By WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, A.M.,

Assistant Professor of German, Harvard University


The greatest German dramatists of the middle of the nineteenth century
were Franz Grillparzer, Friedrich Hebbel, and Otto Ludwig. In a caustic
epigram written in 1855, Grillparzer set forth that Dame Poetry, for
some years a widow and now ailing, needed a husband, but could find
none; and we remember that the heroine of _Libussa_ rejects the wise
Lapak, the strong Biwoy, and the rich Domaslaw because she desires in
one man, united, the qualities which separately dominate the three. With
more charity, Grillparzer might have more fully recognized the poet in
Hebbel or Ludwig; but we may be permitted to think of these three
dramatists as not unlike the three suitors for the hand of Libussa:
Grillparzer was rich, Ludwig was wise, and Hebbel was strong. Each of
them was somewhat deficient in the qualities of the other two; each,
however, was a personality, and Hebbel one of the most powerful that
ever lived.

Hebbel's career is a long battle against all but insuperable obstacles.
Born at Wesselburen in the present province of Schleswig-Holstein on
March 18, 1813, he was the son of a poor stone mason--so poor that, as
Hebbel said, poverty had taken the place of his soul. Though Klaus
Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable _non
possumus_ of penury. In winter, especially, lack of work made even the
provision of daily bread often difficult and sometimes impossible for
him. But Friedrich Hebbel's childhood, full of hardship as it was, was
not cheerless. The father did what he could; and the mother, at whatever
sacrifice to herself, could nearly always do something for the children.