Georg Brandes

“ She has endowed her with her own clear, active intellect; but it is with Corinne, as with herself—the moment passion grips her with its eagle's talon, her intellect avails her nothing, she becomes its defenceless prey. Like Mme. de Staël, Corinne is an exile, with all the thoughts and sorrows of the exile. For in Italy she is severed from the land of her birth, in England banished from the home of her heart and its sunshine. Hence when Corinne sings of Dante, she dwells sorrowfully on his banishment, and declares her belief that his real hell must have been exile. ”

“ I robbed you of all this in giving you it all, or rather in giving nothing, for an incurable wound burned in my inmost soul.... I am weary of life, a weariness which has always consumed me. I am left untouched by all that interests other men. If I had been a shepherd or a king, what should I have done with my shepherd's crook or my crown? Glory and genius, work and leisure, prosperity and adversity, would weary me alike. I have found society and nature irksome in Europe as in America. ”

“ In the whole history of the world I do not know a fame that could tempt me. If the greatest honour in the world lay at my feet and I had but to stoop and take it up, I would not take the trouble. If I had been my own creator, I should probably have made myself a woman, out of passion for the sex; or if I had chosen to be a man, I would first of all have bestowed beauty upon myself; then, to provide against ennui, my worst enemy, I would have been a great but unknown artist, using my talent for myself alone. ”

“ Unlike former love stories, Adolphe does not delineate love only in its first awakening in the dawn of delusive hopes, but follows it through its whole existence, depicts its growth, its strength, its decay, its death, and even pursues it to the other side of the grave and shows the feelings into which it is transformed. Hence Adolphe, even more than René, is the story of the individual's rude awakening from delusion, the representation of the anguish of disappointment. It is the flower of life which is here stripped of its petals one by one and carefully dissected. ”

“ Are you capable of taking a step which would offend what you have been accustomed all your life to defer to, public opinion and established custom, but which would be consonant with morality, reason, and humanity? I was born a Protestant, and have, I grant, not been brought up in awe of those insane and barbarous institutions of society which demand of so many innocent beings the sacrifice of all natural inclinations; but ought you to have less confidence in my judgment because it is uninfluenced by prejudice? A proud and high-minded man should only obey the dictates of universal morality. ”

“ If human beings could but meet freed from that influence which all collectively exercise upon each, how pure the air that would penetrate into the soul! how many new ideas, how many genuine emotions would refresh it!"—"Receive my last salutation, O land of my birth!" cries Corinne in her swan song in praise of Rome—and one feels the bitterness of the exile and the thrust at Napoleon in the words that follow: "You have not grudged me fame, O liberal-minded people that do not banish women from your temples, that do not sacrifice immortal talent to passing jealousies! ”

“ When we remember how powerful is the prejudice which, in every country without exception, makes it a crime for the individual to deny that his nation is in possession of all the virtues which it ascribes to itself, and which so many a sanctimonious Jack-in-the-box finds it to his advantage to assure it daily that it possesses, we shall understand what courage Mme. de Staël displayed in attacking French national vanity at such a period.
There is one great idea that is more fatal than any other to the coercive power wielded by the established beliefs and customs of any given society. ”

“ It is where there is no life, where life loses its hold, that he feels at home. Will he be able to endure life? Or will he, like Werther, some day cast it from him?
He does not do so. He finds strength in a great resolve. He gives up once and for all the idea of pleasure and happiness. "Let us," he says, "look upon all that passes and perishes as of no importance; let us choose a better part in the great drama of the world. It is from our determined resolution alone that we can hope for any enduring result." ”

“ High-spirited, ambitious, vain, and shy, perpetually wavering in his faith in his own powers, he was not only endowed with the self-consciousness of genius, but with an egotism which ignored with absolute indifference all that did not immediately concern himself. He came too late into the world, and was educated under too peculiar circumstances, to have faith in the Revolution or the eighteenth century philosophy which partly inspired it. He came into the world too soon to make acquaintance with the science of the nineteenth century, and through it to win a new faith and a new standpoint. ”

“ Adolphe's chivalrous feeling impels him to run away with her, and for a time their tender feeling towards each other resembles love. Eléonore makes fresh sacrifices which it galls Adolphe to accept. At one time she suffers as much from not being loved as he from not loving; at another she so intoxicates herself with her own passion that she sees it double and believes that it is returned. Both live in the memory of their former happiness, which is vivid enough to make parting seem painful, even impossible, but not strong enough to impart any happiness to their daily life. ”

“ Whichever way she turns, she sees him as something gigantic, looming on every side. Hence there is in this love no criticism, no emancipation of the spirit, no employment of the understanding. He is the great, the glorious one—like Faust, who can talk of everything and has an answer for all questions, or like Egmont, whose name as a hero and a saviour is upon every tongue and who is known to the whole city. The reason why this love brings with it no spiritual emancipation is that the young girl has no spirit, in the sense of intellect; she is pure soul. ”

“ The melancholy of the early nineteenth century partakes of the nature of a disease; and it is not a disease which attacks a single individual or a single nation only, it is an epidemic which spreads from people to people, in the manner of those religious manias which so often spread over Europe in the Middle Ages. René's is merely the first and most marked case of the disease in the form in which it attacked the most gifted intellects.
René bears that mark of Cain already alluded to, which is, withal, the mark of the ruler. The seal of genius, invisible to himself, has been set on his brow. ”

“ My friend, this Revolution, which has unfortunately been soiled by so many violent deeds, will be extolled by posterity because of the freedom it has bestowed upon France. If it is followed only by fresh forms of slavery, this period of slavery will be the most ignominious period in the history of the world; but if freedom is its result, then happiness, honour, virtue, all that is noble in humanity, is so inseparably bound up with freedom, that centuries to come will be lenient in their judgment of the events which prepared the way for the age of freedom. ”

“ Corinne says: "When I sought glory, I always had the hope that it would make people love me," and Mme. de Staël herself exclaims: "Do not let us give our unjust enemies and our ungrateful friends the triumph of crushing, of suppressing our powers. It is they who force those who would so willingly have been content with feeling, to seek fame."
It is this warm-heartedness, one might almost say motherliness, which, in her case, gives the melancholy of the age a peculiar imprint. ”

“ These skirmishes with his narrow surroundings were not sufficient to satisfy the gifted young man; his discontent is perpetually with him, he drags it about as a man drags a weight attached to his leg. Like René and Obermann, he belongs to a generation of sons to whom their fathers did not appear to have left anything to do worth doing. The future has no interest for him, for he has anticipated it in imagination, and the past has made him old, for he has lived in thought through many a century. ”

“ They are faithful by instinct, and do not dream of the possibility of being anything else. They possess no morality, but all the virtues; for human beings are moral consciously, but good by nature. They do not consider themselves the equals of their lovers, but look up to them, as if the old legend had been realised and the sons of God had come down to the daughters of men. Gretchen is amazed and overpowered by Faust's knowledge, Clärchen kneels like a child before Egmont when he appears in his full splendour. ”

“ The inhabitant of Northern Europe, living in a raw climate, amidst cold, harsh natural surroundings, finds the same pleasure in the thought of sitting by a warm hearth whilst snow and rain beat impotently on the window pane, which a Neapolitan feels in the thought of sleeping under the warm, glorious, starry sky, or passing the cool night in dance, play, and song, in the open air. But to each of these different ideals of well-being and happiness corresponds a different conception of virtues and duties, which the nation that possesses or enforces them regards as the universal conception. ”

“ With the genius's instinctive inclination to seize on the great principle of the new age, but without the genius's infallible prevision of its real nature and faith in its final victory, he took hold of the ideas which a temporary revulsion in men's mood and sympathies had brought to light, and championed them with obstinacy, with magnificent but often hollow eloquence, with great talent but without warmth, without that conviction which permeates the whole individual and makes of him the enthusiastic, indefatigable organ of the idea. ”

“ It may not be; they untwist, they recoil from each other; and Corinne, the inspired Sibyl, becomes one of the many crushed, despairing spirits through whom the genius of the century utters its protest against that society which, like these apparently safe towns, is undermined by volcanic flames, flames which are never at rest, but find vent in one outburst after another, throughout the whole of the restless and unhappy nineteenth century. ”

“ We see the writers and writings of the Emigrant Literature as it were in a tremulous light. It is in the dawn of the new century that they stand, these men; the first beams of the morning sun of the nineteenth century fall upon them, and slowly disperse the veil of Ossianic mist and Wertherian melancholy which envelops them. One feels that a night of terror and bloodshed lies behind them ”

“ That in matters of the heart she was the true woman, she has shown us in Delphine and Corinne. Rousseau himself has not depicted love with more fire. Wherever she appeared she collected round her all the men of intellect, drawing them away even from young and beautiful women. When one remembers that in addition to all this she was very rich and very hospitable, giving magnificent entertainments every day, one does not marvel that, like some queen or fairy, she drew men to her enchanted castle. ”

“ He is still so young that there is more of curiosity and of the spirit of adventure in his feeling for a woman than of real love; and even if he loved deeply, he is too weak, too little of the man, to be able to love on in spite of society's disapproval of his passion; above all, in spite of his unlikeness to his father, he is too much his son to be able, without despising or deceiving himself, to stake his whole existence on one card. He differs from and yet resembles his father, just as the beginning of the nineteenth century differed from and yet resembled the eighteenth. ”

“ Oswald represents all those of England; his travelling companion, Count d'Erfeuil, all those of France; and it is against the prejudices of these two nations, at that time the most powerful and the most self-reliant in Europe, that the heroine does battle with her whole soul. It is no coldblooded, impersonal warfare, for Corinne's future depends upon whether she can succeed in freeing Oswald from his national prejudices to such an extent as to enable him to be happy with a woman like herself, whose life conflicts at every turn with the English conception of what is becoming in woman. ”

“ The Italy of the Renaissance divested Christianity of its spirit of self-renunciation, of its Jewish-Asiatic character, and transformed it into a mythology, fragrant of incense, wreathed with flowers. Italian Catholicism allied itself with the civic spirit in the cities, and with all the fine arts when art was born again. Thus its interests were quite as often promoted from patriotic as from religious motives. It was in Tuscany that the Renaissance began. There humanity was born again after its fall, its renegation of Nature. There the first Italian republics were founded. ”

“ Thorvaldsen's "Night" is only the stillness of night, the night in which men sleep. Night, as a Greek would conceive of it, the night in which men love, in which they murder, the night which hides under its mantle voluptuousness and crime, it certainly is not. It is a mild summer night in the country. And it is this idyllic spirit and sweet serenity which is the specially Danish characteristic of this production of the Northern renaissance of the antique. ”

“ To the present generation political circumstances have given the education that fell to the lot of Achilles. We have been fed on the blood and the marrow of lions; and now that a government which leaves nothing to chance and which determines the future has set limits to the dangerous development of the powers of youth, saying to them: 'Thus far and no farther!'—do they understand now what melancholy occurrences result from so much suppressed passion and unemployed strength, how many temptations to crime exist in a passionate, melancholy, world-weary heart? ”

“ When D'Erfeuil for the first time sees St. Peter's in the distance, he likens it to the dome of the Invalides in Paris—a comparison more patriotic than apt; when he sees Corinne at the Capitol he feels a desire to make her acquaintance, but no reverence for her. He is not surprised that her heart has remained untouched in a country where he finds no good qualities in the men, but he cannot help flattering himself with the hope that she will be unable to resist the charms of a well-bred young Frenchman. ”