United States or Barbados ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
M. Renan, with his saintly ironical sympathy for the young and weak, knew it when he excused the symbolists and decadents of various kinds with that indulgent sentence, "Ce sont des enfants qui s'amusent."
It would not have been more ludicrous than putting this portrayer of evil puppets, with their thin lines like wire and their small faces like perverted children's, to trace against the grand barbaric forests the sin and the sorrow of Lancelot. To return to the chief of the decadents, I will not speak of the end of the individual story: there was horror and there was expiation.
I thought the author of "Fungoids" did, unconsciously of course, owe something to the young Parisian decadents or to the young English ones who owed something to THEM. I still think so. The little book, bought by me in Oxford, lies before me as I write. Its pale-gray buckram cover and silver lettering have not worn well. Nor have its contents.
After his trial and condemnation "The Daily Telegraph" spoke with contempt of these "decadents" and "aesthetes" who, it asserted, "could be numbered in London society on the fingers of one hand"; but even "The Daily Telegraph" must have known that in the "smart set" alone there are hundreds of these acolytes whose intellectual and artistic culture gives them an importance out of all proportion to their number.
Maddox shrugged his enormous shoulders. "Jewdwine? Jewdwine won't slate his own man, but he can't very well turn round and boom the set he always goes for. This," said Maddox, "is my deal. I shall sail in and discover Ricky-ticky." "He's taking precious good care to hide himself. It's a thousand pities he ever got in with those wretched decadents." "He isn't in with them."
The city was full of libraries, public and private, and of readers. The culture of the place was, no doubt, self-contained; it did not aim at enriching the outer world, which it despised; its literary productions were imitative, the work of dilettanti and decadents.
We have laws enough now, but the baser politicians protect our city tramps, our gunmen, our decadents, our incendiaries against our elected magistrates, in order that they may keep ready to hand, and increase, the raw material of a purchasable vote, by the domination and protection of which they keep themselves in power.
We might add that even in the plastic arts, symbolists and "décadents" have attempted, as far as possible, methods that merely indicate and suggest or hint instead of giving real, definite objects: which fact makes them inaccessible to the greater number of people. This characteristic of obscurity is due to two causes.
They talked about the decadents, about "The Maid of Orleans," and Kostya delivered a regular monologue; he fancied that he was very successful in imitating Ermolova. Then they sat down and played whist.
But there was a sort of power or at least weight in his coarseness. His lapses were those proper to the one good thing he really was, an Irish swashbuckler a fighter. Some of the Roman Emperors might have had the same luxuriousness and yet the same courage. But the later decadents were far worse, especially the decadent critics, the decadent illustrators there were even decadent publishers.
Word Of The Day