The “Maria Maddalena” of Friedrich Hebbel is a domestic tragedy. It represents the position of a young girl in the lower class of society-a character of quiet goodness and feeling, in a position the most usual, circumstances the most common-place. The representation is from the life, and set forth with a truth which in its naked simplicity, almost hardness, becomes most tragic and terrible. Around this girl, portrayed with consummate delicacy, is a group of men. First her father, an honest artisan, coarse, harsh, despotic. Then a light-minded, good-natured, dissipated brother, and two suitors. All these love her according to their masculine individuality. To the men of her own family she is as a part of the furniture—something they are accustomed to see—necessary to the daily well-being of the house, without whom the fire would not be on the hearth, nor the soup on the table; and they are proud of her charms and good qualities as belonging to them. By her lovers she is loved as an object they desire to possess—and dispute with each other. But no one of all these thinks of _her_—of what she thinks, feels, desires, suffers, is, or may be. Nor does she seem to think of it herself, until the storm falls upon her, enwraps her, overwhelms her. Then she stands in the midst of the beings around her, and who are one and all in a kind of external relation to her, completely alone. In her grief, in her misery, in her amazement, her perplexity, her terror, there is no one to take thought for her, no one to help, no one to sympathise. Each is self-occupied, self-satisfied. And so she sinks down and perishes, and they stand wondering at what they had not the sense to see, wringing their hands over the irremediable. It is the Lucy Ashton of vulgar life. The manners and characters of this play are essentially German; but the _stuff_—the material of the piece—the relative position of the personages, might be true of any place in this christian, civilised Europe. The whole is wonderfully, painfully natural, and strikes home to the heart, like Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs.” It was a surprise to me that such a piece should have been acted, and with applause, at the Court Theatre at Vienna; but I believe it has not been given since 1849. [Illustration] 123.