Georg Brandes

“ These were the watchwords of the champions of the principle of authority. By all means let us have order and refinement—but what men have had to learn, and what they will learn even though it should take them centuries, is that order and refinement are the work of science or natural development, and never are or can be the work of arbitrary legislation, or of a criminal code and a public opinion founded upon tradition and authority. There is no real ordering, no real order of society but that which is the result of scientific insight into the nature of man. ”

“ I believe in a Supreme Being who has created men free and equal, who has formed them to love one another and not to hate one another, who desires to be honoured by the exhibition of virtue, not of fanaticism, and in whose eyes the noblest of worships is the worship of truth and reason. I believe in the approaching fall of all tyrants, in the regeneration of morality, the ever-increasing spread of all the virtues, and the eternal triumph of liberty. ”

“ De Maistre said: "Without the Pope, no authority; without authority, no faith"—that is, without a Pope, no faith. The supremacy of the Pope thus becomes the very fountain, the very kernel of Christianity; in our days (in the writings of Bishop Ségur) the Pope has actually become a sacrament, "the real presence of Jesus upon earth."
De Maistre argued thus: There is no religion without a visible church; there is no church without government, no government without sovereignty, and no sovereignty without infallibility. ”

“ It is, he says, evanescent and invisible, like the fragrance exhaled by dew-laden flowers and fruits, chaste and light, like a virginal kiss, and holy and fecund, like a bridegroom's embrace; nay, it is not only like all this, it is all this; for this condition of the human soul is the marriage of the universe, of the All, with reason personalised; in this condition the individual is for a moment the world-soul and feels its infinite life to be his own. ”

“ No sooner have they found one another than he feels as if he were relieved from a heavy burden—the burden of his heart. As soon as he gives it away he learns what life in all its fulness is. He feels as if he were floating in the purest ether; his joy is infinite and luminous as the air of heaven. During the first hours which he spends with her he loses all perception of time; he is certain that a thousand years spent thus would to him be so many seconds. He does not feel like a human being, but like a living hymn of praise. ”

“ It is not the outcome of discussion and arrangement, but of an unfathomable mystery. Hence a written constitution signifies nothing. It is the soul of the nation which gives the nation unity and permanence, and this soul is the love of the nation for itself and its national memories. France is not thirty millions of human beings living between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, but a thousand millions who have lived there. Our country is nought else but the unity of those who live, those who have lived, and those who will live in the days to come on the same fragment of the earth's surface. ”

“ She believes herself to be converted, and is, at the bottom of her heart, what she was. When she puts into the mouth of the Deity the words in which He assures her of His love, what is she doing but once again writing letters and elegies to Sidonie? The echo of her own self-adoration sounds to her like a voice from heaven, and she thanks God now as she did before for being thus distinguished—by herself. What she desires now as before is to be loved. As Chateaubriand proceeded to his earthly Alhambra via the earthly Jerusalem, she seeks her heavenly Alhambra by the way of the heavenly Zion. ”

“ Every genuine, overpowering enthusiasm naturally makes tolerance impossible. Yet Voltaire's doctrine is none the less valid because of this. The difficulty is easy of solution. The principle of intolerance is the theoretical, that of tolerance the practical, principle. In theory no consideration, no toleration, no mercy! For error must be crushed and torn asunder, follies must be blown from the cannon's mouth, and lies flayed alive. ”

“ When we call to mind what had been done we cannot but be filled with astonishment. The movement towards emancipation which had begun in the days of the Renaissance with warm enthusiasm for Greek and Roman antiquity, which next, in England, through the genius of Newton, had acquired as its mainstay a new conception of the universe, and, gradually taking possession of natural science, had brought forth a new philosophy as its offspring and freemasonry as its witness—this same movement had, like a flying spark, been carried, through Voltaire's mind, to France. ”

“ Assuming, in the manner of his century, that religions are the inventions of their priests, he says: "The priests have made of God a fire-ball, a bull, a tree, a man, a king. The Supreme Being's true priest is nature, his temple the universe, his worship virtue." He goes on to show that priests have everywhere supported tyranny: "It is you who have said to kings: Ye are the representatives of God on earth; it is from Him ye hold your authority! ”

“ The unfortunate Velléda tries all her magic arts. At one time she determines to steal her way in to Eudore on the moonbeams; at another she is preparing to fly into the tower which he inhabits and win his love in the shape of another woman, but the very thought arouses her jealousy and causes her to desist. Eudore, though he does not return her passion, feels himself, as it were, infected by its atmosphere when he is beside her. As a Christian he shrinks with horror from the temptation. ”

“ High-priest of the Roman church, sovereign of a state which is slipping out of your hands, know that the only possible way in which you can preserve state and church is by making a disinterested confession and proclamation of those gospel principles which breathe a spirit of the purest democracy, the tenderest humanity, and the most perfect equality—principles with which Christ's representatives have adorned themselves only for the purpose of supporting and increasing a sovereign power which is now falling to pieces from decrepitude. The age of ignorance is past. ”

“ It makes real scientific progress impossible by keeping all inquiry and research in the leading-strings of powerful outward authority. It dulls the understanding of the rising generation by entrusting its education to a corps of cultivated, well-bred half-men, sworn to blind obedience to the General of the Jesuit order.
And as this same idea, not long after its first vigorous appearance, attains to the possession of a literature, it soon sets its mark upon fiction, upon lyric poetry, from ballad and song to ode and hymn, nay, even upon the drama. In literature, too, the lily reigns. ”

“ The religion of the Romanticist is a parade religion, a tool for the politician, a lyre for the poet, a symbol for the philosopher, a fashion for the man of the world.
Like the German, the Danish, and, at a later period, the French Romanticists, Chateaubriand loves the mysterious. He begins his vindication of belief in authority by appealing to men's sense of mystery in life generally: "There is nothing beautiful or sweet or great in life that is not mysterious. The most wonderful feelings are those which at once move and perplex us. ”

“ Not that Chateaubriand himself was simple enough to have any respect whatever for that Ferdinand of Spain for whom French troops were to shed their blood, in order that he might be restored to a throne which his own people considered him unfit to occupy. He calls him a promise-breaker and a traitor, calls him a tyrant who allowed himself to be influenced by the evil passions of his female relations, one of those cowardly tyrants who have no peace until they have done some high-handed deed, and who sit and tremble when they have done it. ”

“ It is an ego which owns a warm, prolific imagination and great artistic talent, and which, at a period (the end of the eighteenth century) when taste was all in favour of the light, the pretty, the small, felt itself solitary in its love of the grand, of the beauty of magnitude. ”

“ The Jacobins taught: The men of all countries are brothers, and the different nations ought to help each other to the best of their ability, like citizens of the same state. The nation which oppresses another nation declares itself the enemy of all. Those who make war upon any one nation in order to arrest the progress of liberty and abolish the rights of humanity ought to be assailed by all the others, not as ordinary enemies, but as insurrectionary murderers and robbers.
The Girondists opposed every tyranny in human shape, but they seldom tried to protect from the tyranny of circumstances. ”

“ Even Rousseau, though he was "the most mistaken of men," perceived that it was only a narrow-minded and arrogant philosophy which could suppose the founders of such religions as the Jewish and the Mahometan to be nothing but lucky impostors. Philosophy is a disintegrating, religion alone an organising power. But no religion in the world can be compared with Christianity. It alone, although it is founded upon supernatural facts and is a revelation of incomprehensible dogmas, has been believed for eighteen centuries and been defended by the greatest men of all ages, from Origen to Pascal. ”

“ This century will be dated from our double restoration of lost blessings, the restoration of liberty by the throne and of the throne by liberty.... Let us not forget that our future is inseparably bound up with that of our kings, that it is impossible to separate the tree from its root without drying up the trunk, and that in our country it is monarchy which has borne everything, even the perfect fruit of liberty. ”

“ The principle of authority has had a powerful educative influence on the human race; but its real mission is to make itself superfluous. At a comparatively low stage man submits to law because it emanates from authority; at a higher, because he recognises its reasonableness. Where authority is absolute it must, and as a matter of fact does, demand recognition as something mysterious and miraculous, and treat all criticism as rebellion and heresy.
It is its ratification by religion which makes authority absolute. ”

“ A distinguishing feature in both classic prose and poetry is the domination of reason. It is against this ruler that literature makes its first revolt in Madame de Staël's emotional style and Chateaubriand's richly coloured prose. Emotion and colour—these are the two great exiles who now return from a long banishment. And, curiously enough, it is not only his talents but his art theories which make of Chateaubriand a rebel against the principle of authority in literature, the very principle which it was his aim by means of literature to uphold. ”

“ There is not a feeling in the human heart, not a corner of the human mind, and not a branch of literature, upon which this restoration of the spirit of the past does not set its stamp during its day of power. ”