340 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLA Y 



Judgment, decked in all the horrible forms of mediaeval 

 fancy, dancing, singing, and dragging by the chain passed 

 round it the crowd of the damned back to hell. 1 In the 

 mediaeval believer there must have been an intensity of 

 hysterical emotion raised by this Dance of Devils, which 

 it was almost imperative to relieve by some comic by- 

 play. Still more effective than the damned in mass 

 must have been the dance in which each devil brought 

 an individual soul, and narrated the sin which condemned 

 it to hell. 2 In many plays we have a long procession 

 of such souls. The robber, the baker, the false coiner, 

 the rake, the tanner, the lawyer, the old woman with 

 her evil tongue, follow each other in rapid succession ; 

 such soul -lists cast much light on the state of popular feel- 

 ing in the Middle Ages. In one case Satan brings a priest 

 who has been thinking of temporal matters while reading 

 mass, but this " regular old-run-round-the-altar," as 

 Satan terms him, makes hell too hot for Lucifer, and he 

 accordingly is allowed to escape. 3 



1 Compare Meister Stephan's Last Judgment (Cologne Gallery, No. 121 ; repro- 

 duced in the frontispiece) ; a tympanum on the Niirnberg Sebaldskirche, and 

 another over the south-east porch of the Minster at Ulm, with B, vol. i. pp. 274, 

 280, 295 ; I, No. iv. pp. 98, 306 ; H, vol. i. p. 143 ; and Piderit, loc. cit. line 763 

 ("das se kumen an vns seile"). We may further note the woodcuts in Diirer's 

 Small Passion (last cut), and in the Heidelberg block-book reproduced by 

 Geffcken, Bildercatechismus, Beilage, col. 13. Besides Stephan Lochner, the Ars 

 Moriendi, Diirer, etc., we may draw attention to Martin Schongauer's engrav- 

 ing of the Temptation of St. Antony, and Gerhard David's Battle of St. Michael 

 ivithffell, as capital representations of what the passion-play devils were like. 



2 See B, vol. ii. p. 81 and footnote. The novas choreas therein referred to stands, 

 I hold, for the new forms of dancing introduced about 1400, in which the partners 

 instead of dancing in figures began to clasp each other by the arms or even the 

 waist. This much scandalised both town-councils and ecclesiastics, as will be 

 seen from an examination of the Frankfurt and Niirnberg Police Regulations or 

 a study of mediaeval sermons. See further I, p. 99, and H, vol. ii. pp. 37, 281, 

 U, pp. 85 et seq. In Kriiger's play the Dance of Devils is accompanied by witches. 



3 See B, vol. ii. pp. 74, 82, 96, etc. 



