that we may
well question whether anything whatever ought to have been allowed to
stand in the way of it. To Elise, of course, it seemed an outrage--the
more so that she was entirely mistaken as to the character of Christine;
and with furious bitterness she reproached Hebbel for violating her most
sacred rights in his infatuation for an actress. The storm broke, but it
cleared the air for both; and upon the death of her second son in 1847,
Elise came at Christine's invitation to Vienna and spent a year in the
Hebbel household.

Hebbel himself rightly dated an epoch in his life from his marriage and
the renewed productivity which followed upon it. He enjoyed now for the
first time not only freedom from economic worries but also complete
serenity of mind. Outwardly, indeed, he still had to keep up his
offensive and defensive warfare. Beyond the circle of his immediate
adherents, only the more enlightened of his contemporaries, such as
Ruge, Hettner, and Theodor Vischer, perceived what he was aiming at, and
his own public discussions were so abstruse and repellent that it is no
wonder they were misunderstood. Grillparzer declared that he was groping
in esthetic fog. Julian Schmidt recognized his power and the poetic
charm of many of his passages, but thought him in danger of crossing the
line which separates sense from nonsense, genius from insanity. Hebbel
was restive under criticism, and the method of his polemics tended
rather to exasperate than to conciliate his adversaries. Meanwhile
_Maria Magdalena_ and _Judith_ were performed at the _Hofburgtheater_,
with Christine as the heroine. But in 1850 Heinrich Laube became
director of this theatre, and he not only rejected one play of Hebbel's
after another, but also withdrew from Christine the leading parts which
she had heretofore taken in the regular repertory.

The new epoch in Hebbel's dramatic activity really began in 1848. The
fruits of his sojourn in Italy, _A Tragedy in Sicily_ (1846), _Julia_
(1847), and _New Poems_ (published in 1847) were mediocre stragglers in
the train of his first successes. But _Herodes and Mariamne_, begun in
1847 and completed in November, 1848, is the first of a new series of
masterpieces. Mariamne, Hebbel said, was not simply written for
Christine, she _was_ Christine. _The Ruby_, which followed in the spring
of 1849, is a graceful dramatization of a fairy-tale written ten years
before in Munich; _Michel Angelo_ (1850), a satire on his