Similarly, in the conception of the story of Genoveva, Hebbel shifted
attention from the saint to the sinner. In the centre of his _Genoveva_
stands Golo, the unfortunate young man whose good instincts are made
criminal because the faults and errors of others excite them, and
because his desire, justifiable according to nature, is directed toward
a woman who is bound to another in a wedlock which, from the side of the
husband at least, is only formally correct. In Golo's crime and
atonement we accordingly see a great deal more than the operation of the
moral law: we see how crime is begotten of innocence; and instead of
thinking of the wretched creature, we think of the Creator who has so
ordained it, and at whose central position in the moral universe there
can be neither good nor evil, but an equilibrium of forces which become
one or the other, and may become either when the equilibrium is
disturbed. Good and evil, mutually exclusive qualities in the world of
appearance, are, in the world of ideas, complementary conceptions,
different aspects of one and the same thing.

Golo appears, despite his crimes, less guilty than Siegfried, the
husband of Genoveva; and in his case a divine impulse, love, becomes an
evil because it happens to collide with an institution, marriage, which
we are here justified in calling human, since, though it has a social
sanction, it lacks the evidence of divine approval. Clara, in _Maria
Magdalena_, is chargeable with but the minimum of guilt, and perishes
because, too honest and dutiful to safeguard her own interests in a
stern and selfish community, she cannot otherwise preserve for her
father that unassailable reputation which is, in his imperfect ethics,
the highest good. The tragedy in this play is the tragedy of pharisaical
_bourgeois_ society itself. There is no collision between high and low,
such as constituted the plot of the _tragédies bourgeoises_ of the
eighteenth century--e.g., Lessing's _Emilia Galotti_, Schiller's _Cabal