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 Strasbourg. 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 Würzburg’s fortnightly “autos-da-fé” 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 Rogäz, near Dessau, was captured by Mansfeld in , the assailants were forbidden to use their firearms as useless; the members of the garrison, being wizards all, were clubbed to death with hedge-stakes or the butt-ends of muskets. In all probability this superstition arose mainly from observation of the
