27 JANUARY 1923, Page 3

Max Nordau, the author of Degeneration, died on Monday. The

best that can be said of him is that he was not satisfied with the current platitudes of his genera- tion; the worst that he was absolutely satisfied with his own analysis and " exposur " of them. He never had quite the patience to think things finally out, yet he had discovered the necessity of the analytical spirit. He bore in some respects, of period and of opportunity, the same relation to the Continental reaction against the spirit of the nineteenth century that Samuel Butler bore to the reaction against Victorianism in England. But how much finer, less florid, a mind was Butler's.