eighteenth century was made possible. Sachs was the last of a passing generation. He did indeed advance the German drama until it far surpassed the contemporary drama of England; but he left behind him only the banal imitator of the English, Jacob Ayrer: while in England, before Sachs died, Shakespeare had been born. In Sachs the literary traditions of three centuries came to an end. Walther von der Vogelweide had lived to deplore the gradual degradation of courtly poetry: the peasants' life and love became the poet's theme. In the years that followed, it sank into hopeless vulgarity. From this it was rescued by Sachs. But the world meanwhile had traveled a long road: poetry had left the court and castle for the cottage and the chapel; the praise of women was superseded by the praise of God. It is a striking contrast between the knightly figure of Walther, with the exquisite music of his love lyrics, and the dignified but simple shoemaker, with the tame jog-trot of his homely couplets. But Walther was chief among the twelve masters whose traditions the mastersingers pretended to preserve; and the mastersong itself was the mechanical attempt of a matter-of-fact age to reproduce the melodious beauty of the old minnesang. Thus Hans Sachs, the greatest of the mastersingers, was in a sense the last of the minnesingers; and German literature, which had waited three centuries, had two more yet to wait before it should again bloom as in those dazzling days of the Hohenstaufen bards. Hans Sachs was a most prolific and many-sided poet. Before his twentieth year he had fulfilled the exacting conditions of the mastersingers, and had invented a new air, which, after the affected manner of the guild, he called 'Die Silberweise' (Silver Air). Sixty years of uninterrupted productivity followed, during which he filled sixteen folios with mastersongs. These he never published, but kept for the use of the guild, of which he was the most zealous and distinguished member. But the strait-jacket of form imposed by the leathern rules of the "Tabulatur» impeded the free movement of the poet. The real Sachs is in the dramas and poetic tales. All are written in rhymed couplets. He read omnivorously; and chose his subjects from all regions of human interest and inquiry. He often treated the same theme in several forms. Die Ungleichen Kinder Eva' (Eve's Unlike Children), for instance, he took from a prose fable of Melanchthon's, and rendered in four different versions. It seeks to account for and justify the existence of class distinctions; and is perhaps the best as it is the most delightfully characteristic of all his compositions. It is one of the chief merits of Sachs that he purified the popular Fastnachtspiele (Shrovetide Plays). Of these plays Nuremberg was the cradle; and those of Hans Sachs are by far the best that German literature has to show. He shunned the vulgarity that had characterized them; and made them the medium of his homely wisdom, of his humorous and shrewd observation of life, and of his simple philosophy. Each is a delicious genre picture of permanent historic interest. As the Reformation advanced, there came a deeper tone into the poetry of Hans Sachs. He read Luther's writings as early as 1521, and two years later publicly avowed his adherence in the famous poem of 'Die Wittenbergisch Nachtigall' (The Nightingale of Wittenberg). It was a powerful aid in the spread of Lutheran ideas. The dialogue, so closely allied in form with the drama, was a popular form of propaganda in that age; and the four dialogues that Sachs wrote are among his most important contributions to literature. Their influence was as great as that of Luther's own pamphlets; and in form they were inferior only to the brilliant and incisive dialogues of Hutten. One of them was translated into English in 1548. The city council, alarmed at the strongly Lutheran character of these writings, bade the cobbler stick to his last; but the council itself soon turned Lutheran, and Sachs continued his work amid everincreasing popular applause. The impression made by Hans Sachs upon his time was ephemeral: his imitators were few and feeble; all literary traditions were obliterated by the Thirty Years' War. Goethe at last revived the popular interest in him by his poem, The Poetical Vocation of Hans Sachs'; and Wagner's beautiful characterization in The Mastersingers' has endeared him to thousands that have never read a single couplet from his pen. There is a natural tendency to overestimate a man whose real worth has long lain unrecognized; but when all deductions have been made, there remains a man lovable and steadfast, applying the wisdom of a long experience to the happenings of each common day, exhibiting a contagious joy in his work, and avowedly working for "the glory of God, the praise of virtue, the blame of vice, the instruction of youth, and the delight of sorrowing hearts." It is the manifest genuineness of the man, his amiable roguishness, his shrewd practical sense, that give to his writings. their vitality, and to his cheerful hobbling measures their best charm. But the appeal is not direct; one must project oneself back into the sixteenth century, and live the life of Nuremberg in her palmiest days. That city was for Hans Sachs the world; in this concentration of his mind upon his immediate surroundings lay at once his strength and his limitations. He is at his best when he relates what he has himself seen and experienced. His humorous pictures have a sparkling vivacity, beneath which lurks an obvious moral purpose. The popularity of these simply conceited tales gives point to the description of the German peasant's condition at the time of the Reformation as "misery solaced by anecdote." It was such solace that Hans Sachs supplied in a larger quantity and of a better quality than any other man of his time. A grateful posterity, upon the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth, erected to his memory a stately statue in the once imperial city; and his humbler fame is as indissolubly associated with Nuremberg as is the renown of his greater contemporary. "Not thy councils, not thy kaisers, win for thee the world's regard, But thy painter Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs thy cobbler-bard.» Chart Guing UNDER THE PRESSURE OF CARE OR POVERTY HY art thou cast down, my heart? WHY Why troubled, why dost mourn apart, O'er naught but earthly wealth? Trust in thy God; be not afraid: He is thy Friend, who all things made. Dost think thy prayers he doth not heed? My Father and my God, who still Since thou my God and Father art, I know thy faithful loving heart See, I am poor; I am but dust; On earth is none whom I can trust. The rich man in his wealth confides, This one thing fast that he hath taught,- A WAKE, it is the dawn of day! I hear a-singing in green byway The joy-o'erflowing nightingale; Her song rings over hill and dale. The night sinks down the occident, The day mounts up the orient, The ruddiness of morning red Glows through the leaden clouds o'erhead. The moon doth lay herself to sleep; For she is pale, and dim her beam, That they no longer cared or minded But there they could find no pasturage good, The lion laid for them many a snare When there the lion found them tangled, His helpless prey he cruelly mangled. They prowled, and greedy watch did keep. Translation of Charles Harvey Genung. |