DEGENERATION. T HE success of Herr Max Nordau's book on Degeneration*
in Germany, France, England, and America, is of itself evidence that there is a large reading public which is not carried away by what is called the " movement " of the close of the century. Those who adhere to, or even admire, that movement, are the last men to read or to applaud an attack so savage and so forcible as that of Herr Nordau. Enraged at the spread of the movement in the whole European world, Herr Norda.0 has set himself to examine carefully its causes, and finds them in a mental disease which has been produced by the intellectual excitement of the last fifty years. The world, he says, within that time, or from a period just before it, has become, chiefly through scientific and physical pro- gress, a more exhausting world, and though the mass of the people have borne it well enough, the intellectual class had been taken by surprise, had not grown up to it, and had not sufficient strength to perform the amazing increase of work required of it by circumstances :— "The 18,000 new publications, the 6,800 newspapers in Ger- many, desire to be read, although many of them desire in vain ; the 2,759 millions of letters must be written ; the larger com- mercial 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 re- ceptive 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 conversation we * Degeneration. By Max Nordan. London s W. Heinemasui.
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 railway travelling, not per- ceived 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 civilised 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."
The consequence of this is exhaustion, or, to use language which is not strictly scientific, but will be fully intelligible to our readers, a form of insanity described by specialists as "degeneration," in which the control of the will is partially lost, and the patient exhibits erotomania or megalomania, or a maudlin and usually sterile liability to emotion, especially
the emotion of pity. All these symptoms Herr Nordau finds in the cultivated of the present generation considered as a whole ; and he proceeds to prove, by a savage criticism of recent art, literature, and social politics, that they exist in
their highest degree in Russia, Germany, France, England, and America, in the literary class, which is of course the most prominent of all. Tolstoi, Nietschke, Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, Swinburne, and half a hundred more, fall by turns under his lash; and of most he furnishes a collection of proofs which, in his judgment, can leave in no sane mind any doubt that they are all in different degrees moral epileptics, suffering under what is, in truth, a veritable disease. Most of them are in his belief, though of course in different degrees, medically mad ; and reveal their condition some of them in rotten eroticism, some of them in wild boastfulness
and exaggeration of ideas, and all in a certain vagueness which he quotes experts to show is a recognised sign among the &generate of active disease. The whole class exhibits, he says, traces of morbid deviation from type, a trace extending
even to physical peculiarities, morbid emotionalism, morbid pessimism, incapacity for action and proneness to inane reverie. The " degenerate " is incapable of adapting himself to existing circumstances, and must first of all have them all altered, sinking, if they are not altered, into despondency or a vein of mysticism in which, we fancy, Herr Nordau includes, if not religion, all unusual religious depth. The
whole book is a mass of collected evidence—often, we are bound to say, rather disgusting—that the new littera.teurs are, especially in France, thus afflicted, and that a section of the community in all countries, itself also afflicted, although in a less degree, follows them out of secret sympathy, admires
them, and will, if not checked, at last become even as they.
The indictment, sustained as it is by thousands of quota- tions all arranged with a precision and force which indicate that Herr Nordeu would have made a first-class public prosecutor, and by the melancholy fate of many whom he attacks, is a most formidable one, and few readers of "Degeneration" will close its pages without a melancholy doubt as to the future of the thinking world, a doubt not relieved by Herr Nordan's con- clusion that the degenerates must perish, or the world, sick with excitement, must extinguish "the steamship and the
railway and the thoughts that shake mankind," and fall back in selfldefence upon the older and healthier life of the peasant
and the squire. Those few, however, will, we think, detect in Herr Nordau himself one of those signs of disease which he so eloquently depicts,—a tendency to baseless exaggeration.
We do not mean that the evils he describes are not there, and well deserve exposure, but that they will not have the terrible consequences he predicts. They are signs not of the decadence of European man, but of a wave of emotion which has swept over Europe, or parts of Europe, from time to time, which it is as difficult to account
for as for any other pestilence, but which has passed like the pestilences, leaving behind it much destruction, but probably killing out permanent tendencies worse even than itself. To begin with, Herr Nordau's explanation of the cause of the degeneration which, if it were true, would be a most terrible one, is almost demonstrably inaccurate. All the evils which he justly denounces, erotomania, megalomania, maudlin pity without its proper result in mercy, appeared in the early years of the French Revolution, when men tolerated or encouraged any filth, even that of the Pere Duchesne, when boastfulness, both as to the individual and as to mankind, was carried to insanity, and when the guillotine reeked with blood shed in the name of fraternity and love and pity for the " disinherited" poor. The tone of the present fin de siècle was, in all but its cosmo- politan manifestation, the tone of Rousseau ; and Rousseau and his followers sprang not from a period of overstrained excitement, not from the overfilling of men's minds, but from the stertorous sleep of the long reign of Louis XV., as unmarked by progress as any period of sixty years in history. There was no railway, no steamship, no "thoughts that shake mankind" in the time when the men of the Terror were born ; nor were they the heirs of any but a thick-headed, uninstructed generation. They—most of them feeble men—sprang up, had their brief day, and passed, as the men of the present period will pass, having for want of opportunity accomplished far less than their predecessors. The novelists of the France of our day are not filthier than those of the later years of Louis XV., nor are the decadents more depraved than the nobles of his Court. The art of to-day, say of Sir F. Leighton, is at least as virile, and we could not find among European " Socialists " men who talk of the poor with more maudlin or sterile pity than did the early Republicans whom Napoleon so despised. What happened then is what is happening now, a revolt, which we quite admit with Herr Nordan, threatens every " conven- tion " that exists, and especially every good convention, but which is indefinitely less powerful, because the conventions are indefinitely better; which does not, as Herr Nordan fully admits, carry away either the middle class or those who work ; and which is accompanied, as it never was then, by evidence of recoil. All Europe may be said to be tainted with scepti- cism, with impurity, and with maudlin sentiment ; but all Europe at the same indivisible point of time is recoiling towards deeper religions feeling, a loftier "Puritanism," and a social mercifulness which is not yet sufficiently strained of its impetnosities, but which will certainly not be sterile, and we think not maudlin. We will not speak for Germany, or Russia, where the child-like nature of the Slav, so evil and so good, is still an undeveloped force ; but in England Yellow-Book-ness is dying already from the contempt of the frilly sane. Experts tell us that even now in France a healthier literature is arising ; that there is a strong reaction against salaciousness ; that history never was so studied ; that there never was a time when there was more genuine learning. There is a recoil even from disbelief; and this, though not we fear as yet accompanied by a recoil from the previously mentioned evils, is visible also both in Germany and here. It is an evil cloud, but a cloud only, which is passing over the European sky. Why it should pass just now we can no more explain than we can explain why a bright and pleasant child has a fit of evil tempers ; but we know that it is a fit, and does not proceed from an exhaustion of force. It is possible that there is in a class weariness of the usual, a feeling with which we are all familiar ; possible that we have not become completely adapted to the life of cities, where alone the literature, described by a recent jester as "erotic, neurotic, and Tommyrotic," is really born ; possible alio that we have all learned a little too much, and have mental indigestion as the result ; but in exhaustion we disbelieve. An optimist Max Nordan as well inured to the labour of compilation, as facile in epigram and as brilliant in style, could give us a book of the signs of mental and moral progress as large as his, and as well stored with most persuasive facts. Men would read it with as much interest as his, in which the governing thought, after all, is only this, that this generation having done much, is so tired that it needs sleep, and has lost for the moment some control of its nerves and will. We doubt the fact, as a fact, about this country at least, believing that we are suffering not from exhaustion, but from a mental influenza ; but even if it is true, it is temporary, and will quickly pass. The future may be with the Puritan or the Pagan, but it will not be with the "Degenerate."
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