Note 227 — Chapter IX · ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY
Reading edition
In his Mal romantique (1908) E. Seillière labels the generations that have elapsed since the rise of Rousseauism as follows:
1. Sensibility (Nouvelle Héloïse, 1761).
2. Weltschmerz (Schiller’s Æsthetic Letters, 1795).
3. Mal du siècle (Hugo’s Hernani, 1830).
4. Pessimism (vogue of Schopenhauer and Stendhal, 1865).
5. Neurasthenia (culmination of fin de siècle movement, 1900).