chapter 20

, and also for a long time in the famous fortress of Philippsburg, of his residence in which he tells various anecdotes. There are traces both in "Simplicissimus" and his other books of a wide and unusual acquaintance with many lands, German and non-German. He knows both Westphalia and Saxony well; Bohemia also: and certainly Switzerland. The journey to Russia may have some foundation in fact, though the statement put into the mouth of Simplicissimus that he has himself seen the fabulous "sheep plant" (bk. v., chap. 22) growing in Siberia considerably detracts from his trustworthiness here. But when he left the army, and whether he ever attained to any reputable rank therein, is quite uncertain. If 1625 be the correct date of his birth he would be but twenty-three years old at the conclusion of peace.

Besides his military expeditions, it is pretty clear from his works that he had visited Amsterdam and Paris and knew them fairly well; but for nineteen years we have no further trace of his career, till he suddenly appears as Schultheiss, under the Bishop of Strassburg, of Renchen, now in the Grand Duchy of Baden, a town of which he deliberately conceals the name exactly as he does his own, by anagrams, calling it now Rheinec, now Cernheim. In October 1667 he appears as holding this office and issuing an order concerning the mills of the town, which is still in existence. His wife was Katharina Henninger, and entries have been found of the birth of two children, a daughter and a son, in 1669 and 1675. A curious episode in the first part of the "Enchanted Bird's-nest," quoted hereafter, seems to indicate a grave family disappointment. In 1676 he died, aged fifty-one only, but having reached what may almost be called a ripe age for the battered and spent soldier of the Thirty Years War. The entry of his death is peculiarly full and even discursive, and tells how though he had again entered on military service--no doubt on the occasion of the French invasion in 1674--and though his sons and daughters were living in places widely distant from each other, they were all present at his death, in which he was fortified by the rites of Holy Church. A final touch of uncertainty is added by the fact that we do not even know whether Grimmelshausen was his true name: it is more likely to be that of some small estate which he had acquired, and of which he assumed the name when, as we learn, he was raised to noble rank.

It is plain even from this brief outline of his life that Grimmelshausen was emphatically a self-taught man; and it is partly to this fact that we owe the originality of his work; for he had never fallen under the baleful influence of the pedantry of his time. He had, it is true, picked up a deal of out-of-the-way knowledge, which he is willing enough to set before us to the verge of tediousness. But his learning is very superficial; he was a poor Latinist; and it is likely that for most of his erudition he was indebted to the translations which were particularly plentiful during that golden period of material prosperity in Germany which preceded the terrible war. It is clear enough that everywhere he thought more of the content than of the literary form of his own or any other work; and for the times his scientific and mathematical knowledge was considerable. In the field of romance he knows, and does not hesitate to borrow from, Boccaccio, Bandello ("Simplicissimus," bk. iv., chaps. 4, 5), and the "Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles," while in his minor works he shows ample acquaintance with old German legend and also with stories like that of King Arthur of England. Lastly, we find him commending the "incomparable Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney (which he would have read in the translation of Martin Opitz) as a model of eloquence, but corrupting and enervating in its effect upon the manly virtues ("Simplicissimus," bk. iii., chap. 18).

Yet his own earlier works are themselves in the tedious, unreal, and stilted style of the romances of chivalry. "The Chaste Joseph," "Dietrich and Amelind," and "Proximus and Limpida," though widely different in subject, are alike in this, and show no sign of the genius which created Simplicissimus. Yet for the first-named work--the "Joseph"--its author cherished an unreasoning affection, and even alludes to it in our romance as the work of the hero himself (bk. iii., chap. 19). But it is no discredit to Grimmelshausen's originality if we conjecture that the translations of Spanish picaresque novels (chiefly by the untiring Aegidius Albertini), which appeared during the first two decades of the seventeenth century, gave him the idea--they gave him little or nothing more--of a vagabond hero. Mateo Aleman's famous "Guzman de Alfarache" had been succeeded by two miserably poor "Second Parts" by different authors, and in one of these there appears a tedious episode containing the submarine adventures of the hero under the form of a tunny-fish, to which we may conceivably owe the equally tedious story of Simplicissimus and the sylphs of the Mummelsee. At the end of the original book (bk. v., chap. 24) is an unblushing copy of a passage from a work of Antonio Quevara or Guevara, also translated by Albertini.

That Grimmelshausen died a Romanist is pretty clear from the entry of his death quoted above; nor is it likely that a Protestant could have held the office of Schultheiss under the Bishop of Strassburg. There is also extant a curious dialogue ascribed to Grimmelshausen in which Simplicissimus's arguments against changing his religion are combated and finally overthrown by a certain Bonarnicus, who effects his complete conversion. It is far from improbable that the account of his rescue from sinful indifference at Einsiedel which Simplicissimus gives (bk. v., chap. 2)--of course apart from the miraculous incident of the attack on him by the unclean spirit--roughly represents the experience of his author. That the latter had been brought up a Protestant we simply assume from the fact that Simplicissimus is understood to have been so; the first indication which we have of a change in his opinions being his exclamation of "Jesus Maria!" (bk. iii., chap. 20), which draws upon him the suspicions of the pastor at Lippstadt. But Papist or not, our author's superstition is unmistakable.

It was indeed a time, like all periods of intense human misery, in which men, it might almost be said, turned in despair to the powers of hell because they had lost all faith in those of heaven. That numbers of the unhappy wretches who suffered in their thousands for witchcraft during the first period of the war actually believed themselves in direct communication with the devil is certain. The Bishop of Wuerzburg's fortnightly "autos-da-fe" were only stopped when some of the victims denounced the prelate himself as their accomplice, apparently believing it. Grimmelshausen is ready to believe anything. His description of the Witches' Sabbath is that of a scene which he is firmly convinced is a possible one; and he stoutly defends by a multitude of preposterous stories the reasonableness of such conviction ("Simplicissimus," bk. ii., chaps. 17, 18). But among soldiers the most widely spread superstition was that concerned with invulnerability. Not only separate individuals, but whole bodies of troops were supposed to be "frozen," or proof, at all events, against leaden bullets. Christian of Brunswick actually employed his ducal brother's workers in glass to make balls of that material to be used against Tilly's troops, who were credited with this supernatural property; and when the small fortress of Rogaez, near Dessau, was captured by Mansfeld in 1626, the assailants were forbidden to use their fire-arms as useless; the members of the garrison, being wizards all, were clubbed to death with hedge-stakes or the butt-ends of musquets. In all probability this superstition arose mainly from observation of the very small penetrating power of the ammunition of the time. Oliver (bk. iv., chap. 14) is merely bruised on the forehead by a bullet fired a few paces off: and bullets then weighed ten to the pound. It is true that he has, as it seems, been rendered ball-proof by the wicked old Provost Marshal, whose skull Herzbruder (bk. ii., chap. 27) caused his own servant to split with an axe at Wittstock, when no pistol could slay him: but the peasant in

## book i.,