"Decadent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frigid and stilted predecessors, and dared to depict Nature as she really is, not as she was misrepresented by the modish authors and artists of the age. Some persons seem shy of owning an acquaintance with this work; indeed, it has been made the butt of ridicule by the disciples of a decadent school. Its faults and its beauties are on the surface; Rousseau's own estimate is freely expressed at the beginning of the eleventh book of the Confessions and elsewhere. It might be wished that the preface had been differently conceived and worded; for the ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... 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 is stuck ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... ambitionless normality. They had decided that with economy they could still afford the apartment, which Tom, with the domesticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond of. The old English hunting prints on the wall were Tom's, and the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in college, and the great profusion of orphaned candlesticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a minute without acute spinal disorders—Tom claimed that this was because one was sitting in the lap of Montespan's wraith—at any rate, it was Tom's furniture ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... freedom and expansion. There still remained a republican liberty of action, an inspiring possibility of reform, an outlet for personal ambition, which facilitated the rise of great leaders and writers. And Rome was now bringing to ripeness fruit sprung from the seed of Hellenism, a decadent and meretricious Hellenism, but even in its decay the greatest intellectual ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... 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 ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... give 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
... recognizable instant. So our current American life and thought is not something that stands still long enough for us to describe it. Even as we write the description it has changed to another phase. And the phenomena of transition just now are particularly noticeable—that is all. We may call them decadent or we may look upon them as the beginnings of a new and more glorious ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... enemies of Germany, of fighting to root out a dangerous and rank growth. Germany, seeing in her own civilization only the appearance of modernism, has been inclined to regard all other civilizations as decadent. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... a temple. Buddhism being in a decadent state in China, and the temples being in a still further state of decay, it was an easy matter to arrange things with the priests. The temple selected was a large, rambling affair, with many compounds and many ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... 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 ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... heathenish rites—a thing almost cannibalistic. When she elected to engage a woman and a "hired man" to manage her house, she felt the disapprobation of the entire village, as if she had sunk into some decadent and enervating ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... has a native comprehension. Compare his "Diana" of the Louvre with Cellini's in the adjoining room from the point of view of pure sculpture. Goujon's group is superb in every way. Cellini's figure is tormented and distorted by an impulse of decadent though decorative aestheticism. Goujon's caryatides and figures of the Innocents Fountain are equally sculptural in their way—by no means arabesques, as is so much of Renaissance relief, and the modern relief that imitates it. Everything in fine ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... were ever true that a single personality could change an opposite course of thought, it must be held that Richard Wagner, in his own striking and decadent career, comes nearest to such a type. But he was clearly prompted and reinforced in his philosophy by other men and tendencies of his time. The realism of a Schopenhauer, which Wagner frankly adopted without ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... 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 similar to those which today operate ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... populace of Vienna appeals to rise against its Hapsburg masters. D'Annunzio was extraordinary in his literary career. He had been the poet of passion, a writer of novels and plays, which, although artistic in the highest degree, showed him to be an egotist and a decadent. But long before the war he had tired of his erotic productions and had begun to write the praises of Nature and of heroes. He had been singing the praises of his country. "La Nave" symbolizes the glory of Venice. He had become more wholesome. War was making him not only a ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... rampart against reality," against that false reality 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, an optimist dialectic ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... 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 ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... his brow and went to the dining room, saying to himself that, among all the volumes he had just arranged, the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly were the only ones whose ideas and style offered the gaminess he so loved to savor in the Latin and decadent, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... 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 Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... nor was it one of the delicate-boned, decadent, painted creatures such as those who now ringed in their captive. Though the man had been roughly handled and now reeled rather than walked, Raf thought for one wild instant that it was one of the crew ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... that 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 be elucidated to ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... glamour of his name. The annals of mediaeval Italy were stained with blood and tears because of the Tor di Rocca, and their loves that ended always in cruelty and horror, and Filippo had all the instincts of his decadent race. In love he was pitiless; no impulses of tenderness or of chivalry restrained him, and his methods were primeval and violent. Probably the Rape of the Sabines was his ideal of courtship, but the subsequent domesticity, the settling ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... that "nakedness, both in gymnastics and in sport, is a method of cure and a method of regeneration;" he advocates co-education in this culture of nakedness. Although he makes large claims for nakedness—believing that all the nations which have disregarded these claims have rapidly become decadent—Pudor is less hopeful than Ungewitter of any speedy victory over the prejudices opposed to the culture of nakedness. He considers that the immediate task is education, and that a practical commencement may best be ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... question of the position of women too much from the standpoint of expediency, and are scrutinizing too closely the immediate future. Women perhaps are thinking too much just now of their rights. There is a decadent form of chivalry or at least a sexuality that perpetuates conventions and interests that on the whole seem to interfere with progress. Jealousy and in general the tense emotional relations between the sexes obscure larger issues. Thus misunderstanding or antagonism, or at least disharmony, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... the establishment of British institutions; in the Russian Mir, in its older form; in the Arab tribal organisation and the Javan village communities."[1058] That "primitive Communism" of "tribal society," the organisation of savages and semi-savages, of the decadent and of the unfit, Socialists wish to foist upon a highly cultured nation. The above arguments, penned by the philosopher of British Socialism and the editor of "Justice" in recommendation of Communism, suffice ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... from the decadent touch of Europe. Matter is becoming dense and unescapable in the East. Chicago, a centre of tremendous vitalities of truth, is making a splendid fight against the entrenchments of the temporal mania; but in the larger sense, all that is living spirit is being driven westward before gross ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... an unbaptized person, whose faith, even if he does believe in God, is not supernatural, but purely natural. He is an infidel whether he is found in darkest Africa or in the midst of this Christian commonwealth, and in this latter place there are more infidels than most people imagine. A decadent Protestantism rejects the necessity of baptism, thereby ceasing to be Christian, and in its trail infidelity thrives and spreads, disguised, 'tis true, but nevertheless genuine infidelity. It is baptism that makes faith possible, for faith is a ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... 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 ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... semi-educated reader by some quip or quirk equally meretricious and mephitic. Thus would he, metaphorically, throw filth at himself. He felt all the time that he was pursuing the best course, bending things he despised and loathed to better purposes. Mr. Brann believed that the country was, if not in itself decadent and degenerate, under the control of decadent, degenerate and depraved men. He believed that society was a social cesspool. He thought that most religion was hypocrisy. He believed that most wealth represented nothing ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... is the basis of sane Nationalism—an understanding between the patriotic and virile elements in every country which, because they value their own liberties and revere their own traditions, are able to respect those of other nations. Internationalism is an understanding between the decadent elements in each country—the conscientious objectors, the drawing-room Socialists, the visionaries—who shirk the realities of life and, as the Socialist Karl Kautsky in a description of Idealists has admirably expressed ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... these modern days are retrograde. Sheep have fallen to a decadent race. Cheese has lost its cunning. Someone, alas, as the story says, has killed the hen that laid the golden egg. Mory's is sunk and gone. Its faded prints of the Old Brick Row, its tables carved with students' names, its brown Tobies in their three-cornered hats, the brasses ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... (1) cadence, decadent, case, casual, casualty, occasion, accident, incident, mischance, cheat; (2) casuistry, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... a 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 it. There ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... see for myself 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
... 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 ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... most peculiar incidents in this scientific tragi-comedy is the fact that Weismann, the mainstay of contemporary decadent Darwinism, attacks with might and main its fundamental assumption, the transmission of acquired characters, whereas Eimer, who is thoroughly convinced that he has proved that doctrine, in his turn attacks Darwinism ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... "More Songs from Vagabondia", 1896; and "Last Songs from Vagabondia", 1900, — which introduced a new note into American poetry, and appearing, as they did, in the nineties, formed a wholesome contrast to some of the work then emanating from the "Decadent School" in England. Among the finest of Mr. Carman's volumes, aside from his work with Richard Hovey, are "Behind the Arras: A Book of the Unseen", 1895; "Ballads of Lost Haven", 1897; "By the Aurelian Wall, and Other ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... visitors to Florence see outside the Florence Club effeminate elegants in English-made suits of blue serge, and brown boots, and they sigh to think that such specimens of humanity are the representatives of a noble race. Disguise it as you may, poor Italy is sadly decadent. Her glory has passed, her nobile are ruined and her labour enemies are, alas! bent upon putting her into the melting-pot. The gallant Italian army fought valiantly against the Tedesci. It saved Venice ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... the depth and strength of German, it is generally agreed that as an instrument of thought French prose in a master-hand is unrivalled, by its subtlety and precision, and its epigrammatic force. Every one knows and laments the decadent style which is eating into it; and every one knows that the deplorable tone of much of its contemporary literature makes discernment in French reading a matter not only of education but of conscience and sanity; but this does not make the danger to ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... entanglements as may cause a general war. Spain alone has anything to gain from such a contest; in it she would at least have allies, and would expect to see her thirst for revenge upon us gratified. The great powers of Europe, however, do not mean to risk an oecumenical convulsion for the sake of a decadent monarchy, which, considered as the trustee of colonies, has been tried in the balance and found wanting. They recognize that, in seeking to evade the sentence of rigorous isolation which the conscience of mankind has passed upon her, she is jeopardizing ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... used to bring in trade and make it secure. The exploded fictions of alcoholism are kept circulating. Like a tape-worm in the intestines, these articulated and many-jointed parasitic organizations of vice make our communities sick, dirty, and decadent. ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... evident in the attitudes of his team-mates, too. No one had imagined that John Brown would have the nerve to cross Mooney beyond the giving of a reprimand. Not and hold the reputation which he had slaved so hard to preserve in turning out a winning eleven for decadent Elliott his first year there. The great John Brown might better have remained in permanent retirement, resting on his richly deserved laurels, than risk his halo of "wizard" and "miracle man of the gridiron" by failure to restore Elliott's former football supremacy. The press ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... awakening may have been accompanied with too much appeal to the feelings and unhealthy emotional excitement; but some vigorous movement was absolutely necessary to quicken the spiritual life of a decadent age. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... literature doesn't 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
... distributed as 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 ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... "Selections." The reviewer began by thanking his author "for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of ringing optimism, of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good, which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent nihilism.... It is well," the writer continued, "when such reminders come to us not from the moralist but from the man of science—when from the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this glorious cry ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... was an Englishman by 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. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... nationhood exists, they are not necessarily unhappy in other cases. When it takes the form of the settlement of unpeopled lands, or the organisation and development of primitive barbaric peoples, or the reinvigoration and strengthening of old and decadent societies, it may prove itself a beneficent force. But it is beneficent only in so far as it leads to an ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... have also been found the bones of huge human-like beings whose decadent progeny are still alive in ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... his strictures on German music is hardly complimentary to Chopin: "Wagner is a thorough-going decadent, an off-shoot, an epigonus, not a progonus. His cheeks are hollow and pale—but the Germans have the full red cheeks. Equally decadent is Liszt. Liszt is a Hungarian and the Hungarians are confessedly a completely disorganized, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... extremes of life in our new far Eastern provinces: the one is active, progressive, and cosmopolitan; the other, inactive, decadent, and narrow; but, whether one enjoys the first or endures the second, there comes to him after leaving a longing to lounge again in tropic airs and listen to the lullaby of ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... 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. Greed, selfishness or fear-thoughts will ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... for her he had an infinite tenderness and an infinite respect. When that face faded from him, he saw all the other faces, and he saw no more difference than between sheep and sheep. Indeed, that curious love of the sordid, so common an affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so genuine, grew upon him, and dragged him into more and more sorry corners of a life which was never exactly "gay" to him. His father, when he died, left him in possession of an old dock, where for a time he ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... civilized. The Chiquito language was adopted as the means of communication among the converts, who soon numbered 50,000, representing nearly fifty tribes. Upon the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 the Chiquitos became decadent, and now number short of 20,000. Their houses, regularly ranged in streets, are built of adobes thatched with coarse grass. They manufacture copper boilers for making sugar and understand several trades, weave ponchos and hammocks and make straw hats. They are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... have derived them from the conditions of life among the Germans themselves. In Franz von Sickingen and his cause Lassalle thought he saw a glimpse of the revolutionary spirit of modern times. Marx saw only a belated and futile struggle on the part of a member of the decadent medieval order of petty barons against the rising order of territorial princes. Had Lassalle linked up the cause of the petty barons with the revolt of the peasants, Marx would have thought better of his performance, but this ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... 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 caprice; ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... were set the problem of finding a method of sterilizing the unfit, that is, people who showed any decadent tendency to originality. All the increase of population by that time was occasioned under the direction of the High Priests, so that the Holy State had not only the power of dealing death, but of bringing new life. ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... help us to fix a relative date for the "Works". 1) In diction, dialect and style it is obviously dependent upon Homer, and is therefore considerably later than the "Iliad" and "Odyssey": moreover, as we have seen, it is in revolt against the romantic school, already grown decadent, and while the digamma is still living, it is obviously growing weak, and is ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... 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 ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... and while the more prosperous Romans settled on the coast, the others retired to the mountains. One of the sea-towns, by the way, to which the Romans fled was Split, where they could live in the ruins of Diocletian's enormous, decadent palace; and from extant lists of the mayors of that town we see that until the tenth century they all had Latin names, from then till the twelfth century we find partly Latin and partly Slav names, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries their names were nearly always ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... similar may be said with respect to the churches. In every city there are several, and people can usually go to the church of their choice. In many parts of the country the church is decadent, and in some places it is becoming extinct. Even the automobile contributes its influence against the country church as a rural institution, and in favor of the city; for people who are sufficiently well-to-do ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... 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 are ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... and by nature, according to the accounts of those who knew him, of but poor mental calibre, Alexander is, perhaps, to be as much pitied as blamed. His nerves, so Mr. Chedo Miyatovitch told me, never recovered from the shock of a boating accident when young. He was the last and decadent scion of the Obrenovitches and was ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... 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 ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... standard except wealth—all these things are set down with the minute realism that must come, I am sure, of intimate personal knowledge. Sylvia is the offspring of one such family, and mated to the decadent heir of another. Her tragedy is that too late she meets a man whom she supposes capable of giving her the fuller, more complete life for which she has always ignorantly yearned. Then there is Anne, the penniless girl, hired as a child to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... the security that should be due to so supreme an achievement, did not correspond to our real strength and abilities. England had vast dependencies, and had staked out the unoccupied world as her colonies. We had no colonies and no dependencies. France, though decadent, was a menace to our peace upon the West. We could have achieved the thorough conquest and dismemberment of France at any time in the last forty years, and yet during the whole of that time France was adding ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... faith in mankind, and when he became, comparatively, a well-to-do man he went on doing generous deeds as though nothing had happened. With humbugs and pretenders he would have no dealings; but no genuine young artist ever asked his help in vain. He spared even that rancorous decadent Nietzsche; he owned his obligations to that soul of chivalry, Liszt. He spared that mediocre person Meyerbeer; he treated Mendelssohn with almost exaggerated courtesy. He fought a terrific fight with all the forces of reaction ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... one building. No doubt to the fortunate persons through whose hands one pound notes pass, such awful symbolism conveys a sense of England's greatness and power; but I think it would be far more amusing if the back had been left blank, in case some later Robbie Burns (could this decadent world ever know so fine a thing again) wished to ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... 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, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... taste simultaneously; yielding to the 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, but would not have managed to keep quiet about them so prettily. But, now that ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... with his fingers, for he was a simple-minded country lad with no knowledge of women, and many fears of the traps which await the unwary in a great city. Many stories were afloat of pugilists who had been taken up and cast aside again by wealthy ladies, even as the gladiators were in decadent Rome. It was with some suspicion therefore, and considerable inward trepidation, that he faced round as a tall veiled figure swept into the room. He was much consoled, however, to observe the bulky form of Tom Cribb immediately behind her as a proof that ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and art production became again abundant among the subject population, though of inferior quality. The Cnossian palace was re-occupied in its northern part by chieftains WHO have left numerous rich graves; and general commercial intercourse must have been resumed, for the uniformity of the decadent Aegean products and their wide distribution become more ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... great rock in a thirsty land. Dulness will be the New Genius. "Give us dull books," people will cry, "great dull restful pictures. We are weary, very weary." This hectic, restless, incessant phase in which we travail—fin-de-siecle, "decadent," and all the rest of it—will pass away. A chubby, sleepy literature, large in aim, colossal in execution, rotund and tranquil will lift its head. And this Crichton will become a classic, Messrs. Mudie will sell surplus copies of his works at ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Wilhelm 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. ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... centuries, we hear of a "school" of jongleurs at Beauvais. In Lent they might not ply their profession, so they gathered at Beauvais, where they could learn cantilenae, new lays. [Footnote: Epopees Francaises, Leon Gautier, vol. ii. pp. 174, 175.] But by that time the epic was decadent and dying? ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... 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 roofs ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... 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
... basic ideas, gleaned largely from facts provided by Peter Horry and Robert Marion (the nephew of Francis), remain largely unchanged. Even in this decadent state, Weems' biography brought the nation's attention to Francis Marion, and inspired numerous other writers to touch on the subject — two of these works, biographies by James and Simms, are especially noteworthy. Therefore, ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... 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 ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... nothing original in this position. It was characteristic of decadent scholasticism, it squared with Luther's exaggerations about the impotence of reason in fallen man, and Pascal had given his own highly personal twist to it. Bayle has been hailed as a forerunner of ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... themselves 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 qualities ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... 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 ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... sea and commanding a superb view of the Bay of Salerno. It is a baroque structure of the type common everywhere in Italy, which travellers are apt to despise without acknowledging how picturesque this decadent style of architecture can appear. At Prajano the wooden doors of green faded to the hue of ancient bronze, the yellow-washed plaster facade and the lichen-covered tiles of the roof and tower make up a charming mass of varied colouring when viewed against the broad blue band of sea and sky beyond. ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power—but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... seen, all the building of man harmonises with and adorns nature. In the West everything now built is a blot. Many men, I know, sincerely think that this destruction of beauty is a small matter, and that only decadent aesthetes would pay any attention to it in a world so much in need of sewers and hospitals. I believe this view to be profoundly mistaken. The ugliness of the West is a symptom of a disease of the Soul. It implies that the end has been lost sight of in the means. In China the opposite ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Chapters," a set of regulations adopted by the young Tzar Ivan Vasilievitch (afterwards known as Ivan the Terrible), the son of Vasily, and by the most enlightened nobles of his time at a council held in 1551. Their object was to reform the decadent morals of the clergy, and various ecclesiastical and social disorders, and in particular, the absolute illiteracy arising from the lack of schools. Another famous work of the same century is the "Domostroy," or "House-Regulator," attributed to Pope ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... words, it is not immorality which is growing. Rather, it is the moral consciousness which is gaining ground in individual consciences, thus forming a public opinion which formerly did not exist, completely awake to existing social evils and which are combatted. Not that social morals has been decadent. On the contrary, a moral consciousness has been rapidly formed in our society, a consciousness which formerly was found only among an inconsiderable minority, and which resulted in the new ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... and Napoleons down to its successful bandits and ward-bosses, if mankind were in the habit of looking at what the winner had opposed to him,—Alexander faced only by flocks of sheep-like Asiatic slaves; Napoleon routing the badly trained, wretchedly officered soldiers of decadent monarchies; and the bandit or ward-boss overcoming peaceful and unprepared and unorganized citizens. Who would erect statues or write eulogies to a man for mowing a field of corn-stalks with a scythe? Mankind is never more amusing than ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... be equipped with a dual nature, both intellectually and morally, in order to pronounce fully and fairly upon the qualities of this drama by Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss. He should be an embodied conscience stung into righteous fury by the moral stench exhaled by the decadent and pestiferous work, but, though it make him retch, he should be sufficiently judicial in his temperament calmly to look at the drama in all its aspects and determine whether or not as a whole it is an instructive note on the life and culture ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in the final stage of the descent, where my mind woke up from its meditations. One can only say that the whole landscape was like a leper. It was of a wasting white and silver and grey, with mere dots of decadent vegetation like the green spots of a plague. In shape it not only rose into horns and crests like waves or clouds, but I believe it actually alters like waves or clouds, visibly but with a loathsome slowness. The swamp is ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... duties of the man and of the woman can be fulfilled under reasonably favorable circumstances. If a race does not have plenty of children, or if the children do not grow up, or if when they grow up they are unhealthy in body and stunted or vicious in mind, then that race is decadent, and no heaping up of wealth, no splendor of momentary material prosperity, can avail in any degree as offsets. The Congress has the same power of legislation for the District of Columbia which the State legislatures ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... for the life of me imagine how she could have cared for the fellow, with his face all dried and frayed with make-up. There was something lithe and sinuous about him that may, of course, have appealed to her. And I can understand his infatuation. He was decadent, exhausted; and there would be moments when he found her primitive violence stimulating, before ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... 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
... not surprised to find 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 ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... the 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
... 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
... be eventful to the Count. While he was entertaining the Dean, the men on the deck of the galley, unused to Byzantine customs, were startled by a cry, long, swelling, then mournfully decadent. Glancing in the direction from which it came, they saw a black boat sweeping through the water-way of the Port. A man of dubious complexion, tall and lithe, his scant garments originally white, now stiff with dirt of many hues, a ragged red head-cloth ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... 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 comprehend it. It ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... has always hung round the idea of a pilgrimage, with all people and at all times—I except those very rare and highly decadent generations of history in which no pilgrimages are made, nor any journeys, save for curiosity or greed—there has always hung round it, I say, something more than the mere objective. Just as in general worship you will have noble gowns, vivid ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... However, I cannot reasonably lay the blame for her on the doctor. His cow was friendly enough. It was Sport, the old dog, that made the heaviest and at the same time a most ludicrous item in my duties as hired man. Long past the age of sport of any kind, he spent his decadent years in a state of abject fear of thunder and lightning. If only a cloud darkened the sun, Sport kept up a ceaseless pilgrimage between his corner and the kitchen door to observe the sky, sighing most grievously at the outlook. At the first ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... pandering to their vanity. The features are strongly pronounced, and at times verge upon the grotesque—we mean it in no offensive spirit. A high intelligence runs riot, and an idealism untempered by sobriety and practice, with strong passions, and love of show. But they mark a people, not decadent, but evolving. The Mexicans are at the beginning, not the end, of their civilisation; the rise, not the fall, of their life. Here is the material of a vigorous and prolific race which may be destined to bulk largely—like the whole of Spanish-America—in the future regime of the civilisation ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... At the close of the apostolic age, and {263} for many generations afterwards, orthodox Christianity was often regarded as too materialistic for advanced thinkers. They endeavoured to make Christianity keep pace with the times by infusing into it the decadent Greek or Oriental mysticism which depreciated ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... 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 in ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... panorama of the life of a decadent Abyssinian Prince; with full details of his wardrobe, his taste in liqueurs, his emotions and dissipations.... Simply must be read by anyone who wishes to be 'in it.' It is a liberal education in ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various
... 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 ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... mean our army will be here. All know it in Germany. They know it in Paris! But what can they do? How can they stop us?... Decadent!..." He laughed easily. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... an interesting and altruistic scheme, this proposed regeneration at American expense of a corrupt and decadent empire, but in their enthusiasm its supporters seem to have overlooked several obvious objections. In the first place, though both England and France are perfectly willing to have the United States accept a mandate for European Turkey, Armenia and even ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... Roman Empire decadent, crept in on it, and though much more of the invasion was peaceful than we have been accustomed to think, the Romans simply disappearing because family life had been destroyed, children had become infrequent, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... spirituality. We have taken at random four of the most popular stories of Greece. We have found in each of them pagan elements partly bequeathed by that earlier and lower earth-bound worship which preceded the Olympians, partly added in decadent days when the mind of man was turned from the heights and grovelling again. But we have seen a deeper meaning in them, far further-reaching than any story of days and nights or of years and seasons. It is a story of the aspiring spirit ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... 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 ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... 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 me about the mice. You see, when ...
— Reginald • Saki
... and bloody of the Mediterranean adventures of the Middle Ages,—the clash of western crudeness, almost savage but frank and noble, against the refined malice and decadent civilization of the Greeks,—childish and old at the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... orders," he said coldly. "And we don't know what their orders are. Until we realized you'd get here first, we were making ready to take the kids off in a snow-weasel. If we kept to soft snow, no plane could land near them. It's just possible somebody could claim the kids asked protection from us decadent, warmongering Americans, and they might be equipped to shoot ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... 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. I am impregnated with it, I yield ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... passed and man increased, he drifted ever farther afield in search of room. He encountered other drifts of men, and the killing of men became prodigious. The weak and the decadent fell under the sword. Nations that faltered, that waxed prosperous in fat valleys and rich river deltas, were swept away by the drifts of stronger men who were nourished on the hardships of deserts and mountains and who were more capable with the sword. Unknown and unnumbered ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... live on the glory of the past. Now, what is to be the future of our nation? Are we to live only on the glory of the past and die off from the face of the earth, to show that we are worthy descendants of the glorious past and to show by our work, by our intellect and by our service that we are not a decadent nation? We have still a great and mighty future before us, a future that will justify our ancestry. In talking about ancestry, do we ever realise that the only way in which we can do honour to our past is not to boast of what our ancestors have done but to carry out in the future something as ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... 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
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... despises Brahms, and thinks that he had nothing to say. Wagner is, for him, a decadent, like Liszt ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Scripture searched with honesty, and the 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 ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... moment later with a bundle of long, 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 the ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... 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 will ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... 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 man, whom she ever afterwards called the Popinjay, and so handled ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... and most fantastic fripperies of artificial life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new pessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an affectation of sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into the avenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation. And it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their sinister philosophy is ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... said Shelton, "is the way we men decide what women are to bear, and then call them immoral, decadent, or what you will, if they don't ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a hedgehog lay dead athwart the path—nay, more than dead; decadent, distinctly; a sorry sight for one that had known the fellow in more bustling circumstances. Nature might at least have paused to shed one tear over this rough jacketed little son of hers, for his wasted aims, his cancelled ambitions, his whole career of usefulness cut suddenly short. But not a ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... 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,' even as ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... the other hand, has become more decadent than aggressive. This among other rural agencies is not organized in proportion to its importance. Some progress, however, is being made by means of social organizations, but the ultimate solution of the rural problem depends more largely upon education ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... 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 uncommon ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... dexterous hands the decadent idea, what there was of it, went entirely to pieces, which nobody has troubled to pick up. Oddly enough (unless this be always the Nemesis of excess) it began to be insupportable in the very ways in which ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... a 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 gone to seed and was only a dry husk. Morally the world was terribly ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... by some that man as the selector has developed beauty, more beauty than we had before; and we point to the charms of our women as compared with those of the squaw. The answer to this is that the squaw belongs to a decadent race; that she too is subject to the man, that the comparison to have weight should be made between our women and the women of the matriarchate—an obvious impossibility. We have not on earth women in a state of normal freedom and full development; but we have enough difference ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... man at whose side and by whose 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
... 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 be the ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... urged 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 than anything ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang |
