1. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), pp. 12, 17.
2. Havelock Ellis, “A Note on Paul Bourget”, Pioneer (October, 1889). In Views and Reviews: a Selection of Uncollected Articles 1884–1932 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), p. 52. He was quoting Paul Bourget’s Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine, in which Bourget described decadence as that stage of economic development “which produces too large a number of individuals who are unsuited to the labours of the common type” (51), that is, of insatiable desires but limited effort. I discuss Nietzsche’s very similar formulation of 1888 below. The origin of this definition of Decadence as a distorted relation of part to whole was probably Désiré Nisard’s Etudes of 1834, in which Nisard thought that a stylistic over-emphasis on the component parts of writing at the expense of the whole argument indicated a degeneration of French culture.
3. See Bernard Bosanquet], History of Aesthetic (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1892), pp. 441–16
4. See, for one compact example, Victoria Cross’s Self and Other, in which a Western “egoist” falls in love with an Indian nurse, who transforms him mentally, spiritually, and physically. Victoria Cross [Vivian Cory], Self and the Other (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1911).
5. Mrs Havelock Ellis, Attainment (London: Alston Rivers, 1909).