B HANS SACHS (1494-1576) BY CHARLES HARVEY GENUNG ETWEEN the brilliant age of Walther von der Vogelweide and the classic period of Goethe, the most national as well as the most winsome figure in the annals of German literature is Hans Sachs. He was a complete abstract of what his time actually contained, although he lacked the prophetic vision to see that he was living at the dawn of a new era. He represented the sixteenth century, and combined in himself all the homely virtues and amiable limitations of the burghers, who constituted the democracy in which the modern world took its rise. He was born on November 5th, 1494, at Nuremberg. His father was a tailor, and from the first Hans was destined for a trade. In his seventh year, nevertheless, he was sent to a Latin school, and passed through a rigid course of instruction. The knowledge thus acquired kept alive his sympathy with the Humanists, although he was himself deflected into the intellectually reactionary movement of Luther. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and it was from a linen-weaver that he received his first lessons in the mastersinger's art. In 1511 he went forth upon his travels as a journeyman; but upon his return five years later he settled in his native town, and there lived to celebrate his eightyfirst birthday. He died on January 19th, 1576. During these sixty years he seems never to have left Nuremberg. His life ran the honorable, uneventful course of a citizen diligent in business and prosperous. He became master in his guild in 1517. In 1519 he married Kunigunde Kreuzer, who was so entirely a woman of human mold that in The Bitter-Sweet of Wedded Life,' Sachs is obliged to describe her by antitheses,- she was all things to him, at once his woe and weal; but the simple pathos of his sorrow when she died, in 1560, is very touching. Untrue, however, to the cautious principles XXII-789 HANS SACHS that Wagner has put into his mouth, the real Sachs married, one year and a half after his first wife's death, a widow of twenty-seven, whose charms he celebrates in song with refreshing frankness. He was then a hale and healthy man of sixty-eight. He continued to write with unremitting energy until 1573. His mastersongs numbered between four and five thousand; of tales and farces there were some seventeen hundred, besides two hundred and eight dramas. These writings filled thirty-four manuscript volumes, of which twenty have been preserved. Three volumes of a handsome folio edition of his complete works appeared before his death, and two more afterwards. This in itself is an evidence of the high esteem in which he was held. No citizen of Nuremberg except Dürer ever won more honorable distinction in the annals of that ancient city than "Hans Sachs, the Shoe Maker and Poet, too." The rise of cities, and of the bourgeoisie, had placed Germany in the front rank of commercial nations. For the products of the Orient, coming by way of Venice to the west, Nuremberg had become the mart and dépôt. With material wealth came luxury for merchants as well as nobles, and a higher cultivation in the arts of living. Through the Humanistic movement and the Reformation, Germany also assumed the spiritual leadership of Europe. Everywhere there was a deepening of the national consciousness. Of all these elements in their clearest manifestations, Hans Sachs was the representative. He was the type of the well-to-do, patriarchal citizen of the wealthiest among German cities. He had had glimpses of the austere charms of scholarship, and had himself translated Reuchlin's 'Henno' and Macropedius's 'Hecastus.' The Humanists therefore, although their successors despised the cobbler-bard, spoke to him in an intelligible tongue. And he stood in the forefront of the Reformation. Finally, Sachs was wholly and quintessentially German. In him that "incomprehensible century" found its most complete and characteristic expression. And yet, although it was in the full flower of that municipal democracy that the seed of our modern civilization lay, Hans Sachs was a medieval man. It is in this respect that he, and even Luther, were inferior to men like Dürer, Hutten, and Reuchlin. The Reformation was a matter of ecclesiastical administration: it marked no important intellectual advance. The man of the sixteenth century was interested in the Here and Now; he delighted in his daily life, and it presented no problems; theology was accepted as a fact, and no questions were asked. It was only in the souls of the Humanists that the future lay mirrored; and it was through them that the revival of the |