Bi V.

(Canto 0. 33a L.)

Ziemlich langsam. l

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(3‘11) monoo.)
Etwas bewegter.

 

 

 

 

 

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2 a NOT THE. DAUGHTER BOT TH}; MOTHER OF ORDER,
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ROUDHON

 

 

Vol. XI. ——No. 6.

 

“ For always in thine eyes, 0 Liberty!
Shines that highlight whereby the world is saved .'

And though thou stay as, we will trust in thee."
J can HAY.

 

On Picket Duty.

The New York “ Press,” a blatant and nar-
row Republican sheet, referring to Senator
Hill’s opposition to the rigid enforcement of the
Sunday law, states it as a fact of “ standard
history” that “ there ever has been the thinnest
of lines between genuine American Democracy
and international anarchy ” (using the term in
the sense of chaos). If the “ Press ” had more
brains, it would probably see that genuine

; American Democracy is akin, not to anarchy,
T but to Anarchy, to the highest order and
greatest social harmony.

A new anti-trust law is in force in Texas,
under which it is illegal for two or more per-

, sons to combine their capital, skill, or acts so as

j to restrict trade or prevent competition. The

. letter of this law would render all cooperative

i undertakings illegal, and even ordinary business

‘ partnerships would seem to be impossible under
it. Manifestly passed in the interest of labor

; and against big capitalistic combinations, the

’ law, if really followed out, would crush labor
by prohibiting all trades unions and concerted

. action by workmen. Such are the results of
anti-monopoly legislation by men who do not
know what monopoly is or what test to apply
to industrial combinations in order to determine
their character. Such ignorant regulation is
hailed with delight by the monopolists and
their press mouthpieces, for they are able to use
it successfully as a weapon against all anti-
monopoly efforts. The public does not dis—
criminate between the ranter and the reasoner,
the crank and the scientific reformer. It pre—
fers the very convenient Nordau method of
classification; all who rebel are declared equally
irresponsible.

At the time of the “ Debs insurrection ” in
Chicago a similar insurrection was conducted in
California, and omnibus injunctions were is-
sued against hundreds of Pacific railroad strik-
ers. These injunctions were, of course, treated
with supreme contempt, but no one was pun-
ished for this “ contempt of court.” Recently,
however, several attempts have been made to
convict the strikers on criminal charges, with
utter failure as the result. In all there were

s one hundred and thirty cases pending, but the
first trials showed the government that convic-
tions were impossible, and the fight is to be
given up. Now, the facts in these cases are

 

substantially similar to the facts in Chicago
cases, and hence the probabilities are that Debs !
and his associates, if tried on criminal charges,

NEW YORK, N. Y., JULY 2'7, 1895.

would be acquitted by the jury. Yet they are
now undergoing imprisonment for the same
facts. In other words, what is insufficient in
the eyes of a jury is entirely sufficient in the
eyes of a judge; and, before the jury is called
upon to pass upon the question, a judge de-
clares them guilty and sends them to prison.
Can there be a greater outrage on justice ‘3

The New York State Democracy, an organi-
zation led by the most progressive elements of
the party, has adopted a financial platform
which has a radical look and sound, but which
is found to have very little substance. It con-
demns, in the first place, interference with the
standard of value which “ commerce has
adOpted.” Commerce has not been free to
adopt any standard, for legislation has never
ceased meddling with it. Before commerce can
select a standard, all legal-tender laws, all re-
strictions upon credit and circulation, must be
entirely abrogated. Is the State Democracy
prepare‘d to demand that"? Not at all, although
the platform goes on to favor such a repeal of
present laws as shall permit the peOple to pro-
vide themselves with a safe and elastic bank-
note currency and relieve the treasury of all its
responsibilities save that of collecting and dis-
bursing revenue. The trouble with this plank
is that the people are to be permitted only to
provide themselves with a “ safe” currency,
congress to be the sole judge of “ safety.”
Such a proviso opens the door to all the abuses
which it is intended to shut out.

Several scholars and able controversialists
have published replies to Balfour’s Quixotic
attacks on the evolutionary philosophy of life,
but they all have been guilty of the indiscretion
and misplaced generosity of treating the
“ Foundations of Belief ” as a serious metaphy-
sical work of great subtlety and strength. As
a matter of fact, aside from the question of
mere style, the book is as feeble as are the
efforts of any half-baked young preacher with
semi-modern tendencies to prove the “ neces-
sity ” of religion as a “ complement to science.”
The veriest tyro in philosophical literature
ought to be able to point out Mr. Balfour’s ob-
vious fallacious and amusing (if unconscious)
method of assuming the very things which the
book was written to demonstrate. There is no
“ argument ” in the book that is not puerile
and that has not been refuted a thousand times;
and, if the same matter were put forth, in a
less felicitous manner, by an ordinary theolo-
gian, and not by a “ future English Premier”
dabbling in theology, it would not get any
notice even in the most inane portion of the
religious press. I am very glad to see that
Spencer, in his masterly and cruelly effective

meeaces‘

 

Whole No. 3 18.

article in the last “ Fortnightly Review,” deals
with the English politico-theological Quixote in
a straightforward way, without throwing any
sops to his large gaping suite and without
sugarcoating the pill he prepares for them.
Nothing can be more eloquent and significant
than the serenity and good-humor with which
Spencer disposes of the Balfourian “best”
points, and the calm way in which he insists on
treating Christianity merely as one of the

many superstitions of which the wide world is
so full. Indeed, the article is in Spencer’s most
happy vein, and the radical who does not de-
vour it misses a rare intellectual treat.

The newspapers recently published a sym-
posium discussing the practical question
whether or not an “injured” husband should
kill the guilty paramours. Cardinal Gibbons
and Dr. Parkhurst, from the Christian stand-
point, declare that the husband must forgive:
Mr. Depew would not convict the husband ct
murder if he 15:1 him for killingxhis wronger,
for “it is, above all, one of those cases in
which a man must be a law unto himself.”

Mr. Clews would spare the guilty wife, but he
favors the infliction of the death penalty on the
lover. “I. D. Howells, in commenting on
these views, denounces the lay contributors to
the symposium as brutal and wild, but of the
ecclesiastics he says that they “ plant them-
selves upon the only principle that is really
firm under the feet.” Amplifying his state-
ment, he continues: “ One is struck with the
absolute sufficiency of the Christian ethics in
this matter. Forgive that you may be
forgiven. . It is all so simple, and it is
such an easy way out.” No, Mr. Howells, it is
a cowardly way out; it is a mere dodge. Your
clerical friends do not share your opinion re-
garding the “ absolute sufficiency of Christian
ethics,” and they screen themselves behind it
merely to avoid taking a definite position. If
the husband is bound to forgive under Christian
ethics, why is the State, or the community, at
liberty to punish the paramours by imprison-
ment ‘3 How can these divines support the
penal systems of modern societies if forgiveness
is enjoined by the absolutely sufficient Christian
ethics '3 Your Christian teachers sanction pri-
sons, flogging, the gallows, and the electric
chair, and denounce Tolstoi as a crank and
visionary because he really does follow Chris-
tian ethics and insists on non-resistance to evil
on the part of organized society as well as on
the part of individuals. If the divines have an
“easy time,” Mr. Howells, it is because their
hypocrisy and self-stultification are so seldom
exposed, and not because they plant themselves
upon firm principles.

' . exhaustionof‘theracebyeverwork'

MW

» 0

Issued Fortnightly at Two Dollars a Year; Single Cop-
ies. Eight Cents.

 

 

BENJ. R. TUCKER. EDITOR AND PUBLISHER.

 

Office of Publication, 24 Gold Street.
Post Office Address: LIBERTY, P. 0. Box No. 1312, New York, N. Y.

 

Entered at New York as Second-Class Mail Matter.

 

NEW YORK, N. Y.. JULY 27, 1895.

 

“ In abolishing rent and interest, the last vestiges of old-time sla-
very, the Revolution abolishes at one stroke the sword of the execu-
tioner, the seal of the magistrate, the club of the policeman, the gauge
of the exciseman, the erasing—knife of the department clerk, all those
insignia of Politics, which young Liberty grinds beneath her heel.” --
Pnonnnon.

 

W The appearance in the editorial column of arti-
cles over other signatures than the editor’s initial indi-
cates that the editor approves their central purpose and
general tenor, though he does not hold himself respon-
sible for every phrase or word. But the appearance in
other parts of the paper of articles by the same or other
writers by no means indicates that he disapproves
them in any respect, such disposition of them being
governed largely by motives of convenience.

A Degenerate’s View of Nordau.

Copyright, 1895, by G. Bernard Shaw.
My dear Tucker .'

I have read Max Nordau’s “ Degeneration ”
at your request, — two hundred and sixty thou-
sand mortal words, saying the same thing over
and over again. That, as you know, is the
way to drive a thing into the mind of the
world, though Nordau considers it a symptom
of insane “ obsession” on the part of writers

who do not share his own opinions. His mes-

, LIBERTY-

to exhibit a fine drawing of a girl with the
head deliberately crossed out with a few rough
pencil strokes, knowing perfectly well that, if
he left a woman’s face discernible, the British
Philistine would simply look to see whether
she was a pretty girl or not, or whether she re-
presented some of his pet characters in fiction,
and pass on without having seen any of the
qualities of artistic execution which made the
drawing valuable. But it was easier for the
critics to resent the obliteration of the face as
an insolent eccentricity, and to show their own
good manners by writing of Mr. Whistler as

“ Jimmy,” than to think out what he meant.
It took several years of “ propaganda by deed ”
before the qualities which the Impressionists in-
sisted on came to be looked for as a matter of
course in pictures, so that even the ordinary
picture-gallery frequenter, when he came face
to face with Bouguereau’s “ Girl in a Corn-
field,” instead of accepting it as a window-
glimpse of nature, saw at a glance that the girl
is really standing in a studio with what the
house agents call “ a good north light,” and
that the cornfield is a conventional sham. This
advance in public education was effected by
persistently exhibiting pictures which, like Mr.
VVhistler’s girl with her head scratched out,
were propagandist samples of workmanship
rather than complete works of art. But the
moment Mr. Whistler and other really able art-
ists forced the dealers and the societies of paint-
ers to exhibit these studies, and, by doing so,
to accustom the public to tolerate what ap-
peared to it at first to be absurdities, the door
was necessarily opened to real absurdities. It

sage mthmorldaisfihataluzg‘r(character-Istlis exceedingly difficult to draw or paint well; it

’ callnmadelusrlsief.arkanesnnntomsoidism

T,’ease_in,the_zn:t_i_st§i Egfliheilhese diseased art-M
ists are themselves symptomsof th‘e 'ii'ei‘vous””

 

To me, who am a professional critic of art,
and have for many successive London seasons
had to watch a grand march past of books, of
pictures, of concerts and operas, and of stage
plays, there is nothing new in Herr Nordau’s
outburst. I have heard it all before. At every
new birth of energy in art the same alarm has
been raised; and, as these alarms always had
their public, like prophecies of the end of the
world, there is nothing surprising in the fact
that a book which might have been produced
by playing the resurrection man in the old
newspaper rooms of our public libraries, and
collecting all the exploded bogey-criticisms of
the last half century into a huge volume, should
have a considerable success. To give you an
idea of the heap of material ready to hand for
such a compilation, let me lay before you a
sketch of one or two of the Reformations in art
which I have myself witnessed.

When I was engaged chiefly in the criticism
of pictures, the Impressionist movement was
struggling for life in London; and I supported
it vigorously because, being the outcome of
heightened attention and quickened conscious-
ness on the part of its disciples, it was evidently
destined to improve pictures greatly by substi-
tuting a natural, observant, real style for a
conventional, taken-for-granted, ideal one.

The result has entirely justified my choice of
sides. I can remember when Mr. ‘Vliistler, in
order to force the public to observe the quali-
ties he was introducing into pictorial work, had

 

is exceedingly easy to smudge paper or canvas
so as to suggest a picture just as the stains on
an old ceiling or the dark spots in a glowing
coal-fire do. Plenty of rubbish of this kind
was produced, exhibited, and tolerated at the
time when people could not see the difference
between any daub in which there were shadows
painted in vivid aniline hues and a landscape by
Monet. Not that they thought the daub as
good as the Monet: they thought the Monet as
ridiculous as the daub; but they were afraid to
say so, because they had discovered that people
who were good judges did not think Monet
ridiculous. Then, besides the mere inipostors,
there were a certain number of highly con-
scientious painters who produced abnormal pic;
tures because they saw abnormally. My own
sight happens to be “ normal” in the oculist’s
sense: that is, I see things with the naked eye as
most people can only be made to see them by
the aid of spectacles. Once I had a discussion
with an artist who was shewing me a clever
plcture of his in which the parted lipsin a
pretty woman’s face revealed what seemed to
me like a mouthful of virgin snow. The
painter lectured me for not using my eyes, in-
stead of my knowledge of facts. “ You can’t
see the divisions in a set of teeth, when you
look at a person’s mouth,” he said; “ all you
can see is a strip of white, or yellow, or pearl,
as the case may be; but, because you know, as
a matter of anatomic fact, that there are divi-
sions there, you want to have them represented
by strokes in a drawing. That is just like you
art critics, &c., &c.” I do not think he be-
lieved me when I told him that, when I looked
at a row of teeth, I saw, not only the divisions

 

between them, but their exact shape, both in
contour and modelling, just as well as I saw
their general color. Some of the most able of
the Impressionists evidently did not see forms
as definitely as they appreciated color relation-
ship; and, since there is always a great deal of
imitation in the arts, we soon had young paint-
ers with perfectly good sight looking at land-
scapes or at their models with their eyes half
closed and a little asquint, until what they saw
looked to them like one of their favorite mas-
ter’s pictures. Further, the Impressionist
movement led to a busy study of the atmo-
sphere, conventionally supposed to be invisible
but seldom really completely so, and of what
were called “ values”: that is, the relation of
light and dark between the various objects de~
picted, on the correctness of which relation
truth of efl’ect mainly depends. This proved
very difficult in full out-door light with the
“local color” brilliantly visible, and compara-
tively easy in gloomy rooms where the absence
of light reduced all objects to masses of brown
or grey of varying depth with hardly any dis—
cernible local color. “Thistler’s portrait of
Sarasate, a masterpiece in its way, looks like a
study in monochrome beside a portrait by Hol-
bein; and his cleverest followers could paint
dark interiors, or figures placed apparently in
coal cellars, with admirable truth and delicacy
of “ value ” sense, whilst they were still help-
lessly unable to represent a green tree or a blue
sky, much less paint an interior with the light
and local color as clear as in the works of Peter
de Hooghe. Naturally the public eye, with its
utilitarian familiarity with local col ' and its
Philistine insensibility to values and atmo-
sphere, did not at first see what the Impression--
ists were driving at, and dismissed them as
mere perverse, notoriety-hunting cranks.

Here, then, you had a movement in painting
which was wholly beneficial and progressive,
and in no sense insane or decadent. Never-
theless it led to the public exhibition of daubs
which even the authors themselves would never
have presumed to offer for exhibition before; it
betrayed aberrations of vision in painters who,
on the old academic lines, would have hidden
their defects by drawing objects (teeth, for in-
stance) as they knew them to exist, and not as
they saw them; it set hundreds of clear-sighted
students practising optical distortion, so as to
see things myopically; and it substituted can-
vases which looked like enlargements of 0b-
scure photographs for the familiar portraits of
masters of the bounds in cheerfully unmistak-
able pink coats, mounted on bright chestnut
horses. All of which, and much else, to a man I
who looked on at it without any sense of the
deficiencies in conventional painting, necessarily
suggested that the Impressionists and their
contemporaries were much less sane than their
fathers.

Again, my duties as a musical critic com-
pelled me to ascertain very carefully the exact
bearings of the controversy which has raged
round Wagner’s music-dramas since the middle
of the century. When you and I last met, we
were basking in the sun between the acts of
“ Parsifal ” at Bayreuth; but experience has
taught me that an American may appear at
Bayreuth without being necessarily fonder than.
most men of a technical discussion on music.
Let me therefore put the case to you in a mercis

7

LIBERTY.

3

 

fully intelligible way. Music is like drawing in
this respect, —that it can be purely decorative,
-or purely dramatic, or anything between the
two. A draughtsman may be a pattern-
-designer, like William Morris, or he may be a
.delineator of life and character, like Ford
Madox Brown. Or he may come between these
two extremes, and treat scenes of life and cha-
racter in a decorative way, like Walter Crane
or Burne Jones, — both of them consummate
pattern-designers, whose subject pictures and
illustrations are also fundamentally figure~
patterns, prettier, but much less convincingly
human and real, than Madox Brown’s. Now,
in music we have these same alternative appli-
cations of the art to drama and decoration.

You can compose a graceful, symmetrical
sound-pattern that exists solely for the sake of
its own grace and symmetry. Or you can com-
pose music to heighten the expression of human
emotion; and such music will be intensely
affecting in the presence of that emotion, and
utter nonsense apart from it. For examples of
pure pattern-designing in music I should have
to go back to the old music of the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, before the
operatic movement gained the upper hand; but
I am afraid my assertions that much of this
music is very beautiful and hugely superior to
the stuff our music publishers turn out today
would not be believed in America; for, when I
hinted at something of the kind lately in the
American “ Musical Courier,” and pointed out
also the beauty of the instruments for which
this old music was written, — viols, virginals,
and so on}, —— one of your leading musical critics
rebuked ine with an expatiation on the supe-
riority (meaning apparently the greater loud-
ness) of the modern concert grand pianoforte,
and contemptuously ordered the middle ages
out from the majestic presence of the nine-
teenth century.
take my word for it that in England alone a
long line of composers, from Henry VIII to
Henry Purcell, have left us quantities of instru-
mental music which was not dramatic music nor
“ programme music,” but which was designed
to affect the hearer solely by its beauty of
sound and grace and ingenuity of pattern.

This is the art which \Vagner called “ absolute
music.” It is represented today by the formal
sonata and symphony; and we are coming back

Perhaps, however, you will

to it in something like its old integrity by a
post-“'agnerian reaction led by that greatly
gifted absolute musician and hopelessly com-
monplace and tedious dramatic composer,
Johannes Brahms.

To understand the present muddle, you must
know that modern dramatic music did not ap-
pear as an independent branch of musical art,
but as an adulteration of absolute music. The
first modern dramatic composers accepted as
binding on them the rules of good pattern-
designing in sound; and this absurdity was
made to appear practicable by the fact that
Mozart had such an extraordinary command of
his art that his operas contain “ numbers ”
which, though they seem to follow the dra-
matic play of emotion and character without
reference to any other consideration whatever,
are seen, on examining them from the point of
view of the absolute musician, to be perfectly
symmetrical sound-patterns. But these tours
de force were no real justification for imposing

 

the laws of pattern-designing on other dramatic
musicians; and even Mozart himself broke
away from them in all directions, and was vio-
lently attacked by his contemporaries for doing
so, the accusations levelled at him ——absence of
melody, illegitimate and discordant harmonic
progressions, and monstrous abuse of the
orchestra ——being exactly those with which the
opponents of Wagner so often pester ourselves.
‘Vagner, whose leading lay characteristic was
his enormous common sense, completed the
emancipation of the dramatic musician from
these laws of pattern-designing, and we now
have operas, and very good ones too, written
by composers like Bruneau or Boito, who are
not musicians in the old sense at all, -— that is,
they do not compose music apart from drama,
and, when they have to furnish their operas
with instrumental preludes or intermezzos or
the like, they either take themes from the
dramatic part of their operas and rhapsodize on
them, or else they turn out some perfectly sim-
ple song or dance tune, at the cheapness of
which Haydn would have laughed heartily, in
spite of its orchestral and harmonic fineries.

If I add now that music in the academic, pro-
fessorial, Conservative, respectable sense always
means absolute music, and that students are
taught that the laws of pattern-designing are
binding on all musicians, and that violations of
them are absolutely “ wrong”; and if I men—
tion incidentally that these laws are themselves
confused by the survivals from a still older tra-
dition based on the church art, technically very
highly specialized, of writing perfectly smooth
and beautiful vocal'harmony, for unaccom-
panied voices, worthy to be sung by angelic
doctors round the throne of God (this was
Palestrina’s art), — you will understand why it
was that all the professional musicians who
could not see beyond the routine which they
were taught, and all the men and women (and
there are many of them) who have little or no
sense of drama, but a very keen sense of
beauty of sound and prettiness of pattern in
music, regarded Wagner as a madman who was
reducing music to chaos, perversely introducing
ugly and brutal sounds into a region where
beauty and grace had reigned alone, and sub—
stituting an incoherent, aimless, endless mean-
dering for the familiar symmetrical tunes in
four—bar strains, like “ Pop Goes the ‘Veazel,”
in which the second and third strains repeat, or
nearly repeat, the first and second, so that any
one can remember them and treasure them like
It was the unprofessional,

“ unmusical ” public which caught the dramatic
clue, and saw order and power, strength and
sanity in the supposed ‘Vagner chaos; and now,
his battle being won and overwon, the profes-
sors, to avert the ridicule of their pupils, are
compelled to explain (quite truly) that \Vag-
ner’s technical procedure in music is almost
pedantically logical and grammatical; that the
“ Lohengrin ” prelude is a masterpiece of the

“ form” proper to its aim; and that his dis-
regard of “ false relations,” and his free use of
the most extreme discords without “ prepara-
tion,” were straight and sensible instances of
that natural development of harmony which has
proceeded continuously from the time when
common six-four chords were considered

“ wrong,” and such free use of unprepared
dominant sevenths and minor ninths as had

nursery rhymes.

 

become common in Mozart’s time would have
seemed the maddest cacophony.

The dramatic development also touched
purely instrumental music. Liszt was no more
an absolute musician than Wagner was. He
wanted a symphony to express an emotion and
its development, not to be a pretty sound-
pattern. And he defined the emotion by con-
necting it with some known story, poem, or
even picture, — Mazeppa, Victor Hugo’s “ Les
Preludes,” Kaulbach’s “Die Hunnenschlacht,”
or the like. But the moment you try to make
an instrumental composition follow a story, ,
you are forced to abandon the sound-pattern
form, since all patterns consist of some decora-
tive form which is repeated over and over
again, and which generally consists in itself of
a repetition of two similar halves; for example,
if you take a playing card—say the five of
diamonds— as a simple example of a pattern,
you find not only that the diamond figure is
repeated five times, but that each side of each
pip is a reversed duplicate of the other. Now,
the established form for a symphony is essen-
tially a pattern form involving just such sym-
metrical repetitions; and, since a story does not
repeat itself, but pursues a continuous chain of
fresh incident and correspondingly varied emo-
tions, Liszt had either to find a new musical
form for his musical poems, or else face the
intolerable anomalies and absurdities which
spoil the many attempts made by Mendelssohn,
Rafl", and others to handcuif the old form to
the new matter. Consequently he invented the
“ symphonic poem,” a perfectly simple and fit-
ting common-sense form for his purpose, and
one which makes “ Les Preludes ” much plainer
sailing for the ordinary hearer- than Mendels-
sohn’s “ Naiades ” overture or Raff’s “Lenore ”
or “ Im Walde ” symphonies, in both of which
the formal repetitions would stamp Raflr' as a
madman if we did not know that they were
mere superstitions, which he had not the
strength of mind to shake off as Liszt did. But
still, to the people who would not read Liszt’s
explanations and cared nothing for his purpose,
who had no taste for “ tone poetry” and con-
sequently insisted on judging the symphonic
poems as sound-patterns, Liszt must needs ap-
pear, like ‘Vagner, a perverse egotist with
something fundamentally disordered in his in-
tellect, — in short, a lunatic.

The sequel was the same as in the Impres- '
sionist movement. \Vagner, Berlioz, and
Liszt, in securing tolerance for their own
works, secured it for what sounded to many
people absurd; and this tolerance necessarily
extended to a great deal of stufl? which was
really absurd, but which the secretly-bewildered
critics dared not denounce, lest it, too, should
turn out to be great, like the music of Wagner,
over which they had made the most ludicrous
exhibition of their incompetence. Even at
such stupidly conservative concerts as those of
the London Philharmonic Society, I have seen
ultra-modern composers, supposed to be repre-
sentatives of the \Vagnerian movement, con-
ducting rubbish in no essential superior to
Jullien’s British army quadrilles. And then, of.
course, there are the young imitators, who are
corrupted by the desire to make their harmonies
sound like those of the masters whose purposes
and principles of work they are too young to
understand.

4

UBERTY.

 

Here, again, you see, you have a progressive,
intelligent, wholesome, and thoroughly sane
movement in art, producing plenty of evidence
to prove the case of any clever man who does
not understand music, but who has a theory
which involves the proposition that all the
leaders of the art movements of our time are
degenerate and, consequently, retrogressive
lunatics. .

There is no need for me to go at any great
length into the grounds on which any develop-
ment in our moral views must at first appear
insane and blasphemous to people who are satis—
fied, or more than satisfied, with the current
morality. Perhaps you remember the opening
chapters of my “ Quintessence of Ibsenism,” in
which I showed why the London press, now
abjectly polite to Ibsen, received him four
years ago with a shriek of horror. Every step
in morals is made by challenging the validity of
the existing conception of perfect propriety of
conduct; and, when a man does that, he must
look out for a very different reception from the
painter who has ventured to paint a shadow
brilliant purple, or the composer who begins
the prelude to his opera with an unprepared
chord of the thirteenth. Heterodoxy in art is
at worst rated as eccentricity or folly; hetero-
doxy in morals is at once rated as scoundrelism,
and, what is worse, propagandist scoundrelism,
which must, if successful, undermine society
and bring us back to barbarism after a period
of decadence like that which brought impe‘rial
Rome to its downfall. Your function as a
philosophic Anarchist in American society is to
combat the attempts that are constantly being
made to arrest development by using the force
of the State to suppress all departures from
what the majority consider to be “ right ” in
conduct or overt Opinion. I dare say you find
the modern democratic voter a very trouble-
some person, chicken-heartedly diflident as to
the value of his opinions on art or science, but
cocksure about right and wrong in morals, poli-
tics, and religion, — that is to say, in all the
departments in which he can interfere effect-
ively and mischievously. Happily, the indi-
vidual is developing greatly in freedom and
boldness nowadays. Formerly our young
people mostly waited in difiident silence until
they were old enough to find their aspirations
towards the fullest attainable activity and
satisfaction working out in practice very much
as they have worked out in the life of the race;
so that the revolutionist of twenty-five, who
saw nothing for it but a clean sweep of all our
institutions, found himself, at forty, accepting
and even clinging to them on condition of a
few reforms to bring them 11p to date. But
nowadays the young people do not wait so
patiently for this reconciliation. They express
their dissatisfaction with the wisdom of their
elders loudly and irreveren'tly, and formulate
their heresy as a faith. They demand the abo-
lition of marriage, of the State, of the Church;
they preach the divinity of love and the hero-
ism of the man who believes in himself and
dares do the thing he wills; they contemn the
slavery to duty and discipline which has left so
many soured old people with nothing but
envious regrets for a virtuous youth. They
recognize their gospel in such utterances as that
quoted by Nordau from Brandes: “ To obey

one’s senses is to have character. He who

 

allows himself to be guided by his passions has
individuality.” For my part, I think this ex-
cellent doctrine, both in Brandes’s form and in
the older form: “ He that is unjust, let him be
unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be
filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be
righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be
holy still.” This is not the opinion of Nordau,
who, with facile journalistic vulgarity, proceeds
to express his horror of Brandes with all the
usual epithets, — “ debauchery, dissoluteness,
depravity disguised as modernity, bestial in-
stincts, maitre dc plaisz’r, egomaniacal anar-
chist,” —— and such sentences as the following:

It is comprehensible that an educator who turns the
school-room into a tavern and a brothel should have
success and a crowd of followers. He certainly runs
the risk of being slain by the parents, if they come to
know what he is teaching their children; but the
pupils will hardly complain, and will be eager to
attend the lessons of so agreeable a teacher. This is
the explanation of the influence Brandes 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.

In order to thoroughly enjoy this splutter-
ing, you must know that it is immediately fol-

‘ lowed by an attack on Ibsen for the weakness

of “ obsession by the doctrine of original sin.”
Yet what would the passage I have just quoted
be without the doctrine of original sin as a
postulate ? If “ the heart of man is deceitful
above all things, and desperately wicked,”
then, truly, the man who allows himself to be
guided by his passions must needs be a scoun-
drel, and his teacher might well be slain by his
parents. But how if the youth thrown helpless
on his passions found that honesty, that self-
respect, that hatred of cruelty and injustice,
that the desire for soundness and health and -
efficiency, were master passions, -— nay, that
their excess is so dangerous to youth that it is
part of the wisdom of age to say to the young:
“ Be not righteous overmuch: why shouldst
thou destroy thyself ? ” I am sure, my dear
Tucker, your friends have paraphrased that in
vernacular American often enough in remon-
strating with you for your Anarchism, which
defies not only God, but even the wisdom of
the United States congress. On the other
hand, the people who profess to renounce and
abjure their own passions, and ostentatiously
regulate their conduct by the most convenient
interpretation of what the Bible means, or,
worse still, by their ability to find reasons for it
(as if there were not excellent reasons to be
found for every conceivable course of conduct,
from dynamite and vivisection to martyrdom),
seldom need a warning against being righteous
overmuch, their attention, indeed, often need-
ing a rather pressing jog in the opposite direc-
tion. The truth is that passion is the steam in
the engine of all religions and moral systems.
In so far as it is malevolent, the religions are
malevolent too, and insist on human sacrifices,
on hell, wrath, and vengeance. You cannot
read Browning’s “ Caliban upon Setebos, or,

. Natural Theology on the Island” without ad-

mitting that all our religious have been made

as Caliban made his, and that the difference
between Caliban and Prospero is that Prospero
is mastered by holier passions. And as Caliban
imagined his theology, so did Mill reason out
his essay on “ Liberty ” and Spencer his “ Data
of Ethics.” In them we find the authors still

 

trying to formulate abstract principles of con-
duct, —- still missing the fact that truth and
justice are not abstract principles external to
man, but human passions, which have, in their
time, conflicted with higher passions as well as
with lower ones. If a young woman, in a
mood of strong reaction against the preaching
of duty and self-sacrifice and the rest of it,
were to tell Mr. Herbert Spencer that she was
determined not to murder her own instincts and:
throw away her life in obedience to a mouthful.
of empty phrases, I suspect he would recom-
mend the “ Data of Ethics ” to her as a trust--
worthy and conclusive guide to conduct.

Under similar circumstances I should unhesitat-
ingly say to the young woman: “ By all means--i
do as you propose. Try how wicked you can
be; it is precisely the same experiment as trying:
how good you can be. At worst you will only
find out the sort of person you really are. At
best you will find that your passions, if you
really and honestly let them all loose impar-
tially, will discipline you with a severity which:
your conventional friends, abandoning them-
selves to the mechanical routine of fashion,
could not stand for a day.” As a matter of fact,..
I have seen over and over again this comedy of
the “ emancipated ” young enthusiast flinging
duty and religion, convention and parental
authority, to the winds, only to find herself
becoming, for the first time in her life, plunged? .
into duties, responsibilities, and sacrifices from
which she is often glad to retreat, after a few
years’ wearing down of her enthusiasm, into the
comparatively loose life of an ordinary respect-
able woman of fashion. The truth is, laws, '
religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead.‘
of making society better than its best unit,
make it worse than its average unit, because
they are never up to date. You will ask me:

“ Why have them at all ? ” I will tell you.
They are made necessary —though we all
secretly detest them —by the fact that the
number of people who can think out a line of
conduct for themselves even on one point is
very small, and the number who can afford the
time for it still smaller. Nobody can afford the
time to do it on all points. The professional
thinker may on occasion make his own morality
and philosophy as the cobbler may make his
own boots; but the ordinary man of business
must buy at the shop, so to speak, and put up
with what he finds on sale there, whether it ex-
actly suits him or not, because he can neither
make a morality for himself or do without one.-
This typewriter with which I am writing is the
best I can get; but it is by no means a perfect
instrument; and I have not the smallest doubt
that in fifty years’ time the authors of that day
will wonder how men could have put up with

so clumsy a contrivance. \Vhen a better one is.
invented, I shall buy it: until then, I must
make the best of it, just as my Protestant and
Roman Catholic and Agnostic friends make thc
best of their creeds and systems. This would
be better recognized if people took consciously.
and deliberately to the use of creeds as they dc
to the use of typewriters. Just as the traflic (
a great city would be impossible without’a cod
of rules of the road which not one wagoner 1n '
thousand could draw up for himself, much less.
promulgate, and without, in London at least,

an unquestioning consent to treat the police-
man’s raised hand as if it were an impassable

LIBERTY.

5

 

bar stretched half across the road, so the aver-
age man is still unable to get through the world
without being told what to do at every turn,
and basing such calculations as he is capable of
on the assumption that every one else will calcu-
late on the same assumptions. Even your man
of genius accepts a thousand rules for every one
he challenges; and you may lodge in the same
house with an Anarchist for ten years without
noticing anything exceptional about him.
Martin Luther, the priest, horrified the greater
half of Christendom by marrying a nun, yet
was a submissive conformist in countless ways,
living orderly as a husband and father, wearing
what his bootmaker and tailor made for him,
and dwelling in what the builder built for him,
although he would have died rather than take
his Church from the Pope. And when he got
a Church made by himself to his liking, genera-
tions of men calling themselves Lutherans took
that Church from him just as unquestioningly as
he took the fashion of his clothes from his
tailor. As the race evolves, many a convention
which recommends itself by its obvious utility
to every one passes into an automatic habit,
like breathing; and meanwhile the improve-
ment in our nerves and judgment enlarges the
list of emergencies which individuals may be
trusted to deal with on the spur of the moment
without reference to regulations; but there will
for many centuries to come be a huge demand
for a ready-made code of conduct for general
use, which will be used more or less as a matter
of overwhelming convenience by all members of
communities. Oh, Father Tucker, worshipper
of Liberty! where shall I find a country where
the thinking can be done without division of
labor ?

It follows that we can hardly fall into any
error stupider than that of mistaking creeds
and the laws founded on creeds for the applica-
tions to human conduct of eternal and immuta-
ble principles of good and evil. It sets people
regarding laws as institutions too sacred to be
tampered with, whereas in a progressive com-
munity nothing can make laws tolerable unless
their changes and modifications are kept closely
on the heels of the changes and modifications
which are continuously proceeding in the minds
and habits of the people; and it deadens the
conscience of individuals by relieving them of
the moral responsibility of their own actions.
When this relief is made as complete as possi-
ble, it reduces a man to a condition in which
his very virtues are contemptible. Military dis-
cipline, for example, aims at destroying the in-
dividuality and initiative of the soldier whilst
increasing his mechanical efliciency, until he is
simply a weapon with the power of hearing and
obeying orders. In him you have duty, obe-
dience, self-denial, submission to external au-
thority, carried as far as it can be carried; and
the result is that in England, where military
service is voluntary, the common soldier is less
respected than any other serviceable worker in
the community. The police constable, who,
though under discipline too, is a civilian and
has to use his own judgment and act on his OWn
responsibility in innumerable petty emergen-
cies, is by comparison a popular and esteemed
citizen. The Roman Catholic peasant who con-
sults his parish priest instead of his conscience,
and submits wholly to the authority of the
Church, is mastered and governed either by

 

statesmen or cardinals who despise his super-
stition, or by Protestants who are at least
allowed to persuade themselves that they have
arrived at their religious opinions through the
exercise of their private judgment. The whole
progress of the world is from submission and
obedience as safeguards against panic and in-
continence, to wilfulness and self-assertion
made safe by reason and self-control, just as
plainly as the physical growth of the individual
leads from the perambulator and the nurse’s
apron-string to the power of walking alone, or
his moral growth from the tutelage of the boy
to the responsibility of the man. But it is use-
less for impatient spirits— you and I, for in-
stance— to call on people to walk before they
can stand. IVithout high gifts of reason and
self-control — that is, without strong common
sense— no man dare yet trust himself out of
the school of authority. \Vhat he does is to
claim gradual relaxations of the discipline, so as
to have as much freedom as he thinks is good
for him and as much government as he needs to
keep him straight. \Ve see this in the history
of British-American Christianity. Man, as the
hero of that history, starts by accepting as
binding on him the revelation of God’s will as
interpreted by the Church. Then he claims a ,
formal right to exercise his own judgment,
which the Reformed Church, competing with
the [Inreformed for clients, grants him on con-
dition that he arrive at the same conclusions as
itself. Later on, he violates this condition in
certain particulars, and “ dissents,” flying to
America in the Mayflower from the prison of
Conformity, but promptly building a new jail,
Suited to the needs of his sect, in his adopted
country. For all these little mutinies he finds
excellent arguments to prove that he is ex-
changing a false authority for the true one,
never daring even to think of brazenly admit-
ting that what he is really doing is substituting
his own will, hit by bit, for what he calls the
will of God or the laws of Nature. The argu-
ments so accustom the world to submit author-
ity to the test of discussion that he is at last
emboldened to claim the right to do anything
he can find good arguments for, even to the
extent of questioning the scientific accuracy of
the book of Genesis and the validity of the
popular conception of God as an omniscient,
omnipotent, and very serious old gentleman
sitting on a throne above the clouds. This
seems a giant stride towards emancipation; but
it leaves our hero, as Rationalist and Material-
ist, regarding Reason as an eternal principle,
independent of and superior to his erring pas-
sions, at which point it is easy to suggest that
perhaps the experienced authority of a Roman
Catholic Church might be better than the first
crop of arguments raised by a handful of raw
Rationalists in their sects of “ Freethinkers ”
and “ Secularists ” for the working class, and
“ Positivists ” or “ Don’t Knowists ” (Agnos-
tics) for the genteel votaries of the new fetich.
In the meantime came Schopenhauer to re-
establish the old theological doctrine that reason
is no motive power; that the true motive
power in the world — otherwise life — is will;
and that the setting up of reason above will is
a damnable error. But the theologians could
not open their arms to Schopenhauer, because
he fell into the cardinal Rationalist error of
making happiness instead of completeness of

 

activity the test of the value of life, and of
course came to the idiotic pessimist conclusion
that life is not worth living, and that the will
which urges us to live in spite of this is neces-
sarily a malign torturer, the desirable end of

all things being the Nirvana of the stilling of
the will and the consequent setting of life’s sun
“into the blind cave of eternal night.” Fur-
ther, the will of the theologians was the will of
God, standing outside man and in authority
above him, whereas the Schopenhauerian will is
a purely secular force of nature, attaining vari-
ous degrees of organization, here as a jelly fish,
there as a cabbage, more complexly as an ape
or a tiger, and attaining its highest form so far
in the human being. As to the Rationalists,
they approved of Schopenhauer’s secularism
and pessimism, but of course could not stomach
his metaphysical method or his dethronement of
reason by will. Accordingly, his turn for
popularity did not come until after Darwin’s,
and then mostly through the influence of two
great artists, Richard Wagner and Ibsen,
whose “ Tristan ” and “ Emperor or Galilean ”
shew that Schopenhauer was a true pioneer in
the forward march of the human spirit. We
can now, as soon as we are strong-minded
enough, drop the Nirvana nonsense, the pessi-
mism, the rationalism, the theology, and all the
other subterfuges to which we cling because we
are afraid to look life straight in the face and
see in it, not the fulfilment of a moral law or of
the deductions of reason, but the satisfaction of
a passion in us of which we can give no account
whatever. It is natural for man to shrink

from the terrible responsibility thrown on him
by this inexorable fact.
vanish before it, — “ The woman tempted me,”
“The serpent tempted me,” “ I was not myself
at the time,” “ I meant well,” “.My passion
got the better of my reason,” “ It was my

duty to do it,” “ The Bible says that we
should do it,” “Everybody does it,” and so on.
Nothing is left but the frank avowal: “ I did

it because I am built that way.” Every man
hates to say that. He wants to believe that his
generous actions are characteristic of him, and
that his meannesses are aberrations or conces-
sions to the force of circumstances. Our mur-
derers, with the assistance of the jail chaplain,
square accounts with the devil and with God,
never with themselves. The convict gives
every reason for his having stolen something
except the reason that he is a thief. Cruel
people flog their children for their children’s
good, or offer the information that a guinea
pig perspires under atrocious torture as an
affectionate contribution to science. Lynched
negroes are riddled by dozens of superfluous
bullets, every one of which is offered as the ex-
pression of a sense of outraged justice and
womanhood in the scamp and libertine Who ~
fires it. And such is the desire of men to keep
one another in countenance that they positively
demand such excuses from one another as a
matter of public decency. An uncle of mine,
who made it a rule to offer tramps a job when
they begged from him, naturally very soon
became familiar with every excuse that human
ingenuity can invent for not working. But he
lost his temper only once; and that was with a
tramp who frankly replied that he was too

lazy. This my uncle described with disgust as
“ cynicism.” And yet our family arms bear

All his stock excuses.“ ‘ '

6

LIBERTY-

 

the motto, in Latin, “ Know thyself.”

As you know, the true trend of this move-
ment has been mistaken by many of its sup-
porters as well as by its opponents. The in-
grained habit of thinking of the propensities of
which we are ashamed as “ our passions,” and
our shame of them and our propensities to noble
conduct as a negative and inhibitory depart-
ment called generally our conscience, leads us
to conclude that to accept the guidance of our
passions is to plunge recklessly into the in-
supportable tedium of what is called a life of
pleasure. Reactionists against the almost
equally insupportable slavery of what is called a
life of duty are nevertheless willing to venture
on these terms. The “ revolted daughter,” ex-
asperated at being systematically lied to by her
parents on every subject of vital importance to
an eager and intensely curious young student of
life, allies herself with really vicious people and
with humorists who like to shock the pious
with gay paradoxes, in claiming an impossible
license in personal conduct. No great harm is
done beyond the inevitable and temporary ex-
cesses produced by all reactions; for, as I have
said, the would-be wicked ones find, when they
come to the point, that the indispensable quali-
fication for a wicked life is not freedom, but
WIckedness.
ports the clamor of the opponents of the newest
opinions, who naturally shriek as Nordau
shrieks in the passages about Brandes, quoted
above. Thus you have here again a movement
which is thoroughly beneficial and progressive
presenting a hideous appearance of moral cor-
ruption and decay, not only to our old-fashioned
religious folk, but to our comparatively modern
scientific folk as well. And here again, because
the press and the gossips have found out that
this apparent corruption and decay is considered
the right thing in some influential quarters, and
must be spoken of with respect, and patronized
and published and sold and read, we have a
certain number of pitiful imitators taking ad-
vantage of their tolerance to bring out really
silly and rotten stuff, which the reviewers are
afraid to expose, lest it, too, should turn out to
be the correct thing.

After this long preamble, you will have no
difficulty in understanding the sort of book
Nordau has written. Figure to yourself a huge
volume, stuffed with the most slashing of the
criticisms which were hurled at the Impression-
ists, the Tone Poets, and the philosophers and
dramatists of the Schopenhauerian revival,
before these movements had reached the point
at which it began to require some real courage
to attack them. Imagine a rec/zazgfi'c'e, not only
of the newspaper criticisms of this period, but
actually of all its little parasitic paragraphs of
small talk and scandal, from the long-forgotten
jibes against Mr. Oscar “'ilde’s momentary
attempt to bring knee-breeches into fashion
years ago, to the latest scurrilities about “the
New \Voman.” Imagine the general staleness
and occasional putrescence of this mess dis-
guised by a dressing of the terminology in-
vented by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and all the
latest specialists in madness and crime, to de-
scribe the artistic faculties and propensities as
they operate in the insane. Imagine all this
done by a man who is a vigorous and capable
journalist, shrewd enough to see that there is a
good opening for a big reactionary book as a

But the misunderstanding sup-

 

relief to the \Vagner and Ibsen booms, bold
enough to let himself go without respect to
persons or reputations, lucky enough to be a
stronger, clearer-headed man than ninety-nine
out of a hundred of his critics, besides having a
keener interest in science, a born theorist, rea-
soner, and busybody, and so able, without in-
sight, originality, or even any very remarkable
intensive industry (he is, like most Germans,
extensively industrious to an appalling degree),
to produce a book which has made a very con-
siderable impression on the artistic ignorance of
Europe and America. For he says a thing as if
he meant it; he holds superficial ideas obsti-
nately, and sees them clearly; and his mind
works so impetuously that it is a pleasure to
watch it— for a while.
shallow and unfeeling enough to be the dupe of
a theory which would hardly impose on one of
those gamblers who have a system or martin-
gale, founded on a solid rock of algebra, by
which they can infallibly break the bank at
Monte Carlo. “ Psychiatry” takes the place
of algebra in Nordau’s martingale.

This theory of his is, at bottom, nothing but
the familiar delusion of the used-up man that
But Nordau is
too clever to be driven back on ready-made
mistakes; he makes them for himself in his
own way. He appeals to the prodigious ex-
tension of the quantity of business that a single
man can transact through the modern machin-
ery of social intercourse, —— the railway, the
telegraph and telephone, the post, and so
forth. He gives appalling statistics of the in-
crease of railway mileage and shipping, of the
number of letters written per head of the‘popu-
lation, of the newspapers which tell 11s things of
which we used to know nothing.* “In the
last fifty years,” he says, “the population of
Europe has not doubled, whereas the sum of its
labors has increased tenfold, -—in part, even
fiftyfold. Every civilized man furnishes, at
the present time, from five to twenty-five times
as much work as was demanded of him half a
century ago.”f Then follow more statistics of
“ the coustant increase of crime, madness, and
suicide,” of increases in the mortality from dis-
eases of the nerves and heart, of increased con-
sumption of stimulants, of new nervous dis-
eases like “railway spine and railway brain,”
with the general moral that we are all suffering
from exhaustion, and that symptoms of degene-
racy are visible in all directions, culminating at
varlous points in such hysterical horrors as
\Vagner’s music, Ibsen’s dramas, Manet’s pic-

All the same, he is

the world Is gomg to the dogs.

 

* Perhaps I had better remark in passing that, unless
it were true—which it is not —that the length of the
modern penny letter or halfpenny post-card is the
same as that of the eighteenth-century letter, and that
the number of persons who know how to read and
write has not increased, there is no reason whatever to
draw Nordau’s conclusion from these statistics.

i Here again we have a statement which means no-
thing, unless it be compared with statistics as to the
multiplication of the civilized man’s power of produc-
tion by machinery, which in some industries has
multiplied a single man’s power by hundreds and in
others by thousands. As to crimes and disease,
Nordau should state whether he counts convictions
under modern laws —— for offences against the Joint-
Stock Company Acts, for instance — as proving that
we have degenerated since those Acts were passed,
and whether he regards the invention of new names
for a dozen varieties of fever which were formerly
counted as one single disease as an evidence of decay-
ing health in the face of the increasing duration of life.

 

tures, Tolstoi’s novels, ‘Vhitman’s poetry, Dr.
J aeger’s woollen clothing, vegetarianism, scep-
ticism as to the infallibility of vivisection and
vaccination, Anarchism and humanitarianism,
and, in short, everything that Herr Nordau
does not happen to approve of.

You will at once see that such a case, if well
got up and argued, is worth hearing, even
though its advocate has no chance of a verdict,
because it is sure to bring out a certain number
of facts which are interesting and important.

It is, I take it, quite true that, with our rail-
ways and our postal services, many of us are
for the moment very like a pedestrian converted
to bicycling, who, instead of using his machine
to go forty miles with less labor than he used
to walk twenty, proceeds to do a hundred

miles instead, with the result that the “ labor-
saving ” contrivance acts as a means of working
its user to exhaustion. It is also, of course,
true that under our existing industrial system ,
machinery in industrial processes is regarded
solely as a means of extracting a larger pro-
duct from the unremitted toil of the actual
wage-worker. And I do not think any person
who is in touch with the artistic professions
will deny that they are recruited largely by
persons who become actors, or painters, or jour-
nalists and authors because they are incapable
of steady work and regular habits, or that the
attraction which the patrons of the stage,
music, and literature find in their favorite arts
has often little or nothing to do with the need
which nerves great artists to the heavy travail
of creation. The claim of art to our respect
must stand or fall with the validity of its pre-
tension to cultivate and refine our senses and
faculties until seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling,
and tasting become highly conscious and criti-
cal acts with us, protesting vehemently against
ugliness, noise, discordant speech, frowsy
clothing, and foul air, and taking keen interest
and pleasure in beauty, in music, and in the
open air, besides making us insist, as necessary
for comfort and decency, on clean, wholesome,
handsome fabrics to wear, and utensils of fine
material and elegant workmanship to handle.
Further, art should refine our sense of character
andconduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly
heightening our self-knowledge, self-control,
precision of action, and considerateness, and
making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, in-
justice, and intellectual superficiality or vulgar-
ity. The worthy artist or craftsman is he who
responds to this cultivation of the physical and
moral senses by feeding them with pictures,
musical compositions, pleasant houses and gar-
dens, good clothes and fine implements, poems,
fictions, essays, and dramas which call the
heightened senses and ennobled faculties into
pleasurable activity. The great artist is he
who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by
supplying works of a higher beauty and a
higher interest than have yet been perceived,
succeeds, after a brief struggle with its strange~
ness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to
the heritage of the race. This is why we value
art; this is why we feel that the iconoclast and
the Puritan are attacking something made
holier, by solid usefulness, than their own theo-
ries of purity; this is why art has won the
privileges of religion; so that London shop-
keepers who would fiercely resent a compulsory
church rate, who do not know “ Yankee Doo-

 

LIBERTY.

7

 

dle ” from “ God Save the Queen,” and who
:are more interested in the photograph of the
latest celebritiy than in the Velasquez portrait
in the National Gallery, tamely allow the Lon-
don county council to spend their money on
bands, on municipal art inspectors, and on
plaster casts from the antique.

But the business of responding to the demand
“for the gratification of the senses has many
grades. The confectioner who makes unwhole-
'some sweets, the bull~fighter, the women whose
advertisements in the Chicago papers are so as-
tounding to English people, are examples ready
to hand to shew what the art and trade of
pleasing may be, not at its lowest, but at the
lowest that we can speak of without intolerable
shame. “'e have dramatists who write their
lines in such a way as to enable low comedians

.

.of a certain class to give them an indecorous

turn; we have painters who aim no higher than
Giulio Romano did when he decorated the Pa-
lazzo Te in Mantua; we have poets who have
nothing to versify but the commonplaces of
amorous infatuation; and, worse than all the
rest put together, we have journalists who
openly profess that it is their duty to “ reflect ”
what they believe to be the ignorance and pre-
judice of their readers, instead of leading and
enlightening them to the best of their ability,—
an excuse for cowardice and time-serving which
is also becoming well worn in political circles as
“ the duty of a democratic statesman.” In
short, the artist can be a prostitute, a pander,
and a flatterer more easily, as far as external
pressure goes, than a faithful servant of the
community, much less the founder of a school
or the father of a church. Even an artist- who
is doing the best he can may be doing a very
low class of work: for instance, many perform-
ers at the rougher music halls, who get their
living by singing coarse songs in the rowdiest
possible way, do so to the utmost of their abil-
ity in that direction in the most conscientious
spirit of earnng their money honestly and

And the ex-
altation of the greatest artists is not continu-
ous; you cannot defend every line of Shakspere
Since the artist is a
man and his patron a man, all human moods
and grades of development are reflected in art;
consequently the Puritan’s or the Philistine’s

being a credit to their profession.

or every stroke of Titian.

indictment of art has as many counts as the
misanthrope’s indictment of humanity. And
this is the Achilles’ heel of art at which Nordau
has struck. He has piled the Puritan on the
Philistine, the I’hilistine on the misanthrope, in
Let me describe to
you one or two of his typical artifices as a spe-
cial pleader making the most of the eddies at

order to make out his case.

the sides of the stream of progress.

Chief among his tricks is the old and efiective
one of pointing out, as “ stigmata of degenera-
tion ” in the person he is abusing, features
which are common to the whole human race.
The drawing—room palmist astonishes ladies by
telling them “ secrets ” about themselves which
are nothing but the inevitable experiences of
ninety-nine people out of every hundred,
though each individual is vain enough to sup-
pose that they are peculiar to herself. Nordau
turns the trick inside out by trusting to the fact
that people are in the habit of assuming that
uniformity and symmetry are laws of nature, —
for example, that every normal person’s face is

 

precisely symmetrical, that all persons have the
same number of bones in their bodies, and so
Nordau takes advantage of this popular
error to claim asymmetry as a stigma of degene-
ration. As a matter of fact, perfect symmetry
or uniformity is the rarest thing in nature. My
two profiles, when photographed, are hardly
recognizable as belonging to the same person by
those who do not know me; so that the camera
would prove me an utter degenerate if my case
Probably, however, you
would not object to testify that my face is as
symmetrical as faces are ordinarily made. An-
other unfailing trick is the common one of hav—
ing two names for the same thing, — one of
them abusive, the other complimentary, for
use according to circumstances. You know
how it is done: “ \Ve trust the government
will be firm ” in one paper, and “ “'0 hope
ministers will not be obstinate ” in another.
The following is a typical specimen of Nordau’s
use of this device. \Vhen a man with a turn
for rhyming goes mad, he repeats rhymes as if
You
say “ Come ” to him, and he starts away with
“Dumb, plum, sum, rum, numb, gum,” and so
on. This the doctors call “ echolalia.” Dickens
gives a specimen of indulgence in it by sane

011.

were exceptional.

 

he were quoting a rhyming dictionary.

peoplein “ Great Expectations,” where Mr.

Jaggers’s Jewish client expresses his rapture of
admiration for the lawyer by exclaiming:

“ Oh, Jaggerth, Jaggerth, Jaggerth; all
otherth ith Cag-Maggerth, give me Jaggerth
There are some well—known verses by Swin-
burne, beginning, “ If love were what the rose

n)

is,” which, rhyming and tripping along very
prettily, express a sentiment without making
any intelligible statement whatsoever; and we
have plenty of nonsensically inconsequent nurs-
ery rhymes, like “ Ba, ba, black sheep,” or

“ Old Daddy long legs,” which please perfectly
sane children just as Mr. Swinburne’s verses
please perfectly sane adults, simply as funny or
pretty little word-patterns. People do not
write such things for the sake of conveying in-
formation, but for the sake of amusing and
pleasing, just as people do not eat strawberries
and cream to nourish their bones and muscles,
but to enjoy the taste of a toothsom‘e dish. A
lunatic may plead that he eats kitchen soap
and tin tacks on exactly the same ground; and,
as far as I can see, the lunatic would com-
pletely shut up Nordau by this argument: for
Xordau is absurd enough, in the case of rhym-
ing, to claim that every rhyme made for its
own sake, as proved by the fact that it does
not convey an intelligible statement of fact of
any kind, convicts the rhymer of “ echolalia,”
or the disease of the lunatic who, when you ask
him to come in to dinner, begins to reel ofl2

“ Sinner, skinner, thinner, winner,” &c., in-
stead of accepting the invitation or making a
Nordau can thus convict any
poet whom he dislikes of being a degenerate

sensible answer.

by simply picking out a rhyme which exists for
its own sake, or a pun, or what is called a
“burden ” in a ballad, and claiming them as
symptoms of “ echolalia,” supporting this
diagnosis by carefully examining the poem for
contradictions and inconsistencies as to time,
place, description, or the like. It will occur to
you probably that by this means he must bring
out Shakspere as the champion instance of
poetic degeneracy, since ShakSpere was an in-

 

corrigible punster, delighted in “ burdens,” —-—
for instance, “ With hey, ho, the wind and the
rain,” which exactly fulfils all the conditions
accepted by Nordau as symptomatic of insan-
ity in Rossetti’s case, —— and rhymed for the
sake of rhyming in a quite childish fashion,
whilst, as to contradictions and inconsistencies,
“Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as to which
Shakspere never seems to have made up his
mind whether the action covered a week or a
single night, is only one of a dozen instances of
his slips. But no: Shakspere, not being a
nineteenth-century poet, would have spoiled the
case for modern degeneration by shewing that
it could have been made out on the same
grounds before the telegraph and the railway
were dreamt of ; and besides, Nordau likes
Shakspere, just as he likes Goethe, and holds
him up as a model of sanity against the nine-
teenth-century poets. Thus Wagner is a de-
generate because he made puns; and Shak-
spere, who made worse ones, is a great poet.
Swinburne, with his “ unmeaning ” refrains of
“ Small red leaves in the mill water,” and
“Apples of gold for the King’s daughter,” is a
diseased madman; but Shakspere, with his “ In
spring time, the only merry ring time, when
birds do sing hey ding a ding ding ” (if this is
not the worst case of “ echolalia ” in the world,
what is echolalia ‘3), is a sober master mind.
Rossetti, with his Blessed Damozel leaning out
from the gold bar of heaven, who weeps,
although she is in paradise, which is a happy
place, who describes the dead in one place as

“ dressed in white ” and in another as “ mount-
ing like thin flames,” and whose calculations of
days and years do not resemble those in com-
mercial diaries, is that dangerous and cranky
thing, “ a mystic”; whilst Goethe, the author
of the second part of “ Faust,” if you please, is
a hard—headed, accurate, sound scientific poet.
As to the list of inconsistencies of which poor
Ibsen is convicted, it is too long to be dealt
with in detail. But I assure you I am not do-
ing Nordau less than justice when I say that, if
he had accused Shakspere of inconsistency on
the ground that Othello is represented in the
first act as loving his wife, and in the last as
strangling her, the demonstration would have
left you with more respect for his good sense
than his pages on Ibsen, the folly of which goes
beyond all patience.*

\Vhen Nordau deals with painting and music,
he is less irritating, because he errs through ig-
norance, and ignorance, too, of a sort that is
now perfectly well recognized ahd understood.
“Te all know what the old-fashioned literary
and scientific writer, who cultivated his intel-
lect without ever dreaming of cultivating his

 

*‘ Perhaps I had better give one example. Xordau
first quotes a couple of speeches from “ An Enemy of
the People ” and “ The IVild Duck.” '

STOCKMANX: I love my native town so well that I
had rather ruin it than see it flourishing on a lie. All
men who live on lies must be exterminated like
vermin. (“ An Enemy of the People”)

RELLIXG: Yes, I said illusion [lie]. For illusion,
you know, is the stimulating principle. Rob the
average man of his life illusion. and you rob him of
his happiness at the same time. (“The Wild Duck”)

Nordau proceeds to comment as follows:

Now, what is Ibsen’s real opinion ? Is a man to
strive for truth or to swelter in deceit ? Is Ibsen with
Stockmann or with Belling ? Ibsen owes us an answer
to these questions, or, rather, he replies to them
affirmatively and negatively with equal ardor and
equal poetic power.

8

UBERTY,

 

eyes and ears, can be relied upon to say when
painters and composers are under discussion.
Nordau makes a fool of himself with laughable
punctuality. He gives us “ the most glorious
period of the Renaissance ” and “ the rosy
dawn of the new thought” with all the gravity
of the older editions of Murray’s guides to
Italy. He tells 11s that “ to copy Cimabue and
Giotto is comparatively easy; to imitate Ra-
phael it is necessary to be able to draw and
paint to perfection.” He lumps Fra Angelico
with Giotto and Cimabue, as if they repre-
sented the same stage in the development of
technical execution, and Pollajuolo with Ghir-
landajo. “ Here,” he says, speaking of the
great Florentine painters, from Giotto to Ma-
saccio, “ were paintings bad in drawing, faded
or smoked, their coloring either originally fee-
ble or impaired by the action of centuries, pic-
tures executed with the awkwardness of a
learner, . . . . easy of imitation, since, in
painting pictures in the style of the early mas-
ters, faulty drawing, deficient sense of color,
and general artistic incapacity, are so many ad-
vantages.” To make any comment on this
would be to hit a man when he is down. Poor
Nordau offers it as a demonstration that Rus-
kin, who gave this sort of ignorant nonsense its
death~blow, was a delirious mystic. Also that
Millais and Holman Hunt, in the days of the
pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, strove to acquire
the qualities of the early Florentine masters be-
cause the Florentine easel pictures were so
much easier to imitate than those of the appren-
tices in Raphael’s Roman fresco factory.

In music we find Nordau equally content
with the theories as to how music is composed
which were current among literary men fifty
years ago. He tells us of “ the severe disci-

' pline and fixed rules of the theory of composi-
tion, which gave a grammar to the musical bab-
bling of primeval times, and made of it a
worthy medium for the expression of the emo-
tions of civilized men,” and describes Wagner
as breaking these “ fixed rules” and rebelling
against this “ severe discipline ” because he was
"‘ an inattentive mystic, abandoned to amor-
phous dreams.” This notion that there are
certain rules, derived from a science of counter-
point, by the application of which pieces of mu-
sic can be constructed just asan equilateral tri-
angle ean be constructed on a given straight
line by any one who has mastered Euclid’s first
proposition is highly characteristic of the gene-
ration of blind and deaf critics to which Nor-
dau belongs. It is evident that, if there were
“ fixed rules ” by which Wagner or any one else
could have composed good music, there could
have been no more “ severe discipline” in the
work of composition than in the work of ar-
ranging a list of names in alphabetical order.
The severity of artistic discipline is produced
by the fact that in creative art no ready-made
rules can help you. There is nothing to guide
you to the right expression for your thought
except your own sense of beauty and fitness;
and, as you advance upon those who.went be-
fore you, that sense of beauty and fitness is ne-
cessarily often in conflict, not with fixed rules,
because there are no rules, but with precedents,
which are what Nordau means by “fixed
rules,” as far as he knows what he is talking
about well enough to mean anything at all. If
Wagner had composed the prelude to “ Das

 

Rheingold” with a half close at the end of the
eighth bar and a full close at the end of the
sixteenth, he would undoubtedly have followed
the precedent of Mozart and other great com-
posers, and complied with the requirements of
Messrs. Hanslick, Nordau and Company.

Only, as it happened, that was not what he
wanted to do. His purpose was to produce a
tone picture of the mighty flood in the depths
of the Rhine; and, as the poetic imagination
does not conceive the Rhine as stopping at
every eight feet to take off its hat to Herren
Hanslick and Nordau, the closes and half closes
are omitted, and poor Herr Nordau, huffed at
being passed by as if he were a person of no
consequence, complains that the composer is

“ an inattentive mystic, abandoned to amor-
phous dreams.” But, even if Wagner’s de-
scriptive purpose is left out of the question,
Nordau’s general criticism of him is an ignorant
one; for the truth is that Wagner, like most
artists who have great intellectual power, was
dominated in the technical work of his gigantic
scores by so strong a regard for system, order,
logic, symmetry, and syntax that, when in the
course of time his melody and harmony become
perfectly familiar to us, he will be ranked with
Handel as a composer whose extreme regularity
of procedure must make his work appear drily
mechanical to those who cannot catch its dra-
matic inspiration. If Nordau, having no sense
of that inspiration, had said: “This fellow,
whom you all imagine to be the creator of a
new heaven and a new earth in music out of a
chaos of poetic emotion, is really an arrant
pedant and formalist,” I should have pricked
up my ears and listened to him with some curio-
sity, knowing how good a case a really keen
technical critic could make cut for that View.
As it is, I have only to expose him as having
picked up a vulgar error under the influence of
a vulgar literary superstition. For the rest,
you will hardly need any prompting of mine to
appreciate the absurdity of dismissing as “ in-
attentive ” the Dresden conductor, the designer
and founder of the Bayreuth enterprise, the
humorous and practical author of “ On Con-
ducting,” and the man who scored and stage-
managed the four evenings of “ The Niblung
Ring.” I purposely leave out the composer,
the poet, the philosopher, the reformer, since
Nordau cannot be compelled to admit that
Wagner’s eminence in these departments was
real. Striking them all out accordingly, there
remain the indisputable, objective facts of
Wagner’s practical professional ability and
organizing power to put Nordau’s diagnosis of
Wagner as an “ amorphous,” inattentive person
out of the question. If Nordau had one hun-
dredth part of the truly terrific power of atten-
tion which \Vagner must have maintained all
his life almost as easily as a common man
breathes, he would not now be so deplorable an
example of the truth of his own contention
that the power of attention may be taken as
the measure of mental strength.

Nordau’s trick of calling rhyme “ echolalia ”
when he happens not to like the rhymer is re-
applied in the case of authorship, which he
calls “ graphomania ” when he happens not to
like the author. He insists that Wagner, who
was a voluminous author as well as a composer,
was a graphomaniac; and his proof is that in
his books we find “the restless repetition of

 

one and the same strain of thought ......
‘ Opera and Drama,’ ‘ Judaism in Music,’ ‘ Rem

. ligion and the State,’ ‘Art and Religion,’ and, i

‘ The Vocation of Opera ’ are nothing more
than the amplification of single passages in

‘ The Art-\Vork of the Future.’ ” This is a
capital example of Nordau’s limited power of
attention. The moment that limited power is
concentrated on his theory of degeneration, he
loses sight of everything else, and drives his
one borrowed horse into every obstacle on the»
road. To those of us who can attend to more
than one thing at a time, there is no observa-
tion more familiar, and more frequently con-
firmed, than that this growth of pregnant singl‘
sentences into whole books which Nordau dis-
covers in Wagner, balanced as it always is by
the contraction of whole boyish chapters into
single epigrams, is the process by which all
great writers, speakers, artists, and thinkers
elaborate their life-work. Let me take a

writer after Nordau’s own heart, —a specialist
in lunacy, of course, —one whom he quotes as
trustworthy example of what he calls “ the
clear, mentally sane author, who, feeling him-
self impelled to say something, once for all ex-
presses himself as distinctly and impressively a:
it is possible for him to do, and has done with
it”: namely, Dr. Henry Maudsley. Dr.
Maudsley is a clever and cultivated specialist in
insanity, who has written several interesting
books, consisting of repetitions, amplifications,
and historical illustrations of the same idea,
which is, if I may put it rather more bluntly
than the urbane author, nothing less than the
identification of religious with sexual ecstasy.
And the upshot of it is the conventional scien--
tific pessimism, from which Dr. Maudsley
never gets away; so that his last book repeats
his first book, instead of leaving it far behind,
as ‘Vagner’s “ State and Religion ” leaves his

“ Art and Revolution ” behind. But, now
that I have prepared the way by quoting Dr.
Maudsley, why should I not ask Herr Nordau
himself to step before the looking-glass and tell
us frankly whether, even in the ranks of his

“ psychiatrists” and lunacy doctors, he can pic?
out a crank more hopelessly obsessed with one
idea than himself. If you want an example of
“ echolalia,” can you find a more shocking one
than thisgentleman who, when you say “ ma-
nia,” immediately begins to gabble Egomania,
Graphomania, Megalomania, Onomatomania,
Pyromania, Kleptomania, Dipsomania, Eroto-
mania, Arithmomania, Oniomania, and is
started off by the termination “phobia ” with a
string of Agoraphobia, Claustrophobia, Rupe-
phobia, Iophobia, Nosophobia, Aiclnnophobia, .
Belenophobia, Cremnophobia, and Trichophobia.
After which he suddenly observes: “ This is
simply philologico-medical trifling,” —— a re-
mark which looks like returning sanity until he
follows it up by clasping his temples in the tru-r
bedlamite manner, and complaining that “ psyj.
chiatry is being stuffed with useless and dis-
turbing designations,” whereas, if the psychiam.
trists would only listen to him, they would see
that there is only one phobia and one mania, —
namely, degeneracy. That is, the philologico--«
medical triflers are not crazy enough for him.
He is so utterly mad on the subject of degene- A
ration that he finds the symptoms of it in the
loftiest geniuses as plainly as in the lowest jail—l
birds, the only exceptions being himself, Lomr -

 

tabufivww .

LIBERTY.

Q

 

broso, Krafft-Ebing, Dr. Maudsley, and—for
the sake of appearances—Goethe, Shakspere,
and Beethoven. Perhaps he would even except
a case so convenient in many ways for his theory
as Coleridge sooner than spoil the connection
between degeneration and “railway spine.” If
a man’s senses are acute, he is degenerate,
hyperzesthesia having been observed in asylums.
If he is particular as to what he wears, he is
degenerate; silk dressing- gowns and knee-
breeches are grave symptoms, and woollen shirts
conclusive. If he is negligent in these matters,
clearly he is inattentive, and therefore degener-
ate. If he drinks, he is neurotic; if he is a
vegetarian and teetotaller, let him be locked up
at once. If he lives an evil life, that fact con-
demns him without further words; if, on the
other hand, his conduct is irreproachable, he is
a wretched “ mattoid,” incapable of the will
and courage to realize his vicious propensities in
action. If he writes verse, he is afliicted with
echolalia; if he writes prose, he is a grapho-
maniac; if in his books he is tenacious of his
ideas, he is obsessed; if not, he is “ amor-
phous” and “inattentive.” Wagner, as we
have seen, contrived to be both obsessed and
inattentive, as might be expected from one

who was “ himself alone charged with a greater
abundance of degeneration than all the other
degenerates put together.” And so on and so
forth.

There is, however, one sort of mental weak-
ness, common among men who take to science,
as so many people take to art, without the
necessary brain power, which Nordau, with
amusing unconsciousness of himself, has
omitted-’ I mean the weakness of the man
who, when his theory works out into a flagrant
contradiction of the facts, concludes: “ So
much the worse for the facts; let them be
altered,” instead of 2 “ So much the worse for
my theory.” \Vhat in the name of common
sense is the value of a theory which identifies
Ibsen, “'agner, Tolstoi, Ruskin, and Victor
Hugo with the refuse of our prisons and lunatic
asylums? What is to be said of the state of
mind of an inveterate pamphleteer and journal-
ist who, instead of accepting that identification
as a reductio-ad—absurdum of the theory,
desperately sets to work to prove it by point-
ing out that there are numerous resemblances,—
that they all have heads and bodies, appetites,
aberrations, whims, weaknesses, asymmetrical
features, erotic impulses, fallible judgments,
and the like common properties, not merely of
all human beings, but all vertebrate organisms.
Take Nordau’s own list,———“ vague and incohe-
rent thought, the tyranny of the association of
ideas, the presence of obsessions, erotic excita-
bility, religious enthusiasm, feebleness of per-
ception, will, memory, and judgment, as well as
inattention and instability”; is there a single
man capable of understanding these terms who
will not plead guilty to some experience of all
of them, especially when he is accused vaguely
and unscientifically, without any statement of
the subject, or the moment, or the circumstances
to which the accusation refers,‘or any attempt
to fix a standard of sanity? I could prove Nor-
dau to be an elephant on more evidence than he
has brought to prove that our greatest men are
degenerate lunatics. The papers in which
Swift, having predicted the death of the sham
prophet Bickerstalf on a certain date, did, after

 

that date, immediately prove that he was dead

are much more closely and fairly reasoned than
any of Nordau’s chapters. And Swift, though
he afterwards died in a madhouse, was too sane
to be‘the dupe of his own logic. At that rate,
where will Nordau die? Probably in a highly

respectable suburban villa.

Nordau’s most likeable point is the freedom
and boldness with which he expresses himself.
Speaking of Peladan (of whose works I know
nothing), he says, whilst holding him up as a
typical degenerate of the mystical variety:

“ His moral ideal is high and noble. He
pursues with ardent hatred all that is base and
vulgar, every form of egoism, falsehood, and
thirst for pleasure; and his characters are
thoroughly aristocratic souls, whose thoughts
are concerned only with the worthiest, if some-
what exclusively artistic, interests of society.”
On the other hand, Maeterlinck is a “ poor
devil of an idlot”; Mr. W. D. O’Connor, for
describing \Vhitman as “ the good gray poet,”
is politely introduced as “ an American
driveller ”; Nietzsche “belongs, body and soul,
to the flock of the mangy sheep”; Ibsen is “a
malignant, anti-social simpleton ”; and so on.
Only occasionally is he insincerely Pharisaical in
his tone, as, for instance, when he pretends to
become virtuously indignant over VVagner’s
dramas, and plays to Mrs. Grundy by exclaim-
ing ironically: “ How unperverted must wives
and readers be, when they are in a state of
mind to witness these pieces without blushing
crimson and sinking into the earth for shame!”
This, to do him justice, is only an exceptional
lapse; a far more characteristic comment of his
on “Tagner’s love-scenes is: “ The lovers in his
pieces behave like tom oats gone mad, rolling in
contortions and convulsions over a root of
valerian.” And he is not always on the side of
the police, so to speak; for he is as careless of
the feelings of the “ beer-drinking” German
bourgeoisie as of those of the aesthetes. Thus,
though on one page he is pointing out that
Socialism and all other forms of discontent with
the existing social order are “ stigmata of
degeneration,” on the next he is talking pure
Karl Marx. For example, taking the two sides
in their order:

Ibsen’s egomania assumes the form of Anarchism.
He is in a state of constant revolt against all that ex-
ists ..... The psychological roots of his anti—social
impulses are well known. They are the degenerate’s
incapacity for self-adaptation, and the resultant dis-
comfort in the midst of circumstances to which, in
consequence of his organic deficiencies, he cannot
accommodate himself. “ The criminal,” says Lom-
broso, “through his neurotic and impulsive nature,
and his hatred of the institutions which have punished
or imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political
rebel, who finds in insurrection the means, not only of
satisfying his passions, but of even having them
countenanced for the first time by a numerous public.

\Vagner is a declared Anarchist ...... He be-
trays that mental condition which the degenerate
share with enlightened reformers, born criminals with
the martyrs of human progress, —namely, deep, de-
vouring discontent with existing facts ...... He
would like to crush “ political and criminal civiliza-
tion,” as he calls it.

Now for Nordau speaking for himself.

Is it not the duty of intelligent philanthropy and
justice, without destroying civilization, to adopt a
better system of economy and transform the artisan
from a factory convict, condemned to misery and ill
health, into a free producer of wealth, who enjoys the
fruits of his labor himself, and works no more than is

 

compatible with his health and his claims on life ‘2

Every gift that a man receives from some other man
without work, without reciprocal service, is an alms,
and as such is deeply immoral.

Not in the impossible “ return to Nature ” lies heal-
ing for human misery, but in the reasonable organiza-
tion of our struggle with nature, — I might say, in
universal and obligatory service against it, from
which only the crippled should be exempted.

In England it was Tolstoi’s sexual morality that ex-
cited the greatest interest; for in that country eco-
nomic reasons condemn a formidable number of girls,
particularly of the educated classes, to forego mar
riage; and, from a theory which honored chastity as
the highest dignity and noblest human destiny, and
branded marriage with gloomy wrath as abomi-
nable depravity, these poor creatures would naturally
derive rich consolation for their lonely, empty lives
and their cruel exclusion from the possibility of ful-
filling their natural calling.

So it appears that Nordau, too, shares “ the
degenerate’s incapacity for self-adaptation, and
the resultant discomfort in the midst of cir-
cumstances to which, in consequence of his
organic deficiencies, he cannot accommodate
himself.” But he has his usual easy way out of
the dilemma. If Ibsen and Wagner are
dissatisfied with the world, that is because the
world is too good for them; but, if Max Nordau
is dissatisfied, it is because Max is too good for
the world. His modesty does not permit him
to draw the distinction in these exact terms.
Here is his statement of it:

Discontent shews itself otherwise in the degenerate
than in reformers. The latter grow angry over real
evils only, and make rational proposals for their
remedy which are in advance of the time: these reme-
dies may presuppose a better and wiser humanity
than actually exists; but, at least, they are capable of
being defended on reasonable grounds. The degene—
rate, on the other hand, selects among the arrange-
ments of civilization such as are either immaterial or
distinctly suitable, in order to rebel against them. His
fury has either ridiculously insignificant aims, or sim-
ply 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
every one, which he displays in venomous phrases,
savage threats, and the destructive mania of wild
beasts. Wagner is a good specimen of this species.

IVagner is only named here because the pas-
sage occurs in the almost incredibly foolish
chapter which is headed with his name. In
another chapter it might have been Ibsen, or
Tolstoi, or Ruskin, or William Morris, or any
other eminent artist who shares Nordau’s
objection, and yours and mine, to our existing
social arrangements. In the face of this, it is
really impossible to deny oneself the fun of
asking Nordau, with all possible good humor, I
who he is and what he is, that he should rail in
this fashion at great men. Wagner was dis-
contented with the condition of musical art in
Europe. In essay after essay he pointed out
with the most laborious exactitude what it was
he complained of, and how it might be
remedied. He not only shewed, in the teeth of
the most envenomed opposition from all the
dunderheads, pedants, and vested interests in
Europe, what the musical drama ought to be as
a work of art, but how theatres for its proper
performance should be managed,— nay, how
they should be built, down to the arrangement
of the seats and the position of the instruments
in the orchestra. And he not only shewed this
on paper, but he successfully composed the
music dramas, built a model theatre, gave the

i0

LIBERTY.

 

model performances, (lid the impossible; so that
there is now nobody left, not even Hansliek,
who cares to stultify himself by repeating the
old anti-\Vagner cry of craziness and Impossibil-
ism,—nobody, save only Max Nordau, who, like
a true journalist, is fact—proof. \Villiam Morris
objected to the abominable ugliness of early
Victorian decoration and furniture, to the
rhymed rhetoric which has done duty for poetry
ever since the Renaissance, to kamptulicon
stained glass, and, later on, to the shiny com-
mercial gentility of typography according to
the American ideal, which was being spread
through England by “ Harper’s ” and “ The
Century,” and which had not, like your
abolition of “justifying” in Liberty, the
advantage of saving trouble. ‘Vell, did he sit
down, as Nordau suggests, to rail helplessly at
the men who were at all events getting the
work of the world done, however inartistically?
Not a bit, of it; he designed and manufactured
the decorations he wanted, and furnished and
decorated houses with them; he put into public
halls and churches tapestries and picture-
windows which cultivated people now travel to
see as they travel to see first-rate fifteenth-
century work in that kind; the books from his
Kelmscott Press, printed with type designed by
his own hand, are pounced on by collectors like
the treasures of our national museums, all this
work, remember, involving the successful con-
ducting of a large business establishment and
factory, and being relieved by the incidental
production of a series of poems and prose
romances which have placed their author in the
position of the greatest living English poet.
Now let me repeat the terms in which Nordau
describes this kind of activity. “ Ridiculously
insignificant aimS— beating the air—no earnest
thought to improvement —— astoundingly mad
projects for making the world happy—persist-
ent rage against everything and every one,
displayed in venomous phrases, savage threats,
and destructive mania of wild beasts.” Is
there not something deliciously ironical in the
'ease with which a splenetic pamphleteer, with
nothing to ‘shew for himself except a bookful

of blunders tacked on to a mock scientific
theory picked up at second hand from a few
lunacy doctors with a literary turn, should be
able to create a European scandal by declaring
that the greatest creative artists of the century
are barren and hysterical madmen? I do not
know what the American critics have said about
Nordau; but here the tone has been that there
is much in what he says, and that he is
evidently an authority on the subjects with
which he deals. And yet I assure you, on my
credit as a man who lives by art criticism, that
from his preliminary description of a Morris
design as one “ on which strange birds flit
among crazily ramping branches, and blowzy
flowers coquet with vain butterflies” (which is
about as sensible as a description of the Norman
chapel in the Tower of London as a character-
istic specimen of Baroque architecture would
be) to his coupling of (‘imabue and Fra
Angelico as primitive Florentine masters; from
his unashamed bounce about “the conscientious
observance of the laws of counterpoint” by
Beethoven and other masters celebrated for
breaking them to his unlucky shot about “a
pedal bass with correct harmonization ” (a pedal
bass happening to be the particular instance in

 

which even the professor-made rules of
“ correct harmonization” are suspended),—
Nordau gives himself away time after time as
an authority upon the fine arts. But his critics,
being for the most part ignorant literary men
like himself, with sharpened wits and neglected
eyes and ears, have swallowed Cimabue and
Ghirlandajo and the pedal bass like so many
gulls. Here an Ibsen admirer may maintain
that Ibsen is an exception to the degenerate
theory and should be classed with Goethe;
there a VVagnerite may plead that Wagner is
entitled to the honors of Beethoven; elsewhere
one may find a champion of Rossetti venturing
cautiously to suggest a suspicion of the
glaringly obvious fact that Nordau has read
only the two or three popular ballads like “The
Blessed Damozel,” “ Eden Bower,” “ Sister
Helen,” and so on, which every smatterer reads,
and that his knowledge of the mass of pictorial,
dramatic, and decorative work turned out by
Rossetti, Burne Jones, Ford Madox Brown,
\Villiam Morris, and Holman Hunt, without a
large knowledge and careful study of which no
man can possibly speak with any critical
authority of the pre-Raphaelite movement, is
apparently limited to a glance at Holman
Hunt’s “Shadow of the Cross,” or possibly an
engraving thereof. And, if Nordau were to
convince me tomorrow that I am wrong, and
that he knows all the works of the school
thoroughly, I should only be forced to assure
him regretfully that he was all the greater fool.
As it is, I have nothing worse to say of his art
criticism than that it is the work of a preten-
tious ignoramus, instantly recognizable as such
by any expert. I copy his bluntness of speech
as a matter of courtesy to him.

And now, my dear Tucker, I have told you
as much about Nordau’s book as it is worth.
In a country where art was really known to the
people, instead of being merely read about, it
would not be necessary to spend three lines on
such a work. But in England, where nothing
but superstitious awe and self-mistrust prevents
most men from thinking about art as Nordau
boldly speaks about it; where to have a sense
of art is to be one in a thousand, the other nine
hundred and ninety-nine being either Philistine
voluptuaries or Puritan anti-voluptuaries,—it is
useless to pretend that Nordau’s errors will be
self-evident. Already we have native writers,
without half his cleverness or energy of ex-
pression, clumsily imitating his sham scientific
vivisection in their attacks on artists whose
work they happen to dislike. Therefore, in
riveting his book to the counter, I have used a
nail long enough to go through a few pages by
other people as well; and that must be my
excuse for myl’disregard of the familiar editorial
stigma of degeneracy which Nordau calls
Agoraphobia, or Fear of Space.

Gr. BERXARD SILUV.
LONDON, JUNE, 1895,

“Voluntary State Socialism.”

Have we all been wrong in believing that
there are only “ two Socialisms,”— the Social-
ism of compulsion and the State, and the
voluntary Socialism of the libertarian? The
editor of the “Dawn,” Mr. Bliss, has dis-
covered a new kind of Socialism, which he
denominates “voluntary Socialism through the
State.” Mr. Bliss was led to this discovery

 

through a realization of the necessity of having
a Socialism in the United States that would
harmonize with the national genius and the
historically evolved institutions. He believes
that each country evolves a Socialism that is
peculiar to itself, and that an attempt to impose
upon one country the product of another is
necessarily futile. Surveying the civilized
world, Mr. Bliss finds that in France Socialism
is anarchical, in Germany cloclm'naire, in
Switzerland legal or governmental, and in
England evolutionary or spontaneous. Owing
to the profound sympathies and similarities
between this country and England, our Social-
ism must correspond closely to the English
form.

Without stopping to question these general-
izations, let» us proceed to learn Mr. Bliss’s idea
of real American Socialism. Americans, he
says, are jealous of the State and are suspicious
of Socialism by law. Alien Socialisms find
insurmountable obstacles in American traditions
and sentiments. The only Socialism they will
welcome is voluntary Socialism through the
State, which is “ Socialism by practice.”

“ When,” explains Mr. Bliss, “ a democratic
government operates a railroad, but allows any—
body else to do so also, that is voluntary Social-
ism through the State.” And he continues:

“ Let our cities vote to establish gas works.
Let any private company that wants to do so
also [establish such works], provided it pays
what it is worth to tear up the streets.”

We know now what Mr. Bliss means, and, in
View of his earnestness, it is necessary to
analyze his proposition. It ought not to be
difficult to open his eyes to the fallacious
character of his notion. Of course, in so far as
he allows freedom of competition by private
individuals and companies, he is less despotic
than the old-fashioned State Socialists, but his
Socialism is not voluntary on that account.
Where does the State get capital to carry on
industries and start in business of all kinds? It
can get it in one way only,-—by taxing all
citizens. The citizen thus taxed is allowed
to patronize private concerns, but he is com-
pelled to pay twice for the same services. He
gets no return for the tax levied by the State,
if he chooses to deal with the State’s compet-
itors. The State operates gas works at his
expense, but, if he pays a private company
for gas, his payment to the State is pure loss.
To escape such double payment he must accept
the products offered by the State. Of course
the State’s management might be so wasteful
and ineflicient that he might actually find it
more economical to sacrifice his contribution to
the State funds and pay the price of private
enterprise for the ready product, but his loss is
still there, and he has given something for
nothing. So far as he is concerned, the Social-
ism is not voluntary, for the tax is compulsory
and he is not permitted to decline to support
the State’s industrial enterprises. To be sure,
Mr. Bliss assures us that there is no necessity of
raising the rate of taxation at all in order to
enable the State to carry on productiOn, but the
assertion is manifestly a careless one. Most
States are heavily in debt, and any new under-
taking involves an increase of taxation. Social- -
ism, which, even under Mr. Bliss’s plan, means
control, not of one or two industries, but of
most industries at least, would plainly require

LIBERTY.

 

. in enormous capital that could not be obtained
dtherwise than by partial expropriation. Some
municipalities operate ferries and gas or water
works, but even if they are altogether success-
[nl in these, it certainly cannot be claimed that
whey have solved the labor problem and
*(bOllSlled poverty within their limits. Mr.
Bliss expects his State Socialism to abolish
covert i; how can this be done without carrying
And how can
(iocialism be fully established without an
)DCl‘t‘flSt‘ of taxation that would amount to
gxpropriation?

' "It is, indeed, because State Socialists are
rware of this that they openly declare for
:xpropriation and do not even pretend to con-

iut the entire programme?

template the existence of private enterprise side
On a small scale
this is possible, but small-scale Socialism would
not effect the objects of the State Socialists or
3f Mr. Bliss.

But perhaps Mr. Bliss means to tax only
those who consent to be taxed and who freely
igive their capital to the State for industrial pur-
Ah! that is not “ Socialism through the
State,” but voluntary coOperation among

py side with State industry.

30505.

individuals, for within the limits of these
lctivities the State has abolished itself by aban-
doning compulsion and become a voluntary
association. No, Mr. Bliss, “ voluntary Social-
lsm through the State” is a contradiction in
There are only two Socialisms, and, if
you think that State Socialism is alien to the
spirit of American institutions, you are bound
to espouse voluntary Socialism. v.

23911115.

Y .

The plutocratic press is very indignant with
'udge Brown, of the federal supreme court, for
his pessimistic address to the Yale students. It
won’t do to let a man who cannot he lied about
and vilified in the usual manner tell the people
that “ bribery and corruption are so universal
as to threaten the very structure of society,”
that “universal suffrage .
manipulated as to rivet the chains of the poor
man and to secure to the rich man a predomi-
nance in politics he has never enjoyed under a

. is so skilfully

Iestricted system,” and that in no country in the
.world is the influence of corporate wealth more
potent than here.
court are to Speak right out in open meeting in
lthis strain, it will be impossible to apply abus-
ive. epithets to Altgeld, Debs, “Bite, and
The pluto-
:ratic mouthpieces have felt called upon to rea-
. on with Judge Brown and argue him out Of

is pessimism. Bribery, they tell him, is not
, niversal, since it does not dog the steps of
firesidents, judges, and law-makers, and wealth

If judges of the highest

Coxev for saying the same things.

i s not potent, since rich men have very little
chance of political prefermcnt nowadays. Do
they really expect to impress Judge Brown
twith this sort of argumentation ‘3 Even the
average reader is not likely to be satisfied with
‘vit. He knows that the senate has often been
ldescribed as a club of millionaires, and that few
candidates can be elected without “ barrels.”
Moreover, if rich men were really ineligible,
they could accomplish all their objects by send-
ing their tools to the legislatures. The Goulds
and Havemeyers do not need to make laws;
they buy legislatures ready-made and get any-
thing they please enacted into law. As to the
prevalence of bribery and corruption, here is

l

 

3 opposite. .
‘ the mouth of an Anarchist.

what, in an unguarded moment, Godkin himself
was moved to say: “ In the belief of nearly all
the intelligent portion of our population the
meeting of the legislature in January is simply
the opening of a school of vice. As soon as the
speaker is elected the members organize for the
sale of legislation in quantities to suit purchas—
ers or for the levy of blackmail.” \Vhile God-
kin had reference to the New York legislature,
neither he nor anybody else would claim that
other legislatures are in any way superior.

Governor Altgeld has been urging jury re-
form on the corporation agents collectively
known as the Illinois legislature. He will not
be heeded, of course, but it is a satisfaction to
know that Governor Altgeld clearly sees what
the defect in the system is. In Illinois juries
are judges both of law and of fact in criminal
cases, and hence the failure to obtain just de-
cisions can only be due to the character and
complexion of the juries. Governor Altgeld,
realizing this, declares that “ what is wanted is
some method by which juries shall be taken
from the great body of the people, so that they
may represent all callings and conditions.”

The curse of the Illinois system has been the
packing of juries; yet the stupid legislature
passed a law some years ago actually providing
that juries should be selected from the list of
those citizens who neglected to exercise their
right of suffrage, thus making jury service
nothing more than a penalty for failure to vote.
Can such a body be expected to adopt Governor
Altgeld’s rational view ‘9

Anarchist Letter-Writing Corps.

The Secretary wants every reader of Liberty to send
in his name for enrolment. Those who do so thereby
pledge themselves to write, when possible, a letter
every fortnight, on Anarchism or kindred subjects, to
the " target ” assigned in Liberty for that fortnight,
and to notify the secretary promptly in case of any
failure to write to a target (which it is hoped will not
often occur), or in case of temporary or permanent
withdrawal from the work of the Corps. All,
whether members or not, are asked to lose no oppor-
tunity of informing the secretary of suitable targets.
Address, STEPHEN T. BYINGTON, 108 W. 13th St,
New York City.

Writers who want to put their letters in a form that
editors like to publish should use ink, black ink (but
strong colored ink is better than faded black ink), and
be sure to leave plenty of space between words in a
line and between lines on a page. To write only on
every other line of the paper is a custom favored by
editors.

Target, section A. — The “ Deseret Evening News,”
Salt Lake City, Utah, a Morman organ, had in its
issue of July 6 a column editorial referring to the
chapter on Mormonism in \Vhittick’s “Bombs.” After
commending Whittick for fairness in his historical
statements and in his description of the economic ad-
vantages of Mormonism, it says:

The lecturer gives utterance to many a thoroughly
Christian sentiment, Anarchist though he be, notably
when he denounces persecution and demands liberty of
conscience as one of the greatest boons to the children
of men. The way in which Mr. \Vhittick treats his
subject is very different from the general course
adopted. lietwecn Anarchism and Mormonism, we
need hardly say, there can be no sympathy; the two
are different as fire and water. The first aims, as we
understand it, to establish liberty without law and
without morality, —an utter impossibility, foolish in
the extreme. In the pursuit of its work, no means
seem to be shunned, not even the arbitrary destruction
of life and property. Mormonism also aims at the
establishment of liberty, but one built on law and
order and morality such as are sanctioned by divine
authority, Anarchism destroys; Mormonism builds
up. The latter is the work of God; the former, the
Yet, truth is truth wherever found, even in

Point out what is wrong in the editor’s conception
of Anarchism. Ask whether his worst ideas about it

 

are taken from “ Bombs,” or any other Anarchist
source, or whether they come from the statements
current among the ignorant enemies of Anarchism.
Recommend first-hand investigation. Point out the
difference between dynamitism and Anarchism. Hit
the government in any way you expect Mormons to
appreciate; only say nothing of polygamy, as it is the
Mormon’s cue to keep quiet about that at present.

Section B. ——Bolton Hall, 111 Broadway, New York
city, wants attacks from an Anarchist standpoint on
succession taxes and personal property taxes. Write
against one or both of these.

STEPHEN T. BYINGTON.

Expert Reasoning.
[Henri Rochefort in L‘IntransigeantJ

The report of the scientific commission appointed to
investigate the means of poisoning the operatives in
the government match-factories forcibly reminds one
of the words of an official sumnt to Louis XVIII:

“ Sire, these two gases are about to have the honor
to decompose in your presence.”

Our governmental chemists are no less obsequious;
perhaps even more so. It is all that we can expect if
they do not shed tears over this poor phosphorus,
which soon will no longer have the honor to necrose
the men and women who handle it, to the extent of
dislocating their jaws.

The commission reluctantly appointed by M. Ribot
clearly perceives, with its characteristically adminis-
trative flair, that the reform in the manufacture of
matches will cause the hearts of a certain number of
the government’s protégés to bleed. The purveyors of
the white poison occupy influential positions, and to
announce to them, inconsiderately and abruptly, that
they will soon find themselves dispossessed of their
monopoly would be to give proof of revolting
brutality.

See then to what ambages and circumlocutions the
ministerial chemists resort! Not once, in the account
of their experiments, do they consent to confess that
the phosphorated paste employed hitherto is poisonous
and deadly in the highest degree. They bring for
ward several others that seem to contain no phos-
phorus; that is all that they establish.

And even so they are careful to add that, in the case
of two of the products submitted to their analysis,
the inventors have refused to reveal the secret of the
composition of their matches, contenting themselves
with giving their word of honor that they contained
no particle of phosphorus. In which these match-
makers have acted with a prudence upon which we
cannot too highly compliment them. If they had had
the candor to unveil the mystery of their discovery, no
doubt the State would have immediately appropriated
it, declaring to them, in an extremely polite letter,
that the government had long been in possession of the
paste in question, it being the discovery of a modest
clerk in the department of finance, who had generously
made a present of it to his country.

Things do not take place otherwise in the war de-
partment, where the machinist who submits a new rifle
for consideration is sure to meet an officer of genius
who within the week has constructed a weapon iden-
tical with his own. The world is full of such extraor-
dinary meetings!

()n the day when some physicist in his work-room
shall have finally solved the problem of balloon steer-
ing, we shall learn that the managers of the shops at
Mcndon devoted to military air navigation, and who in
twenty years have not advanced the question a single
step, were precisely on the point of launching into the
air an apparatus operating on similar principles.
Lucky, in fact, will be the inventor if he is not ar-
rested and sent to the llcs du Salut for stealing a State
secret. '

However, such as they are, the matches presented
by a Belgian engineer seem to combine the desired
conditions. They are no more explosive than the
matches now in use, which are not explosive at all;
but they do not light more easily, which seems hardly
credible, since the phosphorated matches, six times out
of eight, do not light at all.

And in a careless fashion, as if it were the most insig-
nificant of postscripts, the report adds that non-phos-
phorated matches have been in use for years in Russia,
but in virtue of a privilege'granted by the crown.
Now, in France there is no crown, since we live in a

I2

LIBERTY.

 

republic, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
Therefore it has been impossible hitherto to adopt a
substitute for pliosphorated matches, as thereby we
should have seemed to be borrowing from the Russian
empire its ways of governing, which would have been
unworthy Of a great democracy like ours.

SO it is through pure republicanism that our diflferl
ent ministers have continued to strew the floors of the
French match-factories with cripples and corpses.

\Vhat efl'ect does this logic produce upon you?
my part, I find it phosphorescent.

For

The Logic of the Situation.
[Le Figaro.]

“Le Journal Ofiiciel ” will shortly publish the fol-
lowing ministerial decrec,—-an inevitable result of the
recent votes of the chamber of deputies reducing the
tax on mild beverages and increasing the tax on
alcohol:

I’Wiereas, the increase of the tax on alcohol will not
bear fruit unless the consumption of alcohol increases;
and

Whereas, it is the duty of every good citizen to aid
in bringing about this result in the measure of his
resources; and

Whereas, for instance, every time that a French citi-
zen takes a little glass of brandy after his meal, he
renders a service to his country proportional to the
amount of alcohol absorbed, thereby intensifying the
pleasure that he derives from it; and

Whereas, under these conditions, drunkenness,
though remaining blameworthy from the moral point
of view, ceases to be so from the patriotic point of
view; and .

Whereas, there have long been in existence, in all
parts of the country, so-called Temperance Societies,
whose precise purpose is to combat the progress of
alcoholism; and

Whereas, the object of these societies is now placed
in antagonism to the intent of the law on alcohol and
to the interest of the country; and

Whereas, consequently, the Temperance Societies are
a public danger, constituting an obstacle in the way Of
balancing the budget; and

Whereas, it is now the duty of good citizens to en-
courage the organization Of Intemperance Societies,—

It is hereby decreed, that all the existing Temperance
Societies are abolished.

The minister of the interior is charged with the exe-
cution of this decree.

Pour eopz'e conforme:

ALFRED Carts.

SLAVES TO DUTY.

By John Badcock, Jr.

A unique addition to the pamphlet literature of Anarchism, in that
it assails the morality superstition as the foundation of the various
schemes for the exploitation of mankind. Max Stirner himself
does not expound the doctrine of Egoisin in bolder fashion. 30
pages.

 

PRICE, 15 CENTS.

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This work is an elaborate exposition of the teachings of Josiah
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THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSEN ISM. By G. Bernard
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ANARCHISM: ITS AIMS AND METHODS. An adI
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GOD AND THE STATE. “ One of the most eloquent plead- .,
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MUTUAL BANKING : Showin the radical deficiency .
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FREE POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS: Their mums ‘
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WHAT IS PROPERTY P Or, an Inquiry into the Principl
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A POLITICIAN IN SIGHT OF HAVEN: Bein a Pris
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A LETTER TO GROVER CLEVELAND 0N HI‘

 

 

 

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THE AN ARCHISTS : A Picture Of Civilization at the Clos.‘
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TAXATION OR FREE TRADE ? A Criticism 11 0:
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SOCIALISTIC, COMMUNISTIC, MUTUALISTIC ‘
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CO-OPERATIVE HOMES. An essay showing how the ki
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THE UN CONSTITUTIONALITY OF THE LAWS-‘6I
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NO TREASON.—No. II. 1867. By Lysandcr Spooner. 16 pages}
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NO TREASON.—No. VI. Showing that the constitution is of
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ILLEGALITY OF THE TRIAL OF JOHN W. WEBvI

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ster. Containing the substance of the author‘s larger work, “ 'l‘riaiI
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NATURAL LAW: Or, the Science of Justice. A treatise 01h
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A LETTER TO THOMAS F. BAYARD. Challenging,
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