This, however, is anticipating. The gallant Elise, self-sacrificial to the point of becoming mother without being wife, for some years devoted her help, pecuniary if not intellectual, to furthering her lover’s, or rather her beloved’s, success. From 1836-1839 he studied in Heidelberg and Munich, ostensibly law, though extracting far more from history and philosophy. Always at daggers drawn with poverty, eking out his Brötchen and Kaffee with little appreciated journalism, he felt he was now against stark issues. Here his Northern nature was his ally. When against verities he was indomitable; and henceforth the question--“Shall I write from the inner or the outer necessity?” could receive only one answer. From his travels he gained little. His Germanism needed no accentuation, and his desultory studies had tended to make him an introspective browser. His angularity and bitterness, together with his imperious cry for individualism, came out now in the _Judith_. It was a harum-scarum crudity, yet marked with strange flashes of genius. Judith was to be the forerunner of such an imperial type as Mariamne; but one cannot help feeling the pig-tail beneath the helmet of righteousness; and the gigantesque Holofernes, though he roar like a Bull of Bashan, is apt to give the impression that Judith after all cut off a property head. Many Germans appear to admire this play, but it seems to less Teutonic eyes like an aimless piston. Certainly we are not marching in the fields of Thrasymene, and the reader will not be disappointed if he wants Marlowe’s luridness out-Marlowed. Yet withal there is something craggy and storm-enduring amid the ferocity, and one realises that real anguish is revealing itself by intermittent lightnings. Fretted by penury and hope deferred, Hebbel now conceived a wild design. The Duke of Holstein, his own duchy, was Christian VIII of Denmark. On such a man he had a claim and could be proud as well as suppliant. To Denmark he went, at first with little success. The prospect of a chair of Aesthetics at Kiel opened only to close. He now felt in extremities, when the Danish poet Oehlenschlager gave him a timely appreciation and recommended him to the King: with the result that he received a meagre viaticum for two years’ travel. “Thus we half-men struggle,” says Browning. But the whole men struggle more. It is their misfortune to be world-useful in one thing, world-useless in all others. In them their art is not a choice but a condition of existence, without giving the means of existence. What then this pittance meant to one who for two years was relieved of the necessity of earning a livelihood, only men like himself can realise. Not an opening of great avenues; they always stretch to the imagination; but an end to stolen moments in them, the coming of delightful hauntings of them, and the steady concentration on some mastering thought.