Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
This is only another instance of the amazing indifference to the most easily ascertainable facts shown by Wagner's assailants, and of the truth that if you only assert a thing, however nonsensical, persistently enough, there will always be some who will believe it. I cannot be expected to go through in detail the whole string of aberrations which Nordau finds accumulated in Wagner.
And Nordau shouts in a voice more heady than that of Pilate, more throaty than that of Festus, "Mad Whitman was mad beyond the cavil of a doubt!" Turning to a friend, the President said, "There goes a MAN!" The exclamation sounds singularly like that of Napoleon on meeting Goethe.
It did not seem so to the boy this summer day, not at least the world he knew. Of course the boy had no experience. He had never heard of Juvenal nor of Max Nordau. He had no philosophy of life. He did not even know that when he became very old the world would seem to him good or bad according to the degree in which he had become a good or a bad man.
It is like straining work on an empty stomach. For youth this embroidery of details is the precocious senescence that Nordau has so copiously illustrated as literary decadence.
Despite his own complete health of mind, and the frantic disquisitions of the morbid Nordau, the little doctor felt as if he heard the colour, as if it spoke from beneath his very feet, as if it sang under his fingers when he laid them on the brocade of a couch, as if the room palpitated with a heavy music which murmured drowsily in his ears a monotonous song of dull and weary change.
But Jimmie's mind is open to persuasion, especially from one whose opinions he admires as he admires Max Nordau's, for he looked at me with more tolerance, as he said: "It is the nervous organisation, I suppose. She can bear neuralgia for days at a time which would drive me crazy in an hour, but I've seen her burst into tears because a door slammed." "Exactly so!" said Doctor Nordau.
"I don't know anything about Max Nordau," said Parker, somewhat surprised at this sudden turn of the conversation. "Are you familiar with Schopenhauer?" she asked. I'd forced him in so far that I couldn't get him out. "Schopenhauer?" said Parker, nonplussed. "Oh yes," he added, an idea dawning on his mind. "That is to say, moderately familiar though, as a matter of fact, I'm not at all musical."
But it remained for the last days of our stay for us to have our experiences. The first came about in this wise. I had brought a letter to Max Nordau from America, but I heard after I got to Paris that he was so fierce a woman hater, that I determined not to present it.
He sat down and went on, looking at me with a genuine and friendly expression: "A mediocre philosopher, like Max Nordau, would explain these incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it down to our having been slave-owners and so on; I take quite a different view of it. I repeat, we are dissatisfied because we are idealists.
Nordau told me in Paris that Tolstoy was a combination of genius and insanity. Undoubtedly Tolstoy is actuated by a genuine desire to free Russia, but the idea was unmistakably imbedded in my mind that his Christianity was like Napoleon's description of a Russian.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking