Seite - 19 - in The Forest Farm - Tales of the Austrian Tyrol

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