Degeneracy

§282 Feuerbach, we know, conceived the Christian ideas of the Incarnation, the Trinity, Immortality, etc., as the mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of the Trinity, the mystery of Immortality. Herr Szeliga conceives all present world conditions as mysteries. But whereas Feuerbach disclosed real mysteries, Herr Szeliga makes mysteries out of real trivialities. His art is not that of disclosing what is hidden, but of hiding what is disclosed.

§283 Thus he proclaims as mysteries degeneracy (criminals) within civilisation and rightlessness and inequality in the state. This means that socialist literature, which has revealed these mysteries, is still a mystery to Herr Szeliga, or that he wants to convert the best-known findings of that literature into a private mystery of "Critical Criticism."

§284 We therefore need not go more deeply into Herr Szeliga's discourse on these mysteries; we shall merely draw attention to a few of the most brilliant points.

§285 "Before the law and the judge everything is equal, the high and the low, the rich and the poor. This proposition stands at the head of the credo of the state."

§286 Of the state? The credo of most states starts, on the contrary, by making the high and the low, the rich and the poor unequal before the law.

§287 "The gem-cutter Morel in his naive probity most clearly expresses the mystery" (the mystery of the antithesis of poor and rich) "when he says: If only the rich knew! If only the rich knew! The misfortune is that they do not know what poverty is."

§288 Herr Szeliga does not know that Eugéne Sue commits an anachronism out of courtesy to the French bourgeoisie when he puts the motto of the burghers of Louis XIV's time "Ah! si le roi le savait!" in a modified form: "Ah! si le riche le savait!" into the mouth of the working man Morel who lived at the time of the Charte vérité"[14] In England and France, at least, this naive relation between rich and poor has ceased to exist. There the scientific representatives of wealth, the economists, have spread a very detailed understanding of the physical and moral misery of poverty. They have made up for that by proving that misery must remain because the present state of things must remain. In their solicitude they have even calculated the proportions in which the poor must be reduced in number by deaths for the good of the rich and for their own welfare.

§289 If Eugene Sue depicts the taverns, hide-outs and language of criminals, Herr Szeliga discloses the "mystery” that what the "author" wanted was not to depict that language or those hide-outs, but

§290 "to teach us the mystery of the mainsprings of evil, etc." "It is precisely in the most crowded places ... that criminals feel at home."

§291 What would a natural scientist say if one were to prove to him that the bee's cell does not interest him as a bee's cell, that it has no mystery for one who has not studied it, because the bee "feels at home precisely" in the open air and on the flower? The hide-outs of the criminals and their language reflect the character of the criminal, they are part of his existence, their description is part of his description just as the description of the petite maison is part of the description of the femme galante.

§292 For Parisians in general and even for the Paris police the hide-outs of criminals are such a "mystery" that at this very moment broad light streets are being laid out in the Cité' to give the police access to them.

§293 Finally, Eugéne Sue himself states that in the descriptions mentioned above he was counting "sur la curiosité, craintive" of his readers. M. Eugéne Sue has counted on the timid curiosity of his readers in all his novels. It is sufficient to recall Atar Gull, Salamandre, Plick and Plock, etc.