The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII by Various
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Various >> The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII
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37 VOLUME VIII
BERTHOLD AUERBACH
JEREMIAS GOTTHELF
FRITZ REUTER
ADALBERT STIFTER
WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL
#THE GERMAN CLASSICS#
Masterpieces of German Literature
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH
1914
CONTRIBUTORS AND TRANSLATORS
VOLUME VIII
CONTENTS OF VOLUME VIII
The Novel of Provincial Life. By Edwin C. Roedder
BERTHOLD AUERBACH
Little Barefoot. Translated by H.W. Dulcken; revised and abridged by
Paul Bernard Thomas
JEREMIAS GOTTHELF
Uli, The Farmhand. Translations and Synopses by Bayard Quincy Morgan
FRITZ REUTER
The Braesig Episodes from _Ut mine Stromtid_. Translated by M.W.
Macdowall; edited and abridged by Edmund von Mach
ADALBERT STIFTER
Rock Crystal. Translated by Lee M. Hollander
WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL
Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl. By Otto Heller
Field and Forest. Translated by Frances H. King
The Eye for Natural Scenery. Translated by Frances H. King
The Musical Ear. Translated by Frances H. King
The Struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail. Translated by Frances H.
King
* * * *
ILLUSTRATIONS--VOLUME VIII
The Abduction of Prometheus. By Max Klinger
Berthold Auerbach. By Hans Meyer
Two Coffins were carried away from the little House. By Benjamin Vautier
Amrei briskly brought her Pitcher filled with Water. By Benjamin Vautier
Tears fell upon the Paternal Coat. By Benjamin Vautier
He gave her his Hand for the Last Time. By Benjamin Vautier
While she was milking John asked her all kinds of Questions. By Benjamin
Vautier
Jeremias Gotthelf
A New Citizen. By Benjamin Vautier
The Bath. By Benjamin Vautier
In Ambush. By Benjamin Vautier
First Dancing Lessons. By Benjamin Vautier
Fritz Reuter. By Wulff
Bible Lesson. By Benjamin Vautier
Between Dances. By Benjamin Vautier
The Bridal Pair at the Civil Marriage Office. By Benjamin Vautier
Adalbert Stifter. By Daffinger
A Mountain Scene. By H. Reifferscheid
Leavetaking of the Bridal Pair. By Benjamin Vautier
The Barber Shop. By Benjamin Vautier
Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl
An Official Dinner in the Country. By Benjamin Vautier
At the Sick Bed. By Benjamin Vautier
A Village Funeral. By Benjamin Vautier
* * * *
EDITOR'S NOTE
This volume, containing chiefly masterpieces of the Novel of Provincial
Life, is illustrated by the principal works of one of the foremost
painters of German peasant life, Benjamin Vautier. These picture's have
been so arranged as to bring out in natural succession typical
situations in the career of an individual from the cradle to the grave.
In order not to interrupt this succession, Auerbach's _Little Barefoot_,
likewise illustrated by Vautier, has been placed before Gotthelf's _Uli,
The Farmhand_, although Gotthelf, and not Auerbach, is to be considered
as the real founder of the German village story.
The frontispiece, Karl Spitzweg's _Garret Window_, introduces a master
of German genre painting who in a later volume will be more fully
represented.
KUNO FRANCKE.
* * * *
THE NOVEL OF PROVINCIAL LIFE
By EDWIN C. ROEDDER, PH.D.
Associate Professor of German Philology, University of Wisconsin
To Rousseau belongs the credit of having given, in his passionate cry
"Back to Nature!" the classic expression to the consciousness that all
the refinements of civilization do not constitute life in its truest
sense. The sentiment itself is thousands of years old. It had inspired
the idyls of Theocritus in the midst of the magnificence and luxury of
the courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. It reechoed through the pages of
Virgil's bucolic poetry. It made itself heard, howsoever faintly, in the
artificiality and sham of the pastoral plays from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century. And it was but logical that this sentiment should
seek its most adequate and definitive expression in a portrayal of all
phases of the life and fate of those who, as the tillers of the soil,
had ever remained nearer to Mother Earth than the rest of humankind.
Not suddenly, then, did rural poetry rise into being; but while its
origin harks back to remote antiquity it has found its final form only
during the last century. In this its last, as well as its most vigorous,
offshoot, it presents itself as the village story--as we shall term it
for brevity's sake--which has won a permanent place in literature by the
side of its older brothers and sisters, and has even entirely driven out
the fanciful pastoral or village idyl of old.
The village story was bound to come in the nineteenth century, even if
there had been no beginnings of it in earlier times, and even if it did
not correspond to a deep-rooted general sentiment. The eighteenth
century had allowed the Third Estate to gain a firm foothold in the
domain of dignified letters; the catholicity of the nineteenth admitted
the laborer and the proletarian. It would have been passing strange if
the rustic alone had been denied the privilege. An especially hearty
welcome was accorded to the writings of the first representatives of the
new species. Internationalism, due to increased traffic, advanced with
unparalleled strides in the third and fourth decades. The seclusion of
rural life seemed to remain the quiet and unshakable realm of
patriarchal virtue and venerable tradition. The political skies were
overcast with the thunder clouds of approaching revolutions; France had
just passed through another violent upheaval. Village conditions seemed
to offer a veritable haven of refuge. The pristine artlessness of the
peasant's intellectual, moral, and emotional life furnished a wholesome
antidote to the morbid hyperculture of dying romanticism, the
controversies and polemics of Young Germany, and the self-adulation of
the society of the salons. Neither could the exotic, ethnographic, and
adventure narratives in the manner of Sealsfield, at first
enthusiastically received, satisfy the taste of the reading public for
any length of time--at best, these novels supplanted one fashion by
another, if, indeed, they did not drive out Satan by means of Beelzebub.
And was it wise to roam so far afield when the real good was so close at
hand? Why cross oceans when the land of promise lay right before one's
doors? All that was needed was the poet discoverer.
The Columbus of this new world shared the fate of the great Genoese in
more than one respect. Like him, he set out in quest of shores that he
was destined never to reach. Like him, he discovered, or rather
rediscovered, a new land. Like him, he so far outstripped his
forerunners that they sank into oblivion. Like Columbus, who died
without knowing that he had not reached India, the land of his dreams,
but found a new world, he may have departed from this life in the belief
that he had been a measurably successful social reformer when he had
proved to be a great epic poet. Like Columbus, he was succeeded by his
Amerigo Vespucci, after whom his discovery was named. The Columbus of
the village story is the Swiss clergyman Albert Bitzius, better known by
his assumed name as Jeremias Gotthelf; the Amerigo Vespucci is his
contemporary Berthold Auerbach.
The choice of his _nom de guerre_ is significant of Jeremias Gotthelf's
literary activity. He regarded himself as the prophet wailing the misery
of his people, who could be delivered only through the aid of the
Almighty. It never occurred to him to strive for literary fame. He
considered himself as a teacher and preacher purely and simply; in a
measure, as the successor of Pestalozzi, who, in his _Lienhard und
Gertrud_ (1781-1789), had created a sort of pedagogical classic for the
humbler ranks of society; and if there be such a thing in Gotthelf's
make-up as literary influence, it must have emanated from the sage of
Burgdorf and Yverdun. To some extent also Johann Peter Hebel
(1760-1826), justly famed for his Alemannian dialect poems, may have
served him as a model, for Hebel followed an avowedly educational
purpose in the popular tales of his _Schatzkaestlein des rheinischen
Hausfreunds_ ("Treasure Box of the Rhenish Crony"), of which it has been
said that they outweigh tons of novels.
Gotthelf's intention was twofold: to champion the cause of the rustic
yeomanry in the threatening of its peculiar existence--for the radical
spirit of the times was already seizing and preying upon the hallowed
customs of the peasantry's life--and to fight against certain inveterate
vices of the rural population itself that seemed to be indigenous to the
soil. As the first great social writer of the German tongue, he is not
content to make the rich answerable for existing conditions, but labors
with all earnestness to educate the lower classes toward self-help. At
first he appeared as an uncommonly energetic, conservative, polemic
author in whose views the religious, basis of life and genuine moral
worth coincided with the traditional character of the country yeomanry.
A more thorough examination revealed to his readers an original epic
talent of stupendous powers. He was indeed eminently fitted to be an
educator and reformer among his flock by his own nobility of character,
his keen knowledge and sane judgment of the people's real needs and
wants, his warm feeling, and his unexcelled insight into the peasant's
inner life. Beyond that, however, he was gifted with exuberant poetic
imagination and creative power, with an intuitive knowledge of the
subtlest workings of the emotional life, and a veritable genius for
finding the critical moments in an individual existence.
So it came about that the poet triumphed over the social reformer, in
spite of himself; and while in his own parish, at Luetzelflueh in the
Canton of Berne--where he was installed as minister of the Gospel in
1832 after having spent some time there as a vicar--he is remembered to
this day for his self-sacrificing activity in every walk of life, the
world at large knows him only as one of the great prose writers of
Germany in the nineteenth century. His first work, _Bauernspiegel_ ("The
Peasants' Mirror"), was published in 1836, when he was thirty-nine years
old. From that time on until his death in 1854, his productivity was
most marvelous. _The Peasants' Mirror_ is the first village story that
deserves the name; here, for the first time, the world of the peasant
was presented as a distinct world by itself.[1] It is at the same time
one of the earliest, as well as the most splendid, products of realistic
art; and, considered in connection with his later writings, must be
regarded as his creed and program. For the motives of the several
chapters reappear later, worked out into complete books, and thus both
_Uli der Knecht_ ("Uli, the Farmhand," 1841) and _Uli der Paechter_
("Uli, the Tenant," 1849) are foreshadowed here.
As a literary artist Gotthelf shows barely any progress in his whole
career, and intentionally so. Few writers of note have been so perfectly
indifferent to matters of form. The same Gottfried Keller who calls
Gotthelf "without exception the greatest epic genius that has lived in a
long time, or perhaps will live for a long time to come," characterizes
him thus as to his style: "With his strong, sharp spade he will dig out
a large piece of soil, load it on his literary wheelbarrow, and to the
accompaniment of strong language upset it before our feet; good garden
soil, grass, flowers and weeds, manure and stones, precious gold coins
and old shoes, fragments of crockery and bones--they all come to light
and mingle their sweet and foul smells in peaceful harmony." His
adherence to the principle _Naturalia non sunt turpia_ is indeed so
strict that at times a sensitive reader is tempted to hold his nose. It
is to be regretted that so great a genius in his outspoken preference
for all that is characteristic should have been so partial to the rude,
the crude, and the brutal. For Gotthelf's literary influence--which, to
be sure, did not make itself felt at once--has misled many less original
writers to consider these qualities as essential to naturalistic style.
Very largely in consequence of his indifference to form and the
naturalistic tendencies mentioned--for to all intents and purposes
Gotthelf must be regarded as the precursor of naturalism--the Swiss
writer did not gain immediate recognition in the world of letters, and
the credit rightfully belonging to him fell, as already mentioned, to
Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882), a native of the village of Nordstetten in
the Wuerttemberg portion of the Black Forest. From 1843-1853 Auerbach
published his _Black Forest Village Stories_, which at once became the
delight of the reading public. Auerbach himself claimed the distinction
of being the originator of this new species of narrative--an honor
which was also claimed by Alexander Weill, because of his _Sittengemaelde
aus dem Elsass_ ("Genre Paintings from Alsace," 1843). While Gotthelf
had written only for his peasants, without any regard for others,
Auerbach wrote for the same general readers of fiction as the then
fashionable writers did. So far as his popularity among the readers of
the times and his influence on other authors are concerned, Auerbach has
a certain right to the coveted title, for a whole school of village
novelists followed at his heels; and his name must remain inseparably
connected with the history of the novel of provincial life. The
impression his stories made everywhere was so strong as to beggar
description. They afforded the genuine delight that we get from
murmuring brooks and flowering meadows--although the racy smell of the
soil that is wafted toward us from the pages of Gotthelf's writings is
no doubt more wholesome for a greater length of time. Auerbach has often
been charged with idealizing his peasants too much. It must be admitted
that his method and style are idealistic, but, at least in his best
works, no more so than is compatible with the demands of artistic
presentation. He does not, like Gotthelf, delight in painting a face
with all its wrinkles, warts, and freckles, but works more like the
portrait painter who will remove unsightly blemishes by retouching the
picture without in any way sacrificing its lifelike character. When
occasion demands he also shows himself capable of handling thoroughly
tragic themes with pronounced success. In his later years, it is true,
he fell into mannerism, overemphasized his inclination toward
didacticism and sententiousness, and allowed the philosopher to run away
with the poet by making his peasant folk think and speak as though they
were adepts in the system of Spinoza, with which Auerbach himself,
being of Jewish birth and having been educated to be a rabbi, was
intimately familiar. On the whole, however, the lasting impression we
obtain from Auerbach's literary work remains a very pleasant one--that
of a rich and characteristic life, sound to the core, vigorous and
buoyant.
Not as a writer of village stories--for in the portrayal of the rustic
population, as such, he was not concerned--but in his basic purpose of
holding up nature, pure and holy, as an ideal, Adalbert Stifter
(1805-1868), an Austrian, must be assigned a place of honor in this
group. A more incisive contrast to the general turbulence of the forties
could hardly be imagined than is found in the nature descriptions and
idyls of this quietist, who "from the madding crowd's ignoble strife"
sought refuge in the stillness of the country and among people to whom
such outward peace is a physical necessity. His feeling for nature,
especially for her minutest and seemingly most insignificant phenomena,
is closely akin to religion; there is an infinite charm in his
description of the mysterious life of apparently lifeless objects; he
renders all the sensuous impressions so masterfully that the reader
often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural
that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary
talent, he had dreamed of being a landscape painter. Hebbel's epigram,
"Know ye why ye are such past masters in painting beetles and
buttercups? 'Tis because ye know not man; 'tis because ye see not the
stars," utterly fails to do justice to Stifter's poetic individuality.
But in avoiding the great tempests and serious conflicts of the human
heart he obeyed a healthy instinct of his artistic genius, choosing to
retain undisputed mastery in his own field.
It is, of course, an impossibility to treat adequately, in the remainder
of the space at our disposal, the poetic and general literary merit of
Fritz Reuter (1810-1874), the great regenerator and rejuvenator of Low
German as a literary language. His lasting merit in the field of the
village story is that by his exclusive use of dialect he threw an
effective safeguard around the naturalness of the emotional life of his
characters, and through this ingenious device will for all time to come
serve as a model to writers in this particular domain. For dialectic
utterance does not admit of any super-exaltation of sentiment; at any
rate, it helps to detect such at first glance. But there are other
features no less meritorious in his stories of rural life, chief of
which is that unique blending of seriousness and humor that makes us
laugh and cry at the same time. With his wise and kind heart, with his
deep sympathy for all human suffering, with the smile of understanding
for everything truly human, also for all the limitations and follies of
human nature, Reuter has worthily taken his place by the side of his
model, Charles Dickens. It is questionable whether even Dickens ever
created a character equal to the fine and excellent Uncle Braesig, who,
in the opinion of competent critics, is the most successful humorous
figure in all German literature. Braesig is certainly a masterpiece of
psychology; as remote from any mere comic effect, despite his
idiosyncrasies, as from maudlin sentimentality; an impersonation of
sturdy manhood and a victor in life's battles, no less than his creator,
who, although he had lost seven of the most precious years of his life
in unjust imprisonment and even had been under sentence of death for a
crime of which he knew himself to be absolutely innocent, had not
allowed his fate to make him a pessimist. Nor does the central theme and
idea of his masterpiece _Ut mine Stromtid_ ("From my Roaming Days,"
1862), in its strength and beauty, deserve less praise than the
character delineation. Four years previous, in _Kein Huesung_ ("Homeless
") the author had raised a bitter cry of distress over the social
injustice and the deceit and arrogance of the ruling classes. In spite
of a ray of sunshine at the end, the treatment was essentially tragic.
Now he has found a harmonious solution of the problem; the true
nobility of human nature triumphs over all social distinctions;
aristocracy of birth and yeomanry are forever united. Thus the marriage
of Louise Havermann with Franz von Rambow both symbolizes the fusion of
opposing social forces and exemplifies the lofty teaching of
Gotthelf--"The light that is to illumine our fatherland must have its
birth at a fireside." With his gospel of true humanity the North German
poet supplements and brings to its full fruition the religious austerity
of the doctrines and precepts of Jeremias Gotthelf, the preacher on the
Alpine heights of Switzerland.
* * * *
BERTHOLD AUERBACH
LITTLE BAREFOOT[2] (1856)
A TALE OF VILLAGE LIFE
TRANSLATED BY H.W. DULCKEN, PH.D. REVISED AND ABRIDGED BY PAUL BERNARD
THOMAS
CHAPTER I
THE CHILDREN KNOCK AT THE DOOR
Early in the morning through the autumnal mist two children of six or
seven years are wending their way, hand in hand, along the garden-paths
outside the village. The girl, evidently the elder of the two, carries a
slate, school-books, and writing materials under her arm; the boy has a
similar equipment, which he carries in an open gray linen bag slung
across his shoulder. The girl wears a cap of white twill, that reaches
almost to her forehead, and from beneath it the outline of her broad
brow stands forth prominently; the boy's head is bare. Only one child's
step is heard, for while the boy has strong shoes on, the girl is
barefoot. Wherever the path is broad enough, the children walk side by
side, but where the space between the hedges is too narrow for this, the
girl walks ahead.
[Illustration: BERTHOLD AUERBACH Hans Meyer]
The white hoar frost has covered the faded leaves of the bushes, and the
haws and berries; and the flips especially, standing upright on their
bare stems, seem coated with silver. The sparrows in the hedges
twitter and fly away in restless groups at the children's approach; then
they settle down not far off, only to go whirring up again, till at last
they flutter into a garden and alight in an apple-tree with such force
that the leaves come showering down. A magpie flies up suddenly from the
path and shoots across to the large pear-tree, where some ravens are
perched in silence. The magpie must have told them something, for the
ravens fly up and circle round the tree; one old fellow perches himself
on the waving crown, while the others find good posts of observation on
the branches below. They, too, are doubtless curious to know why the
children, with their school things, are following the wrong path and
going out of the village; one raven, indeed, flies out as a scout and
perches on a stunted willow by the pond. The children, however, go
quietly on their way till, by the alders beside the pond, they come upon
the high-road, which they cross to reach a humble house standing on the
farther side. The house is locked up, and the children stand at the door
and knock gently. The girl cries bravely: "Father! mother!"--and the boy
timidly repeats it after her: "Father! mother!" Then the girl takes hold
of the frost-covered latch and presses it, at first gently, and listens;
the boards of the door creak, but there is no other result. And now she
ventures to rattle the latch up and down vigorously, but the sounds die
away in the empty vestibule--no human voice answers. The boy then
presses his mouth to a crack in the door and cries: "Father! mother!" He
looks up inquiringly at his sister--his breath on the door has also
turned to hoar frost.
From the village, lying in a shroud of mist, come the measured sounds of
the thresher's flail, now in sudden volleys, now slowly and with a
dragging cadence, now in sharp, crackling bursts, and now again with a
dull and hollow beat. Sometimes there is the noise of one flail only,
but presently others have joined in on all sides. The children stand
still and seem lost. Finally they stop knocking and calling, and sit
down on some uprooted tree-stumps. The latter lie in a heap around the
trunk of a mountain-ash which stands beside the house, and which is now
radiant with its red berries. The children's eyes are again turned
toward the door-but it is still locked.
"Father got those out of the Mossbrook Wood," said the girl, pointing to
the stumps; and she added with a precocious look: "They give out lots
of heat, and are worth quite a little; for there is a good deal of resin
in them, and that burns like a torch. But chopping them brings in the
most money."
"If I were already grown up," replied the boy, "I'd take father's big
ax, and the beechwood mallet, and the two iron wedges, and the ash wedge
and break it all up as if it were glass. And then I'd make a fine,
pointed heap of it like the charcoal-burner, Mathew, makes in the woods;
and when father comes home, how pleased he'll be! But you must not tell
him who did it!" the boy concluded, raising a warning finger at his
sister.
She seemed to have a dawning suspicion that it was useless to wait there
for their father and mother, for she looked up at her brother very
sadly. When her glance fell on his shoes, she said:
"Then you must have father's boots, too. But come, we will play ducks
and drakes-you shall see that I can throw farther than you!"
As they walked away, the girl said:
"I'll give you a riddle to guess: What wood will warm you without your
burning it?"
"The schoolmaster's ruler, when you get the spatters," answered the boy.
"No, that's not what I mean: The wood that you chop makes you warm
without your burning it." And pausing by the hedge, she asked again:
"On a stick he has his head, And his jacket it is red, And filled with
stone is he--Now who may he be?"
The boy bethought himself very gravely, and cried "Stop! You mustn't
tell me what it is!--Why, its a hip!"
The girl nodded assentingly, and made a face as if this were the first
time she had ever given him the riddle to guess; as a matter of fact,
however, she had given it to him very often, and had used it many times
to cheer him up.
The sun had dispersed the mist, and the little valley stood in
glittering sheen, as the children turned away to the pond to skim flat
stones on the water. As they passed the house the girl pressed the latch
once more; but again the door did not open, nor was anything to be seen
at the window. And now the children played merrily beside the pond, and
the girl seemed quite content that her brother should be the more clever
at the sport, and that he should boast of it and grow quite excited over
it; indeed, she manifestly tried to be less clever at it, than she
really was, for the stones she threw almost always plumped down to the
bottom as soon as they struck the water--for which she got properly
laughed at by her companion. In the excitement of the sport the children
quite forgot where they were and why they had come there--and yet it was
a strange and sorrowful occasion.
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