the State in too Hegelian a fashion, and sacrificed—unnecessarily—the individual to it. His conception of the State is, in fact, Hegelian. Hence his lack of sympathy with the Revolution of 1848, though he himself was in revolt against society as then constituted, a revolt in which one feels nevertheless some indecision. His observation of contemporary social problems and of the moral fissures in aristocratic and middle-class society was keen. Problems like those of suicide, of the relationship between women and men, of love, he pondered much and presented in many forms. Here, again, his peculiar waverings revealed themselves. He rejected the antiquated view of women but feared to fall into the extreme of advocating their emancipation.
True, such indecision is characteristic of transitional periods. It affected Hebbel’s art as well as his views. As a dramatist he is downright and realistic while bearing in himself the elements of Romanticism and delighting in the unusual. To historical figures, such as his “Judith,” he lends new significance by fresh interpretation; but in his lyrics his artistic indecision crops up again. There is too much reflection in them, too little lyrical poetry. Therefore he cannot, in this respect, be compared with Goethe. None the less his relationship to Goethe interested me, particularly the way in which he lends to the Titanism of Holofernes and Herod certain of the attributes of a State. He took a narrow, a gross, one may almost say a Prussian view of them. As regards form he seems to have imitated Goethe; for, in his later dramas at least, his art approaches the classical form of “Iphigenie.”
One reason why I read so much of Hebbel was that he had lived in Vienna, where I still found living memories of him. To me it seemed that the unhappy influence of Austria and Vienna could be most clearly traced in the work of this North German. In Vienna, too, the theatre led me to pay heed to the Austrian poets, particularly Grillparzer, in whom the Austria of Metternich and her fatal influence on great men can be best studied, as Grillparzer’s autobiography proves. A similar case is that of our Bohemian-German writer, Stifter. The same fatal influence I detected also in Raimund, Bauerfeld, and Anzengruber; while Nestroy expressed the spirit of Vienna. All of them wrote in Austrian handcuffs. To Grillparzer, Vienna was a “Capua”; and, to Anzengruber, Austria was a “murderess” of the mind.
Under the absolutism of Prussia and the Hapsburgs, and especially under the Metternich system after the Revolution,
