Page:Thirty-five years of Luther research.djvu/127

Rh language was contained.' During three centuries the language was neglected, crude, inflexible; degenerate in forms and syntax, irregular and without deeper spirit, it lacked the ability for expressing the finer and more delicate sentiments, it lacked soul and nobility. For this reason the more refined, the humanists looked upon it as 'barbarous' and felt scandalized to use it.*

Even those who spoke and wrote the most elegant and artistic Latin, men like Erasmus, Melanchthon, and even Hutten, wrote a crude and defective German. And the language was blamed for what was due only to personal incapacity, a scholarship that weaned away from nationality, or a lack of heart for one's own people and language. With Luther things took a turn. In him the master had arisen, who recognized that the German language possesses all those elements which were regarded as lacking, and that it only remained for some one to bring them to the light of day. He recognized the princess in the scorned Cinderella, rescued her from her despised humbleness, rinsed her beautiful eyes and noble countenance of the ashes and the dirt of common servitude, took from her her vile rags, clothed and decorated her in the habiliments of wealth and royalty, so that her inherent walk and attitude of quality, her beauty, virility, and elasticity of youth, and her entire nobility became radiantly apparent. And the despised and nearly degenerated as a


 * Kluge has adduced the testimonium paupertatis which the Archbishop Berthold of Mainz, 1486, influenced as he was by humanism, has given to the German language. To substantiate his prohibition of religious and biblical literature in the German language he wrote: Fateri opportet, idiomatis nostri inopiam minime sufficere necesseque fore, translatores . . . . veritatis sensum corrumpere.