Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/448

 444 Rudwin have been the moral as well as the aesthetical judgments of the literary historians in regard to this enfant terrible of German literature. Says Gervinus: Unanstandigkeit ist die Seele des Fastnachts spiels. ("Indecency is the soul of the Shrovetide play.") Stronger is the condemnation uttered by Goedecke: Jeder Sprecher ein Schwein, jeder Spruch eine Roheit, jeder Witz eine Unfiaterei. ("Every speaker is a pig, every speech is a vulgarity, every joke is an obscenity"). It must be admitted that unchaste scenes were represented in these comedies wkh an astonishing realism. The modern reader of these plays finds it hardly credible that pieces so frankly indecent could have bee*n performed in public and patronized by assembled families, including both sons and daughters. The players often carried their immorality so far that the city authorities frequently had to impose a fine for immoral or improper words or acts. The only explanation that can be offered is the well-known fact that tradition dies hard. How much decent people will stand when objectionable features have the sanction of tradition may be seen from an analogy with the ceremonies of the so-called back- ward races of today. Fewkes tells us that the obscene puns and jokes of the mud-heads, the demonic clowns, who appear at the summer ceremonies of the Zuni Pueblos, "are so disgusting that it seems impossible to believe that any of the more prominent of the Zunians would take this part in the dances. No attempt is made or thought of among the on-lookers, which at the close of the afternoon includes all the population clothed in their best attire, to repress the obscenity and vulgarity of the clowns." 327 It would, indeed, be a great injustice to our ances- tors to take the Carnival plays as a criterion of their sex moral- ity. The Carnival player was not bound by the morals of his day. He owed his freedom to his origin from the phallic demon. A recent German writer, judging from the Carnival amusements in the great cities of modern Germany, deeply laments seeing "how far removed we Germans are from the seriousness attri- buted to us." 328 The fact of the matter is that the Germans are not a light-hearted race. The jesting and buffoonery so common at the Carnival are not innate in the Germanic peoples. m Journal of Am. Ethn. & Arch., i. 23n2. 888 H. S. Rehm, Deutsche Volksfeste u. Volkssitten (1908), pp. 2sq.