Three plays by Frederic Hebbel

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[Pg viii] 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[Pg ix] 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[Pg x] 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[Pg xi] 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[Pg xiii] 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[Pg xiv] 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,[Pg xvi] 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,[Pg xvii] 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[Pg xviii] 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[Pg xix] “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.[Pg xx] 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[Pg xxi] he prevents an operatic effect. In reading such lines as these, from The Eve of St. Agnes—

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.

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.

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

ACT I

Scene 1

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

Scene 2

Scene 3

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

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

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

Rhodope’s chamber. Hero and other slave-girls occupied in arranging the room. Enter Rhodope.

Scene 1

Scene 2

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Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

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Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

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Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

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Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

[The servants scatter. The guests, among them Soemus, have been assembling during the latter half of this scene. Music and dancing. Silo and Judas detach themselves from the others and advance to the foreground.

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Scene 8

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

[Enter Aaron, and the other Five Judges. Alexandra and Salome follow. Joab appears immediately after.

Scene 5

[He seats himself on the throne. Titus places himself at his side. Then The Judges seat themselves at a signal in a semicircle round the tribunal.

[He gives Joab a sign. Joab goes out and appears again with Mariamne. A long pause.

Scene 6

[She moves towards the door. Joab opens it. Armed men are seen who form their ranks in homage. She goes out. Titus follows her. Joab joins them. Solemn pause.

Scene 7

Scene 8

[The Servant conducts in the Three Kings From the East. [Pg 172]They are dressed in strange and curious raiment in such a way that they differ from each other in every particular. A rich retinue follows them, of like characteristics. Gold, incense, and myrrh. Enter Herod, and Salome shortly after him.

APPENDIX

containing passages from the original version and those omitted for stage representation.

The words seem to mean “The tribute would be enough to pay Caesar if he (Herod) were assessing his own value to save himself from death.” The passage proved too much for me, and I owe this explanation to Mr. Nicholson. I translate:—

Scene 1

When you’re as ill as I’ve been, and don’t know whether you’ll get better or not, lots of things go round in your head. Death is more terrible than people think. Death is bitter-hard. He darkens the world, he blows out all the lights, one after another, that gleam[Pg 188] so bright and gay all round us. The dear eyes of husband and children cease to shine, and it grows dim on every side. But death sets a light in the heart, and there it grows clear, and you can see lots—lots that you can’t bear to see.... I don’t know what wrong I’ve done. I’ve trodden God’s path, and worked in the house as well as I could. I’ve brought up your brother and you in the fear of the Lord, and eked out what your father earned with the sweat of his brow. And I always managed to have a penny to spare for the poor. If I did turn one away at times because I was cross-tempered, or because there were too many of them, it was no misfortune for him, for I was sure to call him back and give him double. But what’s all that worth! We tremble just the same, when the last hour threatens. We cringe like worms. We pray to God for our lives, like a servant asking his master to let him do a spoiled job over again, so as not to come short on pay-day.

Scene 2

Scene 3

Have you been sulking with each other? I don’t dislike him. He’s so steady. If only he was somebody! In my time he wouldn’t have had to wait long. The gentlefolk used to be as crazy after a good clerk, as a lame man after a crutch, for a good clerk was rare then. He was useful to small people like us, too. One day he would compose a New Year’s greeting from son to father, and would get as much for the gold lettering alone as would buy a child a doll. The next day the father would send for him, and have him read it aloud to him, secretly, with the door locked, lest he should be caught unawares, and show his ignorance. That meant double pay. Clerks were top-dog then, and raised the price of beer. But it’s different now. We old people, who can neither read nor write, are the laughing-stocks of nine-year-old boys. The world’s getting cleverer every day. Perhaps the time will come[Pg 191] when we shall be ashamed if we can’t walk the tightrope.

There she goes. Three times I dreamed she lay in her coffin, and now—— Oh these malicious dreams, they clothe themselves in our fears to terrify our hopes. I’ll never give heed to a dream again. I’ll never again take pleasure in a good one, and then I won’t have to worry about the evil one that follows it. How firm and sure is her step! She’s already near the churchyard. I wonder who’ll be the first to meet her—not that it matters, but——(starting in terror). The grave-digger! He has just dug a grave and is climbing out of it. She’s nodded to him, and is looking down into the dark hole with a smile. Now she’s thrown the flowers in, and is going into church. (Music is heard.) They’re singing: “Now thank we all our God.” (Folding her hands.) Yes! yes! If mother had died, I’d never have been happy again, for——(looking towards heaven). But Thou art gracious, Thou art merciful! I wish I had a faith like the Catholics, so that I could give Thee something. I would empty my money-box and buy Thee a lovely golden heart and wreathe it with roses. Our clergyman says that gifts are nothing in Thy eyes, for all is Thine, and we should not try to give Thee what Thou hast. But then, everything in the house belongs to father, and yet he’s pleased when I buy him a kerchief with his[Pg 192] own money, and embroider it neatly and put it on his plate on his birthday. Yes, he honours me by wearing it on special holidays, Christmas or Whitsuntide. Once I saw a tiny little Catholic girl bringing her cherries to the altar. How I loved to see her! They were the first of the year, and I could see how she longed to eat them. But still she fought against her innocent desire, and threw them down quickly to make an end of temptation. The priest, saying Mass, had just raised the chalice, and looked frowningly at her, and the child hurried away terrified, but the Virgin over the altar smiled down so tenderly, as if she would have liked to step out of her frame, run after the child, and kiss her. I did it for her. There’s Leonard. Ah!

Scene 4

When I got home, I found my mother ill, dangerously ill. Smitten down suddenly, as if by an unseen hand. Father had wanted to send for me, but she wouldn’t let him, because of spoiling my pleasure. Imagine how I felt, when I heard that! I kept out of the way. I didn’t dare to touch her; I trembled. She thought it was just a child’s concern, and motioned me to go to her. When I went up to her slowly, she pulled me down and kissed my desecrated mouth. I gave way altogether, I wanted to confess to her. I wanted to tell her what I thought and felt: “I’m to blame for your lying there like that.” I did so, too, but tears and sobs choked my words; she took father’s hand and said, looking at me so happily—“What a tender heart!”

He came drunk into the exam., bowed to the stove instead of to the mayor, and knocked three cups off the table when he sat down. You know how hot-tempered the old boy is. “Sir!” he began, but he bit his lips and controlled himself, although his eyes flashed through his spectacles like two snakes ready to spring, and all his face was working. Then came the arithmetic and ha! ha! my opponent used a system of tables he had invented himself, and got quite original results. “He’s all astray,” said the mayor, and held out his hand to me with a glance that told me the job was mine. I put it reverently to my lips, although it stank of tobacco, and here’s the appointment, signed and sealed.

Scene 5

Think? About you? About anybody? I shape planks with my tools, I’ll admit, but never a man with my thoughts. I got over that sort of folly long ago. When I see a tree in leaf, I say to myself: It’ll soon be in bloom. And when it’s in bloom: Now it’ll bear fruit. I don’t get taken in there, so I stick to the old custom. But I think nothing about men, nothing at all, neither bad nor good. So that when they disappoint first my fears and then my hopes, I don’t need to go red and white in turn. I simply get knowledge and experience out of them, and I take the cue from my pair of eyes. They can’t think either, they just see. I thought I knew all about you already, but now you’re here again, I have to admit that I only half knew you.

Do you think so? Ah, we old men owe a lot to death, for letting us knock about so long among you young fellows and giving us the chance to get educated. Once upon a time the world was foolish enough to believe that the father was there to educate the son. Now, it’s the other way. The son has to put the finishing touches on his father, lest the old simpleton should disgrace himself in the grave before the worms. Thank God, I’ve an excellent teacher in this boy, Karl, of mine; he wages ruthless war upon my prejudices, and doesn’t spoil the old fellow with too much indulgence. Only this morning, for instance, he’s taught me two new lessons. And very skilfully too, without so much as opening his mouth, without even showing himself; in fact, just by not doing so. In the first place, he has shown me that you don’t need to keep your word; secondly, that it’s unnecessary to go to church and freshen up your memory of God’s commandments. Last night he promised me he’d go, and I counted on it, for I thought, “He’ll surely want to thank the Creator for sparing his mother’s life.” But he wasn’t there, and I was quite comfortable in my pew, which indeed is a bit small for two. I wonder how he’d like it, if I were to act on this new lesson of his at once, and break my word to him? I promised him a new suit on his birthday, and so I have a good chance of seeing what pleasure he would take in a ready pupil. But—prejudice, prejudice! I shan’t do it.

That may be. I only need to ask my wife. She’ll be sure to tell me he’s sick. She tells me the truth about everything on earth except that boy. And even if he isn’t sick—there you young men have the pull over us old folks again. You can do your devotions anywhere; you can say your prayers when you’re out bird-snaring, or taking a walk, or even in a public-house. “‘Our father, which art in Heaven’—Good-morning, Peter, coming to the dance to-night?—‘Hallowed be Thy Name’—Yes, you may smile, Katherine, but you’ll see—‘Thy will be done’—By God, I’m not shaved[Pg 199] yet,”—and so on to the end, when you pronounce your own blessing, since you’re just as much a man as the parson, and there’s as much virtue in a blue coat as in a black. I’ve nothing against it. If you want to insert seven drinks between the seven petitions, what does it matter? I can’t prove to any one that beer and religion don’t go together. Perhaps it will get into the prayer-book some day, as a new way of taking communion. But I, old sinner that I am, am not strong enough to follow the fashion. I can’t catch devotion in the street, as if it were a cock-chafer. The twittering of sparrows and swallows cannot take the place of the organ for me. If my heart is to be uplifted, I must first hear the heavy iron church-doors clang behind me, and imagine they are the gates of the world. The high walls with their narrow windows, that only let the bright bold light of the world filter dimly through, must close in upon me, and in the distance I must see the dead-house with the walled-in skull. Well—better is better.

Without doubt. And I must admit as an honest man that it didn’t work to-day. I lost the mood for worship when I was in church, because of the empty seat beside me, and found it again outside, under the pear-tree in my garden. You are surprised? See, I was going home sad and depressed, like a man that’s had his harvest spoilt; for children are just like land, you sow good seeds and get tares in return. I stood still under the pear-tree, that the caterpillars have devoured. “Yes,” I thought, “my boy is like this tree, bare and empty.” Then I seemed to get thirsty, and felt as if I must go to the inn and have a drink. I was deceiving myself. It wasn’t beer that I wanted. I wanted to find my boy and rate him, and I knew for certain I should find him there. I was just going, when the wise old tree dropped a juicy pear at my feet, as if to say: Quench your thirst with that, and don’t insult me by comparing me with your knave of a son. I thought better of it, ate the pear and went home.

I hope you won’t. And I’ll tell you what I think. Even the holy patriarchs did not despise their wives’ dowries. Jacob loved Rachel and courted her for seven years, but he was pleased, too, with the fat rams and ewes that he earned in her father’s service. It does him no disgrace, to my mind, and I don’t wish to shame him by doing better. I should like to have seen your daughter bring twenty pounds with her. Naturally. It would have been all the better for her, for when a girl brings her bed with her, she doesn’t need to start carding wool and spinning yarn. But she hasn’t got it, and what does it matter? We’ll take lenten soup for Sunday’s dinner, and feast on our Sunday joint at Christmas. We can manage that way.

My father never rested night and day, and worked himself into his grave when he was only thirty. My poor mother made a living, as best she could, with her spinning-wheel. I grew up without any schooling. When I got bigger and still could earn nothing, I should have liked at the least to go without eating. But if I did pretend to be sick at dinner-time and push my plate back, what was the good? My stomach was too much for me at supper-time, and I had to be well again. My greatest sorrow was my own clumsiness. I would quarrel with myself over it, as if I was to blame, as if I had provided myself in the womb with nothing but wolf’s teeth and deliberately left behind me every useful craft and quality. I was fit to blush when the sun shone on me. As soon as I was confirmed, the man they buried yesterday, old Master Gebhardt, came into our little room. He wrinkled his brow and twisted his face, as he always did when he had something good in his mind; then he said to my mother: “Have you brought this boy into the world to eat your head off?” I was just about to cut myself a slice of bread, but I felt so ashamed that I quickly put the loaf back in the cupboard. My mother was annoyed at his words. She stopped her wheel, and retorted hotly that her son was a good boy. “Well, we shall see,” replied old Gebhardt, “if he wants, he can come now, just as he stands, into my workshop. I want no apprentice money. He’ll get his food, and I’ll see to his clothes, too. And if he’s willing to get up early and go to bed late, he’ll get a chance now and then of earning a little money for his old mother.” Mother began to cry and I began to dance, and when at last we started to speak, the old man closed his ears and motioned to me to come. I didn’t need to put my hat on, because I hadn’t got one. I followed him without even saying good-bye to my mother, and when I got half-an-hour off on my first Sunday to go and see her, he sent her half a ham with me. God’s peace on his grave! I can still hear him, in that half-angry way of his: “By Gosh, under your coat with it, for fear my wife should see!”

And if you had ten wives, like the Turks, and as many children as were promised to Father Abraham, and you had only a minute to decide in, you’d—well, anyway you’re going to be my son-in-law. Now you know where the money is. I can tell you to-day because my old master was buried yesterday. A month ago I’d have kept it to myself on my death-bed. I put the I O U under the dead man’s head before they nailed up his coffin. If I could write, I would have put “Honourably paid” at the bottom, but all I could do in my ignorance was to tear the paper lengthways. Now he’ll sleep in peace, and I hope I shall too, when I stretch myself some day by his side.

Scene 6

Scene 7

Clara (almost demented, flings herself with upraised arms at the dead woman’s feet, and calls out like a child).

Scene 1

What do you know about it? Do you think you have any right to join your curses to mine, because that clerk of yours left you in the lurch? Some one else will take you for a walk on Sunday afternoons, some one else will tell you that your cheeks are red and your eyes are blue, some one else will make you his wife, if you deserve it. But when you’ve borne your burden honourably for thirty years, without complaining, when you’ve patiently endured suffering and bereavement and all manner of misfortune, and then your son, who should be making a soft pillow for you in your old age, comes and heaps disgrace on you, till you feel like calling to the earth, “Swallow me, if you can stomach me, for I am more foul than you”—then you may pour out all the curses that I am holding back; then you may tear your hair and beat your breast. That’s the privilege you shall have over me, since you’re a woman.

To dream you are in child-bed, eh? And jump up and lay hold of you and then remember, and say I didn’t know what I was doing? Thank you, no. My sleep has dismissed its magician and hired a prophet instead, who shows me fearful things with his bloody[Pg 211] fingers. I don’t know how it is. Anything seems possible to me now. Ugh! The future makes me shudder, like a glass of water seen through a microscope—is that right, Mr. Choir-master, you’ve spelt it for me often enough? I did that once at the fair in Nürnberg, and couldn’t take a drink the whole day after it. I saw our Karl last night with a pistol in his hand. When I looked at him more closely, he fired. I heard a cry, but I couldn’t see anything for smoke. When the smoke cleared, there was no split skull to be seen, but in the meantime my fine son had become a rich man. He was standing counting gold pieces from one hand into the other, and his face—devil take me if a man could look more placid, if he had slaved all day and just locked up his work-shop. We might look out for that. We might first sit in judgment, and then go ourselves before the greatest judge of all.

Cure yourself, you mean. Why am I sick? Give me the healing draught, physician! Your brother is the worst of sons. You be the best of daughters. Here I stand before the world like a worthless bankrupt. I owed it a worthy man, to take the place of this invalid here, and I’ve pawned off a rogue on it. You be the woman your mother was. Then people will say: “It wasn’t the parents’ fault that the boy went wrong, for the daughter is going the right road and leads the way for others.” (With fearful coldness.) And I’ll do my share. I’ll make it easier for you than the others. The moment I see people pointing their fingers at you,—I shall—(passing his finger over his throat) shave myself, and, this I’ll swear, I shall shave myself away altogether. You can say a fright did it—a horse ran away in the street, or the cat knocked a chair over, or a mouse ran up my legs. Those that know me will have their doubts, because I’m not particularly nervous, but what does it matter? I can’t go on living in a world where only sympathy keeps people from spitting when they see me.

Nothing at all, my child. I’m too hard on you. I know it well. Nothing at all. Just stay as you are and it will be all right. I’ve suffered such injustice that I must practise it, or go under altogether, when it takes hold of me. I was crossing the road just now when Small-pox John came along, that vagabond I had locked up years ago, after he’d robbed me three times. There was a time when the wretch didn’t dare to look at me, but now he walks up coolly and holds out his hand. I wanted to box his ears, but thought better of it and didn’t even spit. Aren’t we cousins of a week’s standing? And isn’t it right for relations to greet one another? Our good man, the parson, came to see me yesterday, and said a man was responsible for nobody but himself, and it was unchristian arrogance in me to make myself answerable for my son, or else Adam would have to take it as much to heart as I. O God, I well believe that it doesn’t disturb the arch-father’s peace in paradise, when one of his great-great-grandchildren goes robbing and murdering, but didn’t he tear his hair over Cain? No, no, it is too much! At times I feel like looking to see if my shadow hasn’t gone blacker. I can bear anything, and I’ve proved it, anything but disgrace. Put as much weight round my neck as you like, but don’t cut through the nerve that holds me together.

Then I’d hire a lawyer, and I’d sell my last shirt to find out whether the mayor had the right to imprison the son of an honourable man, or not. If so, I’d submit, for if it can happen to anybody, I must put up with it, even though I had to pay a thousand times dearer than others. It was fate, and when God strikes me, I fold my hands and say: “O Lord, thou knowest why.” But if it was not so, if that man with the gold chain round his neck overstepped himself, because he couldn’t think of anything except that the merchant who lost the jewels was his brother-in-law, then we’d see whether there’s a hole in the law. The king knows full well that he must justly repay the obedience and loyalty of his subjects, and would wish least of all to be unfair to the smallest of them. We’ll see then whether he’ll stop the hole up for us. But this is all nonsense. It’s as easy for your mother to rise from her grave as for that boy to clear himself. I’ve had no comfort from him, and never shall have. So remember what you owe me. Keep your word and then I won’t have to keep mine. (Goes, and turns back.) I shan’t be home till late. I’m going to see the old wood-cutter in the hills. He’s the only man who looks me in the face as he used to, because he knows nothing yet of my shame. He’s deaf. They can’t tell him anything without shrieking themselves hoarse, and then he mixes it all up and never gets the truth of it. (Goes out.)

Scene 2

O God, O God, have mercy! Have mercy on this old man! Take me! It’s the only way to help him. Look! The sunshine lies so golden on the street that the children snatch at it. The birds fly about. Flowers and plants are never weary of growing. Everything lives and wants to live. Thousands of sick people tremble before thee at this hour, O Death! Those[Pg 214] who called to thee in the oppression of the night, because their pain was more than they could bear, now once more find comfort in their beds. To thee I call! Spare him whose soul shrinks furthest from thee! Let him live until this lovely world again seems grey and desolate. Take me for him! I will not shudder at thy chilly hand. I will seize it bravely, and follow thee more gladly than ever any child of man has followed thee before.

Scene 3

I’ve known for a long time that she, who once was the noblest and kindest of women, had turned malicious and spiteful. She rejoices when she sees an accident, if a maid breaks a glass or cuts her finger. But I only discovered to-day, when it was too late, that she steals things about the house, hides money, and destroys papers. I had lain down on the bed and was just dozing off, when I saw her come quietly up to me and stare at me to see if I was asleep. I closed my eyes tight, and then she took my keys out of my waistcoat, that I’d hung over the chair, opened the desk, took some money out, locked the desk again, and put the key back. I was horrified, but I controlled myself and kept quiet. She left the room and I went after her on tip-toe. She went right to the top of the house and threw the money into an old chest of my grandfather’s that stood empty there. Then she looked nervously about her on all sides, and hurried away without seeing me. I lit a candle and looked through the chest, and found there my youngest daughter’s doll, a pair of the maid’s slippers, an account book, some letters and unfortunately—or God be praised, which?—right at the bottom I found the jewels!

God knows, I’d sacrifice the trinkets if I could undo what’s done. But I’m not to blame. Much as I honour your father, it was natural for me to suspect your brother. He had polished the desk, and the jewels disappeared with him. I noticed it almost immediately, because I had to get some papers out of the very drawer they were in. But I had no intention of taking severe steps against him. I informed bailiff Adam, and asked him to investigate the matter secretly; but he would not hear of caution. He said it was his duty to report the case at once and he was going to do it. Your brother was a boozer and a borrower, and had so much weight with the mayor that he could get him to do anything he wanted. The man seems to be incensed against[Pg 216] your father in the extreme. I don’t know why. I simply couldn’t calm him down. He stuffed his fingers in his ears and shouted as he ran, “If you’d made me a present of the jewels I wouldn’t be as pleased as I am now!”

Scene 4

Scene 5

I’ve brought good news. Your brother, Miss—Oh, Clara, I can’t go on talking in this stiff way to you, with all the old tables and cupboards and chairs around me; my old acquaintances, that we played among when we were children. Good-day, you there! (Nodding to a cupboard.) How are you? You haven’t changed.—I should think they’d put their heads together and laugh at me for a fool if I don’t call you “Clara” as I used to.D If you don’t like it, just think—“The poor chap’s dreaming, I’ll wake him up—I’ll go up to him and show him (with a toss of head) I’m not a little girl now”—that was your mark when you were eleven (pointing to a mark on the door)—“but a proper grown-up, that can reach the sugar when it’s put on the side-board.” Do you remember? That was the spot, that was the stronghold, safe from us, even when it stood unlocked. When the sugar was there, we used to play at catching flies, because we couldn’t bear to let them, flying about so merrily, get at what we couldn’t reach!

They do forget! I wonder what don’t people forget over Justinian and Gaius! Boys, that kick against the A B C so obstinately, know why they do it. They have a sort of feeling that, if they leave the spelling-book alone, they’ll never get at cross-purposes with the Bible. It’s disgraceful how they tempt the innocent souls with the red cock, and the basket of eggs, till they say A of their own accord—and then there’s no holding them! They tear down hill from A to Z, and on and on, till they are in the midst of Corpus Juris and realise to their horror what a desert they’ve been enticed into by those curséd twenty-six letters, which they first used in their play to make tasty, sweet-scented words like “cherry” and “rose.”

That depends on temperament. Some work their way through, and come out again into the light of day after three or four years. They’re a bit thin and pale, but you can’t blame them for that. I belong to them. Others lie down in the middle of the wood. They only want to rest, but they very seldom get up again. One of my own friends has drunk his beer under the shade of the “Lex Julia” for three years. He chose the place on account of the name. It recalls pleasant memories. Others get desperate and turn back. They are the biggest fools of all, for they’re only allowed out of one thicket on condition that they plunge straight into another. And there are some there that never come to an end at all! (Aside.) What stuff a fellow will talk, when he has something in his mind and can’t get it out!

Yes, in weather like this owls fall out of their nests, bats kill themselves, because they feel that the devil made them. The mole bores down into the earth till he loses his way and is stifled, unless he can eat through to the other side and come out in America! To-day every ear of corn puts out a double shoot, and every poppy goes twice as red as usual, if only for shame at not being so. Why should man remain behind? Is he to rob God of the one tribute that this world pays Him, a bright face and a clear eye, that reflects and glorifies all this splendour? Indeed, when I see these lazy-bones crawling out of their houses in the mornings with their brows all wrinkled, and glowering at heaven as if it were a sheet of blotting paper, I often think: “It’ll rain soon. God will have to let down His curtain of clouds; He’s bound to, so as not to be annoyed by such grimaces.” Such fellows ought to be prosecuted as thwarters of holidays and destroyers of harvests. How should you give thanks for life, except by living? Rejoice, bird! else you don’t deserve to have a throat!

Scene 6

Close, close, my heart! Crush in upon thyself. Let not a drop of blood escape, to fire[Pg 222] anew the waning life in my veins. There again something like a hope arose in thee. I realise it now. I thought (laughing)—“That’s too much for any man.” And if—isn’t it too much for you? Would you have courage to seize a hand that——? No, no, you would not have such base courage. You would have to bolt yourself into your prison, if they tried to open the gate from without. For ever—Oh, why does it stop, why doesn’t it go on grinding for ever, why is there a pause now and then? That’s why it seems so long. The tortured one thinks he is having a rest because the torturer has to stop and take breath; you breathe again, like a drowning man in the waves, when the whirlpool that is sucking him down, throws him up again, only to lay hold of him afresh. All he gains from it is a redoubled death-struggle.

“Well, Clara.” Yes, father, I’ll go, I’ll go! Your daughter won’t drive you to suicide. I shall soon be his wife, or—O God, no! I’m not begging for happiness, I’m begging for misery, the deepest misery—surely you’ll grant me my misery. Away!—where is the letter? (Taking it.) There are three wells on the road to him. Let me stop at none of them. You have no right to, yet. (Goes out.)

[Pg 223]

Scene 1

There’s the sixth sheet since dinner. How fine a man feels when he does his duty! Anybody could come into the room that liked, even the king himself—I would stand up, but I would not be embarrassed. Except for one man, that old joiner. But at bottom he can’t trouble me much. Poor Clara! I’m sorry for her. It disturbs me to think of her. If it hadn’t been for that one cursed evening. It was more jealousy than love that excited me, and I’m sure she only yielded to refute my reproaches, for she was as cold as death towards me. She has bad times ahead of her, and I shall have a lot of worry, too. Let each bear his lot. Above all things, I must make sure of that little humpbacked girl and not let her escape me when the storm breaks. Then I shall have the mayor on my side and need fear nothing.

Scene 2

No, I can’t swear that. But this I can swear. That whether I love you or not, you shall never know. I’ll serve you, I’ll work for you. You don’t need to feed me. I’ll keep myself. I’ll sew and spin in the night-time for other people. I’ll go hungry if I’ve no work to do. I’ll eat my own flesh rather than go to my father and let him notice anything. If you strike me because your dog isn’t handy, or you’ve done away with him, I’ll swallow my own tongue rather than utter a sound that could let it out to the neighbours. I can’t promise you that my skin shall not show the marks of your lash, but I’ll lie about it, I’ll say that I ran my head against the cupboard or that the floor was too much polished and I slipped on it. I’ll do it before anybody has time[Pg 225] to ask me where the blue marks came from. Marry me—I shan’t live long. And if it lasts too long for you, and you can’t afford to divorce me, buy some poison at the chemist’s and put it down as if it were for the rats. I’ll take it without even a sign from you, and when I’m dying I’ll tell the neighbours I thought it was crushed sugar.

Scene 3

Scene 4

Yes, Clara, you talked about keeping one’s word, and just because I am a man of my word, I am compelled to answer as I do. I broke with you a week ago. You can’t deny it. There lies the letter. (He passes the letter; she takes it mechanically.) I had good reason to; your brother—you say he’s been cleared. I’m glad to hear it. In the course of this week I have made promises elsewhere. I had a perfect right to, because you didn’t protest at the right time against my letter. In my own mind I was as free as before the law. Now you’ve come, but I’ve already given my word and taken somebody else’s, yes—(aside) I wish it were so!—she’s in the same condition as you.—I’m sorry for you—(stroking back her hair, Clara passive, as if she did not notice it), but you’ll understand that the mayor is not to be trifled with.

Now, you’re getting sensible. And as for your father, you can tell him straight to his face that he’s to blame for it all. Don’t stare at me like that, don’t shake your head; it is so, my girl, it is so! Just tell him so; he’ll understand and keep quiet, I’ll answer for it. (Aside.) When a man gives away his daughter’s dowry, he needn’t be surprised if she’s left on the shelf. It puts my back up to think of[Pg 227] it, and almost makes me wish the old boy was here to be lectured to. Why do I have to be cruel? Simply because he was a fool! Whatever happens, he’s responsible for it, that’s clear. (To Clara.) Would you like me to talk to him, myself? I’ll risk a black eye for your sake and go to him. He can be as rude as he likes, he can throw the boot-tree at me, but he’ll have to swallow the truth, in spite of the belly-ache it gives him, and leave you in peace. Be assured of that. Is he at home?

I thank you as I would thank a snake that had entwined itself around me, and then left me of its own accord to follow other game. I know that I’ve been stung, and am only released because it doesn’t seem worth while to suck the bit of marrow out of my bones. But I thank you in spite of it, for now I shall have a quiet death. Yes, it is no mockery! I thank you. I feel as if I had seen through your heart into the abyss of hell, and whatever may be my lot in the terrors of eternity, I shall have no more to do with you, and that’s a comfort! And just as the unhappy creature bitten by a snake is not blamed for opening his veins in horror and disgust and letting his poisoned life well quickly away, so it may be that God of His grace will take pity on me when He sees you and what you’ve made of me.—If I had no right ever to do such a thing, how should I be able to do it?—One thing more: my father knows nothing of this, he doesn’t suspect, and in order that he may never know, I shall leave this world to-night. If I thought that you——(Takes a step wildly towards him.) But that’s folly. Nothing could suit you better than to see them all stand and shake their heads and vainly ask why it happened!

Scene 5

I must marry her! Yet why must I? She’s going to do a mad trick to keep her father from doing a mad trick. What need is there for me to stop her by doing a madder trick still? I can’t agree to it, not until I see the man before me who’ll anticipate me by doing the maddest trick of all, and if he thinks as I do, there’ll be no end to the business. That sounds quite clear,—and yet—I must go after her! There’s some one at the door. Thank God! Nothing’s worse than quarrelling with your own thoughts. A rebellion in your head, when you beget snake after snake and each one devours the other or bites off its tail, is the worst kind of all.

Scene 6

Scene 7

No one at home! If I didn’t know the rat-hole under the threshold where they keep the key, when they all go out, I wouldn’t have been able to get in. Well, that wouldn’t have mattered. I could run round the town twenty times and imagine there was no greater pleasure in the world than using your legs. Let’s have a light. (Lights up.) The matches are just where they used to be, I’ll bet, because in this house we’ve got twice ten commandments. “Put your hat on the third nail, not the fourth.” “You must be sleepy at half-past nine.” “You’ve no right to be chilly before Martinmas and no right to sweat after it.” And that’s on a level with “Thou shalt fear God and love Him.” I’m thirsty. (Calls.) Mother! Phew! I’d forgotten she’d gone where there’s no waiters to serve you. I didn’t blubber in that gloomy cell when I heard them ringing the bell for her; but—you red-coat! You didn’t let me have my last throw in the skittle-alley, although I’d the ball in my hand. I won’t give you time to breathe your last, when I find you by yourself. And that may be to-night. I know where to find you at ten o’clock. And then off to sea! What keeps Clara out? I’m as hungry as I’m thirsty. To-day’s Thursday. They’ve had veal broth. If it was winter, there’d have been cabbage; white cabbage up to Shrove Tuesday and green after. That’s as certain as that Thursday comes after Wednesday and that it can’t say to Friday, “Take my place, my feet are tired.”

Scene 8

Scene 9

Scene 10

Scene 11

Do you doubt it? You’d like to, but you can’t. Just think of what you said to her. You sent her out on the road to death, and I, I’m to blame that she didn’t turn back. When you suspected her misfortune, you thought of the tongues that would hiss at it, but not of the worthlessness of the snakes that own them. You said things to her that drove her to despair. And I, instead of folding her in my arms, when she opened her heart to me in nameless terror, thought of the knave[Pg 237] that might mock at me, and——I made myself dependent on a man who was worse than I, and I’m paying for it with my life. And you, too, though you stand there like a rock, you too will say some day, “Daughter, I wish you had not spared me the head-shakes and shoulder-shruggings of the Pharisees; it humiliates me more, that you are not here to sit by my deathbed and wipe the sweat of anguish from my brow.”

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	PAGE
Gyges and His Ring (translated by L. H. Allen)	1
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
ACT I
ACT II
ACT III
ACT IV
ACT V
Herod and Mariamne (translated by L. H. Allen)	67
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
ACT I
ACT II
ACT III
ACT IV
ACT V
Maria Magdalena (translated by Barber Fairley)	185
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
ACT I
ACT II
ACT III
FOOTNOTES
Transcriber’s Note

KANDAULES,		King of Lydia.
RHODOPE,		his Queen.
GYGES,		a Greek.
LESBIA	}	Slave Maidens.
HERO	}	Slave Maidens.
THOAS	}	Slaves.
KARNA	}	Slaves.
THE PEOPLE.

KING HEROD.
MARIAMNE,		his Queen.
ALEXANDRA,		her Mother.
SALOME,		Sister of the King.
SOEMUS,		Governor of Galilee.
JOSEPH,		Viceregent in the absence of Herod.
SAMEAS,		a Pharisee.
TITUS,		a Roman Captain.
JOAB,		a Courier.
JUDAS,		a Jewish Captain.
ARTAXERXES	}	Servants; also other Servants.
MOSES
JEHU
SILO,		a Citizen.
ZERUBABEL	}	Galileans.
PHILO, his Son	}	Galileans.
A ROMAN COURIER.
AARON and five other JUDGES.
THREE KINGS FROM THE EAST,		afterwards given the added title of “holy” by the Christian Church.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Three plays by Frederic Hebbel

THREE PLAYS

INTRODUCTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CONTENTS

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

HEBBEL’S PLAYS

ACT I

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

ACT II

ACT III

ACT IV

ACT V

Scene 1

Scene 2

HEROD AND MARIAMNE

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

HEROD AND MARIAMNE

ACT I

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

ACT II

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

ACT III

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

ACT IV

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Scene 8

ACT V

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Scene 8

APPENDIX

MARIA MAGDALENA

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

MARIA MAGDALENA

ACT I

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

ACT II

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

ACT III