"Decadent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his manner, suggested an abnormal condition. Burlingame was not a brave man physically. He had never lived the outdoor life, though he had lived so much among outdoor people. He was that rare thing in a new land, a decadent, a connoisseur in vice, a lover of opiates and of liquor. He was young enough yet not to be incapacitated by it. His face and hands were white and a little flabby, and he wore his hair rather long, which, it is said, accounts for the weakness of some men, on the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Chioggia, even more than from 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, sword-knot, and soprani. Baffo walks beside us in hypocritical ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... japes at Scottish ways, which in his provincial simplicity he offered to the Carnegies. It seemed to him certain that people of Jacobite blood and many travels would have relished his clever talk, for it is not given to a national decadent to understand either the people he has deserted or the ancient houses at whose door he stands. Carnegie was the dullest man living in the matter of sneering, and Kate took an instant dislike to the mincing little ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... at any rate?" he asked, with a careless assumption of a slanginess which is affected by society in its decadent periods. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... an inordinate love of luxury and the insatiable desires of jaded senses had suggested as a means to satisfaction, until the treachery of his own accomplices had thrown the glaring light of publicity on a career of turpitude such as even these decadent times had ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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 rugged ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... 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
... re-embroidering, with extra little stitches, and unnecessary little French knots, and elaborate little buttonholes that would never see a button, a large and fine piece of embroidery on which she had been working for many months. She had that decadent love of minute finish in the unessential so often seen in persons of a ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... 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 ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the wilderness and bought a foothold in the new commonwealth. What great luck that his exit from the old life should prove to be his entrance into the very heart of a simple multitude flying from the greed and stupidity of the decadent aristocracy of Europe! What fitness that he, child of a race which had triumphantly fought injustice, poverty, Indian, and wilderness, should now be leader for a people who had fled from injustice at home only to begin a new struggle with plotters like Livingstone, ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... Jeremiah find any of that firm material which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks against Assyria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering from without harder blows than even Assyria dealt it. These did not weld but broke a people already decadent and with nothing to resist them save the formalities of religion and a fanatic gallantry. The people lost heart and care. He makes them use more than once a phrase about themselves in answer to his call to repent: No'ash, No use! All is up! Probably this reflects his own feelings ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... to the 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. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... appearance in some lists and collections of his work. Feydeau (it is a redeeming point) was one of "those about" Gautier, and Sylvie is by no means unlike a pretty free and fairly original transfer from Les Jeune-France. The hero is a gentleman, decadent by anticipation and romantic by survival to the very nth. He abides in a vast chamber, divanned, and hung with Oriental curtains: he smokes endless tchibouks, and lives chiefly upon preserved ginger. To him enters Sylvie, a sort of guardian angel, with a rather ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous 'ANSI standard cup of tea' and wind up with a political situation distressingly ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... thin, pointed sticks, which he flung to the ground 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 fear went on for ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... instincts tend to drift together: Arthur, the a-moral prodigy, and Gabrielle, the last offshoot of the decayed house of Hewish, daughter of the definitely degenerate Sir Jocelyn. But I do not think that there was anything abnormal or decadent in Gabrielle's composition. Her nature was gay and uncomplicated, in singular contrast to her involved and sombre fate. One is forced to the conclusion that the Payne miracle was the result of nothing more ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... seduction of works of art which grew more and more subtle as the women in whose company he enjoyed them grew more illiterate and common, he would take a little servant-girl to a screened box in a theatre where there was some decadent piece which he had wished to see performed, or to an exhibition of impressionist painting, with the conviction, moreover, that an educated, 'society' woman would have understood them no better, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... 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
... they are, tell their own tales with singular truth and directness. Their sculpture may not display the anatomical knowledge of the work of the Renaissance; yet it has a distinct decorative value that has been seldom equalled in the later decadent period. The fourteen large central bosses on the main longitudinal ribs present in themselves an epitome not only of Bible history, but of the connecting incidents forming the theme of Christian teaching. In the tenth bay, on the longitudinal rib, there is, in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... that he doesn't carry away too jolly a memory of his visit. Take lunch downtown with me to-morrow, won't you, Mr. Queed—at the Business Men's Club? I want to finish our talk about the Catholic nations, and why they're decadent." ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and in Bacon, assuming all knowledge to be his province, while affirming and formulating the principles of Inductive Reasoning in substitution for the Deductive methods by which the Schools had lived for centuries. Wherever the critic turns his glance, he can find no sign of the Decadent. In every field of life, in politics, in war, in religion, in letters, the Elizabethan was virile even in his vices. His offences against morals or against art were essentially of the barbaric not the effete order; as the splendours of his productions were the natural beauties ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... house, and all through the way of life in it, there prevailed a "note" of simplicity, even of plainness. The odd thing, perhaps, was that it pleased almost every one who visited the young couple. A certain well-known man, noted as a Sybarite, clever, decadent and sought after, once got into the house, he pretended by stealth, and spent half an hour there in conversation with Rosamund. He came way "acutely conscious of my profound vulgarity," as he explained later to various ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... undeniable that it became convulsed with the most violent emotions directly the Young Lady in Grey appeared. It began an absolutely unprecedented Wabble—unprecedented so far as Hoopdriver's experience went. It "showed off"—the most decadent sinuosity. It left a track like one of Beardsley's feathers. He suddenly realised, too, that his cap was loose on his head and ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... astute Basque nature, and his judgment of the European situation, taught him that he must use other means than those which Francis and Dominic had employed. He had to make his Company, that forlorn hope of Catholicism, the exponent of a decadent and rotten faith. He had to adapt it to the necessities of Christendom in dissolution, to constitute it by a guileful and sagacious method. He had to render it wise in the wisdom of the world, in order that he might catch the powers of this world ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... enough almost to dominate society, and we poor people who abide by the conventions are absolutely nowhere beside them. They think that we are bourgeois because we have virtue, and prehistoric because we are not decadent." ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... inanimate thing with so strong a sense of disquiet. He had pictured an old stone tower on a bright headland; he found instead this raw thing among trees. The decadence of the brand-new repels as something against nature, and this new thing was decadent. But there was a mysterious life in it, for though not a chimney smoked, it seemed to enshrine a personality and to wear a sinister aura. He felt a lively distaste, which was almost fear. He wanted to get far away ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... of landing so gamey a fish can be realized. When hooked, he invariably turns golden. The idea of the series of leaps is to rid himself of the hook, and the man who has made the strike must be of iron or decadent if his heart does not beat with an extra flutter when he beholds such gorgeous fish, glittering in golden mail and shaking itself like a stallion in each mid-air leap. 'Ware slack! If you don't, on one of those leaps the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... that of peace. Under these 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 ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... 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, I yield to it, I submerge myself ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 there was a large German landscape in oils, called "Im Walde"; it represented a wood ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... 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 ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... 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 ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... of the Pyramids. Their forty centuries of history saw many modifications of the philosophical and religious beliefs, but the fundamental doctrine of Reincarnation was held to during the entire period of history in Ancient Egypt, and was not discarded until the decadent descendants of the once mighty race were overwhelmed by stronger races, whose religions and beliefs superseded the vestiges of the Ancient Doctrine. The Egyptians held that there was "Ka," the divine spirit in man; ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... back-garden door. But there is no merit in that! It is not a thing to be complacent about; still less does it justify you in saying to the simple person who prefers the direct course that the world is getting lazy and decadent and is always trying to save itself trouble. The point is to have lived, not to have been merely occupied. I remember once, when I was an undergraduate, staying at a place in Scotland for a summer holiday. There were all sorts of pleasant things ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... peace. Mars could have taught us so much. She could have guided us out of the mire of war and hatred that we have been wallowing in for centuries. But the Dictator put an end to those possibilities." Drengo shrugged. "He was convinced that the Martians were weak, backward, decadent. He saw their uranium, their gold, their jewelry, their labor—and started on a vast impossible imperialism. If he had had his way, he would have stripped the planet in three years, but the Martians fought against us, turned from peace to suspicion, and finally to open revolt. And the ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse
... narrow pathway of the chorus there is the customary parade of the same haughty 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 ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... were recruited 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
... the new, strong race, you will be found sitting meditating among cabbages and green peas, like Omar Khayym in his rose garden. The rest of us will have died in the fighting-line - except Baby, and they will put him under a glass case, and preserve him as one of the few fine specimens left of a decadent race - in spite ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... de l'Abbe Mouret—the exceptional, the most remote and recherche outcome of each temperament. And of the three it is the novel of Goncourt that appeals to him with special intimacy—that novel which, more than any other, seems to express, in its exquisitely perverse charm, all that decadent civilisation of which Des Esseintes is the type and symbol. In poetry he has discovered the fine perfume, the evanescent charm, of Paul Verlaine, and near that great poet (forgetting, strangely, Arthur ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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, made and unmade empires, and changed the ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... 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 who fought on 'the ringing plains of windy Troy,' ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... the wings of her soul into magnificent motion. Beyond floating folk ballads she has had no literature at all; though latterly, she is trying to supply the place of one with a few slave-made translations from the Greek, and a few imitations of the decadent Greek comedy of Alexandria;—also there has been a poet Naevius, whom—she found altogether too independent to suit her tastes; and a Father Ennius,—uncouth old bone of her bone, (though he too Greek by race) who is struggling to mold her tough inflexible provincial ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... days," said his sire, "through and through I studied that decadent race, And in failing to prove that my forecast was true They have ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... not classified among punishable offences at all. And 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 men, and ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... birth and breeding "goes without saying." He acted like one. No Celtic commander could have robbed his dead soldiers. In the province of belles-lettres John Bull can at least claim Alfred Austin, his present poet- laureate, and Oscar Wilde, the dramatic decadent. Dr. Jameson is England's military lion and President George T. Winston of the Texas 'varsity her representative of learning! The English proper are but "a nation of shopkeepers," and the greatest shops are not conducted by Anglo-Saxons. England's ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... him, and his childlike dependence on me was quite pathetic. His general attitude was, "You see I'm such a damned fool." And so he is. But when I compare him with the Balzacian hauteur and the preposterous posing of many of our Fleet Street decadent geniuses, I feel a movement of the blood which declares that perhaps there are worse things than War. (Between ourselves, I have a sneaking sympathy with fighting: I fought horribly at school. It is well you should know ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... effects of decadent verse is unintentionally told in the following extract from a Hindu's letter to the authorities requesting aid in behalf of his invalid father, who leads sickly life, and is going from bad to perhaps, ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... in her good-nature, had permitted her decayed townswomen—at as low a rent as was compatible with prudence—to shelter themselves under her roof and as near it as possible. Her house being a profitable warren of American art-students, tempered by native journalists and decadent poets, she could, moreover, afford to let the old ladies off coffee and candles. They were at liberty to prepare their own dejeuner in winter or to buy it outside in summer; they could burn their own candles or sit in the dark, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... point I had reached so far, and the neighbourhood of the art-loving Solomon Islands already made itself felt. Whereas in the New Hebrides every form of art, except mat-braiding, is at once primitive and decadent, here any number of pretty things are made, such as daintily designed ear-sticks, bracelets, necklaces, etc.; I also found a new type of drum, a regular skin-drum, with the skin stretched across one end, while the other ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... 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 ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... 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 ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... follows: Leonore, Mrs. Martyn (Miss 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
... aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech. So far as regards the superior aesthetic value of the decadent book, the chances are that the book-lover's contention has some ground. The book is designed with an eye single to its beauty, and the result is commonly some measure of success on the part of the designer. What is insisted on here, however, is that the canon of taste under which the designer ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... rifles in their hands or summon batteries of guns to follow them on the march, the fact of their volunteering, when they knew by watching from day to day the drudgery that it meant and what trench warfare was, shows at least that the race is not yet decadent. Perhaps we should have done better. No one can know until we try it. If liberal treatment by the government and the course set by Secretary Root means anything, our staff ought to be better equipped for such a task than the English were; this, too, only war ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... a newcomer at Heart's Desire, but upon the contrary one of the autochthones of that now decadent community. He was a friend and former bunk-mate of old Jack Wilson, discoverer of the Homestake mine. Five years ago, however, at the breaking of the Heart's Desire boom, he had silently stolen away, whether for Alaska ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... finest in American Literature) was The Scarlet Letter (1850).... Montaigne. Stevenson was heavily indebted to this wonderful genius. See Note 4 of Chapter VI above. ... Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote the brilliant and decadent Fleurs du Mai (1857-61). He translated Poe into French, and was partly responsible for Poe's immense vogue in France. Had Baudelaire's French followers possessed the power of their master, we should be able to forgive them for writing.... Obermann. Obermann is the title of a story ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more than the moral. Something human and kindly in the old fellow had caught my fancy. The decadence was too tragic to prose about, the decadent too human to moralise on. I had left the chamber of the—shall I say de jure King of England?—a sentimental adherent of the cause. But this business of the bagpipes touched the comic. To harry an old valet out of bed ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... extravagant in his talk, and, by way of praising the Parisians, used to represent them as a species of scatterbrains, lewd and rowdy, who spent their time in love-making and revolutions without ever taking themselves seriously, Christophe was not greatly attracted by the "Byzantine and decadent republic beyond the Vosges." He used rather to imagine Paris as it was presented in a naive engraving which he had seen as a frontispiece to a book that had recently appeared in a German art publication; the Devil of Notre Dame appeared huddled up above the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... to be in earnest about anything. You didn't even to have any principles that showed. Life wasn't real and earnest a bit. People just went to tea-dances and talked flippantly, and some of the men had drinks. And everybody laughed a great deal, and it was decadent, and the end of an era, and a lot of shocking things—but it wasn't half as hard as living now, because there weren't standards, except when they were had by aunts and employers and such people. Ah, them was the days!' And the grand-nieces, ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... the capacity for infection. Jack had to own to himself that, though he strove to make it rigorously esthetic, his seeing of d'Annunzio—to take at random one of the fleurs du mal—was as a shining, a luridly splendid warning of what happened to decadent people in unpleasant Latin countries. Such lurid splendor was as far from him as the horrors of the Orestean Trilogy. In Mrs. Upton's eyes this distance, though a distinct advantage for him, was the result of no choice or conflict, but of environment merely, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... tell the truth as he is to exploit and illustrate an interesting theory. You have no right to expect gospel from literary mountebanks. Nor can you judge the integrity of it by such disciples as Rousseau, who was merely a decadent soul fascinated by the contemplation of his own depravity. The scriptures of such a Solomon, however true in theory, are neither honest nor effective. But as a final climax of your argument, you declare ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... published 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 ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... 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 life and culture of the times and whether or not this exudation from ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of the Irish Party, in its more decadent days, to spout out long litanies of its achievements and to claim credit, as a sort of hereditament no doubt, for the reforms won under the leadership of Parnell. It was, when one comes to analyse it, a sorry method of appealing for public confidence—a sort of apology ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... city. There was something incongruous about it. Nature seemed so perfectly peaceful here that it was the very antithesis of those sections of the city in which he had found the gunman, whoever he was, indulging in practically every crime and vice of decadent civilization. ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... does not marry and become the mother of enough healthy children to permit the increase of the race; and if the average man does not marry in times of peace and do his full duty in war if need arises, then the race is decadent and should be swept aside to make room for a ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... aspect. In the Lettish Sun-songs and 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
... 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 ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... Helen Traynor was not popular. Some people thought her old fashioned, strait-laced, prudish. They resented her having no taste for their frivolous, decadent amusements. They called her proud and condescending whereas, as a matter of fact, she merely asked to be let alone. Of course, it was only people whose opinions were worthless that criticized her. All who were admitted to her intimacy knew that there was no ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... how many infants are born, and how many deaf mutes exist? But we should devour statistics, we should read nothing else if only they dealt with matters of real interest: if they recorded how often Mr. Simpson, the decadent poet, had said he was "a child of nature," how often, if ever, the Duchess of Inveraven and Mr. Brown, the junior curate at Salvage-on-Sea, had owned they had been in the wrong; whether it was true that an Archbishop ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... among his poems that "heroical epistle of Sappho to Philaenis," in which he makes himself the casuist of forbidden things. His studies of sensuality, however, are for the most part normal, even in their grossness. There was in him more of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more frequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... pardon! Allow me to ask you a question. If Britain were at war with Germany, do you think it at all likely that Canada would allow herself to become involved in a European war? Canada is a proud, young, virile nation. Would she be likely to link her fortunes with those of a decadent power? Excuse me a moment," checking Larry's impetuous reply with his hand. "Believe me, we know something about these things. We make it our business to know. You acknowledge that we know something about your mines; let me assure you that there is nothing ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... "You say that I have no nerves; that is because I do not allow myself to suffer. If I had gone on living with Wenham, it would have driven me mad. His habits, his manner of life, everything disgusted me. Until I came to see so much of him, I never understood what the term 'decadent' really can mean. The very touch of him grew to be hateful. No woman could live with such a man. By the way, he signed the ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... promising poetical school, "Young Germany," to which Heine belonged. Let us recall this man, who likewise artificially revived the old religion and the old feudalism, who repolished and regilded the scutcheons of the decadent aristocracy, and who, despite all his energy, had at heart no belief in his work, no joy in his task, no faith in the anointed dummies he brought to life again in Europe—and those puzzling personalities of Uraka and Lascaro will ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... 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. Here was an example of the manner ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... Christian? The Goal The Spur Awakened! Shadows The New Commandment Summer Dreams The Breaking of Chains December 'The Way' The Leader to be The Greater Love Thank God for Life Time Enough New Year's Day Life is a Privilege In an Old Art Gallery True Brotherhood The Decadent Lord, speak again My Heaven Life God's Kin Conquest The Statue Sirius At Fontainebleau The Masquerade Sympathy Intermediary Life's Car Opportunity The Age of Motored Things New Year Disarmament ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... England men. Mrs. Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, women of democratic humor, were the pioneers; then came Harriet Prescott Spofford and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, women with nerves; and finally the three artists who have written, out of the material offered by a decadent New England, as perfect short stories as France or Russia can produce—Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown. These gifted writers portrayed, with varying technique and with singular differences in their instinctive choice of material, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... types and snubbed the gay and gildy brand; Instead she loved a decadent whose pagan name was Hildebrand, Until that sad occasion when she met him coming back o' night, His system loaded up with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... afflict him, and he lashes out at them 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 ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... situation; he accused the young because they had remained silent and accepted this last indignity without a protest. God help us, what kind of a youth was that? Was our youth, then, entirely decadent? ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy (1898); Frances Fuller, To Edith May (1851); Metta Fuller, Lines to a Poetess (1851).] Someone has pointed out that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... of their blood by trypanosomes, and that possibly, whilst a freely migrating and vigorous herd would not be extensively infected, a dwindled and confined herd may be more liable to infection, and that thus the final destruction of an already decadent animal may be brought about. It would now be a matter of extreme interest to ascertain whether the few dwindled herds of bison in North America are infected by trypanosomes, and no doubt we shall soon receive reports on ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... meeting place for the few who are struggling ever and ever for an art that will be truly American. An art that is not hidebound by the deadening influences of a decadent Europe, or the result of intellectual theories evolved by those whose only pleasure in existence is to create laws for others to obey ... an art, let us say, that springs out of the emotional depths of creative spirit, courageous and unafraid of rotting power, or limited scope ... an ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... though certainly an unconscious token, of the spontaneous originality of his muse. For a writer of his peculiar philosophic tenets, at all events, the world itself, in truth, must seem irretrievably old or even decadent. ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... particularly high breeding, raised for 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 so ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... tender age your nerves are so inflamed that they must be soothed, and if at the very sunrise of your life your heart is so feeble that it must be forced with any stimulant, you had better quit college. College is no place for you if you are such a decadent; yes, and you will find the world a good deal harder place ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Have Kicked.' Of course I've only kicked 'em mentally; but my! what a list I have!—all sorts, all nations—from certain domestic and predatory statesmen to the cad who made his beautiful and sensitive mistress notorious in a decadent novel!—all kinds, Duane, have I kicked mentally I've just used my foot on another ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 Trollopian manner, and did not so faithfully discuss the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... deceived. This is not vital art, it is decadent and corrupt. True art has always been the expression by the artist of the ideals of his time and of the world in which he lived—ideals which were his own because he was a part of that world. A living and healthy art never has existed and never ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... I obtained Schleswig, Holstein, Alsace, and Lorraine 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 ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... whether they fully comprehended their own work; certainly it had no effect upon their own lives. On the other hand, an innocent, boyish young man, who lived the most correct of lives with a girlish-looking wife in an ivy-covered cottage near Barnes Common, I discovered to be the writer of decadent stories at which the Empress Theodora might have blushed. The men whose names were widest known were not the men who shone the brightest in Deleglise's kitchen; more often they appeared the dull dogs, listening enviously, or failing pathetically when they tried ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... 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
... stating the plain fact," said Kent, nettled a little by her coolness. "Decadent Rome never lifted a baser set of demagogues into office than we have here in this ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... after finishing with his gentle and sweet benedictions, abruptly turned and, with changed tone and impressive words, said to his disciples, "Ye are the salt of the earth." On you rests the obligation of becoming the conservative element in society. Confronting as they did a decadent civilization and a vanishing religious faith and a general heart-despair, they were to be the saviors of men. Pungent and preservative as salt, are ye to be in the midst of a putrid age. Few, too, as they were in numbers, and without ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 7, July, 1889 • Various
... mistaken," Armstrong bit out. "It seems to be a practice that can crop up in any decadent society. Remember Hitler reviving it among the German universities? Well, it's all the rage now among the officers of the Sov world. Limited, however, to Party members, the lowly proletariat are ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... 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
... 'All decadent nations,' said H. Stackton Dunckley, 'produce beautiful women—it is one of the surest signs that they are going to pieces. The Romans did at the last, and Rome and England are parallel cases. As Mrs. Le Roy Jennings says, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... warning based on our own blundering experiences. Beyond being sober, honest, and willing, make sure he is strong enough for such heavy work, that he is reasonably intelligent and, most important of all, that he is not "working to accommodate." The latter is frequently voiced by members of decadent native families who resent the curse of Adam and like to assume that any gesture toward the hated thing, called work, is purely voluntary rather than necessary. If these words fall from the lips of a man you are considering for odd jobs and tilling of the soil, ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... 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 ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... are evil, decadent, and are doomed to slavery under the man of the future. The future man will be a child of my race. My race is superior. From it the uberman will rise. You must help. Prey on these inferior peoples. They do ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... faith, can the pure word of God, and the bright sword of the Spirit, be recognised in the heart and hand of Christianity. The effect of Biblical poetry and legend on its intellect, must be traced farther, through decadent ages, and in unfenced fields;—producing 'Paradise Lost' for us, no less than the 'Divina Commedia';—Goethe's 'Faust,' and Byron's 'Cain,' no less ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... discharging his task. The evidence collected by Mr. Rhodes as to the tone prevailing in 1864 at Washington and among those in touch with Washington suggests that strictly political society was on the average as poor in brain and heart as the court of the most decadent European monarchy. It presents a stern picture of the isolation, on one side at least, in which Lincoln had ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... talk on the Jews in the Holy Land. Professor Simon Litman of our Faculty spoke on "Jews and Modern Capitalism." Professor E. C. Baldwin of our English department, in speaking on "Prayer," roused a lively interest in the question as to whether prayer is decadent among the Jews. Professor Albert H. Lybyer lectured on "Jews as the Transmitters of Culture from the Moslems to the Christians"; Professor Boyd H. Bode discussed "What the Jew Contributes to American Ideals," and Dr. A. R. Vail ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... waltzes, scherzos, polonaises, preludes, he exhibited to us in groups those manifestations of that supreme spirit—that spirit at once stern and tender, not more sad than joyous, and always sane, always perfectly balanced, always preoccupied with beauty. The singular myth of a Chopin decadent, weary, erratic, mournful, hysterical, at odds with fate, was completely dissipated; and we perceived instead the grave artist nourished on Bach and studious in form, and the strong soul that had dared to look on life as it is, and had found beauty everywhere. Ah! how ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... successive ages. The course of art is known; it 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 ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... influence of church, patriotism, and press when one sees how the housewife has disregarded these influences. For all the religions preach that race suicide is a sin, all the statesmen point out that only decadent nations restrict families, and all or nearly all the press thunder against it. It is even against the law for a physician or other person to instruct in the methods of birth restriction, and yet—the birth rate steadily drops. An immigrant ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... be recent indications that the sentiment is changing. The heated discussions in New England about Mr. Hartt's interesting clinic over a decadent hill-town, the suggestive fast-day proclamation of Governor Rollins of New Hampshire a few years ago, the marvelous development of agricultural education, the renewed study of the rural school, the widespread and growing delight in country life, have all ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... readers to think for themselves about the events portrayed; and if I have succeeded in doing that, I shall be satisfied. The history of the United States does mean something: what is it? Are we a decadent fruit that is rotten before it is ripe? or are we the bud of the mightiest tree of time? The materials for forming your judgment are here; form it according as your faith and hope ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... 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
... Wisconsin were of the linguistic family of the Sioux; were generally associated with the confederates against the Americans, and many of their distinguished warriors fought against General Harrison at Tippecanoe. The decadent tribes known in early times as the Illinois, did not play a conspicuous part in the history of ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce |
