wever, in the end, all this had a very good effect upon me. I had
been up to that time a dreamer, who in the daytime liked to creep away
behind the hedge or the well, and in the evening cowered in my mother's
lap, or in that of one of our women neighbors, and begged to be told
fairy and ghost stories. Now I was driven out into active life. It was a
question of defending one's skin, and though I engaged in my first
scuffle only "after long hesitation and many, by no means heroic efforts
to escape," yet the result was such, that I no longer tried to avoid the
second, and began at the third or fourth quite to relish the idea. Our
declarations of war were even more laconic than those of the Romans or
Spartans. The challenger looked over at his opponent during
school-hours, when the teacher had turned his back for a moment,
clenched his right fist and laid it over his mouth, or rather over his
jaw; the opponent repeated the symbolic sign the next moment that it was
safe to do so, without by even so much as a look requiring a more
specific manifesto, and at midday, in the churchyard, in the vicinity of
an old vault, before which there, was a grass plot, the affair was
settled in the presence of the whole school, with natural weapons, by
wrestling and pounding, in extreme cases also by biting and scratching.
I never indeed rose to the rank of a genuine triarian, who made it a
point of honor to go about the whole year with a black eye or a swollen
nose, but I very soon lost the reputation for being a good child, which
I owed to my mother and which up to that time had meant so much to me,
and, to make up for it, rose in my father's estimation, who behaved
toward his sons as Frederick the Great did toward his officers,
punishing them if they fought and mocking them if they allowed
themselves to be trifled with. Once my opponent, while I was lying on
top of him pounding him at my ease, bit my finger through to the bone,
so that for weeks I could not use my hand for writing. That was,
however, the most dangerous wound that I can remember, and, as sometimes
happens later in life also, it led to the forming of an intimate
friendship.

EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF FRIEDRICH

HEBBEL

Reflections on the world, life, and books, but chiefly on myself, in the
form of a journal.

TRANSLATED BY FRANCES A. KING

(1836)

At the moment in which we conceive an ideal, there arises in God the
thought of creating it.

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