Son- undt sented to the Republic of Venice. In the following year, 1647, he returned to Silesia, married, and settled down to a quiet life; in 1650 he was made Syndic of the principality of Glogau, a position which he held until his death. Andreas Gryphius is an excellent type of the Germanic poet, and, under more favourable conditions, might have taken a high place in the national literature. In his religious lyric he appears as an earnest thinker, inclined to brood over the tragic aspects of life. The Son- undt Feyriags-Sonnete (1639), written in Holland, have all the passionate fervour of Luther's hymns, and show what a serious matter Protestantism was to him. The spirit of these lyrics is wholly German, only the form is of the Renaissance; but --just in that form Gryphius shows himself a master: he handles the sonnet with as much ease as the familiar metre of the Volkslied. In the later Oden, and especially in the Thränen über das Leiden Jesu Christi (1652), and KirchhoffsKirchhoffs Gedancken (1656), his religious earnestness gives place to Gedancken, melancholy. 1656. His It was only natural in a century so rich in religious poetry as the seventeenth, that Gryphius should owe his reputation less to his hymns than to his other work. As a dramatist, he was virtually without a rival. His first tragedy tragedies. had for its subject the Byzantine Emperor Leo Armenius (1646, published 1650); and it was followed by Catharina von Georgien, the tragedy of a Christian martyr in Persia. In Ermordete Majestät; oder Carolus Stuardus, König von Gross-Britannien (first published 1657, but written in 1649), Gryphius had the courage to dramatise an event that had only just taken place, namely, the trial and execution of Charles I. of England. He was fond of sanguinary themes, and loved to thrill his audience with the terrors of the supernatural : in Carolus Stuardus, for instance, the chorus, which was introduced in accordance with the dramatic theories of the Renaissance, is made up of the murdered kings of England, who appear as ghosts. The most characteristic of all his tragedies, however, is Cardenio vnd Celinde (ca. 1648). The choice of this subject, which the author himself feared was almost too humble for the purposes of tragedy, points to the abiding influence of the "Englischen Comödianten." Like so many of the pieces in the repertories of these Cardenio vnd Celinde, ca. 1648. actors, Cardenio vnd Celinde is based upon an Italian novel, but Gryphius's dramatisation shows very modest stagecraft compared with that of his English models. Cardenio is a Spanish student of Bologna, who, from disappointed love for the virtuous Olympia, resolves to murder her husband; he is loved by Celinde, who determines to keep him faithful to her by means of magic. The theme of the drama proper is to show how, by the interposition of supernatural powers, Celinde is cured of her passion and Cardenio of his evil intentions. Now and then, there is a touch of real tragic poetry in this first German "bürgerliche Schauspiel," but the fact that at least three of the five "Abhandelungen" or acts consist merely of narrative monologues, shows how rudimentary was the poet's idea of dramatic construction. As a drama, Cardenio vnd Celinde is, after all, little in advance of the work of Hans Sachs. From the tragedy of the Renaissance, as Gryphius found it in Vondel, his Dutch model, he had gained no more than a few technical hints and a taste for the supernatural. Contrary to what might be expected of so sombre-minded His a poet, Gryphius is to be seen to more advantage in his comedies. comedies than in his tragedies. In the " In the "Schimpfspiel," Absurda comica, oder Herr Peter Squentz, and in its companion "Scherzspiel," Horribilicribrifax, he displays a fresh original humour which is in strange contrast to the melancholy tone of the Kirchhoffs-Gedancken. These plays, both of which were written before 1650, although not published until long after, are unquestionably the best German dramas of the seventeenth century. Herr Peter Squentz is a version of the comic episodes in the Midsummer Night's Dream with which Gryphius had become familiar either through performances of English actors, or, what is more likely, through a Dutch version. The better of the plays is the second, which was probably also based on an earlier model: its hero-a bragging soldier—was a favourite type with the dramatists of the Renaissance. Gryphius appears here as a master of that witty caricature which was first developed by the Italians in their commedia dell arte. It is greatly to the advantage of both these comedies that they are written not in the stilted Alexandrines of the tragedies, but in prose. In other plays, such as the "Gesangs- und Scherz-Spiele," Das verliebte Gespenst and Die geliebte Dornrose (1660), adaptations respectively of a French and Dutch original, the lyric element predominates and weakens the dramatic effect. On the whole, Gryphius is at his best in Horribilicribrifax; it is in this farce, rather than in his ambitious tragedies, that he takes an honourable place in the history of the German drama. 217 CHAPTER VII. RELIGIOUS POETRY; EPIGRAM AND SATIRE. 1624-77. ALTHOUGH almost all the poets who accepted Opitz's theories wrote verses on religious themes, it was only exceptionally, as in the case of Fleming and Gryphius, that the religious feeling was deep or genuine enough to conceal the mechanism of the poet's art. The most gifted religious poet of Silesia at this time had little sympathy for the ideals of the first Silesian School, and held aloof from Opitz and his friends. Johann Scheffler, or, to give him the name by which he is best known, Angelus Silesius (1624 77), was a physician in Angelus Breslau, who, to the consternation of his family and fellow- Silesius, citizens, went over in 1653 to the Catholic faith, and, eight years later, became a priest. His recantation of Protestantism was rooted in a revival of that mysticism which, as we have seen, had been a forerunner of the Reformation in the fifteenth century. The virile common-sense of Luther's Protestantism had not been favourable to the self-abnegating spirit of mysticism, and this spirit played a subordinate part in the life of the sixteenth century. But as soon as Lutheranism began to stiffen into a system of dogmas, mysticism again came into favour. In 1612 Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), a J. Böhme, shoemaker of Görlitz, published his first book, Aurora, oder 1575-1624. Morgenröthe im Aufgang, which preached a strange mystic philosophy, and exerted an influence which had not spent itself at the close of the eighteenth century. Böhme's ideas found an enthusiastic advocate in his fellow-countryman, Abraham von Franckenberg (1593-1652), and from Franckenberg, as well as directly from Böhme and Tauler, Silesius drew his inspiration, thus becoming unconsciously the first messenger of a new epoch in German poetry. The writings of Silesius Der Cherubinische Wandersmann, 1657. Friedrich von Spee, 1591-1635. consist of two volumes of poetry, both published in 1657, Heilige Seelenlust, oder Geistliche Hirten-Lieder der in jhren Jesum verliebten Psyche and Geistreiche Sinn- und Schlussreime, the latter in its second edition (1674) known as Der Cherubinische Wandersmann.1 The former of these collections is written under the influence of the pastoral poetry of the Renaissance; Psyche, the soul, is a shepherdess who sighs for her beloved shepherd, Jesus, and leaves her friends and her flock to follow Him. But the mystic earnestness and sincerity of Silesius prevent his verse from degenerating into the triviality of the religious pastoral. He is at his best in the theosophic "Sprüche" of the Cherubinische Wandersmann; with wonderful poetic depth and that clear vision for the spiritual relations of things to be found in all mystic poetry, he pours out the yearning of his soul for union with God. His conception of the universe takes the form of an all-embracing pantheism, which does not shrink from such startling expression as "Ich weiss, dass ohne mich Gott nicht ein Nu kan leben, Dass Gott so seelig ist und Lebet, ohn Verlangen, Ich bin so gross als Gott: Er ist als ich so klein; The typical representative of religious pastoral poetry at this time was an older poet than Silesius, namely the Rhinelander, Friedrich von Spee (1591-1635). Although a Catholic and a Jesuit, Spee seems to have been a man of wider sympathies than his fellows. He did his utmost to destroy the superstition which condemned alleged witches to the stake, and, indeed, his whole life was embittered by the fact that, as professor in Würzburg, he had within two years to prepare, as their confessor, more than two hundred of these "witches" for their fate. He died of fever caught in the hospital of Trèves while nursing the sick and wounded. In the year before his death he collected his religious poetry for 1 Ed. G. Ellinger (Neudrucke, 135-138), Halle, 1895. Cp. E. Wolff, Das deutsche Kirchenlied des 16. und 17. Jahrh. (D.Ñ.L., 31 [1894]), 471 ff. Book 1, 8-10 (G. Ellinger's edition, 15). |