The Philadelphia Inquirer - Friday, May 17, 1895

EXAMPLES OF DEGENERATES
The List Includes Walt Whitman, Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelites, Richard Wagner and Tolstoi. Frank Vincent's Book about Africa—The May Magazines.

If Mr. Howells wishes to dispose of Dr. Max Nordan's "Degeneration," a translation of which from the second edition of the German work is published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, he will have to bring to his assistance powers of analysis as great as those exhibited by Dr. Nordan. The analytical power is one of the rarest. Foggy thinking is to be found on every side, in the pulpit, in literature, in art, and it is this absence of the highest development of mentality and the abundance of cloudy minds which leads the reader to suspect that the peculiar mental manifestations described by Dr. Nordan may be indicative not of a Dark Age or of degeneration and decay, but of the beginning of an effort to think.

Briefly, the theory of Dr. Nordan's book is that Wagnerism in music, pre-Raphaelitism in painting and Tolstoism in literature, with kindred cults in other fields of intellectual activity, are due to a physical degeration which has resulted in unsound minds. This physical degeneration is attributed to fatigue growing out of the amazing material progress of the present century. The world is tired, and thousands of inhabitants have broken down under the strain. Some of them are brought up in the police courts in consequence of criminal acts committed in their unsound state of mind. Others like Richard Wagner, Tolsoi, Swinburne, Rosetti, Ruskin, Zola, manifest powers and limitations which are not unusually united in the degenerate. For all their erratic genius they are crazy, nevertheless, and their peculiar notions find vogue only because a considerable portion of their readers are similarly fatigued and as degnerate physically and mentally as their teachers. It is impossible in the brief space at command to rearray the evidence of this degeneracy which crowds compactly every page of Dr. Nordan's work, which holds to criticism the same position that the works of Darwin and Spencer hold to science and logic. But a good sample of Dr. Nordan's methods may be found in his analysis of Rossetti's familiar poem, "The Blessed Damozel." Conceding that all poetry has this peculiarity that it makes use of words intended not only to arouse the definite ideas which they connate, but also to awaken emotions that shall vibrate in consciousness, Dr. Nordan adds that the procedure of a healthy minded poet is altogether different from that of a weak minded mystic.

When Rossetti interweaves the mystical numbers "three" and "seven" in the description of his "damozel" these numbers signify nothing in themselves; moreover, they 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 the emotions excited by the sacred numbers will not involve a reference to the subject of the poem. * * The blessed maiden after her death lives in the highest bliss, in a golden palace in the presence of God and the Blessed Virgin. Ten years of mortal life are to her as a single day. Even if her beloved lives to be a very old man, she will have but five or six days to wait until he appears at her side. It is not, therefore, obvious why she is distressed and shed tears. This can only be attributed to the bewildered thoughts of the mystic poet. He imagines to himself 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. Hence it is that he comes to close an ecstatic hymn of immortality with tears, which have a meaning only if one does not believe in the continuation of life after death.

Every idea in the poem when we try soberly to follow it infallibly takes refuge in this manner in darkness and intangibility. The poem is declared to be based not upon the scientific knowledge of the author's time, but upon a mist of undeveloped germs of ideas in constant mutual strife. Swinburne is described as a higher degenerate, Rossetti as one of Sollier's imbeciles, and the same methods of analysis are applied more in detail to the works of Tolstoi and Richard Wagner. Tlstoi's "Confessions" are shown to be nonsensical, and from Wagner numerous citations are drawn to show that with him amorous excitement assumes the form of mad delirium. "The lovers in Wagner's pieces behave like Tom cats gone mad." That audiences should sit out "Tristan and Isolde" and "Parsifal" is due to their innocence, which does not comprehend what intentions the words, gestures and acts of Wagner's personages denote. Wagner, the author concludes, suffered from erotic madness, which leads coarse natures to murder for lust and inspires higher degenerates to works like "Siegfried." Tolstoi's hazy theories subjected to this kind of examination are shown to be made of clouds.

Walt Whitman is declared to have been mad without a doubt, his poems containing outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature can hardly be found. It is pointed 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. Oscar Wilde is classified as an Ego maniac. A chapter is devoted to Ibsenism and an analysis of Ibsen's works, his vague phrases that please dreamers and drivelers and his infamous teachings. Medical specialists in insanity are called upon to show the mental derangement of degenerate artists and authors and that their works in fashion are painted and written delirium.

We have not been able to do more than to indicate the value and importance of this strong body of criticism. Its effect must be great. For the first time the sure indications of the highest forms of insanity are formulated and now that the distinction between sanity and this kind of insanity is made clear the world itself must be saner.