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 critics, is a slight but clever refutation of ignorant presumption. Agnes Bernauer (1851) is a worthy successor of Herodes and Mariamne; Gyges and his Ring (1854) is the most poetic and perhaps the most characteristic of his dramas. The trilogy on the Nibelungen (1855-1860) was Hebbel's last great work, ranking with Grillparzer's Golden Fleece and Schiller's Wallenstein; and if he had lived to complete Demetrius, we should have had another remarkable drama, on a subject which Schiller too was destined to leave unfinished.

In the fifties, Hebbel accompanied Christine on professional trips to North Germany, and had ample occasion to observe the spread of his influence. In 1852 he was fêted at Munich in connection with the production there of Agnes Bernauer. In 1858 he attended a performance of Genoveva in Weimar, and was decorated with an order by the Grand Duke. In 1861 the Nibelungen trilogy was performed for the first time in Weimar, with Christine as Brunhild and Kriemhild; and in the following year Hebbel, who had even thought of going to live at Weimar, was the guest of the Grand Duke at his castle in Wilhelmsthal. Though in Vienna honors came later, Hebbel felt himself to be during these years at the summit of his existence. In 1855 he bought a country home at Orth near Gmunden in the Salzkammergut, and to the idyllic atmosphere of that retreat he owed the inspiration for the epic poem Mother and Child (1857), his gentlest treatment of a tragic theme. In 1857 he issued a definitive edition of his Poems, dedicated to Uhland, "the first poet of the present time." In 1854 Genoveva, in modified form, was successfully presented as Magellone at the Burgtheater, with Christine as the heroine. But Hebbel's first Viennese triumph did not come until February 19, 1863, when Christine played Brunhild in the first and second parts of the Nibelungen. On his deathbed he received the news that the Berlin Schiller Prize had been awarded to him for the Nibelungen. Hebbel died on the thirteenth of December, 1863. Christine out-lived him by nearly half a century, until the twenty-ninth of June, 1910.

Rightly or wrongly, Hebbel regarded himself as the creator of a new form of drama, setting in at a step beyond Shakespeare and Schiller, and attacking problems in the manner suggested, but not fully developed, by Goethe. Shakespeare and Schiller, he said, locate the conflict in the breast of the hero: shall 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 heaven's first law. Self-assertion, however, is nothing but the operation of communicated and committed animation, and self-preservation nothing but the postponement of the day of surrender. Self-preservation is impossible; self-assertion is a challenge to the assertiveness of other selves, as well as a hastener of dissolution. The self follows its native bent, and its native impulse is for expansion; but it thus, as a fraction, leaves, on its centrifugal path, the course of the great world spirit from which it separates; and as both a separate entity and a member of a community it must, in its attempt at self-realization, meet the constraint which the community, whose only object is likewise self-realization and self-preservation, puts upon all within its power. The law is negative and repressive, self-interest is positive and assertive; between the two there is no possible reconciliation—at most a