Georg Brandes

“ But the essentially luminous and flamboyant was art, pure art; and seldom has the boundless love of art as art taken such entire possession of a heart as it did of Gautier's. He was animated by it all his life, but in his youth he felt it with all the pleasures it brings, all the admiration it arouses, all the courage it imparts, and all the hatred it inspires.
It was this love which made the man who was himself a master, a sincerely, nobly modest admirer of other artists. He was Hugo's servant, Balzac's self-sacrificing friend. He was a poet, but admiration made him a critic ”

“ What George Sand offers us in hers is, principally, such a masterly revelation of the inner life of a young woman, with its modesty and its enthusiasm, its impulse to self-devotion and its susceptibility to passion, as no woman had ever given to the world before; but in the deepest recesses of her soul there is a purpose; she has a wrong to avenge, wrath to satisfy; she does not see the sufferings of the female sex from the standpoint of an outsider; she does not try to conceal that her heart has bled. Mérimée, on the other hand, has no cause, no theory, no political or social bias whatever. ”

“ What I specially admire in Le Compagnon du Tour de France, a book which, as a novel, is inferior to Horace, is the impulsive strength of the feeling which inspired it. To feel the heart swell and burn with compassion for the unfortunates of society, to feel burdened by the favours which Fortune has bestowed on us and not on all, are sensations with which many a youth and maiden are familiar. ”

“ It is against this grey background, this foil of Legitimist cowls and Louis-Philippe umbrellas—in this society where the new-born power of capital, strong as Hercules, has, even in its cradle, strangled all the external romance of life—on this stage upon the grey walls of which an invisible finger has written in grey letters the word Juste-milieu—that a fiery, glowing, noisy literature, a literature enamoured of scarlet and of passion, suddenly makes its appearance. ”

“ To the young poets and artists of the day there were only two kinds of human beings, the flaming and the grey. On the one side there was the art which meant blood, scarlet, movement, audacity; on the other, a strictly regular, timid, bourgeois, colourless art. Everything in the life of their day seemed to them unpoetic, utilitarian, devoid of genius, grey; they desired to show their contempt for such a day, their admiration of genius, and their hatred of the bourgeois spirit. For now, since the middle-class had become the influential one, this spirit had become a power. ”

“ With real profundity Balzac shows in this powerful representation of the chief impulse of the younger generation of his day—to drink the cup of life greedily to the very dregs—what emptiness there is in satiety, how certain it is that death lies cowering in the satisfaction of desire. Youthful, fertile, suggestive, and vaguely melancholy, like all books produced by genius before the acquirement of personal experience, La Peau de Chagrin made its mark abroad as well as in France. ”

“ In his own day Racine was a Romanticist. Shakespeare is a Romanticist, in the first place because he depicted for the Englishmen of 1590 the bloody struggles and the results of their civil wars, and in the second place because he has painted a series of masterly, subtly shaded pictures of the impulses of the human mind and the passions of the human heart. The teaching of Romanticism is, not that men should imitate England or Germany, but that each nation should have its own literature, modelled upon its own character, just as we all wear clothes cut and sewn for ourselves alone. ”

“ Whilst we are occupied in seeking out these victims of the literary battle and victory, we seem all the time to hear a funeral march played on muffled drums. And when we have seen how numerous they are, we involuntarily regard such a book as De Vigny's Stello and such a drama as his Chatterton in a more favourable light. The idea of the suffering poet or artist was an ever-present one at that period; and yet many were allowed to perish who deserved a better fate. It would seem that at all times, in every age, there is a difficulty in finding out the deserving, suffering men of talent. ”

“ That sense of the infinite which Hugo's great forerunner, André Chénier, despised, that religious feeling which was non-existent in the child of the eighteenth century, reappears in Hugo, purified from the superstition of the reactionary period.
From a height near the shore the poet hears two voices, one from the sea and one from the land. Every wave has its murmur, every human being his distinct utterance, his sigh, his shriek; and the wave voices and the human voices form two great, pathetic choruses—the song of nature and the cry of humanity. ”

“ The characters in Notre-Dame are the character sketches of a genius, drawn in the epic style, in more than life-size. Scott's honest, plain, human beings are superseded by the creatures of an artist intoxicated with colour; his gentle spirit makes way for grandiloquent passion pointing unresignedly to blind, iron necessity, that άνάγχη which is written on the church wall, and which crushes us all—gipsy and priest, beauty and beast, Phœbus and Quasimodo—century after century under its iron heel. ”

“ Rastignac's eyes are opened; he sees all the shams by which he is surrounded, sees that morals and laws are simply screens behind which impudent vice acts unrestrainedly. Everywhere, everywhere, sham respectability, sham friendship, sham love, sham kindness, sham sacredness, sham marriages! With masterly skill Balzac has seized and immortalised that moment in the young man's life when, as I have already put it, his heart swells and becomes strangely heavy, and he feels, when he looks about him, as if a fountain of scorn were surging in his breast. ”

“ Nowhere is the peculiar beauty of George Sand's style more fascinating than in the above quoted letter to Rollinat. The profound understanding of nature acquired in her youth by this revolutionary woman of genius, blends in marvellous unison with her restless, endless longing; and through both the longing for nature and the longing for happiness runs the undertone of a loving heart's lamentation over the disappointments it has caused and the disappointments it has suffered. ”

“ The combination of love of nature with predilection for the unnatural, is to be traced far on into the new literature. All its authors chant the praises of nature. But what they detest and shun under the name of the prosaic and the commonplace is very often the simple nature that lies nearest them. Romantic nature alone is dear to them. George Sand escapes from the world of dreary, hard realities into that of beautiful dreams, Théophile Gautier into the world of art. George Sand in Lelia, Balzac in Père Goriot, make the ideal or the omnipotent galley-slave the judge of society ”

“ And Hugo read the following lines from his Journal d'un Révolutionnaire de 1830:
"The republic, which is not yet ripe, but which in a century will embrace the whole of Europe, signifies that society is its own sovereign. It protects itself by means of its citizen-soldiers; judges itself, by trial by jury; administers its own affairs, by local government; rules itself, by popular representation. The four limbs of monarchy—the standing army, the courts, the bureaucracy, the peerage—are for the republic only four troublesome excrescences which are withering up and will soon die." ”

“ In all the arts colour, passion, and style were aimed at and demanded—colour with such urgency that the most gifted painter of the period, Delacroix, neglected drawing for it; passion with such ardour that both lyric poetry and the drama were in danger of degenerating into hysteric foolishness; style with such artistic enthusiasm that some of the younger men, such as those two opposite poles, Mérimée and Gautier, neglected the human groundwork of their art and became devotees of style pure and simple. ”

“ And no one drew the Parisienne of that day with such genius as De Musset. He stood on the same plane with her. She is the genuine fine lady, but also the genuine woman. The beautiful thing about this character is that in it we see unadulterated, genuine, fresh nature piercing through the extremest refinement of fashionable life—nature, in spite of all the sparkling and tinselly cleverness and all the premature experience and the ennui resulting therefrom; nature even in dissimulation, nature even in the little comedy which Madame de Léry is woman and actress enough to play. ”

“ The first crystallisation begins.
One takes pleasure in adorning with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love one is sure; one rehearses all the details of one's happiness with infinite satisfaction.
Allow the brain of a lover to work for twenty-four hours, and the result will resemble what happens at Salzburg when a leafless branch is let down into the deserted depths of the salt mines. ”

“ If a man hates with a manly hatred, what more natural than that he should put an end to his torment and his enemy's life with a stab or a shot? It is, undoubtedly, natural, when the race which the author chooses to depict is not an effete, but a vigorous one; and this is the explanation of Mérimée's tendency to give to every feeling the character of a fierce passion, to dwell upon what is cruel and hard, to make death—not tragedy death, but real death, in all its cold, hard pitilessness—the dénouement of every tale which he sends out from his artist's workshop. ”

“ Imagine my delight when I found out, what no writer of travels had deprived me of the pleasure of discovering, namely, that in that country it is in good society that there is most of the unforeseen. Nothing deters these remarkable geniuses except want of money or pure impossibility; if prejudices still exist, it is only in the lower classes."
In other words, what Beyle loves best is reckless energy, both in action and emotion—energy, whether revealing itself as the irresistibleness of the military genius or the boundless tenderness of the loving woman. ”

“ In the depths of Beyle's soul there was a lyric tendency; it finds its way to the surface in his persistent enthusiasm for Napoleon, for Italy, for the sixteenth century, for Cimarosa and Rossini, Correggio and Canova, and in all the superlatives which flow almost as abundantly from his pen as from Balzac's. Mérimée, on the other hand, not content with banishing the lyric form from his works, entirely abjures the spirit; he walls himself in; no prose is less lyrical than his. ”

“ Joseph Delorme is of the race of Obermann—poor, gifted, full of compassion for the woes of humanity, a lustreless genius like the founder of the race, but of even a more complex character than he; for Joseph is a philosopher who is unhappy because of his scepticism, an idealist who with all his idealism is addicted to low dissipation. The hero is the usual despairing youth of the 1830 period, but there is more of the bourgeois in him than in the heroes of Saint-Beuve's contemporaries; his despair is less magnificent and more true to nature. ”

“ There is not an emotion in Hernani which is not strained to its extremest pitch. The hero is a noble-minded man of genius, the genius and noble-mindedness being of the type which exists in the imagination of a young man of twenty. His genius impels him to lead the life of a brigand chieftain, and out of pure high-mindedness and contempt for ordinary prudence he does the most foolish things—betrays himself, lets his mortal enemy escape, gives himself up again and again. ”

“ Victor Hugo took the verse which André Chénier had created, that pellucid medium of pure beauty, and when he had breathed upon it, it gleamed with all the colours of the rainbow. Strangely enough it was again from Greece that the inspiration came; but this time from modern Greece. Under the impression produced by the Greek War of Liberation Hugo set to work to write his Orientales. But what a different use of language! The words painted; the words shone, "gilded by a sunbeam" like the beautiful Jewess of the poems; they sang, as if to a secret accompaniment of Turkish music. ”