who really presents a dozen different notions of marriage; Tolstoi, a literal madman, who in " Anna Karenina " has given the natural history of a seduction, with one chapter descriptive of a lying-in scene, and in "The Kreutzer Sonata has denounced marriage as filthy and vile, and on every page used expressions which ought to bar the book from decent society and and from public sale and libraries; Nietzsche, the German philosopher, who glorifies crime and is at last immured in a lunatic asylum. These principally and many more subordinately Nordau exposes, dissects and denounces with an un sparing vigor and a terrible humor. Until one has read these pages one is ignorant of what a vast amount of degeneracy there is, and what a consider able following it has gained. When we see people gloating over the pages of men who are in lunatic asylums or prisons, or have died in madness, we can not be too grateful to a scientific writer who has the ability and the courage to expose the evil and warn people against yielding to its influence. In truth, the vice of eroticism has gained such power in literature, that it is no longer safe to allow one's young son or daughter to read a recent novel without first scrutiniz ing its pages, and this is true of some of the most powerful of recent romances, such as " Tess," " The Manxman," " Trilby." What a falling off since the healthful tales of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and most of the elder school! The same thing is true of the modern drama — most of the reigning plays are full of immorality. There would not be much harm to the young in this if all the young women were as innocent as the female teacher of history in a semi nary which we know of, who advised her history class of sixteen-year-old girls to read Dumas' " historical" novels! Fancy the historical improvement derivable from the adventures of Athos and Madame de Chevreuse and of D'Artagnan and Milady Clarik! There is one thing to be said however for the coarseness of Fielding, Smollett and Dumas — it is vigorous, and manly, not unnatural and debilitating, like that of the moderns, and does not tend to land men where Oscar Wilde has brought up. Until one reads these pages he is ignorant of the grotesque insanity of such a poor creature, for example, as Oscar Wilde, who despises nature; is doubtful of his own opinions when others agree with them; whose " ideal of life is inactivity "; and who gravely argues " that painters have changed the climate, that for the last ten years there have been fogs in London because the impressionists have painted fogs "! Or of the " philosophy " of Nietzsche, who argues that the original man was a " blonde beast," a solitary, roaming beast of prey, "whose fundamental instinct is cruelty" : who glorifies " the sovereign individual resembling himself alone," and denounces civilization as " the slave revolt in moral
ity "; who remarks that " crime is calumniated, and that the defender of the criminal is oftenest not artist enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the crime to the advantage of the doer"'; and whose favorite maxim is, " nothing is true, everything is permis sible." Or of Baudelaire, who " sings of carrion, maladies, criminals and prostitutes," and died of paralysis. Some of us have listened to the unbridled passion, and to the half-hour incestuous love-duets in some of Wagner's operas, but we gain a new sense of their absurdity when Nordau says: "The lovers in his pieces behave like tom-cats gone mad, rolling in contortions and convulsions over a root of valerian. It is the love of those degenerates, who, in sexual transports, become like wild beasts." Some of us have heard and had vague ideas of Maeterlinck's poetical productions, but if one wants a perfectly cor rect idea of them let him read Nordau's parody of them, which is not a whit more ridiculous than the originals: "O Flowers! And we groan so heavily under the very old taxes! An hour-glass, at which the dog barks in May; and the strange envelope of the negro who has not slept. A grandmother who would eat oranges and could not write! Sailors in a balloon, but blue! blue! On the bridge this croco dile and the policeman with the swollen cheek beck ons silently! Other soldiers in the cowhouse, and the razor is notched! But the chief prize they have not drawn. And on the lamp are ink spots! " We quite agree with Nordau, that Maeterlinck's style "has already reached the extreme limits of idiocy," and that it is not " quite worthy of a mentally sound man to make fun of a poor devil of an idiot." Yet in the October number of " The Bookman," a ruling magazine of literature, is the portrait of this writer, whose poetry is as above portrayed, and whose plays would have been better if written by one of Shake speare's fools. Many of us have read some of Zola's novels, so steeped in vice, crime, and sensuality, but we get a strong ray of enlightenment when we read Nordau's assertion that he compresses all the vice, crime and sensuality of a generation and a wide dis trict into the compass of a few persons, a small local ity and a short time, and that " He has in reality seen nothing and observed nothing, but has drawn the idea of his magnum opus, all the details of his plan, all the characters of his twenty novels, solely from one printed source, remaining hitherto unknown to all his critics." namely, the history of a criminal French family of the name of Kerangal, which "in two generations has hitherto produced, to the knowl edge of the authorities, seven murderers and murder esses, nine persons who have led an immoral life 1 The eccentric English artist, Blake, said : " What one called the vices in the natural world are the highest sub limities in the spiritual world."
