Note 114 — Chapter VIII

In the letter Mr. Tucker wrote to Mr. Shaw at Easter, 1895, Shaw once told me, he said that he knew Shaw was the only man in the world capable of tackling Nordau on his various fields of music, literature, painting, etc.: “He said that if I would find out the highest figure ever paid by, say, the Nineteenth Century for a single article to any writer, not excluding Gladstone or any other eminent man, he would pay me that sum for a review of 'Degeneration' for his little paper. This, mind you, from a man who was publishing a paper at his own expense, without a chance of making anything out of it, and with a considerable chance of finding himself in prison some day for telling the truth about American institutions. Mr. Tucker probably worked double shifts and ate half meals for the next two or three years to pay off what the adventure cost him.” This essay, somewhat amplified, was recently (February, 1908) published in America by Benjamin R. Tucker, N. Y.—in England by the New Age Press, London—under the title, The Sanity of Art: an Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate.