The diagnosis made by Dr P. C. Remondino, M.D. was unambiguous. “Trilby is a masterpiece when viewed in the light of a study in heredity,” he announced in the pages of Practical Medicine in Reference Remondino1895. “Du Maurier has given us . . . the well digested results of a careful as well as discriminating study. . . . Neither Darwin, [nor] Galton, . . . could have given us a more comprehensive or more lucid study of the subject. Neither could Maudsley” (380–81). Despite the good doctor's critical insight, Trilby's deployment of degenerationist discourse has often gone unnoticed. On the rare occasions it has been touched upon, it has most often been subsumed under the banner of fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism or connected to Du Maurier's anti-Aestheticism.Footnote ¹ Yet what this essay reveals is that art, degeneration, and anti-Semitism were, in fact, intimately connected in the late nineteenth century, and that this not only influenced literature, it also shaped its reception. This essay examines Trilby (1894) in conjunction with The Master (Reference Zangwill1894), a novel by the most important British Zionist of the late nineteenth century, Israel Zangwill. Since Zangwill's death in 1926, literary critics have paid him scant attention. His contributions to degenerationism have been wholly overlooked even though his notion of the “melting pot” was almost certainly the theory of ethnicity with the most traction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.Footnote ²

Zangwill was the preeminent Anglo-Jewish author of the late nineteenth century. Though his works have sunk into relative obscurity, it is difficult to overstate the magnitude of his cultural importance during his lifetime. In an issue of the Bookman entirely dedicated to Zangwill, Holbrook Jackson praised him for having enriched English culture and contributed an important ingredient to the period's cultural ferment:

In the 1890s, Zangwill became editor of Ariel, or the London Puck, a comic paper that closely modeled itself on Punch, the periodical where Du Maurier had famously made his mark (Rochelson, “Israel”).Footnote ³ As a result of a commission to write a Jewish Robert Elsmere, Zangwill produced The Children of the Ghetto: a Study of Peculiar People (1892), which instantly transformed him into an international literary celebrity. By the mid-1890s, he was thoroughly integrated into the London literary and cultural scene.

Zangwill was concerned that his reputation rested solely on popular Jewish stories, and he aspired to a more artistic, highbrow readership. “I myself am becoming identified with the Ghetto,” he told the interviewer for To-day. “But my interests extend beyond the Jews, and with The Master I widen my field” (“The Master” 361). Zangwill wrote The Master with a dual purpose: he wanted to write a novel that would gain him entry into the non-Jewish literary world, and he felt that the aesthetic movement merited analysis. These two objectives were well matched. Aestheticism was already associated with elite cliques and coteries, high art and the chattering classes. By the 1890s, Aestheticism and decadence had become virtually synonymous with degeneration. With The Master and Trilby, Zangwill and Du Maurier took this association a step further by bringing together art, degeneration, and Jewishness.

Du Maurier was an early disciple of Darwin (Ormond 327).Footnote ⁴ Zangwill keenly followed developments in social Darwinism and degenerationism, and heavily criticized Max Nordau's Degeneration (Reference Nordau1895) (Entartung [1892]).Footnote ⁵ One of his earliest novels, The Premier and the Painter (Reference Zangwill and Cowen1888), called upon a character called “Dr. Maudsley, a writer of some mark in physio-psychology and an authority on lunacy” as an expert witness in an investigation (Zangwill and Cowen 457). The case was “pregnant of meaning to the mental pathologist,” Maudsley said. He “intended to incorporate a minute study of it into the next edition of his Pathology of Mind.” Here fact collided with fiction: the book was actually by Henry Maudsley, the original of Zangwill's character, a well-known psychiatrist and pathologist who had published his original findings under the title The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867).

The issue of degeneration drives both Trilby and The Master and is intimately mingled with the novels’ critiques of fin-de-siècle aesthetics. Zangwill and Du Maurier used their novels as experiments in social Darwinism, and as means of exploring a variety of biological and environmental theories of degeneration. In doing so, both positioned themselves at the center of an increasingly polarized debate. On the one hand, Max Nordau, the leading degeneration theorist of the period, argued that degeneration was the result of environmental causes. On the other, the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley and the criminologist Cesare Lombroso believed degeneration to be hereditary. According to Maudsley and Lombroso's schema, heredity was destiny. “We are governed by silent laws which never cease to operate and which rule society with more authority than the laws inscribed on our statute books,” Lombroso said (qtd. in Gould 153). Maudsley concurred, and said so. “No one can elude the destiny that is innate in him, and which unconsciously and irresistibly shapes his ends” (qtd. in Greenslade 163).

Whereas Zangwill often leans towards the determining power of social circumstances, Du Maurier frequently emphasizes the force of heredity. Trilby and The Master depict degenerate characters and solicit the reader's participation in determining whether it is nature, nurture, or both which makes them so. Though the nature-nurture controversy is debated to this day, Du Maurier and Zangwill's contributions illuminate the intimate connection between race, environment, class, and art at the fin de siècle. What is at stake here is how both authors problematize the view that blood is the literal vehicle through which degeneration is transmitted, as well as the literal substance of artistic and ethnic identity by allowing that environmental factors influence and intervene in this scheme of heredity. The persistent triangulation of art, degeneration, and anti-Semitism suggests their importance to the popular imagination at the fin de siècle.

The Master tells the transatlantic tale of a Canadian painter's attempt to conquer the London art world. Like Trilby, the novel is a Künstlerroman featuring artists struggling to find their place among charismatic idlers, decadents, and Bohemians. Both novels spice traditional romantic plots with a subtext of adultery and romanticized depictions of studio life. Both novels include obvious caricatures of the painter, James McNeill Whistler.Footnote ⁶ Both were published in 1894 and associated with Harper's.Footnote ⁷ Most importantly, both are intensely preoccupied with degeneration.

Zangwill gave the painter-hero of his novel the name of Matt Strang, and endowed him with a physique that betrays no signs of degeneracy. Matt's “stalwart, well-proportioned figure and his handsome head stood out notably from a serried batch of degenerate physiques” (343), but what is inside that handsome head is quite another matter. For starters, Matt's mother was insane, and his brother is “a cripple” (12). And then there is Matt himself. Prey to attacks of “morbid mood” (374) and suicidal mania, Matt's own children are lymphatic, sickly, and slow-witted (324). In Criminal Man (L'uomo delinquente [1876]), the degenerationist and so-called father of criminology, Cesare Lombroso, elaborated a classification for this type, enumerating diagnostic traits such as an absence of signs of physical degeneration, affection for family (sometimes to excess), immoderate altruism or abstemiousness, and an excessive energy for work.Footnote ⁸ According to Lombroso, degeneration of this kind was hereditary and therefore inescapable. Lombroso christened this type the “mattoid” (from the Italian matto, insane), a label Zangwill might have had in mind when he endowed his degenerate master artist with the Christian name of Matt,Footnote ⁹ as well as the patronymic Strang, a further allusion to his strange status.

Despite Zangwill's wish for a successful non-Jewish novel, in selecting Matt Strang he could not have chosen a hero more deeply permeated by a ghetto mentality. The novel opens with a bittersweet proem that establishes the theme of dual allegiances between art and the world that will dominate the story. However, Zangwill articulates this leitmotif in terms befitting a conflicted English Jew: “Ah, but to see the world with other eyes than one's fellows, yet express the vision of one's race, its subconscious sense of beauty, is not at all a covetable dower” (The Master 4). Here, as elsewhere in the novel, the diction betrays a conflation between the racial and the artistic and reveals an investment in this coupling. Given the regularity of such slippages, Matt is not Jewish, but he may as well be. There is perhaps no better example of a character in English literature who so resembles a crypto-Jew but whom, the author promises us, is not Jewish. For one thing, Matt is a transatlantic aesthete, a wandering non-Jew. For another, great swaths of the novel are taken up by his search for a psycho-geographic homeland, a fact that betrays a preoccupation near to Zangwill's heart. Matt's quest for a home in The Master is not unconnected to Zangwill's belief in a Jewish homeland. In fact, shortly after writing The Master, Zangwill's friend, Max Nordau, introduced him to Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism. This relationship marked the beginning of Zangwill's involvement in the Zionist movement and, in time, his advocacy of Territorialism and a Palestine-centered Jewish nationalism (Udelson 164).

There are still other Jewish elements to Zangwill's ostensibly non-Jewish artist-hero. Matt's invisible taint is transmitted through the maternal line, just as Judaic law teaches that Jewishness is biologically inherited from the maternal line (Davies 843). Like Daniel Deronda, the crypto-Jew of George Eliot's eponymous novel, Matt's degenerate nature endows him with a dual but invisible (and therefore secret) identity. He is a conflicted type for whom “the hidden is not marked upon the skin, for the skin hides rather than reveals,” as Sander Gilman observes in The Jew's Body (123). The longstanding psychiatric view of Jews as more susceptible to insanity and delusions of the mind is enacted through Matt's anxiety over his blood taint.Footnote ¹⁰ This tendency to neurosis has the same root as the stereotype of Jewish hypochondria later made famous by Woody Allen. Matt's ruminations also function as a means of drawing attention to his lineage, and to the bad blood he has inherited. He wonders whether his artistic calling means he belongs to a chosen people, “whether the artist were a cold-blooded monster, or a divinely appointed alchemist” (519–20). And during a visit to the London galleries, his kinship with the painters exhibited there is confirmed in terms of a heredity of insanity: “he too was of their blood and race, . . . he too had seen visions and heard voices” (137). Zangwill's insistent commingling of degenerationist and Jewish stereotypes combines to cast serious doubt on Matt's identity.

On the surface at least, Trilby's artist-hero, Little Billee, would appear to be Matt's alter ego. Du Maurier attributes Little Billee's artistic talent to “a tinge of that strong, sturdy, irrepressible, indomitable, indelible [Jewish] blood which is of such priceless value in diluted homeopathic doses” (7). At first glance, this smacks of philosemitism of a kind similar to Holbrook Jackson's appreciation of Zangwill qua Jew (“the Hebrew [race is . . .] a leavening medium”). But look again, and Du Maurier's ostensible compliment morphs into something far more sinister, especially when we bear in mind that homeopathy works on the principle that very small doses of substances (some otherwise toxic) stimulate the body to react defensively, thus enabling it to heal itself. Du Maurier portrays Jewishness “as both medicinal (‘homeopathic doses’) and poisonous,” as Sarah Gracombe observes (93). These polar possibilities – the Jew as talented artist or as mad genius – also define the axis along which the novel characterizes its other Jewish protagonists. Little Billee is the recipient of a beneficent “homeopathic dose” while Svengali is the victim of an overdose, the narrative heavy-handedly suggests. Little Billee and Svengali not only represent “different points on the spectrum of genius,” as Dennis Denisoff contends (Aestheticism 85), but different points on a spectrum of Jewishness. Trilby presses this point home in making virtually every reasonably capable artist in the novel Jewish, from Gecko and Glorioli, to Mimi La Salope and Moses Lyon, the art dealer (Gracombe 93). A drop of this blood will save you, but two will damn you, Du Maurier implies. Or, in Linda Gertner Zatlin's apt summation, “the diseased full-blooded Jew, when infinitely diluted, becomes the noble Victorian Englishman” (129).

I have gone over this in some detail in order to make clear my contention that Du Maurier's Jews and Zangwill's artist are, in fact, subsets of a better-known, much larger category of late nineteenth-century characters: degenerates. In other words, despite their specificities both characters carry the negative valence of the degenerate. According to degenerationists, the problem posed by such types lay not in their individual differences, but in their commonalities. This is why what I term “homeopathic dose theory” (after Du Maurier) enjoyed such a wide applicability: it could just as easily be deployed by an unconscious anti-Semite like Du Maurier as by a Jew like Zangwill. The common target – “the degenerate” – was instantly recognizable to a fin-de-siècle readership. Most importantly, the degenerate type benefited from being both a nebulous entity and a capacious category: it transcended the specificity of Du Maurier's or Zangwill's particular assault by virtue of its general applicability.

Du Maurier and Zangwill's chauvinistic adoption of the degenerate type as a means to further their dissimilar ends actually reflects the diagnostic efforts of the period's medical specialists. With regard to Jews, the consensus was clear: they were, specialists said, more disposed to insanity than other members of the population at large. It is worth reminding ourselves that this theory was not only prevalent, but that it also gained acceptance among leading European psychiatrists, such as Jean Martin Charcot and Richard von Krafft-Ebbing (who took the view that the tendency was the result of inbreeding), as well as among Jewish degenerationists, such as Lombroso and Nordau, who believed insanity to be nurtured by social environments in which the Jew experienced persecution (Chamberlin and Gilman 291–92).

Trilby and The Master mirror the fin-de-siècle tendency to use degeneracy as a catch-all for types and groups consigned to what the critic William Greenslade aptly terms a “zone of abnormality” containing “men of genius, anarchists, lunatics, hooligans, prostitutes” and anyone who showed “symptoms of a pathology, congenital criminality, hysteria or neurasthenia” (18). As the nineteenth century progressed, this elastic category stretched to include members of the lower classes, homosexuals, and imperial conquests such as “our dusky cousins,” as T. H. Huxley characteristically put it (qtd. in Greenslade 22). Contemporary anxieties surrounding class, sexuality and race were thus co-opted into what had, by the 1890s, become an ubiquitous idiom which permeated the popular imagination. Degenerationism became a convenient way of categorizing the ever-growing set of circumstances that made white, heteronormative, middle-class British men and women feel increasingly threatened. Thus, colonial conflict and the decline of imperial power, the revelations of Oscar Wilde's trials and the Cleveland Street scandals, and appalling scenes of urban poverty could all be lumped into a “degenerate” zone which acted as a cordon sanitaire around the public's anxieties.

The origin of Du Maurier's homeopathic dose theory of heredity has never been traced.Footnote ¹¹ It is likely that Du Maurier referred to a number of sources, including Darwin and degenerationist science. The psychiatrist Bénédict Morel's Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine (Reference Morel1857) is most often credited with having been the first to formulate the notion of human degeneracy. In this enormously influential work, Morel defined the degenerate as “une deviation maladive d'un type primitif” (“a morbid deviation from an original type”).Footnote ¹² According to this view, the degenerate was a carrier of an inheritable disease which progressively impeded his ability to fulfill his human purpose (“sa fonction dans l'humanité”) and prevented him from living a normal life (5). In order to explain degeneration in humans, Morel turned to the work of Karl Friedrich von Heusinger, a pathologist who had studied degeneration in animals a few years earlier. Both agreed that a trainer could encourage the “evolution” of domesticated animals, such as dogs, and that this would lead to the improvement (“perfectionnement”) of the race.Footnote ¹³ Heusinger observed that animals that went back to the wild lost their learned traits and returned to their original state, an effect he termed “degeneration” (Heusinger 162). So, for instance, undomesticated dogs would resume barking (Morel 6). What made Morel's contribution new was that he believed that humans operated differently to animals. Left to his own devices, Morel argued, the human degenerate did not return to his original state, but progressively became even more degraded. For Heusinger, degeneration was a return to the original state, whereas for Morel it was a degradation to a savage form of subnormality.

Given the parallels with the effects Du Maurier's representation of Jewish blood on human character, it is quite possible that Morel's Traité des dégénérescences was among the sources for Trilby. It is reasonable to think Du Maurier knew Morel's work because it was rapidly incorporated with Darwin's, which Du Maurier greatly admired (Carlson 140). When Du Maurier came to describe the result of Little Billee's mongrelized bloodline he also reached for a canine analogy, describing Jewish blood as being “like the famous bulldog strain, which is not beautiful in itself, and yet just for lacking a little of the same no greyhound can ever hope to be a champion” (7). In On the Origin of Species (Reference Darwin1859), Darwin notes that, “some authors who have written on Dogs, maintain that the greyhound and bulldog, though appearing so different, are really varieties most closely allied, and have probably descended from the same wild stock” (444). It is worth noting that Du Maurier compares several of the novel's Jewish characters to dogs – Gecko is “doglike” (72), Little Billee's “love for Trilby became as that of a dog for its master” (214), Mrs. Svengali has “the obedience and devotion of a dog” (246), and Svengali's mouth reveals “big yellow teeth baring themselves in a mongrel canine snarl” (92).

The connection between Du Maurier, Darwin and Morel sheds light on Trilby's most bizarre and didactic passage. On his way to ask the vicar for his daughter's hand in marriage, Little Billee discusses Darwinism with his dog, Tray. We learn that this is his third rereading of the Origin of Species, and we hear him anxiously puzzle out what it means for him. “What allowances will he make for a poor little weak-kneed, well-meaning waif of a painter-fellow like me, whose only choice lay between Mr. Darwin and the Pope of Rome, and who has chosen once and for ever – and that long ago – before he'd ever even heard of Mr. Darwin's name,” Little Billee worries to Tray (181). This important digression has been read by several critics as a dilemma hinging on the choice between two faiths – science and generic religion.Footnote ¹⁴ However, such an interpretation belies the specificity of Little Billee's diction which construes his predicament as hinging on two alternatives: Darwin's science (which is open to him) and the Pope's Christianity (from which he is barred). But there is, of course, no real choice here: the die is already cast for Little Billee. What is more, it is at this juncture that his invisible inheritance begins to express itself.

It is not for nothing that Little Billee's confession to his canine friend sounds ominously like degenerate self-diagnosis. Indeed, this awkward interaction signposts a diagnostic turn in the novel as a whole. Suddenly, the narrative tips into rhetoric usually reserved for Svengali, the arch-Jew, to whom Little Billee has, until now, been the acceptable foil. Yet in this passage the first-person narrator abruptly intrudes to steer the reader towards a new understanding of Little Billee: “And now, I regret to say, the reticent Little Billee is going to show his trusty four-footed friend the least attractive side of his many-sided nature, its modernity, its dreary scepticism – his own unhappy portion of la maladie du siècle” (Du Maurier 181).Footnote ¹⁵ This narratorial second opinion confirms Little Billee's self-diagnosis. Comical as the context of this revelation may be, it has serious implications in a novel that is so heavily invested in parsing social disease and fingering artistic Jews. Little Billee has succumbed to the very same diseases as other degenerates and Jews. The latent character of his blood has become patent. He is, in this respect at least, no different from Svengali.

The novel's historical context adds another layer of significance to this passage because it imbricates it with Anglo-Jewish history. Given that Trilby is set in the 1850s, during the time when English debates about Jewish Emancipation were coming to a head, Little Billee's inability to make a profession of Christian faith to the vicar distinctly recalls the basis of various English laws which, for centuries, barred Jews from certain professions, denied them suffrage, and forbade them from matriculating at Oxford and Cambridge. These same laws denied foreign-born Jews English citizenship unless they took the Anglican sacrament, which many Jews saw as incompatible with their faith. In this respect at least, it is worth remembering that the foreign-born Svengali – the “Oriental Israelite Hebrew Jew” (244) whom Du Maurier reminds us “is so offensive to the normal Englishman” (11) – dies almost as soon as he sets foot on English soil.

Of course, Zangwill could be just as chauvinistic as Du Maurier. He agreed with the homeopathic dose theory of heredity, but vehemently rejected Trilby's anti-Semitic application of it. “Who shall say how much Jewish blood dilutes the nations of the Occident, for all their chauvinistic talk!” Zangwill opined in his column for the Pall Mall Magazine: “Mr. Du Maurier, in his unmentionable novel, suspects . . . that a drop of it has lurked in every artistic temperament. And, in sober truth, the drain from Israel throughout the centuries has been immense. In every age, in every country, Jews have been sucked up into the more brilliant life around them, exchanging contempt and danger for consideration and peace” (“Without Prejudice” September 1896 158). Several years later, in a combined review of Du Maurier's The Martian (1897) and Nordau's The Drones Must Die (Drohnenschlacht [1898]), Zangwill sarcastically inquired whether the novel's “Martian lady” was meant to typify “the Jewish blood, already so belauded in Trilby” (“In the World” 223). Then, applying Nordau's theory that degenerate art can only come from a degenerate mind, Zangwill diagnosed Du Maurier as suffering from “a touch of ‘degeneracy’” (“In the World” 223), Du Maurier manifested “the ‘Stigmata’ of the weaker brethren in art,” Zangwill asserted, using Morel's term for the marker of degeneration.

Despite his reservations about Du Maurier's use of degeneration theory to describe Jews, Zangwill enthusiastically applied the homeopathic dose theory to non-Jews, and to those who manifested sympathies with Aestheticism. In an essay on art in England, Zangwill claimed a charlatan's “Continental blood in his veins” (Without 34) would make him instantly recognizable because the “foreign corpuscules” expressed themselves as a “floridness” that true Englishmen never have. Similarly, in an essay on Oscar Wilde, he exclaimed “what a blessing that the minds capable of taking the artistic view of life are rare enough to keep the race sane! . . . What you [i.e., Wilde] want is a little knowledge of life, and twelve months’ hard labor” (Without 141). Regardless of his anti-aesthetic animus, Zangwill greatly admired the work of Walter Pater, and wrote a lengthy essay aimed at clearing Pater's reputation from its association with “the extravagances of a disciple [i.e., Wilde], [who had] been subjected to the verdict of a British jury” (Without 209). Wilde's claim to being a follower of Pater was, Zangwill said, “a libel – almost a criminal libel – on that great writer” (Without 211) – an especially stinging choice of words given the contemporary turn in the Wilde-Queensberry proceedings.

When Zangwill wrote The Master, he transposed a version of the Morel-influenced homeopathic dose theory onto the mentally unstable artist. This is unsurprising given that Zangwill's thoroughgoing familiarity with Nordau's Degeneration, which repeatedly credits Morel and quotes his degenerationist work at length. Like Trilby's Little Billee, it is because of Matt's degenerate blood – not in spite of it – that he ultimately succeeds as an artist.Footnote ¹⁶ In The Master, Matt is a carrier of “that adverse atom which . . . suffices to destroy happiness” (374). “There is French blood in our family” (164), he says by way of explanation for his hereditary dementia. This legacy is a liability, but it is also what makes him a promising artist, and the narrative constantly teeters between these two interpretations. Matt's blood is a metonym for his degenerate lineage. Though Zangwill set out to write a non-Jewish book, The Master actually participates in the same degenerationist discourse as Trilby by portraying Matt's downward spiral.

According to Lombroso, it was virtually inevitable that the degenerate would turn criminal. In this respect, too, Matt follows the typical itinerary of the Lombrosian mattoid or insane criminal. Sensitive to “the poetry of the primitive,” he spends his happiest boyhood days with a Micmac friend, in thrall to the “romance about the red man” (59). During a wander-year, he makes his way to Halifax, where he is dismayed by the slums “where negro wenches and Irishmen reeled and swore” (101). He invests in yellow books on “the human form divine and the house beautiful” (101) and encounters a series of characters who appeal to his Bohemian temperament. He strives to make his living as an artist, but nevertheless becomes all but destitute. When he reaches London, he takes up a variety of low-paying occupations. Out of desperation, he barters a portrait for a pair of shoes, then finds he must take up employment at a bird-stuffers’. Then, in a chapter titled “Towards the Deeps,” Matt veers towards mania and threatens suicide. During this episode of acute mental illness (which is neither his first, nor his last), he evinces symptoms of manic-depression including sharp moodswings, grandiose thoughts (“The more London refused him the more his consciousness of power grew” [239]), euphoria, and delusions (“a thousand ideas for great pictures jostled in his sick brain, . . . In the ecstatic frenzy of moments of hysterical revolt . . . he grew Titanic to his own thought, capable of masterpieces in any and every kind of art” [239]). Matt's “sordid life of Stepney and Whitechapel” (269) sinks to its nadir when a physician diagnoses him with blood poisoning from a taxidermist's arsenic, a “verdict” (270) that virtually consigns him “to the criminal dock.” His decline is complete when he is sent to prison for bankruptcy.

Despite this degenerate trajectory, Matt entertains self-deluding doubts as to whether he has actually inherited his mother's dementia (301). Though his thoughts often revert to her “babbling in the asylum” (375), he is also swayed by the possibility that his mental anguish is the result of a spell. In his youth, an ethereal Nova Scotian woman named Mad Peggy rechristened him “Mad Matt” (65) and cursed him: “May you thirst and thirst, and never be satisfied! And that is to be your fate . . . never to have anything you want” (67).Footnote ¹⁷ This spell buttresses the novel's deterministic degenerationism. It also emphasizes the futility of Matt's attempts to transcend his hereditary taint since, as Maudsley put it, “a man struggling against his nature is like the ancient Grecian fighting fruitlessly against the fate foredoomed to him by the oracle; he goes painfully about to fulfill his destiny unwittingly by the very means which he employs to evade it” (qtd. in Greenslade 27).

Matt, like Little Billee, is au courant about “the Darwinian view of things” (355). His understanding stems from his reading of the Nineteenth Century (325), a publication which would have familiarized him with popularized versions of evolutionary and degenerationist ideas.Footnote ¹⁸ As a result, he is keenly aware of the category to which he belongs, even if he can't bear to acknowledge it publicly. So when he finally accepts that his mother's mental illness may be connected to his own, he does so in a manner that privileges nurture over nature. This way he undermines the idea that degeneration is strictly hereditary and suggests instead that it is the outcome of social influence:

Degeneration is the idée fixe that drives this self-analysis. Matt's attempt at self-diagnosis calls on a host of degenerationist ideas: from Nordau's environmental degenerationism, to Maudsley's theory of heredity as pathological fate, and Lombroso and Galton's physiognomy (“That was not the face of a madman”).

This sort of anxious self-examination was not uncommon in fin-de-siècle fiction. In Dracula, Lucy asks Mina, “Do you ever try to read your own face? I do, and I can tell you it is not a bad study” (63). In Matt's case, the disconnect between his face (healthy/fit) and his mental state (unhealthy/unfit) underscores the novel's overarching preoccupation with doubleness, with the mind-body schism, with appearing one thing and being another, and with being a crypto-degenerate. Matt's disjunction also highlights the novel's ambivalent relationship to decadence. Both attracted and repulsed by it, he is constantly testing it. The mirror moment is a narcissistic classic, but it also introduces a typically decadent mode of self-knowledge. Consider its importance in Mallarmé's “idolatry of a mirror” in Hérodiade.Footnote ¹⁹ Or think of the dissolute hero of Huysmans's Against Nature who murmurs to himself “Oh miroir! . . . Je m'apparus en toi comme une ombre lointaine” [Oh mirror! I saw myself in you like a distant shadow], the very same words Mallarmé puts into Herodias's mouth (Huysmans 180). And remember Dorian Gray's secret painting which mirrors the shadow-side of his soul. Readers inclined to think in Lacanian terms might protest that this is merely a manifestation of the Lacanian mirror stage, “a recognition of self as object, as if seen in a mirror” (Jackson 88). But in Zangwill's novel, as in other decadent and anti-decadent texts, the subject is erased, not constituted, through his encounter with the mirror.Footnote ²⁰ As Charles Bernheimer observes, “the image perceived in Lacan's mirror, however deluded the viewer may be about its being the same as himself, is nevertheless human and familiar” (107–08). But what Matt sees (and what Herodias and Dorian also see for themselves) erases his humanity. The decadent mirror stage alienates the viewer from himself, forcing him to recognize an other self, a self that is not his own. So Matt looks in the mirror and does not see his face, but an externalized other (“the crazy creature was right there”) from which his subjectivity is separated (“He watched with curious interest the tears rolling down the face in the mirror”).

Matt's heroic story of artistic self-education is intertwined with this degenerate parcours. The alienating decadent mirror stage is reflected in Matt's artistic evolution from a representational to a non-representational aesthetic. In other words, he flees his (degenerate) human nature, and much of the novel correspondingly depicts him in flight from Nature and from representational art. His self-discovery as an artist is thoroughly enmeshed with his attempt to elude his nature. In this respect, Zangwill's hero attempts to undo the damage Nordau claims is done by degenerate environments. Matt begins by “absorbing Nature, to give it back one day as Art” (8) – a typically representational approach – but as he makes his way to London, the seat of Aestheticism, this framework fractures. “Where were the sunlight and atmosphere of Nature as he had known her,” he ruminates when confronted by the “unreality” of the landscapes displayed in the National Gallery (137). His artistic vision is reframed through his acceptance of imagination as the filter through which Nature should be seen. Though a fellow painter advocates painting from photographs and tells Matt that he dreams of “a sort of magic mirror to fix the image” (177), Matt protests that “the mirror hasn't got any imagination” (177) – it is not artistically viable. Just as the mirror confronts human nature with an other, the artist reflects and distorts Nature through his work.

There is good cause for the Wildean note in Matt's avowal: just as the young Wilde made himself Whistler's apprentice in matters of art criticism, Matt has been sitting at the knee of the painter Cornpepper, the novel's Whistler figure.Footnote ²¹ The novel's reproduction of this model of decadent discipleship underscores Matt's affiliation with a nonrepresentational aesthetic. “One had only to look in the glass to see how ugly Nature could sometimes be!” Cornpepper contends (339). Like Whistler, Cornpepper is a highly opinionated Paris-trained impressionist who is susceptible to Japanese influences. He wears a monocle in his right eye and has an “an erectile tuft” (264) of hair. His “Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street,” with its shower of gold sparks against a dark sky, refers to a Whistlerian approach famously used in “Nocturne – Black and Gold: The Fire-Wheel” and “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket.” Cornpepper's landscapes allow the viewer to feel “what o'clock it was” (196) – a nod to Whistler's celebrated “Ten O'clock Lecture” in which he said that the artist's relation to Nature was as “her son in that he loves her, [as] her master in that he knows her” (144). Cornpepper's set is as popular as a late nineteenth-century aesthetic society could hope to be: Matt has “read a good deal about them in the papers” (195) and the school is widely misunderstood (always good for publicity, as Whistler and Wilde had cannily noticed). Matt's insertion into Cornpepper's “clique” (195), the Azure Art Club (a set of cosmopolitan artists who advocate a loose, impressionistic style), allies him with an aesthetic brotherhood familiar to adherents of the Whistler school. The specificity and accuracy of Zangwill's winking allusions to Whistler and his school suggest that the Azure Art Club was modelled on the Society of British Artists, a group of Royal Academy aspirants. The Society of British Artists established itself as an alternative to the Grosvenor Gallery and kept to its aesthetic doctrines.Footnote ²² During his fellowship with the Society, Whistler acted as a magnet for disciples including Walter Sickert (a friend of Zangwill's who painted his portrait soon after The Master's publication) and Solomon J. Solomon (the partial inspiration for Matt's character).Footnote ²³

Degeneration intersects with art through the image of Matt's mother, Mrs. Strang. Indeed, he translates his acceptance of his maternal inheritance aesthetically, and he does so in a manner that typifies Aestheticism's relationship to the public. Once he has come to terms with his maternal inheritance, Matt glorifies his mother. Far from being the embarrassment to him that she once was, he now compares her to the mermaid in Matthew Arnold's “The Forsaken Merman,” “a woman, with a soul, throned amid a lower race, yet yearning for the higher spiritual fervors” (316). Taking Arnold's poem as his inspiration, Matt portrays his mother idealistically in The Merman's Bride, a Symbolist painting of the mermaid as a pagan Holy Mother (317). One of the hallmarks of decadence was its ability to span high and low culture, its capacity to embrace both Pater and Punch. Matt's aesthetic response enacts this characteristic when he parodies his high art version of the redeemed degenerate, The Merman's Bride, in an idyllic interior titled Motherhood, a painting which earns him popular recognition and celebrity.

Yet Matt's fame further distances him from the outward signs of his inward state – his wife and their degenerate offspring. As a result, he denies his marriage once he has gained admission to London's elite social circles. There, he meets “the rare, the fine, the ethereal” Eleanor Wyndwood (387), a blue-blooded aesthete for whom he considers leaving his wife. The world of the upper-class Eleanor is the antithesis to the meager, urban life he shares with his wife. “Last night Rosina and Camden Town; tonight Eleanor and the sea and the stars,” he says, marveling at the transformative power of his newfound love (428). A fit muse for a painter, Eleanor is wont to speak in Ruskinisms like “Art taught people to see Nature. And the Impressionists were right” (439). Contrary to his dispiriting life with his wife, Matt envisions a soul-satisfying joint life “of noble work hand in hand” with Eleanor (460). But Eleanor is also a caricature of Aestheticism: she is an ex-Socialist (344), wears a Whistlerian “jeweled butterfly” on her breast (343), “lives on air” (346) like the aesthetes in Punch, and enjoys the company of “haggard, giraffe-necked” women who knit in “occult patterns” (358). With her clustering chestnut hair, long thin hands, small feet, graceful curves, and tall form (345), she is the very picture of a Pre-Raphaelite woman.Footnote ²⁴ Her constant companion is an anti-Semitic New Woman type who believes “beautiful souls have no right to get mixed up with hooked noses. We ought to judge a soul by the body it keeps” (347).

Eleanor's attraction to Matt is partly driven by her aesthetic interests, but these are closely intertwined with her romanticization of his atavistic potential. The undertone of a slumming expedition runs throughout their romance.Footnote ²⁵ The language of popular Darwinism permeates her speech when she tells him, “I can see how fascinating it must be. To actually feel the struggle for existence; it brings you back to the primitive. You touch reality; you remember you're an animal” (442). To her, Matt resembles Lombroso's degenerate criminal, an evolutionary throwback in her midst (see Gould 153). Sure enough, Matt's threatening inheritance is reactivated in Eleanor's presence. Her influence “stung his blood” (456), and her companionship elicits an atavistic response from him. He soon finds himself yearning for “the keen, tingling, savage life of Vikings and sea-robbers in the days before civilization . . . he had some of their blood; it ran in his veins like fire; he was of their race” (456).

Though titillated by her lover's mix of aesthetic and primitive potential, Eleanor never learns the full extent of his degeneracy. When Matt delivers a partial confession – “I am nothing, nobody. . . . I have slept in the streets. I have consorted with the vilest” (426) – the full extent of his maternal inheritance still remains concealed from her. Vowing to protect this secret, Matt promises himself that “even Mrs. Wyndwood would never know that [his mother was mentally ill] –no one would ever really see the scars on his soul” (454). There are parallels here with Daniel Deronda (1876), in which the beautiful Gwendolen Harleth's blossoming affection for Daniel is unimpeded by the fact that she knows almost nothing about him, and certainly does not suspect that he is Jewish. Zangwill and Eliot make a point of luring the reader into a romantic plot and then thwarting the very expectations they have set up. Cannon Schmitt explains these choices in terms of Eliot's interlinkage of the courtship and Jewish plots, both of which involve a Darwinian process of natural selection. Eleanor, like Gwendolen, “figures the novel's investment in race as biology. For Deronda, to decide between Gwendolen and Mirah Cohen is also to decide between his Englishness and his Jewishness” (19). For Matt, the decision between the aesthetic, aristocratic Eleanor and his Philistine, lower-class wife, Rosina, rests on the choice between the continued concealment of his degenerate identity, or his revelation of it.

In the novel's final chapter, Matt recognizes that Eleanor and her aesthetic set are hazardous to his health. Yet the narrative's grinding determinism nevertheless propels him towards a final confrontation with the very decadence and degeneracy he is at pains to escape. His journey through Paris and back to London is reminiscent of Dante's Inferno, though Zangwill replaces the Virgilian cicerone with the memory of an angelic childhood friend. Paris's temptations register with the refrain “women, everywhere women” (500). Until this point, Matt's degenerate thoughts have been held in check by a strong Christian sectarian morality that has regulated his attraction to art for art's sake and its promise of moral freedom. Amid the wine-soaked gaiety of the Quartier Latin, these religious pieties now “seemed a form of dementia” (504) to him, and he gives way to “modern morbidity” (506). Similarly, when Trilby's Little Billee declares himself a Darwinist, his choice is explicitly framed as a modern alternative to Christianity. Greenslade observes that degeneration, as an alternative framework, “suggests a sense of permanent secularized ‘fall’ from grace, a structure for feelings of extreme disappointment with the state of things for which the traditional religious sanctities offered little help” (16). Or, as Chamberlin and Gilman put it, “degeneration is a genetic disorder; and its prototype is appropriately found in the Book of Genesis” (293). The fin de siècle coincided with a seismic shift in religious and aesthetic attitudes which, taken together, reduced religion to its aesthetic components. Zangwill put his finger on this change when he noted that churchgoers emerging from a sermon were as nonchalant as “aesthetes come from a literary and oratorical performance” (Without 105). “Art was the child of Religion, but it has long since abandoned its mother,” he said, mocking the notion of art for art's sake (Without 113). Like most jokes, there is a kernel of truth to it: the new science of race improvement, eugenics, was indexed to religion. Its founder, Francis Galton, expressly urged that eugenics “be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion,” a prescription that modernist artists such as H. G. Wells assisted in turning into a fait accompli (Galton, qtd. in Bernasconi 83).

The Master closes with Matt returning to his family in Camden Town, an act of resignation so profound that it virtually makes good on his previous thoughts of suicide. As such, the novel's pessimism is on par with Jude the Obscure’s. Zangwill uses this bleak scene to reinforce the novel's degenerationist determinism. Nothing, including art and celebrity, has enabled Matt to escape this moment. His return is greeted by his bitter, crippled brother and his sullen wife. His dire circumstances are amplified by “the sudden blare and boom of a Salvationist procession” (515), which signals that we are in darkest London, amid the squalid neighborhoods that William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, described in In Darkest England (1890). To Booth, the city was “an urban jungle that signified physical and spiritual decay, deterioration, and degeneration – a once-lovely garden that had gone to seed” (McLaughlin 79). The Salvationists’ Christian message is also a reminder of the urban degenerationists’ worry over the recent influx of Jewish refugees from Eastern European pogroms.Footnote ²⁶

In an earlier meeting with the Salvationists, Matt, ever the aesthete, was struck by their picturesqueness. Their chants of “only the blood of Christ can save only the blood of Christ has saved only the blood of Christ will save” (235) sent his thoughts running back to art – which he then believed would save him. Spurred by the Salvationists’ infectious emotion but indifferent to their creed, Matt had affirmed a credo of art for art's sake: “to him Art was an end in itself; he was of those who live to paint, not paint to live” (236). The novel's concluding encounter with the Salvationists causes Matt to reaffirm his aesthetic statement of faith. Having resigned himself to his unfortunate domestic situation, he will take solace in his art. He will accept his “narrow-souled wife” (516) though she now marches with the Salvation Army, Bible in hand.Footnote ²⁷ The novel thus ends with Matt not having overcome his doubleness but, in fact, reaffirming it. “This half-and-half-ness was typical of the new life which began that night,” Zangwill writes (516). But Matt's existence is permeated by this duality from start to finish. By the novel's close, Matt has not so much eluded degeneration, as resigned himself to it. The novel's pessimistic ending functions as an affirmation of degenerationist determinism.

As for his aesthetic creed, Matt does not give up art for art's sake, as some have suggested (Udelson 124; Rochelson, A Jew 101).Footnote ²⁸ Though he gives up the external trappings of the fashionable aesthete, he retains the thoroughly Wildean belief that “art springs from personality” (Wilde 374). “Art is not Truth nor Beauty, but a revelation of beautiful truth through the individual vision,” Matt avers, pinning his faith on his belief that “the artist answers Pilate's question [“What is truth?”] through his own personality” (518). Matt eschews the outward and visible signs of an inward state, as he has done all his life as a crypto-degenerate. Degenerationists believed that “the weakened capacity for resistance made the individual progressively vulnerable to disease or a degraded environment whose moral effects expressed themselves as a pathology of the will, an inability to resist the lure and temptations of easy sensualism or crime” (Greenslade 20). Matt enacts Nordau's suggestion that exhausting environmental influences are to blame for fin-de-siècle deviance, and finds himself much improved when he is not among aesthetes:

Zangwill frames Matt's self-removal from London's fashionable circles in terms of a quarantine and medical treatment explicitly designed to prevent relapse into deviance. In one of his essays, Zangwill focused his criticism of Aestheticism through the lens of the Salvationists’ efforts, instructing his readers to

The Master's artist hero may be a degenerate type but he is also an aesthetic type – one who, like James, can make out the music amid the urban clangor.

Though The Master is fascinating as a study of degeneration, it failed to captivate contemporary audiences. The idealized depictions of studio life that readers had so enjoyed in Trilby proved dreary when done by Zangwill. “One finds page after page of art-studio shop, the ordinary things the intelligent beginner hears, repeats, and has done with in the first year of his work, put into the mouths of distinguished artists,” H. G. Wells complained in a review titled “Mr. Zangwill's Master.” There was worse to come. “Still more terrible is Mr. Zangwill on the Beautiful,” Wells warned (656). In this respect, his assessment is fair: The Master is overwritten and the narrative lumbers under the weight of its purple prose.

Wells was far less evenhanded, however, when it came to locating the root cause of the novel's artistic deficiencies. He unhesitatingly laid the blame on Zangwill's polarized Jewish identity as a means of accounting for the novel's inadequacies:

Wells's comments, such as they are, are of a piece with his discussion of Marx's “racial Jewish commercialism” (Outline 489) and his declaration in Experiment in Autobiography (Reference Wells1934) that he had “always refused to be enlightened and sympathetic about the Jewish question” (353).Footnote ³⁰ His rhetoric and diction rehearse the stereotypes of a coarse, grasping, innately commercial people supposedly bent on world domination or, in Zangwill's case, “wordy expansion.” But Wells also portrays Zangwill as a Jew divided against himself, and thus transforms him into a Faustian figure of sorts. Like Goethe's hero, there are “two souls” in him “and one is striving to forsake the other” (Goethe 145). Wells's dualistic Jewish schema also echoes Du Maurier's notion of the Semitic character: Zangwill the talented artist and Zangwill the industrious public-pleaser embody two antithetical points on the spectrum of genius and Jewishness. On the one side, Zangwill is a gifted artist like Little Billee, on the other, he is a grasping Svengali type whose high art potential has been crassly commodified for public consumption. Yet Wells further complicates Du Maurier's equation by deploying the language of mesmerism and inverting the terms of its operation in Trilby. Although the “industrious Zangwill” sharply casts his eye about (as does Svengali), in Wells's schema Zangwill is both the mesmerist and the mesmerized subject: he is the artist-practitioner who entrances his lowbrow readership, but he is also in thrall to this public, his “master.” For these reasons, Wells advises Zangwill to shed his mass cultural allegiances and adopt the mannerisms of high art. At the same time, he insinuates that Zangwill's susceptibility to his own racial impulses circumscribe him to the inartistic world of mere “journalism.” Zangwill's imputed vulgarity and incontinence recall another stereotype Du Maurier had embodied in Svengali: the cliché of the Jew as social invader or, in Zatlin's words, “the insensitive boor who lacked the breeding to fit into genteel society but who continually tried” (Zatlin 128).Footnote ³¹

Wells's offhand anti-Semitism would be unremarkable if it did not map back so exactly onto the fictional terrain delineated in Trilby and The Master. It is telling that Wells, one of the late nineteenth century's leading popularizers of evolutionary ideas, criticized Zangwill in these terms, for his review reveals more than his readiness to apply degenerationist discourse to his contemporaries. Indeed, it shows how art and race were persistently intertwined by medical professionals and artists alike, and how the latter mobilized this rhetoric in order to use it as an exclusionary measure, a bulwark against degenerates and would-be highbrow artists. At a time when distinctions between the highbrow and lowbrow were becoming increasingly clear due to the emergence of the middlebrow, Wells, who had popularized the term “highbrow” in England, gave a clear signal that the irrepressible character of Zangwill's “indomitable, indelible blood” posed a serious artistic problem.Footnote ³² Though Zangwill had hoped to get beyond the ghetto with his story of a degenerate's attempt to enter the English art world, Wells's review confirmed the persistence and actuality of the obstacles faced by Matt Strang, Little Billee, and Svengali by reproducing the terms of their exclusion.