If our interpretation is right, it is impossible that Ibsen’s work could in any way indicate degeneration. It ought, on the contrary, to be evident that his pieces, rendering objective as they do the struggle for a higher and better life, based not on pedantic considerations of immediate and unworthy advantages, but on the noble impulses of a strong and healthy nation, are at once a summons to rise higher, and signals pointing the way. CHAPTER VIII _RICHARD WAGNER_ We all have met with people who, without being degenerates to any great extent repeat stories of their own invention so persistently, that they end by believing in them. In this kind of folly, if folly it be, there is a great deal of method when indulged in by people who are anxious, for some reason or another, that their views should _nolens volens_ be accepted by others. When one comes to deal with the intellectual development of a nation or a race, and wishes to prove certain forms of progress or retrogression, it is half the battle to bring your opponent to believe in the existence of some special, well-defined psychological phenomenon or social tendency, and to give it a high-sounding name. What would astrology have been without the horoscope, or alchemy without the philosopher’s stone? What would modern statecraft be without such terms as “foreign competition” and “international jealousy”? What would German socialism be without the term “revolutionary socialism”? What would bi-metallism be without the phrase, “the stability of the currency”? And what would Nordau’s theory of degeneration be without the “mystic movement”? He takes for granted that there is such a thing as mysticism, as well as that it constitutes a movement, and then endeavours to explain everything as partaking of or resulting from it. According to him, Wagnerism is the reappearance in Germany of that romanticism which originated there, and afterwards travelled through France and England. It reappeared, according to him, through Wagner’s degeneration, and spread in virtue of the degeneration of his contemporaries. He says that he finds in Wagner a greater abundance of degeneration than in all the other degenerates put together. “The stigmata of his morbid condition,” he says, “are united in him in the most complete and most luxuriant development.”