The Pictures of German Life Throughout History. Gustav Freytag

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СКАЧАТЬ villages, falcon on hand, with troopers and damsels; the priests, whom the peasants could neither choose nor dismiss, seduced their wives, or lived scandalously at home. The mendicant monks forced their way into their kitchens, and demanded the smoked meats from their chimneys, and the eggs from their baskets. All the communities throughout Southern Germany were in a state of silent fermentation, and already, at the end of the fifteenth century, local risings had begun, the forerunners of the Peasant war.

      But more wonderful still was the influence of the new art, through which the poorest might acquire knowledge and learning. The method of multiplying written words by thousands was discovered on the banks of the Rhine in the middle of the fifteenth century. The printing of patterns by means of wooden blocks had been practised for many centuries, and frequently single pages of writing had in this way been struck off; at last it occurred to a citizen that whole books might be printed with cast metal type. Its first effect was to give intelligence to the industry of the artisan, and a way was thus opened to the people of turning their mental acquirements to profit.

      The learning of the middle ages still occupied the professors' chairs at the German universities, but it was without soul, and consisted in dry forms and scholastic subtleties. There was little acquaintance with the ancient languages, Hebrew and Greek were almost unknown; the solid learning of the olden times was taught in bad monkish Latin; the Bible and Fathers of the Church, the Roman historians, institutes and pandects, the Greek text of Aristotle, and the writers upon natural philosophy and medicine, were found only in dusty manuscripts; nothing but the commentators and systematizers of the middle ages were ever expounded or learnt by heart. Such was the state of things in Germany. But in Italy, for more than a century, mental cultivation had begun, from the study of Roman and Greek poets, historians, and philosophers. The men of high intellect on the other side of the Alps rejoiced in the beauty of the Latin language and poetry, admired the acute logic of Cicero, and regarded with astonishment the powerful life of the Roman people. Their whole literature entwined itself, like the tendrils of a creeper, round the antique stem. It was soon after the invention of printing, and during the war carried on by the Germans in the Peninsula, that this new Humanitarian learning was gradually introduced into Germany. The Latin language, which appeared to the Germans like a new discovery, was industriously studied in the classical schools, and disseminated through the means of manuals. The close attention and long labour necessary in Germany to acquire the foreign grammar, acted as discipline to the mind. Acuteness and memory were strongly exercised; the logical construction of the language was more attended to than the phonetic; the grandeur and wisdom of the subject, more than the beauty and elegance of the style: the German mind required more exercise, therefore the result was more lasting, because the mastery had to be gained over two languages of different roots. A number of earnest teachers first spread the new learning; among these were Jacob Wimpfeling and Alexander Hegius, Crato of Udenheim, Sapidus, and Michael Hilspach. To these may be added the poets Henry Bebel and Conrade Celtes, Ulrich Zasius the lawyer, and others; in close union with them were to be found all the men of powerful talent in Germany; Sebastian Brand, author of Narrenschiffs, and also the great preacher John Geiler of Kaisersberg, although he had been brought up in the scholastic teaching.

      They were sometimes led by their knowledge of ancient philosophy into secret speculations upon the being of God, and all were opposed to the corruptions of the Romish Church; but their opposition differed from that of Italy in this respect, that the German mind gave it more elevation. It is true that many of the Humanitarian teachers considered the German language as barbarous; they Latinized their names, and in their confidential letters took the liberty of calling their countrymen unpolished; they hated the despotic arrogance with which the Romish priests looked down upon them and their nation; yet they did not cease to be good Christians. Besides their unceasing attacks on the vices of the Italian priesthood, they ventured, though with hesitation and caution, upon an historical critique on the foundation of the claims of the Papacy. They were united in bonds of friendship, and formed one large community. Bitterly persecuted by the representatives of the old scholastic school, they nevertheless gained allies everywhere,--in the burgher houses of the Imperial cities, in the courts of the Princes, in the entourage of the Emperor, and even in the cathedral chapters and on the Episcopal thrones.

      The mental culture of these men, however, could not keep a lasting hold on German life; its groundwork was too foreign to the real needs of the mental life of the people; its ideal, which it had gathered from antiquity, was too vague and arbitrary; its fantastical occupation with a bygone world, of whose real meaning they knew so little, was not favourable to the development of their character. Some indeed became forerunners in the struggle of faith, but others, offended by the roughness and narrowness of the new teaching, fell back to the old Church which they had before so severely judged. One of this school, the enthusiastic and high-minded Ulrich von Hutten, who was passionately German, and attached to the teaching of Luther, suffered for his devotion to the popular cause.

      In the beginning of the century, however, the Humanitarians carried on almost alone the struggle against the oppression under which the nation groaned. They exercised a powerful influence on the minds of the multitude; even what they wrote in Latin was not lost upon them, and the rhymesters of the cities were never weary of propagating the witticisms and bitter attacks of the Humanitarians in the form of proverbs, jocose stories, and plays.

      The desire for learning became powerful amongst the people. Children and half-grown boys rushed from the most distant valleys into the unknown world to seek for knowledge; wherever there was a Latin school established, there the children of the people congregated, often undergoing the greatest sufferings and hardships, demoralized by the uncertainty of their daily life; for though the founders and managers of the schools, or the burghers of the cities, gave these strangers sometimes a roof over their heads, and beds to lie on, they were obliged for the most part to beg for their daily subsistence. Little control was exercised over them; only one thing was strictly enjoined,--that there should be some method in the lawlessness of their life; it was only under appointed forms, and in certain districts of the city, that they were allowed to beg. When the travelling scholar came to a place where there was a Latin school, he was bound to join the association of scholars, that he might not make claims on the benevolence of the inhabitants, to the prejudice of the schoolmaster or of those already there. An organization was formed among these scholars, as was always the case where Germans assembled together in the middle ages, and a code was established, containing many customs and demoralizing laws, with which every one was obliged to comply; besides this there was the rough poetry of an adventurous life, which few could go through without injury to their characters in after life. The younger scholars, called Schützen, were, like the apprentices of artisans, bound to perform the most humiliating offices for their older comrades, the Bacchanten: they had to beg and even to steal for their tyrants, who in return gave them the protection of their strength. It was considered honourable and advantageous for a Bacchant to have many Schützen, who obtained gifts from the benevolent, on which he lived; but when the rough Bacchant rose to the university, he was paid off for all the tyrannical injustice he had practised towards the younger scholars: he had to lay aside his school dress and rude manners, was received into the distinguished society of students with humiliating ceremonies, and was obliged in his turn to render service and to bear rude jests like a slave. The scholars were perpetually changing their schools, for with many the loitering on the high roads was the main object; their youth was passed in wild roving from school to school, in begging, theft, and dissoluteness. Whilst we rejoice in finding a few individuals who, by strength of mind and ability, rose through all this to intellectual preeminence, we must bear in mind how many a pet child died miserably under some hedge, or in the lazar-house of a foreign city, whose youthful minds had looked forward with hope to reaching the same goal.

      The instruction in the Latin schools was very deficient, for a book was a rare treasure: the boys had often to copy the text for themselves, and the old grammar of Donat still served as the groundwork by which they learned to read Latin. There was still much useless scholastic pedantry, and what was then admired as elegant Latin, has somewhat of a monkish flavour. But the great teacher Wimpfeling took every opportunity of selecting examples which might excite the boys to honesty, integrity, and the fear СКАЧАТЬ