Nordau has entertained no such considerations in dealing with the French symbolists. In obedience to his professional prejudices, he looks for no other causes, no other influences, than those that can be found in the mechanism of their brains. This is all the more amazing as he over and over again recognises that external circumstances, conditions of life and habits, exercise a strong influence on the brain, or, in other words, that the mechanism which connects the _Ego_ with matter may be influenced by the _Ego_. The result of his criticism presents therefore a want of fairness which to the English mind is especially objectionable. The manner in which he pries into the private life and antecedents of Paul Verlaine, and the indelicate manner in which he refers to the personal appearance of the poet, impress us English people as so many unfair means of giving plausibility to his conclusions. When a hunchback is good-humoured enough to make fun of his own deformity, those of gentle feelings sympathize all the more with his misfortune, and become all the more anxious not to refer to it. When a poet, in his love of truth and in his anxiety to rouse a certain emotion, makes confessions, when he instances his own sad experiences and failings, when he, so to say, throws himself into the flames on the altar of truth, we in England count it indelicate and unfair to base criticism on facts thus revealed. Had Nordau read Verlaine’s poetry with an unbiassed mind, he could not have failed to be struck by the extent to which the poet typifies the movement going on around him: his failings, his errors, and, maybe, his bad habits—all this is the fate of millions who have been induced by the materialist tendencies of recent times to disregard personal responsibility, and who, after rejecting such guides as the nobler instincts of humanity had proffered, attempt to follow the dictates of the lower instincts and animal impulses. His terrible remorse and despair, while he is still unmoved by religion, bear witness to aspirations which the materialist would fain deny. His instinctive groping for the consolations of religion shows to what an extent he attributes his failings to an irreligious life, and that he experiences within him yearnings for a happiness which the gratification of the senses, prompted by atheism, has never afforded him.