effective measures to prevent punishment by Hagen, who, though his loyal
motives are mixed with envy, acts within his rights as the prime
minister. But Siegfried, being vulnerable in only one spot, cannot be
challenged to open combat; he has to be slain by stealth; so that
Hagen's act is not strictly to be called murder, and the Burgundians,
even though their sense of solidarity should not require them to make
common cause with him against Kriemhild, might with some show of reason
confirm his oath that he is no murderer. Siegfried put himself outside
the pale of humanity when he assumed the dragon's skin. Dragons are
hunted to death. Only men are tried and executed.

We have chosen to examine Hebbel's principal plays from the point of
view of their idea, for the reason that, as said above, it was primarily
the idea which Hebbel found important in every individual phenomenon. He
did not treat cases and conditions for the sake of merely representing
life on the stage, but for the sake of exemplifying, in representations
of life, the fundamental irreconcilability of the expansive and
repressive forces which struggle in every individual. His characters are
certainly persons, not abstract constructions; the action in his plays
moves relentlessly forward, with no lack of inventiveness on his part or
of sensuous impressiveness on the part of his inventions; he seldom
fails to convince our understanding that in his dramatic debate each
side is adequately represented, and that the side which at length
prevails is the stronger under the presuppositions of time and place; it
would be unfair, furthermore, to deny the appeal that he makes to our
sympathy. But, on the other hand, he is not free from suggestions of
artifice; his characters are abnormally introspective and
self-explanatory, and they reveal a talent for logical exposition which
belongs rather to Friedrich Hebbel than to men of like passions with
ourselves. In the unsought, accidental, ingenuous details which