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YALE UNIVERSITY
Xibrarg ofthe Btoinitg School
GIFT OF
Douglas Qgfe Macintosh
DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY
DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AND
PHILOSOPHY OB RELIGION
1916-1942
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DEGENERATION

DEGENERATION

BY

MAX NORDAU

Translated from the Second Edition of the
German Work

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1895

Copyright, 1895,
By D. APPLETON AND. COMPANY,

DEDICATED TO
CESAR LOMBROSO
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY AND FORENSIC MEDICINE
AT THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY OF TURIN
BY THE AUTHOR

TO
PROFESSOR C^SAR LOMBROSO,
TURIN.

Dear and honoured Master,
I dedicate this book to you, in open and joy ful recognition
of the fact that without your labours it could never have been
written. The notion of degeneracy, first introduced into science by Morel,
and developed with so much genius by yourself, has in your hands
already shown itself extremely fertile in the most diverse direc
tions. On numerous obscure points of psychiatry, criminal lazv,
politics, and sociology, you have poured a veritable flood of light,
which those alone have not perceived zvho obdurately close their
eyes, or zvho are too short-sighted to derive benefit from any en
lightenment whatsoever.
But there is a vast and important domain into which neither
you nor your disciples have hitherto borne the torch of your method
— the domain of art and literature.
Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists,
and pronounced lunatics ; they are often authors and artists.
These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for
the most part the same somatic features, as the members of the
above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their un
healthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the
dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil.
Some among these degenerates in literature, music, and painting
have in recent years come into extraordinary prominence, and are

viii DEDICATION
revered by numerous admirers as creators of a new art, and
heralds of 'the coming centuries.
This plienomenon is not to be disregarded. Books and works of
art exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses. It is from these
productions that an age derives its ideals of morality and beauty.
If they are absurd and anti-social, they exert a disturbing and
corrupting influence on the views of a whole generation. Hence
the latter, especially the impressionable youth, easily excited to
enthusiasm for all that is strange and seemingly new, must be
warned and enlightened as to the real nature of the creations so
blindly admired. This warning the ordinary critic does not give.
Exclusively literary and aesthetic culture is, moreover, the worst
preparation conceivable for a true knowledge of the pathological
character of the works of degenerates. The verbose rhetorician
exposes with more or less grace, or cleverness, the subjective im
pressions received from the works he criticises, but is incapable of
judging if these works are the productions of a shattered brain,
and also the nature of the mental disturbance expressing itself by
them. Now I have undertaken the work of investigating (as much as
possible after your method) the tendencies of the fashions in art
and literature ; of proving that they have their source in the de
generacy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of tlieir ad
mirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral
insanity, imbecility, and dementia.
Thus, this book is an attempt at a really scientific criticism,
which does not base its judgment of a book upon the purely acci
dental, capricious, and variable emotions it awakens — emotions
depending on the temperament and mood of the individual reader
— but upon the psycho-physiological elements from which it sprang.
At the same time it ventures to fill a void still existing in your
powerful system.
I have no doubt as to the consequences to myself of my initiative.
There is at the present day no danger in attacking the Church, for
it no longer has the stake at its disposal. To zvrite against rulers
and governments is likewise nothing venturesome, for at the worst
nothing more than imprisonment could follow, with compensating
glory of martyrdom. But grievous is the fate of him who has the
audacity to characterize aesthetic fashions as forms of mental decay.

DEDICATION ix
The author or artist attacked never pardons a man for recognising
in him a lunatic or a charlatan ; the subjectively garrulous critics
are furious when it is pointed out how shallow and incompetent
they are, or how cowardly when swimming with the stream ; and
even the public is a?igered when forced to see that it has been run
ning after fools, quack dentists, and mountebanks, as so many
prophets. Now, the graphomaniacs and their critical body-guard
dominate nearly the entire press, and in the latter possess an in
strument of torture by which, in Indian fashion, they can rack the
troublesome spoiler of sport, to his life's end.
The danger, however, to which he exposes himself cannot deter
a man from doing that which he regards as his duty. When a
scientific truth has been discovered, he owes it to humanity, and
has no right to withhold it. Moreover, it is as little possible to do
this as for a woman voluntarily to prevent the birth of the mature
fruit of her womb.
Without aspiring to the most distant comparison of myself with
you, one of the loftiest mental phenomena of the century, I may yet
take for my example the smiling serenity with which you pursue
your own way, indifferent to ingratitude, insult, and misunder
standing. Pray remain, dear and honoured master, ever favourably dis
posed towards your gratefully devoted
Max Nordau.

CONTENTS. BOOK I.
FIN-DE-SIECLE.

CHAPTER I.
The Dusk of the Nations

The Symptoms

Diagnosis

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

PAGE I

Etiology

i5

34

BOOK II.
MYSTICISM.

CHAPTER I.
The Psychology of Mysticism

CHAPTER II.

The Pre-Raphaelites

45

67

CONTENTS

CHAPTER III. PAGE
Symbolism - - ioo

CHAPTER IV.
TOLSTOISM - 144
CHAPTER V.
The Richard Wagner Cult - - 171
CHAPTER VI.
Parodies of Mysticism - 214

BOOK III.
EGO-MANIA.
CHAPTER I.
The Psychology of Ego-mania - - 241
CHAPTER II.
Parnassians and Diabolists - 266
CHAPTER III.
Decadents and ^Esthetes - 296
CHAPTER IV.
Ibsenism - . 338

CHAPTER V.
Friedrich Nietzsche

4i5

CONTENTS xiii
BOOK IV.
REALISM.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
Zola and his School - - - 473
CHAPTER II.
The ' Young German ' Plagiarists 506
BOOK V.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
CHAPTER I.
Prognosis - 536
CHAPTER II.
Therapeutics 550

DEGENERATION BOOK I.
FIN-DE-SIECLE.
CHAPTER I.
THE DUSK OF THE NATIONS.
Fin-de-siEcle is a name covering both what is character
istic of many modern phenomena, and also the underlying
mood which in them finds expression. Experience has long
shown that an idea usually derives its designation from the
language of the nation which first formed it. This, indeed, is a
law of constant application when historians of manners and
customs inquire into language, for the purpose of obtaining
some notion, through the origins of some verbal root, respect
ing the home of the earliest inventions and the line of evolution
in different human races. Fin-de-siecle is French, for it was
in France that the mental state so entitled was first consciously
realized. The word has flown from one hemisphere to the
other, and found its way into all civilized languages. A proof
this that the need of it existed. The fin-de-siecle state of
mind is to-day everywhere to be met with ; nevertheless, it is
in many cases a mere imitation of a foreign fashion gaining^
vogue, and not an organic evolution. It is in the land oT~its
birth that it appears in its most genuine form, and Paris is the
right place in which to observe its manifold expressions.
No proof is needed of the extreme silliness of the term.
Only the brain of a child or of a savage could form the clumsy
idea that the century is a kind of living being, born like a beast
or a man, passing through all the stages of existence, gradually
ageing and declining after blooming childhood, joyous youth,
and vigorous maturity, to die with the expiration of the
hundredth year, after being afflicted in its last decade with all
the infirmities of mournful senility. Such a childish anthropo
morphism or zoomorphism never stops to consider that the

2 DEGENERATION
arbitrary division of time, rolling ever continuously along, is
not identical amongst all civilized beings, and that while this
nineteenth century of Christendom is held to be a creature
reeling to its death presumptively in dire exhaustion, the four
teenth century of the Mahommedan world is tripping along in
the baby-shoes of its first decade, and the fifteenth century of
the Jews strides gallantly by in the full maturity of its fifty-
second year. Every day on our globe 130,000 human beings
are born, for whom the world begins with this same day, and
the young citizen of the world is neither feebler nor fresher for
leaping into life in the midst of the death-throes of 1900, nor
on the birthday of the twentieth century. But it is a habit of
the human mind to project externally its own subjective states.
And it is in accordance with this naively egoistic tendency
that the French ascribe their own senility to the century, and
speak of fin-de-siecle when they ought correctly to say fin-de-
race. *
But however silly a term fin-de-siecle may be, the mental
constitution which it indicates is actually present in influential
circles. The disposition of the times is curiously confused, a
compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement,
of fearful presage and hang-dog renunciation. The prevalent
feeling is that of imminent perdition and extinction. Fin-dc-
siecle is at once a confession and a complaint. The old
Northern faith contained the fearsome doctrine of the Dusk of
the Gods. In our days there have arisen in more highly-
developed minds vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations, in
which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind
with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst
of a dying world.
It is not for the first time in the course of history that the
horror of world-annihilation has laid hold of men's minds. A
similar sentiment took possession of the Christian peoples at
the approach of the year 1000. But there is an essential
difference between chiliastic panic and fin-de-siecle excitement.
The despair at the turn of the first millennium of Christian
chronology proceeded from a feeling of fulness of life and joy of
life. Men were aware of throbbing pulses, they were conscious
of unweakened capacity for enjoyment, and found it un-
mitigatedly appalling to perish together with the world, when
* This passage has been misunderstood. It has been taken to mean that
all theFiench nation had degenerated, and their race was approaching its end.
However, from the concluding paragraph of this chapter, it may be clearly seen
that I had in my eye only the upper ten thousand. The peasant population,
| and a part of the working classes and the bourgeoisie, are sound. I assert
Jjonly the decay ofthe rich inhabitants of great cities and the leading classes.
'jit is they who have discovered fin-de-siicle, and it is to them also that
'fin-de-race applies.

II

FIN-DE-SIECLE 3
there were yet so many flagons to drain and so many lips to
kiss, and when they could yet rejoice so vigorously in both k>ve
and wine. Of all this in the fin-de-siecle feeling there is nothing.
Neither has it anything in common with the impressive twilight-
melancholy of an aged Faust, surveying the work of a lifetime,
and who, proud of what has been achieved, and contemplating
what is begun but not completed, is seized with vehement
desire to finish his work, and, awakened from sleep by haunting
unrest, leaps up with the cry : ' Was ich gedacht, ich eil' es zu
vollbringen.'* Quite otherwise is the fin-de-siecle mood. It is the impotent
despair of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in the
midst of an eternally living nature blooming insolently for ever.
It is the envy of a rich, hoary voluptuary, who sees a pair of young
lovers making for a sequestered forest nook ; it is the mortifica
tion of the exhausted and impotent refugee from a Florentine
plague, seeking in an enchanted garden the experiences of a
Decamerone, but striving in vain to snatch one more pleasure
of sense from the uncertain hour. The reader of Turgenieff 's
A Nest of Nobles will remember the end of that beautiful
work. The hero, Lavretzky, comes as a man advanced in
years to visit at the house where, in his young days, he had
lived his romance of love. All is unchanged. The garden is
fragrant with flowers. In the great trees the happy birds are
chirping; on the fresh turf the children romp and shout.
Lavretzky alone has grown old, and contemplates, in mournful
exclusion, a scene where nature holds on its joyous way, caring
nought that Lisa the beloved is vanished, and Lavretzky, a
broken-down man, weary of life. Lavretzky's admission that,
amidst all this ever-young, ever-blooming nature, for him alone
there comes no morrow ; Alving's dying cry for ' The sun —
the sun !' in Ibsen's Ghosts — these express rightly the fin-de-
siecle attitude of to-day.
This fashionable term has the necessary vagueness which
fits it to convey all the half-conscious and indistinct drift of
current ideas. Just as the words ' freedom,' ' ideal,' ' progress '
seem to express notions, but actually are only sounds, so in
itself fin-de-sikle means nothing, and receives a varying signifi
cation according to the diverse mental horizons of those who
use it.
The surest way of knowing what fin-de-siecle implies, is to
consider a series of particular instances where the word has
been applied. Those which I shall adduce are drawn from
French books and periodicals ofthe last two years. +
* ' My thought I hasten to fulfil.'
t A four-act comedy, by H. Micard and F. de Jouvenot, named Fin-de-
Steele, which was played in Paris in 1890, hardly avails to determine the

4 DEGENERATION
A king abdicates, leaves his country, and takes up his
residence in Paris, having reserved certain political rights.
One day he loses much money at play, and is in a dilemma.
He therefore makes an agreement with the Government of his
country, by which, on receipt of a million francs, he renounces
for ever every title, official position and privilege remaining to
him. Fin-de-siecle king.
A bishop is prosecuted for insulting the minister of public
worship. The proceedings terminated, his attendant canons
distribute amongst the reporters in court a defence, copies of
which he has prepared beforehand. When condemned to pay
a fine, he gets up a public collection, which brings in tenfold the
amount of the penalty. He publishes a justificatory volume
containing all the expressions of support which have reached
him. He makes a tour through the country, exhibits himself
in every cathedral to the mob curious to see the celebrity of
the hour, and takes the opportunity of sending round the plate.
Fin-de-siecle bishop.
The corpse of the murderer Pranzini after execution under
went autopsy. The head of the secret police cuts off a large
piece of skin, has it tanned, and the leather made into cigar-
cases and card-cases for himself and some of his friends. Fin-
de-siecle official.
An American weds his bride in a gas-factory, then gets with
her into a balloon held in readiness, and enters on a honey
moon in the clouds. Fin-de-siecle wedding.
An attache" of the Chinese Embassy publishes high-class works
in French under his own name. He negotiates with banks
respecting a large loan for his Government, and draws large
advances for himself on the unfinished contract. Later it
comes out that the books were composed by his French
secretary, and that he has swindled the banks. Fin-de-siecle
diplomatist. A public schoolboy walking with a chum passes the gaol
where his father, a rich banker, has repeatedly been imprisoned
for fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement and similar lucrative
misdemeanours. Pointing to the building, he tells his friend
with a smile : ' Look, that's the governor's school.' Fin-de-
siecle son.
Two young ladies of good family, and school friends, are
chatting together. One heaves a sigh. ' What's the matter ?'
asks the other. ' I'm in love with Raoul, and he with me.'
' Oh, that's lovely ! He's handsome, young, elegant ; and yet
you're sad ?' ' Yes, but he has nothing, and is nothing, and
sense of the word as the French use it. The authors were concerned, not
to depict a phase of the age or a psychological state, but only to give an
attractive title to their piece.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 5
my parents want me to marry the baron, who is fat, bald, and
ugly, but has a huge lot of money.' ' Well, marry the baron
without any fuss, and make Raoul acquainted with him, you
goose.' Fin-de-siecle girls.
Such test-cases show how the word is understood in the
land of its birth. Germans who ape Paris fashions, and apply
fin-de-siecle almost exclusively to mean what is indecent and
improper, misuse the word in their coarse ignorance as much
as, in a previous generation, they vulgarized the expression
demi-monde, misunderstanding its proper meaning, and giving
it the sense of fille de pie, whereas its creator Dumas intended
it to denote persons whose lives contained some dark period,
for which they were excluded from the circle to which they
belong by birth, education, or profession, but who do not by
their manner betray, at least to the inexperienced, that they
are no longer acknowledged as members of their own caste.
Prima facie, a king* who sells his sovereign rights for a big
cheque seems to have little in common with a newly-wedded
pair who make their wedding-trip in a balloon, nor is the
connection at once obvious between an episcopal Barnum and
a well-brought-up young lady who advises her friend to a
wealthy marriage mitigated by a cicisbeo. All these fin-de-siecle
cases have, nevertheless, a common feature, to wit, a contempt
for traditional views of custom and morality.
Such is the notion underlying the word fin-de-siecle. It
means a practical emancipation from traditional discipline,
which theoretically is still in force. To the voluptuary this
means unbridled lewdness, the unchaining of the beast in man ;
to the withered heart of the egoist, disdain of all consideration
for his fellow-men, the trampling under foot of all barriers
which enclose brutal greed of lucre and lust of pleasure ; to the
contemner of the world it means the shameless ascendency
of base impulses and motives, which were, if not virtuously
suppressed, at least hypocritically hidden ; to the believer it
means the repudiation of dogma, the negation of a super-
sensuous world, the descent into flat phenomenalism ; to the
sensitive nature yearning for sesthetic thrills, it means the
vanishing of ideals in art, and no more power in its accepted
forms to arouse emotion. And to all, it means the end of an
established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied
logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something
of beauty.
One epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and 1
another is announcing its approach. "TrTere~ls' a sound of 1
rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow
would not link itself with to-day. Things as they are totter
and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man

6 DEGENERATION
is weary, and there is no faith that it is worth an effort to up
hold them. Views that have hitherto governed minds are dead
or driven hence like disenthroned kings, and for their inheritance
they that hold the titles and they that would usurp are locked
in struggle. Meanwhile interregnum in all its terrors prevails ;
there is confusion among the powers that be ; the million,
robbed of its leaders, knows not where to turn; the strong
work their will ; false prophets arise, and dominion is divided
amongst those whose rod is the heavier because their time is
short. Men look with longing for whatever new things are at
hand, without presage whence they will come or what they
will be. They have hope that in the chaos of thought, art
may yield revelations of the order that is to follow on this
tangled web. The poet, the musician, is to announce, or
divine, or at least suggest in what forms civilization will further
be evolved. What shall be considered good to-morrow — what
shall be beautiful? What shall we know to-morrow — what
believe in ? What shall inspire us ? How shall we enjoy ? So
rings the question from the thousand voices of the people, and
where a market-vendor sets up his booth and claims to give an
answer, where a fool or a knave suddenly begins to prophesy
in verse or prose, in sound or colour, or professes to practise
his art otherwise than his predecessors and competitors, there
gathers a great concourse, crowding around him to seek in
what he has wrought, as in oracles of the Pythia, some meaning
to be divined and interpreted. And the more vague and
insignificant they are, the more they seem to convey of the
future to the poor gaping souls gasping for revelations, and
the more greedily and passionately are they expounded.
Such is the spectacle presented by the doings of men in
the reddened light of the Dusk of the Nations. Massed in
the sky the clouds are aflame in the weirdly beautiful glow
which was observed for the space of years after the eruption
of Krakatoa. Over the earth the shadows creep with deepen
ing gloom, wrapping all objects in a mysterious dimness, in
which all certainty is destroyed and any guess seems plausible.
Forms lose their outlines, and are dissolved in floating mist.
The day is over, the night draws on. The old anxiously watch
its approach, fearing they will not live to see the end. A few
amongst the young and strong are conscious of the vigour of
life in all their veins and nerves, and rejoice in the coming sun
rise. Dreams, which fill up the hours of darkness till the
breaking of the new day, bring to the former comfortless
memories, to the latter high-souled hopes. And in the artistic
products of the age we see the form in which these dreams
become sensible.
Here is the place to forestall a possible misunderstanding.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 7
The great majority of the middle and lower classes is naturally
not fin-de-siecle. It is true that the spirit of the times is stirring
the nations down to their lowest depths, and awaking even in
the most inchoate and rudimentary human being a wondrous
feeling of stir and upheaval. But this more or less slight touch
of moral sea-sickness does not excite in him the cravings of
travailing women, nor express itself in new aesthetic needs.
The Philistine or the Proletarian still finds undiluted satisfac
tion in the old and oldest forms of art and poetry, if he knows
himself unwatched by the scornful eye of the votary of fashion,
and is free to yield to his own inclinations. He prefers Ohnet's
novels to all the symbolists, and Mascagni's Cavalleria
Rusticana to all Wagnerians and to Wagner himself; he
enjoys himself royally over slap-dash farces and music-hall
melodies, and yawns or is angered at Ibsen ; he contemplates
gladly chromos of paintings depicting Munich beer-houses and
rustic taverns, and passes the open-air painters without a
glance. It is only a very small minority who honestly find
pleasure in the new tendencies, and announce them with
genuine conviction as that which alone is sound, a sure guide
for the future, a pledge of pleasure and of.moral benefit. But
this minority has the gift of covering the whole visible surface
of society, as a little oil extends over a large area of the surface
of the sea. It consists chiefly of rich educated people, or of
fanatics. The former give the ton to all the snobs, the fools,
and the blockheads ; the latter make an impression upon the
weak and dependent, and intimidate the nervous. All snobs
affect to have the same taste as the select and exclusive
minority, who pass by everything that once was considered
beautiful with an air of the greatest contempt. And thus it
appears as if the whole of civilized humanity were converted to
the aesthetics ofthe Dusk ofthe Nations.

CHAPTER II.
THE SYMPTOMS.
Let us follow in the train frequenting the palaces of European
capitals, the highways of fashionable watering-places, the re
ceptions of the rich, and observe the figures of which it is
composed. Amongst the women, one wears her hair combed smoothly
back and down like Rafael's Maddalena Doni in the Uffizi at
Florence ; another wears it drawn up high over the temples like
Julia, daughter of Titus, or Plotina, wife of Trajan, in the busts

8 DEGENERATION
in the Louvre ; a third has hers cut short in front on the brow
and long in the nape, waved and lightly puffed, after the fashion
of the fifteenth century, as may be seen in the pages and young
knights of Gentile Bellini, Botticelli and Mantegna. Many
have their hair dyed, and in such a fashion as to be startling in
its revolt against the law of organic harmony, and the effect of
a studied discord, only to be resolved into the higher poly
phony of the toilet taken as a whole. This swarthy, dark-eyed
woman snaps her fingers at nature by framing the brown tones
of her face in copper-red or golden-yellow ; yonder blue-eyed
fair, with a complexion of milk and roses, intensifies the bright
ness of her cheeks by a setting of artificially blue-black tresses.
Here is one who covers her head with a huge heavy felt hat,
an obvious imitation, in its brim turned up at the back, and its
trimming of large plush balls, of the sombrero of the Spanish
bull-fighters, who were displaying their skill in Paris at the
exhibition of 1889, and giving all kinds of motifs to modistes.
There is another who has stuck on her hair the emerald-green
or ruby-red biretta of the mediaeval travelling student. The
costume is in keeping with the bizarre coiffure. Here is a
mantle reaching to the waist, slit up on one side, draping the
breast like a portiere, and trimmed round the hem with little
silken bells, by the incessant clicking of which a sensitive
spectator would in a very short time either be hypnotized or
driven to take frantic fright. There is a Greek peplos, of which
the tailors speak as glibly as any venerable philologist. Next
to the stiff monumental trim of Catharine de Medicis, and the
high ruff of Mary, Queen of Scots, goes the flowing white
raiment of the angel of the Annunciation in Memling's pictures,
and, by way of antithesis, that caricature of masculine array,
the fitting cloth coat, with widely opened lapels, waistcoat,
stiffened shirt-front, small stand-up collar, and necktie. The
majority, anxious to be inconspicuous in unimaginative medi
ocrity, seems to have for its leading style a laboured rococo,
with bewildering oblique lines, incomprehensible swellings,
puffings, expansions and contractions, folds with irrational
beginning and aimless ending, in which all the outlines of the
human figure are lost, and which cause women's bodies to
resemble now a beast of the Apocalypse, now an armchair, now
a triptych, or some other ornament.
The children, strolling beside their mothers thus bedecked,
are embodiments of one of the most afflicting aberrations into
¦which the imagination of a spinster ever lapsed. They are
living copies of the pictures of Kate Greenaway, whose love of
children, diverted from its natural outlet, has sought gratifica
tion in the most affected style of drawing, wherein the sacred
ness of childhood is profaned under absurd disguises. Here is

FIN-DE-SIECLE 9
an imp dressed from head to foot in the blood-red costume of
a mediaeval executioner ; there a four-year-old girl wears a
cabriolet bonnet of her great-grandmother's days and sweeps
after her a court mantle of loud-hued velvet. Another wee dot,
just able to keep on her tottering legs, has been arrayed in the
long dress of a lady of the First Empire, with puffed sleeves
and short waist.
The men complete the picture. They are preserved from
excessive oddity through fear of the Philistine's laugh, or
through some remains of sanity in taste, and, with the excep
tion of the red dress-coat with metal buttons, and knee-breeches
with silk stockings, with which some idiots in eye-glass and
gardenia try to rival burlesque actors, present little deviation
from the ruling canon of the masculine attire ofthe day. But
fancy plays the more freely among their hair. One displays
the short curls and the wavy double-pointed beard of Lucius
Verus, another looks like the whiskered cat in a Japanese
kakemono. His neighbour has the barbiche of Henri IV.,
another the fierce moustache of a lansquenet by F. Brun, or
the chin-tuft of the city-watch in Rembrandt's ' Ronde de
Nuit.' The common feature in all these male specimens is that they
do not express their real idiosyncrasies, but try to present
something that they are not. They are not content to show
their natural figure, nor even to supplement it by legitimate
accessories, in harmony with the type to which they approxi
mate, but they seek to model themselves after some artistic
pattern which has no affinity with their own nature, or is even
antithetical to it. Nor do they for the most part limit them
selves to one pattern, but copy several at once, which jar one
with another. Thus we get heads set on shoulders not
belonging to them, costumes the elements of which are as
disconnected as though they belonged to a dream, colours that
seem to have been matched in the dark. The impression is
that of a masked festival, where all are in disguises, and with
heads too in character. There are several occasions, such as
the varnishing day at the Paris Champs de Mars salon, or the
opening of the Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London,
where this impression is so weirdly intensified, that one seems
to be moving amongst dummies patched together at haphazard,
in a mythical mortuary, from fragments of bodies, heads,
trunks, limbs, just as they came to hand, and which the
designer, in heedless pell-mell, clothed at random in the
garments of all epochs and countries. Every single figure
strives visibly by some singularity in outline, set, cut, or colour,
to startle attention violently, and imperiously to detain it.
Each one wishes to create a strong nervous excitement, no

io DEGENERATION
matter whether agreeably or disagreeably. The fixed idea is
to produce an effect at any price.
Let us follow these folk in masquerade and with heads in char
acter to their dwellings. Here are at once stage properties and
lumber-rooms, rag-shops and museums. The study of the
master of the house is a Gothic hall of chivalry, with cuirasses,
shields and crusading banners on the walls ; or the shop of an
Oriental bazaar with Kurd carpets, Bedouin chests, Circassian
narghilehs and Indian lacquered caskets. By the mirror on
the mantelpiece are fierce or funny Japanese masks. Between
the windows are staring trophies of swords, daggers, clubs and
old wheel-trigger pistols. Daylight filters in through painted
glass, where lean saints kneel in rapture. In the drawing-room
the walls are either hung with worm-eaten Gobelin tapestry,
discoloured by the sun of two centuries (or it may be by a
deftly mixed chemical bath), or covered with Morris draperies,
on which strange birds flit amongst crazily ramping branches,
and blowzy flowers coquet with vain butterflies. Amongst
armchairs and padded seats, such as the cockered bodies of
our contemporaries know and expect, there are Renaissance
stools, the heart or shell-shaped bottoms of which would attract
none but the toughened hide of a rough hero of the jousting
lists. Startling is the effect of a gilt-painted couch between
buhl-work cabinets and a puckered Chinese table, next an
inlaid writing-table of graceful rococo. On all the tables and
in all the cabinets is a display of antiquities or articles ofvertu,
big or small, and for the most part warranted not genuine ; a
figure of Tanagra near a broken jade snuff-box, a Limoges
plate beside a long-necked Persian waterpot of brass, a bon-
bonniere between a breviary bound in carved ivory, and snuffers
of chiselled copper. Pictures stand on easels draped with
velvet, the frames made conspicuous by some oddity, such as a
spider in her web, a metal bunch of thistle-heads, and the like.
In a corner a sort of temple is erected to a squatting or a stand
ing Buddha. The boudoir of the mistress of the house partakes
of the nature of a chapel and of a harem. The toilet-table is
designed and decorated like an altar, a prie-Dieu is a pledge for
the piety of the inmate, and a broad divan, with an orgiastic
abandon about the cushions, gives reassurance that things are
not so bad. In the dining-room the walls are hung with the
whole stock-in-trade of a porcelain shop, costly silver is dis
played in an old farmhouse dresser, and on the table bloom
aristocratic orchids, and proud silver vessels shine between
rustic stone-ware plates and ewers. In the evening, lamps of
the stature of a man illumine these rooms with light both
subdued and tinted by sprawling shades, red, yellow or green
of hue, and even covered by black lace. Hence the inmates

FIN-DE-SIECLE ii
appear, now bathed in variegated diaphanous mist, now suffused
with coloured radiance, while the corners and backgrounds are
shrouded in depths of artfully-effected clair-obscur, and the
furniture and bric-a-brac are dyed in unreal chords of colour.
Unreal, too, are the studied postures, by assuming which the
inmates are enabled to reproduce on their faces the light effects
of Rembrandt or Schalcken. Everything in these houses aims at
exciting the nerves and dazzling the senses. The disconnected
and antithetical effects in all arrangements, the constant con
tradiction between form and purpose, the outlandishness of most
objects, is intended to be bewildering. There must be no sen
timent of repose, such as is felt at any composition, the plan of
which is easily taken in, nor of the comfort attending a prompt
comprehension of all the details of one's environment. He
who enters here must not doze, but be thrilled. If the master
of the house roams about these rooms clothed after the example
of Balzac in a white monk's cowl, or after the model of Richepin
in the red cloak of the robber-chieftain of an operetta, he only
gives expression to the admission that in such a comedy theatre
a clown is in place. All is discrepant, indiscriminate jumble.
The unity of abiding by one definite historic style counts as
old-fashioned, provincial, Philistine, and the time has not yet
produced a style of its own. An approach is, perhaps, made to
one in the furniture of Carabin, exhibited in the salon of the
Champs de Mars. But these balusters, down which naked
furies and possessed creatures are rolling in mad riot, these
bookcases, where base and pilaster consist of a pile of guillo
tined heads, and even this table, representing a gigantic open
book borne by gnomes, make up a style that is feverish and
infernal. If the director-general of Dante's ' Inferno ' had an
audience-chamber, it might well be furnished with such as
these. Carabin's creations may be intended to equip a house,
but they are a nightmare.
We have seen how society dresses and where it dwells. We
shall now observe how it enjoys itself, and where it seeks
stimulation and distraction. In the art exhibition it crowds,
with proper little cries of admiration, round Besnard's women,
with their grass-green hair, faces of sulphur-yellow or fiery-red,
and arms spotted in violet and pink, dressed in a shining blue
cloud resembling faintly a sort of nightdress ; that is to say, it
has a fondness for bold, revolutionary debauch of colour. But
not exclusively so. Next to Besnard it worships with equal or
greater rapture the works of Puvis de Chavannes, wan, and as
though blotted out with a half-transparent wash of lime ; or
those of Carriere, suffused in a problematical vapour, reeking
as if with a cloud of incense ; or those of Roll, shimmering in
a soft and silvery sheen. The purple of the Manet school,

12 DEGENERATION
steeping the whole visible creation in bluish glamour, the half
tones, or, rather, phantom-colours of the ' Archaists,' that seem
to have risen, faded and nebulous, out of some primeval tomb,
and all these palettes of ' dead leaves,' ' old ivory,' evaporating
yellows, smothered purple, attract on the whole more rapturous
glances than the voluptuous ' orchestration ' of the Besnard
section. The subject of the picture leaves these select gazers
apparently indifferent ; it is only seamstresses and country-folk,
the grateful clientele of the chromo, who linger over the ' story.'
And yet these as they pass stop by preference before Henry
Martin's 'Every Man and his Chimaera,' in which bloated
figures, in an atmosphere of yellow broth, are doing incompre
hensible things that need profound explanation ; or before Jean
BeYaud's ' Christ and the Adulteress,' where, in a Parisian
dining-room, in the midst of a company in dress-coats, and
before a woman in ball-dress, a Christ robed in correct
Oriental gear, and with an orthodox halo, acts a scene out of
the Gospel ; or before Raffaelli's topers and cut-throats of the
purlieus of Paris, drawn in high relief, but painted with ditch-
water and dissolved clay. Steering in the wake of ' society '
through a picture-gallery, one will be unalterably convinced
that they turn up their eyes and fold their hands before pictures
at which the commoner sort burst out laughing or pull the
grimace of a man who believes he is made a fool of; and that
they shrug their shoulders and hasten with scornful exchange
of looks past such as the latter pause at in grateful enjoy
ment. At opera and concert the rounded forms of ancient melody
are coldly listened to. The translucent thematic treatment of
classic masters, their conscientious observance of the laws of
counterpoint, are reckoned flat and tedious. A coda graceful
in cadence, serene in its ' dying fall,' a pedal base with
correct harmonization, provoke yawns. Applause and wreaths
are reserved for Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, and especially
the mystic Parsifal, for the religious music in Bruneau's
Dream, or the symphonies of Cesar Franck. Music in order
to please must either counterfeit religious devotion, or agitate
the mind by its form. The musical listener is accustomed
involuntarily to develop a little in his mind every motive
occurring in a piece. The mode in which the composer carries
out his motif is bound, accordingly, to differ entirely from this
anticipated development. It must not admit of being guessed.
A dissonant interval must appear where a consonant interval
was expected ; if the hearer is hoping that a phrase in what is
an obvious final cadence will be spun out to its natural end, it
must be sharply interrupted in the middle of a bar. Keys
and pitch must change suddenly. In the orchestra a vigorous

FIN-DE-SIECLE 13
polyphony must summon the attention in several directions at
once ; particular instruments, or groups of instruments, must
address the listener simultaneously without heeding each other,
till he gets as nervously excited as the man who vainly en
deavours to understand what is being said in the jangle of a
dozen voices. The theme, even if in the first instance it has a
distinct outline, must become ever more indefinite, ever more
dissolving into a mist, in which the imagination can see any
forms it likes, as in driving clouds of night. The tide of sound
must flow on without any perceptible limit or goal, surging up
and down in endless chromatic passages of triplets. If now
and then it delude the listener, borne along by it, and straining
his eyes to see land with glimpses of a distant shore, this is
soon discovered to be a fleeting mirage. The music must con
tinually promise, but never perform ; must seem about to tell
some great secret, and grow dumb or break away ere to
throbbing hearts it tells the word they wait for. The audience
go to their concert-room in quest of Tantalus moods, and leave
it with all the nervous exhaustion of a young pair of lovers,
who for hours at the nightly tryst have sought to exchange
caresses through a closely- barred window.
The books in which the public here depicted finds its delight
or edification diffuse a curious perfume yielding distinguishable
odours of incense, eau de Lubin and refuse, one or the other
preponderating alternately. Mere sewage exhalations are played
out. The filth of Zola's art and of his disciples in literary
canal-dredging has been got over, and nothing remains for it
but to turn to submerged peoples and social strata. The van
guard of civilization holds its nose at the pit of undiluted
naturalism, and can only be brought to bend over it with
sympathy and curiosity when, by cunning engineering, a drain
from the boudoir and the sacristy has been turned into it.
Mere sensuality passes as commonplace, and only finds ad
mission when disguised as something unnatural and degenerate.
Books treating of the relations between the sexes, with no
matter how little reserve, seem too dully moral. Elegant
titillation only begins where normal sexual relations leave off.
Priapus has become a symbol of virtue. Vice looks to Sodom
and Lesbos, to Bluebeard's castle and the servants' hall of the
' divine ' Marquis de Sade's Justine, for its embodiments.
The book that would be fashionable must, above all, be
obscure. The intelligible is cheap goods for the million only.
It must further discourse in a certain pulpit tone — mildly
unctuous, not too insistent ; and it must follow up risky scenes
by tearful outpourings of love for the lowly and the suffering,
or glowing transports of piety. Ghost-stories are very popular,
but they must come on in scientific disguise, as hypnotism,

14 DEGENERATION
telepathy, somnambulism. So are marionette-plays, in which
seemingly naive but knowing rogues make used-up old ballad
dummies babble like babies or idiots. So are esoteric novels,
in which the author hints that he could say a deal about magic,
kabbala, fakirism, astrology and other white and black arts
if he only chose. Readers intoxicate themselves in the hazy
word-sequences of symbolic poetry. Ibsen dethrones Goethe ;
Maeterlinck ranks with Shakespeare ; Nietzsche is pronounced
by German and even by French critics to be the leading
German writer of the day; the Kreutzer Sonata is the
Bible of ladies, who are amateurs in love, but bereft of lovers ;
dainty gentlemen find the street ballads and gaol-bird songs of
Jules Jouy, Bruant, MacNab and Xanroff very distingue on
account of ' the warm sympathy pulsing in them/ as the stock
phrase runs ; and society persons, whose creed is limited to
baccarat and the money market, make pilgrimages to the
Oberammergau Passion-play, and wipe away a tear over Paul
Verlaine's invocations to the Virgin.
But art exhibitions, concerts, plays and books, however
extraordinary, do not suffice for the aesthetic needs of elegant
society. Novel sensations alone can satisfy it. It demands
more intense stimulus, and hopes for it in spectacles, where
different arts strive in new combinations to affect all the senses
at once. Poets and artists strain every nerve incessantly to
satisfy this craving. A painter, who for that matter is less
occupied with new impressions than with old puffs, paints
a picture indifferently well of the dying Mozart working at his
Requiem, and exhibits it of an evening in a darkened room,
while a dazzling ray of skilfully directed electric light falls on
the painting, and an invisible orchestra softly plays the Requiem.
A musician, goes one step further. Developing to the utmost a
Bayreuth usage, he arranges a concert in a totally darkened
hall, and thus delights those of the audience who find oppor
tunity, by happily chosen juxtapositions, to augment their
musical sensations by hidden enjoyment of another sort.
Haraucourt, the poet, has his paraphrase of the Gospel,
written in spirited verse, recited on the stage by Sarah
Bernhardt, while, as in the old-fashioned melodrama, soft
music in unending melody accompanies the actress. Even
the nose, hitherto basely ignored by the fine arts, attracts the
pioneers, and is by them invited to take part in aesthetic
delights. A hose is set up in the theatre, by which the spec
tators are sprayed with perfumes. On the stage a poem in
approximately dramatic form is recited. In every division
act, scene, or however the thing is called, a different vowel-
sound is made to preponderate ; during each the theatre is
illuminated with a differently tinted light, the orchestra dis-

FIN-DE-SIECLE 15
courses music in a different key, and the jet gives out a different
perfume. This idea of accompanying verses with odours was
thrown out years ago, half in jest, by Ernest Eckstein. Paris
has carried it out in sacred earnest. The new school fetch the
puppet theatre out of the nursery, and enact pieces for adults
which, with artificial simplicity, pretend to hide or reveal a
profound meaning, and with great talent and ingenuity execute
a magic-lantern of prettily drawn and painted figures moving
across surprisingly luminous backgrounds ; and these living
pictures make visible the process of thought in the mind of
the author who recites his accompanying poem, while a piano
endeavours to illustrate the leading emotion. And to enjoy
such exhibitions as these society crowds into a suburban
circus, the loft of a back tenement, a second-hand costumier's
shop, or a fantastic artist's restaurant, where the performances,
in some room consecrated to beery potations, bring together
the greasy habitue and the dainty aristocratic fledgling.

CHAPTER III.
DIAGNOSIS.
The manifestations described in the preceding chapter must
be patent enough to everyone, be he never so narrow a
Philistine. The Philistine, however, regards them as a passing
fashion and nothing more ; for him the current terms, caprice,
eccentricity, affectation of novelty, imitation, instinct, afford a
sufficient explanation. The purely literary mind, whose merely
aesthetic culture does not enable him to understand the con
nections of things, and to seize their real meaning, deceives
himself and others as to his ignorance by means of sounding
phrases, and loftily talks of a ' restless quest of a new ideal by
the modern spirit,' ' the richer vibrations of the refined nervous
system of the present day,' 'the unknown sensations of an
elect mind.' But the physician, especially if he have devoted
himself to the special study of nervous and mental maladies,
recognises at a glance, in the fin-de-siecle disposition, in the
tendencies of contemporary art and poetry, in the life and
conduct of the men who write mystic, symbolic and ' de
cadent' works, and the attitude taken by their admirers in the
tastes and aesthetic instincts of fashionable society, the conflu
ence of two well-defined conditions of disease, with which he is
quite familiar, viz. degeneration (degeneracy) and hysteria, of
which the minor stages are designated as neurasthenia. These
two conditions of the organism differ from each other, yet have
many features in common, and frequently occur together ; so

16 DEGENERATION
that it is easier to observe them in their composite forms, than
each in isolation.
The conception of degeneracy, which, at this time, obtains
throughout the science of mental disease, was first clearly
grasped and formulated by Morel. In his principal work —
often quoted, but, unfortunately, not sufficiently read* — the
following definition of what he wishes to be understood by
' degeneracy ' is given by this distinguished expert in mental
pathology, who was, for a short time, famous in Germany,
even outside professional circles. t
' The clearest notion we can form of degeneracy is to regard
it as a morbid deviation from an original type. This deviation,
even if, at the outset, it was ever so slight, contained trans
missible elements of such a nature that anyone bearing in him
the germs becomes more and more incapable of fulfilling his'
functions in the world ; and mental progress, already checked
in his own person, finds itself menaced also in his descendants.'
When under any kind of noxious influences an organism
becomes debilitated, its successors will not resemble the
healthy, normal type of the species, with capacities for develop
ment, but will form a new sub-species, which, like all others,
possesses the capacity of transmitting to its offspring, in a
continuously increasing degree, its peculiarities, these being
morbid deviations from the normal form — gaPs in development,
malformations and infirmities. That which distinguishes
degeneracy from the formation of new species (phylogeny) is,
that the morbid variation does not continuously subsist and
propagate itself, like one that is healthy, but, fortunately, is
soon rendered sterile, and after a few generations often dies
out before it reaches the lowest grade of organic degrada
tion. J
Degeneracy betrays itself among men in certain physical
* Traite des Dtgdnerescences physiques, intellectueUes et morales de l ' Espice
humaine et des Causes qui produisent ces Varidtes matadives. Par le Dr.
B. A. Morel. Paris, 1857, p. 5.
f At the instigation of his mistress Ebergenyi, Count Chorinsky had
poisoned his wife, previously an actress. The murderer was an epileptic,
and a 'degenerate,' in the Morelian sense. His family summoned Morel
from Normandy to Munich, for the purpose of proving to the jury, before
whom the case (1868) was tried, that the accused was irresponsible. The
latter was singularly indignant at this; and the Attorney-General also con
tradicted, in the most emphatic manner, the evidence of the French alienist,
and supported himself by the approbation of the most prominent alienists
in Munich. Chorinsky was pronounced guilty. Nevertheless, only a short
time after his conviction, insanity developed itself in him, and a few months
later he died, in the deepest mental darkness, thus justifying all the previous
assertions of the French physician, who had, in the German tongue, demon
strated to a German jury the incompetence of his professional confreres in
Munich. % Morel, op. cit., p. 683.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 17
characteristics, which are denominated ' stigmata,' or brand-
marks — an unfortunate term derived from a false idea, as if
degeneracy were necessarily the consequence of a fault, and
the indication of it a punishment. Such stigmata consist
of deformities, multiple and stunted growths in the first line
of asymmetry, the unequal development of the two halves
of the face and cranium ; then imperfection in the develop
ment of the external ear, which is conspicuous for its enormous
size, or protrudes from the head, like a handle, and the lobe
of which is either lacking or adhering to the head, and the
helix of which is not involuted ; further, squint-eyes, hare
lips, irregularities in the form and position of the teeth ; pointed
or flat palates, webbed or supernumerary fingers (syn- and
poly-dactylia), etc. In the book from which I have quoted,
Morel gives a list of the anatomical phenomena of degeneracy,
which later observers have largely extended. In particular,
Lombroso* has conspicuously broadened our knowledge of
stigmata, but he apportions them merely to his ' born criminals '
— a limitation which from the very scientific standpoint of
Lombroso himself cannot be justified, his 'born criminals'
being nothing but a subdivision of degenerates. Feret ex
presses this very emphatically when he says, ' Vice, crime and
madness are only distinguished from each other by social
prejudices.' There might be a sure means of proving that the applica
tion of the term ' degenerates ' to the originators of all the
fin-de-siecle movements in art and literature is not arbitrary,
that it is no baseless conceit, but a fact ; and that would be a
careful physical examination of the persons concerned, and an
inquiry into their pedigree. In almost all cases, relatives
would be met with who were undoubtedly degenerate, and
one or more stigmata discovered which would indisputably
establish the diagnosis of ' Degeneration.' Of course, from
human consideration, the result of such an inquiry could often
not be made public ; and he alone would be convinced who
should be able to undertake it himself.
Science, however, has found, together with these physical
stigmata, others of a mental order, which betoken degeneracy
quite as clearly as the former ; and they allow of an easy
demonstration from all the vital manifestations, and, in par
ticular, from all the works of degenerates, so that it is not
necessary to measure the cranium of an author, or to see the
lobe of a painter's ear, in order to recognise the fact that he
belongs to the class of degenerates.
* L' Uomo delinquente in rapporto all' Antropologia, Giurisprudenza e alle
Discipline carcerarie. 3a edizione. Torino, 1884, p. 147 et seq. See also
Dr. Ch. FeYe, ' La Famille nevropathique.' Paris, 1894, pp. 176-212.
+ ' La Famille nevropathique,' Archives de Nevrologie, 1884, Nos. 19 et 20.
2

18 DEGENERATION
Quite a number of different designations have been found
for these persons. Maudsley and Ball call them ' Borderland
dwellers ' — that is to say, dwellers on the borderland between
reason and pronounced madness. Magnan gives to them the
name of 'higher degenerates' (degeneres superieurs), and Lom
broso speaks of ' mattoids ' (from matto, the Italian for insane),
and ' graphomaniacs,' under which he classifies those semi-
insane persons who feel a strong impulse to write. In spite,
however, of this variety of nomenclature, it is a question
simply of one single species of individuals, who betray their
fellowship by the similarity of their mental physiognomy.
In the mental development of degenerates, we meet with the
same irregularity that we have observed in their physical
growth. The asymmetry of face and cranium finds, as it were,
its counterpart in their mental faculties. Some of the latter
are completely stunted, others morbidly exaggerated. That
which nearly all degenerates lack is the sense of morality and
of right and wrong. For them there exists no law, no decency,
no modesty. In order to satisfy any momentary impulse, or
inclination, or caprice, they commit crimes and trespasses
with the greatest calmness and self-complacency, and do not
comprehend that other persons take offence thereat. When
this phenomenon is present in a high degree, we speak of
' moral insanity ' with Maudsley ;* there are, nevertheless, lower
stages in which the degenerate does not, perhaps, himself
commit any act which will bring him into conflict with the
criminal code, but at least asserts the theoretical legitimacy
of crime ; seeks, with philosophically sounding fustian, to
prove that ' good ' and ' evil,' virtue and vice, are arbitrary
distinctions ; goes into raptures over evildoers and their deeds ;
professes to discover beauties in the lowest and most repulsive
things ; and tries to awaken interest in, and so-called ' com
prehension ' of, every bestiality. The two psychological roots
of moral insanity, in all its degrees of development, are, firstly,
unbounded egoism, t and, secondly, impulsiveness} — i.e., in-
* See, on this Subject, in particular, Krafft Ebing, Die Lehre vom
moralischen Wahnsinn, 1871 ; H. Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental
Disease, International Scientific Series; and Ch. Fed, Ddgentrescence et
Criininaliti, Paris, 1888.
t J- Roubinovitch, HysUrie male et Ddgdnirescence ; Paris, 1890, p. 62 :
' The society which surrounds him (the degenerate) alwajs remains strange
to him. He knows nothing, and fakes interest in n"thing but himself.'
Legrain, Du Dttire chez les DdgdrUrisj Paris, 1886, p. 10 : 'The patient is
... tbe plaything of his passions ; he is carried away by his impulses, and
has only one care — to satisfy his appetites.' P. 27 : ' They are egoistical
arrogant, conceited, self-infatuated,' etc.
% Henry Colin, Essai sur t'Etat mental des HysUriques; Paris, 1 890, p. 59 :
'Two great facts control the being of the hereditary degenerate : obsession
[the tyrannical domination of one thought from which a man cannot free

FIN-DE-SIECLE 19
ability to resist a sudden impulse to any deed; and these
characteristics also constitute the chief intellectual stigmata of
degenerates. In the following sections of this work, I shall
find occasion to show on what organic grounds, and in con
sequence of what peculiarities of their brain and nervous
system, degenerates are necessarily egoistical and impulsive.
In these introductory remarks I would wish only to point out
the stigma itself.
Another mental stigma of degenerates is their emotionalism.
Morel* has even wished to make this peculiarity their chief
characteristic — erroneously, it seems to me, for it is present
in the same degree among hysterics, and, indeed, is to be found
in perfectly healthy persons, who, from any transient cause,
such as illness, exhaustion, or any mental shock, have been
temporarily weakened. Nevertheless it is a phenomenon rarely
absent in a degenerate. He laughs until he sheds tears, or
weeps copiously without adequate occasion ; a commonplace
line of poetry or of prose sends a shudder down his back ; he
falls into raptures before indifferent pictures or statues ; and
music especially,f even the most insipid and least com
mendable, arouses in him the most vehement emotions.
He is quite proud of being so vibrant a musical instrument,
and boasts that where the Philistine remains completely cold,
he feels his inner self confounded, the depths of his being
broken up, and the bliss of the Beautiful possessing him to the
tips of his fingers. His excitability appears to him a mark of
superiority ; he believes himself to be possessed by a peculiar
insight lacking in other mortals, and he is fain to despise the
vulgar herd for the dulness and narrowness of their minds.
The unhappy creature does not suspect that he is conceited
about a disease and boasting of a derangement of the mind ;
and certain silly critics, when, through fear of being pronounced
deficient in comprehension, they make desperate efforts to
share the emotions of a degenerate in regard to some insipid
or ridiculous production, or when they praise in exaggerated
expressions the beauties which the degenerate asserts he finds
therein, are unconsciously simulating one of the stigmata of
semi-insanity. Besides moral insanity and emotionalism, there is to be
observed in the degenerate a condition of mental weakness and
despondency, which, according to the circumstances of his life,
assumes the form of pessimism, a vague fear of all men, and of
himself; Westphal has created for this the good term 'Zwangs-Vorstellung,'
i.e., coercive idea] and impulsion — both irresistible.'
* Morel, ' Du Delire dmotif,' Archives g4nt?rales, 6 seVie, vol. vii., pp. 385
and 530. See also Roubinovitch, op. cit., p. 53.
•j* J. Roubinovitch, op. cit., p. 68 : ' Music excites him keenly

2o DEGENERATION
the entire phenomenon of the universe, or self-abhorrence.
' These patients,' says Morel,* ' feel perpetually compelled . . .
to commiserate themselves, to sob, to repeat with the most
desperate monotony the same questions and words. They
have delirious presentations of ruin and damnation^ and all
sorts of imaginary fears.' ' Ennui never quits me,' said a
patient of this kind, whose case Roubinovitch t describes,
'ennui of myself.' 'Among moral stigmata,' says the same
author, J 'there are also to be specified those undefinable
apprehensions manifested by degenerates when they see, smell,
or touch any object.' And he further§ calls to notice 'their
unconscious fear of everything and everyone.' In this picture
of the sufferer from melancholia ; downcast, sombre, despairing
of himself and the world, tortured by fear of the Unknown,
menaced by undefined but dreadful dangers, we recognise in
every detail the man of the Dusk of the Nations and the
fin-de-siecle frame of mind, described in the first chapter.
With this characteristic dejectedness of the degenerate,
there is combined, as a rule, a disinclination to action of any
kind, attaining possibly to abhorrence of activity and power-
lessness to will (aboulia). Now, it is a peculiarity of the
human mind, known to every psychologist, that, inasmuch
as the law of causality governs a man's whole thought, he im
putes a rational basis to all his own decisions. This was
prettily expressed by Spinoza when he said : ' If a stone flung
by a human hand could think, it would certainly imagine that
it flew because it wished to fly.' Many mental conditions and
operations of which we become conscious are the result of
causes which do not reach our consciousness. In this case we
fabricate causes a posteriori for them, satisfying our mental
need of distinct causality, and we have no trouble in persuad
ing ourselves that we have now truly explained them. The
degenerate who shuns action, and is without will-power, has no
suspicion that his incapacity for action is a consequence of his
inherited deficiency of brain. He deceives himself into believing
that he despises action from free determination, and takes
pleasure in inactivity ; and, in order to justify himself in his
own eyes, he constructs a philosophy of renunciation and of
contempt for the world and men, asserts that he has convinced
himself of the excellence of Quietism, calls himself with con
summate self-consciousness a Buddhist, and praises Nirvana
in poetically eloquent phrases as the highest and worthiest
ideal of the human mind. The degenerate and insane are
the predestined disciples of Schopenhauer and Hartmann,
* Morel, 'Du De*lire panophobique des Alie*ne*s gemisseurs,' Annates
mMico-psychologiques, 1871.
f Roubinovitch, op. cit., p. 28. % Ibid-i P- 37- § Ibid., p. 66.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 21
and need only to acquire a knowledge of Buddhism to become
converts to it.
With the incapacity for action there is connected the pre
dilection for inane reverie. The degenerate is not in a con
dition to fix his attention long, or indeed at all, on any subject,
and is equally incapable of correctly grasping, ordering, or
elaborating into ideas and judgments the impressions of the
external world conveyed to his distracted consciousness by his
defectively operating senses. It is easier and more convenient
for him to allow his brain-centres to produce semi-lucid,
nebulously blurred ideas and inchoate embryonic thoughts,
and to surrender himself to the perpetual obfuscation of a
boundless, aimless, and shoreless stream of fugitive ideas;
and he rarely rouses himself to the painful attempt to check or
counteract the capricious, and, as a rule, purely mechanical
associations of ideas and succession of images, and bring under
discipline the disorderly tumult of his fluid presentations. On
the contrary, he rejoices in his faculty of imagination, which he
contrasts with the insipidity of the Philistine, and devotes him
self with predilection to all sorts of unlicensed pursuits per
mitted by the unshackled vagabondage of his mind ; while he
cannot endure well-ordered civil occupations, requiring atten
tion and constant heed to reality. He calls this ' having an
idealist temperament,' ascribes to himself irresistible aesthetic
propinquities, and proudly styles himself an artist.*
We will briefly mention some peculiarities frequently mani
fested by a degenerate. He is tormented by doubts, seeks for
the basis of all phenomena, especially those whose first causes
are completely inaccessible to us, and is unhappy when his
inquiries and ruminations lead, as is natural, to no result.!
He is ever supplying new recruits to the army of system-
inventing metaphysicians, profound expositors of the riddle of
the universe, seekers for the philosopher's stone, the squaring
of the circle and perpetual motion. J These last three sub
jects have such a special attraction for him, that the Patent
Office at Washington is forced to keep on hand printed replies
to the numberless memorials in which patents are constantly
* Charcot, ' Lecons du Mardi a la Salpe'triere,' Policlinique, Paris, 1890,
2e partie, p. 392 : ' This person [the invalid mentioned] is a performer
at fairs ; he calls himself " artist." The truth is that his art consists in
personating a " wild man " in fair-booths.'
t Legrain, op. cit, p. 73 : ' The patients are perpetually tormented by a
multitude of questions which invade their minds, and to which they can give
no answer ; inexpressible moral sufferings result from this incapacity. Doubt
envelops every possible subject : — metaphysics, theology, etc.'
X Magnan, ' Considerations sur la Folie des He're'ditaires ou Degeneres,'
Progris mddical, 1886, p. mo (in the report of a medical case) : ' He also
thought of seeking for the philosopher's stone, and of making gold.'

22 DEGENERATION
demanded for the solution of these chimerical problems. In
view of Lombroso's researches,* it can scarcely be doubted
that the writings and acts of revolutionists and anarchists are
also attributable to degeneracy. The degenerate is incapable
of adapting himself to existing circumstances. This incapacity,
indeed, is an indication of morbid variation in every species,
and probably a primary cause of their sudden extinction. He
therefore rebels against conditions and views of things which
he necessarily feels to be painful, chiefly because they impose
upon him the duty of self-control, of which he is incapable on
account of his organic weakness of will. Thus he becomes an
improver of the world, and devises plans for making mankind
happy, which, without exception, are conspicuous quite as
much by their fervent philanthropy, and often pathetic sincerity,
as by their absurdity and monstrous ignorance of all real
relations. Finally, a cardinal mark of degeneration which I have re
served to the last, is mysticism. Colin says :-f- ' Of all the
delirious manifestations peculiar to the hereditarily-afflicted,
none indicates the condition more clearly, we think, than
mystical delirium, or, when the malady has not reached this
point, the being constantly occupied with mystical and religious
questions, an exaggerated piety, etc' I will not here multiply
evidence and quotations. In the following books, where the
art and poetry of the times are treated of, I shall find occasion
to show the reader that no difference exists between these
tendencies and the religious manias observed in nearly all
degenerates and sufferers from hereditary mental taint.
I have enumerated the most important features characterizing
the mental condition of the degenerate. The reader can now
judge for himself whether or not the diagnosis ' degeneration '
is applicable to the originators of the new aesthetic tendencies.
It must not for that matter be supposed that degeneration is
synonymous with absence of talent. Nearly all the inquirers
who have had degenerates under their observation expressly
establish the contrary. ' The degenerate,' says Legrain,J ' may
be a genius. A badly balanced mind is susceptible of the
highest conceptions, while, on the other hand, one meets in
the same mind with traits of meanness and pettiness all the
more striking from the fact that they co-exist with the most
brilliant qualities.' We shall find this reservation in all authors

Lombroso, La Physionomie des Anarchistes,' Nouvelle Revue, May 15,
1891, P- 227 : 'They [the anarchists] frequently have those characteristics
ot degeneracy which are common to criminals and lunatics, for they are
anomalies, and bear hereditary taints.' See also the same author's Pazzi ed
Anomah. Turin, 1884.
t Colin, op. cit, p. 154. J Legrain, op. cit, p. 11.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 23
who have contributed to the natural history of the degenerate.
' As regards their intellect, they can,' says Roubinovitch,*
' attain to a high degree of development, but from a moral point
of view their existence is completely deranged. ... A degenerate
will employ his brilliant faculties quite as well in the service of
some grand object as in the satisfaction of the basest pro
pensities.' Lombrosof has cited a large number of undoubted
geniuses who were equally undoubted mattoids, graphomaniacs,
or pronounced lunatics ; and the utterance of a French savant,
Guerinsen, ' Genius is a disease of the nerves,' has become a
' winged word.' This expression was imprudent, for it gave
ignorant babblers a pretext, and apparently a right, to talk of
exaggeration, and to contemn experts in nervous and mental
diseases, because they professedly saw a lunatic in everyone
who ventured to be something more than the most ordinary,
characterless, average being. Science does not assert that
every genius is a lunatic ; there are some geniuses of super
abundant power whose high privilege consists in the possession
of one or other extraordinarily developed faculty, without the
rest of their faculties falling short of the average standard.
Just as little, naturally, is every lunatic a genius ; most of
them, even if we disregard idiots of different degrees, are much
rather pitiably stupid and incapable ; but in many, nay, in
abundant cases, the ' higher degenerate ' of Magnan, just as
he occasionally exhibits gigantic bodily stature or the dispro
portionate growth of particular parts, has some mental gift
exceptionally developed at the cost, it is true, of the remaining
faculties, which are wholly or partially atrophied. J It is this
which enables the well-informed to distinguish at the first
glance between the sane genius, and the highly, or even the
most highly, gifted degenerate. Take from the former the
special capacity through which he becomes a genius, and there
still remains a capable, often conspicuously intelligent, clever,
moral, and judicious man, who will hold his ground with
propriety in our social mechanism. Let the same be tried in
the case of a degenerate, and there remains only a criminal
or madman, for whom healthy humanity can find no use. If
* Roubinovitch, op. cit., p. 33.
¦f* Lombroso, Genie und lrrsinn; German translation by A. Courth.
Reclam's Universal Bibliothek, Bde. 2313-16. See also in particular, J. F.
Nisbet, The Insanity of Genius. London, 1891.
% Falret, Annates mddico-psychologiques, 1867, p. 76 : 'From their child
hood they usually display a very unequal development of their mental
faculties, which, weak in their entirety, are remarkable for certain special
aptitudes ; they have shown an extraordinary gift for drawing, arithmetic,
music, sculpture, or mechanics . . . and, together with those specially
developed aptitudes, obtaining for them the fame of " infant phenomena,"
they for the most part give evidence of very great deficiencies in their
intelligence, and of a radical debility in the remaining faculties.'

24 DEGENERATION
Goethe had never written a line of verse, he would, all the
same, have still remained a man of the world, of good principles,
a fine art connoisseur, a judicious collector, a keen observer of
nature. Let us, on the contrary, imagine a Schopenhauer who
had written no astounding books, and we should have before
us only a repulsive lusus natures, whose morals would necessarily
exclude him from all respectable society, and whose fixed idea
that he was a victim of persecution would point him out as a
subject for a madhouse. The lack of harmony, the absence
of balance, the singular incapacity of usefully applying, or deriv
ing satisfaction from, their own special faculty among highly-
gifted degenerates, strikes every healthy censor who does not
allow himself to be prejudiced by the noisy admiration of
critics, themselves degenerates : and will always prevent his
mistaking the mattoid for the same exceptional man who opens
out new paths for humanity and leads it to higher develop
ments. I do not share Lombroso's opinion* that highly-gifted
degenerates are an active force in the progress of mankind.
They corrupt and delude ; they do, alas ! frequently exercise a
deep influence, but this is always a baneful one. It may not
be at once remarked, but it will reveal itself subsequently. If
cotemporaries do not recognise it, the historian of morals
will point it out a posteriori. They, likewise, are leading men
along the paths they themselves have found to new goals ; but
these goals are abysses or waste places. They are guides to
swamps like will-o'-the-wisps, or to ruin like the ratcatcher
of Hammelin. Observers lay stress on their unnatural
sterility. ' They are,' says Tarabaud.t ' cranks ; wrongheaded,
unbalanced, incapable creatures ; they belong to the class of
whom it may not be said that they have no mind, but whose
mind produces nothing.' 'A common type,' writes Legrain,J
' unites them : — weakness of judgment and unequal develop
ment of mental powers. . . . Their conceptions are never of a
high order. They are incapable of great thoughts and prolific
ideas. This fact forms a peculiar contrast to the frequently
excessive development of their powers of imagination.' ' If they
are painters,' we read in Lombroso, § 'then their predominant
attribute will be the colour-sense ; they will be decorative. If
they are poets, they will be rich in rhyme, brilliant in style,
but barren of thought ; sometimes they will be " decadents."" '
Such are the qualities of the most gifted of those who are
* Nouvelle Revue, July 15, 1891.
t Tarabaud, Des Rapports de la Ddgdndrescence mentale et de VHvstdrie
Pans, 1888, p. 12.
X Legrain, op. cit, pp. 24 and 26.
§ Lombroso, Nouvelles recherches de Psychiatrie et d ' Anthrofiolocrie
critmneite. Paris, 1892, p. 74. s

FIN-DE-SIECLE 25
discovering new paths, and are proclaimed by enthusiastic
followers as the guides to the promised land of the future.
Among them degenerates and mattoids predominate. The
second of the above-mentioned diagnoses, on the contrary,
applies for the most part to the multitude who admire these
individuals and swear by them, who imitate the fashions they
design, and take delight in the extravagances described in the
previous chapter. In their case we have to deal chiefly with
hysteria, or neurasthenia.
For reasons which will be elucidated in the next chapter,
hysteria has hitherto been less studied in Germany than in
France, where, more than elsewhere, it has formed a subject
of earnest inquiry. We owe what we know of it almost
exclusively to French investigators. The copious treatises
of Axenfeld,* Richer,-]- and in particular Gilles de la Tourette,J
adequately comprise our present knowledge of this malady ;
and I shall refer to these works when I enumerate the
symptoms chiefly indicative of hysteria.
Among the hysterical — and it must not be thought that these
are met with exclusively, or even preponderantly, among females.
for they are quite as often, perhaps oftener, found among males§
— among the hysterical, as among the degenerate, the first thing
which strikes us is an extraordinary emotionalism. ' The lead
ing characteristic ofthe hysterical,' says Colin, || 'is the dispro
portionate impressionability of their psychic centres. . . . They
are, above all things, impressionable.' From this primary
peculiarity proceeds a second quite as remarkable and im
portant — the exceeding ease with which they can be made to
yield to suggestion.! The earlier observers always mentioned
the boundless mendacity of the hysterical; growing, indeed, quite
indignant at it, and making it the most prominent mark of the
mental condition of such patients. They were mistaken. The
hysterical subject does not consciously lie. He believes in the
truth of his craziest inventions. The morbid mobility of his
mind, the excessive excitability of his imagination, conveys to
his consciousness all sorts of queer and senseless ideas. He
suggests to himself that these ideas are founded on true per
ceptions, and believes in the truth of his foolish inventions until
* Axenfeld, Des Ndvroses. 2 vols., 2e Edition, revue et complete par le
Dr. Huchard, Paris, 1879.
T Paul Richer, Etudes cliniques sur V Hystdro-dpilepsie ou Grande Hystdrie.
Paris, 1891.
X Gilles de la Tourette, Traitd clinique et thdrapeutique de I'Hystdrie.
Paris, 1 89 1.
§ Paul Michaut, Contribution d I'Ftude des Manifestations de I'Hystdrie
chez V Ho7nme. Paris, 1890.
|| Colin, op. cit, p. 14.
IT Gilles de la Toureite, op. cit., p. 548 et passim.

26 DEGENERATION
a new suggestion — perhaps his own, perhaps that of another
person— has ejected the earlier one. A result of the suscepti
bility of the hysterical subject to suggestion is his irresistible
passion for imitation,* and the eagerness with which he yields
to all the suggestions of writers and artists. f When he sees a
picture, he wants to become like it in attitude and dress ; when
he reads a book, he adopts its views blindly. He takes as a
pattern the heroes of the novels which he has in his hand at
the moment, and infuses himself into the characters moving
before him on the stage.
Added to this emotionalism and susceptibility to sugges
tion is a love of self never met with in a sane person in any
thing like the same degree. The hysterical person's own ' I '
towers up before his inner vision, and so completely fills his
mental horizon that it conceals the whole of the remaining
universe. He cannot endure that others should ignore him.
He desires to be as important to his fellow-men as he is to
himself. ' An incessant need pursues and governs the hysterical
— to busy those about them with themselves.' 1 A means of
satisfying this need is the fabrication of stories by which they
become interesting. Hence come the adventurous occurrences
which often enough occupy the police and the reports of the
daily press. In the busiest thoroughfare the hysterical person is
set upon, robbed, maltreated and wounded, dragged to a distant
place, and left to die. He picks himself up painfully, and
informs the police. He can show the wounds on his body.
He gives all the details. And there is not a single word of
truth in the whole story ; it is all dreamt and imagined. He
has himself inflicted his wounds in order for a short time to
become the centre of public attention. In the lower stages of
hysteria this need of making a sensation assumes more harm
less forms. It displays itself in eccentricities of dress and
behaviour. ' Other hysterical subjects are passionately fond of
glaring colours and extravagant forms ; they wish to attract
attention and make themselves talked about.' §
It is certainly unnecessary to draw the reader's attention in
a special manner to the complete coincidence of this clinical
picture of hysteria with the description of the peculiarities
of the fin-de-siecle public, and to the fact that in the former we
meet with all the features made familiar to us by the con
sideration of contemporary phenomena ; in particular with the
passion for imitating in externals — in dress, attitude, fashion of
the hair and beard — the figures in old and modern pictures,
and the feverish effort, through any sort of singularity, to make
* Colin, op. cit, pp. 15 and 16.
t Gilles de la Tourette, op. cit, p. 493. £ Ibid., p. 303.
§ Legrain, op. cit., p. 39.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 27
themselves talked about. The observation of pronounced cases
of degeneration and hysteria, whose condition makes them
necessary subjects for medical treatment, gives us also the key
to the comprehension of subordinate details in the fashions
of the day. The present rage for collecting, the piling up, in
dwellings, of aimless bric-a-brac, which does not become any
more useful or beautiful by being fondly called bibelots, appear
to us in a completely new light when we know that Magnan
has established the existence of an irresistible desire among
the degenerate to accumulate useless trifles. It is so firmly
imprinted and so peculiar that Magnan declares it to be a
stigma of degeneration, and has invented for it the name ' onio-
mania,' or ' buying craze.' This is not to be confounded with
the desire for buying, which possesses those who are in the first
stage of general paralysis. The purchases of these persons
are due to their delusion as to their own greatness. They lay
in great supplies because they fancy themselves millionaires.
The oniomaniac, on the contrary, neither buys enormous
quantities of one and the same thing, nor is the price a matter
of indifference to him as with the paralytic. He is simply
unable to pass by any lumber without feeling an impulse to
acquire it.
The curious style of certain recent painters — ' impressionists,'
' stipplers,' or 'mosaists,' ' papilloteurs ' or ' quiverers,' 'roaring '
colourists, dyers in gray and faded tints — becomes at once intel
ligible to us if we keep in view the researches of the Charcot
school into the visual derangements in degeneration and
hysteria. The painters who assure us that they are sincere,
and reproduce nature as they see it, speak the truth. The
degenerate artist who suffers from nystagmus, or trembling of the
eyeball, will, in fact, perceive the phenomena of nature trem
bling, restless, devoid of firm outline, and, ifhe is a conscientious
painter, will give us pictures reminding us of the mode practised
by the draughtsmen of the Fliegende Blatter when they repre
sent a wet dog shaking himself vigorously. If his pictures fail
to produce a comic effect, it is only because the attentive
beholder reads in them the desperate effort to reproduce fully
an impression incapable of reproduction by the expedients of
the painter's art as devised by men of normal vision.
There is hardly a hysterical subject whose retina is not partly
insensitive.* As a rule the insensitive parts are connected, and
include the outer half of the retina. In these cases the field of
vision is more or less contracted, and appears to him not as
it does to the normal man — as a circle — but as a picture
bordered by whimsically zigzag lines. Often, however, the
* Dr. Emile Berger, Les Maladies des Yeux dans leurs rapports avec la
Pathologie gdndral. Paris, 1892, p. 129 et seq.

28 DEGENERATION
insensitive parts are not connected, but are scattered in isolated
spots over the entire retina. Then the sufferer will have all
sorts of gaps in his field of vision, producing strange effects,
and if he paints what he sees, he will be inclined to place in
juxtaposition larger or smaller points or spots which are com
pletely or partially dissociated. The insensitiveness need not
be complete, and may exist only in the case of single colours,
or of all. If the sensitiveness is completely lost ('achroma
topsy ') he then sees everything in a uniform gray, but perceives
differences in the degree of lustre. Hence the picture of nature
presents itself to him as a copper-plate or a pencil drawing,
where the effect of the absent colours is replaced by differences
in the intensity of light, by greater or less depth and power of
the white and black portions. Painters who are insensitive
to colour will naturally have a predilection for neutral-toned
painting; and a public suffering from the same malady will
find nothing objectionable in falsely-coloured pictures. But if,
besides the whitewash of a Puvis de Chavannes, obliterating
all colours equally, fanatics are found for the screaming yellow,
blue, and red of a Besnard, this also has a cause, revealed to
us by clinical science. ' Yellow and blue,' Gilles de la Tourette*
teaches us, ' are peripheral colours ' (i.e., they are seen with
the outermost parts of the retina) ; ' they are, therefore, the
last to be perceived ' (if the sensitiveness for the remaining
colours is destroyed). 'These are . . . the very two colours
the sensations of which in hysterical amblyopia [dulness of
vision] endure the longest. In many cases, however, it is the
red, and not the blue, which vanishes last.'
Red has also another peculiarity explanatory of the predilec
tion shown for it by the hysterical. The experiments of Binett
have established that the impressions conveyed to the brain by
the sensory nerves exercise an important influence on the species
and strength of the excitation distributed by the brain to the
motor nerves. Many sense-impressions operate enervatingly
and inhibitively on the movements ; others, on the contrary,
make these more powerful, rapid and active ; they are ' dyna-
mogenous,' or ' force-producing.' As a feeling of pleasure is
always connected with dynamogeny, or the production of force,
every living thing, therefore, instinctively seeks for dynamo-
genous sense-impressions, and avoids enervating and inhibitive
ones. Now, red is especially dynamogenous. ' When,' says
Binet,J in a report of an experiment on a femalehysterical subject
who was paralyzed in one half of her body, ' we place a dynamo-
* Traite clinique et thdrapeutique de I'Hystdrie, p. 339. See also Drs. A.
Marie et J. Bonnet, La Vision chez les Idiots et les Imbeciles. Paris, 1892.
t Alfred Binet, ' Recherches sur les Al Orations de la Conscience chez les
HysteViques,' Revue philosophique, 1889, vol. xxvii.
X Op. cit, p. 1 50.

FIN-DE-SlECLE 29
meter in the anaesthetically insensible right hand of Amelie
Cle  the pressure of the hand amounts to 12 kilogrammes.
If at the same time she is made to look at a red disc, the
number indicating the pressure in kilogrammes is at once
doubled.' Hence it is intelligible that hysterical painters revel
in red, and that hysterical beholders take special pleasure in
pictures operating dynamogenously, and producing feelings of
pleasure. If red is dynamogenous, violet is conversely enervating and
inhibitive* It was not by accident that violet was chosen by
many nations as the exclusive colour for mourning, and by
us also for half-mourning. The sight of this colour has a
depressing effect, and the unpleasant feeling awakened by it
induces dejection in a sorrowfully - disposed mind. This
suggests that painters suffering from hysteria and neurasthenia
will be inclined to cover their pictures uniformly with the
colour most in accordance with their condition of lassitude
and exhaustion. Thus originate the violet pictures of Manet
and his school, which spring from no actually observable aspect
of nature, but from a subjective view due to the condition of
the nerves. When the entire surface of walls in salons and
art exhibitions of the day appears veiled in uniform half-
mourning, this predilection for violet is simply an expression
of the nervous debility of the painter.
There is yet another phenomenon highly characteristic in
some cases of degeneracy, in others of hysteria. This is the
formation of close groups or schools uncompromisingly ex
clusive to outsiders, observable to-day in literature and art.
Healthy artists or authors, in possession of minds in a
condition of well-regulated equilibrium, will never think of
grouping themselves into an association, which may at pleasure
be termed a sect or band ; of devising a catechism, of binding
themselves to definite aesthetic dogmas, and of entering the
lists for these with the fanatical intolerance of Spanish
inquisitors. If any human activity is individualistic, it is that
of the artist. True talent is always personal. In its creations
it reproduces itself, its own views and feelings, and not the
articles of faith learnt from any aesthetic apostle ; it follows its
creative impulses, not a theoretical formula preached by the
founder of a new artistic or literary church ; it constructs its
work in the form organically necessary to it, not in that
proclaimed by a leader as demanded by the fashion of the day.
The mere fact that an artist or author allows himself to be
* Ch. Fdrd, ' Sensation et Mouvement,' Revue philosophique, 1886. See
also the same author's Sensation et Mouvement, Paris, 1887 ; Ddgdndrescence
et criminalitd, Paris, 1888 ; and ' L'Eiergie et la Vitesse des Mouvements
volontaires,' Revue philosophique, 1889.

30 DEGENERATION
sworn in to the party cry of any 'ism,' that he perambulates
with jubilations behind a banner and Turkish music, is complete
evidence of his lack of individuality — that is, of talent. If the
mental movements of a period — even those which are healthy
and prolific — range themselves, as a rule, under certain main
tendencies, which receive each its distinguishing name, this is
the work of historians of civilization or literature, who subse
quently survey the combined picture of an epoch, and for their
own convenience undertake divisions and classifications, in
order that they may more correctly find their way among the
multifariousness of the phenomena. These are, however,
almost always arbitrary and artificial. Independent minds
(we are not here speaking of mere imitators), united by a good
critic into a group, may, it is true, have a certain resemblance
to each other, but, as a rule, this resemblance will be the
consequence, not of actual internal affinity, but of external
influences. No one is able completely to withdraw himself
from the influences of his time, and under the impression of
events which affect all contemporaries alike, as well as of the
scientific views prevailing at a given time, certain features
develop themselves in all the works of an epoch, which
stamp them as of the same date. But the same men who
subsequently appear so naturally in each other's company, in
historical works, that they seem to form a family, went when
they lived their separate ways far asunder, little suspecting
that at one time they would be united under one common
designation. Quite otherwise it is when authors or artists
consciously and intentionally meet together and found an
aesthetic school, as a joint-stock bank is founded, with a title
for which, if possible, the protection of the law is claimed,
with by-laws, joint capital, etc. This may be ordinary specu
lation, but as a rule it is disease. The predilection for form
ing societies met with among all the degenerate and hysterical
may assume different forms. Criminals unite in bands, as
Lombroso expressly establishes.* Among pronounced lunatics
it is the folie a deux, in which a deranged person completely
forces his insane ideas on a companion ; among the hysterical
it assumes the form of close friendships, causing Charcot to
repeat at every opportunity : ' Persons of highly-strung nerves
attract each other ;'f and finally authors found schools.
The common organic basis of these different forms of one
and the same phenomenon — of the folie a deux, the associa
tion of neuropaths, the founding of aesthetic schools, the
banding of criminals— is, with the active part, viz., those who
lead and inspire, the predominance of obsessions : with the
* Lombroso, L'Uomo ddlinquente, p. 524.
t ' Les Nerveux se recherchent,' Charcot, Lecons du Mardi, passim.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 31
associates, the disciples, the submissive part, weakness of will
and morbid susceptibility to suggestion* The possessor of
an obsession is an incomparable apostle. There is no rational
conviction arrived at by sound labour of intellect, which so
completely takes possession of the mind, subjugates so
tyrannically its entire activity, and so irresistibly impels it to
words and deeds, as delirium. Every proof of the senselesness
of his ideas rebounds from the deliriously insane or half-crazy
person. No contradiction, no ridicule, no contempt, affects
him ; the opinion of the majority is to him a matter of in
difference ; facts which do not please him he does not notice,
or so interprets that they seem to support his delirium ;
obstacles do not discourage him, because even his instinct of
self-preservation is unable to cope with the power of his
delirium, and for the same reason he is often enough ready,
without further ado, to suffer martyrdom. Weak-minded or
mentally-unbalanced persons, coming into contact with a man
possessed ' by delirium, are at once conquered by the strength
of his diseased ideas, and are converted to them. By separating
them from the source of inspiration, it is often possible to
cure them of their transmitted delirium, but frequently their
acquired derangement outlasts this separation.
This is the natural history of the aesthetic schools. Under the
influence of an obsession, a degenerate mind promulgates some
doctrine or other — realism, pornography, mysticism, symbolism,
diabolism. He does this with vehement penetrating eloquence,
with eagerness and fiery heedlessness. Other degenerate, hys
terical, neurasthenical minds flock around him, receive from his
lips the new doctrine, and live thenceforth only to propagate it.
In this case all the participants are sincere — the founder as
well as the disciples. They act as, in consequence of the dis
eased constitution of their brain and nervous system, they are
compelled to act. The picture, however, which from a clinical
standpoint is perfectly clear, gets dimmed if the apostle of a
craze and his followers succeed in attracting to themselves the
attention of wider circles. He then receives a concourse of
unbelievers, who are very well able to recognise the insanity of
the new doctrine, but who nevertheless accept it, because they
hope, as associates of the new sect, to acquire fame and money.
In every civilized nation which has a developed art and litera
ture there are numerous intellectual eunuchs, incapable of
producing with their own powers a living mental work, but
quite able to imitate the process of production. These cripples
* Legrain, op. cit., p. 173 : 'The true explanation of the occurrence of
folie d deux must be sought for, on the one hand, in the predisposition to
insanity, and, on the other hand, in the accompanying weakness of mind.'
See also Regis, La Folie d Deux. Paris, 1880.

32 DEGENERATION
form, unfortunately, the majority of professional authors and
artists, and their many noxious followers often enough stifle
true and original talent. Now it is these who hasten to act as
camp-followers for every new tendency which seems to come
into fashion. They are naturally the most modern of moderns,
for no precept of individuality, no artistic knowledge, hinders
them from bunglingly imitating the newest model with all
the assiduity of an artisan. Clever in discerning externals,
unscrupulous copyists and plagiarists, they crowd round every
original phenomenon, be it healthy or unhealthy, and without
loss of time set about disseminating counterfeit copies of it.
To-day they are symbolists, as yesterday they were realists or
pornographists. If they can promise themselves fame and a
good sale, they write of mysteries with the same fluency as if
they were spinning romances of knights and robbers, tales of
adventure, Roman tragedies, and village stories at a time when
newspaper critics and the public seemed to demand these
things in preference to others. Now these practitioners, who,
let it be again asserted, constitute the great majority of the
mental workers of the fashionable sects in art and literature,
and therefore of the associates of these sects also, are intellec
tually quite sane, even if they stand at a very low level of
development, and were anyone to examine them, he might
easily doubt the accuracy of the diagnosis* ' Degeneration ' as
regards the confessors of the new doctrines. Hence some
caution must be exercised in the inquiry, and the sincere
originators be always distinguished from the aping intriguers,
— the founder of the religion and his apostles from the rabble
to whom the Sermon on the Mount is of less concern than the
miraculous draught of fishes and the multiplication of loaves.
It has now been shown how schools originate. They arise
from the degeneration of their founders and of the imitators
they have convinced. That they come into fashion, and for a
short time attain a noisy success, is due to the peculiarities of
the recipient public, namely, to hysteria. We have seen that
hypersusceptibility to suggestion is the distinguishing charac
teristic of hysteria. The same power of obsession with which
the degenerate in mind wins imitators, gathers round him
adherents. When a hysterical person is loudly and unceasingly
assured that a work is beautiful, deep, pregnant with the future,
he believes in it. He believes in everything suggested to him
with sufficient impressiveness. When the little cow-girl, Ber-
nadette, saw the vision of the Holy Virgin in the grotto of
Lourdes, the women devotees and hysterical males of the sur
rounding country who flocked thither did not merely believe
that the hallucinant maiden had herself seen the vision, but all
of them saw the Holy Virgin with their own eyes. M. E. de

FIN-DE-SIECLE 33
Goncourt* relates that in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian
War, a multitude of men, numbering tens of thousands, in and
before the Bourse in Paris, were convinced that they had them
selves seen — indeed, a part of them had read — a telegram
announcing French victories fastened to a pillar inside the
Exchange, and at which people were pointing with their finger ;
but as a matter of fact it never existed. It would be possible
to cite examples by the dozen, of illusions ofthe senses suggested
to excited crowds. Thus the hysterical allow themselves without
more ado to be convinced of the magnificence of a work, and
even find in it beauties of the highest kind, unthought of by the
authors themselves and the appointed trumpeters of their fame.
If the sect is so completely established that, in addition to the
founders, the priests of the temple, the paid sacristans and
choir-boys, it has a congregation, processions, and far-sounding
bells, it then attaches to itself other converts besides the hys
terical who have accepted the new belief by way of suggestion.
Young persons without judgment, still seeking their way, go
whither they see the multitude streaming, and unhesitatingly
follow the procession, because they believe it to be marching
on the right road. Superficial persons, fearing nothing so
much as to be thought behind the times, attach themselves to
the procession, shouting ' Hurrah !' and ' All hail !' so as to con
vince themselves that they also are really dancing along before
the latest conqueror and newest celebrity. Decrepit gray-
beards, filled with a ridiculous dread of betraying their real age,
eagerly visit the new temple and mingle their quavering voices
in the song of the devout, because they hope to be thought
young when seen in an assembly in which young persons pre
dominate. Thus a regular concourse is established about a victim of
degeneration. The fashionable coxcomb, the aesthetic ' gigerl/f
peeps over the shoulder of the hysterical whose admiration has
been suggested to him ; the intriguer marches at the heel of the
dotard, simulating youth ; and between all these comes pushing
the inquisitive young street-loafer, who must always be in every
place where ' something is going on.' And this crowd, because
it is driven by disease, self-interest and vanity, makes very
much more noise and bustle than a far larger number of sane
men, who, without self-seeking after-thought, take quiet enjoy
ment in works of sane talent, and do not feel obliged to shout out
their appreciation in the streets, and to threaten with death
harmless passers-by who do not join in their jubilations.
* journal des Goncourt. Derniere serie, premier volume, 1870-71. Paris,
1890, p. 17.
f Viennese for ' fop.'— Translator.
3

34 DEGENERATION CHAPTER IV.
ETIOLOGY.
We have recognised the effect of diseases in these fin-de-siecle
literary and artistic tendencies and fashions, as well as in the
susceptibility of the public with regard to them, and we have
succeeded in maintaining that these diseases are degeneracy
and hysteria. We have now to inquire how these maladies of
the day have originated, and why they appear with such extra
ordinary frequency at the present time.
Morel,* the great investigator of degeneracy, traces this
chiefly to poisoning. A race which is regularly addicted, even
without excess, to narcotics and stimulants in any form (such
as fermented alcoholic drinks, tobacco, opium, hashish, arsenic),
which partakes of tainted foods (bread made with bad corn),
which absorbs organic poisons (marsh fever, syphilis, tubercu
losis, goitre), begets degenerate descendants who, if they remain
exposed to the same influences, rapidly descend to the lowest
degrees of degeneracy, to idiocy, to dwarfishness, etc. That
the poisoning of civilized peoples continues and increases at a
very rapid rate is widely attested by statistics.*]" The consump
tion of tobacco has risen in France from o*8 kilogramme per
head in 1841 to 1*9 kilogrammes in 1890. The corresponding
figures for England are 13 and 26 ounces; J for Germany, o*8
and i"5 kilogrammes. The consumption of,alcohol§ during
* Traitd des Ddgdndrescences, passim.
¦f* Personally communicated oy the distinguished statistician, Herr Josef
K6ro<i, Head ofthe Bureau of Statistics at Budapest.
X Speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Goschen, in the House
of Commons, April 11, 1892.
§ J. Vavasseur in the Economiste fran^ais of 1890. See also Bulletin de
Statistique for 1891. The figures are uncertain, for they have been given
differently by every statistician whom I have consulted. The fact of the
increase in the consumption of alcohol alone stands out with certainty in all
the publications consulted. Besides spirits, fermented drinks are consumed
per head of the population, according to J. Korosi :
Great Britain. Wine. Beer and Cider.
Gall. Gall.
1830— 1850  0-2  26
1880— 1888  0*4  27
France.
1840 — 1842  23  3
1870— 1872  25  6

FIN-DE-SlECLE 35
the same period has risen in Germany (1844) from 5*45 quarts
to (1867) 6*86 quarts ; in England from 2'oi litres to 2*64
litres ; in France from 1*33 to 4 litres. The increase in the
consumption of opium and hashish is still greater, but we need
not concern ourselves about that, since the chief sufferers from
them are Eastern peoples, who play no part in the intellectual
development of the white races. To these noxious influences,
however, one more may be added, which Morel has not known,
or has not taken into consideration — residence in large towns.
The inhabitant of a large town, even the richest, who is sur
rounded by the greatest luxury, is continually exposed to un
favourable influences which diminish his vital powers far more
than what is inevitable. He breathes an atmosphere charged
with organic detritus ; he eats stale, contaminated, adulterated
food ; he feels himself in a state of constant nervous excitement,
and one can compare him without exaggeration to the inhabi
tant of a marshy district. The effect of a large town on the
human organism offers the closest analogy to that of the
Maremma, and its population falls victim to the same fatality
of degeneracy and destruction as the victims of malaria. The
death-rate in a large town is more than a quarter greater than
the average for the entire population ; it is double that of the
open country, though in reality it ought to be less, since in a
large town the most vigorous ages predominate, during which
the mortality is lower than in infancy and old age.* And the
children of large towns who are not carried off at an early age
suffer from the peculiar arrested development which Morel*j* has
ascertained in the population of fever districts. They develop
more or less normally until fourteen or fifteen years of age, are
up to that time alert, sometimes brilliantly endowed, and give
the highest promise ; then suddenly there is a standstill, the
mind loses its facility of comprehension, and the boy who,
only yesterday, was a model scholar, becomes an obtuse,
clumsy dunce, who can only be steered with the greatest
Prussia. Quarts.
1839  1348
1871  1792
German Empire.
Litres.
1872  81-7
1889 — 1890  903
* In France the general mortality was, from 1886 to 1890, 22*21 per 1,000.
But in Paris it rose to 23*4 ; in Marseilles to 34*8 ; in all towns with more
than 100,000 inhabitants to a mean of 28*31 ; in all places with less than
5,000 inhabitants to 2174. (La Mddecine moderne, ytar 1891.)
f Traitd des Ddgdnerescences, pp. 614, 615.

36 DEGENERATION
difficulty through his examinations. With these mental
changes bodily modifications go hand in hand. The growth of
the long bones is extremely slow, or ceases entirely, the legs
remain short, the pelvis retains a feminine form, certain other
organs cease to develop, and the entire being presents a strange
and repulsive mixture of incompleteness and decay.*
Now we know how, in the last generation, the number of
the inhabitants of great towns increased f to an extraordinary
degree. At the present time an incomparably larger portion
of the whole population is subjected to the destructive in
fluences of large towns than was the case fifty years ago ;
hence the number of victims is proportionately more striking,
and continually becomes more remarkable. Parallel with the
growth of large towns is the increase in the number of the
degenerate of all kinds — criminals, lunatics, and the ' higher
degenerates ' of Magnan ; and it is natural that these last
should play an ever more prominent part in endeavouring to
introduce an ever greater element of insanity into art and
literature. The enormous increase of hysteria in our days is partly due
to the same causes as degeneracy, besides which there is one
cause much more general still than the growth of large towns
— a cause which perhaps of itself would not be sufficient to
bring about degeneracy, but which is unquestionably quite
enough to produce hysteria and neurasthenia. This cause is
the fatigue of the present generation. That hysteria is in
reality a consequence of fatigue Fere has conclusively demon
strated by convincing experiments. In a communication to
the Biological Society of Paris, this distinguished investigator
says :% 'I have recently observed a certain number of facts
which have made apparent the analogy existing between
fatigue and the chronic condition of the hysterical. One knows
that among the hysterical [involuntary !] symmetry of move-
* Brouardel, La Semaine mddicale. Paris, 1887, p. 254. In this very
remarkable study by the Parisian Professor, the following passage appears :
'What will these [those remaining stationary in their development] young
Parisians become by-and-by? Incapable of accomplishing a long and
conscientious work, they excel, as a rule, in artistic activities. If they are
painters they are stronger in colour than in drawing. If they are poets, the
flow of their verses assures their success rather than the vigour of the thought.'
t The 26 German towns which to-day have more than 100,000 inhabitants,
numbered altogether, in 1891, 6,000,000, and in 1835 1,400,000. The 31
English towns of this category, in 1891, 10,870,000; in 1841, 4,590,000 ; the
n French towns, in 1891, 4,180,000; in 1836, 1,710,000. It should be
remarked that about a third of these 68 towns had not in 1840 as many
generally as 100,000 inhabitants. To-day, in the large towns in Germany,
France, and England, there reside 21,050,000 individuals, while in 1840 only
4,800,000 were living under these conditions. (Communicated by Heir
Josef Korosi.)
X Fere*, La Semaine mddicale. Paris, 1890, p. 192.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 37
ments frequently shows itself in a very characteristic manner.
I have proved that in normal subjects this same symmetry of
movements is met with under the influence of fatigue. A pheno
menon which shows itself in a very marked way in serious
hysteria is that peculiar excitability which demonstrates that
the energy of the voluntary movements, through peripheral
stimulations or mental presentations, suffers rapid and transitory
modifications co-existing with parallel modifications of sensi
bility, and of the functions of nutrition. This excitability can
be equally manifested during fatigue. . . . Fatigue constitutes
a true temporary experimental hysteria. It establishes a transi
tion between the states which we call normal and the various
states which we designate hysteria. One can change a normal
into a hysterical individual by tiring him. ... All these causes
(which produce hysteria) can, as far as the pathogenic part
they play is concerned, be traced to one simple physiological
process — to fatigue, to depression of vitality.'
Now, to this cause — fatigue — which, according to F6r6,
changes healthy men into hysterical, the whole of civilized
humanity has been exposed for half a century. All its con
ditions of life have, in this period of time, experienced a
revolution unexampled in the history of the world. Humanity
can point to no century in which the inventions which penetrate
so deeply, so tyrannically, into the life of every individual are
crowded so thick as in ours. The discovery of America, the
Reformation, stirred men's minds powerfully, no doubt, and
certainly also destroyed the equilibrium of thousands of brains
which lacked staying power. But they did not change the
material life of man. He got up and laid down, ate and drank,
dressed, amused himself, passed his days and years as he had
been always wont to do. In our times, on the contrary, steam
and electricity have turned the customs of life of every member
of the civilized nations upside down, even of the most obtuse
and narrow-minded citizen, who is completely inaccessible to the
impelling thoughts of the times.
In an exceptionally remarkable lecture by Professor A. W.
von Hofmann, in 1890, before the Congress of German Natural
Science held in Bremen, he gave, in concluding, a short
description of the life of an inhabitant of a town in the year
1822. He shows us a student of science who at that date is
arriving with the coach from Bremen to Leipzig. The journey
has lasted four days and four nights, and the traveller is
naturally stiff and bruised. His friends receive him, and he
wishes to refresh himself a little. But there is yet no Munich
beer in Leipzig. After a short interview with his comrades,
he goes in search of his inn. This is no easy task, for in
the streets an Egyptian darkness reigns, broken only at long

38 ' DEGENERATION
distances by the smoky flame of an oil-lamp. He at last finds
his quarters, and wishes for a light. As matches do not yet
exist, he is reduced to bruising the tips of his fingers with flint
and steel, till he succeeds at last in lighting a tallow candle.
He expects a letter, but it has not come, and he cannot now
receive it till after some days, for the post only runs twice a
week between Frankfort and Leipzig.*
But it is unnecessary to go back to the year 1822, chosen
by Professor Hofmann. Let us stop, for purposes of com
parison, at the year 1840. This year has not been arbitrarily
selected. It is about the date when that generation was born
which has witnessed the irruption of new discoveries in every
relation of life, and thus personally experienced those trans
formations which are the consequences. This generation
reigns and governs to-day ; it sets the tone everywhere, and
its sons and daughters are the youth of Europe and America,
in whom the new aesthetic tendencies gain their fanatical
partisans. Let us now compare how things went on in the
civilized world in 1840 and a half-century later.-f-
In 1840 there were in Europe 3,000 kilometres of railway ; in
1891 there were 218,000 kilometres. The number of travellers
in 1840, in Germany, France and England, amounted to
¦z\ millions ; in 1891 it was 614 millions. In Germany every
inhabitant received, in 1840, 85 letters; in 1888, 200 letters.
In 1840 the post distributed in France 94 millions of letters ;
in England, 277 millions ; in 1881, 595 and 1,299 millions
respectively. The collective postal intercourse between all
countries, without including the internal postage of each
separate country, amounted, in 1840, to 92 millions ; in 1889,
to 2,759 millions. In Germany, in 1840, 305 newspapers were
published ; in 1891, 6,800 ; in France, 776 and 5,182 ; in
England (1846), 551 and 2,255. The German book trade
produced, in 1840, 1,100 new works ; in 1891, 18,700. The
exports and imports of the world had, in 1840, a value of
28, in 1889 of 74, milliards of marks. The ships which, in
1840, entered all the ports of Great Britain contained 9^,
in 1890 74J, millions of tons. The whole British merchant
navy measured, in 1840, 3,200,000 ; in 1890, 9,688,000 tons.
* See, besides the lecture by Hofmann, the excellent book : Eine deutsche
Stadt vor 63 Jahren, Kulturgeschichtliche Skizze, von Dr. Otto Bahr,
2 Auflage. Leipzig, 1891.
t In order not to make the footnotes too unwieldy, I state here that the
following figures are borrowed in part from communications made by Herr
Josef Korosi, in part from a remarkable study by M. Charles Richet :
' Dans Cent Ans,' Revue scientifique, 1891-92 ; and in a small degree from
private publications (such as Annuaire de la Presse, Press Directory, etc.).
For some ofthe figures I have also used, with profit, Mulhall, and the speech
of Herr von Stephan to the Reichstag, February 4, 1892.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 39
Let us now consider how these formidable figures arise.
The 18,000 new publications, the 6,800 newspapers in
Germany, desire to be read, although many of them desire in
vain ; the 2,759 millions of letters must be written ; the larger
commercial transactions, the numerous journeys, the increased
marine intercourse, imply a correspondingly greater activity
in individuals. The humblest village inhabitant has to-day
a wider geographical horizon, more numerous and complex
intellectual interests, than the prime minister of a petty, or
even a second-rate state a century ago. If he do but read
his paper, let it be the most innocent provincial rag, he takes
part, certainly not by active interference and influence, but
by a continuous and receptive curiosity, in the thousand events
which take place in all parts of the globe, and he interests
himself simultaneously in the issue of a revolution in Chili,
in a bush-war in East Africa, a massacre in North China, a
famine in Russia, a street-row in Spain, and an international
exhibition in North America. A cook receives and sends more
letters than a university professor did formerly, and a petty
tradesman travels more *and sees more countries and people
than did the reigning prince of other times.
All these activities, however, even the simplest, involve an
effort of the nervous system and a wearing of tissue. Every
line we read or write, every human face we see, every conver
sation we carry on, every scene we perceive through the
window of the flying express, sets in activity our sensory
nerves and our brain centres. Even the little shocks of rail
way travelling, not perceived by consciousness, the perpetual
noises, and the various sights in the streets of a large town,
our suspense pending the sequel of progressing events, the
constant expectation of the newspaper, of the postman, of
visitors, cost our brains wear and tear. In the last fifty years
the population of Europe has not doubled, whereas the sum of
its labours has increased tenfold, in part even fifty-fold. 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.
This enormous increase in organic expenditure has not, and
cannot have, a corresponding increase of supply. Europeans
now eat a little more and a little better than they did fifty
years ago, but by no means in proportion to the increase of
effort which to-day is required of them. And even if they
had the choicest food in the greatest abundance, it would do
nothing towards helping them, for they would be incapable of
digesting it. Our stomachs cannot keep pace with the brain
and nervous system. The latter demand very much more
than the former are able to perform. And so there follows

40 DEGENERATION
what always happens if great expenses are met by small
incomes; first the savings are consumed, then comes
bankruptcy. Its own new discoveries and progress have taken civilized
humanity by surprise. It has had no time to adapt itself to
its changed conditions of life. We know that our organs
acquire by exercise an ever greater functional capacity, that
they develop by their own activity, and can respond to nearly
every demand made upon them ; but only under one condition
— that this occurs gradually, that time be allowed them. If
they are obliged to fulfil, without transition, a multiple of their
usual task, they soon give out entirely. No time was left to
our fathers. Between one day and the next, as it were, without
preparation, with murderous suddenness, they were obliged to
change the comfortable creeping gait of their former existence
for the stormy stride of modern life, and their heart and lungs
could not bear it. The strongest could keep up, no doubt,
and even now, at the most rapid pace, no longer lose their
breath, but the less vigorous soon fell out right and left, and
' fill to-day the ditches on the road of progress.
To speak without metaphor, statistics indicate in what measure
the sum of work of civilized humanity has increased during the
half-century. It had not quite grown to this increased effort.
It grew fatigued and exhausted, and this fatigue and exhaus
tion showed themselves in the first generation, under the form
of acquired hysteria ; in the second, as hereditary hysteria.
The new aesthetic schools and their success are a form of
this general hysteria ; but they are far from being the only one.
The malady of the period shows itself in yet many other
phenomena which can be measured and counted, and thus
are susceptible of being scientifically established. And these
positive and unambiguous symptoms of exhaustion are well
adapted to enlighten the ignorant, who might believe at first
sight that the specialist acts arbitrarily in tracing back fashion
able tendencies in art and literature to states of fatigue in
civilized humanity.
It has become a commonplace to speak of the constant
increase of crime, madness and suicide. In 1840, in Prussia,
out of 100,000 persons of criminally responsible age, there were
714 convictions ; in 1888, 1,102 (from a letter communicated
by the Prussian bureau of statistics). In 1865, in every 10,000
Europeans there were 63 suicides ; in 1883, 109 ; and since that
time the number has increased considerably. In the last
twenty years a number of new nervous diseases have been
discovered and named* Let it not be believed that they
always existed, and were merely overlooked. If they had been
* See G. Andrd, Les nouvelles maladies nerveuses. Paris, 1892.

FIN-DE-SIECLE 41
met with anywhere they would have been detected, for even
if the theories which prevailed in medicine at various periods
were erroneous, there have always been perspicacious and
attentive physicians who knew how to observe. If, then, the
new nervous diseases were not noticed, it is because they did
not formerly appear. And they are exclusively a consequence
of the present conditions of civilized life. Many affections of
the nervous system already bear a name which implies that
they are a direct consequence of certain influences of modern
civilization. The terms ' railway-spine ' and ' railway-brain,'
which the English and American pathologists have given
to certain states of these organs, show that they recognise
them as due partly to the effects of railway accidents, partly
to the constant vibrations undergone in railway travelling.
Again, the great increase in the consumption of narcotics
and stimulants, which has been shown in the figures above,
has its origin unquestionably in the exhausted systems with
which the age abounds. There is here a disastrous, vicious
circle of reciprocal effects. The drinker (and apparently the
smoker also) begets enfeebled children, hereditarily fatigued
or degenerated, and these drink and smoke in their turn,
because they are fatigued. These crave for a stimulus, for a
momentary, artificial invigoration, or an alleviation of their
painful excitability, and then, when they recognise that this
increases, in the long-run, their exhaustion as well as their
excitability, they cannot, through weakness of will, resist those
habits.* Many observers assert that the present generation ages
much more rapidly than the preceding one. Sir James
Crichton-Browne points out this effect of modern circumstances
on contemporaries in his speech at the opening of the winter
term, 1891, before the medical faculty of the Victoria Uni-
versity.t From 1859 to J863 there died in England, of heart-
disease, 92,181 persons ; from 1884 to 1888, 224,102. Nervous
complaints carried off from 1864 to 1868, 196,000 persons ;
from 1884 to 1888, 260,558. The difference of figures would
have been still more striking if Sir James had chosen a more
remote period for comparison with the present, for in 1865 the
high pressure under which the English worked was already
nearly as great as in 1885. The dead carried off by heart and
nerve diseases are the victims of civilization. The heart and
nervous system first break down under the overstrain. Sir
James in his speech says further on : ' Men and women grow
* Legrain, op. cit., p. 251 : 'Drinkers are "degenerates";" and p. 258 (after
four reports of invalids which serve as a basis to the following summary) :
' Hence, at the base of all forms of alcoholism we find mental degeneracy.'
f Revue scientifique, year 1892 ; vol. xlix., p. 168 et seq.

42 DEGENERATION
old before their time. Old age encroaches upon the period of
vigorous manhood. . . . Deaths due exclusively to old age
are found reported now between the ages of forty-five and fifty-
five. . . .' Mr. Critchett (an eminent oculist) says : ' My own
experience, which extends now over a quarter of a century,
leads me to believe that men and women, in the present day,
seek the aid of spectacles at a less advanced period of life than
their ancestors. . . . Previously men had recourse to spectacles
at the age of fifty. The average age is now forty-five years.'
Dentists assert that teeth decay and fall out at an earlier age
than formerly. Dr. Lieving attests the same respecting the
hair, and assures us that precocious baldness is to be specially
observed ' among persons of nervous temperaments and active
mind, but of weak general health.' Everyone who looks round
the circle of his friends and acquaintances will remark that
the hair begins to turn gray much sooner than in former
days. Most men and women show their first white hairs at
the beginning of the thirties, many of them at a very much
younger age. Formerly white hair was the accompaniment
of the fiftieth year.
All the symptoms enumerated are the consequences of states
of fatigue and exhaustion, and these, again, are the effect of con
temporary civilization, of the vertigo and whirl of our frenzied
life, the vastly increased number of sense impressions and
organic reactions, and therefore of perceptions, judgments, and
motor impulses, which at present are forced into a given unity
of time. To this general cause of contemporary pathological
phenomena, one may be added special to France. By the
frightful loss of blood which the body of the French people
suffered during the twenty years of the Napoleonic wars, by
the violent moral upheavals to which they were subjected in
the great Revolution and during the imperial epic, they found
themselves exceedingly ill-prepared for the impact of the great
discoveries of the century, and sustained by these a more
violent shock than other nations more robust and more capable
of resistance. Upon this nation, nervously strained and pre
destined to morbid derangement, there broke the awful cata
strophe of 1870. It had, with a self-satisfaction which almost
attained to megalomania, believed itself the first nation in the
world; it now saw itself suddenly humiliated and crushed.
All its convictions abruptly crumbled to pieces. Every single
Frenchman suffered reverses of fortune, lost some members of
his family, and felt himself personally robbed of his dearest
conceptions, nay, even of his honour. The whole people fell
into the condition of a man suddenly visited by a crushing blow
of destiny, in his fortune, his position, his family, his reputa
tion, even in his self-respect. Thousands lost their reason. In

FIN-DE-SIECLE 43
Paris a veritable epidemic of mental diseases was observed, for
which a special name was found — la folie obsidionale, ' siege-
madness.' And even those who did not at once succumb to
mental derangement, suffered lasting injury to their nervous
system. This explains why hysteria and neurasthenia are much
more frequent in France, and appear under such a greater
variety of forms, and why they can be studied far more closely
in this country than anywhere else. But it explains, too, that
it is precisely in France that the craziest fashions in art and
literature would necessarily arise, and that it is precisely there
that the morbid exhaustion of which we have spoken became
for the first time sufficiently distinct to consciousness to allow
a special name to be coined for it, namely, the designation of
fin-de-siecle. The proposition which I set myself to prove may now be
taken as demonstrated. In the, civilized world there obviously
prevails a twilight mood which finds expression, amongst other
ways, in all sorts of odd aesthetic fashions. All these new
tendencies, realism or naturalism, ' decadentism,' neo-mysti-
cism, and their sub-varieties, are manifestations of degeneration
and hysteria, and identical with the mental stigmata which the
observations of clinicists have unquestionably established as
belonging to these. But both degeneration and hysteria are the
consequences of the excessive organic wear and tear suffered
by the nations through the immense demands on their activity,
and through the rank growth of large towns.
Led by this firmly linked chain of causes and effects, every- ¦
one capable of logical thought will recognise that he commits a
serious error if, in the aesthetic schools which have sprung up
in the last few years, he sees the heralds of a new era. They
do not direct us to the future, but point backwards to times
past. Their word is no ecstatic prophecy, but the senseless
stammering and babbling of deranged minds, and what the
ignorant hold to be the outbursts of gushing, youthful vigour
and turbulent constructive impulses are really nothing but the
convulsions and spasms of exhaustion.
We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by certain
catch-words, frequently uttered in the works of these professed
innovators. They talk of socialism, of emancipation of the
mind, etc., and thereby create the outward show of being
deeply imbued with the thoughts and struggles of the times.
But this is empty sham. The catch -words in vogue are
scattered through the works without internal sequence, and the
struggles of the times are merely painted on the outside. It is
a phenomenon observed in every kind of mania, that it receives
its special colouring from the degree of culture of the invalid,
and from the views prevailing at the times in which he lived.

44 DEGENERATION
The Catholic who is a prey to megalomania fancies he is the
Pope ; the Jew, that he is the Messiah ; the German, that he
is the Emperor or a field-marshal ; the Frenchman, that he is
the President of the Republic. In the persecution-mania, the
invalid of former days complained of the wickedness and
knavery of magicians and witches ; to-day he grumbles because
his imaginary enemies send electric streams through his nerves,
and torment him with magnetism. The degenerates of to-day
chatter of Socialism and Darwinism, because these words,
and, in the best case, the ideas connected with these, are in
current use. These so-called socialist and freethinking works
of the degenerate as little advance the development of society
towards more equitable economic forms, and more rational
views of the relations among phenomena, as the complaints
and descriptions of an individual suffering from persecution-
mania, and who holds electricity responsible for his disagree
able sensations, advance the knowledge of this force of nature.
Those obscure or superficially verbose works which pretend
to offer solutions for the serious questions of our times, or, at
least, to prepare the way thereto, are even impediments and
causes of delay, because they bewilder weak or unschooled
brains, suggest to them erroneous views, and make them either
more inaccessible to rational information or altogether closed
to it.
The reader is now placed at those points of view whence he
can see the new aesthetic tendencies in their true light and
their real shape. It will be the task of the following books
to demonstrate the pathological character of each one of
these tendencies, and to inquire what particular species of
degenerate delirium or hysterical psychological process they
are related to or identical with.

BOOK II.
MYSTICISM.
CHAPTER I.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM.
We have already learnt to see in mysticism a principal
characteristic of degeneration. It follows so generally in the
train of the latter, that there is scarcely a case of degeneration
in which it does not appear. To cite authorities for this is
about as unnecessary as to adduce proof for the fact that in
typhus a rise in the temperature of the body is invariably ob
served. I will therefore only repeat one remark of Legrain's :*
' Mystical thoughts are to be laid to the account of the
insanity of the degenerate. There are two states in which
they are observed — in epilepsy and in hysterical delirium.'
When Federoff,t who makes mention of religious delirium and
ecstasy as among the accompanying features of an attack of
hysteria, puts them down as a peculiarity of women, he commits
an error, since they are at least as common in male hysterical
and degenerate subjects as in female.
What is really to be understood by this somewhat vague
term ' mysticism ' ? The word describes a state of mind in
which the subject imagines that he perceives or divines un
known and inexplicable relations amongst phenomena, discerns
in things hints at mysteries, and regards them as symbols, by
which a dark power seeks to unveil or, at least, to indicate all
sorts of marvels which he endeavours to guess, though generally
in vain. This condition of mind is always connected with
strong emotional excitement, which consciousness conceives
to be the result of its presentiments, although it is this ex
citement, on the contrary, which is pre-existent, while the pre
sentiments are caused by it and receive from it their peculiar
direction and colour.
* Legrain, op. cit, p. 266.
t Quoted by J. Roubinovitch, Hystdrie mdle et Ddgdndrescence, p. 18.

46 DEGENERATION
All phenomena in the world and in life present themselves
in a different light to the mystic from what they do to the sane
man. The simplest word uttered before the former appears
to him an allusion to something mysteriously occult ; in the
most commonplace and natural movements he sees hidden
signs. All things have for him deep backgrounds ; far-reach
ing shadows are thrown by them over adjacent tracts; they
send out wide-spreading roots into remote substrata. Every
image that rises up in his mind points with mysterious silence,
though with significant look and finger, to other images distinct
or shadowy, and induces him to set up relations between
ideas, where other people recognise no connection. In con
sequence of this peculiarity of his mind, the mystic lives as
if surrounded by sinister forms, from behind whose masks
enigmatic eyes look forth, and whom he contemplates with
constant terror, since he is never sure of recognising any
shapes among the disguises which press upon him. ' Things
are not what they seem ' is the characteristic expression
frequently heard from the mystic. In the history of a
' degenerate ' in the clinics of Magnan* it is written : ' A child
asks drink of him at a public fountain. He finds this un
natural. The child follows him. This fills him with astonish
ment. Another time he sees a woman sitting on a curb-stone.
He asks himself what that could possibly mean.' In extreme
cases this morbid attitude amounts to hallucinations, which,
as a rule, affect the hearing; but it can also influence sight
and the other senses. When this is so, the mystic does not
confine himself to conjectures and guesses at mysteries in and
behind phenomena, but hears and sees as real, things which for
the sane man are non-existent.
Pathological observation of the insane is content to describe
this mental condition, and to determine its occurrence in
the hysterical and degenerate. That, however, is not the end
of the matter. We also want to know in what manner the
degenerate or exhausted brain falls into mysticism. In order
to understand the subject, we must refer to some simple facts
in the growth of the mind-i*
Conscious intellection is activity of the gray surface of the
brain, a tissue consisting of countless nerve-cells united by
nerve-fibres. In this tissue the nerves, both of the external
bodily surface and of the internal organs, terminate. When
one of these nerves is excited (the nerve of vision by a ray of
* Legrain, op. cit., p. 200. .
-f The scientific psychologist will perhaps read with impatience expositions
with which he is so familiar; but they are, unfortunately, not superfluous
for a very numerous class of even highly educated persons, who have never
had instruction in the laws of the operations of the brain.

MYSTICISM 47
light, a nerve in the skin by contact, an organic nerve by
internal chemical action, etc.), it at once conveys the excite
ment to the nerve -cell in the cerebral cortex in which it
debouches. This cell undergoes in consequence chemical
changes, which, in a healthy condition of the organism, are
in direct relation to the strength of the stimulus. The nerve-
cell, which is immediately affected by the stimulus conveyed
to it by the conducting nerve, propagates in its turn the
stimulus received to all the neighbouring cells with which it
is connected by fibrous processes. The disturbance spreads
itself on all sides, like a wave-circle that is caused by any
object thrown into water, and subsides gradually exactly as
does the wave — more quickly or more slowly, with greater or
less diffusion, as the stimulus that caused it has been stronger
or weaker.
Every stimulus which reaches a place on the cerebral
cortex results in a rush of blood to that spot,* by means of
which nutriment is conveyed to it. The brain-cells decompose
these substances, and transmute the stored-up energy in them
into other forms of energy, namely, into ideas and motor im-
pulses.t How an idea is formed out of the decomposition of
tissues, how a chemical process is metamorphosed into con
sciousness, nobody knows ; but the fact that conscious ideas
are connected with the process of decomposition of tissues in
the stimulated brain-cells is not a matter of doubt. J
In addition to the fundamental property in the nerve-cells
of responding to a stimulus produced by chemical action, they
have also the capacity of preserving an image of the strength
and character of this stimulus. To put it popularly, the cell
is able to remember its impressions. If now a new, although
it may be a weaker, disturbance reach this cell, it rouses in it
an image of similar stimuli which had previously reached it,
and this memory-image strengthens the new stimulus, making
it more distinct and more intelligible to consciousness. If
the cell could not remember, consciousness would be ever
* Mosso's experiments on, and observations of, the exposed surface of the
brain during trepanning have quite established this fact.
f The experiments of Ferrier, it is true, have led him to deny that a
stimulus which touches the cortex of the frontal lobes can result in move
ment. The case, nevertheless, is not so simple as Ferrier sees it to be. A
portion of the energy which is set free by the peripheral stimulus in the cells
of the cortex of the frontal lobes certainly transmutes itself into a motor
impulse, even if the immediate stimulation of the anterior brain releases no
muscular contractions. But this is not the place to defend this point against
Ferrier. X A. Herzen is the author of the hypothesis that consciousness is con
nected with the destruction of organic connections in the brain-cells, and the
restoration of this connection with rest, sleep, and unconsciousness. All we
know of the chemical composition of the secretions in sleeping and waking
points to the correctness of this hypothesis.

48 DEGENERATION
incapable of interpreting its impressions, and could never suc
ceed in attaining to a presentation of the outer world. Particular
direct stimuli would certainly be perceived, but they would
remain without connection or import, since they are by them
selves, and without the assistance of earlier impressions, in
adequate to lead to knowledge. Memory is therefore the first
condition of normal brain activity.
The stimulus which reaches a brain-cell gives rise, as we
have seen, to an expansion of this stimulus to the neighbour
ing cells, to a wave of stimulus proceeding in all directions.
And since every stimulus is connected with the rise of con
scious presentations, it proves that every stimulus calls a large
number of presentations into consciousness, and not only such
presentations as are related to the immediate external cause
of the stimulation perceived, but also such as are only aroused
by the cells that elaborate them happening to lie in the vicinity
of that cell, or group of cells, which the external stimulus has
immediately reached. The wave of stimulus, like every other
wave-motion, is strongest at its inception ; it subsides in direct
ratio to the widening of its circle, till at last it vanishes into
the imperceptible. Corresponding to this, the presentations,
having their seat in cells which are in the immediate neigh
bourhood of those first reached by the stimulus, are the most
lively, while those arising from the more distant cells are some
what less distinct, and this distinctness continues to decrease
until consciousness can no longer perceive them — until they,
as science expresses it, sink beneath the threshold of conscious
ness. Each particular stimulus arouses, therefore, not only
in the cell to which it was directly led, but also in countless
other contiguous and connected cells, the activity which is
bound up with presentation. Thus arise simultaneously, or,
more accurately, following each other in an immeasurably
short interval of time, thousands of impressions of regularly
decreasing distinctness ; and since unnumbered thousands of
external and internal organic stimuli are carried to the brain,
so continually thousands of stimulus - waves are coursing
through it, crossing and intersecting each other with the
greatest diversity, and in their course arousing millions of
emerging, waning, and vanishing impressions. It is this that
Goethe means when he depicts in such splendid language how
* . . . ein Tritt tausend Faden regt,
Die SchifHein heriiber, hiniiber schiessen,
Die Faden ungesehen fliessen,
Ein Schlag tausend Verbindungen schlagt.'*
* ' One tread moves a thousand threads,
The shuttles dart to and fro,
The threads flow on invisible,
One stroke sets up a thousand ties.'

MYSTICISM 49
Now, memory is a property not only of the nerve-cell, but
also of the nerve-fibre, which is only a modification of ¦ the
cell. The fibre has a recollection of the stimulus which it
conveyed, in the same way as the cell has of that which it has
transformed into presentation and motion. A stimulus will be
more easily conducted by a fibre which has already conveyed
it, than by one which propagates it for the first time from one
cell to another. Every stimulus which reaches a cell will take
the line of least resistance, and this will be set out for it along
those nerve-tracks which it has already traversed. Thus a
definite path is formed for the course of a stimulus-wave, a
customary line of march ; it is always the same nerve-cells
which exchange mutually their stimulus-waves. Presentation
always awakens the same resulting presentations, and always
appears in consciousness accompanied by them. This pro
cedure is called the association of ideas.
It is neither volition nor accident that determines to which
other cells a disturbed cell habitually communicates its stimulus,
which accompanying impressions an aroused presentation draws
with it into consciousness. On the contrary, the linking of
presentations is dependent upon laws which Wundt especially
has well formulated.
Those who have not been born blind and deaf (like the
unfortunate Laura Bridgman, cited by all psychologists) will
never be influenced by one external stimulus only, but invariably
by many stimuli at once. Every single phenomenon of the
outer world has, as a rule, not only one quality, but many ;
and since that which we call a quality is the assumed cause
of a definite sensation, it results that phenomena appeal at
once to several senses, are simultaneously seen, heard, felt,
and moreover are seen in different degrees of light and colour,
heard in various nuances of timbre, etc. The few phenomena
which possess only one quality and arouse therefore only one
sense, e.g., thunder, which is only heard, although with varying
intensity, occur nevertheless in conjunction with other pheno
mena, such as, to keep to thunder, with a clouded sky, lightning
and rain. Our brains are therefore accustomed to receive at
once from every phenomenon several stimuli, which proceed
partly from the many qualities of the phenomenon itself, and
partly from the phenomena usually accompanying it. Now, it
is sufficient that only one of these stimuli should reach the
brain, in order to call into life, in virtue, of the habitual associa
tion ofthe memory-images, the remaining stimuli of the same
group as well. Simultaneity of impressions is therefore a cause
of the association of ideas.
One and the same quality belongs to many phenomena.
There is a whole s tries of things which are blue, round, and

50 DEGENERATION
smooth. The possession of a common quality is a condition
of similarity, which is greater in proportion to the number of
common qualities. Every single quality, however, belongs
to a habitually associated group of qualities, and can by the
mechanism of simultaneity arouse the memory-image of this
group. In consequence of their similarity, therefore, the
memory-images can be aroused of all those groups, which
resemble each other in some quality. The colour blue is a
quality which belongs equally to the cheerful sky, the corn
flower, the sea, certain eyes, and many military uniforms.
The perception of blue will awaken the memory of some or
many blue things which are only related through their common
colour. Similarity is therefore another cause ofthe association
of ideas.
It is a distinctive characteristic of the brain-cell to elaborate
at the same time both a presentation and its opposite. It is
probable that what we perceive as its opposite is generally, in
its original and simplest form, only the consciousness of the
cessation of a certain presentation. As the fatigue of the
optic nerve by a colour arouses the sensation of the compli
mentary colour, so, on the exhaustion of a brain-cell through
the elaboration of a presentation, the contrary presentation
appears in consciousness. Now, whether this interpretation
be right or not, the fact itself is established through the
' contradictory double meaning of primitive roots,' discovered
by K. Abel.* Contrast is the third cause of the association of
ideas. Many phenomena present themselves in the same place
close to, or after, one another; and we associate there, presenta
tion of the particular place with those objects, to which it is
used to serve as a frame. Simultaneity, similarity, contrast,
and occurrence in the same place (contiguity), are thus, accord
ing to Wundt, the four conditions under which phenomena
will be connected in our consciousness through the association
of ideas. To these James Sullyf believes yet a fifth should be
added : presentations which are rooted in the same emotion.
Nevertheless all the examples cited by the distinguished English
psychologist demonstrate without effort the action of one or
more of Wundt's laws.
In order that an organism should maintain itself, it must
be in a position to make use of natural resources, and protect
itself from adverse conditions of every sort. It can accomplish
this only if it possess a knowledge of these adverse conditions,
and of such natural resources as it can use ; and it can do this
better and more surely the more complete this knowledge is.
* Karl Abel, Ueber den Gegensinn der Urworte. Leipzig, 1884.
T James Sully, Illusions. London, 18S1.

MYSTICISM 51
In the more highly differentiated organism it devolves upon
the brain and nervous system to acquire knowledge of the
outer world, and to turn that knowledge to the advantage of
the organism. Memory makes it possible for the brain to
perform its task, and the mechanism by which memory is
made to serve the purport of knowledge is the association of
ideas. For it is clear that a brain, in which a single perception
awakens through the operation of the association of ideas a
whole train of connected representations, will recognise, con
ceive and judge far more rapidly than one in which no associa
tion of ideas obtains, and which therefore would form only such
concepts as had for their content direct sense-perceptions and
such representations as originated in those cells which, by the
accident of their contiguity, happened to lie in the circuit of a
stimulus-wave. For the brain which works with association
of ideas, the perception of a ray of light, of a tone, is sufficient,
in order instantly to produce the presentation of the object from
which the sensation proceeds, as well as of its relations in time
and space, to group these presentations as concepts, and from
these concepts to arrive at a judgment. To the brain with
out association of ideas that perception would only convey
the presentation of having something bright or sonant in
front of it. In addition, presentations would be aroused
which had nothing in common with this bright or sonant
something ; it could form no image of the exciter of the sense,
but it would first have to receive a train of further impressions
from several or all of the senses, in order to learn to recognise
the various properties of the object, of which at first only a
tone or a colour was perceived, and to unite them in a single
presentation. Even then the brain would only know in what
the object consisted, i.e., what it had in front of it, but not
how the object stood in relation to other things, where and
when it had already been perceived, and by what phenomena
it was accompanied, etc. Knowledge of objects thus acquired
would be wholly unadapte.i to the formation of a right judg
ment. It can now be seen what a great advantage was given
to the organism in the struggle for existence by the association
of ideas, and what immense progress in the development of
the brain and its activity the acquirement of it signified.
But this is only true with a limitation. The association of
ideas as such does not do more to lighten the task of the brain
in apprehending and in judging than does the uprising throng
of memory-images in the neighbourhood of the excited centre.
The presentations, which the association of ideas calls into
consciousness, stand, it is true, in somewhat closer connection
with the phenomenon which has sent a stimulus to the brain,
and by the latter has been perceived, than do those occurring

52 DEGENERATION
in the geometrical circuit of the stimulus-wave ; but even this
connection is so slight, that it offers no efficient help in the
interpretation of the phenomenon. We must not forget that
properly all our perceptions, ideas, and conceptions are con
nected more or less closely through the association of ideas.
As in the example cited above the sensation of blue arouses
the ideas of the sky, the sea, a blue eye, a uniform, etc., so will
each of these ideas arouse in its turn, according to Wundt's
law, ideas associated with them. The sky will arouse the idea
of stars, clouds and rain ; the sea, that of ships, voyages,
foreign lands, fishes, pearls, etc. ; blue eyes, that of a girl's
face, of love and all its emotions ; in short, this one sensation,
through the mechanism of the association of ideas, can arouse
pretty well almost all the conceptions which we have ever at
anytime formed, and the blue object which we have in fact
before our eyes and perceive, will, through this crowd of ideas
which are not directly related to it, be neither interpreted nor
explained. In order, however, that the association of ideas, may fulfil its
functions in the operations of the brain, and prove itself a
useful acquisition to the organism, one thing more must be
added, namely, attention. This it is which brings order into
the chaos of representations awakened by the association of
ideas, and makes them subserve the purposes of cognition and
judgment. What is attention ? Th. Ribot* defines this attribute as
' a spontaneous or an artificial adaptation of the individual to
a predominating thought.' (I translate this definition freely
because too long an explanation would be necessary to make
the uninitiated comprehend the expressions made use of by
Ribot.) In other words, attention is the faculty of the brain
to suppress one part of the memory-images which, at each
excitation of a cell or group of cells, have arisen in conscious
ness, by way either of association or of stimulus-wave ; and to
maintain another part, namely, only those memory-images
which relate to the exciting cause, i.e., to the object just
perceived. Who makes this selection among the memory - images ?
The stimulus itself, which rouses the brain-cells into activity.
Naturally those cells would be the most strongly excited which
are directly connected with the afferent nerves. Somewhat
weaker is the excitement of the cells to which the cell first
excited sends its impulse by way of the customary nerve
channels ; still weaker the excitement of those cells which, by
the same mechanism, receive their stimulus from the seconda'rily
excited cell. That idea will be the most powerful, therefore,
* Th. Ribot, Psychologie de V Attention. Paris, 1889.

MYSTICISM 53
which is awakened directly by the perception itself; somewhat
weaker that which is aroused by the first impression through
association of ideas ; weaker still that which the association in
its turn involves. We know further that a phenomenon never
produces a single stimulus, but several at once. If, for example,
we see a man before us, we do not merely perceive a single point
in him, but a larger or smaller portion of his exterior, i.e., a large
number of differently coloured and differently illuminated
points ; perhaps we hear him as well, possibly touch him, and,
at all events, perceive besides him somewhat of his environ
ment, of his spacial relations. Thus, there arise in our brain
quite a number of centres of stimulation, operating simul
taneously in the manner described above. There awakes in con
sciousness a series of primary presentations, which are stronger,
i.e., clearer, than the associated or consequent representations,
namely, just those presentations which the man standing before
us has himself aroused. They are like the brightest light-spots
in the midst of others less brilliant. These brightest light-spots
necessarily predominate in consciousness over the lesser ones.
They fill the consciousness, which combines them in a judgment.
For what we call a judgment is, in the last resort, nothing else
than a simultaneous lighting up of a number of presentations
in consciousness, which we in truth only bring into relation with
each other because we ourselves became conscious of them at
one and the same moment. The ascendency which the clearer
presentations acquire over the more obscure, the primary pre
sentations over derived representations, in consciousness,
enables them, with the help of the will, to influence for a time
the whole brain-activity to their own advantage, viz., to suppress
the weaker, i.e., the derived, representations ; to combat those
which cannot be made to agree with them ; to reinforce, to draw
into their circuit of stimulation, or simply to arouse, others,
through which they themselves are reinforced and secure some
duration in the midst of the constant emergence and disap
pearance of representations in their pursuit of each other. I
myself conceive the interference of the will in this struggle
for life amongst representations as giving motor impulses (even
if unconsciously) to the muscles of the cerebral arteries. By
this means the bloodvessels are dilated or contracted as re
quired,* and the consequent supply of blood becomes more or
* It is possible that an active expansion of the bloodvessels does not
take place, but only a contraction. It has been lately denied that there are any
nerves of vascular dilatation (inter alia by Dr. Morat, La Semaine mddicale,
1892, p. 112). But the effect may be the same in both cases. For through
the contraction of the vessels in a single brain-circuit, the dislodged blood
would be driven to other portions of the brain, and these would experience a
greater access of blood, just as if their vessels were actively dilated.

54 DEGENERATION
less copious.* The cells which receive no blood must suspend
their action ; those which receive a larger supply can, on the
contrary, operate more powerfully. The will which regulates
the distribution of blood, when incited by a group of presenta
tions temporarily predominating, thus resembles a servant who
is constantly occupied in a room in carrying out the behests of
his master : to light the gas in one place, in another to turn it
up higher, in another to turn it off partly or wholly, so that at
one moment this, and at another that, corner of the room
becomes bright, dim, or dark. The preponderance of a group
of presentations allows them during their period of power to
bring into their service, not only the brain-cells, but the whole
organism besides ; and not only to fortify themselves through
the representations which they arouse by way of association, but
also to seek certain new sense-impressions, and repress others,
in order, on the one hand, to obtain new excitations favourable
to their persistence — new original perceptions — and on the
other hand, through the exclusion of the rest, to ward ®ff such
excitations as are adverse to their persistence.
For instance, I see in the street a passer-by who for some
reason arouses my attention. The attention immediately sup
presses all other presentations which, an instant before, were
in my consciousness, and permits those only to remain which
refer to the passer-by. In order to intensify these presenta
tions I look after him, i.e., the ciliary and ocular muscles, then
the muscles of the neck, perhaps also the muscles of the
body and of the legs, receive motor impulses, which serve
the purpose only of keeping up continually new sense-impres
sions ofthe object of my attention, by means of which the pre
sentations of him are continuously strengthened and multiplied.
I do not notice other persons who for the time come into my
field of vision, I disregard the sounds which meet my ears, if
my attention is strong enough I do not perhaps even hear
them ; but I should at once hear them if they proceeded
from the particular passer-by, or if they had any reference
to him.
This is the ' adaptation of the whole organism to a pre-
* When I wrote these words I was under the impression that I was the
sole originator of the physiological theory of attention therein set forth.
Since the appearance of this book, however, I have read Alfred Lehmann's
work, Die Hypnose und die damit verwandten normalen Zustdnde, Leipzig,
1890, and have there (pp. 27 et seq.) found my theory in almost identical words.
Lehmann, then, published it two years before I did, which fact I here duly
acknowledge. That we arrived at this conclusion independently of each
other would testify that the hypothesis of vaso-motor reflex action is really
explanatory. Wundt (Hypnotismus und Suggestion, Leipzig, 1892, pp 27- *o)
it is true, criticises Lehmann's work, but he seems to agree with this hypo
thesis— which is also mine— or, at least, raises no objection to it.

MYSTICISM 55
dominant idea ' of which Ribot speaks. This it is which gives
us exact knowledge of the external world. Without it that
knowledge would be much more difficult of attainment, and
would remain much more incomplete. This adaptation will
continue until the cells, which are the bearers of the pre
dominating presentations, become fatigued. They will then
be compelled to surrender their supremacy to other groups of
cells, whereupon the latter will obtain the power to adapt the
organism to their purposes.
Thus we see it is only through attention that the faculty of
association becomes a property advantageous to the organism,
and attention is nothing but the faculty of the will to determine
the emergence, degree of clearness, duration and extinction of
presentations in consciousness. The stronger the will, so much
the more completely can we adapt the whole organism to a
given presentation, so much the more can we obtain sense
impressions which serve to enhance this presentation, so much
the more can we by association induce memory-images, which
complete and rectify the presentation, so much the more
definitely can we suppress the presentations which disturb it or
are foreign to it ; in a word, so much the more exhaustive and
correct will our knowledge be of phenomena and their true
connection. Culture and command over the powers of nature are solely
the result of attention ; all errors, all superstition, the conse
quence of defective attention. False ideas of the connection
between phenomena arise through defective observation of
them, and will be rectified by a more exact observation. Now,
to observe means nothing else than to convey deliberately
determined sense-impressions to the brain, and thereby raise a
group of presentations to such clearness and intensity that it
can acquire preponderance in consciousness, arouse through
association its allied memory-images, and suppress such as are
incompatible with itself. Observation, which lies at the root
of all progress, is thus the adaptation through attention of the
sense-organs and their centres of perception to a presentation
or group of presentations predominating in consciousness.
A state of attention allows no obscurity to persist in conscious
ness. For either the will strengthens every rising presentation
to full clearness and distinctness, or, if it cannot do this, it
extinguishes the idea completely. The consciousness of a
healthy, strong-minded, and consequently attentive man,
resembles a room in the full light of day, in which the eye sees
all objects distinctly, in which all outlines are sharp, and
wherein no indefinite shadows are floating.
Attention, therefore, presupposes strength of will, and this,
again, is the property only of a normally constituted and un-

56 DEGENERATION
exhausted brain. In the degenerate, whose brain and nervous
system are characterized by hereditary malformations or ir
regularities ; in the hysterical, whom we have learnt to regard
as victims of exhaustion, the will is entirely lacking, is possessed
only in a small degree. The consequence of weakness or want
of will is incapacity of attention. Alexander Starr* published
twenty-three cases of lesions, or diseases of the convolutions of
the brain, in which ' it was impossible for the patients to fix
their attention '; and Ribotf remarks : ' A man who is tired
after a long walk, a convalescent who has undergone a severe
illness — in a word, all weakened persons are incapable of atten
tion. . . . Inability to be attentive accompanies all forms of
exhaustion.' Untended and unrestrained by attention, the brain activity
of the degenerate and hysterical is capricious, and without aim
or purpose. Through the unrestricted play of association re
presentations are called into consciousness, and are free to run
riot there. They are aroused and extinguished automatically ;
and the will does not interfere to strengthen or to suppress
them. Representations mutually alien or mutually exclusive
appear continuously. The fact that they are retained in con
sciousness simultaneously, and at about the same intensity,
combines them (in conformity with the laws of conscious
activity) into a thought which is necessarily absurd, and cannot
express the true relations of phenomena.
Weakness or want of attention, produces, then, in the first
place, false judgments respecting the objective universe,
respecting the qualities of things and their relations to each
other. Consciousness acquires a distorted and blurred view of
the external world. And there follows a further consequence.
The chaotic course of stimuli along the channels of association
and of the adjacent structures arouses the activity both of
contiguous, of further, and of furthest removed groups of cells,
which, left to themselves, act only so long and with such
varying intensity as is proportionate to the intensity of the
stimulus which has reached them. Clear, obscure, and yet
obscurer representations rise in consciousness, which, after a
time, disappear again, without having attained to greater dis
tinctness than they had when first appearing. The clear repre
sentations produce a thought, but such a one as cannot for a
moment become firmer or clearer, because the definite repre
sentations of which it is composed are mingled with others
which consciousness perceives indistinctly, or scarcely perceives
at all. Such obscure ideas cross the threshold of even a healthy
person's consciousness; but in that case attention intervenes
* Brain, January, 1886. quoted by Ribot, Psychologic de P Attention, p. 68.
t Ribot, op. cit, pp. 106 and 119.

MYSTICISM 57
at once, to bring them fully to the light, or entirely to suppress
them. These synchronous over-tones of every thought cannot,
therefore, blur the tonic note. The emergent thought-phantoms
can acquire no influence over the thought-procedure because
attention either lightens up their faces, or banishes them back
to their under-world of the Unconscious. It is otherwise with
the degenerate and debilitated, who suffer from weakness of
will and defective attention. The faint, scarcely recognisable,
liminal presentations are perceived at the same time as those
that are well lit and centrally focussed. The judgment grows
drifting and nebulous like floating fog in the morning wind.
Consciousness, aware of the spectrally transparent shapes,
seeks in vain to grasp them, and interprets them without
confidence, as when one fancies in a cloud resemblances to
creatures or things. Whoever has sought on a dark night
to discern phenomena on a distant horizon can form an idea
of the picture which the world of thought presents to the
mind of an asthenic. Lo there ! a dark mass ! What is it ?
A tree ? A hayrick ? A robber ? A beast of prey ? Ought
one to fly ? Ought one to attack it ? The incapacity to
recognise the object, more guessed at than perceived, fills
him with uneasiness and anxiety. This is just the condition
of the mind of an asthenic in the presence of his liminal
presentations. He believes he sees in them a hundred things
at once, and he brings all the forms that he seems to discern
into connection with the principal presentation which has
aroused them. He has, however, a strong feeling that this
connection is incomprehensible and inexplicable. He combines
presentations into a thought which is in contradiction to all
experience, but which he must look upon as equal in validity to
all his remaining thoughts and opinions, because it originated in
the same way. And even if he wishes to make clear to himself
what is really the content of his judgment, and of what par
ticular presentations it is composed, he observes that these pre
sentations are, as a matter of fact, nothing but unrecognisable
adumbrations of presentations, to which he vainly seeks to give
a name. Now, this state of mind, in which a man is straining
to see, thinks he sees, but does not see — in which a man is forced
to construct thoughts out of presentations which befool and
mock consciousness like will-o'-the-wisps or marsh vapours —
in which a man fancies that he perceives inexplicable relations
between distinct phenomena and ambiguous formless shadows
— this is the condition of mind that is called Mysticism.
From the shadowy thinking of the mystic, springs his washed-
out style of expression. Every word, even the most abstract,
connotes a concrete presentation or a concept, which, inasmuch
as it is formed out of the common attributes of different concrete

58 DEGENERATION
presentations, betrays its concrete origin. Language has no
word for that which one believes he sees as through a mist, with
out recognisable form. The mystic, however, is conscious of
ghostly presentations of this sort without shape or other qualities,
and in order to express them he must either use recognised
words, to which he gives a meaning wholly different from that
which is generally current, or else, feeling the inadequacy of
the fund of language created by those of sound mind, he forges
for himself special words which, to a stranger, are generally
incomprehensible, and the cloudy, chaotic sense of which is
intelligible only to himself; or, finally, he embodies the several
meanings which he gives to his shapeless representations in as
many words, and then succeeds in achieving those bewildering
juxtapositions of what is mutually exclusive, those expressions
which can in no way be rationally made to harmonize, but which
are so typical of the mystic. He speaks, as did the German
mystics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the ' cold
fire ' of heli, and of the ' dark light ' of Satan ; or, he says, like the
degenerate in the twenty-eighth pathological case of Legrain,*
' that God appeared to him in the form of luminous shadows ;'
or he remarks, as did another of Legrain's patients :*f* ' You
have given me an immutable evening' (soiree immuable).%
The healthy reader or listener who has confidence in his
own judgment, and tests with lucidity and self-dependence,
naturally discerns at once that these mystical expressions are
senseless, and do but reflect the mystic's confused manner of
thinking. The majority of mankind, however, have neither
self-confidence nor the faculty of judging, and cannot throw off
the natural inclination to connect some meaning with every
word. And since the words of the mystic have no definite
meaning in themselves, or in their juxtaposition, a certain
meaning is arbitrarily imputed to them, is mysteriously conjured
into them. The effect of the mystical method of expression on
* Legrain, op. cit, p. 177. f Ibid., p. 156.
X In the chapter which treats of French Neomystics, I shall give a cluster
of such disconnected and mutually exclusive expressions, which are quite
parallel with the instances cited by Legrain, of the manner of speech among
those acknowledged to be of weak mind. In this place only one passage
may be repeated from the Vte E. M. de Vogue*, Le Roman Russe, Paris, 1888,
in which this mystical author, unconsciously and involuntarily, characterizes
admirably the shadowiness and emptiness of mystic diction, while praising
it as something superior. 'One trait,' he says (p. 215), 'they' (certain
Russian authors) ' have in common, viz., the art of awakening series of feel
ings and thoughts by a line, a word, by endless re-echoings [rdsonnances] . . . .
The words you read on this paper appear to be written, not in length, but in
depth. They leave behind them a train of faint reverberations, which are
gradually lost, no one knows where.' And p. 227 : ' They see men and
things in the gray light of earliest dawn. The weakly indicated outlines end
in a confused and clouded "perhaps." . . .'

MYSTICISM 59
people who allow themselves to be bewildered is for this reason
a very strong one. It gives them food for thought, as they call
it ; that is to say, it allows them to give way to all kinds of
dream-fancies, which is very much easier, and therefore more
agreeable, than the toil of reflecting on firmly outlined pre
sentations and thoughts admitting of no evasions and ex
travagances.* It transports their minds to the same condition
of mental activity determined by unbridled association of
ideas that is peculiar to the mystic ; it awakens in them also
his ambiguous, unutterable presentations, and makes them
divine the strangest and most impossible relations of things
to each other. All the weak-headed appear therefore ' deep J
to the mystic, and this designation has, from the constant
use made of it by them, become almost an insult. Only
very strong minds are really deep, such as can keep the pro
cesses of thought under the discipline of an extraordinarily
powerful attention. Such minds are in a position to exploit
the association of ideas in the best possible way, to impart the
greatest sharpness and clearness to all representations which
through them are called into consciousness ; to suppress them
firmly and rapidly if they are not compatible with the rest ; to
procure new sense-impressions, if these are necessary in order
to make the presentations and judgments predominant at the
time in their minds still more vivid and distinct ; they gain in this
way an incomparably clear picture of the world, and discover
true relations among phenomena which, to a weaker attention,
must always remain hidden. This true depth of strong select
minds is wholly luminous. It scares shadows out of hidden
corners, and fills abysses with radiant light. The mystic's
pseudo-depth, on the contrary, is all obscurity. It causes
things to appear deep by the same means as darkness, viz., by
reason of its rendering their outlines imperceptible. The mystic
obliterates the firm outlines of phenomena ; he spreads a veil
over them, and conceals them in blue vapour. He troubles
what is clear, and makes the transparent opaque, as does the
cuttle-fish the waters of the ocean. He, therefore, who sees
the world through the eyes of a mystic, gazes into a black
heaving mass, in which he can always find what he desires,
although, and just because, he actually perceives nothing at
all. To the weak-headed everything which is clearly, firmly
defined, and which, therefore, has strictly but one meaning, is
* ' It is certain that the Beautiful never has such charms for us as when
we read it attentively in a language which we only half understand. It is
the amb;guity, the uncertainty, i.e., the pliability of words, which is one of
their greatest advantages, and renders it possible to make an exact [!] use
of them.' — Joubert, quoted by Charles Morice, La Litidrature de tout-d-
Fheure. Paris, 1889, p. 171.

60 DEGENERATION
flat. To them everything is profound which has no meaning,
and which, therefore, allows them to apply what meaning they
please. To them mathematical analysis is flat ; theology and
metaphysics, deep. The study of Roman law is flat ; the
dream-book and the prophecies of Nostradamus are deep.
The forms assumed by pouring molten lead on New Year's Eve
are the true symbols of their depth.
The content of mystic thought is determined by the individual
character and level of culture possessed by each degenerate
and hysteric. For we should never forget that the morbidly-
affected or exhausted brain is only the soil which receives the
seed sown by nurture, education, impressions and experience
of life, etc. The seed-grains do not originate in the soil ; they
only receive in and through it their special irregularities of
development, their deformities, and crazy offshoots. The
naturalist who loses the faculty of attention becomes the
so-called ' Natural Philosopher,' or the discoverer of a fourth
dimension in space, like the unfortunate Zollner. A rough,
ignorant person from the low ranks of the people falls into the
wildest superstition. The mystic, nurtured in religion and
nourished with dogma, refers his shadowy impressions to his
beliefs, and interprets them as revelations of the nature of the
Trinity, or of the condition of existence before birth or after
death. The technologist who has fallen into mysticism worries
over impossible inventions, believes himself to be on the track
of the solution of the problem of a perpetuum mobile, devises
communication between earth and stars, shafts to the glowing
core of the earth, and what not. The astronomer becomes an
astrologist, the chemist an alchemist and a seeker after the
philosopher's stone ; the mathematician labours to square the
circle, or to invent a system in which the notion of progress is
expressed by a process of integration, the war of 1870 by an
equation, and so on.
As was set forth above, the cerebral cortex receives its stimuli,
not only from the external nerves, but also from the interior
of the organism, from the nerves of separate organs, and the
nerve-centres of the spinal cord and the sympathetic system.
Every excitement in these centres affects the brain-cells, and
arouses in them more or less distinct presentations, which are
necessarily related to the activity of the centres from which
the stimulus proceeds. A few examples will make this clear,
even to the uninitiated. If the organism feels the need of
nourishment, and we are hungry, we shall not only be generally
conscious of an indeterminate desire for food, but there will
also arise in our minds definite representations of dishes, of
served repasts, and of all the accessories of eating. If we, from
some cause, maybe an affection of the heart or lungs, cannot

MYSTICISM 6r
breathe freely, we have not only a hunger for air, but also
accompanying ideas of an uneasy nature, presentiments of
unknown dangers, melancholy memories, etc., i.e., representa
tions of circumstances which tend to deprive us of breath or
affect us oppressively. During sleep also organic stimuli exert
this influence pn the cerebral cortex, and to them we owe the
so-called somatic dreams (Leibestraume) , i.e., dream-images
about the functioning of any organs which happen not to be
in a normal condition.
Now, it is known that certain organic nerve-centres, the
sexual centres, namely, in the spinal cord and the medulla
oblongata, are frequently malformed, or morbidly irritated
among the degenerate. The stimuli proceeding from them
therefore awaken, in the brain of patients of this sort, presenta
tions which are more or less remotely connected with the
sexual activity. In the consciousness, therefore, of such a
subject there always exist, among the other presentations which
are aroused by the varying stimuli of the external world, presen
tations of a sexual character, erotic thoughts being associated
with every impression of beings and things. In this way he
attains to a state of mind in which he divines mysterious rela
tions among all possible objective phenomena, e.g., a railway-
train, the title of his newspaper, a piano on the one hand, and
woman on the other ; and feels emotions of an erotic nature at
sights, words, odours, which would produce no such impres
sion on the mind of a sound person, emotions which he
refers to unknown qualities in those sights, words, etc. Hence
it comes that in most cases mysticism distinctly takes on a
decidedly erotic colouring, and the mystic, if he interprets his
inchoate liminal presentations, always tends to ascribe to them
an erotic import. The mixture of super-sensuousness and
sensuality, of religious and amorous rapture, which characterizes
mystic thought, has been noticed even by those observers
who do not understand in what way it is brought about.
The mysticism which I have hitherto investigated is the
incapacity, due to weakness of will, either innate or acquired,
to guide the work of the association of ideas by attention, to
draw shadowy liminal representations into the bright focal circle
of consciousness, and to suppress presentations which are in
compatible with those attended to. There exists, however,
another form of mysticism, the cause of which is not defective
attention, but an anomaly in the sensitivity of the brain and
nervous system. In the healthy organism the afferent nerves
convey impressions of the external world in their full freshness
to the brain, and the stimulation of the brain-cell is in direct
ratio to the intensity of the stimulus conducted to it. Not so
is the deportment of a degenerate or exhausted organism.

62 DEGENERATION
Here the brain may have forfeited its normal irritability ; it is
blunted, and is only feebly excited by stimuli conveyed to it.
Such a brain, as a rule, never succeeds in elaborating sharply-
defined impressions. Its thoughts are always shadowy and
confounded. There is, however, no occasion for me to depict
in detail the characteristics of its mental procedure, for in the
higher species of the degenerate a blunted brain is hardly ever
met with, and plays no part in art or literature. To the
possessor of a sluggishly-reacting brain it hardly ever occurs
to compose or paint. He is of account only as forming the
creative mystic's partial and grateful public. Inadequate
excitability may moreover be a property of the sensory nerves.
This irregularity leads to anomalies in mental life, with which
I shall deal exhaustively in the next book. Finally, instead of
slow reaction there may exist excessive excitability, and this
may be peculiar to the whole nervous system and brain, or
only to a portion of the latter. A generally excessive excita
bility produces those morbidly-sensitive natures in whom the
most insignificant phenomena create the most astonishing
perceptions ; who hear the ' sobbing of the evening glow,'
shudder at the contact of a flower; distinguish thrilling
prophecies and fearful threatenings in the sighing of the wind,
etc.* Excessive irritability of particular groups of cells of the
cerebral cortex gives rise to other phenomena. In the affected
part of the brain, stimulated either externally or by adjacent
stimuli, in other words, by sense impressions or by association,
the disturbance does not in this case proceed in a natural ratio
to the strength of the exciting cause, but is stronger and more
lasting than is warranted by the stimulus. The aroused group
of cells returns to a state of rest either with difficulty or not
at all. It attracts large quantities of nutriment for purposes
of absorption, withdrawing them from the other parts of the
brain. It works like a machine which an unskilful hand has
set in motion but cannot stop. If the normal action of the
brain-cells may be compared to quiet combustion, the action
of a morbidly-irritable group of cells may be said to resemble
an explosion, and one, too, which is both violent and persistent.
With the stimulus there flames forth in consciousness a presen
tation, or train of presentations, conceptions and reasonings,
which suffuse the mind as with the glare of a conflagration,
outshining all other ideas.
* Ge*rard de Nerval, Le Reve et la Vie, Paris, 1868, p. 53 : 'Everything in
Nature assumed a different aspect. Mysterious voices issued from plants,
trees, animals, the smallest insects, to warn and to encourage me. I dis
cerned mysterious turns in the utterances of my companions, and under
stood their purport. Even formless and inanimate things ministered to the
workings of my mind.' Here is a perfect instance of that ' comprehension of
the mysterious' which is one of the most common fancies ofthe insane.

MYSTICISM 63
The degree of exclusiveness and insistence in the predomi
nance of any presentation is in proportion to the degree of
morbid irritability in the particular tract of brain by which it
is elaborated. Where the degree is not excessive there arise
obsessions which the consciousness recognises as morbid.
They do not preclude the coexistence of healthy functioning of
the brain, and consciousness acquires the habit of treating
these coexistent obsessions as foreign to itself, and of banish
ing them from its presentations and judgments. In aggra
vated cases these obsessions grow into fixed ideas. The
immoderately excitable portions of the brain work out their
ideas with such liveliness that consciousness is filled with
them, and can no longer distinguish them from such as are the
result of sense-impressions, the nature and strength of which
they accurately reflect. Then we reach the stage of hallucina
tions and delirium. Finally, in the last stage, comes ecstasy,
which Ribot calls ' the acute form of the effort after unity of
consciousness.' In ecstasy the excited part of the brain works
with such violence that it suppresses the functioning of all the
rest ofthe brain. The ecstatic subject is completely insensible
to external stimuli. There is no perception, no representation,
no grouping of presentations into concepts, and of concepts into
judgments and reasoning. A single presentation, or group of pre
sentations, fills up consciousness. These presentations are of ex
treme distinctness and clearness. Consciousness is, as it were,
flooded with the blinding light of mid-day. There therefore takes
place exactly the reverse of what has been noticed in the case of
the ordinary mystic. . The ecstatic state is associated with ex
tremely intense emotions, in which the highest bliss is mixed
with pain. These emotions accompany every strong and
excessive functioning of the nerve-cells, every extraordinary
and violent decomposition of nerve-nutriment. The feeling of
voluptuousness is an example of the phenomena accompanying
extraordinary decompositions in a nerve-cell. In healthy
persons the sexual nerve-centres are the only ones which,
conformably with their functions, are so differentiated and so
adapted that they exercise no uniform or lasting activity, but,
for by far the greatest part of the time, are perfectly tranquil,
storing up large quantities of nutriment in order, during very
short periods, to decompose this suddsnly and, as it were,
explosively. Every nerve-centre which operates in this way
would procure us voluptuous emotion ; but precisely among
healthy persons there are, except the sexual nerve-centres,
none which are compelled to act in this manner, in order to
serve the purpose of the organism. Among the degenerate,
on the contrary, particular morbidly excited brain-centres oper
ate in this way, and the emotions of delight which accompany

64 DEGENERATION
their explosive activity are more powerful than sexual feelings,
in proportion as the brain-centres are more sensitive than
the subordinate and more sluggish spinal centres. One may
completely believe the assurances of great ecstatics, such as
a St. Theresa, a Mohammed, an Ignatius Loyola, that the
bliss accompanying their ecstatic visions is unlike anything
earthly, and almost more than a mortal can bear. This latter
statement proves that they were conscious of the sharp pain
which accompanies nerve-action in over-excited brain-cells,
and which, on careful analysis, may be distinguished in every
very strong feeling of pleasure. The circumstance that the
only normal organic sensation known to us which resembles
that of ecstasy is the sexual feeling, explains the fact that
ecstatics connect their ecstatic presentations by way of associa
tion with the idea of love, and describe the ecstasy itself as a
kind of supernatural act of love, as a union of an ineffably high
and pure sort with God or the Blessed Virgin. This drawing
near to God and the saints is the natural result of a religious
training, which begets the habit of looking on everything
inexplicable as supernatural, and of bringing it into connection
with the doctrines of faith.
We have now seen that mysticism depends upon the in
capacity to control the association of ideas by the attention,
and that this incapacity results from weakness of will ; while
ecstasy is a consequence of the morbid irritability of special
brain-centres. The incapacity of being attentive occasions,
however, besides mysticism, other eccentricities ofthe intellect,
which may here be briefly mentioned. In extreme stages of
degeneration, e.g., in idiocy, attention is utterly wanting. No
stimulus is able to arouse it, nor is there any external means
of making an impression on the brain of the idiot, and awaken
ing his consciousness to definite presentations. In less complete
degeneration, i.e., in cases of mental debility, attention may
exist, but it is extremely weak and fleeting. Imbeciles (weak
minds) present, in graduated intensity, the phenomenon of
fugitive thought (Gedankenflucht), i.e., the incapacity to retain,
or to unite in a concept or judgment, the representations
automatically and reciprocally called into consciousness in
conformity with the laws of association, and also that of
reverie, which is another form of fugitive thought, but which
differs from it in that the particular representations of which it
is composed are feebly elaborated, and are therefore shadowy
and undefined, sometimes so much so that an imbecile, who
in the midst of his reveries is asked of what he is thinking, is
not able to state exactly what happens to be present in his
consciousness. All observers maintain that the ' higher de
generate ' is frequently 'original, brilliant, witty,' and that

MYSTICISM 65
whereas he is incapable of activity which demands attention
and self-control, he has strong artistic inclinations. All these
peculiarities are to be explained by the uncontrolled working
of association.
The reader should recall the procedure of that brain which is
incapable of attention. A perception arouses a representation
which summons into consciousness a thousand other associated
representations. The healthy mind suppresses the representa
tions which are contradictory to, or not rationally connected with,
the first perception. This the weak-minded cannot do. The mere
similarity of sound determines the current of his thought. He
hears a word, and feels compelled to repeat it, once or oftener,
sometimes to the extent of ' Echolalia '; or it calls into his con
sciousness other words similar to it in sound, but not connected
with it in meaning,* whereupon he thinks and talks in a series
of completely disconnected rhymes ; or else the words have,
besides their similarity of sound, a very remote and weak
connection of meaning ; this gives rise to punning. Ignorant
persons are inclined to call the rhyming and punning of
imbeciles witty, not bearing in mind that this way of com
bining ideas according to the sound of the words frustrates
the purposes of the intellect by obscuring the apprehension of
the real connections of phenomena. No witticism has ever
made easier the discovery of any truth. And whoever has
tried to hold a serious conversation with a quibbling person of
weak mind will have recognised the impossibility of keeping
him in check, of getting from him a logical conclusion, or of
making him comprehend a fact or a causal connection. When
* An imbecile degenerate, the history of whose illness is related by Dr. G.
Ballet, said : ' II y a mille ans que le monde est monde. Milan, la cathddrale
de Milan' (La Semaine mddicale, 1892, p. 133). 'Mille ans' (a thousand
years) calls up in his consciousness the like-sounding word ' Milan,' although
there is absolutely no rational connection between the two ideas. A
graphomaniac named Jasno, whose case is cited by Lombroso, says 'la main
se mene' (the hand guides itself). He then begins to speak of 'semaine'
(week), and continues to play upon the like-sounding words ' se mene,'
'semaine,' and 'main' (Genie und Irsinn, p. 264). In the book of a
German graphomaniac entitled Rembrandt als Erzieher, Leipzig, 1890 (a
book which I shall have to refer to more than once, as an example of the
lucubrations of a weak mind), I find, on the very first pages, the following
juxtaposition of words according to their resemblance in sound : ' Sie
verkiinden eine Ruckkehr . . . zur Einheit und Feinheit ' (p. 3). ' Je
ungeschliffener Jemand ist, destomehr ist an ihm zu schleifen ' (p. 4). 'Jede
rechte Bildung ist bildend, formend, schopferisch, und also kiinstlerisch '
(p. 8). ' Rembrandt war nicht nur ein protestantischer Kunstler, sondern
auch ein kiinstlerischer Protestant' (p. 14). 'Sein Hundert guldenblatt
allein kdnnte schon als ein Tausendgiildenkraut gegen so mancherlei
Schaden . . . dienen ' (p. 23). ' Christus und Rembrandt haben . . . darin
etwas Gemeinsames, dass Jener die religiose, dieser die kiinstlerische
Armseligkeit — die Seligkeit der Armen — zu . . . Ehren bringt' (p. 25), etc.

66 DEGENERATION
presentations are connected, not merely according to auditory
impressions of simple similarity of sound, but also according to
the other laws of association, those juxtapositions of words are
effected which the ignorant designate as ' original modes of
expression,' and which confer upon their originator the reputa
tion of a 'brilliant' conversationalist or author. Sollier*
cites some characteristic examples of the ' original ' modes of
expression of imbeciles. One said to his comrade, ' You look
like a piece of barley-sugar put out to nurse.' Another ex
presses the thought that his friend made him laugh so much
he could not restrain his saliva, by saying, ' Tu me fais baver
des ronds de chapeaux.' The junction of words which by
their sense have little or no relation to each other is, as a rule,
an evidence of imbecility, although it often enough is sensa
tional and mirth-provoking. The cleverness which in Paris is
called blague, or boulevard-esprit, the psychologist discerns as
imbecility. That this condition goes hand-in-hand with artistic
tendencies is easy to understand. All callings which require
knowledge of fact, and adaptation to it, presuppose attention.
This capacity is wanting in imbeciles ; hence they are not
fitted for serious professions. Certain artistic occupations,
especially those of a subordinate kind, are, on the contrary,
quite compatible with uncontrolled association of ideas, reverie,
or fugitive thought, because they exact only a very limited
adaptation to fact, and therefore have great attractions for
persons of weak intellect.
Between the process of thought and movement there exists
an exact parallelism explicable by the fact that the elaboration of
presentations is nothing else than a modification of the elabora
tion of the motor impulses. The phenomena of movement make
the mechanism of thought more easily apprehensible to the lay
mind. The automatic association of muscular contractions
corresponds to the association of ideas, their co-ordination to
attention. As with defective attention there ensues no intelli
gent thought, so with faulty co-ordination there can be no
appropriate movement. Palsy is equivalent to idiocy, St.
Vitus's dance to obsessions and fixed ideas. The attempts
at witticisms of the weak-minded are like beating the air with
a sword ; the notions and judgments of sound brains are like
the careful thrust and parry of skilful fencing. Mysticism
finds its reflected image in the aimless and powerless, often
hardly discernible, movements of senile and paralytic trembling;
and ecstasy is, for a brain-centre, the same state as a pro
longed and violent tonic contraction for a muscle or group
of muscles.
* Dr. Paul Sollier, Psychologie de Vldiot et de Vlmbdcile. Paris, 1891,
P- 153-

MYSTICISM 67

CHAPTER II.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITES.

Mysticism is the habitual condition of the human race, and
in no way an eccentric disposition of mind. A strong brain
which works out every presentation to its full clearness — a power
ful will, which sustains the toiling attention — these are rare
gifts. Musing and dreaming, the free ranging of imagination,
disporting itself at its own sweet will along the meandering
pathways of association, demand less exertion, and will there
fore be widely preferred to the hard labour of observation and
intelligent judgment. Hence the consciousness of men is filled
with a vast mass of ambiguous, shadowy ideas ; they see, as a
rule, in unmistakable clearness only those phenomena which
are daily repeated in their most intimate personal experience,
and, among these, those only which are the objects of their
immediate needs.
Speech, that great auxiliary in the interchange of human
thought, is no unmixed benefit. It brings to the consciousness
of most men incomparably more obscurity than brightness.
It enriches their memory with auditory images, not with well-
defined pictures of reality. A word, whether written or spoken,
excites a sense (sight or hearing), and sets up an activity in
the brain. True ; it always arouses presentation. A series of
musical tones does the same. At an unknown word, at 'Abra
cadabra,' at a proper name, at a tune scraped on the fiddle,
we also think of something, but it is either indefinite, or non
sensical, or arbitrary. It is absolute waste of labour to attempt
to give a man new ideas, or to widen the circle of his positive
knowledge, by means of a word. It can never do more than
awaken such ideas as he already possesses. Ultimately every
one works only with the material for presentation which he has
acquired by attentive personal observation of the phenomena
of the universe. Nevertheless, he cannot do without the stimulus
conveyed to him by speech. The desire for knowledge, without
any hiatus, of all that is in the world, is irresistible ; while the
opportunities of perception at first hand, even in the most
favourable circumstances, are limited. What we have not our
selves experienced we let others, the dead and the living, tell us.
The word must take the place of the direct impressions of sense
for us. And then it is itself an impression of sense, and our con
sciousness is accustomed to put this impression on a level with
others, to estimate the idea aroused by this word equally with

68 DEGENERATION
those ideas which have been acquired through the simultaneous
co-operation of all the senses, through observations, and hand
ling on every side, through moving and lifting, listening to, and
smelling the object itself. This parity of values is an error of
thought. It is false in any case if a word do more than call
into consciousness a memory -image of a presentation, which
it has acquired through personal experience, or a concept com
posed of such presentations. Nevertheless, we all of us commit
this fallacy. We forget that language was only developed by the
race as a means of communication between individuals, that it
is a social function, but not a source of knowledge. Words are
in reality much more a source of error. For a man can only
actually know what he has directly experienced and attentively
observed, not what he has merely heard or read, and what he
repeats ; and if he would free himself from the errors which
words have led him into, he has no other means than the
increase of his sterling representative material, through personal
experience and attentive observation. And since man is never
in a position to do this save within certain limits, everyone is
condemned to carry on the operations of his consciousness with
direct presentations, and at the same time with words. The
intellectual structure which is built up with materials of such
unequal solidity reminds one of those dilapidated Gothic churches
which brainless masons used to patch up with a plaster of soot
and cheese, giving it, by means of a wash, the appearance of
stone. To the eye the frontage is irreproachable, but many
parts of the building could not for one moment resist a vigorous
blow of criticism.
Many erroneous explanations of natural phenomena, the
majority of false scientific hypotheses, all religious and meta
physical systems, have arisen in such a way that mankind, in
their thoughts and opinions, have interwoven, as equally valid
components, ideas suggested by words only, together with such
as were derived from direct perception. The words were either
invented by mystics and originally indicated nothing beyond
the unbalanced condition of a weak and diseased brain, or,
whereas they at first expressed a definite, correct presentation,
their proper meaning was not caught by those who repeated
them, and by them was arbitrarily falsified, differently interpreted,
or blurred. Innate or acquired weakness of mind and ignorance
lead alike to the goal of mysticism. The brain of the ignorant
elaborates presentations that are nebulous, because they are su°-
gested by words, not by the thing itself, and the stimulus of a word
is not strong enough to produce vigorous action in the brain-cells ;
moreover, the brain of the exhausted and degenerate elaborates
nebulous presentations, because in any case it is not in a condition
to respond to a stimulus by vigorous action. Hence ignorance is

MYSTICISM 69
artificial weakness of mind, just as, conversely, weakness of
mind is the natural organic incapacity for knowledge.
In one part or another of his mental field of vision each of
us therefore is a mystic. From all the phenomena which he him
self has not observed, everyone forms shadowy, unstable presen
tations. Nevertheless, it is easy to distinguish healthy men from
those who deserve the designation of mystic. There is a sure sign
for each. The healthy man is in a condition to obtain sharply-
defined presentations from his own immediate perceptions, and to
comprehend their real connection. The mystic, on the contrary,
mixes his ambiguous, cloudy, half-formed liminal representations
with his immediate perceptions, which are thereby disturbed and
obscured. Even the most superstitious peasant has definite presen
tations of his field work, of the feeding of his cattle, and of look
ing after his landmark. He may believe in the weather-witch,
because he does not know how the rain comes to pass, but he
does not wait a moment for the angels to plough for him. He
may have his field blessed, because the real conditions of the
thriving or perishing of his seed are beyond his ken, but he will
never so put his trust in supernatural favour as to omit sowing
his grain. All the genuine mystic's presentations, on the con
trary, even those of daily experience, are permeated and over
grown with that which is incomprehensible, because it is without
form. His want of attention makes him incapable of appre
hending the real connecting links between the simplest and
most obviously related phenomena, and leads him to deduce
them from one or another of the hazy, intangible presentations
wavering and wandering in his consciousness.
There is no human phenomenon in the art and poetry of the
century with whom this characteristic of the mystic so com
pletely agrees as with the originators and supporters of the
Pre-Raphaelite movement in England. It may be taken for
granted that the history of this movement is known — at least,
in its outlines — and that it will suffice here to recall briefly its
principal features. The three painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Holman Hunt, and Millais, in the year 1848, entered into a
league which was called the Pre - Raphaelite Brotherhood.
After the association was formed, the painters F. G. Stephens
and James Collinson, and the sculptor Thomas Woolner, joined
it. In the spring of 1849 they exhibited in London a number
of pictures and statues, all of which, in addition to the signature
of the artist, bore the common mark P.R.B. The result was
crushing. Hitherto no hysterical fanatic had tyrannically forced
on the public a belief in the beauty of these works, nor was
it as yet under the domination of the fashion, invented by
aesthetic snobs, of considering their admiration as a mark of
distinction, and of membership of a narrow and exclusive circle

70 DEGENERATION
of the aristocrats of taste. Hence it confronted them without
prepossession, and found them incomprehensible and funny.
The contemplation of them roused inextinguishable laughter
among the good-humoured, and wrath among the morose, who
are nettled when they think themselves made fools of. The
brotherhood did not renew their attempt ; the P.R.B. exhibi
tion was never repeated; the league broke up of itself. Its
members no longer added the shibboleth of initials after their
names. They formed no longer a closed association, involving
formal admission, but only a loosely-knit circle, consisting of
friends having tastes in common, and who were perpetually
modifying its character by their joining and retiring. In this
way it was joined by Burne Jones and Madox Brown, who also
passed for Pre-Raphaelites, although they had not belonged
to the original P.R.B. Later on the designation was extended
from painters to poets, and among the pre - Raphaelites, in
addition to D. G. Rossetti (who soon exchanged the brush for
the pen), were Algernon Charles Swinburne and William
Morris. What are the governing thoughts and aims of the Pre-
Raphaelite movement? An Anglo-German critic of repute,
F. Hiiffer,* thinks that he answers this question when he
says : ' I myself should call this movement the renaissance of
mediaeval feeling.' Apart from the fact that these words signify
nothing, since every man may interpret 'mediaeval feeling' as
he pleases, the reference to the Middle Ages only emphasizes the
most external accompanying circumstance of pre-Raphaelitism,
leaving its essence entirely untouched.
It is true that the pre - Raphaelites with both brush and
pen betray a certain, though by no means exclusive, predilection
for the Middle Ages ; but the medievalism of their poems
and paintings is not historical, but mythical, and simply
denotes something outside time and space — a time of dreams
and a place of dreams, where all unreal figures and actions
may be conveniently bestowed. That they decorate their un
earthly world with some features which may remotely recall
mediaevalism ; that it is peopled with queens and knights, noble
damozels with coronets on their golden hair, and pages with
plumed caps — these may be accounted for by the prototypes
which, perhaps unconsciously, hover before the eyes of the pre-
Raphaelites. Movements in art and literature do not spring up suddenly
and spontaneously. They have progenitors from whom they
descend in the natural course of generation. Pre-Raphaelitism
* Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With a memoir of the author by
Franz Hiiffer. Leipzig, 1873, P- v"'-

MYSTICISM 71
is the grandson of German, and a son of French, Romanticism.
But in its wanderings through the world Romanticism has
suffered such alteration through the influence of the changing
opinions of the times, and the special characteristics of various
nations, that the English offspring bears scarcely any family
resemblance to its German ancestor.
German romanticism was in its origin a reaction against the
spirit of the French encyclopaedists, who had held undisputed
sway over the eighteenth century. Their criticism of ancient
errors, their new systems which were to solve the riddles of the
world and of the nature of man, had at first dazzled and nearly
intoxicated mankind. They could not, however, satisfy in the
long-run, for they committed a great fault in two respects.
Their knowledge of facts was insufficient to enable them to
explain the collective phenomenon of the universe, and they
looked upon man as an intellectual being. Proud of their
strictly logical and mathematical reasoning, they overlooked the
fact that this is a method of knowledge, but not knowledge
itself. The logical apparatus is a machine, which can manu
facture only the material shot into it. If the machine is not
fed, it runs on empty and makes a noise, but produces nothing.
The condition of science in the eighteenth century did not allow
the encyclopaedists to make advantageous use of their logical
machine. They did not take cognizance of this fact, however,
and, with their limited material and much unconscious temerity,
constructed a system which they complacently announced as a
faithful representation of the system of the universe. It was
soon discovered that the encyclopaedists, for all their intellectual
arrogance, were deluding both themselves and their followers.
There were known facts which contradicted their hasty explana
tions, and there was a whole range of phenomena of which their
system took no account, and failed to cover as if with too short
a cloak, and which peeped out mockingly at all the seams.
Hence the philosophy of the encyclopaedists was kicked and
abused, and the same faults were committed with respect to it
which it had perpetrated ; the methods of intelligent criticism
were mistaken for the results obtained by them. Because the
encyclopaedists, from lack of knowledge and of natural facts,
explained nature falsely and arbitrarily, those who were dis
appointed and thirsting for knowledge cried out, that intelligent
criticism as such was a false method, that consistent reasoning
led to nothing, that the conclusions of the ' Philosophy of
Enlightenment ' were just as unproven and unprovable as those
of religion and metaphysics, only less beautiful, colder, and
narrower; and mankind threw itself with fervour into all the
depths of faith and superstition, where certainly the Tree of
Knowledge did not grow, but where beautiful mirages charmed

72 DEGENERATION
the eye, and the warm fragrant springs of all the emotions
bubbled up.
And more fatal than the error of their philosophy was the
false psychology of the encyclopaedists. They believed that the
thoughts and actions of men are determined by reason and
the laws of consistency, and had no inkling that the really
impelling force in thought and deed are the emotions, those
disturbances elaborated in the depths ofthe internal organs, and
the sources of which elude consciousness, but which suddenly
burst into it like a horde of savages, not declaring whence they
come, submitting to no police regulations of a civilized mind,
and imperiously demanding lodgment. All that wide region of
organic needs and hereditary impulses, all that E. von Hart-
mann calls the ' Unconscious,' lay hidden from the rationalists,
who saw nothing but the narrow circle of the psychic life which
is illumined by the little lamp of consciousness. Fiction which
should depict mankind according to the views of this inadequate
psychology would be absurdly untrue. It had no place for
passions and follies. It saw in the world only logical formulae
on two legs, with powdered heads and embroidered coats of
fashionable cut. The emotional nature took its revenge on this
aesthetic aberration, breaking out in ' storm and stress,' and in
turn attaching value only to the unconscious, the inherited
impulse, and the organic appetites, while it neglected entirely
reason and will, which are there none the less.
Mysticism, which rebelled against the application of the
rationalistic methods to explain the universe, and the Sturm
und Drang, which rebelled against their application to the
psychical life of mankind, were the first-fruits of romanticism,
which is nothing but the union and exaggeration of these two
revolutionary movements. That it took up with fondness the
form of mediaevalism was due to circumstances and the senti
ment of the age. The beginnings of romanticism coincide with
the time of the deepest humiliation of Germany, and the suffering
of young men of talent at the ignominy of foreign rule gave to
the whole content of their thought a patriotic colouring. During
the Middle Ages Germany had passed through a period of the
greatest power and intellectual florescence ; those centuries
which were irradiated at one and the same time by the might
of the world-empire of the Hohenstaufen, by the splendour of
the poems ofthe Court Minnesingers, and by the vastness ofthe
Gothic cathedrals, must naturally have attracted those spirits
who, filled with disgust, broke out against the intellectual jejune-
ness and political abasement of the times. They fled from
Napoleon to Frederick Barbarossa, and drew refreshment with
Walter von der Vogelweide from their abhorrence of Voltaire.
The foreign imitators of the German romanticists do not know

MYSTICISM 73
that if in their flight from reality they come to a halt in
mediaevalism, they have German patriotism as their pioneer.
The patriotic side of romanticism was, moreover, emphasized
only by the sanest talents of this tendency. In others it stands
revealed most signally as a form ofthe phenomenon of degenera
tion. The brothers Schlegel, in their Athenaeum, give this pro
gramme of romanticism : ' The beginning of all poetry is to
suspend the course and the laws of rationally thinking reason,
and to transport us again into the lovely vagaries of fancy and
the primitive chaos of human nature. . . . The freewill of the
poet submits to no law.' This is the exact mode of thought
and expression of the weak-minded, of the imbecile, whose
brain is incapable of following the phenomena of the universe
with discernment and comprehension, and who, with the self-
complacency which characterizes the weak-minded, proclaims
his infirmity as an advantage, and declares that his muddled
thought, the product of uncontrolled association, is alone exact
and commendable, boasting of that for which the sane-minded are
pitying him. Besides the unregulated association of ideas there
appears in most romanticists its natural concomitant, mysticism.
That which enchanted them in the idea of the Middle Ages was
not the vastness and might of the German Empire, not the
fulness and beauty of the German life of that period, but
Catholicism with its belief in miracles and its worship of saints.
' Our Divine Service,' writes H. von Kleist, ' is nothing of the
kind. It appeals only to cold reason. A Catholic feast appeals
profoundly to all the senses.' The obscure symbolism of
Catholicism, all the externals of its priestly motions, all its
altar service so full of mystery, all the magnificence of its vest
ments, sacerdotal* vessels and works of art, the overwhelming
effect of the thunder of the organ, the fumes of incense, the
flashing monstrance — all these undoubtedly stir more confused
and ambiguous adumbrations of ideas than does austere Pro
testantism. The conversion of Friedrich Schlegel, Adam Miiller,
Zacharias Werner, Count Stolberg, to Catholicism is just as
consistent a result as, to the reader who has followed the argu
ments on the psychology of mysticism, it is intelligible that,
with these romanticists, the ebullitions of piety are accompanied
by a sensuousness which often amounts to lasciviousness.
Romanticism penetrated into France a generation later than
into Germany. The delay is easy of historical explanation. In
the storms of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the
leading minds of the French people had no time to think of
themselves. They had no leisure for testing the philosophy of
their encyclopaedists, to find it inadequate, reject it, and rise
up against it. They devoted their whole energy to rough, big,
muscular deeds of war, and the need for the emotional exercise

74 DEGENERATION
afforded by art and poetry, asserted itself but feebly, being
completely satisfied by the far stronger emotions of self-love
and despair produced by their famous battles and cataclysmic
overthrows. ^Esthetic tendencies only reasserted their rights
during the half-dormant period following the battle of Waterloo,
and then the same causes led to the same results as in Germany.
The younger spirits in this case also raised the flag of revolt
against the dominating aesthetic and philosophic tendencies.
They wished Imagination to grapple with Reason, and place
its foot on its neck, and they proclaimed the martial law of
passion against the sober procedure of discipline and morality.
Through Madame de Stael and A. W. Schlegel, partly by the
latter's personal intercourse with Frenchmen, and partly by his
works, which were soon translated into French, they were in some
measure made acquainted with the German movement. They
joined it perhaps half unconsciously. Of the many impulses
which were active among the German romanticists, patriotism
and Catholic mysticism had no influence on the French mind,
which only lent itself to the predilection for what was remote
in time and space, and what was free from moral and mental
restraints. French romanticism was neither mediaeval nor pious. It took
up its abode rather in the Renaissance period as regards remote
ness in time, and in the East or the realms of faerie, if it wished
to be spacially remote from reality. In Victor Hugo's works
the one drama of Les Burgraves takes place in the thirteenth
century ; but in all the others, Cromwell Maria Tudor, Lucrezia
Borgia, Angelo, Ruy Bias, Hernani, Marion Delorme, Le Rot
s' amuse, the scenes were laid in the sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries ; and his one mediaeval romance, Notre Dame de Paris,
can be set over against all the rest, from Han dlslande, which
has for its scene of action a fancied Thule, to Les Miserables
and 1793, which take place in an apocalyptic Paris and in
a history of the Revolution suited to the use of hashish-
smokers. The bent of French romanticism towards the Renais
sance is natural. That was the period of great passions and
great crimes, of marble palaces, of dresses glittering with gold,
and of intoxicating revels ; a period in which the aesthetic pre
vailed over the useful, and the fantastic over the rational, and
when crime itself was beautiful, because assassination was
accomplished with a chased and damascened poniard, and the
poison was handed in goblets wrought by Benvenuto Cellini.
The French romanticists made use of the unreality of their
scene of action and costumes chiefly for the purpose of enabling
them, without restraint, to attribute to their characters all the
qualities, exaggerated even to monstrosity, that were dear to
the French, not yet ailing with the pain of overthrow. Thus

MYSTICISM 75
in the heroes of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Thdophile
Gautier, Alfred de Musset, we become acquainted with the
French ideal of man and woman. The subtle inquiries of
Faust, the soliloquies of Hamlet, are not their affair. They talk
unceasingly in dazzling witticisms and antitheses ; they fight
one against ten ; they love like Hercules in the Thespidian
night, and their whole life is one riot of fighting, wantoning,
wine, perfume, and pageantry — a sort of magnificent illusion,
with performance of gladiators, Don Juans, and Monte Christos;
a crazy prodigality of inexhaustible treasures of bodily strength,
gaiety and gold. These ideal beings had necessarily to wear
doublets or Spanish mantles, and speak in the tongues of un
known times, because the tightness of the contemporary dress-
coat could not accommodate all this wealth of muscle, and the
conversation of the Paris salon did not admit of the candour
of souls which their authors had turned inside out.
The fate of romanticism in England was exactly the reverse
of that which befell it in France. Whereas the French had
imitated chiefly, and even exclusively, in the German roman
ticists, their divergence from reality, and their declaration of
the sovereign rights of the passions, the English just as ex
clusively elaborated their Catholic and mystical elements.
For them the Middle Ages had a powerful attraction, inasmuch
as it was the period of childlike faith in the letter, and of the
revelling of simple piety in personal intercourse with the Trinity,
the Blessed Virgin, and all the guardian saints.
Trade, industry, and civilization were nowhere in the world
so much developed as in England. Nowhere did men work so
assiduously, nowhere did they live under such artificial condi
tions as there. Hence the state of degeneration and exhaustion,
which we observe to-day in all civilized countries as the result
of this over-exertion, must of necessity have shown itself sooner
in England than elsewhere, and, as a matter of fact, did show
itself in the third and fourth decade of the century with con
tinually increasing violence. In consequence, however, of the
peculiarity of the English mind, the emotional factor in
degeneration and exhaustion necessarily assumed with them a
religious colouring.
The Anglo-Saxon race is by nature healthy and strong-
minded. It has therefore, in a high degree, that strong desire
for knowledge which is peculiar to normally - constituted
persons. In every age it has inquired into the why and how of
phenomena, and shown passionate sympathy with, and gratitude
to, everyone who held out hopes of an explanation of them.
The well-known and deeply thoughtful discourse of the Anglian
noble concerning what precedes and follows man's life — a
speech which Bede has preserved for us in his account of the

76 DEGENERATION
conversion of Edwin to Christianity — has been cited by all
authors (e.g., by G. Freytag and H. Taine*) who have studied
the origins of the English mental constitution. It shows that
as early as the beginning of the seventh century the Anglo-
Saxons were consumed by an ardent desire to comprehend the
phenomenon of the universe. This fine and high-minded
craving for knowledge has proved at once the strength and the
weakness of the English. It led with them to the development
along parallel lines of the natural sciences and theology. The
scientific investigators contributed a store of facts won through
toilsome observation ; the experts in divinity obtained theirs
through systems compounded of notions arbitrarily conceived.
Both claimed to explain the nature of things, and the people
were deeply grateful to both, more so, it is true, to the theologians
than to the scholars, because the former could afford to be more
copious and confident in their teaching than the latter. The
natural tendency to reckon words as equivalent to facts,
assertions to demonstrations, always gives theologians and
metaphysicians an immense advantage over observers. The
craving of the English for knowledge has produced both the
philosophy of induction and spiritualism. Humanity owes to
them on the one hand Francis Bacon, Harvey, Newton, Locke,
Darwin, J. S. Mill ; on the other, Bunyan, Berkeley, Milton, the
Puritans, the Quakers, and all the religious enthusiasts,
visionaries, and mediums of this century. No people has done
so much for, and conferred such honour on, scientific investi
gators ; no people has sought with so much earnestness and
devotion for instruction, especially in matters of faith, as have
the English. Eagerness to know is, therefore, the main source
of English religiousness. There is this also to be noticed,
that among them the ruling classes never gave an example
of indifference in matters of faith, but systematically made
religiousness a mark of social distinction ; unlike France, where
the nobility of the eighteenth century exalted Voltairianism into
a symptom of good breeding. The evolution of history led in
England to two results which apparently exclude each other —
to caste-rule, and the liberty of the individual. The caste which
is in possession of wealth and power naturally wishes to protect
its possessions. The rigid independence of the English people
precludes it from applying physical force. Hence it uses moral
restraints to keep the lower ranks submissive and amenable,
and, among these, religion is by far the most effective.
Herein lies the explanation both of the devoutness of the
English and of the religious character of their mental degenera-
* Gustave Freytag, Bilder aus der deutschen Ver^an^enheit, Bd. I. • 'Aus
dem Mittelaher.' Leipzig, 1872, § 266. H. Taine, Histoire de la Littdrature
anglaise. Paris, 1866, 2e Edition, vol. i., p. 46.

MYSTICISM 77
tion. The first result of the epidemic of degeneration and hysteria
was the Oxford Movement in the thirties and forties. Wiseman
turned all the weaker heads. Newman went over to Catholicism.
Pusey clothed the entire Established Church in Romish garb.
Spiritualism soon followed, and it is worthy of remark that all
mediums adopted theological modes of speech, and that their
disclosures were concerned with heaven and hell. The ' revival
meetings' of the seventies, and the Salvation Army of to-day,
are the direct sequel of the Oxford stream of thought, but
rendered turbid and foul in accordance with the lower intellectual
grade of their adherents. In the world of art, however, the
religious enthusiasm of degenerate and hysterical Englishmen
sought its expression in pre-Raphaelitism.
An accurate definition of the connotation of this word is an
impossibility, in that it was invented by mystics, and is as vague
and equivocal as are all new word-creations of the feeble and
deranged in mind. The first members of the Brotherhood
believed that, in the artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen
turies, in the predecessors of the great geniuses of the Umbrian
and Venetian schools, they had discovered minds congenial to
their own. For a short time they took the methods of these
painters for their models, and created the designation ' pre-
Raphaelite.' The term was bound to approve itself to them,
since the prefix ' pre' (' prae ') arouses ideas of the primeval, the
far-away, the hardly perceptible, the mysteriously shadowy.
' Pre-Raphaelite ' calls up, through association of ideas, ' pre-
Adamite,'* ' pre-historic.' etc. — in short, all that is opened to
view by immeasurable vistas down the dusk of the unknown,
and which allow the mind to wander dreamily beyond the limits
of time and in the realms of myth. But that the pre- Raphaelites
should have lit on the quattrocento painters for the embodiment
of their artistic ideals is due to John Ruskin.
Ruskin is one of the most turbid and fallacious minds, and
one of the most powerful masters of style, of the present century.
To the service of the most wildly eccentric thoughts he brings
the acerbity of a bigot and the deep sentiment of Morel's
' emotionalists.' His mental temperament is that of the
first Spanish Grand Inquisitors. He is a Torquemada of
aesthetics. He would liefest burn alive the critic who disagrees
with him, or the dull Philistine who passes by works of art with
out a feeling of devout awe. Since, however, stakes do not stand
within his reach, he can at least rave and rage in word, and
annihilate the heretic figuratively by abuse and cursing. To his
ungovernable irascibility he unites great knowledge of all the
* This is not an arbitrary assertion. One of D. G. Rossetti's most famous
poems, of which further mention will be made, Eden Bowers, treats of the
pre-Adamite Lilith.

78 DEGENERATION
minutiae in the history of art. If he writes of the shapes of
clouds he reproduces the clouds in seventy or eighty existing
pictures, scattered amongst all the collections of Europe. And
be it noted that he did this in the forties, when photographs of
the masterpieces of art, which render the comparative study of
them to-day so convenient, were yet unknown. This heaping
up of fact, this toilsome erudition, made him conqueror of the
English intellect, and explains the powerful influence which he
obtained over artistic sentiment and the theoretic views concern
ing the beautiful of the Anglo-Saxon world. The clear posi
tivism of the Englishman demands exact data, measures, and
figures. Supplied with these he is content, and does not criticise
starting-points. The Englishman accepts a fit of delirium if it
appears with footnotes, and is conquered by an absurdity if it
is accompanied by diagrams. Milton's description of hell and
its inhabitants is as detailed and conscientious as that of a
land-surveyor or a natural philosopher, and Bunyan depicts the
Pilgrim's Progress to the mystical kingdom of Redemption in
the method of the most graphic writer of travels— a Captain
Cook or a Burton. Ruskin has in the highest conceivable degree
this English peculiarity of exactness applied to the nonsensical,
and of its measuring and counting applied to fevered visions.
In the year 1843, almost simultaneously with the outbreak of
the great Catholicizing movement, Ruskin began to publish the
feverish studies on art which were subsequently collected under
the title of Modem Painters. He was then a young divinity
student, and as such he entered upon the study of works of art.
The old scholasticism wished to make philosophy the ' handmaid
of godly learning.' Ruskin's mysticism had the same purpose
with regard to art. Painting and sculpture ought to be a form
of divine worship, or they ought not to exist at all. Works of
art were valuable merely for the supersensuous thoughts that
they conveyed, for the devotion with which they were conceived
and which they revealed, not for the mastery of form.
From this point of view he was able to arrive at judgments
among which I here quote a few of the most typical. ' It
appears to me,' he says,* ' that a rude symbol is oftener more
efficient than a refined one in touching the heart, and that as
pictures rise in rank as works of art they are regarded with less
devotion and more curiosity. . . . It is man and his fancies, man
and his trickeries, man and his inventions, poor, paltry, weak,
self-sighted man, which the connoisseur for ever seeks and
worships. Among potsherds and dunghills, among drunken
boors and withered beldames, through every scene of debauchery
and degradation, we follow the erring artist, not to receive one
wholesome lesson, not to be touched with pity, nor moved with
* J. Ruskin, Modern Painters, American edition, vol. i., pp. xxi. el seq.

MYSTICISM 79
indignation, but to watch the dexterity of the pencil, and gloat
over the glittering of the hue. . . . Painting is nothing but a
noble and expressive language, invaluable as the vehicle of
thought, but by itself nothing. ... It is not by the mode of
representing and saying, but by what is represented and said,
that the respective greatness either ofthe painter or the writer is
to be finally determined. . . . The early efforts of Cimabue and
Giotto are the burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the
stammering lips of infants. . . . The picture which has the
nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed,
is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less
noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed.
. . . The less sufficient the means appear to the end the greater
will be the sensation of power.' These propositions were decisive
in determining the direction taken by the young Englishmen of
1843, who united artistic inclinations with the mysticism of the
degenerate and hysterical. They comprise the aestheticism of
the first pre-Raphaelites, who felt that Ruskin had expressed
with clearness what was vaguely fermenting within them. Here
was the art-ideal which they had presaged — form as indifferent,
idea as everything ; the clumsier the representation, the deeper
its effect ; the devotion of faith as the only worthy import of a
work of art. They reviewed the history of art for phenomena
agreeing with the theories of Ruskin, which they had taken up
with enthusiasm, and they found what they sought in the archaic
Italian school, in which the London National Gallery is extra
ordinarily rich. There they had perfect models to imitate ; they
were bound to take for their starting-point these Fra Angelicos,
Giottos, Cimabues, these Ghirlandajos and Pollajuolos. Here
were paintings bad in drawing, faded or smoked, their colouring
either originally feeble or impaired by the action of centuries;
pictures executed with the awkwardness of a learner represent
ing events in the Passion of Christ, in the life of the Blessed
Virgin, or in the Golden Legend, symbolizing childish ideas of
hell and paradise, and telling of earnest faith and fervent
devotion. They were easy of imitation, since, in painting
pictures in the style of the early masters, faulty drawing, deficient
sense of colour, and general artistic incapacity, are so many
advantages. And they constituted a sufficiently forcible anti
thesis to all the claims of the artistic taste of that decade to
satisfy the proclivity for contradiction, paradox, negation and
eccentricity which we have learned to recognise as a special
characteristic of the feeble-minded.
Ruskin's theory is in itself delirious. It mistakes the funda
mental principles of aesthetics, and, with the unconsciousness of
a saucy child at play, muddles and entangles the boundary lines
of the different arts. It holds of account in plastic art only the

80 DEGENERATION
conception. A picture is valuable only in so far as it is a
symbol giving expression to a religious idea. Ruskin does not
take into consideration, or deliberately overlooks the fact, that
the pleasurable feelings which are produced by the contem
plation of a picture are not aroused by its intellectual import,
but by it as a sensuous phenomenon. The art of painting
awakens through its media of colour and drawing (i.e., the exact
grasp and reproduction of differences in the intensity of light),
firstly, a purely sensuously agreeable impression of beautiful
single colours and happily combined harmonies of colour ;
secondly, it produces an illusion of reality and, together with
this, the higher, more intellectual pleasures arising from a
recognition of the phenomena depicted, and from a compre
hension of the artist's intention ; thirdly, it shows these phe
nomena as seen with the eye of the artist, and brings out details
or collective traits, which until then the inartistic beholder had
not been by himself able to perceive. The painter therefore
influences, through the medium of his art, only so far as he
agreeably excites the sense of colour, gives to the mind an
illusion of reality, together with the consciousness that it is an
illusion, and, through his deeper, more penetrating vision, dis
closes to the spectator the hidden treasures of the phenomenal
world. If, in addition to the presentation of the picture, ' its
story' also affects the beholder, it is no longer the merit of the
painter as such, but of his not exclusively pictorial intelligence
in making choice of a subject, and in committing its portrayal
to his specific pictorial abilities. The effect of the story is not
called forth through the media of painting ; it is not based on
the pleasure of the spectator in colour, on the illusion of reality,
or on a better grasp of the phenomenon, but on some pre
existing inclination, some memory, some prejudice. A purely
painter's picture, such as Leonardo's Mona Lisa, charms every
one whose eye has been sufficiently trained. A picture which
tells a story, but is not distinguished for its purely pictorial
qualities, leaves everyone unappreciative to whom the story in
itself is uninteresting, i.e., to whom it would in any case have
been uninteresting, had it not been executed by the instrumen
tality of pictorial art, but simply narrated. A Russian eikon affects
a moujik, and leaves the Western art connoisseur cold. A paint
ing which represents a French victory over Russian troops would
excite and please a French Philistine, even if it were painted in
the style of an Epinal. It is true, no doubt, that there is a sort
of painting which does not seek to seize and awaken visual im
pressions in the spectator, together with the emotions which
they directly arouse, but to express ideas, and in which the
picture is intended to affect the mind, not by itself and its own
consummate art, but by its spiritual significance. But this kind

MYSTICISM 81
of painting has a special name : we call it writing. The signs,
which are meant to have no pictorial, but only symbolic value,
where we turn away from the form in order to dwell upon their
meaning, we call ' letters,' and the art which makes use of such
symbols for the expression of mental processes is not painting,
but poetry. Originally, pictures were actually, no doubt, a
means of symbolizing thoughts, and their value as things of
beauty was considered of secondary importance in relation to
their value as means of expression. On the other hand,
aesthetic impressions still play in these days a subdued accom
paniment to our writing, and a beautiful handwriting, quite
apart from its import, affects us more agreeably than one that is
ugly. At the very beginning of their evolution, however, the
kind of painting which satisfied only aesthetic needs separated
itself from that of writing, which serves to render ideas per
ceptible to the senses. Descriptive drawing became the hiero
glyph, the demotic writing, the letter ; and it was reserved for
Ruskin to be the first to try to annul a distinction which the
scribes of Thebes had learnt to make six thousand years before
him. The pre-Raphaelites, who got all their leading principles from
Ruskin, went further. They misunderstood his misunderstand
ings. He had simply said that defectiveness in form can be
counter-balanced by devotion and noble feeling in the artist.
They, however, raised it to the position of a fundamental
principle, that in order to express devotion and noble feeling,
the artist must be defective in form. Incapable, like all the
weak-minded, of observing any process and of giving a clear
account of it to themselves, they did not distinguish the real
causes of the influence exercised over them by the old masters.
The pictures touched and moved them ; the most striking dis
tinction between such pictures and others, to which they were
indifferent, was their awkward stiffness ; they did not look
further, however, than this awkward stiffness for the source of
what touched and moved them, and imitated with great care
and conscientiousness the bad drawing of the old masters.
Now, the clumsiness of the old masters is certainly touching ;
but why ? Because these Cimabues and Giottos were sincere.
They wished to get closer to nature, and to free themselves from
the thraldom of the Byzantine school, which had become en
tirely unreal. They struggled with vehement endeavour against
the bad habits of hand and eye which they had acquired from
the teachers of their guilds, and the spectacle of such a conflict,
like every violent effort of an individuality which sets itself to
rend fetters of any sort and save its own soul from bondage,
is the most attractive thing possible to observe. The whole
difference between the old masters and the pre-Raphaelites is,
6

82 DEGENERATION
that the former had first to find out how to draw and paint
correctly, while the latter wished to forget it. Hence, where
the former fascinate, the latter must repel. It is the contrast
between the first babbling of a thriving infant and the stammer
ing of a mentally enfeebled gray-beard ; between child-like and
childish. But this retrogression to first beginnings, this affecta
tion of simplicity, this child's play in word and gesture, is a
frequent phenomenon amongst the weak-minded, and we shall
often meet with it among the mystic poets.
According to the doctrine of their master in theory, Ruskin,
the decline of art for pre-Raphaelites begins with Raphael — and
for obvious reasons. To copy Cimabue and Giotto is compara
tively easy. In order to imitate Raphael it is necessary to be
able to draw and paint to perfection, and this was just what the
first members of the Brotherhood could not do. Moreover,
Raphael lived in the most glorious period of the Renaissance.
The rosy dawn of the New Thought shone in his being and
his work. With the liberal-mindedness of an enlightened
Cinquecentist, he no longer painted only religious subjects, but
mythological and historical, or, as the mystics say, profane, sub
jects as well. His paintings appealed not only to the devotion
of faith, but also to the sense of beauty. They are no longer
exclusively divine worship ; consequently, as Ruskin says, and
his disciples repeat, they are devil-worship, and therefore to be
rejected. Finally, it is consistent with the tendency to contra
diction, and to the repudiation of what is manifest, which
governs the thoughts of the weak-minded, that they should
declare as false those tenets in the history of art which others
than themselves deemed the most incontestable. The whole
world for three hundred years had said, ' Raphael is the zenith
of painting.' To this they replied, ' Raphael is the nadir of
painting.' Hence it came about that, in the designation which
they appropriated, they took up a direct allusion to Raphael,
and to no other master or other portion of the history of art.
Consistency of sequence and unity are not to be expected
from mystical thought. It proceeds after its kind in perpetual
self-contradiction. In one place Ruskin says:* 'The cause of
the evil lies in the painter's taking upon him to modify God's
works at his pleasure, casting the shadow of himself on all he
sees. Every alteration of the features of nature has its origin
either in powerless indolence or blind audacity.' Thus the
painter should reproduce the phenomenon exactly as he sees it,
and not suffer himself to make the smallest alteration in it.
And a few pages further on :f ' There is an ideal form of every
herb, flower, and tree ; it is that form to which every individual
of the species has a tendency to attain, freed from the influence
* Ruskin, op. cit., p. 24. ¦)• Ibid., p. 26.

MYSTICISM 83
of accident or disease.' And, he continues, to recognise and to
reproduce this ideal form is the one great task of the painter.
That one of these propositions completely nullifies the other
it is hardly necessary to indicate. The ' ideal form ' which every
phenomenon strives after does not stand before the bodily eyes
of the painter. He reads it, according to some preconceived
notion, into the phenomenon. He has to deal with individual
forms which, through ' accident or disease,' have diverged from
the ' ideal form.' In order to bring them back in painting to
their ideal form, he must alter the object given by nature.
Ruskin demands that he should do this, but at the same time
says that every alteration is an act of ' powerless indolence or
blind audacity.' Naturally, only one of these mutually exclusive
statements can be true. Unquestionably it is the former. The
' ideal form ' is an assumption, not a perception. The separation
of the essential from the accidental, in the phenomenon, is an
abstraction — the work of reason, not of the eye or aesthetic
emotion. Now, the subject-matter of painting is the visible, not
the conjectural ; the real, not the possible or probable ; the
concrete, not the abstract. To exclude individual features from
a phenomenon as unessential and accidental, and to retain others
as intrinsic and necessary, is to reduce it to an abstract idea.
The work of art, however, is not to abstract, but to individualize.
Firstly, because abstraction presupposes an idea of the law
which determines the phenomenon, because this idea may be
erroneous, because it changes with the ruling scientific theories
of the day, whereas the painter does not reproduce changing
scientific theories, but impressions of sense. Secondly, because
the abstraction rouses the working of thought, and not emotion,
while the task of art is to excite emotion.
Nevertheless, the pre-Raphaelites had no eye for these con
tradictions, and followed blindly all Ruskin's injunctions. They
typified the human form, but they rendered all accessories truth
fully, and had neither 'the blind audacity nor powerless in
dolence' to change any of them. They painted with the
greatest precision the landscape in which their figures stood,
and the objects with which they were surrounded. The botanist
can determine every kind of grass and flower painted ; the
cabinet-maker can recognise the joining and glueing in every
footstool, the kind of wood and varnish in the furniture. More
over, this conscientious distinctness is just the same in the
foreground as in the extreme background, where, according to
the laws of optics, things should be scarcely perceptible.
This uniformly clear reproduction of all the phenomena in
the field of vision is the pictorial expression of the incapacity
for attention. In intellection, attention suppresses a portion of
that which is presented to consciousness (through association or

84 DEGENERATION
perception), and suffers only a dominant group of the latter to
remain. In sight, attention suppresses a portion of the
phenomena in the field of vision in order distinctly to perceive
only that part which the eye can focus. To look at a thing
is to see one object intently, and to disregard others. The
painter must observe if he wishes to make clear to us what
phenomenon has engrossed him, and what his picture is to show
us. If he does not dwell observantly on a definite point in the
field of vision, but represents the whole field of view with the
same proportion of intensity, we cannot divine what he wishes
particularly to tell us, and on what he wishes to direct our
attention. Such a style of painting may be compared to the
disconnected speech of a weak mind, who chatters according to
the current of the association of ideas, wanders in his talk, and
neither knows himself what he wishes to arrive at, nor is able
to make it clear to us ; it is painted drivelling, echolalia of the
brush. But it is just this manner of painting which has gained for
itself an influence on contemporary art. It is the pre-Raphaelite
contribution to its evolution. The non-mystical painters have
also learnt to observe accessories with precision, and to re
produce them faithfully ; but they have prudently avoided fall
ing into the faults of their models, and nullifying the unity of
their work by filling the most distant backgrounds with still life,
painted with painful accuracy. The lawns, flowers and trees,
which they render with botanical accuracy, the geologically
correct rocks, surfaces of soil, and mountain structures, the
distinct patterns of carpets and wall-papers, which we find in
the new pictures, are traceable to Ruskin and the pre-
Raphaelites. These mystics believed themselves to be mentally affiliated
with the Old Masters, because, like the latter, they painted
religious pictures. But in this they deceive themselves. Cimabue,
Giotto and Fra Angelico were no mystics, or, to put it more
precisely, they are to be classed as mystics because of their
ignorance, and not because of organic weakness of mind. The
mediaeval painter, who depicted a religious scene, was convinced
that he was painting something perfectly true. An Annuncia
tion, a Resurrection, an Ascension, an event in the lives of the
saints, a scene of life in paradise or in hell, possessed for him
the same incontestable character of reality as drinking bouts in
a soldier's tavern, or a banquet in a ducal palace. He was a
realist when he was painting the transcendental. To him the
legend of his faith was related as a fact ; he was penetrated with
a sense of its literal truth, and reproduced it exactly as he would
have done any other true story. The spectator approached the
picture with the same conviction. Religious art was the Bible

MYSTICISM 85
of the poor. It had for the mediaeval man the same importance
as the illustrations in the works on the history of civilization,
and on natural science, have in our day. Its duty was to
narrate and to teach, and hence it had to be exact. We know
from the touching stanza of Villon* how the illiterate people of
the Middle Ages regarded church pictures. The dissolute poet
makes his mother say to the Virgin Mary :
'A pitiful poor woman, shrunk and old,
I am, and nothing learn'd in letter-lore ;
Within my parish-cloister I behold
A painted Heaven where harps and lutes adore,
And eke an Hell whose damned folk seethe full sore :
One bringeth fear, the other joy to me.
That joy, great Goddess, make thou mine to be —
Thou of whom all must ask it even as I ;
And that which faith desires, that let it see,
For in this faith I choose to live and die.'
With this sober faith a mystic mode of painting would be quite
incompatible. The painter then avoided all that was obscure
or mysterious ; he did not paint nebulous dreams and moods,
but positive records. He had to convince others, and could do
so, because he was convinced himself.
It was quite otherwise with the pre-Raphaelites. They did
not paint sober visions, but emotions. They therefore intro
duced into their pictures mysterious allusions and obscure
symbols, which have nothing to do with the reproduction of
visible reality. I need cite only one example — Holman Hunt's
Shadow of the Cross. In this picture Christ is standing in the
Oriental attitude of prayer with outstretched arms, and the
shadow of his body, falling on the ground, shows the form of a
cross. Here we have a most instructive pattern of the processes
of mystic thought. Holman Hunt imagines Christ in prayer.
Through the association of ideas there awakes in him
simultaneously the mental image of Christ's subsequent death
* ' Ballade que Villon feit a la requeste de sa mere pour
prier Nostre Dame.
' Femme je suis povrette et ancienne.
Que riens ne scay, oncques lettres ne leuz,
Au Monstier voy (dont suis parroissienne)
Paradis painct, ou sont harpes et luz,
Et ung enfer, ou damnez sont boulluz,
L'ung me faict paour, l'autre joye et liesse,
La joye avoir faictz moy (haulte deesse)
A qui pecheurs doivent tous recourir
Combley de foy, sans faincte ne paresse,
En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir.'
It is significant that the pre-Raphaelite Rossetti has translated this very
poem of Villon, His Mother's Service to Our Lady. Poems, p. 180.

B6 DEGENERATION
on the cross. He wants, by the instrumentality of painting, to
make the association of these ideas visible. And hence he lets
the living Christ throw a shadow which assumes the form of a
cross, thus foretelling the fate of the Saviour, as if some
mysterious, incomprehensible power had so posed his body
with respect to the rays of the sun that a wondrous annuncia
tion of his destiny must needs write itself on the floor. _ The
invention is completely absurd. It would have been childish
trifling if Christ had drawn his sublime death of sacrifice,
whether in jest or in vanity, in anticipation, by his shadow on
the ground. Neither would the shadow-picture have had any
object, for no contemporary of Christ's would have understood
the significance of the shadowed cross before he had suffered
death by crucifixion. In Holman Hunt's consciousness, how
ever, emotion simultaneously awakened the form of the praying
Christ and of the cross, and he unites both presentations any
how, without regard to their reasonable connection. If an Old
Master had had to paint the same idea, namely, the praying
Christ filled with the presentiment of his impending death, he
would have shown us in the picture a realistic Christ in prayer,
and in a corner an equally realistic crucifixion ; but he would
never have sought to blend both these different scenes into a
single one by a shadowy connection. This is the difference
between the religious painting of the strong healthy believer
and of the emotional degenerate mind.
In the course of time the pre-Raphaelites laid aside many of
their early extravagances. Millais and Holman Hunt no longer
practise the affectation of wilfully bad drawing and of childish
babbling in imitation of Giotto's language. They have only
retained, of the leading principles of the school, the careful
reproduction of the unessential and the painting of the idea. A
benevolent critic, Edward Rod,* says of them : ' They were
themselves writers, and their painting is literature.' This speech
is still applicable to the school.
A few of the earliest pre-Raphaelites have understood it.
They have recognised in time that they had mistaken their
vocation, and have gone over, from a style of painting which was
merely thought-writing, to genuine writing. The most notable
among them is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who, though born in
England, was the son of an Italian Carbonaro, and a scholar of
Dante. His fatlier gave him the name of the great poet at his
entrance into the world, and this expressive baptismal name
became a constant suggestion, which Rossetti felt, and has,
perhaps half unconsciously, admitted. f He is the most instruc
tive example of the often-quoted assertion of Balzac, of the
* Edward Rod, Etudes sur le XIX. Steele. Paris et Lausanne, 1888, p. 89.
f Rossetti, Poems, p. 277.

MYSTICISM 87
determining influence of a name on the development and destiny
of its bearer. Rossetti's whole poetical feeling was rooted in
Dante. His theory of life bears an indistinct cast of that of the
Florentine. Through all his ideas there runs a reminiscence,
faint or strong, of the Divina Commedia or the Vita Nuova.
The analysis of one of his most celebrated poems, The Blessed
Damozel, will show this parasitic battening on the body of
Dante, and at the same time disclose some of the most char
acteristic peculiarities of the mental working of a mystic's brain.
The first strophe runs thus :
' The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven ;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even ;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.'
The whole of this description of a lost love, who looks down
upon him from a heaven imagined as a palace, with paradisiacal
decorations, isa reflection of Dante's Paradiso (Canto iii.), where
the Blessed Virgin speaks to the poet from the moon. We
even find details repeated, e.g., the deep and still waters (. . . ' ver
per acque nitide e tranquille Non si profonde, che i fondi sien
persi . . .'). The ' lilies in her hand ' he gets from the Old
Masters, yet even here there is a slight ring of the morning
greeting from the Purgatorio (Canto xxx.), ' Manibus 0 date tilia
plenis' He designates his love by the Anglo-Norman word
'damozel.' By this means he makes any clear outlines in the
idea of a girl or lady artificially blurred, and shrouds the distinct
picture in a veil of clouds. By the word 'girl' we should just
think of a girl and nothing else. ' Damozel ' awakens in the
consciousness of the English reader obscure ideas of slim, noble
ladies in the tapestries of old castles, of haughty Norman
knights in mail, of something remote, ancient, half forgotten ;
' damozel ' carries back the contemporary beloved into the
mysterious depths of the Middle Ages, and spiritualizes her into
the enchanted figure of a ballad. This one word awakens all
the crepuscular moods which the body of romantic poets and
authors have bequeathed as a residuum in the soul of the
contemporary reader. In the hand of the ' damozel ' Rossetti
places three lilies, round her head he weaves seven stars. These
numbers are, of course, not accidental. From the oldest times
they have been reckoned as mysterious and holy. The ' three '
and the ' seven ' are allusions to something unknown, and of
deep meaning, which the intuitive reader may try to understand.
It must not be said that my criticism of the means by which
Rossetti seeks to express his own dreamy states of mind, and to
arouse similar states in the reader, applies equally to all lyrics

88 DEGENERATION
and poetry generally, and that I condemn the latter when I
adduce the former as the emanations of the mystic's weakness
of mind. All poetry no doubt has this peculiarity, that it makes
use of words intended not only to arouse the definite ideas which
they connote, but also to awaken emotions that shall vibrate in
consciousness. But the procedure of a healthy-minded poet is
altogether different from that of a weak-minded mystic. The
suggestive word employed by the former has in itself an
intelligible meaning, but besides this it is adapted to excite
emotions in every healthy-minded man ; and finally the emotions
excited have all of them reference to the subject of the poem.
One example will make this clear. Uhland sings the Praise of
Spring in these words :
' Saatengriin, Veilchenduft,
Lerchenwirbel, Amselschlag
Sonnenregen, linde Luft
Wenn ich solche Worte singe,
Braucht es dann noch grosse Dinge,
Dich zu preisen, Friihlingstag?'*
Each word of the first three lines contains a positive idea. Each
of them awakens glad feelings in a man of natural sentiment.
These feelings, taken together, produce the mood with which
the awakening of spring fills the soul, to induce which was
precisely the intention of the poet. When, on the other hand,
Rossetti interweaves the mystical numbers ' three ' and ' seven '
in the description of his 'damozel,' these numbers signify
nothing in themselves ; moreover, they will call up no emotion
at all in an intellectually healthy reader, who does not believe
in mystical numbers ; but even in the case of the degenerate
and hysterical reader, on whom the cabbala makes impression,
the emotions excited by the sacred numbers will not involve a
reference to the subject of the poem, viz., the apparition of one
loved and lost, but at best will call up a general emotional
consciousness, which may perhaps tell in a remote way to the
advantage of the ' damozel.'
But to continue the analysis of the poem. To the maiden in
bliss it appears that she has been a singer in God's choir for
only one day ; to him who is left behind this one day has been
actually a matter of ten years. ' To one it is ten years of years.'
This computation is thoroughly mystical. It means, that is
absolutely nothing. Perhaps Rossetti imagined that there may
* ' The springing green, the violet's scent,
The trill of lark, the blackbird's note,
Sunshowers soft, and balmy breeze :
If I sing such words as these,
Needs there any grander thing
To praise thee with, O day of spring?'

MYSTICISM 89
exist a higher unity to which the single year may stand as one
day does to a year ; that therefore 365 years would constitute a
sort of higher order of year. The words ' year of years ' there
fore signified 365 years. But as Rossetti- portrays this thought
vaguely and imperfectly, he is far from expressing it as intel
ligibly as this. ' It was the rampart of God's house
That she was standing on ;
By God built over the sheer depth
The which is space begun ;
So high that, looking downward, thence
She scarce could see the sun.
' It lies in heaven, across the flood
Of ether, as a bridge.
Beneath, the tides of day and night
With flame and darkness ridge
The void, as low as where this earth
Spins like a fretful midge.
' Heard hardly, some of her new friends,
Amid their loving games,
Spake evermore among themselves
Their virginal chaste names,
And the souls mounting up to God
Went by her like thin flames.
' From the fixed place of Heaven she saw
Time like a pulse shake fierce
Through all the worlds. . . .'
I leave it to the reader to imagine all the details of this descrip
tion and unite them into one complete picture. If he fail in
this in spite of honest exertion, let him comfort himself by
saying that the fault is not his, but Rossetti's.
The damozel begins to speak. She wishes that her beloved
were already with her. For come he will.
' " When round his head the aureole clings,
And he is clothed in white,
I'll take his hand and go with him
To the deep wells of light.
We will step down as to a stream.
And bathe there in God's sight."'
It is to be observed how, in the midst of the turgid stream of
these transcendental senseless modes of speech, the idea of
bathing together takes a definite shape. Mystical reverie never
fails to be accompanied by sensuality.
' " We two,'' she said, " will seek the groves
Where the Lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies —
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret, and Rosalys." '

90 DEGENERATION
The enumeration of these five feminine names, occupying two
lines of the stanza, is a method of versification characteristic of
the mystic. Here the word ceases to be the symbol of a
distinct presentation or concept, and sinks into a meaningless
vocal sound, intended only to awaken divers agreeable emotions
through association of ideas. In this case the five names arouse
gliding shadowy ideas of beautiful young maidens, 'Rosalys'
those of roses and lilies as well ; and the two verses together
diffuse a glamour of faerie, as if one were roaming at ease in a
garden of flowers, where between lilies and roses slender white
and rosy maidens pace to and fro.
The maiden in paradise goes on picturing to herself the union
with her beloved, and then : ' she cast her arms along
The golden barriers,
And laid her face between her hands
And wept — I heard her tears.'
These tears are incomprehensible. The blessed maiden after
her death lives in the highest bliss, in a golden palace, in the
presence of God and the Blessed Virgin. What pains her now ?
That her beloved is not yet with her? Ten years of mortal
men are to her as a single day. Even if it be her beloved's
destiny to live to be a very old man, she will at most have to
wait only five or six of her days until he appears at her side,
and after this tiny span of time there blossoms for them both an
eternity of joy. It is not, therefore, obvious why she is dis
tressed and sheds tears. This can only be attributed to the
bewildered thoughts of the mystic poet. He imagines to him
self a life of happiness after death, but at the same time there
dawn in his consciousness dim pictures of the annihilation of
individuality, and of final separation through death, and those
painful feelings are excited which we are accustomed to associate
with ideas of death, decay, and separation from all we love.
Hence it is that he comes to close an ecstatic hymn of immor
tality with tears, which have a meaning only if one does not
believe in the continuation of life after death. In other respects
also there are contradictions in the poem which show that
Rossetti had not formed any one of his ideas so clearly as to
exclude the opposite and incompatible. Thus, at one time the
dead are dressed in white, and adorned with a galaxy of stars ;
they appear in pairs and call each other by caressing names ;
they must also be thought of as resembling human beings in
appearance, while on another occasion their souls are ' thin
flames ' which rustle past the damozel. Every single idea in
the poem, when we try soberly to follow it out, infallibly takes
refuge after this manner in darkness and intangibility.

MYSTICISM
In the ' Divine Comedy,' echoes of which are ever humming in
Rossetti's soul, we find nothing of this kind. This was because
Dante, like the Old Masters, was a mystic from ignorance, not
from the weak-mindedness of degeneration. The raw material of
his thought, the store of facts with which he worked, was false,
but the use his mind made of it was true and consistent. All
his ideas were clear, homogeneous, and free from internal con
tradictions. His hell, his purgatory, his paradise, he built up
on the science of his times, which based its knowledge of the
world exclusively on dogmatic theology. Dante was familiar
with the system of his contemporary, Thomas Aquinas (he was
nine years old when the Doctor Angelicus died), and permeated
by it. To the first readers of the Inferno the poem must have
appeared at least as well founded on fact and as convincing as,
let us say, Hackel's Natural History of Creation does to the
public of to-day. In coming centuries our ideas of an atom as
merely a centre of force, of the disposition of atoms in the
molecule of an organic combination, of ether and its vibrations,
will perhaps be discerned to be just as much poetical dreams as
the ideas of the Middle Ages concerning the abode of the souls of
the dead appear to us. But that is no reason why anyone should
claim the right to designate Helmholtz or William Thompson
as mystics, because they base their work upon those notions
which even to their minds do not to-day represent anything
definite. For the same reason no one ought to call Dante a
mystic like a Rossetti. Rossetti's Blessed Damozel is not based
upon the scientific knowledge of his time, but upon a mist of
undeveloped germs of ideas in constant mutual strifes Dante
followed the realities of the world with the keenly penetrating
eyes of an observer, and bore with him its image down to his
hell. Rossetti is not in a condition to understand, or even to see
the real, because he is incapable of the necessary attention ; and
since he feels this weakness he persuades himself, in conformity
with human habit, that he does not wish to do what in reality
he cannot do. ' What is it to me,' he once said* ' whether
the earth revolves around the sun or the sun around the earth ?'
To him it is of no importance, because he is incapable of under
standing it.
It is, of course, impossible to go so deeply into all Rossetti's
poems as into the Blessed Damozel ; but it is also unnecessary,
since we should everywhere meet with the same mixture of
transcendentalism and sensuality, the same shadowy ideation,
the same setiseless combinations of mutually incompatible ideas.
Reference, however, must be made to some of the peculiarities
of the poet, because they characterize the brain-work of weak
degenerate minds. * Rod, op. cit., p. 67.

92 DEGENERATION
The first thing that strikes us is his predilection for refrains.
The refrain is an excellent artistic medium for the purpose of
unveiling the state of a soul under the influence of a strong
emotion. It is natural that, to the lover yearning for his
beloved, the recurring idea of her should be ever thrusting itself
among all the other thoughts in which he temporarily indulges.
It is equally comprehensible that the unhappy being who is
made miserable by thoughts of suicide should be unable to
free himself from an idea which is in harmony with his mental
condition, say of an Armensiinderblum, or ' flower of the doomed
soul,' which he sees when walking at night. (See Heine's poem,
Am Kreuzweg wird begraben, in which the line die Armensiin
derblum is repeated at the end of both strophes with peculiarly
thrilling effect.)
Rossetti's refrains, however, are different from this, which is
natural and intelligible. They have nothing to do with the
emotion or action expressed by the poem. They are alien
to the circle of ideas belonging to the poem. In a word,
they possess the character of an obsession, which the patient
cannot suppress, although he recognises that they are in no
rational connection with the intellectual content of his conscious
ness. In the poem Troy Town it is related how Helen, long
before Paris had carried her off, kneels in the temple of Venus
at Sparta, and, drunken with the luxuriant beauty of her own
body, fervently implores the Goddess of Love to send her a man
panting for love, where or whoever he might be, to whom she
might give herself. The absurdity of this fundamental idea it
is sufficient to indicate in passing. The first strophe runs thus :
' Heaven-born Helen, Sparta's Queen
(O Troy town 1),
Had two breasts of heavenly sheen,
The sun and the moon ofthe heart's desire.
All Love's lordship lay between.
(O Troy's down,
Tall Troy's on fire !)
' Helen knelt at Venus' shrine
(O Troy town !)
Saying, "A little gift is mine,
A Utile gift for a heart's desire.
Hear me speak and make me a sign 1
(O Troy's down,
Tall Troy's on fire !)" '*
And thus through fourteen strophes there constantly recurs,
after the first line, ' O Troy town !' at the end of the third line,'
' heart's desire '; and after the fourth line, ' O Troy's down, tall
Troy's on fire !' It is easy to discern what Rossetti wishes.' In
him there is repeated the mental process which we recognised
* Poems, p. 1 6.

MYSTICISM 93
in Holman Hunt's picture, The Shadow of the Cross. As by
association of ideas, in thinking of Helen at Sparta, he hits
upon the idea of the subsequent fate of Troy, so shall the
reader, while he sees the young queen in Sparta intoxicated by
her own beauty, be simultaneously presented with the picture
of the yet distant tragical consequences of her longing desire.
But he dees not seek to connect these two trains of thought in a
rational way. He is ever muttering as he goes, monotonously
as in a litany, the mysterious invocations to Troy, while he is
relating the visit to the temple of Venus at Sparta. Sollier*
remarks this peculiarity among persons of feeble intellect.
' Idiots,' he says, ' insert words which have absolutely no con
nection with the object.' And further on : ' Among idiots
constant repetition [le rabdehage] grows into a veritable tic'
In another very famous poem, Eden Bower,f which treats of
the pre-Adamite woman Lilith, her lover the serpent of Eden,
and her revenge on Adam, the litany refrain of ' Eden Bower's
in flower,' and ' And O the Bower and the hour,' are introduced
alternately after the first line in forty-nine strophes. As a
matter of course, between these absolutely senseless phrases and
the strophe which each interrupts, there is not the remotest con
nection. They are strung together without any reference to
their meaning, but only because they rhyme. It is a startling
example of echolalia.
We frequently find this peculiarity of the weak and deranged
mind, i.e., echolalia, in Rossetti. Here are a few proofs :
' So wet she comes to wed ' (Stratton Water).
Here the sound ' wed ' has called up the sound ' wet.' In the
poem My Sister's Sleep, in one place where the moon is spoken
of, it is said : ' The hollow halo it was in
Was like an icy crystal cup.'
It is stark nonsense to qualify a plane surface such as a halo
by the adjective ' hollow.' The adjective and noun mutually
exclude each other, but the rhyming assonance has joined
'hollow' to ' halo.' With this we may also compare the line :
' Yet both were ours, but hours will come and go '
(A New Year's Burden),
and ' Forgot it not, nay, but got it not ' (Beauty).
* Sollier, Psychologie de V Idiot et de V Imbecile, p. 184. See also Lom
broso, The Man of Genius (Contemporary Science S.ries), London, 1891,
p. 216. A special characteristic found in literary mattoids, and also, as we
have already seen, in the insane, is that of repeating some words or phrases
hundreds of times in the same page. Thus, in one of Passanante's chapters
the word riprovate (blame) occurs about 143 times.
f Poems, p. 31.

94 DEGENERATION
Many of Rossetti's poems consist of the stringing together of
wholly disconnected words, and to mystic readers these
absurdities seem naturally to have the deepest meaning. I
should like to cite but one example. The second strophe of
the Song of the Bower says :
* . . . My heart, when it flies to thy bower,
What does it find there that knows it again ?
There it must droop like a shower-beaten flower,
Red at the rent core and dark with the rain.
Ah ! yet what shelter is still shed above it —
What waters still image its leaves torn apart ?
Thy soul is the shade that clings round it to love it,
And tears are its mirror deep down in thy heart.'*
The peculiarity of such series of words is, that each single
word has an emotional meaning of its own (such as ' heart,'
' bower,' ' flies,' ' droop,' 'flower,' 'rent/ 'dark,' 'lone,' 'tears,'
etc.), and that they follow each other with a cradled rhythm
,and ear-soothing rhyme. Hence they easily arouse in the
emotional and inattentive reader a general emotion, as does a
succession of musical tones in a minor key. And the reader
fancies that he understands the strophe, while he, as a matter
of fact, only interprets his own emotion according to his own
level of culture, his character, and his recollections of what he
has read.
Besides Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it has been customary to
include Swinburne and Morris among the pre-Raphaelite poets.
But the similarity between these two and the head of the school
is remote. Swinburne is, in Magnan's phrase, a ' higher de
generate,' while Rossetti should be counted among Sollier's
imbeciles. Swinburne is not so emotional as Rossetti, but he
stands on a much higher mental plane. His thought is false
and frequently delirious, but he has thoughts, and they are clear
and connected. He is mystical, but his mysticism partakes
more of the depraved and the criminal than of the paradisiacal
and divine. He is the first representative of ' Diabolism ' in
English poetry. This is because he has been influenced, not
only by Rossetti, but also and especially by Baudelaire. Like
all 'degenerates,' he is extraordinarily susceptible to suggestion,
and, consciously or unconsciously, he has imitated, one after
another, all the strongly-marked poetic geniuses that have come
under his notice, He was an echo of Rossetti and Baudelaire,
as he was of Gautier and Victor Hugo, and in his poems it is
possible to trace the course of his reading step by step.
Completely Rossettian, for example, is A Christmas Carol .*f
* Poems, p. 247.
t Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads. London : Chatto
and Windus, 1889, p. 247.

MYSTICISM 9;.
'Three damsels in the queen's chamber,
The queen's mouth was most fair ;
She spake a word of God's mother,
As the combs went in her hair.
" Mary that is of might,
Bring us to thy Son's sight." '
Here we find a mystical content united to the antiquarianism
and childish phraseology of genuine pre-Raphaelitism. The
Masque of Queen Bersabe is worked out on the same model,
being an imitation of the mediaeval miracle-play, with its Latin
stage directions and puppet-theatre style. This, in its turn, has
become the model of many French poems, in which there is
only a babbling and stammering and a crawling on all fours, as
if in a nursery.
Where he walks in Baudelaire's footsteps, Swinburne tries to
distort his face to a diabolical mien, and makes the woman say
(in Anactoria) to the other unnaturally loved woman:
' I would my love could kill thee. I am satiated
With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead.
I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,
And no mouth but some serpent's found thee sweet.
I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,
Intense device, and superflux of pain ;
. . . O ! that I
Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die —
Die of thy pain and my delight, and be
Mixed with thy blood and molten unto thee.'
Or, when he curses and reviles, as in Before Dawn*;
' To say of shame — what is it ?
Of virtue — we can miss it,
Of sin — we can but kiss it,
And it's no longer sin.'
One poem deserves a more detailed analysis, because it con
tains unmistakably the germ of the later ' symbolism,' and is an
instructive example of this form of mysticism. The poem is
The King's Daughter. It is a sort of ballad, which in fourteen
four-lined stanzas relates a fairy story about the ten daughters of
a king, of whom one was preferred before the remaining nine, was
beautifully dressed, pampered with the most costly food, slept
in a soft bed, and received the attentions of a handsome prince,
while her sisters remained neglected ; but instead of finding
happiness at the prince's side, she became deeply wretched and
wished she were dead. In the first and third lines of every
stanza the story is rehearsed. The second line speaks of a
mythical mill-stream, which comes into the ballad one knows
not how, and which always, by some mysterious influence,
symbolically reflects all the changes that take place as the

96 DEGENERATION
action of the ballad progresses ; while the fourth line contains
a litany-like exclamation, which likewise makes a running refer
ence to the particular stage reached in the narrative.
' We were ten maidens in the green corn,
Small red leaves in the mill-water •
Fairer maidens never were born,
Apples of gold for the King's daughter.
' We were ten maidens by a well-head.
Small white birds in the mill-water :
Sweeter maidens never were wed,
Rings of red for the King's daughter.'
In the following stanzas the admirable qualities of each ofthe
ten princesses are portrayed, and the symbolical intermediate
lines run thus :
' Seeds of wheat in the mill-water — . . . White bread and brown for the
King's daughter — . . . Fair green weed in the mill-water — . . . White
wine and red for the King's daughter — . . . Fair thin reeds in the mill-
water — . . . Honey in the comb for the King's daughter — . . . Fallen flowers
in the mill-water — . . . Golden gloves for the King's daughter — . . . Fallen
fruit in the mill-water — . . . Golden sleeves for the King's daughter — . . .'
The King's son then comes, chooses the one princess and
disdains the other nine. The symbolical lines point out the
contrast between the brilliant fate of the chosen one and the
gloomy destiny of the despised sisters :
' A little wind in the mill-water ; A crown of red for the King's daughter — ¦
A little rain in the mill-water ; A bed of yellow straw for all the rest ; A
bed of gold for the King's daughter — Rain that rains in the mill-water ;
A comb of yellow shell for all the rest, — A comb of gold for the King's
daughter— Wind and hail in the mill-water ; A grass girdle for all the rest,
A girdle of arms for the King's daughter— Snow that snows in the mill-
water ; Nine little kisses for all the rest, An hundredfold for the King's
daughter.' The King's daughter thus appears to be very fortunate, and to
be envied by her nine sisters. But this happiness is only on the
surface, for the poem now suddenly changes :
' Broken boats in the mill-water ;
Golden gilts for all the rest,
Sorrow of heart for the King's daughter.
' " Ye'll make a grave for my fair body,"
Running rain in the mill-water ;
" And ye'll streek my brother at the side of me,"
The pains of hell for the King's daughter.'
What has brought about this change in her fate the poet
purposely leaves obscure. Perhaps he wishes to have us under
stand that the King's son has no right to sue for her hand, being
her brother, and that the chosen princess for shame at the
incest perishes. This would be in keeping with Swinburne's

MYSTICISM 97
childish devilry. But I am not dwelling on this aspect of the
poem, but on its symbolism.
It is psychologically justifiable that a subjective connection
should be set up between our states of mind for the time being
and phenomena ; that we should perceive in the external world
a reflection of our moods. If the external world shows a well-
marked emotional character, it awakens in us the mood corre
sponding to it ; and conversely, if we are under the influence of
some pronounced feeling, we notice, in accordance with the
mechanism of attention, only those features of nature which are
in harmony with our mood, which intensify and sustain it, while
the opposing phenomena we neither observe nor even perceive.
A gloomy ravine overhung by a cloudy sky makes us sad.
This is one form of associating our humour with the outer world.
But if we from any cause are already sad, we find some corre
sponding sadness in all the scenes around us — in the streets of
the metropolis ragged, starved-looking children, thin, miserably
kept cab-horses, a blind beggar-woman ; in the woods withered,
mouldering leaves, poisonous fungi, slimy slugs, etc. If we are
joyous, we see just the same objects, but take no notice of them,
perceiving only beside them, in the street, a wedding procession,
a fresh young maiden with a basket of cherries on her arm,
gaily-coloured placards, a funny fat man with his hat on the
back of his head ; in the woods, birds flitting by, dancing butter
flies, little white anemones, etc. Here we have the other form
of that association. The poet has a perfect right to make use
of both these forms. If Heine sings :
' Es ragt ins Meer der Runenstein,
Da sitz ich mit meinen Traumen ;
Es pfeift der Wind, die Mdwen schrein,
Die Wellen, die wandern und schaumen.
" Ich habe geliebt manch schdnes Kind
Und manchen guten Gesellen —
Wo sind sie hin ? — Es pfeift der Wind,
Es schaumen und wandern die Wellen,'*
he brings his own mournful, melancholy frame of mind with
him. He bemoans the fleetingness of man's life, the imperma-
nence of the feelings, the shadowy passing by and away of
beloved companions. In this state he looks out over the sea
from the shore where he sits, and perceives only those objects
* ' The Runic stone stands out in the sea,
There sit I with my dreams,
'Mid whistling winds and wailing gulls,
And wandering, foaming waves.
I have loved many a lovely child,
And many a good comrade — ¦
Where are they gone ? The wind whistles,
The waves wander foaming on.'

98 DEGENERATION
that are in keeping with his humour and give it embodiment :
the driving gust of wind, the hurrying gulls, now seen, now lost
to sight, the rolling in and trackless ebbing of the surf. These
features of an ocean scene become symbols of what is passing
through the poet's mind, and this symbolism is sound and
founded on the laws of thought.
Swinburne's symbolism is of quite another kind. He does
not let the external world express a mood, but makes it tell a
story ; he changes its appearance according to the character of
the event he is describing. Like an orchestra, it accompanies
all events which somewhere are taking place. Here nature is
no longer a white wall on which, as in a game of shadows, the
varied visions of the soul are thrown ; but a living, thinking
being, which follows the sinful love-romance with the same
tense sympathy as the poet, and which, with its own media,
expresses just as much as he does — complacency, delight, or
sorrow — at every chapter of the story. This is a purely delirious
idea. It corresponds in art and poetry to hallucination in mental
disease. It is a form of mysticism, which is met with in all the
degenerate. Just as in Swinburne the mill-water drives 'small
red leaves,' and, what is certainly more curious, 'little white
birds,' when everything is going on well, and on the other hand
is lashed by snow and hail, and tosses shattered boats about, if
things take an adverse turn ; so, in Zola's Assommoir, the drain
from a dyeing factory carries off fluid of a rosy or golden hue
on days of happiness, but a black or gray-coloured stream if the
fates of Gervaise and Lantier grow dark with tragedy. Ibsen,
too, in his Ghosts, makes it rain in torrents if Frau Alving and
her son are in sore trouble, while the sunshine breaks forth just
as the catastrophe is about to occur. Ibsen, moreover, goes
farther in this hallucinatory symbolism than the others, since
with him Nature not only plays an active part, but shows scornful
malice — she not only furnishes an expressive accompaniment
to the events, but makes merry over them.
William Morris is intellectually far more healthy than Rossetti
and Swinburne. His deviations from mental equilibrium betray
themselves, not through mysticism, but through a want of
individuality, and an overweening tendency to imitation. His
affectation consists in mediaevalism. He calls himself a pupil
of Chaucer.* He artlessly copies whole stanzas also from
Dante, e.g., the well-known Francesca and Paolo episode from
Canto V. of the Inferno, when he writes in his Guenevere :
* William Morris, Poems (Tauchnitz edition), p. 169 :
' And if it hap that . . .
My master, Geoffrey Chaucer, thou do meet,
Then speak . . . the words :
" 0 master 1 O thou great of heart and tongue !'"...

MYSTICISM 99
' In that garden fair
Came Lancelot walking ; this is true, the kiss
Wherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day,
I scarce dare talk of the remembered bliss.'
Morris persuades himself that he is a wandering minstrel of the
thirteenth or fourteenth century, and takes much trouble to look
at things in such a way, and express them in such language, as
would have befitted a real contemporary of Chaucer. Beyond
this poetical ventriloquism, so to speak, with which he seeks so
to alter the sound of his voice that it may appear to come from
far away to our ear, there are not many features of degeneracy
in him to notice. But he sometimes falls into outspoken
echolalia, e.g., in a stanza of the Earthly Paradise :
' Of Margaret sitting glorious there,
In glory of gold and glory of hair,
And glory of glorious face most fair' —
where ' glory ' and ' glorious ' are repeated five times in three
lines. His emotional activity in recent years has made him an
adherent of a vague socialism, consisting chiefly of love and
pity for his fellow-men, and which has an odd effect when ex
pressed artistically in the language of the old ballads.
The pre-Raphaelites have for twenty years exercised a great
influence on the rising generation of English poets. All the
hysterical and degenerate have sung with Rossetti of ' damozels '
and of the Virgin Mary, have with Swinburne eulogized unnatural
license, crime, hell, and the devil. They have, with Morris,
mangled language in bardic strains, and in the manner of the
Canterbury Tales ; and if the whole of English poetry is not
to-day unmitigatedly pre-Raphaelite, it is due merely to the
fortunate accident that, contemporaneously with the pre-
Raphaelites, so sound a poet as Tennyson has lived and worked.
The official honours bestowed on him as Poet Laureate, his
unexampled success among readers, pointed him out to a part
at least of the petty strugglers and aspirants as worthy of
imitation, and so it comes about that among the chorus of the
lily-bearing mystics there are also heard other street-singers who
follow the poet of the Idylls ofthe King.
In its further development pre-Raphaelitism in England
degenerated into ' aestheticism,' and in France into 'symbolism.'
With both of these tendencies we must deal more fully.

100 DEGENERATION CHAPTER III.
SYMBOLISM.
A SIMILAR phenomenon to that which we observed in the case
of the pre-Raphaelites is afforded by the French Symbolists.
We see a number of young men assemble for the purpose of
founding a school. It assumes a special title, but in spite of all
sorts of incoherent cackle and subsequent attempts at mystifica
tion it has, beyond this name, no kind of general artistic principle
or clear aesthetic ideal. It only follows the tacit, but definitely
recognisable, aim of making a noise in the world, and by attract
ing the attention of men through its extravagances, of attaining
celebrity and profit, and the gratification of all the desires and
conceits agitating the envious souls of these filibusters of fame.
Shortly after 1880 there was, in the Quartier Latin in Paris, a
group of literary aspirants, all about the same age, who used to
meet in an underground cafe at the Quai St. Michel, and, while
drinking beer, smoking and quibbling late into the night, or
early hours of the morning, abused in a scurrilous manner the
well-known and successful authors of the day, while boasting
of their own capacity, as yet unrevealed to the world.
The greatest talkers among them were Emile Goudeau, a
chatterbox unknown save as the author of a few silly satirical
verses; Maurice Rollinat, the author of Les Nevroses ; and
Edmond Haraucourt, who new stands in the front rank of
French mystics. They called themselves the ' Hydropaths,' an
entirely meaningless word, which evidently arose out of an
indistinct reminiscence of both ' hydrotherapy ' and ' neuropath,'
and which was probably intended, in the characteristic vague
ness of the mystic thought of the weak-minded, to express only
the general idea of people whose health is not satisfactory, who
are ailing and under treatment. In any case there is, in the
self-chosen name, a suggestion of shattered nervous vitality
vaguely felt and admitted. The group, moreover, owned a
weekly paper Lutece, which ceased after a few issues.*
About 1884 the society left their paternal pot-house, and
pitched their tent in the Cafe" Francois I., Boulevard St. Michel.
This cafe' attained a high renown. It was the cradle of
Symbolism. It is still the temple of a few ambitious youths,
who hope, by joining the Symbolist school, to acquire that
* A history of the commencement of this society has been written by one
of the members, Mathias Morhardt. See ' Les Symboliques ' Nouvelle
Revue du 15 Fe*vrier, 1892, p. 765.

MYSTICISM 101
advancement which they could not expect from their own
abilities. It is, too, the Kaaba to which all foreign imbeciles
make a pilgrimage, those, that is, who have heard of the new
Parisian tendency, and wish to become initiated into its teachings
and mysteries. A few of the Hydropaths did not join in the
change of quarters, and their places were taken by fresh
auxiliaries — Jean Mor^as, Laurent Tailhade, Charles Morice,
etc. These dropped the old name, and were known for a short
time as the ' Decadents.' This had been applied to them by a
critic in derision, but just as the ' Beggars ' of the Netherlands
proudly and truculently appropriated the appellation bestowed
in contempt and mockery, so the ' Decadents ' stuck in their
hats the insult, which had been cast in their faces, as a sign of
mutiny against criticism. Soon, however, these original guests
of the Frangois I. became tired of their name, and Moreas
invented for them the designation of ' Symbolistes,' under which
they became generally known, while a special smaller group,
who had separated themselves from the Symbolists, continued
to retain the title of ' Decadents.'
The Symbolists are a remarkable example of that group-
forming tendency which we have learnt to know as a peculiarity
of ' degenerates.' They had in common all the signs of de
generacy and imbecility : overweening vanity and self-conceit,
strong emotionalism, confused disconnected thoughts, garrulity
(the ' logorrhcea ' of mental therapeutics), and complete incapa
city for serious sustained work. Several of them had had a
secondary education, others even less. All of them were pro
foundly ignorant, and being unable, through weakness of will
and inability to pay attention, to learn anything systematically,
they persuaded themselves, in accordance with a well-known
psychological law, that they despised all positive knowledge, and
held that only dreams and divinings, only 'intuitions,' were worthy
of human beings. A few of them, like Mor6as and Guaita, who
afterwards became a ' magian,' read in a desultory fashion all
sorts of books which chanced to fall into their hands at the bou-
quinistes of the Quais, and delivered themselves of the snatched
fruits of their reading in grandiloquent and mysterious phrases
before their comrades. Their listeners thereupon imagined that
they had indulged in an exhausting amount of study, and in this
way they acquired that intellectual lumber which they peddled
out in such an ostentatious display in their articles and pam
phlets, and in which the mentally sane reader, to his amused
astonishment, meets with the names of Schopenhauer, Darwin,
Taine, Renan, Shelley and Goethe ; names employed to label the
shapeless, unrecognisable rubbish-heaps of a mental dustbin, filled
with raw scraps of uncomprehended and insolently mutilated
propositions and fragments of thought, dishonestly extracted

T02 DEGENERATION
and appropriated. This ignorance on the part of the Symbolists,
and their childish flaunting of a pretended culture, are openly
admitted by one of them. ' Very few of these young men,' says
Charles Morice * ' have any exact knowledge of the tenets of
religion or philosophy. From the expressions used in the Church
services, however, they retain some fine terms, such as " mon
strance," •' ciborium," etc. ; several have preserved from Spencer,
Mill, Shopenhauer (sic I), Comte,,Darwin, a few technical terms.
Few are those who know deeply what they talk about, or those
who do not try to make a show and parade of their manner of
speaking, which has no other merit than that of being a conceit
in syllables.' (Charles Morice naturally is responsible for this
last unmeaning phrase, not I.)
The original guests of the Francois I. made their appearance
at one o'clock in the day at their cate, and remained there till
dinner-time. Immediately after that meal they returned, and
did not leave their headquarters till long after midnight. Of
course none of the Symbolists had any known occupation.
These ' degenerates ' are no more capable of regularly fulfilling
any duty than they are of methodical learning. If this organic
deficiency appears in a man of the lower classes, he becomes a
vagabond ; in a woman of that class it leads to prostitution ; in
one belonging to the upper classes it takes the form of artistic
and literary drivel. The German popular mind betrays a deep
intuition of the true connection of things in inventing such a
word as 'day-thief (Tagedieb) for such aesthetic loafers. Pro
fessional thieving and the unconquerable propensity to busy,
gossiping, officious idleness flow from the same source, to wit,
inborn weakness of brain.
It is true that the boon companions of the cafe are not con
scious of their mentally-crippled condition. They find pet names
and graceful appellations for their inability to submit themselves
to any sort of discipline, and to devote persistent concentration
and attention to any sort of work. They call it ' the artist
nature,' ' genius roaming at large,' * a soaring above the low
miasma of the commonplace.' They ridicule the dull Philistine,
who, like the horse turning a winch, performs mechanically a
regular amount of work ; they despise the narrow-minded loons
who demand that a man should either pursue a circumscribed
bourgeois trade or possess an officially acknowledged status, and
who profoundly distrust impecuniary professions. They glory
in roving folk who wander about singing and carelessly begging,
and they hold up as their ideal the ' commoner of air,' who
bathes in morning dew, sleeps under flowers, and gets his clothing
from the same firm as the lilies of the field ir the Gospel.
Richepin's La Chanson des Gueux is the most typical expression
* Charles Morice, La Littdrature de tout-d-Vheure. Paris, 1889, p. 274.

MYSTICISM 103
of this theory of life. Baumbach's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
and Spielmannslieder are analogous specimens in German litera
ture, but of a less pronounced character. Schiller's Pegasus im
Joch seems to be pulling at the same rope as these haters of the
work society expects of them, but it is only apparently so. Our
great poet sides not with the impotent sluggard, but with that
overflowing energy which would fain do greater things than the
work of an office-boy or a night-watchman.
Moreover, the pseudo-artistic loafer, in spite of his imbecility
and self-esteem, cannot fail to perceive that his mode of life
runs contrary to the laws on which the structure of society and
civilization are based, and he feels the need of justifying himself
in his own eyes. This he does by investing with a high signi
ficance the dreams and chatter over which he wastes his time,
calculated to arouse in him the illusion that they rival in value
the most serious productions. ' The fact is, you see,' says M.
St^phane Mallarmd, ' that a fine book is the end for which the
world was made.'* Morice complains -j- touchingly that the
poetic mind ' should be bound to suffer the interruption of a
twenty-eight days' army drill between the two halves of a verse.'
' The excitement of the streets,' he goes on, ' the jarring of the
Governmental engine, the newspapers, the elections, the change
of the Ministry, have never made so much noise ; the stormy
and turbulent autocracy of trade has suppressed the love of the
beautiful in the thoughts of the multitude, and industry has
killed as much silence as politics might still have permitted to
survive.' In fact, what are all these nothings — commerce,
manufactures, politics, administration — against the immense im
portance of a hemistich ?
The drivelling of the Symbolists was not entirely lost in the
atmosphere of their cafe, like the smoke of their pipes and
cigarettes. A certain amount of it was perpetuated, and ap
peared in the Revue Independante, the Revue Contemporaine, and
other fugitive periodicals, which served as organs to the round
table of the Francois I. These little journals and the books
published by the Symbolists were not at first noticed outside the
cafe\ Then it happened that chroniqueurs of the Boulevard
papers, into whose hands these writings chanced to fall, devoted
an article to them on days when ' copy ' was scanty, but only to
hold them up to ridicule. That was all the Symbolists wanted.
Mockery or praise mattered little so long as they got noticed.
Now they were in the saddle, and showed at once what un
paralleled circus-riders they were. They themselves used every
effort to get into the larger newspapers, and when one of them
succeeded, like the smith of Juterbock in the familiar fairy tale,
* Jules Huret, Enqutte sur VEvolution littdraire. Paris, 1891, p. 65.
t Charles Morice, op. cit, p. 271.

104 DEGENERATION
in throwing his cap into an editor's office through the crack of
the door incautiously put ajar, he followed it neck and crop,
took possession of the place, and in the twinkling of an eye
transformed it into the citadel of the Symbolist party. In these
tactics everything served their turn — the dried-up scepticism
and apathy of Parisian editors, who take nothing seriously, are
capable neither of enthusiasm nor of repugnance, and only know
the cardinal principle of their business, viz., to make a noise, to
arouse curiosity, to forestall others by bringing out something
new and sensational ; the uncritical gaping attitude of the
public, who repeat in faith all that their newspaper gossips to
them with an air of importance ; the cowardice and cupboard-
love of the critics who, finding themselves confronted by a closed
and numerous band of reckless young men, got nervous at the
sight of their clenched fists and angry threatening glances,
and did not dare to quarrel with them ; the low cunning of
the ambitious, who hoped to make a good bargain if they
speculated on the rise of shares in Symbolism. Thus the very
worst and most despicable characteristics of editors, critics,
aspiring authors, and newspaper readers, co-operated to make
known, and, in part, even famous, the names of the original
habituds of the Francois I., and to awaken the conviction in
very many weak minds of both hemispheres that their tendency
governed the literature of the day, and included all the germs of
the future. This triumph of the Symbolists marks the victory
of the gang over the individual. It proves the superiority of
attack over defence, and the efficacy of mutual-admiration-insur
ance, even in the case of the most beggarly incapacity.
With all their differences, the works of the Symbolists have
two features in common. They are vague often to the point
of being unintelligible, and they are pious. Their vagueness
is only to be expected, after all that has been said here about
the peculiarities of mystic thought. Their piousness has
attained to an importance which makes it necessary to consider
it more in detail.
When, in the last few years, a large number of mysteries,
passion plays, golden legends, and cantatas appeared, when one
dozen after another of new poets and authors, in their first
poems, novels, and treatises, made ardent confessions of faith,
invoked the Virgin Mary, spoke with rapture of the sacrifice of
the Mass, and knelt in fervent prayer, the cry arose amongst
reactionists, who have a vested interest in diffusing a belief in
a reversion of cultured humanity to the mental darkness of the
past : ' Behold, the youth, the hope, the future of the French
people is turning away from science ; " emancipation " is
becoming bankrupt ; souls are opening again to religion, and
the Holy Catholic Church steps anew into its lofty office, as the

MYSTICISM 105
teacher, comforter, and guide of civilized mankind.' The
Symbolistic tendency is designedly called ' neo-Catholic,' and
certain critics pointed to its appearance and success as a
proof that freethought was overthrown by faith. ' Even the
most superficial glance at the state of the world,' writes Edouard
Rod,* ' shows us that we are on all sides in the full swing of
reaction.' And, further, ' I believe in reaction in every sense
of the word. How far this reaction will go is the secret of
to-morrow.' The jubilant heralds of the new reaction, in inquiring into
the cause of this movement, find, with remarkable unanimity,
this answer, viz. : The best and most cultivated minds return to
faith, because they found out that science had deceived them,
and not done for them what it had promised to do. ' The man
of this century,' says M. Melchior de Vogue, + ' has acquired
a very excusable confidence in himself. . . . The rational
mechanism of the world has been revealed to him. ... In the
explanation of things the Divine order is wholly eliminated. . . .
Besides, why follow after doubtful causes, when the operations
of the universe and of humanity had become so clear to the
physicist and physiologist? . . . The least wrong God ever
wrought was that of being unnecessary. Great minds assured
us of this, and all mediocre spirits were convinced of it. The
eighteenth century had inaugurated the worship of Reason.
The rapture of that millennium lasted but a moment. Then
came eternal disillusion, the regularly recurring ruin of all that
man had built upon the hollow basis of his reason. . . . He had
to admit that, beyond the circle of acquired truths, the abyss of
ignorance appeared again just as deep, just as disquieting.'
Charles Morice, the theorist and philosopher of the Symbolists,
arraigns Science on almost every page of his book, La Litte'rature
de tout-a-Vhture, for her great and divers sins. ' It is lament
able,' he says in his apocalyptic phraseology,! ' that our learned
men have no idea how, in popularizing science, they were dis
organizing it (?). To entrust principles to inferior memories,
is to expose them to the uncertainty of unauthorized interpre
tations, of erroneous commentaries and heterodox hypotheses.
For the word that the books contain is a dead letter, and the
books themselves may perish, but the impact which they leave
behind them, the breath going forth from them, survives. And
what if they have breathed out storm and unloosed (!) darkness ?
But this is just what all this chaos of vulgarization has as its
most patent result. ... Is not such the natural consequence
of a century of psychological investigation, which was a good
training for the reason, but whose immediate and actual
* Huret, op. cit, p. 14. f Vte E. M. de Vogiie~, op. cit, p. xix et seq.
X Morice, op. cit., pp. 5, 103, 177.

io6 DEGENERATION
consequences must inevitably be weariness, and disgust, ay,
and despair of reason? . . . Science had erased the word
mystery. With the same stroke of the pen she had expunged
the words beauty, truth, joy, humanity. . . . And now mys
ticism takes from Science, the intruder and usurper, not only
all that she had stolen, but something also, it may be, of her
own property. The reaction against the shameless and miser
able negations of scientific literature . . . has taken the form
of an unforeseen poetical restoration of Catholicism.'
Another graphomaniac, the author of that imbecile book,
Rembrandt as Educator, drivels in almost the same way.
' Interest in science, and especially in the once so popular
natural science, has widely diminished of late in the German
world. . . . There has been to a certain extent a surfeit of
induction ; there is a longing for synthesis ; the days of objec
tivity are declining once more to their end, and, in its place,
subjectivity knocks at the door.'*
Edouard Rod**)- says: 'The century has advanced without
keeping all its promises'; and further on he speaks again of
'this ageing and deluded century.'
In a small book, which has become a sort of gospel to
imbeciles and idiots, Le Devoir present, the author, M. Paul
Desjardins,J makes continual attacks on 'so-called scientific
empiricism,' and speaks of the ' negativists, the empiricists, and
the mechanists, whose attention is wholly taken up with physical
and inexorable forces/ boasting of his intention ' to render
invalid the value of the empirical methods.'
Even a serious thinker, M. F. Paulhan,§ in his investigation
of the basis of French neo-mysticism, comes to the conclusion
that natural science has shown itself powerless to satisfy the
needs of mankind. ' We feel ourselves surrounded by a vast
unknown, and demand that at least access to it should be per
mitted to us. Evolution and positivism have blocked the way.
. . . For these reasons evolution could not but show itself
incapable of guiding the mind, even if it left us great thoughts.''
Overwhelming as may appear this unanimity between strong
minds commanding respect and weak graphomaniacs, it does
not, nevertheless, contain the slightest spark of truth. To
assert that the world turns away from science because the
' empirical,' which means the scientific, method of observation
and registration has suffered shipwreck, is either a conscious lie
or shows lack of mental responsibility. A healthy-minded and
honourable man must almost feel ashamed to have still to
* Rembrandt als Erzieher. Leipzig, 1890, p. 2.
f Edouard Rod, Les Iddes morales du Temps prdsent. Paris, 1892, p. 66.
X Paul Desjardins, Le Devoir prdsent. Paris, 1892, pp. 5, 8, 39.
§ F. Paulhan, Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p. 120.

MYSTICISM 107
demonstrate this. In the last ten years, by means of spectrum-
analysis, science has made disclosures in the constitution of the
most distant heavenly bodies, their component matter, their
degree of heat, the speed and direction of their motions ; it has
firmly established the essential unity of all modes of force, and
has made highly probable the unity of all matter ; it is on the
track of the formation and development of chemical elements,
and it has learnt to understand the building up of extremely
intricate organic combinations ; it shows us the relations of
atoms in molecules, and the position of molecules in space ; it
has thrown wonderful light on the conditions of the action of
electricity, and placed this force at the service of mankind ;
it has renewed geology and palaeontology, and disentangled the
concatenation of animal and vegetable forms of life ; it has
newly created biology and embryology, and has explained in a
surprising manner, through the discovery and investigation of
germs, some of the most disquieting mysteries of perpetual
metamorphosis, illness, and death ; it has found or perfected
methods which, like chronography, instantaneous photography,
etc., permit of the analysis and registration of the most fleeting
phenomena, not immediately apprehensible by human sense,
and which promise to become extremely fruitful for the know
ledge of nature. And in the face of such splendid, such over
whelmingly grand results, the enumeration of which could easily
be doubled and trebled, does anyone dare to speak of the
shipwreck of science, and of the incapacity of the empirical
method ?
Science is said not to have kept what she promised. When
has she ever promised anything else than honest and attentive
observation of phenomena and, if possible, establishment of the
conditions under which they occur ? And has she not kept this
promise ? Does she not keep it perpetually ? If anyone has
expected of her that she would explain from one day to
another the whole mechanism of the universe, like a juggler
explains his apparent magic, he has indeed no idea of the true
mission of science. She denies herself all leaps and flights.
She advances step by step. She builds slowly and patiently a
firm bridge out into the Unknown, and can throw no new arch
over the abyss before she has sunk deep the foundations of a
new pier in the depths, and raised it to the right height.
Meanwhile, she asks nothing at all about the first cause of
phenomena, so long as she has so many more proximate causes
to investigate. Many of the most eminent men of science go
so far, indeed, as to assert that the first cause will never become
the object of scientific investigation, and call it, with Herbert
Spencer, 'the Unknowable,' or exclaim despondingly with Du
Bois-Reymond, Ignorabimus. Both of them in this respect are

ic8 DEGENERATION
completely unscientific, and only prove that even clear thinkers
like Spencer, and sober investigators like Du Bois Reymond,
stand yet under the influence of theological dreams. Science can
speak of no Unknowable, since this would presuppose that she
is able to mark exactly the boundaries of the Knowable. This,
however, she cannot do, since every new discovery thrusts back
that boundary. Moreover, the acceptance of an Unknowable
involves the acknowledgment that there is something which we
cannot know. Now, in order to be able seriously to assert the
existence of this Something, either we must have acquired some
knowledge of it, however slight and indistinct, and this, there
fore, would prove that it cannot be unknowable, since we
actually know it, and nothing then would justify us in declaring
beforehand that our present knowledge of it, however little it
may be, will not be extended and deepened ; or else we have no
knowledge, even ofthe minutest character, of the philosopher's
Unknowable, in which case it cannot exist for us. The whole
conception is based upon nothing, and the word is an idle
creation of a dreaming imagination. The same thing can be
said of Ignorabimus. It is the opposite of science. It is not a
correct inference from well-founded premises, it is not the result
of observation, but a mystical prophecy. No one has the right
to make communications with respect to the future as matters
of fact. Science can announce what she knows to-day ; she can
also mark off exactly what she does not know ; but to say what
she will or will not at any time know is not her office.
It is true that whoever asks from Science that she should give
an answer to all the questions of idle and restless minds with
unshaken and audacious certainty must be disappointed by her;
for she will not, and cannot, fulfil his desires. Theology and
metaphysics have an easier task. They devise some fable, and
propound it with overwhelming earnestness. If anyone does
not believe in them, they threaten and insult the intractable
client; but they can prove nothing to him, they cannot force
him to take their chimeras for cash. Theology and meta
physics can never be brought into a dilemma. It costs them
nothing to add to their words more words, to unite to one
voluntary assertion another, and pile up dogma upon dogma.
It will never occur to the serious sound mind, which thirsts after
real knowledge, to seek it from metaphysics or theology. They
appeal only to childish brains, whose desire for knowledge, or,
rather, whose curiosity, is fully satisfied with the cradling croon
of an old wife's tale.
Science does not compete with theology and metaphysics.
If the latter declare themselves able to explain the whole
phenomenon ofthe universe, Science shows that these pretended
explanations are empty chatter. She, for her part, is naturally

MYSTICISM 109
on her guard against putting in the place of a proved absurdity
another absurdity. She says modestly : ' Here we have a fact,
here an assumption, here a conjecture. 'Tis a rogue who gives
more than he has.' If this does not satisfy the neo-Catholics,
they should sit down and themselves investigate, themselves
find out new facts, and help to make clear the weird obscurity
of the phenomenon of the universe. That would be a proof of a
true desire for knowledge. At the table of Science there is
room for all, and every fellow-observer is welcome. But this
does not enter into even the dreams of these poor creatures, who
drivel about the ' bankruptcy of science.' Talk is so much
easier and more comfortable than inquiry and discovery !
True, science tells us nothing about the life after death, of
harp-concerts in Paradise, and of the transformation of stupid
youths and hysterical geese into white-clad angels with rain
bow-coloured wings. It contents itself, in a much more plain
and prosaic manner, with alleviating the existence of mankind
on earth. It lessens the average of mortality, and lengthens the
life of the individual through the suppression of known causes
of disease ; it invents new comforts, and makes easier the
struggle against Nature's destructive powers. The Symbolist,
who is preserved after surgical interference through asepsy from
suppuration, mortification, and death ; who protects himself by
a Chamberland filter from typhus ; who by the careless turning
of a button fills his room with electric light ; who through a
telephone can converse with someone beloved in far-distant
countries, has to thank this alleged bankrupt science for it all,
and not the theology to which he maintains that he wants to
return. The demand that science should give not only true, if limited,
conclusions, and offer not only tangible benefits, but also solve
all enigmas to-day and at once, and make all men omniscient,
happy, and good, is ridiculous. Theology and metaphysics have
never fulfilled this demand. It is simply the intellectual mani
festation of the same foolish conceit, which in material concerns
reveals itself in hankering after pleasure and in shirking work.
The man who has lost his social status, who craves for wine and
women, for idleness and honours, and complains of the consti
tution of society because it offers no satisfaction to his lusts,
is own brother to the Symbolist who demands truth, and
reviles science because it does not hand it to him on a golden
platter. Both betray a similar incapacity to grasp the reality of
things, and to understand that it is not possible to acquire goods
without bodily labour, or truth without mental exertion. The
capable man who wrests her gifts from Nature, the industrious
inquirer who in the sweat of his brow bores into the sources of
knowledge, inspires respect and cordial sympathy. On the other

no DEGENERATION
hand, there can be but little esteem for the discontented idlers
who look for riches from a lucky lottery ticket, or a rich uncle,
and for enlightenment from a revelation which is to come to
them without trouble on their part over the slovenly beer-
drinking at their favourite cafe.
The dunces who abuse science, reproach it also for having
destroyed ideals, and stolen from life all its worth. This accusa
tion is just as absurd as the talk about the bankruptcy of science.
A higher ideal than the increase of general knowledge there
cannot be. What saintly legend is as beautiful as the life of an
inquirer, who spends his existence bending over a microscope,
almost without bodily wants, known and honoured by few,
working only for his own conscience' sake, without any other
ambition than that perhaps one little new fact may be firmly
established, which a more fortunate successor will make use of
in a brilliant synthesis, and insert as a stone in some monument
of natural science ? What religious fable has inspired with a
contempt of death sublimer martyrs than a Gehlen, who sank
down poisoned while preparing the arsenious hydrogen which
he had discovered ; or a Croc^-Spinelli, who was overtaken by
death in an over-rapid ascent of his balloon while observing the
pressure of the atmosphere ; or an Ehrenberg, who became
blind over his life's work ; or a Hyrtl, who almost entirely
destroyed his eyesight by his anatomical corrosive preparations ;
or the doctors, who inoculate themselves with some deadly
disease— not to speak of the innumerable crowd of discoverers
travelling to the North Pole, and to the interior of dark conti
nents ? And did Archimedes really feel his life to be so worth
less when he entreated the pillaging bands of Marcellus, ' Do
not disturb my circles ' ? Genuine healthy poetry has always
recognised this, and finds its most ideal characters, not in a
devotee, who murmurs prayers with drivelling lips, and stares
with distorted eyes at some visual hallucination, but in a
Prometheus and a Faust, who wrestle for science, i.e., for exact
knowledge of nature.
The assertion that science has not kept its promises, and that,
therefore, the rising generation is turning away from it, does not
for a moment resist criticism, and is entirely without foundation.
It is a senseless premise of neo-Catholicism, were the Symbolists
to declare a hundred times over that disgust with science had
made them mystics. The explanations which even a healthy-
minded man makes with respect to the true motives of his
actions are only to be accepted with the most cautious criticism ;
those proffered by the degenerate are completely useless. For
the impulse to act and to think originate, for the degenerate, in
the unconscious, and consciousness finds subsequent, and in some
measure plausible, reasons for the thoughts and deeds, the real

MYSTICISM in
source of which is unknown to itself. Every book on suggestion
gives illustrations of Charcot's typical case : a hysterical female
is sent into hypnotic sleep, and it is suggested to her that on
awaking she is to stab one of the doctors present. She is then
awakened. She grasps a knife and makes for her appointed
victim. The blade is wrenched from her, and she is asked why
she wishes to murder the doctor. She answers without hesita
tion, ' Because he has done me an injury.' Note that she
had seen him that day for the first time in her life. This person
felt when in a waking condition the impulse to kill the doctor.
Her consciousness had no presentiment that this impulse had
been suggested to her in a hypnotic state. Consciousness
knows that a murder is never committed without some motive.
Forced to find a motive for the attempted murder, consciousness
falls back upon the only one reasonably possible under the cir
cumstances, and fancies that it got hold of the idea of murder in
order to avenge some wrong.
The brothers Janet* offer, as an explanation of this psycho
logical phenomenon, the hypothesis of dual personality. ' Every
person consists of two personalities, one conscious and- one
unconscious. Among healthy persons both are alike complete,
and both in equilibrium. In the hysteric they are unequal, and
out of equilibrium. One of the two personalities, usually the
conscious, is incomplete, the other remaining perfect.' The
conscious personality has the thankless task of inventing
reasons for the actions of the unconscious. It resembles the
familiar game where one person makes movements and another
says words in keeping with them. In the degenerate with dis
turbed equilibrium consciousness has to play the part of an ape
like mother finding excuses for the stupid and naughty tricks of
a spoiled child. The unconscious personality commits follies and
evil deeds, and the conscious, standing powerless by, and unable
to hinder it, seeks to palliate them by all sorts of pretexts.
The cause of the neo-Catholic movement, then, is not to be
sought in any objection felt by younger minds to science, or in
their having any complaint to make against it. A De Vogii^, a
Rod, a Desjardins, a Paulhan, who impute such a basis to the
mysticism of the Symbolists, arbitrarily attribute to it an origin
which it never had. It is due solely and alone to the degener
ate condition of its inventors. Neo-Catholicism is rooted in
emotivity and mysticism, both of these being the most frequent
and most distinctive stigmata of the degenerate.
That the mysticism of the degenerate, even in France, the
* Pierre Janet, ' Les Actes inconscients et le De*doublement de la Per
sonality,' Revue philosophique, December, 1886. Paul Janet, ' L'HysteVie et
1'Hypnotismed'apreslaTheorie de la double Personnalite",' Revue scientifique,
1888, ler vol., p. 616.

112 DEGENERATION
land of Voltaire, has frequently taken the form of religious
enthusiasm might at first seem strange, but will be understood if
we consider the political and social circumstances of the French
people during the last decade.
The great Revolution proclaimed three ideals : Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity. Fraternity is a harmless word which
has no real meaning, and therefore disturbs nobody. Liberty,
to the upper classes, is certainly unpleasant, and they lament
greatly over the sovereignty of the people and universal suffrage,
but still they bear, without too much complaint, a state of things
which, after all, is sufficiently mitigated by a prying administra
tion, police supervision, militarism, and gendarmerie, and which
will always be sufficient to keep the mob in leash. But equality
to those in possession is an insufferable abomination. It is the
one thing won by the great Revolution, which has outlasted all
subsequent changes in the form of government, and has remained
alive in the French people. The Frenchman does not know
much about fraternity ; his liberty in many ways has a muzzle
as its emblem ; but his equality he possesses as a matter of fact,
and to it he holds firmly. The lowest vagabond, the bully of
the capital, the rag-picker, the hostler, believes that he is quite
as good as the duke, and says so to his face without the smallest
hesitation if occasion arises. The reasons of the Frenchman's
fanaticism for equality are not particularly elevated. The feel
ing does not spring from a proud, manly consciousness and the
knowledge of his own worth, but from low envy and malicious
intolerance. There shall be nothing above the dead level !
There shall be nothing better, nothing more beautiful or even
more striking, than the average vulgarity ! The upper classes
struggle against this rage for equalization with passionate
vehemence, especially and precisely those who have reached
their high position through the great Revolution.
The grandchildren of the rural serfs, who plundered and
destroyed the country seats of noblemen, basely murdered the
inmates, and seized upon their lands ; the descendants of town
grocers and cobblers, who waxed rich as politicians of street and
club, as speculators in national property and assignats, and as
swindlers in army purveyance, do not want to become identified
with the mob. They want to form a privileged class. They
want to be recognised as belonging to a more honourable caste.
They sought, for this purpose, a distinguishing mark, which
would make them at once conspicuous as members of a select
class, and they found it in belonging to the Church.
This choice is quite intelligible. The mass of the people in
France, especially in towns, is sceptical, and the aristocracy of
the aneien regime, who in the eighteenth century bragged about
free thought, had come out of the deluge of 1789 as very pious

MYSTICISM 113
persons, comprehending or divining the inner connection between
all the old ideas and emblems of the Faith, of the Monarchy,
and of feudal nobility. Hence, through their clericalism, the
parvenus at once established a contrast between themselves and
the multitude from whom they wanted to keep distinct, and a
resemblance with the class into which they would like to smuggle
or thrust themselves.
Experience teaches that the instinct of preservation is often
the worst adviser in positions of danger. The man who cannot
swim, falling into the water, involuntarily throws up his arms,
and thus infallibly lets his head be submerged and himself be
drowned ; whereas his mouth and nose would remain above
water if he held his arms and hands quietly under the surface.
The bad rider, who feels his seat insecure, usually draws up
his legs, and then comes the certainty of a fall ; whereas he
would probably be able to preserve his equilibrium if he left his
legs outstretched. Thus the French bourgeoisie, who knew that
they had snatched for themselves the fruits of the great upheaval,
and let the Fourth Estate, who alone had made the Revolution,
come out of it empty-handed, chose the worst means for retain
ing their unjustly-acquired possessions and privileges, and for
escaping unnatural equalization when they made use of their
clericalism for the establishment of their social status. They
alienated, in consequence, the wisest, strongest, and most culti
vated minds, and drove over to socialism many young men who,
though intellectually radical, were yet economically conservative,
and little in favour of equality, and who would have become
a strong defence for a free-thinking bourgeoisie, but who felt
that socialism, however radical its economic doctrines and
impossible its theories of equality, represented emancipation.
But I have not to judge here whether the religious mimicry
of the French bourgeoisie, which was to make them resemble
the old nobility, exerts the protection expected of it or not ; I
only set down the fact of this mimicry. It is a necessary con
sequence that all the rich and snobbish parvenus send their
sons to the Jesuit middle and high schools. To be educated
by the Jesuits is regarded as a sign of caste, very much as is
membership of the Jockey Club. The old pupils of the Jesuits
form a ' black freemasonry,' which zealously advances their pro
teges in every career, marries them to heiresses, hurries to their
assistance in misfortune, hushes up their sins, stifles scandal, etc.
It is the Jesuits who for the last decade have made it their care
to inculcate their own habits of thinking into the rich and
high-born youth of France entrusted to them. These youths
brought brains of hereditary deficiency, and therefore mystically
disposed, into the clerical schools, and these then gave to the
mystic thoughts of the degenerate pupils a religious content.

1I4 DEGENERATION
This is not an arbitrary assumption, but a well-founded fact.
Charles Morice, the aesthetic theorist and philosopher of the
Symbolists, received his education from the Jesuits, according
to the testimony of his friends.* So did Louis le Cardonnel,
Henri de Regnier, and others. The Jesuits invented the phrase
' bankruptcy of science,' and their pupils repeat it after them,
because it includes a plausible explanation of their pietistic
mooning, the real organic causes of which are unknpwn to them,
and for that matter would not be understood if they were
known. ' I return to faith, because science does not satisfy me,'
is a possible statement. It is even a superior thing to say, since
it presupposes a thirst for truth and a noble interest in great
questions. On the contrary, a man will hardly be willing to
confess, ' I am an enthusiastic admirer of the Trinity and the
Holy Virgin because I am degenerate, and my brain is in
capable of attention and clear thought.'
That the Jesuitical argument as reported by MM. de Vogiie\
Rod, etc., can have found credit beyond clerical circles and
degenerate youth, that the half-educated are heard repeating
to-day, ' Science is conquered, the future belongs to religion,' is
consistent with the mental peculiarities of the million. They
never have recourse to facts, but repeat the ready-made pro
positions with which they have been prompted. If they would
have regard to facts, they would know that the number of
faculties, teachers and students of natural science, of scientific
periodicals and books, of their subscribers and readers, of
laboratories, scientific societies and reports to the academies
increases year by year. It can be shown by figures that science
does not lose, but continually gains ground.*f* But the million
does not care about exact statistics. In France it accepts with
out resistance the suggestion, that science is retreating before
religion, from a few newspapers, written mainly for clubmen
and gilded courtezans, into the columns of which the pupils of
the clerical schools have found an entrance. Of science itself,
of its hypotheses, methods, and results, they have never known
anything. Science was at one time the fashion. The daily
press of that date said, ' We live in a scientific age' ; the news
of the day reported the travels and marriages of scientists ; the
feuilleton-novels contained witty allusions to Darwin ; the in
ventors of elegant walking-sticks and perfumes called their pro
ductions ' Evolution Essence ' or ' Selection Canes ' ; those who
* Morhardt, op. cit, p. 769.
f See the Catalogue of Scientific Papers compiled and published by the
Royal Society. The first series of this catalogue, covering the time from 1800
to 1863, comprises six volumes ; the second, dealing with the decade from
1864 to 1873, comprises two volumes, equivalent to at least three of the first
series (1047 and 1310 pages); of the third series (1874 to 1883) only one
volume has been issued as yet, but it promises to outrun the second by at
least one half.

MYSTICISM US
affected culture took themselves seriously for the pioneers of
progress and enlightenment. To-day those social circles which
set the fashions, and the papers which seek to please these
circles, decree that, not science is chic, but faith, and now the
paragraphs of the boulevard papers relate small piquant sayings
of preachers ; in the feuilleton-novels there are quotations from
the Imitation of Christ ; inventors bring out richly-mounted
prie-dieus and choice rosaries, and the Philistine feels with
deep emotion the miraculous flower of faith springing up and
blossoming in his heart. Of real disciples science has scarcely
lost one. It is only natural, on the contrary, that the plebs of
the salons, to whom it has never been more than a fashion, should
turn their backs on it at the mere command of a tailor or a modiste.
Thus much on the neo-Catholicism which, partly for party
reasons, partly from ignorance, partly from snobbishness, is
mistaken for a serious intellectual movement of the times.
The pretension of Symbolism to be, not only a return to
faith, but a new theory of art and poetry, is what we must now
proceed to test.
If we wish to know at the outset what Symbolists understand
by symbol and symbolism, we i,hall meet with the same difficulties
we encountered in determining the precise meaning of the name
pre-Raphaelitism, and for the same reason, viz., because the
inventors of these appellations understood by them hundreds of
different mutually contradictory, indefinite things, or simply
nothing at all. A skilled and sagacious journalist, Jules Huret,*
instituted an inquiry about the new literary movement in France,
and from its leading representatives acquired information, by
which he has furnished us with a trustworthy knowledge of the
meaning which they connect, or pretend to connect, with the
expressions and phraseology of their programme. I will here
adduce some of these utterances and declarations. They will
not tell us what Symbolism is. But they may afford us some
insight into symbolist methods of thought.
M. Stdphane Mallarmd, whose leadership of the Symbolist
band is least disputed among the disciples, expresses himself as
follows : ' To name an object means to suppress three-quarters
of the pleasure of a poem — i.e., of the happiness which consists
in gradually divining it. Our dream should be to suggest the
object. The symbol is the perfected use of this mystery, viz.,
to conjure up an object gradually in order to show the condition
of a soul ; or, conversely, to choose an object, and out of it to
reveal a state of the soul by a series of interpretations.'
If the reader does not at once understand this combination of
vague words, he need not stop to solve them. Later on I will
translate the stammerings of this weak mind into the speech of
sound men.
* Jules Huret, Enquite sur V Evolution littdraire. Paris, 1891.

116 DEGENERATION
M. Paul Verlaine, another high-priest of the sect, expresses
himself as follows : ' It was I who, in the year 1885, laid claim
to the name of Symbolist. The Parnassians, and most of the
romanticists, in a certain sense lacked symbols. . . . Thence
errors of local colouring in history, the shrinking up of the myth
through false philosophical interpretations, thought without the
discernment of analogies, the anecdote emptied of feeling.'
Let us listen to a few second-rate poets of the group. ' I
declare art,' says M. Paul Adam, 'to be the enshrining of a
dogma in a symbol. It is a means of making a system prevail,
and of bringing truths to the light of day.' M. R£my de Gour-
mont confesses honestly : ' I cannot unveil the hidden meaning
of the word " symbolism," since I am neither a theorist nor a
magician.' And M. Saint-Pol-Roux-le-Magnifique utters this
profound warning : ' Let us take care ! Symbolism carried to
excess leads to nombrilisme, and to a morbid mechanism. . . .
This symbolism is to some extent a parody of mysticism. . . .
Pure symbolism is an anomaly in this remarkable century, re
markable for militant activities. Let us view this transitional
art as a clever trick played upon naturalism, and as a precursor
of the poetry of to-morrow.'
We may expect from the theorists and philosophers of the
group more exhaustive information concerning their methods
and aims. Accordingly, M. Charles Morice instructs us how
' the symbol is the combination of the objects which have
aroused our sensations, with our souls, in a fiction [fiction].
The means is suggestion ; it is a question of giving people a
remembrance of something which they have never seen.' And
M. Gustav Kahn says : ' For me personally, symbolic art con
sists in recording in a cycle of works, as completely as possible,
the modifications and variations of the mind of the poet, who is
inspired by an aim which he has determined.'
In Germany there have already been found some imbeciles
and idiots, some victims of hysteria and graphomania, who affirm
that they understand this twaddle, and who develop it further in
lectures, newspaper articles and books. The cultured German
Philistine, who from of old has had preached to him contempt
for ' platitude,' i.e., for healthy common-sense, and admiration
for 'deep meaning,' which is as a rule only the futile bubbling of
soft and addled brains incapable of thought, becomes visibly
uneasy, and begins to inquire if there may not really be some
thing behind these senseless series of words. In France people
have not been caught on the limed twigs of these poor fools and
cold-blooded jesters, but have considered Symbolism to be what
in fact it is, madness or humbug. We shall meet with these
words in the writings of noted representatives of all shades of
literary thought.
'The Symbolists!' exclaims M. Jules Lemaitre, 'there are

MYSTICISM 117
none. . . . They themselves do not know what they are or
what they want. There is something stirring and heaving under
the earth, but unable to break through. Do you understand ?
When they have painfully produced something, they would like
to build formulae and theories around it, but fail in doing so,
because they do not possess the necessary strength of mind. . . .
They are jesters with a certain amount of sincerity — that I
grant them — but nevertheless jesters.' M. Josdphin Peladan
describes them as ' whimsical pyrotechnists of metrics and
glossaries, who combine in order to get on, and give themselves
odd names in order to get known.' M. Jules Bois is much more
forcible : ' Disconnected action, confused clamour, such are the
Symbolists. Cacophony of savages who have been turning over
the leaves of an English grammar, or a glossary of obsolete
words. If they have ever known anything, they pretend to
have forgotten it. Indistinct, faulty, obscure, they are never
theless as solemn as augurs. . . . You, decadent Symbolists,
you deceive us with childish and necromantic formulae.' Ver-
laine himself, the co-founder of Symbolism, in a moment of
sincerity, calls his followers a * flat-footed horde, each with his
own banner, on which is inscribed Reclame !' M. Henri de
Regnier says apologetically : ' They feel the need of gathering
round a common flag, so that they may fight more effectually
against the contented.' M. Zola speaks of them as ' a swarm of
sharks who, not being able to swallow us, devour each other.'
M. Joseph Caraguel designates symbolical literature as ' a
literature of whining, of babbling, of empty brains, a literature
of Sudanese Griots [minstrels].' Edmond Haraucourt plainly
discerns the aims of the Symbolists : ' They are discontented,
and in a hurry. They are the Boulangists of literature. We
must live ! We would take a place in the world, become
notorious or notable. We beat wildly on a drum which is not
even a kettledrum. . . . Their true symbol is " Goods by ex
press." Everyone goes by express train. Their destination
— Fame.' M. Pierre Quillard thinks that under the title of
Symbolists ' poets of rare gifts and unmitigated simpletons
have been arbitrarily included.' And M. Gabriel Vicaire sees
in the manifestoes of Symbolists 'nothing but school-boy jokes.',.
Finally, M. Laurent Tailhade, one of the leading Symbolists,
divulges the secret: 'I have never attached any other value to
this performance than that of a transient amusement. We
took in the credulous judgment of a few literary beginners with
the joke of coloured vowels, Theban love, Schopenhauerism,
and other pranks, which have since made their way in the
world.' Quite so ; just, as we have already said, in Germany.
To abuse, however, is not to explain, and although summary
justice is fit in the case of deliberate swindlers, who, like
quack-dentists, play the savage in order to entice money from

118 DEGENERATION
market-folk, yet anger and ridicule are out of place in dealing
with honest imbeciles. They are diseased or crippled, and as
such deserve only pity. Their infirmities must be disclosed,
but severity of treatment has been abolished even in lunatic
asylums since Pinel's time.
The Symbolists, so far as they are honestly degenerate and
imbecile, can think only in a mystical, i.e., in a confused way.
The unknown is to them more powerful than the known ; the
activity of the organic nerves preponderates over that of the
cerebral cortex ; their emotions overrule their ideas. When
persons of this kind have poetic and artistic instincts, they
naturally want to give expression to their own mental state.
They cannot make use of definite words of clear import, for
their own consciousness holds no clearly-defined univocal ideas
which could be embodied in such words. They choose, there
fore, vague equivocal words, because these best conform to their
ambiguous and equivocal ideas. The more indefinite, the more
obscure a word is, so much the better does it suit the purpose of
the imbecile, and it is notorious that among the insane this
habit goes so far that, to express their ideas, which have become
quite formless, they invent new words, which are no longer
merely obscure, but devoid of all meaning. We have already
seen that, for the typical degenerate, reality has no significance.
On this point I will only remind the reader of the previously
cited utterances of D. G. Rossetti, Morice, etc. Clear speech
serves the purpose of communication of the actual. It has,
therefore, no value in the eyes of a degenerate subject. He
prizes that language alone which does not force him to follow
the speaker attentively, but allows him to indulge without
restraint in the meanderings of his own reveries, just as his own
language does not aim at the communication of definite
thought, but is only intended to give a pale reflection of the
twilight of his own ideas. That is what M. Mallarmd means
when he says: 'To name an object means to suppress three
quarters of the pleasure. . . . Our dream should be to suggest
the object'
Moreover, the thought of a healthy brain has a flow which is
regulated by the laws of logic and the supervision of attention.
It takes for its content a definite object, manipulates and ex
hausts it. The healthy man can tell what he thinks, and his
telling has a beginning and an end. The mystic imbecile thinks
merely according to the laws of association, and without the red
thread of attention. He has fugitive ideation. He can never
state accurately what he is thinking about ; he can only denote
the emotion which at the moment controls his consciousness.
He can only say in general, ' I am sad/ ' I am merry,' ' I am
fond,' ' I am afraid.' His mind is filled with evanescent, floating,
cloudy ideas, which take their hue from the reigning emotion, as

MYSTICISM 119
the vapour hovering above a crater flames red from the glow at
the bottom of the volcanic caldron. When he poetizes, there
fore, he will never develop a logical train of thought, but will
seek by means of obscure words of distinctly emotional colouring
to represent a feeling, a mood. What he prizes in poetical
works is not a clear narrative, the exposition of a definite
thought, but only the reflected image of a mood, which awakens
in him a similar, but not necessarily the same, mood. The de
generate are well aware of this difference between a work which
expresses strong mental labour and one in which merely emo
tionally coloured fugitive ideation ebbs and flows ; and they
eagerly ask for a distinguishing name for that kind of poetry of
which alone they have any understanding. In France they have
found this designation in the word 'Symbolism.' The explana
tions which the Symbolists themselves give of their cognomen
appear nonsensical ; but the psychologist gathers clearly from
their babbling and stammering that under the name 'symbol'
they understand a word (or series of words) expressing, not a
fact of the external world, or of conscious thought, but an am
biguous glimmer of an idea, which does not force the reader to
think, but allows him to dream, and hence brings about no in
tellectual processes, but only moods.
The great poet of the Symbolists, their most admired model,
from whom, according to their unanimous testimony, they have
received the strongest inspiration, is Paul Verlaine. In this man
we find, in astonishing completeness, all the physical and mental
marks of degeneration, and no author known to me answers so
exactly, trait for trait, to the descriptions of the degenerate given
hy the clinicists — his personal appearance, the history of his life,
his intellect, his world of ideas and modes of expression. M. Jules
Huret* gives the following account of Verlaine's physical ap
pearance : ' His face, like that of a wicked angel grown old,
with a thin, untrimmed beard, and abrupt (?) nose ; his bushy,
bristling eyebrows, resembling bearded wheat, hiding deep-set
green eyes ; his wholly bald and huge long skull, misshapen by
enigmatic bumps — all these give to his physiognomy a contra
dictory appearance of stubborn asceticism and cyclopean appe
tites.' As appears in these ludicrously laboured and, in part,
entirely senseless expressions, even the most unscientific observer
has been struck with what Huret calls his ' enigmatic bumps.'
If we look at the portrait of the poet, by Eugene Carriere, of
which a photograph serves as frontispiece in the Select Poems of
Verlaine,f and still more at that by M. Aman-Jean, exhibited
in the Champs de Mars Salon in 1892, we instantly remark the
great asymmetry of the head, which Lombroso j has pointed out
* Huret, op. cit, p. 6s.
f Paul Verlaine, Choix de Poesies. Paris, 1891.
t Lombroso, L' Uomo delinquente, p. 184.

I20 DEGENERATION
among degenerates, and the Mongolian physiognomy indicated
by the projecting cheek-bones, obliquely placed eyes, and thin
beard, which the same investigator* looks upon as signs of
degeneration. Verlaine's life is enveloped in mystery, but it is known, from
his own r avowals, that he passed two years in prison. In the
poem Ecrit en 1875*7 he narrates in detail, not only without
the least shame, but with gay unconcern, nay, even with boast
ing, that he was a true professional criminal :
' J'ai naguere habite* le meilleur des chateaux
Dans le plus fin pays d'eau vive et de coteaux :
Quatre tours s'elevaient sur le front d'autant d'ailes,
Et j'ai longtemps, longtemps habite* l'une d'elles . . .
Une chambre bien close, une table, une chaise,
Un lit strict ou l'on put dormir juste a son aise, . . .
Tel fut mon lot durant les longs mois Ik passes . . .
. . . J'dtais heureux avec ma vie,
Reconnaissant de biens que nul, certes, n'envie.'
And in the poem Un Conte he says :
. . . ' ce grand pe*cheur eut des conduites
Folles a ce point d'en devenir trop maladroites,
Si bien que les tribunaux s'en mirent — et les suites !
Et le voyez-vous dans la plus etroite des boites ?
Cellules ! prison humanitaires ! II faut taire
Votre horreur fadasse et ce progres d'hypocrisie' . . .
It is now known that a crime of a peculiarly revolting character
led to his punishment ; and this is not surprising, since the special
characteristic of his degeneration is a madly inordinate eroticism.
He is perpetually thinking of lewdness, and lascivious images fill
his mind continually. I have no wish to quote passages in which
this unhappy slave of his morbidly excited senses has expressed
the loathsome condition of his mind, but the reader who wishes
to become acquainted with them may be referred to the poems
Les Coquillages, Fille, and Auburn.% Sexual license is not his only
vice. He is also a dipsomaniac, and (as may be expected in a de
generate subject) a paroxysmal dipsomaniac, who, awakened from
his debauch, is seized with deep disgust of the alcoholic poison
and of himself, and speaks of ' les breuvages ex^cr^s ' (La Bonne
Chanson), but succumbs to the temptation at the next oppor
tunity. Moral insanity, however, is not present in Verlaine. He sins
through irresistible impulse. He is an Impulsivist. The differ
ence between these two forms of degeneration lies in the fact
that the morally insane does not look upon his crimes as bad, but
commits them with the same unconcern as a sane man would
* Lombroso, op. cit, p. 276. f Verlaine, op. cit, p. 272.
% Verlaine, op. cit., pp. 72, 31 5, 3 1 7.

MYSTICISM 121
perform any ordinary or virtuous act, and after his misdeed is
quite contented with himself ; whereas the Impulsivist retains a
full consciousness of the baseness of his deeds, hopelessly fights
against his impulse until he can no longer resist it, and after the
performance* suffers the most terrible remorse and despair. It is
only an Impulsivist who speaks in execration of himself as a
reprobate (' Un seul Pervers,' in Sagesse), or strikes the dejected
note which Verlaine touches in the first four sonnets of Sagesse :
' Hdmmes durs ! Vie atroce et laide d'ici bas !
Ah ! que du moins, loin des baisers et des combats,
Quelque chose demeure un peu sur la montagne,
' Quelque chose du cceur enfantin et subtil,
Bonte, respect ! car qu'est-ce qui nous accompagne,
Et vraiment quand la mort viendra que reste-1-il ? . . .
' Ferme les yeux, pauvre ame, et rentre sur-le-champ :
Une tentation des pires. Fuis l'infame . . .
Si la vieille folie dtait encore en route ?
' Ces souvenirs, va-t-il falloir les retuer ?
Un assaut furieux, le supreme, sans doute !
O va prier contre Forage, va piier ! . . .
' C'est vers le Moyen-Age dnorme et delicat
Qu'il faudrait que mon cceur en panne naviguat,
Loin de nos jours d'esprit charnel et de chair triste . . .
' Et la que j'eusse part . . .
.... k la chose vitale,
Et que je fusse un saint, actes bons, pensers droits,
' Haute theologie et solide morale,
Guide* par la folie unique de la Croix
Sur tes ailes de pierre, 6 folie Cathe*drale !'
This example serves to show that there is not wanting in
Verlaine that religious fervour which usually accompanies
morbidly intensified eroticism. This finds a much more decided
expression in several other poems. I should wish to quote only
from two.**)* ' O mon Dieu, vous m'avez blesse* d'amour,
Et la blessure est encore vibrante,
O mon Dieu, vous m'avez blessd a'amour.
' O mon Dieu, votre crainte m'a frappe*,
Et la brulure est encore Ik qui tonne
O mon Dieu, votre crainte m'a frappe*.
(Observe the mode of expression and the constant repetitions.)
' O mon Dieu, j'ai connu que tout est vii,
Et votre gloire en moi s'est installe'e,
O mon Dieu, j'ai connu que tout est vii.
* Shortly, but not immediately after, the immediate result being a sense of
great relief and satisfaction.
f Verlaine, op. cit, pp. 175, 178.

122 DEGENERATION
' Noyez mon ime aux flots de votre vin,
Fondez ma vie au pain de votre table,
Noyez mon ame aux flots de votre vin.
' Voici mon sang que je n'ai pas verse*,
Voici ma chair indignee de souffrance,
Voici mon sang que je n'ai pas verse*.'
Then follows the ecstatic enumeration of all the parts of his
body, which he offers up in sacrifice to God ; and the poem
closes thus : 'Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,
Et que je suis plus pauvre que personne,
Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela,
Mais ce que j'ai, mon Dieu, je vous le donne.'
He invokes the Virgin Mary as follows :
' Je ne veux plus aimer que ma mere Mane.
Tous les autres amours sont de commandement,
Ne*cessaires qu'ils sont, ma mere seulement
Pourra les allumer aux cceurs qui l'ont cherie.
' C'est pour Elle qu'il faut chenr mes ennemis,
C'est pour Elle que j'ai voue* ce sacrifice,
Et la douceur de cceur et le zele au service.
Comme je la priais, Elle les a permis.
' Et comme j'e*tais faible et bien mechant encore,
Aux mains laches, les yeux dblouis des chemins,
Elle baissa mes yeux et me joignit les mains,
Et m'enseigna les mots par lesquels on adore.'
The accents here uttered are well known to the clinics of
psychiatry. We may compare them to the picture which
Legrain * gives of some of his patients. ' His speech continually
reverts to God and the Virgin Mary, his cousin.' (The case in
question is that of a degenerate subject who was a tramway con
ductor.) ' Mystical ideas complete the picture. He talks of God,
of heaven, crosses himself, kneels down, and says that he is follow
ing the commandments of Christ.' (The subject under observa
tion is a day labourer.) ' The devil will tempt me, but I see
God who guards me. I have asked of God that all people might
be beautiful,' etc.
The continual alternation of antithetical moods in Verlaine —
this uniform transition from bestial lust to an excess of piety,
and from sinning to remorse — has struck even observers who
do not know the significance of such a phenomenon. ' He is,'
writes M. Anatole France,* ' alternately devout and atheistical,
orthodox and sacrilegious.' These he certainly is. But why ?
Simply because he is a circulaire. This not very happy
expression, invented by French psychiatry, denotes that form
* Legrain, Du ddlire chez les degdndres, pp. 135, 140, 164.
t Huret, op. cit, p. 8.

MYSTICISM 123
of mental disease in which states of excitement and depression
follow each other in regular succession. The period of excite
ment coincides with the irresistible impulses to misdeeds and
blasphemous language ; that of dejection with the paroxysms
of contrition and piety. The circulaires belong to the worst
species of the degenerate. ' They are drunkards, obscene, vicious,
and thievish.'* They are also in particular incapable of any
lasting, uniform occupation, since it is obvious that in such a
condition of mental depression they cannot accomplish any
work which demands strength and attention. The circulaires
are, by the nature of their affliction, condemned to be vagabonds
or thieves, unless they belong to rich families. In normally
constituted society there is no place for them. Verlaine has
been a vagabond the whole of his life. He has loafed about all
the highways of France, and roamed as well through Belgium
and England. Since his release from prison he has spent most
of his time in Paris, where, however, he has no residence, but
resorts to the hospitals under the pretext of rheumatism, which
for that matter he may easily have contracted during the nights
which, as a tramp, he has spent under the open sky. The
administration winks at his doings, and grants him food and
shelter gratis, out of regard for his poetical capacity. Con
formably with the constant tendency of the human mind to
beautify what cannot be altered, he persuades himself that his
vagrancy, which was forced upon him by his organic vice, is a
glorious and enviable condition ; he prizes it as something
beautiful, artistic, and sublime, and looks upon vagabonds with
especial tenderness. Speaking of them he says (Grotesques) :
' Leur jambes pour toutes montures,
Pour tous biens l'or de leurs regards,
Par le chemin des aventures
Ils vont haillonneux et hagards.
' Le sage, indigne*, les harangue ;
Le sot plaint ces fous hasardeux ;
Les enfants leur tirent la langue
Et les filles se moquent d'eux.'
We find in every lunatic and imbecile the conviction that the
rational minds who discern and judge him are 'blockheads.'
' . . . Dans leurs prunelles
Rit et pleure — fastidieux—
L'amour des choses e*ternelles,
Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux !
' Done, allez, vagabonds sans treves,
Errez, funestes et maudits,
Le long des gouffres et des greves,
Sous l'ceil ferme des paradis !
* E. Marandon de Montyel, ' De la Criminality et de la DegeneYescence,'
Archives de I' Anthropologic criminelle, Mai, 1892, p. 287.

124 DEGENERATION
' La nature k l'homme s'allie
Pour chatier comme il le faut
L'orgueilleuse melancolie
Qui vous fait marcher le front haut.'
In another poem (Autre) he calls to his chosen mates :
' Allons, fr£res, bons vieux voleurs,
Doux vagabonds
Filous en fleur
Mes chers, mes bons,
' Fumons philosophiquement,
Promenons nous
Paisiblement :
Rien faire est doux.'
As one vagabond feels himself attracted by other vagabonds,
so does one deranged mind feel drawn to others. Verlaine has
the greatest admiration for King Louis II. of Bavaria, that
unhappy madman in whom intelligence was extinct long before
death, in whom only the most abominable impulses of foul
beasts of the most degraded kind had survived the perishing of
the human functions of his disordered brain. He apostrophizes
him thus : ' Roi, le seul vrai Roi de ce sifecle, salut, Sire,
Qui voulutes mourir vengeant votre raison
Des choses de la politique, et du delire
De cette Science intruse dans la maison,
'De cette Science assassin de l'Oraison
Et du Chant et de l'Art et de toute la Lyre,
Et simplement et plein d'orgueil et floraison
Tuates en mourant, salut, Roi, bravo, Sire !
'Vous futes un pofete, un soldat, le seul Roi
De ce siecle . . .
Et le martyr de la Raison selon la Foi. . . .'
Two points are noticeable in Verlaine's mode of expression.
First, we have the frequent recurrence of the same word, of the
same turn of phrase, that chewing the cud, or rabdchage (repeti
tion), which we have learnt to know as the marks of intellectual
debility. In almost every one of his poems single lines and
hemistiches are repeated, sometimes unaltered, and often the
same word appears instead of one which rhymes. Were I to
quote all the passages of this kind, I should have to transcribe
nearly all his poems. I will therefore give only a few specimens,
and those in the original, so that their peculiarity will be fully
apparent to the reader. In the Cre'puscu/e du soir mystique the
lines, ' Le souvenir avec le crepuscule,' and ' Dahlia, lys, tulipe
et renoncules,' are twice repeated without any internal necessity.
In the poem Promenade sentimentale the adjective bleme (wan)
pursues the poet in the manner of an obsession or 'onomatomania,'

MYSTICISM 125
and he applies it to water-lilies and waves (' wan waves '). The
Nuit du Walpurgis classique begins thus :
' Un rythmique sabbat, rythmique, extremement
Rythmique.' . . .
In the Serenade the first two lines are repeated verbatim as the
fourth and eighth. Similarly in Ariettes oublUes, VIII. :
' Dans l'interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.
c Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.
, ' Comme des nuees
Flottent gris les chenes
Des forets prochaines
Parmi les buees.
' Le ciel est de cuivre,
Sans lueur aucune.
On croirait voir vivre
Et mourir la lune.

' Corneille poussive,
Et vous, les loups maigres,
Par ces bises aigres
Quoi done vous arrive?
'Dans l'interminable
Ennui de la plaine,
La neige incertaine
Luit comme du sable.'

The Chevaux de bois begins thus :
' Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois,
Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,
Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,
Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.'
In a truly charming piece in Sagesse he says :
' Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit,
Si bleu, si calme !
Un arbre, par dessus le toit
Berce sa palme.
' La cloche, dans le ciel qu'on volt,
Doucement tinte.
Un oiseau, sur l'arbre qu'on voit,
Chante sa plainte.'
In the passage in Amour, ' Les fleurs des champs, les fleurs
innombrables des champs ... les fleurs des gens,' ' champs '
and 'gens' sound somewhat alike. Here the imbecile repetition

126 DEGENERATION
of similar sounds suggests a senseless pun to the poet, and as
for this stanza in Pierrot gamin :
' Ce n'est pas Pierrot en herbe
Non plus que Pierrot en gerbe,
C'est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot.
Pierrot gamin, Pierrot gosse,
Le cerneau hors de la cosse,
C'est Pierrot, Pierrot, Pierrot !'
it is the language of nurses to babies, who do not care to make
sense, but only to twitter to the child in tones which give him
pleasure. The closing lines of the poem Mains point to a
complete ideational standstill, to mechanical mumbling :
' Ah ! si ce sont des mains de rive,
Tant mieux, ou tant pis, ou tant mieux.'*
The second peculiarity of Verlaine's style is the other mark
of mental debility, viz., the combination of completely dis
connected nouns and adjectives, which suggest each other, either
through a senseless meandering by way of associated ideas, or
through a similarity of sound. We have already found some
examples of this in the extracts cited above. In these we find
the ' enormous and tender Middle Ages' and the ' brand which
thunders.' Verlaine writes also of ' feet which glide with a pure
and wide movement,' of ' a narrow and vast affection,' of 'a slow
landscape,' t of 'a slack liqueur' ('jus flasque '), 'a gilded per
fume,' a 'condensed' or 'terse contour' (' galbe succinct'), etc.
The Symbolists admire this form of imbecility, as ' the research
for rare and precious epithets ' (la recherche de l'epithete rare et
prdcieuse). Verlaine has a clear consciousness of the vagueness of his
thoughts, and in a very remarkable poem from the psychological
point of view, Artpoe'tique, in which he attempts to give a theory
of his lyric creation, he raises nebulosity to the dignity of a
fundamental method :
' De la musique avant toute chose
Et pour cela prefere 1' Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air,
Sans rien en lui qui pese ou qui pose.'
The two verbs ' pese ' and ' pose ' are juxtaposed merely on
account of their similarity of sound.
' II faut aussi que tu n'ailles point
Choisir les mots sans quelque meprise ;
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Ou l'Indecis au Precis se joint.

* Ah ! if these are dream hands,
So much the better, or so much the worse, or so much the better.
f Virgil's 'lentus,' when applied to aspects of nature, conveys a very
different meaning.

MYSTICISM 127
' C'est des beaux yeux derriere des voiles,
C'est le grand jour tremblant de midi,
C'est par un ciel d'automne attiddi,
Le bleu fouillis des claires dtoiles !
' Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance !
Oh ! la nuance seule fiance
Le rSve au reve et la flute au cor !'
(This stanza is completely delirious ; it places ' nuance ' and
'colour' in opposition, as though the latter were not contained
in the former. The idea of which the weak brain of Verlaine
had an inkling, but could not bring to a complete conception,
is probably that he prefers subdued and mixed tints, which lie
on the margin of several colours, to the full intense colour
itself.) ' Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,
L'esprit cruel et le Rire impur,
Qui font pleurer les >eux de 1'Azur,
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine !'
It cannot be denied that this poetical method in the hands
of Verlaine often yields extraordinarily beautiful results. There
are few poems in French literature which can rival the Chanson
d Automne :
' Les sanglots longs
Des violons De l'automne
Blessent mon cceur
D'une langueur Monotone.
' Tout suffocant
Et bleme, quand
Sonne 1'heure,
' Je me souviens
Des jours anciens,
Et je pleure.
' Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deck, delk,
Pareil k la
Feuille morte.'
Even if literally translated, there remains something of the
melancholy magic of the lines, which in French are richly
rhythmical and full of music. Avant que tu ne Pen allies (p. 99)
and II pleure dans mon cozur (p. 116) may also be called pearls
among French lyrics.
This is because the methods of a highly emotional, but
intellectually incapable, dreamer suffice for poetry which deals
exclusively with moods, but this is the inexorable limit of his
power. Let the true meaning of mood be always present with

128 DEGENERATION
us. The word denotes a state of mind, in which, through organic
excitations which it cannot directly perceive, consciousness is
filled with presentations of a uniform nature, which it elaborates
with greater or less clearness, and one and all of which relate to
those organic excitations inaccessible to consciousness. The mere
succession of words, giving a name to these presentations, the roots
of which are in the unknown, expresses the mood, and is able to
awaken it in another. It has no need of a fundamental thought,
or of a progressive exposition to unfold it. Verlaine often attains
to astonishing effects in such poetry of moods. Where, how
ever, distinct vision, or a feeling the motive of which is clear to
consciousness, or a process well delimitated in time and space,
is to be poetically rendered, the poetic art of the emotional
imbecile fails utterly. In a healthy and sane poet even the
mood pure and simple is united to clear presentations, and is not
a mere undulation of fragrance and rose-tinted mist. Poems like
Goethe's Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh, Der Fischer, or Freudvoll und
leidvoll, can never be created by the emotionally degenerate ; but,
on the other hand, the most marvellous of Goethe's poems are
not so utterly incorporeal, not such mere sighs, as three or four
of the best of a Verlaine.
We have now the portrait of this most famous leader of the
Symbolists clearly before us. We see a repulsive degenerate
subject with asymmetric skull and Mongolian face, an impulsive
vagabond and dipsomaniac, who, under the most disgraceful cir
cumstances, was placed in gaol ; an emotional dreamer of feeble
intellect, who painfully fights against his bad impulses, and in
his misery often utters touching notes of complaint ; a mystic
whose qualmish consciousness is flooded with ideas of God and
saints, and a dotard who manifests the absence of any definite
thought in his mind by incoherent speech, meaningless expres
sions and motley images. In lunatic asylums there are many
patients whose disease is less deep-seated and incurable than
is that of this irresponsible circulaire at large, whom only
ignorant judges could have condemned for his epileptoid crimes.
A second leader among the Symbolists, whose prestige is in
no quarter disputed, is M. St^phane Mallarmd He is the most
curious phenomenon in the intellectual life of contemporary
France. Although long past fifty years of age, he has written
hardly anything, and the little that is known of him is, in the
opinion of his most unreserved admirers, of no account ; and
yet he is esteemed as a very great poet, and the utter infertility
of his pen, the entire absence of any single work which he can
produce as evidence of his poetical capacity, is prized as his
greatest merit, and as a most striking proof of his intellectual
importance. This statement must appear so fabulous to any
reader not deranged in mind, that he may rightly demand proofs

MYSTICISM 129
of these statements. M. Charles Morice* says of Mallarme :
' I am not obliged to unveil the secrets of the works of a poet
who, as he has himself remarked, is excluded from all partici
pation in any official exposition of the beautiful. The fact itself
that these works are still unknown . . . would seem to forbid
our associating the name of M. Mallarme with those of men who
have given us books. I let vulgar criticism buzz without reply
ing to it, and state that M. Mallarme^ without having given us
books ... is famous— a fame which, of course, has not been 1
won without arousing the laughter of stupidity in both petty /
and important newspapers, but which does not offer public and I
private . . . ineptitude that opportunity for showing its base- J
ness which is provoked by the advent of a new wonder. ...
The people, in spite of their abhorrence of the beautiful, and '
especially of novelty in the beautiful, have gradually, and in j
spite of themselves, come to comprehend the prestige of a legiti- ;
mate authority. They themselves, even they, feel ashamed of
their foolish laughter; and before this man, whom that laughter
could not tear from the serenity of his meditative silence,
laughter became dumb, and itself suffered the divine contagion
of silence. Even for the million this man, who published no
books, and whom, nevertheless, all designated "a poet," became,
as it were, the very symbol of a poet, seeking, where possible,
to draw near to the absolute. . . . By his silence he has signified
that he . . . cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art
which he wishes to create. Should cruel life refuse to support
him in his effort, our respect — nay, more, our veneration — can
alone give an answer worthy of a reticence thus conditioned.'
The graphomaniac Morice (of whose crazy and distorted style
of expression this literally translated example gives a very good
idea) assumes that perhaps Mallarme' will yet create his ' unpre
cedented work.' Mallarme himself, however, denies us the right
to any such hope. 'The delicious Mallarme,' Paul Hervieu
relates,! 'told me one day ... he could not understand that
anyone should let himself appear in print. Such a proceeding
gave him the impression of an indecency, an aberration, re
sembling that form of mental disease called " exhibitionism."
Moreover, no one has been so discreet with his soul as this in
comparable thinker.' 1
So, then, this ' incomparable thinker ' shows ' a complete dis
cretion as regards his soul.' At one time he bases his silence
on a sort of shamed timidity at publicity ; at another, on the
* Charles Morice, La Littdrature de tout-ti-l'heure, p. 238.
t Huret, op. cit, p. 33.
X Since these words were written, M. MaHamae* has decided to publish
his poems in one volume. This, far from invalidating what has been said,
is its best justification.

130 DEGENERATION
fact that he ' cannot yet realize the unprecedented work of art
which he wishes to create,' two reasons for that matter recipro
cally precluding each other. He is approaching the evening of
his life, and beyond a few brochures, such as Les Dieux de la
Grece and L'apres-midi d'un Faune, together with some verses
and literary and theatrical criticisms, scattered in periodicals,
the lot barely sufficing for a volume, he has published nothing
but some translations from the English and a few school-books
(M. Mallarme is a teacher of English in a Parisian lycee), and
yet there are some who admire him as a great poet, as the one
exclusive poet, and they overwhelm the ' blockheads ' and the
' fools ' who laugh at him with all the expressions of scorn that
the force of imagination in a diseased mind can display. Is not
this one of the wonders of our day ? Lessing makes Conti, in
Emilia Galotti, say that ' Raphael would have been the greatest
genius in painting, even if he had unfortunately been born with
out hands.' In M. Mallarme' we have a man who is revered as
a great poet, although ' he has unfortunately been born without
hands,' although he produces nothing, although he does not
pursue the art he professes. During the period when in London
a great number of bubble-company swindles were being pro
moted, when all the world went mad for the possession of the
least scrap of Stock Exchange paper, it happened that a few
sharp individuals advertised in the newspapers, inviting people to
subscribe for shares in a company of which the object was kept
a secret. There really were men who brought their money to
these lively promoters, and the historian of the City crisis regards
this fact as inconceivable. Inconceivable as it is, Paris sees it
repeated. Some persons demand unbounded admiration for a
poet whose works are his own secret, and will probably remain
such, and others trustingly and humbly bring their admiration
as required. The sorcerers of the Senegal negroes offer their
congregation baskets and calabashes for veneration, in which
they assert that a mighty fetich is enclosed. As a matter of
fact they contain nothing ; but the negroes regard the empty
vessels with holy dread, and show them and their possessors
divine honours. Exactly thus is empty Mallarme the fetich
of the Symbolists, who, it must be admitted, are intellectually
far below the Senegal negroes.
This position of a calabash worshipped on bended knees he
has attained by oral discourse. Every week he gathers round
him embryonic poets and authors, and develops his art theories
before them. He speaks just as Morice and Kahn write. He
strings together obscure and wondrous words, at which his
disciples become as stupid ' as if a mill-wheel were going round
in their heads,' so that they leave him as ff intoxicated, and
with the impression that incomprehensible, superhuman dis
closures have been made to them. If there is anything com-

MYSTICISM 131
prehensible in the incoherent flow of Mallarme's words, it is
perhaps his admiration for the pre-Raphaelites. It was he who
drew the attention of the Symbolists to this school, and enjoined
imitation of it. It is through Mallarme that the French
mystics received their English mediaevalism and neo-Catholicism.
Finally, it may be mentioned that among the physical features
of Mallarme are ' long pointed faun-like ears.'* After Darwin,
who was the first to point out the apish character of this
peculiarity, Hartmann,f Frigerio,*j: and Lombroso,§ have firmly
established the connection between immoderately long and
pointed external ears and atavism and degeneration ; and they
have shown that this peculiarity is of especially frequent occur
rence among criminals and lunatics.
The third among the leading spirits of the Symbolists is Jean
Moreas, a Franco-Greek poet, who at the completion of his
thirty-sixth year (his friends assert, it may be in friendly malice,
that he makes himself out to be very much younger than he is)
has produced in toto three attenuated collections of verses, of
hardly one hundred to one hundred and twenty pages, bearing
the titles, Les Syrtes, Les Cantilenes , and Le Pelerin passionne.
The importance of a literary performance does not, of course,
depend upon its amplitude, if it is otherwise unusually signifi
cant. When, however, a man cackles during interminable cate
seances of the renewal of poetry and the unfolding of a new art
of the future, and finally produces three little brochures of
childish verses as the result of his world-stirring effort, then the
material insignificance of the performance also becomes a subject
for ridicule.
Mordas is one of the inventors of the word ' Symbolism.'
For some few years he was the high -priest of this secret
doctrine, and administered the duties of his service with
requisite seriousness. One day he suddenly abjured his self-
founded faith, and declared that ' Symbolism ' had always
been meant only as a joke, to lead fools by the nose withal ;
and that the true salvation of poetry was in Romanism
(romanisme). Under this new word he affirms a return to the
language, versification and mode of feeling of the French poets
at the close ofthe Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance period ;
but it were well to adopt his declarations with caution, since in
two or three years he may be proclaiming his ' romanisme ' as
much a tap-room joke as his ' symbolism.' The appearance of
the PMerin passionne" in 1891 was celebrated by the Symbolists
as an event which was to be the beginning of a new era in
* Huret, op. cit, p. 55.
t Hartmann, Der Gorilla. Leipzig, 1S81, p. 34.
X Dr. L. Frigerio, V Oreille externe : Etude d' Anthropologic criminelle
Lyon, 1889, pp. 32 and 40.
§ Lombroso, L'Uomo delinquente, p. 255.

132 DEGENERATION
poetry. They arranged a banquet in honour of Moreas, and in
the after-dinner speeches he was worshipped as the deliverer from
the shackles of ancient forms and notions, and as the saviour
who was bringing in the kingdom of God of true poetry. And
the same poets who sat at the table with Moreas, and delivered
to him rapturous addresses or joined in the applause, a few weeks
after this event overwhelmed him with contumely and contempt.
' Moreas a Symbolist !' cried Charles Vignier.* ' Is he one
through his ideas? He laughs at them himself! His thoughts !
They don't weigh much, these thoughts of Jean Moreas !'
' Moreas ?' asks Adrien Remacle.t ' we have all been laughing at
him. It is that which has made him famous.' Rene" Ghil calls
his Pe'lerin passionne ' doggerel written by a pedant,' and Gustav
KahnJ passes sentence on him thus : 'Mor6as has no talent. . . .
He has never done anything worth mentioning. He has his own
particular jargon.' These expressions disclose to us the com
plete hoUowness and falseness of the Symbolistic movement,
which outside France is obstinately proclaimed as a serious
matter by imbeciles and speculators, although its French in
ventors make themselves hoarse in trying to convince the world
that they merely wanted to banter the Philistine with a tap
room jest and advertise themselves.
After the verdict of his brethren in the Symbolist Parnassus,
I may really spare myself the trouble of dwelling longer on
Moreas ; I will, however, cite a few examples from his Pe'lerin
passionne~, in order that the reader may form an idea of the
softness of brain which displays itself in these verses.
The poem Agnes'^ begins thus :
' II y avait des arcs ou passaient des escortes
Avec des bannieres de deuil et du fer
Lac£ (?) des potentats de toutes sortes
— II y avait — dans la cite au bord de la men
Les places dtaient noires, et bien pavees, et les portes,
Du cote* de l'est et de l'ouest, hautes ; et comme en hiver
La foret, de*penssaient les salles de palais, et les porches,
Et les colonnades de belve*der.
C'e*tait (tu dois bien t'en souvenir) c'dtait aux plus beaux jours de ton
adolescence. ' Dans la cite- au bord de la mer, la cape et la dague lourdes
De pierres jaunes, et sur ton chapeau des plumes de perroquets,
Tu t'en venais, devisant telles bourdes,
Tu t'en venais entre tes deux laquais
Si bouffis et tant sots — en veritd, des happelourdes ! —
Dans la cite au bord de la mer tu t'en venais et tu vaguais
Parmi de grands vieillards qui travaillaient aux felouques,
Le long des moles et des quais.
C'e*tait (tu dois bien t'en souvenir) c'e"tait aux plus beaux jours de ton
adolescence.

* Huret, op. cit, p. 102. f Ibid., p. 106. $ Ibid., p. 401.
§ Jean Moreas, Le Pdlertn passionnd. Paris, 1891, p. 3.

MYSTICISM 133
And thus the twaddle goes on through eight more stanzas, and
in every line we find the characteristics of the language used by
imbeciles and made notorious by Sollier (Psychologie de I Idiot et
de V Imbecile), the 'ruminating/ as it were, of the same ex
pressions, the dreamy incoherence of the language, and the
insertion of words which have no connection with the subject.
Two Chansons* run thus :
' Les courlis dans les roseaux !
(Faut-il que je vous en parle,
Des courlis dans les roseaux ?)
O vous joli' Fe*e des eaux.
' Le porche'r et les pourceaux !
(Faut-il que je vous en parle,
Du porcher et des pourceaux?)
O vous joli' Fee des eaux.
' Mon cceur pris en vos roseaux !
(Faut-il que je vous en parle,
De mon cceur en vos reseaux ?)
O vous joli' Fee des eaux.
' On a marche* sur les fleurs au bord de la route,
Et le vent d'automne les secoue si fort, en outre.
' La malle-poste a renverse* la vieille croix au bord de la route 5
Elle e*tait vraiment si pourrie, en outre.
' L'idiot (tu sais) est mort au bord de la route,
Et personne ne le pleurera, en outre.'
The stupid artifice with which Moreas here seeks to produce a
feeling of wretchedness by conjuring up the three associated
figures of crushed flowers, dishevelled by the wind, an over
turned and mouldering cross, and a dead, unmourned idiot,
makes this poem a model of the would-be profound production
of a mad-house !
When Moreas is not soft of brain, he develops a rhetorical
turgidity which reminds us of Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau
in his worst efforts. Only one examplef of this kind, and we
have done with him :
' J'ai tellement soif, 6 mon amour, de ta bouche,
Que j'y boirais en baisers le cours detourae*
Du Strymon, l'Araxe et le Tanai's farouche ;
Et les cent meandres qui arrosent Pitane*,
Et l'Hermus qui prend sa source ou le soleil se couche,
Et toutes les claires fontaines dont abonde Gaza,
Sans que ma soif s'en apaisat.'
Behind the leaders Verlaine, Mallarm-i, and Monias a troop
of minor Symbolists throng, each, it is true, in his own eyes the
one great poet of the band, but whose illusions of greatness do
not entitle them to any special observation. Sufficient justice
* Moreas, op. cit, pp. 21 and 2. t Ibid., p. 43.

I34 DEGENERATION
is dealt them if the spirit they are made of be characterized by
quoting a few lines of their poetry. Jules Laforgue, ' unique
not only in his generation, but in all the republic of literature,'*
cries : ' Oh, how daily [quotidienne] is life !' and in his poem
Pan et la Syrinx we come upon lines like the following :
' O Syrinx ! voyez et comprenez la Terre et la merveille de cette matine'e et
la circulation de la vie.
Oh, vous Ik ! et moi, ici ! Oh vous ! Oh, moi ! Tout est dans Tout ! f
Gustav Kahn, one of the aestheticists and philosophers of Sym
bolism, says in his Nuit sur la Lande : ' Peace descends from
thy lovely eyes like a great evening, and the borders of slow
tents descend, studded with precious stones, woven of far-off
beams and unknown moons.'
In German, at least, ' borders of slow tents which descend ' is
completely unintelligible nonsense. In French they are also
unintelligible ; but in the original their meaning becomes
apparent. ' Et des pans de tentes lentes descendent,' the line
runs, and betrays itself as pure echolalia, as a succession of
similar sounds, as it were, echoing each other.
Charles Vignier, ' the beloved disciple of Verlaine,' says to his
mistress : ' Lk-bas c'est trop loin,
Pauvre libellule,
Reste dans ton coin
Et prends des pilules . . .
' Sois Edmond About
Et d'humeur coulante,
Sois un marabout
Du Jardin des Plantes.'
Another of his poems, Une Coupe de Thule, runs thus :
' Dans une coupe de Thuld
Oil vient palir l'attrait de l'heure,
Dort le senile et dolent leurre
De l'ultime rSve adule\
' Mais des cheveux d'argent file*
Font un voile k celle qui pleure,
Dans une coupe de Timid
Oil s'est dteint l'attrait de l'heure.
' Et l'on ne sait quel jubile*
Ce*lebre une harpe mineure
Que le hautain fant6me effleure
D'un lucide doigt fusele* ! . . .
Dans une coupe de Thuld !'
* Moreas, op. cit., p. 311.
¦f* ' O Syrinx ! do you see and understand the Earth, and the wonder of
this morning, and the circulation of life !
O thou, there ! and I, here ! O thou ! O me ! All is in All 1'

MYSTICISM 135
These poems remind us so forcibly of those doggerel rhymes
at which in Germany jovial students are often wont to try their
skill, and which are known as ' flowery [lit. blooming] nonsense,'
that, in spite of the solemn assurance of French critics, I am
convinced that they were intended as a joke. If I am right in
my supposition, they are really evidences, not of the mental
status of Vignier, but of his readers, admirers, and critics.
Louis Dumur addresses the Neva in the following manner :
'Puissante, magnifique, illustre, grave, noble reine !
O Tsaristsa [sic I] de glace et de fastes Souveraine !
Matrone hieYatique et solennelle et ve'ne're'e ! . . .
Toi qui me forces k rever, toi qui me deconcertes,
Et toi surtout que j'aime, Email, Beaute*, Poeme, Femme.
NeVa! j'evoque ton spectacle et l'hymne de ton ame !'
And Rene Ghil, one of the best-known Symbolists (he is
chief of a school entitled 'dvolutive-instrumentiste'), draws from
his lyre these tones, which I also quote in French ; in the first
place because they would lose their ring in a translation, and,
secondly, because if I were to translate them literally, it is
hopeless to suppose that the reader would think I was serious :
' Ouis ! ouis aux nues haut et nues ou
Tirent-ils d'aile immense qui vire . . .
et quand vide
et vers les grands peteles dans l'air plus aride —
'(Et en le lourd venir grandi lent stridule, et
Titille qui n'alentisse d'air qui dure, et !
Grandie, erratile et multiple d'eveils, stride
Mixte, plainte et splendeur ! la plenitude aride)
'et vers les grands petales d'agitations
Lors evanouissait un vol ardent qui stride. . . .
' (des saltigrades doux n'iront plus vers les mers. . . .)'
One thing must be acknowledged, and that is, the Symbolists
have an astonishing gift for titles. The book itself may belong
to pure mad-house literature ; the title is always remarkable.
We have already seen that Moreas names one of his collection
of verses Les Syrtes. He might in truth just as well call it the
North Pole, or The Marmot, or Abd-el-Kader, since these have
just as much connection with the poems in the little volume as
Syrtes ; but it is undeniable that this geographical name calls
up the lustre of an African sun, and the pale reflection of classic
antiquity, which may well please the eye of the hysteric reader.
Edouard Dubus entitles his poem, Quand les Violons sont partis ;
Louis Dumur, Lassitudes ; Gustave Khan, Les Palais nomades ;
Maurice du Plessis, La Peau de Marsyas ; Ernest Raynaud,
Chairs profanes and Le Signe; Henri de Regnier, Sites et

136 DEGENERATION
Episodes; Arthur Rimbaud, Les Illuminations ; Albert Saint Paul,
L'Echarpe d'lris ; Vielte-Griffin, Ancmus ; and Charles Vignier,
Centon. Of the prose of the Symbolists, I have already given some
examples. I should further like to cite only a few passages
from a book which the Symbolists declare to be one of their
most powerful mental manifestations, La Litterature de tout-d-
I'heure, by Charles Morice. It is a sort of bird's-eye view of the
development of literature up to the present time, a rapid critique
of the more and most recent books and authors, a kind of
programme of the literature of the future. This book is one
of the most astonishing which exists in any language. It
strongly resembles Rembrandt as Educator, but is far beyond
that book in the utter senselessness of its concatenations
of words. It is a monument of pure literary insanity, of
' graphomania '; and neither Delepierre in his Littdrature des
Fous, nor Philomnestes (Gustave Brunet) in his Fous Litteraires ,
quotes examples of more complete mental dislocation than are
visible in every page of this book. Notice the following confes
sion of faith by Morice :* ' Although in this book treating only
of aesthetics — although of aesthetics based upon metaphysics —
we shall remember to refrain, as far as possible, from pure
philosophizing, we must approximately paraphrase a word
which will more than once be made use of, and which, in the
highest sense here put upon it, is not incapable of being para
phrased. God is the first and universal cause, the final and
universal end ; the bond between spirits ; the point of intersec
tion where two parallels would meet ; the fulfilment of our
inclinations ; the fruition which accords with the glories of our
dreams; the abstraction itself of the concrete; the unseen and
unheard and yet certain ideal of our demands for beauty in
truth. God is, par excellence, THE very word — the very word,
that is to say, that unknown certain word of which every author
has the incontrovertible, but undiscernible idea, the self-evident
but hidden goal which he will never reach, and which he
approaches as near as possible. In, so to say, practical aesthetics
He is the atmosphere of joy in which the mind revels victorious,
because it has reduced irreducible mystery to imperishable
symbols.' I do not for a moment doubt that this incomparable
jumble will be quite intelligible to theologians. Like all mystics,
they discover a sense in every sound ; that is, they persuade
themselves and others that the nebulous ideas which the sound
awakens in their brains by association are the meaning of that
sound. But anyone who demands of words that they should
be the media of definite thoughts, will perceive in the face of
this twaddle that the author was not thinking anything at all
* Morice, op. cit, p. 30.

MYSTICISM 137
when he wrote, although he was dreaming of .many things.
'Religion' is for Morice (p. 56), 'the source of art, and art in
its essence is religious '—an affirmation which he borrows from
Ruskin, although he does not acknowledge it. ' Our scholars,
our thinkers . . . the luminous heads ofthe nineteenth century,'
are ' Edgar Poe, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Auguste
Comte, Claude Bernard, Berthelot ' (p. 57). Edgar Poe by the
side of Spencer, Darwin, and Claude Bernard ! never have ideas
danced a crazier fools' quadrille in a disordered brain.
And this book, of which the passages we have cited give a
sufficiently correct idea, was, in France (just as Rembrandt as
Educator was in Germany), pronounced by thoroughly re
sponsible critics to be ' strange, but interesting and suggestive.'
A poor degenerate devil who scribbles such stuff, and an imbecile
reader who follows his twaddle like passing clouds, are simply
to be pitied. But what words of contempt are strong enough
for the sane intellectual tatterdemalions who, in order not to
offend or else to give themselves the appearance of possessing a
remarkable faculty of comprehension, or to affect fairness and
benevolence even towards those whose opinions they in part do
not share, insist that they discover in books of this kind many
a truth, much wit along with peculiar whims, an ideal of fervour
and frequent lightnings of thought ?
The word ' Symbolism ' conveys, as we have seen, no idea to its
inventors. They pursue no definite artistic tendency ; hence it
is not possible to show them that their tendency is a false one.
It is otherwise with some of their disciples, who joined their
ranks, partly through a desire to advertise themselves, partly
because they thought that, in the conflicts between literary
parties, they were fighting on the side which was the stronger
and the more sure of victory, and partly, also, through the folly
of fashion, and through the influence exerted by any noisy
novelty over uncritical minds. Less weak-brained than the
leaders, they felt the need of giving the word ' Symbolism ' a
certain significance, and, in fact, drew up a number of axioms
which, according to their profession, serve to guide them in
their creations. These axioms are sufficiently defined to allow of
discussion. The Symbolists demand greater freedom in the treatment of
French verse. They fiercely rebel against the old alexandrines,
with the caesura in the middle, and the necessary termination of
the sentence at the end ; against the prohibition of the hiatus ;
against the law of a regular alternation of masculine and
feminine rhymes. They make defiant use of the 'free verse,'
with length and rhythm ad libitum, and false rhymes. The
foreigner can only smile at the savage gestures with which this
conflict is carried on. It is a schoolboys' war against some

138 DEGENERATION
hated book, which is solemnly torn in pieces, trodden under
foot, and burned. The whole dispute concerning prosody and
the rules of rhyme is, so to speak, an inter-Gallic concern, and
is of no consequence to the literature of the world. We have
long had everything which the French poets are only now seek
ing to obtain by barricades and street massacres. In Goethe's
Prometheus, Mahomet's Gesang, Harzreise im Winter, in Heine's
Nordsee Cyklus, etc., we possess perfect models of free verse ;
we alternate the rhymes as we will ; we allow masculine and
feminine rhymes to follow one another as seems good to us ;
we do not bind ourselves to the rigid law of old classic metres,
but suffer, in the cradling measure of our verse, anapaests to
alternate with iambics and spondees, according to our feeling
for euphony. English, Italian and Sclavonic poetry have gone
equally far, and if the French alone have remained behind, and
have at last found a need for casting aside their old matted,
moth-eaten periwig, this is quite reasonable ; but to anyone but
a Frenchman they merely make themselves ridiculous when
they trumpet their painful hobbling after the nations who are
far in front of them, as an unheard-of discovery of new paths
and opening up of new roads, and as an advance inspired by
the ideal into the dawn of the future.
Another aesthetic demand of the Symbolists is that the line
should, independently of its sense, call forth an intended
emotion merely by its sound. A word should produce an
effect, not through the idea which it embodies, but as a tone,
language becoming music. It is noteworthy that many of the
Symbolists have given their books titles which are intended to
awaken musical ideas. We find Les Gamines (The Scales),
by Stuart Merrill ; Les Cantilenes, by Jean Moreas ; Cloches dans
la Nuit, by Adolphe Rette" ; Romances sans Paroles, by Paul
Verlaine, etc. To make use of language as a musical instru
ment for the production of pure tone effects is the delirious idea
of a mystic. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites demand
of the fine arts that they should not represent the concrete
plastically or optically, but should express the abstract, and
therefore simply undertake the role of alphabetic writing.
Similarly, the Symbolists displace all the natural boundary lines
of art, and impose upon the word a task which belongs to
musical signs only. But while the pre-Raphaelites wish to
raise the fine arts to a higher rank than is suited to them, the
Symbolists greatly degrade the word. In its origin sound is
musical. It expresses no definite idea, but only a general
emotion of the animal. The cricket fiddles, the nightingale
trills, when sexually excited. The bear growls when stirred by
the rage of conflict ; the lion roars in his pleasure when tearing
a living prey. In proportion as the brain develops in the
animal kingdom, and mental life becomes richer, the means of

MYSTICISM 139
vocal expression are evolved and differentiated, and become
capable of making perceptible to the senses not only simple
generic emotions, but also presentative complexes of a more
restricted and definitely delimitated nature — nay, if Professor
Garner's observations concerning the language of apes are
accurate, even tolerably distinct single presentations. Sound,
as a means of expressing mental operations, reaches its final
perfection in cultivated, grammatically articulated language,
inasmuch as it can then follow exactly the intellectual working
of the brain, and make it objectively perceptible in all the
minutest details. To bring the word, pregnant with thought,
back to the emotional sound is to renounce all the results
of organic development, and to degrade man, rejoicing in
the power of speech, to the level of the whirring cricket
or the croaking frog. The efforts of the Symbolists, then,
result in senseless twaddle, but not in the word -music they
intend, for this simply does not exist. No word of any single
human language is, as such, musical. Many languages abound
in consonants ; in others vowels predominate. The former
require more dexterity in the muscles employed in speaking ;
their pronunciation, therefore, counts as more difficult, and they
seem less agreeable to the ears of foreigners than the languages
which are rich in vowels. But this has nothing to do with the
musical side of the question. What remains of the phonetic
effect of a word if it is whispered, or if it is only visible as a
written character ? And yet in both cases it is able to awaken
the same emotions, as if it had reached consciousness full-toned
through the sense of hearing. Let anyone have read aloud to
him the most cleverly chosen arrangement of words in a
language completely unknown to him, and try to produce in
himself a definite emotion through the mere phonetic effect. In
every case it will be found impossible. The meaning of a word,
and not its sound, determines its value. The sound is as such
neither beautiful nor ugly. It becomes so only through the
voice which gives it life. Even the first soliloquy in Goethe's
Iphigenie would be ugly coming from the throat of a drunkard.
I have had the opportunity of convincing myself that even the
Hottentot language, spoken in a mellow, agreeable contralto
voice, could be pleasing.
Still more cracked is the craze of a sub-section of the Sym
bolists, the ' Instrumentalists,' whose spokesman is Ren6 Ghil.
They connect each sound with a definite feeling of colour, and
demand that the word should not only awaken musical emotion,
but at the same time operate aesthetically in producing a colour-
harmony. This mad idea has its origin in a much-quoted sonnet
by Arthur Rimbaud, Les Voyelles (Vowels), of which the first
line runs thus : ' A black, e white, i red, u green, o blue.'

140 DEGENERATION
Morice declares* explicitly (what in any case no one in a sane
state of mind would have doubted) that Rimbaud wished to
make one of those silly jokes which imbeciles and idiots are in
the habit of perpetrating. Some of his comrades, however, took
the sonnet in grim earnest, and deduced from it a theory of art.
In his Trait 'i du Verbe Rend Ghil specifies the colour-value, not
only of individual vowels, but of musical instruments. ' Harps
establish their supremacy by being white. And violins are blue,
often softened by a shimmer of light, to subdue paroxysms.'
(It is to be hoped the reader will duly appraise these combina
tions of words.) ' In the exuberance of ovations, brass instru
ments are red, flutes yellow, allowing the childlike to proclaim
itself astonished at the luminance of the lips. And the organ,
synthesis of all simple instruments, bewails deafness of earth
and the flesh all in black. . . .' Another Symbolist, who has
many admirers, M. Francis Poictevin, teaches us, in Derniers
Songes, to know the feelings corresponding to colours. ' Blue
goes — without more of passion — from love to death ; or, more
accurately, it is a lost extreme. From turquoise blue to indigo,
one goes from the most shame-faced influences to final ravages.'
Wiseacres were, of course, at once to the fore, and set up a
quasi-scientific theory of 'colour-hearing.' Sounds are said to
awaken sensations of colour in many persons. According to
some, this was a gift of specially finely organized nervous natures ;
according to others, it was due to an accidental abnormal con
nection between the optic and acoustic brain-centres by means
of nerve filaments. This anatomical explanation is entirely
arbitrary, and has not been substantiated by any facts. But
' colour-hearing ' itself is by no means confirmed. The most
complete book hitherto published on this subject, the author of
which is the French oculist, Suarez de Mendoza.f collects all
the available observations on this alleged phenomenon, and
deduces from them the following definition : ' It is the faculty
of associating tones and colours, by which every objective
acoustic perception of sufficient intensity, nay, even the memory-
image of such a perception, arouses in certain persons a luminous
or non-luminous image, which is always the same for the same
letters, the same tone of voice or instrument, and the same
intensity or pitch of tone.' Suarez well hits the truth when he
says, ' Colour-hearing ' (he calls it pseudo-photesthhie) ' is often a
consequence of an association of ideas established in youth . . .
and often of a special action of the brain, the particular nature
of which is unknown to us, and may have a certain similarity
to sense-illusion and hallucination.' For my part, I have no
* Morice, op. cit , p. 321.
f Dr. F. Suarez de Mendoza, L' Audition coloree : Etude sur les fausses
Sensations secondaires physiologiques. Paris, 1892.

MYSTICISM 141
doubt that colour-hearing is always the consequence of associa
tion of ideas, the origins of which must remain obscure, because
the combination of certain presentations of colour with certain
sensations of sound may possibly depend upon the very evan
escent perceptions of early childhood, which were not powerful
enough to arouse the attention, and have therefore remained
undiscerned in consciousness. That it is a question of purely
individual associations brought about by the accident of asso
ciated ideas, and not of organic co-ordinations depending upon
definite abnormal nervous connections, is made very probable
by the fact that every colour-hearer ascribes a different colour to
the same vowel or instrument. We have seen that to Ghil the
flute is yellow, to L. Hoffmann (whom Goethe cites in his
Farbenlehre) this instrument is scarlet. Rimbaud calls the letter
' a ' black. Persons whom Suarez mentions heard this vowel
as blue, and so on.
The relation between the external world and the organism
is originally very simple. Movements are continually occurring
in nature, and the protoplasm of living cells perceives these
movements. Unity of effect corresponds to unity of cause.
The lowest animals perceive of the outer world only this, that
something in it changes, and possibly, also, whether this change
is marked or slight, sudden or slow. They receive sensations
differing quantitatively, but not qualitatively. We know, for
example, that the proboscis, or syphon, of the Pholas dactylus,
which contracts more or less vigorously and quickly at every
excitation, is sensitive to all external impressions — light, noise,
touch, smell, etc. This mollusc sees, hears, feels and smells,
therefore, with this simple organ ; his proboscis is to him at
once eye, ear, nose, finger, etc. In the higher animals the pro
toplasm is differentiated. Nerves, ganglia, brain and sense-
apparatus are formed. The movements of nature are now per
ceived in a variety of ways. The differentiated senses transform
the unity of the phenomenon into the diversity of the percept.
But even in the highest and most differentiated brain there still
remains something like a very distant and very dim remembrance
that the cause which excites the different senses is one and the
same movement, and there are formed presentations and con
ceptions which would be unintelligible if we could not concede
this vague intuition of the fundamental unity of essence in all
perceptions. We speak of ' high ' and ' deep ' tones, and thus
give to sound-waves a relationship in space which they cannot
have. In the same way we speak of tone-colour, and, conversely,
of colour-tones, and thus confound the acoustic and optic pro
perties of the phenomena. ' Hard ' and ' soft ' lines or tones,
' sweet ' voices, are frequent modes of expression, which depend
on a transference of the perception of one sense to the impres-

142 DEGENERATION
sions of another. In many cases this method of speech may no
doubt be traced to mental inertia. It is more convenient to
designate a sense-perception by a word which is familiar, though
borrowed from the province of another sense, than to create a
special word for the particular percept But even this loan for
convenience' sake is possible and intelligible only if we admit
that the mind perceives certain resemblances between the im
pressions of the different senses — resemblances which, although
they are often to be explained by conscious or unconscious asso
ciation of ideas, are oftener quite inexplicable objectively. It
only remains for us to assume that consciousness, in its deepest
substrata, neglects the differentiation of phenomena by the
various senses, passes over this perfection attained very late in
organic evolution, and treats impressions only as undifferentiated
material for the acquirement of knowledge of the external world
without reference to their origin by way of this or that sense.
It thus becomes intelligible that the mind mingles the percep
tions attained through the different senses, and transforms them
one into another. Binet* has established, in his excellent essays,
this transposition of the senses in hysteVical persons. A female
patient, whose skin was perfectly insensible on one half of her
body, took no notice when, unseen by herself, she was pricked
with a needle. But at the moment of puncture there arose in
her consciousness the image of a black (in the case of another
invalid, of a bright) point. Consciousness thus transposed an
impression of the nerves of the skin, which, as such, was not
perceived, into an impression of the retina, of the optic nerve.
In any case, it is an evidence of diseased and debilitated
brain-activity, if consciousness relinquishes the advantages of
the differentiated perceptions of phenomena, and carelessly con
founds the reports conveyed by the particular senses. It is a
retrogression to the very beginning of organic development. It
is a descent from the height of human perfection to the low
level of the mollusc. To raise the combination, transposition
and confusion of the perceptions of sound and sight to the rank
of a principle of art, to see futurity in this principle, is to
designate as progress the return from the consciousness of man
to that of the oyster.
Moreover, it is an old clinical observation that mental decay
is accompanied by colour mysticism. One of Legrain'sf mental
invalids ' endeavoured to recognise good and evil by the
difference of colour, ascending from white to black; when he
was reading, words had (according to their colour) a hidden
meaning, which he understood.' LombrosoJ cites ' eccentric
* Alfred Binet, ' Recherche sur les alterations de la conscience chez les
hysleViques,' Revue philosophique, 1889, 27s vol., p. 165.
t Legrain .pp. cit, p. 162.
X Lombroso Genie und Irrsinn. German edition, p. 233.

MYSTICISM 143
persons ' who, ' like Wigman, had the paper for their books
specially manufactured with several colours on each page. . . .
Filon painted each page of the books he wrote in a different
colour.' Barbey d'Aurevilly, whom the Symbolists venerate as
a pioneer, used to write epistles in which each letter of a word
was coloured with a different tint. Most alienists know similar
cases in their experience.
The more reliable Symbolists proclaim their movement as ' a
reaction against naturalism.' Such a reaction was certainly
justified and necessary ; for naturalism in its beginnings, as
long as it was embodied in De Goncourt and Zola, was morbid,
and, in its later development in the hands of their imitators,
vulgar and even criminal, as will be proved further on. Never
theless Symbolism is not in the smallest degree qualified to
conquer naturalism, because it is still more morbid than the
latter, and, in art, the devil cannot be driven out by Beelzebub.
Finally, it is affirmed that Symbolism connotes ' the inscribing
of a symbol in human form.' Expressed unmystically, this
means that in the poems of the Symbolists the particular human
form should not only exhibit its special nature and contingent
destiny, but also represent a general type of humanity, and
embody a universal law of life. This quality, however, is not
the monopoly of Symbolistic poetry, but belongs to all kinds of
poetry. No genuine poet has yet been impelled to deal with
an utterly unprecedented and unique case, or with a monstrous
being whose likeness is not to be found in mankind. That
which interests him in men and their destiny is just the intimate
connection between the two and the universal laws of human
life. The more the government of universal laws is made
apparent in the fate of the individual, the more there is embodied
in him that which lives in all men, so much the more attractive
will this destiny and this man be to the poet. There is not in
all the literature of humanity a single work of recognised im
portance which in this sense is not symbolic, and in which the
characters, their passions and fortunes, have not a typical
significance, far transcending the particular circumstances. It
is, therefore, a piece of foolish arrogance in the Symbolists to
lay claim to the sole possession of this quality in the works of
their school. They show, moreover,' that they do not under
stand their own formulae ; for those theorists of the school who
demand of poetry that it should be 'a symbol inscribed in
human form,' assert at the same time that only the ' rare and
unique case ' (le cas rare et unique) deserves the attention of the
poet, i.e., the case which is significant of nothing beyond itself,
and consequently the opposite of a symbol.*
* I may here be allowed to remind my readers that in the year 1885, and,
accordingly, before the promulgation of the professed symbolistic programme,
I laid down in my Paradoxe (popular edition, part ii., p. 253) the principle

144 DEGENERATION
We have now seen that Symbolism, like English pre-
Raphaelitism (from which it borrowed its catch-words and
opinions), is nothing else than a form of the mysticism of weak-
minded and morbidly emotional degeneration. The efforts of
some followers of the movement to import a meaning into the
stammering utterances of their leaders, and falsely to ascribe to
them a sort of programme, do not for a moment withstand
criticism, but show themselves to be graphomaniac and delirious
twaddle, without the smallest grain of truth or sound reason.
A young Frenchman, who is certainly not adverse to rational
innovation, Hugues Le Roux,* describes the group of Symbolists
quite correctly in saying of them : ' They are ridiculous cripples,
each intolerable to the other ; they live uncomprehended by the
public, several by their friends as well, and a few by themselves.
As poets or prose writers they proceed in the same way : no
material, no sense, and only juxtapositions of loud-sounding
musical (?) words ; teams of strange rhymes, groupings of unex
pected colours and tones, swaying cadences, hurtlings, hallucina
tions and evoked suggestions.'

CHAPTER IV.
TOLSTOISM.
Count Leo TOLSTOI has become in the last few years one of
the best-known, and apparently, also, of the most widely-read
authors in the world. Every one of his words awakens an echo
among all civilized nations on the globe. His strong influence
over his contemporaries is unmistakable. But it is no artistic
influence. No one has yet imitated him — at least, for the
present. He has formed no school after the manner of the
pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists. The already large number of
writings to which he has given occasion are explanatory or
critical. There are no poetical creations modelled upon his
own. The influence which he exercises over contemporary
thoughts and feelings is a moral one, and applies far more to
the great bulk of his readers than to the smaller circle of
struggling authors who are on the look-out for a leader. What
that the poet must 'to the majority of his readers utter the deep saying,
"Tat twain asi .'" — "That art thou!" of the Indian sage,' and 'muit
be able, with the ancient Romans, to repeat to the sound and normally
developed man, " Of thee is the fable related." In other words, the poem
must be "symbolical" in the sense that it brings into view characters,
destinies, feelings and laws of life which are universal.'
* Hugues Le Roux, Portraits de Cire. Paris, 1891, p. 129.

MYSTICISM 145
we, then, can call Tolstoism is no aesthetic theory, but rather a
conception of life.
In order to bring forward the proof that Tolstoism is a
mental aberration, that it is a form of the phenomenon of
degeneration, it will be necessary to look critically first at
Tolstoi himself, and then at the public which is inspired by his
thoughts. Tolstoi is at once a poet and a philosopher, the latter in the
widest sense — i.e., he is a theologian, a moralist, and a social
theorist. As the author of works of imagination he stands very
high, even if he does not equal his countryman Tourgenieff,
whom he at present appears in the estimation of most people
to have thrown into the shade. Tolstoi does not possess the
splendid sense of artistic proportion of Tourgenieff, with whom
there is never a word too much, who neither protracts his
subject nor digresses from his point, and who, as a grand and
genuine creator of men, stands Prometheus-like over the figures
he has inspired with life. Even Tolstoi's greatest admirers
admit that he is long-winded, loses himself in details, and does
not always know how to sacrifice the unessential in order, with
sure judgment, to enhance the indispensable. Speaking of the
novel War and Peace, M. de Vogue* says : ' Is this complicated
work properly to be termed a novel ? . . . The very simple
and very loose thread of the plot serves to connect chapters on
history, politics, philosophy, which are all crammed promis
cuously into this polygraphy of Russian life. . . . Enjoyment
has here to be purchased in a manner resembling a mountain
ascent. The way is often wearisome and hard ; at times one goes
astray ; effort is necessary and toil. . . . Those who only seek
diversion in fiction are by Tolstoi driven from their wonted
ways. This close analyst doe's not know, or else disdains, the
first duty of analysis, which is so natural to the French genius ;
we desire that the novelist should select ; that he should set
apart a person, a fact, out of the chaos of beings and things,
in order to observe the objects of his choice. The Russian,
governed by the feeling of universal interdependence, cannot
make up his mind to cut the thousand cords which unite a man,
a fact, a thought, to the whole course of the world.'
Vogiie' sees rightly that these facts are deserving of notice,
but he cannot explain them. Unconsciously he has clearly
characterized the method with which a mystical degenerate
looks upon the world, and depicts its phenomena. We know
that it is lack of attention which constitutes the peculiarity of
mystical thought. It is attention which selects from the chaos of
phenomena, and so groups what it selects as to illustrate the
predominating thought in the mind of the beholder. If atten-
* V*** E. M. de Vogue*, Le Roman russe. Paris, 1888, p. 293 et seq.
10

146 DEGENERATION
tion fails, the world appears to the beholder like a uniform
stream of enigmatic states, which emerge and disappear with
out any connection, and remain completely without expres
sion to consciousness. These primary facts of mental life must
ever be kept in view by the reader. The attitude of the atten
tive man in the face of external phenomena is one of activity ;
that of the inattentive man is passive ; the former orders them
according to a plan which he has worked out in his mind ; the
latter receives the turmoil of their impress without attempting
to organize, separate, or co-ordinate. The difference is the
same as that between the reproduction of the scenes of nature
by a good painter and a photographic plate. The painting
suppresses certain features in the world's phenomena, and brings
others into prominence, so that it at once permits a distinct
external incident, or a definite internal emotion of the painter,
to be recognised. The photograph reflects the whole scene with
all its details indiscriminately, so that it is without meaning, until
the beholder brings into play his attention, which the sensitive
plate could not do. At the same time it is to be observed that
even the photograph is not a true impression of reality, for the
sensitive plate is only sensitive to certain colours ; it records the
blue and violet, and receives from yellow and red either a weak
impression or none at all. The sensitiveness of the chemical
plate corresponds to the emotionalism of the degenerate mind.
The latter also makes a choice among phenomena, not, however,
according to the laws of conscious attention, but according to
the impulse of unconscious emotionalism. He perceives what
ever is in tune with his emotions ; what is not consonant with
them does not exist for him. Thus arises the method of work
which Vogiie' has pointed out in Tolstoi's novels. The details
are perceived equally, and placed side by side, not according
to their importance for the leading idea, but according to
their relation with the emotions of the novelist. For that
matter, there is scarcely any leading idea, or none at all. The
reader must first carry it into the novel, as he would carry it
into Nature herself, into a landscape, into a crowd of people,
into the course of events. The novel is only written because
the novelist felt certain strong emotions, and certain features of
the world's panorama as it unrolled before his eyes inten
sified these emotions. Thus, the novel of Tolstoi resembles the
picture of the pre-Raphaelites : an abundance of amazingly
accurate details,* a mystically blurred, scarcely recognisable,
* See, in War and Peace (Leo. N. Tolstoi's collected works, published
with the author's sanction, by Raphael Lowenfeld, Berlin, 1892, vols, v.— viii )'
the soldiers' talk, part i., p. 252 ; the scene at the Outposts,'p. 314 et seq '¦
the description of the troops on the march, p. 332 ; the death of Count
Besuchoi, pp. 142-145 ; the coursing, part ii., pp. 383-407, etc.

MYSTICISM 147
leading idea,* a deep and strong emotion. f This is also dis
tinctly felt by M. de Vogii4 but again without his being able
to explain it. He says :\ ' Through a peculiar and frequent
contradiction, this troubled, vacillating mind, steeped as it is in
the mists of Nihilism, is endowed with an incomparable clear
ness and power of penetration for the scientific (?) study of the
phenomena of life. He sees distinctly, rapidly, analytically,
everything on earth. . . . One might say, the mind of an
English chemist in the soul of an Indian Buddhist. Let any
one who can explain this singular union ; whoever succeeds will
be able to explain Russia. . . . These phenomena, which offer
so firm a basis to him when he observes them singly, he wishes
to know in their universal relations, and to arrive at the definite
laws governing these relations, and at their inaccessible causes.
Then it is that this clear vision darkens, the intrepid inquirer loses
his footing, he falls into the abyss of philosophical contradictions ;
in him and around him he feels only nothingness and night'
M. de Vogiie wishes for an explanation of this ' singular
union ' between great clearness in apprehension of details, and
complete incapacity of understanding their relations to each
other. The explanation is' now familiar to my readers. The
mystical intellect, the intellect without attention, of the emotif
conveys to his consciousness isolated impressions, which can be
very distinct if they relate to his emotions; but it is not in the
condition to connect these isolated impressions intelligibly, just
because it is deficient in the attention necessary to this object.
Grand as are the qualities which Tolstoi's works of fiction
possess, it is not them he has to thank for his world-wide fame,
or his influence on his contemporaries. His novels were recog
nised as remarkable works, but for decades of years neither
Peace and War, nor Anna Karenina, nor his short stories, had
very many readers outside Russia ; and the critics bestowed
upon their author only a guarded commendation. In Germany,
as recently as 1882, Franz Bornmuller said of Tolstoi in his
Biographical Dictionary of Authors of the Present Time: ' He
possesses no ordinary talent for fiction, but one devoid of due
artistic finish, and which is influenced by a certain one-sided
ness in his views of life and history.' This was the opinion
until a few years ago of the not very numerous non-Russian
readers who knew him at all.
* See, in War and Peace, the thoughts of the wounded Prince Andrej,
part i., p. 516 ; Count Peter's conversation with the freemason and Martinicf
Basdjejeff, part ii., pp. 106-114, etc.
f War and Peace, the episode of Princess Maria and her suitor, part i.,
pp. 420-423 ; the confinement of the little Princess, part ii., pp. 58-65 ; and
all the passages where Count Rostoff sees the Emperor Alexander, or where
the author speaks of the Emperor Napoleon I., etc.
X Vogue*, op. cit, p. 282.

148 DEGENERATION
In 1889 his Kreutzer Sonata appeared, and was the first of
his works to carry his name to the borders of civilization. This
little tale was the first to be translated into all cultivated
languages. It was disseminated in hundreds of thousands of
copies, and was read by millions with lively emotion. From
this time onward the public opinion of the Western nations
placed him in the first rank of living authors : his name was
in everyone's mouth, and universal sympathy turned not only
towards his early writings (which had remained unnoticed for
decades), but also to his person and his career, and he became,
as it were, in a night what he unquestionably is now in the
evening of his life — one ofthe chief representative figures ofthe
departing century. Yet the Kreutzer Sonata stands, as a poetic
creation, not so high as most of his older works. A fame which
was not gained by War and Peace, The Cossacks, Anna Kare-
nina, etc., nor, indeed, until long after the appearance of these
rich creations, but came at one stroke . through the Kreutzer
Sonata, cannot therefore depend either solely or principally on
aesthetic excellence. The history of this fame shows conse
quently that Tolstoi the novelist is not the cause of Tolstoism.
In fact, the tendency of mind so named is far more — perhaps
wholly and entirely — traceable to Tolstoi the philosopher. The
philosopher is, therefore, incomparably more important to our
inquiry than the novelist.
Tolstoi has formed certain views on the position of man in the
world, on his relation to collective humanity, and on the aim of
his life, which are visible in all his creations, but which he has
also set forth connectedly in several theoretic works, especially
in My Confession, My Faith, A Short Exposition of the Gospel,
and About my Life. These views are but little complicated, and
can be condensed in a few words : the individual is nothing ; the
species is everything ; the individual lives in order to do his fellow-
creatures good ; thought and inquiry are great evils ; science is
perdition ; faith is salvation.
How he arrived at these results is related in My Confessions :
' I lost my faith early. I lived for a long time like everyone
else, in the frivolities of life. I wrote books, and taught, like
everyone else, what I did not know. Then the Sphinx began to
follow me more and more ruthlessly : " Guess my problem or I
will tear thee to pieces." Science has explained absolutely
nothing to me. In answer to my everlasting question, the only
one which means anything, "Wherefore am I alive?" Science
replied by teaching me things that were indifferent to me.
Science only said . . . : " Life is a senseless evil." I wanted to
kill myself. Finally I had a fancy to see how the vast majority
of men lived who, unlike us of the so-called upper classes, who
give ourselves up to pondering and investigation, work' and

MYSTICISM 149
suffer, and are, nevertheless, quiet and clear in their minds over
the aim of life. I understood that to live like these men one
must return to their simple beliefs.'
If this train of thought is seriously considered, it will be recog
nised at once as nonsensical. The question, ' Wherefore am I
alive ?' is incorrectly and superficially put. It tacitly presupposes
the idea of finality in nature, and it is just upon this presuppo
sition that the mind, thirsting earnestly for truth and knowledge,
has to exercise its criticism.
In order to ask, ' What is the aim of our life ?' we must take
for granted, above all, that our life has a definite aim, and since
it is only a particular phenomenon in the universal life of nature,
in the evolution of our earth, of our solar system, of all solar
systems, this assumption includes in itself the wider one, that
the universal life of Nature has a definite aim. This assumption,
again, necessarily presupposes the rule of a conscious, prescient,
and guiding mind over the universe. For what is an aim ?
The fore-ordained effect in the future of forces active in the
present. The aim exercises an influence on these forces in
pointing out to them a direction, and is thus itself a force. It
cannot, however, exist objectively, in time and space, because
then it would cease to be an aim and become a cause, i.e., a force
fitting in with the general mechanism of the forces of nature,
and all the speculation concerning the aim would fall to the
ground. But if it is not objective, if it does not exist in
time and space, it must, in order to be conceivable, exist some
where, virtually, as idea, as a plan and design. But that which
contains a design, a thought, a plan, we name conscious
ness ; and a consciousness that can conceive a plan of the
universe, and for its realization designedly uses the forces of
nature, is synonymous with God. If a man, however, believes
in a God, he loses at once the right to raise the question, 'Where
fore am I alive ?' Since it is in that case an insolent presump
tion, an effort of small, weak man to look over God's shoulder,
to spy out God's plan, to aspire to the height of omniscience.
But neither is it in such a case necessary, since a God without
the highest wisdom cannot be conceived, and if He has devised
a plan for the world, this is certain to be perfect, all its parts are
in harmony, and the aim to which every co-operator, from the
smallest to the greatest, will devote himself is the best con
ceivable. Thus, man can live in complete rest and confidence in
the impulses and forces implanted in him by God, because he, in
every case, fulfils a high and worthy destiny by co-operating in
a, to him, unknown Divine plan of the world.
If, on the other hand, there is no belief in a God, it is also
impossible to form a conception of the aim, for then the aim,
existing in consciousness only as an idea, in the absence of a

150 DEGENERATION
universal consciousness, has no locus for its existence ; there is
no place for it in Nature. But if there is no aim, then one
cannot ask the question, ' Wherefore am I alive ?' Then life
has not a predetermined aim, but only causes. We have then
to concern ourselves only with these causes — at least, with the
more proximate, and which are accessible to our examination,
since the remote, and especially the first, causes elude our
cognition. Our question must then run, ' Why do we live ?
and we find the answer to it without difficulty. We live,
because we stand, like the rest of cognizable Nature, under the
universal law of causality. This is a mechanical law, which
requires no predetermined plan, and no design, consequently
also no universal consciousness. According to this law present
phenomena are grounded on the past, not on the future. We
live because we are engendered by our parents, because we
have received from them a definite measure of force, which
makes it possible for us to resist for a given time the influence
upon us of Nature's forces of dissolution. How our life is
shaped is determined by the constant interaction of our inherited
organic forces and of our environment. Our life is, therefore,
objectively viewed, the necessary result of the law -governed
activity of the mechanical forces of Nature. Subjectively it
includes a quantity of pleasures and pains. We feel as pleasure
the satisfaction of our organic impulses, as pain their fruitless
struggles for satisfaction. In a sound organism, possessing a
high capacity for adaptation, those appetites only attain develop
ment, the satisfaction of which is possible — at least, to a certain
degree — and is accompanied by no bad consequences for the
individual. In such a life pleasure consequently prevails
decidedly over pain, and he looks upon existence, not as an
evil, but as a great good. In the organism deranged by disease
degenerate appetites exist which cannot be satisfied, or of which
the gratification injures or destroys the individual, or the
degenerate organism is too weak or too inapt to gratify the
legitimate impulses. In his life pain necessarily predominates,
and he looks upon existence as an evil. My interpretation
of the riddle of life is nearly related to the well-known theory
of eudaemonism, but it is founded on a biological, not a
metaphysical, basis. It explains optimism and pessimism
simply as an adequate or inadequate vitality, as the existence
or absence of adaptability, as health or illness. Unprejudiced
observation of life shows that the whole of mankind stands
knowingly or unknowingly at the same philosophical stand
point. Men live willingly, and rather quietly happy than sadly,
so long as existence affords them gratification. If the suffer
ings are stronger than the feeling of pleasure conferred by
the satisfaction of the first and most important of all organic

MYSTICISM 151
impulses — the impulse of life or self-preservation — then they do
not hesitate to kill themselves. When Prince Bismarck once
said, ' I do not know why I should bear all the troubles of life,
if I were not able to believe in a God and a future life,' it only
shows that he is insufficiently acquainted with the progress of
human thought since Hamlet, who raised somewhat the same
question. He bears the troubles of life because, and as long as,
he can bear them, and he throws them down infallibly at* the
moment in which his strength is no longer adequate to carry
them. The unbeliever lives and is happy, so long as the sweets
of life weigh down the scale, and for this reason also the believer,
as experience daily teaches, will commit suicide if he sees his
balance of life's account yielding a deficit of satisfaction. The
arguments of religion have undoubtedly in the mind of the
believer, as have the arguments of duty and honour in the mind
of the unbeliever, a convincing force, and must likewise be taken
into account as so many assets. Nevertheless they have only a
limited, if high value, and can counterbalance their own equivalent
of suffering only, and no more.
From these considerations it follows that the terrible question —
' Wherefore am I alive ?' — which nearly drove Tolstoi to suicide,
is to be answered satisfactorily and without difficulty. The
believer, who accepts the fact that his life must have an aim,
will live according to his inclinations and powers, and tell himself
that he performs correctly, in this way, his allotted portion of
the world's work without knowing its final aim ; as also a
soldier, at that point of the field of battle where he is placed,
does his duty willingly, without having any notion of the general
progress of the fight, and of its significance for the whole
campaign. The unbeliever, who is convinced that his life is a
particular instance of the universal life of Nature, that his
individuality has blossomed into existence as a necessary law-
governed operation of eternal organic forces, knows also very
well not only ' wherefore,' but also ' what for,' he is alive ; he
lives because, and as long as, life is to him a source of gratifica
tion — that is to say, of joy and happiness.
Has Tolstoi found any other answer by his desperate seeking ?
No. The explanation which his pondering and searching did
not offer him was, as we have seen in the above-quoted passage
in My Confessions, given him by 'the enormous majority of
mankind, who . . . labour and suffer, and, nevertheless, are
quiet and clear in their minds as to the aim of life.' ' I under
stood,' he adds, ' that one must return to their simple faith to
live as these men do.' The conclusion is arbitrary, and is a
saltum of mystic thought. 'The masses live quietly, and are
clear in their minds as to the aim of life,' not because they have
a ' simple faith,' but because they are healthy, because they like

152 DEGENERATION
to feel themselves alive, because life gives them, in every organic
function, in every manifestation of their powers, at _ every
moment, some gratification. The ' simple faith * is the accidental
accompanying phenomenon of this natural optimism. No doubt
the majority of the uneducated classes, who represent the
healthy portion of mankind, and therefore certainly rejoice in
life, receive, during childhood, instruction in religious faith, and
afterwards only rarely rectify through their own thought the
errors which, for state reasons, have been imparted to them ;
but their unthinking belief is a consequence of their poverty and
ignorance, like their bad clothing, insufficient food, and insanitary
dwellings. To say that the majority ' live quietly, and are
clear in their minds as to the aim of life,' because they 'have
simple faith,' is quite as logical a sequitur as the assertion that
this majority ' live quietly, and are clear in their minds as to the
aim of life' because they chiefly eat potatoes, or because they
live in cellars, or because they seldom take baths.
Tolstoi has rightly noticed the fact that the majority do not
share his pessimism, and rejoice in their life, but he has explained
it mystically. Instead of recognising that the optimism of the
masses is simply a sign of their vitality, he traces it to their
belief, and then seeks in faith the clue to the aim of his exist
ence. ' I was led to Christianity,' he writes in another book,*
' neither through theological nor historical research, but by the
circumstance that when, at fifty years of age, I asked myself
and the wise among my acquaintance what myself and my life
might signify, and received the answer: " You are an accidental
concatenation of parts ; there is no significance in life ; life as
such is an evil " — I was then brought to despair, and wished to
kill myself. Remembering, however, that formerly, in childhood,
when I believed, life had a meaning for me, and that the people
about me who believe — the greater number being men un
spoilt by riches — both believe and lead real lives, I doubted the
accuracy of the answer which had been given me by the wisdom
of my circle, and endeavoured to understand that answer which
Christianity gives to men who lead a real life.'f
He found this answer 'in the Gospels, that source of light.'
' It was quite the same thing to me,' he goes on to say, • whether
Jesus was God or not God ; whether the Holy Ghost proceeded
from the one or the other. It was likewise neither necessary
nor important for me to know when and by whom the Gospel,
or any one of the parables, was composed, and whether they
could be ascribed to Christ or not. What to me was important
* Count Leo Tolstoi, A Short Exposition of the Gospel. From the
Russian, by Paul Lauterbach. Leipzig : Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek,
P- '3-
j L. Tolstoi, Short Exposition of the Gospel, p. 13.

MYSTICISM 153
was that Light, which for eighteen hundred years was the Light
of the World, and is that Light still, but what name was to
be given to the source of this Light, or what were its com
ponent parts, and by whom it was lighted, was quite indifferent
to me.'
Let us appraise this process of thought in a mystical mind.
The Gospel is the source of truth ; it is, however, quite the same
thing whether the Gospel is God's revelation or man's work, and
whether it contains the genuine tradition of the life of Christ,
or whether it was written down hundreds of years after his
death on the basis of obscured and distorted traditions. Tolstoi
himself feels that he here makes a great error of thought, but he
deceives himself over and out of it in genuine mystical fashion,
in that he makes use of a simile, and pretends that his image
was the matter-of-fact truth. He speaks, namely, of the Gospel
as a light, and says it is indifferent to him what that light is
called, and of what it consists. This is correct if it concerns a
real, material light, but the Gospel is only figuratively a light,
and can obviously, therefore, be compared to a light only if it
contains the truth. Whether it does contain the truth should
first be decided by inquiry. Should inquiry result in establish
ing that it is man's work, and consists only in unauthenticated
traditions, then it would evidently be no receptacle of truth,
and one could not any longer compare it with light, and the
magnificent image with which Tolstoi cuts short inquiry into
the source of the light would vanish into air. While, therefore,
Tolstoi calls the Gospel a light, and denies the necessity of
following up its origin, he forthwith takes as proven the very
thing which is to be proved, namely, that the Gospel is a light.
We know already, however, the peculiarity of mystics to found
all their conclusions on the most senseless premises, alleging
contempt of reality and resisting all reasonable verification of
their starting-point. I only remind the reader of Rossetti's
sentence, ' What does it matter to me whether the sun revolves
round the earth, or the earth round the sun ?' and of Mallarm6's
expression, ' The world is made in order to lead to a beautiful
book.' One can read for one's self in his Short Exposition how
Tolstoi handles the Gospel, so that it may give him the required
explanation. He does not trouble himself in the least about
the literal sense of the Scriptures, but puts into them what is in
his own head. The Gospel which he has so recast has about as
much resemblance to the canonical Scriptures as the Physiogno-
mische Fragmente, which Jean Paul's ' merry little schoolmaster,
Maria Wuz in Auenthal,' ' drew out of his own head,' had with
Lavater's work of the same title. This Gospel of his taught
him concerning the importance of life as follows :* ' Men imagine
* Tolstoi, Short Exposition, etc., p. 172.

154 DEGENERATION
that they are isolated beings, each one shaping his own life as
he wills. This, however, is a delusion. The only true life is
that which acknowledges the will of the Father as the source of
life. This unity of life my teaching reveals, and represents that
life, not as separate shoots, but as a single tree on which all the
shoots grow. He only who lives in the will of the Father, like
a shoot on the tree, has life ; but he who would live according
to his own will, like a severed shoot, dies.' He has already said
that the Father is synonymous with God, and that God, who
' is the eternal origin of all things,' is synonymous with ' Spirit'
If, then, this passage has any sense at all, it can only be that
the whole of Nature is a single living being, that every single
living being, therefore also every human being, is a portion of
universal life, and that this universal life is God. This teaching
is, however, not invented by Tolstoi. It has a name in the
history of philosophy, and is called Pantheism. It is shadowed
forth in Buddhism* and Greek Hylozoism, and was elaborated
by Spinoza. It is certainly not contained in the Gospel, and it
is a definite denial of Christianity which, let its dogmas be ever
so rationalistically interpreted and tortured, can never give up
its doctrine of a personal God and the Divine nature of Christ
without ridding itself of its whole religious import and its vitally
important organs, and ceasing to be a creed.
Thus we see that, though Tolstoi supposes he has succeeded
in his attempt to explain life's problems by the Christian faith
of the masses, he has, on the contrary, fallen into its very
opposite, namely, Pantheism. The reply of the ' wise,' that he
' is an accidental concatenation of parts, and that there is no
significance in life,' ' drove him almost to suicide' ; he is, on the
contrary, quite tranquil in the knowledge thatf ' the true life is
. . . not the life which is past, nor that which will be, but is the
life which now is, that which confronts everyone at the present
minute ' ; he expressly denies in My Religion the resurrection of
the body and the individuality of the soul, and does not notice
that the teaching which contents him is quite the same as that
of the ' wise,' who ' almost drove him into suicide.' For if life
exists only in the present, it can have no aim, since this would
refer to the future ; and if the body does not rise again, and
the soul has no individual existence, then the ' wise ' are quite
right to call the human being (certainly not accidental, but
necessary, because causally conditioned) 'a concatenation of
parts.' Tolstoi's theory of life, the fruit of the despairing mental
labour of his whole life, is therefore nothing but a haze, a failure
to comprehend his own questions and answers, and hollow
* More accurately, in Vedintism.— Translator.
f Tolstoi, Short Exposition, etc., p. 128.

MYSTICISM 155
verbiage. His ethics — on which he himself lays a far greater
stress than on his philosophy — is not in much better case than
the latter. He comprises them* in five laws, of which the
fourth is the most important : ' Do not resist evil ; suffer wrong,
and do more than men ask ; and so judge not, nor suffer to be
judged. . . .' To avenge one's self only teaches to avenge
one's self. His admirer, M. de Vogiie^ expresses Tolstoi's moral
philosophy in this form :f 'Resist not evil, judge not, kill not.
Consequently no courts of justice, no armies, no prisons, no
public or private reprisals. No wars nor judgments. The
world's law is the struggle for existence ; the law of Christ is the
sacrifice of one's own existence for others.'
Is it still necessary to point out the unreasonableness of these
ethics ? It is obvious to sound common-sense without saying
any more. If the murderer had no longer to fear the gallows,
and the thief the prison, throat-cutting and stealing would be
soon by far the most generally adopted trade. It is so much
more convenient to filch baked bread and ready-made boots
than to rack one's self at the plough and in the workshop.
If society should cease to take care that crime should be a
dangerous risk, what would there be, forsooth, to deter wicked
men, who certainly exist, according to Tolstoi's assumption,
from surrendering themselves to their basest impulses ; and
how could the great mass of indifferent people be restrained,
who have no pronounced leaning either for good or for evil, from
imitating the example of the criminal ? Certainly not Tolstoi's
own teaching that ' the true life is life in the present' The first
active measures of society, for the sake of which individuals
originally formed themselves into a society, is the protection
of their members against those who are diseased with homicidal
mania, and against the parasites — another unhealthy variation
from the normal human type — who can only live by the work
of others, and who, to appease all their lusts, unscrupulously
overpower every human being who crosses their path. In
dividuals with anti - social impulses would soon be in the
majority if the healthy members did not subdue them, and
make it difficult for them to thrive. Were they once to become
the stronger, society, and soon mankind itself, would of a
necessity be devoted to destruction.
In addition to the negative precept that one should not resist
evil, Tolstoi's moral philosophy has yet a positive precept, viz. : we
ought to love all men ; to sacrifice everything, even one's own
life, for them ; to do good to them where we can. ' It is
necessary to understand that man, if he does good, only does
that to which he is bound — what he cannot leave undone. . . .
If he gives up his carnal life for the good, he does nothing for
* Short Exposition, p. 60. f De Vogue*, op. cit, p. 333.

156 DEGENERATION
which he need be thanked and praised. . . . Only those live
who do good ' (Short Exposition of the Gospel). ' Not is alms
giving effectual, but brotherly sharing. Whoever has two cloaks
should give one to him who has none ' ( What ought one to Do ?).
This distinction between charity and sharing cannot be main
tained in earnest. Every gift that a man receives from some
other man without work, without reciprocal service, is an alms,
and as such is deeply immoral. The sick, the old, the weak,
those who cannot work, must be supported and tended by their
fellow-creatures ; it is their duty, and it is also their natural
impulse. But to give to men capable of working is under all
circumstances a sin and a self-deception. If men capable of
work find no work, this is obviously attributable to some defect
in the economical structure of society; and it is the duty of
each individual to assist earnestly in removing this defect, but
not to facilitate its continuance by pacifying for awhile the
victim of the defective circumstances by a gift. Charity has in
this case merely the aim of deadening the conscience of the
donor, and furnishing him with an excuse why he should shirk
his duty of curing recognised evils in the constitution of society.
Should, however, the capable man be averse to labour, then
charity spoils him completely, and kills in him entirely any
inclination to put his powers into action, which alone keeps
the organism healthy and moral. Thus alms, extended to an
able-bodied man, degrades both the donor and the recipient,
and operates like poison on the feeling of duty and the morality
of both.
But the love of our neighbour which exhibits itself in alms
giving, or even brotherly sharing, is, properly speaking, no such
love if we look at it closely. Love in its simplest and most
original form (I speak here not of sexual love, but of general
sympathy for some other living being, and that need not even be
a human being) is a selfish impulse, which seeks only its own
gratification, not that of the beloved being ; in its higher
development, on the contrary, it is principally, or wholly, bent
upon the happiness of the beloved being, and forgets itself.
The healthy man, who has no anti-social impulses, enjoys the
company of other men ; he therefore avoids almost uncon
sciously those actions which would cause his fellow-creatures to
avoid him, and he does that which, without costing himself too
much effort, is sufficiently pleasant to his fellows to attract
them to him. In the same healthy man the idea of sufferings,
even when they are not his own, produces pain, which is always
greater or less according to the degree of excitability of his
brain ; the more active the idea of suffering, the more violent
is the accompanying feeling of pain. Because the ideas excited
by direct sense-impressions are the most vivid, the sufferings

MYSTICISM 157
which he sees with his own eyes cause him the sharpest pain,
and in order to escape from this, he makes suitable efforts
to put an end to this extraneous suffering, or often, it is
true, only not to witness it. This degree of love to our neigh
bour is, as was said above, pure self-love ; it merely aims at
averting pain from self, and at increasing one's own feelings of
pleasure. The love of our neighbour, on the contrary, which
Tolstoi obviously wishes to preach, claims to be unselfish. It
contemplates the diminution of the sufferings, and the increase
of the happiness, of others ; it can no longer be exercised in
stinctively, for it demands an exact knowledge of the conditions
of life, and the feelings and wishes of others, and the acquisition
of this knowledge presupposes observation, reflection, and
judgment. One must earnestly consider what is really needful
and good for one's neighbour. One must come out of one's
self, must set aside one's own habits and ideas completely, and
strive to slip into the skin of him to whom one would show love.
One must regard the intended benefit with the other's eyes, and
feel with his nature, and not with one's own. Does Tolstoi do
this ? His novels, in which he shows his alleged love between
fellow-men living and working, prove the exact contrary.
In the tale Albert* Delessow takes up a sickly, strolling
violin-player out of admiration for his great talent, and out of
pity for his poverty and helplessness. But the unhappy artist
is a drunkard. Delessow locks him up in his dwelling, places
him under the care of his servant Sachar, and keeps him from
intoxicating drinks. On the first day Albert the artist submits,
but is very depressed and out of temper. On the second day
he is already casting ' malignant glances ' at his benefactor.
' He seemed to fear Delessow, and whenever their eyes met a
deadly terror was depicted on his face. . . . He did not answer
the questions which were put to him.' Finally, on the third
day Albert rebels against the restraint to which he believes
himself subjected. 'You have no right to shut me up here,' he
cries. ' My passport is in order. I have stolen nothing from
you ; you can search me. I will go to the superintendent of
police.' The servant Sachar tries to appease him. Albert
becomes more and more enraged, and suddenly 'shrieks out
at the top of his voice : " Police !" ' Delessow allows him to
depart. Albert ' goes out of the door without taking leave, and
constantly muttering to himself incomprehensible words.'
Delessow had taken Albert home, because the sight was pain
ful to him of the poorly-clad, sickly, pale artist, trembling in the
cold of a Russian winter. When he saw him in his warm house,
before a well-spread table, in his own handsome dressing-gown,
* L. Tolstoi, Gesammelte Werke, Berlin, 1891, Band II. : Novels and
Short Tales, part i.

158 DEGENERATION
Delessow felt contented and happy. But was Albert also con
tented ? Tolstoi testifies that Albert feels himself much more
unhappy in the new position than in the old — so unhappy that
very soon he could not bear it, and freed himself from it with an
outburst of fury. To whom, then, had Delessow done good, to
himself or to Albert ?
In this narrative a mentally diseased man is depicted, and, it
must be admitted, upon such a one a benefit has frequently
to be forcibly pressed, which he does not understand or appre
ciate as such, though, of course, in a manner more consistent,
persistent, and prudent than Delessow's. In another story in the
same volume, however, From the Diary ofthe Prince Nechljudow,
Lucerne, the absurdity of love for one's fellow-creature which does
not trouble itself about the real needs of the fellow-creature is
brought out more vividly and without any excuse.
One glorious evening in July, in front of the Schweizer- Hof,
in Lucerne, Prince Nechljudow heard a street-singer whose
songs touched and enraptured him deeply. The singer is a
poor, small, hump-backed man, insufficiently clad and looking
half starved. On all the balconies of the sumptuous hotel rich
Englishmen and their wives are standing ; all have enjoyed the
glorious singing of the poor cripple, but when he takes off his
hat and begs a small reward for his artistic performance, not
one person throws even the smallest coin to him. Nechljudow
falls into the most violent excitement. He is beside himself
over the fact that ' the singer could beg three times for a gift,
and no one gave him the smallest thing, while the greater num
ber laughed at him.' It seems to him 'an event which the
historian of our times should inscribe in the pages of history
with indelible letters of fire.' He, for his part, will not be a
participator in this unprecedented sin. He hastens after the
poor devil, overtakes him and invites him to drink a bottle of
wine with him. The singer accepts. ' Close by is a small
cafe,' says he ; 'we can go in there — it is a cheap one," '
he continued. 'The words, "a cheap one," involuntarily
suggested the idea,' relates Nechljudow in his diary, ' not
to go to a cheap cafe, but into the Schweizer- Hof, where
were the people who had listened to his singing. Although
he refused the Schweizer-Hof several times in timid agita
tion, because he thought it was much too grand there, I per
sisted in it'
He leads the singer into the splendid hotel. Although he
appears in the company of the princely guest, the servants look
at the badly dressed vagabond with hostile and comtemptuous
glances. They show the pair into the ' saloon on the left, the
drinking-bar for the people.' The singer is very much embar
rassed, and wishes himself far away, but he conceals his feelings.

MYSTICISM
The Prince orders champagne. The singer drinks without any
real pleasure and without confidence. He talks about his life, and
says suddenly : ' I know what you wish. You want to make me
drunk, and then see what can be got out of me.' Nechljudow,
annoyed by the scornful and insolent demeanour of the servants
jumps up and goes with his guest into the handsome dining-
room on the right hand, which is set apart for the visitors. He
will be served here and nowhere else. The English, who are
present, indignantly leave the room ; the waiters are dismayed,
but do not venture to oppose the angry Russian Prince. ' The
singer drew a very miserable, terrified face, and begged me, as
soon as possible, to go away, evidently not understanding why
I was angry and what I wished.' The little mannikin • sat more
dead than alive ' near the Prince, and was very happy when
Nechljudow finally dismissed him.
It must be noticed how extremely absurdly Prince Nechljudow
behaves from beginning to end. He invites the singer to a
bottle of wine, although, if he had possessed the faintest glimmer
of sound common-sense, he might have said to himself that a
hot supper, or, still better, a five-franc piece, would be far more
necessary and useful to the poor devil than a bottle of wine.
The singer proposes to go to a modest restaurant, where he
himself would feel comfortable. The Prince pays not the
smallest attention to this natural, reasonable desire, but drags
the poor devil into a leading hotel, where he feels extremely
uncomfortable in his bad clothing, under the cross-fire of the
waiters' insolent and scornful looks. The Prince does not care
about this, but orders champagne, to which the singer is not
accustomed, and which gives him so little pleasure that the
thought occurs to him that his noble host desires to make sport
of him by seeing him drunk. Nechljudow begins to squabble
with the waiters, proceeds to the finest saloon of the hotel,
scares away the remaining guests, who do not desire to sit at
supper with the street-singer, and does not concern himself
during the whole of this time about the feelings of his guest,
who sits on hot coals, and would far rather sink into the floor,
and who only breathes again when his terrible benefactor lets
him escape out of his fangs.
Did Nechljudow exercise neighbourly love ? No. He did
nothing pleasant to the singer. He tormented him. He only
satisfied himself. He wished to revenge himself on the hard
hearted English people, with whom he was furious, and he did
so at the expense of the poor devil. Nechljudow calls it an
unheard-of occurrence that the wealthy Englishmen should give
nothing to the singer, but what he did to the latter is worse. The
odious niggardliness of the English people annoyed the singer for
a quarter of an hour, perhaps ; Nechljudow's foolish entertainment

160 DEGENERATION
tortured him for an hour. The Prince never took the trouble to
consider, even for a moment, what would be agreeable and
useful to the singer ; he thought always- of himself only, of his
own feelings, his anger, his indignation. This tender-hearted
philanthropist is a dangerous, depraved egoist.
The irrational neighbourly love of the emotional mystic fails
necessarily in its ostensible aim, because it does not arise from
a knowledge of the true needs of the neighbour. The mystic
practises a sentimental anthropomorphism. He transfers his
own feelings, without more ado, to other beings, who feel quite
differently from himself. He is in a condition bitterly to com
miserate the moles because they are condemned to brood in
perpetual darkness in their underground passages, and dreams,
perhaps with tears in his eyes, of introducing electric light into
their burrows. Because he, as seeing, would suffer severely
under the conditions of a mole's life, therefore this animal is
naturally to be pitied also, although it is blind and so does not
miss the light. An anecdote relates that a child poured some
hot water into the drawing-room aquarium one winter's day
because it must have been so intolerably cold for the gold-fish ;
and in comic papers there is frequently a hit at the benevolent
societies which bestow warm winter clothing on the negroes at
the equator. This is Tolstoi's love of one's neighbour put into
practice. One especial point of his moral doctrine is the mortification of
the flesh. All sexual intercourse is for him unchaste ; marriage is
quite as impure as the loosest tie. The Kreutzer Sonata is the
most complete, and at the same time most celebrated, embodi
ment of these propositions. Pozdnyscheff, the murderer from
motives of jealousy, says :* ' There is nothing pleasant in the
honeymoon ; on the contrary, it is a period of continual embar
rassment, a shame, a profound depression, and, above all, boredom
— fearful boredom ! I can only compare the situation to that of
a youth who is beginning to smoke : he feels sick, swallows his
saliva, and pretends to like it very much. If the cigar is to give
him any pleasure, it can only be later on, as it is with marriage.
In order to enjoy it, the married couple must first accustom
themselves to the vice.'
' How do you mean — to the vice ? You are speaking of one
of the most natural things — of an instinct.'
' Natural thing ? An instinct ? Not in the least. Allow me
to tell you that I have been brought to, and maintain, the oppo
site conviction. I, the depraved and dissolute, assert that it is
something unnatural. ... It is an entirely unnatural treatment
for any pure girl, just as it would be for a child.'
* Leon Tolstoi, La Sonate d Kreutzer. Traduit du Russe par E. HalpeVine-
Kaminsky. Paris : Collection des auteurs celebres, p. 72.

MYSTICISM 161
Further on Pozdnyscheff develops the following crazy theory
of the law of life : ' The object of man, as of humanity in
general, is happiness, and to attain it humanity has a law
which must be carried out. This law consists in the union of
the individual beings which compose humanity. Human
passions only impede this union, particularly the strongest
and worst of all, sensual love, sexual pleasures. When human
passions, especially the most violent, sensuality, shall have been
suppressed, the union will be accomplished, and humanity,
having attained its end, will have no further reason for existing.'
And his last words are : ' People should understand that the
true meaning of the words of St. Matthew, " Whosoever looketh
on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her
already in his heart," applies to one's sister, and not only to a
strange woman, but also, and above all, to one's own wife.'
Tolstoi, in whom, as in every 'higher degenerate,' two natures
co-exist, of whom the one notices and judges the follies of the
other, has yet a distinct feeling of the senselessness of his
Kreutzer Sonata theory, and he makes his mouthpiece, Pozdny
scheff, declare* that he 'was looked upon as cracked.' But in
the Short Exposition, where Tolstoi speaks in his own name,
he develops, if with somewhat more reserve, the same philo
sophy, f ' The temptation to break the seventh commandment
is due to the fact that we believe woman to have been created
for carnal pleasure, and that, if a man leave one wife and take
another, he will have more pleasure. Not to fall into this
temptation, we must remember that it is not the will of the
Father that the man should have pleasure through feminine
charms. . . .' In the story Family Happiness% he likewise
explains that a husband and wife, even if they have married
from love, must become enemies in their wedded life, and it is
quite purposeless to attempt a lasting cultivation of the original
feelings. It is not indeed necessary to refute a theory which pours con
tempt on all experience, all observations of nature, all institutions
and laws that have been historically developed, and the known
aim of which is the destruction of humanity. The thought of
assailing it with zeal could only occur to men who were them
selves more or less deranged. It is sufficient for the healthy
minded to state it in distinct language ; it is at once recognis
able, then, for what it is — insanity.
For Tolstoi the great enemy is science. In My Confession he
is never tired of accusing and abusing it. It is of no use to
the people, but only to governments and to capitalists. It
* P. 119. f Short Exposition ofthe Gospel, p. 140.
X Le Roman du Mariage. Traduit du Kusse par Michel Delines. Paris.
Auteurs cdlebres.

162 DEGENERATION
occupies itself with idle and vain things, such as the inquiries
into protoplasm and spectrum analysis, but has never yet
thought of anything useful, e.g., ' how an axe and an axe-handle
can best be manufactured ; how a good saw ought to be
fashioned ; how good bread can be baked, which species of flour
is best adapted for the purpose, how to manage the yeast, con
struct and heat the baking-oven ; what foods and beverages are
the most wholesome ; what mushrooms are edible,' etc.
He is, be it noted, particularly unfortunate in his examples,
since, as a matter of fact, every beginner takes up all the sub
jects he enumerates in the scientific study of hygiene and
mechanics. In accordance with his poetic nature, he has had a
strong desire to embody his views on science artistically. This he
has done in the comedy The Fruits of Enlightenment. What does
he scoff at in that ? At the pitiable blockheads who believe in
spirits and, in dread of death, hunt after bacteria. Spiritualism,
and the opinions created in uneducated men of the world by the
imperfectly understood news of the day, conveyed in political
papers, respecting infectious micro-organisms, are what he takes
for science, and against them he directs the arrows of his satire.
Real science does not need to be protected against attacks of
this sort. I have already proved, in estimating the value of the
reproaches which the neo-Catholic Symbolists and their critical
patrons raised against natural science, that all those phrases
were either childish or dishonest. The accusation of dishonesty
cannot be brought against Tolstoi. He believes what he says.
But childish his complaints and his mockery certainly are. He
speaks of science as a blind man of colour. He has evidently
no suspicion of its essence, its mission, its methods and the
subjects with which it deals. He resembles Bouvard and
Pecuchet, Flaubert's two idiots, who, completely ignorant, with
out teachers or guides, skim through a number of books indis
criminately, and fancy themselves in this sportive manner to
have gained positive knowledge ; this they seek to apply with
the candour of a trained Krooboy, commit, self-evidently, one
hair-raising stupidity after another, and then believe themselves
justified in sneering at science, and declaring it a vain folly and
deception. Flaubert avenged himself on the absurdity of his
own efforts to conquer science as a lieutenant conquers a music-
hall singer, by tarring and feathering Bouvard and Pecuchet.
Tolstoi exploded his little fuss and fume on Science, that proud,
disdainful beauty, who is only to be won by long, earnest, un
selfish service, by lampooning the blockheads of his Fruits of
Enlightenment. The degenerate Flaubert and the degenerate
Tolstoi meet here in the same frenzy.
The way to happiness is, according to Tolstoi, the turning
away from science, the renunciation of reason, and the return to

MYSTICISM 163
the life of Nature ; that is, to agriculture. ' The town must be
abandoned, the people must be sent away from the factories and
into the country to work with their hands ; the aim of every man
should be to satisfy all his wants himself ( What ought one
to Do?). How oddly is reason mixed with nonsense even in these
economic demands ! Tolstoi has rightly discerned the evils which
follow the uprooting of the people from fostering Mother Earth,
and the incubation of a day-wage-earning, urban industrial pro
letariate. It is true, also, that agriculture could employ very
many more men healthily and profitably than at present if the
land were the property of the community, and each one re
ceived only such a share, and that only for his lifetime, as he
could himself cultivate thoroughly. But must industry on this
account be destroyed ? Would not that mean the destruction
of civilization itself? Is it not rather the duty of intelligent
philanthropy and justice carefully to maintain the division of
labour, this necessary and profitable result of a long evolution,
but at the same time, through a better system of economy, to
transform the artisan from a factory convict, condemned to misery
and ill-health, into a free producer of wealth, who enjoys the
fruits of his labour himself, and works no more than is com
patible with his health and his claims on life ?
It is vain to seek for even the slightest hint of such a solution
in Tolstoi. He contents himself with a barren enthusiasm for
country life, which, if beautiful in Horace, has become annoying
and ridiculous in Rousseau ; and he garrulously plagiarizes the
hollow phrases about the worthlessness of civilization of the
eloquent Genevese, who, smitten with the mania of persecution,
could only have led a sentimental century like his own by the
nose. Return to nature ! It is not possible to compress more
absurdity into fewer words. On our earth Nature is our enemy,
whom we must fight, before whom we dare not lay down our
weapons. In order to maintain our span of life we must create
endlessly complicated artificial conditions ; we must clothe our
bodies, build a roof over our heads, and store up provisions for
many months, during which Nature denies us every nourishment.
There is only one very narrow strip of our planet where mankind
can live without exertion, without inventions and arts, like the
beast in the forest and the fish in the water, and that is on some
of the South Sea islands. There, in perpetual spring, he cer
tainly needs no clothes and no dwelling, or only some palm-
leaves as a shelter from occasional rain. There, at all seasons of
the year, he finds food constantly prepared for him in the cocoa-
nut palm, the bread-fruit tree, the banana, in some domestic
animals, in fish and mussels. No beast of prey threatens his
safety, and forces on him the development of strength and con-

1 64 DEGENERATION
tempt of death. But how many men can this earthly paradise
maintain ? Perhaps a hundredth part of present humanity.
The remaining ninety-nine hundredths have only the alternative
either of perishing, or of settling in regions of our planet where
the table is not spread, and the pillow of delight is not prepared,
but in which everything which life demands for its sustenance
must be procured artificially and laboriously. The ' return to
Nature ' means, in our degrees of latitude, the return to hunger,
to freezing, to being devoured by wolves and bears. Not in the
impossible 'return to Nature' lies healing for human misery,
but in the reasonable organization of our struggle with Nature, I
might say, in universal and obligatory service against it, from
which only the crippled should be exempted.
We have now learnt to know the particular ideas which together
constitute Tolstoism. As a philosophy it gives explanations of
the world and of life, with unmeaning or contradictory para
phrases of some intentionally misunderstood Bible verses. As
ethics, it prescribes the renunciation of resistance against vice
and crime, the distribution of property, and the annihilation of
mankind by complete abstinence. As sociological and economic
doctrine it preaches the uselessness of science, the happiness of
becoming stupid, the renunciation of manufactured products, and
the duty of agriculture, though without betraying from whence
the farmer is to get the necessary soil for cultivation. The
remarkable thing in this system is, that it does not notice its
own superfluity. If it understood itself, it would restrict itself
to one single point — -abstinence — since it is evident that it is
unnecessary to break one's head over the aim and import of
human life, over crime and love of your neighbour, and particu
larly over country or town life, if in any case through abstinence
humanity is to die out with the present generation.
Rod* denies that Tolstoi is a mystic. ' Mysticism was always,
as the word indicates, a transcendental doctrine. The mystics,
especially the Christian mystics, have always sacrificed the pre
sent to the future life. . . . What, on the contrary, astonishes
an unprejudiced mind in Tolstoi's books is the almost complete
absence of all metaphysics, his indifference to the so-called
questions ofthe other world.'
Rod simply does not know what mysticism is. He unduly
restricts the sense of the word, if he only uses it to mean the
investigation of ' other-world questions.' If he were less super
ficial he would know that religious enthusiasm is only one special
instance of a general mental condition, and that mysticism is any
morbid obscuration and incoherence of thought which is accom
panied by emotionalism, and therefore includes that thought,
the fruit of which is the system at once Materialistic, Pantheistic,
* Ed. Rod, Les Iddes morales du Temps prdsent. Paris, 1892, p. 241.

MYSTICISM 165
Christian, Ascetic, Rousseauistic and Communi.stic, of Leo
Tolstoi. Raphael Lowenfeld, whom we have to thank for the first com
plete German edition of Tolstoi's works, has also written a very
commendable biography of the Russian novelist, yet in which he
feels himself obliged, not only to take sides vehemently with his
hero, but also to assure that hero's possible critics beforehand
of his deep contempt for them. ' Want of comprehension,' he
says,* 'calls them (the "independent phenomena" of Tolstoi's
sort) eccentrics, unwilling to allow that anyone should be a
head taller than the rest. The unprejudiced man, who is
capable of admiring greatness, sees in their independence the
expression of an extraordinary power which has outgrown the
possibilities ofthe time, and, leading on, points out the paths to
those coming after.' It is indeed hazardous forthwith to accuse
all who are not of his opinion of ' want of comprehension.' One
who judges so autocratically will have to put up with the answer,
that he is guilty of ' want of comprehension ' who, without the
most elementary training, enters upon the criticism of a pheno
menon, to the understanding of which some degree of aesthetical
and literary so-called ' knowledge ' and personal feeling are very
far from sufficient. Lowenfeld boasts of his capacity to admire
greatness. He is possibly wrong not to presuppose this capacity
in others also. What he precisely has to prove is this, that what
he admires deserves in truth the designation of greatness. His
assertion, however, is the only proof he brings on this most
important point. He calls himself unprejudiced. It may be
admitted that he is free from prejudices, but then he is free also
from the preliminary knowledge that alone entitles anyone to
form an opinion on psychological phenomena, which strike even
the uninitiated as extraordinary, and to present them with
self-assurance. Did he possess this preliminary knowledge he
would know that Tolstoi, who, ' leading, is to point out the
paths to those coming after,' is a mere copy of a class of men
who have had their representatives in every age. Lombroso-f*
instances a certain Knudsen, a madman, who lived in Schleswig
about 1680, and asserted that there was neither a God nor a
hell ; that priests and judges were useless and pernicious, and
marriage an immorality ; that men ceased to exist after death ;
that everyone must be guided by his own inward insight,' etc.
Here we have the principal features of Tolstoi's cosmology
and moral philosophy. Knudsen has, however, so little ' pointed
out, leading, the way to those coming after,' that he still only
exists as an instructive case of mental aberration in books on
diseases ofthe mind.
* Raphael Lowenfeld, Leo N. Tolstoi, sein Leben, seine Werke, seine
Weltanschauung. Erster Theil. Berlin, 1892, Introd., p. 1.
f Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 256, foot-note.

166 DEGENERATION
The truth is that all Tolstoi's idiosyncrasies could be traced
to the best-known and most often observed stigmata of higher
degeneration. He even relates of himself :* ' Scepticism brought
me at one time to a condition nearly bordering on frenzy. I
had the idea that besides myself nobody and nothing existed in
the whole world ; that things were not things, but presentations,
which only became phenomenal at what time I directed my
attention to them, and that these presentations disappeared at
once when I ceased to think of them. . . . There were hours
when, under the influence of this fixed idea, I came to such a
pitch of mental bewilderment that I at times looked quickly the
other way, in the hope that in the place where I was not, I might
be surprised by nothingness.' And in his Confession he says
explicitly : ' I felt that I was not quite mentally sound. 'f His
feeling was correct. He was suffering from a mania of brooding
doubt, observable in many of the ' higher degenerates.' Professor
KowalewskiJ explains the mania of doubt straight away as exclu
sively a psychosis of degeneration. Griesinger§ relates the case
of a patient who continually brooded over the notions of beauty,
existence, etc., and put endless questions about them. Griesinger,
however, was less familiar with the phenomena of degeneration,
and therefore held his case as ' one little known.' Lombroso||
mentions in the enumeration of the symptoms of his maniacs of
genius : 'Almost all are taken up, in the most painful manner,
with religious doubts, which disturb the mind and oppress the
timid conscience and sick heart, like a crime.' It is not, then,
the noble desire for knowledge which forces Tolstoi to be cease
lessly occupied with questions concerning the aim and mean
ing of life, but the degeneration-mania of doubt and brooding
thought, which is barren, because no answer, no explanation can
satisfy them. For it is obvious that be the 'therefore' never so
clear, never so exhaustive, it can never silence the mechanically
impulsive 'wherefore' proceeding from the Unconscious.
A special form of the phenomenon of scepticism and brooding
thought is a rage for contradiction, and the inclination to bizarre
assertions, as is noted by many clinicists — e.g., Sollier1^ — as a
special stigma of degeneration. It has appeared very strongly
in Tolstoi at certain times. ' In the struggles for independence,'
relates Lowenfeld,** ' Tolstoi frequently overstepped the limits of
good taste, while he combated tradition only because it was tradi
tion. Thus he called . . . Shakespeare a scribbler by the dozen,
* Lowenfeld, op. cit, p. 39. f Ibid., p. 276.
X Professor Kowalewski, in The journal of Mental Science, January, 1888.
§ Griesinger, ' Ueber einen wenig bekannten psychopathischen Zustand,'
Archiv fir Psychiatrie, Band I.
|| Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 324.
If Sollier, Psychologic de V Idiot et de I'lmbdcile.
** Lowenfeld, op. cit., p. 100.

MYSTICISM 167
and asserted that the admiration ... for the great English
man . . . has properly no other origin than the custom of echo
ing strange opinions with thoughtless obsequiousness.'
What one finds most touching and most worthy of admiration
in Tolstoi is his boundless spirit of fraternity. I have already
shown above that it is foolish in its starting-points and mani
festations. Here, however, I may have to point out that it is
likewise a stigma, of degeneration. Though he has not the
experience of an alienist, the clear-minded, healthy Tourgenieff
has, by his own common-sense, 'scoffingly' called Tolstoi's
fervent love for the oppressed people ' hysterical,' as Lowenfeld*
says. We shall find it again in many degenerate subjects. ' In
contrast to the selfish imbecile,' Legraint teaches, ' we have the
imbeciles who are good to excess, who are philanthropic, who
set up a thousand absurd systems in order to advance the
happiness of humanity.' And further on : ' Full of his love for
humanity, the imbecile patient, without reflection, takes up the
social question on its most difficult side, and settles it con
fidently in a series of grotesque inventions.' This irrational
philanthropy, untutored by judgment, which Tourgenieff, with
just surmise if incorrect designation, called ' hysterical,' is
nothing else than a manifestation of that emotionalism which
constitutes for Morel the fundamental character of degenera
tion. Nothing in this diagnosis is altered by the fact that
Tolstoi had the good fortune, during the recent famine, of being
able to develop the most highly effective and most devoted help
fulness for the alleviation of the misery of his countrymen. The
case happened to be very simple. The need of his fellow-creatures
was of the most primitive form, want of bodily food. Fraternal
love could likewise set to work in its most primitive for.m, in the
distribution of food and clothing. A special power of judgment,
a deep comprehension of the need of his fellow-creatures, was
here unnecessary. And that Tolstoi's preparations for the relief
of the sufferers were more effective than those of the proper
authorities only proved the stupidity and incapacity of the
latter. Tolstoi's attitude towards women also, which must remain
incomprehensible to a healthy human understanding, will, in the
light of clinical experience, forthwith be understood. It has
been repeatedly pointed out in these pages that the emotionalism
of the degenerate has, as a rule, an erotic colouring, because of
the pathological alteration in their sexual centres. The
abnormal excitability of these parts of the nervous system can
have as a consequence both an especial attraction towards
woman and an especial antipathy to her. The common
* Lowenfeld, op. cit, p. 47.
f Legrain, Du Ddhre chez les Ddgdndrds, pp. 28, 195.

1 68 DEGENERATION
element connecting these opposing effects of one and the same
organic condition is the being constantly occupied with woman,
the being constantly engrossed with presentations in conscious
ness from the region of sexuality.*
In the mental life of a sane man, woman is far from filling
the part she plays in that of the degenerate. The physiological
relation of man to woman is that of desire for the time being
toward her, and of indifference when the state of desire is not
present. Antipathy, let alone violent enmity, to woman, the
normal man never feels. If he desires the woman, he loves her ;
if his erotic excitement is appeased, he becomes cool and more
distant in his attitude, though without feeling aversion or fear.
The man, from his purely subjective, physiological necessities
and inclinations, would certainly never have invented marriage,
the persistent alliance with woman. This is not a sexual but a
social arrangement. It does not rest on the organic instincts of
the individual man, but on the need of collectivity. It depends
on the existing economic order and the dominant opinions about
the State, its problems and its relations to the individual, and
changes its form with these. A man may — or at least should —
choose a certain woman for his consort out of love ; but what
holds him fast married, after a suitable choice and successful
courtship, is no longer physiological love, but a complex mix
ture of habit, gratitude, unsexual friendship, convenience, the
wish to obtain for himself social advantages (to which must
naturally be added an ordered household, social representation,
etc.), considerations of duty towards children and State ; more
or less, also, unthinking imitation of a universal observance.
But feelings such as are described in the Kreutzer Sonata and
in Family Happiness the normal man never experiences towards
his wife, even if he has ceased to love her in the natural sense of
the word.
These relations are quite otherwise in the degenerate. The
morbid activity of his sexual centres completely rules him. The
thought of woman has for him the power of an ' obsession.'
He feels that he cannot resist the exciting influences proceed
ing from the woman, that he is her helpless slave, and would
commit any folly, any madness, any crime, at her beck and call.
He necessarily, therefore, sees in woman an uncanny, over
powering force of nature, bestowing supreme delights or dealing
* It is not my object, in a book intended primarily for the general educated
reader, to dwell on this delicate subject. Anyone wishing to be instructed
more closely in the morbid eroticism of the degenerate may read the books
of Paul Moreau (of Tours) Des Aberrations du Sens gdncsique, 2e Edition,
Paris, 1883; and Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia sexu'alis, Stuttgart, 1886!
Papers on this subject by Westphal (Archiv far Psychiatrie, 1870 and 1876),
by Charcot and Magnan (Archives de Neurologic, ife82), etc., are scarcely
accessible to the general public.

MYSTICISM 169
destruction, and he trembles before this power, to which he is
defencelessly exposed. If, then, besides this, the almost never-
failing aberrations set in, if he, in fact, commits things for
woman for which he must condemn and despise himself; or if
woman, without its coming to actual deeds, awakens in him
emotions and thoughts before whose baseness and infamy he is
horrified, then, in the moment of exhaustion, when judgment is
stronger than impulse, the dread which woman inspires him
withal will be suddenly changed into aversion and savage
hatred. The erotomaniac ' degenerate ' stands in the same posi
tion to the woman as a dipsomaniac to intoxicating drinks.
Magnan* has given an appalling picture, of the struggles waged
in the mind of a dipsomaniac by the passionate eagerness for the
bottle, and the loathing and horror of it. The mind of an
erotomaniac presents a similar spectacle, but probably still
stronger struggles. These frequently lead the unhappy creature,
who sees no other means of escaping from his sexual obsession,
to self-mutilation. There are in Russia, as is well known, a
whole sect of 'degenerates,' the Skoptzi, by whom this is syste
matically exercised, as the only effective treatment to escape the
devil and be saved. Pozdnyscheff, in the Kreutzer Sonata, is a
Skopetz without knowing it, and the sexual morality which
Tolstoi teaches in this narrative and in his theoretic writings is
the expression in literature of the sexual psychopathy of the
Skoptzi. The universal success of Tolstoi's writings is undoubtedly
due in part to his high literary gifts. But that part is not the
greatest ; for, as we have seen in the beginning of this chapter,
it was not his artistically most important creations, the works of
his best years, but his later mystical works, which have won for
him his body of believers. This effect is to be explained, not
on aesthetical, but on pathological grounds. Tolstoi would have
remained unnoticed, like any Knudsen of the seventeenth
century, if his extravagances as a degenerate mystic had not
found his contemporaries prepared for their reception. The
wide-spread hysteria from exhaustion was the requisite soil in
which alone Tolstoism could flourish.
That the rise and expansion of Tolstoism is to be traced, not
to the intrinsic merit of Tolstoi's writings, but to the mental
condition of his readers, is made clear in the most significant
manner by the difference in those parts of his system which
have made an impression in various countries. In every nation
just such tones awakened an echo as were attuned with its own
nervous system.
In England it was Tolstoi's sexual morality that excited the
* V. Magnan, Lecons cliniques sur la Dipsomanie,faites d I'asile Sainte-
Anne. Recueilhes et publiees par M. le Dr. Marcel Briand. Paris, T884.

170 DEGENERATION
greatest interest, for in that country economic reasons condemn
a formidable number of girls, particularly of the educated classes,
to forego marriage ; and, from a theory which honoured chastity
as the highest dignity and noblest human destiny, and branded
marriage with gloomy wrath as abominable depravity, these
poor creatures would naturally derive rich consolation for
their lonely, empty lives, and their cruel exclusion from the
possibility of fulfilling their natural calling. The Kreutzer
Sonata has, therefore, become the book of devotion of all the
spinsters of England.
In France Tolstoism is particularly valued for the way in
which it casts out science, deposes the intellect from all offices
and dignities, preaches the return to implicit faith, and praises
the poor in spirit as alone happy. This is water to the mill of
neo-Catholics, and those mystics, from political motives, or from
degeneration, who erect a cathedral to pious symbolism, raise up
also a high altar to Tolstoi in their church.
In Germany, on the whole, but little enthusiasm is evinced
for the abstinence-morality of the Kreutzer Sonata, and the
intellectual reaction of My Confession, My Religion, and Fruits of
Enlightenment. On the other hand, his followers in that country
exalt Tolstoi's vague socialism and his morbid fraternal love into
their dogma. All the muddle-headed among our people who,
not from sober scientific conviction, but from hysterical emotion
alism, feel a leaning towards a sickly, impotent socialism, which
tends principally towards ministering cheap broth to proleta
rians, and towards revelling in sentimental romances and melo
dramas from the pretended life of the city worker, naturally
discovered in Tolstoi's ' give-me-something-communism,' with
its scorn for all economic and moral laws, the expression of their
— very platonic ! — love for the disinherited. And in the circles
in which Herr von Egidy's watery rationalism (at least a hundred
years behind time) could rise into notoriety, and in which his first
writing could call forth nearly a hundred replies, assents, and
explanations, Tolstoi's Short Exposition of the Gospel, with its
denial of the divine nature of Christ, and of existence after
death, with its effusions of a superabundance of feelings of
aimless love, its incomprehensible personal sanctification and
rhetoric morality, and especially with its astounding misinterpre
tation of the clearest passages from Scripture, must indeed have
been an event. All the adherents of Herr von Egidy are pre
destined followers of Tolstoi, and all Tolstoi's admirers perpe
trate an inconsistency if they do not enter into the new Salvation
Army of Herr von Egidy.
By the special timbre of the echo which Tolstoism calls
forth in different countries, he has become an instrument which
is better fitted than any other tendency of degeneration in con-

MYSTICISM I7i
temporary literature for the determination, measurement, and
comparison, in kind and degree, of degeneration and hysteria
among those civilized nations in which the phenomenon of the
Dusk of the Nations has been observed.

CHAPTER V.
THE RICHARD WAGNER CULT.
We have seen in a previous chapter that the whole mystic
movement of the period has its roots in romanticism, and hence
originally emanates from Germany. In England German
romanticism was metamorphosed into pre-Raphaelitism, in
France the latter engendered, with the last remains of its pro-
creative strength, the abortions of symbolism and neo-
Catholicism, and these Siamese twins contracted with Tolstoism
a mountebank marriage such as might take place between the
cripple of a fair and the wonder of a show-booth. While the
descendants of the emigrant (who on his departure from his
German home already carried in him all the germs of subsequent
tumefactions and disfigurements), so changed as to be almost
unrecognisable, grew up in different countries, and set about re
turning to their native land to attempt the renewal of family
ties with their home-staying connections, Germany gave birth to
a new prodigy, who was in truth only reared with great trouble
to manhood, and for long years received but little notice or
appreciation, but who finally obtained an incomparably mightier
attractive force over the great fools' fair ofthe present time than
all his fellow-competitors. This prodigy is ' Wagnerism.' It is
the German contribution to modern mysticism, and far out
weighs all that the other nations combined have supplied to that
movement. For Germany is powerful in everything, in evil as
in good, and the magnitude of its elementary force manifests
itself in a crushing manner in its degenerate, as well as in its
ennobling, efforts.
Richard Wagner is in himself alone charged with a greater
abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together
with whom we have hitherto become acquainted. The stigmata
of this morbid condition are united in him in the most complete
and most luxuriant development. He displays in the general
constitution of his mind the persecution mania, megalomania
and mysticism ; in his instincts vague philanthropy, anarchism,
a craving for revolt and contradiction ; in his writings all the
signs of graphomania, namely, incoherence, fugitive ideation,
and a tendency to idiotic punning, and, as the groundwork of

172 DEGENERATION
his being, the characteristic emotionalism of a colour at once
erotic and religiously enthusiastic.
For Wagner's persecution mania, we have the testimony of
his most recent biographer and friend, Ferdinand Praeger, who
relates that for years Wagner was convinced that the Jews
had conspired to prevent the representation of his operas — a
delirium inspired by his furious anti-Semitism. His megalo
mania is so well known through his writings, his verbal utter
ances, and the whole course of his life, that a bare reference
to it is sufficient. It is to be admitted that this mania was
essentially increased by the crazy procedure of those who
surrounded Wagner. A much firmer equilibrium than that
which obtained in Wagner's mind would have been infallibly
disturbed by the nauseous idolatry of which Baja*euth was the
shrine. The Bayreuther Blatter is a unique phenomenon.
To me, at least, no other instance is known of a newspaper
which was founded exclusively for the deification of a living
man, and in every number of which, through long years, the
appointed priests of the temple have burned incense to their
household god, with the savage fanaticism of howling and
dancing dervishes, bent the knee, prostrated themselves before
him, and immolated all opponents as sacrificial victims.
We will take a closer view of the graphomaniac Wagner.
His Collected Writings and Poems form ten large thick volumes,
and among the 4,500 pages which they approximately contain
there is hardly a single one which will not puzzle the unbiased
reader, either through some nonsensical thought or some im
possible mode of expression. Of his prose works (his poems
will be treated of further on), the most important is decidedly
The Art-work of the Future* The thoughts therein expressed
— so far as the wavering shadows of ideas in a mystically
emotional degenerate subject may be so called — occupied
Wagner during his whole life, and were again and again pro
pounded by him in ever new terms and phraseology. The Opera
and the Drama, Judaism in Music, On the State and Religion,
The Vocation of the Opera, Religion and Art, are nothing more
than amplifications of single passages of The Art-work of the
Future. This restless repetition of one and the same strain of
thought is itself characteristic in the highest degree. The clear,
mentally sane author, who feels himself impelled to say some
thing, will once for all express himself as distinctly and impres
sively as it is possible for him to do, and have done with it.
He may, perhaps, return to the subject, in order to clear up
misconceptions, repel attacks, and fill up lacunae ; but he will
* Richard Wagner, Das Kunsiwerk der Zukunft. Leipzig, 1850. The
numbering of the pages given in quotations from this work refers to the
edition here indicated.

MYSTICISM 173
never wish to rewrite his book, wholly or in part, two or three
times in slightly different words, not even if in later years he
attains to the insight that he has not succeeded in finding for it
an adequate form. The crazed graphomaniac, on the contrary,
cannot recognise in his book, as it lies finished before him, the
satisfying expression of his thoughts, and he will always be
tempted to begin his work afresh, a task which is endless,
because it must consist in giving a fixed linguistic form to ideas
which are formless.
The fundamental thought of the Art-work of the Future is
this : The first and most original of the arts was that of dancing ;
its peculiar essence is rhythm, and this has developed into
music ; music, consisting of rhythm and tone, has raised
(Wagner says ' condensed ') its phonetic element to speech,
and produced the art of poetry ; the highest form of poetry
is the drama, which for the purpose of stage-construction,
and to imitate the natural scene of human action, has asso
ciated itself with architecture and painting respectively ; finally,
sculpture is nothing but the giving permanence to the appear
ance of the actor in a dead rigid form, while acting is real
sculpture in living, flowing movement. Thus all the arts
group themselves around the drama, and the latter should unite
them naturally. Nevertheless they appear at present in isola
tion, to the great injury of each and of art in general. This
reciprocal estrangement and isolation of the different arts is an
unnatural and decadent condition, and the effort of true artists
must be to win them back to their natural and necessary con
junction with each other. The mutual penetration and fusion of
all arts into a single art will produce the genuine work of art.
Hence the work of art of the future is a drama with music and
dance, which unrolls itself in a landscape painting, has for a frame
a masterly creation of architectural art designed for the poetico-
musical end, and is represented by actors who are really sculptors,
but who realize their plastic inspirations by means of their own
bodily appearance.
In this way Wagner has set forth for himself the evolution of
art. His system calls for criticism in every part. The historical
filiation of the arts which he attempts to establish is false. If
the original reciprocal connections of song, dance and poetry
be granted, the development of architecture, painting and
sculpture is certainly independent of poetry in its dramatic form.
That the theatre employs all the arts is true, but it is one of
those truths which are so self-evident that it is generally un
necessary to mention them, and least of all with profound pro
phetic mien and the grand priestly gestures of one proclaiming
surprising revelations. Everyone knows from experience that
the stage is in a theatrical building, that it displays painted

174 DEGENERATION
decorations which represent landscapes or buildings, and that on
it there is speaking, singing and acting. Wagner secretly feels
that he makes himself ridiculous when he strains himself to
expound this trite matter of first experience in the Pythian mode,
with an enormous outlay of gush and exaltation . . . ; hence he
exaggerates it to such a degree as to turn it into an absurdity.
He not only asseverates that in the drama (more correctly
speaking, the opera, or the musical drama, as Wagner prefers to
call it) different arts co-operate, but he asserts that it is only
through this co-operation that each individual art is advanced
to its highest capacity of expression, and that the individual
arts must and will surrender their independence as an unnatural
error, in order to continue to exist only as collaborators of the
musical drama.
The first asseveration is at least doubtful. In the cathedral
of Cologne architecture produces an impression without the
representation of a drama ; the accompaniment of music would
add nothing whatever to the beauty and depth of Faust and
Hamlet ; Goethe's lyric poetry and the Divina Commedia need
no landscape-painting as a frame and background ; Michael
Angelo's Moses would hardly produce a deeper impression sur
rounded by dancers and singers ; and the Pastoral Symphony
does not require the accompaniment of words in order to exer
cise its full charm. Schopenhauer, although Wagner admired
him as the greatest thinker of all time, expresses himself very
decidedly on this point. ' The grand opera,' he says,* ' is,
properly speaking, no product of pure artistic sense, but rather
of the somewhat barbaric conception of elevating aesthetic en
joyment through accumulation of means, simultaneity of quite
different impressions, and intensification of the effect through
the multiplication of the operating masses and forces ; while,
on the other hand, music, as the mightiest of all arts, is able by
itself alone completely to occupy the mind which is susceptible
to it ; indeed, its loftiest productions, to be appropriately
grasped and enjoyed, demand a mind wholly undivided and un
diverted, so that it may yield itself up to them, and lose itself in
them, in order completely to understand their incredible in
wardness of language. Instead of this, in highly complicated
operatic music the mind is besieged at the same time by way
of the eye, by means of the most variegated pomp, the most
fantastic pictures, and the liveliest impressions of light and
colour ; while over and above this it is occupied with the story
of the piece. . . . Strictly speaking, then, one may call opera
an unmusical invention for the benefit of unmusical minds, into
which music must only be smuggled by means of a medium
* Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, Kurze Phil. Schriften
Leipzig, 1888, Band II., p. 465.

MYSTICISM 175
foreign to it, that is, as a sort of accompaniment to a long spun-
out, insipid love-story, and its poetical thin broth ; for the
libretto of an opera does not tolerate concise poetry, full of
genius and thought.' This is an absolute condemnation of the
Wagnerian idea of the musical drama as the collective art-work
of the future. It might seem, it is true, that certain recent
experiments in psychophysics had come to the help of Wagner's
theory of the reciprocal enhancement of the simultaneous
effects of different arts. Charles F<£re* has, in fact, shown that
the ear hears more keenly when the eye is simultaneously
stimulated by an agreeable (dynamogenous) colour ; but, in the
first place, this phenomenon may also be interpreted thus :
that the keenness of hearing is enhanced not by the visual im
pression as such, not simply as sense excitation, but only through
its dynamogenous quality, which arouses the whole nervous
system as well to a more lively activity. And then the question
in Fern's experiments is merely one of simple sense-perceptions,
whereas the musical drama is supposed to awaken a higher
cerebral activity, to produce presentations and thoughts, together
with direct emotions ; in which case each of the arts acting in
concert will produce, in consequence of the necessary dispersion
of the attention to it, a more feeble effect than if it appealed by
itself alone to sense and intellect.
Wagner's second assertion, that the natural evolution of each
art necessarily leads it to the surrender of its independence and
to its fusion with the other arts,*f contradicts so strongly all
experience and all the laws of evolution, that it can at once be
characterized as delirious. Natural development always proceeds
from the simple to the complex — not inversely ; progress con
sists in differentiation, i.e., in the evolution of originally similar
parts into special organs of different structure and independent
functions, and not in the retrogression of differentiated beings of
rich specialization to a protoplasm without physiognomy.
* Charles FeYe*, Sensation et Mouvement. Paris, 1887.
f Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, p. 169 : ' It is only when the desire ofthe
artistic sculptor has passed into the soul of the dancer, of the mimic inter
preter, of him who sings and speaks, that this desire can be conceived as
satisfied. It is only when the art of sculpture no longer exists, or has fol
lowed another tendency than that of representing human bodies — when it
has passed, as sculpture, into architecture — when the rigid solitude of this
one man carved in stone will have been resolved into the infinitely flowing
plurality of veritable, living men ... it is only then, too, that real plastic
will exist.' And on p. 182 : 'That which it [painting] honestly exerts itself
to attain, it attains in . . . greatest perfection . . . when it descends from
canvas and chalk to ascend to the tragic stage. . . . But landscape-painting
will become, as the last and most finished conclusion of all the fine arts, the
life-giving soul, properly speaking, of architecture ; it will teach us thus to
organize the stage for works ofthe dramatic art ofthe future, in which, itself
living, it will represent the warm background of nature for the use of the
living, and not for the imitated man.'

176 DEGENERATION
The arts have not arisen accidentally ; their differentiation is
the consequence of organic necessity ; once they have attained
independence, they will never surrender it. They can degenerate,
they can even die out, but they can never again shrink back
into the germ from which they have sprung. The effort to
return to beginnings is, however, a peculiarity of degeneration,
and founded in its deepest essence. The degenerate subject is
himself on the downward road from the height of organic develop
ment which our species has reached ; his imperfect brain is
incapable of the highest and most refined operations of thought ;
he has therefore a strong desire to lighten them, to simplify the
multifariousness of phenomena and make them easier to
survey ; to drag everything animate and inanimate down to lower
and older stages of existence, in order to make them more easy
of access to his comprehension. We have seen that the French
Symbolists, with their colour-hearing, wished to degrade man to
the indifferentiated sense-perceptions of the pholas or oyster.
Wagner's fusion of the arts is a pendant to this notion. His
Art-work of the Future is the art-work of times long past.
What he takes for evolution is retrogression, and a return to a
primeval human, nay, to a pre-human stage.
Still more extraordinary than the fundamental idea of the
book is its linguistic form. For example, let us estimate the
following remarks on musical art (p. 68): 'The sea separates
and unites countries; thus musical art separates and unites the
two extreme poles of human art, dancing and poetry. It is the
heart of man ; the blood which takes its circulation from it gives
to the outward flesh its warm living colour ; but it nourishes
with an undulating, elastic force the nerves of the brain which
are directed inward' [! !]. 'Without the activity of the heart,
the activity of the brain would become a piece of mechanical
skill [!], the activity of the external limbs an equally
mechanical, emotionless procedure.' ' By means of the heart
the intellect feels itself related to the entire body [!] ; the mere
sensuous man rises to intellectual activity' [!]. ' Now, the organ
of the heart [!] is sound, and its artistic language is music' What
here floated before the mind of Wagner was a comparison, in
itself senseless, between the function of music as the medium of
expression for the feelings, and the function of the blood as
the vehicle of nutritive materials for the organism. But as his
mystically-disposed brain was not capable of clearly grasping
the various parts of this intricate idea, and of arranging them
in parallel lines, he entangled himself in the absurdity of an
' activity of the brain without activity of the heart '; of a ' rela
tion between the intellect and the whole body through the
heart,' etc., and finally attains to the pure twaddle of callin*;*-
' sound ' the ' organ of the heart'

MYSTICISM 177
He wishes to express the very simple thought that music
cannot communicate definite images and judgments, but merely
feelings of a general character ; and for this purpose devises
the following rigmarole (p. 88) : ' It is never able ... of itself
alone to bring the human individual, determined as to sensation
and morals, to an exactly perceptible, distinctive representation ;
it is in its infinite involution always and only feeling ; it appears
as an accompaniment of the moral deed, not as the deed itself ;
it can place feelings and dispositions side by side, not develop
in necessary sequence one disposition from another ; it is lack
ing in moral will ' [!].
Let the reader further bury himself in this passage (p. 159) :
' It is only and exactly in the degree to which the woman of
perfected womanliness, in her love for the man, and through her
absorption into his being, shall have developed the masculine
element as well as this womanliness, and brought it with the
purely womanly element in herself to a complete consummation ;
in other words, in the degree in which she is not only the man's
mistress, but also his friend, is the man able to find perfect
satisfaction in a woman's love.'
Wagner's admirers asseverate that they understand this string
of words thrown together at random. Indeed, they find them
remarkably clear ! This, however, should not surprise us.
Readers who through weakness of mind or flightiness of
thought are incapable of attention always understand every
thing. For them there exists neither obscurity nor nonsense.
They seek in the words over which their absent gaze flits super
ficially, not the author's thoughts, but a reflection of their own
rambling dreams. Those who have lived lovingly observant in
children's nurseries must have frequently seen the game in which
a child takes a book, or printed paper, and, holding it before his
face, generally upside down, begins gravely to read aloud, often
the story told him by his mamma yesterday before he dropped
asleep, or, more frequently, the fancies which at the moment are
buzzing in his little head. This is somewhat the procedure of
these blessed readers who understand everything. They do not
read what is in the books, but what they put into them ; and as
far as the process and result of this mental activity are concerned1,
it is certainly very much a matter of indifference what the
author has actually thought and said.
The incoherence of Wagner's thought, determined as it is by
the excitations of the moment, manifests itself in his constant
contradictions. At one time (p. 187) he asserts, ' The highest
aim of mankind is the artistic ; the most highly artistic is the
drama;' and in a footnote (p. 194) he exclaims, 'These easy
going creatures are fain to see and hear everything, except the
real, itndisfigured human being who stands exhorting at the exit

178 DEGENERATION
of their dreams. But it is exactly this very human being whom
we must now place in the foreground! It is evident that one of
these affirmations is diametrically opposed to the other. The
' artistic ' ' dramatic ' man is not the ' real ' man, and it will be
impossible for him, who looks upon it as his task to occupy him
self" with the real man, to recognise art as 'the highest aim of
man,' and to regard his ' dreams ' as the most distinguished of
his activities.
In one passage (p. 206) he says : ' Who, therefore, will be the
artist of the future ? Unquestionably the poet. But who will
be the poet ? Incontestably the interpreter. Again, however,
who will be the interpreter ? Necessarily the association of all
artists! If this has any sense at all, it can only be that in the
future the people will jointly write and act their dramas ; and
that Wagner really meant this he proves in the passage (p. 225)
where he meets the objection he anticipated, that therefore the
mob is to be the creator of the art-work of the future, with
the words, ' Bear in mind that this mob is in no way a
normal product of real human nature, but rather the artificial
result of your unnatural civilization ; that all the devices and
abominations which disgust you in this mob are only the
desperate movements of the fight which real human nature is
carrying on against its cruel oppressor, modern civilization.'
Let us contrast with these expressions the following passage
from the treatise, What is German ?* : ' The fact that from the
bosom ofthe German race there have sprung Goethe and Schiller,
Mozart and Beethoven, too easily seduces the greater number
of persons of mediocre gifts into regarding these great minds as
belonging by right to them, and to attempt, with the compla
cency of a demagogue, to persuade the masses that they them
selves are Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven.' But
who, if not Wagner himself, has thus persuaded the masses, pro
claiming them to be the ' artists of the future'? And this very
madness, which he himself recognises as such in the remark
quoted, has made a great impression on the multitude. They
have taken literally what Wagner, with the ' complacency of a
demagogue,' has persuasively said to them. They have really
imagined themselves to be the ' artists of the future,' and we
have lived to see societies formed in many places in Germany
who wanted to build theatres of the future, and themselves to
perforin works of the future in them ! And these societies were
joined not only by students or young commercial employes in
whom a certain propensity for acting plays comes as a malady
of adolescence, and who persuade themselves that they are
serving the ' ideal ' when with childish vanity and in grotesque
* Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Leipzig, 1883,
Band X., p. 68.

MYSTICISM 179
theatrical costume they gesticulate and declaim before their
touched and admiring relatives and acquaintances. Nay, old
burgesses, bald and bulky, abandoned their sacred skat, and
even the thrice-holy morning tankard, and prepared themselves
devoutly for noble dramatic achievements ! Since the memor
able occasion on which Quince, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout, and
Starveling rehearsed their admirable Pyramus and Thisbe, the
world has seen no similar spectacle. Emotional shopkeepers
and enthusiastic counter-jumpers got Wagner's absurdities on
the brain, and the provincials and Philistines whom his joyful
message had reached actually set about with their united
strength to carry on the work of Goethe and Schiller, Mozart
and Beethoven.
In the passages quoted, in which, in the most used-up style
of Rousseau, he glorifies the masses, speaks of ' unnatural cul
ture,' and calls ' modern civilization ' ' the cruel oppressor of
human nature,' Wagner betrays that mental condition which
the degenerate share with enlightened reformers, born criminals
with the martyrs of human progress, namely, deep, devouring
discontent with existing facts. This certainly shows itself other
wise in the degenerate than in reformers. The latter grow
angry over real evils only, and make rational proposals for their
remedy which are in advance of the time : these remedies may
presuppose a better and wiser humanity than actually exists, but,
at least, they are capable of being defended on reasonable grounds.
The degenerate subject, on the other hand, selects among the
arrangements of civilization such as are either immaterial or
distinctly suitable, in order to rebel against them. His fury has
either ridiculously insignificant aims or simply beats the air.
He either gives no earnest thought to improvement, or hatches
astoundingly mad projects for making the world happy. His
fundamental frame of mind is persistent rage against everything
and everyone, which he displays in venomous phrases, savage
threats, and the destructive mania of wild beasts. Wagner is a
good specimen of this species. He would like to crush ' political
and criminal civilization,' as he expresses it. In what, however, does
the corruption of society and the untenableness of the condition
of everything reveal themselves to him ? In the fact that operas
are played with tripping airs, and ballets are performed ! And
how shall humanity attain its salvation ! By performing the
musical drama of the future ! It is to be hoped that no criticism
of this universal plan of salvation will be demanded of me.
Wagner is a declared anarchist. He distinctly develops the
teaching of this faction in the Art-work of the Future (p. 217) :
' All men have but one common need . . . the need of living and
being happy. Herein lies the natural bond between all men. . . .
It is only the special needs which, according to time, place, and

180 DEGENERATION
individuality, make themselves known and increase, which in the
rational condition of future humanity can serve as a basis for
special associations. . . . These associations will change, will
take another form, dissolve and reconstitute themselves accord
ing as those needs change and reappear.'* He does not conceal
the fact that this ' rational condition of future humanity ' can be
brought about only by force ' (p. 228). ' Necessity must force
us, too, through the Red Sea if we, purged of our shame, are to
reach the Promised Land. We shall not be drowned in it ; it is
destructive only to the Pharaohs of this world, who have once
already been swallowed up — man and horse . . . the arrogant,
proud Pharaohs who then forgot that once a poor shepherd's
son with his shrewd advice had saved their land from starva
tion.' Together with this anarchistic acerbity, there is another
feeling that controls the entire conscious and unconscious
mental life of Wagner, viz., sexual emotion. He has been
throughout his life an erotic (in a psychiatric sense), and all his
ideas revolve about woman. The most ordinary incitements,
even those farthest removed from the province of the sexual
instinct, never fail to awaken in his consciousness voluptuous
images of an erotic character, and the bent of the automatic
association of ideas is in him always directed towards this pole
of his thought. In this connection let this passage be read
from the Art-work of the Future (p. 44), where he seeks to
demonstrate the relation between the art of dancing, music, and
poetry : ' In the contemplation of this ravishing dance of the
most genuine and noblest muses, of the artistic man [?], we now
see the three arm-in-arm lovingly entwined up to their necks ;
then this, then that one, detaching herself from the entwinement,
as if to display to the others her beautiful form in complete
separation, touching the hands of the others only with the
extreme tips of her fingers ; now the one, entranced by a back
ward glance at the twin forms of her closely entwined sisters,
bending towards them ; then two, carried away by the allure
ments of the one [!] greeting her in homage ; finally all, in close
embrace, breast to breast, limb to limb, in an ardent kiss of love,
coalescing in one blissfully living shape. This is the love and
life, the joy and wooing of art,' etc. (Observe the word-play :
Lieben und Leben, Freuen und Freien !) Wagner here visibly
loses the thread of his argument ; he neglects what he really
wishes to say, and revels in the picture of the three dancing
* Compare also, in Das Biihnenweihfestspiel in Bayreuth, 1882 (Gesam-
melte Schriften, Band X., p. 384) : ' This [the ' sure rendering of all events
on, above, under, behind, and before the stage'] anarchy accomplishes,
because each individual does what he wishes to do, namely (?), what is
right.'

MYSTICISM 181
maidens, who have arisen before his mind's eye, following with
lascivious longing the outline of their forms and their seductive
movements. The shameless sensuality which prevails in his dramatic
poems has impressed all his critics. Hanslick* speaks of the
'bestial sensuality' in Rheingold, and says of Siegfried: 'The
feverish accents, so much beloved by Wagner, of an insatiable
sensuality, blazing to the uttermost limits — this ardent moan
ing, sighing, crying, and sinking to the ground, move us with
repugnance. The text of these love-scenes becomes sometimes,
in its exuberance, sheer nonsense.' Compare in the first act of
the Walkiire,-\ in the scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde, the
following stage directions : ' Hotly interrupting ' ; ' embraces her
with fiery passion ' ; ' in gentle ecstasy ' ; ' she hangs enraptured
upon his neck ' ; 'close to his eyes ' ; ' beside himself ; ' in the
highest intoxication,' etc. At the conclusion, it is said, ' The
curtain falls quickly,' and frivolous critics have not failed to per
petrate the cheap witticism, ' Very necessary, too.' The amorous
whinings, whimperings and ravings of Tristan und Isolde, the
entire second act of Parsifal, in the scene between the hero and
the flower-girls, and then between him and Kundry in Klingsor's
magic garden, are worthy to rank with the above passages. It
certainly redounds to the high honour of German public morality,
that Wagner's operas could have been publicly performed with
out arousing the greatest scandal. How unperverted must
wives and maidens be when they are in a state of mind to
witness these pieces without blushing crimson, and sinking into
the earth for shame ! How innocent must even husbands and
fathers be who allow their womankind to go to these repre
sentations of ' lupanar ' incidents ! Evidently the German
audiences entertain no misgivings concerning the actions and
attitudes of Wagnerian personages ; they seem to have no
suspicion of the emotions by which they are excited, and what
intentions their words, gestures and acts denote ; and this
explains the peaceful artlessness with which these audiences
follow theatrical scenes during which, among a less childlike
public, no one would dare lift his eyes to his neighbour or
endure his glance.
With Wagner amorous excitement assumes the form of mad
delirium. The lovers in his pieces behave like tom-cats gone mad,
rolling in contortions and convulsions over a root of valerian.
They reflect a state of mind in the poet which is well known to
the professional expert. It is a form of Sadism. It is the love
of those degenerates who, in sexual transport, become like wild
* Edward Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen. Berlin, 1880, pp. 220, 243.
f Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band VI. , p. -$ff.

182 DEGENERATION
beasts.* Wagner suffered from 'erotic madness,' which leads
coarse natures to murder for lust, and inspires 'higher degene
rates ' with works like Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Tristan und
Isolde. Wagner's graphomania is shown not only by the substance,
but also by the outward form of his writings. The reader will
have been able to remark in the quotations given what a mis
use Wagner makes of italics. He often has whole half-pages
printed in spaced letters. Lombroso expressly establishes this
phenomenon among graphomaniacs.-f** It is sufficiently explained
by the peculiarity of mystical thought, so often set forth in this
work. No linguistic form which the mystically degenerate subject
can give to his thought-phantoms satisfies him ; he is always con
scious that the phrases he is writing do not express the mazy
processes of his brain ; and as he is forced to abandon the attempt
to embody these in words, he seeks, by means of notes of exclama
tion, dashes, dots, and blanks, to impart to his writings more of
mystery than the words themselves can express.
The irresistible propensity to play on words — another peculi
arity of graphomaniacs and imbeciles — is developed to a high
degree in Wagner. I will here give only a few examples from
the Art-work of the Future — p. 56: 'Thus it [the science of
music] acquires through sound, which has become speech . . .
its most exalted satisfaction, and at the same time its most
satisfying exaltation! P. 91 : ' Like a second Prometheus,
who from Thou (clay) formed men, Beethoven had striven to
form them from Ton (music). Not from clay or music (Thon
or Ton), but from both of these substances, should man, the
image of Zeus, the dispenser of life, be created.' Special
attention may, however, be called to the following astounding
passage (p. 103) : ' If fashion or custom permitted us again to
adopt, in speech and writing, the genuine and true use of
* In a book on degeneration it is not possible wholly to avoid the subject
of eroticism, which includes precisely the most characteristic and con
spicuous phenomena of degeneration. I dwell, however, on principle as little
as possible on this subject, and will, therefore, in reference to the charac
terization of Wagner's erotic madness, quote only one clinical work : Dr.
Paul Aubry, 'Observation d'Uxoricide et de LibeYicide suivis du Suicide du
Meurtrier,' Archives de V Anthropologic criminelle, vol. vii., p. 326 : ' This
derangement [erotic madness] is characterized by an inconceivable fury of
concupiscence at the moment of approach.' And in a remark on the report
of a murder perpetrated on his wile and children by an erotic maniac — a
professor of mathematics in a public school — whom Aubrey had under his
observation, he says, ' Sa femme qui parlait facilement et a tous des choses
que Ton tient ordinairement le plus secretes, disait que son mari e~tait comme
un furieux pendant 1'acte sexuel.' See also Ball, La Folie drotique. Paris,
1891, p. 127.
f Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 229 : ' When the expression of their
ideas eludes their grasp . . . they resort ... to the continual italicizing of
words and sentences,' etc.

MYSTICISM 183
Tichten for Dichten (to compose poetry), we should thus obtain,
in the united names of the three primitive human arts, Tanz-,
Ton-, and Tichtkunst (dancing, music, and poetry), a beautifully
significant, sensuous image of the essence of this trinity of
sisters, viz., a perfect alliteration. . . . This alliteration would,
moreover, be peculiarly characteristic, on account ofthe position
held in it by Tichtkunst (poetry), for only as its last member
would Tichtkunst transform the alliteration into rhyme,' etc.
We now come to the mysticism of Wagner, which permeates
all his works, and has become one of the chief causes of his
influence over his contemporaries — at least, outside Germany.
Although he is irreligious through and through, and frequently
attacks positive religions, their doctrines and their priests, there
have, nevertheless, remained active in him from childhood
(passed in an atmosphere of Christian Protestant views and
religious practices) ideas and sentiments which he subsequently
transformed so strangely in his degenerate mind. This phe
nomenon, viz., the persistence, in the midst of later doubts and
denials, of early-acquired Christian views, operating as an ever-
active leaven, singularly altering the whole mind, and at the
same time themselves suffering manifold decomposition and
deformation — may be frequently observed in confused brains.
We shall meet it, for example, in Ibsen. At the foundation of
all Wagner's poems and theoretical writings there is to be found
a more or less potent sediment of the Catechism, distorted as
to its doctrines ; and in his most luxuriant pictures, between
the thick, crude colours, we get glimpses of strange and hardly
recognisable touches, betraying the fact that the scenes are
brutally daubed on the pale background of Gospel reminis
cences. One idea, or, more accurately, one word, has remained espe
cially deeply fixed in his mind, and pursued him throughout his
whole life as a real obsession, viz., the word 'redemption.' True,
it has not with him the value it possesses in the language of
theology. To the theologian ' redemption,' this central idea of the
whole Christian doctrine, signifies the sublime act of superhuman
love, which freely takes upon itself the greatest suffering, and
gladly bears it, that it may free from the power of evil those
whose strength is insufficient for such a task. So understood,
redemption presupposes three things. Firstly, we must assume
a dualism in nature, most distinctly developed in the Zend
religion ; the existence of a first principle of good and one of
evil, between which mankind is placed, and becomes the cause
of their strife. Secondly, the one who is to be redeemed must be
free from all conscious and wilful fault ; he must be the victim of
superior forces which he is himself incapable of warding off.
Thirdly, in order that the redeemer's act may be a true act of

!g4 DEGENERATION
salvation and acquire power to deliver, he must, in the fulfilment
of a clearly recognised and purposed mission, offer himself in
sacrifice. It is true that a tendency has often asserted itself to
think of redemption as an act of grace, in which not only the
victims, but also sinners, may participate ; but the Church has
always recognised the immorality of such a conception, and has
expressly taught that, in order to receive redemption, the guilty
must himself strive for it, through repentance and penance, and
not passively await it as a completely unmerited gift.
This theological redemption is not redemption in Wagner's
sense. With him it has never any clearly recognisable import,
and serves only to denote something beautiful and grand, which
he does not more closely specify. At the outset the word has
evidently made a deep impression on his imagination, and
he subsequently uses it like a minor chord, let us say a, c, e,
which is likewise without definite significance, but, nevertheless,
awakens emotion and peoples consciousness with floating presen
tations. With Wagner someone is constantly being ' redeemed.'
If (in the Art-work of the Future) the art of painting ceases to
paint pictures, and produces thenceforth only decorations for the
theatre, this is its ' redemption.' In the same way the music
accompanying a poem is a 'redeemed' music. Man is 're
deemed ' when he loves a woman, and the people is ' redeemed '
when it plays at the drama. His compositions also turn upon
' redemption. Nietsche* has already remarked this, and makes
merry over it, if with repulsively superficial witticisms. ' Wagner,'
he says, ' has meditated on nothing so much as on redemption '
(a wholly false assertion, since Wagner's redemption-twaddle
is certainly no result of meditation, but only a mystical echo of
childish emotions) ; ' his opera is the opera of redemption.
With him someone is always wanting to be redeemed — now a
male, now a female. . . . Who, if not Wagner, teaches us that
innocence has a predilection for redeeming interesting sinners
(the case of Tannkauser) ? Or that even the Wandering Jew will
be redeemed and become sedentary when he marries (the case of
The Flying Dutchman) ? Or that depraved old wantons prefer
to be redeemed by chaste youths (the case of Kundry) ? Or
that beauteous maidens like best to be redeemed by a knight
who is a Wagnerian (the case in Meister singer) ? Or that even
married women like to be redeemed by a knight (the case of
Isolde) ? Or that the ancient god, after having morally com
promised himself in every respect, is redeemed by a free-thinker
and an immoral character (the case in the Niebelungen) ? How
particularly admirable is this last profundity ! Do you under
stand it ? As for me, defend me from understanding it'
The work of Wagner which may be truly termed ' the opera
* Friedrich Nietsche, Der Fall Wagner. Leipzig, 1889.

MYSTICISM 185
of redemption ' is Parsifal. Here we may catch Wagner's mind
in its most nonsensical vagaries. In Parsifal two persons
are redeemed : King Amfortas and Kundry. The King has
allowed himself to become infatuated with the charms of
Kundry, and has sinned in her arms. As a punishment, the
magic spear which had been entrusted to him has been taken
from him, and he wounded by this sacred weapon. The wound
gapes and bleeds unceasingly, and causes him dreadful suffering.
Nothing can heal it but the spear itself which gave it. But ' the
pure fool who through compassion knows ' can alone wrest the
spear from the wicked magician, Klingsor. Kundry, when a
young maiden, had seen the Saviour on the path of his Passion,
and had laughed at him. As a penalty for her act she is
doomed to live for ever, longing in vain for death, and seducing
to sin all men who approach her. Only if a man is able to
resist her allurements can she be redeemed from her curse.
(One man has, in fact, resisted her, the magician Klingsor.
Yet this victorious resistance has not redeemed her as it ought.
Why ? Wagner does not reveal this by a single syllable.) It
is Parsifal who brings redemption to the two accursed ones.
The ' pure fool ' has no inkling that he is predestined to redeem
Amfortas and Kundry, and he neither undergoes any suffering
nor exposes himself to any serious danger in accomplishing the
act of salvation. It is true that, in forcing his way into the en
chanted garden, he is obliged to have a small bout with its
knights, but this skirmish is far more a pleasure than an effort
for him, for he is far stronger than his adversaries, and, after
some playful passes, puts them to flight, bleeding and beaten.
He certainly resists the beauty of Kundry, and this is meri
torious, yet it hardly constitutes an act of deadly self-sacrifice.
He obtains the magic spear without any effort. Klingsor hurls
it at him to slay him, but the weapon ' remains floating above
his head,' and Parsifal has only to stretch out his hand to take
it at his convenience, and then to fulfil his mission.
Every individual feature of this mystical piece is in direct
contrast to the Christian idea of redemption, which has never
theless inspired it. Amfortas is in need of redemption through
his own weakness and guilt, not on account of an invincible
fate, and he is redeemed without any assistance on his part
beyond whining and moaning. The salvation he is awaiting
and ultimately obtains has its source completely outside his will
and consciousness. He has no part in its attainment. Another
effects it for him, and bestows it on him as a gift. The re
demption is a purely external affair, a lucky windfall, and not the
reward of an inward moral struggle. Still more monstrous are the
conditions of Kundry's redemption. Not only is she not allowed
to labour for her own salvation, but she is compelled to employ

1 86 DEGENERATION
all her strength to prevent it ; for her redemption depends on
her being despised by a man, and the task to which she has
been condemned is to turn to account all the seductive power of
beauty and passionate solicitation to win over the man. She
must by all possible means thwart the man by whom her re
demption is to come, from becoming her redeemer. If the
man yields to her charms, then the redemption is frustrated, not
through her fault, though by her action ; if the man resists the
temptation, she obtains redemption without deserving it, because
in spite of her opposing effort. It is impossible to concoct a
situation more absurd and at the same time more immoral.
Parsifal the redeemer is, in fine, from beginning to end, a mystic
re-incarnation of ' Hans in Luck ' in the German fairy-tale.
He succeeds in everything without personal effort. He sets out
to kill a swan, and finds the Grail and the royal crown. His
redeemership is no self-sacrifice, but a benefice. The favour of
Heaven has called him to an enviable, honourable office — on
what powerful recommendation Wagner does not disclose. But
a closer examination reveals worse things. Parsifal, the ' pure
fool,' is simply a precipitate of confused reminiscences of Chris
tology. Powerfully struck by the poetical elements of the
Saviour's life and sufferings, Wagner has been impelled to ex
ternalize his impressions and emotions, and has created Parsifal,
whom he causes to experience some of the most affecting scenes
of the Gospel, and who in his hands becomes (partly, perhaps,
without his being aware of it) at once a foolish and frivolous cari
cature of Jesus Christ. In the mystical work, the temptation of
the Saviour in the desert is transformed into the temptation of
Parsifal by Kundry. The scene in the Pharisee's house, where
the Magdalene anoints the Saviour's feet, is reproduced exactly :
Kundry bathes and anoints Parsifal's feet, and dries them with
her unbound hair ; and the ' pure fool ' plagiarizes the words of
Christ, ' Thy sins be forgiven thee,' in this exclamation : ' Thus
I accomplish my first office ; be baptized and believe on the
Eedeemer.' That the ordinary theatre-goer is not shocked by
this misused application of the Christ legend — nay, that in the
distorted fragments of the Gospel he is able to revive some of
the emotions it perhaps at one time excited in him — is con
ceivable. But it is incomprehensible that earnest believers, and
especially zealous fanatics, have never perceived what a profana
tion of their most sacred ideas is perpetrated by Wagner, when
he endows his Parsifal with traits of the Christ Himself.
We may mention only one of the other absurd details of the
Parsifal. The aged Titurel has succumbed to the earthly penalty
of death, but through the Saviour's mercy continues to live in the
grave. The sight of the Grail continually renews for a time his
waning vital strength. Titurel seems to attach a great value to

MYSTICISM 187
this comfortless life-in-death existence. ' By the mercy of the
Saviour I live in the tomb,' he joyously cries from his coffin,
demanding with impetuous vehemence that the Grail be shown
him, in order that his life may thereby be prolonged. ' Am I
to-day to see once more the Grail and live ?' he asks in anguish,
and because he receives no immediate answer thus laments,
' Must I die unaccompanied by the Deliverer ?' His son,
Amfortas, hesitates, whereupon the old man gives his orders :
' Unveil the Grail ! The benediction !' And when his wishes
are complied with, he exults : ' Oh, sacred bliss ! How bright
the Lord doth greet us to-day !' Subsequently Amfortas has
for some time neglected the unveiling of the Grail, and hence
Titurel has had to die. Amfortas is in despair. ' My father !
highly blessed of heroes ! . . . I, who alone was fain to die, to
thee have I given death !' From all this it undoubtedly results
that all the persons concerned see in life, even if it be the
shadowy and empty life of a being already laid in his coffin,
an exceedingly precious possession, and in death a bitter mis
fortune. And this takes place in the same piece in which
Kundry endures eternal life as a frightful curse, and passionately
longs for death as a most delicious salvation ! Is a more ridicu
lous contradiction conceivable ? Moreover, the Titurel episode
is a denial of all the premises of Parsifal, constructed as it is
on the foundation of the religious idea of personal persistence
after death. How can death frighten the man who is convinced
that the bliss of paradise awaits him ? We are here in the
presence of the same non-comprehension of his own assumptions
which has already struck us in Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
Tolstoi. But this is precisely the peculiarity of morbidly mystic
thought. It unites mutually exclusive ideas ; it shuns the law
of consistency, and imperturbably combines details which are
dumfounded at finding themselves in company. We do not
observe this phenomenon in one who is a mystic through igno
rance, mental indolence, or imitation. He may take an absurd
idea as a point of departure for a train of thought ; but
the latter unrolls itself rationally and consistently, and suffers
no gross contradiction among its particular members.
As Christology inspired Wagner with the figures of Parsifal,
so did the Eucharist inspire him with the most effective scene
of the piece — the love-feast of the Grail. It is the mise-en-scene
of the Catholic Mass, with the heretical addition of one
Protestant feature — the partaking by the communicants of the
elements in both kinds. The unveiling of the Grail corresponds
to the elevation of the Host. The acolytes take the form of the
choir of boys and youths. In the antiphonal songs and the
actions of Amfortas, we find approximations to all four parts of
the Mass. The knights of the Grail intone a sort of stunted

188 DEGENERATION
introit, the long plaint of Amfortas : ' No ! Let it not be un
veiled ! Oh, may no one, no one, fathom the depths of this
torment !' etc., may be regarded as a Confiteor. The boys sing
the offertory (' Take ye my blood for the sake of our love !' etc.).
Amfortas proceeds to the consecration ; all partake in the
Communion, and there is even a parodied reminiscence of the
' Ite, missa est ' in Gurnemanz's exclamation, ' Go out hence
upon thy way !' Since Constantine the Great, since the eleva
tion of Christianity to the rank of a State religion, no poet has
dared do what Wagner has done ; he has drawn theatrical
effects from the incomparable rich emotional content of the
function of the Mass. He felt profoundly the symbolism of the
Lord's Supper ; it provoked in him a powerful mystical excite
ment, and the need arose in him of endowing the symbolical
event with a dramatic form, and of sensuously experiencing in
all its details and in its entirety that which in the sacrifice of
the Mass is only indicated, condensed, and spiritualized. He
wished to see and feel in his own person how the elect enjoy,
amid violent emotions, the body of Christ and His redeeming
blood ; and how super-terrestrial phenomena, the purple gleam
ing of the Grail and the downward hovering dove (in the final
scene), etc., make palpable the real presence of Christ and the
divine nature of the Eucharist. Just as Wagner has borrowed
from the Church his inspiration for the scenes in the Grail, and
then for his own purposes has popularized the liturgy in the
style of the Biblia Pauperum, so does the audience find again
the cathedral and high mass on his stage, and import into the
piece all the emotions left in their soul by Church ceremonies.
The real priest in his sacerdotal robes, the remembrance of his
gestures, of the hand-bell and the genuflexions of the servers,
the blue reek and perfume of the incense, the pealing of the
organ and the play of chequered sunlight through the stained
windows of the church — these are, in the heart of the public,
Wagner's collaborators ; and it is not his art which lulls them
into mystic ecstasy, but the fundamental mood inculcated in
the vast majority of white races by two centuries of Christian
sentiment. Mysticism is, as we know, always accompanied by eroticism,
especially in the degenerate, whose emotionalism has its chief
source in morbidly excited states of the sexual centres.
Wagner's imagination is perpetually occupied with woman.
But he never sees her relation to man in the form of healthy
and natural love, which is a benefit and satisfaction for both
lovers. As with all morbid erotics (we have already re
marked this in Verlaine and Tolstoi), woman presents herself
to him as a terrible force of nature, of which man is the
trembling, helpless victim. The woman that he knows is the

MYSTICISM 189
gruesome Astarte' of the Semites, the frightful man-eating Kali
Bhagawati of the Hindoos, an apocalyptic vision of smiling
blood-thirstiness, of eternal perdition and infernal torment, in
demoniacally beautiful embodiment. No poetical problem has
so profoundly moved him as the relation between man and this
his ensnaring destroyer. He has approached this problem from
all sides, and has given it different solutions corresponding to
his instincts and views of morality. The man frequently
succumbs to the temptress, but Wagner revolts against this
weakness, of which he is himself only too conscious, and in his
chief works makes the man offer a desperate, but finally
victorious, resistance. Not, however, by his own strength does
man tear himself from the paralyzing charm of woman. He
must receive supernatural aid. This proceeds most frequently
from a pure and unselfish virgin, who forms the antithesis to the
sphinx with soft woman's body and lion's paws. In conformity
with the psychological law of contrast, Wagner invents as a
counterpart to the terrible woman of his inmost perception an
angelic woman, who is all love, all devotion, all celestial mildness ;
a woman who asks for nothing and gives all ; a woman soothing,
caressing and healing; in a word, a woman for whom an un
happy creature pants as he writhes, consumed by flames, in the
white-hot flames of Belit. Wagner's Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta,
and Gertrude are extremely instructive manifestations of erotic
mysticism, in which the half- unconscious idea is struggling
for form, viz., that the safety of the sexually crazy degenerate
lies in purity, continence, or in the possession of a wife having
no sort of individuality, no desire and no rights, and hence in
capable of ever proving dangerous to the man.
In one of his first compositions, as in his last, in Tannhduser
as in Parsifal, he treats of the combat between man and his
corruptress, the fly versus the spider, and in this way testifies
that for thirty-three years, from youth to old age, the subject
has never been absent from his mind. In Tannhduser it is the
beautiful devil Venus herself who ensnares the hero, and with
whom he has to wage a desperate conflict for the salvation of his
soul. The pious and chaste Elizabeth, this dream-being, woven
of moonlight, prayer, and song, becomes his 'redeemer.' ln
Parsifal the beautiful devil is named Kundry, and the hero
escapes the danger with which she threatens his soul only
because he is ' the pure fool,' and is in a state of grace.
In the Walkure Wagner's imagination surrenders itself to un
bridled passion. He here represents the ardent man wildly and
madly abandoning himself to his appetite, without regard to the
dictates of society, and without attempting to resist the furious
impetuosity of his instinct. Siegmund sees Sieglinde, and
thenceforth has but one idea — to possess her. That she is

i9o DEGENERATION
another's wife — nay, that he recognises her as his own sister-
does not check him for a moment. Those considerations are as
feathers before the storm. He pays for his night of pleasure by
his death the following morning. For with Wagner love is always
a fatality, and ever round its pillow blaze the flames of hell. And
as he has not made manifest in Sieglinde the images of carnage
and annihilation evoked in him by his idea of woman, he personi
fies these separately in the Walkure. Their appearance in the
drama is for him a psychological need. The traits inseparable
in his mind from his conception of woman, and ordinarily
united by him in a single figure, are here separated and raised
to the dignity of independent types. Venus, Kundry, are seducer
and destroyer in one person. In the Walkure Sieglinde is only
the seducer, but the destroyer grows into a horde of gruesome
Amazons, who drink the blood of battling men, revel in the
spectacle of murderous blows, and rush with wild, exulting cries
across the corpse-strewn waste.
Siegfried, Gbtterddmmerung, Tristan und Isolde are exact
repetitions of the essential content of the Walkure. It is always
the dramatic embodiment ofthe same obsession of the terrors of
love. Siegfried sees Brunhilde in the midst of her fire-circle,
and both instantly fail into each other's arms in a rage of love ;
but Siegfried must expiate his happiness with his life, and falls
under the steel of Hagen. The mere death of Siegfried does
not suffice for Wagner's imagination as the inevitable conse
quence of love ; destiny must show itself more terribly. The
castle of Asgard itself breaks out in flames, and the slave of
love in dying drags to his own perdition all the gods of heaven
along with him. Tristan und Isolde is the echo of this tragedy of
passion. Here also is the complete annihilation of the sentiment
of duty and self-conquest, by the springing up of love both in
Tristan and Isolde ; and here also is death as the natural end
towards which love is hurried. To express his fundamental
mystic thought, that love is an awful fatality wherewith the un
approachable powers of destiny visit the poor mortal incapable
of resistance, he has resort to a childishly clumsy device ; he
introduces into his compositions love-philtres of potent spell,
now to explain the birth of the passion itself, and to indicate its
superhuman nature, as in Tristan und Isolde; now to withdraw
all the moral life of the hero from the control of his will, and
show him as the plaything of super-terrestrial forces, as in the
Gdtterddmmerung .
Thus Wagner's poems give us a deep insight into the world of
ideas of an erotically emotional degenerate nature. They reveal
the alternating mental conditions of a most reckless sensuality, of
a revolt of moral sentiment against the tyranny of appetite, of the
ruin of the higher man and his despairing repentance. As has

MYSTICISM 191
already been said, Wagner is an admirer of Schopenhauer and
his philosophy. Like his master, he persuaded himself that life
is a misfortune, and non-existence salvation and happiness.
Love, as the constantly active incitement to the maintenance of
the species and continuance of life, with all its accompanying
sufferings, was bound to seem to him the source of all evil ; and,
on the other hand, the highest wisdom and morality, to consist
in the victorious resistance of this incitement, in chastity,
sterility, the negation of the will to perpetuate the species.
And while his judgment bound him to these views, his instincts
attracted him irresistibly to woman, and forced him during his
whole life to do all that flouted his convictions and condemned
his doctrine. This discord between his philosophy and his
organic inclinations is the inner tragedy of his mental life, and
his poems form a unique whole, recounting the process of the
internal conflict. He sees a woman, at once loses himself, and
is absorbed in her charms (Siegmund and Sieglinde, Siegfried
and Brunhilde, Tristan and Isolde). This is a great sin, de
manding expiation ; death alone is an adequate punishment
(final scenes in the Walkure, Gotterddmmerung, Tristan und
Isolde). But the sinner has a timid and feeble excuse : ' I could
not resist. I was the victim of superhuman powers. My
seducer was of the race of the gods' (Sieglinde, Brunhilde).
' Magic philtres deprived me of my reason ' (Tristan, Siegfried
in his relations with Gutrune). How glorious to be strong
enough to vanquish the devouring monster of appetite within !
How radiant and exalted the figure of a man able to plant his
foot on the neck of the demon woman ! (Tannhauser and
Parsifal). And, on the other hand, how beautiful and adorable
the woman who should not set ablaze the hell-fire of passion in
man, but aid him in quenching it ; who should not exact of him
a revolt against reason, duty, and honour, but be an example to
him of renunciation and self-discipline ; who, instead of enslav
ing him, should, as his loving handmaid, divest herself of her
own nature, to blend herself with his ; in a word, a woman who
would leave him safe in his defencelessness, because she herself
would be unarmed ! (Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, Gutrune). The
creation of these forms of woman is a sort of De Profundis of
the timid voluptuary, who feels the sting of the flesh, and im
plores aid to protect him from himself.
Like all the degenerates, Wagner is wholly sterile as a poet,
although he has written a long series of dramatic works. The
creative force capable of reproducing the spectacle of universal
normal life is denied him. He has recourse to his own mystico-
erotic emotions for the emotional content of his pieces, and the
external incidents forming their skeleton are purely the fruits of
reading, the reminiscences of books which have made an im-

192 DEGENERATION
pression on him. This is the great difference between the
healthy and the degenerate poet who receives his sentiments at
second-hand. The former is able to ' plunge into full human
life,' as Goethe says ; to seize it, and either make it enter all
breathing and palpitating into a poem which itself thus becomes a
part of natural life, or else remould it with idealizing art, suppress
ing its accidental, accessory features, so as to make prominent
the essential ; and in this way convincingly to reveal law behind
enigmatically bewildering phenomena. The degenerate subject,
on the contrary, can do nothing with life ; he is blind and deaf
to it. He is a stranger in the midst of healthy men. He lacks
the organs necessary for the comprehension of life — nay, even
for its perception. To work from a model does not lie within
his powers. Hie can only copy existing sketches, and then
colour them subjectively with his own emotions. He can see
life only when it lies before him on paper in black and white.
While the healthy poet resembles the chlorophyllic plant, which
dives into the soil, and, by the honest labour of its own roots,
procures for itself the nutritive materials out of which it con
structs its blossoms and fruit, the degenerate poet has the nature
of a parasitic plant, which can only live on a host, and receives its
nutriment exclusively from the juices already elaborated by the
latter. There are modest parasites and proud parasites. Their
range extends from the insignificant lichen to the wondrous
rafflesia, the flower of which, a yard in breadth, illumines the
sombre forests of Sumatra with the wild magnificence of its blood-
red colour. Wagner's poems have in them something ofthe carrion
stench and uncanny beauty of this plant of rapine and corrup
tion. With the single exception of the Meistersinger, they are
grafted on the Icelandic sagas, the epics of Gottfried of Strass-
burg, Wolfram of Eschenbach, and the singer of the Wartburg
war in the Manessian manuscript, as on so many trunks of half-
dead trees, and they draw their strength from these. Tann
hduser, the Niebelungen Tetralogy, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal,
and Lohengrin, are constructed entirely from materials supplied
him by ancient literature. Rienzi he derives from written history,
and the Fliegender Hollander from the tradition already utilized
a hundred times. Among popular legends, that ofthe Wandering
Jew has made the deepest impression on his mind, on account
of its mysticism. He has elaborated it once in the Fliegendet
Hollander ; a second time transposed it feature for feature into
a feminine form in the person of Kundry, not without weaving
into this inversion some reminiscences of the legend of Herodias.
All this is patchwork and dilettantism. Wagner deceives himself
(probably unconsciously) as to his incapacity for creating human
beings, representing, not. men, but gods and demigods, demons
and spectres, whose deeds are not to be explained by human

MYSTICISM 193
motives, but by mysterious destinies, curses and prophecies,
fatal and magic forces. That which passes before our eyes in
Wagner's pieces is not life, but spectres, witches' sabbaths, or
dreams. He is a dealer in old clothes, who has bought at
second-hand the cast-off garments of fairy-tales, and makes of
them (often not without clever tailoring) new costumes, in which
we may recognise, strangely jumbled and joined, rags of ancient
gala stuffs and fragments of damascened suits of armour. But
these masquerading suits do not serve for clothes to a single
being of flesh and blood. Their apparent movements are pro
duced exclusively by the hand of Wagner, who has slipped into
the empty doublets and sleeves, and behind the flowing trains
and dangling robes, and kicks about in them with epileptic con
vulsions, that he may awaken in the spectator the impression of
a ghostly animation in this obsolete wardrobe.
Healthy geniuses have also, no doubt, allied themselves
with popular tradition or history, like Goethe in Faust and
Tasso. But what a difference between the respective treatment by
a healthy poet and a degenerate one of that which they find, of
that which is given ! To the former it is a vessel which he fills
with genuine, fresh life, so that the new contents become the
essential part; to the latter, on the contrary, the outside is and
remains the chief thing, and his own activity consists at best in
choking the receptacle with the chaff of nonsensical phrases.
The great poets, too, lay claim to the cuckoo's privilege of
laying their egg in a strange nest. But the bird which issues
from the egg is so much larger, handsomer and stronger than
the original denizens, that the latter are mercilessly driven from
their home and the former remains the sole possessor. When
the great poet puts his new wine into old bottles, he doubtless
shows a little indolence, a little poverty of invention and a
not very high-minded reckoning on the reader's pre-existing
emotions. But he cannot be held too rigorously accountable for
this small amount of stinginess, because, after all, he gives us so
much that is his own. Imagine Faust deprived of all the por
tions drawn from old popular books ; there would still remain
nearly everything ; there would remain all of the man who
thirsts for knowledge and seeks for it ; all the struggle between
his baser instincts craving for satisfaction, and the higher
morality rejoicing in renunciation ; in brief, just that which
makes the work one of the loftiest poems of humanity. If, on
the other hand, Wagner's old ancestral marionettes are stripped
of their armour and brocades, there remains nothing, or, at best,
only air and a musty smell. Assimilating minds have hundreds
of times felt tempted to modernize Faust. The undertaking is so
sure of success that it is superfluous ; Faust in dress-coat would
be no other than the unaltered embodiment of Goethe's own
13

194 DEGENERATION
Faust. But imagine Lohengrin, Siegmund, Tristan, Parsifal,
as contemporaries ! They would not even serve for burlesque,
in spite of the Tannhauser lampoon by the old Viennese poet
Nestroy. Wagner swaggered about the art-work of the future, and his
partisans hailed him as the artist of the future. He the artist
of the future ! He is a bleating echo of the far-away past His
path leads back to deserts long since abandoned by all life.
Wagner is the last mushroom on the dunghill of romanti
cism. This 'modern' is the degraded heir of a Tieck, of a
La Motte-Fouque' — nay more, sad to say, of a Johann Friedrich
Kind. The home of his intellect is the Dresden evening paper.
He derives his subsistence from the legacy of mediaeval poems,
and dies of starvation when the remittance from the thirteenth
century fails to arrive.
The subject alone of the Wagnerian poems can raise a claim
to serious consideration. As for their form, it is beneath criti
cism. The absurdity of his style, his shallowness, the awkward
ness of his versification, his complete inability to clothe his feel
ings and thoughts in anything like adequate language — these
have been so often pointed out and exposed in detail that I may
spare myself the trouble of dwelling on these points. But one
faculty among the essential constituents of dramatic endowment
cannot be denied him — that of picturesque imagination. It is
developed in him to the point of genius. Wagner as a dramatist
is really a historical painter of the highest rank. Nietzsche (in his
skit, Der Fall Wagner*) perhaps means the same when, without
stopping at this important assertion, he calls Wagner, not only
' magnetizer ' and ' collector of gew-gaws,' but also a ' fresco-painter.'
This he is in a degree never yet attained by any other dramatic
author in the whole world of literature. Every action embodies
itself for him in a series of most imposing pictures, which, when
they are composed as Wagner has seen them with his inner eye,
must overwhelm and enrapture the beholder. The reception of
the guests in the hall of the Wartburg ; the arrival and departure
of Lohengrin in the boat drawn by the swan ; the gambols of
the Rhine maidens in the river ; the defiling of the gods over
the rainbow-bridge towards the castle of Asgard ; the bursting
of the moonlight into Hunding's hut; the ride of the Walktire
over the battlefield ; Brunhilde in the circle of fire ; the final
scene in G otter ddmmerung, where Brunhilde flings herself on to
her horse and leaps into the midst of the funeral-pyre, while
Hagen throws himself into the surging Rhine, and the heavens
are aflame with the glow from the burning palace of the gods ; the
love-feast of the knights in the castle of the Grail ; the obsequies
of Titurel and the healing of Amfortas — these are pictures to
* Der Fall Wagner. Ein Musikanten-Problem. 2toAuflage. Leipzig, 1889.

MYSTICISM 195
which nothing hitherto in art approaches. It is on account of
this gift for inventing incomparably imposing spectacles that
Nietzsche has termed Wagner a ' comedian.' The word signifies
nothing, and, in so far as it may contain a tinge of contempt, is
unjust. Wagner is no comedian,. but a born painter. If he had
been a healthy genius, endowed with intellectual equilibrium,
that is what he would undoubtedly have become. His inner
vision would have forced the brush into his hand, and con
strained him to realize it on canvas, by means of colour.
Leonardo da Vinci had the same gift. It made him the greatest
painter the world had yet known, and at the same time the
unsurpassed deviser and organizer of fetes, pageants, triumphs,
and allegorical plays, which, perhaps more than his genius as
a painter, won for him the admiration of his princely patrons
Ludovico Moro, Isabella of Aragon, Caesar Borgia, Charles VIII.,
Louis XII., Francis I. But Wagner, as is the case with all
the degenerate, did not see clearly into his own nature. He did
not understand his natural impulses. Perhaps also, with the
feeling of his own deep organic feebleness, he dreaded the heavy
labour of drawing and painting, and, conformably with the law
of least effort, his instinct sought vent in the theatre, where his
inner visions were embodied by others — the decorative painters,
machinists, and actors — without requiring him to exert himself.
His pictures have unquestionably a large share in the effect
produced by his pieces. They are admired without an inquiry
into how far their introduction is warranted by the rational course
of the drama. However nonsensical as part of an action, they
justify their appearance, from an artistic standpoint, by their
intrinsic beauty, which makes of them independent aesthetical
phenomena. Through their enormous aggrandizement by the
media of the stage, their pictorial allurements are perceptible
even to the eye of the most crass Philistine, whose sense were
otherwise dead to them.
Of Wagner the musician, more important to all appearance
than Wagner the author, dramatic poet and fresco-painter, I
treat lastly, because this task will give us a clear proof of his
degeneration, although this is very much more evident in his
writings than in his music, where certain stigmata of degeneration
are not so prominent, and where others appear as its un
mistakable advantages. The incoherence in words, noticeable
at once to an attentive person, does not exhibit itself in music
unless it is excessively strongly marked ; the absurdity, the con
tradictions, the twaddle, are hardly apparent in the language of
tones, because it is not the function of music to express an exact
meaning, and emotionalism is not in it an indication of disease,
since emotion is music's proper essence.
We know, moreover, that high musical talent is compatible

196 DEGENERATION
with a very advanced state of degeneration — nay, even with pro
nounced delusion, illusion, and idiocy. Sollier* says : ' We have
to deal with certain aptitudes very often manifested with great
intensity by idiots and imbeciles. . . . That for music especially
is often met with. . . . Although this may seem disagreeable
to musicians, it nevertheless proves that music is the least in
tellectual of all the arts.' Lombroso-f** remarks : ' It has been
observed that the aptitude for music has been displayed almost
involuntarily and unexpectedly among many sufferers from
hypochondria and mania, and even among the really insane.'
He cites, with other cases, a mathematician attacked with
melancholia, who improvised on the piano ; a woman seized
with megalomania, who ' sang very beautiful airs, at the same
time improvising two different themes on the piano'; a patient
' who composed very beautiful new and melodious tunes,' etc. ;
and he adds in explanation that those who are afflicted with
megalomania and general paralysis surpass other mental invalids
in musical talent, 'and from the very same cause as that of their
unusual aptitude for painting, viz., their violent mental excitation.'
Wagner the musician encounters his most powerful attacks
from musicians themselves. He himself bears witness to it :J
' Both my friends (Ferd. Hiller and Schumann) believed that they
very soon discovered me to be a musician of no remarkable en
dowment. My success also has seemed to them to be due to the
libretti written by myself.' In other language, the same old story
— musicians regarded him as a poet, and poets as a musician.
It is of course convenient to explain a posteriori the decisive
judgments of men who were at once prominent professionals
and sincere friends of Wagner by saying (after he had attained
success) that his tendency was too novel to be immediately
appreciated, or even understood, by them. This solution, how
ever, hardly applies to Schumann, as he was a friend to all
innovations, and audacities, even differing from his own, rather
attracted than shocked him. Rubinstein § still makes important
reservations in regard to Wagner's music ; and among serious
contemporary musical critics who have witnessed the birth,
development and triumph of the Wagner cult, Hanslick re
mained a long time recalcitrant, until at last, though not very
valiantly, he struck his colours in face of the overpowering fanati
cism of hysterical Wagnerphiles. What Nietzsche (in his Der
Fall Wagner) says against Wagner as a musician is unimportant,
since the brochure of abjuration is quite as insanely delirious as
* Sollier, op. cit., p. 101.
f Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 214 et seq.
X Wagner, Ges. Schriften, Band X., p. 222.
§ Rubinstein, Musiciens modernes. Traduit du russe par M. Delines.
Priris, 1892.

MYSTICISM 197
the brochure of deification ( Wagner in Bayreuth) written twelve
years before.
In spite of the unfavourable judgments of many of his profes
sional brethren, Wagner is incontestably an eminently gifted
musician. This coolly-expressed recognition will certainly seem
grotesque to Wagnerian fanatics, who place him above Beethoven.
But a serious inquirer into truth need not trouble himself about the
impressions provoked by Wagner among these persons. In the
first period of his productivity Wagner much oftener achieved
compositions of beauty than subsequently, and among these
many may be termed pearls of musical literature, and will for a
long time enjoy even the esteem of serious and rational people.
But Wagner the musician had to confront a life-long enemy,
who forcibly prevented the full unfolding of his gifts, and this
enemy was Wagner the musical theorist.
In his graphomaniacal muddle he concocted certain theories,
which represent so many fits of aesthetic delirium. The most
important of these are the dogmas of the leit-motif and of the
unending melody. Everyone now undoubtedly knows what
Wagner understood by the former. The expression has passed
into all civilized languages. The leit-motif, in which the
threshed-out discarded 'programme music' was bound logically
to culminate, is a sequence of tones supposed to express a
definite conception, and appears in the orchestration whenever
the composer intends to recall to the auditor the corresponding
conception. By the leit-motif Wagner transforms music into
dry speech. The orchestration, leaping from leit-motif to leit
motif, no longer embodies general emotions, but claims to appeal
to memory and to reason, and communicate sharply defined
presentations. Wagner combines a few notes into a musical
figure, as a rule not even distinct or original, and makes this
arrangement with the auditor : — ' This figure signifies a combat,
that a dragon, a third a sword,' etc. If the auditor does not
agree to the stipulation, the leit-motifs lose all significance, for
they possess in themselves nothing which compels us to grasp
the meaning arbitrarily lent them ; and they cannot have
anything of this kind in them, because the imitative powers
of music are by its nature limited to purely acoustical
phenomena, or at most to those optical phenomena ordinarily
accompanied by acoustical phenomena. By imitating thunder,
music can express the notion of a thunderstorm ; by the imitation
of the tones of a bugle, it can call up that of an army in such a
way that the listener can hardly have a doubt as to the significance
of the corresponding sequences of tones. On the other hand,
it is absolutely denied to music, with the means at its disposal,
to produce an unequivocal embodiment of the visible and
tangible world, let alone that of abstract thought. Hence the

198 DEGENERATION
leit-motifs are at best cold symbols, resembling written characters,
which in themselves say nothing, and convey to the initiated and
the learned alone the given import of a presentation.
Here again is found the phenomenon already repeatedly
indicated by us as a mark of the mode of thought among the
degenerate — the unconscious moon-struck somnambulous way
in which they transgress the most firmly-established limits of
the particular artistic domain, annul the differentiation of the
arts arrived at by long historical evolution, and lead them back
to the period of the lacustrines, nay, of the most primitive
troglodytes. We have seen that the pre-Raphaelites reduce the
picture to a writing which is no longer to produce its effect by
its pictorial qualities, but must express an abstract idea ; and
that the Symbolists make of the word, that conventional
vehicle of a conception, a musical harmony, by whose aid they
endeavour to awaken not an idea, but a phonetic effect. In
precisely the same way Wagner wishes to divest music of its
proper essence, and to transform it from a vehicle of emotion
into a vehicle of rational thought. The disguise produced
by this interchange of costumes is in this way complete.
Painters proclaim themselves writers ; poets behave like the
composers of symphonies ; the musician plays the poet. Pre-
Raphaelites wishing to record a religious apothegm do not
make use of writing, which leaves nothing to be desired in the
way of convenience, and by which they would be distinctly
understood, but plunge into the labour of a highly-detailed
painting, costing them much time, and which, in spite of its
wealth of figures, is far from speaking so clearly to the intelli
gence as a single line of rational writing. Symbolists desirous
of awakening a musical emotion do not compose a melody,
but join meaningless, though ostensibly musical words, capable,
perhaps, of provoking amusement or vexation, but not the
intended emotion. When Wagner wishes to express the idea
of ' giant/ ' dwarf,' ' tarn-cap which makes the wearer invisible,'
he does not say in words universally understood 'giant,' 'dwarf,'
' tarn-cap' (which makes the wearer invisible), but replaces these
excellent words by a series of notes, the sense of which no one
will divine without a key. Is anything more needed to expose
the complete insanity of this confusion of all the means of
expression, this ignorance of what is possible to each art ?
It is Wagner's ambition to imitate those facetious students
who teach their dog to say ' papa.' He wants to perform the
trick of making music say the names ' Schulze ' and 'Miiller'
( = Smith and Jones). The score should, when necessary, supply
the place of the directory. Language does not suffice him.
He creates for himself a volapiik, and demands that his hearers
should learn it. No admission without hard work ! Those who

MYSTICISM 199
have not assimilated the vocabulary of the Wagnerian volapiik
cannot understand his operas. It is useless to go to the trouble
of a journey to Bayreuth if one cannot talk fluently in leit
motifs. And how pitiable after all is the result of this delirious
effort ! H. von Wolzogen, the writer of the Thematische
Leitfaden (Thematic Guide) to the Niebelungen Tetralogy,
finds in all these four prodigious works only ninety leit-motifs.
A language of ninety words, however inflated they may be,
such as ' motif of the weary Siegmund,' ' motif of the mania for
vengeance,' ' motif of bondage,' etc. ! with such a vocabulary
it would be impossible even to exchange ideas about the
weather with a native of Tierra del Fuego. A page of Sanders'
lexicon contains more means of expression than Wolzogen's
entire dictionary of the Wagnerian leit-motif language. The
history of art knows no more astounding aberration than this
leit-motif craze. To express ideas is not the function of music ;
language provides for that as completely as could be desired.
When the word is accompanied by song or orchestra it is not
to make it more definite, but to re-enforce it by the intervention
of emotion. Music is a kind of sounding-board, in which the
word has to awake something like an echo from the infinite.
But such an echo of presentiment and mystery does not ring
out from leit-motifs coldly pasted together, as if by the labour
of a conscientious registrar.
With the ' unending melody,' the second of Wagner's tenets,
it is the same as with the leit-motif. It is a product of degenerate
thought ; it is musical mysticism. It is the form in which
incapacity for attention shows itself in music. In painting,
attention leads to composition ; the absence of it to a uniformly
photographic treatment of the whole field of vision as with the
pre-Raphaelites. In poetry, attention results in clearness of
ideas, consistency of statement, the suppression of the un
important, and the giving emphasis to the essential ; its absence
leads to twaddle as with the graphomaniacs, and to a painful
prolixity in consequence of the indiscriminate recording of all
perceptions as with Tolstoi. Finally, in music attention
expresses itself in completed forms, i.e., in well-defined melodies ;
its absence, on the contrary, by the dissolution of form, the
obliteration of its boundary lines, and thus by unending melodies
as with Wagner. This parallelism is not an arbitrary play of
ideas, but an exact picture of the corresponding mental pro
cesses among the different groups of degenerate subjects, pro
ducing in the different arts different manifestations according to
their specific means and aims.
Let us grasp what melody is. It is the regular grouping of
notes in a highly expressive series of tones. Melody in music
corresponds to what in language is a logically -constructed

2oo DEGENERATION
sentence, distinctly presenting an idea, and having a clearly-
marked beginning and ending. The dreamy rambling of half-
formed nebulous thoughts as little allows the mintage of
sentences of this kind, as does the fleeting agitation of the vague
bewildered emotion lead to the composition of a melody. The
emotions, too, have their own grades of distinctness. They,
too, can appear as chaotic, or as well-regulated states. In the
one case they stand out in the consciousness which grasps their
composition and their purpose as discriminable modes strongly
illuminated by the attention ; in the other case they are a
disturbing enigma to consciousness, and perceived by it merely
as a generic excitement, as a sort of subterranean trembling and
rumbling of unknown origin and tendency. If the emotions
are intelligible, they will be fain to manifest themselves in a form
at once the most expressive and most easily grasped. If, on
the contrary, they are a generic continuous state, without
determined cause and discoverable aim, the music presenting
them to the senses will be as blurred and as nebulously fluctuating
in form as themselves. Melody may be said to be an effort of
music to say something definite. ' It is clear that an emotion
unconscious of its cause and its aims, and unilluminated by
attention, will not raise its musical expression to the height of
melody, precisely because it has nothing definite to say.
A completed melody is a late acquisition of music, obtained
by it only after long evolution. In its historic, and still more in
its prehistoric, beginnings, the art of music knew it not. Music
springs originally from song, and the rhythmic noise (i.e., noise
repeated in equal or regular intervals of time) of accompanying
stamping, knocking, or clapping of the hands ; and song is
nothing but speech grown louder and moving in wider intervals
through emotional excitement. I should like to cite only one
passage from the almost unlimited literature on this hackneyed
subject. Herbert Spencer, in his well-known treatise on
The Origin and Function of Music* says : ' All music is
originally vocal. . . . The dance-chants of savage tribes are very
monotonous, and in virtue of their monotony are much more
nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the songs of civilized
races. . . . The early poems of the Greeks, which, be it remem
bered, were sacred legends embodied in that rhythmical, meta
phorical language which strong feeling excites, were not recited,
but chanted ; the tones and the cadences were made musical by
the same influences which made the speech poetical. . . . This
chanting is believed to have been not what we call singing, but
nearly allied to our recitative ; far simpler, indeed, if we may
judge from the fact that the early Greek lyre, which had but
* The Origin and Function of Music : Essays, Scientific, Political and
Speculative. London: Williams and Norgate, 1883 J vol. i., p. 213 et seq.

MYSTICISM 201
four strings, was played in unison with the voice, which was
therefore confined to four notes. . . . That recitative — beyond
which, by the way, the Chinese and Hindoos seem never to
have advanced— grew naturally out of the modulations and
cadences of strong feeling, we have, indeed, still current
evidence. There are even now to be met with occasions on
which strong feeling vents itself in this form. Whoever has
been present when a meeting of Quakers was addressed by one
of their preachers (whose practice it is to speak only under the
influence of religious emotion) must have been struck by the
quite unusual tones, like those of a subdued chant, in which the
address was made.'
Recitative, which is nothing but speech intensified, and allows
no recognition of completed forms of melody, is therefore the
most ancient form of music ; it is the degree pf development
reached by the art of music among savages, the ancient Greeks,
and contemporary races in Eastern Asia. Wagner's ' unending
melody' is nothing but recitative, richly harmonized and ani
mated, but, nevertheless, recitative. The name bestowed by him
on his pretended invention must not mislead us. In the mouth
of the degenerate a word has never the meaning ascribed to it
by universal language. Wagner calmly applies the term
' melody ' — with a distinguishing adjective — to a form which is
actually the negation and suppression of melody. He desig
nates unending melody as an advance in music, while it is really
a return to its primeval starting-point. Here there recurs in
Wagner what we have so often laid stress upon in the preceding
chapters, viz., that by a strange optical illusion the degenerate
regard their atavism, their morbid reversion to the most remote
and lowest grades of evolution, as an ascent into the future.
Wagner was led to his theory of unending melody by his
limited capacity for the invention of finite, that is of real,
melodies. His weakness in melodic creation has struck all im
partial musicians. In youth his power in this direction was
more abundant, and he succeeded in creating some superb
melodies (in Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Fliegender Hollander).
With increasing age this power became more and more im
poverished, and in proportion as the torrent of melodic inven
tion dried up in him, he accentuated his theory of unending
melody with ever more obstinacy and asperity. Always there
reappears the well-known device of concocting a theory a
posteriori as a plausible ground for, and palliation of, what is
done through unconscious organic necessity. Wagner was in
capable of distinguishing the individual personages of his operas
by a purely musical characterization, and therefore he invented
the leit-motif* Experiencing a great difficulty, especially with
* E. Hanslick, op. cit, p. 233 : ' As the dramatis personae in " music-
drama '' are not distinguished by the character of the melodies they sing, as

202 DEGENERATION
advancing age, in creating true melodies, he set up the postulate
of the unending melody.
All the other crotchets of his musical theory also find their
explanation in this clear consciousness of definite incompetency.
In the Art-work of the Future he overwhelms the theory of
counterpoint and the contrapuntists — those dull pedants who
abase the most vital of all arts to a desiccated, dead mathe
matics — with a scorn intended to be biting, but producing the
effect of an echo of Schopenhauer's invectives against the
German philosophers. Why ? Because, as an inattentive
mystic, abandoned to amorphous dreams, he must feel intoler
ably oppressed by the severe discipline and fixed rules of the
theory of composition, which gave a grammar to the musical
babbling of primeval times, and made of it a worthy medium
for the expression of the emotions of civilized men. He asserts
that pure instrumental music ended with Beethoven ; that pro
gress after him is impossible; that 'musical declamation' is the
only path along which the art of music can further develop
itself. It may be that, after Beethoven, instrumental music will
make no progress for decades, or for centuries. He was such a
stupendous genius that it is, in fact, difficult to imagine how he
can be surpassed, or even equalled. Leonardo da Vinci, Shake
speare, Cervantes, Goethe, produce a similar impression ; and, in
truth, these geniuses have not yet been surpassed. It is also
conceivable that there are limits which it is impossible for any
given art to pass at all, so that a very great genius says the last
word for it, and after that no progress can be made in it. In
such a case, however, the aspirant should humbly say : ' I
know that I cannot do better than the supreme master of my
art ; I am therefore contented to labour as one of the epigoni in
the shadow of his greatness, content if my work expresses some
peculiarities of my individuality.' He ought not in pre
sumptuous self-conceit to affirm : ' There is no sense in emu
lating the eagle-flight of the mighty one ; progress now lies alone
in the flapping of my bats'-wings.' But this is exactly what
Wagner does. Not being himself endowed with any great gift
for pure instrumental music, as his few symphonic works suffice
to prove, he decrees in the tone of infallibility : ' Instrumental
music ended with Beethoven. It is an error to seek for any
thing on this well-browsed field. The future of music lies in
the accompaniment of the word, and I am he who is to show
you the way into that future.'
Here Wagner simply makes a virtue of his necessity, and of
in ancient opera (Don Juan and Leporello, Donna Anna and Zerlina, Max
and Caspar), but all resemble each other in the physiognomic pathos of the
tones of their speech, Wagner aims at replacing this characteristic by so-
called leit motifs in the orchestra.'

MYSTICISM 203
his weakness a title of glory. The symphony is the highest
differentiation of musical art. In it music has wholly discarded
its relationship with words, and attained its highest indepen
dence. Hence the symphony is the most musical of all that
music can produce. To disown it is to disown that music is a
special, differentiated art. To place above the-symphony music
as an accompaniment of words is to raise the handmaiden to a
higher rank than her free-born mistress. It will never occur to
a composer, whose inmost being is charged with musical feeling
and thought, to seek words instead of musical themes for
the expression of that in him which is yearning for embodi
ment. For if it does occur to him, it is a proof that in his
inmost being he is a poet or an author, and not a musician.
The choruses in the Ninth Symphony are not to be cited as
proof of the inaccuracy of this assertion. In that case Beethoven
was overmastered by an emotion so powerful and univocal, that
the more general and equivocal character of purely musical ex
pression could no longer suffice for him, and he was uncon
ditionally compelled to call in the aid of words. In the deeply
significant Biblical legend, even Balaam's ass acquired the
power of speech when he had something definite to say. The
emotion which becomes clearly conscious of its content and aim
ceases to be a mere emotion, and transforms itself into presen
tation, notion and judgment, but these express themselves, not
in music, but in articulate language. When Wagner, as a
fundamental principle, placed music as an accompaniment to
words above that which is purely instrumental, and not as a
medium for the expression of thought — for in regard to that
there can be no difference of opinion — but as a musical form
properly so called, he only proved that, in the inmost depths of
his nature, and by virtue of his organic disposition, he was not a
musician, but a confused mixture of a poet feeble in style, and
a painter lazy of brush, with a Javanese 'gamelang' accompani
ment buzzing in between. This is the case with most 'higher
degenerates,' except that the separate fragments of their strangely
intermingled hybrid talent are not so strong and great as
Wagner's. The musical productions in which Wagner has been most
successful — the Venusberg music ; the E flat, G, B flat, ' Wigala-
Weia' of the Rhinemaidens, repeated one hundred and thirty-
six times ; the Walkure ride ; the fire incantation ; the murmur
of the forest ; the Siegfried idyl ; the Good - Friday spell ;
magnificent compositions, and highly praised with justice — show
precisely the peculiarly unmusical character of his genius. All
these pieces have one thing in common that they depict. They
are not an inner emotion crying out from the soul in music, but the
mental vision of the gifted eye of a painter, which Wagner, with

204 DEGENERATION
gigantic power, but also with gigantic aberration, strives to fix in
tones instead of lines and colours. He avails himself of natural
sounds or noises, either imitating them directly, or awakening
ideas of them through association, reproducing the ripple and roar
of waves, the sough of the tree-top and the song of wild birds,
which are in themselves acoustic ; or, by an acoustic parallelism,
the optical phenomena of the movements in the dance of volup
tuous female forms, the tearing along of fiercely snorting steeds,
the blazing and flickering of flames, etc. These creations are
not the outgrowth of emotional excitement, but have been pro
duced by external impressions conveyed through the senses ;
they are not the utterance of a feeling but a reflection — i.e.,
something essentially optical. I might compare Wagner's music,
at its very best, to the flight of flying-fishes. It is an astonishing
and dazzling spectacle, and yet unnatural. It is a straying from
a native to an alien element. Above all, it is something abso
lutely barren and incapable of profiting either normal fishes or
normal birds.
Wagner has felt this himself very forcibly ; he was quite clear
on the point that no one could build further on the foundation
of his tone-paintings ; for with reference to the efforts of musi
cians eagerly desirous of founding a Wagner school, he com
plains* that 'younger composers were most irrationally putting
themselves to trouble in imitating him.'
A searching examination has thus shown us that this pre
tended musician of the future is an out-and-out musician of
long-ago. All the characteristics of his talent point not forward,
but far behind us. His leit-motif, abasing music to a conven
tional phonetic symbol, is atavism ; his unending melody is
atavism, leading back the fixed form to the vague recitative of
savages ; atavism, his subordination of highly differentiated in
strumental music to music-drama, which mixes music and poetry,
and allows neither of the two art-forms to attain to independ
ence ; even his peculiarity of almost never permitting more than
one person on the stage to sing and of avoiding vocal polyphony
is atavism. As a personality he will occupy an important place
in music ; as an initiator, or developer of his att, hardly any, or
a very narrow one. For the only thing that musicians of healthy
capacity can learn from him is to keep song and accompaniment
in opera closely connected with the words, to declaim with
sincerity and propriety, and to suggest pictorial ideas to the
imagination by means of orchestral effects. But I dare not
decide whether the latter is an enlargement or an upheaval of
the natural boundaries of musical art, and in any event disciples
* Wagner, Ueber die Anwendung ^er Musik auf das Drama. Ges.
Schriften, Band X., p. 242.

MYSTICISM 205
of Wagner must use his rich musical palette with caution if they
are not to be led astray.
Wagner's mighty influence on his contemporaries is to be
explained, neither by his capacities as author and musician, nor
by any of his personal qualities, with the exception, perhaps, of
that ' stubborn perseverance in one and the same fundamental
dea ' which Lombroso* cites as a characteristic of grapho
maniacs, but by the peculiarities in the life of the present
nervous temperament. His earthly destiny resembles that of
those strange Oriental plants known as 'Jericho roses ' (Anasta-
tica asteriscus), which, dingy-brown in colour, leathery and dry,
roll about, driven by every wind, until they reach a congenial
soil, when they take root and blossom into full-blown flowers. To
the end of his life Wagner's existence was conflict and bitter
ness, and his boastings had no other echo than the laughter not
only of rational beings, but, alas ! of fools also. It was not until
he had long passed his fiftieth year that he began to know the
intoxication of universal fame ; and in the last decade of his
life he was installed among the demi-gods. It had come to this,
that the world had, in the interval, become ripe for him — and for
the madhouse. He had the good fortune to endure until the
general degeneration and hysteria were sufficiently advanced to
supply a rich and nutritious soil for his theories and his art.
The phenomenon repeatedly established and verified in these
pages, that lunatics fiy to each other as iron filings to the magnet,
is quite strikingly observable in Wagner's life. His first great
patroness was the Princess Metternich, daughter of the well-known
eccentric Count Sandor, and whose own eccentricities formed
material for the chronicle of the Napoleonic Court. His most
enthusiastic disciple and defender was Franz Liszt, whom I have
elsewhere characterized (see my Ausgewdhlte Pariser Brief e ;
2te Auflage; Leipzig, 1887, p. 172), and of whom I will therefore
only briefly remark that he bore in his nature the greatest resem
blance to Wagner. He was an author (his works, filling six thick
volumes, have an honourable place in the literature of grapho
maniacs), composer, erotomaniac and mystic, all in an incom
parably lower degree than Wagner, whom he surpassed only in a
prodigiously developed talent for pianoforte- playing. Wagner
was an enthusiastic admirer of all graphomaniacs who came in his
way — e.g., of that A. Gleizes expressly cited by Lombroso-f- as
a lunatic, but whom Wagner praises in most exuberant terms ;%
* Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 225. f Ibid., op. cit, p. 226.
X Wagner, Religion und Kunst Ges. Schr., Band X., p. 307, note : 'The
author here expressly refers to A. Gleizes' book, Thalysia oder das Heil der
Menschheit . . . Without an exact knowledge of the results, recorded in
this book, of the most careful investigations, which seem to have absorbed
the entire life of one of the most amiable and profound of Frenchmen, it might
be difficult to gain attention for . . . the regeneration of the human race.'

206 DEGENERATION
and he even gathered round him a court of select graphomaniacs,
among whom may be mentioned Nietzsche, whose insanity
compelled his confinement in a madhouse ; H. von Wolzogen,
whose Poetische Laut-Symbolik might have been written by the
most exquisite of French ' Symbolists ' or ' Instrumentists ' ;*
Henri Porges, E. von Hagen, etc. But the most important
relations of this kind were with the unhappy King Louis II.
In him Wagner found the soul he needed. In him he met
with a full comprehension of all his theories and his creations.
It may be safely asserted that Louis of Bavaria created the
Wagner Cult. Only when the King became his protector did
Wagner and his efforts become of importance for the history
of civilization ; not, perhaps, because Louis II. offered Wagner
the means of realizing the boldest and most sumptuous of his
artistic dreams, but chiefly because he placed the prestige of
his crown in the service of the Wagnerian movement. Let us
for a moment consider how deeply monarchical is the disposition
of the vast majority of the German people ; how the knees of
the beery Philistine tremble as he reverentially salutes even an
empty court carriage ; and how the hearts of well-bred maidens
flutter with ineffable inspiration at the sight of a prince ! And
here was a real king, handsome as the day, young, surrounded
by legends, whose mental infirmity was at that time regarded
by all sentimentalists as sublime ' idealism,' displaying un
bounded enthusiasm for an artist, and reviving on a far larger
scale the relations between Charles Augustus and Goethe !
From that moment it was natural that Wagner should become
the idol of all loyal hearts. To share in the royal taste for the
' ideal ' was a thing to be proud of. Wagner's music became
provisionally a royal Bavarian music, adorned with crown and
escutcheon, till it should subsequentl)** become an imperial
German music. At the head of the Wagnerian movement there
walks, as is fit, an insane king. Louis II. was able to bring
Wagner into vogue with the entire German nation (excepting,
of course, those Bavarians who were revolted by the King's pro
digalities) ; nevertheless, no amount of grovelling obsequiousness
could by itself have produced a fanaticism for Wagner. That
the mere Wagner-fashion might attain to this height another
factor was necessary — the hysteria of the age.
Although not so widespread as in France and England, this
* ' Alberich's seductive appeal to the water-sprites makes prominent the
hard, mordant sound of N, so well corresponding in its whole essence to the
negative power in the drama, inasmuch as it forms the sharpest contrast to
the soft W of the water-spirits. Then when he prepares to climb after the
maidens, the alliance of the GI and Schl with the soft, gliding F marks
most forcibly the gliding off the slippery rock. In the appropriate Pr (Fr)
Woglinde as it were shouts " Good luck to you !" (Prosit) when Alberich
sneezes.' — Cited by Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen, p. 255.

MYSTICISM 207
hysteria is not wanting in Germany, where during the last
quarter of a century it has continued to gain ground. Germany
has been longer protected from it than the civilized nations of
the West by the smaller development of large industry and by
the absence of large cities properly so called. In the last genera
tion, however, both of these gifts have been abundantly accorded
her, and two great wars have done the rest to make the nervous
system of the people susceptible to the pernicious influences of
the city and the factory system.
The effect of war on the nerves of the participants has never
been systematically investigated ; and yet how highly important
and necessary a work this would be ! Science knows what dis
orders are produced in man by a single strong moral shock, e.g.,
a sudden mortal danger ; it has recorded hundreds and thousands
of cases in which persons saved from drowning, or present at a
fire on shipboard, or in a railway accident, or who have been
threatened with assassination, etc., have either lost their reason,
or been attacked by grave and protracted, often incurable,
nervous illnesses. In war hundreds of thousands are exposed to
all these fearful impressions at the same time. For months
cruel mutilation or sudden death menaces them at every step.
They are frequently surrounded by the spectacle of devastation,
conflagration, the most appalling wounds, and heaps of corpses
frightful to behold. Moreover, the greatest demands are made
on their strength ; they are forced to march until they break
down, and cannot count on having adequate nourishment or suffi
cient sleep. And shall there not appear among these hundreds
of thousands the effect which is proved to result from a single
one of the occurrences which take place by thousands during
war ? Let it not be said that in a campaign a soldier becomes
callous to the horrors encompassing him. That merely signifies
that they cease to excite the attention of his consciousness.
They are nevertheless perceived by the senses and their cerebral
centres, and therefore leave their traces in the nervous system.
That the soldier does not at the moment notice the deep shock
— nay, even shattering — he has experienced, equally proves
nothing. ' Traumatic hysteria,' ' railway spine,' the nervous
maladies consequent on a moral shock, are also frequently un
observed until months after the event occasioning them.
, In my belief, it can scarcely be doubted that every great war
is a cause of hysteria among multitudes, and that far the larger
number of soldiers, even completely unknown to themselves,
bring home from a campaign a somewhat deranged nervous
system. Of course this is much less applicable to the con
querors than to the conquered, for the feeling of triumph is one
of the most pleasurable the human brain can experience, and
the force-producing (' dynamogenous ') effect of this pleasurable

208 DEGENERATION
feeling is well qualified to counteract the destructive influences
of the impressions produced by war. But it is difficult for it
to entirely annul these impressions, and the victors, like the
vanquished, no doubt leave a large part of their nervous
strength and moral health on the battle-field and in the
bivouac. The brutalization of the masses after every war has become
a commonplace. The expression originates in the perception
that after a campaign the tone of the people becomes fiercer
and rougher, and that statistics show more acts of violence.
The fact is correctly stated, but the interpretation is superficial.
If the soldier on returning home becomes more short-tempered,
and even has recourse to the knife, it is not because the war has
made him rougher, but because it has made him more excitable.
This increased excitability is, however, only one of the forms of
the phenomenon of nervous debility.
Hence under the action of the two great wars in connection
with the development of large industries and the growth of large
towns, hysteria among the German people has, since 1870,
increased in an extraordinary manner, and we have very nearly
overtaken the unenviable start which the English and French
had over us in this direction. Now, all hysteria, like every form
of insanity, and for that matter like every disease, receives its
special form from the personality of the invalid. The degree
of culture, the character, propensities and habits of the deranged
person give the derangement its peculiar colour. Among the
English, always piously inclined, degeneration and hysteria were
bound to appear both mystical and religious. Among the
French, with their highly developed taste and widespread fond
ness for all artistic pursuits, it was natural that hysteria should
take an artistic direction, and lead to the notorious extravagances
in their painting, literature and music. We Germans are in
general neither very pious nor very cultivated in matters of art.
Our comprehension of the beautiful in art expresses itself, for the
most part, in the idiotic ' Reizendl' (charming), and ' Entziickend !'
(ravishing), squeaked in shrill head-tones and with upturned
eyes by our well-bred daughters at the sight of a quaintly-shaved
poodle, and before the Darmstadt Madonna by Holbein, indis
criminately ; and in the grunts of satisfaction with which the plain
citizen pumps in his beer at a concert of his singing club. Not
that we are by nature devoid of a sense of the beautiful  I
believe, on the contrary, that in our deepest being we have more
of it than most other nations — but owing to unfavourable cir
cumstances this sense has not been able to attain development.
Since the Thirty Years' War we have been too poor, we have had
too hard a combat with the necessities of life, to have anything
over for any sort of luxury ; and our ruling classes, profoundly

MYSTICISM 209
Latinized and slaves to French fashion, were so estranged from
the masses, that for the last two centuries the latter could have
no part in the culture, taste, or aesthetic satisfactions of the
upper strata of society, separated from them by an impassable
gulf. As, therefore, the large majority of the German people
had no interest in art, and troubled themselves little about it,
German hysteria could not assume an artistic, aesthetic form.
It assumed other forms, partly abominable, partly ignoble
and partly laughable. German hysteria manifests itself in anti-
Semitism, that most dangerous form of the persecution-mania,
in which the person believing himself persecuted becomes a
savage persecutor, capable of all crimes (the perse'cute1 ' perse'cuteur
of the French mental therapeutics).** Like hypochondriacs and
' hemorro'fdaires,' the German hysterical subject is anxiously
concerned about his precious health. His crazes hinge on the
exhalations of his skin and the functions of his stomach. He
becomes a fanatic for Jaeger vests, and for the groats which
vegetarians grind for themselves. He gets vehemently affected
over Kneipp's douches and barefoot perambulations on wet
grass. At the same time, he excites himself with morbid
sentimentalism (the ' Zoophilia ' of Magnan) concerning the
sufferings of the frog, utilized in physiological experiments, and
through all this anti-Semitic, Kneippish, Jaegerish, vegetarian,
and anti-vivisection insanity, there rings out the fundamental
note of a megalomaniacal, Teutonomaniacal Chauvinism, against
which the noble Emperor Frederick vainly warned us. As a
rule, all these derangements appear simultaneously, and in nine
out of ten cases it is safe to take the proudly strutting wearer
of Jaeger's garments for a Chauvinist, the Kneipp visionary for
a groats-dieted maniac, and the defender of the frog, thirsting
for the professor's blood, for an anti-Semitist
Wagner's hysteria assumed the collective form of German
hysteria. With a slight modification of Terence's Homo sum,
he could say of himself, ' I am a deranged being, and no kind of
derangement is a stranger to me.' He could as an anti-Semitist
give points to Stoecker.-j- He has an inimitable mastery
of Chauvinistic phraseology, j Was he not able to convince
his hypnotized hysterical following that the heroes of his
pieces were primeval German figures — these Frenchmen and
Brabanters, these Icelanders and Norwegians, these women of
Palestine — all the fabulous beings he had fetched from the
* Legrand du Saulle terms the persecutor who believes himself persecuted,
'perse'cute actif.' See his fundamental work : Le Ddlire des Persecutions.
Paris, 1871, p. 194.
f Wagner, Das fudenthum in der Musik. Ges. Schr. Band V., p. 83.
Aufkldrungen iiber das Judenthum in der Musik. Band VIII., p. 299.
X Wagner, Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Polilik. Ges. Schr. Band VIII.,
p. 39. Was ist Deutsche? Band X., p. 51 et passim.
14

210 DEGENERATION
poems of Provence and Northern France, and from the Northern
saga, who (with the exception of Tannhduser and the Meister-
singer) have not a single drop of German blood or a single
German fibre in their whole body ? It is thus that, in public
exhibitions, a quack hypnotist persuades his victims that they
are eating peaches instead of raw potatoes. Wagner became
an advocate for vegetarianism, and as the fruit needed for the
nourishment of the people in accordance with this diet exists in
abundance only in warm regions of the earth, he promptly
advised ' the direction of a rational emigration to lands re
sembling the South American peninsula, which, it has been
affirmed, might, through its superabundant productivity, supply
nourishment for the present population of the entire globe.'*
He brandishes his knightly sword against the physiologists who
experiment on animals. t He was not an enthusiast for wool,
because personally he preferred silk ; and this is the only hiatus
in the otherwise complete picture. He did not live to witness
the greatness of the reverend Pastor Kneipp, otherwise he
probably would have found words of profound significance for
the primitive German sanctity of wet feet, and the redeeming
power vested in the knee-douche.
When, therefore, the enthusiastic friendship of King Louis
had given Wagner the necessary prestige, and directed the uni
versal attention of Germany to him ; when the German people
had learned to know him and his peculiarities, then all the
mystics of the Jewish sacrifice of blood, of woollen shirts, of the
vegetable menu, and sympathy cures, were compelled to raise
their paeans in his honour, for he was the embodiment of all their
obsessions. As for his music, they simply threw that into the
bargain. The vast majority of Wagner fanatics understood
nothing of it. The emotional excitement which the works of
their idol made them experience did not proceed from the
singers and the orchestra, but in part from the pictorial beauty
of the scenic tableaux, and in a greater measure from the
specific craze each brought with him to the theatre, and of which
each worshipped Wagner as the spokesman and champion.
I do not, however, go so far as to assert that skat% patriot
ism, and the heroic idealism of natural cures, rice with fruit,
' away with the Jews !' and flannel, alone made the hearts of
Wagner-bigots beat faster in blissful emotion when they were
listening to his music. This music was certainly of a nature to
fascinate the hysterical. Its powerful orchestral effects produced
in them hypnotic states (at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris the
* Wagner, Religion und Kunst Ges. Schr. Band X., p. 311.
f Ofifenes Schreiben au Herrn Ernst von Weber, Verfasser der Schrift ;
' Die loiter kammern der Wissenschaft' Ges. Schr. Band X. p. 2qi
X A game of cards to which Teutomaniacs are much addicted.

MYSTICISM 211
hypnotic state is often induced by suddenly striking a gong),
and the formlessness of the unending melody was exactly suited
to the dreamy vagaries of their own thought. A distinct melody
awakens and demands attention, and is hence opposed to the
fugitive ideation of the weak brains of the degenerate. A flow
ing recitative, on the contrary, without beginning or end, makes
no sort of demand on the mind — for most auditors trouble
themselves either not at all, or for a very short time, about the
hide-and-seek play of the leit-motif — one can allow one's self to
be swayed and carried along by it, and to emerge from it at
pleasure, without any definite remembrance, but with a merely
sensual feeling of having enjoyed a hot, nervously exciting
tone-bath. The relation of true melody to the unending
melody is the same as that of a genre or historical painting to
the wayward arabesques of a Moorish mural decoration, re
peated a thousand times, and representing nothing definite ; and
the Oriental knows how favourable the sight of his arabesques
is to ' Kef — that dreamy state in which Reason is lulled to sleep,
and crazy Imagination alone rules as mistress ofthe house.
Wagner's music initiated hysterically-minded Germans into
the mysteries of Turkish Kef. Nietzsche may make sport of this
subject with his idiotic play on words ' Sur sum — bum-bum,' and
with his remarks about the German youth who seeks for
' Ahnung ' (presentiments) ; but the fact is not to be denied that
a part of Wagner's devotees — those who brought a diseased
mysticism with them to the theatre — found in him their satis
faction ; for nothing is so well qualified to conjure up 'presenti
ments,' i.e., ambiguous, shadowy border-land presentations, as a
music which is itself born of nebulous adumbrations of thought.
Hysterical women were won over to Wagner chiefly by the
lascivious eroticism of his music, but also by his poetic repre
sentation of the relation of man to woman. Nothing enchants
an 'intense' woman so much as demoniacal irresistibleness
on the part of the woman, and trembling adoration of her
supernatural power on the part of the man. In contrast to
Frederick William I., who cried in anger, ' You should not fear,
but love me,' women of this sort would rather shout to every
man, 'You are not to love me, but to lie, full of dread and
terror, in the dust at my feet' ' Frau ' Venus, Brunhilde,
Isolde, and Kundry have won for Wagner much more admira
tion among women than have Elizabeth, Elsa, Senta, and
Gudrune. After Wagner had once conquered Germany, and a fervent
faith in him had been made the first article in the catechism of
German patriotism, foreign countries could not long withstand
his cult. The admiration of a great people has an extraordinary
power of conviction. Even its aberrations it forces with irresist-

212 DEGENERATION
ible suggestion on other nations. Wagner was one of the fore
most conquerors in the German wars. Sadowa and Sedan
were fought in his behalf. The world, nolens volens, had to
take up its attitude with regard to a man whom Germany
proclaimed its national composer. He began his triumphal
march round the globe draped in the flag of Imperial Germany.
Germany's enemies were his enemies, and this forced even
such Germans as withstood his influence to take his side
against foreign lands. ' I beat my breast : I, too, have fought
for him against the French in speech and writing. I also
have defended him against the pastrycooks who hissed his
Lohengrin in Paris.' How was one to get off this duty ?
Hamlet thrusts at the arras, well knowing that Polonius stands
there ; hence any son or brother of Polonius is bound resolutely
to attack Hamlet. Wagner had the good fortune to play the
part of the tapestry to the French Hamlets, giving them the
pretext for thrusting at the Polonius of Germany. As a result,
the attitude in the Wagner question of every German was
rigidly prescribed for him.
To the zeal of Germans all manner of other things added
their aid in favouring the success of Wagner abroad. A minority,
composed in part of really independent men of honorably unpre
judiced minds, but in part also of degenerate minds with a morbid
passion for contradiction, took sides with him just because he
was blindly and furiously maligned by the Chauvinist majority,
who were a prey to national hatred. ' It is contemptible,' cried
the minority, ' to condemn an artist because he is a German.
Art has no fatherland. Wagner's music should not be judged with
the memory of Alsace-Lorraine.' These views are so reasonable
and noble, that those who entertained them must have rejoiced
in them and been proud of them. On listening to Wagner, they
had the clear feeling, ' We are better and cleverer than the
Chauvinists/ and this feeling necessarily placed them at the
outset in such an agreeable and benevolent mood, that his music
seemed much more beautiful than they would have found it if
they had not been obliged first to stifle their vulgar and base
instincts, and fortify those which were more elevated, free and
refined. They erroneously ascribed to Wagner's music the
emotions produced by their self-satisfaction.
The fact that only in Bayreuth could this music be heard,
unfalsified and in its full strength, was also of great importance
for the esteem in which it was held. If it had been played in
every theatre, if, without trouble and formalities, one could have
gone to a representation of Wagner as to one of // Trovatore,
Wagner would not have obtained his most enthusiastic public
from foreign countries. To know the real Wagner it was neces
sary to journey to Bayreuth. This could be done only at lon°*

MYSTICISM 213
intervals and at specified times ; seats and lodgings had to be
obtained long in advance, and at great expenditure of trouble.
It was a pilgrimage requiring much money and leisure ; hence
' hoi polloi ' were excluded from it. Thus, the pilgrimage to
Bayreuth became a privilege of the rich and well-bred, and to
have been to Bayreuth came to be a great social distinction
among the snobs of both worlds. The journey was a thing to
make a great parade of and be haughty over. The pilgrim no
longer belonged to the vulgar crowd, but to the select few ; he
became a hadji ! Oriental sages so well know the peculiar
vanity of the hadjis, that one of their proverbs contains an
express warning against the pious man who has been thrice to
Mecca. Hence the pilgrimage to Bayreuth became a mark of
aristocracy, and an appreciation of Wagner's music, in spite of
his nationality, was regarded as evidence of intellectual pre
eminence. The prejudice in his favour was created, and pro
vided one went to him in this mood, there was no reason why
Wagner should not have the same influence on hysterical
foreigners as on hysterical Germans. Parsifal was especially
fitted completely to subjugate the French neo-Catholics and
Anglo-American mystics who marched behind the banner of the
Salvation Army. It was with this opera that Wagner chiefly
triumphed among his non-German admirers. Listening to the
music of Parsifal has become the religious act of all those who
wish to receive the Communion in musical form.
These are the explanatory causes of Wagner's conquest,
first of Germany, and then of the world. The absence of judg
ment and independence among the multitude, who chant the
antiphony in the Psalter ; the imitation of musicians possessed
of no originality, who witnessed his triumph, and, like genuine
little boys wanting ' to be taken,' clung to his coat-tails- — these
did what was still needed to lay the world at his feet. As it is
the most widely diffused, so is Wagnerism the most momentous
aberration of the present time. The Bayreuth festival theatre,
the Bayreuther Blatter, the Parisian Revue Wagnerienne, are
lasting monuments by which posterity will be able to measure
the whole breadth and depth of the degeneration and hysteria
of the age.

214 DEGENERATION CHAPTER VI.
PARODIES OF MYSTICISM.
The artistic and poetic forms of mysticism, which we have
studied hitherto, might perhaps inspire doubts in superficial or
insufficiently instructed minds as to their origin in degeneration,
and present themselves as manifestations of a genuine and
fertile talent. But beside them appear others, in which a state
of mind reveals itself which suddenly arrests and perplexes any
reader, however credulous, and however accessible to the sugges
tion of printed words, and to self-puffing charlatanism. Books
and theories find publication, in which even the unlearned
observe the deep intellectual degradation of their authors. One
pretends to be able to initiate the reader into the black art, and
enable him to practise magic himself; another gives a poetical
form to definitely insane ideas, such as have been classified by
mental therapeutics ; a third writes books as if prompted by
thoughts and feelings worthy of little children or idiots. A great
part of the works I have in view would justify, without further
consideration, the placing of their authors under constraint.
As, however, in spite of their manifest craziness, well-known
critics are bent upon discovering in them ' the future,' ' fresh
nerve-stimulations,' and beauties of a mysterious kind, and to
puff them by their chatter to gaping simpletons as revelations
of genius, it is not superfluous to devote some brief considera
tion to them.
A not very large amount of mysticism leads to belief; a
larger amount leads necessarily to superstition, and the more
confused, the more deranged, the mind is, so much the crazier
will be the kind of superstition. In England and America this
most frequently takes the form of spiritualism and the founding
of sects. The hysterical and deranged receive spiritual inspira
tions, and begin to preach and prophesy, or they conjure up
spirits and commune with the dead. In English fiction ghost-
stories have begun to occupy a large place, and in English
newspapers to act glibly as stopgaps, as was done formerly in
the Continental press by the sea-serpent and the Flying Dutch
man. A society has been formed which has for its object the
collecting of ghost-stories, and testing their authenticity ; and
even literary men of renown have been seized with the vertigo
of the supernatural, and condescend to serve as vouchers for the
most absurd aberrations.
In Germany, too, spiritualism has found an entrance, although,
on the whole, it has not gained much ground. In the large

MYSTICISM 215
towns there may be some small spiritualist bodies. The English
expression trance has become so familiar to some deranged
persons that they have adopted it in German as trans, imagining
apparently, with the popular etymology, that it means ' beyond '
instead of ' ecstasy,' or, in other words, the state in which,
according to the spiritualist hypothesis, the medium ought to find
himself who enters into communication with the world of spirits.
Nevertheless, spiritualism has as yet exerted little influence
on our literature. Excluding the later romanticists who have
fallen into childishness, notably the authors of tragedies based
on the idea of ' fatality ' (Schicksalstragbdien), few writers have
dared to introduce the supernatural into their creations other
wise than allegorically. At most in Kleist and Kerner it attains
a certain importance, and healthy readers do not consider that as
a merit in the dramas of the unfortunate author of the Hermanns-
schlacht, and in the Seer of Prevorst of the Swabian poet. On
the other hand, it must certainly be noted that it is the ghost
element precisely which has brought to these two writers, in
recent times, a renewal of youth and popularity among de
generate and hysterical Germans. Maximilian Perty, who was
evidently born too soon, met with but rare and even rather
derisive notice from the less soft-headed generation which
preceded ours, for his bulky books on apparitions. And, among
contemporaries, none but Freiherr Karl du Prel has chosen the
spirit world as the special subject of his theoretic writings and
novels. After all, our plays, our tales, are very little haunted,
scarcely enough to make a schoolgirl shiver ; and even among
the eminent foreign authors best known in Germany, such, for
example, as Tourgenieff, it is not the world of apparitions which
attracts German readers.
The few ghost-seers whom we have at present in Germany
endeavour naturally to give their mental derangement a
scientific colouring, and appeal to individual professors of
mathematics and natural science who happen entirely to agree
with them, or are supposed to be partially inclined to do so.
However, their one sheet-anchor is Zollner, who is simply a sad
proof of the fact that a professorship is no protection from mad
ness ; and they can besides, at any rate, point to opportune
remarks of Helmholtz and other mathematicians on n dimen
sions, which they, either intentionally or from mystical weakness
of mind, have misunderstood. In an analytical problem the
mathematician, instead of one, two, or three dimensions, may
place n dimensions without altering thereby the law of the
problem and its legitimately resulting corollaries, but it does
not occur to him to imagine, under the geometrical expression,
'nth dimension,' something given in space, and capable of being
apprehended by the senses. When Zollner gives the well-known

216 DEGENERATION
example of the inversion of the india-rubber ring which, because
only possible in the third dimension, necessarily appeared quite
inconceivable and supernatural to a bi-dimensional being, he
believes that he facilitates the comprehension of the formation of
a knot in a closed ring as an operation practicable in the fourth
dimension. In doing this he simply offers one more example of
the known tendency of the mystic to delude himself, as he does
others, with words which seem to signify something, and which a
simpleton is convinced oftener than not that he understands,
but which in reality express no idea, and are, therefore, empty
sound, void of import
France is about to become the promised land of believers in
ghosts. Voltaire's countrymen have already got the start ofthe
pious Anglo-Saxons in dealings with the supernatural. I am
not now thinking of the lower ranks of the people, among whom
the book of dreams (La CM des Songes) has never ceased to con
stitute the family library, together with the Calendar, and, per
haps, the ' Paroissien ' (missal) ; nor of the fine ladies who at all
times have ensured excellent incomes to clairvoyantes and
fortune-tellers ; but only of the male representatives of the
educated classes. Dozens of spiritualist circles count their
numbers by thousands. In numerous drawing-rooms of the
best (even in the opinion of the ' most cultured ' !) society, the
dead are called up. A monthly publication, L' Initiation ,
announces, in weighty tones, and with a prodigality of philoso
phical and scientific technicalities, the esoteric doctrine of the
marvels of the unearthly. A bi-monthly publication, Annates
des Sciences Psychiques, terms itself a ' collection of observations
and researches.' Next to these two most important periodicals,
a whole series of others exist, similar in tendency, and all having
a wide circulation. Strictly technical works on hypnotism and
suggestion run through edition after edition, and it has become
a profitable speculation for doctors without practice, who do not
attach much importance to the opinions of their colleagues, to
compile so-called manuals and text-books on these subjects,
which scientifically are completely worthless, but which are
bought up by the public like hot rolls. Novels have, with rare
exceptions, no longer any sale in France, but works on obscure
phenomena of nerve function go off splendidly, so that sagacious
publishers give their discouraged authors this advice : ' Leave
novels for a time, and write on magnetism.'
Some of the books on magic which have appeared of late years
in France connect their subject directly with the phenomena
of hypnotism and suggestion ; for example, A. De Rochas'
Les Etals profonds de I'Hypnose, and C. A. de Bodisco's Traits
de Lumiere, o* 'physical researches dedicated to unbelievers and
egoists.' This has brought many observers to the idea that the

MYSTICISM 217
works and discoveries of the Charcot school in general have
given the impulse to the whole of this movement. Hypnotism,
say the representatives of this opinion, has brought such re
markable facts to light that the accuracy of certain traditions,
popular beliefs and old records can no longer be doubted,
though hitherto they have been generally considered inventions
of superstition ; possession, witch-spells, second-sight, healing
by imposition of hands, prophecy, mental communication at the
remotest distance without the intervention of words, have re
ceived a new interpretation and have been recognised as possible.
What, then, more natural than that minds weak in balance, and of
insufficient scientific training, should become accessible to the
marvellous (against which they had shielded themselves, as long as
they considered it to be all old nurses' fables), when they saw it
appear in the garb of science, and found themselves in the best
society by believing in it ?
Plausible as this opinion is, it is not the less false. It puts
the cart before the horse. It confounds cause with effect. No
completely sound mind has been led by the experiences of the
new hypnotic science into a belief in the marvellous. In former
times no attention was paid to obscure phenomena, or they were
passed by with eyes intentionally closed, because they could
not be fitted in to the prevailing system, and were consequently
held to be chimaeras or frauds. For the last twelve years official
science has taken cognizance of them, and Faculties and
Academies are engaged upon them. But no one thinks of
them for a moment as supernatural, or supposes the working
of unearthly forces behind them. They class them with all
other natural phenomena which are accessible to the observation
of the senses, and are determined by the ordinary laws of nature.
Our knowledge has simply enlarged its frame, and admitted
an order of facts which in former times had remained beyond
its pale. Many processes of hypnosis are more or less
satisfactorily explained ; others as yet not at all. But an
earnest and healthy mind attaches no great importance to this,
for he knows ^fchat the pretended explanation of phenomena
does not go very far, and that we have mostly to be satisfied to
determine them with certainty, and to know their immediate
conditions. I do not say that the new science has exhausted
its subject and has reached its limits. But whatever it may
bring to light of the unknown and the unexpected, it is not a
matter of doubt to the healthy mind that it will be accounted for
by natural means, and that the simple, ultimate laws of physics,
chemistry and biology cannot be shaken by these discoveries.
If, therefore, so many people now interpret the phenomena of
hypnosis as supernatural, and indulge the hope that the conjura
tion of the spirits of the dead, aerial voyages on Faust's magic

218 DEGENERATION
cloak, omniscience, etc., will soon be arts as common as reading
and writing, it is not the discoveries of science which have
brought them to this delusion, although the existing delusion is
happy to be able to pass itself off for science. Far from con
cealing itself, as formerly, it exhibits itself proudly in the streets
on the arms of professors and academicians. Paulhan under
stands the matter very well : ' It is not the love of positive facts,'
he says* ' which has carried minds away ; there has been a
certain kind of return for the love of the marvellous in desires
formerly satisfied, and which, now repressed, slumbered unac
knowledged in a latent condition. Magic, sorcery, astrology,
divination, all these ancient beliefs correspond to a need of
human nature ; that of being able easily to act upon the external
world and the social world ; that of possessing, by means rela
tively easy, the knowledge requisite to make this action possible
and fruitful.' The stormy outburst of superstition has by no
means been let loose through hypnological researches ; it merely
launches itself into the channels they have dug. We have here
already repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that unbalanced
minds always adapt their crazes to the prevailing views, and
usurp by predilection the most recent discoveries of science to
explain them. The physicists were still far from occupying
themselves with magnetism and electricity, when the persons
attacked by persecution-mania were already referring their own
unpleasant sensations and hallucinations to the electric currents
or sparks which their persecutors were supposed to cast on them
through walls, ceilings and floors ; and in our days the degene
rate were equally the first to appropriate to themselves the
results of hypnological researches, and to employ them as
' scientific ' proofs of the reality of spirits, angels and devils.
But the degenerate started with the belief in miracles ; it is
one of their peculiar characteristics, -f and it was not first called
forth by the observations of Parisian and Nancy hypnologists.
If another proof were needed in support of this affirmation,
it could be found in the fact that the greater number of
' occultists,' as they call themselves, in their treatises on occult
arts and magic sciences, scorn to fall back on the results of
hypnological experiments, and, without any pretext of
' modernity,' without any concession to honest investigation of
nature, have direct recourse to the most ancient traditions.
Papus (the pseudonym of a physician, Dr. Encausse) writes
a Trait/ mdthodique de Science occidte, an enormous large-
octavo volume of 1,050 pages, with 400 illustrations, which
introduces the reader to the cabala, magic, necromancy and
* F. Paulhan, Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p. 104.
t Legrain, op. cit, p. 175 : _' The need for the marvellous is almost always
inevitable amcng the weak-minded.'

MYSTICISM 219
cheiromancy, astrology, alchemy, etc., and to which an old, not
undeserving savant, Adolf Franck, of the Institute of France, was
imprudent enough to write a long eulogistic preface, presumably
without having even opened the book himself. Stanislaus de
Guaita, revered with awe by the adepts as past master in the
Black Art, and arch-magician, gives two treatises, Au Seuil
du Mystere and Le Serpent de la Genese, so darkly profound
that, in comparison, Nicolas Flamel, the great alchemist, whom
no mortal has ever comprehended, seems clear and transparent
as crystal. Ernest Bose confines himself to the theory of the
sorcery of the ancient Egyptians. His book, Isis de'voile'e, ou
V Egyptologie sacre'e, has for the sub -title: 'Hieroglyphics,
papyri, hermetic books, religion, myths, symbols, psychology,
philosophy, morals, sacred art, occultism, mysteries, initiation,
music' Nehor has likewise his speciality. If Bose unveils
Egyptian mysteries, Nehor reveals the secrets of Assyria and
Babylonia. Les Mages et le Secret magique is the name of the
modest pamphlet in which he initiates us into the profoundest
magic arts ofthe Chaldean Mobeds, or Knights Templars.
if I do not enter more fully into these books, which have
found readers and admirers, it is because I am not quite certain
that they are intended to be in earnest. Their authors read
and translate so fluently Egyptian, Hebraic and Assyriac texts,
which no professional Orientalist has yet deciphered ; they quote
so frequently and so copiously from books which are found in
no library in the world ; they give with such an imperturbable
air exact instructions how to resuscitate the dead, how to pre
serve eternal youth, how to hold intercourse with the inhabitants
of Sirius, how to divine beyond all the limits of time and space,
that one cannot get rid of the impression that they wished, in
cold blood, to make fun of the reader.
Only one of all these master-sorcerers is certainly to be taken
in good faith, and as he is at the same time intellectually the
most eminent among them, I will deal with him somewhat more
in detail. This is M. Josdphin Peladan. He has even arrogated
to himself the Assyrian royal title of ' Sar,' under which he is
generally known. The public authorities alone do not give him
his Sar title ; but then they do not usually recognise any titles
of nobility in France. He maintains he is the descendant of
the old Magi, and the possessor of all the mental legacies of
Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Orpheus. He is, moreover, the
direct heir of the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians, both of
which orders he has amalgamated and revived under a new form
as the ' Order of the Rosy Cross.' He dresses himself archaically
in a satin doublet of blue or black ; he trims his extremely
luxuriant blue-black hair and beard into the shape in use among
the Assyrians ; he affects a large upright hand, which might be

220 DEGENERATION
taken for mediaeval character, writes by preference with red or
yellow ink, and in the corner of his letter-paper is delineated, as
a distinctive mark of his dignity, the Assyrian king's cap, with
the three serpentine rolls opening in front. As a coat of arms
he has the device of his order ; on an escutcheon divided by
sable and argent a golden chalice surmounted by a crimson rose
with two outspread wings, and overlaid with a Latin cross in
sable. The shield is surmounted by a coronet with three
pentagrams as indents. M. Peladan has appointed a series of
commanders and dignitaries of his order (' grand - priors,'
'archons,' 'aesthetes'), which numbers, besides, 'postulants' and
'grammarians' (scholars). He possesses a special costume as
grand-master and Sar (in which his life-sized portrait has been
painted by Alexandre S6on), and a composer, who belongs to
the order, has composed for him a special fanfare, which on
solemn occasions is to be played by trumpets at his entrance.
He makes use of extraordinary formulae. His letters he calls
'decrees,' or commands (mandements). He addresses the
persons to whom they are directed either as ' magnifiques/ or
' peers,' sometimes also ' deacest adelphe,' or ' synnoede.' He
does not call them 'sir,' but 'your lordship' (seigneurie). The
introduction is : ' Health, light and victory in Jesus Christ, in
the only God, and in Peter, the only king'; or 'Ad Rosam
per Crucem, ad Crucem per Rosam, in ed, in eis gemmatus re-
surgam! This is at the same time the heraldic motto of the
Order of the Rosy Cross. At the conclusion is usually, 'Amen.
Non nobis. Do mine, non nobis, sed nominis tui gloria solce! He
writes the name of his order, with a cross inserted in the middle,
thus : ' Rose *$* Croix! His novels he calls ' dthope'es,' himself
as their author ' e'thopoete,' his dramas ' wagneries,' their table of
contents ' eumolpees!
Every one of his books is ornamented with a large number
of symbols. That which appears the most often is a vignette
showing on a column a cowering form with the head of a woman
breathing flames, and with a woman's breast, lion's paws, and
the lower part of the body of a wasp or dragon-fly, terminating
in an appendage similar to the tail of a fish. The work itself is
always preceded by some prefaces, introductions and invoca
tions, and is often followed by pages of the same nature. I
take as an example the book entitled, Comment on devient
Mage* After the two title-pages adorned with a great number
of symbolical images (winged Assyrian bulls, the mystic rose
cross, etc.), comes a long dedication ' to Count Antoine de la
Rochefoucauld, grand -prior of the temple, archon of the
* Sar MeVodack J./Pe'ladan, Amphtthdatre des Sciences mortes. Comment
on devient Mage. Ethique. Avec un portrait pittoresque grave" par G
Poirel. Paris, 1892.

MYSTICISM 221
Rose *$* Cross.' Then follows in Latin a ' prayer of St. Thomas
Aquinas, well suited to warn the reader against the possible
errors of this book ' ; after this, an /lenctique (counter-demonstra
tion) containing a sort of profession of Catholic faith ; next, an
' invocation to ancestors ' in the style of the Chaldean prayers ;
lastly, a long allocution 'to the contemporary young man,' after
which the book properly begins.
At the head of every chapter appear nine mysterious formulae.
Here are two examples : ' I. The Neophyte. Divine Name :
Jud (the Hebrew letter so called). Sacrament : Baptism.
Virtue: Faith. Gift: Fear of God. Beatitude: Poor in spirit.
Work: Teaching. Angel: Michael. Arcanum: Unity. Planet:
Samas. II. Society. Divine Name : Jah — El (in Hebrew char
acters, which Peladan evidently cannot read, for he turns it
into El-lah). Sacrament : Consecration. Virtue : Hope. Gift :
Pity. Beatitude: Gentleness. Work: Counsel. Angel: Gabriel.
Arcanum : Duality. Planet : Sin.'
Of the further contents of this mighty volume I think no
examples need be given. They correspond exactly with the
headings of these chapters.
The novels or ' ethop£es ' of M. Peladan, of which nine have
appeared hitherto, but of which the author has announced four
teen, are arranged in groups of seven, the mystical number.
He has even established a Schema de Concordance* which
claims to give a synopsis of their leading ideas. Let us hear
how he explains his works :
' First series of seven : I. The supreme vice. Moral and mental
Diathesis of the Latin decline — Merodach, summit of conscious
will, type of absolute entity ; Alta, prototype of the monk in
contact with the world ; Courtenay, inadequate man-of-fate,
bewitched by social facts ; L. d'Este, extreme pride, the grand
style in evil ; Coryse, the true young maiden ; La Nine, the
wicked Androgyne, or, better, Gynander ; Dominicaux, conscious
reprobate, character of the irremediable, resulting from a
specious aesthetic theory for every vice, which kills conscious
ness and, in consequence, conversion. Every novel has a Mero
dach, that is, an abstract Orphic principle, as opposed to an
ideal enigma.
'II. Inquisitive. Parisian clinical collective- phenomenism.
Ethics : Nebo ; the systematic, sentimental will. Erotics : Paula,
passionate with Androgynous Prisrn. The great horror, the
Beast with two backs, in Gynander (IX.), metamorphosing
itself into unisexual corruption. Inquisitive, that is the every
day and the everybody of instinct. Gynander, the Goethesque
midnight, and the exceptional,' etc.
* Jose'phin Peladan, La Decadence le Hie. Ethopee IX. : ' La Gynandre.'
Couverture de Se*on, eau-forte de Desboutins. Paris, 1891, p. xvii.

222 DEGENERATION
I have taken pains to reproduce faithfully all M. Peladan's
whimsical methods of expression. That his Concordance can
give even the slightest idea of the contents of his novels, I do
not for a moment believe. I will, therefore, say a few words
about these in non-magian language.
They all move in the three following circles of ideas, variously
penetrating and intersecting each other : The highest intellectual
aim of man is to hear and thoroughly to appreciate Wagnerian
music ; the highest development of morality consists in re
nouncing sexuality and in transforming one's self into a hybrid
hermaphrodite (Androgyne and Gynander) ; the higher man
can quit and retake his body at pleasure, soar into space as an
' astral being,' and subject to his will the entire supernatural
power of the world of spirits, of the good as well as the bad.
Accordingly, in every romance a hero appears who unites in
himself the distinctive marks of both sexes, and resists with
horror the ordinar}-* sexual instincts, who plays or enjoys the
music of Wagner, enacts in his own life some scene from the Wag
nerian drama, and conjures up spirits or has to repel their attacks.
If anyone wishes to trace the origin of all these delirious
ideas, it will not be difficult to discover how they arose. One
day while reading the Bible Peladan alighted on the name of
the Babylonian king, Merodach Baladan. The similarity of
sound between ' Baladan ' and ' Peladan ' gave an impulse to his
imagination to establish relations between himself and the
Biblical Babylonian king. Once he began to reflect on this, he
found a resemblance, in the cast of his features, the colour of his
hair, and the growth of his beard, to the heads of Assyrian
kings on the alabaster casts from the palace at Nineveh. Thus
he easily arrived at the idea that he was possibly a descendant
of Baladan, or of other Assyrian kings, or, at least, that it would
be a curious thing if he were. And he continued to work out
this thought, until one day he resolutely took the title of Sar.
If he were descended from the kings of Babylon, he could also
be the heir of the wisdom of the Magi. So he began to proclaim
the Magian esoteric doctrine. To these musings were added
afterwards the impressions he received on a pilgrimage to
Bayreuth, from Tristan, and especially from Parsifal. In
fancy he wrought his own life into the legend of the Grail,
looked upon himself as a knight of the Grail, and created his
order of the 'Rose Croix,' which is entirely composed of
reminiscences of Parsifal. His invention of the asexual hybrid
being shows that his imagination is actively preoccupied with
presentations of a sexual character, and unconsciously seeks to
idealize the 'contrary sexual feelings.'
The mental life of Peladan permits us to follow, in an ex
tremely well-marked instance, the ways of mystic thought. He

MYSTICISM 223
is wholly dominated by the association of ideas. A fortuitous
assonance awakens in him a train of thought which urges him
irresistibly to proclaim himself an Assyrian king and Magus,
without his attention being in a condition to make him realize
the fact that a man can be called Peladan without being, there
fore, necessarily descended from a Biblical Baladan. The
meaningless flow of words of the mediaeval scholastics misleads
him, because he is continually thinking by way of analogy, that
is to say, because he follows exclusively the play of the associa
tion of ideas provoked by the most secondary and superficial
resemblances. He receives every artistic suggestion with the
greatest ease. If he hears Wagner's operas, he believes him
self to be a Wagnerian character ; if he reads of the Knights
Templars and Rosicrucians, he becomes the Grand - Master
of the Temple, and of all other secret orders. He has the
peculiar sexual emotionalism of the ' higher degenerates,' and
this endows him with a peculiar fabulous shape, which, at once
chaste and lascivious, embodies, in curiously demonstrative
manner, the secret conflicts which take place in his conscious
ness between unhealthily intensified instincts, and the judgment
which recognises their dangerous character.
Does Peladan believe in the reality of his delusions ? In other
words, does he take himself seriously? The answer to this
question is not so simple as many perhaps think. The two
beings which exist in every human mind are, in a nature such as
Peladan's, a prey to a strange conflict. His unconscious nature
is quite transfused with the rSle of a Sar, a Magus, a Knight of
the Holy Grail, Grand-Master of the Order, etc., which he has
invented. The conscious factor in him knows that it is all non
sense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the uncon
scious life to do as it pleases. It is thus that little girls behave
who play with dolls, caressing or punishing them, and treating
them as if they were living beings, all the time well aware that
in reality they have before them only an object in leather and
porcelain. Peladan's judgment has no power over his unconscious im
pulses. It is not in his power to renounce the part of a Sar or
a Magus, or no longer to pose as grand-master of an order. He
cannot abstain from perpetually returning to his ' Androgynous'
absurdity. All these aberrations, as well as the invention of
neologisms and the predilection for symbols, the prolix titles,
and the casket-series of prefaces, so characteristic of the ' higher
degenerates,' proceed from the depths of his organic tempera
ment, and evade the influence of his higher centres. On its
conscious side Peladan's cerebral activity is rich and beautiful.
In his novels there are pages which rank among the most
splendid productions of a contemporary pen. His moral ideal

224 DEGENERATION
is high and noble. He pursues with ardent hatred all that is
base and vulgar, every form of egoism, falsehood, and thirst for
pleasure ; and his characters are thoroughly aristocratic souls,
whose thoughts are concerned only with the worthiest, if some
what exclusively artistic, interests of humanity. It is deeply to
be regretted that the overgrowth of morbidly mystic presenta
tions should render his extraordinary gifts completely sterile.
Far below Peladan stands Maurice Rollinat, who ought,
nevertheless, to be mentioned first, because he embodies in a
very instructive manner a definite form of mystic degeneration,
and next because all French, and many foreign, hysterical
persons honour in him a great poet.
In his poems, which with characteristic self-knowledge he
entitles Les Ne'vroses* (Nervous Maladies) he betrays all the
stigmata of degeneration, which by this time ought to be
familiar enough to the reader for me to content myself with a
brief notice of them.
He feels in himself criminal impulses (Le Fantome du Crime) :
' Wicked thoughts come into my soul in every place, at all
hours, in the height of my work. ... I listen in spite of myself
to the infernal tones which vibrate in my heart where Satan
knocks ; and although I have a horror of vile saturnalias, of
which the mere shadow suffices to anger me, I listen in spite of
myself to the infernal tones. . . . The phantom of crime across
my reason prowls around (in my skull). . . . Murder, rape,
robbery, parricide, pass through my mind like fierce light
nings. . . .'
The spectacle of death and corruption has a strong attraction
for him. He delights in putrefaction and revels in disease.
' My ghostly beloved, snatched by death, played before me
livid and purple. . . . Bony nakedness, chaste in her leanness !
Hectic beauty as sad as it is ardent ! . . . Near her a coffin . . .
greedily opened its oblong jaws, and seemed to call her. . . .'
(L'Amante macabre). ' Mademoiselle Squelette !
Je la surnommais ainsi :
Elle etait si maigrelette !
' Crachant une gouttelette
De sang tres peu cramoisi . . .
Elle e*tait si maigrelette ! . . .
' Sa phthisie etant complete ; . . .
Sa figure verdelette . . .
Un soir, k l'espagnolette
Elle vint se pendre ici.
* Maurice Rollinat, Les Ndvroses (Les Ames — Les Suaires  Les Refuses
— Les Spectres — Les Tenebres). Avec un portrait de l'auteur par F. D"es-
moulin. Paris, 1883. Quite as striking is his later collection of poems
L'Abime. Paris, 1891. '

MYSTICISM 225
' Horreur ! une cordelette
Decapitait sans merci
Mademoiselle Squelette :
Elle emit si maigrelette !'
Mademoiselle Squelette.
' That I might rescue the angelically beautiful dead from the
horrible kisses of the worm I had her embalmed in a strange
box. It was on a winter's night. From the ice-cold, stiff and
livid body were taken out the poor defunct organs, and into
the open belly, bloody and empty, were poured sweet-smelling
salves. . . .' (La Morte embaumSe).
'Flesh, eyebrows, hair, my coffin and my winding-sheet, the grave
has eaten them all ; its work is done. . . . My skull has attested
its shrinking, and I, a scaling, crumbling residue of death,
have come to look back with regret upon the time when I was
rotting, and the worm yet fasted not. . . .' (Le mauvais Mort).
This depravity of taste will not seldom be observed among
the deranged. In Rollinat it merely inspires loathsome verses ;
among others it leads them to the eager devouring of human
excretions, and, in its worst forms, to being enamoured of a
corpse (Necrophilia).
Violent erotomaniacal excitement expresses itself in a series of
poems (Les Luxures), which not only celebrate the most un
bridled sensuality, but also all the aberrations of sexual psycho
pathy. But the most conspicuous are the sensations of undefined
horrors which continually beset him. Everything inspires him
with anguish ; all the sights of Nature appear to him to enclose
some frightful mystery. He is always expecting, in trembling,
some unknown terror.
' I always shudder at the strange look of some boot and some
shoe. Ay, you may shrug your shoulders mockingly, I do
shudder ; and suddenly, on thinking of the foot they cover, I
ask myself: " Is it mechanical, or living ?" . . .' (Le Maniaque).
' My room is like my soul. . . . Heavy curtains, very ancient,
cling round the deep bed ; long fantastic insects dance and
crawl on the ceiling. When my clock strikes the hour it makes
an appalling noise ; every swing of the pendulum vibrates, and
is strangely prolonged. . . . Furniture, pictures, flowers, even
the books, all smeli of hell and poison ; and the horror, which
loves me, envelops this prison like a pall. . . .' (La Chambre).
' The library made me think of very old forests ; thirteen iron
lamps, oblong and spectral, poured their sepulchral light day
and night on the faded books full of shadow and secrets. I
always shuddered when I entered. I felt myself in the midst
of fogs and death-rattles, drawn on by the arms of thirteen
pale armchairs, and scanned by the eyes of thirteen great
portraits. . . .' (La Bibliotheque).
15

226 DEGENERATION
' In the swamp full of malice, which clogs and penetrates his
stockings, he hears himself faintly called by several voices
making but one. He finds a corpse as sentinel, which rolls its
dull eyeballs, and moves its corruption with an automatic
spring. I show to his dismayed eyes fires in the deserted
houses, and in the forsaken parks beds full of green rose ....
And the old cross on the calvary hails him from afar, and
curses him, crossing its stern arms as it stretches out and
brandishes them. . . .' (La Peur).
I will not weary by multiplying examples, and will only
quote the titles of a few more poems: The Living Grave;
Troppmann's Soliloquy (a well-known eight-fold murderer) ; The
Crazy Hangman ; The Monster ; The Madman ; The Head
ache (La Cephalalgie) ; The Disease ; The Frenzied Woman ;
Dead Eyes ; The Abyss; Tears; Anguish; The Slow Death-
struggle ; The Interment ; The Coffin ; The Death-knell ; Corrup
tion ; The Song of the Guillotined, etc.
All these poems are the production of a craze, which will be
frequently observed among degenerates. Even Dostojevski,
who is known to have been mentally afflicted, suffered from it
also. ' As soon as it grew dusk,' he relates of himself,* ' I
gradually fell into that state of mind which so often over
masters me at night since I have been ill, and which I shall
call mystic fright. It is a crushing anxiety about something
which I can neither define nor even conceive, which does not
actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realized
suddenly, at this very moment, to appear and rise up before me
like an inexorable, horrible, unshapen fact.' Legrainf quotes a
degenerate lunatic whose mania began ' with feelings of fear and
anguish at some fancy.' Professor KowalewskiJ indicates as
degrees of mental derangement in degeneration — first, neuras
thenia ; secondly, impulses of ' obsession ' and feelings of morbid
anguish. Legrand du Saulle§ and Morel || describe this state
of groundless, undefined fear, and coin for it the not very happy
word ' Panophobia.' Magnan calls it more correctly ' Anxio-
mania '• — frenzied anguish — and speaks of it as a very common
stigma of degeneration. The anguish mania is an error of con
sciousness, which is filled with presentations of fear, and transfers
their cause into the external world, while, as a matter of fact,
they are stimulated by pathological processes within the
organism. The invalid feels oppressed and uneasy, and imputes
* Humilids et Offensds, p. 55 ; quoted by De Vogue", Le Roman russe, p. 222,
foot-note. f Legrain, op. cit., p. 246.
X Journal of Mental Science, January, 1888.
§ Le De'lire des Persdcutions. Paris, 1 87 1, p. 512.
| Morel, 'Du De'lire panophobique des Aliened gemisseurs.' Annales
mddico-psychologiques, 1871, 2e vol., p. 322.

MYSTICISM 227
to the phenomena which surround him a threatening and sinister
aspect, in order to explain to himself his dread, the origin of
which escapes him, because it is rooted in the unconscious.
As in Rollinat we have learnt to know the poet of anxio-
mania, so shall we find in another author, whose name has
become widely known in the last two years, in the Belgian,
Maurice Maeterlinck, an example of an utterly childish idiotically-
incoherent mysticism. He reveals the state of his mind most
characteristically in his poems,* of which I will give a few
examples. Here is the first ofthe collection — Serres cliaudes :
' O hot-house in the middle of the woods. And your doors
ever closed ! And all that is under your dome ! And under
my soul in your analogies !
' The thoughts of a princess who is hungry ; the tedium
of a sailor in the desert ; a brass-band under the windows of
incurables. ' Go into the warm moist corners ! One might say, 'tis a
woman fainting on harvest - day. In the courtyard of the
infirmary are postilions ; in the distance an elk-hunter passes
by, who now tends the sick.
' Examine in the moonlight ! (Oh, nothing there is in its
place !) One might say, a madwoman before judges, a battle
ship in full sail on a canal, night-birds on lilies, a death-knell
towards noon (down there under those bells), a halting-place for
the sick in the meadows, a smell of ether on a sunny day.
' My God ! my God ! when shall we have rain and snow and
wind in the hot-house ?'
These idiotic sequences of words are psychologically interest
ing, for they demonstrate with instructive significance the
workings of a shattered brain. Consciousness no longer elabo
rates a leading or central idea. Representations emerge just as
the wholly mechanical association of ideas arouses them. There
is no attention seeking to bring order into the tumult of images
as they come and go, to separate the unconnected, to suppress
those that contradict each other, and to group those which are
allied into a single logical series.
A few more examples of these fugitive thoughts exclusively
under the rule of unbridled association. Here is one entitled
Bell-glasses (Cloches de verre) :
' O bell-glasses ! Strange plants for ever under shelter !
While the wind stirs my senses without ! A whole valley of
the soul for ever still ! And the enclosed lush warmth towards
noon ! And the pictures seen through the glass !
' Never remove one of them ! Several have been placed on
old moonlight. Look through their foliage. There is perhaps
a vagabond on a throne ; one has the impression that corsairs
* Maurice Maeterlinck, Serres chaudes. Nouvelle Edition. Bruxelles, 1890.

228 DEGENERATION
are waiting on the pond, and that antediluvian beings are about
to invade the towns.
' Some have been placed on old snows. Some have been
placed on ancient rains. (Pity the enclosed atmosphere !) I
hear a festival solemnized on a famine Sunday ; there is an
ambulance in the middle of the house, and all the daughters of
the king wander on a fast-day across the meadows.
' Examine specially those of the horizon ! They cover care
fully very old thunderstorms. Oh, there must be somewhere an
, immense fleet on a marsh ! And I believe that the swans
have hatched ravens. (One can scarcely distinguish through the
dampness.) ' A maiden sprinkles the ferns with hot water ; a troop of
little girls watch the hermit in his cell ; my sisters have fallen
asleep on the floor of a poisonous grotto !
' Wait for the moon and the winter, among these bells,
scattered at last on the ice.'
Another called Soul (Ame) :
' My soul ! O my soul truly too much sheltered ! And these
flocks of desires in a hot-house ! Awaiting a storm in the
meadows ! Let us go to the most sickly : they have strange
exhalations. In the midst of them I cross a battlefield with
my mother. They are burying a brother-in-arms at noon, while
the sentries take their repast.
' Let us go also to the weakest ; they have strange sweats :
here is a sick bride, treachery on Sunday, and little children in
prison. (And further across the mist.) Is it a dying woman at
the door of a kitchen ? Or a nun, who cleans vegetables at the
foot of the bed of an incurable ?
' Let us go lastly to the saddest : (at the last because they have
poisons). O my lips accept the kisses of one wounded !
' All the ladies of the castle are dead of hunger this summer
in the towers of my soul ! Here is the dawn, which enters into
the festival ! I have a glimpse of sheep along the quays, and
there is a sail at the windows of the hospital !
' It is a long road from my heart to my soul ! And all the
sentries are dead at their posts !
' One day there was a poor little festival in the suburbs of my
soul ! They mowed the hemlock there one Sunday morning ;
and all the convent virgins saw the ships pass by on the canal
one sunny fast-day. While the swans suffered under a poisonous
bridge. The trees were lopped about the prison ; medicines
were brought one afternoon in June, and meals for the patients
were spread over the whole horizon !
' My soul ! And the sadness of it all, my soul ! and the sad
ness of it all !'
I have translated with the greatest exactness, and not omitted

MYSTICISM 229
one word of the three ' poems.' Nothing would be easier than
to compose others on these models, overtrumping even those of
Maeterlinck— e.g., ' O Flowers ! And we groan so heavily under
the very old taxes ! An hour-glass, at which the dog barks in
May ; and the strange envelope of the negro who has not slept.
A grandmother who would eat oranges and could not write !
Sailors in a ballroom, but blue ! blue ! On the bridge this
crocodile and the policeman with the swollen cheek beckons
silently ! O two soldiers in the cowhouse, and the razor is
notched ! But the chief prize they have not drawn. And on
the lamp are ink-spots !' etc. But why parody Maeterlinck ?
His style bears no parody, for it has already reached the ex
treme limits of idiocy. Nor is it quite worthy of a mentally
sound man to make fun of a poor devil of an idiot.
Certain of his poems consist simply of assonances, linked
together without regard to sense and meaning, e.g., one which is
entitled Ennui :
' The careless peacocks, the white peacocks have flown, the
white peacocks have flown from the tedium of awaking ; I see
the white peacocks, the peacocks of to-day, the peacocks that
went away during my sleep, the careless peacocks, the peacocks
of to-day, reach lazily the pond where no sun is, I hear the
white peacocks, the peacocks of ennui, waiting lazily for the
times when no sun is.'
The French original reveals why these words were chosen ;
they contain almost all the nasal sounds, ' en,' or ' an,' or ' aon ' :
' Les paons nonchalants, les paons blancs ont fui, les paons blancs
ont fui I'ennui du r/veil ; je vols les paons blancs . . . atteindre
indolents I '/tang sans soleil', etc. This is a case of that form of
echolalia which is observed not seldom among the insane. One
patient says, e.g., ' Man kann dann ran Mann wann Clan Bann
Schwan Hahn,' and he continues to grind similar sounds till he
is either tired, or takes a word spoken before him as a starting-
point for a new series of rhymes.
If Maeterlinck's poems are read with some attention, it is soon
seen that the muddled pictures which follow each other pell-
mell as in a dream, are borrowed from a very limited circle of
ideas, which have either generally, or only for him, an emotional
content. ' Strange,' ' old,' ' distant,' are the adjectives he con
stantly repeats ; they have this in common that they indicate
something indistinct, not definitely recognisable, away on the
bounds of the distant horizon, corresponding, therefore, to the
nebulous thought of mysticism. Another adjective which sets
him dreaming is ' slow ' (lent). It also influences the French
Symbolists, and hence their fondness for it. They evidently
associated it with the idea of the movements of the priest
reading the Mass, and it awakens in them the emotions of the

230 DEGENERATION
mysticism of faith. They betray this association of ideas by
this, that they frequently use lent together with hi/ratique
(sacerdotal). Maeterlinck, moreover, is constantly thinking of
hospitals with their sick, and of everything connected with them
(nuns, invalids' diet, medicines, surgical operations, bandages,
etc.), of canals with ships and swans, and of princesses. The
hospitals and the canals, which are a feature in the Belgian
landscape, may be connected with the first impressions of his
childhood, and therefore produce emotions in him. The prin
cesses, on the contrary, shut up in towers, suffering hunger,
going astray, wading through swamps, etc., have evidently
remained fixed in his imagination from the childish ballads of
the pre-Raphaelites, one of which, by Swinburne, was given
above as an example. Hospitals, canals, princesses, these are
the pictures which always recur with the obstinacy of obses
sions, and in the midst of the nebulous chaos of his jargon,
alone show some sort of firm outline.
A few of his poems are written in the traditional poetical
form ; others, on the contrary, have neither measure nor rhyme,
but consist of lines of prose, arbitrarily changing in length, not
according to the style of Goethe's free poems, or of Heine's
North Sea Songs, which ripple by with very strongly marked
rhythmic movement, but deaf", jolting and limping, as the items
of an inventory. These pieces are a servile imitation of the
effusions of Walt Whitman, that crazy American to whom
Maeterlinck was necessarily strongly attracted, according to the
law I have repeatedly set forth — that all deranged minds flock
together. I should like here to interpolate a few remarks on Walt
Whitman, who is likewise one of the deities to whom the
degenerate and hysterical of both hemispheres have for some
time been raising altars. Lombroso ranks him expressly among
'mad geniuses.'* Mad Whitman was without doubt. But a
* Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn, p. 322 : ' Walt Whitman, the poet of the
modern Anglo-Americans, and assuredly a mad genius, was a typographer,
teacher, soldier, joiner, and for some time also a bureaucrat, which for a
poet, is the queerest of trades.'
This constant changing of his profession Lombroso rightly characterizes
as one of the signs of mental derangement. A French admirer of Whitman
Gabriel Sarrazin (La Renaissance de la Podsie anglaise, 1798— 1889 ; Paris'
1889, p. 270, footnote), palliates this proof of organic instability and weak
ness of will in the following manner : ' This American facility of changing
irom one calling to another goes against our old European prejudices and
our unalterable veneration for thoroughly hierarchical, bureaucratic routine-
careers. We have remained in this, as in so many other respects, essentially
narrow-minded, and cannot understand that diversity of capacities gives a
man a very much greater social value.' This is the true method of the
aesthetic windbag, who for every fact which he does not understand finds
roundly-turned phrases with which he explains and justifies everything to
Ius own satisfaction. °

MYSTICISM 231
genius ? That would be difficult to prove. He was a vagabond,
a reprobate rake, and his poems * contain outbursts of eroto
mania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature
could hardly be found with the author's name attached. For
his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces
which first drew to him the attention of all the pruriency of
America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing
between good and evil, virtue and crime. ' This is the deepest
theory of susceptibility,' he says in one place, ' without pre
ference or exclusion ; the negro with the woolly head, the bandit
of the highroad, the invalid, the ignorant — none are denied.'
And in another place he explains he ' loves the murderer and
the thief, the pious and good, with equal love.' An American
driveller, W. D. O'Connor, has called him on this account ' The
good gray Poet.' We know, however, that this ' goodness,'
which is in reality moral obtuseness and morbid sentimentality,
frequently accompanies degeneration, and appears even in the
cruellest assassins, for example, in Ravachol.
He has megalomania, and says of himself :
' From this hour I decree that my being be freed from all
restraints and limits.
' I go where I will, my own absolute and complete master.
' I breathe deeply in space. The east and the west are mine.
' Mine are the north and south. I am greater and better than
I thought myself.
' I did not know that so much boundless goodness was in
me. . . .
' Whoever disowns me causes me no annoyance.
' Whoever recognises me shall be blessed, and will bless me.'
He is mystically mad, and announces : ' I have the feeling of
all. I am all, and believe in all. I believe that materialism is
true, and that spiritualism is also true ; I reject nothing.' And
in another still more characteristic passage :
' Santa Spirita [sic/], breather, life,
Beyond the light, lighter than light,
Beyond the flames of hell, joyous, leaping easily above hell,
Beyond Paradise, perfumed solely with mine own perfume,
Including all life on earth, touching, including God, including Saviour and
Satan,
Ethereal, pervading all, for without me what were all ? what were God ?
Essence of forms, life ofthe real identities . . .
Life ofthe great round world, the sun and stars, and of man, I, the general
soul.'
In his patriotic poems he is a sycophant of the corrupt
American vote-buying, official-bribing, power-abusing, dollar-
democracy, and a cringer to the most arrogant Yankee conceit.
* Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; a new edition. Glasgow, 1884.

232 DEGENERATION
His war-poems — the much renowned Drum Taps — are chiefly
remarkable for swaggering bombast and stilted patter.
His purely lyrical pieces, with their ecstatic ' Oh !' and ' Ah !'
with their soft phrases about flowers, meadows, spring and
sunshine, recall the most arid, sugary and effeminate passages of
our old Gessner, now happily buried and forgotten.
As a man, Walt Whitman offers a surprising resemblance to
Paul Verlaine, with whom he shared all the stigmata of
degeneration, the vicissitudes of his career, and, curiously
enough, even the rheumatic ankylosis. As a poet, he has
thrown off the closed strophe as too difficult, measure and
rhyme as too oppressive, and has given vent to his emotional
fugitive ideation in hysterical exclamations, to which the defini
tion of ' prose gone mad ' is infinitely better suited than it is
to the pedantic, honest hexameters of Klopstock. Uncon
sciously, he seemed to have used the parallelism of the Psalms,
and Jeremiah's eruptive style, as models of form. We had in
the last century the Paramythien of Herder, and the insufferable
' poetical prose ' of Gessner already mentioned. Our healthy
taste soon led us to recognise the inartistic,, retrogressive char
acter of this lack of form, and that error in taste has found no
imitator among us for a century. In Whitman, however, his
hysterical admirers commend this r/chauffe of a superannuated
literary fashion as something to come ; and admire, as an inven
tion of genius, what is only an incapacity for methodical work.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to point out that two persons so
dissimilar as Richard Wagner and Walt Whitman have, in
different spheres, under the pressure of the same motives,
arrived at the same goal — the former at ' infinite melody,' which
is no longer melody ; the latter at verses which are no longer
verses, both in consequence of their incapacity to submit their
capriciously vacillating thoughts to the yoke of those rules
which in ' infinite ' melody, as in lyric verse, govern by measure
and rhyme.
Maeterlinck, then, in his poems is a servile imitator of crazy
Walt Whitman, and carries his absurdities still further. Besides
his poems he has written things to which one cannot well refuse
the name of plays, since they are cast in the form of dialogues.
The best known of them is The Princess Maleine*
The 'dramatis personae,' as he, true to the romantic and
mystical practice of the pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, entitles
the list of his characters, are as follows : Hjalmar, King of one
part of Holland ; Marcellus, King of another part of Holland ;
Prince Hjalmar, son of King Hjalmar; little Allan, son of
Queen Anne ; Angus, friend to Prince Hjalmar ; Stephano and
* Maurice Maeterlinck, The Princess Maleine and the Intruder. London:
W. Heinemann, 1892.

MYSTICISM 233
Vanox, officers of Marcellus ; Anne, Queen of Jutland ; Gode-
liva, wife of King Marcellus ; Princess Maleine, daughter of
Marcellus and Godeliva ; Maleine's nurse ; Princess Uglyane,
daughter of Queen Anne. With them come all the old well-
known jointed dolls and puppets out of the dustiest corners of
the old lumber-rooms of romance — a fool, three poor people,
two old peasants, courtiers, pilgrims, a cripple, beggars, vaga
bonds, an old woman, seven (the mystic number !) nuns, etc.
The names which Maeterlinck gives to his figures should be
noted. As a Fleming, he knows very well that Hjalmar is not
Dutch, but Scandinavian ; that Angus is Scotch. But he makes
this confusion intentionally, in order to obliterate the distinct
outlines with which he appears to surround his figures, when he
calls them ' Kings of Holland '; in order again to detach them
from the firm ground on which he pretends to place them and to
suppress their co-ordinates, which assign them a place in space
and time. They may wear clothes, have names and take a
human rank, but all the while they are only shadows and clouds.
King Hjalmar comes with Prince Hjalmar to the castle of
Marcellus in order to ask for the hand of the Princess Maleine.
The two young people see each other for the first time, and
only for a few minutes, but they instantly fall in love with each
other. At the banquet in honour of the King a quarrel breaks
out, about which we learn no particulars ; King Hjalmar is
seriously offended, swears revenge, and leaves the castle in a
rage. In the interlude Hjalmar wages war against Marcellus,
kills him and his wife, Godeliva, and at once razes his castle and
town to the ground. Princess Maleine and her nurse were on
this occasion — how, why and by whom is not explained —
immured in a vaulted room in a tower ; then the nurse, after
three' days work with her finger-nails, loosens a stone in the
wall, and the two women obtain their liberty.
Since Maleine loves Hjalmar and cannot, forget him, they
make their way towards his father's castle. Things are going
very badly in Hjalmar's castle. There Queen Anne of Jutland
resides, who has been driven away by her subjects, and with her
grown-up daughter Uglyane and her little son Allan (here also
the Dane is systematically given a Scottish name), has found
hospitality with King Hjalmar. Queen Anne has turned the
head of the old man. She has become his mistress, rules him
completely, and makes him ill in body and soul. She wishes
that his son should marry her daughter. Hjalmar is in despair
about his father's collapse. He detests his morganatic step
mother, and shudders at the thought of a marriage with
Uglyane. He believes Maleine to have been slain with her
parents in the war, but he cannot yet forget her.
Maleine has in the meantime been wandering with her nurse

234 DEGENERATION
through a kind of enchanted forest, and through an incompre
hensible village, where she has uncanny meetings with all sorts of
people, beggars, vagabonds, peasants, old women, etc., interchang
ing odd talk, and reaches Hjalmar's castle, where no one knows
her. She is, however, in spite of this, at once appointed as lady-
in-waiting to the Princess Uglyane.
One evening Prince Hjalmar decides to make advances to
Uglyane, and with that object he gives her a nocturnal ren
dezvous in the park of the castle, not a secret, but, so to speak,
an official, lovers' tryst, to which he, with his father's consent,
and she, with her mother's, is to go. Maleine hinders it by
telling Uglyane, who is splendidly attiring and adorning her
self, that Prince Hjalmar has gone into the forest and will not
come. She then goes herself into the park, and makes herself
known to Hjalmar, who arrives punctually. He leads her in
great delight to his father, who receives her as his future
daughter-in-law, and there is no further talk of his betrothal to
Uglyane. Queen Anne determines to get rid of the intruder.
She behaves at first in a friendly manner, assigns her a beautiful
room in the castle, then in the night she forces the King, who
for a long time resists her, to penetrate into Maleine's room,
where she puts a cord round the Princess's neck and strangles
her. Signs and wonders accompany the deed : a tempest forces
open a window, a comet appears, a wing of the castle falls in
ruins, a forest bursts into flames, swans fall wounded out of the
air, etc., etc.
Next morning the body ofthe Princess Maleine is discovered.
King Hjalmar, whom the night's murder has robbed of the last
remnant of reason, betrays the secret of the deed. Prince
Hjalmar stabs Queen Anne, and then plunges the dagger into
his own heart. Thereupon the piece closes thus :
NURSE. Come away, my poor lord.
King. Good God ! good God ! She is waiting now on the wharf of hell !
Nurse. Come away ! come away !
King. Is there anybody here that fears the curses of the dead?
ANGUS. Ay, my lord, I do.
King. Well, you close their eyes, and let us be gone.
Nurse. Ay, ay. Come hence ! come hence !
King. I will ; I will. Oh, oh ! how lonely I shall feel hereafter ! I am
steeped in misery up to my ears at seventy-seven years of age. But where
are you ?
Nurse ! Here, here !
King. You will not feel angry with me ? Let us go to breakfast. Will
there be salad for breakfast ? I should like a little salad.
NURSE. Yes, yes. You shall have some, my lord.
King. I do not know why ; I feel somewhat melancholy to-day. Good
God ! good God ! How unhappy the dead do look ! [Exit with NURSE
ANGUS. Another night such as this, and all our heads will have turned white
[Exeunt all save the NUNS, who begin singing the. Miserere while
conveying the corpses towards the bed. The church bells cease
sounding. Nightingales are heard warbling without A cock
jumps on the window-sill, and crows.

MYSTICISM 235
When we begin to read this piece we are startled, and ask :
'Why is all this so familiar to me? Of what does it remind
me ?' After a few pages it all at once becomes clear : the whole
thing is a kind of cento from Shakespeare ! Every character,
every scene, every speech in any way essential to the piece !
King Hjalmar is put together out of King Lear and Macbeth ;
Lear in his madness and manner of expressing himself, Mac
beth in his share in the murder of the Princess Maleine. Queen
Anne is patched up out of Lady Macbeth and Queen Gertrude ;
Prince Hjalmar is unmistakably Hamlet, with his obscure
speeches, his profound allusions and his inner struggles between
filial duty and morality; the nurse is from Romeo and Juliet ;
Angus is Horatio ; Vanox and Stephano are Rosenkranz and
Guildenstern, with an admixture of Marcellus and Bernardo, and
all the subordinate characters, the fool, the doctor, the courtiers,
etc., bear the physiognomy of Shakespeare's characters.
The piece begins in the following manner :
The Gardens of the Castle.
Enter Stephano and Vanox.
Vanox. What o'clock is it ?
Stephano. Judging from the moon, it should be midnight.
Vanox. I think 'tis going to rain.
Let us compare this with the first scene in Hamlet :
A platform before the Castle.
Francisco . . . Bernardo.
Francisco. You come most carefully upon your hour.
Bernardo. 'Tis now struck twelve. . . .
Francisco. . . . 'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart, etc.
One could, if it were worth while, trace scene for scene, word for
word, from some passage in Shakespeare. In the Princesse
Maleine we find in succession the fearfully stormy night from
Julius Casar (Act I., Scene 3) ; the entrance of King Lear into
the palace of Albany (Act I., Scene 4 . . . ' Lear : Let me
not stay a jot for dinner ; go, get it ready,' etc.) ; the night
scene in Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth induces her husband to
commit murder ; the thrice-repeated ' Oh ! oh ! oh !' of Othello
which Queen Anne here utters ; Hamlet's conversation with
Horatio, etc. The death of the Princess Maleine has been
inspired by memories both of Desdemona suffocated and of
Cordelia hanged. All this is jumbled up in the craziest manner,
and often distorted almost beyond recognition, or given the
opposite meaning ; but, with a little attention, one can always
find one's way.
Let us imagine a child, at the age when he is able to follow
the conversation of grown-up people, attending a performance

236 DEGENERATION
or a reading of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and
Richard IL, and who on his return to the nursery should relate
in his own way to his little brothers and sisters what he had
heard. We should in this way get a correct idea of the composi
tion of Princesse Maleine. Maeterlinck has crammed himself
with Shakespeare, and reproduces the pieces undigested, yet
repulsively altered and with the beginnings of foul decomposi
tion. This is an unappetizing picture, but it alone can serve
to illustrate the mental process which goes on in the so-called
'creations' of the degenerate. They read greedily, receive a
very strong impression in consequence of their emotionalism ;
this pursues them with the force of an 'obsession,' and they do
not rest till they have reproduced, sadly travestied, what they
have read. Thus their works resemble the coins of the
barbarians, which are imitations of Roman and Greek models,
while betraying that their artificers could not read or under
stand the letters and symbols inscribed on them.
Maeterlinck's Princesse Maleine is a Shakespearian anthology
for children or Tierra del Fuegians. The characters of the
British poet have gone to make parts for the actors in a theatre
of monkeys. They still remind us more or less of the attitudes
and movements of the persons whom they ape, but they have
not a human brain in their heads, and cannot say two connected
and rational words. Here are a few examples of the manner
in which Maeterlinck's people converse :
King Marcellus in the First Act (Scene 2) endeavours to
dissuade the Princess Maleine from loving Hjalmar.
Marcellus. Well, Maleine !
Maleine. My lord ?
Marcellus. Do you not understand ?
Maleine. What, my lord ?
Marcellus. Will you promise me to forget Hjalmar ?
Maleine. My lord ! . . .
Marcellus. What say you ? Do you still love Hjalmar?
Maleine. Ay, my lord.
Marcellus. Ay, my lord. Oh, devils and tempests ! she coolly confesses
it. She dares to tell me this without shame. She has seen Hjalmar once
only, for one single afternoon, and now she is hotter than hell.
Godeliva. My lord ! . . .
Marcellus. Be silent, you. " Ay, my lord 1" and she is not yet fifteen !
Ha ! it makes one long to kill them then and there. . . .
Godeliva. My lord. . . .
Nurse. Isn't she free to love, just like anyone else? Do you mean to
put her under a glass case? Is this a reason to bully a poor child? She
has done no harm. ...
Marcellus. Oh, she has done no harm ! . . . Now, in the first place
hold your peace, you. ... I am not addressing you ; and it is doubtless at
your prompting, you procuress. . . .
Godeliva. My lord 1 . . .
Nurse. A procuress ! I a procuress !
Marcellus. Will you let me speak? Begone! begone, both of you'
Oh ! I know well enough you have put your heads together, and that the

MYSTICISM 237
season of scheming and plotting has set in ; but wait awhile. . . . Now,
Maleine, . . . you should be reasonable. Will you promise to be reasonable ?
Maleine. Ay, my lord.
Marcellus. There ! come now. Therefore you will not think any more
of this marriage? . . .
Maleine. Ay.
Marcellus. Ay? You mean you will forget Prince Hjalmar?
Maleine. No.
Marcellus. You do not yet give up Prince Hjalmar ?
Maleine. No.
Marcellus. Now, supposing I compel you ? Ay, I ! and supposing I
have you put under lock and key ? and supposing I separate you for ever
more from your Hjalmar with his puny, girlish face? What say you? (She
weeps.) Ha 1 that's it — is 't ? Begone, and we shall see about that — begone !
Next, the scene in the second act, where Maleine and Hjalmar
meet in the gloomy park of the castle :
Hjalmar. . . . Come !
Maleine. Not yet.
Hjalmar. Uglyane ! Uglyane !
[Kisses her. Here the waterfall, blown about by the wind, collapses
and splashes them.
Maleine. Oh ! what have you done ?
Hjalmar. It is the fountain.
Maleine. Oh, oh !
Hjalmar. It's the wind.
Maleine. I am afraid.
Hjalmar. Think not of that any longer. Let us get further away. Let
us not think of that any more. Ah, ah, ah ! I am wet all over.
Maleine. There is somebody weeping, close by us.
Hjalmar. Somebody weeping?
Maleine. I am afraid.
Hjalmar. But cannot you hear that it's only the wind ?
Maleine. What are all those eyes on the tree, though ?
Hjalmar. Where ? Ha ! those are the owls. They have returned. I
will put them to flight. (Throws earth at them!) Away ! away 1
Maleine. There is yonder one that wid not go.
Hjalmar. Where is it ?
Maleine. On the weeping willow.
Hjalmar. Away !
Maleine. He is not gone.
Hjalmar. Away, away ! [Throws earth at the owl.
Maleine. Oh ! you have thrown earth on me.
Hjalmar. Thrown earth on you ?
Maleine. Ay, it fell on me.
Hjalmar. Oh, my poor Uglyane !
Maleine. I am afraid.
Hjalmar. Afraid— at my side ?
Maleine. There are flames amid the trees.
Hjalmar. That is nothing — mere lightning. It has been very sultry
to-day. Maleine. I am afraid. Oh ! who can be digging so at the ground around
us? Hjalmar. That is nothing. 'Tis but a mole— a poor little mole at work.
(The mole in Hamlet ! To our old acquaintance greeting !)
Maleine. I am afraid.

238 DEGENERATION
After some more conversation in the same style :
Hjalmar. What are you thinking of ?
Maleine. I feel sad.
Hjalmar. Sad ? Now, what are your sad thoughts about, Uglyane?
Maleine. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.
Hjalmar. What do you say ?
Maleine. I am thinking of Princess Maleine.*
Hjalmar. Do you know Princess Maleine?
Maleine. I am Princess Maleine.
Hjalmar. You are not Uglyane ?
Maleine. I am Princess Maleine.
Hjalmar. What! you Princess Maleine ? Dead! But Princess Maleine
is dead !
Maleine. I am Princess Maleine.
Has anyone anywhere in the poetry of the two worlds ever
seen such complete idiocy ? These ' Ahs ' and ' Ohs,' this want
of comprehension of the simplest remarks, this repetition four
or five times of the same imbecile expressions, gives the truest
conceivable clinical picture of incurable cretinism. These parts
are precisely those most extolled by Maeterlinck's admirers.
According to them, all has been chosen with a deep artistic
intention. A healthy reader will scarcely swallow that. Maeter
linck's puppets say nothing, because they have nothing to say.
Their author has not been able to put a single thought into
their hollow skulls, because he himself possesses none. The
creatures moving on his stage are not thinking and speaking
human beings, but tadpoles or slugs, considerably more stupid
than trained fleas at a fair.
Moreover, Princesse Maleine is not altogether a Shake
spearian dream. The ' seven nuns,' e.g., belong to Maeter
linck. They are an astounding invention. They are ever
marching like demented geese through the piece, winding in
and out, with their psalm-singing, through all the rooms and
corridors of the King's castle, through the court, through the
park, through the forest, coming unexpectedly round a corner
in the middle of a scene, trotting across the stage and off at the
other side without anyone understanding whence they come,
whither they go, or for what purpose they are brought on at all.
They are a living ' obsession,' mixing itself irresistibly in all the
incidents of the piece. Here also we find all the intellectual fads
which we noticed in the Serres Chaudes. The Princess Maleine
is herself the embodiment of the hungry, sick, strayed princesses,
wandering over the meadows, who haunt these poems, and
undoubtedly sprang from Swinburne's ballad of The King's
Daughters. The canals also play their part (p. 18). 'And the
expression of her eyes ! It seemed as though one were all of a
sudden in a great stream [Fr. canal] of fresh water. . . .' (p. no).
' We have been to look at the windmills along the canal,' etc.
* Omitted in the English translation. — Translator.

MYSTICISM 239
And sick people and illness are mentioned on almost every
page (p. no):
Anne. I was fever-stricken myself.
The King. Everyone is fever-stricken on arriving here.
Hjalmar. There is much fever in the village, etc.
Besides Princesse Maleine, Maeterlinck has written some other
pieces. One, L' Intruse (The Intruder), deals with the idea that
in a house where a sick person lies in extremis, Death intrudes
towards midnight, that he walks audibly through the garden,
makes at first a few trial strokes with his scythe on the grass
before the castle, then knocks at the door, forces it open because
they will not admit him, and carries off his victim. In a second,
Les Aveugles (The Blind), we are shown how a number of blind
men, the inmates of a blind asylum, were led by an old priest
into a forest, how the priest died suddenly without a sound, how
the blind men did not at first notice this, but becoming at length
uneasy, groped about, succeeded in touching the corpse, already
growing cold, assured themselves by questioning each other that
their leader was dead, and then in terrible despair awaited death
by hunger and cold. For this charming story takes place on a
wild island in the far north ; and between the wood and the
asylum lies a river, crossed by only one bridge, which the blind
cannot find without a guide. It never occurs either to Maeter
linck or to his inconsolable blind men as possible that in the
asylum, where, as is expressly mentioned, there are attendant
nuns, the long absence of the whole body of blind men would
be noticed, and someone sent out to look for them. The reader
will not expect me to point out in detail the craziness of the
assumption in both these pieces, or that, after these examples,
I should relate and analyze two other pieces of Maeterlinck's,
Les Sept Princesses (' seven,' of course !) and Pell/as et Melisande.
The Intruder has been translated into several languages, and
performed in many towns. The Viennese laughed at its im
becility. In Paris and London men shook their heads. In
Copenhagen an audience of appreciators of the ' poetry of the
future ' was touched, enraptured and inspired. This demon
strates the hysteria of to-day quite as much as the piece itself.
The history of Maeterlinck's celebrity is especially remarkable
and instructive. This pitiable mental cripple vegetated for years
wholly unnoticed in his corner in Ghent, without the Belgian
Symbolists, who outbid even the French, according him the
smallest attention ; as to the public at large, no one had a
suspicion of his existence. Then one fine day in 1890 his writings
fell accidentally into the hands of the French novelist, Octave
Mirbeau. He read them, and whether he desired to make fun
of his contemporaries in grand style, or whether he obeyed some
morbid ' impulsion ' is not known ; it is sufficient to say that he

240 DEGENERATION
published in Le Figaro an article of an unheard-of extravagance,
in which he represented Maeterlinck as the most brilliant,
sublime, moving poet which the last three hundred years had
produced, and assigned him a place near — nay, above Shake
speare. And then the world witnessed one of the most extra
ordinary and most convincing examples of the force of
suggestion. The hundred thousand rich and cultivated readers
to whom the Figaro addresses itself immediately took up the
viewswhich Mirbeau had imperiously suggested to them. They
at once saw Maeterlinck with Mirbeau's eyes. They found in
him all the beauties which Mirbeau asserted that he perceived
in him. Andersen's fairy-tale of the invisible clothes of the
emperor repeated itself line for line. They were not there, but
the whole court saw them. Some imagined they really saw the
absent state robes ; the others did not see them, but rubbed
their eyes so long that they at least doubted whether they saw
them or not ; others, again, could not impose upon themselves,
but dared not contradict the rest. Thus Maeterlinck became at
one stroke, by Mirbeau's favour, a great poet, and a poet of the
' future.' Mirbeau had also given quotations which would have
completely sufficed for a reader who was not hysterical, not
given over irresistibly to suggestion, to recognise Maeterlinck
for what he is, namely, a mentally debilitated plagiarist ; but
these very quotations wrung cries of admiration from the Figaro
public, for Mirbeau had pointed them out as beauties of the
highest rank, and one knows that a decided affirmation is suffi
cient to compel hypnotic subjects to eat raw potatoes as oranges,
and to believe themselves to be dogs or other quadrupeds.
Everywhere apostles were quickly at hand to proclaim, inter
pret and extol the new master. The ' mashers ' of the critic
world, whose ambition is set on being the first to assume — nay,
where it is possible, to foretell — the very latest fashions, the
fashion of to-morrow, as much in the styles of literature, as in
the colour and shape of neckties, vied with each other in deifyino*
Maeterlinck. Ten editions of his Princesse Maleine have been
sold out since Mirbeau's suggestion, and, as I have said before
his Aveugles and Intruse have been performed in various places.
We now know the different forms under which the mysticism
of degeneration manifests itself in contemporary literature. The
magism of a Guaita and a Papus, the Androgyne of a Peladan
the anxiomania of a Rollinat, the idiotic drivelling of a Maeter
linck, may be regarded as its culminating aberrations. At least
I cannot myself imagine that it would be possible for mysticism
to go beyond, even by the thickness of a hair, these extreme
points without even the hysterical, the devotees and the snobs of
fashion, who are still in some degree capable of discernment
recognising in it a profound and complete intellectual darkness.'

BOOK III.
EGO-MANIA.
CHAPTER I.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EGO- MANIA.
HOWEVER dissimilar such individualities as Wagner and Tolstoi,
Rossetti and Verlaine, may at first sight appear, we have, never
theless, encountered in all of them certain common traits, to
wit, vague and incoherent thought, the tyranny of the association
of ideas, the presence of obsessions, erotic excitability, religious
enthusiasm, hy which we may recognise them as members of
one and the same intellectual family, and justify their union into
one single group — that of mystics.
We must go a step farther and say that not only the mystics
among the degenerate, but in the main all the degenerate, of
whatever nature they may be, are moulded from the same clay.
They all show the same lacunar, inequalities, and malformations
in intellectual capacity, the same psychic and somatic stigmata.
If, then, anyone, having a certain number of degenerate subjects
to judge from, were to bring into prominence and represent as
their exclusive peculiarity merely mystical thought in some,
merely erotic emotionalism in others, merely vague, barren,
fraternal love and a mania for regenerating the world, or
else merely an impulsion to commit acts of a criminal nature,
etc., he would manifestly be seeing only one side of the
phenomenon, and taking no account of the rest. One or
another stigma of degeneration may, in a given case, be
especially apparent ; but, on duly careful inspection, the
presence of all the others, or, at least, indications of them, will
be discerned.
To the celebrated French alienist, Esquirol, is due the signal
merit of having discovered that there are forms of mental de
rangement in which thought proceeds apparently in a perfectly
rational manner, but in which, in the midst of intelligent and
logical cerebral activity, some insane presentations appear, like
16

242 DEGENERATION
erratic boulders, thus enabling us to recognise the subject as
mentally diseased. But Esquirol has committed the fault of
not digging deep enough ; his observation is too much on
the surface. It was through this that he came to introduce
into science the notion of ' monomania,' that is, of well-
delimitated, partial madness, of an isolated, fixed idea beside
which all the rest of the intellectual life operates with sanity.
This was an error. There is no monomania. Esquirol's own pupil,
the elder Falret, has sufficiently proved it, and our Westphal,
from whose other merits I have no wish to detract, was far
from standing in the forefront of research, when, half a century
after Esquirol, and thirty years after Falret, he still described
the ' fear of space,' or agoraphobia, as a special mental malady,
or kind of monomania. What is apparently monomania is in
reality an indication of a profound organic disorder which never
reveals itself by one single phase of folly. A fixed idea never
exists in isolation* It is always accompanied by other irregu-
1 larities of thought and feeling, which, it is true, at a cursory
glance, may not be so distinctly remarked as the more strongly
developed insane idea. Recent clinical observation has dis
covered a long series of similar fixed ideas or ' monomanias,' and
recognised the fact that they are one and all the consequence of a
fundamental disposition of the organism, viz., of its degeneration.
It was unnecessary for Magnan to give a special name to each
symptom of degeneration, and to draw up in array, with almost
comical effect, the host of ' phobias ' and ' manias.' Agoraphobia
(fear of open space), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed space), rupo-
phobia (fear of dirt), iophobia (fear of poison), nosophobia (fear of
sickness), aichmophobia (fear of pointed objects), belenophobia
(fear of needles), cremnophobia (fear of abysses), trichophobia (fear
of hair), onomatomania (folly of words or names), pyromania (in
cendiary madness), kleptomania (madness for theft), dipsomania
(madness for drink), erotomania (love madness), arithmomania
(madness of numbers), oniomania (madness for buying), etc. This
list might be lengthened at pleasure, and enriched by nearly all
the roots of the Greek dictionary. It is simply philologico-medical
trifling. None of the disorders discovered and described by
Magnan and his pupils, and decorated with a sonorous Greek
name, forms an independent entity, and appears separately ; and
Morel is right in disregarding as unessential all these varied
manifestations of a morbid cerebral activity, and adhering to the
principal phenomenon which lies at the base of all the ' phobias '
* Lisandro Reyes has clearly seen this in his useful sketch entitled
Contribution d I'Elude de I'Elat mental chez les Enfants ddgcnerds ; Paris,
1890, p. 8. He affirms expressly that among degenerate children there is
no really exclusive ' monomania.' ' Among them an isolated delirious idea
may endure for some time, but it is most frequently replaced all at once by
a new conception.'

EGO-MANIA 243
and ' manias,' namely, the great emotionalism of the degenerate.*
If to emotionalism, or an excessive excitability, he had added
the cerebral debility, which implies feebleness of perception, will,
memory, judgment, as well as inattention and instability, he would
have exhaustively characterized the nature of degeneration, and
perhaps prevented psychiatry from being stuffed with a crowd
of useless and disturbing designations. Kowalewski approached
much nearer to the truth in his well-known treatise,! where he
has represented all the mental disorders of the degenerate as
one single malady, which merely presents different degrees of
intensity, and which induces in its mildest form neurasthenia ;
under a graver aspect impulsions and groundless anxieties ; and,
in its most serious form, the madness of brooding thought or
doubt. Within these limits may be ranged all the particular
' manias' and 'phobias'1 which at present swarm in the literature
of mental therapeutics.
But if it be untenable to make a particular malady out of
every symptom in which the fundamental disorder (i.e., de
generation) shows itself, it should not, on the other hand, be
ignored that among certain of the degenerate a group of morbid
phenomena distinctly predominates, without involving the
absence of the other groups. Thus, it is permissible to dis
tinguish among them certain principal species, notably, beside
the mystics, of whom we have studied the most remarkable
representatives in contemporary art and poetry, the ego-maniacs
(Ichsiichtigen). It is not from affectation that I use this word
instead of the terms ' egoism ' (Selbstsucht) and ' egoist,' so
generally employed. Egoism is a lack of amiability, a defect
in education, perhaps a fault of character, a proof of insuffi
ciently developed morality, but it is not a disease. The egoist
is quite able to look after himself in life, and hold his place in
society ; he is often also, when the attainment of low ends only
is in view, even more capable than the superior and nobler man,
who has inured himself to self-abnegation. The ego-maniac, on
the contrary, is an invalid who does not see things as they are, does
not understand the world, and cannot take up a right attitude
towards it. The difference I make in German between Iclisucht
and Selbstsucht, the French also make in their language, where
a careful writer will never confound the word ' egotisme,'
borrowed from the English, with ' egoisme ' — that is, selfishness.
Of course the reader to whom the mental physiognomy of ego
maniacs is shown ought always to remember that, if the prin
cipal representatives of this species and of that of the mystics are
* Legrain (Du Ddlire chez les Ddgdndrds, Paris, 1886) merely expresses this
in somewhat different words, when he says (p. 68), ' Obsession, impulsion,
these are to be found at the base of all monomania.'
f Analyzed in the Journal of Mental science, January, 1888.

244 DEGENERATION
characterized with sufficient clearness, the confines of the latter
type are fluctuating. The ego-maniacs are, on the one hand, at
once mystics, erotics, and, though it seems paradoxical, even affect
occasionally an appearance of philanthropy ; among the mystics,
on the other hand, we frequently meet with a strongly-developed
ego-mania. There are certain specimens among the degenerate
in whom all the disorders are produced to such an equal degree
that it is doubtful whether they ought to be classed with the
mystics or the ego-maniacs. As a general rule, however, co-ordi
nation under one class or the other will not be very difficult.
That egoism is a salient feature in the character of the degene
rate has been unanimously confirmed by all observers. ' The
degenerate neither knows nor takes interest in anything but
himself,' says Roubinovitch ;* and Legrainf* asserts that he
' has . . . only one occupation, that of satisfying his appetites.'
This peculiarity establishes a bond which unites the highest of the
degenerate to the lowest, the insane genius to the feeble mental
cripple. ' All delirious geniuses,' remarks Lombroso, ' are very
much captivated by, and preoccupied with, their own selves/J
and Sollier writes on the subject of their antipodes, the im
beciles : ' Undisciplined as they are, they obey only through fear,
are often violent, especially to those who are weaker than them
selves, humble and submissive towards those they feel to be
stronger. They are without affection, egoistic in the highest
degree, braggarts. '§
The clinicist is satisfied with indicating the fact of this
characteristic egoism, but for ourselves we wish further to in
vestigate what are its organic roots, why the degenerate must
be more than egoistic, why he must be an ego-maniac, and cannot
be otherwise.
In order to understand how the consciousness of the ' I '
(morbidly exaggerated and frequently increasing to megalo
mania) originates, we must recall how the healthy consciousness
of the ' I ' is formed.
It is, of course, not my intention here to treat of the whole
theory of cognition. It is only the most important results of
this science, so highly developed in the present day, that can
find place in this work.
It has become a philosophical commonplace that we know
directly only those changes which take place in our own
organism. If, in spite of this, we are able to form an image of
the external world surrounding us, from perceptions derived
* J. Roubinovitch, Hystdrie male et Degdndrescence. Paris, 1890 p. 62.
t Legrain, op. cit., p. 10. '
X Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn (German edition cited in vol. i.) p -xze.
§ Dr. Paul Sollier, Psvchologie de I' Idiot et de I' Imbecile. Paris' 1800
p. 174- ' y '

EGO-MANIA 245
only from within, it is because we trace the changes in our
organism which we have perceived to causes exterior to it ; and
from the nature and force of the changes taking place in our
organism draw conclusions as to the nature and force of the
external events causing them.
How we come in general to assume that there is something
exterior, and that changes perceived by us only in our organism
can have causes which are not in the organism itself, is a ques
tion over which metaphysics has cudgelled its brain for centuries.
So little has it found an answer, that, in order to put an end to
this difficulty anyhow, it has simply denied the very question, and
jumped to the conclusion that the ' I ' has actually no knowledge
of a ' not-I,' of an external world, and cannot have it because
there is no external world at all, that what we so call is a creation
of our mind, and exists only in our thought as a presentation,
but not outside our ' I ' as a reality.
It is a fact characteristic of the soporific action exercised by
the sound of a word on the human mind that this wholly sense
less cackle, glib, well arranged and formed into the philosophical
system of idealism, should have thoroughly satisfied for nearly
eight generations the greater number of professional meta
physicians, from Berkeley to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. These
wise men repeated, in a tone of conviction, the doctrine of the
non-existence of the ' not-I,' and it did not trouble them that
they themselves contradicted constantly, in all their actions, their
own fustian ; that they devoted themselves from their birth to
their death to an uninterrupted series of absolutely absurd
actions, if there were no objective external world ; that therefore
they themselves recognised their system to be but wind and
shadow, a childish game with words devoid of sense. And the
most logical among these grave drivellers, Bishop Berkeley,
did not even observe that after all he had not obtained, even at
the price of the total abdication of common sense, the answer
he sought to the fundamental question of knowledge, for his
dogmatic idealism denies, it is true, the reality of the external
world, but admits with frivolous thoughtlessness that there are
other minds outside of him, Berkeley, and even a universal
mind. Thus, then, even according to him, the ' I ' is not all ;
there is still something outside of the ' I,' a ' not-I ' ; there does
exist an external world, if only under the form of immaterial
spirits. This, however, brings up the question, How does
Berkeley's ' I ' come to conceive the existence of something
outside of itself, the existence of a 'not-1'? That was the
question which had to be answered, and, in spite of its sacrificing
the whole world of phenomena, Berkeley's idealism, like the
idealism of every one of his successors, makes no reply to it
whatsoever.

246 DEGENERATION
Metaphysics could find no answer to the question, because the
latter, as stated by the former, does not admit of an answer.
Scientific psychology — i.e., psycho-physiology — does not en
counter the same difficulties. It does not take the finished ' I '
of the adult, clearly conscious of himself, feeling himself dis
tinctly opposed to the ' not-I ' to the entire external world, but
it goes back to the beginnings of this ' I,' investigates in what
manner it is formed, and then finds that, at a time when the
idea of the existence of a ' not-I,' would be really inexplicable,
this idea, in fact, was absolutely non-existent, and that, when
we do meet it, the ' I ' has already had experiences which com
pletely explain how it could and must arrive at the formation of
the idea of a ' not-I.**
We may assume that a certain degree of consciousness. is the
accompanying phenomenon of every reaction of the protoplasm
on external action — i.e., is a fundamental quality of living
matter. Even the simplest unicellular living organisms move
with obvious intention towards certain goals, and away from cer
tain points ; they distinguish between foods and such materials
as are unfit for nutrition ; thus they have a species of will and
judgment, and these two activities presuppose consciousness.*
What may be the nature of this consciousness localized in pro
toplasm not yet even differentiated into nerve-cells, is a thing
of which it is impossible for the human mind to form a definite
idea. The only thing we can presuppose with any certainty
is that in the crepuscular consciousness of a unicellular
organism, the notion of an ' I ' and a • not-I,' which is opposed
to it, does not exist. The cell feels changes in itself, and these
changes provoke others, in accordance with established bio
chemical or bio-mechanical laws ; it receives an impression to
which it responds by a movement, but it has certainly no idea
that the impression is caused by a process in the external world,
and that its movement reacts on the external world.
Even among animals very much higher in the scale, and
considerably more advanced in differentiation, a consciousness
of the ' Ego,' properly so called, is inconceivable. Plow can
the ray of a star-fish, the bud of a tunicate, of a botryllus,
the half of a double animal (diplozoon), the tube of an
actinia, or of some other coral polypus, be aware of itself as a
separate ' I,' seeing that, though it is an animal, it is at the
* See on this subject the remarkable treatise of Alfred Binet, ' On the
Psychic Life of Micro-organisms,' contained in the volume of extracts • ' Le
Fdtichisme dans P Amour (Etudes de Psychologie expdriinentale). La Vie
psychtque des Micro-orgqnismes, VIntensitd des Images mentales, le Problhne
hypnotique, Note sur PEcriture hystdrique.' Paris, 1890.— A short time before
Binet, this same subject was treated by Verworn in a very deserving manner
at once original and suggestive, in his Psycho-physiologische Protislen-Studien
Jena, 1889.

EGO-MANIA 247
same time a portion of a composite animal, of a colony of
animals, and must perceive impressions which strike it directly,
as well as those experienced by a companion of the same
colony? Or can certain large worms, many of the species of
Eunice, for example, have an idea of their ' Ego,' when they
neither feel nor recognise portions of their own bodies as con
stituent parts of their individuality, and begin to eat their tails
when, by any accident in coiling themselves, it happens to lie
in front of their mouths ?
The consciousness of the ' Ego ' is not synonymous with
consciousness in general. While the latter is probably an
attribute of all living matter, the former is the result of the
concordant action of a nervous tissue highly differentiated and
' hierarchized,' or brought into a relation of mutual dependence.
It appears very late in the series of organic evolution, and is,
up to the present, the highest vital phenomenon of which we
have knowledge. It arises little by little from experiences
which the organism acquires in the course of the natural activity
of its constituent parts. Every one of our nerve-ganglia, every
one of our nerve-fibres, and even every cell, has a subordinate
and faint consciousness of what passes in it. As the whole
nervous system of our body has numerous communications
between all its parts, it perceives in its totality something of all
the stimulations of its parts, and the consciousness which ac
companies them. In this manner there arises in the centre
where all the nerve ducts of the whole body meet, i.e., in the
brain, a total consciousness composed of innumerable partial
consciousnesses, having evidently for its object only the pro
cesses of its own organism. In the course of its existence, and
that at a very early period, consciousness distinguishes two
kinds of wholly different perceptions. Some appear without
preparation, others accompanied and preceded by other
phenomena. No act of will precedes the stimulation of the
senses, but such an act does precede every conscious movement.
Before our senses perceive anything, our consciousness has no
notion of what they will perceive ; before our muscles execute
a movement, an image of this movement is elaborated in the
brain, or spinal marrow (in the case of a reflex action). There
exists then, beforehand, a presentation of the movement which
the muscles will execute. We feel clearly that the immediate
cause of the movement lies in ourselves. On the other hand,
we have no similar feelings in regard to sense-impressions.
Again, we learn by the muscular sense the realization of motor
images elaborated by our consciousness ; on the other hand, we
experience nothing similar when we elaborate a motor image
not having our own muscles exclusively for its object. We
wish, for example, to raise our arm. Our consciousness elaborates

248 DEGENERATION
this image, the brachial muscles obey, and consciousness receives
the communication that the image has been realized by the
brachial muscles. Next, we wish to raise or throw a stone with
our arm. Our consciousness elaborates a motor image, in
volving our own muscles and the stone. When we are executing
the desired and meditated movement, our consciousness receives
sensations from the muscles in activity, but not from the
stone. Thus it perceives the movements which are accom
panied by muscular sensations, and others which appear with
out this accompaniment.
In order thoroughly to comprehend the formation of our
consciousness of the ' Ego,' and the presentation of the exist
ence of a ' non-Ego,' we must consider a third point. All the
parts, all the cells of our body, have their own separate con
sciousness, which accompanies every one of their excitations.
These excitations are occasioned partly by the activity of
nutrition, of assimilation, of the cleavage of the nucleus — that
is to say, by the vital processes of the cell itself, and partly by
action of the environment. The excitations which proceed
from the interior, the bio-chemical and bio-mechanical processes
of the cell, are continued, and endure as long as the life of the
cell itself. The stimulations which are the result of the action
of the environment only appear, of course, with this action, i.e.,
not continuously, but intermittently. The vital processes in
the cell have direct value and significance only for the cell
itself, not for the whole organism; actions of the environment
may become important for the whole organism. The principal
organ, the brain, acquires the habit of neglecting the excitations
relating to the interior vital activity of the cell — first, because
they are continuous, and we perceive distinctly only a change of
state, not a state itself ; and then, because the cell accomplishes its
own functions by its own energy, which renders the interference
of the brain useless. The brain takes notice, on the contrary,
of excitations which are produced by action ab extra — first,
because they appear with interruptions ; and, secondly, because
they may necessitate an adaptation of the whole organism,
which could only take place through the intervention of the
brain. It cannot be doubted that the brain has knowledge also of
the internal excitations of the organism, and only for the
reasons already stated is not, as a general rule, distinctly
conscious of them. If through illness a disturbance is produced
in the functions of the single cell, we at once become conscious of
the processes in the cell — we feel the diseased organ, it stimulates
our attention ; the whole organism is uncomfortable and out of
tune. It is sensations of this kind, which, in a healthy state,
do not distinctly reach our consciousness, that make up the

EGO-MANIA 249
sensation of our body, our organic ' I,' the so-called ccensesthesis
or general sensibility.
Ccenaesthesis, the organic dimly-conscious ' I,' rises into the
clear consciousness of the ' Ego,' by excitations of the second
order, reaching the brain from the nerves and muscles, for they
are stronger and more distinct than the others, and are inter
rupted. The brain learns the changes produced in the nervous
system by external causes, and the contraction of the muscles.
How it has knowledge of the latter is still obscure. It has been
recently asserted that the muscular sense has for its seat the
nerves of the joints. This is certainly false. We have distinct
sensations of the contractions of muscles which put no joint in
movement — for example, ofthe orbicular and constrictor muscles.
Then there are the cramps and spasms even of isolated muscular
fibres, which likewise do not produce a change of position in the
joints. But in any case the perceptions of muscular sense exist,
however they are or are not produced.
Thus consciousness very soon learns that the muscular
movements it perceives are preceded by certain acts accom
plished by itself, namely, the elaboration of motor images, and
the despatch of impulses to the muscles. It receives know
ledge of these movements twice, one after the other- — it per
ceives them, first, directly as its own presentation and act of
volition, as a motor image elaborated in the nerve-centres ; and
immediately afterwards as an impression arising from the
muscular nerves as accomplished movement. It acquires the
habit of connecting its own acts — those previously elaborated
motor images — with the muscular movements, and of regarding
the latter a consequence of the former — in short, of thinking
causally. If consciousness has adopted the habit of causality,
it seeks a cause in all its perceptions, and can no longer imagine
a perception without a cause. The cause of muscular percep
tions — that is, of movements consciously willed — it finds in itself.
The cause of nervous perceptions — that is, the information
reported by the nervous system concerning the excitations
which it experiences — it does not find in itself. But the latter
must have a cause. Where is it ? As it is not in conscious
ness, it must necessarily exist somewhere else ; there must then
be something else outside consciousness, and so consciousness
comes, through the habit of causal thought, to assume the
existence of something outside itself, of a ' not-I/ of an external
world, and to project into it the cause of the excitations which
it perceives in the nervous system.
Experience teaches that the distinction between the ' I' and
the ' not-I ' is really only a question of a habit of thought, of a
form of thought, and not of an effective, certain knowledge,
which carries in itself the criteria of its accuracy and certitude.

250 DEGENERATION
When, in consequence of a morbid disturbance, our sensory
nerves or their centres of perception are excited, and conscious
ness acquires knowledge of this excitation.it imputes to it with
out hesitation, according to its habit, an external cause existing
in the ' not-I.' Hence arise illusions and hallucinations, which
the patient takes for realities, and that so positively that there
is absolutely no means of convincing him that he perceives facts
passing within him, not outside of him. In the same manner
consciousness concludes that the movements executed uncon
sciously are occasioned by an extraneous will. It perceives the
movement, but it has not noticed that the habitual internal
cause, viz., a motor image and an act of the will, has preceded
it ; hence it places the cause of the movement without hesitation
in the 'not-I,' although it resides in the 'I,' and is only
occasioned by subordinate centres, the activity of which remains
concealed from consciousness. This it is which gives rise to
spiritualism, which, in so far as it is in good faith and not openly
a hocus-pocus, is simply a mystical attempt to explain move
ments, the real cause of which consciousness does not find in
itself, and which it places, in consequence, in the 'not-I.'
In ultimate analysis, the consciousness ofthe ' Ego,' and notably
the opposition of the ' Ego ' and the ' non-Ego,' is an illusion of
the senses and a fallacy of thought. Every organism is related
to a species, and, over and above that, to the universe. It is
the direct material continuation of its parents ; it is itself con
tinued directly and materially in its descendants. It is com
posed of the same materials as the whole environing world ;
these materials are constantly penetrating into it, transforming
it, producing in it all the phenomena of life and consciousness.
All the lines of action of the forces of nature are prolonged
in its interior ; it is the scene of the same physical and chemical
processes in action throughout the universe. What pantheism
divines and clothes in needlessly mystic words is clear, sober
fact, namely, the unity of nature, in which each organism is also
a part related to the whole. Certain parts are more nearly con
nected ; others are more separated from one another. Con
sciousness perceives only the closely-knit parts of its physical
basis, not those more remote. Thus it falls into the illusion
that the parts near together alone belong to it, and that the
more distant are strangers to it, and to consider itself as an
' individuum,' confronting the world as a separate world or
microcosm. It does not observe that the ' I,' so rigidly posited
has no fixed limits, but continues and spreads beneath the
threshold of consciousness, with an ever-diminishing distinctness
of separation, to the extreme depths of nature, till it blends
there with all the other constituents of the universe.
We may now resume much more briefly the natural history of

EGO-MANIA 251
the 'I' and the 'not-I,' and present it in a few formulae. Con
sciousness is a fundamental quality of living matter. The
highest organism itself is only a colony of the simplest organisms
— that is to say, of living cells — differentiated diversely in order
to qualify the colony for higher functions than the simple cell
can accomplish. The collective or ego-consciousness of the
colony is composed of the individual consciousness of the parts.
The ego-consciousness has an obscure and disregarded part
which relates to the vital functions of the cells, or the
ccenaesthesis, and a clear, privileged part which is attentive to
the excitations of the sensory nerves, and to the voluntary
activity of the muscles, and which recognises them. Clear con
sciousness learns from experience that acts of will precede
voluntary movements. It arrives at the assumption of causality.
It observes that the sensorial excitations are not caused by any
thing contained in itself. It is compelled, in consequence, to
transfer this cause, the assumption of which it cannot renounce,
elsewhere, and is necessarily first brought by this to the presenta
tion of a ' not-I,' and afterwards to the development of this
' not-I ' into an apparent universe.
The old spiritualistic psychology, which regards the ' Ego '
as something entirely different from the body, as a special
unitary substance, maintains that this 'Ego' considers its own
body as something not identical with it, as opposed to the ' Ego '
properly so called, as something external — in fact, as ' non-Ego.'
Thus.it denies ccenaesthesis — that is to say, an absolutely certain
empirical fact. We constantly have an obscure sensation of the
existence of all parts of our body, and our ego-consciousness
immediately experiences a change if the vital functions of any
one of our organs or tissues suffers a disturbance.*
Development advances from the unconscious organic ' I ' to
the clear conscious ' I,' and to the conception of the ' not-I.'
The infant probably has ccenaesthesis even before, in any case
after, its birth, for it feels its vital internal processes, shows
satisfaction when they are in healthy action, manifests its dis
comfort by movements and cries, which are also only a move
ment of the respiratory and laryngeal muscles, when any dis-
* ' Certain [sick] persons enjoy keenly a sense of the lightness of their
body, feel themselves hovering in the air, believe they could fly ; or else they
have a feeling of weight either in the whole body, in many limbs, or in one
single limb, which seems to them huge and heavy. A young epileptic
sometimes felt his body so extraordinarily heavy that he could scarcely raise
it. At other times he felt himself so light that he believed he did not touch
the ground. Sometimes it seemed to him that his body had assumed such
proportions that it was impossible for him to pass through a door. In this
last illusion . . . the patient feels himself very much smaller or very
much larger than he really is.' — Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Personnalitd.
3= Edition. Paris, 1889, p. 35.

252 DEGENERATION
turbances appear there, perceives and expresses general states
of the organism, such as hunger, thirst and fatigue. But clear
consciousness does not yet exist for it ; the brain has not yet
taken command over the inferior centres. Sense-impressions
are perhaps perceived, but certainly not yet grouped into ideas ;
the greater part of the movements are preceded by no conscious
act of will, and are only reflex actions — that is, manifestations
of those local consciousnesses which later become so obscure
as to be imperceptible, when the cerebral consciousness has
attained its full clearness. Little by little the higher centres
develop ; the child begins to give heed to its sense-impressions,
to form from its perceptions ideas, and to make voluntary move
ments adapted to an end. With the awakening of its conscious
will the birth of the consciousness of its 'Ego' is linked. The
child apprehends that it is an individual. But its internal
organic processes occupy it very much more than does the
procedure of the external world, transmitted to it by the sensory
nerves, and its own states fill up its consciousness more or less
completely. The child is, for this reason, a model of egoism,
and, until it reaches a more advanced age, is wholly incapable
of displaying either attention or interest in anything at all which
is not directly connected with itself, its needs and inclinations.
By the continued culture of his brain man finally arrives at that
degree of maturity in which he acquires a just idea of his
relations to other men and to Nature. Then consciousness pays
less and less regard to the vital processes in its own organism,
and more and more to the stimulations of its senses. It only
notices the former when they reveal pressing necessities ; it is,
on the contrary, always concerned with the latter when in a
waking state. The ' I ' retires decidedly behind the ' not-I,'
and the image of the world fills the greater part of conscious
ness. As the formation of an ' I,' of an individuality clearly conscious
of its separate existence, is the highest achievement of living
matter, so the highest degree of development of the ' I ' consists
in embodying in itself the ' not-I,' in comprehending the world,
in conquering egoism, and in establishing close relations with
other beings, things and phenomena. Auguste Comte, and
after him Herbert Spencer, have named this stage ' altruism,'
from the Italian word altrui, 'others.' The sexual instinct
which forces an individual to seek for another individual is as
little altruism as the hunger which incites the hunter to follow
an animal in order to kill and eat it. There can be no question
of altruism until an individual concerns himself about another
being from sympathy or curiosity, and not in order to satisfy an
immediate, pressing necessity of his body, the momentary
hunger of some organ.

EGO-MANIA 253
Not till he attains to altruism is man in a condition to main
tain himself in society and in nature. To be a social being,
man must feel with his fellow-creatures, and show himself sensi
tive to their opinion about him. Both the one and the other
presuppose that he is capable of so vividly representing to him
self the feelings of his fellow-creatures as to experience them
himself. He who is not capable of imagining the pain of
another with sufficient clearness to suffer the same himself will
not have compassion, and he who cannot exactly feel for himself
what impression an action or an omission on his part will make
on another will have no regard for others. In both cases he will
soon see himself excluded from the human community as the
enemy of all, and treated as such by all, and very probably he
will perish. And to defend himself against destructive natural
forces and turn them to his advantage, man must know them
intimately — that is, he must be able distinctly to picture their
effects. A clear presentation of the feelings of others, and of
the effects of natural forces, presupposes the faculty of occupy
ing himself intensively with the ' not-I.' While a man is attend
ing to the ' not-I,' he is not thinking of his ' Ego/ and the latter
descends below the level of consciousness. In order that the
' not-I ' should in this way prevail over the ' I,' the sensory
nerves must properly conduct the external impressions, the
cerebral centres of perception must be sensitive to the excita
tions of the sensory nerves, the highest centres must develop, in
a sure, rapid and vigorous manner, the perceptions into ideas,
unite these into conceptions and judgments, and, on occasion,
transform them into acts of volition and motor impulses. And
as the greatest part of these different activities is accomplished
by the gray cortex of the frontal lobes, this means that this gray
cortex must be well developed and work vigorously.
It is thus that a sane man appears to us. He perceives little
and rarely his internal excitations, but always and clearly his
external impressions. His consciousness is filled with images of
the external world, not with images of the activity of his organs.
The unconscious work of his inferior centres plays an almost
vanishing part by the side of the fully conscious work of the
highest centres. His egoism is no stronger than is strictly
necessary to maintain his individuality, and his thoughts and
actions are determined by knowledge of Nature and his fellow-
creatures, and by the consideration he owes to them.
Quite otherwise is the spectacle offered by the degenerate per
son. His nervous system is not normal. In what the digression
from the norm ultimately consists we do not know. Very prob
ably the cell ofthe degenerate is formed a little differently from
that of sane men, the particles of the protoplasm are otherwise
and less regularly disposed ; the molecular movements take

254 DEGENERATION
place, in consequence, in a less free and rapid, less rhythmic
and vigorous, manner. This is, however, a mere undemonstrable
hypothesis. Nevertheless, it cannot reasonably be doubted that
all the bodily signs or ' stigmata ' of degeneration, all the arrests
and inequalities of development that have been observed, have
their origin in a bio-chemical and bio-mechanical derangement
of the nerve-cell, or, perhaps, of the cell in general.
In the mental life of the degenerate the anomaly of his nervous
system has, as a consequence, the incapacity of attaining to the
highest degree of development of the individual, namely, the
freely coming out from the factitious limits of individuality, i.e.,
altruism. As to the relation of his ' Ego ' to his ' non-Ego,' the
degenerate man remains a child all his life. He scarcely appre
ciates or even perceives the external world, and is only occupied
with the organic processes in his own body. He is more than
egoistical, he is an ego-maniac.
His ego-mania may spring directly from different circum
stances of his organism. His sensory nerves may be obtuse, are, in
consequence, but feebly stimulated by the external world, trans
mit slowly and badly their stimuli to the brain, and are not in a
condition to incite it to a sufficiently vigorous perceptive and
ideational activity. Or his sensory nerves may work moder
ately well, but the brain is not sufficiently excitable, and does
not perceive properly the impressions which are transmitted to
it from the external world.
The obtuseness of the degenerate is attested by almost all
observers. From the almost illimitable number of facts which
could be adduced on this point, we will only give a very concise,
but sufficiently characteristic selection. ' Among many idiots,'
says Sollier, ' there is no distinction between sweet and bitter.
When sugar and colocynth are administered to them alternately,
they manifest no change of sensation. . . . Properly speaking,
taste does not exist among them. . . . Besides this, there are
perversions of taste. We are not speaking here of complete
idiots . . . but even of imbeciles who eat ordure or repulsive
things . . . even their own excrements. . . . The same remarks
apply to smell. Perhaps sensibility appears still more abso
lutely obtuse for smells than for taste. . . . Tactile sensi
bility is very obtuse in general, but it is always uniformly so.
. . . Sometimes it might be a question whether there is not
complete anaesthesia.'* Lombroso has examined the general
sensitiveness of skin in sixty-six criminals, and has found it
obtuse in thirty-eight among them, and unequal in the two halves
of the body in forty-six. f In a later work he sums up in
* Sollier, Psychologie de I' Idiot el de Vlmbdcile, p. 52 et seq.
f Lombroso, L' Uomo delinquents V edizione. Torino 1884 n T>n
etseq. > <+> !*• J-y

EGO-MANIA 255
these words his observations of sensorial acuteness in the degene
rate: ' Inaccessible to the feeling of pain, themselves without feel
ing, they never understand pain even in others.'* Ribot traces
the ' diseases of personality ' (that is, the false ideas of the ' I ')
to 'organic disturbances, of which the first result is to depress
the faculty of feeling in general ; the second, to pervert it.' ' A
young man whose conduct had always been excellent suddenly
gave himself up to the worst inclinations. It was ascertained
that in his mental condition there was no sign of evident aliena
tion, but it could be seen that the whole outer surface of the
skin had become absolutely insensible.' ' It may seem strange
that weak and false sensitivity . . . that is, that simple disturb
ances or sensorial alterations should disorganize the " Ego."
Nevertheless, observation proves it'-f- Maudsley*! describes
some cases of degeneration among children whose skin was in
sensible, and remarks : ' They cannot feel impressions z-.s they
naturally should feel them, nor adjust themselves to their sur
roundings, with which they are in discord ; and the motor
outcomes of the perverted affections of self are accordingly of a
meaningless and destructive character. '§
The defective sensibility of the degenerate, confirmed by all
observers, is, moreover, susceptible of different interpretations.
Whereas many consider it a consequence of the pathological con
dition of the sensory nerves, others believe that the perturbation
has its seat, not in these nerves, but in the brain ; not in the ducts,
but in the centres of perception. To quote one of the most emi
nent among the psycho-physiologists of the new school, Binet ||
has proved that, ' if a portion of the body of a person is in
sensible, he is ignorant of what passes there ; but, on the other
hand, the nervous centres in connection with this insensible
* Lombroso, Les Applications de V Anthropologic criniinelle. Paris, 1892,
p. 179.
f Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Personnalitd, pp. 61, 78, 105.
X Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind. London, 1879^.287.
§ See also Alfred Binet, Les Alterations de la Personnalitd, Paris, 1892,
p. 39 : ' His senses close to outside stimulation ; for him, the external world
ceases to exist ; he lives no more than his exclusively personal life ; he acts
only through his own stimuli, with the automatic movement of his brain.
Although he receives nothing more from outside, and his personality is
completely isolated from the surroundings in which he is placed, he may be
seen to go, come, do, act, as if he had his senses and intelligence in full
exercise.' This, it is true, is the description of a patient, but what he says
of the latter applies equally, with a difference of degree only, to the
ego-maniac. FeVe* has communicated to the Biological Society of Faris, in
the seince of November 12, 1892, the results of a great number of experi
ments made by him, whence it appears 'that among the greater part of
epileptics, hysterical and degenerate subjects, cutaneous sensibility is
diminished.' See La Semaine mddicale, 1892, p. 456.
|[ Alfred Binet, Les Alterations de la Personnalitd. Paris, 1892, pp. 83, 85,
et seq.

256 DEGENERATION
region can continue to act ; the result is that certain acts, often
simple, but sometimes very complicated, can be accomplished in
the body of a hysterical subject, without his knowledge ; much
more, these acts can be of a psychical nature, and manifest
an intelligence which will be distinct from that of the sub
ject, and will constitute a second " I " co-existent with the first.
For a long time there was a misconception of the true nature
of hysterical anaesthesia, and it was compared to a common
anaesthesia from organic causes, due, for example, to the inter
ruption of afferent nerves. This view must be wholly aban
doned, and we know now that hysterical anaesthesia is not
a true insensibility ; it is insensibility from unconsciousness
from mental disaggregation ; in a word, it is psychical insensi
bility.' Most frequently it is not a question of simple cases, where it
is the sensory nerves alone, or only the cerebral centres which
work badly, but of mixed cases, where the two apparatuses have
a diversely varying part in the disturbance. But whether the
nerves do not conduct the impressions to the brain, or the brain
does not perceive, or does not raise the impressions brought
to it into consciousness, the result is always the same,
viz., the external world will not be correctly and distinctly
grasped by consciousness, the ' not-I ' will not be suitably repre
sented in consciousness, the 'I ' will not experience the necessary
derivation of the exclusive preoccupation with the processes
taking place in its own organism.
The natural healthy connection between organic sensations
and sense-perceptions is much more strongly displaced when to
the insensibility of the sensory nerves, or of the centres of per
ception, or both, is added an unhealthily modified and intensified
vital activity of the organs. Then the organic ego-sensibility,
or ccenaesthesis, advances irrepressibly into the foreground,
overshadowing in great part or wholly the perceptions of the
external world in consciousness, which no longer takes notice
of anything but the interior processes of the organism. In
this way there originates that peculiar hyper- stimulation or
emotionalism constituting, as we have seen, the fundamental
phenomenon of the intellectual life of the degenerate. For the
fundamental emotional tone, despairing or joyful, angry or tear
ful, which determines the colour of his presentations as well as the
course of his thoughts, is the consequence of phenomena takino-
place in his nerves, vessels and glands.* The consciousness of
the emotionally degenerate subject is filled with obsessions which
* ' The organic, cardiac, vaso-motor, secretory, etc., phenomena accompany
ing almost all, if not all, affective states ... far from following the conscious
phenomenon, precede it ; none the less they remain in many cases uncon
scious.'— Gley, quoted by A. Binet, Les Altdrations de la Personnalitd p 208

EGO-MANIA 257
are not inspired by the events of the external world, and by
impulsions which are not the reaction against external stimula
tion. To this is added next the unfailing weakness of will of
the degenerate person, which makes it impossible for him to
suppress his obsessions, to resist his impulsions, to control
his fundamental moods, to keep his higher centres to the
attentive pursuit of objective phenomena. According to the
saying of the poet, the necessary result of these conditions is
that the work must be differently reflected in such heads than
it is in normal ones. The external world, the ' not-I,' either does
not exist at all in the consciousness of an emotionally degenerate
subject, or it is merely represented there as on a faintly reflecting
surface, by a scarcely recognisable, wholly colourless image, or,
as in a concave or convex mirror, by a completely distorted,
false image ; consciousness, on the other hand, is imperiously
monopolized by the somatic ' I,' which does not permit the
mind to be occupied with anything but the painful or tumultuous
processes taking place in the depths of the organs.
Badly-conducting sensory nerves, obtuse perceptive centres in
the brain, weakness of will with its resulting incapacity of atten
tion, morbidly irregular and violent vital processes in the cells,
are therefore the organic basis on which ego-mania develops.
The ego-maniac must of necessity immensely over-estimate his
own importance and the significance of all his actions, for he is
only engrossed with himself, and but little or not at all with ex
ternal things. He is therefore not in a position to comprehend
his relation to other men and the universe, and to appreciate pro
perly the part he has to play in the aggregate of social institutions.
There might at this juncture be an inclination to confound ego
mania with megalomania, but there is a characteristic difference
between the two states. Megalomania, it is true, is itself, like
its clinical complement, the delusion of persecution, occasioned
by morbid processes within the organism obliging consciousness
perpetually to be attending to its own somatic ' Ego.' More
especially the unnaturally increased bio-chemical activity of the
organs gives rise to the pleasantly extravagant presentations of
megalomania, while retarded or morbidly aberrant activity
gives rise to the painful presentations of the delusion of per
secution.* In megalomania, however, as in the delusion of per
secution, the patient is constantly engrossed with the external
* This is not merely a simple hypothesis, but a well-demonstrated fact.
Hundreds of experiments by Boeck, Weill, Moebius, Charrin, Mairet, Bose,
Slosse, Laborde, Marie, etc., have established that among the deranged,
during periods of excitation and afterwards, the urine is more toxic, i.e., more
full of waste and excreted organic matter, while after the periods of depres
sion it is less toxic, i.e., poorer in disaggregated matter, than among sane
individuals, which proves that, among the former, the nutrition of the tissues
is morbidly increased or retarded.
17

258

DEGENERATION

world and with men ; in ego-mania, on the contrary, he almost
completely withdraws himself from them. In the systematically
elaborated delirium of the megalomaniac and persecution-maniac,
the ' not-I ' plays the most prominent part. The patient accounts
for the importance his 'Ego' obtains in his own eyes by the
invention of a grand social position universally recognised, or
by the inexorable hostility of powerful persons, or groups of
persons. He is Pope, or Emperor, and his persecutors are
the chief men in the State, or great social powers, the police,
the clergy, etc. His delirium, in consequence, takes account of
the State and society ; he admits their importance, and attaches
the greatest value, in one case, to the homage, in the other to the
enmity, of his neighbours. The ego-maniac, on the contrary, does
not regard it as necessary to dream of himself as occupying
some invented social position. He does not require the world
or its appreciation to justify in his own eyes himself as the
sole object of his own interest. He does not see the world
at all. Other people simply do not exist for him. The whole
'non-Ego' appears in his consciousness merely as a vague shadow
or a thin cloud. The idea does not even occur to him that he
is something out of the common, that he is superior to other
people, and for this reason either admired or hated ; he is alone
in the world ; more than that, he alone is the world and every
thing else, men, animals, things are unimportant accessories,
not worth thinking about.
The less diseased are the conducting media, the centres of nutri
tion, perception and volition, so much the weaker naturally will
the ego-mania be, and so much the more harmlessly will it be
manifested. Its least objectionable expression is the comic
importance which the ego-maniac often attributes to his sensa
tions, inclinations and activities. Is he a painter? he has no
doubt that the whole history of the universe only hinges on
painting, and on his pictures in particular. Is he a writer of
prose or verse ? he is convinced that humanity has no other
care, or at least no more serious care, than for verses and books.
Let it not be objected that this is not peculiar to ego-maniacs,
but is the case with the vast majority of mankind. Assuredly
everyone thinks what he is doing is important, and that man
would not be worth much who performed his work so heed
lessly and so superficially, with so little pleasure and conscien
tiousness, that he himself could not look upon it with respect.
But the great difference between the rational and sane man and
the ego-maniac is, that the former sees clearly how subordinate
his occupation is to the rest of humanity, although it fills his
life and exacts his best powers, while the latter can never
imagine that any exertion to which he devotes his time and
efforts can appear to others as unimportant and even puerile.

EGO-MANIA 259
An honest cobbler, resoleing an old boot, gives himself up heart
and soul to his work, nevertheless he admits that there are far
more interesting and important things for humanity than the
repairing of damaged sole-leather. The ego-maniac, on the
contrary, if he is a writer, does not hesitate to declare, like
Mallarnni, 'The world was made to lead up to a fine book.' This
absurd exaggeration of one's own occupations and interests pro
duces in literature the Parnassians and the ^Esthetes.
If degeneration is deeper, and ego - mania is stronger, the
latter no longer assumes the comparatively innocent form of
total absorption in poetic and artistic cooings, but manifests
itself as an immorality, which may amount to moral madness.
The tendency to commit actions injurious to himself or society is
aroused now and then even in a sane man when some obnoxious
desire demands gratification, but he has the will and the power
to suppress it. The degenerate ego-maniac is too feeble of
will to control his impulsions, and cannot determine his actions
and thoughts by a regard to the welfare of society, because
society is not at all represented in his consciousness. He is a
solitary, and is insensible to the moral law framed for life in
society, and not for the isolated individual. It is evident that
for Robinson Crusoe the penal code did not exist. Alone on
his island, having only Nature to deal with, it is obvious he
could neither kill, steal, nor pillage in the sense of the penal
code. He could only commit misdemeanours against himself.
Want of insight and of self-control are the only immoralities
possible to him. The ego-maniac is a mental Robinson Crusoe,
who in his imagination lives alone on an island, and is at the
same time a weak creature, powerless to govern himself. The
universal moral law does not exist for him, and the only thing
he may possibly see and avow, perhaps also regret a little, is
that he sins against the moral law of the solitary, i.e., against
the necessity of controlling instincts in so far as they are
injurious to himself.
Morality — not that learnt mechanically, but that which we
feel as an internal necessity — has become, in the course ot
thousands of generations, an organized instinct. For this reason,
like all other organized instincts, it is exposed to 'perversion,'
to aberration. The effect of this is that an organ, or the whole
organism, works in opposition to its normal task and its natural
laws, and cannot work otherwise.* In perversion of taste the
* Dr. Paul Moreau, of Tours, describes perversion (P aberration) in these
somewhat obscure terms : ' Perversion constitutes a deviation from the laws
which rule the proper sensibility of the organs and faculties. By this word
we mean to designate those cases in which observation testifies to an un
natural, exceptional, and wholly pathological change, a change carrying
palpable disturbance into the regular working of a faculty.' — Des Aberrations
du i>ens gdndsique. 4e Edition. Paris, 1887, p. 1.

260 DEGENERATION
patient seeks greedily to swallow all that ordinarily provokes
the deepest repugnance, i.e., is instinctively recognised as noxious,
and rejected for that reason — decaying organic matter, ordure,
pus, spittle, etc. In perversion of smell he prefers the odours
of putrefaction to the perfume of flowers. In perversion of the
sexual appetite he has desires which are directly contrary to
the purpose of the instinct, i.e., the preservation of the species.
In perversion of the moral sense the patient is attracted by, and
feels delight in, acts which fill the sane man with disgust and
horror. If this particular perversion is added to ego-mania,
we have before us not merely the obtuse indifference towards
crime which characterizes moral madness, but delight in crime.
The ego-maniac of this kind is no longer merely insensible to
good and evil, and incapable of discriminating between them,
but he has a decided predilection for evil, esteems it in others,
does it himself every time he can act according to his inclina
tion, and finds in it the peculiar beauty that the sane man finds
in good.
The moral derangement of an ego-maniac, with or without
perverted moral instincts, will naturally manifest itself in ways
varying according to the social class to which he belongs, as
well as according to his personal idiosyncrasies. If he is a
member of the disinherited class, he is simply either a fallen
or degraded being, whom opportunity has made a thief, who
lives in horrible promiscuity with his sisters or daughters, etc.,
or is a criminal from habit and profession. If he is cultivated
and well-to-do, or in a commanding position, he commits mis
demeanours peculiar to the upper classes which have as their
object not the gratification of material needs, but of other kinds
of craving. He becomes a Don Juan of the drawing-room, and
carries shame and dishonour without hesitation into the family of
his best friend. He is a legacy-hunter, a traitor to those who
trust in him, an intriguer, a sower of discord, and a liar. On the
throne he may even develop into a rapacious animal, and to a
universal conqueror. With a limited tether he becomes Charles
the Bad the Count d'Evreux and King of Navarre, Gilles de
Rais, the prototype of Blue Beard, or Caesar Borgia ; and, with
a wider range, Napoleon I. If his nervous system is not strong
enough to elaborate imperious impulsions, or if his muscles are
too feeble to obey such impulsions, all these criminal inclinations
remain unsatisfied, and only expend themselves by way of his
imagination. The perverted ego-maniac is then only a platonic
or theoretic malefactor, and if he embraces the literary career
he will concoct philosophic systems to justify his depravity, or
will employ an accommodating rhetoric in verse and prose' to
celebrate it, bedizen it and present it under as seductive a form
as possible. We then find ourselves in the presence of the

EGO-MANIA 261
literary phases called Diabolism and Decadentism. ' Diaboliques '
and ' decadents ' are distinguished from ordinary criminals merely
in that the former content themselves with dreaming and
writing, while the latter have the resolution and strength to act.
But they have this bond in common, of being both of them
' antisocial beings.'*
A second characteristic which is shared by all ego-maniacs
is their incapacity to adapt themselves to the conditions in
which they live, whether they assert their anti-social inclinations
in thought or action, in writings or* as criminals. This want of
adaptability is one of the most striking peculiarities of the
degenerate, and it is to them a source of constant suffering, and
finally of ruin. It is a necessary result, however, of the consti
tution of his central nervous system. The indispensable premise
of adaptation is the having an exact presentation of the facts
to which a man must adapt himself. t I cannot avoid the ruts
* ' The vices of the psycho-physical organization manifesting themselves
by acts prohibited, not only by morality — that aggregate of necessary rules
elaborated by the secular experience of peoples — but also by their penal
codes, are in discord with life in society, in the midst of which humanity can
alone make progress. ... A man, from his birth adapted to social life, can
only acquire such vices as a consequence of certain pernicious conditions,
through which his psycho-physical powers are set in opposition to the neces
sary exigencies of social life.' — Drill, Les Criminels mineurs, quoted by
Lombroso in Les Applications de P Anthropologic criminelle. Paris, 1892,
p. 94. See also G. Tarde, La Philosophic pdnale, Lyon, 1890, passim ; ' The
morally deranged are not true lunatics. A Marquise de Brinvilliers, a
Troppmann, a being born without either compassion or sense of shame —
can it be said of such an one that he is not himself when he commits his
crime? No. He is only too much himself. But his existence, his person,
are hostile to society. He does not feel the same sentiments which we
civilized people regard as indispensable. It is useless to think of curing
him or of reforming him.'
+ Darwinism explains adaptation only as the result of the struggle for
existence, and of selection which is a form of this struggle. In one indi
vidual a quality appears accidentally, which makes it more capable of pre
serving itself and of conquering its enemies than those individuals not born
with this quality. It finds more favourable conditions of existence, leaves
behind it more numerous descendants inheriting this advantageous quality, and
by the survival of the fittest and the disappearance of the less fit, the whole
species comes into the possession of this advantageous quality. I do not at
all deny that an accidental individual deviation from the type of the species,
which proves an advantage in the struggle for existence, can be a source of
transformations having as their result a better adaptation of the species to given
and unmodifiable circumstances. But I do not believe that such an accident
is the only source, or even the most frequent source, of such transformations.
The process of adaptation appears to me to be quite otherwise, viz., the living
being experiences in some situation feelings of discomfort from which he
wishes to escape, either by change of situation (movement, flight), or by
trying to act vigorously on the causes of these feelings of discomfort (attack,
modification of natural conditions). If the organs possessed by the living
being, and the aptitude these organs have acquired, are not sufficient to
furnish the counteractions felt and wished for as necessary to those feelings

262 DEGENERATION
in the road if I do not see them ; I cannot ward off the blow I
do not see coming ; it is impossible to thread a needle if its eye
is not seen with sufficient clearness, and if the thread is not
carried with steady hand to the right spot. All this is so
elementary it is scarcely necessary to say it. What we term
power over Nature is, in fact, adaptation to Nature. It is an
inexact expression to say we make the forces of Nature subject
to us. In reality we observe them, we learn to know their
peculiarities, and we manage so that the tendencies of natural
forces and our own desires coincide. We construct a wheel at
the point where the water power, by natural law, must fall, and
we have then the advantage that the wheel turns according to
our needs. We know that electricity flows along copper wire,
and so, with cunning submission to its peculiar ways, we lay
down copper lines to the place where we want it, and where its
action would be useful to us. Without knowledge of Nature,
of discomfort, the weaker creatures submit to their destiny, and suffer or
even perish. More vigorous individuals, on the contrary, make violent and
continuous efforts in order to attain their design, of flight, defence, attack,
suppression of natural obstacles ; they give strong nervous impulses to their
organs to increase to the highest degree their functional capacity, and these
nervous impulses are the immediate cause of transformations, giving to the
organs new qualities, and rendering them more fit to make the living
creature thrive. That the nervous impulse produces, as a consequence, an
increase in the flow of blood, and a better nutrition for the organ in play, is
a positive biological fact. In my opinion, then, adaptation is most frequently
an act of the will, and not the result of qualities accidentally acquired. It
has as premise the clear perception and representation of the external
causes of the feelings of discomfort, and a keen desire to escape from them,
or, again, that of procuring feelings of pleasure, i.e., an inorganic appetite.
Its mechanism consists in the elaboration of an intense representation of
serviceable acts of certain organs, and in the sending of adequate impulses
to these organs. That such impulses can modify the anatomical structure
of the organs, Kant already anticipated when he wrote his treatise, Von der
Macht des Gemiithesj and modern therapeutics has fully confirmed this,
by showing that the stigmata of a Louise Lateau, the healing of tumours
on the tomb of the Deacon Paris, the modifications induced by sugges
tion on the skin of hysterical subjects, the formation of birth-marks by
eventualities and emotions, are the effect of presentations on the bodily
tissues. It was wrong to laugh at Lamarck for teaching that the giraffe has
a long neck because it has continually stretched it in order to be able to
feed off the topmost foliage of plants with tall stems. When the animal
elaborates the clear idea that he ought to elongate his neck as much as
possible in order to reach the elevated foliage, this presentation will
influence in the strongest manner the circulation of the blood in all the
tissues of the neck ; these will be quite differently nourished from what they
would be without this presentation, and the changes desired by the animal
will certainly take place little by little, if his general organization makes
them possible. Knowledge and will are therefore causes of adaptation— not
the will in the mystical sense of Schopenhauer, but the will that is the dis
penser of nervous impulses. This summary must suffice for the reader ; this
is not the place to develop it more, and to demonstrate in detail how fertile
these ideas are for the theory of evolution.

EGO-MANIA 263
therefore, no adaptation, and without adaptation no possibility of
profiting by its forces. Now, the degenerate subject cannot adapt
himself, because he has no clear idea of the circumstances to
which he ought to adapt himself, and he does not obtain from
them any clear idea, because, as we know, he has bad nerve-
conductors, obtuse centres of perception, and feeble attention.
The active cause of all adaptation, as of all effort in general —
and adaptation is nothing else than an effort of a particular
kind — is the wish to satisfy some organic necessity, or to escape
from some discomfort. In other words, the aim of adaptation
is to give feelings of pleasure, and to diminish or suppress the
feelings of discomfort. The being incapable of self-adaptation
is for this reason far less able to procure agreeable, and avoid
disagreeable, sensations than the normal being ; he runs up
against every corner, because he does not know how to avoid
them ; and he longs in vain for the luscious pear, because he
does not know how to catch hold of the branch on which it
hangs. The ego-maniac is a type of such a being. He must,
therefore, necessarily suffer from the world and from men.
Hence at heart he is bad-tempered, and turns in wrathful dis
content against Nature, society and public institutions, irritated
and offended by them, because he does not know how to
accommodate himself to them. He is in a constant state of
revolt against all that exists, and contrives how he may destroy
it, or, at least, dreams of destruction. In a celebrated passage
Henri Taine indicates 'exaggerated self-esteem' and ' dogmatic
argument' as the roots of Jacobinism.* This leads to contempt
for and rejection of institutions already established, and hence
* H. Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine : La Rdvolution,
vol. ii., 'La Conquete jacobine,' Paris, i88i,pp. 11-12 : ' Neither exaggerated
self-esteem nor dogmatic argument is rare in the human species. In every
country these two roots of the Jacobin spirit subsist indestructible beneath
the surface. Everywhere they are kept in check by established society, and
everywhere they try to upheave the old historical structure which presses on
them with all its weight. ... At twenty years old, when a young man enters
the world, his reason is hurt at the same time as his pride. In the first
place, of whatever society he may be a member, it is a scandal to pure
reason, for it has not been constructed on a simple principle by a philo
sophical legislator ; it has been arranged by successive generations according
to their multiple and varying needs. ... In the second place, however
perfect institutions, laws, and manners may be, since they have preceded
him he has not assented to them at all • others, his predecessors, have
chosen for him, and have enclosed him, in advance, in a moral, political, and
social mould which pleased them. It matters little if it displeases him ; he
is forced to submit to it, and, like a harnessed horse, he must walk between
the shafts in the harness put on him. ... It is not surprising, then, if he is
tempted to kick against the framework in which, nolens volens, he is enclosed,
and in which subordination will be his lot. Thence it comes that the
majority of young men — above all, those who have their careers to make —
are more or less Jacobins on leaving college ; it is an infirmity of growth.'

264 DEGENERATION
not invented or chosen by himself. He considers the social
edifice absurd because it is not ' a work of logic,' but of history.
Besides these two roots of Jacobinism which Taine has
brought to light, there is yet another, and the most important,.
that has escaped his attention, viz., the inability of the degener
ate to adapt himself to given circumstances. The ego-maniac is
condemned by his natural organization to be a pessimist and a
Jacobin. But the revolutions he wishes for, preaches, and per
haps effectively accomplishes, are barren as regards progress.
He is, as a revolutionary, what an inundation or cyclone would
be as a street-sweeper. He does not clear the ground with
conscious aim, but blindly destroys. This distinguishes him
from the clear-minded innovator, the true revolutionary, who is
a reformer, leading suffering and stagnating humanity from time
to time by toilsome paths into a new Canaan. The reformer
hurls down with pitiless violence, if violence is necessary, the
ruins which have become obstacles, in order to make way for
useful constructions ; the ego- maniac raves against everything
that stands upright, whether useful or useless, and does not think
of clearing the building-ground after the devastation ; his pleasure
consists in seeing heaps of rubbish overgrown by noxious weeds
where once walls and gables reared themselves.
There is an impassable gulf between the sane revolutionary
and the ego-maniac Jacobin. The former has positive ideals,
the latter has not. The former knows what he is striving for ;
the latter has no conception how that which irritates him could
be changed for the better. His thoughts do not reach so far ;
he never troubles himself to question what will replace the
things destroyed. He knows only that everything frets him,
and he desires to vent his muddled and blustering ill-humour
on all around him. Hence it is characteristic that the foolish
necessity to revolt of this kind of revolutionary frequently turns
against imaginary evils, follows puerile aims, or even fights
against those laws which are wise and beneficent. Here they
form a ' league against lifting the hat in saluting '; there they
oppose compulsory vaccination ; another time they rise in pro
test against taking the census of the population ; and they have
the ridiculous audacity to conduct these silly campaigns with
the same speeches and attitudes that the true revolutionaries
assume — for example, in the service of suppression of slavery,
or liberty of thought.
To the ego-maniac's incapacity for adaptation is often added
the mania for destruction, or clastomania, which is so frequently
observed among idiots and imbeciles, and in some forms of
insanity* In a child the instinct of destruction is normal. It
* Dr. Paul Sollier, Psychologic de P Idiot et de PImbdcile, p. 109 et seq. :
There exists among idiots another instinct which is met with, nevertheless'

EGO-MANIA 265
is the first manifestation of the desire to exert muscular
strength. Very soon, however, the desire is aroused to exert its
strength, not in destroying, but in creating. Now, the act of
creating has a psychic premise, viz., attention. This being
absent in the degenerate, the impulse to destroy, which can
be gratified without attention, by disorderly and casual move
ments, does not rise in them to the instinct of creation.
Hence, discontent as the consequence of incapacity of adapta
tion, want of sympathy with his fellow-creatures arising from
weak representative capacity, and the instinct of destruction, as
the result of arrested development of mind, together constitute
the anarchist, who, according to the degree of his impulsions,
either merely writes books and makes speeches at popular
meetings, or has recourse to a dynamite bomb.
Finally, in its extreme degree of development, ego-mania
leads to that folly of Caligula in which the unbalanced mind
boasts of being ' a laughing lion,' believes himself above all re
straints of morality or law, and wishes the whole of humanity
had one single head that he might cut it off.
The reader who has hitherto followed me will now, I hope,
quite comprehend the psychology of ego-mania. As I have
stated above, consciousness of the ' Ego ' originates from the sensa
tions of the vital processes in all parts of our body, and the con
ception of the ' non-Ego ' from changes in our organs of special
sense. How, generally speaking, we arrive at the assumption of
the existence of a ' not-I,' I have explained above in detail,
hence it is unnecessary to repeat it here. If we wish to leave
the firm soil of positively established facts, and risk ourselves on
the somewhat shaky ground of probable assumptions, we may
say that consciousness of the 'Ego' has its anatomical basis in the
sympathetic system, and the conception of the ' not-I ' in the
cerebro-spinal system. In a healthy man the perception of
vital internal facts does not rise above the level of consciousness.
The brain receives its stimulations far more from the sensory,
than from the sympathetic nerves. In consciousness the pre
sentation of the external world greatly outweighs the conscious
ness of the 'Ego.' In the degenerate, either (1) vital internal
facts are morbidly intensified, or proceed abnormally, and are
therefore constantly perceived by consciousness ; or (2) the
sensory nerves are obtuse, and the perceptional centres weak
to a certain degree among normal children. This is destructiveness, which
shows itself among all children as a fust manifestation of their powers of
movement, under the form of a desire to strike, break, and destroy. . . .
This tendency is much more pronounced among idiots. ... It is not the
same with imbeciles. Their malicious and mischievous spirit drives them
to destroy, not only for the purpose of expending their strength, but with the
object of injuring. It is an unwholesome gratification which they seek.'

266 DEGENERATION
and sluggish ; or (3) perhaps these two deviations from the norm
co-exist. The result in all three cases is that the notion of the
' Ego ' is far more strongly represented in consciousness than
the image of the external world. The ego-maniac, conse
quently, neither knows nor grasps the phenomenon of the
universe. The effect of this is a want of interest and sympathy,
and an incapacity to adapt himself to nature and hunranity.
The absence of feeling, and the incapacity of adaptation, fre
quently accompanied by perversion of the instincts and im
pulses, make the ego-maniac an anti-social being. He is a
moral lunatic, a criminal, a pessimist, an anarchist, a misan
thrope, and he is all these, either in his thoughts and his feelings,
or also in his actions. The struggle against the anti-social
ego-maniac, his expulsion from the social body, are necessary
functions of the latter ; and if it is not capable of accomplishing
it, it is a sign of waning vital power or serious ailment. Tolera
tion, and. above all, admiration, of the ego-maniac, be he one in
theory or in practice, is, so to speak, a proof that the kidneys of
the social organism do not accomplish their task, that society
suffers from Bright's disease.
In the following chapters we shall study the forms under
which ego-mania manifests itself in literature, and we shall find
occasion to treat in detail of many points to which at this stage
mere allusion has been sufficient.

CHAPTER II.
PARNASSIANS AND DIABOLISTS.
IT has become the custom to designate the French Parnassians
a school, but those who are comprised under this denomination
have always refused to allow themselves to be included under
a common name. 'The Parnassus?' . . . exclaimed one of the
most undoubted Parnassians, M. Catulle Mendes* ' We have
never been a school ! . . . The Parnassus ! We have not
even written a preface ! . . . The Parnassus originated from the
necessity of reaction against the looseness of poetry issuing from
the adherents of Murger, Charles Bataille, Amedee Rolland,
Jean du Boys ; then it became a league of minds, who sympa
thized in matters of art. . . .'
The name ' Parnassiens ' was, in fact, applied to a whole series
of poets and writers who have scarcely a point in common
between them. They are united by a purely external bond ;
their works have been brought out by the Parisian editor
* Jules Huret, Enquete sur P Evolution littdraire, p. 288.

EGO-MANIA 267
Alphonse Lemerre, who was able to make Parnassians, as the
editor Cotta, in the first half of this century, made German
classics. The designation itself emanates from a sort of
almanac of the Muses, which Catulle Mendes published in i860
under the title, Le Parnasse contemporain : recueil de vers
nouveaux, and which contains contributions from almost all the
poets of the period.
With most of the names of this numerous group I do not
need to concern myself, for those who bear them are not
degenerate, but honest average men, correctly twittering what
others have first sung to them. They have exercised no sort
of direct influence on contemporary thought, and have only
indirectly contributed to strengthen the action of a few leaders
by grouping themselves around them in the attitude of disciples,
and in permitting them thus to present themselves with an
imposing retinue, which always makes an impression on vacuous
minds. The leaders alone are of importance in my inquiries. It is
of them we think when we speak of the Parnassians, and it is
from their peculiarities that the artistic theory attributed to Le
Parnasse has been derived. Embodied most completely in
Thdophile Gautier, it can be summed up in two words : per
fection of form and impassibility, or impassiveness.
To Gautier and his disciples the form is everything in poetry ;
the substance has no importance. ' A poet,' says he,* ' say
what you will, is a labourer ; he ought not to have more in
telligence than a labourer, or know any other trade than his
own, otherwise he will do it badly. I hold the mania that
there is for putting them on an ideal pedestal is perfectly absurd ;
nothing is less ideal than a poet. . . . The poet is a keyboard
[clavecin], and nothing more. Every idea in passing lays its
finger on a key ; the key vibrates and gives its note, that is all.'
In another place he says : ' For the poet, words have in them
selves, and outside the sense they express, a beauty and value
of their own, like precious stones as yet uncut, and set in
bracelets, necklaces, or rings ; they charm the connoisseur who
looks at them, and sorts them with his finger in the little
bowl where they are stored. '-f* Gustave Flaubert, another
worshipper of words, takes entirely this view of the subject
when he exclaims: "J: 'A beautiful verse meaning nothing, is
superior to a verse less beautiful meaning something.' By the
words ' beautiful ' and 'less beautiful,' Flaubert here understands
* Thebphile Gautier, Les Grotesques. 3™ Edition. Paris, 1856.
f Les Fleurs du Mai, par Charles Baudelaire, precedes d'une notice par
Theophile Gautier. , 2e Edition. Paris, 1869, p. 46.
X M. Guyau, ' L'Esthe*iique du Vers moderne,' Revue philosophique, vol.
xvii., p. 270.

268 DEGENERATION
•names with triumphant syllables, sounding like the blast of
clarions,' or 'radiant words, words of light'* Gautier only
credited Racine, for whom he, a romanticist, naturally had a pro
found contempt, with one verse of any value :
' La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae.'
The most instructive application of this theory is found in a
piece of poetry by Catulle Mendes, entitled Recapitulation, which
begins as follows : ' Rose, Emmeline,
Margueridette, Odette,
Alix, Aline.
' Paule, Hippolyte,
Lucy, Lucile,
Cecile,
Daphne, Melite.
' Artemidore, Myrrha, Myrrhine,
Purine,
Nais, Eudore.'
Eleven stanzas of the same sort follow, which I will dispense
with reproducing, and then this final strophe :
' Zulma, Ze*lie,
Regine, Reine,
Irfene ! . . .
Et j'en oublie.'f
' And I forget the rest ' — this is the only one of the sixty lines
of the piece which has any sense, the fifty-nine others being
composed of women's names only.
What Catulle Mendes intends here is clear enough. He
wishes to show the state of a libertine's soul, who revels in the
remembrance of all the women he has loved, or with whom he
has flirted. In the mind of the reader the enumeration of their
names is to give rise to voluptuous images of a troop of young
girls, ministrants of pleasure, of pictures of a harem or of the
paradise of Mahomet. But apart from the length of the list,
which makes the piece insupportably wearisome and chilling,
Mendes does not attain the desired effect for yet a second
reason — because his artificiality betrays at the first glance the
profound insincerity of his pretended emotion. When before
the mind of a gallant the figures of the Phyllises of his pastoral
idylls present themselves, and he really feels the necessity
of tenderly murmuring their names, he certainly does not
think of arranging these names as a play on words (Alix —
* Th. Gautier, quoted by M. Guyau, loc. cit, p. 270.
f Printed in L'Echo de Paris, No. 2,972, July 8, 1892.

EGO-MANIA 269
Aline, Lucy — Lucile, Myrrha — Myrrhine, etc.). If he is cold
blooded enough to give himself up to this barren desk-work, he
cannot possibly find himself in the lascivious ecstasy which the
piece is supposed to express and impart. This emotion, immoral
and vulgar in its boasting, would still have the right, like every
genuine affection of the soul, of being lyrically expressed. But
a list of unmeaning names, artificially combined, and arranged
according to their assonance, implies nothing. According to
the art theory of the Parnassians, however, Recapitulation is
poetry — nay, the ideal of poetry — for it ' ne signifie rien,' as
Flaubert requires, and is wholly composed of words which,
according to Th. Gautier, ' ont en eux-memes une beauts et une
valeur propres.'
Another eminent Parnassian, Theodore de Banville,* without
pushing to its extreme limits, with the intrepid logic of Catulle
Mendes, the theory of verbal resonance bare of all meaning, has
professed it with a sincerity to which homage is due. ' I charge
you/ he exclaims to poets in embryo, ' to read as much as
possible, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, technical works treating of
all the professions, and of all the special sciences, catalogues of
libraries and of auctions, handbooks of museums — in short, all
the books which can increase your stock of words, and give you
instruction on their exact sense, proper or figurative. Directly
your head is thus furnished you will be already well prepared
to find rhymes.' The only essential thing in poetry, according
to Banville, is to catch rhymes. To compose a piece of poetry
on any subject, he teaches his disciples : ' All the rhymes on
this subject must first of all be known. The remainder, the
soldering, that which the poet must add to stop up the holes
with the hand of an artist and workman — these are called the
plugs. I should like to see those who counsel us to avoid the
plugs bind two planks together with the help of thought' The
poet — Banville thus sums up his doctrine — has no ideas in his
brain ; he has only sounds, rhymes, and play on words
(calembours). This play on words inspires his ideas, or his
simulacra of ideas.
Guyau rightly uses this criticism with regard to the aesthetic
theory of the Parnassians established by Banville. + ' The search
for rhyme, pushed to the extreme, tends to make the poet lose
the habit of logically connecting his ideas — that is to say, in
reality to think — for to think, as Kant has said, is to unite and"
to bind. To rhyme, on the contrary, is to place in juxtaposition
words necessarily unconnected. . . . The cult of rhyme for
rhyme's sake introduces into the brain itself of the poet, little
* Theodore de Banville, Petit Traitd de Podsie francaise. 2<* Edition revue.
Paris, 1880, pp. 54, 64.
f M. Guyau, loc. cit, pp. 264, 265.

270 DEGENERATION
by little, a kind of disorder and permanent chaos ; all the
usual laws of association, all the logic of thought is destroyed
in order to be replaced by the chance encounter of sounds. . .
Periphrasis and metaphor are the only resources for good
rhyming. . . . The impossibility in seeking for rich rhymes,
of remaining' simple, involves in its turn a consequent risk of
a certain lack of sincerity. Freshness of spontaneous feeling
will disappear in the too consummate artist in words ; he will
lose that respect for thought as such which ought to be the first
quality ofthe writer.'
Where Guyau commits an error is when he says that the cult
of rhyme for rhyme's sake ' introduces into the brain even of the
poet a kind of disorder and permanent chaos.' The proposition
must be reversed. ' Permanent chaos ' and ' disorder ' in the
brain of the poet are there already ; the exaggeration of the
importance of rhyme is only a consequence of this state of mind.
Here we have again to deal with a form of that inaptitude for
attention, well known to us, which is a peculiarity of the de
generate subject. The course of his ideas is determined, not by a
central idea round which the will groups all other ideas, suppress
ing some and strengthening others with the help of attention ; but
by the wholly mechanical association of ideas, awakened in the
case of the Parnassians by a similar or identical verbal sound.
His poetical method is pure echolalia.
The Parnassian theory of the importance of form, notably of
rhyme, for poetry, of the intrinsic value of beauty in the sound
of words, of the sensuous pleasure to be derived from sonorous
syllables without regard to their sense, and of the uselessness,
and even harmfulness, of thought in poetry, has become de
cisive in the most recent development of French poetry.* The
Symbolists, whom we have studied in an earlier chapter,
hold closely to this theory. These poor in spirit, who only
babble ' sonorous syllables ' without sense, are the direct de
scendants of the Parnassians.
The Parnassian theory of art is mere imbecility. But the e°*o-
mania of the degenerate minds who have concocted it reveals
itself in the enormous importance they attribute to their hunt
for rhymes, to their puerile pursuit of words which are ' toni-
truants' and ' rayonnants.' Catulle Mendes ends a poem (La
settle Douceur), where he describes in the most fulsome manner
a series of the pleasures of life, with this envoi : ' Prince, I lie.
* Compare with the above Tolstoi's opinion on the same subject • 'He is
violently hostile to all rhymed verse. Rhythm and rhyme chain down
thought, and all that is opposed to the most complete formation possible of
the idea is an evil. . . . Tolstoi . . . regards the decline in our esteem for
poetry in verse as a progress.'— Raphael Lowenfeld, Gesprdche iiber und mit
Tolstoi. Berlin, 1 891, p. 77.

EGO-MANIA 271
Beneath the Twins or the Urn (? Aquarius) to make noble
words rhyme together in one's book, this is the sole joy of life.'*
He who is not of this opinion is simply said to forfeit his
humanity. Thus it is that Baudelaire calls Paris ' a Capernaum,
a Babel peopled by the imbecile and useless, not over- fastidious
in their ways of killing time, and wholly inaccessible to literary
pleasures.'-)" To treat as imbecile those who look upon a sense
less jumble of rhymes and a litany of so-called beautiful proper
names as of no value, is a stupid self-conceit at which one
might well laugh. But Baudelaire goes so far as to speak of the
' useless.' No one has a right to live who is inaccessible to
what he calls ' literary pleasures ' — that is, an idiotic echolalia !
Because he cultivates the art of playing on words with a puerile
seriousness, everyone must place the same importance as he
does on his infantile amusements, and whoever does not do so
is not simply a Philistine or an inferior being, without sus
ceptibility or refinement — no, he is a ' useless creature.' If
this simpleton had the power, he would no doubt wish to
pursue his idea to the end and sweep the ' useless ' out of the
ranks of the living, as Nero put to death those who did not
applaud his acting in the theatre. Can the monstrous ego
mania of one demented be more audaciously expressed than in
this remark of Baudelaire's ?
The second characteristic of the Parnassians, after their insane
exaggeration of the value for humanity of the most external
form for poetry and rhyming, is their ' impassibility,' or im
passivity. They themselves, of course, will not admit that this
term is applicable to them. ' Will they ever have done with this
humbug !' angrily cried Leconte de Lisle, when interrogated on
the subject of 'impassibility,' and Catulle Mendes says, ' Because
Glatigny has written a poem entitled fmpassible, and because I
myself wrote this line, the avowed pose in which is belied in the
course of the poem,
' " Pas de sanglots humains dans le chant des poetes !'J
it has been concluded that the Parnassians were or wished to
be " impassive." Where do they find it, where do they see it,
this icy equanimity, this dryness which they have ascribed
to us ?'§
Criticism, in sooth, has chosen its word badly. 'Impassi-
* ' Prince, je mens. Sous les Gemeaux
Ou l'Amphore, faire en son livre
Rimer entre eux de noble mots,
C'est la seule douceur de vivre.'
f Eugene Cre*pet, Les Poetes franqais, vol. iv., p. 536 : study by Charles
Baudelaire of Theodore de Banville.
X ' No human sobs in the pi ets' song !'
§ Jules Huret, op. cit, pp. 283, 297.

272 DEGENERATION
bility' in art, in the sense of complete indifference to the drama
of nature and of life, there cannot be. It is psychologically
impossible. All artistic activity, in so far as it is not the mere
imitation of disciples, but flows from an original necessity, is a
reaction of the artist upon received impressions. . Those which
leave him completely indifferent inspire the poet with no verse,
the painter with no picture, the musician with no tone com
position. Impressions must strike him in some way or other,
they must awaken in him some emotion, in order that he may
have the idea at all of giving them an objective artistic form.
In the infinite volume of phenomena flowing uniformly past his
senses, the artist has distinguished the subject he treats with the
peculiar methods of his art ; he has exercised a selective activity,
and has given the preference to this subject over others. This
preference presupposes sympathy or antipathy ; the artist, there
fore, must have felt something on perceiving his subject. The
sole fact that an author has written a poem or a book testifies
that the subject treated of has inspired him with curiosity,
interest, anger, an agreeable or disagreeable emotion, that it has
compelled his mind to dwell upon it. This is, therefore, the
contrary of indifference.
The Parnassians are not impassive. In their poems there is
whimpering, cursing and blasphemy, and the utterance of joy,
enthusiasm and sorrow. But what tortures them or enchants
them is exclusively their own states, their own experiences.
The only foundation of their poetry is their ' Ego.' The sorrow
and joy of other men do not exist for them. Their ' impassi
bility ' is, therefore, not impassivity, but rather a complete
absence of sympathy. The ' tower of ivory ' in which, according
to the expression of one of them, the poet lives and proudly
withdraws himself from the indifferent mob, is a pretty name
given to his obtuseness in regard to the being and doing of his
fellow-creatures. All this has been well discerned by that
beneficently clear -minded critic, M. Ferdinand Brunetiere.
' One of the worst consequences,' he writes, ' that they [the
theories of the Parnassians, and, in particular, those of Baude
laire] may involve, is, by isolating art, to isolate the artist as
well, making him an idol to himself, and as it were enclosing
him in the sanctuary of his " Ego." Not only, then, does his work
become a question merely concerned with himself — of his griefs
and his joys, his loves and his dreams — but, in order to develop
himself in the direction of his aptitudes, there is no longer any
thing which he respects or spares, there is nothing he will not
subordinate to himself ; which is, to speak by the way, the true
definition of immorality. To make one's self the centre of
things, from a philosophical point of view, is as puerile an
illusion as to see in man "the king of creation," or in the earth

EGO-MANIA 273
what the ancients called " the navel of the world " ; but, from
the purely human point of view, it is the glorification of egoism,
and, consequently, the negation itself of solidarity.'*
Thus Brunetiere notices the ego-mania of the Parnassians, and
affirms their anti-social principles, their immorality ; he believes,
however, that they have freely chosen their point of view. This
is his only error. They are not ego-maniacs by free choice, but
because they must be, and cannot be otherwise. Their ego
mania is not a philosophy or a moral doctrine ; it is their
malady. The impassivity of the Parnassians is, as we have seen, a
callousness with regard, not to everything, but only to their
fellow-creatures, united to the tenderest love for themselves.
But their 'impassibility' has yet another aspect, and those who
have found the term have probably thought above all of this,
without having given themselves a complete account of it. The
indifference which the Parnassians display, and of which they
are particularly proud, applies less to the joys and sufferings of
their fellow-creatures than to the universally recognised moral
law. For them there is neither virtue nor vice, but only the
beautiful and the ugly, the rare and the commonplace. They
took their point of view ' beyond good and evil,' long before
the moral madness of Frederick Nietzsche found this formula.
Baudelaire justifies it in the following terms : ' Poetry . . . has
no other aim than itself ; it cannot have any other, and no
poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of
poem, as that which will have been written only for the pleasure
of writing a poem. I do not wish to say — be it well understood
— that poetry may not ennoble morals, that its final result may
not be to raise man above vulgar interests. This would evi
dently be an absurdity. I say that, if the poet has pursued a
moral aim he has diminished his poetical power, and it is not
imprudent to wager that his work will be bad. Poetry cannot,
under pain of death or degradation, assimilate itself to science or
morals. It has not truth for its object, it has only itself.' And
Th. Gautier, who records this remark, wholly approves of it.
' On the high summits he [the poet] is at peace : pacem summa
tenent,' he says.f in employing an image which occurs dozens of
times in Nietzsche.
Let us nail here first of all a current sophistical artifice
employed by Baudelaire. The question to which he wishes to
reply is this : Is poetry to be moral or not ? Suddenly he
smuggles science, with which it has nothing to do, into his
* F. Brunetiere, 'La Statue de Baudelaire,' Revue des deux Mondes,
September 1, 1892, vol. cxiii., p. 221.
t Les Fleurs du Mat, par Charles Baudelaire, pre'ce'de'es d'une notice par
Thdophile Gautier. 2<= Edition. Paris, 1869, p 22.
18

274

DEGENERATION

demonstration, names it in the same breath with morality, shows
triumphantly that science has nothing in common with poetry,
and then acts as though he had demonstrated the same thing
on the subject of morality. Now, it does not occur to any
reasonable man of the present day to demand of poetry the
teaching of scientific truths, and for generations no serious poet
has thought of treating of astronomy or physics in a didactic
poem. The only question which some minds would wish to
consider as an open one is that of knowing if we may, or may
not, exact of poetry that it be moral, and it is this question that
Baudelaire answers by an unproven affirmative, and by a crafty
shuffling. I have no wish to linger here on this question, not because it
embarrasses me and I should like to avoid it, but because it
seems to me more in place to discuss it when considering the
disciples of the ' Parnassus,' the ' Decadents,' and the ^Esthetes,
who have pushed the doctrine to its extreme. I will for the
present leave uncontradicted the assertion of the Parnassians,
that poetry has not to trouble itself about morality. The poet
ought to stand ' beyond good and evil.' But that could only
reasonably signify an absolute impartiality ; it can only amount
to this — that the poet, in considering some action or aspect,
simply aspires to find himself confronted by a drama, which he
judges only for its beauty or ugliness, without even asking if it
is moral or not. A poet of this kind must necessarily see, then,
as many beautiful as ugly things, as many moral as immoral.
For, taking all in all, moral and beautiful things in humanity
and Nature are at least as frequent as the contrary, and must
even preponderate. For we consider as ugly, either what presents
a deviation from laws which are familiar to us, and to which
we have adapted ourselves, or that in which we recognise the
manifestation of anything prejudicial to us; and we regard as
immoral all that is contrary to the prosperity, or even the
maintenance, of society. Now, the mere fact that we have
looked to find laws is a proof that phenomena corresponding to
recognised laws, and consequently agreeable to us, must be far
more numerous than the phenomena in contradiction to those
laws, and therefore repulsive ; and so, too, the maintenance of
society is a proof that conservative and favourable, i.e., moral,
forces must be more vigorous than destructive, i.e., immoral',
forces. Hence, in a poem which while it did not trouble itself
about morals, was nevertheless truly impartial, as it pretended
to be, morality would be represented on a scale at least as
large as, and even somewhat larger than, immorality. But in
the poetry of the Parnassians this is not the case. It delights
almost exclusively in depravity and ugliness. Theophile

EGO-MANIA 275
Gautier extols, in Mademoiselle de Maupin, the basest sensuality,
which, if it should become the general rule, would carry humanity
back to the condition of savages living in sexual promiscuous-
ness without individual love, and without any family institutions
whatever; Sainte-Beuve, in other respects more romanticist
than Parnassian, builds in his novel Volupte an altar to sexual
pleasure, at which the ancient Asiatic adorers of Ashtaroth
could, without hesitation, have performed their worship ; Catulle
Mendes, who began his literary career by being condemned for
a moral outrage (brought upon himself by his play Le Roman
d'une Nuit) exalts in his later works, of which I will not quote
the titles, one of the most abominable forms of unnatural
license ; Baudelaire sings of carrion, maladies, criminals and
prostitutes ; in short, if one contemplates the world in the
mirror of Parnassian poetry, the impression received is that it
is composed exclusively of vices, crimes and corruption without
the smallest intermixture of healthy emotions, joyous aspects
of Nature and human beings feeling and acting honestly. In
perpetual contradiction to himself, as becomes a truly degenerate
mind, the same Baudelaire, who in one place does not wish poetry
to be confounded with morality, says in another place : ' Modern
art has an essentially devilish [demoniaque] tendency. And it
seems that this infernal side of his nature, which man takes a
pleasure in explaining to himself, increases daily, as if the devil
amused himself by magnifying it through artificial processes, in
imitation of the poultry-farmers, patiently cramming the human
species in his hen-yards to prepare for himself a more succulent
nourishment.'* There is no indifference here to virtue or vice ; it is an
absolute predilection for the latter, and aversion for the former.
Parnassians do not at all hold themselves ' beyond good or
evil,' but plunge themselves up to the neck in evil, and as far
as possible from good. Their feigned ' impartiality ' with regard
to the drama of morality or immorality is in reality a passionate
partisanship for the immoral and the disgusting. It was wrong,
therefore, to think of characterizing them hy ' impassibility.'
Just as they lack feeling only towards their fellow-creatures,
and not towards themselves, so they are only cold and indifferent
towards good, not towards evil ; the latter attracts them, on the
contrary, as forcibly, and fills them as much with feelings of
pleasure, as the good attracts and rejoices the sane majority
of men.
This predilection for evil has been discerned by many
observers, and a good number have endeavoured to explain it
* Baudelaire, in the work quoted by Eugene Crepet, Les Pontes franqais,
vol. iv., pp. 541, 542.

276 DEGENERATION
philosophically. In a lecture on ' Evil as the Object of Poetical
Representation,' Franz Brentano says :*
' Since what is presented in tragedy appears so little desirable
and cheerful, it suggests the idea that these explanations (of the
pleasure we find in it) are less to be sought in the excellence of
the subject than in some peculiar need of the public, which finds
a response alone in the things thus exhibited. . . . Can it be
that man feels, from time to time, the need of a melancholy
emotion, and longs for tragedy as for something which satisfies
this need in the most efficacious way, assisting him, so to speak,
to weep heartily for once ? . . . If for a long time no passions,
such as tragedies excite, have had sway in us, the power to
experience them demands anew, in some way, to manifest itself,
and it is tragedy which comes to our aid ; we feel the emotions
painfully, it is true, but at the same time we experience a bene
ficial alleviation of our need. I think I have observed similar
facts a hundred times — less in myself than in others, in those,
for example, who devour with avidity the newspaper report of
the "latest murder.'"
Professor Brentano here confounds first of all, with a lament
able levity, what is evil and what is saddening — two wholly
different concepts. The death of a beloved being, for example,
is saddening, but there is nothing evil in it, i.e., immoral, unless,
by a subtle quibble, it is proposed to interpret as an immorality
the action of natural forces in the dissolution of the individual.
Further, he gives as an explanation what is only a perfectly
superficial paraphrase — Why do we take pleasure in evil ? Be
cause ... we have evidently in us a tendency to take pleasure
in evil ! Opium facit dormire quia est in eo virtus dormitiva.
M. Fr. Paulhan has treated the question more seriously, but
neither do we get very far with him. 'A contemplative, broad,
inquisitive, penetrating mind,' he says,-)- ' with profound moral
tendencies, which can nevertheless sink into oblivion in great part
during scientific research or aesthetic contemplation ; sometimes
also with a slight natural perversion, or simply a marked ten
dency towards certain pleasures, whatever they may be, which
are not an evil in themselves, and may even be a good, but of
which the abuse is an evil — such are the foundations of the
sentiment (love of evil) which is occupying us. The idea of evil,
by flattering a taste, finds a solid point of support ; and there is
one reason more why it is agreeable — in that it satisfies, ideally,
an inclination which reason hinders from being satisfied really to
satiety.' * Franz Brentano, Das Schlechle als Gegenstand dichterischer Darstellung.
Vortrag gehalten in der Gesellschaft der Litteratur freunde zu Wien. Leipzig,
1892, p. 17.
t Fr. Paulhan, Le nouveau Mysticisme. Paris, 1891, p 94. See, in addi
tion, all the chapter ' L'amour du mal,' pp. 57-99.

EGO-MANIA 277
Here again is this sequence of ideas revolving in a circle, like
a cat at play biting its tail : we have a taste for evil, because we
find a taste for evil. The intellectual ineptitude which M. Paulhan
here reveals is so much the more surprising in that, some pages
above, he came very near the true solution of the enigma.
' There are morbid states,' he there says, ' where the appetites are
depraved ; the patient eagerly swallows coal, earth, or things still
worse. There are others in which the will is vitiated, and the
character warped in some point. The pathological examples are
striking, and the case ofthe Marquis de Sade is one of the most
characteristic. . . . One sometimes finds enjoyment in the evils
suffered by one's self, just as in those of others. The sentiments
of voluptuousness, sorrow and pity, which psychology has
studied, appear to betray sometimes a veritable perversion, and
to contain as elements the love of sorrow for sorrow itself. . . .
Often one has to do with people who desire their own weal
primarily, and then the woe of others. One or other of these
psychical states is visible in many cases of wickedness ; for
example, in the fact of a rich manufacturer falsely accusing a
young man, who is going to marry, of being affected by a
venereal disease, and maintaining his assertionfor the pleasure of
doing so . . . or, again, of a young villain who relishes the plea
sure of theft to the point of crying : '' Even if I were rich, I
should always like to steal." Even the sight of physical suffering
is not always disagreeable ; many people seek it . . . This per
version is probably of all times and of all countries. ... It
would seem that into the mind of a man of our times there
might enter a certain enjoyment in upsetting the order of
nature, which does not appear to have been manifested before
with a similar intensity. It is one of the thousand forms of
recoiling on one's self which characterizes our advanced civiliza
tion.' Here M. Paulhan touches the kernel of the question,
without remarking it or being arrested by it. The love of evil
is not a universally human attribute; it is an 'aberration ' and a
' perversion,' and ' one of the thousand forms of recoiling on one's
self/ otherwise more briefly and more clearly expressed as ego
mania. The literature of penal legislation and mental therapeutics has
registered hundreds of cases of aberration in which the patient
has felt a passionate predilection for the evil and horrible, for
sorrow and death. I should like to quote only one characteristic
example : ' In the autumn of 1884 there died, in a Swiss prison,
Marie Jeanneret, a murderess. After having received a good
education she devoted herself to the care of the sick, not for
the love of doing good, but to satisfy a mad passion. The
sufferings, groans and distorted features of the sick filled her
with secret voluptuousness. She implored the doctors, on her

278 DEGENERATION
knees and with tears, to allow her to assist in dangerous opera
tions, in order to be able to gratify her cravings. The death-
agony of a human being afforded her the height of enjoyment.
Under the pretext of a disease of the eyes, she had consulted
several oculists, and had obtained from them belladonna and
other poisons. Her first victim, a woman, was her friend ; others
followed ; the doctors, to whom she had recommended herself
as nurse, having no suspicions, the less so because she fre
quently changed her residence. An attempt failing in Vienna
led to discovery ; she had poisoned not less than nine persons,
but felt neither repentance nor shame. In prison her most
ardent wish was to fall dangerously ill, in order to satiate herself
in the looking-glass with the contortions of her own features.'*
Thus we recognise, in the light of clinical observation, the true
nature of the Parnassians. Their impassivity, in so far as it is
mere indifference fo the sufferings of others, and to virtue and
vice, proceeds from their ego-mania, and is a consequence of
their obtuseness, which makes it impossible for them to receive
a sufficiently keen presentation of the external world, hence also
of sorrow, vice, or ugliness, so as to be able to respond by normal
reactions, by aversion, indignation, or pity. But in cases where
impassivity constitutes a declared predilection for what is evil
and disgusting, we can see the same aberration which makes of
the imbecile a cruel torturer of animals,*t and of Marie Jean-
neret, cited above, a tenfold poisoner. The whole difference
consists in the degree of impulsion. If it is strong enough, its
consequences are heartless acts and crimes. If it is elaborated
by diseased centres with insufficient force, it can be satisfied by
imagination alone, by poetic or artistic activity.
Of course there have been attempts made to defend aberra
tion as something justified and voluntary, and even to erect it
* Oswald Zimmermann, Die Wonne des Leids. Beitrage zur Erkenntniss
des menschlichen Empfindens in Kunst und Leben. 2te umgearbeitete Auflage.
Leipzig, 1885, p. ill. This book is without value in point of ideas, for it
reproduces, in language deliberately inflated, and visibly aspiring to 'depth,'
the most imbecile drivel of the trio, Edward von Hartmann, Nietzsche and
Gustave Jager. But the author, who is well read, has carefully compiled
some useful materials in certain chapters, particularly in that entitled,
'Association of Voluptuousness and Cruelty' (p. 107 et seq.). (The case of
Jeanneret, first published by Chatelain in the Annates mddico-psychologiques,
has also been quoted by Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psycho-
pathologic. 3te Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 248.
t Sollier, op. cit, p. 123 : 'The imbecile is refined in his persecutions,
and that knowingly. He loves to see suffering. He skins a bird alive,
laughs on hearing its cries and seeing its struggles. He tears off the feet
of a frog, looks at its suffering for a moment, then abruptly crushes it, or
kills it in some other way, as one ofthe imbeciles at Bicetre does. . . . The
imbecile is as cruel to his fellow-creature as to animals, and that even in
his jesting. Thus he will laugh maliciously and mock at a comrade who has
become crippled.'

EGO-MANIA 279
into an intellectual distinction. Thus it is that M. Paul Bourget*
puts into the mouth of the ' Decadents,' with little artifices of
style which do not permit a moment's doubt that he is expressing
his own opinion, the following argument : ' We delight in what
you call our corruptions of style, and we delight at the same
time the refined people of our race and our time. It remains to
be seen whether our exception is not an aristocracy, and
whether, in the aesthetic order, the majority of suffrages repre
sents anything else than the majority of ignorances. ... It is a
self-deception not to have the courage of one's intellectual plea
sure. Let us delight, therefore, in our singularities of ideal and
of form, even if we must shut ourselves up in a solitude without
visitors.' It seems scarcely necessary to show that by these arguments,
in which M. Bourget anticipates the whole delirious ' philosophy '
of Nietzsche, every crime can be glorified as an ' aristocratic '
action. The assassin has ' the courage of his intellectual plea
sure,' the majority which does not approve of him is a majority
of the ' ignorant,' he delights in the ' singularity ' of his ' ideal,'
and for this reason must at the most allow himself to be shut up
in ' a solitude without visitors,' i.e., to speak plainly, in a
reformatory, if ' the majority of ignorances ' does not have him
hanged or guillotined. Has not the ' Decadent ' Maurice Barres
defended and justified Chambige, a specimen of the murderer
for love of murder, with Bourget's theory ?
This same repulsive theorist of the most abandoned anti
social ego-mania denies also that one can speak of a mind as
diseased or healthy. ' There is,' he says.t ' from the meta
physical observer's point of view, neither disease nor health of
the soul ; there are only psychological states, for he perceives in
our sufferings and in our faculties, in our virtues and in our
vices, in our volitions and in our renunciations, only changing
combinations, inevitable, and therefore normal, subject to the
known laws of the association of ideas. Only prejudice, in
which the ancient doctrine of final causes and the belief in the
definite aim of the universe reappear, can make us consider the
loves of Daphnis and Chloe in the valley as natural and healthy,
and the loves of a Baudelaire as artificial and unwholesome.'
To bring this silly sophistry down to its just value, common-
sense has only to recollect the existence of lunatic asylums. But
common-sense has not the right of suffrage among the rhetori
cians of M. Paul Bourget's stamp. We reply to him, then, with
a seriousness he does not merit, that in fact every vital mani
festation, those of the brain as of any other organ, is the
* Paul Bourget, Essais de Psychologie contemporaine. Paris, 1883, p. 28.
f Ibid., pp. 12, 13.

28o DEGENERATION
necessary and only possible effect of the causes which occasion
them, but that, according to the state of the organ and of its
elementary parts, its activity, necessary and natural as such, can
be useful or hurtful to the whole organism. Whether the world
has a purpose is a question that can altogether be left inde
cisive, but the activity of each part of the organism has never
theless, if not the aim, at least unquestionably the effect, of
preserving the whole organism ; if it does not produce this
effect, and if, on the contrary, it thwarts it, it is injurious to the
whole organism, and for such an injurious activity of any par
ticular organ language has coined the word ' disease.' The
sophist who denies that there may be disease and health must
also logically deny that there may be life and death, or, at
least, that death may have some sort of importance. For, as a
matter of fact, given a certain activity of its parts which we call
morbid, the organism perishes, while with an activity of another
nature, which we qualify as healthy, it lives and thrives. As
long, then, as Bourget does not lay down the dogma that pain
is as agreeable as pleasure, decrepitude as satisfactory as vigour,
and death as desirable as life, he proves that he does not know,
or dares not draw from his premise, the just conclusion which
would immediately make the absurdity of it apparent.
The whole theory which must explain and justify the predi
lection for evil has, besides, been invented as an after-thought.
The inclination for what is evil and disgusting existed first, and
was not a consequence of philosophical considerations and self-
persuasion. We have here merely another case of that method
of our consciousness, so often attested in the course of these
inquiries, which consists of inventing rational causes for the
instincts and acts of the unconscious.
In the predilection of the Parnassians for the immoral, criminal
and ugly, we have to deal merely with an organic aberration, and
with nothing else. To pretend that inclinations of this kind
exist in all men, even in the best and sanest, and are merely
stifled by him, while the Parnassians give the rein to theirs, is an
arbitrary and unproved assertion. Observation and the whole
march ofthe historical development of humanity contradict it.
There may be repulsion and attraction in nature — no one
denies it. A glance at the magnetic poles, at the positive and
negative electrodes, suffices to establish this fact. We find this
phenomenon again among the lowest forms of life. Certain
materials attract, others repel them. There is no question here
of an inclination or an expression of the will. We must
rather consider the process as purely mechanical, having its
reason probably in molecular relations which are still unknown
to us. Microbiology gives to the attitude of micro-organisms
towards attractive and repulsive matter the name of 'chemo-

EGO-MANIA 281
taxis ' or chimiotaxia, invented by Pfeffer.* In higher organisms
the conditions are naturally not so simple. Among them also,
it is true, the ultimate cause of inclinations and aversions is
certainly chimiotactic, but the effect of chimiotaxia must neces
sarily manifest itself under another form. A simple cell such
as a bacillus, for example, is repelled directly when it penetrates
into the radius of a chimie body which repels it. But the cell
constituting a portion of a higher organism has not this liberty
of movement. It cannot change its place independently. If it
is now chimiotactically repelled, it cannot escape from the per
nicious action, but must remain exposed to it, and submit to the
disturbances in its vital activity. If these are sufficiently serious
to injure the functions of the whole organism, the latter obtains
knowledge of it, endeavours to perceive their cause, discovers it
also, as a general rule, and does for the suffering cell what the
latter cannot do alone, namely, shields it from the repelling
action. The organism necessarily acquires experience in its
defence against pernicious influences. It learns to know the
circumstances in which they appear, and no longer permits
matters to reach the stage of the really chimiotactic effect, but
for the most part evades disturbing matters before they can
exert a really direct repulsion. The knowledge acquired by the
individual becomes hereditary, transforms itself into an organized
faculty of the species, and the organism feels subjectively, as a
discomfort which may amount to pain, the warning that a per
nicious influence is acting upon it, and that it has to avoid it.
To escape from pain becomes one principal function of the
organism, which it cannot insufficiently provide against or
neglect without expiating that negligence by its ruin.
In the human being processes take place not otherwise than
as they have been here described. The hereditary organized
experience of the species warns him of the noxiousness of
influences to which he is frequently exposed. His outposts
against naturally hostile forces are his senses. Taste and smell
give him, as to repulsive chimiotactic matter, the impressions of
nausea and of stench ; the different kinds of skin-sensations
make him aware, through sensations of pain, heat, or cold, that
a given contact is unfavourable to him ; eye and ear place him
on his guard, by loud, shrill, discordant sensations, against the
mechanical effects of certain physical phenomena. Finally, the
higher cerebral centres respond to recognised noxious influences
of a composite nature, or to the representation of them by an
equally composite reaction of aversion in different degrees of
intensity, from simple discomfort to horror, indignation, dismay,
or fury.
The vehicle of this hereditary, organized, racial experience
* Verworn employs the word ' chemotropism.'

282 DEGENERATION
is the unconscious life ; to it is confided defence against simple,
frequently recurring noxious influences. Nausea at intolerable
tastes, repugnance to insufferable smells, the fear of dangerous
animals, natural phenomena, etc., have become for it an instinct
to which the organism abandons itself without reflection — i.e.,
without the intervention of consciousness. But the human
organism learns to distinguish and avoid not only all that is
directly prejudicial to itself; it acts in the same way with regard
to that which menaces it not as an individual, but as a racial
being, as a member of an organized society ; antipathy to
influences injurious to the maintenance or prosperity of the
society becomes in him an instinct. But this enriching of
organized unconscious cognition represents a higher degree of
development than many human beings attain to. The social
instincts are those that a man acquires last of all, and, in con
formity to a known law, he loses them first when he retrogrades
in his organic development
Consciousness has occasion to declare the dangerous nature
of phenomena, and to defend the organism against it, only if
these phenomena are either quite new, or very rare, so that they
cannot be hereditarily recognised and dreaded ; or if they enclose
in themselves many different elements, and do not act directly,
but only by their more or less remote consequences, so that to
know them exacts a complex activity of representation and
judgment. Thus aversion is always the instinctive, or conscious cognition
of a noxious influence. Pleasure, its opposite, is not merely,
as has been sometimes maintained, the absence of discomfort —
i.e., a negative state — but something positive. Every part of the
organism has definite needs which assert themselves as a con
scious or unconscious tendency, as an inclination or appetite; the
satisfaction of these needs is felt as a pleasure which can rise to a
feeling of bliss. The first need of each organ is to manifest itself
in activity. Its simple activity is a source of pleasure to it, so long
as it does not go beyond its powers. The activity of the cerebral
centres consists in receiving impressions, and in transforming
them into representations and movements. This activity pro
duces in them feelings of pleasure ; they have in consequence a
strong desire to receive impressions so as to be put into activity
by them, and experience feelings of pleasure.
This, broadly sketched, is the natural history ofthe feelings of
pleasure and pain. The reader who has mastered it will ex
perience no difficulty in comprehending the nature of aberration.
Unconscious life is subject to the same biological laws as con
scious life. The vehicle of the unconscious is the same nervous
tissue — although, it may be, another portion of the system— in
which consciousness is also elaborated, The unconscious is just

EGO-MANIA 283
as little infallible as consciousness. It can be more highly
developed or retarded in its development ; it can be more or less
stupid or intelligent. If the unconscious is incompletely
developed, it distinguishes badly and judges falsely, it deceives
itself in the knowledge of what is prejudicial or favourable to it,
and instinct becomes unreliable or obtuse. Then we get the
phenomenon of indifference to what is ugly, loathsome, im
moral. We know that among the degenerate divers arrested develop
ments and malformations appear. Particular organs or entire
systems of organs are arrested at a degree of development which
corresponds to infancy, or even to the foetal life. If the highest
cerebral centres of the degenerate stop in their development
at a very low stage, they become imbeciles or idiots. If the
arrest of development strikes the nervous centres of unconscious
life, the degenerate lose the instincts which, in normal beings,
find expression in nausea and disgust at certain noxious influ
ences ; I might say, their unconscious life suffers from imbecility
or idiocy.
Again, we have seen in the preceding chapter that the impres
sionability of the nerves and brain in the degenerate subject is
blunted. Hence he only perceives strong impressions, and it is
only these which excite his cerebral centres to that intellectual
and motor activity which produces in them feelings of pleasure.
Now, disagreeable impressions are naturally stronger than agree
able or indifferent impressions, for if they were not stronger we
should not feel them as painful, and they would not induce the
organism to make efforts to defend itself. To procure, then, the
feelings of pleasure which are linked with the activity of the
cerebral centres, to satisfy the need of functioning which is
peculiar to the cerebral centres as to all the other organs, the
degenerate person seeks impressions which are strong enough to
excite to activity his obtuse and inert centres. But such im
pressions are precisely those which the healthy man feels as
painful or repugnant. Thus, the aberrations or perversions of
the degenerate find explanation. They have a longing for
strong impressions, because these only can put their brains into
activity, and this desired effect on their centres is only exercised
by impressions that sane beings dread because of their violence,
i.e., painful, repugnant and revolting impressions.
To say that every human being has secretly a certain predi
lection for the evil and the abominable is absurd : the only little
spark of truth contained in this foolish assertion is, that even the
normal human being becomes obtuse when fatigued, or exhausted
by illness ; i.e., he falls into the state which, in the degenerate, is
chronic. Then he presents naturally the same phenomena as we
have attested in the case of the latter, although in a much lowei

284 DEGENERATION
degree. He may find pleasure, then, in crime and ugliness, and
in the former rather than in the latter; for crimes are social
injuries, while uglinesses are the visible form of forces unfavour
able to the individual ; but social instincts are feebler than the
instincts of self-preservation. Consequently they are sooner
put to sleep, and for this reason the repulsion against crime
disappears more quickly than that against ugliness. In any
case, this state is also an aberration in the normal being,
but imputable to fatigue, and in him is not chronic, as in
the degenerate, nor does it amount to the hidden fundamental
character of his being, as the sophists who calumniate him
pretend. An uninterrupted line of development leads from the French
romantic school to the Parnassians, and all the germs of the
aberrations which confront us in full expansion among the latter
can be distinguished in the former. We have seen in the pre
ceding book how superficial and poor in ideas their poetry is,
how they exalt their imagination above the observation of reality,
and what importance they assign to their world of dreams.
Sainte-Beuve, who at first joined their group, says on this
subject, with a complacency which proves he was not conscious
of expressing any blame : ' The Romance School . . . had a
thought, a cult, viz., love of art and passionate inquisitiveness for
a vivid expression, a new turn, a choice image, a brilliant rhyme :
they wished for every one of their frames a peg of gold. [A re
markably false image, let it be said in passing. A rich frame
may be desired for a picture, but as to the nail which supports it,
regard will be had to its solidity and not to its preciousness.]
Children if you will, but children of the Muses, who never
sacrifice to ordinary grace [grace vulgaire]!*
Let us hold this admission firmly, that the romantic writers
were children ; they were so in their inaptitude to comprehend
the world and men, in the seriousness and zeal with which they
gave themselves up to their game of rhymes, in the artlessness
with which they placed themselves above the precepts of morality
and good sense in use among adults. Let us exaggerate this
childishness a little (without allying with it the wild and exuberant
imagination of a Victor Hugo, and his gift of lightning-like
rapidity of association, evoking the most startling antitheses), and
we obtain the literary figure of Thdophile Gautier, whom the
imbecile Barbey d'Aurevilly could name in the same breath with
Goethe.f evidently for the sole reason that the sound of the
great German poet's name in French pronunciation has a certain
resemblance to that of Gautier, but of whom one of his admirers,
* Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du Lundi, vol. xiv., p. 70. Article on the com
plete poems of Theodore de Banville, October 12th, 1857.
t Barbey d' Aurevilly, Goethe et Diderot. Paris, 1882.

EGO-MANIA 28;
M. J. K. Huysmans, says :* ' Des Esseintes [the hero of his
novel] became gradually indifferent to Gautier's work ; his
admiration for that incomparable painter had gone on diminish
ing from day to day, and now he was more astonished than
delighted by his indifferent descriptions. The impression left
by the objects was fixed on his keenly observant eye, but it was
localized there, and had not penetrated further into his brain
and flesh [?] ; like a monstrous reflector, he was constantly
limited to reverberate his environment with an impersonal
distinctness.' When M. Huysmans regards Gautier as an impersonal mirror
of reality, he is the victim of an optical illusion. In verse as in
prose, Gautier is a mechanical worker, who threads one line of
glittering adjectives after another, without designing anything
particular. His descriptions never give a clear outline of the
object he wishes to depict. They recall some crude mosaic of
the later Byzantine decadence, the different stones of which are
lapis-lazuli, malachite, chrysoprase and jasper, and which yield,
for this reason, an impression of barbarous splendour, while
scarcely any design is discernible. In his ego-mania, lacking all
sympathy with the external world, he does not suspect what
sorrows and joys its drama encloses, and just as he feels nothing
in the prospect before him, so neither can he awaken in the
reader emotion of any sort by his listless and affected attempts
to render it. The only emotions of which he is capable, apart
from his arrogance and vanity, are those connected with sex ;
hence, in his works we merely find alternations between glacial
coldness and lubricity.
If we exaggerate Thebphile Gautier's worship of form and
lasciviousness, and if to his indifference towards the world and
men we associate the aberration which caused it to degenerate
into a predilection for the bad and the loathsome, we have
before us the figure of Baudelaire. We must stop there awhile,
for Baudelaire is — even more than Gautier — the intellectual
chief and model of the Parnassians, and his influence dominates
the present generation of French poets and authors, and a
portion also of English poets and authors, to an omnipotent
degree. It is not necessary to demonstrate at length that Baudelaire
was a degenerate subject. He died of general paralysis, after he
had wallowed for months in the lowest depths of insanity. But
even if no such horrible end had protected the diagnosis from
all attack, there would be no doubt as to its accuracy, seeing
that Baudelaire showed all the mental stigmata of degeneration
during the whole of his life. He was at once a mystic and an
* J. K. Huysmans, A Rebours. 4eme mille. Paris, 1892, p. 251.

286 DEGENERATION
erotomaniac,* an eater of hashish and opium ;f he felt himself
attracted in the characteristic fashion by other degenerate minds,
mad or depraved', and appreciated, for example, above all
authors, the gifted but mentally-deranged Edgar Poe, and the
opium-eater Thomas de Quincey. He translated Poe's tales, and
devoted to them an enthusiastic biography and critique, while
from the Confessions of an Opium-Eater, by De Quincey, he com
piled an exhaustive selection, to which he wrote extravagant
annotations. The peculiarities of Baudelaire's mind are revealed to us in
the collection of his poems, to which he has given a title
betraying at once his self-knowledge and his cynicism : Les
Fleurs du Mai — ' The Flowers of Evil.' The collection is not
complete. There lack some pieces which only circulate in manu
script, because they are too infamous to bear the full publicity
of a marketable book. I will take my quotations, however,
from the printed verses only, which are quite sufficient to
characterize their author.
Baudelaire hates life and movement. In the piece entitled
Les Hiboux, he shows us his owls sitting in a row, motionless,
under the black yews, and continues :
'Leur attitude au sage enseigne
Qu'il faut en ce monde qu'il craigne
Le tumulte et le mouvement.
L'homme ivre d'une ombre qui passe
Porte toujours le chatiment
D'avoir voulu changer de place.'
Beauty says of herself, in the piece of that name :
' Je hais le mouvement qui de*place les lignes ;
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.'

* Paul Bourget, op. cit, p. 6 : ' He is a libertine, and depraved visions
amounting to Sadism disturb the very man who comes to worship the raised
finger of his Madonna. The morose orgies of the vulgar Venus, the heady
fumes of the black Venus, the refined delights of the learned Venus the
criminal audacity of the bloodthirsty Venus, have left their memories in the
most spiritualized of his poems. An offensive odour of vile alcoves escapes
from these . . . verses. . . .' And p. 19 :' ... It is not so with the mystic
soul — and that of Baudelaire's was one. For this soul did not content itself
with a faith in an idea. It saw God. He was for it not a word not a
symbol, not an abstraction, but a Being, in whose company the soul lived
as we live with a father who loves us.'
t The*ophiIe Gautier, who was himself a member of a hashish club tries
to make us believe (Les Fleurs du Mai, p. 57 et seq.), that Baudelaire was
addicted to the use of narcotic poisons only with the object of ' physiological
experiment ' ; but we know the tendency of the degenerate to represent the
impulsions of which they are ashamed as acts of free will, for which they
have all sorts of palliating explanations.

EGO-MANIA 287
He abhors the natural as much as he loves the artificial. Thus
he depicts his ideal world (Rive Parisien) :
' De ce terrible paysage
Que jamais ceil mortel ne vit,
Ce matin encore l'image,
Vague et lointaine, me ravit . . .
' J'avais banni de ces spectacles
Le vegetal irregulier . . .
' Je savourais dans mon tableau
L'enivrante [I] monotonie
Du mdtal, du marbre et de l'eau.
' Babel d'escaliers et d'arcades
C'etait un palais infini,
Plein de bassins et de cascades
Tombant dans l'or mat ou bruni ;
' Et des cataractes pesantes,
Comme des rideaux de cristal,
' Se suspendaient, dblouissantes,
A des murailles de me*tal.
' Non d'arbres, mais de colonnades
Les e*tangs dormants s'entouraient,
Ou de gigantesques naiades,
Comme des femmes, se miraient.
' Des nappes d'eau s'epanchaient, bleues,
Entre des quais roses et verts,
Pendant des millions de lieues,
Vers les confins de l'univers ;
' C'dtaient des pierres inouies
Et des flots magiques ; c'eUaient
D'immenses glaces e*blouies
Par tout ce qu'elles refletaient.
' Et tout, meme la couleur noire,
Semblait fourbi, clair, irisd . . .
' Nul astre d'ailleurs, nuls vestiges
De soleil, meme au bas du ciel,
Pour illuminer ces prodiges,
Qui brillaient d'un feu personnel (!)
' Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles
Planait (terrible nouveaute* !
Tout pour l'oeil, rien pour les oreilles !)
Un silence d'eterniteV
Such is the world he represents to himself, and which fills
him with enthusiasm : not an ' irregular ' plant, no sun, no stars,
no movement, no noise, nothing but metal and glass, i.e., some
thing like a tin landscape from Nuremberg, only larger and of
more costly material, a plaything for the child of an American
millionaire suffering from the wealth-madness of parvenus, with

288 DEGENERATION
a little electric lamp in the interior, and a mechanism which
slowly turns the glass cascades, and makes the glass sheet of
water slide. Such must necessarily be the aspect of the ego
maniac's ideal world. Nature leaves him cold or repels him,
because he neither perceives nor comprehends her ; hence, where
the sane man sees the picture of the external world, the ego
maniac is surrounded by a dark void in which, at most, uncom-
prehended nebulous forms are hovering. To escape the horror
of them he projects, as from a magic-lantern, coloured shadows
of the images which fill his consciousness ; but these representa
tions are rigid, inert, uniform and infantile, like the morbid and
weak cerebral centres by which they are elaborated.
The incapacity of the ego-maniac to feel aright external
impressions, and the toil with which his brain works, are also
the key of the frightful tedium of which Baudelaire complains,
and of the profound pessimism with which he contemplates the
world and life. Let us hear him in Le Voyage :
' Nous avons vu partout . . .
Le spectacle ennuyeux de l'immortel peche* :
' La femme, esclave vile, orgueilleuse et stupide,
Sans rire s'adorant et s'aimant sans degout ;
L'homme, tyran goulu, paillard, dur et cupide,
Esclave de l'esclave et ruisseau dans logout ;
' Le bourreau qui jouit, le martyr qui sanglote ;
La fete qu'assaisonne et parfume le sang ; . . .
' Et les moins sots, hardis amants de la de*mence,
Fuyant le grand troupeau parque* par le Destin,
Et se refugiant dans l'opium immense [!].
— Tel est du globe entier l'eternel bulletin . . .
' O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps ! levons l'ancre !
Ce pays nous ennuie, O Mort 1 Appareillons !
' Nous voulons . . .
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe ?
Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveau !'
This desperate cry towards the ' new ' is the natural com
plaint of a brain which longs to feel the pleasures of action, and
greedily craves a stimulation which his powerless sensory nerves
cannot give him. Let a sane man imagine the state of mind
into which he would fall if he were imprisoned in a cell where
no ray of light, no noise, no scent from the outer world would
reach him. He would then have an accurate idea of the chronic
state of mind in the ego-maniac, eternally isolated by the im
perfection of his nervous system from the universe, from its
joyous sounds, from its changing scenes and from its captivating
movement. Baudelaire cannot but suffer terribly from ennui
for his mind really learns nothing new and amusing and is

EGO-MANIA 289
forced constantly to indulge in the contemplation of. his ailing
and whimpering self.
The qply pictures which fill the world of his thought are
sombre, wrathful and detestable. He says (Un Mort joyeux) :
' Dans une terre grasse et pleine d'escargots
Je veux creuser moi-meme une fosse profounde
Oil je puisse a loisir Staler mes vieux os
Et dormir dans l'oubli comme un requin dans l'onde . . .
Plut6t que d'implorer une larme du monde
Vivant, j'aimerais mieux inviter les corbeaux
A saigner tous les bouts de ma carcasse immonde.
' O vers ! noir compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux,
Voyez venir a vous un mort libre et joyeux !'
In La Cloche fele'e, he says of himself:
' . . . Mon ame est fele'e, et lorsqu'en ses ennuis
Elle veut de ses chants peupler l'air froid des nuits
11 arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie
Semble le rale e*pais d'un blesse* qu'on oublie
Au bord d'un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts.1
Spleen : ' . . . Mon triste cerveau . . .
C'est . . . un immense caveau
Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commune.
— Je suis un cimetiere abhorre de la lune
Ou, comme des remords, se trainent de longs vers. . . .
Horreur sympathique :
' Cieux de'chire's comme des greves,
En vous se mire mon orgueil 1
Vos vastes nuages en deuil.
' Sont les corbillards de mes reves,
Et vos lueurs sont le reflet,
De l'Enfer ou mon cceur se plait !'
Le Coucher du Soleil romantique :
' Une odeur de tombeau dans les te*nebres nage,
Et mon pied peureux froisse, au bord du marecage,
Des crapauds impreVus et de froids limacons.'
Dance macabre: The poet speaking to a skeleton :
' Aucuns t'appelleront une caricature,
Qui ne comprennent pas, amants ivres de chair,
L elegance sans nom de l'humaine armature.
Tu reponds, grand squelette, a mon gout le plus cher ! . . .'
Une Charogne :
' Rappelez-vous l'objet que nous vimes, mon ame,
Ce beau matin d'ele* si doux :
Au defour d'un sentier une charogne infame
Sur un lit seme* de cailloux,
*9

290 DEGENERATION
' Les jambes en Pair, comme une femme lubrique
Brulante et suant les poisons,
Ouvrait d'une facon nonchalante et cynique
Son ventre plein d'exhalaisons . . .
' Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe [!]
Comme une fleur s'epanouir.
La puanteur e*tait si forte, que sur l'herbe
Vous crutes vous eVanouir . . .
' Et pourtant vous serez semblable k cette ordure,
A cette horrible infection,
Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,
Vous, mon ange et ma passion !
* Oui ! telle vous serez, 6 la reine des graces,
Apres les derniers sacrements,
Quand vous irez, sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses,
Moisir parmi les ossements. . . .'
That which pleases Baudelaire most are these pictures of
death and corruption which I could quote in still greater numbers
if I did not think that these examples sufficed. However, next
to the frightful and the loathsome it is the morbid, the criminal
and the lewd, which possess the strongest attraction for him.
Le Rive d'un Curieux :
' Connais-tu, comme moi, la douleur savoureuse ? . . .'
Spleen : ' Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litiere
Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux. . . .
Le Vin du Solitaire :
' Un baiser libertin de la maigre Adeline. . . .'
Le Cre'puscule du Soir :
' Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel ; . . .
Et l'homme impatient se change en bete fauve. . .
La Destruction :
' Sans cesse h mes cote's s'agite le Demon . . .
Je l'avale et le sens qui brule mon poumon
Et l'emplit d'un desir eternel et coupable . . .
4 II me conduit . . .
Haletant et brise de fatigue, au milieu
Des plaines de l'Ennui, profondes et de"sertes,
' Et jette dans mes yeux . . .
Des vetements souille"s, des blessures ouvertes
Et l'appareil sanglant de la Destruction !'
In Une Martyre he describes complacently and in detail a
bedroom in which a young, presumably pretty courtesan has

EGO-MANIA 291
been murdered ; the assassin had cut off her head and carried it
away. The poet is only curious to know one thing :
' L'homme vindicatif que tu n'as pu, vivante,
Malgrd tant d'amour, assouvir,
Combla-t-il sur ta chair inerte et complaisante
L'immensite' de son desir ?
Femmes damne'es, a piece dedicated to the worst aberration of
degenerate women, terminates with this ecstatic apostrophe to
the heroines of unnatural vice :
4 O vierges, 6 demons, 6 monstres, 6 martyres,
De la reaiitd grands esprits contempteurs,
Chercheuses d'infini, deVotes et satyres,
Tantot pleines de cris, tantot pleines de pleurs,
Vous que dans votre enfer mon ime a poursuivies,
Pauvres sceurs, je vous aime autant que je vous plains. . . .'

Preface .

' Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,
N'ont pas encore brode* de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C'est que notre ame, helas ! n'est pas assez hardie. . . .'
But if he is not bold enough to commit crimes himself, he
does not leave a moment's doubt that he loves them, and much
prefers them to virtue, just as he prefers the ' end of autumns,
winters, springs steeped in mud,' to the fine season of the year
(Brumes et Pluies). He is ' hostile to the universe rather than
indifferent ' (Les sept Vieillards). The sight of pain leaves him
cold, and if tears are shed before him they only evoke in his
mind the image of a landscape with running waters.
Madrigal triste :
' Que m'importe que tu sois sage ?
Sois belle ! et sois triste ! Les pleurs
Ajoutent un charme au visage,
Comme le fleuve au paysage.'
In the struggle between Abel et Cain he takes the part of the
latter without hesitation :
' Race d'Abel, dors, bois et mange ;
Dieu te sourit complaisamment.
' Race de Cam, dans la fange
Rampe et meurs mise'rablement.
' Race d'Abel, ton sacrifice
Flatte le nez du Seiaphin.
' Race de Cain, ton supplice
Aura-t-il jamais une fin ?
' Race d'Abel, vois tes semailles
Et ton bewail venir a bien ;

292 DEGENERATION
' Race de Cain, tes entrailles
Hurlent la faim comme un vieux chien.
' Race d'Abel, chauffe ton ventre
A ton foyer patriarchal ;
' Race de Cain, dans ton antre
Tremble de froid, pauvre chacal !
' Ah ! race d'Abel, ta charogne
Engraissera le sol fumant !
' Race de Cain, ta besogne
N'est pas faite suffisamment.
' Race d'Abel, voici ta honte :
Le fer est vaincu par l'^pieu ! [?]
' Race de Cain, au ciel monte
Et sur la terre jette Dieu !'
If he prays it is to the devil (Les Litanies de Satan) :
' Gloire et louange a toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs
Du Ciel, ou tu re'gnas, et dans les profondeurs
De l'Enfer, ou, vaincu, tu reves en silence !
Fais que mon ame un jour, sous l'Arbre de Science,
Pres de toi se repose. . . .'
Here there mingles with the aberration that mysticism which
is never wanting in the degenerate. Naturally, the love of evil
can only take the form of devil-worship, or diabolism, if the
subject is a believer, if the supernatural is held to be a real thing.
Only he who is rooted with all his feelings in religious faith will,
if he suffers from moral aberration, seek bliss in the adoration of
Satan, in impassioned blasphemy of God and the Saviour, in
the violation of the symbols of faith, or will wish to incite un
natural voluptuousness by mortal sin and infernal damnation,
though humouring it in the messe noir, in the presence of a
really consecrated priest, and in a hideous travesty of all the
forms of the liturgy.
Besides the devil, Baudelaire adores only one other power,
viz., voluptuousness. He prays thus to it (La Priere d'un
Paien) : ' Ah ! ne ralentis pas tes flammes 1
Rechauffe mon cceur engourdi,
Volupte\ torture des ames ! . . .
Volupte^ sois toujours ma reine !'
To complete the portrait of this mind, let us cite two more
of his peculiarities. He suffers first from images of perpetual
anguish, as his piece testifies (Le Gouffre), which is valuable as
a confession :
' . . . Tout est abime, — action, ddsir, reve,
Parole ! et sur mon poil qui tout droit se releve
Mainte fois de la peur je sens passer le vent.

EGO-MANIA 293
' En haut, en bas, partout, la profondeur, la greve,
Le silence, l'espace affreux et captivant . . .
Sur le fonde de mes nuits, Dieu, de son doigt savant,
Dessine un cauchemar multiforme et sans treve.
4 J'ai peur du sommeil comme on a peur d'un grand trou,
Tout plein de vague horreur, menant on ne sait ou ;
Je ne vois qu' infini par toutes les fenetres,
' Et mon esprit, toujours du vertige hante*,
Jalouse du neant l'insensibilite.'
Baudelaire describes here accurately enough that obsession
of degenerates which is called 'fear of abysses' (cremnophobia).*
His second peculiarity is his interest in scents. He is attentive
to them, interprets them ; they provoke in him all kinds of
sensations and associations. He expresses himself thus on this
subject in Correspondances :
' Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se repondent.
' II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrumpus, riches et triomphants,
* Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le muse, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.'
He loves woman through his sense of smell ... (' Le parfum
de tes charmes etranges,' A une Malabaraise), and never fails,
in describing a mistress, to mention her exhalations.
Parfum exotique :
' Quand les deux yeux fermes, en un soir chaud d'automne,
Je respire l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux,
je vois se derouler des rivages heureux
Qu'eblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone.'
La Chevelure :
' O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l'encolure !
O boucles ! O parfum charge de nonchaloir ! . . .
' La langoureuse Asie et la brulante Afrique,
Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque deTunt,
Vit dans tes profondeurs, foret aromatique !'
Naturally, instead of good odours, he prefers the perfumes
which affect the healthy man as stinks. Putrefaction, decom
position and pestilence charm his nose.
Le Flacon :
' II est de forts parfums pour qui toute matiere
Est poreuse. On dirait qu'ils pdnetrent le verre . . .
Parfois on trouve un vieux flacon qui se souvient,
D'ou jaillit toute vive une ame qui revient.
* Dr. E. Regis, Manuel -bratique de Mddecine mentale. 2e Edition. Paris,
1892, p. 279.

294 DEGENERATION
' Voilk le souvenir enivrant qui voltige
Dans l'air trouble" ; les yeux se ferment ; le vertige
Saisit fame vaincue et la pousse a deux mains
Vers un gouffre obscurci de miasmes humains ;
' II la terrasse au bord d'un gouffre seculaire,
Oil, Lazare odorant de*chirant son suaire,
Se meut dans son reveil le cadavre spectral
D'un vieil amour ranci, charmant et sepulcral.
' Ainsi, quand je serai perdu dans la memoire
Des hommes, dans le coin d'une sinibtre armoire
Quand on m'aura jete, vieux flacon desole*,
Decrepit, poudreux, sale, abject, visqueux, fele",
' Je serai ton cercueil, aimable pestilence !
Le temoin de ta force et de ta virulence,
Cher poison pre'pare' par les anges ! . . .'
We now know all the features which compose Baudelaire's
character. He has the ' cult of self';* he abhors nature, move
ment and life ; he dreams of an ideal of immobility, of eternal
silence, of symmetry and artificiality ; he loves disease, ugliness
and crime ; all his inclinations, in profound aberration, are
opposed to those of sane beings ; what charms his sense of
smell is the odour of corruption ; his eye, the sight of carrion,
suppurating wounds and the pain of others ; he feels happy in
muddy, cloudy, autumn weather ; his senses are excited by
unnatural pleasures only. He complains of frightful tedium
and of feelings of anguish ; his mind is filled with sombre
ideas, the association of his ideas works exclusively with sad
or loathsome images ; the only thing which can distract or
interest him is badness — murder, blood, lewdness and falsehood.
He addresses his prayers to Satan, and aspires to hell.
He has attempted to make his peculiarities pass for a comedy
and a studied pose. In a note placed at the head of the first
edition (1857) ofthe Fleurs du Mai, he says: 'Among the
following pieces, the most characteristic . . . has been con
sidered, at least by men of intellect, only for what it really is :
the imitation of the arguments of ignorance and fury. Faithful
to his painful programme, the author has had, like a good
comedian, to fashion his mind to all sophisms, as to all corruptions.
This candid declaration will, doubtless, not prevent honest critics
from ranking him among the theologians of the people,' etc.
Some of his admirers accept this explanation or appear to accept
it. ' His intense disdain of the vulgar,' murmurs Paul Bourget,
' breaks out in extremes of paradox, in laborious mystification
. . . Among many readers, even the keenest, the fear of being
duped by this grand disdainer hinders full ad miration, f The
* Les Fleurs du Mai, p. 5 — 'le culte de soi-meme.' This is Theophile
Gautier's own term.
f Paul Bourget, op. cit, p. 31.

EGO-MANIA ' 295
term has become a commonplace of criticism for Baudelaire ; he
is a ' mystificateur ' ; everything for him is only a deception ;
he himself neither feels nor believes anything he expresses in his
poetry. It is twaddle, and nothing else. A rhetorician of the
Paul Bourget sort, threshing straw, and curling scraps of paper,
may believe that an inwardly free man is capable of preserving
artificially, all his life long, the attitude of a galley-slave or a
madman, well knowing he is only acting a comedy. The expert
knows that the choice of an attitude, such as Baudelaire's, is
a proof in itself of deep-seated cerebral disturbance.
Mental therapeutics has declared that persons who simulate
insanity with some perseverance, even with a rational object, as,
for example, in the case of certain criminals on their trial, in order
to escape punishment, are almost without exception really mad,*
although not to the degree they try to represent, just as the
inclination to accuse one's self, or to boast, of imaginary crimes
is a recognised symptom of hysteria. The assertion of Baude
laire himself, that his Satanism is only a studied rdle, has no
sort of value whatever. As is so frequently the case among
the 'higher degenerates,' he feels in his heart that his aberra
tions are morbid, immoral and anti-social, and that all decent
persons would despise him or take pity on him, if they were con
vinced that he was really what he boasts of being in his poems ;
he has recourse, consequently, to the childish excuse that male
factors also often have on their lips, viz., ' that it was not meant
* Ch J. J. Sazaret, Etude sur la Simulation de la Folie. Nancy, 1888.
This pamphlet by a beginner, which contains a useful collection of clinical
observations, is particularly amusing, in that all the observations cited by the
author demonstrate exactly the reverse of what he proposes to prove. After
having himself asserted (p. 22) that ' the victims of hysteria are much given
to simulate all sorts of maladies,' he says (p. 29) : ' Persons mentally
affected now and then simulate madness ; the case is rare, but it has never
theless been verified, and if it has not been oftener recorded, it is, we believe,
that observers have limited themselves to a superficial examination, and cer
tain actions have not been analyzed.' The case is so far from rare that it is
pointed out in every observation quoted by the author. In the case of Bail-
larger (2nd observation), the so-called simulatrix had been in a lunatic asylum
eight years before, as a fully confirmed mad-woman ; in the case of Morel
(4th observation), the simulator 'had a nervous attack at the sight of a
lancet,' which is clearly aichmophobia and a certain stigma of degeneration ;
in the 6th observation Morel admits that ' the extravagance of the subject,
his fear of poison ' (thus a case of pronounced iophobia), ' and the fact of
picking up filth, indicate a possible mental disorder'; the case of Foville
(10th observation) ' had a certain number of insane in his family' ; the case
of Legrand du Saulle (18th observation) was ' the son of a hysterical woman
and grandson of a madman' ; the case of Bonnet and Delacroix (19th obser
vation) 'numbers some insane among his ancestors' ; the case of Billod
(22nd observation) ' has often manifested disturbance and delirium,' etc. All
these supposed simulators were insane quite unmistakably, and the fact that
they intentionally exaggerated the symptoms of their delirium was only a
further proof of their alienation.

296 DEGENERATION
seriously.' Perhaps also Baudelaire's consciousness experienced
a sincere horror of the perverse instincts of his unconscious life,
and he sought to make himself believe that with his Satanism he
was laughing at the Philistines. But such a tardy palliation
does not deceive the psychologist, and is of no importance for his
judgment.

CHAPTER III.
DECADENTS AND ESTHETES.
As on the death of Alexander the Great his generals fell on the
conqueror's empire, and each one seized a portion of land, so
did the imitators that Baudelaire numbered among his con
temporaries and the generation following — many even without
waiting for his madness and death — take possession of some one
of his peculiarities for literary exploitation. The school of
Baudelaire reflects the character of its master, strangely distorted ;
it has become in some sort like a prism, which diffracts this light
into its elementary rays. His delusion of anxiety (anxiomania),
and his predilection for disease, death and putrefaction (necro
philia), have fallen, as we have seen in the preceding book, to
the lot of M. Maurice Rollinat. M. Catulle Mendes has inherited
his sexual aberrations and lasciviousness, and besides all the
newer French pornographists rely upon them for proving the
' artistic raison d'etre ' of their depravity. Jean Richepin, in
La Chanson des Gueux, has spied in him, and copied, his glorifica
tion of crime, and, further, in Les Blasphemes, has swelled Baude
laire's imprecations and prayers to the devil to the size of a fat
volume, in a most dreary and wearisome manner. His mysticism
suckles the Symbolists, who, after his example, pretend to
perceive mysterious relations between colours and the sensations
of the other senses, with this difference, that they hear colours
while he smelt them ; or, if you will, they have an eye in their
ear, while he saw with the nose. In Paul Verlaine we meet again
his mixture of sensuality and pietism. Swinburne has established
an English depot for his Sadism, compounded of lewdness and
cruelty, for his mysticism and for his pleasure in crime, and
I greatly fear that Giosue' Carducci himself, otherwise so richly
gifted and original, must have turned his eyes towards the
Litanies de Satan, when he wrote his celebrated Ode d Satan.
The diabolism of Baudelaire has been specially cultivated by
Villiers de l'lsle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly. These two men
have, in addition to the general family likeness of the degenerate,

EGO-MANIA 297
a series of special features in common. Villiers and Barbey
attributed to themselves, as the deranged frequently do, a
fabulous genealogy ; the former aspired to be a descendant of
Count del'Isle-Adam, the celebrated Marshal and Grand-Master
of Malta (who as such could not be married, be it understood !),
and he claimed one day, in a letter addressed to the Queen of
England, the surrender of Malta in virtue of his right of heritage.
Barbey annexed the aristocratic surname of d'Aurevilly, and
during the whole of his life spoke of his noble race — which
had no existence. Both made a theatrical display of fanatical
Catholicism, but revelled at the same time in studied blas
phemies against God.* Both delighted in eccentricities of
costume and modes of life, and Barbey had the habit of grapho
maniacs, which we know already, of writing his letters and his
literary works with different coloured inks. Villiers de l'lsle-
Adam, and still more Barbey d'Aurevilly, created a class of
poetry to the worship of the devil, which recalls the craziest
depositions of witches of the Middle Ages when put to the
torture. Barbey especially may be said to have gone, in this
respect, to the limits of the imaginable. His book Le Pritre
marie might be written by a contemporary of witch-burners ;
but it is surpassed in its turn by Les Diaboliques, a collection of
crack-brained histories, where men and women wallow in the
most hideous license, continually invoking the devil, extolling
and serving him. All the invention in these ravings Barbey
stole with utter shamelessness from the books of the Marquis de
Sade, without a shade of shame ; that which belongs properly to
him is the colouring of Catholic theology he gives to his profli
gacies. If I only speak in general terms of the books mentioned
here, without entering into details, without summarizing the
contents, or quoting characteristic passages, it is because my
demonstrations do not require a plunge into this filth, and it is
sufficient to point the finger from afar at the sink of vice which
testifies to Baudelaire's influence on his contemporaries.
Barbey, the imitator of Baudelaire, has himself found an
imitator in M. Jos-iphin Peladan, whose first novel, Vice supreme,
occupies an eminent place in the literature of diabolism. M.
Peladan, who had not yet promoted himself to the dignity of a
first-class Assyrian king, paraphrases in his book what he means
by ' vice suprime ' .• ' Let us deny Satan ! Sorcery has always
sorcerers . . . superior minds which have no need of conjuring-
book, their thought being a page written by hell for hell.
Instead of the kid they have killed the good soul within them, and
* Fr. Paulhan, op. cit, p. 92 : 'While affecting the faith of a seminarist,
he fVilliers] delighted in blasphemy. He considered the right to blaspheme
as his peculiar property. . . . This Catholic Breton loved the society of Satan
more than that of God.'

298 DEGENERATION
are going to the Sabbath of the Word.' [May the reader not
stumble over obscurities ! What were Peladan if he were not
mystical ?] ' They assemble to profane and soil the idea. Exist
ing vice does not satisfy them ; they invent, they rival each
other in seeking for, new evil, and if they find it they applaud
each other. Which is worst, the Sabbath-orgies of the body or
those of the mind, of criminal action or of perverted thought ?
To reason, justify, to apotheosize evil, to establish its ritual, to
show the excellence of it — is this not worse than to commit it ?
To adore the demon, or love evil, the abstract or the concrete
term of one and the same fact. There is blindness in the grati
fication of instinct, and madness in the perpetration of misdeeds ;
but to conceive and theorize exacts a calm operation of the
mind which is the vice suprime!*
Baudelaire has expressed this much more concisely in one
single verse: 'La conscience dans le Mai' ('consciousness in
evil').t The same Villiers de l'lsle-Adam, who has copied his
diabolism from Baudelaire, has appropriated the predilection of
the latter for the artificial, and has raised it to a funny pitch in
his novel L'lUve future. In this half-fantastic half-satirical and
wholly mad book, he imagines, as the next development of
humanity, a state in which the woman of flesh and blood
will be abolished, and be replaced by a machine to which he
allows (which is a little contradictory) the shape of a woman's
body, and which it will be sufficient with the help of a screw so to
dispose, in order to obtain from it at once whatever happens
to be desired : love, caprices, infidelity, devotion, every perver
sion and every vice. This is in sooth even more artificial than
Baudelaire's tin and glass landscape !
A later disciple, M. Joris Karl Huysmans, is more instructive
than all those imitators of Baudelaire who have only developed
the one or the other side of him. He has undertaken the toil
some task of putting together, from all the isolated traits which
are found dispersed in Baudelaire's poems and prose writings, a
human figure, and of presenting to us Baudelairism incarnate and
* Josephin Peladan, Vice supreme. Paris, 1882, p. 169.
f Les Fleurs du Mai, p. 244 :
' Tete-a-t£te sombre et limpide
Qu'un cceur devenu son miroir I
Puits de verity, clair et noir,
Ou tremble une e*toile livide,
' Un phare ironique, infernal,
Flambeau des graces sataniques,
Soulagement et gloire uniques,
— La conscience dans le Mai !'

EGO-MANIA 299
living, thinking and acting. The book in which he shows us
his model 'Decadent' is entitled A Rebours ('Against the
Grain ').
The word ' decadent ' was borrowed by the French critics, in
the fifties, from the history of the declining Roman Empire,
to characterize the style of Theophile Gautier, and notably of
Baudelaire. At the present time the disciples of these two
writers, and of their previous imitators, claim it as a title of
honour. Otherwise than with the expressions ' pre-RaphaeKtes '
and ' Symbolists,' we possess an exact explanation of the sense
which those who speak of ' decadence ' and 'decadents' attach
to these words.
'The style of decadence,' says Theophile Gautier* 4. . . is
nothing else than art arrived at that extreme point of maturity
produced by those civilizations which are growing old with their
oblique suns[!] — a style that is ingenious, complicated, learned,
full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further
the limits of language, borrowing from all the technical voca
bularies, taking colours from all palettes, notes from all key
boards, forcing itself to express in thought that which is most
ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours ;
listening, that it may translate them, to the subtle confidences
ofthe neuropath, to the avowals of ageing and depraved passion,
and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on
madness. This style of decadence is the last effort of the Word
( Verbe), called upon to express everything, and pushed to the
utmost extremity. We may remind ourselves, in connection
with it, of the language of the Later Roman Empire, already
mottled with the greenness of decomposition, and, as it were,
gamy (faisandee), and of the complicated refinements of the
Byzantine school, the last form of Greek art fallen into deli
quescence. Such is the inevitable and fatal idiom of peoples
and civilizations where factitious life has replaced the natural
life, and developed in man unknown wants. Besides, it is no
easy matter, this style despised of pedants, for it expresses new
ideas with new forms and words that have not yet been heard.
In opposition to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these
shadows teem and swarm with the larvae of superstitions, the
haggard phantoms of insomnia, nocturnal terrors, remorse which
starts and turns back at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams
stayed only by impotence, obscure phantasies at which the day
light would stand amazed, and all that the soul conceals of the
dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its deepest and
furthest recesses.'
The same ideas that Gautier approximately expresses in this
* Les Fleurs du Mai, pp. 17, 18.]

3oo

DEGENERATION

rigmarole, Baudelaire enumerates in these terms : ' Does it not
seem to the reader, as it does to me, that the language of the later
Latin decadence — the departing sigh of a robust person already
transformed and prepared for the spiritual life — is singularly
appropriate to express passion as it has been understood and felt
by the modern poetic world ? Mysticism is the opposite pole of
that magnet in which Catullus and his followers, brutal and purely
epidermic poets, have only recognised the pole of sensuality. In
this Jharvellous language, solecism and barbarism appear to me
to convey the forced negligences of a passion which forgets
itself and mocks at rules. Words, received in a new acceptation,
display the charming awkwardness of the Northern barbarian
kneeling before the Roman beauty. Even a play on words,
when it enters into these pedantic stammerings, does it not
display the wild and bizarre grace of infancy ?'*
The reader, who has the chapter on the psychology of mysti
cism present to his mind, naturally at once recognises what is
hidden behind the word-wash of Gautier and Baudelaire. Their
description of the state of mind which the ' decadent' language
is supposed to express is simply a description of the disposi
tion of the mystically degenerate mind, with its shifting nebulous
ideas, its fleeting formless shadowy thought, its perversions and
aberrations, its tribulations and impulsions. To express this
state of mind, a new and unheard-of language must in fact be
found, since there cannot be in any customary language designa
tions corresponding to presentations which in reality do not
exist. It is absolutely arbitrary to seek for an example and a
model of ' decadent ' expression in the language of the Later
Roman Empire. It would be difficult for Gautier to discover in
any writer whatever of the fourth or fifth century the ' mottled
greenness of decomposition and, as it were, gamy ' Latin which so
greatly charms him. M. Huysmans, monstrously exaggerating
Gautier's and Baudelaire's idea, as is the way with imitators,
gives the following description of this supposed Latin of the fifth
century : ' The Latin tongue, . . . now hung [!] , completely
rotten, . . . losing its members, dropping suppurations, scarcely
preserving, in the total decay of its body, some firm parts which
the Christians detached in order to pickle them in the brine of
their new language.'t
This debauch in pathological and nauseous ideas of a deranged
mind with gustatory perversion is a delirium, and has no
foundation whatever in philological facts. The Latin of the
later period of decadence was coarse and full of errors, in conse
quence of the increasing barbarity in the manners and taste of
the readers, the narrow-mindedness and grammatical ignorance
* Les Fleurs du Mai, pp. 17, 18.
t J. K. Hu>smans, A Rebours. 4m<= mille. Paris, 1892, p. 49.

EGO-MANIA 301
of the writers, and the intrusion of barbarous elements into its
vocabulary. But it was very far from expressing ' new ideas
with new forms ' and from taking ' colours from all palettes '; it
surprises us, on the contrary, by its awkwardness in rendering
the most simple thoughts, and by its profound impoverishment.
The German language has also had a similar period of deca
dence. After the Thirty Years' War, even the best writers, a
Moscherosch, a Zinkgref, a Schupp, were ' often almost incom
prehensible ' with ' their long-winded and involved periods,' and
'their deportment as distorted as it was stiff';* the grammar
displayed the worst deformities, the vocabulary swarmed with
strange intruders, but the German of those desolate decades was
surely not ' decadent ' in the sense of Gautier's, Baudelaire's and
Huysmans' definitions. The truth is, that these degenerate
writers have arbitrarily attributed their own state of mind to the
authors of the Roman and Byzantine decadence, to a Petronius,
but especially to a Commodianus of Gaza, an Ausonius, a
Prudentius, a Sidonius Apollinaris, etc., and have created in
their own image, or according to their morbid instincts, an ' ideal
man of the Roman decadence,' just as Rousseau invented the
ideal savage and Chateaubriand the ideal Indian, and have
transported him by their own imagination into a fabulous past
or into a distant country. M. Paul Bourget is more honest
when he refrains from fraudulently quoting the Latin authors of
the Latin decline, and thus describes the 'decadence,' inde
pendently of his Parnassian masters : ' The word " decadence "
denotes a state of society which produces too great a number of
individuals unfit for the labours of common life. A society
ought to be assimilated to an organism. As an organism, in
fact, it resolves itself into a federation of lesser organisms, which
again resolve themselves into a federation of cells. The indi
vidual is the social cell. In order that the whole organism
should function with energy, it is necessary that the component
organisms should function with energy, but with a subordinate
energy. And in order that these inferior organisms should
themselves function with energy, it is necessary that their com
ponent cells should function with energy, but with a subordinate
energy. If the energy of the cells becomes independent, the
organisms composing the total organism cease likewise to sub
ordinate their energy to the total energy, and the anarchy which
takes place constitutes the decadence of the whole.'t
Very true. A society in decadence ' produces too great a
number of individuals unfit for the labours of common life ';
* Henri Kurz, in his introduction to the ' Simplician ' writings of Grimmels-
hausen. Leipzig, 1863, ist part, p. li. See also his remarks on the German
of Grimmelshausen (author of Simplicissimus), p. xiv. et seq.
f Paul Bourget, op. cit, p. 24.

302 DEGENERATION
these individuals are precisely the degenerate ; ' they cease to
subordinate their energy to the total energy,' because they are
ego-maniacs, and their stunted development has not attained to
the height at which an individual reaches his moral and intellec
tual junction with the totality, and their ego-mania makes the
degenerate necessarily anarchists, i.e., enemies of all institutions
which they do not understand, and to which they cannot adapt
themselves. It is very characteristic that M. Bourget, who sees
all this, who recognises that 'decadent' is synonymous with
inaptitude for regular functions and subordination to social aims,
and that the consequence of decadence is anarchy and the ruin
of the community, does not the less justify and admire the
decadents, especially Baudelaire. This is ' la conscience dans le
mal ' of which his master speaks.
We will now examine the ideal 'decadent' that Huysmans
draws so complacently and in such detail for us, in A Rebours.
First, a word on the author of this instructive book. Huysmans,
the classical type of the hysterical mind without originality, who
is the predestined victim of every suggestion, began his literary
career as a fanatical imitator of Zola, and produced, in this first
period of his development, romances and novels in which (as in
Marthe) he greatly surpassed his model in obscenity. Then he
swerved from naturalism, by an abrupt change of disposition,
which is no less genuinely hysterical, overwhelmed this tendency
and Zola himself with the most violent abuse, and began to ape
the Diabolists, particularly Baudelaire. A red thread unites
both of his otherwise abruptly contrasted methods, viz., his
lubricity. That has remained the same. He is, as a languish
ing ' Decadent,' quite as vulgarly obscene as when he was a
bestial ' Naturalist.'
A Rebours can scarcely be called a novel, and Huysmans, in
fact, does not call it so. It does not reveal a history, it has no
action, but presents itself as a sort of portrayal or biography of
a man whose habits, sympathies and antipathies, and ideas on
all possible subjects, specially on art and literature, are related to
us in great detail. This man is called Des Esseintes, and is the
last scion of an ancient French ducal title.
The Duke Jean des Esseintes is physically an ansemic and
nervous man of weak constitution, the inheritor of all the vices
and all the degeneracies of an exhausted race. ' For two cen
turies the Des Esseintes had married their children to each
other, consuming their remnant of vigour in consanguineous
unions. . . . The predominance of lymph in the blood appeared.'
(This employment of technical expressions and empty phrases,
scientific in sound, is peculiar to many modern degenerate
authors and to their imitators. They sow these words and
expressions around them, as the ' learned valet ' of a well-

EGO-MANIA 303
known German farce scatters around him his scraps of French,
but without being more cognizant of science than the latter was
of the French language.) Des Esseintes was educated by the
Jesuits, lost his parents early in life, squandered the greater part
of his patrimony in foolish carousing which overwhelmed hiin
with ennui, and soon retired from society, which had become
insupportable. ' His contempt for humanity increased ; he
understood at last that the world is composed for the most part
of bullies and imbeciles. He had certainly no hope of discover
ing in others the same aspirations and the same hatreds, no hope
of uniting himself with a kindred spirit delighting in a diligent
decrepitude [1] as he did. Enervated, moody, exasperated by
the inanity of" interchanged and accepted ideas, he became like
a person aching all over, till at last he was constantly ex
coriating his epidermis, and suffering from the patriotic and
social nonsense which was dealt out each morning in the news
papers. . . . He dreamed of a refined Thebaid, of a comfortable
desert, a warm and unmoving ark, where he would take refuge
far from the incessant flood of human stupidity.'
He realizes this dream. He sells his possessions, buys Govern
ment stock with the ruins of his fortune, draws in this way an
annual income of fifty thousand francs, buys himself a house
which stands alone on a hill at some distance from a small
village near Paris, and arranges it according to his own taste.
'The artificial appeared to Des Esseintes as the distinguishing
mark of human genius. As he expressed it, the day of nature
is past : by the disgusting uniformity of its landscapes and skies,
it has positively exhausted the attentive patience of refined
spirits. In sooth, what platitude of a specialist who sees no
further than his own line ! what pettiness of a tradeswoman
keeping this or that article to the exclusion of every other.!
what a monotonous stock of meadows and trees ! what a common
place agency for mountains and seas!' (p. 31).
He banishes, in consequence, all that is natural from his
horizon, and surrounds himself by all that is artificial. He sleeps
during the day, and only leaves his bed towards evening, in
order to pass the night in reading and musing in his brightly-
lit ground-floor. He never crosses the threshold of his house,
but remains within his four walls. He will see no one, and even
the old couple who wait on him must do their work while he is
asleep, so as not to be seen by him. He receives neither letters
nor papers, knows nothing of the outer world. He never has an
appetite, and when by chance this is aroused, 'he dips his roast
meat, covered with some extraordinary butter, into a cup of tea
[oh, the devil !], a faultless mixture of Si-a-Fayun, Mo-yu-tan
and Khansky, yellow teas brought from China and Russia by
special caravans' (p. 61).

304 DEGENERATION
His dining-room 'resembled a ship's cabin,' with 'its little
French window opening in the wainscot like a port-hole.' It
was built within a larger room pierced by two windows, one o
which was exactly opposite the port-hole in the wainscot. A
large aquarium occupied the whole space between the port-hole
and this window. In order, then, to give light to the cabin, the
daylight had to pass through the window, the panes of which
had been replaced by plate glass, and then through the water
' Sometimes, in the afternoon, when by chance Des Esseintes
was awake and up, he set in motion the play of the pipes and
conduits which emptied the aquarium and filled it afresh with
pure water, introducing into it drops of coloured essences, thus
producing for himself at pleasure the green or muddy yellow,
opalescent or silver, tones of a real river, according to the colour
of the sky, the greater or less heat of the sun, the more or less
decided indications of rain ; in a word, according to the season
and the weather. He would then imagine himself to be between-
decks on a brig, and contemplated with curiosity marvellous
mechanical fish, constructed with clock-work, which passed
before the window of the port-hole, and clung to the sham weeds,
or else, while breathing the smell of the tar with which the
room had been filled before he entered, he examined the coloured
engravings hung on the walls representing steamers sailing for
Valparaiso and La Plata, such as are seen at steamship agencies,
and at Lloyd's ' (p. 27).
These mechanical fish are decidedly more remarkable than
Baudelaire's landscapes in tin. But this dream of an ironmonger,
retired from business and become an idiot, was not the only
pleasure of the Due des Esseintes, who despised so deeply the
' stupidity and vulgarity of men/ although, of all his acquaintance,
probably not one would have stooped to ideas so asinine as
these mechanical fish with clock-work movements. When he
wishes to do himself a particularly good turn, he composes and
plays a gustatory symphony. He has had a cupboard constructed
containing a series of little liqueur barrels. The taps of all the
barrels could be opened or shut simultaneously by an engine set
in motion by pressure on a knob in the wainscot, and under
every tap stood an 'imperceptible' goblet, into which, on the
turning of the cock, a drop fell. Des Esseintes called this liquor-
cupboard his ' mouth organ.' (Notice all these ridiculous com
plications to mix a variety of liqueurs ! As if it required all this
deeply thought out mechanism!) 'The organ was then open.
The stops labelled " flute, horn, voix celeste," were drawn out
ready for action. Des Esseintes drank a drop here and there,
played internal symphonies, and succeeded in procuring in the
throat sensations analogous to those that music offers to the ear.
Each liqueur corresponded in taste, according to him, to the

EGO-MANIA 305
sound of an instrument. Dry curacoa, for example, to the
clarionet, the tone of which is acescent and velvety ; klimmel
brandy to the oboe, with its sonorous nasal sound ; mint and
anisette to the flute, which is at the same time sugary and peppery,
squeaking and sweet ; while, to complete the orchestra, kirsch
rages with the blast of a trumpet; gin and whisky scarify the
palate with their shrill outbursts of cornets and trombones ;
liqueur - brandy fulminates with the deafening crash of the
tuba ; while Chios-raki and mastic roll on to the mucous
membrane like the thunder-claps of cymbals and kettledrums
struck with the arm!' Thus he plays 'string quartettes under
the vault of his palate, representing with the violin old eau-de-
vie, smoky and subtle, sharp and delicate; with the tenor
simulated by strong rum;' with vespetro as violoncello, and
bitters as double bass ; green chartreuse was the major, and bene-
dictine the minor key," etc. (p. 63).
Des Esseintes does not only hear the music of the liqueurs :
he sniffs also the colour of perfumes. As he has a mouth organ,
he possesses a nasal picture-gallery, i.e., a large collection of flasks
containing all possible odorous substances. When his taste-
symphonies no longer give him pleasure, he plays an olfactory
tune. ' Seated in his dressing-room before his table ... a
little fever disturbed him, he was ready for work. . . . With
his vaporizers he injected into the room an essence formed
of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet peas, ess. bouquet, an
essence which, when it is distilled by an artist, deserves the
name by which it is known, viz., "extract of flowery meadow."
Then, in this meadow, he introduced an exact fusion of tuberose,
of orange and almond flower, and forthwith artificially-created
lilacs sprang up, while limes winnowed each other, pouring down
upon the earth their pale emanations. Into this decoration, laid
on in broad outlines ... he blew ... a light rain of human
and quasi-feline essences, savouring of skirts, and indicating the
powdered and painted woman, the stephanotis, ayapana,
opoponax, cypress, champak, and sarcanthus : on which he
juxtaposed a suspicion of syringa, in order to instil into the
factitious atmosphere which emanated from them a natural
bloom of laughter bathed in sweat (! !), and of joys which riot
boisterously in full sunshine ' (pp. 154-157).
We have seen how slavishly M. Huysmans, in his drivel about
tea, liqueurs and perfumes, follows to the letter the fundamental
principle ofthe Parnassians — of ransacking technical dictionaries.
He has evidently been forced to copy the catalogues of com
mercial travellers dealing in perfumes and soaps, teas and
liqueurs, to scrape together his erudition in current prices.
That Des Esseintes should be made ill by this mode of life is
not surprising. His stomach rejects all forms of food, and this

306 DEGENERATION
renders the highest triumph of his love for the artificial possible :
he is obliged to be nourished by means of peptonized injections,
hence, in a way, diametrically opposed to nature.
Not to be too prolix, I omit many details, e.g., an endless
description of tones associated with colours (pp. 17-20) ; of
orchids which he loves, because they have for him the appear
ance of eruptions, scars, scabs, ulcers and cancers, and seem
covered with dressings, plastered with black mercurial axunge,
green belladonna unguents (p. 120 et seq!) ; an exposition of the
mystical aspect of precious and half-precious stones (pp. 57-60),
etc. We will only acquaint ourselves with a few more pecu
liarities of taste in this decadent type :
' The wild spirit, the rough, careless talent of Goya captivated
him; but the universal admiration which Goya's works had
gained deterred him somewhat, and for many years he had
ceased having them framed. . . . Indeed, if the finest tune in
the world becomes vulgar, insupportable, as soon as the public
hum it and barrel-organs seize upon it, the work of art to which
false artists are not indifferent, which is not disputed by fools,
which is not content with stirring up the enthusiasm of some,
even it becomes, by this very means, for the initiated polluted,
commonplace and almost repulsive ' (p. 134).
The reference to barrel-organs is a trick calculated to mislead
the inattentive reader. If a beautiful tune becomes insupport
able as played on barrel-organs, it is because the organs are
false, noisy and expressionless, i.e., they modify the very essence
of the tune and drag it down to vulgarity ; but the admiration
of the greatest fool himself changes absolutely nothing in a work
of art, and those who have loved it for its qualities will again
find all these qualities complete and intact, even when the looks
of millions of impassive Philistines have crawled over it. The
truth is, the decadent, bursting with silly vanity, here betrays
involuntarily his inmost self. The fellow has not, in fact, the
smallest comprehension of art, and is wholly inaccessible to the
beautiful as to all external impressions. To know if a work of
art pleases him or not, he does not look at the work of art — oh
no ! he turns his back and anxiously studies the demeanour of
the people standing before it. Are they enthusiastic, the decadent
despises the work ; do they remain indifferent, or even appear
displeased, he admires it with full conviction. The ordinary man
always seeks to think, to feel, and to do the same as the multi
tude ; the decadent seeks exactly the contrary. Both derive
the manner of seeing and feeling, not from their internal convic
tions, but from what the crowd dictate to them. Both lack all
individuality, and they are obliged to have their eyes constantly
fixed on the crowd to find their way. The decadent is, therefore,
an ordinary man with a minus sign, who, equally with the latter,

EGO-MANIA 307
only in a contrary sense, follows in the wake of the crowd, and
meanwhile makes things far more difficult for himself than the
ordinary man ; he is also constantly in a state of irritation, while
the latter as constantly enjoys himself. This can be summed up
in one proposition — the decadent snob is an anti-social Philistine,
suffering from a mania for contradiction, without the smallest
feeling for the work of art itself.
Des Esseintes reads occasionally between his gustatory and
olfactory seances. The only works which please him are natur
ally those of the most extreme Parnassians and Symbolists. For
he finds in them (p. 266) 'the death-struggle of the olcManguage,
after it had become ever mouldier from century to century, was
ending in dissolution, and in the attainment of that deliquescence
of the Latin language which gave up the ghost in the mysterious
concepts and enigmatical expressions of St. Boniface and St.
Adhelm. Moreover, the decomposition of the French language
had set in all at once. In the Latin language there was a long
transition, a lapse of 400 years, between the speckled and
beautiful speech of Claudian and Rutilius, and the gamy speech
of the eighth century. In the French language no lapse of time,
no succession in age, had taken place ; the speckled (tacheti) and
superb style of the brothers De Goncourt and the gamy style of
Verlaine and Mallarm6 rubbed elbows in Paris, existing at the
same time and in the same century.'
We now know the taste of a typical decadent in all directions.
Let us cast another glance at his character, morals, sentiments
and political views.
He has a friend, D'Aigurande, who one day thinks of marry
ing. ' Arguing from the fact that D'Aigurande possessed no
fortune, and that the dowry of his wife was almost nothing, he
(Des Esseintes) perceived in this simple desire an infinite per
spective of ridiculous misfortunes.' In consequence (!) he en
couraged his friend to commit this folly, and what had to happen
did happen : the young couple lacked money, everything became
a subject for altercations and quarrels ; in short, the life of both
became insupportable. He amused himself out of doors ; she
' sought by the expedients of adultery to forget her rainy and
dull life.' By common consent they cancelled their contract and
demanded a legal separation. ' My plan of battle was exact,
Des Esseintes then said to himself, experiencing the satisfaction
of those strategists who see their long-foreseen manoeuvres suc
ceeding.' Another time, in the Rue de Rivoli, he comes upon a boy of
about sixteen years old, a ' pale, cunning-looking' child, smoking
a bad cigarette, and who asks him for a light Des Esseintes offers
him Turkish aromatic cigarettes, enters into conversation with
him, learns that his mother is dead, that his father beats him,

308 DEGENERATION
and that he works for a cardboard-box maker. ' Des Esseintes
listened thoughtfully. " Come and drink," said he, and led him
into a cafe, where he made him drink some very strong punch.
The child drank in silence. "Come," said Des Esseintes suddenly,
"do you feel inclined for some amusement this evening? I will
treat you." ' And he leads the unfortunate boy into a disorderly
house, where his youth and nervousness astonish the girls. While
one of these women draws the boy away, the landlady asks Des
Esseintes what was his idea in bringing them such an imp. The
decadent answers (p. 95) : " I am simply trying to train an
assassin. This boy is innocent, and has reached the age when
the blood grows hot ; he might run after the girls in his quarter,
remain honest while amusing himself. . . . Bringing him here,
on the contrary, into the midst of a luxury of which he had no
conception, and which will engrave itself forcibly on his memory,
in offering him every fortnight such an unexpected treat, he will
get accustomed to these pleasures from which his means debar
him. Let us admit that it will require three months for them to
become absolutely necessary to him. . . . Well, at the end of
three months I discontinue the little rente which I am going to
pay you in advance for this good action, and then he will steal
in order to live here. . . . He will kill, I hope, the good gentle
man who will appear inopportunely while he is attempting to
break open his writing-table. Then my aim will be attained ; I
shall have contributed, to the extent of my resources, in creating
a villain, one more enemy of that hideous society which fleeces
us.' And he leaves the poor defiled boy on this first evening
with these words : ' Return as quickly as possible to your father.
. . . Do unto others what you would not wish them to do to
you ; with this rule you will go a long way. Good-evening.
Above all, don't be ungrateful. Let me hear of you as soon as
possible through the police news.'
He sees the village children fighting for a piece of black bread
covered with curd cheese ; he immediately orders for himself a
similar slice of bread, and says to his servant : ' Throw this
bread and cheese to those children who are doing for each other
in the road. Let the feeblest be crippled, not manage to get a
single piece, and, besides, be well whipped by their parents
when they return home with torn breeches and black eyes ; that
will give them an idea of the life that awaits them ' (p. 226).
When he thinks of society, this cry bursts from his breast :
' Oh, perish, society ! Die, old world !' (p. 293).
Lest the reader should feel curious as to the course of Des
Esseintes' history, let us add that a serious nervous illness
attacks him in his solitude, and that his doctor imperiously
orders him to return to Paris and the common life. Huysmans, in
a second novel, ' Ld-bas; shows us what Des Esseintes eventually

EGO- MANIA 309
does in Paris. He writes a history of Gilles de Rais, the wholesale
murderer of the fifteenth century, to whom Moreau de Tours' book
(treating of sexual aberrations) has unmistakably called the
attention of the Diabolist band, who are in general profoundly
ignorant, but erudite on this special subject of erotomania.
This furnishes M. Huysmans with the opportunity of burrow
ing and sniffing with swinish satisfaction into the most horrible
filth. Besides this, he exhibits in this book the mystic side of
decadentism ; he shows us Des Esseintes become devout, but
going at the same time to the ' black mass ' with a hysterical
woman, etc. I have no occasion to trouble myself with this
book, as repulsive as it is silly. All I wished was to show the
ideal man of decadentism.
We have him now, then, the ' super-man ' (surhomme) of
whom Baudelaire and his disciples dream, and whom they wish
to resemble : physically, ill and feeble ; morally, an arrant
scoundrel ; intellectually, an unspeakable idiot who passes his
whole time in choosing the colours of stuffs which are to
drape his room artistically, in observing the movements of me
chanical fishes, in sniffing perfumes and sipping liqueurs. His
raciest notion is to keep awake all night and to sleep all day,
and to dip his meat into his tea. Love and friendship are
unknown to him. His artistic sense consists in watching the
attitude of people before some work, in order immediately to
assume the opposite position. His complete inadaptability
reveals itself in that every contact with the world and men
causes him pain. He naturally throws the blame of his dis
comfort on his fellow-creatures, and rails at them like a fish
wife. He classes them all together as villains and blockheads,
and he hurls at them horrible anarchical maledictions. The
dunderhead considers himself infinitely superior to other people,
and his inconceivable stupidity only equals his inflated adoration
of himself. He possesses an income of 50,000 francs, and must
also have it, for such a pitiable creature would not be in a
position to draw one sou from society, or one grain of wheat
from nature. A parasite of the lowest grade of atavism, a sort
of human sacculus,* he would be condemned, if he were poor,
to die miserably of hunger in so far as society, in misdirected
charity, did not assure to him the necessaries of life in an idiot
asylum. * The sacculus is a cirripedia which lives in the condition of a parasite in
the intestinal canal of certain Crustacea. It represents the deepest retro
grade transformation of a living being primarily of a higher organization.
It has lost all its differentiated organs, and essentially only amounts to a
vesicule (hence its name : little bag), which fills itself with juices from its
host, absorbed by the parasite with the help of certain vessels, which it
plunges into the intestinal walls of the latter. This atrophied creature has
retained so few marks of an independent animal that it was looked upon
for a long time as a diseased excrescence of ils host's intestines.

3IO DEGENERATION
If M. Huysmans in his Des Esseintes has shown us the
Decadent with all his instincts perverted, i.e., the complete
Baudelairian with his anti-naturalism, his aesthetic folly and his
anti-social Diabolism, another representative of decadent litera
ture, M. Maurice Barres, is the incarnation of the pure ego-mama
of the incapacity of adaptation in the degenerate. He has dedi
cated up to the present a series of four novels to the culte du
moi, and has annotated, besides, an edition of the three first in a
brochure much more valuable for our inquiry than the novels
themselves, inasmuch as all the sophisms by which conscious
ness forces itself to explain a posteriori the impulsions of morbid
unconscious life appear here conveniently summed up in a sort
of philosophical system.
A few words on M. Maurice Barres. He first made himself
talked of by defending, in the Parisian press, his friend Cham-
bige, the Algerian homicide, a logical cultivator of the ' Ego.'
Then he became a Boulangist deputy, and later he canonized
Marie Bashkirtseff, a degenerate girl who died of phthisis, a
victim to moral madness, with a touch of the megalomania
and the mania of persecution, as well as of morbid erotic exalta
tion. He invoked her as 'Our Lady of the wagon-lit' (Notre
Dame du Sleeping)*
His novels, Sous I'CEil des Barbares, Un Homme libre, Le
jardin de Berenice, and L'Ennemi des Lois, are constructed after
the artistic formula established by M. Huysmans. The descrip
tion of a human being, with his intellectual life, and his
monotonous, scarcely modulated external destinies, gives the
author a pretext for expressing his own ideas on all possible
subjects ; on Leonardo da Vinci and Venice ;f on a French
provincial museum and the industrial art of the Middle Ages ;l
on Nero,§ Saint Simon, Fourier, Marx, and Lassalle.|| Formerly
it was the custom to utilize these excursions into all possible
fields of discussion as articles for newspapers or monthly
periodicals, and afterwards to collect them in book form. But
experience has taught that the public does not exhibit much
interest in these collections of essays, and the Decadents have
adopted the clever ruse of connecting them by means of a
scarcely perceptible thread of narrative, and presenting them to
their readers as a novel. The English novelists of the pre
ceding century, then Stendhal, Jean Paul and Goethe himself,
have also made use of these insertions of the author's personal
reflections in the course of the story ; but with them (with the
* Maurice Banes, Trois Stations de Psycho- thdrapie. Paris, 1892.
' Deuxieme Station.'
f Ibid., Un Homme libre. 3e edition. Paris, 1892.
X Ibid., Le Jardin de Berdnice. Paris, 1891, p. 37 et seq.
§ Ibid., p. 245 et seq.
|| Ibid., L'Ennemi des Lois. Paris, 1893, pp. 63, 88, 170.

EGO-MANIA 311
exception, perhaps, of Jean Paul) these interpellations were at
least subordinated to the work of art as a whole. It was
reserved for M. Huysmans and his school to give them the
chief place, and to transform the novel from an epic poem in
prose into a hybrid mixture of Essais of Montaigne, of Parerga
et Paralipomena of Schopenhauer, and the effusions in the diary
of a girl at a boarding-school.
M. Barres makes it no secret that he has described his own life
in his novels, and that he considers himself a typical representa
tive of a species. ' These monographs . . . are,' he says,* ' a com
munication of a type of young man already frequently met with,
and which, I feel sure, will become still more numerous among
the pupils who are now at the Lycee. . . . These books . . .
will eventually be consulted as documents.'
What is the nature of this type ? Let us answer this question
in the author's own words. The hero of the novels is 'somewhat
literary, proud, fastidious and desarme" (Examen, p. 11); 'a young
bourgeois grown pale, and starving for all pleasures' (p. 26) ;
' discouraged by contact with men ' (p. 34) ; he is one of those
' who find themselves in a sad state in the midst of the order of
the world . . . who feel themselves weak in facing life' (p. 45).
Can one imagine a more complete description of the degenerate
incapable of adaptation, badly equipped for the struggle for
existence, and for this reason hating and fearing the world and
men, but shaken at the same time by morbid desires ?
This poor shattered creature, who was necessarily rendered an
ego-maniac by the weakness of will in his imperfect brain, and
the perpetual turmoil of his unhealthy organs, raises his in
firmities to the dignity of a system which he proudly proclaims.
' Let us keep to our only reality, to our " I " ' (p. 18). 'There is
only one thing which we know and which really exists. . . . This
sole tangible reality, it is the " I," and the universe is only a
fresco which it makes beautiful or ugly. Let us keep to our "I."
Let us protect it against strangers, against Barbarians ' (p. 45).
What does he mean by Barbarians ? These are the ' beings
who possess a dream of life opposed to that which he (the hero
of one of his books) forms of it. If they happen to be, more
over, highly cultured, they are strangers and adversaries for him.'
A young man ' obliged by circumstances to meet persons who
are not of his patrie psychique ' experiences ' a shock.' ' Ah !
what matters to me the quality of a soul which contradicts
some sensibility ? I hate these strangers who impede, or turn
aside the development of such a delicate hesitating and self-
searching " I," these Barbarians through whom more than
one impressionable young man will both fail in his career and
not find his joy of living' (p. 23). ' Soldiers, magistrates,
* Maurice Barres, Examen de trots Ideologies. Paris, 1892, p. 14.

312 DEGENERATION
moralists, teachers,' these are the Barbarians who place obstacles
in the way of the development of the " 1 " ' (p. 43). In one
word, the ' I ' who cannot take his bearings in the social order
regards all the representatives and defenders of that order as
his enemies. What he would like would be ' to give himself up
without resistance to the force of his instincts ' (p. 25), to dis
tinguish ' where lie his sincere curiosity, the direction of his
instinct, and his truth' (p. 47). This idea of setting instinct,
passion and the unconscious life free from the superintendence
of reason, judgment and consciousness recurs hundreds of times
in the author's novels. 'Taste takes the place of morality'
(L'Ennemi des Lois, p. 3). 'As a man, and a free man, may I
accomplish my destiny, respect and favour my interior impulsion,
without taking counsel of anything outside me' (p. 22). ' Society
enclosed by a line of demarcation ! You offer slavery to who
ever does not conform to the definitions of the beautiful and the
good adopted by the majority. In the name of humanity, as
formerly in the name of God and the City, what crimes are devised
against the individual !' (p. 200). ' The inclinations of man ought
not to be forced, but the social system must be adapted to
them' (p. 97). (It would be very much more simple to adapt
the inclinations of a single man to the social system which is a
law to millions of men, but this does not seem to suggest itself
to our philosopher !)
It is absolutely logical that M. Barres, after having shown us
in his three first novels or ideologies the development of his
' cultivator of the moi,' should make the latter become an
anarchist and an ennemi des lois. But he feels himself that the
objection will be justly raised, that society cannot exist without
a law and an order of some sort, and he seeks to forestall this
objection by asserting that everyone knows how to behave him
self, that instinct is good and infallible : ' Do you not feel,' he
says (p. 177), 'that our instinct has profited by the long
apprenticeship of our race amid codes and religions ?' He
admits then that 'codes and religions' have their use and
necessity, but only at a primitive period of human history.
When the instincts were still wild, bad and unreasonable, they
required the discipline of the law. But now they are so perfect
that this guide and master is no longer necessary to them. But
there are still criminals. What is to be done with them ? ' By
stifling them with kisses and providing for their wants they
would be prevented from doing any harm.' I should like to see
M. Banes obliged to use his method of defence against a night
attack of garrotters !
To allow one's self to be cairied away by instincts is, in other
words, to make unconscious life the master of consciousness,
to subordinate the highest nervous centres to the inferior

EGO-MANIA 313
centres. But all progress rests on this, that the highest
centres assume more and more authority over the entire
organism, that judgment and will control and direct ever more
strictly the instincts and passions, that consciousness encroaches
ever further on the domain of the unconscious, and continually
annexes new portions of the latter. Of course, instinct expresses
a directly felt need, the satisfaction of which procures a direct
pleasure. But this need is often that of a single organ, and its
satisfaction, however agreeable to the organ which demands it,
may be pernicious, and even fatal, to the total organism. Then
there are anti-social instincts, the gratification of which is not
directly injurious to the organism itself, it is true, but makes life
in common with the race difficult or impossible, worsening con
sequently its vital conditions, and preparing its ruin indirectly.
Judgment alone is fitted to oppose these instincts by the repre
sentation of the needs of the collective organism and of the
race, and the will has the task of ensuring the victory over
suicidal instinct to the rational representation. Judgment
may be deceived, for it is the result of the work of a highly
differentiated and delicate instrument, which, like all fine and
complicated machinery, gets out of order more easily than a
simpler and rougher tool. Instinct, the inherited and organized
experience of the race, is as a rule more sure and reliable.
This must certainly be admitted. But what harm is done if
judgment does make a mistake for once in the opposition
which it offers to instinct ? The organism is, as a rule, only
deprived of a momentary feeling of pleasure; it suffers there
fore at most a negative loss ; the will, on the other hand, will
have made an effort, and acquired strength by the exercise,
and this is for the organism a positive gain, which nearly always
at least balances thjase negative losses.
And then all these considerations take for granted the perfect
health of the organism, for in such a one only does the un
conscious work as normally as consciousness. But we have
seen above that the unconscious itself is subject to disease ; it
may be stupid, obtuse and mad, like consciousness ; it then
ceases completely to be dependable ; then the instincts are as
worthless guides as are the blind or drunken ; then the organism,
if it gives itself up to them, must stagger to ruin and death. The
only thing which can sometimes save it in this case is the constant,
anxious, tense vigilance of the judgment, and as the latter is
never capable, by its own resources, of resisting a strong flood of
revolted and riotous instincts, it must demand reinforcements
from the judgment of the race, i.e., from some law, from some
recognised morality.
Such is the foolish aberration of the ' cultivators of the " I."'
They fall into the same errors as the shallow psychologists of

314 DEGENERATION
the eighteenth century, who only recognised reason ; they only
see one portion of man's mental life, i.e., his unconscious life ;
they wish to receive their law only from instinct, but wholly
neglect to notice that instinct may become degenerate, diseased,
exhausted, and thereby be rendered as useless for legislative
purposes as a raving lunatic or an idiot.
Besides, M. Barres contradicts his own theories at every step.
While he pretends to believe that instincts are always good,
he depicts many of his heroines, with the most tender expres
sions of admiration, as veritable moral monsters. The ' little
princess' in L'Ennemi des Lois is a feminine Des Esseintes : she
boasts of having been, as a child, 'the scourge of the house'
(p. 146). She looks upon her parents as her ' enemies' (p. 149).
She loves children ' less than dogs ' (p. 284). Naturally, she
gives herself at once to every man that strikes her eye, for,
otherwise, where would be the use of being a ' cultivator of the
" Ego," ' and an adept at the law of instinct ? Such are the good
beings of M. Barres, who no longer need laws, because they
have ' profited by the long apprenticeship of our race.'
Yet a few more traits to complete the mental portrait of this
Decadent. He makes his ' little princess ' relate : ' When I was
twelve years old, I loved, as soon as I was alone in the country,
to take off my shoes and stockings and plunge my bare feet into
warm mud. I passed hours in this way, and that gave me a
thrill of pleasure through all my body.' M. Barres resembles his
heroine ; he ' experiences a thrill of pleasure through all his
body ' when he ' plunges himself into warm mud.'
' There is not a detail in the biography of Berenice which is
not shocking' — thus begins the third chapter of the Jardin de
Berenice. ' I, however, retain of it none but very delicate sensa
tions.' This Berenice was a dancer at the Eden Theatre in
Paris, whom her mother and elder sister had sold as a little child
to some old criminals, and whom a lover took away later from
the prostitution which had already stained her infancy. This
lover dies and leaves her a considerable fortune. The hero
of the novel, who had known her as a gutter-child meets
her at Aries, where he presents himself as the Boulangist
candidate for the Chamber, and he resumes his ancient re
lations with her. What charms him most in their inter
course, and increases his pleasure in the highest degree, is the
idea of the intense love she felt for her dead lover, and the
abandonment with which she had reposed in his arms. 'My
Berenice, who still bears on her pale lips and against her
dazzling teeth the kisses of M. de Transe [the lover in question],
. . . The young man who is no more has left her as much passion
as can be contained in a woman's heart' (p. 138). The feeling
which M. Barres seeks to crown with the help of inflated, grandilo-

EGO-MANIA 315
quent expressions is simply the well-known excitement that
hoary sinners feel at the sight of the erotic exploits of others.
All those who are conversant with Parisian life know what is
meant in Paris by a voyeur, or pryer. M. Barres reveals himself
here as a metaphysical voyeur. And yet he would wish to make
us believe that his little street-walker, whose dirty adventures
he describes with the warmth of love and the enthusiasm of a
dilettante, is in reality a symbol ; it is only as a Symbolist that he
claims to have formed her. ' A young woman is seen about a
young man. Is it not rather the history of a soul with its two
elements, female and male ?' Or is it by the side of the ' I '
which guards itself, wishes to know and establish itself, also the
imagination in a young and sensitive person, for the taste
pleasure and for vagabondage ?* One may well ask him, where is
the ' symbolism ' in the biographical details of Petite Secousse,
the name that he gives to his ' symbol.'
Disease and corruption exercise the customary Baudelairian
attraction over him. ' When Berenice was a little girl,' he says,
in the Jardin de Berenice (p. 72), ' I much regretted that she had
not some physical infirmity ... A blemish is what I prefer
above everything . . . flatters the dearest foibles of my mind.'
And in one place (p. 282) an engineer is scoffed at ' who wishes
to substitute some pond for carp for our marshes full of beauti
ful fevers.'
The stigmata of degeneracy known as zoophilia, or excessive
love for animals, is strongly shown in him. When he wishes
particularly to edify himself he runs 'to contemplate the beau
tiful eyes of the seal, and to distress himself over the mysterious
sufferings of these tender-hearted animals shown in their basin,
brothers of the dogs and of us.'f The only educator that
M. Barres admits is — the dog. ' The education which a dog
gives is indeed excellent ! . . . Our collegians, overloaded with
intellectual acquisitions, which remain in them as notions, not
as methods of feeling, weighted by opinions which they are
unable thoroughly to grasp, would learn beautiful ease from the
dog, the gift of listening, the instinct of their " I." '% And it
must not be imagined that in such passages as these he is
quizzing himself or mocking the Philistine who may by inadver
tence have become a reader of the book. The part played by
two dogs in the novel testifies that the phrases quoted are meant
in bitter earnest.
Like all the truly degenerate, M. Barres reserves for the hysterical
and the demented all the admiration and fraternal love which
he has not expended on seals and dogs. We have already men-
* Examen de trois Iddologies, p. 36.
f Ibid., p. 46.
+ L'Ennemi des Lois, p. 285.

316 DEGENERATION
tioned his enthusiastic regard for poor Marie Bashkirtseff. His
idea of Louis II. of Bavaria is incomparable. The unfortunate
King is, in his eyes, an insatisfait (L'Ennemi des Lois, p. 201); he
speaks of ' his being carried away beyond his native surround
ings, his ardent desire to make his dream tangible, the wrecking
of his imagination in the clumsiness of execution' (p. 203).
Louis II. is ' a most perfect ethical problem ' (p. 200). ' How
could this brother of Parsifal, so pure, so simple, who set the
prompting of his heart in opposition to all human laws — how
could he suffer a foreign will to interfere in his life ? And it
really seems that to have drawn Dr. Gudden under water was
his revenge upon a barbarian who had wished to impose his rule
of life upon him ' (p. 225). It is in such phrases that M. Barres
characterizes a madman, whose mind was completely darkened,
and who for years was incapable of a single reasonable idea !
This impudent fashion of blinking a fact which boxed his ears
on both sides; this incapacity to recognise the irrationality in the
mental life of an invalid, fallen to the lowest degree of insanity ;
this obstinacy in explaining the craziest deeds as deliberate,
intentional, philosophically justified and full of deep sense, throw
a vivid light on the state of mind in the Decadent How could
a being of this kind discern the pathological disturbance of his
own brain, when he does not even perceive that Louis II. was
not ' an ethical problem/ but an ordinary mad patient, such as
every lunatic asylum of any size contains by dozens ?
We now understand the philosophy and moral doctrine of
the Barres type of the ' cultivators of the "I."' Only one word
more on their conduct in practical life. The hero of the Jardin
de Berenice, Philippe, is the happy guest of Petite Secousse, in
the house which her last lover had left to her. After some time
he wearies of the latter's 'educational influence'; he leaves her,
and strongly advises her to marry his opponent in the election
— which she does. ' The enemy ofthe laws,' an anarchist of the
name of Andre Maltere, condemned to prison for several months
for a newspaper article eulogizing a dynamite attempt, has be
come, by his trial, a celebrity of the day. A very rich orphan
offers him her hand, and the 'little princess' her love. He
marries the rich girl, whom he does not love, and continues to
love the ' little princess,' whom he does not marry. For this is
what the ' culture of his " I " ' exacts. To satisfy his aesthetic incli
nations and to ' act ' by word and pen, he must have money,
and to relieve the needs of his heart he must have the ' little
princess.' After some months of marriage he finds it inconve
nient to dissimulate his love for the ' little princess ' before his
wife. He allows her then to guess at the needs of his heart.
His wife understands philosophy. She is ' comprehensive.' She
goes herself to the ' little princess,' takes her to the noble

EGO-MANIA

317

anarchist, and from this moment Maltere lives rich, loved, happy,
and satisfied between heiress and mistress, as becomes a superior
nature. M. Barres believes he has here created 'a rare and
exquisite type.' He deceives himself. The cultivators of the
' I,' like the Boulangist Philippe and the anarchist Andr<i, meet
by thousands in all large towns, only the police know them
under another name. They call them souteneurs. The moral
law of the brave anarchist has long been that of the gilded Paris
prostitutes, who from time immemorial have kept ' I'amant de
cceur,' at the same time as the ' other,' or the ' others.'
Decadentism has not been confined to France alone ; it has
also established a school in England. We have already men
tioned, in the preceding book, one of the earliest and most
servile imitators of Baudelaire — Swinburne. I had to class him
among the mystics, for the degenerative stigma of mysticism
predominates in all his works. He has, it is true, been train-
bearer to so many models that he may be ranked among the
domestic servants of a great number of masters ; but, finally, he
will be assigned a place where he has served longest, and that
is among the pre-Raphaelites. From Baudelaire he has
borrowed principally diabolism and Sadism, unnatural de
pravity, and a predilection for suffering, disease and crime.
The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its
aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement,
its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the
importance of art, have found their English representative
among the ' ^Esthetes,' the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde.
Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by
his works. Like Barbey d'Aurevilly, whose rose-coloured silk
hats and gold lace cravats are well known, and like his disciple
Jos^phin Peladan, who walks about in lace frills and satin
doublet, Wilde dresses in queer costumes which recall partly
the fashions of the Middle Ages, partly the rococo modes. He
pretends to have abandoned the dress of the present time
because it offends his sense of the beautiful ; but this is only a
pretext in which probably he himself does not believe. What
really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be
noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to
get talked about. It is asserted that he has walked down Pall
Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a
picturesque biretta on his head, and a sunflower in his hand,
the quasi-heraldic symbol of the ^Esthetes. This anecdote has
been reproduced in all the biographies of Wilde, and I have
nowhere seen it denied. But is a promenade with a sunflower
in the hand also inspired by a craving for the beautiful ?
Phasemakers are perpetually repeating the twaddle, that it is
a proof of honourable independence to follow one's own taste

318 DEGENERATION
without being bound down to the regulation costume of the
Philistine cattle, and to choose for clothes the colours, materials
and cut which appear beautiful to one's self, no matter how
much they may differ from the fashion of the day. The answer
to this cackle should be that it is above all a sign of anti-social
ego-mania to irritate the majority unnecessarily, only to gratify
vanity, or an a^sthetical instinct of small importance and easy to
control — such as is always done when, either by word or deed, a
man places himself in opposition to this majority. He is
obliged to repress many manifestations of opinions and desires
out of regard for his fellow-creatures ; to make him understand
this is the aim of education, and he who has not learnt to impose
some restraint upon himself in order not to shock others is called
by malicious Philistines, not an .-Esthete, but a blackguard.
It may become a duty to combat the vulgar herd in the cause
of truth and knowledge ; but to a serious man this duty will
always be felt as a painful one. He will never fulfil it with a light
heart, and he will examine strictly and cautiously if it be really
a high and absolutely imperative law which forces him to be
disagreeable to the majority of his fellow-creatures. Such an
action is, in the eyes of a moral and sane man, a kind of martyr
dom for a conviction, to carry out which constitutes a vital
necessity ; it is a form, and not an easy form, of self-sacrifice, for
it means the renunciation of the joy which the consciousness of
sympathy with one's fellow-creatures gives, and it exacts the
painful overthrow of social instincts, which, in truth, do not
exist in deranged ego-maniacs, but are very strong in the
normal man.
The predilection for strange costume is a pathological aberra
tion of a racial instinct. The adornment of the exterior has its
origin in the strong desire to be admired by others — primarily
by the opposite sex — to be recognised by them as especially
well-shaped, handsome, youthful, or rich and powerful, or as pre
eminent through rank or merit. It is practised, then, with the
object of producing a favourable impression on others, and is a
result of thought about others, of preoccupation with the race.
If, now, this adornment be, not through mis-judgment but
purposely, of a character to cause irritation to others, or lend itself
to ridicule — in other words, if it excites disapproval instead of
approbation— it then runs exactly counter to the object ofthe art
of dress, and evinces a perversion of the instinct of vanity.
The pretence of a sense of beauty is the excuse of conscious
ness for a crank of the conscious. The fool who masquerades
in Pall Mall does not see himself, and, therefore, does not enjoy
the beautiful appearance which is supposed to be an aesthetic
necessity for him. There would be some sense in his conduct if
it had for its object an endeavour to cause others to dress in
accordance with his taste ; for them he sees, and they can

EGO-MANIA 319
scandalize him by the ugliness, and charm him by the beauty, of
their costume. But to take the initiative in a new artistic style
in dress brings the innovator not one hair's breadth nearer his
assumed goal of aesthetic satisfaction.
When, therefore, an Oscar Wilde goes about in ' aesthetic
costume' among gazing Philistines, exciting either their ridicule
or their wrath, it is no indication of independence of character,
but rather from a purely anti-socialistic, ego-maniacal reckless
ness and hysterical longing to make a sensation, justified by no
exalted aim ; nor is it from a strong desire for beauty, but from
a malevolent mania for contradiction.
Be that as it may, Wilde obtained, by his buffoon mummery,
a notoriety in the whole Anglo-Saxon world that his poems and
dramas would never have acquired for him. I have no reason
to trouble myself about these, since they are feeble imitations
of Rossetti and Swinburne, and of dreary inanity. His prose
essays, on the contrary, deserve attention, because they exhibit
all the features which enable us to recognise in the ' ./Esthete ' the
comrade in art of the Decadent.
Like his French masters, Oscar Wilde despises Nature.
' Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry
springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious,
and to be obvious is to be inartistic.'*
He is a ' cultivator of the Ego,' and feels deliciously indignant
at the fact that Nature dares to be indifferent to his important
person. ' Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever
I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more
to her than the cattle that browse on the slope ' (p. 5).
With regard to himself and the human species, he shares the
opinion of Des Esseintes. ' Ah ! don't say that you agree with
me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be
wrong' (p. 202).
His ideal of life is inactivity. ' It is only the Philistine who
seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production.
This young dandy sought to be somebody rather than to do
something ' (p. 65). ' Society often forgives the criminal ; it
never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that
art excites in us are hateful in its eyes. . . . People . . . are always
coming shamelessly up to one . . . and saying in a loud, sten
torian voice, " What are you doing?" whereas, "What are you
thinking?" is the only question that any civilized being should
ever be allowed to whisper to another. . . . Contemplation . . .
in the opinion of the highest culture, is the proper occupation of
man. ... It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is
limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of
him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and
dreams ' (pp. 166-168). ' The sure way of knowing nothing about
* Oscar Wilde, Intentions. London, 1891, p. 197.

320 DEGENERATION
life is to try to make one's self useful ' (p. 175). ' From time to
time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet,
because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has " nothing
to say." But if he had something to say, he would probably say
it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has
no new message that he can do beautiful work ' (p. 197).
Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime. In
a very affectionate biographical treatise on Thomas Griffith Wain-
wright, designer, painter, and author, and the murderer of several
people, he says : ' He was a forger of no mean or ordinary capa
bilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in
this or any age. This remarkable man, so powerful with "pen,
pencil, and poison,"' etc. (p. 60). 'He sought to find expression
by pen or poison ' (p. 61). ' When a friend reproached him with
the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he shrugged his shoulders
and said, "Yes ; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very
thick ankles'" (p. 86). ' His crimes seem to have had an im
portant effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to
his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked ' (p. 88).
' There is no sin except stupidity ' (p. 210). ' An idea that is not
dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all ' (p. 179).
He cultivates incidentally a slight mysticism in colours. 'He,'
Wainwright, ' had that curious love of green which in individuals
is always the sign of a subtle, artistic temperament, and in nations
is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals ' (p. 66).
But the central idea of his tortuously disdainful prattling,
pursuing as its chief aim the heckling of the Philistine, and
laboriously seeking the opposite pole to sound common-sense,
is the glorification of art. Wilde sets forth in the following
manner the system of the ' ^Esthetes ' : ' Briefly, then, their
doctrines are these : Art never expresses anything but itself.
It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops
purely on its own lines. . . . The second doctrine is this : All
bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating
them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as
part of Art's rough material, but before they are of any real
service to Art they must be translated into artistic conventions.
The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium [?] it sur
renders everything. As a method Realism is a complete failure,
and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity
of form and modernity of subject matter.* To us who live in
* Schiller also says :
' Ewig jung is nur die Phantasie ;
Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben,
Das allein veraltet nie.' — An die Freunde.
• Forever young is fantasy alone ;
That which nowhere ever has existed,
That alone grows never old.'

EGO-MANIA 321
the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art
except our own. The only beautiful things are the things
that do not concern us. . . . It is exactly because Hecuba is
nothing to us that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a
tragedy. . . .'* (pp. 52-54). The third doctrine is that Life
imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not
merely from Life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the
self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art
offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize
that energy ' (p. 65).
On this third point — the influence of art on life — Wilde does
not refer to the fact, long ago established by me, that the
reciprocal relation between the work of art and the public
consists in this, that the former exercises suggestion and the
latter submits to it.-f- What he actually wished to say was that
nature — not civilized men — develops itself in the direction of
forms given it by the artist. ' Where, if not from the Impres
sionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come
creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing
the houses into monstrous shadows ? To whom, if not to them
and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood
over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved
bridge and swaying barge ? The extraordinary change that has
taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years
is entirely due to this particular school of Art ' (p. 40). If he
But Schiller did not mean by this that Art should disregard truth and life,
but that it must discriminate between what is essential, and consequently
lasting, in the phenomenon, and that which is accidental, and therefore
ephemeral. * Compare this with. Kant's Kritik der Urtheilskraft (herausgegeben und
erlantert von J. H. v. Kirchmann) ; Berlin; 1869, p. 65 : 'All interest spoils
the judgment in matters of taste, and deprives it of its impartiality, especially
if it does not, as rational interest does, make the feeling of utility paramount
to that of pleasure, but bases it upon the latter, which always happens in an
aesthetic judgment in so far as a thing causes pleasure or pain.' Modern
psycho-physiology has recognised this notion of Kant's as erroneous, and
has demonstrated that ' the feeling of pleasure ' in itself is originally a feeling
of organic 'utility,' and that 'judgment in matters of taste' does not exist at
all without ' interest.' Psycho-physiology makes use of the terms ' organic
tendency ' or ' proclivity,' instead of ' interest.' Moreover Wilde, who does
not mind contradicting his own loose assertions, says (p. 186) : ' A critic
cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word. It is only about things
that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which
is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely value
less. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees abso
lutely nothing at all.' Hence Hecuba must be something to the critic, that
he may be able to criticise at all.
¦f- See in my Paradoxe the chapters ' Inhalt der poetischen Literatur ' and
'Zur Naturgeschichte der Liebe.'

322 DEGENERATION
simply wished to affirm that formerly fog and mist were not felt
to be beautiful, and that the artistic rendering of them first drew to
them the attention of the multitude, nothing could be said in con
tradiction ; he would have propounded just a hackneyed common
place with misplaced sententiousness. He asserts, however, that
painters have changed the climate, that for the last ten years there
have been fogs in London, because the Impressionists have
painted fogs — a statement so silly as to require no refutation.
It is sufficient to characterize it as artistic mysticism. Lastly,
Wilde teaches the following : ' ^Esthetics are higher than
ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern
the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can
arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important in the develop
ment of the individual than a sense of right and wrong '
(pp. 210, 21 1).
Thus the doctrine of the ' ^Esthetes ' affirms, with the Parnas
sians, that the work of art is its own aim ; with the Diabolists,
that it need not be moral — nay, were better to be immoral ; with
the Decadents, that it is to avoid, and be diametrically opposed
to, the natural and the true ; and with all these schools of the
ego-mania of degeneration,, that art is the highest of all human
functions. Here is the place to demonstrate the absurdity of these
propositions. This can, of course, be done only in the concisest
manner. For to treat fully of the relation of the beautiful to
morals and truth to Nature, of the conception of aim in artistic
beauty, and of the rank held by art among mental functions, it
would be necessary to expound the whole science of aesthetics, on
which the somewhat exhaustive text-books amount to a con
siderable number of volumes ; and this cannot be my purpose
in this place. Hence I shall of necessity only recapitulate the
latest results in a series of the clearest and most obvious
deductions possible, which the attentive reader will be able
without difficulty to develop by his own reflection.
The ' bonzes ' of art, who proclaim the doctrine of ' art for
art's sake/ look down with contempt upon those who deny
their dogma, affirming that the heretics who ascribe to works
of art any aim whatsoever can be only pachydermatous Philistines,
whose comprehension is limited to beans and bacon, or stock
jobbers with whom it is only a question of profit, or sanc
timonious parsons making a professional pretence of virtue.
They believe that they are supported in this by such men as
Kant, Lessing, etc., who were likewise of the opinion that the
work of art had but one task to perform— that of being beautiful.
We need not be overawed by the great names of these guarantors.
Their opinion cannot withstand the criticism to which it has
been subjected during the last hundred years by a great number

EGO-MANIA 323
of philosophers (I name only Fichte, Hegel and Vischer), and
its inadequacy follows from the fact, among others, that it
allows absolutely no place for the ugly as an object of artistic
representation. Let us remind ourselves how works of art and art in general
originated. That plastic art originally sprang from the imitation of Nature
is a commonplace, open justly to the reproach that it does not
enter deeply enough into the question. Imitation is without
doubt one of the first and most general reactions of the
developed living being upon the impressions it receives from
the external world. This is a necessary consequence of the
mechanism ofthe higher activity of the nervous system. Every
compound movement must be preceded by the representation
of this movement, and, conversely, no representation of move
ment can be elaborated without at least a faint and hinted
accomplishment ofthe corresponding movement by the muscles.
Upon this principle depends, for example, the well-known
' thought - reading.' As often, therefore, as a being (whose
nervous system is developed highly enough to raise perceptions
to the rank of representations) acquires knowledge, i.e., forms
for itself a representation of any phenomenon whatever com
prising in itself a more or less molar form of movement
(molecular movements, and, a fortiori, vibrations of ether
are not directly recognised as changes of position in space), it
has also a tendency to transform the representation into a
movement resembling it, and hence to imitate the phenomenon,
in that form, naturally, which, with its means, it is capable of
realizing. If every representation be not embodied in per
ceptible movement, the cause is to be traced to the action of
the inhibitive mechanism of the brain, which does not permit
every representation at once to set the muscles into activity.
In a state of fatigue inhibition is relaxed, and, in fact, all sorts
of unintentional imitations make their appearance, as, for
example, symmetrical movements, such as the left hand in
voluntarily and aimlessly makes of those executed by the right
hand in writing, etc. There is also a rare disease of the
nerves* hitherto observed chiefly in Russia, and especially in
Siberia, there called myriachit, in which inhibition becomes
completely disorganized, so that the diseased persons are forced
at once to imitate any action seen by them, even if it be
disagreeable or pernicious to them. If, for example, they see
someone fall, they are compelled to throw themselves also to
the ground, even if they are standing in a muddy road.
* S. A. Tokarski's article on ' Myriachit ' in the Neurologisches Central-
Blatt for November, 1890. Tokarski in this article also informs us that
this word should be written meriatschenja, and not myriachit.

324 DEGENERATION
Except in disease and fatigue, the action of inhibition is
suspended only when the excitation produced in the nervous
system by an impression is strong enough to vanquish it If
this impression is disagreeable, or menacing, the movements
set loose by it are those of defence or flight. If, on the
contrary, the impression is pleasant, or if it is surprising
without being disquieting, then the reaction of the organism
against it is a movement without objective aim, most frequently
a movement of imitation. Hence, among healthy men possessed
of well-working inhibitory mechanism in their nervous system,
this movement does not appear with every phenomenon, but
only with such as strike it forcibly, fix its attention, engage
and stimulate it — in a word, cause an emotion. Activity of
imitation (and the plastic arts are at bottom nothing but
residuary traces of imitative movements) has consequently an
immediate organic aim, viz., the freeing of the nervous system
from an excitation set up in it by some visual cause. If
the excitation is not caused by the sight of any external
phenomenon, but by an internal organic state (e.g., sexual
erethism), or by a representation of an abstract nature (e.g., the
joy of victory, sorrow, or longing), it likewise transforms itself,
it is true, into movements ; but these are naturally not imitative.
They embody no motor representation, but are in part such
as have for their sole end the relaxing of the nerve-centres
overcharged with motor impulsions, as in the dance, in outcries,
song and music, and in part such as disburden the centres of
ideation, like declamation, lyric and epic poetry. If artistic
activity is frequently exercised and facilitated by habit, it no
longer requires emotions of extraordinary strength to provoke
it. As often, then, as man is excited by such external or
internal impressions as demand no action (conflict, flight,
adaptation), but reach his consciousness in the form of a mood,
he relieves his nervous system of this excitation through some
kind of artistic activity, either by means of the plastic arts or
by music and poetry.
Hence imitation is not the source of the arts, but one of the
media of art; the real source of art is emotion. Artistic
activity is not its own end, but it is of direct utility to the
artist ; it satisfies the need of his organism to transform its
emotions into movement. He creates the work of art, not for
its own sake, but to free his nervous system from a tension.
The expression, which has become a commonplace, is psycho
physiological ly accurate, viz., the artist writes, paints, sings,
or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind.
To this primary end of art— the subjective end of the self-
deliverance of the artist— a second must be added, viz., the
objective end of acting upon others. Like every other animal

EGO-MANIA 325
living in society and partly dependent upon it, man has, in conse
quence of his racial instinct, the aspiration to impart his own
emotions to those of his own species, just as he himself partici
pates in the emotions of those of his own species. This strong
desire to know himself in emotional communion with the
species is sympathy, that organic base of the social edifice.*
In advanced civilization, where the original natural motives of
actions are partly obscured and partly replaced by artificial
motives, and the actions themselves receive an aim other than
the theoretical one proper to them, the artist is, it is true, not
limited to sharing his emotions with others, but creates his work
of art with the accessory purpose of becoming famous — a wish
springing none the less from social instincts, since it is directed
towards obtaining the applause of his fellow-creatures, or even
of earning money, a motive no longer social, but purely egoistic.
This vulgarly egoistic motive is still the only one influencing
the countless imitators who practise art, not from original
strong desire, and as the natural and necessary mode of
expressing their emotions, but whose artistic activity is caused
by the envy with which they regard the success of others in
art. Once we have established, as a fact, that art is not practised
for its own sake alone, but that it has a double aim, subjective
and objective, viz., the satisfaction of an organic want of the
artist, and the influencing of his fellow-creatures, then the
principles by which every other human activity pursuing the
same end is judged are applicable to it, i.e., the principles of
law and morality.
We test every organic desire to see whether it be the outcome
of a legitimate need or the consequence of an aberration ;
whether its satisfaction be beneficial or pernicious to the
organism. We distinguish the healthy from the diseased
impulse, and demand that the latter be combated. If the
desire seeks its satisfaction in an activity acting upon others,
then we examine to see if this activity is reconcilable with
the existence and prosperity of society, or dangerous to it.
The activity imperilling society offends against law and custom,
which are nothing but an epitome of the temporary notions of
society concerning what is beneficial and what is pernicious
to it.
Notions healthy and diseased, moral and immoral, social or
anti-social, are as valid for art as for every other human
activity, and there is not a scintilla of reason for regarding a
* Edmund R. Clay, L Alternative. Contribution d la Psychologic Traduit
de P anglais par A. Burdeau; Paris, 1886, p. 234 : ' Sympathy is an emotion
caused in us by that which seems to us to be the emotion or the sensation of
others.'

326 DEGENERATION
work of art in any other light than that in which we view every
other manifestation of an individuality.
It is easily conceivable that the emotion expressed by the
artist in his work may proceed from a morbid aberration, may
be directed, in an unnatural, sensual, cruel manner, to what is
ugly or loathsome. Ought we not in this case to condemn
the work and, if possible, to suppress it? How can its right to
exist be justified ? By claiming that the artist was sincere
when he created it, that he gave back what was really existing
in him, and for that reason was subjectively justified in his
artistic expansion? But there is a candour which is wholly
inadmissible. The dipsomaniac and clastomaniac are sincere
when they respectively drink or break everything within reach.
We do not, however, acknowledge their right to satisfy their
desire. We prevent them by force. We put them under
guardianship, although their drunkenness and destructiveness
may perhaps be injurious to no one but themselves. And still
more decidedly does society oppose itself to the satisfaction of
those cravings which cannot be appeased without violently
acting upon others. The new science of criminal anthropology
admits without dispute that homicidal maniacs, certain incen
diaries, many thieves and vagabonds, act under an impulsion ;
that through their crimes they satisfy an organic craving ; that
they outrage, kill, burn, idle, as others sit down to dinner, simply
because they hunger to do so ; but in spite of this and because
of this, it demands that the appeasing of the sincere longings
of these degenerate creatures be prevented by all means, and,
if needs be, by their complete suppression. It never occurs to
us to permit the criminal by organic disposition to ' expand '
his individuality in crime, and just as little can it be expected
of us to permit the degenerate artist to expand his individuality
in immoral works of art. The artist who complacently repre
sents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it,
perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from
the criminal who actually commits it. It is a question of the
intensity of the impulsion and the resisting power of the
judgment, perhaps also of courage and cowardice ; nothing else.
If the actual law does not treat the criminal by intention so
rigorously as the criminal in act, it is because criminal law
pursues the deed, and not the purpose; the objective phe
nomenon, not its subjective roots. The Middle Ages had places
of sanctuary where criminals could not be molested for their
misdemeanours. Modern law has done away with this institu
tion. Ought art to be at present the last asylum to which
criminals may fly to escape punishment ? Are they to be able
to satisfy, in the so-called 'temple' of art, instincts which the
policeman prevents them from appeasing in the street ? I do

EGO-MANIA 327
not see how a privilege so inimical to society can be willingly
defended. I am far from sharing Ruskin's opinion that morality alone,
and nothing else, can be demanded of a work of art. Morality
alone is not sufficient. Otherwise religious tracts would be the
finest literature, and the well-known coloured casts of sacred
subjects turned out wholesale in Munich factories would be the
choicest sculpture. Excellence of form maintains its rights
in all the arts, and gives to the finest creation its artistic value.
Hence the work need not be moral. More accurately, it need
not be designed expressly to preach virtue and the fear of God,
and to be destined for the edification of devotees. But between
a work without sanctified aim and one of wilful immorality
there is a world of difference. A work which is indifferent from
a moral point of view will not be equally attractive or satisfying
to all minds, but it will offend and repel no one. An explicitly
immoral work excites in healthy persons the same feelings of
displeasure and disgust as the immoral act itself, and the form
of the work can change nothing of this. Most assuredly morality
alone does not give beauty to a work of art. But beauty with
out morality is impossible.
We now come to the second argument with which the
.-Esthetes wish to defend the right of the artist to immorality.
The work of art, they say, need only be beautiful. Beauty lies
in the form. Hence the content is a matter of indifference.
This may be vice and crime ; but it cannot derogate from the
excellences of form if these be present
He alone can venture to advance such principles who is with
out the least inkling of the psycho-physiology of the aesthetic
feelings. Everyone who has studied this subject in the least
knows that two kinds of the beautiful are distinguished — the
sensuously-beautiful and the intellectually-beautiful. We feel
those phenomena to be beautiful, the sense-perception of which
is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure — e.g., a particular colour,
perhaps a pure red, or a harmony ; nay, even a single note with
its severally indistinguishable but synchronous overtones. The
researches of Helmholtz* and Blasernaf have thrown light on
the cause of the feeling of pleasure connected with certain
acoustic perceptions, while those of Briickej have led to similar
results with regard to the mechanism of the feelings of pleasure
following optical impressions. It is a question of discernment by
* Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonemfindungen. 4Aufl. Braunschweig,
1877. f Pietro Blaserna, Le Son et la Musique, followed by Causes physio logiques
de PHarmonie musicale, par H. Helmholtz. 4e Edition. Paris, 1891.
X E. Briicke, Bruchstucke aus der Theorie der bildenden Kiinste. Leipzig,
Intern, wissensch. Bibl. (The French edition of Briicke's works contains
also Helmholtz's L'Optique et la Peinture.)

328 DEGENERATION
the sensory nerves of definite simple numerical relations in the
vibrations of matter or of ether. We know less concerning the
causes of the pleasures connected with smell and touch ; yet
here also it seems to be a question of more or less strong im
pressions, hence equally of quantities — i.e., of numbers. The
ultimate cause of all these feelings is that certain modes of
vibrations are in accord with the structure of the nerves, are easy
for them and leave them in order, while other modes disturb the
arrangement of the nerve particles, often costing the nerves an
effort, often dangerous to their existence or at least their
functioning, to restore them to their natural order. The former
will be felt as pleasure, the latter as discomfort, and even as
pain. With the sensuously-beautiful there can be no question
of morality, for it exists as perception only, and does not rise
to the rank of representation.
Above the sensuously-beautiful stands the intellectually-beauti
ful, no longer consisting of mere perceptions, but of representa
tions, of concepts and judgments, with their accompanying
emotions elaborated in the unconscious. The intellectually-
beautiful must also awaken feelings of pleasure, to be perceived
as beautiful ; and, as above explained, with feelings of pleasure
are united, in healthy, fully-developed human beings equipped
with the social instinct (altruism), only those ideas the content
whereof is conducive to the existence and prosperity of the
individual being, society, or species. Now, that which is favour
able to the life and prosperity of the individual and of the
species is precisely that which we call moral.
From this it results by an iron necessity that a work which
awakens no feelings of pleasure cannot be beautiful, and that it
can awaken no feelings of pleasure if it is not moral, and we
arrive at the final conclusion, that morality and beauty are in
their innermost essence identical. It were not false to assert that
beauty is statical repose, and morality beauty in action.
This is only apparently contradicted by the fact that what is
incontestably ugly and bad may also be agreeable, and hence
awaken feelings of pleasure. The mental process set up by
percepts and ideas is not, in this case, so simple and direct as
with respect to the beautiful and the good. Associations some
times of a highly complex nature must first be put into activity,
finally, however, to lead to the single great result, viz., the
awakening of feelings of pleasure. The well-known Aristotelian
catharsis, purging or purification, explains how tragedy, though
it offers the spectacle of pain and ruin, finally produces an
agreeable effect. The representation of deserved misfortune
awakens ideas of justice, a moral, agreeable idea ; and even that
of unmerited misfortune gives rise to pity, in itself a feeling of
pain, though, in its quality of a racial instinct, beneficial and

EGO-MANIA 329
therefore not "only moral, but, in its final essence, agreeable.
When Valdez, in his famous picture of the Caridad de Sevilla,
shows us an open coffin in which lies the corpse of an arch
bishop in full vestments, swarming with worms, this spectacle
is in itself undeniably repulsive. Nevertheless it permits us
at once to recognise the emotion which the painter wished to
express, viz., his feeling of the nothingness of all earthly posses
sions and honours, the frailty of man in the face of the primeval
power of Nature. It is the same emotion embodied by Holbein
in his 'Dance of Death,' not so profoundly and passionately as by
the Spaniard with his stronger feelings, but with self-mockery and
bitterness. The same emotion is heard, somewhat less gloomily
and with more of a melancholy resignation, in Mozart's Requiem.
In the idea of the contrast between the insignificance of indi
vidual life and the vastness and eternity of Nature, there mingles
itself an element of the sublime, of which the idea, as the
'choicest form of activity in the highest brain-centres, is united
with feelings of pleasure.
Another circumstance in the plastic arts has to be considered.
In works of sculpture and painting a broad separation is possible
between the form and the content, between the sensuous and the
moral. A painting, a group, may represent the most immoral
and most criminal incident ; nevertheless, the individual con
stituent parts — the atmosphere, the harmonies of colour, the
human figures — may be beautiful in themselves, and the con
noisseur may derive enjoyment from them without dwelling on
the subject of the work. The engravings in the Editions des
fermiers ge'ne'raux of the last century, the works in marble and
bronze of the pornographic museum at Naples, are, in a measure,
repulsively immoral, because they represent unnatural vice.
In themselves, however, they are excellently executed, and are
accessible to a mode of contemplation which disregards their
idea and keeps in view only the perfection of their form. Here,
therefore, the impression of the work of art is a mixture of disgust
for the subject treated, and enjoyment of the beauty of the several
figures and their attitudes — painted, drawn, or modelled. The
feeling of pleasure may preponderate, and the work, in spite of
its depravity, produce, not a repellent, but an attractive effect.
It is the same in nature. If that which is pernicious and
frightful is sometimes felt to be beautiful, it is because it con
tains certain features and elements which have no cogent
reference to the frightful or pernicious character of the whole,
and can hence in themselves operate aesthetically. The hammer-
headed viper is beautiful on account of its metallic lustre ; the
tiger for its strength and suppleness ; the foxglove (Digitalis) for
its graceful form and rich rosy hue. The noxiousness of the
snake does not lie in its copper-red dorsal bands, nor the

330 DEGENERATION
terribleness of the beast of prey in its graceful arppearance, nor
the danger of the poisonous plant in the form and colour of its
blossoms. In these cases the sensuously-beautiful outweighs the
morally-repulsive, because it is more immediately present, and,
in the collective impression, allows the feelings of pleasure to
predominate. The spectacle of the display of strength and
resolution is equally a beautiful one, on account of the ideas of
organic efficiency awakened by it. Would this, however, be
thought beautiful if one could see how an assassin over
powers a victim who is resisting violently, hurls him to the ground
and butchers him ? Certainly not ; for before such a picture it
is no longer possible to separate the display of strength, beauti
ful in itself, from its aim, and to enjoy the former regardless of
the latter.
In poetry this separation of the form from the content is far
less possible than in the plastic arts. The word can hardly in
itself produce an effect of sensuous beauty by its auditory or
visual image, even if it presents itself rhythmically regulated
and strengthened by the more expressive double sound of a
rhyme. It operates almost solely by its content, by the repre
sentations which it awakens. Hence it is hardly conceivable
that one can hear or read a poetical exposition of criminal or
vicious facts, without having present at each word a representa
tion of its content, and not of its form — i.e., of its sound. In
this case, therefore, the impression can no longer be a composite
one, as at the sight of a finely-painted portrayal of a repulsive
incident, but must be purely disagreeable. The pictures of
Giulio Romano, to which Pietro Aretino dedicated his Sonetti
lussuriosi, may be found beautiful by the admirers of the
effeminate style of that pupil of Raphael ; the sonnets are only
the more disgusting. Who would experience feelings of
pleasure from the perusal of the writings of the Marquis de
Sade, Andrea de Nercia or Liseux ? Only one species of
human beings — that of the degenerate with perverted instincts.
Portrayals of crime and vice in art and literature have their
public ; that we well know. It is the public of the gaols.
Besides dismally sentimental books, criminals read nothing so
willingly as stories of lust and violence ;* and the drawings and
inscriptions with which they cover the walls of their cells have
for the most part, their crimes as subjects.t But the healthy
man feels himself violently repelled by works of this kind, and
it is impossible for him to receive an aesthetic impression 'from
* Henry Joly, Les Lectures dans les Prisons de la Seine. Lyon, 1891. See
also Lombroso, L ' Uomo delinquente. Turin, 1884, p. 366 et seq. and p. 387
et seq.
t Pitr£, Sui Canti popolari italiani in Carcere. Firenze, 1876. See also
the portrait-group of the three brigands of Ravenna in Lombroso ov cit
Plate XV., facing p. 396. ' "' "'

EGO-MANIA 331
them, be their form never so conformable to the most approved
rules of art.
In yet another case it is possible for that which is most
ugly and vicious in artistic portrayal to operate in the direction
of the morally beautiful. This is when it allows us to recognise
the moral purpose of the author and betrays his sympathetic
emotion. For that which we, consciously or unconsciously,
perceive behind every artistic creation is the nature of its
creator and the emotion from which it sprang, and our sympathy
with, or antipathy for, the emotion of the author has the lion's
share in our appreciation of the work. When Raffaelli paints
shockingly degraded absinthe-drinkers in the low drinking dens
of the purlieus of Paris, we clearly feel his profound pity at
the sight of these fallen human beings, and this emotion we ex
perience as a morally beautiful one. In like manner we have not
a momentary doubt of the morality of the artist's emotions when
we behold Callot's pictures of the horrors of war, or the bleeding,
purulent saints of Zurbaran, or the monsters of Breughel van
der Holle, or when we read the murder scene in Dostojevsky's
Raskolnikow* These emotions are beautiful. Sympathy with
them gives us a feeling of pleasure. Against this feeling the
displeasure caused by the repulsiveness of the work cannot
prevail. When, however, the work betrays the indifference
of the author to the evil or ugliness he depicts, nay, his predilec
tion for it, then the abhorrence provoked by the work is
intensified by all the disgust which the author's aberration
of instinct inspires in us, and the aggregate impression is one
of keenest displeasure. Those who share the emotions of
the author, and hence are with him attracted and pleasur-
ably excited by what is repugnant, diseased and evil, are the
degenerate. The vEsthetes affirm that artistic activity is the highest of
which the human mind is capable, and must occupy the first
place in the estimation of men. How do they manage to
establish this assertion from their own standpoint ? Why
should I place a high value on the activity of a fellow who with
rapture describes the colours and odours of putrid carrion ; and
why should I bestow my especial esteem on a painter who
shows me the libidinousness of a harlot ? Because the amount
of artistic technique involved is difficult? If that is to be the
decisive point, then, to be logical, the ^Esthetes must place the
acrobat higher than the artist of their species, since it is much
more difficult to learn the art of the trapezist than the rhyming
and daubing which constitutes the ' art ' of the ^Esthetes. Is it
* Raskolnikow, Roman von F. M. Dostojewskij, Nach der vierten Auflage
des russichen Originals ; Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, iibersetzt von Wilhelm
Henckel. Leipzig, 1882, Band 1., pp. 122-128.

332 DEGENERATION
to be on account of sensations of pleasure given by artists ?
First of all, those artists over whom the ^Esthetes grow so
enthusiastic create in the healthy man no pleasure, but loathing
or boredom. But granted that they do provide sensations, the
first inquiry must then be of what sort these sensations are.
Every sensation, even if we for the moment find it agreeable, does
not inspire us with esteem for the person to whom we are indebted
for it. At the card-table, in the public-house and the brothel,
a base nature may procure sensations the intensity of which
those offered by any work of the ^Esthetes is far from being
able to rival. But even the most dissolute drunkard does not in
consequence hold the keepers of these places of his pleasures in
specially high esteem.
The truth is that the claim of the highest rank for art advanced
by the ^Esthetes involves the complete refutation of their other
dogmas. The race estimates individual activities according to
their utility for the whole. The higher this develops itself, the
more exact and profound is the understanding it acquires of
that which is really necessary and beneficial to it. The warrior,
who in a low grade of civilization rightly plays the most promi
nent part, because society must live, and to this end must defend
itself against its enemies, recedes to a more humble position as
manners become more gentle, and the relations between peoples
cease to resemble those between beasts of prey, and assume a
human character. Once the race has attained in some degree
to a clear comprehension of its relation to nature, it knows that
knowledge is its most important task, and its profoundest
respect is for those who cultivate and enlarge knowledge —
i.e., for thinkers and investigators. Even in the monarchical
state, which, conformably with its own atavistic nature, gauges
the importance of the warrior by the standard of primitive men
(and in the present condition of Europe, in the presence of the
scarcelv restrained fury for war, among a whole series of nations,
the raison d'itre for this atavism cannot, alas ! be contested), the
scholar, as professor, academician, counsellor, is a constituent
part of the governmental machine, and honours and dignities
fall far more to his lot than to the poet and artist. The enthu
siasts of the latter are youths and women — i.e., those components
of the race in whom the unconscious outweighs consciousness ¦
for artist and poet address themselves first of all to emotion and
this is more easily excited in the woman and the adolescent
than in the mature man ; their accomplishments are, moreover,
more accessible to the multitude than those of the scholar whom
almost the best alone of his time can follow, and whose import
ance is in general fully appreciated only by a few specialists
even in our days of the popularization of science by the press!
State and society, however, seek to compensate him for the

EGO-MANIA 333
evasion of this reward, by surrounding him with official forms
of high esteem.
It is true that very great artists and poets, admitted pioneers,
whose influence is recognised as lasting, likewise receive their
share of the official honours disposed of by the organized
commonwealth as such, and these exceptional men obtain a
more brilliant reward than any investigator or discoverer ; for
together with the common distinctions shared by them with the
latter, they possess the wide popularity which the investigator
and discoverer must dispense withal. And why is* the artist
sometimes placed, even by persons of good and serious minds,
on a level with, or even above, the man of science ? Because
these persons value the beautiful more than the true, emotion more
than knowledge ? No ; but because they have the right feeling
that art is equally a source of knowledge.
It is so in three ways. Firstly, the emotion evoked by the
work of art is itself a means of obtaining knowledge, as Edmund
R. Clay, James Sully, and other psychologists have seen,
without, however, dwelling on the important fact. It constrains
the higher centres to attend to the causes of their excitations,
and in this way necessarily induces a sharper observation and
comprehension of the whole series of phenomena related to the
emotion. Next, the work of art grants an insight into the laws
of which the phenomenon is the expression ; for the artist, in his
creation, separates the essential from the accidental, neglects the
latter, which in nature is wont to divert and confuse the less
gifted observer, and involuntarily gives prominence to the
former as that which chiefly or solely occupies his attention,
and is therefore perceived and reproduced by him with especial
distinctness. The artist himself divines the idea behind the
structure, and its inner principle and connection, intelligible but
not perceivable, in the form, and discloses it in his work to the
spectator. That is what Hegel means when he calls the beau
tiful ' the presence of the idea in limited phenomenon.' By
means of his own deep comprehension of natural law, the artist
powerfully furthers the comprehension of it by other men.*
Finally, art is the only glimmer of light, weak and dubious
though it be, which projects itself into the future, and gives us at
* The knowledge of this fact is as old as assthetic science itself. It is
well expressed, as by others, so by Dr. Wilh. Alex. Freund, in his Blicken ins
Culturlebenj Breslau, 1879, p. 9 : ' Idealization consists ... in the removal
of accidental accessories disturbing the true expression of the essential ;'
p. 11 : 'All [eminent artists] raise that which they see to a purified
image, purged of all that is unessential, accidental, disturbing ; from that
image springs up in all of them the idea lying at the base of the vision ;' p. 13 :
' He [the artist] comprehends the essential . . . from which the accidental
disturbing accessories of the external phenomenon fall off like withered
leaves, so that to his inner eye the truth appears as a living idea,' etc.

334 DEGENERATION
least a dream-like idea of the outlines and direction of our further
organic developments. This is not mysticism, but a very
clear and comprehensible fact. We have seen above* that
every adaptation — i.e., every change of form and function ofthe
organs — is preceded by a representation of this change. The
change must first be felt and desired as necessary ; then a re
presentation of it becomes elaborated in the higher or highest
nerve-centres, and finally the organism endeavours to realize
this representation. This process repeats itself in the same
way in the race. Some state is disturbing to it. It experiences
feelings of discomfort from this state. It suffers from it. From
this results its desire to change the state. It elaborates for
itself an image of the nature, direction and extent of this change.
According to the older, mystic phrase, ' it creates for itself
an ideal.' The ideal is really the formative idea of future
organic development with a view to better adaptation. In the
most perfect individuals of the species it exists earlier and more
distinct than in the average multitude, and the artist ventures with
uncertain hand to make it accessible to sense through the medium
of his work of art long before it can be organically realized
by the race. Thus art vouchsafes the most refined and highest
knowledge, bordering on the marvellous, viz., the knowledge
of the future. Not so definitely, of course, nor so unequivocally,
does art express the secret natural law of being and becoming
as science. Science shows the present, the positive ; Art pro
phesies the future, the possible, though stammeringly and ob
scurely. To the former Nature unveils her fixed forms ; to the
latter she grants, amidst shudderings, a rapid, bewildered glimpse
of the depths where what is yet formless is struggling to appear.
The emotion from which the divining work of art springs is the
birth throe of the quick and vigorous organism pregnant with
the future.-f-
This art of presentiment is certainly the highest mental
activity of the human being. But it is not the art of the
^Esthetes. It is the most moral art, for it is the most ideal, a
word only meaning that it is parallel with the paths along which
the race is perfecting itself — nay, coincides with these.
By the most diverse methods we have always attained the
same result, viz., it is not true that art has nothing in common
* See footnote to p. 38.
f Wilhelm Loewenthal makes the feeling and need of religion spring
from the same presentient emotion. For the author of Grundzuge einer
Hygiene des Unterrichts, religion is the form assumed in man's consciousness
by the ideal, i.e., the presentient knowledge of the aim of evolution. 'The
instinct of development — the indispensable base of all life and all knowledge
— is identical with the religious need.' Thus he writes in a memoir,
unfortunately only 'printed as a manuscript,' but most worthy of being made
accessible to all the world.

EGO-MANIA 335
with morality. The work of art must be moral, for its aim is to
express and excite emotions. In virtue of this aim it falls within
the competence of eriticism, which tests all emotions by their
utility or perniciousness to the individual or the race ; and if it
is immoral, it must be condemned like every other organic
activity opposed to this aim. The work of art must be moral,
for it is intended to operate aesthetically. It can only do this if
it awakens feelings of pleasure, at least ultimately ; it provides
such, only if it includes beauty in itself; but beauty is in its
essence synonymous with morality. Finally, the highest work
of art can, from its inmost nature, be none other than moral,
since it is a manifestation of vital force and health, a revelation
of the capacity for evolution of the race; and humanity values it
so highly because it divines this circumstance.
Concerning the last doctrine of the ^Esthetes, viz., that art
must shun the true and the natural, this is a commonplace
pushed to an absurdity, and converted into its contrary. Perfect,
actual truth and naturalness need not be denied to art ; they are
impossible to it. For whereas the work of art makes the artist's
idea tangible, an idea is never an exact copy of a pheno
menon of the external world. Before it can become an idea
in a human consciousness every phenomenon experiences two
very essential modifications — one in the afferent and receptive
organs of sense, the other in the centres elaborating sense-
perceptions into representations. These sensory nerves and
centres of perception change the modes of the external stimuli
conformably with their own nature ; they give to these their
particular colouring, as different wind-instruments played by the
same person give forth different shades of sound with the same
force of breath. The centres forming representations modify in
their turn the actual relation of the phenomena to each other,
in that they bring some into stronger relief, and neglect others
of really equal value. Consciousness does not take cognizance
of all the countless perceptions uninterruptedly excited in the
brain, but of those only to which it is attentive. But by the
simple fact of attention, consciousness selects individual pheno
mena, and gives them an importance they do not possess in the
unceasing uniformity of universal movement.
But if the work of art never renders reality in its exact
relations, it can, on the other hand (and this is both a
psychological and aesthetical commonplace), never be con
structed from constituents other than those supplied by reality.
The mode in which these constituents are blended and united
by the artist's imagination permits the recognition of another
fact, as true and natural as any that is habitually desig
nated by us as real, to wit, the character, mode of thought,
and emotion of the artist. For what is imagination ? A

336 DEGENERATION
special case of the general psychological law of association. In
scientific observation and judgment the play of association is
most rigorously supervised by attention ; the will violently
inhibits the propagation of stimuli along the most convenient
paths, and prevents the penetration of mere similarities, con
trasts, and contiguities in space or time into consciousness,
which is reserved for the images of immediate reality trans
mitted by the senses. In artistic creation imagination rules —
that is to say, the inhibition exercised by the will is relaxed ;
in accordance, with the laws of association a presentation is
allowed to summon into consciousness representations which
are similar, contrasted, or contiguous in space or time. But
inhibition is not wholly inactive, and the will does not permit
the union of reciprocally exclusive representations into a con
cept ; thus it prohibits the elaboration of an intellectual absurdity,
such as is yielded by purely automatic association or fugitive
ideation. The emotion of the artist reveals itself in accordance
with the way in which representations supplied by association
are grouped into concepts, for it causes representations agree
ing with it to be retained, and the indifferent or contradictory
to be suppressed. Even fantastic images, as extravagant as
a winged horse or a woman with lion's paws, reveal a true
emotion : the former an aspiration proceeding from the spectacle
of the bird soaring light and free ; the latter a horror of the
power of sexuality subjugating reason and conjuring up devour
ing passion. It would be a grateful task for workers in the
histology of psychology to trace the emotions whence the best
known fantastic figures of art and the metaphors of poets have
proceeded. Hence it may be said that every work of art
always comprises in itself truth and reality in so far as, if it
does not reflect the external world, it surely reflects the mental
life of the artist.
Hence, as we have seen, not one of the sophisms of the
^Esthetes withstands criticism. The work of art is not its own
aim, but it has a specially organic, and a social task. It is subject
to the moral law ; it must obey this ; it has claim to esteem
only if it is morally beautiful and ideal. And it cannot be other
than natural and true, in so far, at least, as it is the offprint of
a personality, which is also a part of nature and reality. The
entire system takes as its point of departure a few erroneous
or imprudent assertions of thinkers and poets commanding
respect, but developed by the Parnassians and Decadents in
a way of which Lessing, Kant and Schiller never allowed
themselves to dream. This is no other than the well-known
attempt to explain and justify impulsions by motives more or
less obvious and invented post facto. The degenerate who, in
consequence of their organic aberrations, make the repulsive

EGO-MANIA 337
and ugly, vice and crime, the subject-matter of plastic and
literary works of art, naturally have recourse to the theory that
art has nothing in common with morality, truth and beauty, since
this theory has for them the value of an excuse. And must
not the excessive value set upon artistic activity as such, without
regard to the worth of its results, be highly welcome to the
limitless crowd of imitators who practise art, not from an inner
prompting, but from a foolhardy craving for the respect sur
rounding real artists — -imitators who have nothing of their own
to say, no emotion, not an idea, but who, with a superficial
professional dexterity easily acquired, falsify the views and
feelings of masters in all branches of art ? This rabble,
which claims for itself a top place in the scale of intel
lectual rank, and freedom from the constraint of all moral
laws as its most noble privilege, is certainly baser than the
lowest scavenger. These creatures are of absolutely no use to
the commonwealth, and injure true art by their productions,
whose multitude and importunateness shut out from most men
the sight of the genuine works of art — never very numerous
— of the epoch. They are weaklings in will, unfitted for any
activity requiring regular uniform efforts, or else victims to vanity,
wishing to be more famous than is possible to a stone-breaker
or a tailor. The uncertainty of comprehension and taste among
the majority of mankind, and the incompetency of most pro
fessional critics, allow these intruders to make their nest among
the arts, and to dwell there as parasites their life long. The
buyer soon distinguishes a good boot from a bad one, and the
journeyman cobbler who cannot properly sew on a sole finds no
employment. But that a book or painting void of all originality
is indifferent in quality, and for that reason superfluous, is by no
means so easily recognised by the Philistine, or even by the
man armed with the critical pen, and the producer of such chaff
can apply himself undisturbed to his assiduous waste of time.
These bunglers with pen, brush and modelling spattle, strutting
about in cap and doublet, naturally swear by the doctrine of
the .(Esthetes, carry themselves as if they were the salt of
humanity, and make a parade of their contempt for the
Philistine. They belong, however, to the elements of the race
which are most inimical to society. Insensible to its tasks and
interests, without the capacity to comprehend a serious thought
or a fruitful deed, they dream only of the satisfaction of their
basest instincts, and are pernicious — through the example they
set as drones, as well as through the confusion they cause in minds
insufficiently forewarned, by their abuse of the word 'art' to
mean demoralization and childishness. Ego-maniacs, Deca
dents and .-Esthetes have completely gathered under their banner
this refuse of civilized peoples, and march at its head.

338 DEGENERATION CHAPTER IV.
IBSENISM.
In the course of the last two centuries the whole civilized world
has, with greater or less unanimity, repeatedly recognised a sort
of intellectual royalty in some contemporary, to whom it has
rendered homage as the first and greatest among living authors.
For a great part of the eighteenth century Voltaire, ' le roi
Voltaire] was the ' poet laureate ' of all civilized nations.
During the first third of the present century this position was
held by Goethe. After his death the throne remained vacant
for a score of years, when Victor Hugo ascended it amidst the
enthusiastic acclamations of the Latin and Slavonic races, and
with a feeble opposition from those of Teutonic origin, to hold
it until the end of his life.
At the present time voices have for some years been heard
in all countries claiming for Henrik Ibsen the highest intel
lectual honours at the disposal of mankind. It is wished that
the Norwegian dramatist should, in his old age, be recognised
as the world-poet of the closing century. It is true that only a
part of the multitude and of the critical representatives of its
taste acclaims him ; but the fact that it has entered anyone's
mind at all to see in him a claimant for the throne of poetry
makes a minute examination of his titles to the position
necessary. That Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and power is
not for a moment to be denied. He is extraordinarily emotive,
and has the gift of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike and
impressive manner that which has excited his feelings. (We
shall see that these are almost always feelings of hatred and
rage, i.e., of displeasure.) A natural capacity drew him towards
the stage — a capacity for imagining situations in which the
characters are forced to turn inside out their inmost nature ;
in which abstract ideas transform themselves into deeds, and
modes of opinion and of feeling, imperceptible to the senses
but potent as causes, are made patent to sight and hearing in
attitudes and gestures, in the play of feature and in words.
Like Richard Wagner, he knows how to group events into
living frescoes possessing the charm of significant pictures ; with
this difference, however, that Ibsen works, not like Wagner,
with strange costumes and properties, architectural splendour',
mechanical magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with penetrating
vision into the backgrounds of souls and the conditions of

EGO-MANIA 339
humanity. Fairy-lore is not lacking in Ibsen either, but he
does not allow the imagination of the spectators to run riot in
mere spectacles ; he forces them into moods, and binds them
by his spell in circles of ideas, through the pictures which
he unrolls before them.
His strong desire to embody the thought occupying his mind
in a single picture, which can be surveyed at one view, also
dictated to him the set form of his drama — a form not invented,
but largely perfected, by him. His pieces are, as it were, final
words terminating long anterior developments. They are the
sudden breaking into flame of combustible materials accumu
lating during years, it may be during whole human lives, or even
generations, and of which the sudden flare brilliantly illumines a
wide extent of time and space. The incidents of the Ibsen drama
more frequently take place in a day, or at most in twice twenty-
four hours, and in this short space of time there are concentred
all the effects of the course of the world and of social institu
tions on certain characters, in such a conspectus that the
destinies of the dramatis personam become clear to us from the
moment of their first appearance. The Doll's House, Ghosts,
Rosmersholm, The Pillars of Society, and Hedda Gabler comprise
about twenty- four hours ; An Enemy of Society, The Wild Duck,
The Lady from the Sea, about thirty-six hours. It is the return
to the Aristotelian doctrine of the unities of time and space
with an orthodoxy compared with which the French classicists
of the age of Louis XIV. are heretics. I might well term
the Ibsenite technique a technique of fireworks, for it consists
in preparing long in advance a staging on which the suns,
Roman candles, squibs, fireballs and concluding fire-sheaves
are carefully placed in proper position. When all is ready the
curtain rises, and the artistically-constructed work begins to
crackle, explosion following explosion uninterruptedly with
thunder and lightning. This technique is certainly very
effective, but hardly true. In reality events rarely lead up to
a catastrophe so brilliant and succinct. In Nature all is
slowly prepared, and unrolls itself gradually, and the results
of human deeds covering years of time do not compress them
selves into a few hours. Nature does not work epigrammatically.
She cannot trouble herself about Aristotelian unities, for she
has always an infinity of affairs of her own in progress at one
and the same time. As a matter of handicraft, one is certainly
often forced to admire the cleverness with which Ibsen guides
and knots the threads of his plot. Sometimes the labour is more
successful than at other times, but it always implies a great
expenditure of textile skill. Whoever sets most store on
truth in a poem — that is, on the natural action of the laws
of life — will often enough bring away from Ibsen's dramas

340 DEGENERATION
an impression of improbability, and of toilsome and subtle
lucubrations. The power with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches
a situation, an emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much
higher than his skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time,
which may be said to be the poetic counterpart of the painter's
artifice (difficult, but for the most part barren) of foreshortening
in space. Each of the terse words which suffice him has
something of the nature of a peephole, through which limitless
vistas are obtained. The plays of all peoples and all ages have
few situations at once so perfectly simple and so irresistibly
affecting as the scenes — to cite only a few — where Nora is
playing with her children,* where Dr. Rank relates that he is
doomed to imminent death by his inexorable disease, f where
* NORA (the children talk all at once to her during the following). And
so you have been having great fun ? That is splendid. Oh, really ! you
have been giving Emmy and Bob a slide, both at once 1 Dear me! you are
quite a man, Ivar. Oh, give her to me a little, Mary Ann. My sweetheart !
(Takes the smallest from the nurse, and dances it up and down!) Yes, yes ;
mother will dance with Bob, too. What ! did you have a game of snowballs
as well ? Oh, I ought to have been there. No, leave them, Mary Ann ; I
will take their things off. No, no, let me do it ; it is so amusing. Go to the
nursery for awhile, you look so frozen. You'll find some hot coffee on the
stove. (The nurse goes to the room on the left. NORA takes off the
children's things and throws them down anywhere, while she lets the children
talk to each other and lo her.) Really ! Then there was a big dog there
who ran after you all the way home? But I'm sure he didn't bite you. No;
dogs don't bite dear dolly little children. Don't peep into those parcels,
Ivar. You want to know what there is ? Yes, you are the only people who
shall know. Oh, no, no, that is not pretty. What 1 must we have a game ?
What shall it be, then? Hide and seek? Yes, let us play hide and seek.
Bob shall hide first. Am I to? Very well, I will hide first.— A Doll's
House, Griffith and Farran, p. 30.
f Rank (in Nora's and Helmer's room). [He has that day discovered
a symptom in himself which he knows is an infallible sign of approaching
death.] Yes, here is the dear place I know so well. It is so quiet and com
fortable here with you two.
Helmer. You seemed to enjoy yourself exceedingly upstairs, too.
RANK. Exceedingly. Why should I not ? Why shouldn't one get enjoy
ment out of everything in this world ? At any rate, as much and as long as
one can. The wine was splendid.
HELMER. Especially the champagne.
Rank. Did you notice it. too ? It was perfectly incredible the quantity I
contrived to drink. . . . Well, why should one not have a merry evening
after a well-spent day ?
Helmer. Well spent ? As to that, I have not much to boast of.
Rank (tapping him on the shoulder). But I have, don't you see.
Nora. Then, you have certainly been engaged in some scientific investiga
tion, Dr. Rank.
Rank. Quite right. . . .
Nora. And am I to congratulate you on the result?
Rank. By all means you must.
Nora. Then the result was a good one ?

EGO-MANIA 341
Frau Alving with horror discerns his dissolute father* in her
only son, where the housekeeper, Frau Helseth, sees Rosmer
and Rebecca die in each other's arms,f etc.
Similarly, it must be acknowledged that Ibsen has created
some characters possessing a truth to life and a completeness
such as are not to be met with in any poet since Shakespeare.
Gina (in The Wild Duck) is one of the most profound creations of
world-literature — almost as great as Sancho Panza, who inspired
Rank. The best possible, alike for the physician and patient — namely,
certainty. Nora (quickly and searchingly). Certainty ?
Rank. Complete certainty. Ought not I, upon the strength of it, to be
very merry this evening ?
Nora. Yes, you were quite right to be, Dr. Rank. ... I am sure you
are very fond of masquerade balls.
Rank. When there are plenty of interesting masks present, I certainly
am. . . .
Helmer. . . . But what character will you take [at our next masquerade] ?
Rank. I am perfectly clear as to that, my dear friend.
Helmer. Well?
Rank. At the next masquerade I shall appear invisible.
Helmer. What a comical idea !
Rank. Don't you know there is a big black hat — haven't you heard
stories of the hat that made people invisible ? You pull it all over you, and
then nobody sees you. . . . But I am quite forgetting why I came in here.
Helmer, just give me a cigar — one of the dark Havanas. . . . Thanks.
(He lights his cigar!) And now good-bye . . . and thank you for the light.
[He nods to them both and goes. — A Doll's House, pp. 96-100.
* Frau Alving is speaking with Pastor Manders, and is just relating that
she was one day witness to a scene in the adjoining room which proved to
her that her departed husband was carrying on an intrigue with her maid
servant. In the next room are Oswald, her son, and Regina, the offspring
of the intercourse of her husband with the maid-servant.
[From within the dining-room comes the noise of a chair overturned,
and at the same moment is heard :
Regina (sharply, but whispering). Oswald, take care ! Are you mad ?
Let me go 1
Mrs. Alving (starts in terror). Ah ! (She stares wildly towards the
half-opened door j OSWALD is heard coughing and humming inside. A bottle
is uncorked!)
Manders (excited). What in the world is the matter ? What is it, Mrs
Alving ?
MRS. Alving (hoarsely). Ghosts ! The couple from the conservatory
have risen again ! — Ghosts, The Pillars of Society, and other Plays. By
Henrik Ibsen, Camelot Series, p. 150.
f Frau Helseth has in vain sought for Rosmer and Rebecca in the house.
MADAME HELSETH (goes to the window and looks out). Oh, good God !
that white thing there ! — My soul ! They're both of them out on the bridge !
God forgive the sinful creatures — if they're not in each other's arms !
(Shrieks aloud!) Oh — down — both of them ! Out into the mill-race ! Help !
help ! (Her knees tremble, she holds on to the chair-back, shaking all over;
site can scarcely get the words out!) No. No help here. The dead wife
has taken them. — Rosmerholm. London, Walter Scott, p. 144. The last
sentence is not a happy one. It is commonplace, upsetting the mood of the
hearer or reader.

342 DEGENERATION
it Ibsen has had the daring to create a female Sancho, and
in his temerity has come very near to Cervantes, whom no one
has equalled. If Gina is not quite so overpowering as Sancho,
it is because there is wanting in her his contrast to Don
Quixote. Her Don Quixote, Hjalmar, is no genuine, convinced
idealist, but merely a miserable self-deluding burlesquer of the
ideal. None the less, no poet since the illustrious Spanish
master has succeeded in creating such an embodiment of plain,
jolly, healthy common-sense, of practical tact without anxiety
as to things eternal, and of honest fulfilment of all proximate,
obvious duties, without a suspicion of higher moral obligations,
as this Gina, e.g., in the scene where Hjalmar returns home after
having spent the night out.* Hjalmar also is a perfect crea
tion, in which Ibsen has not once succumbed to the cogent
temptation to exaggerate, but has exercised most entranc-
ingly that ' self-restraint ' in every word which, as Goethe said,
' reveals the master.' Little Hedwig (again in The Wild Duck),
the aunt Juliane Tesman (in Hedda Gabler), perhaps also the
childishly egoistical consumptive Lyngstrand (in The Lady frcm
the Sed), are not inferior to these characters. It should, however,
be noticed that, with the exception of Gina, Hjalmar and
Hedwig, the lifelike and artistically delightful persons in Ibsen's
dramas never play the chief parts, but move in subordinate
tasks around the central figures. The latter are not human
beings of flesh and blood, but abstractions such as are evoked
by a morbidly - excited brain. They are attempts at the
embodiment of Ibsenite doctrines, homunculi, originating not
from natural procreation, but through the black art of the poet.
* Hjalmar has passed the night away from home, having learned that his
wife before her marriage with him had had a liaison with another. He
returns in the morning, crapulous and hipped. He is bombastic and melo
dramatic, while his wife is calm and practical : —
GINA (standing with the brush in her hand, and looking at him). Oh,
there now, Ekdal ; so you've come after all ?
Hjalmar (comes in and answers in u, toneless voice). I come — only to
depart again immediately.
Gina. Yes, yes ; I suppose so. But, Lord help us, what a sight you are !
Hjalmar. A sight ?
Gina. And your nice winter coat, too ! Well, that's done for. . . . Then
you are still bent on leaving us, Ekdal ?
Hjalmar. Yes ; that's a matter of course, I should think.
Gina. Well, well . . . (Sets a tray with coffee, etc., on the table.) Here's
a drop of something warm, if you'd like it. And there's some bread and
butter and a snack of salt meat.
Hjalmar (glancing at the tray). Salt meat ! Never under this roof !
It's true I haven't had a mouthful of solid food for nearly twenty-four hours ,
but no matter. ... Oh no, I must go out into the storm and the snow-
blast — go from house to house and seek shelter for my father and myself.
Gina. But you've got no hat, Ekdal. You've lost your hat, you know, etc.
— The Wild Duck, Act V.

EGO-MANIA 343
This is even admitted, although reluctantly and with reserva
tion, by one of his most raving panegyrists, the French pro
fessor, Auguste Ehrhard.* Doubtless Ibsen takes immense
pains to rouge and powder into a semblance of life the talking
puppets who are to represent his notions. He appends to them
all sorts of little peculiarities for the purpose of giving them an
individual physiognomy. But this perpetually recurring imbecile
' Eh ?' of Tesman-f- (in Hedda Gabler), this ' dash it all !' and
stealthy nibbling of sweetmeats by Nora J (in A DolCs House),
this ' smoking a large meerschaum ' and champagne-drinking
of Oswald (in Ghosts), do not delude the attentive observer as
to their being anything but automata. In spite of the poet's
artifices, one sees, behind the thin varnish of flesh-colour, the
hinges and joints of the mechanism, and hears, above the tones
of the phonographs concealed in them, the creaking and grating
of the machinery.
I have endeavoured to do justice to the high poetical endow
ment of Ibsen, and shall sometimes be able in the course of this
inquiry to recognise this gift again. Is it this, however, which
alone or chiefly has gained for him his admirers in all lands ?
Do his retinue of fifers and bagpipers prize him for his homely
emotional scenes, and for his truly lifelike accessory figures ?
No. They glorify something else in him. They discover in his
pieces world-pictures of the greatest truth, the happiest poetic
use of scientific methods, clearness and incisiveness of ideas, a
fiercely revolutionary desire for freedom, and a modernity preg
nant with the future. Now we will test and examine these
affirmations seriatim, and see if they can be supported by
* Auguste Ehrhard, Professor k la Faculte* des Lettres de Clermont-
Ferrand, Henrik Ibsen et le Thddtre contemporain, Paris, 1892, p. 233 :
' Ibsen's characters may in general be divided into two categories — those in
which the moral element, the life of the soul, dominates, and those in which
the animal prevails. The first are, for the most part, mouthpieces of the
theories dear to the poet. . . . They have their primary origin in the brain
of the poet. ... It is he who gives them life.'
f Right out here so early — eh ? . . . Well, did you get safe home from
the quay — eh ? Look here. Let me untie the bow — eh ? etc. — Hedda
Gabler. London, W. Heinemann, pp. 7-9.
X Nora. Yes, I really am now in a state of extraordinary happiness. There
is only one thing in the world that I should really like.
Rank. Well, and what's that ?
Nora. There's something that I should so like to say — but for Torvald to
hear it.
Rank. Then, why don't you say it to him ?
Nora. Because I daren't, for it sounds so ugly. . . .
Rank. In that case I would advise you not to say it. But you might say
it to us, at any rate. . . . What is it that you would like to say in Helmer's
presence ?
Nora. I should like to shout with all my heart — Oh dash it all —A
DolPs House, op. cit, pp. 26, 27.

344 DEGENERATION
Ibsen's works, or are merely the arbitrary and undemonstrable
expressions of aesthetic wind-bags.
It is pretended that Ibsen is before all things exemplary in
truthfulness. He has even become the model of ' realism.' As
a matter of fact, since Alexandre Dumas pere, author of The
Three Musketeers and Monte Cristo, no writer has heaped up in
his works so many startling improbabilities as Ibsen. (I say im
probabilities, because I dare not say impossibilities ; for, after all,
everything is possible as the unheard-of exploit of some fool,
or as the extraordinary effect of a unique accident.) Is it
conceivable that (in Ghosts) the joiner Engstrand, wishing
to open a tavern for sailors, should call upon his own daughter
to be the odalisque of his 'establishment'- — this daughter
who reminds him that she has been ' brought up in the house
of Madam Alving, widow of a lord-in-waiting,' that she has
been treated 'almost as a child of the house'? Not that I
imagine Engstrand to be possessed of any moral scruples. But
a man of this stamp knows that one woman does not suffice for
his house ; and since he must engage others, he would certainly not
turn to his daughter, bred as she was in the midst of higher habits
of life, and knowing that, if she wishes to lead a life of pleasure,
it would not be necessary to become straightway a prostitute for
sailors. Is it conceivable that Pastor Manders (Ghosts), a
liberally educated clergyman in the Norway of to-day, a country
of flourishing insurance companies, banks, railways, prosperous
newspapers, etc., should dissuade Madam Alving from insuring
against fire the asylum she had just founded? 'For my own
part,' he says, ' I should not see the smallest impropriety in
guarding against all contingencies. ... I mean [by really
responsible people] men in such independent and influential
positions that one cannot help allowing some weight to their
opinions. . . . People would be only too ready to interpret our
action as a sign that neither you nor I had the right faith in a
Higher Providence.' Does Ibsen really wish to make anyone
believe that in Norway there are persons who have religious
scruples concerning insurance against fire ? Has not this
nonsensical idea come into his head simply because he wishes
to have the asylum burned down and finally destroyed ? For
this purpose Madam Alving must have no money to rebuild the
asylum, it must not be insured, and hence Ibsen thought it
necessary to assign a motive for the omission of the insurance.
A poet who introduces a fire into his work, as a symbol and
also as an active agent— for it has the dramatic purpose of
destroying the lying reputation for charity of the defunct sinner
Alving— should also have the courage to leave unexplained the
omission of the insurance, strange as it may seem. Oswald
Alving relates to his mother (Ghosts) that a Paris doctor on

EGO-MANIA 345
examining him had told him he had a ' kind of softening of the
brain.' Now, I appeal to all the doctors of the world if they
have ever said plainly to a patient, ' You have softening of the
brain.' To the family it perhaps may be revealed, to the patient
never. Chiefly because, if the diagnosis be correct, the invalid
would not understand the remark, and would certainly no longer
be in a fit state to go alone to the doctor. But for yet another
reason these words are impossible. In any case, Oswald's
disease could not have been a softening, but a hardening, a
callous, sclerotic condition of the brain.
In A DolPs House Helmer, who is depicted as somewhat
sensual, although prosaic, homely, practical, and common
place, says to his Nora : ' Is that my lark who is twittering
outside there ? . . . Is the little squirrel running about ? . . .
Has my little spendthrift bird been wasting more money ? . . .
Come, come ; my lark must not let her wings droop immediately.
. . . What do people call the bird who always spends every
thing? . . . My lark is the dearest little thing in the world;
but she needs a very great deal of money. . . . And I couldn't
wish you to be anything but exactly what you are — my own true
little lark. . . .' And it is thus that a husband, a bank director
and barrister, after eight years of married life, speaks to his wife,
the mother of his three children ; and not in a momentary out
burst of playful affection, but in the full light of an ordinary day,
and in an interminable scene of seven pages (pp. 2-8), with a
view to giving us an idea of the habitually prevalent tone in this
"doll's home!' I should much like to know what my readers of
both sexes who have been married at least eight years think of
this specimen of Ibsen's ' realism.'
In The Pillars of Society all the characters talk about
'society.' 'You are to rise and support society, brother-in-law,'
says Miss Hessel, 'earnestly and with emphasis.' ' If you strike
this blow, you ruin me utterly, and not only me, but also a great
and blessed future for the community which was the home of
your childhood.' And a little further on : ' See, this I have
dared for the good of the community ! . . . Don't you see that
it is society itself that forces us into these subterfuges ?' The
persons thus holding forth are a wholesale merchant and consul,
and a school-mistress who has long resided in America, and has
broad views. Can the word ' society ' in the mouth of cultivated
people, when so used, have any other meaning than 'social
edifice ?' Well, but the characters in the piece, as it is again and
again repeated, employ the word ' society ' in reference to the
well-to-do classes in a small seaside place in Norway — that is,
to a clique of six or eight families ! Ibsen makes the readers of
his piece believe that it is a question of upholding the social
edifice, and they learn with astonishment that this only con-

346 DEGENERATION
cerns the protection of a diminutive coterie of Philistines in a
northern Gotham.
The* American ship Indian Girl is undergoing repairs in
Consul Bernick's dock. Her hull is quite rotten. If she
is sent to sea she will assuredly founder. Bernick, however,
insists that she shall sail in two days. His foreman Aune
pronounces this impossible. Then Bernick threatens Aune
with dismissal, at which the latter yields, and promises that
'in two days the Indian Girl will be ready to sail.' Bernick
knows that he is sending the Indian Girl's crew of eighteen men
to certain death. And why does he commit this wholesale
murder? He gives the following explanation: 'I have my
reasons for hurrying on the affair. Have you read this morn
ing's paper ? Ah ! then you know that the Americans have
been making disturbances again. The shameless pack put the
whole town topsy-turvy. Not a night passes without fights in
the taverns or on the street, not to speak of other abominations.
. . . And who gets the blame for all this disturbance ? It is
I — yes, I — that suffer for it. These newspaper scribblers are
always covertly carping at us for giving our whole attention to
the Palm Tree. And I, whose mission it is to be an example to
my fellow-citizens, must have such things thrown in my teeth !
I cannot bear it. It won't do for me to have my name be
spattered in this way. . . . Not just now ; precisely at this
moment I need all the respect and good-will of my fellow-
citizens. I have a great undertaking on hand, as you have
probably heard ; but if evil-disposed persons succeed in shaking
people's unqualified confidence in me, it may involve me in the
greatest difficulties. So I must silence these carping and spite
ful scribblers at any price, and that is why I give you till the
day after to-morrow.' This paltry motive for the coldly-planned
murder of eighteen men is so ridiculous that even Ehrhard, who
admires everything in Ibsen, dares not defend it, and timidly
remarks that ' the author does not very well explain why the
anxiety for his reputation should require the sending to sea of
a vessel which he has not had time thoroughly to repair.'*
At the head of a delegation of his fellow-citizens, sent to
thank him for the establishment of a railway, Pastor Rorlund
delivers an address to Bernick in which the following passages
occur: 'We have often expressed to you our gratitude for the
broad moral foundation upon which you have, so to speak, built
up our society. This time we chiefly hail in you the . . .
citizen, who has taken the initiative in an undertaking which,
we are credibly assured, will give a powerful impetus to the
temporal prosperity and well-being of the community. . . . You
are in an eminent sense the pillar and corner-stone of this com-
* Auguste Ehrhard, op. cit, p 270.

EGO-MANIA 347
munity. . . . And it is just this light of disinterestedness
shining over all your actions that is so unspeakably beneficent,
especially in these times. You are now on the point of procuring
for us — I do not hesitate to say the word plainly and prosaically
—a railway. . . . But you cannot reject a slight token of your
grateful fellow - citizens' appreciation, least of all on this
momentous occasion, when, according to the assurances of
practical men, we are standing on the threshold of a new era.'
I have not interrupted by a single remark or note of exclama
tion this unheard-of balderdash. It shall produce its own
unaided effect upon the reader. If this nonsense appeared in
a burlesque farce, it would be hardly funny enough, but other
wise acceptable. Now, this claims to be ' realistic ' ! We are
to take Ibsen's word for it that Pastor Rorlund was sober when
he made this speech ! A more insulting demand has never
been made by an author on his readers.
In An Enemy of Society the subject treats of a rather in
comprehensible bathing establishment, comprising at once
mineral waters, medicinal baths and sea-bathing. The doctor
of the establishment has discovered that the springs are con
taminated with typhoid bacilli, and insists that the water shall
be taken from a place higher up in the mountains, where it
would not be polluted by sewage. He is the more urgent in his
demands, as without this precaution a fatal epidemic will break
out among the visitors. And to this the burgomaster of the
town is supposed to reply : ' The existing supply of water for
the baths is once for all a fact, and must naturally be treated
as such. But probably the directors, at some future time, will
not be indisposed to take into their consideration whether, by
making certain pecuniary sacrifices, it may not be possible to
introduce some improvements.' This is a question of a place
which, as Ibsen insists, has staked its future on the development
of its youthful bathing establishment ; the place is situated in
Norway, in a small district where all the inhabitants are
mutually acquainted, and where every case of illness and death
is noticed by all. And the burgomaster will run the risk of
having a number of the visitors at the establishment attacked
with typhoid, when he is forewarned that this will certainly
happen if the conduit pipes of the spring are not transferred.
Without having an exaggeratedly high opinion of the burgo
master mind in general, I deny that any idiot such as Ibsen
depicts is at the head of the local administration of any town
whatsoever in Europe.
Tesman, in Hedda Gabler, expects that his publication, Domestic
Industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages, will secure him a
professorship in a college. But he has a dangerous competitor
in Ejlert Ldvborg, who has published a book on The General

348 DEGENERATION
March of Civilization. This work has already made a ' great
sensation,' but the sequel is far to surpass this, and ' treats of
the future.' ' But, good gracious ! we don't know anything
about that !' someone objects. ' No ; but there are several
things though can be said about it, all the same. ... It is
divided into two sections. The first is about the civilizing
forces of the future, and the other is about the civilizing progress
of the future.' Special stress is laid upon the fact that it lies
wholly outside the domain of science, and consists in mere
prophecy. ' Do you believe it impossible to reproduce such a
work — that it cannot be written a second time ? No. . . . For the
inspiration, you know. . . .' We are acquainted, were it only
through popular histories of morals such as the Democritus of
Karl Julius Weber, with the strange questions with which the
casuists of the Middle Ages used to occupy themselves. But
that, in our century, such works as those of Tesman and Lovborg
could gain for their authors a professorship of any kind in either
hemisphere, or even the position of privat docent, is an infantile
invention, fit to raise a laugh in all academical circles.
In The Lady from the Sea the mysterious sailor returns to
find that his old sweetheart has been for some years the wife of
Dr. Wangel. He urges her to follow him, saying she really
belongs to him. The husband is present at the interview. He
shows the stranger that he is wrong in wishing to carry off Ellida.
He represents to the sailor that it would be preferable if he
addressed himself to him (the husband), and not to the wife.
He mildly remonstrates with the stranger for addressing Ellida
with the familiar 'thou,' and calling her by her Christian name.
' Such a familiarity is not customary with us, sir.' The scene is
unspeakably comic, and would be worthy of reproduction in its
entirety. We will limit ourselves to quoting the conclusion : —
Stranger. To-morrow night I will come again, and then I shall look
for you here. You must wait for me here in the garden, for I prefer settling
the matter with you alone. You understand ?
Ellida (in low, trembling tone). Do you hear that, Wangel ?
Wangel. Only keep calm. We shall know how to prevent this visit.
Stranger. Good-bye for the present, Ellida. So to-morrow night 
ELLIDA (imploringly). Oh, no, no ! Do not come to-morrow night !
Never come here again 1
Stranger. And should you, then, have a mind to follow me over seas ?
Ellida. Oh, don't look at me like that !
Stranger. I only mean that you must then be ready to set out.
Wangel. Go up to the house, Ellida, etc.
And Ibsen depicts Wangel, not as a senile, debile old man, but
in the prime of life and in full possession of all his faculties !
All these crack-brained episodes are, however, far surpassed by
the scene in Rosmersholm, where Rebecca confesses to the doughty
Rosmer that she is consumed by ardent passion for him : 

EGO-MANIA 349
Rosmer. What have you felt ? Speak so that I can understand you.
Rebecca. It came over me — this wild, uncontrollable desire — oh, Rosmer !
Rosmer. Desire? You! For what ?
Rebecca. For you.
Rosmer (fries to spring up). What is this ? [Idiot !]
Rebecca (stops him). Sit still, dear; there is more to tell.
Rosmer. And you mean to say — that you love me — in that way?
Rebecca. I thought that it should be called love. Yes, I thought it was
love ; but it was not. It was what I said. It was a wiid, uncontrollable
desire. ... It came upon me like a storm on the sea. It was like one of
the storms we sometimes have in the North in the winter-time. It seizes
you — and sweeps you along with it — whither it will. Resistance is out of
the question.'
Rosmer, the object of this burning passion, is forty-three years
old, and has been a clergyman. This makes it somewhat
droll, but not impossible, for erotomaniacs can love all sorts of
creatures, even boots.* What, however, is inconceivable is the
way in which the nymphomaniac sets about satisfying her ' wild,
uncontrollable desire,' this ' storm upon the sea ' which ' seizes
you, and sweeps you along with it' She had become the friend
of Rosmer's sickly wife, and had for eighteen months tormented
her by hinting that Rosmer is unhappy because she has no
children, that he loves her, the nymphomaniac, but has con
trolled his passion as long as his wife is living. By means of this
poison, patiently and unceasingly dropped into her soul, she had
happily driven her to suicide. After a year and a half! To
appease her 'wild, uncontrollable passion'! This is exactly as
if a man driven wild by hunger should, with a view to satisfy
ing his craving, devise a deep plan for obtaining a field by fraud,
so that he might grow wheat, have it ground, and afterwards bake
himself a splendid loaf, which would then be Oh, so delicious !
The reader may judge for himself if this is the usual way in
which famished persons, or nymphomaniacs over whom passion
' sweeps like a storm upon the sea,' satisfy their impulses.
Such are the presentations of the world's realities as figured
to himself by this ' realist ' ! Many of his infantile or silly lucu
brations are petty, superficial details, and a benevolent friend,
with some experience of life and some common-sense, could easily
have preserved him in advance from making himself ridiculous.
Others of his inventions, however, touch the very essence of his
poems and convert these into out and out grotesque moonshine.
In The Pillars of Society, Bernick, the man who calmly plans the
* Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis mit besonderer Beriick-
sichligung der contraren Sexualempfindung. Eine klinisch -forensische
Studie. Dritte vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage. Stuttgart, 1888. See
(p. 120) the observation relative to the young nobleman who was erotically
excited by his 'boot-thoughts.' I cite this single case only, but it would be
possible to instance dozens of cases where nightcaps, shoe-nails, white
aprons, the wrinkled head of an old woman, etc., have excited sensuality in
the highest degree.

350 DEGENERATION
murder of eighteen men to maintain his reputation as a capable
dock-owner (we may remark, in passing, the absurdity of this
means for attaining such an end), all at once confesses to his
fellow-citizens, without any compulsion, and solely on the advice
of Miss Hessel, that he has been a villain and a criminal. In
A Doll's House, the wife, who was only a moment before playing
so tenderly with her children, suddenly abandons these children
without a thought for them.* In Rosmersholm we are to believe
that the nymphomaniac Rebecca, while in constant intercourse
with the object of her flame, has become chaste and virtuous,
etc. Many of Ibsen's principal characters present this spectacle
of impossible and incomprehensible metamorphoses, so that
they look like figures composed of odd halves, which some
bungling artisan has stuck together.
After the life-like truthfulness of Ibsen, let us inquire into the
scientific character of his work. This reminds us of the civiliza
tion of Liberian negroes. The constitution and laws of that West
African republic read very much like those of the United States
of North America, and on paper command our respect. But
anyone living in Liberia very soon recognises the fact that these
black republicans are savages, having no idea of the political
institutions nominally existing among them, of their code of
laws, etc. Ibsen likes to give himself the appearance of stand
ing in the domain of natural science and of profiting by its latest
results. In his plays Darwin is quoted. He has evidently
dipped, though with a careless hand, into books on heredity,
and has picked up something about medical science. But the
scanty, ludicrously misunderstood stock phrases which have re
mained in his memory are made use of by him much as my
illustrative Liberian negro uses the respectable paper collars
and top-hats of Europe. The expert can never preserve his
gravity when Ibsen displays his scientific and medical know
ledge. Heredity is his hobby-horse, which he mounts in every one of
his pieces. There is not a single trait in his personages, a single
peculiarity of character, a single disease, that he does not trace
to heredity. In A Doll's House, Dr. Rank's ' poor innocent
spine must do penance for "his" father's notions of amusement
when he was a lieutenant in the army.' Helmer explains to
Nora that ' a misty atmosphere of lying brings contagion into
the whole family. Every breath the children draw contains
* A Doll's House, p. 112 :
Helmer. To forsake your home, your husband, and your children! And
only think what people will say about it.
Nora. I cannot take that into consideration. I only know that to go is
necessary for me. ...
Helmer. . . . Your duties to . . . your children ?
Nora. I have other duties equally sacred . . . duties towards myself, etc.

EGO-MANIA 351
some germ of evil. . . . Nearly all men who go to ruin early
have had untruthful mothers. ... In most cases it comes from
the mother ; but the father naturally works in the same direc
tion.' And again : ' Your father's low principles you have
inherited, every one of them. No religion, no morality, no
sense of duty.' In Ghosts Oswald has learned from the extra
ordinary doctor in Paris who told him he had softening of the
brain, that he had inherited his malady from his father.*
Regina, the natural daughter of the late Alving, exactly re
sembles her mother.
Regina (to herself). So mother was that kind of woman, after all.
Mrs. Alving. Your mother had many good qualities, Regina.
Regina. Yes ; but she was one of that sort, all the same. Oh ! I've often
suspected it. . . A poor girl must make the best of her young days. . . .
And I, too, want to enjoy my life, Mrs. Alving.
Mrs. Alving. Yes, I see you do. But don't throw yourself away, Regina.
Regina. Oh ! what must be, must be. If Oswald takes after his father, I
take after my mother, I dare say.
In Rosmersholm Rebecca's nymphomania is explained by the
fact that she is the natural daughter of a Lapland woman of
doubtful morals. ' I believe your whole conduct is determined
by your origin,' Rector Kroll says to her (p. 82). Rosmer
never laughs, because 'it is a trait of his family.' He is ' the
descendant of the men that look down on us from these walls '
(p. 80). His ' spirit is deeply rooted in his ancestry ' (p. 80).
Hilda, the stepdaughter of the ' Lady from the Sea,' says : ' I
should not wonder if some fine day she went mad. . . . Her
mother went mad, too. She died mad. I know that.' In The
Wild Duck nearly everyone has a hereditary mark. Gregers
Werle, the malignant imbecile, who holds and proclaims his
passion for gossip as an ardent desire for truth, inherits this
craze from his mother. t Little Hedwig becomes blind, like her
father, old Werle.J
* Ghosts, p. 170 : Oswald. At last he said, 'You have been worm-eaten
from your birth.' ... I didn't understand either, and begged of him to give
me a clearer explanation. And then the old cynic said, 'The father's sins
are visited upon the children.' And p. 194 : Oswald. The disease I have as
my birthright (he points to his forehead, and adds very softly) is seated here.
f The Wild Duck, Act III. :
Gregers. Besides, if I'm to go on living, I must try and find some cure
for my sick conscience.
WERLE. It will never be well. Your conscience has been sickly from
childhood. That's an inheritance from your mother, Gregers — it is the only
inheritance she left you. . . .
Relling. But, deuce take it, don't you see the fellow's mad, cracked,
demented !
Gina. There, you hear! His mother before him had mad fits like that
sometimes. X The Wild Duck, Act II. :
Hjalmar. She is in danger of losing her eyesight.
Gregers. Becoming blind ?

352 DEGENERATION
In the earlier philosophical dramas the same idea is constantly
repeated. Brand gets his obstinacy, and Peer Gynt his lively,
extravagant imagination, from the mother. Ibsen has evidently
read Lucas's book on the first principles of heredity, and has
borrowed from it uncritically. It is true that Lucas believes in
the inheritance even of notions and feelings as complex and as
nearly related to specific facts as, e.g., the horror of doctors,* and
that he does not doubt the transmission of diseased deviations
from the norm, e.g., the appearance of blindness at a definite
age.-f- Lucas, however, whose merits are not to be denied, did
not sufficiently distinguish between that which the individual
receives in its material genesis from its parents, and that which
is subsequently suggested by family life and example, by con
tinuous existence in the same conditions as its parents, etc,
Ibsen is the true 'man of one book.' He abides by his Lucas.
If he had read Weismann,! and, above all, Galton,§ he would
have known that nothing is more obscure and apparently
more capricious, than the course of heredity. For the individual
is, says Galton, the result — the arithmetic mean — of three dif
ferent quantities : its father, its mother and the whole species,
represented by the double series, going back to the beginnings
of all terrestrial life, of its paternal and maternal progenitors.
This third datum is the unknown quantity — the x — in the pro
blem. Reversions to distant ancestors may make the individual
wholly unlike its parents, and the influence of the species so far
exceed, as a general rule, those of the immediate progenitors,
that children who are the exact cast of their father or mother,
especially with respect to the most complex manifestations of
personality, of character, capacities and inclinations, are the
greatest rarities. But Ibsen is not at all concerned about
seriously justifying his ideas on heredity in a scientific manner.
As we shall see later on, these ideas have their root in his
mysticism ; Lucas's work was for him only a lucky treasure-trove,
Hjalmar. . . . But the doctor has warned us. It's coming, inexorably.
Gregers. What an awful misfortune ! How do you account for it?
Hjalmar (sighs). Hereditary, no doubt.
Again, Act IV. :
Mrs. Sorby. ... He (Werle) is going blind.
Hjalmar (with a start). Going blind? That's strange — Werle, too, be
coming blind !
* Dr Prosper Lucas, Traitd philosophique et physiologique de PHdrddild
naturelle dans les Etats de Santd et de Maladie du Systhne nerveux, etc. (The
title occupies seven lines more !) Paris, 1847, 2 volumes, t. i., p. 250. (It
appears that Montaigne had this inherited horror of doctors.)
f Lucas, op. cit., t. i., pp. 391-420: Del'hdrdditddes modes sensitifs de lavue.
On page 400 he tells of a family in which the mother became blind at the age
of twenty- one years, and the children at sixteen and seventeen respectively, etc.
% August Weismann, Ueber die Vererbung. Jena, 1883.
§ F. Galton, Natural Inheritance. London, 1888.

EGO-MANIA 353
which he seized on with joy, because it offered him the possi
bility of scientifically cloaking his mystic obsession.
Ibsen's excursions in the domain of medical science, which he
hardly ever denies himself, are most delightful. In The Pillars
of Society Rector Rorlund glorifies the women of his cdterie as a
kind of ' sisters of mercy who pick lint' Pick lint ! In an age
of antiseptics and aseptics ! Let Ibsen only take into his head
to enter any surgical ward with his ' picked lint '! He would be
astonished at the reception given to him and his lint. In An
Enemy of Society Dr. Stockmann declares that the water of the
baths with its ' millions of bacilli is absolutely injurious to health,
whether used internally or externally.' The only bacilli which
can be referred to in this scene, as throughout the whole piece,
are the typhoid bacilli of Eberth. Now, it may be true that
bathing in contaminated water may produce Biskra boils, and
perhaps beVi-beri ; but it would be difficult for Dr. Stockmann
and Ibsen to instance a single case of typhoid fever contracted
through bathing in water containing bacilli. In A Doll's House
Helmer's life 'depended on a journey abroad.' That might be
true for a European in the tropics, or for anyone living in a
fever-district. But in Norway there is no such thing as an
acute illness in which the life of the invalid depends on ' a
journey abroad.' Further on Dr. Rank says (p. 60) : ' In the
last few days I have had a general stock-taking of my inner
man. Bankruptcy ! Before a month is over I shall be food
for worms in the churchyard. . . . There is only one more in
vestigation to be made, and when I have made it I shall know
exactly at what time dissolution will take place.' According
to his own declaration, Dr. Rank suffers from disease of the
dorsal marrow (it is true that he speaks of the dorsal column, but
the mistaken expression need not be taken too rigidly). Ibsen
is evidently thinking of consumption of the spinal marrow.
Now, there is in this disease absolutely no symptom which could
with certainty authorize the prediction of death three weeks
beforehand ; there is no ' general stock-taking of the inner
man ' which the invalid, if he were a doctor, could carry out on
himself to gain a clear knowledge of ' when the dissolution ' was
to take place ; and there is no form of consumption of the spinal
marrow which would allow the invalid four weeks before his
death (not an accidental death, but one necessitated by his
disease) to go to a ball, drink immoderately of champagne, and
afterwards to take an affecting leave of his friends. Oswald
Alving's illness in Ghosts is, from a clinical standpoint, quite as
childishly depicted as that of Rank. From all that is said in the
piece the disease inherited by Oswald from his .father can only
be diagnosed either as syphilis hereditaria tarda, or dementia
paralytica. The first of these diseases is out of the question,
23

354 DEGENERATION
for Oswald is depicted as a model of manly strength and health.*
And even if, in exceptional and extremely rare cases, the
malady does not show itself till after the victim is well on in
his twenties, it yet betrays itself from the earliest childhood by
certain phenomena of degeneracy which would prevent even a
mother, blinded by love and pride, from glorifying her son's
'outer self in the style of Mrs. Alving. Certain minor features
might perhaps indicate dementia paralytica, as, for example,
Oswald's sensual excitability, the artless freedom with which
he speaks before his mother of the amours of his friends in
Paris, or gives expression to his pleasure at the sight of the
' glorious ' Regina, the levity with which, at the first sight of
this girl, he makes plans for his marriage, etc.-f- But together
with these exact, though subordinate, features there appear
others infinitely more important, which wholly preclude the
diagnosis of dementia paralytica. There is in Oswald no trace
of the megalomania which is never absent in the first stage of
this malady ; he is anxious and depressed, while the sufferer
from general paralysis feels extremely happy, and sees life
through rose-coloured spectacles. Oswald forebodes and dreads
an outburst of madness — a fact which I, for my part, have never
observed in a paralytic, nor found indicated by any clinicist what
ever. Finally, Oswald's dementia declares itself with a sudden
ness and completeness found in acute mania only ; but the de
scription given of Oswald in the last scene — his immobility, his
' dull and toneless ' voice, and his idiotic murmuring of the
words 'the sun, the sun,' repeated half a dozen times — does not
in the remotest degree correspond with the picture of acute
mania. The poet has naturally no need to understand anything of
pathology. But when he pretends to describe real life, he
ought to be honest. He should not get out of his depth in
scientific observation and precision simply because these are
demanded or preferred by the age. The more ignorant the
poet is in pathology, the greater is the test of his veracity given
by his clinical pictures. As he cannot, in his lay capacity, draw
on his imagination for them by combining clinical experiences
and reminiscences of books, it is necessary that he shall have seen
with his own eyes each case represented to depict it accurately.
Shakespeare was likewise no physician ; and, besides, what did
the physicians of his time know ? Yet we can to this day still
* Page 136 :
Mrs. Alving. I know one who has kept both his inner and his outer
self unharmed. Only look at him, Mr. Manders.
f Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, p. 139. The author here cites all
the features in question as characteristic of the first stage of general paralysis :
' Libidinous talk, unconstraint in intercourse with the opposite sex, plans of
marriage.'

EGO-MANIA 355
diagnose without hesitation the dementia senilis of Lear,
Hamlet's weakness of will through nervous exhaustion (neuras
thenic ' aboalie '), the melancholia, accompanied with optical
hallucination, of Lady Macbeth. Why ? Because Shakespeare
introduced into his creations things really seen. Ibsen, on
the contrary, has freely invented his invalids, and that this
method could, in the hands of a layman, only lead to laughable
results, needs no proof. A moving or affecting situation offers
itself to his imagination — that of a man who clearly foresees
his near and inevitable death, and with violent self-conquest
lifts himself to the stoic philosophy of renunciation ; or that of
a young man who adjures his mother to kill him when the
madness he awaits with horror shall break out. The situation
is very improbable. Perhaps it has never occurred. In any
event, Ibsen has never witnessed it. But if it occurred it
would possess great poetic beauty, and produce a great effect
on the stage. Consequently Ibsen calmly turns out the
novel and unknown maladies of a Dr. Rank or an Oswald
Alving, the progress of which might make these situations
possible. Such is the procedure of the poet whose realism
and accurate observation are so much vaunted by his ad
mirers. His clearness of mind, his love of liberty, his modernity !
Careful readers of Ibsen's works will not trust their eyes
when they see these words applied to him. We will at once
put immediate and exhaustive tests to the clearness of his
thought. His love of liberty will be revealed by analysis as
anarchism ; and his modernity amounts essentially to this,
that in his pieces railways are constructed (The Pillars of
Society), that there is a cackle about bacilli (An Enemy of
the People), that the struggles of political parties play a
part in them (The League of the Young, Rosmersholm) — all put
on superficially with a brush, without inner dependence upon
the true active forces in the poem. This ' modern,' this ' apostle
of liberty,' has an idea of the press and its functions fit for a
clerk in a police-station, and he pursues journalists with the
hatred, droll in these days, of a tracker of demagogues in the
third decade of this century. All the journalists whom he sets
before us — and they are numerous in his pieces, Peter Mortens-
gaard in Rosmersholm, Haustad and Billing in An Enemy of
the People, Bahlmann in The League of the Young — are either
drunken ragamuffins or poor knock-kneed starvelings, con
stantly trembling at the prospect of being thrashed or kicked
out, or unprincipled rascals who write for anyone who pays.
He has so clear a grasp of the social question that he makes
a foreman mix with the workmen and threaten a strike because
machines are about to be used on the wharves (The Pillars of

356 DEGENERATION
Society) ! He looks upon the masses with the fine contempt of
the great feudal landlords. When he mentions them it is
either with biting derision or a most aristocratic and arrogant
disdain.* The greater part of his notions, moreover, belong to no time,
but are emanations from his personal perversity, and can, there
fore, be neither modern or not modern ; the least uncouth of
them, however, having their root in a definite period, spring
from the circle of ideas of a Gothamist of the first third of the
present century. The label ' modern ' was arbitrarily attached
to Ibsen by George Brandes (Moderne Geister, Frankfurt, 1 886),
one of the most repulsive literary phenomena of the century.
George Brandes, a sponger on the fame or name of others, has
throughout his life followed the calling of a ' human orchestra,'
who with head, mouth, hands, elbows, knees, and feet, plays
ten noisy instruments at once, dancing before poets and authors,
and, after the hubbub, passes his hat round among the deafened
public. For a quarter of a century he has assiduously courted
the favour of all who for any reason had a following, and
written rhetorical and sophistical phrases about them, as long
as he could find a market. Adorned with a few feathers
plucked from the stately pinions of Taine's genius, and prating
of John Stuart Mill, whose treatise On Liberty he has glanced
at, but hardly read, and certainly not understood, he intro
duced himself among the youth of Scandinavia, and, abusing
their confidence, obtained by this means, has made their syste
matic moral poisoning the task of his life. He preached
to them the gospel of passion, and, with truly diabolical zeal
and obstinacy, confused all their notions, giving to whatever
he extolled that was mean and reprehensible the most attractive
and honourable names. It has always been thought weak and
cowardly to yield to base impulses condemned by judgment,
instead of combating and stifling them. If Brandes had said
to the young, ' Renounce your judgment ! Sacrifice duty to
your passions ! Be ruled by your senses ! Let your will
and consciousness be as feathers before the storm of your
appetites !'— the better among his hearers would have spit at
him. But he said to them : ' To obey one's senses is to have
character. He who allows himself to be guided by his passions
has individuality. The man of strong will despises discipline
and duty, and follows every caprice, every temptation, every
movement of his stomach or his other organs ' ; and these
* Rosmersholm, p. 23 :
Rebecca (to Brendel). You should apply to Peter Mortensgaard.
Brendel. Pardon, Madame — what sort of an idiot is he ?
See the flat travesty in An Enemy of the People (Act IV.) of the forum
scene in Shakespeare's fulius Ccesar, and the characterization of the ' crowd '
in Brand (Act V.). '

EGO-MANIA 357
vulgarities, thus presented, no longer had the repulsive character
which awakens distrust and serves as a warning. Proclaimed
under the names of ' liberty ' and ' moral autonomy/ debauchery
and dissoluteness gain easy admission into the best circles, and
depravity, from which all would turn if it appeared as such,
seems to insufficiently informed minds attractive and desirable
when disguised as ' modernity.' It is comprehensible that an
educator who turns the schoolroom into a tavern and a brothel
should have success and a crowd of followers. He certainly
runs the risk of being slain by the parents, if they come to
know what he is teaching their children ; but the pupils will
hardly complain, and will be eager to attend the lessons of so
agreeable a teacher. By a similar method Brandes acquitted
himself of his educational functions. This is the explanation of
the influence he gained over the youth of his country, such as his
writings, with their emptiness of thought and unending tattle,
would certainly never have procured for him.
Brandes discovered in Ibsen a revolt against the prevailing
moral law, together with a glorification of bestial instincts, and
accordingly trumpeted his praises in spite of his astounding
reactionary views, as a ' modern spirit,' recommending Ibsen's
works, with a wink of the eye, to the knowledge - craving
youth, whom he served as maitre de plaisir. But this
'modern,' this ' realist,' with his exact 'scientific' observation,
is in reality a mystic and an egomaniacal anarchist. An
analysis of his intellectual peculiarities will enable us to discern
a resemblance to those of Richard Wagner, which is not
surprising, since a similarity in features is precisely a stigma of
degeneracy, and for this reason is common to many, or to all,
higher degenerates.
Ibsen is the child of a rigorously religious race, and grew up
in a family of believers. The impressions of childhood have de
termined the course of his life. His mind has never been able
to iron out the theological crease it got trough nurture. The
Bible and Catechism became for him the bounds beyond which
he has never passed. His free-thinking diatribes against estab
lished Christianity (Brand, Rosmersholm, etc.), his derision of
the shackled pietism of divines (Manders in Ghosts, Rorlund in
The Pillars of Society, the dean in Brand), are an echo of his
teacher, the theosophist, Sceren Kierkegaard (1815-55), a zealot
certainly for quite another Christianity than that ordained by
the state, and provided with powers of nomination and fixed
salaries, but nevertheless an austere and exclusive Christianity,
demanding the whole being of man. Perhaps even Ibsen looks
upon himself as a freethinker. Wagner did the same. But
what does that prove ? He is not clear with regard to his own
thought

358 DEGENERATION
' It is curious,' writes Herbert Spencer,* ' how commonly men
continue to hold, in fact, doctrines which they have rejected in
name, retaining the substance after they have abandoned the
form. In theology an illustration is supplied by Carlyle, who,
in his student days, giving up, as he thought, the creed of his
fathers, rejected its shell only, keeping the contents, and was
proved by his conceptions of the world, and man and conduct,
to be still among the sternest of Scotch Calvinists.' If Spencer,
when he wrote this, had known Ibsen, he would perhaps have cited
him as a second example. As Carlyle was always a Scotch
Calvinist, so Ibsen has always remained a Norwegian Pro
testant of the school of Kierkegaard — that is to say, a Protestant
with the earnest mysticism of a Jacob Boehme, a Swedenborg,
or a Pusey, which easily passes over into the Catholicism of a
St. Theresa or a Ruysbroek.
Three fundamental ideas of Christianity are ever present in
his mind, and about these as round so many axes revolves the
entire activity of his poetical imagination. These three un
alterable central ideas, constituting genuine obsessions, reaching
up from the unconscious into his intellectual life, are original
sin, confession and self-sacrifice or redemption.
.(Esthetic chatterers have spoken of the idea of heredity in
fluencing all Ibsen's works, an idea which cannot escape even
the feeblest attention, as something appertaining to modern
science and Darwinism. As a matter of fact, it is the ever-
recurring original sin of St. Augustine, and it betrays its
theological nature, firstly by the circumstance that it makes its
appearance in conjunction with the two other theological ideas
of confession and redemption, and secondly, by the distinguish
ing characteristic of hereditary transmission. As we have above
seen, Ibsen's personages always inherit a disease (blindness,
consumption of the spinal marrow, madness), a vice (menda-
ciousness, levity, lewdness, obduracy), or some defect (incapacity
for enjoyment), but never an agreeable or useful quality. Now
what is good and wholesome is just as frequently inherited as
what is evil and diseased — even more frequently, according to
many investigators. Hence if Ibsen had really wished to
exhibit the operation of the law of heredity as understood by
Darwin, he would have offered us at least one example, if only
one, of the inheritance of good qualities. But not a. single
instance is to be met with in all his dramas. What his beings
possess of good, comes one knows not whence. They have
always inherited nothing but evil. The gentle Hedvig in The
Wild Duck becomes blind like her father, Werle. But from
whom does she get her dreamy wealth of imagination, her
devoted loving heart? Her father is a cold egoist, and her
* Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State, 1884, p. 78.

EGO-MANIA 359
mother a clever, practical, prosaic housewife. Thus she can
never have inherited her fine qualities from either of her parents.
From them she receives only her eye-disease. With Ibsen
heredity is only a visitation, a punishment for the sins of the
fathers ; science knows of no such exclusive heredity ; theology
alone knows it, and it is simply original sin.
Ibsen's second theological motif is confession ; in nearly all
his pieces such is the goal to which all the action tends ; not,
perchance, forced by circumstances upon a dissimulating
offender, not the inevitable revelation of a hidden misdeed, but
the voluntary outpouring of a pent-up soul, the voluptuous, self-
tormenting disclosure of an ugly inner wound, the remorseful
' My guilt, my deepest guilt !' of the sinner breaking down
under the weight of his burdened conscience, humbling himself
to an avowal that he may find inward peace ; in short, genuine
confession as required by the Church. In A Doll's House,
Helmer informs his wife (p. 44) : 'Many a man can lift himself
up again morally if he openly recognises his offence and under
goes its punishment. . . . Only just think how a man so con
scious of guilt as that must go about everywhere lying, and a
hypocrite, and an actor ; how he must wear a mask towards his
neighbour, and even his wife and children.' For him not the
guilt, but the dissimulation, is the great evil, and its true
expiation consists in ' public avowal ' — i.e., in confession. In
the same piece Mrs. Linden, without any external necessity,
and simply in obedience to an inner impulse, makes the follow
ing confession (p. 87) : ' I, too, have suffered shipwreck. ... I
had no choice at the time ' ; while later on she develops the
theory of confession once more (p. 90) : ' Helmer must know
everything ; between those two there must be the completest
possible understanding, and that can never come to pass while
all these excuses and concealments are going on.'
In The Pillars of Society Miss Hessel exacts a confession
in these terms (p. 70) :
Here you are, the first man in the town, living in wealth and pride, in
power and honour— you who have set the brand of crime upon an innocent
man. Bernick. Do you think I do not feel deeply how I have wronged him :
Do you think I am not prepared to make atonement?
Lona. How? By speaking out ?
Bernick. Can you ask such a thing?
Lona. What else can atone for such a wrong ?
And Johan also says (p. 75) :
In two months I shall be back again.
Bernick. And then you will tell all ?
Johan. Then the guilty one must take the guilt upon himself.
Bernick actually makes the confession demanded of him
from pure contrition, for at the time he makes it all proofs

360 DEGENERATION
of his crime are destroyed, and he has nothing more to fear
from other persons. His confession is couched in most edifying
terms (p. 108) :
I must begin by rejecting the panegyric with which you . . . have over
whelmed me. I do not deserve it ; for until to-day I have not been dis
interested in my dealings ... I have no right to this homage ; for . . .
my intention was to retain the whole myself. . . . My fellow-citizens must
know me to the core . . . that from this evening we begin a new time.
The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hoUowness, its lying propriety, and
its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a museum open for instruction.
. . . My fellow-citizens, I will come out of the lie ; it had almost poisoned
every fibre of my being. You shall know all. Fifteen years ago / was the
guilty one, etc.
In Rosmersholm there is hardly any other subject treated of
than the confession of all before all. In the very first visit of
Kroll (p. 15) Rebecca urges Rosmer to confess :
Rebecca (comes up close to Rosmer, and says rapidly and in a low voice,
so that the Rector does not hear her). Do it now !
Rosmer (also in a low voice). Not this evening.
Rebecca (as before). Yes, this very evening.
As he does not at once obey she will speak for him (p. 19) :
REBECCA. You must let me tell you frankly.
ROSMER (quickly). No, no ; be quiet. Not just now !
Rosmer soon does it himself (p. 28) :
Kroll. We two are in practical agreement — at any rate, on the great
essential questions.
ROSMER (in a low voice). No ; not now.
KROLL (tries to jump up). What is this ?
Rosmer (holding him). No ; you must sit still. I entreat you, Kroll.
Kroll. What can this mean ? I don't understand you. Speak plainly.
Rosmer. A new summer has blossomed in my soul. I see with eyes
grown young again ; and so now I stand 
Kroll. Where ? where, Rosmer ?
ROSMER. Where your children stand.
KROLL. You ? you ? Impossible ! Where do you say you stand?
Rosmer. On the same side as Laurits and Hilda.
Kroll (bows his head). An apostate ! Johannes Rosmer an apostate !
. . . Is this becoming language for a priest ?
ROSMER. I am no longer a priest.
Kroll. Well, but— the faith of your childhood  ?
Rosmer. Is mine no longer. ... I have given it up. I had to give it up.
. . . Peace, and joy, and mutual forbearance must once more enter our
souls. That is why I am stepping forward and openly avowing myself for
what I am. ...
Rebecca. There now ; he's on his way to his great sacrifice.
(We may here note the purely theological designation given
to Rosmer's act.)
Rosmer. I feel so relieved now it is over. You see, I am quite calm
Rebecca. ...

EGO MANIA 361
Like Rosmer, Rebecca also confesses to Rector Kroll
(p. 86) :
REBECCA. Yes, Herr Rector, Rosmer and I — we say thou to each other.
The relation between us has led to that. . . . Come, let us sit down, dear
— all three of us — and then I will tell the whole story.
Rosmer (seats himself mechanically). What has come over you, Rebecca?
This unnatural calmness — what is it ?
Rebecca. I have only to tell you something. . . . Now it must out. It
was not you, Rosmer. You are innocent ; it was / who lured Beata out
into the paths of delusion . . . that led to the mill-race. Now you know
it, both of you. . . .
ROSMER (after a pause). Have you confessed all now, Rebecca ?
No, not yet all. But she hastens to complete to Rosmer
the confession begun to Kroll (p. 98) :
ROSMER. Have you more confessions to make?
Rebecca. The greatest of all is to come.
Rosmer. The greatest ?
Rebecca. What you have never suspected. What gives light and shade
to all the rest, etc.
In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida (p. 19) confesses to Arnholm
the story of her insensate betrothal with the foreign sailor.
Arnholm so little comprehends the need of this confession,
made without rhyme or reason, that he asks with astonishment :
' What is your object, then, in telling me that you were bound ?'
' Because I must have someone in whom to confide,' is Ellida's
sole — and, moreover, sufficient — answer.
In Hedda Gabler the inevitable confessions take place before
the commencement of the piece. ' Yes, Hedda,' Lovborg says
(p. 123). 'And when I used to confess to you! Told you
about myself — things that nobody else knew in those days.
Sat there and admitted that I had been out on the loose for
whole days and nights. . . . Ah, Hedda, what power was it
in you that forced me to acknowledge things like that ? . . .
Had not you an idea that you could wash me clean if only
I came to you in confession ?' He confesses in order to receive
absolution. In The Wild Duck confession is equally prominent, but it
is deliciously ridiculed. The scene in which Gina confesses
to her husband her early liaison with Werle is one of the most
exquisite things in contemporary drama (Act IV.).
Hjalmar. Is it true — can it be true that— that there was an — an under
standing between you and Mr. Werle, while you were in service there ?
Gina. That's not true. Not at that time, Mr. Werle did come after me,
I own it ; and his wife thought there was something in it ... so that I left
her service.
Hjalmar. But afterwards, then !
Gina. Well, then I went home. And mother— well, she wasn't the woman
you took her for, Ekdal ; she kept on worrying and worrying at me about
one thing and another. For Mr. Werle was a widower by that time.
Hjalmar. Well, and then ?

362 DEGENERATION
Gina. I suppose you must know it. He didn't give it up until he'd had
his way.
Hjalmar (striking his hands together). And this is the mother of my
child ! How could you hide this from me?
Gina. It was wrong of me ; I ought certainly to have told you long ago.
Hjalmar. You should have told me at the very first ; then I should have
known what you were.
Gina. But would you have married me all the same ?
Hjalmar. How can you suppose so ?
Gina. That's just why \ didn't dare to tell you anything then. I'd come
to care for you so much, you know ; and I couldn't go and make myself
utterly miserable. ...
Hjalmar. Haven't you every day, every hour, repented of the spider's
web of deceit you had spun around me ? Answer me that ! How could
you help writhing with penitence and remorse ?
Gina. My dear Ekdal, I've plenty to do looking after the house, and all
the daily business 
Further on the idea of self- deliverance and purification
through confession is pitilessly travestied.
Gregers. Haven't you done it yet?
Hjalmar (aloud). It is done.
Gregers. It is ? . . . After so great a crisis — a crisis that's to be the
starting-point of an entirely new life — of a communion founded on truth,
and free from falsehood of any kind. . . . Surely you feel a new consecra
tion after the great crisis.
Hjalmar. Yes, of course I do — that is, in a sort of way.
GREGERS. For I'm sure there's nothing in the world to compare with the
joy of forgiving one who has erred, and raising her up to one's self in love,
etc. On his way to the guillotine, Avinain, the French assassin,
condensed the experience of his life in the pithy saying,
' Never confess.' But this is advice which only those of strong
will *end healthy minds can follow. A lively idea vehemently
demands to be transformed into movement. The movement
exacting the least effort is that of the small muscles of the
larynx, tongue, and lips, i.e., the organs of speech. Anyone,
therefore, having a specially lively idea experiences a strong
desire to relax those cell-groups of his brain in which this idea
is elaborated by allowing the transmission of their stimulus to
the organs of speech. In a word, he desires to speak out.
And if he is weak, if the inhibitive power of the will is not
greater than the motor impulse proceeding from the ideational
centre, he will burst out into speech, be the consequences what
they may. That this psychological law has always been known
is proved by all literature, from the fable of King Midas to
Dostojewski's Raskolnikow ; and the Catholic Church furnished
one more proof of her profound knowledge of human nature
which she transformed the primitive Christian custom of con
fession before the assembled congregation, which was to be a
self-humiliation and expiation, into auricular confession, which
serves the purpose of a safe and blissful alleviation and relaxa-

EGO-MANIA 363
tion, and constitutes for ordinary men a primary psychic need
of the first order. It was this sort of confession which Ibsen,
probably unconsciously, had in view. (' Because I must have
someone in whom I can confide,' as Ellida says.) Himself a
degenerate, Ibsen can picture to himself only the intellectual
life of degenerates, in whom the mechanism of inhibition is
always disordered, and who, therefore, cannot escape from the
impulse to confess, when anything of an absorbing or exciting
character exists in their consciousness.
The third and most important theological obsession of Ibsen
is the saving act of Christ, the redemption of the guilty by a
voluntary acceptance of their guilt. This devolution of sin
upon a lamb of sacrifice occupies the same position in Ibsen's
drama as in Richard Wagner's. The motif of the sacrificial
lamb and of redemption is constantly present in his mind,
certainly not always clear and comprehensible, but, conform
ably with the confusion of his thought, diversely distorted,
obscured, and, so to speak, in contrapuntal inversion. Now
Ibsen's personages voluntarily and joyfully bear the cross, in
keeping with the Christ-idea ; now it is put upon their shoulders
by force or artifice, which is, as theologians would say, a diaboli
cal mockery of this idea ; now the sacrifice for another is
sincere, now mere hypocrisy ; the effects Ibsen draws from the
incessantly recurring motif are, agreeably with its form, now
moral and affecting, now comically base and repulsive.
In The Pillars of Society there is a talk of some ' scandal '
which occurred years before the commencement of the piece.
The husband of the actress Dorf, on returning home one
evening, found her with a stranger, who, on his entrance, sprang
out of the window. The affair caused great excitement and
indignation in the Norwegian Gotham. Immediately after
wards Johan Tonnesen fled to America. Everyone looked
upon him as the ' culprit' In reality, however, it was his
brother-in-law, Bernick. Johan had voluntarily incurred the
blame of Bernick's fault. On his return from America the
sinner and the sacrificial lamb discuss the circumstance (p. 45) :
Bernick. Johan, now we are alone, you must give me leave to thank
you. Johan. Oh, nonsense !
Bernick. My house and home, my domestic happiness, my whole position
as a citizen in society — all these I owe to you.
Johan. Well, I am glad of it. . . .
Bernick. Thanks, thanks all the same. Not one in ten thousand would
have done what you then did for me.
Johan. Oh, nonsense ! . . . One of us had to take the blame upon him.
Bernick. But to whom did it lie nearer than to the guilty one ?
Johan. Stop ! Then it lay nearer to the innocent one. I was alone, free,
an orphan. . . . You, on the other hand, had your old mother in life ; and,
besides, you had just become secretly engaged to Betty, and she was very
fond of you. What would have become of her if she had come to know  ?

364 DEGENERATION
Bernick. True, true, true ; but . . . but yet, that you should turn ap
pearances against yourself, and go away 
Johan. Have no scruples, my dear Karsten . . . you had to be saved,
and you were my friend.
Here the idea of the sacrificial lamb is normal and rational.
But it is soon afterwards introduced into the same piece in a
distorted shape. Bernick sends the rotten-keeled Indian Girl
to sea, to her certain destruction, in spite of his foreman Aune's
opposition. While, however, planning this wholesale murder,
he also schemes for laying the burden of his crime on the
innocent Aune (p. 65) :
Krap. . . . There is rascality at work, Consul.
Bernick. I cannot believe it, Krap. I cannot, and will not believe such
a thing of Aune.
Krap. I am sorry for it, but it is the plain truth. . . . All bogus ! The
Indian Girl will never get to New York. . . .
Bernick. But this is horrible ! What do you think can be his motive?
Krap. He probably wants to bring the machines into discredit. . . .
Bernick. And for that he would sacrifice all these lives ? . . . But such
a piece of villainy as this ! Listen, Krap ; this affair must be examined into
again. Not a word of it to anyone. . . . During the dinner-hour you must
go down there again ; I must have perfect certainty. . . . We cannot make
ourselves accomplices in a crime. I must keep my conscience unspotted, etc.
In Ghosts the idea of the lamb of sacrifice is equally traves
tied. The asylum founded by Mrs. Alving has been burnt.
The joiner, Engstrand, that theatrical villain, succeeds in per
suading the idiotic pastor, Manders, that he — Manders— was
the cause of the fire. And as the pastor is made desperate by
the possible legal consequences, Engstrand goes to him and
says (p. 184):
Jacob Engstrand isn't the man to desert a noble benefactor in the hour
of need, as the saying is [!].
Manders. Yes ; but, my good fellow, how  ?
Engstrand. Jacob Engstrand may be likened to a guardian angel — he
may, your reverence.
Manders. No, no ; I can't accept that.
Engstrand. Oh, you will though, all the same. I know a man that's
taken others' sins upon himself before now, I do.
Manders. Jacob (wrings his hand). You are a rare character.
In A Doll's House the idea develops itself with great beauty.
Nora confidently expects that her husband, on hearing of her
forgery, will assume the blame, and she is resolved not to accept
his sacrifice (p. 76) :
Nora. I only wanted to tell you that, Christina ; you shall be my witness.
... In case there were to be anybody who wanted to take the . . . the
whole blame, I mean . . . then you will be able to bear witness that it is
not true, Christina. I know very well what I am saying ; I am in full pos
session of my senses, and I say to you, Nobody else knew anything about
it ; I alone have done everything. . . . But a miracle will come to pass
even yet . . . but it is so terrible, Christina ! It must not happen for any
thing in the world 1

EGO-MANIA 365
In the deepest excitement she looks for the expected miracle,
the renewal of Christ's act of salvation in the narrow circum
stances of a small village — ' I am the Lamb of God, who taketh'
away the sins of the world.' And, since the miracle does not
come to pass, there takes place the immense transformation in
her nature which forms the real subject of the piece. Nora
explains this to her husband with the greatest clearness
(p. 116):
. . . The thought never once occurred to me that you could allow your
self to submit to the conditions of such a man. I was so firmly convinced
that you would say to him, ' Pray make the affair known to all the world ';
and when that had been done . . . then you would, as I firmly believed,
stand before the world, take everything upon yourself, and say, ' I am the
guilty person.' . . . That was the miracle that I hoped and feared. And it
was to hinder that that I wanted to put an end to my life.
In The Wild Duck the idea of the sacrificial lamb recurs
no less than three times, and is the moving force of the whole
piece. The infringement of the forest laws, of which the elder
Ekdal was convicted, was not committed by him, but by
Werle :
Werle ... I was quite in the dark as to what Lieutenant Ekdal was
doing. Gregers. Lieutenant Ekdal seems to have been in the dark as to what
he was doing.
Werle. That may be. But the fact remains that he was found guilty,
and I acquitted.
Gregers. Yes, of course I know that nothing was proved against you.
Werle. Acquittal is acquittal. Why do you rake up old troubles ? . . .
I've done all I could without positively exposing myself, and giving rise to
all sorts of suspicion and gossip. . . . I've given Ekdal copying to do from
the office, and I pay him far, far more for it than his work is worth.
Werle thus shuffles his fault on Ekdal, and the latter breaks
down under the weight of the cross. Afterwards, when Hjalmar
learns that little Hedwig is not his child, and disowns her, the
idiot Gregers Werle goes to the despairing maiden, and says :
But suppose you were to sacrifice the wild duck, of your own free will,
for his sake ?
Hedwig (rising). The wild duck !
Gregers. Suppose you were to sacrifice, for his sake, the dearest treasure
you have in the world ?
Hedwig. Do you think that would do any good ?
Gregers. Try it, Hedwig.
Hedwig (softly, with flashing eyes). Yes, I will try it.
Here, then, Hedwig is not to offer herself in sacrifice, but a
pet animal, thus abasing the idea fiom Christianity to paganism.
Finally, it crops up a third time. At the last moment Hedwig
cannot make up her mind to kill the duck, and prefers turning
the pistol against her own breast, thus purchasing with her own
life that of. the bird. This dismal denouement is worrying and
foolish, because useless ; the poetical effect would have been

366 DEGENERATION
fully attained if Hedwig, instead of dying, had only slightly
wounded herself ; for in this way she would have furnished
equally strong proof that she was seriously determined to bear
witness to her love for her father by the sacrifice of her young
life, and to restore peace between him and her mother. But
aesthetic criticism is not my function ; I willingly yield that to
phrase-makers. All that I have to indicate is the triple recur
rence in The Wild Duck of the idea of the sacrificial lamb.
At its third appearance this idea suffers a significant trans
formation. Hedwig sacrifices herself, not in expiation of an
offence — for she is ignorant of her mother's guilt — but to
accomplish a work of love. Here the mystico- theological
element of redemption recedes into the background so far as
to be almost imperceptible, and there remains hardly more
than the purely human element of the joy felt in self-sacrifice
for others — an impulse not rare among good women, and which
is a manifestation of the unsatisfied yearning for maternity
(often unknown to themselves), and at the same time one of
the noblest and holiest forms of altruism. Ibsen shows this
impulse in many of his female characters, the source of which
in the religious mysticism of the poet would not be at once
noticed, if from the numerous other conjugations of the root-
idea of the sacrificial lamb we had not already acquired the
sure habit of recognising it even in its obscurations. Hedwig
constitutes a transition from the theological to the purely
human form of voluntary self-sacrifice. The over-strung child
carries renunciation to the orthodox extreme of yielding up
her life ; Ibsen's other women, to whose character Hedwig
supplies the key, go only to the point of lovingly active self-
denial. They do not die for others, but they live for others.
In A Doll's House Mrs. Linden has this hunger for self-
sacrifice. I must work in order to endure life [she says to Krogstad — p. 87]. I
have worked from my youth up, and work has been my one best friend.
But now I am quite alone in the world— so terribly empty and forsaken.
There is no happiness in working for one's self. Nils, give me somebody
and something to work for. . . .
Krogstad. What ! you really could ? Tell me, do you know my past ?
Mrs. Linden. Yes.
Krogstad. And do you know my reputation ?
Mrs. Linden. Did you not hint it just now, when you said that with me
you could have been another man ?
Krogstad. I am perfectly certain of it.
Mrs. Linden. Could it not yet be so ?
Krogstad. Christina, do you say this after full deliberation ? . . .
Mrs. Linden. I need somebody to mother, and your children need a
mother. Here the idea is not so disguised as to be unrecognisable.
Krogstad is a culprit and an outlaw. If Mrs. Linden offers to

EGO-MANIA 367
live for him, it is certainly chiefly from the instinct of maternity.
But in this natural feeling there is also a tinge of the mystic
idea of the sinner's redemption through disinterested love.
In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida wishes to return to her birth
place on the sea, Skjoldvik, because she believes there is
nothing for her to do in Wangel's house. At the announce
ment of her resolution her step-daughter, Hilda, evinces a profound
despair. Then for the first time Ellida learns that Hilda loves
her ; there is then born in her the thought that she has someone
to live for, and she says dreamily : ' Oh, if there should be
something for me to do here !' In Rosmersholm Rebecca says
to Kroll (p. 8) :
So long -as Mr. Rosmer thinks I am of any use or comfort to him, why,
so long, I suppose, I shall stay here.
Kroll (looks at her with emotion). Do you know, it's really fine for a
woman to sacrifice her whole youth to others, as you have done.
Rebecca. Oh, what else should I have had to live for ?
In The Pillars of Society there are two of these touching
self-sacrificing souls — Miss Martha Bernick and Miss Hessel.
Miss Bernick has reared the illegitimate child Dina, and has
consecrated her own life to her (p. 52) :
Martha. I have been a mother to that much-wronged child — have
brought her up as well as I could.
Johan. And sacrificed your whole life in so doing.
Martha. It has not been thrown away.
She loves Johan, but as she sees that he is attracted by
Dina she unites the two. She explains herself in regard to
the incident in an exceedingly affecting scene with Johan's
half-sister (p. 95) : ,
Lona. Now we are alone, Martha. You have lost her, and I him.
Martha. You him ?
Lona. Oh, I had half lost him already over there. The boy longed to
stand on his own feet, so I made him think / was longing for home.
Martha. That was it ? Now I understand why you came. But he will
want you back again, Lona.
Lona. An old stepsister — what can he want with her now ? Men snap
many bonds to arrive at happiness.
Martha. It is so, sometimes.
Lona. But now we two must hold together, Martha.
MARTHA. Can I be anything to you ?
Lona. Who more? We two foster-mothers — have we not both lost our
children ? Now we are alone.
Martha. Yes, alone. And therefore I will tell you — I have loved him
more than all the world.
Lona. Martha ! (seizes her arm). Is this the truth ?
Martha. My whole life lies in the words. I have loved him, and waited
for him. From summer to summer I have looked for his coming. And
then he came, but he did not see me.
LONA. Loved him ! and it was you that gave his happiness into his hands
Martha. Should I not have given him his happiness, since I loved him i

368 DEGENERATION
Yes, I have loved him. My whole life has been for him . . . He did not
see me.
LONA. It was Dina that overshadowed you, Martha.
Martha. It is well that she did ! When he went away we were of the
same age. When I saw him again — oh, that horrible moment ! — it seemed
to me that I was ten years older than he. He had lived in the bright,
quivering sunshine, and drunk in youth and health at every breath ; and
here sat I, the while, spinning and spinning 
LONA. The thread of his happiness, Martha.
Martha. Yes, it was gold I spun. No bitterness ! Is it not true, Lona,
we have been two good sisters to him ?
In Hedda Gabler it is Miss Tesman, aunt of the imbecile
Tesman, who plays the pathetic part of the sacrificial mother.
She has brought him up, and when he marries gives him the
largest part of her modest income. ' Oh, aunt/ bleats the
poor idiot (p. 18), 'you will never be tired of sacrificing yourself
for me!' 'Do you think,' replies the good creature, 'I have
any other joy in this world than to smooth the way for 3'ou,
my dear boy — you who have never had a father or a mother
to look after you ?' And when subsequently the paralytic sister
of Miss Tesman is dead, Hedda and she hold this conversation
(p. 196) :
Hedda. It will be lonesome for you now, Miss Tesman.
Miss Tesman. The first few days, yes. But that won't last very long.
Dear Rina's little room will not always be empty, that I know.
•Hedda. Indeed ! Who is going to move into it, eh ?
Miss Tesman. Oh, there is always some poor invalid or other who needs
to be looked after and tended, unfortunately.
Hedda. Will you really take such a burden upon you again ?
Miss Tesman. Burden ! God forgive you, child ! that has never been a
burden to me.
Hedda. But now, if a stranger should come, then surely  ¦
Miss Tesman. Oh, one soon becomes friends with sick people. And I
must positively have someone to live for, too.
The three Christo-dogrrfatic obsessions of original sin, con
fession, and self-sacrifice, filling Ibsen's dramas, as we have
seen, from the first line to the last, are not the only tokens of
his mysticism. This betrays itself by a whole series of other
peculiarities, which shall be briefly indicated.
At the head of these stands the astoundingly chaotic nature
of his thought. One cannot believe one's eyes while reading
how his fulsome flatterers have had the audacity to extol him
for the ' clearness ' and ' precision ' of his thought. Do these
individuals, then, imagine that no one capable of forming a
judgment will ever read a line of Ibsen ? A clearly-defined
thought is an extraordinary rarity in this Norwegian dramatist.
Everything floats and undulates, nebulous and amorphous, such
as we are accustomed to see in weak-brained degenerates.
And if he once succeeds, with toil and stress, in grasping
anything and expressing it in a moderately intelligible manner,

EGO-MANIA 369
he unfailingly hastens, a few pages later, or in a subsequent
piece, to say the exact opposite. A talk is made of Ibsen's
' ideas on morality ' and of his ' philosophy.' He has not
formulated a single proposition on morality, a single conception
of the world and life, that he has not himself either refuted or
fittingly ridiculed.
He seems to preach free love, and his eulogy of a licentious
ness unchecked by any self-control, regardless of contracts,
laws, and morality, has made of him a ' modern spirit ' in
the eyes of Georg Brandes and similar protectors of those
' youths who wish to amuse themselves a little.' Mrs. Alvin j
(Ghosts, p. 158), calls a 'crime' the act of Pastor Manders in
repulsing her, after she has quitted her husband and thrown
herself on the pastor's neck. This highly-strung dame pushes
Regina into the arms of Oswald, her son, when in shameless
speech he informs her that it would give him pleasure to possess
the girl. And this very same Mrs. Alving speaks in terms
of the deepest indignation of her dead husband as ' profligate '
(p. 146), and again designates him in the presence of her son
as a ' broken-down man ' (in the original it is ' et forfaldent
Menneske/ an epithet usually bestowed on fallen women), and
why ? Because he had had wanton relations with women !
Well, but is it in Ibsen's opinion permissible, or not permissible,
to gratify carnal lust as often as it is awakened ? If it is
permissible, how does Mrs. Alving come to speak with scorn
of her husband ? If it is not permissible, how dared she offer
herself to Pastor Manders, and be the procuress between Regina
and her own half-brother ? Or does the moral law hold good
for man only, and not for woman ? An English proverb says,
' What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.' Ibsen
evidently does not share the opinion of popular lore. A woman
who runs away from her legal husband and pursues a lover
(Mrs. Elvsted and Ejlert Lovborg, in Hedda Gabler), or who
offers to form an illicit connection with a man, although nothing
prevents their marrying without further ado like other rational
ratepayers (Mrs. Linden and Krogstad in A Doll's House) —
such women have Ibsen's entire approbation and sympathy.
But if a man seduces a maiden and liberally provides for her
subsequent maintenance (Werle and Gina in The Wild Duck),
or, again, if he has illicit relations with a married woman
(Consul Bernick and the actress Dorf in The Pillars of Society),
then it is so heinous a crime that the culprit remains branded
his whole life, and is nailed by the poet to the pillory with the
cruelty of a mediaeval executioner.
The same contradiction finds its expression in another and
more general form. At one time Ibsen contends with ferocious
impetuosity that everyone is ' a law unto himself alone, i.e., that
24

370 DEGENERATION
he should obey every one of his caprices, nay, even of his dis
eased impulsions ; that, as his commentators idiotically put it,
he should (sich auslebe) ' live out his life.' In The Pillars of
Society Miss Bernick says to Dina (p. 94) :
Promise me to make him [her betrothed] happy.
Dina. I will not promise anything. I hate this promising ; things must
come as they can [i.e., as the circumstances of the moment may suggest to
the wayward brain].
Martha. Yes, yes ; so they must. You need only remain as you are,
true and faithful to yourself.
Dina. That I will, Aunt Martha.
In Rosmersholm, Rosmer says admiringly of the scoundrel
Brendel (p. 28) : ' At least he has had the courage to live his life
his own way. I don't think that's such a small matter after all.'
In the same piece Rebecca complains (p. 97) : ' Rosmersholm
has broken me. . . . Broken me utterly and hopelessly. I had
a fresh, undaunted will when I came here. Now I have bent
my neck under a strange law.' And further on (p. 102) : ' It
is the Rosmer view of life . . . that has infected my will. . . .
and made it sick, enslaved it to laws that had no power over
me before.' Ejlert Lovborg laments in like fashion in Hedda
Gabler. ' But it is this — that I don't want to live that kind of
life either. Not now, over again. It is the courage of life and
the defiance of life that she ' (Thea Elvested, with her sweet,
loving constraint) ' has snapped in me.' Quite in opposition to
these views, Ibsen, in his Ghosts, makes Regina proclaim her
'right to live out her life' in these words (p. 189): 'Oh! I
really can't stop out here in the country and wear myself out
nursing sick people ... a poor girl must make the best of her
young days. ... I, too, want to enjoy my life, Mrs. Alving.'
Mrs. Alving replies : ' Alas ! yes.' This • alas ' is bewildering.
Alas ? Why ' alas ' ? Does she not obey her ' law ' if she
satisfies her 'joy in living,' and, as she forthwith explains, enters
the house of ill-fame for sailors set up by the joiner Engstrand ?
How can Mrs. Alving utter this ' alas,' when she also was 'obey
ing her law ' in offering herself as the mistress of Pastor
Manders, and since she wished to aid her son in ' obeying his
law,' when he had set his eyes on Regina? It is because Ibsen,
in his lucid moments, feels that there may be something of
danger in ' obeying one's law,' and this ' alas ' of Mrs. Alving
escapes him as a confession. In The Wild Duck he ridicules
his own dogma in the most liberal style. In that piece there
is one Molvig, a candidate for a University degree, who also
' obeys his law.' This law prescribes that he shall learn nothing,
evade his examinations, and pass his nights in taverns. The
scoffer, Relling, asserts (p. 317) that it 'comes over him like a
sort of possession ; and then I have to go out on the loose with

EGO-MANIA 371
him. Molvig is a demoniac, you see, . . . and demoniac natures
are not made to walk straight through the world ; they must
meander now and then. And in order that there shall be no
doubt as to what Relling means by this, he subsequently
explains (p. 361): '"What the devil do you mean by demoniac?"
" It's only a piece of hocus-pocus I've invented to keep up a
spark of life in him. But for that the poor harmless creature
would have succumbed to self-contempt and despair many a
long year ago.' "
That is true. Molvig is a pitiable weakling, unable to con
quer his indolence and passion for drink ; abandoned to his
own devices, he would recognise himself for the miserable
creature he is, and despise himself as profoundly as he deserves ;
but Relling arrives on the scene, and gives his lack of character
the title ' demoniac/ and now ' the child has a fine name,' which
Molvig can make a parade of to himself and others. Ibsen does
exactly the same thing as his Relling. The weakness of will,
incapable of resisting base and pitiable instincts, he praises as
the ' will to live out one's life,' as the ' freedom of a spirit who
obeys his own law only,' and recommends it as the sole rule of
life. But, unlike Relling, he is for the most part ignorant of
the fact that he is practising a deception (which I by no means
regard in Relling's light as pious and charitable), and believes
in his own humbug. That is, for the most part ; not always.
Here and there, as in The Wild Duck, he recognises his error
and scourges it severely ; and his inmost feeling is so little
influenced by his self-deceptive phrase, fit for a weak-willed
degenerate, that he involuntarily and unconsciously betrays, in
all his productions, his deep abhorrence of men who ' obey their
own law in order to live out their life.' He punishes Chamber
lain Alving in his son, and makes him cursed by his widow
because he has ' lived out his life.' He imputes it as a crime to
Consul Bernick and the merchant Werle that they have ' lived
out their life/ the former in sacrificing his brother-in-law
Johan to protect himself, and for his intrigue with Mrs. Dorf,
the actress ; and the latter for allowing Ekdal to bear the blame
of his fault, and for seducing Gina. He surrounds with an
aureole the glorified heads of Rosmer and Rebecca, because
they did not ' live out their life,' but, on the contrary, ' died
their death,' if I may put it so ; because they obeyed, not ' their
own law,' but that of others, the universal moral law that
annihilated them. Whenever one of his characters acts in
accordance with Ibsen's doctrine, and does what is agreeable to
himself regardless of morals and law, he experiences such con
trition and self-torment that he is unable to find calm and
joy until he has disburdened his conscience by confession and
expiation.

372 DEGENERATION
' This living out one's life ' makes its appearance in Ibsen in
the form also of a rigid individualism. The 'self is the only
real thing ; the ' I ' must be cherished and developed, as, indeed,
Barres preaches independently of Ibsen. The first duty of
every human being is to be just to his ' I,' to satisfy its de
mands, to sacrifice to it every consideration for others. When
Nora wishes to abandon her husband, he cries (p. 1 1 2) :
Only think what people will say about it !
Nora. I cannot take that into consideration. I only know that to go is
necessary for me.
Helmer. Oh, it drives one wild ! Is this the way you can evade your
holiest duties ?
Nora. What do you consider my holiest duties ?
Helmer .... Are they not your duties to your husband and your children?
Nora. I have other duties equally sacred.
Helmer. . . . What duties do you mean ?
NORA. Duties towards myself.
Helmer. Before all else you are a wife and a mother.
Nora. I no longer think so. I think that before all else I am a human
being just as you are, or, at least, I will try to become one.
In Ghosts Oswald says to his mother with triumphant brutality
(p. 192) : ' I can't be much taken up with other people. I have
enough to do thinking about myself.' How in the same piece
Regina emphasizes her ' I ' and its rights, we have already seen.
In An Enemy of the People, Stockmann proclaims the right of
the ' I ' in face of the majority, and even the race, in these words
(p. 283) : ' It is a hideous lie : the doctrine that the multitude,
the vulgar herd, the masses, are the pith of the people — that,
indeed, they are the people — that the common man, that this
ignorant, undeveloped member of society, has the same right to
condemn or to sanction, to govern and to rule, as the few people
of intellectual power.' And (p. 312): 'I only want to drive
into the heads of these curs that the Liberals are the worst
foes of free men . . . that the considerations of expediency
turn morality and righteousness upside down until life is simply
hideous. . . . Now I am one of the strongest men upon earth.
. . . You see the fact is that the strongest man upon earth is
he who stands most alone.-1 But this very Stockmann, who will
hear nothing of ' the multitude, the vulgar herd, the masses,' as
he reiterates with insufferable tautology, who feels his ' I '
powerful only in a majestic solitude, calls his fellow-citizens
'old; women who think only of their families,* and not of the
general good.' And in the very same piece (A Doll's House),
in which Ibsen evidently bestows loud applause on Nora for
declaring that 'her only duties were to herself/ and that she
'could have no consideration for anyone else,' he stigmatizes
her husband as a pitiable, low-spirited weakling, because on his
* In the German text, ' only of themselves and their families.'— Trans
lator.

EGO-MANIA 373
wife's confession of forgery he first of all thinks of his own
reputation only, and hence of his 'duty to himself,' his only
consideration being for himself, and not for his wife. Here
there recurs the same phenomenon as in Ibsen's notions con
cerning sexual morality. Unchastity in a man is a crime, but
in a woman is permissible. In the same way the rude empha
sizing of the ' I ' is a merit only in the woman. The man has
no right to be an egoist. How, for example, Ibsen rails at
egoism through Bernick (in The Pillars of Society), whom he
makes say naively, in reference to his sister Martha, that she ' is
quite insignificant ' (p. 49), and that he does not wish to have
her otherwise !
You know, in a large house like ours, it is always well to have some
steady-going person like her, whom one can put to anything that may turn
up. Johan. Yes, but she herself?
BERNICK. She herself? Why, of course she has enough to interest herself
in — Betty and Olaf, and me, you know. People should not think of them
selves first, and women least of all.
And how severely Ibsen condemns the egoism of Mrs.
Elvsted's husband (Hedda Gabler), when he puts these bitter
words into her mouth (p. 52) : ' He is not really fond of anybody
but himself. Perhaps of the children a little !'
But the most remarkable thing about this philosopher of
individualism is that he not only expressly condemns egoism in
the man as a low vice, but unconsciously also admires dis
interestedness in the woman as an angelic perfection. In A
Doll's House (p. 113) he brags that ' my most sacred duties are
towards myself.' And yet the only touching and charming
characters in his pieces with whom this inflexible individualist
is successful are the saintly wdmen who live and die for others
only — -these Hedwigs, Miss Bernicks, Miss Hessels, Aunt
Tesmans, etc., who never think of their ' I,' but make the
sacrifice of all their impulses and wishes to the welfare of others
their sole task on earth. This contradiction, violent to the
point of absurdity, is very well explained by the nature of
Ibsen's mind. His mystico-religious obsession of voluntary
self-sacrifice for others is necessarily stronger than his pseudo-
philosophic lucubration on individualism.
Among the ' moral ideas ' of Ibsen are counted his professed
thirst for truth. At least enough has been said and written on
this subject. ' Only just think,' Helmer says to Nora (A Doll's
House, pp. 44, 45), ' how a man so conscious of guilt as that
must go about everywhere lying, and a hypocrite, and an
actor ; how he must wear a mask towards his neighbour, and
even his wife and children, his own children. That's the worst,
Nora. . . . Because such a misty atmosphere of lying brings
contagion into the whole family.' ' Is there no voice in your

374 DEGENERATION
mother's heart that forbids you to destroy your son's ideals ?'
asks Pastor Manders in Ghosts (p. 155), when Mrs. Alving has
revealed to her son her defunct husband's ' immorality.' To
which Mrs. Alving magniloquently replies, ' But what about the
truth ?' In The Pillars of Society, Lona Hessel thus preaches
to Consul Bernick (p. 57) '
Is it for the sake of the community, then, that for these fifteen years you
have stood upon a lie ?
Bernick. A lie? . . . You call that 
Lona. I call it the lie — the threefold lie. First the lie towards me ; then
the lie towards Betty ; then the lie towards Johan. ... Is there not some
thing within you that asks you to get clear of the lie ?
Bernick. You would have me voluntarily sacrifice my domestic happi
ness, and my position in society?
Lona. What right have you to stand where you are standing ?
And subsequently (p. 70) :
Lona. A lie, then, has made you the man you now are ?
Bernick. Whom did it hurt, then ? . . .
Lona. You ask whom it hurt ? Look into yourself, and see if it has not
hurt you.
Bernick then examines himself, and shortly before his con
fession there takes place a highly edifying dialogue between
him and the severe guardian of his conscience (p. 98) :
Bernick. Yes, yes, yes ; it all comes of the lie. . . .
LONA. Then, why do you not break with all this lying ? . . . What satis
faction does this show and deception give you ?
Bernick .... It is my son I am working for. . . . There will come a
time when truth shall spread through the life of our society, and upon it he
shall found a happier life than his father's.
Lona. With a lie for its groundwork? Reflect what it is you are giving
your son for an inheritance.
In An Enemy of the People, words of truth are ever coming
from the mouths of the Stockmann family : ' There's so much
falseness both at home and at school,' declaims their daughter,
Petra. ' At home you mustn't speak, and at school you have to
stand there and lie to the children. . . . We have to teach
many and many a thing we don't believe ourselves. ... If
only I could afford it I'd start a school myself, and things should
be very different there.' The courageous maiden quarrels with
an editor who wished to marry her about his want of veracity
(p. 255) : ' What I am angry with you for is that you have not
acted honestly towards my father. You told him it was only
the truth and the good of the community you cared about.
You are not the man you pretend to be. And I shall never
forgive you— never !* ' The whole of our developing social life '
cries the father Stockmann in his turn (p. 242), 'is rooted in a
lie.' And later on (p. 287) : ' Yes, I love my native town so
well I would rather ruin it than see it flourishing upon a lie
All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin
You'll poison the whole country in time ; you'll bring it to such

EGO-MANIA 375
a pass that the whole country will deserve to perish.' Now, all
this would certainly be very fine, if we did not know that this
fervent worship of truth is only one of the forms under which
there appears in Ibsen's consciousness the mystico-religious
obsession of the sacrament of confession, and also, if he were not
careful, conformably with his habit, to destroy any too hasty
belief in the sincerity of his phraseology by himself ridiculing it.
In Gregers Werle he has created the best caricature of his men
of truth. Gregers speaks in exactly the same terms as Lona
Hessel, Petra Stockmann, and her father, but in his mouth the
words are intended to excite laughter : ' And look at this con
fiding nature, this great child,' he says of his friend Hjalmar
(p. 41). 'See him enveloped in a net of perfidy, living under
the same roof as a woman of that kind, not suspecting that his
home, as he calls it, rests upon a lie. . . . At length I see an
object in life.' This object consists in operating on Hjalmar's
moral cataract. And he does it, too. ' You are sunk in a
poisoned quagmire, Hjalmar,' Gregers says to him (p. 101).
'You have an insidious disease within you, and you've sunk down
to die in the dark. . . . Don't be afraid ; I will try to help you
up again. I, too, have a mission in life now.' And shortly
afterwards he says to the father : ' But Hjalmar I can rescue
from all the falsehood and deception that are bringing him to
ruin.' The scoffer Relling treats no worse than he deserves the
idiot who, in fulfilling his ' mission in life ' disturbs the peace
between Hjalmar and his wife, destroys their comfortable home,
and drives Hedwig to her death.
Yours is a complicated case . . . that troublesome integrity-fever [he says
to him — p. 360] . . .
I'm fostering the life-illusion [literally 'the life-lie'] in him.
Gregers. Life-illusion? Is that what you said?
RELLING. Yes, I said illusion. P'or illusion, you know, is the stimulating
principle. . . . Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of
his happiness at the same time.
Now, what is Ibsen's real opinion ? Is a man to strive for
truth, or to swelter in deceit ? Is Ibsen with Stockmann or
with Relling ? Ibsen owes us an answer to these questions, or,
rather, he replies to them affirmatively and negatively with
equal ardour and equal poetic power.
Another 'moral idea' of Ibsen, about which his choristers
chatter most loudly, is that of ' true marriage.' It is certainly
not easy to discover what his mystic brain conceives by these
mysterious words, but it is nevertheless possible to guess it
from the hundred obscure notions in his plays. He does not
seem to approve of the idea that the woman should regard
marriage as merely a means of maintenance. In nearly all his
pieces he comes to this conclusion with the monotony peculiar
to him. In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving ascribes her whole life's un-

376 DEGENERATION
happiness to the fact that she married the chamberlain for his
money — that she sold herself. ' The sums which I have spent
upon the orphanage year by year make up the amount — I
have reckoned it up precisely — the amount which made
Lieutenant Alving a good match in his day. ... It was the
purchase-money. I do not choose that money should pass
into Oswald's hands' (p. 149). In The Lady from the Sea,
Ellida sings the same song (p. 139) : 'It could bring nothing
but unhappiness, after the way in which we came together. . . .
Yes, we are (doing so), or, at least, we suppress the truth. For
the truth ... is, that you came out there and bought me. . . .
I was not a bit better than you. I accepted the bargain — sold
myself to you. I was so helpless and bewildered, and so
absolutely alone. Oh, it was so natural I should accept the
bargain when you came and proposed to provide for me all
my life.' In almost the same words Hedda says (Hedda
Gabler, p. 86) : ' And then he would go and make such a
tremendous fuss about being allowed to provide for me. I
did not know why I should not accept it' She did not know
why; but her inner feverishness and restlessness, her final
suicide, are the consequence of her having allowed herself to
be ' provided for.' The regard paid to the ' being provided
for' became also the lifelong misery of another woman in the
same piece- — Mrs. Elvsted. She went originally as ' governess
in the house of her future husband.' She subsequently under
took the management of the household. Then she allowed
herself to be married, although ' everything around him is
distasteful to me,' and ' we do not possess a thought in common.'
Ibsen condemns the man who marries for money not less than
the woman who allows herself to be ' provided for.' The cause
of Bernick's moral downfall (The Pillars of Society, p. 56), is
chiefly that he did not marry Lona Hessel, whom he loved,
but another. ' It was for no new fancy that I broke with you ;
it was entirely for the sake of the money.'
Hence one should not marry for gain. That is a principle
to which every rational and moral man will subscribe. But
why should one marry ? The most reasonable answer can only
be, 'From inclination.' But Ibsen will have none of this either.
The marriage of Nora and Helmer is purely a love-match. It
leads to a sudden rupture. Wangel (The Lady from the
Sea) has married Ellida from inclination. She expressly
affirms it (p. io-->) : 'You had only seen me and spoken to me
a few times. Then you wanted me, and so . . .' And then
she feels herself a stranger to him, and wishes to leave him.
So Mrs. Alving, Ellida, Wangel, Hedda Gabler, Mrs. Elvsted,
marry from self-interest, and atone for it by the happiness
of their life. Nora marries for love, and becomes profoundly

EGO-MANIA 377
unhappy. Consul Bernick marries a girl because she is rich,
and pays for this fault with his moral downfall. Dr. Wangel
marries a girl because she pleases him, and as a reward she
wishes to quit him and her home. What conclusion is to be
drawn from all this ? That marriage from prudence is bad,
and marriage from love no better? That marriage in general
is worth nothing, and should be abolished ? That would be
at least an inference and a solution. It is not there that Ibsen
arrives. Inclination does not suffice, even if, as in the case
of Nora, it is reciprocal. Something else is still necessary — the
man must become the educator of his wife. He must help
her intellectually. He must let her participate in all his
concerns, make of her a companion possessing equal rights,
and have unlimited confidence in her. Otherwise she always
remains a stranger in her house. Otherwise the marriage is no
' true marriage.' ' I have no right to claim my husband wholly
and solely for myself,' Ellida confesses (The Lady from the Sea,
p. 57). ' Why, I, too, live in something from which others are
shut out.' In the same piece Wangel blames himself in this
way (p. 130): ' I ought to have been at once a father to her
and a guide ; I ought to have done my best to develop and
enlighten her mind. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of that.
... I preferred her just as she was.' In The Pillars of Society
Mrs. Bernick bemoans (p. 141) : ' For many years I believed
that I had at one time possessed you and lost you again. Now
I know that I have never possessed you.' And Lona Hessel
draws the moral from this story (p. 97) :
And do you never think what she might have been to you — she, whom
you chose in my stead ?
Bernick. I know, at any rate, that she has been to me nothing of what I
required. Lona. Because you have never shared your life-work with her ; because
you have never placed her in a free and true relation to you.
In Rosmersholm Rector Kroll has treated his wife in the
same way ; he has intellectually suppressed her, and is painfully
surprised when she finally revolts against the domestic tyrant
who has extinguished her mental light (p. 14). 'My wife, who
all her life long has shared my opinions and concurred in my
views both in great things and small, is actually inclined to
side with the children on many points. And she blames me
for what has happened. She says I tyrannize over the children.
As if it weren't necessary to. Well, you see how my house is
divided against itself. But, of course, I say as little about it
as possible. It's best to keep such things quiet.'
Upon this point also there may be complete agreement.
Most assuredly should marriage be not merely a union of
bodies, but also a community of minds ; most assuredly should

378 DEGENERATION
the man help and educate the wife intellectually, although it
is to be remarked that this role of teacher and guardian assigned
with justice by Ibsen to the man, decisively excludes the full
intellectual equality of the two married parties equally claimed
by him. But how can one reconcile with these notions about
the true relation between the man and his wife Nora's words to
her husband (A Doll's House, p. in): 'I must first try to
educate myself. In that you are not the man to help me. I
must set to work alone. And that is why I am going away
from you now. ... I must be thrown entirely upon myself ?
We rub our eyes and ask ourselves if we have read aright.
What, then, is the duty of the husband in ' true marriage ' ?
Shall he help his wife intellectually ? Wangel, Mrs. Ber
nick, Lona, Mrs. Kroll, say so. But Nora furiously denies it,
and repels all assistance. Fard da se ! She will educate and
form herself. As though this contradiction were not already suffi
ciently bewildering, Ibsen still further mocks those pitiable souls,
who would fain obtain rules of morality from him, when, in The
Wild Duck, he derides, as he is wont, all that he has preached
on the subject of ' true marriage ' in all the rest of his pieces.
In that production a delicious dialogue is brought about be
tween the malevolent idiot Gregers and the scoffer Relling
(P- 337) :
Gregers. [I want] to lay the foundations of a true marriage.
RELLING. So you don't find Ekdal's marriage good enough as it is ?
Gregers. No doubt it's as good a marriage as most others, worse luck.
But a true marriage it has never been.
Hjalmar. You have never had eyes for the claims of the ideal, Relling.
Relling. All rubbish, my "boy ! But, excuse me, Mr. Werle, how many
. . . true marriages have you seen in the course of your life ?
Gregers. Scarcely a single one.
Relling. Mor I, either.
And still more incisive is the mockery contained in Hjalmar's
words (p. 345) : 'Well, then, isn't it exasperating to think that it's
not I, but he (Werle, senior), who will realize the true marriage?
. . . Isn't the marriage between your father and Mrs. Scerby
founded upon complete confidence, upon entire and unreserved
candour on both sides? They hide nothing from each other.
Their relation is based, if I may put it so' (!) ' on mutual con
fession and absolution.' Hence no one has yet seen a 'true
marriage ' ; and when by chance this miracle does happen it is
fulfilled in the case of Mr. Werle and Mrs. Scerby  Mr.
Werle, who confesses to his wife that he has seduced young
girls and sent old friends to prison in his place — Mrs. Scerby,
who confides to her husband that she has had illicit relations
with every imaginable sort of man. It is a tame imitation of
the scene in Ruskolnikow by Dostojewski, where the assassin
and the prostitute, after a contrite confession, unite their soiled

EGO-MANIA 379
and broken lives ; except that in Ibsen the scene is stripped of
its sombre grandeur and lowered to the ridiculous and vulgar.
With Ibsen, when women discover that they are not living in
' true marriage,' their husband suddenly becomes ' a strange
man,' and, without further ceremony, they abandon their home
and their children, some, like Nora, ' to return to their birth
place,' where ' it will be easier for me to get something to
do of one sort or another' ; others, like Ellida, without giving a
thought to what will become of them ; others, again, like Mrs.
Alving and Hedda Gabler, to rush full speed to a lover and
throw themselves on his neck. Ibsen has even deliciously paro
died this last departure, and in a doubly grotesque fashion, for
he assigns the laughable role of the tragic runaway to a man.
' I must out into the snow and tempest,' declaims Hjalmar
(The Wild Duck, p. 166), 'and seek from house to house a
shelter for my old father and myself.' And he really goes, but
naturally only to return home the next day, crestfallen, but
stout-hearted, to breakfast. Truly nothing more need be said
against the idiocy of Nora's high-flown leave-taking, which has
become the gospel for the hysterical of both sexes, since Ibsen
spared us this trouble in creating his Hjalmar.
We have not yet done with Ibsen's drivel on the subject of
marriage. He seems to exact that no girl should marry before
she is fully matured, and possesses an experience of life and a
knowledge of the world and of men (A Doll's House, p. 1 1 1) :
Nora. And I — how have I been prepared to educate the children ? . . .
For that task 1 am not ready. ... I must first try to educate myself. ... I
cannot be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what is
in books.
Helmer. You don't understand the society in which you live.
Nora. No, no more I do. But now I will set to work and learn it.
This necessary maturity the young girl best acquires by going
in quest of adventures, by becoming closely acquainted with the
largest possible number of persons, to make a trial, if possible,
of a few men before binding herself definitely. A young girl is
thoroughly prepared for marriage when she has attained to a
respectable age, managed a few households, perhaps also given
birth to sundry children, and in this way proved to herself and
others that she understands the duties of a housewife and a
mother. Ibsen does not expressly say this, but it is the only
reasonable conclusion which can be deduced from the whole
series of his plays. The great reformer has no suspicion that he
is here preaching something long ago tried by mankind and
rejected as unsuitable, or not more suitable. Experimental
marriage for a longer or shorter period, the preference for
brides endowed with a rich experience in love-affairs and
sundry children, all this has already existed. Ibsen may learn

380 DEGENERATION
all that he needs on this subject from his half-compatriot,
Professor Westermarck.* But he would be no degenerate if he
did not regard as progress the return to conditions of the most
primitive character long since gone by, and if he did not
mistake the far-away past for the future.
Let us recapitulate his marriage-canon as gained from his
dramas. There should be no marriage from interest (Hedda,
Mrs. Alving, Bernick, etc.). There should be no marriage from
love (Nora, Wangel). A marriage of prudence is not a true
marriage. But to marry because each pleases the other is
equally good for nothing. To enter into matrimony with the
full approbation of reason, there should be first of all a thorough
knowledge of each other by the contracting parties (Ellida).
The man should be the woman's instructor and educator
(Wangel, Bernick). The wife should not allow herself to be
instructed and educated by the husband, but acquire the neces
sary knowledge quite alone (Nora). If the wife discovers that
her marriage is not a ' true marriage/ she leaves the husband,
for he is a stranger (Nora, Ellida). She also abandons her
children, for children which she has had by a stranger are
naturally strangers also. She must, however, at the same time
remain with the husband, and endeavour to transform him from
a stranger into her own husband (Mrs. Bernick). Marriage is
not intended permanently to unite two beings. When anything
in the one is not agreeable to the other, they return the ring
and go their respective ways (Nora, Mr. Alving, Ellida, Mrs.
Elvsted). If a man abandons his wife he commits a heinous
crime (Bernick, Werle). And, to sum up, there is no true
marriage (Relling). This is Ibsen's doctrine concerning marriage.
It leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of clearness. It
amply suffices for the diagnosis of the state of the Norwegian
poet's intellect.
Independently of his religious obsessions and his bewildering
contradictions, Ibsen's mysticism reveals itself, step by step, in
absurdities of which a healthy intellect would be incapable.
We have seen in The Lady from the Sea that Ellida wishes to
abandon her husband, because her marriage is not a true one,
and because her husband has become a stranger to her. Why
is he a stranger to her ? Because he has married her without
mutual close acquaintance. ' You had only seen me and spoken
a few words to me.' She ought not to have let herself be pro
vided for. ' Rather the meanest labour, rather the most wretched
surroundings, so long as they were the result of free will, of free
choice.' From this one can only reasonably conclude that
Ellida is of the opinion no true marriage is possible, unless the
* Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage. London :
Macmillan, 1892. See especially the two chapters on 'The Forms of
Human Marriage,' and ' The Duration of Marriage.'

EGO-MANIA 381
woman possesses a thorough knowledge of her suitor and has
had full freedom in her choice. She is convinced that these
conditions existed in the case of the first claimant for her hand.
' The first — that might have been a complete and real marriage.'
Now, the same Ellida, a few pages before (78), says that she
knew absolutely nothing concerning her lover ; she did not even
know his name, and, as a matter of fact, he is spoken of
throughout the piece only as ' the stranger.'
Wangel. What else do you know about him ?
Ellida. Only that he went to sea very young ; and that he had been on
long voyages.
Wangel. Is there nothing more?
Ellida. No ; we never spoke of such things.
Wangel. Of what did you speak, then ?
Ellida. About the sea !
And she betrothed herself to him
Because he said I must.
Wangel. You must ? Had you no will of your own, then ?
Ellida. Not when he was near.
So, then, Ellida is forced to abandon Wangel for the reason
that, previously to her marriage with him, she did not thoroughly
know him, and she must go to 'the stranger,' of whom she
knows nothing. Her marriage with Wangel is no marriage,
because she did not enter into it with perfect freedom of will,
but the marriage with 'the stranger ' will be ' perfect and pure,'
although when she betrothed herself to him she had ' no will
of her own.' After this example of his mental maze, it is truly
humiliating to be obliged to waste more words concerning the
intellectual state of such a man. But since this man is foisted
by fools and fanatics to the rank of a great moralist and poet
of the future, the psychiatrical observer must not spare himself
the labour of referring to his other absurdities.
In this same Lady from the Sea, Ellida renounces her project
of leaving her husband Wangel, and going away with the
' stranger,' as soon as Wangel says ' with aching heart ' : ' Now
you can choose your own path in perfect freedom.' She remains
with Wangel. She chooses him. ' Whence came the change ?'
asks Wangel and the reader with him. ' Ah, don't you under
stand,' Ellida gushingly replies, ' that the change came — was
bound to come — when I could choose in freedom!' (p. 141).
This second choice, then, is intended to form a complete con
trast to the first, in which Ellida plighted her troth to Wangel.
But all the conditions, without a single exception, have remained
the same. Ellida is now free because Wangel expressly gives
her her freedom ; but she was still freer on the first occasion,
because Wangel had as yet no rights over her, and did not
need to begin by setting her free. As little was external
coercion exercised on her at the betrothal as subsequently after

382 DEGENERATION
marriage. Her resolution depended then, as now, entirely on
herself. If at the betrothal she felt herself fettered, it was, as
she herself explains, because she was at that time poor, and
allowed herself to be enticed by the alluring prospect of being
provided for. But in this respect nothing has changed. She
has come into no property since her marriage, so far as we know
from Ibsen. She is just as poor as she ever was. If she quits
Wangel, she will sink once more into the penury she found
insupportable when a young girl. If she remains with him,
she is quite as much provided for as she hoped to be when she
betrothed herself to him. Wherein, then, lies the contrast
between her former want of liberty and her present freedom to
explain the change ? There is none. It exists in the confused
thought of Ibsen alone. If the whole of this piratical story
about Ellida, Wangel, and the stranger is intended to mean, or
to prove, anything, it can only be that a woman must first live
a few years with her husband on trial before she can bind herself
definitively ; and that her decision may be valid, she is to be
free at the end of the period of probation to go or to stay.
The only meaning of the piece is, therefore, pure idiocy —
experimental marriage.
We find the same absurdity repeated, in the fundamental
idea, in the premises and deductions of nearly all his plays.
In Ghosts Oswald Alving's disease is represented as a chastise
ment for the sins of his father, and for the moral weakness of
his mother in marrying for self-interest a man she did not love.
Now, Oswald's state is the consequence of a complaint which
may be contracted without any depravity whatsoever. It is a
silly antiquated idea of the bigoted members of societies for
the suppression of immorality that a contagious disease is the
consequence and punishment of licentiousness. Doctors know
better than that. They know hundreds — nay, thousands — of
cases where a young man is infected for his whole life, for no
other act than one which, with the views now prevailing, is
looked upon as venial. Even holy matrimony is no protection
against such a misfortune, to say nothing of the cases where
doctors, nurses, etc., have contracted the malady in the discharge
of their duties, and without carnal transgression. Ibsen's
drivel proves nothing of that which, according to him, it
should prove. Chamberlain Alving might be a monster of
immorality without for that reason falling ill, or having an
insane son ; and his son could be insane without more culpability
on the part of the father than is the case with all men who
have been unchaste before marriage. Ibsen, however, gives
obtrusive evidence of having had no wish to write a tract in
praise of continence, by making Mrs. Alving throw herself into
the arms of Pastor Manders, and by making the mother the

EGO-MANIA 383
intermediary of an illicit union out of wedlock between the
son and his own sister, putting, moreover, into the mouth of
Oswald a panegyric on concubinage — one of the most incredible
things met with in the incredible Ibsen. ' What are they to
do ?' replies Oswald Alving to the horrified pastor. ' A poor
young artist — a poor young girl. It costs a lot of money to
get married.' I can only suppose that the innocent Norwegian
villager has never with his own bodily eyes seen a ' free union,'
and that he has drawn his idea of one from the depths of a
nature filled with anarchistic rage against the existing order
of things. An inhabitant of any large town, having daily
opportunities for getting insight into dozens and hundreds of
free unions, will burst into hearty laughter over Ibsen's infantine
fantasies, worthy of a lascivious schoolboy. In no country in
the world does civil marriage cost more than a trifling sum,
very much less than the first repast offered by a young fellow
to the girl he has persuaded to live with him ; and religious
marriage, far from costing anything, brings to the bridal couple
a donation in money, clothes, and household articles, if they
are indelicate enough to accept them. Pious societies, which
expend large sums of money in legalizing free unions, exist
everywhere. When persons form unions without the aid of
the civil law or of priests, it is probably never for the purpose
of saving the expense of marriage, but either from culpable
levity, or because either one or other of them makes a mental
reservation not to bind him or herself, but to enjoy something
agreeable without undertaking any serious duties ; or, finally,
in the few cases which a moral man may approve, or, at least,
excuse, because on one side or the other there exists some
legal obstacle above which they raise themselves, strong in love,
and justified in their own eyes by the earnestness of their
intention to be faithful to each other unto death.
But to return from this subordinate absurdity to the capital
absurdity of the piece. Chamberlain Alving is punished for
his illicit indulgence in carnal pleasure, in his own body, and
in his children Oswald and Regina. That is very edifying,
and would, doubtless, meet with approbation at a conference
of clergymen, although nonsensical and inaccurate to the highest
degree. We will only mention in passing that Ibsen constantly
recommends and glorifies unchastity, the ' living out one's life.'
But what inference does Mrs. Alving draw from the case of
her husband ? That all should remain chaste and pure, an
idea worked out by Bjornson in his Glove ? No. She is led
by it to the conclusion that the existing order of morals and
the law are bad. ' Oh, that perpetual law and order !' she
exclaims (p. 154) ; 'I often think it is that which does all the
mischief here in the world. ... I can endure all this constraint

384 DEGENERATION
and cowardice no longer. It is too much for me. I must work
my way out to freedom.' What in the world has Alving's
story to do with 'law and order?' and how does 'freedom'
enter into this Credo ? What connection with the piece have
the silly speeches of this woman, unless it be that they are
lugged in to tickle the radical patrons of the gallery into
applause. In Tahiti neither ' order ' nor ' morals ' reign in the
sense given them by Mrs. Alving. There the brown beauties
have all the ' freedom ' to which Mrs. Alving wishes to ' work
her way out,' and the men so ' live out their lives ' that ships'
officers, not otherwise modest, avert their eyes with shame.
And in that very region Chamberlain Alving's disease is so
widespread that, according to Ibsen's medical theory, all the
young Tahitians must be Oswalds.
But this is a constant habit of Ibsen's, evidenced in all his
pieces. He puts into the mouth of his characters phrases used
for effect by orators in popular meetings of the lowest class,
having nothing in the least to do with the piece. ' I don't know
what religion is,' Nora says in the well-known scene where she
leaves her husband (p. 1 14). ' . . . I know nothing but what
our clergyman told me when I was confirmed. He explained
that religion was this and that. When I have got quite away
from here and am all by myself, then I will examine that matter
too. I will see whether what our clergyman taught is true. . . .
I have now learnt, too, that the laws are different from what I
thought they were ; but I can't convince myself that they are
right.' Now her case has no relation to the religious doctrine of
Pastor Hansen and the excellence or badness of the laws. No
law in the world concedes the right to a child to sign her
father's name to a cheque without his knowledge, and all the
laws of the world not only permit but compel a judge to inquire
into the motives of every misdemeanour, although Ibsen makes
Krogstad the mouthpiece of this idiocy (p. 39) : ' The laws in
quire little into motives.' The whole of this scene, in view of
which, however, the piece was written, is foreign to the play,
and does not originally spring from it If Nora wishes to
abandon her husband, it can only be on the supposition that
she has discovered he does not love her so devotedly as she
had wished and hoped. The hysterical fool, however, utters an
inflammatory diatribe against religion, law, and society (which
are profoundly innocent of the weakness of character and
absence of love in her husband), and departs like a feminine
Coriolanus shaking her fist at her fatherland. In The Pillars of
Society Bernick, wishing to confess his own baseness, introduces
his avowal with the words (p. no): 'Let everyone examine
himself, and let us realize the prediction that from this evening
we begin a new time. The old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its

EGO-MANIA 385
hoUowness, its lying propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall
lie behind us like a museum,' etc. ' Speak for yourself, Bernick,
speak for yourself/ one might well call out to the old wind-bag,
who in this sermonizing tone thus generalizes his own individual
case. ' I wish to speak of the great discovery that I have made
within the last few days,' exclaims Stockmann in An Enemy of
the People, ' the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are
poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil
teeming with the pestilence of lies.' That may in itself be true ;
but nothing in the piece gives Stockmann the right to arrive
reasonably at this conclusion. Even in Plato's republic it might
happen that a ragamuffin, more foolish for that matter than wicked,
should refuse to cleanse an infected spring, and only a fool could
deduce from this single fact, and from the conduct of a clique of
Philistines in an impossible Norwegian village, the general propo
sition that' our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming
with the pestilence of lies.' In Rosmersholm, Brendel says in an
obscurely profound prophetic tone, which shudders with fore
boding (p. 23) : ' We live in a tempestuous, an equinoctial age.'
This expression also, true enough in itself, strikes one like a blow
in the eye in the place where it occurs, for Rosmersholm has no con
nection with any definite period of time ; and it is not necessary
to change a single essential word in the piece, in order to
transport it at pleasure to the Middle Ages, or the age of the
Roman emperors, to China, or the land of the Incas — to any age
or any land where there are hysterical women and idiotic men.
We are familiar with the method pursued by brawlers who
wish to pick a quarrel : ' Sir, why did you look at me in that
way ?' ' Pardon me, I did not look at you.' ' What ! you say,
then, that I lie?' 'I said nothing of the sort' 'You give me
the lie a second time. You must give me satisfaction.' This is
Ibsen's method. What he wishes is to denounce society, the
state, religion, law, and morals in anarchistic phrases. Instead,
however, of publishing them like Nietzsche, in brochures, he
sticks them into his pieces at haphazard, where they appear as
unexpectedly as the couplets sung in the naive farces of our
fathers. Cleanse Ibsen's dramas of these pasted-on phrases,
and even a Brandes will no longer be able to trumpet them as
' modern ' productions ; there will remain only a tissue of
absurdities, belonging to no time or place, in which here and
there emerge single poetically fine scenes and accessory figures,
not changing in the least the atrociousness of the whole. In
fact, Ibsen always begins by finding some thesis — i.e., some
anarchist phrase. Then he tries to find out beings and events
which embody and prove his thesis, for which task, however,
his poetical power, and, above all, his knowledge of life and
men, are insufficient. For he goes through the world without
25

386 DEGENERATION
seeing it, and his glance is always turned inward on himself.
In contradiction to the saying of the poet, 'All that is human is
alien to him,' and his own ' I ' alone occupies him and absorbs
his attention. He himself proclaims this in a well-known poem
wherein he says, ' Life is a battle with the ghost in the vaults of
the heart and brain. To be a poet is to hold judgment day
over one's own self.'*
The ' ghost in the heart and brain ' is the obsessions and
impulses in conflict with which the life of the higher degenerate
is certainly spent. It is as clear as day that a poem, which is
nothing but a 'judgment day' of the poet over himself, cannot
be a mirror of universal human life, freely and broadly flowing, but
simply the intricate arabesques adorning the walls of a distorted,
isolated existence. He sees the image of the world with the
eye of an insect; a diminutive single feature which shows itself
to one of the polished facets of such a discoidal eye, and which
he perchance perceives, he firmly seizes, and renders with dis
tinctness. But he does not comprehend its connection with the
whole phenomenon, and his organ of vision is not able to span
a large comprehensive picture. This explains the fidelity to
nature in petty details and quite accessory figures, while the
chief events and central characters are always astonishingly
absurd and alien to all the realities ofthe world.
It is in Brand that Ibsen's absurdity apparently achieves its
greatest triumph. Northern critics have reiterated ad nauseam
that this silly piece is a dramatic translation of Kierkegaard's
crazy ' Either-Or.' Ibsen shows a fool who wishes to be ' all
or nothing,' and who preaches the same to his fellow-citizens.
What he especially understands by these high-sounding words
the piece nowhere reveals by a single syllable. Brand, how
ever, succeeds in infecting his fellow-citizens with his madness,
and one fine day they sally forth from the village and are led
by him into impassable mountain solitudes. What his purpose
is no one knows or suspects. The sexton, who seems to be
somewhat less crazy than the others, finally becomes uneasy
concerning this wholly senseless mountain climbing, and asks
whither Brand is really leading them, and what may be the
object of this scramble. Whereupon Brand gives him the
following wonderful information (p. 151): 'How long will the
struggle last ?' (viz.,, the climbing, for there is no other struggle
in this Act). ' It lasts until life's end. Until you have sacri
ficed all; until you are freed from your compact; until that
which you may wish for you shall wish for unswervingly.' (What

* ' At leve— er Kamp med Trolde
J Hjertet og Hjernens Hvaelv ;
At digte— det er at holde
Dommedag over sig seiv.'

EGO-MANIA 387
this is which is to be wished for is not explained.) ' Until
every doubt shall have vanished and nothing separates you from
the AU or Nothing. And your sacrifices ? All the gods which
with you take the place of the eternal God ; the shining golden
chains of slavery, together with the beds of your languid sloth-
fulness. The reward of victory ? Unity of will, activity of
faith, pureness of soul.' Naturally on listening to this ranting
the good people ' come to their senses and go home,' but the
lunatic Brand is offended because his fellow-citizens do not want
to pant uphill in order to ' wish for something unswervingly,' to
attain to ' all or nothing,' and to arrive at ' unity of will.' For it
is 'the all' which seems to inhabit mountains; not merely
freedom, which an early poet sought for there. (' Liberty dwells
in the mountains,' Schiller has said.)
And yet Brand is a remarkable figure. In him Ibsen has
unconsciously created a very instructive type of those deranged
beings who run, speak, and act at the bidding of a ruling
impulse,* who with furious passion are continually and reiterat-
ingly talking of ' the goal ' which they wish to attain, but who
neither themselves have a suspicion of what this goal really is,
nor are in a position to indicate it to others in an intelligible
way. Brand thinks the power which impels him is his in
flexible iron will. It is in reality his inflexible iron impulsion
which his consciousness in vain seeks to grasp and to interpret
by the aid of a flood of unintelligible words.
Ibsen's absurdity is not always so clearly apparent as in the
examples cited. It frequently manifests itself in a blurred and
indefinite phrase, plainly expressing the state of a mind which
endeavours to formulate in words a nebulous representation
springing up in it, but which lacks the necessary power and
loses itself in mechanical mutterings void of sense. There are
three sorts of phrases of this kind to be distinguished in Ibsen.
One kind say absolutely nothing, and contain no more of an
idea than the 'tra-la-la' sung to a song of which one has for
gotten the words. They are a symptom of a temporary arrest
of function f in the cerebral centres of ideation, and appear in
healthy persons also in a state of extreme fatigue, under the
form of incidental embarrassment, causing hesitation in speech.
In persons suffering from hereditary exhaustion they are con
tinuously present. Another kind affect an appearance of pro
fundity and significant allusions, but exact observation recog-
* Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger, Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen
Krankheiten fiir Aerzteund Studirende. 5te Auflage. Ganzlich umgearbeitet
und erweitert. Von Dr. Willibald Levinstein-Schleger ; Berlin, 1892. (See
p. 143, on 'Diseased Impulses'; and p. 147, on 'Excessive Energy of Will.')
•j- Griesinger, op. cit, p. 77 : ' Retardation of thought may be produced
... by the state of constriction following a mental depression, by complete
inertia extending to the arrest of thought.'

388 DEGENERATION
nises them as an empty jingle of words devoid of all import.
Finally, the third kind are such evident and unequivocal idiocy
that even unprofessional listeners regard each other in con
sternation, and would feel it to be their duty to give his family
a gentle hint if they heard anything of the kind from one of
their table companions at the habitual cafe\ I will give some
illustrations of each of these three kinds of phraseology.
Firstly, phrases saying absolutely nothing, interpolated be
tween intelligible words, and indicating a temporary paralysis
of the centres of ideation.
In The Lady from the Sea (p. 25) Lyngstrand says: 'I am
to a certain extent a little infirm.' * This ' to a certain extent '
is admirable ! Lyngstrand, a sculptor, is speaking of his artistic
projects (p. 51) :
As soon as I can set about it, I am going to try if I can produce a great
work — a group, as they call it.
Arnholm. Is there anything else?
Lyngstrand. Yes, there is to be another figure — a sort of apparition, as
they say.
As Ibsen makes Lyngstrand a fool, it might be believed that
he intentionally put these idiotic turns of expression into the
sculptor's mouth. But in Hedda Gabler, Brack, a sharp and
clever bon vivant, says (p. 87) : ' But as far as regards myself,
you know very well that I have always entertained a — a certain
respect for the marriage tie, generally speaking, Mrs. Hedda.'
In Rosmersholm Brendel says (p. 24) : ' So you see when golden
dreams descended and enwrapped me ... I fashioned them
into poems, into visions, into pictures — in the rough, as it were,
you understand. Oh, what pleasures, what intoxications I have
enjoyed in my time ! The mysterious bliss of creation — in the
rough, as I said.' Rector Kroll says (p. 18) : 'A family that
now soon for some centuries has held its place as the first in the
land.'f 'Now soon for some centuries' ! That means that it
is not yet ' some centuries,' but ' soon ' will be ' some centuries.'
Hence ' soon ' must include in itself ' some centuries.' By what
miracle? In The Wild Duck we have the intentionally, but, in their
exaggeration impossibly, idiotic conversations of the' fat/ ' bald,'
and ' short-sighted ' gentlemen in the first act, but also this
remark by Gina, who is in no way depicted as an idiot (p. 270) :
Are you glad when you have some good news to tell father when he comes
home in the evening ?
Hedwig. Yes, for then we have a pleasanter time.
Gina. Yes, there is something [lrue]X in that ! !

* Rationalized in the English version cited, as follows (p. 25): 'Yes
perhaps I am a little delicate.' — TRANSLATOR. '
f Rationalized in the English version by ' now soon,' being rendered as
' nearly.'— Translator.
X ' True ' is omitted in the English version quoted. — Translator.

EGO-MANIA 389
In the conversation about the wild duck between Ekdal,
Gregers and Hjalmar we read (p. 289) :
Ekdal. He was out in a boat, you see, and he shot her. But father's
sight is pretty bad now. H'm ; he only wounded her.
Gregers. Ah ! she got a couple of shot in her body, I suppose.
Hjalmar. Yes, two or three. . . .
Gregers. And she thrives all right in the garret there ?
Hjalmar. Yes, wonderfully well. She's got fat. She's been in there so
long now that she's forgotten her natural wild life, and it all depends on
that. Gregers. You're right there, Hjalmar.
And in a dialogue between Hedwig and Gregers Werle
(P- 305):
Hedwig. ... If I had learnt basket-making, I could have made the new
basket for the wild duck.
Gregers. So you could ; and it was, strictly speaking, your business,
wasn't it ?
Hedwig. Yes, for she's my wild duck.
Gregers. Of course she is !
Now for some examples of phrases which sound excessively
profound, but in reality express nothing, or mere foolishness.
In A Doll's House (p. 25) Mrs. Linden expresses the opinion :
' Well, after all, it is better to open the door to the sick, and
get them safe in ;' to which Rank significantly replies : ** Yes,
so people say. And it is that very consideration which turns
society into a hospital.' What does this meditative and
oracular speech mean ? Is it Rank's opinion that society is
a hospital because it cares for its sick, and that it would be
healthy if its sick were not cared for ? Would the untended
sick be any less sick ? If he believes that he believes an
idiocy. Or are the sick to be left to die uncared for, and in
this manner got rid of? If he preaches that, he preaches a
barbarism and a crime, and that is not in accordance with
Rank's character as Ibsen depicts him. We may turn and
twist the vague, mysterious words as we will, we shall always
find either stupidity or want of meaning.
In Rosmersholm, Rosmer (p. 30) wishes to ' devote all his
life and all his energies to this one thing — the creation of a
true democracy in this country.' And, wonderful to relate, the
persons to whom Rosmer says these words all seem to compre
hend what the 'true democracy' is. Without being asked,
Rosmer offers, besides, some explanation of his Pythian utter
ance : ' I want to awaken the democracy to its true task — that
of making all the people of this country noblemen ... by
setting free their minds and purifying their wills. ... I will only
try to arouse them to their task. They themselves must ac
complish it ... by their own strength. There is no other. . . .
Peace and joy and mutual forbearance must once more enter

390 DEGENERATION
into their souls.' Rebecca repeats to him his programme
(p. 62) :
You were to set resolutely to work in the world — the living world of to-day,
as you said. You were to go as a messenger of emancipation from home to
home ; to win over minds and wills ; to create noble men around you in
wider and wider circles. Noblemen.
ROSMER. Joyful noblemen.
Rebecca. Yes, joyful.
Rosmer. For it is joy that ennobles the mind.
It is impossible to avoid calling up a comic picture of Rosmer
going 'from home to home' 'in wider and wider circles,' and
making the persons before whom he talks into 'joyful noble
men,' while he 'awakens' them and 'purifies their wills,' and
thus ' creates a true democracy.' This rigmarole is, it is true,
incomprehensible ; but, at all events, it must be something
agreeable, for Rosmer expressly says that he needs 'joy 'to
create 'noblemen.' And in spite of this Rebecca suddenly
discovers (p. 102) : ' The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it
kills happiness.' What ! Rosmer kill happiness when he ' goes
from home to home/ awakening, winning, making people free,
etc., and creating joyful noblemen ? The word 'joyful ' includes,
at least, something of happiness, and yet the education of men
to 'joyful noblemen ' is to kill happiness ? Rosmer finds (p. 97)
'the work of ennobling men's minds is not for him. And,
besides, it is so hopeless in itself.' This is in a measure
intelligible, though it is not stated from what experience
Rosmer has been led to such a change in his views. But quite
beyond comprehension is Rebecca's speech about the fatal
influence of ' the Rosmer view of life.' In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving
endeavours to explain her defunct husband's vagaries in this
balderdash (p. 187): 'When he was a young lieutenant, he
was brimming over with the joy of life. It was like a breezy
day only to look at him. And what exuberant strength and
vitality there was in him ! And then, child of joy as he was 
for he was like a child at the time — he had to live here at
home in a half-grown town, which had no joys to offer him
but only amusements. He had no object in life, but only an
office. He had no work into which he could throw himself
heart and soul ; he had only business. He had not a single
comrade that knew what the joy of life meant, only loungers
and boon companions.' These antitheses seem to have some
thing in them ; but if we sertously set about hunting for a
definite idea in them, they vanish in smoke. ' Object in life 
office ' — ' work — business ' — ' comrades — boon companions/ are
not in themselves oppositions, but become such through the
individual. With a decent man they are perfectly coincident •
with a base man they fall into opposition. A large or a small

EGO-MANIA 391
town has nothing to do with it. For Kant in the small town
of Koenigsberg, in the last century, the ' office ' was ' the object
in life,' ' work ' was ' business,' and he so chose his ' boon
companions ' that they were at the same time his * comrades,'
as far, indeed, as he could have such. And, on the other hand,
there is, in the largest metropolis, no occupation and no circle of
men in which a degenerate, burdened with his disorder, could
feel at ease and in inward harmony.
In Hedda Gabler we find quite a multitude of such words,
apparently saying much, but in reality saying nothing. ' It
was the passion for life in you !' exclaims Lovborg to Hedda
(p. 128), with the seeming conviction that he has, in this utter
ance, explained something to her. And Hedda says (p. 142) :
' I see him before me. With vine-leaves in his hair. Hot and
bold' (p. 151). 'And Ejlert Lovborg, he is sitting with vine-
leaves in his hair, and reading aloud ' (p. 157). ' Had he vine-
leaves in his hair ?' (p. 171). ' So that is how it all happened.
Then he did not have vine-leaves in his hair ' (p. 188).
HEDDA. Could you not contrive that it should be done gracefully ?
Lovborg. Gracefully ? With vine-leaves in my hair ?
' With vine-leaves in his hair ;' ' the passion for life ' — these
are words meaning, in the connection assigned to them,
absolutely nothing, but giving scope for dreaming. In a few
instances Ibsen employs these dreamily- nebulous, shadowy
expressions with poetic licence, e.g., when we read in The Pillars
of Society (p. 19) :
Rorlund. Tell me, Dina, why you do like so much to be with me?
Dina. Because you teach me so much that is beautiful.
Rorlund. Beautiful ? Do you call what I can teach you beautiful ?
DlNA. Yes; or, rather, you teach me nothing ; but when I hear you speak,
it makes me think of so much that is beautiful.
Rorlund. What do you understand, then, by a beautiful thing ?
Dina. I have never thought of that.
Rorlund. Then think of it now. What do you understand by a beautiful
thing ?
Dina. A beautiful thing is something great and far away.
Dina is a young girl living under sad and painful conditions.
It is psychologically accurate that she should condense all her
longing for a new and happy existence in a word of emotional
colouring, such as 'beautiful.' It is the same with the dialogue
between Gregers and Hedwig in The Wild Duck (p. 53) :
Gregers. And she [the wild duck] has been down in the depths of the sea.
Hedwig. Why do you say 'in the depths ofthe sea'?
Gregers. What else could I say ?
Hedwig. You could say ' the bottom of the sea ' [or ' at the bottom of he
water '].*
Gregers. Oh, mayn't I just as well say the depths of the sea?
* Bracketed clause not in English version. — Translator.

392

DEGENERATION

Hedwig. Yes ; but it sounds so strange to me when other people speak
of the depths of the sea.
Gregers. Why so ? . . .
Hedwig. ... It always seems to me that the whole room and everything
in it should be called the depths of the sea. But that's so stupid. . . .
Because it's only a garret [the place where the wild duck lives, the old
Christmas-trees are put, where old Ekdal chases the rabbit, etc.].
Hedwig is a highly excitable child at the age of puberty
(Ibsen thinks it necessary expressly to affirm that her voice is
changing, and that she willingly plays with fire) ; hence it is
natural that she should be thrilled with presentiments, dreams,
and obscure instincts, and invest poetical expressions denoting
something far away and wild, such as ' in the depths of the sea/
with the secret significance of all the mysterious and marvellous
surging in her. But when expressicns of this sort are used, not
by little growing girls, but by full-grown persons depicted as
rational beings, it is no longer a question of dreaming explicable
on pathological grounds, but of diseased cerebral centres.
These words often assume the nature of an obsession. Ibsen
obstinately repeats them, at the same time imparting to them a
mysterious significance. It is thus, for example, that the words
'joy of life ' appear in Ghosts (p. 176) :
Oswald. . . . She was full of the joy of life (p. 177).
MRS. ALVING. What were you saying about the joy of life?
OSWALD. Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned
upon the joy of life ? — always, always upon the joy of life ? (p. 187).
Mrs. Alving. You spoke of the joy of life ; and at that word a new light
burst for me over my life and all it has contained. . . . You ought to have
known your father. . . . He was brimming over with the joy of life.
In Hedda Gabler the word ' beauty ' plays a similar part
(p. 190) :
Hedda (lo Lovborg). You use it [the pistol] now. . . . And do it beauti
fully (p. 214).
Hedda. I say that there is something beautiful in this [Ldvborg's suicide]
(p. 219).
Hedda. A relief to know that it is still possible for an act of voluntary
courage to take place in the world. Something over which there falls a veil
of unintentional beauty. . . . And then now— the great act ! That over
which the sense of beauty falls !
The ' vine leaves in the hair,' in the same piece, belongs with
equal exactness to this category of words, amounting to an
obsession. The use of expressions full of mystery, incompre
hensible to the hearer, and either freely coined by the speaker,
or endowed by him with a peculiar sense, deviating from that
usually assigned them in speech, is one of the most frequent
phenomena among the mentally deranged. Griesinger* often
* Griesinger, op. cit, p. 176. He names the coining of words 'phraseo-
mania.' Kussmaul gives the name Paraphrasia vesana to the coining of
incomprehensible words, or the using of known words in a sense wholly
foreign to them.

EGO-MANIA 393
lays stress on this, and A. Marie* adduces some characteristic
examples of words and phrases, either newly invented or
employed in a sense differing from the customary one, which
have been repeated by the insane.
Ibsen is certainly not wholly diseased in mind, but only a
dweller on the borderland — a ' mattoid.' His use of formalized
expressions does not therefore go so far as the invention of new
words, as cited by Dr. Marie. But that he ascribes a mysterious
meaning to the expressions 'beauty,' 'joy of life,' 'courage of
life,' etc., and one which they do not possess when rationally
used, follows clearly enough from the examples quoted.
Finally let us adduce a few specimens of sheer nonsense,
corresponding to conversations held in dreams, and the silly
rambling speech of persons suffering from fever or acute mania.
In The Lady from the Sea, Ellida says (p. 39) : ' The water in
the fjord here is sick, . . . yes, sick. And I believe it makes
one sick, too ' (p. 79). ' We ' (Ellida and the ' stranger ') ' spoke
of the gulls and the eagles, and all the other sea-birds. I think
— -isn't it wonderful ? — when we talked of such things it seemed
to me as if both the sea-beasts and sea-birds were one with
him. ... I almost thought I belonged to them all, too ' (p. 100).
I don't think the dry land is really our home. ... I think that if only men
had from the beginning accustomed themselves to live on the sea, or in the
sea, perhaps, we should be more perfect than we are — with better and
happier . . .
Arnholm (jestingly). Well, perhaps ! But it can't be helped. We've
once for all entered upon the wrong path, and have become land-beasts
instead of sea-beasts. Anyhow, I suppose it's too late to make good the
mistake now.
Ellida. Yes, you've spoken a sad truth. And I think men instinctively
feel something of this themselves. And they bear it about with them as a
secret regret and sorrow. Believe me, herein lies the deepest cause for the
sadness of men.
And Dr. Wangel, who is depicted as a rational man, says
(p. 129):
And then she is so changeable, so capricious — she varies so suddenly.
Arnholm. No doubt that is the result of her morbid state of mind.
Wangel. Not altogether. Ellida belongs to the sea-folk. That is the
matter (! !).
* Dr. A. Marie, Etudes sur quelques Symptbmes des De'lires systdmatisds et
sur leur Valeurj Paris, 1892, chap. ii. : 'Eccentricities of language. Neo
logisms and conjuring incantations.' Tanzi cites, among others, the follow
ing examples : A patient used continuously to repeat, ' That is true, and not
false'; another began every phrase with, 'God's Word'; a third said, 'Out
with the vile beast !' making at the same time a sign of benediction with the
right hand ; a fourth said unceasingly. 'Turn over the page'; a fifth cried,
in a tone of command, ' Lips acs livi cux lips sux !' etc. One of Krafft-
Ebing's patients (op. cit, p. 130) constructed, among others, the following
words : ' Magnetismusambosarbeitswellen, Augengedanken Austrahlung,
Gliickseligkeitsbetten, Ohrenschussmaschine,' etc. Krafft-Ebing, op. cit,
pp. 130, 131.

394 DEGENERATION
We must insist that precisely the absurdities, the nugatory,
blurred, deep-sounding phrases, the formalized words, and
the dream-like drivel, have essentially conduced to obtain for
Ibsen his particular admirers. Over them hysterical mystics
can dream, like Dina and Hedwig, over the words ' beautiful '
and ' in the depths of the sea.' As they mean absolutely
nothing, an inattentive and vagrant mind can impart to them
whatever significance may be suggested by the play of associa
tion under the influence of momentary emotion. They are,
moreover, exceedingly grateful material for the (so-called)
' comprehensives,' for whom nothing is ever obscure. ' Compre-
hensives ' always explain everything. The greater the idiocy,
the more involved, the richer in import, the more exhaustive is
its interpretation, and the greater the arrogance with which these
beings of 'perfect comprehension' look down upon the barbarian,
who stoutly refuses to see in fustian anything but fustian.
In an exceedingly amusing French farce, Le Homard, a
husband suddenly returning home one evening surprises a
stranger with his wife. The latter does not lose her presence of
mind, and says to the husband that, having suddenly been seized
with iiiness, she had sent her maid for the first available doctor,
and that this gentleman was the doctor. The husband thanks
the gallant for his speedy appearance, and asks if he has already
prescribed anything. The gallant, who, of course, is not a doctor,
tries to make himself scarce ; but the anxious husband insists
on having a prescription, so that the Galen, bathed in cold
perspiration, is compelled to give one. The husband casts a
glance at it ; it consists of wholly illegible marks. ' And will
the chemist be able to read that?' asks the husband, shaking
his head. ' As if it were print,' asseverates the false physician,
again trying to make his escape. The husband, however,
adjures him to remain, and holds him fast until the maid
returns from the chemist. In a few minutes she makes her
appearance. The Galen prepares himself for a catastrophe.
No. The maid brings a phial of medicine, a box of pills, and
some powders. ' Did the chemist give you those ?' demands
the Galen in bewilderment. ' Certainly.' ' On my prescrip
tion ?' ' Of course it was on your prescription/ replies the
astonished maid. ' Has the chemist made some mistake ?'
interposes the troubled husband. 'No, no,' our Galen hastens
to reply ; but he contemplates the medicines for a long time,
and becomes lost in reverie.
These ' comprehensives ' are like the chemist in Le Homard.
They read with fluency all Ibsen's prescriptions, and especially
those containing absolutely no written characters, but simply
crow's feet devoid of all meaning. It is also their trade to
supply critical pills and electuaries when a piece of paper is
brought to them bearing the signature of a self-styled doctor,

EGO-MANIA 395
and they dispense them without wincing, be there anything of
any sort, or even nothing, on the slip of paper. Is it not
significant that the sole thing in Ibsen which the French mystic
De Vogu6, one of these ' comprehensives,' finds to praise is one
of the meaningless phrases above cited ?*
A final stigma of Ibsen's mysticism must be considered — his
symbolism. In The Wild Duck, this bird is the symbol of
Hjalmar's destiny, and the garret next the photographic studio
a symbol of the ' living lie,' of which, according to Relling,
everyone stands in need. In The Lady from the Sea, Lyng
strand wishes to make a group which shall be the symbol of
Ellida, as the ' stranger' with the changing eyes of a fish is of
the sea and the latter again of freedom, so that the ' stranger '
is really the symbol of a symbol. In Ghosts, the burning of
the asylum is the symbol of the annihilation of Alving's 'living
lie,' and the rainy weather prevailing throughout the whole
piece the symbol of the depressed and sullen frame of mind of
the personages in action. Ibsen's earlier pieces, Emperor and
Galilean, Brand, Peer Gynt, literally swarm with symbols. A
mysterious collateral significance is given to every figure and
every stage accessory, and every word includes a double
meaning. From the ' Psychology of Mysticism ' we already
know this peculiarity of the mystic mind to divine obscure
relations between phenomena. It seeks so to explain the nexus
of the wholly unconnected representations springing up in
consciousness through the play of automatic association, that
it attributes hidden but essential reference to each other in
these representations. The ' comprehensives ' believe they have
said all when, with an extremely consequential and self-satisfied
air, they demonstrate that the ' stranger ' in The Lady from the
Sea signifies the sea, and the sea freedom. They quite over
look the fact that the thing to be explained is not what the
poet intended by his symbol, but, firstly, and in particular, why
he hit upon the idea of making use of a symbol at all. In the
well-known words of the French satirist, a clear-headed poet
calls ' a cat a cat' That to express so sober an idea as that
persons of fine feelings, living in narrow conditions, have a deep
longing for a free, expanded, unrestrained existence, one should
have the whim to invent a ' stranger with fish-like eyes,' pre-
* Vicomte E. M. de Vogue*, ' Les Cigognes,' Revue des deux Mondes,
February 15, 1892, p. 922 : ' Ibsen would have won our trust, were it only by
certain axioms [?] which appeal to our actual distrusts, such as this ... in
Rosmersholm : " The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness." '
I am convinced that, unless previously told that they emanated from con
fined lunatics, these ' comprehensives ' would, without difficulty, understand
and interpret the expression ' little-cupboards-of-appetite-of-representation '
(Vorstellungs-Appetitschrdnkchen), freely used by one of Meynert's lunatic
patients, or the words of a patient under Griesinger's care (op. cit, p. 176)
that ' the lady superior was establishing herself in the military side-tone and
in the retardation of her teeth.'

396 DEGENERATION
supposes a diseased mental activity. In imbeciles, the tendency
to allegory and symbolism is very common. ' Intricate
arabesques, symbolical figures, cabalistic gestures and attitudes,
strange interpretations of natural events, punning, word-coining,
and peculiar modes of expression, frequently occurring in
paranoia, give the delirium a lively and grotesque colouring.'
Thus writes Tanzi,* and in the symbolism of the insane he
saw, as Meynert had previously seen, a form of atavism.
Among men low in the grade of civilization symbolism is, in
fact, the habitual form of thought. We know the reason —
their brain is not yet trained to attention ; it is too weak to
suppress irrational associations, and refers all that shoots
through its consciousness to some chance phenomenon either
just perceived, or else remembered.
After all the mental stigmata of Ibsen with which we. have
become acquainted — his theological obsessions of original sin,
of confession and redemption, the absurdities of his invention,
the constant contradiction in his uncertain opinions, his vague
or senseless modes of expression, his onomatomania and his
symbolism — he might be numbered among the mystic degen
erates with which I have concerned myself in the previous
chapters. We are, however, justified in assigning him his place
among the ego-maniacs, because the diseased intensification of
his ego-consciousness is even more striking and characteristic
than his mysticism. His ego-mania assumes the form of
anarchism. He is in a state of constant revolt against all that
exists. He never exercises rational criticism with regard to this ;
he never shows what is bad, why it is bad, and how it could be
made better. No ; he only reproaches it with its existence, and
has only one longing — to destroy it. ' The ruin of everything '
was the programme of certain destructives in 1848, and has
remained that of Ibsen. He condenses it with a clearness which
leaves nothing to be desired in his well-known poem, To my
Friend the Destructive Orator. In this he glorifies the deluge
as the ' sole revolution not made by a half-and-half dabbler '
(Halohedsfusker) ; but even it was not radically ruinous enough.
' We want to make it still more radical, but for that end we
need men and orators. You charge yourselves with flooding
the terrestrial garden. I place blissfully a torpedo under the
ark.'t In a series of letters offered by elephant-driver Brandes
* Tanzi, / Neologismi in rapporta col Delirio cronico. Turin, 1890.
f ' Vi vii gjore det om igjen raditalere,
Men dertil sordres baade Maend og Talere.
J sdrger sor Vandflom til Verdensparken,
J eg laegger med Lyst Torpedo under Arken.'
Observe the purely mystic vapours of this thought. The poet wishes to
destroy everything, even the ark which shelters the saved remnants of
terrestrial life, but sees himself placed beyond the reach of the destruction
and hence will survive the annihilation of everything else on earth.

EGO-MANIA

397

for the edification of the adorers of Ibsen, the poet gives con
spicuous specimens of his theories.* The state must be de
stroyed. Unfortunately the Paris Communists bungled this
beautiful and fertile idea by clumsy execution. The fight for
freedom has not for its end the conquest of liberty, but is its
own end. As soon as we believe liberty to be attained, and
cease to fight for it, we prove it to be lost to us. The meri
torious thing in the fight for liberty is the state of permanent
revolt against all existing things which it presupposes. There
is nothing fixed and permanent. ' Who warrants me that in the
planet Jupiter twice two are not five ?' (This remark is an
unmistakable manifestation of the insanity of doubt,**)- which in
recent years has been deeply studied.) There is no true mar
riage. Friends are a costly luxury. ' They have long hindered
me from being myself.' The care of the ' I ' is the sole task
of man. He ought not to allow himself to be diverted from it
by any law or any consideration.
These thoughts, expressed by himself in his letters, he also
puts into the mouth of his dramatic characters. I have already
cited some of Mrs. Alving's and Nora's ego-maniacal and
anarchical phrases. In The Pillars of Society, Dina says (p. 19) :
' If only the people I lived amongst weren't so proper and moral.
Every day Hilda and Netta come here that I may take example
by them. I can never be as well behaved as they are, and I
won't be ' (p. 44).
But I wanted to know, too, if people over there [in America] are very —
very moral ... if they are so — so proper and well-behaved as here.
Johan. Well, at any rate, they're not so bad as people here think.
Dina. You don't understand me. What I want is just that they should
not be so very proper and moral (p. 92). I am sick of all this goodness.
Martha Bernick. Oh, how we writhe under this tyranny of custom and
convention ! Rebel against it, Dina. Do something to defy all this use-and-
wont !
In An Enemy of the People (p. 278) Stockmann declares : ' I
detest leading men . . . they stand in the path of a free man
wherever he turns — and I should be glad if we could exter
minate them like other noxious animals.' (P. 280) ' The most
dangerous enemies of truth and freedom in our midst are the
* Georges Brandes, op. cit, pp. 431, 435, 438, etc.
f J. Cotard, Etudes sur les Maladies cdrebrales et mentales j Paris, 1891.
In this book the delire des ndgations is for the first time recognised and
described as a form of melancholia. The Third Congress of French Alienists,
which sat at Blois from the ist to the 6th of August, 1892, devoted almost
the whole of its conferences to the insanity of doubt. In a work by F. Ray
mond and F. L. Arnaud, ' Sur certains cas d'aboulie avec obsession inter
rogative et trouble des mouvements ' (Annates mddico-psychologiques, 7°
series, t. xvi.), we read, p. 202 : ' The invalids occupy themselves with
questions intrinsically insoluble, such as the creation, nature, life, etc. Why
the trees are green ? Why the rainbow has seven colours ? Why men are
not as tall as houses?' etc.

398 DEGENERATION
compact majority. Yes, this execrable compact, Liberal
majority — they it is. . . . The majority is never right. . . .
The minority is always right.' Where Ibsen does not seriously
attack the majority he derides it — e.g., when he entrusts the
maintenance of society to grotesque Philistines, or makes self-
styled Radicals betray the hypocrisy of their Liberal views.
In An Enemy ofthe People (p. 238) :
Burgomaster. You want to fly in the face of your superiors ; and that's
an old habit of yours. You can't endure any authority over you.'
In Rosmersholm (p. 53) :
MORTENSGAARD [the journalist who poses as a Freethinker]. We have
plenty of Freethinkers already, Pastor Rosmer — I almost might say too many.
What the party requires is a Christian element — something that everyone
must respect. That's what we're sadly in need of.
With the same purpose of anarchistic ridicule he always
personifies the sense of duty in idiots or contemptible Pharisees
only. In Ghosts the blockhead, Pastor Manders, thus preaches
(p. 142) : ' What right have we human beings to happiness ?
No, we have to do our duty! And your duty was to hold
firmly to the man you had once chosen, and to whom you are
bound by a holy tie.' In The Pillars of Society it is the rogue
Bernick who is made to proclaim the necessity of the subordi
nation of the individual to the community (p. 58) : ' People
must learn to moderate their personal claims if they are to
fulfil their duties in the community in which they are placed.'
In An Enemy of the People the not less pitiable burgomaster
sermonizes his brother Stockmann in this fashion (p. 209) :
' Anyhow, you've an ingrained propensity for going your own
way. And that in a well-ordered community is almost always
dangerous. The individual must submit himself to the whole
community.' The trick is evident : to make the conception of the neces
sary subordination ofthe individual ridiculous and contemptible,
Ibsen appoints as its mouthpieces ridiculous and contemptible
beings. On the other hand, it is the characters on whom he
lavishes all the wealth of his affection to whom he entrusts the
duty of defending rebellion against duty, the aspersion or
derision of laws, morals, institutions, self-discipline, and the
proclaiming of unscrupulous ego-mania as the sole guide of life.
The psychological roots of Ibsen's anti-social impulses are
well known. They are the degenerate's incapacity for self-
adaptation, and the resulting discomfort in the midst of cir
cumstances to which, in consequence of his organic deficiencies,
he cannot accommodate himself. 'The criminal,' Lombroso*
* Lombroso and B. Laschi, Le Crime politique et les Rdvolutions par
rapport au Droit, d P Anthropologic criminelle et a la Science du Gouverne
ment. Traduit de Pltalien par H. Bouchard. Paris, 1892, t. i. p. 195.

EGO-MANIA 399
says, ' in consequence of his neurotic and impulsive nature,
and his hatred of the institutions which have punished or
imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political rebel, who finds
in insurrection the means not only of satisfying his passions,
but of even having them countenanced for the first time by
a numerous public' This utterance is exactly applicable to
Ibsen, with the slight change, that he is merely a theoretic
criminal, his motor centres not being powerful enough to
transmute his anarchically criminal ideas into deeds, and that
he finds the satisfaction of his destructive impulses not in the
insurrection, but in the activity of dramatic composition.
His incapacity for self-adaptation makes him not only an
anarchist, but also a misanthrope, and fills him with a pro
found weariness of life. The doctrine of An Enemy of the People
is contained in Stockmann's exclamation (p. 315): 'The
strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone ' ; and in
Rosmersholm (p. 24), Brendel says : ' I like to take my pleasures
in solitude, for then I enjoy them doubly.' The same Brendel
subsequently laments (p. 105) : ' I am going homewards ; I
am home-sick for the mighty Void. . . . Peter Mortensgaard
never wills more than he can do. Peter Mortensgaard is
capable of living his life without ideals. And that, do you see,
that is just the mighty secret of action and of victory. It is
the sum of the whole world's wisdom. . . . The dark night is
best. Peace be with you!' Brendel's words have a peculiar
significance, for, on the evidence of Ehrhard,* Ibsen wished
to portray himself in that personage. That which is ex
pressed in these passages is the degout des gens and the tedium
vita of alienists, phenomena never absent in depressed forms of
mental alienation.
In addition to his mysticism and ego-mania, Ibsen's extra
ordinary poverty of ideas indicates another stigma of de
generacy. Superficial or ignorant judges, who appraise an
artist's intellectual wealth by the number of volumes he has
produced, believe that when they point at the high pile of a
degenerate's works they have victoriously refuted the accu
sation of his infecundity. The well-informed are of course
not entrapped by this paltry method of proof. The history
of insane literature knows of a large number of cases in which
fools have written and published dozens of thick volumes.
For tens of years and in feverish haste they must have driven
the pen, almost continuously, night and day ; but since all
* Auguste Ehrhard, op. cit, p. 412 : ' He [Ibsen] assigns himself a role to
acquaint us in a direct manner with his own disillusionings. . . . He presents
himself in the fantastic and tormented character of Ulric Brendel. Let us
not be deceived by the disguise in which he veils himself. Ulric Brendel,
the fool, is no other than Henrik Ibsen, the idealist' (?).

400 DEGENERATION
these bulky tomes contain not a single idea of any utility,
this restless activity is not to be termed fruitful, in spite of the
abundant typographical results. We have seen that Richard
Wagner never invented a tale, a figure, a situation ; but that
he sponged on ancient poems or the Bible. Ibsen has almost
as little genuine original creative power as his intellectual
relative, and as he, in his beggar's pride, disdains for the most
part to borrow from other poets of procreative capacity, or
from popular traditions exuberant with life, his poems reveal,
when closely and keenly examined, an even greater poverty
than those of Wagner. If we do not allow ourselves to be
dazzled by the art of variation in a contrapuntist extra
ordinarily clever in dramatic technique, and follow the themes
he so adroitly elaborates, we at once recognise their dreary
monotony. At the central point of all his pieces (with the exception of
those of a romantic character, written by him in his first period
of pure imitation) stand two figures, always the same and
fundamentally one, but having now a negative and now a
positive sign, a thesis and antithesis in the Hegelian sense.
They are, on the one hand, the human being who obeys his
inner law only (that is, his ego-mania), and dauntlessly and
defiantly makes a parade of it ; and, on the other, the in
dividual who, it is true, really acts in obedience to his ego
mania only, but has not the courage to display it, feigning
respect for the law of others and for the notions of the
majority — in other words, the avowed and violent anarchist,
and his opposite, the crafty and timorously deceitful anarchist.
The avowed ego-maniac is, with one single exception, always
embodied in a woman. The exception is Brand. On the
contrary, the hypocrite is always a man — again with a single
exception, viz., that of Hedda Gabler, who does not personify
the idea in its purity, frank anarchism in her nature being
mingled with something of hypocrisy. Nora (A Doll's House),
Mrs. Alving (Ghosts), Selma Malsberg (The League of the Young),
Dina, Martha Hessel, Mrs. Bernick (The Pillars of Society),
Hedda Gabler, Ellida Wangel (The Lady from the Sea), Rebecca
(Rosmersholm), are one and the same figure, but seen, as it were,
at different hours of the day, and consequently in different
lights. Some are in the major, others in the minor, key ;
some are more, others less hysterically deranged ; but essen
tially they are not only similar, but identical. Selma Malsberg
(p. 60) cries : ' Bear our unhappiness in common ? Am I yet
good enough ? No. I can no longer keep silent, be a hypo
crite and a liar. Now you shall know. ... O, how you have
wronged me ! Infamously, all of you ! . . . How I have
thirsted for a drop of your care ! But when I begged for it

EGOMANIA 401
you repulsed me with a polite joke. You dressed me like a
doll. You played with me as with a child. ... I want to go
away from you. . . . Let me, let me.' And Nora (p. no) :
' I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. . . . You and
your father have sinned greatly against me. It is the fault of
you two that nothing has been made of me. I was never
happy, only merry. . . . Our house has been nothing but a
nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I
used to be papa's doll-child. . . . That is why I am going
away from you now. ... I shall now leave your house at
once.' Ellida (The Lady from the Sea) :- ' What I want is that
we should, of our own free will, release each other. ... I
am not what you took me for. Now you see it yourself. Now
we can separate as friends, and freely. . . . Here there is no
single thing that attracts me and binds me. I am so abso
lutely rootless in your house, Wangel' Selma threatens to
leave, Ellida resolves to leave, Nora does leave, Mrs. Alving
did leave. (Ghosts, p. 144) Pastor Manders : ' All your efforts
have been bent towards emancipation and lawlessness. You
have never been willing to endure any bond. Everything that
has weighed upon you in life you have cast away without care
or conscience, like a burden you could throw off at will. It
did not please you to be a wife any longer, and you left your
husband. You found it troublesome to be a mother, and you
sent your child forth among strangers.' Mrs. Bernick was,
equally with her double, Mrs. Alving, a stranger in her own
house. She, however, does not wish to leave, but to remain and
endeavour to win over her husband (p. 112) : ' For many years
I believed that you had once been mine, and I had lost you
again. Now I know that you never were mine ; but I shall
win you.' Dina (The Pillars of Society) cannot leave because
she is not yet married, but as becomes her state of maiden
hood, she gives her rebellious thoughts this form (p. 93) : ' I
will be your wife ; but first I will work, and become something
for myself, just as you are. I will give myself ; I will not be
taken.' Rebecca (Rosmersholm) is also unmarried, yet she runs
away (p. 96) :
I am going.
ROSMER. Where are you going, Rebecca?
Rebecca. North, by the steamer. It was there I came from.
Rosmer. But you have no ties there now.
Rebecca. I have none here either.
ROSMER. What do you think of doing ?
REBECCA. I don't know. I only want to have done with it all.
Now for the antithesis, the hypocritical egoist who satisfies
his ego-mania without giving offence to society. This per
sonage presents himself under the names successively of
26

402 DEGENERATION
Torvald Helmer, Consul Bernick, Curate Rorlund, Rector
Kroll, Pastor Manders, Burgomaster Stockmann, Werle,
and once, to a certain extent, Hedda Gabler, always with
the same ideas and the same words. In A Doll's House
(p. 104, et seq.), after his wife's confession, Helmer cries : ' Oh,
what an awful awakening ! . . . No religion, no morality, no
sense of duty. . . . He can publish the whole story ; and if
he does publish it, perhaps I should be suspected of having
been a party to your criminal transactions. ... I must try
to pacify him in one way or the other. The story must be
kept secret, cost what it may.' In Ghosts Pastor Manders on
different occasions expresses himself thus : ' One is certainly
not bound to account to everybody for what one reads and
thinks within one's own four walls. . . . We must not expose
ourselves to false interpretations, and we have no right what
ever to give offence to our neighbours. . . . You go and risk
your good name and reputation, and nearly succeed in ruining
other people's reputation into the bargain. It was unspeakably
reckless of you to seek refuge with me. . . . Yes, that is the only
thing possible ' (to ' hush the matter up ') ' . . . yes, family life
is certainly not always so pure as it ought to be. But in such
a case as you point to ' (an incestuous union), ' one can never
know.' Rorlund (The Pillars of Society) : ' See how the family
is undermined over there ! how a brazen spirit of destruction
is attacking the most vital truths ! . . . Of course, a tare now
and then springs up among the wheat, alas ! but we honestly
do our best to weed it out. . . . Oh, Dina, you can form no
conception of the thousand considerations ! When a man is
placed as a moral pillar of the society he lives in, why — he can
not be too careful. . . . Oh, Dina, you are so dear to me !
Hush ! someone is coming. Dina, for my sake, go out to the
others. ... A good book forms a refreshing contrast to what
we unhappily see every day in newspapers and magazines.'
Consul Bernick, in the same piece: 'Just at this time, when I
depend so much on unmixed good feeling, both in the press
and in the town. There will be paragraphs in the papers all
over the country-side. . . . These newspaper scribblers are
always covertly carping at us. . . . I whose mission it is to
be an example to my fellow-citizens, must have such things
thrown in my teeth ! I cannot bear it. It won't do for me to
have my name bespattered in this way. ... I must keep my
conscience unspotted. Besides, it will make a good impression
on both the press and the public at large when they see that I
set aside all personal considerations, and let justice take its
course.' Kroll, in Rosmersholm : ' Do you ever see the Radical
papers? . . . But you've seen, then, I suppose, how these
gentlemen of " the people " have been pleased to treat me ?

EGO-MANIA 403
what infamous abuse they've dared to heap upon me ?'
Werle, in The Wild Duck : ' Even if, out of attachment to me,
she were to disregard gossip and scandal and all that  -?'
The Burgomaster, in An Enemy of the People : ' If, perhaps, I do
watch over my reputation with some anxiety, I do it for the
good of the town. . . . Your statement . . . must be kept
back for the good of all . . . we will do the best we can
quietly ; but nothing whatever, not a single word, of this un
fortunate business must be made public. . . . And then you
have an unhappy propensity for rushing into print upon every
possible and impossible matter. You no sooner hit upon an
idea than you must write at once some newspaper article or a
whole pamphlet about it.' Finally, Hedda Gabler : ' And so
you went off perfectly openly ? . . . But what do you suppose
that people will say about you, then ? . . . I so dread a
scandal ! You should accept for your own sake, or, better
still, for the world's sake.'
If all the Nora-like and all the Helmer-like utterances are
read successively, an impression must be formed that they
are part of the same role; and this impression is correct, for
under all the different names there is only one role. The same
is true of the women who, in contrast to the ego-maniac Nora,
unselfishly sacrifice themselves. Martha Bernick, Miss Hessel,
Hedwig, Miss Tesman, etc., are always the same figure in
different guises. The monotony, moreover, extends to minutest
details. Rank's inherited disease is in Oswald's case only
carried further. Nora's flight is repeated in almost every
piece, and in The Wild Duck is travestied in Hjalmar's de
parture from his house. One feature of this scene appears
word for word in all the richauffes of it :
Nora. Here I lay the keys down. The maids know how to manage
everything in the house far better than I do.
Ellida. If I do go . . . I haven't a key to give up, an order to give. . . .
I am absolutely rootless in your house, etc.
In A Doll's House, the heroine, who has settled her account
with life and is filled with dread of the impending catastrophe,
makes Rank play a wild tarantella on the piano, while she
dances to it. In Hedda Gabler, the heroine is heard ' suddenly
playing a wild dance ' before she shoots herself. Rosmer says
to Rebecca, when the latter makes known her wish to die :
'No; you recoil. You have not the heart to do what she dared.'
The extortioner Krogstad says to Nora, who threatens to
commit suicide : ' Oh, you don't frighten me ! An elegant
spoilt lady like you. . . . People don't do things of that sort.'
Brack says, in response to Hedda Gabler's outburst : ' Rather
die ! That's what people say, but nobody does it !' In much

404 DEGENERATION
the same words Helmer reproaches his wife Nora with having
sacrificed her honour by the forgery, and Pastor Manders
upbraids Mrs. Alving for wishing to sacrifice her honour to
him. Lona Hessel demands confession from Consul Bernick,
and Rebecca from Rosmer, in the same terms. Werle's crime
was the seduction of the maidservant Gina. Alving's crime
was the seduction of his own maidservant. This pitiable and
imbecile self-repetition in Ibsen, this impotence of his indolent
brain to wash out the imprint of an idea once painfully
elaborated, goes so far that, even in the invention of names
for his characters, he is, consciously or unconsciously, under
the influence of a reminiscence. In A Doll's House we have
Helmer ; in The Wild Duck, Hjalmar ; in The Pillars of Society,
Hilmar, Mrs. Bernick's brother.
Thus Ibsen's drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny
bazaar. When one looks through the peep-hole, one sees,
at each shaking of the cardboard tube, new and parti-coloured
combinations. Children are amused at this toy. But adults
know that it contains only splinters of coloured glass, always
the same, inserted haphazard, and united into symmetrical
figures by three bits of looking-glass, and they soon tire of
the expressionless arabesques. My simile applies not only
to Ibsen's plays, but to the author himself. In reality, he is
the kaleidoscope. The few paltry bits of glass which for
thirty years he has rattled and thrown into cheap mosaic
patterns, these are his obsessions. These have existed in his
own diseased mind, and have not sprung from observation of
the world's drama. The pretended ' realist ' knows nothing of
real life. He does not comprehend it ; he does not even see it,
and cannot, therefore, renew from it his store of impressions,
ideas, and judgments. The well-known method of manu
facturing cannon is to take a tube and pour molten metal
round it. Ibsen proceeds in a similar way with his poems.
He has a thesis — more accurately, some anarchistic folly;
this is the tube. It is now only a question of enveloping
this tube with the metal of life's realities. But that lies
beyond Ibsen's power. At best he occasionally finds some
bits df worn-down horseshoe-nails, or castaway sardine-box,
by rummaging among dust-heaps ; but this small quantity of
metal does not suffice for a cannon. Where Ibsen makes
strenuous efforts to produce a picture of actual contempo
raneous events, he astounds us with the niggardliness in
incidents and human beings evinced by the range of his
experience. Philistine, ultra-provincial, these are no fit words for this.
It sinks below the level of the human. The naturalist Huber
and Sir John Lubbock have recorded incidents of this sort

EGO-MANIA 40*3
in their observations of colonies of ants. The small features
pinned by Ibsen to his two-legged theses, to give them, at
least, as much resemblance to humanity as is possessed by a
scarecrow, are borrowed from the society of a hideous hole
on the Norwegian coast, composed of drunkards and silly
louts, of idiots and crazed hysterical geese, who in their whole
life have never formed a clearer thought than : ' How can I
get hold of a bottle of brandy?' or ' How can I make myself
interesting to men ?' The sole characteristic distinguishing
these Lovborgs, Ekdals, Oswald Alvings, etc., from beasts is
that they are given to drink. The Noras, Heddas, Ellidas,
do not tipple, but make up for that by raving so wildly as to
require strait-jackets. The great events of their lives are the
obtaining of a position in a bank (A Doll's House) ; their
catastrophes, that one no longer believes in the articles of
their creed (Rosmersholm) ; the loss of an appointment as
physician at a watering-place (An Enemy of the People) ; the
raked-up rumours of an amorous nocturnal peche de jeunesse
(The Pillars of Society) ; the frightful crimes darkening, like a
thunder-cloud, the lives of these beings and their social circle
are an intrigue with a maidservant (Ghosts, The Wild Duck) ;
a liaison with an itinerant music-hall singer (An Enemy of the
People) ; the felling, by mistake, of wood in a state-forest (The
Wild Duck) ; the visit to a house of ill-fame after a good
dinner (Hedda Gabler). It sometimes happens to me to pass
a half-hour in the nursery, amusing myself with the chatter
and play of the little ones. One day the children by accident
saw the arrest of someone in the street. Although their
attendant hurried them away from the unpleasant spectacle,
they had seen enough of the tumult to be violently excited
by it. Some days afterwards on entering the nursery I found
them full of the great event, and I became the auditor of the
following dialogue :
Matilda (aged three years). Why did they put the gentleman in prison?
Richard (five years old, very dignified and sententious). It wasn't a
gentleman ; it was a bad man. They put him in prison because he was
wicked. Matilda. What had he done then ?
Richard (after reflecting a little). His mamma had said he wasn't to take
chocolate ; but he did take chocolate. That's why his mamma had him put
in prison. This childish conversation always came into my mind when
I lighted, in Ibsen's plays, upon one of his crimes treated with
such overawing importance.
We have now made the complete tour of Ibsen. At the
risk of being prolix and tedious, I have made copious quota
tions from his writings, in order that the reader might himself
see the matter from which I have formed my judgments.

406 DEGENERATION
Ibsen stands before us as a mystic and an ego-maniac, who
would willingly prove the world and mankind not worth
powder and shot, but who only proves that he has not the
faintest inkling of one or the other. Incapable of adapting
himself to any state of things whatsoever, he first abuses the
state of things in Norway, then that of Europe generally.
In no one of his productions is a single thought to be met
with belonging to, or having an active influence on, the
present age, unless we bestow this honour on his anarchism,
which is explained by the diseased constitution of his mind,
and his travesties of the least certain results of investigations
in hypnotism and telepathy. He is a skilful dramatic
technician, and knows how to represent with great poetic
power personages in the background, and situations out of
the chief current of the piece. This, however, is all that a
conscientious and lucid analysis can really find in him. He
has dared to speak of his ' moral ideas,' and his admirers
glibly repeat the expression. Ibsen's moral ideas ! Any
reader of the Ibsen drama, who finds in them no food for
laughter, has truly no sense of humour. He seems to preach
apostacy, yet cannot free himself from the religious ideas
of confession, original sin, and the Saviour's act of redemption.
He sets up egoism and the freedom of the individual from all
scruples as an ideal, yet hardly has anyone acted somewhat
unscrupulously, but he begins to whimper contritely, and
continues until his heart, full to suffocation, has poured itself
out in confession ; while the only persons with whom he
succeeds are women, who sacrifice their individuality to the
point of annihilation for the sake of others. He extols every
offence against morality as heroism, while he punishes, with
nothing less than death, the smallest and stupidest love affair.
He uses the words freedom, progress, etc., as a gargle, and
in his best works honours lying and stagnation. And all
these contradictions appear forsooth not successively as
stations on the road of his development, but at one and the
same time, and side by side. His French admirer, Ehrhard,*
sees this disconcerting fact, and endeavours as best he can
to excuse it. His Norwegian interpreter, Henrik Jaeger, on
the contrary, asserts with the utmost placidity t that the
most prominent characteristic of Ibsen's works is their unity
* Auguste Ehrhard, op. cit, p. 120: 'With admirable frankness Ibsen,
in his latest works, points out the abuse which may be made of his ideas [!].
He counsels reformers to extreme prudence, if not to silence. As for him
self, he ceases to excite the multitude to the pursuit of moral and social
progress [!] ; he entrenches himself in his disdainful pessimism, and in
aristocratic solitude enjoys the serene vision of future ages.'
t Henrik Jaeger, Henrik Ibsen og haus Vaerker. En Fremstilling i
Grundrids. Christiania, \Z<yi, passim.

EGO-MANIA 407
(Enhed). The Frenchman and the Norwegian were most
incautious in not preconcerting, prior to praising their great
man in manners so divergent. The single discoverable unity
in Ibsen is his faculty of distortion. The point in which he
always resembles himself is his entire incapacity to elaborate
a single clear thought, to comprehend a single one of the
watchwords daubed here and there on to his works, or to
deduce the true conclusions from a single one of his
premises. And this malignant, anti- social simpleton, highly gifted, it
must be admitted, in the technique of the stage, they have had
the audacity to try to raise upon the shield as the great world-
poet of the closing century. His partizans have continued to
shout, ' Ibsen is a great poet !' until all stronger judgments
have become at least hesitating, and feebler ones wholly sub
jugated. In a recent book on Simon Magus,* there occurs
this pretty story : ' Apsethus, the Libyan, wished to become a
god. In spite, however, of his most strenuous efforts he could
not succeed in satisfying his longing. But, at any rate, he
would make the people believe that he had become a god.
He therefore collected a large number of parrots, in which
Libya abounds, and shut them all in a cage. He kept them
so for some time, and taught them to say, "Apsethus is a god."
When the birds had learnt this, he opened the cage and set
them free. And the birds spread themselves throughout
Libya, so that the words penetrated to the Greek settlements.
And the Libyans, astonished at the voice of the birds, and not
suspecting the trick Apsethus had played, looked upon him as
a god.' In imitation of the ingenious Apsethus, Ibsen has
taught a few 'comprehensives' — the Brandes, Ehrhards, Jaegers,
etc. — the words: ' Ibsen is a modern! Ibsen is a poet of the
future !' and the parrots have spread over all the lands, and
are chattering with deafening din in books and papers, ' Ibsen
is great ! Ibsen is a modern spirit !' and imbeciles among the
public murmur the cry after them, because they hear it fre
quently repeated, and because, on such as they, every word
uttered with emphasis and assurance makes an impression.
It would certainly be a proof of superficiality to believe that
the audacity of his Corybantes alone explains the high place
to which Ibsen has been fraudulently elevated. Without ques
tion he possesses characteristics by which he could not but act
upon his contemporaries.
Firstly, we have his vague phrases and indefinite incidental
hints concerning 'the great epoch in which we live,' ' the new
era about to dawn,' ' freedom,' ' progress,' etc. These phrases
were bound to please all dreamers and drivellers, for they
* G. R. S. Mead, Simon Magus. London, 1892.

408 DEGENERATION
give free scope to any interpretation, and, in particular, allow
the presumption that their author is possessed of modernity
and a bold spirit of progress. They are not discouraged by
the fact that Ibsen himself makes cruel sport of these ' com
prehensives,' when, in The Wild Duck, he makes Relling
(p. 361) use the word ' demoniac,' while admitting it to be
wholly meaningless, just as the poet himself employs his own
bunkum about progress and freedom. They are ' comprehen
sives ' precisely because they interpret every passage according
to their own sweet will.
Then there is Ibsen's doctrine of the right of the individual
to live in accordance with his own law. Is this really his
doctrine ? This must be denied when, after struggling through
his countless contradictions and self-refutations, we see that
he treats with peculiar affection the sacrificial lambs, who are all
negation of their own ' I,' all suppression of their most natural
impulses, all neighbourly love and consideration for others.
In any case, his apostles have brought forward anarchistic
individualism as the central doctrine of his drama. Ehrhard*
sums up this doctrine in these words : ' The revolt of the
individual against society. In other words, Ibsen is the
apostle of moral autonomy (autonomic morale).' Now such a
doctrine is surely well fitted to cause ravages among the intel
lectually indolent or intellectually incapable.
Ehrhard dares to use the expression ' moral autonomy.' In
the name of this fine principle Ibsen's critical heralds persuade
the youth who gather round him that they have the right to
"live out their lives,' and they smile approvingly when their
auditors understand by this term the right to yield to their
basest instincts and to free themselves from all discipline.
As the scoundrels in Mediterranean ports do with well-
dressed travellers, they whisper in the ear of their public,
' Amuse yourselves ! Enjoy yourselves ! Come with me ; I
will show you the way !' But to confound ' moral autonomy '
with absence of restraint is, on the part of their faith, a mon
strous error, and in the corrupters of youth, hoping for the pay
of procuration, an infamous deception.
These two notions are not only not synonymous, they are
diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Liberty of the
individual ! The right to autonomy ! The Ego its own legis
lator ! Who is this ' I ' that is to make laws for itself ? Who
is this ' Self for whom Ibsen demands the right of autonomy?
Who is this free individual ? That the entire notion of a Self
opposed to the rest of the world as something alien and
exclusive is an illusion of consciousness, we have already seen
in the chapter on the ' Psychology of Ego-mania/ and I need
* Ehrhard, op. cit, p. 94.

EGO-MANIA 409
not, therefore, dwell again on the subject in this place. We
know that man, like every other complex and highly developed
living being, is a society or state, of simpler, and of simplest,
living beings, of cells and cell-systems, or organs, all having
their own functions and wants. In the course of the develop
ment of life on earth they have become associated, and have
undergone changes, in order to be able to perform higher
functions than are possible to the simple cell and primitive
agglomeration of cells. The highest function of life yet known
to us is clear consciousness ; the most elevated content of con
sciousness is knowledge ; and the most obvious and immediate
aim of knowledge is constantly to procure better conditions of
life for the organism, hence to preserve its existence as long as
possible, and to fill it with the greatest possible number of
pleasurable sensations. In order that the collective organism
may be able to perform its task, its constituent parts are bound
to submit to a severe hierarchical order. Anarchy in its in
terior is disease, and leads rapidly to death. The single cell
executes its chemical work of decomposition and of integration
without troubling itself about aught else. It labours almost
for itself alone. Its consciousness is the most limited con
ceivable ; it has hardly any prevision ; its own power of
adaptation is so minute that if a cell is in the smallest degree
less well nourished than its neighbour, it* cannot hold its
ground against the latter, and is immediately devoured by it.*
The differentiated cell-group, or organ, already possesses a
wider consciousness, whose seat is its own nerve-ganglia ; its
function is more complex, and no longer operates wholly, or'
even chiefly, for its own benefit, but for that of the collective
organism ; it also has already, I might say, a constitutional
influence on the direction of the affairs of the whole organism,
asserting itself in the power of the organ to suggest to con
sciousness presentations prompting the will to acts. The most
exalted organ, however, the condensation of all the other
organs, is the gray cerebral cortex. It is the seat of clear
consciousness. It works least of all for itself, most of all for
the commonwealth — i.e., for the whole organism. It is the
government of the State. To it come all reports from the
interior as well as the exterior ; it has to find its way in the
midst of all complications ; it has to exercise foresight, and to
take into consideration not only the immediate effect of an act,
* W. Roux, Ueber den Kampf der Theile des Organismus. Leipzig, 1881.
Since the appearance of Roux's work, the theory of phagocytose, or the
digestion of weaker cells by the stronger, has been considerably extended.
This, however, is not the place to cite the numerous communications bearing
on this subject which have appeared in the Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaftliche
Zoologie, in Virchow's Archivs, in the Biologische Centralblatt, in the
Zoologische Jahrbiicher, etc.

410 DEGENERATION
but also the more remote consequences for the commonwealth.
When, therefore, it is a question of the ' I,' the ' Self,' the
' Individual,' it cannot be any subordinate part of the organism
which is meant, such as the little toe or the rectum, but only
the gray cerebral cortex. To it certainly belongs the right
and duty of directing the individual and of prescribing its law.
It is consciousness itself. But how does consciousness form
its judgments and its decisions ? It forms them from repre
sentations awakened in it by excitations proceeding from the
internal organs and from the senses. If consciousness allows
itself to be directed solely by the organic excitations, it seeks
to gratify its momentary appetites, on the spot, at the cost of
well-being, it injures an organ by favouring the need of
another, and it neglects to take into consideration circum
stances of the external world which must be dealt with in the
interest of the whole organism. Let me give some quite
simple illustrations. A man is swimming under water. His
cells know nothing of it, and do not trouble themselves about
it. They quietly absorb from the blood the oxygen which
they need at the moment, and set free, in exchange, carbonic
dioxide. The decomposed blood excites the medulla oblon
gata, and the latter impetuously demands a movement of
inspiration. Were the gray cerebral cortex to yield to the
perfectly justifiable demand of one organ, and allow an impulse
to inspire to proceed to the muscles concerned, the consequence
would be the filling of the lungs with water, and death of the
entire organism in consequence. Hence consciousness does
not obey the demand of the medulla oblongata, and, instead of
sending motor impulses to the intercostal muscles and those
of the diaphragm, communicates them to the muscles of the
arms and legs ; instead of breathing under water, the swimmer
emerges at the surface. Another instance. A typhoid con
valescent feels ragingly hungry. Were he to yield to this
desire, he might give himself a momentary satisfaction, but
twenty-four hours later he would probably die from perforation
of the intestines. Hence his consciousness resists the desire
of his organs for the benefit of the whole organism. The cases
are, of course, generally much more complex. But it is always
the task of consciousness to test the stimuli which it receives
from the depths of the organs, to comprise in the motor images
which they excite all its earlier experiences, its knowledge, the
directions given by the external world, and to disregard the
stimuli if the judgments opposed to them are more powerful
than they.
Even a perfectly healthy organism quickly goes to rack and
ruin if the inhibitive activity of consciousness is not exercised,
and if, through this want of exercise, its inhibitive strength

EGO-MANIA 411
becomes atrophied. Cassarian madness* is nothing but the
consequence of the systematic indulgence by consciousness
of every demand of the organs. If, however, the organism
is not perfectly healthy ; if it is degenerate, its ruin is much
more speedy and certain when it obeys the urging of its
organs, for in such a case these organs are suffering from
perversions ; they exact satisfactions, not only pernicious in
their remote consequences to the whole organism, but im
mediately so to the organs themselves.
When, therefore, the ' I ' is spoken of, which is to have the
right to dispose of itself, only the conscious ' Ego ' can be
meant, the pondering, remembering, observing, comparing
intellect, not, however, the sub-' Egos ' — unconnected, and
for the most part at strife with each other — which are included
in sub-consciousness. t The individual is the judging, not the
instinctive, human being. Liberty is the capacity of conscious
ness to derive excitations, not only from the stimuli of the
organs, but from those of the senses, and from original
memory-images. Ibsen's liberty is the most abject, and always
suicidal,| slavery. It is the subjugation of judgment to
instinct, and the revolt of some single organ against the
domination of that power, which has to watch over the well-
being of the whole organism. Even so individualistic a
philosopher as Herbert Spencer § says: 'To become fitted
for the social state, it is necessary that the man . . . should
possess the energy capable of renouncing a small enjoyment
of the moment, in order to obtain a greater one in the future.'
A healthy man in the full vigour of intellect cannot sacrifice
his judgment. The sacrifizin dell' intelletto is the only one he
cannot afford. If law and custom impose upon him acts
which he recognises as absurd because they defeat their end,
not only will he have the right, but it will be his duty, to
defend reason against nonsense, and knowledge against error.
* Jacoby, La Folie de Cdsars. Paris, 1880.
j- Alfred Binet, Les Alterations de la Personnalitd, Paris, 1892, p. 23, com
municates the case (observed by Bourru and Burot, and often cited) of
Louis B., who united in himself six different personalities — six ' I's ' having
not the slightest knowledge of each other, each possessing another character,
another memory, other peculiarities of feeling and movement, etc.
X ' Suicidal' is here not a mere rhetorical expression. If the tyrannical
power of instinct always ends by leading the individual in the long-run to
his destruction, it sometimes does this directly. Instinct, namely, may have
for its direct object suicide or self-mutilation ; and the ' free ' man obeying
his instinct has then the 'liberty' of mutilating or killing himself, although
that so little tallies with his real wish that he seeks in others a protec
tion from himself. See Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der gericht-
lichen Psychopathologie. Dritte umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892,
p. 311.
§ Herbert Spencer, The Individual versus the State. London, 1884.

412 DEGENERATION
But his revolt will always be in the name of judgment, not
in the name of instinct.
All this philosophy of self-restraint can, it is true, be preached
to healthy human beings only. It has no application to
degenerates. Their defective brain and nervous system are
not in a state to respond to its demands. The processes
within their organs are morbidly intensified. Hence the latter
send particularly powerful stimuli to consciousness. The
sensory nerves conduct badly. The memory-images in the
brain are faint. Perceptions of the external world, repre
sentations of anterior experiences, are, therefore, non-existent
or too feeble to subdue the stimulus originating in the organs.
Such persons can do nought else but follow their desires and
impulsions. They are the ' instinctivists ' and ' impulsivists '
of mental therapeutics. To this species belong the Noras,
Ellidas, Rebeccas, Stockmanns, Brands, etc. This company,
being dangerous to themselves and to others, require to be
put under the guardianship of rational men, or, better still,
in lunatic asylums. Such must be the answer to those fools
or charlatans who vaunt Ibsen's figures as ' free men ' and
' strong personalities,' and with the sweet-sounding tones of
a Pied Piper's air on 'self-disposal,' 'moral independence,'
and ' living life out,' attract children devoid of judgment
heaven knows whither, but in any case to their ruin.
The third feature of Ibsen's drama accounting for his success
is the light in which he shows woman. ' Women are the
pillars of society,' he makes Bernick say (in The Pillars of
Society, p. 114). With Ibsen -woman has no duties and all
rights. The tie of marriage does not bind her. She runs
away when she longs for liberty, or when she believes she
has cause of complaint against her husband, or when he
pleases her a little less than another man. The man who
plays the Joseph, and does not comply with the will of
Madame Potiphar, does not draw on himself the customary
ridicule ; he is roundly pronounced a criminal (Ghosts, p. 158) :
Pastor Manders. It was my greatest victory, Helen — the victory over
myself. Mrs. Alving. It was a crime against us both.
Woman is always the clever, strong, courageous being;
man always the simpleton and coward. In every encounter
the wife is victorious, and the man flattened out like a pancake.
Woman need live for herself alone. With Ibsen she has even
overcome her most primitive instinct — that of motherhood —
and abandons her brood without twitching an eyelid when
the caprice seizes her to seek satisfactions elsewhere. Such
abject adoration of woman — a pendant to Wagner's woman-
idolatry — such unqualified approval of all feminine depravities,

EGO-MANIA 413
was bound to secure the applause of those women who in
the viragoes of Ibsen's drama — hysterical, nymphomaniacal,
perverted in maternal instinct* — recognise either their own
portrait or the ideal of development of their degenerate
imagination. Women of this species find, as a matter of
fact, all discipline intolerable. They are by birth les femmes
de ruisseau of Dumas fils. They are not fit for marriage —
for European marriage with one man only. Promiscuous
sexual intercourse and prostitution are their most deeply-
seated instincts, according to Ferrerof the atavistic form of
degeneration in women, and they are grateful to Ibsen for
having catalogued, under the fine designations of ' The struggle
of woman for moral independence ' and ' The right of woman
to assert her own personality,' those propensities to which
opprobrious names are usually given.
In his fiercely travestied exaggerations of Ibsen's doctrines,
entitled Der Vater, Grdfin Julie, Gldubiger, etc., poor Grind-
berg, whose brain is equally deranged, but who possesses great
creative power, goes to the greatest pains to show the absurdity
of Ibsen's notions on the nature of woman, her rights, her
relations to man. His method, however, is a false one. He
will never convince Ibsen by rational arguments that his
doctrines are foolish, for they do not spring from his reason,
but from his unconscious instincts. His figures of women and
their destinies are the poetical expression of that sexual per
version of degenerates called by Krafft-Ebing 'masochism.'"]:
* Dr. Ph. Boileau de Castelnau, ' Misopddie ou Lerion de 1' Amour de la
Progeniture' (Annates mddico-psychologiques, 3° se*rie, 7e volume, p. 553).
In this work the author communicates twelve observations, in which the
natural feeling of the mother for her children was transformed by disease
into hatred.
t G. Ferrero, ' L'Atavisme de la Prostitution,' Revue scientifique, 508
volume, p. 136.
X R- von Krafft Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis, etc., 7tB Auflage, p. 89 (the
third edition of this book, from which I have made my previous citations,
contains nothing on masochism), and Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete
der Psychopathia sexualis eine medicinisch-psychologische Studie, Zweite um-
gearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage, Stuttgart, 1891, p. 1 ff. Krafft-Ebing
gives this explanation of his word (p. 1 et seq.) : ' By masochism I understand
a peculiar perversion of the psychic vita sexualis, consisting in this, that the
individual seized with it is dominated in his sexual feeling and thought by
the idea that he is wholly and unconditionally subjected to the will of a
person of the opposite sex, who treats him imperiously, humiliates and
maltreats him.' The word is formed from the name Sacher-Masoch, because
' his writings delineate exactly typical pictures of the perverted psychic life
of men of this kind ' (Neue Forschungen, etc., p. 37). I do not look upon this
designation as a happy one. Krafft-Ebing himself shows that Zola and,
long before him, Rousseau (he might have added Balzac in Baron Hulot in
Parents pauvres, part i. : La cousine Bette) have embodied this condition
quite as clearly as Sacher-Masoch. Hence I prefer the designation ' pas
sivism,' proposed by Dimitry Stefanowsky. See Archives de I 'Anthropologic
criminelle, 1892, p. 294.

414 DEGENERATION
Masochism is a sub-species of ' contrary sexual sensation.'
The man affected by this perversion feels himself, as regards
woman, to be the weaker party ; as the one standing in need
of protection ; as the slave who rolls on the ground, compelled
to obey the behests of his mistress, and finding his happiness
in obedience. It is the inversion of the healthy and natural
relation between the sexes. In Sacher-Masoch imperious
and triumphant woman wields the knout ; in Ibsen she exacts
confessions, inflicts inflammatory reprimands, and leaves in a
flare of Bengal lights. In essence, Ibsen's heroines are the
same as Sacher-Masoch's, though the expression of feminine
superiority is a little less brutal. It is remarkable that the
women who exult over Ibsen's Nora-types are not shocked
by the Hedwigs, Miss Tesmans, and other womanly embodi
ments of sacrifice, in whom the highly contradictory thoughts
and feelings of the confused mystic come to light. But it has
been psychologically established that human beings overlook
what is in dissonance with their own propinquities, and dwell
on that only which is in harmony with them.
Ibsen's leminine clientele is, moreover, not composed merely
of hysterical and degenerate characters, but includes also those
women who are leading an unhappy married life, or believe
themselves misunderstood, or suffer from the discontent and
inner void resulting from insufficient occupation. Clear think
ing is not the most prominent quality of this species of woman.
Otherwise they would not have found their advocate in Ibsen.
Ibsen is not their friend. No one is who, as long as the
present order of society exists, attacks the institution of
marriage. A serious and healthy reformer will contend for the principle
that marriage should acquire a moral and emotional import,
and not remain a lying form. He will condemn the marriage
for interest, a dowry or business marriage ; he will brand as a
crime the action of married couples who feel for some other
human being a strong, true love, tested by time and struggle, and
yet remain together in a cowardly pseudo-union, deceiving and
contaminating each other, instead of honourably separating and
contracting genuine connections elsewhere ; he will demand
that marriage be based on reciprocal inclination, maintained by
confidence, respect, and gratitude, consolidated by considera
tion for the offspring ; but he will guard himself from saying
anything against marriage itself, this bulwark of the relations
between the sexes afforded by definite, permanent duty.
Marriage is a high advance from the free copulation
of savages. To abandon it and return to primitive promis
cuity would be the most profound atavism of degeneracy.
Marriage, moreover, was not instituted for the man, but for

EGO-MANIA 415
the woman and the child. It is a protective social institution
for the benefit of the weaker part. Man has not yet con
quered and humanized his polygamous animal instincts to the
same extent as woman. It would for the most part be quite
agreeable to him to exchange the woman he possesses for a
new one. Departures a la Nora are as a rule not of a nature
to frighten him. He could open the door very wide for Nora,
and bestow on her his parting benediction with much pleasure.
Were it once the law and custom in a society where each
was forced to care for himself alone (and needed only to
trouble himself about the offspring of others, when it was a
question of orphan, abandoned, or begging children) that man
and wife should separate as soon as they ceased to be agree
able to each other, it would be the men and not the women
who would first make use of the new liberty. Departures a la
Nora are perhaps without danger for rich wives, or those
eminently capable of acquiring means of support, and hence
pecuniarily independent. Such, however, in present society
constitute a minute minority. Under Ibsen's code of morals
the vast majority of wives would have everything to lose.
The severe discipline of matrimony is their bulwark. It
obliges the man to take care of the children and of the wife
as she declines in years. Hence it should be the true duty
of rational wives to declare Ibsen infamous, and to revolt
against Ibsenism, which criminally threatens them and their
rights. Only through error can women of spirit and indis
putable morality join the ranks of Ibsen's followers. It is
necessary to enlighten them concerning the range of his
doctrines, and in particular concerning their effect on the posi
tion of woman, so that they may abandon a company which can
never be their own. May he remain surrounded by those only
who are spirit of his spirit, that is to say, by hysterical women
and masculine masochists, who, with Ehrhard,* believe that
'sound common-sense and optimism are the two destructive
principles of all poetry ' !

CHAPTER V.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
As in Ibsen ego-mania has found its poet, so in Nietzsche it
has found its philosopher. The deification of filth by the Par
nassians with ink, paint, and clay ; the censing among the
Diabolists and Decadents of licentiousness, disease, and
corruption ; the glorification, by Ibsen, of the person who
* Ehrhard, op. cit., p. 88

416 DEGENERATION
'wills/ is 'free' and 'wholly himself — of all this Neitzsche
supplies the theory, or something which proclaims itself as
such. We may remark, in passing, that this has ever been
the task of philosophy. It plays in the race the same rdle as
consciousness in the individual. Consciousness has the thank
less task of discovering rational and elucidatory grounds for the
explanation of the impulses and acts springing up in sub
consciousness. In the same way philosophy endeavours to
find formulae of apparent profundity for the peculiarities of
feeling, thought and deed, having their roots in the history of
politics and civilization — in climatic and economic conditions —
and to fit them with a sort of uniform of logic. The race lives
on, conformably with the historical necessity of its evolution,
not troubling itself about a theory of its peculiarities; and
philosophy bobbles busily after it, gathers with more or less
regularity into its album the scattered features of racial
character, and the manifestations of its health and disease ;
methodically provides this album with a title, paging, and full
stop, then places it with a contented air in the library, among
the systems of the same regulation size. Genuine truths, real,
apposite explanations — these are not contained in philosophical
systems. But they furnish instructive evidence of the efforts
ofthe racial consciousness to supply reason, skilfully or clumsily,
with the excuses it demands for the unconscious impulses of the
race during a given period of time.
From the first to the last page of Nietzsche's writings the
careful reader seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes,
wild gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening
bombast ; and through it all, now breaking out into frenzied
laughter, now sputtering expressions of filthy abuse and in
vective, now skipping about in a giddily agile dance, and now
bursting upon the auditors with threatening mien and clenched
fists. So far as any meaning at all can be extracted from
the endless stream of phrases, it shows, as its fundamental
elements, a series of constantly reiterated delirious ideas,
having their source in illusions of sense and diseased organic
processes, which will be pointed out in the course of this
chapter. Here and there emerges a distinct idea, which, as is
always the case with the insane, assumes the form of an
imperious assertion, a sort of despotic command. Nietzsche
never tries to argue. If the thought of the possibility of an
objection arises in his mind, he treats it lightly, or sneers at it
or curtly and rudely decrees, 'That is false!' ('How much
more rational is that . . . theory, for example, represented by
Herbert Spencer ! . . . According to this theory, good is that
which has hitherto always proved itself to be useful, so that it
may be estimated as valuable in the highest degree, as valuable

EGO-MANIA 417
in itself. Although this mode of explanation is also false, the
explanation itself is at least rational and psychologically
tenable.' — Zur Genealogie der Moral, 2 Aufl., p. 5. 'This mode of
explanation is also false.' Full-stop ! Why is it false ? Wherein
is it false ? Because Nietzsche so orders it- The reader has>
no right to inquire further.) For that matter, he himself con
tradicts almost every one of his violently dictatorial dogmas-
He first asserts something and then its opposite, and both with
equal vehemence, most frequently in the same book, often on
the same page. Now and then he becomes conscious of the
self-contradiction, and then he pretends to have been amusing
himself and making sport of the reader. (' It is difficult to be
understood, especially when one thinks and lives gangasroto-
gati, among plain men who think and live otherwise — in other
words, kromagati, or under the most favourable circumstances,
among mandeigati, who " have the frog's mode of progres
sion " — I just do all I can to make myself hard to understand.
. . . But with regard to the " good friends "... it is well
to accord them in advance room for tbe play and exercise of
misconception ; in this way one has still something to laugh
at — or wholly to abolish these good friends — and still laugh!' —
Jenseits von Gut und Bose, 2 Aufl., p. 38. Similarly on p. 51 :
' All that is profound loves the mask ; the most profound
things even hate imagery and parable. Should not contrast
rather be the right disguise in which the shamefacedness of a
god might walk abroad ?')
The nature of the individual dogmatic assertions is very
characteristic. First of all it is essential to become habituated
to Nietzsche's style. This is, 'I admit, unnecessary for the
alienist. To him this sort of style is well known and familiar.
He frequently reads writings (it is true, as a rule, unprinted)
of a similar order of thought and diction, and he reads them,
not for his pleasure, but that he may prescribe the confinement
of the author in an asylum. The unprofessional reader, on the
contrary, is easily confused by the tumult of phrases. Once,
however, he has found his way, once he has acquired some
practice in discerning the actual theme among the drums-and-
fifes of this ear-splitting, merry-go-round music, and, in the
hailstorm of rattling words, that render clear vision almost
impossible, has learned to perceive the fundamental thought,
he at once observes that Nietzsche's assertions are either
commonplaces, tricked out like Indian caciques with feather-
crown, nose-ring, and tattooing (and of so mean a kind that a
high-school girl would be ashamed to make use of them in
a composition-exercise); or bellowing insanity, rambling far
beyond the range of rational examination and refutation. I
27

418 DEGENERATION
will give only one or two examples of each kind among the
thousands that exist :
Also sprach Zarathustra* ('Thus spake Zoroaster'), 3 Theil, p. 9 :
' We halted just by a gateway. " See this gateway, dwarf" — I
said again — " it has two faces. Two roads meet here ; no
one has yet travelled to their end. This long road behind — it
lasts an eternity. And that long road in front — that is another
eternity. They contradict each other, these roads ; they offend
each other; and it is here at this gateway that they meet.
The name of the gateway is inscribed above, " Now." But if
one continues to follow one of them further, and ever further,
and ever further, believest thou, dwarf, that these roads
eternally contradict each other?" '
Blow away the lather from these phrases. What do they
really say ? The fleeting instant of the present is the point of
contact of the past and the future. Can one call this self-
evident fact a thought ?
Also sprach Zarathustra, 4 Theil, p. 124 ff. : 'The world is
deep, and deeper than the day thinks it. Forbear ! forbear !
I am too pure for thee. Disturb me not ! Has my world not
become exactly perfect ? My flesh is too pure for thy hands.
Forbear, thou dull doltish and obtuse day ! Is not the mid
night clearer ? The purest are to be lords of earth, the most
unknown, the strongest, the souls of midnight, who are clearer
and deeper than each day. . . . My sorrow, my happiness,
are deep, thou strange day ; but yet am I no God, no Hell of
God : deep is their woe. God's woe is deeper, thou strange
World'! Grasp at God's woe, not at me! What am I ! A
drunken sweet lyre — a lyre of midnight, a singing frog, under
stood by none, but who must speak before the deaf, O higher
men ! For ye understand me not ! Hence ! hence ! O youth !
O mid-day ! O midnight ! Now came evening and night
and midnight. ... Ah ! ah ! how it sighs ! how it laughs,
how it rattles and gasps, the midnight ! How soberly even
she speaks, this poetess ! Without doubt she has overdrunk
her drunkenness ! She became too wide awake ! She chews
the cud ! She chews the cud of her woe in dream, the old
deep midnight, and still more her joy. For joy, if woe be
already deep : joy is deeper still than heart-pain. . . . Woe
says, " Away ! get thee gone, woe ! . . . But joy wishes for a
second coming, wishes all to be eternally like itself. Woe
says, " Break, bleed, O heart ! Wander, limb ! Wing, fly !
Onward ! Upward ! Pain !" Well, then ! Cheer up ! ' Ohj
my old heart! Woe says, "Away!" Ye higher men . . !
should ye ever wish for one time twice, should ye ever say",
" Thou pleasest me, happiness ! Quick ! instant ! then would
* Persian for Zoroaster.

EGO-MANIA 419
ye wish all back again ! All anew, all eternally, all enchained,
bound, amorous. Oh ! then loved ye the world ; ye eternities
love it eternally and always ; and to woe also speak ye : hence,
but return ! For all pleasure wishes — eternity. All pleasure
wishes for the eternity of all things, wishes for honey, for the
lees, wishes for drunken midnight, tombs, the consolation of
the tears of tombs, gilded twilight — what does pleasure not
wish for ! She is thirstier, heartier, hungrier, more terrible,
more secret than all woe ; she wishes for herself, she gnaws
into herself, the will of the ring struggles in her. . . . Pleasure
wishes for the eternity of all things, wishes for deep, deep
eternity !'
And the sense of this crazy shower of whirling words ? It
is that men wish pain to cease and joy to endure ! This the
astounding discovery expounded by Nietzsche in this demented
raving. The following are obviously insane assertions or expres
sions :
Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 59: ' What is life ? Life — it is
the ceaseless rejection from itself of something wishing to die.
Life — it is the being cruel and pitiless towards all in us that
is weak and old, and not in us alone.'
Persons capable of thought have hitherto always believed
that life is the unceasing reception into itself of something
agreeable ; the rejection of what is used up is only an accom
panying phenomenon of the reception of new material.
Nietzsche's phrase expresses in a highly mysterious Pythian
form the idea of the matutinal visit to a certain place. Healthy
men connect with the conception of life the idea rather of the
dining-room than that of the privy.
Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 92 : ' It is a delicacy that God
learned Greek when He wished to become an author — and
that He did not learn it better.' P. 95 : 'Advice in the form
of an enigma. If the cord is not to snap . . . thou must first
bite on it.'
I have no explanation or interpretation of this profundity
to offer.
The passages quoted will have given the reader an idea of
Nietzsche's literary style. In the dozen volumes, thick or thin,
which he has published it is always the same. His books bear
various titles, for the most part characteristically crack-brained,
but they all amount to one single book. They can be changed
by mistake in reading, and the fact will not be noticed. They
are a succession of disconnected sallies, prose and doggerel
mixed, without beginning or ending. Rarely is a thought
developed to any extent ; rarely are a few consecutive pages
connected by any unity of purpose or logical argument.

420 DEGENERATION
Nietzsche evidently had the habit of throwing on paper with
feverish haste all that passed through his head, and when he
had collected a heap of snippings he sent them to the printer,
and there was a book. These sweepings of ideas he himself
proudly terms ' aphorisms,' and the very incoherence of his
language is regarded by his admirers as a special merit.*
When Nietzsche's moral system is spoken of, it must not be
imagined that he has anywhere developed one. Through all
his books, from the first to the last, there are scattered only
views on moral problems, and on the relation of man to tbe
species and to the universe, from which, taken together, there
may be discerned something like a fundamental conception.
This is what has been called Nietzsche's philosophy. His
disciples, e.g., Kaatz, already cited, and, in addition, Zerbst,*f*
Schellwien,| and others, have attempted to give this pretended
philosophy a certain form and unity by fishing out from
Nietzsche's books a number of passages in some measure
agreeing with each other, and placing them in juxtaposition.
It is true that it would be possible in this way to set up a
philosophy of Nietzsche exactly opposed to the one accepted
by his disciples. For, as has been said, each one of Nietzsche's
assertions is contradicted by himself in some place or other,
and if it be resolved, with barefaced dishonesty, to pay regard
to dicta of a definite kind only, and to pass over those in
opposition to them, it would be possible at pleasure to extract
from Nietzsche a philosophical view or its sheer opposite.
Nietzsche's doctrine, promulgated as orthodox by his dis
ciples, criticises the foundations of ethics, investigates the
* Dr. Hugo Kaatz, Die Weltanschauung Friedrich Nietzsche ; Erster
Theil, ' Cultur und Moral'; Zweiter Theil, ' Kunst und Leben.' Dresden
und Leipzig, 1892, 1 Th., p. vi. : 'We are accustomed, especially in matters
concerning the deepest problems of thought, to a finished, systematic expo
sition. . . . There is none of all this in Nietzsche. No single work of his
forms a finished whole, or is wholly intelligible without the others. Each
book, moreover, is totally wanting in organic structure. Nietzsche writes
almost exclusively in aphorisms, which, filling sometimes two lines, some
times several pages, are complete in themselves, and seldom manifest
any direct connection with each other. . . . With proud indifference to
the reader, the author has avoided cutting even one gap in the hedge with
which he has closely surrounded his intellectual creations. Access to him
must be gained by fighting,' etc. _ In spite of its seeming obscurity, Nietzsche
has himself given such pointed information concerning his method of work
as amounts to an avowal. ' All writing makes me angry or ashamed • for
me, writing is a necessity.' ' But why, then, do you write ?' ' Yes my 'dear
friend, let me say it in confidence : I have hitherto found no other'means of
ridding myself of my thoughts.' (The italics are Nietzsche's.) 'And why
do you wish to rid yourself of them ?' 'Why I wish? Do I so wish ? I must'
Die frbhliche Wissenschaft. Neue Ausgabe, p. 114.
f Dr. Max Zerbst, Nein und fa! Leipzig, 1892.
X Robert Schellwien, Max S timer und Friedrich Nietzsche Erschein-
ungen des modernen Geister und das Wesen des Menschen. Leipzig 1892

EGO-MANIA 421
genesis of the concept of good and evil, examines the value of
that which is called virtue and vice, both for the individual
and for society, explains the origin of conscience, and seeks
to give an idea of the end of the evolution of the race, and,
consequently, of man's ideal — the ' over man ' (Uebermensch). I
desire to condense these doctrines as closely as possible, and,
for the most part, in Nietzsche's own words, but without the
cackle of his mazy digressions or useless phrases.
The morality now prevailing ' gilds, deifies, transports
beyond the tomb, the non-egoistical instincts of compassion,
self-denial, and self-sacrifice.' But this morality of compassion
' is humanity's great danger, the beginning of the end, the
halting, the backward-glancing fatigue of the will, turning
against life.' ' We need a criticism of moral values. The
value of these values is first of all itself to be put in question.
There has hitherto been no hesitation in setting up good as of
higher value than evil, of higher value in the sense of advance
ment, utility, prosperity, as regards man in general, including
the future of man. What if truth lay in the contrary ? What
if good were a symptom of retrogression, a danger, a seduction,
a poison, a narcotic, by means of which the present should
live at the cost of the future ? Perhaps more comfortably,
less dangerously, but also on a smaller scale, more basely ? So
that precisely morality would be to blame for the fact that the
highest might and splendour possible to the human type should
never be attained ? So that morality should be precisely the
danger of dangers ?'
Nietzsche replies to these questions thrown out by him in
the preface to the book Zur Genealogie der Moral, in developing
his idea of the genesis of present morality.
He sees at the beginnings of civilization ' a beast of prey,
a magnificent blond brute, ranging about and lusting for booty
and victory.' These ' unchained beasts of prey were free from
every social restraint ; in the innocence of their wild-beast
conscience they returned as exultant monsters from a horrible
train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, torture, with an arro
gance and composure as if nothing but a student's freak had
been perpetrated.' The blond beasts constituted the noble
races. They fell upon the less noble races, conquered them,
and made slaves of them. 'A herd qf blond beasts of prey,
a race of conquerors and masters, with military organization '
(this word ' organization ' should be noticed ; we shall have to
revert to it), 'with the power to organize, unscrupulously placing
their fearful paws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in
numbers, but still amorphous and wandering — this herd founded
the State. The dream is dispelled which made the State begin
with a contract. What has he to do with contracts, who can

422 DEGENERATION
command, who is master by nature, who comes on the scene
with violence in deed and demeanour ?'
In the State, then, thus established there were a race of
masters and a race of slaves. The master-race first created
moral ideas. It distinguished between good and evil.
Good was with it synonymous with noble ; evil with vulgar.
All their own qualities they felt as good ; those of the subject
race as evil. Good meant severity, cruelty, pride, courage,
contempt of danger, joy in risk, extreme unscrupulousness.
Bad meant ' the coward, the nervous, the mean, the narrow
utilitarian, and also the distrustful with his disingenuous
glance, the self-abasing, the human hound who allows himself
to be abused, the begging flatterer — above all, the liar.' Such
is the morality of the masters. The radical meaning of the
words now expressing the concept ' good ' reveals what men
represented to themselves as ' good ' when the moral of the
masters still held sway. 'The Latin bonus I believe I may
venture to interpret as " the warrior." Provided I rightly trace
bonus to a more ancient duonus (compare bellum, duellum, duen-
lum, in which it seems to me that duonus is contained).
Bonus, then, as a man of discord, of disunion (duo), as warrior :
whereby it is seen what in ancient Rome constituted the
" goodness " of a man.'
The subjugated race had naturally an opposing morality —
the morality of the slaves. ' The slave looks with envy on
the virtues of the powerful ; he is sceptical and distrustful ;
he has the cunning of distrust towards everything honoured
by them as " good." Conversely, those qualities were dis
tinguished and glorified which served to ameliorate the
existence of sufferers. Here the place of honour is given to
compassion, to the complaisant hand ready to help, to the
warm heart, to patience, diligence, humility, friendliness, for
those are here the most useful qualities, and almost the only
means by which the burden of existence can be borne. Slave-
morality is essentially utilitarian morality.'
For a certain period the morality of masters and slaves
subsisted side by side, or, more accurately, the one above the
other. Then an extraordinary event occurred — slave-morality
rebelled against master-morality, conquered and dethroned
it, and set itself in the place thereof. Then ensued a new
valuation of all moral concepts. (In his insane gibberish
Nietzsche names this ' transvaluation of values ' — Umwerthung
der Werthe.) That which, under the master-morals, had
passed for good was now esteemed bad, and vice versa. Weak
ness was meritorious, cruelty a crime ; self-sacrifice, pity for
the pain of others, unselfishness, were virtues. That is what
Nietzsche terms 'the slave revolt in morality.' 'The Jews

EGO-MANIA 423
have brought about that marvel of inversion in values. Their
prophets have melted into one substance " rich," " godless,"
" wicked," " violent," " sensual," and for the first time minted
the word "world" as one of opprobrium. In this inversion
of values (to which belongs the use of the word " poor " as a
synonym of "holy" and "friend") lies the importance of the
Jewish race.'
The Jewish ' slave-revolt in morality ' was an act of vengeance
on the master-race which had long oppressed the Jews, and
the instrument of this vast vengeance was the Saviour.
' Has not Israel, by the very subterfuge of this " Redeemer,"
this seeming adversary and destroyer of Israel, attained the
final goal of its sublime rage for vengeance ? Does it not
belong to the secret black art of a truly grand policy of
vengeance, of a far-seeing, underground, slowly-gripping, fore-
planning vengeance, that Israel itself should deny the proper
instrument of its vengeance before the whole world, as some
thing deadly inimical, and nail him to the cross, in order that
the " entire universe," viz., the enemies of Israel, might un
hesitatingly bite at this very bait ? And on the other hand,
would it be possible, by all the refinement of intellect, to
imagine a more dangerous bait ? Something that should
resemble in enticing, intoxicating, bewildering, corrupting
power that symbol of the " holy cross," that awful paradox
of a " God on the cross," that mystery of an ineffable final
and utmost cruelty, and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation
of man ? It is at least certain that sub hoc signo Israel, with
its vengeance and transvaluation of ail values, has hitherto
triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all
nobler ideals.'
To this passage I would most specially direct the reader's
attention, and beg him to transform into mental images all
that jingle and clatter of words. Well, then, Israel wished to
revenge itself on all the world, and therefore decided to nail
the Saviour to the cross, and thereby create a new morality.
Who was this Israel which conceived and executed the plan ?
Was it a parliament, a ministry, a ruler, a popular assembly ?
Was the plan, before ' Israel ' set about realizing it, submitted
for general deliberation and resolution ? Before the total
insanity of this string of words can be distinctly seen, an
effort must be made to bring clearly to the mind, in all its
actual details, the event described by Nietzsche as pre
meditated, intended, and of conscious purpose.
Since the Jewish slave-revolt in morality, life, till then a
delight, at least for the powerful and bold, or the nobles and
masters, has become a torment. Since that revolt the un
natural holds sway, under which man is becoming dwarfed,

424 DEGENERATION
enfeebled, vulgarized, and gradually degenerate. For the
fundamental instinct of the healthy man is not unselfishness
and pity, but selfishness and cruelty. ' No injury, violence,
exploitation, annihilation, can in itself be a " wrong," inasmuch
as life operates essentially — i.e., in its fundamental functions —
by injuring, violating, exploiting, annihilating, and is absolutely
inconceivable without this character. A legal regulation . . .
would be a principle hostile to existence, a destroyer and
dissolver of man, a mark of lassitude, a crime against the
future of man, a secret way to nothingness.' ' There is at
present universal enthusiasm, even in scientific disguises, con
cerning coming conditions of society in which the exploiting
character is to disappear. That sounds in my ears as if some
one should promise to invent a life which should abstain from
all organic functions. Exploitation does not belong to a
decayed, imperfect, or primitive society : it belongs to the
essence of living things, as organic function.'*
Thus the fundamental instinct of man is cruelty. For this,
in the new slave-morality, there is no place. A fundamental
instinct, however, is not to be uprooted. It still lives and
demands its rights. Hence a series of diversions have been
sought for it. 'All instincts, not discharged outwardly, turn
inwards. Those terrible bulwarks with which political organi
zation protected itself against the ancient instincts of freedom
— and punishments belong to the front line of these bulwarks
— had for their result, that all those instincts of the savage
roaming at large were turned backwards and against man.
Animosity, cruelty, the joy of pursuit, of sudden assault, of
change, of destruction— all that turns itself against the pos
sessors of such instincts is the origin of a " bad conscience."
The man who, from the absence of external foes and opposition,
forced into the oppressive constriction and regularity of custom,
* I refuted this silly sophism before Nietzsche propounded it in the
passages above quoted from Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 66, and Jenseits
¦von Gut und Bose, p. 228. See Die conventionellen Liigen der Kultur-
menschheit, 14 Aufl., pp. 211, 212: 'This expression [of Proudhon's, that
property is theft] can be regarded as true only from the sophistical stand
point that everything existing exists for itself, and from the fact of its exist
ence derives its right to belong to itself. According to this view, forsooth, a
man steals the blade of grass he plucks, the air he breathes, the fish 'he
catches ; but, then, the martin, too, is stealing when it swallows a fly, and the
grub when it eats its way into the root of a tree ; then Nature is altogether
peopled by arch-thieves,and,in general, everything steals that lives, i.e., absorbs
from without materials not belonging to it, and organically elaborates them,
and a block of platinum, which does not even pilfer from the air a little
oxygen with which to oxidize itself, would be the sole example of honesty on
our globe. No ; property resulting from earning, that is, from the exchange of
a determined amount of labour for a corresponding amount of goods is not
theft.' If, throughout this passage, 'theft' be substituted for the word
'exploitation,' used by Nietzsche, his sophism is answered.

EGO-MANIA 425
impatiently tore himself, persecuted, gnawed, hunted, mal
treated himself — this animal which it is sought to "tame,"
wounding himself against the bars of his cage ; this destitute
creature, consumed with homesickness for the desert, who had
to create his adventures, his places of torture, his insecure and
dangerous wildernesses, out of his own self — this fool, this
yearning, despairing prisoner, became the inventor of the
evil conscience.' ' That inclination to self-torture, that re
treating cruelty, of the human brute, forced into inner life,
scared back into himself, he who had invented evil conscience
that he might torture himself, after the natural outlet of this
wish to inflict pain was stopped up,' formed also the concept
of guilt and sin. ' We are the inheritors of the vivisection
of conscience and of animal self-torture of thousands of years.'
But all administration of justice, the punishment of ' so-called '
criminals, the greater part of art, especially tragedy, are also
disguises in which primitive cruelty can still manifest itself.
Slave-morality, with its ' ascetic ideal ' of self-suppression
and contempt of life, and its tormenting invention of con
science, allowed the slaves, it is true, to take vengeance on
their masters ; it also subjugated the mighty man-beasts of
prey and created better conditions of existence for the small
and weak, for the rabble, the gregarious animals ; but it has
been pernicious to humanity as a whole, because it has pre
vented the free evolution of precisely the highest human type.
' The collective degeneration of man to that which, in the eyes
of socialistic ninnies and blockheads of the present day, seems
their " man of the future " — their ideal ! — this degeneration and
dwarfing of man to the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, to
the man of " free society "), this brutalizing of man to the
animal pigmy of equal rights and pretensions,' is the destruc
tive work of slave-morality. In order to discipline humanity
to supreme splendour we must revert to nature, to the morality
of the masters, to the unchaining of cruelty. ' The well-being
of the most and the well-being of the fewest are contrary
standpoints of valuation ; we will leave it to the simplicity of
English biologists to hold that the first as such is undoubtedly
of the higher value.' ' In opposition to the lying watchword
ofthe privilege of the majority, in opposition to the desire for
abasement, humiliation, levelling, for the downward and dusk-
ward of man,' we must sound forth ' the watchword of the
privilege of the minority.' ' As a last indicator of the other
way appeared Napoleon, man most unique, and latest born of
all time, and in him the incarnate problem of the aristocratic
ideal as such,— Napoleon, that synthesis of the inhuman and
the superhuman (Unmensch und V ' ebermensch) .'
The intellectually free man must stand ' beyond good and

426 DEGENERATION
evil ' ; these concepts do not exist for him ; he tests his im
pulses and deeds by their value for himself, not by that which
they have for others, for the herd ; he does that which causes
him pleasure, even when, and especially when, it torments and
injures — nay, annihilates others ; for him holds good the secret
rule of life of the ancient Assassins of the Lebanon : ' Nothing
is true, all is permissible.' With this new morality, humanity
will finally be able to produce the ' over-man.' ' Thus we find,
as the ripest fruit on its tree, the sovereign individual, re
sembling himself alone, freed again from the morality of
custom, the autonomous super-moral individual (for " auto
nomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive) — in short, the
man of his own, independent, long will.' In Zarathustra the
same thought is expressed dithyrambically : ' " Man is wicked,"
so spake to me in consolation all the wisest. Ah, if only it is
yet true to-day ! For wickedness is man's best strength.
Man must become better and more wicked, so I teach. The
greatest wickedness is necessary to the best of the over-man.
It might be good for that preacher of little people that he
suffered and bore the sins of man. But I rejoice in great sins
as my great consolation.'
This is Nietzsche's moral philosophy which (disregarding
contradictions) is deduced from separate concordant passages
in his various books (in particular Menschliches Allzumenschliches,
jenseits von Gut und Bose, and Zur Genealogie der Moral). I
will take it for a moment and subject it to criticism, before
confronting it with Nietzsche's own assertions diametrically
opposed to it.
Firstly, the anthropological assertion. Man is supposed to
have been a freely roaming solitary beast of prey, whose
primordial instinct was egoism and the absence of any con
sideration for his congeners. This assertion contradicts all
that we know concerning the beginnings of humanity. The
Kjbkkenmo'ddinge, or kitchen-middens, of quaternary man,
discovered and investigated by Steenstrup, have in some
places a thickness of three metres, and must have been formed
by a very numerous horde. The piles of horses' bones at
Solutre are so enormous as quite to preclude the idea that a
single hunter, or even any but a very large body of allied
hunters, could have collected and killed such a large number
of horses in one place. As far as our view penetrates into
prehistoric time, every discovery shows us primitive man as
a gregarious animal, who could not possibly have maintained
himself if he had not possessed the instincts which are pre
supposed in life in a community, viz., sympathy, the feeling of
solidarity and a certain degree of unselfishness. We find
these instincts already existent in apes ; and if, in those most

EGO-MANIA 427
like human beings, the ourang-outang and gibbon, these in
stincts fail to appear, it is to many investigators a sufficient
proof that these animals are degenerating and dying out.
Hence it is not true that at any time man was a ' solitary,
roving brute.'
Now with regard to the historical assertion. At first the
morality of masters is supposed to have prevailed, in which
every selfish act of violence seemed good, every sort of unsel
fishness bad. The inverted valuation of deeds and feelings
is said to have been the work of a slave-revolt. The Jews
are said to have discovered ' ascetic morality,' i.e., the ideal of
combating all desires, contempt of all pleasures of the flesh,
pity, and brotherly love, in order to avenge themselves on
their oppressors, the masters — the 'blond beasts of prey.' I
have shown above, the insanity of this idea of a- conscious and
purposed act of vengeance on the part of the Jewish people.
But is it, then, true that our present morality, with its con
ceptions of good and evil, is an invention of the Jews, directed
against ' blond beasts,' an enterprise of slaves against a master-
people ? The leading doctrines of the present morality, falsely
termed Christian, were expressed in Buddhism six hundred
years prior to the rise of Christianity. Buddha preached them,
himself no slave, but a king's son, and they were the moral
doctrines, not of slaves, not of the oppressed, but of the very
masterfolk themselves, of the Brahmans, of the proper Aryans.
The following are some of the Buddhist moral doctrines,
extracted from the Hindu Dhammapada* and from the Chinese
Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king : f ' Do not speak harshly to anybody '
(Dhammapada, verse 133). ' Let us live happily then, not
hating those who hate us ! Among men who hate us let us
dwell free from hatred ' (verse 197). ' Because he has pity on
all living creatures, therefore is a man called Ariya ' (elect)
(verse 270). ' Be not thoughtless, watch your thoughts !'
(verse 327). 'Good is restraint in all things' (verse 361).
' Him I call indeed a Brahmana who, though he has committed
no offence, endures reproach, bonds, and stripes ' (verse 399).
'Be kind to all that lives' (Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, verse 2,024).
' Conquer your foe by force, you increase his enmity ; con
quer by love, and you will reap no after-sorrow ' (verse 2,241).
Is that a morality of slaves or of masters ? Is it a notion of
roving beasts of prey, or that of compassionate, unselfish,
* The Sacred Books of the East. Translated by various Oriental scholars,
and edited by F. Max Miiller. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1st series,
vol. x. : Dhammapada, by F. Max Mii.ler ; and Sutta-Nipata, by V. Faus-
bdll. f The Sacred Books of the East, etc., vol. xix. : Fo-sho-hin^- tsan-king, by
Rev. S. Beal.

428 DEGENERATION
social human beings ? And this notion did not spring up in
Palestine, but in India, among the very people of the conquer
ing Aryans, who were ruling a subordinate race ; and in China,
where at that time no conquering race held another in subjec
tion. Self-sacrifice for others, pity and sympathy, are sup
posed to be the morality of Jewish slaves. Was the heroic
baboon mentioned by Darwin,* after Brehm, a Jewish slave
in revolt against the master-folk of blond beasts-?
In the ' blond beast' Nietzsche evidently is thinking of the
ancient Germans of the migratory ages. They have inspired .
in him the idea of the roving beast of prey, falling upon
weaker men for the voluptuous assuaging of their instincts of
bloodthirstiness and destruction. This beast of prey never
entered into contracts. ' He who comes on the scene violent
in deed and demeanour . . . what has he to do with con
tracts ?' f Very well ; history teaches that the ' blond beast,'
i.e., the ancient German of the migratory ages, not yet affected
by the ' slave-revolt in morals,' was a vigorous but peace-
loving peasant, who made war not to riot in murder, but to
obtain arable land, and who always first sought to conclude
peaceful treaties before necessity forced him to have recourse
to the sword. J And long before intelligence of the ' ascetic
ideal ' of Jewish Christianity reached it, the same ' blond
beast ' developed the conception of feudal fidelity, i.e., the
notion that it is most glorious for a man to divest himself of
his own ' I ' ; to know honour only as the resplendence of
another's honour, of whom one has become the 'man'; and to
sacrifice his life for the chief!
* Charles Darwin, 7%<? Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sexj
London, J. Murray, 1885, p. 101 : 'All the baboons had reascended the
heights, excepting a young one, about six months old, who, loudly calling
for aid, climbed on a block of rock, and was surrounded. Now one of the
largest males, a true hero, came down again from the mountain, slowly went
to the young one, coaxed him, and triumphantly led him away, the dogs
being too much astonished to make an attack.'
T Friedrich Nietsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift
Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1892, § 80.
X Gustav Freytag, Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit Erster Band
aus dem Mittelaher. Leipzig, 1872, p. 42 ^ .• ' The Roman Consul, Papirius
Carbo . . . denies the strangers [the Cimbrians and Teutons !] the right of
sojourn because the inhabitants are enjoying the rights of hospitality of the
Romans. The strangers excuse themselves by saying they did not know
that the natives were under Roman protection, and they are ready to leave
the country. . . . The Cimbrians do not seek a quarrel ; they send to
Consul Silanus, and urgently entreat him to assign them lands ; they are
willing in return for it to serve the Romans in time of war. . . . Once more
the strangers do not invade Roman territory, but send an embassy to the
Senate and repeat the request for an assignment of land. . . . The victorious
Germans now sent a fresh embassy to the leader of the other army for the
third time, to sue for peace and a=k for land and seed-corn.'

EGO-MANIA 429
Conscience is supposed to be ' cruelty introverted.' As the
man to whom it is an irrepressible want to inflict pain, to
torture, and to rend, cannot assuage this want on others, he
satisfies it on himself.*
If this were true, then the respectable, the virtuous man,
who had never satisfied the pretended primeval instinct of
causing pain by means of a crime against others, would be
forced to rage the most violently against himself, and would
therefore of necessity have the worst conscience. Conversely,
the criminal directing his fundamental instinct outwardly, and
hence having no need to seek satisfaction in self-rending,
would necessarily live in the most delightful peace with his
conscience. Does this agree with observation ? Has a
righteous man who has not given way to the instinct of cruelty
ever been seen to suffer from the stings of conscience ? Are
these not, on the contrary, to be observed in the very persons
who have yielded to their instinct, who have been cruel to
others, and hence have attained to that satisfaction of their
craving, vouchsafed them, according to Nietzsche, by the
evil conscience ? Nietzsche says,f ' It is precisely among
criminals and offenders that remorse is extremely rare ; prisons
and reformatories are not the brooding places in which this
species of worm loves to thrive,' and believes that in this
remark he has given a proof of his assertion. But by the
commission of crime prisoners have shown that in them the
instinct of evil is developed in special strength ; in the prison
they are forcibly prevented from giving way to their instinct ;
it is, therefore, precisely in them that self-rending through
remorse ought to be extraordinarily violent, and yet among
them 'the prick of conscience is extremely rare.' It is evident
that Nietzsche's idea is nothing but a delirious sally, and not
worthy for a moment to be weighed seriously against the
explanation of conscience proposed by Darwin, and accepted
by all moral philosophers.!
Now for the philological argument. Originally, bonus is
supposed to have read duonus, and hence signified ' man of
* Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79.
t Ibid, p. 73.
X Charles Darwin, op. cit, p. 98 : 'As soon as the mental faculties had
become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be
incessantly passing through the brain of each individual ; and that feeling
of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results . . . from any
unsatisfied instinct, would arise as often as it was perceived that the endur
ing and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at
the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature nor leaving behind it a
very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that
of hunger, are, in their nature, of short duration, and, after being satisfied,
are not readily or vividly recalled,' etc.

430 DEGENERATION
discord, disunion (duo), warrior.'* The proof of the ancient
form duonus is offered by ' bellum = duellum = duen-lum! Now
ducn-lum is never met with, but is a free invention of Nietzsche,
as is equally duonus. How admirable is this method ! He
invents a word duonus which does not exist, and bases it on
the word duen-lum, which is just as non-existent and equally
drawn from imagination. The philology here displayed by
Nietzsche is on a level with that which has created the
beautiful and convincing series of derivations alopex = lopex =
pexpix = pux = fechs = fichs = Fuchs (fox). Nietzsche is uncom
monly proud of his discovery, that the conception of Schuld
(guilt) is derived from the very narrow and material concep
tion of Schulden (debts). + Even if we admit the accuracy of
this derivation, what has his theory gained by it ? This
would only prove that, in the course of time, the crudely
material and limited conception had become enlarged, deepened,
and spiritualized. To whom has it ever occurred to contest
this fact ? What dabbler in the history of civilization does
not know that conceptions develop themselves ? Did love
and friendship, as primitively understood, ever convey the
idea of the delicate and manifold states of mind now expressed
by these words ? It is possible that the first guilt of which
men were conscious was the duty of restoring a loan. But
neither can guilt, in the sense of a material obligation, arise
amongst ' blond brutes,' or ' cruel beasts of prey.' It already
presupposes a relation of contract, the recognition of a right
of possession, respect for other individuals. It is not possible
if there does not exist, on the part of the lender, the dis
position to be agreeable to a fellow-creature, and a trust in
the readiness of the latter to requite the benefit ; and, on the
part of the borrower, a voluntary submission to the dis
agreeable necessity of repayment. And all these feelings are
really already morality — a simple, but true, morality — the real
' slave - morality ' of duty, consideration, sympathy, self-con
straint ; not the ' master - morality ' of selfishness, cruel
violence, unbounded desires ! Even if single words like the
German schlecht (schlicht) (bad, plain, or straight) have to-day
a meaning the opposite of their original one, this is not
to be explained by a fabulous ' transvaluation of values,' but,
naturally and obviously, by Abel's theory of the ' contrary
double - meaning of primitive words.' The same sound
originally served to designate the two opposites of the same
concept, appearing, in agreement with the law of association,
simultaneously in consciousness, and it was only in the later
life of language that the word became the exclusive vehicle
of one or other of the contrary concepts. This phenomenon
* Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 9. ¦(• Ibid. p. 48.

EGO-MANIA 431
has not the remotest connection with a change in the moral
valuation of feelings and acts.
Now the biological argument. The prevailing morality is
supposed to be admittedly of a character tending to improve
the chances of life in gregarious animals, but to be an obstacle
to the cultivation of the highest human type, and hence
pernicious to humanity as a whole, as it prevents the race
from rising to the most perfect culture, and the attainment
of its possible ideal. Hence the most perfect human type
would, according to Nietzsche, be the ' magnificent beast of
prey,' the ' laughing lion,' able to satisfy all his desires without
consideration for good or evil. Observation teaches that this
doctrine is rank idiocy. All ' over-men ' known to history,
who gave the reins to their instincts, were either diseased
from the outset, or became diseased. Famous criminals —
and Nietzsche expressly ranks these among the ' over-men '*
— have displayed, almost without exception, the bodily
and mental stigmata characterizing them as degenerates, and
hence as cripples or atavistic phenomena, not as specimens of
the highest evolution and florescence. The Caesars, whose
monstrous selfishness could batten on all humanity, succumbed
to madness, which it will hardly be wished to designate as
an ideal condition. Nietzsche readily admits that the ' splendid
beast of prey ' is pernicious to the species, that he destroys
and ravages ; but of what consequence is the species ? It
exists for the sole purpose of making possible the perfect
development of individual ' over-men,' and of satisfying their
most extravagant needs."f" But the 'splendid beast of prey'
is pernicious to itself; it rages against itself, it even annihilates
itself, and yet that cannot possibly be a useful result of highly-
trained qualities. The biological truth is, that constant self-
restraint is a necessity of existence as much for the strongest
as for the weakest. It is the activity of the highest human
cerebral centres. If these are not exercised they waste away,
i.e., man ceases to be man, the pretended ' over-man ' becomes
sub-human — in other words, a beast. By the relaxation or
breaking up of the mechanism of inhibition in the brain the
organism sinks into irrecoverable anarchy in its constituent
* Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 91 : 'The criminal is, often enough, not
grown to the level of his deed : he dwarfs and traduces it. The legal de
fenders ofthe criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terrible
ness of the deed to the profit of the doer.'
f ' A people is the detour of nature, in order to arrive at six or seven great
men.' See also : ' The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is,
that it should feel itself to be not the function, but the end and justification,
be it of royalty or of the commonwealth — that it should, therefore, with a
good conscience, suffer the sacrifice of a countless number of men -who, for
its sake, must be humbled and reduced to imperfect beings, to slaves, to
instruments.' — Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 226.

432 DEGENERATION
parts, and this leads, with absolute certainty, to ruin, to
disease, madness and death, even if no resistance results from
the external world against the frenzied egoism of the un
bridled individual.
What now remains standing of Nietzsche's entire system ?
We have recognised it as a collection of crazy and inflated
phrases, which it is really impossible seriously to seize, since
they possess hardly the solidity of the smoke-rings from a
cigar. Nietzsche's disciples are for ever murmuring about
the ' depth ' of his moral philosophy, and with himself the
words ' deep ' and ' depth ' are a mental trick repeated so
constantly as to be insufferable.* If we draw near to this
' depth ' for the purpose of fathoming it, we can hardly
trust our eyes. Nietzsche has not thought out one of his
so-called ideas. Not one of his wild assertions is carried
a finger's - breadth beneath the uppermost surface, so that,
at least, it might withstand the faintest puff of breath.
It is probable that the entire history of philosophy does not
record a second instance of a man having the impudence to
give out as philosophy, and even as profound philosophy, such
railway-bookstall humour and such tea-table wit. Nietzsche
sees absolutely nothing of the moral problem, around which,
nevertheless, he has poured out ten volumes of talk. Ration
ally treated, this problem can only run thus : Can human
actions be divided into good and evil ? Why should some
be good, the others evil ? What is to constrain men to
perform the good and refrain from the evil ?
Nietzsche would seem to deny the legitimacy of a classifica
tion of actions from moral standpoints. ' Nothing is true, all
is permissible.' t There is no good and no evil. It is a super-
* The following are a few examples, which could easily be centupled
(literally, not hyperbolically)— Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 63 : 'It is the
Orient, the deep Orient.' P. 239: 'Such books of depth and of the first
importance.' P. 248: 'Deep suffering ennobles.' 'A bravery of taste
resisting all that is sorrowful and deep.' P. 249 : 'Any fervour and thirsti-
ness which constantly drives the soul . . . into the bright, the brilliant, the
deep, the delicate.' P. 256: 'An odour quite as much of depth [!] as
of decay.' P. 260 : ' To lie tranquilly like a mirror, so that the deep
heaven might reflect itself in them.' P. 262 : 'I often think how I may make
him [man] stronger, wickeder, and deeper.' Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i.,
p. 71 : 'But thou Deep One, thou sufferest too deeply even from little
wounds.' Pt. ii., p. 52 : ' Immovable is my depth ; but it sparkles with
floating enigmas and laughters' (! !). P. 64 : 'And this forme is knowledge :
all depth should rise— to my height.' P. 70 : 'They did not think enough
into the depth.' Pt. iii., p. 22 : 'The world is deep, and deeper than the
day has ever thought it.' Pt. iv., p. 129 : 'What says the deep midnight?
From a deep dream am I awakened. The world is deep, and deeper than
the day thought. Deep in its woe. Joy— deeper still than sorrow of heart.
All joy . . . wishes for deep, deep eternity,' etc.
¦j- Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 167.

EGO-MANIA 433
stition and hereditary prejudice to cling to these artificial
notions. He himself stands ' beyond good and evil,' and he
invites the ' free spirits ' and ' good Europeans ' to follow him
to this standpoint. And thereupon this 'free spirit,' standing
' beyond good and evil,' speaks with the greatest candour of
the ' aristocratic virtues,'* and of the ' morality of the masters.'
Are there, then, virtues ? Is there, then, a morality, even if it
be opposed to the prevailing one ? How is that compatible
with the negation of all morality ? Are men's actions, there
fore, not of equal value ? Is it possible in these to distinguish
good and evil ? Does Nietzsche, therefore, undertake to
classify them, designating some as virtues — 'aristocratic
virtues ' — others as ' slave actions,' bad for the ' masters, the
commanders,' and hence wicked ; how, then, can he still
affirm that he stands ' beyond good and evil ' ? He stands, in
fact, mid- way between good and evil, only he indulges in the
foolish jest of calling that evil which we call good, and vice-versa
— an intellectual performance of which every naughty and mis
chievous child of four is certainly capable.
This first and astounding non-comprehension of his own
standpoint is already a good example of his ' depth.' But
further. As the chief proof of the non-existence of morality,
he adduces what he calls the ' transvaluation of values.' At
one time good is said to have been that which is now esteemed
evil, and conversely. We have seen that this idea is delirious,
and expressed in a delirious way.t But let it be granted that
Nietzsche is right ; we will for once enter into the folly and
accept the ' revolt of slaves in morality ' as a fact. What has
his fundamental idea gained by this ? A ' transvaluation of
values' would prove nothing against the existence of a morality,
for it leaves the concept of value itself absolutely intact.
These, then, are values ; but now this, now that, species of
action acquires the rank of value. No historian of civilization
denies the fact that the notions concerning what is moral or
immoral have changed in the course of history, that they con-
* Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 159 : ' Our virtues ? It is probable that
we, too, still have our virtues, albeit they are no longer the true-hearted and
robust virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honour — though at a
little distance.' P. 154: 'The man beyond good and evil, the master of his
virtues ... he ought to be the greatest.' So then, 'beyond good and evil,'
and yet having 'virtues'!
f Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79: 'As a premise to this hypothesis
concerning the origin of the evil conscience [through the 'transvaluation of
values ' and the ' revolt of slaves in morality '] belongs the fact . . . that
this transformation was in no way gradual, or voluntary, and did not manifest
itself as an organic growing into new conditions, but as a rapture, a leap, a
compulsion.' Hence, not only was that good which had previously been
evil, but this 'transvaluation' even occurred suddenly, ordered one fine day
by authority !
28

434 DEGENERATION
tinually change, that they will change in the future. The
recognition of this has become a commonplace. If Nietzsche
assumes this to be a discovery of his own, he deserves to be
decked with a fool's cap by the assistant teacher of a village
school. But how can the evolution, the transformation, of
moral concepts in any way contradict the fundamental fact of
the existence of moral concepts ? Not only does this trans
formation not contradict these, but it confirms them ! They
are the necessary premise of this transformation ! A modi
fication of moral concepts is evidently possible only if there
are moral concepts ; but this is exactly the problem — ' are
there moral concepts ?' In spite of all his spouting about the
' transvaluation of values ' and the ' revolt of slaves in morality,'
Nietzsche never approaches this primary and all-important
question. He contemptuously reproaches slave-morality as being a
utilitarian morality,* and he ignores the fact that he extols his
' noble virtues,' constituting the ' morality of masters,' only
because they are advantageous for the individual, for the
' over-man. '+ Are, then, ' advantageous ' and ' useful ' not
exactly synonymous? Is, therefore, master- morality not
every whit as utilitarian as slave-morality ? And the ' deep '
Nietzsche does not see this ! And he ridicules English
moralists because they have invented the ' morality of utili
tarianism. 'J
He believes he has unearthed something deeply hidden,
not yet descried by human eye, when he announces,§ ' What
is there that is not called love ? Covetousness and love —
what different feelings do we experience at each of these words !
And yet it might be the same instinct. . . . Our love for our
neighbours — is it not an ardent desire for a possession ? . . .
When we see anyone suffering, we willingly utilize the oppor-
* Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 232: 'Slave-morality is essentially a
utilitarian morality.'
t Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 32 : ' In reality, however, evil instincts
are just as purposive, as conservative of the species, and as indispensable as
the good, only they have a different function.' Zur Genealogie der Moral
p. 21 : 'At the root of all . . . noble races lies the beast of prey . . . this
foundation needs from time to time to disburden itself ; the animal must out
must hie him back to the desert.' This means that it is essential to his
health, and, consequently, of utility to him.
X Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 6 : ' To what disorders, however, this
[democratic] prejudice can give rise, is shown by the infamous [!] ca'se of
Buckle. The plebeiamsm of the modern spirit, which is of English origin
once more breaks forth . . . there.' fenseits von Gut und Bose p. -z\i '•
'There are truths that are best recognised by mediocre heads. . . . ' We are
driven to this proposition since the intellect of mediocre Englishmen— I
may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer— acquired
preponderance in the mean region of European taste.'
§ Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 43.

EGO-MANIA 435
tunity proferred us to take possession of him ; the pitying and
charitable man, for example, does this ; he also calls by the
name " love " the desire for a new possession awakened in him,
and takes pleasure in it, as he would in a fresh conquest which
beckons him on.' Is it any longer necessary to criticise these
silly superficialities ? Every act, even seemingly the most dis
interested, is admittedly egoistic in a certain sense, viz., that
the doer promises himself a benefit from it, and experiences
a feeling of pleasure from the anticipation of the expected
benefit. Who has ever denied this ? Is it not expressly
emphasized by all modern moralists ?* Is it not implied in
the accepted definition of morality, as a knowledge of what is
useful ? But Nietzsche has not even an inkling of the essence
of the sifbject. To him egoism is a feeling having for its
content that which is useful to a being, whom he pictures to
himself as isolated in the world, separated from the species,
even hostile to it. To the moralist, the egoism which Nietzsche
believes himself to have discovered at the base of all unselfishness,
is the knowledge of what is useful not alone to the individual,
but to the species as well ; to the moralist, the creator of the
knowledge of the useful is not the individual, but the whole
species; to the moralist also egoism is morality, but it is a
collective egoism of the species, an egoism of humanity in face
of the non-human co-habitants of the earth, and in the face of
Nature. The man whom the healthy-minded moralist has
before his eyes is one who has attained a sufficiently high
development to extricate himself from the illusion of his
individual isolation, and to participate in the existence of the
species, to feel himself one of its members, to picture to him
self the states of his fellow-creatures — i.e., to be able to
sympathize with them. This man Nietzsche calls a herd animal
— a term which he has found used by all Darwinist writers,
but which he seems to regard as his own invention. He endows
the word with a meaning of contempt. The truth is that this
herding animal — i.e., man, whose ' I ' consciousness has ex
panded itself to the capacity of receiving the consciousness
of the species — represents the higher development, to which
mental cripples and degenerates, for ever enclosed in their
diseased isolation, cannot ascend.
* See, in my novel, Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderls, Leipzig, 1889,
Band I., p. 140, Schrotter's remarks : 'Egoism is a word. All depends upon
the interpretation. Every living being strives for happiness, i.e., for content
ment. . . . He [the healthy man] cannot be happy when he sees others
suffer. The higher the man's development, the livelier is this feeling. . . .
The egoism of these men consists in their seeking out the pain of others
and striving to alleviate it, in which, while combating the sufferings of
others, they are simply struggling to attain to their own happiness. A Catholic
would say of St. Vincent de Paul or of Carlo Borromeo, He was a great
saint ; I should say of him, He was a great egoist.'

436 DEGENERATION
Quite as ' deep ' as his discovery of the egoism of all un
selfishness is Nietzsche's harangue ' to the teachers of un
selfishness.'* The virtues of a man are called good, not in
respect of their effects upon himself, but in respect of the
effects which we suppose them to have upon ourselves and
society. 'The virtues (such as diligence, obedience, chastity,
piety, justice), are for the most part pernicious to their
possessors.' ' Praise of the virtues is praise of something
pernicious to the individual — the praise of instincts which
deprive a man of his noblest egoism, and of the power of
the highest self-protection.' ' Education . . . seeks to deter
mine the individual to modes of thought and conduct which,
if they have become habit, instinct, and passion, rule in him
and over him, against his ultimate advantage, but*" for the
general good." ' This is the old silly objection against altruism
which we have seen floating in every gutter for the last sixty
years. 'If everyone were to act unselfishly, to sacrifice
himself for his neighbour, the result would be that everyone
would injure himself, and hence humanity, as a whole, would
suffer great prejudice.' Assuredly it would, if humanity were
composed of isolated individuals in no communication with
each other. Whereas it is an organism ; each individual
always gives to the higher organism only the surplus of his
effective force, and in his personal share of the collective
wealth profits by the prosperity of the whole organism, which
he has increased through his altruistic sacrifice. What would
probably be said to the canny householder who should argue
in this way against fire insurance : ' Most houses do not burn
down. The house-owner who insures himself against fire
pays premiums his life long, and as his house will pro
bably never burn down, he has thrown away his money
to no purpose. Fire insurance is consequently injurious.'
The objection against altruism, that it injures each individual
by imposing on him sacrifices for others, is of exactly the
same force.
We have had quite enough tests of the ' depth ' of Nietzsche
and his system. I now wish to point out some of his
most diverting contradictions. His disciples do not deny
these, but seek to palliate them. Thus Kaatz says: 'He
had experienced a change in his own views concerning so
many things, that he warned men against the rigid principle
which would pass off dishonesty to self as " character." In
view of the shifting of opinions as evidenced in Nietzsche's
works, it is, of course, only that theory of life to which
Nietzsche ultimately wrestled his way that can be taken
* Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 48.

EGO-MANIA 437
into consideration for the purposes of this book.'* This is,
however, a conscious and intended falsification of the facts,
and the hand of the falsifier ought, like that of the cheater
at cards, to be forthwith nailed to the table. The fact
is that the contradictions are to be found, not in works of
different periods, but in the same book, often on the same
page. They are not degrees of knowledge, of which the
higher naturally surpass the lower, but opposing, mutually
incompatible opinions co-existing in Nietzsche's conscious
ness, which his judgment is neither capable of reconciling,
nor among which it can suppress either term.
In Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 29, we read : 'Always
love your neighbour as yourself, but first be of those who love
themselves.' P. 56 : ' And at that time it happened also . . .
that his word praised selfishness as blessed, hale, healthy
selfishness, which wells forth from the mighty soul.' And
p. 60 : ' One must learn to love one's self — thus I teach — with
a hale and healthy love, so that one bear with one's self, and
not rove about.' In opposition to this, in the same book,
pt. i., p. 108: 'The degenerating sense which says, "All for
me," is to us a horror.' Is this contradiction explained by an
' effort to wrestle his way to an ultimate theory of life ' ? The
contrary assertions are in the same book a few pages apart.
Another example. Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 264 : ' The
absence of personality avenges itself everywhere ; an en
feebled, thin, effaced personality, denying and calumniating
itself, is worthless for any further good thing, most of all for
philosophy.' And only four pages further in the same book,
p. 268 : ' Have we not been seized with . . . the suspicion
of a contrast — a contrast between the world — in which,
hitherto, we were at home with our venerations . . . and of
another world, which is ourselves ... a suspicion which
might place us Europeans . . . before the frightful alter
native, Either — Or : " either do away with your venerations
or yourselves." ' Here, therefore, he denies, or, at least,
doubts, his personality, even if in an interrogative form ; on
which the reader need not dwell, since Nietzsche 'loves to
mask his thoughts, or to express them hypothetically ; and
to conclude the problems he raises by an interrupted phrase
or a mark of interrogation. '-f-
But he denies his personality, his ' I,' still more decidedly.
In the preface to jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 6, he explains
that the foundation of all philosophies up to the present time
has been ' some popular superstition,' such as ' the super-
* Dr. Hugo Kaatz, op. cit, Thiel I., Vorrede, p. viii.
+ Robert Schellwien, Max Stierner und Iriedrich Nietzsche. Leipzig
1892, p. 23.

438 DEGENERATION
stition of the soul, which, as a superstition of the subjective
and the " I," has not ceased, even in our days, to cause
mischief.' And in the same book, p. 139, he exclaims :
' Who has not already been sated to the point of death with
all subjectivity and his own accursed ipsissimosity !' Hence
the ' I ' is a superstition ! Sated to the point of death with
'subjectivity'! And yet the 'I' should be 'proclaimed as
holy.'* And yet the ' ripest fruit of society and morality is
the sovereign individual, who resembles himself alone. ' +
And yet ' a personality which denies itself is no longer good
for anything ' !
The negation of the ' I,' the designation of it as a super
stition, is the more extraordinary, as Nietzsche's whole
philosophy— if one may call his effusions by that name — is
based only on the ' Ego,' recognising it as alone justifiable,
or even as alone existing.
In all Nietzsche's works we shall, it is true, find no more
subversive contradiction than this ; but a few other examples
will show to what extent he holds mutually-destructive
opposites in his mind in uncompromising juxtaposition.
We have seen that his last piece of wisdom is : ' Nothing
is true ; all is permissible.' At bottom all those ethics are
repugnant to me which say : ' Do not do this ! Renounce !
Overcome self!' 'Self-command!' Those ethical teachers
who . . . enjoin man to place himself in his own power induce
thereby in him a peculiar disease.! And now let the following
sentences be weighed : ' Through auspicious marriage customs
there is a continual increase in the power and pleasure of
willing, in the will to command self.' 'Asceticism and
puritanism are almost indispensable means of education and
ennoblement, if a race desires to triumph over its plebeian
origin, and raise itself at some time to sovereignty.' ' The
essential and priceless feature of every morality is that it is
a long constraint.' §
The characteristic of the over-human is his wish to stand
alone, to seek solitude, to flee from the society of the
gregarious. ' He should be the greatest who can be the
most solitary.' 'The lofty independent spirituality — the will
to stand alone. . . .' (jenseits von Gut und Bose, pp. 154, 123.)
' The strong are constrained by their nature to segregate,
as much as the feeble are by theirs to aggregate ' (Zur
Genealogie der Moral, p. 149). In opposition to this he teaches
* Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 84 : 'The "thou" is proclaimed holy,
but not yet the " 1."'
t Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 43.
% Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 222.
§ Jenseits von Gut und Bose, pp. 78, 106.

EGO-MANIA 439
in other places : ' During the longest interval in the life of
humanity there was nothing more terrible than to feel one's
self alone ' (Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 147). Again: 'We
at present sometimes undervalue the advantages of life in a
community' (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 59). We? That
is a calumny. We value these advantages at their full worth.
He alone does not value them who, in expressions of admira
tion, vaunts ' segregation,' i.e., hostility to the community and
contempt of its advantages, as characterizing the strong.
At one time the primitive aristocratic man is the freely-
roving, splendid beast of prey, the blond beast ; at another :
' these men are rigorously kept within bounds by morality,
veneration, custom, gratitude, still more by reciprocal surveil
lance, by jealousy inter pares ; and, on the other hand, in their
attitude towards each other, inventive in consideration, self-
command, delicacy, fidelity, pride, and friendship.' Ay, if
these be the attributes of ' blond beasts,' may someone speedily
give us a society of ' blond beasts ' ! But how does ' morality,
veneration, self-command,' etc., accord with the 'free-roving'
of the splendid beast of prey ? That remains an unsolved
enigma. It is true that Nietzsche, while making our mouths
water by his description, adds to it this limitation : ' Towards
what lies beyond, where the stranger, and what is strange,
begins, they are not much better than beasts of prey set free '
(Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21). But this is in reality no
limitation. Every organized community regards itself, in
respect of the rest of the world, as a conjoint unity, and does
not accord to the foreigner, the man from without, the same
rights as to a member of its own body. Rights, custom, con
sideration, are not extended to the stranger, unless he knows
how to inspire fear and to compel a recognition of his rights.
The progress in civilization, however, consists in the very fact
that the boundaries of the community are continually enlarged,
that which is strange and without rights or claim to considera
tion being constantly made to recede further and ever further.
At first there existed in the horde reciprocal forbearance and
right alone ; then the feeling of solidarity extended itself to
the tribe, the country, state, and race. At the present day
there is an international law even in war ; the best among con
temporaries feel themselves one with all men, nay, no longer
hold even the animal to be without rights; and the time will
come when the forces of Nature will be the sole strange and
external things which may be treated according to man's need
and pleasure, and in regard to which he may be the ' freed
beast of prey.' The ' deep ' Nietzsche is not capable, it is
true, of comprehending a state of the case so simple and clear.
At one moment he makes merry over the ' naivete ' of those

440 DEGENERATION
who believe in an original social contract (Zur Genealogie der
Moral, p. 80), and then says (in the same book, p. 149) : ' If
they ' (the strong, the born masters, the ' species of solitary
beasts of prey ') ' unite, it is only with a view to a collective
act of aggression, a collective satisfaction of their volition to
exert their power, with much resistance from the individual
conscience.' With resistance or without, does not a ' union
for the purpose of a collective satisfaction' amount to a rela
tion of contract, the acceptation of which Nietzsche with
justice terms ' a naivete ' ?
At one time ' agony is something which inspires pity '
(jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 136), and a ' succession of crimes
is horrible ' (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21) ; and then, again,
the ' beauty ' of crime is spoken of (jenseits von Gut und Bose,
p. 91), and complaint is made that ' crime is calumniated ' (the
same book, p. 123).
Examples enough have been given. I do not wish to lose
myself in minutiae and details, but I believe that I have demon
strated Nietzsche's own contradiction of every single one of his
fundamental assertions, most emphatically of the foremost and
most important, viz., that the ' I ' is the one real thing, that
egoism alone is necessitated and justifiable.
If the conceits which he wildly ejaculates — as it were, shrieks
forth — are examined somewhat more closely, we cannot but
marvel at the profusion of fabulous stupidity and abecedarian
ignorance they contain. It is thus he terms the system of
Copernicus (jenseits von Gut und Bose), ' which has persuaded
us, against all the senses, that the earth is not immovable,'
' the greatest triumph over the senses hitherto achieved on
earth.' Hence he does not suspect that the system of Coper
nicus has for its basis exact observation of the starry heavens,
the movements of the moon and planets, and the position of
the sun in the zodiac ; that this system was, therefore, the
triumph of exact sense-perceptions over sense-illusions — in
other words, of attentiveness over fugacity and distraction. He
believes that ' consciousness developed itself under the pressure
of the need of communication,' for ' conscious thought even
tuates in words, i.e., in signs of communication, by which fact
the origin of consciousness itself is revealed ' (Die frohliche
Wissenschaft, p. 280). He does not know, then, that animals
without the power of speech also have a consciousness ; that
it is possible also to think in images, in representations of
movement, without the help of a word, and that speech is not
added to consciousness until very late in the course of develop
ment. The drollest thing is that Nietzsche very much fancies
himself as a psychologist, and wishes most particularly to be
esteemed as such ! According to this profound man, socialism
has its roots in the fact that ' hitherto manufacturers and

EGO-MANIA 441
entrepreneurs lack those forms and signs of distinction of the
higher races which alone make persons interesting; if they
had in look and gesture the distinction of those born noble,
there would, perhaps, be no socialism of the masses [! !]. For
the latter are at bottom ready for slavery of every kind, on
the condition that the higher class constantly legitimizes itself
as higher, as born to command, by outward distinction ' [! !]
[Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 68). The concept 'thou oughtest,'
the idea of duty, of the necessity of a definite measure of self-
command, is a consequence ofthe fact that ' at all times since
men have existed, human herds have also existed, and always
a very large number of those who obey relatively to the small
number of those who command (jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 118).
Anyone less incapable of thought than Nietzsche will under
stand that, on the contrary, human herds, those obeying and
those commanding, were possible at all, only after and because
the brain had acquired the power and capacity to elaborate
the idea, ' thou oughtest,' i.e., to inhibit an impulse by a
thought or a judgment. The descendant of mixed races ' will
on the average be a weaker being ' (jenseits von Gut und Bose,
p. 120) ; indeed, the ' European Weltschmerz, the pessimism of
the nineteenth century, is essentially the consequence of a
sudden and irrational mixture of classes ' ; social classes, how
ever, always ' express differences of origin and of race as well '
(Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 142). The most competent
investigators are convinced, as we well know, that the crossing
of one race with another is conducive to the progress of both,
and is 'the first cause of development.'* ' Darwinism, with
its incomprehensibly one-sided theory of the struggle for
existence,' is explained by Darwin's origin. His ancestors
were ' poor and humble persons who were only too familiar
with the difficulty of making both ends meet. Around the
whole of English Darwinism there floats, as it were, the
mephitic vapour of English over-population, the odour of
humble life, of pinched and straitened circumstances ' (Die
frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 273). It is presumably known to all
my readers that Darwin was a rich man, and was never com
pelled to follow any profession, and that, for at least three or
four generations, his ancestors had lived in comfort.
Nietzsche lays special claim to extraordinary originality.
He places this epigraph at the beginning of his Froliche
Wissenschaft : ' I live in a house that's my own,
I've never in nought copied no one,
And at every Master I've had my laugh,
Who had not first laughed at himself.'
* C. Lombroso and R. Laschi, Le Crime politique et les Rdvolutions.
Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 142.

442 DEGENERATION
His disciples believe in this brag, and, with upturned eyes,
bleat it after him in sheep-like chorus. The profound ignorance
of this flock of ruminants permits them, forsooth, to believe in
Nietzsche's originality. As they have never learnt, read, or
thought about, anything, all that they pick up in bars, or in
their loafings, is naturally new and hitherto non-existent.
Anyone, however, who regards Nietzsche relatively to analo
gous phenomena of the age, will recognise that his pretended
originalities and temerities are the greasiest commonplaces,
such as a decent self-respecting thinker would not touch with
a pair of tongs.
Whenever he rants, Nietzsche is no doubt really original.
On such occasions his expressions contain no sense at all, not
even nonsense ; hence it is impossible to unite them with any
thing previously thought or said. When, on the contrary,
there is a shimmer of reason in his words, we at once recognise
them as having their origin in the paradoxes or platitudes of
others. Nietzsche's ' individualism ' is an exact reproduction
of Max Stirner, a crazy Hegelian, who fifty years ago exag
gerated and involuntarily turned into ridicule the critical
idealism of his master to the extent of monstrously inflating
the importance — even the grossly empirical importance — ofthe
' I ' ; whom, even in his own day, no one took seriously, and
who since then had fallen into well-merited profound oblivion,
from which at the present time a few anarchists and philo
sophical ' fops ' — for the hysteria of the time has created
such beings — seek to disinter him.* Where Nietzsche extols
the ' I,' its rights, its claims, the necessity of cultivating and
developing it, the reader who has in mind the preceding
chapters of this book will recognise the phrases of Barres,
Wilde, and Ibsen. His philosophy of will is appropriated from
Schopenhauer, who throughout has directed his thought and
given colour to his language. The complete similarity of his
phrases concerning will with Schopenhauer's theory has evi
dently penetrated to his own consciousness and made him
uncomfortable ; for, in order to obliterate it, he has placed a
false nose of his own invention on the cast he has made, viz.,
he contests the fact that the motive force in every being is the
desire for self-preservation ; in his view it is rather the desire
for power. This addition is pure child's play. In the lower
orders of living beings it is never a ' desire for power,' but always
only a desire for self-preservation, that is perceptible; and
among men this seeming 'desire for power' can, by anyone
* R. Schellwien, op. cit, p. 7 : 'The literary activity of the two thinkers [']
is separated by more than fifty years ; but great as may be the difference
between them, the agreement is not less, and thus the essential characters of
systematic individualism are presented with all the more distinctness.'

EGO-MANIA 443
but the ' deep' Nietzsche, be traced to two well-known roots —
either to the effort to make all organs act to the limit of their
functional capacity, which is connected with feelings of plea
sure, or to procure for themselves advantages ameliorative of
the conditions of existence. But the effort towards feelings
of pleasure and better conditions of existence is nothing but a
form of the phenomenon of the desire for existence, and he who
regards the ' desire for power ' as anything different from, and
even opposed to, the desire for existence, simply gives evidence
of his incapacity to pursue this idea of the desire for existence
any distance beyond the length of his nose. Nietzsche's chief
proof of the difference between the desire for power and the
desire for existence is that the former often drives the desirer to
the contemning and endangering, even to the destruction, of his
own life. But in that case the whole struggle for existence, in
which dangers are continually incurred, and for that matter
are often enough sought, would also be a proof that the
struggler did not desire his existence ! Nietzsche would,
indeed, be quite capable of asserting this also.
The degenerates with whom we have become acquainted
affirm that they do not trouble themselves concerning Nature
and its laws. Nietzsche is not so far advanced in self-
sufficiency as Rossetti, to whom it was a matter of indifference
whether the earth revolved around the sun or the sun around
the earth. He openly avows that this is not a matter of in
difference to him ; he regrets it ; it troubles him, that the
earth is no longer the central point of the universe, and he the
chief thing on the earth. ' Since Copernicus, man seems to
have fallen upon an inclined plane ; he is now rolling ever
faster away from the central point — whither ? — into the
nothing ? into the piercing feeling of his nothingness ?' He
is very angry with Copernicus concerning this. Not only
with Copernicus, but with science in general. ' All science is
at present busied in talking man out of the self-respect he has
hitherto possessed, just as if this had been nothing but a
bizarre self-conceit' (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 173). Is
this not an echo of the words of Oscar Wilde, who complains
that Nature ' is so indifferent' to him, ' so unappreciative,' and
that he ' is no more to Nature than the cattle that browse on
the slope ' ?
In other places, again, we find the current of thought and
almost the very words of Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, and other
Diabolists and Decadents. The passage in Zur Genealogie der
Moral (p. 171) in which he glorifies art, because ' in it the lie
sanctifies itself, and the will to deceive has a quiet conscience
on its side,' might be in the chapter in Wilde's Intentions on
' The Decay of Lying/ as, conversely, Wilde's aphorisms :

444 DEGENERATION
'There is no sin except stupidity.' 'An idea that is not
dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.' And his
praises of Wainwright, the poisoner, are in exact agreement
with Nietzsche's ' morality of assassins,' and the latter's
remarks that crime is calumniated, and that the defender of
the criminal is ' oftenest not artist enough to turn the beau
tiful terribleness of the crime to the advantage of the doer.'
Again, by way of joke, compare these passages: 'It is neces
sary to get rid of the bad taste of wishing to agree with many.
Good is no longer good when a neighbour says it's good '
(Nietzsche, jenseits von Giri und Bose, p. 54), and 'Ah! don't
say that you agree with me. When people agree with me, I
always feel that I must be wrong ' (Oscar Wilde, Intentions,
p. 202). This is more than a resemblance, is it not ? To avoid
being too diffuse, I abstain from citing passages exactly re
sembling these from Huysmans' A Rebours, and from Ibsen.
At the same time it is unquestionable that Nietzsche could not
have known the French Decadents and English ^Esthetes
whom he so frequently approaches, because his books are in
part antecedent to those of the latter ; and neither could they
have drawn from him, because, perhaps with the exception
of Ibsen, it is only about two years since they could have
heard as much as Nietzsche's name. The similarity, or rather
identity, is not explained by plagiarism ; it is explained by the
identity of mental qualities in Nietzsche and the other ego-
maniacal degenerates.
Nietzsche presents a specially droll aspect when he confronts
truth, in order to declare it unnecessary, or even to deny its
existence. ' Why not rather untruth ? And uncertainty ? Or
even ignorance?' (jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 3). 'What,
after all, are the truths of man ? They are the irrefutable
errors of man' (Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 193). ' The will
for truth — that might be a hidden will for death ' (Ibid., p. 263).
The section of this book in which he deals with the question
of truth is entitled by him, ' We the Fearless,' and he prefixes
to it, as a motto, Turenne's utterance : ' Thou tremblest, car
cass ? Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest
whither I shall soon lead thee !' And what is this terrible
danger into which the fearless one runs with such heroic
mien ? The investigation of the essence and value of truth.
But this investigation is really the A B C of all serious philo
sophy ! The question as to whether objective truth exists at
all has been also drawn up by him,* it is true with less blowing
of trumpets, beating of drums, and shaking of locks, as its
prologue, accompaniment, and conclusion. It is, moreover,
highly characteristic that the same dragon-slayer who, with
* See, in my Paradoxe, the chapter ' Wo ist die Wahrheit ?

EGO-MANIA 445
such swaggering and snorting takes up the challenge against
' truth,' finds submissive words of most humble apology when
he ventures very gently to doubt the perfection of Goethe in
all his pieces. Speaking of the ' viscosity ' and ' tediousness ' of
the German style, he says (jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 39) :
' I may be pardoned for affirming that even Goethe's prose,
with its mixture of stiffness and grace, is no exception.' When
he timidly criticises Goethe, he begs pardon ; his heroic
attitude of contempt for death is assumed only when he chal
lenges morality and truth to combat. That is to say, this
' fearless one ' possesses the cunning often observed among the
insane, and comprehends that there is absolutely no danger
in his babbling before the imbeciles composing his congre
gation, that fabulous philosophical nonsense, at which, on the
contrary, they would be much enraged the instant it shocked
their aesthetic convictions or prejudices.
Even in the minutest details it is surprising how Nietzsche
agrees, word for word, with the other ego-maniacs with whom
we have become acquainted. Compare, for example, the
phrase in jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 168, where he vaunts,
' What is really noble in works and in men, their moment
of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the golden and
the cool,' with Baudelaire's praise of immobility and his
enraptured description of a metallic landscape ; or the remarks
of Des Esseintes, and the side-thrusts at the press put by
Ibsen into the mouths of his characters, with the insults
continually heaped on newspapers by Nietzsche. ' Great
ascetic spirits have an abhorrence of bustle, veneration,
newspaper' (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 113). The cause
of ' the undeniably gradual and already tangible desolation of
the German mind ' lies in being ' all too exclusively nourished
on newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music ' (Ibid.,
p. 177). ' Behold these superfluities ! . . . They vomit their bile,
and name it a newspaper' (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i.,p. 67).
' Dost thou not see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags ?
And they make newspapers out of those rags ! Hearest thou
not how the spirit has here becoipe a play on words ? He
vomits a loathsome swill -of words. And of this swill of words
they make newspapers!' (Ibid., pt. iii., p. 37). It would be
possible to multiply these examples tenfold, for Nietzsche harks
back to every idea with an obstinacy enough to make the
most patient reader of sound taste go wild.
Such is the appearance presented by Nietzsche's originality.
This ' original ' and ' audacious ' thinker, imitating the familiar
practices of tradesmen at ' sales,' endeavours to palm off as
brand new goods the most shop-worn rubbish of great
philosophers. His most powerful assaults are directed against

446 DEGENERATION
doors that stand open. This ' solitary one,' this ' dweller on
the highest mountain peaks,' exhibits by the dozen the
physiognomy of all decadents. He who is continually talking
with the utmost contempt of the ' herd ' and the ' herd-animal '
is himself the most ordinary herd-animal of all. Only the
herd to which he belongs, body and soul, is a special one ;
it is the flock of the mangy sheep.
Upon one occasion the habitual cunning of the insane has
deserted him, and he has himself revealed to us the source
of his ' original ' philosophy. The passage is so characteristic
that I must quote it at length :
'The first impetus, to make known something of my
hypotheses concerning the origin of morality, was given me
by a clear, tidy, and clever — ay, precocious [!] — little book, in
which there was for the first time presented to me an inverted
and perverted kind of genealogical hypotheses, the truly
English kind, and which attracted me with that attractive
force possessed by everything contrary, everything antipodal.
The title of this little book was Der Ursprung der moralischen
Empfindunger [" The Origin of Moral Sensations "] ; its author,
Dr. Paul Ree ; the year of its publication, 1877. I have,
perhaps, never read anything to which I have in the same
measure mentally said " No " as I did to every proposition
and every conclusion in this book, yet without anger or
impatience. In the previously-mentioned work on which I
was at that time engaged [Menschliches A llzumenschliches —
["Things Human, Things all too Human"], I referred, in season
and out of season, to the propositions of that book, not
refuting them — what have I to do with refutations ? — but, as
befits a positive spirit, to substitute the more probable for
the improbable, and at times one error for another' (Zur
Genealogie der Moral, p. 7).
This gives the reader the key to Nietzsche's ' originality.'
It consists in simple infantile inversion of a rational train of
thought. If Nietzsche imagines that his insane negations and
contradictions grew spontaneously in his head, he is really
the victim of a self-delusion. His rant may have existed in
his mind before he had read Dr. Ree's book. But in that
case it had sprung up as a contradiction to other books without
his having been so clearly conscious of its origin as after the
perusal of Dr. Ree's work. But he pushes the self-delusion
to an incredible height, in terming himself a ' positive spirit,'
after he has just frankly confessed his method of procedure,
viz., that he does not ' refute '¦ — he would not have found that
so easy, either— but that 'to every proposition and every con
clusion he says ' No !'
This explanation of the source of his ' original ' moral

EGO-MANIA 447
philosophy comprehends in itself a diagnosis, which at once
obtrudes on the most short-sighted eye. Nietzsche's system
is the product of the mania of contradiction, the delirious
form of that mental derangement, of which the melancholic
form is the mania of doubt and negation, treated of in the
earlier chapters of this work. His folie des negations betrays
itself also in his peculiarities of language. There is ever in
his consciousness a questioning impulse like a mark of inter
rogation. Of no word is he so fond as of the interrogative
' What ?' constantly used by him in the most marvellous
connection,* and he makes use ad nauseam of the turn of
expression, that one should ' say No ' to this and that, that
this one and that one is a 'No-sayer' — an expression which
suggests to him by association the same immeasurably frequent
use of the contrary expression, ' say Yes ' and ' Yes-sayer.' This
' saying-No' and ' saying- Yes ' is in his case a veritable Para
phasia vesana, or insane language opposed to usage, as the
reader is shown by the examples cited in foot-note. f
* ' With what magic she lays hold of me ! What ? Has all the world's
repose embarked here?' 'What use has the inspired one for wine? What ?
Give the mole wings and proud imaginings ?' ' In so far as he says Yes to
this other world, what? must he not then say No to its counterpart, this
world ?' ' Round about God all becomes — what ? perhaps world ?' ' A
pessimist . . . who says Yes to morality ... to l&de-ne/ninem<-morality ;
what? is that really — a pessimist?' 'Fear and pity : with these feelings has
man hitherto stood in the presence of woman. What ? Is there now to be
an end of this ?' I will content myself with these examples, but let it be
remarked once for all, that all the specimens I adduce here for the purpose
of examining Nietzsche's mental state could easily be multiplied a hundred
fold, as the characteristic peculiarities recur in him hundreds of times.
On one occasion he plainly becomes conscious of this living note of in
terrogation, always present in his mind as an obsession. In Also sprach
Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 55, he calls the passion for rule, 'the flashing note of
interrogation by the side of premature answers.' In this connection, this
expression has absolutely no sense ; but it at once becomes intelligible when
it is remembered that the insane are in the habit of suddenly giving utter
ance to the ideas springing up in their consciousness. Nietzsche plainly
saw in his mind 'the flashing note of interrogation,' and suddenly, and with
out transition, spoke of it.
f 'A Greek life, to which he said, No.' 'A pessimist who not merely
says, No, wishes No [!] but who . . . does No' [!!]. 'An inward saying
No to this or that thing.' ' Free for death, and tree in death, a holy No-
sayer.' Then as a complementary counterpart : ' Pregnant with lightnings,
who say, Yes ! laugh Yes !' ' While all noble morality grows to itself out of
a triumphant saying Yea.' (He feels himself to be something) ' at least
saying Yea to life.' 'To be able to say Yea to yourself, that is ... a ripe
fruit.' (Disinterested wickedness is felt by primitive humanity to be some
thing) ' to which conscience valiantly says Yea.' We see what use Nietzsche
makes of his saying 'Nay' and ' Yea.' It stands in the place of nearly all
verbs joining subject with predicate. The thought ' I am thirsty ' would, by
Nietzsche, be thus expressed, 'I say Yes to water.' Instead of 'I am
sleepy,' he would say, ' I say Nay to wakefulness,' or, ' I say Yes to bed,'
e'c. This is the way in which invalids in incomplete aphasia are in the
habit of paraphrasing their thoughts.

448 DEGENERATION
Nietzsche's assurance that ' without anger or impatience' he
' said No ' to all Ree's assertions may be believed. Persons
afflicted with the mania of doubt and of denial do not get
angry when they question or contradict ; they do this under
the coercion of their mental derangement. But those* among
them who are delirious have the conscious intention of making
others angry, even if they themselves are not so. On this
point Nietzsche allows an avowal to escape him : ' My mode
of thought demands a warlike soul, a wish to give pain, a
pleasure in saying, No ' (Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 63). This
confession may be compared with the passages from Ibsen :
' You were becoming reckless ! In reality that you might anger
these affected beings of both sexes here in the town ' ; and,
' Something shall happen which will be a slap in the face to
all this decorum ' (The Pillars of Society).
The origin of one of the most ' original ' of Nietzsche's
doctrines, viz., the explanation of conscience as a satisfaction
of the instinct of cruelty through inner self-rending, has already
been gone into by Dr. Tiirck, in an excellent little work. He
very justly recognises the diseased state of moral aberration
at the base of this insane idea,* and continues thus :
' Let us now picture to ourselves a man of this kind, with innate
instincts of murder, or in general with ' Anomalies or perversion
of the moral feelings' (Mendel) ; at the same time highly gifted,
with the best instruction and an excellent education, reared in
the midst of agreeable circumstances, and under the careful
. . . nurture of women . . . and occupying at an early age a pro
minent position in society. It is clear that the better moral
instincts must gain such strength as to be able to drive back
to the deepest inner depths the bestial instinct of destruction
and completely to curb it, yet without wholly annihilating it. It
may not, indeed, be able to manifest itself in deeds, but, because
it is inborn, the instinct remains in existence as an unfulfilled
wish, cherished in the inmost heart ... as an ardent desire
... to yield itself up to its cruel lust. But every non-satis
faction of a . . . deeply imprinted instinct has as its conse
quence pain and inner torment. Now, we men are very much
inclined to regard as naturally good and justifiable that which
gives us decided pleasure, and conversely to reprobate, as bad
' and contrary to nature, that which produces pain. Thus, it
may happen that an intellectual and highly gifted man, born
with perverted instincts, and feeling as torment . . . the non-
satisfaction of the instinct, will hit upon the idea of justifying
the passion for murder, the extremest egoism ... as some
thing good, beautiful, and according to Nature, and to char-
* Dr. Hermann Tiirck, Fr. Nietzsche und seine philosophischen Irrwe^c
Zweite Auflage. Dresdtn, 1891, p. 7. b '

EGO-MANIA 449
acterize asmorbid aberration the betteropposingmoral instincts,
manifesting themselves in us as that which we call conscience.
Dr. Tiirck is right in admitting Nietzsche's innate moral
aberration and the inversion in him of healthy instincts.
Nevertheless, in the interpretation of the particular phenomena
in which the aberration manifests itself, he commits an error,
which is explained by the fact that Dr. Tiirck is seemingly not
deeply conversant with mental therapeutics. He assumes that
in Nietzsche's mind the evil instincts are in severe conflict
with those better notions instilled in him by education, and
that he experiences as pain the suppression of his instincts by
judgment. That is hardly the true state of the case. It is
not necessary that Nietzsche should have the wish to commit
murder and other crimes. Not every aberrant person (pervers)
is subject to impulsions. The perversion may be limited
exclusively to the sphere of ideation, and get its satisfaction
wholly in ideas. A subject thus affected never gets the notion
of transforming his ideas into deeds. His derangement does
not encroach upon the centres of will and movement, but
carries on its fell work within the centres of ideation. We
know forms of sexual perversion in which the sufferers
never experience the impulse to seek satisfaction in acts, and
who revel only in thought * This astonishing rupture of the
natural connection between idea and movement, between
thought and act, this detachment of the organs of will and
movement from the organs of conception and judgment which
they normally obey, is in itself a proof of deepest disorder
throughout the machinery of thought. Incompetent critics
eagerly point to the fact that many authors and artists live
unexceptionable lives in complete contrast to their works,
which may be immoral or contrary to nature, and deduce from
this fact that it is unjustifiable to draw from his works con
clusions as to the mental and moral Nature of their author.
Those who talk in this manner do not even suspect that there
are purely mental perversions which are quite as much a
mental disease as the impulsions of the ' impulsivists.'
This is obviously the case with Nietzsche. His perversion
is of a purely intellectual character, and has hardly ever im
pelled him to acts. Hence, in his mind there has been no
conflict between instincts and the morality acquired by
* B. Ball, La Folie drolique, Paris, 1888, p. 50 : ' I have sketched for you
the picture of chaste love (amorous lunacy, or the erotomania of Esquirol),
where the greatest excesses remain enclosed within the limits of feeling, and
are never polluted by the intervention of the senses. I have shown you
some examples of this delirium pushed to the extreme bounds of insanity,
without the intermixture of a single idea foreign to the domain of platonic
affection.' 29

450 DEGENERATION
education. His explanation of conscience has quite another
source than that assumed by Dr. Tiirck. It is one of those
perverted interpretations of a sensation by the consciousness
perceiving it which are so frequently observed. Nietzsche
remarks that with him ideas of a cruel kind are accompanied
by feelings of pleasure — that they are, as mental therapeutics
expresses it, 'voluptuously accentuated.' In consequence of
this accompaniment of pleasure he has the inclination to
conjure up sensually sensuous representations of that kind,
and to dwell on them with enjoyment.* Consciousness then
seeks to give some sort of rational explanation of these ex
periences by assuming cruelty to be a powerful primordial
instinct of man, that, since he may not actually commit cruel
deeds, he may, at least, take pleasure in the representation
of them, and that the rapturous lingering over representations
of this kind, man calls his conscience. As I have shown above,
it is Nietzsche's opinion that stings of conscience are not the
consequence of evil deeds, but appear in men who have never
committed any evil. Hence he obviously makes use of the
word in a sense quite different from that of current usage, a
sense peculiar to himself; he designates by it, simply his
revelling in voluptuously accentuated representations of
cruelty. The alienist, however, is familiar with the perversion in
which the invalid experiences voluptuous stimulation from acts
or representations of a cruel nature. Science has a name for
it. It is called Sadism. Sadism is the opposite form of
sexual perversion to masochism.-)- Nietzsche is a sufferer from
Sadism in its most pronounced form, only with him it is
* In one passage of Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 132, Nietzsche speaks
of the ' species of moral onanists and self-indulgers.' He does not apply the
expression to himself; but it was unquestionably suggested byan obscure
suspicion of his own state of mind.
t Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 45 ff; 'The
complete contrary of masochism is Sadism. While in the former the subject
desires to suffer sorrows, and to feel himself in subjection to violence in the
latter his aim is to cause sorrows, and to exercise violence. . . . All the
acts and situations carried out in the active part played by Sadism con
stitute, for masochism, the object of longing, to be attained passively. In
both perversions these acts form a progression from purely symbolic events
to grievous misdeeds. . . . Both are to be considered as original psycho
pathies of mentally abnormal individuals, afflicted in particular with psychic
Hypera:sthesia sexualis, but also, as a rule, with other anomalies 
The pleasure of causing sorrow and the pleasure of experiencing sorrow
appear only as two different sides of the same psychic event, the primary
and essential principle in which is the consciousness of active and passive
subjection respectively.' See Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra! ot. i.,
P* 95 : /hou art going to women ? Forget not the whip !' Jenseits von
Gut und Bose, p. 186 : ' Woman unlearns the fear of man,' and thus ' exposes
her most womanly instincts.'

EGO-MANIA 451
confined to the intellectual sphere alone, and is satisfied by
ideal debauchery. I do not wish to dwell too long on
this repulsive subject, and will, therefore, quote only a few
passages, showing that, in Nietzsche's thought, images of
cruelty are without exception accompanied by ideas of a
sensual character, and are italicized by him : ' The splendid
beast ranging in its lust after prey and victory ' (Zur Genealogie
der Moral, p. 21). ' The feeling of content at being able,*without
scruple, to wreak his power on a powerless being, the voluptuous
ness de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire, the enjoyment of
vanquishing ' (Ibid., p. 51). ' Do your pleasure, ye wantons ;
roar for very lust and wickedness ' (Die frohliche Wissenschaft,
p. 226). ' The path to one's own heaven ever leads through
the voluptuousness of one's own hell' (Ibid., p. 249). 'How
comes it that I have yet met no one . . . who knew morality
as a problem, and this problem as his personal distress,
torment, voluptuousness, passion ?' (Ibid., p. 264). ' Hitherto
he has felt most at ease on earth at the sight of tragedies,
bull-fights, and crucifixions ; and when he invented hell, behold,
that was his heaven on earth When the great man cries
aloud, the little man runs swiftly thither, and his tongue hangs
out from his throat for very lusting' (Also sprach Zarathustra,
pt. iii., p. 96), etc. I beg the unprofessional reader par
ticularly to observe the association of the words italicized
with those expressing something evil. This association is
neither accidental nor arbitrary. It is a psychical necessity,
for in Nietzsche's consciousness no image of wickedness and
crime can arise without exciting him sexually, and he is unable
to experience any sexual stimulation without the immediate
appearance in his consciousness of an image of some deed of
violence and blood.
Hence the real source of Nietzsche's doctrine is his Sadism.
And I will here make a general remark on which I do not
desire to linger, but which I should like to recommend
to the particular attention of the reader. In the success of
unhealthy tendencies in art and literature, no quality of their
authors has so large and determining a share as their sexual
psychopathy. All persons of unbalanced minds — the neuras
thenic, the hysteric, the degenerate, the insane — have the
keenest scent for perversions of a sexual kind, and perceive
them under all disguises. As a rule, indeed, they are ignorant
of what it is in certain works and artists which pleases them,
but investigation always reveals in the object of their pre
dilection a veiled manifestation of some Psychopathia sexualis.
The masochism of Wagner and Ibsen, the Skoptzism of
Tolstoi, the erotomania (folie amoureuse chaste) of the Diabolists,
the Decadents, and of Nietzsche, unquestionably obtain for

452

DEGENERATION

these authors and tendencies a large, and, at all events, the
most sincere and fanatical fraction of their partisans. Works
of a sexually psychopathic nature excite in abnormal subjects
the corresponding perversion (till then slumbering and un
conscious, perhaps also undeveloped, although present in the
germ), and give them lively feelings of pleasure, which they,
usually in good faith, regard as purely aesthetic or intellectual,
whereas* they are actually sexual. Only in the light of this
explanation do the characteristic artistic tendencies of the
abnormals, of which we have proof,* become wholly intelligible.
This confounding of aesthetic with sexual feelings is not sur
prising, for the spheres of these two feelings are not only
contiguous, but, as has been proved elsewhere, are for the
most part even coincident. f At the base of all oddities of
costume, especially that of women, there is hidden an uncon
scious speculation in something of a sexual-psychopathy, which
finds incitation and attraction in the temporary fashion in
dress. No professional person has yet viewed fashions from
this standpoint. I may not here allow myself so broad a
departure from my principal theme. The subject may, however,
be most emphatically recommended to the consideration of
experts. In the domain of fashions they will make the most
remarkable psychiatrical discoveries.
I have devoted very much more space to the demonstration
of the senselessness of Nietzsche's so - called philosophical
system than the man and his system deserve. It would have
been enough simply to refer to the all-sufficient and expressive
fact that, after having been repeatedly confined in lunatic asylums,
he has for some years past been living as incurably mad in
the establishment of Professor Binswanger at Jena — ' the right
man in the right place.' It is true that a critic is of the
opinion that ' it is possible for mental darkness to extinguish
the clearest mental light ; for this reason its appearance cannot
with certitude be urged against the value and accuracy of what
anyone has taught before the appearance of his affliction.'
The answer to this is that Nietzsche wrote his most important
* Krafft-Ebing, Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 108. (A sexual-psychopath
thus writes) : ' I take great interest in art and literature. Among poets and
authors, those attract me most who describe refined feelings, peculiar passions
choice impressions : an artificial (or ultra-artificial) style pleases me. In
music, again, the nervous, stimulating music of a Chopin, a Schumann, a
Schubert [!], a Wagner, etc., appeal to me most. In art, all that is not only
original, but bizarre, attracts me.' P. 128 (another patient) : ' I am pas
sionately fond of music, and am an enthusiastic partisan of Richard Wagner
for whom I have remarked a predilection in most of us [sufferers from
contrary-sexual-feeling] ; I find that this music accords so very much with
our nature,' etc.
f See, in Paradoxe, the chapter on ' Evolutionistische ^Esthetik.'

EGO-MANIA 453
works between two detentions in a lunatic asylum, and hence
not ' before,' but ' after, the appearance of his affliction,' and
that the whole question hinges on the kind of mental disease
appealed to as proof of the senselessness of any doctrine. It
is clear that insanity caused by an accidental lesion of the
brain, by a fall, blow, etc., can prove nothing against the
accuracy of that which the patient may have taught previous
to his accident. But the case is different when the malady
is one which has undoubtedly existed in a latent condition
from birth, and can with certainty be proved from the works
themselves. Then it amply suffices to establish the fact that
the author is a Bedlamite, and his work the daubing of a
lunatic, and all further criticism, all efforts at rational refu
tation of individual inanities, become superfluous, and even
— at least, in the eyes of those who are competent — a little
ridiculous. And this is the case with Nietzsche. He is
obviously insane from birth, and his books bear on every page
the imprint of insanity. It may be cruel to insist on this fact*
It is, however, a painful, yet unavoidable, duty to refer to it
anew, because Nietzsche has become the means of raising a
mental pestilence, and the only hope of checking its propagation
lies in placing Nietzsche's insanity in the clearest light, and
in branding his disciples also with the marks most suited to
them, viz., as hysterical and imbecile.
Kaatzf affirms that Nietzsche's ' intellectual seed ' is every
where ' beginning to germinate. Now it is one of Nietzsche's
most incisive points which is chosen as the epigraph of a
modern tragedy, now one of his pregnant turns of expression
incorporated in the established usage of language. ... At
the present time one can . . . read hardly any essay touching
even lightly on the province of philosophy, without meeting
with the name of Nietzsche.' Now, that is certainly a calumnious
* Dr. Max Zerbst, Nein und J a I Leipzig, 1892, p. vii. : ' It is not impos
sible that this little book may fall into the hands of some who are nearly
connected with the invalid . . . whom every indelicate treatment of his
affliction must wound most deeply.' The very last person having the right
to complain of indelicate treatment, and to demand consideration, is surely
a partisan of Nietzsche's, who claims for himself the 'joy in wishing to
cause woe,' and 'grand unscrupulousness ' as the 'privilege of the over-man'!
Zerbst calls his book a reply to that by Dr. Hermann Tiirck ; but it is
nothing but a childishly obstinate and insolent repetition of all Nietzsche's
assertions, the insanity of which has been proved by Dr. Tiirck. It is
exceedingly droll that Zerbst, appealing to a feeble compilation by Ziehen,
wishes to demonstrate to Tiirck that there are no such things as psychoses
of the will. Now, Tiirck has not said a single word about a psychosis of the
will in Nietzsche ; but Nietzsche, indeed, in Frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 270,
does speak of ' monstrous disease of the will,' and of a ' will-disease.' Zerbsi's
objection, therefore, applies, not to Tiirck, but to his own master — Nietzsche.
t Dr. Hugo Kaatz, op. cit, pt. i., p. 6.

454 DEGENERATION
exaggeration. Things are not quite so bad as that. The only
' philosophers ' who have hitherto taken Nietzsche's insane
drivel seriously are those whom I have above named the
' fops ' of philosophy. But the number of these ' fops ' is, as
a matter of fact, increasing in a disquieting way, and their
effrontery surpasses anything ever witnessed.
It is, of course, unnecessary to say that Georges Brandes
has numbered himself among Nietzsche's apostles. We know,
indeed, that this ingenious person winds himself around every
human phenomenon in whom he scents a possible prima-
donna, in order to draw from her profit for himself as the im
presario of her fame. He gave lectures in Copenhagen on
Nietzsche, 'and declaimed in words of enthusiasm about this
German prophet, for whom Mill's morality is nothing but a
.diseased symptom of a degenerate age; this radical "aristocrat,"
who degrades to the rank of slave-revolts all the great popular
movements in history for freedom — the Reformation, the
French Revolution, modern socialism — and dares to assert
that the millions on millions of individuals composing the
nations exist only for the purpose of producing, a few times in
each century, a great personality.'*
A series of imitators are eagerly busying themselves to
make Nietzsche their model, whether in clearing the throat
or in expectorating. His treatise Schopenhauer als Erzieher
(Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen, 3 Stiick) has found a monstrous
travesty in Rembrandt als Erzieher. True, the imbecile author
of the latter parody could not imitate Nietzsche's gushing
redundancy of verbiage and the mad leaps of the maniac's
thought. This symptom of disease it were indeed hardly
possible to simulate; but he has appropriated as his own
the word - quibbling, the senseless echolalia of his model,
and endeavours also stammeringly to imitate, as well as his
small means allow, Nietzsche's megalomaniacal and criminal
individualism. Albert Kniepf,f another imbecile, has been
smitten chiefly by Nietzsche's affected superiority, and with
princely mien and gestures struts about in the most diverting
manner. He calls himself ' a man of superior taste and more
refined feeling ' ; he speaks contemptuously of the ' profane
daily bustle of the masses ' ; sees ' the world beneath him ' and
himself ' exalted above the world of the multitude ' ; he does
not wish to ' go into the streets, and squander his wisdom on
everyone,' etc., quite in the style of Zarathustra, the dweller
* Ola Hansson, Das junge Skandinavien. Vier Essays. Dresden und
Leipzig, 1891, p. 12.
t Albert Kniepf, Theorie der Geisteswerthe. Leipzig, 1892.

EGO-MANIA 455
on the highest peaks. The already mentioned Dr. Max Zerbst
affects, like Nietzsche, to regard himself as terrible, and to
believe that his opponents tremble before him. When he
makes them speak he puts whimpering tones into their
mouths,* and he enjoys with cruelly superior scorn the mortal
fear with which he inspires them. In a maniac this attitude
is natural and excites pity. But when a fellow like this Dr.
Max Zerbst assumes it, it produces an irresistibly comic effect,
and calls to remembrance the young man with the weak legs
in Pickwick, who 'believes in blood alone,' 'will have blood.'
Zerbst dares to utter the words ' natural science ' and ' psycho-
physiology.' That is an agreement among Nietzsche's dis
ciples : they pass off the insane word-spouter whom they
worship for a psycho-physiologist and a physicist ! Ola
Hansson speaks of Nietzsche's 'psycho-physiological intui
tion ' ! and in another place says : ' With Nietzsche, that
modern subtle psychologist, who possesses in the highest
degree psycho-physical intuition [again], that peculiar power
of the end of the nineteenth century, of listening to and
spying out all the secret processes and hidden corners in itself,'
etc. ' Psycho-physical intuition 1' ' Listening to and spying out
itself!' Our very eyes deceive us. These men, therefore, have
no suspicion of what constitutes 'psycho-physics/ they do not
suspect that it is the exact contrary of ancient psychology,
which dealt with 'intuition' and introspection, i.e., 'listening
to one's self and 'spying out one's self; that it patiently
counts and mixes with the apparatus in laboratories, and ' spies
and listens to,' not itself, but its experimentists and instru
ments ! And such babble of brainless parrots, who chatter
in repetition the words they accidentally hear, without compre
hending them, is able to make its way in Germany, the creator
of the new science of psycho-physiology, the fatherland of
Fechner, Weber, Wundt ! And no professional has rapped
with a ruler the knuckles of these youths, whose fabulous
ignorance is surpassed only by their impudence !
But worse still has befallen — something at which all jesting
really ceases. Kurt Eisner, who it is true does not agree with
Nietzsche's ' philosophy,' is, nevertheless, of the opinion that
* Dr. Max Zerbst, op. cit , p. i : ' O, this modern natural science ! these
modern psychologists ! Nothing is sacred to them !' ' When a man, grown
up in the school of sickly " idealism," confronts a cruel savant of this kind
. . . this godless man takes a small piece of chalk in his hand,' etc. He
' turns to the nonplussed idealist.' and the latter somewhat timidly answers,
and 'adds something sorrowfully,' whereupon ' the young psychologist replies,
with a gentle shrug of his shoulders.' Quite so ! the 'cruel,' the 'godless,'
the ' shoulder-shrugging ' young psychologist is himself, Zerbst ; the whimper
ing idealist, the ' timid ' and ' sorrowful ' speaker and questioner is his
opponent, Dr. Tiirck !

456 DEGENERATION
he has ' bequeathed us some powerful poems/* and goes so
far as to make use of this unheard-of expression : ' Nietzsche's
Zarathustra is a work of art like Faust! The question first of
all obtruding itself is : Has Kurt Eisner at any time read a
line of Faust ? This, I take it, must be answered in the affirm
ative, for it is hardly conceivable that at this time of day there
is in Germany any adult, seemingly able to read and write, into
whose hands Faust has not fallen at some time or other. Then
there remains only one other question : What may Kurt Eisner
have understood of Faust ? To name in the same breath the
senseless spirting jet of words of a Zarathustra with Faust is
such a defilement of our most precious poetical treasure that
verily if a man of any greater importance than Kurt Eisner
had perpetrated it there had been need of an expiatory festival
to atone for the insult to Goethe, even as the Church newly
consecrates a place of worship when it has been profaned by a
sacrilegious act.
Not only in Germany is the Nietzsche gang working mis
chief ; it is also infesting other lands. Ola Hansson,f already
mentioned, entertains his Swedish fellow-countrymen most
enthusiastically with 'Nietzsche's Poetry' and 'Nietzsche's
Midnight Hymn'; T. de WysewaJ assures the French, who
are not in the position to prove the accuracy of his assertions,
that ' Nietzsche is the greatest thinker and most brilliant
author produced by Germany in the last generation,' etc.
It has, nevertheless, been reserved to a lady to beat the
male disciples of Nietzsche, in the audacious denial of the
most openly manifest truth. This feminine partisan of
Nietzsche, Lou Salome\ with a cool imperturbability fit to
take away the breath of the most callous spectator, turns her
back on the fact that Nietzsche has for years been confined
in a lunatic asylum, and proclaims with brazen brow that
Nietzsche, from the aristocratic contempt of the world belong
ing to the ' over-human/ has voluntarily ceased to write, and
withdrawn himself into solitude. Nietzsche is a man of science
and a psycho-physiologist, and Nietzsche keeps silence, because
he no longer finds it worth the trouble to speak to the men of
the herd; these are the catch-words cried aloud throughout
the world by the Nietzsche band. In the face of such a con
spiracy against truth, honesty, sound reason, it is not enough
to have proved the senselessness of Nietzsche's system, it must
* Kurt Eisner, Psychopathia spiritualis. Friedrich Nietzsche und die
Apostel der Zukunft. Leipzig, i8y2.
t Ola Hansson, Malerialisimen i Skonlitteraturen, Popular-vetenskapliea
[scientific!] Afhandhngar. Stockholm, undated, pp. 28, 50. In this brochure
Hansson also designates the author of Rembrandt als Erzieher &s a ' genius ' 1 '
X Revue politique et littdraire, annee 1891.

EGO-MANIA 457
also be shown that Nietzsche has always been insane, and that
his writings are the abortions of frenzy (more exactly, of
' maniacal exaltation ').
A few followers of Nietzsche, undoubtedly not fit to hold a
candle to Lou Salome^ do not contest the fact of Nietzsche's
insanity, but say that he became insane because he with
drew himself too much from men, because he lived too long
in the deepest solitude, because his speed of thought was so
ruinously, unnaturally rapid. This unheard-of idiocy could
circulate throughout the entire German press, and yet not a
single newspaper had the gumption to remark that insanity
can never be the consequence of solitude and too speedy
thought, but that, on the contrary, a propensity for solitude
and vertiginously rapid thought are the primary and best
known signs' of existing insanity, and that this prattle of
Nietzsche's partisans is, perhaps, of equal force with the asser
tion that someone had contracted lung disease through cough
ing and haemorrhage !
For Nietzsche's ' anthropophobia ' we have the evidence of
his biographers, who cite curious examples of it.* His rapid
thought, however, is a phenomenon never absent in frenzied
madness. That the unprofessional reader may know what he
is to understand by this, we will present him with the clinical
picture of this form of insanity traced by the hand of the most
authoritative masters.
' The acceleration of the course of thought in mania,' says
Griesinger, ' is a consequence of the facilitation of the con
nection between representations, where the patient humbugs,
romances, declaims, sings, calls into service all the modes of
exteriorizing ideas, rambles incoherently from one topic to
another, the ideas hurtling against and overthrowing each
other. The same acceleration of ideation is found in certain
forms of dementia and in secondary psychical enfeeblement,
" with activity produced by hallucinations." The logical
concatenations are not in this case intact, as in argumentation
and hypochondriacal dementia ; or the precipitate sequence of
representations no longer follows any law; or, again, only
words and sounds devoid of meaning succeed each other with
impetuous haste. . . . Thus there arises ... a ceaseless chase
* 'During his sojourn of several years in the solitary mountainous district
of Sils Maria ... he was in the habit ... of lying on a verdant neck of
land stretching into the lake. One spring he returned, to find, on the con
secrated [!] spot, a seat, on which trivial folk might rest, in the place hitherto
peopled only by his most secret thoughts and visions. And the sight of this
all too human [!] structure was enough to render the beloved place of sojourn
insupportable to him. He never set foot there again.' — Ola Hansson, quoted
from Dr. Hermann Tiirck, op. cit, p. io.

458 DEGENERATION
of ideas, in the torrent of which all is borne away in pell-
mell flight. The latter conditions appear chiefly in raving
madness ; at its inception especially, a greater mental vivacity
often manifests itself, and cases have been observed where
the fact that the patient became witty was a sure sign of the
imminence of an attack of frenzy.'*
Still more graphic is the description given by Krafft-Ebing. f
' The content of consciousness is here [in ' maniacal exalta
tion '] pleasure, psychical well-being. It is just as little induced
by events ofthe external world as the opposite state of psychical
pain in melancholia, and is, therefore, referable to an inner
organic cause only. The patient literally revels in feelings of
pleasure, and declares, after recovery, that never, when in
good health, has he felt so contented, so buoyant, so happy,
as during his illness. This spontaneous pleasure undergoes
powerful increments . . . through the perception by the
patient of the facilitated processes of ideation . . . through
the intensive accentuation of ideas by feelings of pleasure and
by agreeable ccenasstheses, especially in the domain of muscular
sensation. ... In this way the cheerful mood temporarily
exalts itself to the height of pleasurable emotions (gay extrava
gance, exuberance), which find their motor exteriorization in
songs, dances, leaps. . . . The patient becomes more plastic in
his diction . . . his faculties of conception act more rapidly,
and, in accelerated association, he is at once more prompt in
repartee, witty and humorous to the point of irony. The
plethora of his consciousness supplies him with inexhaustible
material for talk, and the enormous acceleration of his ideation,
in which there spring up complete intermediate forms with
the rapidity of thought, without undergoing exteriorization
in speech, causes his current of ideas, in so far as they find
expression, to seem rambling. ... He continually exercises
criticism in respect of his own condition, and proves that he
is himself aware of his abnormal state by . . . claiming, among
other things, that he is only a fool, and that to such everything
is permissible. . . . The invalid cannot find words enough to
depict his maniacal well-being, his " primordial health." '
And now every individual feature of this picture of disease
shall be pointed out in Nietzsche's writings. (I repeat my
previous remark, that I am compelled to limit myself in citing
examples, but that literally on every page of Nietzsche's writing
examples of the same kind are to be found.)
His ccenaestheses, or systemic sensations, continually inspire
* Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger, op. cit , p. 77.
t Dr. von Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der Psychiatric auf klinischer Grund-
lage jiir praktische Aerlze und Studirende. Vierte theilweise umgearbeitete
Auflage. Stuttgart, 1890, p. 363^

EGO-MANIA 459
him with presentations of laughter, dancing, flying, buoyancy,
generally of movement ofthe gayest and easiest kind — of rolling,
flowing, plunging. ' Let us guard ourselves from immediately
making gloomy faces at the word " torture "... even there
something remains for laughter.' 'We are prepared for a
carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual carnival-
laughter and exuberance, for the transcendental height of the
most exalted idiocy and Aristophanic derision of the universe.
. . . Perhaps if nothing else of to-day has a future, our very
laughter still has a future.' ' I would even permit myself to
classify philosophers according to the quality of their laughter
— up to those capable of golden laughter [!]... The gods
are jocular. It seems as if, even in sacred deeds, they could
not forbear laughing.' ' Ah ! what are ye then, ye written and
painted thoughts of mine ? It is not long since ye were so
fantastic, so young and naughty . . . that ye made me sneeze
and laugh.' ' Now the world laughs, the dismal veil is rent.'
' It is laughter that kills, not wrath. Come, let us kill the
spirit of heaviness !' ' Truly there are beings chaste by nature ;
they are milder in heart ; they laugh more agreeably and
copiously than ye. They laugh as well over chastity, and ask,
What is chastity ?' ' Had He [Jesus Christ] remained in the
desert, perhaps He would have learned to live and to love the
earth — and to laugh besides.' ' The tension of my cloud was
too great ; between the laughters of the lightnings I will cast
hail-showers into the deep.' ' To-day my shield quivered
gently and laughed at me ; that is the holy laughter and tremor
of beauty.'
It will be seen that in all these cases the idea of laughter
has no logical connection with the real thought ; it is far rather
an accompaniment of his intellection as a basic state, as a
chronic obsession, having its explanation in the maniacal
excitation of the centres of ideation. It is the same with the
presentations of dancing, flying, etc. ' I should only believe
in a god who knew how to dance.' ' Truly, Zarathustra is no
hurricane and whirlwind ; and if he is a dancer, yet is he by
no means a dancer of the tarantella.' ' And once upon a time
I wished to dance, as I never yet have danced ; away over the
whole heaven did I wish to dance. . . . Only in the dance do
I know of parables for the highest things.' ' I found this
blessed security in all things also : that on the feet of chance
they preferred — to dance. O thou heaven above me, O pure !
O sublime ! thy purity is now for me . . . that thou art a
dancing-floor for divine chances.' ' Ask of my foot . . . truly
after such a rhythm, such a tick-tack, it likes neither to dance
nor rest.' ' And, above all, I learned to stand and walk and
run and leap and climb and dance.' ' It is a fine fool's jest

460 DEGENERATION
this, of speech; thanks to it, man dances over all things.'
' O my soul, I taught thee to say " to-day," as well as " once "
and " formerly," and to dance thy measure over all the " here "
and "there" and "yonder." Thou castest thy glance at my
foot crazy for the dance.' ' If my virtue is a dancer's virtue,
and I often bounded with both feet into a rapture of golden
emerald,' etc.
(' A state of mind he experienced with horror :') ' A perpetual
movement between high and deep, and the feeling of high and
deep, a constant feeling as if mounting steps, and at the same
moment as if reposing on clouds.' ' Is there, indeed, one thing
alone that remains uncomprehended by it . . . that only in
flight is it touched, beheld, lightened upon ?' ' All my will
would fly alone, would fly into thee.' ' Ready and impatient to
fly, to fly away ; that is now my nature.' ' My wise longing
cried out from me, and laughed also . . . my great longing,
with rushing wings. And often it dragged me forth, and away
in the midst of my laughter ; then, indeed, I flew shuddering
. . . thither, where gods dance, ashamed of all clothes.' ' If
I ever spread still heavens above me, and with my own wings
flew in my own heavens. ... If my malice is a laughing
malice . . . and if my Alpha and Omega is that all heaviness
may become light, all body a dancer, all spirit a bird ; and
verily that is my Alpha and Omega,' etc.
In the examples hitherto cited the insane ideas are mainly in
the sphere of movement. In those that follow it is excitations
of the sensorial centres that find expression. Nietzsche has
all sorts of illusions of skin-sensibility (cold, warmth, being
breathed upon), of sight (lustre, lightning, brightness), of hear
ing (rushing, roaring), and of smell, which he mixes up in his
fugitive ideation. ' I am too hot and burnt with my own
thoughts.' ' Ah ! ice surrounds me ; my hand is burnt by
iciness.' ' The sun of my love lay brooding upon me ; Zaras-
thustra was stewing in his own juice.' ' Take" care that there
be honey ready to my hand . . . good, icy-fresh, golden honey
comb.' ' Into the coldest water I plunged with head and
heart.' 'There I am sitting . . . lusting for a maiden's round
mouth, but still more for maidenly, icy -cold, snow-white,
cutting, biting teeth.' ' For I deal with deep problems as with
a cold bath — soon into it, soon out of it. '. . . Ho ! the great
cold quickens.' 'Over thy surging sea I blew with the storm
that is called spirit ; I blew from it all clouds.' ' To their
bodies and to their spirits our happiness would be as ice-
caverns ! and, like strong winds, we will live above them
and like a wind will I once blow among them.'
' I am light ... but this is my loneliness, that I am en
girdled with light. ... I live in my own light ; I drink back
into myself the flames that break forth from me.'

EGO-MANIA 461
' Mute over the roaring sea art thou this day arisen for me.'
' They divine nothing from the roaring of my happiness.'
' Sing, and riot in roaring, O Zarathustra !' ' Almost too
fiercely for me thou dost gush forth, well-spring of joy . . .
too violently doth my heart gush forth to meet thee.' ' My
desire now breaks forth from me like a fountain.'
' There is often an odour in her wisdom, as if it came forth
from a swamp.' ' Alas ! that I should have so long lived in
the midst of their noise and foul breath. O blessed stillness
around me !' O pure odours around me ! ' That was the false
hood in my pity, that in each I saw and smelt what was mind
enough for him. . . . With blissful nostrils again I breathed the
freedom of the mountain ! My nose is at length redeemed from
the odour of all that is human !' ' Bad air ! bad air ! . . .
Why must I smell the entrails of a misguided soul?' 'This
workshop, where ideals are manufactured, meseems it stinks of
nothing but lies.' ' We avoided the rabble . . . the stink of
shopkeepers . . . the foul breath.' ' This rabble, that stinks
to heaven.' ' O odours pure around me ! . . . These crowds
of superior men — perhaps they do not smell nice,' etc.
As these examples show, Nietzsche's thought receives its
special colouring from his sense illusions, and from the excita
tion of the centres forming motor presentations, which, in
consequence of a derangement of the mechanism of co
ordination, are not transformed into motor impulses, but
remain as mere images, without influence on the muscles.
In respect of form, Nietzsche's thought makes the two
characteristic peculiarities of madness perceptible : the sole
domination of the association of ideas, watched over and re
strained by no attention, no logic, no judgment ; and the
giddy rapidity of the course of ideation.
As soon as any idea whatsoever springs up in Nietzsche's
mind, it immediately draws with it into consciousness all
presentations related to it, and thus with flying hand he
throws five, six, often eight, synonyms on paper, without
noticing how overladen and turgid his literary style is thereby
rendered : ' The force of a mind measures itself ... by the
degree to which it is obliged to attenuate, veil, sweeten, damp,
falsify the truth.' ' We are of the opinion that severity,
violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, conceal
ment, stoicism, the tempter's art and devilry of every kind ; that
all things wicked, fearful, tyrannical, bestial, and serpent-like
in man, are of as much service in the elevation of the species
" man " as their opposites. He knows ... on what miserable
things the loftiest Becoming has hitherto been shattered,'
snapped off, has fallen away, become miserable.' ' In man
there is material, fragment, surplus, clay, mud, nonsense,
chaos ; but in man there is also creator, constructor, hammer-

462 DEGENERATION
hardness, divinity- of-the-beholder, and the seventh day. . . .
That which for this one must be formed, broken, forged,
torn, burnt, made red-hot, purified.' ' It would sound more
courteous if ... an unrestrained honesty were related,
whispered, and praised (nachsagte, nachraunte, nachriihmte) of
us.' ' Spit upon the town . . . where swarms all that is
rotten, tainted, lustful, gloomy, worm-eaten, ulcerous, seditious.'
' We forebode that it is ever growing downwards into the
more attenuated, more debonnaire, more artful, more easy
going, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more
Christian.' ' All these pallid Atheists, Anti-Christians, Im-
moralists, Nihilists, Sceptics, Ephectics, Hectics of the mind/
etc. From these examples, the attentive reader must have already
remarked that the tumultuous rush of words frequently results
from the merest resemblance in sound. Not seldom does the
riot of words degenerate into paltry quibbling, into the silliest
pun, into the automatic association of words according to their
sound, without regard to their meaning. ' If this turn (Wende)
in all the need (Noth) is called necessity (Nothwendigkeit).'
' Thus ye boast (brustet) of yourselves — alas ! even without
breasts (Brilste)! ' There is much pious lick-spittle-work
(Speichel - Leckerie), baking - of- flattery (Schmeichel - Bdckerei)
before the Lord of Hosts.' ' Spit upon the great town, which
is the great slum (Abraum), where all the scum (Abschaum)
froths together (zusammanschdumt)! ' Here and there there is
nothing to better (bessem), nothing to worsen (bosern).' ' What
have they to do there, far-seeing (weitsichtige) , far-seeking
(weit-siichtige) eyes?' 'In such processions (Ziigen) goats
(Ziegen) and geese, and the strong-headed and the wrong-
headed (Kreuz und Querkopfe), were always running on before.
. . . O, Will, turn of all need (Wende aller Noth) ! O thou my
necessity (Nothwendigkeit) !' ' Thus I look afar over the creep
ing and swarming of little gray waves (Wellen) and wills
(Willen)! 'This seeking (Suchen) for my home was the visita
tion (Heimsuchung) of me.' ' Did not the world become perfect,
round and ripe (reif) ? O for the golden round ring (Reif) !'
' Yawns (Klafft) the abyss here too ? Yelps (Klafft) the dog of
hell here too ?' ' It stultifies, brutalizes (verthiert), and trans
forms into a bull (verstiert) .' ' Life is at least (mindestens), at
the mildest (mildestens), an exploiting.' ' Whom I deemed
transformed akin to myself (verwandt-verwandelt) ,' etc.
Nietzsche, in the wild hurry of his thought, many a time
fails to comprehend the scintillating word-images elaborated in
his centres of speech ; his consciousness, as it were, hears
wrongly, misses its aim in interpreting, and invents wondrous
neologisms, which sound like known expressions, but have no

EGO-MANIA 463
sort of fellowship in meaning with these. He speaks, for
example, of Hinterweltlern (inhabitants of remote worlds) from
Hinterwdldlern (backwoodsmen), of a Kesselbauche (kettle's
belly) when he is thinking of Kesselpauche (kettledrum), etc. ;
or he even repeats, as his centres of speech prompt, wholly
incomprehensible, meaningless sounds. ' Then I went to the
door : Alpa ! I cried, who is carrying his ashes to the moun
tain ? Alpa ! Alpa ! who is carrying his ashes to the moun
tain ?'
He frequently associates his ideas, not according to the
sound of the word, but according to the similarity or habitual
contiguity of the concepts ; then there arise ' analogous ' intel
lection and the fugitive ideation, in which, to use Griesinger's
expression, he ' rambles incoherently from one topic to
another.' Speaking of the ' ascetic ideal/ e.g., he elaborates
the idea that strong and noble spirits take refuge in the desert,
and, without any connection, adds : ' Of course, too, they
would not want for camels there.' The representation of the
desert has irresistibly drawn after it the representation of
camels, habitually associated with it. At another time he
says : ' Beasts of prey and men of prey, e.g., Caesar Borgia,
are radically misunderstood ; Nature is misunderstood so long
as a fundamental diseased condition is sought for in these
healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths. It seems that
there is among moralists a hatred against the primeval forest
and against the tropics, and that the tropical man must, at any
price, be discredited. But why ? For the benefit of the
temperate zone ? For the benefit of the temperate (moderate)
men ? Of the mediocre ?' In this case the contemplation of
Caesar Borgia forces upon him the comparison with a beast of
prey ; this makes him think of the tropics, the torrid zone ;
from the torrid zone he comes to the temperate zone, from
this to the ' temperate ' man, and, through the similarity of
sound, to the ' mediocre ' man (in German, gem'dssigt and
mittelmdssig). ' In truth nothing remains of the world but green twilight
and green lightnings. Do as it pleases ye, ye wantons . . .
shake your emeralds down into the deepest depth.' The
quite incomprehensible ' emeralds ' are called up into con
sciousness by the representation of the ' green ' twilight and
lightnings. In this and hundreds of other cases the course of ideation
can, to a certain extent, be followed, because all the links in
the chain of association are preserved. It often happens,
however, that some of these links are suppressed, and then
there occur leaps of thought, incomprehensible, and, conse
quently, bewildering to the reader : ' It was the body who

464 DEGENERATION
despaired of the earth, who heard the belly of being speaking
to itself.' ' More honestly and more purely speaks the healthy
body, the perfect and rectangular.' ' I am polite towards
them as towards all petty vexation ; to be prickly against petti
ness seems to me wisdom for hedgehogs.' 'Deep yellow and
hot red ; so would my taste have it. This one mixes blood in
all colours. He who whitewashes his house betrays to me
his whitewashed soul.' ' We placed our seat in the midst —
so their smirking tells me — and as far from dying gladiators as
from contented pigs. But this is mediocrity.' ' Our Europe
of to-day is . . . sceptic ... at one time with that mobile
scepticism which leaps impatiently and wantonly from branch
to branch, at another gloomy as a cloud overladen with notes
of interrogation.' ' Let us grant that he [the ' courageous
thinker'] has long enough hardened and pricked up his eye
for himself.' (Here the representation of 'ear' and 'pricked-
up ears ' has evidently crossed with confusing effect the associ
ated idea of ' eye.') ' It is already too much for me to keep
my opinions to myself, and many a bird flies away. And some
times I find flown into my dovecot an animal that is strange
to me, and that trembles when I lay my hand on it.' ' What
matters my justice ? I do not see that I should be fire and
coal.' ' They learned from the sea its vanity, too ; is the sea
not the peacock of peacocks ?' ' How many things now go by
the name of the greatest wickedness, which are only twelve
feet wide and three months long ! But greater dragons will
one day come into the world.' ' And if all ladders now fail
thee, then must thou understand how to mount on thine own
head ; how wouldst thou mount otherwise ?' ' Here I sit,
sniffing the best air, the very air of Paradise, luminous, light
air, rayed with gold ; as good an air as ever yet fell from the
moon.' ' Ha ! up dignity ! Virtue's dignity ! European
dignity ! Blow, blow again, bellows of virtue ! Ha ! roar once
more, morally roar ! As a moral lion roar before the daughters
of the desert ! For virtue's howl, ye dearest maidens, is more
than all European fervour, European voraciousness ! And here
am I, already a European ; I cannot otherwise, God help me !
Amen ! The desert grows, woe to him who hides deserts !'
The last passage is an example of complete fugitive ideation.
Nietzsche often loses the clue, no longer knows what he is
driving at, and finishes a sentence which began as if to
develop into an argument, with a sudden stray jest. ' Why
should the world, which somewhat concerns us, not be a
fiction ? And to him who objects : " But a fiction must have
an author," could not the reply be roundly given : Why ?
Does not this " must " perhaps belong also to the fiction ? Is
it not permissible to be at last a little ironical towards the

EGO-MANIA 465
subject as well as towards the predicate and object ? Ought
not the philosopher to rise above a belief in grammar ? With
all respect for governesses [!], is it not time that philosophy
should renounce its faith in governesses ?' ' " One is always too
many about me," so thinks the hermit. One times one to
infinity at last makes two !' ' What, then, do they call that
which makes them proud ? They name it culture ; it distin
guishes them from the goat-herds.'
Finally, the connection of the associated representations
suddenly snaps, and he breaks off in the midst of a sentence
to begin a new one : ' For in religion the passions have once
more rights of citizenship, provided that.' ' The psychologists
of France . . . have not yet enjoyed to the full their bitter
and manifold pleasure in la bitise bourgeoise, in a manner as if
— enough ; they betray something thereby.' ' There have been
philosophers who knew how to lend yet another seductive . . .
expression to this admiration of the people . . . instead of
adducing the naked and thoroughly obvious truth, that disin
terested conduct is very interesting and interested conduct,
provided that  And love ?'
This is the form of Nietzsche's intellection, sufficiently ex
plaining why he has never set down three coherent pages, but
only more or less short ' aphorisms.'
The content of this incoherent fugitive ideation is formed by
a small number of insane ideas, continually repeating them
selves with exasperating monoton)-. We have already become
acquainted with Nietzsche's intellectual Sadism, and his mania
of contradiction and doubt, or mania for questioning. In
addition to these he evinces misanthropy, or anthropophobia,
megalomania, and mysticism.
His anthropophobia expresses itself in numberless passages :
' Knowledge is no longer sufficiently loved as soon as it is com
municated.' ' Every community leads somehow, somewhen,
somewhere — to vulgarity.' ' There are still many void places
for the lonesome and twosome [!] around which wafts the
odour of tranquil seas.' ' Flee, my friend, into thy lonesome-
ness !' ' And many a one who turned away from life, only
turned away from the rabble . . . and many a one who went
into the desert and suffered thirst with the beasts of prey, only
wished not to sit with filthy camel-drivers about the tank.'
His megalomania appears only exceptionally as monstrous
self-conceit ; but it is, nevertheless, clearly conceivable ; as a
rule it displays a strong and even predominant union of
mysticism and supernaturalism. It is pure self-conceit when
he says : ' In that which concerns my "Zarathustra," I accept
no one as a connoisseur whom each of his words has not at
some time deeply wounded and deeply enraptured ; only then
3°

466 DEGENERATION
can he enjoy the privilege of reverentially participating in the
halcyon element out of which every work is born, in its sunny
brightness, distance, breadth, and certainty.' Or when, after
having criticised and belittled Bismarck, he cries, with trans
parent allusion to himself: 'But I, in my happiness and my
" beyond," pondered how soon the stronger becomes master of
the strong.' On the other hand, the hidden, mystic, primary
idea of his megalomania already distinctly comes out in this
passage : ' But at some given time * . . must he neverthe
less come, the redeeming man of great love and contempt,
the creative spirit who his impulsive strength is ever driving
away out of all that is apart and beyond, whose loneliness is
misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality.
It is only his immersion, interment, absorption [three synonyms
for one concept !] into reality, in order that at some time,
if he again comes into the light, he may bring home the
redemption of this reality.'
The nature of his megalomania is betrayed by the expressions
* redeeming man ' and ' redemption.' He imagines himself a
new Saviour, and plagiarizes the Gospel in form and substance.
Also Sprach Zarathustra is a complete stereotype of the sacred
writings of Oriental nations. The book aims at an external
resemblance to the Bible and Koran. It is divided into chap
ters and verses ; the language is the archaic and prophetic
language of the books of Revelation (' And Zarathustra looked
at the people, and was astonished. Then he spake and said
thus : ') ; there frequently appear long enumerations and ser
mons like litanies (' I love those who do not seek a reason only
behind the stars . . . ; I love him who lives to know . . . ; I
love him who labours and invents . . . ; I love him who loves
his virtue . . . ; I love him who withholds for himself not one
drop, of mind,' etc.), and individual paragraphs point verbatim
to analogous portions of the Gospel, e.g. : ' When Zarathustra
had taken leave of the city . . . there followed him many who
called themselves his disciples and bore him company. Thus
they came to a cross-road; then said Zarathustra unto
them, that thenceforth he would go alone.' ' And the
happiness of the spirit is this : to be anointed by tears and
consecrated as a beast of sacrifice.' ' Verily, said he to his
disciples, yet a little and there comes this long twilight. Ah !
how shall I save my light ?' ' In this manner did Zarathustra
go about, sore at heart, and for three days took no food or
drink. ... At length it came to pass that he fell into a deep
sleep. And his disciples sat around him in long night-watches,'
etc. Many of the chapters have most expressive titles : ' On
Self-Conquest ; ' 'On Immaculate Knowledge ; ' 'On Great
Events; ' ' On the Redemption ; ' ' On the Mount of Olives;'

EGO-MANIA 467
' On Apostates ; ' ' The Cry of Sore Need ; ' ' The Last Sup
per ; ' ' The Awakening,' etc. Sometimes, it is true, it befalls
him to say, atheistically : ' If there were gods, how could I
endure to be no god ? Hence ' (italics his) ' there are no gods ; '
but such passages vanish among the countless ones in which
he refers to himself as a god. ' Thou hast the power and thou
wilt not reign.' ' He who is of my nature escapes not such an
hour — the hour which says to him : Only now art thou going
the way of thy greatness. . . . Thou art entering on the way
of thy greatness ; that which has hitherto been thy last danger
has now become thy last resource. Thou art entering on the
way of thy greatness ; now must thy best courage be, that
there is no longer any way behind thee. Thou art going on
the way of thy greatness ; here shall no one slink behind
thee/ etc.
Nietzsche's mysticism and megalomania manifest them
selves not only in his somewhat more coherent thought, but
also in his general mode of expression. The mystic numbers,
three and seven, frequently appear. He sees the external
world, as he does himself — vast, distant, deep ; and the
words expressing these concepts are repeated on every page,
almost in every line : ' The discipline of suffering, of great
suffering . . .' 'The South is a great school of healing.'
' These last great searchers . . .' ' With the signs of great
destiny.' ' Where together with great compassion he has
learnt great contempt — to learn, at their side, great reverence.'
' Guilt is all great existence.' ' That I may celebrate the great
noon with you.' ' Thus speaks all great love.' ' Not from you
is great weariness to come to me.' ' Men who are nothing but
a great eye, or a great mouth, or a great belly, or something
great . . .' 'To love with great love, to love with great
contempt.' ' But thou, O depth, thou sufferest too deeply.'
' Immovable is my depth, but it gleams with floating enigmas
and laughters.' (It is to be observed how, in this sentence, all
the obsessions of the maniac crowd together — depth, brilliancy,
mania of doubt, hilarious excitation.) 'All depth shall ascend
to my height.' ' They do not think enough into the deep,' etc.
With the idea of depth is connected that of abyss, which recurs
with equal constancy. The words ' abyss ' and ' abysmal ' are
among the most frequent in Nietzsche's writings. His words
which have the prefix ' over ' are associated with his motor
images, especially those of flying and hovering: 'Over-moral
sense ' ; ' over - European music ' ; ' climbing monkeys and
over-heated ' ; ' from the species to the over-species ' ; ' the
over - hero ' ; ' the over - human ' ; ' the over - dragon ' ; ' the
over-urgent ' and ' over-compassionate,' etc.
As is general in frenzied madness, Nietzsche is conscious of

468 DEGENERATION
his diseased interior processes, and in countless places alludes
to the furiously rapid outflow of his ideation and to his in
sanity : ' That true philosophic reunion of a bold, unrestrained
mentality, running presto . . . They regard thought as some
thing slow, hesitant, almost a toil ; not at all as something
light, divine, and nearest of kin to the dance, to exuberance.'
' The bold, light, tender march and flight of his thought.'
' We think too rapidly. ... It is as if we carried about in
our head an incessantly rolling machine.' ' It is in impatient
spirits that there breaks out a veritable pleasure in insanity,
because insanity has so joyous a tempo! ' All talking runs too
slowly for me ; I leap into thy chariot, Storm ! . . . Like a
cry and a huzza would I glide away over vast seas.' ' Eruptive
insanity forever hovers above humanity as its greatest danger.'
(He is, of course, thinking of himself when speaking of
'humanity.') 'In these days it sometimes happens that a
gentle, temperate, self-contained man becomes suddenly
frenzied, breaks plates, upsets the table, shrieks, rages, offends
everyone, and finally retires in shame and anger against him
self.' (Most decidedly 'that sometimes happens,' not only 'in
these days,' but in all times ; but among maniacs only.)
' Where is the insanity with which ye were forced to be
inoculated ? Behold, I teach you the over-man, who is . . .
this insanity.' ' All things are worth the same ; each is alike.
He who feels otherwise goes voluntarily [?] into a madhouse.'
' I put this exuberance and this foolishness in the place of that
will, as I taught ; in all one thing is impossible — reasonable
ness.' ' My hand is a fool's hand ; woe to all tables and walls,
and wherever there is yet room for the embellishments of fools
— scribbling of fools !' (In the original there is here a play on
the words Zierrath, Schmierrath!)* He also, in the manner of
maniacs, excuses his mental disease : ' Finally, there would
remain open the great question whether we could dispense with
disease even for the development of our virtue, and especially
if our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge needed the
sick soul as much as the healthy soul'
Finally, he is not even wanting in the maniacal idea of his
'primaeval health.' His soul is 'always clearer and always
healthier ' ; * we Argonauts of the ideal ' are ' healthier than
one would fain allow us to be— dangerously healthy, more and
more healthy,' etc.
The foregoing is a necessarily condensed summary of the
special colour, form, and content of Nietzsche's thought,
originating in illusions of sense ; and this unhappy lunatic has
been earnestly treated as a 'philosopher,' and his drivel put
forward as a * system '—this man whose scribbling is one
* Translator.

EGO-MANIA 469
single long divagation, in whose writings madness shrieks out
from every line ! Dr. Kirchner, a philosopher by profession,
and the author of numerous philosophical writings, in a news
paper article on Nietzsche's book, Der Fall Wagner, lays great
stress on the fact that ' it superabounds, as it were, in in
tellectual health.' Ordinary university professors — such as
G. Adler, in Freiburg, and others — extol Nietzsche as a ' bold
and original thinker,' and with solemn seriousness take up a
position in respect of his ' philosophy ' — some with avowed
enthusiasm, and some with carefully considered reservations !
In the face of such incurably deep mental obtuseness, it cannot
excite wonder if the clear-thinking and healthy portion of the
young spirits of the present generation should, with hasty
generalization, extend to philosophy itself the contempt
deserved by its officially- appointed teachers. These teachers
undertake to introduce their students into mental philosophy,
and are yet without the capacity to distinguish from rational
thought the incoherent fugitive ideation of a maniac.
Dr. Hermann Tiirck* characterizes in excellent words the
disciples of Nietzsche : ' This piece of wisdom [' nothing is
true ; all is permissible '] in the mouth of a morally insane
man of letters has . . . found ready response among persons
who, in consequence of a moral defect, feel themselves to be
in contradiction to the demands of society. This aforesaid in
tellectual proletariat of large towns is especially jubilant over the
new magnificent discovery that all morality and all truth are
completely superfluous and pernicious to the development of the
individual. It is true that these persons have always in secret
said to themselves, " Nothing is true — all is permissible," and
have also, as far as possible, acted accordingly. But now they
can avow it openly, and with pride ; for Friedrich Nietzsche,
the new prophet, has vaunted this maxim as the most exalted
truth of life. ... It is not society which is right in its estima
tion of morality, science, and true art. Oh dear no ! The
individuals who follow their egoistical personal aims only — who
act only as if truth were of consequence to them — they, the
counterfeiters of truth, those unscrupulous penny-a-liners,
lying critics, literary thieves, and manufacturers of pseudo-
realistic brummagem — they are the true heroes, the masters of
the situation, the truly free spirits.'
That is the truth, but not the whole truth. Without doubt,
the real Nietzsche gang consists of born imbecile criminals,
and of simpletons drunk with sonorous words. But besides
these gallows birds without the courage and strength for
criminal actions, and the imbeciles who allow themselves to be
stupefied and, as it were, hypnotized by the roar and rush of
* Dr. Hermann Tiirck, op. cit, s. 59.

470 DEGENERATION
fustian, the banner of the insane babbler is followed by others,
who must be judged otherwise and in part more gently. In
fact; Nietzsche's ranting includes some ideas which, in part,
respond to a widespread notion of the age, and in part are
capable of awakening the deception that, in spite of all the
exaggeration and insane distortion of exposition, they contain
a germ of truth and right ; and these ideas explain why many
persons agree with them who can hardly be reproached with
lack of clearness and critical capacity.
Nietzsche's fundamental idea of utter disregard and brutal
contempt for all the rights of others standing in the way of
an egoistical desire, must please the generation reared under
the Bismarckian system. Prince Bismarck is a monstrous
personality, raging over a country like a tornado in the torrid
zone ; it crushes all in its devastating course, and leaves behind
as traces, a widespread annihilation of character, destruction
of notions of right, and demolition of morality. In political
life the system of Bismarck is a sort of Jesuitism in cuirass.
' The end sanctifies the means,' and the means are not (as with
the supple sons of Loyola) cunning, obstinacy, secret trickery,
but open brutality, violence, the blow with the fist, and the
stroke with the sword. The end which sanctifies the means
of the Jesuit in cuirass may sometimes be of general utility ;
but it will quite as often, and oftener, be an egoistical one.
In its author this system of the most primitive barbarism had
ever a certain grandeur, for it had its origin in a powerful will,
which with heroic boldness always placed itself at stake, and
entered into every fight with the savage determination to
' conquer or die.' In its imitators, on the contrary, it has got
stunted to 'swaggering' or ' bullying,' i.e., to that most abject
and contemptible cowardice which crawls on its belly before
the strong, but maltreats with the most extreme insolence the
completely unarmed, the unconditionally harmless and weak,
from whom no resistance and no danger are in any way to be
apprehended. The 'bullies' gratefully recognise themselves
in Nietzsche's 'over-man,' and Nietzsche's so-called 'philo
sophy ' is in reality the philosophy of ' bullying.' His doctrine
shows how Bismarck's system is mirrored in the brain of a
maniac. Nietzsche could not have come to the front and
succeeded in any but the Bismarckian and post-Bismarckian
era. He would, doubtless, have been delirious at whatever
period he might have lived ; but his insanity would not have
assumed the special colour and tendency now perceptible in
it. It is true that sometimes Nietzsche vexes himself over
the fact that 'the type of the new Germany most rich in
success in all that has depth . . . fails in " swagger," ' and he
then proclaims : ' It were well for us not to exchange too

EGO-MANIA 47I
cheaply our ancient renown as a people of depth for Prussian
" swagger," and the wit and sand of Berlin.'* But in other
places he betrays what really displeases him in the 'swagger,'
at which he directs his philosophical verse; it makes too
much ado about the officer. ' The moment he [the ' Prussian
officer '] speaks and moves, he is the most forward and taste
less figure in old Europe — unknown to himself. . . . And
unknown also to the good Germans, who wonder at him as
a man of the highest and most distinguished society, and
willingly take their tone from him.'f Nietzsche cannot con
sent to that — Nietzsche, who apprehends that there can be
no God, as in that case he himself must be this God. He
cannot suffer the ' good German ' to place the officer above
him. But apart from this inconvenience, which is involved in
the system of ' swagger,' he finds everything in it good and
beautiful, and lauds it as ' intrepidity of glance, courage and
hardness of the cutting hand, an inflexible will for dangerous
voyages of discovery, for spiritualized North-Polar expeditions
under desolate and dangerous skies, 'J and prophesies exultingly
that for Europe there will soon begin an era of brass, an era
of war, soldiers, arms, violence. Hence it is natural that
' swaggerers ' should hail him as their very own peculiar
philosopher. Besides anarchists, born with incapacity for adaptation, his
' individualism,' i.e., his insane ego-mania, for which the external
world is non-existent, was bound to attract those who in
stinctively feel that at the present day the State encroaches
too deeply and too violently on the rights of the individual,
and, in addition to the necessary sacrifices of strength and
time, exacts from him such as he cannot undergo without
destructive loss of self-esteem, viz., the sacrifice of judgment,
knowledge, conviction, and human dignity. These thirsters
for freedom believe that they have found in Nietzsche the
spokesman of their healthy revolt against the State, as the
oppressor of independent spirits, and as the crusher of strong
characters. They commit the same error which I have already
pointed out in the sincere adherents of the Decadents and of
Ibsen ; they do not see that Nietzsche confounds the conscious
with the subconscious man ; that the individual, for whom
he demands perfect freedom, is the man, not of knowledge and
judgment, but of blind craving, requiring the satisfaction of his
lascivious instincts at any price ; that he is not the moral, but
the sensual, man.
Finally, his consequential airs have also increased the number
* Jenseits von Gut und Bose, pp. 198, 201.
t Die frohliche Wissenschaft, p. 130.
X Jenseits von Gut und Bose, p. 147.

472 DEGENERATION
of his followers. Many of those marching in his train reject
his moral doctrine, but wax enthusiastic over such expressions
as these : ' It might some time happen that the masses should
become masters . . . Therefore, O my brothers, there is need
of a new nobility, the adversary of all plebeians and all violent
domination, and who inscribes anew on a new tablet the word
" Nobility." '*
There is at the present time a widespread conviction that
the enthusiasm for equality was a grievous error of the great
Revolution. A doctrine opposed to all natural laws is justly
resisted. Humanity has need of a hierarchy. It must have
leaders and models. It cannot do without an aristocracy.
But the nobleman to whom the human herd may concede the
most elevated place will certainly not be Nietzsche's ' over
man,' the ego-maniac, the criminal, the robber, the slave of
his maddened instincts, but the man of richer knowledge,
higher intelligence, clearer judgment, and firmer self-discipline.
The existence of humanity is a combat, which it cannot carry
on without captains. As long as the combat is of men against
men, the herd requires a herdsman of strong muscles and ready
blow. In a more perfect state, in which all humanity fights
collectively against Nature only, it chooses as its chief the man
of richest brain, most disciplined will and concentrated atten
tion. This man is the best observer, but he is also one who
feels most acutely and rapidly, who can most vividly picture
to himself the condition of the external world, hence the man
of the liveliest sympathy and most comprehensive interest.
The ' over-man ' of the healthy development of the species is
a Paraclete of knowledge and unselfish love, not a bloodthirsty
' splendid beast of prey.' This is not borne in mind by those
who believe that in Nietzsche's aristocratism they have found
a clear expression of their own obscure views as to the need
of noble natures of light and leading.
Nietzsche's false individualism and aristocratism is capable
of misleading superficial readers. Their error may be accounted
a mitigating circumstance. But even taking this into con
sideration, it still ever remains a disgrace to the German intel
lectual life of the present age, that in Germany a pronounced
maniac should have been regarded as a philosopher, and have
founded a school. * Also Sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 74.

BOOK IV.
REALISM.
CHAPTER I.
ZOLA AND HIS SCHOOL.
It was necessary to treat in detail the two forms of degeneracy
in literature and art hitherto examined, i.e., mysticism and ego
mania, inasmuch as their career of development seems to be
still in the ascendant, and they aft actively at work in making
themselves masters of the aesthetic conscience of our times.
Concerning the third form, realism or naturalism, I can afford
to be much briefer, for two reasons : one having to do with my
subject, the other with myseif. The former reason is that, in
the land of its origin, naturalism is already wholly vanquished,
and we do not kill a corpse — we bury it. The personal reason
is that I have already devoted myself elsewhere to the thorough
examination of naturalism* The conclusions I there came to
I continue to maintain, as regards the appreciation of its
tendency, and I should only wish to limit them by a strong
reservation, in so far as they greatly over-estimate M. Zola's
abilities. That naturalism in France is done with is admitted by all
the world, and is really only disputed by Zola himself. ' There
is no doubt whatever as to the tendencies of the new genera
tion of literary men,' says M. Remy de Gourmont ; ' they are
rigorously anti- naturalist. There has been no question of
forming a party or issuing orders ; no crusade was organized ;
it is individually that we have separated ourselves, horror-
stricken, from a literature the baseness of which made us sick.
Perhaps there is even less disgust than indifference. I re
member, when M. Zola's last novel but one came out, that,
among the eight or ten collaborators of the Mercure de France
* Paris unter der dritten Republik, Vierte Auflage. Leipzig, 1890. Zola
und Naturalismus Ausgewdhlte Pariser Briefe, Zweite Auflage. Leipzig,
1887. ' Pot Bouille, von Zola.'

474 DEGENERATION
(a Symbolist journal), it was impossible for us to find anyone
who had read through La Bete humaine, or anyone who would
have consented to read it with sufficient care to review it.
This species of book, and the method which dictates it,
appears to us quite antiquated with the flavour of bygone years;
more remote and more superannuated than the most truculent
follies of romanticism.'*
Among the disciples of Zola, among those who collaborated
in the Soirees de Medan, as among those who followed him
later, there is scarcely one who has remained faithful to his
tendency. Guy de Maupassant, before he was placed in the
lunatic asylum where he died, ended by turning more and
more towards the psychological novel. Joris Karl Huys
mans, whom we have studied above in his new skin as a
Diabolist and Decadent, cannot find words bitter enough for
naturalism. J. H. Rosny writes novels now in which the
scene is laid in the Stone Age, and the subject of which is the
abduction of a brawny brachycephalous pre-Aryan woman by a
tall, white-skinned, dolichocephalous Aryan man.f When
Zola's La Terre appeared, five of his disciples — Paul Bonnetain,
J. H. Rosny, just mentioned, Lucien Descaves, Paul Mar-
jsueritte, and Gustave Guiches — deemed it necessary to pro
test, in a public manifesto, and with a solemnity somewhat
comical, against the obscenities of this novel, and to disavow
their master in proper and befitting form. If the novels of
M. Zola himself still continue to find a very good and steady
market, as he declares with pride, this in no way proves that
his tendency is still popular. The masses persist in habits,
once adopted, much longer than the leaders and creators
do. If the former continue to follow M. Zola as before, the
latter have already wholly left him. The success of his last
novels is explained, moreover, on quite other than artistic
grounds. His flair for what is occupying public opinion is,
perhaps, the most essential part of his talent. He chooses
from the outset subjects in favour of which he is assured of the
positive interest of a numerous public, no matter how they
may be treated. With books which relate, in the form of a
novel, the story of the financial crisis of 1882, or the war of
1870, as L' Argent and La Debacle, every known French author is
sure to awaken in his own country a passionate interest even
to this day. And M. Zola could equally count on a numerous
connection of lovers of the obscene and nasty. This public
remains faithful to him, and finds in him all it seeks. But it -is
a long time since he acquired any new adherents in his own
country, and abroad he only obtains them among people who
* Jules Huret, Enquete sur PEvolution littdraire, p. 135.
t J. H. Rosny, Vamii eh : Roman des Temps primitifs. Paris, 1892.

REALISM 475
anxiously follow every fashion, whether it be in neckties or
books, but who are too ignorant to know as yet that M. Zola,
in France itself, has long since ceased to be the last fashion.
In the opinion of his disciples, M. Zola is the inventor of
realism in literature. This is a pretension which only young
fellows, who are ignorant beyond all conception, could raise,
and for whom the history of the world only begins at the
moment when they have deigned to recognise it.
First of all, the word ' realism ' itself has no aesthetic signifi
cance. In philosophy it denotes an opinion for which the
general phenomenon of the world is the expression of a
material reality. Applied to art and literature, it possesses no
conception whatever. This I have explicitly demonstrated in
another place (Paris unter der dritten Republik), and will confine
myself here to going very briefly over the argument.
Those ale-house aesthetics, who distinguish between realism
and idealism, explain the former as the effort of the artist to
observe things and to reproduce them with truth. But this
attempt is common to every author, whoever he may be. No
one of deliberate purpose wanders from the truth in his
creations ; and even if he wished to do so, he could not, as this
would contradict all the laws of human thought. Every one
of our presentations, in fact, is based on an observation once
made by us, and even when we invent ad libitum, we only work
with the memory-images recollected from previous observa
tions. If, in spite of this, one work gives a greater impression
of truth than another, it is a question, not of this or that
aesthetic tendency, but exclusively of the degree of talent. A
true poet is always true ; an incapable imitator can never be so.
The first is true even when he disdains always to adhere closely
to reality in details ; the latter is not so even when he clings,
with punctilious attention, and with the method of a land-
surveyor, to little external details.
If one bear in mind the psychological conditions in which
a work of art comes into existence, all the rhodomontade of
so-called ' realism ' is immediately recognised. The origin of
every veritable work of art is an emotion. This is aroused
either by a vital process in the internal organs of the artist, or
by a sense-impression which he receives from the external
world. In both cases the artist feels the necessity of giving
expression to his emotion in a work of art. If this emotion is
of organic origin, he will choose from among his memory-
images, or his sense-impressions of the moment, those which
are in harmony with his emotion, and will compose with them.
If its origin is external, he will employ in his composition
mainly phenomena of the external world, sensuous experiences
which have evoked in him the emotion demanding objective

476 DEGENERATION
shape, and he will combine with this, similar memory-images
in accordance with the laws of association. As may be seen,
the process in the two cases is absolutely the same : the artist,
under the control of an emotion, welds direct sense-per
ceptions and memory-images into a work of art which brings
him relief; only, sometimes the former, sometimes the latter,
are predominant, according to whether the emotion has its
origin in sense-perceptions or in organic processes. Speaking
roughly, the works which result from an emotion aroused by
the phenomena of the world may well be called realistic, and
those expressing an organic emotion idealistic. These de
nominations, however, have not any really distinctive value.
Among thoroughly sane individuals the emotions originate
almost solely from impressions of the external world ; among
those whose nervous life is more or less diseased, namely,
among hysterical, neurasthenic, and degenerate subjects, and
every kind of lunatic, they originate much more frequently in
internal organic processes. Sane artists will produce works,
as a rule, in which perception will predominate ; artists un
healthily emotional will produce works in which the play of
association of ideas predominates — in other words, imagination
working principally on memory-images. And if a false designa
tion is absolutely adhered to, it might be said that the first, as a
general rule, will produce works which are so-called realistic, and
the second, works so-called idealistic. In no case is the work
of art a faithful image of material reality ; its genesis excludes
this possibility. It is always the incarnation of a subjective
emotion only. To desire to know the world by means of a
work of art is a false proceeding ; but the whole essence of a
personality reveals itself in it to him who knows how to read.
The work of art is never a document in the sense attached by
naturalistic cant to this word, i.e., a reliable objective presen
tation of external facts ; but it is always a confession of the
author ; it betrays, consciously or unconsciously, his way of
feeling and thinking; it lays bare his emotions, and shows
what ideas fill his consciousness, and are at the disposal of the
emotion which strives for expression. It is not a mirror of the
world, but a reflection of the soul of the artist.
It might be thought, perhaps, that at least the mainly
imitative arts, painting and sculpture, are capable of a faithful
reproduction of reality, and thus are realisms properly so
called. Even this is an error. It would never occur to a
painter or a sculptor to place himself before a phenomenon,
and reproduce it without selection, without accentuations and
suppressions. And why does he do this ? If he imitates an
aspect, it is evidently because something in that aspect capti
vates or pleases him— a harmony of colours, an effect of light,

REALISM 477
a line of motion. Involuntarily he will accentuate and throw
into relief the feature which has inspired him with the desire
to imitate the aspect in question, and his work, consequently,
will no more represent the phenomenon such as it really was,
but as he saw it ; it will only be a fresh proof, therefore, of his
emotion, not the cast of a phenomenon. To work absolutely
in the method of a camera obscura and a sensitive plate would
be only possible to a very obtuse handicraftsman, who, in the
presence of the visible world, had no feeling for anything, no
pleasure, no disgust, no aspirations of any kind. However, it
is not at all probable that so atrophied a being will ever have
had the inclination to become an artist, and could acquire,
even in a moderate degree, the technical skill necessary for
such a profession.
And if literal realism, the positive actual imitation of the
phenomenon, be interdicted even in the plastic arts by their
intrinsic nature, with how much greater reason is it forbidden to
imaginative writing ! The painter can, after all, if he wishes to
debase himself and his art to the lowest degree, reduce the co
operation of his personality in a work of art (or, to be more
exact, to the work, for then there can be no question of art) to an
extremely feeble, a scarcely perceptible point ; he can reduce
himself to the condition of a mere camera obscura, transmit
his visual impressions in the most mechanical manner possible
to his motor organs, and compel himself to think and feel
nothing during the progress of the work. His picture is fur
nished for him by Nature itself : it is his optical horizon. If,
then, he wishes to exercise no choice, to express nothing of his
own, not even to compose, still there remains the possibility of
copying the phenomena which are enclosed within the limits
of his field of vision. His so-called picture is then no more
than an expressionless fragment of the world, in which the
artist's personality is only represented by the frame which
encloses it, not because the phenomena of Nature really ter
minates at that point, but because the eye of the painter only
embraces that portion, and no more ; nevertheless, it is a picture
in a technical sense, i.e., a picture that can be hung upon the wall
and looked at. The imaginative writer (dichter), on the con
trary, does not find his work ready in this way. It is not provided
for him by Nature itself. His subjects are not developed in space,
but in time. They are not arranged by the side of one another in
such a way that the eye perceives them and can retain all it sees ;
but they succeed each other, and the imaginative writer must by
his own intellect assign them their limits, he must himself decide
what he ought to seize upon and what he must let go ; where
the phenomenon begins which he wishes to utilize in his work,
and where it ends. He cannot begin or end a conversation in

478 DEGENERATION
the middle of a word, in imitation of M. Jean BeYaud, for
example, who in a well-known picture has made the frame
cut off the wheels of a waggon in the middle. He may not pro
duce an inexpressive photograph of the uniform course of
events of life and the world. He must fence round and dam
up certain places in the course of events. In doing this he
clearly affirms himself and his personality. He betrays his
original stamp. He allows his intentions, views, and senti
ments to be recognised. If amongst a million of contemporary
human destinies he relates one only, it is that for some
reason or other this particular one has interested him more
than the rest of the million. If he transmits to us only some
few features, ideas, conversations, and actions of the person
he has selected (not even a millionth part of all that makes up
his actual life) it is because, for some reason or other, these
seemed to him more important and more characteristic than
all the rest ; because in his opinion they prove something, they
express an idea not conceived by things as they are, but which
he believes he can deduce from reality, or which he desires to
read into it. Thus, his ' realistic ' work always reproduces his
thoughts only, his interpretation of reality, his interest in it,
and not reality itself. If the imaginative writer wished to
transcribe the world phonographically or photographically, his
work would no longer be a poem, even in a purely technical
sense ; it would not even be a book, to the extent that the work
of the painter who only photographs still continues, in a purely
technical sense, to be a picture ; it would be something with
neither form, sense, nor name ; for, in reproducing the exist
ence of a single human being during one day only, thousands
of pages could be filled if all his sensations, thoughts, words,
and actions were treated as of equal value. That selection
is therefore made among them which is the subjectivity of the
imaginative writer, i.e., the reverse of 'realism.'
Besides, the work of the painter addresses itself to the same
senses as the phenomenon of Nature itself, and reproduces it
with the help of the same means by which the world itself is
revealed to the senses, viz., with light and colour. Of course
the lights, colours, and lines of the painter are not exactly
those of the real phenomenon, and it is only in consequence
of an illusion that, in his imitation, the phenomenon is recog
nised ; but this illusion is the work of such inferior cerebral
centres that even animals are capable of it, as is demonstrated
by the classical anecdote so well known of the birds wishing to
peck at the bunch of grapes painted by Zeuxis. The imaginative
writer, on the contrary, does not address himself to the senses ; to
be more exact, he appeals by hearing or sight, to which he pre
sents spoken or written words, not to the centres of perception,

REALISM 479
as the plastic artist does in the first instance, but to the higher
centres of conception, judgment, and reasoning. Nor has he
the means for directly reproducing the sensible phenomenon
itself, but he must first translate the phenomenon into concepts
under a linguistic, i.e., a conventional, form. This is, however,
an excessively complicated and highly differentiated activity,
which bears completely the impress of the personality exercising
it. If even two eyes do not see in the same manner, how
much less can two brains perceive and interpret in the same
way what the eye has seen, class it with pre-existing concepts,
associate it with feelings and representations, and clothe it in
traditional forms of language ? The activity of the imaginative
writer, therefore, is incomparably more than that of the artist,
essentially personal ; the elaboration of sense-impressions into
representations, and the translation of representations into
words, are so peculiarly individual, so exclusively subjective,
that for this cause also imaginative writing can never be reality
itself, i.e., ' realistic'
The notion of so-called ' realism ' cannot withstand either
psychological or aesthetic criticism. We might, perhaps, attempt
an external, superficial, practical conception of it, and say, for
example, Realism is the method in the application of which the
imaginative writer starts from his perceptions and observations,
and seeks his subjects in the environment he knows personally ;
idealism is the opposite method, which that writer employs
who, in creating, yields to the play of imagination, and who, in
order not to impede its free energy, borrows his materials from
remote times and countries, or from social strata of which he
has no direct knowledge, but which he conceives only in the
visions of aspiration, intuition, or surmise. Reasonable and
plausible as this explanation appears, it, too, nevertheless,
dissolves into blue mist when more closely examined. For,
in fact, the choice of subject-matter, the surroundings from
which it is borrowed, or in which it is placed, have no decisive
signification ; no method is therein manifested, but merely
the author's personality. One in whom observation pre
dominates will be ' realistic,' i.e., will express experiences,
even if he pretends to speak of men and things placed wholly
beyond the reach of his observation ; and the other in whom
the mechanical association of ideas prevails will be ' idealistic,'
i.e., he will simply follow the wanderings of his imagination,
even when he desires to represent circumstances which may
be personally familiar to him.
Let us give one example only of the two cases. What is
more ' idealistic ' than fairy - stories ? Very well, here are
some passages from the best-known fairy-tales of the brothers
Grimm : ' There was once upon a time a king's daughter who

43o DEGENERATION
went into the forest and seated herself on the brink of a cool
fountain' (The Frog Prince; or, Iron Henry). ' But the little
sister at home [he is speaking of the daughter of a king who
had driven away his twelve sons] grew up, and remained the
only child. Once there was a great washing-day, and amongst
the washing were twelve men's shirts. " For whom are these
shirts ?" demanded the princess ; " they are much too small
for my father." Then the laundress told her that she had had
twelve brothers,' etc. ; 'and as the little sister sat in the meadow
in the afternoon bleaching the linen, the words of the laundress
came into her mind,' etc. (The Twelve Brothers). ' The wood
cutter obeyed ; he fetched his child, and gave her to the Virgin
Mary, who carried her up into heaven. There the child lived
happily; she ate nothing but sweet cakes, and drank new milk/
etc. ' So fourteen years went by in heaven. Then the Virgin
Mary had to take a long journey; but before she went away,
she called the girl to her, and said, " Dear child, I entrust you
with the keys cf the thirteen doors of Paradise," ' etc. (Mary's
Child). The unknown writer of these fairy-tales transports his
stories into royal palaces, or even into heaven — i.e., into sur
roundings which he certainly does not know ; but he endows
beings and things, and even the Virgin Mary, with such traits
as are known and familiar to him by observation. From the
royal palace one enters a wood or a meadow as one might on
leaving a farm ; the princess runs to the fountain in the forest
quite alone, looks after the linen, and bleaches it on the grass,
just like a domestic servant. The Holy Virgin undertakes a
journey, and confides the keys of the household to her adopted
daughter, as a rich chatelaine might do. These fairy-tales are
composed from a peasant's own experience, who describes his
own world with honest realism, and simply gives other names
to the figures and circumstances with which he is familiar.
M. Edmond de Goncourt, on the contrary, the great pioneer
' realist,' relates, in his novel La Faustin, the love-story of a
Lord Annandale and an actress ofthe Theatre Francais, which
elicits from M. F. Brunetiere, the critic, these observations :
' I should much like to hear M. Zola's opinion on M. de Gon-
court's novel. What can M. Zola, who has jested so eloquently
on the subject of novels of adventure — of those novels in which
princes walked about incognito with their pockets full of
diamonds — think in his inmost heart of this Lord Annandale
throwing handfuls of gold out ofthe windows, and ruling from
one day to another over fifty English servants in his mansion
in Paris, without counting the retainers of his lady ? What
can M. Zola, who has made merry so comfortably over the
idealistic novel, as he calls it, think of this one in which love
triumphant carries off the lovers into the adorable world of

REALISM 481
dreams — what can he think to himself concerning this passion
ate tenderness which M. de Goncourt's Englishman has for
the tragedienne, this almost deified gallantry, this sensual
liaison dans le bleu, this physical love in ideality, and all the
rest of the jargon which I spare the reader?'* M. Edmond
de Goncourt professes to depict a contemporary Englishman,
an actress also of our own times, events in Parisian life — i.e.,
all of them mattershe might have observed, and with which
he ought to be familiar ; but what he does relate is so
incredible, so impossible, unprecedented, that one can only
shrug one's shoulders over the childish fable. Thus, the
German story-teller who conducts us into a society of angels,
saints, and kings, really shows us healthy, robust peasants and
lasses whose living reality is in no way diminished by the
carnival crowns and gilded-paper halos playfully placed on
their heads ; while the French realist who would transport
us into Parisian life among Parisians, floats before our eyes
fleshless phantoms moving in clouds of cigar-smoke, marsh-
mists, and punch-flames, and who remain just as unreal, for all
the effort of the author to conjure into them a distant resem
blance to an Englishman in a frock-coat, and a hysterical
lady in a lace-trimmed negligee. The author of the fairy-tales
is a realist in the sense of the explanation given above ; the
novelist of Parisian manners, Edmond de Goncourt, is an
idealist of the most aggravating type.
From whatever side we approach this pretended realism, we
never succeed in seeing in it a concept, but only an empty
word. Every method of investigation leads us to the same
result — viz., that there is no realism in poetry, i.e., no im
personal, actual copy of reality ; there are only the various
personalities of the poet. The only decisive thing is the in
dividuality of the poet. One of them draws from the pheno
menon of Nature, another from his internal organic processes,
those emotions which incite them to create. One is capable of
attention, and observes ; another is the slave of an unbridled
association of ideas. In one the presentation of the ' not-self '
predominates in consciousness, in another the ' self.' I do
not hesitate to express the matter in a single word— one is
healthy and in an evolution of growth ; the other is changed
more or less pathologically — has more or less fallen into
degeneracy. The healthy poet mingles knowledge with every
one of his works, whether it be Dante's Inferno or Goethe's
Faust ; and if held desirable, this element of knowledge, which
it is not possible to acquire except by attention and observa
tion, may be called realism. The degenerate poet never
* Ferdinand Brunetiere, Le Roman naturaliste, nouvelle edition. Paris,
1892, p. 285. 31

482 DEGENERATION
fashions anything but empty soap-bubbles of knowledge, even
when he maintains, and is himself convinced, that he is
giving out what he has observed ; and this confused ebulli
tion of ideas, shot in the best cases with changing hues, but
most frequently simply dirty froth, is very often called, by a
misnomer, idealism.
Still another and the latest meaning has been applied to
realism ; it stands for the systematic treatment of the lower
ranks of life, and commonplace men and things. According
to this definition, the works in which labourers, peasants,
petty bourgeois, etc., appear, would be realistic, and those in
which gods, heroes, kings, etc., take part, idealistic. Louis XIV.,
according to the well-known anecdote when Teniers' tavern-
scenes were exhibited before him, let fall the indignant and
disdainful comment, ' Take away these grotesque things !'
He would not have condemned an artistic method and manner
of representation, but the baseness of the subject only would
have offended his Olympian eye. This explanation of the
term '' realism ' is a little more comprehensible than the others ;
but I have no need to show how grossly external and how
philosophically and aesthetically worthless it is. We have
seen, in fact, above, how the simplest feelings and ideas of
peasants may be attributed to gods and to kings ; and, con
versely, there is no lack of works in which a royal crown or a
saintly halo hovers invisibly over the heads of human beings in
the lowest social position. In Gregory Samarow's novels,
emperors and kings disport themselves who feel, think, and
speak like the commercial travellers of a third - rate wine
business ; in Berthold Auerbach's village stories we see
peasants who in heart and head are of the highest nobility,
sometimes even semi-divine. The one kind is as unreal as the
other, only in the first we discern the craft of the sensation-
monger, in the second there speaks to us the refined and
tender-souled poet. In The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot,
we find a farm-servant, Luke, and a miller's daughter, Maggie,
who would do honour to any Pantheon in the grandeur of their
character and morals ; in Thackeray's Vanity Fair we are
shown a Marquis of Steyne, very magnificent and very proud,
and another such, Earl Bareacres, with neither of whom would
any decent man shake hands. Those are as true as these ;
but whereas the former betray the heart of a poet full of love
and pity, the latter reveal the soul of an artist overflowing with
bitterness and wrath. Which, now, is noble— the emperors
and kings of Samarow or the Black Forest peasants of
Auerbach ? Which is plebeian— the farming men of George
Eliot or the powerful English peers of Thackeray ? And
which of these works must be qualified as realistic, which as

REALISM 483
idealistic, if realism signifies being occupied with inferior
persons and conditions, idealism with those that are superior ?
Hence to serious investigation, which does not stop at the
mere jingle of words, the expressions ' realism ' and ' idealism '
convey no meaning. We will now see what the partisans of
M. Emile Zola give out as his originality, in what he himself
claims to be a model and a pioneer, and how he justifies his
pretension of impersonating a totally new epoch in the history
of literature.
M. Zola's disciples boast of his art of description and his
'impressionism.' I make a great difference between the two.
Description endeavours to seize upon the characteristic features
of the phenomenon by all the senses at once, and convey them
in words ; impressionism shows the conscious state of a person
receiving impressions in the domain of one sense only, seeing
things only, hearing them only, feeling them only, etc.
Description is the work of a brain which comprehends the
things it perceives in their connection and their essence ;
impressionism is the work of a brain which receives from the
phenomenon only the sensuous elements — and by a one-sided
aspect — of knowledge, but not knowledge itself. The describer
recognises in a tree, a tree, with all the ideas which this
concept includes. The impressionist sees before him merely
a mass of colour composed of spots of different greens, on
which the sun flashes here and there points and rays of light.
Description for its own sake, as well as impressionism, are,
in poetry, an aesthetic and psychological error, as will be
demonstrated as briefly as possible ; but even this error was
not invented by M. Zola, for long before him the romanticists,
and Theophile Gautier particularly, cultivated the broad style
of description, inorganically interpolated into literary com
position ; and, on the subject of impressionism, the brothers
De Goncourt showed M. Zola the way.
The purely objective description of objects is science, when
it is worth anyone's while to acquire of them as clear a repre
sentation as may be communicated by words without the
assistance of image or number. Such description is simply
child's play and waste of time, when no one is interested to
pause and look at the things described, either because they
are too well known or because they are without importance.*
* Thirty years before realism began to create a disturbance in Germany,
with its mania for description, the Swiss novelist, Gottfried Keller, with a
curious premonition, ridiculed it. See Die Leute von Seldwyla, Auflage 12,
Berlin, 1892, Band II. , p. 108. (The hero of the story entitled Die miss-
brauchten Liebesbriefe [the misused love-letters] suddenly conceives the
notion of becoming an author.) ' He laid aside the book of commercial
notes, and drew fonh a smaller one provided with a little steel lock. Then
he placed himself before the first tree he came to, examined it attentively,

484 DEGENERATION
Finally, it rises into art while remaining of an inferior species,
when it chooses words so well that it follows the most delicate
peculiarities of the objects, and at the same time calls out the
emotions that the observer experiences during his observations,
i.e., when the words employed have not only the value of a
just portrayal of sensuously perceptible properties, but have
an emotional colouring, and appear accompanied by images
and metaphors. We may cite as examples of art of portrayal
all good descriptions of travel, from the Voyage to the Equinoxial
Regions of the New Continent, by Alexander Humboldt, to Sahara
and Soudan, by Nachtigal, Im Herzen Afrikas, by Schweinfurth,
or Edmond de Amicis' books on Constantinople, Morocco, Spain,
Holland, etc. But these have nothing in common with imagina
tive writing, which always has for its object man, with his ideas
and sentiments, not excepting fables of animals, parables, allego
ries, fairy-tales, all the hybrid forms in which the human element
of all imagination appears disguised as an anthropomorphism
applied to animals, and even to inanimate objects. The material
frame, the scene and surrounding, have no importance in an
imaginative work, except in so far as they affect the person or per
sons of whom it treats. The imaginative writer may be regarded
either as a spectator who narrates human events as they develop
before his eyes, or as an actor in these events, which he looks
upon and feels with the consciousness of one of the personages
concerned. In both cases he can naturally only perceive in
the material surroundings whatever plays a part in the events
themselves. If he is a spectator, he will certainly not let his
eyes wander over the field of vision indifferently, but will pause
before a scene which attracts his attention, and for which he
seeks to arouse our interest. If he has himself adopted the
disguise of one of the actors, he will be even more completely
absorbed by the human events in which he himself co-operates,
and will preserve still less any inclination to stroll indifferently
by the side of scenes which have nothing to do with his given
state of mind, and divert him from acts and feelings with which
he is preoccupied at the moment. Hence an imaginative work
and wrote : "A beech-trunk. Pale gray, with still paler flecks and transverse
stripes. Two kinds of moss cover it, one almost blackish, and one of a
sheeny, velvety green. In addition, yellowish, reddish and white lichen
which often run one into another. . . . Might perhaps be serviceable in
scenes with brigands." Next he paused before a stake driven into the earth
on which some child had hung a dead slow-worm. He wrote : " Interesting
detail. A small staff driven into the ground. Body of a silver-gray snake
wound round it. . . . Is Mercury dead, and has he left his stick with dead
snakes sticking here? This last allusion serviceable, above all for com
mercial tales. N.B.— The staff or stake is old and weather-beaten • of the
same colour as the snake; in places where the sun shines upon' it it is
covered with httle silver-gray hairs. (This last observation might be new,
etc.)," ' etc. " '

REALISM 485
which is true to human nature will only contain descriptions
of such material surroundings as a spectator (absorbed in the
actual events which form the subject of the work, or as one
of its actors) is in a state to perceive, i.e., only what is directly
connected with the events. If the description includes ex
traneous matter, it is psychologically false ; it disturbs moods,
interrupts events, diverts the attention from what ought to be
the essential point in the work of art, and transforms the
latter into a patchwork ; showing signs that its author lacked
artistic earnestness, that the work is not born from the need
to give poetic expression to a genuine emotion.
A very much worse error than desultory, cold-blooded descrip
tion in imaginative writing is impressionism. In painting it
has its authorization. The latter reproduces the impressions of
the visual senses, and the painter is within the limits of his
art when he presents his purely optical perceptions without
composing, or without relating a story, i.e., without intro
ducing any idea into the scene he reproduces, without com
bining any activity of his highest centres of ideation with the
activity of the centres of perception. The picture produced
according to this method will be very inferior from an aesthetic
point of view, but it will be a picture, and can be defended as
such. Poetical impressionism, on the other hand, is a complete
misconception ofthe essence of imaginative work; it is the nega
tion and suppression of it. The medium of poetry is language.
Now this is an activity, not of the centres of perception, but
of the centres of ideation and judgment. The immediate
phonetic reaction upon sensory excitations is merely an ex
clamation. Without the co-operation of the highest centres
a perception cannot express itself phonetically except by an
'Ah!' or an 'Oh!' But in the same ratio that the purely
emotional cry of an animal rises to the height of intelligible
grammatically articulated human speech, the purely sensuous
perception rises also to the height of concept and judgment,
and it is psychologically quite false so to depict the language
of the external world as if it set free only a sensation of
colour or of sound, and provoked neither ideas, concepts, not
judgments. Impressionism in literature is an example of that
atavism which we have noticed as the most distinctive feature
in the mental life of degenerates. It carries back the human
mind to its brute-beginnings, and the artistic activity of its
present high differentiation to an embryonic state; that state in
which all the arts (which were later to emerge and diverge) lay
side by side inchoate and inseparate. Consider, as an example,
these impressionist descriptions by the brothers De Goncourt :
' Above it a great cloud lowered, a heavy mass of a sombre
purple, a scud from the north. . . . This cloud rose and ended

486 DEGENERATION
in sharp rents against a brightness where pale green merged
into rose. Then the sky became dull, of the colour of tin,
swept by fragments of other gray clouds. . . . Beyond the
softly-swaying pinetops, under which the broad garden walk
could be seen bare, leafless, red, almost carmine, . . . the eye
took in the whole space between the dome of the Salpetriere
and the mass of the Observatory ; first, a great plane of shadow
resembling a wash of Indian ink on a red ground, a zone of
warm bituminous tones, burnt with those frost-touched reds
and those wintry glows that are found on an English artist's
water-colour palette; then, in the infinite delicacy of a
degraded tint, a whitish streak arose, a milky nacreous vapour,
pierced by the bright tones of new buildings.' ' The delicate
tones of an old man's complexion played on the yellowish and
bluish pink of his face. Through his tender, wrinkled ears —
ears of paper interwoven by filaments — the day in passing
became orange.' ' The air, streaked with water, had an over-
wash of that violet blue with which the painter imitates the
transparency of thick glass. . . . The first vivid smile of
green began on the black branches of the trees, where, like
strokes from a brush, touches of spring could be discerned
leaving behind it light coatings of green dust.'*
Such is the procedure of impressionism. The writer gives
himself the air of a painter ; he professes to seize the phe
nomenon, not as a concept, but to feel it as simple sense-
stimulation. He writes down the names of colours as an
artist lays on his washes, and he imagines that he has here
with given the reader a particularly strong impression of reality.
But it is a childish illusion, for the reader, nevertheless, comes
to see no colours, but merely words. He has to transform
these names of colours, like every other word, into images,
and with the same mental effort he would procure himself a
much livelier impression if, instead of heavily enumerating to
him one after another ofthe optical elements of the phenomenon,
the phenomenon were presented to him ready elaborated into
a concept. M. Zola has borrowed this absurdity from the
De Goncourt brothers with some exactitude, but it was not
he who invented it.
Another of his originalities is said to be the observation
and reproduction of the milieu, the environment, human and
material, of the persons represented. Coming after the indul
gence in useless description, and after impressionism, the
theory of the ' milieu ' produces a most comical effect, since
it is the exact contrary of the psychological theory which forms
the point of departure of impressionism and of the mania for
* Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Manette Solomon. Paris 1876 pp 3
145, I9i- '

REALISM 487
description. The impressionist places himself over against
some phenomenon as a mere sense, as photographer or phono-
graphist, etc. He registers the nerve-vibrations. He denies
himself all higher comprehension, the elaboration of percep
tions into concepts, and the classification of the concepts in
the experiences which, as general knowledge, pre-exist in his
consciousness. The theorist of the ' milieu,' on the contrary,
systematically attributes the chief importance, not to the
phenomenon, but to its causal connection ; he is not a sense
which perceives, but a philosopher who endeavours to interpret
and explain according to a system. What, in fact, does the
theory of the ' milieu ' mean ? It means that the imaginative
writer asserts that the individuality and mode of conduct of any
person are a consequence of the influences that his environ
ment, living or dead, exert upon him, and that he is trying to dis
cover these influences, and the nature of their action on that per
son. The theory in itself is right, but, again, it is not M. Zola who
invented it, for it is as old as philosophic thought itself. In our
own times, Taine has distinctly conceived and established it, and,
long before M. Zola, Balzac and Flaubert sought to introduce
its operation into their novels. And yet this theory, extremely
fertile as it is in anthropology and sociology, and giving, as it
does, an impulse to meritorious research, is in imaginative
writing but another error, and constitutes a confusion of kinds
engendered by vague thought. The task of the man of science
is to investigate the causes of phenomena. Sometimes he finds
them, frequently he does not ; often he believes he has dis
covered them, till more exact observation subsequently tells
him he has deceived himself and must rectify his hypotheses.
The investigation of the conditions under which man acquires
his various physical and mental qualities is in full progress, but
is only at its commencement, and has as yet furnished extremely
few positive facts. We do not even know why one human
race is tall or another short in stature ; why this one has blue
eyes and fair hair, that one dark eyes and hair ; and yet these
are incomparably simpler, more external and more accessible
properties than the subtle peculiarities of mind and character.
On the causes of these peculiarities we know nothing definite.
We can make conjectures on this subject, but, meanwhile, even
the most plausible of these have still the character of hypotheses,
of probable, but not of verified, truth. And here the imagina
tive writer would like to come upon the scene, carry off unfinished
scientific hypotheses, complete them by means of his own
fantastic conceits, and teach : ' Do you see ? this man whom
I show you has become what he is because his parents have
had such and such attributes, because he has lived here or
there, because when a child he received such and such impres-

488 DEGENERATION
sions, because he has been thus nurtured, thus educated, has
had such and such intercourse, etc' He is here doing what
is not his office. Instead of an artistic creation he attempts to
give us science, and he gives us false science, since he has no
suspicion of the influences which really form the man, and the
details of the ' milieu ' which he throws into relief as being the
causes of individual peculiarities are probably the least essential,
and, in any case, only a minimum portion of what, in the form
ation of the personality, has played a really determining part.
Think of it for a moment. The one question as to the origin of
the criminal has produced in these last twenty years thousands
of books and pamphlets ; hundreds of medical men, jurists,
economists, and philosophers of the first rank, have devoted
to it the most profound and assiduous research, and we are
still far from being able to indicate with certainty what share
heredity social influences (i.e., the ' milieu,' properly so called)
and unknown biological peculiarities of the individual, have in
the formation of the criminal type. And then there comes a
wholly ignorant writer, who, quite by himself, with the sovereign
infallibility claimed for himself by the author in his own pro
vince, decides a question which the combined ten years'
labour of a whole generation of professional investigators
has brought but very little nearer to a solution ! This is an
audacity only explicable by this fact, that the writer has not
the very smallest idea of the weight of the task which he under
takes with so light a heart.
If, in spite of this, Balzac and Flaubert seem to have pro
duced excellent works with this theory of the ' milieu,' it is
an optical illusion. They have devoted great attention and
detailed descriptions to the environment of their characters
(especially Flaubert in Madame Bovary), and the superficial
reader thereby receives the impression that there exists a con
nection of causality between the environment and the being
and doing of the personages, it being one of the most elementary
and tenacious peculiarities of human thought to link causally
one with another all phenomena which present themselves
simultaneously or successively. This peculiarity is one of the
most fruitful sources of defective conclusions, and it cannot be
overcome except by the most attentive observation, often even
only with the help of experiment. In the novels of Balzac
and Flaubert, where the ' milieu ' plays so great a part, the
' milieu,' in fact, explains nothing. For the personages who
move in the same ' milieu ' are, notwithstanding, wholly different.
Everyone reacts on the influences of the ' milieu ' in his own
particular way. This distinctive character must be the datum,
it cannot be the result, of the ' milieu.' The latter has, at
most, the significance of an immediate proximate cause, but 'the

REALISM 489
most remote causes of the effect in question are found in the
distinctive character of the personality, and on the latter, the
' milieu ' that the poet depicts gives us no real enlightenment.
On the pretension of M. Zola and his partisans, that his novels
are ' slices from real life ' (tranches de vie), it is useless to linger.
We have seen above that M. Zola is far from being capable
of transcribing in his novels life as real and as a whole. Like
all the imaginative writers before him, he also makes a choice ;
from a million thoughts of his personages, he reproduces one
only ; from ten thousand functions and actions, one only ; from
years of their life, some minutes, or merely seconds ; his sup
posed ' slice from life ' is a condensed and rearranged con
spectus of life, artificially ordered according to a definite design,
and full of gaps. Like all other imaginative writers, he also
makes his choice according to his particular personal inclina
tions, and the only difference is that these inclinations, which
we shall at once recognise, are very dissimilar from those of
other writers.
M. Zola calls his novels 'human documents' and 'experi
mental novels.' I have already, thirteen years ago, expressed
myself so fully on this double pretension, that I have now
nothing more to add to what I said then. Does he think that
his novels are serious documents from which science can
borrow facts ? What childish folly ! Science can have nothing
to do with fiction. She has no need of invented persons and
actions, however ben trovati they may be ; but she wants beings
who have lived, and actions which have taken place. The
novel treats of individual destinies, or at most those of families ;
science has need of information on the destinies of millions.
Police reports, lists of imposts, tables of commerce, statistics
of crimes and suicides, information on the prices of provisions,
salaries, the mean duration of human life, the marriage rate,
the birth rate, legitimate and illegitimate — these are ' human
documents.' From them we learn how people live, whether
they progress, whether they are happy or unhappy, pure or
corrupt. The history of civilization, when it wants facts, puts
M. Zola's entertaining novels aside as of no account, and has
recourse to tedious statistical tables. And a very much more
singular whim still is his 'experimental novel.' This term
would prove that M. Zola, if he employs it in good faith, does
not even suspect the nature of scientific experiment. He
thinks he has made an experiment when he invents neuro
pathic personages, places them in imaginary conditions, and
makes them perform imaginary actions. A scientific experi
ment is an intelligent question addressed to Nature, and to
which Nature must reply, and not the questioner himself.
M. Zola also puts questions. But to whom ? To Nature ?

490 DEGENERATION
No; to his own imagination. And his answers are to have
the force of proof. The result of scientific experiment is
constraining. Every man in possession of his senses can
perceive it. The results at which M. Zola arrives in his
pretended ' experiment ' do not exist objectively ; they exist
only in his imagination ; they are not facts, but assertions,
in which every man can believe, or not, at his pleasure.
The difference between experiments, and what M. Zola calls
such, is so great that it is difficult for me to impute the
abusive application of the term to ignorance only, or to in
capacity for thought. I believe rather in a conscious pre
meditated snare. The appearance of M. Zola occurred at
a time when mysticism was not yet the fashion in France,
and when the favourite catch-words of the writing and gossiping
gang were positivism and natural science. In order to recom
mend himself to the masses, a man had to represent himself
as a positivist and as scientific. Grocers, hotel-keepers, small
inventors, etc., have everywhere and always the habit of
decorating their sign-boards or their produce with a name
which is connected with an idea dominant with the public.
At the present day a hotel-keeper or a tradesman recommends
his house or his shop by such titles as ' The Progress ' or
' International Commerce ;' and a manufacturer extols his
goods as ' Electric' braces or ' Magnetic' ink. We have seen
that the Nietzscheans designate their tendency as ' psycho
physiological.' In the same way Zola long before them hung
out the catch-word sign to his novels — ' Ye scientificke experi-
mente.' But his novels had no more visible connection with
natural science and experiment than the ink above mentioned
with magnetism, and the braces with electricity.
M. Zola boasts of his method of work; all his books
emanate from ' observation.' The truth is that he has never
' observed ; ' that he has never, following Goethe, ' plunged into
the full tide of human life,' but has always remained shut up
in a world of paper, and has drawn all his subjects out of his
own brain, all his ' realistic ' details from newspapers and
books read uncritically. I need only recall a few cases in
which his sources have been placed within his reach. All the
information on the life, manners, habits, and language of the
Parisian workmen in L'Assommoir are borrowed from a study
by M. Denis Poulot, Le Sublime. The adventure of Une Pa^e
d' Amour is taken from the Memoir es de Casanova. Certam
features in which the masochism or passivism of Count Muffat
is declared in Nana, M. Zola found in a quotation from Taine
relative to the Venice Saved of Thomas Otway.* The scene
of the confinement, in La joie de Vivre, the description of the
* F. Brunetiere, op. cit, p. 153.

REALISM 491
Mass, in La F aide de I'Abbe Mouret, etc., are copied word for
word from an obstetric manual and a Mass-book. One reads
sometimes in the newspapers very pretentious statements of
the ' studies ' to which M. Zola gives himself up when he under
takes a new novel. These ' studies ' consist, on his part, in
making a visit to the Bourse when he wishes to write on
speculation, in undertaking a trip on a locomotive when he
desires to describe the working of a railway, in once casting a
glance round some available bedroom when he means to depict
the mode of life of the Parisian cocottes. Such a manner
of ' observation ' resembles that of a traveller who passes
through a country in an express train. He may perceive some
external details, he may notice some scenes and arrange them
later in descriptions rich in colour, if wholly inaccurate ; but
he learns nothing of the real and essential peculiarities of the
country, and the life and ways of its inhabitants. Like all
degenerates, M. Zola, too, is a complete stranger to the world
in which he lives. His eyes are never directed towards
nature or humanity, but only to his own ' Ego.' He has no
first-hand knowledge of anything, but acquires, by second or
third hand, all that he knows of the world or life. Flaubert
has created, in Bouvard et Pecuchet, the characters of two
blockheads, who, with unsuspecting ingenuousness, attack
all the arts and sciences, and imagine they have acquired
them when they have dipped into, or, more correctly, have
skimmed through, the first book on the subject which falls
into their hands. Zola is an ' observer ' of the Bouvard et
Pecuchet species, and on reading Flaubert's posthumous novel
one is tempted to believe in places that when describing the
' studies ' of his heroes he was thinking, at least amongst
others, of Zola.
I think I have shown that M. Zola has not the priority in
any one of the peculiarities which constitute his method. For
all of them he has had models, and some few are as old as the
world. The supposed realism, mania for description, impres
sionism, the emphasis on the 'milieu,' the human document, the
slices of life — all these are so many aesthetic and psychological
errors, but Zola has not even the doubtful merit of having
conceived them. The only thing he has invented is the word
' naturalism,' substituted by him for ' realism ' (the sole term
in vogue till then), and the expression 'experimental novel,'
which means absolutely nothing, but possesses a piquant little
smattering of science which Zola's public, at the period when
this novelist made his appearance, felt as an agreeable
seasoning. The only real and true things contained in M. Zola's novels
are the little traits borrowed by him from the items of news in

492 DEGENERATION
the daily papers and from technical works. But these also
become false from the lack of criticism and taste with which
he employs them. In fact, in order that the borrowed detail
should remain faithful to reality, it must preserve its right
relation to the whole phenomenon, and this is what never
happens with M. Zola. To quote only two examples. In
Pot-Bouille, among the inhabitants of a single house in the Rue
de Choiseul, he brings to pass in the space of a few months
all the infamous things he has learnt in the course of thirty
years, by reports from his acquaintances, by cases in courts
of law, and various facts from newspapers about apparently
honourable bourgeois families ; in La Terre, all the vices im
puted to the French peasantry or rustic people in general, he
crams into the character and conduct of a few inhabitants of
a small village in Beauce ; he may in these cases have supported
every detail by cuttings from newspapers or jottings, but the
whole is not the less monstrously and ridiculously untrue.
The self-styled innovator who, it is asserted, has invented
hitherto unknown methods of construction and exposition in
the province of the novel, is in reality a pupil of the French
romanticists, from whom he has appropriated and employed
all the tricks of the trade, and whose tradition he carries on,
walking in the straight road of historical continuity, without
interruption and without deviation. This is what is most clearly
proved by the descriptions, which reflect not the world, but the
view that the poet is capable of taking of the world. I will quote,
for the sake of comparison, some characteristic passages from
Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo, and from different novels
by Zola, which will show the reader that both could be very
easily confounded, the self-styled inventor of 'naturalism' and the
extreme romanticist. ' The broom ransacked the corners with
an irritated growling.' ' The Kyrie Eleison ran like a shiver
into this kind of stable.' ' The pulpit . . . stood in front of
a clock with weights, enclosed in a walnut wood case, and the
hollow vibrations of which shook the whole church, like the
beatings of an enormous heart, hidden somewhere beneath
the flag-stones.' ' The rays [of the sun], more and more
horizontal, withdraw slowly from the pavement of the square,
and mount perpendicularly along the gabled front, making its
thousand bas-reliefs spring out from their shadow, while the
great central rose-window blazes like a Cyclop's eye inflamed
by the glow of the forge.' ' When the priest . . . quitted the
altar ... the sun remained sole master of the church. It
had rested in its turn on the altar cloth, illuminated the door
of the tabernacle with splendour, celebrating the fruitful
promise of May. A warmth arose from the flag-stones The
whitewashed walls, the great Virgin, the great Christ himself

REALISM 493
took on a shiver of vital sap [!], as if death had been van
quished by the eternal youth of the earth.' ' In a crevice of
this spout two pretty gilliflowers in blossom, shaken and
animated by the breath of the air, made sportive salutations
to each other.' ' At one of the windows a great service-tree
reared itself, throwing its branches across the broken panes,
extending its shoots as if to look within.' ' Towards the east,
the morning breeze chased some white flocks of down across
the sky, torn from the foggy fleece of the hills.' ' The closed
windows slept. Some few, here and there, brightly lit, opened
their eyes, and seemed to make certain corners squint.'
' Already some whiffs of smoke were disgorged here and there
over all that surface of roofs, as by the fissures of an immense
sulphur-kiln.' ' A miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, ashamed,
which seems always afraid of being caught in flagrante delicto,
so quickly does it disappear after having given its blow.' ' The
alembic went on dully, without a flame, or any gaiety in the
extinct reflexions of its coppers, letting flow its alcoholic sweat,
like a slow and obstinate spring, which should end by invading
the rooms, spreading over the boulevards without inundating
the immense hollow of Paris.' ' At the barrier, the herd-like
trampling went on in the cold of the morning. . . . This crowd,
from a distance, was a chalky blur, a neutral tone, in which
a faded blue and dirty gray predominated. Occasionally, a
workman stopped short . . . while around him the others
walked on, without a smile, without a word to a comrade,
with cadaverous cheeks, faces turned towards Paris, which, one
by one, devoured them by the gaping street of the Faubourg
Poissonniere.' ' And then, as he dived farther into the street, leg
less cripples, blind and lame men multiplied around him ; the
one-armed and the one-eyed, and the lepers with their wounds,
some coming from the houses, some from the adjacent small
streets, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing,
screaming, all limpingly, lamely, rushing towards the light, and
wallowing in the mire like snails after rain.' ' The square . . .
presented . . . the appearance of a sea, in which five or six
streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged new waves
of heads at every instant. . . . The great stairs, ascended
and descended without intermission by a double stream . . .
flowed incessantly into the square, like a cascade into a lake.'
' The flickering brightness of the flames made them appear to
move. There were serpents which had the appearance of
laughing, gargoyles that one seemed to hear yelping, salaman
ders which breathed in the fire, dragons which sneezed in the
smoke.' ' And the steam-engine, ten paces off, went on steadily
breathing, steadily spitting from its scorched metal throat.'
' These were no longer the cold windows of the morning ; now

494 DEGENERATION
they appeared as if warmed and vibrating with internal tremor.
There were people looking at them, women, standing still,
squeezing against the plate-glass, quite a crowd brutalized by
covetousness. And the stuffs seemed alive in this passion of
the pavement : the laces shivered, fell back and hid the depths
of the shop, with a disquieting air of mystery.' It would be
easy to extend these comparisons to some hundreds of pages.
I have indulged in the little joke of not adding the author's
name to the passages quoted. By the nature of the object
described the specially attentive reader will perhaps be able
to guess in one or another of these quotations, whether they
are from Victor Hugo or from Emile Zola ; I have tried to
facilitate the matter by borrowing the passages by Victor Hugo
from the Notre Dame de Paris alone ; but the greatest number
he will certainly not know to whom to attribute until I
tell him that examples three, five, seven, nine, ten, thirteen,
fourteen, and fifteen, are from Victor Hugo, and all the others
from Zola.
This is because the latter is an out-and-out romanticist in
his way of envisaging the world and in his artistic method.
He constantly practises in the most extensive and intensive
fashion that atavistic anthropomorphism and symbolism, con
sequent on undeveloped or mystically confused thought, which
is found among savages in a natural form, and among the
whole category of degenerates in an atavistic form of mental
activity. Like Victor Hugo, and like second-class romanticists,
M. Zola sees every phenomenon monstrously magnified and
weirdly distorted. It becomes for him, as for the savage, a
fetish to which he attributes evil and hostile designs. Machines
are horrible monsters dreaming of destruction ; the streets of
Paris open the jaws of Moloch to devour the human masses ;
a magasin de modes is an alarming, supernaturally powerful
being, panting, fascinating, stifling, etc. Criticism has long
since declared, though without comprehending the psychi
atrical significance of this trait, that in every one of M. Zola's
novels some phenomenon dominates, like an obsession, forms
the main feature of the work, and penetrates, like an appalling
symbol, into the life and actions of all the characters. Thus,
in L'Assommoir, the still; in Pot-Bouille, the 'solemn stair
case'; in Au Bonheur des Dames, the draper's shop; in Nana,
the heroine herself, who is no ordinary harlot, but ' je ne sai's
quel monstre geant a la croupe gonflee de vices, une enorme Venus
populaire, aussi lourdement bite que grossierement impudique, une
espece d'idole hindoue qui n'aseulement qu' a laisser tomber ses voiles
pour faire tomber en arret les viellards et les collegiens, et qui, par
instants, se sent elle-meme planer sur Paris et sur le monde!* This
* F. Brunetiere, op. cit, p. 156.

REALISM 495
symbolism we have encountered among all degenerates, among
symbolists properly so called, and other mystics, as well as
among diabolists, and principally in Ibsen. It never fails
in the madness of doubt or negation.* The would-be
' realist ' sees the sober reality as little as a superstitiously
timid savage, or a lunatic afflicted by hallucinations. He puts
into it his own mental dispositions. He disposes of pheno
mena arbitrarily, so that they appear to express an idea which
is dominating him. He gives to inanimate objects a fantastic
life, and metamorphoses them into so many goblins endowed
with feeling, will, cunning and ideas ; but of human beings
he makes automata through whom a mysterious power declares
itself, a fatality in the ancient sense, a force of Nature, a prin
ciple of destruction. His endless descriptions delineate nothing
but his own mental condition. No image of reality is ever
obtained by them, for the picture of the world is to him like a
freshly varnished oil-painting to which one stands too close in
a disadvantageous light, and in which the reflection of one's
own face may be discerned.
M. Zola calls his series of novels ' The Natural and Social
History of a Family under the Second Empire,*' and he seeks
in this way to awaken the double idea that the Rougon-
Macquarts are a typical average family of the French middle
class, and that their history represents the general social
life of France in the time of Napoleon III. He expressly
asserts, as the fundamental principle of art, that the novelist
should only relate the everyday life observed by himself, f
I allowed myself for thirteen years to be led astray by his
swagger, and credulously accepted his novels as sociological
contributions to the knowledge of French life. Now I know
better. The family whose history Zola presents to us in
twenty mighty volumes is entirely outside normal daily life,
and has no necessary connection whatever with France and the
Second Empire. It might just as well have lived in Patagonia,
and at the time of the Thirty Years' War. He who ridicules
the ' idealists ' as being narrators of ' exceptional cases/ of
that which ' never happened,' has chosen for the subject of his
magnum opus the most exceptional case he could possibly have
* 'Everything is a mystery. Everything is a semblance. Nothing really
exists.' The saying of one of Arnaud's patients afflicted with the mania of
negation. See F. L. Arnaud, ' Sur le De'lire des Negations,' Annates mddico-
psychologiques, 70 serie, t. xvi., p. 387 et seq.
f ' I would lay humanity on a white page, all things, all beings, a work
which would be a vast ark.' — E. Zola, preface to La Faute de VAbbd
Mouret, edition of 1875. 'Throw yourself into the commonplace current of
existence.' ' Choose for your hero a person in the simplicity of daily life.'
'No hollow apotheoses, no grand false sentiments, no ready-made formulas.'
— E. Zola, Le Roman experimental, passim.

496 DEGENERATION
found — a group of degenerates, lunatics, criminals, prostitutes,
and ' mattoids,' whose morbid nature places them apart from
the species ; who do not belong to a regular society, but are
expelled from it, and at strife with it; who conduct themselves
as complete strangers to their epoch and country, and are, by
their manner of existence, not members of any modern civilized
people whatever, but belong to a horde of primitive wild men of
bygone ages. M. Zola affirms that he describes life as he has
observed it, and persons he has seen. He has in reality seen
nothing and observed nothing, but has drawn the idea of his
magnum opus, all the details of his plan, all the characters of his
twenty novels, solely from one printed source, remaining hitherto
unknown to all his critics, a characteristic circumstance due to
the fact that not one of them possesses the least knowledge ofthe
literature of mental therapeutics. There is in France a family
of the name of Kerangal, who came originally from Saint-
Brieuc, in Brittany, and whose history has for the last sixty
years filled the annals of criminal justice and mental therapeu
tics. In two generations it has hitherto produced, to the
knowledge of the authorities, seven murderers and murderesses,
nine persons who have led an immoral life (one the keeper of
a disorderly house, one a prostitute who was at the same time
an incendiary, committed incest, and was condemned for a
public outrage on modesty, etc.), and besides all these, a
painter, a poet, an architect, an actress, several who were
blind, and one musician.* The history of this Kerangal family
has supplied M. Zola with material for all his novels. What
would never have been afforded him in the life he really knows
he found ready to his hand in the police and medical reports
on the Kerangals, viz., an abundant assortment of the most
execrable crimes, the most unheard-of adventures, and the
maddest and most disordered careers, permeated by artistic in
clinations which make the whole particularly piquant. If any
common fabricator of newspaper novels had had the luck to
discover the treasure he would probably have made a hash of
the subject. M. Zola, with his great power and his sombre
emotionalism, has known how to profit very effectively by it.
Nevertheless, the subject he broaches is the roman du colportage,
i.e., of a perishing romanticism which transports his dreams
into no palaces like the flourishing romanticism, but into dens,
prisons, and lunatic asylums, which are quite as far from the
* The family of Kerangal has been the subject of many works, and is well
known in technical literature. The last published work on them is due to
Dr. Paul Aubry : ' Une Famille de Cr'\mme\s,' Annates mddico-psychologiques
7e series, t. xvi., p. 429 (reproduced in La Contagion du Meurtre, by the
same author ; Paris, 1894). See especially, pp. 432, 433, the curious genealo
gical tree of the family, in which Zola's celebrated genealogical tree of the
Rougon-Macquart and the Quenu-Gradelle can be immediately recognised

REALISM 497
middle stratum of sane life as the latter, only in an opposite
direction, tending not upwards, but downwards. But if
M. Zola has infinitely more talent than the German roman
ticists, to whom we owe such works as Rinaldo Rinaldini, Die
blutige Nonne um Mitternacht, Der Scharfrichter vom Schrecken-
stein, etc., he has, on the other hand, infinitely less honesty
than they. For they, at least, admit that they relate the
most marvellous and unique horrors of their kind, while Zola
issues his chronicles of criminals and madmen, the fruits of
his reading, as a normal account of French society, drawn
from the observation of daily life.
By choosing his subject in the domain of the most extraor
dinary and most exceptional, by the childish or crazy symbo
lism and anthropomorphism displayed in his extremely unreal
survey of the world, the ' realist ' Zola proves himself to be the
immediate descendant in a direct line of the romanticists.
His works are distinguished from those of his literary ancestors
by only two peculiarities, which M. Brunetiere has well dis
cerned, viz., by ' pessimism and premeditated coarseness.' *
These peculiarities of M. Zola furnish us finally with a charac
teristic sign also of so-called realism or naturalism, which we
should have in vain attempted to discover by psychological,
aesthetic, historical, and literary inquiries. Naturalism, which
has nothing to do with Nature or reality, is, taken all in all,
the premeditated worship of pessimism and obscenity.
Pessimism, as a philosophy, is the last remains of the super
stition of primitive times, which looked upon man as the
centre and end of the universe. It is one of the philosophic
forms of ego-mania. All the objections of pessimist philoso
phers to Nature and life have but one meaning, if their premise
be correct as to the sovereignty of man in the Cosmos. When
the philosopher says, Nature is irrational, Nature is immoral,
Nature is cruel, what is this, in other words, but : I do not
understand Nature, and yet she is only there that I may under
stand her ; Nature does not consider what is for my utility
alone, and yet she has no other task than to be useful to me ;
Nature grants me but a short period of existence, often crossed
by troubles, and yet it is her duty to make provision for the
eternity of my life and my continual joys ? When Oscar
Wilde is indignant that Nature makes no difference between
himself and the grazing ox, we smile at his childishness. But
have Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Mainlander, Bahnsen, done
anything more than inflate into thick books Oscar Wilde's
ingenuous self-conceit ? and that with terrible seriousness.
Philosophic pessimism has the geocentric conception of the
world as its postulate. It stands and falls with the Ptolemaic
* Brunetiere, op. cit, p. iii.
32

498 DEGENERATION
doctrine. As soon as we recognise the Copernican point of
view we lose the right, and also the desire to apply to Nature
the measure of our logic, our morals, and our own advantage,
and there ceases to be any meaning in calling it irrational,
immoral, or cruel.
But what is also true is that pessimism is not a philosophy,
but a temperament. ' The systemic or organic sensations
which arise from the simultaneous states of the several organs,
digestive, respiratory, etc.,' says Professor James Sully, 'appear,
as Professor Ferrier has lately pointed out, to be the basis of
our emotional life. When the condition of these organs is a
healthy one, and their functions vigorous, the psychical result
is an undiscriminated mass of agreeable feeling. When the
state of the organs is unhealthy, and their functions feeble or
impeded, the psychical result is a similar mass of disagreeable
feeling.'* Pessimism is always the form under which the
patient becomes conscious of certain morbid conditions, and
first and foremost of his nervous exhaustion. Tadium vitoz,
or disgust of life, is an early premonition of insanity, and con
stantly accompanies neurasthenia and hysteria. It is evident
that a period which suffers from general organic fatigue must
necessarily be a pessimistic period. We recognise also the
constant habit which consciousness has of inventing, post facto,
apparently plausible motives, borrowed from its store of repre
sentations, and in conformity with the rules of its formal logic,
to justify the emotional states of which it has acquired the
knowledge. Thus, for the datum of the pessimistic disposition
of mind, which is the consequence of organic fatigue, there
arises the pessimist philosophy as an ulterior creation of
interpretative consciousness. In Germany, in conformity with
the speculative tendency and high intellectual culture of the
German people, this state of mind has sought expression in
philosophical systems. In France it has adopted an artistic
form in accordance with the predominating aesthetic character
of the national mind. M. Emile Zola and his naturalism are the
French equivalent of the German Schopenhauer and his philo
sophical pessimism. That naturalism should see nothing in
the world but brutality, infamy, ugliness, and corruption,
corresponds with all that we know of the laws of thought.
We know that the association of ideas is strongly influenced
by emotion. A Zola, filled from the outset with organically
unpleasant sensations, perceives in the world those phenomena
alone which accord with his organically fundamental disposi
tion, and does not notice or take into consideration those
which differ from or contradict it. And from the associated
* James Sully, Pessimism : A History and n Criticism. London 1877
p. 411. ' '''

REALISM 499
ideas which every perception awakens in him, consciousness
likewise only retains the disagreeable, which are in sympathy
with the fundamentally sour disposition, and suppresses the
others. Zola's novels do not prove that things are badly
managed in this world, but merely that Zola's nervous system
is out of order.
His predilection also for coarseness is a well-known morbid
phenomenon. ' They ' (the imbeciles), says Sollier, ' love to
talk of obscenities. . . . This is a peculiar tendency of mind
observable specially among degenerates ; it is as natural to
them as a wholesome " tone " is to normal minds.'* Gilles
de la Tourette has coined the word ' coprolalia ' (mucktalk)
for obsessional explosions of blasphemies and obscenities
which characterize a malady described most exhaustively by
M. Catrou, and called by him 'disease of convulsive tics.'f
M. Zola is affected by coprolalia to a very high degree. It is
a necessity for him to employ foul expressions, and his con
sciousness is continually pursued by representations referring
to ordure, abdominal functions, and everything connected with
them. Andreas Verga described some years ago a form of
onomatomania, or word -madness, which he called mania
blasphematoria, or oath-madness. It is manifested when the
patient experiences an irresistible desire to utter curses or
blasphemies. Verga's diagnosis applies completely to Zola. It
can only be interpreted as mania blasphematoria, when in La
Terre he gives the nickname of Jesus Christ to a creature
afflicted with flatulency, and that without any artistic necessity
or any aiming thereby at aesthetic effect either of cheerfulness
or of local colour. Finally, he has a striking predilection for
slang, for the professional language of thieves and bullies, etc.,
which he does not only employ when making personages of
this kind speak, but makes use of himself, as an author, in de
scriptions or reflections. This inclination for slang is expressly
noticed by Lombroso as an indication of degeneration in the
born criminal. J
The confusion of thought which is shown in his theoretic
writings, in his invention of the word ' naturalism,' in his
conception of the ' experimental novel,' his instinctive inclina
tion to depict demented persons, criminals, prostitutes, and
semi-maniacs, § his anthropomorphism and his symbolism, his
* Dr. Paul Sollier, Psychologie de P Idiot et de I'Imbdcile. Paris, 1891,
p. 95.
f Catrou, Etude sur la Maladie des Tics convulsifs (Jumping, Latah,
Myriachit). Paris, 1890.
X Lombroso, L' Uomo delinquente, etc., pp. 450-480.
§ His descriptions of impulsive criminals are not really exact. The laity
have greatly admired his description of the assassin Lantier in La BUe
humaine. The most competent judge in such matters, however, Lombroso,

500 DEGENERATION
pessimism, his coprolalia, and his predilection for slang,
sufficiently characterize M. Zola as a high-class degenerate.
But he shows in addition some peculiarly characteristic
stigmata, which completely establish the diagnosis.
That he is a sexual psychopath is betrayed on every page
of his novels. He revels continually in representations from
the region of the basest sensuality, and interweaves them in
all the events of his novels without being able in any way to
assign an artistic reason for this forced introduction. His
consciousness is peopled with images of unnatural vice,
bestiality, passivism, and other aberrations, and he is not
satisfied with lingering libidinously over human acts of such
a nature, but he even produces pairing animals (see La Terre,
pp. 9, io). The sight of a woman's linen produces a peculiar
excitation in him, and he can never speak without betray
ing, by the emotional colouring of his descriptions, that re
presentations of this kind are voluptuously accentuated in
him. This effect of female linen on degenerates affected by
sexual psychopathy is well known in mental therapeutics, and
has often been described by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and
others.* Connected with the sexual psychopathy of M. Zola is the
part played in him by the olfactory sensations. The pre
dominance of the sense of smell and its connection with the
sexual life is very striking among many degenerates. Scents
acquire a high importance in their works. Tolstoi (in War
and Peace) represents to us Prince Pierre suddenly deciding
on marrying the Princess Helene when he smells her fragrance
at a ball.f In the narrative entitled The Cossacks he never
says of this character, which has been inspired in M. Zola, according to his
own declaration, by L'Uomo delinquente ; ' M. Zola, in my opinion, has
never observed criminals in real life. . . . His criminal characters give me
the impression of the wanness and inaccuracy of certain photographs which
reproduce portraits, not from Nature, but from pictures.' — Le piu recenti
scoperte ed applicazioni delta psichiatria ed antropologia criminate. Con
3 tavole e 52 figure nel testo. Torino, 1893, p. 356.
* Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, etc., 3e Auflage ; Stutt
gart, 1888. Beobachtung 23, Zippes Fall, s. 55 ; Beobachtung 24, Passow's
Fall, s. 56 ; Aum. zu s. 57, Lombroso's Fall.
Cresare Lombroso, Le piu recenti scoperte, etc., p. 227 : ' He always had
voluptuous sensations on seeing animals killed, or in perceiving in shops
feminine under-garments and linen.' The case of which Lombroso here
speaks is that of a degenerate of fifteen years old, who had been observed by
Dr. MacDonald, of Clark University.
f Le*on Tolstoi, CEuvres computes, p. 385 : ' He smelt the warmth of her
body, inhaled the odour of her perfumes . . . and at this moment Pierre
understood that not only might Helene become his wife, but that she must
become so— that nothing else was possible.' It is related that the King of
France, Henri III., married Marie of Cleves because, at the wedding of the
King of Navarre and his sister, Marguerite of Valois, wishing to dry his face
in the chemise wet with the perspiration of the young princess, he was so

REALISM 501
mentions the uncle leroschka without speaking of the smell
he emitted.* We have seen in the previous chapters with
what satisfaction the Diabolists and Decadents, Baudelaire,
Huysmans, etc., lingered on odours, and especially on bad
odours. M. Barres makes his little princess say, in L'Ennemi
des Lois : ' I go every morning to the stables. Oh, that
little stabley smell, so warm and pleasant ! And she inhaled
with a pretty [!] sensual expression. . . ,'t M. de Goncourt
describes, in La Faustin, how the actress lets her Lord
Annandale smell her bosom : ' " Smell ! What do you smell ?"
she asked Lord Annandale. " Why, carnations !" he replied,
tasting it with his lips. " And what else ?" " Your skin !" '%
M. A. Binet declares that ' it is the odours of the human body
which are the causes responsible for a certain number of
marriages contracted by clever men with female subordinates
belonging to their households. For certain men, the most
essential thing in a woman is not beauty, mind, or elevation
of character ; it is her smell. The pursuit of the beloved odour
determines them to pursue some ugly, old, vicious, degraded
woman. Carried to this point, the pleasure in smell becomes
a malady of love '§ — a malady, I will add, from which only
the degenerate suffer. The examples that Binet quotes in
the course of his work, and which can be there referred to,
as I have no inclination to repeat them here, prove this
abundantly ; and Krafft-Ebing, while insisting on the ' close
connection between the sexual and the olfactory sense,' never
theless expressly declares : ' At all events, the perceptions of
smell play a very subordinate part within the physiological
limits (i.e., within the limits of the healthy life). || Even after
the abstraction of its sexual significance, the development of
the sense of smell among degenerates, not only of the higher,
but even of the lowest type, has struck many observers.
Seguin speaks of ' idiots who discriminated species of woods
and stones merely by smell without having recourse to sight,
and who, nevertheless, were not disagreeably affected by the
smell and taste of human ordure, and whose sense of touch
was obtuse and unequal. "IT
intoxicated by the scent which emanated from it, that he had no rest till he
had won her who had borne it. See Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis,
p. 17.
* Leon Tolstoi, CEuvres completes, t. ii., p. 385 : 'With him there had
come into the room a strong, but not disagreeable, smell,' etc.
t Maurice Barres, L'Ennemi des Lois, p. 47.
j Edmond de Goncourt, La Faustin. Paris, 1882, p. 267.
§ Alfred Binet, Le Fdtichisme dans P Amour, etc., p. 26. This passage
will make the German reader think of the sniffer of souls, G. Jaeger ; I have
no occasion to mention him here.
|| Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathie Sexualis, p. 15, foot-note, p. 17.
\ E. Seguin, Traitement morale, Hygiene et Education des Idiots. Paris,

5o2 DEGENERATION
M. Zola's case belongs to this series. He shows at times an
unhealthy predominance of the sensations of smell in his con
sciousness, and a perversion of the olfactory sense which make
the worst odours, especially those of all human excretions,
appear to him particularly agreeable and sensually stimulating.
The inspector of the Montpellier Academy, Leopold Bernard,
has taken the trouble, in an elaborate work — which, curiously,
has remained almost unknown* — to bring together all the
passages in Zola's novels which touch on the question of
odours, and to show that men and things do not present them
selves to him as to normal individuals, viz., in the first instance
as optical and acoustic phenomena, but as olfactory percep
tions. He characterizes all his personages by their smell. In
La Faute de I'Abbe Mouret, Albine appears ' like a great nosegay
of strong scent.' Serge, at the seminary, was ' a lily whose
sweet scent charmed his masters ' (! !) Desiree ' smells of
health.' Nana ' degage une odeur de vie, une toute-puissance de
femme! In Pot-Bouille, Bachelard exhales ' une odeur de
debauche canaille ' ; Madame Campardon has ' a good fresh
perfume of autumn fruit.' In Le Ventre de Paris, Francoise
' smells of earth, hay, the open air, the open sky.' In the same
novel the ' cheese-symphony ' occurs, as celebrated among
Zola's enthusiasts as the minute description of the variety of
offensive smells of the dirty linen in L'Assommoir.
To the ' comprehensives ' whom we have learnt to know,
this insistence on the odours emitted by men and things is
naturally one more merit and perfection. A poet who scents
so well and receives through the nose such rich impressions of
the world, is ' a more keenly vibrating instrument of observa
tion,' and his art in representing things is more many-sided
than that of poets who reproduce their impressions from
fewer senses. Why should the sense of smell be neglected in
poetry ? Has it not the same rights as all the other senses ?
And thereupon they rapidly built an aesthetic theory which, as
we have seen, induces Huysmans' Des Esseintes to compose
a symphony of perfumes, and prompts the Symbolists to
accompany the recital of their compositions on the stage with
odours, which they pretend are assorted to the contents of the
verses. The ' comprehensive ' drivellers do not for a moment
suspect that they are simply fencing with the march of organic
evolution in the animal kingdom. It does not depend on the
good pleasure of a being to construct for himself his idea of
the external world with the help of a group of such or such sense-
perceptions. In this respect he is completely subservient to
the conformation of his nervous system. The senses which
predominate are those which his being utilizes in acquiring
* L. Bernard, Le Odeurs dans le Romans de Zola. Montpellier, 1889.

REALISM 503
knowledge. The undeveloped or insufficiently developed senses
help the brain little or not at all, to know and understand
the world. To the vulture and condor the world is a picture ;
to the bat and the mole it is a sound and a tactile sensation ; to
the dog it is a collection of smells. Concerning the sense of
smell in particular, it has its central seat in the so-called
olfactory lobe of the brain, which diminishes in proportion as
the frontal lobe is developed. The more we descend in the
vertebrates the greater is the olfactory, the smaller the frontal,
lobe. In man the olfactory lobe is quite subordinated, and
the frontal lobe, the presumable seat of the highest mental
functions, including language, greatly predominates. The
consequence of these anatomical relations, which evade our
influence, is that the sense of smell has scarcely any further
share in man's knowledge. He obtains his impressions of the
external world no longer by the nose, but principally by the
eye and ear. The olfactory perceptions only furnish a mini
mum contribution to the concepts which are formed out of
ideational elements. It is only in the most limited degree
that smells can awaken abstract concepts, i.e., a higher and
complex mental activity, and stimulate their accompanying
emotions ; a ' symphony of perfumes ' in the Des Esseintes
sense can, therefore, no longer give the impression of moral
beauty, this being an idea which is elaborated by the centres
of conception. In order to inspire a man with logical sequences.
of ideas and judgments, with abstract concepts by scents
alone; to make him conceive the phenomenon of the world,
its changes and causes of motion, by a succession of perfumes,
his frontal lobe must be depressed and the olfactory lobe of a
dog substituted for it, and this, it must be admitted, is beyond
the capacity of ' comprehensive ' imbeciles, however fanati
cally they may preach their aesthetic folly. Smellers among
degenerates represent an atavism going back, not only to the
primeval period of man, but infinitely more remote still, to an
epoch anterior to man. Their atavism retrogrades to animals
amongst whom sexual activity was directly excited by odoriferous
substances, as it is still at the present day in the muskdeer, or
who, like the dog, obtained their knowledge of the world by the
action of their noses.
The extraordinary success of Zola among his contemporaries
is not explained by his high qualifications as an author, that is,
by the extraordinary force and power of his romantic descrip
tions, and by the intensity and truth of his pessimistic emotion,
which makes his representation of suffering and sorrow irre
sistibly impressive ; but by his worst faults, his triviality and
lasciviousness. This can be proved by the surest of methods,
that of figures. Let us consult as to the diffusion of his

504 DEGENERATION
different novels, the printed indications, for example, at the
beginning ofthe last edition of L'Assommoir (bearing the date
1893). They have been put down as follows : Of Nana,
160,000; La Debacle, 143,000; L'Assommoir, 127,000; La
Terre, 100,000 ; Germinal, 88,000 ; La Bete humaine and Le
Reve, each 83,000 ; Pot-Bouille, 82,000 ; as a contrast, L'CBuvre
55,000 ; La joie de Vivre, 44,000 ; La Curee, 36,000 ; La Con-
quete de Plassans, 25,000 ; of the Contes a Ninon not even 2,000
copies, etc. Thus, the novels which have had the greatest
sale are those in which lust and bestial coarseness appear most
flagrantly, and the demand diminishes with mathematical
exactitude in proportion as the layer of obscenity, spread by
Zola over his work as with a mason's trowel, becomes more
thin and less ill-smelling. Three novels appear as an exception
to this rule : La Debacle, Germinal, and Le Reve. Their high
position as regards the number of the editions is explained
by the fact that the first treats of the war of 1870, the second
of socialism, the third of mysticism. These three works appeal
to the frame of mind of the period. They swim with the
fashionable current. But all the rest have owed their success
to the lowest instincts of the masses, to its brutish passion
for the sight of crime and voluptuousness.
M. Zola was bound to make a school — first, because of his
successes in the book trade, which drove into his wake the
whole riff-raff of literary intriguers and plagiarists, and then
because of the facility with which his most striking peculiarities
can be imitated. His art is accessible to every bungler of
the day who dishonours the literary vocation by his slovenly
hand. An empty and mechanical enumeration of completely
indifferent aspects under the pretext of description exacts no
effort. Every porter of a brothel is capable of relating a low
debauch with the coarsest expressions. The only thing which
might offer some difficulty would be the invention of a plot,
the construction of a frame of action. But M. Zola, whose
strength does not lie in the gift of story-telling, boasts' of this
imperfection as a special merit, and proclaims as a rule of
art that the poet must have nothing to relate. This rule suits
excellently the noxious insects who crawl behind him. Their
impotence becomes their most brilliant qualification. They
know nothing, they can do nothing, and they are on that
account particularly adapted to ' die Moderne,' as they say in
Germany. Their so-called 'novels' depict neither human
beings, nor characters, nor destinies ; but, thou poor Philistine
who canst not see it, it is precisely this which constitutes
their value !
Moreover, justice exacts that among Zola's imitators two
groups should be distinguished. The one cultivates chiefly his

REALISM 505
pessimism, and accepts his obscenities into the bargain, though
without enthusiasm, and often even with visible embarrass
ment and secret repugnance. It consists of hysteric and
degenerate subjects who are bond fide, who, in consequence
of their organic constitution, actually feel pessimistic, and
have found in Zola the artistic formula which corresponds
most truly with their sentiments. I place in this group some
dramatic authors of the ' Tb.6a.tre- Libre ' in Paris, directed
by M. Antoine ; and the Italian ' Verists.' The naturalistic
theatre is the most untrue thing that has been seen hitherto,
even more untrue than the operetta and the fairy-play. It
cultivates the so-called ' cruel terms,' i.e., phrases in which
the persons openly make a display of all the pitiable, infamous
and cowardly ideas and feelings which surge through their
consciousness, and systematically neglect this most primitive
and palpable fact, that by far the most widespread and
tenacious characteristic of man is hypocrisy and dissimu
lation. The forms of customs survive incalculably longer
than morality, and man simulates the greater honesty, and
hides his baseness under appearances so much the more
seeming-pious, as his instincts are more crafty and mean.
The Verists, among whom are many powerful literary natures,
are one of the most surprising and distressing phenomena in
contemporary literature. One understands pessimism in sorely-
tried France ; one comprehends it also in the insupportable
narrowness of social life in the crepuscular North, with its
cloudy gray skies and its scourge of alcoholism. Eroticism,
too, is comprehensible among the over-excited and exhausted
Parisian population, and in the Scandinavian North, as a kind
of revolt against the zealous discipline and morose constraint of
a bigotry without joy, and mortifying to the flesh. But how could
pessimism spring up under the radiant sunshine and eternally
blue sky of Italy, in the midst of a handsome and joyous people
who sing even in speaking (invalids like Leopardi might naturally
appear as exceptions everywhere) ? and how did Italians arrive
at insane lubricity, when in their country there still exists,
living in the temples and in the fields, a souvenir of the
artlessly robust sensuality of the pagan world, with its symbols
of fecundity ; where also natural and healthy sexuality has
always preserved through centuries the right to express itself
innocently in art and literature ? If Verism is anything else
but an example of the propagation of intellectual epidemics
by imitation, the task devolves upon the scientific Italian
critic to explain this paradox in the history of manners.
The other group of Zola's imitators is not composed of
superior degenerates, unhealthy persons who sincerely give
themselves out for what they are, and express often with talent

506 DEGENERATION
what they feel ; but of people who morally and mentally stand
ci a level with supporters of evil, who, instead of the trade of
night-birds, have chosen the less dangerous and hitherto more
esteemed vocation of authors of novels and dramas, when the
theory of naturalism had made it accessible to them. This
brood has only taken immodesty from M. Zola, and con
formably with the degree of culture has carried it into obscenity
without circumlocution. To this group belong the professional
Parisian pornographers, whose daily and weekly papers, stories,
pictures, and theatrical representations in M. de Chirac's style,
continually give employment to the correctional tribunals ; the
Norwegian authors of novels on street-walkers ; and, unhappily,
also a portion of our ' Young German ' realists. This group
stands outside of literature. It forms a portion of that riff
raff of great towns who professionally cultivate immorality,
and have chosen this trade with full responsibility, solely from
horror of honest work and greed for lucre. It is not mental
therapeutics, but criminal justice, which is competent to judge
them.

CHAPTER II.
THE 'YOUNG-GERMAN' PLAGIARISTS.
This chapter is not, properly, within the scope of this book.
It must not be forgotten that I did not wish to write a history
of literature, nor to indulge in current aesthetic criticism, but
to demonstrate the unhealthy mental condition of the imitators
of fashionable literary tendencies. It does not enter into my
plan to deal with those degenerates or lunatics who evolve
their works from their own morbid consciousness, and them
selves discover the artistic formula for their own eccentricities
— in other words, with those leaders who go their own way
because they choose or because they must. Mere imitators I
have neglected on principle throughout the whole of my
inquiry, first because the genuine degenerates only form a
feeble minority among them, while the great majority is a per
fectly responsible rabble of swindlers and parasites, and next
because even the few diseased persons who are found in their
ranks do not belong to the class of ' higher ' degenerates, but
are poor weak minds who, taken separately, possess no import
ance whatever, and at most only deserve a fleeting mention in
so far as they testify to the influence of their masters on ill-
balanced minds.
If, then, in spite of this, I devote a special chapter to the
so-called ' Young-German ' ' realists/ while I have despatched

REALISM

507

in a few words the Italian and Scandinavian Zolaists, it is
verily and by no means because the former are any more
worthy than the latter. On the contrary, some of the Italian
'Verists,' fhe Dane, J. P. Jakobsen, the Norwegian, Arne
Garborg, the Swede, Auguste Strindberg, devoid as they are
of real originality, possess, nevertheless, more vigour and
talent in their little finger than all 'Young-Germany' put
together. I only dwell on the latter because the history of
the propagation of a mental contagion in his own country
is not without importance for the German reader, and also
because the way in which this group has appeared and per
meated shows up certain traits in which we can detect the
neurosis of the age, and, lastly, because some few of their
members are good examples of intensive hysteria, having, in
addition to complete incapacity and a general feebleness of
mind, that malicious and anti-social ego-mania, that moral
obtuseness, that irresistible need of attracting attention to them
selves, no matter by what means, that facetious vanity and
self-approbation, which characterizes the complaint.
I will not deny that when I turn towards the ' Young-
German ' movement I can scarcely maintain the cool equani
mity with which, according to scientific method, I have
hitherto observed any given phenomena. As a German writer
I feel deep shame and sorrow at the spectacle of the literature
which has been so long and so brutally proclaimed, with flourish
of trumpets, and with systematic disdain of all that did not bear
its seal, as the unique and exclusively German literature of the
present time, and even that of the future.*
Since genius was congregated at Weimar, German litera
ture has ever taken the lead in civilized humanity. We
were the inventors, foreigners were the imitators. We pro
visioned the world with poetic forms and ideas. Romanticism
originated among us, and only became a literary and artistic
* Le Temps, N° du 13 FeVrier, 1892: 'Current literature ... is, at
present, at an inconceivably low ebb in Germany. From one end of the
year to the other it is becoming an impossibility to discover a novel, a
drama, or a page of criticism worthy of notice. The Deutsche Rundschau
itself recently admitted this in despair. It is not only the talent and the
style which are deficient — all is poor, weak and flat ; one might imagine
one's self in France, in the time of Bouilly. . . . Even the desire to rise
above a certain level of ordinary writing seems wanting. One ends by being
thankful to any contemporary German author who is seen to be making
. . . the simplest effort not to write like a crossing - sweeper.' Every
German who observes all the literary productions of his contemporaries will
see that this is the opinion of a spiteful enemy. This opinion, nevertheless,
is explained and justified by the fact that at the present day it is only the
' realists ' who make enough stir to be heard in certain places abroad, and
that there the natives are delighted to be able to consider them as repre
senting all the German literature of the day.

508 DEGENERATION
fashion in France a good many years later, whence it passed
on into England. Gorres, Zacharias Werner, Novalis, and
Oscar Von Redwitz, created lyric mysticism ^and neo-
Catholicism among us, and these have only just reached
France. Our poet-precursors of the revolution of 1848, Karl
Beck, George Herwegh, Freiligrath, Ludwig Seeger, Friedrich
von Sallet, R. E. Prutz, etc., had even then sung of the
misery, the uprisings, and the hopes of the disinherited, before
the Walt Whitmans, the William Morrises, and the Jules Jouys,
were born, men whom to-day people in America, England,
and France, would like to consider as the discoverers of the
Fourth Estate for lyric poetry. Pessimism was embodied
almost at the same time in Italy (in Leopardi) and among us
in Nicholas Lenau, more than a generation before French
naturalism built its art upon it. Goethe created symbolic
poetry in the second part of Faust half a century before Ibsen
and the French Symbolists parodied this tendency. Every
healthy current and every pathological current in contem
porary poetry and art can be traced back to a German source,
every progress and every decadence in this sphere have their
point of departure in Germany. The philosophical theory
of every novel method of thought, as well as of every new
error, which, during a hundred years, have gained a hold over
civilized humanity, has been furnished by the Germans.
Fichte gave us the theory of romanticism ; Feuerbach (almost
at the same time as Auguste Comte), that of the mechanical
conception of the world ; Schopenhauer, that of pessimism ;
the Hegelians, Max Stirner, and Karl Marx, that of the most
rigid ego-mania and the most rigid collectivism, etc. And
now we suffer the humiliation of seeing a heap of contemptible
plagiarists hawking about the dullest and coarsest counterfeit
of French imitations (which all the clever men in France
have already abandoned and repudiated) as ' the most modern '
production offered by Germany, as the flower of German
literature, present and future. We even permit foreign critics
to say : ' Ancient fashions disdained in France even by village
beauties, are to be seen exhibited in German shop-windows
as the greatest novelties, and credulously accepted by the
public' The realists naturally deny that they are mere re
peaters and limping belated followers.* But he who knows
* Arno Holz— Johannes Schlaf, Die Familie Selicke, 3" Auflage ; Berlin
1892, p. vi. : ' In fact, nothing so provokes us to smile ... as when' they, in
their anxiety to find models, label us as plagiarists of the great foreign
authors. Let them say it, then. ... It will be acknowledged some day
that there has never yet been in our literature a movement less influenced
from without, more strongly originated from within — in one word, more
national — than this movement, even at the further development of which we
look to-day, and which has had for its visible point of departure our Papa

REALISM 509
a little more of art and poetry than is learnt in a Berlin
tavern frequented by realists, or in a low newspaper informed
by this sort of company; he who contemplates in its entire
range the contemporary movement of thought without stop
ping on the frontiers of his own country, can have no doubt
whatever that German realism, as a local phenomenon, may
have for Germany itself a melancholy importance, but does
not exist at all for universal literature, because all trace of
personal or national originality is lacking. To the chorus
in which the voices of humanity express its feelings and
thoughts, not the faintest new note has been added by it.
Plagiarists so low down in the scale as the German realists
are not in the least entitled to a detailed individual examination.
To do this would be to make one's self both ridiculous in the
eyes of competent judges and of a piece with strolling players,
to whom it is a matter of small importance whether they
are praised or blamed, provided they are mentioned. Other
motives also warn me to be prudent in the choice of examples
I propose to lay before the reader. I am firmly convinced that
in a few years all this movement will be forgotten even to the
name itself. The lads who now pretend to be the future of
German literature will discover little by little that the business
to which they have devoted themselves is less agreeable and
lucrative than they had imagined.* Those among them who
yet possess a last remnant of health and strength will find the
way to their natural vocation, and become restaurant-waiters
or servants, night-watchmen or peddlers, and I should fear to
injure their advancement in these honest professions if I nailed
here the remembrance of their aberration of past days, which
would otherwise be forgotten by all. The feebler and weaker
among them, who could not manfully resolve to earn their
bread by a decent occupation, will disappear probably as
drunkards, vagabonds, beggars, perhaps even in a house of
correction, and if, after the lapse of years, a serious reader
happened to come across their names in this book, he would
be right in exclaiming, ' What sort of bad joke is this ? What
Hamlet. Die Familie Selicke is the most thoroughly German piece of writing
our literature possesses,' etc. This passage may serve the reader as a model
both of the style in which these lads write, and of the tone in which they
speak of themselves and their productions.
* The complaint of want of money is a constant refrain among the 'Young
Germans.' Listen to Baron Detlev von Liliencron : 'You had nothing to
eat again to-day ; as a set-off, every blackguard has had his fill.' ' The
terror of infernal damnation is — A garden of roses under the kisses of
spring, — When I think of how heart and soul fret, — To be hourly bitten by
the need of money.' And Karl Bleibtreu : ' Brass reigns, gold reigns, —
Genius goes its way a-begging.' 'To call a ton of gold one's own, — Sublime
end, unattainable to man !' etc.

510 DEGENERATION
does the author want to make me believe ? There never
have been such men !' Finally, an absolutely incapable
pseudo-writer is individually deprived of all importance, and
only acquires it as one of a number. He cannot therefore
be treated critically, but merely statistically. For all these
reasons I shall only draw from the whole number a few char
acters and works, to show with their help what German
' realism ' really is.
The founder of the realist school is Karl Bleibtreu. He
accomplished this work of foundation by publishing a brochure
of which the principal feature was a cover of brilliant red
furrowed by black lightning in zigzags, and which bore this
title like the roll of a kettle-drum, Revolution in Literature. In
this literary ' tout ' Bleibtreu, without the slightest attempt at
substantiation, but with a brazen brow, depreciated a whole
series of esteemed and successful authors, swore with great
oaths that they were dead and buried, and announced the
dawn of a new literary epoch, which already counted a
certain number of geniuses, at the head of whom he him
self stood.
As an author Bleibtreu, in spite of the many and various
works he has already published, does not yet count for much.
It would, however, be unjust to ignore his great ability as a
book-maker. In this respect Revolution in der Literatur is a
model production. With skilful address, he mingled authors
of repute whom he hacked into sausage-meat with a few
shallow scribblers in vogue, whom it was no doubt rather
foolish to fight, with the grand airs of a gladiator, but whom
no one would have defended against a smiling disdain. The
presence of these unwarranted intruders into the group whom
he undertook to extirpate from literature, may give to his
raising of the standard a semblance of reason in the eyes of
superficial readers. Not less cleverly chosen were the people
whom he presented to readers as the new geniuses. With the
exception of two or three decent mediocrities, for whom there
is always a little modest corner in the literature of a great
people, these were complete nullities from whom he himself
never had to fear a dangerous competition. The greatest of
his geniuses is, for example, Max Kretzer, a man who writes,
in the German of a Cameroon -Negro, some professedly
' Berlin ' novels, of which the best known, Die Verkommenen,
is ' Berlinish ' to such a degree that it simply dilutes the history
of the widow Gras and the workman Gaudry, which took place
in Paris in 1877. This event, celebrated as the first adventure
with cocottes in which vitriol played a part, could only happen
in Paris, and under the conditions of Parisian life. It is
specifically Parisian. But Kretzer calmly removed the Paris

REALISM 511
trade-mark, replacing it with that of Berlin, and he thus
created a ' Berlin ' novel, vaunted by Bleibtreu as the ideal of
a ' genuine ' and ' true ' exposition. He reclothes his newly-
discovered ' geniuses,' who recall Falstaff 's recruits, Mouldy,
Shadow, Wart, Feeble, and Bullcalf (King Henry IV., Part II.),
in a uniform which he could not have chosen more effectively.
He dressed them out in the costume of Schiller's brigands
in the Bohemian forests ; he pronounced them to be a troop
of rebels, fighters at barricades, Liitzow huntsmen in the
struggle for freedom against hypocrisy perukes, and pig-tails,
and all obstructionists; and he hoped that youth and the
friends of progress would take him for something serious, on
seeing him march at the head of his poor, infirm cripples and
knockknees, thus disguised.
His plan, although excellently contrived and conducted, was
only partially successful. Scarcely had he in a certain measure
organized and drilled his little troop, when it mutinied and
drove him away. It did not choose another captain, for each
private soldier wished himself to be chief, and the feeblest and
most timid ofthe band alone recognised any other genius outside
his own. Bleibtreu has not to this day got over the ingratitude
of the people who had taken his mystification seriously, and
had really looked upon themselves as the geniuses he had pro
claimed them to be, without, as he thought, running any risks ;
and in his last publication he still utters his sorrow in these
bitter verses (Aus einem lyrischen Tagebuch) :
1 For what purpose this long struggle ? 'Tis vain ! And my hand is
paralyzed. Long live falsehood, stupidity, folly ! Adieu, thou German
piggery ! The earth of the tomb will extinguish the conflagration. I have
been, as long as I could think, a veritable booby. I was no honest German,
I was a wounded swan.'
Bleibtreu could not give any talent to the realists invented
by him, but the latter borrowed from him a few of his turns of
expression. To make an impression on the ignorant, they
have associated with themselves as honorary members some re
spectable authors whom one is surprised to meet with dans ce
galere. Thus the realists include among their numbers, for
example, Theodore Fontane, a true poet, whose novels honour
ably hold their place among the best productions of the kind
in any literature of Europe ; H. Heiberg, of vigorous although
unequal talent ; unfortunately compelled, as it would seem, by
external circumstances to hasty and excessive work, against
which, perhaps, his artistic conscience vainly protests; and
Detlev von Liliencron, who is by no means a geniusr but
a good lyric poet with a sense of style, and who may rank
by the side of epigoni such as a Hans Hopfen, a Hermann
Lingg, a Martin Greif. Considering the high level that

512 DEGENERATION
German lyric poetry — the first in the world even in the
judgment of foreign nations — has occupied uninterruptedly
since Goethe, it is giving a German poet no small praise if
one can say he is not inferior to the average of the last seventy
years. Liliencron, however, does not surpass it, and I do
not see how he can be fairly placed above Rudolf Baumbach,
for example, whom the realists affect to despise, probably
because he has disdained to join their gang. It is not in
comprehensible that a Fontane or a Heiberg should consent
to suffer the importunate promiscuousness of the realists. The
Church, too, admits sometimes to serve in the Mass young
rogues from the street, who have only to swing the censer.
The sole thing that is demanded of them as realists honoris
causa, is to bear silently and smilingly this compromise of an
honourable name. Liliencron alone thinks himself obliged
to make some concessions to his new companions, in using
here and there in his last poems, not his own language, but
theirs. Besides the smuggling in of some esteemed names among
theirs, the realists have carefully practised and cultivated
another business-trick of Bleibtreu's — that of effective disguise.
They assumed (in the collection of lyric poetry entitled Young
Germany, Friedenau and Leipzig, 1886) the name of ' Young
Germany/ which calls up a faint remembrance of the great
and bold innovators of 1830, as well as ideas of blooming
youth and spring, with a false nose of modernism tied on.
But let us here at once remark that the realists, plagiarists
to the backbone, do not even possess sufficient independence
to find a name peculiarly their own, but have quietly plagiarized
the denomination under which the Pleine-Boerne-Gutzkow
group has become renowned.
As the first specimen of ' realist ' literature of ' Young
Germany,' I will quote the novel by Heinz Tovote, Im
Liebesrausch* He relates the history of a landed proprietor
and former officer, Herbert von Diiren, who makes the ac
quaintance of a certain Lucy, formerly a waitress at an inn,
and the mistress of quite a number of young men in succession.
He makes her his mistress, and indulges in his passion until,
being unable to live without her, he induces her to marry
him. Herbert, who is only partially acquainted with Lucy's
past, presents her to his mother. The latter, who very soon
perceives the relations existing between her son and this
person, nevertheless gives her consent, and the marriage
takes place. In the aristocratic and military society of Berlin,
in which the couple move for a time, Lucy's antecedents soon
* Heinz Tovote, Im Liebesrausch, Berliner Roman, 6e Auflage Berlin
1893.

REALISM 513
become known, and she is ' cut ' by all the world. Herbert
himself remains faithfully attached to her, until he discovers one
day by accident, at the house of one of his friends — of course a
' realist ' painter — a picture representing the nude figure of Lucy
bathing in the sea ! He very logically concludes that his wife
had posed as a model to the painter, and he drives her away. As
a matter of fact, however, the ' realist ' had painted the nude
figure from imagination, and involuntarily given it Lucy's
features, because of the respectful admiration he secretly
cherishes for her. (Judge for a moment how that could be
if she had been disreputable !) Then Herbert, smitten with
remorse, seeks the vanished Lucy, whom he discovers, after
heart-breaking efforts, in his own house, where she has lived
for months unknown to him. The reconciliation of husband
and wife takes place amid general pathos, and the young wife
dies in giving birth to a child, and uttering affecting senti
ments. I will not waste time by pointing out the silliness of this
story. The essential part in a novel, moreover, is not the
plot, but the form, in both the narrower and the broader sense
— language, style, composition — and these I will examine a
little later.
The very first thing we have a right to expect of a man
who assumes to write for the public, i.e., for the educated
people of his own nation, is evidently that he should be
master of his own language. Now, Heinz Tovote has no
idea whatever of German. He commits the grossest errors
every moment — solecisms, mistakes of syntax, ignorance of
the value of words — which make one's hair stand on end. Some
few of these abominable faults of language are tolerably wide
spread, others belong to the jargon of the roughest class of
the people ; but there are some that Tovote could never have
heard. They are the result of his personal ignorance of German
grammar. Next as to his style. When Tovote writes a description, in
order to determine and strengthen the substantive, he chooses,
on principle, the adjective naturally contained in that substantive.
Here are some examples of this intolerable tautology : ' An
icy January storm.' ' In the Friedrichstrasse light elegant
equipages were crowded.' ' Incarnation of the most lovable
grace.' 'A slowly creeping fever. 'A lazy somnolence.'
' They glowed fiery in the last light.' ' She suffered cruel
torments,' etc. I doubt if any author, having but little respect
for himself, his vocation, his maternal tongue or his readers,
would put such words together. There is no necessity, in
hunting for the ' rare and precious epithet,' to go so far as
the French stylists, but such a sweeping together of the
33

514 DEGENERATION
stalest, most useless, and most inexpressive adjectives is not
literature ; it is properly, to echo the French critic, the
work of scavengers. Another characteristic of this style is
its silliness. The author relates that Herbert von Diiren was
' keenly interested, from its first appearance,' in Sullivan's
operetta The Mikado. ' Now that it had cast off its English
garb, it seemed to him still more indigenous.' Thus he
seriously declares that an English operetta has seemed to a
German more indigenous in the German language than in
English. ' Suddenly he was seized with a senseless fury
against this man who saluted him so politely, whereby he,
who was habitually politeness itself to everyone, did not return
the salute, and turned away.' Not to respond to a salute by
way of expressing his ' senseless fury ' is truly not very ferocious
on the part of an old officer. ' The horses were hanging their
heads sadly, and sleeping.' That it is possible to sleep sadly
or gaily is a discovery by Tovote. ' Like walls, the colossi
of houses stood crowding against each other.' Like walls ?
One would think that houses really have walls. It is exactly
as if Tovote had said : ' Like men, the people stood crowding
against each other.'
When Tovote strives to write in a sublime and beautiful
style, the result we get is as follows : ' Yet there lay in the
slender perfectly levelled lines a slumbering strength.' (What
can the lines be which are 'slender,' i.e., not thick and
' perfectly levelled ' ?) ' She was already smiling through her
tears, and her face resembled a summer landscape which,
while the rain still falls on the corn, is bathed again in the
bright rays of the sun emerging from clouds.' Thus, what we
are first to think of when contemplating a face is a summer
landscape. ' He felt how her lips clung [sich klammerten !] to
his.' ' It must be granted that, considering his youth, he has
the incontestable genius of a lively conception,' etc.
Tovote seeks to plagiarize the diffuse descriptions of the
French naturalists, and unfolds pictures the novelty, clearness
and vigour of which the following quotations will' enable us
to admire. (End of a theatrical representation :) ' In the
stalls the seats clapped back with a muffled sound. . . . The
audience rose, doors were opened, curtains were drawn "back
and the theatre emptied slowly, while a few isolated spectators
alone remained in their places.' 'Unceasingly, the whole
night the snowflakes fell. In thick bales [!] it lav on the bare
branches of the trees, which threatened to break down in
winterly weakness. The pines and low bushes were enveloped
in a thick mantle of snow. To the straw, wound round the
standard roses the snow clung, and formed strange figures*
it lay a foot high on the walls, and delicately veiled the points

REALISM 515
of the iron railings. All tracks were effaced. The wind,
which drove the flakes before it, threw them into all the
hollows, so that all the corners and all the unevennesses dis
appeared.' ' They stood high above the sea, which spread
around them like an infinite plain.' ' The sun had set. . . .
The clouds, heavily encamped on the horizon, still glowed
with flaming crimson purple ; then they passed into violet,
which changed into a colourless gray [so there is a coloured
gray also ?] until night descended, and all colours gradually
died out.' (Compare this pitiable attempt to counterfeit ' im
pressionism ' with the French models quoted in the preceding
chapter.) ' The night had completely closed in — a dark, pro
foundly black night.' (Consider the juxtaposition of these
two adjectives.) ' The moon alone hung mournfully above the
waters [the moon in a night both ' dark ' and ' profoundly
black !'], and the lighthouse threw its flood of light into the
distance. Deep at their feet the sea raved with muffled roar
in the spite of a thousand years [!], and licked the . creviced
rocks.' A ' raving spite ' which ' licks ' does not appear to be
a very dangerous spite. ' She retained the deep wound over
her eye as a little scar all her life long.' If she had a ' little
scar,' she did not therefore keep a deep wound ' all her life
long.' ' Above them, in the blue sky, a vulture wheeled in
circles with outspread wings, lost like a black point in this
sea of light.' In a vulture which is only seen as ' a black
point,' it is not possible to distinguish the ' outspread wings.'
Here is the description of a face : ' Two full fresh lips,
chaste [!], bright red, a graceful little nose, imperceptibly
tilted, but parting in a narrow straight line from the forehead.'
We will leave the reader the trouble of imagining for himself
this ' little nose imperceptibly tilted ' in ' the narrow straight
line.' ' The engine of the express train panted across the
level plain which stretched all round like a burning desert.
Right and left, field after field of corn, fruitful orchards and
verdant meadows.' Fields, orchards, meadows, and yet a
' burning [?] desert ' ? ' The half-closed eyes, with their white
membranes, look at him so steadily.' This does not mean,
as one might suppose, the eyes of a bird, but those of a human
being, in which our novelist professes to have discovered these
incomprehensible ' white membranes.'
We have seen what impressionism and the descriptive tic
of naturalism have become in the hands of Tovote. I will
now show how this ' realist ' can observe and reproduce reality
in the smallest as in the greatest things. Herbert, the first
evening of his acquaintance with Lucy, takes her to a
restaurant and orders, among other things, a bottle of
burgundy. ' The waiter placed the pot-bellied bottle on the

516 DEGENERATION
table, in a flourishing curve.' Burgundy in 'potbellied'
bottles ! They eat soup, served in ' silver bowls ' (!), green
peas and a capon, the excellence of which forms the subject
of their incredible conversation at table, and when this repast
is disposed of, and Lucy has lighted a cigarette, she asks for
oysters, which are brought and eaten by her ' served according
to the rules of art.' I should certainly not reproach anyone
for not knowing a bottle of burgundy by sight, nor at which
stage of a repast one eats oysters. I myself did not grow up
amongst oysters and burgundy, but it would be more honest
not to speak of these good things till one knows something of
them. Let us give a passing notice to the unconscious respect,
mingled with envy, for the difficult and distinguished occupa
tion of eating oysters, deliciously revealed in this admiring
declaration, that Lucy has oysters ' served ' (?) ' according to
the rules of art,' and the backwoodsman's ignorance of the
most elementary good breeding which Tovote betrays in
making a man of the world talk incessantly at table about the
food. To continue. Lucy's lover has travelled, via Brussels,
' from Havre to Egypt.' In that case he must have chartered
a steamer on his own account, as there is no regular line of
steamers between Havre and Egypt. For some months
Herbert has had on his writing-table some unfinished manu
scripts. ' He rummaged through this heap of yellow manu
scripts.' Under shelter the worst ligneous fibre paper itself
would certainly not turn yellow in the space of a few months.
The bed-chamber, arranged with all possible care by Herbert
for his Lucy, has ' blue silk curtains/ and ' pale pink satin '
seats. Such a wild combination of colours would be avoided
by the better secondhand dealers even in their shop windows.
I grant that all these blunders, although amusing, are insig
nificant. They must not be passed over, however, when com
mitted by a ' realist,' who boasts of ' observation ' and ' truth.'
Graver still are the impossible actions and characters of the
men. In a moment of grief Lucy lets ' fall her arms on the
table-napkin in her lap, and looks vacantly before her, biting
her under lip.' Has anyone ever seen or done such a thing
in this state of mind ? Wild ecstasy of love Lucy expresses
thus : ' " Kiss me," she implored, and her whole being seemed
to wish to lose itself in him — "kiss me!'" Herbert had
made her acquaintance in Heligoland, where she lived with
an Englishman named Ward, and had taken her to be Ward's
betrothed. A German officer of good family, being con
siderably over thirty, was actually able to look upon a woman
living with a rich young foreigner alone at a watering-place as
his betrothed ! The latter, an absolutely neglected child of
the working class, learnt English with Ward in less than a

REALISM 517
year so perfectly that she was everywhere mistaken for an
Englishwoman, and played the piano so well that she could
execute pieces from operettas, etc.
I do not consider it a crime when Tovote, in using French
words, confounds tourniquet with moulinet, and speaks of
cabinets separes instead of cabinets particidiers. A German
does not require to know French. It would be a good thing
indeed if he knew German. Good taste, however, would pre
vent his making a display of scraps of a language of which he
knows absolutely nothing.
The obscenities with which the novel swarms are incom
parably weaker than in analogous passages by Zola, but they
are peculiarly repulsive because, in spite of the absolute inca
pacity of Tovote to rise above the coarseness of commercial
travellers relating their love adventures in hotels, they, never
theless, betray his determination to be violently sensational
and subtly sensual.
If I have lingered thus long over this bungling piece of work,
so far below the level of literature, it is because of its being
thoroughly typical of German realism. The language trans
gresses the simplest rules of grammar. Not one expression is
accurately chosen, and really characterizes the object or the
concept that is brought before the reader. That an author
should speak not only accurately, but expressively, that he
should be able to reproduce impressions and ideas in an
original and powerful way, that he must have a feeling for the
value and delicate sense of words ; of this Tovote has not
the slightest idea. His descriptions are shabby enough to
raise a blush on the cheek of the police reporter of a low class
paper. Nothing is seen, nothing is felt ; the whole is bnt a
droning echo of reading of the worst sort. ' Modernism '
consists finally in this, that a pitiable commonplace is partly
located in Berlin, with here and there vague talk of socialism
and realism. German criticism in the seventies demanded,
very justly, that the German novel should rest on a solid basis,
that it should be worked out in some well-known period, amid
real surroundings, in the German capital of our day. This
demand has produced the ' Berlinese ' novel of the plagiarists.
The especial and characteristic Berlinism of this novel consists
in this, that the author whenever he has to mention a street,
displays the boundless astonishment of a Hottentot at the
' Panoptikum ' (the Grevin Museum in Berlin), because he
finds the street full of people, carriages, and shops, and seeks
opportunities to quote the names of the streets in this capital.
This method is within the reach of every hotel porter.
In order to introduce such Berlinism into a bad novel, the
author need only possess a plan of the town, and perhaps a

518 DEGENERATION
guide-book. The peculiarities of life in the capital are repre
sented by passages such as this : ' On both sides of the pave
ment [he meant to say, on the pavement on both sides of the
street] a dense crowd of people surged, and in the middle of
the avenue, under the trees, just bursting into leaf, a scattered
multitude, resembling the irregular [?J waves of a flood,
pushed on to get out of the town.' Or : 'On all the pave
ments people walking and pushing against each other in con
fusion and haste, which increased to a run, in order to avoid
falling under the wheels, while escaping to a place of refuge
from the deafening clatter of cabs, tramways, and large heavy
omnibuses, with their roofs fully occupied,' etc. Thus, the
only thing Tovote sees in Berlin is what a peasant from
Buxtehude would remark, who has left his village for the first
time, and cannot recover from his astonishment in. finding
more people and carriages than in his own village street. This
is just the view which a resident in a town no longer notices,
and which need not be specially described, because it is implied
in the concept of a 'town,' and, above all, of a 'large town,'
and is, notably, in no way characteristic of Berlin, since
Breslau, Hamburg, Cologne, etc., present exactly the same
sight. Socialism enters into the ' modern ' novel like Pilate into the
Creed. Tovote relates, e.g., how Herbert seeks for Lucy, who
has disappeared ; he arrives at last at the workman's quarter
in Berlin, which supplies the author with this fine picture :
' Everywhere the blue and gray-red blouse of the workman,
which is never seen Unter den Linden, who stands, day after
day, near the panting machine, at the work-table, where he
carries on, during long years, as if asleep, the same manual
labours, until the callosities on his hands become as hard as
iron.' Either Herbert, despairingly seeking his mistress, or the
narrator, wishing to awaken our interest in these events, has
thought of the callosities of the workmen !
The automata who in the ' realist ' novel execute mock-
movements, and between whom the dullest and most miserable
back-stair sentimentality is played off, are always the same : a
gentleman, an ex-officer whenever possible, who, we are
assured, is engaged upon ' works on socialism ' (of what kind
we never learn, it is simply asserted that they are 'very im
portant ') ; a waitress at an inn, as the embodiment of the ewig-
Weibliche ,- and a realist painter who plans or executes pictures
destined to regenerate humanity, and to establish the mil
lennium on earth. Here is the recipe for the ' modernism ' of
the ' Young-German ' realism : quotation of the names of the
Berlin streets, rapture at the sight of some cabs and omnibuses,
a little Berlinese dialect in the mouth of the characters, coarse

REALISM 519
and stupid eroticism, unctuous allusions to socialism and
phrases on painting, such as a goose-fattener grown rich might
make if she wished to pass herself off as a lady. Of the
three persons who are always the supporters of this ' modernity '
the waitress is the only really original one. The merit of this
treasure belongs to Bleibtreu, who first presented her to the
admiration and imitation of his little band in his collection of
novels entitled Schlechte Gesellschaft. She is a conglomeration
of all the fabulous beings that have hitherto been imagined in
poetry: a winged chim-era, a sphinx with lion's claws, and a
siren with a fish's tail, all at one and the same time. She
contains in herself every charm and every gift, love and
wisdom, virtue and love-glowing paganism. It is by the
waitress at the inn that the talent for observation and creative
power of the German ' realist ' can be most accurately gauged.
If Tovote is a representative type — by no means diseased,
but merely incapable beyond conception — of intruders into
literature with which they will at most be connected as
peddling hawkers of trashy novels, we meet in Hermann Bahr
with a clearly pathological individuality. Bahr is an advanced
hysteric who wants at all hazards to get himself talked about, and
has had the unfortunate idea of achieving this result by books.
Devoid of talent to an almost impossible degree, he seeks to
captivate attention by the maddest eccentricities. Thus, he
calls the book most characteristic of his method among
those he has hitherto published, Die gute Schule ; Seelenstdnde*
Seelenstdnde literally means ' states of soul.' He had read
and not understood the term Stats d'dme in the new French
authors, etat having been used in the political sense which it
has in tiers- etats.
In the story related in the Seelenstdnde, a part at least of
the recipe previously mentioned is utilized. The hero is an
Austrian painter living in Paris. One day, weary of living
alone, he picks up a girl in the street, who, contrary to the
orthodox procedure, is not a waitress, but a dressmaker,
possessing, nevertheless, all the mythical excellence of the
' Young German ' barmaid ; he lives with her for a time, then
wearies of her, and torments her to such a degree that she
leaves him one fine day and goes off with a rich negro, whom
she induces to buy pictures at a high price from her abandoned
lover. This fine story is the frame in which Bahr reveals the ' state '
of his hero's ' soul.' This author is a plagiarist of an inveterate
type, such as is only met with in serious cases of hysteria.
Not a single author of any individuality who has passed before
his eyes has been able to escape his rage for servile imitation.
* Hermann Bahr, Die gute Schule j Seelenstdnde. Berlin, 1890.

520 DEGENERATION
The principle of the ' Good School ' — the misery of a painter
who struggles with the conception of a work of art intended to
express his whole soul, and who recognises with despair his
impotence to realize it — is subtilized from Zola's L'GZuvre,
All the details, as we shall see, he has taken from Nietzsche,
Stirner, Ibsen, the Diabolics, Decadents, and French Impres
sionists. But all he plagiarizes becomes, under his pen, a
parody of inimitably exquisite absurdity.
The painter's distress of mind is ' the lyrism of red. His
whole soul was steeped in red, all his feelings, all his aims, all
his desires, in sonnets of lament and hope ; and in general a
complete biography of red, what took place in him and usually
whatever could happen to him. . . . But this lofty canticle
of the red fulfilled itself in the real, simple tones of daily
life. ... It was a large well-boiled lobster, in which he em
bodied the masterful spirit and the violence of the red, his
languor in a salmon on one side, and his mischievousness and
gaiety of disposition in many radishes in cheerful variations.
But the great and supreme confession of his whole soul hung
on a purple tablecloth with heavy folds, on which the sun
shone, a narrow shaft, but with all the more fiery glow.' If
the struggle with the ' biography of the red ' was a torture to
him, even worse things were about to happen. One day ' the
curse struck him behind, coming from an excellent salmon,
juicy and sweet, which one would never have suspected of
perfidy as it la}' cradling itself in a rosy shimmer in its rich
herb sauce.' (A cooked salmon cradling itself! This must
have produced a ghostly effect. And this uncanny salmon
struck him ' behind,' although it was on the table before him !)
But it was precisely this sauce, this sauce of green herbs, the
pride of the cook — yes, it was this that did it. It was this that
conquered him. He had never seen anything like it — never
before, as far back as he could remember, a softer and sweeter
green, at once so languishing and so joyous that one could
have sung and shouted for joy. The whole rococo was in it,
only in a much more gracious, yearning note. It had to go
into his picture. But he could never hit off that green sauce,
and this was the tragedy of his life. He ' kept the truth locked
up cowardly and idle, he who alone could grant it ; he did not
give it to them to assuage thirst, this healing and redeeming
work of his breast,' namely, the green sauce ! ' He would have
liked to make a gigantic gimlet revolve in his flesh with a
burning screw . . . deep, very deep, till there was a great
hole ... an immense triumphal gate of his art, through which
the internals could spit it out.'
What makes this struggle with the green sauce, for the
purpose of overcoming it in a ' healing and redeeming ' work

REALISM 521
of art, so irresistibly comic is that the whole passage is
written in an entirely serious view, and without the least idea
of joking!Bahr describes his own style in these words : ' A wild,
feverish, tropical style, which calls nothing by its usual name
in the ordinary idiom, but which racks itself in the hope of
finding unheard-of, obscure, and strange neologisms, in a
forced and singular combination.'
The painter's mistress must have been a superb creature, to
judge by the description. When a stranger spoke to her in
the street ' she slightly quickened her steps, and with eyelids
haughtily raised, and her little head thrown back sideways,
she began to hum softly, sharply snapping her fingers with
impatience, in such a way as to rouse his desire to persevere
in his useless suit.' This behaviour induces Bahr to call her
a ' majestically inaccessible young lady.' But she is far more
remarkable at her morning toilet at home than she is in the
street. ' Often, when under the greetings of the morning,
which enamelled with gold [!] her hyacinthine flesh, she
plaited her hair while standing before her mirror, surrounded
by his desires, and stretched, moistened, and slowly curved,
with twitching fingers which glittered like swift serpents, quite
gently and persistently, her tangled [!] eyelashes, her dis
hevelled eyebrows, while her lips grew round with silent
whistling, between which the rapid, restless tongue hissed,
shot out, and clacked, and then, with closed eyelids, leant
forward as in submissive adoration, the powder-puff passed
slowly, cautiously, fervently, over the bent cheeks, while the
little nose, fearful of the dust, turned aside,' the painter, as
may be imagined, became so amorous that ' he licked the
soap from her fingers to refresh his fevered gums.' ' Suddenly
standing upright on one leg, with a swing of the other she
kicked her shoe into the air, to catch it again by a nimble,
firm movement. In this graceful attitude she remained.'
' Sometimes she bent down languorously towards herself, very
gently, very slowly, remaining voluptuously in the curve of her
breasts, deep into her knees, while her lips moved ; sometimes,
while her hips turned in a circle, her neck glided lasciviously
into swan-like [!] curves towards her obsequious image.' This
sight filled her lover with such enthusiasm that it seemed to
him ' as if from a thousand springs blasted [!] torrents blazed
through his veins.'
It is not necessary, I think, to multiply specimens of this
style, which simulates insanity, and which is not German, either
in formation, use of terms, or construction. I wish merely
to show to what degree Bahr is a plagiarist. Here we see a copy
of Nietzsche: 'Always the same. He ought to do this, and

522 DEGENERATION
not to do that ; the same litany from his first infancy — always
and only ; he should and he shouldn't. What he would was
the only thing never demanded of him ; and thus, in this
frightful servitude, he felt himself possessed by an immense
desire to be for once himself at last, and an immense anguish
at being always someone else eternally.' ' To say that everyone
only came out of himself to penetrate into another ... to
dominate him ! That a man could never, should never, be
himself, not have one hour of bliss, but everlastingly renounce,
transform, annihilate himself for another's gratification. . . .
Alone — alone ; why would they not leave one alone ?' . . .
' To make a desert for himself — a still silent desert-' ' Others
had not this sentiment of the " I " to such an exuberant and
immeasurable extent.' ' The joyous hatred of men and the
world.' Here we have Ibsen : ' He wished to go into the
country — he himself, precisely as proposed by the other,
certainly. But he wished to go into the country in virtue of
his free resolve, because it was his will, and not the proposal
of another. . . . And rather than bend to another's will he
renounced his own. Moreover, since another wished it, the
pleasure of wishing it himself was lost to him.' Here the
De Goncourts : ' There was around her out of the sorrowful
violet and bright gold a misty shimmer.' ' His feeling was
always something inconceivable, and also on a yellow ground
— dirty yellow — gasping, ecstatic, faint, pining away with a
death-rattle, and with violet tones, but very soft.' ' It was
chaste voluptuousness. He had it there in his brain, pearly
gray, melting into faint violet.' Villiers de l'lsle-Adam : ' He
was bound to establish the new love. . . . The question was
of doing it in the style of electricity and steam. An Edison-
love . . . yes, a machine-like love.' A mixture of Baudelaire
and Huysmans : ' In the undulating silver dust of the light a
lovely quivering sheen, woven of blue-black and pale green
vapour, bathed her rosy flesh, exhaled by its soft down. ... He
wished utterly to destroy and flay her. Nothing but blood —
blood. He only felt at ease when it streaked [!] down. . . .
He established a theory according to which this was the way
towards the new love, viz., by torture.' ' There lay the
meadows red as fire spread out in lovely slopes . . . and
hopes, the blue vampires, grew listless. But upright in its
pride and with imperial mourning walked a huge gray sun
flower, silent and pale, on the arm of an awkward fat stinking
thistle, which trailed noisily afar with large rough gold.' ' This
now became for him true art, the art which alone could redeem
and make happy — the art of odours. . . . From pale and
moaning fumes of the white rose, in which the suicide triumphs,
he awakened the eternal doctrine of Buddha,' etc. The re-

REALISM 523
mainder is better expressed in the original, in Huysmans'
novel, A Rebours. As to the passages full of a heat which
clamours for a strait -jacket, and simulates satyriasis and
Sadism ; as to the quaint confusions and orthographical errors
in French names which the author, who poses as a Parisian,
commits at every step ; and as to his frequent manifestation
of megalomania, it is enough to refer to them. These things
are not essential, but they contribute to make Bahr's book the
only product of hysterical mental derangement hitherto existing
in German literature.
The greater number of Young- German plagiarists have not
yet risen to the monumental productions of a Tovote or a
Bahr, and have stopped at short pieces of lyric poetry.
Special mention ought to be accorded to Gerhart Haupt-
mann, who has, unfortunately, permitted himself to be enrolled
among the ' Young Germans.' It is difficult to confuse him
with them, for if he makes concessions to their aesthetics of
the commonplace with a carelessness which of itself betrays
a disquieting obtuseness of artistic taste and conscience, he
nevertheless may be distinguished from them by some great
qualities. He possesses a luscious, vivid vocabulary, full of ex
pression and feeling, even though it is a dialect. He knows
how to see reality, and he has the power to render it in
poetry. It will not occur to anyone to pronounce any final judgment
on this author of thirty years of age. As yet only his debut
can be mentioned, and hopes be formed for his future develop
ment. What he has hitherto produced has been surprisingly
unequal. Side by side with originality his works present a
barren imitation; with high artistic insight, a schoolboy's
awkwardness and ingenuousness ; with flights of genius, the
most afflicting commonplaces. One scarcely knows if he is a
novelist or a dramatic writer. In two of his pieces, in fact,
Vor Sonnenaufgang and College Crampton, there is such a
complete absence of progressive action, a condition of things
so purely stationary and devoid of development, that even the
instinct of a natural talent for the stage could never have so
forgotten itself. Perhaps Hauptmann is only temporarily under
the spell of an aesthetic theory, from which he will free himself
later. He desires, indeed, to describe the ' milieu ' faithfully
and closely, and loses sight in so doing of the principal thing
in poetry — of the characters and their fate. His dramas
frequently fall asunder for this reason into a series of episodes,
in themselves well observed and characteristic, but only
distantly, or it may be not at all, connected with the plot, as,
e.g., in the play Vor Sonnenaufgang, the appearance of Hopslabar,
the servant Mary who is leaving, the coachman's wife stealing

524 DEGENERATION
the milk, etc. All are pictures of manners, but at the same
time cease to form united compositions.
If Hauptmann has borrowed from the French realists the
excessive and useless accentuation of the ' milieu/ he has
taken from Ibsen the charlatanism of ' modernity ' and the
affectation of the ' thesis.' On the model of the Norwegian
poet he suddenly inserts into some commonplace history
belonging exclusively to no particular period or locality, some
intrusive phrase containing an obscure allusion to ' the great
times in which we live,' or the ' mighty events which are
coming to pass,' etc. For example, Einsame Menschen
(Lonely Folk) is the needlessly pretentious title of a drama
in which we are shown a really Ibsenian idiot, who fancies
himself misunderstood by his excellent wife, and becomes
enamoured of a Russian girl-student, who is their visitor. As
is generally the case with such feeble wights, he desires to
possess the Russian, while not losing his wife ; he has neither
the courage to wound his wife by openly separating from her,
nor the strength to conquer his guilty passion for the stranger.
In his torment he tries to deceive himself, to persuade himself
that his feelings towards the Russian are only those of friend
ship and of gratitude, that she has understood him and in
tellectually stimulated him. The Russian, however, is more
clear-sighted, and is about to leave the house. The end of
the story is that the idiot drowns himself. The conception of
a weak man vacillating between two women, of whom one is
the embodiment of duty, and the other of presumptive happi
ness, is as old as the theatre itself. It has nothing to do with
the times. It can only be made to pass as ' modernism ' by
prevarication. And in this feeble drama Hauptmann makes
his characters hold learned conversations full of allusions, such
as the following :
Fraulein Anna (the Russian). These are, indeed, great times in which
we are living. I seem to feel as if something close and oppressive were
gradually lifting off from us. Do you not agree with me, Doctor ?
Johannes (the idiot). In what way?
Fraulein Anna. On one side, a stifling dread was mastering us ; on
the other, a gloomy fanaticism. The excessive strain seems now to be
straightened. Something like a breath of fresh air, let us say from the
twentieth century, has come in upon us.*
The same swagger of modernity made the author decide
on this title, Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise), for his first
work, and to qualify it as a ' social drama.' It is no more
'social' than any other drama, and has no connection what
ever with ' sunrise ' in a metaphorical sense. It reveals the
state of affairs in a Silesian village, where the discovery of
* Einsame Menschen j Drama. 1891, p. 84.

REALISM 525
coal-mines on their land has made the peasants millionaires.
The contrast between the coarseness of the rustics and their
opulence furnishes good scenes for a farce ; but what has it
to do with the age and its problems ? A fragment of thesis
is dovetailed into the farce. The peasant millionaire is a
drunkard. The daughter may have inherited her father's vice.
And so a man who has become attached and engaged to her
leaves her with sorrowful determination on learning that the
old man drinks. This thesis is an absurdity. A drunkard
can transmit his vice to his children, but is not bound to do
so, and, in the instance in point, the grown-up daughter does
not betray the slightest inclination to drink. His thesis is
worked out on the model of Ibsenian maunderings, and is as
little taken from life as the lover who subordinates his love to
a very uncertain theory. In this man we recognise our old
friend, the type of the recipe for realist novels, who makes
vague allusions to socialistic studies which he is reputed to
pursue,* and proves himself, by these shadowy indications,
to be a ' modern ' man.
Hauptmann is true and strong only when he makes the
poor of the lowest class speak in their own dialect. The maid
servants in Vor Sonnenaufgang are excellent. The nurse, who
sings the baby to sleep ; the laundress, Frau Lehmann, who
laments her domestic troubles, are by far the most successful
characters in Einsame Menschen. And if Die Weber is the best
work he has hitherto produced, it is because only the poorest
people, speaking only their own dialect, appear in it. But as
soon as he has to deal with more complex human beings of
the educated classes — beings who are not perishing with
hunger nor suffering from poverty, who speak high German,
and have a wider intellectual horizon — he becomes uncertain
and flat, and catches up the pattern-album of realism instead
of taking reality as his model.
Die Weber (The Weavers) is the only real drama among
the five which Hauptmann has hitherto written. t There is
* Gerhart Hauptmann, Vor Sonnenaufgang, Snziales Drama, 6s Auflage ;
Berlin, 1892, p. 14 : ' During the two years of my imprisonment, I wrote my
first book on political economy.' P. 42 : 'The Icarians . . . share equally
all work and all desert. No one is poor; there are no poor among them.'
P. 47 : ' My fight is a fight for the happiness of all. . . . Moreover, I must
say that the fight in the interest of progress brings me great satisfaction.'
(Let it be understood that not the smallest trace of this famous 'fight' is to
be seen in the piece !) P. 63 : ' I should like to study the state of things
here. I shall study the position of the miners here. . . . My work must
be pre-eminently descriptive,' etc.
f Since this book has been published, Hauptmann has put on the stage
two new pieces : The Beaver Pelisse, which was an utter fiasco, and
Hannele, a Dream Poem, much discussed on account of its strange mys
ticism.

S26 DEGENERATION
not much action in this piece ; but it is sufficient, and it
progresses. First, we see the profound misery in which the
weavers are perishing ; then we behold the rousing of their
fury at their intolerable condition, and then their passion
gradually developed before our eyes in ever-deepening intensity,
rising into frenzy, destructive madness, tumults and riots, with
all their tragic consequences. The extraordinary part of this
drama is that the author has triumphed, with a genius which
entitles him to our respect, over the enormous difficulty of
captivating and stirring our human feelings, without making
any individual character the centre-point of his piece, and of
distributing the action between a great number of persons and
a multitude of individual traits, without its ever ceasing to be
a united and compact whole. These features, revealing a
painfully minute observation, necessarily belong to individuals;
nevertheless, they excite a very lively interest, sympathy and
pity, not for the person, but for a whole class of men. We
reach through emotion a generalization which usually is only
a work of the intellect, through a poetic composition to a
feeling which usually is excited only by history. In making
this possible, Hauptmann rises infinitely above the bog of
barren imitation, and creates a truly new form, viz., the drama
in which the hero is not an individual, but the crowd ; he
succeeds, by artistic means, in presenting us with the hallucina
tion that we are constantly seeing before us the nameless
millions, while naturally there are never more than a few
persons in the scene who suffer, speak, and act. Besides this
great and radical innovation, other burning aesthetic questions
are solved in the piece with overpowering beauty and sobriety.
We have here a drama without love, and at the same time a
proof that other sentiments besides the one instinct of sex
can powerfully stir the soul of the reader. The piece is, more
over, a curious contribution to the wholly new ' psychology
of the masses,' with which Sighele, Fournial, and others have
been occupied,* and it gives an absolutely exact picture of the
delirium and hallucinations which take possession of the
individual in the midst of an excited crowd, and transforms
his character and all his instincts after the model of the usually
criminal leaders. It comprises, finally, this demonstration,
which I have nowhere found so fully in all the international
literature with which I am acquainted, viz., that beautiful
effects, when rightly employed, can be obtained even with re
pulsive subjects. A poor weaver, who has not touched meat
for two years, asks a comrade — not having the heart to do it
* Scipio Sighele, La Folia delinquente, Turin, 1892 ; translated into
French, La Foule criminelle, Paris, 1893. Fournial, Essai sur la Psychologie
des Foules. Lyon, 18^2.

REALISM 527
himself — to kill a pretty little dog which had run up to him,
and his wife roasts it for him. He cannot control his craving,
and begins dipping into the saucepan almost before the meat
is done. His stomach, however, cannot bear the dainty, and
to his great despair he is forced to reject it.* The incident
in itself is not appetizing. But here it becomes beautiful and
deeply affecting, for it describes with incomparably tragic
power the misery of these woebegone starving people.
This piece, apparently so realistic in the sense attached to
this word by superficial talkers, is, on the whole, the most
convincing refutation of the theory of realism. For it is
incredible that all the incidents which mark the dreadful
position of the weavers could have been condensed into
exactly one hour of the day, and into one single room of the
workman Dreissiger's house ; it is, if not wholly impossible,
at all events very improbable, that the soldier's murderous
bullet should happen to kill the weaver Hilse, the only man
trusting in God and resigned to his fate, who remained quietly
at his work when all the others rushed out to pillage and riot
in the streets. The poet has not depicted ' real ' life here, but
has freely utilized the materials which he has gained through
his observation of life in order to give artistic expression to
his personal ideas. His desire was to excite our pity as
vividly as that felt by himself for a definite form of human
misery. With this object he collected with the sure hand of
an artist, into a narrow compass, events which in life would
be distributed over months or years, and at long intervals, and
he has guided the flight of a blindly unconscious bullet in such
a way that it commits, like a villain endowed with reason, a
peculiarly dastardly crime, thus raising our compassion for
the poor weavers to the height of indignation. The piece,
then, shows us the ideas and designs of the poet, his manner
of viewing and interpreting reality ; it enables us to discern
the sentiments aroused in him by the drama of life. It is,
then, in the highest degree a ' subjective ' work, i.e., the
opposite of a ' realistic ' copy of fact, which would have to be
photographically objective.
* Gerhart Hauptmann, Die Weber, Schauspiel aus den vierziger Jahren,
2e Auflage ; Berlin, 1892, p. 39:
Bertha. Where is father, then ? [Old Baumert has gone silently away.]
Mother Baumert. I don't know where he can have gone.
BERTHA. Could it be that he's no longer used to meat ?
Mother Baumert (beside herself, in tears). There now, you see — you
see for yourself, he can't even keep it down. He'll throw up all the little
good food he has had.
Old Baumert (returns, crying with vexation). Well, well, 'twill soon be
all over with me. They'll soon have done for me. If one do chance to
get something good, one isn't able to keep it. (He sits down on the bench by
the stove weeping!) [All this conversation is written in Silesian dialect.]

528 DEGENERATION
How does it happen that an artist, who applies his means
with so fine a taste and with so skilful a calculation of the
effect, can commit at the same time such naivetes as, for
example, these stage-directions in Vor Sonnenaufgang : ' Frau
Krause, at the moment of seating herself, remembers [!] that
grace has not yet been said, and mechanically folds her hands,
though without otherwise controlling her malice.' ' It is the
peasant Krause who, as always [!], is the last to leave the inn.'
' He -embraces her with the awkwardness of a gorilla/ etc.
How is an actor to set to work by his awkwardness to make
a spectator think precisely of a gorilla, or to show him that,
' as always,' he is the last to leave the inn ? More especially,
how is it to be explained that this same Hauptmann, who
has created Die Weber, should after this lofty composition
have written the novels Der Apostel and Bahnwarter Thiel ?*
Here we fall back into the lowest depths of Young-German
incapacity. The idea is nonsensical and a plagiarism, the
story has not a ray of truth, and the language (so original and
lifelike, and so exactly rendering the lightest shades of thought
when the author has recourse to patois) is commonplace and
slipshod enough to make one weep. No words must be wasted
on Der Apostel. A dreamer, manifestly touched by insanity,
perambulates the streets of Zurich in the costume of an
Oriental prophet, and is taken to be Christ by the crowd who
worship him. This is the whole story. It is represented in
such a way that we never know whether the narrative is
telling what the Apostle dreamed or what really happened.
His ideas and sentiments are an echo of Nietzsche. Zarathustra
has incontestably got into Hauptmann's head, and left him no
peace till he had himself produced a second infusion of this
idiocy. The railway signalman, Thiel, has lost his wife at
the birth of their first child. Constantly away from home on
duty, he is obliged to marry again that his child may be cared
for. The second wife, who soon gives her husband a child
of her own, ill-treats the motherless one. In spite of Thiel's
warnings, she one day leaves her stepchild on the rails un-
tended, and it is crushed by a train. The signalman then
murders his wife and her child with a hatchet in the most
horrible manner at night, and is shut up in a lunatic asylum
as a furious madman. Let me quote just a few of his descrip
tions : ' In the obscurity . . . the signalman's hut was trans
formed into a chapel. A faded photograph of the dead woman
on the table before him, his Psalm-book and Bible open, he
read and sang alternately the whole night through, interrupted
only by the trains tearing past at intervals, and fell into an
* Gerhart Hauptmann, Der Apostel, Bahnwarter Thiel, Novellistische
Studien. Berlin, 1892.

REALISM 529
ecstasy so intense that he saw visions of the dead woman
standing before his eyes.' ' The [telegraphic] pole, at the
southern extremity of the section, had a particularly full and
beautiful chord. . . . The signalman experienced a solemn
feeling-^as at church. And then in time he came to dis
tinguish a voice which recalled to him his dead wife. He
imagined that it was a chorus of blessed spirits in which her
voice was mingled, and this idea awakened in him a longing,
an emotion amounting to tears.' The ' Young German ' speaks
with contempt of Berthold Auerbach, because he depicts
sentimental peasants. Is there a single one of Auerbach's
Black Forest folk impregnated with such a rose-watery senti
mentality as this signalman of the ' realist ' Hauptmann, who
leans against a telegraph-pole, and is moved to tears at its
sound ? Again, the passage (pp. 22, 23) which shows us Thiel
in amorous excitement at the sight of his wife (' from the
woman an invincible, inevitable power seemed to emanate,
which Thiel felt himself impotent to resist ') Hauptmann has
drawn from Zola's novels, and not from the observations of
German signalmen. Or has he rather desired to depict in a
general way a madman who has always been such long before
his furious insanity broke out ? In this case he has drawn the
picture very falsely.
And the style of this unhappy book ! The Scotch firs . . .
rubbed their branches squeaking against each other,' and ' a
noisy squeaking, rattling, clattering, and clashing [of a train
with the brake on] broke upon the stillness of the evening.'
One and the same word to describe the noise of branches
rubbing each other, and of a train with the brake on ! ' Two
red round lights [those of a locomotive] pierced the darkness
like the fixed and staring eyes of a gigantic monster.' 'The
sun . . . sparkling at its rising like an enormous blood-red
jewel.' ' The sky which caught, like a gigantic and stainlessly
blue bowl of crystal, the golden light of the sun.' And once
again : ' The sky like an empty pale-blue bowl of crystal.'
' The moon hung, comparable to a lamp, above the forest.'
How can an author who has any respect for himself employ
comparisons which would make a journeyman tailor who
dabbled in writing blush ? Besides, what countless slovenli
nesses ! ' Before his eyes floated pell-mell little yellow points
like glow-worms.' Glow-worms do not give out a yellow, but
a bluish, light. ' His glassy pupils moved incessantly.' This
is a phenomenon which no one has yet seen. ' The trunks of
the fir-trees stretched like pale decayed bones between the
summits.' Bones are that part of the body which does not
decay. ' The blood which flowed was the sign of combat.'
Truly a reliable sign ! Even great faults in grammar are not
34

530 DEGENERATION
wanting, but I consent to take these as printer's mistakes. If
Gerhart Hauptmann has true friends, their imperative duty is
to rouse his conscience. Having shown what excellent things
he is capable of producing, he has not the right to scribble
carelessly like the first paltry ' Young-German ' writer. He
must be strict with himself, and endeavour always to remain
the artist he has shown himself in Die Weber.
Hauptmann's successes have not let Arno Holz and Johannes
Schlaf rest, and both have joined to imitate his Vor Sonnenauf
gang. Their united efforts produced the Familie Selicke,
a drama in which nothing happens, of which alcohol is like
wise the subject, and where the personages also speak in
dialect. For ' modernity's ' sake they have introduced a
theological candidate who has become a freethinker, yet none
the less wishes to obtain an incumbency. I mention this in
significant patchwork play only because the realists usually
quote it as one of their magna opera.
Such are the Young-German realists, among whose number
I will not include, as I said before, a sterling author like
Gerhart Hauptmann. They do not know German, are in
capable of even observing life, still more of understanding it ;
they know nothing, learn nothing, and experience nothing
whatsoever ; have nothing to say, have neither a true senti
ment nor a personal thought to express, yet never cease
writing ; and their scribbling, in the eyes of a great number,
passes as the sole German literature of the present and future.
They plagiarize the stalest of foreign fashions, and call them
selves innovators and original geniuses. They append on the
signboard before their shops, ' At the Sign of Modernity,'
and nothing is to be found in them but the discarded breeches
of bygone poetasters. If the few lines in which they mutter
about the obscure Socialistic ' studies ' and ' works ' of the
hero be excluded from all they have published up to the
present time, there will remain a miserable balderdash, without
colour, taste, or connection with time and space, and which a
tolerably conscientious editor of a newspaper even half a
century ago would have thrown into the waste-paper basket
as altogether too musty. They know that very well, and to be
beforehand with those who would reproach them with their
charlatanism, they audaciously attribute it to those respectable
authors whom they cover with their slaver. Thus, Hans
Merian dares to say : ' Spielhagen makes it appear as though
he had drawn the fundamental ideas and conflicts in his
novels from the great questions which are stirring the present
time. But closely examined, all this magnificence evaporates
into a vain phantasmagoria.' And: 'To the fabricators of
novels a la Paul Lindau, recently dealing with realism, we

REALISM 53I
address the reproach of false realism.'* And this same Hans
Merian finds that the realism of Max Kretzer and of Karl
Bleibtreu is genuine, and that their Parisian cocotte-stories,
transported contraband into Berlin, and their adventures of
mythical waitresses, are ' drawn from the great questions of
the day ' ! Is not this the practice of thieves who scamper
away at full speed before a policeman, shouting as they run
louder than anyone else, ' Stop thief!' The movement of the
Young German is an incomparable example in literature of
that tendency to form cliques which I described in the first
volume of this work. It began by a foundation in due form.
A man arrogated to himself the rank of captain, and enrolled
armed companions in order to repair with them into the
Bohemian forests. The purpose was the same as that of
every other band of criminals — the ' Maffia,' the ' Mala Vita,'
the ' Mano negra,' etc., viz., that of living well without work
ing, by plundering the rich, by blackmailing the poor, by favour
ing acts of vengeance by the members on persons whom they
envy, hate, or fear, by satisfying with impunity the leaning to
license and crime, kept down by custom and law. Like the
' Mala Vita ' and analogous associations, this band palliates
its acts and deeds by stock phrases intended to secure the
favour, or at least the indulgence, of the crowd, incapable of
judgment and easy to move. Brigands always profess that
they are guided by the desire to repair, to the utmost of their
power, the injustice of fate, by relieving the rich of their
superfluities, and by then alleviating the misery of the poor.
Thus, this band asserts that it defends the cause of truth,
liberty, and progress, with the indecent love adventures of
tavern-maidservants and prostitutes ! Membership is acquired
by formal admission after predetermined tests have been
undergone. He must first publicly bespatter a well-known
and meritorious author with mud. With the predominance
of low and bad emotions in members of the band, they ex
perience more gratification in maligning a man they envy
than in being praised themselves. Next, the candidate must
worship as geniuses one or more members of the band, and
finally give proof, in verse or prose, that he also is able to
express, in the language of a souteneur, the ideas of a convict,
and the sensations of a noisome beast. Having undergone
these three ordeals with success, he is received into the band
and declared a genius. Just as the bands of brigands have
their haunts, their receivers of stolen goods, and their secret
or affiliated allies among the tradespeople, so this band
possesses its own newspaper, its appointed editors (who, at
* Hans Merian, Die sogenannten 'Jungdeutschen' in unsererzeifgenossischen
Literatur, 2» Aufl >ge. Leipzig, ss. 12, 14. Undated.

532 DEGENERATION
first at least, accepted everything from it), and secret under
standings with the critics of respectable papers. Its influence
extends even to foreign countries — a phenomenon frequently
observed in the formation of bands, and expressly confirmed
by Lombroso. ' The Mattoids,' he says, ' as opposed to
geniuses and fools, are linked together by a sympathy of
interests and hatred ; they form a kind of freemasonry so
much the more powerful that it is less regular. It is founded
on the need of resistance to ridicule which is common to all,
and inexorably pursues them everywhere on the necessity of
uprooting, or at least combating, the natural antithesis, which,
for them, is the man of genius ; and, in spite of their hating
each other, they stand firmly by one another.'*
He who from a height surveys a horizon of a certain extent
can easily observe the labour of the apostles of this inter
national freemasonry. M. Teodar de Wyzewa, already men
tioned, who introduced to the French the insane Nietzsche as
the most remarkable author that Germany has produced in
the second half of this century, speaks in La Revue bleue and
in Le Figaro of Conrad Alberti as the ' poet ' who will dominate
German literature in the twentieth century. The 'new
reviews ' ofthe Symbolists and Instrumentists, La Revue blanche,
La Plume, etc., translate the ' Erlebte Gedichte ' of O. J.
Bierbaum. On the other hand, O. E. Hartleben offers the
German public the so-called ' poetry ' of the Belgian Symbo
list, Albert Giraud, Pierrot lunaire, and H. Bahr mutters with
transport over the Parisian mystics. Ola Hansson is enthu
siastic before German readers over the realists of the North,
and carries into Sweden the good news of Young-German
realism, etc.
The actions ofthe band have not done much good to itself,
but they have caused serious injuries to German literature.
It has necessarily exerted a baneful attraction over the young
who have come to the front in the last seven or eight years.
If we consider the enormous difficulties to which a beginner
is exposed, who without protection or influence, depending
wholly on himself, enters into the Via Crucis leading to
literary success, we shall find it quite comprehensible that the
tyros should be eager to join themselves to a society possessing
a powerful organization, its own periodicals and publishers,
as well as a definite public, and always ready to take the part
of its members with the unscrupulousness and pugnacity of
cut-throats. As members of the band, they are freed from all
the difficulties of beginners. The most vigorous talents alone
—such, for example, as Hermann Sudermann— disdained to
lighten their struggles with the help of such allies. The others
* C. Lombroso and R. Laschi, Le Crime politique, etc., t. ii., p. n6.

REALISM 533
willingly allowed themselves to be affiliated. The result was,
on the one hand, that wholly incompetent lads were drawn
into the profession of authors, who would never have come
before the public if they had not had special depots to which
they could cart all their rubbish ; and, on the other hand, that
of procuring for others, who were perhaps not wholly devoid of
talent, periodicals and publishers for their childish effusions, the
appearance of which in print would have been inconceivable
before the formation of the band. Some threw themselves
into the literary profession at an age when they should have
been studying for a long time to come, and thereby remained
ignorant, immature, and superficial ; others acquired slipshod
and slovenly habits into which they would never have fallen if,
in the absence of the conveniences which the organization of
the band offered them, they had been obliged to submit to
some discipline, and develop their capacities with care. The
existence of this literary ' Maffia ' assisted the plagiarists
against independent minds, the common herd against the
solitary, the scribbler against the artist, and the obscene
against the refined, so powerfully that competition was almost
out of the question. The luxuriant growth of silly, boyish,
and crude book-making is the result of this fostering of in
capacity and immaturity, and this premium granted to vulgarity.
I will demonstrate in one instance only the disastrous effect
of the band. The case of the Darmstadt Gymnasium (public
school) boy may be remembered, who wrote under the
pseudonym of Hans G. Ludwigs, and committed suicide in
1892 at the age of seventeen. For two years he had offered
incense to the realist ' geniuses,' and published idiotic novels
in the official periodicals of Young Germany, and he com
mitted suicide because, as he wrote, ' this cursed boxed-in
life,' ie., the obligation to learn and work regularly in class,
'broke down his strength.' A good many gymnasium boys
write trumpery things and send them to the papers ; but as
these are not printed, they gradually recover their reason.
Their heads do not get turned, and they do not come to
imagine that they are much too good to do their lessons, and
diligently prepare for their examinations. Ludwigs would
perhaps have been cured of his folly ; he might have lived till
the present day, and become a useful man, if the criminal realist
periodicals had not printed his twaddle, and thus diverted him
from his studies, and intensified his unwholesome boyish
vanity into megalomania.
That this invasion by main force, this revolt of slaves into
literature, to use Nietzsche's expression, was to a certain
extent successful, can be accounted for by the state of Germany.
Its literature after 1870 had, in fact, become stagnant. It

534 DEGENERATION
could not be otherwise. The German people had been obliged
to exert their whole strength to conquer their unity in terrible
wars. Now, it is not possible simultaneously to make history
on a great scale and lead a flourishing artistic life ; it must be
one or the other. In the France of Napoleon I. the most
celebrated authors were Delille, Esmenard, Parseval de Grand-
maison, and Fontanes. The Germany of William I., of Moltke
and Bismarck, could not produce a Goethe or a Schiller.
This can be explained without any mysticism. From the
mighty events of which they are witnesses and collaborators
the nation obtains a standard of comparison, by the side of
which all works of art shrink together, and poets and artists,
especially those most gifted and conscientious, feel depressed
and discouraged, often even paralyzed, by the double percep
tion that their compatriots only peruse their works distractedly
and superficially, and that their creations absolutely cannot
attain to the grandeur of the historical events passing before
their eyes. In this critical period of transient mental collapse
the Young-German band made its appearance, and profited
greatly by what even honest and sensible people were obliged
to acknowledge as well-founded attacks — even while they
condemned the form of them — on many of the then reigning
literary senators.
But another and weightier ground is the anarchy which
reigns at present in German literature. Our republic of letters
is neither governed nor defended. It has neither authorities
nor police, and that is the reason a small but determined band
of evildoers can make a great stir at their pleasure. Our
masters do not concern themselves about their posterity as
used to be the case. They have no sense of the duty which
success and glory impose upon them. Let me not be mis
understood. Nothing is further from my thoughts than the
wish to transform literature into a closed corporation, and to
require the new arrivals to become apprentices and journey
men (although, in fact, every new generation unconsciously
forms itself on the works of its intellectual ancestors). But
they have not the right to be indifferent to what will come
after them. They are the intellectual leaders of the people
They have their ear. On them is the task incumbent of
facilitating the first steps of the beginner, and presenting them
to the public. By this much would be obtained— continuity
of development, formation of a literary tradition, respect and
gratitude for predecessors, severe and early suppression of
individuals of absolutely unjustifiable pretensions, economy of
power, which in these days a young author must fritter away
in order to come out of his shell. But our literary chiefs have
no understanding for all this. Each one thinks only of himself

REALISM

535

and is furiously jealous of his colleagues and his followers.
Not one of them says that in the intellectual concert of a great
people there is room enough for dozens of different artists,
each one of whom plays his own instrument. Not one takes
into consideration that after him new talent will be born, that
this is a fact he cannot prevent, and that he is preparing for
himself a better old age by levelling the paths, instead of
viciously trying to close them to those who, whatever he may
do, will still be his successors in public favour. Who amongst
us has ever received a word of encouragement from one of our
literary grandees ? To whom amongst us have they testified
their interest and benevolence ? Not one of us owes them
anything whatsoever ; not one feels obliged to be just towards
them, nor to make himself their champion ; and when the
band fell upon them like a lot of brigands, to drive them off
with blows, and put themselves in their place, not a hand was
raised to defend them, and they were cruelly punished for
having lived and acted in isolation and secret mutual hostility,
sternly repulsing the young, and indifferent to the tastes of
the people whenever their own works were not in question.
And as we have no Council of Ancients, so we lack also all
critical police. The reviewer may praise the most wretched
production, kill by silence or drag through the mire the highest
masterpiece, state as the contents of a book things of which
there is not the slightest mention, and no one calls him to
account, no one stigmatizes his ineptitude, his effrontery, or
his falsehood. Thus a public that is neither led nor counselled
by its ancients, nor protected by its critical police, becomes
the predestined prey of all charlatans and impostors.

BOOK V.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
CHAPTER I.
PROGNOSIS.
.> Our long and sorrowful wandering through the hospital — for
|| as such we have recognised, if not all civilized humanity, at
\l all events the upper stratum of the population of large towns
'i to be — is ended. We have observed the various embodi
ments which degeneration and hysteria have assumed in the
art, poetry, and philosophy of our times. We have seen the
mental disorder affecting modern society manifesting itself
chiefly in the following forms : Mysticism, which is the expres
sion of the inaptitude for attention, for clear thought and
control of the emotions, and has for its cause the weakness
of the higher cerebral centres ; Ego-mania, which is an effect of
faulty transmission by the sensory nerves, of obtuseness in the
centres of perception, of aberration of instincts from a craving
for sufficiently strong impressions, and of the great pre
dominance of organic sensations over representative conscious
ness ; and false Realism, which proceeds from confused aesthetic
theories, and characterizes itself by pessimism and the irre
sistible tendency to licentious ideas, and the most vulgar and
unclean modes of expression. In all three tendencies we
detect the same ultimate elements, viz., a brain incapable of
normal working, thence feebleness of will, inattention, pre
dominance of emotion, lack of knowledge, absence of sympathy
or interest in the world and humanity, atrophy of the notion
of duty and morality. From a clinical point of view some
what unlike each other, these pathological pictures are never
theless only different manifestations of a single and unique
fundamental condition, to wit, exhaustion, and they must be
ranked by the alienist in the genus melancholia, which is the
psychiatrical symptom of an exhausted central nervous system.
Superficial or unfair critics have foisted on me the assertion

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 537
that degeneration and hysteria are the products of the present
age. The attentive and candid reader will bear witness that
I have never circulated such an absurdity. Hysteria and
degeneration have always existed ; but they formerly showed
themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of
the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which
was experienced by the generation on which the multitude of
discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing upon it
organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which
created favourable conditions under which these maladies
could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to
civilization. Certain micro - organisms engendering mortal
diseases have always been present also — for example, the
bacillus of cholera ; but they only cause epidemics when cir
cumstances arise intensely favourable for their rapid increase.
In the same way the body constantly harbours parasites which
only injure it when another bacillus has invaded and devas
tated it. For example, we are always inhabited by staphylo
coccus and streptococcus, but the influenza bacillus must first
appear for them to swarm and produce mortal suppurations.
Thus, the vermin of plagiarists in art and literature becomes
dangerous only when the insane, who follow their own original
paths, have previously poisoned the Zeitgeist, weakened by
fatigue, and rendered it incapable of resistance.
We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of
a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is
natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides : ' What is
to come next ?'
This question of eventuality presents itself to the physician
in every serious case, and however delicate and rash, above
all, however little scientific any prediction may be, he cannot
evade the necessity of establishing a prognosis. For that
matter, this is not purely arbitrary, not a blind leap into the
dark ; the most attentive observation of all the symptoms,
assisted by experience, permits a generally just conclusion on
the ulterior evolution of the evil.
It is possible that the disease may not have yet attained its
culminating point. If it should become more violent, gain
yet more in breadth and depth, then certain phenomena which
are perceived as exceptions or in an embryo condition would
henceforth increase to a formidable extent and develop con
sistently ; others, which at present are only observed among
the inmates of lunatic asylums, would pass into the daily
habitual condition of whole classes of the population. Life
would then present somewhat the following picture :
Every city possesses its club of suicides. By the side of
this exist clubs for mutual assassination by strangulation,

538 DEGENERATION
hanging, or stabbing. In the place of the present taverns
houses would be found devoted to the service of consumers
of ether, chloral, naphtha, and hashish. The number of
persons suffering from aberrations of taste and smell has
become so considerable that it is a lucrative trade to open
shops for them where they can swallow in rich vessels all
sorts of dirt, and breathe amidst surroundings which do not
offend their sense of beauty nor their habits of comfort the
odour of decay and filth. A number of new professions are
being formed — that of injectors of morphia and cocaine; of
commissioners who, posted at the corners of the streets, offer
their arms to persons attacked by agoraphobia, in order to
enable them to cross the roads and squares ; of companies of
men who by vigorous affirmations are charged to tranquillize
persons afflicted with the mania of doubt when taken by a fit
of nervousness, etc.
The increase of nervous irritability, far beyond the present
standard, has made it necessary to institute certain measures
of protection. After it has frequently come to pass that over
excited persons, being unable to resist a sudden impulsion, have
killed from their windows with air-guns, or have even openly
attacked, the street boys who have uttered shrill whistles or
piercingly sharp screams without rhyme or reason ; that they
have forced their way into strange houses where beginners are
practising the piano or singing, and there committed murder ;
that they have made attempts with dynamite against tramways
where the conductor rings a bell (as in Berlin) or whistles — it
has been forbidden by law to whistle and bawl in the street ;
special buildings, managed in such a way that no sound
penetrates to the outside, have been established for the
practice of the piano and singing exercises ; public con
veyances have no right to make a noise, and the severest
penalty is at the same time attached to the possession of air-
guns. The barking of dogs having driven many people in the
neighbourhood to madness and suicide, these animals cannot
be kept in a town until after they have been made mute by
severing the ' recurrent ' nerve. A new legislation on subjects
connected with the press forbids journalists, under severe
penalties, to give detailed accounts of violence or suicides
under peculiar circumstances. Editors are responsible for
all punishable actions committed in imitation of their re
ports. Sexual psychopathy of every nature has become so general
and so imperious that manners and laws have adapted them
selves accordingly. They appear already in the fashions.
Masochists or passivists, who form the majority of men, clothe
themselves in a costume which recalls, by colour and cut,

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 539
feminine apparel. Women who wish to please men of this
kind wear men's dress, an eyeglass, boots with spurs and
riding-whip, and only show themselves in the street with a
large cigar in their mouths. The demand of persons with the
' contrary ' sexual sentiment that persons of the same sex can
conclude a legal marriage has obtained satisfaction, seeing
they have been numerous enough to elect a majority of
deputies having the same tendency.* Sadists, ' bestials,'
nosophiles, and necrophiles, etc., find legal opportunities to
gratify their inclinations. Modesty and restraint are dead
superstitions of the past, and appear only as atavism and
among the inhabitants of remote villages. The lust of murder
is confronted as a disease, and treated by surgical interven
tion, etc.
The capacity for attention and contemplation has diminished
so greatly that instruction at school is at most but two hours
a day, and no public amusements, such as theatres, concerts,
lectures, etc., last more than half an hour. For that matter,
in the curriculum of studies, mental education is almost wholly
suppressed, and by far the greater part of the time is reserved for
bodily exercises ; on the stage only representations of unveiled
eroticism and bloody homicides, and to this, flock voluntary
victims from all the parts, who aspire to the voluptuousness
of dying amid the plaudits of delirious spectators.
The old religions have not many adherents. On the other
hand, there are a great number of spiritualist communities
who, instead of priests, maintain soothsayers, evokers of the
dead, sorcerers, astrologers, and chiromancers, etc.
Books such as those of the present day have not been in
fashion for a very long time. Printing is now only on black,
blue, or golden paper; on another colour are single inco
herent words, often nothing but syllables, nay, even letters or
numbers only, but which have a symbolical significance which
is meant to be guessed by the colour and print of the paper
and form of the book, the size and nature of the characters.
Authors soliciting popularity make comprehension easy by
adding to the text symbolical arabesques, and impregnating the
paper with a definite perfume. But this is considered vulgar
by the refined and connoisseurs, and is but little esteemed.
Some poets who publish no more than isolated letters of the
alphabet, or whose works are coloured pages on which is
absolutely nothing, elicit the greatest admiration. There are
societies whose object it is to interpret them, and their
eftthusiasm is so fanatical that they frequently have fights
against each other ending in murder.
* Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Neue Forshungen, etc., 2 Auflage, pp. 109, 118.
By the same, Psychopathia Sexualis, 3 Auflage, p. 65.

540 DEGENERATION
It would be easy to augment this picture still further, no
feature of which is invented, every detail being borrowed from
special literature on criminal law and psychiatria, and obser
vations of the peculiarities of neurasthenics, hysterics, and
mattoids. This will be, in the near future, the condition of
civilized humanity, if fatigue, nervous exhaustion, and the
diseases and degeneration conditioned by them, make much
greater progress.
Will it come to this ? Well, no ; I think not. And this, for
a reason which scarcely perhaps permits of an objection :
because hjrmanrtj^asnot^yet reached the term ofjts ^evolu
tion ; bec^seZtne ' oyer-exertion*^r_twq or"Tnree generations
cannot yet have exhausted ail if s vital "powers. Humanity is
not senile. It is still young, and a moment of over-exertion is
not fatal for youth ; it can recover itself. Humanity resembles
a vast torrent of lava, which rushes, broad and deep, from the
crater of a volcano in constant activity. The outer crust
cracks into cold, vitrified scoriae, but under this dead shell the
mass flows, rapidly and evenly, in living incandescence.
As long as the vital powers of an individual, as of a race,
are not wholly consumed, the organism makes efforts actively
or passively to adapt itself, by seeking to modify injurious
conditions, or by adjusting itself in some way so that condi
tions impossible to modify should be as little noxious as
possible. Degenerates, hysterics, and neurasthenics are not
capable of adaptation. Therefore they are fated to disappear.
That which inexorably destroys them is that they do not know
how to come to terms with reality. They are lost, whether
they are alone in the world, or whether there are people with
them who are still sane, or more sane than they, or at least
curable. They are lost if they are alone : for anti-social, inattentive,
without judgment or prevision, they are capable of no useful
individual effort, and still less of a common labour which
demands obedience, discipline, and the regular performance
of duty. They fritter away their life in solitary, unprofitable,
aesthetic debauch, and all that their organs, which are in full re
gression, are still good for is enervating enjoyment. Like bats in
old towers, they are niched in the proud monument of civiliza
tion, which they have found ready-made, but they themselves
can construct nothing more, nor prevent any deterioration.
They live, like parasites, on labour which past generations
have accumulated for them ; and when the heritage is once
consumed, they are condemned to die of hunger. *
But they are still more surely and rapidly lost if, instead of
being alone in the world, healthy beings yet live at their side.
For in that case they have to fight in the struggle for existence^
and there is no leisure for them to perish in a slow decay by

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 541
their own incapacity for work. The normal man, with his
clear mind, logical thought, sound judgment, and strong will,
sees, where the degenerate only gropes; he plans and acts
where the latter dozes and dreams ; he drives him without
effort from all the places where the life-springs of Nature
bubble up, and, in possession of all the good things of this
earth, he leaves to the impotent degenerate at most the shelter
of the hospital, lunatic asylum, and prison, in contemptuous
pity. Let us imagine the drivelling Zoroaster of Nietzsche,
with his cardboard lions, eagles, and serpents, from a toyshop,
or the noctambulist Des Esseintes of the Decadents, sniffing
and licking his lips, or Ibsen's " solitary powerful " Stock
mann, and his Rosmer lusting for suicide — let us imagine these
beings in competition with men who rise early, and are not
weary before sunset, who have clear heads, solid stomachs and
hard muscles : the comparison will provoke our laughter.
Degenerates must succumb, therefore. They can neither
adapt themselves to the conditions of Nature and civilization,
nor maintain themselves in the struggle for existence against
the healthy. But the latter — and the vast masses of the
people still include unnumbered millions of them — will rapidly
and easily adapt themselves to the conditions which new
inventions have created in humanity. Those who, by marked
deficiency of organization, are unable to do so, among the
generation taken unawares by these inventions, fall out of the
ranks ; they become hysterical and neurasthenical, engender
degenerates, and in these end their race ; * but the more
vigorous, although they at first also have become bewildered
and fatigued, recover themselves little by little, their descend
ants accustom themselves to the rapid progress which
humanity must make, and soon their slow respiration and
their quieter pulsations of the heart will prove that it no
longer costs them any effort to keep pace and keep up with
the others. The end of the twentieth century, therefore, will
probably see a generation to whom it will not be injurious to
.read a dozen square yards of newspapers daily, to be constantly
called to the telephone, to be thinking simultaneously of the
five continents of the world, to live half their time in a railway
carriage or in a flying machine, and to satisfy the demands of
a circle of ten thousand acquaintances, associates, and friends.
It will know how to find its ease in the midst of a city inhabited
by millions, and will be able, with nerves of gigantic vigour, to
respond without haste or agitation to the almost innumerable
claims of existence.
If, however, the new civilization should decidedly outstrip*
* Dr. A. B. Morel, Traitd des Ddgdndrescences, p. 581, note : ' The state of
arrested development and sterility are the essential characteristics of beings
arrived at the extreme limit of degeneracy.'

542 DEGENERATION
the powers of humanity, if even the most robust of the species
should not in the long-run grow up to it, then ulterior genera
tions will settle with it in another way. They will simply give
it up. For humanity has a sure means of defence against
innovations which impose a destructive effort on its nervous
system, namely, ' misoneism,' that instinctive, invincible
aversion to progress and its difficulties that Lombroso has
studied so much, and to which he has given this name.* Mis
oneism protects man from changes of which the suddenness
or the extent would be baneful to him. But it does not only
appear as resistance to the acceptation of the new ; it has
another aspect, to wit, the abandonment and gradual elimina
tion of inventions imposing claims too hard on man. We
see savage races who die out when the power of the white man
makes it impossible for them to shut out civilization ; but we
see also some who hasten with joy to tear off and throw away
the stiff collar imposed by civilization, as soon as constraint is
removed. I need only recall the anecdote, related in detail by
Darwin, of the Fuegian Jemmy Button, who, taken as a child
to England and brought up in that country, returned to his
own land in the patent-leather shoes and gloves and what not
of fashionable attire, but who, when scarcely landed, threw off
the spell of all this foreign lumber for which he was not ripe,
and became again a savage among savages. t During the
period of the great migrations, the barbarians constructed
block-houses in the shadow of the marble palaces of the
Romans they had conquered, and preserved of Roman in
stitutions, inventions, arts and sciences, only those which
were easy and pleasant to bear. Humanity has, to-day as
\much as ever, the tendency to reject all that it cannot digest.
If future generations come to find that the march of progress
is too rapid for them, they will after a time composedly give it
up. They will saunter along at their own pace or stop as they
choose. They will suppress the distribution of letters, allow
railways to disappear, banish telephones from dwelling-houses,
preserving them only, perhaps, for the service of the State, will
prefer weekly papers to daily journals, will quit cities to return
to the country, will slacken the changes of fashion, will simplify
the occupations of the day and year, and will grant the nerves
some rest again. Thus, adaptation will be effected in any case,
either by the increase of nervous power or by the renuncia
tion of acquisitions which exact too much from the nervous
system. As to the future of art and literature, with which these
* C. Lombroso and R. Laschi, Le Crime politique, etc., t. i., p. 8 et seq.
f Charles Darwin, A Naturalist's Voyage round the World, Journal of
Researches, etc., chap. x.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 543
inquiries are chiefly concerned, that can be predicted with
tolerable clearness. I resist the temptation of looking into too
remote a future. Otherwise I should perhaps prove, or at
least show as very probable, that in the mental life of cen
turies far ahead of us art and poetry will occupy but a very
insignificant place. Psychology teaches us that the course of
development is from instinct to knowledge, from emotion to
judgment, from rambling to regulated association of ideas.
Attention replaces fugitive ideation ; will, guided by reason, re
places caprice. Observation, then, triumphs ever more and
more over imagination and artistic symbolism — i.e., the intro
duction of erroneous personal interpretations of the universe
is more and more driven back by an understanding of the laws
of Nature. On the other hand, the march followed hitherto by
civilization gives us an idea of the fate which may be re
served for art and poetry in a very distant future. That which
originally was the most important occupation of men of full
mental development, of the maturest, best, and wisest members
of society, becomes little by little a subordinate pastime, and
finally a child's amusement. Dancing was formerly an ex
tremely important affair. It was performed on certain grand
occasions, as a State function of the first order, with solemn
ceremonies, after sacrifices and invocations to the gods, by the
leading warriors of the tribe. To-day it is no more than a
fleeting pastime for women and youths, and later on its last
atavistic survival will be the dancing of children. The fable
and the fairy-tale were once the highest productions of the
human mind. In them the most hidden wisdom of the tribe
and its most precious traditions were expressed. To-day they
represent a species of literature only cultivated for the nursery.
The verse which by rhythm, figurative expression, and rhyme
trebly betrays its origin in the stimulations of rhythmically
functioning subordinate organs, in association of ideas working
according to external similitudes, and in that working accord
ing to consonance, was originally the only form of literature.
To-day it is only employed for purely emotional portrayal ; for
all other purposes it has been conquered by prose, and, indeed,
has almost passed into the condition of an atavistic language.
Under our very eyes the novel is being increasingly degraded,
serious and highly cultivated men scarcely deeming it worthy
of attention, and it appeals more and more exclusively to the
young and to women. From all these examples, it is fair to
conclude that after some centuries art and poetry will have
become pure atavisms, and will no longer be cultivated except
by the most emotional portion of humanity — by women, by the
young, perhaps even by children.
But, as I have said, I merely venture on these passing hints

544 DEGENERATION
as to their yet remote destinies, and will confine myself to the
immediate future, which is far more certain.
In all countries aesthetic theorists and critics repeat the
phrase that the forms hitherto employed by art are henceforth
effete and useless, and that it is preparing something perfectly
new, absolutely different from all that is yet known. Richard
Wagner first spoke of ' the art-work of the future,' and hundreds
of incapable imitators lisp the term after him. Some among
them go so far as to try to impose upon themselves and the
world that some inexpressive banality, or some pretentious
inanity which they have patched up, is this art-work of the
future. But all these talks about sunrise, the dawn, new land,
etc., are only the twaddle of degenerates incapable of thought.
The idea that to-morrow morning at half-past seven o'clock a
monstrous, unsuspected event will suddenly take place ; that on
Thursday next a complete revolution will be accomplished at
a single blow, that a revelation, a redemption, the advent of a
new age, is imminent — -this is frequently observed among the
insane ; it is a mystic delirium. Reality knows not these
sudden changes. Even the great revolution in France,
although it was directly the work of a few ill-regulated minds
like Marat and Robespierre, did not penetrate far into the
depths, as has been shown by H. Taine and proved by the
ulterior progress of history ; it changed the outer more than
the inner relations of the French social organism. All de
velopment is carried on slowly ; the day after is the continua
tion of the day before ; every new phenomenon is the outcome
of a more ancient one, and preserves a family resemblance to
it. 'One would say,' observes Renan with quiet irony, 'that
the young have neither read the history of philosophy nor
Ecclesiastes : " the thing that hath been, it is that which shall
be." '* The art and poetry of to-morrow, in all essential
points, will be the art and poetry of to-day and yesterday, and
the spasmodic seeking for new forms is nothing more than
hysterical vanity, the freaks of strolling players and charla
tanism. Its sole result has hitherto been childish declamation,
with coloured lights and changing perfumes as accompaniments,
and atavistic games of shadows and pantomimes, nor will it
produce anything more serious in the future.
New forms! Are not the ancient forms flexible and duc
tile enough to lend expression to every sentiment and every
thought ? Has a true poet ever found any difficulty in pouring
into known and standard forms that which surged within him
and demanded an issue ? Has form, for that matter, the
dividing, predetermining, and delimitating importance which
dreamers and simpletons attribute to it ? The forms of lyric
* Ernest Renan, Feuilles ddtachdes. Paris, 1892, PreTace, p. 10.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 545
poetry extend from the birthday-rhyming of the ' popular poet
of the occasion,' who works to order and publishes his address
in the paper, to Schiller's Lay of the Bell ; dramatic form in
cludes at the same time the Geschundener Raub-ritter (The
Highwayman Fleeced), acted some time ago at Berlin, and
Goethe's Faust; the epic form embraces Kortum's jobsiade
and Dante's Divina Commedia, Heinz Tovote's Im Liebesrauche
and Thackeray's Vanity Fair. And yet there are bleatings
for ' new forms ' ? If such there be, they will give no talent to
the incapable, and those who have talent know how to create
something even within the limits of old forms. The most
important thing is the having something to say. Whether
it be said under a lyric, dramatic, or epic form is of no
essential consequence, and the author will not easily feel the
necessity of leaving these forms in order to invent some
dazzling novelty in which to clothe his ideas. The history
of art and poetry teaches us, moreover, that new forms have
not been found for three thousand years. The old ones have
been given by the nature of human thought itself. They would
only be able to change if the form of our thought itself became
changed. There is, of course, evolution, but it only affects
externals, not our inmost being. The painter, for example,
discovers the picture on the easel after the picture on the wall ;
sculpture, after the free figure, discovers high relief, and still
later low relief, which already intrenches in a way not free
from objection on the domain of the painter; the drama
renounces its supernatural character, and learns to unfold
itself in a more compact and condensed exposition ; the epos
abandons rhythmic language, and makes use of prose, etc.
In these questions of detail evolution will continue to operate,
but there will be no modification in the fundamental lines of
the different modes of expression for human emotion.
All amplifications of given artistic frames have hitherto
consisted in the introduction of new subjects and figures, not
in the invention of new forms. It was an advance when,
instead of the gods and heroes which till that time alone had
peopled the epic poem, Petronius introduced into narrative
poetry (The Banquet of Trimalchio) the characters of con
temporary Roman life, or when the Netherlanders of the seven
teenth century discovered for painting — which knew of naught
save religious and mythological events, or great proceedings
of state — the world of fairs, popular festivals, and rustic
taverns. Quevedo and Mendoza, who represent the beggars
in the ' Picaresque ' novel — the model of the German Grim-
melshausen writings— Richardson, Fielding, J. J. Rousseau,
who take as the subject of their novels, instead of extraordinary
adventures, the reflections and emotions of ordinary average
35

546 DEGENERATION
beings ; Diderot, who in Le Fils naturel and Le Pere de Famille
places his townspeople on the arrogant French stage, which till
then had only known insignificant people as figuring in comedies
and farces, but in serious drama, kings and great lords alone —
all these authors invented, it is true, no new forms, but gave
to old forms a different content from that of tradition. We
observe also an advance of this kind in the poetry and art of
our own day. They have given to the proletariat the rights
of citizenship in art and literature. They show the labourer,
not as a coarse or ridiculous figure, not with the object of
producing a comic or coarse effect, but as a serious, frequently
tragic being, worthy of our sympathy. Art is hereby enriched
in the same way as it once was by the introduction of rascals
and adventurers, of a Clarissa, a Tom Jones, a Julie (Nouvelle
Helo'ise), a Werther, a Constance (Le Fils naturel), etc., into the
circle of its representations. Nevertheless, when many people
in bewilderment exclaim hereupon, ' The art of to-morrow will
be socialistic !' they utter unfathomable nonsense. Socialism
is a conception of the laws which ought to determine the
production and distribution of property. With this, art has
nothing to do. Art cannot take any side in politics, nor is it
its business to find and propose solutions to economic questions.
Its task is to represent the eternally human causes of the
socialist movement, the suffering of the poor, their yearning
after happiness, their struggle against hostile forces in Nature
and in the social mechanism, and their mighty elevation
from the abyss into a higher mental and moral atmosphere.
When art fulfils this task, when it shows the proletariat how
it lives and suffers, how it feels and aspires, it awakens in us
an emotion which becomes the mother of projects for altera
tion, transformation, and reform. It is in exciting such
fruitful emotions, and by them the desire to heal the hurt,
that art co-operates with progress, and not by socialist de
clamations, and perhaps still less by executing pictures of the
state and the society of the future. Bellamy's patchwork,
Looking Backward, is outside art, and the twentieth century
will surely not favour books of this quality. The glorification
of the proletariat by a Karl Henckell, who practises with
regard to the fourth estate a more shocking Byzantinism than
was ever displayed by a tail-wagging courtier to a king, is
entirely incapable of awakening interest and sympathy for the
working man. Neither is true and useful emotion to be
expected either by such false nonsense as, for example, Ludwig
Fulda's Verlorene Paradies* or Ernst von Wildenbruch's
* Ludwig Fulda, Das verlorene Paradies, Schauspiel in drei Aufzueen
Stuttgart, 1892. Cf. p. 112: & '
Muhlberger. Rika, Rika ; come out !
FKEDtRiKA. Oh, Lord ! will they send me back?

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 547
Haubenlerche.* A brave woman like Minna Wettstein-Adelt,-f-
who obtains employment as a daily workwoman in a factory, and
simply relates what she experienced there ; a plucky man of
sound sense and a warm heart like Gcehre, who depicts the
life of a factory-hand according to his own experience ;% a
Gerhart Hauptmann, too, with his closely-observed detaiis in
Die Weber, do more for the proletariat than all the Emile
Zolas, with their empty theorizing in Germinal and L' Argent,
than all the William Morrises, with their high-flown rhymings
on the noble workman, who becomes under their pen a
caricature of the ' noble savage ' so much laughed at in the
old novel-writers on the primeval forests, and yet more still
than all the scribblers who strew their pottage with socialist
phrases by way of ' modern ' seasoning. Mrs. Beecher-Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin did not preach against slavery, nor risk
projects in favour of its suppression. But this book has
drawn tears from millions of readers, and caused negro slavery
to be felt as a disgrace to America, and thus contributed
essentially to its abolition. Art and poetry can do for the
proletariat what Mrs. Beecher - Stowe has done for ' the

Muhlberger. Here's my daughter. She miist go into the fresh air —
into the fresh air.
Frederika. Father, let me be. I must work.
Muhlberger (with passionate resolution). No. No more work— no
more — no more work. You must go out into the fresh air, my child — my
good sick child. (He holds her in his embrace. Pause. No one present can
escape from the impression of this episode!)
So says the author ! I do not think that these sentimental phrases pro
duce the smallest effect on anybody. Note (in the original) how Fulda, an
author of talent, in no way affiliated to the ' Young-German realists,' is
himself sufficiently intimidated by their ranting to seek for ' modernity ' by
using the Berlin dialect.
* Ernst von Wildenbruch, Die Haubenlerche, Schauspiel in vier Akten.
Berlin, 1891. Cf. p. 134 *
August. Work builds the world. Therefore, it must be executed for its
own sake ; it must be loved ! . . . And you — when I have seen you stand
ing before your tub — with the water-scoop in your hand — in such a way that
the windows flew open— then I thought, Ah ! here is one who loves his
tub ! . . .
Ilefeld. Master August, 'tis as if I had been married to it, to my tub—
that's how it's been !
AUGUST. And yet you leave it standing there so that anybody might take
your place ? What am I to say to the tub, should it ask after Paul Ilefeld ?
Ilefeld (sits down heavily and dries his eyes with his hand).
All the workmen I know would be convulsed with laughing at this con
versation. f Madame Minna Wettstein-Adelt, Three and a Half Months in a
Factory, Eine praktische Studie, 2" Auflage. Berlin, 1892.
% Paul Gcehre, Three Months Factory Hand and Apprentice, Eine prak
tische Studie. Leipzig, 1892.

548 DEGENERATION
negroes of the United States. They cannot and will not do
more. It is not unusual at present to meet this sentence : ' The
art and poetry of the future will be scientific' Those who
say this assume extraordinarily conceited attitudes, and con
sider themselves unmistakably as extremely progressive and
' modern.' I ask myself in vain what these words can
mean. Do the good people who mean so well by science
imagine that sculptors will in the future chisel microscopes in
marble, that painters will depict the circulation of the blood,
and that poets will display in rich rhymes the principles of
Euclid ? Even this would not be science, but merely a
mechanical occupation with the external apparatus of science.
But this will surely not occur. In the past a confusion
between art and science was possible ; in the future it is un
imaginable. The mental activity of man is too highly de
veloped for such an amalgamation. Art and poetry have
emotion for their object, science has knowledge. The former
are subjective, the latter objective. The former work with
the imagination, i.e., with the association of ideas directed
by emotion ; the latter works with observation, i.e., with the
association of ideas determined by sense-impressions, of which
the acquisition and reinforcement are the work of attention.
Province, object, and method in art and science are so different,
and in part so opposed, that to confuse them would signify a
retrogression of thousands of years. One thing only is correct :
the images issuing from the old anthropomorphic concep
tion, the allusions to obsolete states of things and ideas which
Fritz Mauthner has called ' dead symbols ' — all this will dis
appear from art. I think that in the twentieth century it will
no longer occur to any painter to compose pictures like Guido
Reni's Aurora in the Rospigliosi Palace, and that a poet would
be laughed at who should represent the moon looking amorously
into a pretty girl's room. The artist is the child of his times,
the conception dominant in the world is his also, and in spite
of all his tendency to atavism his method of expression is that
with which contemporary culture furnishes him. No doubt
the art of the future will avoid more than hitherto the great
errors in universally recognised doctrines of science, but it will
never become science.
The feelings of pleasure which a man receives from art
result from the gratification of three different organic inclina
tions or tendencies. He needs the incitement which the
variety offers him ; he takes pleasure in recognising the
originals in the imitations; he represents to himself the
feelings of his fellow-creatures, and shares in them. He finds
variety in works transporting him into wholly different scenes

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 549
from those he knows, and which are familiar to him. The
pleasurable feeling of recognition he obtains by the careful
imitations of familiar realities. His sympathy makes him
share with lively personal emotions every strongly and clearly
expressed emotion of the artist. There will always be in the
future, as heretofore, amateurs of works of imagination, which
transport the reader or spectator into remote times and
countries, or relate extraordinary adventures ; others will
prefer works in which the faithful observation of the known
will prevail ; the most refined and the most advanced will
find pleasure only in those in which a soul, with its most secret
feelings and thoughts, reveals itself. The art of the future will
not be wholly romantic, wholly realistic, or wholly indivi
dualistic, but will appeal from first to last as much by its story
to curiosity, as by imitation to the pleasure of recognition, and
by the externalism of the artist's personality to sympathy.
Two tendencies which have long been rivals will presumably
contend still more violently in the future for supremacy, viz.,
observation and the free flight of imagination, or, to speak
more briefly, though moire inaccurately, realism and romanti
cism. Good artists, doubtless, in consequence of their higher
mental development, will always be more prone and more apt
accurately to perceive and accurately to interpret the phe
nomena of the world. But the crowd will no less certainly
demand of artists in the future something different from the
average reality of the world. Among creators, the desire for
realism will exist, as among recipients, the need of romanticism.
For — and this seems to be an important point — the task of art
in the coming century, will be to exert over men that charm
of variety which reality will no longer offer, and which the
brain cannot relinquish. All that is called ' picturesque ' will
necessarily disappear more and more from the earth. Civiliza
tion ever becomes more uniform. The distinctive is felt as
an inconvenience by those who are marked by it, and got rid
of. Ruins delight a foreigner's eye, but they inconvenience the
native, and he sweeps them away. The traveller is disgusted
at seeing the beauty of Venice profaned by steamers, but for
the Venetian it is a benefit to cover long distances quickly for
ten centesimi. Soon the last Redskin will wear a frock-coat
and tall hat ; the regulation railway buildings will display
their prosaic outlines and hues along the great wall of China
and under the palm-trees of Tuggurt in the Sahara ; and
Macaulay's celebrated Maori will no longer contemplate the
ruins of Westminster, but a trashy imitation of the palace
at Westminster will serve as a Maori House of Parliament.
The unique Yosemite Park, which the Americans in their
very wise foresight wish to preserve intact in its prehistoric

55o DEGENERATION

wildness, will not satisfy the craving for something new,
different, picturesque, romantic, which humanity demands,
and the latter will claim from art what civilization— clean,
curled, and smart— will no longer offer. .
I can now sum up in a few words my prognosis, the
hysteria of the present day will not last. People will recover
from their present fatigue. The feeble, the degenerate, will
perish ; the strong will adapt themselves to the acquisitions
of civilizations, or will subordinate them to their own organic
capacity. The aberrations of art have no future. They will
disappear when civilized humanity shall have triumphed over
its exhausted condition. The art of the twentieth century
will connect itself at every point with the past, but it will have
a new task to accomplish— that of introducing a stimulating
variety into the uniformity of civilized life, an influence which
probably science alone will be in a position to exert, many
centuries later, over the great majority of mankind.

CHAPTER II.
THERAPEUTICS.
Is it possible to accelerate the recovery of the cultivated
classes from the present derangement of their nervous
system ?
I seriously believe it to be so, and for that reason alone
I undertook this work.
No one, I hope, will think me childish enough to imagine
that I can bring degenerates to reason by incontrovertibly and
convincingly demonstrating to them the derangement of their
minds. He whose profession brings him into frequent contact
with the insane knows the utter hopelessness of attempting
by persuasion or argument to bring them to a recognition of
the unreality and morbidness of their delusions. The only
result attained is that they regard the physician either as an
enemy and persecutor, and fiercely hate him, or as a block
head devoid of reason on whom they vent their derision.
It is equally vain to preach to fanatics ofthe insane tendencies
of fashions in art and literature, on their enthusiasm for error
and foolishness. These fanatics, without being actually momen
tarily diseased, are yet on the border-line of insanity. They do
not and cannot believe it. For the works, the madness of which
is at the first glance apparent to every rational being, actually
afford them feelings of pleasure. These works are an expres
sion of their own mental derangement, and of the perversion

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 551
of their own instincts. In the perusal, or contemplation of
these productions, the half-witted fall into a state of excitation
which they hold to be aesthetic, but which is really sensual ;
and this sensation is so genuine and immediate, they are so
sure of it, that they can feel only annoyance at or pity for him
who would make it plain to them that these works evoke no
pleasure, but only disgust and contempt. To an habitual
drinker it is possible to prove that absinthe is pernicious, but
it is absolutely impossible to convince him that it has a
disagreeable taste. To him, indeed, it tastes seductively
delicious. It is in vain that the psychiatrical critic assures
the patient that this book, that picture, are horrible deliriums ;
the invalid will in good faith reply : ' Deliriums ? That may
be. But abhorrent ? That I can never believe. I know
better. They move me deeply and delightfully, and nothing
you can say can prevent their doing so !' Those whose minds
are more unhinged go still further, and say bluntly : ' We feel
in all our nerves the beauty of these works. You do not; so
much the worse for you. Instead of perceiving that you are
a barbarian, devoid of intelligence, and an obtuse Philistine,
you wish to argue us out of our most positive sensations. The
only delirious person here is yourself.'
The history of civilization teaches to satiety, that delusions
awaken ardent enthusiasm, and during hundreds or thousands
of years obtain an invincible mastery of the thought and
feeling of millions, because they vouchsafe a satisfaction, un
healthy though it be, to an existing instinct. Against that
which procures feelings of pleasure for man, the objections of
reason are unavailing.
Those degenerates, whose mental derangement is too deep-
seated, must be abandoned to their inexorable fate. They are
past cure or amelioration. They will rave for a season, and
then perish. This book is obviously not written for them. It
is, however, possible to reduce the disease of the age ' to its
anatomical necessity ' (to use the excellent expression of
German medical science), and to this end every effort must be
directed. For in addition to those whose organic constitution
irrevocably condemns them to such a fate, the present de
generate tendencies are pursued by many who are only victims
to fashion and certain cunning impostures, and these mis
guided ones we may hope to lead back to right paths. If, on
the other hand, they were to be passively abandoned to the
influences of graphomaniacal fools and their imbecile or un
scrupulous bodyguard of critics, the inevitable result of such
a neglect of duty would be a much more rapid and violent
outspread of the mental contagion, and civilized humanity
would with much greater difficulty, and much more slowly,

552 , DEGENERATION
recover from the disease of the age than it might under a
strong and resolute combat with the evil.
Those persons, on whose minds it is above all necessary to
impress the fact that the current tendencies are a result of
mental degeneration and hysteria, are the slightly affected
and the healthy, who allow themselves to be deluded by
cunningly - devised catch-words, or who, through heedless
curiosity, flock where they see a crowd. Certain critics have
thought to intimidate me into speechlessness by saying : ' If
the indications cited are a proof of degeneration and mental
disease, then is art and poetry in general the work of fools
and degenerates, even such as has, without reservation, been
hitherto admired, for in this likewise there are to be met
the marks of degeneration.' To which I reply : If scientific
criticism, which tests works of art according to the principles
of psychiatry and psychology, should result in showing that
all artistic activity is diseased, that would still prove nothing
against the correctness of my critical method. It would only
be the acquisition of fresh knowledge. It would, doubtless,
destroy a charming delusion, and prove painful to many ; but
science ought not to be checked by the consideration that
its results annihilate agreeable errors, and frighten the easy
going out of comfortable habits of thought. Faith, again, is
another sovereign besides art ; it has rendered quite other
services to humanity at a certain stage of evolution, has other
wise consoled and raised it, given it other ideals, and advanced
it morally in a different way from even the greatest geniuses
of art. Science, nevertheless, has not hesitated to pronounce
faith a subjective error of man, and would, therefore, suffer
far fewer scruples in characterizing art as something morbid
if facts should convince it that such was the case. Moreover,
not all that is morbid is necessarily ugly and pernicious. The
expectoration of a sufferer from lung disease is quite as much a
diseased secretion as the pearl. Is the pearl made more ugly
or the expectoration more beautiful by the fact that they have
the same origin ? The toxine of sausage-meat is the excretion
of a bacterium, that of ethyl-alcohol the secretion from a
fungus. Is the similarity of genesis the condition of equal
value for enjoyment in a poisoned sausage and a glass of old
Rhine wine ? It would prove nothing in regard to Tolstoi's
Kreutzer Sonata or Ibsen's Rosmersholm if it were of necessity
admitted that Goethe's Werther suffers from irrational eroticism,
and that the Divina Commedia and Faust are symbolic poems.
The whole objection, indeed, proceeds from a non-recognition
1 ofthe simplest biological facts. The difference between disease
\and health is not one of kind, but of quantity. There is only
one kind of vital activity of the cells and of the cell-systems

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 553
or organs. It is the same in disease and in health. It is
sometimes accelerated, and sometimes retarded ; and when
this deviation from the rule is detrimental to the ends of the
whole organism, we call it disease. As it is here a question
of more or less, it is impossible to define their limits sharply.
Extreme cases are naturally easily recognised. But who shall
determine with accuracy the exact point at which deviation
from the normal, i.e., from health, begins ? The insane brain
performs its functions according to precisely the same laws as
the rational brain, but it obeys these laws either imperfectly
or excessively. In every human being there exists the
tendency to interpret sense-impressions falsely. It is diseased
only when exhibited in extraordinary strength. The traveller
in a railway carriage has an illusory perception of the landscape
flying by him while he is sitting still. The sufferer from the
delusion of persecutions imagines that someone is wafting him
evil odours, or hurling currents of electricity at hirn. Both of
these ideas rest on sense-illusions. Are both for that reason
marks of insanity ? The traveller and the paranoist commit
the same error of thought, and, nevertheless, the former is
perfectly sane, and the latter deranged in mind. It may
therefore with perfect security be affirmed that certain
peculiarities — such as intense emotionalism, the tendency to
symbolism, the predominance of imagination — are to be met
with in all true artists. That all should be degenerates is
very far from being a necessary consequence of this. It is
only the exaggeration of these peculiarities which constitutes
a disease. The sole conclusion justified by their regular ap
pearance in artists would be that art, without being properly
a disease of the human mind, is yet an incipient, slight
deviation from perfect health ; and I should raise no objection
to this conclusion, the less so because it in no way helps the
case of real degenerates and their distinctly diseased works.
But it is not enough to prove that mysticism, ego-mania, and
the pessimism of realism are forms of mental derangement.
All the seductive masks must be torn from these tendencies,
and their real aspect be shown in its grinning nakedness.
In opposition to healthy art, which they deride as musty
and antiquated, they pretend to represent youth. An ill-
advised criticism has actually been caught by their lime, and
emphasizes their youth with constant irony. What clumsiness !
As if any effort in the world could deprive of its charm the
word 'young,' this essential notion of all that is blooming and
fresh, this note of the dawn and the spring, and transform it
into a term of reproach and insult ! The truth is, however,
that degenerates are not only not young, but that they are
weirdly senile. Senile is their splenetic calumniation of the

554 DEGENERATION
world and life ; senile are their babblings, drivellings, ravings
and divagations ; senile their impotent appetites, and their
cravings for all the stimulants of exhaustion. To be young is
to hope ; to be young is to love simply and naturally ; to be
young is to rejoice in one's own health and strength, and in
that of all human beings, and of the birds of the air and the
beetles in the grass ; and of these qualities there is not one
to be met with among the youth-simulating, decayed de
generates. They have the name of liberty on their lips when they pro
claim as their god their corrupt self, and call it progress when
they extol crime, deny morality, raise altars to instinct, scoff at
science, and hold up loafing aestheticism as the sole aim of life.
But their invocation of liberty is shameless blasphemy. How
can there be a question of liberty when instinct is to be
almighty i Let us remember Count Muffat in Zola's Nana
(p. 491) : ' At other times he was a dog. She threw her
scented handkerchief to the end of the room for him, and he
had to run on all fours to pick it up with his teeth. " Fetch
it, Caesar ! . . . Look out ; I'll give it to you if you're lazy !
. . . Very good, Caesar ! mind ! nicely ! . . . Sit up !"
And as for him, he loved his abasement, revelled in the joy
of being a brute. He wanted to sink still lower ; he cried :
"Hit harder. . . . Bowwow! I am mad; hit me then!"'
That is the liberty of one who is ' emancipated ' in the sense
of the degenerates ! He may be a dog, if his crazed instinct
commands him to be a dog ! And if the ' emancipated ' one
is named Ravachol, and his instinct commands him to perpe
trate the crime of blowing up a house with dynamite, the
peaceable citizen sleeping in this house is free to fly into the
air, and fall again to the ground in a bloody rain of shreds of
flesh and splinters of bone. Progress is possible only by the
growth of knowledge ; but this is the task of consciousness and
judgment, not of instinct. The march of progress is charac
terized by the expansion of consciousness and the contrac
tion of the unconscious; the strengthening of will and the
weakening of impulsions ; the increase of self-responsibility
and the repression of reckless egoism. He who makes instinct
man's master does not wish for liberty, but for the most
infamous and abject slavery, viz., enslavement of the judgment
of the individual by his most insensate and self-destructive
appetites ; enslavement of the inflamed man by the craziest
whims of a prostitute ; enslavement of the people by a few
stronger and more violent personalities. And he who places
pleasure above discipline, and impulse above self-restraint
wishes not for progress, but for retrogression to the most
primitive animality.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 555
Retrogression, relapse — this is in general the ideal of this
band who dare to speak of liberty and progress. They wish
to be the future. That is one of their chief pretensions. That
is one of the means by which they catch the largest number of
simpletons. We have, however, seen in all individual cases
that it is not the future but the most forgotten, far-away past.
Degenerates lisp and stammer, instead of speaking. They
utter monosyllabic cries, instead of constructing grammatically
and syntactically articulated sentences. They draw and paint
like children, who dirty tables and walls with mischievous
hands. They compose music like that of the yellow natives
of East Asia. They confound all the arts, and lead them back
to the primitive forms they had before evolution differentiated
them. Every one of their qualities is atavistic, and we know,
moreover, that atavism is one of the most constant marks of
degeneracy. Lombroso has convincingly demonstrated that
many peculiarities of the born criminals described by him are
also atavisms. Over-hasty critics believed that they had dis
covered a very subtle objection when, with a smile of self-
satisfaction, they objected : ' You assert that criminal instinct
is at once degeneracy and atavism. These two dicta are
mutually exclusive. Degeneracy is a pathological state; the
most convincing proof of this is, that the degenerate type does
not propagate itself, but becomes extinct. Atavism is a return
to an earlier state, which cannot have been diseased, because
the men who existed under those conditions have developed
themselves and progressed. Return to a healthy, albeit remote,
state cannot possibly be disease.' All this verbiage! has its
source in the stubborn superstition which sees in disease a
state differing essentially from that of health. This is a good
example of the confusion which a word is capable of producing
in muddled or ignorant brains. As a matter of fact there
exists no activity and no state of the living organism which
can in itself be designated as ' health ' or ' disease.' But they
become these in respect of the circumstances and purposes of
the organism. According to the time of its appearance, one
and the same state may very well be at one time disease and
at another health. In the human foetus, at the sixth week,
hare-lip is a regular and healthy phenomenon. In the newly-
born child it is a malformation. In the first year of its life
the child cannot walk. Why ? Because its legs are too weak
to support it ? Decidedly not. The well-known experiments
of Dr. L. Robinson on sixty new-born infants have proved
that they are able to hang by their hands from a stick for
thirty seconds, a performance implying muscular strength
quite as considerable, relatively to their respective ages, as is
possessed by the adult. It is not from weakness that they are

556 DEGENERATION
unable to walk, but because their nervous system has not yet
learned so to regulate and combine the activity of the different
f roups of muscles, as to produce a purposive movement.
nfants cannot yet ' co-ordinate.' Incapacity of co-ordination
of muscular activity is called by medical science ataxy. Hence
in infants this is the natural and healthy condition. But ataxy
precisely is a serious disease when it appears in adults, as the
chief symptom of inflammation of the spinal cord. The
identity of the ataxy of spinal disease with healthy infantine
ataxy is so complete that Dr. S. Frenkel* was able to found
upon it a treatment of spinal ataxy, which consisted, essen
tially, in teaching the patients anew, like children, to walk and
stand. It is seen, then, that a state may be at the same time
diseased and yet the mere return to what was primitively a
perfectly healthy state of things ; and it was with culpable
frivolity that Lombroso was reproached with contradiction
because he saw in criminal instincts at once degeneracy and
atavism. The disease of degeneracy consists precisely in the
fact that the degenerate organism has not the power to mount
to the height of evolution already attained by the species, but
stops on the way at an earlier or later point. The relapse of
the degenerate may reach to the most stupendous depth. As, in
reverting to the cleavage of the superior maxillary peculiar to
insects with sextuple lips, he sinks somatically to the level of
fishes, nay to that of the arthropoda, or, even further, to that
of rhizopods not yet sexually differentiated ; as by fistulae of
the neck he reverts to the branchiae of the lowest fishes, the
selacious; or by excess in the number of fingers (polydactylia)
to the multiple-rayed fins of fishes, perhaps even to the bristles
of worms ; or, by hermaphrodism, to the asexuality of rhizopods
— so in the most favourable case, as a higher degenerate, he
renews intellectually the type ofthe primitive man ofthe most
remote Stone Age ; or, in the worst case, as an idiot, that of
an animal far anterior to man.
This is the subject in regard to which it is our duty untiringly
and by every means to enlighten the weak in judgment, and
the inexperienced. The fine names appropriated to themselves
by degenerates, their imitators, and their critical hirelings, are
lies and deceit. They are not the future, but an immeasurably
remote past. They are not progress, but the most appalling
reaction. They are not liberty, but the most disgraceful
slavery. They are not youth and the dawn, but the most
exhausted senility, the starless winter night, the grave and
corruption. It is the sacred duty of_a.ll healthy and moral men to take
* Dr. S. Frenkel, 'Die Therapie atactischer Bewegungstorungen,' Mun
ch ener medizinische Wochenschrtft, Nr. 52. 1892.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 557
part in the work of protecting and saving those who are not
already too deeply diseased. Unly by each individual doing
his duty will it be possible to dam up the invading mentai
malady. It is not seemly simply to shrug the shoulders and
smile contemptuously. While the easy-going console them
selves by saying, ' No rational being takes this idiocy seriously,'
madness and crime are doing their work and poisoning a whole
generation. Mystics, but especially ego-maniacs and filthy pseudo-realists,
are enemies to society of the direst kind. Society must un
conditionally defend itself against them. Whoever believes
with me that society is the natural organic form of humanity,
in which alone it can exist, prosper, and continue to develop
itself to higher destinies ; whoever looks upon civilization as a
good, having value and deserving to be defended, must merci
lessly crush under his thumb the anti-social vermin. To him
who, with /Nietzsche, is enthusiastic over the ' freely- roving,
lusting beast of prey,' we cry, ' Get you gone from civilization !
Rove far from us ! Be a lusting beast of prey in the desert !
Satisfy yourself! Level your roads, build your huts, clothe
and feed yourself as you can ! Our streets and our houses are
not built for you ; our looms have no stuffs for you ; our fields
are not tilled for you. All our labour is performed by men
who esteem each other, have consideration for each other,
mutually aid each other, and know how to curb their selfish
ness for the general good. There is no place among us for
the lusting beast of prey; and if you dare return to us, we
will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs.'
And still more determined must the resistance be to the
filth-loving herd of swine, the professional pornographists.
These have no claim to the measure of pity which may still be
extended to degenerates properly so called, as invalids ; for
they have freely chosen their vile trade, and prosecute it from
cupidity, vanity, and hatred of labour. The systematic incita-
tion to lasciviousness causes the gravest injury to the bodily
and mental health of individuals, and a society composed of
individuals sexually over-stimulated, knowing no longer any
self-control, any discipline, any shame, marches to its certain
ruin, because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great
tasks. The pornographist poisons the springs whence flows
the life of future generations. No task of civilization has been
so painfully laborious as the subjugation of lasciviousness.
The pornographist would take from us the fruit of this, the
hardest struggle of humanity. To him we must show no
mercy. The police cannot aid us. The public prosecutor and
criminal judge are not the proper protectors of society against

558 DEGENERATION
crime committed with pen and crayon. They infuse into their
mode of proceeding too much consideration for interests not
always, not necessarily, those of cultivated and moral men.
The policeman is so often compelled to intervene in the
service of a privileged class, of the insupportable arrogance of
administrations, of the assumption of infallibility of ministers
and other government officials of the most unworthy byzantism
and of the most stupid superstition, that he does not dishonour
the man on whose shoulder he lays his heavy hand. Hence it
comes to this, that the pornographist must be branded with
infamy. But the punitive sentence of a judge does not with
certainty have this effect.
The condemnation of works trading on unchastity must
emanate from men of whose freedom from prejudice and free
dom of mind, intelligence and independence, no one entertains
a doubt. The word of such men would be of great weight
among the people. There already exists an ' Association of
Men for the Suppression of Immorality.' Unfortunately it
allows itself to be guided not only by solicitude for the moral
health and purity of the multitude, and especially of the young,
but by considerations which to the majority of the people
seem to be prejudices. The association pursues disbelief
almost more than immorality. An outspoken word against
revelation or the Church inspires this association with as
much horror as an act of obscenity. To this narrow-minded
confessionalism is it due that its work is less rich in blessing
than it might be. But in spite of this, we can take this
' Association of Men ' as a pattern. Let us do what it does,
but without mummeries. Here is a great and grateful task,
e.g., for the new ' Society for Ethical Culture ' of Berlin :
\ Let it constitute itself the voluntary guardian of the people s
morality. Doubtless the pornographists will attempt to turn it
into ridicule. But the scorn will soon enough stick in their
own throats. An association composed of the people's leaders
and instructors, professors, authors, members of Parliament,
judges, high functionaries, has the power to exercise an irre
sistible boycott. Let the ' Society for Ethical Culture ' under
take to examine into the morality of artistic and literary
productions. Its composition would be a guarantee that the
examination would not be narrow-minded, not prudish, and
not canting. Its members have sufficient culture and taste to
"\ distinguish the thoughtlessness of a morally healthy artist from
the vile speculation of a scribbling ruffian. When such a
society, which would be joined by those men from the people
who are the best fitted for this task, should, after serious in
vestigation and in the consciousness of a heavy responsibility,
say of a man, ' He is a criminal !' and of a work, 'It is a

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 559
disgrace to our nation !' work and man would be annihilated.
No respectable bookseller would keep the condemned book ; ]
no respectable paper would mention it, or give the author
access to its columns ; no respectable family would permit the
branded work to be in their house ; and the wholesome dread
of this fate would very soon prevent the appearance of such
books as Bahr's Gute Schule, and would dishabituate the
' realists ' from parading a condemnation based on a crime
against morality as a mark of distinction.
Medical specialists of insanity have likewise failed to under
stand their duty. It is time for them to come to the front.
' It is a prejudice,' Bianchi most justly says,* ' to believe that
psychiatry must be enclosed within a sanctuary like that at
Mecca.' It is no doubt meritorious to indurate sections of
the spinal cord in chromic acid, and tint them in a neutro-
phyllic solution, but this should not exhaust the activity of a
professor of psychiatry. Neither is it sufficient that he should
in addition give a few lectures to jurists, and publish observa
tions in technical journals. Let him speak to the mass of
cultivated persons who are neither physicians nor learned in
law. Let him enlighten them in general publications and in
accessible conferences concerning the leading facts in mental
therapeutics. Let him show them the mental derangement of
degenerate artists and authors, and teach them that the works
in fashion are written and painted delirium. In all other
branches of medical science it is discerned that hygiene is of
more importance than therapeutics, and that the public health
has much more to expect from prophylactics than from treat
ment. With us in Germany the psychiatrist alone fails as
yet to concern himself with the hygiene of the mind. It is
time that he should practise his profession in this direction
also. A Maudsley in England, a Charcot, a Magnan in
France, a Lombroso, a Tonnini in Italy, have brought to vast
circles of the people an understanding of the obscure pheno
mena in the life of the mind, and disseminated knowledge
which would make it impossible in those countries for pro
nounced lunatics with the mania for persecution to gain an
influence over hundreds of thousands of electoral citizens,***1**
even if it could not prevent the coming into fashion of the
degenerate art. In Germany alone no psychiatrist has as yet
followed this example. It is time to atone for this negligence.
Popularized expositions from the pens of experts whose
* A. G. Bianchi, La Patologia del Genie e gli scienziati Italiani. Milano,
1892, p. 79. /
t Allusion is here made to the political influence exercised in a number of
German electoral districts by the anti-Semite Passchen, a proved lunatic,
with a mania for persecution. — Translator.

560 DEGENERATION
prominent official status would recommend them to the reader
would restrain many healthy spirits from affiliating themselves
with degenerate tendencies.
Such is the treatment of the disease of the age which I hold
to be efficacious : Characterization of the leading degenerates
as mentally diseased ; unmasking and stigmatizing of their
imitators as enemies to society ; cautioning the public against
the lies of these parasites.
We in particular, who have made it our life's task to
combat antiquated superstition, to spread enlightenment, to
demolish historical ruins and remove their rubbish, to defend
the freedom of the individual against State oppression and
the mechanical routine of the Philistine ; we must resolutely
set ourselves in opposition to the miserable mongers who
seize upon our dearest watchwords, with which to entrap the
I innocent. The ' freedom ' and ' modernity,' the ' progress '
and 'truth,' of these fellows are not ours. We have nothing
in common with them. They wish for self-indulgence; we
wish for work. They wish to drown consciousness in the
unconscious ; we wish to strengthen and enrich consciousness.
They wish for evasive ideation and babble ; we wish for
attention, observation, and knowledge. The criterion by
which true moderns may be recognised and distinguished from
impostors calling themselves moderns may be this : Whoever
preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress ; and
whoever worships his ' I ' is an enemy to society. Society has
for its first premise, neighbourly love and capacity for self-
sacrifice ; and progress is the effect of an ever more rigorous
subjugation of the beast in man, of an ever tenser self-restraint,
an ever keener sense of duty and responsibility. The emanci
pation for which we are striving is of the judgment, not of the
appetites. In the profoundly penetrating words of Scripture
(Matt. v. 17), ' Think not that I am come to destroy the law,
or the prophets ; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.'

FINIS.