Friedrich Hebbel

“ Even thus young he was bound to speak his mind, and it is precisely those minds that take boldness as an unavoidable pang which suffer under introspection. Truth to oneself is good in the sanctum, but awkward in the parlour, expulsion from which sets one, in his drifting loneliness, grasping at the first straw. Thus it was that Hebbel sought a doubtful balm in the love of Elise Lensing.
She seems to have been one of those pliant natures that cannot live without an idol. Tender, affectionate, brave, but no mental stimulus—there is the tragedy. A German is essentially a thinker. ”

“ But I, old sinner that I am, am not strong enough to follow the fashion. I can’t catch devotion in the street, as if it were a cock-chafer. The twittering of sparrows and swallows cannot take the place of the organ for me. If my heart is to be uplifted, I must first hear the heavy iron church-doors clang behind me, and imagine they are the gates of the world. The high walls with their narrow windows, that only let the bright bold light of the world filter dimly through, must close in upon me, and in the distance I must see the dead-house with the walled-in skull. ”

“ That it is Herod for whose sake ’tis done. Alex.
Be you then the Death-Angel? Sameas.
Or for him
Or for myself! I swear’t! Can I not hinder
This ghastly plan, my impotence I’ll punish
With murder of myself (with a gesture towards his breast) ere that day comes,
The day that he shall first befleck with mire.
There is a binding oath that a misdeed
Will wring from me if for a hero-deed
I prove unfit. Who ever swore a greater? Alex.
Good! But forget not this; if your own arm
Be over-weak to dash your foemen downwards,
A stranger’s arm must not then be contemned. Sameas. ”

“ Two years of uninterrupted thought had brought an expansion of mind incalculable to one who lived in the intellectual. He was now grown up, conscious of power, and alas, Elise was not grown up. Now she called to him, unable to bear the separation longer; and thereby he was placed in the necessity of decision. No palterer with himself, he refused compromise. He was to choose between an absorber of and a compeer in his ideals. There is no need for harrowing psychology. He chose the latter; let those who blame him acknowledge at least his truth to himself. ”

“ Gyges is the tragedy of a personality blindly unveiled; this is the tragedy of a personality blindly veiled.
The historic significance is finely brought out by the opposition of the statuesque Roman Titus against the shifting Hellenic decay. His noble gravity is the last confessional of Mariamne and his arms receive the swooning Herod. The future moulding influence of civilisation is shown in this steel-clad nature. ”

“ We cringe like worms. We pray to God for our lives, like a servant asking his master to let him do a spoiled job over again, so as not to come short on pay-day.
Clara.
Do stop that, mother dear, it exhausts you.
Mother.
Child, it does me good. Am I not strong and healthy again? Didn’t God simply call me to make me see that my garment was not yet spotless and pure, and didn’t He let me turn back at the mouth of the grave, and give me time to adorn myself for the heavenly bridal? He was not as lenient as that to those seven virgins in the Gospel that I made you read to me last night. ”

“ Not an opening of great avenues; they always stretch to the imagination; but an end to stolen moments in them, the coming of delightful hauntings of them, and the steady concentration on some mastering thought.
To Hebbel it meant more, in that he chose Paris for a great part of his stay. Its grey atmospheres and meditative buildings, its blue skies, and above all, its childlike unrestraint were an admirable corrective to the long constriction of necessity and the Teutonic Grübelei. In Paris no two clocks agree. In Germany they are fatally accurate. There is the difference in a nutshell. ”

“ Scene 7 Herod alone.
Herod.
’Tis true I went too far. When half-way launched
I told myself the same. But not less true
If she loved me the offence she would condone.
If she loved me! Has she loved, truth to truth?
I think it. Ay, but now—oh, how the Dead One
Is skilled to vengeance even in the grave! ”

“ Scene 7 Salome. Alexandra. Titus.
Afterwards, Mariamne.
Alex.
Titus, you notice how my daughter’s mourning. Titus.
’Twould seem she has some new despatch from Herod. Alex.
Despatch that all is over with him, yes! Titus (watching Mariamne) .
She dances! Alex.
Less like widow than like bride!
Titus, until to-day she’s worn a mask,
And mark you this, not she alone has done’t. Titus.
Well for her! She’ll not change from what she is,
For if she ranks her with the foes of Herod
She will not share the pangs his friends must suffer. Alex.
And to prove that she gives, you see, this feast. ”

“ Leonard.
You take it too seriously.
Anthony.
Without doubt. And I must admit as an honest man that it didn’t work to-day. I lost the mood for worship when I was in church, because of the empty seat beside me, and found it again outside, under the pear-tree in my garden. You are surprised? See, I was going home sad and depressed, like a man that’s had his harvest spoilt; for children are just like land, you sow good seeds and get tares in return. I stood still under the pear-tree, that the caterpillars have devoured. ”

“ Titus.
Yes, yes, and yet—’tis not what I’d have done. Herod.
Had she but loved me as I her, then were she
After my death all out of love with life.
What the heart’s out of love with lets a man
Begone, nor rues it. No one holds it fast. ”

“ Herod.
I see from all you say one only thing—
Her spell in death itself was true to her.
Why eats Soemus still my heart? How could he
Resist this blinding woman in her life?
Even in the dying flash she kindled you. Titus.
Goes jealousy the very grave beyond? Herod. ”

“ Without his own will he so impressed others with his decisive habit of mind, an effect heightened by his short and penetrating speech, that independent, if lesser, minds felt they must avoid him for their own salvation. He was German to the core, and the best qualities of his nation are a profundity and strength that is good for our craggy moods. The elusive subtlety of the Frenchman is not his, but Siegfrieds are not made of the rarer lights and shadows. So eminent in these qualities is Hebbel that Germany is now asking if she has not in him her greatest poet since Goethe. ”

“ Scene 2 Clara (alone) .
O God, O God, have mercy! Have mercy on this old man! Take me! It’s the only way to help him. Look! The sunshine lies so golden on the street that the children snatch at it. The birds fly about. Flowers and plants are never weary of growing. Everything lives and wants to live. Thousands of sick people tremble before thee at this hour, O Death! ”

“ Herod.
Then—— (His voice fails him.) Titus.
Calm yourself! It wounds me too. Herod.
Ay, wounds
You, her (to Salome) and everyone who here, like me,
Has been the blinded tool of slant-souled Fate,
But I alone have lost what on this earth
Eternally will ne’er be seen again.
Have lost! Oh! Oh! Alex.
Aha, Aristobulus,
You are avenged, my son, and I in you. Herod.
What, triumphing? You think that I will now
Wilt like a broken thing? Nay, I will not.
I am a king and I will let the world [He makes a gesture as though snapping something to pieces.
[Pg 177]
Feel it and tremble! ”

“ Yet, strange to say, at this period he produced Maria Magdalena—yet not strange to say; for like Lucretius’ gazer at the storm from land, Hebbel could write of the bitter peasant-life with a relief, for the nonce at least, that it was over. Perhaps, too, the death of his little son Mark, whereby his stay in Paris was threatened, gave his thoughts a gloomy caste. At all events it would be hard to find a more unrelieved atmosphere of misery than in this play—not that subtle Ibsenesque clutch of Fate, but a hard realism whose lines are burnt in with acid. ”

“ Though she has the feminine pliancy and pard-like ferocity of the Oriental, yet the blend of reasoned motive in her conduct makes her a modern. Hebbel could not graecise, but he could create from the weft of his own nature strong beings resolute in the face of necessity for all their human error. If tragedy be the fatal misdirection of virtues rather than the collision of virtue and vice, this story is truly tragic; for three natures, all noble, by a single error are swept to one drastic atonement. ”

“ Herod.
What, Mariamne? You were never ranked
Among those souls of despicable kind
Who, when their foeman’s countenance or back
Comes to first gaze, forgive and fresh their grudging
Because they are too weak for genuine hate,
Too tiny for the fuller, greater mood. ”

“ The Nibelungen trilogy will be regarded as Hebbel’s crowning achievement. No doubt it is, but really to feel it you must have the soul of Teutonism in you. Hebbel was too concerned with the interplay of human motives to give the sheer pleasure of romantic atmosphere. One feels at times that nothing but the invigorating jar of their own old tongue can picture those strong-thewed and raven-helmeted ones. Hebbel has diminished the childlike largeness of these mythic figures by making them all too human. ”

“ So gay and early, Karna? Pardon, I took you,
Lord, for another. You not yet in bed?
I trow the taste of fame bans sleep—oho! Gyges.
The taste of fame? Thoas.
Why, look at all the garlands
You carried off—— Gyges.
So that the laurel-tree
Need never fear me more! My wish was merely
To prove that bones may be inside a man
And marrow in those bones, although that man
Snap not a zither’s strings to tattered shreds
At the first touch. Now not a soul but knows it [Pg 22]
Whate’er the doubt he may till now have had;
And that is good. Thoas.
But why then take no sleep? Gyges.
Why do you take no drink? ”

“ Rise, rise, I say! Gyges (rising) .
But him it smote like the heaven’s thundery burst;
He felt that he had been until that hour
A shade of Erebus, cold, thinly-passioned,
A mere estray among the Things of Life
Quicked now with its first blood even as themselves.
He felt that all their laughing, all their weeping,
Their joying and their sighing—yea, their breathing
He had but aped nor ever dreamt wherefore
The breast of man forever swells and sinks. ”

“ The intellectual cumulation of images, toilsomely hunted out, he dubs a “Chinese lantern hung by a bankrupt near a gray abstraction.” That he loved the natural music of words can well enough be seen from his sonnets; but he claims that the most emotional situations in drama demand sharp daggers of speech. If one, like Maeterlinck, seeks for these moments the highest utterances of all, silence, he kills drama, even if it re-arises in poetry. Dealing as Hebbel does with the most human of characters he claims that crises are confused, curt, and even savage. ”

“ Let us rather accept it in the spirit of Aglavaine and Selysette, than with the rigid sneer of Arnold at Shelley for proposing the same thing to Harriet. These were the words which Elise could afterwards write to Hebbel’s wife—“That our relations could take so pure a colour I ascribe to my sojourn there (Vienna) . Though so many hours of bitterness were my lot in that unforgettable town, things would never have shaped themselves thus had I not learned to know you and all the facts on the spot itself. Our bond is now one of those of whose like there are few.” ”

“ Aren’t we cousins of a week’s standing? And isn’t it right for relations to greet one another? Our good man, the parson, came to see me yesterday, and said a man was responsible for nobody but himself, and it was unchristian arrogance in me to make myself answerable for my son, or else Adam would have to take it as much to heart as I. O God, I well believe that it doesn’t disturb the arch-father’s peace in paradise, when one of his great-great-grandchildren goes robbing and murdering, but didn’t he tear his hair over Cain? ”

“ If the enduring is to be expressed, art must round the circle of Fate, whereas Life itself is a dubious thing, whose individual meaning may lie in the history of its generation. The whole then is expressed by the selection of significant parts, or as he himself expresses it, by an exaggeration of the detached. From this it follows that drama is more self-conscious than life. ”