"Decadent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Barbarian invasions—the fifth century—the learned countries were Italy, France (especially Southern France) and Spain. Of these three, Italy may be described as stationary or even decadent, but she possessed greater accumulations of books than either of the other two. The result of the invasions was, no doubt, that libraries were destroyed and education dislocated; but there was another result, as we have ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... "You see how decadent I am," she sighed. "I want to toy with my pleasures. Besides, there's that scamp of a brother of mine coming up to have a drink—I saw him get out of a taxi—and you couldn't get it through ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... basic ideas, gleaned largely from facts provided by Peter Horry and Robert Marion (the nephew of Francis), remain largely unchanged. Even in this decadent state, Weems' biography brought the nation's attention to Francis Marion, and inspired numerous other writers to touch on the subject — two of these works, biographies by James and Simms, are especially noteworthy. Therefore, for the literary, rather than strictly historical, value, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... understanding between the patriotic and virile elements in every country which, because they value their own liberties and revere their own traditions, are able to respect those of other nations. Internationalism is an understanding between the decadent elements in each country—the conscientious objectors, the drawing-room Socialists, the visionaries—who shirk the realities of life and, as the Socialist Karl Kautsky in a description of Idealists has admirably ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... races prove decadent? Shall not one produce in time Perfect types of men and women In a ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... greatest and most long-lived of all the medieval Orders of Chivalry. The siege of 1565 was its last great struggle with its mortal foe; after that there is but little left for the historian but to trace its gradual decadence and fall. And, as might be expected in a decadent society, though outwardly the constitution changed but little in the last two centuries, yet gradually the Statutes of the Order and the actual facts ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... Venice, the tide of modern luxury and traffic has retreated. The place is left to fishing folk and builders of the fishing craft, whose wharves still form the liveliest quarter. Wandering about its wide deserted courts and calli, we feel the spirit of the decadent Venetian nobility. Passages from Goldoni's and Casanova's Memoirs occur to our memory. It seems easy to realise what they wrote about the dishevelled gaiety and lawless license of Chioggia in the days of powder, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... had good looks, social position, money and a high reputation. It was the last quality which would give him a unique value in Stella Ballantyne's eyes. He was not one of the chinless who haunt the stage doors; nor again one of that more subtly decadent class which seeks to attract sensation by linking itself to notoriety. No. From Stella's point of view Dick Hazlewood ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... some that man as the selector has developed beauty, more beauty than we had before; and we point to the charms of our women as compared with those of the squaw. The answer to this is that the squaw belongs to a decadent race; that she too is subject to the man, that the comparison to have weight should be made between our women and the women of the matriarchate—an obvious impossibility. We have not on earth women in a state of normal freedom and full ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... to acquire. A repetition of the slow steps and stages by which progress has been secured is impossible. Attachment to civilization must take place at its highest point, just as we set a graft upon the most vigorous and healthy limb of a tree, and not upon a decadent stem. Must the Negro dwell for generations upon Anglo-Saxon stems and Cancerian diction before he is introduced to modern forms of English speech? The child of the African slave is under the same linguistic necessity as the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... progress is also meant, in another sense, which is also improper, the greater abundance of artistic intuitions and the smaller number of imperfect or decadent works which one epoch produces in respect to another. Thus it may be said that there was aesthetic progress, an artistic awakening, at the end of the thirteenth or of ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... into the night. And once, when his young wife had first occupied the new house, the big room had acquired a fairly cosy and comfortable appearance. But it had always been sparsely furnished, and most of the decadent furniture that now littered it was ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... books—French was the only modern language worth reading he used to say—a few modern German etchings, a low Turkish divan, and some Egyptian antiquities, made up the furniture of his two sitting-rooms. Above all things he despised Greek art; it was, he said decadent. The Egyptians and the Germans were, in his opinion, the only people who knew anything about the plastic arts, whereas the only music he could endure was that of the modern French School. Over his chimney-piece ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... then it is necessary to remember that many things that are indefensible when only a few do them, seem to become, by an extraordinary method of reasoning, regarded as allowable when so many people do them that a spurious public opinion and a decadent fashion is born, which shelters them and prevents the light of an unbiassed judgment from showing up their shortcomings in morality. One has only to read up old records of the eighteenth century to see how slavery flourished in England among otherwise honourable ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... excesses of its own development. Already before the close of the fifth century, and with reiterated emphasis in the earlier decades of the fourth, we hear from poets and orators praise of a glorious past that is dead, and denunciations of a decadent present. The ancient training in gymnastics, we are told, the ancient and generous culture of mind and soul, is neglected and despised by a generation of traders; reverence for age and authority, even for law, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... ever true that a single personality could change an opposite course of thought, it must be held that Richard Wagner, in his own striking and decadent career, comes nearest to such a type. But he was clearly prompted and reinforced in his philosophy by other men and tendencies of his time. The realism of a Schopenhauer, which Wagner frankly adopted ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... hedgehog lay dead athwart the path—nay, more than dead; decadent, distinctly; a sorry sight for one that had known the fellow in more bustling circumstances. Nature might at least have paused to shed one tear over this rough jacketed little son of hers, for his wasted aims, his cancelled ambitions, his whole career of usefulness cut ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... After a life of heroic endeavor, disappointment, slavery, and poverty, the author of "Don Quixote" gave the world a serious work which caused to be laughed off the world's stage forever the final vestiges of decadent chivalry. ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... by war, and Saxony and Bavaria by benevolent assimilation. The present Kaiser has already acquired Belgium by the former and Austria by the latter process. Like the Rome of Caesar, the German Empire is now at war on the one hand with decadent civilizations and on the other with a horde of barbarians. What Greece and Carthage were to Rome, France and England are to Germany, while Russia is the modern counterpart of the Gauls, Britons, and Germans of the Commentaries. Such at ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... artistic deterioration may ensue. Rodin has been called, fatuously, the second Michael Angelo—as if there could ever be a replica of any human. He has been hailed as a modern Praxiteles. And he is often damned as a myopic decadent whose insensibility to pure line and deficiency in constructional power have been elevated by his admirers into sorry virtues. Yet is Rodin justly appraised? Do his friends not overdo their glorification, his critics their censure? Nothing so stales a demigod's ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... by temperament unable to maintain the intellectual level of the Doric architecture of the mainland; and a difference appears in the whole orientation of art, in sculpture perhaps even more than in architecture. The history of Hellenistic art has yet to be written. It has been described as decadent, and it was undoubtedly responsible for some very poor stuff, but it also produced the 'Victory' of Samothrace, one of the finest things ever done in sculpture, and some very remarkable developments in architecture. It is not to be judged by the standards of the art ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... would declare war on France. He was wrong in his confidence that France was decadent, wrong in believing that England and the United States would only talk but would not fight, yet right in his belief that revolution would break out in Russia. In fact, I think that for years after the Franco-Russian Alliance, Germany was preparing a Russian revolution to break out ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... as may be seen in his mummy to-day. Ramses the Great, who was thus the glory of the XIXth Dynasty, reigned sixty-eight years, and lived to the age of 100, when he passed away peacefully at Thebes. Under his successors, Minephtah, Seti II., Amenemis and Siphtah, the nation became decadent, though there were transient gleams of prosperity, as when Minephtah won a great victory over the Libyans. But after the death of Siphtah, there were many claimants for the Crown, and anarchy prevailed from one end of the Nile ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... himself with point. But to pierce below these externals is to come on a vacuity of any sterling quality, a deliquescence of the moral nature, a frivolity and inconsequence of purpose that mark the nearly perfect fruit of a decadent age. He has a worthless smattering of many subjects, but a grasp of none. "I soon weary of a pursuit," he said to me, laughing; it would almost appear as if he took a pride in his incapacity and lack of moral courage. The results of his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through historical reading, of the working of several communities, and are capable of forming a correct picture in our minds of the salient characteristics of those that, on the one hand, are eminently prosperous, and of those that, on the other hand, are as eminently decadent. I have little doubt that the reader will agree with me that the members of prospering communities are, as a rule, conspicuously strenuous, and that those of decaying or decadent ones are conspicuously slack. A prosperous community is distinguished by ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... the hirelings of the Company and the Driver of the Wagon became well acquainted with the Large Envelope containing the only Hope of the present decadent Period. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... from the scum of human society. They were made up of bankrupts, decadent students, gamblers, topers, and beggars. They came from the ranks of those who had been pursued by misfortune and who bore the marks of crime. No one was ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... co-operation, but to picture us as a degenerate race from whom anything might be gained by playing upon our imagined weakness and cowardice. A nation which attends quietly to its own sober business must, according to their mediaeval notions, be a nation of decadent poltroons. If we fight our battles by means of free volunteers instead of enforced conscripts then the military spirit must be dead among us. Perhaps, even in this short campaign, they have added this delusion also to the dust-bin of their many errors. But ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... drawing-room; she had had it done this spring. It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope. The note of the room was really too pronounced for Gilbert's fastidious and scholarly eloquence; he lost vitality in it, and dwindled to the pale thin ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... only one criterion for membership in the Brotherhood—membership in the human race. No matter how decadent or primitive a population might be, if it was human it was automatically eligible for Brotherhood—a free and equal partner in the society ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... regenerate European culture. In the first period of his relationship with Wagner, he thought that he had found the man who was prepared to lead in this direction. For a long while he regarded his master as the Saviour of Germany, as the innovator and renovator who was going to arrest the decadent current of his time and lead men to a greatness which had died with antiquity. And so thoroughly did he understand his duties as a disciple, so wholly was he devoted to this cause, that, in spite ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... by the fire. They were the spears the men had made, rough, crude implements compared with the balanced and decorated weapons their fathers had known, but such as would serve to satisfy the hereditary impulse of a decadent race for the weapons of their sires. With one accord the men reached out and seized them, springing to their feet, and standing, with quivering muscles and tremulous hands, as the struggle between inherited instinct and acquired ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... group-organization of some sort is a necessity of human life. History showed us the tendency of all spiritual movements to embody themselves, if not in churches at least in some group-form; the paradox of each successive revolt from a narrow or decadent institutionalism forming a group in its turn, or perishing when its first fervour died. But this social impulse, these spontaneous group-formations of master and disciples, valuable though they may be, do ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... evident in the attitudes of his team-mates, too. No one had imagined that John Brown would have the nerve to cross Mooney beyond the giving of a reprimand. Not and hold the reputation which he had slaved so hard to preserve in turning out a winning eleven for decadent Elliott his first year there. The great John Brown might better have remained in permanent retirement, resting on his richly deserved laurels, than risk his halo of "wizard" and "miracle man of the gridiron" by failure to restore Elliott's former football ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... decadence. And from other causes Durant had fallen into a state of extreme dissatisfaction with himself. Five years ago he had found himself, as they said; found himself out, he said, when at the age of thirty-three he condemned himself and his art as more decadent than the decadents. Frida Tancred had shown insight when she reproached him with his inability to see anything that he could not paint, or to paint anything that he could not see. She had shown him the vanity of the sensuous aspect, she had forced him to love the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... communities of India before the establishment of British institutions; in the Russian Mir, in its older form; in the Arab tribal organisation and the Javan village communities."[1058] That "primitive Communism" of "tribal society," the organisation of savages and semi-savages, of the decadent and of the unfit, Socialists wish to foist upon a highly cultured nation. The above arguments, penned by the philosopher of British Socialism and the editor of "Justice" in recommendation of Communism, suffice ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... Ronald Engleton, an orphan brought up in Paris, a would-be decadent, a dabbler in all modern iniquities, redeemed from folly only by a certain not altogether wholesome cleverness, yet with a disposition which sometimes gained for him friends in most unlikely quarters. He had ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... straw, and dirt, would appear to have been made in a stable and dried on a rubbish heap. The subject of the jotting, busy with his customers, was all unconscious; but an old crone who sat, her feet resting on a tiny charcoal stove, amidst a circle of decadent greens, detecting the Artist's action, became excited, and after eyeing him uneasily for a moment, confided her suspicions as to his ulterior motive to a round-faced young countryman who retailed flowers close by. He, recognising us as customers—even ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... pressure of other desires, any group of primates does happen to become less prolific, they will feel ashamed, talk of race suicide, and call themselves decadent. And they will often be right: for though some regulation of the birth-rate is an obvious good, and its diminution often desirable in any planet's history, yet among simians it will be apt to come from second-rate motives. Greed, selfishness or fear-thoughts will ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... "is the way we men decide what women are to bear, and then call them immoral, decadent, or what you will, if they don't fall ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... byword for absurd unreality. To live at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and incongruity: in its essence the most 'natural' of all poetic forms, pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality of a decadent court or as the plaything of the leisure hours of a college of learning, and its insipid convention having become 'a literary plague in every European capital,' it finally disappeared from view amid the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... newspaper world with supermundane wrath. That France should presume to offer or Germany should accept a French Pacific island in part discharge of liabilities contracted at Algeciras was a threat to British interests. Tahiti in the hands of a decadent republic, the greatest if you will, but still one of the dying nations, is a thing to be borne with, but Tahiti possibly in the hands of Germany becomes at once ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... social science, which, in its onward march, has distanced them by at least half a century. Their "profound thinkers," their "lofty theorists," do not even succeed in making the two ends of their reasoning meet. They are the decadent Utopians, stricken with incurable intellectual anaemia. The great Utopians did much for the development of the working class movement. The Utopians of our days do nothing but retard its progress. And it is especially their so-called tactics that are ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... instant. So our current American life and thought is not something that stands still long enough for us to describe it. Even as we write the description it has changed to another phase. And the phenomena of transition just now are particularly noticeable—that is all. We may call them decadent or we may look upon them as the beginnings of a new and ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... Frederick the Great and William I. Moreover, the new German Navy was acclaimed as a necessary means to the triumph of German Kultur throughout the world. Other nations were depicted as slothful, selfish, decadent; and the decline in the prestige of Great Britain, France, and Russia to some extent justified these pretensions. The Tsar, by turning away from the Balkans towards Korea, deadened Slav aspirations. For the time Pan-Slavism seemed moribund. ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... wrote it,—very young, full of excesses of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression—the "confession" of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its relations. It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:— ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... detectives would ever have queered his pitch. But he was as playful as any other hunting tiger. He rejoiced in adding a thousand details to his original scheme. He was an artist, but too florid, too decadent in his decorations. And so he ruined what might have been the crime of the century. It is just the touch of human fallibility that has brought Nemesis to many a ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... accounts of those who knew him, of but poor mental calibre, Alexander is, perhaps, to be as much pitied as blamed. His nerves, so Mr. Chedo Miyatovitch told me, never recovered from the shock of a boating accident when young. He was the last and decadent scion of the Obrenovitches and was marked down ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... cold finger upon flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to whisper like conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in signal. I was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... been described as decadent, "The very Verlaine of them all," and Victor Meusy personifies it in a poem dedicated to all the great French cheeses, of which ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown
... not so baroque in the architecture as in the sculpture. In the statues of most of the saints and popes it could not be more baroque; they swagger in their niches or over their tombs in an excess of decadent taste for which the most bigoted agnostic, however Protestant he may be, must generously grieve. It is not conceivably the taste of the church or the faith; it is the taste of the wicked world, now ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... exists, they are not necessarily unhappy in other cases. When it takes the form of the settlement of unpeopled lands, or the organisation and development of primitive barbaric peoples, or the reinvigoration and strengthening of old and decadent societies, it may prove itself a beneficent force. But it is beneficent only in so far as it leads to an enlargement of ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... unbaptized person, whose faith, even if he does believe in God, is not supernatural, but purely natural. He is an infidel whether he is found in darkest Africa or in the midst of this Christian commonwealth, and in this latter place there are more infidels than most people imagine. A decadent Protestantism rejects the necessity of baptism, thereby ceasing to be Christian, and in its trail infidelity thrives and spreads, disguised, 'tis true, but nevertheless genuine infidelity. It is baptism that makes faith possible, for faith is a gift ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... of the Florentine Academy, as they were still to be seen in the young Leighton's work, found in him an admirable chastener, but it took many years of painfully hard work, lasting until 1852, to undo the evil wrought by decadent Florence. ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... sigh, habit directing me to the door of the study, where I paused, reminded of Jerry's final admonitions. Dinner—"nothing elaborate," with an entree, salad, and wines to be got for two women, Jerry's beautiful decadent who loved nature and ornithology, and the "not very pretty" poor relation who didn't like men but could be "cheerful when she was expected to be." Damn her cheerfulness! It was inconsiderate of Jerry to set me to squiring middle-aged dames while he spooned with his Freudian miracle in the conservatory. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... reward, oh mighty, holy Revolution! apotheosis of equality and fraternity! grand rival of decadent Christianity. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... apt to languish if it gets too far away from primitive conditions. But, like life also, it is a poor thing and a very uncouth affair if it has nothing but primitive conditions to recommend it. Because there is a decadent art about, one need not make a hero of the pavement artist. But without going to the extreme of flouting the centuries of culture that art inherits, as it is now fashionable in many places to do, students will do well to study at first the early rather than the late work of the different schools, ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... whose hands one pound notes pass, such awful symbolism conveys a sense of England's greatness and power; but I think it would be far more amusing if the back had been left blank, in case some later Robbie Burns (could this decadent world ever know so fine a thing again) wished to ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... attacks. The al-Qaida network targeted the United States long before the United States targeted al-Qaida. Indeed, the terrorists are emboldened more by perceptions of weakness than by demonstrations of resolve. Terrorists lure recruits by telling them that we are decadent, easily intimidated, ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States
... was that love of self is the fundamental principle of all activity. It is the instinct of self-preservation and self-amelioration which leads to every manifestation of revolt against stereotyped formulas of conduct. Between the excessive ideality of Rebecca and the decadent sterility of Hedda Gabler comes another type, perhaps more sympathetic than either, the master-builder Solness. He, too, is led to condemn the old order, but in the act of improving it he is overwhelmed ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... fantastic fripperies of artificial life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new pessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is sincere; ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... position, our foreign possessions, the security that should be due to so supreme an achievement, did not correspond to our real strength and abilities. England had vast dependencies, and had staked out the unoccupied world as her colonies. We had no colonies and no dependencies. France, though decadent, was a menace to our peace upon the West. We could have achieved the thorough conquest and dismemberment of France at any time in the last forty years, and yet during the whole of that time France was adding to her foreign possessions in Tunis, Madagascar, and Tonkin, latterly in Morocco, ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... of a "school" of jongleurs at Beauvais. In Lent they might not ply their profession, so they gathered at Beauvais, where they could learn cantilenae, new lays. [Footnote: Epopees Francaises, Leon Gautier, vol. ii. pp. 174, 175.] But by that time the epic was decadent ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Hogarth's moral force and grim satire. His serene, painstaking observation is never distracted by grossness and violence. The Venetians of his day may have been—undoubtedly were—effeminate, licentious, and decadent, but they were kind and gracious, of refined manners, well-bred, genial and intelligent, and so Longhi has transcribed them. In the time which followed, ceilings were covered by Boucher, pastels by Latour were in demand, the scholars ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... surface and so they equipped a vast army with this clumsy footgear and set it in motion with supplytrains on wide skis pulled by the men themselves. Russian ingenuity, boasted the Kremlin, would succeed in conquering the grass where the decadent imperialists had failed. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... has been run many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. The peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail; technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a caprice; and always as it goes on it loses ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... monumental Terro-Human Future History; the first story where we encounter the Terran Federation. In it we learn about Odin, the planet that will one day be the capital of the First Galactic Empire; and humble Niflheim, which in more decadent times will become a common expletive, a word meaning hell. This is also where Piper introduced and explained the Atomic Era dating system (A.E.). Uller Uprising is set in the early years of the Terran Federation's expansion and ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... northern cathedrals of the pointed style. Many of these frescoes date from years before the birth of Giotto. Giunta the Pisan, Gaddo Gaddi, and Cimabue, are supposed to have worked there, painfully continuing or feebly struggling to throw off the decadent traditions of a dying art. In their school Giotto laboured, and modern painting arose with the movement of new life beneath his brush. Here, pondering in his youth upon the story of Christ's suffering, and in his later manhood on the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... have also been found the bones of huge human-like beings whose decadent progeny are still ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... form a neck which are typical of the rebab and the stringing of the lyre. In outline it resembles a large lute with a wide neck, and the seven strings of the lyre of the best period, or sometimes nine, following the decadent lyre. Most authors in reproducing these sculptures showing the barbiton represent the instrument as boat-shaped and without a neck, as, for instance, Carl Engel. This is due to the fact that the part of the instrument where neck joins body is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... that chamber of the Apostolic Palace by Christ's Vicar—an old man of seventy—by his son and his daughter. Nor is that all by any means. There is much worse to follow—matter which we dare not translate, but must leave more or less discreetly veiled in the decadent Latin of ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... it; even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as embodied in the edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he had attended for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in Hampton. The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewildered Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, to compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... science until, apparently almost overnight, the wars had ceased. Since then the Hirlaji moved in their slow way through their world, growing more complacent with the passage of ancient generations, growing passive, and, eventually, decadent. Now there were only some two dozen of the race ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... without discrimination, and with such an entire lack of prophetic insight that I have found him consoling. For this book was published sixteen years before the Franco-Prussian War, when Germany, the world must admit, proved that it was not decadent. Yet every page of it is a Jeremiad, an exhortation to his countryfolk to stop short on the road to ruin. He does not see that the whole nation is slowly and patiently girding its loins for that mighty effort; he believes it is blind, weak, and flighty. If he had lived in England, and a little later, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... the motherland and her dependencies. They seemed convinced that every Dominion and dependency was merely waiting for the first favourable opportunity to declare its complete independence, and they hardly troubled to conceal their opinion that Britain was hopelessly decadent, and would never be able to wage a campaign again. Bermuda, in view of its wonderful strategic position, had, I am convinced, been marked down as a future German possession, when they would have endeavoured to make a second Heligoland ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... house on the Headland and the family inhabiting it, was a clean place with a clear atmosphere and inhabited by robust, sane, straightforward persons. You felt homesick." Cornwall is notoriously inhabited by queer people, and the Pendragon family was not merely queer but hereditarily rotten and decadent: the old father, who burns a valuable old book of his own to appease his violent temper; the granddaughter a kleptomaniac; the son of forty addicted to hideous cruelties. Unpleasant but well drawn, all of them. Mrs. C. A. DAWSON SCOTT has powerfully suggested the atmosphere ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... painfully decadent, and painfully nascent times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings, and 'impossibilities;' meeting a tall lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque lifeguardsmen, in their frowning bearskins, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... of the lower orders of people from the country; but even of the poor hardly one in twenty took off his hat, and a still smaller number knelt down. A few years ago, not a head was covered, nor was there a knee which did not bow."—A very decadent "Holiness of our Lord the Pope," ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... tells us how Andrew won Peter and Philip won Nathanael by personal appeals to follow Christ. If all the followers of Christ in all the churches would each win one soul for Christ every year there would be no more complaints about decadent churches. ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... only a means to an end. The object of all progress is to get a clear, clean-sighted race, intellectual and broadminded. And I think physical fitness is a great help in the production of a clear, clean mind. The very clever man who is weak bodily is so apt to become a decadent; and because he himself can't stand any real exertion, despises those who can. Games are necessary as a means to an end. But Buller and all the rest of the lot think games are the actual end. Look at the way a man with his footer cap is idealised and worshipped. He may be an utter rake; probably ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... which slowly crept over our family life. The family has in every civilized age been justly regarded as the pillar of the state, but the integrity which it possessed among our fathers, their children invaded in many ways. Mormonism, decadent if not dead, about which so much had been said, was but one of these, and perhaps not the worst. If crimes of a violent nature were becoming less frequent, crimes against chastity were on the increase. Easy divorce was considerably responsible for this. The diversity ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... rat-like face, Lanyard waited with a hand covertly grasping the automatic in his pocket. There was no telling; at any moment that murderous mania might veer his way. And he was not content to die, not yet, not in any event by the hand of a decadent little beast of ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... any former age of decadence known to us. There may be confusion and anarchy, but there is not mere pedantry and stagnation. Artists perhaps are over-conscious, always following some new prophet, but at least there is the conviction of sin in them, which is exactly what all the decadent artists ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Araby are mingled with a powerful stink of Absinthe and barrack-room; Abraham and Zouzou combined, a strange mixture like a page of the Old Testament rewritten by Sergeant Le Ramee or Corporal Pitou.... A curious spectacle for those who would care to look.... A savage and decadent people whom we are civilising by giving them our own vices. The cruel and uncontrolled authority of Pashas, inflated with self-importance in their cordons of the legion of honour, who at their whim have people beaten on the soles of their feet. The so-called justice of bespectacled ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... get some rest, but assumed a mildly willing look. (Too eager an attitude could arouse suspicion of disguising an improper viewpoint.) The maintenance of a proper viewpoint was a necessity if the Planetary State were to survive the hostile plots of Earth and the latter's decadent colonies. That, at ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... up. Another Olympiad had passed away. Wise indeed was Solon, who allowed four years for men to soften and to harden again. During the Olympiads it is to be presumed that men busied themselves with the slums that existed in those days, hearkened to the decadent poetry or fiction of that time, and then, as the robuster period of the games came round, braced themselves once more to the consideration of ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... beauties of Broadway. Only in one item is there a deviation from the usual formula: the costumes. For several years past, the revues at this theater (the Columbian) have been caparisoned with the decadent colors and bizarre designs of the exotic Mr. Grenville Melton. I knew there had been a change for the better as soon as I saw the first number, for these dresses have the stimulating quality of a healthy and vigorous imagination, as well as a vivid decorative ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... art production became again abundant among the subject population, though of inferior quality. The Cnossian palace was re-occupied in its northern part by chieftains WHO have left numerous rich graves; and general commercial intercourse must have been resumed, for the uniformity of the decadent Aegean products and their wide distribution become more marked ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... good or bad—its relation to therapeutics was a mixed one. It can be truthfully said that nothing has retarded the science of medicine during the past two thousand years so much as the iron grip of decadent orthodoxy, and, on the other hand, no power has caused men and women so to sacrifice time, money, and even life itself for the care and nurture of the sick, as the example and precepts of ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... intellectually and morally, in order to pronounce fully and fairly upon the qualities of this drama by Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss. He should be an embodied conscience stung into righteous fury by the moral stench exhaled by the decadent and pestiferous work, but, though it make him retch, he should be sufficiently judicial in his temperament calmly to look at the drama in all its aspects and determine whether or not as a whole it is an instructive note on the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... makes me feel that I belong to a decadent age. One can put up with it from him, because he's willing to live up to his ideas, which is not a universal rule, so far as my experience of moralizers goes. Anyhow, I'll confess that I'm glad to arrive ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... The Decadent was speaking to his soul— Poor useless thing, he said, Why did God burden me with such as thou? The body were enough, ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... circumstances poetry could not thrive; and in truth the eighteenth century in Spain is an age devoted more to the discussion of the principles of literature than to the production of it. At first the decadent remnants of page xxvii the siglo de oro still survived, but later the French taste, following the principles formulated by Boileau, prevailed almost entirely. The history of Spanish poetry in the eighteenth century is a history of the struggle between these two forces ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... a preference, as a Protestant or merely as an inhabitant of North Germany or Scandinavia, for the type of man who originally lived his degraded life outside the Roman Empire. He may, as an anti-Catholic of any kind, hope that civilization was decadent through Catholicism at the end of the united Roman Empire, and it may please him to imagine that the coincidence of what was originally barbaric with what is now Protestant German Europe is a proof of the former's original prowess. Nay, he may even desire that the non-Catholic ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... Jews than amongst Christians? How did it fare with the poor all over Europe in the centuries when Christianity was at the zenith of its power? How is it we have twelve millions of Christians on the verge of starvation in England to-day, with a Church rolling in wealth and an aristocracy decadent from luxury and self-indulgence? How is it that the gulf betwixt rich and poor in such Christian capitals as New York, London, and Paris is ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... nothing about him sufficient to attract a startled notice, there was quite enough to demand a curious consideration when once that notice was attracted. He wore a black top-hat, but there was enough in it of those strange curves whereby the decadent artist of the eighties tried to turn the top-hat into something as rhythmic as an Etruscan vase. His hair, which was largely grey, was curled with the instinct of one who appreciated the gradual beauty of grey and silver. The ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... Mylapore. Holland had lately thrown off the yoke of Spain, and was full of new-born vigour; and Dutch trade in the East—chiefly in the East India Islands—was pushed with a rancorous energy that roused the vain indignation of the decadent Portuguese. Six years later, in 1600, came the English. The English traders were employees of the newly-established East India Company, and were sent out to do business for the Company in the East; and they had to face the opposition of the Dutch as well as of the Portuguese. ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... word for him to write. But the whole world is skew-jee, awry, distorted and altogether perverse. The President is broken in body, and obstinate in spirit. Clemenceau is beaten for an office he did not want. Einstein has declared the law of gravitation outgrown and decadent. Drink, consoling friend of a Perturbed World, is shut off; and all goes merry ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... which I could now but faintly see, were the lakes and salmon rivers in the heart of the great forests which make our Canadian wild life so fascinating. We were being torn from that life and sent headlong into the seething militarism of a decadent European feudalism. I was leaning on the rail looking at the track of moonlight, when a young lad came up to me and said, "Excuse me, Sir, but may I talk to you for a while? It is such a weird sight that it has got on my nerves." He was a young boy of seventeen who had come from Vancouver. ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... go along with the analogy that a human society is like an atomic pile. At one extreme you will have a dying, decadent culture—the remains of a highly mechanized society—living off its capital, using up resources it can't replace because of a lost technology. When the last machine breaks and the final food synthesizer collapses the people will die. This is ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... Maupassant himself says to us, "No, I have not the soul of a decadent, I cannot look within myself, and the effort I make to understand unknown souls is incessant, involuntary and dominant. It is not an effort; I experience a sort of overpowering sense of insight into all that surrounds me. I am impregnated with it, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Bishop's sons, to whom I was introduced as among the aristocrats of the capital, certainly need a large income from the lavish manner I noticed them "treat" all and sundry in the hotel. "It is admitted by all, that in South America the church is decadent and corrupt. The immorality of the priests is taken for granted. Priests' sons and daughters, of course not born in wedlock, abound everywhere, and no stigma attaches to them or to their fathers and mothers." [Footnote: "The Continent of Opportunity." Dr. Clark.] Hon. S. H. ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... subject in a frivolous spirit. It was a portrait of herself. Ted had been rather inclined to affect the romantic antique: Audrey had been a revelation of the artistic possibilities of modern womanhood, and he turned in disgust from his languid studies of decadent renaissance, or renaissant decadence, to this brilliant type. One corner of the studio was stacked with sketches and little full-length portraits of Audrey. Audrey from every point of view. Audrey in a black Gainsborough hat, Audrey with ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... little. His fame was very limited—there were few who read his verses and prose, and even among these but a few who acknowledged his talent. His stories and lyrical poems were not distinguished by any especial obscurity or any especial decadent mannerisms. They bore the imprint of something strange and exquisite. It needed an especial kind of soul to appreciate this poetry which seemed so simple at the first glance, yet actually so out ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... crowds of people standing thick together; the Baptist in his sinewy strength and uncouth attire, surrounded by the little group of disciples; while through the throng a deputation of grey-beards, the representatives of a decadent religion, makes its difficult way—these are the principal features of a ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... his brutality and his insolence, and by the glamour of his name. The annals of mediaeval Italy were stained with blood and tears because of the Tor di Rocca, and their loves that ended always in cruelty and horror, and Filippo had all the instincts of his decadent race. In love he was pitiless; no impulses of tenderness or of chivalry restrained him, and his methods were primeval and violent. Probably the Rape of the Sabines was his ideal of courtship, but the subsequent domesticity, the settling down of the Romans with their ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... make, and other details, inquiries which showed his ignorance. Round in the garage I found my friend Saunders, and later on he took me over the splendid old place, filled as it was with the relics of the noble but now decadent English family. ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... show purposes. He had the happy faculty of speaking the language of Earth without a trace of Zenian or Universal accent; the Zenians are exceeded by none in linguistic ability, which was a real accomplishment before these decadent days when native languages are slipping ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter's eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... from its Alexanders and Napoleons down to its successful bandits and ward-bosses, if mankind were in the habit of looking at what the winner had opposed to him,—Alexander faced only by flocks of sheep-like Asiatic slaves; Napoleon routing the badly trained, wretchedly officered soldiers of decadent monarchies; and the bandit or ward-boss overcoming peaceful and unprepared and unorganized citizens. Who would erect statues or write eulogies to a man for mowing a field of corn-stalks with a scythe? Mankind is never more amusing than in ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... become 'une quantite negligeable.' The prospects of the Church in Italy and Spain do not seem very much better. In fact the only comfort which we can suggest to those who regret the decline of an august institution, is that decadent autocracies have often shown an astonishing toughness. But as head of the universal Church, in any true sense of the word, Rome has ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Romans everywhere yielded to them, and while the more prosperous Romans settled on the coast, the others retired to the mountains. One of the sea-towns, by the way, to which the Romans fled was Split, where they could live in the ruins of Diocletian's enormous, decadent palace; and from extant lists of the mayors of that town we see that until the tenth century they all had Latin names, from then till the twelfth century we find partly Latin and partly Slav names, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries their ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... mean our army will be here. All know it in Germany. They know it in Paris! But what can they do? How can they stop us?... Decadent!..." He laughed easily. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... the Russian bourgeoisie was so thoroughly infected with the ills of the bureaucratic system that it was itself decadent; not virile and progressive as a class aiming to possess the future must be. Since it was thus corrupted and weakened, and therefore incapable of fulfilling any revolutionary historical role, that became the immediate task of the proletariat. ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... effeminate elegants in English-made suits of blue serge, and brown boots, and they sigh to think that such specimens of humanity are the representatives of a noble race. Disguise it as you may, poor Italy is sadly decadent. Her glory has passed, her nobile are ruined and her labour enemies are, alas! bent upon putting her into the melting-pot. The gallant Italian army fought valiantly against the Tedesci. It saved Venice from the heel of the invader and it protected ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... more advanced than their own, and, by the help of their superior weapons, conquered and indeed destroyed it. And second, that even in the gorgeous picture given by the Homeric poems of the period with which they deal, there is a constant tendency to regard that period as being only the decadent and inferior heir of a civilization which had preceded it. Nothing is plainer in Homer than the suggestion that the men of the age before the Trojan Wars were greater, stronger, wiser, better in every respect than even the heroes ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... my earlier days," said his sire, "through and through I studied that decadent race, And in failing to prove that my forecast was true They have covered ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... again. Great gaps were torn out of famous regiments and filled up with new men, so often that the old regiment was but a name and the last remaining officers and men were almost lost among the new-comers. Yet by a miracle in the blood of the British race, in humanity itself, if it is not decadent beyond the point of renaissance, these cockneys and peasants, Scotsmen and Irishmen, and men from the Midlands, the North, and the Home Counties of this little England faced that ordeal, held on, and did not utter aloud (though sometimes secretly) one wailing cry to God for mercy in all this hell. ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... re-establish not only his Cathedral but also the monastery attached to it. He did this on a great scale, providing accommodation for three times the number of monks that had served the Cathedral in the decadent days of the Saxon monarchy, and when this was done he first "destroyed utterly" the Romano-Saxon church and then "set about erecting a more noble one, and in the space of seven years, 1070- 1077, he raised this from the foundations and brought it near to perfection." ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... leaned over the desk. There was a curious intensity in her eyes. "You just pointed out the drawbacks yourself," she said. "This is a decadent period." ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... Lark is a reaction against the decadent spirit. It is blithe, happy, full of the joy of life and the Greek within us—a herald of the dawn of the ...
— The Purple Cow! • Gelett Burgess
... in view of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, that Saintsbury applies this title to Coleridge. "The attitude was that of a mediaevalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by that intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on the Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romantic attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which, through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, repreaching ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... other hand, has become more decadent than aggressive. This among other rural agencies is not organized in proportion to its importance. Some progress, however, is being made by means of social organizations, but the ultimate solution of the rural problem depends more largely upon education than upon ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... foundation of that fame which even envious Time will hardly begrudge Daudet. As for Kings in Exile, it is difficult to see how even the art with which the tragedy of Queen Frederique's life is unfolded or the growing power of characterization displayed in her, in the loyal Merault, in the facile, decadent Christian, can make up for the lack of broadly human appeal in the general subject-matter of a book which was so sympathetically written as to appeal alike to Legitimists and to Republicans. Good as Kings in Exile is, it is not so effective a book as The Nabob, nor ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Bourget's "Cosmopolis," by Rome and by marriage (Sienkiewicz has lately got married). We have the catacombs and a queer old professor sighing after idealism, and Leo XIII, with the unearthly face among the saints, and the advice to return to the prayer-book, and the libel on the decadent who dies of morphinism after confessing and taking the sacrament—that is, after repenting of his errors in the name of the Church. There is a devilish lot of family happiness and talking about love, and the hero's wife is so faithful to her husband and so subtly ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... the decadent idea, what there was of it, went entirely to pieces, which nobody has troubled to pick up. Oddly enough (unless this be always the Nemesis of excess) it began to be insupportable in the very ways in which it claimed specially ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Sun-myths of the peasants we see, he says, a myth-world 'in process of becoming,' in an early state of development, as in the Veda (p. 325). But, we may reply, in the Veda, myths are already full-grown, or even decadent. Already there are unbelievers in the myths. Thus we would say, in the Veda we have (1) myths of nature, formed in the remote past, and (2) poetical phrases about heavenly phenomena, which resemble the nature-poetry of the Letts, but which do not become full-grown myths. The Lett songs, also, ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... women, and many fears of the traps which await the unwary in a great city. Many stories were afloat of pugilists who had been taken up and cast aside again by wealthy ladies, even as the gladiators were in decadent Rome. It was with some suspicion therefore, and considerable inward trepidation, that he faced round as a tall veiled figure swept into the room. He was much consoled, however, to observe the bulky form of Tom Cribb immediately behind her as a proof ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Caxas," he remarked, "was one of the decadent rulers of ancient Peru. At the Conquest by the Spaniards, Inca Atahuallpa was murdered by Pizarro, as you probably know. Inca Toparca succeeded him as a puppet king. He died also, and it was suspected that he was slain by a native chief called Challcuchima. ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... Nibelungenlied here offered in translation. Only the pious loyalty of national sentiment can assign a high place in dramatic literature to Wagner's work with its intended imitation of the alliterative form of verse; while his philosophizing gods and goddesses are also but decadent modern representatives of their ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... mean. They were decadent, neurotic, morbid, worse than old. My magazine will be really young. It's the young writers that I want. And there isn't one of them I want as ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... misunderstanding has arisen by judging such primitive people by the standards of our present day civilization. Sex worship, while it held sway was probably quite as seriously entertained as many other beliefs; it only became degraded during a decadent age, when civilization had advanced beyond such simple conceptions of a deity, but had not evolved a ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Anders Zorn, who, while decidedly Swedish, is after all much of a cosmopolitan painter, with all the earmarks of an international training. The art of the most artistic of all people, that of the French, is often said to have a decadent note. In comparison, Swedish art may be said to be absolutely robust, healthy, and vigorous, without being coarse. To those who pretend to find a certain physical brutality in Swedish art, I should like ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... great rock in a thirsty land. Dulness will be the New Genius. "Give us dull books," people will cry, "great dull restful pictures. We are weary, very weary." This hectic, restless, incessant phase in which we travail—fin-de-siecle, "decadent," and all the rest of it—will pass away. A chubby, sleepy literature, large in aim, colossal in execution, rotund and tranquil will lift its head. And this Crichton will become a classic, Messrs. Mudie will sell surplus copies of his works at a reduction, and I shall cease to be worried ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... progressive movement of humanity in one of the most vital periods and movements in history. It was the treasure of Peru that kindled the fires of the Inquisition, {65} in which the best blood of the nation lighted it to its downfall, and blazed the way for Manila and Santiago. Philip II, and his decadent and infamous successors depended upon the mines of Potosi and the mines of Potosi hung upon Pizarro and his line in the sand. The base-born, ignorant, cruel soldier wrecked in one moment a nation, ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... art where sincerity is so indispensable, felt the effects of the people's blindness, and in the last years of Rembrandt's life we see those portrait-painters coming to the fore, who did away with true expression of character and joined the private burghers in their decadent predilection for artificiality ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... glory of the past. Now, what is to be the future of our nation? Are we to live only on the glory of the past and die off from the face of the earth, to show that we are worthy descendants of the glorious past and to show by our work, by our intellect and by our service that we are not a decadent nation? We have still a great and mighty future before us, a future that will justify our ancestry. In talking about ancestry, do we ever realise that the only way in which we can do honour to our past is not to boast of what our ancestors have ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... offscourings of society, slaves, criminals, and lunatics. They burrowed in the Catacombs, they fastened themselves upon a decaying and magnificent civilization like the parasites they were. A series of political catastrophes, a popular uprising against the rotten emperors of decadent Rome, and the wide growth of the socialist idea—these things and an unscrupulous man, Constantine the Great, put the Christians firmly in the saddle. And soon came cataracts of blood. If the tales of ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... is not moved into ecstasy by ecstasy is hopeless. A people that has not the surging, uplifting, onward power that ecstasy gives, is decadent—dead. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... Inverarity); Marcellina, Miss Poole; Florestan, Mr. Manvers; Pizarro, Mr. Giubilei; and Rocco, Mr. Martyn. The opera was performed every night for a fortnight. Such a thing would be impossible now, but lest some one be tempted to rail against the decadent taste of to-day, let it quickly be recorded that somewhere in the opera—I hope not in the dungeon scene—Mme. Giubilei danced a pas de deux with ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... weak credentials. Parental discipline is openly flouted, pleasure is our modern cult. Jazz bands, long-haired novelists and poets, misty philosophers, anti-national instructors are the idols of many a pale-faced and stunted son of Britain. The reverence which made us great is decadent and openly scoffed at. What is the remedy? Aristophanes burnt out the pestilent teachers. We had better not copy him till we are satisfied that the demand for them has ceased. A nation gets the instruction for which it is morally fitted. There is but one hope; we must follow the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... and heard names, some of which remained tinkling in his empty head. To his confused mind English literature was a period of degeneracy, one and indissoluble, in which certain famous writers lived, devoting what time they could snatch from the practice of what he called the decadent vices to the worship of the bottle. There was no harm in him. He was, as the common phrase has it, his own enemy. But he would be better employed in looking at a game of baseball than in playing with humane letters, and one cannot but regret that ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... my head in a charger," said Delorme, not without heat. "For you, Burne-Jones is 'pure' and I am 'decadent'; because he paints anemic knights in sham armour and ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... harbour and on the neck of the Island; the more modern residences and lodging-houses stretch above Porthminster Beach, with a popular development at Carbis Bay. More inland suburbs are chiefly devoted to the mining that has suffered so many vicissitudes—flourishing, then decadent, and now flourishing again. One such centre is Halsetown, a mining settlement founded something less than a century ago by James Halse, of the old Cornwall Hals family; he was a solicitor and a mayor of St. Ives, intimately ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... decadence of the race. These very grumblers are now foremost in praising, and quite rightly, the spirit shown in every part of their country. Their lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles, for if in truth England had been decadent there could have been no such universal display for them to be praising now. But all this democratic grumbling and habit of "going as you please" serve a deep purpose. Autocracy, censorship, compulsion ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... be said with respect to the churches. In every city there are several, and people can usually go to the church of their choice. In many parts of the country the church is decadent, and in some places it is becoming extinct. Even the automobile contributes its influence against the country church as a rural institution, and in favor of the city; for people who are sufficiently ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... watching for her opportunity. On her lapel was an ivory button, bearing the words "Votes for Women." Ann Veronica sat at the foot of the sufferer's bed, while Teddy Widgett, being something of an athlete, occupied the only bed-room chair—a decadent piece, essentially a tripod and largely a formality—and smoked cigarettes, and tried to conceal the fact that he was looking all the time at Ann Veronica's eyebrows. Teddy was the hatless young man who had turned Ann ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... transport Shakespeare's house bodily to American soil. The moat surrounding the Walled City is already being filled up, but posterity will be grateful for the preservation of those ancient bulwarks—landmarks of a decadent but once glorious civilization. Most of the Spanish feast-days have been abolished, including the St. Andrew's day (vide Li-ma-hong, p. 50), and the following have been officially ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... reasonably lay the blame for her on the doctor. His cow was friendly enough. It was Sport, the old dog, that made the heaviest and at the same time a most ludicrous item in my duties as hired man. Long past the age of sport of any kind, he spent his decadent years in a state of abject fear of thunder and lightning. If only a cloud darkened the sun, Sport kept up a ceaseless pilgrimage between his corner and the kitchen door to observe the sky, sighing most grievously at the outlook. At the first distant rumble—this was ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Even "Buck" de Vries was not forgotten, and without a suggestion of my contemplated departure I entertained my colleagues royally with a bowl of punch brewed after a celebrated Cambridge recipe, which in a decadent age spoke eloquently of the glories of the past. I was in the midst of a highly colored speech—during which I must confess de Vries had eyed me in a somewhat saturnine manner—when the proprietor tapped me ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... the aliens were the rather decadent relics of a highly developed technological civilization existing on the planet in the not too distant past. Yet Miracastle offers no evidence for the existence of a prior technology—no ruins, no residual ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... meaningless architectural forms. In China, as in all old civilisations I have seen, all the building of man harmonises with and adorns nature. In the West everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent aesthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken. The ugliness of the West is a symptom of a disease of the Soul. It implies that the ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... conclusions are drawn as the matter of divorce. The average moralist, but more particularly the clergy, seeing the fairly astonishing increase in divorce during the last decade, jump to the conclusion that family life is decadent and immorality flagrantly on the increase. They point to the indubitable fact that a century ago divorces were insignificant in number; and they infer that morality was then on a much higher level than it is now. ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... trifle rambling, at any rate delightfully critical and much more interesting and profound than certain others which flow periodically from the windows of cloistered retreats. Mr. Henry Savile quotes from the Classics perhaps a little too freely for the taste of a decadent age, and his friends, Dr. Ashford, Lady Grace, the bishop's wife, Olive, her niece, and Philip Daly, nephew of an archdeacon and parliamentary candidate for Sunningwell, would be a little more amusing if they were treated in a more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... "And we don't know what their orders are. Until we realized you'd get here first, we were making ready to take the kids off in a snow-weasel. If we kept to soft snow, no plane could land near them. It's just possible somebody could claim the kids asked protection from us decadent, warmongering Americans, and they might be equipped to ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... abyss, and come down with a thump. Sometimes, but rarely, a man will fall off. It is a throne—and perhaps this is true of all thrones—from which no altogether self-satisfactory descent is possible; and we all know it, sitting behind our newspapers, or staring down on decadent Greece shining at our feet, or examining with curious, furtive glances those calendars the feminine beauty of which seems peculiar to shoe-blacking parlors, and has sometimes led us to wonder whether the late Mr. Comstock ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... awakening may have been accompanied with too much appeal to the feelings and unhealthy emotional excitement; but some vigorous movement was absolutely necessary to quicken the spiritual life of a decadent age. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... "Selections." The reviewer began by thanking his author "for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of ringing optimism, of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good, which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent nihilism.... It is well," the writer continued, "when such reminders come to us not from the moralist but from the man of science—when from the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this glorious cry of ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... as one from Cape Juby to the confines of China? Let a common wave pass over them, let a great soldier or organiser arise among them to use the grand material at his hand, and who shall say that this may not be the besom with which Providence may sweep the rotten, decadent, impossible, half-hearted south of Europe, as it did a thousand years ago, until it makes ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... needed to protect the movements of expansion. It seemed to the more exuberant spirits that a vast British Empire, or a mighty Pan-Germany, might be expected to cover the whole world. France, with its low and falling birth-rate, was looked down at with contempt as a decadent country inhabited by a degenerate population. No attempts to analyse the birth-rate, to ascertain what are really the biological, social, and economic accompaniments of a high birth-rate, made any impression on the popular mind. They were drowned in ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... extent there has been a sense, on the part of the enemies of Germany, of fighting to root out a dangerous and rank growth. Germany, seeing in her own civilization only the appearance of modernism, has been inclined to regard all other civilizations as decadent. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... So decadent and ineffective was the Austrian administrative system when Metternich entered, in 1809, upon his ministry that not even he could have supposed that change would not eventually have to come. Change, however, he dreaded, because when change begins it is not possible to foresee how ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg |
