Max Nordau's chapter on Ibsen in 'Degeneration,' and felt better.

He

The author of this dismal and evil-smelling play is certainly one of the portents of the age. voices better than any one else its morbid tendencies, and, although a man, he is distinctly the founder of the new so-called science of feminine psychology. That is to say, he above all others has directed the energies of the woman psychologist into the channels they now run in. To my humble way of thinking, these semi-insane weaklings and irresponsible neuropaths of the Ibsenite drama are neither admirable nor interesting. They are simply "sick" men and women; degenerates to be shunned, like any other manifestations of disease. And yet they serve as the pattern and type of characters in books and plays innumerable that have taken hold of the public mind. It would be interesting to know how far this literature is the cause, and how far simply the expression, of the morbid tendencies of which I have spoken. The shockingly improper young person in Miss Marie Corelli's Sorrows of Satan,' who would have flirted with the Devil if that more selfrespecting personage had permitted her, attributed her moral downfall to our modern literature of decadence. It was the "satyrsongster," Swinburne, and those wicked women novelists, who wrought all the mischief. Max Nordau thinks that the influence of polite literature on life is much greater than that of life on polite literature. He mentions several instances of fashions being set by books, the most remarkable one being the epidemic of suicide that broke out in Germany after the publication of 'The Sorrows of Young Werther.' Every one knows that the young men in Byron's

Sick, sick; unfound the boon, unslaked the thirst.

Though to the last in verge of our decay,

Some phantom lures, such as sought at first

we

But all too late-so are we doubly curst.

Love, fame, ambition, avarice-'tis the same,

Each idle, and all ill, and none the worst

For all are meteors with a different

name, And Death the sable smoke where vanishes the flame."

This stanza contains as good psychology and as good philosophy as any Scandinavian drama, while there is something almost elevating in the swing and rhythm of the majestic verse compared with the commonplace and the banalités of Ibsen's "Ollendorffian" dialogue. No doubt the Byronic morbidity was all affectation, but so to a great extent is the psychology and morbid pessimism of these days. Marie Bashkirtseff was a walking affectation, a mere pose in petticoats, but she succeeded in making herself intensely miserable. And it seems certain that the same process of needless self-torture is at work in some women's minds now. It is difficult to explain on any other hypothesis their craving for the literature of hysteria or decadence -the doleful squalor of Ibsen, the mawkishness of the neurotic fiction writers, or that strange blend of "hoggishness and hysteria," to borrow a truculent critic's phrase, 'Jude the Obscure.' I know there are people who

say that the whole thing is mere literary and journalistic frothjust as the New Woman was said to be solely a creation of the comic newspapers-and that the sex is no more uneasy in its mind than it was formerly. Surely, however, the evidence is all the other way. The New Woman is simply the woman of to-day striving to shake off old shackles, and the immense mass of "revolting " literature cannot have grown out of nothing, or continue to flourish upon mere curiosity. Mrs Devereux's chapter on "The Feminine Potential" contains some caustic satire on the sham realism with which some women nowadays saturate their souls, and their "cult of the gutter" is unkindly described "simply a form of hysteria based upon a morbid appetite for coquetting with sin, so characteristic of the modern woman."

as

Besides being the outward and visible sign of our modern malaise of the nerves, these books are also an undoubted aggravation of the disorder. If one asks what is the good of it all, one is told that it is inevitable. But surely morbid ity is a disease which can be combated like other diseases, and equally, on the other hand, aggravated by continually dwelling on morbid subjects. And, after all, the world is not made up entirely of refuse - heaps or hospitals; and no sort of good can come out of this literary scavenging and constant removal of the rags that cover poor humanity's sores. That life is full of suffering, and that women have more than their fair share of it, are facts sufficiently sad in themselves without perpetually harping upon them. Of all regrets, we are told, "the nausea of sex is the vainest, the most futile"; and surely even the lot of women has its compensa

tions. There are still many left who have the pluck to say that, in spite of all temptations to belong to the opposite sex, they prefer to remain as they are. Much has been done already, especially in the way of relaxing certain stupid social conventions, to make their lives freer and happier than they were before, and more, doubtless, will be done in the future. To take one small instance, the bicycle, though in some respects it has added a new terror to life, has certainly done something to take women out of themselves, and thus to lighten the load they bear. I cannot help thinking that if poor Marie Bashkirtseff had only possessed a "bike," it might have prolonged her life by rendering her less self-centred and miserable than she was.

There is much that is pathetic in the self- questioning and the cravings of the type of woman depicted in neurotic fiction. There is a note of infinite weariness, a kind of anæmic despondency, in books of the 'Keynotes' class; but there is also a note of real pain.

No one can read them without seeing that the writers have felt, and felt deeply; but while their dolefulness may command our sympathy, the expression of it in hysterical or squalid stories is not to be encouraged, for it does but add one grain more to the heap of humanity's woes. The sale of these books by thousands is not a healthy sign. People read them because they are interested in them, and the interest arises from the fact that what they read corresponds to something in their own natures. Fru Hansson tells us that when 'Keynotes' was published the critics said that the heroines were exceptional types; but the critics, as usual, were wrong. "Good heavens! How

stupid they are!' laughed Mrs Egerton. Numberless women wrote to her, women whom she did not know, and whose acquaintance she never made. 'We are quite ordinary everyday sort of people,' they said; we lead trivial unimportant lives: but there is something in us that vibrates to your touch, for we, too, are such as you describe.'” If so many hysterical people really exist, the best advice that can be given them is to try and cultivate a sense of humour and to "bike" in moderation.

One morbid symptom of our social life is certainly fostered and developed by books of the "revolting" type, and that is the mutual suspiciousness of men and women. Fru Hansson remarks that, in spite of the breaking down of many barriers of social intercourse, there never was a time when the sexes stood wider apart than at present; and when man is represented by so many lady novelists as a blackguard or an idiot, or both, sometimes diseased, always a libertine and a bully, one can hardly wonder at the result. There is no doubt that the literature of vituperation and of sex-mania, with its perpetual harping on the miseries of married life, and its public washing of domestic dirty linen, tends to widen the breach between men and women, and to make them more mutually distrustful than ever.

To institute comparisons between the literary pygmies of these days and the giants of the past may possibly provoke a smile. Nevertheless it may be useful, perhaps, magnis componere parva, to see in what qualities we moderns are especially deficient. As far as mere style goes, there are many living writers who are the superiors of Scott, to take a single example. This sounds rank heresy, but it is nevertheless true. But in such

larger matters as character-drawing, in breadth of sympathy and observation, and, most of all, in their sense of proportion and the atmosphere of restfulness and restraint which envelops their work, the older authors far surpass their successors. Unlike the latter, the great novelists of this century were never morbid or hysterical, and they maintained a dignified reticence in dealing with delicate subjects. The soul of woman was presented by them in less questionable shape. One cannot imagine Diana Vernon, to take one instance that occurs to me, prattling in public about her sexual emotions. Very possibly she may have been filled, like any young person in modern fiction, with "erotic yearnings for fulness of life," but at any rate she had the good taste to keep them to herself. The feebler literary folk of to-day have departed from these wholesome traditions, and have determined to set themselves free from what one of their number, Mr Grant Allen, calls "the leprous taint of respectability." Not content with the shining examples set them by their great English forerunners, they blindly copy French and Norwegian models, and endeavour to supplement their own lack of talent, and to stimulate the flagging interest of their readers, by concentrating their attention upon whatever is foul and unlovely in life.

I read in the newspapers not long ago that an American lady was fortunate enough to obtain the coveted appointment of Garbage Inspector in the town of Denver, with power to burn and destroy the city refuse; and the thought struck me that it might be well if some enterprising Englishwoman could be found to undertake the post of Literary Garbage Inspector in this country,

with authority to relieve the shelves of our circulating libraries of the rubbish under which they groan. I fear, however, the task would be beyond the powers of any single person to accomplish. In the longrun the reading public must always its own censor of books, with the Press as its most effective auxiliary; and it is the lâches of the Press that are largely responsible for the vulgarisation of our fiction in the past decade. As far as concerns the past year, it may readily be admitted that both the literature and the drama of 1896 have shown a distinct improvement upon those of two or three years ago. The protests of the Philistines have not been altogether in vain. We have seen less of our so-called realists and second-hand Diabolists, our fishers for grotesque fantasies in the unclean waters of a diseased imagination. The tide of popular taste is flowing in healthier channels, and the change seems to have affected even that most "modern" of poets, Mr John Davidson. We thought he belonged to the anarchical school, but the following verse of his "Ballad of a Workman" seems to prove him a convert to the old-fashioned ideas of discipline and self-restraint :

"Only obedience can be great;

It brings the Golden Age again;
Even to be still, abiding Fate,
Is kingly ministry to men !"

I commend these lines, coming as they do from so unexpected a quarter, to those ladies whose souls are filled with the fret and fury of revolt or the questionings and self-torture of the new psychology. Such sentiments might have emanated from Carlyle himself-so little do they accord with our modern "eleuthero-mania," or the triumphant doctrine of the ego. We seem to have quitted awhile the seductive society of Baudelaire's surhomme or the Urmensch of Nietzsche, so beloved of the 'Keynotes' novelist, and to be listening once more to the voice of the older prophets. I rather fear, however, lest Mr Davidson may be preaching to deaf ears. Counsels of obedience will be lost upon those watchers for the dawning of the dies domina who claim, not equality, but admitted supremacy, for their sex. "To be still" is advice no less unpalatable to our neuropaths, male or female, who are so busily occupied in rendering the burden of existence intolerable. It would be well, indeed, if they could be induced to follow it. Both in life and in literature humanity has less need nowadays of mental excitants than of sedatives; and the true prophet of the future will be, not another Ibsen, but one who shall deliver to a disordered world the great gospel of Anti-Fuss.

HUGH E. M. STUTFIELD.