The Evening Star - Saturday, April 27, 1895

BY THE WAY.

A German savant, a certain Dr Max Nordan, has just written a book—and a very smartly-written book it appears to be—in which he undertakes to prove that much of the literary and artistic work of the day, the sort of thing that excites a craze of admiration, is really the work of what he terms "degenerates." Degeneracy is defined to be "a morbid deviation from an original type." The original type is the healthy type, but it appears to be very easy to wander away from it. Here is the process:—

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 development, but will form a new sub-species which, like all others, possesses the capacity for transmitting to its offspring in a continually increasing degree its capacities, these being morbid deviations from the normal form—gaps in development, malformations and infirmities.

Now we know that well marked degeneracy does exist, otherwise there is no way of accounting for habitual criminals, who have all got the physical manifestations of degeneracy, though it be only, perhaps, a mal-formed ear. The man who commits a crime may possibly be fairly good-looking and shapely, but the habitual criminal never. I don't believe that a shapely head with a lofty crown was ever found on such a man. Dr Nordan's theory is that there is a mental form of degeneracy, a morbid deviation from a healthy type of mind, and that among its manifestations—stigmata is the term he applies to them—are various odd kinds of originality greatly run after at the present time. One can't lightly pooh-pooh a theory of this kind when one reflects that Rousseau—I have read his confessions—was simply a beast with a charming turn for literature, and that Swift had something incurably nasty about him throughout his whole life. Still, I was inclined to pay very little attention to Dr Nordan's theory of degeneracy until I noticed a list of men whose genius or talent represented a deviation from the normal. Among them was Oscar Wilde. There is a certain comfort, too, to be got out of Dr Nordan's theory—by those, I mean, who have never succeeded in being original. They must at least be perfectly healthy. If one could deviate a bit from the standard of mental health at particular times—say, when one was making a political speech or writing for the newspapers—it would be alright.

NEMO.