APPENDIX.

BRIEF ACCOUNT OF PROSE FICTION IN

GERMANY.

The legendal cycles of Alexander, of Charlemagne, of Arthur, the common fund whence the medieval literature of entertainment drew the themes of its chief productions, received from Romance poets the embodiment in which they were enabled and destined not only to spread through the length and breadth of Europe, and were endowed with stability, in virtue whereof they have endured through centuries to be admired and re-clothed by poets up to our own time. Once thus consolidated, they passed abroad, and Teutonic receptivity soon adopted and assimilated the productions of the troubadours and trouvères; and indeed have in one case—the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach-given such work its finest shaping. But we have to do here only with prose, a form which, following the usual analogy, succeeded the earlier metrical translations from the French minstrels.

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As far as is known, from an extant fragment of it, the earliest of such prose compositions is the romance of Tristan and Iseult, and it may well have been the first, for the writer says:"For the sake of people who do not care for such rhymed books, and who could not properly understand the art of rhyme, have I, unnamed, brought this history into the present form." The work is not, however, based directly upon the Tristan et Iseult of Gottfried of Strasbourg, but on that of Eilhart von Oberg. No printed edition is known of this prose Tristan, and other romances, e.g., Fierabras and the Haimonskinde (Four Sons of Aymon), were long read in manuscript before they were printed in 1533 and 1535 respectively.

From the middle of the fifteenth century, prose began to be employed for the reproduction of national (such as the Nibelung) or other epic materials. Thus the poem of Wigalois (son of Gawain), from the Arthurian cycle, composed in verse by Wirnt von Gravenburg about 1210, was translated by an anonymous writer at the request of several nobles, and printed at Augsburg in 1493, and a prose version of Tristan was printed at the same place in the following year. These redactions reached a wider circle than the poems, which were more confined to knightly society, hence the prose compositions came to be known as Volksbücher, or folk-books. Among the most widely known were Horned Siegfried and Duke Ernest, the first translated from the French, the second from the Latin, the Seven Wise Masters (see the Gesta Romanorum, supra, chap. vii.), the Decameron, Melusine, the Four Sons of Aimon, Pontus and Sidonia, the last translated from the French about 1480 by Eleonora of Scotland, consort of the Archduke Sigmund. Elizabeth, Countess of Nassau and Saarbruck, translated Lother and Maller. Some of the above works will be found characterized in the foregoing pages of Dunlop's work.

1

There were other kinds of imaginative compositions in prose, the collections of facetiæ such as those of Johannes Pauli, of Jewish extraction, a Franciscan monk of the monastery of Thann, in Alsace (1455-1530). Pauli's "Schimpf und Ernst,” or “Grave and Gay," professes to be collected from ancient Greek and Latin writings, the Fathers and Petrarch.2 Facetiæ and fables of this class often found polemical application, thus Erasmus Alberus (15001553) a disciple of Luther, wrote a collection of fables, The Book of Virtue and Wisdom (1534), where the fables are "moralized” in a satirical sense, e.g., in the fable of the Ass in the Lion's Skin; the ass is the Pope, and Luther the first to perceive the ass's ears. The same author's "Der Barfüsser Monche Eulenspiegel und Alkoran" (1542) is full of bitter satire.

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Georg Wickram's "Rollwagenbuchlein " (1555), a compilation purporting to beguile the tedium of travelling, Jacob Frei's Gartengesellschaft" (1556), W. Kirchhof's "Wendunmuth” (1563), M. Montanus's "Wegkürzer" (1565), and W. Büttner's "Klaus Narr" (1572), were somewhat similar collections of facetious stories. In 1590, Johannes Fischart published under the

1 The Heroic Life and Exploits of Siegfrid the Dragon-Slayer, Lond.,

1848.

2 See vol. i., p. 436.

title of Geschichtsklitterung, a very free version of Rabelais' Gargantua."

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The books of stories and legends, popular in Germany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, are characterized by a ponderous, and tediously elaborate, and often coarse humour. Of all the German folk-books, Till Eulenspiegel1 is the most famous. (The earliest known edition is of 1515, and the only known copy is in the British Museum.) It narrates the life of Eulenspiegel, who was thrice baptized, in the font, in mud, having been dropped from his mother's arms, and finally in hot water, to cleanse him from the mud; and his wanderings throughout Europe, and his adventures, practical jokes, and comical frauds, which are taken from various sources. The work, which is anonymous, furnished a host of subjects for poetry and comedy. H. Fischart versified it, and H. Sachs and J. Ayrer found in it materials for their plays. Scarcely less popular was the History and legend of the excellent and much experienced Herr Polycarp von Kirrlarissa, called the Finkenritter, who for twenty-five years before his birth wandered over many lands, and saw many curious things, and at last was found for dead by his mother, and born. The knight, while mowing, cuts off his own head and runs after it, comes to a country where hares hunt dogs, etc., and has many other adventures which abound in laboured Teutonic comicality. The work seems to have been known in the fifteenth century, the first edition, however, is undated. The story certainly existed long before it appeared in the form of a folkbook. The author is not positively ascertained.

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The story of Faust 2 has been the theme of so many compositions, and the object of so much criticism and research, that we need do no more here than give the title of the first known 1 Eulen-spiegel owl-mirror. The title of the book has given the French language the word éspiègle. Translated in Roscoe's "German Novelists." It appears to be ascertained that a person really named Till Ulenspiegel (Ulenspiegel in the Low German equivalent of the High German Eulenspiegel) was living in the neighbourhood of Brunswick, but whether Ulenspiegel had already become a family name or was only a sobriquet is uncertain.

2 See article, Three Fausts, Dublin Review, Oct., 1883. The story was re-set by S. R. Widman in 1599. Faust's Life, Deeds, and Journey to Hell, 1798, is a romance by F. M. Klinger (1752-1831). F. Mueller (1750-1825) dramatized the subject, and N. Lenau (1802-1850) published, in 1836, a philosophical poem, Faust; of Goethe's work it would be superfluous to speak.

German folkbook of the legend; it is anonymous and was printed in 1587 at Frankfort, and runs: History of D. John Faust, the notorious enchanter and expert in black arts, how he wrote himself away to the devil at a certain term, and what rare adventures he saw, himself contrived and pursued in the meantime, until at last he received his well-deserved reward; mainly compiled from writings left by him. It seems to be now ascertained that there really lived in the Duchy of Würtemberg, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, a certain Dr. Faust renowned for magical proficiency.

The Wandering Jew (Der Ewige Jude), which seems to have assumed nearly the form in which it has come down to us in the thirteenth century, was also a very popular folkbook.1

2

The wonderful accounts of the Schildbürger or the Lalenbuch (about 1598). The town of Schilda is inhabited by descendants of one of the seven sages; on account of their wisdom they are in constant request by neighbouring rulers as counsellors, and while absent their home affairs fall into disorder. To avoid being summoned away to give advice, they cultivate folly; and, as a final feat—having purchased a cat to devour their mice, and apprehensive that the cat, upon exhausting the mice, will then devote its energies to the consumption of other animals and human beings-they set fire to the house on the roof of which the grimalkin is sitting. The cat leaps from house to house, communicating the fire: the city is burnt to ashes; whereupon the burghers migrate to different places, and transplant their folly far and wide. (Cf. Supra, ii., p. 26.)

Another extensive class of folkbooks consisted of the translations of the French romances of chivalry, Fierabras (1533), La Belle Maguelone (1536), the Emperor Octavian (1535), the Quatre Fils Aymon (1535), Amadis of Gaul (1583). The last-named gave rise to "The Treasury of Orations, Letters, and Conversations," extracted from the Amadis, and published in 1593, to Philipp von Zesen's romances, and Härsdorffer's "Die Gesprächspiele," or Mirror of Conversation. A collection of various folkbooks was published in 1587 under the title, Buch

See S. B. Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, for an account of this legend.

2 Der Schiltbürger. Wunderseltzame abenteuerliche, unerhörte, und biszher unbeschriebene Geschichten und Thaten der abgemalten Schildbürger in Misnopotamia hinder Utopia gelegen, etc. 1605.

der Liebe. Zesen translated Scudéry's "Ibrahim " (see ii., p. 430), and wrote Die Adriatische Rosamund (1642).

Of more humorous complexion is the writing of the celebrated Abraham a Sancta Clara (Ulrich Megerle, 1642-1709), Augustinian monk and Court preacher at Vienna, viz., Gack, gack, gack, gack a -ga, of a marvellous hen in the Duchy of Bavaria, or description of the Pilgrimage to Maria Stern in Taxa, 1687. Judas, the Arch-rascal (1689), and Mercurialis, or Evergreen, pleasant and diverting stories and poems (1700), are also by him. A. Clara's language is fresh and piquant, free from pedantry, and is, moreover, interesting from the philologist's point of view as having traces of dialect, and exhibiting original compound words or turns of diction. Schiller has taken part of the Capuchin's sermon in Wallenstein's Camp literally from one of Megerle's sermons.

One of the most prominent romance writers of the seventeenth century was Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (16251676), who took for his nom de plume different anagrams of his name, e.g., Samuel Greifnson von Hirschfeld, German Schleifstein von Sulsfort, etc. His first fictions were after the manner of the French love romances, e.g., Life of the Excellent and Chaste Joseph in Egypt, The Story of the gentle Love and Sorrows of Dietwald and Amelinda. Under the title of Der Fliegende Wandersmann nach dem Monde, he produced a free translation of F. Baudoin's "L'homme dans la lune," which is a French version of Godwin's "Man in the Moon" (see vol. ii., p. 524).

A peculiar literary product was called into existence under the influence of the Thirty Years' War, in which the adventurous and vagabond life of the period was depicted. This bears some analogy to the Spanish picaresque romances, the influence of which may be traced in them and especially on the chief work of this school the Simplicissimus usually ascribed to Grimmelshausen. Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (? 1669), i.e., Description of the life of a strange wanderer named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchsheim. He was found as an infant by a herdsman and reared among the cattle. Upon the village being burnt down by soldiers, Simplex, or Simplicissimus so called on account of his

1 Aleman's "Guzman de Alfarache" was translated into German in 1615, by Aegidius Albertinus. J. M. Moscherosch (Philander von Sittenwald, 1601-1669), who was of Spanish extraction, took Quevedo as his model in his Wonderful and Veracious Histories. He is, however, rather a satirist than a writer of fiction.