"Decadent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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. Many ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... must get an electorate of capable critics or collapse as Rome and Egypt collapsed. At this moment the Roman decadent phase of panem et circenses is being inaugurated under our eyes. Our newspapers and melodramas are blustering about our imperial destiny; but our eyes and hearts turn eagerly to the American millionaire. As his hand goes ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... "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
... alone carried her to the triumphant end. The Isthmus and the Caribbean were vital elements in determining the issue of that stern conflict. For centuries, also, the treasures of Mexico and Peru, upon which depended the vigorous action of the great though decadent military kingdom of Spain, flowed towards and accumulated around the Isthmus, where they were reinforced by the tribute of the Philippine Islands, and whence they took their way in the lumbering galleons for the ports ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Porsenna, there was Brennus, there was Hannibal.... Only that time Rome did not get over it. Others tried to use the disasters to castigate the sins of society. Thus Salvian of Marseilles who would no doubt have been called the gloomy dean if he had not been a bishop. For him all that the decadent Roman civilization needs is to copy some of the virtues of these fresh young barbarian people. There is the familiar figure of Orosius, defending the barbarians with the argument that when the Roman empire was founded it was founded in blood ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... Judith. I said, "Silence, for shame!" and brought him in, and dropped him dripping into my own armchair. Would the Good Samaritan have thought of his carpet or his chair? I did think of them, but I overcame it. Ah, we are a decadent generation in ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... tragic theme. Macbeth is destroyed by vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself; Hamlet is ruined by irresoluteness and contemplative procrastination. If Othello were not overtrustful, if Lear were not decadent in senility, they would not be doomed to die in the conflict that confronts them. They fall self-ruined, self-destroyed. This second type of tragedy is less lofty and religious than the first; but it is more human, and therefore, to the spectator, more poignant. ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... 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 ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... was a lesson in 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 and set him droning on pipes in the small hours smacked of a theatrical taste, ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... If no magic could put 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 ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... information, tells me that some three or four years since "a large number of original sketches (not the engravings) were catalogued and announced for sale at Christies'. I went," he says, "possibly to buy several, but (and it is curious as showing the decadent interest in the pictures) no sale took place, because I was told there was no one to buy. I think," my informant adds, "that I was the only person, or nearly the only person, in the room." Distinguished people, however, had been ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... reward, oh mighty, holy Revolution! apotheosis of equality and fraternity! grand rival of decadent Christianity. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... claim to high rank lies in his origination of that blending of grim irony with bright wit which became characteristic of all Jewish humorists, and reached its climax in Heine. But Charizi himself felt that his art as a Hebrew poet was decadent. Great poets of Jewish race have risen since, but the songs they have sung have not been songs of Zion, and the language of their muse has not been the language ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... peoples 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 not deserve ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... 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 ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... the 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
... 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 The Call ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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 of ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... 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 is stuck into the ground. The skin is made of banana leaves. ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... probability that opportunity will be afforded him to participate in more than two or three ceremonies in a year, his instruction is necessarily slow. The medicine-men recognize the fact that their ritual has been decadent for some time, and they regard it as foreordained that when all the ceremonies are forgotten the world will ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... was entering upon a half century of such wellnigh constant low prices that the opening of each new tract for its culture was offset by the abandonment of an old one, and the export remained stationary at a little less than half a million hogsheads. Indigo production was decadent; and rice culture was in painful transition to the new tide-flow system. Slave prices everywhere, like those of most other investments, were declining in so disquieting a manner that as late as the end of 1794 George Washington advised a friend to convert his slaves into other forms of property, ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... 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 without its full significance (where primal will finds a redemption in euthanasia), ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... an urban age. The men of the villages, alas, are leaving behind them the green fields and purple moors of their childhood, are foolishly crowding into the narrow lanes and purlieus of the great cities. Strange decadent sins and morbid pleasures entice them thither. But I desire in these books to utter a word once more in favour of higher and purer ideals of life and art. Those who sicken of the foul air and lurid light of towns may still wander side by side with me on these heathery ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... school of which he was, and, in so many of his sympathies, is still a pupil, a school which regards M. Zola as one of its leading lights. En Route, and its sequels, portray in the colours of realism, in the language of decadence, the conversion of a realist, nay, of a decadent, to mysticism and faith. "The voice indeed is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau," and according as the critic centres his attention too exclusively on one or the other, such ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... only two classes that really can't help taking life seriously—schoolgirls of thirteen and Hohenzollerns; they might be exempt. Albanians come under another heading; they take life whenever they get the opportunity. The one Albanian that I was ever on speaking terms with was rather a decadent example. He was a Christian and a grocer, and I don't fancy he had ever killed anybody. I didn't like to question him on the subject—that showed my delicacy. Mrs. Nicorax says I have no delicacy; she hasn't forgiven ...
— Reginald • Saki
... so strongly to the imagination? Simply because he loved Nature. And in this matter-of-fact period when poetry is dead and even a by-word, the man who loves Nature, if not a poet, at least has poetry in his soul. In a decadent age symbolized by the tango and the problem play, it is at least an encouraging sign for the future that such a character as Senhouse came to the jaded reader of the erotic fiction of the day, as a whiff of sea breeze on a parched plain, and ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... 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 ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... the guests there was a dance of nuptial unveiling and a bout between half-a-dozen Turkish boxers. But it was a decadent and blaze company, and something more piquant was needed for their titillation. This was supplied in the shape of an original dance by the fifteen-year-old Joseph, whom my guide describes as "graceful, wild and pungent." He was introduced in a recumbent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... 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
... his place, unsapped yet by decadent delights, would have loosed his five thousand on the countryside—butchered any who opposed him—pressed into service those who merely lagged—and would have plunged India in a welter of blood before the priests ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... this the danger of class-domination emerges more and more into relief. In Prussia the old Feudal caste remains—in a decadent state, certainly, but perhaps for that very reason more arrogant, more vulgar, and less conscious of any noblesse oblige than even before. By itself, however, and if unsupported by the commercial class, it would probably have done little harm. In Britain the Feudal caste has ceased to ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... for runaway slaves, bequests of slaves, &c, till almost the end of the first decade of the 19th century, the latest known bill of sale is dated March 21, 1807 and transfers a "Negro Woman named Nelly of the age of twenty five or thereabout." It was, however, decadent and from about the beginning of the 19th century was quite as much to the advantage of the Negro in many cases as that of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... one exquisite stream among the Alleghanies, called Lycoming Creek, beside which the family spent a summer in a decadent inn, kept by a tremulous landlord who was always sitting on the steps of the porch, and whose most memorable remark was that he had "a misery in his stomach." This form of speech amused the boy, but he did not in the least ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... 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
... 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 friends. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... "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 and dying? ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... could not survive long the altered times, and the voluminous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher mark the beginning of the end. They are the decadence of Elizabethan drama. Decadence is a term often used loosely and therefore hard to define, but we may say broadly that an art is decadent when any particular one of the elements which go to its making occurs in excess and disturbs the balance of forces which keeps the work a coherent and intact whole. Poetry is decadent when the sound is ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... I notice, though, that he did not choose an ordinary play, but forced his decadent trash on us. I am willing to listen to any raving, so long as it is not meant seriously, but in showing us this, he pretended to be introducing us to a new form of art, and inaugurating a new era. In my opinion, there ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... 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 ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... 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 Four Million • O. Henry
... countries largely retard that moment. The favored portions of the earth's surface are already occupied, though the resources of many are yet virgin. That they have not long since been wrested from the hands of the barbarous and decadent peoples who possess them is due, not to the military prowess of such peoples, but to the jealous vigilance of the industrial nations. The powers hold one another back. The Turk lives because the way is not yet clear to an amicable ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... racial and national far more than dynastic. It is not the Hohenzollern over all that they sing about; it is Deutschland. (And—as in the case of all imperfectly civilised people—songs of hate for foreigners.) But it needed a decadent young ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... Age, far 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 who fought ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... indoors with a 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 ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... principles. They have nothing to do with 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 ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... what it took the race ages 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 ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... 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 be the incentives, the bribes. Contrivances, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... too, and insisting on it with no uncertain voice—I look forward to the time when an Irish legislature shall arise once more on the emerald pasture of College Green, and the Union Jack—that detestable symbol of a decadent Imperialism—be replaced by a flag as green as the island over which it waves—a flag on which we shall ask for England only a modest quartering in memory of our great party and of the immortal name ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... 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
... 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 he should suffer thus profoundly from a vicious ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... that 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 radioactivity from atomic operations. In short, the city ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... and the fleshless head resembled a disinterred black skull, fitted with two restless globes of silver in the sockets of eyes. He was demoralising. Through him we were becoming highly humanised, tender, complex, excessively decadent: we understood the subtlety of his fear, sympathised with all his repulsions, shrinkings, evasions, delusions—as though we had been over-civilised, and rotten, and without any knowledge of the meaning of life. We had the air of being initiated in some infamous mysteries; ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... thinking 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 room ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... was Spinoza to whom he gave the place of highest honour. Regarding the Great Peace as the ultimate object of human attainment, he held that Spinoza alone had found a clear path to the goal; since then European thought had been continually decadent. ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... driven back into Africa, despoiled and humbled. Here the Spaniards followed and harassed them and here the Turks, fighting the Christians, captured the Mediterranean ports and cut the Moors off permanently from Europe. In the slow years that followed, huddled in Northwest Africa, they became a decadent people and finally ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... 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" ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... poorer 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 ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... 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 ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... and, 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, as the heart in them pleased; and thus they were ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... will deny that England stands to-day otherwise than she stood a hundred and thirty-two years ago, when George was born. To-day we are living a decadent life. All the while that we are prating of progress, we are really so deteriorate! There is nothing but feebleness in us. Our youths, who spend their days in trying to build up their constitutions by sport or athletics and their evenings in undermining them with poisonous ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... 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
... 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 ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... 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 the ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... and begins another circuit of faucet, counter and table. A dame so fat that she must remain permanently at anchor—the venerable Constitution of this fleet!—bawls postcards and matches. A man in pince-nez, a decadent doctor of philosophy, sells pale German cigars at three for ten pfennigs. Here we are among the plain people. They believe in Karl Marx, blutwurst and the Hofbraeuhaus. They speak a German that is half speech and half grunt. One passes them to ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... 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 fopperies of the Roman Arcadia ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... scenes of trying on and draping! And as he drew easily, he willingly threw his ideas on paper, as he said, neatly. He had even designed the costumes of a little piece—played in I do not know what little theatre—which was revolutionary, anarchistic, symbolistic, decadent, end of the century, ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... examination." An unprejudiced man, I take it, is a man whose sentiments are the same as mine, and I happen to disagree with Mr. WILLOUGHBY as profoundly as possible on several of the themes he has chosen. On fox-hunting, for instance, which he considers a more decadent sport than bull-fighting; and on Ulster, which he attacks bitterly by comparison with the rest of Ireland, for cherishing antiquated political animosities and talking about the Battle of the Boyne. But will Mr. WILLOUGHBY not have been hearing of "the curse of CROMWELL"? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... well satisfied with it. He used particularly to point to his nose, which was not very large, but very delicate and conspicuously aquiline. "A regular Roman nose," he used to say, "with my goiter I've quite the countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period." He seemed proud ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of daily life which is a mere drapery of civilisation, and has nothing to do with the primitive reality of nature. The realistic drama begins with Euripides; and Euripides, the casuist, the friend of Socrates (whom Nietzsche qualifies as the true decadent, an "instrument of decomposition," the slayer of art, the father of modern science), brings tragedy to an end, as he substitutes pathos for action, thought for contemplation, and passionate sentiments for the primitive ecstasy. "Armed with the scourge of its syllogisms, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... why 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. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... (1) cadence, decadent, case, casual, casualty, occasion, accident, incident, mischance, cheat; ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... 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. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... repeat glibly the current phrases of criticism, but miss the lesson, the clarification of insight, the vision of the author or artist. Such superficial culture is a futile expenditure of time and money. [Footnote: For an arraignment of the money thrown away on modern decadent art, see Tolstoy's ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Bostonian," our guest replied. "I'm not abusing you on behalf of a city that I'm a native proprietor of. If I were, I shouldn't perhaps make your decadent Easter Parade my point of attack, though I think it's a pity to let it spoil. I came from a part of the country where we used to make a great deal of Easter, when we were boys, at least so far as eggs went. ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... interpret them otherwise if he will. After all the best use of a history is probably to stimulate 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 ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... hand she would have been proud to die. They were men, these desert dwellers, master and servants alike; men who endured, men who did things, inured to hardships, imbued with magnificent courage, splendid healthy animals. There was nothing effete or decadent about the men with whom ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... not attract Margaret. The two had nothing in common, but Margaret was well aware of the nature of the tie which had bound Rita Irvin to this empty and decadent representative of English aristocracy. Mollie Gretna was entitled to append the words "The Honorable" to her name, but not only did she refrain from doing so but she even preferred to be known as "Gretna"—the style of one of ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... result of the War would seem to be that it has put a stopper on decadent ideas as to dress. Mlle. GABY DESLYS, we read, found herself unable to begin her season at the Palace the week before last as her dresses ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... her nephew. He 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 must ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... animal of 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 ...
— The Death-Traps of FX-31 • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... in consequence of all that she learned at first hand. She also explains that her tribe are not 'wild blacks,' though, in the absence of missionary influences, they retain their ancient beliefs, at least the old people do; and, in a decadent form, preserve their tribal initiations, or Boorah. How she tested and controlled the evidence of her informants she has herself stated, and I venture to think that she could hardly have made a ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... 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 virtues of S. Francis and his vow, he learned ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... find many of the characters of the Nibelungenlied among the divine beings alluded to in the Edda. It is unlikely that the dramatis personae of a German murder story would find its way into even the most decadent form of Scandinavian belief. There is every reason to conclude that a great many historical elements are to be discovered in the Nibelungenlied, but to discount entirely those which are mythical is absurd and even more futile ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... another lure, a continual aggravation of pain and misery? It is cowardly and dangerous to allow superstition to live. To tolerate and accept it is to revive the dark evil ages afresh. It weakens and stupefies; the sanctimoniousness bequeathed by heredity produces humiliated, timorous generations, decadent and docile nations, who are an easy prey to the powerful of the earth. Whole nations are imposed upon, robbed, devoured, when they have devoted the whole effort of their will to the mere conquest of a future ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... harmonise completely and fully with food, fighting, words, and vision of life; the chords are simple as Handel's, but they are as perfect. Lytton's work, although as vulgar as Verdi's is, in much the same fashion, sustained by a natural sense of formal harmony; but all that follows is decadent,—an admixture of romance and realism, the exaggerations of Hugo and the homeliness of Trollope; a litter of ancient elements in a ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 at least is what certain ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... Pastor heard in 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
... desperately, as if into an 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 ever had ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... 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
... 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.] ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... 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 the imperial persecutions are true, then hath Christianity been revenged a million ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... consent had been the dominant foreign influence. The rattling of the Potsdam saber was threatening the tranquillity of the status quo. A conference of eleven European powers and the United States was held at Algeciras to readjust the treaty provisions for the protection of foreigners in the decadent Moroccan empire. In the words of a historian of America's foreign relations, "Although the United States was of all perhaps the least directly interested in the subject matter of dispute, and might appropriately have held aloof from the meeting altogether, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... 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
... quarter-deities that one sees among the marbles in public collections. "Graeco-Roman School, of the late Antonine Period; probably representing a Rural Deity, or God of Spring or Agriculture in the Latin mythology." Certainly the more decadent side of late Greek or Roman art seemed in some strange way to be living ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... against the anthropological method may be shortly disposed of. 'You examine savages,' people say, 'but how do you know that these savages were not once much more cultivated; that their whole mode of life, religion and all, is not debased and decadent from an earlier standard?' Mr. Muller glances at this argument, which, however, cannot serve his purpose. Mr. Muller has recognised that savage, or 'nomadic,' languages represent a much earlier state of language ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... Sheratons, her drawing-room was furnished with an abundance of easy chairs and lounges, and arranged with cosey nooks and corners calculated to gratify the luxurious tastes and lazy manners of a decadent generation. Her shrewd wit was further discovered in the care she took to assemble to her evening parties the prettiest, brightest, wickedest of the young girls in the wide circle of her friends. As young Robert ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... 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 of David painted classical scenes, and Pietro Longhi was ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... are done for. Decadent in morals, in physique, mean mentally and spiritually, they are even worse off than respectfully cherished ruins, because they are out of fashion; they and their dingy dwellings. Our house is on the market; I'd be glad to see it sold only Tressilvain ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 man, whom she ever afterwards called the Popinjay, and so handled him ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... studying the whole universe to find a race which will serve their purpose and they have chosen us to be the victims. When their fleet gets here, they plan to capture thousands of selected children and carry them to Mercury in order to infuse their blood into the decadent race of slaves they have. Those who are not suitable for breeding when they grow up will die as slaves in the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... affected by an 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 ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... Salaverria, after surviving the attacks of the northern realists under the lead of Pereda, in his novels of country life, and of the less vigorous Antonio de Trueba, and of Madrid vulgarians, headed by Mesonero Romanos and Coloma. The decadent novel, foreshadowed a few years since by Alejandro Sawa, has attained full maturity in Hoyos y Vinent, while the distinctive growth of the century is the novel of ideas, exact, penetrating, persistently suggestive in the larger sense, which does not hesitate to make demands upon the reader, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... 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 ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... chosen and elaborately fortified defences, the proudest of Germany's supermen of war had been beaten at their own game by the civilian soldiers of "effete and luxury loving Britain," and the republican armies of "decadent France," and still the Homeric fight was raging. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the Hun was fighting to hold the line which should make good his insolent claim to the hegemony of the world. Step by step, yard by yard, that line was being torn from his bloody fingers. Into that sea of ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... poverty and misery. Decadent men become dry and pedantic. Oppression and tyranny without engender pedagogism within. Thus the art of the Rococo became in the eighteenth century poor, sober, squeezed into rules, deprived of every passionate impulse which formerly might have reconciled us to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... 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
... 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, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... certain to be four feet long or over, the sport 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 hook will be flung out and twenty feet away. No slack, and away he ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... is the decadence of the German Army. That it is decadent he has no doubt at all, and he is a close, careful and not unfriendly observer. But the writer who deals boldly and broadly with the German Army is in reality dealing with a much larger subject. The British Army is a piece cut ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... an object, without belief in a definite, nontheistic relation between a human clan and a nonhuman object, we cannot recognize totemism proper; such usages must be treated as belonging to man's general attitude toward his nonhuman associates. The question whether they represent germinal or decadent totemism, or neither, must be considered separately in ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Slightly stout. A good liver, much given to Scotch and soda, with a weak heart. Is liable to collapse any time. If anything, slightly lazy or lethargic in his emotional life. One of the "owned" senators representing a decadent New England state, himself master of the state political machine. Also, he is nobody's fool. He possesses the brain and strength of character to play his part. His most distinctive feature ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... 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 ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... 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 ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... period of 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 lately begun ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... 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 ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... any connection with the 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 ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... regular plaintive plea for melody but supposed this was too much to ask, these days. The chauvinist detected German influence in the music (he had missed the parodic satire in March's quotations), and asked Heaven to answer why an American composer should have availed himself of a decadent French libretto. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... 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 ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... 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
... object to a wandering parson in her house and grounds. Probably she was a very imperious, disagreeable young woman,—full of the light scorn, lack of sentiment and cheap atheism common to the 'smart' lady of a decadent period, and if it were true that she had been for so many years in the charge of an American aunt with a 'hundred millions,' the chances were ten to one that she would be ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... be 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 can exist except through the mutual understanding ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... by the time PLATO began to concern himself with its problems. Nature, on the other hand, was a mysterious world of magical happenings, and there was nothing deserving of the name of natural science until alchemy was becoming decadent. It is not surprising, therefore, that the alchemists—these men who wished to probe Nature's hidden mysteries—should reason from above to below; indeed, unless they had started de novo—as babes knowing nothing,—there ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... spending or public voting of the smallest sum we know exactly whether we are so far determining expenditure and influence towards enlarging, say, the influence and example of renascent Florence in one generation or of decadent Versailles in another. There is no danger of awaking this consciousness too fully; for since we have ceased consciously to cite and utilise the high examples of history we have been the more faithfully, because sub-consciously and automatically, continuing and ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... state-finance were powerless to meet. Edward I failed to conquer the petty kingdom of Scotland; and the French provinces which were ceded to Edward III escaped from his grasp in a few years. The profitable wars were border wars, waged against the disunited tribes of Eastern Europe, or the decadent Moslem states of the Mediterranean. And such wars were of common occurrence, sometimes undertaken by the nationalities most favourably situated for the purpose, sometimes by self-expatriated emigrants in search of a ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... in silent mood until far 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
... 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 ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... his address is excellent, and he can express 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 ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a pause. A rather long wait. A distinctly long wait. Bell lighted a cigarette and seemed to become mildly bored. He regarded a voluptuous small statuette with every appearance of pleased interest. A subtly decadent painting seemed to amuse him considerably. He did not seem to notice that no windows at all were visible, and that shaded lamps lit this room, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... the Germany of the end of the eighteenth century possessed still another foil and counterpoise to its decadent rationalism. This was the so-called aesthetic-idealistic movement, which shades off into romanticism. The debt of Schleiermacher to that movement has been already hinted at. It was the revolt of those who had this in common with the pietists, ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... 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 of all his unquestioned gifts and the excellence ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... the two and a half kids from the decadent old families that are dying out go to school? Their sterile parents can motor 'em down to education!" he exclaimed. "Right here is the logical place for the school with the meadow behind it to give a bit ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... difference of feeling toward the Japanese now there if the immigration of more were prohibited by treaty stipulation. There is the same immediate relation between the tolerant attitude of whites toward the natives in the Hawaiian Islands and the feeling that the native is a decadent and dying race. Aside from the influence of the Indian's warlike qualities and of his refusal to submit to slavery, the attitude and disposition of the white race toward him have been influenced by considerations ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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 ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... COMEDY AND TRAGEDY. In Chapter IV we left the drama at that point, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Mystery Plays had largely declined and Moralities and Interlude-Farces, themselves decadent, were sharing in rather confused rivalry that degree of popular interest which remained unabsorbed by the religious, political, and social ferment. There was still to be a period of thirty or forty years before the flowering of the great Elizabethan drama, but they were to be years ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... 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 Rimbaud) ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... appeal to me. I must say many of these poets strike me as decadent fellows, not helped to anything like real ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... '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, they are parasitic nations. What did the Romans ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... 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. ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... 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. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... encourage these researches; a pure enthusiasm, they felt, should be for cricket and football, the dilettanti might even play fives and read Shakespeare without blame, but healthy English boys should have nothing to do with decadent periods. He was once found guilty of recommending Villon to a school-fellow named Barnes. Barnes tried to extract unpleasantness from the text during preparation, and rioted in his place, owing to his incapacity for the language. The matter was ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... machine of bronze, never a misstep, never a false estimate, never the difference of a finger's length in the long, even jumps. It might have been the one-eyed Agib riding his mighty horse of brass, except that no son of a decadent Sultan ever carried the bulk of Orange Jud. And the eccentric El Mahdi! There was no cause for fault-finding on this night. He galloped low and easily, gathering his grey legs as gracefully as his splendid, nervous mother. I watched his mane fluttering in the stiff breeze, his slim ears thrust forward, ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... which 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 ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Powers during the Balkan struggles of 1912 and 1913 and prevented Servia from winning its legitimate fruits of victory or Montenegro from holding what it had won; it had watched with delight the defeat of unorganized Russia at the hands of Japan and saw what its writers described as a decadent British Empire holding in feeble hands a quarter of the earth in fee, with revolt coming in Ireland, rebellion seething in India, dissatisfaction in South Africa, separation upon the horizon in Canada and Australia. Here lay ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... attractions. The frivolous members of the court, always ready for change and excitement, welcomed with enthusiasm the doctrine of the moral and simple life which the King and his advisers preached, just as in the decadent days before the French Revolution the court, bored with licentiousness, gaily welcomed the morality-painting of the young Greuze. And to the more serious-minded, such as Horemheb seems to have been, the movement must have appealed in its imperial aspect. The new god Aton was largely worshipped ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... beyond the proved capacity of New 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 dominant ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... regretted being at odds with their neighbors but also condemned his perpetuation of the old feud as unchristian. Hence it was a cause for much rejoicing to his mind to reflect that one male Howe at least survived to bolster up a spineless, spiritless, and decadent generation. To love one's enemies was a weak creed. Martin neither loved them nor pretended to. Never, never, would he forgive the insults the Websters had heaped upon his family. He wished no positive harm to Ellen Webster; but he certainly ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... this, the 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. ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... compare Shaw with Cervantes. 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
... that this was so, and the whole atmosphere of the place is pregnant with the supreme importance of this struggle, which may well be the dying convulsions of decadent France. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... libertine. They are powerful 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
... you 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
... 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
... review of the fortunes and achievements of Buddhism in that great land, and also to a special study of Tibet and of Lamaism. I have treated of Nepal elsewhere. For the history of religion it is not a new province, but simply the extreme north of the Indian region where the last phase of decadent Indian Buddhism which practically disappeared in Bengal still retains a ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... dark world. Politically it was bound. Despotism constricted and strangled it at the top, and at the bottom its millions were shackled slaves. Intellectually it was decadent. Philosophy had stopped and stagnated in Athens, and no fresh current of thought was irrigating the world, no new light was breaking upon the human mind. Religiously its pagan faiths were outworn and dying or dead. Judaism itself had ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... must be so completely crushed that she will never again cross our path. You must remember that we have not come to make war on the French people, but to bring them the higher Civilization. The French have shown themselves decadent and without respect for the Divine law. Against England we fight for booty. Our real enemy is England. We have to ... crush absolutely perfidious Albion ... subdue her to such an extent that her influence all over the world ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... would have been hard put to it to conceive any contrast greater than the one between this modern berserk and the pampered daughter of his wealth. A Hun or a Vandal gazing down with barbaric scorn on some decadent paramour of captured Rome was the most analogous simile Farnum's brain could summon. What freak of nature, he wondered, had been responsible for so alien an offspring to this ruthless builder? And what under heaven had the two in common except the blood that ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... excitement and desoeuvrement—his strong, grizzled hair bristling about his head, his black eyes staring and bloodshot, and that wild gypsyish look of his youth more noticeable than ever in these surroundings of what promised soon to be a decadent middle age. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Germany should ever change for something less noble the simple earnestness and fidelity to duty, which in those days characterised her teachers, and through them her sons generally, it will not be because of rationalism. Such a decadent Germany might coexist with the most rampant rationalism without their standing to each other in the relation of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... miles north of 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 ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... agitated time, presenting striking contrasts. At Jerusalem, an enlightened king was making a firm stand against the limitation of his power from within and against an almost invincible enemy from without. On the one side, society was decadent, on the other side arose the greatest moralists the world has ever seen, the prophets, the intrepid assailants of corruption. It was, finally, the period in which the noblest dreams of a better, an ideal humanity were dreamed. That is the ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... them to believe and to preach the belief that we are a decadent nation. They proclaim it to the world, through their professors, that we are an unheroic nation skulking behind our mahogany counters, whilst we are egging on more gallant races to their destruction. This is a ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones |
