At the end of 1864 an article appeared in the Graz _Daily Post_,
entitled _A Styrian Poet of the People_, in which a larger
public was called upon to assist the young talented writer. And
now from all quarters sendings poured into the post office in
Krieglach--congratulations, books, small sums of money, and provisions.
A bookseller in Leibach offered him an apprenticeship. Rosegger
accepted it, but after a few days _Heimweh_ again drove him from the
unfamiliar district. However, a free scholarship was found for him at
the Graz Commercial Academy; friends and teachers were not wanting, and
here, between the years 1865-9 the farmer's son, not yet able, when he
entered it, to write correctly, received an intellectual training which
left him no longer inferior to the well educated. In the same year that
he left this institution his first book, a volume of poems in dialect,
and entitled _Zither und Hackbrett_ (_Zither and Dulcimer_), was
published. A second collection, _Tannenharz und Fichtennadeln_
(_Pine-resin and Fir-needles_), came out in the following year; and in
1870 also appeared his first picture of Styrian peasant life,
_Sittenbilder aus dem Steierischen Oberlande_. These won him some fame;
already publishers began to approach him with offers. And now once more
miracle entered his life. In the summer of 1872 a young and beautiful
Graz lady, accompanied by a friend, made a pilgrimage to the birthplace
of her favourite poet; there by chance she and her poet met, and a year
later they were married. Their happy life together lasted but a short
time; after the birth of a second child the young wife died. Six years
after his sad loss Rosegger made a second and equally happy marriage.
About his life since then there is not much to tell. One fact, however,
should be emphasised; namely, that Rosegger, who in his early years had
become indebted to so many friends, very soon began to pay them back,
and the account has long since been balanced in his favour and now
shows a debit on the other side. Many a time has he introduced the work
of young writers to the literary world with warm words of
recommendation, just as the distinguished poet Robert Hammerling once
did for his first collection of poems. The greater part of the profits
of his extensive lecture tour have been used for the public good.
Through him, a Catholic, Mürzzuschlag has got a Protestant church; his
home-parish, Alpl, has for some years now had a school-house of its own
for which it has to thank Rosegger. And only a short time ago it was
his eloquent intervention that obtained a large contribution for the
German School-Society--a society which aims at preserving
race-characteristics and culture where they are threatened on the
language frontiers. Were I to give data of his public life during the
last ten years, they would consist of such services as these, and of
the grateful homage which is rendered him by the many who love and
honour him. But his inner development is revealed in the writings of
his maturity; for Rosegger has written nothing but what in his inmost
heart he has experienced. Since 1876 he has edited a monthly magazine,
_Heimgarten_, which is his public diary. "Heimgarten," he tells us, "is
the name given in various districts to that house in the Alpine village
in which of an evening the village folk come together, bringing in
small handwork to do and enjoying one another's company. Here are to be
found the brightest of the inhabitants, those readiest in storytelling
and description, those who are men of the world, or who would like to
be such, assembled for educative and stimulating intercourse. In the
Heimgarten, stories and legends, tragic and comic incidents from life
are repeated; songs and ballads are sung; poems are improvised; farces
and comedies are given, or incidents of the day and important events in
the life of the village or the wide world are discussed by the village
wiseacres. Intercourse in the Heimgarten enlightens and enriches the
mind, quickens, warms, and ennobles the heart. This homely type from
Alpine village life furnishes the title and programme for my monthly
magazine."
And to this programme the paper, which has become a home for true
national education, has held faithfully for thirty-four years. Here all
stories, articles, and poems of Rosegger's first appeared, and in this
paper he expresses his views on all vital questions of the day.
"All we poets are foresters and woodwards in the great forest of
mankind," said once Berthold Auerbach, another poet of the people, to
Rosegger. Such a one the editor of the _Heimgarten_ feels himself to
be, expending, as he does, all his ripe experience and loving care upon
the husbandry which has been entrusted to him. To protect the vanishing
traditional customs of his forefathers, their natural conceptions of
right and wrong, the blessing of family life, their healthy
contentment--the outcome of bodily toil and the love of the
home--against the demoralisation of modern hyperculture, is his most
earnest aim.
The principal heroes of his romances are by preference those whose
calling involves the task of cherishing and teaching the people:
schoolmasters and priests. The _Writings of the Forest Schoolmaster_
(1878) is the name of Rosegger's most popular work, which already in
1908 appeared in its seventy-eighth edition, and which, let us hope,
may within the author's lifetime still reach its hundredth edition. The
theme is the gradual emergence of a forest parish from a group of
demoralised and utterly uneducated men to a social organisation, to a
lawful and religiously organised community. A similar _Kulturroman_ is
_Der Gottsucher_ (_The God-seeker_, 1883), which leads us back into
past centuries. A parish has been excommunicated by the Church for
murdering its priest. The people cannot exist without religion, and,
deprived of their old church, they create a new one, a religion of
Nature, by means of which the leader of the community brings back order
and industry to the village. The third novel belonging to this series,
_Das Ewige Licht_ (_The Light Eternal_, 1897), is a pessimistic
counterpart to the _Waldschulmeister_. This treats of the dangers to
religion which arise from modern civilisation. The faithful priest of a
mountain parish has to look on helplessly while the modern world
thrusts itself into the mountain idyll; while the atmosphere of the
great cities, brought up by mountain climbers and summer visitors, and
the smoke from the chimneys of the ever-spreading industrialism in the
valleys below, poison the pure air, and, morally and economically, ruin
the old inhabitants.
But the peasantry has yet another enemy: the love of sport among the
nobility. As once Karl Marx, the theorist of collectivism, studied in
Scotland the expropriation of man from the soil in favour of deer, and
in his _Kapital_ exposed the tragic consequences of such excessive
sport, so now Rosegger in his home must look on at the depopulating of
entire villages. By this means his own birthplace has been nearly
ruined. In his first novel, _Heidepeters Gabriel_, he already shows the
hopeless struggle of the peasant against the devastation of his fields
by game, a struggle which leads to poaching and to prison. And in his
novel _Jacob der Letzte_ (1888), which, from an artistic point of view,
is perhaps the most complete of his works, the principal character, the
last descendant of an old peasant family, who clings tenaciously to the
old soil, is beaten and goes under in the struggle. Such a single case
becomes for Rosegger an alarming symptom of the universal decline of
the free peasantry. "What will come of it?" he asks, when he receives
from numerous parts of Germany letters all witnessing to the same
facts: "I am no practical teacher of political economy, I am only a
poet; but they say that poets are seers, and I verily see that future
generations will have to go home to the land again, that only on the
land can the social question be peacefully and lastingly solved. Here
master and man live on far more friendly footing than in the city, and
come humanly nearer together. For twenty-five years I have been
preaching in every way the return to natural living. I have built my
little house in a peasant village and I live right among the
peasants.--I am utterly dissatisfied with the leading spirits of our
time: they don't teach us to live, they teach us only to think. One
thing we have still to learn--to forget what they have taught us. Our
true Mother is the Earth: from her spring our bread and our ideals."
The return of the townspeople to nature forms the theme of two later
novels, _Erdsegen_ (_The Earth and the Fullness Thereof_, 1900) and
_Weltgift_ (_The Poison of the World_, 1903). In the former the editor
of a paper pledges himself to live a whole year as farm-labourer in
the country. He not only earns his wager, but in the course of the
year so richly experiences and realises the blessedness of life on the
land that, cured of the fever of city life, he marries a village girl
and starts his own farm. This thesis, with its obvious strong purpose,
aroused opposition. The chief objection brought forward was that it
would be impossible for a thoroughly town-bred person to take such deep
root in the country. In reply to this, Rosegger points in the other
novel to the fate of a townsman, who, unlike the character in the
former book, is too full of the city virus for recovery. The poison of
the world has eaten right into him, and he cannot escape his doom.
Rosegger can only compare town and country by the strongest contrast of
light and shade. And in the talks which he collected in 1885 under the
title of _Mountain Sermons, delivered in these latter days in the open
air, and dedicated to the reviling and derision of our Enemies, the
Weaknesses, the Vices and the Errors of Civilisation_, a fanatical
anger is occasionally apparent: one misses the beatitudes which the
title leads one to expect.
And yet love is the gospel which Rosegger proclaims at all times, and
religious questions pervade his writings from first to last. He is
himself, like the chief character in his book, a God-seeker. "Man
creates for himself an ideal, an always nobler image of himself, calls
it God and strives after it. So he climbs as if on a rope ladder,
throwing the upper end higher and higher up the rugged wall of rocks
towards the heaven of perfection. But who taught him to do this? Surely
He who has put the power and spirit of growth in His creature's heart,
God the Father, who from everlasting created the world and will create
it to everlasting."
These conceptions are not exactly canonical, and it has been Rosegger's
experience to have an article of his, _How I picture to myself the
personality of Christ_, confiscated by the licensing authorities as
blasphemous. This induced him twice afterwards openly to state his
convictions; once in _Mein Himmelreich_ (_My Kingdom of Heaven_, 1900),
and again in _I.N.R.I: Frohe Botschaft eines armen Sünders_ (_The
Gospel of a poor Sinner_, 1904). These much-discussed writings give us
an image of Christ as Rosegger made it, putting it together from the
four gospels: a Christ rejoicing in God, intimate with man's heart,
filled with joy of the earth, with mighty creative energy, with
consuming wrath in due season; the Superman, the God-man in the highest
sense.
Rosegger is as strongly opposed to all the violent "Missions" movements
in the Church as to the faith-destroying tendency of the modern world's
point of view. He holds piously by many an old belief, not because it
is for him an article of faith, but because it is a piece of poetic
childhood's remembrance; and he has saved many a dogma for himself by
interpreting it symbolically and not literally. To the most poetic of
his interpretations belongs that of the Cross: "The Cross has a foot
rooted in Earth; that means 'Man, make use of the Earth.' The Cross has
a head that towers up into the air of heaven; that means 'Man, remember
thy ideals.' The Cross has two arms stretching out to right and left,
not to chastise men, but to embrace all the world; that means 'Man,
love thy brothers.' Love, Joy,--those are the two beams of our Cross.
The world is not here as a penance, but a joy." In such sentences as
these is contained Rosegger's whole Gospel of Joy, which looks for its
fulfilment on this side. For him the highest aim of civilisation, as of
religion, is the happiness of mankind.
This brings us to a conclusion. We have now seen Rosegger develop from
peasant to craftsman, to teacher, to preacher. And now another question
arises: Has he not possibly reached a greater height still--is he a
prophet? Of that only late generations may judge; to them it is given
to see whether the new birth of mankind, which Rosegger, like Tolstoy,
looks for from a return to the simplicities of life on the land, will
be realised. With Rosegger's prophecy, which we shall do well to
consider, I close this paper. "The future generations will find peace
and happiness again when they turn back to Nature and give themselves
up to the healthy influences of the life of the soil. As yet, when the
leaves turn yellow, the townsfolk hurry back into their walls; but
there will come a time when the well-to-do citizens will buy land and
farm it themselves like peasants, and when artisans will clear and
reclaim such land from the wilderness itself. They will renounce
hyper-intellectualism, and find pleasure and new vigour in bodily toil;
and they will make laws under which a firm-rooted and honourable
peasantry can once more thrive."