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:
“I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism, and can look back to an age whose challenges were moderate in their tone, and the cloud on whose horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Learn then what morals critics ought to show,
For ‘tis but half a judge’s task, to know.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)