Degeneration

by Max Simon Nordau

CHAPTER I.

ZOLA AND HIS SCHOOL.

It was necessary to treat in detail the two forms of degeneracy in literature and art hitherto examined, i.e., mysticism and ego-mania, inasmuch as their career of development seems to be still in the ascendant, and they are actively at work in making themselves masters of the æsthetic conscience of our times. Concerning the third form, realism or naturalism, I can afford to be much briefer, for two reasons: one having to do with my subject, the other with myself. The former reason is that, in the land of its origin, naturalism is already wholly vanquished, and we do not kill a corpse—we bury it. The personal reason is that I have already devoted myself elsewhere to the thorough examination of naturalism.[432] The conclusions I there came to I continue to maintain, as regards the appreciation of its tendency, and I should only wish to limit them by a strong reservation, in so far as they greatly over-estimate M. Zola’s abilities.

That naturalism in France is done with is admitted by all the world, and is really only disputed by Zola himself. ‘There is no doubt whatever as to the tendencies of the new generation of literary men,’ says M. Rémy de Gourmont; ‘they are rigorously anti-naturalist. There has been no question of forming a party or issuing orders; no crusade was organized; it is individually that we have separated ourselves, horror-stricken, from a literature the baseness of which made us sick. Perhaps there is even less disgust than indifference. I remember, when M. Zola’s last novel but one came out, that, among the eight or ten collaborators of the Mercure de France (a Symbolist journal), it was impossible for us to find anyone who had read through La Bête humaine, or anyone who would have consented to read it with sufficient care to review it. This species of book, and the method which dictates it, appears to us quite antiquated with the flavour of bygone years; more remote and more superannuated than the most truculent follies of romanticism.’[433]

Among the disciples of Zola, among those who collaborated in the Soirées de Médan, as among those who followed him later, there is scarcely one who has remained faithful to his tendency. Guy de Maupassant, before he was placed in the lunatic asylum where he died, ended by turning more and more towards the psychological novel. Joris Karl Huysmans, whom we have studied above in his new skin as a Diabolist and Decadent, cannot find words bitter enough for naturalism. J. H. Rosny writes novels now in which the scene is laid in the Stone Age, and the subject of which is the abduction of a brawny brachycephalous pre-Aryan woman by a tall, white-skinned, dolichocephalous Aryan man.[434] When Zola’s La Terre appeared, five of his disciples—Paul Bonnetain, J. H. Rosny, just mentioned, Lucien Descaves, Paul Margueritte, and Gustave Guiches—deemed it necessary to protest, in a public manifesto, and with a solemnity somewhat comical, against the obscenities of this novel, and to disavow their master in proper and befitting form. If the novels of M. Zola himself still continue to find a very good and steady market, as he declares with pride, this in no way proves that his tendency is still popular. The masses persist in habits, once adopted, much longer than the leaders and creators do. If the former continue to follow M. Zola as before, the latter have already wholly left him. The success of his last novels is explained, moreover, on quite other than artistic grounds. His flair for what is occupying public opinion is, perhaps, the most essential part of his talent. He chooses from the outset subjects in favour of which he is assured of the positive interest of a numerous public, no matter how they may be treated. With books which relate, in the form of a novel, the story of the financial crisis of 1882, or the war of 1870, as L’Argent and La Débâcle, every known French author is sure to awaken in his own country a passionate interest even to this day. And M. Zola could equally count on a numerous connection of lovers of the obscene and nasty. This public remains faithful to him, and finds in him all it seeks. But it is a long time since he acquired any new adherents in his own country, and abroad he only obtains them among people who anxiously follow every fashion, whether it be in neckties or books, but who are too ignorant to know as yet that M. Zola, in France itself, has long since ceased to be the last fashion.

In the opinion of his disciples, M. Zola is the inventor of realism in literature. This is a pretension which only young fellows, who are ignorant beyond all conception, could raise, and for whom the history of the world only begins at the moment when they have deigned to recognise it.

First of all, the word ‘realism’ itself has no æsthetic significance. In philosophy it denotes an opinion for which the general phenomenon of the world is the expression of a material reality. Applied to art and literature, it possesses no conception whatever. This I have explicitly demonstrated in another place (Paris unter der dritten Republik), and will confine myself here to going very briefly over the argument.

Those ale-house æsthetics, who distinguish between realism and idealism, explain the former as the effort of the artist to observe things and to reproduce them with truth. But this attempt is common to every author, whoever he may be. No one of deliberate purpose wanders from the truth in his creations; and even if he wished to do so, he could not, as this would contradict all the laws of human thought. Every one of our presentations, in fact, is based on an observation once made by us, and even when we invent ad libitum, we only work with the memory-images recollected from previous observations. If, in spite of this, one work gives a greater impression of truth than another, it is a question, not of this or that æsthetic tendency, but exclusively of the degree of talent. A true poet is always true; an incapable imitator can never be so. The first is true even when he disdains always to adhere closely to reality in details; the latter is not so even when he clings, with punctilious attention, and with the method of a land-surveyor, to little external details.

If one bear in mind the psychological conditions in which a work of art comes into existence, all the rhodomontade of so-called ‘realism’ is immediately recognised. The origin of every veritable work of art is an emotion. This is aroused either by a vital process in the internal organs of the artist, or by a sense-impression which he receives from the external world. In both cases the artist feels the necessity of giving expression to his emotion in a work of art. If this emotion is of organic origin, he will choose from among his memory-images, or his sense-impressions of the moment, those which are in harmony with his emotion, and will compose with them. If its origin is external, he will employ in his composition mainly phenomena of the external world, sensuous experiences which have evoked in him the emotion demanding objective shape, and he will combine with this, similar memory-images in accordance with the laws of association. As may be seen, the process in the two cases is absolutely the same: the artist, under the control of an emotion, welds direct sense-perceptions and memory-images into a work of art which brings him relief; only, sometimes the former, sometimes the latter, are predominant, according to whether the emotion has its origin in sense-perceptions or in organic processes. Speaking roughly, the works which result from an emotion aroused by the phenomena of the world may well be called realistic, and those expressing an organic emotion idealistic. These denominations, however, have not any really distinctive value. Among thoroughly sane individuals the emotions originate almost solely from impressions of the external world; among those whose nervous life is more or less diseased, namely, among hysterical, neurasthenic, and degenerate subjects, and every kind of lunatic, they originate much more frequently in internal organic processes. Sane artists will produce works, as a rule, in which perception will predominate; artists unhealthily emotional will produce works in which the play of association of ideas predominates—in other words, imagination working principally on memory-images. And if a false designation is absolutely adhered to, it might be said that the first, as a general rule, will produce works which are so-called realistic, and the second, works so-called idealistic. In no case is the work of art a faithful image of material reality; its genesis excludes this possibility. It is always the incarnation of a subjective emotion only. To desire to know the world by means of a work of art is a false proceeding; but the whole essence of a personality reveals itself in it to him who knows how to read. The work of art is never a document in the sense attached by naturalistic cant to this word, i.e., a reliable objective presentation of external facts; but it is always a confession of the author; it betrays, consciously or unconsciously, his way of feeling and thinking; it lays bare his emotions, and shows what ideas fill his consciousness, and are at the disposal of the emotion which strives for expression. It is not a mirror of the world, but a reflection of the soul of the artist.

It might be thought, perhaps, that at least the mainly imitative arts, painting and sculpture, are capable of a faithful reproduction of reality, and thus are realisms properly so called. Even this is an error. It would never occur to a painter or a sculptor to place himself before a phenomenon, and reproduce it without selection, without accentuations and suppressions. And why does he do this? If he imitates an aspect, it is evidently because something in that aspect captivates or pleases him—a harmony of colours, an effect of light, a line of motion. Involuntarily he will accentuate and throw into relief the feature which has inspired him with the desire to imitate the aspect in question, and his work, consequently, will no more represent the phenomenon such as it really was, but as he saw it; it will only be a fresh proof, therefore, of his emotion, not the cast of a phenomenon. To work absolutely in the method of a camera obscura and a sensitive plate would be only possible to a very obtuse handicraftsman, who, in the presence of the visible world, had no feeling for anything, no pleasure, no disgust, no aspirations of any kind. However, it is not at all probable that so atrophied a being will ever have had the inclination to become an artist, and could acquire, even in a moderate degree, the technical skill necessary for such a profession.

And if literal realism, the positive actual imitation of the phenomenon, be interdicted even in the plastic arts by their intrinsic nature, with how much greater reason is it forbidden to imaginative writing! The painter can, after all, if he wishes to debase himself and his art to the lowest degree, reduce the co-operation of his personality in a work of art (or, to be more exact, to the work, for then there can be no question of art) to an extremely feeble, a scarcely perceptible point; he can reduce himself to the condition of a mere camera obscura, transmit his visual impressions in the most mechanical manner possible to his motor organs, and compel himself to think and feel nothing during the progress of the work. His picture is furnished for him by Nature itself: it is his optical horizon. If, then, he wishes to exercise no choice, to express nothing of his own, not even to compose, still there remains the possibility of copying the phenomena which are enclosed within the limits of his field of vision. His so-called picture is then no more than an expressionless fragment of the world, in which the artist’s personality is only represented by the frame which encloses it, not because the phenomena of Nature really terminates at that point, but because the eye of the painter only embraces that portion, and no more; nevertheless, it is a picture in a technical sense, i.e., a picture that can be hung upon the wall and looked at. The imaginative writer (dichter), on the contrary, does not find his work ready in this way. It is not provided for him by Nature itself. His subjects are not developed in space, but in time. They are not arranged by the side of one another in such a way that the eye perceives them and can retain all it sees; but they succeed each other, and the imaginative writer must by his own intellect assign them their limits, he must himself decide what he ought to seize upon and what he must let go; where the phenomenon begins which he wishes to utilize in his work, and where it ends. He cannot begin or end a conversation in the middle of a word, in imitation of M. Jean Béraud, for example, who in a well-known picture has made the frame cut off the wheels of a waggon in the middle. He may not produce an inexpressive photograph of the uniform course of events of life and the world. He must fence round and dam up certain places in the course of events. In doing this he clearly affirms himself and his personality. He betrays his original stamp. He allows his intentions, views, and sentiments to be recognised. If amongst a million of contemporary human destinies he relates one only, it is that for some reason or other this particular one has interested him more than the rest of the million. If he transmits to us only some few features, ideas, conversations, and actions of the person he has selected (not even a millionth part of all that makes up his actual life) it is because, for some reason or other, these seemed to him more important and more characteristic than all the rest; because in his opinion they prove something, they express an idea not conceived by things as they are, but which he believes he can deduce from reality, or which he desires to read into it. Thus, his ‘realistic’ work always reproduces his thoughts only, his interpretation of reality, his interest in it, and not reality itself. If the imaginative writer wished to transcribe the world phonographically or photographically, his work would no longer be a poem, even in a purely technical sense; it would not even be a book, to the extent that the work of the painter who only photographs still continues, in a purely technical sense, to be a picture; it would be something with neither form, sense, nor name; for, in reproducing the existence of a single human being during one day only, thousands of pages could be filled if all his sensations, thoughts, words, and actions were treated as of equal value. That selection is therefore made among them which is the subjectivity of the imaginative writer, i.e., the reverse of ‘realism.’

Besides, the work of the painter addresses itself to the same senses as the phenomenon of Nature itself, and reproduces it with the help of the same means by which the world itself is revealed to the senses, viz., with light and colour. Of course the lights, colours, and lines of the painter are not exactly those of the real phenomenon, and it is only in consequence of an illusion that, in his imitation, the phenomenon is recognised; but this illusion is the work of such inferior cerebral centres that even animals are capable of it, as is demonstrated by the classical anecdote so well known of the birds wishing to peck at the bunch of grapes painted by Zeuxis. The imaginative writer, on the contrary, does not address himself to the senses; to be more exact, he appeals by hearing or sight, to which he presents spoken or written words, not to the centres of perception, as the plastic artist does in the first instance, but to the higher centres of conception, judgment, and reasoning. Nor has he the means for directly reproducing the sensible phenomenon itself, but he must first translate the phenomenon into concepts under a linguistic, i.e., a conventional, form. This is, however, an excessively complicated and highly differentiated activity, which bears completely the impress of the personality exercising it. If even two eyes do not see in the same manner, how much less can two brains perceive and interpret in the same way what the eye has seen, class it with pre-existing concepts, associate it with feelings and representations, and clothe it in traditional forms of language? The activity of the imaginative writer, therefore, is incomparably more than that of the artist, essentially personal; the elaboration of sense-impressions into representations, and the translation of representations into words, are so peculiarly individual, so exclusively subjective, that for this cause also imaginative writing can never be reality itself, i.e., ‘realistic.’

The notion of so-called ‘realism’ cannot withstand either psychological or æsthetic criticism. We might, perhaps, attempt an external, superficial, practical conception of it, and say, for example, Realism is the method in the application of which the imaginative writer starts from his perceptions and observations, and seeks his subjects in the environment he knows personally; idealism is the opposite method, which that writer employs who, in creating, yields to the play of imagination, and who, in order not to impede its free energy, borrows his materials from remote times and countries, or from social strata of which he has no direct knowledge, but which he conceives only in the visions of aspiration, intuition, or surmise. Reasonable and plausible as this explanation appears, it, too, nevertheless, dissolves into blue mist when more closely examined. For, in fact, the choice of subject-matter, the surroundings from which it is borrowed, or in which it is placed, have no decisive signification; no method is therein manifested, but merely the author’s personality. One in whom observation predominates will be ‘realistic,’ i.e., will express experiences, even if he pretends to speak of men and things placed wholly beyond the reach of his observation; and the other in whom the mechanical association of ideas prevails will be ‘idealistic,’ i.e., he will simply follow the wanderings of his imagination, even when he desires to represent circumstances which may be personally familiar to him.

Let us give one example only of the two cases. What is more ‘idealistic’ than fairy-stories? Very well, here are some passages from the best-known fairy-tales of the brothers Grimm: ‘There was once upon a time a king’s daughter who went into the forest and seated herself on the brink of a cool fountain’ (The Frog Prince; or, Iron Henry). ‘But the little sister at home [he is speaking of the daughter of a king who had driven away his twelve sons] grew up, and remained the only child. Once there was a great washing-day, and amongst the washing were twelve men’s shirts. “For whom are these shirts?” demanded the princess; “they are much too small for my father.” Then the laundress told her that she had had twelve brothers,’ etc.; ‘and as the little sister sat in the meadow in the afternoon bleaching the linen, the words of the laundress came into her mind,’ etc. (The Twelve Brothers). ‘The wood-cutter obeyed; he fetched his child, and gave her to the Virgin Mary, who carried her up into heaven. There the child lived happily; she ate nothing but sweet cakes, and drank new milk,’ etc. ‘So fourteen years went by in heaven. Then the Virgin Mary had to take a long journey; but before she went away, she called the girl to her, and said, “Dear child, I entrust you with the keys of the thirteen doors of Paradise,”’ etc. (Mary’s Child). The unknown writer of these fairy-tales transports his stories into royal palaces, or even into heaven—i.e., into surroundings which he certainly does not know; but he endows beings and things, and even the Virgin Mary, with such traits as are known and familiar to him by observation. From the royal palace one enters a wood or a meadow as one might on leaving a farm; the princess runs to the fountain in the forest quite alone, looks after the linen, and bleaches it on the grass, just like a domestic servant. The Holy Virgin undertakes a journey, and confides the keys of the household to her adopted daughter, as a rich châtelaine might do. These fairy-tales are composed from a peasant’s own experience, who describes his own world with honest realism, and simply gives other names to the figures and circumstances with which he is familiar. M. Edmond de Goncourt, on the contrary, the great pioneer ‘realist,’ relates, in his novel La Faustin, the love-story of a Lord Annandale and an actress of the Théâtre Français, which elicits from M. F. Brunetière, the critic, these observations: ‘I should much like to hear M. Zola’s opinion on M. de Goncourt’s novel. What can M. Zola, who has jested so eloquently on the subject of novels of adventure—of those novels in which princes walked about incognito with their pockets full of diamonds—think in his inmost heart of this Lord Annandale throwing handfuls of gold out of the windows, and ruling from one day to another over fifty English servants in his mansion in Paris, without counting the retainers of his lady? What can M. Zola, who has made merry so comfortably over the idealistic novel, as he calls it, think of this one in which love triumphant carries off the lovers into the adorable world of dreams—what can he think to himself concerning this passionate tenderness which M. de Goncourt’s Englishman has for the tragedienne, this almost deified gallantry, this sensual liaison dans le bleu, this physical love in ideality, and all the rest of the jargon which I spare the reader?’[435] M. Edmond de Goncourt professes to depict a contemporary Englishman, an actress also of our own times, events in Parisian life—i.e., all of them matters he might have observed, and with which he ought to be familiar; but what he does relate is so incredible, so impossible, unprecedented, that one can only shrug one’s shoulders over the childish fable. Thus, the German story-teller who conducts us into a society of angels, saints, and kings, really shows us healthy, robust peasants and lasses whose living reality is in no way diminished by the carnival crowns and gilded-paper halos playfully placed on their heads; while the French realist who would transport us into Parisian life among Parisians, floats before our eyes fleshless phantoms moving in clouds of cigar-smoke, marsh-mists, and punch-flames, and who remain just as unreal, for all the effort of the author to conjure into them a distant resemblance to an Englishman in a frock-coat, and a hysterical lady in a lace-trimmed négligée. The author of the fairy-tales is a realist in the sense of the explanation given above; the novelist of Parisian manners, Edmond de Goncourt, is an idealist of the most aggravating type.

From whatever side we approach this pretended realism, we never succeed in seeing in it a concept, but only an empty word. Every method of investigation leads us to the same result—viz., that there is no realism in poetry, i.e., no impersonal, actual copy of reality; there are only the various personalities of the poet. The only decisive thing is the individuality of the poet. One of them draws from the phenomenon of Nature, another from his internal organic processes, those emotions which incite them to create. One is capable of attention, and observes; another is the slave of an unbridled association of ideas. In one the presentation of the ‘not-self’ predominates in consciousness, in another the ‘self.’ I do not hesitate to express the matter in a single word—one is healthy and in an evolution of growth; the other is changed more or less pathologically—has more or less fallen into degeneracy. The healthy poet mingles knowledge with every one of his works, whether it be Dante’s Inferno or Goethe’s Faust; and if held desirable, this element of knowledge, which it is not possible to acquire except by attention and observation, may be called realism. The degenerate poet never fashions anything but empty soap-bubbles of knowledge, even when he maintains, and is himself convinced, that he is giving out what he has observed; and this confused ebullition of ideas, shot in the best cases with changing hues, but most frequently simply dirty froth, is very often called, by a misnomer, idealism.

Still another and the latest meaning has been applied to realism; it stands for the systematic treatment of the lower ranks of life, and commonplace men and things. According to this definition, the works in which labourers, peasants, petty bourgeois, etc., appear, would be realistic, and those in which gods, heroes, kings, etc., take part, idealistic. Louis XIV., according to the well-known anecdote when Teniers’ tavern-scenes were exhibited before him, let fall the indignant and disdainful comment, ‘Take away these grotesque things!’ He would not have condemned an artistic method and manner of representation, but the baseness of the subject only would have offended his Olympian eye. This explanation of the term ‘realism’ is a little more comprehensible than the others; but I have no need to show how grossly external and how philosophically and æsthetically worthless it is. We have seen, in fact, above, how the simplest feelings and ideas of peasants may be attributed to gods and to kings; and, conversely, there is no lack of works in which a royal crown or a saintly halo hovers invisibly over the heads of human beings in the lowest social position. In Gregory Samarow’s novels, emperors and kings disport themselves who feel, think, and speak like the commercial travellers of a third-rate wine business; in Berthold Auerbach’s village stories we see peasants who in heart and head are of the highest nobility, sometimes even semi-divine. The one kind is as unreal as the other, only in the first we discern the craft of the sensation-monger, in the second there speaks to us the refined and tender-souled poet. In The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, we find a farm-servant, Luke, and a miller’s daughter, Maggie, who would do honour to any Pantheon in the grandeur of their character and morals; in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair we are shown a Marquis of Steyne, very magnificent and very proud, and another such, Earl Bareacres, with neither of whom would any decent man shake hands. Those are as true as these; but whereas the former betray the heart of a poet full of love and pity, the latter reveal the soul of an artist overflowing with bitterness and wrath. Which, now, is noble—the emperors and kings of Samarow or the Black Forest peasants of Auerbach? Which is plebeian—the farming men of George Eliot or the powerful English peers of Thackeray? And which of these works must be qualified as realistic, which as idealistic, if realism signifies being occupied with inferior persons and conditions, idealism with those that are superior?

Hence to serious investigation, which does not stop at the mere jingle of words, the expressions ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ convey no meaning. We will now see what the partisans of M. Emile Zola give out as his originality, in what he himself claims to be a model and a pioneer, and how he justifies his pretension of impersonating a totally new epoch in the history of literature.

M. Zola’s disciples boast of his art of description and his ‘impressionism.’ I make a great difference between the two. Description endeavours to seize upon the characteristic features of the phenomenon by all the senses at once, and convey them in words; impressionism shows the conscious state of a person receiving impressions in the domain of one sense only, seeing things only, hearing them only, feeling them only, etc. Description is the work of a brain which comprehends the things it perceives in their connection and their essence; impressionism is the work of a brain which receives from the phenomenon only the sensuous elements—and by a one-sided aspect—of knowledge, but not knowledge itself. The describer recognises in a tree, a tree, with all the ideas which this concept includes. The impressionist sees before him merely a mass of colour composed of spots of different greens, on which the sun flashes here and there points and rays of light. Description for its own sake, as well as impressionism, are, in poetry, an æsthetic and psychological error, as will be demonstrated as briefly as possible; but even this error was not invented by M. Zola, for long before him the romanticists, and Théophile Gautier particularly, cultivated the broad style of description, inorganically interpolated into literary composition; and, on the subject of impressionism, the brothers De Goncourt showed M. Zola the way.

The purely objective description of objects is science, when it is worth anyone’s while to acquire of them as clear a representation as may be communicated by words without the assistance of image or number. Such description is simply child’s play and waste of time, when no one is interested to pause and look at the things described, either because they are too well known or because they are without importance.[436] Finally, it rises into art while remaining of an inferior species, when it chooses words so well that it follows the most delicate peculiarities of the objects, and at the same time calls out the emotions that the observer experiences during his observations, i.e., when the words employed have not only the value of a just portrayal of sensuously perceptible properties, but have an emotional colouring, and appear accompanied by images and metaphors. We may cite as examples of art of portrayal all good descriptions of travel, from the Voyage to the Equinoxial Regions of the New Continent, by Alexander Humboldt, to Sahara and Soudan, by Nachtigal, Im Herzen Afrikas, by Schweinfurth, or Edmond de Amicis’ books on Constantinople, Morocco, Spain, Holland, etc. But these have nothing in common with imaginative writing, which always has for its object man, with his ideas and sentiments, not excepting fables of animals, parables, allegories, fairy-tales, all the hybrid forms in which the human element of all imagination appears disguised as an anthropomorphism applied to animals, and even to inanimate objects. The material frame, the scene and surrounding, have no importance in an imaginative work, except in so far as they affect the person or persons of whom it treats. The imaginative writer may be regarded either as a spectator who narrates human events as they develop before his eyes, or as an actor in these events, which he looks upon and feels with the consciousness of one of the personages concerned. In both cases he can naturally only perceive in the material surroundings whatever plays a part in the events themselves. If he is a spectator, he will certainly not let his eyes wander over the field of vision indifferently, but will pause before a scene which attracts his attention, and for which he seeks to arouse our interest. If he has himself adopted the disguise of one of the actors, he will be even more completely absorbed by the human events in which he himself co-operates, and will preserve still less any inclination to stroll indifferently by the side of scenes which have nothing to do with his given state of mind, and divert him from acts and feelings with which he is preoccupied at the moment. Hence an imaginative work which is true to human nature will only contain descriptions of such material surroundings as a spectator (absorbed in the actual events which form the subject of the work, or as one of its actors) is in a state to perceive, i.e., only what is directly connected with the events. If the description includes extraneous matter, it is psychologically false; it disturbs moods, interrupts events, diverts the attention from what ought to be the essential point in the work of art, and transforms the latter into a patchwork; showing signs that its author lacked artistic earnestness, that the work is not born from the need to give poetic expression to a genuine emotion.

A very much worse error than desultory, cold-blooded description in imaginative writing is impressionism. In painting it has its authorization. The latter reproduces the impressions of the visual senses, and the painter is within the limits of his art when he presents his purely optical perceptions without composing, or without relating a story, i.e., without introducing any idea into the scene he reproduces, without combining any activity of his highest centres of ideation with the activity of the centres of perception. The picture produced according to this method will be very inferior from an æsthetic point of view, but it will be a picture, and can be defended as such. Poetical impressionism, on the other hand, is a complete misconception of the essence of imaginative work; it is the negation and suppression of it. The medium of poetry is language. Now this is an activity, not of the centres of perception, but of the centres of ideation and judgment. The immediate phonetic reaction upon sensory excitations is merely an exclamation. Without the co-operation of the highest centres a perception cannot express itself phonetically except by an ‘Ah!’ or an ‘Oh!’ But in the same ratio that the purely emotional cry of an animal rises to the height of intelligible grammatically articulated human speech, the purely sensuous perception rises also to the height of concept and judgment, and it is psychologically quite false so to depict the language of the external world as if it set free only a sensation of colour or of sound, and provoked neither ideas, concepts, nor judgments. Impressionism in literature is an example of that atavism which we have noticed as the most distinctive feature in the mental life of degenerates. It carries back the human mind to its brute-beginnings, and the artistic activity of its present high differentiation to an embryonic state; that state in which all the arts (which were later to emerge and diverge) lay side by side inchoate and inseparate. Consider, as an example, these impressionist descriptions by the brothers De Goncourt: ‘Above it a great cloud lowered, a heavy mass of a sombre purple, a scud from the north.... This cloud rose and ended in sharp rents against a brightness where pale green merged into rose. Then the sky became dull, of the colour of tin, swept by fragments of other gray clouds.... Beyond the softly-swaying pinetops, under which the broad garden walk could be seen bare, leafless, red, almost carmine, ... the eye took in the whole space between the dome of the Salpétrière and the mass of the Observatory; first, a great plane of shadow resembling a wash of Indian ink on a red ground, a zone of warm bituminous tones, burnt with those frost-touched reds and those wintry glows that are found on an English artist’s water-colour palette; then, in the infinite delicacy of a degraded tint, a whitish streak arose, a milky nacreous vapour, pierced by the bright tones of new buildings.’ ‘The delicate tones of an old man’s complexion played on the yellowish and bluish pink of his face. Through his tender, wrinkled ears—ears of paper interwoven by filaments—the day in passing became orange.’ ‘The air, streaked with water, had an over-wash of that violet blue with which the painter imitates the transparency of thick glass.... The first vivid smile of green began on the black branches of the trees, where, like strokes from a brush, touches of spring could be discerned leaving behind it light coatings of green dust.’[437]

Such is the procedure of impressionism. The writer gives himself the air of a painter; he professes to seize the phenomenon, not as a concept, but to feel it as simple sense-stimulation. He writes down the names of colours as an artist lays on his washes, and he imagines that he has herewith given the reader a particularly strong impression of reality. But it is a childish illusion, for the reader, nevertheless, comes to see no colours, but merely words. He has to transform these names of colours, like every other word, into images, and with the same mental effort he would procure himself a much livelier impression if, instead of heavily enumerating to him one after another of the optical elements of the phenomenon, the phenomenon were presented to him ready elaborated into a concept. M. Zola has borrowed this absurdity from the De Goncourt brothers with some exactitude, but it was not he who invented it.

Another of his originalities is said to be the observation and reproduction of the milieu, the environment, human and material, of the persons represented. Coming after the indulgence in useless description, and after impressionism, the theory of the ‘milieu’ produces a most comical effect, since it is the exact contrary of the psychological theory which forms the point of departure of impressionism and of the mania for description. The impressionist places himself over against some phenomenon as a mere sense, as photographer or phonographist, etc. He registers the nerve-vibrations. He denies himself all higher comprehension, the elaboration of perceptions into concepts, and the classification of the concepts in the experiences which, as general knowledge, pre-exist in his consciousness. The theorist of the ‘milieu,’ on the contrary, systematically attributes the chief importance, not to the phenomenon, but to its causal connection; he is not a sense which perceives, but a philosopher who endeavours to interpret and explain according to a system. What, in fact, does the theory of the ‘milieu’ mean? It means that the imaginative writer asserts that the individuality and mode of conduct of any person are a consequence of the influences that his environment, living or dead, exert upon him, and that he is trying to discover these influences, and the nature of their action on that person. The theory in itself is right, but, again, it is not M. Zola who invented it, for it is as old as philosophic thought itself. In our own times, Taine has distinctly conceived and established it, and, long before M. Zola, Balzac and Flaubert sought to introduce its operation into their novels. And yet this theory, extremely fertile as it is in anthropology and sociology, and giving, as it does, an impulse to meritorious research, is in imaginative writing but another error, and constitutes a confusion of kinds engendered by vague thought. The task of the man of science is to investigate the causes of phenomena. Sometimes he finds them, frequently he does not; often he believes he has discovered them, till more exact observation subsequently tells him he has deceived himself and must rectify his hypotheses. The investigation of the conditions under which man acquires his various physical and mental qualities is in full progress, but is only at its commencement, and has as yet furnished extremely few positive facts. We do not even know why one human race is tall or another short in stature; why this one has blue eyes and fair hair, that one dark eyes and hair; and yet these are incomparably simpler, more external and more accessible properties than the subtle peculiarities of mind and character. On the causes of these peculiarities we know nothing definite. We can make conjectures on this subject, but, meanwhile, even the most plausible of these have still the character of hypotheses, of probable, but not of verified, truth. And here the imaginative writer would like to come upon the scene, carry off unfinished scientific hypotheses, complete them by means of his own fantastic conceits, and teach: ‘Do you see? this man whom I show you has become what he is because his parents have had such and such attributes, because he has lived here or there, because when a child he received such and such impressions, because he has been thus nurtured, thus educated, has had such and such intercourse, etc.’ He is here doing what is not his office. Instead of an artistic creation he attempts to give us science, and he gives us false science, since he has no suspicion of the influences which really form the man, and the details of the ‘milieu’ which he throws into relief as being the causes of individual peculiarities are probably the least essential, and, in any case, only a minimum portion of what, in the formation of the personality, has played a really determining part. Think of it for a moment. The one question as to the origin of the criminal has produced in these last twenty years thousands of books and pamphlets; hundreds of medical men, jurists, economists, and philosophers of the first rank, have devoted to it the most profound and assiduous research, and we are still far from being able to indicate with certainty what share heredity, social influences (i.e., the ‘milieu,’ properly so called) and unknown biological peculiarities of the individual, have in the formation of the criminal type. And then there comes a wholly ignorant writer, who, quite by himself, with the sovereign infallibility claimed for himself by the author in his own province, decides a question which the combined ten years’ labour of a whole generation of professional investigators has brought but very little nearer to a solution! This is an audacity only explicable by this fact, that the writer has not the very smallest idea of the weight of the task which he undertakes with so light a heart.

If, in spite of this, Balzac and Flaubert seem to have produced excellent works with this theory of the ‘milieu,’ it is an optical illusion. They have devoted great attention and detailed descriptions to the environment of their characters (especially Flaubert in Madame Bovary), and the superficial reader thereby receives the impression that there exists a connection of causality between the environment and the being and doing of the personages, it being one of the most elementary and tenacious peculiarities of human thought to link causally one with another all phenomena which present themselves simultaneously or successively. This peculiarity is one of the most fruitful sources of defective conclusions, and it cannot be overcome except by the most attentive observation, often even only with the help of experiment. In the novels of Balzac and Flaubert, where the ‘milieu’ plays so great a part, the ‘milieu,’ in fact, explains nothing. For the personages who move in the same ‘milieu’ are, notwithstanding, wholly different. Everyone reacts on the influences of the ‘milieu’ in his own particular way. This distinctive character must be the datum, it cannot be the result, of the ‘milieu.’ The latter has, at most, the significance of an immediate proximate cause, but the most remote causes of the effect in question are found in the distinctive character of the personality, and on the latter, the ‘milieu’ that the poet depicts gives us no real enlightenment.

On the pretension of M. Zola and his partisans, that his novels are ‘slices from real life’ (tranches de vie), it is useless to linger. We have seen above that M. Zola is far from being capable of transcribing in his novels life as real and as a whole. Like all the imaginative writers before him, he also makes a choice; from a million thoughts of his personages, he reproduces one only; from ten thousand functions and actions, one only; from years of their life, some minutes, or merely seconds; his supposed ‘slice from life’ is a condensed and rearranged conspectus of life, artificially ordered according to a definite design, and full of gaps. Like all other imaginative writers, he also makes his choice according to his particular personal inclinations, and the only difference is that these inclinations, which we shall at once recognise, are very dissimilar from those of other writers.

M. Zola calls his novels ‘human documents’ and ‘experimental novels.’ I have already, thirteen years ago, expressed myself so fully on this double pretension, that I have now nothing more to add to what I said then. Does he think that his novels are serious documents from which science can borrow facts? What childish folly! Science can have nothing to do with fiction. She has no need of invented persons and actions, however ben trovati they may be; but she wants beings who have lived, and actions which have taken place. The novel treats of individual destinies, or at most those of families; science has need of information on the destinies of millions. Police reports, lists of imposts, tables of commerce, statistics of crimes and suicides, information on the prices of provisions, salaries, the mean duration of human life, the marriage rate, the birth rate, legitimate and illegitimate—these are ‘human documents.’ From them we learn how people live, whether they progress, whether they are happy or unhappy, pure or corrupt. The history of civilization, when it wants facts, puts M. Zola’s entertaining novels aside as of no account, and has recourse to tedious statistical tables. And a very much more singular whim still is his ‘experimental novel.’ This term would prove that M. Zola, if he employs it in good faith, does not even suspect the nature of scientific experiment. He thinks he has made an experiment when he invents neuropathic personages, places them in imaginary conditions, and makes them perform imaginary actions. A scientific experiment is an intelligent question addressed to Nature, and to which Nature must reply, and not the questioner himself. M. Zola also puts questions. But to whom? To Nature? No; to his own imagination. And his answers are to have the force of proof. The result of scientific experiment is constraining. Every man in possession of his senses can perceive it. The results at which M. Zola arrives in his pretended ‘experiment’ do not exist objectively; they exist only in his imagination; they are not facts, but assertions, in which every man can believe, or not, at his pleasure. The difference between experiments, and what M. Zola calls such, is so great that it is difficult for me to impute the abusive application of the term to ignorance only, or to incapacity for thought. I believe rather in a conscious premeditated snare. The appearance of M. Zola occurred at a time when mysticism was not yet the fashion in France, and when the favourite catch-words of the writing and gossiping gang were positivism and natural science. In order to recommend himself to the masses, a man had to represent himself as a positivist and as scientific. Grocers, hotel-keepers, small inventors, etc., have everywhere and always the habit of decorating their sign-boards or their produce with a name which is connected with an idea dominant with the public. At the present day a hotel-keeper or a tradesman recommends his house or his shop by such titles as ‘The Progress’ or ‘International Commerce;’ and a manufacturer extols his goods as ‘Electric’ braces or ‘Magnetic’ ink. We have seen that the Nietzscheans designate their tendency as ‘psycho-physiological.’ In the same way Zola long before them hung out the catch-word sign to his novels—‘Y^e scientificke experimente.’ But his novels had no more visible connection with natural science and experiment than the ink above mentioned with magnetism, and the braces with electricity.

M. Zola boasts of his method of work; all his books emanate from ‘observation.’ The truth is that he has never ‘observed;’ that he has never, following Goethe, ‘plunged into the full tide of human life,’ but has always remained shut up in a world of paper, and has drawn all his subjects out of his own brain, all his ‘realistic’ details from newspapers and books read uncritically. I need only recall a few cases in which his sources have been placed within his reach. All the information on the life, manners, habits, and language of the Parisian workmen in L’Assommoir are borrowed from a study by M. Denis Poulot, Le Sublime. The adventure of Une Page d’Amour is taken from the Mémoires de Casanova. Certain features in which the masochism or passivism of Count Muffat is declared in Nana, M. Zola found in a quotation from Taine relative to the Venice Preserved of Thomas Otway.[438] The scene of the confinement, in La Joie de Vivre, the description of the Mass, in La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, etc., are copied word for word from an obstetric manual and a Mass-book. One reads sometimes in the newspapers very pretentious statements of the ‘studies’ to which M. Zola gives himself up when he undertakes a new novel. These ‘studies’ consist, on his part, in making a visit to the Bourse when he wishes to write on speculation, in undertaking a trip on a locomotive when he desires to describe the working of a railway, in once casting a glance round some available bedroom when he means to depict the mode of life of the Parisian cocottes. Such a manner of ‘observation’ resembles that of a traveller who passes through a country in an express train. He may perceive some external details, he may notice some scenes and arrange them later in descriptions rich in colour, if wholly inaccurate; but he learns nothing of the real and essential peculiarities of the country, and the life and ways of its inhabitants. Like all degenerates, M. Zola, too, is a complete stranger to the world in which he lives. His eyes are never directed towards nature or humanity, but only to his own ‘Ego.’ He has no first-hand knowledge of anything, but acquires, by second or third hand, all that he knows of the world or life. Flaubert has created, in Bouvard et Pécuchet, the characters of two blockheads, who, with unsuspecting ingenuousness, attack all the arts and sciences, and imagine they have acquired them when they have dipped into, or, more correctly, have skimmed through, the first book on the subject which falls into their hands. Zola is an ‘observer’ of the Bouvard et Pécuchet species, and on reading Flaubert’s posthumous novel one is tempted to believe in places that when describing the ‘studies’ of his heroes he was thinking, at least amongst others, of Zola.

I think I have shown that M. Zola has not the priority in any one of the peculiarities which constitute his method. For all of them he has had models, and some few are as old as the world. The supposed realism, mania for description, impressionism, the emphasis on the ‘milieu,’ the human document, the slices of life—all these are so many æsthetic and psychological errors, but Zola has not even the doubtful merit of having conceived them. The only thing he has invented is the word ‘naturalism,’ substituted by him for ‘realism’ (the sole term in vogue till then), and the expression ‘experimental novel,’ which means absolutely nothing, but possesses a piquant little smattering of science which Zola’s public, at the period when this novelist made his appearance, felt as an agreeable seasoning.

The only real and true things contained in M. Zola’s novels are the little traits borrowed by him from the items of news in the daily papers and from technical works. But these also become false from the lack of criticism and taste with which he employs them. In fact, in order that the borrowed detail should remain faithful to reality, it must preserve its right relation to the whole phenomenon, and this is what never happens with M. Zola. To quote only two examples. In Pot-Bouille, among the inhabitants of a single house in the Rue de Choiseul, he brings to pass in the space of a few months all the infamous things he has learnt in the course of thirty years, by reports from his acquaintances, by cases in courts of law, and various facts from newspapers about apparently honourable bourgeois families; in La Terre, all the vices imputed to the French peasantry or rustic people in general, he crams into the character and conduct of a few inhabitants of a small village in Beauce; he may in these cases have supported every detail by cuttings from newspapers or jottings, but the whole is not the less monstrously and ridiculously untrue.

The self-styled innovator who, it is asserted, has invented hitherto unknown methods of construction and exposition in the province of the novel, is in reality a pupil of the French romanticists, from whom he has appropriated and employed all the tricks of the trade, and whose tradition he carries on, walking in the straight road of historical continuity, without interruption and without deviation. This is what is most clearly proved by the descriptions, which reflect not the world, but the view that the poet is capable of taking of the world. I will quote, for the sake of comparison, some characteristic passages from Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo, and from different novels by Zola, which will show the reader that both could be very easily confounded, the self-styled inventor of ‘naturalism’ and the extreme romanticist. ‘The broom ransacked the corners with an irritated growling.’ ‘The Kyrie Eleison ran like a shiver into this kind of stable.’ ‘The pulpit ... stood in front of a clock with weights, enclosed in a walnut wood case, and the hollow vibrations of which shook the whole church, like the beatings of an enormous heart, hidden somewhere beneath the flag-stones.’ ‘The rays [of the sun], more and more horizontal, withdraw slowly from the pavement of the square, and mount perpendicularly along the gabled front, making its thousand bas-reliefs spring out from their shadow, while the great central rose-window blazes like a Cyclop’s eye inflamed by the glow of the forge.’ ‘When the priest ... quitted the altar ... the sun remained sole master of the church. It had rested in its turn on the altar cloth, illuminated the door of the tabernacle with splendour, celebrating the fruitful promise of May. A warmth arose from the flag-stones. The whitewashed walls, the great Virgin, the great Christ himself, took on a shiver of vital sap [!], as if death had been vanquished by the eternal youth of the earth.’ ‘In a crevice of this spout two pretty gilliflowers in blossom, shaken and animated by the breath of the air, made sportive salutations to each other.’ ‘At one of the windows a great service-tree reared itself, throwing its branches across the broken panes, extending its shoots as if to look within.’ ‘Towards the east, the morning breeze chased some white flocks of down across the sky, torn from the foggy fleece of the hills.’ ‘The closed windows slept. Some few, here and there, brightly lit, opened their eyes, and seemed to make certain corners squint.’ ‘Already some whiffs of smoke were disgorged here and there over all that surface of roofs, as by the fissures of an immense sulphur-kiln.’ ‘A miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, ashamed, which seems always afraid of being caught in flagrante delicto, so quickly does it disappear after having given its blow.’ ‘The alembic went on dully, without a flame, or any gaiety in the extinct reflexions of its coppers, letting flow its alcoholic sweat, like a slow and obstinate spring, which should end by invading the rooms, spreading over the boulevards without inundating the immense hollow of Paris.’ ‘At the barrier, the herd-like trampling went on in the cold of the morning.... This crowd, from a distance, was a chalky blur, a neutral tone, in which a faded blue and dirty gray predominated. Occasionally, a workman stopped short ... while around him the others walked on, without a smile, without a word to a comrade, with cadaverous cheeks, faces turned towards Paris, which, one by one, devoured them by the gaping street of the Faubourg Poissonnière.’ ‘And then, as he dived farther into the street, legless cripples, blind and lame men multiplied around him; the one-armed and the one-eyed, and the lepers with their wounds, some coming from the houses, some from the adjacent small streets, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing, screaming, all limpingly, lamely, rushing towards the light, and wallowing in the mire like snails after rain.’ ‘The square ... presented ... the appearance of a sea, in which five or six streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged new waves of heads at every instant.... The great stairs, ascended and descended without intermission by a double stream ... flowed incessantly into the square, like a cascade into a lake.’ ‘The flickering brightness of the flames made them appear to move. There were serpents which had the appearance of laughing, gargoyles that one seemed to hear yelping, salamanders which breathed in the fire, dragons which sneezed in the smoke.’ ‘And the steam-engine, ten paces off, went on steadily breathing, steadily spitting from its scorched metal throat.’ ‘These were no longer the cold windows of the morning; now they appeared as if warmed and vibrating with internal tremor. There were people looking at them, women, standing still, squeezing against the plate-glass, quite a crowd brutalized by covetousness. And the stuffs seemed alive in this passion of the pavement: the laces shivered, fell back and hid the depths of the shop, with a disquieting air of mystery.’ It would be easy to extend these comparisons to some hundreds of pages. I have indulged in the little joke of not adding the author’s name to the passages quoted. By the nature of the object described the specially attentive reader will perhaps be able to guess in one or another of these quotations, whether they are from Victor Hugo or from Emile Zola; I have tried to facilitate the matter by borrowing the passages by Victor Hugo from the Notre Dame de Paris alone; but the greatest number he will certainly not know to whom to attribute until I tell him that examples three, five, seven, nine, ten, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, are from Victor Hugo, and all the others from Zola.

This is because the latter is an out-and-out romanticist in his way of envisaging the world and in his artistic method. He constantly practises in the most extensive and intensive fashion that atavistic anthropomorphism and symbolism, consequent on undeveloped or mystically confused thought, which is found among savages in a natural form, and among the whole category of degenerates in an atavistic form of mental activity. Like Victor Hugo, and like second-class romanticists, M. Zola sees every phenomenon monstrously magnified and weirdly distorted. It becomes for him, as for the savage, a fetish to which he attributes evil and hostile designs. Machines are horrible monsters dreaming of destruction; the streets of Paris open the jaws of Moloch to devour the human masses; a magasin de modes is an alarming, supernaturally powerful being, panting, fascinating, stifling, etc. Criticism has long since declared, though without comprehending the psychiatrical significance of this trait, that in every one of M. Zola’s novels some phenomenon dominates, like an obsession, forms the main feature of the work, and penetrates, like an appalling symbol, into the life and actions of all the characters. Thus, in L’Assommoir, the still; in Pot-Bouille, the ‘solemn staircase’; in Au Bonheur des Dames, the draper’s shop; in Nana, the heroine herself, who is no ordinary harlot, but ‘je ne sais quel monstre géant à la croupe gonflée de vices, une enorme Vénus populaire, aussi lourdement bête que grossièrement impudique, une espèce d’idole hindoue qui n’a seulement qu’à laisser tomber ses voiles pour faire tomber en arrêt les vieillards et les collégiens, et qui, par instants, se sent elle-même planer sur Paris et sur le monde.’[439] This symbolism we have encountered among all degenerates, among symbolists properly so called, and other mystics, as well as among diabolists, and principally in Ibsen. It never fails in the madness of doubt or negation.[440] The would-be ‘realist’ sees the sober reality as little as a superstitiously timid savage, or a lunatic afflicted by hallucinations. He puts into it his own mental dispositions. He disposes of phenomena arbitrarily, so that they appear to express an idea which is dominating him. He gives to inanimate objects a fantastic life, and metamorphoses them into so many goblins endowed with feeling, will, cunning and ideas; but of human beings he makes automata through whom a mysterious power declares itself, a fatality in the ancient sense, a force of Nature, a principle of destruction. His endless descriptions delineate nothing but his own mental condition. No image of reality is ever obtained by them, for the picture of the world is to him like a freshly varnished oil-painting to which one stands too close in a disadvantageous light, and in which the reflection of one’s own face may be discerned.

M. Zola calls his series of novels ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire,’ and he seeks in this way to awaken the double idea that the Rougon-Macquarts are a typical average family of the French middle class, and that their history represents the general social life of France in the time of Napoleon III. He expressly asserts, as the fundamental principle of art, that the novelist should only relate the everyday life observed by himself.[441] I allowed myself for thirteen years to be led astray by his swagger, and credulously accepted his novels as sociological contributions to the knowledge of French life. Now I know better. The family whose history Zola presents to us in twenty mighty volumes is entirely outside normal daily life, and has no necessary connection whatever with France and the Second Empire. It might just as well have lived in Patagonia, and at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. He who ridicules the ‘idealists’ as being narrators of ‘exceptional cases,’ of that which ‘never happened,’ has chosen for the subject of his magnum opus the most exceptional case he could possibly have found—a group of degenerates, lunatics, criminals, prostitutes, and ‘mattoids,’ whose morbid nature places them apart from the species; who do not belong to a regular society, but are expelled from it, and at strife with it; who conduct themselves as complete strangers to their epoch and country, and are, by their manner of existence, not members of any modern civilized people whatever, but belong to a horde of primitive wild men of bygone ages. M. Zola affirms that he describes life as he has observed it, and persons he has seen. 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, a characteristic circumstance due to the fact that not one of them possesses the least knowledge of the literature of mental therapeutics. There is in France a family of the name of Kérangal, who came originally from Saint-Brieuc, in Brittany, and whose history has for the last sixty years filled the annals of criminal justice and mental therapeutics. In two generations it has hitherto produced, to the knowledge of the authorities, seven murderers and murderesses, nine persons who have led an immoral life (one the keeper of a disorderly house, one a prostitute who was at the same time an incendiary, committed incest, and was condemned for a public outrage on modesty, etc.), and besides all these, a painter, a poet, an architect, an actress, several who were blind, and one musician.[442] The history of this Kérangal family has supplied M. Zola with material for all his novels. What would never have been afforded him in the life he really knows he found ready to his hand in the police and medical reports on the Kérangals, viz., an abundant assortment of the most execrable crimes, the most unheard-of adventures, and the maddest and most disordered careers, permeated by artistic inclinations which make the whole particularly piquant. If any common fabricator of newspaper novels had had the luck to discover the treasure he would probably have made a hash of the subject. M. Zola, with his great power and his sombre emotionalism, has known how to profit very effectively by it. Nevertheless, the subject he broaches is the roman du colportage, i.e., of a perishing romanticism which transports his dreams into no palaces like the flourishing romanticism, but into dens, prisons, and lunatic asylums, which are quite as far from the middle stratum of sane life as the latter, only in an opposite direction, tending not upwards, but downwards. But if M. Zola has infinitely more talent than the German romanticists, to whom we owe such works as Rinaldo Rinaldini, Die blutige Nonne um Mitternacht, Der Scharfrichter vom Schreckenstein, etc., he has, on the other hand, infinitely less honesty than they. For they, at least, admit that they relate the most marvellous and unique horrors of their kind, while Zola issues his chronicles of criminals and madmen, the fruits of his reading, as a normal account of French society, drawn from the observation of daily life.

By choosing his subject in the domain of the most extraordinary and most exceptional, by the childish or crazy symbolism and anthropomorphism displayed in his extremely unreal survey of the world, the ‘realist’ Zola proves himself to be the immediate descendant in a direct line of the romanticists. His works are distinguished from those of his literary ancestors by only two peculiarities, which M. Brunetière has well discerned, viz., by ‘pessimism and premeditated coarseness.’[443] These peculiarities of M. Zola furnish us finally with a characteristic sign also of so-called realism or naturalism, which we should have in vain attempted to discover by psychological, æsthetic, historical, and literary inquiries. Naturalism, which has nothing to do with Nature or reality, is, taken all in all, the premeditated worship of pessimism and obscenity.

Pessimism, as a philosophy, is the last remains of the superstition of primitive times, which looked upon man as the centre and end of the universe. It is one of the philosophic forms of ego-mania. All the objections of pessimist philosophers to Nature and life have but one meaning, if their premise be correct as to the sovereignty of man in the Cosmos. When the philosopher says, Nature is irrational, Nature is immoral, Nature is cruel, what is this, in other words, but: I do not understand Nature, and yet she is only there that I may understand her; Nature does not consider what is for my utility alone, and yet she has no other task than to be useful to me; Nature grants me but a short period of existence, often crossed by troubles, and yet it is her duty to make provision for the eternity of my life and my continual joys? When Oscar Wilde is indignant that Nature makes no difference between himself and the grazing ox, we smile at his childishness. But have Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Mainländer, Bahnsen, done anything more than inflate into thick books Oscar Wilde’s ingenuous self-conceit? and that with terrible seriousness. Philosophic pessimism has the geocentric conception of the world as its postulate. It stands and falls with the Ptolemaic doctrine. As soon as we recognise the Copernican point of view we lose the right, and also the desire to apply to Nature the measure of our logic, our morals, and our own advantage, and there ceases to be any meaning in calling it irrational, immoral, or cruel.

But what is also true is that pessimism is not a philosophy, but a temperament. ‘The systemic or organic sensations which arise from the simultaneous states of the several organs, digestive, respiratory, etc.,’ says Professor James Sully, ‘appear, as Professor Ferrier has lately pointed out, to be the basis of our emotional life. When the condition of these organs is a healthy one, and their functions vigorous, the psychical result is an undiscriminated mass of agreeable feeling. When the state of the organs is unhealthy, and their functions feeble or impeded, the psychical result is a similar mass of disagreeable feeling.’[444] Pessimism is always the form under which the patient becomes conscious of certain morbid conditions, and first and foremost of his nervous exhaustion. Tædium vitæ, or disgust of life, is an early premonition of insanity, and constantly accompanies neurasthenia and hysteria. It is evident that a period which suffers from general organic fatigue must necessarily be a pessimistic period. We recognise also the constant habit which consciousness has of inventing, post facto, apparently plausible motives, borrowed from its store of representations, and in conformity with the rules of its formal logic, to justify the emotional states of which it has acquired the knowledge. Thus, for the datum of the pessimistic disposition of mind, which is the consequence of organic fatigue, there arises the pessimist philosophy as an ulterior creation of interpretative consciousness. In Germany, in conformity with the speculative tendency and high intellectual culture of the German people, this state of mind has sought expression in philosophical systems. In France it has adopted an artistic form in accordance with the predominating æsthetic character of the national mind. M. Emile Zola and his naturalism are the French equivalent of the German Schopenhauer and his philosophical pessimism. That naturalism should see nothing in the world but brutality, infamy, ugliness, and corruption, corresponds with all that we know of the laws of thought. We know that the association of ideas is strongly influenced by emotion. A Zola, filled from the outset with organically unpleasant sensations, perceives in the world those phenomena alone which accord with his organically fundamental disposition, and does not notice or take into consideration those which differ from or contradict it. And from the associated ideas which every perception awakens in him, consciousness likewise only retains the disagreeable, which are in sympathy with the fundamentally sour disposition, and suppresses the others. Zola’s novels do not prove that things are badly managed in this world, but merely that Zola’s nervous system is out of order.

His predilection also for coarseness is a well-known morbid phenomenon. ‘They’ (the imbeciles), says Sollier, ‘love to talk of obscenities.... This is a peculiar tendency of mind observable specially among degenerates; it is as natural to them as a wholesome “tone” is to normal minds.’[445] Gilles de la Tourette has coined the word ‘coprolalia’ (mucktalk) for obsessional explosions of blasphemies and obscenities which characterize a malady described most exhaustively by M. Catrou, and called by him ‘disease of convulsive tics.’[446] M. Zola is affected by coprolalia to a very high degree. It is a necessity for him to employ foul expressions, and his consciousness is continually pursued by representations referring to ordure, abdominal functions, and everything connected with them. Andreas Verga described some years ago a form of onomatomania, or word-madness, which he called mania blasphematoria, or oath-madness. It is manifested when the patient experiences an irresistible desire to utter curses or blasphemies. Verga’s diagnosis applies completely to Zola. It can only be interpreted as mania blasphematoria, when in La Terre he gives the nickname of Jesus Christ to a creature afflicted with flatulency, and that without any artistic necessity or any aiming thereby at æsthetic effect either of cheerfulness or of local colour. Finally, he has a striking predilection for slang, for the professional language of thieves and bullies, etc., which he does not only employ when making personages of this kind speak, but makes use of himself, as an author, in descriptions or reflections. This inclination for slang is expressly noticed by Lombroso as an indication of degeneration in the born criminal.[447]

The confusion of thought which is shown in his theoretic writings, in his invention of the word ‘naturalism,’ in his conception of the ‘experimental novel,’ his instinctive inclination to depict demented persons, criminals, prostitutes, and semi-maniacs,[448] his anthropomorphism and his symbolism, his pessimism, his coprolalia, and his predilection for slang, sufficiently characterize M. Zola as a high-class degenerate. But he shows in addition some peculiarly characteristic stigmata, which completely establish the diagnosis.

That he is a sexual psychopath is betrayed on every page of his novels. He revels continually in representations from the region of the basest sensuality, and interweaves them in all the events of his novels without being able in any way to assign an artistic reason for this forced introduction. His consciousness is peopled with images of unnatural vice, bestiality, passivism, and other aberrations, and he is not satisfied with lingering libidinously over human acts of such a nature, but he even produces pairing animals (see La Terre, pp. 9, 10). The sight of a woman’s linen produces a peculiar excitation in him, and he can never speak without betraying, by the emotional colouring of his descriptions, that representations of this kind are voluptuously accentuated in him. This effect of female linen on degenerates affected by sexual psychopathy is well known in mental therapeutics, and has often been described by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and others.[449]

Connected with the sexual psychopathy of M. Zola is the part played in him by the olfactory sensations. The predominance of the sense of smell and its connection with the sexual life is very striking among many degenerates. Scents acquire a high importance in their works. Tolstoi (in War and Peace) represents to us Prince Pierre suddenly deciding on marrying the Princess Hélène when he smells her fragrance at a ball.[450] In the narrative entitled The Cossacks he never mentions the uncle Ieroschka without speaking of the smell he emitted.[451] We have seen in the previous chapters with what satisfaction the Diabolists and Decadents, Baudelaire, Huysmans, etc., lingered on odours, and especially on bad odours. M. Barrès makes his little princess say, in L’Ennemi des Lois: ‘I go every morning to the stables. Oh, that little stabley smell, so warm and pleasant! And she inhaled with a pretty[!] sensual expression....’[452] M. de Goncourt describes, in La Faustin, how the actress lets her Lord Annandale smell her bosom: ‘“Smell! What do you smell?” she asked Lord Annandale. “Why, carnations!” he replied, tasting it with his lips. “And what else?” “Your skin!”’[453] M. A. Binet declares that ‘it is the odours of the human body which are the causes responsible for a certain number of marriages contracted by clever men with female subordinates belonging to their households. For certain men, the most essential thing in a woman is not beauty, mind, or elevation of character; it is her smell. The pursuit of the beloved odour determines them to pursue some ugly, old, vicious, degraded woman. Carried to this point, the pleasure in smell becomes a malady of love’[454]—a malady, I will add, from which only the degenerate suffer. The examples that Binet quotes in the course of his work, and which can be there referred to, as I have no inclination to repeat them here, prove this abundantly; and Krafft-Ebing, while insisting on the ‘close connection between the sexual and the olfactory sense,’ nevertheless expressly declares: ‘At all events, the perceptions of smell play a very subordinate part within the physiological limits (i.e., within the limits of the healthy life).[455] Even after the abstraction of its sexual significance, the development of the sense of smell among degenerates, not only of the higher, but even of the lowest type, has struck many observers. Séguin speaks of ‘idiots who discriminated species of woods and stones merely by smell without having recourse to sight, and who, nevertheless, were not disagreeably affected by the smell and taste of human ordure, and whose sense of touch was obtuse and unequal.’[456]

M. Zola’s case belongs to this series. He shows at times an unhealthy predominance of the sensations of smell in his consciousness, and a perversion of the olfactory sense which make the worst odours, especially those of all human excretions, appear to him particularly agreeable and sensually stimulating. The inspector of the Montpellier Academy, Leopold Bernard, has taken the trouble, in an elaborate work—which, curiously, has remained almost unknown[457]—to bring together all the passages in Zola’s novels which touch on the question of odours, and to show that men and things do not present themselves to him as to normal individuals, viz., in the first instance as optical and acoustic phenomena, but as olfactory perceptions. He characterizes all his personages by their smell. In La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, Albine appears ‘like a great nosegay of strong scent.’ Serge, at the seminary, was ‘a lily whose sweet scent charmed his masters’(!!) Désirée ‘smells of health.’ Nana ‘dégage une odeur de vie, une toute-puissance de femme.’ In Pot-Bouille, Bachelard exhales ‘une odeur de débauche canaille’; Madame Campardon has ‘a good fresh perfume of autumn fruit.’ In Le Ventre de Paris, Françoise ‘smells of earth, hay, the open air, the open sky.’ In the same novel the ‘cheese-symphony’ occurs, as celebrated among Zola’s enthusiasts as the minute description of the variety of offensive smells of the dirty linen in L’Assommoir.

To the ‘comprehensives’ whom we have learnt to know, this insistence on the odours emitted by men and things is naturally one more merit and perfection. A poet who scents so well and receives through the nose such rich impressions of the world, is ‘a more keenly vibrating instrument of observation,’ and his art in representing things is more many-sided than that of poets who reproduce their impressions from fewer senses. Why should the sense of smell be neglected in poetry? Has it not the same rights as all the other senses? And thereupon they rapidly built an æsthetic theory which, as we have seen, induces Huysmans’ Des Esseintes to compose a symphony of perfumes, and prompts the Symbolists to accompany the recital of their compositions on the stage with odours, which they pretend are assorted to the contents of the verses. The ‘comprehensive’ drivellers do not for a moment suspect that they are simply fencing with the march of organic evolution in the animal kingdom. It does not depend on the good pleasure of a being to construct for himself his idea of the external world with the help of a group of such or such sense-perceptions. In this respect he is completely subservient to the conformation of his nervous system. The senses which predominate are those which his being utilizes in acquiring knowledge. The undeveloped or insufficiently developed senses help the brain little or not at all, to know and understand the world. To the vulture and condor the world is a picture; to the bat and the mole it is a sound and a tactile sensation; to the dog it is a collection of smells. Concerning the sense of smell in particular, it has its central seat in the so-called olfactory lobe of the brain, which diminishes in proportion as the frontal lobe is developed. The more we descend in the vertebrates the greater is the olfactory, the smaller the frontal, lobe. In man the olfactory lobe is quite subordinated, and the frontal lobe, the presumable seat of the highest mental functions, including language, greatly predominates. The consequence of these anatomical relations, which evade our influence, is that the sense of smell has scarcely any further share in man’s knowledge. He obtains his impressions of the external world no longer by the nose, but principally by the eye and ear. The olfactory perceptions only furnish a minimum contribution to the concepts which are formed out of ideational elements. It is only in the most limited degree that smells can awaken abstract concepts, i.e., a higher and complex mental activity, and stimulate their accompanying emotions; a ‘symphony of perfumes’ in the Des Esseintes sense can, therefore, no longer give the impression of moral beauty, this being an idea which is elaborated by the centres of conception. In order to inspire a man with logical sequences of ideas and judgments, with abstract concepts by scents alone; to make him conceive the phenomenon of the world, its changes and causes of motion, by a succession of perfumes, his frontal lobe must be depressed and the olfactory lobe of a dog substituted for it, and this, it must be admitted, is beyond the capacity of ‘comprehensive’ imbeciles, however fanatically they may preach their æsthetic folly. Smellers among degenerates represent an atavism going back, not only to the primeval period of man, but infinitely more remote still, to an epoch anterior to man. Their atavism retrogrades to animals amongst whom sexual activity was directly excited by odoriferous substances, as it is still at the present day in the muskdeer, or who, like the dog, obtained their knowledge of the world by the action of their noses.

The extraordinary success of Zola among his contemporaries is not explained by his high qualifications as an author, that is, by the extraordinary force and power of his romantic descriptions, and by the intensity and truth of his pessimistic emotion, which makes his representation of suffering and sorrow irresistibly impressive; but by his worst faults, his triviality and lasciviousness. This can be proved by the surest of methods, that of figures. Let us consult as to the diffusion of his different novels, the printed indications, for example, at the beginning of the last edition of L’Assommoir (bearing the date 1893). They have been put down as follows: Of Nana, 160,000; La Débâcle, 143,000; L’Assommoir, 127,000; La Terre, 100,000; Germinal, 88,000; La Bête humaine and Le Rêve, each 83,000; Pot-Bouille, 82,000; as a contrast, L’[Œuvre, 55,000; La Joie de Vivre, 44,000; La Curée, 36,000; La Conquête de Plassans, 25,000; of the Contes à Ninon not even 2,000 copies, etc. Thus, the novels which have had the greatest sale are those in which lust and bestial coarseness appear most flagrantly, and the demand diminishes with mathematical exactitude in proportion as the layer of obscenity, spread by Zola over his work as with a mason’s trowel, becomes more thin and less ill-smelling. Three novels appear as an exception to this rule: La Débâcle, Germinal, and Le Rêve. Their high position as regards the number of the editions is explained by the fact that the first treats of the war of 1870, the second of socialism, the third of mysticism. These three works appeal to the frame of mind of the period. They swim with the fashionable current. But all the rest have owed their success to the lowest instincts of the masses, to its brutish passion for the sight of crime and voluptuousness.

M. Zola was bound to make a school—first, because of his successes in the book trade, which drove into his wake the whole riff-raff of literary intriguers and plagiarists, and then because of the facility with which his most striking peculiarities can be imitated. His art is accessible to every bungler of the day who dishonours the literary vocation by his slovenly hand. An empty and mechanical enumeration of completely indifferent aspects under the pretext of description exacts no effort. Every porter of a brothel is capable of relating a low debauch with the coarsest expressions. The only thing which might offer some difficulty would be the invention of a plot, the construction of a frame of action. But M. Zola, whose strength does not lie in the gift of story-telling, boasts of this imperfection as a special merit, and proclaims as a rule of art that the poet must have nothing to relate. This rule suits excellently the noxious insects who crawl behind him. Their impotence becomes their most brilliant qualification. They know nothing, they can do nothing, and they are on that account particularly adapted to ‘die Moderne,’ as they say in Germany. Their so-called ‘novels’ depict neither human beings, nor characters, nor destinies; but, thou poor Philistine who canst not see it, it is precisely this which constitutes their value!

Moreover, justice exacts that among Zola’s imitators two groups should be distinguished. The one cultivates chiefly his pessimism, and accepts his obscenities into the bargain, though without enthusiasm, and often even with visible embarrassment and secret repugnance. It consists of hysteric and degenerate subjects who are bonâ fide, who, in consequence of their organic constitution, actually feel pessimistic, and have found in Zola the artistic formula which corresponds most truly with their sentiments. I place in this group some dramatic authors of the ‘Théâtre-Libre’ in Paris, directed by M. Antoine; and the Italian ‘Verists.’ The naturalistic theatre is the most untrue thing that has been seen hitherto, even more untrue than the operetta and the fairy-play. It cultivates the so-called ‘cruel terms,’ i.e., phrases in which the persons openly make a display of all the pitiable, infamous and cowardly ideas and feelings which surge through their consciousness, and systematically neglect this most primitive and palpable fact, that by far the most widespread and tenacious characteristic of man is hypocrisy and dissimulation. The forms of customs survive incalculably longer than morality, and man simulates the greater honesty, and hides his baseness under appearances so much the more seeming-pious, as his instincts are more crafty and mean. The Verists, among whom are many powerful literary natures, are one of the most surprising and distressing phenomena in contemporary literature. One understands pessimism in sorely-tried France; one comprehends it also in the insupportable narrowness of social life in the crepuscular North, with its cloudy gray skies and its scourge of alcoholism. Eroticism, too, is comprehensible among the overexcited and exhausted Parisian population, and in the Scandinavian North, as a kind of revolt against the zealous discipline and morose constraint of a bigotry without joy, and mortifying to the flesh. But how could pessimism spring up under the radiant sunshine and eternally blue sky of Italy, in the midst of a handsome and joyous people who sing even in speaking (invalids like Leopardi might naturally appear as exceptions everywhere)? and how did Italians arrive at insane lubricity, when in their country there still exists, living in the temples and in the fields, a souvenir of the artlessly robust sensuality of the pagan world, with its symbols of fecundity; where also natural and healthy sexuality has always preserved through centuries the right to express itself innocently in art and literature? If Verism is anything else but an example of the propagation of intellectual epidemics by imitation, the task devolves upon the scientific Italian critic to explain this paradox in the history of manners.

The other group of Zola’s imitators is not composed of superior degenerates, unhealthy persons who sincerely give themselves out for what they are, and express often with talent what they feel; but of people who morally and mentally stand on a level with supporters of evil, who, instead of the trade of night-birds, have chosen the less dangerous and hitherto more esteemed vocation of authors of novels and dramas, when the theory of naturalism had made it accessible to them. This brood has only taken immodesty from M. Zola, and conformably with the degree of culture has carried it into obscenity without circumlocution. To this group belong the professional Parisian pornographers, whose daily and weekly papers, stories, pictures, and theatrical representations in M. de Chirac’s style, continually give employment to the correctional tribunals; the Norwegian authors of novels on street-walkers; and, unhappily, also a portion of our ‘Young German’ realists. This group stands outside of literature. It forms a portion of that riff-raff of great towns who professionally cultivate immorality, and have chosen this trade with full responsibility, solely from horror of honest work and greed for lucre. It is not mental therapeutics, but criminal justice, which is competent to judge them.

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[CHAPTER II.]

THE ‘YOUNG-GERMAN’ PLAGIARISTS.

This chapter is not, properly, within the scope of this book. It must not be forgotten that I did not wish to write a history of literature, nor to indulge in current æsthetic criticism, but to demonstrate the unhealthy mental condition of the imitators of fashionable literary tendencies. It does not enter into my plan to deal with those degenerates or lunatics who evolve their works from their own morbid consciousness, and themselves discover the artistic formula for their own eccentricities—in other words, with those leaders who go their own way because they choose or because they must. Mere imitators I have neglected on principle throughout the whole of my inquiry, first because the genuine degenerates only form a feeble minority among them, while the great majority is a perfectly responsible rabble of swindlers and parasites, and next because even the few diseased persons who are found in their ranks do not belong to the class of ‘higher’ degenerates, but are poor weak minds who, taken separately, possess no importance whatever, and at most only deserve a fleeting mention in so far as they testify to the influence of their masters on ill-balanced minds.

If, then, in spite of this, I devote a special chapter to the so-called ‘Young-German’ ‘realists,’ while I have despatched in a few words the Italian and Scandinavian Zolaists, it is verily and by no means because the former are any more worthy than the latter. On the contrary, some of the Italian ‘Verists,’ the Dane, J. P. Jakobsen, the Norwegian, Arne Garborg, the Swede, Auguste Strindberg, devoid as they are of real originality, possess, nevertheless, more vigour and talent in their little finger than all ‘Young-Germany’ put together. I only dwell on the latter because the history of the propagation of a mental contagion in his own country is not without importance for the German reader, and also because the way in which this group has appeared and permeated shows up certain traits in which we can detect the neurosis of the age, and, lastly, because some few of their members are good examples of intensive hysteria, having, in addition to complete incapacity and a general feebleness of mind, that malicious and anti-social ego-mania, that moral obtuseness, that irresistible need of attracting attention to themselves, no matter by what means, that facetious vanity and self-approbation, which characterizes the complaint.

I will not deny that when I turn towards the ‘Young-German’ movement I can scarcely maintain the cool equanimity with which, according to scientific method, I have hitherto observed any given phenomena. As a German writer I feel deep shame and sorrow at the spectacle of the literature which has been so long and so brutally proclaimed, with flourish of trumpets, and with systematic disdain of all that did not bear its seal, as the unique and exclusively German literature of the present time, and even that of the future.[458]

Since genius was congregated at Weimar, German literature has ever taken the lead in civilized humanity. We were the inventors, foreigners were the imitators. We provisioned the world with poetic forms and ideas. Romanticism originated among us, and only became a literary and artistic fashion in France a good many years later, whence it passed on into England. Görres, Zacharias Werner, Novalis, and Oscar Von Redwitz, created lyric mysticism and neo-Catholicism among us, and these have only just reached France. Our poet-precursors of the revolution of 1848, Karl Beck, George Herwegh, Freiligrath, Ludwig Seeger, Friedrich von Sallet, R. E. Prutz, etc., had even then sung of the misery, the uprisings, and the hopes of the disinherited, before the Walt Whitmans, the William Morrises, and the Jules Jouys, were born, men whom to-day people in America, England, and France, would like to consider as the discoverers of the Fourth Estate for lyric poetry. Pessimism was embodied almost at the same time in Italy (in Leopardi) and among us in Nicholas Lenau, more than a generation before French naturalism built its art upon it. Goethe created symbolic poetry in the second part of Faust half a century before Ibsen and the French Symbolists parodied this tendency. Every healthy current and every pathological current in contemporary poetry and art can be traced back to a German source, every progress and every decadence in this sphere have their point of departure in Germany. The philosophical theory of every novel method of thought, as well as of every new error, which, during a hundred years, have gained a hold over civilized humanity, has been furnished by the Germans. Fichte gave us the theory of romanticism; Feuerbach (almost at the same time as Auguste Comte), that of the mechanical conception of the world; Schopenhauer, that of pessimism; the Hegelians, Max Stirner, and Karl Marx, that of the most rigid ego-mania and the most rigid collectivism, etc. And now we suffer the humiliation of seeing a heap of contemptible plagiarists hawking about the dullest and coarsest counterfeit of French imitations (which all the clever men in France have already abandoned and repudiated) as ‘the most modern’ production offered by Germany, as the flower of German literature, present and future. We even permit foreign critics to say: ‘Ancient fashions disdained in France even by village beauties, are to be seen exhibited in German shop-windows as the greatest novelties, and credulously accepted by the public.’ The realists naturally deny that they are mere repeaters and limping belated followers.[459] But he who knows a little more of art and poetry than is learnt in a Berlin tavern frequented by realists, or in a low newspaper informed by this sort of company; he who contemplates in its entire range the contemporary movement of thought without stopping on the frontiers of his own country, can have no doubt whatever that German realism, as a local phenomenon, may have for Germany itself a melancholy importance, but does not exist at all for universal literature, because all trace of personal or national originality is lacking. To the chorus in which the voices of humanity express its feelings and thoughts, not the faintest new note has been added by it.

Plagiarists so low down in the scale as the German realists are not in the least entitled to a detailed individual examination. To do this would be to make one’s self both ridiculous in the eyes of competent judges and of a piece with strolling players, to whom it is a matter of small importance whether they are praised or blamed, provided they are mentioned. Other motives also warn me to be prudent in the choice of examples I propose to lay before the reader. I am firmly convinced that in a few years all this movement will be forgotten even to the name itself. The lads who now pretend to be the future of German literature will discover little by little that the business to which they have devoted themselves is less agreeable and lucrative than they had imagined.[460] Those among them who yet possess a last remnant of health and strength will find the way to their natural vocation, and become restaurant-waiters or servants, night-watchmen or peddlers, and I should fear to injure their advancement in these honest professions if I nailed here the remembrance of their aberration of past days, which would otherwise be forgotten by all. The feebler and weaker among them, who could not manfully resolve to earn their bread by a decent occupation, will disappear probably as drunkards, vagabonds, beggars, perhaps even in a house of correction, and if, after the lapse of years, a serious reader happened to come across their names in this book, he would be right in exclaiming, ‘What sort of bad joke is this? What does the author want to make me believe? There never have been such men!’ Finally, an absolutely incapable pseudo-writer is individually deprived of all importance, and only acquires it as one of a number. He cannot therefore be treated critically, but merely statistically. For all these reasons I shall only draw from the whole number a few characters and works, to show with their help what German ‘realism’ really is.

The founder of the realist school is Karl Bleibtreu. He accomplished this work of foundation by publishing a brochure of which the principal feature was a cover of brilliant red furrowed by black lightning in zigzags, and which bore this title like the roll of a kettledrum, Revolution in Literature. In this literary ‘tout’ Bleibtreu, without the slightest attempt at substantiation, but with a brazen brow, depreciated a whole series of esteemed and successful authors, swore with great oaths that they were dead and buried, and announced the dawn of a new literary epoch, which already counted a certain number of geniuses, at the head of whom he himself stood.

As an author Bleibtreu, in spite of the many and various works he has already published, does not yet count for much. It would, however, be unjust to ignore his great ability as a book-maker. In this respect Revolution in der Literatur is a model production. With skilful address, he mingled authors of repute whom he hacked into sausage-meat with a few shallow scribblers in vogue, whom it was no doubt rather foolish to fight, with the grand airs of a gladiator, but whom no one would have defended against a smiling disdain. The presence of these unwarranted intruders into the group whom he undertook to extirpate from literature, may give to his raising of the standard a semblance of reason in the eyes of superficial readers. Not less cleverly chosen were the people whom he presented to readers as the new geniuses. With the exception of two or three decent mediocrities, for whom there is always a little modest corner in the literature of a great people, these were complete nullities from whom he himself never had to fear a dangerous competition. The greatest of his geniuses is, for example, Max Kretzer, a man who writes, in the German of a Cameroon-Negro, some professedly ‘Berlin’ novels, of which the best known, Die Verkommenen, is ‘Berlinish’ to such a degree that it simply dilutes the history of the widow Gras and the workman Gaudry, which took place in Paris in 1877. This event, celebrated as the first adventure with cocottes in which vitriol played a part, could only happen in Paris, and under the conditions of Parisian life. It is specifically Parisian. But Kretzer calmly removed the Paris trade-mark, replacing it with that of Berlin, and he thus created a ‘Berlin’ novel, vaunted by Bleibtreu as the ideal of a ‘genuine’ and ‘true’ exposition. He reclothes his newly-discovered ‘geniuses,’ who recall Falstaff’s recruits, Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble, and Bullcalf (King Henry IV., Part II.), in a uniform which he could not have chosen more effectively. He dressed them out in the costume of Schiller’s brigands in the Bohemian forests; he pronounced them to be a troop of rebels, fighters at barricades, Lützow huntsmen in the struggle for freedom against hypocrisy perukes, and pig-tails, and all obstructionists; and he hoped that youth and the friends of progress would take him for something serious, on seeing him march at the head of his poor, infirm cripples and knockknees, thus disguised.

His plan, although excellently contrived and conducted, was only partially successful. Scarcely had he in a certain measure organized and drilled his little troop, when it mutinied and drove him away. It did not choose another captain, for each private soldier wished himself to be chief, and the feeblest and most timid of the band alone recognised any other genius outside his own. Bleibtreu has not to this day got over the ingratitude of the people who had taken his mystification seriously, and had really looked upon themselves as the geniuses he had proclaimed them to be, without, as he thought, running any risks; and in his last publication he still utters his sorrow in these bitter verses (Aus einem lyrischen Tagebuch):

‘For what purpose this long struggle? ’Tis vain! And my hand is paralyzed. Long live falsehood, stupidity, folly! Adieu, thou German piggery! The earth of the tomb will extinguish the conflagration. I have been, as long as I could think, a veritable booby. I was no honest German, I was a wounded swan.’

Bleibtreu could not give any talent to the realists invented by him, but the latter borrowed from him a few of his turns of expression. To make an impression on the ignorant, they have associated with themselves as honorary members some respectable authors whom one is surprised to meet with dans ce galère. Thus the realists include among their numbers, for example, Théodore Fontane, a true poet, whose novels honourably hold their place among the best productions of the kind in any literature of Europe; H. Heiberg, of vigorous although unequal talent; unfortunately compelled, as it would seem, by external circumstances to hasty and excessive work, against which, perhaps, his artistic conscience vainly protests; and Detlev von Liliencron, who is by no means a genius, but a good lyric poet with a sense of style, and who may rank by the side of epigoni such as a Hans Hopfen, a Hermann Lingg, a Martin Greif. Considering the high level that German lyric poetry—the first in the world even in the judgment of foreign nations—has occupied uninterruptedly since Goethe, it is giving a German poet no small praise if one can say he is not inferior to the average of the last seventy years. Liliencron, however, does not surpass it, and I do not see how he can be fairly placed above Rudolf Baumbach, for example, whom the realists affect to despise, probably because he has disdained to join their gang. It is not incomprehensible that a Fontane or a Heiberg should consent to suffer the importunate promiscuousness of the realists. The Church, too, admits sometimes to serve in the Mass young rogues from the street, who have only to swing the censer. The sole thing that is demanded of them as realists honoris causâ, is to bear silently and smilingly this compromise of an honourable name. Liliencron alone thinks himself obliged to make some concessions to his new companions, in using here and there in his last poems, not his own language, but theirs.

Besides the smuggling in of some esteemed names among theirs, the realists have carefully practised and cultivated another business-trick of Bleibtreu’s—that of effective disguise. They assumed (in the collection of lyric poetry entitled Young Germany, Friedenau and Leipzig, 1886) the name of ‘Young Germany,’ which calls up a faint remembrance of the great and bold innovators of 1830, as well as ideas of blooming youth and spring, with a false nose of modernism tied on. But let us here at once remark that the realists, plagiarists to the backbone, do not even possess sufficient independence to find a name peculiarly their own, but have quietly plagiarized the denomination under which the Heine-Boerne-Gutzkow group has become renowned.

As the first specimen of ‘realist’ literature of ‘Young Germany,’ I will quote the novel by Heinz Tovote, Im Liebesrausch.[461] He relates the history of a landed proprietor and former officer, Herbert von Düren, who makes the acquaintance of a certain Lucy, formerly a waitress at an inn, and the mistress of quite a number of young men in succession. He makes her his mistress, and indulges in his passion until, being unable to live without her, he induces her to marry him. Herbert, who is only partially acquainted with Lucy’s past, presents her to his mother. The latter, who very soon perceives the relations existing between her son and this person, nevertheless gives her consent, and the marriage takes place. In the aristocratic and military society of Berlin, in which the couple move for a time, Lucy’s antecedents soon become known, and she is ‘cut’ by all the world. Herbert himself remains faithfully attached to her, until he discovers one day by accident, at the house of one of his friends—of course a ‘realist’ painter—a picture representing the nude figure of Lucy bathing in the sea! He very logically concludes that his wife had posed as a model to the painter, and he drives her away. As a matter of fact, however, the ‘realist’ had painted the nude figure from imagination, and involuntarily given it Lucy’s features, because of the respectful admiration he secretly cherishes for her. (Judge for a moment how that could be if she had been disreputable!) Then Herbert, smitten with remorse, seeks the vanished Lucy, whom he discovers, after heart-breaking efforts, in his own house, where she has lived for months unknown to him. The reconciliation of husband and wife takes place amid general pathos, and the young wife dies in giving birth to a child, and uttering affecting sentiments.

I will not waste time by pointing out the silliness of this story. The essential part in a novel, moreover, is not the plot, but the form, in both the narrower and the broader sense—language, style, composition—and these I will examine a little later.

The very first thing we have a right to expect of a man who assumes to write for the public, i.e., for the educated people of his own nation, is evidently that he should be master of his own language. Now, Heinz Tovote has no idea whatever of German. He commits the grossest errors every moment—solecisms, mistakes of syntax, ignorance of the value of words—which make one’s hair stand on end. Some few of these abominable faults of language are tolerably widespread, others belong to the jargon of the roughest class of the people; but there are some that Tovote could never have heard. They are the result of his personal ignorance of German grammar.

Next as to his style. When Tovote writes a description, in order to determine and strengthen the substantive, he chooses, on principle, the adjective naturally contained in that substantive. Here are some examples of this intolerable tautology: ‘An icy January storm.’ ‘In the Friedrichstrasse light elegant equipages were crowded.’ ‘Incarnation of the most lovable grace.’ ‘A slowly creeping fever’ ‘A lazy somnolence.’ ‘They glowed fiery in the last light.’ ‘She suffered cruel torments,’ etc. I doubt if any author, having but little respect for himself, his vocation, his maternal tongue or his readers, would put such words together. There is no necessity, in hunting for the ‘rare and precious epithet,’ to go so far as the French stylists, but such a sweeping together of the stalest, most useless, and most inexpressive adjectives is not literature; it is properly, to echo the French critic, the work of scavengers. Another characteristic of this style is its silliness. The author relates that Herbert von Düren was ‘keenly interested, from its first appearance,’ in Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado. ‘Now that it had cast off its English garb, it seemed to him still more indigenous.’ Thus he seriously declares that an English operetta has seemed to a German more indigenous in the German language than in English. ‘Suddenly he was seized with a senseless fury against this man who saluted him so politely, whereby he, who was habitually politeness itself to everyone, did not return the salute, and turned away.’ Not to respond to a salute by way of expressing his ‘senseless fury’ is truly not very ferocious on the part of an old officer. ‘The horses were hanging their heads sadly, and sleeping.’ That it is possible to sleep sadly or gaily is a discovery by Tovote. ‘Like walls, the colossi of houses stood crowding against each other.’ Like walls? One would think that houses really have walls. It is exactly as if Tovote had said: ‘Like men, the people stood crowding against each other.’

When Tovote strives to write in a sublime and beautiful style, the result we get is as follows: ‘Yet there lay in the slender perfectly levelled lines a slumbering strength.’ (What can the lines be which are ‘slender,’ i.e., not thick and ‘perfectly levelled’?) ‘She was already smiling through her tears, and her face resembled a summer landscape which, while the rain still falls on the corn, is bathed again in the bright rays of the sun emerging from clouds.’ Thus, what we are first to think of when contemplating a face is a summer landscape. ‘He felt how her lips clung [sich klammerten!] to his.’ ‘It must be granted that, considering his youth, he has the incontestable genius of a lively conception,’ etc.

Tovote seeks to plagiarize the diffuse descriptions of the French naturalists, and unfolds pictures the novelty, clearness, and vigour of which the following quotations will enable us to admire. (End of a theatrical representation:) ‘In the stalls the seats clapped back with a muffled sound.... The audience rose, doors were opened, curtains were drawn back, and the theatre emptied slowly, while a few isolated spectators alone remained in their places.’ ‘Unceasingly, the whole night the snowflakes fell. In thick bales [!] it lay on the bare branches of the trees, which threatened to break down in winterly weakness. The pines and low bushes were enveloped in a thick mantle of snow. To the straw, wound round the standard roses, the snow clung, and formed strange figures; it lay a foot high on the walls, and delicately veiled the points of the iron railings. All tracks were effaced. The wind, which drove the flakes before it, threw them into all the hollows, so that all the corners and all the unevennesses disappeared.’ ‘They stood high above the sea, which spread around them like an infinite plain.’ ‘The sun had set.... The clouds, heavily encamped on the horizon, still glowed with flaming crimson purple; then they passed into violet, which changed into a colourless gray [so there is a coloured gray also?] until night descended, and all colours gradually died out.’ (Compare this pitiable attempt to counterfeit ‘impressionism’ with the French models quoted in the preceding chapter.) ‘The night had completely closed in—a dark, profoundly black night.’ (Consider the juxtaposition of these two adjectives.) ‘The moon alone hung mournfully above the waters [the moon in a night both ‘dark’ and ‘profoundly black!’], and the lighthouse threw its flood of light into the distance. Deep at their feet the sea raved with muffled roar in the spite of a thousand years[!], and licked the creviced rocks.’ A ‘raving spite’ which ‘licks’ does not appear to be a very dangerous spite. ‘She retained the deep wound over her eye as a little scar all her life long.’ If she had a ‘little scar,’ she did not therefore keep a deep wound ‘all her life long.’ ‘Above them, in the blue sky, a vulture wheeled in circles with outspread wings, lost like a black point in this sea of light.’ In a vulture which is only seen as ‘a black point,’ it is not possible to distinguish the ‘outspread wings.’ Here is the description of a face: ‘Two full fresh lips, chaste[!], bright red, a graceful little nose, imperceptibly tilted, but parting in a narrow straight line from the forehead.’ We will leave the reader the trouble of imagining for himself this ‘little nose imperceptibly tilted’ in ‘the narrow straight line.’ ‘The engine of the express train panted across the level plain which stretched all round like a burning desert. Right and left, field after field of corn, fruitful orchards and verdant meadows.’ Fields, orchards, meadows, and yet a ‘burning[?] desert’? ‘The half-closed eyes, with their white membranes, look at him so steadily.’ This does not mean, as one might suppose, the eyes of a bird, but those of a human being, in which our novelist professes to have discovered these incomprehensible ‘white membranes.’

We have seen what impressionism and the descriptive tic of naturalism have become in the hands of Tovote. I will now show how this ‘realist’ can observe and reproduce reality in the smallest as in the greatest things. Herbert, the first evening of his acquaintance with Lucy, takes her to a restaurant and orders, among other things, a bottle of burgundy. ‘The waiter placed the pot-bellied bottle on the table, in a flourishing curve.’ Burgundy in ‘pot-bellied’ bottles! They eat soup, served in ‘silver bowls’(!), green peas and a capon, the excellence of which forms the subject of their incredible conversation at table, and when this repast is disposed of, and Lucy has lighted a cigarette, she asks for oysters, which are brought and eaten by her ‘served according to the rules of art.’ I should certainly not reproach anyone for not knowing a bottle of burgundy by sight, nor at which stage of a repast one eats oysters. I myself did not grow up amongst oysters and burgundy, but it would be more honest not to speak of these good things till one knows something of them. Let us give a passing notice to the unconscious respect, mingled with envy, for the difficult and distinguished occupation of eating oysters, deliciously revealed in this admiring declaration, that Lucy has oysters ‘served’(?) ‘according to the rules of art,’ and the backwoodsman’s ignorance of the most elementary good breeding which Tovote betrays in making a man of the world talk incessantly at table about the food. To continue. Lucy’s lover has travelled, viâ Brussels, ‘from Havre to Egypt.’ In that case he must have chartered a steamer on his own account, as there is no regular line of steamers between Havre and Egypt. For some months Herbert has had on his writing-table some unfinished manuscripts. ‘He rummaged through this heap of yellow manuscripts.’ Under shelter the worst ligneous fibre paper itself would certainly not turn yellow in the space of a few months. The bed-chamber, arranged with all possible care by Herbert for his Lucy, has ‘blue silk curtains,’ and ‘pale pink satin’ seats. Such a wild combination of colours would be avoided by the better second-hand dealers even in their shop windows.

I grant that all these blunders, although amusing, are insignificant. They must not be passed over, however, when committed by a ‘realist,’ who boasts of ‘observation’ and ‘truth.’ Graver still are the impossible actions and characters of the men. In a moment of grief Lucy lets ‘fall her arms on the table-napkin in her lap, and looks vacantly before her, biting her under lip.’ Has anyone ever seen or done such a thing in this state of mind? Wild ecstasy of love Lucy expresses thus: ‘“Kiss me,” she implored, and her whole being seemed to wish to lose itself in him—“kiss me!”’ Herbert had made her acquaintance in Heligoland, where she lived with an Englishman named Ward, and had taken her to be Ward’s betrothed. A German officer of good family, being considerably over thirty, was actually able to look upon a woman living with a rich young foreigner alone at a watering-place as his betrothed! The latter, an absolutely neglected child of the working class, learnt English with Ward in less than a year so perfectly that she was everywhere mistaken for an Englishwoman, and played the piano so well that she could execute pieces from operettas, etc.

I do not consider it a crime when Tovote, in using French words, confounds tourniquet with moulinet, and speaks of cabinets séparés instead of cabinets particuliers. A German does not require to know French. It would be a good thing indeed if he knew German. Good taste, however, would prevent his making a display of scraps of a language of which he knows absolutely nothing.

The obscenities with which the novel swarms are incomparably weaker than in analogous passages by Zola, but they are peculiarly repulsive because, in spite of the absolute incapacity of Tovote to rise above the coarseness of commercial travellers relating their love adventures in hotels, they, nevertheless, betray his determination to be violently sensational and subtly sensual.

If I have lingered thus long over this bungling piece of work, so far below the level of literature, it is because of its being thoroughly typical of German realism. The language transgresses the simplest rules of grammar. Not one expression is accurately chosen, and really characterizes the object or the concept that is brought before the reader. That an author should speak not only accurately, but expressively, that he should be able to reproduce impressions and ideas in an original and powerful way, that he must have a feeling for the value and delicate sense of words; of this Tovote has not the slightest idea. His descriptions are shabby enough to raise a blush on the cheek of the police reporter of a low class paper. Nothing is seen, nothing is felt; the whole is but a droning echo of reading of the worst sort. ‘Modernism’ consists finally in this, that a pitiable commonplace is partly located in Berlin, with here and there vague talk of socialism and realism. German criticism in the seventies demanded, very justly, that the German novel should rest on a solid basis, that it should be worked out in some well-known period, amid real surroundings, in the German capital of our day. This demand has produced the ‘Berlinese’ novel of the plagiarists. The especial and characteristic Berlinism of this novel consists in this, that the author whenever he has to mention a street, displays the boundless astonishment of a Hottentot at the ‘Panoptikum’ (the Grévin Museum in Berlin), because he finds the street full of people, carriages, and shops, and seeks opportunities to quote the names of the streets in this capital. This method is within the reach of every hotel porter. In order to introduce such Berlinism into a bad novel, the author need only possess a plan of the town, and perhaps a guide-book. The peculiarities of life in the capital are represented by passages such as this: ‘On both sides of the pavement [he meant to say, on the pavement on both sides of the street] a dense crowd of people surged, and in the middle of the avenue, under the trees, just bursting into leaf, a scattered multitude, resembling the irregular [?] waves of a flood, pushed on to get out of the town.’ Or: ‘On all the pavements people walking and pushing against each other in confusion and haste, which increased to a run, in order to avoid falling under the wheels, while escaping to a place of refuge from the deafening clatter of cabs, tramways, and large heavy omnibuses, with their roofs fully occupied,’ etc. Thus, the only thing Tovote sees in Berlin is what a peasant from Buxtehude would remark, who has left his village for the first time, and cannot recover from his astonishment in finding more people and carriages than in his own village street. This is just the view which a resident in a town no longer notices, and which need not be specially described, because it is implied in the concept of a ‘town,’ and, above all, of a ‘large town,’ and is, notably, in no way characteristic of Berlin, since Breslau, Hamburg, Cologne, etc., present exactly the same sight.

Socialism enters into the ‘modern’ novel like Pilate into the Creed. Tovote relates, e.g., how Herbert seeks for Lucy, who has disappeared; he arrives at last at the workman’s quarter in Berlin, which supplies the author with this fine picture: ‘Everywhere the blue and gray-red blouse of the workman, which is never seen Unter den Linden, who stands, day after day, near the panting machine, at the work-table, where he carries on, during long years, as if asleep, the same manual labours, until the callosities on his hands become as hard as iron.’ Either Herbert, despairingly seeking his mistress, or the narrator, wishing to awaken our interest in these events, has thought of the callosities of the workmen!

The automata who in the ‘realist’ novel execute mock-movements, and between whom the dullest and most miserable back-stair sentimentality is played off, are always the same: a gentleman, an ex-officer whenever possible, who, we are assured, is engaged upon ‘works on socialism’ (of what kind we never learn, it is simply asserted that they are ‘very important’); a waitress at an inn, as the embodiment of the ewig-Weibliche; and a realist painter who plans or executes pictures destined to regenerate humanity, and to establish the millennium on earth. Here is the recipe for the ‘modernism’ of the ‘Young-German’ realism: quotation of the names of the Berlin streets, rapture at the sight of some cabs and omnibuses, a little Berlinese dialect in the mouth of the characters, coarse and stupid eroticism, unctuous allusions to socialism and phrases on painting, such as a goose-fattener grown rich might make if she wished to pass herself off as a lady. Of the three persons who are always the supporters of this ‘modernity’ the waitress is the only really original one. The merit of this treasure belongs to Bleibtreu, who first presented her to the admiration and imitation of his little band in his collection of novels entitled Schlechte Gesellschaft. She is a conglomeration of all the fabulous beings that have hitherto been imagined in poetry: a winged chimæra, a sphinx with lion’s claws, and a siren with a fish’s tail, all at one and the same time. She contains in herself every charm and every gift, love and wisdom, virtue and love-glowing paganism. It is by the waitress at the inn that the talent for observation and creative power of the German ‘realist’ can be most accurately gauged.

If Tovote is a representative type—by no means diseased, but merely incapable beyond conception—of intruders into literature with which they will at most be connected as peddling hawkers of trashy novels, we meet in Hermann Bahr with a clearly pathological individuality. Bahr is an advanced hysteric who wants at all hazards to get himself talked about, and has had the unfortunate idea of achieving this result by books. Devoid of talent to an almost impossible degree, he seeks to captivate attention by the maddest eccentricities. Thus, he calls the book most characteristic of his method among those he has hitherto published, Die gute Schule; Seelenstände.[462] Seelenstände literally means ‘states of soul.’ He had read and not understood the term états d’âme in the new French authors, état having been used in the political sense which it has in tiers-états.

In the story related in the Seelenstände, a part at least of the recipe previously mentioned is utilized. The hero is an Austrian painter living in Paris. One day, weary of living alone, he picks up a girl in the street, who, contrary to the orthodox procedure, is not a waitress, but a dressmaker, possessing, nevertheless, all the mythical excellence of the ‘Young German’ barmaid; he lives with her for a time, then wearies of her, and torments her to such a degree that she leaves him one fine day and goes off with a rich negro, whom she induces to buy pictures at a high price from her abandoned lover.

This fine story is the frame in which Bahr reveals the ‘state’ of his hero’s ‘soul.’ This author is a plagiarist of an inveterate type, such as is only met with in serious cases of hysteria. Not a single author of any individuality who has passed before his eyes has been able to escape his rage for servile imitation. The principle of the ‘Good School’—the misery of a painter who struggles with the conception of a work of art intended to express his whole soul, and who recognises with despair his impotence to realize it—is subtilized from Zola’s L’[Œuvre, All the details, as we shall see, he has taken from Nietzsche, Stirner, Ibsen, the Diabolics, Decadents, and French Impressionists. But all he plagiarizes becomes, under his pen, a parody of inimitably exquisite absurdity.

The painter’s distress of mind is ‘the lyrism of red. His whole soul was steeped in red, all his feelings, all his aims, all his desires, in sonnets of lament and hope; and in general a complete biography of red, what took place in him and usually whatever could happen to him.... But this lofty canticle of the red fulfilled itself in the real, simple tones of daily life.... It was a large well-boiled lobster, in which he embodied the masterful spirit and the violence of the red, his languor in a salmon on one side, and his mischievousness and gaiety of disposition in many radishes in cheerful variations. But the great and supreme confession of his whole soul hung on a purple tablecloth with heavy folds, on which the sun shone, a narrow shaft, but with all the more fiery glow.’ If the struggle with the ‘biography of the red’ was a torture to him, even worse things were about to happen. One day ‘the curse struck him behind, coming from an excellent salmon, juicy and sweet, which one would never have suspected of perfidy as it lay cradling itself in a rosy shimmer in its rich herb sauce.’ (A cooked salmon cradling itself! This must have produced a ghostly effect. And this uncanny salmon struck him ‘behind,’ although it was on the table before him!) But it was precisely this sauce, this sauce of green herbs, the pride of the cook—yes, it was this that did it. It was this that conquered him. He had never seen anything like it—never before, as far back as he could remember, a softer and sweeter green, at once so languishing and so joyous that one could have sung and shouted for joy. The whole rococo was in it, only in a much more gracious, yearning note. It had to go into his picture. But he could never hit off that green sauce, and this was the tragedy of his life. He ‘kept the truth locked up cowardly and idle, he who alone could grant it; he did not give it to them to assuage thirst, this healing and redeeming work of his breast,’ namely, the green sauce! ‘He would have liked to make a gigantic gimlet revolve in his flesh with a burning screw ... deep, very deep, till there was a great hole ... an immense triumphal gate of his art, through which the internals could spit it out.’

What makes this struggle with the green sauce, for the purpose of overcoming it in a ‘healing and redeeming’ work of art, so irresistibly comic is that the whole passage is written in an entirely serious view, and without the least idea of joking!

Bahr describes his own style in these words: ‘A wild, feverish, tropical style, which calls nothing by its usual name in the ordinary idiom, but which racks itself in the hope of finding unheard-of, obscure, and strange neologisms, in a forced and singular combination.’

The painter’s mistress must have been a superb creature, to judge by the description. When a stranger spoke to her in the street ‘she slightly quickened her steps, and with eyelids haughtily raised, and her little head thrown back sideways, she began to hum softly, sharply snapping her fingers with impatience, in such a way as to rouse his desire to persevere in his useless suit.’ This behaviour induces Bahr to call her a ‘majestically inaccessible young lady.’ But she is far more remarkable at her morning toilet at home than she is in the street. ‘Often, when under the greetings of the morning, which enamelled with gold [!] her hyacinthine flesh, she plaited her hair while standing before her mirror, surrounded by his desires, and stretched, moistened, and slowly curved, with twitching fingers which glittered like swift serpents, quite gently and persistently, her tangled [!] eyelashes, her dishevelled eyebrows, while her lips grew round with silent whistling, between which the rapid, restless tongue hissed, shot out, and clacked, and then, with closed eyelids, leant forward as in submissive adoration, the powder-puff passed slowly, cautiously, fervently, over the bent cheeks, while the little nose, fearful of the dust, turned aside,’ the painter, as may be imagined, became so amorous that ‘he licked the soap from her fingers to refresh his fevered gums.’ ‘Suddenly standing upright on one leg, with a swing of the other she kicked her shoe into the air, to catch it again by a nimble, firm movement. In this graceful attitude she remained.’ ‘Sometimes she bent down languorously towards herself, very gently, very slowly, remaining voluptuously in the curve of her breasts, deep into her knees, while her lips moved; sometimes, while her hips turned in a circle, her neck glided lasciviously into swan-like [!] curves towards her obsequious image.’ This sight filled her lover with such enthusiasm that it seemed to him ‘as if from a thousand springs blasted [!] torrents blazed through his veins.’

It is not necessary, I think, to multiply specimens of this style, which simulates insanity, and which is not German, either in formation, use of terms, or construction. I wish merely to show to what degree Bahr is a plagiarist. Here we see a copy of Nietzsche: ‘Always the same. He ought to do this, and not to do that; the same litany from his first infancy—always and only; he should and he shouldn’t. What he would was the only thing never demanded of him; and thus, in this frightful servitude, he felt himself possessed by an immense desire to be for once himself at last, and an immense anguish at being always someone else eternally.’ ‘To say that everyone only came out of himself to penetrate into another ... to dominate him! That a man could never, should never, he himself, not have one hour of bliss, but everlastingly renounce, transform, annihilate himself for another’s gratification.... Alone—alone; why would they not leave one alone?’ ... ‘To make a desert for himself—a still silent desert.’ ‘Others had not this sentiment of the “I” to such an exuberant and immeasurable extent.’ ‘The joyous hatred of men and the world.’ Here we have Ibsen: ‘He wished to go into the country—he himself, precisely as proposed by the other, certainly. But he wished to go into the country in virtue of his free resolve, because it was his will, and not the proposal of another.... And rather than bend to another’s will he renounced his own. Moreover, since another wished it, the pleasure of wishing it himself was lost to him.’ Here the De Goncourts: ‘There was around her out of the sorrowful violet and bright gold a misty shimmer.’ ‘His feeling was always something inconceivable, and also on a yellow ground—dirty yellow—gasping, ecstatic, faint, pining away with a death-rattle, and with violet tones, but very soft.’ ‘It was chaste voluptuousness. He had it there in his brain, pearly gray, melting into faint violet.’ Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: ‘He was bound to establish the new love.... The question was of doing it in the style of electricity and steam. An Edison-love ... yes, a machine-like love.’ A mixture of Baudelaire and Huysmans: ‘In the undulating silver dust of the light a lovely quivering sheen, woven of blue-black and pale green vapour, bathed her rosy flesh, exhaled by its soft down.... He wished utterly to destroy and flay her. Nothing but blood—blood. He only felt at ease when it streaked [!] down.... He established a theory according to which this was the way towards the new love, viz., by torture.’ ‘There lay the meadows red as fire spread out in lovely slopes ... and hopes, the blue vampires, grew listless. But upright in its pride and with imperial mourning walked a huge gray sunflower, silent and pale, on the arm of an awkward fat stinking thistle, which trailed noisily afar with large rough gold.’ ‘This now became for him true art, the art which alone could redeem and make happy—the art of odours.... From pale and moaning fumes of the white rose, in which the suicide triumphs, he awakened the eternal doctrine of Buddha,’ etc. The rehardness, ainder is better expressed in the original, in Huysmans’ novel, A Rebours. As to the passages full of a heat which clamours for a strait-jacket, and simulates satyriasis and Sadism; as to the quaint confusions and orthographical errors in French names which the author, who poses as a Parisian, commits at every step; and as to his frequent manifestation of megalomania, it is enough to refer to them. These things are not essential, but they contribute to make Bahr’s book the only product of hysterical mental derangement hitherto existing in German literature.

The greater number of Young-German plagiarists have not yet risen to the monumental productions of a Tovote or a Bahr, and have stopped at short pieces of lyric poetry.

Special mention ought to be accorded to Gerhart Hauptmann, who has, unfortunately, permitted himself to be enrolled among the ‘Young Germans.’ It is difficult to confuse him with them, for if he makes concessions to their æsthetics of the commonplace with a carelessness which of itself betrays a disquieting obtuseness of artistic taste and conscience, he nevertheless may be distinguished from them by some great qualities. He possesses a luscious, vivid vocabulary, full of expression and feeling, even though it is a dialect. He knows how to see reality, and he has the power to render it in poetry.

It will not occur to anyone to pronounce any final judgment on this author of thirty years of age. As yet only his début can be mentioned, and hopes be formed for his future development. What he has hitherto produced has been surprisingly unequal. Side by side with originality his works present a barren imitation; with high artistic insight, a schoolboy’s awkwardness and ingenuousness; with flights of genius, the most afflicting commonplaces. One scarcely knows if he is a novelist or a dramatic writer. In two of his pieces, in fact, Vor Sonnenaufgang and College Crampton, there is such a complete absence of progressive action, a condition of things so purely stationary and devoid of development, that even the instinct of a natural talent for the stage could never have so forgotten itself. Perhaps Hauptmann is only temporarily under the spell of an æsthetic theory, from which he will free himself later. He desires, indeed, to describe the ‘milieu’ faithfully and closely, and loses sight in so doing of the principal thing in poetry—of the characters and their fate. His dramas frequently fall asunder for this reason into a series of episodes, in themselves well observed and characteristic, but only distantly, or it may be not at all, connected with the plot, as, e.g., in the play Vor Sonnenaufgang, the appearance of Hopslabär, the servant Mary who is leaving, the coachman’s wife stealing the milk, etc. All are pictures of manners, but at the same time cease to form united compositions.

If Hauptmann has borrowed from the French realists the excessive and useless accentuation of the ‘milieu,’ he has taken from Ibsen the charlatanism of ‘modernity’ and the affectation of the ‘thesis.’ On the model of the Norwegian poet he suddenly inserts into some commonplace history belonging exclusively to no particular period or locality, some intrusive phrase containing an obscure allusion to ‘the great times in which we live,’ or the ‘mighty events which are coming to pass,’ etc. For example, Einsame Menschen (Lonely Folk) is the needlessly pretentious title of a drama in which we are shown a really Ibsenian idiot, who fancies himself misunderstood by his excellent wife, and becomes enamoured of a Russian girl-student, who is their visitor. As is generally the case with such feeble wights, he desires to possess the Russian, while not losing his wife; he has neither the courage to wound his wife by openly separating from her, nor the strength to conquer his guilty passion for the stranger. In his torment he tries to deceive himself, to persuade himself that his feelings towards the Russian are only those of friendship and of gratitude, that she has understood him and intellectually stimulated him. The Russian, however, is more clear-sighted, and is about to leave the house. The end of the story is that the idiot drowns himself. The conception of a weak man vacillating between two women, of whom one is the embodiment of duty, and the other of presumptive happiness, is as old as the theatre itself. It has nothing to do with the times. It can only be made to pass as ‘modernism’ by prevarication. And in this feeble drama Hauptmann makes his characters hold learned conversations full of allusions, such as the following:

Fräulein Anna (the Russian). These are, indeed, great times in which we are living. I seem to feel as if something close and oppressive were gradually lifting off from us. Do you not agree with me, Doctor?

Johannes (the idiot). In what way?

Fräulein Anna. On one side, a stifling dread was mastering us; on the other, a gloomy fanaticism. The excessive strain seems now to be straightened. Something like a breath of fresh air, let us say from the twentieth century, has come in upon us.[463]

The same swagger of modernity made the author decide on this title, Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise), for his first work, and to qualify it as a ‘social drama.’ It is no more ‘social’ than any other drama, and has no connection whatever with ‘sunrise’ in a metaphorical sense. It reveals the state of affairs in a Silesian village, where the discovery of coal-mines on their land has made the peasants millionaires. The contrast between the coarseness of the rustics and their opulence furnishes good scenes for a farce; but what has it to do with the age and its problems? A fragment of thesis is dovetailed into the farce. The peasant millionaire is a drunkard. The daughter may have inherited her father’s vice. And so a man who has become attached and engaged to her leaves her with sorrowful determination on learning that the old man drinks. This thesis is an absurdity. A drunkard can transmit his vice to his children, but is not bound to do so, and, in the instance in point, the grown-up daughter does not betray the slightest inclination to drink. His thesis is worked out on the model of Ibsenian maunderings, and is as little taken from life as the lover who subordinates his love to a very uncertain theory. In this man we recognise our old friend, the type of the recipe for realist novels, who makes vague allusions to socialistic studies which he is reputed to pursue,[464] and proves himself, by these shadowy indications, to be a ‘modern’ man.

Hauptmann is true and strong only when he makes the poor of the lowest class speak in their own dialect. The maidservants in Vor Sonnenaufgang are excellent. The nurse, who sings the baby to sleep; the laundress, Frau Lehmann, who laments her domestic troubles, are by far the most successful characters in Einsame Menschen. And if Die Weber is the best work he has hitherto produced, it is because only the poorest people, speaking only their own dialect, appear in it. But as soon as he has to deal with more complex human beings of the educated classes—beings who are not perishing with hunger nor suffering from poverty, who speak high German, and have a wider intellectual horizon—he becomes uncertain and flat, and catches up the pattern-album of realism instead of taking reality as his model.

Die Weber (The Weavers) is the only real drama among the five which Hauptmann has hitherto written.[465] There is not much action in this piece; but it is sufficient, and it progresses. First, we see the profound misery in which the weavers are perishing; then we behold the rousing of their fury at their intolerable condition, and then their passion gradually developed before our eyes in ever-deepening intensity, rising into frenzy, destructive madness, tumults and riots, with all their tragic consequences. The extraordinary part of this drama is that the author has triumphed, with a genius which entitles him to our respect, over the enormous difficulty of captivating and stirring our human feelings, without making any individual character the centre-point of his piece, and of distributing the action between a great number of persons and a multitude of individual traits, without its ever ceasing to be a united and compact whole. These features, revealing a painfully minute observation, necessarily belong to individuals; nevertheless, they excite a very lively interest, sympathy and pity, not for the person, but for a whole class of men. We reach through emotion a generalization which usually is only a work of the intellect, through a poetic composition to a feeling which usually is excited only by history. In making this possible, Hauptmann rises infinitely above the bog of barren imitation, and creates a truly new form, viz., the drama in which the hero is not an individual, but the crowd; he succeeds, by artistic means, in presenting us with the hallucination that we are constantly seeing before us the nameless millions, while naturally there are never more than a few persons in the scene who suffer, speak, and act. Besides this great and radical innovation, other burning æsthetic questions are solved in the piece with overpowering beauty and sobriety. We have here a drama without love, and at the same time a proof that other sentiments besides the one instinct of sex can powerfully stir the soul of the reader. The piece is, moreover, a curious contribution to the wholly new ‘psychology of the masses,’ with which Sighele, Fournial, and others have been occupied,[466] and it gives an absolutely exact picture of the delirium and hallucinations which take possession of the individual in the midst of an excited crowd, and transforms his character and all his instincts after the model of the usually criminal leaders. It comprises, finally, this demonstration, which I have nowhere found so fully in all the international literature with which I am acquainted, viz., that beautiful effects, when rightly employed, can be obtained even with repulsive subjects. A poor weaver, who has not touched meat for two years, asks a comrade—not having the heart to do it himself—to kill a pretty little dog which had run up to him, and his wife roasts it for him. He cannot control his craving, and begins dipping into the saucepan almost before the meat is done. His stomach, however, cannot bear the dainty, and to his great despair he is forced to reject it.[467] The incident in itself is not appetizing. But here it becomes beautiful and deeply affecting, for it describes with incomparably tragic power the misery of these woebegone starving people.

This piece, apparently so realistic in the sense attached to this word by superficial talkers, is, on the whole, the most convincing refutation of the theory of realism. For it is incredible that all the incidents which mark the dreadful position of the weavers could have been condensed into exactly one hour of the day, and into one single room of the workman Dreissiger’s house; it is, if not wholly impossible, at all events very improbable, that the soldier’s murderous bullet should happen to kill the weaver Hilse, the only man trusting in God and resigned to his fate, who remained quietly at his work when all the others rushed out to pillage and riot in the streets. The poet has not depicted ‘real’ life here, but has freely utilized the materials which he has gained through his observation of life in order to give artistic expression to his personal ideas. His desire was to excite our pity as vividly as that felt by himself for a definite form of human misery. With this object he collected with the sure hand of an artist, into a narrow compass, events which in life would be distributed over months or years, and at long intervals, and he has guided the flight of a blindly unconscious bullet in such a way that it commits, like a villain endowed with reason, a peculiarly dastardly crime, thus raising our compassion for the poor weavers to the height of indignation. The piece, then, shows us the ideas and designs of the poet, his manner of viewing and interpreting reality; it enables us to discern the sentiments aroused in him by the drama of life. It is, then, in the highest degree a ‘subjective’ work, i.e., the opposite of a ‘realistic’ copy of fact, which would have to be photographically objective.

How does it happen that an artist, who applies his means with so fine a taste and with so skilful a calculation of the effect, can commit at the same time such naïvetés as, for example, these stage-directions in Vor Sonnenaufgang: ‘Frau Krause, at the moment of seating herself, remembers [!] that grace has not yet been said, and mechanically folds her hands, though without otherwise controlling her malice.’ ‘It is the peasant Krause who, as always [!], is the last to leave the inn.’ ‘He embraces her with the awkwardness of a gorilla,’ etc. How is an actor to set to work by his awkwardness to make a spectator think precisely of a gorilla, or to show him that, ‘as always,’ he is the last to leave the inn? More especially, how is it to be explained that this same Hauptmann, who has created Die Weber, should after this lofty composition have written the novels Der Apostel and Bahnwärter Thiel?[468] Here we fall back into the lowest depths of Young-German incapacity. The idea is nonsensical and a plagiarism, the story has not a ray of truth, and the language (so original and lifelike, and so exactly rendering the lightest shades of thought when the author has recourse to patois) is commonplace and slipshod enough to make one weep. No words must be wasted on Der Apostel. A dreamer, manifestly touched by insanity, perambulates the streets of Zürich in the costume of an Oriental prophet, and is taken to be Christ by the crowd who worship him. This is the whole story. It is represented in such a way that we never know whether the narrative is telling what the Apostle dreamed or what really happened. His ideas and sentiments are an echo of Nietzsche. Zarathustra has incontestably got into Hauptmann’s head, and left him no peace till he had himself produced a second infusion of this idiocy. The railway signalman, Thiel, has lost his wife at the birth of their first child. Constantly away from home on duty, he is obliged to marry again that his child may be cared for. The second wife, who soon gives her husband a child of her own, ill-treats the motherless one. In spite of Thiel’s warnings, she one day leaves her stepchild on the rails untended, and it is crushed by a train. The signalman then murders his wife and her child with a hatchet in the most horrible manner at night, and is shut up in a lunatic asylum as a furious madman. Let me quote just a few of his descriptions: ‘In the obscurity ... the signalman’s hut was transformed into a chapel. A faded photograph of the dead woman on the table before him, his Psalm-book and Bible open, he read and sang alternately the whole night through, interrupted only by the trains tearing past at intervals, and fell into an ecstasy so intense that he saw visions of the dead woman standing before his eyes.’ ‘The [telegraphic] pole, at the southern extremity of the section, had a particularly full and beautiful chord.... The signalman experienced a solemn feeling—as at church. And then in time he came to distinguish a voice which recalled to him his dead wife. He imagined that it was a chorus of blessed spirits in which her voice was mingled, and this idea awakened in him a longing, an emotion amounting to tears.’ The ‘Young German’ speaks with contempt of Berthold Auerbach, because he depicts sentimental peasants. Is there a single one of Auerbach’s Black Forest folk impregnated with such a rose-watery sentimentality as this signalman of the ‘realist’ Hauptmann, who leans against a telegraph-pole, and is moved to tears at its sound? Again, the passage (pp. 22, 23) which shows us Thiel in amorous excitement at the sight of his wife (‘from the woman an invincible, inevitable power seemed to emanate, which Thiel felt himself impotent to resist’) Hauptmann has drawn from Zola’s novels, and not from the observations of German signalmen. Or has he rather desired to depict in a general way a madman who has always been such long before his furious insanity broke out? In this case he has drawn the picture very falsely.

And the style of this unhappy book! ‘The Scotch firs ... rubbed their branches squeaking against each other,’ and ‘a noisy squeaking, rattling, clattering, and clashing [of a train with the brake on] broke upon the stillness of the evening.’ One and the same word to describe the noise of branches rubbing each other, and of a train with the brake on! ‘Two red round lights [those of a locomotive] pierced the darkness like the fixed and staring eyes of a gigantic monster.’ ‘The sun ... sparkling at its rising like an enormous blood-red jewel.’ ‘The sky which caught, like a gigantic and stainlessly blue bowl of crystal, the golden light of the sun.’ And once again: ‘The sky like an empty pale-blue bowl of crystal.’ ‘The moon hung, comparable to a lamp, above the forest.’ How can an author who has any respect for himself employ comparisons which would make a journeyman tailor who dabbled in writing blush? Besides, what countless slovenlinesses! ‘Before his eyes floated pell-mell little yellow points like glow-worms.’ Glow-worms do not give out a yellow, but a bluish, light. ‘His glassy pupils moved incessantly.’ This is a phenomenon which no one has yet seen. ‘The trunks of the fir-trees stretched like pale decayed bones between the summits.’ Bones are that part of the body which does not decay. ‘The blood which flowed was the sign of combat.’ Truly a reliable sign! Even great faults in grammar are not wanting, but I consent to take these as printer’s mistakes. If Gerhart Hauptmann has true friends, their imperative duty is to rouse his conscience. Having shown what excellent things he is capable of producing, he has not the right to scribble carelessly like the first paltry ‘Young-German’ writer. He must be strict with himself, and endeavour always to remain the artist he has shown himself in Die Weber.

Hauptmann’s successes have not let Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf rest, and both have joined to imitate his Vor Sonnenaufgang. Their united efforts produced the Familie Selicke, a drama in which nothing happens, of which alcohol is likewise the subject, and where the personages also speak in dialect. For ‘modernity’s’ sake they have introduced a theological candidate who has become a free-thinker, yet none the less wishes to obtain an incumbency. I mention this insignificant patchwork play only because the realists usually quote it as one of their magna opera.

Such are the Young-German realists, among whose number I will not include, as I said before, a sterling author like Gerhart Hauptmann. They do not know German, are incapable of even observing life, still more of understanding it; they know nothing, learn nothing, and experience nothing whatsoever; have nothing to say, have neither a true sentiment nor a personal thought to express, yet never cease writing; and their scribbling, in the eyes of a great number, passes as the sole German literature of the present and future. They plagiarize the stalest of foreign fashions, and call themselves innovators and original geniuses. They append on the signboard before their shops, ‘At the Sign of Modernity,’ and nothing is to be found in them but the discarded breeches of bygone poetasters. If the few lines in which they mutter about the obscure Socialistic ‘studies’ and ‘works’ of the hero be excluded from all they have published up to the present time, there will remain a miserable balderdash, without colour, taste, or connection with time and space, and which a tolerably conscientious editor of a newspaper even half a century ago would have thrown into the waste-paper basket as altogether too musty. They know that very well, and to be beforehand with those who would reproach them with their charlatanism, they audaciously attribute it to those respectable authors whom they cover with their slaver. Thus, Hans Merian dares to say: ‘Spielhagen makes it appear as though he had drawn the fundamental ideas and conflicts in his novels from the great questions which are stirring the present time. But closely examined, all this magnificence evaporates into a vain phantasmagoria.’ And: ‘To the fabricators of novels à la Paul Lindau, recently dealing with realism, we address the reproach of false realism.’[469] And this same Hans Merian finds that the realism of Max Kretzer and of Karl Bleibtreu is genuine, and that their Parisian cocotte-stories, transported contraband into Berlin, and their adventures of mythical waitresses, are ‘drawn from the great questions of the day’! Is not this the practice of thieves who scamper away at full speed before a policeman, shouting as they run louder than anyone else, ‘Stop thief!’ The movement of the Young German is an incomparable example in literature of that tendency to form cliques which I described in the first volume of this work. It began by a foundation in due form. A man arrogated to himself the rank of captain, and enrolled armed companions in order to repair with them into the Bohemian forests. The purpose was the same as that of every other band of criminals—the ‘Maffia,’ the ‘Mala Vita,’ the ‘Mano negra,’ etc., viz., that of living well without working, by plundering the rich, by blackmailing the poor, by favouring acts of vengeance by the members on persons whom they envy, hate, or fear, by satisfying with impunity the leaning to license and crime, kept down by custom and law. Like the ‘Mala Vita’ and analogous associations, this band palliates its acts and deeds by stock phrases intended to secure the favour, or at least the indulgence, of the crowd, incapable of judgment and easy to move. Brigands always profess that they are guided by the desire to repair, to the utmost of their power, the injustice of fate, by relieving the rich of their superfluities, and by then alleviating the misery of the poor. Thus, this band asserts that it defends the cause of truth, liberty, and progress, with the indecent love adventures of tavern-maidservants and prostitutes! Membership is acquired by formal admission after predetermined tests have been undergone. He must first publicly bespatter a well-known and meritorious author with mud. With the predominance of low and bad emotions in members of the band, they experience more gratification in maligning a man they envy than in being praised themselves. Next, the candidate must worship as geniuses one or more members of the band, and finally give proof, in verse or prose, that he also is able to express, in the language of a souteneur, the ideas of a convict, and the sensations of a noisome beast. Having undergone these three ordeals with success, he is received into the band and declared a genius. Just as the bands of brigands have their haunts, their receivers of stolen goods, and their secret or affiliated allies among the tradespeople, so this band possesses its own newspaper, its appointed editors (who, at first at least, accepted everything from it), and secret understandings with the critics of respectable papers. Its influence extends even to foreign countries—a phenomenon frequently observed in the formation of bands, and expressly confirmed by Lombroso. ‘The Mattoids,’ he says, ‘as opposed to geniuses and fools, are linked together by a sympathy of interests and hatred; they form a kind of freemasonry so much the more powerful that it is less regular. It is founded on the need of resistance to ridicule which is common to all, and inexorably pursues them everywhere on the necessity of uprooting, or at least combating, the natural antithesis, which, for them, is the man of genius; and, in spite of their hating each other, they stand firmly by one another.’[470]

He who from a height surveys a horizon of a certain extent can easily observe the labour of the apostles of this international freemasonry. M. Téodar de Wyzewa, already mentioned, who introduced to the French the insane Nietzsche as the most remarkable author that Germany has produced in the second half of this century, speaks in La Revue bleue and in Le Figaro of Conrad Alberti as the ‘poet’ who will dominate German literature in the twentieth century. The ‘new reviews’ of the Symbolists and Instrumentists, La Revue blanche, La Plume, etc., translate the ‘Erlebte Gedichte’ of O. J. Bierbaum. On the other hand, O. E. Hartleben offers the German public the so-called ‘poetry’ of the Belgian Symbolist, Albert Giraud, Pierrot lunaire, and H. Bahr mutters with transport over the Parisian mystics. Ola Hansson is enthusiastic before German readers over the realists of the North, and carries into Sweden the good news of Young-German realism, etc.

The actions of the band have not done much good to itself, but they have caused serious injuries to German literature. It has necessarily exerted a baneful attraction over the young who have come to the front in the last seven or eight years. If we consider the enormous difficulties to which a beginner is exposed, who without protection or influence, depending wholly on himself, enters into the Via Crucis leading to literary success, we shall find it quite comprehensible that the tyros should be eager to join themselves to a society possessing a powerful organization, its own periodicals and publishers, as well as a definite public, and always ready to take the part of its members with the unscrupulousness and pugnacity of cut-throats. As members of the band, they are freed from all the difficulties of beginners. The most vigorous talents alone—such, for example, as Hermann Sudermann—disdained to lighten their struggles with the help of such allies. The others willingly allowed themselves to be affiliated. The result was, on the one hand, that wholly incompetent lads were drawn into the profession of authors, who would never have come before the public if they had not had special depôts to which they could cart all their rubbish; and, on the other hand, that of procuring for others, who were perhaps not wholly devoid of talent, periodicals and publishers for their childish effusions, the appearance of which in print would have been inconceivable before the formation of the band. Some threw themselves into the literary profession at an age when they should have been studying for a long time to come, and thereby remained ignorant, immature, and superficial; others acquired slipshod and slovenly habits into which they would never have fallen if, in the absence of the conveniences which the organization of the band offered them, they had been obliged to submit to some discipline, and develop their capacities with care. The existence of this literary ‘Maffia’ assisted the plagiarists against independent minds, the common herd against the solitary, the scribbler against the artist, and the obscene against the refined, so powerfully that competition was almost out of the question. The luxuriant growth of silly, boyish, and crude book-making is the result of this fostering of incapacity and immaturity, and this premium granted to vulgarity. I will demonstrate in one instance only the disastrous effect of the band. The case of the Darmstadt Gymnasium (public school) boy may be remembered, who wrote under the pseudonym of Hans G. Ludwigs, and committed suicide in 1892 at the age of seventeen. For two years he had offered incense to the realist ‘geniuses,’ and published idiotic novels in the official periodicals of Young Germany, and he committed suicide because, as he wrote, ‘this cursed boxed-in life,’ i.e., the obligation to learn and work regularly in class, ‘broke down his strength.’ A good many gymnasium boys write trumpery things and send them to the papers; but as these are not printed, they gradually recover their reason. Their heads do not get turned, and they do not come to imagine that they are much too good to do their lessons, and diligently prepare for their examinations. Ludwigs would perhaps have been cured of his folly; he might have lived till the present day, and become a useful man, if the criminal realist periodicals had not printed his twaddle, and thus diverted him from his studies, and intensified his unwholesome boyish vanity into megalomania.

That this invasion by main force, this revolt of slaves into literature, to use Nietzsche’s expression, was to a certain extent successful, can be accounted for by the state of Germany. Its literature after 1870 had, in fact, become stagnant. It could not be otherwise. The German people had been obliged to exert their whole strength to conquer their unity in terrible wars. Now, it is not possible simultaneously to make history on a great scale and lead a nourishing artistic life; it must be one or the other. In the France of Napoleon I. the most celebrated authors were Delille, Esménard, Parseval de Grandmaison, and Fontanes. The Germany of William I., of Moltke and Bismarck, could not produce a Goethe or a Schiller. This can be explained without any mysticism. From the mighty events of which they are witnesses and collaborators the nation obtains a standard of comparison, by the side of which all works of art shrink together, and poets and artists, especially those most gifted and conscientious, feel depressed and discouraged, often even paralyzed, by the double perception that their compatriots only peruse their works distractedly and superficially, and that their creations absolutely cannot attain to the grandeur of the historical events passing before their eyes. In this critical period of transient mental collapse the Young-German band made its appearance, and profited greatly by what even honest and sensible people were obliged to acknowledge as well-founded attacks—even while they condemned the form of them—on many of the then reigning literary senators.

But another and weightier ground is the anarchy which reigns at present in German literature. Our republic of letters is neither governed nor defended. It has neither authorities nor police, and that is the reason a small but determined band of evildoers can make a great stir at their pleasure. Our masters do not concern themselves about their posterity as used to be the case. They have no sense of the duty which success and glory impose upon them. Let me not be misunderstood. Nothing is further from my thoughts than the wish to transform literature into a closed corporation, and to require the new arrivals to become apprentices and journeymen (although, in fact, every new generation unconsciously forms itself on the works of its intellectual ancestors). But they have not the right to be indifferent to what will come after them. They are the intellectual leaders of the people. They have their ear. On them is the task incumbent of facilitating the first steps of the beginner, and presenting them to the public. By this much would be obtained—continuity of development, formation of a literary tradition, respect and gratitude for predecessors, severe and early suppression of individuals of absolutely unjustifiable pretensions, economy of power, which in these days a young author must fritter away in order to come out of his shell. But our literary chiefs have no understanding for all this. Each one thinks only of himself, and is furiously jealous of his colleagues and his followers. Not one of them says that in the intellectual concert of a great people there is room enough for dozens of different artists, each one of whom plays his own instrument. Not one takes into consideration that after him new talent will be born, that this is a fact he cannot prevent, and that he is preparing for himself a better old age by levelling the paths, instead of viciously trying to close them to those who, whatever he may do, will still be his successors in public favour. Who amongst us has ever received a word of encouragement from one of our literary grandees? To whom amongst us have they testified their interest and benevolence? Not one of us owes them anything whatsoever; not one feels obliged to be just towards them, nor to make himself their champion; and when the band fell upon them like a lot of brigands, to drive them off with blows, and put themselves in their place, not a hand was raised to defend them, and they were cruelly punished for having lived and acted in isolation and secret mutual hostility, sternly repulsing the young, and indifferent to the tastes of the people whenever their own works were not in question.

And as we have no Council of Ancients, so we lack also all critical police. The reviewer may praise the most wretched production, kill by silence or drag through the mire the highest masterpiece, state as the contents of a book things of which there is not the slightest mention, and no one calls him to account, no one stigmatizes his ineptitude, his effrontery, or his falsehood. Thus a public that is neither led nor counselled by its ancients, nor protected by its critical police, becomes the predestined prey of all charlatans and impostors.

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[BOOK V.]

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.