Rendered desperate by his sins, though now deeply enamoured of the unfortunate Jewess Esther, the merchant is on the verge of surrendering himself to the power of “black magicians” of the worst and most diabolical kind when he escapes by betaking himself to the wars. Possessing besides his invisibility the power of rendering himself invulnerable, he is nevertheless wounded by a “consecrated” bullet, and finally makes his way home in poverty and misery accompanied by a pious monk. The nest is thrown into the Rhine and disappears forever, and the merchant prepares to spend the remainder of his life in prayer and penitence.
The connection of the fifth work, the Everlasting Almanac, with Simplicissimus is nominal only. It appeared in , and is a perfect specimen of what may be called the best class of chapbooks of that day. It is the Whitaker’s Almanac of the period. Each day has its special saints given: there are rules of good husbandry and weather prognostics; recipes for the house, the kitchen, and the farmyard; together with matters adapted for the higher class of readers, such as brief scientific notices, fragments of historical interest, narratives of marvellous occurrences, and, of course, in the spirit of the time, a mass of particulars as to astrology and the casting of horoscopes. Ingenious as it all is, and not without interest from the sociological point of view the book reminds us of Simplicissimus only by its connection with that side of his character which we would willingly forget, but for which Grimmelshausen seems to have cherished an unreasoning admiration, and on which he insisted more and more in his successive works—namely his qualities as a quack and mountebank.
As already pointed out, the interest of the central romance of Simplicissimus is less literary than historic, whereas German critics in their estimate of its value have considered the first aspect only, and their opinions are consequently little worth recording. Gervinus for example, looking at the book from a purely artistic point of view, finds it wanting. Other critics have followed him blindly and with a considerable amount of underlying ignorance to boot. The accurate Dahlmann, for example, though he reckons the romance among his “historical sources,” speaks of it as published at Möpelgard in in six “volumes.” Plainly he had never seen a copy, but had heard of the six books (five and the Continuation) and mistook them for volumes. Tittmann, one of the latest editors of the work, sums up its chief merits when he says: “Simplicissimus and the Simplician writings are almost our only substitute, and that a poor one, for the contemporary memoirs in which our western neighbours are so rich.”
The bibliography of the book is for our purpose not important. For a year or two editions seem to have succeeded each other with such rapidity that it is difficult to distinguish between them; but the only additional value which those printed later than possess is the questionable one of including the three worthless little sequels above referred to. Of modern editions the best, perhaps, is that of Tittmann (Leipzig, ), which has been principally used for this translation. The annotations, however, leave much to be desired; many difficulties are left unexplained, and there are some positive mistakes, of which a single instance may suffice. In book V, chapter 4, we find the expression in prima plana, which is a sufficiently well-known military phrase of the time and means “on the first page” (of the muster-roll), which contained the names of the officers of a company written separately from those of the rank and file. It is explained by Tittmann to mean “at the first estimate,” and succeeding editors have copied this, adding as a possible alternative “in the first engagement,” or “at the first start.” The editions for school and family reading which are current in Germany are, as a rule, so expurgated as to deprive the book of much of its interest. In this translation it has been found necessary to omit a single episode only, which is as childishly filthy as it is utterly uninteresting.
