Nineteenth Century
The pessimistic element was available in Schopenhauer's philosophy and Matthew Arnold's cultural criticism. The tide of Whiggish optimism (exemplified by Macaulay) receded somewhat in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria.
Classical culture, based on traditional classical scholarship in Latin and Greek literature, had itself been under attack externally for two generations or more by 1900, and had produced in Nietzsche, a model pessimistic thinker.
The increasing availability of information of world events during this period, led to increased despondence and consultants such as Marcus Buckle vocalised this as a general feeling of doom.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Pessimism
Famous quotes related to nineteenth century:
“The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Why does he not know how to select servants? The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)
“In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)