Georg Brandes

“ Mine is not the usual idealism, the idealism of faith; mine is an idealism of the heart, peculiar to those who have often experienced all the emotions, on the stage, on paper, or in real life. But of what good is it?... I often look upon the mountains and the rivers and the ground round about me, and feel as if at any moment they might dissolve and disappear, and I with them.... There is in man a callous, bold spirit, which asserts its independence of everything, even of virtue. Man chooses virtue if he will; he is its creator, not its creature. ”

“ Every soul is born again; words of power are heard again; the great world-soul moves, and puts forth bud and blossom without end....
"The world becomes a dream, our dream the world; and what we believed to have happened long ago, we now see only coming, as yet far off. Imagination must have free play, must weave her web as seems best to her, here veiling, there discovering, at last dissolving all into magic vapour. Sadness and rapture, death and life, are here by inmost sympathy but one: he who has known the highest love never recovers from its wounds." ”

“ Only ruthlessness, only a clear perception of the illusion can save us; Amalie is, therefore, nothing to me, now that I see that poetry, art, and even love, are only draped and veiled sensuality.... Sensuality is the driving-wheel of the whole machinery ... voluptuousness is the inspiration of music, of painting, of all the arts; all human desires flutter round this magnetic pole, like moths round a candle;... hence it is that Boccaccio and Ariosto are the greatest poets, and that Titian and the wanton Correggio stand high above Domenichino and pious Raphael. ”

“ I go down to the foundations of real life, and show how the emotions which find their expression in literature arise in the human heart. And this same human heart is no still pool, no idyllic mountain lake. It is an ocean, with submarine vegetation and terrible inhabitants. Drawing-room history of literature, like drawing-room poetry, sees in human life a drawing-room, a decorated ball-room—the furniture and the people alike polished, the brilliant illumination excluding all possibility of dark corners. ”

“ The child will be the express image of the father—a new golden age, with dark, fathomless eyes; a prophetic, miracle-working, comforting age, which will kindle the flame of eternal life; a great reconciler, a saviour who, like a spirit taking up his abode amongst men, will only be believed in, not seen, will appear to the faithful in innumerable forms, will be consumed as bread and wine, embraced as the beloved, inhaled as the air, heard as word and song, received as death with voluptuous ecstasy and love's keenest pain, into the inmost recesses of the dissolving body. ”

“ When we know that the following extraordinary speech of Otto's is made of so sagacious and devoted a horse as this, it does not astonish us so much as it otherwise might: "My horse's colour makes him specially dear to me. For this bright brown is in my eyes a colour of angelic beauty; my blessed mother had great, bright brown eyes, and, as all heaven looked out of them, the colour has always seemed to me like a greeting from heaven."
Thus does the psychology of the romance of chivalry culminate—psychology of the patrician, or psychology of the horse, call it which you will. ”

“ Soul remains at home when enthusiasm draws the sword and goes forth to war. To the Romanticists the greatest poet is he who has most soul.
The change which takes place in the case of the Romanticists is the turning of Goethe's "Seelenwärme"—warmth of soul—into heat, a heat which rises to the boiling or melting point, and in its intensity consumes all established forms and ideas. The glory of the Romantic poet is the heat and passion of the emotion which burns within him. What Novalis does is done with the force of his whole being. Intense, reckless feeling is his motto. ”

“ You remember the blue flower in Novalis's tale? Do you know what it is? It is the flower which no mortal eye has seen, yet the fragrance of which fills the world. Not every creature is delicately enough organised to perceive its perfume; but the nightingale is intoxicated with it when she sings and wails and sobs in the moonlight and the grey dawn; and so were, and so are, all the foolish human beings who, in prose and verse, have poured, and are pouring, forth their woes to Heaven ”

“ In the midst of such a life as this he was surprised by the French Revolution. Its first effect was to fire him with youthful enthusiasm. "If this revolution were to fail," he wrote, "I should deem it one of the greatest misfortunes which has befallen mankind. It is the first practical triumph of philosophy, the first example of a form of government founded upon principles and a coherent system. It is hope and comfort for our race, which is groaning under so many ancient evils. Should this revolution fail, these evils will be more irremediable than before. ”

“ What it aims at depicting is the transformation of real life into poetry, into art, into Schiller's "play" of powers, into a dreamy, imaginative existence, with every longing satisfied, a life in which man, acting with no aim, living for no purpose, is initiated into the mysteries of nature, "understands the plaint of the nightingale, the smile of the new-born babe, and all that is mysteriously revealed in the hieroglyphics of flowers and stars." ”

“ To him the true man is not only a thinking and moral being, but a portion of nature. He loves and sets most store by the original; he prefers intuition to reason, and would overcome narrow-mindedness, not by reason, but by originality. The man of intuitions is to him the most human. His own genius was the genius of receptivity. He expanded his Ego until it comprehended every kind of originality, but it was by virtue of feeling that he comprehended, that he absorbed into his soul a wealth of life, human and national. ”

“ The Romanticists aimed at founding a philosophy and a literature upon want and longing—that is to say, upon the idea of the infinite importance of the individual. The man who bases his philosophy of life upon want is certainly more reasonable than the man who bases it upon either present happiness or the pleasures and bliss of a future existence; for all the happiness we know is undermined by sorrow and by insufficiency, and thus it is on the whole better and safer to build upon want and desire. But the Romanticists do not build upon desire alone, but also upon its satisfaction ”

“ After occupying ourselves so long with voluptuous rapture, bliss, religion, night, and death, do we not instinctively cry: "Air! light!" We seem to be suffocating. This "soul" in truth resembles the shaft of a mine. Novalis's love for the miner's life, in which smoky red lanterns replace the light of day, is not without significance. ”

“ O impotent Art! how stammering and childish are thine accents compared with the full swelling organ tones that well forth from the inmost depths, from mountain and valley, forest and stream! I hear, I feel how the eternal World Spirit sweeps all the strings of the terrible harp with constraining fingers, how all the most diverse forms are born of his playing and speed throughout nature upon spirit wings. My little human heart in wild enthusiasm takes up the contest and fights itself weary and faint in its rivalry with the highest.... ”

“ It is precisely because of its dreaminess and disconnectedness that Novalis prefers Sternbald to Wilhelm Meister. "For," says he, "the kernel of my philosophy is the belief that the poetical is the absolutely real, and that the more poetical anything is, the truer it is. Therefore, the task of the poet is not to idealise, but to cast a spell. The poetry of the fairy tale is the true poetry. A fairy tale is a disconnected dream-picture, and its strength lies in its being exactly the reverse of the true world, and yet exactly like it." ”

“ He had expected to find a religion in philosophy, and Kant's Theory of Cognition taught him that we cannot attain to the truth, can never know what things are in themselves, but only see them as our own organs show them to us—that is to say, he who has green spectacles sees things green, and he who has red, sees them red. When he recognised that knowledge of the truth, as he had represented it to himself, was not possible, it seemed to the young man as if his highest, his only aim were gone. ”

“ The divine significance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is an enigma to the carnal mind. But he who even once has drunk in the breath of life from warm, beloved lips, whose heart has melted in the quivering flames of holy fire, whose eyes have been opened to fathom the unfathomable depths of heaven—he will eat of His body and drink of His blood for ever more. Who has yet discerned the transcendent meaning of the earthly body? Who can say that he understands the blood? The day is coming when all body will be one body ”

“ That self-confidence, that living and acting in the present, that simple reverence for the gods as ancestors and admiration for them as if they were works of art, that resignation to an inevitable fate, and that belief in a future of highly prized posthumous fame, all these things together constitute such an indivisible whole, unite in such a manner to form the human existence designed by nature herself, that those pagans show themselves alike robust and sane in the supreme moment of enjoyment and in the dread moment of self-sacrifice or annihilation. ”

“ In this idea lies the germ of the notorious Romantic irony in art, the treating of everything as both jest and earnest, the eternal self-parody, the disturbing play with illusions alternately summoned up and banished, which destroys all directness of effect in many of the favourite works of the Romanticists.
The Romanticist's theory of art and life thus owes its existence to a mingling of poetry with philosophy, a coupling of the poet's dreams with the student's theories; it is a production of purely intellectual powers, not of any relation between these powers and real life. ”

“ The world of the future, according to Novalis, is rational chaos—chaos which prevails. The genuine fairy tale must therefore, he maintains, be not a mere tale, but also prophetic representation, ideal, inevitable. The real fairy tale writer is the modern seer. The romance, the novel, is, as it were, free history, the mythology of history. And love, being the form of morality which implies the possibility of magic, is the soul of the novel, the foundation of all romances, all novels. For where true love is, there marvellous, miraculous things happen. ”

“ Nay, more; the hatred of religion developed naturally and inevitably into a hatred of all enthusiasms, denounced imagination and feeling, morality and love of art, the past and the future, barely acknowledged man to be the highest among the animals, and reduced the creative music of the universe to the monotonous whirr of an enormous mill, driven by the stream of chance—a mill without a builder or miller, a true perpetuum mobile.... One enthusiasm was magnanimously left to mankind, enthusiasm for this glorious philosophy and its priests. ”

“ It was necessary, too, that he should be stimulated by the ardour of a kindred talent and assisted by the keen criticism of a woman. Hundreds of sources had to flow into each other, hundreds of circumstances to coincide, of people to make each other's acquaintance, of minds to meet and fertilise each other, before this work, in its modest perfection, could be given to the world; a small thing, the translation of a poet who had been dead for two hundred years, it yet provided the most precious spiritual nourishment for millions, and exercised a deep and lasting influence on German poetry. ”

“ Diotima is "the one thing desired by Hyperion's soul, the perfection which we imagine to exist beyond the stars." She is beauty itself, the incarnation of the ideal. Love is to him religion, and his religion is love of beauty. Beauty is the highest, the absolute ideal; it belongs, as a conception, to the world of reason, and as a symbol, to the world of imagination. From his æsthetic point of view, Hölderlin does not perceive that boundary line drawn by Kant between the domains of reason and imagination. ”

“ And so the man without a country writes the tale of the man without a shadow. In spite of its intangibility, a man's shadow is, like his country, like his home, one of his natural possessions, a thing which belongs to him from his birth, which is, as it were, part of him. In ordinary circumstances it is regarded as so entirely natural that a man should have a country, that it is hardly reckoned as a special possession, but is, like his shadow, taken as a matter of course. Chamisso gave expression to all his sadness, to the great sorrow of his life, in his daringly imagined fable. ”

“ XV MYSTICISM IN THE ROMANTIC DRAMA
There is one form of literature in which men and women are, for the most part, portrayed as essentially intellectual beings, endowed with freedom of will and action. That form is the drama. In lyric poetry emotion reigns; in epic the character is partly lost sight of in the broad painting of the circumstances and powers which determine it; but the subject of the drama is action; and because the human character, acting and willing, is in itself something absolutely definite, it compels the author to give clear, well-defined form to his production. ”

“ The thinkers and heroes of the Revolution allow reason, as it were, to upset everything, in order that reason may put everything straight again. Although Novalis is deaf to all the social and political cries of the period, and blind to all its progressive movements, and although he ends in the most grim and repulsive reaction, he is, nevertheless, not merely influenced, but, all unconsciously, completely penetrated by the spirit of his age. ”

“ The quality in literature which, it seems to me, we Danes have never sufficiently prized, is boldness, that quality in the author which incites him, regardless of consequences, to give expression to his artistic ideal. The daring development of what is typical in his literary tendency, often constitutes the beauty of his work; or, to put it more plainly, when a literary tendency like Romanticism develops in the direction of pure fancy, that author seems to me the most interesting, who rises to the most daring heights of fantastic extravagance—as, for instance, Hoffmann. ”

“ Life and death are to Novalis only "relative ideas." The dead are half alive, the living half dead. It is this thought which in his case first gives zest to existence. In the first of his Hymns to Night he writes: "I turn to thee, holy, ineffable, mysterious Night! Far off lies the world, as if it had sunk into a deep grave; deserted and lonely is its place. My heart-strings vibrate with sorrow.... Dost thou find pleasure in us as we in thee, dark Night?... Costly balsam drips from thy hand, from thy poppy-sheaf. Thou unfoldest the heavy wings of the soul.... ”