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Back then, at the age of 36, he, Nawin Biadklang, had considered the sardonic comment both humorous and exhilarating, for every article allotting time and space to an examination of his self- absorbed ruminations on decadent living, no matter how critical and regardless of the domestic nature, like this one in point, was to him, then, like the first lick of succulent success.
But in the past the great artists, Michelangelo, Titian, even the great innovator Giorgione; Mozart, Bach, Handel; none of these were thought of as rebels. They had not to conquer the world against its will. They came into the world, and the world knew them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the Graeco-Roman world were not rebels.
From that time on for a hundred years France was without a rival, for the decadent work of Brussels could not be counted as such. Although the work of Italy in the Seventeenth Century has its admirers, it is guilty of the faults of all of Italy's art during the dominance of Bernini's ideals. America is too late on the field to enter the game of antiquity.
Shuttered, silent, abandoned, it stood like a harsh memento mori of human hopes. Dickson had never before been 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.
Poetry is decadent when the sound is allowed to outrun the sense or when the suggestions, say, of colour, which it contains are allowed to crowd out its deeper implications. Thus we can call such a poem as this one well-known of O'Shaughnessy's "We are the music-makers, We are the dreamers of dreams,"
I wonder how much of their supernal glory would be left to the world's men of action, from its Alexanders and Napoleons down to its successful bandits and ward-bosses, if mankind were in the habit of looking at what the winner had opposed to him, Alexander faced only by flocks of sheep-like Asiatic slaves; Napoleon routing the badly trained, wretchedly officered soldiers of decadent monarchies; and the bandit or ward-boss overcoming peaceful and unprepared and unorganized citizens.
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.
For a whole month, Tartarin, hunting for non-existent lions, wandered from village to village in the immense plain of the Chetiff, across this extraordinary, cock-eyed French Algeria, where the perfumes of ancient 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.
This was a doctrine which had long been preached by the chief political mentor of modern Germany, Treitschke, who died in 1896. He was never tired of declaring that Britain was a decadent and degenerate state, that her empire was an unreal empire, and that it would collapse before the first serious attack.
And with those things came all the rest; the manners, the household life, the necessaries and the fancies of a conquering and already decadent nation, the thousands of slaves whose only duty was to amuse their owners and the public; the countless men and women and girls and boys, whose souls and bodies went to feed the corruption of the gorgeous capital, or to minister to its enormous luxuries; the companies of flute-players and dancing-girls, the sharp-tongued jesters, the coarse buffoons, the play-actors and the singers.
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