Poetry in the late nineteenth centuryhouse." 35 Equally important here was the inebriate Lionel Johnson.
"[W]hat he drank," Yeats writes, "would certainly be too much for that of
most of the men I knew" (379). Another, equally famous, version is the
degenerate. In early 1895 Max Nordau's Degeneration was published in
England in a translation made from the original German edition of 1892;
this study was widely reviewed and debated, particularly Nordau's belief in
the inescapable "incapacity for inaction" and "predilection for inane
reverie" that characterize "degenerates." 36 Such individuals are the pro-
ducts of industrialized societies, specifically cities. They suffer from
decayed brain centers, they therefore lack all discipline, and so they
produce the "senseless stammering and babbling of deranged minds": the
"convulsions and spasms of exhaustion" (43).
For Nordau, morality in literature is essential to its worth: "The work of
art is not its own aim, but it has a specially organic, and a social task. It is
subject to the moral law; it must obey this; it has claim to esteem only if it
is morally beautiful and ideal" (336). We can get a fairly exact measure of
what Nordau has in mind if we put his claims for art's subjection to "moral
law" against the dicta that constitute the "Preface" that Wilde added to the
second edition of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). The
following statements summarize Wilde's opposing position: "There is no
such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly
written. That is all"; "No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy
in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style"; "Vice and virtue are to
the artist materials for an art"; "We can forgive a man for making a useful
thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless
thing is that one admires it intensely"; "All art is quite useless." 37 Wilde is
very obviously "degeneration" made flesh, which is precisely how Nordau
regards him: "[w]hen ... an Oscar Wilde goes about in 'aesthetic costume'
among gazing Philistines, exciting either their ridicule or their wrath, it is
no indication of independence of character, but rather from a purely anti-
socialistic, ego-maniacal recklessness and hysterical longing to make a
sensation" (319). Although Wilde's only known comment on Nordau came
after his release from imprisonment - "I quite agree with Dr. Nordau's
assertion that all men of genius are insane," he told Chris Healy in
September 1897, "but Dr Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots" 38
- it is difficult to imagine that Nordau's book would have had no impact on
those people who, in whatever capacity, attended the trials that eventually
sentenced Wilde for committing acts of "gross indecency."
The connection between genius and insanity is age-old. But Nordau felt
that he was entitled to emphasize it because of the work of Cesare
Lombroso, whose Genius and Insanity - first published in Italy as Genio e
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