THE SPIRIT OF THE PASSION-PLA Y 269 



and in this symbolism took the place of gesture and of 

 character in the modern sense ; nor was the unity one of 

 place, time, or person, but of the thread by which the 

 historical world-drama itself was supposed to be linked 

 together. The reader who bears this in mind will the 

 better comprehend the crudeness and apparent helpless- 

 ness of the earliest attempts at the secular drama in 

 Germany its authors had to learn how to replace 

 symbolism by acting, and how to build up a new concep- 

 tion of dramatic unity. 1 It was the English actors and 

 English playwrights who chiefly helped them in this 

 matter. 



III. On the Spirit of the Passion-Plays 



The reader who comes without a preliminary study of 

 the mediaeval spirit to the perusal of a fifteenth-century 

 passion-play will probably be struck in the first place by 

 the incongruous juxtaposition of religion and humour. 

 He may feel inclined to assert that the people who could 

 bring the sublime and the ridiculous into such close con- 

 tact, who could joke even with the most sacred personages 

 of their faith, must have had no deep religious feeling. 

 Such a reader might even be inclined to agree with 

 certain Protestant authors who have asserted that the 

 mediaeval treatment of sacred topics, as evidenced in the 

 passion-plays, shows how little hold their religion had 

 upon the people in the fifteenth century. Yet such an 

 opinion is not only a misapprehension of the mediaeval 



1 The relation of the passion-plays to the Fastnachtspiele cannot be discussed 

 here, but the chief defects of the latter are closely connected with essential 

 features, rather than defects of the former. 



