attempt to modify the relation, we must seek our freedom.  Hebbel’s plays are historical:  character in its setting of circumstances is the only character really and fully comprehensible.  They are sociological:  exhibiting the ceaseless collision of individualistic and collectivistic tendencies, they teach forbearance, and patience, and the will to face the facts—­tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.  And they are modern:  treating problems of character and milieu, they disdain the adventitious aids of eloquence and theatrical splendor, and speak to us with the directness, often with the bluntness, of nature herself.  Hebbel was no naturalist, in the sense of one who seeks but to reproduce phenomena in all their details, sordid, trivial, or vulgar, if such they be.  But through Ibsen, who esteemed him alone among his German predecessors, he became a factor in the recent naturalistic movement; and he might have saved it from many an aberration, if his example had been more closely followed.

Hebbel strikingly revealed his independence and originality at the beginning of his public career, by his new conception of old and familiar subjects.  His Judith is a totally different person from the heroine of the Apocrypha.  The Biblical Judith is a widow who slays a public enemy, and returns unscathed amid the plaudits of the multitude.  But Hebbel’s Judith is a widow who has never been a wife, a woman who seems to have been appointed by Providence to do a great deed in His service, who takes the duty upon herself only to find that as a woman she is unequal to it; for as a woman she loves the manly heathen.  She kills him, as she set out to do; but the motive for her act is personal revenge for a personal outrage; and she returns to Bethulia broken in spirit and appalled at the thought that she may bear a son by Holofernes.  The attempt to make of herself an impersonal instrument in the hands of the Almighty—­certainly a laudable undertaking—­is her only fault, and is tragic because inconsistent with the character of womanhood, which the Almighty has also ordained.  Compared with the iron necessity of her being, to which Judith succumbs, the accidental and improbable fault of Schiller’s Maid of Orleans seems as trivial as it is conventional.

Similarly, in the conception of the story of Genoveva, Hebbel shifted attention from the saint to the sinner.  In the centre of his Genoveva stands Golo, the unfortunate young man whose good instincts are made criminal because the faults and errors of others excite them, and because his desire, justifiable according to nature, is directed toward a woman who is bound to another in a wedlock which, from the side of the husband at least, is only formally correct.  In Golo’s crime and atonement we accordingly see a great deal more than the operation of the moral law:  we see how crime is begotten of innocence; and instead of thinking of the wretched creature, we think of the Creator who has so ordained it, and at whose central position in the moral universe there can be neither good nor evil, but an equilibrium of forces which become one or the other, and may become either when the equilibrium is disturbed.  Good and evil, mutually exclusive qualities in the world of appearance, are, in the world of ideas, complementary conceptions, different aspects of one and the same thing.