A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION.

Gisborne Times, Volume V, Issue 131, 13 June 1901, Page 3

A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION.

A few months ago, just after the Spectator had sounded its alarm over the Kaiser’s famous telegram to the Sultan, a certain journal decided to get the best expert opinion about the Kaiser’s mental condition. It accordingly interviewed Max Nordau, who is, or asserts himself to be, a scientific authority on mental pathology. Readers of that depressing work,_“ Degeneration,” will remember that Nordau reduces most forms of genius under the one head, “ megalomania.” The person afflicted with this malady exaggerates enormously the importance of his own ideas and actions, and everything that is his ; and the cynical observer might well have expected that an advanced revolutionary thinker would have been glad to elucidate a favorite theory by reference to a conspicuous example. But the interviewer seems to have ignored the fact that Nordau lives in Germany, and that it is not discreet to speak one’s mind too fully within reach of the “mailed fist.” Nordau, when pressed, talked of “ megalomania ” as if he had never heard of it before, and diverged into a rather sweeping panegyric of the Kaiser. Insanity? Not a trace of it —a strong intellect, firm, proud, energetic, but absolutely consistent with itself. He firmly believes that the assertion of his will is identified with the highest interests of the State; and his weaknesses — obstinacy, vanity, arrogance (though Nordau did not use these impolite terms), are the logical outcome of his strength. The enterprising paper, which did not believe in the Anglo-German agreement, determined to try elsewhere for another professional opinion, and accordingly consulted Dr Forbes Winslow, the celebrated London alienist. The curious feature of the interview is that Forbes Winslow said exactly what Nordau was expected to say, but refused to admit. The Kaiser, said the London doctor, has the brain of a genius, unhinged by his nervous temperament; and the result is but a little way removed from insanity. The disease that carried off his father and is now killing his mother is often the physical concomitant of mental degeneration. The Kaiser’s withered arm, like Byron’s club-foot, is the sign of that abnormal development of self which Nordau has described as “ megalomania.” Forbes Winslow owns that the Kaiser’s views about his mission as Emperor, or prophet, or preacher, are absolutely sincere, but he fails to see the rationality that the German philosophic eye discovered in these eccentricities. On

the whole we congratulate Dr Forbes Winslow that he does not live in Germany, and it is a tribute to tho efficacy of the Kaiser’s treason laws that Nordau should bo compelled to leavo to a foreign disciple the task of illustrating so aptly tho gospel “ mogalomania.”