398 THE GERMAN PASSION-PLAY 



evolution and their legends in order to appreciate a 

 great literature, a greater philosophy, and the highest 

 development of plastic art, so we must study the 

 mediseval gods even in their smallest details, if we would 

 master the spirit of another great literature, another 

 great philosophy, and the highest development of 

 pictorial art the world has known. Nay, if the Hellenist 

 smiles at you, reader, say boldly that you will set your 

 Dante against his Homer, that St. Thomas was not more 

 arid than his Aristotle, that your Zeitblom and Diirer 

 were as great creative artists as his Praxiteles and 

 Pheidias ; nay, that he who built the Parthenon would 

 have stood speechless and as a little child before the 

 minster at Strasburg, or the cathedral at Cologne. 

 Take that Hellenist through the streets and courtyards 

 of Niirnberg or Augsburg, and give back to them the 

 colour and incident of the folk-life of 500 years ago, 

 and if he be an artist by nature, he will hesitate to give 

 the palm to Periclean Athens, even if the sigh of her 

 slaves has not caught his ear. He will find the same 

 religious folk-festivals, the processions, the music, the 

 song, and the dance. He will find art in the service of 

 the people, at the street corners, in the religious build- 

 ings, at the altars of the gods, in the civic buildings, the 

 assembly halls, the market, the meeting and dance- 

 places of the guilds. He will mark joyous marriage- 

 feasts, and the bride led with torches through the 

 streets ; there will be maidens with fine raiment, and 

 youths in brightly-woven doublets with daggers hang- 

 ing from their girdles, wrought in wondrous fashion by 

 never-surpassed metal-workers ; 



