hall he, or shall he not, endeavor to attain the
object of his desire, against forces which oppose him from without, and
which have their allies in his own conscience, in his own sense of right
and wrong? He desires the wrong, or neglects the right, and for his
tragic fault atones with death. We pity the unfortunate individual,
console ourselves, however, with the inviolability of the moral law, and
profit by his example: only those are free whose will chooses to be
moral. But Goethe, in the dramatically conceived _Elective Affinities_,
focuses attention not upon the doings of individuals, but upon the
sanctions of the law which a power superior to their wills forces them
to break. And so Hebbel, passing over the individual, as one of myriads,
directs inquiry into the causes that make him what he is, that make him
do what he does, that prevent him from doing what at the same time they
impel him to attempt; and he reveals, back of the individual typical
phenomenon, an irreconcilable conflict in the very condition and
definition of its existence. This conflict has its roots in the dualism
of all being.

The corner-stone of Martin Luther's system of morals was the paradox: "A
Christian is a sovereign lord over all things, and is subject to nobody;
a Christian is a duty-bound servant of all things, and is subject to
everybody." In other words, a man's soul is his own and is superior to
all the things of the flesh; but through his body he is made dependent
upon the life-giving earth, and subject to the laws which those other
"bodies" in the community in which he lives make for the common defense
and the general welfare. Hebbel carried the antithesis farther, asking
what is the soul, and what is the body? And he answered, in effect, that
the soul is indeed the very essence of personality, but is no original,
self-begotten, and self-sufficient entity--on the contrary, it is a
fragment, a participant in the animating principle of the universe--and
that the body is indeed the medium of contact between person and person,
but is also the separating barrier of soul from soul, and of the
individual soul from the soul of the world. The body is the form or
vessel which vouchsafes to the soul individual existence, and which the
soul, by its very impulse to activity, wears out and destroys. Birth is
a prophecy of destruction and a doom to death.

But life is activity, the soul is a motive force, self-assertion and
self-preservation are