Nordau is very severe on several other symbolists and certainly does his best to represent them in an unfavourable light. In order to show that Charles Morice, the author of _La Littérature de tout à l’heure_ is literally insane and a graphomaniac, he quotes Morice’s rhapsodical conception of God, which he pretends to take as an exact definition in order to reduce it to twaddle. To any unprejudiced reader it is evident that Morice intended to convey by this wild attempt at description how impossible it is to define God. Nordau’s prejudice against the French nation becomes palpable when speaking of the fact that the French language lends itself badly to blank verse and that a freer treatment of it in French poetry is a comparatively modern departure which by other countries was taken long ago. He says: “But to any one but a Frenchman, they merely make themselves ridiculous when they trumpet their painful hobbling after the nations who are far in front of them, as an unheard-of discovery of new paths and opening up of new roads and as an advance inspired by the ideal into the dawn of the future.” This gratuitous insult of a whole nation gives us a vivid insight into the working of his mind. He would not have penned a sentence of such bad taste, and so marked by the echolalia he condemns in others, had he not been prompted by feelings stronger than his judgment. CHAPTER VI _THE LIGHT OF RUSSIA_ With regard to the Russian novelist, Count Leo Tolstoi, Nordau pursues the same mode of criticism as he employed against other writers. He also aims at the same object, firstly, to show that authors suffer from mental aberration; and, secondly, that the public who read their books do not do so on account of their literary merit, but because the readers are mentally afflicted in the same way as the authors. To prove this against Tolstoi and his admirers is no light enterprise, and Nordau does not acquit himself of his self-imposed task without a great deal of shuffling. He allows nothing for Tolstoi’s surroundings, the social condition of the country in which he lives, and the life he has led, but lifts him out of all that tends to interpret this ultra-Russian writer, and regards him as one who has evolved some extraordinary notions in a studio far from his native land.