These plays, however, were followed by Herod and Mariamne, which left no doubt as to his genius, and proved that he had now found the power of creation in his own atmosphere. As has been said, there was now an increasing happiness in his domestic affairs, and the acquisition of a little property gave him the possessor’s pride in tending a garden. But in exterior things a crash came in his fortunes. In 1849 Laube took over the management of the Vienna Hofburgtheater. His personal dislike of Hebbel reflected itself on his wife. He seems to have been quite unconvinced of Hebbel’s dramatic genius and augured for him no lasting position. Certain of his plays had met with poor success and on this ground Laube cut out of the theatre programme Judith and Maria Magdalena, nor did he notice the dramas between 1850 and 1860. His position was frankly that a good drama should vindicate itself within two or three years from its first performance—a principle that means the condemnation of Hebbel. Yet even thus his injustice to Christine is not excused. “As far as concerns my wife,” Hebbel writes, “Laube deprived her of her best rôles and did not give her a single new one. Indeed he forced her to play grandmothers and nurses. It is an attempt at moral murder, for an artist who must let her powers lie unused wears herself out consciously or unconsciously, and naturally loses in the process.”
For Hebbel it seemed an impasse, but at this juncture Dingelstedt of Munich came to his rescue by performing Judith and Agnes Bernauer. In the latter, however, political faction in Munich found offence, alleging reflections on Bavarian royalty. When, therefore, the drama was forbidden, Dingelstedt seceded to Weimar, bringing out Hebbel’s Genoveva in 1858, and in 1861 his Nibelungen triology.
It meant the poet’s final triumph. The Court of Weimar, anxious to maintain its cultural traditions, and keen enough to recognise a man of genius, offered him residence among the memories of Goethe and Schiller, and the last year of his life (1863) was crowned by the bestowal of the position of Privat-Bibliothekar to the Grand Duke of Sachs-Weimar.
The offer of residence at Weimar he refused, being now no longer young and thoroughly habilitated at Vienna. He had outlived any mad quest of fame, had reached an inner assurance, and could rest content with the knowledge that his work would be his monument. Spending his last days in quiet reading, and meditating on the philosophy of Kant, he met his last illness prepared and happy. His wife survived him many years, and is indeed but recently dead. Her earlier bitterness was sweetened by the assurance of the increasing regard for her husband throughout Germany.
The personality of the man was almost a penalty paid to his art. He was no lover of strife for its own sake, not rancoured against individuals, no conscious doctrinaire in conversation, and brief of speech. Yet he had so forceful a conviction that it was difficult for him to make lasting friends. Without his own will he so impressed others with his decisive habit of mind, an effect heightened by his short and penetrating speech, that independent, if lesser, minds felt they must avoid him for their own salvation. He was German to the core, and the best qualities of his nation are a profundity and strength that is good for our craggy moods. The elusive subtlety of the Frenchman is not his, but Siegfrieds are not made of the rarer lights and shadows. So eminent in these qualities is Hebbel that Germany is now asking if she has not in him her greatest poet since Goethe.
This is a question that cannot be answered hurriedly, but at least it may be said that no poetic dramatist since Goethe expressed so deep or consistent a conviction about art. The creator in him only stimulated the critic, and his various treatises show that his dramas have been built on deep foundations. Two things most impressed him about humanity, first the individual will, secondly the relation of the unit to the whole. Tragedies arise not from the direction of the will, as Christianity would have it, but from the will itself, the “obstinate extension of the individuality.” Deed and circumstance are the outward expressions of will and necessity, and it is primarily with these outward expressions that drama has to do. Through these dynamic means it interprets the static abstraction, and though the comprehension of the latter is the main end of drama, yet it must work within its own limits. It is this mingling of Being with Becoming that makes the artist problem difficult.
Hebbel thus recognised art as symbolic, but unlike the symbolists he made the character himself the symbol. The tragic figure, at once the instrument and agent, is his own problem. When Dr. Heiberg, adversely criticising Hebbel, announced that the drama of the future would subordinate the character to the problem, Hebbel trenchantly condemned the prophecy. Out of Heiberg’s own country arose Ibsen to vindicate the poet. It is the decline from Ibsen’s art that has emasculated his followers. The Shaws and Galsworthys create their characters out of their problems. It will make no drama, as Hebbel foresaw. Treated by the prosaic mind it will become a sermon; the idealist like Maeterlinck may make of it pure poetry, but neither of these are, in the true sense, drama.
Hebbel further considered that since dramatic art must involve the static with the dynamic, it necessitates certain modifications as opposed to real life. If the enduring is to be expressed, art must round the circle of Fate, whereas Life itself is a dubious thing, whose individual meaning may lie in the history of its generation. The whole then is expressed by the selection of significant parts, or as he himself expresses it, by an exaggeration of the detached. From this it follows that drama is more self-conscious than life. This is why, especially in Shakespeare, the characters are more self-conscious than they would be in reality. They become the centre-point of Fate, not merely by the action of the play but by their own foreboding and introspection. This is, however, to be reconciled with a living humanity, so that the mental processes are natural, if intensified. Added to this, in dramatic crises, the word comes straight before or after the deed, so that both are significantly linked to the principle. Any of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes will show the truth of this reflection. The classic drama, which fixed one mighty moment in a process, needed exposition rather than introspection, situation rather than development. But the dynamic element, on which Hebbel insisted, and which he found in Shakespeare, makes crucial the growth of the individual, as well as his will-attitude.
In short, the self-consciousness of art makes situations psychologic as well as actual, yet not, as with Browning, positing the psychology as an end in itself. This atmosphere, in which the character assumes a slightly exaggerated contemplative attitude, never obscures him.
Psychology brings in a third element, that of the poet’s own mind. Hebbel differed from realists proper in regarding sheer objectivity as impossible. Exterior mental processes must be strained through the poet’s own experience, and hence partake of his personality. Even if complete self-detachment were impossible, art existed for the expression of the poet’s own being. This applies as well to the material of drama. Neither actions of men nor events in time exist objectively. For this reason he called history “the deposit of time;” only the permanent elements left by the ages are history and the poet’s sphere is not the reproduction of events but the interpolation of their atmosphere. Following these tenets, Hebbel set himself to embrace the three main currents from which arise human problems—the historic, social and philosophic. In some he attempted to unite all three, in others he touched a single aspect. It was a gigantic task only partially fulfilled, but his greatest work has vindicated him.