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In all the conversations I ever had with Max Nordau, he spent most of the time in trying to be a help and a benefit to me. The physician in him was always at the front. His aim was healing, and I only regret that their intimate personality prevents me from relating them word for word, as they would interest and benefit others quite as much as they did me.
Within recent years the distinct grievance of each group has been made articulate in a formal denunciation of the artist's morals. There is, first, that notorious indictment, Degeneration, by Max Nordau. Nordau speaks eloquently for all who claim the name "average plain citizen," all who would hustle off to the gallows anyone found guilty of breaking the lockstep imposed upon men by convention.
I recommend the entire chapter to such men as Lombroso Levi, Max Nordau and Heinrich Pudor, who have yet to learn that "all confusion of intellectual substances is foolish." Oscar Bie states the Chopin case most excellently: Chopin is a poet. It has become a very bad habit to place this poet in the hands of our youth.
Max Nordau, that devastating critic of art and literature, was swept off his feet and described the pamphlet as a revelation, Richard Beer Hoffman, the poet, wrote to Herzl saying "At last there comes again a man, who does not carry his Judaism with resignation as if it were a burden or a misfortune, but is proud to be the legal heir of an immemorial culture."
Strange that Nordau, in his "Conventional Lies of Civilisation," should echo this aspiration and gush over the Goethean Wahlverwandtschaft the elective affinity of souls almost with the rapture of a Platonist, conceiving love as the soul finding its pre-natal half.
But that is not the point, it is not a matter of pro and con; the thing is that in one way or another Tolstoy has passed for me, he is not in my soul, and he has departed from me, saying: "I leave this your house empty." I am untenanted. I am sick of theorizing of all sorts, and such bounders as Max Nordau I read with positive disgust.
Nordau gives with generous enthusiasm of his time, his learning, his genius, most of all, of himself. Tolstoy fastens himself upon each newcomer politely, like a courteous leech, sucks him dry, and then writes. Max Nordau, like Shakespeare, absorbs humanity as a whole.
I saw that civilization was honeycombed with what Max Nordau called conventional lies, with sham ecstasy, sham sympathy, sham smiles, sham laughter
"Then I will leave you to judge for yourself," said Doctor Nordau. "The entire amount I have received from my American publishers for 'Degeneration' is fifty pounds! That is every sou!" "Fifty pounds!" cried Jimmie, in consternation. "Why that is only two hundred and fifty dollars of our money!" "I leave it to you to judge for yourselves," said Doctor Nordau again.
He took her hand and held it whilst he spoke. His finger and thumb closed on her pulse, as I thought instinctively and unconsciously, as she spoke. "The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of an imperfectly formed mind. Thus, in a difficulty he has to seek resource in habit.
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