Of books of these various classes Max Nordau has made a dismal list in "Degeneration," a book itself discouragingly bulky, discouragingly opinionated, discouragingly prejudiced and illogical, and yet not without much rightness both of perception and intention. He says of the books most popular with that portion of society which is most in evidence, that they diffuse a curious perfume, yielding distinguishable odors of incense, eau de Lubin, and refuse, one or the other preponderating alternately.... Books treating of the relations of the sexes, with no matter how little reserve, seem too dully moral. Elegant titillation only begins where normal sexual relations leave off.... Ghost-stories are very popular, but they must come on in scientific disguise, as hypnotism, telepathy, or somnambulism. So are marionette plays, in which seemingly naïve but knowing rogues make used-up old ballad dummies babble like babies or idiots. So are esoteric novels in which the author hints that he could say a deal about magic, fakirism, kabbala, astrology, and other white and black arts if he chose. Readers intoxicate themselves in the hazy word-sequences of symbolic poetry. Ibsen dethrones Goethe; Maeterlinck ranks with Shakespeare; Nietzsche is pronounced by German and even French critics to be the leading German writer of the day; the "Kreutzer Sonata" is the Bible of ladies, who are amateurs in love, but bereft of lovers; dainty gentlemen find the street ballads and gaol-bird songs of Jules Jouy, Bruant, MacNab, and Xanroff very _distingué_ on account of "the warm sympathy pulsing in them," as the phrase runs; and society persons, whose creed is limited to baccarat and the money market, make pilgrimages to the Oberammergau Passion-Play, and wipe away a tear over Paul Verlaine's invocations to the Virgin.--_Degeneration_, ii.