
 The grandchildren of the rural serfs, who plundered and 
 destroyed the country seats of noblemen, basely murdered the 
 inmates, and seized upon their lands ; the descendants of town 
 grocers and cobblers, who waxed rich as politicians of street and 
 club, as speculators in national property and assignats, and as 
 swindlers in army purveyance, do not want to become identified 
 with the mob. They want to form a privileged class. They 
 want to be recognised as belonging to a more honourable caste. 
 They sought, for this purpose, a distinguishing mark, which 
 would make them at once conspicuous as members of a select 
 class, and they found it in belonging to the Church. 
 
 This choice is quite intelligible. The mass of the people in 
 France, especially in towns, is sceptical, and the aristocracy of 
 the ancien regime, who in the eighteenth century bragged about 
 free thought, had come out of the deluge of 1789 as very pious
 
 MYSTICISM 11.3 
 
 persons, comprehending or divining the inner connection between 
 all the old ideas and emblems of the Faith, of the Monarchy, 
 and of feudal nobility. Hence, through their clericalism, the 
 parvenus at once established a contrast between themselves and 
 the multitude from whom they wanted to keep distinct, and a 
 resemblance with the class into which they would like to smuggle 
 or thrust themselves. 
 
 Experience teaches that the instinct of preservation is often 
 the worst adviser in positions of danger. The man who cannot 
 swim, falling into the water, involuntarily throws up his arms, 
 and thus infallibly lets his head be submerged and himself be 
 drowned ; whereas his mouth and nose would remain above 
 water if he held his arms and hands quietly under the surface. 
 The bad rider, who feels his seat insecure, usually draws up 
 Tiis legs, and then comes the certainty of a fall ; whereas he 
 would probably be able to preserve his equilibrium if he left his 
 legs outstretched. Thus the French bourgeoisie, who knew that 
 they had snatched for themselves the fruits of the great upheaval, 
 and let the Fourth Estate, who alone had made the Revolution, 
 come out of it empty-handed, chose the worst means for retain- 
 ing their unjustly-acquired possessions and privileges, and for 
 escaping unnatural equalization when they made use of their 
 clericalism for the establishment of their social status. They 
 alienated, in consequence, the wisest, strongest, and most culti- 
 vated minds, and drove over to socialism many young men who, 
 though intellectually radical, were yet economically conservative, 
 and little in favour of equality, and who would have become 
 a strong defence for a free-thinking bourgeoisie, but who felt 
 that socialism, however radical its economic doctrines and 
 impossible its theories of equality, represented emancipation. 
 
 But I have not to judge here whether the religious mimicry 
 of the French bourgeoisie, which was to make them resemble 
 the old nobility, exerts the protection expected of it or not ; I 
 only set down the fact of this mimicry. It is a necessary con- 
 sequence that all the rich and snobbish parvenus send their 
 sons to the Jesuit middle and high schools. To be educated 
 by the Jesuits is regarded as a sign of caste, very much as is 
 membership of the Jockey Club. The old pupils of the Jesuits 
 form a ' black freemasonry,' which zealously advances their pro- 
 teges in every career, marries them to heiresses, hurries to their 
 assistance in misfortune, hushes up their sins, stifles scandal, etc. 
 It is the Jesuits who for the last decade have made it their care 
 to inculcate their own habits of thinking into the rich and 
 high-born youth of France entrusted to them. These youths 
 brought brains of hereditary deficiency, and therefore mystically 
 disposed, into the clerical schools, and these then gave to the 
 mystic thoughts of the degenerate pupils a religious content, 
 
 8
 
 114 DEGENERATION 
 
 This is not an arbitrary assumption, but a well-founded fact. 
 Charles Morice, the aesthetic theorist and philosopher of the 
 Symbolists, received his education from the Jesuits, according 
 to the testimony of his friends.* So did Louis le Cardonncl, 
 Henri de Regnier, and others. The Jesuits invented the phrase 
 ' bankruptcy of science,' and their pupils repeat it after them, 
 because it includes a plausible explanation of their pictistic 
 mooning, the real organic causes of which are unknown to them, 
 and for that matter would not be understood if they were 
 known. ' I return to faith, because science does not satisfy me,' 
 is a possible statement. It is even a superior thing to say, since 
 it presupposes a thirst for truth and a noble interest in great 
 questions. On the contrary, a man will hardly be willing to 
 confess, ' I am an enthusiastic admirer of the Trinity and the 
 Holy Virgin because I am degenerate, and my brain is in- 
 capable of attention and clear thought. 1 
 
 That the Jesuitical argument as reported by MM. de Vogue*, 
 Rod, etc., can have found credit beyond clerical circles and 
 degenerate youth, that the half-educated are heard repeating 
 to-day, ' Science is conquered, the future belongs to religion,' is 
 consistent with the mental peculiarities of the million. They 
 never have recourse to facts, but repeat the ready-made pro- 
 positions with which they have been prompted. If they would 
 have regard to facts, they would know that the number of 
 faculties, teachers and students of natural science, of scientific 
 periodicals and books, of their subscribers and readers, of 
 laboratories, scientific societies and reports to the academies 
 increases year by year. It can be shown by figures that science 
 does not lose, but continually gains ground.-f- But the million 
 does not care about exact statistics. In France it accepts with- 
 out resistance the suggestion, that science is retreating before 
 religion, from a few newspapers, written mainly for clubmen 
 and gilded courtezans, into the columns of which the pupils of 
 the clerical schools have found an entrance. Of science itself, 
 of its hypotheses, methods, and results, they have never known 
 anything. Science was at one time the fashion. The daily 
 press of that date said, 'We live in a scientific age'; the news 
 of the day reported the travels and marriages of scientists ; the 
 fcuilleton-novels contained witty allusions to Darwin ; the in- 
 ventors of elegant walking-sticks and perfumes called their pro- 
 ductions 'Evolution Essence' or ' Selection Canes '; those who 
 
 * Morhardt, op. cit^ p. 769. 
 
 f See the Catalogue of Scientific Papers compiled and published by the 
 Royal Society. The first series of this catalogue, covering the time from 1800 
 to 1863, comprises six volumes ; the second, dealing with the decade from 
 1864 to 1873, comprises two volumes, equivalent to at least three of the first 
 series (1047 and 1310 pages); of the third series (1874 to 1883) only one 
 volume has been issued as yet, but it promises to outrun the second by at 
 least one half.
 
 MYSTICISM U5 
 
 affected culture took themselves seriously for the pioneers of 
 progress and enlightenment. To-day those social circles which 
 set the fashions, and tr^ papers which seek to please these 
 circles, decree that, not science is chic, but faith, and now the 
 paragraphs of the boulevard papers relate small piquant sayings 
 of preachers ; in the feuilleton-novels there are quotations from 
 the Imitation^ of Christ : inventors bring out richly-mounted 
 prie-dieus~arKrchc^ice rosaries, and the Philistine feels with 
 deep emotion the miraculous flower of faith springing up and 
 blossoming in his heart. Of real disciples science has scarcely 
 lost one. It is only natural, on the contrary, that the plebs of 
 the salons, to whom it has never been more than a fashion, should 
 turn their backs on it at the mere command of a tailor or a modiste. 
 
 Thus much on the neo-Catholicism which, partly for party 
 reasons, partly from ignorance, partly from snobbishness, is 
 mistaken for a serious intellectual movement of the times. 
 
 The pretension of Symbolism to be, not only a return to 
 faith, but a new theory of art and poetry, is what we must now 
 proceed to test. 
 
 If we wish to know at the outset what Symbolists understand 
 by symbol and symbolism, we shall meet with the same difficulties 
 we encountered in determining the precise meaning of the name 
 pre-Raphaelitism, and for the same reason, viz., because the 
 inventors of these appellations understood by them hundreds of 
 different mutually contradictory, indefinite things, or simply 
 nothing at all. A skilled and sagacious journalist, Jules Huret,* 
 instituted an inquiry about the new literary movement in France, 
 and from its leading representatives acquired information, by 
 which he has furnished us with a trustworthy knowledge of the 
 meaning which they connect, or pretend to connect, with the 
 expressions and phraseology of their programme. I will here 
 adduce some of these utterances and declarations. They will 
 not tell us what Symbolism is. But they may afford us some 
 insight into symbolist methods of thought. 
 
 M. Stephane Mallarme, whose leadership of the Symbolist 
 band is least disputed among the disciples, expresses himself as 
 follows : ' To name an object means to suppress three-quarters 
 of the pleasure of a poem i.e., of the happiness which consists 
 in gradually divining it. Our dream should be to suggest the 
 object. The symbol is the perfected use of this mystery, viz., 
 to conjure up an object gradually in order to show the condition 
 of a soul ; or, conversely, to choose an object, and out of it to 
 reveal a state of the soul by a series of interpretations.' 
 
 If the reader does not at once understand this combination of 
 vague words, he need not stop to solve them. Later on I will 
 translate the stammerings of this weak mind into the speech of 
 sound men. , 
 
 * Jules Huret, Enqnete sur I' Evolution littefaire. Paris, 1891.
 
 H6 DEGENERATION 
 
 M. Paul Vcrlainc, another high-priest of the sect, expresses 
 himself as follows : ' It was I who, in 4 .!ie year 1885, laid claim 
 to the name of Symbolist. The Parnassians, and most of the 
 romanticists, in a certain sense lacked symbols. . . . Thence 
 errors of local colouring in history, the shrinking up of the myth 
 through false philosophical interpretations, thought without the 
 discernment of analogies, the anecdote emptied of feeling.' 
 
 Let us listen to a few second-rate poets of the group. ' I 
 declare art,' says M. Paul Adam, 'to be the enshrining of a 
 dogma in a symbol. It is a means of making a system prevail, 
 and of bringing truths to the light of day.' M. Re"my de Gour- 
 mont confesses honestly : ' I cannot unveil the hidden meaning 
 of the word " symbolism," since I am neither a theorist nor a 
 magician.' And M. Saint-Pol-Roux-le-Magnifique utters this 
 profound warning : ' Let us take care ! Symbolism carried to 
 excess leads to noinbrilisine, and to a morbid mechanism. . . . 
 This symbolism is to some extent a parody of mysticism. . . . 
 Pure symbolism is an anomaly in this remarkable century, re- 
 markable for militant activities. Let us view this transitional 
 I art as a clever trick played upon naturalism, and as a precursor 
 of the poetry of to-morrow.' 
 
 We may expect from the theorists and philosophers of the 
 group more exhaustive information concerning their methods 
 and aims. Accordingly, M. Charles Morice instructs us how 
 ' the symbol is the combination of the objects which have 
 aroused our sensations, with our souls, in a fiction [fiction]. 
 The means is suggestion ; it is a question of giving people a 
 remembrance of something which they have never seen.' And 
 M. Gustav Kahn says : ' For me personally, symbolic art con- 
 sists in recording in a cycle of works, as completely as possible, 
 the modifications and variations of the mind of the poet, who is 
 inspired by an aim which he has determined.' 
 
 In Germany there have already been found some imbeciles 
 and idiots, some victims of hysteria and graphomania, who affirm 
 that they understand this twaddle, and who develop it further in 
 lectures, newspaper articles and books. The cultured German 
 Philistine, who from of old has had preached to him contempt 
 lor ' platitude,' i.e., for healthy common-sense, and admiration 
 for 'deep meaning,' which is as a rule only the futile bubbling of 
 soft and addled brains incapable of thought, becomes visibly 
 uneasy, and begins to inquire if there may not really be some- 
 thing behind these senseless series of words. In France people 
 have not been caught on the limed twigs of these poor fools and 
 cold-blooded jesters, but have considered Symbolism to be what 
 in fact it is, madness or humbug. We shall meet with these 
 words in the writings of noted representatives of all shades of 
 literary thought. 
 
 "The Symbolists!' exclaims M. Jules Lemaitre, 'there are
 
 MYSTICISM n 7 
 
 none. . . . They themselves do not know what they are or 
 what they want. There is something stirring and heaving under 
 the earth, but unable to break through. Do you understand ? 
 When they have painfully produced something, they would like 
 to build formulae and theories around it, but fail in doing so, 
 because they do not possess the necessary strength of mind. . . . 
 They are jesters with a certain amount of sincerity that I 
 grant them but nevertheless jesters.' M. Josephin Peladan 
 describes them as ' whimsical pyrotechnists of metrics and 
 glossaries, who combine in order to get on, and give themselves 
 odd names in order to get known.' M. Jules Bois is much more 
 forcible : ' Disconnected action, confused clamour, such are the 
 Symbolists. Cacophony of savages who have been turning over 
 the leaves of an English grammar, or a glossary of obsolete 
 words. If they have ever known anything, they pretend to 
 have forgotten it. Indistinct, faulty, obscure, they are never- 
 theless as solemn as augurs. . . . You, decadent Symbolists, 
 you deceive us with childish and necromantic formulae.' Ver- 
 laine^jTirnself, the co-founder of Symbolism, in a moment of 
 sincerity, calls his followers a ' flat-footed horde, each with his 
 own banner, on which is inscribed Reclame T M. Henri de 
 Regnier says apologetically : ' They feel the need of gathering 
 round a common flag, so that they may fight more effectually 
 against the contented.' M. Zola speaks of them as ' a swarm of 
 sharks who, not being able to swallow us, devour each other.' 
 M. Joseph Caraguel designates symbolical literature as ' a 
 literature of whining, of babbling, of empty brains, a literature 
 of Sudanese Griots [minstrels].'" Edmond Haraucourt plainly 
 discerns the aims of the Symbolists : ' They are discontented, 
 and in a hurry. They are the Boulangists of literature. We 
 must live ! We would take a place in the world, become 
 notorious or notable. We beat wildly on a drum which is not 
 even a kettledrum. . . . Their true symbol is " Goods by ex- 
 press." Everyone goes by express train. _Their destination 
 Fame.' M. Pierre Quillard thinks that under the title of 
 Symbolists ' poets of rare gifts and unmitigated simpletons 
 have been arbitrarily included.' And M. Gabriel Vicaire sees 
 in the manifestoes of Symbolists ' nothing but school-boy jokes.' 
 Finally, M. Laurent Tailhade, one of the leading Symbolists, 
 divulges the secret: 'I have never attached any other value to 
 this performance than that of a transient amusement. We 
 took in the credulous judgment of a few literary beginners with 
 the joke of coloured vowels, Theban love, Schopenhauerism, 
 and other pranks, which have since made their way in the 
 world.' Quite so ; just, as we have already said, in Germany. 
 
 To abuse, however, is not to explain, and although summary 
 justice is fit in the case of deliberate, swindlers, who, liko 
 quack-dentists, play the savage in order to entice money fro in
 
 ii8 DEGENERATION 
 
 market-folk, yet anger and ridicule are out of place in dealing 
 with honest imbeciles. They are diseased or crippled, and as 
 such deserve only pity. Their infirmities must be disclosed, 
 but severity of treatment has been abolished even in lunatic 
 asylums since Pincl's time. 
 
 The Symbolists, so far as they are honestly degenerate and 
 imbecile, can think only in a mystical, i.e., in a confused way. 
 The unknown is to them more powerful than the known ; the 
 activity of the organic nerves preponderates over that of the 
 cerebral cortex ; their emotions overrule their ideas. When 
 persons of this kind have poetic and artistic instincts, they 
 naturally want to give expression to their own mental state. 
 They cannot make use of definite words of clear import, for 
 their own consciousness holds no clearly-defined univocal ideas 
 which could be embodied in such words. They choose, there- 
 fore, vague equivocal words, because these best conform to their 
 ambiguous and equivocal ideas. The more indefinite, the more 
 obscure a word is, so much the better does it suit the purpose of 
 the imbecile, and it is notorious that among the insane this 
 habit goes so far that, to express their ideas, which have become 
 quite formless, they ia^ent^newwords, which are no longer 
 merely obscure, but devoid of all meaning. We have already 
 seen that for the typical degenerate, reality has no significance. 
 On this point I will only remind the reader of the previously 
 cited utterances of D. G. Rossetti, Morice, etc. Clear speech 
 serves the purpose of communication of the actual. It has, 
 therefore, no value in the eyes of a degenerate subject. He 
 prizes that language alone which does not force him to follow 
 the speaker attentively, but allows him to indulge without 
 restraint in the meanderings of his own reveries, just as his own 
 language does not aim at the communication of definite 
 thought, but is only intended to give a pale reflection of the 
 twilight of his own ideas. That is what M. Mallarme' means 
 when he says: 'To name an object means to suppress three 
 quarters of the pleasure. . . . Our dream should be to suggest 
 the object' 
 
 Moreover, the thought of a healthy brain has a flow which is 
 regulated by the laws of logic and the supervision of attention. 
 It takes for its content a definite object, manipulates and ex- 
 hausts it. The healthy man can tell what he thinks, and his 
 telling has a beginning and an end. The mystic imbecile thinks 
 merely according to the laws of association, and without the red 
 thread of attention. He has fugitive ideation. He can never 
 state accurately what he is thinking about ; he can only denote 
 the emotion which at the moment controls his consciousness. 
 He can only say in general, ' I am sad/ ' I am merry,' ' I am 
 fond,' ' I am afraid.' His mind is filled with evanescent, floating, 
 cloudy ideas, which take their hue from the reigning emotion, as
 
 MYSTICISM 119 
 
 the vapour hovering above a crater flames red from the glow at 
 the bottom of the volcanic caldron. When he poetizes, there- 
 fore, he will never develop a logical train of thought, but will 
 seek by means of obscure words of distinctly emotional colouring 
 to represent a feeling, a mood. What he prizes in poetical 
 works is not a clear narrative, the exposition of a definite 
 thought, but only the reflected image of a mood, which awakens 
 in him a similar, but not necessarily the same, mood. The de- 
 generate are well aware of this difference between a work which 
 expresses strong mental labour and one in which merely emo- 
 tionally coloured fugitive ideation ebbs and flows ; and they 
 eagerly ask for a distinguishing name for that kind of poetry of 
 which alone they have any understanding. In France they have 
 found this designation in the word 'Symbolism.' The explana- 
 tions which the Symbolists themselves give of their cognomen 
 appear nonsensical ; but the psychologist gathers clearly fromi 
 their babbling and stammering that under the name 'symbol' 
 they understand a word (or series of words) expressing, not a 
 fact of the external world, or of conscious thought, but an am- 
 biguous glimmer of an idea, which does not force the reader to 
 think, but allows him to dream, and hence brings about no in- \ 
 tellectual processes, but only moods. 
 
 The great poet of the Symbolists, their most admired model, .-jf 
 from whom, according to their unanimous testimony, they have 
 received the strongest inspiration, is Paul Verlaine. In this man 
 we find, in astonishing completeness, all the physical and mental 
 marks of degeneration, and no author known to me answers so 
 exactly, trait for trait, to the descriptions of the degenerate given 
 by the clinicists his personal appearance, the history of his life, 
 his intellect, his world of ideas and modes of expression. M. Jules 
 Huret* gives the following account of Verlaine's physical ap- 
 pearance : ' His face, like that of a wicked angel grown old, 
 with a thin, untrimmed beard, and abrupt (?) nose ; his bushy, 
 bristling eyebrows, resembling bearded wheat, hiding deep-set 
 green eyes ; his wholly bald and huge long skull, misshapen by 
 enigmatic bumps all these give to his physiognomy a contra- 
 dictory appearance of stubborn asceticigm_and cyclopean appe- 
 tites.' As appears in these ludicrously laboured and, in part, 
 entirely senseless expressions, even the most unscientific observer 1 
 has been struck with what Huret calls his ' enigmatic bumps.' 
 If we look at the portrait of the poet, by Eugene Carriere, of 
 which a photograph serves as frontispiece in the Select Poems of 
 Verlaine, f and still more at that by M. Aman-Jean, exhibited 
 in the Champs de Mars Salon in 1892, we instantly remark the 
 great asymmetry of the head, which LombrosoJ has pointed out 
 
 * Huret, op. '/., p. 6=5. 
 
 f Paul Verlaine, Choix de Poesies.- Paris, 1891. 
 
 j Lombrosj, U Uomo delinquente, p. 184.
 
 120 DEGENERATION 
 
 among degenerates, and the Mongolian physiognomy indicated* 
 by the projecting cheek-bones, obliquely placed eyes, and thin 
 beard, which the same investigator* looks upon as signs of 
 degeneration. 
 
 Verlaine's life is enveloped in mystery, but it is known, from 
 his own r avowals, that he passed two years., in prison. In the 
 poem Ecrif en 1875^ he narrates in detail, not only without 
 the least shame, but with gay unconcern, nay, even with boast- 
 ing, that he was a true professional criminal : 
 
 1 J'ai naguere habite* le meilleur des chateaux 
 Dans le plus fin pays d'eau vive et de coteaux : 
 . Quatre tours s'eMevaient sur le front d'autant d'ailes, 
 Et j'ai longtemps, longtemps habite' 1'une d'elles . . . 
 Une chambre bien close, une table, une chaise, 
 Un lit strict ou Ton put dormir juste a son aise, . . . 
 Tel fut mon lot durant les longs mois Ik passes . . . 
 . . . J'e'tais heureux avec ma vie, 
 Reconnaissant de biens que nul, certes, n'envie.' 
 
 And in the poem Un Conte he says : 
 
 . . . 'ce grand pdcheur cut des conduites 
 Folles a ce point d'en devenir trop maladroites, 
 Si bien que les tribunaux s'en mirent et les suites ! 
 Et le voyez-vous dans la plus e"troite des boites ? 
 
 Cellules ! prison humanitaires ! II faut taire 
 
 Votre horreur fadasse et ce progr^s d'hypocrisie ' . . . 
 
 It is now known that a crime of a peculiarly revolting character 
 led to his punishment ; and this is not surprising, since the special 
 characteristic of his degeneration is a madly inordinate eroticism. 
 He is perpetually thinking of lewdness, and lascivious images fill 
 his mind continually. I have no wish to quote passages in which 
 this unhappy slave of his morbidly excited senses has expressed 
 the loathsome condition of his mind, but the reader who wishes 
 to become acquainted with them may be referred to the poems 
 Les Coquillages, Fille, and Auburn^ Sexual license is not his only 
 vice. He is also a dipsomaniac, and (as may be expected in a de- 
 generate subject) a paroxysmal dipsomaniac, who, awakened from 
 his debauch, is seized with deep disgust of the alcoholic poison 
 and of himself, and speaks of ' les breuvages execre"s ' (La Bonne 
 Chanson}, but succumbs to the temptation at the next oppor- 
 tunity. 
 
 Moral insanity, however, is not present in Verlaine. He sins 
 through irresistible impulse. He is an Impulsivist. The differ- 
 ence between these two forms of degeneration lies in the fact 
 that the morally insane does not look upon his crimes as bad, but 
 commits them with the same unconcern as a sane man would 
 
 * Lombroso, op. cit., p. 276. t Verlaine, op. at., p. 272. 
 
 ^ Veilaine, op. cit., pp. 72, 315, 3:7. .
 
 MYSTICISM 121 
 
 perform any ordinary or virtuous act, and after his misdeed is 
 quite contented with himself ; whereas the Impulsivist retains a 
 full consciousness of the baseness of his deeds, hopelessly fights 
 against his impulse until he can no longer resist it, and after the 
 performance* suffers the most terrible remorse and despair. It is 
 only an Impulsivist who speaks in execration of himself as a 
 reprobate (' Un seul Pervers,' in Sagesse), or strikes the dejected 
 note which Verlaine touches in the first four sonnets of Sagesse .* 
 
 ' Hommes durs ! Vie atroce et laide d'ici has ! 
 Ah ! que du moins, loin des baisers et des combats, 
 Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne, 
 
 ' Quelque chose du cceur enfantin et subtil, 
 Bonte, respect ! car qu'est-ce qui nous accompagne, 
 Et vraiment quand la mort viendra que reste-1-il ? . . . 
 
 ' Ferme les yeux, pauvre ame, et rentre sur-le-champ : 
 Une tentation des pires. Fuis 1'infame . . . 
 Si la vieille folie e'tait encore en route ? 
 
 * Ces souvenirs, va-t-il falloir les retuer? 
 Un assaut furieux, le supreme, sans doute ! 
 O va prier contre 1'orage, va prier ! . . . 
 
 * C'est vers le Moyen-Age enorme et delicat 
 Qu'il faudrait que mon cceur en panne naviguat, 
 
 Loin de nos jours d'esprit charnel et de chair triste . . . 
 
 ' Et la que j'eusse part . . . 
 ... k la chose vitale, 
 Et que je fusse un saint, actes bons, pensers droits, 
 
 * Haute thdologie et solide morale, 
 Guide par la folie unique de la Croix 
 
 Sur tes ailes de pierre, 6 folie Cathe"drale !' 
 
 This example serves to show that there is not wanting in 
 Verlaine that religious fervour which usually accompanies 
 morbidly intensified eroticism. This finds a much more decided 
 expression in several other poems. I should wish to quote only 
 from two."}* 
 
 *O mon Dieu, vous m'avez blessd d'amour, 
 Et la blessure est encore vibrante, 
 O mon Dieu, vous m'avez blessd d'amour. 
 
 ' O mon Dieu, votre crainte m'a frappe", 
 Et la brulure est encore Ik qui tonne 
 O mon Dieu, votre crainte m'a frappe. 
 
 (Observe the mode of expression and the constant repetitions.) 
 
 ' O mon Dieu, j'ai connu que tout est vil, 
 Et votre gloire en moi s'est instaliee, 
 O mon Dieu, j'ai connu que tout, est vil. 
 
 ^* Shortly, but not immediately after, the immediate result being a sense of 
 great relief and satisfaction. 
 
 f Verlaine, op. cit., pp. 175, 178.
 
 122 DEGENERATION 
 
 * Noyez rnon ame aux flots de votre vin, 
 Fondez ma vie au pain de votre table, 
 Noyez mon ame aux flots de votre vin. 
 
 * Voici mon sang que je n'ai pas versd, 
 Voici ma chair indigne"e de souffrance, 
 Voici mon sang que je n'ai pas verseV 
 
 Then follows the ecstatic enumeration of all the parts of his 
 body, which he offers up in sacrifice to God ; and the poem 
 closes thus : 
 
 1 Vous conrtaissez tout cela, tout cela, 
 Et que je suis plus pauvre que personne, 
 Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela, 
 Mais ce que j'ai, mon Dieu, je vous le donne.' 
 
 He invokes the Virgin Mary as follows : 
 
 ' Je ne veux plus aimer que ma mere Marie. 
 Tous les autres amours sont de commandement, 
 Ndcessaires qu'ils sont, ma mere seulement 
 Pourra les allumer aux cceurs qui 1'ont chdrie, 
 
 ' C'est pour Elle qu'il faut cherir mes ennemis, 
 C'est poor Elle que j'ai voud ce sacrifice, 
 Et la douceur de coeur et le zele au service. 
 Comme je la priais, Elle les a permis. 
 
 ' Et comme j'e*tais faible et bien me'chant encore, 
 Aux mains Inches, les yeux e"blouis des chemins, 
 Elle baissa mes yeux et me joignit les mains, 
 Et m'enseigna les mots par lesquels on adore.' 
 
 The accents here uttered are well known to the clinics of 
 psychiatry. We may compare them to the picture which 
 Legrain* gives of some of his patients. ' His speech continually 
 reverts to God and the Virgin Mary, his cousin.' (The case in 
 question is that of a degenerate subject who was a tramway con- 
 ductor.) ' Mystical ideas complete the picture. He tajks of God, 
 of heaven, crosses himself, kneels down, and says that he is follow- 
 ing the commandments of Christ.' (The subject under observa- 
 tion is a day labourer.) 'The devil will tempt me, but I see 
 God who guards me. I have asked of God that all people might 
 be beautiful,' etc. 
 
 The continual alternation of antithetical moods in Verlaine 
 this uniform transition from bestial lust to an excess of piety, 
 and from sinning to remorse has struck even observers who 
 do not know the significance of such a phenomenon. ' He is,' 
 writes M. Anatole France,* ' alternately devout and atheistical, 
 orthodox and sacrilegious.' These he certainly is. But why ? 
 Simply because he is a circulaire. This not very happy 
 expression, invented by French psychiatry, denotes that form 
 
 * Legrain, Du cUlire chez les ttegtntres, pp. 135, 140, 164. 
 f Huret, op. '/., p. 8.
 
 MYSTICISM 123 
 
 of mental disease in which states of excitement and depression 
 follow each other in regular succession. The period of excite- 
 ment coincides with the irresistible impulses to misdeeds and 
 blasphemous language ; that of dejection with the paroxysms / 
 of contrition and piety. The circulaires belong to the worst 
 species of the degenerate. ' They are drunkards, obscene, vicious, 
 and thievish.'* They are also in particular incapable of any 
 lasting, uniform occupation, since it is obvious that in such a 
 condition of mental depression they cannot accomplish any 
 work which demands strength and attention. The circulaires 
 are, by the nature of their affliction, condemned to be vagabonds 
 or thieves, unless they belong to rich families. In normally 
 constituted society there is no place for them. Verlaine has 
 been a vagabond the whole of his life. He has loafed about all 
 the highways of France, and roamed as well through Belgium 
 and England. Since his release from prison he has spent most 
 of his time in Paris, where, however, he has no residence, but 
 resorts to the hospitals under the pretext of rheumatism, which 
 for that matter he may easily have contracted during the nights 
 which, as a tramp, he has spent under the open sky. The 
 administration winks at his doings, and grants him food and 
 shelter gratis, out of regard for his poetical capacity. Con- 
 formably with the constant tendency of the human mind to 
 beautify what cannot be altered, he persuades himself that his 
 vagrancy, which was forced upon him by his organic vice, is a 
 glorious and enviable condition ; he prizes it as something 
 beautiful, artistic, and sublime, and looks upon vagabonds with 
 especial tenderness. Speaking of them he 
 
 ' Leur jambes pour toutes montures, 
 Pour tous biens Tor de leurs regards, 
 Par le chemin des aventures 
 Us vont haillonneux et hagards. 
 
 * Le sage, indigne", les harangue ; 
 Le sot playit ces fous hasardeux } 
 Les enfants leur tirent la langue 
 Et les filles se moquent d'eux.' 
 
 We find in every lunatic and imbecile the conviction that the 
 rational minds who discern and judge him are 'blockheads.' 
 
 ' . . . Dans leurs prunelles 
 Rit et pleure fastidieux 
 L'amour des choses e"ternelles, 
 Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux ! 
 
 ' Done, allez, vagabonds sans treves, 
 Errez, funestes et maudits, 
 Le long des gouffres et des greves, 
 Sous Pceil ferme des paradis ! 
 
 * E. Marandon de Montyel, ' De la Criminalke' et de la Dege'ne'rescence,' 
 Archives de V Anthropologie crtminelle, Mai, 1892, p. 287.
 
 124 DEGENERATION 
 
 ' La nature i I'homme s'allie 
 Pour chaiier comme il le faut 
 L'orgueilleuse mdlnncolie 
 Qui vous fait marcher le front haut* 
 
 In another poem (Autre) he calls to his chosen mates: 
 
 ' Aliens, frres, bons vieux voleurs, 
 Doux vagabonds 
 Filous en fleur 
 Mes chers, mes bons, 
 
 'Fumons philosophiquement, 
 Promenons nous 
 Paisiblenient : 
 Rien faire est doux.' 
 
 As one vagabond feels himself attracted by other vagabonds, 
 so does one deranged mind feel drawn to others. Verlaine has 
 the greatest admiration for King Louis II. of Bavaria, that 
 unhappy madman in whom intelligence was extinct long before 
 death, in whom only the most abominable impulses of foul 
 beasts of the most degraded kind had survived the perishing of 
 the human functions of his disordered brain. He apostrophizes 
 him thus : 
 
 * Roi, le seul vrai Roi de ce si&cle, salut, Sire, 
 Qui voulutes mourir vengeant votre raison 
 Des choses de la politique, et du de*lire 
 De cette Science intruse dans la maison, 
 
 *De cette Science assassin de 1'Oraison 
 
 Et du Chant et de PArt et de toute la Lyre, 
 Et simplement et plein d'orgueil et floraison 
 Tuates en mourant, salut, Roi, bravo, Sire ! 
 
 ' Vous futes un poete, un soldat, le seul Roi 
 
 De ce siecle . . . 
 Et le martyr de la Raison selon la Foi. . . .' 
 
 Two points are noticeable in Verlaine's mode of expression. 
 First, we have the frequent recurrence t of the same word, of the 
 same turn of phrase, that chewing the cud, or rabachage (repeti- 
 tion), which we have learnt to know as the marks of intellectual 
 debility. In almost every one of his poems single lines and 
 hemistiches are repeated, sometimes unaltered, and often the 
 same word appears instead of one which rhymes. Were I to 
 quote all the passages of this kind, I should have to transcribe 
 nearly all his poems. I will therefore give only a few specimens, 
 and those in the original, so that their peculiarity will be fully 
 apparent to the reader. In the Crtpuscute du soir mystique the 
 lines, ' Le souvenir avec le crepuscule,' and ' Dahlia, lys, tulipe 
 et renoncules,' are twice repeated without any internal necessity. 
 In the poem Promenade sentimentale the adjective bleme (wan) 
 pursues the poet in the manner of an obsession or 'onomatomania,'
 
 MYSTICISM 125 
 
 and he applies it to water-lilies and waves (' wan waves '). The 
 Nuit du Walpurgis classique begins thus : 
 
 ' Un rythmique sabbat, rythmique, extre'mement 
 Rythmique.' . . . 
 
 In the S/renadethe first two lines are repeated verbatim as the 
 fourth and eighth. Similarly in Ariettes onblties, VIII. : 
 
 ' Dans Tinterminable 
 Ennui de la plaine, 
 La neige incertaine 
 Luit comme du sable. 
 
 ' Le ciel est de cuivre, 
 Sans lueur aucune. 
 On croirait voir vivre 
 Et mourir la lune. 
 
 ' Comme des nudes 
 Flottent gris les chenes 
 Des forets prochaines 
 Parmi les bue"es. 
 
 * Le ciel est de cuivre, 
 Sans lueur aucune. 
 On croirait voir vivre 
 Et mourir la lune. 
 
 ' Corneille poussive, 
 Et vous, les loups maigres, 
 Par ces bises aigres 
 Quoi done vous arrive? 
 
 ' Dans 1'interminable 
 Ennui de la plaine, 
 La neige incertaine 
 Luit comme du sable.' 
 
 The Chevaux de bois begins thus : 
 
 ' Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois, 
 Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours, 
 Tournez souvent et tournez toujours, 
 Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.' 
 
 In a truly charming piece in Sagesse he says : 
 
 ' Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, 
 
 Si bleu, si calme ! 
 Un arbre, par dessus le toit 
 Berce sa palme. 
 
 ' La cloche, dans le ciel qu'on voit, 
 
 Doucement tinte. 
 
 Un oiseau, sur 1'arbre qu'on voit, 
 
 Chante sa plainte.' 
 
 In the passage in Amour, ' Les fleurs des champs, les fleurs 4- 
 innombrables des champs ... les fleurs des gens,' ' champs ' 
 and * gens' sound somewhat alike. Here the imbecile repetition
 
 126 DEGENERATION 
 
 of similar sounds suggests a senselessf pun, to the poet, and as 
 for this stanza ifTPierrot gamin : 
 
 1 Ce n'est pas Pierrot en herbe 
 Non plus que Pierrot en gerbe, 
 C'est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot. 
 Pierrot gamin, Pierrot gosse, 
 Le cerneau hors de la cosse, 
 C'est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot !' 
 
 it is the language of nurses to babies, who do not care to make 
 sense, but only to twitter to the child in tones which give him 
 pleasure. The closing lines of the poem Mains point to a 
 complete ideational standstill, to mechanical mumbling : 
 
 ' Ah ! si ce sont des mains de reVe, 
 Tant mieux, ou tant pis, ou tant mieux.'* 
 
 / The second peculiarity of Verlaine's style is the other mark 
 of mental debility, viz., the combination of completely dis- 
 connected nouns and adjectives, which suggest each other, either 
 through a senseless meandering by way of associated ideas, or 
 through a similarity of sound. VVe have already found some 
 examples of this in the extracts cited above. In these we find 
 the ' enormous and tender Middle Ages' and the ' brand which 
 thunders.' Verlaine writes also of ' feet which glide with a pure 
 and wide movement/ of ' a narrow and vast affection,' of ' a slow 
 landscape,'t of 'a slack liqueur' ('jus flasque '), 'a gilded per- 
 fume,' a 'condensed' or 'terse contour' ('galbe succinct'), etc. 
 The Symbolists admire this form of imbecility, as 'the research 
 for rare and precious epithets ' (la recherche de 1'epithete rare et 
 precieuse). 
 
 Verlaine has a clear consciousness of the vagueness of his 
 thoughts, and in a very remarkable poem from the psychological 
 point of vi<tvr,Artpolftique t in which he attempts to give a theory 
 
 (of his lyric creation, he raises nebulosity to the dignity of a 
 fundamental method : 
 ' De la musique avant toute chose 
 Et pour cela prefere 1' Impair 
 Plus vague et plus soluble dans 1'air, 
 Sans rien en lui qui pese ou qui pose.' 
 
 The two verbs ' pese ' and 'pose' are juxtaposed merely on 
 account of their similarity of sound. 
 
 * II faut aussi que tu n'ailles point 
 Choisir les mots sans quelque me'prise ; " 
 Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise 
 Ou 1'Inddcis au Precis se joint. 
 
 * Ah ! it these are dream hands, 
 
 So much the better, or so much the worse, or so much the better. 
 
 f Virgil's 'lentus,' when applied to aspects of nature conveys a very 
 different meaning.
 
 MfflCISM 127 
 
 * C'est des beaux yeux derriere des voiles, 
 C'est le grand jour tremblant de midi, 
 C'est par un ciel d'automne attiedi, 
 Le bleu fouillis des claires e'toiles ! 
 
 ' Car nous voulons la Nuance encor, 
 Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance ! 
 Oh ! la nuance seule fiance 
 Le reve au reve et la flute au cor !' 
 
 (This stanza is completely delirious ; it places 'nuance* and 
 'colour' in opposition, as though the latter were not contained 
 in the former. The idea of which the weak brain of Verlaine 
 had an inkling, but could not bring to a complete conception, 
 is probably that he prefers subdued and mixed tints, which lie 
 on the margin of several colours, to the full intense colour 
 itself.) 
 
 ' Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine, 
 
 L'esprit cruel et le Rire impur, 
 
 Oui font pleurer les yeux de 1'Azur, 
 
 Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine !' 
 
 It cannot be denied that this poetical method in the hands 
 of Verlaine often yields extraordinarily beautiful results. There 
 are few poems in French literature which can rival the Chanson 
 <?Automne : 
 
 ' Les sanglots longs 
 Des violons 
 
 De 1'automne 
 , Blessent mon coeur 
 D'une langueur 
 
 Monotone. 
 
 ' Tout suffocant 
 Et bleme, quand 
 
 Sonne 1'heure, 
 ' Je me souviens 
 Des jours anciens, 
 Et je pleure. 
 
 ' Et je m'en vais 
 Au vent mauvais 
 
 Qui m'emporte 
 Dec,a, deJa, 
 Pareil a la 
 
 Feuille morte.' 
 
 Even if literally translated, there remains something of the 
 melancholy magic of the lines, which in French are richly 
 rhythmical and full of music. Avant que tu ne t'm allies (p. 99) 
 and II pleure dans mon cceitr (p. 116) may also be called pearls 
 among French lyrics. 
 
 This is because the methods of a highly emotional, but 
 intellectually incapable, dreamer suffice for, poetry which deals 
 exclusively with moods, but this is the inexorable limit of his 
 power. Let the true meaning of mood be always present with
 
 128 DEGENERATION 
 
 us. The word denotes a state of mind, in which, through organic 
 excitations which it cannot directly perceive, consciousness is 
 filled with presentations of a uniform nature, which it elaborates 
 with greater or less clearness, and one and all of which relate to 
 those organic excitations inaccessible to consciousness. The mere 
 succession of words, giving a name to these presentations, the roots 
 of which are in the unknown, expresses the mood, and is able to 
 awaken it in another. It has no need of a fundamental thought, 
 or of a progressive exposition to unfold it. Verlaine often attains 
 to astonishing effects in such poetry of moods. Where, how- 
 ever, distinct vision, or a feeling the motive of which is clear to 
 consciousness, or a process well delimitated in time and space, 
 is to be poetically rendered, the poetic art of the emotional 
 imbecile fails utterly. In a healthy and sane poet even the 
 mood pure and simple is united to clear presentations, and is not 
 amere undulation of fragrance and rose-tinted mist. Poems like 
 OoethVs Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ru/i, Der Fischer ; or Freudvoll und 
 leittiml, can never be created by the emotionally degenerate ; but, 
 on the other hand, the most marvellous of Goethe's poems are 
 not so utterly incorporeal, not such mere sighs, as three or four 
 of the best of a Verlaine. 
 
 We have now the portrait of this most famous leader of the 
 Symbolists clearly before us. We see a repulsive degenerate 
 subject with asymmetric skull and Mongolian face, an impulsive 
 vagabond and dipsomaniac, who, under the most disgraceful cir- 
 cumstances, was placed in gaol ; an emotional dreamer of feeble 
 intellect, who painfully fights against his bad impulses, and in 
 his misery often utters touching notes of complaint ; a mystic 
 whose qualmish consciousness is flooded with ideas of God and 
 saints, and a dotard who manifests the absence of any definite 
 thought in his mind by incoherent speech, meaningless expres- 
 sions and motley images. In lunatic asylums there are many 
 patients whose disease is less deep-seated and incurable than 
 is that of this irresponsible circulaire at large, whom only 
 ignorant judges could have condemned for his epileptoid crimes. 
 
 A second leader among the Symbolists, whose prestige is in 
 no quarter disputed, is M. St^phane Mallarme*. He is the most 
 curious phenomenon in the intellectual life of contemporary 
 France. Although long past fifty years of age, he has written 
 hardly anything, and the little that is known of him is, in the 
 opinion of his most unreserved admirers, of no account ; and 
 yet he is esteemed as a very great poet, and the utter infertility 
 of his pen, the entire absence of any single work which he can 
 produce as evidence of his poetical capacity, is prized as his 
 greatest merit, and as a most striking proof of his intellectual 
 importance. This statement must appear so fabulous to any 
 reader not deranged in mind, that he may rightly demand proofs
 
 MYSTICISM 129 
 
 <of these statements. M. Charles Morice* says of Mallarme: 
 * I am not obliged to unveil the secrets of the works of a poet 
 who, as he has himself remarked, is excluded from all partici- 
 pation in any official exposition of the beautiful. The fact itself 
 that these works are still unknown . . . would seem to forbid 
 our associating the name of M. Mallarme with those of men who 
 have given us books. I let vulgar criticism buzz without reply- 
 ing to it, and state that M. Mallarme', without having given us 
 books ... is famous a fame which, of course, has not been 
 won without arousing the laughter of stupidity in both petty 
 and important newspapers, but which does not offer public and 
 private . . . ineptitude that opportunity for showing its base- 
 ness which is provoked by the advent of a new wonder. . . . 
 The people, in spite of their abhorrence of the beautiful, and 
 especially of novelty in the beautiful, have gradually, and in 
 spite of themselves, come to comprehend the prestige of a legiti- 
 mate authority. They themselves, even they, feel ashamed of 
 their foolish laughter ; and before this man, whom that laughter 
 could not tear from the serenity of his meditative silence, 
 laughter became dumb, and itself suffered the divine contagion 
 of silence. Even for the million this man, who published no 
 books, and whom, nevertheless, all designated "a poet," became, 
 as it were, the very symbol of a poet, seeking, where possible, 
 to draw near to the absolute. . . . By his silence he has signified 
 that he ... cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art 
 which he wishes to create. Should cruel life refuse to support 
 him in his effort, our respect nay, more, our veneration can 
 alone give an answer worthy of a reticence thus conditioned.' 
 
 The graphomaniac Morice (of whose ^iazy and distorted style 
 -of expression this literally translated example gives a very good 
 idea) assumes that perhaps Mallarm^ will yet create his ' unpre- 
 cedented work.' Mallarme himself, however, denies us the right 
 to any such hope. ' The delicious MallarmeY Paul Hervieu 
 relates,! ' told me one day ... he could not understand that 
 anyone should let himself appear in print. Such a proceeding 
 gave him the impression of an indecency, an aberration, re- 
 sembling that form of mental disease called " exhibitionism." 
 Moreover, no one has been so discreet with his soul as this in- 
 comparable thinker.' J 
 
 So, then, this 'incomparable thinker' shows 'a complete dis- 
 cretion as regards his soul.' At one time he bases his silence 
 on a sort of shamed timidity at publicity ; at another, on the 
 
 * Charles Morice, La Literature de tout-ci-Vheure, p. 238. 
 
 t Huret, op. '/., p. 33. 
 
 j Since these words were written, M. Mallarme" has decided to publish 
 his poems in one volume. This, far from invalidating what has been said, 
 is its best justification. 
 
 9
 
 I 3 o DEGENERATION 
 
 fact that he ' cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art 
 which he wishes to create,' two reasons for that matter recipro- 
 cally precluding each other. He is approaching the evening of 
 his life, and beyond a few brochures, such as Les Dif.ux de la 
 Grhe and Uaprts-niidi d'un Fatine, together with some verses 
 and literary and theatrical criticisms, scattered in periodicals, 
 the lot barely sufficing for a volume, he has published nothing 
 but some translations from the English and a few school-books 
 (M. Mallarme is a teacher of English in a Parisian lycee), and 
 yet there are some who admire him as a great poet, as the one 
 exclusive poet, and they overwhelm the ' blockheads ' and the 
 ' fools ' who laugh at him with all the expressions of scorn that 
 the force of imagination in a diseased mind can display. Is not 
 this one of the wonders of our day ? Lessing makes Conti, in 
 Emilia Galotti, say that ' Raphael would have been the greatest 
 genius in painting, even if he had unfortunately been born with- 
 out hands.' In M. Mallarme 1 we have a man who is revered as 
 a great poet, although ' he has unfortunately been born without 
 hands,' although he produces nothing, although he does not 
 pursue the art he professes. During the period when in London 
 a great number of bubble-company swindles were being pro- 
 moted, when all the world went mad for the possession of the 
 least scrap of Stock Exchange paper, it happened that a few 
 sharp individuals advertised in the newspapers, inviting people to 
 subscribe for shares in a company of which the object was kept 
 a secret. There really were men who brought their money to 
 these lively promoters, and the historian of the City crisis regards 
 this fact as inconceivable. Inconceivable as it is, Paris sees it 
 repeated. Some persons demand unbounded admiration for a 
 poet whose works are his own secret, and will probably remain 
 such, and others trustingly and humbly bring their admiration 
 as required. The sorcerers of the Senegal negroes offer their 
 congregation baskets and calabashes for veneration, in which 
 they assert that a mighty fetich is enclosed. As a matter of 
 fact they contain nothing ; but the negroes regard the empty 
 vessels with holy dread, and show them and their possessors 
 divine honours. Exactly thus is empty Mallarme the fetich 
 of the Symbolists, who, it must be admitted, are intellectually 
 far below the Senegal negroes. 
 
 This position of a calabash worshipped on bended knees he 
 has attained by oral discourse. Every week he gathers round 
 him embryonic poets and authors, and develops his art theories 
 before them. He speaks just as Morice and Kahn write. He 
 strings together obscure and wondrous words, at which his 
 disciples become as stupid ' as if a mill-wheel were going round 
 in their heads,' so that they leave him as if intoxicated, and 
 with the impression that incomprehensible, superhuman dis- 
 closures have been made to them. If there is anything com-
 
 MYSTICISM 131 
 
 prehensible in the incoherent flow of Mallarme's words, it is 
 perhaps his admiration for the pre-Raphaelites. It was he who 
 drew the attention of the Symbolists to this school, and enjoined 
 imitation of it. It is through Mallarme that the French 
 mystics received their English mediaevalism and neo-Catholicism. 
 Finally, it may be mentioned that among the physical features 
 of Mallarme are ' long pointed faun-like ears.'* After Darwin, 
 who was the first to point out the apish character of this 
 peculiarity, Hartmann,f Frigerio.j and Lombroso, have firmly 
 established the connection between immoderately long and 
 pointed external ears and atavism and degeneration ; and they 
 have shown that this peculiarity is of especially frequent occur- 
 rence among criminals and lunatics. 
 
 The third among the leading spirits of the Symbolists is Jean 
 
 Moreas, a Franco-Greek poet, who at the completion of his 
 thirty-sixth year (his friends assert, it may be in friendly malice,, 
 that he makes himself out to be very much younger than he is) 
 has produced in toto three attenuated collections of verses, of 
 hardly one hundred to one hundred and twenty pages, bearing 
 the titles, Les Syrtes, Les Cantilenes, and Le Pelerin passionne'. 
 The importance of a literary performance does not, of course, 
 depend upon its amplitude, if it is otherwise unusually signifi- 
 cant. When, however, a man cackles during interminable caf6 
 seances of the renewal of poetry and the unfolding of a new art 
 of the future, and finally produces three little brochures of 
 childish verses as the result of his world-stirring effort, then the 
 material insignificance of the performance also becomes a subject 
 for ridicule. 
 
 Moreas is one of the inventors of the word ' Symbolism.' 
 For some few years he was the high -priest of this secret 
 doctrine, and administered the duties of his service with 
 requisite seriousness. One day he suddenly abjured his self- 
 founded faith, and declared that ' Symbolism ' 'had always 
 .been meant only as a joke, to lead fools by the nose withal; 
 and that the true salvation of poetry was in Romanism 
 (romanisme). Under this new word he affirms a return to the 
 language, versification and mode of feeling of the French poets 
 at the close of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance period ; 
 but it were well to adopt his declarations with caution, since in 
 two or three years he may be proclaiming his ' romanisme ' as 
 much a tap-room joke as his 'symbolism.' The appearance of 
 the Pelerin passionne' in 1891 was celebrated by the Symbolists 
 as an event which was to be the beginning of a new era in 
 
 * Huret, op. tit., p. 55. 
 
 f Hartmann, Der Gorilla. Leipzig, 1881, p. 34. 
 
 J Dr. L. Frigerio, L'Oreille externe : Etude cPAnthropologie criminelle. 
 Lyon, 1889, pp. 32 and 40. 
 
 Lombroso, L'Uomo delinqttcnte^ p. 255.
 
 I 3 a DEGENERATION 
 
 poetry. They arranged a banquet in honour of Mordas, and in 
 the after-dinner speeches he was worshipped as the deliverer from 
 the shackles of ancient forms and notions, and as the saviour 
 who was bringing in the kingdom of God of true poetry. And 
 the same poets who sat at the table with More'as, and delivered 
 to him rapturous addresses or joined in the applause, a few weeks 
 after this event overwhelmed him with contumely and contempt 
 ' More'as a Symbolist !' cried Charles Vignier.* ' Is he one 
 through his ideas ? He laughs at them himself 1 His thoughts! 
 They don't weigh much, these thoughts of Jean More'as !' 
 1 More'as ?' asks Adrien Remacle,t ' we have all been laughing at 
 him. It is that which has made him famous.' Rene* Ghil calls 
 his Ptterin passionnt ' doggerel written by a pedant,' and Gustav 
 KahnJ passes sentence on him thus : ' More'as has no talent. . . . 
 He has never done anything worth mentioning. He has his own 
 particular jargon.' These expressions disclose to us the com- 
 plete hollowness and falseness of the Symbolistic movement, 
 which outside France is obstinately proclaimed as a serious 
 matter by imbeciles and speculators, although its French in- 
 ventors make themselves hoarse in trying to convince the world 
 that they merely wanted to banter the Philistine with a tap- 
 room jest and advertise themselves. 
 
 After the verdict of his brethren in the Symbolist Parnassus, 
 I may really spare myself the trouble of dwelling longer on 
 More'as ; I will, however, cite a few examples from his Pttenn 
 fassionnt, in order that the reader may form an idea of the 
 softness of brain which displays itself in these verses. 
 
 The poem Agnes'^ begins thus : 
 
 * II y avait des arcs ou passaient des escortes 
 Avec des bannieres de deuil et du fer 
 Lace" (?) des potentats de toutes sortes 
 II y avail dans la cite" au bord de la mer. 
 Les places e'taient noires, et bien pave"es, et les portes, 
 Du c&re" de I'est et de 1'ouest, hautes ; et comme en hiver 
 La foret, de'pe'rissaient les salles de palais, et les porches, 
 Et les colonnades de belve*der. 
 
 C'e"tait (tu dois bien t'en souvenir) c'e"tait aux plus beaux jours de ton 
 adolescence. 
 
 ' Dans la cite" au bord de la mer, la cape et la dague lourdes 
 De pierres jaunes, et sur ton chapeau des plumes de perroquets, 
 Tu t'en venais, devisant telles bourdes, 
 Tu t'en venais entre tes deux laquais 
 Si bouffis et tant sots en verite", des happelourdes ! 
 Dans la cite au bord de la mer tu t'en venais et tu vaguais 
 Parmi de grands vieillards qui travaillaient aux felouques, 
 Le long des moles et des quais. 
 
 Ce*tait (tu dois bien t'en souvenir) c'dtait aux plus beaux jours de ton 
 adolescence. 
 
 * Huret, op. cit., p. 102. f Ibid., p. 106. \ Ibid., p. 401. 
 
 Jean Moreas, Le Pilerin passionnt. Palis, 1891, p. 3.
 
 MYSTICISM 133 
 
 And thus the twaddle goes on through eight more stanzas, and 
 in every line we find the characteristics of the language used by 
 imbeciles and made notorious by Sollier (Psychologie de F Idiot ft 
 de f Imbecile), the ' ruminating/ as it were, of the same ex- 
 pressions, the dreamy incoherence of the language, and th$ 
 insertion of words which have no connection with the subject 
 Two Ctuotsotts* run thus : 
 
 ' Les courlis dans les roseaux ! 
 (Faut-il que je vous en parle, 
 Des courlis dans les roseaux ?) 
 O vous joli' Fee des eaux. 
 
 ' Le porcher et les pourceaux ! 
 (Faut-il que je vous en parle, 
 Du porcher et des pourceaux ?) 
 O vous joli' Fee des eaux. 
 
 * Mon coeur pris en vos reseaux ! 
 (Faut-il que je vous en parle, 
 De mon coeur en vos reseaux ?) 
 O vous joli' Fee des eaux. 
 
 1 On a march sur les fleurs au bord de la route, 
 Et le vent d'automne les secoue si fort, en outre. 
 
 1 La malle-poste a renvers la vieille croix au bord de la route ; 
 Elle tait vraiment si pourrie, en outre. 
 
 ' L'idiot (tu sais) est mort au bord de la route, 
 Et personne ne le pleurera, en outre.' 
 
 The stupid artifice with which Moreas here seeks to produce a 
 feeling of wretchedness by conjuring up the three associated 
 figures of crushed flowers, dishevelled by the wind, an over- 
 turned and mouldering cross, and a dead, unmounted idiot, 
 makes this poem a model of the would-be profound production 
 of a mad-house ! 
 
 When More"as is not soft of brain, he develops a rhetorical 
 turgidity which reminds us of Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau 
 in his worst efforts. Only one examplef of this kind, and we 
 have done with him : 
 
 1 J'ai tellement soif. 6 mon amour, de ta bouche, 
 Que j'y boirais en baisers le cours detourne" 
 Du Strymon, FAraxe et le Tana'is farouche ; 
 Et les cent meandres qui arrosent Pitan, 
 Et 1'Hermus qui prend sa source ou le soleil se couche, 
 Et toutes les claires fontaines dont abonde Gaza, 
 Sans que ma soif s'en apaisat.' 
 
 Behind the leaders Verlaine, Mallarme", and Moreas a troop 
 of minor Symbolists throng, each, it is true, in his own eyes the 
 one great poet of the band, but whose illusions of greatness do 
 not entitle them to any special observation. Sufficient justice 
 
 * Moreas, op. '/., pp. 21 and 2. t /$'</., P- 43-
 
 I 3 4 DEGENERATION- 
 
 IS dealt them if the spirit they are made of be characterized by 
 quoting a few lines of their poetry. Jules Laforgue, l unique 
 not only in his generation, but in all the republic of literature,'* 
 cries : ' Oh, how daily \guotidienne\ is life !' and in his poem 
 Pan et la Syrinx we come upon lines like the following : 
 
 1 O Syrinx ! voyez et comprenez la Terre et la merveille de cette matinde et 
 
 la circulation de la vie. 
 Oh, vous la ! ct moi, ici ! Oh vous ! Oh, moi ! Tout est dans Tout !'f 
 
 Gustav Kahn.one of the sestheticists and philosophers of Sym- 
 bolism, says in his Nuit sur la Lande : ' Peace descends from 
 thy lovely eyes like a great evening, and the borders of slow 
 tents descend, studded with precious stones, woven of far-off 
 beams and unknown moons.' 
 
 In German, at least, ' borders of slow tents which descend ' is 
 completely unintelligible nonsense. In French they are also 
 unintelligible ; but in the original their meaning becomes 
 apparent. ' Et des pans de tentes lentes descendent,' the line 
 runs, and betrays itself as pure echolalia, as a succession of 
 similar sounds, as it were, echoing each other. 
 
 Charles Vignier, ' the beloved disciple of Verlaine,' says to his 
 mistress : 
 
 ' La-bas c'est trop loin, 
 Pauvre libellule, 
 Reste dans ton coin 
 Et prends des pilules . . . 
 
 * Sois Edmond About 
 Et d'humeur coulante, 
 Sois un marabout 
 Du Jardin des Plantes.' 
 
 Another of his poems, Une Coupe de Thule, runs thus : 
 
 ' Dans une coupe de Thuld 
 Oil vient palir 1'attrait de Pheure, 
 Dort le sdnile et dolent leurre 
 De 1'ultime rfive aduld. 
 
 ' Mais des cheveux d'argent file* 
 
 Font un voile a celle qui pleure, 
 
 Dans une coupe de Thuld 
 
 Oit s'est dteint 1'attrait de Pheure. 
 4 Et Pon ne sait quel jubild 
 
 Cdlebre une harpe mineure 
 
 Que le hautain fantdme eflleure 
 
 D'un lucide doigt fuseld ! . . . 
 
 Dans une coupe de Thuld !' 
 
 * MordAs, op, at., p. 31 1. 
 
 Othou, there! 'and I, here! O fhou ! o' me I All is in All 1'
 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 135 
 
 These poems remind us so forcibly of thoe doggerel rhymes 
 at which in Germany jovial students are often wont to try their 
 skill, and which are known as 'flowery [lit. blooming] nonsense,' 
 that, in spite of the solemn assurance of French critics, I am 
 convinced that they were intended as a joke. If I am right in 
 my supposition, they are really evidences, not of the mental 
 status of Vignier, but of his readers, admirers, and critics. 
 
 Louis Dumur addresses the Neva in the following manner : 
 
 j'jJrl lp Jut-xntiob-.- 
 
 Puissante, magmfique, illustre, grave, noble reme 1 
 O Tsaristsa [sicf] de glace et de fastes Souveraine ! 
 Matrone liieratique et solennelle et ve'ne're'e ! . . . 
 Toi qui me forces a rever, toi qui me deconcertes, 
 Et^toi surtout que j'aime, Email, Beaute", Poeme, Femme. 
 Neva ! j'evoque ton spectacle et 1'hymne de ton ame !' 
 
 And Rene Ghil, one of the best-known Symbolists (he is 
 chief of a school entitled ' evolutive-instrumentiste '), draws from 
 his lyre these tones, which I also quote in French ; in the first 
 place because they would lose their ring in a translation, and, 
 secondly, because if I were to translate them literally, it is 
 hopeless to suppose that the reader would think I was serious : 
 
 1 Ouis ! oui's aux nues haut et nues ou 
 Tirent-ils d'aile immense qui vire . . . 
 
 et quand vide 
 et vers les grands petales dans 1'air plus aride 
 
 *(Et en le lourd venir grandi lent stridule, et 
 Titilie qui n'alentisse d'air qui dure, et ! 
 Grandie, erratile et multiple d'eVeiis, stride 
 Mixte, plainte et splendeur ! la plenitude aride) 
 
 ' et vers les grands pdtales d'agitations 
 Lors eVanouissait un vol ardent qui stride. . . , 
 
 ' (des saltigrades doux n'iront plus vers les mers. . . .)' 
 
 One thing must be acknowledged, and that is, the Symbolists 
 have an astonishing gift for titles. The book itself may belong 
 to pure mad-house literature ; the title is always remarkable. 
 We have already seen that Moreas names one of his collection 
 of verses Les Syrtes. He might in truth just as well call it the 
 North Pole, or The Marmot, or Abd-el-Kader, since these have 
 just as much connection with the poems in the little volume as 
 Syrtes ; but it is undeniable that this geographical name calls 
 up the lustre of an African sun, and the pale reflection of classic 
 antiquity, which may well please the eye of the hysteric reader. 
 Edouard Dubus entitles his poem, Quand les Violons sont partis ; 
 Louis Dumur, Lassitudes ; Gustave Khan, Les Palais nomades ; 
 Maurice du Plessis, La Peau de Marsyas ; Ernest Raynaud, 
 Chairs profanes and Le Signe; Henri de Regnier, Sites e
 
 J3 6 DEGENERATION 
 
 Episodes-. Arthur Rjmbaud, Les Illuminations; Albert Saint Paul, 
 L'Echarjx a" Iris; Vidte-Griffin, Ancceus ; and Charles Vignier r 
 Ctnton. 
 
 Of the prose of the Symbolists, I have already given some 
 examples. I should further like to cite only a few passages- 
 from a book which the Symbolists declare to be one of their 
 most powerful mental manifestations, La Literature de tout-a- 
 f/uure, by Charles Morice. It is a sort of bird's-eye view of the 
 development of literature up to the present time, a rapid critique 
 of the more and most recent books and authors, a kind of 
 programme of the literature of the future. This book is one 
 of the most astonishing which exists in any language. It 
 strongly resembles Rembrandt as Educator, but is far beyond 
 that book in the utter senselessness of its concatenations 
 of words. It is a monument of pure literary insanity, of 
 ' graphomania'; and neither Delepierre in his Litttrature def 
 Fous, nor Philomnestes (Gustave Brunet) in his Fous Littfraires, 
 quotes examples of more complete mental dislocation than are 
 visible in every page of this book. Notice the following confes- 
 sion of faith by Morice :* ' Although in this book treating only 
 of aesthetics although of aesthetics based upon metaphysics 
 we shall remember to refrain, as far as possible, from pure 
 philosophizing, we must approximately paraphrase a word 
 which will more than once be made use of, and which, in the 
 highest sense here put upon it, is not incapable of being para- 
 phrased. God is the first and universal cause, the final and 
 universal end ; the bond between spirits ; the point of intersec- 
 tion where two parallels would meet ; the fulfilment of our 
 inclinations ; the fruition which accords with the glories of our 
 dreams ; the abstraction itself of the concrete ; the unseen and 
 unheard and yet certain ideal of our demands for beauty in 
 truth. God is, par excellence, THE very word tile very word, 
 that is to say, that unknown certain word of which every author 
 has the incontrovertible, but undiscernible idea, the self-evident 
 but hidden goal which he will never reach, and which he 
 approaches as near as possible. In, so to say, practical aesthetics 
 He is the atmosphere of joy in which the mind revels victorious, 
 because it has reduced irreducible mystery to imperishable 
 symbols.' I do not for a moment doubt that this incomparable 
 jumble will be quite intelligible to theologians. Like all mystics,. 
 ihey discover asense in every sound ; that is, they persuade* 
 Themselves and others that the nebulous ideas which the sound 
 awakens in their brains by association are the meaning of that 
 sound. But anyone who demands of words that they should 
 be the media of definite thoughts, will perceive in the face of 
 this twaddle that the author was not thinking anything at all 
 * Morice. op. cit., p. 30.
 
 MYSTICISM 137 
 
 when he wrote, although he was dreaming of many things. 
 'Religion' is for Morice (p. 56), 'the source of art, and art in 
 its essence is religious ' an affirmation which he borrows from 
 Ruskin, although he does not acknowledge it. ' Our scholars, 
 our thinkers . . . the luminous heads of the nineteenth century,' 
 are ' Edgar Poe, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Auguste 
 Comte, Claude Bernard, Berthelot ' (p. 57). Edgar Poe by the 
 side of Spencer, Darwin, and Claude Bernard ! never have ideas 
 danced a crazier fools' quadrille in a disordered brain. 
 
 And this book, of which the passages we have cited give a 
 sufficiently correct idea, was, in France (just as Rembrandt as 
 Educator was in Germany), pronounced by thoroughly re- 
 sponsible critics to be ' strange, but interesting and suggestive.' 
 A poor degenerate devil who scribbles such stuff, and an imbecile 
 reader who follows his twaddle like passing clouds, are simply 
 to be pitied. But what words of contempt are strong enough 
 for the sane intellectual tatterdemalions who, in order not to 
 offend or else to give themselves the appearance of possessing a 
 remarkable faculty of comprehension, or to affect fairness and 
 benevolence even towards those whose opinions they in part do 
 not share, insist that they discover in books of this kind many 
 a truth, much wit along with peculiar whims, an ideal of fervour 
 and frequent lightnings of thought? 
 
 The word ' Symbolism ' conveys, as we have seen, no idea to its 
 inventors. They pursue no definite artistic tendency ; hence it 
 is not possible to show them that their tendency is a false one. 
 It is otherwise with some of their disciples, who joined their 
 ranks, partly through a desire to advertise themselves, partly 
 because they thought that, in the conflicts between literary 
 parties, they were fighting on the side which was the stronger 
 and the more sure of victory, and partly, also, through the folly 
 of fashion, and through the influence exerted by any noisy 
 novelty over uncritical minds. Less weak-brained than the 
 leaders, they felt the need of giving the word ' Symbolism ' a 
 certain significance, and, in fact, drew up a number of axioms 
 which, according to their profession, serve to guide them in 
 their creations. These axioms are sufficiently defined to allow of 
 discussion. 
 
 The Symbolists demand greater freedom in the treatment of 
 French verse. They fiercely rebel against the old alexandrines, 
 with the caesura in the middle, and the necessary termination of 
 the sentence at the end ; against the prohibition of the hiatus ; 
 against the law of a regular alternation of masculine and 
 feminine rhymes. They make defiant use of the 'free verse,' 
 with length and rhythm ad libitum, and false rhymes. The 
 foreigner can only smile at the savage gestures with which this 
 conflict is canied on. It is a schoolboys' war against some
 
 ijg DEGENERATION 
 
 hated book, which is solemnly torn in pieces, trodden under 
 foot, and burned. The whole dispute concerning prosody and 
 the rules of rhyme is, so to speak, an inter-Gallic concern, and 
 is of no consequence to the literature of the world. We have 
 long had everything which the French poets are only now seek- 
 ing to obtain by barricades and street massacres. In Goethe's 
 Proniet/itits, Mahomet's Gcsang, Harzreise im Winter, in Heine's 
 Xordstc Cyklus, etc, we possess perfect models of free verse ; 
 we alternate the rhymes as we will ; we allow masculine and 
 feminine rhymes to follow one another as seems good to us ; 
 we do not bind ourselves to the rigid law of old classic metres, 
 but suffer, in the cradling measure of our verse, anapaests to 
 alternate with iambics and spondees, according to our feeling 
 for euphony. English, Italian and Sclavonic poetry have gone 
 equally far, and if the French alone have remained behind, and 
 have at last found a need for casting aside their old matted, 
 moth-eaten periwig, this is quite reasonable ; but to anyone but 
 a Frenchman they merely make themselves ridiculous when 
 they trumpet their painful hobbling after the nations who are 
 far in front of them, as an unheard-of discovery of new paths 
 and opening up of new roads, and as an advance inspired by 
 the ideal into the dawn of the future. 
 
 Another aesthetic demand of the Symbolists is that the line 
 should, independently of its sense, call forth an intended 
 emotion merely by its sound. A word should produce an 
 effect, not through the idea which it embodies, but as a tone, 
 language becoming music. It is noteworthy that many of the 
 Symbolists have given their books titles which are intended to 
 awaken musical ideas. We find Les Gamines (The Scales), 
 by Stuart Merrill ; Les Cantilenes, by Jean Moreas ; Cloches dans 
 la Nuit t by Adolphe Rett6 ; Romances sans Paroles, by Paul 
 Verlaine, etc. To make use_pf language as a musical instru- 
 ment for the producfion~oTpure tone effects is the delirious idea 
 of a mystic. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites demand 
 of the fine arts that they should not represent the concrete 
 plastically or optically, but should express the abstract, and 
 therefore simply undertake the rdle of alphabetic writing. 
 Similarly, the Symbolists displace all the natural boundary lines 
 of art, and impose upon the word a task which belongs to 
 musical signs only. tfut while the pre-Raphaelites wish to 
 raise the fine arts to a nigher rank than is suited to them, the 
 Symbolists greatly degrade the word. In its origin sound is 
 musical. It expresses no definite idea, but only a general 
 emotion of the animal. The cricket fiddles, the nightingale 
 trills, when sexually excited. The bear growls when stirred by 
 the rage of conflict ; the lion roars in his pleasure when tearing 
 a living prey. In proportion as the brain develops in the 
 animal kingdom, and mental life becomes richer, the means of
 
 MYSTICISM 139 
 
 vocal expression are evolved and differentiated, and become 
 capable of making perceptible to the senses not only simple 
 generic emotions, but also presentative complexes of a more 
 restricted and definitely delimitated nature nay, if Professor 
 Garner's observations concerning the language of apes are 
 accurate, even tolerably distinct single presentations. Sound, 
 as a means of expressing mental operations, reaches its final 
 perfection in cultivated, grammatically articulated language, 
 inasmuch as it can then follow exactly the intellectual working 
 of the brain, and make it objectively perceptible in all the 
 minutest details. To bring the word, pregnant with thought, 
 back to the emotional sound is to renounce all the results 
 of organic development, and to degrade man, rejoicing in 
 the power of speech, to the level of the whirring cricket 
 or the croaking frog. The efforts of the Symbolists, then, 
 result in senseless twaddle, but not in the word -music they 
 intend, for this simply does not exist. No word of any single 
 human language is, as such, musical. Many languages abound 
 in consonants ; in others vowels predominate. The former 
 require more dexterity in the muscles employed in speaking ; 
 their pronunciation, therefore, counts as more difficult, and they 
 seem less agreeable to the ears of foreigners than the languages 
 which are rich in vowels. But this has nothing to do with the 
 musical side of the question. What remains of the phonetic 
 effect of a word if it is whispered, or if it is only visible as a 
 written character ? And yet in both cases it is able to awaken 
 the same emotions, as if it had reached consciousness full-toned 
 through the sense of hearing. Let anyone have read aloud to 
 him the most cleverly chosen arrangement of words in a 
 language completely unknown to him, and try to produce in 
 himself a definite emotion through the mere phonetic effect. In 
 every case it will be found impossible. The meaning of a word, 
 and not its sound, determines its value. The sound is as such 
 neither beautiful nor ugly. It becomes so only through the 
 voice which gives it life. Even the first soliloquy in Goethe's 
 Iphigenie would be ugly coming from the throat of a drunkard. 
 I have had the opportunity of convincing myself that even the 
 Hottentot language, spoken in a mellow, agreeable contralto 
 voice, could be pleasing. 
 
 Still more gracked is the craze of a sub-section of the Sym- 
 bolists, the ' Instrumentalists,' whose spokesman is Rene Ghil. 
 They connect each sound with a definite feeling of colour, and 
 demand that the word should not only awaken musical emotion, 
 but at the same time operate aesthetically in producing a colour- 
 harmony. This mad idea has its origin in a much-quoted sonnet 
 by Arthur Rimbaud, Les Voydles (Vowels), of which the first 
 line runs thus : 
 
 ' A black, e white, i red, u green, o blue.'
 
 I40 DEGENERATION 
 
 Moricc declares* explicitly (what in any case no one in a sane 
 state of mind would have doubted) that Rimbaud wished to 
 make one of those silly jokes which imbeciles and idiots are in 
 the habit of perpetrating. Some of his comrades, however, took 
 the sonnet in grim earnest, and deduced from it a theory of art. 
 In his Trait* du Verbe Ren Ghil specifies the colour-value, not 
 only of individual vowels, but of musical instruments. ' Harps 
 establish their supremacy by being white. And violins are blue, 
 often softened by a shimmer of light, to subdue paroxysms. 
 (It is to be hoped the reader will duly appraise these combina- 
 tions of words.) ' In the exuberance of ovations, brass instru- 
 ments are red, flutes yellow, allowing the childlike to proclaim 
 itself astonished at the luminance of the lips. And the organ, 
 synthesis of all simple instruments, bewails deafness of earth 
 and the flesh all in black. . . .' Another Symbolist, who has 
 many admirers, M. Francis Poictevin, teaches us, in Demiers 
 Songes, to know the feelings corresponding to colours. ' Blue 
 goes without more of passion from love to death ; or, more 
 accurately, it is a lost extreme. From turquoise blue to indigo, 
 one goes from the most shame-faced influences to final ravages.' 
 Wiseacres were, of course, at once to the fore, and set up a 
 quasi-scientific theory of 'colour-hearing.' Sounds are said to 
 awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to 
 some, this was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures ; 
 according to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal con- 
 nection between the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means 
 of nerve filaments. This anatomical explanation is entirely 
 arbitrary, and has not been substantiated by any facts. But 
 colour-hearing ' itself is by no means confirmed. The most 
 complete book hitherto published on this subject, the author of 
 which is the French oculist, Suarez de Mendoza.t collects all 
 the available observations on this alleged phenomenon, and 
 deduces from them the following definition : ' It is the faculty 
 of associating tones and colours, by which every objective 
 acoustic perception of sufficient intensity, nay, even the memory- 
 image of such a perception, arouses in certain persons a luminous 
 or non-luminous image, which is always the same for the same 
 letters, the same tone of voice or instrument, and the same 
 intensity or pitch of tone.' Suarez well hits the truth- when he 
 says, 'Colour-hearing ' (he calls it pseudo-photesthhie) ' is often a 
 consequence of an association of ideas established in youth . . . 
 and often of a special action of the brain, the particular nature 
 of which is unknown to us, and may have a certain similarity 
 to sense-illusion and hallucination.' For my part, I have no 
 
 Morice, op. cit % p. 321. 
 
 f Dr. F. Suam de Mendoza, L Audition colorle: jttude tur les fausses 
 Stnsations semndaires physivlogiques. Paris, 1892.
 
 MYSTICISM 141 
 
 doubt that colour-hearing is always the consequence of associa- 
 tion of ideas, the origins of which must remain obscure, because 
 the combination of certain presentations of colour with certain 
 sensations of sound may possibly depend upon the very evan- 
 escent perceptions of early childhood, which were not powerful 
 enough to arouse the attention, and have therefore remained 
 undiscerned in consciousness. That it is a question of purely 
 individual associations brought about by the accident of asso- 
 ciated ideas, and not of organic co-ordinations depending upon 
 definite abnormal nervous connections, is made very probable 
 by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a different colour to 
 the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that to Ghil the 
 flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in his 
 Farbenlehre) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter 
 ' a ' black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel 
 as blue, and so on. 
 
 The relation between the external world and the organism 
 is originally very simple. Movements are continually occurring 
 in nature, and the protoplasm of living cells perceives these 
 movements. Unity of effect corresponds to unity of cause. 
 The lowest animals perceive of the outer world only this, that 
 something in it changes, and possibly, also, whether this change 
 is marked or slight, sudden or slow. They receive sensations 
 differing quantitatively, but not qualitatively. We know, for 
 example, that the proboscis, or syphon, of the P kolas dactylus, 
 \vhich contracts more or less vigorously and quickly at every 
 excitation, is sensitive to all external impressions light, noise, 
 touch, smell, etc. This mollusc sees, hears, feels and smells, 
 therefore, with this simple organ ; his proboscis is to him at 
 once eye, ear, nose, finger, etc. In the higher animals the pro- 
 toplasm is differentiated. Nerves, ganglia, brain and sense- 
 apparatus are formed. The movements of nature are now per- 
 ceived in a variety of ways. The differentiated senses transform 
 the unity of the phenomenon into the diversity of the percept. 
 But even in the highest and most differentiated brain there still 
 remains something like a very distant and very dim remembrance 
 that the cause which excites the different senses is one and the 
 same movement, and there are formed presentations and con- 
 ceptions which would be unintelligible if we could not concede 
 this vague intuition of the fundamental unity of essence in all 
 perceptions. We speak of ' high ' and ' deep ' tones, and thus 
 give to sound-waves a relationship in space which they cannot 
 have. In the same way we speakof tone-colour, and, conversely, 
 of colour-tones, and thus confound the acoustic and optic pro- 
 perties of the phenomena. ' Hard ' and ' soft ' lines or tones, 
 ' sweet ' voices, are frequent modes of expression, which depend 
 on a transference of the perception of one sense to the impres-
 
 I 4 3 DEGENERATION 
 
 sions of another. In many cases this method of speech may no 
 doubt be traced to mental inertia. It is more convenient to 
 designate a sense-perception by a word which is familiar, though 
 borrowed from the province of another sense, than to create a 
 special word for the particular percept. But even this loan for 
 convenience' sake is possible and intelligible only if we admit 
 that the mind perceives certain resemblances between the im- 
 pressions of the different senses resemblances which, although 
 they are often to be explained by conscious or unconscious asso- 
 ciation of ideas, are oftener quite inexplicable objectively. It 
 only remains for us to assume that consciousness, in its deepest 
 substrata, neglects the differentiation of phenomena by the 
 various senses, passes over this perfection attained very late in 
 organic evolution, and treats impressions only as undifferentiated 
 material for the acquirement of knowledge of the external world 
 without reference to their origin by way of this or that sense. 
 It thus becomes intelligible that the mind mingles the percep- 
 tions attained through the different senses, and transforms them 
 one into another. Binet* has established, in his excellent essays, 
 this transposition of the senses in hysterical persons. A female 
 patient, whose skin was perfectly insensible on one half of her 
 body, took no notice when, unseen by herself, she was pricked 
 with a needle. But at the moment of puncture there arose in 
 her consciousness the image of a black (in the case of another 
 invalid, of a bright) point Consciousness thus transposed an 
 impression of the nerves of the skin, which, as such, was not 
 perceived, into an impression of the retina, of the optic nerve. 
 
 In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated 
 brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of 
 the differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly con- 
 founds the reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a 
 retrogression to the very beginning of organic development It 
 is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low 
 level of the mollusc To raise the combination, transposition 
 and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank 
 of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle is to 
 
 rs.gnate as progress the return from the consciousness of man 
 to that of the oyster. 
 
 Moreover, it is an old clinical observation that mental decay 
 
 5 ac I c m P amed b y colo ,ur mysticism. One of Legrain'sf mental 
 
 invalids 'endeavoured to recognise good and evil by the 
 
 Terence of colour, ascending from white to black when he 
 was reading .words had (according to their colour) a hidden 
 meaning, which he understood.' LombrosoJ cites 'eccentric 
 
 Mfrcd Binet, 'Recherche sur les alterations de la 
 hystcnques,' Rtvue philosopkique, 1889, 27* vol., p. 16? 
 \ Legrain, op. *., p. 162. 
 J Lorabroso G<me und Irrsinn. German edition, p. 
 
 conscience chez les
 
 MYSTICISM 143 
 
 persons' who, 'like Wigman, had the paper for their books 
 specially manufactured with several colours on each page. . . . 
 Filon painted each page of the hooks he wrote in a different 
 colour.' Barbey d'Aurevilly, whom the Symbolists venerate as 
 a pioneer, used to write epistles in which each letter of a word 
 was coloured with a different tint. Most alienists know similar 
 cases in their experience. 
 
 The more reliable Symbolists proclaim their movement as ' a 
 reaction against naturalism.' Such a reaction was certainly 
 justified and necessary ; for naturalism in its beginnings, as 
 long as it was embodied in De Goncourt and Zola, was morbid, 
 and, in its later development in the hands of their imitators, 
 vulgar and even criminal, as will be proved further on. Never- 
 theless Symbolism is not in the smallest degree qualified to 
 conquer naturalism, because it is still more morbid than the 
 latter, and, in art, the devil cannot be driven out by Beelzebub. 
 
 Finally, it is affirmed that Symbolism connotes ' the inscribing 
 of a symbol in human form.' Expressed unmystically, this 
 means that in the poems of the Symbolists the particular human 
 form should not only exhibit its special nature and contingent 
 destiny, but also represent a general type of humanity, and 
 embody a universal law of life. This quality, however, is not 
 the monopoly of Symbolistic poetry, but belongs to all kinds of 
 poetry. No genuine poet has yet been impelled to deal with 
 an utterly unprecedented and unique case, or with a monstrous 
 being whose likeness is not to be found in mankind. That 
 which interests him in men and their destiny is just the intimate 
 connection between the two and the universal laws of human 
 life. The more the government of universal laws is made 
 apparent in the fate of the individual, the more there is embodied 
 in him that which lives in all men, so much the more attractive 
 will this destiny and this man be to the poet. There is not in 
 all the literature of humanity a single work of recognised im- 
 portance which in this sense is not symbolic, and in which the 
 characters, their passions and fortunes, have not a typical 
 significance, far transcending the particular circumstances. It 
 is, therefore, a piece of foolish arrogance in the Symbolists to 
 lay claim to the sole possession of this quality in the works of 
 their school. They show, moreover, that they do not under- 
 stand their own formulae ; for those theorists of the school who 
 demand of poetry that it should be 'a symbol inscribed in 
 human form,' assert at the same time that only the ' rare and 
 unique case ' (le cas rare et unique) deserves the attention of the 
 poet, i.e., the case which is significant of nothing beyond itself, 
 and consequently the opposite of a symbol.* 
 
 * I may here be allowed to remind my readers that in the year 1885, and, 
 accordingly, before the promulgation of the professed symbolistic programme, 
 I laid down in my Paradoxe (popular edition, part ii., p. 253) the principle
 
 I44 DEGENERATION 
 
 We have now seen that Symbolism, like English pre- 
 Raphaclilism (from which it borrowed its catch-words and 
 opinions), is nothing else than a form of the mysticism of weak- 
 minded and morbidly emotional degeneration. The efforts of 
 some followers of the movement to import a meaning into the 
 stammering utterances of their leaders, and falsely to ascribe to 
 them a sort of programme, do not for a moment withstand 
 criticism, but show themselves to be graphomaniat and delirious 
 twaddle, without the smallest grain of truth or sound reason 
 A young Frenchman, who is certainly not adverse to rational 
 innovation, Hugues Le Roux,* describes the group of Symbolists 
 quite correctly in saying of them : ' They are ridiculous cripples, 
 each intolerable to the other ; they live uncomprehended by the 
 public, several by their friends as well, and a few by themselves. 
 As poets or prose writers they proceed in the same way : no 
 material, no sense, and only juxtapositions of loud-sounding 
 musical (?) words ; teams of strange rhymes, groupings of unex- 
 pected colours and tones, swaying cadences, hurtlings, hallucina- 
 tions and evoked suggestions.' 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 TOLSTOISM. 
 
 COUNT LEO TOLSTOI has become in the last few years one of 
 the best-known, and apparently, also, of the most widely-read 
 authors in the world. Every one of his words awakens an echo 
 among all civilized nations on the globe. His strong influence 
 over his contemporaries is unmistakable. But it is no artistic 
 influence. No one has yet imitated him at least, for the 
 present. He has formed no school after the manner of the 
 pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists. The already large number of 
 writings to which he has given occasion are explanatory or 
 critical. There are no poetical creations modelled upon his 
 /'own. The influence which he exercises over contemporary 
 thoughts and feelings is a moral one, and applies far more to 
 the great bulk of his readers than to the smaller, circle of 
 struggling authors who are on the look-out for a leader. What 
 
 nust 'to the majority of his readers utter the deep saying, 
 * /" a That art thou 1" of the Indian sage,' and ' must 
 
 that the poet must 
 44 Tat /warn aril*- 
 
 be able, with the ancient Romans, to repeat to the sound and normally 
 developed man, "Of thee is the fable related" In other words, the poem 
 must be "symbolical" in the sense that it brings into view characters, 
 tiesiinies, feelings and laws of life which are universal.' 
 * Hugues Le Roux, Portraits dt Cire. Paris, 1891, p. 129.
 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 I4S 
 
 we, then, can call Tolstoism is no aesthetic theory, but rather a 
 conception of life. 
 
 In order to bring forward the proof that Tolstoism is a 
 mental aberration, that it is a form of the phenomenon of 
 degeneration, it will be necessary to look critically first at 
 Tolstoi himself, and then at the public which is inspired by his 
 thoughts. 
 
 Tolstoi is at once a poet and a philosopher, the latter in the 
 widest sense i.e., he is a theologian, a moralist, and a social 
 theorist. As the author of works of imagination he stands very 
 high, even if he does not equal his countryman Tourgenieff, 
 whom he at present appears in the estimation of most people 
 to have thrown into the shade. Tolstoi does not possess the 
 splendid sense of artistic proportion of Tourgenieff, with whom 
 there is never a word too much, who neither protracts his 
 subject nor digresses from his point, and who, as a grand and 
 genuine creator of men, stands Prometheus-like over the figures 
 he has inspired with life. Even Tolstoi's greatest admirers 
 admit that he is long-winded, loses himself in details, and does 
 not always know how to sacrifice the unessential in order, with 
 sure judgment, to enhance the indispensable. Speaking of the 
 novel War and Peace, M. de Vogiie* says : ' Is this complicated 
 work properly to be termed a novel ? . . . The very simple 
 and very loose thread of the plot serves to connect chapters on 
 history, politics, philosophy, which are all crammed promis- 
 cuously into this polygraphy of Russian life. . . . Enjoyment 
 has here to be purchased in a manner resembling a mountain 
 ascent. The way is often wearisome and hard ; at times one goes 
 astray ; effort is necessary and toil. . . . Those who only seek 
 diversion in fiction are by Tolstoi driven from their wonted 
 ways. This close analyst does not know, or else disdains, the 
 first duty of analysis, which is so natural to the French genius ; 
 we desire that the novelist should select ; that he should set 
 apart a person, a fact, out of the chaos of beings and things, 
 in order to observe the objects of his choice. The Russian, 
 governed by the feeling of universal interdependence, cannot 
 make up his mind to cut the thousand cords which unite a man, 
 a fact, a thought, to the whole course of the world.' 
 
 Vogue* sees rightly that these facts are deserving of notice, 
 but he cannot explain them. Unconsciously he has clearly 
 characterized the method with which a mystical degenerate 
 looks upon the world, and depicts its phenomena. We know 
 that it is lack of attention which Constitutes the peculiarity of 
 mystical thought. It is attention which-selects from the chaos of 
 phenomena, and so groups what it selects as to illustrate the 
 predominating thought in the mind of the beholder. Ifatten- 
 
 * V t<! E. M. de Vogiid, Le Roman russe. Paris, 1888, p. 293 et sc.y. 
 
 IO
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 55 
 
 by a good painter and a photographic plate. The 
 SpprcLs certain features in the world's phenomena, and i brmgs 
 otfcrs into prominence, so that it at once permits a 
 external incident, or a definite internal emotion of the painter 
 to be recognised. The photograph reflects the whole scene with 
 all its details indiscriminately, so that it is without meaning, until 
 the beholder brings into play his attention, which the sensitive 
 plate could not do. At the same time it is to be observed that 
 even the photograph is not a true impression of reality, for 1 
 sensitive plate is only sensitive to certain colours ; it records the 
 blue and violet, and receives from yellow and red either a weak 
 impression or none at all. The sensitiveness of the chemical 
 plate corresponds to the emotionalism of the degenerate mind. 
 The latter also makes a choice among phenomena, not, however, 
 according to the laws of conscious attention, but according to 
 the impulse of unconscious emotionalism. He perceives what- 
 ever is in tune with his emotions ; what is not consonant with 
 them does not exist for him. Thus arises the method of work 
 which Vogue" has pointed out in Tolstoi's novels. The details 
 are perceived equally, and placed side by side, not according 
 to their importance for the leading idea, but according to 
 their relation with the emotions of the novelist. For that 
 matter, there is scarcely any leading idea, or none at all. The 
 reader must first carry it into the novel, as he would carry it 
 into Nature herself, into a landscape, into a crowd of people, 
 into the course of events. The novel is only written because 
 the novelist felt certain strong emotions, and certain features of 
 the world's panorama as it unrolled before his eyes inten- 
 sified these emotions. Thus, the novel of Tolstoi resembles the 
 picture of the prc-Raphaelites : an abundance of amazingly 
 accurate details,* a mystically blurred, scarcely recognisable, 
 
 See, in War and Peace (Leo. N. Tolstoi's collected works, published, 
 with the author's sanction, by Raphael Lftwenfeld, Berlin, 1892, vols. v. viii.), 
 the soldiers' talk, part ., p. 252 ; the scene at the outposts, p. 314 el seq. f 
 the description of the troops on the march, p. 332 ; the death of Count 
 liesuchoi, pp. 142-145 ; the coursing, part ii., pp. 383 407, etc.
 
 MYSTICISM 147 
 
 leading idea,* a deep arid strong emotion, f This is also dis- 
 tinctly felt by M. de Vogue, but again without his being able 
 to explain it. He says :J ' Through a peculiar and frequent 
 contradiction, this troubled, vacillating mind, steeped as it is in 
 the mists of Nihilism, is endowed with an incomparable clear- 
 ness and power of penetration for the scientific (?) study of the 
 phenomena of life. He sees distinctly, rapidly, analytically, 
 everything on earth. . . . One might say, the mind of an 
 English chemist in the soul of an Indian Buddhist. Let any- 
 one who can explain this singular union ; whoever succeeds will 
 be able to explain Russia. . . . These phenomena, which offer 
 so firm a basis to him when he observes them singly, he wishes 
 to know in their universal relations, and to arrive at the definite 
 laws governing these relations, and at their inaccessible causes. 
 Then it is that this clear vision darkens, the intrepid inquirer loses 
 his footing, he falls into the abyss of philosophical contradictions ; 
 in him and around him he feels only nothingness and night.' 
 
 M. de Vogiie wishes for an explanation of this 'singular 
 union ' between great clearness in apprehension of details, and 
 complete incapacity of understanding their relations to each 
 other. The explanation is now familiar to my readers. The 
 mystical intellect, the intellect without attention, of the emotif 
 conveys to his consciousness isolated impressions, which can be 
 very distinct if they relate to his emotions ; but it is not in the 
 condition to connect these isolated impressions intelligibly, just 
 because it is deficient in the attention necessary to this object. 
 
 Grand as are the qualities which Tolstoi's works of fiction 
 possess, it is not them he has to thank for his world-wide fame, 
 or his influence on his contemporaries. His novels were recog- 
 nised as remarkable works, but for decades of years neither 
 Peace and War, nor Anna Karenina, nor his short stories, had 
 very many readers outside Russia ; and the critics bestowed 
 upon their author only a guarded commendation. In Germany, 
 as recently as 1882, Franz Bornmiiller said of Tolstoi in his 
 BiograpJiical Dictionary of Authors of the Present Time : ' He 
 possesses no ordinary talent for fiction, but one devoid of due 
 artistic finish, and which is influenced by a certain one-sided- 
 ness in his views of life and history.' This was the opinion 
 until a few years ago of the not very numerous non-Russian 
 readers who knew him at all. 
 
 * See, in War and Peace, the thoughts of the wounded Prince Andrej, 
 part i.,p. 516; Count Peter's conversation with the freemason and Martinief 
 Basdjejeff, part ii., pp. 106-114, etc - 
 
 f War and Peace, the episode of Princess Maria and her suitor, part i. t 
 pp. 420-423 ; the confinement of the little Princess, part ii., pp. 58-65 ; and 
 all the passages where Count Rostoff sees the Emperor Alexander, or where 
 the author speaks of the Emperor Napoleon I., etc. 
 
 | Vogiie, 'op. '/., p. 282.
 
 M 8 DEGENERATION 
 
 In 1889 \^^utzer_Sonjtia appeared, and was the first of 
 his works to carryTils name to the borders of civilization. This 
 little tale was the first to be translated into all cultivated 
 languages. It was disseminated in hundreds of thousands of 
 copies, and was read by millions with lively emotion. From 
 this time onward the public opinion of the Western nations 
 placed him in the first rank of living authors : his name was 
 in everyone's mouth, and universal sympathy turned not only 
 towards his early writings (which had remained unnoticed for 
 decades), but also to his person and his career, and he became, 
 as it were, in a night what he unquestionably is now in the 
 evening of his life one of the chief representative figures of the 
 departing century. Yet the Kreutzer Sonata stands, as a poetic 
 creation, not so high as most of his older works. A fame which 
 was not gained by War and Peace, The Cossacks, Anna Kare- 
 nina, etc., nor, indeed, until long after the appearance of these 
 rich creations, but came at one stroke through the Kreutzer 
 Sonata, cannot therefore depend either solely or principally on 
 aesthetic excellence. The history of this fame shows conse- 
 quently that Tolstoi the novelist is not the cause of Tolstoism. 
 
 In fact, the tendency of mind so named is far more perhaps 
 wholly and entirely traceable to Tolstoi the philosopher. The 
 philosopher is, therefore, incomparably more important to our 
 inquiry than the novelist. 
 
 Tolstoi has formed certain views on the position of man in the 
 world, on his relation to collective humanity, and on the aim of 
 his life, which are visible in all his creations, but which he has 
 also set forth connectedly in several theoretic works, especially 
 in My Confession, My Faith, A Short Exposition of the Gospel, 
 and About my Life. These views are but little complicated, and 
 can be condensed in a few words: the individual is nothing ; the 
 species is everything ; the individual lives in order to do his fellow- 
 creatures good ; thought and inquiry are great evils ; science is 
 perdition ; faith is salvation. 
 
 How he arrived at these results is related in My Confessions - 
 
 I lost my faith early. I lived for a long time like everyone 
 
 else, in the frivolities of life. I wrote books, and taught like 
 
 everyone else, what I did not know. Then the Sphinx began to 
 
 follow me more and more ruthlessly: "Guess my problem or I 
 
 tear thee to pieces." Science has explained absolutely 
 
 to me. In answer to my everlasting question, the only 
 
 one which means anything, "Wherefore am I alive?" Science 
 
 replied by teaching me things that were indifferent to me 
 
 Science only said . . . : " Life is a senseless evil." I wanted to 
 
 cf m^ r lf 'rf F r Uy r, had a f ? nCy l SCC how the vast ma ori y 
 f men lived who, unlike us of the so-called upper classes who 
 
 ourselves up to pondering and investigation, work and
 
 MYSTICISM 149 
 
 suffer, and are, nevertheless, quiet and clear in their minds over 
 the aim of life. I understood that to live like these men one 
 must return to their simple beliefs.' 
 
 If this train of thought is seriously considered, it will be recog- 
 nised at once as nonsensical. The question, * Wherefore am I 
 alive ?' is incorrectly and superficially put. It tacitly presupposes 
 the idea of finality in nature, and it is just upon this presuppo- 
 sition that the mind, thirsting earnestly for truth and knowledge, 
 has to exercise its criticism. 
 
 In order to ask, ' What is the aim of our life ?' we must take 
 for granted, above all, that our life has a definite aim, and since 
 it is only a particular phenomenon in the universal life of nature, 
 in the evolution of our earth, of our solar system, of all solar 
 systems, this assumption includes in itself the wider one, that 
 the universal life of Nature has a definite aim. This assumption, 
 again, necessarily presupposes the rule of a conscious, prescient, 
 and guiding mind over the universe. For what is an aim ? 
 The fore-ordained effect in the future of forces active in the 
 present. The aim exercises an influence on these forces in 
 pointing out to them a direction, and is thus itself a force. It 
 cannot, however, exist objectively, in time and space, because 
 then it would cease to be an aim and become a cause, t.e., a force 
 fitting in with the general mechanism of the forces of nature, 
 and all the speculation concerning the aim would fall to the 
 ground. But if it is not objective, if it does not exist in 
 time and space, it must, in order to be conceivablej exist some- 
 where, virtually, as idea, as a plan and design. But that which 
 contains a design, a thought, a plan, we name conscious- 
 ness ; and a consciousness that can conceive a plan of the 
 universe, and for its realization designedly uses the forces of 
 nature, is synonymous with God. If a man, however, believes 
 in a God, he loses at once the right to raise the question, 'Where- 
 fore am I alive ?' Since it is in that case an insolent presump- 
 tion, an effort of small, weak man to look over God's shoulder, 
 to spy out God's plan, to aspire to the height of omniscience. 
 But neither is it in such a case necessary, since a God without 
 the highest wisdom cannot be conceived, and if He has devised 
 a plan for the world, this is certain to be perfect, all its parts are 
 in harmony, and the aim to which every co-operator, from the 
 smallest to the greatest, will devote himself is the best con- 
 ceivable. Thus, man can live in complete rest and confidence in 
 the impulses and forces implanted in him by God, because he, in 
 every case, fulfils a high and worthy destiny by co-operating in 
 a, to him, unknown Divine plan of the world. 
 
 If, on the other hand, there is no belief in a God, it is also 
 impossible to form a conception of the aim, for then the aim, 
 existing in consciousness only as an idea, in the absence of a
 
 T$o DEGENERATION 
 
 universal consciousness, has no locus for its existence ; there is 
 no place for it in Nature. But if thr 5 /e is no aim, then one 
 cannot ask the question, ' Wherefore am I alive ?' Then life 
 has not a predetermined aim, but only causes. We have then 
 to concern ourselves only with these causes at least, with the 
 more proximate, and which are accessible to our examination, 
 since the remote, and especially the first, causes elude our 
 cognition. Our question must then run, ' Why do we live ? 
 and we find the answer to it without difficulty. We live, 
 because we stand, like the rest of cognizable Nature, under the 
 universal law of causality. This is a mechanical law, whicu 
 requires no predetermined plan, and no design, consequently 
 also no universal consciousness. According to this law present 
 phenomena are grounded on the past, not on the future. We 
 live because we are engendered by our parents, because we 
 have received from them a definite measure of force, which 
 makes it possible for us to resist for a given time the influence 
 upon us of Nature's forces of dissolution. How our life is 
 shaped is determined by the constant interaction of our inherited 
 organic forces and of our environment. Our life is, therefore, 
 objectively viewed, the necessary result of the law -governed 
 activity of the mechanical forces of Nature. Subjectively it 
 includes a quantity of pleasures and pains. We feel as pleasure 
 the satisfaction of our organic impulses, as pain their fruitless 
 struggles for satisfaction. In a sound organism, possessing a 
 high capacity for adaptation, those appetites only attain develop- 
 ment, the satisfaction of which is possible at least, to a certain 
 degree and is accompanied by no bad consequences for the 
 individual. In such a life pleasure consequently prevails 
 decidedly over pain, and he looks upon existence, not as an 
 evil, but as a great good. In the organism deranged by disease 
 degenerate appetites exist which cannot be satisfied, or of which 
 the gratification injures or destroys the individual, or the 
 degenerate organism is too weak or too inapt to gratify the 
 legitimate impulses. In his life pain necessarily predominates, 
 and he looks upon existence as an evil. My interpretation 
 of the riddle of life is nearly related to the well-known theory 
 of eudaemonism, but it is founded on a biological, not a 
 metaphysical, basis. It explains optimism and pessimism 
 simply as an adequate or inadequate vitality, as the existence 
 or absence of adaptability, as health or illness. Unprejudiced 
 observation of life shows that the whole of mankind stands 
 knowingly or unknowingly at the same philosophical stand- 
 point. Men live willingly, and rather quietly happy than sadly, 
 so long as existence affords them gratification. If the suffer- 
 ings are stronger than the feeling of pleasure conferred by 
 the satisfaction of the first and most important of all organic
 
 MYSTICISM I 5I 
 
 impulses the impulse of life or self-preservation then they do 
 not hesitate to kill themselves. When Prince Bismarck once 
 said, ' I do not know why I should bear all the troubles of life, 
 if I were not able to believe in a God and a future life/ it only 
 shows that he is insufficiently acquainted with the progress of 
 human thought since Hamlet, who raised somewhat the same 
 question. He bears the troubles of life because, and as long as, 
 he can bear them, and he throws them down infallibly at the 
 moment in which his strength is no longer adequate to carry 
 them. The unbeliever lives and is happy, so long as the sweets 
 of life weigh down the scale, and for this reason also the believer, 
 as experience daily teaches, will commit suicide if he sees his 
 balance of life's account yielding a deficit of satisfaction. The 
 arguments of religion have undoubtedly in the mind of the 
 believer, as have the arguments of duty and honour in the mind 
 of the unbeliever, a convincing force, and must likewise be taken 
 into account as so many assets. Nevertheless they have only a 
 limited, if high value, and can counterbalance their own equivalent 
 of suffering only, and no more. 
 
 From these considerations it follows that the terrible question 
 ' Wherefore am I alive ?' which nearly drove Tolstoi to suicide, 
 is to be answered satisfactorily and without difficulty. The 
 believer, who accepts the fact that his life must have an aim, 
 will live according to his inclinations and powers, and tell himself 
 that he performs correctly, in this way, his allotted portion of 
 the world's work without knowing its final aim ; as also a 
 soldier, at that point of the field of battle where he is placed, 
 does his duty willingly, without having any notion of the general 
 progress of the fight, and of its significance for the whole 
 campaign. The unbeliever, who is convinced that his life is a 
 particular instance of the universal life of Nature, that his 
 individuality has blossomed into existence as a necessary law- 
 governed operation of eternal organic forces, knows also very 
 well not only ' wherefore,' but also ' what for,' he is alive ; he 
 lives because, and as long as, life is to him a source of gratifica- 
 tion that is to say, of joy and happiness. 
 
 Has Tolstoi found any other answer by his desperate seeking ? 
 No. The explanation which his pondering and searching did 
 not offer him was, as we have seen in the above-quoted passage 
 in My Confessions, given him by 'the enormous majority of 
 mankind, who . . . labour and suffer, and, nevertheless, are 
 quiet and clear in their minds as to the aim of life.' ' I under- 
 stood,' he adds, ' that one must return to their simple faith to 
 live as these men do.' The conclusion is arbitrary, and is a 
 saltum of mystic thought. 'The masses live quietly, and are 
 clear in their minds as to the aim of life,' not because they have 
 a ' simple faith/ but because they are healthy, because they like
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 to feel themselves alive, because life gives them, in every organic 
 function, in every manifestation of their powers, at every 
 moment, some gratification. The ' simple faith ' is the accidental 
 accompanying phenomenon of this natural optimism. No doubt 
 the majority of the uneducated classes, who represent the 
 healthy portion of mankind, and therefore certainly rejoice in 
 life, receive, during childhood, instruction in religious faith, and 
 afterwards only rarely rectify through their own thought the 
 errors which, for state reasons, have been imparted to them ; 
 but their unthinking belief is a consequence of their poverty and 
 ignorance, like their bad clothing, insufficient food, and insanitary 
 dwellings. To say that the majority ' live quietly, and are 
 clear in their minds as to the aim of life,' because they ' have 
 simple faith,' is quite as logical a sequitur as the assertion that 
 this majority ' live quietly, and are clear in their minds as to the 
 aim of life' because they chiefly eat potatoes, or because they 
 live in cellars, or because they seldom take baths. 
 
 Tolstoi has rightly noticed the fact that the majority do not 
 share his pessimism, and rejoice in their life, but he has explained 
 it mystically. Instead of recognising that the optimism of the 
 masses is simply a sign of their vitality, he traces it to their 
 belief, and then seeks in faith the clue to the aim of his exist- 
 ence. ' I was led to Christianity,' he writes in another book,* 
 ' neither through theological nor historical research, but by the 
 circumstance that when, at fifty years of age, I asked myself 
 and the wise among my acquaintance what myself and my life 
 might signify, and received the answer: " You are an accidental 
 concatenation of parts ; there is no significance in life ; life as 
 such is an evil " I was then brought to despair, and wished to 
 kill myself. Remembering, however, that formerly, in childhood, 
 when I believed, life had a meaning for me, and that the people 
 about me who believe the greater number being men un- 
 spoilt by riches both believe and lead real lives, I doubted the 
 accuracy of the answer which had been given me by the wisdom 
 of my circle, and endeavoured to understand that answer which 
 Christianity gives to men who lead a real life.'t 
 
 He found this answer 'in the Gospels, that source of light.' 
 4 It was quite the same thing to me,' he goes on to say, ' whether 
 Jesus was God or not God ; whether the Holy Ghost proceeded 
 from the one or the other. It was likewise neither necessary 
 nor important for me to know when and by whom the Gospel, 
 or any one of the parables, was composed, and whether they 
 could be ascribed to Christ or not. What to me was important 
 
 * Count Leo Tolstoi, A Short Exposition of the Gospel. From the 
 Russian, by Paul Lauterbach. Leipzig : Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek, 
 
 P- 13- 
 
 t L, Tolstoi, Slwri Exposition of the Gospel, p. 13.
 
 MYSTICISM 153 
 
 was that Light, which for eighteen hundred years was the Light 
 of the World, and is that Light still, but what name was to 
 be given to the source of this Light, or what were its com- 
 ponent parts, and by whom it was lighted, was quite indifferent 
 to me.' 
 
 Let us appraise this process of thought in a mystical mind. 
 The Gospel is the source of truth ; it is, however, quite the same 
 thing whether the Gospel is God's revelation or man's work, and 
 whether it contains the genuine tradition of the life of Christ, 
 or whether it was written down hundreds of years after his 
 death on the basis of obscured and distorted traditions. Tolstoi 
 himself feels that he here makes a great error of thought, but he 
 deceives himself over and out of itjrj genuine mystical fashion, 
 in that he makes use of a simile, and pretends that his image 
 was the matter-of-fact truth. He speaks, namely, of the Gospel 
 as a light, and says it is indifferent to him what that light is 
 called, and of what it consists. This is correct if it concerns a 
 real, material light, but the Gospel is only figuratively a light, 
 and can obviously, therefore, be compared to a light only if it 
 contains the truth. Whether it does contain the truth should 
 first be decided by inquiry. Should inquiry result in establish- 
 ing that it is man's work, and consists only in unauthenticated 
 traditions, then it would evidently be no receptacle of truth, 
 and one could not any longer compare it with light, and the 
 magnificent image with which Tolstoi cuts short inquiry into 
 the source of the light would vanish into air. While, therefore, 
 Tolstoi calls the Gospel a light, and denies the necessity of 
 following up its origin, he forthwith takes as proven the very 
 thing which is to be proved, namely, that the Gospel is a light. 
 We know already, however, the peculiarity of mystics to found 
 all their conclusions on the most senseless premises, alleging 
 contempt of reality and resisting all reasonable verification or 
 their starting-point. I only remind the reader of Rossetti's 
 sentence, ' What does it matter to me whether the sun revolves 
 round the earth, or the earth round the sun ?' and of Mallarme's 
 expression, ' The world is made in order to lead to a beautiful 
 book.' 
 
 One can read for one's self in his Short Exposition how 
 Tolstoi handles the Gospel, so that it may give him the required 
 explanation. He does not trouble himself in the least about 
 the literal sense of the Scriptures, but puts into them what is in 
 his own head. The Gospel which he has so recast has about as 
 much resemblance to the canonical Scriptures as the Physiogno- 
 mische Fragments, which Jean Paul's ; merry little schoolmaster, 
 Maria Wuz in Auenthal,' ' drew out of his own head,' had with 
 Lavater's work of the same title. This Gospel of his taught 
 him concerning the importance of life as follows :* ' Men imagine 
 * Tolstoi, Short Exposition, etc., p. 172
 
 I 5 4 DEGENERATION 
 
 that they are isolated beings, each one shaping his own life as 
 he wills. This, however, is a delusion. The only true life is 
 that which acknowledges the will of the Father as the source of 
 life. This unity of life my teaching reveals, and represents that 
 life, not as separate shoots, but as a single tree on which all the 
 shoots grow. He only who lives in the will of the Father, like 
 a shoot on the tree, has life; but he who would live according 
 to his own will, like a severed shoot, dies.' He has already said 
 that the Father is synonymous with God, and that God, who 
 * is the eternal origin of all things/ is synonymous with 'Spirit.' 
 If, then, this passage has any sense at all, it can only be that 
 the whole of Nature is a single living being, that every single 
 living being, therefore also every human being, is a portion of 
 universal life, and that this universal life is God. This teaching 
 is, however, not invented by Tolstoi. It has a name in the 
 history of philosophy, and is called Pantheism. It is shadowed 
 forth in Buddhism* and Greek Hylozoism, and was elaborated 
 by Spinoza. It is certainly not contained in the Gospel, and it 
 is a definite denial of Christianity which, let its dogmas be ever 
 so rationalistically interpreted and tortured, can never give up 
 its doctrine of a personal God and the Divine nature of Christ 
 without ridding itself of its whole religious import and its vitally 
 important organs, and ceasing to be a creed. 
 
 Thus we see that, though Tolstoi supposes he has succeeded 
 in his attempt to explain life's problems by the Christian faith 
 of the masses, he has, on the contrary, fallen into its very 
 opposite, namely, Pantheism. The reply of the ' wise,' that he 
 ' is an accidental concatenation of parts, and that there is no 
 significance in life,' 'drove him almost to suicide'; he is, on the 
 contrary, quite tranquil in the knowledge thatf ' the true life is 
 . . . not the life which is past, nor that which will be, but is the 
 life which now is, that which confronts everyone at the present 
 minute ' ; he expressly denies in My Religion the resurrection of 
 the body and the individuality of the soul, and does not notice 
 that the teaching which contents him is quite the same as that 
 of the * wise,' who ' almost drove him into suicide.' For if life 
 exists only in the present, it can have no aim, since this would 
 refer to the future ; and if the body does not rise again, and 
 the soul has no individual existence, then the ' wise ' are quite 
 right to call the human being (certainly not accidental, but 
 necessary, because causally conditioned) ' a concatenation of 
 parts.' 
 
 Tolstoi's theory of life, the fruit of the despairing mental 
 labour of his whole life, is therefore, nothing but a haze, a failure 
 to comprehend his own questions and answers, and hollow 
 
 * More accurately, in Vedantism. TRANSLATOR. 
 f Tolstoi, Short Exposition, etc., p. 128.
 
 MYSTICISM 155 
 
 verbiage. His ethics on which he himself lays a far greater 
 stress than on his philosophy is not in much better case than 
 the latter. He comprises them* in five laws, of which the 
 fourth is the most important : 'Do not resist evil ; suffer wrong, 
 and do more than men ask ; and so judge not, nor suffer to be 
 judged. . . .' To avenge one's self only teaches to avenge 
 one's self. His admirer, M. de Vogue", expresses Tolstoi's moral 
 philosophy in this form :f ' Resist not evil, judge not, kill not. 
 Consequently no courts of justice, no armies, no prisons, no 
 public or private reprisals. No wars nor judgments. The 
 world's law is the struggle for existence ; the law of Christ is the 
 sacrifice of one's own existence for others/ 
 
 Is it still necessary to point out the unreasonableness of these 
 ethics ? It is obvious to sound common-sense without saying 
 any more. If the murderer had no longer to fear the gallows, 
 and the thief the prison, throat-cutting and stealing would be 
 soon by far the most generally adopted trade. It is so much 
 more convenient to filch baked bread and ready-made boots 
 than to rack one's self at the plough and in the workshop. 
 If society should cease to take care that crime should be a 
 dangerous risk, what would there be, forsooth, to deter wicked 
 men, who certainly exist, according to Tolstoi's assumption, 
 from surrendering themselves to their basest impulses ; and 
 how could the great mass of indifferent people be restrained, 
 who have no pronounced leaning either for good or for evil, from 
 imitating the example of the criminal ? Certainly not Tolstoi's 
 own teaching that 'the true life is life in the present.' The first 
 active measures of society, for the sake of which individuals 
 originally formed themselves into a society, is the protection 
 of their members against those who are diseased with homicidal 
 mania, and against the parasites another unhealthy variation 
 from the normal human type who can only live by the work 
 of others, and who, to appease all their lusts, unscrupulously 
 overpower every human being who crosses their path. In- 
 dividuals with anti - social impulses would soon be in the 
 majority if the healthy members did not subdue them, and 
 make it difficult for them to thrive. Were they once to become 
 the stronger, society, and soon mankind itself, would of a 
 necessity be devoted to destruction. 
 
 In addition to the negative precept that one should not resist 
 evil, Tolstoi's moral philosophy has yet a positive precept, viz. : we 
 ought to love all men ; to sacrifice everything, even one's own 
 life, for them ; to do good to them where we can. ' It is 
 necessary to understand that man, if he does good, only does 
 that to which he is bound what he cannot leave undone. . . . 
 If he gives up his carnal life for the good, he does nothing for 
 * Short Exposition, p. 60. f De Vogiid, op. cit., p. 333.
 
 156 DEGENERATION 
 
 which he need be thanked and praised. . . . Only those live 
 who do good ' (Short Exposition of the Gospel}. ' Not is alms- 
 giving effectual, but brotherly sharing. Whoever has two cloaks 
 should give one to him who has none ' ( What ought one to Do ?). 
 This distinction between charity and sharing cannot be main- 
 tained in earnest. Every gift that a man receives from some 
 other man without work, without reciprocal service, is an alms, 
 and as such is deeply immoral. The sick, the old, the weak, 
 those who cannot work, must be supported and tended by their 
 fellow-creatures ; it is their duty, and it is also their natural 
 impulse. But to give to men capable of working is under all 
 circumstances a sin and a self-deception. If men capable of 
 work find no work, this is obviously attributable to some defect 
 in the economical structure of society; and it is the duty of 
 each individual to assist earnestly in removing this defect, but 
 not to facilitate its continuance by pacifying for awhile the 
 victim of the defective circumstances by a gift. Charity has in 
 this case merely the aim of deadening the conscience of the 
 donor, and furnishing him with an excuse why he should shirk 
 his duty of curing recognised evils in the constitution of society. 
 Should, however, the capable man be averse to labour, then 
 charity spoils him completely, and kills in him entirely any 
 inclination to put his powers into action, which alone keeps 
 the organism healthy and moral. Thus alms, extended to an 
 able-bodied man, degrades both the donor and the recipient, 
 and operates like poison on the feeling of duty and the morality 
 of both. 
 
 But the love of our neighbour which exhibits itself in alms- 
 giving, or even brotherly sharing, is, properly speaking, no such 
 love if we look at it closely. Love in its simplest and most 
 original form (I speak here not of sexual love, but of general 
 sympathy for some other living being, and that need not even be 
 a human being) is a selfish impulse, which seeks only its own 
 gratification, not that of the beloved being ; in its higher 
 development, on the contrary, it is principally, or wholly, bent 
 upon the happiness of the beloved being, and forgets itself. 
 The healthy man, who has no anti-social impulses, enjoys the 
 company of other men ; he therefore avoids almost uncon- 
 sciously those actions which would cause his fellow-creatures to 
 avoid him, and he does that which, without costing himself too 
 much effort, is sufficiently pleasant to his fellows to attract 
 them to him. In the same healthy man the idea of sufferings, 
 even when they are not his own, produces pain, which is always 
 greater or less according to the degree of excitability of his 
 brain ; the more active the idea of suffering, the more violent 
 is the accompanying feeling of pain. Because the ideas excited 
 by direct sense-impressions are the most vivid, the sufferings
 
 MYSTICISM 157 
 
 which he sees with his own eyes cause him the sharpest pain, 
 and in order to escape from this, he makes suitable efforts 
 to put an end to this extraneous suffering, or often, it is 
 true, only not to witness it. This degree of love to our neigh- 
 bour is, as was said above, pure self-love ; it merely aims at 
 averting pain from self, and at increasing one's own feelings of 
 pleasure. The love of our neighbour, on the contrary, which 
 Tolstoi obviously wishes to preach, claims to be unselfish. It 
 contemplates the diminution of the sufferings, and the increase 
 of the happiness, of others ; it can no longer be exercised in- 
 stinctively, for it demands an exact knowledge of the conditions 
 of life, and the feelings and wishes of others, and the acquisition 
 of this knowledge presupposes observation, reflection, and 
 judgment. One must earnestly consider what is really needful 
 and good for one's neighbour. One must come out of one's 
 self, must set aside one's own habits and ideas completely, and 
 strive to slip into the skin of him to whom one would show love. 
 One must regard the intended benefit with the other's eyes, and 
 feel with his nature, and not with one's own. Does Tolstoi do 
 this? His novels, in which he shows his alleged love between 
 fellow-men living and working, prove the exact contrary. 
 
 In the tale Albert* Delessow takes up a sickly, strolling 
 violin-player out of admiration for his great talent, and out of 
 pity for his poverty and helplessness. But the unhappy artist 
 is a drunkard. Delesbow locks him up in his dwelling, places 
 him under the care of his servant Sachar, and keeps him from 
 intoxicating drinks. On the first day Albert the artist submits, 
 but is very depressed and out of temper. On the second day 
 he is already casting ' malignant glances ' at his benefactor. 
 ' He seemed to fear Delessow, and whenever their eyes met a 
 deadly terror was depicted on his face. . . . He did not answer 
 the questions which were put to him.' Finally, on the third 
 day Albert rebels against the restraint to which he believes 
 himself subjected. 'You have no right to shut me up here,' he 
 cries. ' My passport is in order. I have stolen nothing from 
 you ; you can search me. I will go to the superintendent of 
 police.' The servant Sachar tries to appease him. Albert 
 becomes more and more enraged, and suddenly 'shrieks out 
 at the top of his voice : " Police !" ' Delessow allows him to 
 depart. Albert ' goes out of the door without taking leave, and 
 constantly muttering to himself incomprehensible words.' 
 
 Delessow had taken Albert home, because the sight was pain- 
 ful to him of the poorly-clad, sickly, pale artist, trembling in the 
 cold of a Russian winter. When he saw him in his warm house, 
 before a well-spread table, in his own handsome dressing-gown, 
 
 * L. Tolstoi, Gesammelte Werke, Berlin, 1891, Band II. : Novels and 
 Shot t Tales, part i.
 
 158 DEGENERATION 
 
 Delessow felt contented and happy. But was Albert also con- 
 tented ? Tolstoi testifies that Albert feels himself much more 
 unhappy in the new position than in the old so unhappy that 
 very soon he could not bear it, and freed himself from it with an 
 outburst of fury. To whom, then, had Delessow done good, to 
 himself or to Albert? 
 
 In this narrative a mentally diseased man is depicted, and, it 
 must be admitted, upon such a one a benefit has frequently 
 to be forcibly pressed, which he does not understand or appre- 
 ciate as such, though, of course, in a manner more consistent, 
 persistent, and prudent than Delessow's. In another story in the 
 same volume, however, From the Diary of the Prince Nechljudoiv, 
 Lucerne, the absurdity of love for one's fellow-creature which does 
 not trouble itself about the real needs of the fellow-creature is 
 brought out more vividly and without any excuse. 
 
 One glorious evening in July, in front of the Schweizer-Hof, 
 in Lucerne, Prince Nechljudow heard a street-singer whose 
 songs touched and enraptured him deeply. The singer is a 
 poor, small, hump-backed man, insufficiently clad and looking 
 half starved. On all the balconies of the sumptuous hotel rich 
 Englishmen and their wives are standing ; all have enjoyed the 
 glorious singing of the poor cripple, but when he takes off his 
 hat and begs a small reward for his artistic performance, not 
 one person throws even the smallest coin to him. Nechljudow 
 falls into the most violent excitement. He is beside himself 
 over the fact that ' t!?e singer could beg three times for a gift, 
 and no one gave him the smallest thing, while the greater num- 
 ber laughed at him.' It seems to him 'an event which the 
 historian of our times should inscribe in the pages of history 
 with indelible letters of fire.' He, for his part, will not be a 
 participator in this unprecedented sin. He hastens after the 
 poor devil, overtakes him and invites him to drink a bottle of 
 wine with him. The singer accepts. ' Close by is a small 
 cafe,' says he ; ' we can go in there it is a cheap one," ' 
 he continued. ' The words, " a cheap one," involuntarily 
 suggested the idea,' relates Nechljudow in his diary, ' not 
 to go to a cheap cafe, but into the Schweizer-Hof, where 
 were the people who had listened to his singing. Although 
 he refused the Schweizer-Hof several times in timid agita- 
 tion, because he thought it was much too grand 'there, I per- 
 sisted in it.' 
 
 He leads the singer into the splendid hotel. Although he 
 appears in the company of the princely guest, the servants look 
 at the badly dressed vagabond with hostile and comtemptuous 
 glances. They show the pair into the ' saloon on the left, the 
 drinking-bar for the people.' The singer is very much embar- 
 rassed, and wishes himself far away, but he conceals his feelings.
 
 MYSTICISM 159 
 
 The Prince orders champagne. The singer drinks without any 
 real pleasure and without confidence. He talks about his life, and 
 says suddenly : ' I know what you wish. You want to make me 
 drunk, and then see what can be got out of me.' Nechljudow, 
 annoyed by the scornful and insolent demeanour of the servants 
 jumps up and goes with his guest into the handsome dining- 
 room on the right hand, which is set apart for the visitors. He 
 will be served here and nowhere else. The English, who are 
 present, indignantly leave the room ; the waiters are dismayed, 
 but do not venture to oppose the angry Russian Prince. ' The 
 singer drew a very miserable, terrified face, and begged me, as 
 soon as possible, to go away, evidently not understanding why 
 I was angry and what I wished.' The little mannikin ' sat more 
 dead than alive ' near the Prince, and was very happy when 
 Nechljudow finally dismissed him. 
 
 It must be noticed how extremely absurdly Prince Nechljudow 
 behaves from beginning to end. He invites the singer to a 
 bottle of wine, although, if he had possessed the faintest glimmer 
 of sound common-sense, he might have said to himself that a 
 hot supper, or, still better, a five-franc piece, would be far more 
 necessary and useful to the poor devil than a bottle of wine. 
 The singer proposes to go to a modest restaurant, where he 
 himself would feel comfortable. The Prince pays not the 
 smallest attention to this natural, reasonable desire, but drags 
 the poor devil into a leading hotel, where he feels extremely 
 uncomfortable in his bad clothing, under the cross-fire of the 
 waiters' insolent and scornful looks. The Prince does not care 
 about this, but orders champagne, to which the singer is not 
 accustomed, and which gives him so little pleasure that the 
 thought occurs to him that his noble host desires to make sport 
 of him by seeing him drunk. Nechljudow begins to squabble 
 with the waiters, proceeds to the finest saloon of the hotel, 
 scares away the remaining guests, who do not desire to sit at 
 supper with the street-singer, and does not concern himself 
 during the whole of this time about the feelings of his guest, 
 who sits on hot coals, and would far rather sink into the floor, 
 and who only breathes again when his terrible benefactor lets 
 him escape out of his fangs. 
 
 Did Nechljudow exercise neighbourly love ? No. He did 
 nothing pleasant to the singer. He tormented him. He only 
 satisfied himself. He wished to revenge himself on the hard- 
 hearted English people, with whom he was furious, and he did 
 so at the expense of the poor devil. Nechljudow calls it an 
 unheard-of occurrence that the wealthy Englishmen should give 
 nothing to the singer, but what he did to the latter is worse. The 
 odious niggardliness of the English people annoyed the singer for 
 a quarter of an hour, perhaps ; Nechljudow's foolish entertainment
 
 160 DEGENERATION 
 
 tortured him for an hour. The Prince never took the trouble to 
 consider, even for a moment, what would be agreeable and 
 useful to the singer ; he thought always of himself only, of his 
 own feelings, his anger, his indignation. This tender-hearted 
 philanthropist is a dangerous, depraved egoist. 
 
 The irrational neighbourly love of the emotional mystic fails 
 necessarily in its ostensible aim, because it does not arise from 
 a knowledge of the true needs of the neighbour. The mystic 
 practises a sentimental anthropomorphism. He transfers his 
 own feelings, without more ado, to other beings, who feel quite 
 differently from himself. He is in a condition bitterly to com- 
 miserate the moles because they are condemned to brood in 
 perpetual darkness in their underground passages, and dreams, 
 perhaps with tears in his eyes, of introducing electric light into 
 their burrows. Because he, as seeing, would suffer severely 
 under the conditions of a mole's life, therefore this animal is 
 naturally to be pitied also, although it is blind and so does not 
 miss the light. An anecdote relates that a child poured some 
 hot water into the drawing-room aquarium one winter's day 
 because it must have been so intolerably cold for the gold-fish ; 
 and in comic papers there is frequently a hit at the benevolent 
 societies which bestow warm winter clothing on the negroes at 
 the equator. This is Tolstoi's love of one's neighbour put into 
 practice. 
 
 One especial point of his moral doctrine is the mortification of 
 the flesh. All sexual intercourse is for him unchaste ; marriage is 
 quite as impure as the loosest tie. The Kreutzer Sonata is the 
 most complete, and at the same time most celebrated, embodi- 
 ment of these propositions. Pozdnyscheff, the murderer from 
 motives of jealousy, says :* ' There is nothing pleasant in the 
 honeymoon ; on the contrary, it is a period of continual embar- 
 rassment, a shame, a profound depression, and, above all, boredom 
 fearful boredom ! I can only compare the situation to that of 
 a youth who is beginning to smoke : he feels sick, swallows his 
 saliva, and pretends to like it very much. If the cigar is to give 
 him any pleasure, it can only be later on, as it is with marriage. 
 In order to enjoy it, the married couple must first accustom 
 themselves to the vice.' 
 
 ' How do you mean to the vice ? You are speaking of one 
 of the most natural things of an instinct.' 
 
 * Natural thing ? An instinct ? Not in the least. Allow me 
 to tell you that I have been brought to, and maintain, the oppo- 
 site conviction. I, the depraved and dissolute, assert that it is 
 something unnatural. ... It is an entirely unnatural treatment 
 for any pure girl, just as it would be for a child.' 
 
 * Lon Tolstoi, La Sonatc d Kreutzer. Traduit du Russe par E. Halp^rine- 
 Kaminsky. Paris : Collection des auteurs cdlbres, p. 72.
 
 MYSTICISM i6j 
 
 Further on Pozdnyscheff develops the following crazy theory 
 of the law of life : ' The object of man, as of humanity in 
 general, is happiness, and to attain it humanity has a law 
 which must be carried out. This law consists in the union of 
 the individual beings which compose humanity. Human 
 passions only impede this union, particularly the strongest 
 and worst of all, sensual love, sexual pleasures. When human 
 passions, especially the most violent, sensuality, shall have been 
 suppressed, the union will be accomplished, and humanity, 
 having attained its end, will have no further reason for existing.' 
 And his last words are : ' People should understand that the 
 true meaning of the words of St. Matthew, " Whosoever looketh 
 on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her 
 already in his heart," applies to one's sister, and not only to a 
 strange woman, but also, and above all, to one's own wife.' 
 
 Tolstoi, in whom, as in every 'higher degenerate,' two natures 
 co-exist, of whom the one notices and judges the follies of the 
 other, has yet a distinct feeling of the senselessness of his 
 Kreutzer Sonata theory, and he makes his mouthpiece, Pozdny- 
 scheff, declare* that he ' was looked upon as cracked.' But in 
 the Short Exposition, where Tolstoi speaks in his own name, 
 he develops, if with somewhat more reserve, the same philo- 
 sophy.! ' The temptation to break the seventh commandment 
 is due to the fact that we believe woman to have been created 
 for carnal pleasure, and that, if a man leave one wife and take 
 another, he will have more pleasure. Not to fall into this 
 temptation, we must remember that it is not the will of the 
 Father that the man should have pleasure through feminine 
 charms. . . .' In the story Family Happimss\ he likewise 
 explains that a husband and wife, even if they have married 
 from love, must become enemies in their wedded life, and it is 
 quite purposeless to attempt a lasting cultivation of the original 
 feelings. 
 
 It is not indeed necessary to refute a theory which pours con- 
 tempt on all experience, all observations of nature, all institutions 
 and laws that have been historically developed, and the known 
 aim of which is the destruction of humanity. The thought of 
 assailing it with zeal could only occur to men who were them- 
 selves more or less deranged. It is sufficient for the healthy 
 minded to state it in distinct language; it is at once recognis- 
 able, then, for what it is insanity. 
 
 For Tolstoi the great enemy is science. In My Confession he 
 is never tired of accusing and abusing it. It is of no use to 
 the people, but only to governments and to capitalists. It 
 
 * P. 119. f Short Exposition of the Gospel, p. 140. 
 
 1 Le Roman du Manage. Tiaduil du Russe par Michel Deiines. Paris. 
 Auteurs celebres. 
 
 II
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 occupies itself with idle and vain things, such as the inquiries 
 into protoplasm and spectrum analysis, but has never yet 
 thought of anything useful, e.g., ' how an axe and an axe-handle 
 can best be manufactured ; how a good saw ought to be 
 fashioned ; how good bread can be baked, which species of flour 
 is best adapted for the purpose, how to manage the yeast, con- 
 struct and heat the baking-oven ; what foods and beverages are 
 the most wholesome ; what mushrooms are edible,' etc. 
 
 He is, be it noted, particularly unfortunate in his examples, 
 since, as a matter of fact, every beginner takes up all the sub- 
 jects he enumerates in the scientific study of hygiene and 
 mechanics. In accordance with his poetic nature, he has had a 
 strong desire to embody his views on science artistically. This he 
 has done in the comedy The Fruits of Enlightenment. What does 
 he scoff at in that ? At the pitiable blockheads who believe in 
 spirits and, in dread of death, hunt after bacteria. Spiritualism, 
 and the opinions created in uneducated men of the world by the 
 imperfectly understood news of the day, conveyed in political 
 papers, respecting infectious micro-organisms, are what he takes 
 for science, and against them he directs the arrows of his satire. 
 
 Real science does not need to be protected against attacks of 
 this sort. I have already proved, in estimating the value of the 
 reproaches which the neo-Catholic Symbolists and their critical 
 patrons raised against natural science, that all those phrases 
 were either childish or dishonest. The accusation of dishonesty 
 cannot be brought against Tolstoi. He believes what he says. 
 But childish his complaints and his mockery certainly are. He 
 speaks of science as a blind man of colour. He has evidently 
 no suspicion of its essence, its mission, its methods and the 
 subjects with which it deals. He resembles Bouvard and 
 Pe"cuchet, Flaubert's two idiots, who, completely ignorant, with- 
 out teachers or guides, skim through a number of books indis- 
 criminately, and fancy themselves in this sportive manner to 
 have gained positive knowledge ; this they seek to apply with 
 the candour of a trained Krooboy, commit, self-evidently, one 
 hair-raising stupidity. after another, and then believe themselves 
 justified in sneering at science, and declaring it a vain folly and 
 deception. Flaubert avenged himself on the absurdity of his 
 own efforts to conquer science as a lieutenant conquers a music- 
 hall singer, by tarring and feathering Bouvard and Pe*cuchet 
 Tolstoi exploded his little fuss and fume on Science, that proud, 
 'disdainful beauty, who is only to be won by long, earnest, un- 
 selfish service, by lampooning the blockheads of his Fruits of 
 Enlightenment. The degenerate Flaubert and the degenerate 
 Tolstoi meet here in the same frenzy. 
 
 The way to happiness is, according to Tolstoi, the turning 
 away from science, the renunciation of reason, and the return to
 
 MYSTICISM 163 
 
 the life of Nature ; that is, to agriculture. ' The town must be 
 abandoned, the people must be sent away from the factories and 
 into the country to work with their hands ; the aim of every man 
 should be to satisfy all his wants himself (What ought one 
 to Do ?}. 
 
 How oddly is reason mixed with nonsense even in these 
 economic demands ! Tolstoi has rightly discerned the evils which 
 follow the uprooting of the people from fostering Mother Earth, 
 and the incubation of a day-wage-earning, urban industrial pro- 
 letariate. It is true, also, that agriculture could employ very 
 many more men healthily and profitably than at present if the 
 land were the property of the community, and each one re- 
 ceived only such a share, and that only for his lifetime, as he 
 could himself cultivate thoroughly. But must industry on this 
 account be destroyed ? Would not that mean the destruction 
 of civilization itself? Is it not rather the duty of intelligent 
 philanthropy and justice carefully to maintain the division of 
 labour, this necessary and profitable result of a long evolution, 
 but at the same time, through a better system of economy, to 
 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 labour himself, and works no more than is com- 
 patible with his health and his claims on life? 
 
 It is vain to seek for even the slightest hint of such a solution 
 in Tolstoi. He contents himself with a barren enthusiasm for 
 country life, which, if beautiful in Horace, has become annoying 
 and ridiculous in Rousseau ; and he garrulously plagiarizes the 
 hollow phrases about the worthlessness of civilization of the 
 eloquent Genevese, who, smitten with the mania of persecution, 
 could only have led a sentimental century like his own by the 
 nose. Return to nature ! It is not possible to compress more 
 absurdity into fewer words. On our earth Nature is our enemy, 
 whom we must fight, before whom we dare not lay down our 
 weapons. In order to maintain our span of life we must create 
 endlessly complicated artificial conditions ; we must clothe our 
 bodies, build a roof over our heads, and store up provisions for 
 many months, during which Nature denies us every nourishment. 
 There is only one very narrow strip of our planet where mankind 
 can live without exertion, without inventions and arts, like the 
 beast in the forest and the fish in the water, and that is on some 
 of the South Sea islands. There, in perpetual spring, he cer- 
 tainly needs no clothes and no dwelling, or only some palm- 
 leaves as a shelter from occasional rain. There, at all seasons of 
 the year, he finds food constantly prepared for him in the cocoa- 
 nut palm, the bread-fruit tree, the banana, in some domestic 
 animals, in fish and mussels. No beast of prey threatens his 
 safety, and forces on him the development of strength and con-
 
 164 DEGENERATION 
 
 tempt of death. But how many men can this earthly paradise 
 maintain ? Perhaps a hundredth part of present humanity. 
 The remaining ninety-nine hundredths have only the alternative 
 either of perishing, or of settling in regions of our planet where 
 the table is not spread, and the pillow of delight is not prepared, 
 but in which everything which life demands for its sustenance 
 must be procured artificially and laboriously. The ' return to 
 Nature ' means, in our degrees of latitude, the return to hunger, 
 to freezing, to being devoured by wolves and bears. Not in the 
 impossible 'return to Nature' lies healing for human misery, 
 but in the reasonable organization of our struggle with Nature, I 
 might say, in universal and obligatory service against it, from 
 which only the crippled should be exempted. 
 
 We have now learnt to know the particular ideas which together 
 constitute Tolstoism. As a philosophy it gives explanations of 
 the world and of life, with unmeaning or contradictory para- 
 phrases of some intentionally misunderstood Bible verses. As 
 ethics, it prescribes the renunciation of resistance against vice 
 and crime, the distribution of property, and the annihilation of 
 mankind by complete abstinence. As sociological and economic 
 doctrine it preaches the uselessness of science, the happiness of 
 becoming stupid, the renunciation of manufactured products, and 
 the duty of agriculture, though without betraying from whence 
 the farmer is to get the necessary soil for cultivation. The 
 remarkable thing in this system is, that it does not notice its 
 own superfluity. If it understood itself, it would restrict itself 
 to one single point abstinence since it is evident that it is 
 unnecessary to break one's head over the aim and import of 
 human life, over crime and love of your neighbour, and particu- 
 larly over country or town life, if in any case through abstinence 
 humanity is to die out with the present generation. 
 
 Rod* denies that Tolstoi is a mystic. ' Mysticism was always, 
 as the word indicates, a transcendental doctrine. The mystics, 
 especially the Christian mystics, have always sacrificed the pre- 
 sent to the future life. . . . What, on the contrary, astonishes 
 an unprejudiced mind in Tolstoi's books is the almost complete 
 absence of all metaphysics, his indifference to the so-called 
 questions of the other world.' 
 
 Rod simply does not know what mysticism is. He unduly 
 restricts the sense of the word, if he only uses it to mean the 
 investigation of ' other-world questions.' If he were less super- 
 ficial he would know that religious enthusiasm is only one special 
 instance of a general mental condition, and that mysticism is any 
 morbid obscuration and incoherence of thought which is accom- 
 panied by emotionalism, and therefore includes that thought, 
 the fruit of which is the system at once Materialistic, Pantheistic 
 
 * Ed. Rod, Les Idt-es morales du Temps present. Paris, 1892, p. 241.
 
 MYSTICISM 165 
 
 Christian, Ascetic, Rousseauistic and Communistic, of Leo 
 Tolstoi. 
 
 Raphael Lowenfeld, whom we have to thank for the first com- 
 plete German edition of Tolstoi's works, has also written a very 
 commendable biography of the Russian novelist, yet in which he 
 feels himself obliged, not only to take sides vehemently with his 
 hero, but also to assure that hero's possible critics beforehand 
 of his deep contempt for them. ' Want of comprehension,' he 
 says,* 'calls them (the "independent phenomena" of Tolstoi's 
 sort) eccentrics, unwilling to allow that anyone should be a 
 head taller than the rest. The unprejudiced man, who is 
 capable of admiring greatness, sees in their independence the 
 expression of an extraordinary power which has outgrown the 
 possibilities of the time, and, leading on, points out the paths to 
 those coming after.' It is indeed hazardous forthwith to accuse 
 all who are not of his opinion of ' want of comprehension.' One 
 who judges so autocratically will have to put up with the answer, 
 that he is guilty of ' want of comprehension ' who, without the 
 most elementary training, enters upon the criticism of a pheno- 
 menon, to the understanding of which some degree of aesthetical 
 and literary so-called ' knowledge ' and personal feeling are very 
 far from sufficient. Lowenfeld boasts of his capacity to admire 
 greatness. He is possibly wrong not to presuppose this capacity 
 in others also. What he precisely has to prove is this, that what 
 lie admires deserves in truth the designation of greatness. His 
 assertion, however, is the only proof he brings on this most 
 Important point. He calls himself unprejudiced. It may be 
 admitted that he is free from prejudices, but then he is free also 
 from the preliminary knowledge that alone entitles anyone to 
 form an opinion on psychological phenomena, which strike even 
 the uninitiated as extraordinary, and to present them with 
 self-assurance. Did he possess this preliminary knowledge he 
 would know that Tolstoi, who, ' leading, is to point out the 
 paths to those coming after,' is a mere copy of a class of men 
 who have had their representatives in every age. Lombroso-f 
 instances a certain Knudsen, a madman, who lived in Schleswig 
 about 1680, and asserted that there was neither a God nor a 
 hell ; that priests and judges were useless and pernicious, and 
 marriage an immorality ; that men ceased to exist after death ; 
 that everyone must be guided by his own inward insight,' etc. 
 Here we have the principal features of Tolstoi's cosmology 
 and moral philosophy. Knudsen has, however, so little ' pointed 
 out, leading, the way to those coming after,' that he still only 
 exists as an instructive case of mental aberration in books on 
 diseases of the mind. -V".' 
 
 * Raphael Lowenfeld, Leo N. Tolstoi, sein Leben, seine Werke, seine. 
 Weltanschauung. Erster Theil. Berlin, 1892, Introd., p. i. 
 f Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 256, foot-note.
 
 166 DEGENERATION 
 
 The truth is that all Tolstoi's idiosyncrasies could be traced 
 to the best-known and most often observed stigmata of higher 
 degeneration. He even relates of himself :* ' Scepticism brought 
 me at one time to a condition nearly bordering on frenzy. I 
 had the idea that besides myself nobody and nothing existed in 
 the whole world ; that things were not things, but presentations, 
 which only became phenomenal at what time I directed my 
 attention to them, and that these presentations disappeared at 
 once when I ceased to think of them. . . . There were hours 
 when, under the influence of this fixed idea, I came to such a 
 pitch of mental bewilderment that I at times looked quickly the 
 other way, in the hope that in the place where I was not, I might 
 be surprised by nothingness.' And in his Confession he says 
 explicitly : ' I felt that I was not quite mentally sound.'t His 
 feeling was correct. He was suffering from a mania of brooding" 
 doubt, observable in many of the ' higher degenerates.' Professor 
 KowalewskiJ explains the mania of doubt straight away as exclu- 
 sively a psychosis of degeneration. Griesinger relates the case ' 
 of a patient who continually brooded over the notions of beauty, 
 existence, etc., and put endless questions about them. Griesinger, 
 however, was less familiar with the phenomena of degeneration, 
 and therefore held his case as ' one little known.' Lombroso|| 
 mentions in the enumeration of the symptoms of his maniacs of 
 genius : 'Almost all are taken up, in the most painful manner, 
 with religious doubts, which disturb the mind and oppress the 
 timid conscience and sick heart, like a crime.' It is not, then, 
 the noble desire for knowledge which forces Tolstoi to be cease- 
 lessly occupied with questions concerning the aim and mean- 
 ing of life, but the degeneration-mania of doubt and brooding 
 thought, which is barren, because no answer, no explanation can 
 satisfy them. For it is obvious that be the 'therefore' never so 
 clear, never so exhaustive, it can never silence the mechanically 
 impulsive ' wherefore ' proceeding from the Unconscious. 
 
 A special form of the phenomenon of scepticism and brooding 
 thought is a rage for contradiction, and the inclination to bizarre 
 assertions, as is noted by many clinicists e.g., Sollier^f as a 
 special stigma of degeneration. It has appeared very strongly 
 in Tolstoi at certain times. ' In the struggles for independence/ 
 relates Lowenfeld,** ' Tolstoi frequently overstepped the limits of 
 good taste, while he combated tradition only because it was tradi- 
 tion. Thus he called . . . Shakespeare a scribbler by the dozen, 
 
 * Lowenfeld, op. tit., p. 39. f /bid., p. 276. 
 
 % Professor Kowalewski, in The Journal of Mental Science, January, 1888. 
 Griesinger, ' Ueber einen wenig bekannten psychopathischen Zustand/ 
 Jlrchivfdr Psychiatric, Band I. 
 
 || Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 324. 
 
 f Sollier, Psychologic de I' Idiot et de flmbtcil*. 
 
 ** Lowenfeld, op. cit., p. 100,
 
 MYSTICISM 167 
 
 and asserted that the admiration ... for the great English- 
 man . . . has properly no other origin than the custom of echo- 
 ing strange opinions with thoughtless obsequiousness.' 
 
 What one finds most touching and most worthy of admiration 
 in Tolstoi is his boundless spirit of fraternity. I have already 
 shown above that it is foolish in its starting-points and mani- 
 festations. Here, however, I may have to point out that it is 
 likewise a stigma of degeneration. Though he has not the 
 experience of an alienist, the clear-minded, healthy Tourgenieff 
 has, by his own common-sense, 'scoffingly' called Tolstoi's 
 fervent love for the oppressed people ' hysterical,' as Lowenfeld* 
 says. We shall find it again in many degenerate subjects. ' In 
 contrast to the selfish imbecile/ Legraint teaches, ' we have the 
 imbeciles who are good to excess, who are philanthropic, who 
 set up a thousand absurd systems in order to advance the 
 happiness of humanity.' And further on : ' Full of his love for 
 humanity, the imbecile patient, without reflection, takes up the 
 social question on its most difficult side, and settles it con- 
 fidently in a series of grotesque inventions.' This irrational 
 philanthropy, untutored by judgment, which Tourgenieff, with 
 just surmise if incorrect designation, called ' hysterical,' is 
 nothing else than a manifestation of that emotionalism \vhich 
 constitutes for Morel the fundamental character of degenera- 
 tion. Nothing in this diagnosis is altered by the fact that 
 Tolstoi had the good fortune, during the recent famine, of being 
 able to develop the most highly effective and most devoted help- 
 fulness for the alleviation of the misery of his countrymen. The 
 case happened to be very simple. The need of his fellow-creatures 
 was of the most primitive form, want of bodily food. Fraternal 
 love could likewise set to work in its most primitive form, in the 
 distribution of food and clothing. A special power of judgment, 
 a deep comprehension of the need of his fellow-creatures, was 
 here unnecessary. And that Tolstoi's preparations for the relief 
 of the sufferers were more effective than those of the proper 
 authorities only proved the stupidity and incapacity of -the 
 latter. 
 
 Tolstoi's attitude towards women also, which must remain 
 incomprehensible to a healthy human understanding, will, in the 
 light of clinical experience, forthwith be understood. It has 
 been repeatedly pointed out in these pages that the emotionalism 
 of the degenerate has, as a rule, an erotic colouring, because of 
 the pathological alteration in their Sexual centres. The 
 abnormal excitability of these parts of the nervous system can 
 have as a consequence both an especial attraction towards 
 woman and an especial antipathy to her. The common 
 
 * Lowenfeld, op. cif., p. 47. 
 
 j- Legrain, Du Dclire chez les De&neres^ pp. 28, 195.
 
 168 DEGENERATION 
 
 element connecting these opposing effccte of one and the same 
 organic condition is the being constantly occupied with woman, 
 the being constantly engrossed with presentations in conscious- 
 ness from the region of sexuality.* 
 
 In the mental life of a sane man, woman is far from filling 
 the part she plays in that of the degenerate. The physiological 
 relation of man to woman is that of desire for the time being 
 toward her, and of indifference when the state of desire is not 
 present. Antipathy, let alone violent enmity, to woman, the 
 normal man never feels. If he desires the woman, he loves her; 
 if his erotic excitement is appeased, he becomes cool and more 
 distant in his attitude, though without feeling aversion or fear. 
 The man, from his purely subjective, physiological necessities 
 and inclinations, would certainly never have invented marriage, 
 the persistent alliance with woman. This is not a sexual but a 
 social arrangement. It does not rest on the organic instincts of 
 the individual man, but on the need of collectivity. It depends 
 on the existing economic order and the dominant opinions about 
 the State, its problems and its relations to the individual, and 
 changes its form with these. A man may or at least should 
 choose a certain woman for his consort out of love ; but what 
 holds him fast married, after a suitable choice and successful 
 courtship, is no longer physiological love, but a complex mix- 
 ture of habit, gratitude, unsexual friendship, convenience, the 
 wish to obtain for himself social advantages (to which must 
 naturally be added an ordered household, social representation, 
 etc.), considerations of duty towards children and State ; more 
 or less, also, unthinking imitation of a universal observance. 
 But feelings such as are described in the Kreutzer Sonata and 
 in Family Happiness the normal man never experiences towards 
 his wife, even if he has ceased to love her in the natural sense of 
 the word. 
 
 These relations are quite otherwise in the degenerate. The 
 morbid activity of his sexual centres completely rules him. The 
 thought of woman has for him the power of an ' obsession.' 
 He feels that he cannot resist the exciting influences proceed- 
 ing from the woman, that he is her helpless slave, and would 
 commit any folly, any madness, any crime, at her beck and call. 
 He necessarily, therefore, sees in woman an uncanny, over- 
 powering force of nature, bestowing supreme delights or dealing 
 
 * It is not my object, in a book intended primarily for the general educated 
 reader, to dwell on this delicate subject. Anyone wishing to be instructed 
 more closely in the morbid eroticism of the degenerate may read the books 
 of Paul Moreau (of Tours) Des Aberrations du Sens gtnhique, 2 e Edition, 
 Paris, 1883; and Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia sexualis, Stuttgart, 1886. 
 Papers on this subject by Westphal (Archiv fur Psychiatric, 1870 and 1876), 
 by Charcot and Magnan (Archives de Neurologie, 1882), etc., are scarcely 
 accessible to the general public.
 
 MYSTICISM 169 
 
 destruction, and he trembles before this power, to which he is 
 defencelessly exposed. If, then, besides this, the almost never- 
 failing aberrations set in, if he, in fact, commits things for 
 woman for which he must condemn and despise himself; or if 
 woman, without its coming to actual deeds, awakens in him 
 emotions and thoughts before whose baseness and infamy he is 
 horrified, then, in the moment of exhaustion, when judgment is 
 stronger than impulse, the dread which woman inspires him 
 withal will be suddenly changed into aversion and savage 
 hatred. The erotomaniac 'degenerate' stands in the same posi- 
 tion to the woman as a dipsomaniac to intoxicating drinks. 
 Magnan* has given an appalling picture of the struggles waged 
 in the mind of a dipsomaniac by the passionate eagerness for the 
 bottle, and the loathing and horror of it. The mind of an 
 erotomaniac presents a similar spectacle, but probably still 
 stronger struggles. These frequently lead the unhappy creature, 
 who sees no other means of escaping from his sexual obsession, 
 to self-mutilation. There are in Russia, as is well known, a 
 whole sect of ' degenerates,' the Skoptzi, by whom this is syste- 
 matically exercised, as the only effective treatment to escape the 
 devil and be saved. Pozdnyscheff, in the Kreutzer Sonata^ is a 
 Skopetz without knowing it, and the sexual morality which 
 Tolstoi teaches in this narrative and in his theoretic writings is 
 the expression in literature of the sexual psychopathy of the 
 Skoptzi. 
 
 The universal success of Tolstoi's writings is undoubtedly 
 due in part to his high literary gifts. But that part is not the 
 greatest ; for, as we have seen in the beginning of this chapter' 
 it was not his artistically most important creations, the works 01 
 his best years, but his later mystical works, which have won for 
 him his body of believers. This effect is to be explained, nox 
 on aesthetical, but on pathological grounds. Tolstoi would havs 
 remained unnoticed, like any Knudsen of the seventeenth 
 century, if his extravagances as a degenerate mystic had no: 
 found his contemporaries prepared for their reception. Th 
 wide-spread hysteria from exhaustion was the requisite soil in 
 which alone Tolstoism could flourish. 
 
 That the rise and expansion of Tolstoism is to be traced, not 
 to the intrinsic merit of Tolstoi's writings, but to the mental 
 condition of his readers, is made clear in the most significant 
 manner by the difference in those parts of his system which 
 have made an impression in various countries. In every nation 
 just such tones awakened an echo as were attuned with its own 
 nervous system. 
 
 In England it was Tolstoi's sexual morality that excited the 
 
 * V. Magnan, Lemons diniques sur la Dipsomanie,faites d I'asile Stitnle- 
 Anne. Recueillies et publides par M. le Dr. Marcel Briand. Paris, i'384.
 
 170 DEGENERATION 
 
 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 honoured chastity 
 as the highest dignity and noblest human destiny, and 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. The Krcutzer 
 Sonata has, therefore, become the book of devotion of all the 
 spinsters of England. 
 
 In France Tolstoism is particularly valued for the way in 
 which it casts out science, deposes the intellect from all offices 
 and dignities, preaches the return to implicit faith, and praises 
 the poor in spirit as alone happy. This is water to the mill of 
 neo-Catholics, and those mystics, from political motives, or from 
 degeneration, who erect a cathedral to pious symbolism, raise up 
 also a high altar to Tolstoi in their church. 
 
 In Germany, on the whole, but little enthusiasm is evinced 
 for the abstinence-morality of the Kreutzer Sonata, and the 
 intellectual reaction of My Confession, My Religion, and Fruits of 
 Enlightenment. On the other hand, his followers in that country 
 exalt Tolstoi's vague socialism and his morbid fraternal love into 
 their dogma. All the muddle-headed among our people who, 
 not from sober scientific conviction, but from hysterical emotion- 
 alism, feel a leaning towards a sickly, impotent socialism, which 
 tends principally towards ministering cheap broth to proleta- 
 rians, and towards revelling in sentimental romances and melo- 
 dramas from the pretended life of the city worker, naturally 
 discovered in Tolstoi's ' give-me-something-communism,' with 
 its scorn for all economic and moral laws, the expression of their 
 very platonic! love for the disinherited. And in the circles 
 in which Herr von Egidy's watery rationalism (at least a hundred 
 years behind time) could rise in to notoriety, and in which his first 
 writing could call forth nearly a hundred replies, assents, and 
 explanations, Tolstoi's Short Exposition of the Gospel, with its 
 denial of the divine nature of Christ, and of existence after 
 death, with its effusions of a superabundance of feelings of 
 aimless love, its incomprehensible personal sanctificatkm and 
 rhetoric morality, and especially with its astounding misinterpre- 
 tation of the clearest passages from Scripture, must indeed have 
 been an event. All the adherents of Herr von Egidy are pre- 
 destined followers of Tolstoi, and all Tolstoi's admirers perpe- 
 trate an inconsistency if they do not enter into the new Salvation 
 Army of Herr von Egidy. 
 
 By the special timbre of the echo which Tolstoisrn calls 
 forth in different countries, he has become an instrument which 
 is better fitted than any other tendency of degeneration in con-
 
 MYSTICISM 171 
 
 temporary literature for the determination, measurement, and 
 comparison, in kind and degree, of degeneration and hysteria 
 among those civilized nations in which the phenomenon of the 
 Dusk of the Nations has been observed. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE RICHARD WAGNER CULT, 
 
 WE have seen in a previous chapter that the whole mystic 
 movement of the period has its roots in romanticism, and hence 
 originally emanates from Germany. In England German 
 romanticism was metamorphosed into pre-Raphaelitism, in 
 France the latter engendered, with the last remains of its pro- 
 creative strength, the abortions of symbolism and neo- 
 Catholicism, and these Siamese twins contracted with Tolstoism 
 a mountebank marriage such as might take place between the 
 cripple of a fair and the wonder of a show-booth. While the 
 descendants of the emigrant (who on his departure from his 
 German home already carried in him all the germs of subsequent 
 tumefactions and disfigurements), so changed as to be almost 
 unrecognisable, grew up in different countries, and set about re- 
 turning to their native land to attempt the renewal of family 
 ties with their home-staying connections, Germany gave birth to 
 a new prodigy, who was in truth only reared with great trouble 
 to manhood, and for long years received but little notice or 
 appreciation, but who finally obtained an incomparably mightier 
 attractive force over the great fools' fair of the present time than 
 all his fellow-competitors. This prodigy is ' Wagnerism.' It is 
 the German contribution to modern mysticism, and far out- 
 weighs all that the other nations combined have supplied to that 
 movement. For Germany is powerful in everything, in evil as , 
 in good, and the magnitude of its elementary force manifests 
 itself in a crushing manner in its degenerate, as well as in its 
 ennobling, efforts. 
 
 Richard Wagner is in himself alone charged with a greater 
 abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together 
 with whom we have hitherto become acquainted. The stigmata 
 of this morbid condition are united in him in the most complete 
 and most luxuriant development. He displays in the general 
 constitution of his mind the persecution mania, megalomania 
 and mysticism ; in his instincts vague philanthropy, anarchism, 
 a craving for revolt and contradiction ; in his writings all the 
 signs of graphomania, namely, incoherence, fugitive ideation, 
 and a tendency to idiotic punning, and, as the groundwork of
 
 172 DEGENERATION 
 
 his being, the characteristic emotionalism of a colour at cnce 
 erotic and religiously enthusiastic. 
 
 For Wagner's persecution mania, we have the testimony of 
 his most recent biographer and friend, Ferdinand Praeger, who 
 relates that for years Wagner was convinced that the Jews 
 had conspired to prevent the representation of his operas a 
 delirium inspired by his furious anti-Semitism. His megalo- 
 mania is so well known through his writings, his verbal utter- 
 ances, and the whole course of his life, that a bare reference 
 to it is sufficient. It is to be admitted that this mania was 
 essentially increased by the crazy procedure of those who 
 surrounded Wagner. A much firmer equilibrium than that 
 which obtained in Wagner's mind would have been infallibly 
 disturbed by the nauseous idolatry of which Bayreuth was the 
 shrine. The Bayreuther Blatter is a unique phenomenon. 
 To me, at least, no other instance is known of a newspaper 
 which was founded exclusively for the deification of a living 
 man, and in every number of which, through long years, the 
 appointed priests of the temple have burned incense to their 
 household god, with the savage fanaticism of howling and 
 dancing dervishes, bent the knee, prostrated themselves before 
 him, and immolated all opponents as sacrificial victims. 
 
 We will take a closer view of the graphomaniac Wagner. 
 His Collected Writings and Poems form ten large thick volumes, 
 and among the 4,500 pages which they approximately contain 
 there is hardly a single one which will not puzzle the unbiased 
 reader, either through some nonsensical thought or some im- 
 possible mode of expression. Of his prose works (his poems 
 will be treated of further on), the most important is decidedly 
 The Art-work of the Future.* The thoughts therein expressed 
 so far as the wavering shadows of ideas in a mystically 
 emotional degenerate subject may be so called occupied 
 Wagner during his whole life, and were again and again pro- 
 pounded by him in ever new terms and phraseology. The Opera 
 and the Drama, Judaism in Music, On ttte State and Religion, 
 Tlie Vocation of the Opera, Religion and Art, are nothing more 
 than amplifications of single passages of The Art-work of tlie 
 Future. This restless repetition of one and the same strain of 
 thought is itself characteristic in the highest degree. The clear, 
 mentally sane author, who feels himself impelled to say some- 
 thing, will once for all express himself as distinctly and impres- 
 sively as it is possible for him to do, and have done with it 
 He may, perhaps, return to the subject, in order to clear up 
 misconceptions, repel attacks, and fill up lacunae ; but he will 
 
 * Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft. Leipzig, 1850. The 
 numbering of the pages given in quotations from this work reiers to the 
 edition here indicated.
 
 MYSTICISM 173 
 
 never wish to rewrite his book, wholly or in part, two or three 
 times in slightly different words, not even if in later years he 
 attains to the insight that he has not succeeded in finding for it 
 an adequate form. The crazed graphomaniac, on the contrary, 
 cannot recognise in his book, as it lies finished before him, the 
 satisfying expression of his thoughts, and he will always be 
 tempted to begin his work afresh, a task which is endless, 
 because it must consist in giving a fixed linguistic form to ideas 
 which are formless. 
 
 The fundamental thought of the Art-work of the Future is 
 this : The first and most original of the arts was that of dancing ; 
 its peculiar essence is rhythm, and this has developed into 
 music ; music, consisting of rhythm and tone, has raised 
 (Wagner says ' condensed ') its phonetic element to speech, 
 and produced the art of poetry ; the highest form of poetry 
 is the drama, which for the purpose of stage-construction, 
 and to imitate the natural scene of human action, has asso- 
 ciated itself with architecture and painting respectively ; finally, 
 sculpture is nothing but the giving permanence to the appear- 
 ance of the actor in a dead rigid form, while acting is real 
 sculpture in living, flowing movement. Thus all the arts 
 group themselves around the drama, and the latter should unite 
 them naturally. Nevertheless they appear at present in isola- 
 tion, to the great injury of each and of art in general. This 
 reciprocal estrangement and isolation of the different arts is an 
 unnatural and decadent condition, and the effort of true artists 
 must be to win them back to their natural and necessary con- 
 junction with each other. The mutual penetration and fusion of 
 all arts into a single art will produce the genuine work of art. 
 Hence the work of art of the future is a drama with music and 
 dance, which unrolls itself in a landscape painting, has for a frame 
 a masterly creation of architectural art designed for the poetico- 
 musical end, and is represented by actors who are really sculptors, 
 but who realize their plastic inspirations by means of their own 
 bodily appearance. 
 
 In this way Wagner has set forth for himself the evolution of 
 art. His system calls for criticism in every part. The historical 
 filiation of the arts which he attempts to establish is false. If 
 the original reciprocal connections of song, dance and poetry 
 be granted, the development of architecture, painting and 
 sculpture is certainly independent of poetry in its dramatic form. 
 That the theatre employs all the arts is true, but it is one of 
 those truths which are so self-evident that it is generally un- 
 necessary to mention them, and least of all with profound pro- 
 phetic mien and the grand priestly gestures of one proclaiming 
 surprising revelations. Everyone knows from experience that 
 the stage is in a theatrical building, that it displays painted
 
 174 DEGENERATION 
 
 decorations which represent landscapes or buildings, and that on 
 it there is speaking, singing and acting. Wagner secretly feels 
 that he makes himself ridiculous when he strains himself to 
 expound this trite matter of first experience in the Pythian mode, 
 with an enormous outlay of gush and exaltation . . . ; hence he 
 exaggerates it to such a degree as to turn it into an absurdity. 
 He not only asseverates that in the drama (more correctly 
 speaking, the opera, or the musical drama, as Wagner prefers to 
 call it) different arts co-operate, but he asserts that it is only 
 through this co-operation that each individual art is advanced 
 to its highest capacity of expression, and that the individual 
 arts must and will surrender their independence as an unnatural 
 error, in order to continue to exist only as collaborators of the 
 musical drama. 
 
 The first asseveration is at least doubtful. In the cathedral 
 of Cologne architecture produces an impression without the 
 representation of a drama ; the accompaniment of music would 
 add nothing whatever to the beauty and depth of Faust and 
 Hamlet ; Goethe's lyric poetry and the Divina Commedia need 
 no landscape-painting as a frame and background ; Michael 
 Angelo's Moses would hardly produce a deeper impression sur- 
 rounded by dancers and singers ; and the Pastoral Symphony 
 does not require the accompaniment of words in order to exer- 
 cise its full charm. Schopenhauer, although Wagner admired 
 him as the greatest thinker of all time, expresses himself very 
 decidedly on this point. ' The grand opera,' he says,* ' is, 
 properly speaking, no product of pure artistic sense, but rather 
 of the somewhat barbaric conception of elevating aesthetic en- 
 joyment through accumulation of means, simultaneity of quite 
 different impressions, and intensification of the effect through 
 the multiplication of the operating masses and forces ; while, 
 on the other hand, music, as the mightiest of all arts, is able by 
 itself alone completely to occupy the mind which is susceptible 
 to it ; indeed, its loftiest productions, to be appropriately 
 grasped and enjoyed, demand a mind wholly undivided and un- 
 diverted, so that it may yield itself up to them, and lose itself in 
 them, in order completely to understand their incredible in- 
 wardness of language. Instead of this, in highly complicated 
 operatic music the mind is besieged at the same time by way 
 of the eye, by means of the most variegated pomp, the most 
 fantastic pictures, and the liveliest impressions of light and 
 colour ; while over and above this it is occupied with the story 
 of the piece. . . . Strictly speaking, then, one may call opera 
 an unmusical invention for the benefit of unmusical minds, into 
 which music must only be smuggled by means of a medium 
 
 * Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, KurzePhil. Schriften. 
 Leipzig, 1888, Band II., p. 465.
 
 MYSTICISM 175 
 
 foreign to it, that is, as a sort of accompaniment to a long spun- 
 out, insipid love-story, and its poetical thin broth ; for the 
 libretto of an opera does not tolerate concise poetry, full of 
 genius and thought.' This is an absolute condemnation of the 
 Wagnerian idea of the musical drama as the collective art-work 
 of the future. It might seem, it is true, that certain recent 
 experiments in psychophysics had come to the help of Wagner's 
 theory of the reciprocal enhancement of the simultaneous 
 effects of different arts. Charles Fe're'* has, in fact, shown that 
 the ear hears more keenly when the -eye is simultaneously 
 stimulated by an agreeable (dynamogenous) colour ; but, in the 
 first place, this phenomenon may also be interpreted thus : 
 that the keenness of hearing is enhanced not by the visual im- 
 pression as such, not simply as sense excitation, but only through 
 its dynamogenous quality, which arouses the whole nervous 
 system as well to a more lively activity. And then the question 
 in Fere"'s experiments is merely one of simple sense-perceptions, 
 whereas the musical drama is supposed to awaken a higher 
 cerebral activity, to produce presentations and thoughts, together 
 with direct emotions ; in which case each of the arts acting in 
 concert will produce, in consequence of the necessary dispersion 
 of the attention to it, a more feeble effect than if it appealed by 
 itself alone to sense and intellect. 
 
 Wagner's second assertion, that the natural evolution of each 
 art necessarily leads it to the surrender of its independence and 
 to its fusion with the other arts,-f- contradicts so strongly all 
 experience and all the laws of evolution, that it can at once be 
 characterized as delirious. Natural development always proceeds 
 from the simple to the complex not inversely ; progress con- 
 sists in differentiation, i.e., in the evolution of originally similar 
 parts into special organs of different structure and independent 
 functions, and not in the retrogression of differentiated beings of 
 rich specialization to a protoplasm without physiognomy. 
 
 * Charles Fe're', Sensation et Mouvement. Paris, 1887. 
 
 f Das Kunstwerk der Znkunft, p. 169 : ' It is only when the desire of the 
 artistic sculptor has passed into the soul of the dancer, of the mimic inter- 
 preter, of him who sings and speaks, that this desire can be conceived as 
 satisfied. It is only when the art of sculpture no longer exists, or has fol- 
 lowed another tendency than that of representing human bodies when it 
 has passed, as sculpture, into architecture when the rigid solitude of this 
 one man carved in stone will have been resolved into the infinitely flowing 
 plurality of veritable, living men ... it is only then, too, that real plastic 
 will exist.' And on p. 182 : 'That which it [painting] honestly exerts itself 
 to attain, it attains in ... greatest perfection . . . when it descends from 
 canvas and chalk to ascend to the tragic stage. . . . But landscape-painting 
 will become, as the last and most finished conclusion of all the fine arts, the 
 life-giving soul, properly speaking, of architecture ; it will teach us thus to 
 organize the stage for works of the dramatic art of the future, in which, itself 
 living, it will represent the warm background of nature for the use of the 
 living, and not for the imitated man.'
 
 176 DEGENERATION 
 
 The arts have not arisen accidentally ; their differentiation is 
 the consequence of organic necessity ; once they have attained 
 independence, they will never surrender it. They can degenerate, 
 they can even die out, but they can never again shrink back 
 into the germ from which they have sprung. The effort to 
 return to beginnings is, however, a peculiarity of degeneration, 
 and founded in its deepest essence. The degenerate subject is 
 himself on the downward road from the height of organic develop- 
 ment which our species has reached ; his imperfect brain is 
 incapable of the highest and most refined operations of thought ; 
 he has therefore a strong desire to lighten them, to simplify the 
 multifariousness of phenomena and make them easier to 
 survey ; to drag everything animate and inanimate down to lower 
 and older stages of existence, in order to make them more easy 
 of access to his comprehension. We have seen that the French 
 Symbolists, with their colour-hearing, wished to degrade man to 
 the indifferentiated sense-perceptions of the pholas or oyster. 
 Wagner's fusion of the arts is a pendant to this notion. His 
 Art-work of the Future is the art- work of times long past. 
 What he takes for evolution is retrogression, and a return to a 
 primeval human, nay, to a pre-human stage. 
 
 Still more extraordinary than the fundamental idea of the 
 book is its linguistic form. For example, let us estimate the 
 following remarks on musical art (p. 68) : ' The sea separates 
 and unites countries ; thus musical art separates and unites the 
 two extreme poles of human art, dancing and poetry. It is the 
 heart of man ; the blood which takes its circulation from it gives 
 to the outward flesh its warm living colour ; but it nourishes 
 with an undulating, elastic force the nerves of the brain which 
 are directed inward' [! !]. 'Without the activity of the heart, 
 the activity of the brain would become a piece of mechanical 
 skill [!], the activity of the external limbs an equally 
 mechanical, emotionless procedure.' ' By means of the heart 
 the intellect feels itself related to the entire body [!] ; the mere 
 sensuous man rises to intellectual activity ' [!]. ' Now, the organ 
 of the heart [!] is sound, and its artistic language is music.' What 
 here floated before the mind of Wagner was a comparison, in 
 itself senseless, between the function of music as the medium of 
 expression for the feelings, and the function of the blood as 
 the vehicle of nutritive materials for the organism. But as his 
 mystically-disposed brain was not capable of clearly grasping 
 the various parts of this intricate idea, and of arranging them 
 in parallel lines, he entangled himself in the absurdity of an 
 ' activity of the brain without activity of the heart '; of a ' rela- 
 tion between the intellect and the whole body through the 
 heart,' etc., and finally attains to the pure twaddle of calling 
 ' sound ' the ' organ of the heart'
 
 MYSTICISM 177 
 
 He wishes to express the very simple thought that music 
 cannot communicate definite images and judgments, but merely 
 feelings of a general character ; and for this purpose devises 
 the following rigmarole (p. 88) : ' It is never able ... of itself 
 .alone to bring the human individual, determined as to sensation 
 and morals, to an exactly perceptible, distinctive representation ; 
 it is in its infinite involution always and only feeling ; it appears 
 as an accompaniment of the moral deed, not as the deed itself ; 
 it can place feelings and dispositions side by side, not develop 
 in necessary sequence one disposition from another; it is lack- 
 ing in moral will ' [!]. 
 
 Let the reader further bury himself in this passage (p. 159) : 
 ' It is only and exactly in the degree to which the woman of 
 perfected womanliness, in her love for the man, and through her 
 absorption into his being, shall have developed the masculine 
 element as well as this womanliness, and brought it with the 
 purely womanly element in herself to a complete consummation ; 
 in other words, in the degree in which she is not only the man's 
 mistress, but also his friend, is the man able to find perfect 
 satisfaction in a woman's love.' 
 
 Wagner's admirers asseverate that they understand this string 
 of words thrown together at random. Indeed, they find them 
 remarkably clear ! This, however, should not surprise us. 
 Readers who through weakness of mind or flightiness of 
 thought are incapable of attention always understand every- 
 thing. For them there exists neither obscurity nor nonsense. 
 They seek in the words over which their absent gaze flits super- 
 ficially, not the author's thoughts, but a reflection of their own 
 rambling dreams. Those who have lived lovingly observant in 
 children's nurseries must have frequently seen the game in which 
 a child takes a book, or printed paper, and, holding it before his 
 face, generally upside down, begins gravely to read aloud, often 
 the story told him by his mamma yesterday before he dropped 
 asleep, or, more frequently, the fancies which at the moment are 
 buzzing in his little head. This is somewhat the procedure of 
 these blessed readers who understand everything. They do not 
 read what is in the books, but what they put into them ; and as 
 far as the process and result of this mental activity are concerned, 
 it is certainly very much a matter of indifference what the 
 author has actually thought and said. 
 
 The incoherence of Wagner's thought, determined as it is by 
 the excitations of the moment, manifests itself in his constant 
 contradictions. At one time (p. 187) he asserts, 'The highest 
 aim of mankind is the artistic ; the most highly artistic is the 
 drama ;' and in a footnote (p. 194) he exclaims, * These easy- 
 going creatures are fain to see and hear everything, except the 
 real, undisfigitred human being who stands exhorting at the exit 
 
 12
 
 I 7 8 DEGENERATION 
 
 of their dreams. Lnt it is exactly this very human being whom 
 we must now place in the foreground' It is evident that one of 
 these affirmations is diametrically opposed to the other. The 
 ' artistic ' ' dramatic' man is not the ' real' man, and it will be 
 impossible for him, who looks upon it as his task to occupy him- 
 self with the real man, to recognise art as 'the highest aim of 
 man/ and to regard his ' dreams ' as the most distinguished of 
 his activities. 
 
 In one passage (p. 206) he says : ' Who, therefore, will be the 
 artist of the future ? Unquestionably the poet. But who will 
 be the poet ? Incontestably the interpreter. Again, however, 
 wJw will be the interpreter ? Necessarily the association of all 
 artists? If this has any sense at all, it can only be that in the 
 future the people will jointly write and act their dramas ; and 
 that Wagner really meant this he proves in the passage (p. 225) 
 where he meets the objection he anticipated, that therefore the 
 mob is to be the creator of the art-work of the future, with 
 the words, ' Bear in mind that this mob is in no way a 
 normal product of real human nature, but rather the artificial 
 result of your unnatural civilization ; that all the devices and 
 abominations which disgust you in this mob are only the 
 desperate movements of the fight which real human nature is 
 carrying on against its cruel oppressor, modern civilization.' 
 Let us contrast with these expressions the following passage 
 from the treatise, What is German ?* : ' The fact that from the 
 bosom of the German race there have sprung Goethe and Schiller, 
 Mozart and Beethoven, too easily seduces the greater number 
 of persons of mediocre gifts into regarding these'great minds as 
 belonging by right to them, and. to attempt, with the compla- 
 cency of a demagogue, to persuade the masses that they them- 
 selves are Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven.' But 
 who, if not Wagner himself, has thus persuaded the masses, pro- 
 claiming them to be the 'artists of the future'? And this very 
 madness, which he himself recognises as such in the remark 
 quoted, has made a great impression on the multitude. They 
 have taken literally what Wagner, with the ' complacency of a 
 demagogue,' has persuasively said to them. They have really 
 imagined themselves to be the ' artists of the future,' and we 
 have lived to see societies formed in many places in Germany 
 who wanted to build theatres of the future, and themselves to 
 perform works of the future in them ! And these societies were 
 joined not only by students or young commercial employes in 
 whom a certain propensity for acting plays comes as a malady 
 of adolescence, and who persuade themselves that they are 
 serving the ' ideal ' when with childish vanity and in grotesque 
 
 * Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtu'ngen. Leipzig, 1883, 
 Band X., p. 68.
 
 MYSTICISM .179 
 
 theatrical costume they gesticulate and declaim before their 
 touched and admiring relatives and acquaintances. Nay, old 
 burgesses, bald and bulky, abandoned their sacred skat, and 
 even the thrice-holy morning tankard, and prepared themselves 
 devoutly for noble dramatic achievements ! Since the memor- 
 able occasion on which Quince, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout, and 
 Starveling rehearsed their admirable Pyramus and Thisbe, the 
 world has seen no similar spectacle. Emotional shopkeepers 
 and enthusiastic counter-jumpers got Wagner's absurdities on 
 the brain, and the provincials and Philistines whom his joyful 
 message had reached actually set about with their united 
 strength to carry on the work of Goethe and Schiller, Mozart 
 and Beethoven. 
 
 In the passages quoted, in which, in the most used-up style 
 of Rousseau, he glorifies the masses, speaks of ' unnatural cul- 
 ture/ and calls ' modern civilization ' ' the cruel oppressor of 
 human nature,' Wagner betrays that mental condition which 
 the degenerate share with enlightened reformers, born criminals 
 with the martyrs of human progress, namely, deep, devouring 
 discontent with existing facts. This certainly shows itself other- 
 wise 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 remedies may 
 presuppose a better and wiser humanity than actually exists, but, 
 at least, they are capable of being defended on reasonable grounds. 
 The degenerate subject, 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 improvement, or hatches 
 astoundingly mad projects for making the world happy. His 
 fundamental frame of mind is persistent rage against everything 
 and everyone, which he displays in venomous phrases, savage 
 threats, and the destructive mania of wild beasts. Wagner is a 
 good specimen of this species. He would like to crush ' political 
 and criminal civilization,' as he expresses it. In what, however, does 
 the corruption of society and the untenableness of the condition 
 of everything reveal themselves to him ? In the fact that operas 
 are played with tripping airs, and ballets are performed ! And 
 how shall humanity attain its salvation ! By performing the 
 musical drama of the future ! It is to be hoped that no criticism 
 of this universal plan of salvation will be demanded of me. 
 
 Wagner is a declared anarchist. He distinctly develops the 
 teaching of this faction in the Art-work of the Future (p. 217) : 
 ''All men have but one common need . . . the need of living and 
 being happy. Herein lies the natural bond between all men. . . . 
 It is only the special needs which, according to time, place, and
 
 I8o DEGENERATION 
 
 individuality, make themselves known and increase, which in the 
 rational condition of future humanity can serve as a basis for 
 special associations. . . . These associations will change, will 
 take another form, dissolve and reconstitute themselves accord- 
 ing as those needs change and reappear.'* He does not conceal 
 the fact that this ' rational condition of future humanity ' can be 
 brought about only by force ' (p. 228). ' Necessity must force 
 us, too, through the Red Sea if we, purged of our shame, are to 
 reach the Promised Land. We shall not be drowned in it ; it is 
 destructive only to the Pharaolis of this world, who have once 
 already been swallowed up man and horse . . . the arrogant, 
 proud Pharaohs who then forgot that once a poor shepherd's 
 son with his shrewd advice had saved their land from starva- 
 tion.' 
 
 Together with this anarchistic acerbity, there is another 
 feeling that controls the entire conscious and unconscious 
 mental life of Wagner, viz., sexual emotion. He has been 
 throughout his life an erotic (in a psychiatric sense), and all his 
 ideas revolve about woman. The most ordinary incitements, 
 even those farthest removed from the province of the sexual 
 instinct, never fail to awaken in his consciousness voluptuous 
 images of an erotic character, and the bent of the automatic 
 association of ideas is in him always directed towards this pole 
 of his thought. In this connection let this passage be read 
 from the Art-work of the Future (p. 44), where he seeks to 
 demonstrate the relation between the art of dancing, music, and 
 poetry : ' In the contemplation of this ravishing dance of the 
 most genuine and noblest muses, of the artistic man [?], we now 
 see the three arm-in-arm lovingly entwined up to their necks ; 
 then this, then that one, detaching herself from the entwinement, 
 as if to display to the others her beautiful form in complete 
 separation, touching the hands of the others only with the 
 extreme tips of her fingers ; now the one, entranced by a back- 
 ward glance at the twin forms of her closely entwined sisters, 
 bending towards them ; then two. carried away by the allure- 
 ments of the one [!] greeting her in homage ; finally all, in close 
 embrace, breast to breast, limb to limb, in an ardent kiss of love, 
 coalescing in one blissfully living shape. This is the love and 
 life, the joy and wooing of art,' etc. (Observe the word-play : 
 Lieben und Leben, Freuen und Freien /) Wagfter here visibly 
 loses the thread of his argument ; he neglects what he really 
 wishes to say, and revels in the picture of the three dancing 
 
 * Compare also, in Das Biihnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth, 1882 (Gcsam- 
 melte Schriften, Band X., p. 384) : ' This [the ' sure rendering of all events 
 on, above, under, behind, and before the stage'] a'narchy accomplishes, 
 )>ecause each individual does what he wisJies to do, namely (?), what is 
 right'
 
 MYSTICISM 181 
 
 maidens, who have arisen before his mind's eye, following with 
 lascivious longing the outline of their forms and their seductive 
 movements. 
 
 The shameless sensuality which prevails in his dramatic 
 poems has impressed all his critics. Hanslick* speaks of the 
 'bestial sensuality' in Rheingold, and says of Siegfried: 'The 
 feverish accents, so much beloved by Wagner, of an insatiable 
 sensuality, blazing to the uttermost limits this ardent moan- 
 ing, sighing, crying, and sinking to the ground, move us with 
 repugnance. The text of these love-scenes becomes sometimes, 
 in its exuberance, sheer nonsense.' Compare in the first act of 
 the Walkure,"\ in the scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde, the 
 following stage directions : ' Hotly interrupting ' ; ' embraces her 
 with fiery passion ' ; ' in gentle ecstasy ' ; ' she hangs enraptured 
 upon his neck ' ; ' close to his eyes ' ; ' beside himself ; ' in the 
 highest intoxication,' etc. At the conclusion, it is said, ' The 
 curtain falls quickly,' and frivolous critics have not failed to per- 
 petrate the cheap witticism, ' Very necessary, too.' The amorous 
 whinings, whimperings and ravings of Tristan und Isolde, the 
 entire second act of Parsifal, in the scene between the hero and 
 the flower-girls, and then between him and Kundry in Klingsor's 
 magic garden, are worthy to rank with the above passages. It 
 certainly redounds to the high honour of German public morality, 
 that Wagner's operas could have been publicly performed with- 
 out arousing the greatest scandal. How unperverted must 
 wives and maidens be when they are in a state of mind to 
 witness these pieces without blushing crimson, and sinking into 
 the earth for shame ! How innocent must even husbands and 
 fathers be who allow their womankind to go to these repre- 
 sentations of ' lupanar ' incidents ! Evidently the German 
 audiences entertain no misgivings concerning the actions and 
 attitudes of Wagnerian personages ; they seem to have no 
 suspicion of the emotions by which they are excited, and what 
 intentions their words, gestures and acts denote ; and this 
 explains the peaceful artlessness with which these audiences 
 follow theatrical scenes during which, among a less childlike 
 public, no one would dare lift his eyes to his neighbour or 
 endure his glance. 
 
 With Wagner amorous excitement assumes the form of mad 
 delirium. The lovers in his pieces behave like tom-cats gone mad, 
 rolling in contortions and convulsions over a root of valerian. 
 They reflect a state of mind in the poet which is well known to 
 the professional expert. It is a form of Sadism. It is the IOVQ 
 of those degenerates who, in sexual transport, become like wild 
 
 * Edward Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen. Berlin, 1880, pp. 220, 243, 
 } Wagner, Gesannnclte Schriftcn und Diditungen, Band VI., p. ^Jf.
 
 J82 DEGENERATION 
 
 beasts.* Wagner suffered from 'erotic madness,' which leads 
 coarse natures to murder for lust, and inspires ' higher degene- 
 rates ' with works like Die Walkiire, Siegfried, and Tristan und 
 Isolde. 
 
 Wagner's graphomania is shown not only by the substance, 
 but also by the outward form of his writings. The reader will 
 have been able to remark in the quotations given what a mis- 
 use Wagner makes of italics. He often has whole half-pages 
 printed in spaced letters. Lombroso expressly establishes this 
 phenomenon among graphomaniacs.-f It is sufficiently explained 
 by the peculiarity of mystical thought, so often set forth in this 
 work. No linguistic form which the mystically degenerate subject 
 can give to his thought- phantoms satisfies him ; he is always con- 
 scious that the phrases he is writing do not express the mazy 
 processes of his brain ; and as he is forced to abandon the attempt 
 to embody these in words, he seeks, by means of notes of exclama- 
 tion, dashes, dots, and blanks, to impart to his writings more of 
 mystery than the words themselves can express. 
 
 The irresistible propensity to play on words another peculi- 
 arity of graphomaniacs and imbeciles is developed to a high 
 degree in Wagner. I will here give only a few examples from 
 the Art-work of the Future p. 56: 'Thus it [the science of 
 music] acquires through sound, which has become speech . . . 
 its most exalted satisfaction, and at the same time its most 
 satisfying exaltation' P. 91 : ' Like a second Prometheus, 
 who from Thon (clay) formed men, Beethoven had striven to 
 form them from Ton (music). Not from clay or music (Thon 
 or Ten), but from both of these substances, should man, the 
 image of Zeus, the dispenser of life, be created.' Special 
 attention may, however, be called to the following astounding 
 passage (p. 103): 'If fashion or custom permitted us again to 
 adopt, in speech and writing, the genuine and true use of 
 
 * In a book on degeneration it is not possible wholly to avoid the subject 
 of eroticism, which includes precisely the most characteristic and con- 
 spicuous phenomena of degeneration. I dwell, however, on principle as little 
 as possible on this subject, and will, therefore, in reference to the charac- 
 terization of Wagner's erotic madness, quote only one clinical work : Dr. 
 Paul Aubry, ' Observation d'Uxoricide et de LibeVicide suivis du Suicide du 
 Meurtrier,' Archives de I'Anthropologie criminelle, vol. vii., p. 326 : ' This 
 derangement [erotic madness] is characterized by an inconceivable fury of 
 concupiscence at the moment of approach.' And in a remark on the report 
 of a murder perpetrated on his wife and children by an erotic maniac a 
 professor of mathematics in a public school whom Aubrey had under his 
 observation, he says, ' Sa femme qui parlait facilement et a tous des choses 
 que 1'on tient ordinairement le plus secretes, disait que son mari dtait comme 
 un furieux pendant 1'acte sexueL' See also Ball, La Folie trotique. Paris, 
 1891, p. 127. 
 
 f Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 229 : 'When the expression of their 
 ideas eludes their grasp . . . they resort ... to the continual italicizing of 
 words and sentences,' etc.
 
 MYSTICISM 183 
 
 Tichten for DicJiten (to compose poetry), we should thus obtain, 
 in the united names of the three primitive human arts, Tans-, 
 Ton-, and Tichtkunst (dancing, music, and poetry), a beautifully 
 significant, sensuous image of the essence of this trinity of 
 sisters, viz., a perfect alliteration. . . . This alliteration would, 
 moreover, be peculiarly characteristic, on account of the position 
 held in it by Tichtkunst (poetry), for only as its last member 
 would Tichtkunst transform the alliteration into rhyme,' etc. 
 
 We now come to the mysticism of Wagner, which permeates 
 all his works, and has become one of the chief causes of his 
 influence over his contemporaries at least, outside Germany. 
 Although he is irreligious through and through, and frequently 
 attacks positive religions, their doctrines and their priests, there 
 have, nevertheless, remained active in him from childhood 
 {passed in an atmosphere of Christian Protestant views and 
 religious practices) ideas and sentiments which he subsequently 
 transformed so strangely in his degenerate mind. This phe- 
 nomenon, viz., the persistence, in the midst of later doubts and 
 denials, of early-acquired Christian views, operating as an ever- 
 active leaven, singularly altering the whole mind, and at the 
 same time themselves suffering manifold decomposition and 
 deformation may be frequently observed in confused brains. 
 We shall meet it, for example, in Ibsen. At the foundation of 
 all Wagner's poems and theoretical writings there is to be found 
 a more or less potent sediment of the Catechism, distorted as 
 to its doctrines ; and in his most luxuriant pictures, between 
 the thick, crude colours, we get glimpses of strange and hardly 
 recognisable touches, betraying the fact that the scenes are 
 brutally daubed on the pale background of Gospel reminis- 
 cences. 
 
 One idea, or, more accurately, one word, has remained espe- 
 cially deeply fixed in his mind, and pursued him throughout his 
 whole life as a real obsession, viz., the word ' redemption/ True, 
 it has not with him the value it possesses in the language of 
 theology. To the theologian ' redemption,' this central idea of the 
 whole Christian doctrine, signifies the sublime act of superhuman 
 love, which freely takes upon itself the greatest suffering, and 
 gladly bears it, that it may free from the power of evil those 
 whose strength is insufficient for such a task. So understood, 
 redemption presupposes three things. Firstly, we must assume 
 a dualism in nature, most distinctly developed in the Zend 
 religion ; the existence of a first principle of good and one of 
 evil, between which mankind is placed, and becomes the cause 
 of their strife. Secondly, the one who is to be redeemed must be 
 free from all conscious and wilful fault ; he must be the victim of 
 superior forces which he is himself incapable of warding off. 
 Thirdly in order that the redeemer's act may be a true act of
 
 j84 DEGENERATION 
 
 salvation and acquire power to deliver, he must, in the fulfilment 
 of a clearly recognised and purposed mission, offer himself in 
 sacrifice. It is true that a tendency has often asserted itself to 
 think of redemption as an act of grace, in which not only the 
 victims, but also sinners, may participate ; but the Church has 
 always recognised the immorality of such a conception, and has 
 expressly taught that, in order to receive redemption, the guilty- 
 must himself strive for it, through repentance and penance, and 
 not passively await it as a completely unmerited gift. 
 
 This theological redemption is not redemption in Wagner's 
 sense. With him it has never any clearly recognisable import, 
 and serves only to denote something beautiful and grand, which. 
 he does not more closely specify. At the outset the word has 
 evidently made a deep impression on his imagination, and 
 he subsequently uses it like a minor chord, let us say a, c, e, 
 which is likewise without definite significance, but, nevertheless, 
 awakens emotion and peoples consciousness with floating presen- 
 tations. With Wagner someone is constantly being ' redeemed.* 
 If (in the Art-work of the Future) the art of painting ceases to 
 paint pictures, and produces thenceforth only decorations for the 
 theatre, this is its ' redemption.' In the same way the music 
 accompanying a poem is a ' redeemed ' music. Man is ' re- 
 deemed ' when he loves a woman, and the people is ' redeemed ' 
 when it plays at the drama. His compositions also turn upon 
 'redemption. Nietsche* has already remarked this, and makes 
 merry over it, if with repulsively superficial witticisms. ' Wagner/ 
 he says, ' has meditated on nothing so much as on redemption * 
 (a wholly false assertion, since Wagner's redemption-twaddle 
 is certainly no result of meditation, but only a mystical echo of 
 childish emotions) ; ' his opera is the opera of redemption. 
 With him someone is always wanting to be redeemed now a 
 male, now a female. . . . Who, if not Wagner, teaches us that 
 innocence has a predilection for redeeming interesting sinners 
 (the case of Tannhauser)? Or that even the Wandering Jew will 
 be redeemed and become sedentary when he marries (the case of 
 The Flying Dutchman} ? Or that depraved old wantons prefer 
 to be redeemed by chaste youths (the case of Kundry}^ Or 
 that beauteous maidens like best to be redeemed by a knight 
 who is a Wagnerian (the case in Meister singer) ? Or that even 
 married women like to be redeemed by a knight" (the case of 
 Isolde) ? Or that the ancient god, after having morally com- 
 promised himself in every respect, is redeemed by a free-thinker 
 and an immoral character (the case in the Niebelungen) ? How 
 particularly admirable is this last profundity ! Do you under- 
 stand it ? As for me, defend me from understanding it.' 
 
 The work of Wagner which may be truly termed ' the opera 
 * Friedrich Nietsche, Dcr Full IVagner. Leipzig, 1889.
 
 MYSTICISM 185 
 
 f redemption ' is Parsifal. Here we may catch Wagner's mind 
 in its most nonsensical vagaries. In Parsifal two persons 
 are redeemed : King Amfortas and Kundry. The King has 
 allowed himself to become infatuated with the charms of 
 Kundry, and has sinned in her arms. As a punishment, the 
 magic spear which had been entrusted to him has been taken 
 from him, and he wounded by this sacred weapon. The wound 
 gapes and bleeds unceasingly, and causes him dreadful suffering. 
 Nothing can heal it but the spear itself which gave it. But ' the 
 pure fool who through compassion knows ' can alone wrest the 
 spear from the wicked magician, Klingsor. Kundry, when a 
 young maiden, had seen the Saviour on the path of his Passion, 
 and had laughed at him. As a penalty for her act she is 
 doomed to live for ever, longing in vain for death, and seducing 
 to sin all men who approach her. Only if a man is able to 
 resist her allurements can she be redeemed from her curse. 
 (One man has, in fact, resisted her, the magician Klingsor. 
 Yet this victorious resistance has not redeemed her as it ought. 
 Why ? Wagner does not reveal this by a single syllable.) It 
 is Parsifal who brings redemption to the two accursed ones. 
 The ' pure fool ' has no inkling that he is predestined to redeem 
 Amfortas and Kundry, and he neither undergoes any suffering 
 nor exposes himself to any serious danger in accomplishing the 
 act of salvation. It is true that, in forcing his way into the en- 
 chanted garden, he is obliged to have a small bout with its 
 knights, but this skirmish is far more a pleasure than an effort 
 for him, for he is far stronger than his adversaries, and, after 
 some playful passes, puts them to flight, bleeding and beaten. 
 He certainly resists the beauty of Kundry, and this is meri- 
 torious, yet it hardly constitutes an act of deadly self-sacrifice. 
 He obtains the magic spear without any effort. Klingsor hurls 
 it at him to slay him, but the weapon ' remains floating above 
 his head,' and Parsifal has only to stretch out his hand to take 
 it at his convenience, and then to fulfil his mission. 
 
 Every individual feature of this mystical piece is in direct 
 contrast to the Christian idea of redemption, which has never- 
 theless inspired it. Amfortas is in need of redemption through 
 his own weakness and guilt, not on account of an invincible 
 fate, and he is redeemed without any assistance on his part 
 beyond whining and moaning. The salvation he is awaiting 
 and ultimately obtains has its source completely outside his will 
 and consciousness. He has no part in its attainment. Another 
 effects it for him, and bestows it on him as a gift. The re- 
 demption is a purely external affair, a lucky windfall, and not the 
 reward of an inward moral struggle. Still more monstrous are the 
 conditions of Kundry's redemption. Not only is she not allowed 
 to labour for her own salvation, but she is compelled to employ
 
 186 DEGENERATION 
 
 all her strength to prevent it ; for her redemption depends on 
 her being despised by a man, and the task to which she has 
 been condemned is to turn to account all the seductive power of 
 beauty and passionate solicitation to win over the man. She 
 must by all possible means thwart the man by whom her re- 
 demption is to come, from becoming her redeemer. If the 
 man yields to her charms, then the redemption is frustrated, not 
 through her fault, though by her action ; if the man resists the 
 temptation, she obtains redemption without deserving it, because 
 in spite of her opposing effort. It is impossible to concoct a 
 situation more absurd and at the same time more immoral. 
 Parsifal the redeemer is, in fine, from beginning to end, a mystic 
 re-incarnation of ' Hans in Luck ' in the German fairy-tale. 
 He succeeds in everything without personal effort. He sets out 
 to kill a swan, and finds the Grail and the royal crown. His 
 redeemership is no self-sacrifice, but a benefice. The favour of 
 Heaven has called him to an enviable, honourable office on 
 what powerful recommendation Wagner does not disclose. But 
 a closer examination reveals worse things. Parsifal, the ' pure 
 fool,' is simply a precipitate of confused reminiscences of Chris- 
 tology. Powerfully struck by the poetical elements of the 
 Saviour's life and sufferings, Wagner has been impelled to ex- 
 ternalize his impressions and emotions, and has created Parsifal, 
 whom he causes to experience some of the most affecting scenes 
 of the Gospel, and who in his hands becomes (partly, perhaps, 
 without his being aware of it) at once a foolish and frivolous cari- 
 cature of Jesus Christ. In the mystical work, the temptation of 
 the Saviour in the desert is transformed into the temptation of 
 Parsifal by Kundry. The scene in the Pharisee's house, where 
 the Magdalene anoints the Saviour's feet, is reproduced exactly : 
 Kundry bathes and anoints Parsifal's feet, and dries them with 
 her unbound hair ; and the ' pure fool ' plagiarizes the words of 
 Christ, ' Thy sins be forgiven thee,' in this exclamation : ' Thus 
 I accomplish my first office; be baptized and believe on the 
 Redeemer.' That the ordinary theatre-goer is not shocked by 
 this misused application of the Christ legend nay, that in the 
 distorted fragments of the Gospel he is able to revive some of 
 the emotions it perhaps at one time excited in him is con- 
 ceivable. But it is incomprehensible that earnest believers, and 
 especially zealous fanatics, have never perceived what a profana- 
 tion of their most sacred ideas is perpetrated by Wagner, when 
 he endows his Parsifal with traits of the Christ Himself. 
 
 We may mention only one of the other absurd details of the 
 Parsifal. The aged Titurel has succumbed to the earthly penalty 
 of death, but through the Saviour's mercy continues to live in the 
 grave. The sight of the Grail continually renews for a time his 
 waning vital strength. Titurel seems to attach a great value to
 
 MYSTICISM 187 
 
 this comfortless life-in-dcath existence. ' By the mercy of the 
 Saviour I live in the tomb,' he joyously cries from his coffin, 
 demanding with impetuous vehemence that the Grail be shown 
 him, in order that his life may thereby be prolonged. 'Am I 
 to-day to see once more the Grail and live ?' he asks in anguish, 
 and because he receives no immediate ans\ver thus laments, 
 'Must I die unaccompanied by the Deliverer?' His son, 
 Amfortas, hesitates, whereupon the old man gives his orders : 
 ' Unveil the Grail ! The benediction !' And when his wishes 
 are complied with, he exults : ' Oh, sacred bliss ! How bright 
 the Lord doth greet us to-day !' Subsequently Amfortas has 
 for some time neglected the unveiling of the Grail, and hence 
 Titurel has had to die. Amfortas is in despair. ' My father ! 
 highly blessed of heroes !...!, who alone was fain to die, to 
 thee have I given death !' From all this it undoubtedly results 
 that all the persons concerned see in life, even if it be the 
 shadowy and empty life of a being already laid in his coffin, 
 an exceedingly precious possession, and in death a bitter mis- 
 fortune. And this takes place in the same piece in which 
 Kundry endures eternal life as a frightful curse, and passionately 
 longs for death as a most delicious salvation! Is a more ridicu- 
 lous contradiction conceivable ? Moreover, the Titurel episode 
 is a denial of all the premises of Parsifal, constructed as it is 
 on the foundation of the religious idea of personal persistence 
 after death. How can death frighten the man who is convinced 
 that the bliss of paradise awaits him ? We are here in the 
 presence of the same non-comprehension of his own assumptions 
 which has already struck us in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and 
 Tolstoi. But this is precisely the peculiarity of morbidly mystic 
 thought. It unites mutually exclusive ideas ; it shuns the law 
 of consistency, and imperturbably combines details which are 
 dumfounded at finding themselves in company. We do not 
 observe this phenomenon in one who is a mystic through igno- 
 rance, mental indolence, or imitation. He may take an absurd 
 idea as a point of departure for a train of thought ; but 
 the latter unrolls itself rationally and consistently, and suffers 
 no gross contradiction among its particular members. 
 
 As Christology inspired Wagner with the figures of Parsifal, 
 so did the Eucharist inspire him with the most effective scene 
 of the piece the love-feast of the Graii. It is the mise-en-scene 
 of the Catholic Mass, with the heretical addition of one 
 Protestant feature the partaking by the communicants of the 
 elements in both kinds. The unveiling of the Grail corresponds 
 to the elevation of the Host. The acolytes take the form of the 
 choir of boys and youths. In the antiphonal songs and the 
 actions of Amfortas, we find approximations to all four parts of 
 the Mass. The knights of the Grail intone a sort of stunted
 
 188 DEGENERATION 
 
 introit, the long plaint of Amfortas : ' No ! Let it not be un- 
 veiled ! Oh, may no one, no one, fathom the depths of this 
 torment !' etc., may be regarded as a Confiteor. The boys sing 
 the offertory (' Take ye my blood for the sake of our love !' etc.). 
 Amfortas proceeds to the consecration ; all partake in the 
 Communion, and there is even a parodied reminiscence of the 
 ' Ite, missa est ' in Gurnemanz's exclamation, ' Go out hence 
 upon thy way 1' Since Constantine the Great, since the eleva- 
 tion of Christianity to the rank of a State religion, no poet has 
 dared do what Wagner has done ; he has drawn theatrical 
 effects from the incomparable rich emotional content of the 
 function of the Mass. He felt profoundly the symbolism of the 
 Lord's Supper ; it provoked in him a powerful mystical excite- 
 ment, and the need arose in him of endowing the symbolical 
 event with a dramatic form, and of sensuously experiencing in 
 all its details and in its entirety that which in the sacrifice of 
 the Mass is only indicated, condensed, and spiritualized. He 
 wished to see and feel in his own person how the elect enjoy, 
 amid violent emotions, the body of Christ and His redeeming- 
 blood ; and how super-terrestrial phenomena, the purple gleam- 
 ing of the Grail and the downward hovering dove (in the final 
 scene), etc., make palpable the real presence of Christ and the 
 divine nature of the Eucharist. Just as Wagner has borrowed 
 from the Church his inspiration for the scenes in the Grail, and 
 then for his own purposes has popularized the liturgy in the 
 style of the Biblia Pauperum, so does the audience find again 
 the cathedral and high mass on his stage, and import into the 
 piece all the emotions left in their soul by Church ceremonies. 
 The real priest in his sacerdotal robes, the remembrance of his 
 gestures, of the hand-bell and the genuflexions of the servers, 
 the blue reek and perfume of the incense, the pealing of the 
 organ and the play of chequered sunlight through the stained 
 windows of the church these are, in the heart of the public, 
 Wagner's collaborators ; and it is not his art which lulls them 
 into mystic ecstasy, but the fundamental mood inculcated in 
 the vast majority of white races by two centuries of Christian 
 sentiment. 
 
 Mysticism is, as we know, always accompanied by eroticism, 
 especially in the degenerate, whose emotionalism has its chief 
 source in morbidly excited states of the sexual centres. 
 Wagner's imagination is perpetually occupied with woman. 
 But he never sees her relation to man in the form of healthy 
 and natural love, which is a benefit and satisfaction for both 
 lovers. As with all morbid erotics (we have already re- 
 marked this in Verlaine and Tolstoi), woman presents herself 
 to him as a terrible force of nature, of which man is the 
 trembling, helpless victim. The woman that he knows is the
 
 MYSTICISM 189 
 
 gruesome Astatic* of the Semites, the frightful man-eating Kali 
 Bhagawati of the Hindoos, an apocalyptic vision of smiling 
 blood-thirstiness, of eternal perdition and infernal torment, in 
 demoniacally beautiful embodiment. No poetical problem has 
 so profoundly moved him as the relation between man and this 
 his ensnaring destroyer. He has approached this problem from 
 all sides, and has given it different solutions corresponding to 
 his instincts and views of morality. The man frequently 
 succumbs to the temptress, but Wagner revolts against this 
 weakness, of which he is himself only too conscious, and in his 
 chief works makes the man offer a desperate, but finally 
 victorious, resistance. Not, however, by his own strength does 
 man tear himself from the paralyzing charm of woman. He 
 must receive supernatural aid. This proceeds most frequently 
 from a pure and unselfish virgin, who forms the antithesis to the 
 sphinx with soft woman's body and lion's paws. In conformity 
 with the psychological law of contrast, Wagner invents as a 
 counterpart to the terrible woman of his inmost perception an 
 angelic woman, who is all love, all devotion, all celestial mildness ; 
 a woman who asks for nothing and gives all ; a woman soothing, 
 caressing and healing; in a word, a woman for whom an un- 
 happy creature pants as he writhes, consumed by flames, in the 
 white-hot flames of Belit. Wagner's Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, 
 and Gertrude are extremely instructive manifestations of erotic 
 mysticism, in which the half- unconscious idea is struggling 
 for form, viz , that the safety of the sexually crazy degenerate 
 lies in purity, continence, or in the possession of a wife having 
 no sort of individuality, no desire and no rights, and hence in- 
 capable of ever proving dangerous to the man. 
 
 In one of his first compositions, as in his last, in Tannhauser 
 as in Parsifal, he treats of the combat between man and his 
 corruptress, the fly versus the spider, and in this way testifies 
 that for thirty-three years, from youth to old age, the subject 
 has never been absent from his mind. In Tannhauser it is the 
 beautiful devil Venus herself who ensnares the hero, and with 
 whom he has to wage a desperate conflict for the salvation of his 
 soul. The pious and chaste Elizabeth, this dream-being, woven 
 of moonlight, prayer, and song, becomes his 'redeemer.' In 
 Parsifal the beautiful devil is named Kundry, and the hero 
 escapes the danger with which she threatens his soul only 
 because he is * the pure fool,' and is in a state of grace. 
 
 In the Walkilre Wagner's imagination surrenders itself to un- 
 bridled passion. He here represents the ardent man wildly and 
 madly abandoning himself to his appetite, without regard to the 
 dictates of society, and without attempting to resist the furious 
 impetuosity of his instinct. Siegmund sees Sieglinde, and 
 thenceforth has but one idea to possess her. That she is
 
 igo -DEGENERATION 
 
 another's wife nay, that he recognises her as his own sister 
 does not check him for a moment. Those considerations are as 
 feathers before the storm. He pays for his night of pleasure by 
 his death the following morning. For with Wagner love is always 
 a fatality, and ever round its pillow blaze the flames of hell. And 
 as he has not made manifest in Sieglinde the images of carnage 
 and annihilation evoked in him by his idea of woman, he personi- 
 fies these separately in the Walkure. Their appearance in the 
 drama is for him a psychological need. The traits inseparable 
 in his mind from his conception of woman, and ordinarily 
 united by him in a single figure, are here separated and raised 
 to the dignity of independent types. Venus, Kundry, are seducer 
 and destroyer in one person. In the Walkure Sieglinde is only 
 the seducer, but the destroyer grows into a horde of gruesome 
 Amazons, who drink the blood of battling men, revel in the 
 spectacle of murderous blows, and rush with wild, exulting cries 
 across the corpse-strewn waste. 
 
 Siegfried, Gotterdammenmg, Tristan und Isolde are exact 
 repetitions of the essential content of the Walkure. It is always 
 the dramatic embodiment of the same obsession of the terrors of 
 love. Siegfried sees Brunhilde in the midst of her fire-circle, 
 and both instantly fall into each other's arms in a rage of love ; 
 but Siegfried must expiate his happiness with his life, and falls 
 under the steel of Hagen. The mere death of Siegfried does 
 not suffice for Wagner's imagination as the inevitable conse- 
 quence of love ; destiny must show itself more terribly. The 
 castle of Asgard itself breaks out in flames, and the slave of 
 love in dying drags to his own perdition all the gods cf heaven 
 along with him. Tristan und Isolde is the echo of this tragedy of 
 passion. Here also is the complete annihilation of the sentiment 
 of duty and self-conquest, by the springing up of love both in 
 Tristan and Isolde ; and here also is death as the natural end 
 towards which love is hurried. To express his fundamental 
 mystic thought, that love is an awful fatality wherewith the un- 
 approachable powers of destiny visit the poor mortal incapable 
 of resistance, he has resort to a childishly clumsy device ; he 
 introduces into his compositions love-philtres of potent spell, 
 now to explain the birth of the passion itself, and to indicate its 
 superhuman nature, as in Tristan und Isolde; now to withdraw 
 all the moral life of the hero from the control of his will, and 
 show him as the plaything of super-terrestrial forces, as in the 
 Cotter dam me rung. 
 
 Thus Wagner's poems give us a deep insight into the world of 
 ideas of an erotically emotional degenerate nature. They reveal 
 the alternating mental conditions of a most reckless sensuality, of 
 a revolt of moral sentiment against the tyranny of appetite, of the 
 ruin of the higher man and his despairing repentance. As has
 
 MYSTICISM 191 
 
 already been said, Wagner is an admirer of Schopenhauer and 
 his philosophy. Like his master, he persuaded himself that life 
 is a misfortune, and non-existence salvation and happiness. 
 Love, as the constantly active incitement to the maintenance of 
 the species and continuance of life, with all its accompanying 
 sufferings, was bound to seem to him the source of all evil; and, 
 on the other hand, the highest wisdom and morality, to consist 
 in the victorious resistance of this incitement, in chastity, 
 sterility, the negation of the will to perpetuate the species. 
 And while his judgment bound him to these views, his instincts 
 attracted him irresistibly to woman, and forced him during his 
 whole life to do all that flouted his convictions and condemned 
 his doctrine. This discord between his philosophy and his 
 organic inclinations is the inner tragedy of his mental life, and 
 his poems form a unique whole, recounting the process of the 
 internal conflict. He sees a woman, at once loses himself, and 
 is absorbed in her charms (Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried 
 and Brunhilde, Tristan and Isolde). This is a great sin, de- 
 manding expiation ; death alone is an adequate punishment 
 (final scenes in the Walkure, Gotterdammerung, Tristan und 
 Isolde], But the sinner has a timid and feeble excuse : ' I could 
 not resist. I was the victim of superhuman powers. My 
 seducer was of the race of the gods' (Sieglinde, Brunhilde). 
 * Magic philtres deprived me of my reason ' (Tristan, Siegfried 
 in his relations with Gutrune). How glorious to be strong 
 enough to vanquish the devouring morister of appetite within ! 
 How radiant and exalted the figure of a man able to plant his 
 foot on the neck of the demon woman ! (Tannhauser and 
 Parsifal). And, on the other hand, how beautiful and adorable 
 the woman who should not set ablaze the hell-fire of passion in 
 man, but aid him in quenching it ; who should not exact of him 
 a revolt against reason, duty, and honour, but be an example to 
 him of renunciation and self-discipline ; who, instead of enslav- 
 ing him, should, as his loving handmaid, divest herself of her 
 own nature, to blend herself with his ; in a word, a woman who 
 would leave him safe in his defencelessness, because she herself 
 would be unarmed ! (Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, Gutrune). The 
 creation of these forms of woman is a sort of De Profundis of 
 the timid voluptuary, who feels the sting of the flesh, and im- 
 plores aid to protect him from himself. 
 
 Like all the degenerates, Wagner is wholly sterile as a poet, 
 although he has written a long series of dramatic works. The 
 creative force capable of reproducing the spectacle of universal 
 normal life is denied him. He has recourse to his own mystico- 
 erotic emotions for the emotional content of his pieces, and the 
 external incidents forming their skeleton are purely the fruits of 
 reading, the reminiscences of books which have made an im-
 
 192 DEGENERATION 
 
 pression on him. This is the great difference between the 
 healthy and the degenerate poet who receives his sentiments at 
 second-hand. The former is able to ' plunge into full human 
 life,' as Goethe says ; to seize it, and either make it enter all 
 breathing and palpitating into a poem which itself thus becomes a 
 part of natural life, or else remould it with idealizing art, suppress- 
 ing its accidental, accessory features, so as to make prominent 
 the essential ; and in this way convincingly to reveal law behind 
 enigmatically bewildering phenomena. The degenerate subject, 
 on the contrary, can do nothing with life ; he is blind and deaf 
 to it. He is a stranger in the midst of healthy men. He lacks 
 the organs necessary for the comprehension of life nay, even 
 for its perception. To work from a model does not lie within 
 his powers. He can only copy existing sketches, and then 
 colour them subjectively with his own emotions. He can see 
 life only when it lies before him on paper in black and white. 
 While the healthy poet resembles the chlorophyllic plant, which 
 dives into the soil, and, by the honest labour of its own roots, 
 procures for itself the nutritive materials out of which it con- 
 structs its blossoms and fruit, the degenerate poet has the nature 
 of a parasitic plant, which can only live on a host, and receives its 
 nutriment exclusively from the juices already elaborated by the 
 latter. There are modest parasites and proud parasites. Their 
 range extends from the insignificant lichen to the wondrous 
 rafflesia, the flower of which, a yard in breadth, illumines the 
 sombre forests of Sumatra with the wild magnificence of its blood- 
 red colour. Wagner's poems have in them something of the carrion 
 stench and uncanny beauty of this plant of rapine and corrup- 
 tion. With the single exception of the Meistersinger, they are 
 grafted on the Icelandic sagas, the epics of Gottfried of Strass- 
 burg, Wolfram of Eschenbach, and the singer of the Wartburg 
 \var in the Manessian manuscript, as on so many trunks of half- 
 dead trees, and they draw their strength from these. Tann- 
 hduser, the Niebelnngen Tetralogy, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, 
 and Lohengrin, are constructed entirely from materials supplied 
 him by ancient literature. Rienzi\\z derives from written history, 
 and the Fliegender Hollander from the tradition already utilized 
 a hundred times. Among popular legends, that of the Wandering 
 Jew has made the deepest impression on his mind, on account 
 of its mysticism. He has elaborated it once in -the Fliegender 
 Hollander ; a second time transposed it feature for feature into 
 a feminine form in the person of Kundry, not without weaving 
 into this inversion some reminiscences of the legend of Herodias. 
 All this is patchwork and dilettantism. Wagner deceives himself 
 (probably unconsciously) as to his incapacity for creating human 
 beings, representing, not men, but gods and demigods, demons 
 and spectres, whose deeds are not to be explained by human
 
 MYSTICISM 193 
 
 motives, but by mysterious destinies, curses and prophecies, 
 fatal and magic forces. That which passes before our eyes in 
 Wagner's pieces is not life, but spectres, witches' sabbaths, or 
 dreams. He is a dealer in old clothes, who has bought at 
 second-hand the cast-off garments of fairy-tales, and makes of 
 them (often not without clever tailoring) new costumes, in which 
 we may recognise, strangely jumbled and joined, rags of ancient 
 gala stuffs and fragments of damascened suits of armour. But 
 these masquerading suits do not serve for clothes to a single 
 being of flesh and blood. Their apparent movements are pro- 
 duced exclusively by the hand of Wagner, who has slipped into 
 the empty doublets and sleeves, and behind the flowing trains 
 and dangling robes, and kicks about in them with epileptic con- 
 vulsions, that he may awaken in the spectator the impression of 
 a ghostly animation in this obsolete wardrobe. 
 
 Healthy geniuses have also, no doubt, allied themselves 
 with popular tradition or history, like Goethe in Faiist and 
 Tasso. But what a difference between the respective treatment by 
 a healthy poet and a degenerate one of that which they find, of 
 that which is given ! To the former it is a vessel which he fills 
 with genuine, fresh life, so that the new contents become the 
 essential part ; to the latter, on the contrary, the outside is and 
 remains the chief thing, and his own activity consists at best in 
 choking the receptacle with the chaff of nonsensical phrases. 
 The great poets, too, lay claim to the cuckoo's privilege of 
 laying their egg in a strange nest. But the bird which issues 
 from the egg is so much larger, handsomer and stronger than 
 the original denizens, that the latter are mercilessly driven from 
 their home and the former remains the sole possessor. When 
 the great poet puts his new wine into old bottles, he doubtless 
 shows a little indolence, a little poverty of invention and a 
 not very high-minded reckoning on the reader's pre-existing 
 emotions. But he cannot be held too rigorously accountable for 
 this small amount of stinginess, because, after all, he gives us so 
 much that is his own. Imagine Faust deprived of all the por- 
 tions drawn from old popular books ; there would still remain 
 nearly everything ; there would remain all of the man who 
 thirsts for knowledge and seeks for it ; all the struggle between 
 his baser instincts craving for satisfaction, and the higher 
 morality rejoicing in renunciation ; in brief, just that which 
 makes the work one of the loftiest poems of humanity. If, on 
 the other hand, Wagner's old ancestral marionettes are stripped 
 of their armour and brocades, there remains nothing, or, at best, 
 only air and a musty smell. Assimilating minds have hundreds 
 of times felt tempted to modernize Faust. The undertaking is so 
 sure of success that it is superfluous ; Faust in dress-coat would 
 be no other than the unaltered embodiment of Goethe's own 
 
 13
 
 ,Q4 DEGENERATION 
 
 Faust. But imagine Lohengrin, Siegmund, Tristan, Parsifal, 
 as contemporaries ! They would not even serve for burlesque, 
 in spite of the Tannhauscr lampoon by the old Viennese poet 
 Kestroy. 
 
 Wagner swaggered about the art-work of the future, and his 
 partisans hailed him as the artist of the future. He the artist 
 of the future ! He is a bleating echo of the far-away past. His 
 path leads back to deserts long since abandoned by all life. 
 Wagner is the last mushroom on the dunghill of romanti- 
 cism. This ' modern ' is the degraded heir of a Tieck, of a 
 La Motte-Fouque' nay more, sad to say, of a Johann Friedrich 
 Kind. The home of his intellect is the Dresden evening paper. 
 He derives his subsistence from the legacy of mediaeval poems, 
 and dies of starvation when the remittance from the thirteenth 
 century fails to arrive. 
 
 The subject alone of the Wagnerian poems can raise a claim 
 to serious consideration. As for their form, it is beneath criti- 
 cism. The absurdity of his style, his shallowness, the awkward- 
 ness of his versification, his complete inability to clothe his feel- 
 ings and thoughts in anything like adequate language these 
 have been so often pointed out and exposed in detail that I may 
 spare myself the trouble of dwelling on these points. But one 
 faculty among the essential constituents of dramatic endowment 
 cannot be denied him that of picturesque imagination. It is 
 developed in him to the point of genius. Wagner as a dramatist 
 is really a historical painter of the highest rank. Nietzsche (in his 
 skit, Der Fall Wagner*) perhaps means the same when, without 
 stopping at this important assertion, he calls Wagner, not only 
 'magnetizer'and ' collector of gew-gaws,' but also a 'fresco-painter.' 
 This he is in a degree never yet attained by any other dramatic 
 author in the whole world of literature. Every action embodies 
 itself for him in a series of most imposing pictures, which, when 
 they are composed as Wagner has seen them with his inner eye, 
 must overwhelm and enrapture the beholder. The reception of 
 the guests in the hall of the Wartburg ; the arrival and departure 
 of Lohengrin in the boat drawn by the swan ; the gambols of 
 the Rhine maidens in the river ; the defiling of the gods over 
 the rainbow-bridge towards the castle of Asgard ; the bursting 
 of the moonlight into Hunding's hut ; the ride of the Walkiire 
 over the battlefield ; Brunhilde in the circle of fire ; the final 
 scene in Gotterddmmerung, where Brunhilde flings herself on to 
 her horse and leaps into the midst of the funeral-pyre, while 
 Hagen throws himself into the surging Rhine, and the heavens 
 are aflame with the glow from the burning palace of the gods ; the 
 love-feast of the knights in the castle of the Grail ; the obsequies 
 of Titurel and the healing of Amfortas these are pictures to 
 
 * Der Fall Wagner. Ein Musikanlen-Problcm. 2 t "Auflage. Leipzig, 1889.
 
 MYSTICISM 195 
 
 vhich nothing hitherto in art approaches. It is on account of 
 this gift for inventing incomparably imposing spectacles that 
 Nietzsche has termed Wagner a ' comedian.' The word signifies 
 nothing, and, in so far as it may contain a tinge of contempt, is 
 unjust. Wagner is no comedian, but a born painter. If he had 
 been a healthy genius, endowed with intellectual equilibrium, 
 that is what he would undoubtedly have become. His inner 
 vision would have forced the brush into his hand, and con- 
 strained him to realize it on canvas, by means of colour. 
 Leonardo da Vinci had the same gift. It made him the greatest 
 painter the world had yet known, and at the same time the 
 unsurpassed deviser and organizer of fetes, pageants, triumphs, 
 and allegorical plays, which, perhaps more than his genius as 
 a painter, won for him the admiration of his princely patrons 
 Ludovico Moro, Isabella of Aragon, Caesar Borgia, Charles VIII., 
 Louis XII., Francis I. But Wagner, as is the case with all 
 the degenerate, did not see clearly into his own nature. He did 
 not understand his natural impulses. Perhaps also, with the 
 feeling of his own deep organic feebleness, he dreaded the heavy 
 labour of drawing and painting, and, conformably with the law 
 of least effort, his instinct sought vent in the theatre, where his 
 inner visions were embodied by others the decorative painters, 
 machinists, and actors without requiring him to exert himself. 
 His pictures have unquestionably a large share in the effect 
 produced by his pieces. They are admired without an inquiry 
 into how far th.eir introduction is warranted by the rational course 
 of the drama. However nonsensical as part of an action, they 
 justify their appearance, from an artistic standpoint, by their 
 intrinsic beauty, which makes of them independent aesthetical 
 phenomena. Through their enormous aggrandizement by the 
 media of the stage, their pictorial allurements are perceptible 
 even to the eye of the most crass Philistine, whose sense were 
 otherwise dead to them. 
 
 Of Wagner the musician, more important to all appearance 
 than Wagner the author, dramatic poet and fresco-painter, I 
 treat lastly, because this task will give us a clear proof of his 
 degeneration, although this is very much more evident in his 
 writings than in his music, where certain stigmata of degeneration 
 are not so prominent, and where others appear as its un- 
 mistakable advantages. The incoherence in words, noticeable 
 at once to an attentive person, does not exhibit itself in music 
 unless it is excessively strongly marked ; the absurdity, the con- 
 tradictions, the twaddle, are hardly apparent in the language of 
 tones, because it is not the function of music to express an exact 
 meaning, and emotionalism is not in it an. indication of disease, 
 since emotion is music's proper essence. 
 
 We know, moreover, that high musical talent is compatible
 
 196 DEGENERATION 
 
 with a very advanced state of degeneration nay, even with pro- 
 nounced delusion, illusion, and idiocy. Sollier* says : ' We have 
 to deal with certain aptitudes very often manifested with great 
 intensity by idiots and imbeciles. . . . That for music especially 
 is often met with. . . . Although this may seem disagreeable 
 to musicians, it nevertheless proves that music is the least in- 
 tellectual of all the arts.' Lombroso-f- remarks : ' It has been 
 observed that the aptitude for music has been displayed almost 
 involuntarily and unexpectedly among many sufferers from 
 hypochondria and mania, and even among the really insane.' 
 He cites, with other cases, a mathematician attacked with 
 melancholia, who improvised on the piano ; a woman seized 
 with megalomania, who ' sang very beautiful airs, at the same 
 time improvising two different themes on the piano"; a patient 
 ' who composed very beautiful new and melodious tunes,' etc. ; 
 and he adds in explanation that those who are afflicted with 
 megalomania and general paralysis surpass other mental invalids 
 in musical talent, 'and from the very same cause as that of their 
 unusual aptitude for painting, viz., their violent mental excitation.' 
 Wagner the musician encounters his most powerful attacks 
 from musicians themselves. He himself bears witness to it :J 
 ' Both my friends (Ferd. Hiller and Schumann) believed that they 
 very soon discovered me to be a musician of no remarkable en- 
 dowment. My success also has seemed to them to be due to the 
 libretti written by myself.' In other language, the same old story 
 musicians regarded him as a poet, and poets as a musician. 
 It is of course convenient to explain a posteriori the decisive 
 judgments of men who were at once prominent professionals 
 and sincere friends of Wagner by saying (after he had attained 
 success) that his tendency was too novel to be immediately 
 appreciated, or even understood, by them. This solution, how- 
 ever, hardly applies to Schumann, as he was a friend to all 
 innovations, and audacities, even differing from his own, rather 
 attracted than shocked him. Rubinstein still makes important 
 reservations in regard to Wagner's music ; and among serious 
 contemporary musical critics who have witnessed the birth, 
 development and triumph of the Wagner cult, Hanslick re- 
 mained a long time recalcitrant, until at last, though not very 
 valiantly, he struck his colours in face of the overpowering fanati- 
 cism of hysterical Wagnerphiles. What Nietzsche (in his Der 
 Fall Wagner) says against Wagner as a musician is unimportant, 
 since the brochure of abjuration is quite as insanely delirious as 
 
 * Sollier, op. cit., p. 101. 
 J Lombroso, Genie und frrsz'nn, p. 214 et seg. 
 I Wagner, Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 222. 
 
 Rubinstein, Musiciens modernes. Traduit du russe par M. Delines. 
 Paris, 1892.
 
 MYSTICISM 197 
 
 the brochure of deification ( Wagner in BayrentJi) written twelve 
 years before. 
 
 In spite of the unfavourable judgments of many of his profes- 
 sional brethren, Wagner is incontestably an eminently gifted 
 musician. This coolly-expressed recognition will certainly seem 
 grotesque to Wagnerian fanatics, who place him above Beethoven. 
 But a serious inquirer into truth need not trouble himself about the 
 impressions provoked by Wagner among these persons. In the 
 first period of his productivity Wagner much oftener achieved 
 -compositions of beauty than subsequently, and among these 
 many may be termed pearls of musical literature, and will for a 
 Jong time enjoy even the esteem of serious and rational people. 
 But Wagner the musician had to confront a life-long enemy, 
 who forcibly prevented the full unfolding of his gifts, and this 
 enemy was Wagner the musical theorist. 
 
 In his graphomaniacal muddle he concocted certain theories, 
 which represent so many fits of aesthetic delirium. The most 
 important of these are the dogmas of the leit-motif 'and of the 
 unending melody. Everyone now undoubtedly knows what 
 Wagner understood by the former. The expression has passed 
 into all civilized languages. The leit-motif t in which the 
 threshed-out discarded 'programme music' was bound logically 
 to culminate, is a sequence of tones supposed to express a 
 definite conception, and appears in the orchestration whenever 
 the composer intends to recall to the auditor the corresponding 
 conception. By the leit-motif Wagner transforms music into 
 -dry speech. The orchestration, leaping from leit-motif to leit- 
 motif, no longer embodies general emotions, but claims to appeal 
 to memory and to reason, and communicate sharply defined 
 presentations. Wagner combines a few notes into a musical 
 figure, as a rule not even distinct or original, and makes this 
 arrangement with the auditor: 'This figure signifies a combat, 
 that a dragon, a third a sword,' etc. If the auditor does not 
 agree to the stipulation, the leit-motifs lose all significance, for 
 they possess in themselves nothing which compels us to grasp 
 the meaning arbitrarily lent them ; and they cannot have 
 anything of this kind in them, because the imitative powers 
 of music are by its nature limited to purely acoustical 
 phenomena, or at most to those optical phenomena ordinarily 
 accompanied by acoustical phenomena. By imitating thunder, 
 music can express the notion of a thunderstorm ; by the imitation 
 of the tones of a bugle, it can call up that of an army in such a 
 way that the listener can hardly have a doubt as to the significance 
 of the corresponding sequences of tones. On the other hand, 
 it is absolutely denied to music, with the means at its disposal, 
 to produce an unequivocal embodiment of the visible and 
 tangible world, let alone that of abstract thought. Hence the
 
 1 9 8 DEGENERATION 
 
 leit-motifs are at best cold symbols, resembling written characters, 
 which in themselves say nothing, and convey to the initiated and 
 the learned alone the given import of a presentation. 
 
 Here again is found the phenomenon already repeatedly- 
 indicated by us as a mark of the mode of thought among the 
 degenerate the unconscious moon-struck somnambulous way 
 in which they transgress the most firmly-established limits of 
 the particular artistic domain, annul the differentiation of the 
 arts arrived at by long historical evolution, and lead them back 
 to the period of the lacustrines, nay, of the most primitive 
 troglodytes. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites reduce the 
 picture to a writing which is no longer to produce its effect by 
 its pictorial qualities, but must express an abstract idea ; and 
 that the Symbolists make of the word, that conventional 
 vehicle of a conception, a musical harmony, by whose aid they 
 endeavour to awaken not an idea, but a phonetic effect. In 
 precisely the same way Wagner wishes to divest music of its 
 proper essence, and to transform it from a vehicle of emotion 
 into a vehicle of rational thought. The disguise .produced 
 by this interchange of costumes is in this way complete. 
 Painters proclaim themselves writers ; poets behave like the 
 composers of symphonies ; the musician plays the poet. Pre- 
 Raphaelites wishing to record a religious apothegm do not 
 make use of writing, which leaves nothing to be desired in the 
 way of convenience, and by which they would be distinctly 
 understood, but plunge into the labour of a highly-detailed 
 painting, costing them much time, and which, in spite of its 
 wealth of figures, is far from speaking so clearly to the intelli- 
 gence as a single line of rational writing. Symbolists desirous 
 of awakening a musical emotion do not compose a melody, 
 but join meaningless, though ostensibly musical words, capable, 
 perhaps, of provoking amusement or vexation, but not the 
 intended emotion. When Wagner wishes to express the idea 
 of ' giant,' ' dwarf/ ' tarn-cap which makes the wearer invisible,' 
 ,he does not say in words universally understood 'giant/ 'dwarf/ 
 ' tarn-cap ' (which makes the wearer invisible), but replaces these 
 excellent words by a series of notes, the sense of which no one 
 will divine without a key. Is anything more needed to expose 
 the complete insanity of this confusion of all the means ot 
 expression, this ignorance of what is possible to ea'ch art ? 
 
 It is Wagner's ambition to imitate those facetious students 
 who teach their dog to say ' papa.' He wants to perform the 
 trick of making music say the names 'Schulze' and 'Muller* 
 ( = Smith and Jones). The score should, when necessary, supply 
 the place of the directory. Language does not suffice him. 
 He creates for himself a volapiik, and demands that his hearers 
 should learn it. No admission without hard work ! Those who
 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 199 
 
 have not assimilated the vocabulary of the Wagnerian volapiik 
 cannot understand his operas. It is useless to go to the trouble 
 of a journey to Bayreuth if one cannot talk fluently in leit- 
 motifs. And how pitiable after all is the result of this delirious 
 effort ! H. von \Volzogen, the writer of the ThematiscJie 
 Leitfadcn (Thematic Guide) to the Niebelungen Tetralogy, 
 finds in all these four prodigious works only ninety leit-motifs. 
 A language of ninety words, however inflated they may be, 
 such as ' motif of the weary Siegmund,' ' motif of the mania for 
 vengeance/ 'motif of bondage,' etc.! with such a vocabulary 
 it would be impossible even to exchange ideas about the 
 weather with a native of Tierra del Fuego. A page of Sanders' 
 lexicon contains more means of expression than Wolzogen's 
 entire dictionary of the \Yagnerian leit-motif language. The 
 history of art knows no more astounding aberration than this 
 leit- motif craze. To express ideas is not the function of music ; 
 language provides for that as completely as could be desired. 
 When the word is accompanied by song or orchestra it is not 
 to make it more definite, but to re-enforce it by the intervention 
 of emotion. Music is a kind of sounding-board, in which the 
 word has to awake something like an echo from the infinite. 
 But such an echo of presentiment and mystery does not ring 
 out from leit-motifs coldly pasted together, as if by the labour 
 of a conscientious registrar. 
 
 With the ' unending melody,' the second of \Vagner's tenets, 
 it is the same as with the leit-motif. It is a product of degenerate 
 thought ; it is musical mysticism. It is the form in which 
 incapacity for attention shows itself in music. In painting, 
 attention leads to composition ; the absence of it to a uniformly 
 photographic treatment of the whole field of vision as with the 
 pre-Raphaelites. In poetry, attention results in clearness of 
 ideas, consistency of statement, the suppression of the un- 
 important, and the giving emphasis to the essential ; its absence 
 leads to twaddle as with the graphomaniacs, and to a painful 
 prolixity in consequence of the indiscriminate recording of all 
 perceptions as with Tolstoi. Finally, in music attention 
 expresses itself in completed forms, i.e., in well-defined melodies ; 
 its absence, on the contrary, by the dissolution of form, the 
 obliteration of its boundary lines, and thus by unending melodies 
 as with Wagner. This parallelism is not an arbitrary play of 
 ideas, but an exact picture of the corresponding mental pro- 
 cesses among the different groups of degenerate subjects, pro- 
 ducing in the different arts different manifestations according to 
 their specific means and aims. 
 
 Let us grasp what melody is. It is the regular grouping of 
 notes in a highly expressive series of tones. Melody in music 
 corresponds to what in language is a logically -constructed
 
 joo DEGENERATION 
 
 sentence, distinctly presenting an idea, and having a clearly- 
 marked beginning and ending. The dreamy rambling of half- 
 formed nebulous thoughts as little allows the mintage of 
 sentences of this kind, as does the fleeting agitation of the vague 
 bewildered emotion lead to the composition of a melody. The 
 emotions, too, have their own grades of distinctness. They, 
 too, can appear as chaotic, or as well-regulated states. In the 
 one case they stand out in the consciousness which grasps their 
 composition and their purpose as discriminable modes strongly 
 illuminated by the attention; in the other case they are a 
 disturbing enigma to consciousness, and perceived by it merely 
 as a generic excitement, as a sort of subterranean trembling and 
 fumbling of unknown origin and tendency. If the emotions 
 are intelligible, they will be fain to manifest themselves in a form 
 at once the most expressive and most easily grasped. If, on 
 the contrary, they are a generic continuous state, without 
 determined cause and discoverable aim, the music presenting 
 them to the senses will be as blurred and as nebulously fluctuating 
 ki form as themselves. Melody may be said to be an effort of 
 music to say something definite. It is clear that an emotion 
 unconscious of its cause and its aims, and unilluminated by 
 attention, will not raise its musical expression to the height of 
 melody, precisely because it has nothing definite to say. 
 
 A completed melody is a late acquisition of music, obtained 
 by it only after long evolution. In its historic, and still more in 
 its prehistoric, beginnings, the art of music knew it not. Music 
 springs originally from song, and the rhythmic noise (i.e., noise 
 repeated in equal or regular intervals of time) of accompanying 
 stamping, knocking, or clapping of the hands ; and song is 
 nothing but speech grown louder and moving in wider intervals 
 through emotional excitement. I should like to cite only one 
 passage from the almost unlimited literature on this hackneyed 
 subject. Herbert Spencer, in his well - known treatise on 
 The Origin and Function of Music* says : ' All music is 
 originally vocal. . . . The dance-chants of savage tribes are very 
 monotonous, and in virtue of their monotony are much more 
 nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the songs of civilized 
 races. . . . The early poems of the Greeks, which, be it remem- 
 bered, were sacred legends embodied in that rhythmical, meta- 
 phorical language which strong feeling excites, were not recited, 
 but chanted ; the tones and the cadences were made musical by 
 the same influences which made the speech poetical. . . . This 
 chanting is believed to have been not what we call singing, but 
 nearly allied to our recitative ; far simpler, indeed, if we may 
 judge from the fact that the early Greek lyre, which had but 
 
 * The Origin and Function of Music : Essays, Scientific, Political and 
 Speculative. London: Williams and Norgate, 1883; vol. i., p. 213 et seq.
 
 MYSTICISM 201 
 
 four strings, was played in unison with the voice, which was 
 therefore confined to four notes. . . . That recitative beyond 
 which, by the way, the Chinese and Hindoos seem never to 
 have advanced grew naturally out of the modulations and 
 cadences of strong feeling, we have, indeed, still current 
 evidence. There are even now to be met with occasions on 
 which strong feeling vents itself in this form. Whoever has 
 been present when a meeting of Quakers was addressed by one 
 of their preachers (whose practice it is to speak only under the 
 influence of religious emotion) must have been struck by the 
 quite unusual tones, like those of a subdued chant, in which the 
 address was made.' 
 
 Recitative, which is nothing but speech intensified, and allows 
 no recognition . of completed forms of melody, is therefore the 
 most ancient form of music ; it is the degree of development 
 reached by the art of music among savages, the ancient Greeks, 
 and contemporary races in Eastern Asia. Wagner's ' unending 
 melody' is nothing but recitative, richly harmonized and ani- 
 mated, but, nevertheless, recitative. The name bestowed by him 
 on his pretended invention must not mislead us. In the mouth 
 of the degenerate a word has never the meaning ascribed to it 
 by universal language. Wagner calmly applies the term 
 * melody ' with a distinguishing adjective to a form which is 
 actually the negation and suppression of melody. He desig- 
 nates unending melody as an advance in music, while it is really 
 a return to its primeval starting-point. Here there recurs in 
 Wagner what we have so often laid stress upon in the preceding 
 chapters, viz., that by a strange optical illusion the degenerate 
 regard their atavism, their morbid reversion to the most remote 
 and lowest grades of evolution, as an ascent into the future. 
 
 Wagner was led to his theory of unending melody by his 
 limited capacity for the invention of finite, that is of real, 
 melodies. His weakness in melodic creation has struck all im- 
 partial musicians. In youth his power in this direction was 
 more abundant, and he succeeded in creating some superb 
 melodies (in Tannkauser, Lohengrin, Fliegender Hollander). 
 With increasing age this power became more and more im- 
 poverished, and in proportion as the torrent of melodic inven- 
 tion dried up in him, he accentuated his theory of unending 
 melody with ever more obstinacy and asperity. Always there 
 reappears the well-known device of concocting a thedry a 
 posteriori as a plausible ground for, and palliation of, what is 
 done through unconscious organic necessity. Wagner was in- 
 capable of distinguishing the individual personages of his operas 
 by a purely musical characterization, and therefore he invented 
 the leit-motif* Experiencing 1 a great difficulty, especially with 
 
 * E. Hanslick, op. cit., p. 233: 'As the dramatis persona^ in "music- 
 drama " are not distinguished by the character of the melodies they sing, as
 
 ?oi DEGENERATION 
 
 advancing age, in creating true melodies, he set up the postulate 
 of the unending melody. 
 
 All the other crotchets of his musical theory also find their 
 explanation in this clear consciousness of definite incompetency. 
 In the Art-work of tiie Future he overwhelms the theory of 
 counterpoint and the contrapuntists those dull pedants who 
 abase the most vital of all arts to a desiccated, dead mathe- 
 matics with a scorn intended to be biting, but producing the 
 effect of an echo of Schopenhauer's invectives against the 
 German philosophers. Why ? Because, as an inattentive 
 mystic, abandoned to amorphous dreams, he must feel intoler- 
 ably oppressed by the severe discipline and fixed rules of the 
 theory of composition, which gave a grammar to the musical 
 babbling of primeval times, and made of it a worthy medium 
 for the expression of the emotions of civilized men. He asserts 
 that pure instrumental music ended with Beethoven ; that pro- 
 gress after him is impossible; that 'musical declamation' is the 
 only path along which the art of music can further develop 
 itself. It may be that, after Beethoven, instrumental music will 
 make no progress for decades, or for centuries. He was such a 
 stupendous genius that it is, in fact, difficult to imagine how he 
 can be surpassed, or even equalled. Leonardo da Vinci, Shake- 
 speare, Cervantes, Goethe, produce a similar impression ; and, in 
 truth, these geniuses have not yet been surpassed. It is also 
 conceivable that there are limits which it is impossible for any 
 given art to pass at all, so that a very great genius says the last 
 word for it, and after that no progress can be made in it. In 
 such a case, however, the aspirant should humbly say : ' I 
 know that I cannot do better than the supreme master of my 
 art ; I am therefore contented to labour as one of the epigoni in 
 the shadow of his greatness, content if my work expresses some 
 peculiarities of my individuality.' He ought not in pre- 
 sumptuous self-conceit to affirm : ' There is no sense in emu- 
 lating the eagle-flight of the mighty one ; progress now lies alone 
 in the flapping of my bats'-wings.' But this is exactly what 
 Wagner does. Not being himself endowed with any great gift 
 for pure instrumental music, as his few symphonic works suffice 
 to prove, he decrees in the tone of infallibility: 'Instrumental 
 music ended with Beethoven. It is an error to seek for any- 
 thing on this well-browsed field. The future of music lies in 
 the accompaniment of the word, and I am he who is to show 
 you the way into that future/ 
 
 Here Wagner simply makes a virtue of his necessity, and of 
 
 in ancient opera (Don Juan and Leporello, Donna Anna and Zerlina, Max 
 and Caspar), but all resemble each other in the physiognomic pathos of the 
 tones of their speech, Wagner aims at replacing this characteristic by so- 
 called leit-motifs in the orchestra.'
 
 MYSTICISM 203 
 
 his weakness a title of glory. The symphony is the highest 
 differentiation of musical art. In it music has wholly discarded 
 its relationship with words, and attained its highest indepen- 
 dence. Hence the symphony is the most musical of all that 
 music can produce. To disown it is to disown that music is a 
 special, differentiated art. To place above the symphony music 
 as an accompaniment of words is to raise the handmaiden to a 
 higher rank than her free-born mistress. It will never occur to 
 a composer, whose inmost being is charged with musical feeling 
 and thought, to seek words instead of musical themes for 
 the expression of that in him which is yearning for embodi- 
 ment. For if it does occur to him, it is a proof that in his 
 inmost being he is a poet or an author, and not a musician. 
 The choruses in the Ninth Symphony are not to be cited as 
 proof of the inaccuracy of this assertion. In that case Beethoven 
 was overmastered by an emotion so powerful and univocal, that 
 the more general and equivocal character of purely musical ex- 
 pression could no longer suffice for him, and he was uncon- 
 ditionally compelled to call in the aid of words. In the deeply 
 significant Biblical legend, even Balaam's ass acquired the 
 power of speech when he had something definite to say. The 
 emotion \vhich becomes clearly conscious of its content and aim 
 ceases to be a mere emotion, and transforms itself into presen- 
 tation, notion and judgment, but these express themselves, not 
 in music, but in articulate language. When Wagner, as a 
 fundamental principle, placed music as an accompaniment to 
 words above that which is purely instrumental, and not as a 
 medium for the expression of thought for in regard to that 
 there can be no difference of opinion but as a musical form 
 properly so called, he only proved that, in the inmost depths of 
 his nature, and by virtue of his organic disposition, he was not a 
 musician, but a confused mixture of a poet feeble in style, and 
 a painter lazy of brush, with a Javanese 'gamelang ' accompani- 
 ment buzzing in between. This is the case with most ' higher 
 degenerates, 'except that the separate fragments of their strangely 
 intermingled hybrid talent are not so strong and great as 
 Wagner's. 
 
 The musical productions in which Wagner has been most 
 successful the Venusberg music ; the E flat, G, B flat, ' Wigala- 
 Weia' of the Rhinemaidens, repeated one hundred and thirty- 
 six times ; the Walkiire ride ; the fire incantation ; the murmur 
 of the forest ; the Siegfried idyl ; the Good - Friday spell ; 
 magnificent compositions, and highly praised with justice show 
 precisely the peculiarly unmusical character of his genius. All 
 these pieces have one thing in common that they depict. They 
 are not an inner emotion crying out from the soul in music, but the 
 mental vision of the gifted eye of a painter, which Wagner, whh
 
 704 DEGENERATION 
 
 gigantic power, but also with gigantic aberration, strives to fix in 
 tones instead of lines and colours. He avails himself of natural 
 sounds or noises, either imitating them directly, or awakening 
 ideas of them through association, reproducing the ripple and roar 
 of waves, the sough of the tree-top and the song of wild birds, 
 which are in themselves acoustic ; or, by an acoustic parallelism; 
 the optical phenomena of the movements in the dance of volup- 
 tuous female forms, the tearing along of fiercely snorting steeds, 
 the blazing and flickering of flames, etc. These creations are 
 not the outgrowth of emotional excitement, but have been pro- 
 duced by external impressions conveyed through the senses ; 
 they are not the utterance of a feeling but a reflection i.e., 
 something essentially optical. I might compare Wagner's music, 
 at its very best, to the flight of flying-fishes. It is an astonishing 
 and dazzling spectacle, and yet unnatural. It is a straying from 
 a native to an alien element. Above all, it is something abso- 
 lutely barren and incapable of profiting either normal fishes or 
 normal birds. 
 
 Wagner has felt this himself very forcibly ; he was quite clear 
 on the point that no one could build further on the foundation 
 of his tone-paintings ; for with reference to the efforts of musi- 
 cians eagerly desirous of founding a Wagner school, he com- 
 plains* that 'younger composers were most irrationally putting 
 themselves to trouble in imitating him.' 
 
 A searching examination has thus shown us that this pre- 
 tended musician of the future is an out-and-out musician of 
 long-ago. All the characteristics of his talent point not forward, 
 but far behind us. His leit-motif, abasing music to a conven- 
 tional phonetic symbol, is atavism ; his unending melody is 
 atavism, leading back the fixed form to the vague recitative of 
 savages ; atavism, his subordination of highly differentiated in- 
 strumental music to music-drama, which mixes music and poetry, 
 and allows neither of the two art-forms to attain to independ- 
 ence ; even his peculiarity of almost never permitting more than 
 one person on the stage to sing and of avoiding vocal polyphony 
 is atavism. As a personality he will occupy an important place 
 in music; as an initiator, or developer of his ait, hardly any, or 
 a very narrow one. For the only thing that musicians of healthy 
 capacity can learn from him is to keep song and accompaniment 
 in opera closely connected with the words, to declaim with 
 sincerity and propriety, and to suggest pictorial ideas to the 
 imagination by means of orchestral effects. But I dare not 
 decide whether the latter is an enlargement or an upheaval of 
 the natural boundaries of musical art, and in any event disciples 
 
 * Wagner, Ueber die Anwendung der Afusik auf das Drama. Ces. 
 Schtiften, Band X., p. 242.
 
 MYSTICISM 205 
 
 of Wagner must use his rich musical palette with caution if they 
 are not to be led astray. 
 
 Wagner's mighty influence on his contemporaries is to be 
 explained, neither by his capacities as author and musician, nor 
 by any of his personal qualities, with the exception, perhaps, of 
 that ' stubborn perseverance in one and the same fundamental 
 idea ' which Lombroso* cites as a characteristic of grapho- 
 maniacs, but by the peculiarities in the life of the present 
 nervous temperament. His earthly destiny resembles that of 
 those strange Oriental plants known as 'Jericho roses ' (Anasta- 
 tica asteriscus), which, dingy- brown in colour,, leathery and dry, 
 roll about, driven by every wind, until they reach a congenial 
 soil, when they take root and blossom into full-blown flowers. To 
 the end of his life Wagner's existence was conflict and bitter- 
 ness, and his boasting^ had no other echo than the laughter not 
 only of rational beings, but, alas ! of fools also. It was not until 
 he had long passed his fiftieth year that he began to know the 
 intoxication of universal fame ; and in the last decade of his 
 life he was installed among the demi-gods. It had come to this, 
 that the world had, in the interval, become ripe for him and for 
 the madhouse. He had the good fortune to endure until the 
 general degeneration and hysteria were sufficiently advanced to 
 supply a rich and nutritious soil for his theories and his art. 
 
 The phenomenon repeatedly established and verified in these 
 pages, that lunatics fly to each other as iron filings to the magnet, 
 is quite strikingly observable in Wagner's life. His first great 
 patroness was the Princess Metternich, daughter of the well-known 
 eccentric Count Sandor, and whose own eccentricities formed 
 material for the chronicle of the Napoleonic Court. His most 
 enthusiastic disciple and defender was Franz Liszt, whom I have 
 elsewhere characterized (see my Ausgewahlte Pariser Brief e ; 
 2 te Auflage; Leipzig, 1887, p. 172), and of whom I will therefore 
 only briefly remark that he bore in his nature the greatest resem- 
 blance to Wagner. He was an author (his works, filling six thick 
 volumes, have an honourable place in the literature of grapho- 
 maniacs), composer, erotomaniac and mystic, all in an incom- 
 parably lower degree than Wagner, whom he surpassed only in a 
 prodigiously developed talent for pianoforte- playing. Wagner 
 was an enthusiastic admirer of all graphomaniacs whc came in his 
 way e.g., of that A. Gleizes expressly cited by Lombroso^ as 
 a lunatic, but whom Wagner praises in most exuberant terms ; J 
 
 * Lombroso, Genie tind Irrsinn, p. 225. f Ibid., op. cit., p. 226. 
 
 % Wagner, Religion und Kunst. Ges. Schr., Band X., p. 307, note : 'The 
 author here expressly refers to A. Gleizes' book, Thalysia oder das Heil der 
 Menschheit. . . . Without an exact knowledge of the results, recorded in 
 this book, of the most careful investigations, which seem to have absorbed 
 the entire life of one of the most amiable and profound of Frenchmen, it might 
 be difficult to gain attention for ... the regeneration of the human race.'
 
 205 DEGENERATION 
 
 and he even gathered round him a court of select graphomaniacs, 
 among whom may be mentioned Nietzsche, whose insanity 
 compelled his confinement in a madhouse ; H. von Wolzogen, 
 whose Poctische Laut-Symbolik might have been written by the 
 most exquisite of French ' Symbolists ' or ' Instrumentists ' ;* 
 Henri Forges, E. von Hagen, etc. But the most important 
 relations of this kind were with the unhappy King Louis II. 
 In him Wagner found the soul he needed. In him he met 
 with a full comprehension of all his theories and his creations. 
 It may be safely asserted that Louis of Bavaria created the 
 Wagner Cult. Only when the King became his protector did 
 Wagner and his efforts become of importance for the history 
 of civilization ; not, perhaps, because Louis II. offered Wagner 
 the means of realizing the boldest and most sumptuous of his 
 artistic dreams, but chiefly because he placed the prestige of 
 his crown in the service of the Wagnerian movement. Let us 
 for a moment consider how deeply monarchical is the disposition 
 of the vast majority of the German people ; how the knees of 
 the beery Philistine tremble as he reverentially salutes even an 
 empty court carriage ; and how the hearts of well-bred maidens 
 flutter with ineffable inspiration at the sight of a prince! And 
 here was a real king, handsome as the day, young, surrounded 
 by legends, whose mental infirmity was at that time regarded 
 by all sentimentalists as sublime ' idealism,' displaying un- 
 bounded enthusiasm for an artist, and reviving on a far larger 
 scale the relations between Charles Augustus and Goethe ! 
 From that moment it was natural that Wagner should become 
 the idol of all loyal hearts. To share in the royal taste for the 
 ' ideal ' was a thing to be proud of. Wagner's music became 
 provisionally a royal Bavarian music, adorned with crown and 
 escutcheon, till it should subsequent!)' become an imperial 
 German music. At the head of the Wagnerian movement there 
 walks, as is fit, an insane king. Louis II. was able to bring 
 Wagner into vogue with the entire German nation (excepting, 
 of course, those Bavarians who were revolted by the King's pro- 
 digalities) ; nevertheless, DO amount of grovelling obsequiousness 
 could by itself have produced a fanaticism for Wagner. That 
 the mere Wagner- fashion might attain to this height another 
 factor was necessary the hysteria of the age. 
 
 Although not so widespread as in France and England, this 
 
 * * Alberich's seductive appeal to the water-sprites makes prominent the 
 liard, mordant sound of N, so well corresponding in its whole essence to the 
 negative power in the drama, inasmuch as it forms the sharpest contrast to 
 t.ie soft W of the water-spirits. Then when he prepares to climb after the 
 maidens, the alliance of the Gl and Schl with the soft, gliding F marks 
 riiost forcibly the gliding off the slippery rock. In the appropriate Pr (/>), 
 Woglinde as it were shouts " Good luck to you !" (Prosit) when Alberich 
 sneezes.' Cited by Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen t p. 255.
 
 MYSTICISM 207 
 
 hysteria is not wanting in Germany, where during the last 
 quarter of a century it has continued to gain ground. Germany 
 has been longer protected from it than the civilized nations of 
 the West by the smaller development of large industry and by 
 the absence of large cities properly so called. In the last genera- 
 tion, however, both of these gifts have been abundantly accorded 
 'her, and two great wars have done the rest to make the nervous 
 system of the people susceptible to the pernicious influences of 
 the city and the factory system. 
 
 The effect of war on the nerves of the participants has never 
 been systematically investigated ; and yet how highly important 
 and necessary a work this would be ! Science knows what dis- 
 orders are produced in man by a single strong moral shock, e.g., 
 a sudden mortal danger ; it has recorded hundreds and thousands 
 of cases in which persons saved from drowning, or present at a 
 fire on shipboard, or in a railway accident, or who have been 
 threatened with assassination, etc., have cither lost their reason, 
 or been attacked by grave and protracted, often incurable, 
 nervous illnesses. In war hundreds of thousands are exposed to 
 all these fearful impressions at the same time. For months 
 cruel mutilation or sudden death menaces them at every step. 
 They are frequently surrounded by the spectacle of devastation, 
 conflagration, the most appalling wounds, and heaps of corpses 
 frightful to behold. Moreover, the greatest demands are made 
 on their strength ; they are forced to march until they break 
 down, and cannot count on having adequate nourishment or suffi- 
 cient sleep. And shall there not appear among these hundreds 
 of thousands the effect which is proved to result from a single 
 one of the occurrences which take place by thousands during 
 war ? Let it not be said that in a campaign a soldier becomes 
 callous to the horrors encompassing him. That merely signifies 
 that they cease to excite the attention of his consciousness. 
 They are nevertheless perceived by the senses and their cerebral 
 centres, and therefore leave their traces in the nervous system. 
 Th*at the soldier does not at the moment notice the deep shock 
 nay, even shattering he has experienced, equally proves 
 nothing. ' Traumatic hysteria,' ' railway spine,' the nervous 
 maladies consequent on a moral shock, are also frequently un- 
 observed until months after the event occasioning them. 
 
 In my belief, it can scarcely be doubted that every great war 
 is a cause of hysteria among multitudes, and that far the larger 
 number of soldiers, even completely unknown to themselves, 
 bring home from a campaign a somewhat deranged nervous 
 system. Of course this is much less applicable to the con- 
 querors than to the conquered, for the feeling of triumph is one 
 of the most pleasurable the human brain can experience, and 
 the force-producing (' dynamogenous ') effect of this pleasurable
 
 203 DEGENERATION 
 
 feeling is well qualified to counteract the destructive influences 
 of the impressions produced by war. But it is difficult for it 
 to entirely annul these impressions, and the victors, like the 
 vanquished, no doubt leave a large part of their nervous 
 strength and moral health on the battle - field and in the 
 bivouac. 
 
 The brutalization of the masses after every war has become 
 a commonplace. The expression originates in the perception 
 that after a campaign the tone of the people becomes fiercer 
 and rougher, and that statistics show more acts of violence. 
 The fact is correctly stated, but the interpretation is superficial. 
 If the soldier on returning home becomes more short-tempered, 
 and even has recourse to the knife, it is not because the war has 
 made him rougher, but because it has made him more excitable. 
 This increased excitability is, however, only one of the forms of 
 the phenomenon of nervous debility. 
 
 Hence under the action of the two great wars in connection 
 with the development of large industries and the growth of large 
 towns, hysteria among the German people has, since 1870, 
 increased in an extraordinary manner, and we have very nearly 
 overtaken the unenviable start which the English and French 
 had over us in this direction. Now, all hysteria, like every form 
 of insanity, and for that matter like every disease, receives its 
 special form from the personality of the invalid. The degree 
 of culture, the character, propensities and habits of the deranged 
 person give the derangement its peculiar colour. Among the 
 English, always piously inclined, degeneration and hysteria were 
 bound to appear both mystical and religious. Among the 
 French, with their highly developed taste and widespread fond- 
 ness for all artistic pursuits, it was natural that hysteria should 
 take an artistic direction, and lead to the notorious extravagances 
 in their painting, literature and music. We Germans are in 
 general neither very pious nor very cultivated in matters of art. 
 Our comprehension of the beautiful in art expresses itself, for the 
 most part, in the idiotic ' Reizendf (charming), and * Entziickendt 
 (ravishing), squeaked in shrill head-tones and with upturned 
 eyes by our well-bred daughters at the sight of a quaintly-shaved 
 poodle, and before the Darmstadt Madonna by Holbein, indis- 
 criminately ; and in the grunts of satisfaction with which the plain 
 citizen pumps 'in his beer at a concert of his sinking club. Not 
 that we are by nature devoid of a sense of the beautiful I 
 believe, on the contrary, that in our deepest being we have more 
 of it than most other nations but owing to unfavourable cir- 
 cumstances this sense has not been able to attain development. 
 Since the Thirty Years' War we have been too poor, we have had 
 too hard a struggle for the necessities of life to have anything 
 left for any sort of luxury; and our ruling classes, profoundly
 
 MYSTICISM 209 
 
 Latinized and slaves to French fashion, were so estranged from 
 the masses, that for the last two centuries the latter could have 
 no part in the culture, taste, or resthetic satisfactions of the 
 upper strata of society, separated from them by an impassable 
 gulf. As, therefore, the large majority of the German people 
 had no interest in art, and troubled themselves little about it, 
 German hysteria could not assume an artistic, aesthetic form. 
 
 It assumed other forms, partly abominable, partly ignoble 
 and partly laughable. German hysteria manifests itself in anti- 
 Semitism, that most dangerous form of the persecution-mania, 
 in \vhich the person believing himself persecuted becomes a 
 savage persecutor, capable of all crimes (the persecute persecuteur 
 of the French mental therapeutics).* Like hypochondriacs and 
 * hemorroi'daires/ the German hysterical subject is anxiously 
 concerned about his precious health. His crazes hinge on the 
 exhalations of his skin and the functions of his stomach. He 
 becomes a fanatic for Jaeger vests, and for the groats which 
 vegetarians grind for themselves. He gets vehemently affected 
 over Kneipp's douches and barefoot perambulations on wet 
 grass. At the same time, he excites himself with morbid 
 sentimentalism (the 'Zoophilia' of Magnan) concerning the 
 sufferings of the frog, utilized in physiological experiments, and 
 through ail this anti-Semitic, Kneippish, Jaegerish, vegetarian, 
 and anti-vivisection insanity, there rings out the fundamental 
 note of a megalomaniacal, Teutonomaniacal Chauvinism, against 
 which the nobie Emperor Frederick vainly warned us. As a 
 rule, all these derangements appear simultaneously, and in nine 
 out of ten cases it is safe to take the proudly strutting wearer 
 of Jaeger's garments for a Chauvinist, the Kneipp visionary for 
 a groats-dieted maniac, and the defender of the frog, thirsting 
 for the professor's blood, for an anti-Semitist. 
 
 Wagner's hysteria assumed the collective form of German 
 hysteria. With a slight modification of Terence's Homo sum, 
 he could say of himself, ' I am a deranged being, and no kind of 
 derangement is a stranger to me.' He could as an anti-Semitist 
 give points to Stoecker.f He has an inimitable mastery 
 of Chauvinistic phraseology. * Was he not able to convince 
 his hypnotized hysterical following that the heroes of his 
 pieces were primeval German figures these Frenchmen and 
 Brabanters, these Icelanders and Norwegians, these women of 
 Palestine all the fabulous beings he had fetched from the 
 
 * Legrand du Saulle terms the persecutor who believes himself persecuted, 
 * persecute actif.' See his fundamental work : Lc Define ties Persecutions. 
 Paris, 1871, p. 194. 
 
 f Wagner, Das Jitdeniliinii in dcr Musik. Gcs. ScJir. Band V., p. 83. 
 Anfkliiriingcn iiber das Judenthum in dcr Miisik. ' Band VIII., p. 299. 
 
 % \Vaner, Dcutsciu Kunst utui Dcutsclie rolilik. Ges, Sclir. Band VIII., 
 p. 39. Was ist Deutsche / Band X., p. 51 ct passim.
 
 2To DEGENERATION 
 
 poems of Provence and Northern France, and from the Northern 
 saga, who (with the exception of Tannkiiuser and the Meister- 
 singer) have not a single drop of German blood or a single 
 German fibre in their whole body ? It is thus that, in public 
 exhibitions, a quack hypnotist persuades his victims that they 
 are eating peaches instead of raw potatoes. Wagner became 
 an advocate for vegetarianism, and as the fruit needed for the 
 nourishment of the people in accordance with this diet exists in 
 abundance only in warm regions of the earth, he promptly 
 advised ' the direction of a rational emigration to lands re- 
 sembling the South American peninsula, which, it has been 
 affirmed, might, through its superabundant productivity, supply 
 nourishment for the present population of the entire globe.'* 
 He brandishes his knightly sword against the physiologists who 
 experiment on animals, t He was not an enthusiast for wool, 
 because personally he preferred silk ; and this is the only hiatus 
 in the otherwise complete picture. He did not live to witness 
 the greatness of the reverend Pastor Kneipp, otherwise he 
 probably would have found words of profound significance for 
 the primitive German sanctity of wet feet, and the redeeming 
 power vested in the knee-douche. 
 
 When, therefore, the enthusiastic friendship of King Louis 
 had given Wagner the necessary prestige, and directed the uni- 
 versal attention of Germany to him ; when the German people 
 had learned to know him and his peculiarities, then all the 
 mystics of the Jewish sacrifice of blood, of woollen shirts, of the 
 vegetable menu, and sympathy cures, were compelled to raise 
 their paeans in his honour, for he was the embodiment of all their 
 obsessions. As for his music, they simply threw that into the 
 bargain. The vast majority of Wagner fanatics understood 
 nothing of it. The emotional excitement which the works of 
 their idol made them experience did not proceed from the 
 singers and the orchestra, but in part from the pictorial beauty 
 of the scenic tableaux, and in a greater measure from the 
 specific craze each brought with him to the theatre, and of which 
 each worshipped Wagner as the spokesman and champion. 
 
 I do not, however, go so far as to assert that skat\ patriot- 
 ism, and the heroic idealism of natural cures, rice with fruit, 
 ' away with the Jews !' and flannel, alone made the hearts of 
 Wagner-bigots beat faster in blissful emotion when they were 
 listening to his music. This music was certainly of a nature to 
 fascinate the hysterical. Its powerful orchestral effects produced 
 in them hypnotic states (at the Salpetrtere hospital in Paris the 
 
 * Wagner, Religion und Kunst. Ges. Schr. Band X., p. 311. 
 f Offenes Schreiben an Hcrrn Ernst von Weber, Verfasser der Schrift . 
 Die frolterkammern der Wissenschaft? Ges. Schr. Band X., p. 251. 
 J A game of cards to which Teutomaniacs are much addicted.
 
 MYSTICISM 2M 
 
 hypnotic state is often induced by suddenly striking a gong), 
 and the formlessness of the unending melody was exactly suited 
 to the dreamy vagaries of their own thought. A distinct melody 
 awakens and demands attention, and is hence opposed to the 
 fugitive ideation of the weak brains of the degenerate. A flow- 
 ing recitative, on the contrary, without beginning or end, makes 
 no sort of demand on the mind for most auditors trouble 
 themselves either not at all, or for a very short time, about the 
 hide-and-seek play of the leit-motif one can allow one's self to 
 be swayed and carried along by it, and to emerge from it at 
 pleasure, without any definite remembrance, but with a merely 
 sensual feeling of having enjoyed a hot, nervously exciting 
 tone-bath. The relation of true melody to the unending 
 melody is the same as that of a genre or historical painting to 
 the wayward arabesques of a Moorish mural decoration, re- 
 peated a thousand times, and representing nothing definite ; and 
 the Oriental knows how favourable the sight of his arabesques 
 is to ' Kef ' that dreamy state in which Reason is lulled to sleep, 
 and crazy Imagination alone rules as mistress of the house. 
 
 Wagner's music initiated hysterically-minded Germans into 
 the mysteries of Turkish Kef. Nietzsche may make sport of this 
 subject with his idiotic play on words ' Sursum bum-bum,' and 
 with his remarks about the German youth who seeks for 
 ' Ahnung ' (presentiments) ; but the fact is not to be denied that 
 a part of Wagner's devotees those who brought a diseased 
 mysticism with them to the theatre found in him their satis- 
 faction ; for nothing is so well qualified to conjure up 'presenti- 
 ments/ i.e., ambiguous, shadowy border-land presentations, as a 
 music which is itself born of nebulous adumbrations of thought. 
 
 Hysterical women were won over to Wagner chiefly by the 
 lascivious eroticism of his music, but also by his poetic repre- 
 sentation of the relation of man to woman. Nothing enchants 
 an 'intense' woman so much as demoniacal irresistibleness 
 on the part of the woman, and trembling adoration of her 
 supernatural power on the part of the man. In contrast to 
 Frederick William I., who cried in anger, ' You should not fear, 
 but love me,' women of this sort would rather shout to every 
 man, 'You are not to love me, but to lie, full of dread and 
 terror, in the dust at my feet.' ' Frau ' Venus, Brunhilde, 
 Isolde, and Kundry have won for Wagner much more admira- 
 tion among women than have Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, and 
 Gudrune. 
 
 After Wagner had once conquered Germany, and a fervent 
 faith in him had been made the first article in the catechism of 
 German patriotism, foreign countries could not long withstand 
 his cult. The admiration of a great people has an extraordinary 
 power of conviction. Even its aberrations it forces with irresist^''
 
 212 DEGENERATION 
 
 ible suggestion on other nations. Wagner was one of the fore- 
 most conquerors in the German wars. Sadowa and Sedan 
 were fought in his behalf. The world, nolens voletts. had to 
 take up its attitude with regard to a man whom Germany 
 proclaimed its national composer. He began his triumphal 
 march round the globe draped in the flag of Imperial Germany. 
 Germany's enemies were his enemies, and this forced even 
 such Germans as withstood his influence to take his side 
 against foreign lands. ' I beat my breast : I, too, have fought 
 for -him against the French in speech and writing. I also 
 have defended him against the pastrycooks who hissed his 
 Lohengrin in Paris.' How was one to get off this duty? 
 Hamlet thrusts at the arras, well knowing that Polonius stands 
 there ; hence any son or brother of Polonius is bound resolutely 
 to attack Hamlet. Wagner had the good fortune to play the 
 part of the tapestry to the French Hamlets, giving them the 
 pretext for thrusting at the Polonius of Germany. As a result, 
 the attitude in the Wagner question of every German was 
 rigidly prescribed for him. 
 
 To the zeal of Germans all manner of other things added 
 their aid in favouring the success of Wagner abroad. A minority, 
 composed in part of really independent men of honorably unpre- 
 judiced minds, but in part also of degenerate minds with a morbid 
 passion for contradiction, took sides with him just because he 
 was blindly and furiously maligned by the Chauvinist majority, 
 who were a prey to national hatred. ' It is contemptible,' cried 
 the minority, ' to condemn an artist because he is a German. 
 Art has no fatherland. Wagner's music should not be judged with 
 the memory of Alsace-Lorraine.' These views are so reasonable 
 and noble, that those who entertained them must have rejoiced 
 in them and been proud of them. On listening to Wagner, they 
 had the clear feeling, ' We are better and cleverer than the 
 Chauvinists/ and this feeling necessarily placed them at the 
 outset in such an agreeable and benevolent mood, that his music 
 seemed much more beautiful than they would have found it if 
 they had not been obliged first to stifle their vulgar and base 
 instincts, and fortify those which were more elevated, free and 
 refined. They erroneously ascribed to Wagner's music the 
 emotions produced by their self-satisfaction. 
 
 The fact that only in Bayreuth could this music be heard, 
 unfalsified and in its full strength, was also of great importance 
 for the esteem in which it was held. If it had been played in 
 every theatre, if, without trouble and formalities, one could have 
 gone to a representation of Wagner as to one of // Troratore, 
 Wagner would not have obtained his most .enthusiastic public 
 from foreign countries. To know the real Wagner it was neces- 
 sary to journey to Bayreuth. This could be done only at long
 
 MYSTICISM 213 
 
 intervals and at specified times ; seats and lodgings had to be 
 obtained long in advance, and at great expenditure of trouble. 
 It was a pilgrimage requiring much money and leisure ; hence 
 ' hoi polloi ' were excluded from it. Thus, the pilgrimage to 
 Bayreuth became a privilege of the rich and well-bred, and to 
 have been to Bayreuth came to be a great social distinction 
 among the snobs of both worlds. The journey was a thing to 
 make a great parade of and be haughty over. The pilgrim no 
 longer belonged to the vulgar crowd, but to the select few ; he 
 became a hadji ! Oriental sages so well know the peculiar 
 vanity of the hadjis, that one of their proverbs contains an 
 express warning against the pious man who has been thrice to 
 Mecca, 
 
 Hence the pilgrimage to Bayreuth became a mark of 
 aristocracy, and an appreciation of Wagner's music, in spite of 
 his nationality, was regarded as evidence of intellectual pre- 
 eminence. The prejudice in his favour was created, and pro. 
 vided one went to him in this mood, there was no reason why 
 Wagner should not have the same influence on hysterical 
 foreigners as on hysterical Germans. Parsifal was especially 
 fitted completely to subjugate the French neo-Catholics and 
 Anglo-American mystics who marched behind the banner of the 
 Salvation Army. It was with this opera that Wagner chiefly 
 triumphed among his non-German admirers. Listening to the 
 music of Parsifal has become the religious act of all those who 
 wish to receive the Communion in musical form. 
 
 These are the explanatory causes of Wagner's conquest, 
 first of Germany, and then of the world. The absence of judg- 
 ment and independence among the multitude, who chant the 
 antiphony in the Psalter ; the imitation of musicians possessed 
 of no originality, who witnessed his triumph, and, like genuine 
 little boys wanting ' to be taken,' clung to his coat-tails these 
 did what was still needed to lay the world at his feet. As it is 
 the most widely diffused, so is Wagnerism the most momentous 
 aberration of the present time. The Bayreuth festival theatre, 
 the BayrentJier Blatter, the Parisian Revue Wagnerienne, are 
 lasting monuments by which posterity will be able to measure 
 the whole breadth and depth of the degeneration and hysteria 
 of the age.
 
 
 H4 DEGENERATION 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PARODIES OF MYSTICISM. 
 
 THE artistic and poetic forms of mysticism, which we have 
 studied hitherto, might perhaps inspire doubts in superficial or 
 insufficiently instructed minds as to their origin in degeneration, 
 and present themselves as manifestations of a genuine and 
 fertile talent. But beside them appear others, in which a state 
 of mind reveals itself which suddenly arrests and perplexes any 
 reader, however credulous, and however accessible to the sugges 
 tion of printed words, and to self-puffing charlatanism. Books 
 and theories find publication, m which even the unlearned 
 observe the deep intellectual degradation of their authors. One 
 pretends to be able to initiate the reader into the black art, and 
 enable him to practise magic himself; another gives a poetical 
 form to definitely insane ideas, such as have been classified by 
 mental therapeutics ; a third writes books as if prompted by 
 thoughts and feelings worthy of little children or idiots. A great 
 part of the works I have in view would justify, without further 
 consideration, the placing of their authors under constraint. 
 As, however, in spite of their manifest craziness, well-known 
 critics are bent upon discovering in them ' the future,' ' fresh 
 nerve-stimulations,' and beauties of a mysterious kind, and to 
 puff them by their chatter to gaping simpletons as revelations 
 of genius, it is not superfluous to devote some brief considera- 
 tion to them. 
 
 A not very large amount of mysticism leads to belief; a 
 larger amount leads necessarily to superstition, and the more 
 confused, the more deranged, the mind is, so much the crazier 
 will be the kind of superstition. In England and America this 
 most frequently takes the form of spiritualism and the founding 
 of sects. The hysterical and deranged receive spiritual inspira- 
 tions, and begin to preach and prophesy, or they conjure up 
 spirits and commune with the dead. In English fiction ghost- 
 stories have begun to occupy a large place, and in English 
 newspapers to act glibly as stopgaps, as was done formerly in 
 the Continental press by the sea-serpent and the' Plying Dutch- 
 man. A society has been formed which has for its object the 
 collecting ^f_gjipst-stories^ and testing_their authenticity ; and 
 even literaTy men ol renownTiave TSeen seized with the vertigo 
 of the supernatural, and condescend to serve as vouchers for the 
 most absurd aberrations. 
 
 In Germany, too, spiritualism has found an entrance, although, 
 on the whole, it has not gained much ground. In the large
 
 MYSTICISM 215 
 
 towns there may be some small spiritualist bodies. The English 
 expression trance has become so familiar to some deranged 
 persons that they have adopted it in German as trans, imagining 
 apparently, with the popular etymology, that it means ' beyond ' 
 instead of ' ecstasy/ or, in other words, the state in which, 
 according to the spiritualist hypothesis, the medium ought to find 
 himself who enters into communication with the world of spirits. 
 Nevertheless, spiritualism has as yet exerted little influence 
 on our literature. Excluding the later romanticists who have < 
 fallen into childishness, notably the authors of tragedies based 
 on the idea of ' fatality ' (ScJiicksalstragodieri), few writers have 
 dared to introduce the supernatural into their creations other- 
 wise than allegorically. At most in Kleist and Kerner it attains 
 a certain importance, and healthy readers do not consider that as 
 a merit in the dramas of the unfortunate author of the Hermanns- 
 schlacJit, and in the Seer of Prevorst of the Swabian poet. On 
 the other hand, it must certainly be noted that it is the ghost 
 element precisely which has brought to these two writers, in 
 recent times, a renewal of youth and popularity among de- 
 generate and hysterical Germans. Maximilian Perty, who was 
 evidently born too soon, met with but rare and even rather 
 derisive notice from the less soft-headed generation which 
 preceded ours, for his bulky books on apparitions. And, among 
 contemporaries, none but Freiherr Karl du Prel has chosen the 
 spirit world as the special subject of his theoretic writings and 
 novels. After all, our plays, our tales, are very little haunted, 
 scarcely enough to make a schoolgirl shiver ; and even among 
 the eminent foreign authors best known in Germany, such, for 
 example, as Tourgenieff, it is not the world of apparitions which 
 attracts German readers. 
 
 The few ghost-seers whom we have at present in Germany 
 endeavour naturally to give their mental derangement a 
 scientific colouring, and appeal to individual professors of 
 mathematics and natural science who happen entirely to agree 
 with them, or are supposed to be partially inclined to do so. 
 However, their one sheet-anchor is Zollner, who is simply a sad 
 proof of the fact that a professorship is no protection from mad- 
 ness ; and they can besides, at any rate, point to opportune 
 remarks of Helmholtz and other mathematicians on n dimen- 
 sions, which they, either intentionally or from mystical weakness 
 of mind, have misunderstood. In an analytical problem the 
 mathematician, instead of one, two, or three dimensions, may 
 place n dimensions without altering thereby the law of the 
 problem and its legitimately resulting corollaries, but it does 
 not occur to him to imagine, under the geometrical expression, 
 *n\.\\ dimension,' something given in space, and capable of being 
 apprehended by the senses. When Zollner gives the well-known
 
 ai6 DEGENERATION 
 
 example of the inversion of the india-rubber ring which, because 
 only possible in the third dimension, necessarily appeared quite 
 inconceivable and supernatural to a bi-dimensional being, he 
 believes that he facilitates the comprehension of the formation of 
 a knot in a closed ring as an operation practicable in the fourth 
 dimension. In doing this he simply offers one more example of 
 the known tendency of the mystic to delude himself, as he does 
 others, with words which seem to signify something, and which a 
 simpleton is convinced oftener than not that he understands,, 
 but which in reality express no idea, and are, therefore, empty 
 sound, void of import. 
 
 France is about to become the promised land of believers in 
 ghosts. Voltaire's countrymen have already got the start of the 
 pious Anglo-Saxons in dealings with the supernatural. I am. 
 not now thinking of the lower ranks of the people, among whom 
 the book of dreams (La CM des Songes) has never ceased to con- 
 stitute the family library, together with the Calendar, and, per- 
 haps, the ' Paroissien ' (missal) ; nor of the fine ladies who at all 
 times have ensured excellent incomes to clairvoyantes and 
 fortune-tellers ; but only of the male representatives of the 
 educated classes. Dozens of spiritualist circles count their 
 numbers by thousands. In numerous drawing-rooms of the 
 best (even in the opinion of the ' most cultured ' !) society, the 
 dead are called up. A monthly publication, L'lnitiation^. 
 announces, in weighty tones, and with a prodigality of philoso- 
 phical and scientific technicalities, the esoteric doctrine of the 
 marvels of the unearthly. A bi-monthly publication, Annaler 
 des Sciences Psychiques, terms itself a ' collection of observations 
 and researches.' Next to these two most important periodicals,, 
 a whole series of others exist, similar in tendency, and all having 
 a wide circulation. Strictly technical works on hypnotism and 
 suggestion run through edition after edition, and it has become 
 a profitable speculation for doctors without practice, who do not 
 attach much importance to the opinions of their colleagues, to- 
 compile so-called manuals and text-books on these subjects,, 
 which scientifically are completely worthless, but which are 
 bought up by the public like hot rolls. Novels have, with rare 
 exceptions, no longer any sale in France, but works on obscure 
 phenomena of nerve function go off splendidly, so that sagacious 
 publishers give their discouraged authors this advice : ' Leave 
 novels for a time, and write on magnetism.' 
 
 Some of the books on magic which have appeared of late years 
 in France connect their subject directly with the phenomena 
 of hypnotism and suggestion ; for example, A. De Rochas*" 
 Les Etats profonds de fHypnose, and C. A. de Bodisco's Traits 
 de Lnmiere, or 'physical researches dedicated to unbelievers and 1 
 egoists.' This has brought many observers to the idea that the
 
 MYSTICISM 217 
 
 works and discoveries of the Charcot school in general have 
 given the impulse to the whole of this movement. Hypnotism, 
 say the representatives of this opinion, has brought such re- 
 markable facts to light that the accuracy of certain traditions, 
 popular beliefs and old records can no longer be doubted, 
 though hitherto they have been generally considered inventions 
 of superstition ; possession, witch-spells, second-sight, healing 
 by imposition of hands, prophecy, mental communication at the 
 remotest distance without the intervention of words, have re- 
 ceived a new interpretation and have been recognised as possible. 
 What, then, more natural than that minds weak in balance, and of 
 insufficient scientific training, should become accessible to the 
 marvellous (against which they had shielded themselves, as long as 
 they considered it to be all old nurses' fables), when they saw it 
 appear in the garb of science, and found themselves in the best 
 society by believing in it ? 
 
 Plausible as this opinion is, it is not the less false. It puts 
 the cart before the horse. It confounds cause with effect. No 
 completely sound mind has been led by the experiences of the 
 new hypnotic science into a belief in the marvellous. In former 
 times no attention was paid to obscure phenomena, or they were 
 passed by with eyes intentionally closed, because they could 
 not be fitted in to the prevailing system, and were consequently 
 held to be chimaeras or frauds. For the last twelve years official 
 science has taken cognizance of them, and Faculties and 
 Academies are engaged upon them. But no one thinks of 
 them for a moment as supernatural, or supposes the working 
 of unearthly forces behind them. They class them with all 
 other natural phenomena which are accessible to the observation 
 of the senses, and are determined by the ordinary laws of nature. 
 Our knowledge has simply enlarged its frame, and admitted 
 an order of facts which in former times had remained beyond 
 its pale. Many processes of hypnosis are more or less 
 satisfactorily explained ; others as yet not at all. But an 
 earnest and healthy mind attaches no great importance to this, 
 for he knows that the pretended explanation of phenomena 
 does not go very far, and that we have mostly to be satisfied to 
 determine them with certainty, and to know their immediate 
 conditions. I do not say that the new science has exhausted 
 its subject and has reached its limits. But whatever it may 
 bring to light of the unknown and the unexpected, it is not a 
 matter of doubt to the healthy mind that it will be accounted for 
 by natural means, and that the simple, ultimate laws of physics, 
 chemistry and biology cannot be shaken by these discoveries. 
 
 If, therefore, so many people now interpret the phenomena of 
 hypnosis as supernatural, and indulge the hope that the conjura- 
 tion of the spirits of the dead, aerial voyages on Faust's magic
 
 ai8 DEGENERATION 
 
 cloak, omniscience, etc., will soon be arts as common as reading 
 and writing, it is not the discoveries of science which have 
 brought them to this delusion, although the existing delusion is 
 happy to be able to pass itself off for science. Far from con- 
 cealing itself, as formerly, it exhibits itself proudly in the streets 
 on the arms of professors and academicians. Paulhan under- 
 stands the matter very well : ' It is not the love of positive facts,' 
 he says,* ' which has carried minds away ; there has been a 
 certain kind of return for the love of the marvellous in desires 
 formerly satisfied, and which, now repressed, slumbered unac- 
 knowledged in a latent condition. Magic, sorcery, astrology, 
 divination, all these ancient beliefs correspond to a need of 
 human nature ; that of being able easily to act upon the external 
 world and the social world ; that of possessing, by means rela- 
 tively easy, the knowledge requisite to make this action possible 
 and fruitful.' The stormy outburst of superstition has by no 
 means been let loose through hypnological researches ; it merely 
 launches itself into the channels they have dug. We have here 
 already repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that unbalanced 
 minds always adapt their crazes to the prevailing views, and 
 usurp by predilection the most recent discoveries of science to 
 explain them. The physicists were still far from occupying 
 themselves with magnetism and electricity, when the persons 
 attacked by persecution-mania were already referring their own 
 unpleasant sensations and hallucinations to the electric currents 
 or sparks which their persecutors were supposed to cast on them 
 through walls, ceilings and floors ; and in our days the degene- 
 rate were equally the first to appropriate to themselves the 
 results of hypnological researches, and to employ them as 
 ' scientific ' proofs of the reality of spirits, angels and devils. 
 But the degenerate started with the belief in miracles ; it is 
 one of their peculiar characteristics^ and it was not first called 
 forth by the observations of Parisian and Nancy hypnologists. 
 
 If another proof were needed in support of this affirmation, 
 it could be found in the fact that the greater number of 
 ' occultists,' as they call themselves, in their treatises on occult 
 arts and magic sciences, scorn to fall back on the results of 
 hypnological experiments, and, without any pretext of 
 ' modernity,' without any concession to honest investigation of 
 nature, have direct recourse to the most ancient traditions. 
 Papus (the pseudonym of a physician, Dr. Encausse) writes 
 a Traitt mtthodique de Science occulte, an enormous large- 
 octavo volume of 1,050 pages, with 400 illustrations, which 
 introduces the reader to the cabala, magic, necromancy and 
 
 * F. Paulhan, Le nouveau Mysticisnu. Paris, 1891, p. 104. 
 t Legrain, op. "/., p. 175 : 'The need for the marvellous is almost always 
 inevitable among the weak-minded.'
 
 MYSTICISM 219 
 
 cheiromancy, astrology, alchemy, etc., and to which an old, not 
 undeserving savant, Adolf Franck, of the Institute of France, was 
 imprudent enough to write a long eulogistic preface, presumably 
 without having even opened the book himself. Stanislaus de 
 Guaita, revered with awe by the adepts as past master in the 
 Black Art, and arch-magician, gives two treatises, Au Seuil 
 du Mystere and Le Serpent de la Genese, so darkly profound 
 that, in comparison, Nicolas Flamel, the great alchemist, whom 
 no mortal has ever comprehended, seems clear and transparent 
 as crystal. Ernest Bosc confines himself to the theory of the 
 sorcery of the ancient Egyptians. His book, Isis devoilee, ou 
 rEgyptologie sacre'e, has for the sub -title: 'Hieroglyphics, 
 papyri, hermetic books, religion, myths, symbols, psychology, 
 philosophy, morals, sacred art, occultism, mysteries, initiation, 
 music.' Nehor has likewise his speciality. If Bosc unveils 
 Egyptian mysteries, Nehor reveals the secrets of Assyria and 
 Babylonia. Les Mages et le Secret magique is the name of the 
 modest pamphlet in which he initiates us into the profoundest 
 magic arts of the Chaldean Mobeds, or Knights Templars. 
 
 If I do not enter more fully into these books, which have 
 found readers and admirers, it is because I am not quite certain 
 that they are intended to be in earnest. Their authors read 
 and translate so fluently Egyptian, Hebraic and Assyriac texts, 
 which no professional Orientalist has yet deciphered ; they quote 
 so frequently and so copiously from books which are found in 
 no library in the world ; they give with such an imperturbable 
 air exact instructions how to resuscitate the dead, how to pre- 
 serve eternal youth, how to hold intercourse with the inhabitants 
 of Sirius, how to divine beyond all the limits of time and space, 
 that one cannot get rid of the impression that they wished, in 
 cold blood, to make fun of the reader. 
 
 Only one of all these master-sorcerers is certainly to be taken 
 in good faith, and as he is at the same time intellectually the 
 most eminent among them, I will deal with him somewhat more 
 in detail. This is M. Josephin Peladan. He has even arrogated 
 to himself the Assyrian royal title of ' Sar,' under which he is 
 generally known. The public authorities alone do not give him 
 his Sar title ; but then they do not usually recognise any titles 
 of nobility in France. He maintains he is the descendant of 
 the old Magi, and the possessor of all the mental legacies of 
 Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Orpheus. He is, moreover, the 
 direct heir of the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians, both of 
 which orders he has amalgamated and revived under a new form 
 
 i as the ' Order of the Rosy Cross.' He dresses himself archaically 
 in a satin doublet of blue or black ; he trims his extremely 
 
 1 luxuriant blue-black hair and beard into the shape in use among 
 the Assyrians ; he affects a large upright hand, which might be
 
 223 DEGENERATION 
 
 taken for mediaeval character, writes by preference with red or 
 yellow ink, and in the corner of his letter-paper is delineated, as 
 a distinctive mark of his dignity, the Assyrian king's cap, with, 
 the three serpentine rolls opening in front. As a coat of arms- 
 he has the device of his order ; on an escutcheon divided by 
 sable and argent a golden chalice surmounted by a crimson rose 
 with two outspread wings, and overlaid with a Latin cross in 
 sable. The shield is surmounted by a coronet with three 
 pentagrams as indents. M. Peladan has appointed a series of. 
 commanders and dignitaries of his order (' grand - priors/ 
 ' archons,' ' aesthetes '), which numbers, besides, ' postulants ' and 
 ' grammarians ' (scholars). He possesses a special costume as. 
 grand-master and Sar (in which his life-sized portrait has been 
 painted by Alexandre Son), and a composer, who belongs to* 
 the order, has composed for him a special fanfare, which on 
 solemn occasions is to be played by trumpets at his entrance. 
 He makes use of extraordinary formulae. His letters he calls 
 'decrees,' or commands (mandements). He addresses the 
 persons to whom they are directed either as ' magnifiques/ or 
 ' peers, 1 sometimes also ' dearest adelphe/ or ' synnoede.' He 
 does not call them 'sir/ but 'your lordship' (seigneurie}. The 
 introduction is : ' Health, light and victory in Jesus Christ, in- 
 the only God, and in Peter, the only king'; or ' Ad Rosam. 
 per Crucem, ad Crucem per Rosam, in ed, in eis gem mat us re~ 
 surgam? This is at the same time the heraldic motto of the 
 Order of the Rosy Cross. At the conclusion is usually, 'Amen* 
 Non nobis, Do mine t non nobis, sed nominis tut glorice soles' He 
 writes the name of his order, with a cross inserted in the middle, 
 thus: 'Rose ^ Croix' His novels he calls ' e'thope'es? himself 
 as their author ' e'thopoete,' his dramas ' wagneries', their table of 
 contents * e'umolpe'es' 
 
 Every one of his books is ornamented with a large number 
 of symbols. That which appears the most often is a vignette 
 showing on a column a cowering form with the head of a woman 
 breathing flames, and with a woman's breast, lion's paws, and 
 the lower part of the body of a wasp or dragon-fly, terminating 
 in an appendage similar to the tail of a fish. The work itself is- 
 always preceded by some prefaces, introductions and invoca- 
 tions, and is often followed by pages of the same nature. I 
 take as an example the book entitled, Comment on devient 
 Mage* After the two title-pages adorned with a great number 
 of symbolical images (winged Assyrian bulls, the mystic rose 
 cross, etc.), comes a long dedication ' to Count Antoine de la 
 Rochefoucauld, grand -prior of the temple, archon of the 
 
 * Sar M^rodack J.,Pdladan, Amphitheatre des Science* mortes. Comment 
 on devient Mage. Ethique. Avec un portrait pittoresque grav par G. 
 Poirel. Paris, 1892.
 
 MYSTICISM 221 
 
 ^ Cross.' Then follows in Latin a ' prayer of St. Thomas 
 Aquinas, well suited to warn the reader against the possible 
 errors of this book ' ; after this, an ttenctique (counter-demonstra- 
 tion) containing a sort of profession of Catholic faith ; next, an 
 * invocation to ancestors' in the style of the Chaldean prayers; 
 lastly, a long allocution 'to the contemporary young man,' after 
 Avhich the book properly begins. 
 
 At the head of every chapter appear nine mysterious formulas. 
 Here are two examples : ' I. The Neophyte. Divine Name : 
 Jud (the Hebrew letter so called). Sacrament : Baptism. 
 Virtue: Faith. Gift: Fear of God. Beatitude: Poor in spirit. 
 Work : Teaching. Angel : Michael. Arcanum : Unity. Planet : 
 Samas. II. Society. Divine Name : Jah El (in Hebrew char- 
 acters, which Peladan evidently cannot read, for he turns it 
 into El-lah). Sacrament : Consecration. Virtue : Hope. Gift : 
 Pity. Beatitude: Gentleness. Work: Counsel. Angel: Gabriel. 
 Arcanum: Duality. Planet: Sin.' 
 
 Of the further contents of this mighty volume I think no 
 examples need be given. They correspond exactly with the 
 headings of these chapters. 
 
 The novels or ' ethopees ' of M. Peladan, of which nine have 
 appeared hitherto, but of which the author has announced four- 
 teen, are arranged in groups of seven, the mystical number. 
 He has even established a Schhna de Concordance* which 
 claims to give a synopsis of their leading ideas. Let us hear 
 how he explains his works : 
 
 ' First series of seven : I. The supreme vice. Moral and mental 
 Diathesis of the Latin decline Merodach, summit of conscious 
 will, type of absolute entity ; Alta, prototype of the monk in 
 contact with the world ; Courtenay, inadequate man-of-fate, 
 bewitched by social facts ; L. d'Este, extreme pride, the grand 
 style in evil ; Coryse, the true young maiden ; La Nine, the 
 wicked Androgyne, or, better, Gynander ; Dominicaux, conscious 
 reprobate, character of the irremediable, resulting from a 
 specious aesthetic theory for every vice, which kills conscious- 
 ness and, in consequence, conversion. Every novel has a Mero- 
 dach, that is, an abstract Orphic principle, as opposed to an 
 ideal enigma. 
 
 'II. Inquisitive. Parisian clinical collective -phenomenism. 
 Ethics : Nebo ; the systematic, sentimental will. Erotics : Paula, 
 passionate with Androgynous Prisrn. The great horror, the 
 Beast with two backs, in Gynander (IX.), metamorphosing 
 itself into unisexual corruption. Inquisitive, that is the every- 
 day and the everybody of instinct. Gynander, the Goethesque 
 midnight, and the exceptional,' etc. "*%? ' 
 
 * Josdphin Peladan, La Decadence latins. Ethopde IX. : ' La Gynandre. 1 
 Couverture de Sdon, eau-forte de Desboutins. Paris, 1891, p. xvii.
 
 222 DEGENERATION 
 
 I have taken pains to reproduce faithfully all M. Peladan's 
 whimsical methods of expression. That his Concordance can 
 give even the slightest idea of the contents of his novels, I do 
 not for a moment believe. I will, therefore, say a few words 
 about these in non-magian language. 
 
 They all move in the three following circles of ideas, variously 
 penetrating and intersecting each other : The highest intellectual 
 aim of man is to hear and thoroughly to appreciate Wagnerian 
 music ; the highest development of morality consists in re- 
 nouncing sexuality and in transforming one's self into a hybrid 
 hermaphrodite (Androgyne and Gynander) ; the higher man 
 can quit and retake his body at pleasure, soar into space as an 
 ' astral being,' and subject to his will the entire supernatural 
 power of the world of spirits, of the good as well as the bad. 
 
 Accordingly, in every romance a hero appears who unites in 
 himself the distinctive marks of both sexes, and resists with 
 horror the ordinary sexual instincts, who plays or enjoys the 
 music of Wagner, enacts in his own life some scene from the Wag- 
 nerian drama, and conjures up spirits or has to repel their attacks. 
 
 If anyone wishes to trace the origin of all these delirious 
 ideas, it will not be difficult to discover how they arose. One 
 day while reading the Bible Peladan alighted on the name of 
 the Babylonian king, Merodach Baladan. The similarity of 
 sound between ' Baladan ' and ' Peladan ' gave an impulse to his 
 imagination to establish relations between himself and the 
 Biblical Babylonian king. Once he began to reflect on this, he 
 found a resemblance, in the cast of his features, the colour of his 
 hair, and the growth of his beard, to the heads of Assyrian 
 kings on the alabaster casts from the palace at Nineveh. Thus 
 he easily arrived at the idea that he was possibly a descendant 
 of Baladan, or of other Assyrian kings, or, at least, that it would 
 be a curious thing if he were. And he continued to work out 
 this thought, until one day he resolutely took the title of Sar. 
 If he were descended from the kings of Babylon, he could also 
 be the heir of the wisdom of the Magi. So he began to proclaim 
 the Magian esoteric doctrine. To these musings were added 
 afterwards the impressions he received on a pilgrimage to 
 Bayreuth, from Tristan, and especially from Parsifal. In 
 fancy he wrought his own life into the legend of the Grail, 
 looked upon himself as a knight of the Grail, and created his 
 order of the ' Rose Croix,' which is entirely composed of 
 reminiscences of Parsifal. His invention of the asexual hybrid 
 being shows that his imagination is actively preoccupied with 
 presentations of a sexual character, and unconsciously seeks to 
 idealize the ' contrary sexual feelings.' 
 
 The mental life of Peladan permits us to follow, in an ex- 
 tremely well-marked instance, the ways of mystic thought. He
 
 MYSTICISM 22-j 
 
 is wholly dominated by the association of ideas. A fortuitous 
 assonance awakens in him a train of thought which urges him 
 irresistibly to proclaim himself an Assyrian king and Magus, 
 without his attention being in a condition to make him realize 
 the fact that a man can be called Peladan without being, there- 
 fore, necessarily descended from a Biblical Baladan. The 
 meaningless flow of words of the mediaeval scholastics misleads 
 him, because he is continually thinking by way of analogy, that 
 is to say, because he follows exclusively the play of the associa- 
 tion of ideas provoked by the most secondary and superficial 
 resemblances. He receives every artistic suggestion with the 
 greatest ease. If he hears Wagner's operas, he believes him- 
 self to be a Wagnerian character ; if he reads of the Knights 
 Templars and Rosicrucians, he becomes the Grand - Master 
 of the Temple, and of all other secret orders. He has the 
 peculiar sexual emotionalism of the 'higher degenerates,' and 
 this endows him with a peculiar fabulous shape, which, at once 
 chaste and lascivious, embodies, in curiously demonstrative 
 manner, the secret conflicts which take place in his conscious- 
 ness between unhealthily intensified instincts, and the judgment 
 which recognises their dangerous character. 
 
 Does Peladan believe in the reality of his delusions ? In other 
 words, does he take himself seriously ? The answer to this 
 question is not so simple as many perhaps think. The two 
 beings which exist in every human mind are, in a nature such as' 
 Peladan's, a prey to a strange conflict. His unconscious nature 
 is quite transfused with the role of a Sar, a Magus, a Knight of 
 the Holy Grail, Grand-Master of the Order, etc., which he has 
 invented. The conscious factor in him knows that it is all non- 
 sense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the uncon- 
 scious life to do as it pleases. It is thus that little girls behave 
 who play with dolls, caressing or punishing them, and treating 
 them as if they were living beings, all the time well aware that 
 in reality they have before them only an object in leather and, 
 porcelain. 
 
 Peladan's judgment has no power over his unconscious im- 
 pulses. It is not in his power to renounce the part of a Sar or 
 a Magus, or no longer to pose as grand-master of an order. He 
 cannot abstain from perpetually returning to his 'Androgynous' 
 absurdity. All these aberrations, as well as the invention of 
 neologisms and the predilection for symbols, the prolix titles, 
 and the casket-series of prefaces, so characteristic of the ' higher 
 degenerates,' proceed from the depths of his organic tempera- 
 ment, and evade the influence of his higher centres. On its 
 conscious side Peladan's cerebral activity is rich and beautiful. 
 In his novels there are pages which rank among the most 
 splendid productions of a contemporary pen. His moral ideal
 
 224 DEGENERATION 
 
 is high and noble. He pursues with ardent hatred all that is 
 base 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 humanity. It is deeply to 
 be regretted that the overgrowth of morbidly mystic presenta- 
 tions should render his extraordinary gifts completely sterile. 
 
 Far below Pdladan stands Maurice Rollinat, who ought, 
 nevertheless, to be mentioned first, because he embodies in a 
 very instructive manner a definite form of mystic degeneration, 
 and next because all French, and many foreign, hysterical 
 persons honour in him a great poet. 
 
 In his poems, which with characteristic self-knowledge he 
 entitles Les N/vroses* (Nervous Maladies) he betrays all the 
 stigmata of degeneration, which by this time ought to be 
 familiar enough to the reader for me to content myself with a 
 brief notice of them. 
 
 He feels in himself criminal impulses (Le Fantome du Crime) : 
 
 1 Wicked thoughts come into my soul in every place, at all 
 hours, in the height of my work. ... I listen in spite of myself 
 to the infernal tones .which vibrate in my heart where Satan 
 knocks ; and although I have a horror of vile saturnalias, of 
 which the mere shadow suffices to anger me, I listen in spite of 
 myself to the infernal tones. . . . The phantom of crime across 
 my reason prowls around (in my skull). . . . Murder, rape, 
 robbery, parricide, pass through my mind like fierce light- 
 nings. . . .' 
 
 The spectacle of death and corruption has a strong attraction 
 for him. He delights in putrefaction and revels in disease. 
 
 ' My ghostly beloved, snatched by death, played before me 
 livid and purple. . . . Bony nakedness, chaste in her leanness ! 
 Hectic beauty as sad as it is ardent ! . . . Near her a coffin . . . 
 greedily opened its oblong jaws, and seemed to call her. . . .* 
 {L'Amante macabre). 
 
 ' Mademoiselle Squelette ! 
 Je la surnommais ainsi : 
 Elle etait si maigrelette ! 
 
 ' Crachant tine gouttelette 
 De sang tres peu cramoisi . . . 
 Elle e'tait si maigrelette ! . . . 
 
 r Sa phthisic dtant complete ; . . . 
 Sa figure verdelette . . . 
 Un soir, a 1'espagnolette 
 Elle vint se pendre ici. 
 
 * Maurice Rollinat, Les NJrroses (Les Ames Les Suaires Les Refuges 
 Les Spectres Les Te'nebres). Avec un portrait de -1'auteur par F. Des- 
 moulin. Paris, 1883. Quite as striking is his later collection of poems, 
 LAbiine. Paris, 1891.
 
 MYSTICISM 224 
 
 * Horreur ! une cordelette 
 Decapitait sans merci 
 Mademoiselle Squelette : 
 Elle dtait si maigrelette !' 
 
 Mademoiselle Squelette. 
 
 'That I might rescue the angelically beautiful dead from the 
 horrible kisses of the worm I had her embalmed in a strange 
 box. It was on a winter's night. From the ice-cold, stiff and 
 livid body were taken out the poor defunct organs, and into 
 the open belly, bloody and empty, were poured sweet-smelling 
 salves. . . .' (La Morte embaumee). 
 
 ' Flesh, eyebrows, hair, my coffin and my winding-sheet, the grave 
 has eaten them all ; its work is done. . . . My skull has attested 
 its shrinking, and I, a scaling, crumbling residue of death, 
 have come to look back with regret upon the time when I was 
 rotting, and the worm yet fasted not. . . .' (Le mauvais Mart}. 
 
 This depravity of taste will not seldom be observed among 
 the deranged. In Rollinat it merely inspires loathsome verses ; 
 among others it leads them to the eager devouring of human 
 excretions, and, in its worst forms, to being enamoured of a 
 corpse (Necrophilia). 
 
 Violent erotomaniacal excitement expresses itself in a series of 
 poems (Les Luxures], which not only celebrate the most un- 
 bridled sensuality, but also all the aberrations of sexual psycho, 
 pathy. 
 
 But the most conspicuous are the sensations of undefined 
 horrors which continually beset him. Everything inspires him 
 with anguish ; all the sights of Nature appear to him to enclose 
 some frightful mystery. He is always expecting, in trembling, 
 some unknown terror. 
 
 ' I always shudder at the strange look of some boot and some 
 shoe. Ay, you may shrug your shoulders mockingly, I do 
 shudder ; and suddenly, on thinking of the foot they cover, I 
 ask myself: " Is it mechanical, or living?" . . .' (Le Maniaque). 
 
 ' My room is like my soul. . . . Heavy curtains, very ancient, 
 cling round the deep bed ; long fantastic insects dance and 
 crawl on the ceiling. When my clock strikes the hour it makes 
 an appalling noise ; every swing of the pendulum vibrates, and 
 is strangely prolonged. . . . Furniture, pictures, flowers, even 
 the books, all smell of hell and poison ; and the horror, which 
 loves me, envelops this prison like a pall. . . .' (La Chambre). 
 
 'The library made me think of very old forests ; thirteen iron 
 lamps, oblong and spectral, poured their sepulchral light day 
 and night on the faded books full of shadow and secrets. I 
 always shuddered when I entered. I felt myself in the midst 
 of fogs and death-rattles, drawn on by. the arms of thirteen 
 pale armchairs, and scanned by the eyes of thirteen great 
 portraits. . . .' (La Bibliotheque). 
 
 15
 
 226 DEGENERATION 
 
 ' In the swamp full of malice, which clogs and penetrates his 
 stockings, he hears himself faintly called by several voices 
 making but one. He finds a corpse as sentinel, which rolls its 
 dull eyeballs, and moves its corruption with an automatic 
 spring. I show to his dismayed eyes fires in the deserted 
 houses, and in the forsaken parks beds full of green rose .... 
 And the old cross on the calvary hails him from afar, and 
 curses him, crossing its stern arms as it stretches out and 
 brandishes them. . . .' (La Peur). 
 
 I will not weary by multiplying examples, and will only 
 quote the titles of a few more poems: The Living Grave; 
 Troppmann's Soliloquy (a well-known^ight-fold murderer) ; The 
 Crazy Hangman; The Monster; TJie Madman; The Head- 
 ache (La Ctphalalgie) ; Tfie Disease ; The Frenzied Woman ; 
 Dead Eyes ; The Abyss; Tears; Anguish; The Slow Death- 
 struggle ; The Interment ; The Coffin ; The Death-knell ; Corrup- 
 tion ; The Song of the Guillotined, etc. 
 
 All these poems are the production of a craze, which will be 
 frequently observed among degenerates. Even Dostojevski, 
 who is known to have been mentally afflicted, suffered from it 
 also. ' As soon as it grew dusk,' he relates of himself,* ' I 
 gradually fell into that state of mind which so often over- 
 masters me at night since I have been ill, and which I shall 
 call mystic fright. It is a crushing anxiety about something 
 which I can neither define nor even conceive, which does not 
 actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realized 
 suddenly, at this very moment, to appear and rise up before me 
 like an inexorable, horrible, unshapen fact.' Legrain-f quotes a 
 degenerate lunatic whose mania began ' with feelings of fear and 
 anguish at some fancy.' Professor KowalevvskiJ indicates as 
 degrees of mental derangement in degeneration first, neuras- 
 thenia ; secondly, impulses of * obsession ' and feelings of morbid 
 anguish. Legrand du Saulle and Morel || describe this state 
 of groundless, undefined fear, and coin for it the not very happy 
 word * Panophobia.' Magnan calls it more correctly ' Anxio- 
 mania ' frenzied anguish and speaks of it as a very common 
 stigma of degeneration. The anguish mania is an error of con- 
 sciousness, which is filled with presentations of fear, and transfers 
 their cause into the external world, while, as a matter of fact, 
 they are stimulated by pathological processes within the 
 organism. The invalid feels oppressed and uneasy, and imputes 
 
 * HumilUs et Offenses, p. 55 ; quoted by De Vogue*, Le Roman russe, p. 222, 
 foot-note. 
 
 f Legrain, op. cit., p. 246. 
 
 J Journal of Mental Science, January, 1888. 
 
 Le DtHire des Persecutions. Paris, 1871, p. 512. 
 
 f Morel, ' Du Ddlire panophobique des Alidads gdmisseurs.' Annales 
 jncdico-psychologiques, 1871, 2 vol., p. 322. ,
 
 MYSTICISM 227 
 
 to the phenomena which surround him a threatening and sinister 
 aspect, in order to explain to himself his dread, the origin of 
 which escapes him, because it is rooted in the unconscious. 
 
 As in Rollinat we have learnt to know the poet of anxio- 
 mania, so shall we find in another author, whose name has 
 become widely known in the last two years, in the Belgian, 
 Maurice Maeterlinck, an example of an utterly childish idiotically- 
 incoherent mysticism. He reveals the state of his mind most 
 characteristically in his poems,* of which I will give a few 
 examples. Here is the first of the collection Serres chaudes : 
 
 ' O hot-house in the middle of the woods. And your doors 
 ever closed ! And all that is under your dome ! And under 
 my soul in your analogies! 
 
 'The thoughts of a princess who is hungry; the tedium 
 of a sailor in the desert ; a brass-band under the windows of 
 incurables. 
 
 ' Go into the warm moist corners ! One might say, 'tis a 
 woman fainting on harvest - day. In the courtyard of the 
 infirmary are postilions ; in the distance an elk-hunter passes 
 by, who now tends the sick. 
 
 ' Examine in the moonlight ! (Oh, nothing there is in its 
 place !) One might say, a madwoman before judges, a battle- 
 ship in full sail on a canal, night-birds on lilies, a death-knell 
 towards noon (down there under those bells), a halting-place for 
 the sick in the meadows, a smell of ether on a sunny day. 
 
 ' My God ! my God ! when shall we have rain and snow and 
 wind in the hot-house ?' 
 
 These idiotic sequences of words are psychologically interest- 
 ing, for they demonstrate with instructive significance the 
 workings of a shattered brain. Consciousness no longer elabo- 
 rates a leading or central idea. Representations emerge just as 
 the wholly mechanical association of ideas arouses them. There 
 is no attention seeking to bring order into the tumult of images 
 as they come and go, to separate the unconnected, to suppress 
 those that contradict each other, and to group those which are 
 allied into a single logical series. 
 
 A few more examples of these fugitive thoughts exclusively 
 under the rule of unbridled association. Here is one entitled 
 Bell-glasses (Cloches de verre) : 
 
 ' O bell-glasses ! Strange plants for ever under shelter ! 
 While the wind stirs my senses without! A whole valley of 
 the soul for ever still ! And the enclosed lush warmth towards 
 noon ! And the pictures seen through the glass ! 
 
 ' Never remove one of them ! Several have been placed on 
 
 old moonlight. Look through their foliage. There is perhaps 
 
 a vagabond on a throne ; one has the impression that corsairs 
 
 * Maurice Maeterlinck, Serres chaudes. Nouvelle Edition. Bruxelles, 1890.
 
 228 DEGENERATION 
 
 are waiting on the pond, and that antediluvian beings are about 
 to invade the towns. 
 
 ' Some have been placed on old snows. Some have been 
 placed on ancient rains. (Pity the enclosed atmosphere !) I 
 hear a festival solemnized on a famine Sunday ; there is an 
 ambulance in the. middle of the house, and all the daughters of 
 the king wander on a fast-day across the meadows. 
 
 ' Examine specially those of the horizon ! They cover care- 
 fully very old thunderstorms. Oh, there must be somewhere an 
 immense fleet on a marsh ! And I believe that the swans 
 have hatched ravens. (One can scarcely distinguish through the 
 dampness.) 
 
 ' A maiden sprinkles the ferns with hot water ; a troop of 
 little girls watch the hermit in his cell ; my sisters have fallen 
 asleep on the floor of a poisonous grotto ! 
 
 'Wait for the moon and the winter, among these bells, 
 scattered at last on the ice.' 
 
 Another called Soul (Ame) : 
 
 ' My soul ! O my soul truly too much sheltered ! And these 
 flocks of desires in a hot-house ! Awaiting a storm in the 
 meadows ! Let us go to the most sickly : they have strange 
 exhalations. In the midst of them I cross a battlefield with 
 my mother. They are burying a brother-in-arms at noon, while 
 the sentries take their repast. 
 
 ' Let us go also to the weakest ; they have strange sweats : 
 here is a sick bride, treachery on Sunday, and little children in 
 prison. (And further across the mist.) Is it a dying woman at 
 the door of a kitchen ? Or a nun, who cleans vegetables at the 
 foot of the bed of an incurable? 
 
 ' Let us go lastly to the saddest : (at the last because they have 
 poisons). O my lips accept the kisses of one wounded ! 
 
 'All the ladies of the castle are dead of hunger this summer 
 in the towers of my soul ! Here is the dawn, which enters into 
 the festival ! I have a glimpse of sheep along the quays, and 
 there is a sail at the windows of the hospital ! 
 
 ' It is a long road from my heart to my soul 1 And all the 
 sentries are dead at their posts ! 
 
 ' One day there was a poor little festival in the suburbs of my 
 soul ! They mowed the hemlock there one Sunday morning ; 
 and all the convent virgins saw the ships pass, by on the canal 
 one sunny fast-day. While the swans suffered under a poisonous 
 bridge. The trees were lopped about the prison ; medicines 
 were brought one afternoon in June, and meals for the patients 
 were spread over the whole horizon ! 
 
 ' My soul ! And the sadness of it all, my soul ! and the sad- 
 ness of it all !' 
 
 I have translated with the greatest exactness, and not omitted
 
 MYSTICISM 229 
 
 one word of the three ' poems.' Nothing would be easier than 
 to compose others on these models, overtrumping even those of 
 Maeterlinck e.g., ' O Flowers ! And we groan so heavily under 
 the very old taxes ! An hour-glass, at which the dog barks in 
 May ; and the strange envelope of the negro who has not slept. 
 A grandmother who would eat oranges and could not write! 
 Sailors in a ballroom, but blue ! blue ! On the bridge this 
 crocodile and the policeman with the swollen cheek beckons 
 silently ! O two soldiers in the cowhouse, and the razor is 
 notched ! But the chief prize they have not drawn. And on 
 the lamp are ink-spots!' etc. But why parody Maeterlinck? 
 His style bears no parody, for it has already reached the ex- 
 treme limits of idiocy. Nor is it quite worthy of a mentally 
 sound man to make fun of a poor devil of an idiot. 
 
 Certain of his poems consist simply of assonances, linked 
 together without regard to sense and meaning, e.g., one which is 
 entitled Ennui : 
 
 ' The careless peacocks, the white peacocks have flown, the 
 white peacocks have flown from the tedium of awaking ; I see 
 the white peacocks, the peacocks of to-day, the peacocks that 
 went away during my sleep, the careless peacocks, the peacocks 
 of to-day, reach lazily the pond where no sun is, I hear the 
 white peacocks, the peacocks of ennui, waiting lazily for the 
 times when no sun is.' 
 
 The French original reveals why these words were chosen ; 
 they contain almost all the nasal sounds, ' en,' or ' an,' or ' aon ' : 
 ' Les paons nonchalants, les paons blancs ont fui, les paons blancs 
 ontfui I ennui dti r/veil ; je vois les paons blancs . . . atteindre 
 indolents l^tang sans soldi', etc. This is a case of that form of 
 echolalia which is observed not seldom among the insane. One 
 patient says, e.g., ' Man kann dann ran Mann wann Clan Bann 
 ScJiwan Hahn,' and he continues to grind similar sounds till he 
 is either tired, or takes a word spoken before him as a starting- 
 point for a new series of rhymes. 
 
 If Maeterlinck's poems are read with some attention, it is soon 
 seen that the muddled pictures which follow each other pell- 
 mell as in a dream, are borrowed from a very limited circle of 
 ideas, which have either generally, or only for him, an emotional 
 content. ' Strange,' ' old,' ' distant,' are the adjectives he con- 
 stantly repeats ; they have this in common that they indicate 
 something indistinct, not definitely recognisable, away on the 
 bounds of the distant horizon, corresponding, therefore, to the 
 nebulous thought of mysticism. Another adjective which sets 
 him dreaming is ' slow ' (lent}. It also influences the French 
 Symbolists, and hence their fondness for it. They evidently 
 associated it with the idea of the movements of the priest 
 reading the Mass, and it awakens in them the emotions of the
 
 230 DEGENERATION 
 
 mysticism of faith. They betray this association of ideas by 
 this, that they frequently use lent together with hitratijue 
 (sacerdotal). Maeterlinck, moreover, is constantly thinking of 
 hospitals with their sick, and of everything connected with them 
 (nuns, invalids' diet, medicines, surgical operations bandages, 
 etc.), of canals with ships and swans, and of princesses. The 
 hospitals and the canals, which are a feature in the Belgian 
 landscape, may be connected with the first impressions of his 
 childhood, and therefore produce emotions in him. The prin- 
 cesses, on the contrary, shut up in towers, suffering hunger, 
 going astray, wading through swamps, etc., have evidently 
 remained fixed in his imagination from the childish ballads of 
 the pre-Raphaelites, one of which, by Swinburne, was given 
 above as an example. Hospitals, canals, princesses, these are 
 the pictures which always recur with the obstinacy of obses- 
 sions, and in the midst of the nebulous chaos of his jargon, 
 alone show some sort of firm outline. 
 
 A few of his poems are written in the traditional poetical 
 form ; others, on the contrary, have neither measure nor rhyme, 
 but consist of lines of prose, arbitrarily changing in length, not 
 according to the style of Goethe's free poems, or of Heine's 
 North Sea Songs, which ripple by with very strongly marked 
 rhythmic movement, but deaf, jolting and limping, as the items 
 of an inventory. These pieces are a servile imitation of the 
 effusions of Walt Whitman, that crazy American to whom 
 Maeterlinck was necessarily strongly attracted, according to the 
 law I have repeatedly set forth that all deranged minds flock 
 together. 
 
 I should like here to interpolate a few remarks on Walt 
 Whitman, who is likewise one of the deities to whom the 
 degenerate and hysterical of both hemispheres have for some 
 time been raising altars. Lombroso ranks him expressly among 
 ' mad geniuses.'* Mad Whitman was without doubt. But a 
 
 * Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 322 : ' Walt Whitman, the poet of the 
 modern Anglo-Americans, and assuredly a mad genius, was a typographer, 
 teacher, soldier, joiner, and for some time also a bureaucrat, which, lor a 
 poet, is the queerest of trades.' 
 
 This constant changing of his profession Lombroso rightly characterizes 
 as one of the signs of mental derangement. A French admirer of Whitman, 
 Gabriel Sarrazin (La Renaissance de la Pohie anglaise, 1798 1889 ; I'.ms, 
 1889, p. 270, footnote), palliates this proof of organic instability and weak- 
 ness of will in the following manner : ' This American facility of changing 
 from one calling to another goes against our old European prejudices, and 
 our unalterable veneration for thoroughly hierarchical, bureaucratic routine- 
 careers. We have remained in this, as in so many other respects, essentially 
 narrow-minded, and cannot understand that diversity of capacities gi\es a 
 man a very much greater social value.' This is the true method of the 
 aesthetic windbag, who for every fact which he does not understand finds 
 roundly-turned phrases with which he explains and justifies everything to 
 his own satisfaction.
 
 MYSTICISM 231 
 
 genius ? That would be difficult to prove. He was a vagabond, 
 a reprobate rake, and his poems * contain outbursts of eroto- 
 mania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature 
 could hardly be found with the author's name attached. For 
 his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces 
 which first drew to him the attention of all the pruriency of 
 America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing 
 between good and evil, virtue and crime. ' This is the deepest 
 theory of susceptibility,' he says in one place, ' without pre- 
 ference or exclusion ; the negro with the woolly head, the bandit 
 of the highroad, the invalid, the ignorant none are denied.' 
 And in another place he explains he ' loves the murderer and 
 the thief, the pious and good, with equal love.' An American 
 driveller, W. D. O'Connor, has called him on this account ' The 
 good gray Poet.' We know, however, that this ' goodness," 
 which is in reality moral obtuseness and morbid sentimentality, 
 frequently accompanies degeneration, and appears even in the 
 cruellest assassins, for example, in Kavachol. 
 
 He has megalomania, and says of himself : 
 
 ' From this hour I decree that my being be freed from all 
 restraints and limits. 
 
 ' I go where I will, my own absolute and complete master. 
 
 1 1 breathe deeply in space. The east and the west are mine. 
 
 ' Mine are the north and south. I am greater and better than 
 I thought myself. 
 
 ' I did not know that so much boundless goodness was in 
 me. . . . 
 
 'Whoever disowns me causes me no annoyance. 
 
 ' W ; hoever recognises me shall be blessed, and will bless me.' 
 
 He is mystically mad, and announces : ' I have the feeling of 
 all. I am all, and believe in all. I believe that materialism is 
 true, and that spiritualism is also true ; I reject nothing.' And 
 in another still more characteristic passage : 
 
 'Santa Spirita [sit/'], breather, life, 
 Beyond the light, lighter than light, 
 
 Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell, 
 Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume, 
 Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including Saviour and 
 
 Satan, 
 
 Ethereal, pervading all, for without me what were all? what were God? 
 Essence of forms, life of the real identities . ~^-^ 
 Life of the great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the general 
 
 soul.' 
 
 In his patriotic poems he is a sycophant of the corrupt 
 American vote-buying, official-bribing, power-abusing, dollar- 
 democracy, and a cringer to the most arrogant Yankee conceit. 
 
 * Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass ; a new edition. Glasgow, 1884.
 
 32 DEGENERATION 
 
 His war-poems the much renowned Drum Taps are chiefly 
 remarkable for swaggering bombast and stilted patter. 
 
 His purely lyrical pieces, with their ecstatic 'Oh !' and 'Ah!' 
 with their soft phrases about flowers, meadows, spring and 
 sunshine, recall the most arid, sugary and effeminate passages of 
 our old Gessner, now happily buried and forgotten. 
 
 As a man, Walt Whitman offers a surprising resemblance to 
 Paul Verlaine, with whom he shared all the stigmata of 
 degeneration, the vicissitudes of his career, and, curiously 
 enough, even the rheumatic ankylosis. As a poet, he has 
 thrown off the closed strophe as too difficult, measure and 
 rhyme as too oppressive, and has given vent to his emotional 
 fugitive ideation in hysterical exclamations, to which the defini- 
 tion of ' prose gone mad ' is infinitely better suited than it is 
 to the pedantic, honest hexameters of Klopstock. Uncon- 
 sciously, he seemed to have used the parallelism of the Psalms, 
 and Jeremiah's eruptive style, as models of form. We had in 
 the last century the ParamytJtien of Herder, and the insufferable 
 ' poetical prose ' of Gessner already mentioned. Our healthy 
 taste soon led us to recognise the inartistic, retrogressive char- 
 acter of this lack of form, and that error in taste has found no 
 imitator among us for a century. In Whitman, however, his 
 hysterical admirers commend this rechauffe of a superannuated 
 literary fashion as something to come ; and admire, as an inven- 
 tion of genius, what is only an incapacity for methodical work. 
 Nevertheless, it is interesting to point out that two persons so 
 dissimilar as Richard Wagner and Walt Whitman have, in 
 different spheres, under the pressure of the same motives, 
 arrived at the same goal the former at ' infinite melody,' which 
 M no longer melody ; the latter at verses which are no longer 
 verses, both in consequence of their incapacity to submit their 
 capriciously vacillating thoughts to the yoke of those rules 
 which in ' infinite ' melody, as in lyric verse, govern by measure 
 and rhyme. 
 
 Maeterlinck, then, in his poems is a servile imitator of crazy 
 Walt Whitman, and carries his absurdities still further. Besides 
 his poems he has written things to which one cannot well refuse 
 the name of plays, since they are cast in the form of dialogues. 
 The best known of them is Tlie Princess Maleine* 
 
 The 'dramatis personse,' as he, true to the -romantic and 
 mystical practice of the pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, entitles 
 the list of his characters, are as follows : Hjalmar, King of one 
 part of Holland ; Marcellus, King of another part of Holland ; 
 Prince Hjalmar, son of King Hjalmar; little Allan, son of 
 Queen Anne ; Angus, friend to Prince Hjalmar ; Stephano and 
 
 * Maurice Maeterlinck, The Princess Maleine and the Intruder. London: 
 W. Heinemann, 1892.
 
 MYSTICISM 23* 
 
 Vanox, officers of Marcellus ; Anne, Queen of Jutland ; Gode- 
 liva, wife of King Marcellus ; Princess Maleine, daughter of 
 Marcellus and Godeliva ; Maleine's nurse ; Princess Uglyane, 
 daughter of Queen Anne. With them come all the old well- 
 known jointed dolls and puppets out of the dustiest corners of 
 the old lumber-rooms of romance a fool, three poor people, 
 two old peasants, courtiers, pilgrims, a cripple, beggars, vaga- 
 bonds, an old woman, seven (the mystic number !) nuns, etc. 
 
 The names which Maeterlinck gives to his figures should be 
 noted. As a Fleming, he knows very well that Hjalmar is not 
 Dutch, but Scandinavian ; that Angus is Scotch. But he makes 
 this confusion intentionally, in order to obliterate the distinct 
 outlines with which he appears to surround his figures, when he 
 calls them ' Kings of Holland'; in order again to detach them 
 from the firm ground on which he pretends to place them and to 
 suppress their co-ordinates, which assign them a place in space 
 .and time. They may wear clothes, have names and take a 
 human rank, but all the while they are only shadows and clouds. 
 
 King Hjalmar comes with Prince Hjalmar to the castle of 
 Marcellus in order to ask for the hand of the Princess Maleine. 
 The two young people see each other for the first time, and 
 only for a few minutes, but they instantly fall in love with each 
 other. At the banquet in honour of the King a quarrel breaks 
 out, about which we learn no particulars ; King Hjalmar is 
 seriously offended, swears revenge, and leaves the castle in a 
 rage. In the interlude Hjalmar wages war against Marcellus, 
 kills him and his wife, Godeliva, and at once razes his castle and 
 town to the ground. Princess Maleine and her nurse were on 
 this occasion how, why and by whom is not explained 
 immured in a vaulted room in a tower ; then the nurse, after 
 three' days work with her finger-nails, loosens a stone in the 
 wall, and the two women obtain their liberty. 
 
 Since Maleine loves Hjalmar and cannot forget him, they 
 make their way towards his father's castle. Things are going 
 very badly in Hjalmar's castle. There Queen Anne of Jutland 
 resides, who has been driven away by her subjects, and with her 
 grown-up daughter Uglyane and her little son Allan (here also 
 the Dane is systematically given a Scottish name), has found 
 hospitality with King Hjalmar. Queen Anne has turned the 
 head of the old man. She has become his mistress, rules him 
 -completely, and makes him ill in body and soul. She wishes 
 that his son should marry her daughter. Hjalmar is in despair 
 about his father's collapse. He detests his morganatic step- 
 mother, and shudders at the thought of a marriage with 
 Uglyane. He believes Maleine to have been slain with her 
 parents in the war, but he cannot yet forget her. 
 
 Maleine has in the meantime been wandering with her nurse
 
 234 DEGENERATION 
 
 through a kind of enchanted forest, and through an incompre- 
 hensible village, where she has uncanny meetings with all sorts of 
 people, beggars, vagabonds, peasants, old women, etc., interchang- 
 ing odd talk, and reaches Hjalmar's castle, where no one knows 
 her. She is, however, in spite of this, at once appointed as lady- 
 in-waiting to the Princess Uglyane. 
 
 One evening Prince Hjalmar decides to make advances to 
 Uglyane, and with that object he gives her a nocturnal ren- 
 dezvous in the park of the castle, not a secret, but, so to speak, 
 an official, lovers' tryst, to which he, with his father's consent, 
 and she, with her mother's, is to go. Maleine hinders it by 
 telling Uglyane, who is splendidly attiring and adorning her- 
 self, that Prince Hjalmar has gone into the forest and will not 
 come. She then goes herself into the park, and makes herself 
 known to Hjalmar, who arrives punctually. He leads her in 
 great delight to his father, who receives her as his future 
 daughter-in-law, and there is no further talk of his betrothal to 
 Uglyane. Queen Anne determines to get rid of the intruder. 
 She behaves at first in a friendly manner, assigns her a beautiful 
 room in the castle, then in the night she forces the King, who 
 for a long time resists her, to penetrate into Maleine's room, 
 where she puts a cord round the Princess's neck and strangles 
 her. Signs and wonders accompany the deed : a tempest forces 
 open a window, a comet appears, a wing of the castle falls in 
 ruins, a forest bursts into flames, swans fall wounded out of the 
 air, etc., etc 
 
 Next morning the body of the Princess Maleine is discovered. 
 King Hjalmar, whom the night's murder has robbed of the last 
 remnant of reason, betrays the secret of the deed. Prince 
 Hjalmar stabs Queen Anne, and then plunges the dagger into 
 his own heart. Thereupon the piece closes thus : 
 
 NURSE. Come away, my poor lord. 
 
 KING. Good God ! good God ! She is waiting now on the wharf of hell ! 
 
 NURSE. Come away ! come away ! 
 
 KING. Is there anybody here that fears the curses of the dead? 
 
 ANGUS. Ay, my lord, I do. 
 
 KING. Well, you close their eyes, and let us be gone. 
 
 NURSE. Ay, ay. Come hence 1 come hence ! 
 
 KING. I will ; I will. Oh, oh ! how lonely I shall feel hereafter ! I am 
 steeped in misery up to my ears at seventy-seven years of age. But where 
 are you ? 
 
 NURSE ! Here, here ! 
 
 KING. You will not feel angry with me? Let us go to breakfast. Will 
 there be salad for breakfast ? I should like a little salad. 
 
 NURSE. Yes, yes. You shall have some, my lord. 
 
 KING. I do not know why ; I feel somewhat melancholy to-day. Good 
 God ! good God ! How unhappy the dead do look ! [Ex-it with NURSE. 
 
 ANGUS. Another night such as this, and all our heads will have turned white. 
 
 [Exeunt all save the NUNS, who begin singing the Miserere while 
 
 conveying the corpses towards the bed, 7 he church bells cease 
 
 sounding. Nightingales are heard warbling without. A cock 
 
 jumps on the window -sill, and crows.
 
 MYSTICISM 235 
 
 When we begin to read this piece we are startled, and ask : 
 * Why is all this so familiar to me? Of what does it remind 
 me ?' After a few pages it all at once becomes clear : the whole 
 thing is a kind of cento from Shakespeare ! Every character, 
 every scene, every speech in any way essential to ihe piece ! 
 King Hjalmar is put together out of King Lear and Macbeth ; 
 Lear in his madness and manner of expressing himself, Mac- 
 beth in his share in the murder of the Princess Maleine. Queen 
 Anne is patched up out of Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude ; 
 Prince Hjalmar is unmistakably Hamlet, with his obscure 
 speeches, his profound allusions and his inner struggles between 
 filial duty and morality ; the nurse is from Romeo and Juliet ; 
 Angus is Horatio ; Vano'x and Stephano are Rosenkranz and 
 Guildenstern, with an admixture of Marcellus and Bernardo, and 
 all the subordinate characters, the fool, the doctor, the courtiers, 
 etc., bear the physiognomy of Shakespeare's characters. 
 
 The piece begins in the following manner : 
 
 The Gardens of the Castle. 
 Enter STEPHANO and VANOX. 
 
 VANOX. What o'clock is it ? 
 
 STEPHANO. Judging from the moon, it should be midnight. 
 
 VANOX. I think 'tis going to rain. 
 
 Let us compare this with the first scene in Hamlet : 
 
 A platform before the Castle. 
 FRANCISCO . . . BERNARDO. 
 
 FRANCISCO. You come most carefully upon your hour. 
 
 BERNARDO. 'Tis now struck twelve. . . . 
 
 FRANCISCO. . . . 'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart, etc. 
 
 One could, if it were worth while, trace scene for scene, word for 
 word, from some passage in Shakespeare. In the Princesse 
 Maleine we find in succession the fearfully stormy night from 
 Julius C<zsar (Act I., Scene 3) ; the entrance of King Lear into 
 the palace of Albany (Act I., Scene 4 . . . ' LEAR : Let me 
 not stay a jot for dinner ; go, get it ready/ etc.) ; the night 
 scene in Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth induces her husband to 
 commit murder ; the thrice-repeated ' Oh ! oh ! oh !' of Othello 
 which Queen Anne here utters ; Hamlet's conversation with 
 Horatio, etc. The death of the Princess Maleine has been 
 inspired by memories both of Desdemona suffocated and of 
 Cordelia hanged. All this is jumbled up in the craziest manner, 
 and often distorted almost beyond recognition, or given the 
 opposite meaning ; but, with a little attention, one can always 
 find one's way. 
 
 Let us imagine a child, at the age when he is able to follow 
 the conversation of grown-up people, attending a performance
 
 236 DEGENERATION 
 
 or a reading of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and 
 Richard J I., and who on his return to the nursery should relate 
 in his own way to his little brothers and sisters what he had 
 heard. We should in this way get a correct idea of the composi- 
 tion of Princesse Maleine. Maeterlinck has crammed himself 
 with Shakespeare, and reproduces the pieces undigested, yet 
 repulsively altered and with the beginnings of foul decomposi- 
 tion. This is an unappetizing picture, but it alone can serve 
 to illustrate the mental process which goes on in the so-called 
 ' creations ' of the degenerate. They read greedily, receive a 
 very strong impression in consequence of their emotionalism ; 
 this pursues them with the force of an 'obsession,' and they do 
 not rest till they have reproduced, sadly travestied, what they 
 have read. Thus their works resemble the coins of the 
 barbarians, which are imitations of Roman and Greek models, 
 while betraying that their artificers could not read or under- 
 stand the letters and symbols inscribed on them. 
 
 Maeterlinck's Princesse Maleine is a Shakespearian anthology 
 for children or Tierra del Fuegians. The characters of the 
 British poet have gone to make parts for the actors in a theatre 
 of monkeys. They still remind us more or less of the attitudes 
 and movements of the persons whom they ape, but they have 
 not a human brain in their heads, and cannot say two connected 
 and rational words. Here are a few examples of the manner 
 in which Maeterlinck's people converse ! 
 
 King Marcellus in the First Act (Scene 2) endeavours to 
 dissuade the Princess Maleine from loving Hjalmar. 
 
 MARCELLUS. Well, Maleine ! 
 
 MALEINE. My lord ? 
 
 MARCELLUS. Do you not understand? 
 
 MALEINE. What, my lord ? 
 
 MARCELLUS. Will you promise me to forget Hjalmar ? 
 
 MALEINE. My lord ! . . . 
 
 MARCELLUS. What say you? Do you still love Hjalmar? 
 
 MALEINE. Ay, my lord. 
 
 MARCELLUS. Ay, my lord. Oh, devils and tempests ! she coolly confesses 
 it. She dares to tell me this without shame. She has seen Hjalmar once 
 only, for one single afternoon, and now she is hotter than hell. 
 
 GODELIVA. My lord ! . . . 
 
 MARCELLUS. Be silent, you. " Ay, my lord 1" and she is not yet fifteen ! 
 Ha ! it makes one long to kill them then and there. . . . 
 
 GODELIVA. My lord. . . . 
 
 NURSE. Isn't she free to love, just like anyone else? Do you mean to 
 put her under a glass case? Is this a reason to bully a poor child? She 
 has done no harm. . . . 
 
 MARCELLUS. Oh, she has done no harm ! . . . Now, in the first place, 
 hold your peace, you. ... I am not addressing you ; and it is doubtless at 
 your prompting, you procuress. . . . 
 
 GODELIVA. My lord 1 ... 
 
 NURSE. A procuress ! I a procuress ! 
 
 MARCELLUS. Will you let me speak? Begone! begone, both of you! 
 Oh ! I know well enough you have put your heads together, and that the
 
 MYSTICISM 237 
 
 season of scheming and plotting has set in ; but wait awhile. . . . Now, 
 Maleine, . . . you should be reasonable. Will you promise to be reasonable ? 
 
 MALEINE. Ay, my lord. 
 
 MARCELLUS. There ! come now. Therefore you will not think any more 
 of this marriage ? . . . 
 
 MALEINE. Ay. 
 
 MARCELLUS. Ay? You mean you will forget Prince Hjalmar? 
 
 MALEINE. No. 
 
 MARCELLUS. You do not yet give up Prince Hjalmar ? 
 
 MALEINE. No. 
 
 MARCELLUS. Now, supposing I compel you ? Ay, I ! and supposing I 
 have you put under lock and key ? and supposing I separate you for ever- 
 more from your Hjalmar with his puny, girlish face? What say you? (She 
 weeps.) Ha ! that's it is 't ? Begone, and we shall see about that begone ! 
 
 Next, the scene in the second act, where Maleine and Hjalmar 
 meet in the gloomy park of the castle : 
 
 HJALMAR. . . . Come ! 
 
 MALEINE. Not yet. 
 
 HJALMAR. Uglyane ! Uglyane! 
 
 [Kisses her. Here the waterfall, blown about by the wind, collapses 
 and splashes them. 
 
 MALEINE. Oh ! what have you done ? 
 
 HJALMAR. It is the fountain. 
 
 MALEINE. Oh, oh ! 
 
 HJALMAR. It's the wind. 
 
 MALEINE. I am afraid. 
 
 HJALMAR. Think not of that any longer. Let us get further away. Let 
 us not think of that any more. Ah, ah, ah ! I am wet all over. 
 
 MALEINE. There is somebody weeping, close by us. 
 
 HJALMAR. Somebody weeping? 
 
 MALEINE. I am afraid. 
 
 HJALMAR. But cannot you hear that it's only the wind ? 
 
 MALEINE. What are all those eyes on the tree, though ? 
 
 HJALMAR. Where ? Ha ! those are the owls. They have returned. I 
 will put them to flight. (Throws earth at them.) Away ! away J 
 
 MALEINE. There is yonder one that will not go. 
 
 HJALMAR. Where is it ? 
 
 MALEINE. On the weeping willow. 
 
 HJALMAR. Away ! 
 
 MALEINE. He is not gone. 
 
 HJALMAR. Away, away ! [Throws earth at the owl. 
 
 MALEINE. Oh ! you have thrown earth on me. 
 
 HJALMAR. Thrown earth on you ? 
 
 MALEINE. Ay, it fell on me. 
 
 HJALMAR. Oh, my poor Uglyane ! 
 
 MALEINE. I am afraid. 
 
 HJALMAR. Afraid at my side ? 
 
 MALEINE. There are flames amid the trees. 
 
 HJALMAR. That is nothing mere lightning. It has been very sultry 
 to-day. 
 
 MALEINE. I am afraid. Oh ! who can be digging so at the ground around 
 us? 
 
 HJALMAR. That is nothing. 'Tis but a mole a poor little mole at work. 
 
 (The mole in Hamlet ! To our old acquaintance greeting !) 
 MALEINE. I am afraid.
 
 238 DEGENERATION 
 
 After some more conversation in the same style : 
 
 HJALMAR. What are you thinking of ? 
 MALEINE. I feel sad. 
 
 HJAI.MAR. Sad ? Now, what are your sad thoughts about, Uglyane? 
 MAI.F.INE. I am thinking of Princess Maleine. 
 HJALMAR. What do you say? 
 MALEINE. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.* 
 HJALMAR. Do you know Princess Maleine? 
 MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine. 
 HJALMAR. You are not Uglyane ? 
 MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine. 
 
 HJALMAR. What ! you Princess Maleine ? Dead! Eut Princess Maleine 
 is dead ! 
 
 MALEINE. I am Princess Maleine. 
 
 Has anyone anywhere in the poetry of the two worlds ever 
 seen such complete idiocy ? These ' Ahs ' and ' Ohs,' this want 
 of comprehension of the simplest remarks, this repetition four 
 or five times of the same imbecile expressions, gives the truest 
 conceivable clinical picture of incurable cretinism. These parts 
 are precisely those most extolled by Maeterlinck's admirers. 
 According to them, all has been chosen with a deep artistic 
 intention. A healthy reader will scarcely swallow that. Maeter- 
 linck's puppets say nothing, because they have nothing to say. 
 Their author has not been able to put a single thought into 
 their hollow skulls, because he himself possesses none. The 
 creatures moving on his stage are not thinking and speaking 
 human beings, but tadpoles or slugs, considerably more stupid 
 than trained fleas at a fair. 
 
 Moreover, Princesse Maleine is not altogether a Shake- 
 spearian dream. The ' seven nuns,' e.g., belong to Maeter- 
 linck. They are an astounding invention. They are ever 
 marching like demented geese through the piece, winding in 
 and out, with their psalm-singing, through all the rooms and 
 corridors of the King's castle, through the court, through the 
 park, through the forest, coming unexpectedly round a corner 
 in the middle of a scene, trotting across the stage and off at the 
 other side without anyone understanding whence they come, 
 whither they go, or for what purpose they are brought on at all. 
 They are a living * obsession,' mixing itself irresistibly in all the 
 incidents of the piece. Here also we find all the intellectual fads 
 which we noticed in the Serres Chaudes. The Princess Maleine 
 is herself the embodiment of the hungry, sick, strayed princesses, 
 wandering over the meadows, who haunt these poems, and 
 undoubtedly sprang from Swinburne's ballad of Tlte King's 
 Daughters. The canals also play their part (p. 18). 'And the 
 expression of her eyes! It seemed as though one were all of a 
 sudden in a great stream [Fr. canal} of fresh water. . . .' (p. rio). 
 ' We have been to look at the windmills along the canal,' etc. 
 
 * Omitted in the English translation. TRANSLATOR.
 
 MYSTICISM 239 
 
 And sick people and illness are mentioned on almost every 
 page (p. 1 10) : 
 
 ANNE. I was fever-stricken myself. 
 
 THE KING. Everyone is fever-stricken on arriving here. 
 
 HJALMAR. There is much fever in the village, etc. 
 
 Besides Princesse Maleine, Maeterlinck has written some other 
 pieces. One, Llntruse (The Intruder), deals with the idea that 
 in a house where a sick person lies in extremis, Death intrudes 
 towards midnight, that he walks audibly through the garden, 
 makes at first a few trial strokes with his scythe on the grass 
 before the castle, then knocks at the door, forces it open because 
 they will not admit him, and carries off his victim. In a second, 
 Les Aveugles (The Blind), we are shown how a number of blind 
 men, the inmates of a blind asylum, were led by an old priest 
 into a forest, how the priest died suddenly without a sound, how 
 the blind men did not at first notice this, but becoming at length 
 uneasy, groped about, succeeded in touching the corpse, already 
 growing cold, assured themselves by questioning each other that 
 their leader was dead, and then in terrible despair awaited death 
 by hunger and cold. For this charming story takes place on a 
 wild island in the far north ; and between the wood and the 
 asylum lies a river, crossed by only one bridge, which the blind 
 cannot find without a guide. It never occurs either to Maeter- 
 linck or to his inconsolable blind men as possible that in the 
 asylum, where, as is expressly mentioned, there are attendant 
 nuns, the long absence of the whole body of blind men would 
 be noticed, and someone sent out to look for them. The reader 
 will not expect me to point out in detail the craziness of the 
 assumption in both these pieces, or that, after these examples, 
 I should relate and analyze two other pieces of Maeterlinck's, 
 Les Sept Princesses (' seven,' of course !) and Pelleas et Melisande. 
 
 The Intruder has been translated into several languages, and 
 performed in many towns. The Viennese laughed at its im- 
 becility. In Paris and London men shook their heads. In 
 Copenhagen an audience of appreciators of the ' poetry of the 
 future ' was touched, enraptured and inspired. This demon- 
 strates the hysteria of to-day quite as much as the piece itself. 
 
 The history of Maeterlinck's celebrity is especially remarkable 
 and instructive. This pitiable mental cripple vegetated for years 
 wholly unnoticed in his corner in Ghent, without the Belgian 
 Symbolists, who outbid even the French, according him the 
 smallest attention ; as to the public at large, no one had a 
 suspicion of his existence. Then one fine day in 1890 his writings 
 fell accidentally into the hands of the French novelist, Octave 
 Mirbeau. He read them, and whether he desired to make fun 
 of his contemporaries in grand style, or whether he obeyed some 
 morbid ' impulsion ' is not known ; it is sufficient to say that he
 
 240 DEGENERATION 
 
 published in Le Figaro an article of an unheard-of extravagance, 
 in which he represented Maeterlinck as the most brilliant, 
 sublime, moving poet which the last three hundred years had 
 produced, and assigned him a place near nay, above Shake- 
 speare. And then the world witnessed one of the most extra- 
 ordinary and most convincing examples of the force of 
 suggestion. The hundred thousand rich and cultivated readers 
 to whom the Figaro addresses itself immediately took up the 
 views which Mirbeau had imperiously suggested to them. They 
 at once saw Maeterlinck with Mirbeau's eyes. They found in, 
 him all the beauties which Mirbeau asserted that he perceived 
 in him. Andersen's fairy-tale of the invisible clothes of the 
 emperor repeated itself line for line. They were not there, but 
 the whole court saw them. Some imagined they really saw the 
 absent state robes ; the others did not see them, but rubbed 
 their eyes so long that they at least doubted whether they saw 
 them or not ; others, again, could not impose upon themselves,, 
 but dared not contradict the rest. Thus Maeterlinck became at 
 one stroke, by Mirbeau's favour, a great poet, and a poet of the 
 ' future.' Mirbeau had also given quotations which would have 
 completely sufficed for a reader who was not hysterical, not 
 given over irresistibly to suggestion, to recognise Maeterlinck 
 for what he is, namely, a mentally debilitated plagiarist ; but 
 these very quotations wrung cries of admiration from the Figarv 
 public, for Mirbeau had pointed them out as beauties of the 
 highest rank, and one knows that a decided affirmation is suffi- 
 cient to compel hypnotic subjects to eat raw potatoes as oranges,, 
 and to believe themselves to be dogs or other quadrupeds. 
 
 Everywhere apostles were quickly at hand to proclaim, inter- 
 pret and extol the new master. The ' mashers ' of the critic 
 world, whose ambition is set on being the first to assume nay,, 
 where it is possible, to foretell the very latest fashions, the 
 fashion of to-morrow, as much in the styles of literature, as in 
 the colour and shape of neckties, vied with each other in deifying 
 Maeterlinck. Ten editions of his Princesse Maleine have been 
 sold out since Mirbeau's suggestion, and, as I have said before,, 
 his Aveugles and Inlruse have been performed in various places. 
 . We now know the different forms under which the mysticism 
 of degeneration manifests itself in contemporary literature. The 
 magism of a Guaita and a Papus, the Androgyne of a Peladan, 
 the anxiomania of a Rollinat, the idiotic drivelling of a Maeter- 
 linck, may be regarded as its culminating aberrations. At least 
 I cannot myself imagine that it would be possible for mysticism 
 to go beyond, even by the thickness of a hair, these extreme 
 points without even the hysterical, the devotees and the snobs of 
 fashion, who are still in some degree capable of discernment, 
 recognising in it a profound and complete intellectual darkness.
 
 BOOK III. 
 
 EGO-MANIA. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EGO-MANIA. 
 
 'HOWEVER dissimilar such individualities as Wagner and Tolstoi, / 
 Rossetti and Verlaine, may at first sight appear, we have, never- 
 theless, encountered in all of them certain common traits, to 
 wit, vague and incoherent thought, the tyranny of the association 
 of ideas, the presence of obsessions, erotic excitability, religious 
 enthusiasm, by which we may recognise them as members of 
 one and the same intellectual family, and justify their union into 
 one single group that of mystics. 
 
 We must go a step farther and say that not only the mystics 
 among the degenerate, but in the main all the degenerate, of 
 whatever nature they may be, are moulded from the same clay. 
 They all show the same lacunae, inequalities, and malformations 
 in intellectual capacity, the same psychic and somatic stigmata. 
 If, then, anyone, having a certain number of degenerate subjects 
 to judge from, were to bring into prominence and represent as 
 their exclusive peculiarity merely mystical thought in some, 
 merely erotic emotionalism in others, merely vague, barren, 
 fraternal love and a mania for regenerating the world, or 
 else merely an impulsion to commit acts of a criminal nature, 
 etc., he would manifestly be seeing only one side of the 
 phenomenon, and taking no account of the rest. One or 
 another stigma of degeneration may, in a given case, be 
 especially apparent ; but, on duly careful inspection, the 
 presence of all the others, or, at least, indications of them, will 
 be discerned. 
 
 To the celebrated French alienist, Esquirol, is due the signal 
 merit of having discovered that there are forms of mental de- 
 rangement in which thought proceeds apparently in a perfectly 
 rational manner, but in which, in the midst of intelligent and 
 logical cerebral activity, some insane presentations appear, like 
 
 16
 
 242 DEGENERATION 
 
 erratic boulders, thus enabling us to recognise the subject as 
 mentally diseased. But Esquirol has committed the fault of 
 not digging deep enough ; his observation is too much on 
 the surface. It was through this that he came to introduce 
 into science the notion of ' monomania,' that is, of well- 
 delimitated, partial madness, of an isolated, fixed idea beside 
 which all the rest of the intellectual life operates with sanity. 
 This was an error. There is no monomania. Esquirol's own pupil, 
 the elder Falret, has sufficiently proved it, and our Westphal, 
 from whose other merits I have no wish to detract, was far 
 from standing in the forefront of research, when, half a century- 
 after Esquirol, and thirty years after Falret, he still described 
 the ' fear of space,' or agoraphobia, as a special mental malady, 
 or kind of monomania. What is apparently monomania is in 
 reality an indication of a profound organic disorder which never 
 reveals itself by one single phase of folly. A fixed idea never 
 exists in isolation.* It is always accompanied by other irregu- 
 larities of thought and feeling, which, it is true, at a cursory 
 glance, may not be so distinctly remarked as the more strongly 
 developed insane idea. Recent clinical observation has dis- 
 covered a long series of similar fixed ideas or ' monomanias,' and 
 recognised the fact that they are one and all the consequence of a 
 fundamental disposition of the organism, viz., of its degeneration. 
 It was unnecessary for Magnan to give a special name to each 
 symptom of degeneration, and to draw up in array, with almost 
 comical effect, the host of ' phobias ' and ' manias.' Agoraphobia 
 (fear of open space), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed space), rupo- 
 phobia (fear of dirt), iophobia (fear of poison), nosophobia (fear of 
 sickness), aichmophobia (fear of pointed objects), belenophobia 
 (fear of needles), cremnophobia (fear of abysses), trichophobia (fear 
 of hair), onomatomania (folly of words or names), pyromania (in- 
 cendiary madness), kleptomania (madness for theft), dipsomania 
 (madness for drink), erotomania (love madness), arithmomania 
 (madness of numbers), oniomania (madness for buying), etc. This 
 list might be lengthened at pleasure, and enriched by nearly all 
 the roots of the Greek dictionary. It is simply philologico-medical 
 trifling. None of the disorders discovered and described by 
 Magnan and his pupils, and decorated with a sonorous Greek 
 name, forms an independent entity, and appears separately ; and 
 Morel is right in disregarding as unessential "all these varied 
 manifestations of a morbid cerebral activity, and adhering to the 
 principal phenomenon which lies at the base of all the ' phobias ' 
 
 * Lisandro Reyes has clearly seen this in his useful sketch entitled 
 Contribution d r Etude de VEtat mental chez les Enfants dt'ge'nttre's ; Paris, 
 1890, p. 8. He affirms expressly that among degenerate children there is 
 no really exclusive 'monomania.' ' Among them an isolated delirious idea 
 may endure for some time, but it is most frequently replaced all at once by 
 a new conception.'
 
 EGO-MANIA 243 
 
 and ' manias,' namely, the great emotionalism of the degenerate.* 
 If to emotionalism, or an excessive excitability, he had added 
 the cerebral debility, which implies feebleness of perception, will, 
 memory, judgment, as well as inattention and instability, he would 
 have exhaustively characterized the nature of degeneration, and 
 perhaps prevented psychiatry from being stuffed with a crowd 
 of useless and disturbing designations. Kowalewski approached 
 much nearer to the truth in his well-known treatise, f where he 
 has represented all the mental disorders of the degenerate as 
 one single malady, which merely presents different degrees of 
 intensity, and which induces in its mildest form neurasthenia ; 
 under a graver aspect impulsions and groundless anxieties ; and, 
 in its most serious form, the madness of brooding thought or 
 doubt. Within these limits may be ranged all the particular 
 ' manias' and 'phobias' which at present swarm in the literature 
 of mental therapeutics. 
 
 But if it be untenable to make a particular malady out of 
 every symptom in which the fundamental disorder (i.e., de- 
 generation) shows itself, it should not, on the other hand, be 
 ignored that among certain of the degenerate a group of morbid 
 phenomena distinctly predominates, without involving the 
 absence of the other groups. Thus, it is permissible to dis- 
 tinguish among them certain principal species, notably, beside 
 the mystics, of whom we have studied the most remarkable 
 representatives in contemporary art and poetry, the ego-maniacs 
 (Ichsiichtigen). It is not from affectation that I use this word 
 instead of the terms ' egoism ' (Selbstsuc/tt) and ' egoist,' so 
 generally employed. Egoism is a lack of amiability, a defect 
 in education, perhaps a fault of character, a proof of insuffi- 
 ciently developed morality, but it is not a disease. The egoist 
 is quite able to look after himself in life, and hold his place in 
 society ; he is often also, when the attainment of low ends only 
 is in view, even more capable than the superior and nobler man, 
 who has inured himself to self-abnegation. The ego-maniac, on 
 the contrary, is an invalid who does not see things as they are, does 
 not understand the world, and cannot take up a right attitude 
 towards it. The difference I make in German between IcJisucht 
 and Selbstsncht, the French also make in their language, where 
 a careful writer will never confound the word ' egotisme/ 
 borrowed from the English, with ' egoisme ' that is, selfishness. 
 
 Of course the reader to whom the mental physiognomy of ego- 
 maniacs is shown ought always to remember that, if the prin- 
 cipal representatives of this species and of that of the mystics are 
 
 * Legrain (Du Ddlire chez les Degentres, Paris, 1886) merely expresses this 
 in somewhat different words, when he says (p. 68), 'Obsession, impulsion, 
 these are to be found at the base of all monomania.' 
 
 f Analyzed in the Journal of Mental Science, January, 1888.
 
 344 DEGENERATION 
 
 characterized with sufficient clearness, the confines of the latter 
 type are fluctuating. The ego-maniacs are, on the one hand, at 
 once mystics, erotics, and, though it seems paradoxical, even affect 
 occasionally an appearance of philanthropy ; among the mystics, 
 on the other hand, we frequently meet with a strongly-developed 
 ego-rnania. There are certain specimens among the degenerate 
 in whom all the disorders are produced to such an equal degree 
 that it is doubtful whether they ought to be classed with the 
 mystics or the ego-maniacs. As a general rule, however, co-ordi- 
 nation under one class or the other will not be very difficult. 
 
 That egoism is a salient feature in the character of the degene- 
 rate has been unanimously confirmed by all observers. ' The 
 degenerate neither knows nor takes interest in anything but 
 himself,' says Roubinovitch ;* and Legrainf asserts that he 
 ' has . . . only one occupation, that of satisfying his appetites.' 
 This peculiarity establishes a bond which unites the highest of the 
 degenerate to the lowest, the insane genius to the feeble mental 
 cripple. ' All delirious geniuses,' remarks Lombroso, ' are very 
 much captivated by, and preoccupied with, their own selves,'* 
 and Sollier writes on the subject of their antipodes, the im- 
 beciles : ' Undisciplined as they are, they obey only through fear, 
 are often violent, especially to those who are weaker than them- 
 selves, humble and submissive towards those they feel to be 
 stronger. They are without affection, egoistic in the highest 
 degree, braggarts. ' 
 
 The clinicist is satisfied with indicating the fact of this 
 characteristic egoism, but for ourselves we wish further to in- 
 vestigate what are its organic roots, why the degenerate must 
 be more than egoistic, why he must be an ego-maniac, and cannot 
 be otherwise. 
 
 In order to understand how the consciousness of the ' I ' 
 (morbidly exaggerated and frequently increasing to megalo- 
 mania) originates, we must recall how the healthy consciousness 
 of the ' I ' is formed. 
 
 It is, of course, not my intention here to treat of the whole 
 theory of cognition. It is only the most important results of 
 this science, so highly developed in the present day, that can 
 find place in this work. 
 
 It has become a philosophical commonplace that we know 
 directly only those changes which take place in our own 
 organism. If, in spite of this, we are able to form an image of 
 the external world surrounding us, from perceptions derived 
 
 * J. Roubinovitch, Hyste'rie mdle et De'ge'ne'rescence. Paris, 1890, p. 62. 
 t Legrain, of), tit., p. 10. 
 
 1 Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn (German edition cited in vol. i.), p. 325. 
 Dr. Paul Sollier, PsvcJwlogie de r Idiot et de rimbttile. Paris, 1890, 
 p. 174-
 
 EGO-MANIA 24$ 
 
 only from within, it is because we trace the changes in our 
 organism which we have perceived to causes exterior to it ; and 
 from the nature and force of the changes taking place in our 
 organism draw conclusions as to the nature and force of the 
 external events causing them. 
 
 How we come in general to assume that there is something 
 exterior, and that changes perceived by us only in our organism 
 can have causes which are not in the organism itself, is a ques- 
 tion over which metaphysics has cudgelled its brain for centuries. 
 So little has it found an answer, that, in order to put an end to 
 this difficulty anyhow, it has simply denied the very question, and 
 jumped to the conclusion that the ' I ' has actually no knowledge 
 of a ' not-I,' of an external world, and cannot have it because 
 there is no external world at all, that what we so call is a creation 
 of our mind, and exists only in our thought as a presentation, 
 but not outside our ' I ' as a reality. 
 
 It is a fact characteristic of the soporific action exercised by 
 the sound of a word on the human mind that this wholly sense- 
 less cackle, glib, well arranged and formed into the philosophical 
 system of idealism, should have thoroughly satisfied for nearly 
 eight generations the greater number of professional meta. 
 physicians, from Berkeley to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. These 
 wise men repeated, in a tone of conviction, the doctrine of the 
 non-existence of the ' not-I,' and it did not trouble them that 
 they themselves contradicted constantly, in all their actions, their 
 own fustian ; that they devoted themselves from their birth to 
 their death to an uninterrupted series of absolutely absurd 
 actions, if there were no objective external world ; that therefore 
 they themselves recognised their system to be but wind and 
 shadow, a childish game with words devoid of sense. And the 
 most logical among these grave drivellers, Bishop Berkeley, 
 did not even observe that after all he had not obtained, even at 
 the price of the total abdication of common sense, the answer 
 he sought to the fundamental question of knowledge, for his 
 dogmatic idealism denies, it is true, the reality of the external 
 world, but admits with frivolous thoughtlessness that there are 
 other minds outside of him, Berkeley, and even a universal 
 mind. Thus, then, even according to him, the ' I ' is not all ; 
 there is still something outside of the ' I,' a ' not-I ' ; there does 
 exist an external world, if only under the form of immaterial 
 spirits. This, however, brings up the question, How does 
 Berkeley's ' I ' come to conceive the existence of something 
 outside of itself, the existence of a ' not-1 ' ? That was the 
 question which had to be answered, and, in spite of its sacrificing 
 the whole world of phenomena, Berkeley's idealism, like the 
 idealism of every one of his successors, makes no reply to it 
 whatsoever.
 
 j 4 6 DEGENERATION 
 
 Metaphysics could find no answer to the question, because the 
 latter, as stated by the former, does not admit of an answer. 
 Scientific psychology i.e., psycho-physiology does not en- 
 counter the same difficulties. It does not take the finished ' I ' 
 of the adult, clearly conscious of himself, feeling himself dis- 
 tinctly opposed to the ' not-I ' to the entire external world, but 
 it goes back to the beginnings of this ' I,' investigates in what 
 manner it is formed, and then finds that, at a time when the 
 idea of the existence of a ' not-I,' would be really inexplicable, 
 this idea, in fact, was absolutely non-existent, and that, when 
 we do meet it, the ' I ' has already had experiences which com- 
 pletely explain how it could and must arrive at the formation of 
 the idea of a ' not-I/ 
 
 We may assume that a certain degree of consciousness is the 
 accompanying phenomenon of every reaction of the protoplasm 
 on external action i.e., is a fundamental quality of living 
 matter. Even the simplest unicellular living organisms move 
 with obvious intention towards certain goals, and away from cer- 
 tain points ; they distinguish between foods and such materials 
 as are unfit for nutrition ; thus they have a species of will and 
 judgment, and these two activities presuppose consciousness.* 
 What may be the nature of this consciousness localized in pro- 
 toplasm not yet even differentiated into nerve-cells, is a thing 
 of which it is impossible for the human mind to form a definite 
 idea. The only thing we can presuppose with any certainty 
 is that in the crepuscular consciousness of a unicellular 
 organism, the notion of an ' I ' and a ' not-I,' which is opposed 
 to it, does not exist. The cell feels changes in itself, and these 
 changes provoke others, in accordance with established bio- 
 chemical or bio-mechanical laws ; it receives an impression to 
 which it responds by a movement, but it has certainly no idea 
 that the impression is caused by a process in the external world, 
 and that its movement reacts on the external world. 
 
 Even among animals very much higher in the scale, and 
 considerably more advanced in differentiation, a consciousness 
 of the * Ego,' properly so called, is inconceivable. How can 
 the ray of a star-fish, the bud of a tunicate, of a botryllus, 
 the half of a double animal (diplozoon), the tube of an 
 actinia, or of some other coral polypus, be aware of itself as a 
 separate ' I,' seeing that, though it is an animal, it is at the 
 
 * See on this subject the remarkable treatise of Alfred Binet, 'On the 
 Psychic Life of Micro-organisms,' contained in the volume of extracts : ' Le 
 ft'tifhistne dans r Amour {Etudes de Psychologie experimentale). La Vie 
 psyc/iigue des Micro-orgqnisiiies, I'lntensitt des Images tnentales, le Probteme 
 hypnotique, Note snr t 'Ecrtture hyste'rigue.' Paris, 1 890. A short time before 
 Binet, this same subject was treated by Verworn in a very deserving manner, 
 at once original and suggestive, in \aptych<h>physiologische Protisten-Studien. 
 Jena, 1889.
 
 EGO-MANIA 247 
 
 same time a portion of a composite animal, of a colony of 
 animals, and must perceive impressions which strike it directly, 
 as well as those -experienced by a companion of the same 
 colony ? Or can certain large worms, many of the species of 
 Eunice, for example, have an idea of their 'Ego/ when they 
 neither feel nor recognise portions of their own bodies as con- 
 stituent parts of their individuality, and begin to eat their tails 
 when, by any accident in coiling themselves, it happens to lie 
 in front of their mouths ? 
 
 The consciousness of the ' Ego ' is not synonymous with 
 consciousness in general. While the latter is probably an 
 attribute of all living matter, the former is the result of the 
 concordant action of a nervous tissue highly differentiated and 
 ' hierarchized,' or brought into a relation of mutual dependence. 
 It appears very late in the series of organic evolution, and is, 
 up to the present, the highest vital phenomenon of which we 
 have knowledge. It arises little by little from experiences 
 which the organism acquires in the course of the natural activity 
 of its constituent parts. Every one of our nerve-ganglia, every 
 one of our nerve-fibres, and even every cell, has a subordinate 
 and faint consciousness of what passes in it. As the whole 
 nervous system of our body has numerous communications 
 between all its parts, it perceives in its totality something of all 
 the stimulations of its parts, and the consciousness which ac- 
 companies them. In this manner there arises in the centre 
 where all the nerve ducts of the whole body meet, i.e., in the 
 brain, a total consciousness composed of innumerable partial 
 consciousnesses, having evidently for its object only the pro- 
 cesses of its own organism. In the course of its existence, and 
 that at a very early period, consciousness distinguishes two 
 kinds of wholly different perceptions. Some appear without 
 preparation, others accompanied and preceded by other 
 phenomena. No act of will precedes the stimulation of the 
 senses, but such an act does precede every conscious movement. 
 Before our senses perceive anything, our consciousness has no 
 notion of what they will perceive ; before our muscles execute 
 a movement, an image of this movement is elaborated in the 
 brain, or spinal marrow (in the case of a reflex action). There 
 exists then, beforehand, a presentation of the movement which 
 the muscles will execute. We feel clearly that the immediate 
 cause of the movement lies in ourselves. On the other hand, 
 we have no similar feelings in regard to sense-impressions. 
 Again, we learn by the muscular sense the realization of motor 
 images elaborated by our consciousness ; on the other hand, we 
 experience nothing similar when we elaborate a motor image 
 not having our own muscles exclusively for its object. We 
 wish, for example, to raise our arm. Our consciousness elaborates
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 this image, the brachial muscles obey, and consciousness receives 
 the communication that the image has been realized by the 
 brachial muscles. Next, we wish to raise or throw a stone with. 
 our arm. Our consciousness elaborates a motor image, in- 
 volving our own muscles and the stone. When we are executing 
 the desired and meditated movement, our consciousness receives- 
 sensations from the muscles in activity, but not from the 
 stone. Thus it perceives the movements which are accom- 
 panied by muscular sensations, and others which appear with- 
 out this accompaniment. 
 
 In order thoroughly to comprehend the formation of our 
 consciousness of the ' Ego,' and the presentation of the exist- 
 ence of a ' non-Ego,' we must consider a third point. All the 
 parts, all the cells of our body, have their own separate con- 
 sciousness, which accompanies every one of their excitations.. 
 These excitations are occasioned partly by the activity of 
 nutrition, of assimilation, of the cleavage of the nucleus that 
 is to say, by the vital processes of the cell itself, and partly by 
 action of the environment. The excitations which proceed 
 from the interior, the bio-chemical and bio-mechanical processes 
 of the cell, are continued, and endure as long as the life of the 
 cell itself. The stimulations which are the result of the action. 
 of the environment only appear, of course, with this action, i.e., 
 not continuously, but intermittently. The vital processes in- 
 the cell have direct value and significance only for the cell 
 itself, not for the whole organism ; actions of the environment 
 may become important for the whole organism. The principal 
 organ, the brain, acquires the habit of neglecting the excitations, 
 relating to the interior vital activity of the cell first, because 
 they are continuous, and we perceive distinctly only a change of 
 state, not a state itself ; and then, because the cell accomplishes its 
 own functions by its own energy, which renders the interference 
 of the brain useless. The brain takes notice, on the contrary, 
 of excitations which are produced by action ab extra first, 
 because they appear with interruptions ; and, secondly, because 
 they may necessitate an adaptation of the whole organism, 
 which could only take place through the intervention of the 
 brain. 
 
 It cannot be doubted that the brain has knowledge also of 
 the internal excitations of the organism, and only for the 
 reasons already stated is not, as a general rule, distinctly 
 conscious of them. If through illness a disturbance is produced 
 in the functions of the single cell, we at once become conscious of 
 the processes in the cell we feel the diseased organ, it stimulates 
 our attention ; the whole organism is uncomfortable and out of 
 tune. It is sensations of this kind, which, in a healthy state,. 
 do not distinctly reach our consciousness, that make up the
 
 EGO-MANIA 249 
 
 sensation of our body, our organic ' I,' the so-called ccensesthesis 
 or general sensibility. 
 
 Ccensesthesis, the organic dimly-conscious ' I,' rises into the 
 clear consciousness of the ' Ego,' by excitations of the second 
 order, reaching the brain from the nerves and muscles, for they 
 are stronger and more distinct than the others, and are inter- 
 rupted. The brain learns the changes produced in the nervous 
 system by external causes, and the contraction of the muscles. 
 How it has knowledge of the latter is still obscure. It has been 
 recently asserted that the muscular sense has for its seat the 
 nerves of the joints. This is certainly false. We have distinct 
 sensations of the contractions of muscles which put no joint in 
 movement for example, of the orbicular and constrictor muscles. 
 Then there are the cramps and spasms even of isolated muscular 
 fibres, which likewise do not produce a change of position in the 
 joints. But in any case the perceptions of muscular sense exist, 
 however they are or are not produced. 
 
 Thus consciousness very soon learns that the muscular 
 movements it perceives are preceded by certain acts accom- 
 plished by itself, namely, the elaboration of motor images, and 
 the despatch of impulses to the muscles. It receives know- 
 ledge of these movements twice, one after the other it per- 
 ceives them, first, directly as its own presentation and act of 
 volition, as a motor image elaborated in the nerve-centres ; and 
 immediately afterwards as an impression arising from the 
 muscular nerves as accomplished movement. It acquires the 
 habit of connecting its own acts those previously elaborated 
 motor images with the muscular movements, and of regarding 
 the latter a consequence of the former in short, of thinking 
 causally. If consciousness has adopted the habit of causality, 
 it seeks a cause in all its perceptions, and can no longer imagine 
 a perception without a cause. The cause of muscular percep- 
 tions that is, of movements consciously willed it finds in itself. 
 The cause of nervous perceptions that is, the information 
 reported by the nervous system concerning the excitations 
 which it experiences it does not find in itself. But the latter 
 must have a cause. Where is it ? As it is not in conscious- 
 ness, it must necessarily exist somewhere else ; there must then 
 be something else outside consciousness, and so consciousness 
 comes, through the habit of causal thought, to assume the 
 existence of something outside itself, of a 'not-I/ of an external 
 world, and to project into it the cause of the excitations which 
 it perceives in the nervous system. 
 
 Experience teaches that the distinction between the ' I ' and 
 the ' not-I ' is really only a question of a habit of thought, of a 
 form of thought, and not of an effective, certain knowledge, 
 which carries in itself the criteria of its accuracy and certitude.
 
 250 DEiGE.NKRATION 
 
 When, in consequence of a morbid disturbance, our sensory 
 nerves or their centres of perception are excited, and conscious- 
 ness acquires knowledge of this excitation, it imputes to it with- 
 out hesitation, according to its' habit, ah external cause existing 
 in the ' not-I.' Hence arise illusions and hallucinations, which 
 the patient takes for realities, and that so positively that there 
 is absolutely no means of convincing him that he perceives facts 
 passing within him, not outside "of him. In the same manner 
 consciousness concludes that the movements executed uncon- 
 sciously are occasioned by an extraneous will. It perceives the 
 movement, but it has not noticed that the habitual internal 
 cause, viz., a motor image and an act of the will, has preceded 
 it ; hence it places the cause of the movement without hesitation 
 in the 'not-I,' although it resides in the 'I,' and is only 
 occasioned by subordinate centres, the activity of which remains 
 concealed from consciousness. This it is which gives rise to 
 spiritualism, which, in so far as it is in good faith and not openly 
 a hocus-pocus, is simply a mystical attempt to explain move- 
 ments, the real cause of which consciousness does not find in 
 itself, and which it places, in consequence, in the ' not-I.' 
 
 In ultimate analysis, the consciousness of the ' Ego,' and notably 
 the opposition of the 'Ego' and the 'non-Ego,' is an illusion of 
 the senses and a fallacy of thought. Every organism is related 
 to a species, and, over and above that, to the universe. It is 
 the direct material continuation of its parents ; it is itself con- 
 tinued directly and materially in its descendants. It is com- 
 posed of the same materials as the whole environing world ; 
 these materials are constantly penetrating into it, transforming 
 it, producing in it all the phenomena of life and consciousness. 
 All the lines of action of the forces of nature are prolonged 
 in its interior ; it is the scene of the same physical and chemical 
 processes in action throughout the universe. What pantheism 
 divines and clothes in needlessly mystic words is clear, sober 
 fact, namely, the unity of nature, in which each organism is also 
 a part related to the whole. Certain parts are more nearly con- 
 nected ; others are more separated from one another. Con- 
 sciousness perceives only the closely-knit parts of its physical 
 basis, not those more remote. Thus it falls into the illusion 
 that the parts near together alone belong to it, and that the 
 more distant are strangers to it, and to consider itself as an 
 4 individuum,' confronting the world as a separate world or 
 microcosm. It does not observe that the ' I,' so rigidly posited, 
 has no fixed limits, but continues and spreads beneath the 
 threshold of consciousness, with an ever-diminishing distinctness 
 of separation, to the extreme depths of nature, till it blends 
 there with all the other constituents ofjtfie universe. 
 
 We may now resume much more briefly the natural history of
 
 EGO-MANIA 251 
 
 the ' I ' and the ' not-I,' and present it in a few formulae. Con- 
 sciousness is a fundamental quality of living matter. The 
 highest organism itself is only a colony of the simplest organisms 
 that is to say, of living cells differentiated diversely in order 
 to qualify the colony for higher functions than the simple cell 
 can accomplish. The collective or ego-consciousness of the 
 colony is composed of the individual consciousness of the parts. 
 The ego-consciousness has an obscure and disregarded part 
 which relates to the vital functions of the cells, or the 
 ccensesthesis, and a clear, privileged part which is attentive to 
 the excitations of the sensory nerves, and to the voluntary 
 activity of the muscles, and which recognises them. Clear con- 
 sciousness learns from experience that acts of will precede 
 voluntary movements. It arrives at the assumption of causality. 
 It observes that the sensorial excitations are not caused by any- 
 thing contained in itself. It is compelled, in consequence, to 
 transfer this cause, the assumption of which it cannot renounce, 
 elsewhere, and is necessarily first brought by this to the presenta- 
 tion of a ' not-I,' and afterwards to the development of this 
 * not-I ' into an apparent universe. 
 
 The old spiritualistic psychology, which regards the 'Ego' 
 as something entirely different from the body, as a special 
 unitary substance, maintains that this 'Ego' considers its own 
 body as something not identical with it, as opposed to the ' Ego ' 
 properly so called, as something external in fact, as ' non-Ego.' 
 Thus, it denies ccenassthesis that is to say, an absolutely certain 
 empirical fact. We constantly have an obscure sensation of the 
 existence of all parts of our body, and our ego-consciousness 
 immediately experiences a change if the vital functions of any 
 one of our organs or tissues suffers a disturbance.* 
 
 Development advances from the unconscious organic ' I ' to 
 the clear conscious ' I,' and to the conception of the ' not-I.' 
 The infant probably has ccenaesthesis even before, in any case 
 after, its birth, for it feels its vital internal processes, shows 
 satisfaction when they are in healthy action, manifests its dis- 
 comfort by movements and cries, which are also only a move- 
 ment of the respiratory and laryngeal muscles, when any dis- 
 
 * ' Certain [sick] persons enjoy keenly a sense of the lightness of their 
 body, feel themselves hovering in the air, believe they could fly ; or else they 
 have a feeling of weight either in the whole body, in many limbs, or in one 
 single limb, which seems to them huge and heavy. A young epileptic 
 sometimes felt his body so extraordinarily heavy that he could scarcely raise 
 it. At other times he felt himself so light that he believed he did not touch 
 the ground. Sometimes it seemed to him that his body had assumed such 
 proportions that it was impossible for him to pass through a door. In this 
 last illusion . . . the patient feels himself very much smaller or very 
 much larger than he really is.' Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Personnalitt 
 3 e edition. Paris, 1889, p. 35.
 
 253 DEGENERATION 
 
 turbances appear there, perceives and expresses general states 
 of the organism, such as hunger, thirst and fatigue. But clear 
 consciousness does not yet exist for it ; the brain has not yet 
 taken command over the inferior centres. Sense-impressions 
 are perhaps perceived, but certainly not yet grouped into ideas ; 
 the greater part of the movements are preceded by no conscious 
 act of will, and are only reflex actions that is, manifestations 
 of those local consciousnesses which later become so obscure 
 as to be imperceptible, when the cerebral consciousness has 
 attained its full clearness. Little by little the higher centres 
 develop ; the child begins to give heed to its sense-impressions,, 
 to form from its perceptions ideas, and to make voluntary move- 
 ments adapted to an end. With the awakening of its conscious 
 will the birth of the consciousness of its ' Ego ' is linked. The 
 child apprehends that it is an individual. But its internal 
 organic processes occupy it very much more than does the 
 procedure of the external world, transmitted to it by the sensory 
 nerves, and its own states fill up its consciousness more or less 
 completely. The child is, for this reason, a model of egoism,, 
 and, until it reaches a more advanced age, is wholly incapable 
 of displaying either attention or interest in anything at all which 
 is not directly connected with itself, its needs and inclinations. 
 By the continued culture of his brain man finally arrives at that 
 degree of maturity in which he acquires a just idea of his. 
 relations to other men and to Nature. Then consciousness pays 
 less and less regard to the vital processes in its own organism,, 
 and more and more to the stimulations of its senses. It only 
 notices the former when they reveal pressing necessities ; it is, 
 on the contrary, always concerned with the latter when in a 
 waking state. The ' I ' retires decidedly behind the ' not-I,*" 
 and the image of the world fills the greater part of conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 As the formation of an ' I,' of an individuality clearly conscious 
 of its separate existence, is the highest achievement of living 
 matter, so the highest degree of development of the ' I ' consists- 
 in embodying in itself the ' not-I,' in comprehending the world, 
 in conquering egoism, and in establishing close relations with 
 other beings, things and phenomena. Auguste Comte, and 
 after him Herbert Spencer, have named this stage ' altruism," 
 from the Italian word altrui, 'others/ The 'sexual instinct 
 which forces an individual to seek for another individual is as. 
 little altruism as the hunger which incites the hunter to follow 
 an animal in order to kill and eat it. There can be no question- 
 of altruism until an individual concerns himself about another 
 being from sympathy or curiosity, and not in order to satisfy an> 
 immediate, pressing necessity of his body, the momentary 
 hunger of some organ.
 
 EGO-MANIA 253 
 
 Not till he attains to altruism is man in a condition to 
 tain himself in society and in nature. To be a social being, 
 man must feel with his fellow-creatures, and show himself sensi- 
 tive to their opinion about him. Both the one and the other 
 presuppose that he is capable of so vividly representing to him- 
 self the feelings of his fellow-creatures as to experience them 
 himself. He who is not capable of imagining the pain of 
 -another with sufficient clearness to suffer the same himself will 
 not have compassion, and he who cannot exactly feel for himself 
 what impression an action or an omission on his part will make 
 on another will have no regard for others. In both cases he will 
 soon see himself excluded from the human community as the 
 enemy of all, and treated as such by all, and very probably he 
 will perish. And to defend himself against destructive natural 
 forces and turn them to his advantage, man must know them 
 intimately that is, he must be able distinctly to picture their 
 effects. A clear presentation of the feelings of others, and of 
 the effects of natural forces, presupposes the faculty of occupy- 
 ing himself intensively with the ' not-I.' While a man is attend- 
 ing to the ' not-I,' he is not thinking of his ' Ego/ and the latter 
 descends below the level of consciousness. In order that the 
 ' not-I ' should in this way prevail over the ' I/ the sensory 
 nerves must properly conduct the external impressions, the 
 cerebral centres of perception must be sensitive to the excita- 
 tions of the sensory nerves, the highest centres must develop, in 
 a sure, rapid and vigorous manner, the perceptions into ideas, 
 unite these into conceptions and judgments, and, on occasion, 
 transform them into acts of volition and motor impulses. And 
 as the greatest part of these different activities is accomplished 
 by the gray cortex of the frontal lobes, this means that this gray 
 cortex must be well developed and work vigorously. 
 
 It is thus that a sane man appears to us. He perceives little 
 and rarely his internal excitations, but always and clearly his 
 -external impressions. His consciousness is filled with images of 
 the external world, not with images of the activity of his organs. 
 The unconscious work of his inferior centres plays an almost 
 vanishing part by the side of the fully conscious work of the 
 highest centres. His egoism is no stronger than is strictly 
 necessary to maintain his individuality, and his thoughts and 
 actions are determined by knowledge of Nature and his fellow- 
 creatures, and by the consideration he owes to them. 
 
 Quite otherwise is the spectacle offered by the degenerate per- 
 son. His nervous system is not normal. In what the digression 
 from the norm ultimately consists we do not know. Very prob- -H 
 ably the cell of the degenerate is formed a little differently from 
 that of sane men, the particles of the protoplasm are otherwise 
 and less regularly disposed ; the molecular movements take
 
 254 DEGENERATION 
 
 place, in consequence, in a less free and rapid, less rhythmic 
 and vigorous, manner. This is, however, a mere undemonstrable 
 hypothesis. Nevertheless, it cannot reasonably be doubted that 
 all the bodily signs or ' stigmata' of degeneration, all the arrests 
 and inequalities of development that have been observed, have 
 their origin in a bio-chemical and bio-mechanical derangement 
 of the nerve-cell, or, perhaps,, of the cell in general. 
 
 In the mental life of the degenerate the anomaly of his nervous 
 system has, as a consequence, the incapacity of attaining to the 
 highest degree of development of the individual, namely, the 
 freely coming out from the factitious limits of individuality, i.e., 
 altruism. As to the relation of his ' Ego ' to his ' non-Ego,' the 
 degenerate man remains a child all his life. He scarcely appre- 
 ciates or even perceives the external world, and is only occupied 
 with the organic processes in his own body. He is more than 
 egoistical, he is an ego-maniac. 
 
 His ego-mania may spring directly from different circum- 
 stances of his organism. His sensory nerves may be obtuse, are, in 
 consequence, but feebly stimulated by the external world, trans- 
 mit slowly and badly their stimuli to the brain, and are not in a 
 condition to incite it to a sufficiently vigorous perceptive and 
 idcational activity. Or his sensory nerves may work moder- 
 ately well, but the brain is not sufficiently excitable, and does 
 not perceive properly the impressions which are transmitted to 
 it from the external world. 
 
 The obtuseness of the degenerate is attested by almost all 
 observers. From the almost illimitable number of facts which 
 could be adduced on this point, we will only give a very concise, 
 but sufficiently characteristic selection. ' Among many idiots,' 
 says Sollier, ' there is no distinction between sweet and bitter. 
 When sugar and colocynth are administered to them alternately, 
 they manifest no change of sensation. . . . Properly speaking, 
 taste does not exist among them. . . . Besides this, there are 
 perversions of taste. We are not speaking here of complete 
 idiots . . . but even of imbeciles who eat ordure or repulsive 
 things . . . even their own excrements. . . . The same remarks 
 apply .to smell. Perhaps sensibility appears still more abso- 
 lutely obtuse for smells than for taste. . . . Tactile sensi- 
 bility is very obtuse in general, but it is always uniformly so. 
 . . . Sometimes it might be a question whether- there is not 
 complete anaesthesia.'* Lombroso has examined the general 
 sensitiveness of skin in sixty-six criminals, and has found it 
 obtuse in thirty-eight among them, and unequal in the two halves 
 of the body in forty-six.f In a later work he sums up in 
 
 * Sollier, Psychologic de V Idiot el de Vlmbtcile, p. 52 et seq. 
 f Lombroso, L'Uomo delinquents. 3" edizione. Torino, 1884, p. 329 
 I scq.
 
 EGO-MANIA 255: 
 
 these words his observations of sensorial acwteness in the degene- 
 rate : ' Inaccessible to the feeling of pain, themselves without feel- 
 ing, they never understand pain even in others.'* Ribot traces 
 the ' diseases of personality ' (that is, the false ideas of the ' I ') 
 to ' organic disturbances, of which the first result is to depress 
 the faculty of feeling in general ; the second, to pervert it.' ' A 
 young man whose conduct had always been excellent suddenly 
 gave himself up to the worst inclinations. It was ascertained 
 that in his mental condition there was no sign of evident aliena- 
 tion, but it could be seen that the whole outer surface of the 
 skin had become absolutely insensible.' ' It may seem strange 
 that weak and false sensitivity . . . that is, that simple disturb- 
 ances or sensorial alterations should disorganize the " Ego." 
 Nevertheless, observation proves it/f MaudsleyJ describes 
 some cases of degeneration among children whose skin was in- 
 sensible, and remarks : ' They cannot feel impressions as they 
 naturally should feel them, nor adjust themselves to their sur- 
 roundings, with which they are in discord ; and the motor 
 outcomes of the perverted affections of self are accordingly of a 
 meaningless and destructive character.' 
 
 The defective sensibility of the degenerate, confirmed by all 
 observers, is, moreover, susceptible of different interpretations. 
 Whereas many consider it a consequence of the pathological con- 
 dition of the sensory nerves, others believe that the perturbation 
 has its seat, not in these nerves, but in the brain ; not in the ducts, 
 but in the centres of perception. To quote one of the most emi- 
 nent among the psycho-physiologists of the new school, Binet|| 
 has proved that, ' if a portion of the body of a person is in- 
 sensible, he is ignorant of what passes there ; but, on the other 
 hand, the nervous centres in connection with this insensible 
 
 * Lombroso, Les Applications de V Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, 
 p. 179. 
 
 f Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Personnalite^ pp. 61, 78, 105. 
 
 % Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind. London, 1879^.287. 
 
 See also Alfred Binet, Les Alterations de la Personnalite, Paris, 1892, 
 p. 39 : 'His senses close to outside stimulation ; for him, the external world 
 ceases to exist ; he lives no more than his exclusively personal life ; he acts 
 only through his own stimuli, with the automatic movement of hfl brain. 
 Although he receives nothing more from outside, and his personality is 
 completely isolated from the surroundings in which he is placed, he may be 
 seen to go, come, do, act, as if he had his senses and intelligence in full 
 exercise.' This, it is true, is the description of a patient, but what he says 
 of the latter applies equally, with a difference of degree only, to the 
 ego-maniac. Fe"re has communicated to the Biological Society of Paris, in 
 the sednce of November 12, 1892, the results of a great number of experi- 
 ments made by him, whence it appears 'that among the greater part of 
 epileptics, hysterical and degenerate subjects, cutaneous sensibility is 
 diminished.' See La Semaine medicale, 1892, p.* 4 56. 
 
 || Alfred Binet, Les Alterations de la Personnalite'. Paris, 1892, pp. 83, 85, 
 et seq
 
 2 5 6 DEGENERATION 
 
 region can continue to act ; the result is that certain acts, often 
 simple, but sometimes very complicated, can be accomplished in 
 the body of a hysterical subject, without his knowledge ; much 
 more, these acts can be of a psychical nature, and manifest 
 an intelligence which will be distinct from that of the sub- 
 ject, and will constitute a second " I " co-existent with the first. 
 For a long time there was a misconception of the true nature 
 of hysterical anaesthesia, and it was compared to a common 
 anaesthesia from organic causes, due, for example, to the inter- 
 ruption of afferent nerves. This view must be wholly aban- 
 doned, and we know now that hysterical anaesthesia is not 
 a true insensibility ; it is insensibility from unconsciousness 
 from mental disaggregation ; in a word, it is psychical insensi- 
 bility.' 
 
 Most frequently it is not a question of simple cases, where it 
 is the sensory nerves alone, or only the cerebral centres which 
 work badly, but of mixed cases, where the two apparatuses have 
 a diversely varying part in the disturbance. But whether the 
 nerves do not conduct the impressions to the brain, or the brain 
 does not perceive, or does not raise the impressions brought 
 to it into consciousness, the result is always the same, 
 viz., the external world will not be correctly and distinctly 
 grasped by consciousness, the * not-I ' will not be suitably repre- 
 sented in consciousness, the ' I ' will not experience the necessary 
 derivation of the exclusive preoccupation with the processes 
 taking place in its own organism. 
 
 The natural healthy connection between organic sensations 
 and sense-perceptions is much more strongly displaced when to 
 the insensibility of the sensory nerves, or of the centres of per- 
 ception, or both, is added an. unhealthily modified and intensified 
 vital activity of the organs. Then the organic ego-sensibility, 
 or ccenaesthesis, advances irrepressibly into the foreground, 
 overshadowing in great part or wholly the perceptions of the 
 external world in consciousness, which no longer takes notice 
 of anything but the interior processes of the organism. In 
 this way there originates that peculiar hyper- stimulation or 
 emotionalism constituting, as we have seen, the fundamental 
 phenomenon of the intellectual life of the degenerate. For the 
 fundamental emotional tone, despairing or joyful, angry or tear- 
 ful, which determines the colour of his presentations" as well as the 
 course of his thoughts, is the consequence of phenomena taking 
 place in his nerves, vessels and glands.* The consciousness of 
 the emotionally degenerate subject is filled with obsessions which 
 
 * ' The organic, cardiac, vaso-motor, secretory, etc., phenomena accompany- 
 ing almost all, if not all, affective states ... far from folfowing the conscious 
 phenomenon, precede it ; none the less they remain in many cases uncon- 
 scious.' Gley, quoted by A Binet, Les Alterations df la Persontmliti, p. 208,
 
 EGO-MANIA 25f 
 
 are not inspired by the events of the external world, and by 
 impulsions which are not the reaction against external stimula- 
 tion. To this is added next the unfailing weakness of will of 
 the degenerate person, which makes it impossible for him to 
 suppress his obsessions, to resist his impulsions, to control 
 his fundamental moods, to keep his higher centres to the 
 attentive pursuit of objective phenomena. According to the 
 saying of the poet, the necessary result of these conditions is 
 that the world must be differently reflected in such heads than 
 it is in normal ones. The external world, the ' not-I,' either does 
 not exist at all in the consciousness of an emotionally degenerate 
 subject, or it is merely represented there as on a faintly reflecting 
 surface, by a scarcely recognisable, wholly colourless image, or, 
 as in a concave or convex mirror, by a completely distorted, 
 false image ; consciousness, 'on the other hand, is imperiously 
 monopolized by the somatic ' I/ which does not permit the 
 mind to be occupied with anything but the painful or tumultuous 
 processes taking place in the depths of the organs. 
 
 Badly-conducting sensory nerves, obtuse perceptive centres in 
 the brain, weakness of will with its resulting incapacity of atten- 
 tion, morbidly irregular and violent vital processes in the cells, 
 are therefore the organic basis on which ego-mania develops. 
 
 The ego-maniac must of necessity immensely over-estimate his 
 own importance and the significance of all his actions, for he is 
 only engrossed with himself, and but little or not at all with ex- 
 ternal things. He is therefore not in a position to comprehend 
 his relation to other men and the universe, and to appreciate pro- 
 perly the part he has to play in the aggregate of social institutions. 
 There might at this juncture be an inclination to confound ego- 
 mania with megalomania, but there is a characteristic difference 
 between the two states. Megalomania, it is true, is itself, like 
 its clinical complement, the delusion of persecution, occasioned 
 by morbid processes within the organism obliging consciousness 
 perpetually to be attending to its own somatic ' Ego.' More 
 especially the unnaturally increased bio-chemical activity of the 
 organs gives rise to the pleasantly extravagant presentations of 
 megalomania, while retarded or morbidly aberrant activity 
 gives rise to the painful presentations of the delusion of per- 
 secution.* In megalomania, however, as in the delusion of per- 
 secution, the patient is constantly engrossed with the external 
 
 * This is not merely a simple hypothesis, but a well-demonstrated fact. 
 Hundreds of experiments by Boeck, Weill, Moebius, Charrin, Mairet, Bosc, 
 Slosse, Laborde, Marie, etc., have established that among the deranged, 
 during periods of excitation and afterwards, the urine is more toxic, *>., more 
 full of waste and excreted organic matter, while after the periods of depres- 
 sion it is less toxic, /'.., poorer in disaggregated' matter, than among sane 
 individuals, which proves that, among the former, the nutrition of the tissues 
 is morbidly increased or retarded. 
 
 17
 
 258 DEGENERATION 
 
 world and with men ; in ego-mania, on the contrary, he almost 
 completely withdraws himself from them. In the systematically 
 elaborated delirium of the megalomaniac and persecution-maniac, 
 the ' not-I ' plays the most prominent part. The patient accounts 
 for the importance his ' Ego ' obtains in his own eyes by the 
 invention of a grand social position universally recognised, or 
 by the inexorable hostility of powerful persons, or. groups of 
 persons. He is Pope, or Emperor, and his persecutors are 
 the chief men in the State, or great social powers, the police, 
 the clergy, etc. His delirium, in consequence, takes account of 
 the State and society ; he admits their importance, and attaches 
 the greatest value, in one case, to the homage, in the other to the 
 enmity, of his neighbours. The ego-maniac, on the contrary, does 
 not regard it as necessary to dream of himself as occupying 
 some invented social position. He does not require the world 
 or its appreciation to justify in his own eyes himself as the 
 sole object of his own interest. He does not see the world 
 at all. Other people simply do not exist for him. The whole 
 * non-Ego' appears in his consciousness merely as a vague shadow 
 or a thin cloud. The idea does not even occur to him that he 
 is something out of the common, that he is superior to other 
 people, and for this reason either admired or hated ; he is alone 
 in the world ; more than that, he alone is the world and every- 
 thing else, men, animals, things are unimportant accessories, 
 not worth thinking about. 
 
 The less diseased are the conducting media, the centres of nutri- 
 tion, perception and volition, so much the weaker naturally will 
 the ego-mania be, and so much the more harmlessly will it be 
 "manifested. Its least objectionable expression is the comic 
 importance which the ego-maniac often attributes to his sensa- 
 tions, inclinations and activities. Is he a painter? he has no 
 doubt that the whole history of the universe only hinges on 
 painting, and on his pictures in particular. Is he a writer of 
 prose or verse? he is convinced that humanity has no other 
 care, or at least no more serious care, than for verses and books. 
 Let it not be objected that this is not peculiar to ego-maniacs, 
 but is the case with the vast majority of mankind. Assuredly 
 everyone thinks what he is doing is important, and that man 
 would not be worth much who performed his work so heed- 
 lessly and so superficially, with so little pleasure and conscien- 
 tiousness, that he himself could not look upon it with respect. 
 But the great difference between the rational and sane man and 
 the ego-maniac is, that the former sees clearly how subordinate 
 his occupation is to the rest of humanity, although it fills his 
 life and exacts his best powers, while the latter can never 
 imagine that any exertion to which he devotes his time and 
 efforts can appear to others as unimportant and even puerile.
 
 EGO-MAN I Ajv! 259 
 
 An honest cobbler, resoleing an old boot, gives himself up heart 
 and soul to his work, nevertheless he admits that there are far 
 more interesting and important things for humanity than the 
 repairing of damaged sole-leather. The ego-maniac, on the 
 contrary, if he is a writer, does not hesitate to declare, like 
 Mallarme, ' The world was made to lead up to a fine book.' This 
 absurd exaggeration of one's own occupations and interests pro- 
 duces in literature the Parnassians and the Esthetes. 
 
 If degeneration is deeper, and ego - mania is stronger, the 
 latter no longer assumes the comparatively innocent form of 
 total absorption in poetic and artistic cooings, but manifests 
 itself as an immorality, which may amount to moral madness. 
 The tendency to commit actions injurious to himself or society is 
 aroused now and then even in a sane man when some obnoxious 
 desire demands gratification, but he has the will and the power 
 to suppress it. The degenerate ego-maniac is too feeble of 
 will to control his impulsions, and cannot determine his actions 
 and thoughts by a regard to the welfare of society, because 
 society is not at all represented in his consciousness. He is a 
 solitary, and is insensible to the moral law framed for life in 
 society, and not for the isolated individual. It is evident that 
 for Robinson Crusoe the penal code did not exist. Alone on 
 his island, having only Nature to deal with, it is obvious he 
 could neither kill, steal, nor pillage in the sense of the penal 
 code. He could only commit misdemeanours against himself. 
 Want of insight and of self-control are the only immoralities 
 possible to him. The ego-maniac is a mental Robinson Crusoe, 
 who in his imagination lives alone on an island, and is at the 
 same time a weak creature, powerless to govern himself. The 
 universal moral law does not exist for him, and the only thing 
 he may possibly see and avow, perhaps also regret a little, is 
 that he sins against the moral law of the solitary, i.e., against 
 the necessity of controlling instincts in so far as they are 
 injurious to himself. 
 
 Morality not that learnt mechanically, but that which we 
 feel as an internal necessity has become, in the course of 
 thousands of generations, an organized instinct. For this reason, 
 like all other organized instincts, it is exposed to ' perversion,' 
 to aberration. The effect of this is that an organ, or the whole 
 organism, works in opposition to its normal task and its natural 
 laws, and cannot work otherwise.* In perversion of taste the 
 
 * Dr. Paul Moreau, of Tours, describes perversion (T aberration) in these 
 somewhat obscure terms : ' Perversion constitutes a deviation from the laws 
 which rule the proper sensibility of the organs and faculties. By this word 
 we mean to designate those cases in which observation testifies to an un- 
 natural, exceptional, and wholly pathological change, a change carrying 
 palpable disturbance into the regular working of a faculty.' Des Aberrations 
 du Sens gene sique. 4 e Edition. Paris, 1887, p. I. . ;
 
 a6o DEGENERATION 
 
 patient seeks greedily to swallow all that ordinarily provokes 
 the deepest repugnance, i.e., is instinctively recognised as noxious, 
 and rejected for that reason decaying organic matter, ordure, 
 pus, spittle, etc. In perversion of smell he prefers the odours 
 of putrefaction to the perfume of flowers. In perversion of the 
 sexual appetite he has desires which are directly contrary to 
 the purpose of the instinct, i.e., the preservation of the species. 
 In perversion of the moral sense the patient is attracted by, and 
 feels delight in, acts which fill the sane man with disgust and 
 horror. If this particular perversion is added to ego-mania, 
 we have before us not merely the obtuse indifference towards 
 crime which characterizes moral madness, but delight in crime. 
 The ego-maniac of this kind is no longer merely insensible to 
 good and evil, and incapable of discriminating between them, 
 but he has a decided predilection for evil, esteems it in others, 
 does it himself every time he can act according to his inclina- 
 tion, and finds in it the peculiar beauty that the sane man finds 
 in good. 
 
 The moral derangement of an ego-maniac, with or without 
 perverted moral instincts, will naturally manifest itself in ways 
 varying according to the social class to which he belongs, as 
 well as according to his personal idiosyncrasies. If he is a 
 member of the disinherited class, he is simply either a fallen 
 or degraded being, whom opportunity has made a thief, who 
 lives in horrible promiscuity with his sisters or daughters, etc., 
 or is a criminal from habit and profession. If he is cultivated 
 and well-to-do, or in a commanding position, he commits mis- 
 demeanours peculiar to the upper classes which have as their 
 object not the gratification of material needs, but of other kinds 
 of craving. He becomes a Don Juan of the drawing-room, and 
 carries shame and dishonour without hesitation into the family of 
 his best friend. He is a legacy-hunter, a traitor to those who 
 trust in him, an intriguer, a sower of discord, and a liar. On the 
 throne he may even develop into a rapacious animal, and to a 
 universal conqueror. With a limited tether he becomes Charles 
 the Bad the Count d'Evreux and King of Navarre, Gilles de 
 Rais, the prototype of Blue Beard, or Caesar Borgia ; and, with 
 a wider range, Napoleon I. If his nervous system is not strong 
 enough to elaborate imperious impulsions, or if his muscles are 
 too feeble to obey such impulsions, all these criminal inclinations 
 remain unsatisfied, and only expend themselves by way of his 
 imagination. The perverted ego-maniac is then only a platonic 
 or theoretic malefactor, and if he embraces the literary career, 
 he will concoct philosophic systems to justify his depravity, or 
 will employ an accommodating rhetoric in verse and prose to 
 celebrate it, bedizen it and present it under as seductive a form 
 as possible. We then find ourselves in the presence of the
 
 EGO-MANIA 261 
 
 literary phases called Diabolism and Dccadentism. 'Diaboliques' 
 and ' decadents ' are distinguished from ordinary criminals merely 
 in that the former content themselves with dreaming and 
 writing, while the latter have the resolution and strength to act. 
 But they have this bond in common, of being both of them 
 * antisocial beings.'* 
 
 A second characteristic which is shared by all ego-maniacs 
 is their incapacity to adapt themselves to the conditions in 
 which they live, whether they assert their anti-social inclinations 
 in thought or action, in writings or as criminals. This want of 
 adaptability is one of the most striking peculiarities of the 
 degenerate, and it is to them a source of constant suffering, and 
 finally of ruin. It is a necessary result, however, of the consti- 
 tution of his central nervous system. The indispensable premise 
 of adaptation is the having an exact presentation of the facts 
 to which a man must adapt himself, t I cannot avoid the ruts 
 
 * ' The vices of the psycho-physical organization manifesting themselves 
 by acts prohibited, not only by morality that aggregate of necessary rules 
 elaborated by the secular experience of peoples but also by their penal 
 codes, are in discord with life in society, in the midst of which humanity can 
 alone make progress. ... A man, from his birth adapted to social life, can 
 only acquire such vices as a consequence of certain pernicious conditions, 
 through which his psycho-physical powers are set in opposition to the neces- 
 sary exigencies of social life.' Drill, Les Criminels mz'neurs, quoted by 
 Lombroso in Les Applications de I* Anthropologie criminelle. Paris, 1892, 
 p. 94. See also G. Tarde, La Philosophic penale, Lyon, 1890, passim ; ' The 
 morally deranged are not true lunatics. A Marquise de Brinvilliers, a 
 Troppmann, a being born without either compassion or sense of shame 
 can it be said of such an one that he is not himself when he commits his 
 crime? No. He is only too much himself. But his existence, his person, 
 are hostile to society. He does not feel the same sentiments which we 
 civilized people regard as indispensable. It is useless to think of curing 
 him or of reforming him.' 
 
 t Darwinism explains adaptation only as the result of the struggle for 
 existence, and of selection which is a form of this struggle. In one indi- 
 vidual a quality appears accidentally, which makes it more capable of pre- 
 serving itself and of conquering its enemies than those individuals not born 
 with this quality. It finds more favourable conditions of existence, leaves 
 behind it more numerous descendants inheriting this advantageous quality, and 
 by the survival of the fittest and the disappearance of the less fit, the whole 
 species comes into the possession of this advantageous quality. I do not at 
 all deny that an accidental individual deviation from the type of the species, 
 which proves an advantage in the struggle for existence, can be a source of 
 transformations having as their result a better adaptation of the species to given 
 and unmodifiable circumstances. But I do not believe that such an accident 
 is the only source, or even the most frequent source, of such transformations. 
 The process of adaptation appears to me to be quite otherwise, viz., the living 
 being experiences in some situation feelings of discomfort from which he 
 wishes to escape, either by change of situation (movement, flight), or by 
 trying to act vigorously on the causes of these feelings of discomfort (attack, 
 modification of natural conditions). If the organs possessed by the living 
 being, and the aptitude these organs have acquired, are not sufficient to 
 furnish the counteractions felt and wished for as necessary to those feelings
 
 362 DEGENERATION 
 
 in the road if I do not see them ; I cannot ward off the blow 1 
 do not see coming ; it is impossible te thread a needle if its eye 
 is not seen with sufficient clearness, and if the thread is not 
 carried with steady hand to the right spot. All this is so 
 elementary it is scarcely necessary to say it. What we term 
 power over Nature is, in fact, adaptation to Nature. It is an 
 inexact expression to say we make the forces of Nature subject 
 to us. In reality we observe them, we learn to know their 
 peculiarities, and we manage so that the tendencies of natural 
 forces and our own desires coincide. We construct a wheel at 
 the point where the water power, by natural law, must fall, and 
 we have then the advantage that the wheel turns according to 
 our needs. We know that electricity flows along copper wire,, 
 and so, with cunning submission to its peculiar ways, we lay 
 down copper lines to the place where we want it, and where its 
 action would be useful to us. Without knowledge of Nature, 
 
 of discomfort, the weaker creatures submit to their destiny, and suffer or 
 even perish. More vigorous individuals, on the contrary, make violent and 
 continuous efforts in order to attain their design, of flight, defence, attack, 
 suppression of- natural obstacles ; they give strong nervous impulses to their 
 organs to increase to the highest degree their functional capacity, and these 
 nervous impulses are the immediate cause of transformations, giving to the 
 organs new qualities, and rendering them more fit to make the living 
 creature thrive. That the nervous impulse produces, as a consequence, an 
 increase in the flow of blood, and a better nutrition for the organ in play, is 
 a positive biological fact. In my opinion, then, adaptation is most frequently 
 an act of the will, and not the result of qualities accidentally acquired. It 
 has as premise the clear perception and representation of the external 
 causes of the feelings of discomfort, and a keen de^re to escape from them,, 
 or, again, that of procuring feelings of pleasure, i.e., an inorganic appetite. 
 Its mechanism consists in the elaboration of an intense representation of 
 serviceable acts of certain organs, and in the sending of adequate impulses 
 to these organs. That such impulses can modify the anatomical structure 
 of the organs, Kant already anticipated when he wrote his treatise, Von der 
 Macht des Gemiithes; and modern therapeutics has fully confirmed this,, 
 by showing that the stigmata of a Louise Lateau, the healing of tumours 
 On the tomb of the Deacon Paris, the modifications induced by sugges- 
 tion on the skin of hysterical subjects, the formation of birth-marks by 
 eventualities and emotions, are the effect of presentations on the bodily 
 tissues. It was wrong to laugh at Lamarck for teaching that the giraffe has 
 a long neck because it has continually stretched it in order to be able to- 
 feed off the topmost foliage of plants with tall stems. When the animal 
 elaborates the clear idea that he ought to elongate his neck as much as 
 possible in order to reach the elevated foliage, this presentation will 
 influence in the strongest manner the circulation of the blood in all the 
 tissues of the neck ; these will be quite differently nourished from what they 
 would be without this presentation, and the changes desired by the animal 
 will certainly take place little by little, if his general organization makes 
 them possible. Knowledge and will are therefore causes of adaptation not 
 <he will in the mystical sense of Schopenhauer, but the will that is the dis- 
 penser of nervous impulses. This summary must suffice'for the reader ; this 
 is not the place to develop it more, and to demonstrate in detail how fertile 
 these ideas are for the theory of evolution.
 
 EGO-MANIA 263 
 
 therefore, no adaptation, and without adaptation no possibility of 
 profiting by its forces. Now, the degenerate subject cannot adapt 
 himself, because he has no clear idea of the circumstances to 
 which he ought to adapt himself, and he does not obtain from 
 them any clear idea, because, as we know, he has bad nerve- 
 conductors, obtuse centres of perception, and feeble attention. 
 
 The active cause of all adaptation, as of all effort in general- 
 and adaptation is nothing else than an effort of a particular 
 kind is the wish to satisfy some organic necessity, or to escape 
 from some discomfort. In other words, the aim of adaptation 
 is to give feelings of pleasure, and to diminish or suppress the 
 feelings of discomfort. The being incapable of. self-adaptation 
 is for this reason far less able to procure agreeable, and avoid 
 disagreeable, sensations than the normal being ; he runs up 
 against every corner, because he does not know how to avoid 
 them ; and he longs in vain for the luscious pear, because he 
 does not know how to catch hold of the branch on which it 
 hangs. The ego-maniac is a type of such a being. He must, 
 therefore, necessarily suffer from the world and from men. 
 Hence at heart he is bad-tempered, and turns in wrathful dis- 
 content against Nature, society and public institutions, irritated 
 and offended by them, because he does not know how to 
 accommodate himself to them. He is in a constant state of 
 revolt against all that exists, and contrives how he may destroy 
 it, or, at least, dreams of destruction. In a celebrated passage 
 Henri Taine indicates 'exaggerated self-esteem' and ' dogmatic 
 argument' as the roots of Jacobinism.* This leads to contempt 
 for and rejection of institutions already established, and hence 
 
 * H. Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine : La Revolution, 
 vol. ii., 'La Conqucte jacobine/ Paris, i88r,pp. 11-12 : ' Neither exaggerated 
 self-esteem nor dogmatic argument is rare in the human species. In every 
 country these two roots of the Jacobin spirit subsist indestructible beneath 
 the surface. Everywhere they are kept in check by established society, and 
 everywhere they try to upheave the old historical structure which presses on 
 them with all its weight. ... At twenty years old, when a young man enters 
 the world, his reason is hurt at the same time as his pride. In the first 
 place, of whatever society he may be a member, it is a scandal to pure 
 reason, for it has not been constructed on a simple principle by a philo- 
 sophical legislator ; it has been arranged by successive generations according 
 to their multiple and varying needs. ... In the second place, however 
 perfect institution?, laws, and manners may be, since they have preceded 
 him he has not assented to them at all ; others, his predecessors, have 
 chosen for him, and have enclosed him, in advance, in a moral, political, and 
 social mould which pleased them. It matters little if it displeases him ; he 
 is forced to submit to it, and, like a harnessed horse, he must walk between 
 the shafts in the harness put on him. ... It is not surprising, then, if he is 
 tempted to kick against the framework in which, nolens -volens, he is enclosed, 
 and in which subordination will be his lot. Thence it comes that the 
 majority of young men above all, those who have their careers to make 
 are more or less jacobins on leaving college ; it is an infirmity of growth!
 
 264 DEGENERATION 
 
 not invented or chosen by himself. He considers the social 
 edifice absurd because it is not 'a work of logic,' but of history. 
 
 Besides these two roots of Jacobinism which Taine has 
 brought to light, there is yet another, and the most important, 
 that has escaped his attention, viz., the inability of the degener- 
 ate to adapt himself to given circumstances. The ego-maniac is 
 condemned by his natural organization to be a pessimist and a 
 Jacobin. But the revolutions he wishes for, preaches, and per- 
 haps effectively accomplishes, are barren as regards progress. 
 He is, as a revolutionary, what an inundation or cyclone would 
 be as a street-sweeper. He does not clear the ground with 
 conscious aim, but blindly destroys. This distinguishes him 
 from the clear-minded innovator, the true revolutionary, who is 
 a reformer, leading suffering and stagnating humanity from time 
 to time by toilsome paths into a new Canaan. The reformer 
 hurls down with pitiless violence, if violence is necessary, the 
 ruins which have become obstacles, in order to make way for 
 useful constructions ; the ego-maniac raves against everything 
 that stands upright, whether useful or useless, and does not think 
 of clearing the building-ground after the devastation ; his pleasure 
 consists in seeing heaps of rubbish overgrown by noxious weeds 
 where once walls and gables reared themselves. 
 
 There is an impassable gulf between the sane revolutionary 
 and the ego-maniac Jacobin. The former has positive ideals, 
 the latter has not. The former knows what he is striving for ; 
 the latter has no conception how that which irritates him could 
 be changed for the better. His thoughts do not reach so far ; 
 he never troubles himself to question what will replace the 
 things destroyed. He knows only that everything frets him, 
 and he desires to vent his muddled and blustering ill-humour 
 on all around him. Hence it is characteristic that the foolish 
 necessity to revolt of this kind of revolutionary frequently turns 
 against imaginary evils, follows puerile aims, or even fights 
 against those laws which are wise and beneficent. Here they 
 form a 'league against lifting the hat in saluting'; there they 
 oppose compulsory vaccination ; another time they rise in pro- 
 test against taking the census of the population ; and they have 
 the ridiculous audacity to conduct these silly campaigns with 
 the same speeches and attitudes that the true revolutionaries 
 assume for example, in the service of suppression of slavery, 
 or liberty of thought. 
 
 To the ego-maniac's incapacity for adaptation is often added 
 the mania for destruction, or clastomania, which is so frequently 
 observed among idiots and imbeciles, and in some forms of 
 insanity.* In a child the instinct of destruction is normal. It 
 
 * Dr. Paul Sollier, Psychologic de ? Idiot et de I'ltnMcile, p. 109 et seq. : 
 'There exists among idiots another instinct which is met wiih, nevertheless,
 
 EGO-MAXIA 265 
 
 is the first manifestation of the desire to exert muscular 
 strength. Very soon, however, the desire is aroused to exert its 
 strength, not in destroying, but in creating. Now, the act of 
 creating has a psychic premise, viz., attention. This being 
 absent in the degenerate, the impulse to destroy, which can 
 be gratified without attention, by disorderly and casual move- 
 ments, does not rise in them to the instinct of creation. 
 
 Hence, discontent as the consequence of incapacity of adapta- 
 tion, want of sympathy with his fellow-creatures arising from 
 weak representative capacity, and the instinct of destruction, as 
 the result of arrested development of mind, together constitute 
 the anarchist, who, according to the degree of his impulsions, 
 either merely writes books and makes speeches at popular 
 meetings, or has recourse to a dynamite bomb. 
 
 Finally, in its extreme degree of development, ego-mania 
 leads to that folly of Caligula in which the unbalanced mind 
 boasts of being ' a laughing lion,' believes himself above all re- 
 straints of morality or law, and wishes the whole of humanity 
 had one single head that he might cut it off". 
 
 The reader who has hitherto followed me will now, I hope, 
 quite comprehend the psychology of ego-mania. As I have 
 stated above, consciousness of the ' Ego' originates from the sensa- 
 tions of the vital processes in all parts of our body, and the con- 
 ception of the ' non-Ego ' from changes in our organs of special 
 sense. How, generally speaking, we arrive at the assumption of 
 the existence of a ' not-I,' I have explained above in detail, 
 hence it is unnecessary to repeat it here. If we wish to leave 
 the firm soil of positively established facts, and risk ourselves on 
 the somewhat shaky ground of probable assumptions, we may 
 say that consciousness of the 'Ego' has its anatomical basis in the 
 sympathetic system, and the conception of the ' not-I ' in the 
 cerebro-spinal system. In a healthy man the perception of 
 vital internal facts does not rise above the level of consciousness. 
 The brain receives its stimulations far more from the sensory, 
 than from the sympathetic nerves. In consciousness the pre- 
 sentation of the external world greatly outweighs the conscious- 
 ness of the 'Ego.' In the degenerate, either (i) vital internal 
 facts are morbidly intensified, or proceed abnormally, and are 
 therefore constantly perceived by consciousness ; or (2) the 
 sensory nerves are obtuse, and the perceptional centres weak 
 
 to a certain degree among normal children. This is destructiveness, which 
 shows itself among all children as a fiist manifestation of their powers of 
 movement, under the form of a desire to strike, break, and destroy. . . . 
 This tendency is much more pronounced among idiots. ... It is not the 
 same with imbeciles. Their malicious and mischievous spirit drives them 
 to destroy, not only for the purpose of expending their strength, but with the 
 object of injuring. It is an unwholesome gratification which they seek.'
 
 366 DEGENERATION 
 
 and sluggish ; or (3) perhaps these two deviations from the norm 
 co-exist. The result in all three cases is that the notion of the 
 ' Ego ' is far more strongly represented in consciousness than 
 the image of the external world. The ego-maniac, conse- 
 quently, neither knows nor grasps the phenomenon of the 
 universe. The effect of this is a want of interest and sympathy, 
 and an incapacity to adapt himself to nature and humanity. 
 The absence of feeling, and the incapacity of adaptation, fre- 
 quently accompanied by perversion of the instincts and im- 
 pulses, /make the ego-maniac an anti-social being. He is a 
 moral lunatic, a criminal, a pessimist, an anarchist, a misan- 
 thrope, and he is all these, either in his thoughts and his feelings, 
 or also in his actions. The struggle against the anti-social 
 ego-maniac, his expulsion from the social body, are necessary 
 functions of the latter ; and if it is not capable of accomplishing 
 it, it is a sign of waning vital power or serious ailment. Tolera- 
 tion, and, above all, admiration, of the ego-maniac, be he one in 
 theory or in practice, is, so to speak, a proof that the kidneys of 
 the social organism do not accomplish their task, that society 
 suffers from Bright's disease. 
 
 In the following chapters we shall study- the forms under 
 which ego-mania manifests itself in literature, and we shall find 
 occasion to treat in detail of many points to which at this stage 
 mere allusion has been sufficient. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 PARNASSIANS AND DIABOLISTS. 
 
 IT has become the custom to designate the French Parnassians 
 a school, but those who are comprised under this denomination 
 have always refused to allow themselves to be included under 
 a common name. 'The Parnassus?' . . . exclaimed one of the 
 most undoubted Parnassians, M. Catulle Mendes.* ' We havw 
 never been a school ! . . . The Parnassus ! We have not 
 even written a preface ! . . . The Parnassus originated from trm 
 necessity of reaction against the looseness of poetry issuing from 
 the adherents of Murger, Charles Bataille, Ame'de'e Holland, 
 Jean du Boys ; then it became a league of minds, who sympa- 
 thized in matters of art. . . .' 
 
 The name ' Parnassiens ' was, in fact, applied to a whole series 
 of poets and writers who have scarcely a point in common 
 between them. They are united by a purely external bond ; 
 their works have been brought out by the" Parisian editor 
 
 * Jules Huret, Enquite stir P Evolution liltiraire, p. 288.
 
 EGO-MANIA 267 
 
 Alphonse Lemerre, who was able to make Parnassians, as the 
 editor Cotta, in the first half of this century, made German 
 classics. The designation itself emanates from a sort of 
 almanac of the Muses, which Catulle Mendes published in 1860 
 under the title, Le Parnasse contemporain : recneil de vers 
 nouveaiix, and which contains contributions from almost all the 
 poets of the period. 
 
 With most of the names of this numerous group I do not 
 need to concern myself, for those who bear them are not 
 degenerate, but honest average men, correctly twittering what 
 others have first sung to them. They have exercised no sort 
 of direct influence on contemporary thought, and have only 
 indirectly contributed to strengthen the action of a few leaders 
 by grouping themselves around them in the attitude of disciples, 
 and in permitting them thus to present themselves with an 
 imposing retinue, which always makes an impression on vacuous 
 minds. 
 
 The leaders alone are of importance in my inquiries. It is 
 of them we think when we speak of the Parnassians, and it is 
 from their peculiarities that the artistic theory attributed to Le 
 Parnasse has been derived. Embodied most completely in 
 Theophile Gautier, it can be summed up in two words : per- 
 fection of form and impassibility or impassiveness. 
 
 To Gautier and his disciples the form is everything in poetry ; 
 the substance has no importance. 'A poet,' says he,* 'say 
 what you will, is a labourer ; he ought not to have more in- 
 telligence than a labourer, or know any other trade than his 
 own, otherwise he will do it badly. I hold the mania that 
 there is for putting them on an ideal pedestal is perfectly absurd ; 
 nothing is less ideal than a poet. . . . The poet is a keyboard 
 \clavecin~\, and nothing more. Every idea in passing lays its 
 finger on a key ; the key vibrates and gives its note, that is all.' 
 In another place he says : ' For the poet, words have in them- 
 selves, and outside the sense they express, a beauty and value 
 of their own, like precious stones as yet uncut, and set in 
 bracelets, necklaces, or rings ; they charm the connoisseur who 
 looks at them, and sorts them with his finger in the little 
 bowl where they are stored, y Gustave Flaubert, another 
 worshipper of words, takes entirely this view of the subject 
 when he exclaims : J 'A beautiful verse meaning nothing, is 
 superior to a verse less beautiful meaning something.' By the 
 words ' beautiful ' and ' less beautiful,' Flaubert here understands 
 
 * Theophile Gautier, Les Grotesques. 3 me drtition. Paris, 1856. 
 
 f Les Fleurs du Afal, par Charles Baudelaire, pre'cede'es d'une notice par 
 Theophile Gautier. t 2 e Edition. Paris, 1869, p. 46! 
 
 % M. Guyau, ' L'Esthe'iique du Vers moderne,' Revue philosophique, vol. 
 xvii., p. 270.
 
 :68 DEGENERATION 
 
 ' names with triumphant syllables, sounding like the blast of 
 clarions,' or ' radiant words, words of light.'* Gautier only 
 credited Racine, for whom he, a romanticist, naturally had a pro- 
 found contempt, with one verse of any value : 
 
 ' La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae.' 
 
 The most instructive application of this theory is found in a 
 piece of poetry by Catulle Mendes, entitled Recapitulation, whick 
 begins as follows : 
 
 * Rose, Emmeline, 
 Margueridette, 
 
 Odette, 
 Alix, Aline. 
 
 ' Paule, Hippolyte, 
 Lucy, Lucile, 
 
 Ce"cile, 
 Daphne, Me'lite. 
 
 ' Arte'midore, 
 Myrrha, Myrrhine, 
 
 PeVine, 
 Nais, Eudore.' 
 
 Eleven stanzas of the same sort follow, which I will dispense 
 with reproducing, and then this final strophe : 
 
 ' Zulma, Zdlie, 
 Rdgine, Reine, 
 
 Et j'en oublie.'f 
 
 'And I forget the rest' this is the only one of the sixty lines 
 of the piece which has any sense, the fifty-nine others being 
 composed of women's names only. 
 
 What Catulle Mendes intends here is clear enough. He 
 wishes to show the state of a libertine's soul, who revels in the 
 remembrance of all the women he has loved, or with whom he 
 has flirted. In the mind of the reader the enumeration of their 
 names is to give rise to voluptuous images of a troop of young 
 girls, ministrants of pleasure, of pictures of a harem or of the 
 paradise of Mahomet. But apart from the length of the list, 
 which makes the piece insupportably wearisome and chilling, 
 Mendes does not attain the desired effect for yet a second 
 reason because his artificiality betrays at the first glance the 
 profound insincerity of his pretended emotion. When before 
 the mind of a gallant the figures of the Phyllises of his pastoral 
 idylls present themselves, and he really feels the necessity 
 of tenderly murmuring their names, he certainly does not 
 think of arranging these names as a play on words (Alix 
 
 * Th. Gautier, quoted by M. Gityau, loc. '/., p. 270. 
 f Printed in LEcko de Paris, No. 2,972, July 8, 1892.
 
 EGO-MANIA 269 
 
 Aline, Lucy Lucile, Myrrha Myrrhine, etc.). If he is cold- 
 blooded enough to give himself up to this barren desk-work, he 
 cannot possibly find himself in the lascivious ecstasy which the 
 piece is supposed to express and impart. This emotion, immoral 
 and vulgar in its boasting, would still have the right, like every 
 genuine affection of the soul, of being lyrically expressed. But 
 a list of unmeaning names, artificially combined, and arranged 
 according to their assonance, implies nothing. According to 
 the art theory of the Parnassians, however, Recapitulation is 
 poetry nay, the ideal of poetry for it ' ne signifie rien,' as 
 Flaubert requires, and is wholly composed of words which, 
 according to Th. Gautier, ' ont en eux-memes une beaute" et une 
 valeur propres.' 
 
 Another eminent Parnassian, Theodore de Banville,* without 
 pushing to its extreme limits, with the intrepid logic of Catulle 
 Mendes, the theory of verbal resonance bare of all meaning, has 
 professed it with a sincerity to which homage is due. ' I charge 
 you/ he exclaims to poets in embryo, ' to read as much as 
 possible, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, technical works treating of 
 all the professions, and of all the special sciences, catalogues of 
 libraries and of auctions, handbooks of museums in short, all 
 the books which can increase your stock of words, and give you 
 instruction on their exact sense, proper or figurative. Directly 
 your head is thus furnished you will be already well prepared 
 to find rhymes.' The only essential thing in poetry, according 
 to Banville, is to catch rhymes. To compose a piece of poetry 
 on any subject, he teaches his disciples : ' All the rhymes on 
 this subject must first of all be known. The remainder, the 
 soldering, that which the poet must add to stop up the holes 
 with the hand of an artist and workman these are called the 
 plugs. I should like to see those who counsel us to avoid the 
 plugs bind two planks together with the help of thought.' The 
 poet Banville thus sums up his doctrine has no ideas in his 
 brain ; he has only sounds, rhymes, and play on words 
 (calembours). This play on words inspires his ideas, or his 
 simulacra of ideas. 
 
 Guyau rightly uses this criticism with regard to the aesthetic 
 theory of the Parnassians established by Banville. \ 'The search 
 for rhyme, pushed to the extreme, tends to make the poet lose 
 the habit of logically connecting his ideas that is to say, in 
 reality to think for to think, as Kant has said, is to unite and 
 to bind. To rhyme, on the contrary, is to place in juxtaposition 
 words necessarily unconnected. . . . The cult of rhyme for 
 rhyme's sake introduces into the brain itself of the poet, little 
 
 * Theodore de Banville, Petit Traite de Pocsie frani^aise. 2<* Edition revue. 
 Paris, 1880, pp. 54, 64. 
 
 t M. Guyau, loc. cit., pp. 264, 265.
 
 270- DEGENERATION 
 
 by little, a kind of disorder and permanent chaos; all the 
 usual laws of association, all the logic of thought is destroyed 
 in order to be replaced by the chance encounter of sounds. . . 
 Periphrasis and metaphor are the only resources for good 
 rhyming. . . . The impossibility in seeking for rich rhymes, 
 of remaining simple, involves in its turn a consequent risk of 
 a certain lack of sincerity. Freshness of spontaneous feeling 
 will disappear in the too consummate artist in words; he will 
 lose that respect for thought as such which ought to be the first 
 quality of the writer,' 
 
 Where Guyau commits an error is when he says that the cult 
 of rhyme for rhyme's sake * introduces into the brain even of the 
 poet a kind of disorder and permanent chaos.' The proposition 
 must be reversed. 'Permanent chaos' and 'disorder' in the 
 brain of the poet are there already; the exaggeration of the 
 importance of rhyme is only a consequence of this state of mind. 
 Here we have again to deal with a form of that inaptitude for 
 attention, well known to us, which is a peculiarity of the de- 
 generate subject. The course of his ideas is determined, not by a 
 central idea round which the will groups all other ideas, suppress- 
 ing some and strengthening others wjth the help of attention ; but 
 by the wholly mechanical association of ideas, awakened in the 
 case of the Parnassians by a similar or identical verbal sound. 
 His poetical method is pure echolalia. 
 
 The Parnassian theory of the importance of form, notably of 
 rhyme, for poetry, of the intrinsic value of beauty in the sound 
 of words, of the sensuous pleasure to be derived from sonorous 
 syllables without regard to their sense, and of the uselessness, 
 and even harmfulness, of thought in poetry, has become de- 
 cisive in the most recent development of French poetry.* The 
 Symbolists, whom we have studied in an earlier chapter, 
 hold closely to this theory. These poor in spirit, who only 
 babble ' sonorous syllables ' without sense, are the direct de- 
 scendants of the Parnassians. 
 
 The Parnassian theory of art is mere imbecility. But the ego- 
 mania of the degenerate minds who have concocted it reveals 
 itself in the enormous importance they attribute to their hunt 
 for rhymes, to their puerile pursuit of words which are ' toni- 
 truants' and ' rayonnants.' Catulle Mendes ends a poem (La 
 scule Douceur), where he describes in the most fulsome manner 
 a series of the pleasures of life, with this envoi : ' Prince, I lie. 
 
 * Compare with the above Tolstoi's opinion on the same subject : * He is 
 violently hostile to all rhymed verse. Rhythm and rhyme chain down 
 thought, and all that is opposed to the most complete formation possible of 
 the idea is an evil. . . . Tolstoi . . . regards the decline in our esteem for 
 poetry in verse as a progress.' Raphael Lowenfeld, Gesprache iiber und mit 
 Tolstoi. Berlin, 1891, p. 77.
 
 EGO-MANIA 271 
 
 Beneath the Twins or the Urn '(? Aquarius) to make noble 
 words rhyme together in one's book, this is the sole joy of life.'* 
 He who is not of this opinion is simply said -to forfeit his 
 humanity. Thus it is that Baudelaire calls Paris ' a Capernaum, 
 a Babel peopled by the imbecile and useless, not over-fastidious 
 in their ways of killing time, and wholly inaccessible to literary 
 pleasures.'-f- To treat as imbecile those who look upon a sense- 
 less jumble of rhymes and a litany of so-called beautiful proper 
 names as of no value, is a stupid self-conceit at which one 
 might well laugh. But Baudelaire goes so far as to speak of the 
 ' useless.' No one has a right to live who is inaccessible to 
 what he calls ' literary pleasures ' that is, an idiotic echolalia ! 
 Because he cultivates the art of playing on words with a puerile 
 seriousness, everyone must place the same importance as he 
 does on his infantile amusements, and whoever does not do so 
 is not simply a Philistine or an inferior being, without sus- 
 ceptibility or refinement no, he is a ' useless creature.' If 
 this simpleton had the power, he would no doubt wish to 
 pursue his idea to the end and sweep the 'useless' out of the 
 ranks of the living, as Nero put to death those who did not 
 applaud his acting in the theatre. Can the monstrous ego- 
 mania of one demented be more audaciously expressed than in 
 this remark of Baudelaire's ? 
 
 The second characteristic of the Parnassians, after their insane 
 exaggeration of the value for humanity of the most external 
 form for poetry and rhyming, is their ' impassibility/ or im- 
 passivity.' They themselves, of course, will not admit that this 
 term is applicable to them. ''Will they ever have done with this 
 humbug !' angrily cried Leconte de Lisle, when interrogated on 
 the subject of ' impassibility/ and Catulle Mendes says, ' Because 
 Glatigny has written a poem entitled Impassible, and because I 
 myself wrote this line, the avowed pose in which is belied in the 
 course of the poem, 
 
 ' " Pas de sanglots humains dans le chant des poetes 1" J 
 
 it has been concluded that the Parnassians were or wished to 
 be "impassive." Where do they find it, where do they see it, 
 this icy equanimity, this dryness which they have ascribed 
 to us ?' 
 
 Criticism, in sooth, has chosen its word badly. 'Impassi- 
 
 * ' Prince, je mens. Sous les Ge"meaux 
 
 Ou 1'Amphore, faire en son livre 
 Rimer entre eux de noble mots, 
 C'est la seule douceur de vivre.' 
 
 t Eugene Cre'pet, Les Poetes franc ais, vol. iv., p. 536 : study by Charles 
 I34udelaire of Theodore de Banville. 
 ' No human sobs in the poets' song !' 
 Jules Huret, op. '/., pp. 283, 297.
 
 272 DEGENERATION 
 
 bility' in art, in the sense of complete indifference to the drama 
 of nature and of life, there cannot be. It is psychologically 
 impossible. All artistic activity, in so far as it is not the mere 
 imitation of disciples, but flows from an original necessity, is a 
 reaction of the artist upon received impressions. Those which 
 leave him completely indifferent inspire the poet with no verse, 
 the painter with no picture, the musician with no tone com- 
 position. Impressions must strike him in some way or other, 
 they must awaken in him some emotion, in order that he may 
 have the idea at all of giving them an objective artistic form. 
 In the infinite volume of phenomena flowing uniformly past his 
 senses, the artist has distinguished the subject he treats with the 
 peculiar methods of his art ; he has exercised a selective activity, 
 and has given the preference to this subject over others. This 
 preference presupposes sympathy or antipathy ; the artist, there- 
 fore, must have felt something on perceiving his subject. The 
 sole fact that an author has written a poem or a book testifies 
 that the subject treated of has inspired him with curiosity, 
 interest, anger, an agreeable or disagreeable emotion, that it has 
 compelled his mind to dwell upon it This is, therefore, the 
 contrary of indifference. 
 
 The Parnassians are not impassive. In their poems there is 
 whimpering, cursing and blasphemy, and the utterance of joy, 
 enthusiasm and sorrow. But what tortures them or enchants 
 them is exclusively their own states, their own experiences. 
 The only foundation of their poetry is their ' Ego.' The sorrow 
 and joy of other men do not exist for them. Their ' impassi- 
 bilite' is, therefore, not impassivity, but rather a complete 
 absence of sympathy. The ' tower of ivory ' in which, according 
 to the expression of one of them, the poet lives and proudly 
 withdraws himself from the indifferent mob, is a pretty name 
 given to his obtuseness in regard to the being and doing of his 
 fellow-creatures. All this has been well discerned by that 
 beneficently clear- minded critic, M. Ferdinand Brunetiore. 
 ' One of the worst consequences,' he writes, ' that they [the 
 theories of the Parnassians, and, in particular, those of Baude- 
 laire] may involve, is, by isolating art, to isolate the artist as 
 well, making him an idol to himself, and as it were enclosing 
 him in the sanctuary of his " Ego." Not only, then, does his work 
 become a question merely concerned with himself 1 of his griefs 
 and his joys, his loves and his dreams but, in order to develop 
 himself in the direction of his aptitudes, there is no longer any- 
 thing which he respects or spares, there is nothing he will not 
 subordinate to himself; which is, to speak by the way, the true 
 definition of immorality. To make one's self the centre of 
 things, from a philosophical point of view, is as puerile an 
 illusion as to see in man " the king of creation," or in the earth
 
 EGO-MANIA 273 
 
 what the ancients called " the navel of the world " ; but, from 
 the purely human point of view, it is the glorification of egoism, 
 and, consequently, the negation itself of solidarity.'* 
 
 Thus Brunetiere notices the ego-mania of the Parnassians, and 
 -affirms their anti-social principles, their immorality ; he believes, 
 however, that they have freely chosen their point of view. This 
 is his only error. They are not ego-maniacs by free choice, but 
 because they must be, and cannot be otherwise. Their ego- 
 mania is not a philosophy or a moral doctrine ; it is their 
 malady. 
 
 The impassivity of the Parnassians is, as we have seen, a ' 
 callousness with regard, not to everything, but only to their 
 fellow-creatures, united to the tenderest love for themselves. 
 But their ' impassibility ' has yet another aspect, and those who 
 have found the term have probably thought above all of this, 
 without having given themselves a complete account of it. The 
 indifference which the Parnassians display, and of which they 
 are particularly proud, applies less to the joys and sufferings of 
 their fellow-creatures than to the universally recognised moral 
 law. For them there is neither virtue nor vice, but only the 
 beautiful and the ugly, the rare and the commonplace. They 
 took their point of view ' beyond good and evil/ long before 
 the moral madness of Frederick Nietzsche found this formula. 
 Baudelaire justifies it in the following terms: ' Poetry . . . has 
 no other aim than itself ; it cannot have any other, and no 
 poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of 
 poem, as that which will have been written only for the pleasure 
 of writing a poem. I do not wish to say be it well understood 
 that poetry may not ennoble morals, that its final result may 
 not be to raise man above vulgar interests. This would evi- 
 dently be an absurdity. I say that, if the poet has pursued a 
 moral aim he has diminished his poetical power, and it is not 
 imprudent to wager that his work will be bad. Poetry cannot, 
 under pain of death or degradation, assimilate itself to science or 
 morals. It has not truth for its object, it has only itself.' And 
 Th. Gautier, who records this remark, wholly approves of it. 
 ' On the high summits he [the poet] is at peace : pacem summa 
 tenent? he says,-f- in employing an image which occurs dozens of 
 times in Nietzsche. 
 
 Let us nail here first of all a current sophistical artifice 
 employed by Baudelaire. The question to which he wishes to 
 reply is this : Is poetry to be moral or not ? Suddenly he 
 smuggles science, with which it has nothing to do, into his 
 
 * F. Brunetiere, ' La Statue de Baudelaire,' Revue des deux Mondes* 
 September i, 1^92, vol. cxiii., p. 221. 
 
 t Les Fleurs du Mai, par Charles Baudelaire, pre"ce"de"es d'une notice par 
 Theophile Gautier. 2^ edition. .Paris, 1869, p. 22. 
 
 18
 
 274 DEGENERATION 
 
 demonstration, names it in the same breath with morality, shows 
 triumphantly that science has nothing in common with poetry, 
 and then acts as though he had demonstrated the same thing 
 on the subject of morality. Now, it does not occur to any 
 reasonable man of the present day to demand of poetry the 
 teaching of scientific truths, and for generations no serious poet 
 has thought of treating of astronomy or physics in a didactic 
 poem. The only question which some minds would wish to 
 consider as an open one is that of knowing if we may, or may 
 not, exact of poetry that it be moral, and it is this question that 
 Baudelaire answers by an unproven affirmative, and by a crafty 
 shuffling. 
 
 I have no wish to linger here on this question, not because it 
 embarrasses me and I should like to avoid it, but because it 
 seems to me more in place to discuss it when considering the 
 disciples of the ' Parnassus,' the ' Decadents,' and the ^Esthetes, 
 who have pushed the doctrine to its extreme. I will for the 
 present leave uncontradicted the assertion of the Parnassians, 
 that poetry has not to trouble itself about morality. The poet 
 ought to stand ' beyond good and evil.' But that could only 
 reasonably signify an absolute impartiality ; it can only amount 
 to this that the poet, in considering some action or aspect, 
 simply aspires to find himself confronted by a drama, which he 
 judges only for its beauty or ugliness, without even asking if it 
 is moral or not. A poet of this kind must necessarily see, then, 
 as many beautiful as ugly things, as many moral as immoral. 
 For, taking all in all, moral and beautiful things in humanity 
 and Nature are at least as frequent as the contrary, and must 
 even preponderate. For we consider as ugly, either what presents 
 a deviation from laws which are familiar to us, and to which 
 we have adapted ourselves, or that in which we recognise the 
 manifestation of anything prejudicial to us ; and we regard as 
 immoral all that is contrary to the prosperity, or even the 
 maintenance, of society. Now, the mere fact that we have 
 looked to find laws is a proof that phenomena corresponding to 
 recognised laws, and consequently agreeable to us, must be far 
 more numerous than the phenomena in contradiction to those 
 laws, and therefore repulsive ; and so, too, the maintenance of 
 society is a proof that conservative and favourable, i.e., moral, 
 forces must be more vigorous than destructive; i.e., immoral, 
 forces. Hence, in a poem which while it did not trouble itself 
 about morals, was nevertheless truly impartial, as it pretended 
 to be, morality would be represented on a scale at least as 
 large as, and even somewhat larger than, immorality. But in 
 the poetry of the Parnassians this is not the case. It delights 
 almost exclusively in depravity and ugliness. Theophile
 
 EGO-MANIA 275- 
 
 Gautier extols, in Mademoiselle de Maupin, the basest sensuality, 
 which, if it should become the general rule, would carry humanity 
 back to the condition of savages living in sexual promiscuous- 
 ness without individual love, and without any family institutions 
 whatever; Sainte-Beuve, in other respects more romanticist 
 than Parnassian, builds in his novel Voluptt an altar to sexual 
 pleasure, at which the ancient Asiatic adorers of Ashtaroth 
 could, without hesitation, have performed their worship ; Catulle 
 Mendes, who began his literary career by being condemned for 
 a moral outrage (brought upon himself by his play Le Roman 
 d'une Nuif) exalts in his later works, of which I will not quote 
 the titles, one of the most abominable forms of unnatural 
 license ; Baudelaire sings of carrion, maladies, criminals and 
 prostitutes ; in short, if one contemplates the world in the 
 mirror of Parnassian poetry, the impression received is that it 
 is composed exclusively of vices, crimes and corruption without 
 the smallest intermixture of healthy emotions, joyous aspects 
 of Nature and human beings feeling and acting honestly. In 
 perpetual contradiction to himself, as becomes a truly degenerate 
 mind, the same Baudelaire, who in one place does not wish poetry 
 to be confounded with morality, says in another place : ' Modern 
 art has an essentially devilish \demoniaque~\ tendency. And it 
 seems that this infernal side of his nature, which man takes a 
 pleasure in explaining to himself, increases daily, as if the devil 
 amused himself by magnifying it through artificial processes, in 
 imitation of the poultry-farmers, patiently cramming the human 
 species in his hen-yards. to prepare for himself a more succulent 
 nourishment.'* 
 
 There is no indifference here to virtue or vice ; it is an 
 absolute predilection for the latter, and aversion for the former. 
 Parnassians do not at all hold themselves ' beyond good or 
 evil,' but plunge themselves up to the neck in evil, and as far 
 as possible from good. Their feigned ' impartiality ' with regard 
 to the drama of morality or immorality is in reality a passionate 
 partisanship for the immoral and the disgusting. It was wrong, 
 therefore, to think of characterizing them by ' impassibility.' 
 Just as they lack feeling only towards their fellow-creatures, 
 and not towards themselves, so they are only cold and indifferent 
 towards good, not towards evil ; the latter attracts them, on the 
 contrary, as forcibly, and fills them as much with feelings of 
 pleasure, as the good attracts and rejoices the sane majority 
 of men. 
 
 This predilection for evil has been discerned by many 
 observers, and a good number have endeavoured to explain it 
 
 * Baudelaire, in the work quoted by Eugene Cre'pet, Les Poetes fran$ais t 
 vol. iv., pp. 541, 542.
 
 276 DEGENERATION 
 
 philosophically. In a lecture on ' Evil as the Object of Poetical 
 Representation,' Franz Brentano says :* 
 
 1 Since what is presented in tragedy appears so little desirable 
 and cheerful, it suggests the idea that these explanations (of the 
 pleasure we find in it) are less to be sought in the excellence of 
 the subject than in some peculiar need of the public, which finds 
 a response alone in the things thus exhibited. . . . Can it be 
 that man feels, from time to time, the need of a melancholy 
 emotion, and longs for tragedy as for something which satisfies 
 this need in the most efficacious way, assisting him, so to speak, 
 to weep heartily for once ? . . . If for a long time no passions, 
 such as tragedies excite, have had sway in us, the power to 
 experience them demands anew, in some way, to manifest itself, 
 and it is tragedy which comes to cur aid ; we feel the emotions 
 painfully, it is true, but at the same time we experience a bene- 
 ficial alleviation of our need. 1 think I have observed similar 
 facts a hundred times less in myself than in others, in those, 
 for example, who devour with avidity the newspaper report of 
 the " latest murder." ' 
 
 Professor Brentano here confounds first of all, with a lament- 
 able levity, what is evil and what is saddening two wholly 
 different concepts. The death of a beloved being, for example, 
 is saddening, but there is nothing evil in it, i.e. t immoral, unless, 
 by a subtle quibble, it is proposed to interpret as an immorality 
 the action of natural forces in the dissolution of the individual. 
 Further, he gives as an explanation what is only a perfectly 
 superficial paraphrase Why do we take pleasure in evil ? Be- 
 cause . . . we have evidently in us a tendency to take pleasure 
 in evil ! Opium facit dormire quia est in eo virtus donnitiva. 
 M. Fr. Paulhan has treated the question more seriously, but 
 neither do we get very far with him. 'A contemplative, broad, 
 inquisitive, penetrating mind/ he says,-f 'with profound moral 
 tendencies, which can nevertheless sink into oblivion in great part 
 during scientific research or aesthetic contemplation ; sometimes 
 also with a slight natural perversion, or simply a marked ten- 
 dency towards certain pleasures, whatever they may be, which 
 are not an evil in themselves, and may even be a good, but of 
 which the abuse is an evil such are the foundations of the 
 sentiment (love of evil) which is occupying us. The idea of evil, 
 by flattering a taste, finds a solid point of support ; and there is 
 one reason more why it is agreeable in that it satisfies, ideally, 
 an inclination which reason hinders from being satisfied really to 
 satiety/ 
 
 * * Franz Brentano, Das Schlechle ah Gegenstand dichten 'scJier Darstellung. 
 Vortrag gehalten in der Gesellschaft der Luteratur freunde zu Wien. Leipzig, 
 1892, p. 17. 
 
 t Fr. Paulhan, Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p 94. See, in addi- 
 tion, all the chapter ' L'amour du mal,' pp. 57-99-
 
 EGO-MANIA 277 
 
 Here again is this sequence of ideas revolving in a circle, like 
 a cat at play biting its tail : we have a taste for evil, because we 
 find a taste for evil. The intellectual ineptitude which M. Paulhan 
 here reveals is so much the more surprising in that, some pages 
 above, he came very near the true solution of the enigma. 
 ' There are morbid states/ he there says, ' where the appetites are 
 depraved ; the patient eagerly swallows coal, earth, or things still 
 worse. There are others in which the will is vitiated, and the 
 character warped in some point. The pathological examples are 
 striking, and the case of the Marquis de Sade is one of the most 
 characteristic. . . . One sometimes finds enjoyment in the evils 
 suffered by one's self, just as in those of others. The sentiments 
 of voluptuousness, sorrow and pity, which psychology has 
 studied, appear to betray sometimes a veritable perversion, and 
 to contain as elements the iove of sorrow for sorrow itself. . . . 
 Often one has to do with people who desire their own weal 
 primarily, and then the woe of others. One or other of these 
 psychical states is visible in many cases of wickedness ; for 
 example, in the fact of a rich manufacturer falsely accusing a 
 young man, who is going to marry, of being affected by a 
 venereal disease, and maintaining his ttszriiQft for the pleasure of 
 doing so ... or, again, of a young villain who relishes the plea- 
 sure of theft to the point of crying : " Even if I were rich, I 
 should always like to steal." Even the sight of physical suffering 
 is not always disagreeable ; many people seek it. ... This per- 
 version is probably of all times and of all countries. ... It 
 would seem that into the mind of a man of our times there 
 might enter a certain enjoyment in upsetting the order of 
 nature, which does not appear to have been manifested before 
 with a similar intensity. It is one of the thousand forms of 
 recoiling on one's self which characterizes our advanced civiliza- 
 tion.' Here M. Paulhan touches the kernel of the question, 
 without remarking it or being arrested by it. The love of evil 
 is not a universally human attribute; it is an 'aberration ' and a 
 ' perversion,' and ' one of the thousand forms of recoiling on one's 
 self/ otherwise more briefly and more clearly expressed as ego- 
 mania. 
 
 The literature of penal legislation and mental therapeutics has 
 registered hundreds of cases of aberration in which the patient 
 has felt a passionate predilection for the vil and horrible, for 
 sorrow and death. I should like to quote only one characteristic 
 example : ' In the autumn of 1884 there died, in a Swiss prison, 
 Marie Jeanneret, a murderess. After having received a good 
 education she devoted herself to the care of the sick, not for 
 the love of doing good, but to satisfy a- mad passion. The 
 sufferings, groans and distorted features of the sick filled her 
 with secret voluptuousness. She implored the doctors, on her
 
 278 DEGENERATION 
 
 knees and with tears, to allow her to assist in dangerous opera- 
 tions, in order to be able to gratify her cravings. The death- 
 agony of a human being afforded her the height of enjoyment. 
 Under the pretext of a disease of the eyes, she had consulted 
 several oculists, and had obtained from them belladonna and 
 other poiscns. Her first victim, a woman, was her friend ; others 
 followed ; the doctors, to whom she had recommended herself 
 as nurse, having no suspicions, the less so because she fre- 
 quently changed her residence. An attempt failing in Vienna 
 led to discovery ; she had poisoned not less than nine persons, 
 but felt neither repentance nor shame. In prison her most 
 ardent wish was to fall dangerously ill, in order to satiate herself 
 in the looking-glass with the contortions of her own features.'* 
 
 Thus we recognise, in the light of clinical observation, the true 
 nature of the Parnassians. Their impassivity, in so far as it is 
 mere indifference to the sufferings of others, and to virtue and 
 vice, proceeds from their ego-mania, and is a consequence of 
 their obtuseness, which makes it impossible for them to receive 
 a sufficiently keen presentation of the external world, hence also 
 of sorrow, vice, or ugliness, so as to be able to respond by normal 
 reactions, by aversion, indignation, or pity. But in cases where 
 impassivity constitutes a declared predilection for what is evil 
 and disgusting, we can see the same aberration which makes of 
 the imbecile a cruel torturer of animals,-f and of Marie Jean- 
 neret, cited above, a tenfold poisoner. The whole difference 
 consists in the degree of impulsion. If it is strong enough, its 
 consequences are heartless acts and crimes. If it is elaborated 
 by diseased centres with insufficient force, it can be satisfied by 
 imagination alone, by poetic or artistic activity. 
 
 Of course there have been attempts made to defend aberra- 
 tion as something justified and voluntary, and even to erect it 
 
 * Oswald Zimmermann, Die Wonne des Leids, Beitrage zur Erkenntniss 
 des menschlichen Empfindens in Kunst und Leben. 2te umgearbeitete Auflage. 
 Leipzig, 1885, p. in. This book is without value in point of ideas, for it 
 reproduces, in language deliberately inflated, and visibly aspiring to 'depth, 1 
 the most imbecile drivel of the trio, Edward von Hartmann, Nietzsche and 
 Gustave Jager. But the author, who is well read, has carefully compiled 
 some useful materials in certain chapters, particularly in that entitled, 
 Association of Voluptuousness and Cruelty' (p. 107 et seg.). (The case of 
 jeanneret, first published byChatelain in the Annales mMico-psychologiques^ 
 has also been quoted by Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der gerichtliclien Psycho* 
 pathologie. 3te Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 248. 
 
 t Sollier, op. '/., p. 123 : 'The imbecile is refined in his persecutions, 
 and that knowingly. He loves to see suffering. He skins a bird alive, 
 laughs on hearing its cries and seeing its struggles. He tears off the feet 
 of a frog, looks at its suffering for a moment, then abruptly crushes it, or 
 kills it in some other way, as one of the imbeciles at Bice'tre does. . . . The 
 imbecile is as cruel to his fellow-creature as to animals, and that even in 
 his jesting. Thus he will laugh maliciously and mock at a comrade who has 
 become crippled.'
 
 EGO- MAN I A 279 
 
 into an intellectual distinction. Thus it is that M. Paul Bourget* 
 puts into the mouth of the ' Decadents/ with little artifices of 
 style which do not permit a moment's doubt that he is expressing 
 his own opinion, the following argument : ' We delight in what 
 you. call our corruptions of style, and we delight at the same 
 time the refined people of our race and our time. It remains to 
 be seen whether our exception is not an aristocracy, and 
 whether, in the aesthetic order, the majority of suffrages repre- 
 sents anything else than the majority of ignorances. . . . It is a 
 self-deception not to have the courage of one's intellectual plea- 
 sure. Let us delight, therefore, in our singularities of ideal and 
 of form, even if we must shut ourselves up in a solitude without 
 visitors.' 
 
 It seems scarcely necessary to show that by these arguments, 
 in which ]\I. Bourget anticipates the whole delirious ' philosophy' 
 of Nietzsche, every crime can be glorified as an 'aristocratic' 
 action. The assassin has 'the courage of his intellectual plea- 
 sure,' the majority which does not approve of him is a majority 
 of the ' ignorant,' he delights in the ' singularity ' of his 'ideal,' 
 and for this reason must at the most allow himself to be shut up 
 in ' a solitude without visitors,' i.e., to speak plainly, in a 
 reformatory, if ' the majority of ignorances ' does not have him 
 hanged or guillotined. Has not the ' Decadent' Maurice Barres 
 defended and justified Chambige, a specimen of the murderer 
 for love of murder, with Bourget's theory ? 
 
 This same repulsive theorist of the most abandoned anti- 
 social ego-mania denies also that one can speak of a mind as 
 diseased or healthy. ' There is,' he says,t ' from the meta- 
 physical observer's point of view, neither disease nor health of 
 the soul ; there are only psychological states, for he perceives in 
 our sufferings and in our faculties, in our virtues and in our 
 vices, in our volitions and in our renunciations, only changing 
 combinations, inevitable, and therefore normal, subject to the 
 known laws of the association of ideas. Only prejudice, in 
 which the ancient doctrine of final causes and the belief in the 
 -definite aim of the universe reappear, can make us consider the 
 loves of Daphnis and Chloe in the valley as natural and healthy, 
 and the loves of a Baudelaire as artificial and unwholesome.' 
 
 To bring this silly sophistry down to its just value, common- 
 sense has only to recollect the existence of lunatic asylums. But 
 common-sense has not the right of suffrage among the rhetori- 
 cians of M. Paul Bourget's stamp. We reply to him, then, with 
 a seriousness he does not merit, that in fact every vital mani- 
 festation, those of the brain as of any other organ, is the 
 
 * Paul Bourget, Essais dn Psyeh-nlogie conteiiiporaine. Paris, 1883, p. 28. 
 f Ibid., pp. 12, 13.
 
 a8o DEGENERATION 
 
 necessary and only possible effect of the causes which occasion 
 them, but that, according to the state of the organ and of its 
 elementary parts, its activity, necessary and natural as such, can 
 be useful or hurtful to the whole organism. Whether the world 
 has a purpose is a question that can altogether be left inde- 
 cisive, but the activity of each part of the organism has never- 
 theless, if not the aim, at least unquestionably the effect, of 
 preserving the whole organism ; if it does not produce this 
 effect, and if, on the contrary, it thwarts it, it is injurious to the 
 whole organism, and for such an injurious activity of any par- 
 ticular organ language has coined the word ' disease.' The 
 sophist who denies that there may be disease and health must 
 also logically deny that there may be life and death, or, at 
 least, that death may have some sort of importance. For, as a 
 matter of fact, given a certain activity of its parts which we call 
 morbid, the organism perishes, while with an activity of another 
 nature, which we qualify as healthy, it lives and thrives. As 
 long, then, as Bourget does not lay down the dogma that pain 
 is as agreeable as pleasure, decrepitude as satisfactory as vigour, 
 and death as desirable as life, he proves that he does not know, 
 or dares not draw from his premise, the just conclusion which 
 would immediately make the absurdity of it apparent. 
 
 The whole theory which must explain and justify the predi- 
 lection for evil has, besides, been invented as an after-thought. 
 The inclination for what is evil and disgusting existed first, and 
 was not a consequence of philosophical considerations and self- 
 persuasion. We have here merely another case of that method 
 of our consciousness, so often attested in the course of these 
 inquiries, which consists of inventing rational causes for the 
 instincts and acts of the unconscious. 
 
 In the predilection of the Parnassians for the immoral, criminal 
 and ugly, we have to deal merely with an organic aberration, and 
 with nothing else. To pretend that inclinations of this kind 
 exist in all men, even in the best and sanest, and are merely 
 stifled by him, while the Parnassians give the rein to theirs, is an 
 arbitrary and unproved assertion. Observation and the whole 
 march of the historical development of humanity contradict it. 
 
 There may be repulsion and attraction in nature no one 
 denies it. A glance at the magnetic poles, at the positive and 
 negative electrodes, suffices to establish this fact. "We find this 
 phenomenon again among the lowest forms of life. Certain 
 materials attract, others repel them. There is no question here 
 of an inclination or an expression of the will. We must 
 rather consider the process as purely mechanical, having its 
 reason probably in molecular relations which are still unknown 
 to us. Microbiology gives to the attitude of micro-organisms 
 towards attractive and repulsive matter the name of 'chemo-
 
 EGO-MANIA 281 
 
 taxis ' or chimiotaxia, invented by Pfeffer.* In higher organisms 
 the conditions are naturally not so simple. Among them also, 
 it is true, the ultimate cause of inclinations and aversions is 
 certainly chimiotactic, but the effect of chimiotaxia must neces- 
 sarily manifest itself under another form. A simple cell such 
 as a bacillus, for example, is repelled directly when it penetrates 
 into the radius of a chimic body which repels it. But the cell 
 constituting a portion of a higher organism has not this liberty 
 of movement. It cannot change its place independently. If it 
 is now chimiotactically repelled, it cannot escape from the per- 
 nicious action, but must remain exposed to it, and submit to the 
 disturbances in its vital activity. If these are sufficiently serious 
 to injure the functions of the whole organism, the latter obtains 
 knowledge of it, endeavours to perceive their cause, discovers it 
 also, as a general rule, and does for the suffering cell what the 
 latter cannot do alone, namely, shields it from the .repelling 
 action. The organism necessarily acquires experience in its 
 defence against pernicious influences. It learns to know the 
 circumstances in which they appear, and no longer permits 
 matters to reach the stage of the really chimiotactic effect, but 
 for the most part evades disturbing matters before they can 
 exert a really direct repulsion. The knowledge acquired by the 
 individual becomes hereditary, transforms itself into an organized 
 faculty of the species, and the organism feels subjectively, as a 
 discomfort which may amount to pain, the warning that a per- 
 nicious influence is acting upon it, and that it has to avoid it. 
 To escape from pain becomes one principal function of the 
 organism, which it cannot insufficiently provide against or 
 neglect without expiating that negligence by its ruin. 
 
 In the human being processes take place not otherwise than 
 as they have been here described. The hereditary organized 
 experience of the species warns him of the noxiousness of 
 influences to which he is frequently exposed. His outposts 
 against naturally hostile forces are his senses. Taste and smell 
 give him, as to repulsive chimiotactic matter, the impressions of 
 nausea and of stench ; the different kinds of skin-sensations 
 make him aware, through sensations of pain, heat, or cold, that 
 a given contact is unfavourable to him ; eye and ear place him 
 on his guard, by loud, shrill, discordant sensations, against the 
 mechanical effects of certain physical phenomena. Finally, the 
 higher cerebral centres respond to recognised noxious influences 
 of a composite nature, or to the representation of them by an 
 equally composite reaction of aversion in different degrees of 
 intensity, from simple discomfort to horror, indignation, dismay, 
 or fury. 
 
 The vehicle of this hereditary, organized, racial experience 
 * Verworn employs the word ' chemotropism.'
 
 282 DEGENERATION 
 
 is the unconscious life ; to it is confided defence against simple, 
 frequently recurring noxious influences. Nausea at intolerable 
 tastes, repugnance to insufferable smells, the fear of dangerous 
 animals, natural phenomena, etc., have become for it an instinct 
 to which the organism abandons itself without reflection i.e., 
 
 -^without the intervention of consciousness. But the human 
 organism learns to distinguish and avoid not only all that is 
 directly prejudicial to itself; it acts in the same way with regard 
 to that which menaces it not as an individual, but as a racial 
 being, as a member of an organized society ; antipathy to 
 influences injurious to the maintenance or prosperity of the 
 society becomes in him an instinct. But this enriching of 
 organized unconscious cognition represents a higher degree of 
 development than many human beings attain to. The social 
 instincts are those that a man acquires last of all, and, in con- 
 formity to a known law, he loses them first when he retrogrades 
 in his organic development. 
 
 Consciousness has occasion to declare the dangerous nature 
 of phenomena, and to defend the organism against it, only if 
 these phenomena are either quite new, or very rare, so that they 
 cannot be hereditarily recognised and dreaded; or if they enclose 
 in themselves many different elements, and do not act directly, 
 but only by their more or less remote consequences, so that to 
 know them exacts a complex activity of representation and 
 judgment. 
 
 Thus aversion is always the instinctive, or conscious cognition 
 of a noxious influence. Pleasure, its opposite, is not merely, 
 as has been sometimes maintained, the absence of discomfort 
 i.e., a negative state but something positive. Every part of the 
 organism has definite needs which assert themselves as a con- 
 
 ' scious or unconscious tendency, as an inclination or appetite ; the 
 satisfaction of these needs is felt as a pleasure which can rise to a 
 feeling of bliss. The first need of each organ is to manifest itself 
 in activity. Its simple activity is a source of pleasure to it, so long 
 as it does not go beyond its powers. The activity of the cerebral 
 centres consists in receiving impressions, and in transforming 
 them into representations and movements. This activity pro- 
 duces in them feelings of pleasure ; they have in consequence a 
 strong desire to receive impressions so as to be put into activity 
 by them, and experience feelings of pleasure. 
 
 This, broadly sketched, is the natural history of the feelings of 
 pleasure and pain. The reader who has mastered it will ex- 
 perience no difficulty in comprehending the nature of aberration. 
 Unconscious life is subject to the same biological laws as con- 
 scious life. The vehicle of the unconscious is the same nervous 
 tissue although, it may be, another portion of the system in 
 which consciousness is also elaborated, The unconscious is just
 
 EGO-MANIA 283 
 
 as little infallible as consciousness. It can be more highly 
 developed or retarded in its development; it can be more or less 
 stupid or intelligent. If the unconscious is incompletely 
 developed, it distinguishes badly and judges falsely, it deceives 
 itself in the knowledge of what is prejudicial or favourable to it, 
 and instinct becomes unreliable or obtuse. Then we get the 
 phenomenon of indifference to what is ugly, loathsome, im- 
 moral. 
 
 We know that among the degenerate divers arrested develop- 
 ments and malformations appear. Particular organs or entire 
 systems of organs are arrested at a degree of development which 
 corresponds to infancy, or even to the foetal life. If the highest 
 cerebral centres of the degenerate stop in their development 
 at a very low stage, they become imbeciles or idiots. If the 
 arrest of development strikes the nervous centres of unconscious 
 life, the degenerate lose the instincts which, in normal beings, 
 find expression in nausea and disgust at certain noxious influ- 
 ences ; I might say, their unconscious life suffers from imbecility 
 or idiocy. 
 
 Again, we have seen in the preceding chapter that the impres- 
 sionability of the nerves and brain in the degenerate subject is 
 blunted. Hence he only perceives strong impressions, and it is 
 only these which excite his cerebral centres to that intellectual 
 and motor activity which produces in them feelings of pleasure. 
 Now, disagreeable impressions are naturally stronger than agree- 
 able or indifferent impressions, for if they were not stronger we 
 should not feel them as painful, and they would not induce the 
 organism to make efforts to defend itself. To procure, then, the 
 feelings of pleasure which are linked with the activity of the 
 cerebral centres, to satisfy the need of functioning which is 
 peculiar to the cerebral centres as to all the other organs, the 
 degenerate person seeks impressions which are strong enough to 
 excite to activity his obtuse and inert centres. But such im- 
 pressions are precisely those which the healthy man feels as 
 painful or repugnant. Thus, the aberrations or perversions of 
 the degenerate find explanation. They have a longing for 
 strong impressions, because these only can put their brains into 
 activity, and this desired effect on their centres is only exercised 
 by impressions that sane beings dread because of their violence, 
 i.e., painful, repugnant and revolting impressions. 
 
 To say that every human being has secretly a certain predi- 
 lection for the evil and the abominable is absurd : the only little 
 spark of truth contained in this foolish assertion is, that even the 
 normal human being becomes obtuse when fatigued, or exhausted 
 by illness ; i.e., he falls into the state which, in the degenerate, is 
 chronic. Then he presents naturally the same phenomena as we 
 have attested in the case of the latter, although in a much lower
 
 284 DEGENERATION 
 
 degree. He may find pleasure, then, in crime and ugliness, and 
 in the former rather than in the latter ; for crimes are social 
 injuries, while uglinesses are the visible form of threes unfavour- 
 able to the individual ; but social instincts are feebler ihan the 
 instincts of self-preservation. Consequently they are sooner 
 put to sleep, and for this reason the repulsion against crime 
 disappears more quickly than that against ugliness. In any 
 case, this state is also an aberration in the normal being, 
 bi't imputable to fatigue, and in him is not chronic, as in 
 the degenerate, nor does it amount to the hidden fundamental 
 character of his being, as the sophists who calumniate him. 
 pretend. 
 
 An uninterrupted line of development leads from the French 
 romantic school to the Parnassians, and all the germs of the 
 aberrations which confront us in full expansion among the latter 
 can be distinguished in the former. \Ve have seen in the pre- 
 ceding book how superficial and poor in ideas their poetry is, 
 how they exalt their imagination above the observation of reality, 
 and what importance they assign to their world of dreams.. 
 Sainte-Beuve, who at first joined their group, says on this 
 subject, with a complacency which proves he was not conscious 
 of expressing any blame : ' The Romance School . . . had a 
 thought, a cult, viz., love of art and passionate inquisitiveness for 
 a vivid expression, a new turn, a choice image, a brilliant rhyme i 
 they wished for every one of their frames a peg of gold. [A re- 
 markably false image, let it be said in passing. A rich frame 
 may be desired for a picture, but as to the nail which supports it. 
 regard will be had to its solidity and not to its preciousness.} 
 Children if you will, but children of the Muses, who never 
 sacrifice to ordinary grace [grace vulgaire\!* 
 
 Let us hold this admission firmly, that the romantic writers- 
 were children ; they were so in their inaptitude to comprehend 
 the world and men. in the seriousness 'and zeal with which they 
 gave themselves up to their game of rhymes, in the artlessness 
 with which they placed themselves above the precepts of morality 
 and good sense in use among adults. Let us exaggerate this 
 childishness a little (without allying with it the wild and exuberant 
 imagination of a Victor Hugo, and his gift of lightning-like 
 rapidity of association, evoking the most startling antitheses), and 
 we obtain the literary figure of Theophile Gautier, whom the 
 imbecile Barbey d'Aurevilly could name in the same breath with 
 Goethe,f evidently for the sole reason that the sound of the 
 great German poet's name in French pronunciation has a certain 
 resemblance to that of Gautier, but of wnom one of his admirers,. 
 
 * Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vol. xiv., p. 70. Article on the com- 
 plete poems of Theodore de Banville. October I2th, 1857. 
 1 I'.aibey d' Aureviily, Geetkc et DiiL-rot. Paris, iSS2.
 
 EGO-MANIA 285 
 
 M. J. K. Huysmans, says :* ' Des Esseintes [the hero of his 
 novel] became gradually indifferent to Gautier's work ; his 
 admiration for that incomparable painter had gone on diminish- 
 ing from day to day, and now he was more astonished than 
 delighted by his indifferent descriptions. The impression left 
 by the objects was fixed on his keenly observant eye, but it was 
 localized there, and had not penetrated further into his brain 
 and flesh [?] ; like a monstrous reflector, he was constantly 
 limited to reverberate his environment with an impersonal 
 distinctness.' 
 
 When M. Huysmans regards Gautier as an impersonal mirror 
 of reality, he is the victim of an optical illusion. In verse as in 
 prose, Gautier is a mechanical worker, who threads one line of 
 glittering adjectives after another, without designing anything 
 particular. His descriptions never give a clear outline of the 
 object he wishes to depict. They recall some crude mosaic of 
 the later Byzantine decadence, the different stones of which are 
 lapis-lazuli, malachite, chrysoprase and jasper, and which yield, 
 for this reason, an impression of barbarous splendour, while 
 scarcely any design is discernible. In his ego-mania, lacking all 
 sympathy with the external world, he does not suspect what 
 sorrows and joys its drama encloses, and just as he feels nothing 
 in the prospect before him, so neither can he awaken in the 
 reader emotion of any sort by his listless and affected attempts 
 to render it. The only emotions of which he is capable, apart 
 from his arrogance and vanity, are those connected with sex ; 
 hence, in his works we merely find alternations between glacial 
 coldness and lubricity. 
 
 If we exaggerate Theophile Gautier's worship of form and 
 lasciviousness, and if to his indifference towards the world and 
 men we associate the aberration which caused it to degenerate 
 into a predilection for the bad and the loathsome, we have 
 before us the figure of Baudelaire. We must stop there awhile, 
 for Baudelaire is even more than Gautier the intellectual 
 chief and model of the Parnassians, and his influence dominates 
 the present generation of French poets and authors, and a 
 portion also of English poets and authors, to an omnipotent 
 degree. 
 
 It is not necessary to demonstrate at length that Baudelaire-^ 
 was a degenerate subject. He died of general paralysis, after he 
 had wallowed for months in the lowest depths of insanity. But 
 even if no such horrible end had protected the diagnosis from 
 all attack, there would be no doubt as to its accuracy, seeing 
 that Baudelaire showed all the mental stigmata of degeneration 
 during the whole of his life. He was at once a mystic and an 
 
 * J. K. Huysmans, A Rebours. 4^me mille. Paris, 1892, p. 251.
 
 2 S6 DEGENERATION 
 
 erotomaniac,* an eater of hashish and opium ;f he felt himself 
 attracted in the characteristic fashion by other degenerate minds, 
 mad or depraved, and appreciated, for example, above all 
 authors, the gifted but mentally-deranged Edgar Poe, and the 
 opium-eater Thomas de Quincey. He translated Foe's tales, and 
 devoted to them an enthusiastic biography and critique, while 
 from the Conjessions of an Opium-Eater, by De Quincey, he com- 
 piled an exhaustive selection, to which he wrote extravagant 
 annotations. 
 
 The peculiarities of Baudelaire's mind are revealed to us in 
 the collection of his poems, to which he has given a title 
 betraying at once his self-knowledge and his cynicism : Les 
 Fletirs du Mai ' The Flowers of Evil.' The collection is not 
 complete. There lack some pieces which only circulate in manu- 
 script, because they are too infamous to bear the full publicity 
 of a marketable book. I will take my quotations, however, 
 from the printed verses only, which are quite sufficient to 
 characterize their author. 
 
 Baudelaire hates life and movement. *In the piece entitled 
 Les Hiboux, he shows us his owls sitting in a row, motionless, 
 under the black yews, and continues : 
 
 * Leur attitude au sage enseigne 
 Qu'il faut en ce monde qu'il craigne 
 Le tumulte et le mouvement. 
 
 L'homme ivre d'une ombre qui passe 
 Porte toujours le chatiment 
 D'avoir voulu changer de place.' 
 
 Beauty says of herself, in the piece of that name : 
 
 * Je hais le mouvement qui de'place les lignes ; 
 Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.' 
 
 * Paul Bourget, op. a't., p. 6 : ' He is a libertine, and depraved visions 
 amounting to Sadism disturb the very man who comes to worship the raised 
 finger of his Madonna. The morose orgies of the vulgar Venus, the heady 
 fumes of the black Venus, the refined delights of the learned Venus, the 
 criminal audacity of the bloodthirsty Venus, have left their memories in the 
 most spiritualized of his poems. An offensive odour of vile alcoves escapes 
 from these . . . verses. . . .' And p. 19 : ' . . . It is not so with the mystic 
 soul and that of Baudelaire's was one. Foi this scul did not content itself 
 with a faith in an idea. It saw God. He was foi it not a word, not a 
 symbol, not an abstraction, but a Being, in whose company the soul lived 
 as we live with a father who loves us.' 
 
 t The'ophile Gautier, who was himself a membei of a hashish club, tries 
 to make us believe (Les Fleurs du Mai, p. 57 et seq,\ that Baudelaire was 
 addicted to the use of narcotic poisons only with the object of ' physiological 
 experiment ' ; but we know the tendency of the degenerate to represent the 
 impulsions of which they are ashamed as acts of free will, for which they 
 have all sorts of palliating explanations.
 
 EGO-MANIA 287 
 
 He abhors the natural as much as he loves the artificial. Thus 
 he depicts his ideal world (Reve Parisieii): 
 
 4 De ce terrible paysage 
 Oue jamais ceil mortel ne vit, 
 Ce matin encore 1'image, 
 Vague et lointaine, me ravit . . . 
 
 ' J'avais banni de ces spectacles 
 Le ve'ge'tal irrdgulier . . . 
 
 *Je savourais dans mon tableau 
 L'enivrante [!] monotonie 
 Du metal, du marbre et de 1'eau. 
 
 ' Babel d'escaliers et d'arcades 
 Cetait un palais infini, 
 Plein de bassins et de cascades 
 Tombant dans 1'or mat ou bruni ; 
 
 'Et des cataractes pesantes, 
 Comme des rideaux de cristal, 
 Se suspendaient, dblouissantes, 
 A des murailles de me"tal. 
 
 ' Non d'arbres, mais de colonnades 
 Les etangs dormants s'entouraient, 
 Ou de gigantesques naiades, 
 Comme des femmes, se miraient. 
 
 * Des nappes d'eau s'epanchaient, bleues, 
 Entre des quais roses et verts, 
 Pendant des millions de lieues, 
 
 Vers les confins de 1'univers ; 
 
 * C'dtaient des pierres inoui'es 
 
 Et des flots magiques ; c'etaient 
 D'immenses glaces e"blouies 
 Par tout ce qu'elles refletaient. 
 
 * Et tout, meme la couleur noire, 
 Semblait fourbi, clair, irise" . . . 
 
 ' Nul astre d'ailleurs, nuls vestiges 
 De soleil, meme au bas du ciel, 
 Pour illuminer ces prodiges, 
 Qui brillaient d'un feu personnel (!) 
 
 4 Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles 
 Planait (terrible nouveaute" ! 
 Tout pour 1'ceil, rien pour les oreilles !) 
 Un silence d'eterniteV 
 
 Such is the world he represents to himself, and which fills 
 him with enthusiasm : not an ' irregular ' plant, no sun, no stars, 
 no movement, no noise, nothing but metal and glass, i.e., some- 
 thing like a tin landscape from Nuremberg, only larger and of 
 more costly material, a plaything for the child of an American 
 millionaire suffering from the wealth-madness of parvenus, with
 
 288 DEGENERATION 
 
 a little electric lamp in the interior, and a mechanism which 
 slowly turns the glass cascades, and makes the glass sheet of 
 water slide. Such must necessarily be the aspect of the ego- 
 maniac's ideal world. Nature leaves him cold or repels him, 
 because he neither perceives nor comprehends her ; hence, where 
 the sane man sees the picture of the external world, the ego- 
 maniac is surrounded by a dark void in which, at most, uncom- 
 prehended nebulous forms are hovering. To escape the horror 
 of them he projects, as from a magic-lantern, coloured shadows 
 of the images which fill his consciousness ; but these representa- 
 tions are rigid, inert, uniform and infantile, like the morbid and 
 weak cerebral centres by which they are elaborated. 
 
 The incapacity of the ego-maniac to feel aright external 
 impressions, and the toil with which his brain works, are also 
 the key of the frightful tedium of which Baudelaire complains, 
 and of the profound pessimism with which he contemplates the 
 world and life. Let us hear him in Le Voyage : 
 
 1 Nous avons vu partout . . . 
 Le spectacle ennuyeux de Pimmortel pe"che" : 
 
 <* La femme, esclave vile, orgueilleuse et stupide, 
 Sans rire s'adorant et s'aimant sans dugout ; 
 L'homme, tyran goulu, paillard, dur et cupide, 
 Esclave de 1'esclave et ruisseau dans I'e'gout ; 
 
 * Le bourreau qui jouit, le martyr qui sanglote ; 
 La fete qu'assaisonne et parfume le sang ; . . 
 
 *Et les moins sots, hardis amants de la de*mence, 
 Fuyant le grand troupeau parque" par le Destin, 
 Et se reTugiant dans 1'opium immense [!]. 
 Tel est du globe entier l'e"ternel bulletin . . . 
 
 'O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps ! levons I'ancre!! 
 Ce pays nous ennuie, O Mort 1 Appareillons 1 
 
 ' Nous voulons . . . 
 
 Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe ? 
 Au fund de 1'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau !' 
 
 This desperate cry towards the ' new ' is the natural com- 
 plaint of a brain which longs to feel the pleasures of action, and 
 greedily craves a stimulation which his powerless sensory nerves 
 cannot give him. Let a sane man imagine the state of mind 
 into which he would fall if he were imprisoned in a cell where 
 no ray of light, no noise, no scent from the outer world would 
 reach him. He would then have an accurate idea of the chronic 
 state of mind in the ego-maniac, eternally isolated by the im- 
 perfection of his nervous system from the universe, from its 
 joyous sounds, from its changing scenes and from its captivating 
 movement. Baudelaire cannot but suffer terribly from ennui, 
 for his mind really learns nothing new and amusing, and is
 
 EGO-MANIA 289 
 
 forced constantly to indulge in the contemplation of his ailing 
 and whimpering self. 
 
 The only pictures which fill the world of his thought are 
 sombre, wrathful and detestable. He says (Un Mortjoyeux) : 
 
 ' Dans une terre grasse et pleine d'escargots 
 Je veux creuser moi-meme une fosse profounde 
 Oil je puisse a loisir dialer mes vieux os 
 Et dormir dans 1'oubli comme un requin dans 1'onde , . 
 Flutot que d'implorer une larme du monde 
 Vivant, j'aimerais mieux inviter les corbeaux 
 A saigner tous les bouts de ma carcasse immonde. 
 
 ' O vers ! npir compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux, 
 Voyez venir a vous un mort libre et joyeux !' 
 
 In La ClocJief'dee, he says of himself : 
 
 ' . . . Mon ame est fele'e, et lorsqu'en ses ennuis 
 Elle veut de ses chants peupler 1'air froid des nuits 
 II arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie 
 
 Semble le rale e"pais d'un blesse" qu'on oublie 
 
 Au bord d'un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts.' 
 
 Spleen : 
 
 ' . . . Mon triste cerveau . . . 
 C'est . . . un immense caveau 
 Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commune. 
 Je suis un cimetiere abhorre de la lune 
 Ou, comme des ramords, se trainent de longs vers. . % 
 
 Horreur sympatkique : 
 
 ' Cieux dechirfs comme des greves, 
 En vous se mire mon orgueil ! 
 Vos vastes nuages en deuil. 
 
 ' Sont les corbillards de mes reves, 
 Et vos lueurs sont le reflet, 
 De PEnfer ou mon coeur se plait P 
 
 Le Coucher du Soleil romantique : 
 
 ' Une odeur de tombeau dans les te"nebres nage, 
 Et mon pied peureux froisse, au bord du mardcage, 
 Des crapauds imprivus et de froids limagons.' 
 
 Dance macabre : The poet speaking to a skeleton : 
 
 *Aucuns t'appelleront une caricature, 
 Qui ne comprennant pas, amants ivres de chair, 
 L'eldgance sans nom de 1'humaine armature. 
 Tu reponds, grand squelette, a mon gout le plus cher ! . . .' 
 
 Une Charogne : 
 
 ' Rappelez-vous 1'objet que nous vimes, mon imCi 
 
 Ce beau matin d'dte si doux : 
 Au devour d'un sentier une charogne infame 
 Sur un lit seme* de cailloux, 
 
 19
 
 2QO DEGENERATION 
 
 * Les jambes en Pair, comme une femme lubrique 
 
 Brfilante et suant les poisons, 
 Ouvrait d'une faqon nonchalante et cynique 
 Son venire plein d'exhalaisons . . . 
 
 ' Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe [!] 
 
 Comme une fleur s'epanouir. 
 La puanteur dtait si forte, que sur 1'herbe 
 Vous crutes vous dvanouir . . . 
 
 * Et pourtant vous serez semblable a cette ordure, 
 
 A cette horrible infection, 
 Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature, 
 Vous, mon ange et ma passion ! 
 
 * Oui ! telle vous serez, 6 la reine des graces, 
 
 Aprils les derniers sacrements, 
 
 Quand vous irez, sous I'herbe et les floraisons grasses, 
 Moisir parmi les ossements. . . .' 
 
 That which pleases Baudelaire most are these pictures of 
 death and corruption which I could quote in still greater numbers 
 if I did not think that these examples sufficed. However, next 
 to the frightful and the loathsome it is the morbid, the criminal 
 and the lewd, which possess the strongest attraction for him. 
 
 Le Reve (Tun Curieux : 
 
 1 Connais-tu, comme moi, la douleur savoureuse ? . . .' 
 Spleen : 
 
 ' Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litiere 
 Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux. . . . 
 
 Le Vin du Solitaire : 
 
 ' Un baiser libertin de la maigre Adeline. . . .' 
 Le Crtpuscule du Soir : 
 
 1 Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel ; . . ."* 
 Et 1'homme impatient se change en bete fauve. . ~J 
 
 La Destruction : 
 
 ' Sans cesse a mes cote's s'agite le De'mon . . . 
 Je 1'avale et le sens qui brule mon poumon 
 Et 1'emplit d'un de*sir dternel et coupable . . . 
 
 * II me conduit . . . 
 
 Haletant et bris^ de fatigue, au milieu 
 
 Des plaines de PEnnui, profondes et de'sertes, 
 
 1 Et jette dans mes yeux . . . 
 Des vetements souilles, des blessures ouvertes, 
 Et Pappareil sanglant de la Destruction !' 
 
 In Une Martyre he describes complacently and in detail a 
 bedroom in which a young, presumably pretty courtesan has
 
 EGO-MANIA 291. 
 
 been murdered ; the assassin had cut off her head and carried it 
 away. The poet is only curious to know one thing : 
 
 ' L'homme vindicatif que tu n'as pu, vivante > 
 
 Malgr<~> tant d'amour, assouvir, 
 Combla-t-il sur ta chair inerte et complaisante 
 L'immensite" de son de"sir ?' 
 
 Femmes damnees, a piece dedicated to the worst aberration of 
 degenerate women, terminates with this ecstatic apostrophe to 
 the heroines of unnatural vice : 
 
 ' O vierges, 6 demons, 6 monstres, 6 martyres, 
 De la rdalite grands esprits contempteurs, 
 Chercheuses d'infini, deVotes et satyres, 
 Tantot pleines de cris, tantot pleines de pleurs, 
 
 Vous que dans votre enfer mon ame a poursuivies, 
 Pauvres soeurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains. , . . 
 
 Preface : 
 
 ' Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, 1'incendie, 
 N'ont pas encore brod de leurs plaisants dessins 
 Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins, 
 C'est que notre ame, helas ! n'est pas assez bardie. . . .' 
 
 But if he is not bold enough to commit crimes himself, he 
 does not leave a moment's doubt that he loves them, and much 
 prefers them to virtue, just as he prefers the ' end of autumns, 
 winters, springs steeped in mud/ to the fine season of the year 
 (Brumes et P lutes). He is ' hostile to the universe rather than 
 indifferent ' (Les sept Vieillards}. The sight of pain leaves him 
 cold, and if tears are shed before him they only evoke in his 
 mind the image of a landscape with running waters. 
 
 Madrigal triste : 
 
 ' Que m'importe que tu sois sage ? 
 Sois belle ! et sois triste ! Les pleurs 
 Ajoutent un charme au visage, 
 Comme le fleuve au paysage.' 
 
 In the struggle between Abel et Cain he takes the part of the 
 latter without hesitation : 
 
 ' Race d'Abel, dors, bois et mange ; 
 Dieu te sourit complaisamment. 
 
 'Race de Cain, dans la fange 
 Rampe et meurs mise'rablement. 
 
 'Race d'Abel, ton sacrifice 
 Flatte le nez du Sdrapjiin. 
 
 * Race de Cain, ton supplies 
 Aura-t-il jamais une fin ? 
 
 ' Race d'Abel, vois tes semailles 
 Et ton be"tail venir a bien ;
 
 393 DEGENERATION 
 
 Race de Cain, tes entrailles 
 
 Hurlent la faim comme un vieux chieiu 
 
 4 Race d'Abel, chauffe ton ventre 
 A ton foyer patriarchal ; ^ 
 
 ' Race de Cain, dans ton antre 
 Tremble de froid, pauvre chacal 1 
 
 4 Ah ! race d'Abel, ta charogne 
 Engraissera le sol fumant ! 
 
 * Race de Cain, ta besogne 
 N'est pas faite suffisamment 
 
 1 Race d'Abel, voici ta honte : 
 Le fer est vaincu par 1'dpieu ! [?] 
 
 ' Race de Cain, au ciel monte 
 Et sur la terre jette Dieu I' 
 
 If he prays it is to the devil (Les Litanies de Satan) : 
 
 4 Gloire et louange a toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs 
 Du Ciel, ou tu re"gnas, et dans les profondeurs 
 De 1'Enfer, oil, vaincu, tu reves en silence I 
 Fais que mon ame un jour, sous 1'Arbre de Science, "* 
 Pre"s de toi se repose. . . .' 
 
 Here there mingles with the aberration that mysticism which 
 is never wanting in the degenerate. Naturally, the love of evil 
 can only take the form of devil-worship, or diabolism, if the 
 subject is a believer, if the supernatural is held to be a real thing. 
 Only he who is rooted with all his feelings in religious faith will, 
 if he suffers from moral aberration, seek bliss in the adoration of 
 Satan, in impassioned blasphemy of God and the Saviour, in 
 the violation of the symbols of faith, or will wish to incite un- 
 natural voluptuousness by mortal sin and infernal damnation, 
 though humouring it in the messe noir, in the presence of a 
 really consecrated priest, and in a hideous travesty of all the 
 forms of the liturgy. 
 
 Besides the devil, Baudelaire adores only one other power, 
 viz., voluptuousness. He prays thus to it (La Priere (Tun 
 Paieri) : 
 
 ' Ah ! ne ralentis pas tes flammes I 
 
 Re'chauffe mon cceur engourdi, 
 
 Volupte', torture des ames ! . . . 
 
 Volupte, sois toujours ma reine !' 
 
 To complete the portrait of this mind, let us cite two more 
 of his peculiarities. He suffers first from images of perpetual 
 anguish, as his piece testifies (Le Gouffre), which is valuable as 
 a confession : 
 
 *. . . Tout est abime, action, ddsir, reVe, 
 Parole ! et sur mon poil qui tout droit se releve 
 Mainte fois de la peur je sens passer le vent.
 
 EGO-MANIA 293 
 
 *En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la greve, 
 Le silence, 1'espace affreux et captivant . . . 
 Sur le fonde de mes nuits, Dieu, de son doigt savant, 
 Dessine un cauchemar multiforme et sans treve. 
 
 ' J'ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d'un grand trou, 
 Tout plein de vague horreur, menant on ne sait ou ; 
 Je ne vois qu' infini par toutes les fene'tres, 
 
 ' Et mon esprit, toujours du vertige hante", 
 Jalouse du neant PinsensibiliteV 
 
 Baudelaire describes here accurately enough that obsession 
 of degenerates which is called 'fear of abysses' (cremnophobia).* 
 His second peculiarity is his interest in scents. He is attentive 
 to them, interprets them ; they provoke in him all kinds of 
 sensations and associations. He expresses himself thus on this 
 subject in Correspondences : 
 
 1 Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se re*pondent.. 
 
 * II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants, 
 Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, 
 Et d'autres, corrumpus, riches et triornphants, 
 
 'Ayant 1'expansion des choses infinies, 
 Comme 1'ambre, le muse, le benjoin et 1'encens, 
 Qui chantent les transports de 1'esprit et des sens.' 
 
 He loves woman through his sense of smell . . . ('Le parfurn 
 de tes charmes etranges,' A une Malabaraise), and never fails, 
 in describing a mistress, to mention her exhalations. 
 
 Parfum exotique : 
 
 ' Quand les deux yeux fermes, en un soir chaud d'automne, 
 Je respire 1'odeur de ton sein chaleureux, 
 Je vois se derouler des rivages heureux 
 Qu'eblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone.' 
 
 La Cktvelure : 
 
 ' O toison, moutonnant jusque sur 1'encolure ! 
 O boucles ! O parfum charge" de nonchaloir ! . . . 
 
 ' La langoureuse Asie et la brulante Afrique, 
 Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque defunt, 
 Vit dans tes profondeurs, foret aromatique !' 
 
 Naturally, instead of good odours, he prefers the perfumes 
 which affect the healthy man as stinks. Putrefaction, decom- 
 position and pestilence charm his nose. 
 
 Le Flacon : 
 
 1 II est de forts parfums pour qui toute matiere 
 Est poreuse. On dirait qu'ils p^netrent le verre . . . 
 Parfois on trouve un vieux flacon qui se souvient, 
 D ; ou jaillit toute vive une ame qui revient. 
 
 * Dr. E. Regis, Manuel pratique de Mededne "lentale. 2e edition. Paris, 
 1892, p. 279.
 
 294 DEGENERATION 
 
 * Voilk le souvenir enivrant qui voltige 
 
 Dans 1'air trouble ; les yeux se ferment ; le vertige 
 Saisit 1'ame vaincue et la pousse a deux mains 
 Vers un gouffre obscurci de miasmes humains ; 
 
 ' II la terrasse au bord d'un gouffre sdculaire, 
 Ou, Lazare odorant dechirant son suaire, 
 Se meut dans son rdveil le cadavre spectral 
 D'un vieil amour ranci, charmant et sepulcral. 
 
 ' Ainsi, quand je serai perdu dans la memoire 
 Des hommes, dans le coin d'une sinistre armoire 
 Quand on m'aura jete, vieux Bacon ddsole", 
 Ddcrdpit, poudreux, sale, abject, visqueux, fele", 
 
 * Je serai ton cercueil, aimable pestilence ! 
 Le temoin de ta force et de ta virulence, 
 Cher poison prdpare" par les anges ! . . .' 
 
 We now know all the features which compose Baudelaire's 
 character. He has the ' cult of self';* he abhors nature, move- 
 ment and life ; he dreams of an ideal of immobility, of eternal 
 silence, of symmetry and artificiality ; he loves disease, ugliness 
 and crime ; all his inclinations, in profound aberration, are 
 opposed to those of sane beings; what charms his sense of 
 smell is the odour of corruption ; his eye, the sight of carrion, 
 suppurating wounds and the pain of others ; he feels happy in 
 muddy, cloudy, autumn weather ; his senses are excited by 
 unnatural pleasures only. He complains of frightful tedium 
 and of feelings of anguish ; his mind is filled with sombre 
 ideas, the association of his ideas works exclusively with sad 
 or loathsome images ; the only thing which can distract or 
 interest him is badness murder, blood, lewdness and falsehood. 
 He addresses his prayers to Satan, and aspires to hell. 
 
 He has attempted to make his peculiarities pass for a comedy 
 and a studied pose. In a note placed at the head of the first 
 edition (1857) of the Fleurs du Mai, he says: 'Among the 
 following pieces, the most characteristic . . . has been con- 
 sidered, at least by men of intellect, only for what it really is : 
 the imitation of the arguments of ignorance and fury. Faithful 
 to his painful programme, the author has had, like a good 
 comedian, to fashion his mind to all sophisms, as to all corruptions. 
 This candid declaration will, doubtless, not prevent honest critics 
 from ranking him among the theologians of the people,' etc 
 Some of his admirers accept this explanation or appear to accept 
 it. ' His intense disdain of the vulgar,' murmurs Paul Bourget, 
 ' breaks out in extremes of paradox, in laborious mystification 
 . . . Among many readers, even the keenest, the fear of being 
 duped by this grand disdainer hinders full admiration.^ The 
 
 * Les Fleurs du Ma/, p, 5 'le culte de soi-meme."* This is Thdophile 
 Gautier's own term. 
 f Paul Bourget, op. cit., p. 31.
 
 EGO-MANIA 295 
 
 term has become a commonplace of criticism for Baudelaire; he 
 is a ' mystificateur ' ; everything for him is only a deception ; 
 he himself neither feels nor believes anything he expresses in his 
 poetry. It is twaddle, and nothing else. A rhetorician of the 
 Paul Bourget sort, threshing straw, and curling scraps of paper, 
 may believe that an inwardly free man is capable of preserving 
 artificially, all his life long, the attitude of a galley-slave or a 
 madman, well knowing he is only acting a comedy. The expert 
 knows that the choice of an attitude, such as Baudelaire's, is 
 a proof in itself of deep-seated cerebral disturbance. 
 
 Mental therapeutics has declared that persons who simulate 
 insanity with some perseverance, even with a rational object, as, 
 for example, in the case of certain criminals on their trial, in order 
 to escape punishment, are almost without exception really mad,* 
 although not to the degree they try to represent, just as the 
 inclination to accuse one's self, or to boast, of imaginary crimes 
 is a recognised symptom of hysteria. The assertion of Baude- 
 laire himself, that his Satanism is only a studied role, has no 
 sort of value whatever. As is so frequently the case among 
 the 'higher degenerates,' he feels in his heart that his aberra- 
 tions are morbid, immoral and anti-social, and that all decent 
 persons would despise him or take pity on him, if they were con- 
 vinced that he was really what he boasts of being in his poems ; 
 he has recourse, consequently, to the childish excuse that male- 
 factors also often have on their lips, viz., ' that it was not meant 
 
 * Ch J. J. Sazaret, Etude sur la Simulation de la Folie. Nancy, 1888. 
 This pamphlet by a beginner, which contains a useful collection of clinical 
 observations, is particularly amusing, in that all the observations cited by the 
 author demonstrate exactly the reverse of what he proposes to prove. After 
 having himself asserted (p. 22) that ' the victims of hysteria are much given 
 to simulate all sorts of maladies,' he says (p. 29) : ' Persons mentally 
 affected now and then simulate madness ; the case is rare, but it has never- 
 theless been verified, and if it has not been oftener recorded, it is, we believe, 
 that observers have limited themselves to a superficial examination, and cer- 
 tain actions have not been analyzed.' The case is so far from rare that it is 
 pointed out in every observation quoted by the author. In the case of Bail- 
 larger (2nd observation), the so-called simulatrix had been in a lunatic asylum 
 eight years before, as a fully confirmed mad-woman ; in the case of Morel 
 -(4th observation), the simulator 'had a nervous attack at the sight of a 
 lancet,' which is clearly aichmophobia and a certain stigma of degeneration ; 
 in the 6th observation Morel admits that ' the extravagance of the subject, 
 his fear of poison ' (thus a case of pronounced iophobia), ' and the fact of 
 picking up filth, indicate a possible mental disorder' ; the case of Foville 
 (loth observation) ' had a certain number of insane in his family' ; the case 
 of Legrand du Saulle (iSth observation) was 'the son of a hysterical woman 
 and grandson of a madman' ; the case of Bonnet and Delacroix (igth obser- 
 vation) 'numbers some insane among his ancestors' ; the case of Billed 
 (22nd observation) ' has often manifested disturbance and delirium,' etc. All 
 these supposed simulators were insane quite unmistakably, and the fact that 
 they intentionally exaggerated the symptoms of 'their delirium was only a 
 further proof of their alienation.
 
 396 DEGENERATION 
 
 seriously.' Perhaps also Baudelaire's consciousness experienced 
 a sincere horror of the perverse instincts of his unconscious life, 
 and he sought to make himself believe that with his Satanism he 
 was laughing at the Philistines. But such a tardy palliation 
 does not deceive the psychologist, and is of no importance for his. 
 judgment. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 DECADENTS AND AESTHETES. 
 
 As on the death of Alexander the Great his generals fell on the 
 conqueror's empire, and each one seized a portion of land, so 
 did the imitators that Baudelaire numbered among his con- 
 temporaries and the generation following many even without 
 waiting for his madness and death take possession of some one 
 of his peculiarities for literary exploitation. The school of 
 Baudelaire reflects the character of its master, strangely distorted ;. 
 it has become in some sort like a prism, which diffracts this light 
 into its elementary rays. His delusion of anxiety (anxiomania), 
 and his predilection for disease, death and putrefaction (necro- 
 philia), have fallen, as we have seen in the preceding book, to- 
 the lot of M. Maurice Rollinat. M. Catulle Mendes has inherited 
 his sexual aberrations and lasciviousness, and besides all the 
 newer French pornographists rely upon them for proving the 
 4 artistic raison d'etre ' of their depravity. Jean Richepin, in 
 La Cftanson des Gueux, has spied in him, and copied, his glorifica- 
 tion of crime, and, further, in Les Blasphemes, has swelled Baude- 
 laire's imprecations and prayers to the devil to the size of a fat 
 volume, in a most dreary and wearisome manner. His mysticism 
 suckles the Symbolists, who, after his example, pretend to- 
 perceive mysterious relations between colours and the sensations 
 of the other senses, with this difference, that they hear colours 
 while he smelt them ; or, if you will, they have an eye in their 
 ear, while he saw with the nose. In Paul Verlaine we meet again 
 his mixture of sensuality and pietism. Swinburne has established 
 an English depot for his Sadism, compounded of lewd ness and 
 cruelty, for his mysticism and for his pleasure in crime, and 
 I greatly fear that Giosue* Carducci himself, otherwise so richly 
 gifted and original, must have turned his eyes towards the 
 Litanies de Satan, when he wrote his celebrated Ode a Satan. 
 
 The diabolism of Baudelaire has been specially cultivated by 
 Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly. These two men 
 have, in addition to the general family likeness of the degenerate,
 
 EGO-MANIA 297 
 
 a series of special features in common. Villiers and Barbey 
 attributed to themselves, as the deranged frequently do, a 
 fabulous genealogy ; the former aspired to be a descendant of 
 Count de 1'Isle-Adam, the celebrated Marshal and Grand-Master 
 of Malta (who as such could not be married, be it understood !), 
 and he claimed one day, in a letter addressed to the Queen of 
 England, the surrender of Malta in virtue of his right of heritage. 
 Barbey annexed the aristocratic surname of d'Aurevilly, and 
 during the whole of his life spoke of his noble race which 
 had no existence. Both made a theatrical display of fanatical 
 Catholicism, but revelled at the same time in studied blas- 
 phemies against God.* Both delighted in eccentricities of 
 costume and modes of life, and Barbey had the habit of grapho- 
 maniacs, which we know already, of writing his letters and his 
 literary works with different coloured inks. Villiers de 1'Isle- 
 Adam, and still more Barbey d'Aurevilly, created a class of 
 poetry to the worship of the devil, which recalls the craziest 
 depositions of witches of the Middle Ages when put to the 
 torture. Barbey especially may be said to have gone, in this 
 respect, to the limits of the imaginable. His book Le Pretre 
 marie might be written by a contemporary of witch-burners ; 
 but it is surpassed in its turn by Les Diaboliques, a collection of 
 crack-brained histories, where men and women wallow in the 
 most hideous license, continually invoking the devil, extolling 
 and serving him. All the invention in these ravings Barbey 
 stole with utter shamelessness from the books of the Marquis de 
 Sade, without a shade of shame ; that which belongs properly to 
 him is the colouring of Catholic theology he gives to his profli- 
 gacies. If I only speak in general terms of the books mentioned 
 here, without entering into details, without summarizing the 
 contents, or quoting characteristic passages, it is because my 
 demonstrations do not require a plunge into this filth, and it is 
 sufficient to point the finger from afar at the sink of vice which 
 testifies to Baudelaire's influence on his contemporaries. 
 
 Barbey, the imitator of Baudelaire, has himself found an 
 imitator in M. Josephin Peladan, whose first novel, Vice supreme, 
 occupies an eminent place in the literature of diabolism. M. 
 Peladan, who had not yet promoted himself to the dignity of a 
 first-class Assyrian king, paraphrases in his book what he means 
 by ' vice supreme ' : ' Let us deny Satan ! Sorcery has always 
 sorcerers . . . superior minds which have no need of conjuring- 
 book, their thought b ,;ng a page written by hell for hell. 
 Instead of the kid they have killed the good soul within them, and 
 
 * Fr. Paulhan, op. a'f., p. 92 : 'While affecting the faith of a seminarist, 
 he [VilliersJ delighted in blasphemy. He considered the right to blaspheme 
 as his peculiar property. . . . This Catholic Breton loved the society of Satan 
 more than that of God.'
 
 29S DEGENERATION 
 
 are going to the Sabbath of the Word.' [May the reader not 
 stumble over obscurities ! What were PeUadan if he were not 
 mystical ?] ' They assemble to profane and soil the idea. Exist- 
 ing vice does not satisfy them ; they invent, they rival each 
 other in seeking for, new evil, and if they find it they applaud 
 each other. Which is worst, the Sabbath-orgies of the body or 
 those of the mind, of criminal action or of perverted thought ? 
 To reason, justify, to apotheosize evil, to establish its ritual, to 
 show the excellence of it is this not worse than to commit it ? 
 To adore the demon, or love evil, the abstract or the concrete 
 term of one and the same fact. There is blindness in the grati- 
 fication of instinct, and madness in the perpetration of misdeeds ; 
 but to conceive and theorize exacts a calm operation of the 
 mind which is the vice supreme'* 
 
 Baudelaire has expressed this much more concisely in one 
 single verse: 'La conscience dans le Mai' ('consciousness in 
 evil ')-t 
 
 The same Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam, who has copied his 
 diabolism from Baudelaire, has appropriated the predilection of 
 the latter for the artificial, and has raised it to a funny pitch in 
 his novel L'^ve future. In this half-fantastic half-satirical and 
 wholly mad book, he imagines, as the next development of 
 humanity, a state in which the woman of flesh and blood 
 will be abolished, and be replaced by a machine to which he 
 allows (which is a little contradictory) the shape of a woman's 
 body, and which it will be sufficient with the help of a screw so to 
 dispose, in order to obtain from it at once whatever happens 
 to be desired : love, caprices, infidelity, devotion, every perver- 
 sion and every vice. This is in sooth even more artificial than 
 Baudelaire's tin and glass landscape ! 
 
 A later disciple, M. Joris Karl Huysmans, is more instructive 
 than all those imitators of Baudelaire who have only developed 
 the one or the other side of him. He has undertaken the toil- 
 some task of putting together, from all the isolated traits which 
 are found dispersed in Baudelaire's poems and prose writings, a 
 human figure, and of presenting to us Baudelairism incarnate and 
 
 * Jose"phin Pe*ladan, Vice supreme. Paris, 1882, p. 169. 
 f Les Fleurs du Mai, p. 244 : 
 
 * Tete-a-te'te sombre et limpide ' 
 Qu'un coeur devenu son miroir 1 
 Puits de ve'rite', olair et noir, 
 Oil tremble une e'toile livide, 
 
 * Un phare ironique, infernal, 
 Flambeau des graces sataniques, 
 Soulagement et gloire uniques, 
 La conscience dans le Mai f
 
 EGO-MANIA 299 
 
 living, thinking and acting. The book in which he shows us 
 his model ' Decadent ' is entitled A Rebours (' Against the 
 Grain '). 
 
 The word ' decadent ' was borrowed by the French critics, irt 
 the fifties, from the history of the declining Roman Empire, 
 to characterize the style of Theophile Gautier, and notably of 
 Baudelaire. At the present time the disciples of these two 
 writers, and of their previous imitators, claim it as a title of 
 honour. Otherwise than with the expressions ' pre-Raphaelites ' 
 and ' Symbolists,' we possess an exact explanation of the sense 
 which those who speak of ' decadence ' and ' decadents ' attach 
 to these words. 
 
 ' The style of decadence,' says Theophile Gautier,* ' ... is 
 nothing else than art arrived at that extreme point of maturity 
 produced by those civilizations which are growing old with their 
 oblique suns!"!] a style that is ingenious, complicated, learned, 
 full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further 
 the limits of language, borrowing from all the technical voca- 
 bularies, taking colours from all palettes, notes from all key- 
 boards, forcing itself to express in thought that which is most 
 ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours ; 
 listening, that it may translate them, to the subtle confidences 
 of the neuropath, to the avowals of ageing and depraved passion, 
 and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on 
 madness. This style of decadence is the last effort of the Word 
 (Verbe), called upon to express everything, and pushed to the 
 utmost extremity. We may remind ourselves, in connection 
 with it, of the language of the Later Roman Empire, already 
 mottled with the greenness of decomposition, and, as it were, 
 gamy (faisandee), and of the complicated refinements of the 
 Byzantine school, the last form of Greek art fallen into deli- 
 quescence. Such is the inevitable and fatal idiom of peoples 
 and civilizations where factitious life has replaced the natural 
 life, and developed in man unknown wants. Besides, it is no 
 easy matter, this style despised of pedants, for it expresses new 
 ideas with new forms and words that have not yet been heard. 
 In opposition to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these 
 shadows teem and swarm with the larvae of superstitions, the 
 haggard phantoms of insomnia, nocturnal terrors, remorse which 
 starts and turns back at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams 
 stayed only by impotence, obscure phantasies at which the day- 
 light would stand amazed, and all that the soul conceals of the 
 dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its deepest and 
 furthest recesses.' 
 
 The same ideas that Gautier approximately expresses in this 
 
 * Les Fleurs du Mai, pp. 17, 18.
 
 300 DEGENERATION 
 
 rigmarole, Baudelaire enumerates in these terms : ' Does it not 
 seem to the reader, as it does to me, that the language of the later 
 Latin decadence the departing sigh of a robust person already 
 transformed and prepared for the spiritual life is singularly- 
 appropriate to express passion as it has been understood and felt 
 by the modern poetic world ? Mysticism is the opposite pole of 
 that magnet in which Catullus and his followers, brutal and purely 
 epidermic poets, have only recognised the pole of sensuality. In- 
 this marvellous language, solecism and barbarism appear to me 
 to convey the forced negligences of a passion which forgets 
 itself and mocks at rules. Words, received in a new acceptation, 
 display the charming awkwardness of the Northern barbarian 
 kneeling before the Roman beauty. Even a play on words, 
 when it enters into these pedantic stammerings, does it not 
 display the wild and bizarre grace of infancy ?'* 
 
 The reader, who has the chapter on the psychology of mysti- 
 cism present to his mind, naturally at once recognises what is 
 hidden behind the word-wash of Gautier and Baudelaire. Their 
 description of the state of mind which the ' decadent' language 
 is supposed to express is simply a description of the disposi- 
 tion of the mystically degenerate mind, with its shifting nebulous 
 ideas, its fleeting formless shadowy thought, its perversions and 
 aberrations, its tribulations and impulsions. To express this 
 state of mind, a new and unheard-of language must in fact be 
 found, since there cannot be in any customary language designa- 
 tions corresponding to presentations which in reality do not 
 exist. It is absolutely arbitrary to seek for an example and a 
 model of ' decadent ' expression in the language of the Later 
 Roman Empire. It would be difficult for Gautier to discover in 
 any writer whatever of the fourth or fifth century the ' mottled 
 greenness of decomposition and, as it were, gamy ' Latin which so 
 greatly charms him. M. Huysmans, monstrously exaggerating 
 Gautier's and Baudelaire's idea, as is the way with imitators, 
 gives the following description of this supposed Latin of the fifth 
 century : ' The Latin tongue, . . . now hung [!] , completely 
 rotten, . . . losing its members, dropping suppurations, scarcely 
 preserving, in the total decay of its body, some firm parts which 
 the Christians detached in order to pickle them in the brine of 
 their new language.'t 
 
 This debauch in pathological and nauseous ideas of a deranged 
 mind with gustatory perversion is a delirium, and has no 
 foundation whatever in philological facts. The Latin of the 
 later period of decadence was coarse and full of errors, in conse- 
 quence of the increasing barbarity in the manners and taste of 
 the readers, the narrow-mindedness and grammatical ignorance 
 
 * Les Fleurs dn Mai, pp. 17, 18. 
 
 f J. K. Hinsmans, A Rebours. 4^* mille. Paris, 1892, p. 49.
 
 EGO-MANIA 301 
 
 of the writers, and the intrusion of barbarous elements into its 
 vocabulary. But it was very far from expressing ' new ideas 
 with new forms' and from taking 'colours from all palettes'; it 
 surprises us, on the contrary, by its awkwardness in rendering 
 the most simple thoughts, and by its profound impoverishment. 
 The German language has also had a similar period of deca- 
 dence. After the Thirty Years' War, even the best writers, a 
 Moscherosch, a Zinkgref, a Schupp, were ' often almost incom- 
 prehensible ' with ' their long-winded and involved periods,' and 
 * their deportment as distorted as it was stiff';* the grammar 
 displayed the worst deformities, the vocabulary swarmed with 
 strange intruders, but the German of those desolate decades was 
 surely not 'decadent' in the sense of Gautier's, Baudelaire's and 
 Huysmans' definitions. The truth is, that these degenerate 
 writers have arbitrarily attributed their own state of mind to the 
 authors of the Roman and Byzantine decadence, to a Petronius, 
 but especially to a Commodianus of Gaza, an Ausonius, a 
 Prudentius, a Sidonius Apollinaris, etc., and have created in 
 their own image, or according to their morbid instincts, an ' ideal 
 man of the Roman decadence/ just as Rousseau invented the 
 ideal savage and Chateaubriand the ideal Indian, and have 
 transported him by their own imagination into a fabulous past 
 or into a distant country. M. Paul Bourget is more honest 
 when he refrains from fraudulently quoting the Latin authors of 
 the Latin decline, and thus describes the 'decadence,' inde- 
 pendently of his Parnassian masters : ' The word " decadence " 
 denotes a state of society which produces too great a number of 
 individuals unfit for the labours of common life. A society 
 ought to be assimilated to an organism. As an organism, in 
 fact, it resolves itself into a federation of lesser organisms, which 
 again resolve themselves into a federation of cells. The indi- 
 vidual is the social cell. In order that the whole organism 
 should function with energy, it is necessary that the component 
 organisms should function with energy, but with a subordinate 
 energy. And in order that these inferior organisms should 
 themselves function with energy, it is necessary that their com- 
 ponent cells should function with energy, but with a subordinate 
 energy. If the energy of the cells becomes independent, the 
 organisms composing the total organism cease likewise to sub- 
 ordinate their energy to the total energy, and the anarchy which 
 takes place constitutes the decadence of the whole.'t 
 
 Very true. A society in decadence ' produces too great a 
 number of individuals unfit for the labours of common life '; 
 
 * Henri Kurz, in his introduction to the ' Simplician ' writings of Grimmels- 
 hausen. Leipzig, 1863, 1st part, p. li. See also 'his remarks on the German 
 of Grimmelshausen (author of Simplicissimus\ p. xlv. et seq. 
 
 f Paul Bourget, op. cit., p. 24.
 
 302 DEGENERATION 
 
 these individuals are precisely the degenerate; 'they cease to- 
 subordinate their energy to the total energy,' because they are 
 ego-maniacs, and their stunted development has not attained to 
 the height at which an individual reaches his moral and intellec- 
 tual junction with the totality, and their ego-mania makes the 
 degenerate necessarily anarchists, i.e., enemies of all institutions 
 which they do not understand, and to which they cannot adapt 
 themselves. It is very characteristic that M. Bourget, who sees 
 all this, who recognises that 'decadent' is synonymous with 
 inaptitude for regular functions and subordination to social aims, 
 and that the consequence of decadence is anarchy and the ruin 
 of the community, does not the less justify and admire the 
 decadents, especially Baudelaire. This is ' la conscience dans le 
 mal ' of which his master speaks. 
 
 We will now examine the ideal 'decadent' that Huysmans 
 draws so complacently and in such detail for us, in A Rebours. 
 First, a word on the author of this instructive book. Huysmans, 
 the classical type of the hysterical mind without originality, who 
 is the predestined victim of every suggestion, began his literary 
 career as a fanatical imitator of Zola, and produced, in this first 
 period of his development, romances and novels in which (as in 
 Martlie) he greatly surpassed his model in obscenity. Then he 
 swerved from naturalism, by an abrupt change of disposition, 
 which is no less genuinely hysterical, overwhelmed this tendency 
 and Zola himself with the most violent abuse, and began to ape 
 the Diabolists, particularly Baudelaire. A red thread unites 
 both of his otherwise abruptly contrasted methods, viz., his 
 lubricity. That has remained the same. He is, as a languish- 
 ing ' Decadent,' quite as vulgarly obscene as when he was a 
 bestial ' Naturalist.' 
 
 A Rebours can scarcely be called a novel, and Huysmans, in 
 fact, does not call it so. It does not reveal a history, it has no 
 action, but presents itself as a sort of portrayal or biography of 
 a man whose habits, sympathies and antipathies, and ideas on 
 all possible subjects, specially on art and literature, are related to 
 us in great detail. This man is called Des Esseintes, and is the 
 last scion of an ancient French ducal title. 
 
 The Duke Jean des Esseintes is physically an anaemic and 
 nervous man of weak constitution, the inheritor of all the vices 
 and all the degeneracies of an exhausted race. ' JFor two cen- 
 turies the Des Esseintes had married their children to each 
 other, consuming their remnant of vigour in consanguineous 
 unions. . . . The predominance of lymph in the blood appeared.' 
 (This employment of technical expressions and empty phrases, 
 scientific in sound, is peculiar to many modern degenerate 
 authors and to their imitators. They sow these words and 
 expressions around them, as the' learned valet' of a well-
 
 EGO-MANIA 303 
 
 known German farce scatters around him his scraps of French, 
 but without being more cognizant of science than the latter was 
 of the French language.) Des Esseintes was educated by the 
 Jesuits, lost his parents early in life, squandered the greater part 
 of his patrimony in foolish carousing which overwhelmed him 
 with ennui, and soon retired from society, which had become 
 insupportable. ' His contempt for humanity increased ; he 
 understood at last that the world is composed for the most part 
 of bullies and imbeciles. He had certainly no hope of discover- 
 ing in others the same aspirations and the same hatreds, no hope 
 of uniting himself with a kindred spirit delighting in a diligent 
 decrepitude [!] as he did. Enervated, moody, exasperated by 
 the inanity of interchanged and accepted ideas, he became like 
 a person aching all over, till at last he was constantly ex- 
 coriating his epidermis, and suffering from the patriotic and 
 social nonsense which was dealt out each morning in the news- 
 papers. . . . He dreamed of a refined Thebaid, of a comfortable 
 desert, a warm and unmoving ark, where he would take refuge 
 far from the incessant flood of human stupidity.' 
 
 He realizes this dream. He sells his possessions, buys Govern- 
 ment stock with the ruins of his fortune, draws in this way an 
 annual income of fifty thousand francs, buys himself a house 
 which stands alone on a hill at some distance from a small 
 village near Paris, and arranges it according to his own taste. 
 
 'The artificial appeared to Des Esseintes as the distinguishing 
 mark of human genius. As he expressed it, the day of nature 
 is past : by the disgusting uniformity of its landscapes and skies, 
 it has positively exhausted the attentive patience of refined 
 spirits. In sooth, what platitude of a specialist who sees no 
 further than his own line ! what pettiness of a tradeswoman 
 keeping this or that article to the exclusion of every other ! 
 what a monotonous stock of meadows and trees! what a common- 
 place agency for mountains and seas!' (p. 31). 
 
 He banishes, in consequence, all that is natural from his 
 horizon, and surrounds himself by all that is artificial. He sleeps 
 during the day, and only leaves his bed towards evening, in 
 order to pass the night in reading and musing in his brightly- 
 lit ground-floor. He never crosses the threshold of his house, 
 but remains within his four walls. He will see no one, and even 
 the old couple who wait on him must do their work while he is 
 asleep, so as not to be seen by him. He receives neither letters 
 nor papers, knows nothing of the outer world. He never has an 
 appetite, and when by chance this is aroused, 'he dips his roast 
 meat, covered with some extraordinary butter, into a cup of tea 
 [oh, the devil !], a faultless mixture of -Si-a-Fayun, Mo-yu-tan 
 and Khansky, yellow teas brought from China and Russia by 
 special caravans ' (p. 61).
 
 304 DEGENERATION 
 
 His dining-room 'resembled a ship's cabin,' with 'its little 
 French window opening in the wainscot like a port-hole/ It 
 was built within a larger room pierced by two windows, one of 
 which was exactly opposite the port-hole in the wainscot. A 
 large aquarium occupied the whole space bet%veen the port-hole 
 and this window. In order, then, to give light to the cabin, the 
 daylight had to pass through the window, the panes of which 
 had been replaced by plate glass, and then through the water 
 'Sometimes, in the afternoon, when by chance Des Esseintes 
 was awake and up, he set in motion the play of the pipes and 
 conduits which emptied the aquarium and filled it afresh with 
 pure water, introducing into it drops of coloured essences, thus 
 producing for himself at pleasure the green or muddy yellow, 
 opalescent or silver, tones of a real river, according to the colour 
 of the sky, the greater or less heat of the sun, the more or less 
 decided indications of rain ; in a word, according to the season 
 and the weather. He would then imagine himself to be between- 
 decks on a brig, and contemplated with curiosity marvellous 
 mechanical fish, constructed with clock-work, which passed 
 before the window of the port-hole, and clung to the sham weeds, 
 or else, while breathing the smell of the tar with which the 
 room had been filled before he entered, he examined the coloured 
 engravings hung on the walls representing steamers sailing for 
 Valparaiso and La Plata, such as are seen at steamship agencies, 
 and at Lloyd's ' (p. 27). 
 
 These mechanical fish are decidedly more remarkable than 
 Baudelaire's landscapes in tin. But this dream of an ironmonger, 
 retired from business and become an idiot, was not the only 
 pleasure of the Due des Esseintes, who despised so deeply the 
 ' stupidity and vulgarity of men/ although, of all his acquaintance, 
 probably not one would have stooped to ideas so asinine as 
 these mechanical fish with clock-work movements. When he 
 wishes to do himself a particularly good turn, he composes and 
 plays a gustatory symphony. He has had a cupboard constructed 
 containing a series of little liqueur barrels. The taps of all the 
 barrels could be opened or shut simultaneously by an engine set 
 in motion by pressure on a knob in the wainscot, and under 
 every tap stood an ' imperceptible ' goblet, into which, on the 
 turning of the cock, a drop fell. Des Esseintes called this liquor- 
 cupboard his ' mouth organ.' (Notice all these ridiculous com- 
 plications to mix a variety of liqueurs ! As if it required all this 
 deeply thought out mechanism !) ' The organ was then open. 
 The stops labelled " flute, horn, voix celeste," were drawn out 
 ready for action. Des Esseintes drank a drop here and there, 
 played internal symphonies, and succeeded in procuring in the 
 throat sensations analogous to those that music offers to the ear. 
 Each liqueur corresponded in taste, according to him, to the
 
 EGO-MANIA 305 
 
 sound of an instrument Dry cura9oa, for example, to the 
 clarionet, the tone of which is acescent and velvety ; kumrnel 
 brandy to the oboe, with its sonorous nasal sound ; mint and 
 anisette to the flute, which is at the same time sugary and peppery, 
 squeaking and sweet ; while, to complete the orchestra, kirsch 
 rages with the blast of a trumpet ; gin and whisky scarify the 
 palate with their shrill outbursts of cornets and trombones ; 
 liqueur - brandy fulminates with the deafening crash of the 
 tuba ; while Chios-raki and mastic roll on to the mucous 
 membrane like the thunder-claps of cymbals and kettledrums 
 struck with the arm!' Thus he plays 'string quartettes under 
 the vault of his palate, representing with the violin old eau-de- 
 vie, smoky and subtle, sharp and delicate; with the tenor 
 simulated by strong rum;' with vespetro as violoncello, and 
 bitters as double bass ; green chartreuse was the major, and bene- 
 dictine the minor key,' etc. (p. 63). 
 
 Des Esseintes does not only hear the music of the liqueurs : 
 he sniffs also the colour of perfumes. As he has a mouth organ, 
 he possesses a nasal picture-gallery, i.e., a large collection of flasks 
 containing all possible odorous substances. When his taste- 
 symphonies no longer give him pleasure, he plays an olfactory 
 tune. ' Seated in his dressing-room before his table ... a 
 little fever disturbed him, he was ready for work. . . . With 
 his vaporizers he injected into the room an essence formed 
 of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet peas, ess. bouquet, an 
 essence which, when it is distilled by an artist, deserves the 
 name by which it is known, viz., " extract of flowery meadow." 
 Then, in this meadow, he introduced an exact fusion of tuberose, 
 of orange and almond flower, and forthwith artificially-created 
 lilacs sprang up, while limes winnowed each other, pouring down 
 upon the earth their pale emanations. Into this decoration, laid 
 on in broad outlines ... he blew ... a light rain of human 
 and quasi-feline essences, savouring of skirts, and indicating the 
 powdered and painted woman, the stephanotis, ayapana, 
 opoponax, cypress, champak, and sarcanthus : on which he 
 juxtaposed a suspicion of syringa, in order to instil into the 
 factitious atmosphere which emanated from them a natural 
 bloom of laughter bathed in sweat (! !), and of joys which riot 
 boisterously in full sunshine ' (pp. 154-157). 
 
 We have seen how slavishly M. Huysmans, in his drivel about 
 tea, liqueurs and perfumes, follows to the letter the fundamental 
 principle of the Parnassians of ransacking technical dictionaries. 
 He has evidently been forced to copy the catalogues of com- 
 mercial travellers dealing in perfumes and soaps, teas and 
 liqueurs, to scrape together his erudition in current prices. 
 
 That Des Esseintes should be made ill by this mode of life is 
 not surprising. His stomach rejects all forms of food, and this 
 
 20
 
 306 DEGENERATION 
 
 renders the highest triumph of his love for the artificial possible: 
 he is obliged to be nourished by means of peptonized injections, 
 hence, in a way, diametrically opposed to nature. 
 
 Not to be too prolix, I omit many details, e.g., an endless 
 description of tones associated with colours (pp. 17-20) ; of 
 orchids which he loves, because they have for him the appear- 
 ance of eruptions, scars, scabs, ulcers and cancers, and seem 
 covered with dressings, plastered with black mercurial axunge, 
 green belladonna unguents (p. 120 et seq.) ; an exposition of the 
 mystical aspect of precious and half-precious stones (pp. 57-60), 
 etc. We will only acquaint ourselves with a few more pecu- 
 liarities of taste in this decadent type : 
 
 ' The wild spirit, the rough, careless talent of Goya captivated 
 him ; but the universal admiration which Goya's works had 
 gained deterred him somewhat, and for many years he had 
 ceased having them framed. . . . Indeed, if the finest tune in 
 the world becomes vulgar, insupportable, as soon as the public 
 hum it and barrel-organs seize upon it, the work of art to which 
 false artists are not indifferent, which is not disputed by fools, 
 which is not content with stirring up the enthusiasm of some, 
 even it becomes, by this very means, for the initiated polluted, 
 commonplace and almost repulsive ' (p. 134). 
 
 The reference to barrel-organs is a trick calculated to mislead 
 the inattentive reader. If a beautiful tune becomes insupport- 
 able as played on barrel-organs, it is because the organs are 
 false, noisy and expressionless, i.e., they modify the very essence 
 of the tune and drag it down to vulgarity; but the admiration 
 of the greatest fool himself changes absolutely nothing in a work 
 of art, and those who have loved it for its qualities will again 
 find all these qualities complete and intact, even when the looks 
 of millions of impassive Philistines have crawled over it. The 
 truth is, the decadent, bursting with silly vanity, here betrays 
 involuntarily his inmost self. The fellow has not, in fact, the 
 smallest comprehension of art, and is wholly inaccessible to the 
 beautiful as to all external impressions. To know if a work of 
 art pleases him or not, he does not look at the work of art oh 
 no ! he turns his back and anxiously studies the demeanour of 
 the people standing before it. Are they enthusiastic, the decadent 
 despises the work ; do they remain indifferent, or even appear 
 displeased, he admires it with full conviction. The ordinary man 
 always seeks to think, to feel, and to do the same as fhe multi- 
 tude ; the decadent seeks exactly the contrary. Both derive 
 the manner of seeing and feeling, not from their internal convic- 
 tions, but from what the crowd dictate to them. Both lack all 
 individuality, and they are obliged to have the.ir eyes constantly 
 fixed on the crowd to find their way. The decadent is, therefore, 
 an ordinary man with a minus sign, who, equally with the latter,
 
 EGO-MANIA 307 
 
 only in a contrary sense, follows in the wake of the crowd, and 
 meanwhile makes things far more difficult for himself than the 
 ordinary man ; he is also constantly in a state of irritation, while 
 the latter as constantly enjoys himself. This can be summed up 
 in one proposition the decadent snob is an anti-social Philistine, 
 suffering from a mania for contradiction, without the smallest 
 feeling for the work of art itself. 
 
 Des Esseintes reads occasionally between his gustatory and 
 olfactory seances. The only works which please him are natur- 
 ally those of the most extreme Parnassians and Symbolists. For 
 he finds in them (p. 266) ' the death-struggle of the old language, 
 after it had become ever mouldier from century to century, was 
 ending in dissolution, and in the attainment of that deliquescence 
 of the Latin language which gave up the ghost in the mysterious 
 concepts and enigmatical expressions of St. Boniface and St. 
 Adhelm. Moreover, the decomposition of the French language 
 had set in all at once. In the Latin language there was a long 
 transition, a lapse of 400 years, between the speckled and 
 beautiful speech of Claudian and Rutilius, and the gamy speech 
 of the eighth century. In the French language no lapse of time, 
 no succession in age, had taken place ; the speckled (tachete} and 
 superb style of the brothers De Goncourt and the gamy style of 
 Verlaine and Mallarme" rubbed elbows in Paris, existing at the 
 same time and in the same century.' 
 
 We now know the taste of a typical decadent in all directions. 
 Let us cast another glance at his character, morals, sentiments 
 and political views. 
 
 He has a friend, D'Aigurande, who one day thinks of marry- 
 ing. ' Arguing from the fact that D'Aigurande possessed no 
 fortune, and that the dowry of his wife was almost nothing, he 
 (Des Esseintes) perceived in this simple desire an infinite per- 
 spective of ridiculous misfortunes.' In consequence (!) he en- 
 couraged his friend to commit this folly, and what had to happen 
 did happen : the young couple lacked money, everything became 
 a subject for altercations and quarrels ; in short, the life of both 
 became insupportable. He amused himself out of doors ; she 
 * sought by the expedients of adultery to forget her rainy and 
 dull life.' By common consent they cancelled their contract and 
 demanded a legal separation. ' My plan of battle was exact, 
 Des Esseintes then said to himself, experiencing the satisfaction 
 of those strategists who see their long-foreseen manoeuvres suc- 
 ceeding.' 
 
 Another time, in the Rue de Rivoli, he comes upon a boy of 
 about sixteen years old, a 'pale, cunning-looking' child, smoking 
 a bad cigarette, and who asks him for a light. Des Esseintes offers 
 him Turkish aromatic cigarettes, enters into conversation with 
 him, learns that his mother is dead, that his father beats him,
 
 308 DEGENERATION 
 
 and that he works for a cardboard-box maker. ' Des Esseintes 
 listened thoughtfully. " Come and drink," said he, and led him 
 into a cafe, where he made him drink some very strong punch. 
 The child drank in silence. "Come," said Des Esseintes suddenly, 
 "do you feel inclined for some amusement this evening? I will 
 treat you." ' And he leads the unfortunate boy into a disorderly 
 house, where his youth and nervousness astonish the girls. While 
 one of these women draws the boy away, the landlady asks Des 
 Esseintes what was his idea in bringing them such an imp. The 
 decadent answers (p. 95) : ' I am simply trying to train an 
 assassin. This boy is innocent, and has reached the age when 
 the blood grows hot ; he might run after the girls in his quarter, 
 remain honest while amusing himself. . . . Bringing him here, 
 on the contrary, into the midst of a luxury of which he had no 
 conception, and which will engrave itself forcibly on his memory, 
 in offering him every fortnight such an unexpected treat, he will 
 get accustomed to these pleasures from which his means debar 
 him. Let us admit that it will require three months for them to 
 become absolutely necessary to him. . . . Well, at the end of 
 three months I discontinue the little rente which I am going to 
 pay you in advance for this good action, and then he will steal 
 in order to live here. . . . He will kill, I hope, the good gentle- 
 man who will appear inopportunely while he is attempting to 
 break open his writing-table. Then my aim will be attained ; I 
 shall have contributed,,^ the extent of my resources, in creating 
 a villain, one more enemy of that hideous society which fleeces 
 us.' And he leaves the poor defiled boy on this first evening 
 with these words : ' Return as quickly as possible to your father. 
 . . . Do unto others what you would not wish them to do to 
 you ; with this rule you will go a long way. Good-evening. 
 Above all, don't be ungrateful. Let me hear of you as soon as 
 possible through the police news.' 
 
 He sees the village children fighting for a piece of black bread 
 covered with curd cheese ; he immediately orders for himself a 
 similar slice of bread, and says to his servant : ' Throw this 
 bread and cheese to those children who are doing for each other 
 in the road. Let the feeblest be crippled, not manage to get a 
 single piece, and, besides, be well whipped by their parents 
 when they return home with torn breeches and black eyes ; that 
 will give them an idea of the life that awaits them"* (p. 226). 
 
 When he thinks of society, this cry bursts from his breast : 
 4 Oh, perish, society ! Die, old world !' (p. 293). 
 
 Lest the reader should feel curious as to the course of Des 
 Esseintes' history, let us add that a serious nervous illness 
 attacks him in his solitude, and that his doctor imperiously 
 orders him to return to Paris and the common life. Huysmans, in 
 a second novel, ' Ld-bas,' shows us what Des Esseintes eventually
 
 EGO- MANIA 309 
 
 does in Paris. He writes a history of Gilles de Rais, the wholesale 
 murderer of the fifteenth century, to whom Aloreau de Tours' book 
 (treating of sexual aberrations) has unmistakably called the 
 attention of the Diabolist band, who are in general profoundly 
 ignorant, but erudite on this special subject of erotomania. 
 This furnishes M. Huysmans with the opportunity of burrow- 
 ing and sniffing with swinish satisfaction into the most horrible 
 filth. Besides this, he exhibits in this book the mystic side of 
 decadentism ; he shows us Des Esseintes become devout, but 
 going at the same time to the ' black mass ' with a hysterical 
 woman, etc. I have no occasion to trouble myself with this 
 book, as repulsive as it is silly. All I wished was to show the 
 ideal man of decadentism. 
 
 We have him now, then, the ' super-man ' (surhomme) of 
 whom Baudelaire and his disciples dream, and whom they wish 
 to resemble : physically, ill and feeble ; morally, an arrant 
 scoundrel ; intellectually, an unspeakable idiot who passes his 
 whole time in choosing the colours of stuffs which are to 
 drape his room artistically, in observing the movements of me- 
 chanical fishes, in sniffing perfumes and sipping liqueurs. His 
 raciest notion is to keep awake all night and to sleep all day, 
 and to dip his meat into his tea. Love and friendship are 
 unknown to him. His artistic sense consists in watching the 
 attitude of people before some work, in order immediately to 
 assume the opposite position. His complete inadaptability 
 reveals itself in that every contact with the world and men 
 causes him pain. He naturally throws the blame of his dis- 
 comfort on his fellow-creatures, and rails at them like a fish- 
 wife. He classes them all together as villains and blockheads, 
 and he hurls at them horrible anarchical maledictions. The 
 dunderhead considers himself infinitely superior to other people, 
 and his inconceivable stupidity only equals his inflated adoration 
 of himself. He possesses an income of 50,000 francs, and must 
 also have it, for such a pitiable creature would not be in a 
 position to draw one sou from society, or one grain of wheat 
 from nature. A parasite of the lowest grade of atavism, a sort 
 of human sacculus,* he would be condemned, if he were poor, 
 to die miserably of hunger in so far as society, in misdirected 
 charity, did not assure to him the necessaries of life in an idiot 
 asylum. 
 
 * The sacculus is a cirripedia which lives in the condition of a parasite in 
 the intestinal canal of certain Crustacea. It represents the deepest retro- 
 grade transformation of a living being primarily of a higher organization. 
 It has lost all its differentiated organs, and essentially only amounts to a 
 vesicule (hence its name : little bag), which fills itself with juices from its 
 host, absorbed by the parasite with the help of certain vessels, which it 
 plunges into the intestinal walls of the latter. This atrophied creature has 
 retained so few marks of an independent animal that it was looked upon, 
 lor a long time as a diseased excrescence of its host's intestines.
 
 3 io DEGENERATION 
 
 If M. Huysmans in his Des Esseintes has shown us the 
 Decadent with all his instincts perverted, i.e., the complete 
 Baudelairian with his anti-naturalism, his aesthetic folly and his 
 anti-social Diabolism, another representative of decadent litera- 
 ture, M. Maurice Barres, is the incarnation of the pure ego-mania 
 of the incapacity of adaptation in the degenerate. He has dedi- 
 cated up to the present a series of four novels to the culle du 
 mot, and has annotated, besides, an edition of the three first in a 
 brochure much more valuable for our inquiry than the novels 
 themselves, inasmuch as all the sophisms by which conscious- 
 ness forces itself to explain a posteriori the impulsions of morbid 
 unconscious life appear here conveniently summed up in a sort 
 of philosophical system. 
 
 A few words on M. Maurice Barres. He first made himself 
 talked of by defending, in the Parisian press, his friend Cham- 
 bige, the Algerian homicide, a logical cultivator of the ' Ego/ 
 Then he became a Boulangist deputy, and later he canonized 
 Marie Bashkirtseff, a degenerate girl who died of phthisis, a 
 victim to moral madness, with a touch of the megalomania 
 and the mania of persecution, as well as of morbid erotic exalta- 
 tion. He invoked her as 'Our Lady of the wagon-lit' (Notre 
 Dame du Sleeping)* 
 
 His novels, Sous I' (EH des Barbares, Un Hommc libre, Le 
 Jardin de Berenice, and L'Ennemi des Lois, are constructed after 
 the artistic formula established by M. Huysmans. The descrip- 
 tion of a human being, with his intellectual life, and his 
 monotonous, scarcely modulated external destinies, gives the 
 author a pretext for expressing his own ideas on all possible 
 subjects ; on Leonardo da Vinci and Venice ;f on a French 
 provincial museum and the industrial art of the Middle Ages ;J 
 on Nero, Saint Simon, Fourier, Marx, and Lassalle.|| Formerly 
 it was the custom to utilize these excursions into all possible 
 fields of discussion as articles for newspapers or monthly 
 periodicals, and afterwards to collect them in book form. But 
 experience has taught that the public does not exhibit much 
 interest in these collections of essays, and the Decadents have 
 adopted the clever ruse of connecting them by means of a 
 scarcely perceptible thread of narrative, and presenting them to 
 their readers as a novel. The English novelists of the pre- 
 ceding century, then Stendhal, Jean Paul and Goethe himself, 
 have also made use of these insertions of the author's personal 
 reflections in the course of the story ; but with them (with the 
 
 * Maurice Barrfcs, Trot's Stations de Psycho - thtrapie. Paris, 1892. 
 *Deuxime Station. 1 
 
 f Ibid., Un Homme litre. 36 Edition. Paris, 1892. 
 I Ibid., Le Jardin de BJrtnice. Paris, 1891, p. 37 et scq. 
 Ibid., p. 245 et seq. 
 \ Ibid., LEnnemi des Lois. Paris, 1893, pp. 63, 88, 170.
 
 EGO-MANIA 311 
 
 exception, perhaps, of Jean Paul) these interpellations were at 
 least subordinated to the work of art as a whole. It was 
 reserved for M. Huysmans and his school to give them the 
 chief place, and to transform the novel from an epic poem in 
 prose into a hybrid mixture of Essais of Montaigne, of Parerga 
 et Paralipomena of Schopenhauer, and the effusions in the diary 
 of a girl at a boarding-school. 
 
 M. Barres makes it no secret that he has described his own life 
 in his novels, and that he considers himself a typical representa- 
 tive of a species. ' These monographs . . . are,' he says,* ' a com- 
 munication of a type of young man already frequently met with, 
 and which, I feel sure, will become still more numerous among 
 the pupils who are now at the Lyce'e. . . . These books . . . 
 will eventually be consulted as documents.' 
 
 What is the nature of this type ? Let us answer this question 
 in the author's own words. The hero of the novels is 'somewhat 
 literary, proud, fastidious and desarmf (Examen, p. 1 1) ; 'a young 
 bourgeois grown pale, and starving for all pleasures' (p. 26) ; 
 ' discouraged by contact with men ' (p. 34) ; he is one of those 
 * who find themselves in a sad state in the midst of the order of 
 the world . . . who feel themselves weak in facing life ' (p. 45). 
 Can one imagine a more complete description of the degenerate 
 incapable of adaptation, badly equipped for the struggle for 
 existence, and for this reason hating and fearing the world and 
 men, but shaken at the same time by morbid desires ? 
 
 This poor shattered creature, who was necessarily rendered an 
 ego-maniac by the weakness of will in his imperfect brain, and 
 the perpetual turmoil of his unhealthy organs, raises his in- 
 firmities to the dignity of a system which he proudly proclaims. 
 ' Let us keep to our only reality, to our " I " ' (p. 18). 'There is 
 only one thing which we know and which really exists. . . . This 
 sole tangible reality, it is the " I," and the universe is only a 
 fresco which it makes beautiful or ugly. Let us keep to our "I." 
 Let us protect it against strangers, against Barbarians ' (p. 45). 
 
 What does he mean by Barbarians ? These are the ' beings 
 who possess a dream of life opposed to that which he (the hero 
 of one of his books) forms of it. If they happen to be, more- 
 over, highly cultured, they are strangers and adversaries for him/ 
 A young man ' obliged by circumstances to meet persons who 
 are not of his patne psychique' experiences 'a shock.' 'Ah! 
 what matters to me the quality of a soul which contradicts 
 some sensibility ? I hate these strangers who impede, or turn 
 aside the development of such a delicate hesitating and self- 
 searching " I," these Barbarians through whom more than 
 one impressionable young man will both fail in his career and 
 not find his joy of living ' (p. 23). ' Soldiers, magistrates, 
 
 * Maurice Barr&s, Examen de trots Ideologies. Paris, 1892, p. 14.
 
 3 i2 DEGENERATION 
 
 moralists, teachers,' these are the Barbarians who place obstacles 
 in the wc.y of the development of the " I " ' (p. 43). In one 
 word, the ' I ' who cannot take his bearings in the social order 
 regards all the representatives and defenders of that order as 
 his enemies. What he would like would be ' to give himself up 
 without resistance to the force of his instincts ' (p. 25), to dis- 
 tinguish ' where lie his sincere curiosity, the direction of his 
 instinct, and his truth' (p. 47). This idea of setting instinct, 
 passion and the unconscious life free from the superintendence 
 of reason, judgment and consciousness recurs hundreds of times 
 in the author's novels. 'Taste takes the place of morality' 
 (L'Ennemi des Lois, p. 3). ' As a man, and a free man, may I 
 accomplish my destiny, respect and favour my interior impulsion, 
 without taking counsel of anything outside me' (p. 22). ' Society 
 enclosed by a line of demarcation ! You offer slavery to who- 
 ever does not conform to the definitions of the beautiful and the 
 good adopted by the majority. In the name of humanity, as 
 formerly in the name of God and the City, what crimes are devised 
 against the individual !' (p. 200). ' The inclinations of man ought 
 not to be forced, but the social system must be adapted to 
 them* (p. 97). (It would be very much more simple to adapt 
 the inclinations of a single man to the social system which is a 
 law to millions of men, but this does not seem to suggest itself 
 to our philosopher !) 
 
 It is absolutely logical that M. Barres, after having shown us 
 in his three first novels or ideologies the development of his 
 ' cultivator of the moi,' should make the latter become an 
 anarchist and an ennemi des lots. But he feels himself that the 
 objection will be justly raised, that society cannot exist without 
 a law and an order of some sort, and he seeks to forestall this 
 objection by asserting that everyone knows how to behave him- 
 self, that instinct, is good and infallible : ' Do you not feel,' he 
 says (p. 177), 'that our instinct has profited by the long 
 apprenticeship of our race amid codes and religions ?' He 
 admits then that 'codes and religions' have their use and 
 necessity, but only at a primitive period of human history. 
 When the instincts were still wild, bad and unreasonable, they 
 required the discipline of the law. But now they are so perfect 
 that this guide and master is no longer necessary to them. But 
 there are still criminals. What is to be done with them ? ' By 
 stifling them with kisses and providing for their wants they 
 would be prevented from doing any harm.' I should like to see 
 M. Barres obliged to use his method of defence against a night 
 attack of garrotters ! 
 
 To allow one's self to be carried away by instincts is, in other 
 words, to make unconscious life the master of consciousness, 
 to subordinate the highest nervous centres to the inferior
 
 EGO-MANIA 313 
 
 centres. But all progress rests on this, that the highest 
 centres assume more and more authority over the entire 
 organism, that judgment and will control and direct ever more 
 strictly the instincts and passions, that consciousness encroaches 
 ever further on the domain of the unconscious, and continually 
 annexes new portions of the latter. Of course, instinct expresses 
 a directly felt need, the satisfaction of which procures a direct 
 pleasure. But this need is often that of a single organ, and its 
 satisfaction, however agreeable to the organ which demands it, 
 may be pernicious, and even fatal, to the total organism. Then 
 there are anti-social instincts, the gratification of which is not 
 directly injurious to the organism itself, it is true, but makes life 
 in common with the race difficult or impossible, worsening con- 
 sequently its vital conditions, and preparing its ruin indirectly. 
 Judgment alone is fitted to oppose these instincts by the repre- 
 sentation of the needs of the collective organism and of the 
 race, and the will has the task of ensuring the victory over 
 suicidal instinct to the rational representation. Judgment 
 may be deceived, for it is the result of the work of a highly 
 differentiated and delicate instrument, which, like all fine and 
 complicated machinery, gets out of order more easily than a 
 simpler and rougher tool. Instinct, the inherited and organized 
 experience of the race, is as a rule more sure and reliable. 
 This must certainly be admitted. But what harm is done if 
 judgment does make a mistake for once in the opposition 
 which it offers to instinct? The organism is, as a rule, only 
 deprived of a momentary feeling of pleasure; it suffers there- 
 fore at most a negative loss ; the will, on the other hand, will 
 have made an effort, and acquired strength by the exercise, 
 and this is for the organism a positive gain, which nearly always 
 at least balances those negative losses. 
 
 And then all these considerations take for granted the perfect 
 health of the organism, for in such a one only does the un- 
 conscious work as normally as consciousness. But we have 
 seen above that the unconscious itself is subject to disease ; it 
 may be stupid, obtuse and mad, like consciousness ; it then 
 ceases completely to be dependable ; then the instincts are as 
 worthless guides as are the blind or drunken ; then the organism, 
 if it gives itself up to them, must stagger to ruin and death. The 
 only thing which can sometimes save it in this case is the constant, 
 anxious, tense vigilance of the judgment, and as the latter is 
 never capable, by its own resources, of resisting a strong flood of 
 revolted and riotous instincts, it must demand reinforcements 
 from the judgment of the race, i.e., from some law, from some 
 recognised morality. 
 
 Such is the foolish aberration of the ' cultivators of the " I."' 
 They fall into rhe same errors as the shallow psychologists of
 
 314 DEGENERATION 
 
 the eighteenth century, who only recognised reason ; they only 
 see one portion of man's mental life, i.e., his unconscious life ; 
 they wish to receive their law only from instinct, but wholly 
 neglect to notice that instinct may become degenerate, diseased, 
 exhausted, and thereby be rendered as useless for legislative 
 purposes as a raving lunatic or an idiot. 
 
 Besides, M. Barres contradicts his own theories at every step. 
 While he pretends to believe that instincts are always good, 
 he depicts m^iny of his heroines, with the most tender expres- 
 sions of admiration, as veritable moral monsters. The ' little 
 princess' in L 1 Ennemi des Lois is a feminine Des Esseintes : she 
 boasts of having been, as a child, ' the scourge of the house * 
 (p. 146). She looks upon her parents as her * enemies' (p. 149). 
 She loves children ' less than dogs ' (p. 284). Naturally, she 
 gives herself at once to every man that strikes her eye, for, 
 otherwise, where would be the use of being a ' cultivator of the 
 " Ego," ' and an adept at the law of instinct ? Such are the good 
 beings of M. Barres, who no longer need laws, because they 
 have ' profited by the long apprenticeship of our race.' 
 
 Yet a few more traits to complete the mental portrait of this 
 Decadent. He makes his ' little princess ' relate : ' When I was 
 twelve years old, I loved, as soon as I was alone in the country, 
 to take off my shoes and stockings and plunge my bare feet into 
 warm mud. I passed hours in this way, and that gave me a 
 thrill of pleasure through all my body.' M. Barres resembles his 
 heroine ; he ' experiences a thrill of pleasure through all his 
 body ' when he ' plunges himself into warm mud/ 
 
 ' There is not a detail in the biography of Berenice which is 
 not shocking ' thus begins the third chapter of the Jardin de 
 Berenice. 1 1, however, retain of it none but very delicate sensa- 
 tions.' This Berenice was a dancer at the Eden Theatre in 
 Paris, whom her mother and elder sister had sold as a little child 
 to some old criminals, and whom a lover took away later from 
 the prostitution which had already stained her infancy. Thi.t 
 lover dies and leaves her a considerable fortune. The hero 
 of the novel, who had known her as a gutter-child, meets 
 her at Aries, where he presents himself as the Boulangist 
 candidate for the Chamber, and he resumes his ancient re- 
 lations with her. What charms him most in their inter- 
 course, and increases his pleasure in the highest -degree, is the 
 idea of the intense love she felt for her dead lover, and the 
 abandonment with which she had reposed in his arms. ' My 
 Berenice, who still bears on her pale lips and against her 
 dazzling teeth the kisses of M. de Transe [the lover in question]. 
 . . . The young man who is no more has left her as much passion 
 as can be contained in a woman's heart' (p. 138). The feeling; 
 which M. Barres seeks to crown with the help of inflated, grandilo-
 
 EGO-MANIA 315 
 
 quent expressions is simply the well-known excitement that 
 hoary sinners feel at the sight of the erotic exploits of others. 
 All those who are conversant with Parisian life know what is 
 meant in Paris by a voyeur, or pryer. M. Barres reveals himself 
 here as a metaphysical voyeur. And yet he would wish to make 
 us believe that his little street-walker, whose dirty adventures 
 he describes with the warmth of love and the enthusiasm of a 
 dilettante, is in reality a symbol ; it is only as a Symbolist that he 
 claims to have formed her. ' A young woman is seen about a 
 young man. Is it not rather the history of a soul with its two 
 elements, female and male ?' Or is it by the side of the ' I ' 
 which guards itself, wishes to know and establish itself, also the 
 imagination in a young and sensitive person, for the taste 
 pleasure and for vagabondage ?* One may well ask him, where is 
 the ' symbolism ' in the biographical details of Petite Secousse, 
 the name that he gives to his ' symbol.' 
 
 Disease and corruption exercise the customary Baudelairian 
 attraction over him. ' When Berenice was a little girl,' he says, 
 in \\\o. Jardin de Berenice (p. 72), * I much regretted that she had 
 not some physical infirmity ... A blemish is what I prefer 
 above everything . . . flatters the dearest foibles of my mind.' 
 And in one place (p. 282) an engineer is scoffed at 'who wishes 
 to substitute some pond for carp for our marshes full of beauti- 
 ful fevers.' 
 
 The stigmata of degeneracy known as zoophilia, or excessive 
 love for animals, is strongly shown in him. When he wishes 
 particularly to edify himself he runs 'to contemplate the beau- 
 tiful eyes of the seal, and to distress himself over the mysterious 
 sufferings of these tender-hearted animals shown in their basin, 
 brothers of the dogs and of us.'f The only educator that 
 M. Barres admits is the dog. 'The education which a dog 
 gives is indeed excellent ! . . . Our collegians, overloaded with 
 intellectual acquisitions, which remain in them as notions, not 
 as methods of feeling, weighted by opinions which they are 
 unable thoroughly to grasp, would learn beautiful ease from the 
 dog, the gift of listening, the instinct of their " I." 'J And it 
 must not be imagined that in such passages as these he is 
 quizzing himself or mocking the Philistine who may by inadver- 
 tence have become a reader of the book. The part played by 
 two dogs in the novel testifies that the phrases quoted are meant 
 in bitter earnest. 
 
 Like all the truly degenerate, M. Barres reserves for the hysterical 
 and the demented all the admiration and fraternal love which 
 he has not expended on seals and dogs. We have already men- 
 
 * Examen de trots Ideologies, p. 36. 
 
 t Ibid., p. 46. 
 
 % DEnnemi des Lois, p. 285.
 
 316 DEGENERATION 
 
 tioncd his enthusiastic regard for poor Marie Bashkirtseff. His 
 idea of Louis II. of Bavaria is incomparable. The unfortunate 
 King is, in his eyes, an insatisfait {L* Ennemi des Lois, p. 201) ; he 
 speaks of ' his being carried away beyond his native surround- 
 ings, his ardent desire to make his dream tangible, the wrecking 
 of his imagination in the clumsiness of execution' (p. 203). 
 Louis II. is 'a most perfect ethical problem' (p. 200). 'How 
 could this brother of Parsifal, so pure, so simple, who set the 
 prompting of his heart in opposition to all human laws how 
 could he suffer a foreign will to interfere in his life . ? And it 
 really seems that to have drawn Dr. Gudden under water was 
 his revenge upon a barbarian who had wished to impose his rule 
 of life upon him ' (p. 225). It is in such phrases that Ml Barres 
 characterizes a madman, whose mind was completely darkened, 
 and who for years was incapable of a single reasonable idea ! 
 This impudent fashion of blinking a fact which boxed his ears 
 on both sides; this incapacity to recognise the irrationality in the 
 mental life of an invalid, fallen to the lowest degree of insanity ; 
 this obstinacy in explaining the craziest deeds as deliberate, 
 intentional, philosophically justified and full of deep sense, throw 
 a vivid light on the state of mind in the Decadent. How could 
 a being of this kind discern the pathological disturbance of his 
 own brain, when he does not even perceive that Louis II. was 
 not ' an ethical problem,' but an ordinary mad patient, such as 
 every lunatic asylum of any size contains by dozens ? 
 
 We now understand the philosophy and moral doctrine of 
 the Barres type of the ' cultivators of the "I."' Only one word 
 more on their conduct in practical life. The hero of the Jar din 
 de Berenice, Philippe, is the happy guest of Petite Secousse, in 
 the house which her last lover had left to her. After some time 
 he wearies of the latter's 'educational influence'; he leaves her, 
 and strongly advises her to marry his opponent in the election 
 which she does. ' The enemy of the laws/ an anarchist of the 
 name of Andre" Maltere, condemned to prison for several months 
 for a newspaper article eulogizing a dynamite attempt, has be- 
 come, by his trial, a celebrity of the day. A very rich orphan 
 offers him her hand, and the 'little princesj' her love. He 
 marries the rich girl, whom he does not love, and continues to 
 love the ' little princess,' whom he does not marry. For this is 
 what the ' culture of his " I " ' exacts. To satisfy his- aesthetic incli- 
 nations and to ' act ' by word and pen, he must have money, 
 and to relieve the needs of his heart he must have the ' little 
 princess.' After some months of marriage he finds it inconve- 
 nient to dissimulate his love for the ' little princess ' before his 
 wife. He allows her then to guess at the needs of his heart 
 His wife understands philosophy. She is ' comprehensive.' She 
 goes herself to the ' little princess," takes her to the noble
 
 EGO-MANIA 317 
 
 anarchist, and from this moment Maltere lives rich, loved, happy, 
 and satisfied between heiress and mistress, as becomes a superior 
 nature. M. Barres believes he has here created ' a rare and 
 exquisite type.' He deceives himself. The cultivators of the 
 1 1,' like the Boulangist Philippe and the anarchist Andre, meet 
 by thousands in all large towns, only the police know them 
 under another name. They call them souteneurs. The moral 
 law of the brave anarchist has long been that of the gilded Paris 
 prostitutes, who from time immemorial have kept ' famant de 
 cceur^ at the same time as the 'other,' or the 'others.' 
 
 Decadentism has not been confined to France alone ; it has 
 also established a school in England. We have already men- 
 tioned, in the preceding book, one of the earliest and most 
 servile imitators of Baudelaire Swinburne. I had to class him 
 among the mystics, for the degenerative stigma of mysticism 
 predominates in all his works. He has, it is true, been train- 
 bearer to so many models that he may be ranked among the 
 domestic servants of a great number of masters ; but, finally, he 
 will be assigned a place where he has served longest, and that 
 is among the pre-Raphaelites. From Baudelaire he has 
 borrowed principally diabolism and Sadism, unnatural de- 
 pravity, and a predilection for suffering, disease and crime. 
 The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its 
 aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, 
 its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the 
 importance of art, have found their English representative 
 among the ' ^Esthetes,' the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde. 
 
 Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by 
 his works. Like Barbey d'Aurevilly, whose rose-coloured silk 
 hats and gold lace cravats are well known, and like his disciple 
 Josephin Peladan, who walks about in lace frills and satin 
 doublet, Wilde dresses in queer costumes which recall partly 
 the fashions of the Middle Ages, partly the rococo modes. He 
 pretends to have abandoned the dress of the present time 
 because it offends his sense of the beautiful ; but this is only a 
 pretext in which probably he himself does not believe. What 
 really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be 
 noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to 
 get talked about. It is asserted that he has walked down Pall 
 Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a 
 picturesque biretta on his head, and a sunflower in his hand, 
 the quasi-heraldic symbol of the ./Esthetes. This anecdote has 
 been reproduced in all the biographies of Wilde, and I have 
 nowhere seen it denied. But is a promenade with a sunflower 
 in the hand also inspired by a craving for .the beautiful ? 
 
 Phasemakers are perpetually repeating the twaddle, that it is 
 a proof of honourable independence to follow one's own taste
 
 3i8 DEGENERATION 
 
 without being bound down to the regulation costume of the 
 Philistine cattle, and to choose for clothes the colours, materials 
 and cut which appear beautiful to one's self, no matter how 
 much they may differ from the fashion of the day. The answer 
 to this cackle should be that it is above all a sign of anti-social 
 ego-mania to irritate the majority unnecessarily, only to gratify 
 vanity, or an aesthetical instinct of small importance and easy to 
 control such as is always done when, either by word or deed, a 
 man places himself in opposition to this majority. tie is 
 obliged to repress many manifestations of opinions and desires 
 out of regard for his fellow-creatures ; to make him understand 
 this is the aim of education, and he who has not learnt to impose 
 some restraint upon himself in order not to shock others is called 
 by malicious Philistines, not an ./Esthete, but a blackguard. 
 
 It may become a duty to combat the vulgar herd in the cause 
 of truth and knowledge ; but to a serious man this duty will 
 always be felt as a painful one. He will never fulfil it with a light 
 heart, and he will examine strictly and cautiously if it be really 
 a high and absolutely imperative law which forces him to be 
 disagreeable to the majority of his fellow-creatures. Such an 
 action is, in the eyes of a moral and sane man, a kind of martyr- 
 dom for a conviction, to carry out which constitutes a vital 
 necessity ; it is a form, and not an easy form, of self-sacrifice, for 
 it means the renunciation of the joy which the consciousness of 
 sympathy with one's fellow-creatures gives, and it exacts the 
 painful overthrow of social instincts, which, in truth, do not 
 exist in deranged ego-maniacs, but are very strong in the 
 normal man. 
 
 The predilection for strange costume is a pathological aberra- 
 tion of a racial instinct. The adornment of the exteriorjias its 
 origin in the strong desire to be admired by others primarily 
 by the opposite sex to be recognised by them as especially 
 well-shaped, handsome, youthful, or rich and powerful, or as pre- 
 eminent through rank or merit. It is practised, then, with the 
 object of producing a favourable impression on others, and is a 
 result of thought about others, of preoccupation with the race. 
 If, now, this adornment be, not through mis-judgment but 
 purposely, of a character to cause irritation to others, or lend itself 
 to ridicule in other words, if it excites disapproval instead of 
 approbation it then runs exactly counter to the object of the art 
 of dress, and evinces a perversion of the instinct of vanity. 
 
 The pretence of a sense of beauty is the excuse of conscious- 
 ness for a crank of the conscious. The fool who masquerades 
 in Pall Mall does not see himself, and, therefore, does not enjoy 
 the beautiful appearance which is supposed to be an aesthetic 
 necessity for him. There would be some sense in his conduct if 
 it had for its object an endeavour to cause others to dress in 
 accordance with his taste ; for them he sees, and they can
 
 EGO-MANIA 319 
 
 scandalize him by the ugliness, and charm him by the beauty, of 
 their costume. But to take the initiative in a new artistic style 
 in dress brings the innovator not one hair's breadth nearer his 
 assumed goal of aesthetic satisfaction. 
 
 When, therefore, an Oscar Wilde goes about in ' aesthetic 
 costume' among gazing Philistines, exciting either their ridicule 
 or their wrath, it is no indication of independence of character, 
 but rather from a purely anti-socialistic, ego-maniacal reckless- 
 ness and hysterical longing to make a sensation, justified by no 
 exalted aim ; nor is it from a strong desire for beauty, but from 
 a malevolent mania for contradiction. 
 
 Be that as it may, Wilde obtained, by his buffoon mummery, 
 a notoriety in the whole Anglo-Saxon world that his poems and 
 dramas would never have acquired for him. I have no reason 
 to trouble myself about these, since they are feeble imitations 
 of Rossetti and Swinburne, and of dreary inanity. His prose 
 essays, on the contrary, deserve attention, because they exhibit 
 all the features which enable us to recognise in the ' ^Esthete ' the 
 comrade in art of the Decadent 
 
 Like his French masters, Oscar Wilde despises Nature. 
 * Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry 
 springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, 
 and to be obvious is to be inartistic.'* 
 
 He is a ' cultivator of the Ego,' and feels deliciously indignant 
 at the fact that Nature dares to be indifferent to his important 
 person. ' Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever 
 I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more 
 to her than the cattle that browse on the slope ' (p. 5). 
 
 With regard to himself and the human species, he shares the 
 opinion of Des Esseintes. ' Ah ! don't say that you agree with 
 me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be 
 wrong' (p. 202). 
 
 His ideal of life is inactivity. ' It is only the Philistine who 
 seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. 
 This young dandy sought to be somebody rather than to do 
 something ' (p. 65). ' Society often forgives the criminal ; it 
 never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that 
 art excites in us are hateful in its eyes. . . . People . . . are always 
 coming shamelessly up to one . . . and saying in a loud, sten- 
 torian voice, " What are you doing?" \vhereas, " What are you 
 thinking?" is the only question that any civilized being should 
 ever be allowed to whisper to another. . . . Contemplation . . . 
 in the opinion of the highest culture, is the proper occupation of 
 man. ... It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is 
 limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of 
 him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and 
 dreams ' (pp. 166-168). ' The sure way of knowing nothing about 
 * Oscar Wilde, Intentions. London, 1891, p. 197.
 
 320 DEGENERATION 
 
 life is to try to make one's self useful ' (p. 175). ' From time to 
 time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, 
 because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has " nothing 
 to say." But if he had something to say, he would probably say 
 it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has 
 no new message that he can do beautiful work ' (p. 197). 
 
 Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime. In 
 a very affectionate biographical treatise on Thomas Griffith VVain- 
 wright, designer, painter, and author, and the murderer of several 
 people, he says : ' He was a forger of no mean or ordinary capa- 
 bilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in 
 this or any age. This remarkable man, so powerful with " pen, 
 pencil, and poison,"' etc. (p. 60). 'He sought to find expression 
 by pen or poison ' (p. 61). ' When a friend reproached him with 
 the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he shrugged his shoulders 
 and said, "Yes ; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very 
 thick ankles'" (p. 86). ' His crimes seem to have had an im- 
 portant effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to 
 his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked ' (p. 88). 
 ' There is no sin except stupidity ' (p. 210). ' An idea that is not 
 dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all ' (p. 179). 
 
 He cultivates incidentally a slight mysticism in colours. 'He/ 
 Wainwright, ' had that curious love of green which in individuals 
 is always the sign of a subtle, artistic temperament, and in nations 
 is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals ' (p. 65). 
 
 But the central idea of his tortuously disdainful prattling, 
 pursuing as its chief aim the heckling of the Philistine, and 
 laboriously seeking the opposite pole to sound common-sense, 
 is the glorification of art. Wilde sets forth in the following 
 manner the system of the ' ^Esthetes ' : ' Briefly, then, their 
 doctrines are these : Art never expresses anything but itself. 
 It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops 
 purely on its own lines. . . . The second doctrine is this : All 
 bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating 
 them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as 
 part of Art's rough material, but before they are of any real 
 service to Art they must be translated into artistic conventions. 
 The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium [?] it sur- 
 renders everything. As a method Realism is a complete failure, 
 and the two things that every artist should avoid-are modernity 
 of form and modernity of subject matter.* To us who live in 
 
 * Schiller also says : 
 
 ' Ewig jung is nur die Phantasie ; 
 Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben, 
 Das allein veraltet nie.' An die Freunde. 
 
 Forever young is fantasy alone : 
 That which nowhere ever has existed, 
 That alone grows never old.'
 
 EGO-MANIA -32.1 
 
 the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art 
 except our own. The only beautiful things are the things 
 that do not concern us. ... It is exactly because Hecuba is 
 nothing to us that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a 
 tragedy. . . .'* (pp. 52-54). The third doctrine is that Life 
 imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not 
 merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the 
 self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art 
 offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize 
 that energy' (p. 65). 
 
 On this third point the influence of art on life Wilde does 
 not refer to the fact, long ago established by me, that the 
 reciprocal relation between the work of art and the public 
 consists in this, that the former exercises suggestion and the 
 latter submits to it/f- What he actually wished to say was that 
 nature not civilized men develops itself in the direction of 
 forms given it by the artist. ' Where, if not from the Impres- 
 sionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that coma 
 creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing 
 the houses into monstrous shadows ? To whom, if not to them 
 and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood 
 over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved 
 bridge and swaying barge ? The extraordinary change that has 
 taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years 
 is entirely due to this particular school of Art' (p. 40). If he 
 
 But Schiller did not mean by this that Art should disregard truth and life, 
 but that it must discriminate between what is essential, and consequently 
 lasting, in the phenomenon, and that which is accidental, and therefore 
 ephemeral. 
 
 * Compare this with Kant's Kritik der Urtheilskraft (herausgegeben und 
 erlautertvonj. H. v. Kirchmanri) ; Berlin, 1869, p. 65 : 'All interest spoils 
 the judgment in matters of taste, and deprives it of its impartiality, especially 
 if it does not, as rational interest does, make the feeling of utility paramount 
 to that of pleasure, but bases it upon the latter, which always happens in an 
 aesthetic judgment in so far as a thing causes pleasure or pain.' Modern 
 psycho-physiology has recognised this notion of Kant's as erroneous, and 
 has demonstrated that 'the feeling of pleasure' in itself is originally a feeling 
 of organic 'utility,' and that 'judgment in matters of taste ' does not exist at 
 all without ' interest.' Psycho-physiology makes use of the terms 'organic 
 tendency ' or ' proclivity,' instead of ' interest.' Moreover Wilde, who does 
 not mind contradicting his own loose assertions, says (p. 186) : 'A critic 
 cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things 
 that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which 
 is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely value- 
 less. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees abso- 
 lutely nothing at all.' Hence Hecuba must be something to the critic, that 
 he may be able to criticise at all. < 
 
 f See in my Puradoxe the chapters ' Inhalt der poetischen Literatur' and 
 'Zur Naturgeschichte der Liebe.' 
 
 21
 
 322 DEGENERATION 
 
 simply wished to affirm that formerly fog and mist were not felt 
 to be beautiful, and that the artistic rendering of them first drew to 
 them the attention of the multitude, nothing could be said in con- 
 tradiction ; he would have propounded just a hackneyed common- 
 place with misplaced sententiousness. He asserts, however, that 
 painters have changed the climate, that for the last ten years there 
 have been fogs in London, because the Impressionists have 
 painted fogs a statement so sil-ly as to require no refutation. 
 It is sufficient to characterize it as artistic mysticism. Lastly, 
 "Wilde teaches the following : ' ./Esthetics are higher than 
 ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern 
 the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can 
 arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important in the develop- 
 ment of the individual than a sense of right and wrong' 
 (pp. 210, 21 i). 
 
 Thus the doctrine of the ' ^Esthetes ' affirms, with the Parnas- 
 sians, that the work of art is its own aim ; with the Diabolists, 
 that it need not be moral nay, were better to be immoral ; with 
 the Decadents, that it is to avoid, and be diametrically opposed 
 to, the natural and the true ; and with all these schools of the 
 ego-mania of degeneration, that art is the highest of all human 
 functions. 
 
 Here is the place to demonstrate the absurdity of these 
 propositions. This can, of course, be done only in the concisest 
 manner. For to treat fully of the relation of the beautiful to 
 morals and truth to Nature, of the conception of aim in artistic 
 beauty, and of the rank held by art among mental functions, it 
 would be necessary to expound the whole science of aesthetics, on 
 which the somewhat exhaustive text-books amount to a con- 
 siderable number of volumes; and this cannot be my purpose 
 in this place. Hence I shall of necessity only recapitulate the 
 latest results in a series of the clearest and most obvious 
 deductions possible, which the attentive reader will be able 
 \vithout difficulty to develop by his own reflection. 
 
 The ' bonzes ' of art, who proclaim the doctrine of ' art for 
 art's sake/ look down with contempt upon those who deny 
 their dogma, affirming that the heretics who ascribe to works 
 of art any aim whatsoever can be only pachydermatous Philistines, 
 whose comprehension is limited to beans and bacon, or stock- 
 jobbers with whom it is only a question of profit, or sanc- 
 timonious parsons making a professional pretence of virtue. 
 They believe that they are supported in this by such men as 
 Kant, Lessing, etc., who were likewise of the opinion that the 
 work of art had but one task to perform that of being beautiful. 
 We need not be overawed by the great names of these guarantors. 
 Their opinion cannot withstand the criticism to which it has 
 been subjected during the last hundred years by a great number
 
 GO-MANIA 323 
 
 of philosophers (I name only Fichte, Hegel and Vischer), and 
 its inadequacy follows from the fact, among others, that it 
 allows absolutely no place for the ugly as an object of artistic 
 representation. 
 
 Let us remind ourselves how works of art and art in general 
 originated. 
 
 That plastic art originally sprang from the imitation of Nature 
 is a commonplace, open justly to the reproach that it does not 
 enter deeply enough into the question. Imitation is without 
 doubt one of the first and most general reactions of the 
 developed living being upon the impressions it receives from 
 the external world. This is a necessary consequence of the 
 mechanism of the higher activity of the nervous system. Every 
 compound movement must be preceded by the representation 
 of this movement, and, conversely, no representation of move- 
 ment can be elaborated without at least a faint and hinted 
 accomplishment of the corresponding movement by the muscles. 
 Upon this principle depends, for example, the well-known 
 ' thought - reading.' As often, therefore, as a being (whose 
 nervous system is developed highly enough to raise perceptions 
 to the rank of representations) acquires knowledge, i,e. y forms 
 for itself a representation of any phenomenon whatever com- 
 prising in itself a more or less molar form of movement 
 (molecular movements, and, a fortiori, vibrations of ether 
 are not directly recognised as changes of position in space), it 
 has also a tendency to transform the representation into a 
 movement resembling it, and hence to imitate the phenomenon, 
 in that form, naturally, which, with its means, it is capable of 
 realizing. If every representation be not embodied in per- 
 ceptible movement, the cause is to be traced to the action of 
 the inhibitive mechanism of the brain, which does not permit 
 every representation at once to set the muscles into activity. 
 In a state of fatigue inhibition is relaxed, and, in fact, all sorts 
 of unintentional imitations make their appearance, as, for 
 example, symmetrical movements, such as the left hand in- 
 voluntarily and aimlessly makes of those executed by the right 
 hand in writing, etc. There is also a rare disease of the 
 nerves* hitherto observed chiefly in Russia, and especially in 
 Siberia, there called myriachit, in which inhibition becomes 
 completely disorganized, so that the diseased persons are forced 
 at once to imitate any action seen by them, even if it be 
 disagreeable or pernicious to them. If, for example, they see 
 someone fall, they are compelled to throw themselves also to 
 the ground, even if they are standing an a muddy road. 
 
 * S. A. Tokarski's article on 'Myriachit' in the Neurologisches Central' 
 Blatt for November, 1890. Tokarski in this article also informs us that 
 this word should be written meriatschenja, and not myriackil.
 
 324 DEGENERATION 
 
 Except in disease and fatigue, the action of inhibition is 
 suspended only when the excitation produced in the nervous 
 system by an impression is strong enough to vanquish it. If 
 this impression is disagreeable, or menacing, the movements 
 set loose by it are those of defence or flight. If, en the 
 contrary, the impression is pleasant, or if it is surprising 
 without being disquieting, then the reaction of the organism 
 against it is a movement without objective aim, most frequently 
 a movement of imitation. Hence, among healthy men possessed 
 of well-working inhibitory mechanism in their nervous system,, 
 this movement does not appear with every phenomenon, but 
 only with such as strike it forcibly, fix its attention, engage 
 and stimulate it in a word, cause an emotion. Activity of 
 imitation (and the plastic arts are at bottom nothing but 
 residuary traces of imitative movements) has consequently an 
 immediate organic aim, viz., the freeing of the nervous system 
 from an excitation set up in it by some visual cause. If 
 the excitation is not caused by the sight of any external 
 phenomenon, but by an internal organic state (e.g., sexual 
 erethism), or by a representation of an abstract nature (e.g., the 
 joy of victory, sorrow, or longing), it likewise transforms itself,. 
 it is true, into movements ; but these are naturally not imitative. 
 They embody no motor representation, but are in part such 
 as have for their sole end the relaxing of the nerve-centres 
 overcharged with motor impulsions, as in the dance, in outcries, 
 song and music, and in part such as disburden the centres of 
 ideation, like declamation, lyric and epic poetry. If artistic 
 activity is frequently exercised and facilitated by habit, it no 
 longer requires emotions of extraordinary strength to provoke 
 it. As often, then, as man is excited by such external or 
 internal impressions as demand no action (conflict, flight, 
 adaptation), but reach his consciousness in the form of a mood, 
 he relieves his nervous system of this excitation through some 
 kind of artistic activity, either by means of the plastic arts or 
 by music and poetry. 
 
 Hence imitation is not the source of the arts, but one of the 
 media of art ; the real source of art is emotion. Artistic 
 activity is not its own end, but it is of direct utility to the 
 artist ; it satisfies the need of his organism to transform its 
 emotions into movement. He creates the work of art, not for 
 its own sake, but to free his nervous system from a tension. 
 The expression, which has become a commonplace, is psycho- 
 physiologically accurate, viz., the artist writes, paints, sings,. 
 or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind. 
 
 To this primary end of art the subjective -end of the self- 
 deliverance of the artist a second must be added, viz., the 
 objective end of acting upon others. Like every other animal
 
 EGO-MAXIA 325 
 
 living in society and partly dependent upon it, man has, in conse- 
 quence of his racial instinct, the aspiration to impart his own 
 emotions to those of his own species, just as he himself partici- 
 pates in the emotions of those of his own species. This strong 
 desire to know himself in emotional communion with the 
 species is sympathy, that organic base of the social edifice.* 
 In advanced civilization, where the original natural motives of 
 actions are partly obscured and partly replaced by artificial 
 motives, and the actions themselves receive an aim other than 
 the theoretical one proper to them, the artist is, it is true, not 
 limited to sharing his emotions with others, but creates his work 
 of art with the accessory purpose of becoming famous a wish 
 springing none the less from social instincts, since it is directed 
 towards obtaining the applause of his fellow-creatures, or even 
 of earning money, a motive no longer social, but purely egoistic. 
 This vulgarly egoistic motive is still the only one influencing 
 the countless imitators who practise art, not from original 
 strong desire, and as the natural and necessary mode of 
 expressing their emotions, but whose artistic activity is caused 
 by the envy with which they regard the success of others in 
 art. 
 
 Once we have established, as a fact, that art is not practised 
 for its own sake alone, but that it has a double aim, subjective 
 and objective, viz., the satisfaction of an organic want of the 
 artist, and the influencing of his fellow-creatures, then the 
 principles by which every other human activity pursuing the 
 same end is judged are applicable to it, z>., the principles of 
 law and morality. 
 
 We test every organic desire to see whether it be the outcome 
 of a legitimate need or the consequence of an aberration ; 
 whether its satisfaction be beneficial or pernicious to the 
 organism. TVe distinguish the healthy from the diseased 
 impulse, and demand that the latter be combated. If the 
 desire seeks its satisfaction in an activity acting upon others, 
 then we examine to see if this activity is reconcilable with 
 the existence and prosperity of society, or dangerous to it. 
 The activity imperilling society offends against law and custom, 
 which are nothing but an epitome of the temporary notions of 
 society concerning what is beneficial and what is pernicious 
 4o it. 
 
 Notions healthy and diseased, moral and immoral, social or 
 anti-social, are as valid for art as for every other human 
 activity, and there is not a scintilla of reason for regarding a 
 
 * Edmund R. Clay, L? Alternative. Contribution a la Psychologie. Traduit 
 de I' anglais par A. Bitrdeau; Paris, 1886, p. 234 : ' Sympathy is an emotion 
 caused in us by that which seems to us to be the emotion or the sensation of 
 others.'
 
 326 DEGENERATION 
 
 work of art in any other light than that in which we view every 
 other manifestation of an individuality. 
 
 It is easily conceivable that the emotion expressed by the 
 artirt in his work may proceed from a morbid aberration, may 
 be directed, in an unnatural, sensual, cruel manner, to what is 
 ugly or loathsome. Ought we not in this case to condemn 
 the work and, if possible, to suppress it ? How can its right to 
 exist be justified ? By claiming that the artist was sincere 
 when he created it, that he gave back what was really existing 
 in him, and for that reason was subjectively justified in his 
 artistic expansion? But there is a candour which is wholly 
 inadmissible. The dipsomaniac and clastomaniac are sincere 
 when they respectively drink or break everything within reach. 
 We do not, however, acknowledge their right to satisfy their 
 desire. We prevent them by force. We put them under 
 guardianship, although their drunkenness and destructiveness 
 may perhaps be injurious to no one but themselves. And still 
 more decidedly does society oppose itself to the satisfaction of 
 those cravings which cannot be appeased without violently 
 acting upon others. The new science of criminal anthropology 
 admits without dispute that homicidal maniacs, certain incen- 
 diaries, many thieves and vagabonds, act under an impulsion ; 
 that through their crimes they satisfy an organic craving ; that 
 they outrage, kill, burn, idle, as others sit down to dinner, simply 
 because they hunger to do so ; but in spite of this and because 
 of this, it demands that the appeasing of the sincere longings 
 of these degenerate creatures be prevented by all means, and, 
 if needs be, by their complete suppression. It never occurs to 
 us to permit the criminal by organic disposition to ' expand * 
 his individuality in crime, and just as little can it be expected 
 of us to permit the degenerate artist to expand his individuality 
 in immoral works of art. The artist who complacently repre- 
 sents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, 
 perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from 
 the criminal who actually commits it. It is a question of the 
 intensity of the impulsion and the resisting power of the 
 judgment, perhaps also of courage and cowardice ; nothing else. 
 If the actual law does not treat the criminal by intention so 
 rigorously as the criminal in act, it is because criminal law 
 pursues the deed, and not the purpose ; the objective phe- 
 nomenon, not its subjective roots. The Middle Ages had places 
 of sanctuary where criminals could not be molested for their 
 misdemeanours. Modern law has done away with this institu- 
 tion. Ought art to be at present the last asylum to which 
 criminals may fly to escape punishment ? Are they to be able 
 to satisfy, in the so-called 'temple' of art, instincts which the 
 policeman prevents them from appeasing in the street ? I do
 
 EGO-MANIA 327 
 
 not see how a privilege so inimical to society can be willingly 
 defended. 
 
 I am far from sharing Ruskin's opinion that morality alone, 
 and nothing else, can be demanded of a work of art. Morality 
 alone is not sufficient. Otherwise religious tracts would be the 
 finest literature, and the well-known coloured casts of sacred 
 subjects turned out wholesale in Munich factories would be the 
 choicest sculpture. Excellence of form maintains its rights 
 in all the arts, and gives to the finest creation its artistic value. 
 Hence the work need not be moral. More accurately, it need 
 not be designed expressly to preach virtue and the fear of God, 
 and to be destined for the edification of devotees. But between 
 a work without sanctified aim and one of wilful immorality 
 there is a world of difference. A work which is indifferent from 
 a moral point of view will not be equally attractive or satisfying 
 to all minds, but it will offend and repel no one. An explicitly 
 immoral work excites in healthy persons the same feelings of 
 displeasure and disgust as the immoral act itself, and the form 
 of the work can change nothing of this. Most assuredly morality 
 alone does not give beauty to a work of art. But beauty with- 
 out morality is impossible. 
 
 We now come to the second argument with which the 
 Esthetes wish to defend the right of the artist to immorality. 
 The work of art, they say, need only be beautiful. Beauty lies 
 in the form. Hence the content is a matter of indifference. 
 This may be vice and crime ; but it cannot derogate from the 
 excellences of form if these be present. 
 
 He alone can venture to advance such principles who is with- 
 out the least inkling of the psycho-physiology of the aesthetic 
 feelings. Everyone who has studied this subject in the least 
 knows that two kinds of the beautiful are distinguished the 
 sensuously-beautiful and the intellectually-beautiful. We feel 
 those phenomena to be beautiful, the sense-perception of which 
 is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure e.g., a particular colour, 
 perhaps a pure red, or a harmony ; nay, even a single note with 
 its severally indistinguishable but synchronous overtones. The 
 researches of Helmholtz* and Blaserna^ have thrown light on 
 the cause of the feeling of pleasure connected with certain 
 acoustic perceptions, while those of Briicke} have led to similar 
 results with regard to the mechanism of the feelings of pleasure 
 following optical impressions. It is a question of discernment by 
 
 * Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonemfindungen. 4 Aufl. Braunschweig, 
 1877. 
 
 t Pietro Blaserna, Le Son etla Musique, followed by Causes phystologiques 
 de rHannonie musicale, par H. Helmholtz. 4 e Edition. Paris, 1891. 
 
 % E. Briicke, Bruchstiicke aus der Theorie der bihlenden Kiinst*. Leipzig,. 
 Intern, wissensch. Bibl. (The French edition of Briicke's works contains 
 also HelmhoLz's LOptique et la Peinlure.}
 
 328 DEGENERATION 
 
 the sensory nerves of definite simple numerical relations in the 
 vibrations of matter or of ether. We know less concerning the 
 causes of the pleasures connected with smell and touch ; yet 
 here also it seems to be a question of more or less strong -im- 
 pressions, hence equally of quantities i.e., of numbers. The 
 ultimate cause of all these feelings is that certain modes of 
 vibrations are in accord with the structure of the nerves, are easy 
 for them and leave them in order, while other modes disturb the 
 arrangement of the nerve particles, often costing the nerves an 
 effort, often dangerous to their existence or at least their 
 functioning, to restore them to their natural order. The former 
 will be felt as pleasure, the latter as discomfort, and even as 
 pain. With the sensuously-beautiful there can be no question 
 of morality, for it exists as perception only, and does not rise 
 to the rank of representation. 
 
 Above the sensuously-beautiful stands the intellectually-beauti- 
 ful, no longer consisting of mere perceptions, but of representa- 
 tions, of concepts and judgments, with their accompanying 
 emotions elaborated in the unconscious. The intellectually- 
 beautiful must also awaken feelings of pleasure, to be perceived 
 as beautiful ; and, as above explained, with feelings of pleasure 
 are united, in healthy, fully-developed human beings equipped 
 with the social instinct (altruism), only those ideas the content 
 whereof is conducive to the existence and prosperity of the 
 individual being, society, or species. Now, that which is favour- 
 able to the life and prosperity of the individual and of the 
 species is precisely that which we call moral. 
 
 From this it results by an iron necessity that a work which 
 awakens no feelings of pleasure cannot be beautiful, and that it 
 can awaken no feelings of pleasure if it is not moral, and we 
 arrive at the final conclusion, that morality and beauty are in 
 their innermost essence identical. It were not false to assert that 
 beauty is statical repose, and morality beauty in action. 
 
 This is only apparently contradicted by the fact that what is 
 incontestably ugly and bad may also be agreeable, and hence 
 awaken feelings of pleasure. The mental process set up by 
 percepts and ideas is not, in this case, so simple and direct as 
 with respect to the beautiful and the good. Associations some- 
 times of a highly complex nature must first be put into activity, 
 finally, however, to lead to the single great result, viz., the 
 awakening of feelings of pleasure. The well-known Aristotelian 
 catharsis, purging or purification, explains how tragedy, though 
 it offers the spectacle of pain and ruin, finally produces an 
 agreeable effect. The representation of deserved misfortune 
 awakens ideas of justice, a moral, agreeable idea ; and even that 
 of unmerited misfortune gives rise to pity, irr itself a feeling of 
 pain, though, in its quality of a racial instinct, beneficial and
 
 EGO-MANIA 329 
 
 therefore not only moral, but, in its final essence, agreeable. 
 When Valdez, in his famous picture of the Caridad de Sevilla, 
 shows us an open coffin in which lies the corpse of an arch- 
 bishop in full vestments, swarming with worms, this spectacle 
 is in itself undeniably repulsive. Nevertheless it permits us 
 at once to recognise the emotion which the painter wished to 
 express, viz., his feeling of the nothingness of all earthly posses- 
 sions and honours, the frailty of man in the face of the primeval 
 power of Nature. It is the same emotion embodied by Holbein 
 in his ' Dance of Death/ not so profoundly and passionately as by 
 the Spaniard with his stronger feelings, but with self-mockery and 
 bitterness. The same emotion is heard, somewhat less gloomily 
 and with more of a melancholy resignation, in Mozart's Requiem. 
 In the idea of the contrast between the insignificance of indi- 
 vidual life and the vastness and eternity of Nature, there mingles 
 itself an element of the sublime, of which the idea, as the 
 choicest form of activity in the highest brain-centres, is united 
 with feelings of pleasure. 
 
 Another circumstance in the plastic arts has to be considered. 
 In works of sculpture and painting a broad separation is possible 
 between the form and the content, between the sensuous and the 
 moral. A painting, a group, may represent the most immoral 
 and most criminal incident; nevertheless, the individual con- 
 stituent parts the atmosphere, the harmonies of colour, the 
 human figures may bs beautiful in themselves, and the con- 
 noisseur may derive enjoyment from them without dwelling on 
 the subject of the work. The engravings in the Editions des 
 fenniers generaux of the last century, the works in marble and 
 bronze of the pornographic museum at Naples, are, in a measure, 
 repulsively immoral, because they represent unnatural vice. 
 In themselves, however, they are excellently executed, and are 
 accessible to a mode of contemplation which disregards their 
 idea and keeps in view only the perfection of their form. Here, 
 therefore, the impression of the work of art is a mixture of disgust 
 for the subject treated, and enjoyment of the beauty of the several 
 figures and their attitudes painted, drawn, or modelled. The 
 feeling of pleasure may preponderate, and the work, in spite of 
 its depravity, produce, not a repellent, but an attractive effect. 
 It is the same in nature. If that which is pernicious and 
 frightful is sometimes felt to be beautiful, it is because it con- 
 tains certain features and elements which have no cogent 
 reference to the frightful or pernicious character of the whole, 
 and can hence in themselves operate aesthetically. The hammer- 
 beaded viper is beautiful on account of its metallic lustre ; the 
 tiger for its strength and suppleness ; the foxglove (Digitalis) for 
 its graceful form and rich rosy hue. The noxiousness of the 
 snake does not lie in its copper-red dorsal bands, nor the
 
 330 DEGENERATION 
 
 tcrribleness of the beast of prey in its graceful appearance, nor 
 the danger of the poisonous plant in the form and colour of its 
 blossoms. In these cases the sensuously-beautiful outweighs the 
 morally-repulsive, because it is more immediately present, and, 
 in the collective impression, allows the feelings of pleasure to 
 predominate. The spectacle of the display of strength and 
 resolution is equally a beautiful one, on account of the ideas of 
 organic efficiency awakened by it. Would this, however, be 
 thought beautiful if one could see how an assassin over- 
 powers a victim who is resisting violently, hurls him to the ground 
 and butchers him ? Certainly not ; for before such a picture it 
 is no longer possible to separate the display of strength, beauti- 
 ful in itself, from its aim, and to enjoy the former regardless of 
 the latter. 
 
 In poetry this separation of the form from the content is far 
 less possible than in the plastic arts. The word can hardly in 
 itself produce an effect of sensuous beauty by its auditory or 
 visual image, even if, it presents itself rhythmically regulated 
 and strengthened by the more expressive double sound of a 
 rhyme. It operates almost solely by its content, by the repre- 
 sentations which it awakens. Hence it is hardly conceivable 
 that one can hear or read a poetical exposition of criminal or 
 vicious facts, without having present at each word a representa- 
 tion of its content, and not of its form i.e., of its sound. In 
 this case, therefore, the impression can no longer be a composite 
 one, as at the sight of a finely-painted portrayal of a repulsive 
 incident, but must be purely disagreeable. The pictures of 
 Giulio Romano, to which Pietro Aretino dedicated his Sonetti 
 lussuriosi, may be found beautiful by the admirers of the 
 effeminate style of that pupil of Raphael ; the sonnets are only 
 the more disgusting. Who would experience feelings of 
 pleasure from the perusal of the writings of the Marquis de 
 Sade, Andrea de Nercia or Liseux ? Only one species of 
 human beings that of the degenerate with perverted instincts. 
 Portrayals of crime and vice in art and literature have their 
 public; that we well know. It is the public of the gaols. 
 Besides dismally sentimental books, criminals read nothing so 
 willingly as stories of lust and violence ;* and the drawings and 
 inscriptions with which they cover the walls of their cells have, 
 for the most part, their crimes as subjects.t But the healthy 
 man feels himself violently repelled by works of this kind, and 
 it is impossible for him to receive an aesthetic impression from 
 
 * Henry Joly, Les Lectures dans les Prisons de la Seine. Lyon, 1891. See 
 also Lombroso, LUomo delinquente. Turin, 1884, p. 366 et scq., and p. 387 
 et seq: 
 
 f Pitre, Sui Canti popolari italiani in Carcere. Firerfze, 1876. See also 
 the portrait-group of the three brigands of Ravenna in Lombroso, op. cit. t 
 Plate XV., facing p. 396.
 
 EGO-MANIA 331 
 
 them, be their form never so conformable to the most approved 
 rules of art. 
 
 In yet another case it is possible for that which is most 
 ugly and vicious in artistic portrayal to operate in the direction 
 of the morally beautiful. This is when it allows us to recognise 
 the moral purpose of the author and betrays his sympathetic 
 emotion. For that which we, consciously or unconsciously, 
 perceive behind every artistic creation is the nature of its 
 creator and the emotion from which it sprang, and our sympathy 
 with, or antipathy for, the emotion of the author has the lion's 
 share in our appreciation of the work. When Raffaelli paints 
 shockingly degraded absinthe-drinkers in the low drinking dens 
 of the purlieus of Paris, we clearly feel his profound pity at 
 the sight of these fallen human beings, and this emotion we ex- 
 perience as a morally beautiful one. In like manner we have not 
 a momentary doubt of the morality of the artist's emotions when 
 we behold Callot's pictures of the horrors of war, or the bleeding, 
 purulent saints of Zurbaran, or the monsters of Breughel van 
 der Holle, or when we read the murder scene in Dostoievsky's 
 Raskolnikow* These emotions are beautiful. Sympathy with 
 them gives us a feeling of pleasure. Against this feeling the 
 displeasure caused by the repulsiveness of the work cannot 
 prevail. When, however, the work betrays the indifference 
 of the author to the evil or ugliness he depicts, nay, his predilec- 
 tion for it, then the abhorrence provoked by the work is 
 intensified by all the disgust which the author's aberration 
 of instinct inspires in us, and the aggregate impression is one 
 of keenest displeasure. Those who share the emotions of 
 the author, and hence are with him attracted and pleasur- 
 ably excited by what is repugnant, diseased and evil, are the 
 degenerate. 
 
 The ^Esthetes affirm that artistic activity is the highest of 
 which the human mind is capable, and must occupy the first 
 place in the estimation of men. How do they manage to 
 establish this assertion from their own standpoint ? Why 
 should I place a high value on the activity of a fellow who with 
 rapture describes the colours and odours of putrid carrion ; and 
 why should I bestow my especial esteem on a painter who 
 shows me the libidinousness of a harlot ? Because the amount 
 of artistic technique involved is difficult? If that is to be the 
 decisive point, then, to be logical, the ^Esthetes must place the 
 acrobat higher than the artist of their species, since it is much 
 more difficult to learn the art of the trapezist than the rhyming 
 and daubing which constitutes the ' art ' of the ^Esthetes. Is it 
 
 * Raskolnikow, Roman von F. M. Dostojewskij, Nach der vierten Auflage 
 des russichen Originals ; Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, iibersetzt von Wilhelm 
 Henckel. Leipzig, 1882, Jiand 1., pp. 122-128.
 
 332 DEGENERATION 
 
 to be on account of sensations of pleasure given by artists? 
 First of all, those artists over whom the /Esthetes grow so 
 enthusiastic create in the healthy man no pleasure, but loathing 
 or boredom. But granted that they do provide sensations, the 
 first inquiry must then be of what sort these sensations are. 
 Every sensation, even if we for the moment find it agreeable, does 
 not inspire us with esteem for the person to whom we are indebted 
 for it. At the card-table, in the public-house and the brothel, 
 a base nature may procure sensations the intensity of which 
 those offered by any work of the ^Esthetes is far from being 
 able to rival. But even the most dissolute drunkard does not in 
 consequence hold the keepers of these places of his pleasures in 
 specially high esteem. 
 
 The truth is that the claim of the highest rank for art advanced 
 by the ^Esthetes involves the complete refutation of their other 
 dogmas. The race estimates individual activities according to 
 their utility for the whole. The higher this develops itself, the 
 more exact and profound is the understanding it acquires of 
 that which is really necessary and beneficial to it. The warrior, 
 who in a low grade of civilization rightly plays the most promi- 
 nent part, because society must live, and to this end must defend 
 itself against its enemies, recedes to a more humble position as 
 manners become more gentle, and the relations between peoples 
 cease to resemble those between beasts of prey, and assume a 
 human character. Once the race has attained in some degree 
 to a clear comprehension of its relation to nature, it knows that 
 knowledge is its most important task, and its profoundest 
 respect is for those who cultivate and enlarge knowledge 
 i.e., for thinkers and investigators. Even in the monarchical 
 state, which, conformably with its own atavistic nature, gauges 
 the importance of the warrior by the standard of primitive men 
 (and in the present condition of 1. :ope, in the presence of the 
 scarcely restrained fury for war, among a whole series of nations, 
 the raison d'etre for this atavism cannot, alas be contested), the 
 scholar, as professor, academician, counsellor, is a constituent 
 part of the governmental machine, and honours and dignities 
 fall far more to his lot than to the poet and artist. The enthu- 
 siasts of the latter are youths and women i.e., those components 
 of the race in whom the unconscious outweighs consciousness ; 
 for artist and poet address themselves first of all to emotion, and 
 this is more easily excited in the woman and the adolescent 
 than in the mature man ; their accomplishments are, moreover, 
 more accessible to the multitude than those of the scholar whom 
 almost the best alone of his time can follow, and whose import- 
 ance is in general fully appreciated only by a- few specialists, 
 even in our days of the popularization of science by the press. 
 State and society, however, seek to compensate him for the
 
 EGO-MANIA 333 
 
 evasion of this reward, by surrounding him with official fom;s 
 of high esteem. 
 
 It is true that very great artists and poets, admitted pioneers, 
 whose influence is recognised as lasting, likewise receive their 
 share of the official honours disposed of by the organized 
 commonwealth as such, and these exceptional men obtain a 
 more brilliant reward than any investigator or discoverer ; for 
 together with the common distinctions shared by them with the 
 latter, they possess the wide popularity which the investigator 
 and discoverer must dispense withal. And why is the artist 
 sometimes placed, even by persons of good and serious minds, 
 on a level with, or even above, the man of science ? Because 
 these persons value the beautiful more than the true, emotion more 
 than knowledge ? No ; but because they have the right feeling 
 that art is equally a source of knowledge. 
 
 It is so in three ways. Firstly, the emotion evoked by the 
 work of art is itself a means of obtaining knowledge, as Edmund 
 R. Clay, James Sully, and other psychologists have seen, 
 without, however, dwelling on the important fact. It constrains 
 the higher centres to attend to the causes of their excitations, 
 and in this way necessarily induces a sharper observation and 
 comprehension of the whole series of phenomena related to the 
 emotion. Next, the work of art grants an insight into the laws 
 of which the phenomenon is the expression ; for the artist, in his 
 creation, separates the essential from the accidental, neglects the 
 latter, which in nature is wont to divert and confuse the less 
 gifted observer, and involuntarily gives prominence to the 
 former as that which chiefly or solely occupies his attention, 
 and is therefore perceived and reproduced by him with especial 
 distinctness. The artist himself divines the idea behind the 
 structure, and its inner principle and connection, intelligible but 
 not perceivable, in the form, and discloses it in his work to the 
 spectator. That is what Hegel means when he calls the beau- 
 tiful 'the presence of the idea in limited phenomenon.' By 
 means of his own deep comprehension of natural law, the artist 
 powerfully furthers the comprehension of it by other men.* 
 Finally, art is the only glimmer of light, weak and dubious 
 though it be, which projects itself into the future, and gives us at 
 
 * The knowledge of this fact is as old as aesthetic science itself. It is 
 well expressed, as by others, so by Dr. Wilh. Alex. Freund, in his Blicken ins 
 Culturlebcn; Breslau, 1879, p. 9: ' Idealization consists . . . in the removal 
 of accidental accessories disturbing the true expression of the essential ;' 
 p. ii : 'All [eminent artists] raise that which they see to a purified 
 image, purged of all that is unessential, accidental, disturbing ; from that 
 image springs up in all of them the idea lying at the base of the vision ;' p. 13 : 
 'He [the artist] comprehends the essential . . . from which the accidental 
 disturbing accessories of the external phenomenon fall off like withered 
 leaves, so that to his inner eye the truth appears as a living idea,' etc.
 
 334 
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 least a dream-like idea of the outlines and direction of our further 
 organic developments. This is not mysticism, but a very 
 clear and comprehensible fact. We have seen above* that 
 every adaptation i.e., every change of form and function of the 
 organs is preceded by a representation of this change. The 
 change must first be felt and desired as necessary ; then a re- 
 presentation of it becomes elaborated in the higher or highest 
 nerve-centres, and finally the organism endeavours to realize 
 this representation. This process repeats itself in the same 
 way in the race. Some state is disturbing to it. It experiences 
 feelings of discomfort from this state. It suffers from it. From 
 this results its desire to change the state. It elaborates for 
 itself an image of the nature, direction and extent of this change. 
 According to the older, mystic phrase, ' it creates for itself 
 an ideal.' The ideal is really the formative idea of future 
 organic development with a view to better adaptation. In the 
 most perfect individuals of the species it exists earlier and more 
 distinct than in the average multitude, and the artist ventures with 
 uncertain hand to make it accessible to sense through the medium 
 of his work of art long before it can be organically realized 
 by the race. Thus art vouchsafes the most refined and highest 
 knowledge, bordering on the marvellous, viz., the knowledge 
 of the future. Not so definitely, of course, nor so unequivocally, 
 does art express th.e secret natural law of being and becoming 
 as science. Science shows the present, the positive ; Art pro- 
 phesies the future, the possible, though stammeringly and ob- 
 scurely. To the former Nature unveils her fixed forms ; to the 
 latter she grants, amidst shudderings, a rapid, bewildered glimpse 
 of the depths where what is yet formless is struggling to appear. 
 The emotion from which the divining work of art springs is the 
 birth throe of the quick and vigorous organism pregnant with 
 the future.f 
 
 This art of presentiment is certainly the highest mental 
 activity of the human being. But it is not the art of the 
 /Esthetes. It is the most moral art, for it is the most ideal, a 
 word only meaning that it is parallel with the paths along which 
 the race is perfecting itself nay, coincides with these. 
 
 By the most diverse methods we have always attained the 
 same result, viz., it is not true that art has nothing in common 
 
 * See footnote to p. 38. 
 
 f Wilhelm Loewenthal makes the feeling and need of religion spring 
 from the same presentient emotion. For the author of Gnindziige einer 
 hygiene des Unterrichts, religion is the form assumed in man's consciousness 
 by the ideal, />., the presentient knowledge of the aim of evolution. ' The 
 instinct of development the indispensable base of all life and all knowledge 
 is identical with the religious need.' Thus he writes in a memoir, 
 unfortunately only 'printed as a manuscript,' but most worthy of being made 
 accessible to all the world.
 
 EGO-MANIA 335 
 
 with morality. The work of art must be moral, for its aim is to 
 express and excite emotions. In virtue of this aim it falls within 
 the competence of criticism, which tests all emotions by their 
 utility or perniciousness to the individual or the race ; and if it 
 is immoral, it must be condemned like every other organic 
 activity opposed to this aim. The work of art must be moral, 
 for it is intended to operate aesthetically. It can only do this if 
 it awakens feelings of pleasure, at least ultimately ; it provides 
 such, only if it includes beauty in itself; but beauty is in its 
 essence synonymous with morality. Finally, the highest work 
 of art can, from its inmost nature, be none other than moral, 
 since it is a manifestation of vital force and health, a revelation 
 of the capacity for evolution of the race; and humanity values it 
 so highly because it divines this circumstance. 
 
 Concerning the last doctrine of the ^Esthetes, viz., that art 
 must shun the true and the natural, this is a commonplace 
 pushed to an absurdity, and converted into its contrary. Perfect, 
 actual truth and naturalness need not be denied to art ; they are 
 impossible to it. For whereas the work of art makes the artist's 
 idea tangible, an idea is never an exact copy of a pheno- 
 menon of the external world. Before it can become an idea 
 in a human consciousness every phenomenon experiences two 
 very essential modifications one in the afferent and receptive 
 organs of sense, the other in the centres elaborating sense- 
 perceptions into representations. These sensory nerves and 
 centres of perception change the modes of the external stimuli 
 conformably with their own nature ; they give to these their 
 particular colouring, as different wind-instruments played by the 
 same person give forth different shades of sound with the same 
 force of breath. The centres forming representations modify in 
 their turn the actual relation of the phenomena to each other, 
 in that they bring some into stronger relief, and neglect others 
 cf really equal value. Consciousness does not take cognizance 
 of all the countless perceptions uninterruptedly excited in the 
 brain, but of those only to which it is attentive. But by the 
 simple fact of attention, consciousness selects individual pheno- 
 mena, and gives them an importance they do not possess in the 
 unceasing uniformity of universal movement. 
 
 But if the work of art never renders reality in its exact 
 relations, it can, on the other hand -(and this is both a 
 psychological and sesthetical commonplace), never be con- 
 structed from constituents other than those supplied by reality. 
 The mode in which these constituents are blended and united 
 by the artist's imagination permits the recognition of another 
 fact, as true and natural as any that- is habitually desig- 
 nated by us as real, to wit, the character, mode of thought, 
 and emotion of the artist. For what is imagination ? A
 
 336 DEGENERATION 
 
 special case of the general psychological law of association. In 
 scientific observation and judgment the play of association is 
 most rigorously supervised by attention ; the will violently 
 inhibits the propagation of stimuli along the most convenient 
 paths, and prevents the penetration of mere similarities, con- 
 trasts, and contiguities in space or time into consciousness, 
 which is reserved for the images of immediate reality trans- 
 mitted by the senses. In artistic creation imagination rules 
 that is to say, the inhibition exercised by the will is relaxed ; 
 in accordance with the laws of association a presentation is 
 allowed to summon into consciousness representations which 
 are similar, contrasted, or contiguous in space or time. But 
 inhibition is not wholly inactive, and the will does not permit 
 the union of reciprocally exclusive representations into a con- 
 cept ; thus it prohibits the elaboration of an intellectual absurdity, 
 such as is yielded by purely automatic association or fugitive 
 ideation. The emotion of the artist reveals itself in accordance 
 with the way in which representations supplied by association 
 are grouped into concepts, for it causes representations agree- 
 ing with it to be retained, and the indifferent or contradictory 
 to be suppressed. Even fantastic images, as extravagant as 
 a winged horse or a woman with lion's paws, reveal a true 
 emotion : the former an aspiration proceeding from the spectacle 
 of the bird soaring light and free ; the latter a horror of the 
 power of sexuality subjugating reason and conjuring up devour- 
 ing passion. It would be a grateful task for workers in the 
 histology of psychology to trace the emotions whence the best 
 known fantastic figures of art and the metaphors of poets have 
 proceeded. Hence it may be said that every work of art 
 always comprises in itself truth and reality in so far as, if it 
 does not reflect the external world, it surely reflects the mental 
 life of the artist. 
 
 Hence, as we have seen, not one of the sophisms of the 
 ./Esthetes withstands criticism. The work of art is not its own 
 aim, but it has a specially organic, and a social task. It is subject 
 to the moral law ; it must obey this ; it has claim to esteem 
 only if it is morally beautiful and ideal. And it cannot be other 
 than natural and true, in so far, at least, as it is the offprint of 
 a personality, which is also a part of nature and reality. The 
 entire system takes as its point of departure a- Jew erroneous 
 or imprudent assertions of thinkers and poets commanding 
 respect, but developed by the Parnassians and Decadents in 
 a way of which Lessing, Kant and Schiller never allowed 
 themselves to dream. This is no other than the well-known 
 attempt to explain and justify impulsions by motives more or 
 less obvious and invented post facto. The degenerate who, in 
 consequence of their organic aberrations, make the repulsive
 
 EGO-MANIA 337 
 
 and ugly, vice and crime, the subject-matter of plastic and 
 literary works of art, naturally have recourse to the theory that 
 .art has nothing in common with morality, truth and beauty, since 
 this theory has for them the value of an excuse. And must 
 not the excessive value set upon artistic activity as such, without 
 regard to the worth of its results, be highly welcome to the 
 limitless crowd of imitators who practise art, not from an inner 
 prompting, but from a foolhardy craving for the respect sur- 
 rounding real artists imitators who have nothing of their own 
 to say, no emotion, not an idea, but who, with a superficial 
 professional dexterity easily acquired, falsify the views and 
 feelings of masters in all branches of art ? This rabble, 
 which claims for itself a top place in the scale of intel- 
 lectual rank, and freedom from the constraint of all moral 
 laws as its most noble privilege, is certainly baser than the 
 lowest scavenger. These creatures are of absolutely no use to 
 the commonwealth, and injure true art by their productions, 
 whose multitude and importunateness shut out from most men 
 the sight of the genuine works of art never very numerous 
 of the epoch. They are weaklings in will, unfitted for any 
 activity requiring regular uniform efforts, or else victims to vanity, 
 wishing to be more famous than is possible to a stone-breaker 
 or a tailor. The uncertainty of comprehension and taste among 
 the majority of mankind, and the incompetency of most pro- 
 fessional critics, allow these intruders to make their nest among 
 the arts, and to dwell there as parasites their life long. The 
 buyer soon distinguishes a good boot from a bad one, and the 
 journeyman cobbler who cannot properly sew on a sole finds no 
 employment. But that a book or painting void of all originality 
 is indifferent in quality, and for that reason superfluous, is by no 
 means so easily recognised by the Philistine, or even by the 
 man armed with the critical pen, and the producer of such chaff 
 can apply himself undisturbed to his assiduous waste of time. 
 These bunglers with pen, brush and modelling spattle, strutting 
 about in cap and doublet, naturally swear by the doctrine of 
 the ^Esthetes, carry themselves as if they were the salt of 
 humanity, and make a parade of their contempt for the 
 Philistine. They belong, however, to the elements of the race 
 which are most inimical to society. Insensible to its tasks and 
 interests, without the capacity to comprehend a serious thought 
 or a fruitful deed, they dream only of the satisfaction of their 
 basest instincts, and are pernicious through the example they 
 set as drones, as well as through the confusion they cause in minds 
 insufficiently forewarned, by their abuse of the word 'art' t 
 mean demoralization and childishness. Ego-maniacs, Deca- 
 dents and ./Esthetes have completely gathered under their banner 
 -this refuse of civilized peoples, and march at its head. 
 
 22
 
 338 DEGENERATION 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 IBSEXISM. 
 
 IN the course of the last two centuries the whole civilized world 
 has, with greater or less unanimity, repeatedly recognised a sort 
 of intellectual royalty in some contemporary, to whom it has 
 rendered homage as the first and greatest among living authors. 
 For a great part of the eighteenth century Voltaire, ' le rot 
 Voltaire] was the 'poet laureate' cf all civilized nations.. 
 During the first third of the present century this position was 
 held by Goethe. After his death the throne remained vacant 
 for a score of years, when Victor Hugo ascended it amidst the 
 enthusiastic acclamations of the Latin and Slavonic races, and 
 with a feeble opposition from those of Teutonic origin, to hold 
 it until the end of his life. 
 
 At the present time voices have for some years been heard 
 in a"ll countries claiming for Henrik Ibsen the highest intel- 
 lectual honours at the disposal of mankind. It is wished that 
 the Norwegian dramatist should, in his old age, be recognised 
 as the world-poet of the closing century. It is true that only a 
 part of the multitude and of the critical representatives of its 
 taste acclaims him ; but the fact that it has entered anyone's 
 mind at all to see in him a claimant for the throne of poetry 
 makes a minute examination of his titles to the position 
 necessary. 
 
 That Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and power is 
 not for a moment to be denied. He is extraordinarily emotive, 
 and has the gift of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike and 
 impressive manner that which has excited his feelings. (We 
 shall see that these are almost always feelings of hatred and 
 rage, i.e., of displeasure.) A natural capacity drew him towards 
 the stage a capacity for imagining situations in which the 
 characters are forced to turn inside out their inmost nature ; 
 in which abstract ideas transform themselves into deeds, and 
 modes of opinion and of feeling, imperceptible .to the senses, 
 but potent as causes, are made patent to sight and hearing in 
 attitudes and gestures, in the play of feature and in words. 
 Like Richard Wagner, he knows how to group events into 
 living frescoes possessing the charm of significant pictures ; with 
 this difference, however, that Ibsen works, not like Wagner, 
 with strange costumes and properties, architectural splendour, 
 mechanical magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with penetrating 
 .vision into the backgrounds of souls and the conditions of
 
 EGO-MANIA 339 
 
 humanity. Fairy-lore is not lacking in Ibsen either, but he 
 does not allow the imagination of the spectators to run riot in 
 mere spectacles ; he forces them into moods, and binds them 
 by his spell in circles of ideas, through the pictures which 
 he unrolls before them. 
 
 His strong desire to embody the thought occupying his mind 
 in a single picture, which can be surveyed at one view, also 
 dictated to him the set form of his drama a form not invented, 
 but largely perfected, by him. His pieces are, as it were, final 
 words terminating long anterior developments. They are the 
 sudden breaking into flame of combustible materials accumu- 
 lating during years, it may be during whole human lives, or even 
 generations, and of which the sudden flare brilliantly illumines a 
 wide extent of time and space. The incidents of the Ibsen drama 
 more frequently take place in a day, or at most in twice twenty- 
 four hours, and in this short space of time there are concentred 
 all the effects of the course of the world and of social institu- 
 tions on certain characters, in such a conspectus that the 
 destinies of the dramatis personae become clear to us from the 
 moment of their first appearance. TJie Doll's House, Ghosts^ 
 RosmersJwlm, The Pillars of Society, and Hedda Gabler comprise 
 about twenty-four hours; An Enemy of Society, The Wild Duck, 
 The Lady from the Sea, about thirty-six hours. It is the return 
 to the Aristotelian doctrine of the unities of time and space 
 with an orthodoxy compared with which the French classicists 
 of the age of Louis XIV. are heretics. I might well term 
 the Ibsenite technique a technique of fireworks, for it consists 
 in preparing long in advance a staging on which the suns, 
 Roman candles, squibs, fireballs and concluding fire-sheaves 
 are carefully placed in proper position. When all is ready the 
 curtain rises, and the artistically-constructed work begins to 
 crackle, explosion following explosion uninterruptedly with 
 thunder and lightning. This technique is certainly very 
 effective, but hardly true. In reality events rarely lead up to 
 a catastrophe so brilliant and succinct. In Nature all is 
 slowly prepared, and unrolls itself gradually, and the results 
 of human deeds covering years of time do not compress them- 
 selves into a few hours. Nature does not work epigrammatically. 
 She cannot trouble herself about Aristotelian unities, for she 
 has always an infinity of affairs of her own in progress at one 
 and the same time. As a matter of handicraft, one is certainly 
 often forced to admire the cleverness with which Ibsen guides 
 and knots the threads of his plot. Sometimes the labour is more 
 successful than at other times, but it always implies a great 
 expenditure of textile skill. Whoever sets most store on 
 truth in a poem that is, on the natural action of the laws 
 of life will often enough bring away from Ibsen's dramas
 
 340 DEGENERATION 
 
 an impression of improbability, and of toilsome and subtle 
 lucubrations. 
 
 The power with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches 
 a situation, an emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much 
 higher than his skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time, 
 which may be said to be the poetic counterpart of the painter's 
 artifice (difficult, but for the most part barren) of foreshortening 
 in space. Each of the terse words which suffice him has 
 something of the nature of a peephole, through which limitless 
 vistas are obtained. The plays of all peoples and all ages have 
 few situations at once so perfectly simple and so irresistibly 
 affecting as the scenes to cite only a few where Nora is 
 playing with her children,* where Dr. Rank relates that he is 
 doomed to imminent death by his inexorable disease, f where 
 
 * NORA {the children talk all at once to her during the following). And 
 so you have been having great fun ? That is splendid. Oh, really ! you 
 have been giving Emmy and Bob a slide, both at once ! Dear me! you are 
 quite a man, Ivar. Oh, give her to me a little, Mary Ann. My sweetheart ! 
 (Takes the smallest from the nurse, and dances it up and down.} Yes, yes ; 
 mother will dance with Bob, too. What ! did you have a game of snowballs 
 as well? Oh, I ought to have been there. No, leave them, Mary Ann ; I 
 will take their things off. No, no, let me do it ; it is so amusing. Go to the 
 flursery for awhile, you look so frozen. You'll find some hot coffee on the 
 stove. {The nurse goes to the room on the left. NORA takes off the 
 children's things and throws them down anywhere, while she lets the children 
 talk to each other and to her.} Really ! Then there was a big dog there 
 who ran after you all the way home? But I'm sure he didn't bite you. No; 
 dogs don't bite dear dolly little children. Don't peep into those parcels, 
 Ivar. You want to know what there is? Yes, you are the only people who 
 shall know. Oh, no, no, that is not pretty. What ! must we have a game ? 
 What shall it be, then? Hide and seek? Yes, let us play hide and seek. 
 Bob shall hide first. Am I to? Very well, I will hide first. A DoW$ 
 House, Griffith and Farran, p. 30. 
 
 f RANK (in NORA'S and H ELMER'S room}. [He has that day discovered 
 a symptom in himself which he knows is an infallible sign of approaching 
 death.] Yes, here is the dear place I know so well. It is so quiet and com- 
 fortable here with you two. 
 
 HELMER. You seemed to enjoy yourself exceedingly upstairs, too. 
 
 RANK. Exceedingly. Why should I not? Why shouldn't one get enjoy- 
 ir.ent out of everything in this world ? At any rate, as much and as long as 
 r.ne can. The wine was splendid. 
 
 HELMER. Especially the champagne. 
 
 RANK. Did you notice it. too ? It was perfectly incredible the quantity I 
 contrived to drink. . . . Well, why should one not have, a merry evening 
 aftci a well-spent day ? 
 
 HELMER. Well spent ? As to that, I have not much to boast of. 
 
 RANK (taf>pin him on the shoulder}. But I have, don't you see. 
 
 NORA. Then, you have certainly been engaged in some scientific investiga- 
 tion, Dr. Rank. 
 
 RANK. Quite right. . . . 
 
 NORA. And am I to congratulate you on the result? 
 
 RANK. By all means you must. 
 
 NORA. Then the result was a good one?
 
 EGO-MANIA 34i 
 
 Frau Alving with horror discerns his dissolute father* in her 
 only son, where the housekeeper, Frau Helseth, sees Rosmer 
 and Rebecca die in each other's arms,-f- etc. 
 
 Similarly, it must be acknowledged that Ibsen has created 
 some characters possessing a truth to life and a completeness 
 such as are not to be met with in any poet since Shakespeare. 
 Gina (in The Wild Duck) is one of the most profound creations of 
 world-literature almost as great as Sancho Panza, who inspired 
 
 RANK. The best possible, alike for the physician and patient namely, 
 certainty. 
 
 NORA (quickly and searchingly). Certainty ? 
 
 RANK. Complete certainty. Ought not I, upon the strength of it, to be 
 very merry this evening ? 
 
 NORA. Yes, you were quite right to be, Dr. Rank. ... I am sure you 
 are very fond of masquerade balls. 
 
 RANK. When there are plenty of interesting masks present, I certainly 
 am. . . . 
 
 HELMER. . . . But what character will you take [at our next masquerade]? 
 
 RANK. I am perfectly clear as to that, my dear friend. 
 
 HELMER. Well? 
 
 RANK. At the next masquerade I shall appear invisible. 
 
 HELMER. What a comical idea ! 
 
 RANK. Don't you know there is a big black hat haven't you heard 
 stories of the hat that made people invisible ? You pull it all over you, and 
 then nobody sees you. . . . But I am quite forgetting why I came in here. 
 Helmer, just give me a cigar one of the dark Havanas. . . . Thanks. 
 (He lights his cigar.) And now good-bye . . . and thank you for the light. 
 \He nods to them both and goes. A Doll's House, pp. 96-100, 
 
 * Frau Alving is speaking with Pastor Manders, and is just relating that 
 she was one day witness to a scene in the adjoining room which proved to 
 her that her departed husband was carrying on an intrigue with her maid- 
 servant. In the next room are Oswald, her son, and Regina, the offspring 
 of the intercourse of her husband with the maid-servant. 
 
 [From within the dining room comes the noise of a chair overturned, 
 and at the same moment is heard : 
 
 REGINA (sharply, but whispering). Oswald, take care ! Are you mad ? 
 Let me go ! 
 
 MRS. ALVING (starts in terror). Ah ! (She stares -wildly towards the 
 half-opened door j OSWALD is heard coughing and humming inside. A bottle 
 is uncorked?) 
 
 MANDERS (excited). What in the world is the matter? What is it, Mrs 
 Alving ? 
 
 MRS. ALVING (hoarsely). Ghosts ! The couple from the conservatory 
 liave risen again ! Ghosts, The Pillars of Society, and other Plays. By 
 Henrik Ibsen, Camelot Series, p. 150. 
 
 f Frau Helseth has in vain sought for Rosmer and Rebecca in the house. 
 
 MADAME HELSETH (goes to the window and looks out). Oh, good God ! 
 that white thing there ! My soul ! They're both of them out on the bridge ! 
 God forgive the sinful creatures if they're not in each other's arms ! 
 (Shrieks aloud) Oh down both of them ! Out into the mill-race ! Help ' 
 help ! (Her knees tremble, she holds on to the chair-back, shaking all over, 
 she can scarcely get the words out.) No. No help here. The dead wife 
 has taken them. Rosmerholm. London, Walter Scott, p. 144. The last 
 sentence is not a happy ona. It is commonplace, upsetiing the mood of the 
 heaier or reader.
 
 342 DEGENERATION 
 
 it. Ibsen has had the daring to create a female Sancho, and 
 in his temerity has come very near to Cervantes, whom no one 
 has equalled. If Gina is not quite so overpowering as Sancho, 
 it is because there is wanting in her his contrast to Don 
 Quixote. Her Don Quixote, Hjalmar, is no genuine, convinced 
 idealist, but merely a miserable self-deluding burlesquer of the 
 ideal. None the less, no poet since the illustrious Spanish 
 master has succeeded in creating such an embodiment of plain, 
 jolly, healthy common-sense, of practical tact without anxiety 
 as to things eternal, and of honest fulfilment of all proximate, 
 obvious duties, without a suspicion of higher moral obligations, 
 as this Gina, e.g., in the scene where Hjalmar returns home after 
 having spent the night out.* Hjalmar also is a perfect crea- 
 tion, in which Ibsen has not once succumbed to the cogent 
 temptation to exaggerate, but has exercised most entranc- 
 ingly that ' self-restraint ' in every word which, as Goethe said, 
 ' reveals the master.' Little Hedwig (again in The Wild Duck}, 
 the aunt Juliane Tesman (in Hedda Gabler), perhaps also the 
 childishly egoistical consumptive Lyngstrand (in The Lady frcm 
 the Sea), are not inferior to these characters. It should, however, 
 be noticed that, with the exception of Gina, Hjalmar and 
 Hedwig, the lifelike and artistically delightful persons in Ibsen's 
 dramas never play the chief parts, but move in subordinate 
 tasks around the central figures. The latter are not human 
 beings of flesh and blood, but abstractions such as are evoked 
 by a morbidly - excited brain. They are attempts at the 
 embodiment of Ibsenite doctrines, Jtomunculi, originating not 
 from natural procreation, but through the black art of the poet. 
 
 * Hjalmar has passed the night away from home, having learned that his 
 wife before her marriage with him had had a liaison with another. He 
 returns in the morning, crapulous and hipped. He is bombastic and melo- 
 dramatic, while his wife is calm and practical : 
 
 GlNA (standing with the brush in her hand, and looking at him). Oh, 
 there now, Ekdal ; so you've come after all ? 
 
 HJALMAR (comes in and answers in a toneless voice). I come only to 
 depart again immediately. 
 
 GINA. Yes, yes ; I suppose so. But, Lord help us, what a sight you are ! 
 
 HJALMAR. A sight ? 
 
 GINA. And your nice winter coat, too ! Well, that's done for. . . . Then, 
 you are still bent on leaving us, Ekdal ? 
 
 HJALMAR. Yes ; that's a matter of course, I should think. 
 
 GlNA. Well, well . . . (Sets a tray -with coffee, etc., on the table.) Here's 
 a drop of something warm, if you'd like it. And there's some bread and 
 butter and a snack of salt meat. 
 
 HJALMAR (glancing at the tray). Salt meat! Never under this roof! 
 It's true I haven't had a mouthful of solid food for nearly twenty-four hours ; 
 but no matter. . . . Oh no, I must go out into the storm and the snow- 
 blast go from house to house and seek shelter for my father and myself. 
 
 GINA. But you've got no hat, Ekdal. You've lost your bat, you know, etc, 
 The IVild Duck, Act V.
 
 EGO-MANIA 343 
 
 This is even admitted, although reluctantly and with reserva- 
 tion, by one of his most raving panegyrists, the French pro- 
 fessor, Auguste Ehrhard.* Doubtless Ibsen takes immense 
 pains to rouge and powder into a semblance of life the talking 
 puppets who are to represent his notions. He appends to them 
 all sorts of little peculiarities for the purpose of giving them an 
 individual physiognomy. But this perpetually recurring imbecile 
 ' Eh ?' of Tesman-f- (in Hedda G abler), this ' dash it all !' and 
 stealthy nibbling of sweetmeats by NoraX (in A DolFs House\ 
 this 'smoking a large meerschaum' and champagne-drinking 
 of Oswald (in Ghosts}, do not delude the attentive observer as 
 to their being anything but automata. In spite of the poet's 
 artifices, one sees, behind the thin varnish of flesh-colour, the 
 hinges and joints of the mechanism, and hears, above the tones 
 of the phonographs concealed in them, the creaking and grating 
 of the machinery. 
 
 I have endeavoured to do justice to the high poetical endow- 
 ment of Ibsen, and shall sometimes be able in the course of this 
 inquiry to recognise this gift again. Is it this, however, which 
 alone or chiefly has gained for him his admirers in all lands ? 
 Do his retinue of fifers and bagpipers prize him for his homely 
 emotional scenes, and for his truly lifelike accessory figures ? 
 No. They glorify something else in him. They discover in his 
 pieces world-pictures of the greatest truth, the happiest poetic 
 use of scientific methods, clearness and in'cisiveness of ideas, a 
 fiercely revolutionary desire for freedom, and a modernity preg- 
 nant with the future. Now we will test and examine these 
 -affirmations seriatim, and see if they can be supported by 
 
 * Auguste Ehrhard, Professor k la Faculte" des Lettres de Clermont- 
 Ferrand, Henrik Ibsen et le Theatre contempcra.in, Paris, 1892, p. 233 : 
 ' Ibsen's characters may in general be divided into two categories those 1.1 
 which the moral element, the life of the soul, dominates, and those in which 
 the animal prevails. The first are, for the most part, mouthpieces of the 
 theories dear to the poet. . . . They have their primary origin in the brain 
 of the poet. ... It is he who gives them life.' 
 
 f Right out here so early eh ? . . . Well, djd you get safe home from 
 the quay eh ? Look here. Let me untie the bow eh ? etc. Heddn 
 Gabler. London, W. Heinemann, pp. 7-9. 
 
 J NORA. Yes, I really am now in a state of extraordinary happiness. There 
 is only one thing in the world that I should really like. 
 
 RANK. Well, and what's that ? 
 
 NORA. There's something that I should so like to say but for Torvald to 
 hear it. 
 
 RANK. Then, why don't you say it to him ? 
 
 NORA. Because I daren't, for it sounds so ugly. . . . 
 
 RANK. In that case I would advise you not to say it. But you might say 
 it to us, at any rate. . . . What is it that you would like to say in Helmer's 
 presence ? 
 
 NORA. I should like to shout with all my heart Oh, dash it all! A 
 Doll's House, op. tit., pp. 26, 27.
 
 344 DEGENERATION 
 
 Ibsen's works, or are merely the arbitrary and undemonstrable 
 expressions of aesthetic wind-bags. 
 
 It is pretended that Ibsen is before all things exemplary irt 
 truthfulness. He has even become the model of ' realism.' A* 
 a matter of fact, since Alexandre Dumas pere, author of The 
 Three Musketeers and Monte Cristo, no writer has heaped up in 
 his works so many startling improbabilities as Ibsen. (I say im- 
 probabilities, because I dare not say impossibilities; for, after all, 
 everything is possible as the unheard-of exploit of some fool,. 
 or as the extraordinary effect of a unique accident.) Is it 
 conceivable that (in Ghosts} the joiner Engstrand, wishing^ 
 to open a tavern for sailors, should call upon his own daughter 
 to be the odalisque of his 'establishment' this daughter 
 who reminds him that she has been ' brought up in the house 
 of Madam Alving, widow of a lord-in-waiting,' that she has? 
 been treated ' almost as a child of the house '? Not that I 
 imagine Engstrand to be possessed of any moral scruples. But 
 a man of this stamp knows that one woman does not suffice for 
 his house; and since he must engage others, he would certainly not 
 turn to his daughter, bred as she was in the midst of higher habits: 
 of life, and knowing that, if she wishes to lead a life of pleasure,. 
 it would not be necessary to become straightway a prostitute for 
 sailors. Is it conceivable that Pastor Manders (Ghosts'], a 
 liberally educated clergyman in the Norway of to-day, a country 
 of flourishing insurance companies, banks, railways, prosperous-, 
 newspapers, etc., should dissuade Madam Alving from insuring- 
 against fire the asylum she had just founded ? ' For my own 
 part,' he says, ' I should not see the smallest impropriety in- 
 guarding against all contingencies. ... I mean [by really 
 responsible people] men in such independent and influential 
 positions that one cannot help allowing some weight to their 
 opinions. . . . People would be only too ready to interpret our 
 action as a sign that neither you nor I had the right faith in a 
 Higher Providence.' Does Ibsen really wish to make anyone 
 believe that in Norway there are persons who have religious 
 scruples concerning insurance against fire? Has not this- 
 nonsensical idea come into his head simply because he wishes- 
 to have the asylum burned down and finally destroyed ? For 
 this purpose Madam Alving must have no money to rebuild the 
 asylum, it must not be insured, and hence Ibsen thought it 
 necessary to assign a motive for the omission of the insurance. 
 A poet who introduces a fire into his work, as a symbol and 
 also as an active agent for it has the dramatic purpose of 
 destroying the lying reputation lor charity of the defunct sinner 
 Alving should also have the courage to leave unexplained the 
 omission of the insurance, strange as it may seem. Oswald 
 Alving relates to his mother (Ghosts) that a Paris doctor on>
 
 EGO-MANIA 345 
 
 examining him had told him he had a ' kind of softening of the 
 brain.' Now, I appeal to all the doctors of the world i-f they 
 have ever said plainly to a patient, ' You have softening of the 
 brain.' To the family it perhaps may be revealed, to the patient 
 never. Chiefly because, if the diagnosis be correct, the invalid 
 would not understand the remark, and would certainly no longer 
 be in a fit state to go alone to the doctor. But for yet another 
 reason these words are impossible. In any case, Oswald's 
 disease could not have been a softening, but a hardening, a 
 callous, sclerotic condition of the brain. 
 
 In A Doll's House Helmer, who is depicted as somewhat 
 sensual, although prosaic, homely, practical, and common- 
 place, says to his Nora : ' Is that my lark who is twittering 
 outside there ? . . . Is the little squirrel running about ? . . . 
 Has my little spendthrift bird been wasting more money ? . . . 
 Come, come ; my lark must not let her wings droop immediately. 
 . . . What do people call the bird who always spends every- 
 thing ? . . . My lark is the dearest little thing in the world ; 
 but she needs a very great deal of money. . . . And I couldn't 
 wish you to be anything but exactly what you are my own true 
 little lark. . . .' And it is thus that a husband, a bank director 
 and barrister, after eight years of married life, speaks to his wife, 
 the mother of his three children ; and not in a momentary out- 
 burst of playful affection, but in the full light of an ordinary day, 
 and in an interminable scene of seven pages (pp. 2-8), with a 
 view to giving us an idea of the habitually prevalent tone in this 
 'doll's home!' I should much like to know what my readers of 
 both sexes who have been married at least eight years think of 
 this specimen of Ibsen's ' realism.' 
 
 In The Pillars of Society all the characters talk about 
 'society.' 'You are to rise and support society, brother-in-law/ 
 says Miss Hcssel, 'earnestly and with emphasis.' ' If you strike 
 this blow, you ruin me utterly, and not only me, but also a great 
 and blessed future for the community which was the home of 
 your childhood.' And a little further on : ' See, this I have 
 dared for the good of the community ! . . . Don't you see that 
 it is society itself that forces us into these subterfuges?' The 
 persons thus holding forth are a wholesale merchant and consul, 
 and a school-mistress who has long resided in America, and has 
 broad views. Can the word ' society ' in the mouth of cultivated 
 people, when so used, have any other meaning than ' social 
 edifice ?' Well, but the characters in the piece, as it is again and 
 again repeated, employ the word 'society' in reference to the 
 well-to-do classes in a small seaside place in Norway that is, 
 to a clique of six or eight families ! Ibsen makes the readers of 
 his piece believe that it is a question of upholding the social 
 edifice, and they learn with astonishment that this only con-
 
 346 DEGENERATION 
 
 cerns the protection of a diminutive coterie of Philistines in a 
 northern Gotham. 
 
 The American ship Indian Girl is undergoing repairs in 
 Consul Bernick's dock. Her hull is quite rotten. If she 
 is sent to sea she will assuredly founder. Bernick, however, 
 insists that she shall sail in two days. His foreman Aune 
 pronounces this impossible. Then Bernick threatens Aune 
 with dismissal, at which the latter yields, and promises that 
 4 in two days the Indian Girl will be ready to sail.' Bernick 
 kno\vs that he is sending the Indian Girl's crew of eighteen men 
 to certain death. And why does he commit this wholesale 
 murder? He gives the following explanation: 'I have my 
 reasons for hurrying on the affair. Have you read this morn- 
 ing's paper ? Ah ! then you know that the Americans have 
 been making disturbances again. The shameless pack put the 
 whole town topsy-turvy. Not a night passes without fights in 
 the taverns or on the street, not to speak of other abominations. 
 . . . And who gets the blame for all this disturbance ? It is 
 I yes, I that suffer for it. These newspaper scribblers are 
 always covertly carping at us for giving our whole attention to 
 the Palm Tree. And I, whose mission it is to be an example to 
 my fellow-citizens, must have such things thrown in my teeth ! 
 I cannot bear it. It won't do for me to have my name be- 
 spattered in this way. . . . Not just now; precisely at this 
 moment I need all the respect and good-will of my fellow- 
 citizens. I have a great undertaking on hand, as you have 
 probably heard ; but if evil-disposed persons succeed in shaking 
 people's unqualified confidence in me, it may involve me in the 
 greatest difficulties. So I must silence these carping and spite- 
 ful scribblers at any price, and that is why I give you till the 
 day after to-morrow.' This paltry motive for the coldly-planned 
 murder of eighteen men is so ridiculous that even Ehrhard, who 
 admires everything in Ibsen, dares not defend it, and timidly 
 remarks that ' the author does not very well explain why the 
 anxiety for his reputation should require the sending to sea of 
 a vessel which he has not had time thoroughly to repair.'* 
 
 At the head of a delegation of his fellow-citizens, sent to 
 thank him for the establishment of a railway, Pastor Rorlund 
 delivers an address to Bernick in which the following passages 
 occur : ' We have often expressed to you our gratitude for the 
 broad moral foundation upon which you have, so to speak, built 
 up our society. This time we chiefly hail in you the . . . 
 citizen, who has taken the initiative in an undertaking which, 
 we are credibly assured, will give a powerful impetus to the 
 temporal prosperity and well-being of the community. . . . You 
 are in an eminent sense the pillar and corner-stone of this com- 
 
 * Auguste Ehrhard, op. cil., p. 270.
 
 EGO-MANIA 347 
 
 munity. . . . And it is just this light of disinterestedness 
 shining over all your actions that is so unspeakably beneficent, 
 especially in these times. You are now on the point of procuring" 
 for us I do not hesitate to say the word plainly and prosaically 
 a railway. . . . But you cannot reject a slight token of your 
 grateful fellow - citizens' appreciation, least of all on this 
 momentous occasion, when, according to the assurances of 
 practical men, we are standing on the threshold of a new era.' 
 I have not interrupted by a single remark or note of exclama- 
 tion this unheard-of balderdash. It shall produce its own 
 unaided effect upon the reader. If this nonsense appeared in 
 a burlesque farce, it would be hardly funny enough, but other- 
 wise acceptable. Now, this claims to be ' realistic ' ! We are 
 to take Ibsen's word for it that Pastor Rorlund was sober when 
 he made this speech ! A more insulting demand has never 
 been made by an author on his readers. 
 
 In An Enemy of Society the subject treats of a rather in- 
 comprehensible bathing establishment, comprising at once 
 mineral waters, medicinal baths and sea-bathing. The doctor 
 of the establishment has discovered that the springs are con- 
 taminated with typhoid bacilli, and insists that the water shall 
 be taken from a place higher up in the mountains, where it 
 would not be polluted by sewage. He is the more urgent in his 
 demands, as without this precaution a fatal epidemic will break 
 out among the visitors. And to this the burgomaster of the 
 town is supposed to reply : ' The existing supply of water for 
 the baths is once for all a fact, and must naturally be treated 
 as such. But probably the directors, at some future time, will 
 not be indisposed to take into their consideration whether, by 
 making certain pecuniary sacrifices, it may not be possible to 
 introduce some improvements.' This is a question of a place 
 which, as Ibsen insists, has staked its future on the development 
 of its youthful bathing establishment ; the place is situated in 
 Norway, in a small district where all the inhabitants are 
 mutually acquainted, and where every case of illness and death 
 is noticed by all. And the burgomaster will run the risk of 
 having a number of the visitors at the establishment attacked 
 with typhoid, when he is forewarned that this will certainly 
 happen if the conduit pipes of the spring are not transferred. 
 Without having an exaggeratedly high opinion of the burgo- 
 master mind in general, I deny that any idiot such as Ibsen 
 depicts is at the head of the local administration of any town 
 whatsoever in Europe. 
 
 Tesman, in Hedda Gablcr, expects that his publication, Domestic 
 Industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages, will secure him a 
 professorship in a college. But he has a dangerous competitor 
 in Ejlert Lovborg, who has published a book on The General
 
 348 DEGENERATION 
 
 March of Civilization. This work has already made a ' great 
 sensation,' but the sequel is far to surpass this, and ' treats of 
 the future.' ' But, good gracious ! we don't know anything 
 about that !' someone objects. ' No ; but there are several 
 things though can be said about it, all the same. ... It is 
 divided into two sections. The first is about the civilizing 
 forces of the future, and the other is about the civilizing progress 
 of the future." Special stress is laid upon the fact that it lies- 
 wholly outside the domain of science, and consists in mere 
 prophecy. ' Do you believe it impossible to reproduce such a. 
 work that it cannot be written a second time ? No. . . . For the 
 inspiration, you know. . . .' We are acquainted, were it only 
 through popular histories of morals such as the Deinocritus of 
 Karl Julius Weber, with the strange questions with which the 
 casuists of the Middle Ages used to occupy themselves. But 
 that, in our century, such works as those of Tesman and Lb'vborg 
 could gain for their authors a professorship of any kind in either 
 hemisphere, or even the position of privat docent, is an infantile 
 invention, fit to raise a laugh in all academical circles. 
 
 In The Lady from the Sea the mysterious sailor returns to 
 find that his old sweetheart has been for some years the wife of 
 Dr. Wangel. He urges her to follow him, saying she really 
 belongs to him. The husband is present at the interview. He 
 shows the stranger that he is wrong in wishing to carry off Ellida. 
 He represents to the sailor that it would be preferable if he 
 addressed himself to him (the husband), and not to the wife. 
 He mildly remonstrates with the stranger for addressing Ellida 
 with the familiar 'thou,' and calling her by her Christian name. 
 ' Such a familiarity is not customary with us, sir.' The scene is 
 unspeakably comic, and would be worthy of reproduction in its 
 entirety. We will limit ourselves to quoting the conclusion : 
 
 STRANGER. To-morrow night I will come again, and then I shall look, 
 for you here. You must wait for me here in the garden, for I prefer settling 
 the matter with you alone. You understand ? 
 
 ELLIDA (in low, trembling tone). Do you hear that, Wangel ? 
 
 WANGEL. Only keep calm. We shall know how to prevent this visit. 
 
 STRANGER. Good-bye for the present, Ellida. So to-morrow night 
 
 ELLIDA (imploringly). Oh, no, no ! Do not come to-morrow night fc 
 Never come here again ! 
 
 STRANGER. And should you, then, have a mind to follow me over seas ? 
 
 ELLIDA. Oh, don't look at me like that ! 
 
 STRANGER. I only mean that you must then be ready to set out. 
 
 WANGEL. Go up to the house, Ellida, etc. 
 
 And Ibsen depicts Wangel, not as a senile, debile old man, but 
 in the prime of life and in full possession of all his faculties ! 
 
 All these crack-brained episodes are, ho\vever r far surpassed by* 
 the scene in Rostttetsfwlm, \vhtrre Rebecca confesses to the doughty 
 Rosmer that she is consumed by ardent passion for him :
 
 EGO-MANIA 349 
 
 "RoSMER. What have you felt? Specie so that I can understand you. 
 
 REBECCA. It came over me this wild, uncontrollable desire oh, Rosmer ! 
 
 ROSMER. Desire? You! For what ? 
 
 REBECCA. For you. 
 
 Ros.MKR (tries to spring up). What is this ? [Idiot !] 
 
 REBECCA (stops him}. Sit still, dear; there is more to tell. 
 
 ROSMER. And you mean to say that you love me in that way? 
 
 REBECCA. I thought that it should be called love. Yes, I thought it was 
 love ; but it was not. It was what I said. It was a wild, uncontrollable 
 ocsire. ... It came upon me like a storm on the sea. It was like one of 
 the storms we sometimes have in the North in the winter-time. It seizes 
 you and sweeps you along with it whither it will. Resistance is out of 
 the question.' 
 
 Rosmer, the object of this burning passion, is forty-three years 
 old, and has been a clergyman. This makes it somewhat 
 droll, but not impossible, for erotomaniacs can love all sorts of 
 creatures, even boots.* What, however, is inconceivable is the 
 way in which the nymphomaniac sets about satisfying her 'wild, 
 uncontrollable desire,' this 'storm upon the sea' which 'seizes 
 you, and sweeps you along with it.' She had become the friend 
 of Rosmer's sickly wife, and had for eighteen months tormented 
 her by hinting that Rosmer is unhappy because she has no 
 -children, that he loves her, the nymphomaniac, but has con- 
 trolled his passion as long as his wife is living. By means of this 
 poison, patiently and unceasingly dropped into her soul, she had 
 happily driven her to suicide. After a year and a half! To 
 appease her ' wild, uncontrollable passion ' ! This is exactly as 
 if a man driven wild by hunger should, with a view to satisfy- 
 ing his craving, devise a deep plan for obtaining a field by fraud, 
 so that he might grow wheat, have it ground, and afterwards bake 
 himself a splendid loaf, which would then be Oh, so delicious ! 
 The reader may judge for himself if this is the usual way in 
 which famished persons, or nymphomaniacs over whom passion 
 * sweeps like a storm upon the sea,' satisfy their impulses. 
 
 Such are the presentations of the world's realities as figured 
 to himself by this ' realist ' ! Many of his infantile or silly lucu- 
 brations are petty, superficial details, and a benevolent friend, 
 with some experience of life and some common-sense, could easily 
 have preserved him in advance from making himself ridiculous. 
 Others of his inventions, however, touch the very essence of his 
 poems and convert these into out and out grotesque moonshine. 
 In The Pillars of Society, Bernick, the man who calmly plans the 
 
 * Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, P sychopathia sexitalis mit besonderer Beriick- 
 sichtigung der contrdren Sexualcmpfindung. Eine klinisch-forensische 
 Studie. Dritte vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage. Stuttgart, 1888. See 
 (o. 120) the observation relative to the young nobleman who was erotically 
 excited by his ' boot-thoughts.' I cite this "single case only, but it would be 
 possible to instance dozens of cases where nightcaps, shoe-nails, white 
 aprons, the wrinkled head of an old woman, etc., have excited sensuality in 
 ine highest degree.
 
 350 DEGENERATION 
 
 murder of eighteen men to maintain his reputation as a capable 
 dock-owner (we may remark, in passing, the absurdity of this 
 means for attaining such an end), all at once confesses to his 
 fellow-citizens, without any compulsion, and solely on the advice 
 of Miss Hessel, that he has been a villain and a criminal. In 
 A Dolfs House, the wife, who was only a moment before playing 
 so tenderly with her children, suddenly abandons these children 
 without a thought for them.* In Rosmersholm we are to believe 
 that the nymphomaniac Rebecca, while in constant intercourse 
 with the object of her flame, has become chaste and virtuous, 
 etc. Many of Ibsen's principal characters present this spectacle 
 of impossible and incomprehensible metamorphoses, so that 
 they look like figures composed of odd halves, which some 
 bungling artisan has stuck together. 
 
 After the life-like truthfulness of Ibsen, let us inquire into the 
 scientific character of his work. This reminds us of the civiliza- 
 tion of Liberian negroes. The constitution and laws of that West 
 African republic read very much like those of the United States 
 of North America, and on paper command our respect. But 
 anyone living in Liberia very soon recognises the fact that these 
 black republicans are savages, having no idea of the political 
 institutions nominally existing among them, of their code of 
 laws, etc. Ibsen likes to give himself the appearance of stand- 
 ing in the domain of natural science and of profiting by its latest 
 results. In his plays Darwin is quoted. He has evidently 
 dipped, though with a careless hand, into books on heredity, 
 and has picked up something about medical science. But the 
 scanty, ludicrously misunderstood stock phrases which have re- 
 mained in his memory are made use of by him much as my 
 illustrative Liberian negro uses the respectable paper collars 
 and top-hats of Europe. The expert can never preserve his 
 gravity when Ibsen displays his scientific and medical know- 
 ledge. 
 
 Heredity is his hobby-horse, which he mounts in every one of 
 his pieces. There is not a single trait in his personages, a single 
 peculiarity of character, a single disease, that he does not trace 
 to heredity. In A Doll's House, Dr. Rank's * poor innocent 
 spine must do penance for "his" father's notions of amusement 
 when he was a lieutenant in the army.' Helmer explains to 
 Nora that * a misty atmosphere of lying brings contagion into 
 the whole family. Every breath the children draw contains 
 
 * A DoWs House, p. 112 : 
 
 HELMER. To forsake your home, your husband, and your children ! And 
 only think what people will say about it. 
 
 NORA. I cannot take that into consideration. 1 only know that to go is 
 necessary for me. . . . 
 
 HELMER. . . . Your duties to . . . your children ? 
 
 NORA. I have other duties equally sacred . . . duties towards myself, etc.
 
 EGO-MANIA 351 
 
 some germ of evil. . . . Nearly all men who go to ruin early 
 have had untruthful mothers. ... In most cases it comes from 
 the mother; but the father naturally works in the same direc- 
 tion.' And again : ' Your father's low principles you have 
 inherited, every one of them. No religion, no morality, no 
 sense of duty.' In Ghosts Oswald has learned from the extra- 
 ordinary doctor in Paris who told him he had softening of the 
 brain, that he had inherited his malady from his father.* 
 Regina, the natural daughter of the late Alving, exactly re- 
 sembles her mother. 
 
 REGINA (to herself). So mother was that kind of woman, after all. 
 
 MRS. ALVING. Your mother had many good qualities, Regina. 
 
 REGINA. Yes ; but she was one of that sort, all the same. Oh ! I've often 
 suspected it. . . A poor girl must make the best of her young days. . . . 
 And 1, too, want to enjoy my life, Mrs. Alving. 
 
 MRS. ALVING. Yes, I see you do. But don't throw yourself away, Regina. 
 
 REGINA. Oh ! what must be, must be. If Oswald takes after his father, I 
 take after my mother, I dare say. 
 
 In Rosmersholm Rebecca's nymphomania is explained by the 
 fact that she is the natural daughter of a Lapland woman of 
 doubtful morals. ' I believe your whole conduct is determined 
 by your origin,' Rector Kroll-says to her (p. 82). Rosmer 
 never laughs, because 'it is a trait of his family.' He is ' the 
 descendant of the men that look down on us from these walls ' 
 (p. 80). His ' spirit is deeply rooted in his ancestry ' (p. 80). 
 Hilda, the stepdaughter of the 'Lady from the Sea,' says: 'I 
 should not wonder if some fine day she went mad. . . . Her 
 mother went mad, too. She died mad. I know that.' In The 
 Wild Duck nearly everyone has a hereditary mark. Gregers 
 Werle, the malignant imbecile, who holds and proclaims his 
 passion for gossip as an ardent desire for truth, inherits this 
 craze from his mother. t Little Hedwig becomes blind, like her 
 father, old Werle. | 
 
 * Ghosts, p. 170 : OSWALD. At last he said, 'You have been worm-eaten 
 from your birth.' ... I didn't understand either, and begged of him to give 
 me a clearer explanation. And then the old cynic said, 'The father's sins 
 are visited upon the children.' And p. 194 : OSWALD. The disease I have as 
 my birthright (he points to his forehead, and adds -very softly) is seated here. 
 
 t The Wild Duck, Act III. : 
 
 GREGERS. Besides, if I'm to go on living, I must try and find some cure 
 for my sick conscience. 
 
 WERLE. It will never be well. Your conscience has been sickly from 
 childhood. That's an inheritance from your mother, Gregers it is the only 
 inheritance she left you. . . . 
 
 RELLING. But, deuce take it, don't you see the fellow's mad, cracked, 
 demented ! 
 
 GINA. There, you hear ! His mother before him had mad fits like that 
 sometimes. 
 
 t The Wild Duck, Act II. : 
 
 HJALMAR. She is in danger of losing her eyesight. 
 
 GREGERS. Becoming blind ?
 
 352 DEGENERATION 
 
 In the earlier philosophical dramas the same idea is constantly 
 repeated. Brand gets his obstinacy, and Peer Gynt his lively, 
 extravagant imagination, from the mother. Ibsen has evidently 
 read Lucas's book on the first principles of heredity, and has 
 borrowed from it uncritically. It is true that Lucas believes in 
 the inheritance even of notions and feelings as complex and as 
 nearly related to specific facts as, e.g., the horror of doctors,* and 
 that he does not doubt the transmission of diseased deviations 
 from the norm, e.g., the appearance of blindness at a definite 
 age.-f Lucas, however, whose merits are not to be denied, did 
 not sufficiently distinguish between that which the individual 
 receives in its material genesis from its parents, and that which 
 is subsequently suggested by family life and example, by con- 
 tinuous existence in the same conditions as its parents, etc. 
 Ibsen is the true ' man of one book.' He abides by his Lucas. 
 If he had read Weismann.J and, above all, Galton, he would 
 have known that nothing is more obscure and apparently 
 more capricious, than the course of heredity. For the individual 
 is, says Galton, the result the arithmetic mean of three dif- 
 ferent quantities : its father, its mother and the whole species, 
 represented by the double series, going back to the beginnings 
 of all terrestrial life, of its paternal and maternal progenitors. 
 This third datum is the unknown quantity the x in the pro- 
 blem. Reversions to distant ancestors may make the individual 
 wholly unlike its parents, and the influence of the species so far 
 exceed, as a general rule, those of the immediate progenitors 
 that children who are the exact cast of their father or mother, 
 especially with respect to the most complex manifestations of 
 personality, of character, capacities and inclinations, are the 
 greatest rarities. But Ibsen is not at all concerned about 
 seriously justifying his ideas on heredity in a scientific manner. 
 As we shall see later on, these ideas have their root in his 
 mysticism ; Lucas's work was for him only a lucky treasure-trove, 
 
 HjALMAR. . . . But the doctor has warned us. It's coming, inexorably. 
 
 GREGERS. What an awful misfortune ! How do you account for it? 
 
 HJALMAR {sighs). Hereditary, no doubt. 
 
 Again, Act IV. : 
 
 MRS. SORBY. . . . He (Werle) is going blind. 
 
 HJALMAR (with a start). Going blind ? That's strange Werle, too, be- 
 coming blind ! 
 
 * Dr Prosper Lucas, Traitt philosophique et physiologique de rHtrtditl 
 naturelle dans les lats de Sante" et de Maladie du Systems nerveux, etc. (The 
 title occupies seven lines more !) Paris, 1847, 2 volumes, t. i., p. 250. (It 
 appears that Montaigne had this inherited horror of doctors.) 
 
 f Lucas, op. '/., t. i., pp. 391-420 : De Vhere'ditt ' des modes sensitifs de la vue. 
 On page 400 he tells of a family in which the mother became blind ai the age 
 of twenty-one years, and the children at sixteen and seventeen respectively, etc. 
 
 J August Weismann, Ueber die Vererbung. Jena, 1883. 
 
 F. Galton, Natural Inheritance. London, 1 888.
 
 EGO-MANIA 353 
 
 which he seized on with joy, because it offered him the possi- 
 bility of scientifically cloaking his mystic obsession. 
 
 Ibsen's excursions in the domain of medical science, which he 
 hardly ever denies himself, are most delightful. In The Pillars 
 of Society Rector Rorlund glorifies the women of his coterie as a 
 kind of 'sisters of mercy who pick lint.' Pick lint ! In an age 
 of antiseptics and aseptics ! Let Ibsen only take into his head 
 to enter any surgical ward with his ' picked lint '! He would be 
 astonished at the reception given to him and his lint In An 
 Enemy of Society Dr. Stockmann declares that the water of the 
 baths with its ' millions of bacilli is absolutely injurious to health, 
 whether used internally or externally.' The only bacilli which 
 can be referred to in this scene, as throughout the whole piece, 
 are the typhoid bacilli of Eberth. Now, it may be true that 
 bathing in contaminated water may produce Biskra boils, and 
 perhaps beri-beri ; but it would be difficult for Dr. Stockmann 
 and Ibsen to instance a single case of typhoid fever contracted 
 through bathing in water containing bacilli. In A Doll's House 
 Helmer's life 'depended on a journey abroad.' That might be 
 true for a European in the tropics, or for anyone living in a 
 fever-district. But in Norway there is no such thing as an 
 acute illness in which the life of the invalid depends on ' a 
 journey abroad.' Further on Dr. Rank says (p. 60) : ' In the 
 last few days I have had a general stock-taking of my inner 
 man. Bankruptcy ! Before a month is over I shall be food 
 for worms in the churchyard. . . . There is only one more in- 
 vestigation to be made, and when I have made it I shall know 
 exactly at what time dissolution will take place.' According 
 to his own declaration, Dr. Rank suffers from disease of the 
 dorsal marrow (it is true that he speaks of the dorsal column, but 
 the mistaken expression need not be taken too rigidly). Ibsen 
 is evidently thinking of consumption of the spinal marrow. 
 Now, there is in this disease absolutely no symptom which could 
 with certainty authorize the prediction of death three weeks 
 beforehand ; there is no ' general stock-taking of the inner 
 man' which the invalid, if he were a doctor, could carry out on 
 himself to gain a clear knowledge of ' when the dissolution ' was 
 to take place ; and there is no form of consumption of the spinal 
 marrow which would allow the invalid four weeks before his 
 death (not an accidental death, but one necessitated by his 
 disease) to go to a ball, drink immoderately of champagne, and 
 afterwards to take an affecting leave of his friends. Oswald 
 Alving's illness in Ghosts is, from a clinical standpoint, quite as 
 childishly depicted as that of Rank. From all that is said in the 
 piece the disease inherited by Oswald from his father can only 
 be diagnosed either as syphilis hereditaria tarda, or dementia 
 paralytica. The first of these diseases is out of the question, 
 
 23
 
 354 DEGENERATION 
 
 for Oswald is depicted as a model of manly strength and health.* 
 And even if, in exceptional and extremely rare cases, the 
 malady does not show itself till after the victim is well on in 
 his twenties, it yet betrays itself from the earliest childhood by 
 certain phenomena of degeneracy which would prevent even a 
 mother, blinded by love and pride, from glorifying her son's 
 ^ outer self in the style of Mrs. Alving. Certain minor features 
 might perhaps indicate dementia paralyiica, as, for example, 
 Oswald's sensual excitability, the artless freedom with which 
 he speaks before his mother of the amours of his friends in 
 Paris, or gives expression to his pleasure at the sight of the 
 ' glorious ' Regina, the levity with which, at the first sight of 
 this girl, he makes plans for his marriage, etc.-f But together 
 with these exact, though subordinate, features there appear 
 others infinitely more important, which wholly preclude the 
 diagnosis of dementia paralytica. There is in Oswald no trace 
 of the megalomania which is never absent in the first stage of 
 this malady ; he is anxious and depressed, while the sufferer 
 from general paralysis feels extremely happy, and sees life 
 through rose-coloured spectacles. Oswald forebodes and dreads 
 an outburst of madness a fact which I, for my part, have never 
 observed in a paralytic, nor found indicated by any clinicist what- 
 ever. Finally, Oswald's dementia declares itself with a sudden- 
 ness and completeness found in acute mania only ; but the de- 
 scription given of Oswald in the last scene his immobility, his 
 ' dull and toneless ' voice, and his idiotic murmuring of the 
 words 'the sun, the sun,' repeated half a dozen times does not 
 in the remotest degree correspond with the picture of acute 
 mania. 
 
 The poet has naturally no need to understand anything of 
 pathology. But when he pretends to describe real life, he 
 ought to be honest. He should not get out of his depth in 
 scientific observation and precision simply because these are 
 demanded or preferred by the age. The more ignorant the 
 poet is in pathology, the greater is the test of his veracity given 
 by his clinical pictures. As he cannot, in his lay capacity, draw 
 on his imagination for them by combining clinical experiences 
 and reminiscences of books, it is necessary that he shall have seen 
 with his own eyes each case represented to depict it accurately. 
 Shakespeare was likewise no physician ; and, besides, what did 
 the physicians of his time know ? Yet we can to this day still 
 
 * Page 1 36 : 
 
 MRS. ALVING. I know one who has kept both his inner and his outer 
 self unharmed. Only look at him, Mr. Manders. 
 
 f Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, p. 139. The author here cites all 
 the features in question as characteristic of the first stage" of general paralysis : 
 ' Libidinous talk, unconstraint in intercourse with the opposite sex, plans of 
 marriage.'
 
 EGO-MANIA 355 
 
 diagnose without hesitation the dementia senilis of Lear, 
 Hamlet's weakness of will through nervous exhaustion (neuras- 
 thenic ' aboalie '), the melancholia, accompanied with optical 
 hallucination, of Lady Macbeth. Why ? Because Shakespeare 
 introduced into his creations things really seen. Ibsen, on 
 the contrary, has freely invented his invalids, and that this 
 method could, in the hands of a layman, only lead to laughable 
 results, needs no proof. A moving or affecting situation offers 
 itself to his imagination that of a man who clearly foresees 
 his near and inevitable death, and with violent self-conquest 
 lifts himself to the stoic philosophy of renunciation ; or that of 
 a young man who adjures his mother to kill him when the 
 madness he awaits with horror shall break out. The situation 
 is very improbable. Perhaps it has never occurred. In any 
 event, Ibsen has never witnessed it. But if it occurred it 
 would possess great poetic beauty, and produce a great effect 
 on the stage. Consequently Ibsen calmly turns out the 
 novel ' and unknown maladies of a Dr. Rank or an Oswald 
 Alving, the progress of which might make these situations 
 possible. Such is the procedure of the poet whose realism 
 and accurate observation are so much vaunted by his ad- 
 mirers. 
 
 His clearness of mind, his love of liberty, his modernity ! 
 Careful readers of Ibsen's works will not trust their eyes 
 when they see these words applied to him. We will at once 
 put immediate and exhaustive tests to the clearness of his 
 thought. His love of liberty will be revealed by analysis as 
 anarchism ; and his modernity amounts essentially to this, 
 that in his pieces railways are constructed (The Pillars of 
 Society), that there is a cackle about bacilli (An Enemy of 
 the People], that the struggles of political parties play a 
 part in them (The League of the Young, Rosmersholm} all put 
 on superficially with a brush, without inner dependence upon 
 the true active forces in the poem. This ' modern,' this ' apostle 
 of liberty,' has an idea of the press and its functions fit for a 
 :lerk in a police-station, and he pursues journalists with the 
 hatred, droll in these days, of a tracker of demagogues in the 
 third decade of this century. All the journalists whom he sets 
 before us and they are numerous in his pieces, Peter Mortens- 
 gaard in Rosmersholm, Haustad and Billing in An Enemy of 
 the People, Bahlmann in The League of the Young are either 
 drunken ragamuffins or poor knock-kneed starvelings, con- 
 stantly trembling at the prospect of being thrashed or kicked 
 out, or unprincipled rascals who write for anyone who pays. 
 He has so clear a grasp of the social question that he makes 
 a foreman mix with the workmen and threaten a strike because 
 machines are about to be used on the wharves (The Pillars of
 
 356 DEGENERATION 
 
 Society] \ He looks upon the masses with the fine contempt of 
 the great feudal landlords. When he mentions them it is 
 either with biting derision or a most aristocratic and arrogant 
 disdain.* 
 
 The greater part of his notions, moreover, belong to no time, 
 but are emanations from his personal perversity, and can, there- 
 fore, be neither modern or not modern ; the least uncouth of 
 them, however, having their root in a definite period, spring 
 from the circle of ideas of a Gothamist of the first third of the 
 present century. The label ' modern ' was arbitrarily attached 
 to Ibsen by George Brandes (Moderne Geister, Frankfurt, 1886), 
 one of the most repulsive literary phenomena of the century. 
 George Brandes, a sponger on the fame or name of others, has 
 throughout his life followed the calling of a 'human orchestra,' 
 who with head, mouth, hands, elbows, knees, and feet, plays 
 ten noisy instruments at once, dancing before poets and authors, 
 and, after the hubbub, passes his hat round among the dea/ened 
 public. For a quarter of a century he has assiduously courted 
 the favour of all who for any reason had a following, and 
 written rhetorical and sophistical phrases about them, as long 
 as he could find a market. Adorned with a few feathers 
 plucked from the stately pinions of Taine's genius, and prating 
 of John Stuart Mill, whose treatise On Liberty he has glanced 
 at, but hardly read, and certainly not understood, he intro- 
 duced himself among the youth of Scandinavia, and, abusing 
 their confidence, obtained by this means, has made their syste- 
 matic moral poisoning the task of. his life. He preached 
 to them the gospel of passion, and, with truly diabolical zeal 
 and obstinacy, confused all their notions, giving to whatever 
 he extolled that was mean and reprehensible the most attractive 
 and honourable names. It has always been thought weak and 
 cowardly to yield to base impulses condemned by judgment, 
 instead of combating and stifling them. If Brandes had said 
 to the young, ' Renounce your judgment ! Sacrifice duty to 
 your passions ! Be ruled by your senses ! Let your will 
 and consciousness be as feathers before the storm of your 
 appetites!' the better among his hearers would have spit at 
 him. But he said to them: ' To obey one's senses is to have 
 character. He who allows himself to be guided by his passions 
 has individuality. The man of strong will despises discipline 
 and duty, and follows every caprice, every temptation, every 
 movement of his stomach or his other organs ' ; and these 
 
 * Rosmershohn, p. 23 : 
 
 REBECCA (to Brendel}. You should apply to Peter Mprtensgaard. 
 
 BRENDEL. Pardon, Madame what sort of an idiot is he? 
 
 See the flat travesty in An Enemy of the People (Act IV.) of the forum 
 scene in Shakespeare's Julius Ctesar, and the characterization of the ' crowd/ 
 in Brand (Act V.).
 
 EGO-MANIA 357 
 
 vulgarities, thus presented, no longer had the repulsive character 
 which awakens distrust and serves as a warning. Proclaimed 
 under the names of ' liberty ' and ' moral autonomy/ debauchery 
 and dissoluteness gain easy admission into the best circles, and 
 depravity, from which all would turn if it appeared as such, 
 seems to insufficiently informed minds attractive and desirable 
 when disguised as ' modernity.' It is comprehensible that an 
 educator who turns the schoolroom 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 pupils will 
 hardly complain, and will be eager to attend the lessons of so 
 agreeable a teacher. By a similar method Brandes acquitted 
 himself of his educational functions. This is the explanation of 
 the influence he gained over the youth of his country, such as his 
 writings, with their emptiness of thought and unending tattle, 
 would certainly never have procured for him. 
 
 Brandes discovered in Ibsen a revolt against the prevailing 
 moral law, together with a glorification of bestial instincts, and 
 -accordingly trumpeted his praises in spite of his astounding 
 reactionary views, as a 'modern spirit,' recommending Ibsen's 
 works, with a wink of the eye, to the knowledge - craving 
 youth, whom he served as mattre de plaisir. But this 
 * modern/ this ' realist,' with his exact ' scientific ' observation, 
 is in reality a mystic and an egomaniacal anarchist. An 
 analysis of his intellectual peculiarities will enable us to discern 
 a resemblance to those of Richard Wagner, which is not 
 surprising, since a similarity in features is precisely a stigma of 
 degeneracy, and for this reason is common to many, or to all, 
 iiigher degenerates. 
 
 Ibsen is the child of a rigorously religious race, and grew up 
 in a family of believers. The impressions of childhood have de- 
 termined the course of his life. His mind has never been able 
 to iron out the theological crease it got through nurture. The 
 Bible and Catechism became for him the bounds beyond which 
 -he has never passed. His free-thinking diatribes against estab- 
 lished Christianity (Brand, Rosmersholm, etc.), his derision of 
 the shackled pietism of divines (Manders in Ghosts, Rorlund in 
 The Pillars of Society, the dean in Brand), are an echo of his 
 teacher, the theosophist, Sceren Kierkegaard (1815-55), a zealot 
 certainly for quite another Christianity than that ordained by 
 the state, and provided with powers of nomination and fixed 
 salaries, but nevertheless an austere and exclusive Christianity, 
 demanding the whole being of man. Perhaps even Ibsen looks 
 upon himself as a freethinker. Wagner did the same. But 
 what does that prove ? He is not clear with regard to his own 
 thought.
 
 35 8 DEGENERATION 
 
 ' It is curious,' writes Herbert Spencer,* ' how commonly men 
 continue to hold, in fact, doctrines which they have rejected in 
 name, retaining the substance after they have abandoned the 
 form. In theology an illustration is supplied by Carlyle, who, 
 in his student days, giving up, as he thought, the creed of his 
 fathers, rejected its shell only, keeping the contents, and was 
 proved by his conceptions of the world, and man and conduct, 
 to be still among the sternest of Scotch Calvinists.' If Spencer, 
 when he wrote this, had known Ibsen, he would perhaps have cited 
 him as a second example. As Carlyle was always a Scotch 
 Calvinist, so Ibsen has always remained a Norwegian Pro- 
 testant of the school of Kierkegaard that is to say, a Protestant 
 with the earnest mysticism of a Jacob Boehme, a Swedenborg, 
 or a Pusey, which easily passes over into the Catholicism of a 
 St. Theresa or a Ruysbroek. 
 
 Three fundamental ideas of Christianity are ever present in 
 his mind, and about these as round so many axes revolves the 
 entire activity of his poetical imagination. These three un- 
 alterable central ideas, constituting genuine obsessions, reaching 
 up from the unconscious into his intellectual life, are original 
 sin, confession and self-sacrifice or redemption. 
 
 ./Esthetic chatterers have spoken of the idea of heredity in- 
 fluencing all Ibsen's works, an idea which cannot escape even 
 the feeblest attention, as something appertaining to modern 
 science and Darwinism. As a matter of fact, it is the ever- 
 recurring original sin of St. Augustine, and it betrays its 
 theological nature, firstly by the circumstance that it makes its 
 appearance in conjunction with the two other theological ideas 
 of confession and redemption, and secondly, by the distinguish- 
 ing characteristic of hereditary transmission. As we have above 
 seen, Ibsen's personages always inherit a disease (blindness, 
 consumption of the spinal marrow, madness), a vice (menda- 
 ciousness, levity, lewdness, obduracy), or some defect (incapacity 
 for enjoyment), but never an agreeable or useful quality. Now 
 what is good and wholesome is just as frequently inherited as 
 what is evil and diseased even more frequently, according to 
 many investigators. Hence if Ibsen had really wished to 
 exhibit the operation of the law of heredity as understood by 
 Darwin, he would have offered us at least one example, if only 
 one, of the inheritance of good qualities. But not a single 
 instance is to be met with in all his dramas. What his beings 
 possess of good, comes one knows not whence. They have 
 always inherited nothing but evil. The gentle Hedvig in TJie 
 Wild Duck becomes blind like her father, Werle. But from 
 whom does she get her dreamy wealth of "imagination, her 
 devoted loving heart? Her father is a cold egoist, and her 
 
 * Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State, 1884, p. 78.
 
 EGO-MANIA 359 
 
 mother a clever, practical, prosaic housewife. Thus she can 
 never have inherited her fine qualities from either of her parents. 
 From them she receives only her eye-disease. With Ibsen 
 heredity is only a visitation, a punishment for the sins of the 
 fathers ; science knows of no such exclusive heredity ; theology 
 alone knows it, and it is simply original sin. 
 
 Ibsen's second theological motif is confession ; in nearly all 
 his pieces such is the goal to which all the action tends ; not, 
 perchance, forced by circumstances upon a dissimulating 
 offender, not the inevitable revelation of a hidden misdeed, but 
 the voluntary outpouring of a pent-up soul, the voluptuous, self- 
 tormenting disclosure of an ugly inner wound, the remorseful 
 ' My guilt, my deepest guilt !' of the sinner breaking down 
 under the weight of his burdened conscience, humbling himself 
 to an avowal that he may find inward peace ; in short, genuine 
 confession as required by the Church. In A Doll's House, 
 Helmer informs his wife (p. 44) : 'Many a man can lift himself 
 up again morally if he openly recognises his offence and under- 
 goes its punishment. . . . Only just think how a man so con- 
 scious of guilt as that must go about everywhere lying, and a 
 hypocrite, and an actor ; how he must wear a mask towards his 
 neighbour, and even his wife and children.' For him not the 
 guilt, but the dissimulation, is the great evil, and its true 
 expiation consists in ' public avowal ' i.e., in confession. In 
 the same piece Mrs. Linden, without any external necessity, 
 and simply in obedience to an inner impulse, makes the follow- 
 ing confession (p. 87) : ' I, too, have suffered shipwreck. ... I 
 had no choice at the time ' ; while later on she develops the 
 theory of confession once more (p. 90) : ' Helmer must know 
 everything ; between those two there must be the completest 
 possible understanding, and that can never come to pass while 
 all these excuses and concealments are going on/ 
 
 In The Pillars of Society Miss Hessel exacts a confession 
 in these terms (p. 70) : 
 
 Here you are, the first man in the town, living in wealth and pride, in 
 power and honour you who have set the brand of crime upon an innocent 
 man. 
 
 BERNICK. Do you think I do not feel deeply how I have wronged him? 
 Do you think I am not prepared to make atonement? 
 
 LONA. How? By speaking out ? 
 
 BERNICK. Can you ask such a thing? 
 
 LONA. What else can atone for such a wrong? 
 
 And Johan also says (p. 75) : 
 
 In two months I shall be back again. 
 BERNICK. And then you will tell all ? 
 JOHAN. Then the guilty one must take the guilt upon himself. 
 
 Bernick actually makes the confession demanded of him 
 from pure contrition, for at the time he makes it all proofs
 
 360 DEGENERATION 
 
 of his crime are destroyed, and he has nothing more to fear 
 from other persons. His confession is couched in most edifying 
 terms (p. 108) : 
 
 I must begin by rejecting the panegyric with which you . . . have over- 
 whelmed me. I do not deserve it ; for until to-day I have not been dis- 
 interested in my dealings ... I have no right to this homage ; for ... 
 my intention was to retain the whole myself. . . . My fellow-citizens must 
 know me to the core . . . that from this evening we begin a new time. 
 The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hollowness, its lying propriety, and 
 its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum open for instruction. 
 ... My feliow-citizens, I will come out of the lie ; it had almost poisoned 
 every fibre of my being. You shall know all. Fifteen years ao / was the 
 guilty one, etc. 
 
 In Rosmersholm there is hardly any other subject treated of 
 than the confession of all before all. In the very first visit of 
 Kroll (p. 15) Rebecca urges Rosmer to confess : 
 
 REBECCA (comes up close to Rosmer, and says rapidly and in a low voice* 
 so that the Rector does not hear her). Do it now ! 
 ROSMER (also in a low voice). Not this evening. 
 REDECCA (as before}. Yes, this very evening. 
 
 As he does not at once obey she will speak for him (p. 19) : 
 
 REBECCA. You must let me tell you frankly. 
 ROSMER (quickly). No, no ; be quiet. Not just now ! 
 
 Rosmer soon does it himself (p. 28): 
 
 KROLL. We two are in practical agreement at any rate, on the great 
 essential questions. 
 
 ROSMER (in a low voice). No ; not now. 
 
 KROLL (tries to jump up). What is this? 
 
 ROSMER (holding him). No ; you must sit still. I entreat you, Kroll. 
 
 KROLL. What can this mean? I don't understand you. Speak plainly. 
 
 ROSMER. A new summer has blossomed in my soul. I see with eyes 
 grown young again ; and so now I stand 
 
 KROLL. Where ? where, Rosmer ? 
 
 ROSMER. Where your children stand. 
 
 KROLL. You ? you ? Impossible ! Where Ho you say you stand? 
 
 ROSMER. On the same side as Laurits and Hilda. 
 
 KROLL (bows his head). An apostate ! Johannes Rosmer an apostate I 
 ... Is this becoming language for a priest? 
 
 ROSMER. I am no longer a priest. 
 
 KROLL. Well, but the faith of your childhood ? 
 
 ROSMER. Is mine no longer. ... I have given it up. I had\.t> give it up. 
 . . . Peace, and joy, and mutual forbearance must once more enter our 
 souls. That is why I am stepping forward and openly avowing myself for 
 what I am. . . . 
 
 REBECCA. There now ; he's on his way to his great sacrifice. 
 
 (We may here note the purely theological designation given 
 to Rosmer's act.) 
 
 ROSMER. I feel so relieved now it is over. You see, I am quite calm 
 Rebecca. . . .
 
 EGO MANIA 361 
 
 Like Rosmer, Rebecca also confesses to Rector Kroll 
 (p. 86) : 
 
 REBECCA. Yes, Herr Rector, Rosmer and I we say thou to each other. 
 The relation between us has led to that. . . . Come, let us sit down, dear 
 all three of us and then I will tell the whole story. 
 
 ROSMER (seats himself mechanically}. What has come over you, Rebecca? 
 This unnatural calmness what is it ? 
 
 REBECCA. I have only to tell you something. . . . Now it must out. It 
 was not you, Rosmer. You are innocent ; it was / who lured Beata out 
 into the paths of delusion . . . that led to the mill-race. Now you know 
 it, both of you. . . . 
 
 ROSMER (after a pause]. Have you confessed all now, Rebecca? 
 
 No, not yet all. But she hastens to complete to Rosmer 
 the confession begun to Kroll (p. 98) : 
 
 ROSMER. Have you more confessions to make? 
 REBECCA. The greatest of all is to come. 
 ROSMER. The greatest ? 
 
 REBECCA. What you have never suspected. What gives light and shade 
 to all the rest, etc. 
 
 In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida (p. 19) confesses to Arnholm 
 the story of her insensate betrothal with the foreign sailor. 
 Arnholm so little comprehends the need of this confession, 
 made without rhyme or reason, that he asks with astonishment : 
 * What is your object, then, in telling me that you were bound ?' 
 ' Because I must have someone in whom to confide,' is Ellida's 
 sole and, moreover, sufficient answer. 
 
 In Hedda G abler the inevitable confessions take place before 
 the commencement of the piece. ' Yes, Hedda,' Lovborg says 
 r (p. 123). 'And when I used to confess to you! Told you 
 about myself things that nobody else knew in those days. 
 Sat there and admitted that I had been out on the loose for 
 whole days and nights. . . . Ah, Hedda, what power was it 
 in you that forced me to acknowledge things like that ? . . . 
 Had not you an idea that you could wash me clean if only 
 I came to you in confession ?' He confesses in order to receive 
 absolution. 
 
 In The Wild Duck confession is equally prominent, but it 
 is deliciously ridiculed. The scene in which Gina confesses 
 to her husband her early liaison with Werle is one of the most 
 exquisite things in contemporary drama (Act IV.). 
 
 HJALMAR. Is it true can it be true that that there was an an under- 
 standing between you and Mr. Werle, while you were in service there? 
 
 GINA. That's not true. Not at that time. Mr. Werle did come after me, 
 I own it ; and his wife thought there was something in it ... so that I left 
 'her service. 
 
 HJALMAR. But afterwards, then ! 
 
 GlNA. Well, then I went home. And mother well, she wasn't the woman 
 you took her for, Ekdal ; she kept on worrying and worrying at me about 
 -one thing and another. For Mr. Werle was a widower by that time. 
 
 HJALMAR. Well, and then ?
 
 362 DEGENERATION 
 
 GINA. I suppose you must know it. He didn't give it up until he'd had 
 his way. 
 
 HJALMAR (striking his hands together}. And this is the mother of my 
 child ! How could you hide this from me? 
 
 GlNA. It was wrong of me ; I ought certainly to have told you long ago. 
 
 HJALMAR. You should have told me at the very first ; then I should have 
 known what you were. 
 
 GINA. But would you have married me all the same ? 
 
 HJALMAR. How can you suppose so ? 
 
 GINA. That's just why I didn't dare to tell you anything then. I'd come 
 to care for you so much, you know ; and I couldn't go and make myself 
 utterly miserable. . . . 
 
 HJALMAR. Haven't you every day, every hour, repented of the spider's 
 web of deceit you had spun around me? Answer me that! How could 
 you help writhing with penitence and remorse? 
 
 GINA. My dear Ekdal, I've plenty to do looking after the house, and all 
 the daily business 
 
 Further on the idea of self - deliverance and purification 
 through confession is pitilessly travestied. 
 
 GREGERS. Haven't you done it yet? 
 
 HJALMAR (aloud}. It is done. 
 
 GREGERS. It is? . . . After so great a crisis a crisis that's to be the 
 starting-point of an entirely new life of a communion founded on truth, 
 and free from falsehood of any kind. . . . Surely you feel a new consecra- 
 tion after the great crisis. 
 
 HJALMAR. Yes, of course I do that is, in a sort of way. 
 
 GREGERS. For I'm sure there's nothing in the world to compare with the 
 joy of forgiving one who has erred, and raising her up to one's self in love, 
 etc. 
 
 On his way to the guillotine, Avinain, the French assassin, 
 condensed the experience of his life in the pithy saying, 
 4 Never confess.' But this is advice which only those of strong 
 will End healthy minds can follow. A lively idea vehemently 
 demands to be transformed into movement. The movement 
 exacting the least effort is that of the small muscles of the 
 larynx, tongue, and lips, i.e., the organs of speech. Anyone, 
 therefore, having a specially lively idea experiences a strong 
 desire to relax those cell-groups of his brain in which this ide.i 
 is elaborated by allowing the transmission of their stimulus to 
 the organs of speech. In a word, he desires to speak ou:. 
 And if he is weak, if the inhibitive power of the will is not 
 greater than the motor impulse proceeding from the ideational 
 centre, he will burst out into speech, be the consequences what 
 they may. That this psychological law has always been known 
 is proved by all literature, from the fable of King Midas to 
 Dostojewski's Raskolnikow; and the Catholic Church furnished 
 one more proof of her profound knowledge of human nature 
 which she transformed the primitive Christian custom of con. 
 fession before the assembled congregation, which was to be a 
 self-humiliation and expiation, into auricular confession, which 
 serves the purpose of a safe and blissful alleviation and relaxa-
 
 EGO-MANIA 363 
 
 tion, and constitutes for ordinary men a primary psychic need 
 of the first order. It was this sort of confession which Ibsen, 
 probably unconsciously, had in view. ('Because I must have 
 someone in whom I can confide,' as Ellida says.) Himself a 
 degenerate, Ibsen can picture to himself only the intellectual 
 life of degenerates, in whom the mechanism of inhibition is 
 always disordered, and who, therefore, cannot escape from the 
 impulse to confess, when anything of an absorbing or exciting 
 character exists in their consciousness. 
 
 The third and most important theological obsession of Ibsen 
 is the saving act of Christ, the redemption of the guilty by a 
 voluntary acceptance of their guilt. This devolution of sin 
 upon a lamb of sacrifice occupies the same position in Ibsen's 
 drama as in Richard Wagner's. The motif of the sacrificial 
 lamb and of redemption is constantly present in his mind, 
 certainly not always clear and comprehensible, but, conform- 
 ably with the confusion of his thought, diversely distorted, 
 obscured, and, so to speak, in contrapuntal inversion. Now 
 Ibsen's personages voluntarily and joyfully bear the cross, in 
 keeping with the Christ-idea ; now it is put upon their shoulders 
 by force or artifice, which is, as theologians would say, a diaboli- 
 cal mockery of this idea ; now the sacrifice for another is 
 sincere, now mere hypocrisy; the effects Ibsen draws from the 
 incessantly recurring motif are, agreeably with its form, now 
 moral and affecting, now comically base and repulsive. 
 
 In The Pillars of Society there is a talk of some ' scandal ' 
 which occurred years before the commencement of the piece. 
 The husband of the actress Dorf, on returning home one 
 evening, found her with a stranger, who, on his entrance, sprang 
 out of the window. The affair caused great excitement and 
 indignation in the Norwegian Gotham. Immediately after- 
 wards Johan Tonnesen fled to America. Everyone looked 
 upon him as the ' culprit.' In reality, however, it was his 
 brother-in-law, Bernick. Johan had voluntarily incurred the 
 blame of Bernick's fault. On his return from America the 
 sinner and the sacrificial lamb discuss the circumstance (p. 45) : 
 
 BERNICK. Johan, now we are alone, you must give me leave to thank 
 you. 
 
 JOHAN. Oh, nonsense ! 
 
 BERNICK. My house and home, my domestic happiness, my whole position 
 as a citizen in society all these I owe to you. 
 
 JOHAN. Well, I am glad of it. . . . 
 
 BERNICK. Thanks, thanks all the same. Not one in ten thousand would 
 have done what you then did for me. 
 
 JOHAN. Oh, nonsense ! . . . One of us had to take the blame upon him. 
 
 BERNICK. But to whom did it lie nearer than to the guilty one ? 
 
 JOHAN. Stop ! Then it lay nearer to the innocent one. I was alone, free, 
 an orphan. . . . You, on the other hand, had your old mother in life ; and, 
 besides, you had just become secretly engaged to Betty, and she was very 
 fond of you. What would have become of her if she had come to know ?
 
 3&4 DEGENERATION 
 
 BEI. T ICK. True, true, true; but . . . but yet, that you should turn ap- 
 pe irances against yourself, and go away 
 
 JOHAN. Have no scruples, my dear Karsten . . . you had to be saved, 
 and you were my friend. 
 
 Here the idea of the sacrificial lamb is normal and rational. 
 But it is soon afterwards introduced into the same piece in a 
 distorted shape. Bernick sends the rotten-keeled Indian Girl 
 to sea, to her certain destruction, in spite of his foreman Aune's 
 opposition. While, however, planning this wholesale murder, 
 he also schemes for laying the burden of his crime on the 
 innocent Aune (p. 65) : 
 
 KRAP. . . . There is rascality at work, Consul. 
 
 BERNICK. I cannot believe it, Krap. I cannot, and will not believe such 
 a thing of Aune. 
 
 KRAP. I am sorry for it, but it is the plain truth. ... All bogus ! The 
 Indian Girl will never get to New York. . . . 
 
 BERNICK. But this is horrible ! What do you think can be his motive? 
 
 KRAP. He probably wants to bring the machines into discredit. . . . 
 
 BERNICK. And for that he would sacrifice all these lives? . . . But such 
 a piece of villainy as this ! Listen, Krap ; this affair must be examined into 
 again. Not a word of it to anyone. . . . During the dinner-hour you must 
 go down there again ; I must have perfect certainty. . . . We cannot make 
 ourselves accomplices in a crime. I must keep my conscience unspotted, etc. 
 
 In Ghosts the idea of the lamb of sacrifice is equally traves- 
 tied. The asylum founded by Mrs. Alving has been burnt. 
 The joiner, Engstrand, that theatrical villain, succeeds in per- 
 suading the idiotic pastor, Manders, that he Manders was 
 the cause of the fire. And as the pastor is made desperate by 
 the possible legal consequences, Engstrand goes to him and 
 says (p. 184): 
 
 Jacob Engstrand isn't the man to desert a noble benefactor in the hour 
 of need, as the saying is [!]. 
 
 MANDERS. Yes ; but, my good fellow, how ? 
 
 ENGSTRAND. Jacob Engstrand may be likened to a guardian angel he 
 mav, your reverence. 
 
 MANDERS. No. no ; I can't accept that. 
 
 ENGSTRAND. Oh, you will though, all the same. I know a man that's 
 taken others' sins upon himself before now, I do. 
 
 MANDERS. Jacob (wrings his hand). You are a rare character. 
 
 In A Dolls House the idea develops itself with great beauty. 
 Nora confidently expects that her husband, on hearing of her 
 forgery, will assume the blame, and she is resolved not to accept 
 his sacrifice (p. 76) : 
 
 NORA. I only wanted to tell you that, Christina ; you shall be my witness. 
 ... In case there were to be anybody who wanted to take the ... the 
 whole blame, I mean . . . then you will be able to bear witness that it is 
 not true, Christina. I know very well what I am saying ; I am in full pos- 
 session of my senses, and I say to you, Nobody else knew anything about 
 it ; I alone have done everything. . . . But a miracle will come to pass 
 even yet . . . but it is so terrible, Christina ! It must not happen for any- 
 thing in the world 1
 
 KGO-MANIA 365 
 
 In the deepest excitement she looks for the expected miracle, 
 the renewal of Christ's act of salvation in the narrow circum- 
 stances of a small village ' I am the Lamb of God, who taketh 
 away the sins of the world.' And, since the miracle does not 
 come to pass, there takes place the immense transformation in 
 her nature which forms the real subject of the piece. Nora 
 explains this to her husband with the greatest clearness 
 (p. 116): 
 
 . . . The thought never once occurred to me that you could allow your- 
 self to submit to the conditions of such a man. I was so firmly convinced 
 that you would say to him, ' Pray make the affair known to all the world '; 
 and when that had been done . . . then you would, as I firmly believed, 
 stand before the world, take everything upon yourself, and say, ' I am the 
 guilty person.' . . . That was the miracle that I hoped and feared. And it 
 was to hinder that that I wanted to put an end to my life. 
 
 In The Wild Duck the idea of the sacrificial lamb recurs 
 no less than three times, and is the moving force of the whole 
 piece. The infringement of the forest laws, of which the elder 
 Ekdal was convicted, was not committed by him, but by 
 Werle : 
 
 WERLE ... I was quite in the dark as to what Lieutenant Ekdal was 
 doing. 
 
 GREGERS. Lieutenant Ekdal seems to have been in the dark as to what 
 he was doing. 
 
 WERLE. That maybe. But the fact remains that he was .found guilty, 
 and I acquitted. 
 
 GREGERS. Yes, of course I know that nothing was proved against you. 
 
 WERLE. Acquittal is acquittal. Why do you rake up old troubles ? . . . 
 I've done all I could without positively exposing myself, and giving rise to 
 all sorts of suspicion and gossip. . . . I've given Ekdal copying to do from 
 the office, and I pay him far, far more for it than his work is worth. 
 
 Werle thus shuffles his fault on Ekdal, and the latter breaks 
 down under the weight of the cross. Afterwards, when Hjalmar 
 learns that little Hedwig is not his child, and disowns her, the 
 idiot Gregers Werle goes to the despairing maiden, and says : 
 
 But suppose you were to sacrifice the wild duck, of your own free will, 
 for his sake ? 
 
 HEDWIG (rising). The wild duck ! 
 
 GREGERS. Suppose you were to sacrifice, for his sake, the dearest treasure 
 you have in the world ? 
 
 HEDWIG. Do you think that would do any good? 
 
 GREGERS. Try it, Hedwig. 
 
 HEDWIG (softly, with flashing eyes}. Yes, I will try it 
 
 Here, then, Hedwig is not to offer herself in sacrifice, but a 
 pet animal, thus abasing the idea fiom Christianity to paganism. 
 Finally, it crops up a third time. At the last moment Hedwig 
 cannot make up her mind to kill the duck, and prefers turning 
 the pistol against her own breast, thus purchasing with her own 
 life that of the bird. This dismal denouement is worrying and 
 foolish, because useless ; the poetical effect would have been
 
 366 DEGENERATION 
 
 fully attained if Hcdwig, instead of dying, had only slightly 
 wounded herself ; for in this way she would have furnished 
 equally strong proof that she was seriously determined to bear 
 witness to her love for her father by the sacrifice of her young 
 life, and to restore peace between him and her mother. But 
 aesthetic criticism is not my function ; I willingly yield that to 
 phrase makers. All that I have to indicate is the triple recur- 
 rence in The Wild Duck of the idea of the sacrificial lamb. 
 
 At its third appearance this idea suffers a significant trans- 
 formation. Hedwig sacrifices herself, not in expiation of an 
 offence for she is ignorant of her mother's guilt but to 
 accomplish a work of love. Here the mystico- theological 
 element of redemption recedes into the background so far as 
 to be almost imperceptible, and there remains hardly more 
 than the purely human element of the joy felt in self-sacrifice 
 for others an impulse not rare among good women, and which 
 is a manifestation of the unsatisfied yearning for maternity 
 (often unknown to themselves), and at the same time one of 
 the noblest and holiest forms of altruism. Ibsen shows this 
 impulse in many of his female characters, the source of which 
 in the religious mysticism of the poet would not be at once 
 noticed, if from the numerous other conjugations of the root- 
 idea of the sacrificial lamb we had not already acquired the 
 sure habit -of recognising it even in its obscurations. Hedwig' 
 constitutes a transition from the theological to the purely 
 human form of voluntary self-sacrifice. The over-strung child 
 carries renunciation to the orthodox extreme of yielding up 
 her life ; Ibsen's other women, to whose character Hedwig 
 supplies the key, go only to the point of lovingly active self- 
 denial. They do not die for others, but they live for others. 
 In A Doll's House Mrs. Linden has this hunger for self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 I must work in order to endure life [she says to Krogstad p. 87]. I 
 have worked from my youth up, and work has been my one best friend. 
 But now I am quite alone in the world so terribly empty and forsaken. 
 There is no happiness in working for one's self. Nils, give me somebody 
 and something to work for. . . . 
 
 KROGSTAD. What ! you really could ? Tell me, do you know my past ? 
 
 MRS. LINDEN. Yes. 
 
 KROGSTAD. And do you know my reputation ? 
 
 MRS. LINDEN. Did you not hint it just now, when you said that with me 
 you could have been another man ? 
 
 KROGSTAD. I am perfectly certain of it. 
 
 MRS. LINDEN. Could it not yet be so ? 
 
 KROGSTAD. Christina, do you say this after full deliberation ? . . . 
 
 MRS. LINDEN. I need somebody to mother, and your children need a 
 mother. 
 
 Here the idea is not so disguised as to be unrecognisable. 
 Krogstad is a culprit and an outlaw. If Mrs. Linden offers to
 
 EGO-MANIA 367 
 
 live for him, it is certainly chiefly from the instinct of maternity. 
 But in this natural feeling there is also a tinge of the mystic 
 idea of the sinner's redemption through disinterested love. 
 In The Lady from tJie Sea, Ellida wishes to return to her birth- 
 place on the sea, Skjoldvik, because she believes there is 
 nothing for her to do in Wangel's house. At the announce- 
 ment of her resolution her step-daughter, Hilda,evinces a profound 
 despair. Then for the first time Ellida learns that Hilda loves 
 her ; there is then born in her the thought that she has someone 
 to live for, and she says dreamily : ' Oh, if there should be 
 something for me to do here !' In Rosmersholm Rebecca says 
 to Kroll (p. 8) : 
 
 So long as Mr. Rosmer thinks I am of any use or comfort to him, why, 
 so long, I suppose, I shall stay here. 
 
 KROLL (looks at her with emotion}. Do you know, it's really fine for a 
 woman to sacrifice her whole youth to others, as you have done. 
 
 REBECCA. Oh, what else should I have had to live for? 
 
 In The Pillars of Society there are two of these touching 
 self-sacrificing souls Miss Martha Bernick and Miss Hessel. 
 Miss Bernick has reared the illegitimate child Dina, and has 
 consecrated her own life to her (p. 52) : 
 
 MARTHA. I have been a mother to that much-wronged child have 
 brought her up as well as I could. 
 
 JOHAN. And sacrificed your whole life in so doing. 
 MARTHA. It has not been thrown away. 
 
 She loves Johan, but as she sees that he is attracted by 
 Dina she unites the two. She explains herself in regard to 
 the incident in an exceedingly affecting scene with Johan's 
 half-sister (p. 95) : 
 
 LONA. Now we are alone, Martha. You have lost her, and I him. 
 
 MARTHA. You him ? 
 
 LONA. Oh, I had half lost him already over there. The boy longed to 
 stand on his own feet, so I made him think /was longing for home. 
 
 MARTHA. That was it? Now I understand why you came. But he will 
 want you back again, Lona. 
 
 LONA. An old stepsister what can he want with her now ? Men snap 
 rnany bonds to arrive at happiness. 
 
 MARTHA. It is so, sometimes. 
 
 LONA. But now we two must hold together, Martha. 
 
 MARTHA. Can I be anything to you ? 
 
 LONA. Who more? We two foster-mothers have we not both lost our 
 children ? Now we are alone. 
 
 MARTHA. Yes, alone. And therefore I will tell you I have loved him 
 more than all the world. 
 
 LONA. Martha ! (seizes her arm}. Is this the truth ? 
 
 MARTHA. My whole life lies in the words. I have loved him, and waited 
 for him. From summer to summer I have looked for his coming. And 
 then he came, but he did not see me. 
 
 LONA. Loved him ! and it was you that gave his happiness into his hands. 
 
 MARTHA. Should I not have given him his happiness, since I loved himr
 
 3 68 DEGENERATION 
 
 Yes, I have loved him. My whole life has been for him ... He did not 
 see me. 
 
 LONA. It was Dina that overshadowed you, Martha. 
 
 MARTHA. It is well that she did ! When he went away we were of the 
 same age. When I saw him again oh, that horrible moment ! it seemed 
 to me that 1 was ten years older than he. He had lived in the bright, 
 quivering sunshine, and drunk in youth and health at every breath ; and 
 here sat I, the while, spinning and spinning 
 
 LONA. The thread of his happiness, Martha. 
 
 MARTHA. Yes, it was gold I spun. No bitterness ! Is it not true, Lona, 
 we have been two good sisters to him ? 
 
 In Hedda Gaoler it is Miss Tesman, aunt of the imbecile 
 Tesman, who plays the pathetic part of the sacrificial mother. 
 She has brought him up, and when he marries gives him the 
 largest part of her modest income. ' Oh, aunt,' bleats the 
 poor idiot (p. 18), 'you will never be tired of sacrificing yourself 
 for me!' 'Do you think,' replies the good creature, 'I have 
 any other joy in this world than to smooth the way for you, 
 my dear boy you who have never had a father or a mother 
 to look after you ?' And when subsequently the paralytic sister 
 of Miss Tesman is dead, Hedda and she hold this conversation 
 (p. 196) : 
 
 HEDDA. It will be lonesome for you new, Miss Tesman. 
 
 Miss TESMAN. The first few days, yes. But that won't last very long. 
 Dear Rina's little room will not always be empty, that I know. 
 
 HEDDA. Indeed ! Who is going to move into it, eh ? 
 
 Miss TESMAN. Oh, there is always some poor invalid or other who needs 
 to be looked after and tended, unfortunately. 
 
 HEDDA. Will you really take such a burden upon you again ? 
 
 Miss TESMAN. Burden ! God forgive you, child ! that has never been a 
 burden to me. 
 
 HEDDA. But now, if a stranger should come, then surely 
 
 Miss TESMAN. Oh, one soon becomes friends with sick people. And I 
 must positively have someone to live for, too. 
 
 The three Christo-dogmatic obsessions of original sin, con- 
 fession, and self-sacrifice, filling Ibsen's dramas, as we have 
 seen, from the first line to the last, are not the only tokens of 
 his mysticism. This betrays itself by a whole series of other 
 peculiarities, which shall be briefly indicated. 
 
 At the head of these stands the astoundingly chaotic nature 
 cf his thought. One cannot believe one's eyes while reading 
 how his fulsome flatterers have had the audacity to extol him 
 for the ' clearness ' and ' precision ' of his thought. Do these 
 individuals, then, imagine that no one capable of forming a 
 judgment will ever read a line of Ibsen ? A clearly-defined 
 thought is an extraordinary rarity in this Norwegian dramatist. 
 Everything floats and undulates, nebulous and amorphous, such 
 as we are accustomed to see in weak-brained degenerates. 
 And it he once succeeds, with toil and stress, in grasping 
 anything and expressing it in a moderately intelligible manner,
 
 EGO-MANIA 369 
 
 he unfailingly hastens, a few pages later, or in a subsequent 
 piece, to say the exact opposite. A talk is macle of Ibsen's 
 4 ideas on morality ' and of his ' philosophy.' He has not 
 formulated a single proposition on morality, a single conception 
 -of the world and life, that he has not himself either refuted or 
 ^fittingly ridiculed. 
 
 He seems to preach free love, and his eulogy of a licentious- 
 ness unchecked by any self-control, regardless of contracts, 
 Jaws, and morality, has made of him a ' modern spirit ' in 
 the eyes of Georg Brandes and similar protectors of those 
 
 * youths who wish to amuse themselves a little.' Mrs. Alving 
 '(Ghosts, p. 158), calls a 'crime' the act of Pastor Manders in 
 repulsing her, after she has quitted her husband and thrown 
 "herself on the pastor's neck. This highly-strung dame pushes 
 Regina into the arms of Oswald, her son, when in shameless 
 speech he informs her that it would give him pleasure to possess 
 the girl. And this very same Mrs. Alving speaks in terms 
 of the deepest indignation of her dead husband as ' profligate ' 
 j(p. 146), and again designates him in the presence of her son 
 as a ' broken-down man ' (in the original it is ' et forfaldent 
 Menneske,' an epithet usually bestowed on fallen women), and 
 why ? Because he had had wanton relations with women ! 
 Well, but is it in Ibsen's opinion permissible, or not permissible, 
 .to gratify carnal lust as often as it is awakened ? If it is 
 permissible, how does Mrs. Alving come to speak with scorn 
 of her husband ? If it is not permissible, how dared she offer 
 herself to Pastor Manders, and be the procuress between Regina 
 and her own half-brother ? Or does the moral law hold good 
 for man only, and not for woman ? An English proverb says, 
 
 * What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.' Ibsen 
 evidently does not share the opinion of popular lore. A woman 
 who runs away from her legal husband and pursues a lover 
 (Mrs. Elvsted and Ejlert Lovborg, in Hedda Gabler), or who 
 offers to form an illicit connection with a man, although nothing 
 prevents their marrying without further ado like other rational 
 ratepayers (Mrs. Linden and Krogstad in A Doll's House) 
 such women have Ibsen's entire approbation and sympathy. 
 But if a man seduces a maiden and liberally provides for her 
 subsequent maintenance (Werle and Gina in The Wild Duck), 
 or, again, if he has illicit relations with a married woman 
 (Consul Bernick and the actress Dorf in The Pillars of Society), 
 then it is so heinous a crime that the culprit remains branded 
 his whole life, and is nailed by the poet to the pillory with the 
 cruelty of a mediaeval executioner. 
 
 The same contradiction finds its expression in another and 
 more general form. At one time Ibsen contends with ferocious, 
 impetuosity that everyone is ' a law unto himself alone, i.e., that 
 
 24
 
 370 DEGENERATION 
 
 he should obey every one of his caprices, nay, even of his dis- 
 eased impulsions ; that, as his commentators idiotically put it, 
 he should (sich auslebe] ' live out his life.' In The Pillars of 
 Society Miss Bernick says to Dina (p. 94) : 
 
 Promise me to make him [her betrothed] happy. 
 
 DINA. I will not promise anything. I hate this promising; things must 
 come as they can [/.*., as the circumstances of the moment may suggest to 
 the wayward brainj. 
 
 MARTHA. Yes, yes ; so they must. You need only remain as you are,, 
 true and faithful to yourself. 
 
 DINA. That I will, Aunt Martha. 
 
 In Rosmersholm, Rosmer says admiringly of the scoundrel 
 Brendel (p. 28) : ' At least he has had the courage to live his life 
 his own way. I don't think that's such a small matter after all/ 
 In the same piece Rebecca complains (p. 97) : ' Rosmersholm 
 has broken me. . . . Broken me utterly and hopelessly. I had 
 a fresh, undaunted will when I came here. Now I have bent 
 my neck under a strange law.' And further on (p. 102) : ' It 
 is the Rosmer view of life . . . that has infected my will. . . . 
 and made it sick, enslaved it to laws that had no power over 
 me before.' Ejlert Lovborg laments in like fashion in Hedda 
 Gabler. ' But it is this that I don't want to live that kind of 
 life either. Not now, over again. It is the courage of life and 
 the defiance of life that she ' (Thea Elvested, with her sweet, 
 loving constraint) * has snapped in me.' Quite in opposition to 
 these views, Ibsen, in his Ghosts, makes Regina proclaim her 
 'right to live out her life' in these words (p. 189): 'Oh! I 
 really can't stop out here in the country and wear myself out 
 nursing sick people ... a poor girl must make the best of her 
 young days. ... I, too, want to enjoy my life, Mrs. Alving/ 
 Mrs. Alving replies: 'Alas! yes/ This 'alas' is bewildering. 
 Alas? Why 'alas'? Does she not obey her 'law' if she 
 satisfies her 'joy in living,' and, as she forthwith explains, enters 
 the house of ill-fame for sailors set up by the joiner Engstrand ? 
 How can Mrs. Alving utter this ' alas,' when she also was 'obey- 
 ing her law ' in offering herself as the mistress of Pastor 
 Manders, and since she wished to aid her son in ' obeying his 
 law,' when he had set his eyes on Regina? It is because Ibsen, 
 in his lucid moments, feels that there may be something of 
 danger in ' obeying one's law,' and this ' alas ' of Mrs. Alving 
 escapes him as a confession. In The Wild Duck he ridicules 
 his own dogma in the most liberal style. In that piece there 
 is one Molvig, a candidate for a University degree, who also 
 ' obeys his law.' This law prescribes that he shall learn nothing, 
 evade his examinations, and pass his nights, in taverns. The 
 scoffer, Relling, asserts (p. 317) that it 'comes over him like a 
 sort of possession ; and then I have to go out on the loose with
 
 EGO-MANIA 37 r. 
 
 him. Molvig is a demoniac, you see, . . . and demoniac natures 
 are not made to walk straight through the world ; they must 
 meander now and then. And in order that there shall be no 
 doubt as to what Relling means by this, he subsequently 
 explains (p. 361): '"What the devil do you mean by demoniac ?" 
 " It's only a piece of hocus-pocus I've invented to keep up a 
 spark of life in him. But for that the poor harmless creature 
 would have succumbed to self-contempt and despair many a 
 long year ago.' " 
 
 That is true. Molvig is a pitiable weakling, unable to con- 
 quer his indolence and passion for drink ; abandoned to his 
 own devices, he would recognise himself for the miserable 
 creature he is, and despise himself as profoundly as he deserves ; 
 but Relling arrives on the scene, and gives his lack of character 
 the title ' demoniac,' and now* the child has a fine name,' which 
 Molvig can make a parade of to himself and others. Ibsen does 
 exactly the same thing as his Relling. The weakness of will, 
 incapable of resisting base and pitiable instincts, he praises as 
 the ' will to live out one's life,' as the ' freedom of a spirit who 
 obeys his own law only,' and recommends it as the sole rule of 
 life. But, unlike Relling, he is for the most part ignorant of 
 the fact that he is practising a deception (which I by no means 
 regard in Relling's light as pious and charitable), and believes 
 in his own humbug. That is, for the most part ; not always. 
 Here and there, as in The Wild Duck, he recognises his error 
 and scourges it severely ; and his inmost feeling is so little 
 influenced by his self-deceptive phrase, fit for a weak-willed 
 degenerate, that he involuntarily and unconsciously betrays, in 
 all his productions, his deep abhorrence of men who 'obey their 
 own law in order to live out their life.' He punishes Chamber- 
 lain Alving in his son, and makes him cursed by his widow 
 because he has ' lived out his life.' He imputes it as a crime to 
 Consul Bernick and the merchant Werle that they have ' lived 
 out their life,' the former in sacrificing his brother-in-law 
 Johan to protect himself, and for his intrigue with Mrs. Dorf, 
 the actress ; and the latter for allowing Ekdal to bear the blame 
 of his fault, and for seducing Gina. He surrounds with an 
 aureole the glorified heads of Rosmer and Rebecca, because 
 they did not ' live out their life,' but, on the contrary, ' died 
 their death,' if I may put it so ; because they obeyed, not ' their 
 own law,' but that of others, the universal moral law that 
 annihilated them. Whenever one of his characters acts in 
 accordance with Ibsen's doctrine, and does what is agreeable to 
 himself regardless of morals and law, he experiences such con- 
 trition and self-torment that he is unable to find calm and 
 joy until he has disburdened his conscience by confession and 
 expiation.
 
 372 DEGENERATION 
 
 ' This living out one's "life ' makes its appearance in Ibsen in 
 the form also of a rigid individualism. The 'self is the only 
 real thing ; the ' 1 ' must be cherished and developed, as, indeed, 
 Barres preaches independently of Ibsen. The first duty of 
 every human being is to be just to his ' I,' to satisfy its de- 
 mands, to sacrifice to it every consideration for others. Vv'hen 
 Nora wishes to abandon her husband, he cries (p. 112) : 
 
 Only think what people will say about it ! 
 
 NORA. I cannot take that into consideration. I only know that to go is 
 necessary for me. 
 
 HELMER. Oh, it drives one wild ! Is this the way you can evade your 
 holiest duties ? 
 
 NORA. What do you consider my holiest duties ? 
 
 HELMER .... Are they not your duties to your husband and your children? 
 
 NORA. I have other duties equally sacred. 
 
 HELMER. . . . What duties do you mean? 
 
 NORA. Duties towards myself. 
 
 HELMER. Before all else you are a wife and a mother. 
 
 NORA. I no longer think so. I think that before all else I am a human 
 being just as you are, or, at least, 1 will try to become one. 
 
 In Ghosts Oswald says to his mother with triumphant brutality 
 (p. 192) : ' I can't be much taken up with other people. I have 
 enough to do thinking about myself.' How in the same piece 
 Regina emphasizes her ' I ' and its rights, we have already seen. 
 In An Enemy of the People, Stockmann proclaims the right of 
 the ' I ' in face of the majority, and even the race, in these words 
 (p. 283) : ' It is a hideous lie : the doctrine that the multitude, 
 the vulgar herd, the masses, are the pith of the people that, 
 indeed, they are the people that the common man, that this 
 ignorant, undeveloped member of society, has the same right to 
 condemn or to sanction, to govern and to rule, as the few people 
 of intellectual power.' And (p. 312): 'I only want to drive 
 into the heads of these curs that the Liberals are the worst 
 foes of free men . . . that the considerations of expediency 
 turn morality and righteousness upside down until life is simply 
 hideous. . . . Now I am one of the strongest men upon earth. 
 . . . You see the fact is that the strongest man upon earth is 
 he who stands most alone/ But this very Stockmann, who will 
 hear nothing of ' the multitude, the vulgar herd, the masses,' as 
 he reiterates with insufferable tautology, who feels, his ' I ' 
 powerful only in a majestic solitude, calls his fellow-citizens 
 'old women who think only of their families,*- and not of the 
 general good/ And in the very same piece (A Doll's House), 
 in which Ibsen evidently bestows loud applause on Nora for. 
 declaring that 'her only duties were to herself/ and that she 
 'could have no consideration for anyone else,' he stigmatizes 
 her husband as a pitiable, low-spirited weakling, because on his 
 
 * In the German text, ' only of themselves and their families.' TRANS- 
 LATOR.
 
 EGO-MANIA 3/j 
 
 wife's confession of forgery he first of all thinks of his own 
 reputation only, and hence of his 'duty to himself/ his only 
 consideration being for himself, and not for his wife. Here 
 there recurs the same phenomenon as in Ibsen's notions con- 
 cerning sexual morality. Unchastity in a man is a crime, but 
 in a woman is permissible. In the same way the rude empha- 
 sizing of the ' I ' is a merit only in the woman. The man has 
 no right to be an egoist. How, for example, Ibsen rails at 
 egoism through Bernick (in The Pillars of Society), whom he 
 makes say naively, in reference to his sister Martha, that she ' is 
 quite insignificant ' (p. 49), and that he does not wish to have 
 her otherwise ! 
 
 You know, in a large house like ours, it is always well to have some 
 steady-going person like her, whom one can put to anything that may turn 
 up. 
 
 JOHAN. Yes, but she herself? 
 
 BERNICK. She herself? Why, of course she has enough to interest herself 
 in Betty and Olaf, and me, you know. People should not think of them- 
 selves first, and women least of all. 
 
 And how severely Ibsen condemns the egoism of Mrs. 
 Elvsted's husband (Hedda Gabler), when he puts these bitter 
 words into her mouth (p. 52) : ' He is not really fond of anybody 
 but himself. Perhaps of the children a little !' 
 
 But the most remarkable thing about this philosopher of 
 individualism is that he not only expressly condemns egoism in 
 the man as a low vice, but unconsciously also admires dis^ 
 interestedness in the woman as an angelic perfection. In A 
 Doll's House (p. 113) he brags that ' my most sacred duties are 
 towards myself/ And yet the only touching and charming 
 characters in his pieces with whom this inflexible individualist 
 is successful are the saintly women who live and die for others 
 only these Hedwigs, Miss Bernicks, Miss Hessels, Aunt 
 Tesmans, etc., who never think of their ' I,' but make the 
 sacrifice of all their impulses and wishes to the welfare of others 
 their sole task on earth. This contradiction, violent to the 
 point of absurdity, is very well explained by the nature of 
 Ibsen's mind. His mystico-religious obsession of voluntary 
 self-sacrifice for others is necessarily stronger than his pseudo- 
 philosophic lucubration on individualism. 
 
 Among the ' moral ideas ' of Ibsen are counted his professed 
 thirst for truth. At least enough has been said and written on 
 this subject. ' Only just think,' Helmer says to Nora (A Doll's 
 House, pp. 44, 45), ' how a man so conscious of guilt as that 
 must go about everywhere lying, and a hypocrite, and an 
 actor ; how he must wear a mask towards his neighbour, and 
 even his wife and children, his own children. That's the worst, 
 Nora. . . . Because such a misty atmosphere of lying brings 
 contagion into the whole family.' ' Is there no voice in your
 
 374 
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 mother's heart that forbids you to destroy your son's ideals ?' 
 asks Pastor Manders in Ghosts (p. 155), when Mrs. Alving has 
 revealed to her son her defunct husband's ' immorality.' To 
 which Mrs. Alving magniloquently replies, ' But what about the 
 truth ?' In The Pillars of Society, Lona Hessel thus preaches 
 to Consul Bernick (p. 5.7) : 
 
 Is it for the sake of the community, then, that for these fifteen years you 
 have stood upon a lie? 
 
 BERNICK. A lie? . . . You call that 
 
 LONA. I call it the lie the threefold lie. First the lie towards me ; then 
 the lie towards Betty ; then the lie towards Johan. ... Is there not some- 
 thing within you that asks you to get clear of the lie ? 
 
 UERNICK. You would have me voluntarily sacrifice my domestic happi- 
 ness, and my position in society? 
 
 LONA. What right have you to stand where you are standing ? 
 
 And subsequently (p. 70) : 
 
 LONA. A lie, then, has made you the man you now are? 
 
 BERNICK. Whom did it hurt, then ? . . . 
 
 LONA. You ask whom it hurt ? Look into yourself, and see if it has not 
 hurt you. 
 
 Bernick then examines himself, and shortly before his con- 
 fession there takes place a highly edifying dialogue between 
 him and the severe guardian of his conscience (p. 98) : 
 
 BEKNICK. Yes, yes, yes ; it all comes of the lie. . . . 
 
 LONA. Then, why do you not break with all this lying? . . . What satis- 
 faction does this show and deception give you? 
 
 BERNICK .... It is my son I am working for. . . . There will come a 
 time when truth shall spread through the life of our society, and upon it he 
 shall found a happier life than his father's. 
 
 LONA. With a lie for its groundwork? Reflect what it is you are giving 
 your son for an inheritance. 
 
 In An Enemy of the People, words of truth are ever coming 
 from the mouths of the Stockmann family: 'There's so much 
 falseness both at home and at school,' declaims their daughter, 
 Petra. ' At home you mustn't speak, and at school you have to 
 stand there and lie to the children. . . . We have to teach 
 many and many a thing we don't believe ourselves. ... If 
 only I could afford it I'd start a school myself, and things should 
 be very different there.' The courageous maiden quarrels with 
 an editor who wished to marry her about his want of veracity 
 (p. 255) : ' What I am angry with you for is that you have not 
 acted honestly towards my father. You told him it was only 
 the truth and the good of the community you cared about. 
 You are not the man you pretend to be. And I shall never 
 forgive you never !' ' The whole of our developing social life,' 
 cries the father Stockmann in his turn (p. 242), ' is rooted in a 
 lie/ And later on (p. 287) : ' Yes, I love my native town so 
 well I would rather ruin it than see it flourishing upon a lie. . . . 
 All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin. 
 You'll poison the whole country in time ; you'll bring it to such
 
 EGO-MANIA 375 
 
 a pass that the whole country will deserve to perish.' Now, all 
 this would certainly be very fine, if we did not know that this 
 fervent worship of truth is only one of the forms under which 
 there appears in Ibsen's consciousness the mystico-religious 
 obsession of the sacrament of confession, and also, if he were not 
 careful, conformably with his habit, to destroy any too hasty 
 belief in the sincerity of his phraseology by himself ridiculing it. 
 In Gregers Werle he has created the best caricature of his men 
 of truth. Gregers speaks in exactly the same terms as Lona 
 Hessel, Petra Stockmann, and her father, but in his mouth the 
 words are intended to excite laughter : ' And look at this con- 
 fiding nature, this great child,' he says of his friend Hjalmar 
 (p. 41). 'See him enveloped in a net of perfidy, living under 
 the same roof as a woman of that kind, not suspecting that his 
 home, as he calls it, rests upon a lie. . . . At length I see an 
 object in life.' This object consists in operating on Hjalmar's 
 moral cataract. And he does it, too. ' You are sunk in a 
 poisoned quagmire, Hjalmar,' Gregers says to him (p. 101). 
 'You have an insidious disease within you, and you've sunk down 
 to die in the dark. . . . Don't be afraid ; I will try to help you 
 up again. I, too, have a mission in life now.' And shortly 
 afterwards he says to the father : ' But Hjalmar I can rescue 
 from all the falsehood and deception that are bringing him to 
 ruin.' The scoffer Relling treats no worse than he deserves the 
 idiot who, in fulfilling his ' mission in life ' disturbs the peace 
 between Hjalmar and his wife, destroys their comfortable home, 
 and drives Hedwig to her death. 
 
 Yours is a complicated case . . . that troublesome integrity-fever [he says 
 to him p. 360] . . . 
 
 I'm fostering the life-illusion [literally 'the life-lie'] in him. 
 
 GREGERS. Life-illusion? Is that what you said? 
 
 RELLING. Yes, I said illusion. 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. 
 
 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 and negatively with 
 equal ardour and equal poetic power. 
 
 Another 'moral idea' of Ibsen, about which his choristers 
 chatter most loudly, is that of ' true marriage.' It is certainly 
 not easy to discover what his mystic brain conceives by these 
 mysterious words, but it is nevertheless possible to guess it 
 from the hundred obscure notions in his plays. He does not 
 seem to approve of the idea that the woman should regard 
 marriage as merely a means of maintenance. In nearly all his 
 pieces he comes to this conclusion with the monotony peculiar 
 to him. In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving ascribes her whole life's un- t
 
 376 DEGENERATION 
 
 happiness to the fact that she married the chamberlain for hi* 
 money that she sold herself. 'The sums which I have spent 
 upon the orphanage year by year make up the amount I 
 have reckoned it up precisely the amount which made 
 Lieutenant Alving a good match in his day. ... It was the 
 purchase-money. I do not choose that money should pass, 
 into Oswald's hands' (p. 149). In T/ie Lady from the Sea,. 
 Ellida sings the same song (p. 139) : 'It could bring nothing 
 but unhappiness, after the way in which we came together. . . . 
 Yes, we are (doing so), or, at least, we suppress the truth. For 
 the truth ... is, that you came out there and bought me. . . . 
 I was not a bit better than you. I accepted the bargain sold 
 myself to you. I was so helpless and bewildered, and so 
 absolutely alone. Oh, it was so natural I should accept the 
 bargain when you came and proposed to provide for me all 
 my life.' In almost the same words Hedda says (Hedda. 
 Gabler, p. 86) : ' And then he would go and make such a- 
 tremendous fuss about being allowed to provide for me. I 
 did not know why I should not accept it.' She did not know 
 why ; but her inner feverishness and restlessness, her final 
 suicide, are the consequence of her having allowed herself to- 
 be ' provided for/ The regard paid to the ' being provided 
 for* became also the lifelong misery of another woman in the 
 same piece Mrs. Elvsted. She went originally as ' governess- 
 in the house of her future husband.' She subsequently under- 
 took the management of the household. Then she allowed 
 herself to be married, although ' everything around him is. 
 distasteful to me,' and ' we do not possess a thought in common.*" 
 Ibsen condemns the man who marries for money not less than 
 the woman who allows herself to be ' provided for.' The cause 
 of Bernick's moral downfall (The Pillars of Society, p. 56), is 
 chiefly that he did not marry Lona Hessel, whom he loved,, 
 but another. ' It was for no new fancy that I broke with you ;. 
 it was entirely for the sake of the money.' 
 
 Hence one should not marry for gain. That is a principle 
 to which every rational and moral man will subscribe. But 
 why should one marry ? The most reasonable answer can only 
 be, ' From inclination.' But Ibsen will have none of this either. 
 The marriage of Nora and Helmer is purely a love-match. It 
 leads to a sudden rupture. Wangel (The Lady from the- 
 Sea) has married Ellida from inclination. She expressly 
 affirms it (p. 108) : ' You had only seen me and spoken to me 
 a few times. Then you wanted me, and so ..." And then 
 she feels herself a stranger to him, and wishes to leave him. 
 So Mrs. Alving, Ellida, Wangel, Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Elvsted,. 
 marry from self-interest, and atone for it by the happiness 
 of their life. Nora marries for love, and becomes profoundly.
 
 EGO-MANIA 377 
 
 unhappy. Consul Bernick marries a girl because she is rich, 
 and pays for this fault with his moral downfall. Dr. Wangel 
 marries a girl because she pleases him, and as a reward she 
 wishes to quit him and her home. What conclusio/i is to be 
 drawn from all this? That marriage from prudence is bad, 
 and marriage from love no better ? That marriage in general 
 is worth nothing, and should be abolished ? That would be 
 at least an inference and a solution. It is not there that Ibsen 
 arrives. Inclination does not suffice, even if, as in the case 
 of Nora, it is reciprocal. Something else is still necessary the 
 man must become the educator of his wife. He must help 
 her intellectually. He must let her participate in all his 
 concerns, make of her a companion possessing equal rights, 
 and have unlimited confidence in her. Otherwise she always 
 remains a stranger in her house. Otherwise the marriage is no 
 ' true marriage/ ' I have no right to claim my husband wholly 
 and solely for myself/ Ellida confesses (The Lady from tJie Sea, 
 p. 57). ' Why, I, too, live in something from which others are 
 shut out.' In the same piece Wangel blames himself in this 
 way (p. 130): ' I ought to have been at once a father to her 
 and a guide ; I ought to have done my best to develop and 
 enlighten her mind. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of that. 
 ... I preferred her just as she was.' In The Pillars of Society 
 Mrs. Bernick bemoans (p. 141): 'For many years I believed 
 that I had at one time possessed you and lost you again. Now 
 I know that I have never possessed you.' And Lona Hessel 
 draws the moral from this story (p. 97) : 
 
 And do you never think what she might have been to you she, whom 
 you chose in my stead ? 
 
 BERNICK. I know, at any rate, that she has been to me nothing of what I 
 required. 
 
 LONA. Because you have never shared your life-work with her ; because 
 you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you. 
 
 In Rosmersholm Rector Kroll has treated his wife in the 
 same way ; he has intellectually suppressed her, and is painfully 
 surprised when she finally revolts against the domestic tyrant 
 who has extinguished her mental light (p. 14). 'My wife, who 
 all her life long has shared my opinions and concurred in my 
 views both in great things and small, is actually inclined to 
 side with the children on many points. And she blames me 
 for what has happened. She says I tyrannize over the children. 
 As if it weren't necessary to. Well, you see how my house is 
 divided against itself. But, of course, I say as little about it 
 as possible. It's best to keep such things quiet.' 
 
 Upon this point also there may be complete agreement. 
 Most assuredly should marriage be not merely a union of 
 bodies, but also a community of minds ; most assuredly should
 
 378 DEGENERATION 
 
 the man help and educate the wife intellectually, although it 
 is to be remarked that this role of teacher and guardian assigned 
 with justice by Ibsen to the man, decisively excludes the full 
 intellectual equality of the two married parties equally claimed 
 by him. But how can one reconcile with these notions about 
 the true relation between the man and his wife Nora's words to 
 her husband (A Doll's House, p. in): 'I must first try to 
 educate myself. In that you are not the man to help me. I 
 must set to work alone. And that is why I am going away 
 from you now. ... I must be thrown entirely upon myself? 
 We rub our eyes and ask ourselves if we have read aright. 
 What, then, is the duty of the husband in ' true marriage ' ? 
 Shall -he help his wife intellectually? Wangel, Mrs. Ber- 
 nick, Lona, Mrs. Kroll, say so. But Nora furiously denies it, 
 and repels all assistance. Fara da se ! She will educate and 
 form herself. As though this contradiction were not already suffi- 
 ciently bewildering, Ibsen still further mocks those pitiable souls, 
 who would fain obtain rules of morality from him, when, in Tlie 
 Wild Duck, he derides, as he is wont, all that he has preached 
 on the subject of ' true marriage ' in all the rest of his pieces. 
 In that production a delicious dialogue is brought about be- 
 tween the malevolent idiot Gregers and the scoffer Relling 
 <P- 337) : 
 
 GREGERS. [I want] to lay the foundations of a true marriage. 
 
 RELLING. So you don't find Ekdal's marriage good enough as it is ? 
 
 GREGERS. No doubt it's as good a marriage as most others, worse luck. 
 But a true marriage it has never been. 
 
 HJALMAR. You have never had eyes for the claims of the ideal, Relling. 
 
 RELLING. All rubbish, my boy ! But, excuse me, Mr. Werle, how many 
 . . . true marriages have you seen in the course of your life ? 
 
 GREGERS. Scarcely a single one. 
 
 RELLING. Nor I, either. 
 
 And still more incisive is the mockery contained in Hjalmar's 
 words (p. 345) : 'Well, then, isn't it exasperating to think that it's 
 not I, but he (Werle, senior), who will realize the true marriage? 
 . . . Isn't the marriage between your father and Mrs. Scerby 
 founded upon complete confidence, upon entire and unreserved 
 candour on both sides? They hide nothing from each other. 
 Their relation is based, if I may put it so' (!) ' on mutual con- 
 fession and absolution.' Hence no one has yet seen a 'true 
 marriage ' ; and when by chance this miracle does happen it is 
 fulfilled in the case of Mr. Werle and Mrs. Scerby Mr. 
 Werle, who confesses to his wife that he has seduced young 
 girls and sent old friends to prison in his place Mrs. Scerby, 
 who confides to her husband that she has had illicit relations 
 with every imaginable sort of man. It is a tame imitation of 
 the scene in Ruskolnikow by Dostojewski, where the assassin 
 and the prostitute, after a contrite confession, unite their soiled
 
 EGO-MANIA 379 
 
 and broken lives ; except that in Ibsen the scene is stripped of 
 its sombre grandeur and lowered to the ridiculous and vulgar. 
 With Ibsen, when women discover that they are not living in 
 
 * true marriage,' their husband suddenly becomes ' a strange 
 man,' and, without further ceremony, they abandon their home 
 and their children, some, like Nora, ' to return to their birth- 
 place,' where ' it will be easier for me to get something to 
 do of one sort or another' ; others, like Ellida, without giving a 
 thought to what will become of them ; others, again, like Mrs. 
 Alving and Hedda Gabler, to rush full speed to a lover and 
 throw themselves on his neck. Ibsen has even deliciously paro- 
 died this last departure, and in a doubly grotesque fashion, for 
 he assigns the laughable role of the tragic runaway to a man. 
 
 * I must out into the snow and tempest,' declaims Hjalmar 
 (The Wild Duck, p. 166), ' and seek from house to house a 
 shelter for my old father and myself.' And he really goes, but 
 naturally only to return home the next day, crestfallen, but 
 stout-hearted, to breakfast. Truly nothing more need be said 
 against the idiocy of Nora's high-flown leave-taking, which has 
 become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes, since Ibsen 
 spared us this trouble in creating his Hjalmar. 
 
 We have not yet done with Ibsen's drivel on the subject of 
 marriage. He seems to exact that no girl should marry before 
 she is fully matured, and possesses an experience of life and a 
 knowledge of the world and of men (A Doll's House, p. 1 1 1) : 
 
 NORA. And I how have I been prepared to educate the children ? . . . 
 For that task I am not ready. ... I must first try to educate myself. ... I 
 cannot be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what is 
 in books. 
 
 HELMER. You don't understand the society in which you live. 
 
 NORA. No, no more I do. But now I will set to work and learn it. 
 
 This necessary maturity the young girl best acquires by going 
 in quest of adventures, by becoming closely acquainted with the 
 largest possible number of persons, to make a trial, if possible, 
 of a few men before binding herself definitely. A young girl is 
 thoroughly prepared for marriage when she has attained to a 
 respectable age, managed a few households, perhaps also given 
 birth to sundry children, and in this way proved to herself and 
 others that she understands the duties of a housewife and a 
 mother. Ibsen does not expressly say this, but it is the only 
 reasonable conclusion which can be deduced from the whole 
 series of his plays. The great reformer has no suspicion that he 
 is here preaching something long ago tried by mankind and 
 rejected as unsuitable, or not more suitable. Experimental 
 marriage for a longer or shorter pericrd, the preference for 
 brides endowed with a rich experience in love-affairs and 
 sundry children, all this has already existed. Ibsen may learn
 
 3So DEGENERATION 
 
 all that he needs on this subject from his half-compatriot. 
 Professor Westermarck.* But he would be no degenerate if he 
 did not regard as progress the return to conditions of the most 
 primitive character long since gone by, and if he did not 
 mistake the far-away past for the future. 
 
 Let us recapitulate his marriage-canon as gained from his 
 dramas. There should be no marriage from interest (Hedda,. 
 Mrs. Alving. Bernick, etc.). There should be no marriage from, 
 love (Nora, Wangel). A marriage of prudence is not a true 
 marriage. But to marry because each pleases the other is 
 equally good for nothing. To enter into matrimony with the 
 full approbation of reason, there should be first of all a thorough, 
 knowledge of each other by the contracting parties (Ellida).. 
 The man should be the woman's instructor and educator 
 (Wangel, Bernick). The wife should not allow herself to be: 
 instructed and educated by the husband, but acquire the neces- 
 sary knowledge quite alone (Nora). If the wife discovers that 
 her marriage is not a ' true marriage/ she leaves the husband,, 
 for he is a stranger (Nora, Ellida). She also abandons her 
 children, for children which she has had by a stranger are- 
 naturally strangers also. She must, however, at the same time 
 remain with the husband, and endeavour to transform him from 
 a stranger into her own husband (Mrs. Bernick). Marriage is 
 not intended permanently to unite two beings. When anything 
 in the one is not agreeable to the other, they return the ring 
 and go their respective ways (Nora, Mr. Alving, Ellida, Mrs. 
 Elvsted). If a man abandons his wife he commits a heinous 
 crime (Bernick, Werle). And, to sum up, there is no true 
 marriage (Relling). This is Ibsen's doctrine concerning marriage. 
 It leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of clearness. It 
 amply suffices for the diagnosis of the state of the Norwegian 
 poet's intellect. 
 
 Independently of his religious obsessions and his bewildering, 
 contradictions, Ibsen's mysticism reveals itself, step by step, in 
 absurdities of which a healthy intellect would be incapable. 
 We have seen in The Lady from the Sea that Ellida wishes ta 
 abandon her husband, because her marriage is not a true one,, 
 and because her husband has become a stranger to her. Why 
 is he a stranger to her ? Because he has married her without 
 mutual close acquaintance. ' You had only seen me and spoken. 
 a few words to me.' She ought not to have let herself be pro- 
 vided for. ' Rather the meanest labour, rather the most wretched 
 surroundings, so long as they were the result of free will, of free 
 choice.' From this one can only reasonably conclude that 
 Ellida is of the opinion no true marriage is possible, unless the 
 
 * Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage. London : 
 Macmillan, 1892. See especially the two chapters on 'The Forms of. 
 Human Marriage, 1 and ' The Duration of Marriage.'
 
 EGO-MANIA 381 
 
 woman possesses a thorough knowledge of her suitor and has 
 had full freedom in her choice. She is convinced that these 
 conditions existed in the case of the first claimant for her hand. 
 * The first that might have been a complete and real marriage.' 
 Now, the same Ellida, a few pages before (78), says that she 
 knew absolutely nothing concerning her lover ; she did not even 
 "know his name, and, as a matter of fact, he is spoken of 
 throughout the piece only as ' the stranger.' 
 
 WANGEL. What else do you know about him ? 
 
 ELLIDA. Only that he went to sea very young ; and that he had been on 
 long voyages. 
 
 WANGEL. Is there nothing more ? 
 ELLIDA. No ; we never spoke of such things. 
 WANGEL. Of what did you speak, then ? 
 ELLIDA. About the sea ! 
 
 And she betrothed herself to him 
 
 Because he said I must. 
 
 WANGEL. You must ? Had you no will of your own, then ? 
 
 ELLIDA. Not when he was near. 
 
 So, then, Ellida is forced to abandon Wangel for the reason 
 that, previously to her marriage with him, she did not thoroughly 
 "know him, and she must go to ' the stranger/ of whom she 
 knows nothing. Her marriage with Wangel is no marriage, 
 because she did not enter into it with perfect freedom of will, 
 but the marriage with 'the stranger ' will be ' perfect and pure,' 
 although when she betrothed herself to him she had ' no will 
 of her own.' After this example of his mental maze, it is truly 
 humiliating to be obliged to waste more words concerning the 
 intellectual state of such a man. But since this man is foisted 
 by fools and fanatics to the rank of a great moralist and poet 
 of the future, the psychiatrical observer must not spare himself 
 the labour of referring to his other absurdities. 
 
 In this same Lady from the Sea, Ellida renounces her project 
 of leaving her husband Wangel, and going away with the 
 ' stranger,' as soon as Wangel says 'with aching heart' : ' Now 
 you can choose your own path in perfect freedom.' She remains 
 with Wangel. She chooses him. ' Whence came the change ?' 
 asks Wangel and the reader with him. 'Ah, don't you under- 
 stand,' Ellida gushingly replies, ' that the change came was 
 bound to come when I could choose in freedom !' (p. 141). 
 This second choice, then, is intended to form a complete con- 
 trast to the first, in which Ellida plighted her troth to Wangel. 
 But all the conditions, without a single exception, have remained 
 the same. Ellida is now free because Wangel expressly gives 
 her her freedom ; but she was still freer on the first occasion, 
 because Wangel had as yet no rights over her, and did not 
 need to begin by setting her free. As little was external 
 coercion exercised on her at the betrothal as subsequently after
 
 3 S2 DEGENERATION 
 
 marriage. Her resolution depended then, as now, entirely on 
 herself. If at the betrothal she felt herself fettered, it was, as 
 she herself explains, because she was at that time poor, and 
 allowed herself to be enticed by the alluring prospect of being 
 provided for. But in this respect nothing has changed. She 
 has come into no property since h^r marriage, so far as we know 
 from Ibsen. She is just as poor as she ever was. If she quits 
 VVangel, she will sink once more into the penury she found 
 insupportable when a young girl. If she remains with him, 
 she is quite as much provided for as she hoped to be when she 
 betrothed herself to him. Wherein, then, lies the contrast 
 between her former want of liberty and her present freedom to 
 explain the change? There is none. It exists in the confused 
 thought of Ibsen alone. If the whole of this piratical story 
 about Ellida, VVangel, and the stranger is intended to mean, or 
 to prove, anything, it can only be that a woman must first live 
 a few years with her husband on trial before she can bind herself 
 definitively ; and that her decision may be valid, she is to be 
 free at the end of the period of probation to go or to stay. 
 The only meaning of the piece is, therefore, pure idiocy 
 experimental marriage. 
 
 We find the same absurdity repeated, in the fundamental 
 idea, in the premises and deductions of nearly all his plays. 
 In Ghosts Oswald Alving's disease is represented as a chastise- 
 ment for the sins of his father, and for the moral weakness of 
 his mother in marrying for self-interest a man she did not love. 
 Now, Oswald's state is the consequence of a complaint which 
 may be contracted without any depravity whatsoever. It is a 
 silly antiquated idea of the bigoted members of societies for 
 the suppression of immorality that a contagious disease is the 
 consequence and punishment of licentiousness. Doctors know 
 better than that. They know hundreds nay, thousands of 
 cases where a young man is infected for his whole life, for no 
 other act than one which, with the views now prevailing, is 
 looked upon as venial. Even holy matrimony is no protection 
 against such a misfortune, to say nothing of the cases where 
 doctors, nurses, etc., have contracted the malady in the discharge 
 of their duties, and without carnal transgression. Ibsen's 
 drivel proves nothing of that which, according to him, it 
 should prove. Chamberlain Alving might be -a monster of 
 immorality without for that reason falling ill, or having an 
 insane son ; and his son could be insane without more culpability 
 on the part of the father than is the case with all men who 
 have been unchaste before marriage. Ibsen, however, gives 
 obtrusive evidence of having had no wish to write a tract in 
 praise of continence, by making Mrs. Alving throw herself into 
 the arms of Pastor Manders, and by making the mother the
 
 EGO-MANIA 383 
 
 intermediary of an illicit union out of wedlock between the 
 son and his own sister, putting, moreover, into the mouth of 
 Oswald a panegyric on concubinage one of the most incredible 
 things met with in the incredible Ibsen. ' What are they to 
 do ?' replies Oswald Alving to the horrified pastor. ' A poor 
 young artist a poor young girl. It costs a lot of money to 
 get married/ I can only suppose that the innocent Norwegian 
 villager has never with his own bodily eyes seen a ' free union/ 
 and that he has drawn his idea of one from the depths of a 
 nature filled with anarchistic rage against the existing order 
 of things. An inhabitant of any large town, having daily 
 opportunities for getting insight into dozens and hundreds of 
 free unions, will burst into hearty laughter over Ibsen's infantine 
 fantasies, worthy of a lascivious schoolboy. In no country in 
 the world does civil marriage cost more than a trifling sum, 
 very much less than the first repast offered by a young fellow 
 to the girl he has persuaded to live with him ; and religious 
 marriage, far from costing anything, brings to the bridal couple 
 a donation in money, clothes, and household articles, if they 
 are indelicate enough to accept them. Pious societies, which 
 expend large sums of money in legalizing free unions, exist 
 everywhere. When persons form unions without the aid of 
 the 'civil law or of priests, it is probably never for the purpose 
 of saving the expense of marriage, but either from culpable 
 levity, or because either one or other of them makes a mental 
 reservation not to bind him or herself, but to enjoy something 
 agreeable without undertaking any serious duties ; or, finally, 
 in the few cases which a moral man may approve, or, at least, 
 excuse, because on one side or the other there exists some 
 legal obstacle above which they raise themselves, strong in love, 
 and justified in their own eyes by the earnestness of their 
 intention to be faithful to each other unto death. 
 
 But to return from this subordinate absurdity to the capital 
 absurdity of the piece. Chamberlain Alving is punished for 
 his illicit indulgence in carnal pleasure, in his own body, and 
 in his children Oswald and Regina. That is very edifying, 
 and would, doubtless, meet with approbation at a conference 
 of clergymen, although nonsensical and inaccurate to the highest 
 degree. We will only mention in passing that Ibsen constantly 
 recommends and glorifies unchastity, the ' living out one's life.' 
 But what inference does Mrs. Alving draw from the case of 
 her husband ? That all should remain chaste and pure, an 
 idea worked out by Bjornson in his Glove ? No. She is led 
 by it to the conclusion that the existing order of morals and 
 the law are bad. ' Oh, that perpetual law and order !' she 
 exclaims (p. 154) ; 'I often think it is that which does all the 
 mischief here in the world. ... I can endwe all this constraint
 
 384 DEGENERATION 
 
 and cowardice no longer. It is too much for me. I must work 
 my way out to freedom.' What in the world has Alving's 
 story to do with Maw and order?' and how does 'freedom* 
 enter into this Credo ? What connection with the piece have 
 the silly speeches of this woman, unless it be that they are 
 lugged in to tickle the radical patrons of the gallery into 
 applause. In Tahiti neither ' order ' nor ' morals ' reign in the 
 sense given them by Mrs. Alving. There the brown beauties 
 have all the ' freedom ' to which Mrs. Alving wishes to ' work 
 her way out,' and the men so ' live out their lives ' that ships' 
 officers, not otherwise modest, avert their eyes with shame. 
 And in that very region Chamberlain Alving's disease is so 
 widespread that, according to Ibsen's medical theory, all the 
 young Tahitians must be Oswalds. 
 
 But this is a constant habit of Ibsen's, evidenced in all his 
 pieces. He puts into the mouth of his characters phrases used 
 for effect by orators in popular meetings of the lowest class, 
 having nothing in the least to do with the piece. ' I don't know 
 what religion is,' Nora says in the well-known scene where she 
 leaves her husband (p. 114). "... I know nothing but what 
 our clergyman told me when I was confirmed. He explained 
 that religion was this and that. When I have got quite away 
 from here and am all by myself, then I will examine that matter 
 too. I will see whether what our clergyman taught is true. . . . 
 I have now learnt, too, that the laws are different from what I 
 thought they were ; but I can't convince myself that they are 
 right.' Now her case has no relation to the religious doctrine of 
 Pastor Hansen and the excellence or badness of the laws. No 
 law in the world concedes the right to a child to sign her 
 father's name to a cheque without his knowledge, and all the 
 laws of the world not only permit but compel a judge to inquire 
 into the motives of every misdemeanour, although Ibsen makes 
 Krogstad the mouthpiece of this idiocy (p. 39) : ' The laws in- 
 quire little into motives.' The whole of this scene, in view of 
 which, however, the piece was written, is foreign to the play, 
 and does not originally spring from it. If Nora wishes to 
 abandon her husband, it can only be on the supposition that 
 she has discovered he does not love her so devotedly as she 
 had wished and hoped. The hysterical fool, however, utters an 
 inflammatory diatribe against religion, law, and" society (which 
 are profoundly innocent of the weakness of character and 
 absence of love in her husband), and departs like a feminine 
 Coriolanus shaking her fist at her fatherland. In The Pillars of 
 Society Bernick, wishing to confess his own baseness, introduces 
 his avowal with the words (p. 1 10) : ' Let everyone examine 
 himself, and let us realize the prediction that from this evening 
 we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its
 
 EGO-MANIA 385 
 
 hollowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall 
 lie behind us like a museum,' etc. ' Speak for yourself, Bernick, 
 speak for yourself,' one might well call out to the old wind-bag, 
 who in this sermonizing tone thus generalizes his own individual 
 case. ' I wish to speak of the great discovery that I have made 
 within the last few days,' exclaims Stockmann in An Enemy of 
 the People, ' the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are 
 poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil 
 teeming with the pestilence of lies.' That may in itself be true ; 
 but nothing in the piece gives Stockmann the right to arrive 
 reasonably at this conclusion. Even in Plato's republic it might 
 happen that a ragamuffin, more foolish for that matter than wicked, 
 should refuse to cleanse an infected spring, and only a fool could 
 deduce from this single fact, and from the conduct of a clique of 
 Philistines in an impossible Norwegian village, the general propo- 
 sition that ' our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming 
 with the pestilence of lies.' In Rosmersholm, Brendel says in an 
 obscurely profound prophetic tone, which shudders with fore- 
 boding (p. 23) : ' We live in a tempestuous, an equinoctial age.' 
 This expression also, true enough in itself, strikes one like a blow 
 in the eye in the place where it occurs, for Rosmersholm has no con- 
 nection with any definite period of time; and it is not necessary 
 to change a single essential word in the piece, in order to 
 transport it at pleasure to the Middle Ages, or the age of the 
 Roman emperors, to China, or the land of the Incas to any age 
 or any land where there are hysterical women and idiotic men. 
 
 We are familiar with the method pursued by brawlers who 
 wish to pick a quarrel : ' Sir, why did you look at me in that 
 way?' ' Pardon me, I did not look at you.' 'What ! you say, 
 then, that I lie?' 'I said nothing of the sort.' 'You give me 
 the lie a second time. You must give me satisfaction.' This is 
 Ibsen's method. What he wishes is to denounce society, the 
 state, religion, law, and morals in anarchistic phrases. Instead, 
 however, of publishing them like Nietzsche, in brochures, he 
 sticks them into his pieces at haphazard, where they appear as 
 unexpectedly as the couplets sung in the naive farces of our 
 fathers. Cleanse Ibsen's dramas of these pasted-on phrases, 
 and even a Brandes will no longer be able to trumpet them as 
 ' modern ' productions ; there will remain only a tissue of 
 absurdities, belonging to no time or place, in which here and 
 there emerge single poetically fine scenes and accessory figures, 
 not changing in the least the atrociousness of the whole. In 
 fact, Ibsen always begins by finding some thesis i.e., some 
 anarchist phrase. Then he tries to. find out beings and events 
 which embody and prove his thesis, for which task, however, 
 his poetical power, and, above all, his knowledge of life and 
 men, are insufficient. For he goes through the world without 
 
 25
 
 3 S6 DEGENERATION 
 
 seeing it, and his glance is always turned inward on himself. 
 In contradiction to the saying of the poet, 'All that is human is 
 alien to him,' and his own ' I ' alone occupies him and absorbs 
 his attention. He himself proclaims this in a well-known poem 
 wherein he says, ' Life is a battle with the ghost in the vaults of 
 the heart and brain. To be a poet is to hold judgment day 
 over one's own self.'* 
 
 The ' ghost in the heart and brain ' is the obsessions and 
 impulses in conflict with which the life of the higher degenerate 
 is certainly spent. It is as clear as day that a poem, which is 
 nothing but a 'judgment day' of the poet over himself, cannot 
 be a mirror of universal human life, freely and broadly flowing, but 
 simply the intricate arabesques adorning the walls of a distorted, 
 isolated existence. He sees the image of the world with the 
 eye of an insect; a diminutive single feature which shows itself 
 to one of the polished facets of such a discoidal eye, and which 
 he perchance perceives, he firmly seizes, and renders with dis- 
 tinctness. But he does not comprehend its connection with the 
 whole phenomenon, and his organ of vision is not able to span 
 a large comprehensive picture. This explains the fidelity to 
 nature in petty details and quite accessory figures, while the 
 chief events and central characters are always astonishingly 
 absurd and alien to all the realities of the world. 
 
 It is in Brand that Ibsen's absurdity apparently achieves its 
 greatest triumph. Northern critics have reiterated ad nauseam 
 that this silly piece is a dramatic translation of Kierkegaard's 
 crazy ' Either-Or.' Ibsen shows a fool who wishes to be 'all 
 or nothing,' and who preaches the same to his fellow-citizens. 
 What he especially understands by these high-sounding words 
 the piece nowhere reveals by a single syllable. Brand, how- 
 ever, succeeds in infecting his fellow-citizens with his madness, 
 and one fine day they sally forth from the village and are led 
 by him into impassable mountain solitudes. What his purpose 
 is no one knows or suspects. The sexton, who seems to be 
 somewhat less crazy than the others, finally becomes uneasy 
 concerning this wholly senseless mountain climbing, and asks 
 whither Brand is really leading them, and what may be the 
 object of this scramble. Whereupon Brand gives him the 
 following wonderful information (p. 151): 'How long will the 
 struggle last ?' (viz., the climbing, for there is no 'other struggle 
 in this Act). ' It lasts until life's end. Until you have sacri- 
 ficed all ; until you are freed from your compact ; until that 
 which you may wish for you shall wish for unswervingly.' (What 
 
 * ' At leve er Kamp med Trolde 
 
 J Hjertet og Hjernens Hvaelv ; 
 At digte det er at holde 
 Dommedag over sig selv.'
 
 EGO-MANIA 387 
 
 this is which is to be wished for is not explained.) ' Until 
 every doubt shall have vanished and nothing separates you, from 
 the All or Nothing. And your sacrifices ? All the gods which 
 with you take the place of the eternal God ; the shining golden 
 chains of slavery, together with the beds of your languid sloth- 
 fulness. The reward of victory ? Unity of will, activity of 
 faith, pureness of soul.' Naturally on listening to this ranting 
 the good people ' come to their senses and go home,' but the 
 lunatic Brand is offended because his fellow-citizens do not want 
 to pant uphill in order to ' wish for something unswervingly/ to 
 attain to ' all or nothing/ and to arrive at ' unity of will.' For it 
 is ' the all ' which seems to inhabit mountains ; not merely 
 freedom', which an early poet sought for there. (' Liberty dwells 
 in the mountains/ Schiller has said.) 
 
 And yet Brand is a remarkable figure. In him Ibsen has 
 unconsciously created a very instructive type of those deranged 
 beings who run, speak, and act at the bidding of a ruling 
 impulse,* who with furious passion are continually and reiterat- 
 ingly talking of ' the goal ' which they wish to attain, but who 
 tieither themselves have a suspicion of what this goal really is, 
 nor are in a position to indicate it to others in an intelligible 
 way. Brand thinks the power which impels him is his in- 
 flexible iron will. It is in reality his inflexible iron impulsion 
 which his consciousness in vain seeks to grasp and to interpret 
 by the aid of a flood of unintelligible words. 
 
 Ibsen's absurdity is not always so clearly apparent as in the 
 examples cited. It frequently manifests itself in a blurred and 
 indefinite phrase, plainly expressing the state of a mind which 
 endeavours to formulate in words a nebulous representation 
 springing up in it, but which lacks the necessary power and 
 loses itself in mechanical mutterings void of sense. There are 
 three sorts of phrases of this kind to be distinguished in Ibsen. 
 One kind say absolutely nothing, and contain no more of an 
 idea than the ' tra-la-la ' sung to a song of which one has for- 
 gotten the words. They are a symptom of a temporary arrest 
 of function f in the cerebral centres of ideation, and appear in 
 healthy persons also in a state of extreme fatigue, under the 
 form of incidental embarrassment, causing hesitation in speech. 
 In persons suffering from hereditary exhaustion they are con- 
 tinuously present. Another kind affect an appearance of pro- 
 fundity and significant allusions, but exact observation recog- 
 
 * Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger, Pathologic und Therapie der psychischcn 
 Krankheiten fiir Aerzteund Stitdirende. 5teAuflage. Ganzlich umgearbeitet 
 und erweitert. Von Dr. Willibald Levinsteip-Schleger ; Berlin, 1892. (See 
 p. 143, on 'Diseased Impulses'; and p. 147, on 'Excessive Energy of Will.') 
 
 j- Griesinger, op. '/., p. 77 : ' Retardation of' thought may be produced 
 ... by the state of constriction following a mental depression, by complete 
 inertia extending to the arrest of thought 1
 
 3 88 DEGENERATION 
 
 nises them as an empty jingle of words devoid of all import. 
 Finally, the third kind are such evident and unequivocal idiocy 
 that even unprofessional listeners regard each other in con- 
 sternation, and would feel it to be their duty to give his family 
 a gentle hint if they heard anything of the kind from one of 
 their table companions at the habitual cafe\ I will give some 
 illustrations of each of these three kinds of phraseology. 
 
 Firstly, phrases saying absolutely nothing, interpolated be- 
 tween intelligible words, and indicating a temporary paralysis 
 of the centres of ideation. 
 
 In Tlie Lady from the Sea (p. 25) Lyngstrand says : ' I am 
 to a certain extent a little infirm.'* This 'to a certain extent' 
 is admirable ! Lyngstrand, a sculptor, is speaking of his artistic 
 projects (p. 51) : 
 
 As soon as 1 can set about it, I am going to try if I can produce a great 
 work a group, as they call it. 
 
 ARNHOLM. Is there anything else? 
 
 LYNGSTRAND. Yes, there is to be another figure a sort of apparition, as 
 they say. 
 
 As Ibsen makes Lyngstrand a fool, it might be believed that 
 he intentionally put these idiotic turns of expression into the 
 sculptor's mouth. But in Hedda Gabler, Brack, a sharp and 
 clever bon vivant, says (p. 87) : ' But as far as regards myself, 
 you know very well that I have always entertained a a certain 
 respect for the marriage tie, generally speaking, Mrs. Hedda.' 
 In Rosmersholm Brendel says (p. 24) : ' So you see when golden 
 dreams descended and enwrapped me ... I fashioned them 
 into poems, into visions, into pictures in the rough, as it were, 
 you understand. Oh, what pleasures, what intoxications I have 
 enjoyed in my time ! The mysterious bliss of creation in ttie 
 rough, as I said.' Rector Kroll says (p. 18) : 'A family that 
 now soon for some centuries has held its place as the first in the 
 land.'y ' Now soon for some centuries' ! That means that it 
 is not yet ' some centuries,' but ' soon ' will be ' some centuries.' 
 Hence ' soon ' must include in itself ' some centuries.' By what 
 miracle? In The WildDuck we have the intentionally, but, in their 
 exaggeration impossibly, idiotic conversations of the ' fat,' ' bald,' 
 and ' short-sighted ' gentlemen in the first act, but also this 
 remark by Gina, who is in no way depicted as an idiot (p. 270) : 
 
 Are you glad when you have some good news to tell father "when he comes 
 home in the evening ? 
 
 HEDWIG. Yes, for then we have a pleasanter time. 
 GINA. Yes, there is something [true\% in that J ! 
 
 * Rationalized in the English version cited, as follows (p. 25): 'Yes, 
 perhaps I am a little delicate.' TRANSLATOR. 
 
 f Rationalized in the English version by ' now soon,' being rendered as 
 ' nearly.' TRANSLATOR. 
 
 J ' True ' is omitted in the English version quoted TRANSLATOR.
 
 EGO-MANIA 389 
 
 In the conversation about the wild duck between Ekdal, 
 Grcgcrs and Hjalmar we read (p. 289) : 
 
 EKDAL. He was out in a boat, you see, and he shot her. But father's 
 sight is pretty bad now. H'rn ; he only wounded her. 
 
 GREGEKS. Ah ! she got a couple of shot in her body, I suppose. 
 
 HJALMAR. Yes, Iwo or //tree. . . . 
 
 GKEGKRS. And s-he thrives all right in the garret there? 
 
 HJALMAR. Yes, wonderfully well. She's got fat. She's been in there so 
 long now that she's forgotten her natural wild life, and it all depends on 
 that. 
 
 GREGERS. You're right there^ Hjalmar. 
 
 And in a dialogue between Hedwig and Gregers Werle 
 
 (P- 305) : 
 
 HF.DWIG. ... If I had learnt basket-making, I could have made the new 
 basket for the wild duck. 
 
 GREGKRS. So you could; and it was, strictly speaking, your business, 
 wasn't it ? 
 
 IlEDWiG. Yes. for she's my wild duck. 
 
 GKEGERS. Of course she is ! 
 
 Now for some examples of phrases which sound excessively 
 profound, but in reality express nothing, or mere foolishness. 
 
 In A Doll's Ho2ise (p. 25) Mrs. Linden expresses the opinion : 
 'Well, after all, it is better to open the door to the sick, and 
 get them safe in ;' to which Rank significantly replies : ' Yes, 
 so people say. And it is that very consideration which turns 
 society into a hospital.' What does this meditative and 
 oracular speech mean ? Is it Rank's opinion that society is 
 a hospital because it cares for its sick, and that it would be 
 healthy if its sick were not cared for ? Would the untended 
 sick be any less sick ? If he believes that he believes an 
 idiocy. Or are the sick to be left to die uncared for, and in 
 this manner got rid of? If he preaches that, he preaches a 
 barbarism and a crime, and that is not in accordance with 
 Rank's character as Ibsen depicts him. We may turn and 
 twist the vague, mysterious words as we will, we shall always 
 find either stupidity or want of meaning. 
 
 In Rosmersholm, Rosmer (p. 30) wishes to ' devote all his 
 life and all his energies to this one thing the creation of a 
 true democracy in this country.' And, wonderful to relate, the 
 persons to whom Rosmer says these words all seem to compre- 
 hend what the ' true democracy ' is. Without being asked, 
 Rosmer offers, besides, some explanation of his Pythian utter- 
 ance : ' I want to awaken the democracy to its true task that 
 of making all the people of this country noblemen ... by 
 setting free their minds and purifying their wills. ... I will only 
 try to arouse them to their task. They themselves must ac- 
 complish it ... by their own strength. There is no other. . . . 
 Peace and joy and mutual forbearance must once more enter
 
 390 DEGENERATION 
 
 into their souls.' Rebecca repeats to him his programme 
 (P- 62) : 
 
 You were to set resolutely to work in the world the living world of to-day, 
 as you said. You were to go as a messenger of emancipation from home to 
 home ; to win over minds and wills ; to create noble men around you in, 
 wider and wider circles. Noblemen. 
 
 ROS.MER. Joyful noblemen. 
 
 RtBECCA. Yes, joyful. 
 
 ROSMER. For it is joy that ennobles the mind. 
 
 It is impossible to avoid calling up a comic picture of Rosmer 
 going ' from home to home ' ' in wider and wider circles,' and 
 making the persons before whom he talks into 'joyful noble- 
 men,' while he ' awakens ' them and ' purifies their wills,' and 
 thus ' creates a true democracy.' This rigmarole is, it is true, 
 incomprehensible ; but, at all events, it must be something 
 agreeable, for Rosmer expressly says that he needs ' joy 'to 
 create ' noblemen.' And in spite of this Rebecca suddenly 
 discovers (p. 102) : ' The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it 
 kills happiness.' What ! Rosmer kill happiness when he ' goes 
 from home to home/ awakening, winning, making people free, 
 etc., and creating joyful noblemen ? The word 'joyful ' includes, 
 at least, something of happiness, and yet the education of men 
 to 'joyful noblemen ' is to kill happiness ? Rosmer finds (p. 97) 
 'the work of ennobling men's minds is not for him. And, 
 besides, it is so hopeless in itself.' This is in a measure 
 intelligible, though it is not stated from what experience 
 Rosmer has been led to such a change in his views. But quite 
 beyond comprehension is Rebecca's speech about the fatal 
 influence of ' the Rosmer view of life.' In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving 
 endeavours to explain her defunct husband's vagaries in this 
 balderdash (p. 187): 'When he was a young lieutenant, he 
 was brimming over with the joy of life. It was like a breezy 
 day only to look at him. And what exuberant strength and 
 vitality there was in him ! And then, child of joy as he was 
 for he was like a child at the time he had to live here at 
 home in a half-grown town, which had no joys to offer him, 
 but only amusements. He had no object in life, but only an 
 office. He had no work into which he could throw himself 
 heart and soul ; he had only business. He had not a single 
 comrade that knew what the joy of life meant, only loungers 
 and boon companions.' These antitheses seem to have some- 
 thing in them ; but if we seriously set about hunting for a 
 definite idea in them, they vanish in smoke. ' Object in life 
 office ' ' work business ' ' comrades boon companions,' are 
 not in themselves oppositions, but become such through the 
 individual. With a decent man they are perfectly coincident ; 
 with a base man they fall into opposition. A large or a small
 
 EGO-MANIA 39 r 
 
 town has nothing to do with it. For Kant in the small town 
 of Kcenigsberg, in the last century, the 'office ' was 'the object 
 in life,' ' work ' was ' business,' and he so chose his ' boon 
 companions ' that they were at the same time his ' comrades/ 
 as far, indeed, as he could have such. And, on the other hand, 
 there is, in the largest metropolis, no occupation and no circle of 
 men in which a degenerate, burdened with his disorder, could 
 feel at ease and in inward harmony. 
 
 In Hedda Gabler we find quite s. multitude of such words, 
 apparently saying much, but in reality saying nothing. ' It 
 was the passion for life in you !' exclaims Lovborg to Hedda 
 (p. 128), with the seeming conviction that he has, in this utter- 
 ance, explained something to her. And Hedda says (p. 142) : 
 '/see him before me. With vine-leaves in his hair. Hot and 
 bold' (p. 151). 'And Ejlert Lovborg, he is sitting with vine- 
 leaves in his hair, and reading aloud' (p. 157). ' Had he vine- 
 leaves in his hair?' (p. 171). ' So that is how it all happened. 
 Then he did not have vine-leaves in his hair ' (p. 188). 
 
 HEDDA. Could you not contrive that it should be done gracefully ? 
 LOVBORG. Gracefully ? With vine-leaves in my hair ? 
 
 1 With vine-leaves in his hair ;' ' the passion for life ' these 
 are words meaning, in the connection assigned to them, 
 absolutely nothing, but giving scope for dreaming. In a few 
 instances Ibsen employs these dreamily- nebulous, shadowy 
 expressions with poetic licence, e.g., when we read in The Pillars 
 of Society (p. 19) : 
 
 RORLUND. Tell me, Dina, why you do like so much to be with me? 
 
 DlNA. Because you teach me so much that is beautiful. 
 
 RORLUND. Beautiful ? Do you call what I can teach you beautiful ? 
 
 DINA. Yes; or, rather, you teach me nothing ; but when I hear you speak, 
 it makes me think of so much that is beautiful. 
 
 RORLUND. What do you understand, then, by a beautiful thing ? 
 
 DINA. I have never thought of that. 
 
 RORLUND. Then think of it now. What do you understand by a beautiful 
 thing ? 
 
 DINA. A beautiful thing is something great and far away. 
 
 Dina is a young girl living under sad arid painful conditions. 
 It is psychologically accurate that she should condense all her 
 longing for a new and happy existence in a word of emotional 
 colouring, such as ' beautiful." It is the same with the dialogue 
 between Gregers and Hedwig \n~TJie Wild Duck (p. 53) : 
 
 GREGERS. And she [the wild duck] has been down in the depths of the sea. 
 HEDWIG. Why do you say 'in the depths of the sea'? 
 GREGERS. What else could I say ? 
 
 HEDWIG. You could say ' the bottom of the sea' [or ' at the bottojn of he 
 water'].* 
 
 GREGERS. Oh, mayn't I just as well say the depths of the sea? 
 
 * Bracketed clause not in English version. TRANSLATOR.
 
 392 DEGENERATION 
 
 HEDWIG. Yes ; but it sounds so strange to me when other people speak 
 of the depths of the sea. 
 
 GREGERS. Why so ? ... 
 
 HEDWIG. ... It always seems to me that the whole room and everything 
 in it should be called the depths of the sea. But that's so stupid. . . . 
 Because it's only a garret [the place where the wild duck lives, the old 
 Christmas-trees are put, where old Ekdal chases the rabbit, etc.]. 
 
 Hedwig is a highly excitable child at the age of puberty 
 (Ibsen thinks it necessary expressly to affirm that her voice is 
 changing, and that she willingly plays with fire) ; hence it is 
 natural that she should be thrilled with presentiments, dreams, 
 and obscure instincts, and invest poetical expressions denoting 
 something far away and wild, such as ' in the depths of the sea/ 
 with the secret significance of all the mysterious and marvellous 
 surging in her. But when expressions of this sort are used, not 
 by little growing girls, but by full-grown persons depicted as 
 rational beings, it is no longer a question of dreaming explicable 
 on pathological grounds, but of diseased cerebral centres. 
 
 These words often assume the nature of an obsession. Ibsen 
 obstinately repeats them, at the same time imparting to them a 
 mysterious significance. It is thus, for example, that the words 
 'joy of life ' appear in Ghosts (p. 176) : 
 
 OSWALD She was full of the joy of life (p. 177). 
 
 MRS. ALVING. What were you saying about the joy of life? 
 
 OSWALD. Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned 
 opon the joy of life ? always, always upon the joy of life ? (p. 187). 
 
 MRS. ALVING. You spoke of the joy of life ; and at that word a new light 
 burst for me over my life and all it has contained. . . . You ought to have 
 known your father. . . . He was brimming over with the joy of life. 
 
 In Hedda Gabler the word 'beauty' plays a similar part 
 (p. 190): 
 
 HEDDA (to Lovborg). You use it [the pistol] now. . . . And do it beauti- 
 fully (p. 214). 
 
 HEDDA. I say that there is something beautiful in this [Lovborg's suicide] 
 (p. 219). 
 
 HEDDA. A relief to know that it is still possible for an act of voluntary 
 courage to take place in the world. Something over which there falls a veil 
 of unintentional beauty. . . . And then now the great act ! That over 
 which the sense of beauty falls ! 
 
 The ' vine leaves in the hair,' in the same piece, belongs with 
 equal exactness to this category of words, amounting to an 
 obsession. The use of expressions full of myste'ry, incompre- 
 hensible to the hearer, and either freely coined by the speaker, 
 or endowed by him with a peculiar sense, deviating from that 
 usually assigned them in speech, is one of the most frequent 
 j.henora.ena among the mentally deranged. Griesinger* often 
 
 * Griesinger, op. cit., p. 176. He names the coining of words 'phraseo- 
 tnnnia.' Kussmaul gives the name Paraphrasia vesana to the coining of 
 incomprehensible words, or the using of known words in a sense wholly 
 foreign to them.
 
 EGO-MANIA 393 
 
 lays stress on this, and A. Marie* adduces some characteristic 
 examples of words and phrases, either newly invented or 
 employed in a sense differing from the customary one, which 
 have been repeated by the insane. 
 
 Ibsen is certainly not wholly diseased in mind, but only a 
 dweller on the borderland a ' mattoid.' His use of formalized 
 expressions does not therefore go so far as the invention of new 
 words, as cited by Dr. Marie. But that he ascribes a mysterious 
 meaning to the expressions 'beauty,' 'joy of life/ 'courage of 
 life,' etc., and one which they do not possess when rationally 
 used, follows clearly enough from the examples quoted. 
 
 Finally let us adduce a few specimens of sheer nonsense, 
 corresponding to conversations held in dreams, and the silly 
 gambling speech of persons suffering from fever or acute mania. 
 In "J'/ie Lady from the Sea, Ellida says (p. 39) : ' The water in 
 the fjord here is sick, . . . yes, sick. And I believe it makes 
 one sick, too ' (p. 79). ' We ' (Ellida and the ' stranger ') ' spoke 
 -of the gulls and the eagles, and all the other sea-birds. I think 
 isn't it wonderful? when we talked of such things it seemed 
 to me as if both the sea-beasts and sea-birds were one with 
 'him. ... I almost thought I belonged to them all, too * (p. 100). 
 
 I don't think the dry land is really our home. ... I think that if only men 
 had from the beginning accustomed themselves to live on the sea, or in the 
 sea, perhaps, we should be more perfect than we are with better and 
 happier . . . 
 
 ARNHOLM (jestingly}. Well, perhaps ! But it can't be helped. We've 
 -once for all entered upon the wrong path, and have become land-beasts 
 instead of sea-beasts. Anyhow, I suppose it's too late to make good the 
 mistake now. 
 
 ELLIDA. Yes, you've spoken a sad truth. And I think men instinctively 
 feel something of this themselves. And they bear it about with them as a 
 secret regret and sorrow. Believe me, herein lies the deepest cause for the 
 sadness of men. 
 
 And Dr. Wangel, who is depicted as a rational man, says 
 (p. 129): 
 
 And then she is so changeable, so capricious she varies so suddenly. 
 ARNHOLM. No doubt that is the result of her morbid state of mind. 
 WANGEL. Not altogether. Ellida belongs to the sea-folk. That! is the 
 :matter (! !. 
 
 * Dr. A. Marie, Etudes sur quelques Sytnptomes des Delires systematises et 
 sur leur Valcur; Paris, 1892, chap. ii. : ' Eccentricities of language. Neo- 
 logisms and conjuring incantations.' Tanzi cites, among others, the follow- 
 ing examples : A patient used continuously to repeat, ' That is true, and not 
 false'; another began every phrase with, 'God's Word'; a third said, 'Out 
 with the vile beast !' making at the same time a sign of benediction with the 
 right hand ; a fourth said unceasingly. 'Turn over the page'; a fifth cried, 
 in a tone of command, ' Lips acs livi cux lips sux !' etc. One of Krafft- 
 Ebing's patients (op. cit., p. 130) constructed, among others, the following 
 words : ' Magnetismusambosarbeitswellen, Augengedanken Austrahlung, 
 Gliickseligkeitsbetten, Ohrenschussmascnine,' etc. Krafft-Ebin^, op. '/, 
 jpp. 130, 131.
 
 394 DEGENERATION 
 
 We must insist that precisely the absurdities, the nugatory, 
 blurred, deep-sounding phrases, the formalized words, and 
 the dream-like drivel, have essentially conduced to obtain for 
 Ibsen his particular admirers. Over them hysterical mystics 
 can dream, like Dina and Hedxvig, over the words ' beautiful ' 
 and ' in the depths of the sea.' As they mean absolutely 
 nothing, an inattentive and vagrant mind can impart to them 
 whatever significance may be suggested by the play of associa- 
 tion under the influence of momentary emotion. They are. 
 moreover, exceedingly grateful material for the (so-called) 
 ' comprehuensives,' for whom nothing is ever obscure. ' Compre- 
 hensives ' always explain everything. The greater the idiocy, 
 the more involved, the richer in import, the more exhaustive is 
 its interpretation, and the greater the arrogance with which these 
 beings of 'perfect comprehension' look down upon the barbarian, 
 who stoutly refuses to see in fustian anything but fustian. 
 
 In an exceedingly amusing French farce, Le Howard, a 
 husband suddenly returning home one evening surprises a 
 stranger with his wife. The latter does not lose her presence of 
 mind, and says to the husband that, having suddenly been seized 
 with illness, she had sent her maid for the first available doctor, 
 and that this gentleman was the doctor. The husband thanks 
 the gallant for his speedy appearance, and asks if he has already 
 prescribed anything. The gallant, who, of course, is not a doctor, 
 tries to make himself scarce ; but the anxious husband insists 
 on having a prescription, so that the Galen, bathed in cold 
 perspiration, is compelled to give one. The husband casts a 
 glance at it ; it consists of wholly illegible marks. ' And will 
 the chemist be able to read that?' asks the husband, shaking 
 his head. ' As if it were print,' asseverates the false physician, 
 again trying to make his escape. The husband, however, 
 adjures him to remain, and holds him fast until the maid 
 returns from the chemist. In a few minutes she makes her 
 appearance. The Galen prepares himself for a catastrophe. 
 No. The maid brings a phial of medicine, a box of pills, and 
 some powders. ' Did the chemist give you those ?' demands 
 the Galen in bewilderment. ' Certainly.' ' On my prescrip- 
 tion ?' ' Of course it was on your prescription/ replies the 
 astonished maid. ' Has the chemist made some mistake ?' 
 interposes the troubled husband. ' No, no, 1 our Galen hastens 
 to reply ; but he contemplates the medicines for a long time, 
 and becomes lost in reverie. 
 
 These ' comprehensives ' are like the chemist in Le Howard. 
 They read with fluency all Ibsen's prescriptions, and especially 
 those containing absolutely no written characters, but simply 
 crow's feet devoid of all meaning. It is also their trade to 
 supply critical pills and electuaries when a piece of paper is 
 brought to them bearing the signature of a self-styled doctor,
 
 EGO-MANIA 395 
 
 and they dispense them without wincing, be there anything of 
 any sort, or even nothing, on the slip of paper. Is it not 
 significant that the sole thing in Ibsen which the French mystic 
 De Vogue, one of these ' comprehensives,' finds to praise is one 
 of the meaningless phrases above cited ?* 
 
 A final stigma of Ibsen's mysticism must be considered his 
 symbolism. In The Wild Duck, this bird is the symbol of 
 Hjalmar's destiny, and the garret next the photographic studio 
 a symbol of the ' living lie,' of which, according to Relling, 
 everyone stands in need. In The Lady from the Sea, Lyng- 
 strand wishes to make a group which shall be the symbol of 
 Ellida, as the 'stranger' with the changing eyes of a fish is of 
 the sea and the latter again of freedom, so that the ' stranger ' 
 is really the symbol of a symbol. In Ghosts, the burning of 
 the asylum is the symbol of the annihilation of Alving's 'living 
 lie,' and the rainy weather prevailing throughout the whole 
 piece the symbol of the depressed and sullen frame of mind of 
 the personages in action. Ibsen's earlier pieces, Emperor and 
 Galilean, Brand, Peer Gynt, literally swarm with symbols. A 
 mysterious collateral significance is given to every figure and 
 every stage accessory, and every word includes a double 
 meaning. From the ' Psychology of Mysticism ' we already 
 know this peculiarity of the mystic mind to divine obscure 
 relations between phenomena. It seeks so to explain the nexus 
 of the wholly unconnected representations springing up in 
 consciousness through the play of automatic association, that 
 it attributes hidden but essential reference to each other in 
 these representations. The ' comprehensives' believe they have 
 said all when, with an extremely consequential and self-satisfied 
 air, they demonstrate that the 'stranger' in The Lady from the 
 Sea signifies the sea, and the sea freedom. They quite over- 
 look the fact that the thing to be explained is not what the 
 poet intended by his symbol, but, firstly, and in particular, why 
 he hit upon the idea of making use of a symbol at all. In the 
 well-known words of the French satirist, a clear-headed poet 
 calls ' a cat a cat.' That to express so sober an idea as that 
 persons of fine feelings, living in narrow conditions, have a deep 
 longing for a free, expanded, unrestrained existence, one should 
 have the whim to invent a ' stranger with fish-like eyes,' pre- 
 
 * Vicomte E. M. de Vogue", ' Les Ctgognes/ Revue des deux Mondes, 
 February 15, 1892, p. 922 : ' Ibsen would have won our trust, were it only by 
 certain axioms [?] which appeal to our actual distrusts, such as this ... in 
 Rosniersko lin : "The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness."' 
 I am convinced that, unless previously told thai they emanated from con- 
 fined lunatics, these ' comprehensives ' would, without difficulty, understand 
 and interpret the expression ' Iittle-cupboards-of-apr3etite-of-representation ' 
 (Vorstelhings-Appetitschrdnkchen\ freely used by one of Meynert's lunatic 
 patients, or the words of a patient under Griesinger's care (op. tit., p. 176) 
 that ; the lady superior was establishing herself in the military side-tone and 
 in the retardation of her teeth.'
 
 3Q6 DEGENERATION 
 
 supposes a diseased mental activity. In imbeciles, the tendency 
 to allegory and symbolism is very common. ' Intricate 
 arabesques, symbolical figures, cabalistic gestures and attitudes, 
 strange interpretations of natural events, punning, word-coining, 
 and peculiar modes of expression, frequently occurring in 
 paranoia, give the delirium a lively and grotesque colouring.' 
 Thus writes Tanzi,* and in the symbolism of the insane he 
 saw, as Meynert had previously seen, a form of atavism. 
 Among men low in the grade of civilization symbolism is, in 
 fact, the habitual form of thought. We know the reason 
 their brain is not yet trained to attention ; it is too weak to 
 suppress irrational associations, and refers all that shoots 
 through its consciousness to some chance phenomenon either 
 just perceived, or else remembered. 
 
 After all the mental stigmata of Ibsen with which we have 
 become acquainted his theological obsessions of original sin, 
 of confession and redemption, the absurdities of his invention, 
 the constant contradiction in his uncertain opinions, his vague 
 or senseless modes of expression, his onomatomania and his 
 symbolism he might be numbered among the mystic degen- 
 erates with which I have concerned myself in the previous 
 chapters. We are, however, justified in assigning him his place 
 among the ego-maniacs, because the diseased intensification of 
 his ego-consciousness is even more striking and characteristic 
 than his mysticism. His ego-mania assumes the form of 
 anarchism. He is in a state of constant revolt against all that 
 exists. He never exercises rational criticism with regard to this ; 
 he never shows what is bad, why it is bad, and how it could be 
 made better. No ; he only reproaches it with its existence, and 
 has only one longing to destroy it. 'The ruin of everything ' 
 was the programme of certain destructives in 1848, and has 
 remained that of Ibsen. He condenses it with a clearness which 
 leaves nothing to be desired in his well-known poem, To my 
 Friend tJte Destructive Orator. In this he glorihes the deluge 
 as the 'sole revolution not made by a half-and-half dabbler* 
 (HaloJiedsfusker) ; but even it was not radically ruinous enough. 
 ' We want to make it still more radical, but for that end we 
 need men and orators. You charge yourselves with flooding 
 the terrestrial garden. I place blissfully a torpedo under the 
 ark.'t In a series of letters offered by elephant-driver Brandes 
 
 * Tanzi, / Neologismi in rapporta col Delirio cronico. Turin, 1890. 
 f ' Vi vil gjore del om igjen raditalere, 
 
 Men dertil sordres baade Maend og Talere. 
 J sorger sor Vandfiom til Verdensparken, 
 Jeg laegger med Lyst Torpedo under Arken.' 
 
 Observe the purely mystic vapours of this thought. The poet wishes to 
 destroy everything, even the ark which shelters the saved remnants of 
 terrestrial life, but sees himself placed beyond the reach of the destruction, 
 and hence will survive the annihilation of everything else on earth.
 
 EGO- MAN I A 397 
 
 for the edification of the adorers of Ibsen, the poet gives con- 
 spicuous specimens of his theories.* The state must be de- 
 stroyed. Unfortunately the Paris Communists bungled this 
 beautiful and fertile idea by clumsy execution. The fight for 
 freedom has not for its end the conquest of liberty, but is its 
 own end. As soon as we believe liberty to be attained, and 
 cease to fight for it, we prove it to be lost to us. The meri- 
 torious thing in the fight for liberty is the state of permanent 
 revolt against all existing things which it presupposes. There 
 is nothing fixed and permanent. 'Who warrants me that in the 
 planet Jupiter twice two are not five?' (This remark is an 
 unmistakable manifestation of the insanity of doubt/f which in 
 recent years has been deeply studied.) There is no true mar- 
 riage. Friends are a costly luxury. ' They have long hindered 
 me from being myself.' The care of the ' I ' is the sole task 
 of man. He ought not to allow himself to be diverted from it 
 by any law or any consideration. 
 
 These thoughts, expressed by himself in his letters, he also 
 puts into the mouth of his dramatic characters. I have already 
 cited some of Mrs. Alving's and Nora's ego-maniacal and 
 anarchical phrases. In The Pillars of Society, Dinasays (p. 19) : 
 ' If only the people I lived amongst weren't so proper and moral. 
 Everyday Hilda and Netta come here that I may take example 
 by them. I can never be as well behaved as they are, and I 
 won't be' (p. 44). 
 
 But I wanted to know, too, if people over thei-e [in America] are very 
 very m>ral ... if they are so so proper and well-behaved as here. 
 
 JOHAN. Well, at any rate, they're not so bad as people here think. 
 
 DINA. You don't understand me. What I want is just that they should 
 not be so very proper and moral (p. 92). I am sick of all this goodness. 
 
 MARTHA BERNICK. Oh, how we writhe under this tyranny of custom and 
 convention ! Rebel against it, Dina. Do something to defy all this use-and- 
 wont ! 
 
 In An Enemy of the People (p. 278) Stockmann declares : ' I 
 detest leading men . . . they stand in the path of a free man 
 wherever he turns and I should be glad if we could exter- 
 minate them like other noxious animals.' (P. 280) ' The most 
 dangerous enemies of truth and freedom in our midst are the 
 
 * Georges Brandes, op. tit., pp. 431, 435, 438, etc. 
 
 "f J. Cotard, Etudes sur les Maladits cerebrates et mental es ; Paris, 1891. 
 In this book the delire des negations is for the first time recognised and 
 described as a form of melancholia. The Third Congress of French Alienists, 
 which sat at Blois from the ist to the 6th of August, 1892, devoted almost 
 the whole of its conferences to the insanity of doubt. In a work by F. Ray- 
 mond and F. L. Arnaud, 'Sur certains cas d'aboulie avec obsession inter- 
 rogative et trouble des mouvements ' (Annales mcdico-psychologiques, / 
 series, t. xvi.), we read, p. 202 : ' The invalids occupy themselves with 
 questions intrinsically insoluble, such as the creation, nature, life, etc. Why 
 the trees are green ? Why the rainbow has seven colours ? \Vhy men are 
 not as tall as houses ?' etc.
 
 393 DEGENERATION 
 
 compact majority. Yes, this execrable compact, Liberal 
 majority they it is. ... The majority is never right. . . . 
 The minority is always right.' Where Ibsen does not seriously 
 attack the majority he derides it e.g., when he entrusts the 
 maintenance of society to grotesque Philistines, or makes self- 
 styled Radicals betray the hypocrisy of their Liberal views. 
 In An Enemy of the People (p. 238) : 
 
 BURGOMASTER. You want to fly in the face of your superiors ; and that's 
 an old habit of yours. You can't endure any authority over you.' 
 
 In Rosmersholm (p. 53) : 
 
 MORTF.NSGAARD [the journalist who poses as a Freethinker]. We have 
 plenty of Freethinkers already, Pastor Rosmer I almost might say too many. 
 What the party requires is a Christian element something that everyone 
 must respect. That's what we're sadly in need of. 
 
 With the same purpose of anarchistic ridicule he always 
 personifies the sense of duty in idiots or contemptible Pharisees 
 only. In Ghosts the blockhead, Pastor Manders, thus preaches 
 (p. 142) : ' What right have we human beings to happiness ? 
 No, we have' to do our duty! And your duty was to hold 
 firmly to the man you had once chosen, and to whom you are 
 bound by a holy tie.' In The Pillars of Society it is the rogue 
 Bernick who is made to proclaim the necessity of the subordi- 
 nation of the individual to the community (p. 58) : ' People 
 must learn to moderate their personal claims if they are to 
 fulfil their duties in the community in which they are placed.' 
 In An Enemy of the People the not less pitiable burgomaster 
 sermonizes his brother Stockmann in this fashion (p. 209) : 
 ' Anyhow, you've an ingrained propensity for going your own 
 way. And that in a well-ordered community is almost always 
 dangerous. The individual must submit himself to the whole 
 community.' 
 
 The trick is evident : to make the conception of the neces- 
 sary subordination of the individual ridiculous and contemptible, 
 Ibsen appoints as its mouthpieces ridiculous and contemptible 
 beings. On the other hand, it is the characters on whom he 
 lavishes all the wealth of his affection to whom he entrusts the 
 duty of defending rebellion against duty, the aspersion or 
 derision of laws, morals, institutions, self-discipline, and the 
 proclaiming of unscrupulous ego-mania as the sole guide of life. 
 
 The psychological roots of Ibsen's anti-social impulses are 
 well known. They are the degenerate's incapacity for self- 
 adaptation, and the resulting discomfort in the midst of cir- 
 cumstances to which, in consequence of his organic deficiencies, 
 he cannot accommodate himselfc ' The criminal,' Lombroso* 
 
 * Lombroso and B. Laschi, Le Crime politique et les Resolutions par 
 rapport au Droit, a V Anthropologie criminelle et a la Science du Gouvone- 
 inettt. Traduit de PItalien par H. Bouchard. Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 195.
 
 EGO-MANIA 399 
 
 says, ' in consequence of 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 satisfying his passions, 
 but of even having them countenanced for the first time by 
 a numerous public.' This utterance is exactly applicable to 
 Ibsen, with the slight change, that he is merely a theoretic 
 criminal, his motor centres not being powerful enough to 
 transmute his anarchically criminal ideas into deeds, and that 
 he finds the satisfaction of his destructive impulses not in the 
 insurrection, but in the activity of dramatic composition. 
 
 His incapacity for self-adaptation makes him not only an 
 anarchist, but also a misanthrope, and fills him with a pro- 
 found weariness of life. The doctrine of An Enemy of the People 
 is contained in Stockmann's exclamation (p. 315): 'The 
 strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone ' ; and in 
 Rosmersholm (p. 24), Brendel says : ' I like to take my pleasures 
 in solitude, for then I enjoy them doubly.' The same Brendel 
 subsequently laments (p. 105) : ' I am going homewards ; I 
 am home-sick for the mighty Void. . . . Peter Mortensgaard 
 never wills more than he can do. Peter Mortensgaard is 
 capable of living his life without ideals. And that, do you see, 
 that is just the mighty secret of action and of victory. It is 
 the sum of the whole world's wisdom. ... The dark night is 
 "best. Peace be with you !' Brendel's words have a peculiar 
 significance, for, on the evidence of Ehrhard,* Ibsen wished 
 to portray himself in that personage. That which is ex- 
 pressed in these passages is the degoiit des gens and the tedium 
 vita of alienists, phenomena never absent in depressed forms of 
 mental alienation. 
 
 In addition to his mysticism and ego-mania, Ibsen's extra- 
 ordinary poverty of ideas indicates another stigma of de- 
 generacy. Superficial or ignorant judges, who appraise an 
 artist's intellectual wealth by the number of volumes he has 
 produced, believe that when they point at the high pile of a 
 degenerate's works they have victoriously refuted the accu- 
 sation of his infecundity. The well-informed are of course 
 not entrapped by this paltry method of proof. The history 
 of insane literature knows of a large number of cases in which 
 fools have written and published dozens of thick volumes. 
 For tens of years and in feverish haste they must have driven 
 the pen, almost continuously, night and day ; but since all 
 
 * Auguste Ehrhard, op. tit., p. 412 : ' He [Ibsen] assigns himself a rch to 
 acquaint us in a direct manner with his own disillusionings. . . . He presents 
 himself in the fantastic and tormented character of Ulric Brendel. Let us 
 not be deceived by the disguise in which he veils himself. Ulric Brendel, 
 the fool, is no other than Henrik Ibsen, the idealist' (?).
 
 400 DEGENERATION 
 
 these bulky tomes contain not a single idea of any utility, 
 this restless activity is not to be termed fruitful, in spite of the 
 abundant typographical results. We have seen that Richard 
 Wagner never invented a tale, a figure, a situation ; but that 
 he sponged on ancient poems or the Bible. Ibsen has almost 
 as little genuine original creative power as his intellectual 
 relative, and as he, in his beggar's pride, disdains for the most 
 part to borrow from other poets of procreative capacity, or 
 from popular traditions exuberant with life, his poems reveal, 
 when closely and keenly examined, an even greater poverty 
 than those of Wagner. If we do not allow ourselves to be 
 dazzled by the art of variation in a contrapuntist extra- 
 ordinarily clever in dramatic technique, and follow the themes 
 he so adroitly elaborates, we at once recognise their dreary 
 monotony. 
 
 At the central point of all his pieces (with the exception of 
 those of a romantic character, written by him in his first period 
 of pure imitation) stand two figures, always the same and 
 fundamentally one, but having now a negative and now a 
 positive sign, a thesis and antithesis in the Hegelian sense. 
 They are, on the one hand, the human being who obeys his 
 inner law only (that is, his ego-mania), and dauntlessly and 
 defiantly makes a parade of it ; and, on the other, the in- 
 dividual who, it is true, really acts in obedience to his ego- 
 mania only, but has not the courage to display it, feigning- 
 respect for the law of others and for the notions of the 
 majority in other words, the avowed and violent anarchist, 
 and his opposite, the crafty and timorously deceitful anarchist. 
 
 The avowed ego-maniac is, with one single exception, always 
 embodied in a woman. The exception is Brand. On the 
 contrary, the hypocrite is always a man again with a single 
 exception, viz., that of Hedda Gabler, who does not personify 
 the idea in its purity, frank anarchism in her nature being 
 mingled with something of hypocrisy. Nora (A Doll's Home), 
 Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Selma Malsberg (The League of the Young), 
 Dina, Martha Hessel, Mrs. Bernick (The Pillars of Society), 
 Hedda Gabler, Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea), Rebecca 
 (Rosmersholm), are one and the same figure, but seen, as it were, 
 at different hours of the day, and consequently in different 
 lights. Some are in the major, others in the minor, key ; 
 some are more, others less hysterically deranged ; but essen- 
 tially they are not only similar, but identical. Selma Malsberg 
 (p. 60) cries : ' Bear our unhappiness in common ? Am I yet 
 good enough ? No. I can no longer keep silent, be a hypo- 
 crite and a liar. Now you shall know. .... O, how you have 
 wronged me ! Infamously, all of you ! . . . How I have 
 thirsted for a drop of your care ! But when I begged for it
 
 EGG -MAN I A 4or 
 
 you repulsed me with a polite joke. You dressed me like a 
 doll. You played with me as with a child. ... I want to go 
 -away from you. . . . Let me, let me.' And Nora (p. no) : 
 "* I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. . . . You and 
 your father have sinned greatly against me. It is the fault of 
 you two that nothing has been made of me. I was never 
 happy, only merry. . . . Our house has been nothing but a 
 nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I 
 used to be papa's doll-child. . . . That is why I am going 
 -away from you now. ... I shall now leave your house at 
 once.' Ellida (The Lady from the Sea) : ' What I want is that 
 we should, of our own free will, release each other. ... I 
 am not what you took me for. Now you see it yourself. Now 
 we can separate as friends, and freely. . . . Here there is no 
 single thing that attracts me and binds me. I am so abso- 
 lutely rootless in your house, Wangel.' Selma threatens to 
 leave, Ellida resolves to leave, Nora does leave, Mrs. Alving 
 did leave. (Ghosts, p. 144) Pastor Manders : ' All your efforts 
 have been bent towards emancipation and lawlessness. You 
 have never been willing to endure any bond. Everything that 
 has weighed upon you in life you have cast away without care 
 or conscience, like a burden you could throw off at will. It 
 did not please you to be a wife any longer, and you left your 
 husband. You found it troublesome to be a mother, and you 
 sent your child forth among strangers.' Mrs. Bernick was, 
 equally with her double, Mrs. Alving, a stranger in her own 
 house. She, however, does not wish to leave, but to remain and 
 endeavour to win over her husband (p. 112) : ' For many years 
 I believed that you had once been mine, and I had lost you 
 again. Now I know that you never were mine ; but I shall 
 win you.' Dina (The Pillars of Society) cannot leave because 
 she is not yet married, but as becomes her state of maiden- 
 hood, she gives her rebellious thoughts this form (p. 93) : ' I 
 will be your wife ; but first I will work, and become something 
 for myself, just as you are. I will give myself; I will not be 
 taken.' Rebecca (Rosmersholm} is also unmarried, yet she runs 
 -away (p. 96) : 
 
 I am going. 
 
 ROSMER. Where are you going, Rebecca? 
 
 REBECCA. North, by the steamer. It was there I came from. 
 
 ROSMER. But you have no ties there now. 
 
 REBECCA. I have none here either. 
 
 ROSMER. What do you think of doing ? 
 
 REBECCA. I don't know. I only want to have done with it all. 
 
 Now for the antithesis, the hypocritical egoist who satisfies 
 Tiis ego-mania without giving offence to society. This per- 
 sonage presents himself under the names successively of 
 
 26
 
 402 DEGENERATION 
 
 Torvald Helmer, Consul Bernick, Curate Rorlund, Rector 
 Kroll, Pastor Manders, Burgomaster Stockmann, Werle, 
 and once, to a certain extent, Hedda Gabler, always with 
 the same ideas and the same words. In A Doll's House 
 (p. 104, et seq.), after his wife's confession, Helmer cries : ' Oh, 
 what an awful awakening ! . . . No religion, no morality, no- 
 sense of duty. . . . He can publish the whole story ; and if 
 he does publish it, perhaps I should be suspected of having 
 been a party to your criminal transactions. ... I must try 
 to pacify him in one way or the other. The story must be 
 kept secret, cost what it may.' In Ghosts Pastor Manders on 
 different occasions expresses himself thus : ' One is certainly 
 not boun3 to account to everybody for what one reads and 
 thinks within one's own four walls. . . . We must not expose 
 ourselves to false interpretations, and we have no right what- 
 ever to give offence to our neighbours. . . . You go and risk 
 your good name and reputation, and nearly succeed in ruining 
 other people's reputation into the bargain. It was unspeakably 
 reckless of you to seek refuge with me. . . . Yes, that is the only 
 thing possible ' (to ' hush the matter up ') ' . . . yes, family life 
 is certainly not always so pure as it ought to be. But in such 
 a case as you point to ' (an incestuous union), ' one can never 
 know.' Rorlund (The Pillars of Society) : ' See how the family 
 is undermined over there ! how a brazen spirit of destruction 
 is attacking the most vital truths ! . . . Of course, a tare now 
 and then springs up among the wheat, alas ! but we honestly 
 do our best to weed it out. . . . Oh, Dina, you can form no 
 conception of the thousand considerations ! When a man is 
 placed as a moral pillar of the society he lives in, why he can- 
 not be too careful. . . . Oh, Dina, you are so dear to me ! 
 Hush ! someone is coming. Dina, for my sake, go out to the 
 others. ... A good book forms a refreshing contrast to what 
 we unhappily see every day in newspapers and magazines/ 
 Consul Bernick, in the same piece: 'Just at this time, when I 
 depend so much on unmixed good feeling, both in the press 
 and in the town. There will be paragraphs in the papers all 
 over the country-side. . . . These newspaper scribblers are 
 always covertly carping at us. ... I whose mission it is to 
 be an example to my fellow-citizens, must have such things 
 thrown in my teeth ! I cannot bear it. It won't do for me to 
 have my name bespattered in this way. ... I must keep my 
 conscience unspotted. Besides, it will make a good impression 
 on both the press and the public at large when they see that I 
 set aside all personal considerations, and let justice take its 
 course.' Kroll, in Rosmersholm : ' Do you ever see the Radical 
 papers ? . . . But you've seen, then, I suppose, how these 
 gentlemen of " the people " have been pleased to treat me ?
 
 EGO-MANIA 403 
 
 what infamous abuse they've dared to heap upon me ?' 
 Werle, in The Wild Duck : ' Even if, out of attachment to me, 
 
 she were to disregard gossip and scandal and all that ?' 
 
 The Burgomaster, in An Enemy of the People : ' If, perhaps, I do 
 watch over my reputation with some anxiety, I do it for the 
 good of the town. . . . Your statement . . . must be k-.pt 
 back for the good of all ... we will do the best we can 
 quietly ; but nothing whatever, not a single word, of this un- 
 fortunate business must be made public. . . . And then you 
 have an unhappy propensity for rushing into print upon every 
 possible and impossible matter. You no sooner hit upon an 
 idea than you must write at once some newspaper article or a 
 whole pamphlet about it.' Finally, Hedda Gabler : ' And so 
 you went off perfectly openly ? . . . But what do you suppose 
 that people will say about you, then ? . , . I so dread a 
 scandal ! You should accept for your own sake, or, better 
 still, for the world's sake.' 
 
 If all the Nora-like and all the Helmer-like utterances are 
 read successively, an impression must be formed that they 
 are part of the same role; and this impression is correct, for 
 under all the different names there is only one role. The same 
 is true of the women who, in contrast to the ego-maniac Nora, 
 unselfishly sacrifice themselves. Martha Bernick, Miss Hessel, 
 Hedwig, Miss Tesman, etc., are always the same figure in 
 different guises. The monotony, moreover, extends to minutest 
 details. Rank's inherited disease is in Oswald's case only 
 carried further. Nora's flight is repeated in almost every 
 piece, and in The Wild Duck is travestied in Hjalmar's de- 
 parture from his house. One feature of this scene appears 
 word for word in all the rechauffes of it : 
 
 NORA. Here I lay the keys down. The maids know how to manage 
 everything in the house far better than I do. 
 
 ELLIDA. If I do go ... I haven't a key to give up, an order to give. . . . 
 I am absolutely rooiless in your house, etc. 
 
 In A Doll's House, the heroine, who has settled her account 
 with life and is filled with dread of the impending catastrophe, 
 makes Rank play a wild tarantella on the piano, while she 
 dances to it. In Hedda Gabler, the heroine is heard 'suddenly 
 playing a wild dance ' before she shoots herself. Rosmer says 
 to Rebecca, when the latter makes known her wish to die : 
 'No; you recoil. You have not the heart to do what she dared.' 
 The extortioner Krogstad says to Nora, who threatens to 
 commit suicide : ' Oh, you don't frighten me ! An elegant 
 spoilt lady like you. . . . People don't dd things of that sort' 
 Brack says, in response to Hedda Gabler's outburst : ' Rather 
 die ! That's what people say, but nobody does it !' In much
 
 404 DEGENERATION 
 
 the same words Helmer reproaches his wife Nora with having 
 sacrificed her honour by the forgery, and Pastor Manders 
 upbraids Mrs. Alving for wishing to sacrifice her honour to 
 him. Lona Hessel demands confession from Consul Bernick, 
 and Rebecca from Rosmer, in the same terms. Werle's crime 
 was the seduction of the maidservant Gina. Alving's crime 
 was the seduction of his own maidservant. This pitiable and 
 imbecile self-repetition in Ibsen, this impotence of his indolent 
 brain to wash out the imprint of an idea once painfully 
 elaborated, goes so far that, even in the invention of names 
 for his characters, he is, consciously or unconsciously, under 
 the influence of a reminiscence. In A Doll's House we have 
 Helmer; in The Wild Duck, Hjalmar; in The Pillars of Society, 
 Hilmar, Mrs. Bernick's brother. 
 
 Thus Ibsen's drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny 
 bazaar. When one looks through the peep-hole, one sees, 
 at each shaking of the cardboard tube, new and parti-coloured 
 combinations. Children are amused at this toy. But adults 
 know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass, always 
 the same, inserted haphazard, and united into symmetrical 
 figures by three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of 
 the expressionless arabesques. My simile applies not only 
 to Ibsen's plays, but to the author himself. In reality, he is 
 the kaleidoscope. The few paltry bits of glass which for 
 thirty years he has rattled and thrown into cheap mosaic 
 patterns, these are his obsessions. These have existed in his 
 own diseased mind, and have not sprung from observation of 
 the world's drama. The pretended ' realist ' knows nothing of 
 real life. He does not comprehend it ; he does not even see it, 
 and cannot, therefore, renew from it his store of impressions, 
 ideas, and judgments. The well-known method of manu- 
 facturing cannon is to take a tube and pour molten metal 
 round it. Ibsen proceeds in a similar way with his poems. 
 He has a thesis more accurately, some anarchistic folly ; 
 this is the tube. It is now only a question of enveloping 
 this tube with the metal of life's realities. But that lies 
 beyond Ibsen's power. At best he occasionally finds some 
 bits of worn-down horseshoe-nails, or castaway sardine-box, 
 by rummaging among dust-heaps ; but this small quantity of 
 metal does not suffice for a cannon. Where- Ibsen makes 
 strenuous efforts to produce a picture of actual contempo- 
 raneous events, he astounds us with the niggardliness in 
 incidents and human beings evinced by the range of his 
 experience. 
 
 Philistine, ultra-provincial, these are no fit words for this. I 
 It sinks below the level of the human. The naturalist Huber 
 and Sir John Lubbock have recorded incidents of this sort
 
 EGO-MANIA 405 
 
 n their observations of colonies of ants. The small features 
 pinned by Ibsen to his two-legged theses, to give them, at 
 least, as much resemblance to humanity as is possessed by a 
 scarecrow, are borrowed from the society of a hideous hole 
 on the Norwegian coast, composed of drunkards and silly 
 louts, of idiots and crazed hysterical geese, who in their whole 
 life have never formed a clearer thought than : ' How can I 
 get hold of a bottle of brandy ?' or ' How can I make myself 
 interesting to men ?' The sole characteristic distinguishing 
 these Lovborgs, Ekdals, Oswald Alvings, etc., from beasts is 
 that they are given to drink. The Noras, Heddas, Ellidas, 
 do not tipple, but make up for that by raving so wildly as to 
 require strait-jackets. The great events of their lives are the 
 obtaining of a position in a bank (A Doll's House) ; their 
 catastrophes, that one no longer believes in the articles of 
 their creed (Rosmersholm*) ; the loss of an appointment as 
 physician at a watering-place (An Enemy of the People) ; the 
 raked-up rumours of an amorous nocturnal pe'chJ de jeunesse 
 (The Pillars of Society) ; the frightful crimes darkening, like q. 
 thunder-cloud, the lives of these beings and their social circle 
 are an intrigue with a maidservant (Ghosts, The Wild Duck) ; 
 a liaison with an itinerant music-hall singer (An Enemy of the 
 People) ; the felling, by mistake, of wood in a state-forest (Thi 
 Wild Duck) ; the visit to a house of ill-fame after a good 
 dinner (Hedda Gabler). It sometimes happens to me to pass 
 a half-hour in the nursery, amusing myself with the chatter 
 and play of the little ones. One day the children by accident 
 saw the arrest of someone in the street. Although their 
 attendant hurried them away from the unpleasant spectacle, 
 they had seen enough of the tumult to be violently excited 
 by it. Some days afterwards on entering the nursery I found 
 them full of the great event, and I became the auditor of the 
 following dialogue : 
 
 MATILDA (aged three years). Why did they put the gentleman in prison ? 
 
 RICHARD (Jive years old, very dignified and sententious). It wasn't a 
 gentleman ; it was a bad man. They put him in prison because he was 
 wicked. 
 
 MATILDA. What had he done then? 
 
 RICHARD (after reflecting a little}. His mamma had said he wasn't to take 
 chocolate ; but he did take chocolate. That's why his mamma had him put 
 in prison. 
 
 This childish conversation always came into my mind when 
 I lighted, in Ibsen's plays, upon one of his crimes treated with 
 such overawing importance. 
 
 We have now made the complete tour of Ibsen. At the 
 risk of being prolix and tedious, I have 'made copious quota- 
 tions from his writings, in order that the reader might himself 
 see the matter from which I have formed my judgments.
 
 406 DEGENERATION 
 
 Ibsen stands before us as a mystic and an ego-maniac, who 
 would willingly prove the world and mankind not worth 
 powder and shot, but who only proves that he has not the 
 faintest inkling of one or the other. Incapable of adapting 
 himself to any state of things whatsoever, he first abuses the 
 state of things in Norway, then that of Europe generally. 
 In no one of his productions is a single thought to be met 
 with belonging to, or having an active influence on, the 
 present age, unless we bestow this honour on his anarchism, 
 which is explained by the diseased constitution of his mind, 
 and his travesties of the least certain results of investigations 
 in hypnotism and telepathy. He is a skilful dramatic 
 technician, and knows how to represent with great poetic 
 power personages in the background, and situations out of 
 the chief current of the piece. This, however, is all that a 
 conscientious and lucid analysis can really find in him. He 
 has dared to speak of his ' moral ideas,' and his admirers 
 glibly repeat the expression. Ibsen's moral ideas ! Any 
 reader of the Ibsen drama, who finds in them no food for 
 laughter, has truly no sense of humour. He seems to preach 
 apostacy, yet cannot free himself from the religious ideas 
 of confession, original sin, and the Saviour's act of redemption. 
 He sets up egoism and the freedom of the individual from all 
 scruples as an ideal, yet hardly has anyone acted somewhat 
 unscrupulously, but he begins to whimper contritely, and 
 continues until his heart, full to suffocation, has poured itself 
 out in confession ; while the only persons with whom he 
 succeeds are women, who sacrifice their individuality to the 
 point of annihilation for the sake of others. He extols every 
 offence against morality as heroism, while he punishes, with 
 nothing less than death, the smallest and stupidest love affair. 
 He uses the words freedom, progress, etc., as a gargle, and 
 in his best works honours lying and stagnation. And all 
 these contradictions appear forsooth not successively as 
 stations on the road of his development, but at one and the 
 same time, and side by side. His French admirer, Ehrhard,* 
 sees this disconcerting fact, and endeavours as best he can 
 to excuse it. His Norwegian interpreter, Henrik Jaeger, on 
 the contrary, asserts with the utmost placidity t that the 
 most prominent characteristic of Ibsen's works "is their unity 
 
 * Auguste Ehrhard, op. tit., p. 120: 'With admirable frankness Ibsen, 
 in his latest works, points out the abuse which may be made of his ideas [!]. 
 He counsels reformers to extreme prudence, if not to silence. As for him- 
 self, he ceases to excite the multitude to the pursuit of moral and social 
 progress [!]; he entrenches himself in his disdainful . pessimism, and in 
 aristocratic solitude enjoys the serene vision of future ages.' 
 
 f Henrik Jaeger, Henrik Ibsen og haus Vaerker. En Fremstilling t 
 Crundrids. Christiania, 1892, passim.
 
 EGO-MANIA 407 
 
 (Enhed). The Frenchman and the Norwegian were most 
 incautious in not preconcerting, prior to praising their great 
 man in manners so divergent. The single discoverable unity 
 in Ibsen is his faculty of distortion. The point in which he 
 always resembles himself is his entire incapacity to elaborate 
 a single clear thought, to comprehend a single one of the 
 watchwords daubed here and there on to his works, or to 
 deduce the true conclusions from a single one of his 
 premises. 
 
 And this malignant, anti-social simpleton, highly gifted, it 
 must be admitted, in the technique of the stage, they have had 
 the audacity to try to raise upon the shield as the great world- 
 poet of the closing century. His partizans have continued to 
 shout, 'Ibsen is a great poet!' until all stronger judgments 
 have become at least hesitating, and feebler ones wholly sub- 
 jugated. In a recent book on Simon Magus,* there occurs 
 this pretty story : ' Apsethus, the Libyan, wished to become a 
 god. In spite, however, of his most strenuous efforts he could 
 not succeed in satisfying his longing. But, at any rate, he 
 would make the people believe that he had become a god. 
 He therefore collected a large number of parrots, in which 
 Libya abounds, and shut them all in a cage. He kept them 
 so for some time, and taught them to say, "Apsethus is a god." 
 When the birds had learnt this, he opened the cage and set 
 them free. And the birds spread themselves throughout 
 Libya, so that the words penetrated to the Greek settlements. 
 And the Libyans, astonished at the voice of the birds, and not 
 suspecting the trick Apsethus had played, looked upon him as 
 a god.' In imitation of the ingenious Apsethus, Ibsen has 
 taught a few 'comprehensives' the Brandes, Ehrhards, Jaegers, 
 etc. the words : ' Ibsen is a modern ! Ibsen is a poet of the 
 future !' and the parrots have spread over all the lands, and 
 are chattering with deafening din in books and papers, ' Ibsen 
 is great ! Ibsen is a modern spirit !' and imbeciles among the 
 public murmur the cry after them, because they hear it fre- 
 quently repeated, and because, on such as they, every word 
 uttered with emphasis and assurance makes an impression. 
 
 It would certainty be a proof of superficiality to believe that 
 the audacity of his Corybantes alone explains the high place 
 to which Ibsen has been fraudulently elevated. Without ques- 
 tion he possesses characteristics by which he could not but act 
 upon his contemporaries. 
 
 Firstly, we have his vague phrases and indefinite incidental 
 
 hints concerning 'the great epoch in which we live,' ' the new 
 
 ra about to dawn,' ' freedom,' ' progress,' etc. These phrases 
 
 were bound to please all dreamers and drivellers, for they 
 
 * G. R. S. Mead, Simon Magus. London, 1892.
 
 4 o8 DEGENERATION 
 
 give free scope to any interpretation, and, in particular, allow 
 the presumption that their author is possessed of modernity 
 and a bold spirit of progress. They are not discouraged by 
 the fact that Ibsen himself makes cruel sport of these ' com- 
 prehensives,' when, in The Wild Duck, he makes Rellingr 
 (p. 361) use the word ' demoniac,' while admitting it to be- 
 wholly meaningless, just as the poet himself employs his own 
 bunkum about progress and freedom. They are ' comprehen- 
 sives ' precisely because they interpret every passage according: 
 to their own sweet will. 
 
 Then there is Ibsen's doctrine of the right of the individual 
 to live in accordance with his own law. Is this really his- 
 doctrine ? This must be denied when, after struggling through 
 his countless contradictions and self-refutations, we see that 
 he treats with peculiar affection the sacrificial lambs, who are all 
 negation of their own ' I, 1 all suppression of their most natural 
 impulses, all neighbourly love and consideration for others. 
 In any case, his apostles have brought forward anarchistic 
 individualism as the central doctrine of his drama. Ehrhard*" 
 sums up this doctrine in these words : ' The revolt of the 
 individual against society. In other words, Ibsen is the 
 apostle of moral autonomy (autonomie morale).'' Now such a. 
 doctrine is surely well fitted to cause ravages among the intel- 
 lectually indolent or intellectually incapable. 
 
 Ehrhard dares to use the expression ' moral autonomy.' la- 
 the name of this fine principle Ibsen's critical heralds persuade 
 the youth who gather round him that they have the right to 
 
 * live out their lives,' and they smile approvingly when their 
 auditors understand by this term the right to yield to their 
 basest instincts and to free themselves from all discipline. 
 As the scoundrels in Mediterranean ports do with well- 
 dressed travellers, they whisper in the ear of their public, 
 
 * Amuse yourselves ! Enjoy yourselves ! Come with me ; I 
 will show you the way !' But to confound ' moral autonomy ' 
 with absence of restraint is, on the part of their faith, a mon- 
 strous error, and in the corrupters of youth, hoping for the pay 
 of procuration, an infamous deception. 
 
 These two notions are not only not synonymous, they are 
 diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Liberty of the 
 individual ! The right to autonomy ! The Ego 'its own legis- 
 lator ! Who is this ' I ' that is to make laws for itself? Who 
 is this ' Self for whom Ibsen demands the right of autonomy? 
 Who is this free individual ? That the entire notion of a Self 
 opposed to the rest of the world as something alien and 
 exclusive is an illusion of consciousness, we have already seen 
 in the chapter on the ' Psychology of Ego-mania,' and I need 
 * Ehrhard, op. #'/., p. 94.
 
 EGO-MANIA 409 
 
 not, therefore, dwell again on the subject in this place. We 
 know that man, like every other complex and highly developed 
 living being, is a society or state, of simpler, and of simplest, 
 living beings, of cells and cell-systems, or organs, all having 
 their own functions and wants. In the course of the develop- 
 ment of life on earth they have become associated, and have 
 undergone changes, in order to be able to perform higher 
 functions than are possible to the simple cell and primitive 
 agglomeration of cells. The highest function of life yet known 
 to us is clear consciousness ; the most elevated content of con- 
 sciousness is knowledge ; and the most obvious and immediate 
 aim of knowledge is constantly to procure better conditions of 
 life for the organism, hence to preserve its existence as long as 
 possible, and to fill it with the greatest possible number of 
 pleasurable sensations. In order that the collective organism 
 may be able to perform its task, its constituent parts are bound 
 to submit to a severe hierarchical order. Anarchy in its in- 
 terior is disease, and leads rapidly to death. The single cell 
 executes its chemical work of decomposition and of integration 
 without troubling itself about aught else. It labours almost 
 for itself alone. Its consciousness is the most limited con- 
 ceivable ; it has hardly any prevision ; its own power of 
 adaptation is so minute that if a cell is in the smallest degree 
 less well nourished than its neighbour, it cannot hold its 
 ground against the latter, and is immediately devoured by it.* 
 The differentiated cell-group, or organ, already possesses a 
 wider consciousness, whose seat is its own nerve-ganglia; its 
 function is more complex, and no longer operates wholly, or 
 even chiefly, for its own benefit, but for that of the collective 
 organism ; it also has already, I might say, a constitutional 
 influence on the direction of the affairs of the whole organism, 
 asserting itself in the power of the organ to suggest to con- 
 sciousness presentations prompting the will to acts. The most 
 exalted organ, however, the condensation of all the other 
 organs, is the gray cerebral cortex. It is the seat of clear 
 consciousness. It works least of all for itself, most of all for 
 the commonwealth i.e., for the whole organism. It is the 
 government of the State. To it come all reports from the 
 interior as well as the exterior ; it has to find its way in the 
 midst of ail complications ; it has to exercise foresight, and to 
 take into consideration not only the immediate effect of an act, 
 
 * W. Roux, Ueber den Kampf der Theile des Organismits. Leipzig, 1881. 
 Since the appearance of Roux's work, the theory of ptiagocytose, or the 
 digestion of weaker cells by the stronger, has been considerably extended. 
 This, however, is not the place to cite the numerous communications bearing 
 on this subject which have appeared in the Zeitschrift fur whsenschaftliche 
 Zoologie, in Virchow's Archiv, in the Biologische Central blatt, in the 
 Zoologische Jahrbiicher, etc.
 
 4'0 DEGENERATION 
 
 but also the more remote consequences for the commonwealth. 
 When, therefore, it is a question of the ' I,' the ' Self,' the 
 ' Individual,' it cannot be any subordinate part of the organism 
 which is meant, such as the little toe or the rectum, but only 
 the gray cerebral cortex. To it certainly belongs the right 
 and duty of directing the individual and of prescribing its law. 
 It is consciousness itself. Hut how does consciousness form 
 its judgments and its decisions ? It forms them from repre- 
 sentations awakened in it by excitations proceeding from the 
 internal organs and from the senses. If consciousness allows 
 itself to be directed solely by the organic excitations, it seeks 
 to gratify its momentary appetites, on the spot, at the cost of 
 well-being, it injures an organ by favouring the need of 
 another, and it neglects to take into consideration circum- 
 stances of the external world which must be dealt with in the 
 interest of the whole organism. Let me give some quite 
 simple illustrations. A man is swimming under water. His 
 cells know nothing of it, and do not trouble themselves about 
 it. They quietly absorb from the blood the oxygen which 
 they need at the moment, and set free, in exchange, carbonic 
 dioxide. The decomposed blood excites the medulla oblon- 
 gata, and the latter impetuously demands a movement of 
 inspiration. Were the gray cerebral cortex to yield to the 
 perfectly justifiable demand of one organ, and allow an impulse 
 to inspire to proceed to the muscles concerned, the consequence 
 would be the filling of the lungs with water, and death of the 
 entire organism in consequence. Hence consciousness does 
 not obey the demand of the medulla oblongata, and, instead of 
 sending motor impulses to the intercostal muscles and those 
 of the diaphragm, communicates them to the muscles of the 
 arms and legs ; instead of breathing under water, the swimmer 
 emerges at the surface. Another instance. A typhoid con- 
 valescent feels ragingly hungry. Were he to yield to this 
 desire, he might give himself a momentary satisfaction, but 
 twenty-four hours later he would probably die from perforation 
 of the intestines. Hence his consciousness resists the desire 
 of his organs for the benefit of the whole organism. The cases 
 are, of course, generally much more complex. But it is always 
 the task of consciousness to test the stimuli which it receives 
 from the depths of the organs, to comprise in the motor images 
 which they excite all its earlier experiences, its knowledge, the 
 directions given by the external world, and to disregard the 
 stimuli if the judgments opposed to them are more powerful 
 than they. 
 
 Even a perfectly healthy organism quickly goes to rack and 
 ruin if the inhibitive activity of consciousness is not exercised, 
 and if, through this want of exercise, its inhibitive strength
 
 EGO-MANIA 411 
 
 becomes atrophied. Caesarian madness* is nothing but the 
 consequence of the systematic indulgence by consciousness 
 of every demand of the organs. If, however, the organism 
 is not perfectly healthy ; if it is degenerate, its ruin is much 
 more speedy and certain when it obeys the urging of its 
 organs, for in such a case these organs are suffering from 
 perversions ; they exact satisfactions, not only pernicious in 
 their remote consequences to the whole organism, but im- 
 mediately so to the organs themselves. 
 
 When, therefore, the ' I ' is spoken of, which is to have the 
 right to dispose of itself, only the conscious ' Ego ' can be 
 meant, the pondering, remembering, observing, comparing 
 intellect, not, however, the sub-' Egos ' unconnected, and 
 for the most part at strife with each other which are included 
 in sub-consciousness. t The individual is the judging, not the 
 instinctive, human being. Liberty is the capacity of conscious- 
 ness to derive excitations, not only from the stimuli of the 
 organs, but from those of the senses, and from original 
 memory-images. Ibsen's liberty is the most abject, and always 
 suicidal,J slavery. It is the subjugation of judgment to 
 instinct, and the revolt of some single organ against the 
 domination of that power, which has to watch over the well- 
 being of the whole organism. Even so individualistic a 
 philosopher as Herbert Spencer says: 'To become fitted 
 for the social state, it is necessary that the man . . . should 
 possess the energy capable of renouncing a small enjoyment 
 of the moment, in order to obtain a greater one in the future.' 
 A healthy man in the full vigour of intellect cannot sacrifice 
 his judgment. The sacnjizio dell' intelldto is the only one he 
 cannot afford. If law and custom impose upon him acts 
 which he recognises as absurd because they defeat their end, 
 not only will he have the right, but it will be his duty, to 
 defend reason against nonsense, and knowledge against error. 
 
 * Jacoby, La Folie de Cesars. Paris, 1880. 
 
 ) Alfred Binet, Les Alterations de la Personnalite', Paris, 1892, p. 23, com- 
 municates the case (observed by Bourru and Burot, and olten cited) of 
 Louis B., who united in himself six different personalities six Ts ' having 
 not the slightest knowledge of each other, each possessing another character, 
 another memory, other peculiarities of feeling and movement, etc. 
 
 + ' Suicidal' is here not a mere rhetorical expression. If the tyrannical 
 power of instinct always ends by leading the individual in the long-run to 
 his destruction, it sometimes does this directly. Instinct, namely, may have 
 for its direct object suicide or self-mutilation ; and the 'free ' man obeying 
 his instinct has then the 'liberty' of mutilating or killing himself, although 
 that so little tallies with his real wish that he seeks in others a protec- 
 tion from himself. See Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der gericht- 
 lichen Psychopathologie. Dritte umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, 
 p. 311. 
 
 Herbert Spencer, The Individual versus the State. London, 1884.
 
 4 ia DEGENERATION 
 
 But his revolt will always be in the name of judgment, not 
 in the name of instinct. 
 
 All this philosophy of self-restraint can, it is true, be preached 
 to healthy human beings only. It has no application to- 
 degenerates. Their defective brain and nervous system are 
 not in a state to respond to its demands. The processes 
 within their organs are morbidly intensified. Hence the latter 
 send particularly powerful stimuli to consciousness. The 
 sensory nerves conduct badly. The memory-images in the 
 brain are faint. Perceptions of the external world, repre- 
 sentations of anterior experiences, are, therefore, non-existent 
 or too feeble to subdue the stimulus originating in the organs. 
 Such persons can do nought else but follow their desires and 
 impulsions. They are the ' instinctivists ' and ' impulsivists * 
 of mental therapeutics. To this species belong the Noras, 
 Ellidas, Rebeccas, Stockmanns, Brands, etc. This company, 
 being dangerous to themselves and to others, require to be 
 put under the guardianship of rational men, or, better still, 
 in lunatic asylums. Such must be the answer to those fools 
 or charlatans who vaunt Ibsen's figures as ' free men ' and 
 4 strong personalities,' and with the sweet-sounding tones of 
 a Pied Piper's air on 'self-disposal,' 'moral independence/ 
 and ' living life out,' attract children devoid of judgment 
 heaven knows whither, but in any case to their ruin. 
 
 The third feature of Ibsen's drama accounting for his success 
 is the light in which he shows woman. ' Women are the 
 pillars of society,' he makes Bernick say (in The Pillars of 
 Society, p. 114). With Ibsen womap has no duties and all 
 rights. The tie of marriage does not bind her. She runs 
 away when she longs for liberty, or when she believes she 
 has cause of complaint against her husband, or when he 
 pleases her a little less than another man. The man who 
 plays the Joseph, and does not comply with the will of 
 Madame Potiphar, does not draw on himself the customary 
 ridicule ; he is roundly pronounced a criminal (Ghosts, p. 158) : 
 
 PASTOR MANDERS. It was my greatest victory, Helen the victory over 
 myself. 
 
 MRS. ALVING. It was a crime against us both. 
 
 Woman is always the clever, strong, courageous being; 
 man always the simpleton and coward. In every encounter 
 the wife is victorious, and the man flattened out like a pancake. 
 Woman need live for herself alone. With Ibsen she has even; 
 overcome her most primitive instinct that of motherhood 
 and abandons her brood without twitching an eyelid when 
 the caprice seizes her to seek satisfactions elsewhere. Such 
 abject adoration of woman a pendant to Wagner's woman- 
 idolatry such unqualified approval of all feminine depravities,
 
 EGO-MANIA 413 
 
 was bound to secure the applause of those women who in 
 the viragoes of Ibsen's drama hysterical, nymphomaniacal, 
 perverted in maternal instinct* recognise either their own 
 portrait or the ideal of development of their degenerate 
 imagination. Women of this species find, as a matter of 
 fact, all discipline intolerable. They are by birth les femmes 
 de ruisseau of Dumas fils. They are not fit for marriage 
 for European marriage with one man only. Promiscuous 
 sexual intercourse and prostitution are their most deeply- 
 seated instincts, according to Ferrero'f' the atavistic form of 
 degeneration in women, and they are grateful to Ibsen for 
 having catalogued, under the fine designations of ' The struggle 
 of woman for moral independence ' and ' The right of woman 
 to assert her own personality,' those propensities to which 
 opprobrious names are usually given. 
 
 In his fiercely travestied exaggerations of Ibsen's doctrines, 
 entitled Der Vater, Grafin Julie, Glaubiger, etc., poor Grind- 
 berg, whose brain is equally deranged, but who possesses great 
 creative power, goes to the greatest pains to show the absurdity 
 of Ibsen's notions on the nature of woman, her rights, her 
 relations to man. His method, however, is a false one. He 
 will never convince Ibsen by rational arguments that his 
 doctrines are foolish, for they do not spring from his reason, 
 but from his unconscious instincts. His figures of women and 
 their destinies are the poetical expression of that sexual per- 
 version of degenerates called by Krafft-Ebing ' masochism.' % 
 
 * Dr. Ph. Boileau de Castelnau, ' Misopddie ou Lesion de 1'Amour de la 
 Progeniture' (Annales medico-psychologiques, 3 serie, 7 B volume, p 553). 
 In this work the author communicates twelve observations, in which the 
 natural feeling of the mother for her children was transformed by disease 
 into hatred. 
 
 f G. Ferrero, ' L'Atavisme de la Prostitution,' Revue scientifique, 5o 
 volume, p. 136. 
 
 J R. von Kraflfc Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, etc., 7 te Auflage, p. 89 (the 
 third edition of this book, from which 1 have made my previous citations, 
 contains nothing on masochism), and Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete 
 der Psychopathia sexualis eine medicinisch-psychologische Studie, Zweite um- 
 gearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage, Stuttgart, 1891, p. I ff, Krafft-Ebing 
 gives this explanation of his word (p. I et seq.) : ' By masochism I understand 
 a peculiar perversion of the psychic vita sexualis^ consisting in this, that the 
 individual seized with it is dominated in his sexual feeling and thought by 
 the idea that he is wholly and unconditionally subjected to the will of a 
 person of the opposite sex, who treats him imperiously, humiliates and 
 maltreats him." The word is formed from the name Sacher-Masoch, because 
 'his writings delineate exactly typical pictures of the perverted psychic life 
 of men of this kind ' (Neue Forschungen, etc., p. 37). I do not look upon this 
 designation as a happy one. Kraffc-Ebing himself shows that Zola and, 
 long before him, Rousseau (he might have added Balzac in Baron Hulot in 
 Parents pauvres, part i. : La cousine Bette) have embodied this condition 
 quite as clearly as Sacher-Masoch. Hence I prefer the designation ' pas- 
 sivism,' proposed by Dimitry Stefanowsky. See Archives de f ' Anthropologie 
 criminelle, 1892, p. 294.
 
 414 DEGENERATION 
 
 Masochism is a sub-species of 'contrary sexual sensation. 
 The man affected by this perversion feels himself, as regards 
 woman, to be the weaker party ; as the one standing in need 
 of protection ; as the slave who rolls on the ground, compelled 
 to obey the behests of his mistress, and finding his happiness 
 in obedience. It is the inversion of the healthy and natural 
 relation between the sexes. In Sacher-Masoch imperious 
 and triumphant woman wields the knout ; in Ibsen she exacts 
 confessions, inflicts inflammatory reprimands, and leaves in a 
 flare of Bengal lights. In essence, Ibsen's heroines are the 
 same as Sacher-Masoch's, though the expression of feminine 
 superiority is a little less brutal. It is remarkable that the 
 women who exult over Ibsen's Nora-types are not shocked 
 by the Hedwigs, Miss Tesmans, and other womanly embodi- 
 ments of sacrifice, in whom the highly contradictory thoughts 
 and feelings of the confused mystic come to light. But it has 
 been psychologically established that human beings overlook 
 what is in dissonance with their own propinquities, and dwell 
 on that only which is in harmony with them. 
 
 Ibsen's feminine clientele is, moreover, not composed merely 
 of hysterical and degenerate characters, but includes also those 
 women who are leading an unhappy married life, or believe 
 themselves misunderstood, or suffer from the discontent and 
 inner void resulting from insufficient occupation. Clear think- 
 ing is not the most prominent quality of this species of woman. 
 Otherwise they would not have found their advocate in Ibsen. 
 Ibsen is not their friend. No one is who, as long as the 
 present order of society exists-, attacks the institution of 
 marriage. 
 
 A serious and healthy reformer will contend for the principle 
 that marriage should acquire a moral and emotional import, 
 and not remain a lying form. He will condemn the marriage 
 for interest, a dowry or business marriage ; he will brand as a 
 crime the action of married couples who feel for some other 
 human being a strong, true love, tested by time and struggle, and 
 yet remain together in a cowardly pseudo-union, deceiving and 
 contaminating each other, instead of honourably separating and 
 contracting genuine connections elsewhere ; he will demand 
 that marriage be based on reciprocal inclination, maintained by 
 confidence, respect, and gratitude, consolidated -by considera- 
 tion for the offspring ; but he will guard himself from saying 
 anything against marriage itself, this bulwark of the relations 
 between the sexes afforded by definite, permanent duty. 
 Marriage is a high advance from the free copulation 
 of savages. To abandon it and return to primitive promis- 
 cuity would be the most profound atavism of degeneracy. 
 Marriage, moreover, was not instituted for the man, but for
 
 EGO-MANIA 415 
 
 the woman and the child. It is a protective social institution 
 for the benefit of the weaker part. Man has not yet con- 
 quered and humanized his polygamous animal instincts to the 
 same extent as woman. It would for the most part be quite 
 agreeable to him to exchange the woman he possesses for a 
 new one. Departures a la Nora are as a rule not of a nature 
 to frighten him. He could open the door very wide for Nora, 
 and bestow on her his parting benediction with much pleasure. 
 Were it once the law and custom in a society where each 
 was forced to care for himself alone (and needed only to 
 trouble himself about the offspring of others, when it was a 
 question of orphan, abandoned, or begging children) that man 
 and wife should separate as soon as they ceased to be agree- 
 able to each other, it would be the men and not the women 
 who would first make use of the new liberty. Departures a la 
 Nora are perhaps without danger for rich wives, or those 
 eminently capable of acquiring means of support, and hence 
 pecuniarily independent. Such, however, in present society 
 constitute a minute minority. Under Ibsen's code of morals 
 the vast majority of wives would have everything to lose. 
 The severe discipline of matrimony is their bulwark. It 
 obliges the man to take care of the children and of the wife 
 as she declines in years. Hence it should be the true duty 
 of rational wives to declare Ibsen infamous, and to revolt 
 against Ibsenism, which criminally threatens them and their 
 rights. Only through error can women of spirit and indis- 
 putable morality join the ranks of Ibsen's followers. It is 
 necessary to enlighten them concerning the range of his 
 doctrines, and in particular concerning their effect on the posi- 
 tion of woman, so that they may abandon a company which can 
 never be their own. May he remain surrounded by those only 
 who are spirit of his spirit, that is to say, by hysterical women 
 and masculine masochists, who, with Ehrhard,"* believe that 
 ' sound common-sense and optimism are the two destructive 
 principles of all poetry ' ! 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. 
 
 As in Ibsen ego-mania has found its poet,, so in Nietzsche it T 
 has found its philosopher. The deification of filth by the Par- 
 nassians with ink, paint, and clay"; the censing among the 
 Diabolists and Decadents of licentiousness, disease, and 
 corruption ; the glorification, by Ibsen, of the person who 
 
 * Ehrhard, op. cit., p. 88
 
 416 DEGENERATION 
 
 'wills,' is 'free* and 'wholly himself of all this Neitzsche 
 supplies the theory, or something which proclaims itself as 
 such. We may remark, in passing, that this has ever been 
 the task of philosophy. It plays in the race the same role as 
 consciousness in the individual. Consciousness has the thank- 
 less task of discovering rational and elucidatory grounds for the 
 explanation of the impulses and acts springing up in sub- 
 consciousness. In the same way philosophy endeavours to 
 find formulae of apparent profundity for the peculiarities of 
 feeling, thought and deed, having their roots in the history of 
 J^politics and civilization in climatic and economic conditions 
 and to fit them with a sort of uniform of logic. The race lives 
 on, conformably with the historical necessity of its evolution, 
 not troubling itself about a theory of its peculiarities ; and 
 philosophy hobbles busily after it, gathers with more or less 
 regularity into its album the scattered features of racial 
 character, and the manifestations of its health and disease ; 
 methodically provides this album with a title, paging, and full 
 stop, then places it with a contented air in the library, among 
 the systems of the same regulation size. Genuine truths, real, 
 apposite explanations these are not contained in philosophical 
 systems. But they furnish instructive evidence of the efforts 
 of the racial consciousness to supply reason, skilfully or clumsily, 
 with the excuses it demands for the unconscious impulses of the 
 race during a given period of time. 
 
 From the first to the last page of Nietzsche's writings the 
 careful reader seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes, 
 wild gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening 
 bombast ; and through it all, now breaking out into frenzied 
 laughter, now sputtering expressions of filthy abuse and in- 
 vective, now skipping about in a giddily agile dance, and now 
 bursting upon the auditors with threatening mien and clenched 
 fists. So far as any meaning at all can be extracted from 
 the endless stream of phrases, it shows, as its fundamental 
 elements, a series of constantly reiterated delirious ideas, 
 having their source in illusions of sense and diseased organic 
 processes, which will be pointed out in the course of this 
 chapter. Here and there emerges a distinct idea, which, as is 
 always the case with the insane, assumes the form of an 
 imperious assertion, a sort of despotic command. Nietzsche 
 never tries to argue. If the thought of the possibility of an 
 objection arises in his mind, he treats it lightly, or sneers at it, 
 or curtly and rudely decrees, ' That is false !' (' How much 
 more rational is that . . . theory, for example, represented by 
 Herbert Spencer ! . . . According to this theory, good is that 
 which has hitherto always proved itself to be useful, so that it 
 may be estimated as valuable in the highest degree, as valuable
 
 EGO-MANIA 4if 
 
 in itself. Although this mode of explanation is also false, the 
 explanation itself is at least rational and psychologically 
 tenable.' ZUY Genealogie der Moral, 2 Aufl., p. 5. 'This mode of 
 explanation is also false.' Full-stop ! Why is it false ? Whereia 
 is it false ? Because Nietzsche so orders it. The reader has 
 no right to inquire further.) For that matter, he himself con- 
 tradicts almost every one of his violently dictatorial dogmas. 
 He first asserts something and then its opposite, and both with 
 equal vehemence, most frequently in the same book, often on 
 the same page. Now and then he becomes conscious of the 
 self-contradiction, and then he pretends to have been amusing 
 himself and making sport of the reader. (' It is difficult to be 
 understood, especially when one thinks and lives gangasroto- 
 gati, among plain men who think and live otherwise in other 
 words, kromagati, or under the most favourable circumstances, 
 among m-andeigati, who " have the frog's mode of progres- 
 sion " I just do all I can to make myself hard to understand, 
 . . . But with regard to the " good friends "... it is well 
 to accord them in advance room for the play and exercise of 
 misconception ; in this way one has still something to laugh 
 at or wholly to abolish these good friends and still laugh !' 
 Jenseits von Gut und Bose, 2 Aufl., p. 38. Similarly on p. 51 ; 
 ' All that is profound loves the mask ; the most profound 
 things even hate imagery and parable. Should not contrast 
 rather be the right disguise in which the shamefacedness of a 
 god might walk abroad ?') 
 
 The nature of the individual dogmatic assertions is very 
 characteristic. First of all it is essential to become habituated 
 to Nietzsche's style. This is, I admit, unnecessary for the 
 alienist. To him this sort of style is well known and familiar. 
 He frequently reads writings (it is true, as a rule, unprinted) 
 of a similar order of thought and diction, and he reads them, 
 not for his pleasure, but that he may prescribe the confinement 
 of the author in an asylum. The unprofessional reader, on the 
 contrary, is easily confused by the tumult of phrases. Once, 
 however, he has found his way, once he has acquired some 
 practice in discerning the actual theme among the drums-and- 
 fifes of this ear-splitting, merry-go-round music, and, in the 
 hailstorm of rattling words, that render clear vision almost 
 impossible, has learned to perceive the fundamental thought, 
 he at once observes that Nietzsche's assertions are either 
 commonplaces, tricked out like Indian caciques with feather- 
 crown, nose-ring, and tattooing (and of so mean a kind that a 
 high-school girl would be ashamed to make use of them in 
 a composition- exercise) ; or bellowing insanity, rambling far 
 beyond the range of rational examination and refutation. I 
 
 27
 
 DEGENERATION 
 
 will give only one or two examples of each kind among the 
 thousands that exist : 
 
 A Iso sprach Zarathustra* (' Thus spake Zoroaster'), 3 Theil, p. 9 : 
 * We halted just by a gateway. " See this gateway, dwarf" I 
 said again "it has two faces. Two roads meet here; no 
 one has yet travelled to their end. This long road behind it 
 lasts an eternity. And that long road in front that is another 
 eternity. They contradict each other, these roads ; they offend 
 each other; and it is here at this gateway that they meet. 
 The name of the gateway is inscribed above, ' Now." But if 
 one continues to follow one of them further, and ever further, 
 and ever further, believest thou, dwarf, that these roads 
 eternally contradict each other?" 
 
 Blow away the lather from these phrases. What do they 
 really say ? The fleeting instant of the present is the point of 
 contact of the past and the future. Can one call this self- 
 evident fact a thought ? 
 
 Also sprach Zarathustra, 4 Theil, p. 124 ff. : 'The world is 
 -deep, and deeper than the day thinks it. Forbear ! forbear ! 
 I am too pure for thee. Disturb me not ! Has my world not 
 become exactly perfect ? My flesh is too pure for thy hands. 
 Forbear, thou dull doltish and obtuse day ! Is not the mid- 
 night clearer ? The purest are to be lords of earth, the most 
 unknown, the strongest, the souls of midnight, who are clearer 
 and deeper than each day. . . . My sorrow, my happiness, 
 are deep, thou strange day ; but yet am I no God, no Hell of 
 God : deep is their woe. God's woe is deeper, thou strange 
 World ! Grasp at God's woe, not at me ! What am I ! A 
 drunken sweet lyre a lyre of midnight, a singing frog, under- 
 stood by none, but who must speak before the deaf, O higher 
 men ! For ye understand me not ! Hence ! hence ! O youth ! 
 O mid-day ! O midnight ! Now came evening and night 
 and midnight. ... Ah ! ah ! how it sighs ! how it laughs, 
 how it rattles and gasps, the midnight ! How soberly even 
 she speaks, this poetess ! Without doubt she has overdrunk 
 her drunkenness ! She became too wide awake ! She chews 
 the cud ! She chews the cud of her woe in dream, the old 
 deep midnight, and still more her joy. For joy, if woe be 
 already deep : joy is deeper still than heart-pain, . . . Woe 
 says, " Away ! get thee gone, woe ! . . . But joy wishes for a 
 second coming, wishes all to be eternally like itself. Woe 
 says, " Break, bleed, O heart ! Wander, limb ! Wing, fly ! 
 Onward ! Upward ! Pain !" Well, then ! Cheer up ! Oh, 
 my old heart ! Woe says, " Away !" Ye higher men . . . 
 should ye ever wish for one time twice, should ye ever say, 
 *' Thou pleasest me, happiness ! Quick ! instant ! then would 
 * Persian for Zoroaster.
 
 EGO-MANIA 419 
 
 re wish all back again ! All anew, all eternally, all enchained, 
 bound, amorous. Oh ! then loved ye the world ; ye eternities 
 love it eternally and always ; and to woe also speak ye : hence, 
 but return ! For all pleasure wishes eternity. All pleasure 
 wishes for the eternity of all things, wishes for honey, for the 
 lees, wishes for drunken midnight, tombs, the consolation of 
 the tears of tombs, gilded twilight what does pleasure not 
 wish for ! She is thirstier, heartier, hungrier, more terrible, 
 more secret than all woe ; she wishes for herself, she gnaws 
 into herself, the will of the ring struggles in her. . . . Pleasure 
 wishes for the eternity of all things, wishes for deep, deep 
 eternity !' 
 
 And the sense of this crazy shower of whirling words ? It 
 is that men wish pain to cease and joy to endure ! This the 
 astounding discovery expounded by Nietzsche in this demented 
 raving. 
 
 The following are obviously insane assertions or expres- 
 sions : 
 
 Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 59: ' What is life ? Life it is 
 the ceaseless rejection from itself of something wishing to die. 
 Life it is the being cruel and pitiless towards all in us that 
 is weak and old, and not in us alone.' 
 
 Persons capable of thought have hitherto always believed 
 that life is the unceasing reception into itself of something 
 agreeable ; the rejection of what is used up is only an accom- 
 panying phenomenon of the reception of new material. 
 Nietzsche's phrase expresses in a highly mysterious Pythian 
 form the idea of the matutinal visit to a certain place. Healthy 
 men connect with the conception of life the idea rather of the 
 dining-room than that of the privy. 
 
 Jenseits von Gut und BiJse, p. 92 : * It is a delicacy that God 
 learned Greek when He wished to become an author and 
 that He did not learn it better.' P. 95 : 'Advice in the form 
 of an enigma. If the cord is not to snap . . . thou must first 
 bite on it.' 
 
 I have no explanation or interpretation of this profundity 
 to offer. 
 
 The passages quoted will have given the reader an idea of 
 Nietzsche's literary style. In the dozen volumes, thick or thin, 
 which he has published it is always the same. His books bear 
 various titles, for the most part characteristically crack-brained, 
 but they all amount to one single book. They can be changed 
 by mistake in reading, and the fact will not be noticed. They 
 are a succession of disconnected sallies, prose and doggerel 
 mixed, without beginning or ending. Rarely is a thought 
 developed to any extent ; rarely are a few consecutive pages 
 connected by any unity of purpose or logical argument.
 
 420 DEGENERATION 
 
 Nietzsche evidently had the habit of throwing on paper with 
 feverish haste all that passed through his head, and when he 
 had collected a heap of snippings he sent them to the printer, 
 and there was a book. These sweepings of ideas he himself 
 proudly terms ' aphorisms,' and the very incoherence of his 
 language is regarded by hi? admirers as a special merit.* 
 When Nietzsche's moral system is spoken of, it must not be 
 imagined that he has anywhere developed one. Through all 
 his books, from the first to the last, there are scattered only 
 views on moral problems, and on the relation of man to the 
 species and to the universe, from which, taken together, there 
 may be discerned something like a fundamental conception. 
 This is what has been called Nietzsche's philosophy. His 
 disciples, e.g., Kaatz, already cited, and, in addition, Zerbst,^ 
 Schellwien^ and others, have attempted to give this pretended 
 philosophy a certain form and unity by fishing out from. 
 Nietzsche's books a number of passages in some measure 
 agreeing with each other, and placing them in juxtaposition. 
 It is true that it would be possible in this way to set up a 
 philosophy of Nietzsche exactly opposed to the one accepted 
 by his disciples. For, as has been said, each one of Nietzsche's 
 assertions is contradicted by himself in some place or other, 
 and if it be resolved, with barefaced dishonesty, to pay regard 
 to dicta of a definite kind only, and to pass over those ia 
 opposition to them, it would be possible at pleasure to extract 
 from Nietzsche a philosophical view or its sheer opposite. 
 
 Nietzsche's doctrine, promulgated as orthodox by his dis- 
 ciples, criticises the foundations of ethics, investigates the 
 
 * Dr. Hugo Kaatz, Die Weltanschauung Friedrich Nietzsche; Erster 
 Theil, 'Cultur und Moral'; Zweiter Theil, ' Kunst und Leben.' Dresden 
 und Leipzig, 1892, i Th., p. vi. : 'We are accustomed, especially in matters 
 concerning the deepest problems of thought, to a finished, systematic expo- 
 sition. . . . There is none of all this in Nietzsche. No single work of his 
 forms a finished whole, or is wholly intelligible without the others. Each 
 book, moreover, is totally wanting in organic structure. Nietzsche writes 
 almost exclusively in aphorisms, which, filling sometimes two lines, some- 
 times several pages, are complete in themselves, and seldom manifest 
 any direct connection with each other. . . . With proud indiffeience to- 
 the reader, the author has avoided cutting even one gap in the hedge with 
 which he has closely surrounded his intellectual creations. Access to him 
 must be gained by fighting,' etc. In spite of its seeming obscurity, Nietzsche 
 has himself given such pointed information concerning his method of work 
 as amounts to an avowal. 'All writing makes me angry or ashamed ; for 
 me, writing is a necessity.' ' But why, then, do you write ? ' Yes, my dear 
 friend, let me say it in confidence : I have hitherto found no other means of 
 ridding myself of my thoughts.' (The italics are Nietzsche's.) 'And why 
 do you wish to rid yourself of them ? ' Why I wish ? Do I so wish i I must.* 
 Die frbhliche Wissenschaft. Neue Ausgabe, p. 114. . 
 
 f Dr. Max Zerbst, Nein undja! Leipzig, 1892. 
 
 j Robert Schellwien, Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche, Erschein- 
 vngen ties moiiermn Geister und das We*en dcs Menschen. Leipzig, 1892.
 
 EGO-MANIA 421 
 
 genesis of the concept of good and evil, examines the value of 
 that which is called virtue and vice, both for the individual 
 and for society, explains the origin of conscience, and seeks 
 to give an idea of the end of the evolution of the race, and, 
 consequently, of man's ideal the 'over man' ( U ebermenscli). I 
 desire to condense these doctrines as closely as possible, and, 
 for the most part, in Nietzsche's own words, but without the 
 cackle of his mazy digressions or useless phrases. 
 
 The morality now prevailing ' gilds, deifies, transports-^" 
 beyond the tomb, the non-egoistical instincts of compassion, 
 self-denial, and self-sacrifice.' But this morality of compassion 
 ' is humanity's great danger, the beginning of the end, the 
 halting, the backward-glancing fatigue of the will, turning 
 against life.' ' We need a criticism of moral values. The 
 value of these values is first of all itself to be put in question. 
 There has hitherto been no hesitation in setting up good as of 
 higher value than evil, of higher value in the sense of advance- 
 ment, utility, prosperity, as regards man in general, including 
 the future of man. What if truth lay in the contrary ? What 
 if good were a symptom of retrogression, a danger, a seduction, 
 a poison, a narcotic, by means of which the present should 
 live at the cost of the future ? Perhaps more comfortably, 
 less dangerously, but also on a smaller scale, more basely ? So 
 that precisely morality would be to blame for the fact that the 
 highest might and splendour possible to the human type should 
 never be attained ? So that morality should be precisely the 
 danger of dangers ?' 
 
 Nietzsche replies to these questions thrown out by him in 
 the preface to the book Zur Genealogie der Moral, in developing 
 Jiis idea of the genesis of present morality. 
 
 He sees at the beginnings of civilization ' a beast of prey, 
 a magnificent blond brute, ranging about and lusting for booty 
 and victory.' These ' unchained beasts of prey were free from 
 very social restraint ; in the innocence of their wild-beast 
 conscience they returned as exultant monsters from a horrible 
 train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, torture, with an arro- 
 gance and composure as if nothing but a student's freak had 
 been perpetrated.' The blond beasts constituted the noble 
 races. They fell upon the less noble races, conquered them, 
 and made slaves of them. ' A herd of blond beasts of prey, 
 a race of conquerors and masters, with military organization ' 
 (this word ' organization ' should be noticed ; we shall have to 
 revert to it), 'with the power to organize, unscrupulously placing 
 their fearful paws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in 
 numbers, but still amorphous and wandering this herd founded 
 the State. The dream is dispelled which made the State begin 
 with a contract. What has he to do with contracts, who can
 
 422 DEGENERATION 
 
 command, who is master by nature, who comes on the scene 
 with violence in deed and demeanour ? 
 
 In the State, then, thus established there were a race of 
 masters and a race of slaves. The master-race first created 
 moral ideas. It distinguished between good and evil. 
 Good was with it synonymous with noble ; evil with vulgar. 
 All their own qualities they felt as good ; those of the subject 
 race as evil. Good meant severity, cruelty, pride, courage, 
 contempt of danger, joy in risk, extreme unscrupulousness. 
 Bad meant 'the coward, the nervous, the mean, the narrow 
 utilitarian, and also the distrustful with his disingenuous 
 glance, the self-abasing, the human hound who allows himself 
 to be abused, the begging flatterer above all, the liar.' Such 
 is the morality of the masters. The radical meaning of the 
 words now expressing the concept ' good ' reveals what men 
 represented to themselves as ' good ' when the moral of the 
 masters still held sway. 'The Latin bonus I believe I may 
 venture to interpret as " the warrior." Provided I rightly trace 
 bonus to a more ancient ducnus (compare bellum, duellwn, duen- 
 lum, in which it seems to me that duonus is contained). 
 Bonus, then, as a man of discord, of disunion (duo), as warrior : 
 whereby it is seen what in ancient Rome constituted the 
 " goodness " of a man.' 
 
 The subjugated race had naturally an opposing morality 
 the morality of the slaves. ' The slave looks with envy on 
 the virtues of the powerful ; he is sceptical and distrustful ; 
 he has the cunning of distrust towards everything honoured 
 by them as "good." Conversely, those qualities were dis- 
 tinguished and glorified which served to ameliorate the 
 existence cf sufferers. Here the place of honour is given to 
 compassion, to the complaisant hand ready to help, to the 
 warm heart, to patience, diligence, humility, friendliness, for 
 those are here the most useful qualities, and almost the only 
 means by which the burden of existence can be borne. Slave- 
 morality is essentially utilitarian morality.' 
 
 For a certain period the morality of masters and slaves 
 subsisted side by side, or, more accurately, the one above the 
 other. Then an extraordinary event occurred slave-morality 
 rebelled against master-morality, conquered and dethroned 
 it, and set itself in the place thereof. Then ensued a new 
 valuation of all moral concepts. (In his insane gibberish 
 Nietzsche names this ' transvaluation of values' Uwwerthung 
 der Werthe.) That which, under the master-morals, had 
 passed for good was now esteemed bad, and vice versa. Weak- 
 ness was meritorious, cruelty a crime ; self-sacrifice, pity for 
 the pain of others, unselfishness, were virtues. That is what 
 'Nietzsche terms 'the slave revolt in morality.' 'The Jews
 
 EGO-MANIA 
 
 42J 
 
 have brought about that marvel of inversion in values. Their 
 prophets have melted into one substance " rich," " godless," 
 "wicked," "violent," "sensual," and for the first time minted 
 the word "world" as one of opprobrium. In this inversion 
 of values (to which belongs the use of the word " poor " as a 
 synonym of " holy " and " friend") lies the importance of the 
 Jewish race.' 
 
 The Jewish ' slave-revolt in morality ' was an act of vengeance 
 on the master-race which had long oppressed the Jews, and 
 the instrument of this vast vengeance was the Saviour. 
 ' Has not Israel, by the very subterfuge of this " Redeemer," 
 this seeming adversary and destroyer of Israel, attained the 
 final goal of its sublime rage for vengeance ? Does it not 
 belong, to the secret black art of a truly grand policy of 
 vengeance, of a far-seeing, underground, slowly-gripping, fore- 
 planning vengeance, that Israel itself should deny the proper 
 instrument of its vengeance before the whole world, as some- 
 thing deadly inimical, and nail him to the cross, in order that 
 the "entire universe," viz., the enemies of Israel, might un- 
 hesitatingly bite at this very bait ? And on the other hand, 
 would it be possible, by all the refinement of intellect, to 
 imagine a more dangerous bait ? Something that should 
 resemble in enticing, intoxicating, bewildering, corrupting 
 power that symbol of the " holy cross," that awful paradox 
 of a " God on the cross," that mystery of an ineffable final 
 and utmost cruelty, and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation 
 of man ? It is at least certain that sub hoc signo Israel, with 
 its vengeance and transvaluation of all values, has hitherto 
 triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all 
 nobler ideals.' 
 
 To this passage I would most specially direct the reader's 
 attention, and beg him to transform into mental images all 
 that jingle and clatter of words. Well, then, Israel wished to 
 revenge itself on all the world, and therefore decided to nail 
 the Saviour to the cross, and thereby create a new morality. 
 Who was this Israel which conceived and executed the plan? 
 Was it a parliament, a ministry, a ruler, a popular assembly ? 
 Was the plan, before ' Israel ' set about realizing it, submitted 
 for general deliberation and resolution? Before the total 
 insanity of this string of words can be distinctly seen, an 
 effort must be made to bring clearly to the mind, in all its 
 actual details, the event described by Nietzsche as pre- 
 meditated, intended, and of conscious purpose. 
 
 Since the Jewish slave-revolt in morality, life, till then a 
 delight, at least for the powerful and bold, or the nobles and 
 masters, has become a torment. Since that revolt the un- 
 natural holds sway, under which man is becoming dwarfed,
 
 424 DEGENERATION 
 
 enfeebled, vulgarized, and gradually degenerate. For the 
 fundamental instinct of the healthy man is not unselfishness 
 and pity, but selfishness and cruelty. ' No injury, violence, 
 exploitation, annihilation, can in itself be a " wrong," inasmuch 
 as life operates essentially i.e., in its fundamental functions 
 by injuring, violating, exploiting, annihilating, and is absolutely 
 inconceivable without this character. A legal regulation . . . 
 would be a principle hostile to existence, a destroyer and 
 dissolver of man, a mark of lassitude, a crime against the 
 future of man, a secret way to nothingness.' ' There is at 
 present universal enthusiasm, even in scientific disguises, con- 
 cerning coming conditions of society in which the exploiting 
 character is to disappear. That sounds in my ears as if some- 
 one should promise to invent a life which should abstain from 
 all organic functions. Exploitation does not belong to a 
 decayed, imperfect, or primitive society : it belongs to the 
 essence of living things, as organic function. 1 * 
 
 Thus the fundamental instinct of man is cruelty. For this, 
 in the new slave-morality, there is no place. A fundamental 
 instinct, however, is not to be uprooted. It still lives and 
 demands its rights. Hence a series of diversions have been 
 sought for it. 'All instincts, not discharged outwardly, turn 
 inwards. Those terrible bulwarks with which political organi- 
 zation protected itself against the ancient instincts of freedom 
 and punishments belong to the front line of these bulwarks 
 had for their result, that all those instincts of the savage 
 roaming at large were turned backwards and against man. 
 Animosity, cruelty, the joy of pursuit, of sudden assault, of 
 change, of destruction all that turns itself against the pos- 
 sessors of such instincts is the origin of a " bad conscience." 
 The man who, from the absence of external foes and opposition, 
 forced into the oppressive constriction and regularity of custom, 
 
 * I refuted this silly sophism before Nietzsche propounded it in the 
 passages above quoted from Zur Genealogie der Moral^ p. 66, and Jenseits 
 von Gut tind Base, p. 228. See Die conventionellen Liigen der Kultur- 
 menschheit, 14 Aufl., pp. 21 1, 212: 'This expression [of Proudhon's, that 
 property is theft] can be regarded as true only from the sophistical stand- 
 point that everything existing exists for itself, and from the fact of its exist- 
 ence derives its right to belong to itself. According to this view, forsooth, a 
 man steals the blade of grass he plucks, the air he breathes, the fish he 
 catches ; but, then, the martin, too, is stealing when it swallpws a fly, and the 
 grub when it eats its way into the root of a tree ; then Nature is altogether 
 peopled by arch-thieves, and, in general,everything steals that lives,/.^., absorbs 
 from without materials not belonging to it, and organically elaborates them, 
 and a block of platinum, which does not even pilfer from the air a little 
 oxygen with which to oxidize itself, would be the sole example of honesty on 
 our globe. No ; property resulting from earning, that is, from the exchange of 
 a determined amount of labour for a corresponding amount of goods, is not 
 theft.' If, throughout this passage, 'theft' be substituted for the word 
 'exploitation,' used by Nietzsche, his sophism is answered.
 
 EGO-MANIA 425 
 
 impatiently tore himself, persecuted, gnawed, hunted, mal- 
 treated himself this animal which it is sought to " tame," 
 wounding himself against the bars of his cage ; this destitute 
 creature, consumed with homesickness for the desert, who had 
 to create his adventures, his places of torture, his insecure and 
 dangerous wildernesses, out of his own self this fool, this 
 yearning, despairing prisoner, became the inventor of the 
 evil conscience.' ' That inclination to self-torture, that re- 
 treating cruelty, of the human brute, forced into inner life, 
 scared back into himself, he who had invented evil conscience 
 that he might torture himself, after the natural outlet of this 
 wish to inflict pain was stopped up,' formed also the concept 
 of guilt and sin. ' We are the inheritors of the vivisection 
 of conscience and of animal self-torture of thousands of years.' 
 But all administration of justice, the punishment of 'so-called ' 
 criminals, the greater part of art, especially tragedy, are also 
 disguises in which primitive cruelty can still manifest itself. 
 
 Slave-morality, with its ' ascetic ideal ' of self-suppression-*- 
 ^md contempt of life, and its tormenting invention of con- 
 science, allowed the slaves, it is true, to take vengeance on 
 their masters ; it also subjugated the mighty man-beasts of 
 prey and created better conditions of existence for the small 
 ;and weak, for the rabble, the gregarious animals ; but it has 
 been pernicious to humanity as a whole, because it has pre- 
 vented the free evolution of precisely the highest human type. 
 '* The collective degeneration of man to that which, in the eyes 
 of socialistic ninnies and blockheads of the present day, seems 
 their " man of the future " their ideal ! this degeneration and 
 dwarfing of man to the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, to 
 the man of " free society "), this brutalizing of man to the 
 animal pigmy of equal rights and pretensions,' is the destruc- 
 tive work of slave-morality. In order to discipline humanity 
 -to supreme splendour we must revert to nature, to the morality 
 of the masters, to the unchaining of cruelty. 'The well-being 
 of the most and the well-being of the fewest are contrary 
 standpoints of valuation ; we will leave it to the simplicity of 
 English biologists to hold that the first as such is undoubtedly 
 of the higher value.' 'In opposition to the lying watchword 
 of the privilege of the majority, in opposition to the desire for 
 abasement, humiliation, levelling, for the downward and dusk- 
 r ward of man/ we must sound forth ' the watchword of the 
 'privilege of the minority.' ' As a last indicator of the other 
 "way appeared Napoleon, man most unique, and latest born of 
 .-all time, and in him the incarnate problem of the aristocratic 
 ideal as such, Napoleon, that synthesis .of the inhuman and 
 >the superhuman (IJnmensch und Uebcrmensch).' 
 
 The intellectually free man must stand ' beyond good and
 
 426 DEGENERATION 
 
 evil ' ; these concepts do not exist for him ; he tests his im- 
 pulses and deeds by their value for himself, not by that which 
 they have for others, for the herd ; he does that which causes 
 him pleasure, even when, and especially when, it torments and 
 injures nay, annihilates others ; for him holds good the secret 
 rule of life of the ancient Assassins of the Lebanon : ' Nothing 
 is true, all is permissible.' With this new morality, humanity 
 will finally be able to produce the 'over-man.' ' Thus we find, 
 as the ripest fruit on its tree, the sovereign individual, re- 
 sembling himself alone, freed again from the morality of 
 custom, the autonomous super-moral individual (for " auto- 
 nomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive) in short, the 
 man of his own, independent, long will.' In Zarathustra the 
 same thought is expressed dithyrambically : ' " Man is wicked," 
 so spake to me in consolation all the wisest. Ah, if only it is 
 yet true to-day ! For wickedness is man's best strength. 
 Man must become better and more wicked, so I teach. The 
 greatest wickedness is necessary to the best of the over-man. 
 It might be good for that preacher of little people that he 
 suffered and bore the sins of man. But I rejoice in great sins 
 as my great consolation.' 
 
 This is Nietzsche's moral philosophy which (disregarding 
 contradictions) is deduced from separate concordant passages 
 in his various books (in particular Menschliches Allzumenschliches, 
 Jenseits von Gut und Bose, and Zur Genealogie der Moral). I 
 will take it for a moment and subject it to criticism, before 
 confronting it with Nietzsche's own assertions diametrically 
 opposed to it. 
 
 Firstly, the anthropological assertion. Man is supposed to 
 have been a freely roaming solitary beast of prey, whose 
 primordial instinct was egoism and the absence of any con- 
 sideration for his congeners. This assertion contradicts all 
 that we know concerning the beginnings of humanity. The 
 Kjokkenmoddinge, or kitchen-middens, of quaternary man, 
 discovered and investigated by Steenstrup, have in some 
 places a thickness of three metres, and must have been formed 
 by a very numerous horde. The piles of horses' bones at 
 Solutr are so enormous as quite to preclude the idea that a 
 single hunter, or even any but a very large body of allied 
 hunters, could have collected and killed such a. large number 
 of horses in one place. As far as our view penetrates into 
 prehistoric time, every discovery shows us primitive man as 
 a gregarious animal, who could not possibly have maintained 
 himself if he had not possessed the instincts which are pre- 
 supposed in life in a community, viz., sympathy, the feeling of 
 solidarity and a certain degree of unselfishness. We iind 
 these instincts already existent in apes ; and if, in those most
 
 EGO-MANIA 427 
 
 like human beings, the ourang-outang and gibbon, these in- 
 stincts fail to appear, it is to many investigators a sufficient 
 proof that these animals are degenerating and dying out. 
 Hence it is not true that at any time man was a ' solitary, 
 roving brute.' 
 
 Now with regard to the historical assertion. At first the 
 morality of masters is supposed to have prevailed, in which 
 every selfish act of violence seemed good, every sort of unsel- 
 fishness bad. The inverted valuation of deeds and feelings 
 is said to have been the work of a slave-revolt. The Jews 
 are said to have discovered ' ascetic morality,' i.e., the ideal of 
 combating all desires, contempt of all pleasures of the flesh, 
 pity, and brotherly love, in order to avenge themselves on 
 their oppressors, the masters the ' blond beasts of prey.' 
 have shown above, the insanity of this idea of a conscious and 
 purposed act of vengeance on the part of the Jewish people. 
 But is it, then, true that our present morality, with its con- 
 ceptions of good and evil, is an invention of the Jews, directed 
 against ' blond beasts/ an enterprise of slaves against a master- 
 people ? The leading doctrines of the present morality, falsely 
 termed Christian, were expressed in Buddhism six hundred 
 years prior to the rise of Christianity. Buddha preached them, 
 himself no slave, but a king's son, and they were the moral 
 doctrines, not of slaves, not of the oppressed, but of the very 
 masterfolk themselves, of the Brahmans, of the proper Aryans. 
 The following are some of the Buddhist moral doctrines, 
 extracted from the Hindu Dhammapada* and from the Chinese 
 Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king : { 'Do not speak harshly to anybody' 
 (Dhammapada, verse 133). ' Let us live happily then, not 
 hating those who hate us ! Among men who hate us let us 
 dwell free from hatred ' (verse 197). ' Because he has pity on 
 all living creatures, therefore is a man called Ariya ' (elect) 
 (verse 270). ' Be not thoughtless, watch your thoughts !' 
 (verse 327). 'Good is restraint in all things' (verse 361). 
 ' Him I call indeed a B^ahmana who, though he has committed 
 no offence, endures reproach, bonds, and stripes ' (verse 399). 
 'Be kind to all that lives' (Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, verse 2,024). 
 ' Conquer your foe by force, you increase his enmity ; con- 
 quer by love, and you will reap no after-sorrow ' (verse 2,241). 
 Is that a morality of slaves or of masters ? Is it a notion of 
 roving beasts of prey, or that of compassionate, unselfish, 
 
 * The Sacred Books of the East. Translated by various Oriental scholars, 
 and edited by F. Max Miiller. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, ist series, 
 vol. x. : Dhammapada, by F. Max Miiller ; and &utta-Nipdta, by V. Faus- 
 boll. 
 
 t The Sacred Books of the East, etc., vol. xix. : Fo-sho-hinp-tsan-king. by 
 Rev. S. Beal.
 
 428 DEGENERATION 
 
 social human beings ? And this notion did not spring up in 
 Palestine, but in India, among the very people of the conquer- 
 ing Aryans, who were ruling a subordinate race ; and in China, 
 where at that time no conquering race held another in subjec- 
 tion. Self-sacrifice for others, pity and sympathy, are sup- 
 posed to be the morality of Jewish slaves. Was the heroic 
 baboon mentioned by Darwin,* after Brehm, a Jewish slave 
 in revolt against the master-folk of blond beasts ? 
 
 In the ' blond beast" Nietzsche evidently is thinking of the 
 ancient Germans of the migratory ages. They have inspired 
 in him the idea of the roving beast of prey, falling upon 
 weaker men for the voluptuous assuaging of their instincts of 
 bloodthirstiness and destruction. This beast of prey never 
 entered into contracts. ' He who comes on the scene violent 
 in deed and demeanour . . . what has he to do with con- 
 tracts ?' f Very well ; history teaches that the ' blond beast,' 
 i.e., the ancient German of the migratory ages, not yet affected 
 by the ' slave-revolt in morals,' was a vigorous but peace- 
 loving peasant, who made war not to riot in murder, but to 
 obtain arable land, and who always first sought to conclude 
 peaceful treaties before necessity forced him to have recourse 
 to the sword. I And long before intelligence of the ' ascetic 
 ideal ' of Jewish Christianity reached it, the same ' blond 
 beast ' developed the conception of feudal fidelity, i.e., the 
 notion that it is most glorious for a man to divest himself of 
 his own ' I ' ; to know honour only as the resplendence of 
 another's honour, of whom one has become the ' man ' ; and to 
 sacrifice his life for the chief ! 
 
 * Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; 
 London, J. Murray, 1885, p. lot : 'All the baboons had reascended the 
 heights, excepting a young one, about six months old, who, loudly calling 
 for aid, climbed on -a block of rock, and was surrounded. Now one of the 
 largest males, a true hero, came down again from the mountain, slowly went 
 to the young one, coaxed him, and triumphantly led him away, the dogs 
 being too much astonished to make an attack.' 
 
 | Fried rich Nietsche, Zur Genealogic der Moral. Eine Streitschrift. 
 Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1892, 80. 
 
 J Gustav Freytag, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit. Erster Band, 
 aus dem Mittelalter. Leipzig, 1872, p. $iff.: ' The Roman Consul, Papirius 
 Carbo . . . denies the strangers [the Cimbrians and Teutons !] the right of 
 sojourn because the inhabitants are enjoying the rights of hospitality of the 
 Romans. The strangers excuse themselves by saying they did not know 
 that the natives were under Roman protection, and they are ready to leave 
 the country. . . . The Cimbrians do not seek a quarrel ; they send to 
 Consul Silanus, and urgently entreat him to assign them lands ; they are 
 willing in return for it to serve the Romans in time of war. . . . Once more 
 the strangers do not invade Roman territory, but send an embassy to the 
 Senate and repeat the request for an assignment of land. . . . The victorious 
 Germans now sent a fresh embassy to the leader of the other army, for the 
 third time, to sue for peace and ask for land and seed-corn.'
 
 EGO-MANIA 429 
 
 Conscience is supposed to be * cruelty introverted.' As 
 man to whom it is an irrepressible want to inflict pain, to 
 torture, and to rend, cannot assuage this want on others, he 
 satisfies it on himself.* 
 
 If this were true, then the respectable, the virtuous man, 
 who had never satisfied the pretended primeval instinct of 
 causing pain by means of a crime against others, would be 
 forced to rage the most violently against himself, and would 
 therefore of necessity have the worst conscience. Conversely, 
 the criminal directing his fundamental instinct outwardly, and 
 hence having no need to seek satisfaction in self-rending, 
 would necessarily live in the most delightful peace with his 
 conscience. Does this agree with observation ? Has a 
 righteous man who has not given way to the instinct of cruelty 
 ever been seen to suffer from the stings of conscience ? Are 
 these not, on the contrary, to be observed in the very persons 
 who have yielded to their instinct, who have been cruel to 
 others, and hence have attained to that satisfaction of their 
 craving, vouchsafed them, according to Nietzsche, by the 
 evil conscience ? Nietzsche says,"f* ' It is precisely among 
 criminals and offenders that remorse is extremely rare ; prisons 
 and reformatories are not the brooding places in which this 
 species of worm loves to thrive,' and believes that in this 
 remark he has given a proof of his assertion. But by the 
 commission of crime prisoners have shown that in them the 
 instinct of evil is developed in special strength ; in the prison 
 they are forcibly prevented from giving way to their instinct ; 
 it is, therefore, precisely in them that self-rending through 
 remorse ought to be extraordinarily violent, and yet among 
 them ' the prick of conscience is extremely rare.' It is evident 
 that Nietzsche's idea is nothing but a delirious sally, and not 
 worthy for a moment to be weighed seriously against the 
 explanation of conscience proposed by Darwin, and accepted 
 by all moral philosophers. J 
 
 Now for the philological argument. Originally, bonus is 
 supposed to have read duonus, and hence signified 'man of 
 
 * Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79. 
 
 t Ibid., p. 73. 
 
 J Charles Darwin, op. tit., p. 98 : ' As soon as the mental faculties had 
 become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be 
 incessantly passing through the brain of each individual ; and that feeling 
 of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results . . . from any- 
 unsatisfied instinct, would arise as often as it was perceived that the endur- 
 ing and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at 
 the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature nor leaving behind it a 
 very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that 
 of hunger, are, in their nature, of short duration, and, after being satisfied. 
 are not reauily or vividly recalled,' etc.
 
 430 DEGENERATION 
 
 discord, disunion (dno), warrior.'* The proof of the ancient 
 form diionus is offered by ' be Hum duellum = duen -htm.' Now 
 duen-lum is never met with, but is a free invention of Nietzsche, 
 as is equally duomts. How admirable is this method ! He 
 invents a word duomts which does not exist, and bases it on 
 the word duen-lum, which is just as non-existent and equally 
 drawn from imagination. The philology here displayed by 
 Nietzsche is on a level with that which has created the 
 beautiful and convincing series of derivations alopcx = lopex ^ 
 pexpix = pux = fecks = fichs = Fuchs (fox). Nietzsche is uncom- 
 monly proud of his discovery, that the conception of Schuld 
 (guilt) is derived from the very narrow and material concep- 
 tion of Schulden (debts). t Even if we admit the accuracy of 
 this derivation, what has his theory gained by it ? This 
 would only prove that, in the course of time, the crudely 
 material and limited conception had become enlarged, deepened, 
 and spiritualized. To whom has it ever occurred to contest 
 this fact ? What dabbler in the history of civilization does 
 not know that conceptions develop themselves ? Did love 
 and friendship, as primitively understood, ever convey the 
 idea of the delicate and manifold states of mind now expressed 
 by these words ? It is possible that the first guilt of which 
 men were conscious was the duty of restoring a loan. But 
 neither can guilt, in the sense of a material obligation, arise 
 amongst ' blond brutes,' or ' cruel beasts of prey.' It already 
 presupposes a relation of contract, the recognition of a right 
 of possession, respect for other individuals. It is not possible 
 if there does not exist, on the part of the lender, the dis- 
 position to be agreeable to a fellow-creature, and a trust in 
 the readiness of the latter to requite the benefit ; and, on the 
 part of the borrower, a voluntary submission to the dis- 
 agreeable necessity of repayment. And all these feelings are 
 really already morality a simple, but true, morality the real 
 ' slave - morality ' of duty, consideration, sympathy, self-con- 
 straint ; not the * master - morality ' of selfishness, cruel 
 violence, unbounded desires ! Even if single words like the 
 German schlecht (schlicht) (bad, plain, or straight) have to-day 
 a meaning the opposite of their original one, this is not 
 to be explained by a fabulous ' transvaluation of values,' but, 
 naturally and obviously, by Abel's theory of the ' contrary 
 double - meaning of primitive words.' The same sound 
 originally served to designate the two opposites of the same 
 concept, appearing, in agreement with the law of association, 
 simultaneously in consciousness, and it was only in the later 
 life of language that the word became the exclusive vehicle 
 of one or other of the contrary concepts. This phenomenon 
 
 * Zur Genealogit der Mora/, p. 9. f Ibid., p. 48.
 
 EGO-MANIA 431 
 
 has not the remotest connection with a change in the moral 
 valuation of feelings and acts. 
 
 Now the biological argument. The prevailing morality is 
 supposed to be admittedly of a character tending to improve 
 the chances of life in gregarious animals, but to be an obstacle 
 to the cultivation of the highest human type, and hence 
 pernicious to humanity as a whole, as it prevents the race 
 from rising to the most perfect culture, and the attainment 
 of its possible ideal. Hence the most perfect human type 
 would, according to Nietzsche, be the ' magnificent beast of 
 prey,' the ' laughing lion,' able to satisfy all his desires without 
 consideration for good or evil. Observation teaches that this 
 doctrine is rank idiocy. All ' over-men ' known to history, 
 who gave the reins to their instincts, were either diseased 
 from the outset, or became diseased. Famous criminals 
 and Nietzsche expressly ranks these among the 'over-men'* 
 have displayed, almost without exception, the bodily 
 and mental stigmata characterizing them as degenerates, and 
 hence as cripples or atavistic phenomena, not as specimens of 
 the highest evolution and florescence. The Caesars, whose 
 monstrous selfishness could batten on all humanity, succumbed 
 to madness, which it will hardly be wished to designate as 
 an ideal condition. Nietzsche readily admits that the ' splendid 
 beast of prey ' is pernicious to the species, that he destroys 
 and ravages ; but of what consequence is the species ? It 
 exists for the sole purpose of making possible the perfect 
 development of individual ' over-men/ and of satisfying their 
 most extravagant needs/f- But the ' splendid beast of prey ' 
 is pernicious to itself; it rages against itself, it even annihilates 
 itself, and yet that cannot possibly be a useful result of highly- 
 trained qualities. The biological truth is, that constant self- 
 restraint is a necessity of existence as much for the strongest 
 as for the weakest. It is the activity of the highest human 
 cerebral centres. If these are not exercised they waste away, 
 i.e., man ceases to be man, the pretended 'over-man ' becomes 
 sub-human in other words, a beast. By the relaxation or 
 breaking up of the mechanism of inhibition in the brain the 
 organism sinks into irrecoverable anarchy in its constituent 
 
 * Jenseits von Gut und Base, p. 91 : 'The criminal is, often enough, not 
 grown to the level of his deed : he dwarfs and traduces it. The legal de- 
 tenders of the criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terrible- 
 ness of the deed to the profit of the doer.' 
 
 f 'A people is the detour of nature, in order to arrive at six or seven great 
 men.' See also : ' The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is, 
 that it should feel itself to be not the function, but the end 2cc\& justification, 
 be it of royalty or of the commonwealth that i't should, therefore, with a 
 good conscience, suffer the sacrifice of a countless number of men \vho,_/0r 
 its sake, must be humbled and reduced to imperfect beings, to slaves, to 
 instruments.'; Jenseits von Cut und L'ose, p. 226.
 
 432 DEGfcNEKATION 
 
 parts, and this leads, with absolute certainty, to ruin, to 
 disease, madness and death, even if no resistance results from 
 the external world against the frenzied egoism of the un- 
 bridled individual. 
 
 What now remains standing of Nietzsche's entire system ? 
 We have recognised it as a collection of crazy and inflated 
 phrases, which it is really impossible seriously to seize, since 
 they possess hardly the solidity of the smoke-rings from a 
 cigar. Nietzsche's disciples are for ever murmuring about 
 the ' depth ' of his moral philosophy, and with himself the 
 words ' deep ' and ' depth ' are a mental trick repeated so- 
 constantly as to be insufferable.* If we draw near to this 
 1 depth ' for the purpose of fathoming it, we can hardly 
 trust our eyes. Nietzsche has not thought out one of his 
 so-called ideas. Not one of his wild assertions is carried 
 a ringer's - breadth beneath the uppermost surface, so that, 
 at least, it might withstand the faintest puff of breath. 
 It is probable that the entire history of philosophy does not 
 record a second instance of a man having the impudence to 
 give out as philosophy, and even as profound philosophy, such 
 railway-bookstall humour and such tea-table wit. Nietzsche 
 sees absolutely nothing of the moral problem, around which, 
 nevertheless, he has poured out ten volumes of talk. Ration- 
 ally treated, this problem can only run thus : Can human 
 actions be divided into good and evil ? Why should some 
 be good, the others evil ? What is to constrain men to 
 perform the good and refrain from the evil ? 
 
 Nietzsche would seem to deny the legitimacy of a classifica- 
 tion of actions from moral standpoints. ' Nothing is true, all 
 is permissible.'! There is no good and no evil. It is a super- 
 
 * The following are a few examples, which could easily be centupled 
 (literally, not hyperbolically) Jenseits von Gut und Base, p. 63 : ' It is the 
 Orient, the deep Orient.' P. 239 : ' Such books of depth and of the first 
 importance.' P. 248: 'Deep suffering ennobles.' 'A bravery of taste,, 
 resisting all that is sorrowful and deep.' P. 249 : ' Any fervour and thirsti- 
 ness which constantly drives the soul . . . into the bright, the brilliant, the- 
 deep, the delicate.' P. 256: 'An odour quite as much of depth [!] as- 
 of decay.' P. 260 : ' To lie tranquilly like a mirror, so that the deep- 
 heaven might reflect itself in them.' P. 262 : ' I often think how I may make- 
 him [man] stronger, wickeder, and deeper.' Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i.,. 
 p. 71 : 'But thou Deep One, thou sufferest too deeply even from little- 
 wounds.' Pt. ii., p. 52 : 'Immovable is my depth ; but it sparkles with. 
 tloating enigmas and laughters ' (! !). P. 64 : ' And this for me is knowledge r 
 all depth should rise to my height.' P. 70 : 'They did not think enough 
 into the depth.' Pt. iii., p. 22: 'The world is deep, and deeper than the 
 day has ever thought it' Pt. iv., p. 129 : ' What says the deep midnight ? . . . 
 From a deep dream am I awakened. The world is deep, and erper tham 
 the day thought. Deep in its woe. Joy deeper stili'iii-iu s_>rru.v uf heart. 
 AH joy . . . wishes for deep, deep eternity,' etc. 
 
 f 7.ur Genealogie der Moral, p. 167.
 
 EGO-MANIA 433 
 
 stition and hereditary prejudice to cling to these artificial 
 .notions. He himself stands ' beyond good and evil,' and he 
 invites the ' free spirits ' and ' good Europeans ' to follow him 
 to this standpoint. And thereupon this ' free spirit,' standing 
 ~* beyond good and evil,' speaks with the greatest candour of 
 the ' aristocratic virtues, 1 * and of the ' morality of the masters.' 
 Are there, then, virtues ? Is there, then, a morality, even if it 
 be opposed to the prevailing one ? How is that compatible 
 with the negation of all morality ? Are men's actions, there- 
 fore, not of equal value ? Is it possible in these to distinguish 
 _good and evil ? Does Nietzsche, therefore, undertake to 
 classify them, designating some as virtues 'aristocratic 
 virtues ' others as ' slave actions,' bad for the ' masters, the 
 commanders,' and hence wicked ; how, then, can he still 
 affirm that he stands ' beyond good and evil ' ? He stands, in. 
 .fact, mid- way between good and evil, only he indulges in the 
 foolish jest of calling that evil which we call good, and vice-versd 
 an intellectual performance of which every naughty and mis- 
 chievous child of four is certainly capable. 
 
 This first and astounding non-comprehension of his own 
 standpoint is already a good example of his ' depth.' But 
 further. As the chief proof of the non-existence of morality, 
 he adduces what he calls the ' transvaluation of values.' At 
 one time good is said to have been that which is now esteemed 
 evil, and conversely. We have seen that this idea is delirious, 
 and expressed in a delirious way.t But let it be granted that 
 Nietzsche is right; we will for once enter into the folly and 
 accept the ' revolt of slaves in morality ' as a fact. What has 
 his fundamental idea gained by this ? A ' transvaluation of 
 values' would prove nothing against the existence of a morality, 
 for it leaves the concept of value itself absolutely intact. 
 These, then, are values ; but now this, now that, species of 
 action acquires the rank of value. No historian of civilization 
 denies the fact that the notions concerning what is moral or 
 immoral have changed in the course of history, that they con- 
 
 * Jenseits von Gut und Base, p. 159 : * Our virtues ? It is probable that 
 we, too, still have our virtues, albeit they are no longer the true-hearted and 
 robust virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honour though at a 
 little distance.' P. 154: 'The man beyond good and evil, the master of his 
 virtues ... he ought to be the greatest.' So then, 'beyond good and evil,' 
 -and yet having ' virtues'! 
 
 f Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79 : 'As a premise to this hypothesis 
 concerning the origin of the evil conscience [through the 'transvaluation of 
 values ' and the ' revolt of slaves in morality '] belongs the fact . . . that 
 this transformation was in no way gradual, or voluntary, and did not manifest 
 itself as an organic growing into new conditions,' but as a rapture, a leap, a 
 compulsion.' Hence, not only was that good which had previously been 
 evil, but this 'transvaluation' even occurred suddenly, ordered one fine day 
 by authority 1 
 
 28
 
 434 DEGENERATION 
 
 tinually change, that they will change in the future. The 
 recognition of this has become a commonplace. If Nietzsche 
 assumes this to be a discovery of his own, he deserves to be 
 decked with a fool's cap by the assistant teacher of a village 
 school. But how can the evolution, the transformation, of 
 moral concepts in any way contradict the fundamental fact of 
 the existence of moral concepts ? Not only does this trans- 
 formation not contradict these, but it confirms them ! They 
 are the necessary premise of this transformation ! A modi- 
 fication of moral concepts is evidently possible only if there 
 are moral concepts ; but this is exactly the problem * are 
 there moral concepts ?' In spite of all his spouting about the 
 ' transvaluation of values ' and the ' revolt of slaves in morality,* 
 Nietzsche never approaches this primary and all-important 
 question. 
 
 He contemptuously reproaches slave-morality as being a 
 utilitarian morality,* and he ignores the fact that he extols his 
 
 * noble virtues,' constituting the ' morality of masters,' only 
 because they are advantageous for the individual, for the 
 ' over-man. 't Are, then, 'advantageous' and 'useful' not 
 exactly synonymous? Is, therefore, master -morality not 
 every whit as utilitarian as slave-morality ? And the ' deep ' 
 Nietzsche does not see this ! And he ridicules English 
 moralists because they have invented the ' morality of utili- 
 tarianism.'! 
 
 He believes he has unearthed something deeply hidden, 
 not yet descried by human eye, when he announces, ' What 
 is there that is not called love ? Covetousness and love 
 what different feelings do we experience at each of these words ! 
 And yet it might be the same instinct. . . . Our love for our 
 neighbours is it not an ardent desire for a possession ? . . J 
 When we see anyone suffering, we willingly utilize the oppor- 
 
 * Jenseits von Gut und ose, p. 232 : ' Slave-morality is essentially a 
 utilitarian morality.' 
 
 t Die frohliche IVissenschaft, p. 32 : ' In reality, however, evil instincts 
 are just as purposive, as conservative of the species, and as indispensable as 
 the good, only they have a different function.' Zur Genealogie der Moral y 
 p. 21 : 'At the root of all ... noble races lies the beast of prey . . . this 
 foundation needs from time to time to disburden itself ; the animal must out, 
 must hie him back to the desert.' This means that it is essential to his 
 health, and, consequently, of utility to him. 
 
 J Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 6 : 'To what disorders, however, this 
 [democratic] prejudice can give rise, is shown by the infamous [!] case of 
 Buckle. The plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English origin, 
 once more breaks forth . . . there.' Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 212: 
 
 * There are truths that are best recognised by mediocre heads. . . . We are 
 driven to this proposition since the intellect of mediocre Englishmen I 
 may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer acquired 
 preponderance in the mean region of European taste.' 
 
 Die frohliche IVissenschaft, p. 43.
 
 EGO-MANIA 435 
 
 tunity preferred us to take possession of him ; the pitying and 
 charitable man, for example, does this ; he also calls by the 
 name " love " the desire for a new possession awakened in him, 
 and takes pleasure in it, as he would in a fresh conquest which 
 beckons him on.' Is it any longer necessary to criticise these 
 silly superficialities ? Every act, even seemingly the most dis- 
 interested, is admittedly egoistic in a certain sense, viz., that 
 the doer promises himself a benefit from it, and experiences 
 a feeling of pleasure from the anticipation of the expected 
 benefit. Who has ever denied this ? Is it not expressly 
 emphasized by all modern moralists ?* Is it not implied in 
 the accepted definition of morality, as a knowledge of what is. 
 useful ? But Nietzsche has not even an inkling of the essence 
 of the subject. To him egoism is a feeling having for its 
 content that which is useful to a being, whom he pictures to 
 himself as isolated in the world, separated from the species, 
 even hostile to it. To the moralist, the egoism which Nietzsche 
 believes himself to have discovered at the base of all unselfishness, 
 is the knowledge of what is useful not alone to the individual, 
 but to the species as well ; to the moralist, ths creator of the 
 knowledge of the useful is not the individual, but the whole 
 species ; to the moralist also egoism is morality, but it is a. 
 collective egoism of the species, an egoism of humanity in face 
 of the non-human co-habitants of the earth, and in the face of 
 Nature. The man whom the healthy-minded moralist has 
 before his eyes is one who has attained a sufficiently high 
 development to extricate, himself from the illusion of his- 
 individual isolation, and to participate in the existence of the: 
 species, to feel himself one of its members, to picture to him- 
 self the states of his fellow-creatures i.e., to be able to 
 sympathize with them. This man Nietzsche calls a herd animal 
 a term which he has found used by all Darwinist writers, 
 but which he seems to regard as his own invention. He endows 
 the word with a meaning of contempt. The truth is that this 
 herding animal i.e., man, whose ' I ' consciousness has ex- 
 panded itself to the capacity of receiving the consciousness 
 of the species represents the higher development, to which 
 mental cripples and degenerates, for ever enclosed in their 
 diseased isolation, cannot ascend. 
 
 * See, in my novel, Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1889, 
 Band I., p. 140, Schrotter's remarks : 'Egoism is a word. All depends upon 
 the interpretation. Every living being strives for happiness, i.e., for content- 
 ment. . . . He [the healthy man] cannot be happy when he sees others 
 suffer. The higher the man's development,- the livelier is this feeling. . . . 
 The egoism of these men consists in their seeking out the pain of others 
 and striving to alleviate it, in which, while combating the sufferings of 
 others, they are simply struggling to attain to their own happiness. A Catholic 
 would say of St. Vincent de Paul or of Carlo Borromeo, He was a great 
 saint ; I should say of him, He was a great egoist.'
 
 436 DEGENERATION 
 
 Quite as ' deep ' as his discovery of the egoism of all un- 
 selfishness is Nietzsche's harangue ' to the teachers of un- 
 selfishness.'* The virtues of a man are called good, not in 
 respect of their effects upon himself, but in respect of the 
 effects which we suppose them to have upon ourselves and 
 society. 'The virtues (such as diligence, obedience, chastity, 
 piety, justice), are for the most part pernicious to their 
 possessors.' ' Praise of the virtues is praise of something 
 pernicious to the individual the praise of instincts which 
 deprive a man of his noblest egoism, and of the power of 
 the highest self-protection.' ' Education . . . seeks to deter- 
 mine the individual to modes of thought and conduct which, 
 if they have become habit, instinct, and passion, rule in him 
 and over him, against his ultimate advantage, but " for the 
 general good." ' This is the old silly objection against altruism 
 which we have seen floating in every gutter for the last sixty 
 years. ' If everyone were to act unselfishly, to sacrifice 
 himself for his neighbour, the result would be that everyone 
 would injure himself, and hence humanity, as a whole, would 
 suffer great prejudice.' Assuredly it would, if humanity were 
 composed of isolated individuals irt no communication with 
 each other. Whereas it is an organism ; each individual 
 always gives to the higher organism only the surplus of his 
 effective force, and in his personal share of the collective 
 wealth profits by the prosperity of the whole organism, which 
 he has increased through his altruistic sacrifice. What would 
 probably be said to the canny householder who should argue 
 in this way against fire insurance : ' Most houses do not burn 
 down. The house-owner who insures himself against fire 
 pays premiums his life long, and as his house will pro- 
 bably never burn down, he has thrown away his money 
 to no purpose. Fire insurance is consequently injurious.' 
 The objection against altruism, that it injures each individual 
 by imposing on him sacrifices for others, is of exactly the 
 same force. 
 
 We have had quite enough tests of the ' depth ' of Nietzsche 
 and his system. I now wish to point out some of his 
 most diverting contradictions. His disciples do not deny 
 these, but seek to palliate them. Thus Kaatz says : ' He 
 had experienced a change in his own views concerning so 
 many things, that he warned men against the rigid principle 
 which would pass off dishonesty to self as "character." In 
 view of the shifting of opinions as evidenced in Nietzsche's 
 works, it is, of course, only that theory of life to which 
 Nietzsche ultimately wrestled his way that can be taken 
 
 * Diefrohliche Wissenschaft^ p. 48.
 
 EGO-MANIA 437 
 
 into consideration for the purposes of this book.'* This is, 
 however, a conscious and intended falsification of the facts, 
 and the hand of the falsifier ought, like that of the cheater 
 at cards, to be forthwith nailed to the table. The fact 
 is that the contradictions are to be found, not in works of 
 different periods, but in the same book, often on the same 
 page. They are not degrees of knowledge, of which the 
 higher naturally surpass the lower, but opposing, mutually 
 incompatible opinions co-existing in Nietzsche's conscious- 
 ness, which his judgment is neither capable of reconciling, 
 nor among which it can suppress either term. 
 
 In Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 29, we read : ' Always 
 love your neighbour as yourself, but first be of those who love 
 themselves.' P. 56 : ' And at that time it happened also . . . 
 that his word praised selfishness as blessed, hale, healthy 
 selfishness, which wells forth from the mighty soul.' And 
 p. 60 : ' One must learn to love one's self thus I teach with 
 a hale and healthy love, so that one bear with one's self, and 
 not rove about.' In opposition to this, in the same book, 
 pt. i., p. 108 : 'The degenerating sense which says, " All for 
 me," is to us a horror.' Is this contradiction explained by an 
 ' effort to wrestle his way to an ultimate theory of life ' ? The 
 contrary assertions are in the same book a few pages apart. 
 
 Another example. Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 264: 'The 
 absence of personality avenges itself everywhere ; an en- 
 feebled, thin, effaced personality, denying and calumniating 
 itself, is worthless for any further good thing, most of all for 
 philosophy.' And only four pages further in the same book, 
 p. 268 : ' Have we not been seized with . . . the suspicion 
 of a contrast a contrast between the world in which, 
 hitherto, we were at home with our venerations . . . and of 
 another world, which is ourselves ... a suspicion which 
 might place us Europeans . . . before the frightful alter- 
 native, Either Or : " either do away with your venerations 
 or yourselves." ' Here, therefore, he denies, or, at least, 
 doubts, his personality, even if in an interrogative form ; on 
 which the reader need not dwell, since Nietzsche ' loves to 
 mask his thoughts, or to express them hypothetically ; and 
 to conclude the problems he raises by an interrupted phrase 
 or a mark of interrogation. '-f* 
 
 But he denies his personality, his ' I,' still more decidedly. 
 In the preface to Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 6, he explains 
 that the foundation of all philosophies up to the present time 
 has been ' some popular superstition,' such as ' the super- 
 
 * Dr. Hugo Kaatz, op. tit., Thiel I., Vorrede, p. viii. 
 t Robert Schellwien, Max Stierner und firiedrich Nietzsche. Leipzig, 
 1892, p. 23.
 
 438 DEGENERATION 
 
 stition of the soul, which, as a superstition of the subjective 
 and the " I," has not ceased, even in our days, to cause 
 mischief.' And in the same book, p. 139, he exclaims : 
 ' Who has not already been sated to the point of death with 
 all subjectivity and his own accursed ipsissimosity !' Hence 
 the ' I ' is a superstition ! Sated to the point of death with 
 'subjectivity'! And yet the 'I* should be 'proclaimed as 
 holy.'* And yet the ' ripest fruit of society and morality is 
 the sovereign individual, who resembles himself alone. 't 
 And yet ' a personality which denies itself is no longer good 
 for anything ' ! 
 
 The negation of the ' I,' the designation of it as a super- 
 stition, is the more extraordinary, as Nietzsche's whole 
 philosophy if one may call his effusions by that name is 
 based only on the ' Ego,' recognising it as alone justifiable, 
 or even as alone existing. 
 
 In all Nietzsche's works we shall, it is true, find no more 
 subversive contradiction than this ; but a few other examples 
 will show to what extent he holds mutually-destructive 
 opposites in his mind in uncompromising juxtaposition. 
 
 We have seen that his last piece of wisdom is : ' Nothing 
 is true ; all is permissible.' At bottom all those ethics are 
 repugnant to me which say : ' Do not do this ! Renounce ! 
 Overcome self!' 'Self-command!' Those ethical teachers 
 who . . . enjoin man to place himself in his own power induce 
 thereby in him a peculiar disease.t And now let the following 
 sentences be weighed : ' Through auspicious marriage customs 
 there is a continual increase in the power and pleasure of 
 willing, in the will to command self.' 'Asceticism and 
 puritanism are almost indispensable means of education and 
 ennoblement, if a race desires to triumph over its plebeian 
 origin, and raise itself at some time to sovereignty.' ' The 
 essential and priceless feature of every morality is that it is 
 a long constraint. ' 
 
 The characteristic of the over-human is his wish to stand 
 alone, to seek solitude, to flee from the society of the 
 gregarious. ' He should be the greatest who can be the 
 most solitary.' 'The lofty independent spirituality the will 
 to stand alone. . . .' (Jenseits von Gut und Bose, pp. 154, 123.) 
 ' The strong are constrained by their nature "to segregate, 
 as much as the feeble are by theirs to aggregate ' (Zur 
 Genealogie der Moral, p. 149). In opposition to this he teaches 
 
 * Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 84 : 'The "thou" is proclaimed holy, 
 but not yet the " 1."' 
 
 t Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 43. 
 \ Dieftdhliche Wissenschaft,\>. 222. 
 Jenseits von Gut und Base, pp. 78, 106.
 
 EGO-MANIA 439 
 
 in other places : ' During the longest interval in the life of 
 humanity there was nothing more terrible than to feel one's 
 self alone ' (Die frb'hliche Wissenschaft, p. 147). Again : ' We 
 at present sometimes undervalue the advantages of life in a 
 community ' (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 59). We ? That 
 is a calumny. We value these advantages at their full worth. 
 He alone does not value them who, in expressions of admira- 
 tion, vaunts ' segregation,' i.e., hostility to the community and 
 contempt of its advantages, as characterizing the strong. 
 
 At one time the primitive aristocratic man is the freely- 
 roving, splendid beast of prey, the blond beast ; at another : 
 4 these men are rigorously kept within bounds by morality, 
 veneration, custom, gratitude, still more by reciprocal surveil- 
 lance, by jealousy inter pares ; and, on the other hand, in their 
 attitude towards each other, inventive in consideration, self- 
 command, delicacy, fidelity, pride, and friendship.' Ay, if 
 these be the attributes of ' blond beasts,' may someone speedily 
 ;give us a society of ' blond beasts ' ! But how does ' morality, 
 veneration, self-command,' etc., accord with the 'free-roving' 
 of the splendid beast of prey ? That remains an unsolved 
 enigma. It is true that Nietzsche, while making our mouths 
 water by his description, adds to it this limitation : ' Towards 
 what lies beyond, where the stranger, and what is strange, 
 begins, they are not much better than beasts of prey set free ' 
 (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21). But this is in reality no 
 limitation. Every organized community regards itself, in 
 respect of the rest of the world, as a conjoint unity, and does 
 not accord to the foreigner, the man from without, the same 
 rights as to a member of its own body. Rights, custom, con- 
 sideration, are not extended to the stranger, unless he knows 
 how to inspire fear and to compel a recognition of his rights. 
 The progress in civilization, however, consists in the very fact 
 that the boundaries of the community are continually enlarged, 
 that which is strange and without rights or claim to considera- 
 tion being constantly made to recede further and ever further. 
 At first there existed in the horde reciprocal forbearance and 
 right alone ; then the feeling of solidarity extended itself to 
 the tribe, the country, state, and race. At the present day 
 there is an international law even in war; the best among con- 
 temporaries feel themselves one with all men, nay, no longer 
 hold even the animal to be without rights ; and the time will 
 come when the forces of Nature will be the sole strange and 
 external things which may be treated according to man's need 
 and pleasure, and in regard to which he may be the ' freed 
 beast of prey.' The /deep' Nietzsche is not capable, it is 
 true, of comprehending a state of the case so simple and clear. 
 
 At one moment he makes merry over the ' naivete ' of those
 
 440 DEGENERATION 
 
 \vho believe in an original social contract (Zur Genealogie der 
 Moral, p. 80), and then says (in the same book, p. 149) : ' If 
 they ' (the strong, the born masters, the ' species of solitary- 
 beasts of prey ') ' unite, it is only with a view to a collective 
 act of aggression, a collective satisfaction of their volition to> 
 exert their power, with much resistance from the individual 
 conscience.' With resistance or without, does not a ' unioa 
 for the purpose of a collective satisfaction' amount to a rela- 
 tion of contract, the acceptation of which Nietzsche with, 
 justice terms ' a naivet6 ' ? 
 
 At one time ' agony is something which inspires pity * 
 (Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 136), and a ' succession of crimes. 
 is horrible ' (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21) ; and then, again, 
 the 'beauty' of crime is spoken of (Jenseits von Gut und Bose, 
 p. 91), and complaint is made that 'crime is calumniated ' (the 
 same book, p. 123). 
 
 Examples enough have been given. I do not wish to lose 
 myself in minutiae and details, but I believe that I have demon- 
 strated Nietzsche's own contradiction of every single one of his 
 fundamental assertions, most emphatically of the foremost and. 
 most important, viz., that the ' 1 ' is the one real thing, that 
 egoism alone is necessitated and justifiable. 
 
 If the conceits which he wildly ejaculates as it were, shrieks 
 forth are examined somewhat more closely, we cannot but 
 marvel at the profusion of fabulous stupidity and abecedarian 
 ignorance they contain. It is thus he terms the system of 
 Copernicus (Jenseits von Gut und Bose), ' which has persuaded 
 us, against all the senses, that the earth is not immovable," 
 * the greatest triumph over the senses hitherto achieved on* 
 earth.' Hence he does not suspect that the system of Coper- 
 nicus has for its basis exact observation of the starry heavens,. 
 the movements of the moon and planets, and the position of 
 the sun in the zodiac ; that this system was, therefore, the 
 triumph of exact sense-perceptions over sense-illusions in 
 other words, of attentiveness over fugacity and distraction. He 
 believes that ' consciousness developed itself under the pressure 
 of the need of communication,' for ' conscious thought even- 
 tuates in words, i.e., in signs of communication, by which fact 
 the origin of consciousness itself is revealed ' (Die frohliche- 
 Wissenschaft, p. 280). He does not know, then, that animals 
 without the power of speech also have a consciousness ; that 
 it is possible also to think in images, in representations of 
 movement, without the help of a word, and that speech is not 
 added to consciousness until very late in the course of develop- 
 ment. The drollest thing is that Nietzsche very much fancies 
 himself as a psychologist, and wishes most particularly to be 
 esteemed as such ! According to this profound man, socialism 
 has its roots in the fact that 'hitherto manufacturers and
 
 EGO-MANIA 441 
 
 entrepreneurs lack those forms and signs of distinction of the 
 higher races which alone make persons interesting; if they 
 had in look and gesture the distinction of those born noble, 
 there would, perhaps, be no socialism of the masses [! !]. For 
 the latter are at bottom ready for slavery of every kind, on 
 the condition that the higher class constantly legitimizes itself 
 as higher, as born to command, by outward distinction ' [! !] 
 (Die frohlichc Wissenschaft, p. 68). The concept ' thou oughtest,' 
 the idea of duty, of the necessity of a definite measure of self- 
 command, is a consequence of the fact that ' at all times since 
 men have existed, human herds have also existed, and always 
 a very large number of those who obey relatively to the small 
 number of those who command (Jenseits von Gut und Base, p. 118). 
 Anyone less incapable of thought than Nietzsche will under- 
 stand that, on the contrary, human herds, those obeying and 
 those commanding, were possible at all, only after and because 
 the brain had acquired the power and capacity to elaborate 
 the idea, ' thou oughtest,' i.e., to inhibit an impulse by a 
 thought or a judgment. The descendant of mixed races ' will 
 on the average be a weaker being ' (Jenseits von Gut und Base, 
 p. 120) ; indeed, the ' European Weltschmerz, the pessimism of 
 the nineteenth century, is essentially the consequence of a 
 sudden and irrational mixture of classes ' ; social classes, how- 
 ever, always ' express differences of origin and of race as well ' 
 (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 142). The most competent 
 investigators are convinced, as we well know, that the crossing 
 of one race with another is conducive to the progress of both, 
 and is 'the first cause of development.'* 'Darwinism, with 
 its incomprehensibly one-sided theory of the struggle for 
 existence,' is explained by Darwin's origin. His ancestors 
 were ' poor and humble persons who were only too familiar 
 with the difficulty of making both ends meet. Around the 
 whole of English Darwinism there floats, as it were, the 
 mephitic vapour of English over-population, the odour of 
 humble life, of pinched and straitened circumstances ' (Die 
 frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 273). It is presumably known to all 
 my readers that Darwin was a rich man, and was never com- 
 pelled to follow any profession, and that, for at least three or 
 four generations, his ancestors had lived in comfort. 
 
 Nietzsche lays special claim to extraordinary originality. 
 He places this epigraph at the beginning of his Frolich& 
 Wissenschaft : 
 
 * I live in a house that's my own, 
 I've never in nought copied no one, 
 And at every Master I've had my laugh, 
 Who had not first laughed at himself.' 
 
 * C. Lombroso and R. La^chi, Le Crime politique et Ics Revolutions. 
 Paris, 189.:, t. i., p. 142.
 
 442 DEGENERATION 
 
 His disciples believe in this brag, and, with upturned eyes, 
 bleat it after him in sheep-like chorus. The profound ignorance 
 of this flock of ruminants permits them, forsooth, to believe in 
 Nietzsche's originality. As they have never learnt, read, or 
 thought about, anything, all that they pick up in bars, or in 
 their loafings, is naturally new and hitherto non-existent. 
 Anyone, however, who regards Nietzsche relatively to analo- 
 gous phenomena of the age, will recognise that his pretended 
 originalities and temerities are the greasiest commonplaces, 
 such as a decent self-respecting thinker would not touch with 
 a pair of tongs. 
 
 Whenever he rants, Nietzsche is no doubt really original. 
 On such occasions his expressions contain no sense at all, not 
 even nonsense ; hence it is impossible to unite them with any- 
 thing previously thought or said. When, on the contrary, 
 there is a shimmer of reason in his words, we at once recognise 
 them as having their origin in the paradoxes or platitudes ot 
 others. Nietzsche's ' individualism ' is an exact reproduction 
 of Max Stirner, a crazy Hegelian, who fifty years ago exag- 
 gerated and involuntarily turned into ridicule the critical 
 idealism of his master to the extent of monstrously inflating 
 the importance even the grossly empirical importance of the 
 * I ' ; whom, even in his own day, no one took seriously, and 
 who since then had fallen into well-merited profound oblivion, 
 from which at the present time a few anarchists and philo- 
 sophical ' fops ' for the hysteria of the time has created 
 such beings seek to disinter him.* Where Nietzsche extols 
 the * I,' its rights, its claims, the necessity of cultivating and 
 developing it, the reader who has in mind the preceding 
 chapters of this book will recognise the phrases of Barres, 
 Wilde, and Ibsen. His philosophy of will is appropriated from 
 Schopenhauer, who throughout has directed his thought and 
 given colour to his language. The complete similarity of his 
 phrases concerning will with Schopenhauer's theory has evi- 
 dently penetrated to his own consciousness and made him 
 uncomfortable ; for, in order to obliterate it, he has placed a 
 false nose of his own invention on the cast he has made, viz., 
 he contests the fact that the motive force in every being is the 
 desire for self-preservation ; in his view it is rather the desire 
 for power. This addition is pure child's play. 'In the lower 
 orders of living beings it is never a ' desire for power,' but always 
 only a desire for self-preservation, that is perceptible; and 
 among men this seeming 'desire for power' can, by anyone 
 
 * R. Schellwien, op. '/., p. 7 : 'The literary activity of the two thinkers [!] 
 is separated by more than fifty years ; but great as may be the difference 
 between them, the agreement is not less, and thus the essential characters of 
 systematic individualism are presented with all the more distinctness.'
 
 EGO-MANIA 443 
 
 but the ' deep' Nietzsche, be traced to two well-known roots 
 either to the effort to make all organs act to the limit of their 
 functional capacity, which is connected with feelings of plea- 
 sure, or to procure for themselves advantages ameliorative of 
 the conditions of existence. But the effort towards feelings 
 of pleasure and better conditions of existence is nothing but a 
 form of the phenomenon of the desire for existence, and he who 
 regards the ' desire for power ' as anything different from, and 
 even opposed to, the desire for existence, simply gives evidence 
 of his incapacity to pursue this idea of the desire for existence 
 any distance beyond the length of his nose. Nietzsche's chief 
 proof of the difference between the desire for power and the 
 desire for existence is that the former often drives the desirer to 
 the contemning and endangering, even to the destruction, of his 
 own life. But in that case the whole struggle for existence, in 
 which dangers are continually incurred, and for that matter 
 are often enough sought, would also be a proof that the 
 struggler did not desire his existence ! Nietzsche would, 
 indeed, be quite capable of asserting this also. 
 
 The degenerates with whom we have become acquainted 
 affirm that they do not trouble themselves concerning Nature 
 and its- laws. Nietzsche is not so far advanced in self- 
 sufficiency as Rossetti, to whom it was a matter of indifference 
 whether the earth revolved around the sun or the sun around 
 the earth. He openly avows that this is not a matter of in- 
 difference to him ; he regrets it ; it troubles him, that the 
 earth is no longer the central point of the universe, and he the 
 chief thing on the earth. ' Since Copernicus, man seems to 
 have fallen upon an inclined plane ; he is now rolling ever 
 faster away from the central point whither ? into the 
 nothing ? into the piercing feeling of his nothingness ?' He 
 is very angry with Copernicus concerning this. Not only 
 with Copernicus, but with science in general. ' All science is 
 at present busied in talking man out of the self-respect he has 
 hitherto possessed, just as if this had been nothing but a 
 bizarre self-conceit ' (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 173). Is 
 this not an echo of the words of Oscar Wilde, who complains 
 that Nature ' is so indifferent' to him, ' so unappreciative,' and 
 that he ' is no more to Nature than the cattle that browse on 
 the slope ' ? 
 
 In other places, again, we find the current of thought and 
 almost the very words of Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, and other 
 Diabolists and Decadents. The passage in Zur Genealogie der 
 Moral (p. 171) in which he glorifies art, because ' in it the lie 
 sanctifies itself, and the will to deceive has a quiet conscience 
 on its side,' might be in the chapter in Wilde's Intentions on 
 'The Decay of Lying,' as, conversely, Wilde's aphorisms:
 
 444 DEGENERATION 
 
 ' There is no sin except stupidity.' ' An idea that is not 
 dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.' And his 
 praises of Wainwright, the poisoner, are in exact agreement 
 with Nietzsche's ' morality of assassins,' and the latter's 
 remarks that crime is calumniated, and that the defender of 
 the criminal is ' oftenest not artist enough to turn the beau- 
 tiful terribleness of the crime to the advantage of the doer.* 
 Again, by way of joke, compare these passages : ' It is neces- 
 sary to get rid of the bad taste of wishing to agree with many. 
 Good is no longer good when a neighbour says it's good * 
 (Nietzsche, Jenscits von Gut und Base, p. 54), and 'Ah ! don't 
 say that you agree with me. When people agree with me, I 
 always feel that I must be wrong ' (Oscar Wilde, Intentions, 
 p. 202). This is more than a resemblance, is it not ? To avoid 
 being too diffuse, I abstain from citing passages exactly re- 
 sembling these from Huysmans' A Rebours, and from Ibsen. 
 At the same time it is unquestionable that Nietzsche could not 
 have known the French Decadents and English ^Esthetes 
 whom he so frequently approaches, because his books are in 
 part antecedent to those of the latter ; and neither could they 
 have drawn from him, because, perhaps with the exception 
 of Ibsen, it is only about two years since they could have- 
 heard as much as Nietzsche's name. The similarity, or rather 
 identity, is not explained by plagiarism ; it is explained by the 
 identity of mental qualities in Nietzsche and the other ego- 
 maniacal degenerates. 
 
 Nietzsche presents a specially droll aspect when he confronts 
 truth, in order to declare it unnecessary, or even to deny its- 
 existence. ' Why not rather untruth ? And uncertainty ? Or 
 even ignorance?' (Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 3). 'What, 
 after all, are the truths of man ? They are the irrefutable 
 errors of man' (Die frohliche Wissenschajt, p. 193). * The will 
 for truth that might be a hidden will for death ' (Ibid., p. 263). 
 The section of this book in which he deals with the question 
 of truth is entitled by him, ' We the Fearless,' and he prefixes 
 to it, as a motto, Turenne's utterance : ' Thou tremblest, car- 
 cass ? Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest 
 whither I shall soon lead thee !' And what is this terrible- 
 danger into which the fearless one runs with such heroic 
 mien ? The investigation of the essence and value of truth. 
 But this investigation is really the A B C of all serious philo- 
 sophy ! The question as to whether objective truth exists at 
 all has been also drawn up by him,* it is true with less blowing 
 of trumpets, beating of drums, and shaking of locks, as its 
 prologue, accompaniment, and conclusion. It is, moreover, 
 highly characteristic that the same dragon-slayer who, with, 
 
 * Set-, in my Paradoxe, the chapter ' Wo ist die Wahrheit ?
 
 EGO-MANIA 445 
 
 such swnggering and snorting takes up the challenge against 
 
 * truth,' finds submissive words of most humble apology when 
 he ventures very gently to doubt the perfection of Goethe in 
 all his pieces. Speaking of the ' viscosity ' and ' tediousness ' of 
 the German style, he says (Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 39) : 
 4 I may be pardoned for affirming that even Goethe's prose, 
 with its mixture of stiffness and grace, is no exception.' When 
 he timidly criticises Goethe, he begs pardon ; his heroic 
 attitude of contempt for death is assumed only when he chal- 
 lenges morality and truth to combat. That is to say, this 
 ' fearless one ' possesses the cunning often observed among the 
 insane, and comprehends that there is absolutely no danger 
 in his babbling before the imbeciles composing his congre- 
 gation, that fabulous philosophical nonsense, at which, on the 
 contrary, they would be much enraged the instant it shocked 
 their aesthetic convictions or prejudices. 
 
 Even in the minutest details it is surprising how Nietzsche 
 agrees, word for word, with the other ego-maniacs with whom 
 we have become ' acquainted. Compare, for example, the 
 phrase in JenseHs von Gut und Bose, p. 168, where he vaunts, 
 
 * What is really noble in works and in men, their moment 
 of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the golden and 
 the cool,' with Baudelaire's praise of immobility and his 
 enraptured description of a metallic landscape ; or the remarks 
 of Des Esseintes, and the side-thrusts at the press put by 
 Ibsen into the mouths of his characters, with the insults 
 continually heaped on newspapers by Nietzsche. ' Great 
 ascetic spirits have an abhorrence of bustle, veneration, 
 newspaper ' (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 113). The cause 
 of ' the undeniably gradual and already tangible desolation of 
 the German mind ' lies in being ' all too exclusively nourished 
 on newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music ' (Ibid., 
 p. 177). ' Behold these superfluities ! . . . They vomit their bile, 
 and name it a newspaper' (Alsospvach Zarathustra, pt. i.,p. 67). 
 ' Dost thou not see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags ? 
 And they make newspapers out of those rags ! Hearest thou 
 not how the spirit has here become a play on words ? He 
 vomits a loathsome swill of words. And of this swill of words 
 they make newspapers!' (Ibid., pt. iii., p. 37). It would be 
 possible to multiply these examples tenfold, for Nietzsche harks 
 back to every idea with an obstinacy enough to make the 
 most patient reader of sound taste go wild. 
 
 Such is the appearance presented by Nietzsche's originality. 
 This ' original ' and ' audacious ' thinker, imitating the familiar 
 practices of tradesmen at ' sales,' endeavours to palm off as 
 brand new goods the most shop-worn rubbish of great 
 philosophers. His most powerful assaults are directed against
 
 446 DEGENERATION 
 
 doors that stand open. This ' solitary one,' this 'dweller on 
 the highest mountain peaks,' exhibits by the dozen the 
 physiognomy of all decadents. He who is continually talking 
 with the utmost contempt of the ' herd ' and the ' herd-animal ' 
 is himself the most ordinary herd-animal of all. Only the 
 herd to which he belongs, body and soul, is a special one ; 
 it is the flock of the mangy sheep. 
 
 Upon one occasion the habitual cunning of the insane has 
 deserted him, and he has himself revealed to us the source 
 of his ' original ' philosophy. The passage is so characteristic 
 that I must quote it at length : 
 
 ' The first impetus, to make known something of my 
 hypotheses concerning the origin of morality, was given me 
 by a clear, tidy, and clever ay, precocious [!] little book, in 
 which there was for the first time presented to me an inverted 
 and perverted kind of genealogical hypotheses, the truly 
 English kind, and which attracted me with that attractive 
 force possessed by everything contrary, everything antipodal. 
 The title of this little book was Der Ursprung der moralischen 
 Empfindunger ["The Origin of Moral Sensations "] ; its author, 
 Dr. Paul R6e ; the year of its publication, 1877. I have, 
 perhaps, never read anything to which I have in the same 
 measure mentally said " No " as I did to every proposition 
 and every conclusion in this book, yet without anger or 
 impatience. In the previously-mentioned work on which I 
 was at that time engaged [Menschliches Allzumenschliclws 
 ["Things Human, Things all too Human"], I referred, in season 
 and out of season, to the propositions of that book, not 
 refuting them what have I to do with refutations ? but, as 
 befits a positive spirit, to substitute the more probable for 
 the improbable, and at times one error for another' (Zur 
 Gcnealogie der Moral, p. 7). 
 
 This gives the reader the key to Nietzsche's ' originality.' 
 It consists in simple infantile inversion of a rational train of 
 thought. If Nietzsche imagines that his insane negations and 
 contradictions grew spontaneously in his head, he is really 
 the victim of a self-delusion. His rant may have existed in 
 his mind before he had read Dr. R6e's book. But in that 
 case it had sprung up as a contradiction to other books without 
 his having been so clearly conscious of its origin" as after the 
 perusal of Dr. R6e's work. But he pushes the self-delusion 
 to an incredible height, in terming himself a ' positive spirit,' 
 after he has just frankly confessed his method of procedure, 
 viz., that he does not ' refute ' he would not have found that 
 so easy, either but that ' to every proposition, and every con- 
 clusion he says ' No !' 
 
 This explanation of the source of his 'original* moral
 
 EGO-MANIA 447 
 
 philosophy comprehends in itself a diagnosis, which at once 
 obtrudes on the most short-sighted eye. Nietzsche's system 
 is the product of the mania of contradiction, the delirious 
 form of that mental derangement, of which the melancholic 
 form is the mania of doubt and negation, treated of in the 
 earlier chapters of this work. His folie des negations betrays 
 itself also in his peculiarities of language. There is ever in 
 his consciousness a questioning impulse like a mark of inter- 
 rogation. Of no word is he so fond as of the interrogative 
 ' What ?' constantly used by him in the most marvellous 
 connection,* and he makes use ad nauseam of the turn of 
 expression, that one should ' say No ' to this and that, that 
 this one and that one is a 'No-sayer' an expression which 
 suggests to him by association the same immeasurably frequent 
 use of the contrary expression, ' say Yes ' and ' Yes-sayer.' This 
 ' saying-No ' and ' saying- Yes ' is in his case a veritable Para- 
 phasia vesana, or insane language opposed to usage, as the 
 reader is shown by the examples cited in foot-note. f 
 
 * ' With what magic she lays hold of me! What? Has all the world's 
 repose embarked here? 'What use has the inspired one for wine? What ? 
 Give the mole wings and proud imaginings ?' ' In so far as he says Yes to 
 this other world, what ? must he not then say No to its counterpart, this 
 world ?' ' Round about God all becomes what ? perhaps world ? ; ' A 
 pessimist . . . who says Yes to morality ... to Itzde-neminem-moraliiy ; 
 what? is that really a pessimist?' 'Fear and pity : with these feelings has 
 man hitherto stood in the presence of woman. What ? Is there now to be 
 an end of this ?' I will content myself with these examples, but let it be 
 remarked once for all, that all the specimens I adduce here for the purpose 
 of examining Nietzsche's mental state could easily be multiplied a hundred- 
 fold, as the characteristic peculiarities recur in him hundreds of times. 
 On one occasion he plainly becomes conscious of this living note of in- 
 terrogation, always present in his mind as an obsession. In ATso sprach 
 Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 55, he calls the passion for rule, 'the flashing note of 
 interrogation by the side of premature answers.' In this connection, this 
 xpression has absolutely no sense ; but it at once becomes intelligible when 
 ic is remembered that the insane are in the habit of suddenly giving utter- 
 ance to the ideas springing up in their consciousness. Nietzsche plainly 
 saw in his mind 'the flashing note of interrogation,' and suddenly, and with- 
 out transition, spoke of it. 
 
 J- 'A Greek life, to which he said, No.' 'A pessimist who not merely 
 says, No, wishes No [!] but who . . . does No' [!!]. 'An inward saying 
 No to this or that thing. 5 ' Free for death, and tree in death, a holy No- 
 sayer.' Then as a complementary counterpart : ' Pregnant with lightnings, 
 who say, Yes ! laugh Yes !' ' While all noble morality grows to itself out of 
 a triumphant saying Yea.' (He feels himself to be something) ' at least 
 saying Yea to life.' ' To be able to say Yea to yourself, that is ... a ripe 
 fruit.' (Disinterested wickedness is felt by primitive humanity to be some- 
 thing) ' to which conscience valiantly says Yea.' We see what use Nietzsche 
 makes of his saying 'Nay' and ' Yea.' It, stands in the place of nearly all 
 verbs joining subject with predicate. The thought ' I am thirsty ' would, by 
 Nietzsche, be thus expressed, 'I say Yes to- water.' Instead of 'I am 
 sleepy,' he would say, ' I say Nay to wakefulness,' or, ' I say Yes to bed,' 
 etc. This is the way in which invalids in incomplete aphasia are in the 
 habit of paraphrasing their thoughts.
 
 448 DEGENERATION 
 
 Nietzsche's assurance that ' without anger or impatience' he 
 'said No' to all ReVs assertions maybe believed. Persons 
 afflicted with the mania of doubt and of denial do not get 
 angry when they question or contradict ; they do this under 
 the coercion of their mental derangement. But those among 
 them who are delirious have the conscious intention of making 
 others angry, even if they themselves are not so. On this 
 point Nietzsche allows an avowal to escape him: ' My mode 
 of thought demands a warlike soul, a wish to give pain, a 
 pleasure in saying, No ' (Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 63). This 
 confession may be compared with the passages from Ibsen : 
 * You were becoming reckless ! In reality that you might anger 
 these affected beings of both sexes here in the town ' ; and, 
 ' Something shall happen which will be a slap in the face to 
 all this decorum ' (The Pillars of Society). 
 
 The origin of one ot the most 'original' of Nietzsche's 
 doctrines, viz., the explanation of conscience as a satisfaction 
 of the instinct of cruelty through inner self-rending, has already 
 been gone into by Dr. Tiirck, in an excellent little work. He 
 very justly recognises the diseased state of moral aberration 
 at the base of this insane idea,* and continues thus : / 
 
 ' Let us now picture to ourselves a man of this kind, with innate 
 instincts of murder, or in general with ' Anomalies or perversion 
 of the moral feelings' (Mendel) ; at the same time highly gifted, 
 with the best instruction and an excellent education, reared in 
 the midst of agreeable circumstances, and under the careful 
 . . . nurture of women . . . and occupying at an early age a pro- 
 minent position in society. It is clear that the better moral 
 instincts must gain such strength as to be able to drive back 
 to the deepest inner depths the bestial instinct of destruction 
 and completely to curb it, yet without wholly annihilating it. It 
 may not, indeed, be able to manifest itself in deeds, but, because 
 it is inborn, the instinct remains in existence as an unfulfilled 
 wish, cherished in the inmost heart ... as an ardent desire 
 ... to yield itself up to its cruel lust. But every non-satis- 
 faction of a . . . deeply imprinted instinct has as its conse- 
 quence pain and inner torment. Now, we men are very much 
 inclined to regard as naturally good and justifiable that which 
 gives us decided pleasure, and conversely to reprobate, as bad 
 and contrary to nature, that which produces pain. Thus, it 
 may happen that an intellectual and highly gifted man, born 
 with perverted instincts, and feeling as torment . . . the non- 
 satisfaction of the instinct, will hit upon the idea of justifying 
 the passion for murder, the extremest egoism ... as some- 
 thing good, beautiful, and according to Nature, and to char- 
 
 * Dr. Hermann Tiirck, Fr. NietzscJu und seine philosophischen Irrwege t 
 Zweite Auflage. Dresden, 1891, p. 7.
 
 EGO-MANIA 449 
 
 acterize as morbid aberration the better opposingmoral instincts, 
 manifesting themselves in us as that which we call conscience, 
 
 Dr. Tiirck is right in admitting Nietzsche's innate moral 
 aberration and the inversion in him of healthy instincts. 
 Nevertheless, in the interpretation of the particular phenomena 
 in which the aberration manifests itself, he commits an error, 
 which is explained by the fact that Dr. Tiirck is seemingly not 
 deeply conversant with mental therapeutics. He assumes that 
 in Nietzsche's mind the evil instincts are in severe conflict 
 with those better notions instilled in him by education, and 
 that he experiences as pain the suppression of his instincts by 
 judgment. That is hardly the true state of the case. It is 
 not necessary that Nietzsche should have the wish to commit 
 murder and other crimes. Not every aberrant person (pervers) 
 is subject to impulsions. The perversion may be limited 
 exclusively to the sphere of ideation, and get its satisfaction 
 wholly in ideas. A subject thus affected never gets the notion 
 of transforming his ideas into deeds. His derangement does 
 not encroach upon the centres of will and movement, but 
 carries on its fell work within the centres of ideation. We 
 know forms of sexual perversion in which the sufferers 
 never experience the impulse to seek satisfaction in acts, and 
 who revel only in thought.* This astonishing rupture of the 
 natural connection between idea and movement, between 
 thought and act, this detachment of the organs of will and 
 movement from the organs of conception and judgment which 
 they normally obey, is in itself a proof of deepest disorder 
 throughout the machinery of thought. Incompetent critics 
 eagerly point to the fact that many authors and artists live 
 unexceptionable lives in complete contrast to their works, 
 which may be immoral or contrary to nature, and deduce from 
 this fact that it is unjustifiable to draw from his works con- 
 clusions as to the mental and moral Nature of their author. 
 Those who talk in this manner do not even suspect that there 
 are purely mental perversions which are quite as much a 
 mental disease as the impulsions of the ' impulsivists.' 
 
 This is obviously the case with Nietzsche. His perversion 
 is of a purely intellectual character, and has hardly ever im- 
 pelled him to acts. Hence, in his mind there has been no 
 conflict between instincts and the morality acquired by 
 
 * B. Ball, La Folie trotique, Paris, 1888, p. 50 : ' I have sketched for you 
 the picture of chaste love (amorous lunacy, or the erotomania of Esquirol), 
 where the greatest excesses remain enclosed within the limits of feeling, arid 
 are never polluted by the intervention of the senses. I have shown you 
 some examples of this delirium pushed to the .extreme bounds of insanity} 
 without the intermixture of a single idea foreign to the domain of platonic 
 affection.' 
 
 29
 
 450 DEGENERATION 
 
 education. His explanation of conscience has quite another 
 source than that assumed by Dr. Tiirck. It is one of those 
 perverted interpretations of a sensation by the consciousness 
 perceiving it which are so frequentry observed. Nietzsche 
 remarks that with him ideas of a cruel kind are accompanied 
 by feelings of pleasure that they are, as mental therapeutics 
 expresses it, ' voluptuously accentuated.' In consequence of 
 this accompaniment of pleasure he has the inclination to 
 conjure up sensually sensuous representations of that kind, 
 and to dwell on them with enjoyment.* Consciousness then 
 seeks to give some sort of rational explanation of these ex- 
 periences by assuming cruelty to be a powerful primordial 
 instinct of man, that, since he may not actually commit cruel 
 deeds, he may, at least, take pleasure in the representation 
 of them, and that the rapturous lingering over representations 
 of this kind, man calls his conscience. As I have shown above, 
 it is Nietzsche's opinion that stings of conscience are not the 
 consequence of evil deeds, but appear in men who have never 
 committed any evil. Hence he obviously make's use of the 
 word in a sense quite different from that of current usage, a 
 sense peculiar to himself; he designates by it, simply his 
 revelling in voluptuously accentuated representations of 
 cruelty. 
 
 The alienist, however, is familiar with the perversion in 
 which the invalid experiences voluptuous stimulation from acts 
 jor representations of a cruel nature. Science has a name for 
 ,it. It is called Sadism. Sadism is the opposite form of 
 sexual perversion to masochism. f Nietzsche is a sufferer from 
 Sadism in its most pronounced form, only with him it is 
 
 * In one passage of Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 132, Nietzsche speaks 
 of the ' species of moral onanists and self-indulgers.' He does not apply the 
 expression to himself ; but it was unquestionably suggested by an obscure 
 suspicion of his own state of mind. 
 
 f Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Aeue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. ^ff.: 'The 
 complete contrary of masochism is Sadism. While in the former the subject 
 desires to suffer sorrows, and to feel himself in subjection to violence, in the 
 latter his aim is to cause sorrows, and to exercise violence. . . . All the 
 acts and situations carried out in the active part played by Sadism con- 
 stitute, for masochism, the object of longing, to be attained passively. In 
 both perversions these acts form a progression from purely symbolic events 
 to grievous misdeeds. . . . Both are to be considered as original psycho- 
 pathies of mentally abnormal individuals, afflicted in particular with psychic 
 Hyperasthesia sexualis, but also, as a rule, with other anomalies. . . . 
 The pleasure of causing sorrow and the pleasure of experiencing sorrow 
 appear only as two different sides of the same psychic event, the primary 
 and essential principle in which is the consciousness of active and passive 
 subjection respectively.' See Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i. t 
 p. 95 : ' Thou art going to women ? Forget not the whip !' Jenscits -von 
 Gut und Base, p. 186 : ' Woman unlearns the rear of man,' and thus ' exposes 
 her most womanly instincts.'
 
 EGO-MANIA 451 
 
 confined to the intellectual sphere alone, and is satisfied by 
 ideal debauchery. I do not wish to dwell too long on 
 this repulsive subject, and will, therefore, quote only a few 
 passages, showing that, in Nietzsche's thought, images of 
 cruelty are without exception accompanied by ideas of a 
 sensual character, and are italicized by him : ' The splendid 
 beast ranging in its lust after prey and victory ' (Zur Genealogie 
 der Moral, p. 21). ' The feeling of content at being able, without 
 scruple, to wreak his power on a powerless being, the voluptuous- 
 ness de faire le mat pour le plaisir de le faire, the enjoyment of 
 vanquishing' (Ibid., p. 51). ' Do your pleasure, ye wantons; 
 roar for very lust and wickedness ' (Die frohliche Wissenschaft, 
 p. 226). ' The path to one's own heaven ever leads through 
 the voluptuousness of one's own hell' (Ibid., p. 249). 'How 
 comes it that I have yet met no one . . . who knew morality 
 as a problem, and this problem as his personal distress, 
 torment, voluptuousness, passion ?' (Ibid., p. 264). ' Hitherto 
 he has felt most at ease on earth at the sight of tragedies, 
 bull-fights, and crucifixions ; and when he invented hell, behold, 
 that was his heaven on earth. When the great man cries 
 aloud, the little man runs swiftly thither, and his tongue hangs 
 out from his throat for very lusting' (Also sprach Zarathustra, 
 pt. iii., p. 96), etc. I beg the unprofessional reader par- 
 ticularly to observe the association of the words italicized 
 with those expressing something evil. This association is 
 neither accidental nor arbitrary. It is a psychical necessity, 
 for in Nietzsche's consciousness no image of wickedness and 
 crime can arise without exciting him sexually, and he is unable 
 to experience any sexual stimulation without the immediate 
 appearance in his consciousness of an image of some deed of 
 violence and blood. 
 
 Hence the real source of Nietzsche's doctrine is his Sadism.^" 
 And I will here make a general remark on which I do not 
 desire to linger, but which I should like to recommend 
 to the particular attention of the reader. In the success of 
 unhealthy tendencies in art and literature, no quality of their 
 authors has so large and determining a share as their sexual 
 psychopathy. All persons of unbalanced minds the neuras- 
 thenic, the hysteric, the degenerate, the insane have the 
 keenest scent for perversions of a sexual kind, and perceive 
 them under all disguises. As a rule, indeed, they are ignorant 
 of what it is in certain works and artists which pleases them, 
 but investigation always reveals in the object of their pre- 
 dilection a veiled manifestation of some Psychopathia sexualis. 
 The masochism of Wagner and Ibsen, the Skoptzism of 
 Tolstoi, the erotomania (folie amoureuse chaste) of the Diabolists, 
 the Decadents, and of Nietzsche, unquestionably obtain for
 
 452 DEGENERATION 
 
 these authors and tendencies a large, and, at all events, the 
 most sincere and fanatical fraction of their partisans. Works 
 of a sexually psychopathic nature excite in abnormal subjects 
 the corresponding perversion (till then slumbering and un- 
 conscious, perhaps also undeveloped, although present in the 
 germ), and give them lively feelings of pleasure, which they, 
 usually in good faith, regard as purely aesthetic or intellectual, 
 whereas they are actually sexual. Only in the light of this 
 explanation do the characteristic artistic tendencies of the 
 abnormals, of which we have proof,* become wholly intelligible. 
 This confounding of aesthetic with sexual feelings is not sur- 
 prising, for the spheres of these two feelings are not only 
 contiguous, but, as has been proved elsewhere, are for the 
 most part even coincident. f At the base of all oddities of 
 costume, especially that of women, there is hidden an uncon- 
 scious speculation in something of a sexual-psychopathy, which 
 finds incitation and attraction in the temporary fashion in 
 dress. No professional person has yet viewed fashions from 
 this standpoint. I may not here allow myself so broad a 
 departure from my principal theme. The subject may, however, 
 be most emphatically recommended to the consideration of 
 experts. In the domain of fashions they will make the most 
 remarkable psychiatrical discoveries. 
 
 I have devoted very much more space to the demonstration 
 of the senselessness of Nietzsche's so-called philosophical 
 system than the man and his system deserve. It would have 
 been enough simply to refer to the all-sufficient and expressive 
 fact that, after having been repeatedly confined in lunatic asyl urns, 
 he has for some years past been living as incurably mad in 
 the establishment of Professor Binswanger at Jena * the right 
 man in the right place.' It is true that a critic is of the 
 opinion that ' it is possible for mental darkness to extinguish 
 the clearest mental light ; for this reason its appearance cannot 
 with certitude be urged against the value and accuracy of what 
 anyone has taught before the appearance of his affliction.' 
 The answer to this is that Nietzsche wrote his most important 
 
 * Krafft-Ebing, Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 108. (A sexual-psychopath 
 thus writes) : ' I take great interest in art and literature. Among poets and 
 authors, those attract me most who describe refined feelings, peculiar passions, 
 choice impressions : an artificial (or ultra-artificial) style pleases me. In 
 music, again, the nervous, stimulating music of a Chopin, a Schumann, a 
 Schubert [!], a Wagner, etc., appeal to me most. In art, all that is not only 
 original, but bizarre, attracts me.' P. 128 (another patient) : ' I am pas- 
 sionately fond of music, and am an enthusiastic partisan of Richard Wagner, 
 for whom I have remarked a predilection in most of us [sufferers from 
 contrary-sexual-feeling] ; I find that this music accords so very much wiui 
 our nature,' etc 
 
 f See, in Parasfojre, the cnnpter on ' Evoluiionistische ./Esthetik.'
 
 EGO-MANIA 453 
 
 works between two detentions in a lunatic asylum, and hence 
 not ' before,' but ' after, the appearance of his affliction,' and 
 that the whole question hinges on the kind of mental disease 
 appealed to as proof of the senselessness of any doctrine. It 
 is clear that insanity caused by an accidental lesion of the 
 brain, by a fall, blow, etc., can prove nothing against the 
 accuracy of that which the patient may have taught previous 
 to his accident. But the case is different when the malady 
 is one which has undoubtedly existed in a latent condition 
 from birth, and can with certainty be proved from the works 
 themselves. Then it amply suffices to establish the fact that 
 the author is a Bedlamite, and his work the daubing of a 
 lunatic, and all further criticism, all efforts at rational refu- 
 tation of individual inanities, become superfluous, and even 
 at least, in the eyes of those who are competent a little 
 ridiculous. And this is the case with Nietzsche. He is 
 obviously insane from birth, and his books bear on every page 
 the imprint of insanity. It may be cruel to insist on this fact.* 
 It is, however, a painful, yet unavoidable, duty to refer to it 
 anew, because Nietzsche has become the means of raising a 
 mental pestilence, and the only hope of checking its propagation 
 lies in placing Nietzsche's insanity in the clearest light, and 
 in branding his disciples also with the marks most suited to 
 them, viz., as hysterical and imbecile. 
 
 Kaatzt" affirms that Nietzsche's ' intellectual seed ' is every- 
 where ' beginning to germinate. Now it is one of Nietzsche's 
 most incisive points which is chosen as the epigraph of a 
 modern tragedy, now one of his pregnant turns of expression 
 incorporated in the established usage of language. ... At 
 the present time one can . . . read hardly any essay touching 
 even lightly on the province of philosophy, without meeting 
 with the name of Nietzsche.' Now, that is certainly a calumnious 
 
 * Dr. Max Zerbst, Nein und Jat Leipzig, 1892, p. vii. : ' It is not impos- 
 sib'e that this little book may fall into the hands of some who are nearly 
 connected with the invalid . . . whom every indelicate treatment of his 
 affliction must wound most deeply.' The very last person having the right 
 to complain of indelicate treatment, and to demand consideration, is surely 
 a partisan of Nietzsche's, who claims for himself the 'joy in wishing to 
 cause woe,' and ' grand unscrupulousness ' as the ' privilege of the over-man '! 
 Zerbst calls his book a reply to that by Dr. Hermann Tiirck ; but it is 
 nothing but a childishly obstinate and insolent repetition of all Nietzsche's 
 assertions, the insanity of which has been proved by Dr. Tiirck. It is 
 exceedingly droll that Zerbst, appealing to a feeble compilation by Ziehen, 
 wishes to demonstrate to Tiirck that there are no such tnings as psychoses 
 of the will. Now, Tiirck has not said a single word about a psychosis of the 
 will in Nietzsche ; but Nietzsche, indeed, in Frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 270, 
 does speak of ' monstrous disease of the will,' and of a ' will-disease.' Zerbst's 
 objection, therefore, applies, not to Tiirck, but to his own master Nietzsche^ 
 
 t Dr. Hugo Kaatz, op. cit., pt. L, p. 6.
 
 454 DEGENERATION 
 
 exaggeration. Things are not quite so bad as that. The only 
 'philosophers' who have hitherto Liken Nietzsche's insane 
 drivel seriously are those whom I have above named the 
 'fops' of philosophy. But the number of these 'fops' is, as 
 a matter of fact, increasing in a disquieting way, and their 
 effrontery surpasses anything ever witnessed. 
 
 It is, of course, unnecessary to say that Georges Brandes 
 has numbered himself among Nietzsche's apostles. We know, 
 indeed, that this ingenious person winds himself around every 
 human phenomenon in whom he scents a possible prima- 
 donna, in order to draw from her profit for himself as the im- 
 presario of her fame. He gave lectures in Copenhagen on 
 Nietzsche, ' and declaimed in words of enthusiasm about this 
 German prophet, for whom Mill's morality is nothing but a 
 diseased symptom of a degenerate age; this radical '''aristocrat," 
 who degrades to the rank of slave-revolts all the great popular 
 movements in history for freedom the Reformation, the 
 French Revolution, modern socialism and dares to assert 
 that the millions on millions of individuals composing the 
 nations exist only for the purpose of producing, a few times in 
 each century, a great personality.'* 
 
 A series of imitators are eagerly busying themselves to 
 make Nietzsche their model, whether in clearing the throat 
 or in expectorating. His treatise Schopenhauer als Erzieher 
 (Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen, 3 Stuck) has found a monstrous 
 travesty in Rembrandt als Erzieher. True, the imbecile author 
 of the latter parody could not imitate Nietzsche's gushing 
 redundancy of verbiage and the mad leaps of the maniac's 
 thought. This symptom of disease it were indeed hardly 
 possible to simulate; but he has appropriated as his own 
 the word - quibbling, the senseless echolalia of his model, 
 and endeavours also stammeringly to imitate, as well as his 
 small means allow, Nietzsche's megalomaniacal and criminal 
 individualism. Albert Kniepf,t another imbecile, has been 
 smitten chiefly by Nietzsche's affected superiority, and with 
 princely mien and gestures struts about in the most diverting 
 manner. He calls himself ' a man of superior taste and more 
 refined feeling ' ; he speaks contemptuously of the ' profane 
 daily bustle of the masses ' ; sees ' the world beneath him ' and 
 himself ' exalted above the world of the multitude"' : he does 
 not wish to ' go into the streets, and squander his wisdom on 
 everyone,' etc., quite in the style of Zarathustra, the dweller 
 
 * Ola Hansson, Das jungc Skandinavien. Vier Essays. Dresden und 
 Leipzig, 1891. p. 12. 
 f Albert Kniepf, Theorie der Geisteswerthe. Leipzig, 1892.
 
 EGO-MANIA 455. 
 
 on the highest peaks. The already mentioned Dr. Max Zerbst 
 affects, like Nietzsche, to regard himself as terrible, and to- 
 believe that his opponents tremble before him. When he 
 makes them speak he puts whimpering tones into their 
 mouths,* and he enjoys with cruelly superior scorn the mortal 
 fear with which he inspires them. In a maniac this attitude 
 is natural and excites pity. But when a fellow like this Dr.. 
 Max Zerbst assumes it, it produces an irresistibly comic effect, 
 and calls to remembrance the young man with the weak legs 
 in Pickwick, who ' believes in blood alone,' ' will have blood/ 
 Zerbst dares to utter the words ' natural science ' and ' psycho- 
 physiology.' That is an agreement among Nietzsche's dis- 
 ciples : they pass off the insane word-spouter whom they 
 worship for a psycho-physiologist and a physicist ! Ola 
 Hansson speaks of Nietzsche's 'psycho-physiological intui- 
 tion ' ! and in another place says : ' With Nietzsche, that 
 modern subtle psychologist, who possesses in the highest 
 degree psycho-physical intuition [again], that peculiar power 
 of the end of the nineteenth century, of listening to and 
 spying out all the secret processes and hidden corners in itself,' 
 etc. ' Psycho-physical intuition!' ' Listening to and spying out 
 itself!' Our very eyes deceive us. These men, therefore, have 
 no suspicion of what constitutes ' psycho-physics,' they do not 
 suspect that it is the exact contrary of ancient psychology, 
 which dealt with 'intuition' and introspection, i.e., 'listening 
 to one's self and 'spying out one's self; that it patiently 
 counts and mixes with the apparatus in laboratories, and 'spies 
 and listens to,' not itself, but its experimentists and instru- 
 ments ! And such babble of brainless parrots, who chatter 
 in repetition the words they accidentally hear, without compre- 
 hending them, is able to make its way in Germany, the creator 
 of the new science of psycho-physiology, the fatherland of 
 Fechner, Weber, Wundt ! And no professional has rapped 
 with a ruler the knuckles of these youths, whose fabulous 
 ignorance is surpassed only by their impudence ! 
 
 But worse still has befallen something at which all jesting 
 really ceases. Kurt Eisner, who it is true does not agree with 
 Nietzsche's ' philosophy,' is, nevertheless, of the opinion that 
 
 * Dr. Max Zerbst, op. cit., p. I : ' O, this modern natural science ! these 
 modern psychologists ! Nothing is sacred to them !' ' When a man, grown 
 up in the school of sickly " idealism," confronts a cruel savant of this kind 
 . . . this godless man takes a small piece of chalk in his hand,' etc. He 
 'turns to the nonplussed idealist,' and the latter somewhat timidly answers, 
 and 'adds something sorrowfully,' whereupon 'the young psychologist replies, 
 with a gentle shrug of his shoulders.' Quite so, ! the 'cruel,' the 'godless,' 
 the ' shoulder-shrugging ' young psychologist is himself, Zerbst ; the whimper- 
 ing idealist, the 'timid' and 'sorrowful' speaker and questioner is his 
 opponent, Dr. Tiirck !
 
 4$6 DEGENERATION 
 
 he has ' bequeathed us some powerful poems,'* and goes so 
 far as to make use of this unheard-of expression : ' Nietzsche's 
 Zarathustra is a work of art like Faust.' The question first of 
 all obtruding itself is : Has Kurt Eisner at any time read a 
 line of Faust ? This, I take it, must be answered in the affirm- 
 ative, for it is hardly conceivable that at this time of day there 
 is in Germany any adult, seemingly able to read and write, into 
 whose hands Faust has not fallen at some time or other. Then 
 there remains only one other question : What may Kurt Eisner 
 have understood of Faust ? To name in the same breath the 
 senseless spirting jet of words of a Zarathustra with Faust is 
 such a defilement of our most precious poetical treasure that 
 verily if a man of any greater importance than Kurt Eisner 
 had perpetrated it there had been need of an expiatory festival 
 to atone for the insult to Goethe, even as the Church newly 
 consecrates a place of worship when it has been profaned by a 
 sacrilegious act. 
 
 Not only in Germany is the Nietzsche gang working mis- 
 chief; it is also infesting other lands. Ola Hansson,-f- already 
 mentioned, entertains his Swedish fellow-countrymen most 
 enthusiastically with 'Nietzsche's Poetry' and 'Nietzsche's 
 Midnight Hymn'; T. de WysewaJ assures the French, who 
 are not in the position to prove the accuracy of his assertions, 
 that ' Nietzsche is the greatest thinker and most brilliant 
 author produced by Germany in the last generation,' etc. 
 
 It has, nevertheless, been reserved to a lady to beat the 
 male disciples of Nietzsche, in the audacious denial of the 
 most openly manifest truth. This feminine partisan of 
 Nietzsche, Lou Salome", with a cool imperturbability fit to 
 take away the breath of the most callous spectator, turns her 
 back on the fact that Nietzsche has for years been confined 
 in a lunatic asylum, and proclaims with brazen brow that 
 Nietzsche, from the aristocratic contempt of the world belong- 
 ing to the ' over-human/ has voluntarily ceased to write, and 
 withdrawn himself into solitude. Nietzsche is a man of science 
 and a psycho-physiologist, and Nietzsche keeps silence, because 
 he no longer finds it worth the trouble to speak to the men of 
 the herd ; these are the catch-words cried aloud throughout 
 the world by the Nietzsche band. In the face of such a con- 
 spiracy against truth, honesty, sound reason, it 'is not enough 
 to have proved the senselessness of Nietzsche's system, it must 
 
 * Kurt Eisner, Psychopathia spiritualis. Friedrich Nietzsche ttnd die 
 A pastel der Zukunft. Leipzig, i8y2. 
 
 t Ola Hansson, Malerialisimen i Skonlitteratitren, Popular-vetenskapliga 
 \ scientific !] Afhandlingar. Siockholm, undated, pp. 28,*5o. In this brochure 
 Hansson also designates the author of Rembrandt ails Erzieherns a 'genius '1 1 
 
 J Revue politique et HtMraire, annde 1891.
 
 EGO-MANIA 457 
 
 also be shown that Nietzsche has always been insane, and that 
 his writings are the abortions of frenzy (more exactly, of 
 * maniacal exaltation '). 
 
 A few followers of Nietzsche, undoubtedly not fit to hold a 
 candle to Lou Salome, do not contest the fact of Nietzsche's 
 insanity, but say that he became insane because he with- 
 drew himself too much from men, because he lived too long 
 in the deepest solitude, because his speed of thought was so 
 ruinously, unnaturally rapid. This unheard-of idiocy could 
 circulate throughout the entire German press, and yet not a 
 single newspaper had the gumption to remark that insanity 
 can never be the consequence of solitude and too speedy 
 thought, but that, on the contrary, a propensity for solitude 
 and vertiginously rapid thought are the primary and best 
 known signs of existing insanity, and that this prattle of 
 Nietzsche's partisans is, perhaps, of equal force with the asser- 
 tion that someone had contracted lung disease through cough- 
 ing and haemorrhage ! 
 
 For Nietzsche's ' anthropophobia ' we have the evidence of 
 his biographers, who cite curious examples of it.* His rapid 
 thought, however, is a phenomenon never absent in frenzied 
 madness. That the unprofessional reader may know what he 
 is to understand by this, we will present him with the clinical 
 picture of this form of insanity traced by the hand of the most 
 authoritative masters. 
 
 'The acceleration of the course of thought in mania,' says 
 Griesinger, ' is a consequence of the facilitation of the con- 
 nection between representations, where the patient humbugs, 
 romances, declaims, sings, calls into service all the modes of 
 exteriorizing ideas, rambles incoherently from one topic to 
 another, the ideas hurtling against and overthrowing each 
 other. The same acceleration of ideation is found in certain 
 forms of dementia and in secondary psychical enfee.blement, 
 " with activity produced by hallucinations." The logical 
 concatenations arc not in this case intact, as in argumentation 
 and hypochondriacal dementia ; or the precipitate sequence of 
 representations no longer follows any law ; or, again, only 
 words and sounds devoid of meaning succeed each other with 
 impetuous haste. . . . Thus there arises ... a ceaseless chase 
 
 * 'During his sojourn of several years in the solitary mountainous district 
 of Sils Maria . . . he. was in the habit ... of lying on a verdant neck of 
 land stretching into the lake. One spring he returned, to find, on the con- 
 secrated [!] spot, a seat, on which trivial folk might rest, in the place hitherto 
 peopled only by his most secret thoughts and visions. And the sight of this 
 all too human [!] structure was enough to render the beloved place of sojourn 
 insupportable to him. He never sec toot there again.' Ola Hansson, quoted 
 from Dr. Hermann Tiirck, op. '/., p. 10.
 
 458 DEGENERATION 
 
 of ideas, in the torrent of which all is borne away in pell- 
 mell flight. The latter conditions appear chiefly in raving 
 madness ; at its inception especially, a greater mental vivacity 
 often manifests itself, and cases have been observed where 
 the fact that the patient became witty was a sure sign of the 
 imminence of an attack of frenzy.'* 
 
 Still more graphic is the description given by Krafft-Ebing.-f- 
 ' The content of consciousness is here [in ' maniacal exalta- 
 tion '] pleasure, psychical well-being. It is just as little induced 
 by events of the external world as the opposite state of psychical 
 pain in melancholia, and is, therefore, referable to an inner 
 organic cause only. The patient literally revels in feelings of 
 pleasure, and declares, after recovery, that never, when in 
 good health, has he felt so contented, so buoyant, so happy, 
 as during his illness. This spontaneous pleasure undergoes 
 powerful increments . . . through the perception by the 
 patient of the facilitated processes of ideation . . . through 
 the intensive accentuation of ideas by feelings of pleasure and 
 by agreeable ccenaestheses, especially in the domain of muscular 
 sensation. ... In this way the cheerful mood temporarily 
 exalts itself to the height of pleasurable emotions (gay extrava- 
 gance, exuberance), which find their motor exteriorization in 
 songs, dances, leaps. . . . The patient becomes more plastic in 
 his diction . . . his faculties of conception act more rapidly, 
 and, in accelerated association, he is at once more prompt in 
 repartee, witty and humorous to the point of irony. The 
 plethora of his consciousness supplies him with inexhaustible 
 material for talk, and the enormous acceleration of his ideation, 
 in which there spring up complete intermediate forms with 
 the rapidity of thought, without undergoing exteriorization 
 in speech, causes his current of ideas, in so far as they find 
 expression, to seem rambling. . . . He continually exercises 
 criticism in respect of his own condition, and proves that he 
 is himself aware of his abnormal state by ... claiming, among 
 other things, that he is only a fool, and that to such everything 
 is permissible. . . . The invalid cannot find words enough to 
 depict his maniacal well-being, his " primordial health." ' 
 
 And now every individual feature of this picture of disease 
 shall be pointed out in Nietzsche's writings. (I repeat my 
 previous remark, that I am compelled to limit myself in citing 
 examples, but that literally on every page of Nietzsche's writing 
 examples of the same kind arc to be found.) 
 
 His ccenaestheses, or systemic sensations, continually inspire 
 
 * Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger, op. '/., p. 77. 
 
 t Dr. von Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der Psychiatric anf klinischer Grund- 
 lage JUT praktische Aertse und Studirende. Vierte theilweise umgearbeitete 
 Auflage. Stuttgart, 1890, p. 363^
 
 EGO-MANIA 459 
 
 him with presentations of laughter, dancing, flying, buoyancy, 
 generally of movement of the gayest and easiest kind of rolling, 
 flowing, plunging. ' Let us guard ourselves from immediately 
 making gloomy faces at the word " torture "... even there 
 something remains for laughter.' 'We are prepared for a 
 carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual carnival- 
 laughter and exuberance, for the transcendental height of the 
 most exalted idiocy and Aristophanic derision of the universe. 
 . . . Perhaps if nothing else of to-day has a future, our very 
 laughter still has a future/ 'I would even permit myself to 
 clrssify philosophers according to the quality of their laughter 
 up to those capable of golden laughter [!]... The gods 
 are jocular. It seems as if, even in sacred deeds, they could 
 not forbear laughing.' ' Ah ! what are ye then, ye written and 
 painted thoughts of mine ? It is not long since ye were so 
 fantastic, so young and naughty . . . that ye made me sneeze 
 and laugh.' ' Now the world laughs, the dismal veil is rent.' 
 ' It is laughter that kills, not wrath. Come, let us kill the 
 spirit of heaviness !' * Truly there are beings chaste by nature ; 
 they are milder ki heart ; they laugh more agreeably and 
 copiously than ye. They laugh as well over chastity, and ask, 
 What is chastity ?' ' Had He [Jesus Christ] remained in the 
 desert, perhaps He would have learned to live and to love the 
 earth and to laugh besides.' ' The tension of my cloud was 
 too great ; between the laughters of the lightnings I will cast 
 hail-showers into the deep.' ' To-day my shield quivered 
 gently and laughed at me ; that is the holy laughter and tremor 
 of beauty.' 
 
 It will be seen that in all these cases the idea of laughter 
 has no logical connection with the real thought ; it is far rather 
 an accompaniment of his intellection as a basic state, as a 
 chronic obsession, having its explanation in the maniacal 
 excitation of the centres of ideation. It is the same with the 
 presentations of dancing, flying, etc. '-I should only believe 
 in a god who knew how to dance.' ' Truly, Zarathustra is no 
 hurricane and whirlwind ; and if he is a dancer, yet is he by 
 no means a dancer of the tarantella.' ' And once upon a time 
 I wished to dance, as I never yet have danced ; away over the 
 whole heaven did I wish to dance. . . . Only in the dance do 
 I know of parables for the highest things.' ' I found this 
 blessed security in all things also : that on the feet of chance 
 they preferred to dance. O thou heaven above me, O pure ! 
 O sublime ! thy purity is now for me . . . that thou art a 
 dancing-floor for divine chances.' ' Ask of my foot . . . truly 
 after such a rhythm, such a tick-tack, it likes neither to dance 
 nor rest.' * And, above all, I learned to stand and walk and 
 run and leap and climb and dance.' ' It is a fine fool's jest
 
 460 DEGENERATION 
 
 this, of speech ; thanks to it, man dances over all things.' 
 4 O my soul, I taught thee to say " to-day," as well as " once " 
 and " formerly," and to dance thy measure over all the " here " 
 and "there" and "yonder." Thou easiest thy glance at my 
 foot crazy for the dance.' ' If my virtue is a dancer's virtue, 
 and I often bounded with both feet into a rapture of golden 
 emerald,' etc. 
 
 (' A state of mind he experienced with horror :') 4 A perpetual 
 movement between high and deep, and the feeling of high and 
 deep, a constant feeling as if mounting steps, and at the same 
 moment as if reposing on clouds.' ' Is there, indeed, one thing 
 alone that remains uncomprehended by it ... that only in 
 flight is it touched, beheld, lightened upon?' 'All my will 
 would fly alone, would fly into thee.' ' Ready and impatient to 
 ily, to fly away ; that is now my nature.' ' My wise longing 
 cried out from me, and laughed also . . . my great longing, 
 with rushing wings. And often it dragged me forth, and away 
 in the midst of my laughter; then, indeed, I flew shuddering 
 . . . thither, where gods dance, ashamed of all clothes.' 4 If 
 I ever spread still heavens above me, and with my own wings 
 flew in my own heavens. ... If my malice is a laughing 
 malice . . . and if my Alpha and Omega is that all heaviness 
 may become light, all body a dancer, all spirit a bird ; and 
 verily that is my Alpha and Omega,' etc. 
 
 In the examples hitherto cited the insane ideas are mainly in 
 the sphere of movement. In those that follow it is excitations 
 of the sensorial centres that find expression. Nietzsche has 
 all sorts of illusions of skin-sensibility (cold, warmth,' being 
 breathed upon), of sight (lustre, lightning, brightness), of hear- 
 ing (rushing, roaring), and of smell, which he mixes up in his 
 fugitive ideation. * I am too hot and burnt with my own 
 thoughts.' 4 Ah ! ice surrounds me ; my hand is burnt by 
 iciness.' 4 The sun of my love lay brooding upon me ; Za.ra.s- 
 thustra was stewing in his own juice.' ' Take care that there 
 be honey ready to my hand . . . good, icy-fresh, golden honey- 
 comb.' ' Into the coldest water I plunged with head and 
 heart.' 4 There I am sitting . . . lusting for a maiden's round 
 mouth, but still more for maidenly, icy -cold, snow-white, 
 cutting, biting teeth.' ' For I deal with deep problems as with 
 a cold bath soon into it, soon out of it. ... "Ho ! the great 
 cold quickens.' ' Over thy surging sea I blew with the storm 
 that is called spirit ; I blew from it all clouds.' ' To their 
 bodies and to their spirits our happiness would be as ice- 
 caverns ! and, like strong winds, we will live above them . . . 
 and like a wind will I once blow among them.' 
 
 ' I am light . . . but this is my loneliness, that I am en- 
 girdled with light. ... I live in my own light ; I drink back 
 into myself the flames that break forth from me.'
 
 EGO-MANIA 461 
 
 ' Mute over the roaring sea art thou this day arisen for me. 
 * They divine nothing from the roaring of my happiness.' 
 ' Sing, and riot in roaring, O Zarathustra !' ' Almost too 
 fiercely for me thou dost gush forth, well-spring of joy . . . 
 too violently doth my heart gush forth to meet thee.' * My 
 desire now breaks forth from rne like a fountain.' 
 
 ' There is often an odour in her wisdom, as if it came forth 
 from a swamp.' ' Alas ! that I should have so long lived in 
 the midst of their noise and foul breath. O blessed stillness 
 around me !' O pure odours around me ! ' That was the false- 
 hood in my pity, that in each I saw and smelt what was mind 
 enough for him. . . . With blissful nostrils again I breathed the 
 freedom of the mountain ! My nose is at length redeemed from 
 the odour of all that is human!' 'Bad air! bad air! . . . 
 Why must I smell the entrails of a misguided soul?' 'This 
 workshop, where ideals are manufactured, meseems it stinks of 
 nothing but lies.' ' We avoided the rabble . . . the stink of 
 shopkeepers . . . the foul breath.' ' This rabble, that stinks 
 to heaven.' ' O odours pure around me ! . . . These crowds 
 of superior men perhaps they do not smell nice,' etc. 
 
 As these examples show, Nietzsche's thought receives its 
 special colouring from his sense illusions, and from the excita- 
 tion of the centres forming motor presentations, which, in 
 consequence of a derangement of the mechanism of co- 
 ordination, are not transformed into motor impulses, but 
 remain as mere images, without influence on the muscles. 
 
 In respect of form, Nietzsche's thought makes the two 
 characteristic peculiarities of madness perceptible : ths sole 
 domination of the association of ideas, watched over and re- 
 strained by no attention, no logic, no judgment ; and the 
 giddy rapidity of the course of ideation. 
 
 As soon as any idea whatsoever springs up in Nietzsche's 
 mind, it immediately draws with it into consciousness all 
 presentations related to it, and thus with flying hand he 
 throws five, six, often eight, synonyms on paper, without 
 noticing how overladen and turgid his literary style is thereby 
 rendered : ' The force of a mind measures itself ... by the 
 degree to which it is obliged to attenuate, veil, sweeten, damp, 
 falsify the truth.' ' We are of the opinion that severity, 
 violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, conceal- 
 ment, stoicism, the tempter's art and devilry of every kind ; that 
 all things wicked, fearful, tyrannical, bestial, and serpent-like 
 in man, are of as much service in the elevation of the species 
 " man " as their opposites. He knows ... on what miserable 
 things the loftiest Becoming has hi-therto been shattered, 
 snapped off, has fallen away, become miserable.' ' In man 
 there is material, fragment, surplus, clay, mud, nonsense, 
 chaos ; but in man there is also creator, constructor, hammer-
 
 462 DEGENERATION 
 
 hardness, divinity-of-the-beholder, and the seventh day. . , . 
 That which for this one must be formed, broken, forged, 
 torn, burnt, made red-hot, purified.' ' It would sound more 
 courteous if ... an unrestrained honesty were related, 
 whispered, and praised (nachsagte, nachraunte, nachruhmtc) of 
 us.' ' Spit upon the town . . . where swarms all that is 
 rotten, tainted, lustful, gloomy, worm-eaten, ulcerous, seditious.' 
 ' We forebode that it is ever growing downwards into the 
 more attenuated, more debonnaire, more artful, more easy- 
 going, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more 
 Christian.' ' All these pallid Atheists, Anti-Christians, Im- 
 moralists, Nihilists, Sceptics, Ephectics, Hectics of the mind/ 
 etc. 
 
 From these examples, the attentive reader must have already 
 remarked that the tumultuous rush of words frequently results 
 from the merest resemblance in sound. Not seldom does the 
 riot of words degenerate into paltry quibbling, into the silliest 
 pun, into the automatic association of words according to their 
 sound, without regard to their meaning. ' If this turn (Wende) 
 in all the need (Noth) is called necessity (Nothwendigkcit).' 
 ' Thus ye boast (briistet) of yourselves alas ! even without 
 breasts (Bruste).' 'There is much pious lick-spittle-work 
 (Spcichel - Leckerie), baking - of- flattery (Schmeichel - Bdckerei) 
 before the Lord of Hosts.' ' Spit upon the great town, which 
 is the great slum (Abraum), where all the scum (Abschauin) 
 froths together (zusammanschaumt).' ' Here and there there is 
 nothing to better (bessern), nothing to worsen (bosern).' ' What 
 have they to do there, far-seeing (weitsichtige) , far-seeking 
 (weit-suchtige) eyes ?' ' In such processions (Zilgen) goats 
 (Ziegen) and geese, and the strong-headed and the wrong- 
 headed (Kreuz und Querkopfe), were always running on before. 
 . . . O, Will, turn of all need (Wende alter Noth) \ O thou my 
 necessity (Nothwendigkeif) !' ' Thus I look afar over the creep- 
 ing and swarming of little gray waves (IVellen) and wills 
 (Willen).' 'This seeking (Suchen) for my home was the visita- 
 tion (H eimsuchung) of me.' ' Did not the world become perfect, 
 round and ripe (reif) ? O for the golden round ring (Reif) !' 
 ' Yawns (Klafft) the abyss here too ? Yelps (Klafft) the dog of 
 hell here too ?' ' It stultifies, brutalizes (verthiert), and trans- 
 forms into a bull (verstiert).' ' Life is at least (inindestens), at 
 the mildest (mildestens), an exploiting.' ' Whom I deemed 
 transformed akin to myself (yerwandt-verwandelf),' etc. 
 
 Nietzsche, in the wild hurry of his thought, many a time 
 fails to comprehend the scintillating word-images elaborated in 
 his centres of speech ; his consciousness, as it were, hears 
 wrongly, misses its aim in interpreting, and invents wondrous 
 neologisms, which sound like known expressions, but have no
 
 EGO-MANIA 463 
 
 sort of fellowship in meaning with these. He speaks, for 
 example, of Hinterweltlern (inhabitants of remote worlds) from 
 Hinterwaldlern (backwoodsmen), of a Kessdbauche (kettle's 
 belly) when he is thinking of Kesselpanche (kettledrum), etc. ; 
 or he even repeats, as his centres of speech prompt, wholly 
 incomprehensible, meaningless sounds. ' Then I went to the 
 door : Alpa ! I cried, who is carrying his ashes to the moun- 
 tain ? Alpa ! Alpa ! who is carrying his ashes to the moun- 
 tain ?' 
 
 He frequently associates his ideas, not according to the 
 sound of the word, but according to the similarity or habitual 
 contiguity of the concepts ; then there arise ' analogous ' intel- 
 lection and the fugitive ideation, in which, to use Griesinger's 
 expression, he ' rambles incoherently from one topic to 
 another.' Speaking of the ' ascetic ideal/ e.g., he elaborates 
 the idea that strong and noble spirits take refuge in the desert, 
 and, without any connection, adds : ' Of course, too, they 
 would not want for camels there.' The representation of the 
 desert has irresistibly drawn after it the representation of 
 camels, habitually associated with it. At another time he 
 says : ' Beasts of prey and men of prey, e.g., Caesar Borgia, 
 .are radically misunderstood ; Nature is misunderstood so long 
 .as a fundamental diseased condition is sought for in these 
 healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths. It seems that 
 there is among moralists a hatred against the primeval forest 
 and against the tropics, and that the tropical man must, at any 
 price, be discredited. But why ? For the benefit of the 
 temperate zone ? For the benefit of the temperate (moderate) 
 men ? Of the mediocre ?' In this case the contemplation of 
 Caesar Borgia forces upon him the comparison with a beast of 
 prey ; this makes him think of the tropics, the torrid zone ; 
 from the torrid zone he comes. to the temperate zone, from 
 this to the * temperate ' man, and, through the similarity of 
 sound, to the ' mediocre ' man (in German, gemassigt and 
 mittelmcissig). 
 
 ' In truth nothing remains of the world but green twilight 
 and green lightnings. Do as it pleases ye, ye wantons . . . 
 shake your emeralds down into the deepest depth.' The 
 quite incomprehensible 'emeralds' are called up into con- 
 sciousness by the representation of the 'green' twilight and 
 lightnings. 
 
 In this and hundreds of other cases the course of ideation 
 can, to a certain extent, be followed, because all the links in 
 the chain of association are preserved. It often happens, 
 however, that some of these links are suppressed, and then 
 there occur leaps of thought, incomprehensible, and, conse- 
 quently, bewildering to the reader: 'It was the body who
 
 464 DEGENERATION 
 
 despaired of the earth, who heard the belly of being speaking 
 to itself.' ' More honestly and more purely speaks the healthy 
 body, the perfect and rectangular.' ' I am polite towards 
 them as towards all petty vexation ; to be prickly against petti- 
 ness seems to me wisdom for hedgehogs.' ' Deep yellow and 
 hot red ; so would my taste have it. This one mixes blood in 
 all colours. He who whitewashes his house betrays to me 
 his whitewashed soul.' ' We placed our seat in the midst 
 so their smirking tells me and as far from dying gladiators as 
 from contented pigs. But this is mediocrity.' ' Our Europe 
 of to-day is ... sceptic ... at one time with that mobile 
 scepticism which leaps impatiently and wantonly from branch 
 to branch, at another gloomy as a cloud overladen with notes 
 of interrogation.' ' Let us grant that he [the ' courageous 
 thinker'] has long enough hardened and pricked up his eye 
 for himself.' (Here the representation of 'ear' and ' pricked- 
 up ears ' has evidently crossed with confusing effect the associ- 
 ated idea of ' eye.') ' It is already too much for me to keep 
 my opinions to myself, and many a bird flies away. And some- 
 times I find flown into my dovecot an animal that is strange 
 to me, and that trembles when I lay my hand on it.' ' What 
 matters my justice ? I do not see that I should be fire and 
 coal." ' They learned from the sea its vanity, too ; is the sea 
 not the peacock of peacocks ?' ' How many things now go by 
 the name of the greatest wickedness, which are only twelve 
 feet wide and three months long ! But greater dragons will 
 one day come into the world.' ' And if all ladders now fail 
 thee, then must thou understand how to mount on thine own 
 head ; how wouldst thou mount otherwise ?' ' Here I sit, 
 sniffing the best air, the very air of Paradise, luminous, light 
 air, rayed with gold ; as good an air as ever yet fell from the 
 moon.' * Ha ! up dignity ! Virtue's dignity ! European 
 dignity ! Blow, blow again, bellows of virtue ! Ha ! roar once 
 more, morally roar ! As a moral lion roar before the daughters 
 of the desert ! For virtue's howl, ye dearest maidens, is more 
 than all European fervour, European voraciousness ! And here 
 am I, already a European ; I cannot otherwise, God help me ! 
 Amen ! The desert grows, woe to him who hides deserts !' 
 
 The last passage is an example of complete fugitive ideation. 
 Nietzsche often loses the clue, no longer knows what he is 
 driving at, and finishes a sentence which began as if to 
 develop into an argument, with a sudden stray jest. ' Why 
 should the world, which somewhat concerns us, not be a 
 fiction? And to him who objects: "But a fiction must have 
 an author," could not the reply be roundly given : \Yhy ? 
 Does not this " must" perhaps belong also to the fiction ? Is 
 it not permissible to be at last a little ironical towards the
 
 EGO-MANIA 465 
 
 subject as well as towards the predicate and object ? Ought 
 not the philosopher to rise above a belief in grammar ? With 
 all respect for governesses [!], is it not time that philosophy 
 should renounce its faith in governesses ?' ' " One is always too 
 many about me," so thinks the hermit. One times one to 
 infinity at last makes two !' ' What, then, do they call that 
 which makes them proud? They name it culture; it distin- 
 guishes them from the goat-herds.' 
 
 Finally, the connection of the associated representations 
 suddenly snaps, and he breaks off in the midst of a sentence 
 to begin a new one : ' For in religion the passions have once 
 more rights of citizenship, provided that.' ' The psychologists 
 of France . . . have not yet enjoyed to the full their bitter 
 and manifold pleasure in la betise bourgeoise, in a manner as if 
 enough ; they betray something thereby.' ' There have been 
 philosophers who knew how to lend yet another seductive . . . 
 expression to this admiration of the people . . . instead of 
 adducing the naked and thoroughly obvious truth, that disin- 
 terested conduct is very interesting and interested conduct, 
 provided that And love ?' 
 
 This is the form of Nietzsche's intellection, sufficiently ex- 
 plaining why he has never set down three coherent pages, but 
 only more or less short ' aphorisms.' 
 
 The content of this incoherent fugitive ideation is formed by 
 a small number of insane ideas, continually repeating them- 
 selves with exasperating monotony. We have already become 
 acquainted with Nietzsche's intellectual Sadism, and his mania 
 of contradiction and doubt, or mania for questioning. In 
 addition to these he evinces misanthropy, or anthropophobia, 
 megalomania, and mysticism. 
 
 His anthropophobia expresses itself in numberless passages: 
 * Knowledge is no longer sufficiently loved as soon as it is com- 
 municated.' ' Every community leads somehow, somewhen, 
 somewhere to vulgarity.' ' There are still many void places 
 for the lonesome and twosome [!] around which wafts the 
 odour of tranquil seas.' ' Flee, my friend, into thy lonesome- 
 ness !' ' And many a one who turned away from life, only 
 turned away from the rabble . . . and many a one who went 
 into the desert and suffered thirst with the beasts of prey, only 
 wished not to sit with filthy camel-drivers about the tank.' 
 
 His megalomania appears only exceptionally as monstrous 
 self-conceit ; but it is, nevertheless, clearly conceivable ; as a 
 rule it displays a strong and even predominant union of 
 mysticism and supernaturalism. It is pure self-conceit when 
 he says : ' In that which concerns my "Zarathustra," I accept 
 no one as a connoisseur whom each of his words has not at 
 some time deeply wounded and deeply enraptured ; only then 
 
 30
 
 466 DEGENERATION 
 
 can he enjoy the privilege of reverentially participating in the 
 halcyon element out of which every work is born, in its sunny 
 brightness, distance, breadth, and certainty.' Or when, after 
 having criticised and belittled Bismarck, he cries, with trans- 
 parent allusion to himself: ' But I, in my happiness and my 
 " beyond," pondered how soon the stronger becomes master of 
 the strong.' On the other hand, the hidden, mystic, primary 
 idea of his megalomania already distinctly comes out in this 
 passage : * But at some given time . . . must he neverthe- 
 less come, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, 
 the creative spirit who his impulsive strength is ever driving 
 away out of all that is apart and beyond, whose loneliness is 
 misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality. 
 It is only his immersion, interment, absorption [three synonyms 
 for one concept !] into reality, in order that at some time 
 if he again comes into the light, he may bring home the 
 redemption of this reality.' 
 
 The nature of his megalomania is betrayed by the expressions 
 ' redeeming man ' and ' redemption.' He imagines himself a 
 new Saviour, and plagiarizes the Gospel in form and substance. 
 Also Sprach Zarathustra is a complete stereotype of the sacred 
 writings of Oriental nations. The book aims at an external 
 resemblance to the Bible and Koran. It is divided into chap- 
 ters and verses ; the language is the archaic and prophetic 
 language of the books of Revelation (' And Zarathustra looked 
 at the people, and was astonished. Then he spake and said 
 thus : ') ; there frequently appear long enumerations and ser- 
 mons like litanies (' I love those who do not seek a reason only 
 behind the stars . . . ; I love him who lives to know . . . ; I 
 love him who labours and invents . . . ; I love him who loves 
 his virtue . . . ; I love him who withholds for himself not one 
 drop of mind,' etc.), and individual paragraphs point verbatim 
 to analogous portions of the Gospel, e.g. : ' When Zarathustra 
 had taken leave of the city . . . there followed him many who 
 called themselves his disciples and bore him company. Thus 
 they came to a cross-road; then said Zarathustra unto 
 them, that thenceforth he would go alone.' ' And the 
 happiness of the spirit is this : to be anointed by tears and 
 consecrated as a beast of sacrifice.' ' Verily, sajd he to his 
 disciples, yet a little and there comes this long twilight. Ah ! 
 how shall I save my light ?' ' In this manner did Zarathustra 
 go about, sore at heart, and for three days took no food or 
 drink. ... At length it came to pass that he fell into a deep 
 sleep. And his disciples sat around him in long night-watches,' 
 etc. Many of the chapters have most expressive titles: 'On 
 Self-Conquest ; ' ' On Immaculate Knowledge ; ' ' On Great 
 Events; ' ' On the Redemption ; ' ' On the Mount of Olives;'
 
 EGO-MANIA 467 
 
 On Apostates ; ' ' The Cry of Sore Need ; ' ' The Last Sup- 
 per ; ' ' The Awakening,' etc. Sometimes, it is true, it befalls 
 him to say, atheistically : ' If there were gods, how could I 
 endure to be no god ? Hence ' (italics his) ' there are no gods ; ' 
 but such passages vanish among the countless ones in which 
 he refers to himself as a god. ' Thou hast the power and thou 
 wilt not reign.' ' He who is of my nature escapes not such an 
 hour the hour which says to him : Only now art thou going 
 the way of thy greatness. . . . Thou art entering on the way 
 of thy greatness ; that which has hitherto been thy last danger 
 has now become thy last resource. Thou art entering on the 
 way of thy greatness ; now must thy best courage be, that 
 there is no longer any way behind thee. Thou art going on 
 the way of thy greatness; here shall no one slink behind 
 thee,' etc. 
 
 Nietzsche's mysticism and megalomania manifest them- 
 selves not only in his somewhat more coherent thought, but 
 also in his general mode of expression. The mystic numbers, 
 three and seven, frequently appear. He sees the external 
 world, as he does himself vast, distant, deep ; and the 
 words expressing these concepts are repeated on every page, 
 almost in every line : ' The discipline of suffering, of great 
 suffering . . .' 'The South is a great school of healing.' 
 * These last great searchers . . .' ' With the signs of great 
 destiny.' ' Where together with great compassion he has 
 learnt great contempt to learn, at their side, great reverence.' 
 ' Guilt is all great existence.' ' That I may celebrate the great 
 noon with you.' ' Thus speaks all great love.' c Not from you 
 is great weariness to come to me.' ' Men who are nothing but 
 a great eye, or a great mouth, or a great belly, or something 
 great . . .' 'To love with great love, to love with great 
 contempt.' ' But thou, O depth, thou sufferest too deeply.' 
 ' Immovable is my depth, but it gleams with floating enigmas 
 and laughters.' (It is to be observed how, in this sentence, all 
 the obsessions of the maniac crowd together depth, brilliancy, 
 mania of doubt, hilarious excitation.) ' All depth shall ascend 
 to my height.' ' They do not think enough into the deep,' etc. 
 With the idea of depth is connected that of abyss, which recurs 
 with equal constancy. The words ' abyss ' and ' abysmal ' are 
 among the most frequent in Nietzsche's writings. His words 
 which have the prefix ' over ' are associated with his motor 
 images, especially those of flying and hovering : ' Over-moral 
 sense'; ' over - European music'; .'climbing monkeys and 
 over-heated ' ; ' from the species to the over-species ' ; ' the 
 over - hero ' ; * the over - human ' ; ' the over - dragon ' ; ' the 
 over-urgent ' and ' over-compassionate,' etc. 
 
 As is general in frenzied madness, Nietzsche is conscious of
 
 468 DEGENERATION 
 
 his diseased interior processes, and in countless places alludes 
 to the furiously rapid outflow of his ideation and to his in- 
 sanity : ' That true philosophic reunion of a bold, unrestrained 
 mentality, running presto . . . They regard thought as some- 
 thing slow, hesitant, almost a toil; not at all as something 
 light, divine, and nearest of kin to the dance, to exuberance.' 
 ' The bold, light, tender march and flight of his thought.' 
 ' We think too rapidly. ... It is as if we carried about in 
 our head an incessantly rolling machine.' ' It is in impatient 
 spirits that there breaks out a veritable pleasure in insanity, 
 because insanity has so joyous a tempo.' ' All talking runs too 
 slowly for me ; I leap into thy chariot, Storm ! . . . Like a 
 cry and a huzza, would I glide away over vast seas.' ' Eruptive 
 insanity forever hovers above humanity as its greatest danger.' 
 (He is, of course, thinking of himself when speaking of 
 ' humanity.') ' In these days it sometimes happens that a 
 gentle, temperate, self-contained man becomes suddenly 
 frenzied, breaks plates, upsets the table, shrieks, rages, offends 
 everyone, and finally retires in shame and anger against him- 
 self.' (Most decidedly ' that sometimes happens,' not only ' in 
 these days,' but in all times ; but among maniacs only.) 
 ' Where is the insanity with which ye were forced to be 
 inoculated ? Behold, I teach you the over-man, who is ... 
 this insanity.' ' All things are worth the same ; each is alike. 
 He who feels otherwise goes voluntarily [?] into a madhouse.' 
 ' I put this exuberance and this foolishness in the place of that 
 will, as I taught ; in all one thing is impossible reasonable- 
 ness.' ' My hand is a fool's hand ; woe to all tables and walls, 
 and wherever there is yet room for the embellishments of fools 
 scribbling of fools !' (In the original there is here a play on 
 the words Zierrath, Schmierrath.}* He also, in the manner of 
 maniacs, excuses his mental disease : ' Finally, there would 
 remain open the great question whether we could dispense with 
 disease even for the development of our virtue, and especially 
 if our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge needed the 
 sick soul as much as the healthy soul.' 
 
 Finally, he is not even wanting in the maniacal idea of his 
 'primaeval health.' His soul is 'always clearer and always 
 healthier'; 'we Argonauts of the ideal' are 'healthier than 
 one would fain allow us to be dangerously healthy, more and 
 more healthy,' etc. 
 
 The foregoing is a necessarily condensed summary of the 
 special colour, form, and content of Nietzsche's thought, 
 originating in illusions of sense ; and this unhappy lunatic has 
 been earnestly treated as a ' philosopher,' and his drivel put 
 forward as a ' system ' this man whose scribbling is one 
 
 * Translator.
 
 EGO-MANIA 469 
 
 single long divagation, in whose writings madness shrieks out 
 from every line ! Dr. Kirchner, a philosopher by profession, 
 and the author of numerous philosophical writings, in a news- 
 paper article on Nietzsche's book, Der Fall Wagner, lays great 
 stress on the fact that ' it superabounds, as it were, in in- 
 tellectual health.' Ordinary university professors such as 
 G. Adler, in Freiburg, and others extol Nietzsche as a ' bold 
 and original thinker,' and with solemn seriousness take up a 
 position in respect of his ' philosophy ' some with avowed 
 enthusiasm, and some with carefully considered reservations ! 
 In the face of such incurably deep mental obtuseness, it cannot 
 excite wonder if the clear-thinking and healthy portion of the 
 young spirits of the present generation should, with hasty 
 generalization, extend to philosophy itself the contempt 
 deserved by its officially-appointed teachers. These teachers 
 undertake to introduce their students into mental philosophy, 
 and are yet without the capacity to distinguish from rational 
 thought the incoherent fugitive ideation of a maniac. 
 
 Dr. Hermann Tu-rck* characterizes in excellent words the 
 disciples of Nietzsche : ' This piece of wisdom [' nothing is 
 true ; all is permissible '] in the mouth of a morally insane 
 man of letters has . . . found ready response among persons 
 who, in consequence of a moral defect, feel themselves to be 
 in contradiction to the demands of society. This aforesaid in- 
 tellectual proletariat of large towns is especially jubilant over the 
 new magnificent discovery that all morality and all truth are 
 completely superfluous and pernicious to the development of the 
 individual. It is true that these persons have always in secret 
 said to themselves, " Nothing is true all is permissible," and 
 have also, as far as possible, acted accordingly. But now they 
 can avow it openly, and with pride; for Friedrich Nietzsche, 
 the new prophet, has vaunted this maxim as the most exalted 
 truth of life. ... It is not society which is right in its estima- 
 tion of morality, science, and true art. Oh dear no! The 
 individuals who follow their egoistical personal aims only who 
 act only as if truth were of consequence to them they, the 
 counterfeiters of truth, those unscrupulous penny-a-liners, 
 lying critics, literary thieves, and manufacturers of pseudo- 
 realistic brummagem they are the true heroes, the masters of 
 the situation, the truly free spirits.' 
 
 That is the truth, but not the whole truth. Without doubt, 
 the real Nietzsche gang consists of born imbecile criminals, 
 and of simpletons drunk with sonorous words. But besides 
 these gallows birds without the courage and strength for 
 criminal actions, and the imbeciles who ajlow themselves to be 
 stupefied and, as it were, hypnotized by the roar and rush of 
 * Dr. Hermann Tiirck, op. '/., s. 59.
 
 470 DEGENERATION 
 
 fustian, the banner of the insane babbler i? followed by others, 
 who must be judged otherwise and in pirt more gently. In 
 fact, Nietzsche's ranting includes some ideas which, in part, 
 respond to a widespread notion of the age, and in part are 
 capable of awakening the deception that, in spite of all the 
 exaggeration and insane distortion of exposition, they contain 
 a germ of truth and right ; and these ideas explain why many 
 persons agree with them who can hardly be reproached with 
 lack of clearness and critical capacity. 
 
 Nietzsche's fundamental idea of utter disregard and brutal 
 contempt for all the rights of others standing in the way of 
 an egoistical desire, must please the generation reared under 
 the Bismarckian system. Prince Bismarck is a monstrous 
 personality, raging over a country like a tornado in the torrid 
 zone ; it crushes all in its devastating course, and leaves behind 
 as traces, a widespread annihilation of character, destruction 
 of notions of right, and demolition of morality. In political 
 life the system of Bismarck is a sort of Jesuitism in cuirass. 
 ' The end sanctifies the means,' and the means are not (as with 
 the supple sons of Loyola) cunning, obstinacy, secret trickery, 
 but open brutality, violence, the blow with the fist, and the 
 stroke with the sword. The end which sanctifies the means 
 of the Jesuit in cuirass may sometimes be of general utility ; 
 but it will quite as often, and oftener, be an egoistical one. 
 In its author this system of the most primitive barbarism had 
 ever a certain grandeur, for it had its origin in a powerful will, 
 which with heroic boldness always placed itself at stake, and 
 entered into every fight with the savage determination to 
 * conquer or die.' In its imitators, on the contrary, it has got 
 stunted to ' swaggering ' or ' bullying,' i.e., to that most abject 
 and contemptible cowardice which crawls on its belly before 
 the strong, but maltreats with the most extreme insolence the 
 completely unarmed, the unconditionally harmless and weak, 
 from whom no resistance and no danger are in any way to be 
 apprehended. The * buliics ' gratefully recognise themselves 
 in Nietzsche's 'over-man,' and Nietzsche's so-called 'philo- 
 sophy ' is in reality the philosophy of ' bullying.' His doctrine 
 shows how Bismarck's system is mirrored in the brain of a 
 maniac. Nietzsche could not have come to the front and 
 succeeded in any but the Bismarckian and post-Bismarckian 
 era. He would, doubtless, have been delirious at whatever 
 period he might have lived ; but his insanity would not have 
 assumed the special colour and tendency now perceptible in 
 it. It is true that sometimes Nietzsche vexes himself over 
 the fact that 'the type of the new Germany most rich in 
 success in all that has depth . . . fails in " swagger," ' and he 
 then proclaims : ' It were well for us not to exchange too
 
 , EGO-MANIA 47t 
 
 cheaply our ancient renown as a people of depth for Prussian 
 " swagger," and the wit and' sand of Berlin.'* But in other 
 places he betrays what really displeases him in the ' swagger,' 
 at which he directs his philosophical verse ; it makes too 
 much ado about the officer. ' The moment he [the ' Prussian 
 officer '] speaks and moves, he is the most forward and taste- 
 less figure in old Europe unknown to himself. . . . And 
 unknown also to the good Germans, who wonder at him as 
 a man of the highest and most distinguished society, and 
 willingly take their tone from him.'-f- Nietzsche cannot con- 
 sent to that Nietzsche, who apprehends that there can be 
 no God, as in that case he himself must be this God. He 
 cannot suffer the ' good German ' to place the officer above 
 him. But apart from this inconvenience, which is involved in 
 the system of ' swagger,' he finds everything in it good and 
 beautiful, and lauds it as ' intrepidity of glance, courage and 
 hardness of the cutting hand, an inflexible will for dangerous 
 voyages of discovery, for spiritualized North-Polar expeditions 
 under desolate and dangerous skies, '$ and prophesies exultingly 
 that for Europe there will soon begin an era of brass, an era 
 of war, soldiers, arms, violence. Hence it is natural that 
 * swaggerers ' should hail him as their very own peculiar 
 philosopher. 
 
 Besides anarchists, born with incapacity for adaptation, his 
 ' individualism,' i.e., his insane ego-mania, for which the external 
 world is non-existent, was bound to attract those who in- 
 stinctively feel that at the present day the State encroaches 
 too deeply and too violently on the rights of the individual, 
 and, in addition to the necessary sacrifices of strength and 
 time, exacts from him such as he cannot undergo without 
 destructive loss of self-esteem, viz., the sacrifice of judgment, 
 knowledge, conviction, and human dignity. These thirsters 
 for freedom believe that they have found in Nietzsche the 
 spokesman of their healthy revolt against the State, as the 
 oppressor of independent spirits, and as the crusher of strong 
 characters. They commit the same error which I have already 
 pointed out in the sincere adherents of the Decadents and of 
 Ibsen ; they do not see that Nietzsche confounds the conscious 
 with the subconscious man ; that the individual, for whom 
 he demands perfect freedom, is the man, not of knowledge and 
 judgment, but of blind craving, requiring the satisfaction of his 
 lascivious instincts at any price ; that he is not the moral, but 
 the sensual, man. 
 
 Finally, his consequential airs have also increased the number 
 
 * Jenseits von Gut und Bose, pp. 198, 201. 
 t Die frbhliche Wissenschaft, p. 130. 
 % Jenseits von Gut und Base, p. 147.
 
 472 DEGENERATION 
 
 of his followers. Many of those marching in his train reject 
 his moral doctrine, but wax enthusiastic over such expressions 
 as these : 4 It might some time happen that the masses should 
 become masters . . . Therefore, O my brothers, there is need 
 of a new nobility, the adversary of all plebeians and all violent 
 domination, and who inscribes anew on a new tablet the word 
 " Nobility." '* 
 
 There is at the present time a widespread conviction that 
 the enthusiasm for equality was a grievous error of the great 
 Revolution. A doctrine opposed to all natural laws is justly 
 resisted. Humanity has need of a hierarchy. It must have 
 leaders and models. It cannot do without an aristocracy. 
 But the nobleman to whom the human herd may concede the 
 most elevated place will certainly not be Nietzsche's 'over- 
 man,' the ego-maniac, the criminal, the robber, the slave of 
 his maddened instincts, but the man of richer knowledge, 
 higher intelligence, clearer judgment, and firmer self-discipline. 
 The existence of humanity is a combat, which it cannot carry 
 on without captains. As long as the combat is of men against 
 men, the herd requires a herdsman of strong muscles and ready 
 blow. In a more perfect state, in which all humanity fights 
 collectively against Nature only, it chooses as its chief the man 
 of richest brain, most disciplined will and concentrated atten- 
 tion. This man is the best observer, but he is also one who 
 feels most acutely and rapidly, who can most vividly picture 
 to himself the condition of the external world, hence the man 
 of the liveliest sympathy and most comprehensive interest. 
 The ' over-man ' of the healthy development of the species is; 
 a Paraclete of knowledge and unselfish love, not a bloodthirsty 
 ' splendid beast of prey.' This is not borne in mind by those 
 who believe that in Nietzsche's aristocratism they have found 
 a clear expression of their own obscure views as to the need 
 of noble natures of light and leading. 
 
 Nietzsche's false individualism and aristocratism is capable 
 of misleading superficial readers. Their error may be accounted 
 a mitigating circumstance. But even taking this into con- 
 sideration, it still ever remains a disgrace to the German intel- 
 lectual life of the present age, that in Germany a pronounced 
 maniac should have been regarded as a philosopher, and have 
 founded a school. 
 
 * Also Sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 74.
 
 BOOK IV, 
 
 REALISM. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ZOLA AND HIS SCHOOL. 
 
 IT was necessary to treat in detail the two forms of degeneracy 
 in literature and art hitherto examined, i.e., mysticism and ego- 
 mania, inasmuch as their career of development seems to be 
 still in the ascendant, and they are actively at work in making 
 themselves masters of the aesthetic conscience of our times. 
 Concerning the third form, realism or naturalism, I can afford 
 to be much briefer, for two reasons : one having to do with my 
 subject, the other with myself. The former reason is that, in 
 the land of its origin, naturalism is already wholly vanquished, 
 and we do not kill a corpse we bury it. The personal reason 
 is that I have already devoted myself elsewfiere to the thorough 
 examination of naturalism.* The conclusions I there came to 
 I continue to maintain, as regards the appreciation of its 
 tendency, and I should only wish to limit them by a strong 
 reservation, in so far as they greatly over-estimate M. Zola's 
 abilities. 
 
 That naturalism in France is done with is admitted by all 
 the world, and is really only disputed by Zola himself. ' There 
 is no doubt whatever as to the tendencies of the new genera- 
 tion of literary men,' says M. Remy de Gourmont ; 'they are 
 rigorously anti- naturalist. There has been no question of 
 forming a party or issuing orders ; no crusade was organized ; 
 it is individually that we have separated ourselves, horror- 
 stricken, from a literature the baseness of which made us sick. 
 Perhaps there is even less disgust than indifference. I re- 
 member, when M. Zola's last novel but one came out, that, 
 among the eight or ten collaborators of the Mercure de France 
 
 * Paris unter der dritten Republik, Vierie Auflage. Leipzig, 1890. Zola 
 und Naturalismus Ausgeivahlte Pariser Briefe, Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 
 1887. * Pot- Bouille, von Zola/
 
 474 DEGENERATION 
 
 (a Symbolist journal), it was impossible for us to find anyone 
 who had read through La Bete humaine, or anyone who would 
 have consented to read it with sufficient care to review it. 
 This species of book, and the method which dictates it, 
 appears to us quite antiquated with the flavour of bygone years; 
 more remote and more superannuated than the most truculent 
 follies of romanticism.'* 
 
 Among the disciples of Zola, among those who collaborated 
 in the Soirees de Medan, as among those who followed him 
 later, there is scarcely one who has remained faithful to his 
 tendency. Guy de Maupassant, before he was placed in the 
 lunatic asylum where he died, ended by turning more and 
 more towards the psychological novel. Joris Karl Huys- 
 mans, whom we have studied above in his new skin as a 
 Diabolist and Decadent, cannot find words bitter enough for 
 naturalism. J. H. Rosny writes novels now in which the 
 scene is laid in the Stone Age, and the subject of which is the 
 abduction of a brawny brachycephalous pre-Aryan woman by a 
 tall, white-skinned, dolichocephalous Aryan man.t When 
 Zola's La Terre appeared, five of his disciples Paul Bonnetain, 
 J. H. Rosny, just mentioned, Lucien Descaves, Paul Mar- 
 gueritte, and Gustave Guiches deemed it necessary to pro- 
 test, in a public manifesto, and with a solemnity somewhat 
 comical, against the obscenities of this novel, and to disavow 
 their master in proper and befitting form. If the novels of 
 M . Zola himself still continue to find a very good and steady 
 market, as he declares with pride, this in no way proves that 
 his tendency is still popular. The masses persist in habits, 
 once adopted, much longer than the leaders and creators 
 do. If the former continue to follow M. Zola as before, the 
 latter have already wholly left him. The success of his last 
 novels is explained, moreover, on quite other than artistic 
 grounds. His flair for what is occupying public opinion is, 
 perhaps, the most essential part of his talent. He chooses 
 from the outset subjects in favour of which he is assured of the 
 positive interest of a numerous public, no matter how they 
 may be treated. With books which relate, in the form of a 
 novel, the story of the financial crisis of 1882, or the war of 
 1870, as L' Argent and La Debacle, every known French author is 
 sure to awaken in his own country a passionate -interest even 
 to this day. And M. Zola could equally count on a numerous 
 connection of lovers of the obscene and nasty. This public 
 remains faithful to him, and finds in him all it seeks. But it is 
 a long time since he acquired any new adherents in his own 
 country, and abroad he only obtains them among people who 
 
 * Jules Huret, Enquete sur V Evolution litldraire, p. 135. 
 
 f J. H. Rosny, Vamireh : Roman des Temps primitijs, Paris, 1892.
 
 REALISM 475 
 
 anxiously follow every fashion, whether it be in neckties or 
 books, but who are too ignorant to know as yet that M. Zola, 
 in France itself, has long since ceased to be the last fashion. 
 
 In the opinion of his disciples, M. Zola is the inventor of 
 realism in literature. This is a pretension which only young 
 fellows, who are ignorant beyond all conception, could raise, 
 and for whom the history of the world only begins at the 
 moment when they have deigned to recognise it. 
 
 First of all, the word ' realism ' itself has no aesthetic signifi- 
 cance. In philosophy it denotes an opinion for which the 
 general phenomenon of the world is the expression of a 
 material reality. Applied to art and literature, it possesses no 
 conception whatever. This I have explicitly demonstrated in 
 another place (Paris unter dcr dritten Republik), and will confine 
 myself here to going very briefly over the argument. 
 
 Those ale-house aesthetics, who distinguish between realism 
 and idealism, explain the former as the effort of the artist to 
 observe things and to reproduce them with truth. But this 
 attempt is common to every author, whoever he may be. No 
 one of deliberate purpose wanders from the truth in his 
 creations ; and even if he wished to do so, he could not, as this 
 would contradict all the laws of human thought. Every one 
 of our presentations, in fact, is based on an observation once 
 made by us, and even when we invent ad libitum, we only work 
 with the memory-images recollected from previous observa- 
 tions. If, in spite of this, one work gives a greater impression 
 of truth than another, it is a question, not of this or that 
 aesthetic tendency, but exclusively of the degree of talent. A 
 true poet is always true ; an incapable imitator can never be so. 
 The first is true even when he disdains always to adhere closely 
 to reality in details ; the latter is not so even when he clings, 
 with punctilious attention, and . with the method of a land- 
 surveyor, to little external details. 
 
 If one bear in mind the psychological conditions in which 
 a work of art comes into existence, all the rhodomontade of 
 so-called ' realism ' is immediately recognised. The origin of 
 every veritable work of art is an emotion. This is aroused 
 either by a vital process in the internal organs of the artist, or 
 by a sense-impression which he receives from the external 
 world. In both cases the artist feels the necessity of giving 
 expression to his emotion in a work of art. If this emotion is 
 of organic origin, he will choose from among his memory- 
 images, or his sense-impressions of the moment, those which 
 are in harmony with his emotion, and will compose with them. 
 If its origin is external, he will em-ploy in his composition 
 mainly phenomena of the external world, sensuous experiences 
 which have evoked in him the emotion demanding objective
 
 476 DEGENERATION 
 
 shape, and he will combine with this, similar memory-images 
 in accordance with the laws of association. As may be seen, 
 the process in the two cases is absolutely the same : the artist, 
 under the control of an emotion, welds direct sense-per- 
 ceptions and memory-images into a work of art which brings 
 him relief; only, sometimes the former, sometimes the latter, 
 are predominant, according to whether the emotion has its 
 origin in sense-perceptions or in organic processes. Speaking; 
 roughly, the works which result from an emotion aroused by 
 the phenomena of the world may well be called realistic, and 
 those expressing an organic emotion idealistic. These de- 
 nominations, however, have not any really distinctive value. 
 Among thoroughly sane individuals the emotions originate 
 almost solely from impressions of the external world ; among 
 those whose nervous life is more or less diseased, namely, 
 among hysterical, neurasthenic, and degenerate subjects, and 
 every kind of lunatic, they originate much more frequently in 
 internal organic processes. Sane artists will produce works, 
 as a rule, in which perception will predominate ; artists un- 
 healthily emotional will produce works in which the play of 
 association of ideas predominates in other words, imagination 
 working principally on memory-images. And if a false designa- 
 tion is absolutely adhered to, it might be said that the first, as a. 
 general rule, will produce works which are so-called realistic, and 
 the second, works so-called idealistic. In no case is the work 
 of art a faithful image of material reality ; its genesis, excludes 
 this possibility. It is always the incarnation of a subjective 
 emotion only. To desire to know the world by means of a 
 work of art is a false proceeding ; but the whole essence of a 
 personality reveals itself in it to him who knows how to read. 
 The work of art is never a document in the sense attached by 
 naturalistic cant to this word, i.e., a reliable objective presen- 
 tation of external facts ; but it is always a confession of the 
 author ; it betrays, consciously or unconsciously, his way of 
 feeling and thinking; it lays bare his emotions, and shows 
 what ideas fill his consciousness, and are at the disposal of the 
 emotion which strives for expression. It is not a mirror of the 
 world, but a reflection of the soul of the artist. 
 
 It might be thought, perhaps, that at least the mainly 
 imitative arts, painting and sculpture, are capable of a faithful 
 reproduction of reality, and thus are realisms properly so- 
 called. Even this is an error. It would never occur to a 
 painter or a sculptor to place himself before a phenomenon, 
 and reproduce it without selection, without accentuations and 
 suppressions. And why does he do this ? If he imitates an 
 aspect, it is evidently because something in that aspect capti- 
 vates or pleases him a harmony of colours, an effect of light,
 
 REALISM 477 
 
 a line of motion. Involuntarily he will accentuate and throw 
 into relief the feature which has inspired him with the desire 
 to imitate the aspect in question, and his work, consequently, 
 will no more represent the phenomenon such as it really was, 
 but as he saw it ; it will only be a fresh proof, therefore, of his 
 emotion, not the cast of a phenomenon. To work absolutely 
 in the method of a camera obscura and a sensitive plate would 
 be only possible to a very obtuse handicraftsman, who, in the 
 presence of the visible world, had no feeling for anything, no 
 pleasure, no disgust, no aspirations of any kind. However, it 
 is not at all probable that so atrophied a being will ever have 
 had the inclination to become an artist, and could acquire, 
 even in a moderate degree, the technical skill necessary for 
 such a profession. 
 
 And if literal realism, the positive actual imitation of the 
 phenomenon, be interdicted even in the plastic arts by their 
 intrinsic nature, with how much greater reason is it forbidden to 
 imaginative writing ! The painter can, after all, if he wishes to 
 debase himself and his art to the lowest degree, reduce the co- 
 operation of his personality in a work of art (or, to be more 
 exact, to the work, for then there can be no question of art) to an 
 extremely feeble, a scarcely perceptible point ; he can reduce 
 himself to the condition of a mere camera obscura, transmit 
 his visual impressions in the most mechanical manner possible 
 to his motor organs, and compel himself to think and feel 
 nothing during the progress of the work. His picture is fur- 
 nished for him by Nature itself: it is his optical horizon. If, 
 then, he wishes to exercise no choice, to express nothing of his 
 own, not even to compose, still there remains the possibility of 
 copying the phenomena which are enclosed within the limits 
 of his field of vision. His so-called picture is then no more 
 than an expressionless fragment of the world, in which the 
 artist's personality is only represented by the frame which 
 encloses it, not because the phenomena of Nature really ter- 
 minates at that point, but because the eye of the painter only 
 embraces that portion, and no more ; nevertheless, it is a picture 
 in a technical sense, i.e., a picture that can be hung upon the wall 
 and looked at. The imaginative writer (dichter), on the con- 
 trary, does not find his work ready in this way. It is not provided 
 for him by Nature itself. His subjects are not developed in space, 
 but in time. They are not arranged by the side of one another in 
 such a way that the eye perceives them and can retain all it sees ; 
 but they succeed each other, and the imaginative writer must by 
 his own intellect assign them their h'mits, he must himself decide 
 what he ought to seize upon and what he must let go ; where 
 the phenomenon begins which he wishes to utilize in his work, 
 .and where it ends. He cannot begin or end a conversation in
 
 478 DEGENERATION 
 
 the middle of a word, in imitation oi M. Jean Bcraud, for 
 example, who in a well-known picture has made the frame 
 cut off the wheels of a waggon in the middle. He may not pro- 
 duce an inexpressive photograph of the uniform course of 
 events of life and the world. He must fence round and dam 
 up certain places in the course of events. In doing this he 
 clearly affirms himself and his personality. He betrays his 
 original stamp. He allows his intentions, views, and senti- 
 ments to be recognised. If amongst a million of contemporary 
 human destinies he relates one only, it is that for some 
 reason or other this particular one has interested him more 
 than the rest of the million. If he transmits to us only some 
 few features, ideas, conversations, and actions of the person 
 he has selected (not even a millionth part of all that makes up 
 his actual life) it is because, for some reason or other, these 
 seemed to him more important and more characteristic than 
 all the rest ; because in his opinion they prove something, they 
 express an idea not conceived by things as they are, but which 
 he believes he can deduce from reality, or which he desires to 
 read into it. Thus, his ' realistic ' work always reproduces his 
 thoughts only, his interpretation of reality, his interest in it, 
 and not reality itself. If the imaginative writer wished to 
 transcribe the world phonographically or photographically, his 
 work would no longer be a poem, even in a purely technical 
 sense ; it would not even be a book, to the extent that the work 
 of the painter who only photographs still continues, in a purely 
 technical sense, to be a picture ; it would be something with 
 neither form, sense, nor name; for, in reproducing the exist- 
 ence of a single human being during one day only, thousands 
 of pages could be filled if all his sensations, thoughts, words, 
 and actions were treated as of equal value. That selection 
 is therefore made among them which is the subjectivity of the 
 imaginative writer, i.e., the reverse of 'realism.' 
 
 Besides, the work of the painter addresses itself to the same 
 senses as the phenomenon of Nature itself, and reproduces it 
 with the help of the same means by which the world itself is 
 revealed to the senses, viz., with light and colour. Of course 
 the lights, colours, and lines of the painter are not exactly 
 those of the real phenomenon, and it is only in consequence 
 of an illusion that, in his imitation, the phenomenon is recog- 
 nised ; but this illusion is the work of such inferior cerebral 
 centres that even animals are capable of it, as is demonstrated 
 by the classical anecdote so well known of the birds wishing to 
 peck at the bunch of grapes painted by Zeuxis. The imaginative 
 writer, on the contrary, does not address himself to the senses ; to 
 be more exact, he appeals by hearing or sight, to which he pre- 
 sents spoken or written words, not to the centres of perception,
 
 REALISM 479 
 
 as the plastic artist does in the first instance, but to the higher 
 centres of conception, judgment, and reasoning. Nor has he 
 the means for directly reproducing the sensible phenomenon 
 itself, but he must first translate the phenomenon into concepts 
 under a linguistic, i.e., a conventional, form. This is, however, 
 an excessively complicated and highly differentiated activity, 
 which bears completely the impress of the personality exercising 
 it. If even two eyes do not see in the same manner, how 
 much less can two brains perceive and interpret in the same 
 way what the eye has seen, class it with pre-existing concepts, 
 associate it with feelings and representations, and clothe it in 
 traditional forms of language ? The activity of the imaginative 
 writer, therefore, is incomparably more than that of the artist, 
 essentially personal ; the elaboration of sense-impressions into 
 representations, and the translation of representations into 
 words, are so peculiarly individual, so exclusively subjective, 
 that for this cause also imaginative writing can never be reality 
 itself, i.e., ' realistic.' 
 
 The notion of so-called ' realism ' cannot withstand either 
 psychological or aesthetic criticism. We might, perhaps, attempt 
 an external, superficial, practical conception of it, and say, for 
 example, Realism is the method in the application of which the 
 imaginative writer starts from his perceptions and observations, 
 and seeks his subjects in the environment he knows personally ; 
 idealism is the opposite method, which that writer employs 
 who, in creating, yields to the play of imagination, and who, in 
 order not to impede its free energy, borrows his materials from 
 remote times and countries, or from social strata of which he 
 has no direct knowledge, but which he conceives only in the 
 visions of aspiration, intuition, or surmise. Reasonable and 
 plausible as this explanation appears, it, too, nevertheless, 
 dissolves into blue mist when more closely examined. For, 
 in fact, the choice of subject-matter, the surroundings from 
 which it i-s borrowed, or in which it is placed, have no decisive 
 signification ; no method is therein manifested, but merely 
 the author's personality. One in whom observation pre- 
 dominates will be ' realistic,' i.e., will express experiences, 
 even if he pretends to speak of men and things placed wholly 
 beyond the reach of his observation ; and the other in whom 
 the mechanical association of ideas prevails will be ' idealistic/ 
 i.e., he will simply follow the wanderings of his imagination, 
 even when he desires to represent circumstances which may 
 be personally familiar to him. 
 
 Let us give one example only of the two cases. What is 
 more ' idealistic ' than fairy - stories ? ' Very well, here are 
 some passages from the best-known fairy-tales of the brothers 
 Grimm : ' There was once upon a time a king's daughter who
 
 4 8o DEGENERATION 
 
 went into the forest and seated herself on the brink of a cool 
 fountain ' (The Frog Prince ; or, Iron Henry). ' But the little 
 sister at home [he is speaking of the daughter of a king who 
 had driven away his twelve sons] grew up, and remained the 
 only child. Once there was a great washing-day, and amongst 
 the washing were twelve men's shirt?. " For whom are these 
 shirts?" demanded the princess; "they are much too small 
 for my father." Then the laundress told her that she had had 
 twelve brothers,' etc.; 'and as the little sister sat in the meadow 
 in the afternoon bleaching the linen, the words of the laundress 
 came into her mind/ etc. (The Twelve Brothers). ' The wood- 
 cutter obeyed ; he fetched his child, and gave her to the Virgin 
 Mary, who carried her up into heaven. There the child lived 
 happily; she ate nothing but sweet cakes, and drank new milk,' 
 etc. ' So fourteen years went by in heaven. Then the Virgin 
 Mary had to take a long journey ; but before she went away, 
 she called the girl to her, and said, " Dear child, I entrust you 
 with the keys of the thirteen doors of Paradise," ' etc. (Mary's 
 Child). The unknown writer of these fairy-tales transports his 
 stories into royal palaces, or even into heaven i.e., into sur- 
 roundings which he certainly does not know ; but he endows 
 beings and things, and even the Virgin Mary, with such traits 
 as are known and familiar to him by observation. From the 
 royal palace one enters a wood or a meadow as one might on 
 leaving a farm ; the princess runs to the fountain in the forest 
 quite alone, looks after the linen, and bleaches it on the grass, 
 just like a domestic servant. The Holy Virgin undertakes a 
 journey, and confides the keys of the household to her adopted 
 daughter, as a rich chatelaine might do. These fairy-tales are 
 composed from a peasant's own experience, who describes his 
 own world with honest realism, and simply gives other names 
 to the figures and circumstances with which he is familiar. 
 M. Edmond de Goncourt, on the contrary, the great pioneer 
 * realist,' relates, in his novel La Faustin, the love-story of a 
 Lord Annandale and an actress of the Theatre Fran9ais, which 
 elicits from M. F. Brunetiere, the critic, these observations : 
 ' I should much like to hear M. Zola's opinion on M. de Gon- 
 court's novel. What can M. Zola, who has jested so eloquently 
 on the subject of novels of adventure of those novels in which 
 princes walked about incognito with their pockets full of 
 diamonds think in his inmost heart of this Lord Annandale 
 throwing handfuls of gold out of the windows, and ruling from 
 one day to another over fifty English servants in his mansion 
 in Paris, without counting the retainers of his lady ? What 
 can M. Zola, who has made merry so comfortably over the 
 idealistic novel, as he calls it, think of this one in which love 
 triumphant carries off the lovers into the adorable world of
 
 REALISM 481 
 
 dreams what can he think to himself concerning this passion- 
 ate tenderness which M. de Goncourt's Englishman has for 
 the tragedienne, this almost deified gallantry, this sensual 
 liaison dans le bleu, this physical love in ideality, and all the 
 rest of the jargon which I spare the reader?'* M. Edmond 
 de Goncourt professes to depict a contemporary Englishman, 
 an actress also of our own times, events in Parisian life i.e., 
 all of them mattershe might have observed, and with which 
 he ought to be familiar ; but what he does relate is so 
 incredible, so impossible, unprecedented, that one can only 
 shrug one's shoulders over the childish fable. Thus, the 
 German story-teller who conducts us into a society of angels, 
 saints, and kings, really shows us healthy, robust peasants and 
 lasses whose living reality is in no way diminished by the 
 carnival crowns and gilded-paper halos playfully placed on 
 their heads ; while the French realist who would transport 
 us into Parisian life among Parisians, floats before our eyes 
 fleshless phantoms moving in clouds of cigar-smoke, marsh- 
 mists, and punch-flames, and who remain just as unreal, for all 
 the effort of the author to conjure into them a distant resem- 
 blance to an Englishman in a frock-coat, and a hysterical 
 lady in a lace-trimmed negligee. The author of the fairy-tales 
 is a realist in the sense of the explanation given above ; the 
 novelist of Parisian manners, Edmond de Goncourt, is an 
 idealist of the most aggravating type. 
 
 From whatever side we approach this pretended realism, we 
 never succeed in seeing in it a concept, but only an empty 
 word. Every method of investigation leads us to the same 
 result viz., that there is no realism in poetry, i.e., no im- 
 personal, actual copy of reality ; there are only the various 
 personalities of the poet. The only decisive thing is the in- 
 dividuality of the poet. One of them draws from the pheno- 
 menon of Nature, another from his internal organic processes, 
 those emotions which incite them to create. One is capable of 
 attention, and observes ; another is the slave of an unbridled 
 association of ideas. In one the presentation of the * not-self 
 predominates in consciousness, in another the * self.' I do 
 not hesitate to express the matter in a single word one is 
 healthy and in an evolution of growth ; the other is changed 
 more or less pathologically has more or less fallen into 
 degeneracy. The healthy poet mingles knowledge with every 
 one of his works, whether it be Dante's Inferno or Goethe's 
 Faust ; and if held desirable, this element of knowledge, which 
 it is not possible to acquire except by attention and observa- 
 tion, may be called realism. The degenerate poet never 
 
 * Ferdinand Bruneti^re, Le Roman naturaliste^ nouvelle Edition. Paris, 
 1892, p. 285. 
 
 31
 
 482 DEGENERATION 
 
 fashions anything but empty soap-bubbles of knowledge, even 
 when he maintains, and is himself convinced, that he is 
 giving out what h? has observed ; and this confused ebulli- 
 tion of ideas, shot in the best cases with changing hues, but 
 most frequently simply dirty froth, is very often called, by a 
 misnomer, idealism. 
 
 Still another and the latest meaning has been appked to 
 realism ; it stands for the systematic treatment of the lower 
 ranks of life, and commonplace men and things. According 
 to this definition, the works in which labourers, peasants, 
 petty bourgeois, etc., appear, would be realistic, and those in 
 which gods, heroes, kings, etc., take part, idealistic. Louis XIV., 
 according to the well-known anecdote when Teniers' tavern- 
 scenes were exhibited before him, let fall the indignant and 
 disdainful comment, ' Take away these grotesque things !' 
 He would not have condemned an artistic method and manner 
 of representation, but the baseness of the subject only would 
 have offended his Olympian eye. This explanation of the 
 term ' realism ' is a little more comprehensible than the others ; 
 but I have no need to show how grossly external and how 
 philosophically and aesthetically worthless it is. We have 
 seen, in fact, above, how the simplest feelings and ideas of 
 peasants may be attributed to gods and to kings ; and, con- 
 versely, there is no lack of works in which a royal crown or a 
 saintly halo hovers invisibly over the heads of human beings in 
 the lowest social position. In Gregory Samarow's novels, 
 emperors and kings disport themselves who feel, think, and 
 speak like the commercial travellers of a third-rate wine 
 business ; in Berthold Auerbach's village stories we see 
 peasants who in heart and head are of the highest nobility, 
 sometimes even semi-divine. The one kind is as unreal as the 
 other, only in the first we discern the craft of the sensation- 
 monger, in the second there speaks to us the refined and 
 tender-souled poet. In The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, 
 we find a farm-servant, Luke, and a miller's daughter, Maggie, 
 who would do honour to any Pantheon in the grandeur of their 
 character and morals ; in Thackeray's Vanity Fair we are 
 shown a Marquis of Steyne, very magnificent and very proud, 
 and another such, Earl Bareacres, with neither of whom would 
 any decent man shake hands. Those are as trire as these ; 
 but whereas the former betray the heart of a poet full of love 
 and pity, the latter reveal the soul of an artist overflowing with 
 bitterness and wrath. Which, now, is noble the emperors 
 and kings of Samarow or the Black Forest peasants of 
 Auerbach ? Which is plebeian the farming men of George 
 Eliot or the powerful English peers of Thackeray ? And 
 of these works must be qualified as realistic, which as
 
 REALISM 483 
 
 idealistic, if realism signifies being occupied with inferior 
 persons and conditions, idealism with those that are superior ? 
 
 Hence to serious investigation, which does not stop at the 
 mere jingle of words, the expressions ' realism ' and ' idealism ' 
 convey no meaning. We will now see what the partisans of 
 M. Emile Zola give out as his originality, in what he himself 
 claims to be a model and a pioneer, and how he justifies his 
 pretension of impersonating a totally new epoch in the history 
 of literature. 
 
 M. Zola's disciples boast of his art of description and his 
 * impressionism.' I make a great difference between the two. 
 Description endeavours to seize upon the characteristic features 
 -of the phenomenon by all the senses at once, and convey them 
 in words ; impressionism shows the conscious state of a person 
 receiving impressions in the domain of one sense only, seeing 
 things only, hearing them only, feeling them only, etc. 
 Description is the work of a brain which comprehends the 
 things it perceives in their connection and their essence ; 
 impressionism is the work of a brain which receives from the 
 phenomenon only the sensuous elements and by a one-sided 
 aspect of knowledge, but not knowledge itself. The describer 
 recognises in a tree, a tree, with all the ideas which this 
 concept includes. The impressionist sees before him merely 
 a mass of colour composed of spots of different greens, on 
 which the sun flashes here and there points and rays of light. 
 Description for its own sake, as well as impressionism, are, 
 in poetry, an aesthetic and psychological error, as wil be 
 demonstrated as briefly as possible ; but even this error was 
 not invented by M. Zola, for long before him the romanticists, 
 and Theophile Gautier particularly, cultivated the broad style 
 of description, inorganically interpolated into literary com- 
 position ; and, on the subject of impressionism, the brothers 
 De Goncourt showed M. Zola the way. 
 
 The purely objective description of objects is science, when 
 it is worth anyone's while to acquire of them as clear a repre- 
 sentation as may be communicated by words without the 
 assistance of image or number. Such description is simply 
 child's play and waste of time, when no one is interested to 
 pause and look at the things described, either because they 
 are too well known or because they are without importance.* 
 
 * Thirty years before realism began to create a disturbance in Germany, 
 with its mania for description, the Swiss novelist, Gottfried Keller, with a 
 curious premonition, ridiculed it. See Die Leute -von Seldwyla, Auflage 12, 
 Berlin, 1892, Band II., p. 108. (The hero of the story entitled Die miss- 
 brauchten Liebesbriefe [the misused love-letters'] suddenly conceives the 
 notion of becoming an author.) ' He laid aside the book of commercial 
 notes, and drew forth a smaller one provided with a little steel lock. Then 
 he placed himself before the first tree he came to, examined it attentively,
 
 484 DEGENERATION 
 
 Finally, it rises into art while remaining of an inferior species, 
 when it chooses words so well that it follows the most delicata 
 peculiarities of the objects, and at the same time calls out the 
 emotions that the observer experiences during his observations, 
 i.e., when the words employed have not only the value of a 
 just portrayal of sensuously perceptible properties, but have 
 an emotional colouring, and appear accompanied by images 
 and metaphors. We may cite as examples of art of portrayal 
 all good descriptions of travel, from the Voyage to the Equinoxial 
 Regions of the New Continent, by Alexander Humboldt, to Sahara 
 and Soudan, by Nachtigal, Iff! Herzen Afrikas, by Schweinfurth, 
 or Edmond de Amicis' books on Constantinople, Morocco, Spain, 
 Holland, etc. But these have nothing in common with imagina- 
 tive writing, which always has for its object man, with his ideas 
 and sentiments, not excepting fables of animals, parables, allego- 
 ries, fairy-tales, all the hybrid forms in which the human element 
 of all imagination appears disguised as an anthropomorphism 
 applied to animals, and even to inanimate objects. The material 
 frame, the scene and surrounding, have no importance in an 
 imaginative work, except in so far as they affect the person or per- 
 sons of whom it treats. The imaginative writer may be regarded 
 either as a spectator who narrates human events as they develop 
 before his eyes, or as an actor in these events, which he looks 
 upon and feels with the consciousness of one of the personages 
 concerned. In both cases he can naturally only perceive in 
 the material surroundings whatever plays a part in the events 
 themselves. If he is a spectator, he will certainly not let his 
 eyes wander over the field of vision indifferently, but will pause 
 befors a scens which attracts his attention, and for which he 
 seeks to arouse our interest. If he has himself adopted the 
 disguise of one of the actors, he will be even more completely 
 absorbed by the human events in which he himself co-operates, 
 and will preserve still less any inclination to stroll indifferently 
 by the side of scenes which have nothing to do with his given 
 state of mind, and divert him from acts and feelings with which 
 he is preoccupied at the moment. Hence an imaginative work 
 
 and wrote : " A beech-trunk. Pale gray, with still paler flecks and transverse 
 stripes. Two kinds of moss cover it, one almost blackish, and one of a 
 sheeny, velvety green. In addition, yellowish, reddish and white lichen, 
 which often run one into another. . . . Might perhaps be serviceable in 
 scenes with brigands." Next he paused before a stake driven into the earth, 
 on which some child had hung a dead slow- worm. He wrote : " Interesting 
 detail. A small staff driven into the ground. Body of a silver-gray snake 
 wound round it. ... Is Mercury dead, and has he left his stick with dead 
 snakes sticking here ? This last allusion serviceable, above all, for com- 
 mercial tales. N.B. The staff or stake is old and weather-beaten ; of the 
 same colour as the snake; in places where the sun "shines upon it it is 
 covered with little silver-gray hairs. (This last observation might be new,
 
 REALISM 485 
 
 which is true to human nature will only contain descriptions 
 of such material surroundings as a spectator (absorbed in the 
 actual events which form the subject of the work, or as one 
 of its actors) is in a state to perceive, i.e., only what is directly 
 connected with the events. If the description includes ex- 
 traneous matter, it is psychologically false ; it disturbs moods, 
 interrupts events, diverts the attention from what ought to be 
 the essential point in the work of art, and transforms the 
 latter into a patchwork ; showing signs that its author lacked 
 artistic earnestness, that the work is not born from the need 
 to give poetic expression to a genuine emotion. 
 
 A very much worse error than desultory, cold-blooded descrip- 
 tion in imaginative writing is impressionism. In painting it 
 has its authorization. The latter reproduces the impressions of 
 the visual senses, and the painter is within the limits of his 
 art when he presents his purely optical perceptions without 
 composing, or without relating a story, i.e., without intro- 
 ducing any idea into the scene he reproduces, without com- 
 bining any activity of his highest centres of ideation with the 
 activity of the centres of perception. The picture produced 
 according to this method will be very inferior from an aesthetic 
 point of view, but it will be a picture, and can be defended as 
 such. Poetical impressionism, on the other hand, is a complete 
 misconception of the essence of imaginative work; it is the nega- 
 tion and suppression of it. The medium of poetry is language. 
 Now this is an activity, not of the centres of perception, but 
 of the centres of ideation and judgment. The immediate 
 phonetic reaction upon sensory excitations is merely an ex- 
 clamation. Without the co-operation of the highest centres 
 a perception cannot express itself phonetically except by an 
 'Ah!' or an 'Oh!' But in the same ratio that the purely 
 emotional cry of an animal rises to the height of intelligible 
 grammatically articulated human speech, the purely sensuous 
 perception rises also to the height of concept and judgment, 
 and it is psychologically quite false so to depict the language 
 of the external world as if it set free only a sensation of 
 colour or of sound, and provoked neither ideas, concepts, not 
 judgments. Impressionism in literature is an example of that 
 atavism which we have noticed as the most distinctive feature 
 in the mental life of degenerates. It carries back the human 
 mind to its brute-beginnings, and the artistic activity of its 
 present high differentiation to an embryonic state; that state in 
 which all the arts (which were later to emerge and diverge) lay 
 side by side inchoate and inseparate. Consider, as an example, 
 these impressionist descriptions by the brothers De Goncourt : 
 ' Above it a great cloud lowered, a heavy mass of a sombre 
 purple, a scud from the north. . . . This cloud rose and ended
 
 486 DEGENERATION 
 
 in sharp rents against a brightness where pale green merged 
 into rose. Then the sky became dull, of the colour of tin, 
 swept by fragments of other gray clouds. . . . Beyond the 
 softly-swaying pinetops, under which the broad garden walk 
 could be seen bare, leafless, red, almost carmine, . . . the eye 
 took in the whole space between the dome of the Salpetriere 
 and the mass of the Observatory ; first, a great plane of shadow 
 resembling a wash of Indian ink on a red ground, a zone of 
 warm bituminous tones, burnt with those frost-touched reds 
 and those wintry glows that are found on an English artist's 
 water - colour palette ; then, in the infinite delicacy of a 
 degraded tint, a whitish streak arose, a milky nacreous vapour, 
 pierced by the bright tones of new buildings.' ' The delicate 
 tones of an old man's complexion played on the yellowish and 
 bluish pink of his face. Through his tender, wrinkled ears 
 ears of paper interwoven by filaments the day in passing; 
 became orange.' ' The air, streaked with water, had an over- 
 wash of that violet blue with which the painter imitates the 
 transparency of thick glass. . . . The first vivid smile of 
 green began on the black branches of the trees, where, like 
 strokes from a brush, touches of spring could be discerned 
 leaving behind it light coatings of green dust.'* 
 
 Such is the procedure of impressionism. The writer gives 
 himself the air of a painter ; he professes to seize the phe- 
 nomenon, not as a concept, but to feel it as simple sense- 
 stimulation. He writes down the names of colours as an. 
 artist lays on his washes, and he imagines that he has here- 
 with given the reader a particularly strong impression of reality. 
 But it is a childish illusion, for the reader, nevertheless, comes 
 to see no colours, but merely words. He has to transform 
 these names of colours, like every other word, into images, 
 and with the same mental effort he would procure himself a. 
 much livelier impression if, instead of heavily enumerating to- 
 him one after another of the optical elements of the phenomenon, 
 the phenomenon were presented to him ready elaborated into- 
 a concept. M. Zola has borrowed this absurdity from the 
 De Goncourt brothers with some exactitude, but it was not 
 he who invented it. 
 
 Another of his originalities is said to be the observation 
 and reproduction of the milieu, the environment," human and 
 material, of the persons represented. Coming after the indul- 
 gence in useless description, and after impressionism, the 
 theory of the ' milieu ' produces a most comical effect, since 
 it is the exact contrary of the psychological theory which forms 
 the point of departure of impressionism and of the mania for 
 * Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Manettc Solomon. Paris, 1876, pp. 3, 
 145, I9-
 
 REALISM 487 
 
 description. The impressionist places himself over against 
 some phenomenon as a mere sense, as photographer or phono- 
 graphist, etc. He registers the nerve-vibrations. He denies 
 himself all higher comprehension, the elaboration of percep- 
 tions into concepts, and the classification of the concepts in 
 the experiences which, as general knowledge, pre-exist in his 
 consciousness. The theorist of the ' milieu,' on the contrary, 
 systematically attributes the chief importance, not to the 
 phenomenon, but to its causal connection ; he is not a sense 
 which perceives, but a philosopher who endeavours to interpret 
 and explain according to a system. What, in fact, does the 
 theory of the 'milieu' mean? It means that the imaginative 
 writer asserts that the individuality and mode of conduct of any 
 person are a consequence of the influences that his environ- 
 ment, living or dead, exert upon him, and that he is trying to dis- 
 cover these influences, and the nature of their action on that per- 
 son. The theory in itself is right, but, again, it is not M. Zola who 
 invented it, for it is as old as philosophic thought itself. In our 
 own times, Taine has distinctly conceived and established it, and, 
 long before M. Zola, Balzac and Flaubert sought to introduce 
 its operation into their novels. And yet this theory, extremely 
 fertile as it is in anthropology and sociology, and giving, as it 
 does, an impulse to meritorious research, is in imaginative 
 writing but another error, and constitutes a confusion of kinds 
 engendered by vague thought. The task of the man of science 
 is to investigate the causes of phenomena. Sometimes he finds 
 them, frequently he does not ; often he believes he has dis- 
 covered them, till more exact observation subsequently tells 
 him he has deceived himself and must rectify his hypotheses. 
 The investigation of the conditions under which man acquires 
 his various physical and mental qualities is in full progress, but 
 is only at its commencement, and has as yet furnished extremely 
 few positive facts. We do not even know why one human 
 race is tall or another short in stature ; why this one has blue 
 eyes and fair hair, that one dark eyes and hair ; and yet these 
 are incomparably simpler, more external and more accessible 
 properties than the subtle peculiarities of mind and character^ 
 On the causes of these peculiarities we know nothing definite. 
 We can make conjectures on this subject, but, meanwhile, even 
 the most plausible of these have still the character of hypotheses,, 
 of probable, but not of verified, truth. And here the imagina- 
 tive writer would like to come upon the scene, carry off unfinished 
 scientific hypotheses, complete them by means of his own 
 fantastic conceits, and teach: ' Do you see? this man whom 
 I show you has become what he is because his parents have 
 had such and such attributes, because he has lived here or 
 there, because when a child he received such and such impres-
 
 488 DEGENERATION 
 
 sions, because he has been thus nurtured, thus educated, has 
 had such and such intercourse, etc.' He is here doing what 
 is not his office. Instead of an artistic creation he attempts to 
 give us science, and he gives us false science, since he has no 
 suspicion of the influences which really form the man, and the 
 details of the ' milieu' which he throws into relief as being the 
 causes of individual peculiarities are probably the least essential, 
 and, in any case, only a minimum portion of what, in the form- 
 ation of the personality, has played a really determining part. 
 Think of it for a moment. The one question as to the origin of 
 the criminal has produced in these last twenty years thousands 
 of books and pamphlets ; hundreds of medical men, jurists, 
 economists, and philosophers of the first rank, have devoted 
 to it the most profound and assiduous research, and we are 
 still far from being able to indicate with certainty what share 
 heredity social influences (i.e., the * milieu,' properly so called) 
 and unknown biological peculiarities of the individual, have in 
 the formation of the criminal type. And then there comes a 
 wholly ignorant writer, who, quite by himself, with the sovereign 
 infallibility claimed for himself by the author in his own pro- 
 vince, decides a question which the combined ten years' 
 labour of a whole generation of professional investigators 
 has brought but very little nearer to a solution ! This is an 
 audacity only explicable by this fact, that the writer has not 
 the very smallest idea of the weight of the task which he under- 
 takes with so light a heart. 
 
 If, in spite of this, Balzac and Flaubert seem to have pro- 
 duced excellent works with this theory of the ' milieu,' it is 
 an optical illusion. They have devoted great attention and 
 detailed descriptions to the environment of their characters 
 (especially Flaubert in Madame Bovary), and the superficial 
 reader thereby receives the impression that there exists a con- 
 nection of causality between the environment and the being 
 and doing of the personages, it being one of the most elementary 
 and tenacious peculiarities of human thought to link causally 
 one with another all phenomena which present themselves 
 simultaneously or successively. This peculiarity is one of the 
 most fruitful sources of defective conclusions, and it cannot be 
 overcome except by the most attentive observation, often even 
 only with the help of experiment. In the novels of Balzac 
 and Flaubert, where the ' milieu ' plays so great a part, the 
 'milieu,' in fact, explains nothing. For the personages who 
 move in the same ' milieu ' are, notwithstanding, wholly different. 
 Everyone reacts on the influences of the ' milieu ' in his own 
 particular way. This distinctive character mast be the datum, 
 it cannot be the result, of the ' milieu.' The latter has, at 
 most, the significance of an immediate proximate cause, but the
 
 REALISM 489 
 
 most remote causes of the effect in question are found in the 
 distinctive character of the personality, and on the latter, the 
 * milieu' that the poet depicts gives us no real enlightenment. 
 
 On the pretension of M. Zola and his partisans, that his novels 
 are ' slices from real life ' (tranches de vie), it is useless to linger. 
 We have seen above that M. Zola is far from being capable 
 of transcribing in his novels life as real and as a whole. Like 
 all the imaginative writers before him, he also makes a choice ; 
 from a million thoughts of his personages, he reproduces one 
 only; from ten thousand functions and actions, one only ; from 
 years of their life, some minutes, or merely seconds ; his sup- 
 posed ' slice from life ' is a condensed and rearranged con- 
 spectus of life, artificially ordered according to a definite design, 
 and full of gaps. Like all other imaginative writers, he also 
 makes his choice according to his particular personal inclina- 
 tions, and the only difference is that these inclinations, which 
 we shall at once recognise, are very dissimilar from those of 
 other writers. 
 
 M. Zola calls his novels 'human documents' and 'experi- 
 mental novels.' I have already, thirteen years ago, expressed 
 myself so fully on this double pretension, that I have now 
 nothing more to add to what I said then. Does he think that 
 his novels are serious documents from which science can 
 borrow facts ? What childish folly ! Science can have nothing 
 to do with fiction. She has no need of invented persons and 
 actions, however ben trovati they may be ; but she wants beings 
 who have lived, and actions which have taken place. The 
 novel treats of individual destinies, or at most those of families ; 
 science has need of information on the destinies of millions. 
 Police reports, lists of imposts, tables of commerce, statistics 
 of crimes and suicides, information on the prices of provisions, 
 salaries, the mean duration of human life, the marriage rate, 
 the birth rate, legitimate and illegitimate these are ' human 
 documents.' From them we learn how people live, whether 
 they progress, whether they are happy or unhappy, pure or 
 corrupt. The history of civilization, when it wants facts, puts 
 M. Zola's entertaining novels aside as of no account, and has 
 recourse to tedious statistical tables. And a very much more 
 singular whim still is his 'experimental novel.' This term 
 would prove that M. Zola, if he employs it in good faith, does 
 not even suspect the nature of scientific experiment. He 
 thinks he has made an experiment when he invents neuro- 
 pathic personages, places them in imaginary conditions, and 
 makes them perform imaginary actions. A scientific experi- 
 ment is an intelligent question addressed to Nature, and to 
 which Nature must reply, and not the questioner himself. 
 M. Zola also puts questions. But to whom ? To Nature ?
 
 490 DEGENERATION 
 
 No; to his own imagination. And his answers are to have 
 the force of proof. The result of scientific experiment is 
 constraining. Every man in possession of his senses can 
 perceive it. The results at which M. Zola arrives in his 
 pretended ' experiment ' do not exist objectively ; they exist 
 only in his imagination ; they are not facts, but assertions, 
 in which every man can believe, or not, at his pleasure. 
 The difference between experiments, and what M. Zola calls 
 such, is so great that it is difficult for me to impute the 
 abusive application of the term to ignorance only, or to in- 
 capacity for thought. I believe rather in a conscious pre- 
 meditated snare. The appearance of M. Zola occurred at 
 a time when mysticism was not yet the fashion in France, 
 and when the favourite catch-words of the writing and gossiping 
 gang were positivism and natural science. In order to recom- 
 mend himself to the masses, a man had to represent himself 
 as a positivist and as scientific. Grocers, hotel-keepers, small 
 inventors, etc., have everywhere and always the habit of 
 decorating their sign-boards or their produce with a name 
 which is connected with an idea dominant with the public. 
 At the present day a hotel-keeper or a tradesman recommends 
 his house or his shop by such titles as ' The Progress ' or 
 ' International Commerce ;' and a manufacturer extols his 
 goods as ' Electric ' braces or ' Magnetic ' ink. We have seen 
 that the Nietzscheans designate their tendency as ' psycho- 
 physiological.' In the same way Zola long before them hung 
 out the catch-word sign to his novels ' Y e scientificke experi- 
 mente.' But his novels had no more visible connection with 
 natural science and experiment than the ink above mentioned 
 with magnetism, and the braces with electricity. 
 
 M. Zola boasts of his method of work; all his books 
 emanate from ' observation.' The truth is that he has never 
 ' observed ; ' that he has never, following Goethe, ' plunged into 
 the full tide of human life,' but has always remained shut up 
 in a world of paper, and has drawn all his subjects out of his 
 own brain, all his ' realistic ' details from newspapers and 
 books read uncritically. I need only recall a few cases in 
 which his sources have been placed within his reach. All the 
 information o"n the life, manners, habits, and language of the 
 Parisian workmen in L'Assommoir are borrowed from a study 
 by M. Denis Poulot, Le Sublime. The adventure of Une Page 
 d 1 Amour is taken from the MJmoires de Casanova. Certain 
 features in which the masochism or passivism of Count Muffat 
 is declared in Nana, M. Zola found in a quotation from Taine 
 relative to the Venice Preserved of Thomas Otway.* The scene 
 of the confinement, in La Joie de Vivre, the description of the 
 
 * F. Brunetifcre, 'op. '/., p. 1 53.
 
 REALISM 491 
 
 Mass, in La 'F ante de I'Abbe Mouret, etc., are copied word for 
 word from an obstetric manual and a Mass-book. One reads 
 sometimes in the newspapers very pretentious statements of 
 the ' studies ' to which M. Zola gives himself up when he under- 
 takes a new novel. These ' studies ' consist, on his part, in 
 making a visit to the Bourse when he wishes to write on 
 speculation, in undertaking a trip on a locomotive when he 
 desires to describe the working of a railway, in once casting a 
 glance round some available bedroom when he means to depict 
 the mode of life of the Parisian cocottes. Such a manner 
 of ' observation ' resembles that of a traveller who passes 
 through a country in an express train. He may perceive some 
 external details, he may notice some scenes and arrange them 
 later in descriptions rich in colour, if wholly inaccurate ; but 
 he learns nothing of the real and essential peculiarities of the 
 country, and the life and ways of its inhabitants. Like all 
 degenerates, M. Zola, too, is a complete stranger to the world 
 in which he lives. His eyes are never directed towards 
 nature or humanity, but only to his own ' Ego.' He has no 
 first-hand knowledge of anything, but acquires, by second or 
 third hand, all that he knows of the world or life. Flaubert 
 has created, in Bouvard et Pecuchet, the characters of two 
 blockheads, who, with unsuspecting ingenuousness, attack 
 all the arts and sciences, and imagine they have acquired 
 them when they have dipped into, or, more correctly, have 
 skimmed through, the first book on the subject which falls 
 into their hands. Zola is an ' observer ' of the Bouvard et 
 Pecuchet species, and on reading Flaubert's posthumous novel 
 one is tempted to believe in places that when describing the 
 ' studies ' of his heroes he was thinking, at least amongst 
 others, of Zola. 
 
 I think I have shown that M. Zola has not the priority in 
 any one of the peculiarities which constitute his method. For 
 all of them he has had models, and some few are as old as the 
 world. The supposed realism, mania for description, impres- 
 sionism, the emphasis on the 'milieu,' the human document, the 
 slices of life all these are so many aesthetic and psychological 
 errors, but Zola has not even the doubtful merit of having 
 conceived them. The only thing he has invented is the word 
 ' naturalism,' substituted by him for ' realism ' (the sole term 
 in vogue till then), and the expression 'experimental, novel,' 
 which means absolutely nothing, but possesses a piquant little 
 smattering of science which Zola's public, at the period when 
 this novelist made his appearance, felt as an agreeable 
 seasoning. 
 
 The only real and true things contained in M. Zola's novels 
 are the little traits borrowed by him from the items of news in
 
 492 DEGENERATION 
 
 the daily papers and from technical works. But these also 
 become false from the lack of criticism and taste with' which 
 he employs them. In fact, in order that the borrowed detail 
 should remain faithful to reality, it must preserve its right 
 relation to the whole phenomenon, and this is what never 
 happens with M. Zola.. To quote only two examples. In 
 Pot-Douille, among the inhabitants of a single house in the Rue 
 de Choiseul, he brings to pass in the space of a few months 
 all the infamous things he has learnt in the course of thirty 
 years, by reports from his acquaintances, by cases in courts 
 of law, and various facts from newspapers about apparently 
 honourable bourgeois families ; in La Terre, all the vices im- 
 puted to the French peasantry or rustic people in general, he 
 crams into the character and conduct of a few inhabitants of 
 a small village in Beauce ; he may in these cases have supported 
 every detail by cuttings from newspapers or jottings, but the 
 , whole is not the less monstrously and ridiculously untrue. 
 
 The self-styled innovator who, it is asserted, has invented 
 hitherto unknown methods of construction and exposition in 
 the province of the novel, is in reality a pupil of the French 
 romanticists, from whom he has appropriated and employed 
 all the tricks of the trade, and whose tradition he carries on, 
 walking in the straight road of historical continuity, without 
 interruption and without deviation. This is what is most clearly 
 proved by the descriptions, which reflect not the world, but the 
 view that the poet is capable of taking of the world. I will quote, 
 for the sake of comparison, some characteristic passages from 
 Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo, and from different novels 
 by Zola, which will show the reader that both could be very 
 easily confounded, the self-styled inventor of 'naturalism' and the 
 extreme romanticist. ' The broom ransacked the corners with 
 an irritated growling.' ' The Kyrie Eleison ran like a shiver 
 into this kind of stable.' ' The pulpit . . . stood in front of 
 a clock with weights, enclosed in a walnut wood case, and the 
 hollow vibrations of which shook the whole church, like the 
 beatings of an enormous heart, hidden somewhere beneath 
 the flag-stones.' ' The rays [of the sun], more and more 
 horizontal, withdraw slowly from the pavement of the square, 
 and mount perpendicularly along the gabled front, making its 
 thousand bas-reliefs spring out from their shadow, while the 
 great central rose-window blazes like a Cyclop's eye inflamed 
 by the glow of the forge.' ' When the priest . . . quitted the 
 altar . . . the sun remained sole master of the church. It 
 had rested in its turn on the altar cloth, illuminated the door 
 of the tabernacle with splendour, celebrating the fruitful 
 promise of May. A warmth arose from the flag-stones. The 
 whitewashed walls, the great Virgin, the great Christ himself,
 
 REALISM 493 
 
 took on a shiver of vital sap [!], as if death had been van- 
 quished by the eternal youth of the earth.' * In a crevice of 
 this spout two pretty gilliflowers in blossom, shaken and 
 animated by the breath of the air, made sportive salutations 
 to each other.' 'At one of the windows a great service-tree 
 reared itself, throwing its branches across the broken panes, 
 extending its shoots as if to look within.' ' Towards the east, 
 the morning breeze chased some white flocks of down across 
 the sky, torn from the foggy fleece of the hills/ ' The closed 
 windows slept. Some few, here and there, brightly lit, opened 
 their eyes, and seemed to make certain corners squint.' 
 * Already some whiffs of smoke were disgorged here and there 
 over all that surface of roofs, as by the fissures of an immense 
 sulphur-kiln.' ' A miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, ashamed, 
 which seems always afraid of being caught in flagrante delicto, 
 so quickly does it disappear after having given its blow.' ' The 
 alembic went on dully, without a flame, or any gaiety in the 
 extinct reflexions of its coppers, letting flow its alcoholic sweat, 
 like a slow and obstinate spring, which should end by invading 
 the rooms, spreading over the boulevards without inundating 
 the immense hollow of JParis.' ' At the barrier, the hard-like 
 trampling went on in the cold of the morning. . . . This crowd, 
 from a distance, was a chalky blur, a neutral tone, in which 
 a faded blue and dirty gray predominated. Occasionally, a 
 workman stopped short . . . while around him the others 
 walked on, without a smile, without a word to a comrade, 
 with cadaverous cheeks, faces turned towards Paris, which, one 
 by one, devoured them by the gaping street of the Faubourg 
 Poissonniere.' ' And then, as he dived farther into the street, leg- 
 less cripples, blind and lame men multiplied around him ; the 
 one-armed and the one-eyed, and the lepers with their wounds, 
 some coming from the houses, some from the adjacent small 
 streets, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing, 
 screaming, all limpingly, lamely, rushing towards the light, and 
 wallowing in the mire like snails after rain.' ' The square . . . 
 presented . . . the appearance of a sea, in which five or six 
 streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged new waves 
 of heads at every instant. . . . The great stairs, ascended 
 and descended without intermission by a double stream . . . 
 flowed incessantly into the square, like a cascade into a lake.' 
 ' The flickering brightness of the flames made them appear to 
 move. There were serpents which had the appearance of 
 laughing, gargoyles that one seemed to hear yelping, salaman- 
 ders which breathed in the fire, dragons which sneezed in the 
 smoke.' ' And the steam-engine, ten paces off, went on steadily 
 breathing, steadily spitting from its scorched metal throat.' 
 ' These were no longer the cold windows of the morning ; now
 
 494 DEGENERATION 
 
 they appeared as if warmed and vibrating with internal tremor. 
 There were people looking at them, women, standing still, 
 squeezing against the plate-glass, quite a crowd brutalized by 
 covetousness. And the stuffs seemed alive in this passion of 
 the pavement : the laces shivered, fell back and hid the depths 
 cf the shop, with a disquieting air of mystery.' It would be 
 easy to extend these comparisons to some hundreds of pages. 
 I have indulged in the little joke of not adding the author's 
 name to the passages quoted. By the nature of the object 
 described the specially attentive reader will perhaps be able 
 to guess in one or another of these quotations, whether they 
 are from Victor Hugo or from Emile Zola.; I have tried to 
 facilitate the matter by borrowing the passages by Victor Hugo 
 from the Notre Dame de Paris alone ; but the greatest number 
 he will certainly not know to whom to attribute until I 
 tell him that examples three, five, seven, nine, ten, thirteen, 
 fourteen, and fifteen, are from Victor Hugo, and all the others 
 from Zola. 
 
 This is because the latter is an out-and-out romanticist in 
 his way of envisaging the world and in his artistic method. 
 He constantly practises in the most extensive and intensive 
 fashion that atavistic anthropomorphism and symbolism, con- 
 sequent on undeveloped or mystically confused thought, which 
 is found among savages in a natural form, and among the 
 whole category of degenerates in an atavistic form of mental 
 activity. Like Victor Hugo, and like second-class romanticists, 
 M. Zola sees every phenomenon monstrously magnified and 
 weirdly distorted. It becomes for him, as for the savage, a 
 fetish to which he attributes evil and hostile designs. Machines 
 are horrible monsters dreaming of destruction ; the streets of 
 Paris open the jaws of Moloch to devour the human masses; 
 a magasin de modes is an alarming, supernaturally powerful 
 being, panting, fascinating, stifling, etc. Criticism has long 
 since declared, though without comprehending the psychi- 
 atrical significance of this trait, that in every one of M. Zola's 
 novels some phenomenon dominates, like an obsession, forms 
 the main feature of the work, and penetrates, like an appalling 
 symbol, into the life and actions of all the characters. Thus, 
 in L'Assommoir, the still; in Pot-Bouille, the 'solemn stair- 
 case'; in Au Bonhcur des Dames, the draper's shop; in Nana, 
 the heroine herself, who is no ordinary harlot, but ' je ne sais 
 CjU:l monstre giant a la croupe gonflee de vices, une enorme Venus 
 p ipulaire, aussi lourdement bete.que grossierenicnt impudique, une 
 ^^PCCC d'idole hindone qui n'aseulement qu* d laisser tomber ses voiles 
 puitr faiie tomber en arret les viellards et les collegiens, et qui, par 
 i..sUints t se sent elle-meme planer sur Paris et sur le wonde.'* This 
 
 * F. Brunettere, of. cit. t p. 156.
 
 REALISM 495 
 
 symbolism we have encountered among all degenerates, among 
 symbolists properly so called, and other mystics, as well as 
 among diabolists, and principally in Ibsen. It never fails 
 in the madness of doubt or negation.* The would-be 
 * realist ' sees the sober reality as little as a superstitiously 
 timid savage, or a lunatic afflicted by hallucinations. He puts 
 into it his own mental dispositions. He disposes of pheno- 
 mena arbitrarily, so that they appear to express an idea which 
 is dominating him. He gives to inanimate objects a fantastic 
 life, and metamorphoses them into so many goblins endowed 
 with feeling, will, cunning and ideas ; but of human beings 
 he makes automata through whom a mysterious power declares 
 itself, a fatality in the ancient sense, a force of Nature, a prin- 
 ciple of destruction. His endless descriptions delineate nothing 
 but his own mental condition. No image of reality is ever 
 obtained by them, for the picture of the world is to him like a 
 freshly varnished oil-painting to which one stands too close in 
 a disadvantageous light, and in which the reflection of one's 
 own face may be discerned. 
 
 M. Zola calls his series of novels ' The Natural and Social 
 History of a Family under the Second Empire,' and he seeks 
 in this way to awaken the double idea that the Rougon- 
 Macquarts are a typical average family of the French middle 
 class, and that their history represents the general social 
 life of France in the time of Napoleon III. He expressly 
 asserts, as the fundamental principle of art, that the novelist 
 should only relate the everyday life observed by himself, f 
 I allowed myself for thirteen years to be led astray by his 
 swagger, and credulously accepted his novels as sociological 
 contributions to the knowledge of French life. Now I know 
 better. The family whose history Zola presents to us in 
 twenty mighty volumes is entirely outside normal daily life, 
 and has no necessary connection whatever with France and the 
 Second Empire. It might just as well have lived in Patagonia, 
 and at the time of the Thirty Years' War. He who ridicules 
 the ' idealists ' as being narrators of ' exceptional cases,' of 
 that which ' never happened,' has chosen for the subject of his 
 magnum opus the most exceptional case he could possibly have 
 
 * 'Everything is a mystery. Everything is a semblance. Nothing really 
 exists.' The saying of one of Arnaud's patients afflicted with the mania of 
 negation. See F. L. Arnaud, ' Sur le Delire des Negations,' Annales medico- 
 jsychologtqties, 7 e se"rie, t. xvi., p. 387 et seq. 
 
 f ' 1 would lay humanity on a white page, all things, all beings, a work 
 which would be a vast ark.' E. Zola, preface to La Faute de VAbbS 
 Mouret, edition of 1875. 'Throw yourself into the commonplace current of 
 existence.' ' Choose for your hero a person in the simplicity of daily life. 1 
 *Mo hollow apotheoses, no grand false sentiments, no ready-made formulae. 
 E. Zola, Le Roman experimental, passim.
 
 496 DEGENERATION 
 
 found a group of degenerates, lunatics, criminals, prostitutes, 
 and ' mattoids,' whose morbid nature places them apart from 
 the species ; who do not belong to a regular society, but are 
 expelled from it, and at strife with it ; who conduct themselves 
 as complete strangers to their epoch and country, and are, by 
 their manner of existence, not members of any modern civilized 
 people whatever, but belong to a horde of primitive wild men of 
 bygone ages. M. Zola affirms that he describes life as he has 
 observed it, and persons he has seen. He has in reality seen 
 nothing and observed nothing, but has drawn the idea of his 
 magnum opus, all the details of his plan, all the characters of his 
 twenty novels, solely from one printed source, remaining hitherto 
 unknown to all his critics, a characteristic circumstance due to 
 the fact that not one of them possesses the least knowledge of the 
 literature of mental therapeutics. There is in France a family 
 of the name of Kerangal, who came originally from Saint- 
 Brieuc, in Brittany, and whose history has for the last sixty 
 years filled the annals of criminal justice and mental therapeu- 
 tics. In two generations it has hitherto produced, to the 
 knowledge of the authorities, seven murderers and murderesses, 
 nine persons who have led an immoral life (one the keeper of 
 a disorderly house, one a prostitute who was at the same time 
 an incendiary, committed incest, and was condemned for a 
 public outrage on modesty, etc.), and besides all these, a 
 painter, a poet, an architect, an actress, several who were 
 blind, and one musician.* The history of this Kerangal family 
 has supplied M. Zola with material for all his novels. \Yhat 
 would never have been afforded him in the life he really knows 
 he found ready to his hand in the police and medical reports 
 on the Krangals, viz., an abundant assortment of the most 
 execrable crimes, the most unheard-of adventures, and the 
 maddest and most disordered careers, permeated by artistic in- 
 clinations which make the whole particularly piquant. If any 
 common fabricator of newspaper novels had had the luck to 
 discover the treasure he would probably have made a hash of 
 the subject. M. Zola, with his great power and his sombre 
 emotionalism, has known how to profit very effectively by it. 
 Nevertheless, the subject he broaches is the roman du colportage, 
 i.e., of a perishing romanticism which transports his dreams 
 into no palaces like the flourishing romanticism, but into dens, 
 prisons, and lunatic asylums, which are quite as far from the 
 
 * The family of Kerangal has been the subject of many works, and is well 
 known in technical literature. The last published work on them is due to 
 Dr. Paul Aubry : ' Une Famille de Crim'meh,' Anna/ex medico- psyckoloriques, 
 7 e sdries, t. xvi., p. 429 (reproduced in La Contagion, du A/etirtre, by the 
 same author ; Paris, 1894). See especially, pp. 432, 433, the curious genealo- 
 gical tree of the family, in which Zola's celebrated genealogical tree of the 
 Rougon-Macquart and the Quenu-Gradelle can be immediately recognised.
 
 REALISM 497 
 
 middle stratum of sane life as the latter, only in an opposite 
 direction, tending not upwards, but downwards. But if 
 M. Zola has infinitely more talent than the German roman- 
 ticists, to whom we owe such works as Rinaldo Rinaldini, Dig. 
 blutige Nonne inn Mitternacht, Der Scharfrichter vom Schrecken- 
 stein, etc., he has, on the other hand, infinitely less honesty 
 than they. For they, at least, admit that they relate the 
 most marvellous and unique horrors of their kind, while Zola 
 issues his chronicles of criminals and madmen, the fruits of 
 his reading, as a normal account of French society, drawn 
 from the observation of daily life. 
 
 By choosing his subject in the domain of the most extraor- 
 dinary and most exceptional, by the childish or crazy symbo- 
 lism and anthropomorphism displayed in his extremely unreal 
 survey of the world, the ' realist ' Zola'proves himself to be the 
 immediate descendant in a direct line of the romanticists. 
 His works are distinguished from those of his literary ancestors 
 by only two peculiarities, which M. Brunetiere has well dis- 
 cerned, viz., by 'pessimism and premeditated coarseness.'* 
 These peculiarities of M. Zola furnish us finally with a charac- 
 teristic sign also of so-called realism or naturalism, which we 
 should have in vain attempted to discover by psychological 
 aesthetic, historical, and literary inquiries. Naturalism, which 
 has nothing to do with Nature or reality, is, taken all in all, 
 the premeditated worship of pessimism and obscenity. 
 
 Pessimism, as a philosophy, is the last remains of the super- 
 stition of primitive times, which looked upon man as the 
 centre and end of the universe. It is one of the philosophic 
 forms of ego-mania. All the objections of pessimist philoso- 
 phers to Nature and life have but one meaning, if their premise 
 be correct as to the sovereignty of man in the Cosmos. When 
 the philosopher says, Nature is irrational, Nature is immoral,. 
 Nature is cruel, what is this, in other words, but : I do not 
 understand Nature, and yet she is only there that I may under- 
 stand her ; Nature does not consider what is for my utility 
 alone, and yet she has no other task than to be useful to me ; 
 Nature grants me but a short period of existence, often crossed 
 by troubles, and yet it is her duty to make provision for the 
 eternity of my life and my continual joys ? When Oscar 
 Wilde is indignant that Nature makes no difference between 
 himself and the grazing ox, we smile at his childishness. But 
 have Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Mainlander, Bahnsen, done 
 anything more than inflate into thick books Oscar Wilde's 
 ingenuous self-conceit? and that. with terrible seriousness. 
 Philosophic pessimism has the geocentric conception of the 
 world as its postulate. It stands and falls with the Ptolemaic 
 
 * Brunetiere, op. czt. t p. iii. 
 
 32
 
 49 3 DEGENERATION 
 
 doctrine. As soon as we recognise the Ccpernican point of 
 view we lose the right, and also the desire to apply to Nature 
 the measure of cur logic, our morals, and cur own advantage, 
 and there ceases to be any meaning in calling it irrational,, 
 immoral, or cruel. 
 
 But what is also true is that pessimism is net a philosophy, 
 but a temperament. ' The systemic or crganic sensations 
 which arise from the simultaneous states of the several organs, 
 digestive, respiratory, etc.,' says Professor James Sully, 'appear, 
 as Professor Ferrier has lately pointed cut, to be the basis of 
 our emotional life. When the condition of these organs is a 
 healthy one, and their functions vigorous, the psychical result 
 is an undiscriminated mass of agreeable feeling. When the 
 state of the organs is unhealthy, and their functions feeble or 
 impeded, the psychical result is a similar mass of disagreeable 
 feeling.'* Pessimism is always the form under which the 
 patient becomes conscious of certain morbid conditions, and 
 first and foremost of his nervous exhaustion. Tcedium vitce, 
 or disgust of life, is an early premoniticn of insanity, and con- 
 stantly accompanies neurasthenia and hysteria. It is evident 
 that a period which suffers from general organic fatigue must 
 necessarily be a pessimistic period. We recognise also the 
 constant habit which consciousness has of inventing, post facto f 
 apparently plausible motives, borrowed from its store of repre- 
 sentations, and in conformity with the rules of its formal logic, 
 to justify the emotional states of which it has acquired the 
 knowledge. Thus, for the datum of the pessimistic disposition 
 of mind, which is the consequence of organic fatigue, there 
 arises the pessimist philosophy as an ulterior creation of 
 interpretative consciousness. In Germany, in conformity with 
 the speculative tendency and high intellectual culture of the 
 German people, this state of mind has sought expression in 
 philosophical systems. In France it has adopted an artistic 
 form in accordance with the predominating aesthetic character 
 of the national mind. M. Emile Zola and his naturalism are the 
 French equivalent of the German Schopenhauer and his philo- 
 sophical pessimism. That naturalism should see nothing in 
 the world but brutality, infamy, ugliness, and corruption, 
 corresponds with all that we know of the laws of thought. 
 We know that the association of ideas is strongly influenced 
 by emotion. A Zola, filled from the outset with organically 
 unpleasant sensations, perceives in the world those phenomena 
 alone which accord with his organically fundamental disposi- 
 tion, and does not notice or take into consideration those 
 which differ from or contradict it. And from the associated 
 
 * James Sully, Pessimism: A History and a Criticism. London, 1877, 
 p. 411.
 
 REALISM 499 
 
 ideas which every perception awakens in him, consciousness 
 likewise only retains the disagreeable, which are in sympathy 
 with the fundamentally sour disposition, and suppresses the 
 others. Zola's novels do not prove that things are badly 
 managed in this world, but merely that Zola's nervous system 
 is out of order. 
 
 His predilection also for coarseness is a well-known morbid 
 phenomenon. ' They ' (the imbeciles), says Sollier, ' love to 
 talk of obscenities. . . . This is a peculiar tendency of mind 
 observable specially among degenerates ; it is as natural to 
 them as a wholesome " tone " is to normal minds.'* Gilles 
 de la Tourette has coined the word ' coprolalia ' (mucktalk) 
 for obsessional explosions of blasphemies and obscenities 
 which characterize a malady described most exhaustively by 
 M. Catrou, and called by him 'disease of convulsive tics.''f' 
 M. Zola is affected by coprolalia to a very high degree. It is 
 a necessity for him to employ foul expressions, and his con- 
 sciousness is continually pursued by representations referring 
 to ordure, abdominal functions, and everything connected with 
 them. Andreas Verga described some years ago a form of 
 onomatomania, or word -madness, which he called mania 
 blasphematoria, or oath-madness. It is manifested when the 
 patient experiences an irresistible desire to utter curses or 
 blasphemies. Verga's diagnosis applies completely to Zola. It 
 can only be interpreted as mania blasphematoria, when in La 
 Terre he gives the nickname of Jesus Christ to a creature 
 afflicted with flatulency, and that without any artistic necessity 
 or any aiming thereby at aesthetic effect either of cheerfulness 
 or of local colour. Finally, he has a striking predilection for 
 slang, for the professional language of thieves and bullies, etc., 
 which he does not only employ when making personages of 
 this kind speak, but makes use of himself, as an author, in de- 
 scriptions or reflections. This inclination for slang is expressly 
 noticed by Lombroso as an indication of degeneration in the 
 born criminal.^ 
 
 The confusion of thought which is shown in his theoretic 
 writings, in his invention of the word ' naturalism,' in his 
 conception of the ' experimental novel,' his instinctive inclina- 
 tion to depict demented persons, criminals, prostitutes, and 
 semi-maniacs, his anthropomorphism and his symbolism, his 
 
 * Dr. Paul Sollier, Psychologic de I' Idiot et de I' Imbecile. Paris, 1891, 
 
 P- 95- 
 
 f Catrou, Etude sur la Maladie des Tics convulsifs (Jumping, Latab, 
 Myriachit). Paris, 1890. 
 
 i Lombroso, U Uomo delinquente, etc., pp. 45o->48o. 
 
 His descriptions of impulsive criminals are not really exact. The laity 
 have greatly admired his description of the assassin Lantier in La Bete 
 hmnaine. The most competent judge in such matters, however, Lombroso,
 
 *oo DEGENERATION 
 
 pessimism, his coprolalia, and his predilection for slang, 
 sufficiently characterize M. Zola as a high-class degenerate. 
 But he shows in addition some peculiarly characteristic 
 stigmata, which completely establish the diagnosis. 
 
 That he is a sexual psychopath is betrayed on every page 
 of his novels. He revels continually in representations from 
 the region of the basest sensuality, and interweaves them in 
 all the events of his novels without being able in any way to 
 assign an artistic reason for this forced introduction. His 
 consciousness is peopled with images of unnatural vice, 
 bestiality, passivism, and other aberrations, and he is not 
 satisfied with lingering libidinously over human acts of such 
 a nature, but he even produces pairing animals (see La Terre, 
 pp. 9, 10). The sight of a woman's linen produces a peculiar 
 excitation in him, and he can never speak without betray- 
 ing, by the emotional colouring of his descriptions, that re- 
 presentations of this kind are voluptuously accentuated in 
 him. This effect of female linen on degenerates affected by 
 sexual psychopathy is well known in mental therapeutics, and 
 has often been described by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and 
 others.* 
 
 .Connected with the sexual psychopathy of M. Zola is the 
 part played in him by the olfactory sensations. The pre- 
 dominance of the sense of smell and its connection with the 
 sexual life is very striking among many degenerates. Scents 
 acquire a high importance in their works. Tolstoi (in War 
 and Peace) represents to us Prince Pierre suddenly deciding 
 on marrying the Princess Helene when he smells her fragrance 
 at a ball.f In the narrative entitled The Cossacks he never 
 
 says of this character, which has been inspired in M. Zola, according to his 
 own declaration, by UUomo delinquente : ' M. Zola, in my opinion, has 
 never observed criminals in real life. . . . His criminal characters give me 
 the impression of the wanness and inaccuracy of certain photographs which 
 reproduce portraits, not from Nature, but from pictures.' Le piu recenti 
 scoperte ed applicazioni della psichiatria ed antropologia criminate. Con 
 3 tavole e ^figure nel testo. Torino, 1893, p. 356. 
 
 * Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, etc., 3 Auflage ; Stutt- 
 gart, 1888. Beobachtung 23, Zippes Fall, s. 55 ; Beobachtung 24, Passow's 
 Fall, s. 56 ; Aum. zu s. 57, Lombroso's Fall. 
 
 Ccesare Lombroso, Le piu recenti scoperte, etc., p. 227 : ' He always had 
 voluptuous sensations on seeing animals killed, or in perceiving in shops 
 feminine under-garments and linen.' The case of which Lombroso here 
 speaks is that of a degenerate of fifteen years old, who had been observed by 
 Dr. MacDonald, of Clark University. 
 
 f Ldon Tolstoi, GLuvres completes, p. 385 : ' He smelt the warmth of her 
 body, inhaled the odour of her perfumes . . . and at this moment Pierre 
 understood that not only might Helene become his wife, but that she must 
 become so that nothing else was possible.' It is related that the King of 
 France, Henri III., married Marie of Cleves because, at the wedding of the 
 King of Navarre and his sister, Marguerite of Valois, wishing to dry his face 
 in the chemise wet with the perspiration of the young princess, he was so
 
 REALISM 501 
 
 mentions the uncle leroschka without speaking of the smell 
 he emitted.* We have seen in the previous chapters with 
 what satisfaction the Diabolists and Decadents, Baudelaire, 
 Huysmans, etc., lingered on odours, and especially on bad 
 odours. M. Banes makes his little princess say, in L'Ennemi 
 des Lois : ' I go every morning to the stables. Oh, that 
 little stabley smell, so warm and pleasant ! And she inhaled 
 with a pretty [!] sensual expression. . . .'t M. de Goncourt 
 describes, in La Faustin, how the actress lets her Lord 
 Annandale smell her bosom : ' " Smell ! What do you smell ?" 
 she asked Lord Annandale. " Why, carnations !" he replied, 
 tasting it with his lips. " And what else ?" " Your skin !" '{ 
 M. A. Binet declares that ' it is the odours of the human body 
 which are the causes responsible for a certain number of 
 marriages contracted by clever men with female subordinates 
 belonging to their households. For certain men, the most 
 essential thing in a woman is not beauty, mind, or elevation 
 of character ; it is her smell. The pursuit of the beloved odour 
 determines them to pursue some ugly, old, vicious, degraded 
 woman. Carried to this point, the pleasure in smell becomes 
 a malady of love' a malady, I will add, from which only 
 the degenerate suffer. The examples that Binet quotes in 
 the course of his work, and which can be there referred to, 
 as I have no inclination to repeat them here, prove this 
 abundantly ; and Krafft-Ebing, while insisting on the ' close 
 connection between the sexual and the olfactory sense,' never- 
 theless expressly declares : ' At all events, the perceptions of 
 smell play a very subordinate part within the physiological 
 limits (i.e., within the limits of the healthy life). !| Even after 
 the abstraction of its sexual significance, the development of 
 the sense of smell among degenerates, not only of the higher, 
 but even of the lowest type, has struck many observers. 
 Seguin speaks of ' idiots who discriminated species of woods 
 and stones merely by smell without having recourse to sight, 
 and who, nevertheless, were not disagreeably affected by the 
 smell and taste of human ordure, and whose sense of touch 
 was obtuse and unequal.'IT 
 
 intoxicated by the scent which emanated from it, that he had no rest till he 
 had won her who had borne it. See Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sevualis, 
 p. 17. 
 
 * Leon Tolstoi, CEuvres completes, t. ii., p. 385 : ' With him there had 
 come into the room a strong, but not disagreeable, smell,' etc. 
 
 t Maurice Barres, DEnnemi des Lois, p. 47. 
 
 % Edmond de Goncourt, La Faustin. Paris, 1882, p. 267. 
 
 Alfred Binet, Le Fetichisme dans V Amour, etc., p. 26. This passage 
 will make the German reader think of the sniffer' of souls, G. Jaeger; I have 
 no occasion to mention him here. 
 
 || Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathic Sexualis, p. 15, foot-note, p. 17. 
 
 \ E. Se"guin, Traitement morale, Hygiene et Education des Idiots. Paris, 
 1846.
 
 5oa DEGENERATION 
 
 M. Zola's case belongs to this series. He shows at times art 
 unhealthy predominance of the sensations of smell in his con- 
 sciousness, and a perversion of the olfactory sense which make 
 the worst odours, especially those of all human excretions, 
 appear to him particularly agreeable and sensually stimulating. 
 The inspector of the Montpellier Academy, Leopold Bernard, 
 has taken the trouble, in an elaborate work which, curiously, 
 has remained almost unknown* to bring together all the 
 passages in Zola's novels which touch on the question of 
 odours, and to show that men and things do not present them- 
 selves to him as to normal individuals, viz., in the first instance 
 as optical and acoustic phenomena, but as olfactory percep- 
 tions. He characterizes all his personages by their smell. In 
 La Faute de I'Abb/ Mouret, Albine appears ' like a great nosegay 
 of strong scent.' Serge, at the seminary, was ' a lily whose 
 sweet scent charmed his masters ' (! !) D6siree ' smells of 
 health.' Nana ' degage une odeur de vie, line toute-puissance de 
 femme.' In Pot-Bouille, Bachelard exhales ' une odeur de 
 d6bauche canaille'; Madame Camyardon has 'a good fresh 
 perfume of autumn fruit.' In Le Venire de Paris, Fran9oise 
 ' smells of earth, hay, the open air, the open sky.' In the same 
 novel the ' cheese-symphony ' occurs, as celebrated among 
 Zola's enthusiasts as the minute description of the variety of 
 offensive smells of the dirty linen in L'Assommoir. 
 
 To the ' comprehensives ' whom we have learnt to know, 
 this insistence on the odours emitted by men and things is 
 naturally one more merit and perfection. A poet who scents 
 so well and receives through the nose such rich impressions of 
 the world, is ' a more keenly vibrating instrument of observa- 
 tion,' and his art in representing things is more many-sided 
 than that of poets who reproduce their impressions from 
 fewer senses. Why should the sense of smell be neglected in 
 poetry ? Has it not the same rights as all the other senses ? 
 And thereupon they rapidly built an aesthetic theory which, as 
 we have seen, induces Huysmans' Des Esseintes to compose 
 a symphony of perfumes, and prompts the Symbolists to 
 accompany the recital of their compositions on the stage with 
 odours, which they pretend are assorted to the contents of the 
 verses. The ' comprehensive ' drivellers do not for a moment 
 suspect that they are simply fencing with the march of organic 
 evolution in the animal kingdom. It does not depend on the 
 good pleasure of a being to construct for himself his idea of 
 the external world with the help of a group of such or such sense- 
 perceptions. In this respect he is completely subservient to 
 the conformation of his nervous system. The senses which 
 predominate are those which his being utilizes in acquiring 
 
 * L. Bernard, Le Odeurs dans le Romans de Zola. Montpellier, 1889.
 
 REALISM 503 
 
 knowledge. The undeveloped or insufficiently developed senses 
 help the brain little or not at all, to know and understand 
 the world. To the vulture and condor the world is a picture ; 
 to the bat and the mole it is a sound and a tactile sensation ; to 
 the dog it is a collection of smells. Concerning the sense of 
 smell in particular, it has its central seat in the so-called 
 olfactory lobe of the brain, which diminishes in proportion as 
 the frontal lobe is developed. The more we descend in the 
 vertebrates the greater is the olfactory, the smaller the frontal, 
 lobe. In man the olfactory lobe is quite subordinated, and 
 the frontal lobe, the presumable seat of the highest mental 
 functions, including language, greatly predominates. The 
 consequence of these anatomical relations, which evade our 
 influence, is that the sense of smell has scarcely any further 
 share in man's knowledge. He obtains his impressions of the 
 external world no longer by the nose, but principally by the 
 eye and ear. The olfactory perceptions only furnish a mini- 
 mum contribution to the concepts which are formed out of 
 ideational elements. It is only in the most limited degree 
 that smells can awaken abstract concepts, i.e., a higher and 
 complex mental activity, and stimulate their accompanying 
 emotions ; a ' symphony of perfumes ' in the Des Esseintes 
 sense can, therefore, no longer give the impression of moral 
 beauty, this being an idea which is elaborated by the centres 
 of conception. In order to inspire a man with logical sequences 
 of ideas and judgments, with abstract concepts by scents 
 alone ; to make him conceive the phenomenon of the world, 
 its changes and causes of motion, by a succession of perfumes, 
 his frontal lobe must be depressed and the olfactory lobe of a 
 dog substituted for it, and this, it must be admitted, is beyond 
 the capacity of ' comprehensive ' imbeciles, however fanati- 
 cally they may preach their aesthetic folly. Smellers among 
 degenerates represent an atavism going back, not only to the 
 primeval period of man, but infinitely more remote still, to an 
 epoch anterior to man. Their atavism retrogrades to animals 
 amongst whom sexual activity was directly excited by odoriferous 
 substances, as it is still at the present day in the muskdeer, or 
 who, like the dog, obtained their knowledge of the world by the 
 action of their noses. 
 
 The extraordinary success of Zola among his contemporaries 
 is not explained by his high qualifications as an author, that is, 
 by the extraordinary force and power of his romantic descrip- 
 tions, and by the intensity and truth of his pessimistic emotion, 
 which makes his representation of suffering and sorrow irre- 
 sistibly impressive ; but by his worst faults, his triviality and 
 lasciviousness. This can be proved by the surest of methods, 
 that of figures. Let us consult as to the diffusion of his
 
 504 DEGENERATION 
 
 different novels, the printed indications, for example, at the 
 beginning of the last edition of L'Assommoir (bearing the date 
 1893). They have been put down as follows : Of Nana, 
 160,000; La Debacle, 143,000; L'Assommoir, 127,000; La 
 Terre, 100,000 ; Germinal, 88,000 ; La Bete humaine and Le 
 Reve, each 83,000 ; Pot-Bouille, 82,000 ; as a contrast, L'CEuvre 
 55,000 ; La Joie de Vivre, 44,000 ; La Curee, 36,000 ; La Con- 
 quete de Plassans, 25,000 ; of the Contes a Ninon not even 2,000 
 copies, etc. Thus, the novels which have had the greatest 
 sale are those in which lust and bestial coarseness appear most 
 flagrantly, and the demand diminishes with mathematical 
 exactitude in proportion as the layer of obscenity, spread by 
 Zola over his work as with a mason's trowel, becomes more 
 thin and less ill-smelling. Three novels appear as an exception 
 to this rule : La Debacle, Germinal, and Le Reve. Their high 
 position as regards the number of the editions is explained 
 by the fact that the first treats of the war of 1870, the second 
 of socialism, the third of mysticism. These three works appeal 
 to the frame of mind of the period. They swim with the 
 fashionable current. But all the rest have owed their success 
 to the lowest instincts of the masses, to its brutish passion 
 for the sight of crime and voluptuousness. 
 
 M. Zola was bound to make a school first, because of his 
 successes in the book trade, which drove into his wake the 
 \vhole riff-raff of literary intriguers and plagiarists, and then 
 because of the facility with which his most striking peculiarities 
 can be imitated. His art is accessible to every bungler of 
 the day who dishonours the literary vocation by his slovenly 
 hand. An empty and mechanical enumeration of completely 
 indifferent aspects under the pretext of description exacts no 
 effort. Every porter of a brothel is capable of relating a low 
 debauch with the coarsest expressions. The only thing which 
 might offer some difficulty would be the invention of a plot, 
 the construction of a frame of action. But M. Zola, whose 
 strength does not lie in the gift of story-telling, boasts of this 
 imperfection as a special merit, and proclaims as a rule of 
 art that the poet must have nothing to relate. This rule suits 
 excellently the noxious insects who crawl behind him. Their 
 impotence becomes their most brilliant qualification. They 
 know nothing, they can do nothing, and they are on that 
 account particularly adapted to ' die Moderns,' as they say in 
 Germany. Their so-called 'novels' depict neither human 
 beings, nor characters, nor destinies ; but, thou poor Philistine 
 who canst not see it, it is precisely this which constitutes 
 their value ! 
 
 Moreover, justice exacts that among Zola's imitators two 
 groups should be distinguished. The one cultivates chiefly his
 
 REALISM 505 
 
 pessimism, and accepts his obscenities into the bargain, though 
 without enthusiasm, and often even with visible embarrass- 
 ment and secret repugnance. It consists of hysteric and 
 degenerate subjects who are bond fide, who, in consequence 
 of their organic constitution, actually feel pessimistic, and 
 have found in Zola the artistic formula which corresponds 
 most truly with their sentiments. I place in this group some 
 dramatic authors of the ' Theatre-Libre ' in Paris, directed 
 by M. Antoine ; and the Italian 'Verists.' The naturalistic 
 theatre is the most untrue thing that has been seen hitherto, 
 even more untrue than the operetta and the fairy-play. It 
 cultivates the so-called ' cruel terms,' i.e., phrases in which 
 the persons openly make a display of all the pitiable, infamous 
 and cowardly ideas and feelings which surge through their 
 consciousness, and systematically neglect this most primitive 
 and palpable fact, that by far the most widespread and 
 tenacious characteristic of man is hypocrisy and dissimu- 
 lation. The forms of customs survive incalculably longer 
 than morality, and man simulates the greater honesty, and 
 hides his baseness under appearances so much the more 
 seeming-pious, as his instincts are more crafty and mean. 
 The Verists, among whom are many powerful literary natures, 
 are one of the most surprising and distressing phenomena in 
 contemporary literature. One understands pessimism in sorely- 
 tried France ; one comprehends it also in the insupportable 
 narrowness of social life in the crepuscular North, with its 
 cloudy gray skies and its scourge of alcoholism. Eroticism, 
 too, is comprehensible among the over-excited and exhausted 
 Parisian population, and in the Scandinavian North, as a kind 
 of revolt against the zealous discipline and morose constraint of 
 a bigotry without joy, and mortifying to the flesh. But how could 
 pessimism spring up under the radiant sunshine and eternally 
 blue sky of Italy, in the midst of a handsome and joyous people 
 who sing even in speaking(invalids like Leopardi might naturally 
 appear as exceptions everywhere) ? and how did Italians arrive 
 at insane lubricity, when in their country there still exists, 
 living in the temples and in the fields, a souvenir of the 
 artlessly robust sensuality of the pagan world, with its symbols 
 of fecundity ; where also natural and healthy sexuality has 
 always preserved through centuries the right to express itself 
 innocently in art and literature ? If Verism is anything else 
 but an example of the propagation of intellectual epidemics 
 by imitation, the task devolves upon the scientific Italian 
 critic to explain this paradox in the histpry of manners. 
 
 The other group of Zola's imitators is not composed of 
 superior degenerates, unhealthy persons who sincerely give 
 themselves out for what they are, and express often with talent
 
 5o6 DEGENERATION 
 
 what they feel ; but of people who morally and mentally stand 
 on a level with supporters of evil, who, instead of the trade of 
 night-birds, have chosen the less dangerous and hitherto more 
 esteemed vocation of authors of novels and dramas, when the. 
 theory of naturalism had made it accessible to them. This 
 brood has only taken immodesty from M. Zola, and con- 
 formably with the degree of culture has carried it into obscenity 
 without circumlocution. To this group belong the professional 
 Parisian pornographers, whose daily and weekly papers, stories, 
 pictures, and theatrical representations in M. de Chirac's style, 
 continually give employment to the correctional tribunals ; the 
 Norwegian authors of novels on street-walkers; and, unhappily, 
 also a portion of our ' Young German ' realists. This group 
 stands outside of literature. It forms a portion of that riff- 
 raff of great towns who professionally cultivate immorality, 
 and have chosen this trade with full responsibility, solely from 
 horror of honest work and greed for lucre. It is not mental 
 therapeutics, but criminal justice, which is competent to judge 
 them. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE ' YOUNG-GERMAN ' PLAGIARISTS. 
 
 THIS chapter is not, properly, within the scope of this book. 
 It must not be forgotten that I did not wish to write a history 
 of literature, nor to indulge in current aesthetic criticism, but 
 to demonstrate the unhealthy mental condition of the imitators 
 of fashionable literary tendencies. It does not enter into my 
 plan to deal with those degenerates or lunatics who evolve 
 their works from their own morbid consciousness, and them- 
 selves discover the artistic formula for their own eccentricities 
 in other words, with those leaders who go their own way 
 because they choose or because they must. Mere imitators I 
 have neglected on principle throughout the whole of my 
 inquiry, first because the genuine degenerates only form a 
 feeble minority among them, while the great majority is a per- 
 fectly responsible rabble of swindlers and parasites, and next 
 because even the few diseased persons who are found in their 
 ranks do not belong to the class of ' higher ' degenerates, but 
 are poor weak minds who, taken separately, possess no import- 
 ance whatever, and at most only deserve a fleeting mention in 
 so far as they testify to the influence of their masters on ill- 
 balanced minds. 
 
 If, then, in spite of this, I devote a special chapter to the 
 so-called ' Young-German ' ' realists,' while I have despatched
 
 REALISM 507 
 
 in a few words the Italian and Scandinavian Zolaists, it is 
 verily and by no means because the former are any more 
 worthy than the latter. On the contrary, some of the Italian 
 'Verists,' the Dane, J. P. Jakobsen, the Norwegian, Arne 
 Garborg, the Swede, Auguste Strindberg, devoid as they are 
 of real originality, possess, nevertheless, more vigour and 
 talent in their little finger than all 'Young-Germany' put 
 together. I only dwell on the latter because the history of 
 the propagation of a mental contagion in his own country 
 is not without importance for the German reader, and also 
 because the way in which this group has appeared and per- 
 meated shows up certain traits in which we can detect the 
 neurosis of the age, and, lastly, because some few of their 
 members are good examples of intensive hysteria, having, in 
 addition to complete incapacity and a general feebleness of 
 mind, that malicious and anti-social ego-mania, that moral 
 obtuseness, that irresistible need of attracting attention to them- 
 selves, no matter by what means, that facetious vanity and 
 self-approbation, which characterizes the complaint. 
 
 I will not deny that when I turn towards the ' Young- 
 German ' movement I can scarcely maintain the cool equani- 
 mity with which, according to scientific method, I have 
 hitherto observed any given phenomena. As a German writer 
 I feel deep shame and sorrow at the spectacle of the literature 
 "which has been so long and so brutally proclaimed, with flourish 
 of trumpets, and with systematic disdain of all that did not bear 
 its seal, as the unique and exclusively German literature of the 
 present time, and even that of the future.* 
 
 Since genius was congregated at Weimar, German litera- 
 ture has ever taken the lead in civilized humanity. We 
 were the inventors, foreigners were the imitators. We pro- 
 visioned the world with poetic forms and ideas. Romanticism 
 originated among us, and only became a literary and artistic 
 
 * Le Temps, N du 13 Fe*vrier, 1892 : ' Current literature ... is, at 
 present, at an inconceivably low ebb in Germany. From one end of the 
 year to the other it is becoming an impossibility to discover a novel, a 
 drama, or a page of criticism worthy of notice. The Deutsche Rundschau 
 itself recently admitted this in despair. It is not only the talent and the 
 style which are deficient all is poor, weak and flat ; one might imagine 
 one's self in France, in the time of Bouilly. . . . Even the desire to rise 
 above a certain level of ordinary writing seems wanting. One ends by being 
 thankful to any contemporary German author who is seen to be making 
 .. . . the simplest effort not to write like a crossing - sweeper.' Every 
 German who observes all the literary productions of his contemporaries will 
 see that this is the opinion of a spiteful enemy. This opinion, nevertheless, 
 is explained and justified by the fact that at the present day it is only the 
 * realists ' who make enough stir to be heard in certain places abroad, and 
 that there the natives are delighted to be able to consider them as repre- 
 senting all the German literature of the day.
 
 5o8 DEGENERATION 
 
 fashion in France a pood many years later, whence it passed 
 on into England. Gorres, Zacharias Werner, Novalis, and 
 Oscar Von Redwitz, created lyric mysticism and neo- 
 Catholicism among us, and these have only just reached 
 France. Our poet-precursors of the revolution of 1848, Karl 
 Beck, George Hervvegh, Freiligrath, Ludwig Seeger, Friedrich 
 von Sallet, R. E. Prutz, etc., had even then sung of the 
 misery, the uprisings, and the hopes of the disinherited, before 
 the Walt Whitmans, the William Morrises, and the Jules Jouys, 
 were born, men whom to-day people in America, England, 
 and France, would like to consider as the discoverers of the 
 Fourth Estate for lyric poetry. Pessimism was embodied 
 almost at the same time in Italy (in Leopardi) and among us 
 in Nicholas Lenau, more than a generation before French 
 naturalism built its art upon it. Goethe created symbolic 
 poetry in the second part of Faust half a century before Ibsen 
 and the French Symbolists parodied this tendency. Every 
 heakhy current and every pathological current in contem- 
 porary poetry and art can be traced back to a German source, 
 every progress and every decadence in this sphere have their 
 point of departure in Germany. The philosophical theory 
 of every novel method of thought, as well as of every new 
 error, which, during a hundred years, have gained a hold over 
 civilized humanity, has been furnished by the Germans. 
 Fichte gave us the theory of romanticism ; Feuerbach (almost 
 at the same time as Auguste Comte), that of the mechanical 
 conception of the world ; Schopenhauer, that of pessimism ; 
 the Hegelians, Max Stirner, and Karl Marx, that of the most 
 rigid ego-mania and the most rigid collectivism, etc. And 
 now we suffer the humiliation of seeing a heap of contemptible 
 plagiarists hawking about the dullest and coarsest counterfeit 
 of French imitations (which all the clever men in France 
 have already abandoned and repudiated) as ' the most modern ' 
 production offered by Germany, as the flower of German 
 literature, present and future. We even permit foreign critics 
 to say : ' Ancient fashions disdained in France even by village 
 beauties, are to be seen exhibited in German shop-windows 
 as the greatest novelties, and credulously accepted by the 
 public.' The realists naturally deny that they are mere re- 
 peaters and limping belated followers.* But he who knows 
 
 * Arno Holz Johannes Schlaf, Die Familie Selicke. 3 Auflage ; Berlin, 
 1892, p. vi. : 'In fact, nothing so provokes us to smile ... as when they, in 
 their anxiety to find models, label us as plagiarists of the great foreign 
 authors. Let them say it, then. ... It will be acknowledged some day 
 that there has never yet been in our literature a movement less influenced 
 from without, more strongly originated from within in one word, more 
 national than this movement, even at the further development of which we 
 look to-day, and which has had for its visible point of departure our /'<//<
 
 REALISM 509 
 
 a little more of art and poetry than is learnt in a Berlin 
 tavern frequented by realists, or in a low newspaper informed 
 by this sort of company ; he who contemplates in its entire 
 range the contemporary movement of thought without stop- 
 ping on the frontiers of his own country, can have no doubt 
 whatever that German realism, as a local phenomenon, may 
 have for Germany itself a melancholy importance, but does 
 not exist at* all for universal literature, because all trace of 
 personal or national originality is lacking. To the chorus 
 in which the voices of humanity express its feelings and 
 thoughts, not the faintest new note has been added by it. 
 
 Plagiarists so low down in the scale as the German realists 
 are not in the least entitled to a detailed individual examination. 
 To do this would be to make one's self both ridiculous in the 
 eyes of competent judges and of a piece with strolling players, 
 to whom it is a matter of small importance whether they 
 are praised or blamed, provided they are mentioned. Other 
 motives also warn me to be prudent in the choice of examples 
 I propose to lay before the reader. I am firmly convinced that 
 in a few years all this movement will be forgotten even to the 
 name itself. The lads who now pretend to be the future of 
 German literature will discover little by little that the business 
 to which they have devoted themselves is less agreeable and 
 lucrative than they had imagined.* Those among them who 
 yet possess a last remnant of health and strength will find the 
 way to their natural vocation, and become restaurant-waiters 
 or servants, night-watchmen or peddlers, and I should fear to 
 injure their advancement in these honest professions if I nailed 
 here the remembrance of their aberration of past days, which 
 would otherwise be forgotten by all. The feebler and weaker 
 among them, who could not manfully resolve to earn their 
 bread by a decent occupation, will disappear probably as 
 drunkards, vagabonds, beggars, perhaps even in a house of 
 correction, and if, after the lapse of years, a serious reader 
 happened to come across their names in this book, he would 
 be right in exclaiming, ' What sort of bad joke is this ? What 
 
 Hamlet. Die Familie Selicke is the most thoroughly German piece of writing 
 our literature possesses,' etc. This passage may serve the reader as a model 
 both of the style in which these lads write, and of the tone in which they 
 speak of themselves and their productions. 
 
 * The complaint of want of money is a constant refrain among the ' Young 
 Germans.' Listen to Baron Detlev von Liliencron : 'You had nothing to 
 eat again to-day ; as a set-off, every blackguard has had his fill.' ' The 
 terror of infernal damnation is A garden of roses under the kisses of 
 spring, When I think of how heart and soul fret, To be hourly bitten by 
 the need of money.' And Karl Bleibtreu : ' Brass reigns, gold reigns, 
 Genius goes its way a-begging.' 'To call a ton of gold one's own, Sublime 
 end, unattainable to man !' etc.
 
 5 io DEGENERATION 
 
 does the author want to make me believe ? There never 
 have been such men !' Finally, an absolutely incapable 
 pseudo-writer is individually deprived of all importance, and 
 only a* quires it as one of a number. He cannot therefore 
 be treated critically, but merely statistically. For all these 
 reasons I shall only draw from the whole number a few char- 
 acters and works, to show with their help what German 
 
 * realism ' really is. 
 
 The founder of the realist school is Karl Bleibtreu. He 
 accomplished this work of foundation by publishing a brochure 
 of which the principal feature was a cover of brilliant red 
 furrowed by black lightning in zigzags, and which bore this 
 title like the roll of a kettle-drum, Revolution in Literature. In 
 this literary 'tout' Bleibtreu, without the slightest attempt at 
 substantiation, but with a brazen brow, depreciated a whole 
 series of esteemed and successful authors, swore with great 
 oaths that they were dead and buried, and announced the 
 dawn of a new literary epoch, which already counted a 
 certain number of geniuses, at the head of whom he him- 
 self stood. 
 
 As an author Bleibtreu, in spite of the many and various 
 works he has already published, does not yet count for much. 
 It would, however, be unjust to ignore his great ability as a 
 book-maker. In this respect Revolution in der Liter atur is a 
 model production. With skilful address, he mingled authors 
 of repute whom he hacked into sausage-meat with a few 
 shallow scribblers in vogue, whom it was no doubt rather 
 foolish to fight, with the grand airs of a gladiator, but whom 
 no one would have defended against a smiling disdain. The 
 presence of these unwarranted intruders into the group whom 
 he undertook to extirpate from literature, may give to his 
 raising of the standard a semblance of reason in the eyes of 
 superficial readers. Not less cleverly chosen were the people 
 whom he presented to readers as the new geniuses. \Yith the 
 exception of two or three decent mediocrities, for whom there 
 is always a little modest corner in the literature of a great 
 people, .these were complete nullities from whom he himself 
 never had to fear a dangerous competition. The greatest of 
 his geniuses is, for example, Max Kretzer, a man who writes, 
 in the German of a Cameroon -Negro, some" professedly 
 
 * Berlin ' novels, of which the best known, Die Verkommenen, 
 is ' Berlinish ' to such a degree that it simply dilutes the history 
 of the widow Gras and the workman Gaudry, which took place 
 in Paris in 1877. This event, celebrated as the first adventure 
 with cocottes in which vitriol played a part, could only happen 
 in Paris, and under the conditions of Parisian life. It is 
 specifically Parisian. But Kretzer calmly removed the Paris
 
 REALISM 511 
 
 trade-mark, replacing it with that of Berlin, and he thus 
 created a ' Berlin ' novel, vaunted by Bleibtreu as the ideal of 
 a 'genuine' and 'true' exposition. He reclothes his newly- 
 disccvered ' geniuses,' who recall Falstaff's recruits, MouJ.dy, 
 Shadow, Wart, Feeble, and Bullcalf (King Henry IV., Part II.), 
 in a. uniform which he could not have chosen more effectively. 
 He dressed them out in the costume of Schiller's brigands 
 in the Bohemian forests ; he pronounced them to be a troop 
 of rebels, fighters at barricades, Liitzow huntsmen in the 
 struggle for freedom against hypocrisy perukes, and pig-tails, 
 and all obstructionists ; and he hoped that youth and the 
 friends of progress would take him for something serious, on 
 seeing him march at the head of his poor, infirm cripples and 
 knockknees, thus disguised. 
 
 His plan, although excellently contrived and conducted, was 
 only partially successful. Scarcely had he in a certain measure 
 organized and drilled his little troop, when it mutinied and 
 drove him away. It did not choose another captain, for each 
 private soldier wished himself to be chief, and the feeblest and 
 most timid of the band alone recognised any other genius outside 
 his own. Bleibtreu has not to this day got over the ingratitude 
 of the people who had taken his mystification seriously, and 
 had really looked upon themselves as the geniuses he had pro- 
 claimed them to be, without, as he thought, running any risks ; 
 and in his last publication he still utters his sorrow in these 
 bitter verses (A us einem lyrischen Tagebuch) : 
 
 'For what purpose this long struggle? 'Tis vain! And my hand is 
 paralyzed. Long live falsehood, stupidity, folly ! Adieu, thou German 
 piggery ! The earth of the tomb will extinguish the conflagration. I have 
 been, as long as I could think, a veritable booby. I was no honest German, 
 1 was a wounded swan.' 
 
 Bleibtreu could not give any talent to the realists invented 
 by him, but the latter borrowed from him a few of his turns of 
 expression. To make an impression on the ignorant, they 
 have associated with themselves as honorary members some re- 
 spectable authors whom one is surprised to meet with dans ce 
 galere. Thus the realists include among their numbers, for 
 example, Theodore Fontane, a true poet, whose novels honour- 
 ably hold their place among the best productions of the kind 
 in any literature of Europe ; H. Heiberg, of vigorous although 
 unequal talent ; unfortunately compelled, as it would seem, by 
 external circumstances to hasty and excessive work, against 
 which, perhaps, his artistic conscieice vainly protests; and 
 Detlev von Liliencron, who is by" no means a genius, but 
 a good lyric poet with a sense of style, and who may rank 
 by the side of epigoni such as a Hans Hopfen, a Hermann 
 Ungg, a Martin Greif. Considering the high level that
 
 $ia DEGENERATION 
 
 German lyric poetry the first in the world even in the 
 judgment of foreign nations has occupied uninterruptedly 
 since Goethe, it is giving a German poet no small praise if 
 one can say he is not inferior to the average of the last seventy 
 years. Liliencron, however, does not surpass it, and I do 
 not see how he can be fairly placed above Rudolf Baumbach, 
 for example, whom the realists affect to despise, probably 
 because he has disdained to join their gang. It is not in- 
 comprehensible that a Fontane or a Heiberg should consent 
 to suffer the importunate promiscuousness of the realists. The 
 Church, too, admits sometimes to serve in the Mass young 
 rogues from the street, who have only to swing the censer. 
 The sole thing that is demanded of them as realists honoris 
 causa, is to bear silently and smilingly this compromise of an 
 honourable name. Liliencron alone thinks himself obliged 
 to make some concessions to his new companions, in using 
 here and there in his last poems, not his own language, but 
 theirs. 
 
 Besides the smuggling in of some esteemed names among 
 theirs, the realists have carefully practised and cultivated 
 another business-trick of Bleibtreu's that of effective disguise. 
 They assumed (in the collection of lyric poetry entitled Young 
 Germany, Friedenau and Leipzig, 1886) the name of ' Young 
 Germany/ which calls up a faint remembrance of the great 
 and bold innovators of 1830, as well as ideas of blooming 
 youth and spring, with a false nose of modernism tied on. 
 But let us here at once remark that the realists, plagiarists 
 to the backbone, do not even possess sufficient independence 
 to find a name peculiarly their own, but have quietly plagiarized 
 the denomination under which the Heine-Boerne-Gutzkow 
 group has become renowned. 
 
 As the first specimen of ' realist ' literature of ' Young 
 Germany,' I will quote the novel by Heinz Tovote, I in 
 Liebesrausch.* He relates the history of a landed proprietor 
 and former officer, Herbert von Diiren, who makes the ac- 
 quaintance of a certain Lucy, formerly a waitress at an inn, 
 and the mistress of quite a number of young men in succession. 
 He makes her his mistress, and indulges in his passion until, 
 being unable to live without her, he induces her to marry 
 him. Herbert, who is only partially acquainted-. with Lucy's 
 past, presents her to his mother. The latter, who very soon 
 perceives the relations existing between her son and this 
 person, nevertheless gives her consent, and the marriage 
 takes place. In the aristocratic and military society of Berlin, 
 in which the couple move for a time, Lucy's antecedents soon 
 
 * Heinz Tovote, Itn Liebesrausch^ Berliner Roman, 6 e Auflage. Berlin* 
 1893.
 
 REALISM qij 
 
 become known, and she is ' cut ' by all the world. Herbert 
 himself remains faithfully attached to her, until he discovers one 
 day by accident, at the house of one of his friends of course a 
 ' realist ' painter a picture representing the nude figure of Lucy 
 bathing in the sea ! He very logically concludes that his wife 
 had posed as a model to the painter, and he drives her away. As 
 a matter of fact, however, the 'realist' had painted the nude 
 figure from imagination, and involuntarily given it Lucy's 
 features, because of the respectful admiration he secretly 
 cherishes for her. (Judge for a moment how that could be 
 if she had been disreputable !) Then Herbert, smitten with 
 remorse, seeks the vanished Lucy, whom he discovers, after 
 heart-breaking efforts, in his own house, where she has lived 
 for months unknown to him. The reconciliation of husband 
 and wife takes place amid general pathos, and the young wife 
 dies in giving birth to a child, and uttering affecting senti- 
 ments. 
 
 I will not waste time by pointing out the silliness of this 
 story. The essential part in a novel, moreover, is not the 
 plot, but the form, in both the narrower and the broader sense 
 language, style, composition and these I will examine a 
 little later. 
 
 The very first thing we have a right to expect of a man 
 who assumes to write for the public, i.e., for the educated 
 people of his own nation, is evidently that he should be 
 master of his own language. Now, Heinz Tovote has no 
 idea whatever of German. He commits the grossest errors 
 every moment solecisms, mistakes of syntax, ignorance of 
 the value of words which make one's hair stand on end. Some 
 few of these abominable faults of language are tolerably wide- 
 spread, others belong to the jargon of the roughest class of 
 the people ; but there are some that Tovote could never have 
 heard. They are the result of his personal ignorance of German 
 grammar. 
 
 Next as to his style. When Tovote writes a description, in 
 order to determine and strengthen the substantive, he chooses, 
 on principle, the adjective naturally contained in that substantive. 
 Here are some examples of this intolerable tautology: 'An 
 icy January storm.' ' In the Friedrichstrasse light elegant 
 equipages were crowded.' ' Incarnation of the most lovable 
 grace.' 'A slowly creeping fever. 'A lazy somnolence. 1 
 'They glowed fiery in the last light.' 'She suffered cruel 
 torments,' etc. I doubt if any author, having but little respect 
 for himself, his vocation, his maternal tongue or his readers, 
 would put such words together. There is no necessity, in 
 hunting for the ' rare and precious epithet,' to go so far as 
 the French stylists, but such a sweeping together of the 
 
 33
 
 5 i 4 DEGENERATION 
 
 stalest, most useless, and most inexpressive adjectives is not 
 literature ; it is properly, to echo the French critic, the 
 work of scavengers. Another characteristic of this style is 
 its silliness. The author relates that Herbert von Duren was 
 ' keenly interested, from its first appearance,' in Sullivan's 
 operetta Tlie Mikado. ' Now that it had cast off its English 
 garb, it seemed to him still more indigenous.' Thus he 
 seriously declares that an English operetta has seemed to a 
 German more indigenous in the German language than in 
 English. ' Suddenly he was seized with a senseless fury 
 against this man who saluted him so politely, whereby he, 
 who was habitually politeness itself to everyone, did not return 
 the salute, and turned away.' Not to respond to a salute by 
 way of expressing his ' senseless fury ' is truly not very ferocious 
 on the part of an old officer. ' The horses were hanging their 
 heads sadly, and sleeping.' That it is possible to sleep sadly 
 or gaily is a discovery by Tovote. ' Like walls, the colossi 
 of houses stood crowding against each other.' Like walls ? 
 One would think that houses really have walls. It is exactly 
 as if Tovote had said : ' Like men, the people stood crowding 
 against each other. 1 
 
 When Tovote strives to write in a sublime and beautiful 
 style, the result we get is as follows : ' Yet there lay in the 
 slender perfectly levelled lines a slumbering strength.' (What 
 can the lines be which are 'slender,' i.e., not thick and 
 ' perfectly levelled ' ?) ' She was already smiling through her 
 tears, and her face resembled a summer landscape which, 
 while the rain still falls on the corn, is bathed again in the 
 bright rays of the sun emerging from clouds.' Thus, what we 
 are first to think of when contemplating a face is a summer 
 landscape. ' He felt how her lips clung [sich klammerten /] to 
 his.' ' It must be granted that, considering his youth, he has 
 the incontestable genius of a lively conception,' etc. 
 
 Tovote seeks to plagiarize the diffuse descriptions of the 
 French naturalists, and unfolds pictures the novelty, clearness, 
 and vigour of which the following quotations will enable us 
 to admire. (End of a theatrical representation :) ' In the 
 stalls the seats clapped back with a muffled sound. . . . The 
 audience rose, doors were opened, curtains were drawn back, ' 
 and the theatre emptied slowly, while a few isolated spectators 
 alone remained in their places.' ' Unceasingly, the whole 
 night the snowflakes fell. In thick bales [!] it lay on the bare 
 branches of the trees, which threatened to break down in 
 winterly weakness. The pines and low bushes were enveloped 
 in a thick mantle of snow. To the straw, wound round the 
 standard roses, the snow clung, and formed strange figures; 
 it lay a foot high on the walls, and delicately veiled the points
 
 REALISM 515 
 
 of the iron railings. All tracks were effaced. The wind, 
 which drove the flakes before it, threw them into all the 
 hollows, so that all the corners and all the unevennesses dis- 
 appeared.' ' They stood high above the sea, which spread 
 around them like an infinite plain.' 'The sun had set. . . . 
 The clouds, heavily encamped on the horizon, still glowed 
 with flaming crimson purple ; then they passed into violet, 
 Avhich changed into a colourless gray [so there is a coloured 
 gray also ?] until night descended, and all colours gradually 
 died out.' (Compare this pitiable attempt to counterfeit ' im- 
 pressionism ' with the French models quoted in the preceding 
 chapter.) ' The night had completely closed in a dark, pro- 
 foundly black night.' (Consider the juxtaposition of these 
 two adjectives.) ' The moon alone hung mournfully above the 
 waters [the moon in a night both ' dark ' and ' profoundly 
 black !'], and the lighthouse threw its flood of light into the 
 distance. Deep at their feet the sea raved with muffled roar 
 in the spite of a thousand years [!], and licked the creviced 
 rocks.' A ' raving spite ' which ' licks ' does not appear to be 
 a very dangerous spite. ' She retained the deep wound over 
 her eye as a little scar all her life long.' If she had a ' little 
 scar,' she did not therefore keep a deep wound 'all her life 
 long.' ' Above them, in the blue sky, a vulture wheeled in 
 circles with outspread wings, lost like a black point in this 
 sea of light.' In a vulture which is only seen as ' a black 
 point,' it is not possible to distinguish the ' outspread wings.' 
 Here is the description of a face : ' Two full fresh lips, 
 chaste [!], bright red, a graceful little nose, imperceptibly 
 tilted, but parting in a narrow straight line from the forehead.' 
 We will leave the reader the trouble of imagining for himself 
 this ' little nose imperceptibly tilted ' in ' the narrow straight 
 line.' ' The engine of the express train panted across the 
 level plain which stretched all round like a burning desert. 
 Right and left, field after field of corn, fruitful orchards and 
 verdant meadows.' Fields, orchards, meadows, and yet a 
 * burning [?] desert ' ? ' The half-closed eyes, with their white 
 membranes, look at him so steadily.' This does not mean, 
 as one might suppose, the eyes of a bird, but those of a human 
 being, in which our novelist professes to have discovered these 
 incomprehensible ' white membranes.' 
 
 We have seen what impressionism and the descriptive tic 
 of naturalism have become in the hands of Tovote. I will 
 now show how this ' realist ' can observe and reproduce reality 
 in the smallest as in the greatest ' things. Herbert, the first 
 evening of his acquaintance with Lucy, takes her to a 
 restaurant and orders, among other things, a bottle of 
 burgundy. ' The waiter placed the pot-bellied bottle on the
 
 516 DEGENERATION 
 
 table, in a flourishing curve.' Burgundy in 'pot-bellied* 
 bottles ! They eat soup, served in ' silver bowls ' (!), green 
 peas and a capon, the excellence of which forms the subject 
 of their incredible conversation at table, and when this repast 
 is disposed of, and Lucy has lighted a cigarette, she asks for 
 oysters, which are brought and eaten by her 'served according 
 to the rules of art.' I should certainly not reproach anyone 
 for not knowing a bottle of burgundy by sight, nor at which 
 stage of a repast one eats oysters. I myself did not grow up 
 amongst oysters and burgundy, but it would be more honest 
 not to speak of these good things till one knows something oi 
 them. Let us give a passing notice to the unconscious respect, 
 mingled with envy, for the difficult and distinguished occupa- 
 tion of eating oysters, deliciously revealed in this admiring 
 declaration, that Lucy has oysters ' served ' (?) ' according to 
 the rules of art,' and the backwoodsman's ignorance of the 
 most elementary good breeding which Tovote betrays in 
 making a man of the world talk incessantly at table about the 
 food. To continue. Lucy's lover has travelled, via Brussels, 
 ' from Havre to Egypt.' In that case he must have chartered 
 a steamer on his own account, as there is no regular line of 
 steamers between Havre and Egypt. For some months 
 Herbert has had on his writing-table some unfinished manu- 
 scripts. ' He rummaged through this heap of yellow manu- 
 scripts.' Under shelter the worst ligneous fibre paper itself 
 would certainly not turn yellow in the space of a few months. 
 The bed-chamber, arranged with all possible care by Herbert 
 for his Lucy, has ' blue silk curtains,' and ' pale pink satin ' 
 seats. Such a wild combination of colours would be avoided 
 by the better secondhand dealers even in their shop windows. 
 
 I grant that all these blunders, although amusing, are insig- 
 nificant. They must not be passed over, however, when com- 
 mitted by a ' realist/ who boasts of ' observation ' and ' truth.' 
 Graver still are the impossible actions and characters of the 
 men. In a moment of grief Lucy lets ' fall her arms on the 
 table-napkin in her lap, and looks vacantly before her, biting 
 her under lip.' Has anyone ever seen or done such a thing 
 in this state of mind ? Wild ecstasy of love Lucy expresses 
 thus : ' " Kiss me," she implored, and her whole being seemed 
 to wish to lose itself in him "kiss me!"' Herbert had 
 made her acquaintance in Heligoland, where she lived with 
 an Englishman named Ward, and had taken her to be Ward's 
 betrothed. A German officer of good family, being con- 
 siderably over thirty, was actually able to look upon a woman 
 living with a rich young foreigner alone at a watering-place as 
 his betrothed ! The latter, an absolutely neglected child of 
 the working class, learnt English with Ward in less than a
 
 REALISM 517- 
 
 year so perfectly that she was everywhere mistaken for an 
 Englishwoman, and played the piano so well that she could 
 execute pieces from operettas, etc. 
 
 I do not consider it a crime when Tovote, in using French 
 words, confounds tourniquet with moulinet, and speaks of 
 cabinets separes instead of cabinets particuliers. A German 
 does not require to know French. It would be a good thing 
 indeed if he knew German. Good taste, however, would pre- 
 vent his making a display of scraps of a language of which he 
 knows absolutely nothing. 
 
 The obscenities with which the novel swarms are incom- 
 parably weaker than in analogous passages by Zola, but they 
 are peculiarly repulsive because, in spite of the ^absolute inca- 
 pacity of Tovote to rise above the coarseness of commercial 
 travellers relating their love adventures in hotels, they, never- 
 theless, betray his determination to be violently sensational 
 and subtly sensual. 
 
 If I have lingered thus long over this bungling piece of work, 
 so far below the level of literature, it is because of its being 
 thoroughly typical of German realism. The language trans- 
 gresses the simplest rules of grammar. Not one expression is 
 accurately chosen, and really characterizes the object or the 
 concept that is brought before the reader. That an author 
 should speak not only accurately, but expressively, that he 
 should be able to reproduce impressions and ideas in an 
 original and powerful way, that he must have a feeling for the 
 value and delicate sense of words ; of this Tovote has not 
 the slightest idea. His descriptions are shabby enough to 
 raise a blush on the cheek of the police reporter of a low class 
 paper. Nothing is seen, nothing is felt; the whole is but a 
 droning echo of reading of the worst sort. ' Modernism ' 
 consists finally in this, that a pitiable commonplace is partly 
 located in Berlin, with here and there vague talk of socialism 
 and realism. German criticism in the seventies demanded, 
 very justly, that the German novel should rest on a solid basis, 
 that it should be worked out in some well-known period, amid 
 real surroundings, in the German capital of our day. This 
 demand has produced the ' Berlinese ' novel of the plagiarists. 
 The especial and characteristic Berlinism of this novel consists 
 in this, that the author whenever he has to mention a street, 
 displays the boundless astonishment of a Hottentot at the 
 * Panoptikum ' (the Grevin Museum in Berlin), because he 
 finds the street full of people, carriage", and shops, and seeks 
 opportunities to quote the names of the streets in this capital. 
 This method is within the reach of every hotel porter. 
 In order to introduce such Berlinism into a bad novel, the 
 author need only possess a plan of the town, and perhaps a
 
 5 i8 DEGENERATION 
 
 guide-book. The peculiarities of life in the capital are repre- 
 sented by passages such as this : ' OQ both sides of the pave- 
 ment [he meant to say, on the pavement on both sides of the 
 street] a dense crowd of people surged, and in the middle oT 
 the avenue, under the trees, just bursting into leaf, a scattered 
 multitude, resembling the irregular [?J waves of a flood, 
 pushed on to get out of the town.' Or : ' On all the pave- 
 ments people walking and pushing against each other in con- 
 fusion and haste, which increased to a run, in order to avoid 
 falling under the wheels, while escaping to a place of refuge 
 from the deafening clatter of cabs, tramways, and large heavy 
 omnibuses, with their roofs fully occupied,' etc. Thus, the 
 only thing Tovote sees in Berlin is what a peasant from 
 Buxtehude would remark, who has left his village for the first 
 time, and cannot recover, from his astonishment in finding 
 more people and carriages than in his own village street. This 
 is just the view which a resident in a town no longer notices, 
 and which need not be specially described, because it is implied 
 in the concept of a 'town,' and, above all, of a 'large town,' 
 and rs, notably, in no way characteristic of Berlin, since 
 Breslau, Hamburg, Cologne, etc., present exactly the same 
 sight. 
 
 Socialism enters into the ' modern ' novel like Pilate into the 
 Creed. Tovote relates, e.g., how Herbert seeks for Lucy, who 
 has disappeared ; he arrives at last at the workman's quarter 
 in Berlin, which supplies the author with this fine picture : 
 ' Everywhere the blue and gray-red blouse of the workman, 
 which is never seen Unter den Linden, who stands, day after 
 day, near the panting machine, at the work-table, where he 
 carries on, during long years, as if asleep, the same manual 
 labours, until the callosities on his hands become as hard as 
 iron.' Either Herbert, despairingly seeking his mistress, or the 
 narrator, wishing to awaken our interest in these events, has 
 thought of the callosities of the workmen ! 
 
 The automata who in the ' realist ' novel execute mock- 
 movements, and between whom the dullest and most miserable 
 back-stair sentimentality is played off, are always the same : a 
 gentleman, an ex-officer whenever possible, who, we are 
 assured, is engaged upon 'works on socialism' (of what kind 
 we never learn, it is simply asserted that they are ' very im- 
 portant ') ; a waitress at an inn, as the embodiment of the ewig- 
 Weibliche ; and a realist painter who plans or executes pictures 
 destined to regenerate humanity, and to establish the mil- 
 lennium on earth. Here is the recipe for the ' modernism ' of 
 the ' Young-German ' realism : quotation of the names of the 
 Berlin streets, rapture at the sight of some cabs and omnibuses, 
 a little Berlinese dialect in the mouth of the characters, coarse
 
 REALISM 519 
 
 and stupid eroticism, unctuous allusions to socialism and 
 phrases on painting, such as a goose-fattener grown rich might 
 make if she wished to pass herself off as a lady. Of the 
 three persons who are always the supporters of this ' modernity ' 
 the waitress is the only really original one. The merit of this 
 treasure belongs to Bleibtreu, who first presented her to the 
 admiration and imitation of his little band in his collection of 
 novels entitled Schlechte Gesellschaft. She is a conglomeration 
 of all the fabulous beings that have hitherto been imagined in 
 poetry : a winged chimera, a sphinx with lion's claws, and a 
 siren with a fish's tail, all at one and the same time. She 
 contains in herself every charm and every gift, love and 
 wisdom, virtue and love-glowing paganism. It is by the 
 waitress at the inn that the talent for observation and creative 
 power of the German ' realist ' can be most accurately gauged. 
 
 If Tovote is a representative type by no means diseased, 
 but merely incapable beyond conception of intruders into 
 literature with which they will at most be connected as 
 peddling hawkers of trashy novels, we meet in Hermann Bahr 
 with a clearly pathological individuality. Bahr is an advanced 
 hysteric who wants at all hazards to get himself talked about, and 
 has had the unfortunate idea of achieving this result by books. 
 Devoid of talent to an almost impossible degree, he seeks to 
 captivate attention by the maddest eccentricities. Thus, he 
 calls the book most characteristic of his method among 
 those he has hitherto published, Die gute Schule ; Seelenstcinde* 
 Seelenstdnde literally means ' states of soul.' He had read 
 and not understood the term etats d'dme in the new French 
 authors, etat having been used in the political sense which it 
 has in tiers-stats. 
 
 In the story related in the Seelenstdnde, a part at least of 
 the recipe previously mentioned is utilized. The hero is an 
 Austrian painter living in Paris. One day, weary of living 
 alone, he picks up a girl in the street, who, contrary to the 
 orthodox procedure, is not a waitress, but a dressmaker, 
 possessing, nevertheless, all the mythical excellence of the 
 ' Young German ' barmaid ; he lives with her for a time, then 
 wearies of her, and torments her to such a degree that she 
 leaves him one fine day and goes off with a rich negro, whom 
 she induces to buy pictures at a high price from her abandoned 
 lover. 
 
 This fine story is the frame in which Bahr reveals the ' state ' 
 of his hero's * soul.' This author is a plagiarist of an inveterate 
 type, such as is only met with in serious cases of hysteria. 
 Not a single author of any individuality who has passed before 
 his eyes has been able to escape his rage for servile imitation, 
 
 * Hermann Bahr, Die gute Schule j Seelenstdnde. Berlin, 1890.
 
 J20 DEGENERATION 
 
 The principle of the ' Good School ' the misery of a painter 
 who struggles with the conception of a work of art intended to 
 express his whole soul, and who recognises with despair his 
 impotence to realize it is subtilized from Zola's L'CEuvre, 
 All the details, as we shall see, he has taken from Nietzsche, 
 Stirner, Ibsen, the Diabolics, Decadents, and French Impres- 
 sionists. But all he plagiarizes becomes, under his pen, a 
 parody of inimitably exquisite absurdity. 
 
 The painter's distress of mind is ' the lyrism of red. His 
 whole soul was steeped in red, all his feelings, all his aims, all 
 his desires, in sonnets of lament and hope ; and in general a 
 complete biography of red, what took place in him and usually 
 whatever could happen to him. . . . But this lofty canticle 
 of the red fulfilled itself in the real, simple tones of daily 
 life. ... It was a large well-boiled lobster, in which he em- 
 bodied the masterful spirit and the violence of the red, his 
 languor in a salmon on one side, and his mischievousness and 
 gaiety of disposition in many radishes in cheerful variations. 
 But the great and supreme confession of his whole soul hung 
 on a purple tablecloth with heavy folds, on which the sun 
 shone, a narrow shaft, but with all the more fiery glow.' If 
 the struggle with the ' biography of the red ' was a torture to 
 him, even worse things were about to happen. One day ' the 
 curse struck him behind, coming from an excellent salmon, 
 juicy and sweet, which one would never have suspected of 
 perfidy as it la}' cradling itself in a rosy shimmer in its rich 
 herb sauce.' (A cooked salmon cradling itself! This must 
 have produced a ghostly effect. And this uncanny salmon 
 struck him ' behind,' although it was on the table before him !) 
 But it was precisely this sauce, this sauce of green herbs, the 
 pride of the cook yes, it was this that did it. It was this that 
 conquered him. He had never seen anything like it never 
 before, as far back as he could remember, a softer and sweeter 
 green, at once so languishing and so joyous that one could 
 have sung and shouted for joy. The whole rococo was in it, 
 only in a much more gracious, yearning' note. It had to go 
 into his picture. But he could never hit off that green sauce, 
 and this was the tragedy of his life. He ' kept the truth locked 
 up cowardly and idle, he who alone could grant it ; he did not 
 give it to them to assuage thirst, this healing and redeeming 
 work of his breast,' namely, the green sauce ! ' He would have 
 liked to make a gigantic gimlet revolve in his flesh with a 
 burning screw . . . deep, very deep) till there was a great 
 hole ... an immense triumphal gate of his art, through which 
 the internals could spit it out.' 
 
 What makes this struggle with the green sauce, for the 
 purpose of overcoming it in a 'healing and redeeming' work
 
 REALISM 521 
 
 of art, so irresistibly comic is that the whole passage is 
 written in an entirely serious view, and without the least idea 
 of joking ! 
 
 Bahr describes his own style in these words : ' A wild, 
 feverish, tropical style, which calls nothing by its usual name 
 in the ordinary idiom, but which racks itself in the hope of 
 finding unheard-of, obscure, and strange neologisms, in a 
 forced and singular combination.' 
 
 The painter's mistress must have been a superb creature, to 
 judge by the description. When a stranger spoke to her in 
 the street ' she slightly quickened her steps, and with eyelids 
 haughtily raised, and her little head thrown back sideways, 
 she began to hum softly, sharply snapping her fingers with 
 impatience, in such a way as to rouse his desire to persevere 
 in his useless suit.' This behaviour induces Bahr to call her 
 a 'majestically inaccessible young lady.' But she is far more 
 remarkable at her morning toilet at home than she is in the 
 street. ' Often, when under the greetings of the morning, 
 which enamelled with gold [!] her hyacinthine flesh, she 
 plaited her hair while standing before her mirror, surrounded 
 by his desires, and stretched, moistened, and slowly curved, 
 with twitching fingers which glittered like swift serpents, quite 
 gently and persistently, her tangled [!] eyelashes, her dis- 
 hevelled eyebrows, while her lips grew round with silent 
 whistling, between which the rapid, restless tongue hissed, 
 shot out, and clacked, and then, with closed eyelids, leant 
 forward as in submissive adoration, the powder-puff passed 
 slowly, cautiously, fervently, over the bent cheeks, while the 
 little nose, fearful of the dust, turned aside,' the painter, as 
 may be imagined, became so amorous that ' he licked the 
 soap from her fingers to refresh his fevered gums.' ' Suddenly- 
 standing upright on one leg, with a swing of the other she 
 kicked her shoe into the air, to catch it again by a nimble, 
 firm movement. In this graceful attitude she remained.' 
 * Sometimes she bent down languorously towards herself, very 
 gently, very slowly, remaining voluptuously in the curve of her 
 breasts, deep into her knees, while her lips moved ; sometimes, 
 while her hips turned in a circle, her neck glided lasciviously 
 into swan-like [!] curves towards her obsequious image.' This 
 sight filled her lover with such enthusiasm that it seemed to 
 him ' as if from a thousand springs blasted [!] torrents blazed 
 through his veins.' 
 
 It is not necessary, I think, to multiply specimens of this 
 style, which simulates insanity, and which is not German, either 
 in formation, use of terms, or construction. I wish merely 
 to show to what degree Bahr is a plagiarist. Here we see a copy 
 of Nietzsche: 'Always the same. He ought to do this, and
 
 523 DEGENERATION 
 
 not to do that ; the same litany from his first infancy always 
 and only ; he should and he shouldn't. What he would was 
 the only thing never demanded of him ; and thus, in this 
 frightful servitude, he felt himself possessed by an immense 
 desire to be for once himself at last, and an immense anguish 
 at being always someone else eternally.' ' To say that everyone 
 only came out of himself to penetrate into another ... to 
 dominate him ! That a man could never, should never, be 
 himself, not have one hour of bliss, but everlastingly renounce, 
 transform, annihilate himself for another's gratification. . . . 
 Alone alone ; why would they not leave one alone ?' . . . 
 ' To make a desert for himself a still silent desert.' ' Others 
 had not this sentiment of the " I " to such an exuberant and 
 immeasurable extent.' ' The joyous hatred of men and the 
 world.' Here we have Ibsen: 'He wished to go into the 
 country he himself, precisely as proposed by the other, 
 certainly. But he wished to go into the country in virtue of 
 his free resolve, because it was his will, and not the proposal 
 of another. . . . And rather than bend to another's will he 
 renounced his own. Moreover, since another wished it, the 
 pleasure of wishing it himself was lost to him.' Here the 
 De Goncourts : ' There was around her out of the sorrowful 
 violet and bright gold a misty shimmer.' ' His feeling was 
 always something inconceivable, and also on a yellow ground 
 dirty yellow gasping, ecstatic, faint, pining away with a 
 death-rattle, and with violet tones, but very soft.' ' It was 
 chaste voluptuousness. He had it there in his brain, pearly 
 gray, melting into faint violet.' Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam : ' He 
 was bound to establish the new love. . . . The question was 
 of doing it in the style of electricity and steam. ^ n Edison- 
 love . . . yes, a machine-like love.' A mixture of Baudelaire 
 and Huysmans : ' In the undulating silver dust of the light a 
 lovely quivering sheen, woven of blue-black and pale green 
 vapour, bathed her rosy flesh, exhaled by its soft down. . . . He 
 wished utterly to destroy and flay her. Nothing but blood 
 blood. He only felt at ease when it streaked [!] down. . . . 
 He established a theory according to which this was the way 
 towards the new love, viz., by torture.' ' There lay the 
 meadows red as fire spread out in lovely slopes . . . and 
 hopes, the blue vampires, grew listless. But upright in its 
 pride and with imperial mourning walked a huge gray sun- 
 flower, silent and pale, on the arm of an awkward fat stinking 
 thistle, which trailed noisily afar with large rough gold.' ' This 
 now became for him true art, the art which alone could redeem 
 and make happy the art of odours. . . . From pale and 
 moaning fumes of the white rose, in which the suicide triumphs, 
 be awakened the eternal doctrine of Buddha,' etc. The re-
 
 REALISM 523 
 
 mainder is better expressed in the original, in Huysmans' 
 novel, A Rebours. As to the passages full of a heat which 
 clamours for a strait -jacket, and simulates satyriasis and 
 Sadism ; as to the quaint confusions and orthographical errors 
 in French names which the author, who poses as a Parisian, 
 commits at every step ; and as to his frequent manifestation 
 of megalomania, it is enough to refer to them. These things 
 are not essential, but they contribute to make Bahr's book the 
 only product of hysterical mental derangement hitherto existing 
 in German literature. 
 
 The greater number of Young- German plagiarists have not 
 yet risen to the monumental productions of a Tovote or a 
 Bahr, and have stopped at short pieces of lyric poetry. 
 
 Special mention ought to be accorded to Gerhart Haupt- 
 mann, who has, unfortunately, permitted himself to be enrolled 
 among the ' Young Germans.' It is difficult to confuse him 
 with them, for if he makes concessions to their aesthetics of 
 the commonplace with a carelessness which of itself betrays 
 a disquieting obtuseness of artistic taste and conscience, he 
 nevertheless may be distinguished from them by some great 
 qualities. He possesses a luscious, vivid vocabulary, full of ex- 
 pression and feeling, even though it is a dialect. He knows 
 how to see reality, and he has the power to render it in 
 poetry. 
 
 It will not occur to anyone to pronounce any final judgment 
 on this author of thirty years of age. As yet only his debut 
 can be mentioned, and hopes be formed for his future develop- 
 ment. What he has hitherto produced has been surprisingly 
 unequal. Side by side with originality his works present a 
 barren imitation; with high artistic insight, a schoolboy's 
 awkwardness and ingenuousness ; with flights of genius, the 
 most afflicting commonplaces. One scarcely knows if he is a 
 novelist or a dramatic writer. In two of his pieces, in fact, 
 Vor Sonnenaufgang and College Grampian, there is such a 
 complete absence of progressive action, a condition of things 
 so purely stationary and devoid of development, that even the 
 instinct of a natural talent for the stage could never have so 
 forgotten itself. Perhaps Hauptmann is only temporarily under 
 the spell of an aesthetic theory, from which he will free himself 
 later. He desires, indeed, to describe the ' milieu ' faithfully 
 and closely, and loses sight in so doing of the principal thing 
 in poetry of the characters and their fate. His dramas 
 frequently fall asunder for this reason into a series of episodes, 
 in themselves well observed and characteristic, but only 
 distantly, or it may be not at all, connected with the plot, as, 
 e.g., in the play Vor Sonnenaufgang, the appearance of Hopslabar, 
 the servant Mary who is leaving, the coachman's wife stealing
 
 524 DEGENERATION 
 
 the milk, etc. All are pictures of manners, but at the same 
 time cease to form united compositions. 
 
 If Hauptmann has borrowed from the French realists the 
 excessive and useless accentuation of the ' milieu,' he has 
 taken from Ibsen the charlatanism of * modernity ' and the 
 affectation of the ' thesis.' On the model of the Norwegian 
 poet he suddenly inserts into some commonplace history 
 belonging exclusively to no particular period or locality, some 
 intrusive phrase containing an obscure allusion to ' the great 
 times in which we live,' or the ' mighty events which are 
 coming to pass,' etc. For example, Einsame MenscJien 
 (Lonely Folk) is the needlessly pretentious title of a drama 
 in which we are shown a really Ibsenian idiot, who fancies 
 himself misunderstood by his excellent wife, and becomes 
 enamoured of a Russian girl-student, who is their visitor. As 
 is generally the case with such feeble wights, he desires to 
 possess the Russian, while not losing his wife ; he has neither 
 the courage to wound his wife by openly separating from her, 
 nor the strength to conquer his guilty passion for the stranger. 
 In his torment he tries to deceive himself, to persuade himself 
 that his feelings towards the Russian are only those of friend- 
 ship and of gratitude, that she has understood him and in- 
 tellectually stimulated him. The Russian, however, is more 
 clear-sighted, and is about to leave the house. The end of 
 the story is that the idiot drowns himself. The conception of 
 a weak man vacillating between two women, of whom one is 
 the embodiment of duty, and the other of presumptive happi- 
 ness, is as old as the theatre itself. It has nothing to do with 
 the times. It can only be made to pass as 'modernism' by 
 prevarication. And in this feeble drama Hauptmann makes 
 his characters hold learned conversations full of allusions, such 
 as the following : 
 
 FRAULEIN ANNA (the Russian). These are, indeed, great times in which 
 we are living. I seem to feel as if something close and oppressive were 
 gradually lifting off from us. Do you not agree with me, Doctor ? 
 
 JOHANNES (the idiot). In what way? 
 
 FRAULEIN ANNA. On one side, a stifling dread was mastering us ; on 
 the other, a gloomy fanaticism. The excessive strain seems now to be 
 straightened. Something like a breath. of fresh air, let us say from the 
 twentieth century, has come in upon us.* 
 
 The same swagger of modernity made the author decide 
 on this title, Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise), for his first 
 work, and to qualify it as a ' social drama.' It is no more 
 ' social ' than any other drama, and has no connection what- 
 ever with ' sunrise ' in a metaphorical sense. It reveals the 
 state of affairs in a Silesian village, where the discovery of 
 
 * Einsame Menschcn; Drama. 1891, p. 84.
 
 REALISM 525 
 
 coal-mines on their land has made the peasants millionaires. 
 The contrast between the coarseness of the rustics and their 
 opulence furnishes good scenes for a farce ; but what has it 
 to do with the age and its problems ? A fragment of thesis 
 is dovetailed into the farce. The peasant millionaire is a 
 drunkard. The daughter may have inherited her father's vice. 
 And so a man who has become attached and engaged to her 
 leaves her with sorrowful determination on learning that the 
 old man drinks. This thesis is an absurdity. A drunkard 
 can transmit his vice to his children, but is not bound to do 
 so, and, in the instance in point, the grown-up daughter does 
 not betray the slightest inclination to drink. His thesis is 
 worked out on the model of Ibsenian maunderings, and is as 
 little taken from life as the lover who subordinates his love to 
 a very uncertain theory. In this man we recognise our old 
 friend, the type of the recipe for realist novels, who makes 
 vague allusions to socialistic studies which he is reputed to 
 pursue,* and proves himself, by these shadowy indications, 
 to be a * modern ' man. 
 
 Hauptmann is true and strong only when he makes the 
 poor of the lowest class speak in their ow r n dialect. The maid- 
 servants in Vor Sonnenaufgang are excellent. The nurse, who 
 sings the baby to sleep ; the laundress, Frau Lehmann, who 
 laments her domestic troubles, are by far the most successful 
 characters in Einsame Menschen. And if Die Weber is the best 
 work he has hitherto produced, it is because only the poorest 
 people, speaking only their own dialect, appear in it. But as 
 soon as he has to deal with more complex human beings of 
 the educated classes beings who are not perishing with 
 hunger nor suffering from poverty, who speak high German, 
 and have a wider intellectual horizon he becomes uncertain 
 and flat, and catches up the pattern-album of realism instead 
 of taking reality as his model. 
 
 Die Weber (The Weavers) is the only real drama among 
 the five which Hauptmann has hitherto written.! There is 
 
 * Gerhart Hauptmann, Vor Sonnenaufgang, Soziales Drama, 6 e Auflage ; 
 Berlin, 1892, p. 14 : ' During the two years of my imprisonment, I wrote my 
 first book on political economy.' P. 42 : 'The Icarians . . . share equally 
 j>.ll work and all desert. No one is poor; there are no poor among them.' 
 P. 47 : ' My fight is a fight for the happiness of all. . . . Moreover, I must 
 say that the fight in the interest of progress brings me great satisfaction.' 
 (Let it be understood that not the smallest trace of this famous 'fight' is to 
 be seen in the piece !) P. 63 : 'I should like to study the state of things 
 here. I shall study the position of the miners here. . . . My work must 
 be pre-eminently descriptive,' etc. 
 
 t Since this book has been published, Hauptmann has put on the stage 
 two new pieces : The Beaver Pelisse, which was an utter fiasco, and 
 Hannele, a Dream Poem, much discussed on account of its strange mys- 
 ticism.
 
 526 DEGENERATION 
 
 not much action in this piece ; but it is sufficient, and it 
 progresses. First, we see the profound misery in which the 
 weavers are perishing ; then we behold the rousing of their 
 fury at their intolerable condition, and then their passion 
 gradually developed before our eyes in ever-deepening intensity^ 
 rising into frenzy, destructive madness, tumults and riots, with 
 all their tragic consequences. The extraordinary part of this 
 drama is that the author has triumphed, with a genius which 
 entitles him to our respect, over the enormous difficulty of 
 captivating and stirring our human feelings, without making 
 any individual character the centre-point of his piece, and of 
 distributing the action between a great number of persons and 
 a multitude of individual traits, without its ever ceasing to be 
 a united and compact whole. These features, revealing a 
 painfully minute observation, necessarily belong to individuals ; 
 nevertheless, they excite a very lively interest, sympathy and 
 pity, not for the person, but for a whole class of men. We 
 reach through emotion a generalization which usually is only 
 a work of the intellect, through a poetic composition to a 
 feeling which usually is excited only by history. In making 
 this possible, Hauptmann rises infinitely above the bog of 
 barren imitation, and creates a truly new form, viz., the drama 
 in which the hero is not an individual, but the crowd ; he 
 succeeds, by artistic means, in presenting us with the hallucina- 
 tion that we are constantly seeing before us the nameless 
 millions, while naturally there are never more than a few 
 persons in the scene who suffer, speak, and act. Besides this 
 great and radical innovation, other burning aesthetic questions 
 are solved in the piece with overpowering beauty and sobriety. 
 We have here a drama without love, and at the same time a 
 proof that other sentiments besides the one instinct of sex 
 can powerfully stir the soul of the reader. The piece is, more- 
 over, a curious contribi^tion to the wholly new ' psychology 
 of the masses,' with which Sighele, Fournial, and others have 
 been occupied,* and it gives an absolutely exact picture of the 
 delirium and hallucinations which take possession of the 
 individual in the midst of an excited crowd, and transforms 
 his character and all his instincts after the model of the usually 
 criminal leaders. It comprises, finally, this demonstration, 
 which I have nowhere found so fully in all the "international 
 literature with which I am acquainted, viz., that beautiful 
 effects, when rightly employed, can be obtained even with re- 
 pulsive subjects. A poor weaver, who has not touched meat 
 for two years, asks a comrade not having the heart to do it 
 
 * Scipio Sighele, La Folia delinqucnte, Turin, 1892 ; translated into 
 French, La houle crhntnelle, Paris, 1893. Fournial, Essai sur laTsychologie 
 des Foules. Lyon, 18^2. <*
 
 REALISM 527 
 
 himself to kill a pretty little dog which had run up to him, 
 and his wife roasts it for him. He cannot control his craving, 
 and begins dipping into the saucepan almost before the meat 
 is done. His stomach, however, cannot bear the dainty, and 
 to his great despair he is forced to reject it.* The incident 
 in itself is not appetizing. But here it becomes beautiful and 
 deeply affecting, for it describes with incomparably tragic 
 power the misery of these woebegone starving people. . 
 
 This piece, apparently so realistic in the sense attached to 
 this word by superficial talkers, is, on the whole, the most 
 convincing refutation of the theory of realism. For it is 
 incredible that all the incidents which mark the dreadful 
 position of the weavers could have been condensed into 
 exactly one hour of the day, and into one single room of the 
 workman Dreissiger's house ; it is, if not wholly impossible, 
 at all events very improbable, that the soldier's murderous 
 bullet should happen to kill the weaver Hilse, the only man 
 trusting in God and resigned to his fate, who remained quietly 
 at his work when all the others rushed out to pillage and riot 
 in the streets. The poet has not depicted ' real ' life here, but 
 has freely utilized the materials which he has gained through 
 his observation of life in order to give artistic expression to 
 liis personal ideas. His desire was to excite our pity as 
 vividly as that felt by himself for a definite form of human 
 misery. With this object he collected with the sure hand of 
 an artist, into a narrow compass, events which in life would 
 be distributed over months or years, and at long intervals, and 
 he has guided the flight of a blindly unconscious bullet in such 
 a way that it commits, like a villain endowed, with reason, a 
 peculiarly dastardly crime, thus raising our compassion for 
 the poor weavers to the height of indignation. The piece, 
 then, shows us the ideas and designs of the poet, his manner 
 of viewing and interpreting reality ; it enables us to discern 
 the sentiments aroused in him by the drama of life. It is, 
 then, in the highest degree a * subjective ' work, i.e., the 
 opposite of a ' realistic ' copy of fact, which would have to be 
 photographically objective. 
 
 * Gerhart Hauptmann, Die Weber, Schauspiel aus den vierziger Jahren, 
 2 Auflage ; Berlin, 1892, p. 39 : 
 
 BERTHA. Where is father, then ? [Old Baumert has gone silently away.] 
 
 MOTHER BAUMERT. I don't know where he can have gone. 
 
 BERTHA. Could it be that he's no longer used to meat ? 
 
 MOTHER BAUMERT (beside herself, in tears). There now, you see you 
 see for yourself, he can't even keep it down. He'll throw up all the little 
 good food he has had. 
 
 OLD BAUMERT (returns, crying -with vexation): Well, well, 'twill soon be 
 all over with me. They'll soon have done for me. If one do chance to 
 get something good, one isn't able to keep it. (He sits down on the bench by 
 Jhe stove, weeping^} [All this conversation is written in Silesian dialect.]
 
 528 DEGENERATION 
 
 How does it happen that an artist, who applies his means 
 with so fine a taste and with so skilful a x calculation of the 
 effect, can commit at the same time such naivete's as, for 
 example, these stage-directions in Vor Sonnenaufgang : ' Frau 
 Krause, at the moment of seating herself, remembers [!] that 
 grace has not yet been said, and mechanrcally folds her hands, 
 though without otherwise controlling her malice.' ' It is the 
 peasant Krause who, as always [!], is the last to leave the inn/ 
 ' He embraces her with the awkwardness of a gorilla,' etc. 
 How is an actor to set to work by his awkwardness to make 
 a spectator think precisely of a gorilla, or to show him that, 
 ' as always,' he is the last to leave the inn ? More especially, 
 how is it to be explained that this same Hauptmann, who 
 has created Die Weber, should after this lofty composition 
 have written the novels Der Apostel and Bahnwarter Thiel ?* 
 Here we fall back into the lowest depths of Young-German 
 incapacity. The idea is nonsensical and a plagiarism, the 
 story has not a ray of truth, and the language (so original and 
 lifelike, and so exactly rendering the lightest shades of thought 
 when the author has recourse to patois) is commonplace and 
 slipshod enough to make one weep. No words must be wasted 
 on Der Apostel. A dreamer, manifestly touched by insanity, 
 perambulates the streets of Zurich in the costume of an 
 Oriental prophet, and is taken to be Christ by the crowd who 
 worship him. This is the whole story. It is represented in 
 such a way that we never know whether the narrative is 
 telling what the Apostle dreamed or what really happened. 
 His ideas and sentiments are an echo of Nietzsche. Zarathustra 
 has incontestably got into Hauptmann's head, and left him no 
 peace till he had himself produced a second infusion of this 
 idiocy. The railway signalman, Thiel, has lost his wife at 
 the birth of their first child. Constantly away from home on 
 duty, he is obliged to marry again that his child may be cared 
 for. The second wife, who soon gives her husband a child 
 of her own, ill-treats the motherless one. In spite of Thiel's 
 warnings, she one day leaves her stepchild on the rails un- 
 tended, and it is crushed by a train. The signalman then 
 murders his wife and her child with a hatchet in the most 
 horrible manner at night, and is shut up in a lunatic asylum 
 as a furious madman. Let me quote just a few of his descrip- 
 tions : ' In the obscurity . . . the signalman's hut was trans- 
 formed into a chapel. A faded photograph of the dead woman 
 on the table before him, his Psalm-book and Bible open, he 
 read and sang alternately the whole night through, interrupted 
 only by the trains tearing past at intervals,- and fell into an 
 
 * Gerhart Hauptmann, Der Apostel, Bahnwarter Thiel, Novellistische 
 Studien. Berlin, 1892.
 
 REALISM 529 
 
 ecstasy so intense that he saw visions of the dead woman 
 standing before his eyes.' ' The [telegraphic] pole, at the 
 southern extremity of the section, had a particularly full and 
 beautiful chord. . . . The signalman experienced a solemn 
 feeling as at church. And then in time he came to dis- 
 tinguish a voice which recalled to him his dead wife. He 
 imagined that it was a chorus of blessed spirits in which her 
 voice was mingled, and this idea awakened in him a longing, 
 an emotion amounting to tears.' The ' Young German ' speaks 
 with contempt of Berthold Auerbach, because he depicts 
 sentimental peasants. Is there a single one of Auerbach's 
 Black Forest folk impregnated with such a rose-watery senti- 
 mentality as this signalman of the ' realist ' Hauptmann, who 
 leans against a telegraph-pole, and is moved to tears at its 
 sound ? Again, the passage (pp. 22, 23) which shows us Thiel 
 in amorous excitement at the sight of his wife (' from the 
 woman an invincible, inevitable power seemed to emanate, 
 which Thiel felt himself impotent to resist ') Hauptmann has 
 drawn from Zola's novels, and not from the observations of 
 German signalmen. Or has he rather desired to depict in a 
 general way a madman who has always been such long before 
 his furious insanity broke out ? In this case he has drawn the 
 picture very falsely. 
 
 And the style of this unhappy book ! The Scotch firs . . . 
 rubbed their branches squeaking against each other,' and * a 
 noisy squeaking, rattling, clattering, and clashing [of a train 
 with the brake on] broke upon the stillness of the evening.' 
 One and the same word to describe the noise of branches 
 rubbing each other, and of a train with the brake on ! ' Two 
 red round lights [those of a locomotive] pierced the darkness 
 like the fixed and staring eyes of a gigantic monster.' 'The 
 sun . . . sparkling at its rising like an enormous blood-red 
 jewel.' * The sky which caught, like a gigantic and stainlessly 
 blue bowl of crystal, the golden light of the sun.' And once 
 again : ' The sky like an empty pale-blue bowl of crystal.' 
 * The moon hung, comparable to a lamp, above the forest." 
 How can an author who has any respect for himself employ 
 comparisons which would make a journeyman tailor who 
 dabbled in writing blush ? Besides, what countless slovenli- 
 nesses ! ' Before his eyes floated pell-mell little yellow points 
 like glow-worms.' Glow-worms do not give out a yellow, but 
 a bluish, light. ' His glassy pupils moved incessantly.' This 
 is a phenomenon which no one has yet seen. ' The trunks of 
 the fir-trees stretched like pale decayed bones between the 
 summits.' Bones are that part of the body which does not 
 decay. ' The blood which flowed was the sign of combat.*- 
 Truly a reliable sign ! Even great faults in grammar are noti 
 
 34
 
 530 DEGENERATION 
 
 wanting, but I consent to take these as printer's mistakes. If 
 Gerhart Hauptmann has true friends, their imperative duty is 
 to rouse his conscience. Having shown what excellent things 
 he is capable of producing, he has not the right to scribble 
 carelessly like the first paltry ' Young-German ' writer. He 
 must be strict with himself, and endeavour always to remain 
 the artist he has shown himself in Die Weber. 
 
 Hauptmann's successes have not let Arno Holz and Johannes 
 Schlaf rest, and both have joined to imitate his Vor Sonncnauf- 
 gang. Their united efforts produced the Familie Selicke, 
 a drama in which nothing happens, of which alcohol is like- 
 wise the subject, and where the personages also speak in 
 dialect. For * modernity's ' sake they have introduced a 
 theological candidate who has become a freethinker, yet none 
 the less wishes to obtain an incumbency. I mention this in- 
 significant patchwork play only because the realists usually 
 quote it as one of their magna opera. 
 
 Such are the Young-German realists, among whose number 
 I will not include, as I said before, a sterling author like 
 Gerhart Hauptmann. They do not know German, are in- 
 capable of even observing life, still more of understanding it ; 
 they know nothing, learn nothing, and experience nothing 
 whatsoever ; have nothing to say, have neither a true senti- 
 ment nor a personal thought to express, yet never cease 
 writing ; and their scribbling, in the eyes of a great number, 
 passes as the sole German literature of the present and future. 
 They plagiarize the stalest of foreign fashions, and call them- 
 selves innovators and original geniuses. They append on the 
 signboard before their shops, ' At the Sign of Modernity,' 
 and nothing is to be found in them but the discarded breeches 
 of bygone poetasters. If the few lines in which they mutter 
 about the obscure Socialistic 'studies' and 'works' of the 
 hero be excluded from all they have published up to the 
 present time, there will remain a miserable balderdash, without 
 colour, taste, or connection with time and space, and which a 
 tolerably conscientious editor of a newspaper even half a 
 century ago would have thrown into the waste-paper basket 
 as altogether too musty. They know that very well, and to be 
 beforehand with those who would reproach them with their 
 charlatanism, they audaciously attribute it to those respectable 
 authors whom they cover with their slaver. Thus, Hans 
 Merian dares to say : ' Spielhagen makes it appear as though 
 he had drawn the fundamental ideas and conflicts in his 
 novels from the great questions which are stirring the present 
 time. But closely examined, all this magnificence evaporates 
 into a vain phantasmagoria.' And : ' To the fabricators of 
 novels a la Paul Lindau, recently dealing with realism, we
 
 REALISM 5 $r 
 
 address the reproach of false realism.'* And this same Hans 
 Merian finds that the realism of Max Kretzer and of Karl 
 Bleibtreu is genuine, and that their Parisian cocotte-stories, 
 transported contraband into Berlin, and their adventures of 
 mythical waitresses, are * drawn from the great questions of 
 the day ' ! Is not this the practice of thieves who scamper 
 away at full speed before a policeman, shouting as they run 
 louder than anyone else, ' Stop thief!' The movement of the 
 Young German is an incomparable example in literature of 
 that tendency to form cliques which I described in the first 
 volume of this work. It began by a foundation in dile form. 
 A man arrogated to himself the rank of captain, and enrolled 
 armed companions in order to repair with them into the 
 Bohemian forests. The purpose was the same as that of 
 every other band of criminals the ' Maffia,' the ' Mala Vita,' 
 the ' Mano negra,' etc., viz., that of living well without work- 
 ing, by plundering the rich, by blackmailing the poor, by favour- 
 ing acts of vengeance by the members on persons whom they 
 envy, hate, or fear, by satisfying with impunity the leaning to 
 license and crime, kept down by custom and law. Like the 
 ' Mala Vita ' and analogous associations, this band palliates 
 its acts and deeds by stock phrases intended to secure the 
 favour, or at least the indulgence, of the crowd, incapable of 
 judgment and easy to move. Brigands always profess that 
 they are guided by the desire to repair, to the utmost of their 
 power, the injustice of fate, by relieving the rich of, their 
 superfluities, and by then alleviating the misery of the poor. 
 Thus, this band asserts that it defends the cause of truth, 
 liberty, and progress, with the indecent love adventures of 
 tavern-maidservants and prostitutes ! Membership is acquired 
 by formal admission after predetermined tests have been 
 undergone. He must first publicly bespatter a well-known 
 and meritorious author with mud. With the predominance 
 of low and bad emotions in members of the band, they ex- 
 perience more gratification in maligning a man they envy 
 than in being praised themselves. Next, the candidate must 
 worship as geniuses one or more members of the band, and 
 finally give proof, in verse or prose, that he also is able to 
 express, in the language of a souteneur, the ideas of a convict, 
 and the sensations of a noisome beast. Having undergone 
 these three ordeals with success, he is received into the band 
 and declared a genius. Just as the bands of brigands, have 
 their haunts, their receivers of stolen goods, and their, secret 
 or affiliated allies among the tradespeople, so this /band 
 possesses its own newspaper, its appointed editors (who, at 
 
 * Hans Merian, Die sogenannten l Jungdeutschen ' in unsererzeitgeriussischett 
 Literatur, 2 e Auflage. Leipzig, ss. 12, 14. Undated.
 
 333 DEGENERATION 
 
 first at least, accepted everything from it), and secret under- 
 standings with the critics of respectable papers. Its influence 
 extends even to foreign countries a phenomenon frequently 
 observed in the formation of bands, and expressly confirmed 
 by Lombroso. ' The Mattoids,' he says, ' as opposed to 
 geniuses and fools, are linked together by a sympathy of 
 interests and hatred ; they form a kind of freemasonry so 
 much the more powerful that it is less regular. It is founded 
 on the need of resistance to ridicule which is common to all, 
 and inexorably pursues them everywhere on the necessity of 
 uprooting, or at least combating, the natural antithesis, which, 
 for them, is the man of genius ; and, in spite of their hating 
 each other, they stand firmly by one another.'* 
 
 He who from a height surveys a horzon of a certain extent 
 can easily observe the labour of the apostles of this inter- 
 national freemasonry. M. T6odar de Wyzewa, already men- 
 tioned, who introduced to the French the insane Nietzsche as 
 the most remarkable author that Germany has produced in 
 the second half of this century, speaks in La Revue bleue and 
 in Le Figaro of Conrad Alberti as the ' poet ' who will dominate 
 German literature in the twentieth century. The ' new 
 reviews' of the Symbolists and Instrumentists, La Revue blanche, 
 La Plume, etc., translate the ' Erlebte Gedichte ' of O. J. 
 Bierbaum. On the other hand, O. E. Hartleben offers the 
 German public the so-called ' poetry ' of the Belgian Symbo- 
 list, Albert Giraud, Pierrot lunaire, and H. Bahr mutters with 
 transport over the Parisian mystics. Ola Hansson is enthu- 
 siastic before German readers over the realists of the North, 
 and carries into Sweden the good news of Young-German 
 realism, etc. 
 
 The actions of the band have not done much good to itself, 
 but they have caused serious injuries to German literature. 
 It has necessarily exerted a baneful attraction over the young 
 who have come to the front in the last seven or eight years. 
 If we consider the enormous difficulties to which a beginner 
 is exposed, who without protection or influence, depending 
 wholly on himself, enters into the Via Crucis leading to 
 literary success, we shall find it quite comprehensible that the 
 tyros should be eager to join themselves to a society possessing 
 a powerful organization, its own periodicals and publishers, 
 as well as a definite public, and always ready to take the part 
 of its members with the unscrupulousness and pugnacity of 
 cut-throats. As members of the band, they are freed from all 
 the difficulties of beginners. The most vigorous talents alone 
 such, for example, as Hermann Sudermann disdained to 
 lighten their struggles with the help of such allies. The others 
 
 * C. Lombroso and R. Laschi, Le Crime pottlique, etc., t ii., p. 116.
 
 REALISM 533 
 
 willingly allowed themselves to be affiliated. The result was, 
 on the one hand, that wholly incompetent lads were drawn 
 into the profession of authors, who would never have come 
 before the public if they had not had special depots to which 
 they could cart all their rubbish ; and, on the other hand, that 
 of procuring for others, who were perhaps not wholly devoid of 
 talent, periodicals and publishers for their childish effusions, the 
 appearance of which in print would have been inconceivable 
 before the formation of the band. Some threw themselves 
 into the literary profession at an age when they should have 
 been studying for a long time to come, and thereby remained 
 ignorant, immature, and superficial ; others acquired slipshod 
 and slovenly habits into which they would never have fallen if, 
 in the absence of the conveniences which the organization of 
 the band offered them, they had been obliged to submit to 
 some discipline, and develop their capacities with care. The 
 existence of this literary ' Mama ' assisted the plagiarists 
 against independent minds, the common herd against the 
 solitary, the scribbler against the artist, and the obscene 
 against the refined, so powerfully that competition was almost 
 out of the question. The luxuriant growth of silly, boyish, 
 and crude book-making is the result of this fostering of in- 
 capacity and immaturity, and this premium granted to vulgarity. 
 I will demonstrate in one instance only the disastrous effect 
 of the band. The case of the Darmstadt Gymnasium (public 
 school) boy may be remembered, who wrote under the 
 pseudonym of Hans G. Ludwigs, and committed suicide in 
 1892 at the age of seventeen. For two years he had offered 
 incense to the realist ' geniuses,' and published idiotic novels 
 in the official periodicals of Young Germany, and he com- 
 mitted suicide because, as he wrote, ' this cursed boxed-in 
 life,' ie., the obligation to learn and work regularly in class, 
 'broke down his strength.' A good many gymnasium boys 
 write trumpery things and send them to the papers ; but as 
 these are not printed, they gradually recover their reason. 
 Their heads do not get turned, and they do not come to 
 imagine that they are much too good to do their lessons, and 
 diligently prepare for their examinations. Ludwigs would 
 perhaps have been cured of his folly ; hs might have lived till 
 the present day, and become a useful man, if the criminal realist 
 periodicals had not printed his twaddle, and thus diverted him 
 from his studies, and intensified his unwholesome boyish 
 vanity into megalomania. 
 
 That this invasion by main force, this revolt of slaves into 
 literature, to use Nietzsche's expression, was to a certain 
 extent successful, can be accounted for by the stats of Germany. 
 Its literature after 1870 had, in fact, become stagnant. It
 
 534 DEGENERATION 
 
 could not be otherwise. The German people had been obliged 
 to exert their whole strength to conquer their unity in terrible 
 wars. Now, it is not possible simultaneously to make history 
 on a great scale and lead a ilourishing artistic life ; it must be 
 one or the other. In the France of Napoleon I. the most 
 celebrated authors were Delille, Esm6nard, Parseval de Grand- 
 maison, and Fontanes. The Germany of William I., of Moltke 
 and Bismarck, could not produce a Goethe or a Schiller. 
 This can be explained without any mysticism. From the 
 mighty events of which they are witnesses and collaborators 
 the nation obtains a standard of comparison, by the side of 
 which all works of art shrink together, and poets and artists, 
 especially those most gifted and conscientious, feel depressed 
 and discouraged, often even paralyzed, by the double percep- 
 tion that their compatriots only peruse their works distractedly 
 and superficially, and that their creations absolutely cannot 
 attain to the grandeur of the historical events passing before 
 their eyes. In this critical period of transient mental collapse 
 the Young-German band made its appearance, and profited 
 greatly by what even honest and sensible people were obliged 
 to acknowledge as well-founded attacks even while they 
 condemned the form of them on many of the then reigning 
 literary senators. 
 
 But another and weightier ground is the anarchy which 
 reigns at present in German literature. Our republic of letters 
 is neither governed nor defended. It has neither authorities 
 nor police, and that is the reason a small but determined band 
 of evildoers can make a great stir at their pleasure. Our 
 masters do not concern themselves about their posterity as 
 used to be the case. They have no sense of the duty which 
 success and glory impose upon them. Let me not be .nis- 
 understood. Nothing is further from my thoughts than the 
 wish to transform literature into a closed corporation, and to 
 require the new arrivals to become apprentices and journey- 
 men (although, in fact, every new generation unconsciously 
 forms itself on the works of its intellectual ancestors). But 
 they have not the right to be indifferent to what will come 
 after them. They are the intellectual leaders of the peo )le. 
 They have their ear. On them is the task incumbent of 
 facilitating the first steps of the beginner, and presenting them 
 to the public. By this much would be obtained continuity 
 of development, formation of a literary tradition, respect and 
 gratitude for predecessors, severe and early suppression of 
 individuals of absolutely unjustifiable pretensions, economy of 
 power, which in these days a young author must fritter away 
 >-\ order to come out of his shell. But our literary chiefs have 
 no understanding for all this. Each one thinks only of himself,
 
 REALISM 535 
 
 and is furiously jealous of his colleagues and his followers. 
 Not one of them says that in the intellectual concert of a great 
 people there is room enough for dozens of different artists, 
 each one of whom plays his own instrument. Not one takes 
 into consideration that after him new talent will be born, that 
 this is a fact he cannot prevent, and that he is preparing for 
 himself a better old age by levelling the paths, instead of 
 viciously trying to close them to those who, whatever he may 
 do, will still be his successors in public favour. Who amongst 
 us has ever received a word of encouragement from one of our 
 literary grandees ? To whom amongst us have they testified 
 their interest and benevolence ? Not one of us owes them 
 anything whatsoever ; not one feels obliged to be just towards 
 them, nor to make himself their champion ; and when the 
 band fell upon them like a lot of brigands, to drive them off 
 with blows, and put themselves in their place, not a hand was 
 raised to defend them, and they were cruelly punished for 
 having lived and acted in isolation and secret mutual hostility, 
 sternly repulsing the young, and indifferent to the tastes of 
 the people whenever their own works were not in question. 
 
 And as we have no Council of Ancients, so we lack also all 
 critical police. The reviewer may praise the most wretched 
 production, kill by silence or drag through the mire the highest 
 masterpiece, state as the contents of a book things of which 
 there is not the slightest mention, and no one calls him to 
 account, no one stigmatizes his ineptitude, his effrontery, or 
 his falsehood. Thus a public that is neither led nor counselled 
 by its ancients, nor protected by its critical police, becomes 
 the predestined prey of all charlatans and impostors.
 
 BOOK V. 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PROGNOSIS. 
 
 OUR long and sorrowful wandering through the hospital for 
 as such we have recognised, if not all civilized humanity, at 
 all events the upper stratum of the population of large towns 
 to be is ended. We have observed the various embodi- 
 ments which degeneration and hysteria have assumed in the 
 art, poetry, and philosophy of our times. We have seen the 
 mental disorder affecting modern society manifesting itself 
 chiefly in the following forms : Mysticism, which is the expres- 
 sion of the inaptitude for attention, for clear thought and 
 control of the emotions, and has for its cause the weakness 
 of the higher cerebral centres ; Ego-mania, which is an effect of 
 faulty transmission by the sensory nerves, of obtuseness in the 
 centres of perception, of aberration of instincts from a craving 
 for sufficiently strong impressions, and of the great pre- 
 dominance of organic sensations over representative conscious- 
 ness; and false Realism, which proceeds from confused aesthetic 
 theories, and characterizes itself by pessimism and the irre- 
 sistible tendency to licentious ideas, and the most vulgar and 
 unclean modes of expression. In all three tendencies we 
 detect the same ultimate elements, viz., a brain incapable of 
 normal working, thence feebleness of will, inattention, pre- 
 dominance of emotion, lack of knowledge, absence, of sympathy 
 or interest in the world and humanity, atrophy of the notion 
 of duty and morality. From a clinical point of view some- 
 what unlike each other, these pathological pictures are never- 
 theless only different manifestations of a single and unique 
 fundamental condition, to wit, exhaustion, and they must be 
 ranked by the alienist in the genus melancholia, which is the 
 psychiatrical symptom of an exhausted central nervous system. 
 Superficial or unfair critics have foisted on me the assertion
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 53? 
 
 that degeneration and hysteria are the products of the present 
 age. The attentive and candid reader will bear witness that 
 I have never circulated such an absurdity. Hysteria and 
 degeneration have always existed ; but they formerly showed 
 themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of 
 the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which 
 was experienced by the generation on which the multitude of 
 discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing upon it 
 organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which 
 created favourable conditions under which these maladies 
 could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to 
 civilization. Certain micro - organisms engendering mortal 
 diseases have always been present also for example, the 
 bacillus of cholera ; but they only cause epidemics when cir- 
 cumstances arise intensely favourable for their rapid increase. 
 In the same way the body constantly harbours parasites which 
 only injure it when another bacillus has invaded and devas- 
 tated it. For example, we are always inhabited by staphylo- 
 coccus and streptococcus, but the influenza bacillus must first 
 appear for them to swarm and produce mortal suppurations. 
 Thus, the vermin of plagiarists in art and literature becomes 
 dangerous only when the insane, who follow their own original 
 paths, have previously poisoned the Zeitgeist, weakened by 
 fatigue, and rendered it incapable of resistance. 
 
 We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic ; of 
 a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is 
 natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides : ' What is 
 to come next ?' 
 
 This question of eventuality presents itself to the physician 
 in every serious case, and however delicate and rash, above 
 all, however little scientific any prediction may be, he cannot 
 evade the necessity of establishing a prognosis. For that 
 matter, this is not purely arbitrary, not a blind leap into the 
 dark ; the most attentive observation of all the symptoms, 
 assisted by experience, permits a generally just conclusion on 
 the ulterior evolution of the evil. 
 
 It is possible that the disease may not have yet attained its 
 culminating point. If it should become more violent, gain 
 yet more in breadth and depth, then certain phenomena which 
 are perceived as exceptions or in an embryo condition would 
 henceforth increase to a formidable extent and develop con- 
 sistently ; others, which at present are only observed amonp; 
 the inmates of lunatic asylums, would pass into the daily 
 habitual condition of whole classes of the population. Life 
 would then present somewhat the following picture : 
 
 Every city possesses its club of suicides. By the side of 
 this exist clubs for mutual assassination by strangulation,
 
 533 DEGENERATION 
 
 hanging, or stabbing. In the place of the present taverns 
 houses would be found devoted to the service of consumers 
 of ether, chloral, naphtha, and hashish. The number of 
 persons suffering from aberrations of taste and smell has 
 become so considerable that it is a lucrative trade to open 
 shops for them where they can swallow in rich vessels all 
 sorts of dirt, and breathe amidst surroundings which do not 
 oftend their sense of beauty nor their habits of comfort the 
 odour of decay and filth. A number of new professions are 
 being formed that of injectors of morphia and cocaine ; of 
 commissioners who, posted at the corners of the streets, offer 
 their arms to persons attacked by agoraphobia, in order to 
 enable them to cross the roads and squares ; of companies of 
 men who by vigorous affirmations are charged to tranquillize 
 persons afflicted with the mania of doubt when taken by a fit 
 of nervousness, etc. 
 
 The increase of nervous irritability, far beyond the present 
 standard, has made it necessary to institute certain measures 
 of protection. After it has frequently come to pass that over- 
 excited persons, being unable to resist a sudden impulsion, have 
 killed from their windows with air-guns, or have even openly 
 atracked, the street boys who have uttered shrill whistles or 
 piercingly sharp screams without rhyme or reason ; that they 
 have forced their way into strange houses where beginners are 
 practising the piano or singing, and there committed murder ; 
 that they have made attempts with dynamite against tramways 
 where the conductor rings a bell (as in Berlin) or whistles it 
 has been forbidden by law to whistle and bawl in the street ; 
 special buildings, managed in such a way that no sound 
 penetrates 'to the outside, have been established for the 
 practice of the piano and singing exercises ; public con- 
 veyances have no right to make a noise, and the severest 
 penalty is at the same time attached to the possession of air- 
 guns. The barking of dogs having driven many people in the 
 neighbourhood to madness and suicide, these animals cannot 
 be kept in a town until after they have been made mute by 
 severing the ' recurrent ' nerve. A new legislation on subjects 
 connected with the press forbids journalists, under severe 
 penalties, to give detailed accounts of violence, or suicides 
 under peculiar circumstances. Editors are responsible for 
 all punishable actions committed in imitation of their re- 
 ports. 
 
 Sexual psychopathy of every nature has become so general 
 and so imperious that manners and laws have adapted them- 
 selves accordingly. They appear already in the fashions. 
 Masochists or passivists, who form the majority of men, clothe 
 themselves in a costume which recalls, by colour and cut,
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 539 
 
 feminine apparel. Women who wish to please men of this 
 kind wear men's dress, an eyeglass, boots with spurs and 
 riding-whip, and only show themselves in the street with a 
 large cigar in their mouths. The demand of persons with the 
 * contrary ' sexual sentiment that persons of the same sex can 
 conclude a legal marriage has obtained satisfaction, seeing 
 they have been numerous enough to elect a majority of 
 deputies having the same tendency.* Sadists, ' bestials,' 
 nosophiles, and necrophiles, etc., find legal opportunities to 
 gratify their inclinations. Modesty and restraint are dead 
 superstitions of the past, and appear only as atavism and 
 among the inhabitants of remote villages. The lust of murder 
 is confronted as a disease, and treated by surgical interven- 
 tion, etc. 
 
 The capacity for attention and contemplation has diminished 
 so greatly that instruction at school is at most but two hours 
 a day, and no public amusements, such as theatres, concerts, 
 lectures, etc., last more than half an hour. For that matter, 
 in the curriculum of studies, mental education is almost wholly 
 suppressed, and by far the greater part of the time is reserved for 
 bodily exercises ; on the stage only representations of unveiled 
 eroticism and bloody homicides, and to this, flock voluntary 
 victims from all the parts, who aspire to the voluptuousness 
 of dying amid the plaudits of delirious spectators. 
 
 The old religions have not many adherents. On the other 
 hand, there are a great number of spiritualist communities 
 who, instead of priests, maintain soothsayers, evokers of the 
 dead, sorcerers, astrologers, and chiromancers, etc. 
 
 Books such as those of the present day have not been in 
 fashion for a very long time. Printing is now only on black, 
 blue, or golden paper ; on another colour are single inco- 
 herent words, often nothing but syllables, nay, even letters or 
 numbers only, but which have a symbolical significance which 
 is meant to be guessed by the colour and print of the paper 
 and form of the book, the size and nature of the characters. 
 Authors soliciting popularity make comprehension easy by 
 adding to the text symbolical arabesques, and impregnating the 
 paper with a definite perfume. But this is considered vulgar 
 by the refined and connoisseurs, and is but little esteemed. 
 Some poets who publish no more than isolated letters of the 
 alphabet, or whose works are coloured pages on which is 
 absolutely nothing, elicit the greatest admiration. There are 
 societies whose object it is to interpret them, and their 
 enthusiasm is so fanatical that they frequently have fights 
 against each other ending in murder. 
 
 * Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Neue Forshutigen, etc., 2 Auflage, pp. 109, 118. 
 By the same, Psycho pathia Sexualis, 3 Auflage, p. 65.
 
 540 DEGENERATION 
 
 It would be easy to augment this picture still further, no 
 feature of which is invented, every detail being borrowed from 
 special literature on criminal law and psychiatria, and obser- 
 vations of the peculiarities of neurasthenics, hysterics, and 
 mattoids. This will be, in the near future, the condition of 
 civilized humanity, if fatigue, nervous exhaustion, and the 
 diseases and degeneration conditioned by them, make much 
 greater progress. 
 
 Will it come to this ? Well, no ; I think not. And this, for 
 a reason which scarcely perhaps permits of an objection : 
 because humanity has not yet reached the term of its evolu- 
 tion ; because the over-exertion of two or three generations 
 cannot yet have exhausted all its vital powers. Humanity is 
 not senile. It is still young, and a moment of over-exertion is 
 not fatal for youth ; it can recover itself. Humanity resembles 
 a vast torrent of lava, which rushes, broad and deep, from the 
 crater of a volcano in constant activity. The outer crust 
 cracks into cold, vitrified scoriae, but under this dead shell the 
 mass flows, rapidly and evenly, in living incandescence. 
 
 As long as the vital powers of an individual, as of a race, 
 are not wholly consumed, the organism makes efforts actively 
 or passively to adapt itself, by seeking to modify injurious 
 conditions, or by adjusting itself in some way so that condi- 
 tions impossible to modify should be as little noxious as 
 possible. Degenerates, hysterics, and neurasthenics are not 
 capable of adaptation. Therefore they are fated to disappear. 
 That which inexorably destroys them is that they do not know 
 how to come to terms with reality. They are lost, whether 
 they are alone in the world, or whether there are people with 
 them who are still sane, or more sane than they, or at least 
 curable. 
 
 They are lost if they are alone : for anti-social, inattentive, 
 without judgment or prevision, they are capable of no useful 
 individual effort, and still less of a common labour which 
 demands obedience, discipline, and the regular performance 
 of duty. They fritter away their life in solitary, unprofitable, 
 sesthetic debauch, and all that their organs, which are in full re- 
 gression, are still good for is enervating enjoyment. Like bats in 
 old towers, they are niched in the proud monument of civiliza- 
 tion, which they have found ready-made, but they themselves 
 can construct nothing more, nor prevent any deterioration. 
 They live, like parasites, on labour which past generations 
 have accumulated for them ; and when the heritage is once 
 consumed, they are condemned to die of hunger. 
 
 But they are still more surely and rapidly lost if, instead of 
 being alone in the world, healthy beings yet live at their side. 
 For in that case they have to fight in the struggle for existence, 
 and there is no leisure for them to perish in a slow decay by
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 541 
 
 their own incapacity for work. The normal man, with his 
 clear mind, logical thought, sound judgment, and strong will, 
 sees, where the degenerate only gropes ; he plans and acts 
 where the latter dozes and dreams ; he drives him without 
 effort from all the places where the life-springs of Nature 
 bubble up, and, in possession of all the good things of this 
 earth, he leaves to the impotent degenerate at most the shelter 
 of the hospital, lunatic asylum, and prison, in contemptuous 
 pity. Let us imagine the drivelling Zoroaster of Nietzsche, 
 with his cardboard lions, eagles, and serpents, from a toyshop, 
 or the noctambulist Des Esseintes of the Decadents, sniffing 
 and licking his lips, or Ibsen's "solitary powerful" Stock- 
 mann, and his Rosmer lusting for suicide let us imagine these 
 beings in competition with men who rise early, and are not 
 weary before sunset, who have clear heads, solid stomachs and 
 hard muscles : the comparison will provoke our laughter. 
 
 Degenerates must succumb, therefore. They can neither 
 adapt themselves to the conditions of Nature and civilization, 
 nor maintain themselves in the struggle for existence against 
 the healthy. But the latter and the vast masses of the 
 people still include unnumbered millions of them will rapidly 
 and easily adapt themselves to the conditions which new 
 inventions have created in humanity. Those who, by marked 
 deficiency of organization, are unable to do so, among the 
 generation taken unaw : ares by these inventions, fall out of the 
 ranks ; they become hysterical and neurasthenical, engender 
 degenerates, and in these end their race ; * but the more 
 vigorous, although they at first also have become bewildered 
 and fatigued, recover themselves little by little, their descend- 
 ants accustom themselves to the rapid progress which 
 humanity must make, and soon their slow respiration and 
 their quieter pulsations of the heart will prove that it no 
 longer costs them any effort to keep pace and keep up with 
 the others. The end of the twentieth century, therefore, 
 probably see a generation to whom it will not be injurious to 
 read a dozen square yards of newspapers daily, to be constantly 
 called to the telephone, to be thinking simultaneously of the 
 five continents of the world, to live half their time in a railway 
 -carriage or in a flying machine, and to satisfy the demands of 
 a circle of ten thousand acquaintances, associates, and friends. 
 It will know how to find its ease in the midst of a city inhabited 
 by millions, and will be able, -with nerves of gigantic vigour, to 
 respond without haste or agitation to the almost innumerable 
 claims of existence. 
 
 If, however, the new civilization should decidedly outstrip 
 
 * Dr. A. B. Morel, Traiti des D/ge'nJrescences, p. 581, note : 'The state of 
 arrested development and sterility are the essential characteristics of beings 
 arrived at the extreme limit of degeneracy. 1
 
 ij42 DEGENERATION 
 
 the powers of humanity, if .even the most robust of the species 
 should not in the long-run grow up to it, then ulterior genera- 
 tions will settle with it in another way. They will simply give 
 it up. For humanity has a sure means of defence against 
 innovations which impose a destructive effort on its nervous 
 system, namely, ' misoneism,' that instinctive, invincible 
 aversion to progress and its difficulties that Lombroso has 
 studied so much, and to which he has given this name.* Mis- 
 oneism protects man from changes of which the suddenness 
 or the extent would be baneful to him. But it does not only 
 appear as resistance to the acceptation of the new ; it has 
 another aspect, to wit, the abandonment and gradual elimina- 
 tion of inventions imposing claims too hard on man. We 
 see savage races who die out when the power of the white man 
 makes it impossible for them to shut out civilization ; but we 
 see also some who hasten with joy to tear off and throw away 
 the stiff collar imposed by civilization, as soon as constraint is 
 removed. I need only recall 'the anecdote, related in detail by 
 Darwin, of the Fuegian Jemmy Button, who, taken as a child 
 to England and brought up in that country, returned to his 
 own land in the patent-leather shoes and gloves and what not 
 of fashionable attire, but who, when scarcely landed, threw off 
 the spell of all this foreign lumber for which he was not ripe, 
 and became again a savage among savages. t During the 
 period of the great migrations, the barbarians constructed 
 block-houses in the shadow of the marble palaces of the 
 Romans they had conquered, and preserved of Roman in- 
 stitutions, inventions, arts and sciences, only those which 
 were easy and pleasant to bear. Humanity has, to-day as 
 much as ever, the tendency to reject all that it cannot digest. 
 If future generations come to find that the march of progress 
 is too rapid for them, they will after a time composedly give it 
 up. They will saunter along at their own pace or stop as they 
 choose. They will suppress the distribution of letters, allow 
 railways to disappear, banish telephones from dwelling-houses, 
 preserving them only, perhaps, for the service of the State, will 
 prefer weekly papers to daily journals, will quit cities to return 
 to the country, will slacken the changes of fashion, will simplify 
 the occupations of the day and year, and will grant the nerves 
 some rest again. Thus, adaptation will be effected in any case, 
 either by the increase of nervous power or by the renuncia- 
 tion of acquisitions which exact too much from the nervous 
 system. 
 
 As to the future of art and literature, with which these 
 
 * C. Lombroso and R. Laschi, Le Crime politique, etc.,t. i., p. 8 et seq. 
 t Charles Darwin, A Naturalist's Voyage round the World, Journal oj 
 Reseat ches, etc., chap. x.
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 543 
 
 inquiries are chiefly concerned, that can be predicted with 
 tolerable clearness. I resist the temptation of looking into too 
 remote a future. Otherwise I should perhaps prove, or at 
 least show as very probable, that in the mental life of cen- 
 turies far ahead of us art and poetry will occupy but a very 
 insignificant place. Psychology teaches us that the course of 
 development is from instinct to knowledge, from emotion to 
 judgment, from rambling to regulated association of ideas. 
 Attention replaces fugitive ideation ; will, guided by reason, re- 
 places caprice. Observation, then, triumphs ever more and 
 more over imagination and artistic symbolism i.e., the intro- 
 duction of erroneous personal interpretations of the universe 
 is more and more driven back by an understanding of the laws 
 of Nature. On the other hand, the march followed hitherto by 
 civilization gives us an idea of the fate which may be re- 
 served for art and poetry in a very distant future. That which 
 originally was the most important occupation of men of full 
 mental development, of the maturest, best, and wisest members 
 of society, becomes little by little a subordinate pastime, and 
 finally a child's amusement. Dancing was formerly an ex- 
 tremely important affair. It was performed on certain grand 
 occasions, as a State function of the first order, with solemn 
 ceremonies, after sacrifices and invocations to the gods, by the 
 leading warriors of the tribe. To-day it is no more than a 
 fleeting pastime for women and youths, and later on its last 
 atavistic survival will be the dancing of children. The fable 
 and the fairy-tale were once the highest productions of the 
 human mind. In them the most hidden wisdom of the tribe 
 and its most precious traditions were expressed. To-day they 
 represent a species of literature only cultivated for the nursery. 
 The verse which by rhythm, figurative expression, and rhyme 
 trebly betrays its origin in the stimulations of rhythmically 
 functioning subordinate organs, in association of ideas working 
 according to external similitudes, and in that working accord- 
 ing to consonance, was originally the only form of literature. 
 To-day it is only employed for purely emotional portrayal ; for 
 all other purposes it has been conquered by prose, and, indeed, 
 has almost passed into the condition of an atavistic language. 
 Under our very eyes the novel is being increasingly degraded, 
 serious and highly cultivated men scarcely deeming it worthy 
 of attention, and it appeals more and more exclusively to the 
 young and to women. From all these examples, it is fair to 
 condr.de that after some centuries art and poetry will have 
 become pure atavisms, and will no longer be cultivated except 
 by the most emotional portion of humanity by women, by the 
 young, perhaps even by children. 
 
 But, as I have said, I merely venture on these passing hints
 
 544 DEGENERATION 
 
 as to their jet remote destinies, and will confine myself to thu 
 immediate future, which is far more certain. 
 
 In all countries aesthetic theorists and critics repeat the 
 phrase that the forms hitherto employed by art are henceforth 
 effete and useless, and that it is preparing something perfectly 
 new, absolutely different from all that is yet known. Richard 
 \Vagner first spoke of ' the art-work of the future,' and hundreds 
 of incapable imitators lisp the term after him. Some among 
 them go so far as to try to impose upon themselves and the 
 world that some inexpressive banality, or some pretentious 
 inanity which they have patched up, is this art-work of the 
 future. But all these talks about sunrise, the dawn, new land, 
 etc., are only the twaddle of degenerates incapable of thought. 
 The idea that to-morrow morning at half-past seven o'clock a 
 monstrous, unsuspected event will suddenly take place ; that on 
 Thursday next a complete revolution will be accomplished at 
 a single blow, that a revelation, a redemption, the advent of a 
 new age, is imminent this is frequently observed among the 
 insane ; it is a mystic delirium. Reality knows not these 
 sudden changes. Even the great revolution in France, 
 although it was directly the work of a few ill-regulated minds 
 like Marat and Robespierre, did not penetrate far into the 
 depths, as has been shown by H. Taine and proved by the 
 ulterior progress of history; it changed the outer more than 
 the inner relations of the French social organism. All de- 
 velopment is carried on slowly ; the day after is the continua- 
 tion of the day before ; every new phenomenon is the outcome 
 of a more ancient one, and preserves a family resemblance to 
 it. ' One would say,' observes Renan with quiet irony, ' that 
 the young have neither read the history of philosophy nor 
 Ecclesiastes : " the thing that hath been, it is that which shall 
 be." '* The art and poetry of to-morrow, in all essential 
 points, will be the art and poetry of to-day and yesterday, and 
 the spasmodic seeking for new forms is nothing more than 
 hysterical vanity, the freaks of strolling players and charla- 
 tanism. Its sole result has hitherto been childish declamation, 
 with coloured lights and changing perfumes as accompaniments, 
 and atavistic games of shadows and pantomimes, nor will it 
 produce anything more serious in the future. 
 
 New forms! Are not the ancient forms flexible and duc- 
 tile enough to lend expression to every sentiment and every 
 thought ? Has a true poet ever found any difficulty in pouring 
 into known and standard forms that which surged within him, 
 and demanded an issue ? Has form, for that matter, the 
 dividing, predetermining, and delimitating importance which 
 dreamers and simpletons attribute to it ? The forms of lyric 
 * Ernest Renan, Feuilles dttacJUes. Paris, 1892, Preface, p. 10.
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 545 
 
 poetry extend from the birthday-rhyming of the ' popular poet 
 of the occasion,' who works to order and publishes his address 
 in the paper, to Schiller's Lay of the Bell ; dramatic form in- 
 cludes at the same time the Geschundener Ranb-ritter (The 
 Highwayman Fleeced), acted some time ago at Berlin, and 
 Goethe's Faust ; the epic form embraces Kortum's Jobsiade 
 and Dante's Divina Commedia, Heinz Tovote's Im Liebesrauche 
 and Thackeray's Vanity Fair. And yet there are bleatings 
 for ' new forms ' ? If such there be, they will give no talent to 
 the incapable, and those who have talent know how to create 
 something even within the limits of old forms. The most 
 important thing is the having something to say. Whether 
 it be said under a lyric, dramatic, or epic form is of no 
 essential consequence, and the author will not easily feel the 
 necessity of leaving these forms in order to invent some 
 dazzling novelty in which to clothe his ideas. The history 
 of art and poetry teaches us, moreover, that new forms have 
 not been found for three thousand years. The old ones have 
 been given by the nature of human thought itself. They would 
 only be able to change if the form of our thought itself became 
 changed. There is, of course, evolution, but it only affects 
 externals, not our inmost being. The painter, for example, 
 discovers the picture on the easel after the picture on the wall ; 
 sculpture, after the free figure, discovers high relief, and still 
 later low relief, which already intrenches in a way not free 
 from objection on the domain of the painter; the drama 
 renounces its supernatural character, and learns to unfold 
 itself in a more compact and condensed exposition ; the epos 
 abandons rhythmic language, and makes use of prose, etc. 
 In these questions of detail evolution will continue to operate, 
 but there will be no modification in the fundamental lines of 
 the different modes of expression for human emotion. 
 
 All amplifications of given artistic frames have hitherto 
 consisted in the introduction of new subjects and figures, not 
 in the invention of new forms. It was an advance when, 
 instead of the gods and heroes which till that time alone had 
 peopled the epic poem, Petronius introduced into narrative 
 poetry (The Banquet of Trimalchio) the characters of con- 
 temporary Roman life, or when the Netherlander of the seven- 
 teenth century discovered for painting which knew of naught 
 save religious and mythological events, or great proceedings 
 of state the world of fairs, popular festivals, and rustic 
 taverns. Quevedo and Mendoza, who represent the beggars 
 in the ' Picaresque ' novel the model of the German Grim- 
 melshausen writings Richardson, Fielding, J. J. Rousseau, 
 who take as the subject of their novels, instead of extraordinary 
 adventures, the reflections and emotions of ordinary average 
 
 35
 
 546 DEGENERATION 
 
 beings ; Diderot, who in Le Fits naturel and Le Pere de Famille 
 places his townspeople on the arrogant French stage, which till 
 then had only known insignificant people as figuring in comedies 
 and farces, but in serious drama, kings and great lords alone 
 all these authors invented, it is true, no new forms, but gave 
 to old forms a different content from that of tradition. We 
 observe also an advance of this kind in the poetry and art of 
 our own day. They have given to the proletariat the rights 
 of citizenship in art and literature. They show the labourer, 
 not as a coarse or ridiculous figure, not with the object of 
 producing a comic or coarse effect, but as a serious, frequently 
 tragic being, worthy of our sympathy. Art is hereby enriched 
 in the same way as it once was by the introduction of rascals 
 and adventurers, of a Clarissa, a Tom Jones, a Julie (Nouvelle 
 Hcloise), a Werther, a Constance (Le Fils naturel), etc., into the 
 circle of its representations. Nevertheless, when many people 
 in bewilderment exclaim hereupon, ' The art of to-morrow will 
 be socialistic !' they utter unfathomable nonsense. Socialism 
 is a conception of the laws which ought to determine the 
 production and distribution of property. With this, art has 
 nothing to do. Art cannot take any side in politics, nor is it 
 its business to find and propose solutions to economic questions. 
 Its task is to represent the eternally human causes of the 
 socialist movement, the suffering of the poor, their yearning 
 after happiness, their struggle against hostile forces in Nature 
 and in the social mechanism, and their mighty elevation 
 from the abyss into a higher mental and moral atmosphere. 
 When art fulfils this task, when it shows the proletariat how 
 it lives and suffers, how it feels and aspires, it awakens in us 
 an emotion which becomes the mother of projects for altera- 
 tion, transformation, and reform. It is in exciting such 
 fruitful emotions, and by them the desire to heal the hurt, 
 that art co-operates with progress, and not by socialist de- 
 clamations, and perhaps still less by executing pictures of the 
 state and the society of the future. Bellamy's patchwork, 
 Looking Backward, is outside art, and the twentieth century 
 will surely not favour books of this quality. The glorification 
 of the proletariat by a Karl Henckell, who practises with 
 regard to the fourth estate a more shocking Byzantinism than 
 was ever displayed by a tail-wagging courtier to a king, is 
 entirely incapable of awakening interest and sympathy for the 
 working man. Neither is true and useful emotion to be 
 expected either by such false nonsense as, for example, Ludwig 
 Fulda's Verlorene Paradies* or Ernst von Wildenbruch's 
 
 * Ludwig Fulda, Das verlorene Paradies, Schauspiel in drei Aufziigen. 
 Stuttgart, 1892. Cf. p. 112: 
 
 MiJHLBERGER. Rika, Rika ; come out ! 
 FREDERIKA. Oh, Lord ! will they send me back ?
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 547 
 
 Hanbenlerche.* A brave woman like Minna Wettstein-Adelt,*f* 
 who obtains employment as a daily workwoman in a factory, and 
 simply relates what she experienced there ; a plucky man of 
 sound sense and a warm heart like Gcehre, who depicts the 
 life of a factory-hand according to his own experience ; a 
 Gerhart Hauptmann, too, with his closely-observed details in 
 Die Weber, do more for the proletariat than all the Emile 
 Zolas, with their empty theorizing in Germinal and L' 'Argent, 
 than all the William Morrises, with their high-flown rhymings 
 on the noble workman, who becomes under their pen a 
 caricature of the ' noble savage ' so much laughed at in the 
 old novel-writers on the primeval forests, and yet more still 
 than all the scribblers who strew their pottage with socialist 
 phrases by way of ' modern ' seasoning. Mrs. Beecher-Stowe's 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin did not preach against slavery, nor risk 
 projects in favour of its suppression. But this book has 
 drawn tears from millions of readers, and caused negro slavery 
 to be felt as a disgrace to America, and thus contributed 
 essentially to its abolition. Art and poetry can do for the 
 proletariat what Mrs. Beecher - Stowe has done for the 
 
 MUHLBERGER. Here's my daughter. She must go into the fresh air 
 into the fresh air. 
 
 FREDERIKA. Father, let me be. I must work. 
 
 MUHLBERGER ('with passionate resolution). No. No more work no 
 more no more work. You must go out into the fresh air, my child my 
 good sick child. (He holds her in his embrace. Pause. No one present can 
 escape from the impression of this episode.} 
 
 So says the author ! I do not think that these sentimental phrases pro- 
 duce the smallest effect on anybody. Note (in the original) how Fulda, an 
 author of talent, in no way affiliated to the ' Young-German realists,' is 
 himself sufficiently intimidated by their ranting to seek for ' modernity ' by 
 using the Berlin dialect. 
 
 * Ernst von Wildenbruch, Die Haubenlerche, Schauspiel in vier Akten. 
 Berlin, 1891.1.'. Cf. p. 134 ' 
 
 AUGUST. Work builds the world. Therefore, it must be executed for its 
 own sake ; it must be loved ! . . . And you when I have seen you stand- 
 ing before your tub with the water-scoop in your hand in such a way that 
 the windows flew open then I thought, Ah ! here is one who loves his 
 
 tub! ... 
 
 ILEFELD. Master August, 'tis as if I had been married to it, to my tub 
 that's how it's been ! 
 
 AUGUST. And yet you leave it standing there so that anybody m'^ht take 
 your place ? What am I to say to the tub, should it ask after Paul ilefeld ? 
 
 ILEFELD (sits down heavily and dries his eyes with his hand}. 
 
 All the workmen I know would be convulsed with laughing at this con- 
 versation. 
 
 f Madame Minna Wettstein-Adelt, Three and a Half Months in a 
 Factory, Eine praktische Studie, 2" Auflage. - Berlin, 1892. 
 
 J Paul Gcehre, Three Months Factory Hand and Apprentice, Eine prak- 
 tische Studie. Leipzig, 1892.
 
 548 DEGENERATION 
 
 negroes of the United States. They cannot and will not do 
 more. 
 
 It is not unusual at present to meet this sentence : ' The 
 art and poetry of the future will be scientific.' Those who 
 say this assume extraordinarily conceited attitudes, and con- 
 sider themselves unmistakably as extremely progressive and 
 ' modern.' I ask myself in vain what these words can 
 mean. Do the good people who mean so well by science 
 imagine that sculptors will in the future chisel microscopes in 
 marble, that painters will depict the circulation of the blood, 
 and that poets will display in rich rhymes the principles of 
 Euclid ? Even this would not be science, but merely a 
 mechanical occupation with the external apparatus of science. 
 But this will surely not occur. In the past a confusion 
 between art and science was possible ; in the future it is un- 
 imaginable. The mental activity of man is too highly de- 
 veloped for such an amalgamation. Art and poetry have 
 emotion for their object, science has knowledge. The former 
 are subjective, the latter objective. The former work with 
 the imagination, i.e., with the association of ideas directed 
 by emotion ; the latter works with observation, i.e., with the 
 association of ideas determined by sense-impressions, of which 
 the acquisition and reinforcement are the work of attention. 
 Province, object, and method in art and science are so different, 
 and in part so opposed, that to confuse them would signify a 
 retrogression of thousands of years. One thing only is correct : 
 the images issuing from the old anthropomorphic concep- 
 tion, the allusions to obsolete states of things and ideas which 
 Fritz Mauthner has called ' dead symbols ' all this will dis- 
 appear from art. I think that in the twentieth century it will 
 no longer occur to any painter to compose pictures like Guido 
 Reni's Aurora in the Rospigliosi Palace, and that a poet would 
 be laughed at who should represent the moon looking amorously 
 into a pretty girl's room. The artist is the child of his times, 
 the conception dominant in the world is his also, and in spite 
 of all his tendency to atavism his method of expression is that 
 with which contemporary culture furnishes him. No doubt 
 the art of the future will avoid more than hitherto the great 
 errors in universally recognised doctrines of science, but it will 
 never become science. 
 
 The feelings of pleasure which a man receives from art 
 result from the gratification of three different organic inclina- 
 tions or tendencies. He needs the incitement which the 
 variety offers him ; he takes pleasure in recognising the 
 originals in the imitations ; he represents to himself the 
 feelings of his fellow-creatures, and shares in them. He finds 
 variety in works transporting him into wholly different scenes
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 549 
 
 from those he knows, and which are familiar to him. The 
 pleasurable feeling of recognition he obtains by the careful 
 imitations of familiar realities. His sympathy makes him 
 share with lively personal emotions every strongly and clearly 
 expressed emotion of the artist. There will always be in the 
 future, as heretofore, amateurs of works of imagination, which 
 transport the reader or spectator into remote times and 
 countries, or relate extraordinary adventures ; others will 
 prefer works in which the faithful observation of the known 
 will prevail ; the most refined and the most advanced will 
 find pleasure only in those in which a soul, with its most secret 
 feelings and thoughts, reveals itself. The art of the future will 
 not be wholly romantic, wholly realistic, or wholly indivi- 
 dualistic, but will appeal from first to last as much by its story 
 to curiosity, as by imitation to the pleasure of recognition, and 
 by the externalism of the artist's personality to sympathy. 
 
 Two tendencies which have long been rivals will presumably 
 contend still more violently in the future for supremacy, viz., 
 observation and the free flight of imagination, or, to speak 
 more briefly, though more inaccurately, realism and romanti- 
 cism. Good artists, doubtless, in consequence of their higher 
 mental development, will always be more prone and more apt 
 accurately to perceive and accurately to interpret the phe- 
 nomena of the world. But the crowd will no less certainly 
 demand of artists in the future something different from the 
 average reality of the world. Among creators, the desire for 
 realism will exist, as among recipients, the need of romanticism. 
 For and this seems to be an important point the task of art 
 in the coming century, will be to exert over men that charm 
 of variety which reality will no longer offer, and which the 
 brain cannot relinquish. All that is called ' picturesque ' will 
 necessarily disappear more and more from the earth. Civiliza- 
 tion ever becomes more uniform. The distinctive is felt as 
 an inconvenience by those who are marked by it, and got rid 
 of. Ruins delight a foreigner's eye, but they inconvenience the 
 native, and he sweeps them away. The traveller is disgusted 
 at seeing the beauty of Venice profaned by steamers, but for 
 the Venetian it is a benefit to cover long distances quickly for 
 ten centesimi. Soon the last Redskin will wear a frock-coat 
 and tall hat ; the regulation railway buildings will display 
 their prosaic outlines and hues along the great wall of China 
 and under the palm-trees of Tuggurt in the Sahara ; and 
 Macaulay's celebrated Maori will no longer contemplate the 
 ruins of Westminster, but a trashy imitation of the palace 
 at Westminster will serve as a Maori ' House of Parliament. 
 The unique Yosemite Park, which the Americans in their 
 very wise foresight wish to preserve intact in its prehistoric
 
 55 o DEGENERATION 
 
 wildness, will not satisfy the craving for something new, 
 different, picturesque, romantic, which humanity demands, 
 and the latter will claim from art what civilization clean, 
 curled, and smart will no longer offer. 
 
 I can now sum up in a few words my prognosis. The 
 hysteria of the present day will not last. People will recover 
 from their present fatigue. The feeble, the degenerate., will 
 perish ; the strong will adapt themselves to the acquisitions 
 of civilizations, or will subordinate them to their own organic 
 capacity. The aberrations of art have no future. They will 
 disappear when civilized humanity shall have triumphed over 
 its exhausted condition. The art of the twentieth century 
 will connect itself at every point with the past, but it will have 
 a new task to accomplish that of introducing a stimulating 
 variety into the uniformity of civilized life, an influence which 
 probably science alone will be in a position to exert, many 
 centuries later, over the great majority of mankind. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THERAPEUTICS. 
 
 Is it possible to accelerate the recovery of the cultivated 
 classes from the present derangement of their nervous 
 system ? 
 
 I seriously believe it to be so, and for that reason alone 
 I undertook this work. 
 
 No one, I hope, will think me childish enough to imagine 
 that I can bring degenerates to reason by incontrovertibly and 
 convincingly demonstrating to them the derangement of their 
 minds. He whose profession brings him into frequent contact 
 with the insane knows the utter hopelessness of attempting 
 by persuasion or argument to bring them to a recognition of 
 the unreality and morbidness of their delusions. The only 
 result attained is that they regard the physician either as an 
 enemy and persecutor, and fiercely hate him, or as a block- 
 head devoid of reason on whom they vent their derision. 
 
 It is equally vain to preach to fanatics of the insane tendencies 
 of fashions in art and literature, on their enthusiasm for error 
 and foolishness. These fanatics, without being actually momen- 
 tarily diseased, are yet on the border-line of insanity. They do 
 not and cannot believe it. For the works, the madness of which 
 is at the first glance apparent to every rational . being, actually 
 afford them feelings of pleasure. These works are an expres- 
 sion of their own mental derangement, and of the perversion
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 551 
 
 of their own instincts. In the perusal, or contemplation of 
 these productions, the half-witted fall into a state of excitation 
 which they hold to be aesthetic, but which is really sensual ; 
 and this sensation is so genuine and immediate, they are so 
 sure of it, that they can feel only annoyance at or pity for him 
 who would make it plain to them that these works evoke no 
 pleasure, but only disgust and contempt. To an habitual 
 drinker it is possible to prove that absinthe is pernicious, but 
 it is absolutely impossible to convince him that it has a 
 disagreeable taste. To him, indeed, it tastes seductively 
 delicious. It is in vain that the psychiatrical critic assures 
 the patient that this book, that picture, are horrible deliriums ; 
 the invalid will in good faith reply : ' Deliriums ? That may 
 be. But abhorrent ? That I can never believe. I know 
 better. They move me deeply and delightfully, and nothing 
 you can say can prevent their doing so !' Those whose minds 
 are more unhinged go still further, and say bluntly : ' We feel 
 in all our nerves the beauty of these works. You do not ; so 
 much the worse for you. Instead of perceiving that you are 
 a barbarian, devoid of intelligence, and an obtuse Philistine, 
 you wish to argue us out of our most positive sensations. The 
 only delirious person here is yourself.' 
 
 The history of civilization teaches to satiety, that delusions 
 awaken ardent enthusiasm, and during hundreds or thousands 
 of years obtain an invincible mastery of the thought and 
 feeling of millions, because they vouchsafe a satisfaction, un- 
 healthy though it be, to an existing instinct. Against that 
 which procures feelings of pleasure for man, the objections of 
 reason are unavailing. 
 
 Those degenerates, whose mental derangement is too deep- 
 seated, must be abandoned to their inexorable fate. They are 
 past cure or amelioration. They will rave for a season, and 
 then perish. This book is obviously not written for them. It 
 is, however, possible to reduce the disease of the age ' to its 
 anatomical necessity ' (to use the excellent expression of 
 German medical science), and to this end every effort must be 
 directed. For in addition to those whose organic constitution 
 irrevocably condemns them to such a fate, the present de- 
 generate tendencies are pursued by many who are only victims 
 to fashion and certain cunning impostures, and these mis- 
 guided ones we may hope to lead back to right paths. If, on 
 the other hand, they were to be passively abandoned to the 
 influences of graphomaniacal fools and their imbecile or un- 
 scrupulous bodyguard of critics, the inevitable result of such 
 a neglect of duty would be a much more rapid and violent 
 outspread of the mental contagion, and civilized humanity 
 would with much greater difficulty, and much more slowly,
 
 552 DEGENERATION 
 
 recover from the disease of the age than it might under a 
 strong and resolute combat with the evil. 
 
 Those persons, on whose minds it is above all necessary to 
 impress the fact that the current tendencies are a result of 
 mental degeneration and hysteria, are the slightly affected 
 and the healthy, who allow themselves to be deluded by 
 cunningly -devised catch-words, or who, through heedless 
 curiosity, flock where they see a crowd. Certain critics have 
 thought to intimidate me into speechlessness by saying : ' If 
 the indications cited are a proof of degeneration and mental 
 disease, then is art and poetry in general the work of fools 
 and degenerates, even such as has, without reservation, been 
 hitherto admired, for in this likewise there are to be met 
 the marks of degeneration.' To which I reply : If scientific 
 criticism, which tests works of art according to the principles 
 of psychiatry and psychology, should result in showing that 
 all artistic activity is diseased, that would still prove nothing 
 against the correctness of my critical method. It would only 
 be the acquisition of fresh knowledge. It would, doubtless, 
 destroy a charming delusion, and prove painful to many ; but 
 science ought not to be checked by the consideration that 
 its results annihilate agreeable errors, and frighten the easy- 
 going out of comfortable habits of thought. Faith, again, is 
 another sovereign besides art; it has rendered quite other 
 services to humanity at a certain stage of evolution, has other- 
 wise consoled and raised it, given it other ideals, and advanced 
 it morally in a different way from even the greatest geniuses 
 of art. Science, nevertheless, has not hesitated to pronounce 
 faith a subjective error of man, and would, therefore, suffer 
 far fewer scruples in characterizing art as something morbid 
 if facts should convince it that such was the case. Moreover, 
 not all that is morbid is necessarily ugly and pernicious. The 
 expectoration of a sufferer from lung disease is quite as much a 
 diseased secretion as the pearl. Is the pearl made more ugly 
 or the expectoration more beautiful by the fact that they have 
 the same origin ? The toxine of sausage-meat is the excretion 
 of a bacterium, that of ethyl-alcohol the secretion from a 
 fungus. Is the similarity of genesis the condition of equal 
 value for enjoyment in a poisoned sausage and a glass of old 
 Rhine wine ? It would prove nothing in regard to Tolstoi's 
 Kreutzer Sonata or Ibsen's Rosmersholm if it were of necessity 
 admitted that Goethe's Werther suffers from irrational eroticism, 
 and that the Divina Commedia and Faust are symbolic poems. 
 The whole objection, indeed, proceeds from a non-recognition 
 of the simplest biological facts. The difference between disease 
 and health is not one of kind, but of quantity. There is only 
 jne kind of vital activity of the cells and of the cell-systems
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 553 
 
 or organs. It is the same in disease and in health. It is 
 some:imes accelerated, and sometimes retarded; and when 
 this deviation from the rule is detrimental to the ends of the 
 whole organism, we call it disease. As it is here a question 
 of more or less, it is impossible to define their limits sharply. 
 Extreme cases are naturally easily recognised. But who shall 
 determine with accuracy the exact point at which deviation 
 from the normal, i.e., from health, begins ? The insane brain 
 performs its functions according to precisely the same laws as 
 the rational brain, but it obeys these laws either imperfectly 
 or excessively. In every human being there exists the 
 tendency to interpret sense-impressions falsely. It is diseased 
 only when exhibited in extraordinary strength. The traveller 
 in a railway carriage has an illusory perception of the landscape 
 flying by him while he is sitting still. The sufferer from the 
 delusion of persecutions imagines that someone is wafting him 
 evil odours, or hurling currents of electricity at him. Both of 
 these ideas rest on sense-illusions. Are both for that reason 
 marks of insanity ? The traveller and the paranoist commit 
 the same error of thought, and, nevertheless, the former is 
 perfectly sane, and th,e latter deranged in mind. It may 
 therefore with perfect security be affirmed that certain 
 peculiarities such as intense emotionalism, the tendency to 
 symbolism, the predominance of imagination are to be met 
 with in all true artists. That all should be degenerates is 
 very far from being a necessary consequence of this. It is 
 only the exaggeration of these peculiarities which constitutes 
 a disease. The sole conclusion justified by their regular ap- 
 pearance in artists would be that art, without being properly 
 a disease of the human mind, is yet an incipient, slight 
 deviation from perfect health ; and I should raise no objection 
 to this conclusion, the less so because it in no way helps the 
 case of real degenerates and their distinctly diseased works. 
 But it is not enough to prove that mysticism, ego-mania, and 
 the pessimism of realism are forms of mental derangement. 
 All the seductive masks must be torn from these tendencies, 
 and their real aspect be shown in its grinning nakedness. 
 
 In opposition to healthy art, which they deride as musty 
 and antiquated, they pretend to represent youth. An ill- 
 advised criticism has actually been caught by their lime, and 
 emphasizes their youth with constant irony. What clumsiness ! 
 As if any effort in the world could deprive of its charm the 
 word 'young,' this essential notion cf all that is blooming and 
 fresh, this note of the dawn and the spring, and transform it 
 into a term of reproach and insult ! The truth is, however, 
 that degenerates are not only not young, but that they are 
 weirdly senile. Senile is their splenetic calumniation of the
 
 554 DEGENERATION 
 
 world and life ; senile are their babblings, drivellings, ravings 
 and divagations ; senile their impotent appetites, and their 
 cravings for all the stimulants of exhaustion. To be young is 
 to hope ; to be young is to love simply and naturally ; to be 
 young is to rejoice in one's own health and strength, and in 
 that of all human beings, and of the birds of the air and the 
 beetles in the grass ; and of these qualities there is not one 
 to be met with among the youth-simulating, decayed de- 
 generates. 
 
 They have the name of liberty on their lips when they pro- 
 claim as their god their corrupt self, and call it progress when 
 they extol crime, deny morality, raise altars to instinct, scoff at 
 science, and hold up loafing sestheticism as the sole aim of life. 
 But their invocation of liberty is shameless blasphemy. How 
 can there be a question of liberty when instinct is to be 
 almighty ? Let us remember Count Muffat in Zola's Nana 
 (p. 491) : ' At other times he was a dog. She threw her 
 scented handkerchief to the end of the room for him, and he 
 had to run on all fours to pick it up with his teeth. " Fetch 
 it, Caesar ! . . . Look out ; I'll give it to you if you're lazy ! 
 . . . Very good, Caesar ! mind ! nicely ! . . . Sit up !" 
 And as for him, he loved his abasement, revelled in the joy 
 of being a brute. He wanted to sink still lower ; he cried : 
 " Hit harder. . . . Bow wow ! I am mad ; hit me then !" 
 That is the liberty of one who is ' emancipated ' in the sense 
 of the degenerates ! He may be a dog, if his crazed instinct 
 commands him to be a dog ! And if the ' emancipated ' one 
 is named Ravachol, and his instinct commands him to perpe- 
 trate the crime of blowing up a house with dynamite, the 
 peaceable citizen sleeping in this house is free to fly into the 
 air, and fall again to the ground in a bloody rain of shreds of 
 flesh and splinters of bone. Progress is possible only by the 
 growth of knowledge ; but this is the task of consciousness and 
 judgment, not of instinct. The march of progress is charac- 
 terized by the expansion of consciousness and the contrac- 
 tion of the unconscious; the strengthening of will and the 
 weakening of impulsions ; the increase of self-responsibility 
 and the repression of reckless egoism. He who makes instinct 
 man's master does not wish for liberty, but for the most 
 infamous and abject slavery, viz., enslavement of the judgment 
 of the individual by his most insensate and self-destructive 
 appetites ; enslavement of the inflamed man by the craziest 
 whims of a prostitute ; enslavement of the people by a few 
 stronger and more violent personalities. And he who places 
 pleasure above discipline, and impulse above, self-restraint, 
 wishes not for progress, but for retrogression to the most 
 primitive animality.
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 555 
 
 Retrogression, relapse this is in general the ideal of this 
 band who dare to speak of liberty and progress. They wish 
 to be the future. That is one of their chief pretensions. That 
 is one of the means by which they catch the largest number of 
 simpletons. We have, however, seen in all individual cases 
 that it is not the future but the most forgotten, far-away past. 
 Degenerates lisp and stammer, instead of speaking. They 
 utter monosyllabic cries, instead of constructing grammatically 
 and syntactically articulated sentences. They draw and paint 
 like children, who dirty tables and walls with mischievous 
 hands. They compose music like that of the yellow natives 
 of East Asia. They confound all the arts, and lead them back 
 to the primitive forms they had before evolution differentiated 
 them. Every one of their qualities is atavistic, and we know, 
 moreover, that atavism is one of the most constant marks of 
 degeneracy. Lombroso has convincingly demonstrated that 
 many peculiarities of the born criminals described by him are 
 also atavisms. Over-hasty critics believed that they had dis- 
 covered a very subtle objection when, with a smile of self- 
 satisfaction, they objected : ' You assert that criminal instinct 
 is at once degeneracy and atavism. These two dicta are 
 mutually exclusive. Degeneracy is a pathological state ; the 
 most convincing proof of this is, that the degenerate type does 
 not propagate itself, but becomes extinct. Atavism is a return 
 to an earlier state, which cannot have been diseased, because 
 the men who existed under those conditions have developed 
 themselves and progressed. Return to a healthy, albeit remote, 
 state cannot possibly be disease.' All this verbiage has its 
 source in the stubborn superstition which sees in disease a 
 state differing essentially from that of health. This is a good 
 example of the confusion which a word is capable of producing 
 in muddled or ignorant brains. As a matter of fact th 
 exists no activity and no state of the living organism which 
 can in itself be designated as ' health ' or ' disease.' But they 
 become these in respect of the circumstances and purposes of 
 the organism. According to the time of its appearance, one 
 and the same state may very well be at one time disease and 
 at another health. In the human fetus, at the sixth week, 
 hare-lip is a regular and healthy phenomenon. In the newly- 
 born child it is a malformation. In the first year of its life 
 the child cannot walk. Why ? Because its legs are too weak 
 to support it ? Decidedly not. The well-known experiments 
 of Dr. L. Robinson on sixty new born infants have proved 
 that they are able to hang by their hands from a stick for 
 thirty seconds, a performance implying muscular strength 
 quite as considerable, relatively to their respective ages, as is 
 possessed by the adult. It is not from weakness that they are
 
 556 DEGENERATION 
 
 unable to walk, but because their nervous system has not yet 
 learned so to regulate and combine the activity of the different 
 groups of muscles, as to produce a purposive movement. 
 Infants cannot yet ' co-ordinate.' Incapacity of co-ordination 
 of muscular activity is called by medical science ataxy. Hence 
 in infants this is the natural and healthy condition. But ataxy 
 precisely is a serious disease when it appears in adults, as the 
 chief symptom of inflammation of the spinal cord. The 
 identity of the ataxy of spinal disease with healthy infantine 
 ataxy is so complete, that Dr. S. Frenkel* was able to found 
 upon it a treatment of spinal ataxy, which consisted, essen- 
 tially, in teaching the patients anew, like children, to walk and 
 stand. It is seen, then, that a state may be at the same time 
 diseased and yet the mere return to what was primitively a 
 perfectly healthy state of things ; and it was with culpable 
 frivolity that Lombroso was reproached with contradiction 
 because he saw in criminal instincts at once degeneracy and 
 atavism. The disease of degeneracy consists precisely in the 
 fact that the degenerate organism has not the power to mount 
 to the height of evolution already attained by the species, but 
 stops on the way at an earlier or later point. The relapse of 
 the degenerate may reach to the most stupendous depth. As, in 
 reverting to the cleavage of the superior maxillary peculiar to 
 insects with sextuple lips, he sinks somatically to the level of 
 fishes, nay to that of the arthropoda, or, even further, to that 
 of rhizopods not yet sexually differentiated ; as by fistulae of 
 the neck he reverts to the branchiae of the lowest fishes, the 
 selacious; or by excess in the number of fingers (polydactylia) 
 to the multiple-rayed fins of fishes, perhaps even to the bristles 
 of worms ; or, by hermaphrodism, to the asexuality of rhizopods 
 so in the most favourable case, as a higher degenerate, he 
 renews intellectually the type of the primitive man of the most 
 remote Stone Age ; or, in the worst case, as an idiot, that of 
 an animal far anterior to man. 
 
 This is the subject in regard to which it is our duty untiringly 
 and by every means to enlighten the weak in judgment, and 
 the inexperienced. The fine names appropriated to themselves 
 by degenerates, their imitators, and their critical hirelings, are 
 lies and deceit. They are not the future, but an immeasurably 
 remote past. They are not progress, but the most appalling 
 reaction. They are not liberty, but the most disgraceful 
 slavery. They are not youth and the dawn, but the most 
 exhausted senility, the starless winter night, the grave and 
 corruption. 
 
 It is the sacred duty of all healthy and moral men to take 
 
 * Dr. S. Frenkel, ' Die Therapie atactischer Bewegungstorungen,' Miin- 
 chencr medizinische Wochenschrift^ Nr. 52. 1892.
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 557 
 
 part in the work of protecting and saving those who are not 
 already too deeply diseased. Only by each individual doing 
 his duty will it be possible to dam up the invading mental 
 malady. It is not seemly simply to shrug the shoulders and 
 smile contemptuously. While the easy-going console them- 
 selves by saying, ' No rational being takes this idiocy seriously,' 
 madness and crime are doing their work and poisoning a whole 
 generation. 
 
 Mystics, but especially ego-maniacs and filthy pseudo-realists, 
 are enemies to society of the direst kind. Society must un- 
 conditionally defend itself against them. Whoever believes 
 with me that society is the natural organic form of humanity, 
 in which alone it can exist, prosper, and continue to develop 
 itself to higher destinies ; whoever looks upon civilization as a 
 good, having value and deserving to be defended, must merci- 
 lessl)' crush under his thumb the anti-social vermin. To him 
 who, with Nietzsche, is enthusiastic over the ' freely-roving, 
 lusting beast of prey,' we cry, ' Get you gone from civilization ! 
 Rove far from us ! Be a lusting beast of prey in the desert ! 
 Satisfy yourself! Level your roads, build your huts, clothe 
 and feed yourself as you can ! Our streets and our houses are 
 not built for you ; our looms have no stuffs for you ; our fields 
 are not tilled for you. All our labour is performed by men 
 who esteem each other, have consideration for each other, 
 mutually aid each other, and know how to curb their selfish- 
 ness for the general good. There is no place among us for 
 the lusting beast of prey ; and if you dare return to us, we 
 will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs.' 
 
 And still more determined must the resistance be to the 
 filth-loving herd of swine, the professional pornographists. 
 These have no claim to the measure of pity which may still be 
 extended to degenerates properly so called, as invalids ; for 
 they have freely chosen their vile trade, and prosecute it from 
 cupidity, vanity, and hatred of labour. The systematic incita- 
 tion to lasciviousness causes the gravest injury to the bodily 
 and mental health of individuals, and a society composed of 
 individuals sexually over-stimulated, knowing no longer any 
 self-control, any discipline, any shame, marches to its certain 
 ruin, because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great 
 tasks. The pornographist poisons the springs whence flows 
 the life of future generations. No task of civilization has been 
 so painfully laborious as the subjugation of lasciviousness. 
 The pornographist would take from us the fruit of this, the 
 hardest struggle of humanity. To him we must show no 
 mercy. 
 
 The police cannot aid us. The public prosecutor and 
 criminal judge are not the proper protectors of society against
 
 553 DEGENERATION 
 
 crime committed with pen and crayon. They infuse into their 
 mode of proceeding too much consideration for interests not 
 always, not necessarily, those of cultivated and moral men. 
 The policeman is so often compelled to intervene in the 
 service of a privileged class, of the insupportable arrogance of 
 administrations, of the assumption of infallibility of ministers 
 and other government officials of the most unworthy byzantism 
 and of the most stupid superstition, that he'does not dishonour 
 the man on whose shoulder he lays his heavy hand. Hence it 
 comes to this, that the pornographist must be branded with 
 infamy. But the punitive sentence of a judge does not with 
 certainty have this effect. 
 
 The condemnation of works trading on unchastity must 
 emanate from men of whose freedom from prejudice and free- 
 dom of mind, intelligence and independence, no one entertains 
 a doubt. The word of such men would be of great weight 
 among the people. There already exists an ' Association of 
 Men for the Suppression of Immorality.' Unfortunately it 
 allows itself to be guided not only by solicitude for the mon 
 health and purity of the multitude, and especially of the younj. 
 but by considerations which to the majority of the peopli 
 seem to be prejudices. The association pursues disbeliet 
 almost more than immorality. An outspoken word against 
 revelation or the Church inspires this association with as 
 much horror as an act of obscenity. To this narrow-minded 
 confessionalism is it due that its work is less rich in blessing 
 than it might be. But in spite of this, we can take this 
 ' Association of Men ' as a pattern. Let us do what it does, 
 but without mummeries. Here is a great and grateful task, 
 e.g., for the new ' Society for Ethical Culture ' of Berlin : 
 Let it constitute itself the voluntary guardian of the people's 
 morality. Doubtless the pornographists will attempt to turn it 
 into ridicule. But the scorn will soon enough stick in their 
 own throats. An association composed of the people's leaders 
 and instructors, professors, authors, members of Parliament, 
 judges, high functionaries, has the power to exercise an irre- 
 sistible boycott. Let the ' Society for Ethical Culture ' under- 
 take to examine into the morality of artistic and literary 
 productions. Its composition would be a guarantee that the 
 examination would not be narrow-minded, not prudish, and 
 not canting. Its members have sufficient culture and taste tQ. 
 distinguish the thoughtlessness of a morally healthy artist from 
 the vile speculation of a scribbling ruffian. When such a 
 society, which would be joined by those men from thje people 
 who are the best fitted for this task, should, after serious in-., 
 vestigation and in the consciousness of a heavy responsibility, 
 say of a man, ' He is a criminal 1' and of a work, 'It is a
 
 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 559 
 
 disgrace to our nation !' work and man would be annihilated. 
 No respectable bookseller would keep the condemned book ; 
 no respectable paper would mention it, or give the author 
 access to its columns ; no respectable family would permit the 
 branded work to be in their house ; and the wholesome dread 
 of this fate would very soon prevent the appearance of such 
 books as Bahr's Gute Schule, and would dishabituate the 
 ' realists ' from parading a condemnation based on a crime 
 against morality as a mark of distinction. 
 
 Medical specialists of insanity have likewise failed to under- 
 stand their duty. It is time for them to come to the front. 
 ' It is a prejudice,' Bianchi most justly says,* ' to believe that 
 psychiatry must be enclosed within a sanctuary like that at 
 Mecca.' It is no doubt meritorious to indurate sections of 
 the spinal cord in chromic acid, and tint them in a neutro- 
 phyllic solution, but this should not exhaust the activity of a 
 professor of psychiatry. Neither is it sufficient that he should 
 in addition give a few lectures to jurists, and publish observa- 
 tions in technical journals. Let him speak to the mass of 
 cultivated persons who arc neither physicians nor learned in 
 law. Let him enlighten them in general publications and in 
 accessible conferences concerning the leading facts in mental 
 therapeutics. Let him show them the mental derangement of 
 degenerate artists and authors, and teach them that the works 
 in fashion are written and painted delirium. In all other 
 branches of medical science it is discerned that hygiene is of 
 more importance than therapeutics, and that the public health 
 has much more to expect from prophylactics than from treat- 
 ment. With rs in Germany the psychiatrist alone fails as 
 yet to concern himself with the hygiene of the mind. It is 
 time that he should practise his profession in this direction 
 also. A Maudsley in England, a Charcot, a Magnan in 
 France, a Lombroso, a Tonnini in Italy, have brought to vast 
 circles of the people an understanding of the obscure pheno- 
 mena in the life of the mind, and disseminated knowledge 
 which would make it impossible in those countries for pro- 
 nounced lunatics with the mania for persecution to gain an 
 influence over hundreds of thousands of electoral citizens,^ 
 even if it could not prevent the coming into fashion of the 
 degenerate art. In Germany alone no psychiatrist has as yet 
 followed this example. It is time to atone for this negligence. 
 Popularized expositions from the pens of experts whose 
 
 * A. G. Bianchi, La Patologia del Genie e gli scienziati Italiani. Milano, 
 1892, p. 79. 
 
 T Allusion is here made to the political influence exercised in a number of 
 German electoral districts by the anti-Semite Passchen, a proved lunatic, 
 with a mania for persecution. TRANSLATOR.
 
 5 oo DEGENERATION 
 
 prominent official status would recommend them to the reader 
 would restrain many healthy spirits from affiliating themselves 
 with degenerate tendencies. 
 
 Such is the treatment of the disease of the age which I hold 
 to be efficacious : Characterization of the leading degenerates 
 as mentally diseased ; unmasking and stigmatizing of their 
 imitators as enemies to society ; cautioning the public against 
 the lies of these parasites. 
 
 We in particular, who have made it our life's task to 
 combat antiquated superstition, to spread enlightenment, to 
 demolish historical ruins and remove their rubbish, to defend 
 the freedom of the individual against State oppression and 
 the mechanical routine of the Philistine ; we must resolutely 
 set ourselves in opposition to the miserable mongers who 
 seize upon our dearest watchwords, with which to entrap the 
 innocent. The ' freedom ' and ' modernity,' the ' progress ' 
 and ' truth,' of these fellows are not ours. We have nothing 
 in common with them. They wish for self-indulgence ; we 
 wish for work. They wish to drown consciousness in the 
 unconscious ; we wish to strengthen and enrich consciousness. 
 They wish for evasive ideation and babble ; we wish for 
 attention, observation, and knowledge. The criterion by 
 which true moderns may be recognised and distinguished from 
 impostors calling themselves moderns may be this : Whoever 
 preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress ; and 
 whoever worships his ' I ' is an enemy to society. Society has 
 for its first premise, neighbourly love and capacity for self- 
 sacrifice ; and progress is the effect of an ever more rigorous 
 subjugation of the beast in man, of an ever tenser self-restraint, 
 an ever keener sense of duty and responsibility. The emanci- 
 pation for which we are striving is of the judgment, not of the 
 appetites. In the profoundly penetrating words of Scripture 
 (Matt. v. 17), ' Think not that I am come to destroy the law, 
 or the prophets ; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' 
 
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 y'
 
 DEGENERATION, 
 
 By MAX NORDAU. 
 
 The Times. ' His theory opens the door to a large amount of vigorous 
 criticism upon the fashionable crazes of the day, much of which may be 
 read with amusement, if not with complete conviction.' 
 
 W. L. COURTNEY in the Daily Telegraph. ' Dr. Max Nordau writes with 
 a keen sense of humour, and many evidences of literary skill. He begins 
 with a discussion of the precise characteristics included in the French term 
 fin de sticle, tracking through its various disguises all the aberrations of the 
 modern spirit. . . . Dr. Max Nordau is always interesting, always graphic 
 in his descriptions, at once humorous and pathetic, grave and gay, and now 
 and then full of valuable and important aperqus. ... As a powerful antidote 
 to many prevailing modes of thought, his book has a value which it is 
 difficult to overestimate.' 
 
 The Daily Chronicle. ' Max Nordau's book, we are told, made a sensation 
 in Germany, and we do not wonder at it, for it is likely to make, if not a 
 sensation, at least a great impression here. It is a powerful, trenchant 
 attack on all the leading literary and artistic idols of the time by a man of 
 great intellectual power, immense range of knowledge, and the possessor 
 of a lucid style rare among German writers, and becoming rarer everywhere, 
 owing to the very influences which Nordau attacks with such unsparing 
 energy. . . . We have purposely confined ourselves to exposition of this 
 remarkable book, which is sure to be vehemently attacked, but which cannot 
 be ignored.' 
 
 The Standard. ' The wit and learning, the literary skill and the scientific 
 method, the righteous indignation, and the ungoverned prejudice displayed 
 in Herr Max Nordau's treatise on " Degeneration" attracted to it, on its first 
 appearance in Germany, an attention that was partly admiring and partly
 
 ( 2 ) 
 
 astonished. . . . The work is one that demands to be studied as a whole, 
 and we are glad to welcome the spirited version published to-day. . . . But 
 let no reader be deterred by the hard words scattered about these pages, nor 
 any searcher after truth imagine that, as in some philosophical works, he will 
 be presented with a vocabulary when he asks for a demonstration. Not 
 only do we find solid information and deep thinking, but we are drawn 
 along by the rhetoric, the passion, and the humour. . . . We may derive 
 unalloyed enjoyment from its graphic vigour and its moral earnestness.' 
 
 The World. ' From his astonishingly able and powerful diagnosis of 
 certain easily-recognisable forms of literary and artistic morbidity, no com- 
 petent observer can withhold a full measure of admiration and acquiescence. 
 That the melancholy phenomena exhibited by the "mystics" and "sym- 
 bolists," the "decadents" and the "ego-maniacs" of latter-day literature 
 and art have been due to some strange epidemic of mental declension, was 
 evident to most thinking persons before Nordau turned the pitiless search- 
 light of his analytical genius upon the works of these several orders of art 
 eccentrics.' 
 
 The Sketch. * Max Nordau's assessment of the types chosen as warning 
 examples will receive the assent of sober judges of modern tendencies.' 
 
 The Literary World. ' He appears to us to be racy and trenchant as a 
 satirist of the follies of the day.' 
 
 The Saturday Review, ' We frankly admit that there is a large residuum 
 of keen criticism and exposure of folly. We read the six hundred pages 
 without rinding one dull, sometimes in reluctant agreement, sometimes with 
 amused content, sometimes with angry indignation. There is, and alway . 
 will be, a foolish claque applauding each new eccentricity, unable to dis- 
 tinguish, among the sensations of the hour, the inspirations of genius. For 
 these Max Nordau may serve as an excellent tonic, and so be justified of the 
 reputation this English rendering will certainly bring him.' 
 
 The National Observer. ' Nobody who has kept an eye on the fleeting 
 oments of the so-called end of this so-called nineteenth century, is likely 
 contradict Herr Nordau. His work has made its appearance in its 
 English dress at a very appropriate time. . . . On the main facts which he 
 sets himself to expound, Herr Nordau is most indubitably right' 
 
 The Jewish Chronicle. ' It is a masterly indictment of the delirious in- 
 dividualism which has so deeply infected the art and literature of these 
 latter days, and which is sapping the whole fabric of public and private 
 morality. . . . The book cannot fail to clear the air. The overflowing wit 
 and humour of the writing ensure it a larger audience than is usually 
 accorded to such serious speculation.'
 
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