The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX | Page 4

he was ill-adapted, but chiefly through the limitless bounty of
Elise Lensing--for months at a time the only being with whom, and
only by correspondence, he had human intercourse. He heard the
lectures of Schelling and Görres at the university; but, as at Heidelberg,
he, gained most by prodigious reading in literature, history; and
philosophy. His savage melancholy found relief in grimly humorous
narratives and gloomy poems. At the time of his greatest wretchedness
he conceived the plots of comedies, "ridiculing something by the
representation of nothing." But we note that his reading now begins to
suggest to him innumerable subjects for tragedies, such as Napoleon,
Alexander the Great, Julian the Apostate, the Maid of Orleans, Judith
and Holofernes, Golo and Genoveva,--all of them characters the key to
whose destiny lay in their personalities, and in whom Hebbel saw the
destiny of mankind typified. Still more directly, however, the tragedy
of human life was brought home to him--not merely through his
personal struggle for existence, but through the death of Emil Rousseau,
a dear friend who had followed him from Heidelberg to Munich, the
death of his mother, for whose necessities he had of late been able to do
but little, and misfortune in the family of Anton Schwarz, a cabinet
maker, with whose daughter, Beppy, Hebbel had been on too intimate

terms. Hebbel's dramas _Judith_, _Genoveva_, and Maria Magdalena
all germinated during these terrible years of the sojourn in Munich.
But the actual output of these years was not large. Attempts to publish a
volume of poems and a volume of short stories had failed. Nevertheless,
Hebbel was no longer an unknown quantity in the world of letters when,
in the early spring of 1839, he decided to return to Hamburg. Hope of
aid from Campe, Heine's publisher, and from Gutzkow, the editor of a
paper published by Campe, encouraged this decision. But Hebbel was
really going home, going back to Elise, after having accomplished the
purpose of his pilgrimage, even though for lack of money he could not
take with him a doctor's degree. He came as a man who could do things
for which the world gives a man a living. The return journey, lasting
from the eleventh to the thirty-first of March, 1839, amid alternate
freezing and thawing, was a tramp, than which only the retreat from
Moscow could have been more frightful; but Hebbel accomplished it,
more concerned for the little dog that accompanied him than for his
own sufferings. And it appeared that he had wisely chosen to return; for
he found opportunity for critical work in Gutzkow's _Telegraph_, and
Campe published the works which in rapid succession he now
completed: Judith (1840), Genoveva (1841), The Diamond (1841;
printed in 1847), and Poems (1842).
These publications won fame for Hebbel and yielded some immediate
pecuniary gain. But although he had reached the goal of his ambition in
having become a poet, and a dramatist whose first play had appeared on
the stage, he still lacked a settled occupation and a sure income. Having
been born a Danish subject, he conceived the idea of a direct appeal to
Christian VIII. of Denmark for such an appointment as the king might
be persuaded to give him. In spite of the unacademic course of his
studies and his lack of strictly professional training, he thought of a
professorship of esthetics at Kiel. Even in those days, when
professorships could be had on easier terms than now, this was a wild
dream. But Hebbel did not appeal to his sovereign in vain. He spent the
winter of 1842-43 in Copenhagen, where the Danish-German dramatist
Oehlenschläger smoothed his path to royal favor; and after two
audiences with Christian VIII. he was granted a pension of six hundred
thalers a year for two years, in order that by traveling he might learn
more of the world and cultivate his poetic talents. His first expression

of gratitude for this privilege was the tragedy _Maria Magdalena_,
begun at Hamburg in May, finished at Paris in December, 1843, and
dedicated to the king.
Hebbel's departure for Paris, in September, 1843, did not mean for him
what Heine's settlement there twelve years before had meant for
Heine--the beginning of a new life. Hebbel's knowledge of French was
very imperfect, and he was as much isolated in Paris as he had been in
Munich; he did not seek stimulus from without so much as freedom to
develop the ideas that were teeming in his mind. When he left
Hamburg, however, he was destined never to return thither except as a
visitor, and started on the long, roundabout way to an unforeseen new
home in Vienna. He had been but little over a month in Paris when he
learned of the death of the little son that Elise