the validity of the institutions that condition
his life or cause his death. There is no question of guilt and
atonement. Protagonist and antagonist are right, each in his way and
from his point of view; the conflict may arise from excess of goodness
as well as from excess of evil; but the representative of the whole
prevails of necessity over the champion of a single interest; and in the
knowledge of this truth, rather than in the futile 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 wit