Another of those features of Nordau’s work which strongly impresses his readers is seriousness. He speaks throughout in that grave and solemn tone—the So-spake-the-Lord style—which never yet failed to impress superficial readers. He is anxious to convey the impression that if he has to say unpleasant things it is because his teachings are momentous to humanity, and not because he wishes to be sensational. He condescends to speak about poetry, drama, and music, but he plainly shows it to be his opinion that all these are vanities, and hardly worthy to occupy a great man’s thoughts. He aims at crushing with his contempt both artists and poets, the whole herd who have neglected science, and who try to divert the attention of humanity from this all-important subject. He would scare us with the threat that, when science has elevated humanity for a little longer, such frivolities as poetry, music, and dancing will be relegated to the nursery. Grown-up men and women, who now indulge in such pastimes, are made to feel that they belong to degenerates, and that they only prove their folly if they look upon themselves with any self-respect. He endeavours to deprive love between persons of the two sexes of its poetical reality, and to wrap it in a gloomy scientific misconception by regarding it as a feeling of comradeship grown out of habit, or as the same sexual instinct as in animals. The pure and real love which permeates life, which gives to man his manhood, and to woman her true womanhood, which has created the home and therefore the State—this love he denies, and expects serious-minded readers to look upon the world-phenomenon and the drama of humanity deprived of their chief elements—light, heat, and motion. He speaks of the tendency in men and women to take their own life when its burdens out-balance its pleasures as calmly as if suicide were the usual exit from our earthly existence. Nordau thus obtains part of his success by the same methods as those so freely adopted by the gloomy, anathematising preachers—rapidly becoming types of the past—who, by threats of the devil and hell-fire, aim at compelling their hearers to turn their attention from this world in order to brood exclusively on dismal dogmas. He would fain banish from our minds all that appeals to what is truest within us—our imagination and our emotions,—as the kill-joy fanatics in the pulpit have banished from our villages the maypole, the dance on the green, and the forfeit game.