Chapter XXVI: How Freneli and Uli Get Out and Are Finally Wedded (7)

One of Philip's sons made his way downward, and the other went his way with the flag.

The hunter took the little girl by her hand, and the shepherd Philip the boy. The others helped as they could. Thus they started out. They turned this way and that. Now they followed one direction, now they took the opposite course, now they climbed up, now down, always through snow, and the surroundings seemed to remain the same. On very steep inclines they fastened climbing-irons to their feet and carried the children. Finally, after a long time, they heard the ringing of a little bell that sounded up to them soft and thin, which was the first sign the lower regions sent to them again. They must really have descended quite far; for now they saw a snowy bluish peak lift up its head to a great height above them. The bell, however, which they had heard was that of the Sideralp chalet which was being rung, because there the meeting was to be. As they proceeded farther they also heard in the still atmosphere the faint report of the mortars which were fired at the sight of the flag; and still later they saw thin columns of smoke rising into the still air.

When they, after a little while, descended a gentle slope they caught sight of the Sideralp chalet. They approached. In the hut a fire was burning, the mother of the children was there, and with a terrible cry she sank in the snow as she saw her children coming with the hunter.

Then she ran up, looked them all over, wanted to give them something to eat, wanted to warm them, and bed them in the hay that was there; but soon she convinced herself that the children were more stimulated by their rescue than she had thought and only required some warm food and a little rest, both of which they now obtained.

When, after some time of rest, another group of men descended the snow-slope while the little bell continued tolling, the children themselves ran out to see who they were. It was the shoemaker, the former mountaineer, with Alpen-stock and climbing-irons, accompanied by friends and comrades.

"Sebastian, here they are!" cried the woman.

He, however, remained speechless, shaking with emotion, and then ran up to her. Then his lips moved as if he wanted to say something, but he said nothing, caught the children in his embrace and held them long. Thereupon he turned to his wife, embraced her and cried "Sanna, Sanna!"

After awhile he picked up his hat which had fallen on the snow and stepped among the men as if to speak. But he only said: "Neighbors and friends, I thank you!"

After waiting awhile, until the children had recovered from their excitement, he said: "If we are all together we may start, in God's name."

"We are not all together yet, I believe," said the shepherd Philip, "but those who are still missing will know from the smoke that we have found the children and will go home when they find the chalet empty."

All got ready to depart.

The Sideralp chalet is not so very far from Gschaid, from whose windows one can, in summer time, very well see the green pasture on which stands the gray hut with its small belfry; but below it there is a perpendicular wall with a descent of many fathoms which one could climb in summer, with the help of climbing-irons, but which was not to be scaled in winter. They were, therefore, compelled to go by way of the "neck" in order to get down to Gschaid. On their way, they came to the Sider meadow which is still nearer to Gschaid so that from it one could see the windows in the village.

As they were crossing these meadows, the bell of the Gschaid church sounded up to them bright and clear, announcing the Holy Transubstantiation.

On account of the general commotion that obtained in Gschaid that morning, the celebration of the High-mass had been deferred, as the priest thought the children would soon be found. Finally, however, as still no news came, the holy mass had to be celebrated.

When they heard the bell announcing the Holy Transsubstantiation, all those crossing the Sider meadow sank upon their knees in the snow and prayed. When the tolling had ceased they arose and marched on.

The shoemaker was carrying his little girl for the most part and made her tell him all.

When they were descending toward the forest of the "neck" they saw tracks which, he declared, came not from shoes of his make.

The explanation came soon. Attracted probably by the many voices they heard, another body of men joined them. It was the dyer--ash-gray in the face from fright--descending at the head of his workmen, apprentices, and several men of Millsdorf.

"They climbed over the glacier and the crevasses without knowing it," the shoemaker shouted to his father-in-law.

"There they are--there they are--praised be the Lord," answered the dyer, "I knew already that they had been on the mountain when your messenger came to us in the night, and we had searched through the whole forest with lanterns and had not found anything--and then, when it dawned, I observed that on the road which leads on the left up toward the snow-mountain, on the spot where the post stands--that there some twigs and stalks were broken off, as children like to do on their way--and then I knew it, and then they could not get away, because they walked in the hollow, and then between the rocks on to the ridge which is so steep on either side that they could not get down. They just had to ascend. After making this observation I sent a message to Gschaid, but the wood-cutter Michael who carried it told us at his return, when he joined us up there near the ice, that you had found them already, and so we came down again."

"Yes," said Michael, "I told you so because the red flag is hung out on the Krebsstein, and this was the sign agreed upon in Gschaid. And I told you that they all would come down this way, as one cannot climb down the precipice."

"And kneel down and thank God on your knees, my son-in-law," continued the dyer, "that there was no wind. A hundred years will pass before there will be another such fall of snow that will come down straight like wet cords hanging from a pole. If there had been any wind the children would have perished."

"Yes, let us thank God, let us thank God," said the shoemaker.

The dyer who since the marriage of his daughter had never been in Gschaid decided to accompany the men to the village.

When they approached the red post where the side-road began they saw the sleigh waiting for them which the shoemaker had ordered there, whatever the outcome. They let mother and children get into it, covered them well up in the rugs and furs provided for them and let them ride ahead to Gschaid.

The others followed and arrived in Gschaid by afternoon. Those who still were on the mountain and had only learned through the smoke that the signal for returning had been given, gradually also found their way into the valley. The last to appear in the evening was the son of the shepherd Philip who had carried the red flag to the Krebsstein and planted it there.

In Gschaid there was also grandmother waiting for them who had driven across the "neck."

"Never, never," she cried, "will I permit the children to cross the 'neck' in winter!"

The children were confused by all this commotion. They received something more to eat and were put to bed then. Late in the evening, when they had recovered somewhat, and some neighbors and friends had assembled in the living-room and were talking about the event, their mother came into the sleeping-room. As she sat by Sanna's bed and caressed her, the little girl said: "Mother, last night, when we sat on the mountain, I saw the holy Christ-child."

"Oh, my dear, darling child," answered her mother, "he sent you some presents, too, and you shall get them right soon."

The paste-board boxes had been unpacked and the candles lit, and now the door into the living-room was opened, and from their bed the children could behold their belated, brightly gleaming, friendly Christmas tree. Notwithstanding their utter fatigue they wanted to be dressed partly, so that they could go into the room. They received their presents, admired them, and finally fell asleep over them.

In the inn at Gschaid it was more lively than ever, this evening. All who had not been to church were there, and the others too. Each related what he had seen and heard, what he had done or advised, and the experiences and dangers he had gone through. Especial stress was laid on how everything could have been done differently and better.

This occurrence made an epoch in the history of Gschaid. It furnished material for conversation for a long time; and for many years to come people will speak about it on bright days when the mountain is seen with especial clearness, or when they tell strangers of the memorable events connected with it.

Only from this day on the children were really felt to belong to the village and were not any longer regarded as strangers in it but as natives whom the people had fetched down to them from the mountain.

Their mother Sanna also now was a native of Gschaid.

The children, however, will not forget the mountain and will look up to it more attentively, when they are in the garden; when, as in the past, the sun is shining beautifully and the linden-tree is sending forth its fragrance, when the bees are humming and the mountain looks down upon them beautifully blue, like the soft sky.

WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL

By OTTO HELLER, PH.D.

Professor of the German Language and Literature, Washington University

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl was born May 6, 1823, in Bieberich on the Rhine, of parents so poor that after his father's early death his mother had to deprive herself of every comfort in order to enable the lad to go to the university. At Bonn he swerved from his theological bent--chiefly through the influence of two of his professors, Ernst Moritz Arndt and Ch. F. Dahlmann--and made up his mind to devote his studies henceforth to the scientific as well as patriotic purpose of comprehending the character and history of his own people. Even in the many articles concerning popular ways and manners which he had already contributed to periodicals he revealed a thorough firsthand acquaintance with the land and the people, in particular the peasantry, as he had observed them in the course of numerous holiday tramps.

Soon after leaving the university he drifted into professional journalism. He held a number of responsible editorial positions, nor did he wholly withdraw from such work when in 1859 he was called to the newly created chair of the History of Civilization and of Statistics at Munich. Both in his professional and publicistic capacity he wrote prolifically to the very end of his life, November 16, 1897. His works are classifiable, roughly, under three headings: History of Culture, Sociology, and Fiction. Of the large number, the following, chronologically enumerated, are considered the most important.

_The Natural History of the People, being the Elements of German Social Politics_ (1851-1869), in four volumes; _Musical Character-Portraits (1853); Culture-historical Stories (1856); The Palatine People (1857); Studies in the History of Culture, from Three Centuries (1859); German Work (1861); Tales of the Olden Time (1863); New Story-Book (1868); From my Nook (1874); At Eventide (1880); Riddles of Life (1888); Religious Studies of a Worldling (1892-1893); A Whole Man (1897)._

Riehl's position in the literature of Germany cannot be defined solely, nor even mainly, on the basis of his imaginative writings. As a romancer he falls far short of Gustav Freytag, whose _Pictures of the German Past_ served Riehl obviously for a model, and of Jeremias Gotthelf, in whose manner, though perhaps unconsciously, he likewise strove to write. It is characteristic of his tales that they invariably play against a native background, which, however, stretches across more than full ten centuries, and that, while failing to prove any high poetic vocation for their author, they demonstrate his singularly acute perception of cultural tendencies and values. Equally keen is the appreciation shown in these stories of the dominant national traits, whether commendable or otherwise: German contentiousness, stubbornness, envy, jealousy and _Schadenfreude_, i.e., the malicious joy over calamities that befall others, are impartially balanced against German self-reliance, sturdiness, love of truth, sense of duty, sincerity, unselfishness, loyalty, and depth of feeling.

On the whole, the inclusion of Riehl among the most eminent German writers of the nineteenth century is due far less to his works of fiction than to a just recognition of his primacy among historians of culture, on account of the extraordinary reach of his influence. This influence he certainly owed as much to his rare art of popular presentation as to his profound scholarship. Nevertheless the intrinsic scientific worth of these more or less popular writings is vouched for by the consensus of leading historians and other specially competent judges who, regarding Riehl's work as epoch-making and in some essential aspects fundamental, recognize him as one of the organizers of modern historical science and in particular as the foremost pioneer in the exploration of the widest area within the territory of human knowledge; in fine, as the most efficient representative of the History of Civilization.

_Kulturgeschichte_, as Riehl used the term, connoted a rather ideal conception, namely, that of an interpretative record of the sum total of human civilization. It required a high challenge like that to energize and unify the requisite laborious research in so many different directions art, letters, science, economics, politics, social life, and what not. The History of Civilization, as understood by Riehl, embraces the results gained in all the special branches of historical study, political history included.

By a formulation so comprehensive and exacting, Riehl himself stood committed to the investigation of the national life not only in the breadth and variety of its general aspect, but also in its minuter processes that had so far been left unheeded. But under his care even the study of seemingly trite details quickened the approach to that fixed ideal of a History of Civilization that should have for its ultimate object nothing less than the revelation of the spirit of history itself. The goal might never be attained, yet the quest for it would at all events disclose "the laws under which racial civilizations germinate, mature, bloom, and perish."

Personally Riehl applied the bulk of his labors to the two contiguous fields of Folklore and Art History. Folklore (_Volkskunde_) is here taken in his own definition, namely, as the science which uncovers the recondite causal relations between all perceptible manifestations of a nation's life and its physical and historical environment. Riehl never lost sight, in any of his distinctions, of that inalienable affinity between land and people; the solidarity of a nation, its very right of existing as a political entity, he derived from homogeneity as to origin, language, custom, habitat. The validity of this view is now generally accepted in theory, while its practical application to science must necessarily depend upon the growth of special knowledge. In _The Palatine People_ Riehl presented a standard treatise upon one of the ethnic types of the German race, an illustration as it were of his own theorems.

Among Riehl's contributions to the History of Art, the larger number concern the art of music. He was qualified for this work by a sure and sound critical appreciation rooted in thorough technical knowledge. Here again, following his keen scent for the distinguishing racial qualities, he gave his attention mainly to the popular forms of composition; at the same time his penetrating historic insight enabled him to account for the distinctive artistic character of the great composers by a due weighing of their individual attributes against the controlling influences of their time. It is hardly necessary to add that in his reflections music was never detached from its generic connection with the fine arts, inclusive of industrial, decorative, and domestic art.

Like many another student and lover of the past Riehl was a man of conservative habits of mind, without, however, deserving to be classed as a confirmed reactionary. His anti-democratic tendency of thought sprang plausibly enough from convictions and beliefs which owed their existence, in some part at least, to strained and whimsical analogies. His defense of a static order of society rested at bottom upon a sturdy hatred of Socialism, then in the earliest stage of its rise. This ingrained aversion to the new, suggested to him a rather curious sort of rational or providential sanction for the old. He discerned, by an odd whim of the fancy, in the physical as well as the spiritual constitution of Germany a preëestablished principle of "trialism.". According to this queer notion, Germany is in every respect divided _in partes tres_. The territorial conformation itself, with its clean subdivision into lowland, intermediate, and highland, demonstrates the natural tri-partition to which a like "threeness" of climate, nationality, and even of religion corresponds. Hence the tripartition of the population into peasantry, bourgeoisie, and nobility should be upheld as an inviolable, foreordained institution, and to this end the separate traditions of the classes be piously conserved. Educational agencies ought to subserve the specific needs of the different ranks of society and be diversified accordingly. Riehl would even hark back to wholly out-dated and discarded customs, provided they seemed to him clearly the outflow of a vital class-consciousness. For instance, he would have restored the trade corporations to their medieval status; inhibited the free disposal of farming land, and governed the German aristocracy under the English law of primogeniture.

Altogether, Riehl's propensity for spanning a fragile analogy between concrete and abstract phenomena of life is apt to weaken the structural strength of his argumentation. Yet even his boldest comparisons do not lack in illuminative suggestiveness. Take, for example, the following passage from _Field and Forest:_ "In the contrast between the forest and the field is manifest the most simple and natural preparatory stage of the multiformity and variety of German social life, that richness of peculiar national characteristics in which lies concealed the tenacious rejuvenating power of our nation." (See p. 418 of this volume.)

The predisposition to draw large inferences coupled with that pronounced conservatism detract in a measure from the authenticity of Riehl's work in the department of Social Science, which to him is fundamentally "the doctrine of the natural inequality of mankind." (See p. 417 of this volume.)

That Riehl, despite his conservative bias, is not a reactionary out and out has already been stated. He stands for evolutionary, not revolutionary, social reform; in his opinion the social-economic order can be bettered by means of the gradual self-improvement of society, and in no other way. Unless, moreover, the improvement be effected without the sacrifice of that basic subdivision of society, the needful social stability is bound to be upset by the "proletariat"--namely, the entire "fourth estate" reinforced by the ever increasing number of deserters, renegades, and outcasts who have drifted away from their appointed social level.

Notwithstanding this rather dogmatic attitude of which, among other things, a sweeping rejection of "Woman Emancipation," was one corollary, Riehl's organic theory of society as explicitly stated in his _Civic Society_ has a great and permanent usefulness for our time because of its thoroughgoing method and its clear-cut statement of problems and issues. The leader of the most advanced school of modern historians, Professor Karl Lamprecht, goes so far as to declare that the social studies of W.H. Riehl constitute the very corner stone of scientific Sociology. In this achievement, to which all of his scholarly endeavors were tributary, Riehl's significance as a historian of culture may be said to culminate.

WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL

FIELD AND FOREST[11]

TRANSLATED BY FRANCES H. KING

The intimate connection between a country and its people may well start with a superficial survey of the external aspects of a country. He sees before him mountain and valley, field and forest--such familiar contrasts that one scarcely notices them any longer; and yet they are the explanation of many subtle and intimate traits in the life of the people. A clever schoolmaster could string a whole system of folklore on the thread of mountain and valley, field and forest. I will be content to invite further meditation by some thoughts on field and forest, the _tame_ and the _wild_ cultivation of our soil.

In Germany this contrast still exists in all its sharpness, as we still have a real forest. England, on the contrary, has practically no really free forest left--no forest which has any social significance. This, of necessity, occasions at the very outset a number of the clearest distinctions between German and English nationality.

In every decisive popular movement in Germany the forest is the first to suffer. A large part of the peasants live in continual secret feud with the masters of the forest and their privileges; no sooner is a spark of revolution lighted, then, before everything else, there flares up among these people "the war about the forest." The insurgent rural proletariat can raise no barricades, can tear down no royal palaces, but, instead, lay waste the woodland of their masters; for in their eyes this forest is the fortress of the great lord in comparison with the little unprotected plot of ground of the small farmer. As soon as the power of the State has conquered the rebellious masses, the first thing it proceeds to do is to restore the forest to its former condition and again to put in force the forest charters which had been torn up. This spectacle, modified in accordance with the spirit of the age, repeats itself in every century of our history, and it will no doubt be of constant recurrence, always in new forms, for centuries to come.

The preservation, the protection of the forest, guaranteed anew by charter, is at present (1853) once again a question of the day, and in German legislative assemblies in recent years weighty words have been uttered in favor of the forest from the point of view of the political economist. Thus it is again becoming popular to defend the poor much-abused forest. The forest, however, has not only an economic, but also a social-political value. He who from liberal political principles denies the distinction between city and country should also, after the English model, seek to do away with the distinction between the field and the forest. Wherever common possession of the forest continues to exist side by side with private possession of the field, there will never be any real social equality among the people. In the cultivation of the soil the forest represents the aristocracy; the field represents the middle class.

The concessions made by the different governments in the matter of forest-clearing, of the preservation of game, the free use of the forest, etc., form a pretty exact instrument with which to measure the triumphant advance of the aristocratic or the democratic spirit. In the year 1848 many a vast tract of forest was sacrificed in order to purchase therewith a small fraction of popularity. Every revolution does harm to the forest, but, provided it does not wish to strangle itself, it leaves the field untouched.

After December 2, 1851, the gathering of fallen leaves in the forest was countenanced in Alsace in order to make the Napoleonic _coup d' état_ popular. It was cleverly thought out; for the never-resting war about the forest can be for a government a mighty lever of influence on a class of the people which is, in general, hard enough to swing round. The concession permitting the gathering of leaves, and manhood suffrage, are one and the same act of shrewd Bonapartist policy, only aimed at different classes. Thus social politics lurks even behind the forest-trees and beneath the rustling red leaves of last autumn--a strange circle of cause and effect! The immoderate cultivation of potatoes contributes not a little to saddle the modern State with the proletariat, but this same cultivation of potatoes, which deprives the small peasant of straw, drives him into the forest to seek for withered leaves in place of straw for his cattle, and thus places again in the hands of the State authorities a means--based upon the strange historic ruin of our forest-franchises--of curbing a powerful part of the proletariat.

Popular sentiment in Germany considers the forest to be the one large piece of property which has not yet been completely portioned off. In contrast to field, meadow, and garden, every one has a certain right to the forest, even if it consists merely in being able to run about in it at pleasure. In the right, or the permission, to gather wood and dry leaves and to pasture cattle, in the distribution of the so-called "loose-wood" from the parish forests, and such acts, lie the historic foundation of an almost communist tradition. Where else has anything of the kind been perpetuated except in the case of the forest? The latter is the root of truly German social conditions. In very truth the forest, with us, has not yet been completely portioned off; therefore every political agitator who wishes to pay out in advance to the people a little bit of "prosperity" as earnest-money of the promised universal prosperity, immediately lays hands upon the forest. By means of the forest, and by no other, you can substantially preach communism to the German peasant. It is well known that the idea of the forest as private property was introduced at a late date and gained ground gradually among the German people.

Forest, pasturage, water, are, in accordance with a primitive German principle of jurisprudence, intended for the common use of all inhabitants of the same district. The old alliteration "wood, wold and water," has not yet been entirely forgotten by the people. Thus a dim and feeble memory, a well-nigh forgotten legend, looking upon the common claim to general use of the forest as a natural right which had been in force since the beginning of time, confirms the conclusions of the historian, according to whom community of possession of the forest was a true old Germanic idea. Such a line of argument, however, could also bring us to the further conclusion that this community of possession has only once been fully realized--namely, by and in the primeval forest.

In times of excitement men have worked out on paper wonderful arithmetical problems concerning the partition of the soil of the forest into small plots of ground for the poor. Paper is very forbearing, and it looks very idyllic and comfortable to see, carefully calculated before our eyes, how many hundreds of dear little estates could be made out of the meagre soil of the forest, on which the proletarian could settle down to the contented patriarchal existence of a farmer. Practical attempts along this line have not been wanting, but, instead of diminishing the proletariat, such an increase of small farms only served to augment it all the more; practice is ahead of theory. The people should have thanked God that the forest, almost alone, had not been parceled out; yet, instead, they were ready even to destroy the forest in order to assist the small farmer! In many parts of Germany the poor farmer would starve if the traditional free use of the forest did not form a steady annuity for him. The forest helps in a hundred ways to place the petty farms on a solid foundation; if, therefore, men destroy the forests in order to increase the number of petty farms, they are undermining firmly rooted existences in order, in their place, to plant new ones upon the sand.

It is a source of great comfort for the social politician that, in Germany, the contrast of forest and field yet remains so generally established that we still have a whole group of regular forest lands. A nation which still holds fast to the forest as a common public possession along with the field that is divided off into private property, has not only a present but also a future. Thus in Russia's impenetrable forests, whose inner thickets are, in the words of the poet Mickiewicz, such a deep mystery that they are as little known to the eye of-the huntsman as the depths of the sea are known to the eve of the fisherman--in these forests is hidden the future of the great Slav Empire; while in the English and French provinces, where there is no longer a genuine forest, we are confronted by an already partially extinct national life. The United States of America whose society is permeated with materialism, and whose strange national life is made up of a mixture of youthful energy and of torpor, would rapidly hurry on to their destruction if they did not have in the background the primeval forest which is raising up a fresher, more vigorous, race to take the place of the rapidly degenerating inhabitants of the coast-lands. The wilderness is an immense dormant capital in ready cash, possessing which as a basis the North Americans may, for a long time to come, risk the most daring social and political stock-jobbing. But woe to them should they consume the capital itself!

The German forest and the privileges and compulsory service connected with it are a last surviving fragment of the Middle Ages. Nowhere are the ruins of the feudal elements more plainly visible than in the forest regulations; the forest alone assures the rural population--in true medieval style--a subsidy for its existence, untouched by the fury of competition and small-farming.

Therefore do the demagogues so often try to change the war "about" the forest into a war "against" the forest; they know that the forest must first be hewn down before the Middle Ages can be wiped out of Germany, and, on that account, the forest always fares worse than anything else in every popular uprising. For though in our rapidly moving century there is an average interval of fifteen years allowed between one revolution and another, yet a good forest tree requires a much longer time to reach full growth. At least the incalculable loss suffered by our forest property in the year 1848, through lavish waste, plundering, and wanton ruination, has certainly, up to the present time, not been made good by natural means.

In Anhalt-Dessau it was decided, in an ordinance of the year 1852, that all oak-trees standing on private ground should, in accordance with ancient custom, remain the property of the sovereign. In this conception the contrast between forest and field is an absolutely ideal one; even the separate forest tree is in itself still a forest and has forest-rights, just as in localities where all the forests have been cut down the peasants still frequently designate a single remaining tree by the title of their "parish forest."

The political economists argue that the amount of wood which can be supplied by our present forests is by no means too great for the satisfaction of the demand--that, if anything, it is too small. Those, however, whose enmity to the forest is based on political principles detail to us the yearly increasing substitutes for wood, and point triumphantly to the not far distant time when forests will no longer be needed, when all forest land can be turned into cultivated land, so that every glebe of earth in civilized Europe shall produce sufficient nourishment for a man. This idea of seeing every little patch of earth dug up by human hands strikes the imagination of every natural man as something appallingly uncanny; it is especially repugnant to the German spirit. When that comes to pass it will be high time for the day of judgment to dawn. Emmanuel Geibel, in his poem _Mythus_, has symbolized this natural aversion to the extreme measures of a civilization which would absorb every form of wild nature. He creates a legend about the demon of steam, who is chained and forced to do menial service. The latter will break his bonds again and with his primitive titanic strength, which has been slumbering in the heart of the world, he will destroy the very earth itself when once the whole ball has been covered with the magic network of the railroads. Before that time all the forests will have been turned into cultivated land.

The advocates of the forest resort to a feeble method of defense when they demand the preservation of the present moderate forest area solely on economic grounds. The social-political reasons certainly weigh quite as heavy. Hew down the forest and you will at the same time destroy the historic _bourgeois_ society.--In the destruction of the contrast between field and forest you are taking a vital element away from German nationality. Man does not live by bread alone; even if we no longer required any wood we should still demand the forest. The German people need the forest as a man needs wine, although for our mere necessities it might be quite sufficient if the apothecary alone stored away ten gallons in his cellar. If we do not require any longer the dry wood to warm our outer man, then all the more necessary will it be for the race to have the green wood, standing in all its life and vigor, to warm the inner man.

In our woodland villages--and whoever has wandered through the German mountains knows that there are still many genuine woodland villages in the German Fatherland--the remains of primitive civilization are still preserved to our national life, not only in their shadiness but also in their fresh and natural splendor. Not only the woodland, but likewise the sand dunes, the moors, the heath, the tracts of rock and glacier, all wildernesses and desert wastes, are a necessary supplement to the cultivated field lands. Let us rejoice that there is still so much wilderness left in Germany. In order for a nation to develop its power it must embrace at the same time the most varied phases of evolution. A nation over-refined by culture and satiated with prosperity is a dead nation, for whom nothing remains but, like Sardanapalus, to burn itself up together with all its magnificence. The _blasé_ city man, the fat farmer of the rich corn-land, may be the men of the present; but the poverty-stricken peasant of the moors, the rough, hardy peasant of the forests, the lonely, self-reliant Alpine shepherd, full of legends and songs--these are the men of the future. Civil society is founded on the doctrine of the natural inequality of mankind. Indeed, in this inequality of talents and of callings is rooted the highest glory of society, for it is the source of its inexhaustible vital energy. As the sea preserves the vigor of the people of the coast-lands by keeping them in a hardy natural state, so does the forest produce a similar effect on the people of the interior. Therefore since Germany has such a large expanse of interior country, it needs just that much more forest-land than does England. The genuine woodland villagers, the foresters, wood-cutters, and forest laborers are the strong, rude seamen among us landlubbers. Uproot the forests, level the mountains, and shut out the sea, if you want to equalize society in a closet-civilization where all will have the same polish and all be of the same color. We have seen that entire flourishing lands which have been robbed of the protecting forests have fallen prey to the devastating floods of the mountain streams and the scorching breath of the storms. A large part of Italy, the paradise of Europe, is a land which has, ceased to live, because its soil no longer bears any forests under the protection of which it might become rejuvenated. And not only is the land exhausted, but the people are, likewise. A nation must die off when it can no longer have recourse to the back-woodsmen in order to gather from them the fresh strength of a natural, hardy, national life. A nation without considerable forest-property is worthy of the same consideration as a nation without requisite sea-coast. We must preserve our forests not only so that our stoves shall not be cold in winter, but also that the pulse of the nation's life shall continue to throb on warmly and cheerfully--in short, so that Germany shall remain German.

The inhabitants of the German woodland villages have almost always a far fresher, more individual, mental stamp than the inhabitants of the villages of the plain. In the latter we find more sleek prosperity side by side with greater degeneracy of morals, than in the former. The inhabitant of the woodland villages is often very poor, but the discontented proletarian dwells far more frequently in the villages of the plain. The latter is more important in an economic sense, the former in a social-political one. The forest peasant is rougher, more quarrelsome, but also merrier than the peasant of the field; the former often turns out a genial rascal, when the dull peasant of the field in like case would have turned into a heartless miser. The preservation or the extinction of ancient popular customs and costumes does not depend so much on the contrast between mountainous-country and flat-country as on that between the woodland and the field, if one includes in the former the heaths, moors, and other wild regions. The forest is the home of national art; the forest peasant still continues through many generations to sing his peculiar song along with the birds of the woods, when the neighboring villager of the plain has long ago entirely forgotten the folk-song. A village without woods is like a city without historical buildings, without monuments, without art-collections, without theatres and music--in short, without emotional or artistic stimulation. The forest is the gymnasium of youth and often the banqueting hall of the aged. Does not that weigh at least as heavy as the economic question of the timber? In the contrast between the forest and the field is manifest the most simple and natural preparatory stage of the multiformity and variety of German social life, that richness of peculiar national characteristics in which lies concealed the tenacious rejuvenating power of our nation.

The century of the pig-tail possessed no eye for the forest and, in consequence, no understanding of the natural life of the people. Everywhere in the German provinces they removed the princely pleasure-seats from the woody mountains to the woodless flat country. But then, to be sure, the art of the pig-tail age was almost entirely un-German. For the artists of the pig-tail the forest was too irregular in design, too humpbacked in form, and too dark in color. It was shoved into the background as a flat accessory of the landscape, while, on the contrary, the landscape painters of the preceding great period of art drew the inspiration for their forest pictures from the very depths of the forest solitudes. No painter of Romance origin has ever painted the forest as Ruysdael and Everdingen did; they in their best pictures place themselves right in the midst of the deepest thickets. Poussin and Claude Lorraine have made magnificent studies of the forest, but Ruysdael knows the forest by heart from his childhood, as he knows the Lord's Prayer.

The Frenchified lyric poets of the school of Hagedorn and Gleim sing forest-songs, as though they longed after the forest from hearsay. Then, with the resurrected folk-song and the resuscitated Shakespeare, who has poetically explored deeper into the glory of the forest than all others, the English art of gardening, an imitation of the free nature of the forest, reaches Germany. At the same time, in German poetry, Goethe again strikes the true forest-note which he has learned from the folk-song; and from the moment that the forest no longer appears too disorderly for the poets, the coarse, vigorous national life no longer seems to them too dirty and rugged for artistic treatment. The most recent and splendid revival of landscape painting is intimately connected with the renewed absorption of the artist in the study of the forest. We also find that, at the time when Goethe was writing his best songs, Mozart and Haydn were, with equal enthusiasm, composing music for the folk-song, as if they had "learned it listening to the birds" that is to say, to the birds in the woods, not, like one of the new branch schools of romantic miniature poets, to the birds singing their sickly songs in gilded cages in a parlor.

The forest alone permits us civilized men to enjoy the dream of a personal freedom undisturbed by the surveillance of the police. There at least one can ramble about as one will, without being bound to keep to the common patented high road. Yes, there a staid mature man can even run, jump, climb to his heart's content, without being considered a fool by that old stickler, Dame Propriety. These fragments of ancient Germanic sylvan liberty have happily been preserved almost everywhere in Germany. They no longer exist in neighboring lands which have greater political freedom but where annoying fences very soon put an end to an unfettered desire to roam at will. What good does the citizen of the large North American cities get out of his lack of police surveillance in the streets, if he cannot even run around at will in the woods of the nearest suburb because the odious fences force him, more despotically than a whole regiment of police, to keep to the road indicated by the sign-post? What good do the Englishmen get out of their free laws, since they have nothing but parks inclosed by chains, since they have scarcely any free forest left? The constraint of customs and manners in England and North America is insupportable to a German. As the English no longer even know how to appreciate the free forest, it is no wonder that they require a man to bring along a black dress-suit and a white cravat, in addition to the ticket-money, in order to obtain entrance to the theatre or a concert. Germany has a future of greater social liberty before her than England, for she has preserved the free forest. They might perhaps be able to root up the forests in Germany, but to close them to the public would cause a revolution.

From this German sylvan liberty which peeps forth so strangely from amidst our other modern conditions, flows a deeper influence upon the manners and character of every class of the people than is dreamed of by many a stay-at-home. On the other hand, in a thousand different characteristics in the life of our great cities we perceive how far the real forest has withdrawn from these cities, how alienated from the forest their inhabitants have grown to be. One sees, of late, much more green in our large German cities; walks on the ramparts and municipal parks and public gardens have been laid out; open squares, too, have been decorated with grass plots, bushes and flowers. In no former age has the art of gardening done so much to enhance the picturesque charm of our cities as at the present day. I do not by any means wish to underestimate the high value of such public grounds, but they are something entirely different from the free forest; they cannot possibly form any equivalent for it, and the forest unhappily withdraws farther and farther away from the city. Art and nature have both an equally just claim upon us; but art can never make up to us for the loss of nature, not even though it were an art which takes nature itself as the material upon which to work, like the art of gardening.

The free forest and the free ocean have, with profound significance, been called by poetry the _sacred_ forest and the _sacred_ ocean, and nowhere does this sacredness of virgin nature produce a more intense effect than when the forest rises directly out of the sea. The real, sacred forest is where the roar of the breaking waves mingles with the rustling of the tree-tops in one loud hymn; but it is also where, in the hushed mid-day silence of the German mountain forests, the wanderer, miles away from every human habitation, hears nothing but the beating of his own heart in the church-like stillness of the wilderness.

Yet even in the free, sacred forest we find same splendid examples of the humor of the police. On the Island of Rügen, when one enters what is celebrated throughout northern Germany as a sort of primeval beech-forest of the Granitz,[12] from the trunk of a huge tree a sign-board meets the wanderer's gaze, bearing an inscription stating that in this forest one may go about only if accompanied by a forest-keeper of His Highness, the Prince of Putbus, at five silver groschen the hour. To enjoy the awe of a primeval forest in the company of a member of the forest-police, at five silver groschen the hour--that only a born Berliner is capable of!

It is owing to a strange confusion of ideas that many people consider the uprooting of the forests in the Germany of the nineteenth century to be still a reclaiming of the soil, an act of inner colonization, by means of which the uprooted piece of ground is for the first time given over to cultivation. For us the forest is no longer the wilderness out of which we must force our way into cleared land, but it is a veritable magnificent safeguard of our most characteristic national life. Therefore it was that I called it the wild cultivation of the soil in contrast to the tame cultivation of the field. In our day, to root out the soil of the forest no longer means making it arable; it simply means exchanging one form of cultivation for another. He who estimates the value of the culture of the soil merely according to the percentage of clear profit accruing from it, will wish to clear forest-land in order to make it arable. We, however, do not estimate the various forms of cultivation of the soil only by the standard of their money value, but also by that of their ideal worth. The fact that our soil is cultivated in so many various ways is one of the chief causes of our wealth of individual social organizations, and therefore of the vitality of our society itself.

The forest represents the aristocratic element in the cultivation of the soil. Its value consists more in what it represents than in what it produces and in the profit which it yields. The rich man alone can afford to manage and cultivate a forest; indeed, often the richest is not rich enough to do so, and therefore it is just that the State, as the sum total of the country's wealth, should be the first and largest forest proprietor. To cultivate the forest solely in the interest of the contemporary generation is a wretched sort of copse-wood business; large trees are raised for future generations. Therefore the forest is, primarily, a subject of national economy and, secondarily, one of domestic economy. In the forest the interests of the entire nation must be considered; it must be, as far as possible, equally distributed over the whole land, for its treasures interfere with the facilities of traffic. These are thoughts which might make any genuine forest proprietor proud of his own particular forest.

For the opponents of the conservation of large landed estates the forest will always be the worst stumbling-block, for it will never be possible to establish an even apparently successful forestry on a small scale. Where agriculture is concerned, the advantage of small farming is open to discussion; but he who would not see the pitifulness of forestry on a small scale must hold his hands before both eyes. In proportion as forestry is carried on in a small way, that is to say, in so far as it shall be exclusively operated so as to obtain the largest possible income out of the smallest possible capital and with the shortest possible delay, the forest loses its historic stamp, its cultural influence on the social and esthetic education of the nation, and on the characteristic distinctions of society.

Germany is not separated into field and woodland in such a manner that one part is dedicated almost exclusively to forestry and the other part to agriculture. Rather does the contrast between field and forest exist everywhere; it interferes with the natural division into mountainous and flat country, and thus divides and subdivides the soil of the entire German empire in a fashion of which no other country of Europe can boast. In addition, agriculture and forestry are present in every legitimate form possible. On German soil the whole scale is run through, and we have the most variegated examples all the way from spade-husbandry up to the largest private estates; in the forms of our forest economy we are much more divided than in the forms of our political economy. This unexampled multiplicity of ways of cultivating the soil is not only typical of the wonderfully rich organization of our social conditions, but it also furnishes the most natural basis for the peculiar suppleness, many-sidedness, and receptivity of German mental-culture and civilization.

Through the recently ever-increasing artificial conversion of the proud beech and oak into short-lived pine-forests, which is due to necessity or to a short-sighted financial policy, Germany has lost at least as much of the peculiar character lent to it by its forests as through the complete uprooting of tremendous tracts of woodland. In the old forest ordinances especial weight is, with good reason, laid upon the protection of the oak-trees. Even the German Reichstag, as early as the sixteenth century, was occupied with the "art of economizing the woods." There are a few kinds of forestry which, to a certain extent, permit the parceling off of the forest--as, for example, there are localities where forestry and agriculture are carried on, turn and turn about, on the same land; or others where the practice prevails of stripping the bark off the oak-trees, a process which yields a quick monetary return--these few kinds of forestry, however, which are favorable to the parceling off of the woodland into small estates, quite destroy the conception of the forest as we understand it. An oak-forest like the above, which, as soon as the trees begin to grow really strong and sturdy, stretches forth toward the wanderer only slim, bark-stripped trunks with withered remnants of leaves, interspersed with rank miserable meadow-trees, with hazel-nut thickets and dog-rose bushes, a piece of woodland in which husbandry and forestry are completely jumbled, is actually no longer a real forest. The most valuable kind of timber furnished by the massive trunks of the oaks and beeches and for which there is absolutely no substitute elsewhere--this most specific treasure of the forest can be obtained only when the forest is managed by a rich corporation which can afford to wait a hundred years for the interest on its capital.

The olden times gauged correctly this aristocratic character of the forest when they chose it as a privileged exercise-ground where princes might take their amusement, and when they ennobled the chase; although, seen by the light of a philosophic student's lamp, there is nothing very noble about it when a court, shining with the smoothest polish that civilization can give, withdraws from time to time into the barbarity of the primeval forest, and in faithful imitation of the rude life of the hunter spells out again, as it were, the first beginnings of civilization. For no title did the German princes of the Empire struggle more bitterly than for that of "Master of the Imperial Hunt." On Frankish-German soil royalty put its centralizing power to the test first and most decisively in the establishment of royal forest preserves. The king's woods from that time on stood under a higher and more efficient protection than the Common Law could have afforded. A more strikingly aristocratic prerogative than that of the forest preserves is inconceivable, and yet it is owing to this privilege that Germany still looks so green, that our mountains are not bare of trees like those of Italy, that country and people have not died off and dried up, that, in fine, such vast magnificent tracts of forest could, as a whole complete in itself, later pass over into the hands of the state.