ABSTRACT
For such satire German town life offered material of extraordinary variety as well as amount. The 'new saint* whom Brandt by a careless stroke had brought into existence, had his busy votaries everywhere and in almost all ranks of society. The taunts which refined Europe directed against the gross and drunken being whom it assumed to typify the country of Goethe, were the commonest of international amenities. Erasmus, who could be severe upon the filthiness of the English streets, upon the house floors with their twenty-year old carpeting of indescribable abominations1, mourned the change from the obsequious hospitality of an English inn to the rough fashions of its German counterpart2. 'Porco tedesco,' 'inebriaco,' 'Thudesque yvrongne3,' 'Comedones/ 'Bibones,'—were phrases as familiar as the later 'drunken Dutchman/ 'butter-box,' &c., of the English stage. In Germany itself these taunts were industriously turned to account by satirist and reformer. 'We must indeed be well-pleased/ wrote Kaspar Scheidt, 'with these aristocratic and courtly titles of ours, since we hold so fast to that which procured them for us4 \
But Grobianism was not to be so lightly put to shame. I t was not merely the blundering improprieties of ill-breeding, but an aggressive and militant grossness, trampling on
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refinement, and glorifying its own excesses,—not aypoua'a, but P$c\vpCa and dvaia-^yyrCa,—which the satirist had to meet; and he attacked it with every variety of resource. Here it was a plain speaking 'elegy* on drunkenness1; there a polemical dialogue, where, in all seriousness, Bacchus and Silenus defend the art of drinking from the attacks of a temperate Pittacus2; or a romance where the ruin of a gross-living prodigal is held up as a warning to gross-livers in general3; or a drama where, still more solemnly, the typical German reveller is startled in the midst of his excesses, like the heroes of Everyman and Hecastus, by the summons of Death4. But far oftener the satire was ironical. And here it fell in with a fashion which found extraordinary favour with Humanists, small and great, from Erasmus and Scaliger and Heinsius and Pirckheimer to Martin Schook and Conrad Goddaeus,— the fashion of burlesque encomia. Often no doubt these were little more than jeux d'esprit; but satire insinuated itself in details if it was excluded from the general intention, and it is hard to draw an absolute line between harmless laudations of Smoke and Shadow, Blindness and Deafness, Gout and Ague5, and the scathing satires in which
Bebel 'praised* Venus and Erasmus eulogised Folly. It was a fashion easily adopted, and before the century was over the learned world was deluged with the sonorous praise not merely of negations or vacuities such as these, but of ridiculous or loathsome things, asses, owls, geese, vermin and dung. No modern literature has showed so keen and unaffected a relish for the comic qualities of the disgusting. Greek and Italian had found heroes for their burlesque epics in the denizens of the warm summer air; the typical German humourist selected them from an old mattress. I t was reserved for Fischart in modern literature to 'create' the flea, in the extraordinary work which celebrates its 'eternal war with women.'
