treat of it, among them the well-known Mrs. Wharton. From time to time our newspapers report that, in America, abortion has become a business and that the number of divorces is legion. Whence does decadence spring? In France its source is said to have lain chiefly in militarism, because the French were bled white and enfeebled by wars and revolutions; yet America, a wealthy land without army or militarism, is alleged to be degenerating by reason of peace and wealth! If America is called a young country, one must say that she is not young but new—her inhabitants left Europe already old, and spent their strength in pioneering. In Europe, decadence is attributed to over-population and its consequences; yet America shows signs of decadence despite the comparative sparseness of her population. Who can tell how the blending of races, the “great melting-pot”, as the Americans say, is working out morally and biologically? Nervousness and neurasthenia are widespread, and the number of suicides is increasing, just as in Europe; and there is constant talk of the nervousness—I would rather say the “nerviness”—of American women.
These and other American problems have always interested me both in themselves and as reflected in literature. In 1877, when I first came into close touch with America, a peculiar realism and, with it, new tendencies were making themselves felt. The cleavage wrought by the Civil War was healed and the unity and the power of the nation were expressing themselves in a realist and critical consciousness of the special character of America and of Americanism. From the beginning my attention was fixed on Howells and his realism, for in him the thesis can be proved that realism is the method of democracy—the observation and artistic treatment of what is called “everyday,” that is to say, non-aristocratic life. Just when I was beginning to pay more heed to American writings, the notorious case of Comstock and his campaign against literature, native and foreign, made a stir; and, through my personal associations, I was brought into lively intercourse with the great American writers then living—for, between 1877 and 1897, representatives of the elder generation like W. C. Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Whitman, Holmes and Emerson, were still alive. My relations led me also to study older writers such as Thomas Paine, Theodore Parker, the two Danas and Daniel Webster. Hawthorne I have already mentioned; in substance and in artistic value he is akin to Edgar Allan Poe whose grave I often visited when in Baltimore. Poe was a decadent. Between him and Baudelaire the comparison is
