Degeneration / by Max Nordau.

  • Nordau, Max Simon, 1849-1923.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Degeneration / by Max Nordau. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    foreign to it, that is, as a sort of accompaniment to a long spun- out, insipid love-story, and its poetical thin broth; for the libretto of an opera does not tolerate concise poetry, full of genius and thought.' This is an absolute condemnation of the Wagnerian idea of the musical drama as the collective art-work of the future. It might seem, it is true, that certain recent experiments in psychophysics had come to the help of Wagner's theory of the reciprocal enhancement of the simultaneous effects of different arts. ' Charles F^re* has, in fact, shown that the ear hears more keenly when the eye is simultaneously stimulated by an agreeable (dynamogenous) colour; but, in the first place, this phenomenon may also be interpreted thus: that the keenness of hearing is enhanced not by the visual im- pression as such, not simply as sense excitation, but only through its dynamogenous quality, which arouses the whole nervous system as well to a more lively activity. And then the question in Fere's experiments is merely one of simple sense-perceptions, whereas the musical drama is supposed to awaken a higher cerebral activity, to produce presentations and thoughts, together with direct emotions ; in which case each of the arts acting in concert will produce, in consequence of the necessary dispersion of the attention to it, a more feeble effect than if it appealed by itself alone to sense and intellect. Wagner's second assertion, that the natural evolution of each art necessarily leads it to the surrender of its independence and to its fusion with the other arts,-f- contradicts so strongly all experience and all the laws of evolution, that it can at once be characterized as delirious. Natural development always proceeds from the simple to the complex—not inversely; progress con- sists in differentiation, i.e., in the evolution of originally similar parts into special organs of different structure and independent functions, and not in the retrogression of differentiated beings of rich specialization to a protoplasm without physiognomy. * Charles Fdr6, Sensatioii et Mouvement. Paris, 1887. t Das Ktcjtstwerk der Zukttnft, p. 169 : ' It is only when the desire of the artistic sculptor has passed into the soul of the dancer, of the mimic inter- J>reter, of him who smgs and speaks, that this desire can be conceived as satistied. It is only when the art of sculpture no longer exists, or has fol- lowed another tendency than that of representing human bodies when it has passed, as sculpture, into archiiechire~\vh&n the rigid solitude of this ■cue man carved in stone will have been resolved into the infinitely flowing- plurality of veritable, living men ... it is only then, too, that real i>lastic will exist._ And on p. 182 : 'That which it [painting] honestly exerts itself to attain, it attains in . . . greatest perfection . . . when it descends from canvas and chalk to ascend to the tragic stage. ... But landscape-painting will become, as the last and most finished conclusion of all the fiine arts thi Jife-giying soul, properly speaking, of architecture ; it will teach us thus to organize the stage for works of the dramatic art of the future, in which itself living, it will represent the warm background of nature for the use of the ■iiviitg, and not for the imitated man.'