of the universe--and
that the body is indeed the medium of contact between person and
person, but is also the separating barrier of soul from soul, and of the
individual soul from the soul of the world. The body is the form or
vessel which vouchsafes to the soul individual existence, and which the
soul, by its very impulse to activity, wears out and destroys. Birth is a
prophecy of destruction and a doom to death.
But life is activity, the soul is a 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
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