The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX | Page 8

a great deed in
His service, who takes the duty upon herself only to find that as a
woman she is unequal to it; for as a woman she loves the manly
heathen. She kills him, as she set out to do; but the motive for her act is
personal revenge for a personal outrage; and she returns to Bethulia
broken in spirit and appalled at the thought that she may bear a son by
Holofernes. The attempt to make of herself an impersonal instrument in
the hands of the Almighty--certainly a laudable undertaking--is her
only fault, and is tragic because inconsistent with the character of
womanhood, which the Almighty has also ordained. Compared with
the iron necessity of her being, to which Judith succumbs, the
accidental and improbable fault of Schiller's Maid of Orleans seems as
trivial as it is conventional.
Similarly, in the conception of the story of Genoveva, Hebbel shifted
attention from the saint to the sinner. In the centre of his Genoveva
stands Golo, the unfortunate young man whose good instincts are made
criminal because the faults and errors of others excite them, and
because his desire, justifiable according to nature, is directed toward a
woman who is bound to another in a wedlock which, from the side of
the husband at least, is only formally correct. In Golo's crime and
atonement we accordingly see a great deal more than the operation of
the moral law: we see how crime is begotten of innocence; and instead
of thinking of the wretched creature, we think of the Creator who has
so ordained it, and at whose central position in the moral universe there
can be neither good nor evil, but an equilibrium of forces which
become one or the other, and may become either when the equilibrium
is disturbed. Good and evil, mutually exclusive qualities in the world of
appearance, are, in the world of ideas, complementary conceptions,
different aspects of one and the same thing.
Golo appears, despite his crimes, less guilty than Siegfried, the husband
of Genoveva; and in his case a divine impulse, love, becomes an evil
because it happens to collide with an institution, marriage, which we
are here justified in calling human, since, though it has a social sanction,
it lacks the evidence of divine approval. Clara, in _Maria Magdalena_,
is chargeable with but the minimum of guilt, and perishes because, too
honest and dutiful to safeguard her own interests in a stern and selfish
community, she cannot otherwise preserve for her father that

unassailable reputation which is, in his imperfect ethics, the highest
good. The tragedy in this play is the tragedy of pharisaical bourgeois
society itself. There is no collision between high and low, such as
constituted the plot of the _tragédies bourgeoises_ of the eighteenth
century--e.g., Lessing's _Emilia Galotti_, Schiller's _Cabal and
Love_--but the stubborn hardness of the middle-class society in its
typical representative is unable to meet a crisis; and by the banishment,
or the condemnation to suicide, of its most promising members, this
society pronounces its own doom. Altruism is contrary to the custom,
that is, to the morals of this community, and for that reason is forbidden
and suppressed.
Another community in which altruism is unusual and discredited is
Judæa just before the birth of Christ. Herod the king is a masterful ruler
and a benefactor; but the end justifies the means that he adopts, and he
is no respecter of persons. He does not even respect the person of his
wife. The love of Mariamne is the one sure rock upon which he can rest
when the earthquake, threatening at every moment, comes to shatter his
throne and engulf him. He loves her too with a passion which dreams
of union so perfect that death cannot break it, so perfect that one of
them would wish to die at the moment when the soul of the other left
the body. This is Mariamne's dream also, but Herod cannot trust her to
fulfil it. Not once, but twice, upon going to the wars, he leaves orders
that Mariamne shall be slain if he is killed; and these orders are an
assassination of her soul. The community can execute an individual;
but one individual can only assassinate another. In the ancient orient a
wife was a precious possession, entirely subject to the will of her
husband, and liable to be burned in his funeral pyre. Herod represents
such an ancient, oriental point of view; but Judæa is on the eve of
becoming occidental and modern. Herod represents the law and has the
power to crush the insurgent personality of Mariamne: he has not the
power to slay the infant Savior, nor to hinder the coming of the day
when every human soul is known to be an object