Degeneration / by Max Nordau.

  • Nordau, Max Simon, 1849-1923.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Degeneration / by Max Nordau. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    revered by numerous admirers as creators of a new art, and heralds of the coming centuries. This phenomenon is not to be disregarded. Books and works of art exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses. It is from these productiorps 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 enthiisiasm for all that is strange and seemingly new, must be warned and en- lightened as to the real nature of the creations so blindly admired. This warning the ordinary critic does not give. Exclusively literary and cesthetic culture is, moreover, the worst preparation conceivable for a true knowledge of the pathological character of the works of degenerates. The verbose rhetorician exposes with more or less grace, or cleverness, the subjective impressions received from the works he criticises, but is incapable of judging if these works are the productions of a shattered ^ brain, and also the nature of the mental disturbance expressing itself by them. Now I have undertaken 'the 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 their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia. Thts, this book is an attempt at a really scientific criticism, which does not base its jtidgment of a book upon the purely accidental, capricioiis 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 write against rulers and governments is likewise nothing venturesome, for at the worst nothing more than imprisonment could follow, with compensating glory of martyrdom. But grievous is the fate of him who has the audacity to characterize cBsthetic fashions as forms of mental decay. The author or artist attacked never pardons a man for recognising