118. “Herodes and Mariamne”

A tragedy in five acts by Friedrich Hebbel
Performance at the Königliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin

The infinite abundance and diversity of the solar system has brought Kepler's world-spanning power of thought, fueled by the imagination, to a few simple formulas of monumental size. Such formulas fill us with the deepest satisfaction. Our feeling for the richness of reality loses nothing when it is confronted with the awareness that simple, great, iron laws are expressed in the fullness of this reality. For the creation of nature has as its basis the secret that it produces diversity out of simplicity; and our spirit has the urge to penetrate from the confusing details to the simple basic plan that can be grasped in a few lines.

And as nature creates, so does the great poet. Hebbel's creations are based on this naturalness in the most beautiful sense of the word. The poet unfolds the details of human emotional life, its great conflicts, its nobility and its aberrations in great paintings. And when we survey these paintings, they reveal the great, simple traits by which the human soul lives. Hebbel made it almost a condition of genuine, dramatic poetry that its creations can be reduced to simple, grand formulas like the phenomena of nature itself.

Great love generates jealousy. And this jealousy cannot bear the thought that the beloved could ever belong to another. Herod wants Mariamne to die with him at the same time so that no other man can enter his most sacred place. How he tries to realize this is the content of "Herod and Mariamne". What has to happen when this will is fulfilled is carried out with gruesome consistency, with that consistency which again only nature shows when it allows the facts in space and time to develop according to its simple basic laws. The echo of Herod's passion lives in Mariamne's soul. She too does not want to live when her beloved is no longer there. But she wants to bring about this consequence herself; and that Herod seeks means to carry out his will of his own accord, that he does not have the confidence that she herself will go to her death when his own is announced to her: this brings about the catastrophe. Mariamne takes her revenge by pleading guilty and causing Herod to have her condemned to death for a crime she did not commit.

Herod's tragic fate is that he does not expect his wife's love to be equal to his own. He interferes with her free will. Where he intends to love, he wants to rule. Mariamne would make any sacrifice for his love; his rule rebounds against her pride. This is the simple, great truth that is presented to us in this enchanting painting of the soul.

Hebbel shows himself to be an unparalleled painter of the soul, a herald of human passions in their deepest form, as in all his dramas. The fidelity to nature in the individual goes hand in hand with the truth of nature in the broad outlines. It will always remain a mistake for poetry to strive for truth in detail. It thereby fails to recognize the deeper essence of things. It even goes beyond them.