I
In the heart of Austria lies Steiermark (Styria), a rough mountain
country on the eastern slope of the Alps. Its inhabitants, protected
from the levelling influences of modern civilisation and cut off from
that mingling with other peoples which destroys racial character, have
retained their old individuality and customs longer than any other
German people. Rough though the climate is, the soil stony, the
struggle for existence hard, these sons of the mountains have grown
stubbornly inseparable from their home; it is with difficulty that they
take root in other soil--they are evermore drawn back to the place
where once their cradle stood. In former centuries the Swiss soldiers
in French service could not hear the home-like chime of cow-bells
without a temptation to desert their colours; and time after time sons
of Steiermark have been driven back to their free hills by the
constraint of garrison life. The deserters were always easily caught:
the sergeant in pursuit had simply to look for the culprit in his
father's house. The _Heimweh_ (other languages can hardly express the
meaning of this word) is the national sickness to which all natives of
the Alps driven into foreign parts are subject, and it is but the other
side of that impassioned joy in the home, which finds expression in
jubilant songs and shouts rising for ever from the mountains to the
sky.
Peter Rosegger is the national poet of Styria. If it can be said that
all men on their way through life carry with them a clod of home-soil,
as the pious pilgrim carries a handful of sacred earth, then one may
say that this poet is home personified. "Styria on two legs," he is
called by his own people. All that can move the soul of this people,
from the lightest jest to the deepest longings and searchings, has
found expression in his writings.
He has passed through many phases of life, from peasant to craftsman,
to schoolmaster, to theologian, and all these phases are reflected in
his life-work. The son of the peasant, who on his journey has attained
the heights of humanity, is always turning back to his starting-point.
Like the old giant Antæus, he draws new strength from his mother Earth.
Close touch with the home soil is for him a condition of life. When
Rosegger was on a lecturing tour through the great German cities, where
he was enthusiastically greeted by audiences of thousands, there never
left him the longing for the silent peace of the mountains; and
_Heimweh_ drove him away even from the shining Gulf of Naples. Even
Graz, the beautiful capital of Steiermark, where Rosegger has his
vine-covered house, cannot take the place of home for him. In the
summer months he escapes to Krieglach in the Mürztal; there he lives
among his native people, and from his window he looks out to those
heights where, out of sight, stands a deserted farm--his birthplace.
In Alpl, near Krieglach, a forest community which has now almost ceased
to exist and even at the time of his birth consisted only of
twenty-three farms, Rosegger came into the world on July 31st, 1843. It
was almost by accident that he learnt to read and to write. An old
schoolmaster, whom the Church had dismissed from his office because of
his leanings towards freedom in 1848, wandered a beggar through the
mountains, and when he came to the peasants of Alpl they said: "Beggars
we have anyhow in plenty, but a schoolmaster we have not and never
have had since the world began. He shall be schoolmaster here, and our
children shall learn to read and to write; if it does no good, it can
do no harm." And so the old schoolmaster went hawking his learning from
house to house, and his school fees consisted of the right to eat as
much as ever he liked.
Peter, the son of the _Wald-bauer_ (forest peasant),[1] was soon known
for his learning. Once in the dead of winter he was taken to one of the
highest-lying farms, where the old peasant owner wanted to make her
will. There being neither paper nor ink, he wrote the will with
charcoal inside a coffer lid, for the boy was gifted with a bright
mother-wit which never left him at a loss. He read everything printed
that he could lay hands on, but as he did not find enough to read, he
began to write himself; stories of saints, sermons, works of devotion
and calendars. These he illustrated with drawings of his own invention.
A student who had spent his holidays in the mountains had left him a
little box of watercolours. The boy cut a lock of hair from his own
head, bound it to a little stick, and so made himself a brush with
which to paint his pictures of his saints. This story is a symbol of
all Rosegger's achievement of learning. However much outside help he
may have received, he may thank himself for the best, after all. "My
little saddle-horse," says he, "has never fed upon the dry hay of
school-knowledge, but only on the green grass of life itself. The
little that I know, Life has taught me, and the little that I can do,
Necessity. The inability to express myself by word of mouth has taught
me to write, and my desire to share that written word with others
taught me to read. As the father of a family, with a very uncertain
income, I learnt arithmetic; as a herdsman on the pasture land,
zoology; as farmer and stonecutter, mineralogy; as hay-maker and
woodcutter, botany. Geography I learnt in travelling; history from
events which followed one another as cause and consequence; folklore I
learnt as a travelling journeyman; and astronomy in sleepless nights,
when I lay and looked up at the stars. Thoughts about physiology,
anatomy, medicine, and patience have come to me in illness; theology I
have turned to in times of need and loneliness; and law has been learnt
in self-examination. Music became dear to me from the birds of the
woods and the sound of waterfalls. The telling of stories I never
learnt at all. My first baby stammer--so says our old cousin--was a
story in Styrian dialect; and my life, according to the belletristic
newspapers, was a romance."
His life, indeed, is rich in wonders, and the evolution of the peasant
boy a sort of fairy tale. Rosegger has described for us his youth in
the form of a novel, _Heidepeters Gabriel_ (1872), in which it all
reads like an impossible romance. Later he has published the story of
his life in a series of autobiographical writings, _Waldheimat_ (_The
Forest Home_, 1875); _Als Ich jung noch war_ (_When I was still young_,
1895); _Mein Weltleben_ (_My Life in the World_, 1898); in these the
same course of events is given with a wonderful truth to life. As
documents of a rare human evolution they may stand on a level with
Rousseau's _Confessions_; they are more lovable, though no less honest.
The boy very early saw something of the world. As a little fellow his
father took him with him on a pilgrimage to Maria Zell; his godfather,
on another pilgrimage, pointed out to him the first railway as an
uncanny bit of devil's invention; and on one occasion the
eleven-year-old boy set out alone for Vienna, reaching the Imperial
city after a several days' tramp. His aim was to visit the Kaiser Josef
II, of whose friendliness so many stories were going about among his
people. As a matter of fact, Josef II had been lying in his grave for
more than sixty years, and his visitor was conducted to his mausoleum.
Later, as he was again wandering in the streets and casting about how
to get home (for of his travelling money--the proceeds of the sale of a
lamb--only just the equivalent of the little beast's tail was left), a
bearded man came up to him and offered him five florins if he would
pose for half an hour in his studio. And, wonder on wonder, the
water-colour which the artist painted from this sketch now hangs in the
Rosegger Room at Mürzzuschlag, which is the nucleus of a future
Rosegger Museum! Here also is preserved the tailor's goose, which later
the boy, then in his apprenticeship, had to carry after his master; and
beside it is a peasant's waistcoat--the same apprentice's claim to
journeymanship! It appears that, though his brothers and sisters all
became farm-workers, the Waldbauer's first-born proved to be too sickly
for the ancestral calling. He was to become a priest. The parish priest
of Birkfeld offered to instruct him in Latin. Peter, as a candidate for
holy orders, was entrusted to the care of a peasant in that parish.
After three days he ran away in the night--home-sickness was too much
for him. So in 1860 he became apprentice to a master-tailor of his own
district, and played his part in his itinerant trade. He worked on more
than sixty farms in the neighbourhood, and in this way learned to know
the life of the people in Styria more intimately than would have been
possible in any other calling. The inexhaustible wealth of strange
character and peasant originality and the unique acquaintance with the
most ancient and characteristic native customs which Rosegger displays
in his later writings, are the fruit of those years of close
observation.
With the passion for reading grew the desire to write. One day his
master set out, leaving his carefully guarded paper-patterns lying
about. He was accustomed to apprentices, anxious to become independent,
making use of such an opportunity to copy the patterns for themselves.
His apprentice Peter seized on them too, concerning himself with their
shape not at all, but only with the contents of the cut-out newspapers
whose stale news he devoured. This made his master almost despair of
him. "Honesty's a very fine thing, Peter," he said, "but I can clearly
see you'll never be much of a credit to me. Here you are, waiting from
week to week for the end of your time, and have never yet stolen one
pattern from your master!"
Others, too, prophesied to the youth that he would never make a proper
tailor. Once he had to share quarters with a shoemaker's apprentice.
Then it was that the little note-book in which he used to write songs
of his own making was discovered. The song which made Rosegger
celebrated, and which as a genuine folk-song is not only sung in
Styria, but all over Germany, was amongst them: "Darf ih's Dirndl
liabe." The beauty of this song, which is inseparable from its dialect,
can scarcely be rendered in a translation: without the charming form
the idea is almost too primitive. The boy goes in succession to priest,
father, and mother, and puts the question to them, whether he may love
the maid? Each puts him sharply off until at last he goes to the Lord
God Himself, and there finds sympathy with his inquiry.
"Why yes, of course," He smiled and said;
"Because of the boy I have made the maid."
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.