UNIVERSITY* CAUFORW* SAN OlEQO Library of Horace L.Lftiter presented to the UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO by MRS ETHEL ROGERS SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE Study in the History of Civilisation BY KUNO FRANCKE, PH.D. Assistant Professor of German Literature in Harvard University NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1896 Copyright, 1896, BV HENRY HOLT & CO. ROBERT DRUMMOND, HLECTROTYPBR AND PRINTER, NEW YORK. UTetnen Itebcn (Befcfjtmftern in Deutfdjlanb, ber Scf?u)ct5 unb ZTTeytco totbme tcfy biefe Blatter als etnen fd}tt>acfyen ^lusbrtic! unnerbruc^Iic^er Creue unb 2JnfjangItcfyfett an unfer gemeinfames X)aterlanb. Die Litteraturen, scheint es mir, haben Jahreszeiten, die, miteinander abwechselnd, wie in der Natur, gewisse PhSnomene hervorbringen und sich der Reihe nach wiederholen. GOETHE, Dichtung und Wahrheit III, 12. Die Gedanken kommen wieder, die Ueberzeugungen pfianzen sich fort, die Zustande gehen unwiederbringlich vorilber. GOETHE, Maximen und Reflexionen III. und so oft im erneuenden Umschwung In verjiingter Gestalt aufstrebte die Welt, Klang auch ein germanisches Lied nach. PLATEN, Der Romantische Oedipus V. PREFACE. THE following attempt to define what seem to me the essential features of German literature is made from the point of view of the student of civilization rather than from that of the linguistic scholar or the literary critic. My own university studies under such men as Giesebrecht, Brunn, Erwin Rohde, Paulsen; my subsequent work under Georg Waitz; and the part taken by me in editing for the Monumenta Germanics Historica the controversial writings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries all this has naturally led me to look at the substance rather than the form of literature, to see in literature primarily the working of popu- lar forces, to consider it chiefly as an expression of national culture. To this personal bias there was added the consideration that, while there is no lack of works dealing with the his- tory of German literature from the linguistic or the literary point of view, there seems to be a decided need of a book which, based upon an original study of the sources, should give a coherent account of the great intellectual movements of German life as expressed in literature; which should point out the mutual relation of action and reaction between these movements and the social and political condition of the masses from which they sprang or which they affected; VI PREFACE. which, in short, should trace the history of the German people in the works of its thinkers and poets. No one could feel more clearly than I how far the present essay falls short of achieving what is implied in the foregoing remarks. All that I wish to claim is that this is an honest attempt, to analyze the social, religious, and moral forces which determined the growth of German litera- ture as a whole. And all that I can hope is that the very distance which separates me from the country of my birth may have helped me to see at least some of its intellectual mountain-peaks as they tower up in clear outline above the dark stretch of the hills and the lowlands. As to the fundamental principles which have shaped my conception of German literature, I may here say this. It seems to me that all literary development is determined by the incessant conflict of two elemental human tendencies: the tendency toward personal freedom and the tendency toward collective organization. The former leads to the observation and representation of whatever is striking, genuine, individual; in short, to realism. The latter leads to the observation and representation of whatever is beauti- ful, significant, universal; in short, to idealism. The indi- vidualistic tendency, if unchecked, may lead either to a vulgar naturalism or to a fantastic mysticism. The col- lectivistic tendency, if unchecked, may lead to an empty conventionalism. Those ages and those men in whom the individualistic and the collectivistic tendencies are evenly balanced, produce the works of literature which are truly great. Should this book reach the shores of Germany, let it greet from me all the dear old places and faces; especially three friends and associates of youthful days, the thought of whom was constantly with me while writing it: Friedrich Reuter, professor at the Altona ' Christianeum '; Friedrich Paulsen, professor at the University of Berlin; Ferdinand Tonnies, professor at the University of Kiel. I should be PREFA CE. Vll happy if they were to find here a not altogether unworthy expression of the ideals which were the bond of our friend- ship in years gone by. To my American friends and colleagues, Ephraim Emer- ton and G. L. Kittredge, I am indebted for a careful re- vision of the language of the book. But in spite of this kind service, for which I wish here to express my sincerest gratitude, its style will easily betray the foreigner. KUNO FRANCKE. CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A., December i, 1895. TABLE OF CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. PAGE THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN CULTURE 3 CHAPTER I. THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. (From the Fifth to the Ninth Century.) The disintegrating effect of the Migrations upon public morality. The Germanic Epic. The historical and mythical elements of the different sagas. Leading char- acters of the Dietrich-, Wolfdietrich-, Walthari-, Gudrun-, and Nibelung-sagas 7 CHAPTER II. THE GROWTH OF MEDIMVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. (From the Ninth to the Middle of the Twelfth Century.) The conflict, in mediaeval life, between church and state; and the corresponding conflict, in mediaeval literature, be- tween the spiritual and the worldly. Heljand. Otfrid's Harmony of the Gospels. Liudprand of Cremona. Ecbasis Captivi. Rosvitha. Ruodlieb. Konig Rother. Herzog Ernst. Rolandslied. Alexanderlied 34 CHAPTER III. THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE. (From the Middle of the Twelfth to the Middle of the Thirteenth Century.) The approach, in the aristocratic society of the Hohenstaufen epoch, toward a reconciliation between the spiritual and X TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE the worldly. Minnesong: Walther von der Vogelweide. Revival of the ancient Germanic Epic : Nibelungenlied. Gudrun. The Court Epic: Hartmann von Aue. Wolfram von Eschenbach. Gottfried von Strassburg 63 CHAPTER IV. THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. (From the Middle of the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century.) Growth of territorial sovereignty and municipal independ- ence. The beginnings of modern individualism. The Mystic Movement: Berthold von Regensburg. Eckhart. Suso. Tauler. The Volkslied. Didactic and satirical narrative: Der Pfaffe Amis. Meier Helmbrecht. Hugo von Trimberg's Renner. Boner's Edelstein. Sebastian Brant. Reinkede Vos. Thomas Murner. Till Eulen- spiegel. The religious drama: Ludus de Antichristo. Wiener Osterspiel. Alsfelder Passionsspiel. Hessisches Weihnachtspiel. Redentiner Osterspiel. The Fast- nachtspiel 100 CHAPTER V. THE ERA OF THE REFORM A TION. (The Sixteenth Century.) The democratic movement of the beginning of the sixteenth century. Humanism: Erasmus's Moriae Encomium and Enchiridion Militis Christiani. Hutten's Dialogues and other anti-Roman writings. Luther's revolutionary pamphlets of 1520. The turning-point of the Reforma- tion. Luther's return to authority. The effect of the re- action upon literature. Hans Sachs. Johann Fischart. The Faust-book of 1587 139 CHAPTER VI, THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN LIFE. (The Seventeenth and the First Half of the Eighteenth Century.) i. THE RECOVERY FROM THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR. The growth of Prussia. Pietism and Rationalism. Leibniz 172 TABLE OF CONTENTS. XI PAGE 2. PSEUDO-CLASSICISM. Opitz. Gottsched. The literature of gallantry 178 3. THE INDIVIDUALISTIC UNDERCURRENT OF SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY LITERATURE. Religious poetry: Fleming. Gerhardt. Spec. Scheffler. Satire and novel: Logau. Moscherosch. Grimmelshausen. Comedy: Gryphius. Weise 187 4. THE SENTIMENTALISM AND RATIONALISM OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Giinther. Brockes. Haller. The Anacreonticists. Gellert 213 CHAPTER VII. THE AGE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE HEIGHT OF ENLIGHTENMENT. (The Third Quarter of the Eighteenth Century.) 1. THE ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM. The conflict between Frederick's intellectual convictions and political methods. Its effect on modern German culture 228 2. KLOPSTOCK. His spirituality. His poetic quality as ex- emplified in the Messias. His patriotism. His cosmo- politanism 233 3. WIELAND. His ideal of culture as shown in Agathon. His position as literary interpreter of the rationalistic phi- losophy 251 4. LESSING. The destruction of Gottschedianism. The re- discovery of classic antiquity: Winckelmann. Laokoon. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. The creation of a national drama: Tellheim and Odoardo as its types. The positive and the rational religion: Anti-Goeze. Nathan. Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. Frederick's De la Litterature Allemande 265 CHAPTER VIII. THE AGE OF THE REVOLUTION AND THE CLIMAX OP INDIVIDUALISM. (The End of the Eighteenth and the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century.) I. THE STORM-AND-STRESS MOVEMENT. Its revolutionary tendencies: Lenz. H. L. Wagner. Klinger. Schubart. Maler Muller. Fr. Stolberg. Burger. Heinse. Con- xii TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE servative influences: Justus Moeser. The outcome of the movement 3 O1 II. THE CLASSICS OF INDIVIDUALISM. 1. Herder. The idea of organic development. Literature as an index of national culture. The apotheosis of humanity 3 J 8 2. Kant. The Pure Reason. The Moral Law. Latent Pantheism. The new Humanism: Wilhelm von Hum- boldt 328 3. Goethe and Schiller. Their part in the Storm-and-Stress movement: Goetz. Werther. Faust. Egmont. Die RSuber. Kabale und Liebe. Don Carlos. Goethe's maturity: Lyrics and Ballads. Iphigenie. Tasso. Wil- helm Meister. Hermann und Dorothea. The second conception of Faust. Schiller's maturity: Esthetic prose writings. Lyrics and ballads. Wallenstein. Maria Stuart. Jungfrau von Orleans. Braut von Messina. Tell. Goethe and Schiller as public characters 335 CHAPTER IX. THE ERA OF NA TIONAL RECONSTRUCTION AND THE GROWTH OF THE COLLECTIVISTIC IDEAL. (From the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century to the Revolution of 1848.) I. THE TRANSITION FROM CLASSICISM TO ROMANTICISM. Jean Paul. His sense of the unity of life. His greatness as landscape-painter; as genre-painter; as humorist. His excessive individualism. His capriciousness. His lack of form 399 II. THE DISINTEGRATION OF CLASSICISM. Early Romanticism a caricature of Classicism. Tieck's William Lovell. Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde. Novalis 412 III. THE REGENERATION OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE AND THE WARS OF LIBERATION. I. Pantheism and Socialism. Schleiermacher's Reden fiber die Religion and Monologen. Fichte's Grundziige des gegenwartigen Zeitalters and Reden an die deutsche Nation 428 2.. The Renaissance of the German Past. HOlderlin. Wack- enroder. Novaljs's Geistliche Lieder. Tieck and his TABLE OF CONTENTS. Xlll PAGE followers. August Wilhelm Schlegel. Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Gorres. The brothers Grimm 444 3. The New Poetry and the National Uprising. Kleist: Der zerbrochene Krug. Penthesilea. Ka'thchen von Heil- bronn. Kohlhaas. Hermannsschlacht. Katechismus der Deutschen. Prinz von Homburg. Uhland. The war of 1813. Korner. Arndt 467 IV. THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION. 1. The Effect of the Political Reaction upon Literature. Grillparzer. Riickert. Schopenhauer. Lenau. Platen. Immermann. Borne. Heine 495 2. The Victory of Liberalism. Goethe's old age. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and the Second Part of Faust. Hegel. Rechtsphilosophie and Philosophic der Ge- schichte. The development from 1830 to the Revolution of 1848 527 EPILOGUE. RICHARD WAGNER. THE CONTEMPORARY DRAMA 548 INDEX 563 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. GdgPh. = Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, herausgege- ben von H. Paul. Strassburg, 1891-93. GG. = K. Goedeke, Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung. Zweite Aufl., Hannover (Dresden), 1884-91. MSD. = Miillenhoff und Scherer, DenkmSler deutscher Poesie und Prosa aus dem 8. -12. Jahrhundert. Dritte Aufl., Berlin, 1892. DNL. = Deutsche National-Litteratur, herausgegeben von Joseph Kiirschner. Berlin und Stuttgart. NddLw. = Neudrucke deutscher Litteraturwerke des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, herausgegeben von W. Braune. Halle, 1882 ff. DLD. = Deutsche Litteraturdenkmale des 18. (und 19. ) Jahr- hunderts, herausgegeben von B. Seuffert (und A. Sauer). Heilbronn (Stuttgart), 1882 ff. xiv INTRODUCTION. THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN CULTURE. THE fundamental conception which underlies the follow- ing account of the development of German literature is that of a continual struggle between individualistic and collec- tivistic tendencies, between man and society, between per- sonality and tradition, between liberty and unity, between cosmopolitanism and nationality, a struggle which may be said to be the prime motive power of all human progress. The first appearance of Germanic tribes in the foreground of European history, the influx of the Northern barbarians into the decaying civilization of the Roman empire, is marked by a dissolution of all social bonds. Severed from their native soil, thrust into a world in which their ancestral faith, customs, institutions have no authority, the Teutons of the era of the Migrations experience for the first time on a grand scale the conflict between universal law and indi- vidual passion. The Germanic epic with its colossal types of heroic devotion, greed, and guilt, is the poetic embodi- ment of this tragic conflict. Out of the bloody tumult of the Migration epoch there rise gradually, from the ninth century on, the outlines of a new social order. The Carolingian monarchy, a gigantic attempt to unite the whole continent under Germanic rule, soon gives way to more limited and more natural political combinations; and by the middle of the tenth century we see for the first time a distinctly German state holding its place among, or rather above, a variety of 3 4 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. other nationalities. At the same time, the papacy, as the representative both of the Christian ideal of cosmopolitan- ism and of the Roman claim to world-dominion, extends its centralizing influence over the whole Occident, thus creat- ing a new international bond of spiritual relationship. In the fierce and prolonged struggles which, with alternating success, are waged between empire and papacy, the intellec- tual life of feudal society reaches its first climax. Under the influence of all these contrasting tendencies there grows up a literature which, though controlled exclusively by ecclesiastics, oscillates for a long time between a drastic rep- resentation of every-day reality, and ideal images of the inner life; until about the middle of the twelfth century, simultaneously with the heightening of the whole national existence brought about by the crusades, attempts are made to depict human nature in its fulness. The end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth show mediaeval society at its height. The struggle between empire and papacy now assumes its grand- est proportions and brings forth the most striking mani- festations of collective consciousness. The aristocratic principles of chivalry have been fully established, and are accepted as the foundation of public life. Allegiance to the feudal lord, to the church, to the chosen lady; a decorous be- haviour, courtliness of speech and bearing, valour, readiness for service, self-possession, gentleness, magnanimity, mode- ration; the whole galaxy of virtues suggested by the one word diu mdze (measure): these are the duties magnified by an age whose social etiquette seems to bring back in a new form the Greek ideal of Ka\OKaya$ia. In the Minnesong; in the rejuvenated and transformed Germanic epic of the Migration period; in the adaptation, through the medium of the French, of Celtic and Graeco-Roman epic traditions; .he chivalric ideal receives its supreme poetic expression. At the same time, however, there is seen in the finest repre- sentatives of chivalric culture in Walther von der Vogel- THE EPOCHS OF GERMAN CULTURE. J> veide, Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg an instinctive reaching out be- yond the limits of this culture, a divinatory anticipation of a new social order. The beginnings of this new order make themselves felt about the middle of the thirteenth century. While the empire falls a prey to sectional rivalries, while the church shows signs of internal decay, while chivalry deteriorates both economically and morally, modern freedom finds its first embodiment in the communal independence of the great commercial centres. Corporate interest, to be sure, remains even here the chief concern of life ; but -by its side, or rather within it, there develops a spirit of self-assertion, of observation, of introspection, which ultimately must turn against the corporate consciousness and destroy it. In the directness and subjectivity of the Volkslied; in the sturdy realism of the religious drama; in the glorification by the Mystics of the inner union between God and the individual soul; in the proclamation by the Humanists of the sove- reignty of the individual intellect we see different phases of that revolt against mediaeval society which culminates in the religious Reformation. The reformation begins with a grand movement for popular freedom; it ends by establishing more firmly than ever the absolutism, religious as well as political, of the ter- ritorial princes. It begins with the restoration of national unity and greatness in sight; it ends in the misery of the Thirty Years' War. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the fate of Germany seems to be sealed. Instead of the generous, broad, all-embracing mediaeval church there dominates in religious affairs a narrow, spiteful, inquisitorial sectarianism. Instead of the cultivated and public-spirited aristocracy of the Hohenstaufen period, there rules in political matters an ignorant, swaggering, depraved cavalier- dom. The proud, stately, self-asserting burgher of the palmy days of the Hanse has been transformed into a O SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. timid, cowed, official-ridden subject. Literature is degraded into a plaything for idle courtiers. The German past is effaced. Society is atomized; public life is dead. At this point there sets in a movement, the roots of which go back to Humanism and the Reformation, the climax of which is attained in the age of Kant and Goethe, the struggle for completeness of individuality. Debarred from active participation in public life, hemmed in by nar- row surroundings, out of contact with the nation at large, Germany's best men now turn all the more eagerly to the cultivation of the inner self. Reorganization of the national body through regeneration of the individual mind this now becomes the great task of literature. Pietism and Rationalism, Sentimentalism and Storm-and-Stress, Classi- cism and Romanticism, co-operate in this common task of building up and rounding out the inner life. And at the end of the eighteenth century, at the very time when the last remnants of the old German empire are swept away by the irresistible tide of the French Revolution, German cul- ture has reached a height which is best described in the words of Goethe : " Germany as a whole is nothing, the individual German is everything." And here, finally, begins the last great movement of Ger- man thought. Just as Wolfram von Eschenbach and his peers point beyond the conventions of chivalric society toward individual freedom and culture, so Goethe, Schiller, and their kin point beyond individual freedom and culture toward the common tasks of a new society. German litera- ture of the nineteenth century, while by no means discard- ing the individualism of the eighteenth, finds its highest inspiration in this new, collectivistic ideal. This is, in outline, the intellectual development which we shall now proceed to consider in detail, briefly up to the time of the Thirty Years' War, somewhat more fully from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nine- teenth century. CHAPTER I. THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. (From the Fifth to the Ninth Century.) THE period of the Migrations, introducing for the first time Germanic tribes as shapers of the destiny of Europe, forms the opening chapter in the political career ,_, of the German people. From their seats north mentsofthe and east of the Danube and the Rhine, where various tribeSl we find the Germans settled at the time of Augustus, they move, tribe after tribe, southward and westward and grad- ually overrun the greater part of the Roman empire. First, to mention only a few striking dates, the Visigoths under their heroic leader Alaric (d. 410) sweep over the Balkan peninsula, down into Greece, and through all Italy, until they finally settle in Spain. They are succeeded by the Vandals, who with equally irresistible rapidity pass through middle and southwestern Europe, cross over to Africa (429), and from there, by frequent piratical expeditions, terrorize the coasts of the Mediterranean. About the same time the Burgundians leave their seats between the Oder and the Vistula and settle in the upper Rhine valley; until, defeated in a violent conflict with Hunnish tribes (437), they abandon this new home also and move on towards the banks of the Rhone. Soon after (449), the Anglo-Saxons, hired by the Britons to assist them in their struggle against the Picts and Scots, swarm over the Channel and, having conquered the common foe, defeat and subdue their former allies. There follows the gigantic clash between the Roman world and the Hunnish invaders under Attila; and here again Ger- 7 8 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. manic tribes play an important part. Attila himself appears half Germanized, his name is Gothic, 1 at his court he re- ceives Gothic singers, Ostrogoths and Thuringians form a part of his hosts; but against him also, on the side of the Romans, there are German armies, and the great battle of Chalons (451) is won mainly through the valour of the Visi- goths. Shortly afterwards the domination of Italy passes definitely into German hands. In 476 Odoacer, a chieftain of the tribe of the Heruli, dethrones the powerless Roman emperor and assumes himself the title of patricius and king of Italy. This rule soon gives way to that of the noble tribe of the Ostrogoths, who under their great leader The- oderic and his successors not only extend their sway over the greater part of the peninsula, but also attempt to bring about a reconciliation between Germanic and Roman cul- ture and institutions; until they, in turn, succumb to the armies of the Byzantine emperor (552). Now the Lango- bards rush into the place left free by the Ostrogoths, and for two centuries (568-774) subject the people of northern Italy to an iron military rule, without, however, leaving more than a sporadic impress on the character of the van- quished country. Finally, the Franks, by overthrowing the Roman rule in Gaul and by gradually forcing the other German tribes into their allegiance, become the dominating power in Europe, and, under Charles the Great, even restore the name and supremacy of the old Roman empire. With the foundation of the Carolingian monarchy the period of the wanderings of Germanic nations may be said to have come to an end; except for the Norsemen, whose Viking expeditions continued to infest the coast districts of north- ern and western Europe throughout the ninth century, terminating only with the establishment of that Norman 1 It is a diminutive form of Goth, atta = father. Cf. J. Grimm, Gesch. der d. Spr* p. 189. 332. F. Kluge, Nominate Stammbildungs- lehre 56. THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. 9 colony on French soil (912) which was destined to be the foster-mother of English greatness. The full extent of the extraordinary revolution which these centuries of uninterrupted warfare and tumult pro- duced in the life and character of the German Effect of the race it is hard for us to appreciate at this dis- Migrations on the national tant day. But if we were to express in a word character. the main lines on which this revolution seems to have pro- ceeded, we might say that the Teutons during the period of the Migrations conquered the world at the expense of them- selves. In the time of Tacitus they were the most purely aboriginal and unadulterated nation of Europe; in the time of Charles the Great they are largely Romanized. Before they had crossed the Danube, they prayed to Wodan and Donar and Frija; having overthrown the Roman empire, they bow before the Crucified One. Once, in their native woods, they were free men; now, on foreign soil, they obey kings. It would, of course, be a mistake to see in this self- surrender of Germanic tradition and faith a loss only. Without the influx of Roman elements, without Christian- ity, without the feudal monarchy, the history of the Middle Ages would have been without its greatest glory and its greatest achievements. And even the very process of mas- tering the new form of life, the struggle between native and foreign conceptions and institutions, seems to have brought out in the character of the German invaders traits which otherwise might have remained hidden. There can be little doubt that it was this very conflict which gave rise to those manifestations of a haughty race- feeling which are so characteristic of the heroes , ,, .,. . j * i A i i Eace feelinsr, of the Migration period. As early as the begin- ning of the third century an adventurous Gothic herdboy the later emperor Maximinus found his way into the camp of a Roman army and the presence of the Roman emperor. Far from being overawed by the august surroundings, he at once enters upon a wrestling-match with one of the im- IO SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. perial body-guards, and tries to outrun the horse of the emperor himself. 2 When Alaric, before the walls of Rome, is met by a deputation of citizens, who, in order to frighten him from an attack on the city, point out to him the strength of the Roman army, he answers: 3 "Well, the thicker the grass the easier it is to mow." When the Vandal king Geiseric sets out on one of his piratic expeditions, and the pilot asks him whither he shall direct his course, the king replies: 4 "Wherever there are people with whom God is angry." Such stories, be they historically correct or not, show at least the spirit attributed to the leaders of the in- vaders by their own contemporaries; and something of the same spirit, of the same contempt for their enemies, of the same fatalistic belief in their own power and race-superiority, must have lived in the masses of the invaders also. Surely, nothing could be prouder and more defiant than the self- characterization of the Franks in the prologue of their national code, the Lex Salica* " The glorious people of the Franks, whose founder is God himself, brave in arms, firm in peace, wise in council, noble in body, radiant in health, excelling in beauty, daring, quick, hardened, . . . this is the people which shook the cruel yoke of the Romans from its neck." Alongside of this proud self-consciousness of a people brimming over with animal vigour and youthful defiance we C 'th ^ n( ^ an ec l ua ^y wonderful power of adaptation in higher civili- these German barbarians, and this faculty also is zation. stimulated by the contact with the higher civiliza- tion of Rome and the deeper thought of the Christian church. The history of the world knows few more impressive figures than Theoderic, the noble Ostrogoth, who, after having es- * Jordanes Getica ed. Th. Mommsen XV, 84 ff. 8 Zosimus 'Icrropta vea ed. Imm. Bekker V, 40. 4 Procopius De bello Vandalico ed. W. Dindorf I, 5. 8 Lex Salica ed. Merckel prol, IV., p. 93. THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. II tablished the dominion of his people in Italy with bloody hand, attempts to rule as a prince of peace over Teutons and Romans alike, protecting the weak, advancing the public prosperity, establishing a new code of law, surround- ing himself with Roman statesmen, philosophers and artists, and at the same time preserving the proud, warlike traditions of his own people. No more venerable leader is seen at the beginning of any nation's history than Ulfilas, the bishop of the Visigoths (d. 381), who, a second Moses, guiding his people through war and strife, at the same time became, through his translation of the Bible, the creator of their written language. No purer and better men have ever lived than the Anglo-Saxon missionaries, such as Willibrord (d. c. 740) and Winifred (d. 755), who, only a few gen- erations after their own nation had been won over to Christianity, set out to preach the gospel to their Ger- man brethren on the Rhine and the Weser : men sturdy in mind and body, single-minded, open-eyed, full of com- mon sense, yet unflinchingly clinging to the spiritual, ready to lay down their lives at any moment in the service of the eternal. And what hero of the world's history could be compared to the man whose towering figure stands at the end of this whole epoch : Charles the Great ? His attempt to weld the Germanic tribes into one Charles the Great, mighty nation may have been premature; his methods of spreading the Christian religion may have been crude and barbaric; his efforts, both for the renewal of classic literature and art and for the preservation of ancient Germanic poetry, may have been temporary fail- ures; yet it is not too much to say that his life-work was an anticipation of the course which German culture was to take during the next eight hundred years. His empire soon crumbled to pieces, but the idea of German unity and the memory of Germanic traditions remained alive, in spite of all that tended to obliterate them. The splendour of imperial 12 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. Aachen soon vanished, but the seeds from which was to spring the flower of mediaeval art had not been sown in vain. The fame of the imperial academy was soon forgotten, but the foundations had been laid for a system of public instruction which was to maintain throughout the Middle Ages the contact at least of the clergy with classic antiquity; and scholars like Paulus Diaconus, Einhard, and Alcuin, the emperor's most trusted advisers, must be counted among the forerunners of sixteenth-century Humanism. One may be fully sensible of these hopeful and positive features of the time, and yet find the chief characteristic of T) . . . the period of the Migrations in a complete up- of public mo- rooting of public morality, a universal overturn- rality. j n g o f inherited conceptions of right and wrong. Even if we consider the description of Germanic society by Tacitus, written about three hundred years before the Mi- grations began, as too idealistic and as, in some respects, overdrawn, there can be no doubt that the life of the Ger- mans at that time was in a singular degree surrounded and guarded by a pure tradition, that the sanctity of blood-rela- tionship, the holiness of the plighted word, the chastity of women, were with them ideals not yet to be denied without popular chastisement. And nothing could more vividly ex- press the very essence of Germanic life at that time than the famous word of the Roman historian, 8 that with the Germans good customs were more powerful than elsewhere good laws. Now this whole fabric of popular custom is broken up. In the decades, nay, centuries of perpetual fighting and wan- dering that follow, tribal traditions are effaced, the contact with the native soil is lost, family ties are severed, religious beliefs are shattered. And now there appear, as the typical 6 Tacitus Germania ed. Mullenhoff, c. 19. A masterly character- ization of primitive Germanic culture in K. Lamprecht, Deutsche Ge- schichte I, 160 ff. Cf. W. Arnold, Deutsche Urzeit -p. 187 ff. F. Dahn, Gesch. d. deutschen Urzeit I, 122 ff. For the oldest religious poetry cf. R. Koegel, Gesch. d. d. Litt. bis z. Ausg. d. MA. I, 12 ff. THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. 13 hero and heroine of the period, the man without conscience, the woman without shame, believing in nothing but them- selves, restrained by nothing but the limits of their own power, individuals cut loose from the laws of common humanity. Especially the annals of the Langobards and the Franks are stained with the record of crimes, perhaps the most atrocious and colossal in human history. The Langobard Aiboin and king Aiboin had killed in battle the king of a Bosamond. rival tribe, Kunimund. Out of the murdered man's skull he ordered a drinking-cup to be made, his daughter Rosamond he carried away captive and made her his wife. Once, at a drinking-bout in his banquet-hall, he has the cup filled with wine, and offers it to the queen. Compelled to drink, she obeys, but she feels deeply the insult to her father's memory, and resolves on revenge. She hires a mur- derer, leads him herself into the room where Aiboin is taking his noonday rest, binds the sword of the sleeping man to the bedstead, takes away his shield, and then watches him as he falls under the blows of the assassin. She marries an accomplice to the murder, Helmichis ; and both, taking with them Alboin's treasure, flee the country. But soon Rosamond's wanton desire is directed toward another lover. She gives poison to Helmichis ; but he, after putting the cup to his lips, feels what he has taken, and forces Rosamond to drink the rest of the deadly potion. 7 The whole record of Clovis, the king of the Franks, who through his alliance with the papal see won for himself and his successors the honorary title of rex chris- tianissimus, is one of broken faith and brutal per- fidy. It may suffice to relate one episode in his career, in the words of the bishop Gregory of Tours, his contemporary, and the foremost historian of the Prankish race (d. 594):" 1 Paulus Diaconus Historia Langobardorum ed. G. Waitz II, 28 f. 8 Gregorius Turonensis Historia Francorum ed. W. Arndt II, 40. 14 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. "After Clovis had made Paris his capital, he sent secret messen- gers to Cloderic, son of Sigibert, king of the Ripuarian Franks, who resided at Cologne, with these words : ' Your father is old and feeble and lame. If he were dead, his kingdom and our friendship would be yours.' This message aroused the young man's cupidity, and set him to thinking how he could do away with his father. One day the latter was hunting in the forests on the banks of the Rhine opposite Cologne ; when at noon he was lying asleep in his tent, assassins, hired by his son, fell upon him and killed him. Thereupon the son sent messengers to king Clovis, who said in Cloderic's name : ' My father is dead, and his kingdom and treasures are now mine. Send some of your people to me, and I will gladly give you whatever of my father's treasure pleases you.' Clovis answered: 'I thank you for your good will. When my envoys come, do not hesitate, I pray you, to show them all ; for I shall not take anything of your riches.' The messengers came, and Cloderic showed them the treasure of his father. Leading them to one of the chests, he said : ' In this chest my father used to keep his coins.' ' Will you not,' answered the messengers, ' reach with your hand into it down to the bottom that we may see all that is in it ? ' He did so, and as he stooped, one of the men split his skull with an axe. Clovis, at the news of Cloderic's death, hastened to Cologne, called the people to- gether, and spoke as follows : 'Listen to what has happened! While I was far from here, sailing down the Scheldt river, Cloderic, the son of my own cousin Sigibert, coveting his father's realm, made him believe that I was seeking his life. And when the old man, alarmed by this suspicion, fled, he sent assassins after him who succeeded in killing him. Thereafter Cloderic himself, while displaying his father's treasures, was likewise murdered by a man unknown to me. In all these things 1 have had no part ; for I am not so wicked as to kill my own kin. But since it has thus come to pass, I give you this advice : turn to me, that you may live securely under my protection." The people, when they heard this, applauded Clovis, lifted him on the shield, and greeted him as king." It is hardly necessary to give further proofs of the utter disintegration of moral feeling brought about by the poli- tical and social revolution of the Migration period; but it may be added that the part played by women Fredegond j n tn is shocking history of crime and perfidy and Brunhild. seems to have been even more striking than that of men. There is a touch of genuine humanity in Rosa- THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. 1 5 mond's atrocities ; for they proceeded in the first place from filial attachment and wounded pride. But one looks in vain for any redeeming weakness or virtue in such characters as the Prankish princess Austrichildis, who, dying, entreated her husband to have the attendant physi- cians beheaded after her death, 9 or the rival queens, Frede- gond and Brunhild, who involved a whole generation of Prankish princes in their own vice and villany. There is no parallel in history to the fearful death which Brunhild, by that time a white-haired matron of about seventy years, found in 613 at the hands of the enraged Prankish nobles Convicted of the murder of ten members of the Mero- vingian dynasty, she was tortured for three days, led through the camp on the back of a camel, tied to the feet of wild horses and dragged to death. Her corpse was thrown into the fire. 10 To sum up. It is a time of rapid national expansion, of radical changes in habit, in conduct, in belief ; a time full of gigantic passions, full of unscrupulous achieve- ment. The heart of the people is stirred by the sight of great individuals and mighty deeds, represent- ing those tremendous forces which are shaping the destiny of the people itself, showing in striking proportions the power of this youthful race both for good and for evil. Out of such travail great epics are born. Such a time it was when the Hindu people migrated from their peaceful settlements on the banks of the Indus south- j , v . f .1 r> The Germanic ward, to conquer the nations of the Ganges e i>ic a reflex of valley; and the poetical reflection of this era of theMigra- warfare and conquest was the great national epic * Mahabbharata. Such a time it was when the Greeks fought their way into western Asia ; and the poetical re- flection of this combat was the Homeric poetry. Now the same thing happens again ; at the entrance of modern 9 Gregorius Turonensis /. c. V, 35. 10 Liber historiae Francorum ed. B. Krusch c. 40. 1O SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. .European history, and as a poetical reflection of the time of he Migrations, stand the great epic poems of the Ger- manic peoples : creations alive with all the stir and strife of the time ; retaining an afterglow of the oldest mythical tradition, but strangely tinged with recent historical experi- ences ; representing the old Germanic idea of uprightness, devotion and fidelity, but also the loosening of all social bonds, and the rule of vile passions brought about through this age of revolt ; a grand triumphal song of world-wide victories, but also a fearful record of the reach of guilt and the tragedy of greatness. Our direct knowledge of these poems is very scanty. We know that they were sung or recited in the banquet-halls of Germanic kings, mostly by men of noble blood, Mode of re- W ^ Q themselves might have taken part in the heroic scenes which they described. The By- zantine statesman Priscus, in the narrative of his stay at the court of Attila, tells of the appearance of Gothic sing- ers at the royal table. " Towards evening," he says, 11 "they lit torches, and two barbarians, stepping in front of Attila, recited songs celebrating his victories and warlike virtues. The guests looked intently at the singers, some enjoying the poems, some inspired by the thought of their own frays ; others, however, whose bodies had become feeble, and whose impetuosity had been calmed by age, bursting into tears." Jordanes, the historian of the Ostrogoths, relates of the nobles of his own race, that, accompanied by stringed instruments, they sang the heroic deeds of their ances- tors. 12 In the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf a thane of the king is introduced, 13 a man renowned, mindful of songs, he who very many of old-time sagas, a great number remembered, 11 Cf. Historici Graeci minores ed. L. Dindorf I, 317. 12 Jordanes Getica V, 43. 18 v. 867 ff . ; Garnett's translation. THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. 1 7 riding on horseback with other warriors and singing to them of dragon-fights and the winning of ring-hoards. We know, also, or may at least infer, that the form of all of these poems once in existence was the same as that of the few preserved to us : namely, the rhymeless, alliterative verse, consisting of two half-lines, separated by a caesura, a metre whose grand, sonorous monotony was wonderfully adapted to the representation of a life of primitive heroism. But as to the subject-matter of these poems, the extent of the sagas treated in them, and the manner in which they were treated, our knowledge is for the most part based not upon these songs themselves but R e mnan t sof epic poetry, upon indirect evidence drawn from works of a much later period. It is well known that the Christian church, considering the native Germanic traditions as heathenish monstrosities, tried to suppress them in every possible way. This attempt was so successful that, al- though even a man like Charles the Great asserted his influence for the preservation and collection of ancient popular lays, 14 they had by the end of the tenth cen- tury, with a few exceptions, disappeared. And the only genuine remnants of the poetry of the Migration per- iod left to us are the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, just mentioned (end of the seventh century), a fragment of the old Low-German song of Hildebrand (c. 800), and the heroic lays of the Icelandic Edda (ninth and tenth centuries). Fortunately, however, the memory of the deeds related in the ancient songs did not die out with the songs themselves. And when in the twelfth century, ushered in by the enthusiasm of the crusades and the glorious reign of the Hohenstaufen, a new epoch of literary greatness dawned upon Germany, the old heroes of the Migration period again took hold of the popular fancy 14 Einhard Vita Karoli Magni ed. G. Waitz c. 29. 1 8 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE, and again were celebrated in epic song. Of course they did not appear in the same guise as of old : they were thor- oughly Christianized, from fierce stormy barbarians they had turned into gallant chivalrous knights; and yet it is possible to detect the old spirit even in this ew form, to recognise in these creations of the Minnesinger period the contemporaries of Attila and Theoderic. It is, then, from these later epics, in connection with the few older lays just mentioned, that we shall try to gather Combination at least a few hints of what the heroic poetry of of mythical tne Germanic peoples of the time of the Migra- and historical elements. tions seems to have been. A feature common to all, or nearly all, of these lays, which perhaps more clearly than any other brings before our mind the disinte- grating, transforming, and readjusting process forced upon the Germanic tribes during their wanderings, is, on the one hand, a strange blending of half-forgotten mythical legends with historical facts, on the other, an utter con- fusion of the historical tradition itself. Thus Theoderic the Ostrogoth, or, as the epic poets, in memory of his victory over Odoacer near Verona (489), call him, Dietrich von Bern, is taken to be a contemporary, not only of Attila, who in reality lived in the time of his father, but also of king Ermanric, who lived more than a century before him; and this Ermanric is called king of Rome, in- stead of what he really was, king of the Goths. The his- torical fact then of the conquest of Italy by the Ostrogoths is reproduced in this legendary form: Theoderic is driven from his Italian home through the evil devices of his uncle Ermanric; with a few faithful followers he finds refuge at the court of Attila, where for long years he lives as an exile; finally he gathers an army round him, returns to Italy, defeats Ermanric, and wins back his inherited kingdom. In the same way the Beowulf saga retains the memory of an actual Danish chieftain, living in the beginning of the THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. 1 9 srxth century, blended with the remnants of an ancient myth of the fight between a dragon and a godlike hero. So an old Vandal myth of a pair of divine youths, similar to that of Castor and Pollux, developed through a succession of curious interpretations and combinations into the sagas of Ortnit and Wolfdietrich, who are called kings of Lom- bardy and Constantinople ; and their legends are connected with confused recollections of the intestine wars of the Merovingian dynasty. So the sagas of Hilde, Gudrun, and Walthari, different as they are from each other in plot and scenery, the two former depicting episodes in the pirate life of the Norsemen, the latter introducing us into the conflict between Attila's hosts and the nations of western Europe, yet all three contain the same old mythical basis: the rape of a Valkyrie, the pursuit of the robber, and a violent combat ensuing from it. So, finally, the Nibelungen saga, the greatest of them all, consists of an almost inextricable web of mythical and his- torical threads intertwined. The mythical element is of Prankish origin. 16 There is a treasure upon which the gods have laid a curse; Siegfried, or, as the Norse poets call him, Sigurd wins it by killing the dragon hoarding it. There is an enchanted virgin sleeping on a mountain side surrounded by a wall of flames, to be delivered only by him who is chosen. Siegfried is the chosen one; he rides through the fiery wall, awakens Brun- hild, or, as the Norsemen also call her, Sigrdrifa, and makes her his bride. But soon he becomes the prey of demonic powers. He leaves his wife and arrives at the court of the king of the Nibelungs, the sons of darkness, who are imagined as a race living near the Rhine stream. Here, through a magic potion, he is made forgetful of Brunhild and marries the king's daughter, whose name in the later German poems is Kriemhild. The latter's brother "Cf. GdgPh. II, i,/. 25 f. 20 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. Gunther, in the Norse sources called Gunnar, hears of Brun- hild's beauty and sets out to woo her. Unable to overcome her strength, he appeals to Siegfried, and the latter, dis- guised as Gunther, conquers Brunhild for a second time. When Brunhild learns what an outrage has been done to her, she resolves on Siegfried's death. She incites the Nibelungs against him, and he is treacherously slain, his treasure being made the booty of his murderers. When Brunhild sees his corpse on the pyre, her passion for him bursts out once more; she stabs herself, and is burnt to- gether with her faithless lover. With this essentially mythical tale there were connected in course of time dim historical reminiscences of the period of the Migrations. At the beginning of this chapter was mentioned the decisive defeat which, in 437, the Bur- gundians, then settled in the upper Rhine valley, suffered in a terrible conflict with the Hunnish invaders, their king Gundicar and some twenty thousand of the tribe being killed. This king Gundicar is identified with the Gun- ther of the Siegfried saga, the Nibelungs are identified with the Burgundians, and their collision with the Huns is con- sidered as having been brought about through the latter's coveting Siegfried's treasure. But this is not enough. Although the historical Attila had nothing whatever to do with the conflict between the Huns and the Burgundians. his name also, being one of the most impressive of the time, is connected with the new form of the Nibelungen saga: he is introduced as the leader of the Huns in the destruction of Gunther's race. And finally, his wife Ildico, who is said to have murdered him, is identified with Siegfried's widow Kriemhild; and either, as in the Norse poems, appears as the avenger of the ruin of her race, the Burgundians, by killing her Hunnish husband, or, as in the later German form of the saga, marries him merely in order to take revenge, through him, on the murderers of her first husband, Sieg- fried. The last touch is added to the saga by the ap- THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. 21 pearance of the great Theoderic, who, in accordance with the majestic wisdom of his traditional character, here also takes the part of supreme judge. After the terrible struggle is over, Huns and Burgundians alike having been slaugh- tered by the thousand, the Gothic king steps up to Kriem- hild, the instigator of all this horror and bloodshed, and beheads her." Even from what has been said thus far, it must have be- come evident that the chief characteristic of the Fierceness of life portrayed in these sagas of the Migration the life por- period is fierce combativeness and reckless Germanic bravery. Let us illustrate this point somewhat epic, more fully by a few striking scenes. Hildebrand,' 7 the armourer 18 of Theoderic of Bern, has followed the latter into his exile at Attila's court. After many years' absence he sets out to ride home- ward. On his way he is met and challenged by his own son Hadubrand, who meanwhile has become a stranger to him. Hildebrand inquires from the younger man his descent and kin. He replies : " Thus told me our people, old and wise ones, who formerly lived, that Hilde- brand was my father ; I am Hadubrand. Once he went eastward, fleeing before Odoacer's wrath, with Theoderic and many of his thanes. He left in the land, helplessly sitting, his wife in the house, the child ungrown, bereft of the inheritance. Always he was at the head of the people, always fight was dearest to him. Not, I think, is he alive." 18 In the Nibelungenlied this execution is performed by Theoderic's armourer Hildebrand. 11 Cf. MSD* p. 2 ff. P. Piper, Die alleste deutsche Litter atur (DNL. I) /. 145 ff. An excellent account of the warlike aspect of early Germanic life is given by F. B. Gummere, Germanic Origins p. 226 ff. 18 About this office, its frequent mention in the Germanic sagas, and its political counterpart in the institution of the Prankish maior domus cf. Uhland, Schriften zur Gesch. d, Dichtung u. Sage I, 242-253. 22 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. Upon these words the father makes himself known, and as a token of friendship offers his son a pair of golden brace- lets on the point of his spear. But Hadubrand 1 suspects him to be a trickster, and rejects the gifts. " With the spear a man receives gifts, point against point. Thou old Hun, oversly, wishest to mislead me with thy words, wishest to smite me with thy spear. Thou art such an old man and yet designest evil. Thus told me seafaring men, westward over the Wendelsea, 19 that war took him away. Dead is Hildebrand, Heribrand's son." Now Hildebrand bewails his fate, which forces him to fight his own son; but not for a moment does he think of evading the combat. " Woe is rne, avenging God, woeful fate is near. I wandered sum- mers and winters sixty; always they placed me in the crowd of the shooters, before no walls death was brought me; now my own child shall strike me with the sword, crush me with his axe, or I become his murderer. But he would be the basest of the Eastern men who would now refuse the fight, since thou desirest strife so much. Try then the combat, which of us to-day shall loose his mail-coat, or both of these byrnies possess." So they ride against each other with their spears; then they dismount and fight with swords; finally, it seems, for the end of the lay is lost, the father kills his own offspring." Less pathetic, but perhaps for that reason all the more unmitigated in its grimness, is the Walthari saga, as it has been preserved to us in Latin by the monk Ekkehard I. of St. Gallen (c. 930)." Walthari, like Hildebrand, has for years been living at the Hunnish court, sent thither as a hostage by his father, the Visigothic king 19 The Mediterranean. * This tragic end is suggested by comparison with similar tal-s of other nations, especially Persian and Gaelic. Cf. Uhland /. c. 164 If. A happy ending in the ballad of the isth century (DNL. VII., 301 ff.). 41 Cf. Waltharius manu fortis ed. Scheffel and Holder v. 1186 ff. J. Kelle, Gesch. d. d. Lift, bis z. Mi He nrkvif>aen skamrna str. 69 ; /. c. 55. 3t Skdldskaparmfyl c. 45 ; Edda Snorra Sturlusotutr ed. Th. J6nsson p. 121. THE PERIOD OF THE MIGRATIONS. 33 events of the epoch, the destruction of the Roman empire and the adoption of Christianity by the Germanic race, are not mentioned by a single word in the whole range of this poetry. And of the frequent and strange distortions of actual history which occur in it we have had sufficient proof. And yet the Germanic epic, as well as the histori- cal annals of the time, tells its tale of the Migrations of the peoples. It speaks to us of the greed and savagery of those German adventurers who terrorized Roman cities and made Roman emperors tremble. It brings to our mind the record of many a German chieftain who, cut loose from the belief of his own ancestors and not yet firmly rooted in the new creed, plunged a whole tribe into ruin by his lust and recklessness. But it also tells us of the indomitable energy, the dauntless courage, the self-sacrificing devotion, and the deep sense of moral justice which, through all the tumult and uproar of those times, remained the priceless heritage of the German race, and which, when the floods of that great revolution had passed away, helped, under the guidance of Christian ideas, to develop a better and nobler state of national existence. CHAPTER II. THE GROWTH OF MEDIEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. (From the Ninth to the Middle of the Twelfth Century.) THE period of German history from the middle of the ninth to the middle of the twelfth century embracing the dismemberment of the universal Carolingian Consolidation of papacy and monarchy ; the growth, under the Saxon and empire. Frankish dynasties, of a distinctively German nation; the struggle, at the time of Henry IV., between church and state ; and the beginning of the crusades is an age of political organization and consolidation. The two great institutions which had emerged from the turmoil of the Migration period as the controlling forces of European life, the Roman church and the Germanic state, are now assuming a more distinct form and gradually define their spheres of influence. A remarkable contrast in the development of these two powers at once claims our attention. Ever since the western Christian church had come to The centraliz- recognise the bishop of Rome as its supreme Jjmjjjjf" hea d, the guiding principle of its policy had aval church, been centralization without regard to nation- ality. Everything conspired to make this policy suc- cessful. It proceeded from the very spirit of the Chris- tian religion, which addresses itself to all humanity and proclaims the spiritual kinship of all races. It gained powerful support from the traditional reverence of the European nations for the name of that great empire the Roman which had been the first embodiment, if not of the brotherhood, at least of the unity of humankind, 34 MEDIAEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM, 3$ and whose political aspirations, methods of government and even language were now adopted by the church, its successor. It was advocated and impersonated by a remarkable number of men of genius and enthusiasm, from St. Augustine (d. 430), who in his Civitas Dei depicted in glowing colours the joys of a spiritual existence lifted high above the barriers and distinctions of the visible world, down to pope Gregory VII. (d. 1085), who during his strug- gle with the German crown opposed to the variety of na- tional and temporal interests the supreme law of the one indivisible and all-transcendent church. It was put into practice and carried out in detail through a hierarchy of most elaborate organization and machinery, and yet, through all its manifold gradations of archbishop, bishop, canons, priests, and monks, directed by one command and given over to one service, the most formidable intellectual army which the world has seen. On the other hand, the political life of the time more and more drifted towards decentralization. To be sure, the empire founded by Charles the Great was The decentral- meant by its creator to be, in a still more direct ! f n g tenden- cies of the me- sense than the church, a continuation of the old dixval state. Roman empire. Its boundaries reached almost as far as the dominion of the church ; its claims of sovereignty were quite as universal. But this empire was rather the creation of a gigantic personality than a natural growth, and after the death of its founder (814) it soon passed away also. In its place there arose a variety of race confederations, which in course of time developed into the three leading nations of continental Europe: the German, the French, and the Italian. And even within these new national units there was no power which exercised as undisputed and general an influence as the church. As in all primitive periods, when no uniform medium of exchange has as yet been established, the state officials in the Carolingian mon- archy were paid, not in money, but by the transference of 36 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. power,-^-power over the produce of a certain tract of land, power over the property and the lives of a certain number of people. This temporary delegation of sovereign rights to crown officials the root of mediaeval feudalism in course of time became a permanent one, and by the middle of the eleventh century the principle had become fairly established that rights acquired in this way should be hereditary. The consequence was that, as contrasted with the all-pervading, uniform, impersonal authority of the church, the state of that time represented a great variety of small, secondary sovereignties, based on local tradition and personal privi- leges, loosely held together by common descent and a cer- tain degree of allegiance to the nominal source of all tem- poral sovereignty, the king. At the time of Charles the Great, church and state were in the main co-ordinated and closely allied. The emperor C fli t b an( ^ ^ e PP e > eacn i n hi s own sphere, were tween church considered as the two equal sovereigns of all and state. Christendom. They were the two fountain-heads from which the light of divine justice and mercy flowed out over all humanity ; they were the two swords, the spi- ritual and the worldly, with which the conflict of heaven against the powers of darkness was to be waged. With the decay of the Carolingian empire, however, this relation of the two powers to each other began to be disturbed. The ninth century, the period of ferment in the development of the new nationalities, is characterized by an utter lack of any domi- nating or even preponderating secular power ; this century, therefore, sees the pope as arbitrator between kings and nations, as a leading factor in European politics. There follows a reaction in the tenth century. Under the reign of the sturdy Saxon dynasty the foundations of a truly national German state are laid, and at once an attempt is made on the part of this state to reunite the German king- dom and the universal empire. Otto I. is crowned at Rome as the successor of Charles the Great (962). On the MEDIEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 37 strength of his imperial dignity he not only deposes one pope and directs the election of another : he even makes the clergy the chief instrument of the feudal organization of the German state. But this combination of the highest political and ecclesiastical authority in the hands of the German king is of short duration. In the eleventh century, during the reign of the Frankish dynasty, the untenable position of the clergy as in the service both of the pope and the emperor, of the pope as keepers of souls, of the emperor as holders of land brings about a conflict between papacy and empire (1075-1122) which plunges Germany into a fierce civil war ; stirs up the public opinion of Europe in a manner unheard of before; humiliates in turn the emperor before the pope, and the pope before the emperor, and finally ends with a compromise favourable to the papacy, by theoretically separating the spiritual and temporal functions of the clerical office, practically, however, putting the clergy under the exclusive control of the Roman bishop. About the same time the ascendency of the church reaches its climax in the great movement of the crusades, which is both the result and the cause of a most extraordinary popular outburst of religious enthusiasm, and which raises the pope to the undisputed leadership of all Europe united in a holy warfare. These, then, in a general way, were the social and intel- lectual conditions under which German literature developed during the first centuries of the Middle Ages. . , , ..... . Conflict be- On the one hand, the soaring idealism of an all- tween the embracing church, preaching, if not always prac- spiritual and tising, the abnegation of the flesh, the essential vanity of earthly things, the nothingness of human greatness ; resting on the deep-rooted belief of the human mind in the indestructibility of things spiritual, and the eternal longing of the human heart for a better world beyond the grave. On the other hand, the sturdy realism of a youthful people settling down to the practical business of the day ; turning 38 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. the glebe of a virgin soil, and at the same time constantly in arms against inner and outer foes ; taking the first steps in working out a national state, but also jealously watching over the maintenance of individual rights and privileges ; living in close communion with nature and enjoying the sights of the visible world ; pre-eminently given over to the present, to things tangible and near at hand. It will be our task to see how the literature of the time reflected these Effect of these two reat tendencies; how it gave expression, conflicts upon now to the aspirations of the church, now to literature. patriotic sentiment ; how it stood in turn for the worldly and the spiritual, the real and the ideal ; and how towards the end of the period it helped in opening the way for reconciling and combining both these principles. It cannot be denied that at the very beginning of the period there stands a work which in a singular degree is both real and ideal, national and religious ; a work reminding us, in the ruggedness of its alli- terative form and the robustness of its descriptions, of old Germanic hero-life, but at the same time, by the whole drift of its thought, pointing forward to a higher moral plane than that afforded by the epics of the preceding age : the Old-Saxon poem Heljand or The Redeemer, written about 830 at the suggestion of the emperor Ludwig the Pious, by a Saxon priest, with the avowed purpose of open- ing the obdurate ears of his countrymen to the message of Christianity. It is not too much to say that this poem, based as it is on , a Latin Harmony of the Gospels? represents the racterofthe most complete absorption of the Christian tradi- P em ' tion by the German mind, the most perfect blend- ing of Christian ideas and German forms of expression 1 Which in its turn goes back to a work of the Syrian Tatianus (second century). Cf. GdgPh. II, i, 241. For the Oki-Saxon Genesis cf. Koegel I.e. 288a ff. F. Vetter, D. neuentdeckte deutsche Bibeldichtg d. qtfn Jhdts. MEDIEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 39 before the time of Diirer. The same acclimatization of sacred history to German soil which gives to the religious paintings of the fifteenth century such a wonderful, homely charm, we find in this poem of the ninth century. Christ himself is conceived of as the ideal Germanic king. He is the ruler of the land, the folklord, the giver of rings, the leader of the armed host, bold and strong, mighty and renowned. With his twelve warlike thanes he travels over the land, from Bethlehemburg to Nazarethburg and Je- rusalemburg, everywhere pledging the people to his alle- giance. The Sermon on the Mount is given as the speech of a warrior-king before his faithful followers. 11 The people gather and place themselves around him, " silently expect- ing what the lord, the ruler, is going to reveal to them with his own words, a joy to them all." And he himself "sat and was silent and looked at them for a long time," and finally " opened his lips and spoke wise words to the men whom he had called to the thing." The marriage-feast in Cana becomes a picture of a drinking-bout in a royal ban- quet-hall, where the cup-bearers go about with bumpers and jugs filled with limpid wine, the joy of the people resounds from the benches, the warriors are revelling. 3 The air of the North Sea breathes in the description of the storm on the Lake of Tiberias. 4 "The sails hoisted the weatherwise men, and let the wind drive them into the middle of the sea. Then fearful weather came up, a storm gathered, the waves rose, darkness burst upon darkness, the sea was in uproar, wind battled with water." The scene of Christ's capture by the Jews gives an opportunity for grati- fying the Germanic love of fighting. Even here Christ appears less a martyr than a hero who, even though betrayed and forsaken, makes his enemies tremble. And hardly any situation is dwelt upon with such apparent delight as when * He 'Hand ed. Sievers v. 1279 ff. 3 Ib. v. 2006 ff. * Ib. v. 2239 ff. 40 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. "the swift warrior" Peter smites off Malchus' ear.* "Then became enraged the swift sword-thane, Simon Peter ; his wrath welled up, he could not speak a word, so deeply it grieved him that they wanted to bind the Lord. Fiercely he went, the bold thane, to stand in front of his liege lord. Not wavering was his heart nor shy his bosom. At once he drew the sword from his side and smote the foremost of the foes with full force so that Malchus was reddened with the sword's edge on the right side, his ear hewn off, his cheek gashed, blood leaped forth, welling from the wound. And the people drew back, fearing the sword-bite." There is reason to believe that two other poetical ver- / sions of biblical subjects, contemporary with thelfe/jand, of .... which, however, only fragments have been pre- Wessobrunn served to us, showed this same blending of Prayer. Christian and Germanic conceptions which is seen in the Heljand. One of these fragments, the so-called Wes- sobrunn Prayer (c. 800),' describes the creation of the world in a manner remarkably similar to the cosmogony of the Elder Edda. The other, the so-called Muspilli (c. 850),' depicts the last judgment in words which cannot fail to suggest the old Germanic idea of the conflagration of the world. 8 " The 6 Heliand v. 4865 ff. 6 It was found in a codex of the Bavarian monastery Wessobrunn, which contains among other things an exposition of the seven liberal arts, the verses on the world's creation being introduced as a speci- men of poetical diction. The beginning (MSD. I, i. Piper, /. c. p. 139) reads: "This I learned among men as the greatest of won- ders that once there was no earth nor sky nor tree nor hill nor brook nor the shining sun nor the glistening moon nor the glorious sea." compare with this Vylospq sir. 3 ; Eddalieder ed. F. J6nsson I, i. Cf., however, Kelle, Gesch. d. d. Lift, p. 75 ff. 1 This name was given to it by Schmeller, the first editor of the fragment, on account of the word muspilli = earth-destruction occur- ring in it. 8 v. 51 ff. ; MSD. I, 10, Piper /. c. p. 154. Compare Vylospfy str. 39, /. c. 7. Cf. Kogel, Gesch. d. d. Litt. I, 324 f. MEDIAEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 4! mountains take fire, not a tree remains standing on the earth, the waters run dry, the sea is swallowed up, the heavens stand ablaze, the moon falls, Midgard is aglow." These expressions, however, in the ninth century, of old Germanic conceptions and ideals in the midst of Christian surroundings, were only a remnant of a time gone by, a last offshoot, as it were, of the great Cadency of ] ' . ... . clericalism. pan-Germanic uprising which had received its final political form in the Carolingian empire. As the century passes on, bringing in its train the gradual dismemDerment of that empire and the gradual but steady growth and ex- pansion of the Roman church, literature also assumes more and more an exclusively clerical appearance. The most striking example 9 of this change in the literary taste of the time is a poetical story of Christ's otfridof life by the monk Otfrid of Weissenburg in Weissenburg. Alsace (c. 868). The very fact that Otfrid's work The Book of the Gos- pels in the Vernacular, as he calls it himself is known as the first specimen of rhymed verse in German literature, is significant of the tendency of that yme time. Otfrid's personal reason for discarding alliterative verse and adopting rhyme in its stead was his hatred of what he calls 10 " the obscene songs of the laymen," i.e., the 9 The same prevalence of Christian over Germanic conceptions which marks Otfrid's poem is found in the so-called Ludwigslied (MSD. I, 24 ff. Piper /. c. 258 ff.), a song of triumph written in 881 by a Prankish ecclesiastic to celebrate the victory, in the battle of Sau- court, of the West-Frankish king over an army of piratical Norsemen. The inroad of the Norsemen appears here as a visitation sent by God to try the king's heart ; and the Prankish army enters the battle sing- ing a Kyrie eleison. Cf. E. Dtimmler, Gesch. des ostfrank. Reiches 1 . Ill, 152 ff. Kelle/. c. p. 177. 10 Otfrid's Evangtlienbuch ed. Erdmann, praff. ad Liutbertum 5. Otfrid was a disciple of Hrabanus Maiirus, abbot of Fulda and arch- bishop of Mainz, the foremost representative of clerical learning among the Germans of the ninth century. 42 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. popular epic ballads. As these still preserved the alliter- ative measure, Otfrid could not have marked his opposi- tion to them more effectively than by introducing a poeti- cal form hallowed by the example of the great hymn-writers of the Latin church. But there can be little doubt that alliterative verse itself in the middle of the ninth century had already begun to decay, and to lose its hold upon the people at large. Limited as it was to the portrayal of a primitive, sturdy, unreflective life, it would have given way, even without Otfrid's initiative, to a poetic form better adapted to the emotional, reflective, spiritual state of mind which now was in the ascendency, and which Otfrid him- self so well represents. Nothing is more characteristic of his way of looking at things than the division of his work into five books and his justification of it. "Although," he says, 11 Absence of "there are only four gospels, I have divided epic quality. ' the narrative of Christ's life into five books, be- cause they are intended to purify our five senses. What- ever sin, through sight, srnell, touch, taste, and hearing, we are led to commit, we can purge our corruption through reading these books. Let vulgar sight be blinded, our in- ternal eye being illumined by evangelic words ; let vile hearing cease to be harmful to our heart ; let smell and taste be made susceptible to Christian sweetness ; let the touch of memory always rest on sacred lessons." Only, then, as revelations of some deeper religious truth have the phenomena of outward life any interest for Otfrid. He altogether lacks that delight in the surface of things, that sympathy with the visible world, that joy in mere being and doing, which more than anything else makes the epic poet. Consequently his descriptions of actual scenes are far in- ferior to those in the Heljand. The turning of the water into wine at the marriage-feast in Cana, which in the Saxon 11 Otfrid 45. MEDIAEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 43 poem is filled with the uproarious joy of Germanic holiday life, is introduced by Otfrid with the dry remark :" " Meanwhile the beverage gave out, and there was a lack of wine." The Sermon on the Mount, which to his predeces- sor gave an opportunity of presenting an impressive picture of a large popular gathering, Otfrid prefaces by saying : n " When the Lord saw the multitude coming together, he received them with kind eyes and went to a mountain, and when he sat down his disciples stepped up to him, as was their duty. And he opened his mouth and imparted to them the greatest of treasures." But this lack, in Otfrid, of descriptive power and epic emphasis is outweighed, on the other hand, by a sweetness and tenderness of the inner life of which the author of the Heljand knew nothing. It is in Otfrid's poem that we first meet those beauti- ful, idyllic pictures of the Annunciation, of Christ's birth, of the Chant of the Shepherds, and other scenes of the Saviour's youth, in nearly the same form in which later they became the favourite subjects of mediaeval poets, painters, and sculptors. Even the master of the Cologne altar-piece does not excel in naive gracefulness and inno- cence the description by Otfrid of Gabriel's entrance into the Virgin's chamber 14 : "There came a messenger from God, an angel from heaven, he brought to this world precious tidings. He flew the sun's path, the road of the stars, the way of the clouds to the sacred Virgin, the noble mistress, Mary herself. He went into the palace and found her in sadness, the psalm-book in her hand, singing from it, working embroidery of costly cloth. And he spoke to her reverently, as a man shall speak to a woman, a mes- senger to his mistress : ' Hail to thee, lovely maiden, beau- tiful virgin, of all women dearest to God. Do not tremble in thy heart, nor turn the colour of thy face ; thou art full of Otfrid II, 8, ii. " Ib. II, 15, 13 ft. " Ib. I, 5, 3 ff. 44 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. the grace of God. The prophets have sung of thee, blissful one, all the worlds they have turned towards thee, of old. Immaculate gem, O beautiful maiden, the dearest of mothers thou shalt be ! ' ' No poet has sung more touch- ingly than the Weissenburg monk of Mary's joy in nursing her baby. 15 " With delight she gave him her virgin's breast, not did she avoid showing that she was suckling him. Hail to the breast which Christ himself has kissed, and to the mother who spoke to him and covered him. Hail to her who rocked him and held him in her lap, who sweetly put him to sleep, and laid him beside her. Blessed she who clothed him and swaddled him and who lay in the same bed with such a child." And even the frequent symbolic interpretations which Otfrid is so fond of adding to his narrative, and which have given so much offence to his modern critics, show at least how deeply imbued this earnest soul was with spiritual problems, and how devotedly he clung to the ideals of his life. Who would, for instance, dare to ridicule the following contemplation, occasioned by the mention of the fact that the Magi returned home on a different road from that which they had travelled in search of Bethlehem 16 ? " By this journey we also are admonished to think of the return to our native land. Our native land is Paradise, the land where there is life without death, light without darkness, and eternal joy. We have left it, lost it through trespassing ; our heart's wanton desire seduced us. Now we are weeping, exiled in a foreign land. O foreign land, how hard thou art, how heavy to bear ! In sorrow live those who are away from home. I have felt it myself. No other good 1 found abroad than sadness, a woeful heart and manifold pain. So then, like the Magi, let us take another road, the path that brings us back to our own native land. That lovely path demands pure feet ; and if thou wishest to tread it, let humility live in thy heart and tru- love, for evermore. Give thyself up joyfully to abstinence ; do not listen to thy own will ; into the pureness of thy heart let not the lust 18 Otfrid I, ii, 37 ff. ' Ib. I, 18. MEDIEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 45 of the world enter ; flee the sight of present things. Lo, this is the other path. Tread the path, it will bring thee home." The tenth and the first half of the eleventh century, as was said before, are marked by an intense national move- ment: under Henry I. (912-936) an independent, Realistic cha- distinctively German kingdom is founded; Otto JJ^J^^ I. (936-973) adds to this the revived imperial tureofthe dignity; Henry III. (1039-1056) appears as the acknowledged master of Europe. But this re- turiee. newed national life bears an unmistakably ecclesiastical stamp. The monasteries, such as St. Gallen, Reichenau, Fulda, Gandersheim, are the principal seats of learning and culture ; the archbishoprics and bishoprics, such as Mainz, Trier, Koln, Metz, Speier, Constanz, Regensburg, Hildes- heim, are the main centres of commercial and political activity; the clergy are the chief support and stay of the central government, intimately connected with the every-day life of the people, in close contact with its work and its joys in field and market-place. This state of things brings about a new turn in the intellectual development and gives to the literature of the period its peculiar, double-faced appear- ance. It makes monks the biographers of kings, it opens the gates of nunneries to Ovid's Ars amandi and the realistic Roman comedy; it calls forth a numerous class of writings devoted to those very subjects from which Otfrid had turned away in holy horror: scenes of actual, present life, but couched in Latin, the language of the learned. It produces, in short, a clerical literature which, to a very large extent at least, is decidedly unclerical ; it gives place within the ranks of the clergy themselves to a reaction of the national, sensual, real, against the universal, spiritual, ideal. One of the most interesting figures at the court of Otto I. is Liudprand, bishop of Cremora, a Lombard by birth, well versed in affairs, indefatigable in diplomatic machinations and intrigues, of a passionate, ambitious, vindictive temper. In 968 he was 46 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. was sent by his master on a diplomatic mission to the Byzantine emperor, Nicephorus. This mission entirely failed; Liudprand was not even treated with a minimum of international courtesy; he was, as we should say, given the cold shoulder both by the emperor and his courtiers. On his return, he wrote a report of his stay at Constantinople which in tartness of expression, bitterness of invective, and grotesqueness of caricature ranks among the most remark- able documents of mediaeval literature. This is the description which Liudprand gives of the personal appearance of the Byzantine emperor " : " On the holy Whitsunday, in the Hall of Coronation, I was brought before Nicephorus, a man of most extraordinary appearance, a pygmy with a swollen head and small eyes like those of a mole, disfigured by a short, broad, thick grayish beard, with a neck about an inch long. His long dense hair gives him the appearance of a hog, in com- plexion he looks like an ./Ethiopian; he is one of those whom you wouldn't care to meet at midnight. Moreover, he has a puffed-up paunch, thin hips, disproportionately long shanks, and short legs. Only his feet are in good proportion. He was dressed in a precious state garment, which, however, from old age and long use was faded and had a very musty smell." And the following is the picture he draws of one of the great occasions in Byzantine court life, the solemn Pentecost procession of the emperor to the Hagia Sophia 18 : " A large crowd of merchants and other common people had gathered for the reception of Nicephorus and stood like walls on both sides of the street from the palace to the cathedral, disfigured by small thin shields and miserable-looking lances. The contemptibleness of " Liudprandi Relatio de legatione Constantinopol. ed. Dtimmler c. 3. 18 Ib. c. 9. 10. That Liudprand in spite of his Italian extraction and surroundings (cf. Wattenbach Gtschichtsquellen * I, 391) had a most pronounced Germanic race feeling is proven by his violent decla- mations against the Romans, "quos nys, Langobardi scilicet, Sax- ones, Franci, Lotharingi, Bagoarii, Suevi, Burgundiones, tanto indighamur, ut inimicos nostros commoti nil aliud contumeliarum, nisi : Romane ! dicamus." Ib. c. 12. MEDIAEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM, 47 their appearance was heightened by the fact that the larger part of this rabble, in honour of the emperor, had marched up barefoot. But even among the grandees of his court, who proceeded with him through the ranks of this barefooted populace, there was hardly any one who wore a garment which his grandfather had worn new. With gold or precious stones no one was decorated, except Nicephorus, who in his long imperial garment, made after the measure of his predecessors, looked all the more abominable. They had given me a place on a stand next to the imperial choir of singers. When he now came along like a creeping worm, the choir struck up this hymn: ' Lo ! there comes the morning star ! Lucifer is rising ! his glance is a reflection of the sunbeams ! the pale death of the Saracens ! Nicephorus the ruler ! ' Much more fittingly would they have sung something like this: 'You burned-out coal, you old hussy, you ugly ape, you goat- footed, horned faun, you shaggy, stubborn, boorish barbarian.' Thus then, puffed up by deceitful eulogies, the emperor enters the church of the Hagia Sophia." If a bishop condescended to depict events of contempo- rary history in a manner which comes near the sensationalism of modern newspaper style, one will not be sur- -^ , , . prised to find that the fiction of the time also, Ecbasis Cap- although it emanated exclusively from the cells *"*' of the monks and the cloister school-rooms, was at bottom thoroughly realistic and responded, on its part, to the popular demand for broad facts and blunt actuality. In the pre- ceding chapter the fact was mentioned that about the year 930 the monk Ekkehard I. of St. Gallen treated in Latin hex- ameter the saga of Walthari, the hero of Aquitaine, and his fight in the Vosges mountains with King Gunther and his vassals ; and it will be remembered how faithfully and with what apparent delight the translator reproduced the graphic bluntness and rugged ferocity of the old Germanic tale. 19 About the same time another monk, whose name has not been preserved to us, was led through strange personal experiences to produce the first connected animal story of German literature, the Ecbasis cuiusdam captivi. He seems 19 Supra p. 22 f. 48 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. to have been an exuberant, unruly fellow, fond of roving and outdoor sports, who naturally found it very hard to submit to the strict, monotonous discipline of the monastery. Several times he escaped from it, but was caught and forced back to the life so distasteful to him. At last, in the desolation of his heart, he took refuge in poetry and repre- sented his own unlucky escapades under the disguise of the adventures of a calf, which, left alone in the barn, while all the other cattle had been driven to pasture, finally broke loose and started in search of his mother. At least a few scenes from this poem may be selected, showing how atten- tively this monk must have listened to the sounds of nature, how deeply he must have been in sympathy with the life around him in forest and field. After sporting about in the meadows to his heart's content, the calf towards evening seeks the shelter of the woods. There he is met by the wolf, the forester, and at once taken to his den, situated under bold rocks, near a lustily flowing torrent. As it is Lenten time, the wolf has been living for months on a very light diet; vegetables, and some trout and salmon furnished him by his two servants, the urchin and the otter, being his daily food. No wonder that he welcomes the calf most cordially. He invites him to share in his supper and offers him a shelter for the night, but announces at the same time that he is to be eaten up for dinner to-morrow, orders being given to the steward to put him on the table raw, with a little salt and spicy dressing, but for heaven's sake with- out beans. 58 Things, however, turn out well for the calf. In the morning the mournful lowing of the mother cow calls the attention of the shepherd to his absence. A dog, familiar with all the highways and byways of the region, reports that last night he heard a great deal of noise in a robber's den up in the mountains. So the whole herd, the mighty bull at their head, start out to besiege the wolf's 40 Ecbasis Captivi ed. E. Voigt v. 69 ff. MEDIAEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 49 fastness, and with the assistance of the fox, who has an old grudge against him," the wolf is overcome, and the calf trots off by the side of his mother. It has often been pointed out what a remarkably active part the women of the tenth century seem to have played in politics and literature. Side by side with the influence of heroic figures of Henry I. and Otto I. stand the women in the venerable forms of Mathilda and Editha, their RosTithao'f 7 ' pious wives, and the reigns of Otto II. and Otto Gandersheim, III. bear most decided traces of the influence which two royal women, Adelheid and Theophano, exercised upon the political and intellectual life of their time. Well known is Hadwig, Duchess of Swabia, a niece of Otto the Great, a strong-minded, almost manly woman, who whiled away the loneliness of her early widowhood in the study of Greek and Latin and in intercourse with learned men, such as Ekkehard, the monk of St. Gallen." Her sister Gerbirg was abbess of the monastery of Gandersheim and likewise famous for her thorough knowledge of the ancient authors. All the more noteworthy is it, therefore, that the most refined and most highly cultured of all these women of the tenth century, Rosvitha of Gandersheim, surrounded as she was by the atmosphere of the nunnery, and filled as she was 91 The origin of the hostility between fox and wolf is related in a long digression, v. 392-1097, which indeed forms the larger half of the poem. The first comprehensive animal-epic is the Isengrimus (c. 1148). 52 Ekkehard II., tutor of the emperor Otto II., not the author of Walthariv.s. Foremost among the representatives of clerical learning in the tenth and eleventh centuries are Ekkehard's cousin Notker III., surnamed the German (d. 1022), the head of the St. Gallen cloister- school, the translator of the Psalms, of Boethius, Aristotle, and Mar- cianus Capella; Williram abbot of Ebersberg, author of a paraphrase of the Song of Solomon (c. 1065) ; the historians Widukind of Corvey {Res gestae Saxonicae, c. 967), Thietmar of Merseburg (Chronicon, 1018), Ekkehard IV. of St. Gallen (Casus S. Galli, c. 1035), Hermann of Reichenau (Chronicon, 1054), Adam of Bremen (Gesta pontificum Hammenburgensium, c. 1072), Lambert of Hersfeld (Annales, 1077). 5O SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. with a fiery enthusiasm for Christian holiness and purity, was carried away by the naturalistic current of the time, like the rest of her contemporaries. The one theme of her plays which, by the way, are the first dramatic attempts in the literatures of modern Europe is the battle of vice and virtue, the triumph of Christian martyrdom over the tempta- tions and sins of this world. But the world is not a shadowy abstraction to this maiden dramatist, as it has been and is to so many didactic and homiletic writers. It is a living being, a monster to be sure, heinous and doomed, but yet alluring and strangely human. None of her plays passes beyond the range of a dramatic sketch. Most of them con- sist only of a few scenes. There is hardly any attempt at the development of character. But it is astonishing how well Rosvitha understands with a few bold touches, with a few glaring colours, to bring before us an image of life. Here are two scenes of her Dulcitius, a play which very properly has been called a sacred farce. 23 Dulcitius, a Roman general, has, by order of the emperor Diocletian, thrown three Christian maidens into prison. Seized with wanton desire, he goes to see them at night. On approaching the prison he asks the guard : " How do the prisoners behave themselves to- night ? " Guard : " They are singing hymns. " Dulc.: " Let us go nearer." Guard : " You can hear the silvery sound of their voices from afar." Dulc.: "You stand here and keep watch with the lanterns ; I'll go and see them my- self." The next scene shows the interior of the prison with the three maidens, Agape, Irene, Chionia. Agape : " What a noise there is in front of the door ! " Irene : " The wretched Dulcitius enters." Chiona: "God be with us ! " Agape : "Amen." Chiona : " What can that clatter mean among the pots and kettles and pans in the kitchen ? " Irene : " Let us see what it is. Come let us look through 23 Cf. Die Wtrke der Hrotsvitha ed. K. A. Barack^. 180 ff. MEDIEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 5 1 the chinks of the wall." Agape : " What do you see ? " Irene: "The fool, he is out of his mind; he fancies he is embracing us." Agape: "Why, what does he do?" Irene : " He is holding the pots caressingly on his lap. Now he goes for the pans and kettles and kisses them ten- derly." Chiona : " How funny ! " Irene : " And his face and his hands and his clothes are soiled and blackened all over by his imaginary sweethearts." Chiona : " That is right : it is the colour of Satan, who possesses him." In another play, entitled Abraham, an old hermit of that name hears that his stepdaughter, after having eloped with an adventurer, is now living in abject misery. Abrahanii He at once sets out to rescue her, and finds her in a house of ill-repute. Having introduced himself under a false name, he comes to see the full depth of moral wretchedness into which the poor woman has fallen. Then throwing off his mask, he exclaims": "O my daughter, part of my soul, Maria, do you recognise the old man who with fatherly love brought you up and betrothed you to the Son of the Heavenly Ruler?" Now there ensues the following dialogue, which one would not be surprised to find in a drama of Sardou. Maria : " Woe is me ! My father and teacher Abraham it is whom I hear." Abra- ham : " What is it, child ? " M. : " Oh, misery ! " A. : " Whither has nown that sweet angelic voice which formerly was yours ? " M. : " Gone, forever gone ! " A. : " Your maiden purity, y^ur virgin modesty, where are they ? " M.: " Lost, irretrievably lost." A.: " What reward, unless you repent, is btfore you ? You that plunged wilfully from heavenly heights into the depths of hell!" M.: "Oh!" A.: "Why did you flee from me? Why did you conceal your misery from me from me who would have prayed and done penance for you?" M.: "After I had fallen a victim to sin I did not dare approach you." A.: " To sin 14 Hrotsvitha 229 ff. For the Callimachus cf. Scherer I.e. 58. 52 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. is human, to persist in sin is devilish. He who stumbles is not to be blamed, only he who neglects to rise as quickly as possible." M. (throwing herself down): "Woe is me, miserable one ! " A.: "What do you throw yourself down ? Why do you lie on the ground motionless ? Arise ! Listen to my words." As the last example of the predominance of the realistic taste in the clerical literature of the tenth and eleventh centuries a work may briefly be mentioned which has been called the first novel of modern European literature, the Ruodlieb, written by an unknown monk of the Bavarian monastery Tegernsee about 1030. Under the form of a story of love and adventure, into which we cannot here enter, this work gives us a vivid and complete picture of German life in the first half of the eleventh century." We see the king, surrounded by his vassals in ceremonious splendour; we see a most elabo- rate, somewhat heavy etiquette of courtly manners ; we see a rural population, rough and uncultivated, but full of sturdy thriftiness. We have hunting and fishing scenes, battles and diplomatic negotiations, 26 country fairs, murders, mobs, criminal proceedings, flirtations, weddings, scenes of domes- tic happiness and misfortune, hardly any feature of life remains untouched. And here again, as in the works men- tioned before, we find a carefulness of delineation, an exact- ness in reproducing outward happenings, and a realistic love of detail which is truly astonishing, and which we should hardly expect in men drawn by their calling towards the spiritual, if we did not know that by the same class of men were done those wonderfully minute and careful illumina- " Cf. Ruodlieb ed. F. Seiler, introd. p. 81. 26 One of these negotiations, /. c. p. 226 ff., is depicted so much in accordance with historical reports about a meeting between emperor Henry II. and king Robert of France, which took place in 1023, that W. v. Giesebrecht, Kaiserzeit' 1 II, 602, has felt justified to use this chapter of the Ruodlieb as a historical document. MEDIAEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 53 tions and miniatures of mediaeval manuscripts, which bring the life of the Middle Ages perhaps more vividly before our eyes than anything else can do. From the middle of the eleventh to the last decades of the twelfth century there follows a transition-period. Two events of far-reaching import stand in the fore- New impulse ground of the political interest of this epoch: gl ^ nt i 1 - f the struggle between church and state, and the through the beginning of the crusades. Both events, while investiture . ' , conflicts and raising the supremacy of the church to its highest tne crusades. pitch, at the same time set free popular forces hitherto bound. To be sure, both the crusades and the wars of investiture had their evil consequences, the former by fos- tering that spirit of aimless adventure and waste of energy which found its most characteristic type in the figure of the knight-errant, the latter by giving rise to a violent party hatred which prevented the formation of a strong national executive. But what do these evils count compared with the elevation of the whole national life, the quickening of religious feeling, the widening of the intellectual horizon, brought about by these great movements ? Whether priests should be allowed to marry; whether the king or the pope was to appoint bishops; whether the pope had the right to absolve subjects from their oath of allegiance to the king, these were questions, not of theo- logical interest, but of the most direct bearing on the every- day life of the people. And the mere putting of these questions could not fail to bring both clergy and laity into closer contact with the great problems of the day; so that it is perhaps not too much to say that the struggle between church and state at the time of Gregory VII. created public opinion in Germany, and not only in Germany but in Europe. On the other hand, however large an admixture of worldly motives there may have been in the crusade enthusiasm, it certainly cannot be denied that here, for the first time in history, we find the leading classes of Europe, 54 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. the clergy and the nobility, united in one great ideal under- taking, an undertaking which lifts even the average man into a higher sphere and kindles a flame of human brother- hood even in enemies. In short, the time of fulfilment is ripening, a time is approaching which will make the spiritual worldly and the worldly spiritual, and bring forth a literature more real than the speculative flight of Otfrid's asceticism and more ideal than the narrow sensualism of the Ruodlieb. Let us take a brief glance at the literary symptoms of this approaching reconciliation. A fact not without importance, which, however, can here be only hinted at, is the stepping into prominence, at the The Spiel- beginning of the twelfth century, of the minstrel mannsdich- poetry. When, after the period of the Migra- Both'er g^f tions, the old heroic poetry was banished from zog Ernst. the banquet-halls of kings, it took refuge with the lower people, and became the property of wandering gleemen. During the centuries of prevailing clerical litera- ture these popular singers seem to have led a very humble and, as a rule, a rather doubtful existence, ranking in the same class with jugglers and tricksters, and appealing in the main to a vulgar taste." Now the social position of these minstrels begins to be raised, they begin to regain the favour of the nobility, they begin to assume a more dig- 41 Still cruder are such poems as St. Oswald (cf. Die Spielmanns- dichtung, DNL. II, I, p. 146 ff.), Orendel (ib. 170 &.), Salman und Morolf (ib. 196 ff.), clumsy conglomerations of fantastic adventure, farcical satire, and commonplace morality. They are, however, note- worthy as testifying to the social aspirations of the gleemen of the twelfth century. In every one of these poems the gleeman (for in St. Oswald the raven takes the gleeman 's role) performs an important part, as merrymaker, as messenger, as trusty and shrewd counsellor, as indefatigable helper in need. In Salman und Morolf, king Solo- mon himself is entirely overshadowed by his versatile brother, who very fittingly has been called the ideal gleeman. Cf. W. Golther, GescA. d. d. Lift, bis z. Ausg. d. MA. p. no. MEDIEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM, 55 nified tone. And what is most significant, they treat by preference subjects which show the influence of the cru- sades. No doubt the sensational still prevails in these poems. Even in the best of them, such as Konig Rother (c. 1150) and Herzog Ernst (c. 1175), the imagination is crowded with stupendous monstrosities. King Rother on his voyage to Constantinople is accompanied by giants, one of whom is so ferocious that he must be led by a chain, while another is so abnormally strong that when he stamps his foot it goes into the ground up to his knee. 28 Duke Ernst, during his adventurous expeditions in the Orient, fights against cranes and griffins, pygmies and giants, against men so flat-footed that they use their feet as umbrellas, against others with ears so long that they cover their nakedness with them." However absurd such exaggerations appear to us, even these exotic extravagances throw light on the influx of new ideas brought about through the crusades. And in this lies the chief importance of the minstrel song as a whole. It shows that the representation of that which is near at hand and familiar does not any longer satisfy the popular taste; that men are attempting to assimilate foreign ideas; that the distant begins to exert its fantastic charm; that German literature is beginning to take flights into regions heretofore unexplored. Of still greater significance than this development of the minstrel song is a revolution which simultaneously takes place in the form and spirit of the clerical litera- , New idealism ture. It has been made sufficiently clear, it seems, in clerical that this literature although confined to Latin, Uteratnre. the language of books and of the past, as its vehicle of expression was up to this time mainly given over to a portrayal of things present and visible. Now we observe a change in both respects. The clerical writers begin to 48 Konig Rother ed. H. Riickert v. 758 ff. 942 f. 59 Herzog Ernst ed. K. Bartsch v. 2845 ff. 4114 ff. 4669 ff. 4813 ff. 56 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. adopt the German language, and at the same time they begin to imbue their writings with a larger sentiment, to evince a higher view of human life, to draw characters of a deeper meaning, to bestow less attention upon accurate description of details, and to bring out more fully the out- lines and proportions of the whole. Let us observe the manifestations of this new spirit in two poems, 30 which belong to the best productions of clerical literature in the twelfth century, and which stand fittingly at the close of this review of the preclassic period in the mediaeval litera- ture of Germany: the Rolandslied of the pfaffe Konrad (c. 1132) and the Alexander -lied of the pfaffe Lamprecht (c. 1138). A comparison of the German Rolandslied with its French model cannot but be unfavourable to the former. It alto- gether lacks that patriotic joyousness, that fiery enthusiasm for " sweet France " and her glorious heroes, which make the Chanson de Roland such an impor- tant testimony to the growth of French national feeling. 30 These two poems, however, do not stand alone. The same com- bination of the worldly and the spiritual which we observe in the Rolandslied and Alexander lied \s manifested in not a small number of clerical poems of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, of which it may suffice here to mention Ezzo's Song of Redemption (c. 1060), the Wiener Genesis (c. 1070), the Annolied (before uoo), the so-called elder Judith (c. i no), the Life of Jesus formerly ascribed to the nun Ava (c. 1120), the Kaiserchronik (c. 1150, written probably by Konrad, the author of the Rolandslied), the Amsteiner Marienleich (c. 1150), the Life of Mary by the priest Wernher (c. 1172), the legend of Pilatus (c. 1180). Cf. MSD.\ Piper, D. geistl. Dichtung d. MA., DNL. Ill ; and Spielmannsdichtung I. c. II, 2. All these poems are marked by childlike purity of feeling and simple delight in the passing show of existence, and at the same time betray a deep sense of the eternal mystery of things. On the other hand, even in the violent declama- tions of Heinrich of Melk (c. 1160, cf. H. Hildebrand, Didaktik aus d. Zt. d. Kreuzziige, DNL. IX, 69 ff.) against the world and its treacherous splendour there is a power of human passion which shows that he, too, felt himself under the spell of the world's realities. MEDIEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 57 But this lack of a strong national consciousness in the German poem we are made to forget by a religious fervour which is not of the monkish, world-abjuring type, but heroic, masculine, world-conquering. Not until our own century, when Uhland's ballads infused a new life into the old legend, has the tale of Kaiser Karl and his pala- dins received a more worthy interpretation in German literature than in the Rolandslied. As Karl Bartsch has said, 91 " the spirit of the Old Testament breathes in this poem." What a wonderful majesty is poured out over the figure of emperor Karl! When he hears of the heathenish horrors in Spain, that the Saracens venerate idols and have no fear of God, he grows very sad and beseeches the Creator of man- kind to rescue his people and to deliver heathendom from the dark night of hell. An angel appears calling upon him to go forth and fight against the reprobate. All night the emperor lies in fervent prayer; in the morning he summons his twelve paladins and tells them that they are chosen to win the crown of martyrdom, which shines as brightly as the morning star. 34 When the messengers of the Saracens, bearing a deceitful offer of submission, appear before him, they find him playing at chess. Without asking, they recog- nise him by the fiery glance of his eyes, which they can bear as little as the rays of the midday sun. Three times the chief of the ambassadors addresses him, declaring the will- ingness of his master to accept Christianity. The emperor, his head bowed down, listens silently; at last he raises his face and, as if moved by divine inspiration, breaks out in praise of the Almighty. 3 * What a truly great picture of Christian heroism is the scene of Roland's death on the battle-field of Roncesval ! After accomplishing most wonderful deeds of prowess, 31 Das Rolandslied ed. Bartsch, introd. p. 14. M Ib. v. 31 ff. 83 Ib. v. 675 ff. 58 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. mortally wounded, he sits down on the stump of a tree. A Saracen, believing him dead, steals up to him to rob him of his sword and horn. But Roland, lifting his horn, breaks it upon the helmet of the coward so that the blood leaps forth from his eyes. Then, feeling that his hour has come, he tries to destroy his dear sword Durendarte. He grasps it with both hands; ten times he dashes it against the rock, but in vain: the sword remains without notch or blemish. Now he addresses it, calls up the memory of all the deeds which it has done, of all the enemies which it has con- quered, and then bids it farewell. He takes off his gauntlet and holds it up to heaven; an angel appears and receives it. Roland commends his soul to the heavenly Father; and as he dies, the earth quivers, the thunder rolls, the sun is darkened, and the sea is swept by mighty whirlwinds. 34 If in the Rolandslied the ideal religious hero of the time of the crusades is exhibited, the author of the Alexanderlied makes at least an attempt at representing the ideal worldly hero. What strange transforma- tions the great Alexander has undergone from the time of his death to the twelfth century! Almost all the nations of southern Europe and the Orient have contributed in chang- ing him from an historical figure into a hero of legend. The Greeks saw in him a new Dionysos. The Egyptians made him the son of a fabulous magician. The Jews re- garded him as the representative of human presumptuous- ness, and told of his attempted conquest of paradise. The Byzantines made him a predecessor of their emperors, and tried to back up their claims on Italy with a fictitious Italian expedition of his. The Persians changed him into the hero of a fairy tale, who knows the hidden powers of nature and who lives entirely in a world of the incredible. All these traits we see combined in the German Alexanderlied ; and if the combination is neither very original for its author, 14 Rolandslied v. 6771 ff . MEDIAEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. 59 like the poet of the Rolandslied, worked after a French model" nor artistically altogether satisfactory, it shows at least an honest attempt to focus the manifold and di- verging rays of character, to penetrate into the mystery of genius, to look at human life from a free and elevated standpoint. We may smile at the naive way in which the poet, in order to suggest the supernatural greatness and fertility of his hero's mind, lends to his body a most fanciful mixture of animal characteristics, making him look like a wolf standing over his prey; with hair, red and shaggy, like the fins of a sea-monster or the mane of a lion; his one eye blue, like that of a dragon, the other black, like that of a griffin. 38 But we can have nothing but admiration for the truly human large-mindedness with which the same poet knows how to treat the heroic as well as the humble, the passionate as well as the gentle, the active and the con- templative, the sublime and the graceful, the gigantic and the sentimental. The description of the grief of the Per- sians over the defeat of Darius 87 is pathetic in the extreme. " When the message came into Persia that the king had been beaten, grief and sorrow were great overall the land. There was many a one that bewailed and wept over the loss of his fellow; the father wept over his child; the sister over her brother; the mother over her son; the betrothed over her lover. The boys in the streets, gathered for play, wept for their lords and masters. The infants lying in the cradle wept with their elders. Moon and sun were darkened and turned away from the terrible slaughter, Darius himself went up into 36 Cf. Lamprecht's Alexander ed. Kinzel v. 13 : Alberich von Bisinzo der brahte uns diz lit zu. er hetez in walhisken getihtet. Since only a few fragmentary lines of this poem have been pre- served to us, it is impossible to decide how far Lamprecht is indebted to it. So much is clear, that he did not follow it slavishly. Cf. Kinzel's introd. p. 29. For an analysis of the poem cf. Gervinus, Gesch. d. d. Dichtg 6 I, 334 ff. 34 Ib. v. 115 ff. Ib. v. 3346 ff. 60 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERA TURE. his hall, threw himself on the floor and longed to die. He cried : ' What does it now avail me that I ruled over many lands, conquered by my own valour? At my service there was many a land in the wide sea. There were thousands who paid me tribute and never saw me all their lives. If they only heard my name they were ready to serve me. Now I am broken and helpless, scarcely have I saved my own life. That is the way of Fortune ; she turns her wheel swiftly, and he who sits securely often falls.' " What a contrast with this is the lovely fairylike story of the flower-maidens whom Alexander, on one of his fabulous expeditions after the conflict with Darius, ' meets in a primeval forest, and whom he himself describes in the fol- lowing manner : "We found there," he says, 38 " many beautiful maidens sporting on the green lawn, a hundred thousand and more. They played and danced about, and oh how beautifully they sang! The sweet sound made me and all my heroes forget our sorrows and troubles and pains. To all of us it seemed that we had found enough of joy and riches to last all our lives, and as though sickness and death could touch us no more. What these maidens were and how they lived, I will tell you. When summer came and beautiful flowers sprang up in the green fields, they were a joy to look at in the splendour of their colours; they were round like balls and firmly closed all round. They were wonderfully large, and when they unfolded themselves, lo! there were maidens in them, beautiful and fair. Women so perfect in body and face, in arms and hands, I never saw. They were graceful and joyful, and laughed and sang. But only in the shade could they live; in the sun they wilted away at once. Early and late the forest resounded with the sweet voice of the maidens; what could be more beautiful? Their garments were grown to their bodies, red and snow- white like the flowers was their colour. When we saw them approach us, all our hearts rushed to meet them. We pitched our tents in the forest; joyfully we received the strange brides; we had more delight than ever since we were born. But oh how soon we lost our happi- ness ! Three months it lasted and twelve days, that I and my good warriors lived with our beautiful brides in the green forest near the lovely brook. But when the time was fulfilled, our joy vanished away. The flowers withered, the beautiful women died, the trees 38 Lamprecht's Alexander v. 5210 ff. MEDIAEVAL HIERARCHY AND FEUDALISM. OI shed their leaves, the brook stopped its flowing, the birds their song; grief and sorrow subdued my heart, when day after day I saw the women and the flowers pine away. And we left the forest with gloom and sadness." Alexander's own character shows a truly human mixture of fierce heroism and gentle magnanimity, and his whole careei appears to the poet as a symbol of human great- ness and human littleness. Hardly any battle-scene of the old Germanic epics is wilder and more ferocious than his fight with King Poms. 39 The two heroes rushed against each other like wild boars; the sound of their strokes was deafening, fire flashed from their helmets, and the green meadows were reddened with blood. In his combat with the Duke of Arabia/' Alexander for three days waded in blood up to his knees, and many a one was drowned in the awful torrent. In his meeting with the Scythian barba- rians, 41 who are so contented with their simple and barren existence that they beseech Alexander to give them immor- tality, his titanic nature flames up in truly awe-inspiring greatness. He declines their request by saying that this is not in his power. But when they, surprised at this, ask him why then, being only a mortal, he was making such a stir in the world, he answers: "The Supreme Power has ordained us to carry out what is in us. The sea is given over to the whirlwind to plough it up. As long as life lasts and I am master of my senses, I must bring forth what is in me. What would life be if all men in the world were like you ? " But this same man is as tender-hearted and innocent as a child. In touching words he laments the death of his enemy Darius; in the midst of his victorious march through Asia, he stops and returns home because he hears that his mother has fallen sick. And the wife of Darius he treats 8> Lamprechfs Alexander v. 4653 ff. *> Ib. v. 2144 ff. 41 2b. v. 4844 ff. 62 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. reverently and tenderly, because he thinks of his own mother. When he reaches the end of the world he is seized with melancholy ; and, repulsed from paradise, he gives up his warlike career and closes his days in works of piety and charity. His death the poet mentions with the words: "There he was forgiven." Of all things that he owned in life, only seven feet in the ground remained his." We have followed the course of German literature through three important stages of development. We have seen, at the time of the decaying Carolingian empire, lon ' the supplanting of old Germanic traditions and conceptions by an intense ascetic idealism. We have seen how, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, together with the growth of a strong national state, relying, however, on the clergy as its main organ of administration, there de- velops a clerical literature of a most outspoken, realistic character. We have seen how, towards the end of the eleventh and at the beginning of the twelfth century, under the influence of internal struggles and outward con- quest, there arises a new idealism, more human and more real than that of the Carolingian period. We shall now see how in the next period the knightly order, the leading class of the laity, steps into the place of the clergy as the main upholder and cultivator of literature, and how this class takes up the new idealistic movement begun by the clergy, and carries it to its highest perfection. 48 Lamprecht 's Alexander v. 7271 ff. CHAPTER III. THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE. (From the Middle of the Twelfth to the Middle of the Thirteenth Century.) OUR story has now reached about the year 1200. What a change in the political, religious, and social aspect of Europe has been brought about during the six hundred years leading up to this date ! Instead ^ ifflval so ~ of the surging mass of Germanic tribes flooding the face of Europe, we find the European nations firmly settled within almost the same boundaries which they oc- cupy to-day; instead of the violent conflict between pagan- ism and Christianity, we find the supremacy of the Catholic church universally acknowledged; instead of the social chaos brought about through the collision of the Roman and the Germanic world, we find a society organized under the complicated system of feudalism. Two features of this system appear to be of especial interest for us of the present day. The first is a remark- able absence of individual liberty. Only as a A bsence ^, part of the social whole has the individual in dividual lib- mediaeval society any right of existence. Politi- erty< cally he is not an independent citizen, not a representative of popular sovereignty, but only a link in the long chain of social interdependence that stretches from the emperor through dukes, counts, lords, proprietors, to the serf. As a Christian he has communion with God, not through his own individual spirit, but through the interposition of priest, bishop, archbishop, pope; not he himself, but the church 63 64 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. for him, administers the offices of grace. In the whole mediaeval organism man, as man, does not exist. But this lack of individual liberty in the feudal system is offset by a remarkable community of interest and purpose. It would be preposterous to believe that those Community of g reat institutions of empire and papacy, during the time of their highest consummation, were soulless machines, fettering the spirit of the nations; on the contrary, they were the living organs through which the European nations at that time voiced their deepest faith and their finest aspirations. It was the masses that supported the papacy; the vicar of Christ on earth was their advocate; in him they saw an incarnate expression of what the many were striving for in vain: sanctity in the flesh, spiritual perfection, an anticipation of heavenly existence. And the emperor, far from being an absolute autocrat, was thought of as the visible symbol of justice on earth. He was elected by the best and most exalted of the nation; he was pledged to be a pro- tector of the poor and weak, a promoter of God's kingdom among men. And the union of these two powers, of pope and emperor, gave assurance of the union of all Christen- dom in the struggle against the powers of darkness. Even Dante, modern man that he was in many respects, could not conceive of any private or public happiness without the unhampered influence of these two supreme powers and their well-balanced relation towards each other. 1 It cannot be said that either papacy or empire, m the period which we have now reached i.e., roughly speaking, The papacy at the ^ me ^ rom tne last q uar ter of the twelfth the time of to the middle of the thirteenth century en- tered upon any new line of thought. It was in the tenth and eleventh centuries that they created and 1 De monarchic, ed. Witte III, 16, 52 ff. Cf. F. X. Wegele, Dante Alighieri's Leben u. Werke* p. 336 ff. THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE. 65 slowly developed their ideals. Now, however, these ideals ripen into the fulness of visible perfection; now they find, if not their greatest, at least their most brilliant representa- tives and exponents. No pope has ever been in a truer sense the arbiter of Europe than the proud Innocent III. (1198-1216). The patriarch of Constantinople acknowl- edged him as his superior; the kings of Arragon, Portugal, Hungary, and even England bowed before him as their liege lord; the king of France submitted to his command in a question of his matrimonial relations; and his attitude toward the German empire Innocent has himself defined in ever-memorable words: "Even as God," he says, 3 "the creator of the universe, has placed two great lights in the firmament of the heavens, a larger one to rule over the day, a smaller one to rule over the night, in like manner has he placed in the firmament of the universal church two great offices, a larger one to rule over the souls, a lesser one to rule over the bodies: the papal and the imperial authority. And even as the moon receives its light from the sun, so the imperial power receives the splendour of its office from the papal dignity." On the other hand, no more impressive rulers have ever held the German sceptre than the princes of the Hohen- staufen dynasty. One may regret their lack of TheHohen- the highest statesmanship, their futile attempt staufen at re-establishing the absolutism of the Roman I 1 **?- Caesars, their failure to understand the meaning of the new life developing at this very time in the republican com- munities of northern Italy. But there can be no doubt that with all their faults they did much to strengthen Ger- man national feeling. It is certainly not a mere coincidence that the greatest German historian of the Middle Ages, the bishop Otto of Freising, was a biographer of Frederick s Innocentii III Regest. I, 401 (Migne, Patrol. CCXIV, 377) ; cf. Registr. de negot. Rom. imp. 32 . (/. was a ly a l an d devoted son of his country. In these courtly poems we are met by an all-absorbing sense of class and convention. Of the people we hear nothing; national matters are left out of sight; the whole world seems to have been converted into one vast opportunity for fashionable sport and sentimental love- making. There is no background to most of these poems. 44 Kudrun ed. Martin str. 1207 ff. THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALR1C CULTURE. 8$ In reading them we feel as though we were seeing a mirage. It all hangs in the air. To be sure, we meet names which originally were borne by poetical characters endowed with the fulness of national life: the heroes of the Homeric poems and of King Arthur's court. But these names in the chivalrous epics have entirely lost their native flavour. The heroes of the Trojan war have been changed into dallying, love-sighing courtiers; and King Arthur is no longer the champion of the Celtic race in its struggles with Romans and Anglo-Saxons, but the typical representative of a fan- tastic, high-flown chivalry. With his noble wife Ginevre, he resides in his castle of Caerlleon. Hundreds of brill- iant knights and of beautiful women surround him. Among them all the most distinguished are his twelve paladins, the companions of his Round Table, the most valiant of the valiant, the noblest of the noble. They are mod- elled somewhat after the paladins of Kaiser Karl; like them they lead a life of incessant combat. But the heroes of the Karl saga are champions of religion, the heroes of King Arthur are champions of etiquette; the former fight against heathendom and for the expansion of Christianity, the latter maintain the cause of social decorum. Their enemies are the uncouth and awkward, braggarts, liars, de- spisers of women, giants, dwarfs. Their charges are noble ladies, orphans, imprisoned youths, enchanted princesses. Even animals in distress attract their generous attention, and usually reward their rescuers by faithful attachment. 4 ' Some of the love-scenes in these aristocratic romances are of exquisite delicacy. Famous is the senti- ~ v \ J . Delicacy in mental picture which Heinrich von Veldeke, the portrayal in his Eneid (c. 1180), gives of the love-sick oflovei Laviniawhen she first sees the noble ^neas. 47 Her mother 48 Most renowned is the rescue of a lion from the clutches of a dragon by the gallant Iwein. Hartmann's hvein ed. E. Henrici v. 3828 ff. Cf. W. Scherer, Gesch. d. d. Lift. p. 158 ff. 41 Cf. Heinrich von Veldeke's Enetdeed. O. Behaghel v, 10031-10631. 86 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. wished her to marry the gallant Turnus. But she was quite unsusceptible to men's wooings, and when her mother, a short time before, had given her a long lecture about love, she had hardly understood her. But now, when she saw the Trojan hero, Lady Venus shot a poisoned dart at her. That gave her pain and grief enough. It wounded her heart and made her love, whether she would or not, even if she should lose her mother's good-will. She was hot and cold, she perspired and trembled, she was pale and flushed, great were her pangs. She knew nothing of the wound from which the evil came, but she was forced to think of what her mother had said to her. At last she recovered her strength and spoke wailing to herself: " Now I do not know what to do. I do not know what dazzles and bewil- ders me so. I was always hale and sound, and now I am almost dead. Who has so bound my heart, which only now was loose and free ? I fear it was the grief of which my mother spoke." All night she lies awake. In the morning her mother, seeing her pale and colourless, insists on learn- ing what ails her, and Lavinia confesses that it is love. But she is too bashful to tell the name of her loved one. All she can persuade herself to do is to write it. " Trem- blingly she smoothed the wax and began to write. E was the first letter, then N, then again E great was her anguish and pain then A and S. The mother spelled it and ex- claimed: ' Here stands Eneas ! ' ' Yes, mother dear ! ' " Most pathetic is the way in which in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival Sigune mourns her dead lover Schionatulander. She appears in the poem four times, separated by long intervals. The first time she is sitting by the roadside, tearing her hair in despair over her lover, who has just been slain. 48 The second time she is still sit- 48 Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival ed. Bartsch III, 667 ff. It is well known that Wolfram made the love of Sigune and Schionatulander the subject of a separate cycle of poems, the so-called Titurel. THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE. 8/ ting in the same place, with the embalmed body of the dead man on her lap. 49 The third time she is living as a recluse in a cell, built by her own hands, over the grave of her loved one. 50 The fourth time she is found dead, kneeling in her cell as if in prayer." And similar in its heart-stirring effu- sion is the grief of the heathen princess Jafite over the death of her husband Roaz, as described in Wirnt von Graven- berg's Wigalois ".- "She rushed upon him, pressed him with her white arms, and kissed him as though he were still living. 'Woe,' she cried, 'woe, my dear husband, now you have lost your beautiful body for my sake. But nothing shall keep me from you. I shall be yours in heaven or in hell, wherever we shall be. Where art thou now, Mach- met? In thy help I always trusted. Machmet, sweet god, I have always loved thee. To whom hast thou now left me here ? O Roaz, dear husband, you were my soul and my body, I was your heart and your wife. As your heart was mine and my will yours, so your death shall be my death.' She lifted him upon her lap, with both her arms she embraced him, her heart broke. So she lay upon him dead." It is remarkable to see what painstaking care these chival- rous poets bestow upon a correct representation of the manners and the outward paraphernalia of Convention- courtly life. Again and again we are reminded ^ lity of J . . drapery and of how this hero or that one bore himself, how landscape, he stood or sat, how he was dressed, what his complexion was, or the cut of his hair. We have most elaborate de- scriptions of castles, of weapons, of monsters, of romantic landscapes. No doubt these descriptions help to make the doings and happenings of chivalrous life more real to us ; they transport us into its social atmosphere. But it cannot be said that they add anything to the human interest of these poems. It is largely drapery and nothing more. However varied and fantastic the armours and garments of ParzivaleA. Bartsch V, 761 ff. M Jb. IX, 66 ff. 51 Ib. XVI, 517 ff. Wigalois ed. Benecke v. 7677 ff. 88 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. these lords and ladies are, almost all their faces look alike ; however wild the forests, however gorgeous the ravines, we do not hear the wind rustle in the leaves, or the water roaring in its fall. And over the unending succession of fashion- able happenings, of gallant tournaments, of love-scenes, both delicate and frivolous," of bold abductions and miracu- lous escapes, we entirely lose sight of the real forces and the true meaning of human life. The very thing which called forth this poetry also tended to kill its spirit : aristocratic exclusiveness and social correctness. It is the lasting glory of three great men to have risen Hartmann above these narrow bounds of an artificial taste, Wolfram, and thus to have raised themselves above the mass of the chivalrous epic poets as Walther von der Vogelweide stands out from the crowd of the Minne- singers : Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg." These men were far from disclaiming the ideas of chivalry ; on the contrary they were full of them. They avowedly meant to represent the perfect chivalrous life. Traces of ... conventional They even bowed not infrequently to its con- chivalry in ventional absurdities. Hartmann's two most them. . pretentious epics, Erec and Iwem, are not very different in their detail from the average romances of the knight-errant style ; they show the same superabundance of meaningless adventures, the same worship of courteous bearing, the same revelling in insignificant trifles : the bulk of a chapter in Erec, for instance, is devoted to the description of a saddle-horse." In Gottfried's Tristan the whole plot hinges on so conventional a device as a magic potion, which brings about a sudden change of char- 63 One of the most frivolous and inane of all these romances is the Lanzelet of Ulrich von Zatzikhoven (c. 1200). 64 Hartmann's principal works were written between 1190 and 1205. Gottfried's and Wolfram's poetic activity falls between 1205 and 1220. 65 Erec der Wunderare ed. F. Rech z>. 7289-7765. THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE. 89 acter, drawing together with irresistible power two persons who only a short time before were kept apart from each other by grudge and hatred. Even in Wolfram's Parzival the machinery of the central action is utterly conventional and comes dangerously near being a farce. Parzival on one of his knightly sallies gets by chance into the castle of the Holy Grail, that mysterious symbol of consummate knight- hood which forms the spiritual counterpart to the worldly perfection of King Arthur's court. Parzival was destined to be the royal high-priest of this knightly sanctuary. There is, however, a rule that only he shall actually attain to that dignity who, brought face to face with the wonders of the Grail, not knowing what it all means, asks a certain question about it. Parzival, from a misdirected sense of propriety, neglects to ask that question. He is therefore not yet worthy of the Holy Grail. Again entering upon his former life of adventure, he comes to know where he has been, what the wonders of the Grail are, and what question he ought to have asked. A second time he is brought into the presence of the sanctuary, and now, on the strength of the knowledge meanwhile acquired, he asks the required question, and it works to a charm. But how insignificant and almost trifling do these blem- ishes appear when we realize what these three men, Hart- mann, Gottfried, and Wolfram, have done for ' . . Their essen- German literature at large ! Being rooted in tial freedom chivalry, they rose above it ; representing a life from cpnven- v . .. tionality. of class prejudice and conventionality, they preached toleration and liberality ; each in his own way, consciously or unconsciously, they demonstrated the superi- ority of human feeling over the dead forms of accepted rules and dogmas. And 'thus they have created poetic characters which in their peculiar blending of conventional form with a thoroughly independent spirit mark the same phase in the development of German culture which in the plastic arts is marked by those strangely fascinating, half- $O SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. archaic, half-modern sculptures of the fully matured Ro- manesque style : above all, the portrait-statues in the cathedral of Naumburg, the saints and prophets of the golden gate at Freiberg, and the superb Sibyl of Bamberg." Hartmann's Erec and Iwein, as already intimated, stand nearest the commonplace level of approved chivalrous Hartmann's m r ality. Yet even here there is at least a con- Erec and flict between the two principal motives of chiv- Iwem. alrous conduct : honour and love. Erec, giving himself up to the joys of domestic love, comes near losing his manly vigour and his social reputation. Iwein, in a life of ambition and restless adventure, forgetting his duties to his wife, comes near losing her love. Both are saved by sore trials and womanly forbearance. Iwein, although as a literary production more finished than Erec, is, from a psychological point of view, less interesting, the only epi- sode of deeper import being the spell of insanity to which the hero for a time succumbs. But in Erec there are not a few scenes of most pathetic power. It is Erec's own wife Enite who points out to him that he is in danger of becom- ing effeminate. He rallies, and resolves to show the world that he is still worthy of knighthood. At the same time, a doubt in the confidence and faithfulness of his wife arises in him. So, in going forth to meet adventures, he compels her to accompany him, and in addition lays upon her the capricious injunction never to speak to him. The trial of husband and wife in this expedition forms the essence of the poem. Erec is everywhere victorious ; Enite con- stantly trespasses against the unnatural command of silence, especially by warning her husband of approaching dangers. Every time the cruel man makes her suffer for it ; but through his very cruelty her faithfulness and devotion are brought out all the more resplendently. The climax of the romance is reached in chapters 16 and 17. Erec undergoes 66 Cf. W. Bode, Gesfhichte der deutschen Plastik p. 39. THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE. $1 a terrible combat with two giants, in which badly healed wounds of former fights break out again. With difficulty he rides back to the place where he has left his wife ; in dismounting he faints and falls prostrate at her feet. Enite thinks him dead and gives herself up to heart-rending lamentation over her beloved husband. She wants to die and is about to throw herself on her husband's sword, when a count Oringlas of Limors appears, who, enraptured by Enite's beauty, prevents her from committing suicide. On his own horse he takes her to his castle ; Erec also, appar- ently dead, is carried thither, and placed on a bier sur- rounded with candles. Oringlas determines to marry Enite at once ; from the bier he drags her into his banquet-hall. Her loud wailings arouse Erec from his stupor. Like a ghost, wrapped in his white shroud, he appears in the hall. The company is terrified, he strikes down whomever he meets, the rest scatter in flight. Enite remains alone with her husband, who now asks and receives her forgiveness. It is, however, not in these high-flown representations of chivalry that Hartmann's art is seen at its best, but rather in the humbler sphere of legendary narrative, in ffig reffor i ug stories such as that of Gregorius, " the virtuous and Der arme sinner," who atones for heinous crimes unwit- tingly committed by retiring to a life of holy abnegation on a barren rock in the wide sea ; or that of Der arme Heinrich, the Suabian knight, who, like Job, in the midst of worldly affluence and splendour is visited by a terrible disease, who, unlike Job, abandons himself to grief and despair, but is finally healed, both bodily and mentally, through the pure faith and self-surrender of a simple peasant girl. Nowhere does Hartmann betray such a breadth of human sympathy as in this latter poem, the only one of his works which was inspired by a popular tradition of his own Suabian home." 87 Erec and Iwein are taken almost bodily from Chrestien deTroyes ; Gregorius, an ancient subject of legendary literature, is likewise copied from a French model ; the " buoch " which inspired Hartmann to Der 92 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. Nowhere does he show so clearly the liberalizing influence of Christian spirituality. And it may be doubted whether in all literature there is a finer type of naive religious devo- tion than this lovely child of the Black Forest who craves to sacrifice her life in order to save her master. How she sits at his feet while he tells her parents of his sad fate which dooms him to lifelong agony unless a pure maiden of her own free will dies for him ; how she lies awake at night weeping and grieving for the poor man, until she suddenly is overjoyed and transfigured by the thought that it is her own mission to rescue him ; how she awakens her parents and tells them of her decision ; how the parents, heart- broken, yet with wondering adoration, submit to it, because they see it is the divine spirit that is speaking through their child ; how, finally, the sight of this lovely creature joyfully offering her bosom to the deadly knife brings about a change of heart in Heinrich himself ; how he recognises his unwor- thiness to accept this offering ; how he interrupts the sacri- ficial act ; how he resolves henceforth to bear his burden without complaint and with trust in God ; how this inner transformation is followed by his delivery from disease ; and how his rescuer now becomes his wedded wife all this *" is told with such a sublime simplicity and childlikeness that even a poem like Goethe's Iphigenie appears cold and studied in comparison with it. If Hartmann von Aue tries to reconcile inclination and duty ; if he holds up symbols of a life in which " diu Wolfram's maze," i.e., a happy harmony of instinct and Pandval. reason, is the dominating rule of conduct, 69 his great contemporary Wolfram von Eschenbach strikes arme Heinrich was probably a Latin version of the legend. That Long- fellow's Golden Legend \s based on Hartmann's poem is well known. 68 Der arme Heinrich ed. Bech v. 295-3.48. 459-902. 1217-1520. Cf. Goethe's strange verdict, Tag- u. Jahreshefte i8ir, Werke Hempel, XXVII, 203. 69 In one of his lyric poems, Lieder ed. Bech 2, 15, Hartmann ex- THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE. 93 a still higher key. Indeed, with the one exception of Dante, no mediaeval poet has treated so deep and por- tentous problems as this honest, ardent, sinewy Franco- nian, whose mental physiogonomy reminds one of Diirer's famous knight riding fearlessly in the company of death and the devil. We observed the unsatisfactory and formal way in which Wolfram makes his Parzival comply with the rules of the Holy Grail. But this defect does not touch the real core of his wonderful epic. After all, the Holy Grail is only an episode, although a most important one, of the poem ; its true essence lies in the development of Parzival's character. And who will deny that in this character Wol- fram has put before us, within the forms of chivalrous life, an immortal symbol of struggling, sinning, despairing, but finally redeemed humanity ? What an inimitable picture of the vague sweet dreami- ness of boyhood is the description of Parzival's youth spent with his mother in the loneliness of the forest ! * He loves to listen to the songs of the birds. He roams about under the trees and gazes at them, his bosom swells, he runs home with tears in his eyes ; his mother asks what ails him, but he cannot tell. One day he meets some knights in the forest; he is so amazed by their shining armour that he thinks it is God, whom his mother has described to him as being brighter than day. They tell him of King Arthur's court, and in spite of his mother's warning he sets out to try his fortune in the world. Inexperienced and boyish as he is, he falls into strange errors and incurs ridicule, especially by the too literal following out of the precepts which his mother and other friends had given him. 61 But even in his follies, the chaste, unsoiled mind of the youth is proved ; the good in him, although not developed, is felt as a hidden, presses this ideal by saying : ' ' sinne machent saeldehaften man," i.e. a wise sensuousness makes a happy man. Cf. Erstes Biichlein ed. Bech v. 1269 ff. 60 Parzival ed. Bartsch III, 56 ff. " Ib. 339 ff. 1629 ff. 94 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. unspent force. This it is which opens to him the hearts of all whom he meets, which makes him a welcome guest at Arthur's court, which wins him the love and the hand of a beautiful woman, which even makes him worthy to reach the castle of the Grail without knowing it. But here he entirely misses his opportunity. 83 Biassed by social prejudice and etiquette, he does not listen to the voice of pure human sympathy, he does not ask what the strange and affecting things mean which he sees in the castle ; the whole episode passes by like a dream without leaving a trace. Returning to Arthur's court he hears what he has missed. And now, instead of blaming himself, he revolts against God. 83 "What is God ?" he exclaims. " If he were mighty, he would not allow such a mockery. I have served him as long as I have lived and could think. In future I will throw up his service. If he has hatred, I will bear hatred." So he hardens his heart, in dark despair he defies all tender feelings. That which was not to be given to him he will now obtain by force. Here the poet takes leave of Parzival for a time, con- centrating the main attention upon the worldly circle of the Round Table knights, and their main champion Gawain. Only from time to time Parzival appears as if in the dis- tance, not taking part in the action, but keeping aloof, and in gloomy despair pursuing his path. But gradually we see a change taking place in his soul. He has a succession of experiences which cannot fail to appeal to his better nature. First he meets a young maiden (the above-mentioned Sigune) living as a recluse by the grave of her slain lover. The sight of her self-sacrificing, consecrated life, and her calm, consoling words, awaken in Parzival, also, a sense of humility and a gentle hope. 84 Then, on a Good Friday morning he is accosted by an old knight, who, being on a pilgrimage with his wife and daughters, is astonished to see 6J Parzival ed. Bartsch book V. M It>. VI, 1561 ff. " Id. IX, 62 ff. THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE, 95 Parzival on such a sacred day in full armour and on horse- back. He calls up in ParzivaFs mind the memory of long- forgotten means of grace." Finally, he falls in with an old lay hermit, who, in a most tender, benevolent manner, shows him his mistakes, reveals to him the eternal wisdom, patience, and long-suffering of God, and succeeds in win- ning back his heart to a joyful view of life. 68 Now Parzival is worthy to be granted what first in the folly of inexperience he had trifled away and what he had then in vain tried to get by force. He is no longer the innocent, unconscious youth; he has passed through the hard school of life, he has doubted and despaired, but through doubt he has returned to the old certainty, to the belief of his childhood. Now he is chosen, as keeper of the Holy Grail, to become a guide for others also to the highest treasures of earthly life. 87 Wolfram is the most liberal-minded man of mediaeval Germany. Although deeply religious, he is far from being a churchman. He even has a certain weakness for the heathen. In one of his expeditions Par- ^ olfra ; m ' s . toleration, ztval meets a pagan. They fight with each other. Parzival's sword breaks, but his opponent is gen- erous enough not to take any advantage of this. In the conversation which ensues, he proves to be a half-brother of Parzival's, a son of the first, heathen wife of his father. They exchange words of friendship and affection, and the heathen man is even received into the company of the Round Table. Although intensely earnest, Wolfram is far from being ascetic. None of his contemporaries has depicted the joys of manly sport more sympathetically, none has felt more 5 Parzival ed. Bartsch 396 ff. 66 Ib. 585 ff. 61 The poem ends with a brief allusion to the legend of Lohengrin, Parzival's son, who "in the service of the Grail won praise" ; XVI, 1107 ff. Cf. K. Bartsch, Parz. als p~ychol. Epos^ Vortr. u. Aufs. p. 109 ff. 68 Il>. XV, 35 ff. g6 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE deeply the comfort of married life, none has set greater store by a strong, doughty knighthood. The ideal of Parzival's life he expresses in the words *': "des libes pris unt doch der sele pardis bejagen mit schilt und ouch mit sper" (the body's prize and the soul's para- dise conquer with shield and with spear); and when the old hermit absolves Parzival from his sins, Wolfram adds, with evident gratification, that he at the same time gave him good chivalrous advice. 70 In no poem of the Middle Ages does chivalry appear so complete and so truly human as in the Parzival. It is hard to understand fully the mental attitude of Gottfried von Strassburg. On the one hand he shows himself thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Tristan,' polite society. Courtly manners are to him a most essential part of ethics. He delights in the description of brilliant fashionable events; he even gives at times direct advice in the liberal art of etiquette; nothing seems to him more to the credit of his hero Tristan than that he knows how to quarter a deer in blamelessly correct fashion." On the other hand, he has no heart for the ideal tasks of chivalry; of Wolfram's enthusiasm for spiritual knighthood he has not a spark; the sacred rites of the church are hollow forms to him; he does not shrink from representing a judicial ordeal as mockery." He seems to have been one of those finely organized natures who see the essential inanity of all things and yet delight in the beauty of their outward aspects; a doubtful character, without respect or reverence, but a true artist, with the most delicate sense of form and a caressing sympathy for human frailties and passions. " Parzival ed. Bartsch IX, 1171 ff. A similar ideal is represented in Wolfram's Willehalm. Cf. GdgPh. II, i, 279. 70 Ib. IX, 2057 f. For Wolfram's relation to Chrestien and Kyot cf. GdgPh. II, I, p. 278 f. 71 Cf. Tristan ed. R. Bechstein V, 2786 ff. Ib. XXIV, 15737 ff - THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE. 9/ His Tristan is the most exquisitely finished portrayal in mediaeval literature of the human soul swayed by emotions. Never has the irresistible power of love been represented in a more enchanting, bewildering, intoxicating manner than in this poem. 73 Tristan has been sent by his uncle Marke, king of Kur- newal, to sue in his name for the hand of Isolt, daughter of the king of Ireland. Isolt follows him grudgingly. She entertains a twofold spite against him: for he is the slayer of Morolt, her uncle; and now he has come to take her away from her home to a foreign country and to an un- known husband. On board the ship which carries them to Kurnewal she keeps aloof from him, and when he ap- proaches her she receives him with bitter words. As for Tristan, he feels towards Isolt nothing more than the respect due to a beautiful woman, who is moreover the betrothed of his master. Through an accident, however, they both drink of a magic love-potion, and now their hearts and minds are completely changed. 74 " When the maiden and the man, Isolt and Tristan, had taken the potion, forthwith there appeared the world's unrest, Love, the hunt- ress of hearts, and stole upon their souls. Before they were aware of it, she waved her banner over them and drew them both into her power. One and united they became who had been two and divided. Isolt's hatred was gone. Love, the peacemaker, had cleansed and smoothed both their hearts so that each to the other seemed as clear as a mirror. They had only one heart: Isolt's grief was Tristan's pain, Tristan's pain was Isolt's grief; they were one in joy and in sorrow. And yet they hid it from each other. It was doubt and shame that made them do so. She felt ashamed, and so did he; she 73 Cf. K. Bartsch, Tristan u. Isolde, in Vortr. u. Aufs. p. 132 ff. For the relation of Gottfried to his French predecessor " Thomas von Britan je " ( Trist. v. 150) cf. GdgPh. II, i, 284 f. The first German poet to treat the Tristan saga was Eilhart von Oberge (c. 1170). Gottfried's Tristan, which was left unfinished, was brought to a close by Ulrich von Tiirheim (c. 1240) and Heinrich von Freiberg (c. 1300). 14 Tristan ed. Bechstein XVI, 11711 ff. 98 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. doubted him, he doubted her. Though blindly their hearts' desire drew them towards one goal, yet they both dreaded the first step. When Tristan felt the touch of Love, he said to himself : ' No, Tristan, turn away, recollect yourself, put it out of your mind.' He battled against his will, he desired against his desire, he wished to flee and was arrested. He turned to Honour and Faith for help, but at once Love attacked him and brought him back to her. Honour and Faith pressed upon him, but Love pressed still harder. Of ten, as prisoners are wont to do, did he think of escape. 'Look after others,' he said to himself, ' let your desire wander and love who may be loved.' But the snare held him fast, and when he probed his heart to find a change in it, he found in it Love and Isolt. Even so it fared with Isolt. She, also, struggled like a bird in the lime, she felt her senses sink, she tried to lift herself up, but she was held back and drawn down- ward. She turned hither and thither, with hands and feet she strove, but all the more her hands and feet sank into the blind sweetness of Love and Tristan. Shame turned her eyes away from him, but Love drew her heart back to him. Shame and maiden battled against Love and man. But as it is said that Shame and maiden do not live long, so here also they soon surrendered; and Isolt, yielding to Love, let her glances and her heart rest upon Tristan." From this time on they both seem to have lost all moral responsibility. They are driven about like wrecks on the sea of passion, they trespass all human and divine law. Even before they reach Kurnewal they have sinned, and when Isolt becomes Marke's wife she has already broken her plight. Hardly an attempt is made at hushing the matter. Even at Marke's court Tristan and Isolt find constant opportunity to see each other and to continue their criminal relation. Marke constantly suspects, and is constantly deceived; and the poet, although seeming to disapprove of the immorality of all this, at heart evidently delights in the ever-new tricks and devices which the lovers find for gratifying their fatal desire. At last Tristan is exiled. He enters upon a new life of adventure and struggle; he again falls victim to his passion by losing his heart to another Isolt who reminds him of his first love. A new conflict arises in his soul; his old and his new love THE HEIGHT OF CHIVALRIC CULTURE. 99 struggle with each other; self-reproach and gloomy fore- bodings take hold of him. Here the poem breaks off. But we may assume that it was the intention of the poet to let the hero die in the midst of his moral agonies, his feelings exhausted, his heart broken. In Gottfried von Strassburg we see the dissolution of chivalric society. Passion overleaps all the barriers of social custom and moral law. An elemental instinct breaks down the rules of tradition and accepted respectability. As in the poetry of the Migration period, the individual appears again as its own centre, its own guiding star, its own ruin. The ideals of mediaeval life have lost their meaning. 75 We shall see, in the chapter following, the growth of a new life, the appearance of a new social spirit : the rise of the middle classes, and the first advancing steps of modern Democracy. 15 Cf. for the whole subject of this chapter, K. Lamprecht I.e. Ill, 204-253. CHAPTER IV. THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. (From the Middle of the Thirteenth to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century.) THE middle of the thirteenth century marks the transition from mediaeval to modern life. The two great institutions which had controlled European society ever since the time of Charles the Great, empire and D ,. f papacy, were now showing unmistakable signs pireand of decay. The downfall of the Hohenstaufen papacy. dynasty (1268) put an end to German predomi- nance in Europe. The imperial dignity, divested of national import, became a mere party name and a pretext for sec- tional aspirations. Nothing is more significant of the utter dissolution of national unity in Germany during the follow- ing centuries than that in 1347, at a time when Paris and London had for generations been the acknowledged centres of French and English political life, the seat of the German government was transferred for more than fifty years tt; Prague, the capital of a territory un-German in population and until then hardly connected with the political system of the German empire. During the whole period from Rudolf von Habsburg (d. 1291) to Maximilian I. (d. 1519) there appeared not a single ruler who succeeded in enforc- ing the most ordinary right and performing the most ordinary duty of government: the levying of taxes and the maintenance of public order. Less apparent, but all the more significant, were the symptoms of decay threatening the very root of the ecclesi- 100 THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. IOI astical system of the time. Never, to be sure, was the out- ward condition of the church more flourishing than in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Never did monasti- cism exert such an omnipresent influence upon all classes of the people as in the period following the foundation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders (beginning of the thirteenth century). Never was the Christian doctrine ex- pounded and defended by more learned or zealous men than the great scholastic writers of the thirteenth century: Albert of Cologne (d. 1280), Thomas of Aquino (d. 1274), Duns Scotus (d. 1308). Never did Christian art bring forth more perfect embodiments of Christian ideals than the wonderful cathedrals which during the same century rose in Amiens, Cologne, and Canterbury. But all this outward splendour and activity could not cover up the fact that the most advanced minds of the age, at any rate, were beginning to fall away from a religious system which regarded the pope as not only the infallible inter- preter of eternal truth, but also the keeper of supreme temporal power. In Italy, Dante, the forerunner of Humanism, raised the cry of indignant protest against the degradation of divine offices to human ends, 1 upholding at the same time the divine origin and essential indepen- dence of the temporal state. 2 In France king Philip the Fair called up his people against the attempts of the pope to interfere with the internal affairs of the nation, and public opinion rallied solidly around the standard of the crown. In Germany the violent struggle between church and state during the reign of Ludwig of Bavaria led (in 1338) to a solemn declaration by the assembled princes that the election by the princes, not the papal consecra- tion, was the source of imperial power. In England the 1 Cf., e.g.. Inferno XIX, 115. * This is the central thought of his treatise De monarchia ; cf. es- pecially III, 13-15 ed. Witte. 102 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE, bold accusations of Wycliffe (1324-84) against Romish corruption and usurpation were re-echoed at least among the learned, and were upheld by Parliament. And not long after, the spirit of revolt against mediaeval hierarchy found its first great martyr and hero in Johannes Hus (d. 1415)- While thus the main supports of mediaeval life were gradually crumbling away, there arose at the same time two forces destined to become the chief instruments The new polit- Q f a new c j v iii za tion: the sovereign power of ical powers, .... . . ... the territorial princes and the communal inde- pendence of the cities. Paradoxical as it may seem, both these forces combined to prepare the way for modern de- mocracy, the princes by levelling down, the cities by level- ling up; the former by forcing their subjects into equality, the latter by opening their gates to liberty, both by intro- ducing a new social factor: the middle classes. It was the territorial princes who broke up the feudal state. Their claims of sovereignty did not, like those of the emperor, rest upon a personal relation of The territorial allegiance, but upon the hereditary transmission pnnces. . of a public office. And the history of the four- teenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries is a record of one continuous and finally successful effort on the part of the princes to assert the supreme power of such office against the conflicting interests of all classes, the clergy and the nobility as well as the bourgeoisie. Many time-honoured rights were crushed in this struggle, many well-founded privileges were trampled into the ground; and yet k is impossible not to see that without this demolition of medi- aeval institutions and class distinctions the structure of the modern state could not have been established. And it ought not to be forgotten that it was the princes who dur- ing the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries founded most of the universities which to-day are the pride of Germany; that it was they who in the sixteenth century saved the THE RISE OP THE MIDDLE CLASSES. IO3 religious Reformation from being smothered in party hatred and fanaticism. The whole history of the German cities from the tenth to the fifteenth century is a succession of stages of emanci- pation. From settlements of artisans employed by the bishop and living around the bishop's castle, they had in course of time changed into independent communities of free citizens, making and executing their own laws, electing their own magistrates, ranking with the princes and barons as one of the great estates of the empire, upholding the honour of the common fatherland at home and abroad at a time when the central government had become decrepit and powerless. An animated description from the pen of the Italian cardinal Enea Silvio, who visited Germany in 1458, gives us a picture of the material prosperity of the German cities in the fifteenth century. ''We say frankly," he declares, 3 "never has Germany been richer, never more resplendent than to-day. Nothing more magnificent or beautiful can be found in all Europe than Cologne with its wonderful churches, city halls, towers and palaces, its stately burghers, its noble stream, its fer- tile cornfields." And equally beautiful are Mainz, Worms ( Speier, Basel, Bern. ' Some of the houses of Strassburg citizens are so proud and costly that no king would disdain to live in them. Certainly the kings of Scotland would be glad if they were housed as well as the moderately well-to-do burghers of NUrnberg. Augsburg is not surpassed in riches by any city in the world; Vienna has some palaces and churches which even Italy may envy." It would be hard to overrate the social importance of this outward prosperity of the German cities in the later Middle Ages, spreading as it did over a large geographical area, and affording comfort s Aeneas Sylvius De ritu, situ, moribus ft conditione Germaniae, Opera ed. Hopperus, Basileae 1571, p. 1052-55. Cf. H. Janitschek, Geschlchle d. deutschen Malerei p. 225. IO4 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. to a class of people who during the height of chivalrous culture were still confined to the hard struggle for bare existence. But even more important than this prosperity itself is the fact that it was the fruit of a long-sustained fight for independence. It seems like an embodiment of the very spirit of this fight when Eike von Repgow in his Sachsenspiegel (1230) says 4 : "Servitude is against God's will. It has its origin in constraint, imprisonment, and illegitimate force, which in times of old were introduced by usurpation, and which now are held up to us as right." The very consciousness of having fought for their existence gave to the German cities that character of intellectual sturdi- ness and fearlessness which made them the principal seats of the Mystic movement, which opened their gates to Hu- manism, which rendered them the firmest allies of Luther. The literature which corresponds to this changed state of affairs is at first sight somewhat disappointing, and seems to offer little to attract the attention of the student The new lite- of ii terary history. The heroic grandeur of the rature. . - . national epics, the aristocratic noblesse of the Minnesong, the dignity and grace of the court romances, are now things of the past. Their place is taken by produc- tions which reveal depth rather than beauty, truthfulness rather than wealth of imagination, common-sense rather than genius. One generation at the point of transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth century had produced Hartmann, Wolfram, Gottfried, Walther von der Vogelweide, the singers of the Nibelungenlied and of Gudrun ; now there follow three centuries without a poet whose name is counted among the great names of history. 4 Sachsenspiegel ed. Homeyer, Landr. Ill, 42. The same spirit of civic independence permeates the city chronicles of the time, such as those of Strassburg by Fritsche Closener (1362) and Jacob Twinger von Ko'nigshofen (1415), Konrad Justinger's Chronik von Bern (1420). Cf. for this whole subject K. Lamprecht I.e. IV, 211-303. THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. 1 05 And yet these same centuries, far from being a waste in the development of German civilization, belong to the most fruitful epochs which the history of the German mind has ever seen. If they have given us no Individualism, Wolfram, they prepared the way for a Diirer ; if they produced no Nibelungenlied, they brought forth a prose literature of marvellous wealth and power. If they fell behind the time of the crusades in explosive enthusi- asm and chivalrous devotion, they brought to life a prin- ciple without which there would have been no Luther, no Lessing, no Kant, no Goethe, in short no modern life: the principle of individualism. It would of course be a mistake to attach to the word individualism, when applied to the fourteenth century, the same fulness of meaning which it has for us of the present day. No mediaeval man ever thought of himself as a per- fectly independent being founded only on himself, or with- out a most direct and definite relation to some larger organism, be it empire, church, city, or guild. No mediae- val man ever seriously doubted that the institutions within which he lived were divinely established ordinances, far superior and quite inaccessible to his own individual reason and judgment. No mediaeval man would ever have ad- mitted that he conceived nature to be other than the crea- tion of an extramundane God, destined to glorify its creator and to please the eye of man. It was reserved for the eighteenth century to draw the last consequences of indi- vidualism; to see in man, in each individual man, an inde- pendent and complete entity; to derive the origin of state, church, and society from the spontaneous action of these independent individuals; and to consider nature as a sys- tem of forces sufficient unto themselves. When we speak of individualism in the declining centuries of the Middle Ages, we mean by it that these centuries initiated the move- ment which the eighteenth century brought to a climax. Now, for the first time since the decay of classic literature, IO6 SOCIAL fOACES IN" GERMAN LJTE/tATl'AE. people at large began to give way to emotional introspec- tion; now for the first time they dared to throw off the disguises of rank and station and lay bare the human heart which is hidden under it all. Now for the first time popu- lar criticism lifted its head and attacked, if not the existing order of things itself, at least its evils and abuses. And now for the first time men were seized by a common im- pulse to reproduce the reality of nature in its thousandfold manifestations, and to enter into the mysterious affinity of its life with ours. It cannot be denied that the first traces of this movement are to be seen in the very climax of the preceding literary epoch. The AriMungrnlied abounds in scenes of wonder- ful realistic power. Hartmann, Wolfram, Gottfried, al- though they give a consummate expression to the ideals of chivalry, at the same time demonstrate, each in his own way, the superiority of human feeling over social conven- tions. Walther is quite as unrestrained in revealing his own personal emotions as he is bold in his attacks against the church and the princes. And one need only to think of the humane refinement preached in the Wdstker Cast by Thomas in von Zirclaria (1216), of Freidank's passionate declamations against Romish corruption (about 1230), of the graphic descriptions of peasant life by Neidhart von Reuenthal (d. about 1 240), of the moral enthusiasm revealed in the poetry of Rein mar von Zweter (d. about 1250), of the sympathetic view of burgherdom taken in The Good Gerhard by Rudolf von Ems (d. 1254), of the intense spirit- uality displayed in The Wh poet Willem (c. 1250), and thence to the Low German Reinke (1498), cf. GdgPh. II, i, 262.462 f. THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES, 12$ One of the earliest works of this kind, Der Pfaffe Amis, a collection of tales, written about 1230 by an Austrian poet named Strieker, is noteworthy as an attempt to draw the character of a clerical swindler. Of the manner in which this design is carried out the following episode in the impostor's career may serve as an illustration. 38 Conceal- ing his clerical character, he introduces himself to T". Pfaffe the prior of a monastery as a simple, unlearned business-man. Appointed manager of the worldly affairs of the monastery, he displays remarkable executive capacity and wins the favour and confidence of the prior. One day he announces that he has had a vision : an angel has appeared before him and summoned him to conduct mass. He is in great perplexity about it ; for how could he, an ignorant, uneducated layman, who has never looked into a book, read Latin ? The prior encourages him to try. They lock them- selves up in the church. Amis (the name of the impostor) is put into priestly garments, he steps before the altar, and lo and behold, he sings the mass from beginning to end most fluently and impressively. The prior is amazed and overjoyed : he has discovered a saint ! He spreads his fame abroad ; from all parts of the country people flock to the monastery, bringing large offerings of silver and gold. One fine morning the saint is gone, and the silver and gold with him. About the same time, probably towards 1250, a Bavarian poet, Wernher " the Gardener," wrote the story of Meier Helmbrecht, a young farmer, who, despising the jf e i er Helm- honest modesty of his father's home, embraces Iweoht. court life, associates with a robber knight, becomes a high- wayman himself, and is finally hung by enraged peasants. The scene where, on one of his plundering expeditions, he revisits his home for the first time since he left it against 38 Cf. c. 10, Die Messe; Erzahlungen u. Schwdnke d. MA. ed. Lam- bel/. 67 ff. 124 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. his father's warning and wishes, is a masterpiece of minute and terse characterization 3 ': " When Helmbrecht rode up to his father's house, all the inmates ran to the gate, and the servants called out, not ' Welcome, Helm- brecht ' that they did not dare to do but : ' Our young lord, be graciously welcome.' He answered in the Saxon dialect: ' Suster- kindeken, got late iuch immer saelic sin.' His sister ran up to him and embraced him, but he said to her, 'Gratia vester. ' Last of all came the old folks rather slowly, and embraced him affectionately ; but he said to his father in French, ' Deu sal,' and to his mother in Bohemian, ' Dobra ytra." Father and mother looked at each other, and the mother said to her husband : ' My lord, our senses have been bewildered, it is not our child, it is a Bohemian.' The father cried out : ' It is a Frenchman, it is not my son, whom I commended to God.' And his sister Gotelint said : ' It is not your son, to me he spoke in Latin, it must be a monk.' And the servant said : ' What I heard of him made me think he came from Saxony or Brabant ; he said Susterkindekin, he surely is a Saxon.' Then the old farmer said with direct simplicity : ' Is it you, my son, Helmbrecht ? Honour your mother and me, say a word in German, and I myself will groom your horse, I, and not my servant.' ' Ey waz sakent ir, gebure- kin?' answered the son. ' Min parit sol dehein geburik man zvvare nimmer gripen an.' ('Eh, what are you talking of, peasant? My horse, forsooth, no peasant shall dare to touch.') The old man was grieved and frightened, but again said : ' Are you Helmbrecht, my son? Then will I roast you a chicken this very night. But if you are a stranger, a Bohemian, or a Wendish man, then I have no shelter for you. If you are a Saxon or a Brabanter you must look out your- self for a meal, from me you shall have nothing, even though the night lasted a whole year. If you are a lord I have no beer or wine for you, go and find it with the lords.' Meanwhile it had grown late, and the boy knew there was no shelter for him in the neighbour- hood, so at last he said : ' Yes, I am he, I am Helmbrecht ; once I was your son and servant.' 'Then tell me the names of my four oxen ! ' ' Ouwer, Raeme, Erge, Sunne ; I have often cracked my whip over them, they are the best oxen in the world ; will you now receive me ? ' And the father cried out : ' Door and gate, chamber and closet, all shall be open to you ! ' ' *' Meier Helmbrecht v. 697 ff. ; ib. p. 163 ff. THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. 32$ Some fifty years after Wernher had drawn this tragic picture from Bavarian peasant life a Bamberg schoolmaster, Hugo of Trimberg, composed a vast didactic poem, en- titled Der Rentier (1300), in which he attempted ^ c of Trim - to give a view of the universe as it presented itself to him from behind the windows of his cloistered study. And here again, in the midst of long-winded reflec- tions about heaven and earth, about the nature of beast and man, about virtues and vices, we find descriptions of actual life so forcible, so wholesome and unaffected, that we may feel tempted to apply to this moralising poet what the Lim- burg Chronicle under the year 1380 says of Master Wilhelm of Koln, the first great German painter 4 : " He knew how to paint any man of whatever form as though he were alive." The following parable 41 of the mule who tries to hide his plebeian origin shows the democratic spirit which pervades all of these scenes. When the lion had been elected king of the animals he commanded all the beasts, great and small, to come before him and tell him their names. With the rest the mule came to the gathering. Said the king : " Tell me, what is your name ?" The mule answered : " Sire, do you know the horse of the knight who resides at Bacharach and is called Sir Toldnir ? Believe me, that same horse is my uncle ; that same horse and my mother fed from the same manger and were born of the same mother." The king waxed angry and said : " As yet, it is not known to me what was your father's name." The mule answered : " Sire, did your path ever lead you by the town of Bruns- wick ? Sire, there stands a young colt well kept and groomed. He belongs to the lord of the land, and is my uncle, as I have heard from my mother." The king said : 40 Limburger Chronik ed. Wyss p. 75. 41 Cf. F. Vetter, Lehrhafte Litt. d. 14. u. \$.Jhdts, DNL. XII, i,p. 258 ff. 126 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. " However noble your uncles are, however noble your mother may be, as yet I do not know who you are yourself, unless you tell me who your father is." Then the mule was silent. But the fox, who stood near by, said : " Sire, do you know the donkey whom the baker owns at Wesel, out yonder towards the field ? Know that selfsame donkey is his father. Himself he is called mule, and he is four times my superior in strength and size. But I should not care to exchange my state with his patched-up nobility. His father, of whom he did not wish to speak, is far more worthy than any of his uncles. For faithfulness and sim- plicity dwell in him, and he supports himself by honest toil and to no one does he any harm. Sire, I speak the truth." Said the king : " You are right." About thirty years later than this poetic encyclopaedia of Hugo's is the Edelstein of the Bernese friar Ulrich Boner , a collection of parables and fables in- ' * Ulrich Boner. . .. tended, as the title indicates, to serve as a talisman against the evils and errors of the world. To what lengths of realistic frankness not to say coarseness the fourteenth century would go in its protest against chivalric conventions is illustrated, among other parables of this col- lection, by the tale of the fever and the flea. 13 One day the fever met the flea. Both had had a terrible night, and told their woes to each other. The flea said : "I'm nearly dead of hunger. Last night I went to a convent hoping for a good supper. But how sadly was I mistaken. I jumped upon a high bed, beautifully upholstered and richly decked out. It was that of the abbess, a very fine lady. When in the evening she went to bed, she noticed me at once, and cried : ' Irmentraut, where are you ? come ! bring the candle, quick ! ' I skipped off before the girl came, and when the light was out again I went back to the same place as before. Again she called, again I skipped off. And so Vetter /. c.p. 28 ff. THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. 12J it went all night long, and now you see I am completely tired out. Would to God that I had better luck." The fever said : " Well, don't think that I fared much better. I went to a working-woman last night. When she noticed that I was shaking her, she sat down, brewed herself a strong broth and ate it, after which she poured a pailful of water down her throat. Then she went to work to wash a lot of linen that she had standing in a tub ; and she kept it up nearly all night long. I never spent such an uncom- fortable night. At early dawn she put the tub on her head and carried it off to a brook to rinse the washing. Then I had enough of her and ran away." The two now agree to change places the next night. The fever visits the abbess, the flea goes to the washerwoman's, and both have a very satisfactory time of it. For the abbess has herself warmly covered up and treated to all sorts of delicacies, which of course makes the fever stay with her for weeks ; and the washerwoman is so tired with her day's work that she im- mediately drops off and sleeps all night without even sus- pecting that anything is wrong. In order to convince ourselves that the tendency to realis- tic portrayal of life which is manifested in these specimens of poetic narrative from the thirteenth and four- R ea ii sm i n teenth centuries had by no means abated by the fifteenth-cen- beginning of the sixteenth, we need only to SVstoric'al glance at some of the representative works of significance, the decades immediately preceding the religious Reforma- tion, such as Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (1494), Reinke de Vos (1498), Thomas Murner's Narrenbeschworung (1512) and Gauchmatt (Fools' Meadow, 1514), or the popular prose tale of Till Eulenspiegel (1515)." Here we find 48 Cf., e.g., Narrensch. (DNL. XVI) c. 62 " Von nachts hofieren " ; fieinke ed. K. Schroder I, 9 (the grotesque description of the villagers); Narrenbeschw. (DNL. XVII, i) c. 80 " Ein lutenschlaher im herzen hon" ; Eulensp. (DNL. XXV>v. 68 " Wie Ulenspiegel. einen buren. umb ein gain leindisch thuch betrog." 128 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. the same spirit which we observed in Meier Helmbrecht or Der Pfaffe Amis, the same spirit which was to find its con- summate artistic expression in the woodcuts and the sculptures of the sixteenth century, in works like Diirer's Life of Mary, Peter Vischer's Tomb of St. Sebald, or Hol- bein's Dance of Death: a spirit of naive fearlessness and truthfulness ; a childlike delight in direct and unconven- tional, and even coarse, utterance ; a loving tenderness for the apparently small and common; and a grim hatred of all pretence and usurpation. And if we thus are led to consider the historic significance of this outburst of realism in the narrative poetry of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, we cannot fail to see in it a symptom of one of the most important movements in modern history ; we cannot fail to see in it a symptom that the time had come when the peasant, the merchant, the artisan were ready to claim their share in public life alongside of the clergyman and the knight ; we cannot fail to see in it a symptom that the tide of that great popular upheaval against class rule which reached its first high-water mark in the religious Reforma- tion had set in. When the second climax of that great upheaval, the French Revolution, was approaching, it was heralded in France, England, and Germany by a literary revolt. Instead of the gallant shepherds and shepherd- esses, instead of the polite cavaliers and high-minded kings, who in the seventeenth century were deemed the only suit- able subjects for fiction and the drama, people now wanted to see men and women of their own flesh and blood ; and Fielding, Diderot, and Lessing appeared as the regenerators of literature. Just so, in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- turies, the old heroic and ideal figures of Siegfried, of Par- zival, of Tristan, representatives of a bygone aristocratic past, had lost their force ; what people wanted to see in literature was their own life, their own narrow, crowded streets, their own gabled houses and steepled cathedrals, their own sturdy and homely faces. THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. 1 29 It is under this same aspect, it is primarily as a social phenomenon, that the development of the religious drama during these centuries interests us here. The . The religious beginnings of the religious drama go back to drama. Its the early Middle Ages. They were connected Beginnings. with the chief festivals of the church, and had their basis in the dramatic elements of the church liturgy. Out of the Christmas ritual, the principal subjects of which were the events centring around the birth of the Saviour, there de- veloped simple dramatic representations of such scenes as the Annunciation, the Song of the Angels, the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Magi, the Flight into Egypt, the Slaughter of the Innocents. 44 The recital on Good Friday of the biblical account of Christ's passion and death gradually led to an impersonation of the principal characters that appear in it. The introduction into the Easter mass of brief choral anthems, suggesting the dialogue between the angel and the three Marys at the grave, naturally gave rise to a similar representation of the whole group of events connected with the Resurrection. 45 And to these three foremost plays on Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter, other performances on other festivals in course of time were added. During the height of chivalric culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries these plays seem to have shared the ideal and solemn character which marked this T , -Lts CfltirflctBr whole period. They were written in Latin; & the twelfth they were performed within the churches and Centui 7' by members of the clergy; they were operatic rather than dramatic; they were confined to the sphere of thought and 44 Cf., e.g., the so-called Ordo Rachelis; K. Weinhold, Weihnachts- spieleu. -Lieder p. 62 ff. Bibliography of the religious drama GdgPh. II, i, 397. A comprehensive account in K. Hase, D. geistl. Schau- spiel. Ten Brink, Hist, of Engl. Lit. II, i, 234 ff. Cf- K. Lange, Die lat. Osterfeiern p. 22 ff. I3O SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. fancy which had received the sanction of the temporal and spiritual authorities. From a contemporary and ardent admirer of emperor Frederick Barbarossa we have a Play of Antichrist (c. n8o), 48 which in a most emphatic manner reveals the elevated and sombre tone of the early sacred drama. Two allegoric personages, Paganism and the Syna- The Indus de gogue, open this play. Paganism extols the poly- Antichnsto, r . ,4. _ * jheistic view, which accords due reverence to all heavenly powers, while the Synagogue glorifies the one in- visible God, and inveighs against the belief in the divinity of Christ. Then, as a third, the Church comes forward, in regal crown and armour, on her right hand Mercy with the olive branch, on her left Justice with balance and sword. Against those who are of another faith than hers she pro- nounces eternal damnation. She is followed on the right by the pope and clergy, on the left by the emperor and his hosts. The kings of the earth bring up the rear. The emperor now demands the submission of the kings. All accord it, except the king of France, who, however, is at last forced into obedience. Then the emperor starts for the Holy Land to deliver it from the hands of the pagans. He triumphs over the enemies of Christendom, and thereupon lays down his crown and sceptre in the house of the Lord. But now the hypocrites conspire against the Church. In their midst is Antichrist, wearing a coat of mail beneath his wings, and leading on his right hand Hypocrisy, on his left Heresy. In the very temple of Jerusalem his followers erect his throne; and the Church, conquered and humili- ated, is driven to the Papal See. Antichrist sends ""ambas- sadors to demand the homage of the world, and all kings 48 Edited by Froning, Das Drama des MA. (DJVL. XIV) I, 199 ff. Of a similarly elevated character are the two so-called Benediktbeuren Plays (Froning III, 875 ff. I, 278 ff.), the former a Christmas, the latter a Passion play ; and the Trier Easter play (ib. I, 46 ff.). THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. \$\ kneel before him, except the German emperor. But al- though the emperor conquers him in a pitched battle, Anti- christ manages at last, through false miracles, to gain even the support of the Germans; he conquers Babylon and is received by the Jews as their Messiah; his earthly kingdom extends farther than any other realm. But now the prophets Elijah and Enoch appear and preach the glory of the Saviour. A new struggle between light and darkness begins, but immediately comes to an abrupt end. A sound is heard. from above, Antichrist falls, his followers flee away in haste and consternation, while the Church sings a halle- lujah and announces that the Lord is corning to sit in judg- ment over the world. If we now turn from this essentially allegorical drama, and, passing over nearly three hundred years, on an Easter Sunday in the second half of the fifteenth cen- _. tury, mingle with the populace of a ftee (German character of town, assembled in the market-place to witness JJ 1 later re- ligious drama i the representation of the Redeemer s resurrec- wiener Oster- tibn, we shall see a very different spectacle. 47 8 P ie1 ' The first person that appears on the stage after the resur- rection itself with its usual sequence, Christ's descent into hell and the delivery of the Fathers, has passed before our eyes is a quack doctor and vender of medicines. He has just come from Paris, where he has bought a great supply of salves and tonics and domestic wares, the usefulness of which he is not slow to impress upon his audience. But his salesman has run away, and he wants another. Now a second personage of an equally doubtful character, by the name of Rubin, presents himself. Though still a young fellow, he is an expert in all sorts of tricks. He is a pick- pocket, a gambler, a counterfeiter, and he has always managed to defy the courts, except in Bavaria, where they caught him once and branded his cheeks. To the doctor 47 Cf. Hoffmann, Pundgruben II, 313 ff. I3 2 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. he seems the right man, and he is engaged accordingly, the salary being fixed at a pound of mushrooms and a soft cheese. And since the streets are now beginning to be filled with a concourse of people, the two proceed at once to set up their booth. At this moment there arises from amidst the crowd a wailing song, the three Marys are lamenting the death of Christ : Wir haben verlorn Jesum Christ, Der aller werlde ein troster ist, Marien son den reinen: Darum mttsse wir beweinen Swerlichen seinen tot: Wenn er half uns aus grosser not which is followed by the exhortation to go to his grave and anoint his body with ointment. The quack sees his chance for a good bargain; he sends Rubin to coax the women to his booth, and now there ensues a regular country fair scene. The three Marys evidently do not know the value of money; they offer to pay all they have, three gold florins; and the merchant is so overcome by this unexpected readiness of his customers that he in turn gives them better stuff than he is accustomed to do. But here his wife, who, it seems, has a better business head, intervenes. She has made the ointment herself, she knows it ought to sell for much more, she bids the women not to touch it, and when her hus- band insists on keeping his agreement, she abuses him as a drunkard and spendthrift, an attack which he answers by beating and kicking her. Finally they pack all their things together and move off, and again the farcical suddenly gives way to the pathetic. The three women arrive at the grave; but the stone has been rolled away, and the angel accosts them singing: Er ist nicht hie den ir sucht; Sunder get, ob irs gerucht, Und saget seinen jungern Und Petro besunder THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. 133 Dass er ist erstanden Und gein Galilea gegangen. The scene closes with a chant of the three Marys, which is partly an expression of grief and sorrow that even the body of the Saviour should have been taken away from them: Owe der mere ! Owe der jemmerlichen klage ! Das grap ist lere : Owe meiner tage ! and partly an assertion of hope and confidence in the sup- port of their Redeemer: Jesu, du bist der milde trost Der uns von sunden hat erlost, Von sunden und von sorgen Den abent und den morgen. Er hat dem teufel angesiget,. Der noch vil feste gebunden liget. Er hat vil manche sele erlost : O Jesu, du bist der werlde trost. The whole religious drama of the fifteenth century is crowded with scenes similar to these. Most pathetic and soul-stirring are the lamentations of Mary before the cross, as they are depicted, for instance, in the Alsfeld Passion play of the end of the cen- tury. 4 " She appeals to all Christendom, to the earth, to the very stones for sympathy; she makes John repeat again and again the cruel tale of all the tortures and wounds inflicted upon her son; she wails at seeing him hanging yonder so naked and bare, his cheeks so pallid and hollow; she turns to the Jews and beseeches them to take her own life instead /of his: 'all this reveals the deepest feelings of a mother's heart. Yet in the same play there are scenes of such caustic 48 Froning III, 779 ff. A large part of these lamentations is taken verbatim from the so-called Trier er Marienklage (Wackernagel, Das deutsche Kirchenlied II, 347). The Judas-scene ib. 68 1 ff. 134 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN sarcasm and such grotesque caricature that we might fancy ourselves face to face with a farcical satire rather than a religious tragedy. This, for instance, is the way Judas haggles with the Jews about the traditional thirty pieces of silver. In the first place he demands thirty shillings; subsequently he comes down to thirty pennies instead. But he has them counted out to him one by one, and he is as scrupulous in the examination of the different coins as a mediaeval trades- man dealing with people from a neighbouring town. Judas : This penny is red. Caiphas : Tis good enough to buy meat and bread. Judas : This one is bad. Caiphas : Judas, hear what a good ring it has. Judas : This one is broken. Caiphas : Well, take another and stop grumbling. Judas : This one has a hole in it. Caiphas : Take another, then ; here is a good one. Judas : This one has a false stamp. Caiphas : If you don't want it, I'll give you another. Judas : This one is black. Caiphas : Look at this one, and be done with it. Judas : This crack is altogether too large. Caiphas : Judas, if you'll hang yourself, here's a rope. Judas : This one is leaden. Caiphas : How long are you going to make fun of us? In a Hessian Christmas play, also of the end of the fif- teenth century, 49 Joseph and Mary appear as a poor home- . , less couple. They wander from house to house, nessiscnes ^ . . J Weihnachts- nobody is willing to take them in, and even in spiel. t^g vagrants' home, where they at last find shelter, poor Joseph must submit to the most humiliating insults heaped upon him by two servant-girls. When the child is born, the most necessary provisions are lacking; no food, no bedding for the mother, not even swaddling-clothes' for the infant. But Mary comforts herself: naked are we 49 Froning III, 902 ff. THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. 13$ born, naked are we to go hence. And old Joseph makes a most devoted father. He succeeds in hunting up a cradle for the baby, he has a pair of old trousers which will do very well for swaddling-clothes; and how happy he sits there rocking the little one to sleep and singing to him a German lullaby ! But if we wish to see the religious drama of the fifteenth century at its best, if we wish to know what a R e a e ntiner wealth of earnestness and humour, of spiritual Osterspiel. fervour and sturdy joy of the world it contained, if we would fully realize the life-giving influence of city freedom upon the popular conceptions of the old sacred lore, we must turn to an Easter play written at Redentin near Wismar in i464. so Here we have a worthy counterpart to the best creations of sixteenth-century art, to works like Diirer's Passion (1511) or Briiggemann's noble altar-piece in Schleswig cathedral (1515). Here more deeply than in any other of these plays are we made to feel that won- derful blending of the secular and the religious, the ephem- eral and the eternal, which gives to the city life of the end of the Middle Ages its unique and ineffaceable charm. Here we find ourselves transported into a time when sacred history had acquired all the actuality of local happenings, when every crucifix on the roadside was a Golgotha, every cathedral a Jerusalem, every baptismal font a Jordan in which at any time the figure of the Saviour might be seen, bowing down before the Baptist, while from above would be heard the word: "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." The play begins with the resurrection of Christ, but the resurrection takes place, not in Jerusalem, but in the good old town of Wismar itself. Pilate, who appears as the type of a stately, somewhat phlegmatic burgomaster, hears a rumour that Christ's followers intend to steal his body; and 60 Froning I, 107 ff. 136 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. therefore details four knights to watch the grave, one to the north, one to the south, one to the east, and one to the west. The knights behave in a manner altogether suitable to representatives of that vagrant soldiery which in those times of club-law were an object of both terror and ridicule to the peaceful citizen. They brag about their prowess, clatter with their swords, threaten to smash any one who shall dare to come near them; and then go quietly to sleep, having first made an arrangement with the night- watchman, who is stationed on the steeple of the cathedral, to keep on the lookout in their place. The watchman sees a vessel approaching on the Baltic Sea. He tries to wake the knights, but in vain. He hears the dogs barking, and again vainly tries to arouse the sleepers. He calls out the midnight hour. And now a chorus of angels is heard on high, the earth is shaken, Jesus arises and sings: Nu synt alle dynke vullenbracht De dar vor in der ewicheit weren bedacht, Dat ik des bitteren dodes scholde sterven, Unt deme mynschen gnade wedder vorwerven. From these scenes, in which the burlesque and the serious are so quaintly mingled, we now pass on to events of truly sublime simplicity and serene grandeur. Jesus descends into hell to rescue the souls of the- Fathers. His approach is foreshadowed in the joyous expectancy of the waiting souls. They see a wondrous light spreading overhead. Abel is the first to interpret this as a sign that the time of their redemption is nigh; but the others at once join with him. Adam rejoices in the hope of regaining paradise. Isaiah is sure that this is the light of God; for is it not an evident fulfilment of what is written in his own book of prophecy (he quotes himself in Latin): "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light " ? And Seth recalls the twig which five thousand six hundred years ago he planted at God's behest that it might grow into the tree THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES. 137 of salvation (the cross). Now John the Baptist appears as forerunner of the Saviour, and announces his coming. In vain do Lucifer and Satan summon their hosts, in vain do they lock the gates of hell. Surrounded by the archangels, Christ advances. With a few majestic words he silences Satan, the "accursed serpent"; with a mere sign of his hand he bursts the gates; Lucifer he commands to be bound until the day of judgment. And now the souls stream forward, exulting, jubilating, stammering with joy and gratitude; and Jesus takes them by the hand and greets them, and then commits them to the care of Michael, the archangel, that he may lead them upward into paradise. At the end of the play we return once more to the sphere of the burlesque, to a satire upon social conditions of the fifteenth century. Through the rescue of the souls of die Fathers, hell has become desolate; Lucifer, therefore, chained as he is, sends his servants out to catch new souls. But the devils return empty-handed and discouraged: through Christ's death and resurrection, they say, the world has become so good that "very little chance is left for hell. Lucifer, however, is not discouraged. He has heard that a great plague is raging just now in the city of Liibeck, and he sends his messengers out for a second time, to try their fortunes in the Hanse town. And this time they come back laden with souls of sinners, sinners of every kind and description! There is the baker, who deceived his cus- tomers by using too much yeast in his bread and too little flour. There is the shoemaker, who sold sheepskin for Cordovan leather. There is the tailor, who stole half of his customers' cloth. There is the inn-keeper, who adul- terated his beer and served it with too much foam in the pot. There is the butcher, who stuffed his sausages with sorts of refuse. There is the grocer, who used false measure and weight. There is even the priest, who so often overslept the mass and so often celebrated the even- ing service in the tavern. In short, this is the moral SOCIAL FORCES IN GEKMAtf LITERATURE. pointed out by the concluding chorus, Lucifer is right: the power of evil has not yet been broken. Sin is still mighty in the land, and only by cleaving to God and his word can we be saved. And only then can we truly sing with the angels: ' Christ is risen.' It would be easy to multiply these examples. It might be shown how the same realistic tendency, the same blend- ing of the religious and the secular which is re- Other plays. The Fast- vealed in these Christmas, Passion, and Easter nachtspiel. plays, also manifested itself in other dramatic representations of biblical or legendary themes,, as, for in- stance, in the plays of The Wise and the Foolish Virgins (1322)," of Theophilus (fifteenth century), 52 of Frau Jutta (i48o). M It might be shown how in the Shrovetide plays 64 of the fifteenth century the secular, detached from its con- nection with the religious, ran riot and degenerated into uncouth vulgarity. But enough has been said to prove that the drama of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, no less than the Mystic prose, the Volkslied, and the narrative and didactic poetry of the same period, was a result of that wonderful awakening of individual thought and feeling which politically led to the classic epoch of German city freedom. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, all these forces worked together to bring about those two great movements which mark the final breaking away from medi- aeval authority: Humanism and the religious Reformation. 51 Das Spiel von den zehen Jungfrauen ed. M. Rieger, Germania X, 3" ff- 82 Ed. Ettmtiller 1849 ; Hoffmann 1853. 54. 83 A. v. Keller, Fastnachtspiele nr. in. 64 Five of the better Shrovetide plays (Der Fastnacht undder Fasten Keckt, Von Papst Kardinal und Bischofen, Des Turken Fastnachtspiel, by Hans Rosenpliit ; Fastnachtspiel von einem Bauerns;ericht by Hans Folz ; and the anonymous Spiel von einem Kaiser und einem Abt) re- printed from Keller by Froning, /. c. Ill, 963 ff. Cf. GG. 93. Al- win Schultz, Deutsches Leben im 14. . 15. Jhdt. II, 398 ff. CHAPTER V. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. (The Sixteenth Century.) THE history of the German people in the sixteenth cen- tury presents a strange and tragic spectacle. At the begin- ning of the period Germany, of all European Contrast be- nations, shows the highest intellectual promise, t^een begin- The long pent-up spirit of revolt against medi- ^^Refor- aeval class rule and scholasticism is breaking mation. forth with elemental power. Great men are standing up for a great cause. Copernicus is pointing toward an en- tirely new conception of the physical universe. Erasmus and Hutten, Holbein and Diirer, Melanchthon and Luther, each in his own sphere, are preparing the way for a new and higher form of national life. It seems as though a strong and free German state, a golden age of German art and literature, were near at hand. At the end of the cen- tury all these hopes have been crushed. While England is entering the Elizabethan era, while the Dutch are fighting the most glorious struggle of modern times for free thought and free government, Germany, the motherland of religious liberty, is hopelessly lost in the conflict between Jesuit and Protestant fanaticism, and is gradually drifting toward the abyss of the Thirty Years' War. How different would the course of events have been if there had existed at that time a broad national spirit, a strong public opinion, in Germany! When, in 1521, Luther 140 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. at the diet of Worms, face to face with emperor, princes, and cardinals, upheld the freedom of conscience, the heart of Germany was with him. Never before in German his- tory had there arisen a national hero like him; never be- fore had there been a moment fraught with such weighty possibilities. On Luther's side there were the most en- lightened of the princes and nearly all of the gentry. The cities greeted his teaching as a weapon against hierarchi- cal aggression; the peasantry hailed it as a promise of social betterment. What might not have been accomplished if all the friends of reform had united, if all party desires and class aspirations had been merged in one grand popular uprising ? No great opportunity was ever more irretrievably lost. Instead of a nation rallying to establish its independence, we see separate classes and sects, regardless of the welfare of the whole, attempting to secure their own individual liberties. Instead of a great idea sweeping everything before it, we see the inevitable defeat of small conspira- cies. Instead of a continuous growth and gradual expan- sion of the Protestant cause, we see it, after a first glorious effort, step by step retreating, and at last confining itself within the narrow limits of an orthodoxy not a whit more rational and far less imposing than the old system of papal supremacy. The religious Reformation had been born out of the bitter agonies of an ardent soul seeking after truth; it was brought to a close by a compromise between opposing political powers. It had bidden fair to inaugurate a new era of national unification and greatness; its real effect was a further step in the dismemberment and weakening of the empire. Its first outcry had been Luther's: " Ich kann nicht anders, Gott helfe mir, amen "; its final word was the abso- lutist doctrine: " eujus regio, eius religio" Was there ever a noble cause more shamefully disfigured and perverted ? In order to understand fully the effect of this deplorable THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. 141 / course of events upon the literature of the period, we must remember that the two preceding centuries had been marked by a steady growth of realistic tendencies. More m, , and more had literature come to be an expres- tic movement sion of the needs of the day, more and more had a * tbe ] )e p n - J . mng of the it imbued itself with democratic ideas, more sixteenth cen- and more had it become the prophecy of a ^ sa ^' great intellectual and social revolution. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, it seemed as if the hour of fulfil- ment had come, as if the vital energy of the people had been nourished long enough to give birth to a new ideal- ism, inspired with a larger conception of humanity, and therefore fuller of life and higher-reaching than that of any previous age. What is it that gives such an imperishably youthful charm to the German Humanistic movement of the first decades of the sixteenth century ? ' What was it that in- spired such men as Reuchlin, Erasmus, and Hutten ? Was it simply the revival of classical learning ? Was it merely delight in the discovery of a great civili- zation buried beneath the wreck of centuries ? Was it pre- eminently an aesthetic pleasure in the splendour of Cicero- nian eloquence or the massiveness of Augustan verse ? Far from it. More than anything else, it was the instinctive feeling that a new era in the history of mankind was dawn- ing, that the time had come to throw off the fetters of obsolete tradition, and to reach out, each man for himself, into the heights of human freedom and greatness. It was this spirit that moved the quiet, retiring Reuchlin to 1 A bibliography of German Humanism in L. Geiger, Renaissance u. Humanismus in Italien u. Deutschland p. 573 ff. For earlier German Humanism cf. GG. 97 (Niclas von Wyle, Heinr. Stain- hoewel, Albrecht von Eyb). M. Herrmann, Albrecht von Eyb u. d. Fruhzeit d. deutschen Humanismus. K. Burdach, Vom MA. zur Reformation. For Konrad Celtis cf. Allg. D. Biogr. IV, 82 ft 142 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. throw down the gauntlet to the whole system of clerical learning 2 ; that made Hutten exclaim 8 : Die warheit ist von newem gborn Und hatt der btrugk sein schein verlorn, Des sag Gott yeder lob und eer Und acht nit furter lugen meer; that put upon the lips of Erasmus the prayer 4 : " Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis- " The Humanistic movement, in a word, was an intellectual revolution, a search for new prin- ciples of human conduct, an attempt to reconstruct the spiritual life by fhe light of human reason, the first great declaration, if not of the rights, at least of the dignity of man. ~~Th"e Humanists have left no works which can be called great. Their force was spent in battle. They were pioneers, they were violent partisans. Into the finer problems and the deeper mysteries of life they did not enter. There is a certain shallowness and showiness in even the best of them. And yet who can fail to perceive in them a breath of that spirit which has created the ideal world of modern hu- manity ? Erasmus, the acknowledged leader of the movement, has very fittingly been compared to Voltaire. He was a scoffer and a merciless critic. No more scathing satire of the existing order of things has ever been written than his Moriae Encomium (1509). To represent the world as ruled by Folly was no new device; countless satirists of the Middle Ages had done the same thing. The * Cf. his Augenspiegel, the Defensio contra caluwniatores Colonitnses, and other polemics called forth through his controversy with the Jew- baiter Pfefferkorn. Geiger, Joh. Reuchlin p. 205 ff. 3 Preface to his Gesprachbuchlein ed. Balke, DNL. XVII, 2, /. 285. 4 Colloquia familiaria, Opera Lugd. Batav. 1703, I,. 683. Cf. A. Horawitz Ueber die colloquia des Erasmus v. R. in ffistor. Taschcnb. VI, 6. p. 55 ff. mile Amiel, Erasme p. 337 f. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. 143 new thing, the thing which startled the contemporaries and gave this book at once a European reputation, was the un- sparingly empirical manner, the cold rationalistic way, in which even the most fundamental beliefs and the most sacred idols of the time were held up to ridicule. Former critics had tried to heal the defects of church and state from within; here was a man who looked at the whole hier- archical system from without, who dared to place his own private reason over and above the towering mass of time- honoured fallacies and hallowed superstitions. Do we not seem to hear an e'crasez Mnfdme in the following passage 6 on the inane wisdom of the schoolmen of the time ? "Whilst being happy in their own opinion, and as if they dwelt in the third heaven, they look with haughtiness on all others as poor creeping things, and could almost find in their hearts to pitie 'em. Whilst hedg'd in with so many magisterial definitions, conclusions, corollaries, propositions explicit and implicit, they abound with so many starting holes that Vulcan's net cannot hold 'em so fast, but they'll slip through with their distinctions, with which they so easily cut all knots asunder that a hatchet could not have done it better. They explicate the most hidden mysteries according to their own fancie, as: how the world was first made; how original sin is deriv'd to posterity; in what manner, how much room, and how long time, Christ lay in the Virgin's womb; how accidents subsist in the Eu- charist without their subject. But these are common and threadbare. These are worthy of our great and illuminated divines, as the world calls 'em, at these, if ever they fall athwart 'em, they prick up, as: whether there was any instant of time in the generation of the Second Person; whether there be more than one filiation in Christ; whether it be a possible proposition that God the Father hates the Son, or whether it was possible that Christ could have taken upon him the likeness of a woman, or of the devil, or of an ass, or of a stone, or of a gourd; and then how that gourd should have preach't, wrought miracles, or been hung on the cross. There are infinite of these sub- tile trifles and other more subtile than these, of notions, relations, 6 Trsl. by John Wilson, London i66S,/. 97. Cf. J. A. Froude, Life and Letters of Erasmus p. 129 ff. For similar attacks by Bu- schius, Bebel, and other Humanists cf. Paulsen, Cesch. d. gel. Un- terrichts . 47. 97. 144 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. instants, formalities, quiddities, ecceities which no one can perceive who could not look through a stone wall and discover those things through the thickest darkness that never were." Or, to take another example, does not this passage on the follies of saint-worship 8 sound like the frivolous laughter of a La Mettrie ? "As every one of them (the saints) has his particular gift, so, also, his particular form of worship. As, one is good for the tooth ache; another for groaning women; a third for stolen goods; a fourth for making a voyage prosperous; and a fifth to cure sheep of the rot; and so of the rest, for it would be too tedious to run over all. And some there are that are good for more things than one; but chiefly the Vir- gin Mother, to whom the common people do in a manner attribute more than to the Son. Yet what do they beg of these saints, but what belongs to Folly ? To examine it a little: among all those offerings which are so frequently hung up in churches, nay up to the very roof of some of 'em, did you ever see the least acknowledgment from any one that he had left his Folly, or grown a hair's-breadth the wiser? One scapes a shipwrack and gets safe to shore. Another, run through in a duel, recovers. Another, while the rest were fighting, ran out of the field, no less luckily than valiantly. Another, con- demn'd to be hang'd, by the fa,vour of some saint or other, a friend to thieves, got off himself by impeaching his fellows. Another es- cap'd by breaking prison. Another's poison turning to a looseness prov'd his remedy rather than death; and that to his wife's no small sorrow, in that she lost both her labour and her charge. Another's cart broke, and he sav'd his horses. Another preserv'd from the fall of a house. Another taken tardy by her husband, persuades him out of 't. All these hang up their tablets; but no one gives thanks for his recovery from Folly. So sweet a thing it is, not to be wise, that, on the contrary, men rather pray against anything than Folly." Undoubtedly, Erasmus and his followers were sarcastic rather than appreciative, destroyers rather than organizers. But they were destroyers, not because they were without ideals, but because they felt the value of the ideal so deeply that the grossness and self-sufficiency of the actual world aroused in them a noble indignation. And they were sar- castic, not because they held low views of human life, but 6 Encom. Mor. p. 69. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. 145 because they held higher views about the dignity and voca- tion of man than the bulk of their contemporaries. There is no single book which demonstrates this more clearly than Erasmus's Manual of the Christian Soldier {Enchiridion Militis Christiant, 1509), one of the first unmis- takable attempts in modern history to make reason the basis of religious experience. Reason is to Erasmus " a king, a divine counsellor of man." " Enthroned in its lofty citadel, mindful of its exalted origin, it does not admit a thought of baseness or impurity." ' It is to reason that we must turn to fathom the divine wisdom, it is here that the roots of self-perfection lie. To the unenlightened mind the Bible remains a labyrinth of contradictions, a book full of insipid and even immoral incidents. Through rational interpreta- tion we learn to understand it as a symbolical expression of moral truths. An unthinking piety is without avail. " Christ despises the eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood, if it is not taken spiritually." ' " God hates a well-fed, cor- pulent devoutness."" But the rational believer sees the working of the divine spirit everywhere, his eye is open to the beauty, the wisdom, the virtue of all ages, he penetrates to the very core of Christianity. " For Christ is nothing else than love, simplicity, patience, purity, in short all that he himself taught; and the devil is nothing but that which draws us away from those ideals." ' It is evident that this sort of rationalism, bursting as it did upon an age full of religious emotions and in the main guided by an undoubting faith, could not help acting as a moral dissolvent; and it is not to be wondered at that so many of the young Humanists were plunged into a life of wild conflicts and consuming passions. In most of them 1 Enchiridion Militis Christiani ed. Ludg. Bat. 1641 /. 96 : ration! tanquam regi. 97 : consultor ille divinus, sublimi in arce praesidens, memor originis suae, nihil sordidum, nihil humile cogitat. *Ib.p. 171. /./. 173. w lb.p. 145. 146 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. the result was simply, a sinking to the level of the common- place. But when, as in the case of Ulrich von Hutten, a sturdy mind and a fiery soul were wasted in this conflict, the sadness of this issue was relieved by a note of genuine greatness. For in Hutten certainly, if in none other, this very struggle brought out all the intellectual enthusiasm and moral idealism, which, after all, were the fundamental forces of the Humanistic movement. If Erasmus has been compared to Voltaire, Hutten may justly be called a forerunner of Lessing. No one, not even Luther, has fought more sturdily for the free- dom of conscience, no one has been a better hater of any kind of usurpation. His life stands to us as a symbol of that wonderful flight of thought and feeling which the German people took under the inspiration of the first great moments of Luther's work. Hutten had already won his place as a writer when Luther struck his first blows against the papal system. He had taken part in that memorable campaign of the Human- ists against the old time-scholasticism, which began with Reuchlin's protest against the Dominican persecution of Jewish literature, and which culminated in the famous Epistola obscurorum virorum (1515-17), that collection of fictitious letters presenting a glaring caricature of the monkish party with all its filth, ignorance, and fanaticism. In biting satire he had held up to ridicule the arrogance and nothingness of professorial learning, contrasting it with the fulness and glory of a life devoted to the free pursuit of truth. 11 In high-flown rhetoric he had entreated the em- peror to guard the honour of the state against inner and outer foes." But it was only Luther's redeeming word 11 Cf. the satire Nemo, Schriften ed. Rocking III. 107 ff. Especially significant the dedication to Crotus Rubianus, ib. I, 187. Strauss, Ulrich v. Hutten p. 105 ff. The Epistolae obscur. mr. in the Suppl. to the Schriften. Cf. Paulsen /. c. 49 ff. 12 Cf. especially the Epigrams addressed to Maximilian (Sckr. Ill, THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. 1 47 that aroused him to the full consciousness of his own mission. To be sure, the chief object of his writings remained as it had been, war to the knife against the church of Rome. But the spirit of his attacks underwent a change under Luther's influence. Formerly he had been a scoffer, now he became a prophet; formerly he had addressed himself to the small circle of the educated, now he became the spokes- man of a whole people; formerly he had written in Latin ex- clusively, now he translated his own writings into German; formerly he had looked down upon the theological disputes of the ecclesiastics as unworthy trifles, now he recognised the Wittenberg monk as his "dearest brother," as " the ser- vant of God," and pledged to his cause his own life and earthly possessions. 13 From the artistic point of view, Hutten's most important contribution to the literature of the Reformation are the two volumes of Dialogues which appeared in 1520 and 1521. A true little masterpiece, full of Lucianic wit, and teeming with a noble patriotic fervour, is the scene, in Die Anschauen- den, where Sol and Phaeton from their heavenly heights look down upon the imperial diet held at Augsburg in 1518." Their attention is attracted by a magnificent pro- cession: cardinal Gaetani, who, as Sol explains to his son, has been sent by the pope to extort money from the Germans, is being conducted to the city hall in solemn state. Phaeton asks: " How long is the pope going to play this shameful game ? " Sol: " Until the Germans, whom up to the present time he has led by the nose, shall recover their senses." Phaeton: "Is the time near when they will 205 ff. Strauss /. c. p. 65 ff.)and the orations against Ulric of Wiirtem- berg (Schr. IV, i ff. Strauss/. 79 ff.). 13 Eyn klag iiber den Luterischen Brandt zu Mentz, Schr. Ill, 459. 14 Die Anschauenden ed. Balke, DNL. XVII, 2, p. 295 ff. For the dates of Hutten's Reformation pamphlets cf. S. Szamat61ski, Ulrichs v. Hutlen deutsche Schriftenf. 53 ff. 148 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE, recover their senses?" Sol: "Very near. For this car- dinal will be the first to go home with empty bags, to the great dismay of the Holy City, where they never would have believed the barbarians would stand their own ground." Phaeton: "The Germans, then, belong to the barbarians?" Sol: "According to the judgment of the Romans they do, they no less than the French and all other peoples outside of Italy. But if you consider good morals and friendly in- tercourse, zeal in all virtues, steadiness and honesty of mind, then the Germans are the most highly cultivated nation, and the Romans the most hopeless barbarians. For they are corrupted through effeminacy and luxury; and you find with them fickleness and inconstancy, little faith and trust, but trickery and malice more than with any other people." Phaeton: " I like what you tell me of the Germans, if they only were not given so much to drunkenness." There fol- lows an animated conversation between the two heavenly observers about the social and political condition of the German people, and the abuses of the Roman church, which, however, is suddenly cut short when they hear the cardinal in great excitement flinging angry words at them from below. Incensed at their freedom of speech, he pro- nounces the papal excommunication against them, where- upon 'with a scornful smile they leave him to the contempt of mankind. Phaeton: " I leave you to the laughter of the Germans. May they chase you away with shame, and make you an example for future times. Be the derision of the world! That is a fitting punishment for you." Sol: " Let the wretch alone. It is time to turn our chariot downward, and to give room to the evening star. Let him yonder go on tying, cheating, stealing, robbing, and pillaging at his own risk." Phaeton: "Yes, and go to the deuce, too! Uut I'll drive on the horses and resume our westward course." If this dialogue is distinguished by elegance of com- position and gracefulness of invention, there are others that excel it in depth of passion. What an irresistible, over- THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION, 149 whelming force there is in the repetition of those threefold accusations which like echoing thunder roll upon us again and again from the Roman Triad (Die Romische Dreifaltig- keii)\ l * "Three things uphold the Roman authority: the papal power, relics, and indulgences. Three things are brought home by those who make a pilgrimage to Rome: a bad conscience, a sick stomach, and an empty purse. Three things are killed at Rome: a good conscience, re- ligion, and a binding oath. Three things the Romans sneer at: the example of the ancients, St. Peter's memory, and the last judgment. Three things are banished from Rome: simplicity, continence, and honesty. Three things are for sale at Rome: Christ, spiritual offices, and women." And what reader, even of the present day, can fail to be thrilled by the flaming words with which Hutten in his reply to the papal excommunication against Luther (Bulla vel Bullicida] summons the. German youth to bring succour to endangered Liberty ? 16 "Oh, hither, ye freemen! It is our common cause, our common weal! The flame of war is spreading. Come hither all ye who want to be free. Here the tyrants shall be smitten, here the bondage shall be broken. Where are you, freemen ? Where are you, nobles ? Men of great names, where are you ? Heads of nations, why do you not rally to deliver the common fatherland from this plague ? Is there no one who is ashamed of servitude and cannot wait to be free ? They have heard me. A hun- dred thousand I see coming on. Thanks to the gods! Ger- many has become herself! Now woe to you, bull of Leo! " Ulrich von Hutten could indeed say of himself ": Ich habs gewagt mit sinnen Und trag des noch kein reu; Mag ich nit dran gewinnen, Noch muss man spiiren treu. 16 Cf. Strauss, Huttens Gesprache p. 114 flf. 18 Ib. p. 259. " DNL. XVII, 2, p. 269. 150 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. He could indeed call himself Truth's most devoted champion 18 : Von wahrheit ich will nimmer Ian, Das soil mir bitten ab kein mann. Auch schafft zu stillen mich kein wehr, Kein bann, kein acht, wie vast und sehr Man mich darmit zu schrecken tneint. Wie wol mein fromme mutter weint Do ich die sach hett gfangen an Gott woll sie trosten es muss gan! And if his life was by no means free from blemishes, if the flame of his passion did not always burn purely, he at least never palliated his own defects. And Death, finding him, as it did, wounded, disarmed, and with broken hopes, still found him a man. There can be no doubt that Luther, in his first great revolutionary writings, strove, although in a different spirit, after exactly the same ideal which the Human- Lnther. . . , , . ,. . ists had at heart: a strong, sweeping religious individualism. That he himself felt this to be the under- lying thought of his Theses against the sale of indulgences (1517) is shown by the fact that in sending them to a friend he signed himself as " Martinus Eleutherius " (Mar- tin the Freeman), adding these unmistakable words 19 : " Why were Christ and all the martyrs put to death ? Why did most of the great teachers incur hatred and envy, if not because they were bold despisers of old far-famed wisdom, or because, without consulting the preservers of -old knowl- edge, they brought forward a new thing?" But the works in which Luther set forth what is truly vital and permanent in his doctrine, in which he spoke the word that was to revolutionize all modern life, in which he anticipated what 18 DNL. XVII, 2, /. 286. 19 Luthers Briefe ed. de Wette I, 73- Cf. Th. Kolde, Martin Luther I, 146. A masterly presentation of Luther's religious develop- ment in K. Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte V, I, p. 221 ff. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. \^l has become a reality only in our day, were the three great manifestoes of the year 1520: the address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation on the Improvement of Chris- tian Society, the pamphlet On the Babylonish Captivity of the Church, and the essay On the Liberty of a Christian Man. Let us examine somewhat more closely these three great pillars of our own spiritual existence. The address to the German nobility is Luther's first com- prehensive avowal of religious independence. As Joshua led the children of Israel against Jericho, so Vondes Luther in this treatise is going to lead the Ger- christlichen Standes Bes- man knighthood against the walls of Rome; and serung. he prays God to give him a trumpet, before whose blast the straw and paper walls of the enemy shall fall. Three such walls there are, behind which the papacy has in- trenched itself. The first wall is the assertion that there exists a special spiritual order, distinct from the secular, and in all respects superior to it. This, Luther says, is a mere fiction of Rome. All Christians are of a truly spiritual order. Christ has made us all priests: the pope can make no one a priest. " The infant, when he creeps out of the baptismal font, may boast to have already been consecrated priest, bishop, and pope." 2 There is a difference between men with regard to their external occupation only. As there are shoe- makers, smiths, peasants, so there may be priests also; that is, men whose external occupation it is to administer the public services of religion. Inwardly, every true Christian has aright to this office; to its outward exercise only he is entitled on whom the right has been conferred by the com- munity. The community, then, elects the priest, it deposes him, it is the only sovereign in the spiritual administration. " If it should happen that a person elected to such an office 40 An den christl. Adel deutscher Nation von des christl. Standes Bes- serung, NddLiv. nr. 4, /. 8. I $2 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. through his abuse of it were deposed, then he would be as he was before, a peasant or a burgher, like the rest." " Thus the first wall of the papists is shattered. The second wall is the assertion that nobody but the pope has the right to interpret the Holy Scriptures. This is a wantonly concocted fable. Has not the pope often erred ? Have there not been, in all ages, pious Christians who understood Christ's spirit better than the pope ? Are not all of us priests ? Why, then, should we not be able to perceive and judge what is right and wrong in belief ? What means the word of Paul: A spiritual man judges all things, and is judged by nobody ? " So let us, then, be courageous and free; and let not the spirit of liberty be stifled by the fictitious assumptions of popery; but boldly forward ! to judge all that they do and all that they leave undone according to our trustful understanding of the Scriptures. If God spoke through an ass against the prophet Balaam, why should he not speak now through us against the pope ?"" The third wall is the claim of the pope that he alone has the right to call an ecclesiastical council. This wall falls by itself with the two others. When the pope acts con- trary to the Scriptures, then it is our duty to uphold the Scriptures against the pope. We must arraign him before the community, and therefore the community must be gathered in a council. And every Christian, no matter of what rank or condition, has a sacred obligation to co- operate in such an endeavour. " If there is a fire in the city, shall the citizens stand still and let the fire burn because they are not the burgomaster, or because the fire perhaps began in the burgomaster's own house?"" So, in Christ's spiritual city, if there arises the fire of scandal, it is the duty and right of every man to lend a hand to quench the flame. " NddLw. nr. 4, /. 9. n Ib. p. 14. 83 Ib. /.is. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. 153 There follow in the greater part of the pamphlet a de- scription of the evils that existed in the church of Luther's time, and radical propositions for their reform. Germany, he says, ought to be purged of the vile, devilish rule of the Romans. For Rome is draining the nation in such a way that " it is a wonder that we have still anything left to eat." " It would not be strange if God should rain fire and brim- stone from heaven, and hurl Rome into the abyss, as in olden times he hurled Sodom and Gomorrah. O noble princes and lords, how long will you suffer your land and your people to be a prey to these ravaging wolves ?" " All money contributions to Rome he would have forbidden; every envoy of the pope that should come to Germany he would have ordered to quit the country or to jump into the Rhine, to give the Roman brief a cold bath. The German bishops should cease to be mere figures and tools in the hands of the pope; none of them should be allowed to ask to have his election confirmed in Rome. The temporal power of the pope should be entirely abolished. All holi- days ought to be done away with, or restricted to Sundays. All pilgrimages ought to be prohibited, and the chapels of pilgrimage be demolished. The marriage of priests should be allowed. Spiritual punishments as interdict, ban, sus- pension are horrible plagues imposed by the evil spirit upon Christianity, and ought, therefore, to be abrogated. On the whole, the entire canon law, from its first letter to the last, ought to be uprooted. This pamphlet to the German nobility preaches, indeed, nothing less than a complete revolution of the religious and social order as it then existed. And Luther himself was fully aware that these few pages contained the programme of a new chapter in the history of mankind. " I consider well" (these are his closing words 26 ) "that I have pitched my song high and brought forward many things that will be 14 NddLw. nr. 4, /. 20. 24. " Ib. p. 79. 80. 154 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. thought impossible. But what shall I do ? I am bound to say it. I would rather have the world angry with me than God. Therefore, let them come on, whether he be pope, bishop, priest, monk, or scholar; they are just the right ones to persecute truth, as they have always done. May God give us all a Christian understanding, and, above all, to the Christian nobility of the German nation a true spir- itual courage to do their best for the poor church. Amen." A further step in the emancipation of secular life from ecclesiastical pretensions was taken in the pamphlet on the . Babylonish Captivity of the Church, which ap- Babylonica peared in the same year with the address to ecclesiae. t ^ e nobility. One of the chief means by which the mediaeval church walled about the life of the people was the doctrine of the sacraments. Without baptism, no promise of grace; without confirmation, no continuance of it; without holy communion, no sight of God; without the sanction of the church, no marital union; without the author- ity of the church, no right of priesthood; without extreme unction, no hope of eternal life. From the bondage of these ecclesiastical enactments Luther finds in the Bible the right to free the people. Neither confirmation, nor penance, nor marriage, nor consecration of priests, nor extreme unction, have a right to existence, as church insti- tutions, through any recognition or especial promise in the Bible." Above all, the sanction of marriage and the anointing of priests are nothing but arbitrary encroachments of the church upon purely human relations. " Since matrimony." he says, 81 " has existed from the beginning of the world, and still continues even among unbelievers, there are no 26 The real meaning of sacrament, according to Luther, is "a promise of blessing from God to his children, confirmed by an out- ward and visible sign." Two such promises, accompanied by two such signs, he finds in baptism and communion ; and these alone he recognises as means of grace. 11 De captivitatc Babylonica ecclesiae, Luthers Werke, Krit. Gesammt- ausg. VI, 550 f. THE ERA Of THE REFORMATION. 155 reasons why it should be called a sacrament of the new law and the church alone. The marriages of the patriarchs were not less mar- riages than ours, nor are those of unbelievers less real than those of believers ; and yet no one calls them a sacrament. Moreover, there are among believers wicked husbands and wives worse than any gentiles. Why should we, then, say: there is sacrament here, and not among the gentiles ? Shall we so trifle with baptism and the church as to say that matrimony is a sacrament in the church only?" And still more strongly than in the address to the nobility he condemns the self-glorification of the priesthood, asserting again and again the inalienable rights of common humanity. " What then," he exclaims, 88 " is there in you that is not to be found in any layman ? Your tonsure and your vestments ? Wretched priesthood, which consists in tonsure and vestments ! Is it the oil poured on your fingers? Every Christian is anointed and sanctified in body and soul with the oil of the Holy Spirit. . . . When I see how far the sacrosanct sanctity of these orders has already gone, I expect that the time will come when the laity will not even be allowed to touch the altar except when they offer money. I almost burst with anger when I think of the impious tyranny of these reck- less men who mock and ruin the liberty and glory of the religion of Christ by such frivolous and puerile triflings. . . . Those priests and bishops with whom the church is crowded at the present day, unless they work out their salvation on another plan that is, unless they acknowledge themselves to be neither priests nor bishops, and repent pf bearing the name of an office the work of which they either do not know or cannot fulfil, and thus deplore with prayers and tears the miserable fate of their hypocrisy, are verily the people of eternal perdition, concerning whom the saying will be fulfilled : ' My people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge ; and their honourable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst. Therefore, hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure ; and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth shall descend into it.' " It shows the extraordinary productivity of Luther's mind that the same year in which he published the address to the 98 Luthers Werke I. c. 566 f. I$6 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. nobility and the pamphlet on the captivity of the church saw also a third treatise from his hand, in which heit einea " " ^ e tr i fi d to establish a positive foundation of Christen- morals, which should find its sanction exclu- menschen, ..... . , ,. sively in the inner consciousness and personality of the individual. This is the precious little tract On the Liberty of a Christian Man. The whole of this essay is summed up in the two anti- thetical propositions which stand at its head " : "A Chris- tian man is the freest lord of all, and subject to none. A Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and sub- ject to every one." Wherein, according to Luther, lies this lordship of the Christian man over all. things ? Luther answers with the Mystics : in faith, in an inward renunciation of the indi- vidual to God, in a personal surrender to his word. To many this faith seems an easy thing ; but, in truth, nobody can even conceive of it who has not under deep tribulations acquired it by himself. He, however, who has once at- tained it cannot cease to speak and write of it. He needs no external thing any longer, he has all comfort, food, joy, peace, light, power, justice, truth, wisdom, liberty, and all good things in abundance. " The soul which cleaves to the promises of God with a firm faith is so united to them, nay, thoroughly absorbed by them, that it not only partakes in but is penetrated and saturated by all their virtue. For, if the touch of Christ was health, how much more does that spiritual touch, nay, absorption of the word communicate to the soul all that belongs to the word ! As is the word, such is the soul made by it, just as iron exposed to fire glows like fire on account of its union with the fire." s Thus the Christian has been elevated above all things, and ** Von der Freiheit eines Christen menschen, Luthers Schriften ed. E. Wolff, DNL. XV, 80. Cf. J, Kostlin, Lutkert Leben* p. 223 ff. 30 Ib. 84. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION, 157 has become lord of all. For nothing can prevent his salva- tion. " It is a lofty and eminent dignity, a true and almighty dominion, a spiritual empire, in which there is noth- ing so good, nothing so bad, as not to work together for my good, if I only believe." ' The second part of the original proposition namely, that " a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one " is only an outgrowth of the first. It is the application of faith to practice, it is the message of man's service to mankind. " The good things which we have from God ought to flow from one to another and become common to all, so that every one of us may, as it were, put on his neighbour, and so behave towards him as if he were himself in his place. They flowed and do flow from Christ to us : he put us on and acted for us as if he himself were what we are. From us they flow to those who have need of them. We conclude, therefore, that a Christian man does not live in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour, or else is no Christian : in Christ by faith, in his neighbour by love. By faith he is carried upwards above himself to God, and by love he sinks back below himself to his neighbour." 32 In 1521 Albrecht Diirer, while travelling in the Nether- lands, was startled by a rumour of Luther's having been as- sassinated. The words of passionate grief which this re- port wrung from Diirer's lips, and which ha\ ^ been preserved in his diary, show perhaps more / . Luther. clearly than any other single utterance what a future there was before the German people if the wonder- ful idealism of its great reformers had been supported by an unwavering, sober, broad-minded public opinion. After having inveighed against the insidious policy of the Roman See, to which, he thought, Luther had fallen a victim, Diirer goes on to say S3 : " And if we really should have lost this man who has written in a more enlightened manner than any one for the last hundred and forty Ib. 87 f. 3 * Ib. 98 f. Cf. Albrecht Diirer s Tagebuch ed. F. Leitschuh p. 82. 1 58 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. years [i.e., since Wycliffe], and to whom thou, O Heavenly Father, hast given such an evangelic mind, then we pray thee that thou wilt again give thy Holy Spirit to some man who may bind together thy holy Christian church, so that we may live again peaceably, and as true Christians. . . . But as thy Son, Jesus Christ, had to be put to death by the priests in order to rise from death and ascend to heaven, so perhaps thou wiliest it to be done likewise to thy servant Martin Luther, whom the pope with his money has so treacherously de- prived of his life. And as thou didst ordain that Jerusalem be de- stroyed for it, so thou wilt destroy the arbitrary power of the Roman See. And after that, O Lord, give us the new beautiful Jerusalem, descending from heaven, about which it is written in the Apocalypse, the holy unalloyed Gospel, unobscured by human wil- fulness." Durer himself is the most illustrious proof of the artis- tic perfection to which the inspiration of this great moral uplifting might have led. His Four Apostles, painted in 1526 Diirer's Four f r tne c ity ^ Nurnberg, his native town, 84 will Apostles. forever stand as the most complete incarnation of the German national spirit in the age of Luther. The two principal figures are John and Paul, Luther's favourite 34 Cf. M. Thausing, Durer p. 483 ft. That a victory of the demo- cratic principles underlying the religious Reformation would probably have brought about the growth of a truly national German drama may be inferred from the existence in the first half of the sixteenth century of a Protestant drama which, while preserving the popular character of the religious plays of the fifteenth century, at the same time stands in the service of the new spiritual life. Cf., e.g., Die Totenfresser by Pam- philus Gengenbach (c. 1521), Der Ablasskramer by Niklaus Manuel (1525), Der verlorne Sohn by Burkard Waldis (1527), Paul Rebhuhn's Susanna (1535) in : Froning, Das Drama der Reformationszeit DNL. XXII. If we compare with works like these the dramatic produc- tions of the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century: the plays of the English comedians (DNL. XXIII.) and their imitators, such as Jacob Ayrer (ed. Keller, Bibliothek d. Litter. Vereins LXXVI ff.) and Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick (ed. Tittmann, Deutsche Dichter d. 16. Jhdts XIV.), we find ourselves transported from the free' air of popular art into the stifling atmosphere of technical drill, sensational effects, and clownish slang. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. 159 writers. John, the type of a tall, strongly built, blond German youth, wrapt in his wide red mantle, standing erect, his chaste, manly, thoughtful head slightly bent forward, his gaze fixed upon the open Bible which he holds in his hands. Paul, the very image of a spiritual warrior. His long flowing beard, the swollen vein in his forehead, the mighty skull, the threatening eye, the massive neck, the majestic folds of his white mantle, the naked sword in his right hand, all this reminds one of an old Ger- manic chieftain. But what he fights for is not a hoard of gold, not the booty of fair women, it is the book which he holds clasped in his left hand, it is the same eternal truth, the gospel of redeemed humanity, which John is represented as contemplating. Both figures together bring before us that magnificent union of fearless speculation and firm, unswerving faith which has made the Germany of the Reformation period the classic soil of spiritual and moral freedom. We have already spoken of the causes which, between 1525 and 1530, brought the Reformation movement to a stand- still, and checked the upward idealistic current -, . The turmng- of German literature. To say it once more: point of the the chief reason was the absence in the Germany Beform ation. of the sixteenth century of a strong national will, of an en- lightened public opinion. Divided into an infinite num- ber of little independent sovereignties, separated in itself by class prejudices and provincial jealousies, without effi- cient organs of popular legislation, even without a truly national dynasty, the German people did not as yet feel itself as a whole. The result was that the religious Reformation, instead of being borne along by an irresistible tide of national enthusiasm, was forced into the narrow channels of local fanaticism ; that Germany, instead of be- ing led into an era of social reconstruction, saw itself plunged into a state of confusion, bordering upon anarchy ; and that the enemies of reform found it an easy matter to l6o SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. quench the new thought soon after it had been kindled. Probably no event in modern history has so decidedly re- tarded the progress of civilization as the series of isolated revolutionary uprisings and their successive defeats which mark the course of the German Reformation from 1:522 to about 1530. First, in 1522, the landed gentry in a bold assault try to overthrow the temporal power of the ecclesi- astical magnates ; this conspiracy is easily crushed. Two years later the peasantry, stirred up by Luther's proclaim- ing the spiritual equality of all men, attempt to shake off the yoke of hereditary bondage ; this rebellion is ruth- lessly suppressed. About the same time, the masses of the city population, intoxicated by the doctrine of universal priesthood, are led into a wild communistic movement ; this agitation is mercilessly stamped out. And thus it came about that at the very time (1530) when, in the Augsburg Confession, the official form of the Protestant belief was definitely fixed, Protestantism had ceased to represent what in the beginning it had stood for, the deepest hopes and highest aspirations of a united people. Luther himself ended by abandoning the ideals of his early manhood. He had broken with the old sacred tradi- tion ; he had rejected all outward helps to sal- turn to the vation ; he had placed himself on his own principle of ground, alone in all the world, trusting in the personal guidance and protection of God. As a result of his own teaching he now saw the country trans- formed into a surging sea, tossed, as it seemed to him, by evil doctrines and pernicious contests. Had it, then, really been the voice of God that called him ? or had he lent his ear to the insinuations of Satan ? Persecuted by terrible visions, the very foundations of his faith tottering under him, his life appearing blighted and his work cursed, he sees in his extremity only one way of deliverance. He can only answer these terrible questionings by a blind and implicit faith. He comes fonh from the struggle, not as he had THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. l6l entered it, strong in intellectual fearlessness, but strong in stubborn adherence to a chosen authority ; not any longer as the champion of reason, but as its defamer. Reason now appears to him as the root of all evil ; reason has led man astray from God ; reason is " a light that is only dark- ness." Without knowledge of the divine grace it is " a poisonous beast with many dragons' heads," it is " an ugly devil's bride," it is " the all-cruellest and most fatal enemy of God." " It is a quality of faith," he says, " that it wrings the neck of reason and strangles the beast which else the whole world with all creatures could not strangle. But how ? It holds to God's word, lets it be right and true, HO matter how foolish and impossible it sounds." And by thus strangling reason, we offer to God " the all-accept- ablest sacrifice and service that can ever be brought to him." a5 Nothing is a surer evidence of moral greatness than the courage of inconsistency. Nothing makes Luther's figure more impressive than the scars of this Titanic struggle be- tween his former and his later self. Nor has it been with- out noble fruits for humanity. Out of this very struggle were born those spiritual battle-songs of his, such as " Ach Gott vom himmel sieh darein," " Aus defer not schrei ich zu dir," " Ein feste burg ist unser Gott," the power of which will be felt as long as there is a human soul longing for a sight of the divine. And in this very con- flict Luther found the inspiration to undertake and carry through that colossal work through which he has become the creator of the modern German language, his translation 35 Cf. his Exposition of the Epistle to the Galatians ( Werke ed. Walch VIII, 2043. 2048), quoted by C. Beard, The Reformation in its relation to Modern Thought p. 156. 163. In the last sermon preached by Luther in Wittenberg, Jan. 17, 1546, he says of reason : " Es ist die hochste Hure die der Teufel hat." Luthers Werke f. d. christi. ffaus ed. Buchwald, Kawerau etc. V, 96. Selections from Luther's lyrics DNL. XV. For his language cf. Wackernagel, Gesch. d. d. Liti* II, 8 ff. l62 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. of the Bible. And yet how different the intellectual his- tory of Germany and of the world would have been if the man who had given the German people the idea of univer- sal priesthood, who had called on them to fling away the form in order to save the substance of religion, who had grounded the religious life upon individual belief and indi- vidual reason, had not ended as the founder of a new or- thodoxy and a new absolutism. From this time on the higher life of Germany slowly sinks, until toward the middle of the seventeenth century it reaches its lowest ebb. Realism becomes again, The intellect- wna t it had been before the Reformation move- nal reaction. ment, the dominant force in literary production ; but it is no longer the youthful realism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, full of buoyancy and hope ; it is the realism of disappointment and resignation. It has no message of its own to tell, it only restates what has been told before, it looks backward and not forward. We shall, therefore, not enter here upon the by no means inconsider- able literary output of the second half of the sixteenth cen- tury. We shall not speak of the mass of vulgarity and coarseness which flooded the popular prose romances of the tinae they are characterized sufficiently by the uncouth figure of Grobianus ; S8 nor of the revival which the inani- ties of chivalric love-adventure found in the tales of Ama- dis of Gaul" ; nor even of the good-natured honesty, the a * The word occurs for the first time in Seb. Brant's Narrenschiff 72, i: Ein nuer heilig heisst Grobian, den will ietz ftiren iederman. Caspar Scheldt's Grobianus (NddLw. nr. 34. 35) appeared in 1551. Cf. GG. 158. K. Borinski, Geschichte d. dcutschcn Lift, sett d. Ausg. d. MA. p. 15 f. C. H. Herford, Literary Relations of England and Germany p. 379 ff. 31 GG. 160. Borinski /. c. p. 104 f. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION, 163 racy humoiu and sturdy patriotism displayed in the writings of such men as Jorg Wickram, 38 Burkard Waldis, 39 Georg Rollenhagen**" Nicodemus Frischlin. 41 Only two men, who under more favourable circumstances might have become writers of national influence and leaders in a new progres- sive movement, may be singled out as the most striking figures of a time which had turned away from its true ideal : Hans Sachs (d. 1576) and Johann Fischart (d. 1590). Hans Sachs is one of the most lovable characters in German literature. This honest NUrnberg burgher, faith- ful in the narrow circle of his handicraft, and at the same time reaching out into the wide realm of thought and poetry ; looking into the world with wondering childlike eyes ; transforming all that he sees or hears into a tale or ditty or shrovetide play ; restlessly working, and yet always seeming at leisure ; serene, true- hearted, public-spirited ; a loyal supportei of Luther, whom he greeted (1523) as the "Wittenberg Nightingale," but un- failingly gentle and good-natured even in his polemics he indeed deserved to be glorified by Goethe 4 ' as "our dear Master." On what terms of jocular intimacy he stands with the figures of sacred history, not even excluding the saints, Christ, or God the Father himself ! One day, he tells us/* Saint Peter, walking with Christ through the country, fell to complaining about the bad management of 34 GG. 159 The Roll-wagenbuchlin (ed. H. Kurz) appeared in 1555. 31 GG. 157. The Esopus (ed. Titlmann, Dichter d. 16. Jhdts XVI. XVII.) appeared in 1548. 40 GG. 164. The Froschmeuseler (ed. Goedeke, Dichter d. 16. Jhdts VIII. IX.) appeared in 1595. 41 Cf. D. F. Strauss, Leben u. Schriften d. Dichters u. Philologen N. Frischlin. A discussion of the Protestant and Catholic school-drama in Janssen's Gesch. d. deutschen Volkes sdt d. Ausg. d. MA. VII, 106 ff. Cf. Herford I.e. 74 ff. The Julius Redivivus appeared in 1585. 45 Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung, Werke Hempel I, 113. A just and discriminating discussion of H. Sachs as a poet in GG. 154. 43 Sanct Peter mit d. Geiss, Deutsche Dichter d. 16. Jhdts V, 144 ff. 164 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. the world, how the evil prevaileth and the just suffereth without the Lord's stirring a ringer. Christ answered : " If you think, Peter, you can do better than I, here ! take my staff and command, have full power to curse or to bless, to bring on wind, rain, or sunshine, to punish or to reward, and try to rule the world just for a day." . Peter was over- joyed and felt very lordly in his new omnipotence. Mean- while an old woman came along, driving her goat to pasture and commending it to the protection of God. Peter, to take care of the animal, followed it into the pasture; and as it was an unruly and roving beast, he had to follow it over stock and stone, through underbrush and thicket, until late in the evening he came home, tired out and disgusted. 'Well, Peter," said the Lord, laughing, "should you like to rule the world for another day ? ' In another scene * 4 we are led back to the time when Adam and Eve, banished from paradise, earn their bread as honest farmers. They have a large family of children, some of them beautiful, clever, and good, some of them ugly, awk- ward, and rude. The beautiful ones Eve brings up with all motherly care, the ugly ones she lets run about as they please. One day God the Father sent word by an angel that he would call on Adam and Eve to see how they were get- ting along. W.hen Eve heard this, she rejoiced greatly and put the whole house in good order. She scrubbed the floor, strewed sweet-scented grasses about, and washed and combed and dressed her children, that is, the beautiful chil- dren ; the ugly ones she hid in dark corners, in the stable, behind the hearth, some of them even in the oven. When the Lord came, the children stood there in a row neatly dressed and well behaved, and gave their hands to him as he stepped up to them, and very nicely said the Lord's 44 Cf . Die ungleichen Kinder Eve or IVie Gott der Herr Adam n. Eva ihre Kinder segnet, DNL. XX, I, p. 88 f. 2, p. 254. Deutsche Dichter d. \b.Jhdts\l, 173 ff. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. 165 prayer when he asked them whether they knew it. And the Lord was pleased and laid his hand on each child's head, saying : " Thou shalt be a king, thou a knight, thou a burgomaster, thou a rich merchant," and so on ; and he blessed them all. Then Eve took heart and went and got the ugly children out of their hiding-places, and brought them before God that he might bless them also. And the Lord could not help laughing when he saw this unkempt and doubtful-looking crowd before him ; but he had pity on them and blessed them each, saying : "Thou shalt be a shoemaker, thou a weaver, thou a shepherd, thou a farmer," and so forth. And when Eve protested that these callings were too humble, God showed her how all callings were necessary and equally important. For, if all men were kings and princes, burgomasters and councillors, who should till the soil or build houses or provide for food and cloth- ing ? And if there were no government, who would main- tain the public peace ? And Adam and Eve resolved henceforth to bring up all their children with equal care, because they knew they were all destined to work for the common good of man. These are examples of Hans Sachs's art in treating legen- dary themes. It would be easy to show how the same simple humour, the same serene irony pervades his representations of actual life. The travel- His mediaeval- ling student cheating the peasant woman out of her husband's money 46 ; the robber knight lying in ambush for the rich prelate 46 ; the gypsy telling peasant girls their fortunes " ; the husband bringing his jealous wife back to her senses " ; the landsknecht, the priest, the peasant, the " Cf. Der fahrcnde Schuler im Parodies, Fastnachtspiele ed. Goetze (NddL-w. nr. 26 ff.) nr. 22. A discussion of the more prominent of the Fastnachtspiele in R. Genee, Hans Sachs . s. Zeit p. 335. 46 Cf . Das Wildbad 1. c. nr. 27. 4l Cf. Die Rockenstube 1. c. nr. 10. 40 Cf, Das heiss Eisen, I. c. nr. 38. l66 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. artisan, the beggar vying with each other in lamenting over the hard times ** what a wealth of shrewd observation and solid common-sense these scenes, and many others like them, contain ! And yet, how can all this compensate us for the absence in Hans Sachs of any large conception of the great revolution which the first decades of the century had attempted ? In reading him we have the impression that all the world-moving thoughts of the early Reforma- tion period had swept over the German people without touching it. Although he died thirty years after Luther, he was at heart a mediaeval man. Had he felt the pulse of modern life, as Hutten and his friends felt it, he might have become the creator of the modern German drama. In reality he was the last, and greatest, of the Mastersingers. He was in literature what Lucas Cranach, his contempo- rary, was in art : a master in the minute. For the lofty conceptions and majestic proportions of a Diirer the age had no longer any room. 4f Cf. Die fiinf elenden Wanderer, /. c. nr, 13. An admirable self-characterization of H. Sachs is found in the preface to the second volume of his poems (1560), quoted in Liitzelberger-From- mann, Hans Sachs, s. Leben u. s. Dichtung p. 34 f. : " Mein beger, gutherziger, freundtlicher Leser, ist, Du wo'llest diss ander Buch meiner Gedicht annemen fiir ein gemeines, offens LustgSrtlein, so an offner Strassen steht fiir den gemeinen Mann, darinn man nit allein findet etliche suss fruchttragende Biiumlein zur Speyss der gesunden, sondern Wurtz und Kraut, so resz und pitter sindt, zu artzney, die krancken gemtiter zu purgieren und die bo'sen Feuchtigkeit der Laster ausszutreiben. Dergleich findt man darin wolriechende Feyel, Rosen, und Lylien, auss den man krefftige Wasser, 61 und Safft distilieren und bereyten mag, die abkrefftigen und schvvachen gemtiter, so bektimmert und abkrefflig sind, zu stercken und wider auffzurichten ; auch entlich mancherley schlechte Gewechs und Feldpliimlein, als Klee, Distel und Korenpliimlein, doch mit schonen, lieblichen Farben, die schvvermtitigen, Melancolischen ge- miiter frQlich und leichtsinnig zu machen. Bin also guter, tro'stlicher Hoffnung, das es on nutz nit abgen werdt." Cf. also Puschmann's dream, ib. p. 38. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. 1 67 Johann Fischart, also, was a man of truly remarkable qualities. He was a stanch upholder of Lutheran princi- ples, a friend of the Huguenots, an inveterate hater of the Jesuits and of Philip II., whose de- Fisohartl feat at the hands of the English he commemorated in high- flown verse. He was a keen observer of the life around him. Probably nowhere does the fundamental joyousness of his nature manifest itself so finely as in his poetic glori- fication of a piece of juvenile sport by which in 1576 some citizens of Zurich distinguished themselves, rowing in one day from Zurich to Strassburg. This event Fischart cele- brates, in his Gliickhafft Schiff as a feat of manly vigour and sturdy citizenship. Of Xerxes, he says, we hear that he once tried to chain the sea, and ordered it to be beaten ; the Venetians every year have a ring thrown into the Adri- atic in order to wed it to themselves. But that is not the way to subdue the elements Welchs ist dieselb ? Nemlich nur die Welche wir ban erfaren hie Das neulich sie gebrauchet hat Die Jung Mannschaft auss Ziirch der Statt, Das ist, hantfest Arbeitsamkeyt Und stanthafft Unverdrossenheit Durch rudern, rimen, stosen, schalten, Ungeacht Miih ernsthafft anhalten, Nich schewen Hiz, Schweis, GfSrligkeit, Noch der Wasser Ungstiimmigkeit, Nicht erschrecken ab Wirbeln, Wallen, Sender sich hertzhafft gegenstellen, le meh die Fltiss laut rauschend trutzen, le kraftiger hinwider stutzen. And now the poet accompanies the sturdy crew on their toilsome yet so delightful voyage. How they embark at 60 DNL. XVIII, i, p. 131 ff. An excellent account of Fischart's literary character in Goedeke, Elf Bucher deutscher Dichtung I, 156 ff . A comprehensive monograph on Fischart is promised by Adolf Hauffen, 168 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. early dawn amid the concourse of a cheering populace ; how the boat like a water-bird shoots joyfully along ; how the Limmat and Aare are soon left behind ; how the Rhinestream, when he sees them approaching, wells up with joy, and bids them speed on ; how the water dances about the oars ; how even the banks of the river respond with merry sound to the greeting of the waves washing to the shore ; how in the early morning they fly past Basel, cheered on by the applause of a multitude filling the dock- yards and bridges ; how the Sun, seeing that even his noon- day arrows have no effect upon the brave boatsmen, has fresh horses hitched to his chariot and tries to outstrip them in the race ; and how at last, shortly after sunset, they reach Strassburg, welcomed by beat of drum and sound of trumpets, all this is told in a manner worthy of a great poet. As a satirist and pamphleteer, also, Fischart shows the fibre of true genius. His Ehezuchtbuchlein (1578), one of the most wholesome books on marriage ever written; his Bienen- korb des heiligen Romischcn Immenschwarms (1579), a violent satire of popery ; his Jesuiterhiitlein (1580)," a formidable arraignment of Jesuitic doctrines ; his paraphrase of Rabe- lais's Gargantua (1575), are marvels of strong, virile, sonorous diction, profoundly original and inexhaustible in its vocab- ulary. There is an exuberance and opulence in his style that reminds one of the superabundant wealth of German Renaissance architecture, the climax of which did indeed coincide with the best years of his manhood. And there is an invincible rectitude of purpose, a fulness of human understanding, a keenness of wit, and a raciness of satire in his lines, which place him as a moral teacher directly by the side of Luther and the Humanists. Yet, in spite of all this, who can help feeling that even Fischart is the representative of a time of decay ? He en- " The Ehezuchtbtichlein DNL. XVIII, 3, p. 115 ff. The Jesuiter- hutlein ib. i, /. 227 ff. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. 169 tirely lacks that mastery over himself which is indispensa- ble to the true artist. He does not know how to select; he wants to say all; he bewilders us with His lack of a mass of detail ; hardly ever does he afford form, unalloyed and simple enjoyment. It is instructive to note the difference between the original Gargantua of Rabelais and Fischart's imitation, the monstrous title of which" gives a true index of its character. Where Rabelais is grotesque, Fischart is absurd. Where Rabelais draws with a pencil, Fischart paints with a broom. Where the Frenchman has one illustration, the German has ten. 63 A single book of the original is in the copy puffed up into a whole volume. And thus, with all its wealth of satire and invective, this novel has come to be a striking example of realism breaking down under its own weight. Had Fischart lived in an age of new ideas his genius would have unfolded and taken wings. Alas for us that his lot was cast in the time that followed the failure of the religious Reformation ! Compelled to witness the decline of national greatness and independence; placed in a public M The title of Rabelais's work is : La -vie tres horrificque du Grand Gargantua pere de Pantagruel ; livre plein de Pantagruelisme . Of this Fischart makes the following: Affentheurlich Naupengeheurliche Geschichtklitterung von Thaten und Rhaten der vor kurtzen langrn und je weilen Volleniuolbeschreiten Helden und Herren Grandgoschier Gorgel- lantua und dess dess Eiteldurstlichen Durchdurstlechtigen Fiirsten Pan- tagruel von Durstwelten, Konigen in Utopien, Jederwelt Nullatenenten und Nienenreich, Soldan der Neuen Kannarien, Faumlappen, Dipsoder, Diirstling und Oudissen Inseln : auch grossfiirsten im Finster stall und Nubel Nibel Nebelland, Erbvogt auf Nichllburg, und Niderherren zu Nullibingen, Nullenstein und Niergendheym, etc. NddLw. nr. 65, A i. 83 Compare Geschichtklitterung c. 8 (/. c. p. 123 ff.) with Gargantua I, 5 (CEuvres de Rabelais ed. P. Favre I, /. 52 ff.). A detailed com- parison of the two works in L. Ganghofer, Johann Fischart u. s. Ver- deutschung des Rabelais p. 9 ff. , who however is prejudiced in favour of Fischart. SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE, life that afforded room only for theological squabbles and party hatred ; hearing in the distance the approaching thunder of the Thirty Years' War, 64 he lost the native elas- ticity of his soul. In one of his poems" he compares Ger- many to a young captured eagle : his ancestors lived as kings of the air in the free mountain clefts, but he sits drearily chained to his perch and must catch what his master wills. This image may be applied to Fischart him- self. He, too, was born to soar into the free air of the ideal ; he, too, was condemned to flutter wearily over the sterile ground of actuality. And here we take leave of this wonderful and incompre- hensible sixteenth century. If it were possible to sum up the experience of several generations in the life The Faust- Q f a s i n gi e individual, we should say : the six- book of 1587. . . teenth century is like that mysterious, heroic figure, which owed its legendary existence to this very age of reaction against the freedom of the early Reformation, the " famous necromancer " Dr. Johann Faust. The six- teenth century, like the legendary Faust, had thrown away the wisdom of former ages, like him it had tried to open a new path towards the higher realms of life, like him it found itself powerless to work out its own salvation. The spirit of the Faust-book of 1587 b6 is altogether theological. Faust is represented as a godless rebel, his pact with the devil 7s devoid of higher motives, his death is surrounded by all the horrors of hell. The book transports us into a world in * 4 Cf. the prophecy in c. 57 of the Geschichtklitterung, 1. c. p. 453 ff. " Ernstl. Ermahnung an d. lieben Teutschen ; Goedeke, Elf Biicher deutscher Dichtung I, 175. 56 NddLw. nr. 7 and 8. Cf. Erich Schmidt, Charakteristiken p. I ff. It is worthy of note that in the very decades in which the Faust- legend spread throughout Germany and beyond. Johann Kepler, the intellectual successor of Copernicus, had to fight his way against both Lutheran and Jesuit fanaticism. Cf. Allg, D. Biogr. XV, 603 ff. THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION. I /I which the Copernican system has no place ; it is a warning against free thought and human aspiration ; it is the auto- biography of an age which has lost faith in itself. Let us be thankful that the central truth, which, in spite of all transient veiling, the era of the Reformation stood for, has at last prevailed. What the men of the sixteenth cen- tury were not able to accomplish has been fulfilled in our own time. The classic poets and thinkers of the eighteenth century took up the work where Luther and his contem- poraries had left it, and led us into that realm of universal brotherhood and humanity which the great religious re- former saw from afar, but was not allowed to enter. CHAPTER VI. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN LIFE. (From the Beginning of the Seventeenth to the Middle of the Eighteenth Century.) i. The Recovery from the Thirty Years' War. IF it is true that for nations as well as individuals every moment of existence is at once a decay and a growth, this is pre-eminently true of the condition of the Elements of German people in the seventeenth century. modern life in seventeenth- When the Thirty Years' War had ended by century reducing the German empire to its atoms, no absolutism. .... ....... hope of religious or political liberty seemed to be left. Nowhere and at no period in modern history has despotism assumed such an absurd and hideous form as in the numberless petty principalities which at the time of the peace of Westphalia (1648) were the last rem- nants of what had been the dominant power of Europe. Municipal privileges had been trampled down ; not a trace of rural autonomy remained ; Luther's principle of religious self-determination had been converted into an absolute power of the princes to determine the religious belief of their subjects. As an embodiment of national traditions and national ideals Germany was dead. Out of the midst of this utter desolation modern German life has sprung. From under the ruins of the Holy Roman Empire grew up that state which, through unflinching ad- herence to the principle of public welfare and under the stern discipline of a dynasty unrivalled in shrewdness, 172 THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 1/3 tenacity of purpose, and devotion to duty, finally became the foremost factor in the upbuilding of a new, united Ger- many. From the horrors of religious fanaticism and perse* cution, which have made the era of Ferdinand II. and Louis XIV. an abomination to thinking men, came forth that movement for religious toleration which has now per- meated the whole atmosphere of higher culture. From the dead formalism and shallow correctness which in the first part of the seventeenth century took the place of the unre- strained exuberance of Fischart and his contemporaries, literature, slowly but steadily, rose to a recognition of its eternal tasks, until at last it acquired that lofty freedom and transcendent beauty which have made the great German poets of the eighteenth century the noblest spiritual leaders of the modern world. Modest, indeed, and laborious were the beginnings of this upward course. He would have preached to unbelieving ears who, about the year 1650, should have pro- The political phesied that the reorganization and future great- reconstmc- ness of the German state was to be wrought out ^wof Prus- under the leadership of what was then the little sia. electorate of Brandenburg. In no part of the empire had the ravages of the Thirty Years' War been more disastrous. Berlin, the capital, had only 300 citizens left ; the popula- tion of the whole state amounted to probably less than a million inhabitants. Life to most of them was only a struggle to maintain a bare, joyless existence. Nor was the governmental absolutism less harsh here than anywhere else. There have been no more unrelenting autocrats than the Hohenzollern princes. With an iron hand the Great Elector (1640-88) put down whatever of municipal freedom there was left within his dominions ; with the brutality of a barbarian his grandson, Frederick William I. (1713-40), made sport of citizens' rights in order to exalt his army. It is indeed no wonder that the name of Prussia was an object of hatred and fear all over Germany. And yet, here 1/4 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. lay the origins of modern constitutional life. 1 The old em- pire with its unwieldy mass of feeble sovereignties was not only, as Pufendorf, the greatest publicist of the seventeenth century, declared, a monster ; it was a dying monster, too. If there was to be any form of a German state hereafter, what was left but foe some healthy limb of this monster to cut loose from the dying body, and to try life at its own peril ? This it is what the Prussian monarchy undertook to do; it could not have succeeded if it had not begun by brushing away the remnants of feudal exemption within its borders, by centralizing its own forces, by subordinating all class distinctions and privileges to the one principle of pub- lic usefulness. Public service has always been proclaimed by the Prussian kings as the fundamental obligation laid upon them by their hereditary dignity, and in all decisive moments of its history the Prussian people has proved its loyalty to this principle. It is this that has made the Prus- sia of to-day. The intellectual reconstruction, also, like the political, had to be made from the very foundations. Here, too, an Th ' 1 11 empty, sterile dogmaticism had forced itself into tnai recon- authority. Witch-burning and inquisition had stmction. undermined the very foundations of a true relig- ious life. Both the Protestant and the Catholic church had become machines as lifeless and out of date as the Holy Roman Empire itself. If it had not been for a small band of independent men who, in the midst of this uni- 1 Cf. for this and the following : H. v. Zwiedineck-Siidenhorst, Deutsche Gesch. i. Zeitraum d. Grtindg d. preuss. Konigttims I, 32 ff. K. F. Hanser, Deutschl. nach d. ysjahr. Kriege p. 117 ff. Von Inama-Sternegg, D. volkswirthschaftl. Folgen d. y>jahr. Krieges, Hist. Taschenb. IV, 5, I ff. K. Biedermann, Deutschlands triibste Zeit, p. 18 ff. Levy-Bruhl, V Allemagne depuis Leibniz, p. 8 ff. Pufen- dorf 's remark in the pseudon. pamphlet Severini de Monzambano De statu imp. Germ., Genev. 1667, VI, 9: Nihil aliud ergo restat quam ut dicamus, Germaniam esse irregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 17$ versal gloom, kept alive the spark of individual thought and feeling, the cause of spiritual culture might forever have been lost. Two movements, both of them taking up the task of the religious Reformation of the sixteenth century, both of them pointing forward to the victory of intellectual freedom in the eighteenth, were the outcome of this indi- vidualistic revival : Pietism and Rationalism. The Pietistic movement is bound up with the names of Jacob Spener (1635-1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663-1727). About the same time, when in Pietigm France the Jansenists protested against the Spener and rigid exclusiveness of Jesuitic morality, when Francke - William Penn and his friends carried the gospel of the brotherhood of Christ to the banks of the Delaware, these men and their disciples tried to quicken religious feeling in Protestant Germany. 2 Their ideas were not new. They only repeated what Luther had taught : the inanity of ecclesiastical formalism, the need of inner regeneration, the priesthood of all believers. They entirely lacked the heroic stature of the men of the sixteenth century. Their efforts were not directed toward arousing the people as a * It seems practically unknown that the Pietistic movement, and especially the great philanthropic and educational enterprises of Francke, aroused the keenest interest in one of the most remarkable Americans of his time : Cotton Mather. For several years Mather maintained a correspondence both with Francke himself and with his followers in England ; and in 1715, avowedly on the basis of informa- tion acquired in this manner, he published a little pamphlet entitled Nuncio Bona e Terra Longinqua : A Brief Account of Some Good and Great Things A doing for the Kingdom of God in the Midst of Europe (Boston, S. Gerrish), in which he gave a succinct but accurate descrip- tion of the work done at the famous orphan-asylum and the other institutions founded by Francke at Halle. Of the spirit which per- vades this description the following words are an index (/. 9) : "The World begins to feel a Warmth from the Fire of God which thus flames in the Heart of Germany, beginning to extend into many Regions ; the whole World will ere long be sensible of it ! " 176 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE, whole ; they were content to save individual souls, and to gather about them the devout and the lowly. There is a touch of self-complacent sentimentality in them which, when the movement had gained ground and become out- wardly successful, soon turned into a new form of orthodox conventionalism. But with all these shortcomings, it can- not be denied that upon a country blighted by the drought of dogmatic dissensions the Pietistic message of love and godliness fell like rain from heaven. Without it the seed of religious toleration, which was sown by the Rationalistic philosophy, would have found a less susceptible soil. German Rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a part of that larger movement which in England began with Bacon, in France with Descartes - Jt was an attempt to carry out in a systematic manner, and with the help of natural science, what the Humanists had undertaken in a popular way and from the literary point of view, a critical exam- ination of the outer and the inner world before the supreme tribunal of reason. In England, and later on in France, this inquiry led to a view of life which is best characterized by Locke's basing all knowledge upon sense impressions, by Hume's dissecting the idea of causation, and by the moral and intellectual scepticism of Bayle, Voltaire, and the En- cyclopaedists. In Germany, on the other hand, there sprang from it the optimistic idealism of Leibniz (1646- 1716), which, systematized by Wolff (1679-1754), and pop- ularized by a host of minor philosophers, was to be the * A more practical turn this movement took in the radical utilitari- anism of Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), the founder of the first German literary periodical in German (the so-called Monatsgesprache, since 1688), the untiring advocate of popular speech and common- sense even in matters pertaining to scholarly research (Discours, welcher Gestalt man denen Franzosen im gemeinen Leben u. Wandel nachahmen soil, 1687). Cf. J. Minor, Chr. Thomasius, Vitrtdjahrschr. f. Littgesch. I, I ff. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 177 prevailing form of thought in the German universities of the eighteenth century. While Descartes, Locke, and even Spinoza look at the world as a huge mechanism in which there is little room left for spontaneous activity and self- assertion, Leibniz considers it as an aggregate of an infinite multitude of independent intellectual forces. There is mind in everything. The body is nothing but mind con- tracted into a form : " Omne corpus est mens momen- tanea." 4 Between plant, animal, and man there is a differ- ence of degree only, not of quality. The whole world is engaged in a process of continual change, transition, per- fection. There is an unbroken line of development from the sleeping life of a seed to the free consciousness of a full-grown man ; from the narrow, gloomy egotism of the savage to the broad, enlightened charity of the sage. God is the supreme wisdom and the supreme love. From an infinite number of possible worlds he has chosen the world that is as the best. He has created it, and is therefore out- side of it, but he has constituted it in such a manner that it needs no guidance except through its own intrinsic laws. He has so arranged it that all individual forces work to- gether in even measure and for a common end, that evil itself is only a less perfect good. An admiring insight into this harmony of the universe is man's highest happiness and virtue. It is happiness, because it gives us trust in the rea- sonableness of things, and makes us accept all that may befall us, pain no less than pleasure, as the dispensation of a divine Providence. It is virtue, because it helps us to overcome all littleness, puts before us the ideal of a com- plete existence, and teaches us, through self-perfection, to take part in the betterment of the race. It is hard to overestimate the services which Leibniz has rendered to modern culture. He stands midway between Luther and Goethe. He first reduced to philosophic reasoning 4 Cf. E. Zeller, Gesch. d. d. Philosophic p. 89. 1/8 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. the individualistic view of the universe which had been at the bottom of the Reformation movement, and which was to find its fullest expression in the classic epoch of eighteenth- century literature. In a time of national degradation and misery, his philosophy offered shelter to the higher life, and kept awake the hope of an ultimate resurrection of the German people. 2. Pseudo-classicism, We have considered some of the political and intellectual tendencies which were destined ultimately to break up the absolutism of the seventeenth century. Were similar forces at work in the literature of the period ? Here, no less than in all other domains of life, the lux- urious freedom of the sixteenth century had since the beginning of the seventeenth been superseded Absolutism m by the absolutism of narrow conventionalities. literatnre< All the poems, dramas, satires, pamphlets, which we thus far have been considering, were written because their authors had something to say, because they had a mission to fulfill, because they could not help giving utterance to thoughts, longings, passions which came from and flowed back to the national heart. It was reserved for the seventeenth and the first part of the eigh- teenth century to produce a literature which was completely out of touch with national feeling, which had not a single idea to express, which existed solely for the purpose of put- ting together high-sounding words, a meaningless pastime for impotent and arbitrary princelings, idle courtiers, and learned pedants. Here again Germany stood not alone. Just as the political and social life of the seventeenth cen- tury all over Europe was hemmed in by the prejudices and assumptions of a self-sufficient, frivolous, and despotic aristocracy, so European literature during this period was held in the bondage of a set of arbitrary rules and dictates, THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. which, strangely enough, had been derived from the very same source the great writers of ancient Greece and Rome from which during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- turies had sprung the freedom and fervour of the Renais- sance. But just as the political despotism of the seven- teenth century in no country of Europe was so completely deprived of even the last remnant of dignity and self-re- spect as in Germany, so, also, did pseudo-classic literature in no other country reach the same depth of contemptible- ness and absurdity as here. Two men who were the dictators of literary taste in Ger- many, the one during the larger part of the seventeenth, the other during the first part of the eighteenth century, may be considered as the most com- plete types and the most trustworthy interpreters of this school of inanity and pretension: Opitz (1597-1639) and Gottsched (1700-66). Both men had undoubtedly the cause of German literature at heart. Opitz through his connections among the nobility, Gottsched through the dignity of his Leipzig professorship, helped to raise the social standing of authors as a class. Both worked to the best of their ability for a purification of the German language, for the establishment of a normal standard of literary correctness. And although Opitz, by advocating the imitation of the French writers of his time, put Ger- man poetry to the rack of the Alexandrine verse, while Gottsched, by adopting the same policy for his own time, forced the German drama into the strait-jacket of the "three unities," yet it is hard to see how, without the discV pline afforded by the attempt to reproduce foreign models, or without the chastening influence of the refined elegance of French versification and composition, GermanlTteFature could have* attained even to the small degree of formal respectability which in those days had come to be consid- ered as the supreme test of poetic genius. But if we turn to the opinions which these men held ISO SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. about the nature and the office of poetry, if we try to for- mulate the ideals of life which prompted their Their literary aesthetic views, it is indeed as though we saw an ideals. impersonation of all the misery and degradation which was the lot of the German people from the failure of the Reformation to the time of Frederick the Great, as though we saw the sad figure of German Poetry herself, bereft of her mind by the insults and persecutions heaped upon her, making an empty sport of her own glori- ous past. Opitz laid down the laws of poetry in the little Buck von der deutschen Poeterey, which appeared in 1624. Gottsched propounded his views about the subject chiefly in the volu- minous Versuch finer Critischen Dichtkunst vor die Deutschen, which appeared about a hundred years later, in 1730 (Until Lessing's time the theories expressed in these books had, in the minds of the vast majority of those who aspired to be poets, the vitality and infallible authority of revealed truthsj And yet it is safe to say that never has there been written a treatise about poetry that was further removed than either of these two books from even the vrj'iest poetical understanding. To put it plainly, poetry is to both these men primarily a means of currying favour with the great. At the begin- ning as well as the end of his essay Opitz slave of frankly admits that what he has most at heart is aristocratic the good-will and friendship of men of birth and station. 5 And Gottsched, in dedicating his book to certain courtiers of that most despicable of all the * NddLw. nr. i,p. 8. 58. For the literature on Opitz cf. GG. 179. K. Borinski, D. Poetik d. Renaiss, i. Dtschld. About Opitz's follow- ers and the term ' Erste schlesische Schule ' Koberstein, Gesch. d. d. Natlitt* II, 120 ff. About the ' Sprachgesellschaften ' of the seven- teenth century ib. 27 ff. GG. 177. About Opitz's earlier contem- porary and literary forerunner G. R. Weckherlin (1584-1653) cf.' GG. 178, 12. An elaboration of Opiiz's theories in G. Harsdorfer's THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. iSl petty tyrants of the time, Augustus the Strong of Saxony and Poland, pleads guilty to this same desire with such naive candour, not to say unblushing servility, that com- ment on his words is superfluous. "In the midst of the most important state transactions," he says,' 'through which your most honourable excellencies and lordships in the service of our most gracious king are helping to further the welfare of these lands" [he probably refers to the carnivals, hunting-parties, and water-promenades through which the Dresden court of that time has acquired such a sad notoriety], "I make bold to put before your eyes a book dealing with poetry, nay, to place your most high names upon its front pages. It has never been a matter of indiffer- ence to the great whether their bodily forms were portrayed satisfac- torily or otherwise; and we find in history some princes who were unwilling to be painted except by the very best artists of their time. What the art of painting accomplishes with regard to the body, the art of poetry, as a much more perfect species of painting, accom- plishes with regard to the qualities of mind and heart. Wherefore it is a wonder that great lords should not have long ago forbidden all unskilled or even mediocre poets, with their gross brushes, to attempt a delineation of their virtues and deeds, which, by right, ought to be executed only by the most rare pencils. This book, which I have the honour of dedicating to your most noble and gracious lordships, con- tains among other things those rules which must be observed by the Poetischer Trickier, die dcutsche Dicht- u. Reimkunst, in 6 Stunden einzugicssen (1647) ; Koberstein /. c. 52. 6 The dedicatory letter is addressed to " Johann Adolph von Loos, Sr. Konigl., Maj. in Pohlen und Churn 1 . Durchl. zu Sachsen Hochbe- trauten wircklich geheimten Rathe und Obersten Stallmeistern " and to " Christian von Loos, Sr. Konigl. Maj. etc. Hochansehnlichen Cammerherrn, Hofrathe und geheimtem Referendario." It is hardly necessary to add that the above quotation is given in full, not to throw particular blame upon Gottsched personally, but to illustrate the spirit of the time. Such performances as this were at that time the most common way for aspiring authors to advertise themselves. For Gottsched's services as literary historian and linguist cf. M. Bernays, Gottsched in Allg. D. Biogr. IX, 497 ff. Erich Schmidt, Lessing I, 410 ff. Gottsched's Sterbender Cato DNL. XLII, 55 ff. 182 SOCIAL FORCES Iff GERMAN LITERATURE. authors of laudatory poems, and consequently also by those who in the future will sing your most high praise. The more exalted the qualities are through which your lordships have won the favour of a great monarch and the respect of a large court, and the wider, there- fore, the field which here opens itself to a poet, the more reprehen- sible would his work be if in such a worthy task he failed and, as it were, desecrated such a noble praise from lack of knowledge or ability. Since, then, it is one of the chief aims of this book to pro- cure for the great of this world suitable heralds of their deeds, it will, I hope, not seem altogether improper if these Principles of Poetry arc. submitted to the judgment of such illustrious connoisseurs as you, who cannot be indifferent as to what hands shall transmit their portraits to posterity. And although I find myself not worthy to perpetuate the names of your most illustrious lordships and excellencies in poems of my own, you will perhaps nevertheless consider me not entirely unworthy of your mercy, since I have, at least indirectly, tried to add a little to your immortalization. If I should indeed attain the undeserved good fortune of enjoying the patronage of such great statesmen, I shall forever remain your most illustrious, gracious, and noble lordships' and excellencies' most devoted and obedient servant." It is hardly necessary to go into the details of a theory which was prompted by such sentiments as these. Neither _, , , Opitz nor Gottsched was in the least concerned Poetry a play t * with empty with any question touching the true essence and forms. inner motive of poetic production. /Poetry was to them simply a part of rhetoric, a kind of ornate prose; the office of the critic they saw in suggesting, the office of the poet in applying certain tricks and devices conducive to the successful handling of a given subject] Opitz does not even make an attempt to conceal the shallowness of his principles. Two considerations appear to him of para- mount importance : first the proper " invention of things," secondly " the correct preparation and decoration of words." What he means by "invention of things" may be gathered from his definition of tragedy and comedy. 7 1 L. c. p. 22. TH STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM* 183 "Tragedy . . . seldom permits the introduction of people of hum- ble birth or common deeds, because it deals only with royal decrees, murders, despairs, slaughters of fathers and children, fires, incests, wars and rebellions, lamentations, outcries, sighs, and the like. Comedy has to do with ordinary matters and persons; it speaks of weddings, banquets, games, tricks and knaveries of servingmen, bragging foot-soldiers, love affairs, frivolity of youth, avarice of old age, match-making, and such things which daily occur among the common people." What is meant by the proper " decoration of words " may be learned from his remarks about the " weight and dig- nity of poetical speech." ' "Concerning the weight and dignity of poetical speech," he says, "it consists in tropes and figures, by which we make a certain word assume a different meaning from its real one. To dwell here on the division, qualities, and accessories of these figures, I deem unne- cessary, because in this respect we can learn everything from the example of the Latin writers. Only this I will say, that it is of the highest importance that we should try to borrow from them and the Greeks the use of epithets; in which we Germans thus far have been extremely lacking. For they give to poetical pieces such a splendour that Stesichorus has been considered the most graceful of poets because he knew how to utilize epithets most fittingly. In poems of a low order common and insignificant people are introduced; as in comedies and bucolics. These people of course are made to speak in a simple and ordinary manner. But in the higher order of poetry, where the interest turns on gods, heroes, kings, princes, cities, and the like, one must bring in high-sounding, forcible, and spirited lan- guage, and call a thing not only by its name, but paraphrase it with specious and magnificent words." Gottsched, in some respects, represents a more advanced stage of criticism than Opitz. He had the benefit of hav- ing before his eyes the classic French literature of the time of Louis XIV., while Opitz's view had been confined to Ronsard and his contemporaries. As a disciple of Horace and Boileau he insisted, or at least professed to insist, upon 8 /,. c. p. 32 ff. 184 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. the imitation of nature as the principal form of poetic expression. As an adherent of the Wolffian philosophy, he tried to assign to poetry its place among the moral agencies of the world. And yet, from the appreciation of true artis- tic feeling and power he was still more hopelessly debarred than his less systematic predecessor. fWhat he most ad- mired in classic French literature was, not the fire and pas- sion which, after all, underlay its outward elegance and regularity, but this elegance and regularity itself. What he was pleased to call imitation of nature was, as a matter of fact, a pedantic exclusion of everything not commonplace.] What he considered as the moral aim of poetry was in real- ity the cultivation of a petty, servile, bloodless, and heart- less savoir vivre, such as became a generation which sub- mitted to the rule of the powdered wig and padded calves. A single quotation, from the fourth chapter of his Critische Dichtkunst* will illustrate sufficiently the absolute barren- ness of his mind in problems concerning the true meaning of poetry. " How ought one to proceed," he asks, apparently without any sense of the ludicrous resemblance of this question to the language of a cook-book, "how ought one to proceed if he is of a mind to make a poem or to work out a plot?" And his answer is as follows: "At the outset select an instructive moral lesson which is to form the basis of the whole poem, in accordance with the intentions which you wish to follow out. Next invent the general lines of an event in which there occurs an action which most palpably demonstrates the chosen lesson. Now there arises the question, what use you want to make of this invention; whether you wish to turn it into a fable, a comedy, a tragedy, or an epic. Everything in this respect depends on the names which you give to the persons who are to appear in it. In a fable the names must be of animals. If you wish to make a comedy of your subject, the persons must be citizens; for heroes and princes belong in a tragedy. Tragedy is distinguished from comedy only in this, that, instead of laughter, it tries to ' Ed. of 1730, /. 133 ff. In the condensation of these pages I have followed Hettner, Gesch. d. d. I.itt. \. 18. Jhdt. I, 364. ' THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 185 arouse wonder, terror, and pity ; therefore, it usually concerns itself with men of birth only, who are conspicuous by their rank, name, and appearance. In an epic, which is the masterpiece of all poetry, the persons must be the most impressive in the world, kings, heroes, and great statesmen, and everything in it must sound majestic, strange, and wonderful." It would have been a waste of time to lose a single word upon these puerile and unworthy trifles if the theories of Opitz and Gottsched had been only the opinions of individuals. What gives to them their great, though melancholy, importance is the fact that to the paeudo- they were the expression of the prevailing literary taste throughout the seventeenth and the first decades of the eighteenth century. The same dead formalism, the same worship of the phrase, the same slavish subservience to an arbitrary fashion, the same utter lack of manli- ness, originality, and inspiration we find in all the favourite forms of literature throughout this period. We find it in the hollow verbosity of the arcadian and courtly novel, represented by such works as Philip von Zesen's Adriatic Rosamond (1645); Buchholz's Pleasant Romance of the Christian Royal Princes Herculiscus and Herculadisla and their Princely Company (1659); Ziegler's The Asiatic Banise, or Bloody but Courageous Pegu, Based on Historic Truth but Covered with the Veil of a Pleasing Story of Heroic Love-Adventure (1688); Lohenstein's The Mag- nanimous General Arminius, with his Illustrious Thusnelda, Held up to the German Nobility as an Honourable Example and for Praiseworthy Emulation (1689); and a host of others. We find it in the vapid pomposity of the drama: the blood-curdling, bombastic tragedies of Andreas Gry- phius (1616-64) and his contemporaries; the boisterous, spectacular Haupt- und Staatsactionen from the beginning of the eighteenth century; the tame declamatory exercises of the academic school, of which Gottsched himself was the head. We find it lastly in lyric and descriptive poetry: 1 86 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERM A ft LITERATURE. from Opitz's own pedantic odes, pastoral and didactic re- flections, through Hoffmannswaldau's (1618-79) glittering and frivolous dallying with unreal sentiments, down to the unspeakable platitudes of such courtlings as Besser (1654- 1729) and Konig (1688-1744), whose elaborations are in- deed on a plane with a famous political controversy of their time, to wit: whether certain of the princely delegates to the German Diet should enjoy the privilege of having their chairs upholstered in red, and whether these chairs should be allowed on the same carpet with that of the imperial commissioner. 10 It is the same spirit as that which gave rise to the meaningless splendour of rococo architecture; which degraded the cathedrals into curiosity-shops filled with tinsel, tortuous columns, and unholy paintings; which populated royal parks and galleries with the statues of high- born nonentities and impossible allegories; which stamped its aristocratic scrolls and flourishes even upon the house- hold goods of the humble citizen. To sum up. (Again, as in the twelfth century, literature had become the handmaid of a small fraction of the people; Difference be- again it had become bound up with the inter- tween the ests o f aristocratic class rule. / But what a dif- anstocracy of the twelfth ference between the aristocracy of the twelfth andthatofthe an( j t h at o f t h e seventeenth century! The seventeenth ,.,, , . .,_, century. knighthood of the time of Frederick Barbarossa had obtained its leading position by right of political ser- 10 Cf. J. S. Piitter, Histor. Entwickelung der heut. deutschen Staats- verf. (1786) II, 262 ff. K. Biedermann, Deutscklands trubste Zeit p, 50. For the courtly and arcadian novel cf. F. Bobertag, Gesch. d. Romans in Deutschld II, i, 51 ff. Bobertag, Zweite schles. Schule, DNL. XXXVII. For the courtly drama Koberstein /. c. II, 269 ff. L. G. Wysocki, A. Gryphius et la tra&die Allemande au XVII* sihle. DNL. XXIX (Gryphius). XXXVI, 108 ff. (Zweite schles. Schule). For the courtly lyrics M. v. Waldberg, Die galante Lyrik, and Die deutsche Renaissancelyrik. T. S. Perry, From Opitz to Lessing p. 31 ff. Godeke, Elf Biicher d. Dichlgl, book 2 and 4. DNL. XXVII (Opitz and his followers). XXXVI. I ff. 334 ff. (Zweite THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 1 8? vice; chivalric literature embodied the finest culture and the highest aspirations of the age. The so-called nobility which flocked to the court of Augustus the Strong and other centres of princely dissipation owed its predominance solely to the helpless condition of a people whose material prosperity this same nobility had ruined and whose spiritual hopes it had crushed. Is it a wonder that the belles-lettres which corresponded to this state of things were the most depraved and abject mockery that has ever usurped the name of literature ? 3. The Individualistic Undercurrent in Seventeenth-century Literature . It is comforting and inspiring to observe how even in this bondage of despicable conventions German literature re- tained something of its native independence and , . sturdiness, how it gradually wrenched itself out opposition to of the deadly enclosure of corruption and de- al)8olutism ' pravity, and ultimately became the freest and most enlight- ened spiritual force of the world. Let us follow some of the phases of this literary undercurrent, let us see how it gathered below the icy crust of rule and scholasticism, how it grew and broadened, and finally burst to the surface with the irresistible power of genius and life. In speaking of the political, religious, and philosophical revivals of the seventeenth century, we observed that they were only belated results of the great sixteenth-century revolution. The same must be said of the literary revival. And it must be added that the manner in which these revi- vals came about was in all cases essentially the same. The sixteenth century had been on the point of establishing schles. Schule). On the influence of Guarini, Marino, and other Italian writers upon this whole literature cf. Borinski, Gesch. d. d. Litt. seit d. Ausg. d. MA. p. 112 f. Koberstein /. c. 104 f. 142. 1 88 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE, national unity and religious and intellectual liberty through a grand popular uprising. Now that this popular uprising had been definitely crushed, there was no hope for the ulti- mate victory of its principles left except in individual effort, except in the determination of single men to carry on the work oi a nobler past even under the most discouraging conditions and in the face of appalling difficulties. This it was which the Great Elector, Leibniz, Spener did, each in his own way. This it was which a number of writers, whom we now shall proceed to consider, at least tried to do. This is the manner in which modern culture has fought its way to maturity. The writers who represent this upward tendency may be divided into three groups: those who are chiefly concerned with religious matters, those whose attention is chiefly directed toward social conditions, those who depict chiefly their own individual emotions. The first group consists of Protestant and Catholic hymn-writers, the second embraces novelists, satirists, and playwrights; the third, representa- tives of worldly lyrics and descriptive poetry. There is a marked contrast between the hymns of the sixteenth and those of the seventeenth century. The hymns of Luther and his contemporaries were i r/T" battle-songs; they were born out of the conflict of the old religious world and the new; they were outcrys of a whole people struggling to revolutionize its spiritual existence. The hymns of the seventeenth cen- tury are the outpourings of individual souls longing for peace and reconciliation, expressions of trust in the guid- ance of a divine Providence, offerings of prayer and praise for protection in distress. And, what is most remarkable, there is hardly an allusion in them to the warfare between Protestantism and Catholicism, an unmistakable sign of the growth of religious toleration even under the surface of official dogmatism and sectarianism. Among the large number of Protestant hymn-writers, the THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 189 most representative are Paul Fleming (1609-40) and Paul Gerhardt (1606-76). Paul Fleming, an ambi- tious youth who worked his way from the modest surroundings of his f ather s country parsonage into the ser- vice of the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and who, after having taken part in diplomatic missions to Russia and Persia, died at the .threshold of full manhood, was far from being in opposition to Opitz and his school. On the con- trary, he admired Opitz as the German Pindar and Homer "; he considered himself his pupil; he tried to vie with him in artificial odes and sonnets, full of classical allusions and allegories; and when a few days before his own death, in an epitaph written for his grave, he claimed immortality for himself, there is little doubt that he based this claim upon those conventional and lifeless productions of the Opitzian kind, which now are deservedly forgotten. Fleming's real claim to immortality, however, rests on the fact that in sacred song at least, at times also in songs of love and home, he broke away, one might say in spite of himself, from his own artificial standards. It is as though in the presence of his Creator the ambitions and passions of his worldly career dwindled into nothing. For the deepest feeling, for the most momentous relations of life, he finds the simplest and most artless language. In starting on his Russian journey, he commends himself to God with all his own 12 : 11 Cf. the sonnet Ueber Herrn Martin Opitzen auf Boberfeld sein Ableben, DNL. XXVIII, 96. In worldly lyrics a similar falling away from the canon of Opitzian theories, in spite of unbounded admiration for Opitz, is seen in Simon Dach (d. 1659), the poet of Anke von Tharau; DNL. XXX, 106. 18 Nach des VI. Psalmens Weise, DNL. XXVIII, 27 ff. For German religious lyrics of the sixteenth century cf. Ph. Wackernagel, D. d. Kirchenlied v. d. dltesten Zeit b. z. Anfg d. 17. Jhdts. 19 SOCIAL fORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. Ich zieh in feme Lande Zu niitzen einem Stande An den er mich bestellt. Sein Segen wird mir lassen Was gut und recht ist fassen, Zu dienen seiner Welt. Leg ich mich spate nieder, Erwach ich friihe vvieder, Lieg oder zieh ich fort In Schwachheit und in Banden, Und was mir stosst zu handen, So trostet mich sein Wort. Ihm hab ich mich ergeben, Zu sterben und zu leben, So bald er mir gebeut. Es sey heut oder morgen, Dafiir lass ich ihn sorgen, Er weiss die rechte Zeit. Like Walther von der Vogelweide, Fleming is sick of the world. He bids it good-night with all its treasures, 13 he knows that its part is evil; he thanks God for having opened his eyes to the true life; he feels full of heaven; he feels raised above himself, and he defies the evil powers to drag him down again: Hin, Welt, du Dunst; von itzt an schwing ich mich Frei, ledig, los, hoch iiber mich und dich Und Alles das, was hoch heisst und dir heisset. Das hochste Gut erfiillet mich mit sich Macht hoch, macht reich. Ich bin nun nicht mehr ich. Trutz dem, das mich in mich zurucke reisset! 13 Neuer Vorsatz, I. c 92 :' Welt, gute Nacht, mit allern deinem Wesen.' Similarly Johann Rist (cf. GG. 182) in his Lob des Hof- lebens (DNL. XXVII, 380) : Himmel, dir sey Lob gesungen, Dass ich der bin, der ich bin, Auch annoch fein ungezwungen Leben kann nach meinem Sinn; Aller Hofe Glantz und Pracht Sing und sag ich gute Nacht. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. IQI If Fleming rose superior to his artistic maxims and preju- dices, Paul Gerhardt was borne by a living faith and an imperturbable joyfulness of mind above the prison walls of orthodox righteousness. In reading his poems we forget that he was an uncompromising Lutheran zealot, an irreconcilable foe of Calvmistic here- sies. To him the world, as Scherer expresses it, lies in continual sunshine. He is akin to Leibniz in his unfailing optimism. He scorns trouble; distress is to him happiness, darkness is light 14 : Die Welt ist mir ein Lachen Mil ihrem grossen Zorn; Sie ztirnt, und kann nichts machen, All Arbeit ist verlorn. Die Triibsal trlibt mir nicht Mein Herz und Angesicht; Das Ungltick ist mein Gluck, Die Nacht mein Sonnenblick. From the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, from the sight of fallen castles and destroyed cities, of trampled fields and open graves, he turns away to thank God for the final return of peace and to inspire his people with gratitude for the infinite grace and mercy of the Highest l6 : Wohlauf und nimm nun wieder Dein Saitenspiel hervor, O Deutschland! und sing Lieder Im hohen vollen Chor. Erhebe dein Gemiithe Unddanke Gott, und sprich: Herr, deine Gnad und Giite Bleibt dennoch ewiglich ! Gerhardt knows that to the children of God all things work together for good. He who rules in heaven, he who 14 The hymn ' Auf, auf mein Herz mit Freuden ' ; Geistl. Lieder ed. Wackernagel nr. 27. Cf. Scherer's Gesch d. d. Litt. p. 340. 15 Danklied ror die Verkiindiguns; des Friedms ,* &$?&. XXXI, 154 ff. IQ2 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. has ordered the ways of winds and clouds, will find a path for our feet also. 1 * To him Gerhardt lifts his face in the morning, 17 into his care he commits himself at night, as the chicken seeks refuge under the wings of the mother hen." The joys of nature are God's gift, the dumb animals sing his praise, all creation is a mighty chorus of thanksgiving, in which the poet cannot help mingling his voice ": Die Lerche schwingt sich in die Luft, Das Ta'ublein fleucht aus seiner Kluft Und macht sich in die Walder, Die hochbegabte Nachtigal Ergotzt und fiillt mil ihrem Schall Berg, Huge!, Thai and Felder. ****** Ich selbsten kann und mag nicht ruhn, Des grossen Gottes grosses Thun Erweckt mir alle Sinnen: Ich singe mil, wenn alles singt, Und lasse, was dem Hochsten klingt, Aus meinem Herzen rinnen. But more than all else does the death and resurrection of Christ fill Gerhardt with unspeakable joy. In a wonderful apostrophe to Christ's bleeding head, 20 all the more won- derful because it is an adaptation from Bernhard of Clair- vaux, he vows faithfulness to his Saviour unto the grave. He knows that his Redeemer liveth, that his own body is not always to be the prey of worms, that he will step into the presence of God transfigured." 1 And his feeling of oneness with his Lord and Master is so vivid and real that he in- 16 The hymn ' Befiehl du deine Wege ' ; ib. 174. 11 Morgenlied ' Wach auf mein Herz und singe'; ib. 137. 18 Abendlied ' Nun ruhen alle Wilder ' ; ib. 139. 19 Sommergesang ' Geh aus mein Herz und suche Freud' ; ib. 191 ff. 40 Passionssalve 'O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden ' ; ib. 133 ff. 21 The hymn 'Ich weiss dass mein Erloser lebt'; Geistl. Lieder ed. Wackernagel nr. 118. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. IQ3 stinctively clothes it in words which remind us of the old popular love-song": Herr, mein Hirt, Brunn aller Freuden, Du bist mein, Ich bin dein, Niemand kann uns scheiden. Ich bin dein, weil du dein Leben Und dein Blut Mir zu gut In den Tod gegeben. Du bist mein, weil ich dich fasse Und dich nicht, O mein Licht, Aus dem Herzen lasse. The two most distinguished among the Catholic hymn- writers of the seventeenth century, Friedrich Spec (1591- 1635) and Johann Scheffler (1624-77), were both Sl)66 Jesuits. But in neither of them is there a trace of that dark fanatic spirit, that abnegation of individual feeling, which so often has been pronounced the inevitable fruit of Jesuit doctrines. They both share in the morbid taste of their Contemporaries for daintiness of language, florid descriptions, and far-fetched comparisons. Spec de- votes a poem of twenty stanzas to describing how he and the Echo once in a forest " played ball " with the name of Jesus." 3 Scheffler goes so far as to compare the dying Jesus with a nightingale sitting on the cross and pouring out melodious strains, from which, the poet says, his own soul has derived eternal comfort and bliss." But both Spec and Scheffler are noteworthy examples of the power of true ** Christliches Freudenlied ' Warum sollt' ich mich denn grSmen?' DNL. XXXI, 163 ff. Cf. supra, p. 69. 43 The poem Die Gespons Jesu spielet im Wald mil einer Echo odet Widcrschall; Goedeke Elf B&cher d. Dichtg I, 249. 24 The poem Die Psyche vergleicht ihren Jesttm einer Nachtigall ; ib. 429. Similar aberrations in Zinzendorf's Geistl. Lieder (1725). 194 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. human feeling to enliven and transfigure even unreal and assumed forms. They are the Minnesingers of sacred song. Spec's strength lies in his keen eye for the beauty of out- ward things, in the Rhinelander's love for outdoor merri- ment, in a delicate ear for harmonious sound. His descrip- tions of nature are not always the worse for being saturated with Renaissance conceptions. When he pictures the proud huntress Diana sporting with the Nymphs of the forest, the Sun filling his quiver with fresh arrows; when he represents the summer winds as noble youths, riding upon clouds, 20 the morning-red as Aurora braiding her purple locks," we are reminded of a Domenichino or a Guido Reni. And all the more deeply are we impressed when in the midst of such a luxuriant apotheosis of earthly splendour he gives vent to his craving for spiritual atonement, and with heart-rending lamentation turns to his beloved Jesus for help 17 : Ade du schone Friihlingszeit, Ihr Felder, Wald und Wiesen, Laub, Gras, und Blumlein neu gekleidt, Mit siissem Tau berisen! Ihr Wasser klar Erd, Himmel gar, Ihr Pfeil der gulden Sonnen! Nur Pein und Qual Bei mir zumal Hat Ueberhand gewonnen. Ach Jesu, Jesu, treuer Held Wie krankest mich so sehre! Bin je doch harb und harb gequelt; Ach, nit mich so beschwere! Ja wiltu sehn All Pein und Peen 88 Cf. the Liebgesang der Gespons Jesu im Anfang der Sommerzeit ; ib. 250. * Cf. the Ecloga oder Hirtengesprach ; ib. 255. J: Liebgesang der Gespons str. n. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 19$ Im Augenblick vergangen, Mein Augen beid Nur fiihr zur Weid, Auf dein so schone Wangen. Scheffler drew his inspiration not so much from a delight in the visible world as from a deep conception of the inner unity of all nature. A Protestant by birth, he was led by the writings of Jacob Boehme and other Mystics of his own as well as earlier times into the wider realm of a fantastic Catholicism, very much in the same way in which cardinal Newman was estranged from the rigid formalism of the Anglican church through his craving for a fuller and richer spiritual life. And as Newman confessed that he "was not ever thus"; that there was a time when he " loved to choose and see his path," when he "loved the garish day"; but that now he was will- ing to be led by the " kindly light amidst the encircling gloom," so Scheffler, also, contrasted his former aimless wandering with the serene security of his converted state ": Ich lief verirrt und war verblendet. , Ich suchte dich und fand dich nicht ; Ich hatte mich von dir gewendet, Und liebte das geschaffne Licht. Nun aber ists durch dich geschehn Dass ich dich habgesehn. Erhalte mich auf deinen Stegen Und lass mich nicht mehr irre gehn ; Lass meinen Fuss in deinen Wegen Nicht straucheln oder stille stehn : Erleucht mir Leib und Seele ganz, Du starker Himmelsglanz. But Scheffler's innermost life was on a plane raised high above both Protestantism and Catholicism. Like Spinoza, he dwelt in the intuition of a divine universe, in which there 18 The hymn ' Ich will dich lieben, meine SUirke' ; /. c. 426. SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. is no above or below, and no past or present. , God was to him as much a part of man as man a part of God; the whole as much a part of the individual as the individual a part of the whole. All life was to him the projection of a single infinite being. In the whole range of literature there is no book in which pantheism has found a more original poetic expression than in the childlike sibylline verses of his Cherubinischer Wandersmann (1657)." The rose which blossoms to-day has been blooming in God from all eternity: Die Rose welche hier dein Sussres Auge sieht Die hat von Ewigkeit in Gott also geblUht. Man is at the same time a thing and not a thing, a point and a circle: Ich weiss nicht was ich bin, ich bin nicht was ich weiss, Ein Ding und nicht ein Ding, ein Stiipfchen und ein Kreis. The true man is as unchangeable as eternity itself; he becomes what he is and is what he has been: Ein wesentlicher Mensch ist wie die Ewigkeit Die unverandert bleibt von aller Aeusserheit. Ich ward das was ich war, und bin was ich gewesen, Und werd es ewig sein, wenn Leib und Seel genesen. God is in the soul as the ocean is in a drop of water: Sag an, wie geht es zu, wenn in ein Tropfelein, In mich, das ganze Meer Gott ganz und gar fleusst ein ? God died in Abel no less than in Christ: Gott ist nicht's erstemal am Kreuz getSdtet worden; Denn schau ! er Hess sich ja in Abel schon ermorden. 49 Cf. for the following ib. 429. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 1Q7 God is the oneness of all things: Ein einger Gott und viel, wie stimmt dies iiberein ? Gar schone ; well sie all in einem einer sem. All the virtues are swallowed up in one, which is justice: Schau alle Tugenden, ist ein ohn Unterscheid. Wiltu den Namen horn ? sie heisst Gerechtigkeit. Thus Scheffler, with an astonishing wealth of ever-new applications and similes, goes on repeating in endless varia- tions his one great theme of a divine universe. And he who is able to translate the language of one century into that of another will discover here again, as in so many phenomena of this period, the pulse-beat of our own modern thought and culture. There can be hardly a question that no other species of seventeenth-century literature has exerted so healthy an influence upon national life and has helped so National much to reawaken a strong and manly sentiment as sacred song. At a time when princely courts song. had come to be meeting-grounds of vice and frivolity, when the city halls and market-places had ceased to echo with the sounds of popular energy and enterprise, there still remained a refuge for noble imagination in the churches, and from more than one solitary country parsonage there shone forth a light which in due time was to mingle with the dawning of a better day. Only ten years after the death of Paul Ger- hardt, two men were born who were to make church music the vehicle of emotions as lofty and exalted as any that ever found expression in poetry and art: Bach and Handel. And these men were both still living when Klopstock, the first great poet of modern German literature, arose to sing the delivery of the human soul from the thraldom of sin, the resurrection of mind, the immortality of the individual. If the religious song of the seventeenth century is 198 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. unmistakably individualistic, the same may be said of what we have called the undercurrent of secular litera- taS* 1 " ^^ ture of this P eriod - Here, too, we notice a con- stant and growing opposition to the dictates of arbitrary rule and fashion, a gradual return to nature, a slowly advancing emancipation of individual feeling. None of the men who represent this movement achieved anything that can be called great. Few of them reached beyond mediocrity. The intellectual horizon of most of them was narrow, their language timid, their moral aims philistine. But if we remember that they were part of a people utterly crushed and disorganized, that they had to make a life-long fight against conventionalism and pedantry, we shall find in their efforts more to admire than to criticise. In one respect the movement appears to be essentially negative. The further we leave the time of the Thirty Years' War behind, the further we advance planting of P toward the middle of the eighteenth century, the public by pri- more are we struck with the constantly waning a s> influence of public affairs upon literature. But this apparent symptom of decay was in reality a condition, a necessary condition, of the growth of a new society. Since public life more and more came to be a prey of an aristocracy devoid alike of moral dignity and national aspirations, it more and more ceased to arouse in the breast of self-respecting men any feeling except that of anger and indignation. Private morality now came to be the chief concern of life. Freedom and humanity retired into the sanctuary of the heart. Self-observation and self-cultiva- tion took the place of outward activity. And literature, by taking part in this new tendency, by concentrating its atten- tion upon the inner self, by clinging to the idea of a spiritual life independent of external conditions, helped in its part to prepare the minds of the educated for the noble cosmopoli- tanism of Lessing and his contemporaries. A few hints about this gradual supplanting of public by private ideals THE STRUGGLE AGAtNST ABSOLUTISM. will bring our consideration of the literature of this period to a close. To the very disasters of the Thirty Years' War, with its doleful sequence of popular misery, foreign oppression, and national degradation, German literature owes a , . . Popular life of number of genuinely patriotic and public-spirited the seven- writers, all of whom, however, were in opposition teentl1 cen - . . . , , tnry as ez- to the strongest and most wide-spread currents pressed in of the public taste and conduct of their time. literature. Not even Walther von der Vogelweide inveighed more fervently against political and moral corruption than the noble Friedrich von Logau (1604-55), a man , . , . ! " Logaui who in a time of sham and servility remained true to himself. In his own idealism Logau finds a stand- ard for judging the false gods of the day. Society as he sees it about him, he describes as a sea in which the weighty and solid goes under, while the light and frivolous is kept afloat. 30 In the midst of contending religious parties, he looks in vain for religion, 81 and in the unctuous piety of official churchdom he detects the note of hypo- crisy." Although himself an aristocrat by birth, he in- veighs against the immorality of court life, which seems to him a hideous masquerade," and he declines to bend his knee before tinsel potentates and powdered grandees." With scorn and indignation he speaks of militarism, and the ravages inflicted by it upon the peaceful citizen. 36 " Merry, ye soldiers, merry ! The sabre-belts with which your loins are girded have been wrought from the skin of peasants. Your boots, your saddles and pistols you have stolen in knightly fashion *> Weltgunst; DNL. XXVIII, 156. 31 Glauben ; ib. 166. 31 Heuchler ; Sammtl. Sinngedichte ed. Eitner I, 8, 74. 13 Hofewerkzeug ; ib. II, 7, 5. 14 Poeterey ; ib. I, 5, 3 r Ich biege keine Knie und rucke keine Kappen Ftir auffgeputzter Ehr und angestrichner Gunst. K Anzeigungen des Sieges ; ib. I, 8, 46. 20O SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. upon the highway. Your horses have been torn from the plough. The last bloody crumbs of bread have been carried away by your camp-followers and courtesans. The whole country is being ruined to lift a handful of riders into the saddle. Merry, ye soldiers, merry ! " He bewails the influx of foreign, especially French, fashions into Germany; for he knows that a people changes its morality together with its garb." " In olden times Germany was the land of honesty, now it has come to be a lumber-room where other nations store their crimes and vices." 37 " No one is honoured amongst us who knows no French ; we disclaim and condemn our very ancestors because they spoke and felt German." 38 " Servants have to wear the livery of their masters ; can it, then, be true that France is the mistress and Germany the slave ? Fie upon thee, proud Germany, for this shameful bondage." 39 The same tone of manly independence which gives such a solid ring to Logau's epigrams we hear in the prose satires of his contemporary, Hans Michael Moscherosch Moscherosch. , - , \ _. ... . ... .... - Gesichte Phi- (1601-69). But while the lofty idealism of landers von Logau seldom stoops to a detailed representa- tion of actual conditions, it is just here that Moscherosch is strongest. His Visions of Philander von Sittewald (1642), although they are in part, at least, adapted from the Spanish, 40 and although they have a large admix- ture of the fanciful and the fantastic, at the same time give 35 Fremde Tracht ; DNL. XXVIII, 190. * 7 Deutschland ; ib. 156. 88 Frantzosische Sprache ; ib. 176. 39 Frantzosische Kleidv.ng ; ib. 162. 40 The Sttefios of Francisco Gomez de Quevedo (1635), which Moscheroch knew through a French translation by the Sieur de la Geneste. For the Spanish influence on German literature of the seventeenth century, especially manifest in the so-called picaresco novel (Warren, History of the Novel p. 284 ff.), cf. Bobertag in the in- troduction to Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, DNL. XXXIII, p. xxvi ff. Among the earliest translations from the Spanish is the Landstortzer Gusman von Alfarache oder Picaro genannt by Aegidius Albertinus (1615; the original, by Mateo Aleman, appeared in 1599). THE STRUGGLE. AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 2OI a most realistic picture of the ordinary German life of that age in all its manifold aspects and modifications. And what a life it is that he portrays ! What a gigantic Vanity Fair, what an endless variation of the one theme of the radi- cal wickedness of human nature and institutions ! In one of the visions, entitled Children of Hell, the author is trans- ported to the Inferno, where he finds the chief representa- tives of contemporary society in the role of associates and bondsmen of the devil. In another, called Ways of the World, Philander describes his experiences on the great highroad which extends from North America to the Straits of Magellan, from Nova Zembla to New Guinea, from Ormus to Seville, from Greenland to Sumatra, from the Cape of Good Hope to Archangel: the road of hypocrisy. Among other incidents, he meets a funeral procession, a widower with a great crowd of relatives following the body of his wife. 41 Philander takes compassion on the poor man as he drags himself along, his head bowed down, wrapped up in a wide black mantle. " What a blessed woman," he ex- claims, "to be mourned so deeply by her dear ones ! what a hapless husband to be bereft of such a noble wife ! " But he is quickly disenchanted when his companion tells him that what afflicts the widower so deeply is, not the death of his wife, but the large expenses of the funeral and the re- flection that she might have died before doctor and apothe- cary had had a chance of running up such enormous bills; and that, while he is following her to the grave, his imagina- tion is busily engaged with a host of future sweethearts. In still another vision, called Fashion s Windup^ the spirits of Ariovistus, Arminius, and other heroes of an imaginary Germanic past 42 are conjured up to inveigh against the out- landish and effeminate manners of their depraved descend- 41 Cf. for the following DNL. XXXII, 46 ff. 41 The identification of things Germanic and Celtic was a common mistake throughout the seventeenth and the larger part of the eigh- teenth century. 2O2 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITERATURE. ants. It is Philander himself who appears before this council, and although he prides himself on being a good German, he finds not the least favour in their eyes. They first take offence at his name. " Why," asks King Ario- vistus, 4 ' " if you are a German by birth, have you not a German name ? Of what use is a Greek or a Hebrew name in Germany ? " " Your Majesty," answers Philander, " such names are common with us." " Common ? Yes, common as French vices. Is there no faith left in t he- hearts of Germans for their fatherland ? Have you not been ruined by Roman despotism and perfidy, and yet you crave to be called by names borrowed from your oppressors? Have you lost your self-respect to such a degree that such noble-sounding German names as Erhard, Adelhard, Bald- fried, Karl, Kunrath, Degenbrecht, Eitellieb, Gottfried, Sig- fried, Theuerdank, and others equally beautiful are despised by you ? " Another of the royal company makes fun of Philander's fashionable hat ; another takes him by his fore- lock and exclaims: " Are you a German ? and you wear your hair like a Frenchman ? Why do you have your hair hang- ing down over your forehead like a thief ? " Another says: " You are a German ? Why, then, do you wear that silly Frenchified beard ? Your ancestors considered an honest full-grown beard their greatest pride, and you, like the fickle French fools, treat and trim and curl it every month, every week, every day ! " " You are a German ? " says another, " look at your garments ! What manner of doublet is that, what stockings and knee-breeches ? Is nothing good enough for you that is made in your own country, you despisers and traitors of your fatherland ? Where is the people so fickle, so fastidious, so foolish in bearing as the degenerate Germans of the present day?" But the most fearful picture of depravity drawn by Mo- scherosch is the vision entitled Soldier's Life, of which it will Cf. for the following DNL. I. c. 140 ff. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ABSOLUTISM. 2O3 suffice to mention one episode. 44 Philander in his wander- ings of an evening passes by a church. As he sees a light in it, he decides to enter and quarter there for the night. Approaching the door, he is suddenly seized by two men who hold pistols to his breast and warn him to be quiet. Then they take him into the church, and there, good God ! what a spectacle opens before his eyes ! Horses stand- ing in a row along the pews and feeding, soldiers lying around a fire, and by another fire some twenty peasants and citizens huddled together and tied with ropes. Before dawn the whole party breaks up, the soldiers and Philander on horseback, the captives driven along, like cattle, with whips and sabres. In a wilderness amid the mountains a camp is pitched, and now the torturing of the victims begins. A few offer ransoms and escape with blows and kicks ; the majority undergo excruciating agonies. One, with both hands tied on his back, has a horsehair drawn through his tongue. Every time that the unfortunate man cries out, his calves are lashed with a cowhide. Another has a rope with many knots wound around his forehead and tightened in the neck with a gag, so that the blood streams from his eyes and nose. And so the story goes on, a most appalling record of cruelty, perhaps with de- tails which offend a refined taste, but with a formidable arraignment of the corruption and villany of the omnipo- tent soldiery, which does the greatest credit to the author's moral courage and patriotism. By the side of Logau and Moscherosch, the greatest epi- grammatist and the greatest satirist of the seventeenth cen- tury, 46 stands Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen 44 DNL. I. c. 257 ff. 45 Among other satirical writings of the seventeenth century the most remarkable are Johann Lauremberg's Low-German Schertz- gedichte (1652), reprinted NddLiv. nr. 17 ; Balthasar Schupp's Freund in der Noth (1657), ib. nr g ; Abraham a S. Clara's Judas der 204 SOCIAL FORCES IN GERMAN LITER A TURE. (1625-76), its greatest novelist, he, too, radically opposed to the fashionable vices and follies of the ruling Grimmelshan- aristocracy. The whole drift of his principal cissimu P work, the famous Simplicius Simplicissimus (1668), is to show the vanity and perverse- ness of the existing social order. Gervrnus, and after him Scherer, have drawn a parallel between Simplicissimus and Parzival which is indeed striking. Like Parzival, Simpli- cissimus loses his parents at an early age; like him he is reared in the wilderness; like him he enters the world a dreamy, childish youth; like him he loses his better self in a life of reckless adventure; like him he is taught through his very mistakes and misfortunes a fuller view of God and mankind, and ends, contented with his lot, with soul at peace. But there is one radical difference between Wol- fram's work and that of Grimmelshausen. Wolfram be- lieved in the ideals of his time, Grimmelshausen despised those of his age. Wolfram's hero participates in the highest and best which chivalrous culture can offer him, and finally attains the crown of perfect knighthood. Grim- melshausen's hero is tossed about in a world of savageness and brutality, and at the end of his career finds salvation only by denouncing and abjuring what had been the chief concern of his life. A few episodes of this remarkable work will serve to bring out more fully the grim pessimistic spirit with which Grimmelshausen must have looked about him. The open- ing scene 4 " shows a troop of pillaging soldiers breaking into the house of Simplicius's foster-father, a peasant in the Spessart. Doors and windows are smashed, the furniture is battered and burned; with devilish ingenuity the inmates are tortured, one of them has a pail of dung-water poured ErtzscheIm(ib?>(>),DNL. XL; Christian Renter's Schelmuffsky(\b