Regeneration : A reply to Max Nordau by A. Egmont Hake
"Regeneration: A Reply to Max Nordau" by A. Egmont Hake is a polemical work of cultural criticism written in the late 19th century. It rebuts Max Nordau’s Degeneration, arguing that modern art, literature, and music are not pathological signs but expressions of renewal, imagination, and ethical striving. The treatise challenges the misuse of “scientific” diagnosis in aesthetics, defends mysticism and symbolism, and situates cultural change within social realities like poverty, militarism, and
press sensationalism. The opening of the work sets the stage with Nicholas Murray Butler’s introduction, which dismantles Nordau’s melodramatic attack on modern culture and his credulous use of alienist “science,” urging fair standards and reminding readers of the steady moral and intellectual gains among “the plain people.” Hake then begins by interrogating the critic himself: he shows how judgments of an era are distorted by specialization and bias, and he reads Nordau through lenses of German deference to authority, anti-French sentiment, Jewish free‑thinker pragmatism, and “scientific superstition.” In the next section he contests Nordau’s claim that only elites are “degenerating,” noting that masses and classes mirror each other, that the real corruptor is systemic misery (especially poverty), and that citing eccentric fashions, beards, or décor as proofs of decline is absurd; unrest, he argues, is a sign of coming renewal, not decay. He then defends mysticism, imagination, and symbolic art as sane and necessary to human feeling, upholds the legitimacy of pre‑Raphaelite aims (while separating them from camp followers), corrects Nordau’s misreadings (e.g., of Millais and Holman Hunt), and highlights the limits of materialist science and the emotive power of music and visual art to convey meaning beyond strict logic. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
