EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF FRIEDRICH
HEBBEL
Reflections on the world, life, and books, but chiefly on myself, in the form of a journal.
TRANSLATED BY FRANCES A. KING
(1836)
At the moment in which we conceive an ideal, there arises in God the thought of creating it.
Social life in all its nuances is no mere confluence of meaningless accidents; it is the product of the experience of whole millenniums, and our task is to apprehend the correctness of these experiences.
A poetic idea cannot be expressed allegorically; allegory is the ebb-tide at once of the intellect and of the productive power.
Nature eternally repeats the same thought in ever widening expansion; therefore the drop is an image of the sea.
Poetic and plastic art are alike in being both formative; that is to say, they are intended to bring to view a limited amount of matter in definite relations which are fixed by nature; and when the poet gives expression to an idea, the process is exactly the same as when a painter or sculptor represents the noble or beautiful outlines of a body.
"Throw away so that thou shalt not lose!" is the best rule of life.
There are said to have been people who, when a limb had been amputated, still felt pain in the severed member. Twofold mode of all being: what has been from the beginning and what has only become. Cogito ergo sum; am I not much more under the dominion of the thinking faculty within me than the latter is under my dominion? Individuality is not so much the goal as the way, and not so much the best way as the only one.
Two human beings are always two extremes.
Words are monuments not of what mankind has thought for centuries about certain subjects but only of the fact that it has thought about them. The difference is considerable.
A really great genius can never chance upon an age which would make it impossible for him to allow free play to his superior powers. If he chances upon a dull, exhausted, empty century,—well then, this century is his problem.
Most of my knowledge about myself I have gained in moments when I perceived the peculiarities of other people.
It is a sign of mediocre intelligence to be able to fix one's attention upon details when contemplating a great work of art; on the other hand, it is a sign of the mediocrity of a work of art (poetic or plastic) if one cannot get beyond the details, if they, so to speak, impede the way to the whole.
Goethe says in regard to Michael Kohlhaas that one should not single out such cases in the general course of human events. That is true in so far as one should not draw any conclusions therefrom to the detriment of mankind. But it seems to me that it is precisely to exceptions of this sort that the poet must turn his attention, in order to show that they, as well as common-place events, have their origin in what is most genuinely human.
Man cannot abstract his ego from the universe. As firmly as he is interwoven with the universe and life, just so firmly does he believe that life and the universe are interwoven with him.
(1837)
It takes a great deal of time merely to perceive where the enigmatical in many things is actually located. Many simply introduce logic into their poetry and believe this is equivalent to motivation.
All reasoning (and here belongs what Schiller, under the trade mark of the sentimental, would smuggle in as poetry) is onesided and allows the heart and mind no further activity than simply to deny or affirm. On the contrary, all that is actual and objective (and here belong the so-called natural sounds, which reveal the innermost essence of a state or a human personality) is infinite, and offers to those who are in sympathy and to those who are not the widest scope for the employment of all their powers.
Philosophy strives ever and always for the absolute, and yet that is properly speaking the task of poetry.
With every human being (let him be who he will) disappears from the world a mystery, that, owing to his peculiar construction, he alone could reveal, and that no one will reveal after him.
It is dangerous to think in images, but it cannot always be avoided; for often, especially in regard to the highest things, image and thought are identical.
A miracle is easier to repeat than to explain. Thus the artist continues the act of creation in the highest sense, without being able to comprehend it.
(1838)
God Himself when, in order to attain great ends, He exerts a direct influence upon an individual, and thus allows Himself an arbitrary interference (if we put the case we must use expressions that fit it) in the world's machinery, cannot protect His tool from being crushed by the same wheel which this individual has arrested for a moment or has turned in another direction. This is surely the principal tragic motif which underlies the history of the Maid of Orleans. A tragedy which should reflect this idea would produce a great impression through the glimpse it would afford into the eternal order of nature, which God Himself may not disturb with impunity.
When the poet attempts to delineate characters by making them speak, he must be careful not to allow them to speak about their own inner life. All their utterances must relate to something external; only then does their inner nature come out vividly and expressively, for it fashions itself only in reflections of the world and of life.
To depict two kindred characters one by means of the other, to have them mutually reflect one another without their becoming aware of it, would surely be the triumph of delineation.
It is a masterly trait in the Prince of Homburg that the suspicion that the Elector has had the Prince condemned to death, not so much on account of the act of overhastiness committed on the battlefield as for another reason, does not arise spontaneously in the Prince's soul, but is first awakened by Hohenzollern's questioning.
A double process must take place in the mind of the true poet before it can evolve anything. The crude matter must be resolved into an idea, and the idea must condense again into a form. Man is the continuation of the act of creation, an eternally growing, never completed creation, which prevents the termination of the world and keeps it from congealing and hardening. It is highly significant (this thought led me to the one I have just expressed) that everything which exists as a human conception is never wholly and perfectly—only fragmentarily—embodied in nature, and everything which exists perfectly and completely in nature eludes human conception, man's own nature not excepted. Thus we know and define right and wrong, virtue and innocence (the latter as soon as we have lost it), but not life itself, etc. Where knowledge has been vouchsafed us, there nature requires our coöperation.
The first and last aim of art is to render intuitively perceptible the process of life itself, to show how the soul of man develops in the atmosphere surrounding him, let it be suited to him or not, how good engenders evil within him, and evil in turn produces something less evil, and how this eternal growth has a limit so far as our apprehension is concerned, but none at all in reality; this is symbolization. It is an error when men say that only the fully developed is matter for the poet; on the contrary, what is in process of development, what is first begotten in conflict with the elements of creation, that is matter for him. What is finished can be only a plaything of the waves, it can only be destroyed and devoured by them; can art have anything to do with that which is most common, in other words, most universal? But what is in process of development must pass from one form into another at the hands of the poet, it must never as formless soft clay dissolve before our eyes into chaos and confusion; it must always, in a certain sense, be at the same time a finished product, just as in the universe we never encounter naked raw material. Man exists only because of his future; an inexplicable mystery, but one that may not be denied. Man, therefore, cannot be brought before us as something complete in himself; for not how he affects the world but how the world affects him arouses our interest and is of importance to us; the great forces and powers outside of him find embodiment by exerting an influence over him, and thus lose their formidableness, the riddle of the universe is solved as soon as it finds utterance, and even though at the end a question remains, we can bear this much easier than an empty nothing.
Not only in art but in history as well life sometimes assumes a form, and art should not seek her subjects and her themes where this has occurred.
God was a mystery to Himself before the creation; He had to create in order to understand Himself. If only some one thing had been completely explained, then everything would be explained.
The motives before a deed are usually transformed during the deed, and at least seem quite different after the deed: this is an important circumstance which most dramatists overlook.
Lyric poetry has something childlike about it, dramatic poetry something manly, epic poetry something senile.
Two hands can indeed clasp one another but cannot grow together. This is the relation of one individuality to another.
(1840)
From my conception of form many consequences ensue of the most varied kind. In reference to lyric poetry: the whole emotional life is a shower, the emotion which is singled out is a drop illumined by the sun. Dramatic poetry: form is the point where divine and human strength neutralize one another.
The true idyll results when a man is represented as happy and complete in himself within his own appointed sphere. So long as he remains within this sphere fate has no power over him.
Poetry of the highest kind is the true historiography. It grasps the result of historical processes and holds it fast in imperishable images as, for example, Sophocles has done with the idea of Hellenism.
All life is a struggle of the individual with the universe.
Duality pervades all our intuitions and thoughts and every moment of our being, and is our supreme, our last idea. Beside it we, have absolutely no fundamental idea. Life and death, health and sickness, time and eternity: we can imagine and picture to ourselves how one gradually shades off into the other, but not that which lies behind these divided dualities as a common solvent and reconciliation. (1841)
Antigone, representing as it does a romantic individual subject in a classical form, is the masterpiece of tragic art.
Life is the attempt of the defiantly refractory part to tear itself loose from the whole and to exist for itself, an attempt that succeeds just so long as the strength endures which was robbed from the whole by the individual separation.
"What a man can become, that he is already." God will not lay the decisive weight on the sins committed by sinful individuals against one another but only on the sins committed against the idea itself, and there actual and merely possible sins are one and the same.
(1843)
Expiation in tragedy occurs in the interest of the community, not in that of the individual, the hero, and it is not at all necessary, although it is better, that he himself should be conscious of it. Life is the great river, individualities are drops; tragic individualities are, however, blocks of ice which must be liquefied again, and in order that this may be possible they must break and wear themselves away one against the other.
There is only one necessity, which is that the world should continue to exist; what happens to individuals in the world is of no consequence. The evil that they commit must be punished because it endangers the existence of the world; but there is no reason why they should be indemnified for the misfortune that befalls them.
(1844)
Absolutely everything depends upon a right conception of guilt. Guilt must not, in any direction, be confounded with the subordinate conception of sin, which even in the modern drama—where indeed it finds, for reasons which are not far to seek, a wider scope than in the ancient—must always be merged again into the conception of guilt, if the drama is to rise above the anecdotal to the symbolical. For the conception of tragic guilt can be developed only from life itself, from the original incongruity between idea and phenomenon—which incongruity manifests itself in the phenomenon as extravagance, the natural consequence of the instinct of self-preservation and self-assertion, the first and most legitimate of all instincts. But it cannot be developed from one of the many consequences of this original incongruity, which lead us too far down into the errors and aberrations of the individual to allow the working out of the highest dramatic possibilities. So, too, the conception of tragic expiation should be developed only from extravagance, which, since it is irrepressible in the phenomenon, represses the phenomenon, and thus frees the idea again from its imperfect form. It is true the original incongruity between idea and phenomenon remains unremoved and unovercome; but it is evident that in the sphere of life, which art, so long as it understands itself, will never go beyond, nothing can be removed that lies outside this sphere, and that art reaches its supreme goal when it seizes upon the immediate consequence of this incongruity, extravagance, and points out in it the element of self-destruction; but leaves the incongruity enshrouded in the darkness of creation, unexplained, as a fact immediately posited.
(1845)
A genuine drama may be compared to one of those great buildings which have almost as many passages and rooms below the earth as above it. Ordinary people only know the former; the architect knows the latter also.
A king has less right than any other person to be an individual.
(1846)
In the poet humanity dreams. Decidedly, a dream is for the spirit what sleep is for the body.
As every crystallization is dependent upon certain physical conditions, so every individualization of human nature depends upon the state of the historical epoch in which it occurs. To represent these modifications of human nature in their relative necessity is the main task which poetry has to fulfill in contradistinction to history, and here it can, if it attains to pure form, render a supreme service. But it is difficult to separate the merely incidental from the main task and then besides to avoid subjective moods; so that we scarcely have even the beginnings of such poems as now hover before my mind.
(1847)
To present the necessary, but in the form of the accidental: that is the whole secret of dramatic style.
If the characters do not negate the moral idea, what does it matter that the piece affirms it? The negation of the individual factors must be so very decided, precisely in order to give emphasis to the affirmation of the whole.
Human institutions require a man to be a man like other men; but man, whoever and whatever he may be, wishes to be an individual, indeed is, as such, individualized. Hence the rupture.
Let the understanding question in a work of art, but do not let it answer.
(1848)
The understanding no more makes poetry than salt makes food, but it is necessary to poetry as salt is to food.
(1849)
One does not sit down to play on the piano in order to verify mathematical laws. Just as little does one write poetry in order to demonstrate something. Oh, if people would only learn to comprehend that! Indeed the beauty of all the higher activity of man is precisely the fact, that ends which the individual never even thinks of are attained thereby.
(1853)
The process of dramatic individualization is perhaps best illustrated by comparison to water. Everywhere water is water and man is man, but as the former acquires a mysterious flavor from every stratum of earth that it flows or trickles through, so man acquires a peculiarity from his time, his nation, history, and fate.
(1857) Man would perhaps still have as acute senses as animals, if thinking did not divert him from the outer world.
(1859)
Ideas are the same thing in the drama that counterpoint is in music; nothing in themselves but the primary condition for everything.
(1861)
(Concerning my Nibelungen.)
It seems to me that a purely human tragedy, natural in all its motifs, can be constructed upon the mythical foundation inseparable from this subject, and that so far as my powers permit I have constructed one. The mysticism of the background should at most remind us that what we hear in this poem is not the seconds' clock, which measures off the existence of gnats and ants, but the clock that marks the hours only. Let the reader who is nevertheless disturbed by the mythical foundation consider that, if he examines closely, he will also discover such a basis in man himself, and that, too, in the mere man, in the representative of the species, and not only in the more specific branch of the same, in the individual. Or may man's fundamental qualities, either physical or mental, be accounted for, that is to say, can they be deduced from any other organic canon than the one which has been posited once for all with man himself, and which cannot be traced farther back to a final primitive cause of things, or be critically resolved into its components? Are they not in part, as for example most of the passions, opposed to reason and conscience, therefore to the very faculties of man which, being quite general and disinterested, may most safely be designated as those which connect him immediately with the universe, and has this contradiction ever been explained away? Why, then, in art negate an act upon which is founded even our view of nature?
Otto Prechtler related to me the following incident. When Grillparzer made my acquaintance upon my arrival in Vienna he said to Prechtler: "No one on earth will be able to influence this man. One person might have done so, but he is dead; I mean Goethe." A few years later he added, "I was mistaken, not even Goethe would have been able to influence him."
(1863)
I do not know the world, for although I myself represent a piece of it, this is such a minutely small part that no conclusion as to the true nature of the world can be deduced therefrom. Man, however, I know, for I am myself a man, and even though I do not know how he originates in the world, yet I know very well how, having once originated, he reacts upon it. I therefore conscientiously respect the laws of the human soul; in reference to everything else, however, I believe that imagination draws inspiration from the same depths out of which the world itself arose, that is to say, the multifarious series of phenomena which exists at present, but which at some future time, may perhaps be replaced by another.
(To Siegmund Englaender.)
—You wish to believe in the poet as you believe in the Deity; why ascend so high into the region of clouds, where everything ceases to be, even analogy? Would you not probably attain more if you descended to the beast and ascribed to the artistic faculty an intermediate stage between the instinct of the beast and the consciousness of man? There at least we are in the sphere of experience, and have the prospect of ascertaining something real by applying two known quantities to an unknown one. The beast leads a dream life which nature herself immediately regulates and strictly adapts to those purposes, by the attainment of which, on the one hand, the creature itself subsists, but, on the other, the world continues. The artist leads a similar dream life, naturally only as an artist, and probably from the same cause; for the cosmic laws hardly come any more clearly into his field of vision than the organic laws come into that of the beast, and yet he cannot round off and complete any of his images without going back to them. Why then should nature not do for him what she does for the beast? You will, however, find in general—to go still deeper—that the processes of life have nothing to do with consciousness, and artistic generation is the highest of all processes; they differ from the logical precisely in that they absolutely cannot be traced back to definite factors. Who has ever closely watched evolution in any of its phases, and what has the impregnation theory of physiology, in spite of the microscopic detailed description of the working apparatus, done for the solution of the fundamental mystery? Can it explain even a humpback? On the other hand, there can be no complex which it would not be possible to follow up in all its involutions and finally to resolve. The structure of the universe is revealed to us, we can, if we like, play the fiddle for the dance of the heavenly bodies; but the sprouting blade of grass is a riddle and will always remain one. You would therefore be perfectly right in laughing at Newton if he wanted to "play the naïve child" and declare that the falling apple had inspired him with the idea of the system of gravitation, whereas it may very well have given him the impetus which started him to reflect upon the subject. On the other hand, you would wrong Dante if you should doubt that Heaven and Hell had arisen in colossal outline before his soul at the mere sight of a wood, half in light and half in shadow. For systems are not dreamed, but neither are works of art made by minute calculations, nor, what amounts to the same thing, since thinking is only a higher kind of arithmetic, thought out. The artistic imagination is the organ which drains those depths of the world which are inaccessible to the other faculties, and in accordance herewith, my mode of viewing things puts, in place of the false realism which takes the part for the whole, only the true realism, which also comprises what does not lie on the surface. For the rest, this false realism is not curtailed thereby, for even though one can no more prepare oneself for writing poetry than for dreaming, yet dreams will always reflect daily and yearly impressions, and no less do poems reflect the sympathies and antipathies of the author. I believe all these propositions are simple and comprehensible. Whoever refuses to recognize them must throw the half of literature overboard, for example Edipus at Colonus (for geography knows nothing of sacred groves), Shakespeare's Tempest (for there is no such thing as magic), Hamlet and Macbeth (for only a fool is afraid of ghosts, etc.); nay he must also—and this even he who might be ready to make the other sacrifices would find it hard to bring himself to do—he must also place the French at the head of what remains; for where can one find realists like Voltaire, etc.? This, to me, seems to demonstrate my proposition, at least the counter-test is made.