V. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE. {141}

It is an interesting branch of psychological observation to note the

images that are habitually associated with abstract or collective

terms—what may be called the picture-writing of the mind, which it

carries on concurrently with the more subtle symbolism of language.

Perhaps the fixity or variety of these associated images would furnish a

tolerably fair test of the amount of concrete knowledge and experience

which a given word represents, in the minds of two persons who use it

with equal familiarity. The word _railways_, for example, will probably

call up, in the mind of a man who is not highly locomotive, the image

either of a “Bradshaw,” or of the station with which he is most familiar,

or of an indefinite length of tram-road; he will alternate between these

three images, which represent his stock of concrete acquaintance with

railways. But suppose a man to have had successively the experience of a

“navvy,” an engineer, a traveller, a railway director and shareholder,

and a landed proprietor in treaty with a railway company, and it is

probable that the range of images which would by turns present themselves

to his mind at the mention of the _word_ “railways,” would include all

the essential facts in the existence and relations of the _thing_. Now

it is possible for the first-mentioned personage to entertain very

expanded views as to the multiplication of railways in the abstract, and

their ultimate function in civilization. He may talk of a vast network

of railways stretching over the globe, of future “lines” in Madagascar,

and elegant refreshment-rooms in the Sandwich Islands, with none the less

glibness because his distinct conceptions on the subject do not extend

beyond his one station and his indefinite length of tram-road. But it is

evident that if we want a railway to be made, or its affairs to be

managed, this man of wide views and narrow observation will not serve our

purpose.

Probably, if we could ascertain the images called up by the terms “the

people,” “the masses,” “the proletariat,” “the peasantry,” by many who

theorize on those bodies with eloquence, or who legislate without

eloquence, we should find that they indicate almost as small an amount of

concrete knowledge—that they are as far from completely representing the

complex facts summed up in the collective term, as the railway images of

our non-locomotive gentleman. How little the real characteristics of the

working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their

natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as

well as by our political and social theories. Where, in our picture

exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry? What English

artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies of popular

life as the pictures of Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one

of the greatest painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while, in

his picture of “The Hireling Shepherd,” he gave us a landscape of

marvellous truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who

were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our

chimney ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy

with our peasantry could give a moment’s popularity to such a picture as

“Cross Purposes,” where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew

L. E. L.’s poems by heart, and English rustics, whose costume seems to

indicate that they are meant for ploughmen, with exotic features that

remind us of a handsome _primo tenore_. Rather than such cockney

sentimentality as this, as an education for the taste and sympathies, we

prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But

even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of

features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the “Keepsake”

style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and

prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that

peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a

smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound

teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children

necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the

artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of

life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic literature,

which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and

town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are

jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds make bashful

love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the checkered

shade and refresh themselves, not immoderately, with spicy nut-brown ale.

But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund; no

one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them

merry. The slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humor

twinkles, the slow utterance, and the heavy, slouching walk, remind one

rather of that melancholy animal the camel than of the sturdy countryman,

with striped stockings, red waistcoat, and hat aside, who represents the

traditional English peasant. Observe a company of haymakers. When you

see them at a distance, tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden

light, while the wagon creeps slowly with its increasing burden over the

meadow, and the bright green space which tells of work done gets larger

and larger, you pronounce the scene “smiling,” and you think these

companions in labor must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to

which they give animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find

that haymaking time is a time for joking, especially if there are women

among the laborers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and

then, and expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your

conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the

mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except

tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English

clown exists at the bottom of the third quart pot.

The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket-books and

never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty

has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake, that an

unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that

slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true

that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical

cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master’s corn

in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing

begging-letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairymaid into

filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not

subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least

established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men

moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.

Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin’s indignation, are

surely too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular

chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can hardly

object to lyric rustics in elegant laced boddices and picturesque motley,

unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit

costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But our social

novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of

their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to

the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our

sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a

sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture

of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial

and the selfish into that attention to what is a part from themselves,

which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott

takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit’s cottage, or tells the story of “The

Two Drovers;” when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of “Poor Susan;”

when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which

leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw; when Hornung

paints a group of chimney-sweepers—more is done toward linking the higher

classes with the lower, toward obliterating the vulgarity of

exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical

dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of

amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men

beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task

of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People.

Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial

aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false

ideas about evanescent fashions—about the manners and conversation of

beaux and duchesses; but it _is_ serious that our sympathy with the

perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humor in the

life of our more heavily laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and

turned toward a false object instead of the true one.

This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation which

give rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for

mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the

moralist thinks _ought_ to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what

are the motives and influences which _do_ act on him. We want to be

taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant,

but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his

suspicious selfishness.

We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of

rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could

give us their psychological character—their conception of life, and their

emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would

be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social

sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish’s colloquial style with

the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the same startling

inspiration in his description of the gestures and phrases of “Boots,” as

in the speeches of Shakespeare’s mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever

passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic,

without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment

before in his artistic truthfulness. But for the precious salt of his

humor, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve in some

degree as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his

preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic

boatmen and courtesans, would be as obnoxious as Eugène Sue’s idealized

proletaires, in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and

refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and

want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once

into a millennial state of _altruism_, wherein every one is caring for

everyone else, and no one for himself.

If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our

sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct

us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid conquests

of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged

in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors

may be settled by algebraic equations—the dream that the uncultured

classes are prepared for a condition which appeals principally to their

moral sensibilities—the aristocractic dilettantism which attempts to

restore the “good old times” by a sort of idyllic masquerading, and to

grow feudal fidelity and veneration as we grow prize turnips, by an

artificial system of culture—none of these diverging mistakes can coexist

with a real knowledge of the people, with a thorough study of their

habits, their ideas, their motives. The landholder, the clergyman, the

mill-owner, the mining-agent, have each an opportunity for making

precious observations on different sections of the working-classes, but

unfortunately their experience is too often not registered at all, or its

results are too scattered to be available as a source of information and

stimulus to the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral

and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a

foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote

himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially

of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry—the degree in which

they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the

points of view from which they regard their religious teachers, and the

degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the

interaction of the various classes on each other, and what are the

tendencies in their position toward disintegration or toward

development—and if, after all this study, he would give us the result of

his observation in a book well nourished with specific facts, his work

would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer.

What we are desiring for ourselves has been in some degree done for the

Germans by Riehl, the author of the very remarkable books, the titles of

which are placed at the head of this article; and we wish to make these

books known to our readers, not only for the sake of the interesting

matter they contain, and the important reflections they suggest, but also

as a model for some future or actual student of our own people. By way

of introducing Riehl to those who are unacquainted with his writings, we

will give a rapid sketch from his picture of the German Peasantry, and

perhaps this indication of the mode in which he treats a particular

branch of his subject may prepare them to follow us with more interest

when we enter on the general purpose and contents of his works.

In England, at present, when we speak of the peasantry we mean scarcely

more than the class of farm-servants and farm-laborers; and it is only in

the most primitive districts, as in Wales, for example, that farmers are

included under the term. In order to appreciate what Riehl says of the

German peasantry, we must remember what the tenant-farmers and small

proprietors were in England half a century ago, when the master helped to

milk his own cows, and the daughters got up at one o’clock in the morning

to brew—when the family dined in the kitchen with the servants, and sat

with them round the kitchen fire, in the evening. In those days, the

quarried parlor was innocent of a carpet, and its only specimens of art

were a framed sampler and the best tea-board; the daughters even of

substantial farmers had often no greater accomplishment in writing and

spelling than they could procure at a dame-school; and, instead of

carrying on sentimental correspondence, they were spinning their future

table-linen, and looking after every saving in butter and eggs that might

enable them to add to the little stock of plate and china which they were

laying in against their marriage. In our own day, setting aside the

superior order of farmers, whose style of living and mental culture are

often equal to that of the professional class in provincial towns, we can

hardly enter the least imposing farm-house without finding a bad piano in

the “drawing-room,” and some old annuals, disposed with a symmetrical

imitation of negligence, on the table; though the daughters may still

drop their _h’s_, their vowels are studiously narrow; and it is only in

very primitive regions that they will consent to sit in a covered vehicle

without springs, which was once thought an advance in luxury on the

pillion.

The condition of the tenant-farmers and small proprietors in Germany is,

we imagine, about on a par, not, certainly, in material prosperity, but

in mental culture and habits, with that of the English farmers who were

beginning to be thought old-fashioned nearly fifty years ago, and if we

add to these the farm servants and laborers we shall have a class

approximating in its characteristics to the _Bauernthum_, or peasantry,

described by Riehl.

In Germany, perhaps more than in any other country, it is among the

peasantry that we must look for the historical type of the national

_physique_. In the towns this type has become so modified to express the

personality of the individual that even “family likeness” is often but

faintly marked. But the peasants may still be distinguished into groups,

by their physical peculiarities. In one part of the country we find a

longer-legged, in another a broader-shouldered race, which has inherited

these peculiarities for centuries. For example, in certain districts of

Hesse are seen long faces, with high foreheads, long, straight noses, and

small eyes, with arched eyebrows and large eyelids. On comparing these

physiognomies with the sculptures in the church of St. Elizabeth, at

Marburg, executed in the thirteenth century, it will be found that the

same old Hessian type of face has subsisted unchanged, with this

distinction only, that the sculptures represent princes and nobles, whose

features then bore the stamp of their race, while that stamp is now to be

found only among the peasants. A painter who wants to draw mediæval

characters with historic truth must seek his models among the peasantry.

This explains why the old German painters gave the heads of their

subjects a greater uniformity of type than the painters of our day; the

race had not attained to a high degree of individualization in features

and expression. It indicates, too, that the cultured man acts more as an

individual, the peasant more as one of a group. Hans drives the plough,

lives, and thinks, just as Kunz does; and it is this fact that many

thousands of men are as like each other in thoughts and habits as so many

sheep or oysters, which constitutes the weight of the peasantry in the

social and political scale.

In the cultivated world each individual has his style of speaking and

writing. But among the peasantry it is the race, the district, the

province, that has its style—namely, its dialect, its phraseology, its

proverbs, and its songs, which belong alike to the entire body of the

people. This provincial style of the peasant is again, like his

_physique_, a remnant of history, to which he clings with the utmost

tenacity. In certain parts of Hungary there are still descendants of

German colonists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who go about

the country as reapers, retaining their old Saxon songs and manners,

while the more cultivated German emigrants in a very short time forget

their own language, and speak Hungarian. Another remarkable case of the

same kind is that of the Wends, a Slavonic race settled in Lusatia, whose

numbers amount to 200,000, living either scattered among the German

population or in separate parishes. They have their own schools and

churches, and are taught in the Slavonic tongue. The Catholics among

them are rigid adherents of the Pope; the Protestants not less rigid

adherents of Luther, or _Doctor_ Luther, as they are particular in

calling him—a custom which a hundred years ago was universal in

Protestant Germany. The Wend clings tenaciously to the usages of his

Church, and perhaps this may contribute not a little to the purity in

which he maintains the specific characteristics of his race. German

education, German law and government, service in the standing army, and

many other agencies, are in antagonism to his national exclusiveness; but

the _wives_ and _mothers_ here, as elsewhere, are a conservative

influence, and the habits temporarily laid aside in the outer world are

recovered by the fireside. The Wends form several stout regiments in the

Saxon army; they are sought far and wide, as diligent and honest

servants; and many a weakly Dresden or Leipzig child becomes thriving

under the care of a Wendish nurse. In their villages they have the air

and habits of genuine sturdy peasants, and all their customs indicate

that they have been from the first an agricultural people. For example,

they have traditional modes of treating their domestic animals. Each cow

has its own name, generally chosen carefully, so as to express the

special qualities of the animal; and all important family events are

narrated to the _bees_—a custom which is found also in Westphalia.

Whether by the help of the bees or not, the Wend farming is especially

prosperous; and when a poor Bohemian peasant has a son born to him he

binds him to the end of a long pole and turns his face toward Lusatia,

that he may be as lucky as the Wends, who live there.

The peculiarity of the peasant’s language consists chiefly in his

retention of historical peculiarities, which gradually disappear under

the friction of cultivated circles. He prefers any proper name that may

be given to a day in the calendar, rather than the abstract date, by

which he very rarely reckons. In the baptismal names of his children he

is guided by the old custom of the country, not at all by whim and fancy.

Many old baptismal names, formerly common in Germany, would have become

extinct but for their preservation among the peasantry, especially in

North Germany; and so firmly have they adhered to local tradition in this

matter that it would be possible to give a sort of topographical

statistics of proper names, and distinguish a district by its rustic

names as we do by its Flora and Fauna. The continuous inheritance of

certain favorite proper names in a family, in some districts, forces the

peasant to adopt the princely custom of attaching a numeral to the name,

and saying, when three generations are living at once, Hans I., II., and

III.; or—in the more antique fashion—Hans the elder, the middle, and the

younger. In some of our English counties there is a similar adherence to

a narrow range of proper names, and a mode of distinguishing collateral

branches in the same family, you will hear of Jonathan’s Bess, Thomas’s

Bess, and Samuel’s Bess—the three Bessies being cousins.

The peasant’s adherence to the traditional has much greater inconvenience

than that entailed by a paucity of proper names. In the Black Forest and

in Hüttenberg you will see him in the dog-days wearing a thick fur cap,

because it is an historical fur cap—a cap worn by his grandfather. In

the Wetterau, that peasant girl is considered the handsomest who wears

the most petticoats. To go to field-labor in seven petticoats can be

anything but convenient or agreeable, but it is the traditionally correct

thing, and a German peasant girl would think herself as unfavorably

conspicuous in an untraditional costume as an English servant-girl would

now think herself in a “linsey-wolsey” apron or a thick muslin cap. In

many districts no medical advice would induce the rustic to renounce the

tight leather belt with which he injures his digestive functions; you

could more easily persuade him to smile on a new communal system than on

the unhistorical invention of braces. In the eighteenth century, in

spite of the philanthropic preachers of potatoes, the peasant for years

threw his potatoes to the pigs and the dogs, before he could be persuaded

to put them on his own table. However, the unwillingness of the peasant

to adopt innovations has a not unreasonable foundation in the fact that

for him experiments are practical, not theoretical, and must be made with

expense of money instead of brains—a fact that is not, perhaps,

sufficiently taken into account by agricultural theorists, who complain

of the farmer’s obstinacy. The peasant has the smallest possible faith

in theoretic knowledge; he thinks it rather dangerous than otherwise, as

is well indicated by a Lower Rhenish proverb—“One is never too old to

learn, said an old woman; so she learned to be a witch.”

Between many villages an historical feud, once perhaps the occasion of

much bloodshed, is still kept up under the milder form of an occasional

round of cudgelling and the launching of traditional nicknames. An

historical feud of this kind still exists, for example, among many

villages on the Rhine and more inland places in the neighborhood.

_Rheinschnacke_ (of which the equivalent is perhaps “water-snake”) is the

standing term of ignominy for the inhabitant of the Rhine village, who

repays it in kind by the epithet “karst” (mattock), or “kukuk” (cuckoo),

according as the object of his hereditary hatred belongs to the field or

the forest. If any Romeo among the “mattocks” were to marry a Juliet

among the “water-snakes,” there would be no lack of Tybalts and Mercutios

to carry the conflict from words to blows, though neither side knows a

reason for the enmity.

A droll instance of peasant conservatism is told of a village on the

Taunus, whose inhabitants, from time immemorial, had been famous for

impromptu cudgelling. For this historical offence the magistrates of the

district had always inflicted the equally historical punishment of

shutting up the most incorrigible offenders, not in prison, but in their

own pig-sty. In recent times, however, the government, wishing to

correct the rudeness of these peasants, appointed an “enlightened” man as

a magistrate, who at once abolished the original penalty above mentioned.

But this relaxation of punishment was so far from being welcome to the

villagers that they presented a petition praying that a more energetic

man might be given them as a magistrate, who would have the courage to

punish according to law and justice, “as had been beforetime.” And the

magistrate who abolished incarceration in the pig-sty could never obtain

the respect of the neighborhood. This happened no longer ago than the

beginning of the present century.

But it must not be supposed that the historical piety of the German

peasant extends to anything not immediately connected with himself. He

has the warmest piety toward the old tumble-down house which his

grandfather built, and which nothing will induce him to improve, but

toward the venerable ruins of the old castle that overlooks his village

he has no piety at all, and carries off its stones to make a fence for

his garden, or tears down the gothic carving of the old monastic church,

which is “nothing to him,” to mark off a foot-path through his field. It

is the same with historical traditions. The peasant has them fresh in

his memory, so far as they relate to himself. In districts where the

peasantry are unadulterated, you can discern the remnants of the feudal

relations in innumerable customs and phrases, but you will ask in vain

for historical traditions concerning the empire, or even concerning the

particular princely house to which the peasant is subject. He can tell

you what “half people and whole people” mean; in Hesse you will still

hear of “four horses making a whole peasant,” or of “four-day and

three-day peasants;” but you will ask in vain about Charlemagne and

Frederic Barbarossa.

Riehl well observes that the feudal system, which made the peasant the

bondman of his lord, was an immense benefit in a country, the greater

part of which had still to be colonized—rescued the peasant from

vagabondage, and laid the foundation of persistency and endurance in

future generations. If a free German peasantry belongs only to modern

times, it is to his ancestor who was a serf, and even, in the earliest

times, a slave, that the peasant owes the foundation of his independence,

namely, his capability of a settled existence—nay, his unreasoning

persistency, which has its important function in the development of the

race.

Perhaps the very worst result of that unreasoning persistency is the

peasant’s inveterate habit of litigation. Every one remembers the

immortal description of Dandle Dinmont’s importunate application to

Lawyer Pleydell to manage his “bit lawsuit,” till at length Pleydell

consents to help him to ruin himself, on the ground that Dandle may fall

into worse hands. It seems this is a scene which has many parallels in

Germany. The farmer’s lawsuit is his point of honor; and he will carry

it through, though he knows from the very first day that he shall get

nothing by it. The litigious peasant piques himself, like Mr.

Saddletree, on his knowledge of the law, and this vanity is the chief

impulse to many a lawsuit. To the mind of the peasant, law presents

itself as the “custom of the country,” and it is his pride to be versed

in all customs. _Custom with him holds the place of sentiment_, _of

theory_, _and in many cases of affection_. Riehl justly urges the

importance of simplifying law proceedings, so as to cut off this vanity

at its source, and also of encouraging, by every possible means, the

practice of arbitration.

The peasant never begins his lawsuit in summer, for the same reason that

he does not make love and marry in summer—because he has no time for that

sort of thing. Anything is easier to him than to move out of his

habitual course, and he is attached even to his privations. Some years

ago a peasant youth, out of the poorest and remotest region of the

Westerwald, was enlisted as a recruit, at Weilburg in Nassau. The lad,

having never in his life slept in a bed, when he had got into one for the

first time began to cry like a child; and he deserted twice because he

could not reconcile himself to sleeping in a bed, and to the “fine” life

of the barracks: he was homesick at the thought of his accustomed poverty

and his thatched hut. A strong contrast, this, with the feeling of the

poor in towns, who would be far enough from deserting because their

condition was too much improved! The genuine peasant is never ashamed of

his rank and calling; he is rather inclined to look down on every one who

does not wear a smock frock, and thinks a man who has the manners of the

gentry is likely to be rather windy and unsubstantial. In some places,

even in French districts, this feeling is strongly symbolized by the

practice of the peasantry, on certain festival days, to dress the images

of the saints in peasant’s clothing. History tells us of all kinds of

peasant insurrections, the object of which was to obtain relief for the

peasants from some of their many oppressions; but of an effort on their

part to step out of their hereditary rank and calling, to become gentry,

to leave the plough and carry on the easier business of capitalists or

government functionaries, there is no example.

The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of peasant-life fall

into the same mistake as our English novelists: they transfer their own

feelings to ploughmen and woodcutters, and give them both joys and

sorrows of which they know nothing. The peasant never questions the

obligation of family ties—he questions _no custom_—but tender affection,

as it exists among the refined part of mankind, is almost as foreign to

him as white hands and filbert-shaped nails. That the aged father who

has given up his property to his children on condition of their

maintaining him for the remainder of his life, is very far from meeting

with delicate attentions, is indicated by the proverb current among the

peasantry—“Don’t take your clothes off before you go to bed.” Among

rustic moral tales and parables, not one is more universal than the story

of the ungrateful children, who made their gray-headed father, dependent

on them for a maintenance, eat at a wooden trough because he shook the

food out of his trembling hands. Then these same ungrateful children

observed one day that their own little boy was making a tiny wooden

trough; and when they asked him what it was for, he answered—that his

father and mother might eat out of it, when he was a man and had to keep

them.

Marriage is a very prudential affair, especially among the peasants who

have the largest share of property. Politic marriages are as common

among them as among princes; and when a peasant-heiress in Westphalia

marries, her husband adopts her name, and places his own after it with

the prefix _geborner_ (_née_). The girls marry young, and the rapidity

with which they get old and ugly is one among the many proofs that the

early years of marriage are fuller of hardships than of conjugal

tenderness. “When our writers of village stories,” says Riehl,

“transferred their own emotional life to the peasant, they obliterated

what is precisely his most predominant characteristic, namely, that with

him general custom holds the place of individual feeling.”

We pay for greater emotional susceptibility too often by nervous diseases

of which the peasant knows nothing. To him headache is the least of

physical evils, because he thinks head-work the easiest and least

indispensable of all labor. Happily, many of the younger sons in peasant

families, by going to seek their living in the towns, carry their hardy

nervous system to amalgamate with the overwrought nerves of our town

population, and refresh them with a little rude vigor. And a return to

the habits of peasant life is the best remedy for many moral as well as

physical diseases induced by perverted civilization. Riehl points to

colonization as presenting the true field for this regenerative process.

On the other side of the ocean a man will have the courage to begin life

again as a peasant, while at home, perhaps, opportunity as well as

courage will fail him. _Apropos_ of this subject of emigration, he

remarks the striking fact, that the native shrewdness and mother-wit of

the German peasant seem to forsake him entirely when he has to apply them

under new circumstances, and on relations foreign to his experience.

Hence it is that the German peasant who emigrates, so constantly falls a

victim to unprincipled adventurers in the preliminaries to emigration;

but if once he gets his foot on the American soil he exhibits all the

first-rate qualities of an agricultural colonist; and among all German

emigrants the peasant class are the most successful.

But many disintegrating forces have been at work on the peasant

character, and degeneration is unhappily going on at a greater pace than

development. In the wine districts especially, the inability of the

small proprietors to bear up under the vicissitudes of the market, or to

insure a high quality of wine by running the risks of a late vintage and

the competition of beer and cider with the inferior wines, have tended to

produce that uncertainty of gain which, with the peasant, is the

inevitable cause of demoralization. The small peasant proprietors are

not a new class in Germany, but many of the evils of their position are

new. They are more dependent on ready money than formerly; thus, where a

peasant used to get his wood for building and firing from the common

forest, he has now to pay for it with hard cash; he used to thatch his

own house, with the help perhaps of a neighbor, but now he pays a man to

do it for him; he used to pay taxes in kind, he now pays them in money.

The chances of the market have to be discounted, and the peasant falls

into the hands of money-lenders. Here is one of the cases in which

social policy clashes with a purely economical policy.

Political vicissitudes have added their influence to that of economical

changes in disturbing that dim instinct, that reverence for traditional

custom, which is the peasant’s principle of action. He is in the midst

of novelties for which he knows no reason—changes in political geography,

changes of the government to which he owes fealty, changes in

bureaucratic management and police regulations. He finds himself in a

new element before an apparatus for breathing in it is developed in him.

His only knowledge of modern history is in some of its results—for

instance, that he has to pay heavier taxes from year to year. His chief

idea of a government is of a power that raises his taxes, opposes his

harmless customs, and torments him with new formalities. The source of

all this is the false system of “enlightening” the peasant which has been

adopted by the bureaucratic governments. A system which disregards the

traditions and hereditary attachments of the peasant, and appeals only to

a logical understanding which is not yet developed in him, is simply

disintegrating and ruinous to the peasant character. The interference

with the communal regulations has been of this fatal character. Instead

of endeavoring to promote to the utmost the healthy life of the Commune,

as an organism the conditions of which are bound up with the historical

characteristics of the peasant, the bureaucratic plan of government is

bent on improvement by its patent machinery of state-appointed

functionaries and off-hand regulations in accordance with modern

enlightenment. The spirit of communal exclusiveness—the resistance to

the indiscriminate establishment of strangers, is an intense traditional

feeling in the peasant. “This gallows is for us and our children,” is

the typical motto of this spirit. But such exclusiveness is highly

irrational and repugnant to modern liberalism; therefore a bureaucratic

government at once opposes it, and encourages to the utmost the

introduction of new inhabitants in the provincial communes. Instead of

allowing the peasants to manage their own affairs, and, if they happen to

believe that five and four make eleven, to unlearn the prejudice by their

own experience in calculation, so that they may gradually understand

processes, and not merely see results, bureaucracy comes with its “Ready

Reckoner” and works all the peasant’s sums for him—the surest way of

maintaining him in his stupidity, however it may shake his prejudice.

Another questionable plan for elevating the peasant is the supposed

elevation of the clerical character by preventing the clergyman from

cultivating more than a trifling part of the land attached to his

benefice; that he may be as much as possible of a scientific theologian,

and as little as possible of a peasant. In this, Riehl observes, lies

one great source of weakness to the Protestant Church as compared with

the Catholic, which finds the great majority of its priests among the

lower orders; and we have had the opportunity of making an analogous

comparison in England, where many of us can remember country districts in

which the great mass of the people were christianized by illiterate

Methodist and Independent ministers, while the influence of the parish

clergyman among the poor did not extend much beyond a few old women in

scarlet cloaks and a few exceptional church-going laborers.

Bearing in mind the general characteristics of the German peasant, it is

easy to understand his relation to the revolutionary ideas and

revolutionary movements of modern times. The peasant, in Germany as

elsewhere, is a born grumbler. He has always plenty of grievances in his

pocket, but he does not generalize those grievances; he does not complain

of “government” or “society,” probably because he has good reason to

complain of the burgomaster. When a few sparks from the first French

Revolution fell among the German peasantry, and in certain villages of

Saxony the country people assembled together to write down their demands,

there was no glimpse in their petition of the “universal rights of man,”

but simply of their own particular affairs as Saxon peasants. Again,

after the July revolution of 1830, there were many insignificant peasant

insurrections; but the object of almost all was the removal of local

grievances. Toll-houses were pulled down; stamped paper was destroyed;

in some places there was a persecution of wild boars, in others, of that

plentiful tame animal, the German _Rath_, or councillor who is never

called into council. But in 1848 it seemed as if the movements of the

peasants had taken a new character; in the small western states of

Germany it seemed as if the whole class of peasantry was in insurrection.

But, in fact, the peasant did not know the meaning of the part he was

playing. He had heard that everything was being set right in the towns,

and that wonderful things were happening there, so he tied up his bundle

and set off. Without any distinct object or resolution, the country

people presented themselves on the scene of commotion, and were warmly

received by the party leaders. But, seen from the windows of ducal

palaces and ministerial hotels, these swarms of peasants had quite

another aspect, and it was imagined that they had a common plan of

co-operation. This, however, the peasants have never had. Systematic

co-operation implies general conceptions, and a provisional subordination

of egoism, to which even the artisans of towns have rarely shown

themselves equal, and which are as foreign to the mind of the peasant as

logarithms or the doctrine of chemical proportions. And the

revolutionary fervor of the peasant was soon cooled. The old mistrust of

the towns was reawakened on the spot. The Tyrolese peasants saw no great

good in the freedom of the press and the constitution, because these

changes “seemed to please the gentry so much.” Peasants who had given

their voices stormily for a German parliament asked afterward, with a

doubtful look, whether it were to consist of infantry or cavalry. When

royal domains were declared the property of the State, the peasants in

some small principalities rejoiced over this, because they interpreted it

to mean that every one would have his share in them, after the manner of

the old common and forest rights.

The very practical views of the peasants with regard to the demands of

the people were in amusing contrast with the abstract theorizing of the

educated townsmen. The peasant continually withheld all State payments

until he saw how matters would turn out, and was disposed to reckon up

the solid benefit, in the form of land or money, that might come to him

from the changes obtained. While the townsman was heating his brains

about representation on the broadest basis, the peasant asked if the

relation between tenant and landlord would continue as before, and

whether the removal of the “feudal obligations” meant that the farmer

should become owner of the land!

It is in the same naïve way that Communism is interpreted by the German

peasantry. The wide spread among them of communistic doctrines, the

eagerness with which they listened to a plan for the partition of

property, seemed to countenance the notion that it was a delusion to

suppose the peasant would be secured from this intoxication by his love

of secure possession and peaceful earnings. But, in fact, the peasant

contemplated “partition” by the light of an historical reminiscence

rather than of novel theory. The golden age, in the imagination of the

peasant, was the time when every member of the commune had a right to as

much wood from the forest as would enable him to sell some, after using

what he wanted in firing—in which the communal possessions were so

profitable that, instead of his having to pay rates at the end of the

year, each member of the commune was something in pocket. Hence the

peasants in general understood by “partition,” that the State lands,

especially the forests, would be divided among the communes, and that, by

some political legerdemain or other, everybody would have free fire-wood,

free grazing for his cattle, and over and above that, a piece of gold

without working for it. That he should give up a single clod of his own

to further the general “partition” had never entered the mind of the

peasant communist; and the perception that this was an essential

preliminary to “partition” was often a sufficient cure for his Communism.

In villages lying in the neighborhood of large towns, however, where the

circumstances of the peasantry are very different, quite another

interpretation of Communism is prevalent. Here the peasant is generally

sunk to the position of the proletaire living from hand to mouth: he has

nothing to lose, but everything to gain by “partition.” The coarse

nature of the peasant has here been corrupted into bestiality by the

disturbance of his instincts, while he is as yet incapable of principles;

and in this type of the degenerate peasant is seen the worst example of

ignorance intoxicated by theory.

A significant hint as to the interpretation the peasants put on

revolutionary theories may be drawn from the way they employed the few

weeks in which their movements were unchecked. They felled the forest

trees and shot the game; they withheld taxes; they shook off the

imaginary or real burdens imposed on them by their mediatized princes, by

presenting their “demands” in a very rough way before the ducal or

princely “Schloss;” they set their faces against the bureaucratic

management of the communes, deposed the government functionaries who had

been placed over them as burgomasters and magistrates, and abolished the

whole bureaucratic system of procedure, simply by taking no notice of its

regulations, and recurring to some tradition—some old order or disorder

of things. In all this it is clear that they were animated not in the

least by the spirit of modern revolution, but by a purely narrow and

personal impulse toward reaction.

The idea of constitutional government lies quite beyond the range of the

German peasant’s conceptions. His only notion of representation is that

of a representation of ranks—of classes; his only notion of a deputy is

of one who takes care, not of the national welfare, but of the interests

of his own order. Herein lay the great mistake of the democratic party,

in common with the bureaucratic governments, that they entirely omitted

the peculiar character of the peasant from their political calculations.

They talked of the “people” and forgot that the peasants were included in

the term. Only a baseless misconception of the peasant’s character could

induce the supposition that he would feel the slightest enthusiasm about

the principles involved in the reconstitution of the Empire, or even

about the reconstitution itself. He has no zeal for a written law, as

such, but only so far as it takes the form of a living law—a tradition.

It was the external authority which the revolutionary party had won in

Baden that attracted the peasants into a participation of the struggle.

Such, Riehl tells us, are the general characteristics of the German

peasantry—characteristics which subsist amid a wide variety of

circumstances. In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Brandenburg the peasant

lives on extensive estates; in Westphalia he lives in large isolated

homesteads; in the Westerwald and in Sauerland, in little groups of

villages and hamlets; on the Rhine land is for the most part parcelled

out among small proprietors, who live together in large villages. Then,

of course, the diversified physical geography of Germany gives rise to

equally diversified methods of land-culture; and out of these various

circumstances grow numerous specific differences in manner and character.

But the generic character of the German peasant is everywhere the same;

in the clean mountain hamlet and in the dirty fishing village on the

coast; in the plains of North Germany and in the backwoods of America.

“Everywhere he has the same historical character—everywhere custom is his

supreme law. Where religion and patriotism are still a naïve instinct,

are still a sacred _custom_, there begins the class of the German

Peasantry.”

* * * * *

Our readers will perhaps already have gathered from the foregoing

portrait of the German peasant that Riehl is not a man who looks at

objects through the spectacles either of the doctrinaire or the dreamer;

and they will be ready to believe what he tells us in his Preface,

namely, that years ago he began his wanderings over the hills and plains

of Germany for the sake of obtaining, in immediate intercourse with the

people, that completion of his historical, political, and economical

studies which he was unable to find in books. He began his

investigations with no party prepossessions, and his present views were

evolved entirely from his own gradually amassed observations. He was,

first of all, a pedestrian, and only in the second place a political

author. The views at which he has arrived by this inductive process, he

sums up in the term—_social-political-conservatism_; but his conservatism

is, we conceive, of a thoroughly philosophical kind. He sees in European

society _incarnate history_, and any attempt to disengage it from its

historical elements must, he believes, be simply destructive of social

vitality. {164} What has grown up historically can only die out

historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The external

conditions which society has inherited from the past are but the

manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings who

compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to each

other as the organism and its medium, and development can take place only

by the gradual consentaneous development of both. Take the familiar

example of attempts to abolish titles, which have been about as effective

as the process of cutting off poppy-heads in a cornfield. _Jedem

Menschem_, says Riehl, _ist sein Zopf angeboren_, _warum soll denn der

sociale Sprachgebrauch nicht auch sein Zopf haben_?—which we may

render—“As long as snobism runs in the blood, why should it not run in

our speech?” As a necessary preliminary to a purely rational society,

you must obtain purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter

prejudices of hereditary affection and antipathy; which is as easy as to

get running streams without springs, or the leafy shade of the forest

without the secular growth of trunk and branch.

The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of

language. It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations is

in anything but a rational state; the great sections of the civilized

world are only approximatively intelligible to each other, and even that

only at the cost of long study; one word stands for many things, and many

words for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and still subtler

echoes of association, make language an instrument which scarcely

anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and certainty.

Suppose, then, that the effect which has been again and again made to

construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length

succeeded, and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no

whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful simmer of many-hued

significance, no hoary Archaisms “familiar with forgotten years”—a patent

deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the purpose of

communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language

may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express

_life_, which is a great deal more than science. With the anomalies and

inconveniences of historical language you will have parted with its music

and its passions, and its vital qualities as an expression of individual

character, with its subtle capabilities of wit, with everything that

gives it power over the imagination; and the next step in simplification

will be the invention of a talking watch, which will achieve the utmost

facility and despatch in the communication of ideas by a graduated

adjustment of ticks, to be represented in writing by a corresponding

arrangement of dots. A melancholy “language of the future!” The sensory

and motor nerves that run in the same sheath are scarcely bound together

by a more necessary and delicate union than that which binds men’s

affections, imagination, wit and humor, with the subtle ramifications of

historical language. Language must be left to grow in precision,

completeness, and unity, as minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness,

and sympathy. And there is an analogous relation between the moral

tendencies of men and the social conditions they have inherited. The

nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can

only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the

process of development is going on until that perfect ripeness of the

seed which carries with it a life independent of the root. This vital

connection with the past is much more vividly felt on the Continent than

in England, where we have to recall it by an effort of memory and

reflection; for though our English life is in its core intensely

traditional, Protestantism and commerce have modernized the face of the

land and the aspects of society in a far greater degree than in any

continental country:

“Abroad,” says Ruskin, “a building of the eighth or tenth century

stands ruinous in the open streets; the children play round it, the

peasants heap their corn in it, the buildings of yesterday nestle

about it, and fit their new stones in its rents, and tremble in

sympathy as it trembles. No one wonders at it, or thinks of it as

separate, and of another time; we feel the ancient world to be a real

thing; and one with the new; antiquity is no dream; it is rather the

children playing about the old stones that are the dream. But all is

continuous; and the words “from generation to generation”

understandable here.”

This conception of European society as incarnate history is the

fundamental idea of Riehl’s books. After the notable failure of

revolutionary attempts conducted from the point of view of abstract

democratic and socialistic theories, after the practical demonstration of

the evils resulting from a bureaucratic system, which governs by an

undiscriminating, dead mechanism, Riehl wishes to urge on the

consideration of his countrymen a social policy founded on the special

study of the people as they are—on the natural history of the various

social ranks. He thinks it wise to pause a little from theorizing, and

see what is the material actually present for theory to work upon. It is

the glory of the Socialists—in contrast with the democratic doctrinaires

who have been too much occupied with the general idea of “the people” to

inquire particularly into the actual life of the people—that they have

thrown themselves with enthusiastic zeal into the study at least of one

social group, namely, the factory operatives; and here lies the secret of

their partial success. But, unfortunately, they have made this special

duty of a single fragment of society the basis of a theory which quietly

substitutes for the small group of Parisian proletaires or English

factory-workers the society of all Europe—nay, of the whole world. And

in this way they have lost the best fruit of their investigations. For,

says Riehl, the more deeply we penetrate into the knowledge of society in

its details, the more thoroughly we shall be convinced that _a universal

social policy has no validity except on paper_, and can never be carried

into successful practice. The conditions of German society are

altogether different from those of French, of English, or of Italian

society; and to apply the same social theory to these nations

indiscriminately is about as wise a procedure as Triptolemus Yellowley’s

application of the agricultural directions in Virgil’s “Georgics” to his

farm in the Shetland Isles.

It is the clear and strong light in which Riehl places this important

position that in our opinion constitutes the suggestive value of his

books for foreign as well as German readers. It has not been

sufficiently insisted on, that in the various branches of Social Science

there is an advance from the general to the special, from the simple to

the complex, analogous with that which is found in the series of the

sciences, from Mathematics to Biology. To the laws of quantity comprised

in Mathematics and Physics are superadded, in Chemistry, laws of quality;

to these again are added, in Biology, laws of life; and lastly, the

conditions of life in general branch out into its special conditions, or

Natural History, on the one hand, and into its abnormal conditions, or

Pathology, on the other. And in this series or ramification of the

sciences, the more general science will not suffice to solve the problems

of the more special. Chemistry embraces phenomena which are not

explicable by Physics; Biology embraces phenomena which are not

explicable by Chemistry; and no biological generalization will enable us

to predict the infinite specialities produced by the complexity of vital

conditions. So Social Science, while it has departments which in their

fundamental generality correspond to mathematics and physics, namely,

those grand and simple generalizations which trace out the inevitable

march of the human race as a whole, and, as a ramification of these, the

laws of economical science, has also, in the departments of government

and jurisprudence, which embrace the conditions of social life in all

their complexity, what may be called its Biology, carrying us on to

innumerable special phenomena which outlie the sphere of science, and

belong to Natural History. And just as the most thorough acquaintance

with physics, or chemistry, or general physiology, will not enable you at

once to establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that

your particular society of zoophytes, mollusks, and echinoderms may feel

themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skin; so the most

complete equipment of theory will not enable a statesman or a political

and social reformer to adjust his measures wisely, in the absence of a

special acquaintance with the section of society for which he legislates,

with the peculiar characteristics of the nation, the province, the class

whose well-being he has to consult. In other words, a wise social policy

must be based not simply on abstract social science, but on the natural

history of social bodies.

Riehl’s books are not dedicated merely to the argumentative maintenance

of this or of any other position; they are intended chiefly as a

contribution to that knowledge of the German people on the importance of

which he insists. He is less occupied with urging his own conclusions

than with impressing on his readers the facts which have led him to those

conclusions. In the volume entitled “Land und Leute,” which, though

published last, is properly an introduction to the volume entitled “Die

Bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” he considers the German people in their

physical geographical relations; he compares the natural divisions of the

race, as determined by land and climate, and social traditions, with the

artificial divisions which are based on diplomacy; and he traces the

genesis and influences of what we may call the ecclesiastical geography

of Germany—its partition between Catholicism and Protestantism. He shows

that the ordinary antithesis of North and South Germany represents no

real ethnographical distinction, and that the natural divisions of

Germany, founded on its physical geography are threefold—namely, the low

plains, the middle mountain region, and the high mountain region, or

Lower, Middle, and Upper Germany; and on this primary natural division

all the other broad ethnographical distinctions of Germany will be

found to rest. The plains of North or Lower Germany include all the

seaboard the nation possesses; and this, together with the fact that they

are traversed to the depth of 600 miles by navigable rivers, makes them

the natural seat of a trading race. Quite different is the geographical

character of Middle Germany. While the northern plains are marked off

into great divisions, by such rivers as the Lower Rhine, the Weser, and

the Oder, running almost in parallel lines, this central region is cut up

like a mosaic by the capricious lines of valleys and rivers. Here is the

region in which you find those famous roofs from which the rain-water

runs toward two different seas, and the mountain-tops from which you may

look into eight or ten German states. The abundance of water-power and

the presence of extensive coal-mines allow of a very diversified

industrial development in Middle Germany. In Upper Germany, or the high

mountain region, we find the same symmetry in the lines of the rivers as

in the north; almost all the great Alpine streams flow parallel with the

Danube. But the majority of these rivers are neither navigable nor

available for industrial objects, and instead of serving for

communication they shut off one great tract from another. The slow

development, the simple peasant life of many districts is here determined

by the mountain and the river. In the south-east, however, industrial

activity spreads through Bohemia toward Austria, and forms a sort of

balance to the industrial districts of the Lower Rhine. Of course, the

boundaries of these three regions cannot be very strictly defined; but an

approximation to the limits of Middle Germany may be obtained by

regarding it as a triangle, of which one angle lies in Silesia, another

in Aix-la-Chapelle, and a third at Lake Constance.

This triple division corresponds with the broad distinctions of climate.

In the northern plains the atmosphere is damp and heavy; in the southern

mountain region it is dry and rare, and there are abrupt changes of

temperature, sharp contrasts between the seasons, and devastating storms;

but in both these zones men are hardened by conflict with the roughness

of the climate. In Middle Germany, on the contrary, there is little of

this struggle; the seasons are more equable, and the mild, soft air of

the valleys tends to make the inhabitants luxurious and sensitive to

hardships. It is only in exceptional mountain districts that one is here

reminded of the rough, bracing air on the heights of Southern Germany.

It is a curious fact that, as the air becomes gradually lighter and rarer

from the North German coast toward Upper Germany, the average of suicides

regularly decreases. Mecklenburg has the highest number, then Prussia,

while the fewest suicides occur in Bavaria and Austria.

Both the northern and southern regions have still a large extent of waste

lands, downs, morasses, and heaths; and to these are added, in the south,

abundance of snow-fields and naked rock; while in Middle Germany culture

has almost over-spread the face of the land, and there are no large

tracts of waste. There is the same proportion in the distribution of

forests. Again, in the north we see a monotonous continuity of

wheat-fields, potato-grounds, meadow-lands, and vast heaths, and there is

the same uniformity of culture over large surfaces in the southern

table-lands and the Alpine pastures. In Middle Germany, on the contrary,

there is a perpetual variety of crops within a short space; the diversity

of land surface and the corresponding variety in the species of plants

are an invitation to the splitting up of estates, and this again

encourages to the utmost the motley character of the cultivation.

According to this threefold division, it appears that there are certain

features common to North and South Germany in which they differ from

Central Germany, and the nature of this difference Riehl indicates by

distinguishing the former as _Centralized Land_ and the latter as

_Individualized Land_; a distinction which is well symbolized by the fact

that North and South Germany possess the great lines of railway which are

the medium for the traffic of the world, while Middle Germany is far

richer in lines for local communication, and possesses the greatest

length of railway within the smallest space. Disregarding

superficialities, the East Frieslanders, the Schleswig-Holsteiners, the

Mecklenburghers, and the Pomeranians are much more nearly allied to the

old Bavarians, the Tyrolese, and the Styrians than any of these are

allied to the Saxons, the Thuringians, or the Rhinelanders. Both in

North and South Germany original races are still found in large masses,

and popular dialects are spoken; you still find there thoroughly peasant

districts, thorough villages, and also, at great intervals, thorough

cities; you still find there a sense of rank. In Middle Germany, on the

contrary, the original races are fused together or sprinkled hither and

thither; the peculiarities of the popular dialects are worn down or

confused; there is no very strict line of demarkation between the country

and the town population, hundreds of small towns and large villages being

hardly distinguishable in their characteristics; and the sense of rank,

as part of the organic structure of society, is almost extinguished.

Again, both in the north and south there is still a strong ecclesiastical

spirit in the people, and the Pomeranian sees Antichrist in the Pope as

clearly as the Tyrolese sees him in Doctor Luther; while in Middle

Germany the confessions are mingled, they exist peaceably side by side in

very narrow space, and tolerance or indifference has spread itself widely

even in the popular mind. And the analogy, or rather the causal relation

between the physical geography of the three regions and the development

of the population goes still further:

“For,” observes Riehl, “the striking connection which has been

pointed out between the local geological formations in Germany and

the revolutionary disposition of the people has more than a

metaphorical significance. Where the primeval physical revolutions

of the globe have been the wildest in their effects, and the most

multiform strata have been tossed together or thrown one upon the

other, it is a very intelligible consequence that on a land surface

thus broken up, the population should sooner develop itself into

small communities, and that the more intense life generated in these

smaller communities should become the most favorable nidus for the

reception of modern culture, and with this a susceptibility for its

revolutionary ideas; while a people settled in a region where its

groups are spread over a large space will persist much more

obstinately in the retention of its original character. The people

of Middle Germany have none of that exclusive one-sidedness which

determines the peculiar genius of great national groups, just as this

one-sidedness or uniformity is wanting to the geological and

geographical character of their land.”

This ethnographical outline Riehl fills up with special and typical

descriptions, and then makes it the starting-point for a criticism of the

actual political condition of Germany. The volume is full of vivid

pictures, as well as penetrating glances into the maladies and tendencies

of modern society. It would be fascinating as literature if it were not

important for its facts and philosophy. But we can only commend it to

our readers, and pass on to the volume entitled “Die Bürgerliche

Gesellschaft,” from which we have drawn our sketch of the German

peasantry. Here Riehl gives us a series of studies in that natural

history of the people which he regards as the proper basis of social

policy. He holds that, in European society, there are _three natural

ranks or estates_: the hereditary landed aristocracy, the citizens or

commercial class, and the peasantry or agricultural class. By _natural

ranks_ he means ranks which have their roots deep in the historical

structure of society, and are still, in the present, showing vitality

above ground; he means those great social groups which are not only

distinguished externally by their vocation, but essentially by their

mental character, their habits, their mode of life—by the principle they

represent in the historical development of society. In his conception of

the “Fourth Estate” he differs from the usual interpretation, according

to which it is simply equivalent to the Proletariat, or those who are

dependent on daily wages, whose only capital is their skill or bodily

strength—factory operatives, artisans, agricultural laborers, to whom

might be added, especially in Germany, the day-laborers with the quill,

the literary proletariat. This, Riehl observes, is a valid basis of

economical classification, but not of social classification. In his

view, the Fourth Estate is a stratum produced by the perpetual abrasion

of the other great social groups; it is the sign and result of the

decomposition which is commencing in the organic constitution of society.

Its elements are derived alike from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and

the peasantry. It assembles under its banner the deserters of historical

society, and forms them into a terrible army, which is only just awaking

to the consciousness of its corporate power. The tendency of this Fourth

Estate, by the very process of its formation, is to do away with the

distinctive historical character of the other estates, and to resolve

their peculiar rank and vocation into a uniform social relation founded

on an abstract conception of society. According to Riehl’s

classification, the day-laborers, whom the political economist designates

as the Fourth Estate, belong partly to the peasantry or agricultural

class, and partly to the citizens or commercial class.

Riehl considers, in the first place, the peasantry and aristocracy as the

“Forces of social persistence,” and, in the second, the bourgeoisie and

the “fourth Estate” as the “Forces of social movement.”

The aristocracy, he observes, is the only one among these four groups

which is denied by others besides Socialists to have any natural basis as

a separate rank. It is admitted that there was once an aristocracy which

had an intrinsic ground of existence, but now, it is alleged, this is an

historical fossil, an antiquarian relic, venerable because gray with age.

It what, it is asked, can consist the peculiar vocation of the

aristocracy, since it has no longer the monopoly of the land, of the

higher military functions, and of government offices, and since the

service of the court has no longer any political importance? To this

Riehl replies, that in great revolutionary crises, the “men of progress”

have more than once “abolished” the aristocracy. But, remarkably enough,

the aristocracy has always reappeared. This measure of abolition showed

that the nobility were no longer regarded as a real class, for to abolish

a real class would be an absurdity. It is quite possible to contemplate

a voluntary breaking up of the peasant or citizen class in the

socialistic sense, but no man in his senses would think of straightway

“abolishing” citizens and peasants. The aristocracy, then, was regarded

as a sort of cancer, or excrescence of society. Nevertheless, not only

has it been found impossible to annihilate an hereditary nobility by

decree, but also the aristocracy of the eighteenth century outlived even

the self-destructive acts of its own perversity. A life which was

entirely without object, entirely destitute of functions, would not, says

Riehl, be so persistent. He has an acute criticism of those who conduct

a polemic against the idea of an hereditary aristocracy while they are

proposing an “aristocracy of talent,” which after all is based on the

principle of inheritance. The Socialists are, therefore, only consistent

in declaring against an aristocracy of talent. “But when they have

turned the world into a great Foundling Hospital they will still be

unable to eradicate the ‘privileges of birth.’” We must not follow him

in his criticism, however; nor can we afford to do more than mention

hastily his interesting sketch of the mediæval aristocracy, and his

admonition to the German aristocracy of the present day, that the

vitality of their class is not to be sustained by romantic attempts to

revive mediæval forms and sentiments, but only by the exercise of

functions as real and salutary for actual society as those of the

mediæval aristocracy were for the feudal age. “In modern society the

divisions of rank indicate _division of labor_, according to that

distribution of functions in the social organism which the historical

constitution of society has determined. In this way the principle of

differentiation and the principle of unity are identical.”

The elaborate study of the German bourgeoisie, which forms the next

division of the volume, must be passed over, but we may pause a moment to

note Riehl’s definition of the social _Philister_ (Philistine), an

epithet for which we have no equivalent, not at all, however, for want of

the object it represents. Most people who read a little German know that

the epithet _Philister_ originated in the _Burschen-leben_, or

Student-life of Germany, and that the antithesis of _Bursch_ and

_Philister_ was equivalent to the antithesis of “gown” and “town;” but

since the word has passed into ordinary language it has assumed several

shades of significance which have not yet been merged into a single,

absolute meaning; and one of the questions which an English visitor in

Germany will probably take an opportunity of asking is, “What is the

strict meaning of the word _Philister_?” Riehl’s answer is, that the

_Philister_ “is one who is indifferent to all social interests, all

public life, as distinguished from selfish and private interests; he has

no sympathy with political and social events except as they affect his

own comfort and prosperity, as they offer him material for amusement or

opportunity for gratifying his vanity. He has no social or political

creed, but is always of the opinion which is most convenient for the

moment. He is always in the majority, and is the main element of

unreason and stupidity in the judgment of a “discerning public.” It

seems presumptuous in us to dispute Riehl’s interpretation of a German

word, but we must think that, in literature, the epithet _Philister_ has

usually a wider meaning than this—includes his definition and something

more. We imagine the _Philister_ is the personification of the spirit

which judges everything from a lower point of view than the subject

demands; which judges the affairs of the parish from the egotistic or

purely personal point of view; which judges the affairs of the nation

from the parochial point of view, and does not hesitate to measure the

merits of the universe from the human point of view. At least this must

surely be the spirit to which Goethe alludes in a passage cited by Riehl

himself, where he says that the Germans need not be ashamed of erecting a

monument to him as well as to Blucher; for if Blucher had freed them from

the French, he (Goethe) had freed them from the nets of the _Philister_:

“Ihr mögt mirimmer ungescheut

Gleich Blüchern Denkmal setzen!

Von Franzosen hat er euch befreit,

Ich von Philister-netzen.”

Goethe could hardly claim to be the apostle of public spirit; but he is

eminently the man who helps us to rise to a lofty point of observation,

so that we may see things in their relative proportions.

The most interesting chapters in the description of the “Fourth Estate,”

which concludes the volume, are those on the “Aristocratic Proletariat”

and the “Intellectual Proletariat.” The Fourth Estate in Germany, says

Riehl, has its centre of gravity not, as in England and France, in the

day laborers and factory operatives, and still less in the degenerate

peasantry. In Germany the _educated_ proletariat is the leaven that sets

the mass in fermentation; the dangerous classes there go about, not in

blouses, but in frock coats; they begin with the impoverished prince and

end in the hungriest _littérateur_. The custom that all the sons of a

nobleman shall inherit their father’s title necessarily goes on

multiplying that class of aristocrats who are not only without function

but without adequate provision, and who shrink from entering the ranks of

the citizens by adopting some honest calling. The younger son of a

prince, says Riehl, is usually obliged to remain without any vocation;

and however zealously he may study music, painting, literature, or

science, he can never be a regular musician, painter, or man of science;

his pursuit will be called a “passion,” not a “calling,” and to the end

of his days he remains a dilettante. “But the ardent pursuit of a fixed

practical calling can alone satisfy the active man.” Direct legislation

cannot remedy this evil. The inheritance of titles by younger sons is

the universal custom, and custom is stronger than law. But if all

government preference for the “aristocratic proletariat” were withdrawn,

the sensible men among them would prefer emigration, or the pursuit of

some profession, to the hungry distinction of a title without rents.

The intellectual proletaires Riehl calls the “church militant” of the

Fourth Estate in Germany. In no other country are they so numerous; in

no other country is the trade in material and industrial capital so far

exceeded by the wholesale and retail trade, the traffic and the usury, in

the intellectual capital of the nation. _Germany yields more

intellectual produce than it can use and pay for_.

“This over-production, which is not transient but permanent, nay, is

constantly on the increase, evidences a diseased state of the

national industry, a perverted application of industrial powers, and

is a far more pungent satire on the national condition than all the

poverty of operatives and peasants. . . . Other nations need not envy

us the preponderance of the intellectual proletariat over the

proletaires of manual labor. For man more easily becomes diseased

from over-study than from the labor of the hands; and it is precisely

in the intellectual proletariat that there are the most dangerous

seeds of disease. This is the group in which the opposition between

earnings and wants, between the ideal social position and the real,

is the most hopelessly irreconcilable.”

We must unwillingly leave our readers to make acquaintance for themselves

with the graphic details with which Riehl follows up this general

statement; but before quitting these admirable volumes, let us say, lest

our inevitable omissions should have left room for a different

conclusion, that Riehl’s conservatism is not in the least tinged with the

partisanship of a class, with a poetic fanaticism for the past, or with

the prejudice of a mind incapable of discerning the grander evolution of

things to which all social forms are but temporarily subservient. It is

the conservatism of a clear-eyed, practical, but withal large-minded

man—a little caustic, perhaps, now and then in his epigrams on democratic

doctrinaires who have their nostrum for all political and social

diseases, and on communistic theories which he regards as “the despair of

the individual in his own manhood, reduced to a system,” but nevertheless

able and willing to do justice to the elements of fact and reason in

every shade of opinion and every form of effort. He is as far as

possible from the folly of supposing that the sun will go backward on the

dial because we put the hands of our clock backward; he only contends

against the opposite folly of decreeing that it shall be mid-day while in

fact the sun is only just touching the mountain-tops, and all along the

valley men are stumbling in the twilight.