The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX | Page 7

motive force, self-assertion and self-preservation are heaven's first law. Self-assertion, however, is nothing but the operation of communicated and committed animation, and self-preservation nothing but the postponement of the day of surrender. Self-preservation is impossible; self-assertion is a challenge to the assertiveness of other selves, as well as a hastener of dissolution. The self follows its native bent, and its native impulse is for expansion; but it thus, as a fraction, leaves, on its centrifugal path, the course of the great world spirit from which it separates; and as both a separate entity and a member of a community it must, in its attempt at self-realization, meet the constraint which the community, whose only object is likewise self-realization and self-preservation, puts upon all within its power. The law is negative and repressive, self-interest is positive and assertive; between the two there is no possible reconciliation--at most a compromise--so that in the last analysis it appears that the assertion of individual will as such is immoral, that is, contrary to the will of the community; and is sinful, for it is not the will of God, but the will of a particularized individual, however godly he may be. There are differences in degree, but not in kind, among immoralities and sins, with corresponding degrees of punitive repression; but the potential tragic conflict is constant, and there is as little doubt about the eminent domain of the State as about the supremacy of God.
The laws of God are changeless and eternal, but human morality is a local and temporal development. As the character of an individual is the product of disposition and experience, so his fate is humanly determined by the particular forms of custom and law established in the community in which his lot is cast. But these change from time to time, and in periods of change the disparity between public and private interest is most conspicuous: the progressive individual bears not only the burden of proof but also the dead weight of public inertia. Only at infinity can the parallel antithetical interests coincide. Nevertheless, the world gradually effects self-correction by the evolution of new syntheses from the thesis and antithesis ever and anon presented for trial and judgment as between liberal and conservative forces.
Hebbel's drama, then, is the representation of a process, the process of life, by which things come into being. It reveals the individual in the making, and discusses the validity of the institutions that condition his life or cause his death. There is no question of guilt and atonement. Protagonist and antagonist are right, each in his way and from his point of view; the conflict may arise from excess of goodness as well as from excess of evil; but the representative of the whole prevails of necessity over the champion of a single interest; and in the knowledge of this truth, rather than in the futile attempt to modify the relation, we must seek our freedom. Hebbel's plays are historical: character in its setting of circumstances is the only character really and fully comprehensible. They are sociological: exhibiting the ceaseless collision of individualistic and collectivistic tendencies, they teach forbearance, and patience, and the will to face the facts--_tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_. And they are modern: treating problems of character and _milieu_, they disdain the adventitious aids of eloquence and theatrical splendor, and speak to us with the directness, often with the bluntness, of nature herself. Hebbel was no naturalist, in the sense of one who seeks but to reproduce phenomena in all their details, sordid, trivial, or vulgar, if such they be. But through Ibsen, who esteemed him alone among his German predecessors, he became a factor in the recent naturalistic movement; and he might have saved it from many an aberration, if his example had been more closely followed.
Hebbel strikingly revealed his independence and originality at the beginning of his public career, by his new conception of old and familiar subjects. His Judith is a totally different person from the heroine of the Apocrypha. The Biblical Judith is a widow who slays a public enemy, and returns unscathed amid the plaudits of the multitude. But Hebbel's Judith is a widow who has never been a wife, a woman who seems to have been appointed by Providence to do a great deed in His service, who takes the duty upon herself only to find that as a woman she is unequal to it; for as a woman she loves the manly heathen. She kills him, as she set out to do; but the motive for her act is personal revenge for a personal outrage; and she returns to Bethulia broken in spirit and appalled at the thought that she may bear a son by Holofernes. The attempt to make of herself an impersonal instrument