The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX | Page 6

1847 and completed in November, 1848, is the first of a new series of
masterpieces. Mariamne, Hebbel said, was not simply written for
Christine, she was Christine. _The Ruby_, which followed in the spring
of 1849, is a graceful dramatization of a fairy-tale written ten years
before in Munich; Michel Angelo (1850), a satire on his critics, is a
slight but clever refutation of ignorant presumption. Agnes Bernauer
(1851) is a worthy successor of _Herodes and Mariamne_; Gyges and
his Ring (1854) is the most poetic and perhaps the most characteristic
of his dramas. The trilogy on the Nibelungen (1855-1860) was Hebbel's
last great work, ranking with Grillparzer's Golden Fleece and Schiller's
_Wallenstein_; and if he had lived to complete _Demetrius_, we should
have had another remarkable drama, on a subject which Schiller too
was destined to leave unfinished.
In the fifties, Hebbel accompanied Christine on professional trips to
North Germany, and had ample occasion to observe the spread of his
influence. In 1852 he was fêted at Munich in connection with the
production there of Agnes Bernauer. In 1858 he attended a performance
of Genoveva in Weimar, and was decorated with an order by the Grand
Duke. In 1861 the Nibelungen trilogy was performed for the first time
in Weimar, with Christine as Brunhild and Kriemhild; and in the
following year Hebbel, who had even thought of going to live at
Weimar, was the guest of the Grand Duke at his castle in Wilhelmsthal.
Though in Vienna honors came later, Hebbel felt himself to be during
these years at the summit of his existence. In 1855 he bought a country
home at Orth near Gmunden in the Salzkammergut, and to the idyllic
atmosphere of that retreat he owed the inspiration for the epic poem
Mother and Child (1857), his gentlest treatment of a tragic theme. In
1857 he issued a definitive edition of his _Poems_, dedicated to Uhland,

"the first poet of the present time." In 1854 _Genoveva_, in modified
form, was successfully presented as Magellone at the _Burgtheater_,
with Christine as the heroine. But Hebbel's first Viennese triumph did
not come until February 19, 1863, when Christine played Brunhild in
the first and second parts of the Nibelungen. On his deathbed he
received the news that the Berlin Schiller Prize had been awarded to
him for the Nibelungen. Hebbel died on the thirteenth of December,
1863. Christine out-lived him by nearly half a century, until the
twenty-ninth of June, 1910.
Rightly or wrongly, Hebbel regarded himself as the creator of a new
form of drama, setting in at a step beyond Shakespeare and Schiller,
and attacking problems in the manner suggested, but not fully
developed, by Goethe. Shakespeare and Schiller, he said, locate the
conflict in the breast of the hero: shall he, or shall he not, endeavor to
attain the object of his desire, against forces which oppose him from
without, and which have their allies in his own conscience, in his own
sense of right and wrong? He desires the wrong, or neglects the right,
and for his tragic fault atones with death. We pity the unfortunate
individual, console ourselves, however, with the inviolability of the
moral law, and profit by his example: only those are free whose will
chooses to be moral. But Goethe, in the dramatically conceived
_Elective Affinities_, focuses attention not upon the doings of
individuals, but upon the sanctions of the law which a power superior
to their wills forces them to break. And so Hebbel, passing over the
individual, as one of myriads, directs inquiry into the causes that make
him what he is, that make him do what he does, that prevent him from
doing what at the same time they impel him to attempt; and he reveals,
back of the individual typical phenomenon, an irreconcilable conflict in
the very condition and definition of its existence. This conflict has its
roots in the dualism of all being.
The corner-stone of Martin Luther's system of morals was the paradox:
"A Christian is a sovereign lord over all things, and is subject to
nobody; a Christian is a duty-bound servant of all things, and is subject
to everybody." In other words, a man's soul is his own and is superior
to all the things of the flesh; but through his body he is made dependent
upon the life-giving earth, and subject to the laws which those other
"bodies" in the community in which he lives make for the common

defense and the general welfare. Hebbel carried the antithesis farther,
asking what is the soul, and what is the body? And he answered, in
effect, that the soul is indeed the very essence of personality, but is no
original, self-begotten, and self-sufficient entity--on the contrary, it is a
fragment, a participant in the animating principle