The unmistakable trend of our time is the civilisation--which, in its
modern form, is largely urbanisation--of the whole habitable globe.
From its centres outwards it is thrusting itself upon places, men,
processes--ultimate sanctuaries, never before reached by alien
trespassing. Most men are looking on at its destruction of the old
order with shrugging acceptance of the inevitable, or hailing the
chaotic stuff of the new in its making with so far unjustified joy.
With a wit worn somewhat threadbare with use they invariably counsel
the few eccentrics who deny its inevitability and question its
beneficence to quit the hopes and mops of Mrs. Partington for the
discreet submission of the wiser Canute. Then they grow properly grave,
and declare that this modern civilisation, for all its shortcomings,
has been well described as a banquet, the like of which, for those
below as for those above the salt, has never been spread before.
However that may be, there is no question that here and there a guest
is sometimes moved to look round on the company and scan its several
types with a sudden sense of their significance. Some of these, good
and bad, are common to all late civilisations, he perceives, others as
hatefully peculiar to our own as certain diseases. Where, in God's
name, were there ever till now men like these, who bend a complaisant
spectacled gaze on a world going under, content if they may but first
secure their museum sample (including one carefully chosen, perfectly
embalmed, stuffed and catalogued peasant) of every species? Or their
younger kindred--men whose intellect obeys no inspiration save
curiosity nor law save its own limit, whose inventions, therefore,
cannot foster good and beauty but only spoil these in Nature and men's
souls? As for that splendid group beyond, one may question if Athens,
Rome, or Byzantium, whose sumptuous culture of brain and body achieved
an almost criminal comeliness by Christian standards, ever equalled
them: question, too, whether their selfish perfection or the travesty
of it in this mob of women dull with luxury, of men brutalised by the
scramble of getting it for them--be less desirable for the race!
Thankfully his eye passes from them to those who turn such a cold
shoulder upon their vulgarity: a little company, fine-edged, polished
and flexible with perpetual fence of wit and word, hardly peculiar to
our day perhaps, but rather such as might have played their
irresponsible game on the eve of any red revolution. Now and again they
lend an amused ear to various gassy gospels over the way, where, as he
perceives, he is once more among the children of this latter day alone:
notably certain insignificances who, because they have raised their
self-indulgence to the dignity of a problem play, are solemnly
mistaking themselves (as actors and audience too) for pioneers of
social progress; and some earnest women who have slammed the front door
on their nearest and dearest stay-at-home duties and privileges, to go
questing after problematical rights. It looks, too, as if the same
types, modified for worse and better by class conditions, were repeated
below the salt; but there the multitude is so great that the
individuals are soon lost in a far-off colourless mass--sometimes a
menacing mass--by no means so content with stale bread as the others
with caviare.
Is then this civilisation to become the universal order? he asks
himself; and must the world it has laid waste be repeopled from these?
The very fear of it summons a shadowy memory of fathers' fathers among
Sussex sheepfolds, Highland crofts, Tuscan vineyards, or German
forests. After that the banquet grits in the teeth like husks, and
there is nothing possible but to get up and go out from it, sick with
longing for those simpler, saner people. To them, it is said,
fatherhood, motherhood, home, were chiefest of prides and sanctities
outside Heaven. They either kept or consciously broke the ten
commandments, but they never set up the _Seven deadly Sins_ in their
place. They won life out of the earth, sometimes with difficulty
enough, but the struggle bred a muscle and fortitude only now failing
their descendants in hyper-civilisation. They laboured, and took their
pleasures too, under open skies and in quiet places where the divine
voice could clearly be heard at times, and unperplexedly obeyed.
Between fear and hope these famished feasters come at last to the
ancestral places; only too often to find them ruined, or sheltering
some sad survival unaware of his own splendid history. On the cold
thresholds they stand, stricken with the sense of the world's
irreparable loss in a virile and faithful race.
Just so far have many thinking people come to-day, and there remain,
needing a leader who can turn regretful retrospect to rational hope.
Such a one is Peter Rosegger, whose life is a type of our own day and a
prophecy of better. He, too, left the land for the city, and now,
because all his culture and experience do but confirm his faith that
_Bauernthum_ is as necessary for the world's soul as the bread which
the peasant grows for its body, he has gone back to it. When he wants
new vigour for daily life, or for his mission of protecting and
pleading for a vanishing folk, he touches earth and gets it.
Peasant-born, in most of his books he _is_ Peasantry grown conscious
and articulate,--he gives us that life from within. But culture has
enabled him to see the peasant in his true relation to the world as
well, to measure the life he was born into with the civilisation whose
guest he has been. And so in one invaluable book, _Erdsegen_, he writes
of the folk life from without, and that with great truth and
consistency. The story is given in a series of letters from a city
journalist, who for a frivolous wager goes to live "the simple life" as
a peasant among peasants for one year. Looking through the townsman's
eyes, we find there no stage-peasant's Arcady, no rose-bowered cottages
pleasantly ready for week-end lodgers; rather we stare aghast at the
coarse food, rough work, some very unwholesome conditions, and
obstinate superstitions. The journalist's earlier letters treat of
these things with humorous realism, and we respect his pluck for
putting up with them. Gradually the tone of the letters changes, and we
see the innate fineness--not the cultured refinement--of the townsman,
responding to the strong faith behind the superstition, to the beauty
of the traditional labours, the heroic endurance of their undoing by
storm and bad fortune, and the acceptance of good and ill alike as from
the hands of a good if sometimes incomprehensible Father. The faint
sneer, even the amused smile, die from the townsman's face; dirt and
discomfort are lost sight of in the divine realities which draw him,
humbly enough at last, to throw in his lot with these humble people.
Rosegger is a true prophet, he never disguises truth in defending it.
His passion for essential Peasantry is too great for sentimentalities,
too honest for whitewash; and so while he exhilarates us with its
elemental force he does not fear to show where this merges into
brutality, nor when its simplicity opens the door to superstition. And
yet in the end we are one with his faith in _Bauernthum_ and the
world's need of it. The land-folk who emigrate to cities, and their
children there born, are fast losing and will soon quite lose what no
money or experience can compensate them for. Age after age, great
shaping influences from the forest, the mountain and the waters of the
mountain, the solitudes, the mastery and love of beasts, the
disciplinary tragedies and triumphs of agriculture, came and wrought
upon the humanity in their midst, gradually creating the customs,
traditions, lore and art--everything except religion in its _Church_
sense--which is part of the collective soul of Peasantry. Whatever
these uprooted land-folk gain in the city, though they gain the whole
world, they certainly lose their own soul--the soul special to
Peasantry and until now the fullest spring of the world's imaginative
life.
At times, perhaps when he has stayed too long in Graz, Rosegger writes
of _Bauernthum_ as of something irrevocably passing; at others he
utters his faith--for it is deeper than hope--that it will come again.
To him his own life is racially prophetic. He has had the best of
civilisation, intellectual intercourse, fame, travel, wealth: but from
these and all others of its benefits or lures, he has again and again
run back, mastered by a _Heimweh_ which saved him. Sometimes, in
terrible trouble, once at the point of death, he went back, and every
time the touch of the earth renewed him, body and soul. Signs of this
saving _Heimweh_ he sees here and there among those who remain at the
banquet, actually starving in satiety, some of them; and from the quiet
valley where his genius, long since the consecrated champion of the
ancient peasantry, does its best work, he calls upon these to come back
and make possible a new. His loyal traditionalism does not hinder his
belief that a new peasantry, not born, but becoming such from a choice
inspired by heart's hunger and a surfeit of civilisation, must have a
strong redemptive value of its own among the decadent nations.
Of the earth he writes as he wrote of the stern tender woman who bore
him in the Forest Farm,--with a worship that makes a town-bred creature
drag at his chain or break his heart to run home to her. She has never
failed him, he says, in any need of spirit or flesh, nor will she ever
fail her prodigals. When they come back in a hundred or a thousand
years they will find her patiently waiting to teach them all the vital
forgotten things over again: and, even if she take the gewgaws and
lumber out of their hands, she will leave them whatever of learning she
can with her ancient processes and gift of wonder transmute into
wisdom.