Degeneration

by Max Simon Nordau

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.