Degeneration / by Max Nordau.

  • Nordau, Max Simon, 1849-1923.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Degeneration / by Max Nordau. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    beings ; Diderot, who in Le Fils Hahirel and Le Pere 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 Hterature. 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 {Noiivelle HSlo'ise), 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 altera- tion, 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 de- clamations, 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* or Ernst von Wildenbruch's * Ludwig Fulda, L>as verlorene Paradies^ Schauspiel in drei Aufziigen. Stuttgart, 1892. C/. p. 112 : MUHLBERGER. Rika, Rika ; come out ! Frederika. Oh, Lord ! will they send me back ?