To say the least, then, it is somewhat surprising to be stopped on the street corner and assured, with due emphasis and the appearance of authority, that nineteenth-century men and women are absorbed in interests that mark a diseased type of mind, and are given over to a literature, an art, and a music that, themselves produced by madmen, are rapidly reducing us all to the mad-house level; in other words, that we and our boasted civilization are degenerates. There is, as I have said, a certain use in this brutal proceeding, for it causes us to stop and think. It shatters our conceit and shakes our confidence. If we pause only for a moment, yet pause we must. The mere daring of the attack forces this. So it has come about that Nordau’s _Degeneration_, quite apart from its intrinsic merits or demerits, has been widely read and much talked of throughout the civilized world. It has provoked some anger, not a little amusement, and a fair measure of contempt. Yet in a certain subtle way it has set us to examining the reasons that lead most of us to deny the essential viciousness and abnormality of some of the most salient and striking characteristics of contemporary culture. If Nordau’s indictment be classed as pessimism, it at least has the merit of novelty of statement. From Homer’s time to the present poets and philosophers have not forgotten, even in moments of highest exaltation, to remind man that his life has a dark and hopeless side. Our own century has listened to Leopardi, who envied only the dead, and to Schopenhauer, who called man both the priest and the victim of nature. And yet we have not been altogether unhappy. But Nordau is no ordinary pessimist. He does not lead us to despair through the by-paths of metaphysical subtlety, nor does he take advantage of the awful mystery of pain to perplex and distract us. Rather he drags us into the laboratory and, stretching us on a table of definitions made for the purpose, proceeds to measure our faces and our skulls, our teeth, the lobes of our ears, and our palates; we pay the penalty of our individuality in being found to be “morbid deviations from an original type,” and are therefore degenerate. Next comes an examination of a selected group of man’s newer interests. The music of Wagner, the dramas of Ibsen, the romances of Zola, the art of the pre-Raphaelites, the mystics, the symbolists, the Parnassians—who but a “decadent” would treat all these alike?—are passed in review and pronounced to be proofs of the decadence of mankind even more conclusive than those based upon physical measurements. All this is done in the name of Science, which, reversing the procedure of Saturn, thus hastens to devour the parent that begot it, Modern Civilization.