Three plays by Frederic Hebbel

by Friedrich Hebbel

Since Goethe there has not existed, in the field of poetic drama, so powerful an individuality, nor one so completely expressed. Schiller, being Goethe’s contemporary, does not come into the comparison. Yet even he is more the vehicle of a movement than a great individual. When his art stands by itself it is little more than a wonderfully dexterous adaptation. His mastery of language and form cannot compensate for the lack of stamina in his character. In the lyric and idyllic lay his real bent, and his dramas tell more by the direction they gave the German tongue and literature than by their innate worth. No other could dispute with Hebbel but Kleist, who lacked, however, the power of self-facing, the only way to true self-effacement in art. In truth, Kleist had something of the prig in his composition. There is an avoidance of the ultimate in him which makes him shrill when intense and sentimental when human. Compare the tawdriness of Kleist’s Käthchen von Heildronn with Agnes Bernauer, the greatest of Hebbel’s prose dramas. In Maria Magdalena he had avoided portraying a conflict between the nobility and higher life; in Julia he had touched it from an entirely individual point, one which could bring about no conflict of the classes. When in Agnes Bernauer he really essayed the problem, he crushed all sentimentalism and rigidly drew the tragedy to a brief and pitiless end. In the preface to Maria Magdalena Hebbel had declared that the union of a burgher-maiden with a prince was not tragic but pathetic. Tragic outcome must, in his eyes, be inevitable as death. For this reason he does not confine the story to a mere personal intrigue, but involves in it the whole fortune of a state. Innocent and lovely as the burgher-girl Agnes is, her marriage with the prince makes her mere existence her death-warrant, and the same necessity demands that the headstrong lover shall live and reign. Conflict between classes is, in a masterly way, resolved into the opposition of the State and the individual. Yet nowhere does the poet drift into abstract theory. The calm wisdom of the old Duke is as human and touching as the innocence of Agnes and the hot chivalry of her husband. That Hebbel was marching here with surer step is shown in the more clearly conceived scenes, the simpler language and the naturalness of the plot. Against this play Kleist’s Käthchen betrays its melodrama the more strongly. In these two plays there is really the difference between the two men.

The Nibelungen trilogy will be regarded as Hebbel’s crowning achievement. No doubt it is, but really to feel it you must have the soul of Teutonism in you. Hebbel was too concerned with the interplay of human motives to give the sheer pleasure of romantic atmosphere. One feels at times that nothing but the invigorating jar of their own old tongue can picture those strong-thewed and raven-helmeted ones. Hebbel has diminished the childlike largeness of these mythic figures by making them all too human. Nevertheless he has preserved the starkness of warriors and made his triology a monument of the German genius.

Here we may mention that his style, so eminently fitted for such subjects, suffers for its virtues. Form he has, but it is rather the swing of a whirlpool than the symmetry of a crystal. He could not glimpse a subject. Things were sucked into him with all their issues, and kept in their expression the traces of his pondering. He startles with antitheses and sharp epigrams which give at first the impression of labour. They have in them none of the catchiness of half-thought brilliance, but just because they are the result of an intellectual thoroughness which had become integral, they have a cloudy effect which later resolves itself into the haze of deep perspective. His roughness of style, moreover, was not stumbled upon. The Dittmarscher may have been sharp and brusque in his own utterance, but he did not merely transfer his idiosyncrasies to his characters. In his essay On the Style of Drama, he declares that speech is a living product of the folk, and that only within these limits can the individual modify it. He was repelled as much by the music-monger as by the overwrought intellectual. When music comes, it is the idea self-born in symmetry, not an arrangement of prettily coaxed words. The intellectual cumulation of images, toilsomely hunted out, he dubs a “Chinese lantern hung by a bankrupt near a gray abstraction.” That he loved the natural music of words can well enough be seen from his sonnets; but he claims that the most emotional situations in drama demand sharp daggers of speech. If one, like Maeterlinck, seeks for these moments the highest utterances of all, silence, he kills drama, even if it re-arises in poetry. Dealing as Hebbel does with the most human of characters he claims that crises are confused, curt, and even savage. In the relation of episodes he favours the sonorous roll; but in the portrayal of characters, especially in crises, he asserts that there are sudden reversals of feeling, rips in the thread of thought, hidden things projected by a single word—things that necessitate roughness of metre, complexity and confusion of the period and contradiction of images. The fight for expression is itself expression; he declares that what is undeft is often passionate. Not always, however, has he reached his effect. Though his style is not mannerism it can become a monotony of sharpness. He was apt to forget that there can be an intensity of quiet and tragic significance, not always in broken utterances, but in a commonplace.

It is often the same with his psychology. The non-success of Herod and Mariamne at its initial performance is quite intelligible. Though Hebbel wished here to reduce an “almost fantastic story to the hardest reality” (understanding “reality” in his own sense), he has succeeded only by burrowing his way there. The motives are not at first sight evident, but when grasped they carry the conviction that the situation has been revolved in every possible light and only that one chosen which seemed tragically necessary. These true and appealing characters are thus built up from within, and partake of the solidity of their creator’s mind. The effect is more abiding than a patchwork of subtleties and suggestions, being organic and unshakable. This can be the only “realism”; for carried to a logical conclusion it would have to combine the patience of the Chinese play with the verisimilitude of the cinematograph.

Of the first two plays here translated something may be said. They have been rendered because they appealed most to the translator, a subjective reason, but a true ground for zest in the work. At the same time more complete specimens of Hebbel’s dramatic art could not be found.

Gyges and his Ring, adapted from Herodotus, Plato, and perhaps Gautier, is a convincing example of Hebbel’s Teutonism. The most prominent impression it leaves is that it is no Greek tale and no Greek form. Kandaules is too reflective a philosopher to have lived in the land of Lydian airs, Gyges has not the easy freedom of Greek youth; and Rhodope leaps at a bound from a cloistered negation into the terrible energy of an avenging goddess. Though she has the feminine pliancy and pard-like ferocity of the Oriental, yet the blend of reasoned motive in her conduct makes her a modern. Hebbel could not graecise, but he could create from the weft of his own nature strong beings resolute in the face of necessity for all their human error. If tragedy be the fatal misdirection of virtues rather than the collision of virtue and vice, this story is truly tragic; for three natures, all noble, by a single error are swept to one drastic atonement. Here, too, Hebbel, who had pondered so deeply on the meaning of the personality, shows what an irrevocable thunderblast meets the ignorant tamperer therewith.

In the Judith, Hebbel had essayed a Hebrew theme somewhat callowly, but his maturity produces a masterpiece. His fidelity to Josephus is remarkable, yet in his hands a bare narrative becomes the interaction of vivid forces. Woman he understood, and Mariamne has in her the woman’s strange blend of self-sacrificial devotion and guardianship of her soul. There is such truth of feeling, such regal sorrow, in this deep-hearted Maccabean, and such a war between pride and abasement resolved finally into a noble composure before the inevitable, that she must stand as one of the great women of tragedy. As for Herod, brave and resolute though he was, the erosive atmosphere of intrigue had made him so familiar with the sham attitude of diplomacy that an unsullied emotion baffled him. True insight would have made him responsive, for ignoble he was not. Gyges is the tragedy of a personality blindly unveiled; this is the tragedy of a personality blindly veiled.

The historic significance is finely brought out by the opposition of the statuesque Roman Titus against the shifting Hellenic decay. His noble gravity is the last confessional of Mariamne and his arms receive the swooning Herod. The future moulding influence of civilisation is shown in this steel-clad nature.

The episode of the Three Kings may be regarded as unhappy. No doubt, as the spiritual counterpart of Titus, it was meant to show the irresistible oncoming of a new influence, as well as the futility of Herod against Fate. But Fate is sufficient if she works from the characters involved, unless, as in Agnes Bernauer, the general issue is indissolubly linked with the particular. The doom of Herod was cast without the final irony of Christianity, whereby the tragedy of man and wife is unnecessarily inter-related with the world-drama.

As to the translation itself, the roll of Hebbel’s verse is so distinctive that its preservation seemed necessary. Therefore, wherever possible, his lengthy sentences have been given their full value. He has also a habit of ending his lines with less accentuated words, and carrying the stress to the beginning of the following line. This at first jars, but as it was a conscious art-principle, it has been kept. We have spoken above of his theory of dramatic verse. By this device he tries to compensate for his roughness of style by another roughness which has a lightening effect. Both in the roll of his blank verse and in his broken rhythms it keeps his characters to a conversational pitch, whereby he prevents an operatic effect. In reading such lines as these, from The Eve of St. Agnes—