Since this Germanic stock has remained free from contamination through intermarriage with alien nations, it constitutes a separate, uniform race. Hence the same figure in all the representatives of this numerous nation, the same uncommonly developed hands and feet, the same hard, impenetrable formation of the head. Like their ancestors, they are fit for violent assault, and fond of it. They show great capacity for the endurance of fatigue and tribulation; the only thing they cannot endure is thirst.
This people is equipped with manifold weapons; but even in these they have more regard for usefulness than for beauty. Widespread is the short dagger which every mature man carries in the fold of his garment; but the use of it is not permitted--on the contrary, the powers that be seek to get possession of all such; whereupon the common man replaces the lost weapon by another. As missiles they have earthen mugs, with handles which make them likewise adaptable for delivering blows. At their gathering places every man, when strife arises, seeks to possess himself of as many of these as possible, and hurls them then uncommonly far. Most of the Baiovarii carry a sort of spear, or in their language, "chaser", made of the hazel of their forests, with blunt end, supple, and very handy. In the lack of these weapons, each man assumes any that chance may offer. Indeed, for this purpose even articles of household furniture, such as tables and chairs, are robbed of their supports. In high favor are also the constituent parts of garden inclosures. Before the beginning of the conflict the battle song resounds. It is not as though human throats, but rather as though the spirit of war were singing. They essay chiefly the formation of wild sounds, and close their eyes as though thereby to reinforce their utterance. They fight without a preconsidered plan of battle, each at the place that he occupies. Of shields they make no employment. The head is deemed a natural protection, which meets the shock of the attacking enemy and guards the rest of the body. Many even use the head for the purposes of attack, when other weapons fail.
In this ridicule of savage pugnacity one cannot fail to see the secret love of the writer for the uncouth power of his sound-hearted and sound-limbed compatriots. This same love explains the contempt in which Thoma holds the sentimental depiction of parlor peasants which is so often met with in family magazines. He knows no glossing-over, and what is boorish in his peasants, he leaves boorish. But more and more he has developed from a satirist to a serious moralist of his native land. In his stories Wedding (1901) and Matt the Holy (1904) the satirical purpose predominates. But then, in his great novels, Thoma proceeds to more serious matters. One, Andreas Vöst (1905), which develops to a magnificent climax the uncompromising rebellion of a stubborn peasant against the superior resources of a malicious priest, with the consequent destruction of the poor victim of his own sense of justice, might be compared with Kleist's masterly narrative Michael Kohlhaas, if in the treatment of the antagonist Kleist's incorruptible objectivity were not lacking and the whole did not, therefore, ultimately turn into pleading for a cause. But when satire fails to amuse for bitterness, and humor fails to conciliate, the pictures become almost too gloomy and the moral purpose too obtrusive. Thus it is in the novel The Widower (1911). The folly of a lustful old peasant who in the toils of a scheming hussy supinely looks on while his property goes to wrack and ruin and his son becomes a murderer, is here treated with too harsh a naturalism. The same may be said of the drama Magdalena (1912), in which a rustic Virginius makes of himself the judge of his daughter who has fallen into a life of public shame.
The life of the closely related peasant stock of Austria has found hardly at any other hands than those of the Tirolese Karl Schönherr an equally unadorned depiction. Rosegger's Styrian peasants are, in spite of the pessimistic Sylvan Schoolmaster, drawn after all with much more extenuating gentleness. More recent literary products of Styrian writers are, however, no whit inferior in local patriotism to the works of the still living first master. The warmest praise of his home land has been sung by Rudolf Hans Bartsch who, born in 1873 at Graz, lived for many years as an officer in Vienna, until in 1911 he returned as a retired captain to his native city. After an historical novel When Austria Disintegrated (1905), which dealt with the epoch of Forty-eight, and was reissued under the title The Last Student, Bartsch celebrated his greatest triumph with the novel Twelve Men of Styria (1908), a book of inexhaustible, exuberant youthfulness and contagious optimism. The careers of the twelve youths who meet on the common ground of love for the beautiful Frau von Karminell, and who set out together on the stormy path of life, are only loosely connected; and yet the book achieves a unified effect, thanks to the wonderful musical atmosphere which is its element, and to the pivotal position in it of province and city: "Graz, city lost in the expanse of nature, so still, so receptive and yet fulfilled as no other is with soft impressiveness; the green-dreaming, tree-rustling, gentle-singing city of Graz, animate beyond all great cities with the soul of nature." The next novel, The Sons of Haindl (1908), a collection of similar types of character in Viennese surroundings, is too much of a repetition not to have proved a disappointment; as was also The German Sorrow (1911). In the later Viennese novels Elisabeth Kött (1909) and The Story of Hannah and her Four Lovers (1914) Bartsch lost much of his original vivacity and purity of style, and the novel Schwammerl (1912), which revolves about the figure of the composer Schubert, falls in with the vogue of that novel of the artistic life which has of late been cultivated in somewhat routine fashion and to which--to mention only a few names--Goethe, Schiller, Grillparzer, Lenau, Wagner, and Heine in his last years, succumbed. Bartsch was indeed led to this theme by an elective affinity; for he is inspired in equal measure by love of music and love for Old Vienna, and he is capable of entering with entire sympathy into the spirit of former times. To this capacity his short stories entitled The Last Days of Rococo (1909) bear eloquent testimony, conjuring up as they do with charming winsomeness the spirit of the epoch that preceded the French Revolution. The second collection of narratives, Bitter-Sweet Love Stories (1910), brings us back to Austrian territory. To this collection belongs The Styrian Wine Carrier, in which the ancient carefree joyfulness of the highway falls a victim to the modern rush of business. Is not the fate of the amiable, easy-going, reveling Styrian symbolical of the fate of the whole country of Austria, which is organized on the outgrown plan of a former generation, and is now placed in opposition to the iron necessity of modern progress? Bartsch has deeply felt the incompatibilities rooted in the Austrian character: there are two souls, one desperately clinging to the Austria of the good old times, to the long-lost lovely Vienna of the coach and post-horn, the other the soul of turbulent young Austria, with its eye on the knotty problems of the future. But the enervating atmosphere of literary Vienna, which Grillparzer once characterized as a "Capua in the world of spirits," is the natural element of Old Austria, and we suspect that Bartsch, whose rapid productivity defies stern artistic self-discipline, has not altogether escaped its dangers.
The Alemannic races on the Upper German territories reveal a greater toughness of fibre and more power of resistance. They are blunt individualists, whose love of country utters itself with less enthusiasm and attains to perfect certainty perhaps only after a longing for adventures abroad has been stilled.
Emil Strauss, the older of the two Swabian writers here represented (he was born at Pforzheim in 1866), lived for a while in Brazil; from his experiences there he derived material for some of his stories in The Ways of Men (1898), for his drama, unsuccessful from the point of view of technique, Don Pedro (1899), and for his first novel Mine Host of the Angel (1900), the tragi-comical history of a man who learns by experience, who deserts his wife and after a long series of disappointments returns humbled to his home. The later narrative Mara, in the collection entitled Hans and Grete (1909), is also the fruit of exotic experiences. This account of a love in imagination has the same motif as one of the most original narratives of the Swiss Spitteler, Imago, with the only difference that in Mara over-excitation of the brain is motivated by tropical heat. Strauss is in all of his narratives an extremely acute psychologist, who everywhere concentrates his attention upon the development of character, and whose work, as appears in Mine Host of the Angel, is inclined toward a mild didacticism. This is especially noticeable in the work that first made his name famous, the novel Death the Comforter (Freund Hein, 1902), the story of a boy of musical disposition who is worried to death in school. Compared with English and American literature, German literature has been said to be poor in stories of childhood. This criticism hardly applies to the new century, which has been called the century of the child. The fate of little Henry Lindner who is to be transformed by hook or by crook from a dreamy musician into a circumspect efficient man, and who suffers shipwreck on the reefs of mathematics, reminds us in many ways of the tragedy of the last Buddenbrook, Hanno, whose delicate sensibility is crushed out by the discipline of the school. A few years later there, appeared in Hermann Hesse's On the Rack (1906) another story of schoolboy martyrdom, and between these two pessimistic works lay two sunshiny novels of childhood, Asmus Semper's Childhood Land (1904), by Otto Ernst, and Gottfried Kämpfer (1904), by Hermann Anders Krüger. These were the most successful novels of those years; Strauss' Death the Comforter is, next to the conclusion of Buddenbrooks, the poetically most significant of these stories of childhood. The writer, rich in comprehension of the vitality of the problems and in the delicacy of his treatment of them, has not had to repeat himself: his novel Friction (1904) is a fine psychological study in the form of a love story, in which life undertakes the education of two recalcitrant lovers; and his latest work, The Naked Man (1912), is a powerful historical novel.
Hermann Hesse, who is often grouped with Strauss, is, in spite of his belonging to the same stock, a different nature; he is more of a lyricist, and his lyrical poems, though less well known, take perhaps a higher rank than his novels. Even in these the lyrical mood outweighs the human action; he ponders the riddles of nature more earnestly than the riddles of humanity. Among human beings, however, his favorite is the gentle St. Francis of Assisi, to whom he has devoted a splendid little book.
Hesse was born in 1877 at Calw in Württemberg; it is his own youth that he describes in the novel On the Rack. After fleeing from the Theological Seminary at Moulbronn he became a machinist; then he worked in a bookstore at Basel, where he found opportunity to study at the University. He spent a few years at Munich, and finally made Switzerland his home by establishing himself in the neighborhood of Bern. In respect to literary relations he had even before this acquired a certain right to be called a Swiss; for his work may be regarded as a continuation of the line of development that runs from Jean Paul to Gottfried Keller. There is a kind of resurrection of Jean Paul in the wonderful descriptions of nature, the dreams of universal love and natural piety, which we find in Hesse's first great novel Peter Camenzind (1904); no writer since Jean Paul has bestowed such eloquent praise upon the clouds:
Show me in all the wide world the man who knows the clouds better and loves them more than I do! Or show me the thing in the world that is more splendid than the clouds! They are playthings and balm for the eyes, they are a blessing and divine gift, they are wrath and omnipotent death. They are frail, tender, and peaceful, like the souls of the newly born; they are beautiful, opulent, and lavish, like good angels; they are dark, unescapable, and pitiless, like the messengers of death. They hover in silvery thin expanse, they sail laughingly white with a golden rim, they stand at rest in yellow, red, and bluish tints; they creep up slowly and darkly threatening like murderers, they rush with a headlong roar like mad horsemen, they hang sad and pensive at equal heights like melancholy hermits. They have the forms of blessed isles and the forms of blessing angels; they are like threatening hands, fluttering sails, a flight of cranes. They float between God's heaven and the poor earth as fair symbols of all human longings, akin to both--dreams of the earth, in which her sullied soul flies to the embrace of the pure heaven. They are the eternal symbol of all wandering, all seeking, desiring, all homesickness. And as they hang timidly and yearningly and persistently between earth and heaven, so the souls of men hang timidly and yearningly and persistently between time and eternity.
From Gottfried Keller, on the other hand, Hesse has derived the specific gravity of realism; and so the romantic life of the peasant boy Peter Camenzind concludes, after protracted roving through Italy and France, like that of Green Henry, with a weary, resigned return home. The novel On the Rack, which represents a falling off after this brilliant beginning, was followed by a new efflorescence in Hesse's artistry with the novels Gertrude (1910) and the latest work Rosshalde, a story of matrimony which combines the former merits of poetic atmosphere with the merit of a greater concentration upon action. Between the two lie the collections of short stories On this Side (1907) and Neighbors (1908). From the second is taken the story here translated, In the Old Sun, which as an idyll of the Poorhouse has something of the qualities of Gottfried Keller, while the mystic setting is quite the property of the Swabian author.