Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide,

In thy most need to go by thy side.

This is No. 694 of Everyman’s Library. A list of authors and their works in this series will be found at the end of this volume. The publishers will be pleased to send freely to all applicants a separate, annotated list of the Library.

J. M. DENT & SONS LIMITED
10-13 BEDFORD STREET LONDON W.C.2

E. P. DUTTON & CO. INC.
286-302 FOURTH AVENUE
NEW YORK

EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS

POETRY & THE DRAMA

THREE PLAYS
BY FREDERIC HEBBEL
INTRODUCTION BY L. H. ALLEN

FREDERIC CHRISTIAN HEBBEL, born in 1813 in Schleswig-Holstein, in humble circumstances. After travelling about Europe he settled in Vienna in 1846. He died there in 1863.

THREE PLAYS

FREDERIC HEBBEL

LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO. INC.

All rights reserved

Made in Great Britain
at The Temple Press Letchworth
and decorated by Eric Ravilious
for
J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
Aldine House Bedford St. London
Toronto · Vancouver
Melbourne · Wellington

First Published in this Edition 1914

INTRODUCTION

If a stringent quality be noticeable in Hebbel, it can well be traced to his early environment. The greater ills which strike the manhood into human nature are drastic godsends; but the long draw of poverty, the depressing atmosphere of dour faces, the helpless baffle of young and ignorant art “made tongue-tied with authority”—it is these things that in a sensitive nature are prone to twist strength into rancour. Luckily this was not the effect on Hebbel, but in the caustic, if honest, introspection, the rigid or hesitant self-examinings, the loathing of poverty and uncongenial work that was almost a panic, in these things whose excess tends to stunt the energy, the bane of Hebbel’s early years is seen. Nothing more can be said for his great stature than that through all his miseries he won his way to a mature confidence and mellow resignation.

He was born in 1813, a Dittmarscher, the son of a mason. There is in that sea-coast blood something of an ancient savagery, a kinship with grey skies and seas, yet a power under strong control. To this he owed his sharp directness of speech, and to his peasanthood a raw facing of unvarnished things that was to stand him in good stead in his future war on faddists and dilettanti. Yet these resultant goods helped little in his early strife. A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles in education, destined by his father for masonry, at fourteen a petty clerk “set to feed with grooms,” derided by his master for crude effusions in the local weekly, and no doubt soundly trounced for a malcontent cub, suffering this for twenty-two years, the sensitive young thinker might well have wondered which was out of joint, himself or the time. It was not till a Hamburg authoress, Amelia Schoppe, struck by his writing, invited him to Hamburg, that his restricted nature began to expand—yet under difficulties. His patroness advised him to make a crutch of law and a walking-stick of poetry, to which end she made him the pensioner of a well-intentioned clique. It was a gigantic task for an ill-equipped boy to make up the yawning gaps in systematic education: it was worse to bury himself in constitutional niceties; and, most unkindest cut, to eat the bread of dependence. The Northern stubbornness bristled at this last; and it was intolerable to be admitted as a favoured guest into a banal society where literature was pasteurised. There he ruffled some honest brows by boldly affirming that Kleist was superior to Körner.

Even thus young he was bound to speak his mind, and it is precisely those minds that take boldness as an unavoidable pang which suffer under introspection. Truth to oneself is good in the sanctum, but awkward in the parlour, expulsion from which sets one, in his drifting loneliness, grasping at the first straw. Thus it was that Hebbel sought a doubtful balm in the love of Elise Lensing.

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.

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.

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—

“And there hide

Him in a chamber of such privacy

That he might view her beauties unespied,”

one feels that by beginning the line with an unaccentuated word Keats throws emphasis on the rhyme. Hebbel employs the opposite device to prevent his heavy lines from crashing on the final word.

Let me lastly acknowledge my deep indebtedness to Mr. G. G. Nicholson, B.A., B.C.L., of the University of Sydney, whose fine scholarship and ready advice have been invaluable. If the rendering be correct, it is his virtue; the defects that will become apparent must be laid at the door of my own deficiencies.

L. H. ALLEN.

Sydney, N.S.W.,

February 7, 1914.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Judith, 1841; Gedichte, 1842; Genoveva, 1843; Maria Magdalena, 1844; Der Diamant, 1847; Neue Gedichte, 1848; Herodes und Mariamne, 1850; Der Rubin, 1851; Ein Trauerspiel in Sicilien, 1851; Julia, 1851; Michel Angelo, 1855; Agnes Bernauer, 1855; Gyges und sein Ring, 1856; Mutter und Kind (Gedicht), 1859; Die Nibelungen, 1862; Demetrius, 1864; Tagebücher, 1885-87; Briefwechsel mit Freunden und berühmten Zeitgenossen, 1890-92; Briefe, 1908, 1913.

Collected Works: Edition by E. Kuh, 12 vols., 1866-68; edition by Krumm, 12 vols., 1900; edition by Werner, 12 vols., 1901-7.

Life: E. Kuh, 1877; Kulke, 1878; Bartels, 1899; A. von Winterfeld, 1908. See also Wuetschke, H., Hebbel, Bibliographie, 1910; A. Gubelmann, Studies in the Lyric Poems of F. Hebbel, 1912.

CONTENTS

GYGES AND HIS RING

A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS

Translated into English Verse by

L. H. ALLEN

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

The action is prehistoric and mythical. It takes place within a period of twenty-four hours.

HEBBEL’S PLAYS

GYGES AND HIS RING

ACT I

Scene 1

A Hall

Enter Kandaules and Gyges. Kandaules buckles on his sword. Thoas follows with the diadem.

Kandaules.

To-day you’ll see what Lydia can achieve!

I know you Grecians, though your necks are bended,

Just for your standstill plight bear the old yoke

With gnashing teeth and lip-curl at your lords.

No thing on earth were easily invented

You were not quick to better, were’t alone

The crown you add, you set it on—and lo,

The thing’s your work, you see that it is good!

[Thoas hands him the diadem.

Bring the new diadem! What use is this?

Has your dolt’s hand the sword as well mistaken?

[Looks at his sword.

Why yes, by Herakles whose feast we’re holding!

What, Thoas, are you doddering ere your time?

Thoas.

I thought——

Kan.

Well, what?

Thoas.

Not for five hundred years

Has King in other trapping graced the games

Your Ancestor, the Puissant, has stablished,

And when, the feast before, you made endeavour

To oust the hallowed things from olden honour,

The folk stood rooted, horrified, amazed,

Muttering as ne’er before.

Kan.

And so you think

I should have marked their gapes for my salvation?

I’ve hit your thought?

Thoas.

Lord, not without a shudder

I touch this diadem, and not till now

Has hand of mine been closed on this sword’s hilt

That all the seed of Herakles once brandished;

But these new baubles I can see unblenching

Like any other such as blinks and glances

And is your own for paying of the price.

Not on Hephaestus do I need to think,

At sight of these, who for divine Achilles

His weapons smithied,—ay, and in the fire

Wherewith the thunderbolts for Zeus are steeled;

Nor yet on Thetis, she who bade her daughters

For him be fisherfolk of pearl and coral

That thus his decking fail not of its fill.

But this sword—why, I knew the man that forged it,

And him by whom this diadem was pieced!

Kan.

Eh, Gyges!

Thoas.

Sire, fair faith speaks out of me!

If I am overbold, ’tis for your welfare.

Believe my words, the many thousand folk

That stream t’assembly hither,—ay, albeit

They walk in finer wool and fare the daintier,—

Are just as fond or pious-prim as I.

This crown here and your head—these are for them,

Your henchman vouches, halves of a single whole,

And in like grade this sword here and your arm.

Kan.

And that’s the thought of all?

Thoas.

Yes, by my head!

Kan.

Then there’s no room for dawdling! Take them off

And do what I have bid!

[Thoas takes off the regalia.

Gyges.

You’ve hurt the man.

Kan.

I know; but say, what else could I have done?

’Tis true what he has said; here the King’s worth

Is gauged but by his crown, and the crown’s worth

Owed to its rust. Woe to its furbisher!

Brighter but lighter—gain and loss are matched.

But why bemoan it if for just this once

I so forgot me—sheer worn out, and loath

Only by force of heirloom garb to glitter,

Pass current just as minted coins pass current

By take-for-granted worth, and share with statues

That in the sacred temple-niches stand

A blind and blockish sacrosanctity?

You can’t undo what’s done.

[Thoas comes with the new adornment.

Ah, thus ’tis good!

[He puts on the diadem.

That fits in place, and only what my realm

Of pearls and precious jewels disenwombs

From out the miner’s shaft or bed of ocean,

Not more nor less, is here enharmonied.

The noble stone that is not found among us,

It matters not how fair, is straitly banned.

I need not say I’ve left a place for such

As are unearthed in the next hundred years.

Now do you follow?

(To Gyges.) That one fitly suits

Some massive giant-skull such as your sculptors

Are wont to give my forebear for a head-piece,

When in his lion-skin, with bulky club,

Towering above a streamlet’s mossy rim,

You make him useful as a children’s bogy.

[He girds on the sword.

This sword is somewhat lighter than the old one;

But that’s no loss—you’ll swing it, if you must,

Not outside merely ’neath unhampered heaven

Where giants at each other volley boulders,

[He draws it and swings it.

No, but in space cramped human-small, like this!

Then, Thoas, spare the pains of a third sermon,

To-day I’ve heard the second.

Thoas.

Pardon, sire!

And yet you know ’tis not the young man’s limbs

In which a change of weather gives its warning,

It is the old man’s bones that feel it first.

[Exit.

Gyges.

He goes in sorrow!

Kan.

True; he’s loath to think

That the next thunderbolt will now strike me;

And that’s fast in his mind. I may, perhaps,

Ere that can hap, be gulped into Earth’s entrails

Unless, forsooth, the Minotaur appears!

Such is their fashion; do not therefore think

But light of them. This very day you’ll see

Their fighting stuff.

Gyges.

And wish to join the fighting.

Kan.

What, Gyges?

Gyges.

Sire, I beg you for the boon.

Kan.

No, no! Beside myself you shall be seated

That all may see how much I give you honour

And will that all men give you honour-meed.

Gyges.

But if you honour me you’ll not refuse.

Kan.

You know not what you do. Know you the Lydians?

You Grecians are a cunning folk; you set

The others all to spinning, and you weave,

And lo, a net wherein no piece of cordage

Belongs to you, yet the whole thing’s your own!

How easy ’twere to tighten, and how swift

The wide world clutched in capture if the arm

The fisher stretched were but a little stronger,

The arm that should control! But there’s the rub!

You have no trick to lure the nervy tendons

From out our bodies, so with artful seeming

We look much blinder than in truth we are,

And with a covert laugh we bungle in

Because a tiny fin-flick sets us free.

Gyges.

We celebrate these games as well.

Kan.

Yes, yes,

After a fashion, ’mongst yourselves. There Dorians

Grip with Ionians, and then, to cap it,

It comes to this—Boeotians join the fray,

And so you think that Ares’ self looks on

And with a shudder marks your every blow.

Gyges, had every prize that’s offered there

Been won by you, still were I forced to warn you

Avoid the lists e’en for the lowest guerdon.

We’ve ever set a wild and bloody pace;

But even a single twig of silver poplar,

Such as to-day are in their thousands strown,

Ventured by you, a Greek and in my graces,

Would ne’er allow you scapement of your life.

Gyges.

And so I have your “yes”; no longer now

Can you withhold consent.

Kan.

You take it so?

I were best mute.

Gyges.

I came, Sire, not alone

For begging. (He brings forth a ring.) Take it! ’Tis a royal ring.

You look on it, find naught of mark therein,

You’re mazed I am so bold to make the offer,

You’ll take it, too, as from a child a flower,

To keep the poor and artless grace unwounded

That plucked it for you, not because you’re pleased.

It’s surface-show is meagre—true—and plain

And yet you cannot, for your kingly realm,

Purchase it for your own, nor yet with force,

’Spite all your power, turn robber ’gainst its wearer

Unless of free consent he will the gift.

You wear it so (indicating with signs) to make the metal rest

With forward trend—’tis but a trinket-thing,

Perchance not even as much, but give a twist

Just so far round that with its tiny shine

This stone of dullish red can fling its rays

And presto! you are viewless and go striding

Like gods enclouded up and down the world.

Therefore contemn it not, for once again—

It is a royal ring, and this same day

Long since I chose in which to make my present.

’Tis you alone may wear it, no one else.

Kan.

Why, things before unheard sent even to us

Their rumouring; men spoke about a woman,

Medea was her name, and arts she plied

Such that the very moon was earthwards chanted;

But never have I heard of such a ring.

Where did you get it, then?

Gyges.

From out a grave.

From out a grave that lies in Thessaly.

Kan.

You oped a grave and sacrileged its peace?

Gyges.

Nay, nay, my King—I found it oped to hand.

I only crept therein to slip from robbers

Toward hid retreat, for they in whelming odds

Were hot-foot on my track and harried me

As I, by some adventurous prompting driven,

Of late a desolate wooded mountain ranged.

The urns were overthrown and spilt their ashes,

In touching disarray the shards were scattered,

And in the sickly shaft of westering sunlight

That pierced a passage through the chinkéd wall

I saw a wisp of pallid dust was swaying.

It rose before me as the final motes

That vestige death, and turned my mood so eerie

That, lest my fellow-flesh, my very fathers

Perchance, be mixed with my unconscious breathing,

Long time I held the air within my breast.

Kan.

Well? And the robbers?

Gyges.

Found my every trace

Was vanished, so it seemed, for far and farther

Their dwindling voices died, and now I thought me

Already safe assured, although not yet

I left my glimmering retreat. As now

In such a plight I cramped upon my knees

My sight fell suddenly upon this ring.

From out the wreckage heaped in tangled waste

Its stone, as though it were a living thing,

Half minding me of some sharp serpent’s eye,

Shot sparkles at me. Straight I raised it up,

I blew the ashes from it and I spoke:—

“Who bore thee once on his long-mouldered finger?”

And then, to see if ’twere a man had worn it,

I put it on, and scarce the deed was done

When from without rang—“Halt! He must be here!

See you the grave? Then onward, onward, comrades!

We have our man!” and quick appeared the troop.

But I was loath, like some defenceless beast

Harried into a hole, to suffer slaughter,

And springing forth I charged impetuous—flashing

Full at them, in my hand the lifted sword.

The sun was near the dipping of its disc

And streaming, like a candle destined soon

To quench its glow, with doubly vivid ray.

But they, as though for them alone the night

Outran its hour, stormed on with furious curses

Passing me by, and ringed them round the grave.

They raked it through, and, as I still was hid,

Cried out in scorn—“What odds? We’d find he bore

Nothing upon him but the truculent eye

That with its taunting glance so roused our rage;

Some other soon enough will blow that out!”

Then once again, but with chagrin’s slow footsteps,

Peering around and in my face even staring,

They passed me by and I was still unseen.

Kan.

And then you thought——

Gyges.

Not on the ring—not yet.

My notion was a god had wrought a wonder

To save me, and upon my knees I flung me

And thus to the Invisible One I spoke:—

“I know not who thou art, and if from me

Thy face thou hid’st, I cannot slay for thee

The beast that is thy consecrated due;

But for a sign that I have thanks at heart

And lack not courage, I will bring to thee

The fiercest of these robbers as thy meed,

And this I swear, how hard soe’er it prove.”

I hastened after them and slipped amid

Their company, and I was seized with shudders

Before myself, to see how I alone

Was marked not of them, how they spoke together,

As I were air and void, right through my form

And through it even handed bread and wine.

My eyes grew overveiled and ranging fell

Upon the ring-set stone whose radiance red

And brilliant from my hand was scintillating

With restless well and swell and pearly bubbling

Puffed into vapour; and it seemed an eye

That ever breaks in blood which ever steams.

I turned it, sheer compelled, to make confession,

Sheer terrified; for all these pearls were glinting

Like just as many stars; it touched my mood

As though the pure ethereal stream of light

Lay naked to mine eyes and I were blind

From overglory, as the harmony

They tell of in the spheres makes all men deaf.

But straight I felt me in a lusty grip

And “What is this? Hey! Who held him concealed?

A pretty joke!” was ringing in my ears.

And now ten fists were grappling for my throttle,

Ten others made to rip my raiment from me,

And I had surely met inglorious end

Had not the clumsiest fist of all the mob

Held back to snatch the ring; for suddenly

The cry was raised—“Hallo! He is not poor!

Here’s a fine fish i’ the net! See, blinking gold,

Ay, and a precious stone! Come, here with it!”

But almost in the selfsame-taken breath

Rang out—“A god, a god is come among us!”

And lo, they all were lying at my feet!

Kan.

Just as their hands about the ring were scrambling

They turned it round again and went a-quiver

As you evanished like a shape of cloud.

Gyges.

It must be so. But now I turned it back,

At last initiate in its mystic secret,

And filled with pride and recklessness I called,

“A god! Even so! And each pays penance due!”

Then hot-foot set upon them. Horror-struck,

As though I bore within my hands the thunder

And at my side new modes of death in thousands,

They scarce retained the heart and strength for flight.

But I was on their heels as though compelled

To act the vicar in the Furies’ office,

And not a soul came free of my revenge.

I would have rendered to the grave its ring,

But though I’d strewn the way with bloody corses

That marked the backward path, neither at evening

Nor yet with morning could it be discovered,

And so against my will the ring was mine.

Kan.

Such treasure has no peer.

Gyges.

Said I not so?

A royal ring! Then take it, Royal One!

Kan.

Not till the battle’s ended.

Gyges.

Sire, since then

I never have and ne’er again will wear it.

So niggard of your wood? O fie! A forest

Will not be needed for my funeral pyre;

A single tree’s enough, and trust this arm,

You’ll get remittance of the single tree.

Kan.

Then give’t! I’ll test it.

Gyges.

And I’ll weapon me.

[Exeunt.

Scene 2

The Queen’s Apartment

Enter Rhodope with her attendants, among them Lesbia and Hero.

Rhodope.

And now be happy, maidens mine; to-day

Your whims are free. Though I must blame you dear

If other times you even hide and listen,

And though my gay-heart Hero yesterday,

Who clambered up the tree, were sternly scolded

Had not a bough, for all her lightsome limb,

Swift-snapping dealt her punishment enough,

Being over-weak for such a weight of wonder——

Hero.

O Queen, and if it verily caught your eyes

You’ll know as well it was the thickest one

Of all our garden-trees that I had chosen.

Rhod.

The thickest one! Maybe; but certain ’tis

The one that stood the nearest to the wall.

Hero.

The thickest one of all! I clambered up

And pierced into a very night of green.

’Twas well-nigh eerie when the golden day

Was thus behind me left, and in the darkness

I still crept on.

Rhod.

What made you do it, then?

Hero.

No wish to bring Olympus some few feet

Nearer my reach; no, such I freely granted

The nightingale a-trilling overhead.

I wanted—nay, but laugh not—I can never

Forget my cradle-rocking, and I wanted

A tiny rock up yonder.

Rhod.

Nothing more?

Hero.

And as I swung, nay not of set desire,

But as I swung—no more, just peep a fraction;

I’d be so glad to know if round our garden,

As scowling Karna ever says to us,

There runs a lake.

Lesbia.

A lake!

Hero.

Ah, you know better?

Lesbia.

Ho, have you ever heard it here a-swishing?

And is a lake untroublous as yourself?

Rhod.

I will not question further, for I know

You’ll not do thus again. Ne’er fell a maiden

So soft as you, nor e’er was frighted so.

Lesbia.

Yes, all her limbs were swooned away.

Hero.

And never

Ought I have fallen, for a stronger bough

Was near enough; but as it moved it swayed

A nest with young ones, and I would beware

Of trampling on them lest the tender brood,

Its featherless wings already in a flutter,

Be thrown in flurry.

Lesbia.

This then was the cause?

Yet they flew up. You ended with a grasp,

There’s not a doubt, a desperate grasp for safety.

Rhod.

Tease long as e’er you will; this is the day

On which the cabined house for you is open;

Now to it as you may and sate your eyes!

Hero.

And you?

Rhod.

Nay, eye not me. What’s granted you

Is merely not forbid to me. To-day

I cannot be your paragon and pattern.

Hero.

And once again you will not see the feast?

Rhod.

Nay, lest my presence mar your merry frolic.

With us it is not wont, and I should feel

As though I were to eat and have no hunger

Or drink and feel no thirst. It seems to me

That we’ve a better way at home than yours,

For ne’er without a shudder turn you home

From feasts like these whose outset is so luring.

And her I love most dearly who most deeply

Can thrill with pain nor goes a second time.

But that would not show blame in you—why, no!

Only I’m happy that my Lesbia,

Who’s grown to woman with you, feels as I.

Lesbia.

Will you to-day forgive me——

Rhod.

Why, what’s this?

And what must I forgive you? You would go?

Oh, but to take my praise back! Now she’s shamed,

Ashamed to be the daughter of her folk,

And has no cause. Am I myself aught other?

Go, go, and tell me who the victor was.

Hero.

Young Gyges too will surely join the fighting,

He of the noble voice.

Rhod.

So soon you know

How rings his voice?

Hero.

Oh, yes—but nothing more.

To-day we’ll see him, and believe my words,

She goes, like us, only for him.

Lesbia.

But I

May cheat you, and remaining prove your falsehood.

Hero.

Oh, that you’ll never do.

[Kandaules enters in haste.

Kan.

Rhodope, greeting!

But know you who I am? A carpet-gallant,

A kingly ninth-of-man, forsooth a measurer

Of ells but not of swords, who is to blame

That Herakles’ twelve deeds have not long since

Found four-and-twenty other feats and greater

For overmatch. If you will not believe ’t

Why only ask Alcaeus—old curmudgeon!

You know him not? Nor I, before to-day.

And know you how I use to make men happy?

I speak thus:—“Come, young man, here is a seed!

Now plant it in the earth and sprinkle o’er

The spot with water; do it day by day

And be assured that when your hair is frosty

You’ll have a meal of cherries for your pains.

What? ‘Sweet or sour?’—You’ll not find out till then!”

I give you Agron as my guarantee

Worthy Alcaeus names him worthy friend,

His perfect peer, but not so white of beard.

Rhod.

Your mood is merry.

Kan.

Ay, and wherefore not?

’Tis true Alcaeus, outright in rebellion,

Will make against me soon as e’er I venture

To show myself to him as thus to you,

Bedecked, I mean, with the new diadem.

Agron will deign me succour, and for thanks

I’m merely forced to swear—be not astounded

At such a lamblike heart—to keep my garb

For aye unaltered, and a sword to carry

Whose mere unsheathing drains my utmost strength.

Rhod.

Where did you gain this knowledge?

Kan.

Through no spy,

Nor yet the more through any false-heart friend,

But from themselves, direct from their own mouths.

Rhod.

You’re pleased to mock my questioning.

Kan.

No, no!

I speak in utter earnest. I stood by

While they set nails a-grubbing at the tables,

Digging their whetted teeth in their own lips

As though ’twere game and not their very flesh,

And took the oath which sure enough they’ll hold.

It makes a Bar of God here in a fashion—

One hacks at me, the other wards the blow,

And Diké passes verdict if she can.

Rhod.

You must have eavesdropped, then; I’ll not believe ’t.

If I come in a place all unexpected

I make a warning noise that I be marked,

And what should be unheard be left unsaid.

And you—no, no—that is no kingly act.

Kan.

Why, surely not—but that you’d ne’er unriddle.

You see this ring? How do you rate its worth?

Rhod.

How can I tell from whom it comes?

Kan.

From Gyges.

Rhod.

You’ll think it past all rating then.

Kan.

It is;

And yet you dream not why. Then hear the marvel—

If any put it on it makes him viewless.

Rhod.

Viewless?

Kan.

Just now I tried it for myself.

“Nay, no more climbing, Hero! Only birdlings

Go hiding in the leafage!”[A]

Rhod.

Lesbia!

Kan.

Through every door I stalk along—naught holds me,

Nor lock nor bolt, at distance due.

Rhod.

How fearful!

Kan.

For all bad souls, you mean.

Rhod.

No, no, I say!

For all good souls, still more, still more! (To Lesbia.) Can you

Still breathe unruffled, will not blushing shame

Dissolve you now you know’t? Sire, cast it hence

Down, down into the deepest flood! When more

Than mortal strength is given a man, he’s born

Half-god, innate, sufficient. Give it me!

My people say that things through which the world

May fly to fragments, here and there on earth

Are lying hid. They reach us from the time

When men and gods still walked the world together

And pledged their love with mutual gifts. This ring

Is of that time, and who can tell what hand

Bore this, what goddess put it on, what bond

It sealed of yore? Do you not shiver to think

That her dark gift’s your arrogated plunder

And that you draw her vengeance on your head?

I shudder at the very sight—then give it!

Kan.

On one condition—this, that you as Queen

Will show you at the feast to-day.

Rhod.

How can I?

You bore away a bride from farthest borders

Seclusion-hedged, and knew her as she was.

Once you were glad that never an eye ere yours,

Except alone my Sire’s, had rested on me

And that none after you should win the sight.

Kan.

Forgive! I only think the precious stone

That’s not displayed——

Rhod.

Will lure no robber’s lust!

Kan.

Enough. Alas, this “No” is but your wont.

Yes, let the wind blow fresh from every quarter

On fluttered veils—you’ll keep yours tight and trim.

[Music.

The pomp! No time for kings to fail their presence.

Rhod.

Yes, but the rebels? Ah, I’m pained to-day

That I dare not go with you.

Kan.

You are kind,

But have no anxious fret—the matter’s settled.

Rhod.

In truth?

Kan.

In truth. I need not say through fear;

I punished them through force alone, not choice.

This life’s too short to let a man therein

Earn even so much as the desert of death,

And so to-day I’d not condemn one gladly.

[Exit.

Rhod.

Now all of you begone!

Lesbia.

I’ll stay, my Queen.

Rhod.

Oh, no; your nurse ne’er crooned a prophecy

That some man’s face would token death for you.

[Exeunt Lesbia, Hero, and the others.

They’re over-dull to dream here; even the noblest (looking after Lesbia)

Is irked by what I deem peculiar joy.

Scene 3

Open space. A crowd. Kandaules on his throne. Lesbia, Hero, and others at one side, on a raised structure. The games are just over. General stir and drifting into groups. Wrestlers, boxers, charioteers, etc., come by degrees to sight, all crowned with branches of the Silver Poplar. Wine is handed round. Music. The Feast begins.

The People.

Hail, Gyges, hail!

Kan. (gazing into the background).

In discus-throwing, too?

For the third time? I should be sore to see it!

Why this leaves not a doit for mine own people!

[He descends and goes to meet Gyges as he comes from the background. The people are still acclaiming him and make way for him.

A modest fellow, you, forsooth! You take

No more than’s here.

Gyges.

My Lord, I fought to-day

As Greek and not as Gyges.

Kan.

All the sorrier

For us if the new standard’s set by you.

Why, then we’ll have to start at lumber-hunting

And stuff to bulging those old skins of dragons

That, left by Herakles in some odd place,

Some temple hiding-hole, must now lie mouldering.

The bladdered serpent, too, the hundred-headed,

And any bogy that can raise Greek hair.

You hear me not.

Gyges.

I do, I do!

Kan.

Oh no!

I see too well. You slant at yonder maidens

Your listless eyes. They see it too. Look there!

The shorter twits the taller. You go red?

Pooh, shame on you!

Gyges.

I’m thirsty, Sire.

Kan.

You’re thirsty?

Why, that’s another tale. Who fights like you

Has honest right unto a goodly drink,

And though I lack the right I’ll share the draught.

Ah, now there comes the part o’ the feast I love!

(Beckons to a servant.) Come hither!

[The servant brings a goblet of wine. Kandaules pours some drops on the earth.

First the root and then the branch!

[He drinks and is about to hand the goblet to Gyges, but he is again looking towards the raised structure.

Come! Ho! Brunette or dark? That is the question,

Eh, friend?

Gyges.

Oh, Sire?

Kan.

Your palate likes the wine?

Gyges.

I’ve not yet drunk.

Kan.

You know’t? Then let your ears

Accept reminder of your thirst and to it!

I guarantee you this, that long enough

She’ll stay to let you ease the press of pain.

Gyges (drinks).

That cools!

Kan.

Alack the day, down sinks your star!

[The maidens retire, but can still be seen.

Well, it was time. Just glance around. Already

They twine as though about a Thyrsus-staff

That, sudden-launched from earth in upward sally,

And swift and swifter dartwise nearing heaven,

Cascades the clusters of a million grapes.

Wine fits the subtler stuff of winged Beings,

But not the world of hobbling crawling man,

It stands him on his head. That old man there

Would never stick at mounting on a tiger

Or pranking his shrunk temples with a garland,

As Dionysos did when Ganges-bound.

But I’m at home with loosed wits—Was she fair?

Gyges.

I know not if what pleases me be fair.

Kan.

Say “yes”—no blushes! an eye like a coal,

Only a-glimmer, but at lightest breath

Bursting in sparks shot with such twining hues

You could not tell if it be black or brown;

And then, as though this restless weft of colour

Immingled with her every drop of blood,

’Tis fluctuant ’twixt shame and love unbreathed

That gives her blush a tint of peerless charm.

Gyges.

You make complete what the wind half-way wrought;

It stirred the fringes, you uplift the veil.

Kan.

Not that you owe the bent knee at her power—

Nay, should I guide you to another vision,

A sight like this, for all its winsomeness,

You’d purge your eye of as it were a fleck

That touched your glass with tarnish.

Gyges.

Think you, Sire?

Kan.

Even so; but stay—you should not cry a prize

Which cannot be displayed—that earns you jeering.

Who’s gulled by cries of “pearls!” when the hand’s shut?

Gyges.

I.

Kan.

Gyges—why, the shadow of Rhodope

Cast in the shine o’ the moon—you smile! We’ll drink.

Gyges.

I smile not.

Kan.

Smile you should, then! Where’s the man

That cannot boast thus? Should you speak to me

As I to you, I’d say—“Then show her me

Else hold your tongue.”

Gyges.

I trust you.

Kan.

Trust me, eh?

The eye commands your credence, not the ear.

You trust me! Ho! This shrinking bit of a girl

Gave you hot cheeks, and now—enough, enough—

I’ll pout my breast no more with windy babble

Such as for all this length of time I’ve used.

Nay, you shall see her.

Gyges.

See her!

Kan.

And to-night.

I want some soul to witness that I’m not

A futile fool, a mere self-dupe that boasts

He has the fairest woman for his kissing.

I fill the want with you.

Gyges.

Oh, never more

Think on it!—for the man ’twere blot of soul,

But for a woman,—woman such as she

That even by day——

Kan.

Why, why—she’ll never learn it.

Have you forgot the ring? And I’ll ne’er be

A happy man till your lips say I am.

Come, ask you—if the crown were to your liking

Should you be bound to wear it but in darkness?

Well, that’s the plight I’m in with her. She is

The Queen of women, but I hold possession

Of her as Ocean holds its pearls—none dreams

How rich I am, and when I’m dead and done with

There’s not a friend can set it on my tombstone,

And so I lie i’ the grave, beggar to beggar.

Then do not say me nay, but take the ring.

[He proffers it to Gyges, who will not take it.

The night is closing in; I’ll show the chamber

And when you see me tread the floor with her

Then follow us.

[Takes Gyges by the hand and draws him along with him.

I lay demand on you,

And is it not a debt to Lesbia forfeit?

Perhaps she is the vanquisher.

[Exeunt.

ACT II

A Hall. Early morning. Enter Thoas.

Thoas.

I will and must have further parley with him.

To think what I’ve been forced to hear this night!

Heaven knows I went not out to catch the talk,

Yet home I come as packed as though I were

The wandering ear o’ the bloodiest of tyrants

And scarce had faith I’d see my Lord again.

Rebellion, imminent raid of sudden foemen,

Yea, a new choice of King! Is’t possible?

I dreaded much, but dreaded not so much.

Hist, hist! Are those not footfalls? Yes! Why, who

Is out of bed with greybeards ere the morn?

The youthful Gyges! Ho! but if you knew

What I now know you’d have no droop i’ the gait!

[He retires. Enter Gyges.

Gyges.

And once again I’m here! What will I here?

I sicken in the fresh of heaven. With scent

The air’s besprent, so leaden and sense-steeping

’Twould seem that every flower with one accord

Were opened, that the lungs of men be stifled,

And Earth herself outgasped her latest breath.

Thoas.

So gay and early, Karna? Pardon, I took you,

Lord, for another. You not yet in bed?

I trow the taste of fame bans sleep—oho!

Gyges.

The taste of fame?

Thoas.

Why, look at all the garlands

You carried off——

Gyges.

So that the laurel-tree

Need never fear me more! My wish was merely

To prove that bones may be inside a man

And marrow in those bones, although that man

Snap not a zither’s strings to tattered shreds

At the first touch. Now not a soul but knows it

Whate’er the doubt he may till now have had;

And that is good.

Thoas.

But why then take no sleep?

Gyges.

Why do you take no drink?

Thoas.

I guess you rose

Once ere this.

Gyges.

If I went to bed, why yes!

Thoas.

Just what I’d like to know; for if he’s heard

What I have heard—Pooh! no—I’ll vow he can’t have.

[Slowly retires.

Gyges.

She slumbers still! O blest, who dares to wake her!

’Tis dared by the nightingale that even now

Still half in dream sweet orison begins;

’Tis dared—He comes! What can he think of me?

[Enter Kandaules.

She wakes, and yet she offers show of sleeping.

Kan.

Gyges! So soon? Or should I ask you—still?

But no, I have your word.

Gyges.

Here is the ring!

Kan.

So early and so hasty?

Gyges.

’Tis your own.

Kan.

You trust yourself no longer to retain it?

Gyges.

Why not? And yet why should I? Take the thing!

Kan.

This tells me even more than what your sigh

Already told i’ the night.

Gyges.

Forgive it, Sire!

Kan.

Why, what a thing you say! It was my triumph!

Gyges.

And did you only hear it then?

Kan.

Oh no—

She started up, she shrieked—and did all that

So fully slip your eyes? No further then

I need to ask if I am conqueror.

Gyges.

It did not slip my eyes.

Kan.

Keep on—deny

Your wits were all a pother. Nay, I have

Still better proof to clinch the thing—you went

So far to turn the ring and know it not!

Gyges.

And know it not!

Kan.

She trembled, and when she

Grew ’ware o’ the noise, she cried, “Arise, Arise!

I’ the corner lurks a man! It is his will

Thy bane to be, or mine! Where is thy sword?”

I made pretence I felt her fear, and did so—

When lo, revealed stood—you, before me there,

Sharp outlined by the lamp’s intensest beam.

Is that enough? Now are you dumb to me?

Gyges.

My will was to be seen.

Kan.

You say that now

To rob my victory of its edge. Had I

Not stepped between to shut you from her glances

Or ere they lit on you, I had been forced

To strike you dead.

Gyges.

Sire, this I knew right well,

And just because I’d force you to the action

I turned the ring around with hasty twitch.

Kan.

What, Gyges?

Gyges.

Yes, it shocked the sight of heaven

This boldness—yes, I felt it.

Kan.

I allowed it.

Gyges.

But in the stifling closeness of that moment,

It seemed as though you had no right thereto,

And I would punish you with me; for fain

You had not been to strike me dead.

Kan.

You varlet!

Gyges.

And even now a shudder thrills my soul

As though some ugly thing I had committed

For which ’tis true the lip may lack a name

But not the conscience the implanted sense.

Yea, if I held that trash, that Dead Man’s Ring

Thrust on my hand by you, nor yet in wrath

Pitched it before your feet; and if instead