Part 2

The shoemaker's apprentice found this moral most enlightening and determined to send the song to his sweetheart, but could not believe that the young tailor could make such verses without having a sweetheart of his own. "Get along--and look here, you tell me of anyone else who can turn out verses like that!" he said admiringly. "And don't be angry, tailor; I don't understand much of your trade, but after looking at your father's new jacket I don't mind telling you that you'll never make a first-rate tailor. Your song now, _that's_ a masterpiece if you like. Now, don't you forget, that down here on the plain and in the farmer's oat-straw I told you how it would be--you'll never remain a tailor. You'll go to the towns and become somebody; you'll be a bookbinder! Mark my word, in the end you'll become a bookbinder!"

That was the highest the shoemaker's apprentice could conceive of. But it soon happened otherwise. Passing tourists had come across the verses which the country folk had already set to music, and they encouraged the author to send certain of them to town. As a result, the editor of the Graz _Daily Post_ took an interest in the people's poet, and asked him to send him all the poetry he had written and to give him an account of his life. Peter packed up, and, carrying a bundle of manuscripts weighing fifteen pounds, set off on his way to Graz. The postage for such a parcel would have been quite beyond his means.

II

At the end of 1864 an article appeared in the Graz _Daily Post_, entitled _A Styrian Poet of the People_, in which a larger public was called upon to assist the young talented writer. And now from all quarters sendings poured into the post office in Krieglach--congratulations, books, small sums of money, and provisions. A bookseller in Leibach offered him an apprenticeship. Rosegger accepted it, but after a few days _Heimweh_ again drove him from the unfamiliar district. However, a free scholarship was found for him at the Graz Commercial Academy; friends and teachers were not wanting, and here, between the years 1865-9 the farmer's son, not yet able, when he entered it, to write correctly, received an intellectual training which left him no longer inferior to the well educated. In the same year that he left this institution his first book, a volume of poems in dialect, and entitled _Zither und Hackbrett_ (_Zither and Dulcimer_), was published. A second collection, _Tannenharz und Fichtennadeln_ (_Pine-resin and Fir-needles_), came out in the following year; and in 1870 also appeared his first picture of Styrian peasant life, _Sittenbilder aus dem Steierischen Oberlande_. These won him some fame; already publishers began to approach him with offers. And now once more miracle entered his life. In the summer of 1872 a young and beautiful Graz lady, accompanied by a friend, made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of her favourite poet; there by chance she and her poet met, and a year later they were married. Their happy life together lasted but a short time; after the birth of a second child the young wife died. Six years after his sad loss Rosegger made a second and equally happy marriage.

About his life since then there is not much to tell. One fact, however, should be emphasised; namely, that Rosegger, who in his early years had become indebted to so many friends, very soon began to pay them back, and the account has long since been balanced in his favour and now shows a debit on the other side. Many a time has he introduced the work of young writers to the literary world with warm words of recommendation, just as the distinguished poet Robert Hammerling once did for his first collection of poems. The greater part of the profits of his extensive lecture tour have been used for the public good. Through him, a Catholic, Mürzzuschlag has got a Protestant church; his home-parish, Alpl, has for some years now had a school-house of its own for which it has to thank Rosegger. And only a short time ago it was his eloquent intervention that obtained a large contribution for the German School-Society--a society which aims at preserving race-characteristics and culture where they are threatened on the language frontiers. Were I to give data of his public life during the last ten years, they would consist of such services as these, and of the grateful homage which is rendered him by the many who love and honour him. But his inner development is revealed in the writings of his maturity; for Rosegger has written nothing but what in his inmost heart he has experienced. Since 1876 he has edited a monthly magazine, _Heimgarten_, which is his public diary. "Heimgarten," he tells us, "is the name given in various districts to that house in the Alpine village in which of an evening the village folk come together, bringing in small handwork to do and enjoying one another's company. Here are to be found the brightest of the inhabitants, those readiest in storytelling and description, those who are men of the world, or who would like to be such, assembled for educative and stimulating intercourse. In the Heimgarten, stories and legends, tragic and comic incidents from life are repeated; songs and ballads are sung; poems are improvised; farces and comedies are given, or incidents of the day and important events in the life of the village or the wide world are discussed by the village wiseacres. Intercourse in the Heimgarten enlightens and enriches the mind, quickens, warms, and ennobles the heart. This homely type from Alpine village life furnishes the title and programme for my monthly magazine."

And to this programme the paper, which has become a home for true national education, has held faithfully for thirty-four years. Here all stories, articles, and poems of Rosegger's first appeared, and in this paper he expresses his views on all vital questions of the day.

"All we poets are foresters and woodwards in the great forest of mankind," said once Berthold Auerbach, another poet of the people, to Rosegger. Such a one the editor of the _Heimgarten_ feels himself to be, expending, as he does, all his ripe experience and loving care upon the husbandry which has been entrusted to him. To protect the vanishing traditional customs of his forefathers, their natural conceptions of right and wrong, the blessing of family life, their healthy contentment--the outcome of bodily toil and the love of the home--against the demoralisation of modern hyperculture, is his most earnest aim.

The principal heroes of his romances are by preference those whose calling involves the task of cherishing and teaching the people: schoolmasters and priests. The _Writings of the Forest Schoolmaster_ (1878) is the name of Rosegger's most popular work, which already in 1908 appeared in its seventy-eighth edition, and which, let us hope, may within the author's lifetime still reach its hundredth edition. The theme is the gradual emergence of a forest parish from a group of demoralised and utterly uneducated men to a social organisation, to a lawful and religiously organised community. A similar _Kulturroman_ is _Der Gottsucher_ (_The God-seeker_, 1883), which leads us back into past centuries. A parish has been excommunicated by the Church for murdering its priest. The people cannot exist without religion, and, deprived of their old church, they create a new one, a religion of Nature, by means of which the leader of the community brings back order and industry to the village. The third novel belonging to this series, _Das Ewige Licht_ (_The Light Eternal_, 1897), is a pessimistic counterpart to the _Waldschulmeister_. This treats of the dangers to religion which arise from modern civilisation. The faithful priest of a mountain parish has to look on helplessly while the modern world thrusts itself into the mountain idyll; while the atmosphere of the great cities, brought up by mountain climbers and summer visitors, and the smoke from the chimneys of the ever-spreading industrialism in the valleys below, poison the pure air, and, morally and economically, ruin the old inhabitants.

But the peasantry has yet another enemy: the love of sport among the nobility. As once Karl Marx, the theorist of collectivism, studied in Scotland the expropriation of man from the soil in favour of deer, and in his _Kapital_ exposed the tragic consequences of such excessive sport, so now Rosegger in his home must look on at the depopulating of entire villages. By this means his own birthplace has been nearly ruined. In his first novel, _Heidepeters Gabriel_, he already shows the hopeless struggle of the peasant against the devastation of his fields by game, a struggle which leads to poaching and to prison. And in his novel _Jacob der Letzte_ (1888), which, from an artistic point of view, is perhaps the most complete of his works, the principal character, the last descendant of an old peasant family, who clings tenaciously to the old soil, is beaten and goes under in the struggle. Such a single case becomes for Rosegger an alarming symptom of the universal decline of the free peasantry. "What will come of it?" he asks, when he receives from numerous parts of Germany letters all witnessing to the same facts: "I am no practical teacher of political economy, I am only a poet; but they say that poets are seers, and I verily see that future generations will have to go home to the land again, that only on the land can the social question be peacefully and lastingly solved. Here master and man live on far more friendly footing than in the city, and come humanly nearer together. For twenty-five years I have been preaching in every way the return to natural living. I have built my little house in a peasant village and I live right among the peasants.--I am utterly dissatisfied with the leading spirits of our time: they don't teach us to live, they teach us only to think. One thing we have still to learn--to forget what they have taught us. Our true Mother is the Earth: from her spring our bread and our ideals."

The return of the townspeople to nature forms the theme of two later novels, _Erdsegen_ (_The Earth and the Fullness Thereof_, 1900) and _Weltgift_ (_The Poison of the World_, 1903). In the former the editor of a paper pledges himself to live a whole year as farm-labourer in the country. He not only earns his wager, but in the course of the year so richly experiences and realises the blessedness of life on the land that, cured of the fever of city life, he marries a village girl and starts his own farm. This thesis, with its obvious strong purpose, aroused opposition. The chief objection brought forward was that it would be impossible for a thoroughly town-bred person to take such deep root in the country. In reply to this, Rosegger points in the other novel to the fate of a townsman, who, unlike the character in the former book, is too full of the city virus for recovery. The poison of the world has eaten right into him, and he cannot escape his doom.

Rosegger can only compare town and country by the strongest contrast of light and shade. And in the talks which he collected in 1885 under the title of _Mountain Sermons, delivered in these latter days in the open air, and dedicated to the reviling and derision of our Enemies, the Weaknesses, the Vices and the Errors of Civilisation_, a fanatical anger is occasionally apparent: one misses the beatitudes which the title leads one to expect.

And yet love is the gospel which Rosegger proclaims at all times, and religious questions pervade his writings from first to last. He is himself, like the chief character in his book, a God-seeker. "Man creates for himself an ideal, an always nobler image of himself, calls it God and strives after it. So he climbs as if on a rope ladder, throwing the upper end higher and higher up the rugged wall of rocks towards the heaven of perfection. But who taught him to do this? Surely He who has put the power and spirit of growth in His creature's heart, God the Father, who from everlasting created the world and will create it to everlasting."

These conceptions are not exactly canonical, and it has been Rosegger's experience to have an article of his, _How I picture to myself the personality of Christ_, confiscated by the licensing authorities as blasphemous. This induced him twice afterwards openly to state his convictions; once in _Mein Himmelreich_ (_My Kingdom of Heaven_, 1900), and again in _I.N.R.I: Frohe Botschaft eines armen Sünders_ (_The Gospel of a poor Sinner_, 1904). These much-discussed writings give us an image of Christ as Rosegger made it, putting it together from the four gospels: a Christ rejoicing in God, intimate with man's heart, filled with joy of the earth, with mighty creative energy, with consuming wrath in due season; the Superman, the God-man in the highest sense.

Rosegger is as strongly opposed to all the violent "Missions" movements in the Church as to the faith-destroying tendency of the modern world's point of view. He holds piously by many an old belief, not because it is for him an article of faith, but because it is a piece of poetic childhood's remembrance; and he has saved many a dogma for himself by interpreting it symbolically and not literally. To the most poetic of his interpretations belongs that of the Cross: "The Cross has a foot rooted in Earth; that means 'Man, make use of the Earth.' The Cross has a head that towers up into the air of heaven; that means 'Man, remember thy ideals.' The Cross has two arms stretching out to right and left, not to chastise men, but to embrace all the world; that means 'Man, love thy brothers.' Love, Joy,--those are the two beams of our Cross. The world is not here as a penance, but a joy." In such sentences as these is contained Rosegger's whole Gospel of Joy, which looks for its fulfilment on this side. For him the highest aim of civilisation, as of religion, is the happiness of mankind.

This brings us to a conclusion. We have now seen Rosegger develop from peasant to craftsman, to teacher, to preacher. And now another question arises: Has he not possibly reached a greater height still--is he a prophet? Of that only late generations may judge; to them it is given to see whether the new birth of mankind, which Rosegger, like Tolstoy, looks for from a return to the simplicities of life on the land, will be realised. With Rosegger's prophecy, which we shall do well to consider, I close this paper. "The future generations will find peace and happiness again when they turn back to Nature and give themselves up to the healthy influences of the life of the soil. As yet, when the leaves turn yellow, the townsfolk hurry back into their walls; but there will come a time when the well-to-do citizens will buy land and farm it themselves like peasants, and when artisans will clear and reclaim such land from the wilderness itself. They will renounce hyper-intellectualism, and find pleasure and new vigour in bodily toil; and they will make laws under which a firm-rooted and honourable peasantry can once more thrive."

FOOTNOTE:

[1] _Wald-bauer_, one whose farm included forest-land.

I

My Father and I

On the whole I had not a bad bringing up, rather I had none at all. When I was a good, devout, obedient, apt child, my parents praised me; when I was the reverse they gave me a downright scolding. Praise almost always did me good and made me feel inches taller; for some children like plants shoot up only in sunshine.

But my father was of opinion that I ought not to grow in height only, but also in breadth, and that to this end reserve and austerity were good.

My mother was love itself. My father may have been the same by nature, but he did not know how to express his warm and loving heart. With all his gentleness this care and labour-laden man had a taciturn, serious bearing: only later, when he judged me man enough to appreciate it, did he ever give his rich humour free play before me.

During those years when I was tearing my first dozen pairs of breeches, he concerned himself with me but little except when I had done something naughty; then he allowed his severity full play. His harshness and my punishment generally consisted in his standing over me, and in loud angry tones, holding up my sin before me and pointing out the punishment I deserved.

When such an outburst occurred, it was my habit to plant myself in front of my father and remain standing before him as if petrified, with my arms hanging down, and looking steadily in his angry face throughout the vehement rebuke. In my inmost heart I always repented my wrongdoing and had the clearest sense of guilt; but I also remember another feeling that used to come over me during those homilies: a strange trembling, a sense of charm and ecstasy when the storm burst over my head. Tears came to my eyes and trickled down my cheeks; but I stood rooted there like a little tree, gazing up at my father, and was filled with an inexplicable sense of wellbeing, that increased mightily the longer and louder he thundered.

When after such a scene weeks went by without my concocting mischief, and my father, kind and silent as ever, went about his business without taking notice of me, the longing to devise something to put him in a rage gradually began and ripened in me again. This was not for the sake of vexing him, for I loved him passionately; nor yet from malice; but from another cause which I did not understand at the time.

Thus it once happened on the sacred eve of Christmas. In the previous summer in Maria Zell[2] my father had bought a little black cross on which hung a Christus in cast lead, and all the instruments of the Passion in the same material. This treasure had been put safely away until Christmas Eve, when my father brought it out of his press and set it on the little house-altar. I profited by the time when my parents and the rest of our people were still busy on the farm outside and in the kitchen making ready for the great festival, and, not without endangering my sound limbs, I reached the crucifix down from the wall, and crouched down behind the stove with it, and began taking it to pieces. It was a rare joy to me when with the aid of my little pocket-knife I loosened first the ladder, then the pincers and hammer, then Peter's cock, and at last the dear Christ Himself from the cross. The separated parts seemed to me much more interesting now than before as a whole; but when I had finished and wanted to put the things together again and could not, I began to grow hot inside and thought I was choking. Would it stop at a mere scolding this time? To be sure, I told myself: the black cross is now much finer than before; there is a black cross with nothing on it in the chapel in Hohenwang too, and people go there to pray. Besides, who wants a crucified Lord at Christmas time? At that time He ought to be lying in the manger--the Priest said so; and I must see about that now.

I bent the legs of the leaden Christus back and the arms over the breast, then laid Him reverently in my mother's work-basket, and so set my crib upon the house-altar; while I hid the cross in the straw of my parents' bed--forgetting that the basket would betray the taking down from the cross.

Fate swiftly overtook me. My mother was first to observe how absurdly the work-basket had got up among the Saints to-day!

"Who can have found the crucifix in his way up there?" asked my father at the very same moment.

I was standing a little apart, and I felt like a creature thirsting for strong wine to drink. But at the same time a strange fear warned me to get still farther into the background if possible.

My father approached me, asking almost humbly if I did not know where the crucifix had got to? I stood bolt upright before him and looked him in the face. He repeated his question. I pointed towards the bed-straw; tears came, but I believe there was no quiver of my lips.

My father searched for and found it, and was not angry, only surprised when he saw the mishandling of the sacred relic. My craving for the strong bitter wine grew apace. My father put the bare cross on the table.

"I can see," he said, speaking with perfect calmness, and he took his hat down from the nail, "I can see he'll have to be thoroughly punished at last. When even the Lord Christ Himself is not safe----! Mind you stay in the room, boy!" he bade me darkly, and then went out to the door.

"Run after him and beg for pardon!" cried my mother to me. "He's gone to cut a birch-rod."

I was as if welded to the floor. With horrible clearness I saw what would befall me, but was quite incapable of taking a single step in self-defence. My mother went about her work; I stood alone in the darkening room, the mutilated crucifix on the table before me. The least sound scared me. Inside the old case of the Black Forest clock standing there on the floor against the wall, the weights rattled as the clock struck five. At last I heard someone outside knocking the snow off his shoes; that was my father's step. When he entered the room with the birch-rod I had vanished.

He went into the kitchen and demanded in abrupt and angry tones where the rascal was? Then began a search throughout the whole house; in the living-room the bed and the corner by the stove and the great coffer were rummaged through. I heard them moving about in the next room, in the loft overhead. I heard orders given to search through the very mangers in the byres and the hay and straw in the barns; they were to go out to the shed, too, and bring the fellow straight to his father--he should remember this Christmas Eve all the rest of his life! But they came back empty-handed. Two farm-hands were to be sent about among the neighbours; but my mother called out that if I had gone over the open and through the forest to a neighbour I should certainly be frozen to death, for my little coat and hat were still in the room. What grief and vexation children were!

They went away, the house was nearly empty and in the dark room there was nothing visible but the grey squares of the windows. I was hidden in the clock-case and could peep through the chinks. I had squeezed in through the little door meant for winding up the works and let myself down inside the panelling, so that I was now standing upright in the clock-case.

What anguish I suffered in my hiding-place! That no good could come of it all, and that the hourly increasing commotion was certainly working towards an hourly more dangerous conclusion, I clearly perceived. I bitterly blamed the work-basket which had betrayed me from the very beginning, and I blamed the little crucifix; but I quite forgot to blame my own folly. Hours passed, I was still in my up-on-end coffin, already the icicles of the clock-weights touched the crown of my head, and I had to duck myself down as well as I could lest the stopping of the clock should lead to its winding up and thereby the discovery of myself. For my parents had at last come back into the room again and kindled a light and were beginning to quarrel about me.

"I don't know anywhere else to look for him," said my father, and he sank exhausted on a chair.

"Just think, if he's gone astray in the forest, or if he's lying under the snow!" cried my mother, and broke into audible weeping.

"Don't say such things!" said my father, "I can't bear to hear it."

"You can't bear to hear it, and yet you yourself have driven him away with your harshness!"

"I shouldn't have broken any bones with these twigs," he replied, and brought the birch-rod swishing down upon the table: "but if I catch him now, I'll break a hedge-pole across his back!"