with this freedom and variety, a fund of social sympathies and a belief in the dignity and mysterious greatness of individual being. In Elizabethan England and the Spain of Charles V. and Philip II., a variety of causes had supplied these elements of dramatic art. In both countries the individualism of the feudal lords had been forced to live in peaceful relations with the corporate life of the towns by a strong centralism holding in its hands the reins of local government. In France, too, a like growth of central authority was drawing together these types of ultra-corporate and ultra-individual life. Indeed, it is at this confluence of the feudal with the corporate spirit that we reach the full stream of national literature in each European country; and perhaps the best point from which we may view the meeting of the waters is supplied by a dramatist whose fatherland was destined to bitterly experience the want of a central arbitrator between the nobles and the towns.
§ 92. Hans Sachs, born at Nürnberg in 1494, stands on the borderland which divides the old allegorising drama, with its acting guilds and impersonal authorship, from the drama of personal authorship and individualised character, Sachs, as Dr. Karl Hase[1] observes, "attempts no subjective development of character, but simply causes his personages to translate into action, or more often into dialogue only, the event which he wishes to represent." Like the writers of Mysteries, also, he places Christianity and heathendom closely together. "Next to God the Father and God the Son appear Jupiter and Apollo; at the Last Judgment the bark of Charon bears the departed souls; with the Judgment of Solomon appears the Choice of Paris." But, though proprieties of time and place are
- ↑ Miracle-Plays and Sacred Dramas, by Dr. Karl Hase; translated by A. W. Jackson, and edited by Rev. W. W. Jackson (Trübner, 1880).
