"Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts"
About this Quote
Hemingway takes a word that sounds like diagnosis and exposes it as a weaponized vibe. “Decadence” arrives dressed in historical gravitas - fallen empires, moral rot, velvet curtains - but he insists it’s mostly a lazy insult, a way for gatekeepers to shut down art that threatens their categories. The sting is in “do not yet understand”: critics aren’t just prudish, they’re behind. Their outrage is framed as intellectual failure masquerading as ethical clarity.
The line also performs a neat reversal. Critics claim to defend standards; Hemingway implies they’re defending themselves. Calling something decadent is less a description than a reflex, a social immune response to the unfamiliar. By tethering aesthetic judgment to “moral concepts,” he highlights how criticism often smuggles in private anxieties as public principle. The subtext: taste is never neutral, and moral language is a convenient cudgel when you lack better arguments.
Context matters. Hemingway came up amid modernism’s rubble after World War I, when the old assurances - God, nation, polite realism - looked increasingly fake. New forms and new freedoms were instantly branded as cultural decline. His own career was shadowed by that charge: spare prose, sexual candor, hard drinking, cosmopolitan drift. So the sentence reads like self-defense, but it’s sharper than that. It’s a warning about critical power: when “decadence” becomes shorthand for “I disapprove,” the critic stops describing art and starts policing it. The real target isn’t excess; it’s difference.
The line also performs a neat reversal. Critics claim to defend standards; Hemingway implies they’re defending themselves. Calling something decadent is less a description than a reflex, a social immune response to the unfamiliar. By tethering aesthetic judgment to “moral concepts,” he highlights how criticism often smuggles in private anxieties as public principle. The subtext: taste is never neutral, and moral language is a convenient cudgel when you lack better arguments.
Context matters. Hemingway came up amid modernism’s rubble after World War I, when the old assurances - God, nation, polite realism - looked increasingly fake. New forms and new freedoms were instantly branded as cultural decline. His own career was shadowed by that charge: spare prose, sexual candor, hard drinking, cosmopolitan drift. So the sentence reads like self-defense, but it’s sharper than that. It’s a warning about critical power: when “decadence” becomes shorthand for “I disapprove,” the critic stops describing art and starts policing it. The real target isn’t excess; it’s difference.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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