Part 1

The Forest Farm

The Forest Farm

_Tales of the Austrian Tyrol_

By Peter Rosegger

With an Appreciation by Maude Egerton King And a Biographical Note by Dr. Julius Petersen

The Vineyard Press London: A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford's Inn, E.C. 1912

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

Contents

PAGE

FRONTISPIECE: THE FOREST FARM. Drawn by MELICENT NORRIS

ROSEGGER: AN APPRECIATION. By MAUDE EGERTON KING 9

PETER ROSEGGER: A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. By DR. JULIUS PETERSEN. With a portrait 15

I. MY FATHER AND I. Illustrated by M. E. K. and L. E. 29

II. HOW I GAVE GOD MY SUNDAY JACKET. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 36

III. CHRISTMAS EVE. Translated by M. E. K. 42

IV. A LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT. Translated by M. E. K. 61

V. HOW LITTLE MAXEL'S HOUSE WAS BURNED DOWN. Translated by M. E. K. and L. G. 74

VI. THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FOUR NIGHTS AND A NIGHT. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 80

VII. HOW THE WHITE KID DIED. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 86

VIII. CHILDREN OF THE WORLD IN THE FOREST. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 93

IX. HOW MEISENSEPP DIED. Translated by LOUISE EVERS 105

X. THE CORPUS CHRISTI ALTAR. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 114

XI. ABOUT KICKEL, WHO WENT TO PRISON. Translated by ETHEL BLOUNT 124

XII. HOW I CAME TO THE PLOUGH. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 142

XIII. THE RECRUIT. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 146

XIV. A FORGOTTEN LAND. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 161

XV. THE SCHOOLMASTER. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 170

XVI. THE STAG ON THE WALL. Translated by MELICENT NORRIS and M. E. KING 179

XVII. FOREST-LILY IN THE SNOW. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 186

XVIII. THE SACRED CORNFIELD. Translated by M. E. KING and L. SWIETOKOWSKI 190

XIX. ABOUT MY MOTHER. Translated by A. T. DE MATTOS 195

Rosegger: An Appreciation

The unmistakable trend of our time is the civilisation--which, in its modern form, is largely urbanisation--of the whole habitable globe. From its centres outwards it is thrusting itself upon places, men, processes--ultimate sanctuaries, never before reached by alien trespassing. Most men are looking on at its destruction of the old order with shrugging acceptance of the inevitable, or hailing the chaotic stuff of the new in its making with so far unjustified joy. With a wit worn somewhat threadbare with use they invariably counsel the few eccentrics who deny its inevitability and question its beneficence to quit the hopes and mops of Mrs. Partington for the discreet submission of the wiser Canute. Then they grow properly grave, and declare that this modern civilisation, for all its shortcomings, has been well described as a banquet, the like of which, for those below as for those above the salt, has never been spread before. However that may be, there is no question that here and there a guest is sometimes moved to look round on the company and scan its several types with a sudden sense of their significance. Some of these, good and bad, are common to all late civilisations, he perceives, others as hatefully peculiar to our own as certain diseases. Where, in God's name, were there ever till now men like these, who bend a complaisant spectacled gaze on a world going under, content if they may but first secure their museum sample (including one carefully chosen, perfectly embalmed, stuffed and catalogued peasant) of every species? Or their younger kindred--men whose intellect obeys no inspiration save curiosity nor law save its own limit, whose inventions, therefore, cannot foster good and beauty but only spoil these in Nature and men's souls? As for that splendid group beyond, one may question if Athens, Rome, or Byzantium, whose sumptuous culture of brain and body achieved an almost criminal comeliness by Christian standards, ever equalled them: question, too, whether their selfish perfection or the travesty of it in this mob of women dull with luxury, of men brutalised by the scramble of getting it for them--be less desirable for the race! Thankfully his eye passes from them to those who turn such a cold shoulder upon their vulgarity: a little company, fine-edged, polished and flexible with perpetual fence of wit and word, hardly peculiar to our day perhaps, but rather such as might have played their irresponsible game on the eve of any red revolution. Now and again they lend an amused ear to various gassy gospels over the way, where, as he perceives, he is once more among the children of this latter day alone: notably certain insignificances who, because they have raised their self-indulgence to the dignity of a problem play, are solemnly mistaking themselves (as actors and audience too) for pioneers of social progress; and some earnest women who have slammed the front door on their nearest and dearest stay-at-home duties and privileges, to go questing after problematical rights. It looks, too, as if the same types, modified for worse and better by class conditions, were repeated below the salt; but there the multitude is so great that the individuals are soon lost in a far-off colourless mass--sometimes a menacing mass--by no means so content with stale bread as the others with caviare.

Is then this civilisation to become the universal order? he asks himself; and must the world it has laid waste be repeopled from these? The very fear of it summons a shadowy memory of fathers' fathers among Sussex sheepfolds, Highland crofts, Tuscan vineyards, or German forests. After that the banquet grits in the teeth like husks, and there is nothing possible but to get up and go out from it, sick with longing for those simpler, saner people. To them, it is said, fatherhood, motherhood, home, were chiefest of prides and sanctities outside Heaven. They either kept or consciously broke the ten commandments, but they never set up the _Seven deadly Sins_ in their place. They won life out of the earth, sometimes with difficulty enough, but the struggle bred a muscle and fortitude only now failing their descendants in hyper-civilisation. They laboured, and took their pleasures too, under open skies and in quiet places where the divine voice could clearly be heard at times, and unperplexedly obeyed.

Between fear and hope these famished feasters come at last to the ancestral places; only too often to find them ruined, or sheltering some sad survival unaware of his own splendid history. On the cold thresholds they stand, stricken with the sense of the world's irreparable loss in a virile and faithful race.

Just so far have many thinking people come to-day, and there remain, needing a leader who can turn regretful retrospect to rational hope. Such a one is Peter Rosegger, whose life is a type of our own day and a prophecy of better. He, too, left the land for the city, and now, because all his culture and experience do but confirm his faith that _Bauernthum_ is as necessary for the world's soul as the bread which the peasant grows for its body, he has gone back to it. When he wants new vigour for daily life, or for his mission of protecting and pleading for a vanishing folk, he touches earth and gets it. Peasant-born, in most of his books he _is_ Peasantry grown conscious and articulate,--he gives us that life from within. But culture has enabled him to see the peasant in his true relation to the world as well, to measure the life he was born into with the civilisation whose guest he has been. And so in one invaluable book, _Erdsegen_, he writes of the folk life from without, and that with great truth and consistency. The story is given in a series of letters from a city journalist, who for a frivolous wager goes to live "the simple life" as a peasant among peasants for one year. Looking through the townsman's eyes, we find there no stage-peasant's Arcady, no rose-bowered cottages pleasantly ready for week-end lodgers; rather we stare aghast at the coarse food, rough work, some very unwholesome conditions, and obstinate superstitions. The journalist's earlier letters treat of these things with humorous realism, and we respect his pluck for putting up with them. Gradually the tone of the letters changes, and we see the innate fineness--not the cultured refinement--of the townsman, responding to the strong faith behind the superstition, to the beauty of the traditional labours, the heroic endurance of their undoing by storm and bad fortune, and the acceptance of good and ill alike as from the hands of a good if sometimes incomprehensible Father. The faint sneer, even the amused smile, die from the townsman's face; dirt and discomfort are lost sight of in the divine realities which draw him, humbly enough at last, to throw in his lot with these humble people.

Rosegger is a true prophet, he never disguises truth in defending it. His passion for essential Peasantry is too great for sentimentalities, too honest for whitewash; and so while he exhilarates us with its elemental force he does not fear to show where this merges into brutality, nor when its simplicity opens the door to superstition. And yet in the end we are one with his faith in _Bauernthum_ and the world's need of it. The land-folk who emigrate to cities, and their children there born, are fast losing and will soon quite lose what no money or experience can compensate them for. Age after age, great shaping influences from the forest, the mountain and the waters of the mountain, the solitudes, the mastery and love of beasts, the disciplinary tragedies and triumphs of agriculture, came and wrought upon the humanity in their midst, gradually creating the customs, traditions, lore and art--everything except religion in its _Church_ sense--which is part of the collective soul of Peasantry. Whatever these uprooted land-folk gain in the city, though they gain the whole world, they certainly lose their own soul--the soul special to Peasantry and until now the fullest spring of the world's imaginative life.

At times, perhaps when he has stayed too long in Graz, Rosegger writes of _Bauernthum_ as of something irrevocably passing; at others he utters his faith--for it is deeper than hope--that it will come again. To him his own life is racially prophetic. He has had the best of civilisation, intellectual intercourse, fame, travel, wealth: but from these and all others of its benefits or lures, he has again and again run back, mastered by a _Heimweh_ which saved him. Sometimes, in terrible trouble, once at the point of death, he went back, and every time the touch of the earth renewed him, body and soul. Signs of this saving _Heimweh_ he sees here and there among those who remain at the banquet, actually starving in satiety, some of them; and from the quiet valley where his genius, long since the consecrated champion of the ancient peasantry, does its best work, he calls upon these to come back and make possible a new. His loyal traditionalism does not hinder his belief that a new peasantry, not born, but becoming such from a choice inspired by heart's hunger and a surfeit of civilisation, must have a strong redemptive value of its own among the decadent nations.

Of the earth he writes as he wrote of the stern tender woman who bore him in the Forest Farm,--with a worship that makes a town-bred creature drag at his chain or break his heart to run home to her. She has never failed him, he says, in any need of spirit or flesh, nor will she ever fail her prodigals. When they come back in a hundred or a thousand years they will find her patiently waiting to teach them all the vital forgotten things over again: and, even if she take the gewgaws and lumber out of their hands, she will leave them whatever of learning she can with her ancient processes and gift of wonder transmute into wisdom.

M. E. K.

Peter Rosegger

A Biographical Note

By Dr. Julius Petersen

I

In the heart of Austria lies Steiermark (Styria), a rough mountain country on the eastern slope of the Alps. Its inhabitants, protected from the levelling influences of modern civilisation and cut off from that mingling with other peoples which destroys racial character, have retained their old individuality and customs longer than any other German people. Rough though the climate is, the soil stony, the struggle for existence hard, these sons of the mountains have grown stubbornly inseparable from their home; it is with difficulty that they take root in other soil--they are evermore drawn back to the place where once their cradle stood. In former centuries the Swiss soldiers in French service could not hear the home-like chime of cow-bells without a temptation to desert their colours; and time after time sons of Steiermark have been driven back to their free hills by the constraint of garrison life. The deserters were always easily caught: the sergeant in pursuit had simply to look for the culprit in his father's house. The _Heimweh_ (other languages can hardly express the meaning of this word) is the national sickness to which all natives of the Alps driven into foreign parts are subject, and it is but the other side of that impassioned joy in the home, which finds expression in jubilant songs and shouts rising for ever from the mountains to the sky.

Peter Rosegger is the national poet of Styria. If it can be said that all men on their way through life carry with them a clod of home-soil, as the pious pilgrim carries a handful of sacred earth, then one may say that this poet is home personified. "Styria on two legs," he is called by his own people. All that can move the soul of this people, from the lightest jest to the deepest longings and searchings, has found expression in his writings.

He has passed through many phases of life, from peasant to craftsman, to schoolmaster, to theologian, and all these phases are reflected in his life-work. The son of the peasant, who on his journey has attained the heights of humanity, is always turning back to his starting-point. Like the old giant Antæus, he draws new strength from his mother Earth. Close touch with the home soil is for him a condition of life. When Rosegger was on a lecturing tour through the great German cities, where he was enthusiastically greeted by audiences of thousands, there never left him the longing for the silent peace of the mountains; and _Heimweh_ drove him away even from the shining Gulf of Naples. Even Graz, the beautiful capital of Steiermark, where Rosegger has his vine-covered house, cannot take the place of home for him. In the summer months he escapes to Krieglach in the Mürztal; there he lives among his native people, and from his window he looks out to those heights where, out of sight, stands a deserted farm--his birthplace.

In Alpl, near Krieglach, a forest community which has now almost ceased to exist and even at the time of his birth consisted only of twenty-three farms, Rosegger came into the world on July 31st, 1843. It was almost by accident that he learnt to read and to write. An old schoolmaster, whom the Church had dismissed from his office because of his leanings towards freedom in 1848, wandered a beggar through the mountains, and when he came to the peasants of Alpl they said: "Beggars we have anyhow in plenty, but a schoolmaster we have not and never have had since the world began. He shall be schoolmaster here, and our children shall learn to read and to write; if it does no good, it can do no harm." And so the old schoolmaster went hawking his learning from house to house, and his school fees consisted of the right to eat as much as ever he liked.

Peter, the son of the _Wald-bauer_ (forest peasant),[1] was soon known for his learning. Once in the dead of winter he was taken to one of the highest-lying farms, where the old peasant owner wanted to make her will. There being neither paper nor ink, he wrote the will with charcoal inside a coffer lid, for the boy was gifted with a bright mother-wit which never left him at a loss. He read everything printed that he could lay hands on, but as he did not find enough to read, he began to write himself; stories of saints, sermons, works of devotion and calendars. These he illustrated with drawings of his own invention. A student who had spent his holidays in the mountains had left him a little box of watercolours. The boy cut a lock of hair from his own head, bound it to a little stick, and so made himself a brush with which to paint his pictures of his saints. This story is a symbol of all Rosegger's achievement of learning. However much outside help he may have received, he may thank himself for the best, after all. "My little saddle-horse," says he, "has never fed upon the dry hay of school-knowledge, but only on the green grass of life itself. The little that I know, Life has taught me, and the little that I can do, Necessity. The inability to express myself by word of mouth has taught me to write, and my desire to share that written word with others taught me to read. As the father of a family, with a very uncertain income, I learnt arithmetic; as a herdsman on the pasture land, zoology; as farmer and stonecutter, mineralogy; as hay-maker and woodcutter, botany. Geography I learnt in travelling; history from events which followed one another as cause and consequence; folklore I learnt as a travelling journeyman; and astronomy in sleepless nights, when I lay and looked up at the stars. Thoughts about physiology, anatomy, medicine, and patience have come to me in illness; theology I have turned to in times of need and loneliness; and law has been learnt in self-examination. Music became dear to me from the birds of the woods and the sound of waterfalls. The telling of stories I never learnt at all. My first baby stammer--so says our old cousin--was a story in Styrian dialect; and my life, according to the belletristic newspapers, was a romance."

His life, indeed, is rich in wonders, and the evolution of the peasant boy a sort of fairy tale. Rosegger has described for us his youth in the form of a novel, _Heidepeters Gabriel_ (1872), in which it all reads like an impossible romance. Later he has published the story of his life in a series of autobiographical writings, _Waldheimat_ (_The Forest Home_, 1875); _Als Ich jung noch war_ (_When I was still young_, 1895); _Mein Weltleben_ (_My Life in the World_, 1898); in these the same course of events is given with a wonderful truth to life. As documents of a rare human evolution they may stand on a level with Rousseau's _Confessions_; they are more lovable, though no less honest.

The boy very early saw something of the world. As a little fellow his father took him with him on a pilgrimage to Maria Zell; his godfather, on another pilgrimage, pointed out to him the first railway as an uncanny bit of devil's invention; and on one occasion the eleven-year-old boy set out alone for Vienna, reaching the Imperial city after a several days' tramp. His aim was to visit the Kaiser Josef II, of whose friendliness so many stories were going about among his people. As a matter of fact, Josef II had been lying in his grave for more than sixty years, and his visitor was conducted to his mausoleum. Later, as he was again wandering in the streets and casting about how to get home (for of his travelling money--the proceeds of the sale of a lamb--only just the equivalent of the little beast's tail was left), a bearded man came up to him and offered him five florins if he would pose for half an hour in his studio. And, wonder on wonder, the water-colour which the artist painted from this sketch now hangs in the Rosegger Room at Mürzzuschlag, which is the nucleus of a future Rosegger Museum! Here also is preserved the tailor's goose, which later the boy, then in his apprenticeship, had to carry after his master; and beside it is a peasant's waistcoat--the same apprentice's claim to journeymanship! It appears that, though his brothers and sisters all became farm-workers, the Waldbauer's first-born proved to be too sickly for the ancestral calling. He was to become a priest. The parish priest of Birkfeld offered to instruct him in Latin. Peter, as a candidate for holy orders, was entrusted to the care of a peasant in that parish. After three days he ran away in the night--home-sickness was too much for him. So in 1860 he became apprentice to a master-tailor of his own district, and played his part in his itinerant trade. He worked on more than sixty farms in the neighbourhood, and in this way learned to know the life of the people in Styria more intimately than would have been possible in any other calling. The inexhaustible wealth of strange character and peasant originality and the unique acquaintance with the most ancient and characteristic native customs which Rosegger displays in his later writings, are the fruit of those years of close observation.

With the passion for reading grew the desire to write. One day his master set out, leaving his carefully guarded paper-patterns lying about. He was accustomed to apprentices, anxious to become independent, making use of such an opportunity to copy the patterns for themselves. His apprentice Peter seized on them too, concerning himself with their shape not at all, but only with the contents of the cut-out newspapers whose stale news he devoured. This made his master almost despair of him. "Honesty's a very fine thing, Peter," he said, "but I can clearly see you'll never be much of a credit to me. Here you are, waiting from week to week for the end of your time, and have never yet stolen one pattern from your master!"

Others, too, prophesied to the youth that he would never make a proper tailor. Once he had to share quarters with a shoemaker's apprentice. Then it was that the little note-book in which he used to write songs of his own making was discovered. The song which made Rosegger celebrated, and which as a genuine folk-song is not only sung in Styria, but all over Germany, was amongst them: "Darf ih's Dirndl liabe." The beauty of this song, which is inseparable from its dialect, can scarcely be rendered in a translation: without the charming form the idea is almost too primitive. The boy goes in succession to priest, father, and mother, and puts the question to them, whether he may love the maid? Each puts him sharply off until at last he goes to the Lord God Himself, and there finds sympathy with his inquiry.

"Why yes, of course," He smiled and said; "Because of the boy I have made the maid."