The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX | Page 3

a hardy
North-German peasant could have endured.
Hebbel came to Hamburg as a young man of twenty-two, far ahead of
his years in knowledge, judgment, and capacity, but still unacquainted
with rudimentary things belonging to higher education, such as Latin
grammar. He could not find the right tone in dealing with his
benefactors, and he suffered unspeakable humiliation in the conflict of
a proud and independent spirit with the subjection which inconsiderate
well-wishers imposed upon him. He learned more by private reading
and by association with students in a Scientific Society than he learned
in school; and to one woman, Elise Lensing, who became his friend and
angel of mercy, he owed more than to the whole aggregation of those
who gave him money and meals. Somewhat more than eight years his
senior, in respect to experience of the world and training in the finer
graces of life his superior, she aided, encouraged, and loved him, well
aware that his feeling for her was, at the most, admiration and gratitude,
and that the intimate union and companionship which soon became for
him an indispensable solace could never lead to marriage.

In Hamburg Hebbel began the diary which, continued throughout his
life, is the most valuable source of information about him that we have,
and which, being the repository of his meditations as well as the record
of his experiences, is one of the most remarkable documents of the kind
ever composed. He wrote and published a number of poems, and began
several short stories. More significant, however, was the development
of his critical faculty, which found in the Scientific Society a free field
for exercise. Here, on the twenty-eighth of July, 1835, Hebbel read a
paper on Theodor Körner and Heinrich von Kleist which, in spite of a
rather juvenile tone, shows a maturity of insight quite unparalleled in
the critical literature of that day. It is greatly to Hebbel's credit, and was
to his profit, as the sequel showed, that against the opinion of his
generation he could demonstrate the poetic excellence of Kleist and
could distinguish in Körner between the heroic patriot and the mediocre
poet; for it was a dramatic masterpiece that Hebbel analyzed in Kleist's
_Prince of Hamburg_, and in this analysis he formulated views that
remained the canons of all his subsequent activity as a playwright. The
study of Kleist gave him for the drama the same sort of illumination
that Uhland had given him for lyric poetry.
Though Hebbel was unable to acquire in Hamburg a certificate of
preparedness for the university, he soon felt ready for university studies,
and after some difficulty persuaded his benefactors to give him the
balance of the fund that they had collected, and consent to his going to
Heidelberg. In March, 1836, he departed thither, with less than eighty
thalers in his pocket. He could be admitted only as a special student;
nevertheless, he was hospitably received by members of the faculty of
law, and attended their lectures. But the romantic scenery of Heidelberg,
and, the reading of Goethe and Shakespeare, whom he now for the first
time studied thoroughly, were more fruitful and suggestive to him than
jurisprudence, however much he was interested in "cases" as examples
of human experience. Such a "case" he treated in _Anna_, the first
short story with which he was satisfied, and which indeed is worthy of
his model in this _genre_, Kleist. Other narratives, and a few poems,
testify to a closer approach to nature and a less morbid attitude toward
life than had appeared in the earlier works. Hebbel was now finishing
his apprenticeship, wisely restraining the impulse to dramatize until in
the less exacting forms he had mastered the means of expression. But

everything pointed toward literature as a calling, and before the year
was out Hebbel resolved to migrate to Munich, still, to be sure, a
student, but from the moment of his arrival living there under the name
and title of Literat.
The journey to Munich Hebbel made afoot, leaving Heidelberg on
September 12, 1836. He passed through Strassburg, and thought of
Goethe as he climbed the tower of the cathedral; he visited the Suabian
poets at Stuttgart and Tübingen, and was deeply disappointed with the
kindly but undemonstrative Uhland; and he reached Munich on
September the twenty-ninth. Here he remained until March, 1839.
Hebbel's two and a half years in Munich, years of solitude, unheard-of
privation, illness, and battling against despair, came near to wearing out
the physical man, and were, through long-continued insufficient
nourishment, the cause of the disease to which he finally succumbed;
but they were also the finishing school of the personality that
henceforth unflinchingly faced the world and demanded to be heard.
Hebbel provided for his material needs partly by journalistic work, to
which