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Degeneration. 



Degeneration. By Max Nordau. Translated from the Second Edition of the 

 German work. 8vo. Pp.560. London : Heinemann,' 1895. Price 17s. nett. 



Max Nordau renders no more than his due to Professor Lombroso 

 when, in his dedication, he acknowledges frankly and fully that his 

 own work would not have been written but for the labours of the 

 Italian. Indeed, it must be stated at once that readers of 

 " Degeneration " will find no scientific facts or reasoning that do not 

 occur in Lombroso's " Man of Genius." Moreover, the Turin 

 professor wrote in a careful and scientific spirit, developing his 

 arguments and drawing his conclusions without passion or prejudice. 

 Max Nordau has the style and the manners of a Hebrew prophet crying 

 out against a faithless generation. He attacks the eccentricities and 

 the depravities of authors and painters, dramatists and musicians, 

 with an envenomed rancour that adds interest to his pages if it tends 

 to leave the reader unconvinced. Professor Lombroso ranged over 

 all modern and ancient times, culling examples from every age and 

 from every people. Nordau deals only with the modern world, and, 

 therefore, has the advantage of treating only of people and subjects 

 in which all of us are interested. Unless a reader has narrow 

 sympathies in literature and art, unless he has been content with the 

 art of Punch and the literature of the Daily Telegraph, he will find 

 Nordau trying to convict him of having admired a maniac or an 

 idiot. It is easy to predict that his book will have a circulation as 

 wide in its English form as it had in the original, and where so much 

 has been left to lacerate the feelings of those who pin their faith to 

 some modern hero, we need not complain that a few of the violent 

 personal attacks have been softened down so as to avoid the English 

 laws of libel. 



Nordau impeaches our age, finding everywhere in it the signs of 

 degeneracy and of neurasthenia. Degeneracy he defines, in the words 

 of Morel, as a " morbid deviation from an original type." He has no 

 doubt but that if the originators of " all the fin-de-siecle movements 

 in art and literature " were to be examined, it would be found that 

 they or their immediate relatives would exhibit what Lombroso has 

 shown to be the physical " stigmata " of degeneration. But the 

 result of such an inquiry could not be made public. " Science, 

 however, has found, together with these physical stigmata, others of 

 a mental order which betoken degeneracy quite as clearly as the 

 former ; and they allow of an easy demonstration from all the vital 

 manifestations, and, in particular, from all the works of degenerates, 

 so that it is not necessary to measure the cranium of an author, or to 

 see the lobe of a painter's ear, in order to recognise the fact that he 

 belongs to the class of degenerates." 



