THE COMING OF THE MASTERSINGERS
After the lofty house of Hohenstaufen had been overwhelmed with destruction, the interregnum, the time of anarchy, "the emperorless, the terrible time," in Schiller's words, (1250-1273), and the reign of Rudolf of the house of Habsburg mark the beginning of the era of the decline in German culture. Princes and nobles had long ago ceased to sing, for between arms the Muses are silent. Tenderness and refinement of feeling gradually drifted into the commonplace if not into downright coarseness. We are obliged to record a cheerless period of mediocrity and degradation lasting almost four centuries, though, of course, interwoven here and there with illuminating stars that shoot up to the heavens from this dreary waste, and continuing until about the middle of the eighteenth century, when the second classical bloom came into florescence and intensified strongly the classical era of the Middle Ages.
The decline that found its perigee in the period of the Mastersingers went on gradually. It was the result of various political and social causes. The aesthetic ideals, because of which in the time of the Hohenstaufens women were revered, vanished. With the decadence of culture superstition asserted itself more strongly. Women were burned as witches; and the general references to them in the literature of the period of decline are usually vulgar, and not infrequently obscene. Refined deportment toward women ceased. Saint Ruffian (Sanct Grobianus) became the idol of the era of decadence, and the vulgarities of Till Eulenspiegel furnished amusement. "Shamelessness celebrated a boisterous carnival." The classics alone, though diluted by pitiful scholasticism until rescued and raised to a higher plane by the Humanists of the Renaissance, became the only oasis in the dreary waste of the decadence.
In most of the cities that were centres of intellectual life, the plebeians arose and replaced the formerly highly cultured patricians. The burghers began to tune the melodies of a new music: a banausic artisan song. The comic anecdote and the dramatic farce pleased the people best and, therefore, prevailed. There was a general delight in comical, farcical roles, and such elements were even introduced into religious plays. For example, Saint Mary complains that she has no diapers to protect the Holy Child from frost. Saint Joseph gets into a quarrel with two maids; there is a free fight; vulgar reproaches and blows are exchanged. Darkness begins to spread over Germany. The devil, stupid or otherwise, introduces his spook; sorceresses and hags professing magic skill are everywhere. The defamation of the grand institutions of the Papacy, owing to several unworthy successors of Saint Peter, promotes contempt and ludicrous treatment. The ridiculous fiction of the alleged "Papess" Joanna becomes a farcical subject, but is, nevertheless, jokingly rescued from the claws of the devil. Her story goes thus: a maiden elopes with a priest, her lover, to Rome, dons man's dress, becomes a doctor, a cardinal, and at last a Pope. She is finally ignominiously unmasked, received by the devils in hell, but saved by the intercession of Saint Mary and Saint Nicholas. Dietrich Schernberg treated this strange subject at Muhlhausen, in Thuringia, in his play of Frau Jutla. All these morality plays, mysteries, farces, sottises, sacred or profane, are scarcely ever edifying, and this whether they treat of court sessions regarding love troubles, marriage calamities, allegorical figures, fools of love, women, wicked monks, or quacks. Here, a maiden leads her lovers by the nose; there, lovers present themselves before Lady Venus. An immoderate coarseness and indecency in manner and action is part of the game; even in the presence of women the utmost vulgarity was permitted. Women joined in the most obscene conversation, and it is astonishing to what depths of immodesty their speech descended. Nürnberg was the centre of carnival plays. Hans Rosenblut and Hans Folz, authors of incredibly obscene, though very clever, farces, were the forerunners of the great and lovable Hans Sachs,
"Who was a shoe-
maker and a poet, too."
But it is incumbent upon us to return to the beginning of the period of decadence and consider the decline in its sequence. During the era of chivalry the follies of the nobles were imitated by the peasants and burghers. Inter-marriages between poor nobles and rich peasants occurred now and then, liaisons and amours between them were much more frequent; the caricature of the bourgeois gentilhomme, whom Moliere satirized in his immortal comedy, was ever present. Neidhart's and Strieker's poems and Werner's Meier Helmbrecht furnish delightful figures and caricatures of the upstart class which was so scorned, ridiculed, and snubbed by the "smart set" of the time.
Yet, on the whole, it may be said that the boys and girls of the peasants and bourgeois led natural lives, courting and dancing and wooing, as long as they were kept from the influence of the chivalric craze. Instead of knight-errantry there were among these young people simple though not always platonic relations. The lords still exercised their harmful influence upon the freedom of the peasantry, but it gradually diminished. At springtide there was love and marriage, not always voluntarily, but in deference to the right of lords and princes to command their dependants to marry. In some localities a system of pairing prevailed, and maids were assigned as companions by lot, and mated couples danced together during an entire summer. Such play, very naturally, and not infrequently, became earnest.
The nobles were mostly landed proprietors, but when the cities began to grow, urban patricians, proud and self-satisfied, arose. The common people, however, because of their number and increasing wealth, gained a share in the government. They formed themselves, for strength and self-defence, into "corporations and guilds." They won city rights. In the course of time, instead of the rule of the "families," or patricians, there came the rule of the guilds. The democracy gained control, though not until after hard and frequently very bloody fights of the factions at the polls for municipal supremacy. With the victory of democracy begins the industrial, commercial, and political vigor of the common people. This is manifested in the great and important city leagues: especially the Hansa, but also the League of Rhenish and of Suabian Cities unions that were at times more powerful than kings and emperors.
Socially, nevertheless, the picture is reversed: the castes remain separated even in the church, as they were separated in dancing halls and other places of pleasure and drinking. Yet the free artisans, their wives and daughters, led a joyful life at their weddings, dances, and carnivals, though they dwelt in narrow lanes and alleys, in houses of wood, straw-covered and with a few windows, and these frequently with panes of paper or none at all. Goethe in Faust describes these abodes: