KUNO FRANCKE.
THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH HEBBEL
By WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.,
Assistant Professor of German, Harvard University
The greatest German dramatists of the middle of the nineteenth century were Franz Grillparzer, Friedrich Hebbel, and Otto Ludwig. In a caustic epigram written in 1855, Grillparzer set forth that Dame Poetry, for some years a widow and now ailing, needed a husband, but could find none; and we remember that the heroine of Libussa rejects the wise Lapak, the strong Biwoy, and the rich Domaslaw because she desires in one man, united, the qualities which separately dominate the three. With more charity, Grillparzer might have more fully recognized the poet in Hebbel or Ludwig; but we may be permitted to think of these three dramatists as not unlike the three suitors for the hand of Libussa: Grillparzer was rich, Ludwig was wise, and Hebbel was strong. Each of them was somewhat deficient in the qualities of the other two; each, however, was a personality, and Hebbel one of the most powerful that ever lived.
Hebbel's career is a long battle against all but insuperable obstacles. Born at Wesselburen in the present province of Schleswig-Holstein on March 18, 1813, he was the son of a poor stone mason—so poor that, as Hebbel said, poverty had taken the place of his soul. Though Klaus Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable non possumus of penury. In winter, especially, lack of work made even the provision of daily bread often difficult and sometimes impossible for him. But Friedrich Hebbel's childhood, full of hardship as it was, was not cheerless. The father did what he could; and the mother, at whatever sacrifice to herself, could nearly always do something for the children. The greatest hardship was caused by the father's hostility to these maternal concessions to childish desires; for to him, whose life was labor, unproductive use of time was a crime. He thought it a matter of course that his son should become a laboring man like himself, and it is little less than a miracle that this did not happen. The mother, to be sure, fostered the boy's more ambitious hopes; the death of the father in Hebbel's fourteenth year was perhaps a blessing in disguise; undoubtedly the happiest chance in Hebbel's boyhood, so far as external events are concerned, was the fact that he won the favor of a real teacher in his schoolmaster Dethlefsen, who not only gave his education the proper start, but also recommended him, as his best scholar, to the local magistrate, J.J. Mohr.
For nearly eight years (1827 to 1835) Hebbel was in Mohr's employ, first as an errand boy, and ultimately as a clerk, to whom more and more official business was intrusted. He lived in the household of his superior, continued in the magistrate's library the assiduous reading which he had begun with Dethlefsen's books, and acquired, along with the habits of official accuracy, something of the ways of a higher social station than that to which he had been born. His contact with the world of affairs and with litigation also considerably broadened his outlook, though it was often the seamy side of life that he saw, and his own early necessities had sharpened his sense of the essential tragedy of existence. Among the young people of the town Hebbel was as active and inventive as any; he wrote verses, took part in amateur theatricals, and was a leader in many undertakings that had not amusement as their sole object.
From the beginning Hebbel shows extraordinary sensitiveness to esthetic appeal and a disposition to dreamy imaginativeness. The Bible, the Protestant hymnal, pre-classical prose and poetry of the eighteenth century, as well as contemporary romantic fiction, including Jean Paul, Hoffmann, and Heine, touched his fancy and stirred him to emulation.
[Illustration: FRIEDRICH HEBBEL]
As a boy, he is said to have composed a tragedy Evolia, the Captain of Robbers, which his mother confiscated and burned. His early poems are echoes of Klopstock, Matthisson, Hölty, Bürger, and other predecessors; but especially of Schiller, whose moral seriousness and sonorous language alike inspired the serious and rhetorically gifted youth. The influence of Schiller, however, marks no epoch in the poetic development of Hebbel; it dominates the period of adolescence. The sense of poetry was aroused in him as a boy, he said, by Paul Gerhardt's hymn "The woods are now at rest" (Nun ruhen alle Wãlder); the discovery of what poetry is he made in 1830, when he read Uhland's Minstrel's Curse and perceived that the sole principle of art is not to write, like Schiller, eloquently about ideas, but "to make in a particular phenomenon the universal intuitively perceptible."