Victorian Sages As Critics
Cultural critics came to the scene in the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle are leading examples of a cultural critic of the Victorian age; in Arnold there is also a concern for religion. John Ruskin was another. Because of an equation made between ugliness of material surroundings and an impoverished life, aesthetes and others might be considered implicitly to be engaging in cultural criticism, but the actual articulation is what makes a critic. In France, Charles Baudelaire was a cultural critic, as was Søren Kierkegaard in Denmark and Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany.
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Famous quotes containing the words victorian, sages and/or critics:
“Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humoured, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.”
—C.E.M. (Cyril Edwin Mitchinson)
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“All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)