ABSTRACT
German I F the wit of a nation were measured by its industry ^oftke°ilth * n c ° U e c t i n g good things, Germany might have met the century, famous question of the Pkre Bouhours with complete
equanimity. No literature is richer than hers in those compilations of amusing anecdote of which the sixteenth century was everywhere so prolific, and which owed their extraordinary development if not their origin to the new
II. Bebel: literary influence of the bourgeois class. The first arum lilfri stiniulus indeed came from elsewhere; it was not the tres, 1506 naive grossness of a Nurnberg Fastnachtsspiel but the T^PauH '^ elegant and pointed grossness of Italian Humanism Schimpf which served as model for the Facetiae of Bebel1; and undEmst % the second great Jest-book, the Schimpf und Ernst of
the monk Johannes Pauli, though owing much to Bebel, is still more closely related to mediaeval collections, such as the Gesta Romanorum, of moral examples for use in the pulpit. Bebel was the direct follower of the ardent and purely pagan Poggio; Pauli drew no small part of his work from the anecdotes which had lately been heard in Strassburg cathedral from the lips of the most
remarkable preacher of the age, Geiler von Kaisersberg, as he illustrated its most famous moral satire, the Ship of Fools\
But when some years later, this beginning was fol-Later lowed up, it was in a different quarter. Soon after the I e s t " b o o k s - middle of the century the production of jest-books came suddenly into vogue; but their authors are now neither scholars, as such, nor monks, but genuine citizens, often of official standing, and their contents, though in great part founded on either Bebel or Pauli, retain scarcely a trace of the formal elegance of the one, and but few of the moral earnestness of the other. Jorg Wickram, town-clerk of Burgheim, one of the most attractive figures in the literary history of Alsace2, led the way; and he was rapidly followed by his fellow-Alsatians Jacob Frey, town-clerk at Maursmiinster, and Martin Montanus of Strassburg; while across the Rhine the congenial vein was continued by Velten Schumann, Wilhelm Kirchhof, and Michael Lindener, the last-named one of the most extraordinary of the genial Grobians, the \frommen, auserlesenen, bundten und rundten Schnudel-
butzenwho ever spent wit and learning in giving a literary flavour to filth. Rough and gross-minded as many of these men were, nearly all had a practical, and in its way a moral, purpose, commonly disclosed with more or less sounding epithets in their preface or titlepage. Pauli had chiefly had in view his own clerical order, though not without a hope that his moral examples might benefit an unruly aristocracy. Wickram and his followers write explicitly in behalf of the merchant class of the towns. The rapid growth of luxury had produced not only ampler leisure, but a higher standard of social intercourse, a more deliberate cultivation of amusing talk. To the noble absorbed in war and hunting, to the peasant immersed in the wearing labours of the field, society meant little more than the unceremonious drinking-bout that closed the day in castle or in tavern. But civic life brought with i t countless occasions of more or less formal and involuntary intercourse, for which a store of 1 Schimpfreden] 'boszen,' 'spudelingen] ' grill en' itaubenand 4schwanke' was the best of equipments. The tedious sea-voyage, the long diligence journey across country to Nurnberg or Koln, or to the great national fairs of Frankfurt or Leipzig, the evenings spent in rough country inns (where supper, as we know, was often deferred t i l l the last chance of more guests was gone1), the critical intervals of convivial intercourse in garden or banqnet hall, the tavern, where folk sat, says Lindener, like a 'hiiltzner laternV nay, even the
briefer emergencies of being shaved or taking a bath1, were all relieved by the possession of one of these compendiums of good things,—Rollwagenbilchlin 2, Nachtbiichlin, Rastbiichlin, Wegkurzer, Wendunmuth (4 turn away gloom'), Gartengesellschaft, as they were christened with pointed reference to their intended use8.
