CHAPTER I.
PROGNOSIS.
Our long and sorrowful wandering through the hospital—for as such we have recognised, if not all civilized humanity, at all events the upper stratum of the population of large towns to be—is ended. We have observed the various embodiments which degeneration and hysteria have assumed in the art, poetry, and philosophy of our times. We have seen the mental disorder affecting modern society manifesting itself chiefly in the following forms: Mysticism, which is the expression of the inaptitude for attention, for clear thought and control of the emotions, and has for its cause the weakness of the higher cerebral centres; Ego-mania, which is an effect of faulty transmission by the sensory nerves, of obtuseness in the centres of perception, of aberration of instincts from a craving for sufficiently strong impressions, and of the great predominance of organic sensations over representative consciousness; and false Realism, which proceeds from confused æsthetic theories, and characterizes itself by pessimism and the irresistible tendency to licentious ideas, and the most vulgar and unclean modes of expression. In all three tendencies we detect the same ultimate elements, viz., a brain incapable of normal working, thence feebleness of will, inattention, predominance of emotion, lack of knowledge, absence of sympathy or interest in the world and humanity, atrophy of the notion of duty and morality. From a clinical point of view somewhat unlike each other, these pathological pictures are nevertheless only different manifestations of a single and unique fundamental condition, to wit, exhaustion, and they must be ranked by the alienist in the genus melancholia, which is the psychiatrical symptom of an exhausted central nervous system.
Superficial or unfair critics have foisted on me the assertion that degeneration and hysteria are the products of the present age. The attentive and candid reader will bear witness that I have never circulated such an absurdity. Hysteria and degeneration have always existed; but they formerly showed themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitude of discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing upon it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which created favourable conditions under which these maladies could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to civilization. Certain micro-organisms engendering mortal diseases have always been present also—for example, the bacillus of cholera; but they only cause epidemics when circumstances arise intensely favourable for their rapid increase. In the same way the body constantly harbours parasites which only injure it when another bacillus has invaded and devastated it. For example, we are always inhabited by staphylococcus and streptococcus, but the influenza bacillus must first appear for them to swarm and produce mortal suppurations. Thus, the vermin of plagiarists in art and literature becomes dangerous only when the insane, who follow their own original paths, have previously poisoned the Zeitgeist, weakened by fatigue, and rendered it incapable of resistance.
We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides: ‘What is to come next?’
This question of eventuality presents itself to the physician in every serious case, and however delicate and rash, above all, however little scientific any prediction may be, he cannot evade the necessity of establishing a prognosis. For that matter, this is not purely arbitrary, not a blind leap into the dark; the most attentive observation of all the symptoms, assisted by experience, permits a generally just conclusion on the ulterior evolution of the evil.
It is possible that the disease may not have yet attained its culminating point. If it should become more violent, gain yet more in breadth and depth, then certain phenomena which are perceived as exceptions or in an embryo condition would henceforth increase to a formidable extent and develop consistently; others, which at present are only observed among the inmates of lunatic asylums, would pass into the daily habitual condition of whole classes of the population. Life would then present somewhat the following picture:
Every city possesses its club of suicides. By the side of this exist clubs for mutual assassination by strangulation, hanging, or stabbing. In the place of the present taverns houses would be found devoted to the service of consumers of ether, chloral, naphtha, and hashish. The number of persons suffering from aberrations of taste and smell has become so considerable that it is a lucrative trade to open shops for them where they can swallow in rich vessels all sorts of dirt, and breathe amidst surroundings which do not offend their sense of beauty nor their habits of comfort the odour of decay and filth. A number of new professions are being formed—that of injectors of morphia and cocaine; of commissioners who, posted at the corners of the streets, offer their arms to persons attacked by agoraphobia, in order to enable them to cross the roads and squares; of companies of men who by vigorous affirmations are charged to tranquillize persons afflicted with the mania of doubt when taken by a fit of nervousness, etc.
The increase of nervous irritability, far beyond the present standard, has made it necessary to institute certain measures of protection. After it has frequently come to pass that overexcited persons, being unable to resist a sudden impulsion, have killed from their windows with air-guns, or have even openly attacked, the street boys who have uttered shrill whistles or piercingly sharp screams without rhyme or reason; that they have forced their way into strange houses where beginners are practising the piano or singing, and there committed murder; that they have made attempts with dynamite against tramways where the conductor rings a bell (as in Berlin) or whistles—it has been forbidden by law to whistle and bawl in the street; special buildings, managed in such a way that no sound penetrates to the outside, have been established for the practice of the piano and singing exercises; public conveyances have no right to make a noise, and the severest penalty is at the same time attached to the possession of air-guns. The barking of dogs having driven many people in the neighbourhood to madness and suicide, these animals cannot be kept in a town until after they have been made mute by severing the ‘recurrent’ nerve. A new legislation on subjects connected with the press forbids journalists, under severe penalties, to give detailed accounts of violence, or suicides under peculiar circumstances. Editors are responsible for all punishable actions committed in imitation of their reports.
Sexual psychopathy of every nature has become so general and so imperious that manners and laws have adapted themselves accordingly. They appear already in the fashions. Masochists or passivists, who form the majority of men, clothe themselves in a costume which recalls, by colour and cut, feminine apparel. Women who wish to please men of this kind wear men’s dress, an eye-glass, boots with spurs and riding-whip, and only show themselves in the street with a large cigar in their mouths. The demand of persons with the ‘contrary’ sexual sentiment that persons of the same sex can conclude a legal marriage has obtained satisfaction, seeing they have been numerous enough to elect a majority of deputies having the same tendency.[471] Sadists, ‘bestials,’ nosophiles, and necrophiles, etc., find legal opportunities to gratify their inclinations. Modesty and restraint are dead superstitions of the past, and appear only as atavism and among the inhabitants of remote villages. The lust of murder is confronted as a disease, and treated by surgical intervention, etc.
The capacity for attention and contemplation has diminished so greatly that instruction at school is at most but two hours a day, and no public amusements, such as theatres, concerts, lectures, etc., last more than half an hour. For that matter, in the curriculum of studies, mental education is almost wholly suppressed, and by far the greater part of the time is reserved for bodily exercises; on the stage only representations of unveiled eroticism and bloody homicides, and to this, flock voluntary victims from all the parts, who aspire to the voluptuousness of dying amid the plaudits of delirious spectators.
The old religions have not many adherents. On the other hand, there are a great number of spiritualist communities who, instead of priests, maintain soothsayers, evokers of the dead, sorcerers, astrologers, and chiromancers, etc.
Books such as those of the present day have not been in fashion for a very long time. Printing is now only on black, blue, or golden paper; on another colour are single incoherent words, often nothing but syllables, nay, even letters or numbers only, but which have a symbolical significance which is meant to be guessed by the colour and print of the paper and form of the book, the size and nature of the characters. Authors soliciting popularity make comprehension easy by adding to the text symbolical arabesques, and impregnating the paper with a definite perfume. But this is considered vulgar by the refined and connoisseurs, and is but little esteemed. Some poets who publish no more than isolated letters of the alphabet, or whose works are coloured pages on which is absolutely nothing, elicit the greatest admiration. There are societies whose object it is to interpret them, and their enthusiasm is so fanatical that they frequently have fights against each other ending in murder.
It would be easy to augment this picture still further, no feature of which is invented, every detail being borrowed from special literature on criminal law and psychiatria, and observations of the peculiarities of neurasthenics, hysterics, and mattoids. This will be, in the near future, the condition of civilized humanity, if fatigue, nervous exhaustion, and the diseases and degeneration conditioned by them, make much greater progress.
Will it come to this? Well, no; I think not. And this, for a reason which scarcely perhaps permits of an objection: because humanity has not yet reached the term of its evolution; because the over-exertion of two or three generations cannot yet have exhausted all its vital powers. Humanity is not senile. It is still young, and a moment of over-exertion is not fatal for youth; it can recover itself. Humanity resembles a vast torrent of lava, which rushes, broad and deep, from the crater of a volcano in constant activity. The outer crust cracks into cold, vitrified scoriæ, but under this dead shell the mass flows, rapidly and evenly, in living incandescence.
As long as the vital powers of an individual, as of a race, are not wholly consumed, the organism makes efforts actively or passively to adapt itself, by seeking to modify injurious conditions, or by adjusting itself in some way so that conditions impossible to modify should be as little noxious as possible. Degenerates, hysterics, and neurasthenics are not capable of adaptation. Therefore they are fated to disappear. That which inexorably destroys them is that they do not know how to come to terms with reality. They are lost, whether they are alone in the world, or whether there are people with them who are still sane, or more sane than they, or at least curable.
They are lost if they are alone: for anti-social, inattentive, without judgment or prevision, they are capable of no useful individual effort, and still less of a common labour which demands obedience, discipline, and the regular performance of duty. They fritter away their life in solitary, unprofitable, æsthetic debauch, and all that their organs, which are in full regression, are still good for is enervating enjoyment. Like bats in old towers, they are niched in the proud monument of civilization, which they have found ready-made, but they themselves can construct nothing more, nor prevent any deterioration. They live, like parasites, on labour which past generations have accumulated for them; and when the heritage is once consumed, they are condemned to die of hunger.
But they are still more surely and rapidly lost if, instead of being alone in the world, healthy beings yet live at their side. For in that case they have to fight in the struggle for existence, and there is no leisure for them to perish in a slow decay by their own incapacity for work. The normal man, with his clear mind, logical thought, sound judgment, and strong will, sees, where the degenerate only gropes; he plans and acts where the latter dozes and dreams; he drives him without effort from all the places where the life-springs of Nature bubble up, and, in possession of all the good things of this earth, he leaves to the impotent degenerate at most the shelter of the hospital, lunatic asylum, and prison, in contemptuous pity. Let us imagine the drivelling Zoroaster of Nietzsche, with his cardboard lions, eagles, and serpents, from a toyshop, or the noctambulist Des Esseintes of the Decadents, sniffing and licking his lips, or Ibsen’s “solitary powerful” Stockmann, and his Rosmer lusting for suicide—let us imagine these beings in competition with men who rise early, and are not weary before sunset, who have clear heads, solid stomachs and hard muscles: the comparison will provoke our laughter.
Degenerates must succumb, therefore. They can neither adapt themselves to the conditions of Nature and civilization, nor maintain themselves in the struggle for existence against the healthy. But the latter—and the vast masses of the people still include unnumbered millions of them—will rapidly and easily adapt themselves to the conditions which new inventions have created in humanity. Those who, by marked deficiency of organization, are unable to do so, among the generation taken unawares by these inventions, fall out of the ranks; they become hysterical and neurasthenical, engender degenerates, and in these end their race;[472] but the more vigorous, although they at first also have become bewildered and fatigued, recover themselves little by little, their descendants accustom themselves to the rapid progress which humanity must make, and soon their slow respiration and their quieter pulsations of the heart will prove that it no longer costs them any effort to keep pace and keep up with the others. The end of the twentieth century, therefore, will probably see a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen square yards of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone, to be thinking simultaneously of the five continents of the world, to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine, and to satisfy the demands of a circle of ten thousand acquaintances, associates, and friends. It will know how to find its ease in the midst of a city inhabited by millions, and will be able, with nerves of gigantic vigour, to respond without haste or agitation to the almost innumerable claims of existence.
If, however, the new civilization should decidedly outstrip the powers of humanity, if even the most robust of the species should not in the long-run grow up to it, then ulterior generations will settle with it in another way. They will simply give it up. For humanity has a sure means of defence against innovations which impose a destructive effort on its nervous system, namely, ‘misoneism,’ that instinctive, invincible aversion to progress and its difficulties that Lombroso has studied so much, and to which he has given this name.[473] Misoneism protects man from changes of which the suddenness or the extent would be baneful to him. But it does not only appear as resistance to the acceptation of the new; it has another aspect, to wit, the abandonment and gradual elimination of inventions imposing claims too hard on man. We see savage races who die out when the power of the white man makes it impossible for them to shut out civilization; but we see also some who hasten with joy to tear off and throw away the stiff collar imposed by civilization, as soon as constraint is removed. I need only recall the anecdote, related in detail by Darwin, of the Fuegian Jemmy Button, who, taken as a child to England and brought up in that country, returned to his own land in the patent-leather shoes and gloves and what not of fashionable attire, but who, when scarcely landed, threw off the spell of all this foreign lumber for which he was not ripe, and became again a savage among savages.[474] During the period of the great migrations, the barbarians constructed block-houses in the shadow of the marble palaces of the Romans they had conquered, and preserved of Roman institutions, inventions, arts and sciences, only those which were easy and pleasant to bear. Humanity has, to-day as much as ever, the tendency to reject all that it cannot digest. If future generations come to find that the march of progress is too rapid for them, they will after a time composedly give it up. They will saunter along at their own pace or stop as they choose. They will suppress the distribution of letters, allow railways to disappear, banish telephones from dwelling-houses, preserving them only, perhaps, for the service of the State, will prefer weekly papers to daily journals, will quit cities to return to the country, will slacken the changes of fashion, will simplify the occupations of the day and year, and will grant the nerves some rest again. Thus, adaptation will be effected in any case, either by the increase of nervous power or by the renunciation of acquisitions which exact too much from the nervous system.
As to the future of art and literature, with which these inquiries are chiefly concerned, that can be predicted with tolerable clearness. I resist the temptation of looking into too remote a future. Otherwise I should perhaps prove, or at least show as very probable, that in the mental life of centuries far ahead of us art and poetry will occupy but a very insignificant place. Psychology teaches us that the course of development is from instinct to knowledge, from emotion to judgment, from rambling to regulated association of ideas. Attention replaces fugitive ideation; will, guided by reason, replaces caprice. Observation, then, triumphs ever more and more over imagination and artistic symbolism—i.e., the introduction of erroneous personal interpretations of the universe is more and more driven back by an understanding of the laws of Nature. On the other hand, the march followed hitherto by civilization gives us an idea of the fate which may be reserved for art and poetry in a very distant future. That which originally was the most important occupation of men of full mental development, of the maturest, best, and wisest members of society, becomes little by little a subordinate pastime, and finally a child’s amusement. Dancing was formerly an extremely important affair. It was performed on certain grand occasions, as a State function of the first order, with solemn ceremonies, after sacrifices and invocations to the gods, by the leading warriors of the tribe. To-day it is no more than a fleeting pastime for women and youths, and later on its last atavistic survival will be the dancing of children. The fable and the fairy-tale were once the highest productions of the human mind. In them the most hidden wisdom of the tribe and its most precious traditions were expressed. To-day they represent a species of literature only cultivated for the nursery. The verse which by rhythm, figurative expression, and rhyme trebly betrays its origin in the stimulations of rhythmically functioning subordinate organs, in association of ideas working according to external similitudes, and in that working according to consonance, was originally the only form of literature. To-day it is only employed for purely emotional portrayal; for all other purposes it has been conquered by prose, and, indeed, has almost passed into the condition of an atavistic language. Under our very eyes the novel is being increasingly degraded, serious and highly cultivated men scarcely deeming it worthy of attention, and it appeals more and more exclusively to the young and to women. From all these examples, it is fair to conclude that after some centuries art and poetry will have become pure atavisms, and will no longer be cultivated except by the most emotional portion of humanity—by women, by the young, perhaps even by children.
But, as I have said, I merely venture on these passing hints as to their yet remote destinies, and will confine myself to the immediate future, which is far more certain.
In all countries æsthetic theorists and critics repeat the phrase that the forms hitherto employed by art are henceforth effete and useless, and that it is preparing something perfectly new, absolutely different from all that is yet known. Richard Wagner first spoke of ‘the art-work of the future,’ and hundreds of incapable imitators lisp the term after him. Some among them go so far as to try to impose upon themselves and the world that some inexpressive banality, or some pretentious inanity which they have patched up, is this art-work of the future. But all these talks about sunrise, the dawn, new land, etc., are only the twaddle of degenerates incapable of thought. The idea that to-morrow morning at half-past seven o’clock a monstrous, unsuspected event will suddenly take place; that on Thursday next a complete revolution will be accomplished at a single blow, that a revelation, a redemption, the advent of a new age, is imminent—this is frequently observed among the insane; it is a mystic delirium. Reality knows not these sudden changes. Even the great revolution in France, although it was directly the work of a few ill-regulated minds like Marat and Robespierre, did not penetrate far into the depths, as has been shown by H. Taine and proved by the ulterior progress of history; it changed the outer more than the inner relations of the French social organism. All development is carried on slowly; the day after is the continuation of the day before; every new phenomenon is the outcome of a more ancient one, and preserves a family resemblance to it. ‘One would say,’ observes Renan with quiet irony, ‘that the young have neither read the history of philosophy nor Ecclesiastes: “the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be.”’[475] The art and poetry of to-morrow, in all essential points, will be the art and poetry of to-day and yesterday, and the spasmodic seeking for new forms is nothing more than hysterical vanity, the freaks of strolling players and charlatanism. Its sole result has hitherto been childish declamation, with coloured lights and changing perfumes as accompaniments, and atavistic games of shadows and pantomimes, nor will it produce anything more serious in the future.
New forms! Are not the ancient forms flexible and ductile enough to lend expression to every sentiment and every thought? Has a true poet ever found any difficulty in pouring into known and standard forms that which surged within him, and demanded an issue? Has form, for that matter, the dividing, predetermining, and delimitating importance which dreamers and simpletons attribute to it? The forms of lyric poetry extend from the birthday-rhyming of the ‘popular poet of the occasion,’ who works to order and publishes his address in the paper, to Schiller’s Lay of the Bell; dramatic form includes at the same time the Geschundener Raub-ritter (The Highwayman Fleeced), acted some time ago at Berlin, and Goethe’s Faust; the epic form embraces Kortum’s Jobsiade and Dante’s Divina Commedia, Heinz Tovote’s Im Liebesrauche and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. And yet there are bleatings for ‘new forms’? If such there be, they will give no talent to the incapable, and those who have talent know how to create something even within the limits of old forms. The most important thing is the having something to say. Whether it be said under a lyric, dramatic, or epic form is of no essential consequence, and the author will not easily feel the necessity of leaving these forms in order to invent some dazzling novelty in which to clothe his ideas. The history of art and poetry teaches us, moreover, that new forms have not been found for three thousand years. The old ones have been given by the nature of human thought itself. They would only be able to change if the form of our thought itself became changed. There is, of course, evolution, but it only affects externals, not our inmost being. The painter, for example, discovers the picture on the easel after the picture on the wall; sculpture, after the free figure, discovers high relief, and still later low relief, which already intrenches in a way not free from objection on the domain of the painter; the drama renounces its supernatural character, and learns to unfold itself in a more compact and condensed exposition; the epos abandons rhythmic language, and makes use of prose, etc. In these questions of detail evolution will continue to operate, but there will be no modification in the fundamental lines of the different modes of expression for human emotion.
All amplifications of given artistic frames have hitherto consisted in the introduction of new subjects and figures, not in the invention of new forms. It was an advance when, instead of the gods and heroes which till that time alone had peopled the epic poem, Petronius introduced into narrative poetry (The Banquet of Trimalchio) the characters of contemporary Roman life, or when the Netherlanders of the seventeenth century discovered for painting—which knew of naught save religious and mythological events, or great proceedings of state—the world of fairs, popular festivals, and rustic taverns. Quevedo and Mendoza, who represent the beggars in the ‘Picaresque’ novel—the model of the German Grimmelshausen writings—Richardson, Fielding, J. J. Rousseau, who take as the subject of their novels, instead of extraordinary adventures, the reflections and emotions of ordinary average beings; Diderot, who in Le Fils naturel and Le Père de Famille places his townspeople on the arrogant French stage, which till then had only known insignificant people as figuring in comedies and farces, but in serious drama, kings and great lords alone—all these authors invented, it is true, no new forms, but gave to old forms a different content from that of tradition. We observe also an advance of this kind in the poetry and art of our own day. They have given to the proletariat the rights of citizenship in art and literature. They show the labourer, not as a coarse or ridiculous figure, not with the object of producing a comic or coarse effect, but as a serious, frequently tragic being, worthy of our sympathy. Art is hereby enriched in the same way as it once was by the introduction of rascals and adventurers, of a Clarissa, a Tom Jones, a Julie (Nouvelle Héloïse), a Werther, a Constance (Le Fils naturel), etc., into the circle of its representations. Nevertheless, when many people in bewilderment exclaim hereupon, ‘The art of to-morrow will be socialistic!’ they utter unfathomable nonsense. Socialism is a conception of the laws which ought to determine the production and distribution of property. With this, art has nothing to do. Art cannot take any side in politics, nor is it its business to find and propose solutions to economic questions. Its task is to represent the eternally human causes of the socialist movement, the suffering of the poor, their yearning after happiness, their struggle against hostile forces in Nature and in the social mechanism, and their mighty elevation from the abyss into a higher mental and moral atmosphere. When art fulfils this task, when it shows the proletariat how it lives and suffers, how it feels and aspires, it awakens in us an emotion which becomes the mother of projects for alteration, transformation, and reform. It is in exciting such fruitful emotions, and by them the desire to heal the hurt, that art co-operates with progress, and not by socialist declamations, and perhaps still less by executing pictures of the state and the society of the future. Bellamy’s patchwork, Looking Backward, is outside art, and the twentieth century will surely not favour books of this quality. The glorification of the proletariat by a Karl Henckell, who practises with regard to the fourth estate a more shocking Byzantinism than was ever displayed by a tail-wagging courtier to a king, is entirely incapable of awakening interest and sympathy for the working man. Neither is true and useful emotion to be expected either by such false nonsense as, for example, Ludwig Fulda’s Verlorene Paradies,[476] or Ernst von Wildenbruch’s Haubenlerche.[477] A brave woman like Minna Wettstein-Adelt,[478] who obtains employment as a daily workwoman in a factory, and simply relates what she experienced there; a plucky man of sound sense and a warm heart like Gœhre, who depicts the life of a factory-hand according to his own experience;[479] a Gerhart Hauptmann, too, with his closely-observed details in Die Weber, do more for the proletariat than all the Emile Zolas, with their empty theorizing in Germinal and L’Argent, than all the William Morrises, with their high-flown rhymings on the noble workman, who becomes under their pen a caricature of the ‘noble savage’ so much laughed at in the old novel-writers on the primeval forests, and yet more still than all the scribblers who strew their pottage with socialist phrases by way of ‘modern’ seasoning. Mrs. Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not preach against slavery, nor risk projects in favour of its suppression. But this book has drawn tears from millions of readers, and caused negro slavery to be felt as a disgrace to America, and thus contributed essentially to its abolition. Art and poetry can do for the proletariat what Mrs. Beecher-Stowe has done for the negroes of the United States. They cannot and will not do more.
It is not unusual at present to meet this sentence: ‘The art and poetry of the future will be scientific.’ Those who say this assume extraordinarily conceited attitudes, and consider themselves unmistakably as extremely progressive and ‘modern.’ I ask myself in vain what these words can mean. Do the good people who mean so well by science imagine that sculptors will in the future chisel microscopes in marble, that painters will depict the circulation of the blood, and that poets will display in rich rhymes the principles of Euclid? Even this would not be science, but merely a mechanical occupation with the external apparatus of science. But this will surely not occur. In the past a confusion between art and science was possible; in the future it is unimaginable. The mental activity of man is too highly developed for such an amalgamation. Art and poetry have emotion for their object, science has knowledge. The former are subjective, the latter objective. The former work with the imagination, i.e., with the association of ideas directed by emotion; the latter works with observation, i.e., with the association of ideas determined by sense-impressions, of which the acquisition and reinforcement are the work of attention. Province, object, and method in art and science are so different, and in part so opposed, that to confuse them would signify a retrogression of thousands of years. One thing only is correct: the images issuing from the old anthropomorphic conception, the allusions to obsolete states of things and ideas which Fritz Mauthner has called ‘dead symbols’—all this will disappear from art. I think that in the twentieth century it will no longer occur to any painter to compose pictures like Guido Reni’s Aurora in the Rospigliosi Palace, and that a poet would be laughed at who should represent the moon looking amorously into a pretty girl’s room. The artist is the child of his times, the conception dominant in the world is his also, and in spite of all his tendency to atavism his method of expression is that with which contemporary culture furnishes him. No doubt the art of the future will avoid more than hitherto the great errors in universally recognised doctrines of science, but it will never become science.
The feelings of pleasure which a man receives from art result from the gratification of three different organic inclinations or tendencies. He needs the incitement which the variety offers him; he takes pleasure in recognising the originals in the imitations; he represents to himself the feelings of his fellow-creatures, and shares in them. He finds variety in works transporting him into wholly different scenes from those he knows, and which are familiar to him. The pleasurable feeling of recognition he obtains by the careful imitations of familiar realities. His sympathy makes him share with lively personal emotions every strongly and clearly expressed emotion of the artist. There will always be in the future, as heretofore, amateurs of works of imagination, which transport the reader or spectator into remote times and countries, or relate extraordinary adventures; others will prefer works in which the faithful observation of the known will prevail; the most refined and the most advanced will find pleasure only in those in which a soul, with its most secret feelings and thoughts, reveals itself. The art of the future will not be wholly romantic, wholly realistic, or wholly individualistic, but will appeal from first to last as much by its story to curiosity, as by imitation to the pleasure of recognition, and by the externalism of the artist’s personality to sympathy.
Two tendencies which have long been rivals will presumably contend still more violently in the future for supremacy, viz., observation and the free flight of imagination, or, to speak more briefly, though more inaccurately, realism and romanticism. Good artists, doubtless, in consequence of their higher mental development, will always be more prone and more apt accurately to perceive and accurately to interpret the phenomena of the world. But the crowd will no less certainly demand of artists in the future something different from the average reality of the world. Among creators, the desire for realism will exist, as among recipients, the need of romanticism. For—and this seems to be an important point—the task of art in the coming century, will be to exert over men that charm of variety which reality will no longer offer, and which the brain cannot relinquish. All that is called ‘picturesque’ will necessarily disappear more and more from the earth. Civilization ever becomes more uniform. The distinctive is felt as an inconvenience by those who are marked by it, and got rid of. Ruins delight a foreigner’s eye, but they inconvenience the native, and he sweeps them away. The traveller is disgusted at seeing the beauty of Venice profaned by steamers, but for the Venetian it is a benefit to cover long distances quickly for ten centesimi. Soon the last Redskin will wear a frock-coat and tall hat; the regulation railway buildings will display their prosaic outlines and hues along the great wall of China and under the palm-trees of Tuggurt in the Sahara; and Macaulay’s celebrated Maori will no longer contemplate the ruins of Westminster, but a trashy imitation of the palace at Westminster will serve as a Maori House of Parliament. The unique Yosemite Park, which the Americans in their very wise foresight wish to preserve intact in its prehistoric wildness, will not satisfy the craving for something new, different, picturesque, romantic, which humanity demands, and the latter will claim from art what civilization—clean, curled, and smart—will no longer offer.
I can now sum up in a few words my prognosis. The hysteria of the present day will not last. People will recover from their present fatigue. The feeble, the degenerate, will perish; the strong will adapt themselves to the acquisitions of civilizations, or will subordinate them to their own organic capacity. The aberrations of art have no future. They will disappear when civilized humanity shall have triumphed over its exhausted condition. The art of the twentieth century will connect itself at every point with the past, but it will have a new task to accomplish—that of introducing a stimulating variety into the uniformity of civilized life, an influence which probably science alone will be in a position to exert, many centuries later, over the great majority of mankind.
[CHAPTER II.]
THERAPEUTICS.
Is it possible to accelerate the recovery of the cultivated classes from the present derangement of their nervous system?
I seriously believe it to be so, and for that reason alone I undertook this work.
No one, I hope, will think me childish enough to imagine that I can bring degenerates to reason by incontrovertibly and convincingly demonstrating to them the derangement of their minds. He whose profession brings him into frequent contact with the insane knows the utter hopelessness of attempting by persuasion or argument to bring them to a recognition of the unreality and morbidness of their delusions. The only result attained is that they regard the physician either as an enemy and persecutor, and fiercely hate him, or as a blockhead devoid of reason on whom they vent their derision.
It is equally vain to preach to fanatics of the insane tendencies of fashions in art and literature, on their enthusiasm for error and foolishness. These fanatics, without being actually momentarily diseased, are yet on the border-line of insanity. They do not and cannot believe it. For the works, the madness of which is at the first glance apparent to every rational being, actually afford them feelings of pleasure. These works are an expression of their own mental derangement, and of the perversion of their own instincts. In the perusal, or contemplation of these productions, the half-witted fall into a state of excitation which they hold to be æsthetic, but which is really sensual; and this sensation is so genuine and immediate, they are so sure of it, that they can feel only annoyance at or pity for him who would make it plain to them that these works evoke no pleasure, but only disgust and contempt. To an habitual drinker it is possible to prove that absinthe is pernicious, but it is absolutely impossible to convince him that it has a disagreeable taste. To him, indeed, it tastes seductively delicious. It is in vain that the psychiatrical critic assures the patient that this book, that picture, are horrible deliriums; the invalid will in good faith reply: ‘Deliriums? That may be. But abhorrent? That I can never believe. I know better. They move me deeply and delightfully, and nothing you can say can prevent their doing so!’ Those whose minds are more unhinged go still further, and say bluntly: ‘We feel in all our nerves the beauty of these works. You do not; so much the worse for you. Instead of perceiving that you are a barbarian, devoid of intelligence, and an obtuse Philistine, you wish to argue us out of our most positive sensations. The only delirious person here is yourself.’
The history of civilization teaches to satiety, that delusions awaken ardent enthusiasm, and during hundreds or thousands of years obtain an invincible mastery of the thought and feeling of millions, because they vouchsafe a satisfaction, unhealthy though it be, to an existing instinct. Against that which procures feelings of pleasure for man, the objections of reason are unavailing.
Those degenerates, whose mental derangement is too deep-seated, must be abandoned to their inexorable fate. They are past cure or amelioration. They will rave for a season, and then perish. This book is obviously not written for them. It is, however, possible to reduce the disease of the age ‘to its anatomical necessity’ (to use the excellent expression of German medical science), and to this end every effort must be directed. For in addition to those whose organic constitution irrevocably condemns them to such a fate, the present degenerate tendencies are pursued by many who are only victims to fashion and certain cunning impostures, and these misguided ones we may hope to lead back to right paths. If, on the other hand, they were to be passively abandoned to the influences of graphomaniacal fools and their imbecile or unscrupulous bodyguard of critics, the inevitable result of such a neglect of duty would be a much more rapid and violent outspread of the mental contagion, and civilized humanity would with much greater difficulty, and much more slowly, recover from the disease of the age than it might under a strong and resolute combat with the evil.
Those persons, on whose minds it is above all necessary to impress the fact that the current tendencies are a result of mental degeneration and hysteria, are the slightly affected and the healthy, who allow themselves to be deluded by cunningly-devised catch-words, or who, through heedless curiosity, flock where they see a crowd. Certain critics have thought to intimidate me into speechlessness by saying: ‘If the indications cited are a proof of degeneration and mental disease, then is art and poetry in general the work of fools and degenerates, even such as has, without reservation, been hitherto admired, for in this likewise there are to be met the marks of degeneration.’ To which I reply: If scientific criticism, which tests works of art according to the principles of psychiatry and psychology, should result in showing that all artistic activity is diseased, that would still prove nothing against the correctness of my critical method. It would only be the acquisition of fresh knowledge. It would, doubtless, destroy a charming delusion, and prove painful to many; but science ought not to be checked by the consideration that its results annihilate agreeable errors, and frighten the easy-going out of comfortable habits of thought. Faith, again, is another sovereign besides art; it has rendered quite other services to humanity at a certain stage of evolution, has otherwise consoled and raised it, given it other ideals, and advanced it morally in a different way from even the greatest geniuses of art. Science, nevertheless, has not hesitated to pronounce faith a subjective error of man, and would, therefore, suffer far fewer scruples in characterizing art as something morbid if facts should convince it that such was the case. Moreover, not all that is morbid is necessarily ugly and pernicious. The expectoration of a sufferer from lung disease is quite as much a diseased secretion as the pearl. Is the pearl made more ugly or the expectoration more beautiful by the fact that they have the same origin? The toxine of sausage-meat is the excretion of a bacterium, that of ethyl-alcohol the secretion from a fungus. Is the similarity of genesis the condition of equal value for enjoyment in a poisoned sausage and a glass of old Rhine wine? It would prove nothing in regard to Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata or Ibsen’s Rosmersholm if it were of necessity admitted that Goethe’s Werther suffers from irrational eroticism, and that the Divina Commedia and Faust are symbolic poems. The whole objection, indeed, proceeds from a non-recognition of the simplest biological facts. The difference between disease and health is not one of kind, but of quantity. There is only one kind of vital activity of the cells and of the cell-systems or organs. It is the same in disease and in health. It is sometimes accelerated, and sometimes retarded; and when this deviation from the rule is detrimental to the ends of the whole organism, we call it disease. As it is here a question of more or less, it is impossible to define their limits sharply. Extreme cases are naturally easily recognised. But who shall determine with accuracy the exact point at which deviation from the normal, i.e., from health, begins? The insane brain performs its functions according to precisely the same laws as the rational brain, but it obeys these laws either imperfectly or excessively. In every human being there exists the tendency to interpret sense-impressions falsely. It is diseased only when exhibited in extraordinary strength. The traveller in a railway carriage has an illusory perception of the landscape flying by him while he is sitting still. The sufferer from the delusion of persecutions imagines that someone is wafting him evil odours, or hurling currents of electricity at him. Both of these ideas rest on sense-illusions. Are both for that reason marks of insanity? The traveller and the paranoist commit the same error of thought, and, nevertheless, the former is perfectly sane, and the latter deranged in mind. It may therefore with perfect security be affirmed that certain peculiarities—such as intense emotionalism, the tendency to symbolism, the predominance of imagination—are to be met with in all true artists. That all should be degenerates is very far from being a necessary consequence of this. It is only the exaggeration of these peculiarities which constitutes a disease. The sole conclusion justified by their regular appearance in artists would be that art, without being properly a disease of the human mind, is yet an incipient, slight deviation from perfect health; and I should raise no objection to this conclusion, the less so because it in no way helps the case of real degenerates and their distinctly diseased works. But it is not enough to prove that mysticism, ego-mania, and the pessimism of realism are forms of mental derangement. All the seductive masks must be torn from these tendencies, and their real aspect be shown in its grinning nakedness.
In opposition to healthy art, which they deride as musty and antiquated, they pretend to represent youth. An ill-advised criticism has actually been caught by their lime, and emphasizes their youth with constant irony. What clumsiness! As if any effort in the world could deprive of its charm the word ‘young,’ this essential notion of all that is blooming and fresh, this note of the dawn and the spring, and transform it into a term of reproach and insult! The truth is, however, that degenerates are not only not young, but that they are weirdly senile. Senile is their splenetic calumniation of the world and life; senile are their babblings, drivellings, ravings and divagations; senile their impotent appetites, and their cravings for all the stimulants of exhaustion. To be young is to hope; to be young is to love simply and naturally; to be young is to rejoice in one’s own health and strength, and in that of all human beings, and of the birds of the air and the beetles in the grass; and of these qualities there is not one to be met with among the youth-simulating, decayed degenerates.
They have the name of liberty on their lips when they proclaim as their god their corrupt self, and call it progress when they extol crime, deny morality, raise altars to instinct, scoff at science, and hold up loafing æstheticism as the sole aim of life. But their invocation of liberty is shameless blasphemy. How can there be a question of liberty when instinct is to be almighty? Let us remember Count Muffat in Zola’s Nana (p. 491): ‘At other times he was a dog. She threw her scented handkerchief to the end of the room for him, and he had to run on all fours to pick it up with his teeth. “Fetch it, Cæsar!... Look out; I’ll give it to you if you’re lazy!... Very good, Cæsar! mind! nicely!... Sit up!” And as for him, he loved his abasement, revelled in the joy of being a brute. He wanted to sink still lower; he cried: “Hit harder.... Bow wow! I am mad; hit me then!”’ That is the liberty of one who is ‘emancipated’ in the sense of the degenerates! He may be a dog, if his crazed instinct commands him to be a dog! And if the ‘emancipated’ one is named Ravachol, and his instinct commands him to perpetrate the crime of blowing up a house with dynamite, the peaceable citizen sleeping in this house is free to fly into the air, and fall again to the ground in a bloody rain of shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. Progress is possible only by the growth of knowledge; but this is the task of consciousness and judgment, not of instinct. The march of progress is characterized by the expansion of consciousness and the contraction of the unconscious; the strengthening of will and the weakening of impulsions; the increase of self-responsibility and the repression of reckless egoism. He who makes instinct man’s master does not wish for liberty, but for the most infamous and abject slavery, viz., enslavement of the judgment of the individual by his most insensate and self-destructive appetites; enslavement of the inflamed man by the craziest whims of a prostitute; enslavement of the people by a few stronger and more violent personalities. And he who places pleasure above discipline, and impulse above self-restraint, wishes not for progress, but for retrogression to the most primitive animality.
Retrogression, relapse—this is in general the ideal of this band who dare to speak of liberty and progress. They wish to be the future. That is one of their chief pretensions. That is one of the means by which they catch the largest number of simpletons. We have, however, seen in all individual cases that it is not the future but the most forgotten, far-away past. Degenerates lisp and stammer, instead of speaking. They utter monosyllabic cries, instead of constructing grammatically and syntactically articulated sentences. They draw and paint like children, who dirty tables and walls with mischievous hands. They compose music like that of the yellow natives of East Asia. They confound all the arts, and lead them back to the primitive forms they had before evolution differentiated them. Every one of their qualities is atavistic, and we know, moreover, that atavism is one of the most constant marks of degeneracy. Lombroso has convincingly demonstrated that many peculiarities of the born criminals described by him are also atavisms. Over-hasty critics believed that they had discovered a very subtle objection when, with a smile of self-satisfaction, they objected: ‘You assert that criminal instinct is at once degeneracy and atavism. These two dicta are mutually exclusive. Degeneracy is a pathological state; the most convincing proof of this is, that the degenerate type does not propagate itself, but becomes extinct. Atavism is a return to an earlier state, which cannot have been diseased, because the men who existed under those conditions have developed themselves and progressed. Return to a healthy, albeit remote, state cannot possibly be disease.’ All this verbiage has its source in the stubborn superstition which sees in disease a state differing essentially from that of health. This is a good example of the confusion which a word is capable of producing in muddled or ignorant brains. As a matter of fact there exists no activity and no state of the living organism which can in itself be designated as ‘health’ or ‘disease.’ But they become these in respect of the circumstances and purposes of the organism. According to the time of its appearance, one and the same state may very well be at one time disease and at another health. In the human fœtus, at the sixth week, hare-lip is a regular and healthy phenomenon. In the newly-born child it is a malformation. In the first year of its life the child cannot walk. Why? Because its legs are too weak to support it? Decidedly not. The well-known experiments of Dr. L. Robinson on sixty new born infants have proved that they are able to hang by their hands from a stick for thirty seconds, a performance implying muscular strength quite as considerable, relatively to their respective ages, as is possessed by the adult. It is not from weakness that they are unable to walk, but because their nervous system has not yet learned so to regulate and combine the activity of the different groups of muscles, as to produce a purposive movement. Infants cannot yet ‘co-ordinate.’ Incapacity of co-ordination of muscular activity is called by medical science ataxy. Hence in infants this is the natural and healthy condition. But ataxy precisely is a serious disease when it appears in adults, as the chief symptom of inflammation of the spinal cord. The identity of the ataxy of spinal disease with healthy infantine ataxy is so complete, that Dr. S. Frenkel[480] was able to found upon it a treatment of spinal ataxy, which consisted, essentially, in teaching the patients anew, like children, to walk and stand. It is seen, then, that a state may be at the same time diseased and yet the mere return to what was primitively a perfectly healthy state of things; and it was with culpable frivolity that Lombroso was reproached with contradiction because he saw in criminal instincts at once degeneracy and atavism. The disease of degeneracy consists precisely in the fact that the degenerate organism has not the power to mount to the height of evolution already attained by the species, but stops on the way at an earlier or later point. The relapse of the degenerate may reach to the most stupendous depth. As, in reverting to the cleavage of the superior maxillary peculiar to insects with sextuple lips, he sinks somatically to the level of fishes, nay to that of the arthropoda, or, even further, to that of rhizopods not yet sexually differentiated; as by fistulæ of the neck he reverts to the branchiæ of the lowest fishes, the selacious; or by excess in the number of fingers (polydactylia) to the multiple-rayed fins of fishes, perhaps even to the bristles of worms; or, by hermaphrodism, to the asexuality of rhizopods—so in the most favourable case, as a higher degenerate, he renews intellectually the type of the primitive man of the most remote Stone Age; or, in the worst case, as an idiot, that of an animal far anterior to man.
This is the subject in regard to which it is our duty untiringly and by every means to enlighten the weak in judgment, and the inexperienced. The fine names appropriated to themselves by degenerates, their imitators, and their critical hirelings, are lies and deceit. They are not the future, but an immeasurably remote past. They are not progress, but the most appalling reaction. They are not liberty, but the most disgraceful slavery. They are not youth and the dawn, but the most exhausted senility, the starless winter night, the grave and corruption.
It is the sacred duty of all healthy and moral men to take part in the work of protecting and saving those who are not already too deeply diseased. Only by each individual doing his duty will it be possible to dam up the invading mental malady. It is not seemly simply to shrug the shoulders and smile contemptuously. While the easy-going console themselves by saying, ‘No rational being takes this idiocy seriously,’ madness and crime are doing their work and poisoning a whole generation.
Mystics, but especially ego-maniacs and filthy pseudo-realists, are enemies to society of the direst kind. Society must unconditionally defend itself against them. Whoever believes with me that society is the natural organic form of humanity, in which alone it can exist, prosper, and continue to develop itself to higher destinies; whoever looks upon civilization as a good, having value and deserving to be defended, must mercilessly crush under his thumb the anti-social vermin. To him who, with Nietzsche, is enthusiastic over the ‘freely-roving, lusting beast of prey,’ we cry, ‘Get you gone from civilization! Rove far from us! Be a lusting beast of prey in the desert! Satisfy yourself! Level your roads, build your huts, clothe and feed yourself as you can! Our streets and our houses are not built for you; our looms have no stuffs for you; our fields are not tilled for you. All our labour is performed by men who esteem each other, have consideration for each other, mutually aid each other, and know how to curb their selfishness for the general good. There is no place among us for the lusting beast of prey; and if you dare return to us, we will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs.’
And still more determined must the resistance be to the filth-loving herd of swine, the professional pornographists. These have no claim to the measure of pity which may still be extended to degenerates properly so called, as invalids; for they have freely chosen their vile trade, and prosecute it from cupidity, vanity, and hatred of labour. The systematic incitation to lasciviousness causes the gravest injury to the bodily and mental health of individuals, and a society composed of individuals sexually over-stimulated, knowing no longer any self-control, any discipline, any shame, marches to its certain ruin, because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks. The pornographist poisons the springs whence flows the life of future generations. No task of civilization has been so painfully laborious as the subjugation of lasciviousness. The pornographist would take from us the fruit of this, the hardest struggle of humanity. To him we must show no mercy.
The police cannot aid us. The public prosecutor and criminal judge are not the proper protectors of society against crime committed with pen and crayon. They infuse into their mode of proceeding too much consideration for interests not always, not necessarily, those of cultivated and moral men. The policeman is so often compelled to intervene in the service of a privileged class, of the insupportable arrogance of administrations, of the assumption of infallibility of ministers and other government officials of the most unworthy byzantism and of the most stupid superstition, that he does not dishonour the man on whose shoulder he lays his heavy hand. Hence it comes to this, that the pornographist must be branded with infamy. But the punitive sentence of a judge does not with certainty have this effect.
The condemnation of works trading on unchastity must emanate from men of whose freedom from prejudice and freedom of mind, intelligence and independence, no one entertains a doubt. The word of such men would be of great weight among the people. There already exists an ‘Association of Men for the Suppression of Immorality.’ Unfortunately it allows itself to be guided not only by solicitude for the moral health and purity of the multitude, and especially of the young but by considerations which to the majority of the people seem to be prejudices. The association pursues disbelief almost more than immorality. An outspoken word against revelation or the Church inspires this association with as much horror as an act of obscenity. To this narrow-minded confessionalism is it due that its work is less rich in blessing than it might be. But in spite of this, we can take this ‘Association of Men’ as a pattern. Let us do what it does, but without mummeries. Here is a great and grateful task, e.g., for the new ‘Society for Ethical Culture’ of Berlin: Let it constitute itself the voluntary guardian of the people’s morality. Doubtless the pornographists will attempt to turn it into ridicule. But the scorn will soon enough stick in their own throats. An association composed of the people’s leaders and instructors, professors, authors, members of Parliament, judges, high functionaries, has the power to exercise an irresistible boycott. Let the ‘Society for Ethical Culture’ undertake to examine into the morality of artistic and literary productions. Its composition would be a guarantee that the examination would not be narrow-minded, not prudish, and not canting. Its members have sufficient culture and taste to distinguish the thoughtlessness of a morally healthy artist from the vile speculation of a scribbling ruffian. When such a society, which would be joined by those men from the people who are the best fitted for this task, should, after serious investigation and in the consciousness of a heavy responsibility, say of a man, ‘He is a criminal!’ and of a work, ‘It is a disgrace to our nation!’ work and man would be annihilated. No respectable bookseller would keep the condemned book; no respectable paper would mention it, or give the author access to its columns; no respectable family would permit the branded work to be in their house; and the wholesome dread of this fate would very soon prevent the appearance of such books as Bahr’s Gute Schule, and would dishabituate the ‘realists’ from parading a condemnation based on a crime against morality as a mark of distinction.
Medical specialists of insanity have likewise failed to understand their duty. It is time for them to come to the front. ‘It is a prejudice,’ Bianchi most justly says,[481] ‘to believe that psychiatry must be enclosed within a sanctuary like that at Mecca.’ It is no doubt meritorious to indurate sections of the spinal cord in chromic acid, and tint them in a neutrophyllic solution, but this should not exhaust the activity of a professor of psychiatry. Neither is it sufficient that he should in addition give a few lectures to jurists, and publish observations in technical journals. Let him speak to the mass of cultivated persons who are neither physicians nor learned in law. Let him enlighten them in general publications and in accessible conferences concerning the leading facts in mental therapeutics. Let him show them the mental derangement of degenerate artists and authors, and teach them that the works in fashion are written and painted delirium. In all other branches of medical science it is discerned that hygiene is of more importance than therapeutics, and that the public health has much more to expect from prophylactics than from treatment. With us in Germany the psychiatrist alone fails as yet to concern himself with the hygiene of the mind. It is time that he should practise his profession in this direction also. A Maudsley in England, a Charcot, a Magnan in France, a Lombroso, a Tonnini in Italy, have brought to vast circles of the people an understanding of the obscure phenomena in the life of the mind, and disseminated knowledge which would make it impossible in those countries for pronounced lunatics with the mania for persecution to gain an influence over hundreds of thousands of electoral citizens,[482] even if it could not prevent the coming into fashion of the degenerate art. In Germany alone no psychiatrist has as yet followed this example. It is time to atone for this negligence. Popularized expositions from the pens of experts whose prominent official status would recommend them to the reader would restrain many healthy spirits from affiliating themselves with degenerate tendencies.
Such is the treatment of the disease of the age which I hold to be efficacious: Characterization of the leading degenerates as mentally diseased; unmasking and stigmatizing of their imitators as enemies to society; cautioning the public against the lies of these parasites.
We in particular, who have made it our life’s task to combat antiquated superstition, to spread enlightenment, to demolish historical ruins and remove their rubbish, to defend the freedom of the individual against State oppression and the mechanical routine of the Philistine; we must resolutely set ourselves in opposition to the miserable mongers who seize upon our dearest watchwords, with which to entrap the innocent. The ‘freedom’ and ‘modernity,’ the ‘progress’ and ‘truth,’ of these fellows are not ours. We have nothing in common with them. They wish for self-indulgence; we wish for work. They wish to drown consciousness in the unconscious; we wish to strengthen and enrich consciousness. They wish for evasive ideation and babble; we wish for attention, observation, and knowledge. The criterion by which true moderns may be recognised and distinguished from impostors calling themselves moderns may be this: Whoever preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress; and whoever worships his ‘I’ is an enemy to society. Society has for its first premise, neighbourly love and capacity for self-sacrifice; and progress is the effect of an ever more rigorous subjugation of the beast in man, of an ever tenser self-restraint, an ever keener sense of duty and responsibility. The emancipation for which we are striving is of the judgment, not of the appetites. In the profoundly penetrating words of Scripture (Matt. v. 17), ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.’
FINIS.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD