The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX | Page 5

had borne him three
years before. He was deeply grieved both for himself and for the
despairing mother, to whom he offered all the comfort he could give,
not excepting marriage, as soon as he should ever be able to provide for
her. In May, 1844, Elise bore him another son who, dying in 1847, was
never seen by his father. Hebbel did not forget what he owed to the
mother of his children, but he felt the debt more and more as an
obligation, in the fulfilment of which there was no prospect of
satisfaction to either. Despite the fact that she had a hundred times
declared to him that he was free, all her dreaming and planning tended
solely to keep him bound. He, who had been her pupil, had now far
outgrown her capacity to understand his endeavors and achievements;
and he felt that he could sacrifice much for her, but not himself, his
personality, and his mission. And so the unwholesome relation wore on,
with aggravating burdensomeness, to the inevitable crisis.
In the fall of 1844 Hebbel journeyed from Paris to Rome. He had met
few notables in Paris--Heine, Felix Bamberg, and Arnold Ruge almost
complete the tale--but in Italy he, like Goethe, made the acquaintance
of a group of German artists, and followed their leadership in the study
of ancient art. He enjoyed this study in natural, unaffected appreciation
of the beautiful; and a certain artistic polish distinguishes the poems
which nature and art in Italy inspired him to write. The Italian journey,
however, was far from being a renaissance to him as it had been to
Goethe. Hebbel remained a Northern artist. Vesuvius impressed him,
but Pompeii proved a disappointment; it was laid out, he said, like any

other city. He departed from Rome in October, 1845, richer in the
friendship of distinguished men--including Hermann Hettner--and in
accumulated experience, but not as one to whom the Ponte Molle is a
bridge of sighs.
Hebbel's design was to return to Hamburg by way of Vienna. In Vienna,
which he reached on the fourth of November, 1845, he was cordially
received in literary circles. Men of influence promised their good
offices in getting his plays performed, but failed to take effective
measures, and he was about to continue his journey when the romantic
enthusiasm of two young barons Zerboni gave him an _entrée_ into
aristocratic society, and he tarried. Ere long he had decided to stay for
life. In Christine Enghaus, the leading lady at the _Hofburgtheater_, he
found the feminine counterpart to his masculine nature; and on the
twenty-sixth of May, 1846, they were married.
From every point of view this marriage proved so perfect that we may
well question whether anything whatever ought to have been allowed to
stand in the way of it. To Elise, of course, it seemed an outrage--the
more so that she was entirely mistaken as to the character of Christine;
and with furious bitterness she reproached Hebbel for violating her
most sacred rights in his infatuation for an actress. The storm broke, but
it cleared the air for both; and upon the death of her second son in 1847,
Elise came at Christine's invitation to Vienna and spent a year in the
Hebbel household.
Hebbel himself rightly dated an epoch in his life from his marriage and
the renewed productivity which followed upon it. He enjoyed now for
the first time not only freedom from economic worries but also
complete serenity of mind. Outwardly, indeed, he still had to keep up
his offensive and defensive warfare. Beyond the circle of his immediate
adherents, only the more enlightened of his contemporaries, such as
Ruge, Hettner, and Theodor Vischer, perceived what he was aiming at,
and his own public discussions were so abstruse and repellent that it is
no wonder they were misunderstood. Grillparzer declared that he was
groping in esthetic fog. Julian Schmidt recognized his power and the
poetic charm of many of his passages, but thought him in danger of
crossing the line which separates sense from nonsense, genius from
insanity. Hebbel was restive under criticism, and the method of his
polemics tended rather to exasperate than to conciliate his adversaries.

Meanwhile Maria Magdalena and Judith were performed at the
_Hofburgtheater_, with Christine as the heroine. But in 1850 Heinrich
Laube became director of this theatre, and he not only rejected one play
of Hebbel's after another, but also withdrew from Christine the leading
parts which she had heretofore taken in the regular repertory.
The new epoch in Hebbel's dramatic activity really began in 1848. The
fruits of his sojourn in Italy, A Tragedy in Sicily (1846), Julia (1847),
and New Poems (published in 1847) were mediocre stragglers in the
train of his first successes. But _Herodes and Mariamne_, begun in