She seems to have been one of those pliant natures that cannot live without an idol. Tender, affectionate, brave, but no mental stimulus—there is the tragedy. A German is essentially a thinker. His inner world is the camera obscura for the outer, with this consequence, that a woman is to him intellectually nothing at all. Hebbel, to whom intellect was vital, in the weak hour when that intellect itself was in question, sought refuge in emotional fellowship—not love; he did not pretend it. For some years he tried, no doubt with that agony of hesitation endured by Shelley, to act up to his sense of chivalry. But “self-consciousness” and “self-development” are the besetting virtues of the German. The homely housewife could not hold him, that portrayer of strong characters felt integral necessity for some positive, dominant quality of soul that could share his own expansion.
This, however, is anticipating. The gallant Elise, self-sacrificial to the point of becoming mother without being wife, for some years devoted her help, pecuniary if not intellectual, to furthering her lover’s, or rather her beloved’s, success. From 1836-1839 he studied in Heidelberg and Munich, ostensibly law, though extracting far more from history and philosophy. Always at daggers drawn with poverty, eking out his Brötchen and Kaffee with little appreciated journalism, he felt he was now against stark issues. Here his Northern nature was his ally. When against verities he was indomitable; and henceforth the question—“Shall I write from the inner or the outer necessity?” could receive only one answer.
From his travels he gained little. His Germanism needed no accentuation, and his desultory studies had tended to make him an introspective browser. His angularity and bitterness, together with his imperious cry for individualism, came out now in the Judith. It was a harum-scarum crudity, yet marked with strange flashes of genius. Judith was to be the forerunner of such an imperial type as Mariamne; but one cannot help feeling the pig-tail beneath the helmet of righteousness; and the gigantesque Holofernes, though he roar like a Bull of Bashan, is apt to give the impression that Judith after all cut off a property head. Many Germans appear to admire this play, but it seems to less Teutonic eyes like an aimless piston. Certainly we are not marching in the fields of Thrasymene, and the reader will not be disappointed if he wants Marlowe’s luridness out-Marlowed. Yet withal there is something craggy and storm-enduring amid the ferocity, and one realises that real anguish is revealing itself by intermittent lightnings.
Fretted by penury and hope deferred, Hebbel now conceived a wild design. The Duke of Holstein, his own duchy, was Christian VIII of Denmark. On such a man he had a claim and could be proud as well as suppliant. To Denmark he went, at first with little success. The prospect of a chair of Aesthetics at Kiel opened only to close. He now felt in extremities, when the Danish poet Oehlenschlager gave him a timely appreciation and recommended him to the King: with the result that he received a meagre viaticum for two years’ travel.
“Thus we half-men struggle,” says Browning. But the whole men struggle more. It is their misfortune to be world-useful in one thing, world-useless in all others. In them their art is not a choice but a condition of existence, without giving the means of existence. What then this pittance meant to one who for two years was relieved of the necessity of earning a livelihood, only men like himself can realise. Not an opening of great avenues; they always stretch to the imagination; but an end to stolen moments in them, the coming of delightful hauntings of them, and the steady concentration on some mastering thought.
To Hebbel it meant more, in that he chose Paris for a great part of his stay. Its grey atmospheres and meditative buildings, its blue skies, and above all, its childlike unrestraint were an admirable corrective to the long constriction of necessity and the Teutonic Grübelei. In Paris no two clocks agree. In Germany they are fatally accurate. There is the difference in a nutshell. The best good that might befall Hebbel at this period was to forget to wind up his watch. His warm words about Paris and his regretful departure thence showed that the Teuton had loved the geniality of the Frank. Yet, strange to say, at this period he produced Maria Magdalena—yet not strange to say; for like Lucretius’ gazer at the storm from land, Hebbel could write of the bitter peasant-life with a relief, for the nonce at least, that it was over. Perhaps, too, the death of his little son Mark, whereby his stay in Paris was threatened, gave his thoughts a gloomy caste. At all events it would be hard to find a more unrelieved atmosphere of misery than in this play—not that subtle Ibsenesque clutch of Fate, but a hard realism whose lines are burnt in with acid. Unwilling to follow out the regulation sorrows of peasant-maidens and noble seducers, Hebbel keeps this tragedy of the bourgeoisie entirely in its own atmosphere. This, his express aim, was good in itself, for the gallant noble has too often been made an example of gaudy and melodramatic sin. It is more powerful to show that a pusillanimous clerk’s sordid love-affair involves tragic issues. The more closely to knit this tragedy to its own atmosphere, the ruin of the girl has been set against the problem of paternal authority. The effect of terror is worked less by the self-slain daughter than by the still living father, who has in him a sort of stupid grandeur, one whose ideas the blacksmith traditions of his class had cast in iron. With a son mismanaged and a daughter dead through these metallic good intentions, he cries dazedly, “I understand the world no longer!” It is the terrible “I want the sun!” given in more manful tones, for with all his obtuseness, he has in him the Roman solemnity of a father’s powers and duties.
The drama was published, but refused by the Berliner Hoftheater, and indeed it now looked as if his retrospect were to become forecast. With the Maria Magdalena was published an essay on the then conditions of the drama, a treatise that made him determined enemies. This fruitless toil for the time embittered him, but his money was not yet exhausted and he went to prolong his dreams in Rome, where the acquaintance with several men of high talent did much to deepen him.
In 1845 he was ready to return to Germany; but during his sojourn abroad the slow shadows of his love-crisis had been creeping on him. Two years of uninterrupted thought had brought an expansion of mind incalculable to one who lived in the intellectual. He was now grown up, conscious of power, and alas, Elise was not grown up. Now she called to him, unable to bear the separation longer; and thereby he was placed in the necessity of decision. No palterer with himself, he refused compromise. He was to choose between an absorber of and a compeer in his ideals. There is no need for harrowing psychology. He chose the latter; let those who blame him acknowledge at least his truth to himself. Let this be said—in later years when Elise had lost her second child, he invited her to his house and made her acquainted with his wife, at whose instance the invitation came. “You have not borne children!” she cried when he hesitated, and in those words she revealed the sympathy which made her so great an actress. Between these two women there grew up a warm friendship—a thing impossible if somewhere in all this there was not a noble element. Let us rather accept it in the spirit of Aglavaine and Selysette, than with the rigid sneer of Arnold at Shelley for proposing the same thing to Harriet. These were the words which Elise could afterwards write to Hebbel’s wife—“That our relations could take so pure a colour I ascribe to my sojourn there (Vienna). Though so many hours of bitterness were my lot in that unforgettable town, things would never have shaped themselves thus had I not learned to know you and all the facts on the spot itself. Our bond is now one of those of whose like there are few.”
It was from Vienna that Hebbel sent Elise his decision, and the variegated Southern capital was to be his home till his death. In 1846 he met Christine Enghausen, an actress of power and a warm admirer of his work. In this woman of feminine devotion and deep insight he found one who could foster his art as well as his nature. From their marriage began sweeter days for him. Her own earnings at the theatre relieved his immediate want; and it speaks the more for the proud man that he could take what was freely given with no sense of dependence. More than ever now he needed domestic happiness, for his relations with the Viennese were not of the best. He did not sympathise with their revolution or fall in with their polished manners. His own laconisms were hardly complimentary or attractive, and his strong Northern accent ruffled Southern ears. But with a noble wife at his side he could afford to be shut in on himself. It meant a grip on his thought-world and an absence of corrosive compromise. At this time there appeared Julia, The Ruby, and A Tragedy in Sicily. They show that for the time at least his equilibrium was upset by his estrangement from the outer world. It is hardly a reflection on contemporary taste that Julia was unappreciated. Berlin declared that it did not suit the public; Vienna had doubts as to its moral and aesthetic value. Any new and good art meets these objections, yet there are cases where they apply. It has a fantastic plot which finds a halting solution. Moral it is, as Hebbel sharply pointed out, but the “problem” is hardly thinkable, the motives are bizarre, and the turgid language betrays a straining mind. If no other point be taken, a comparison between the grim father in this play and that of Maria Magdalena will show that here he has substituted the remarkable for the terrible.
In The Ruby he essayed humour, a quality he lacked. The servants, for instance, in Herod and Mariamne, and the Persian in Gyges, make elephantine fun which depends rather on verbal antitheses than on genuine situation. In The Ruby he missed the fascinating topsy-turvydom of the fairy tale; and there is a certain oriental nonchalance of the wonderful which was quite outside his province.