Degeneration / by Max Nordau.

  • Max Nordau
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    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 as.^ijn 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 \_grdce vulgaire\.^ Let us hold this admission firmly, that the romantic writers were children ; they were so in their inaptitude to comprehend the world and men, in the seriousness and zeal with which they gave themselves up to their game of rhymes, in the artlessness with which they placed themselves above the precepts of morality and good sense in use among adults. Let us exaggerate this childishness a little (without allying with it the wild and exuberant imagination of a Victor Hugo, and his gift of lightning-like rapidity of association, evoking the most startling antitheses), and we obtain the literary figure of Theophile Gautier, whom the imbecile Barbey d'Aurevilly could name in the same breath with Goethe,t 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 Lundz, vol. xiv., p. 70. Article on the com- plete poems of Theodore de Banville, October 12th, 1857. t ^axhty d! KxxreMiWy, Goethe et Diderot. Paris, 1882.