ABSTRACT
In choosing a colourless title for my address, it was my purpose to avoid misunderstanding. If I had announced as my subject “The Praises of Decadence,” apart from the explanations which I hope to furnish to-day, I might have incurred the old imputation of being a corrupter of youth. And I shrank from the honour of sharing this imputation with my betters, whether of ancient or of modern times. None the less, it is my desire to call attention to the debt which we are under to periods of art and letters and ideas, other than the great classical epochs; which latter form, after all, but brief interruptions in the routine of human affairs. Some consideration of this matter seems at once to be forced upon us if we adopt in any degree what I take to be the modern standpoint with regard to continuity in history. For if it were true that for long ages together the human mind is either manifestly in decay or retrogression, or, at all events, is living on its capital, and ceasing to be intellectually and artistically productive, how could such a state of things enable us to account for the occasional renaissance of brilliant achievement? I do not suggest that this paradox is at all final or decisive against the reality of decay and degeneration in mankind, as we certainly observe them in particular forms of art, letters, and philosophy. Of course, we may suppose that new combinations, racial perhaps, or economic, may disengage latent energies, and that thus, practically, a new thing may be created and new life arise after what was really a decay and not merely a transformation of the old. History is much too complex, I take it, to allow of our pronouncing definitely that the conditions of a totally new civilization might not come together at some time and place, practically without inheritance from anything that had gone before.
