Chapter XV: Part 1861: ). This novel deals with the conditions in Pomerania in (14)

"My child! Oh Elke, Oh faithful Elke!" cried Hauke out into the storm. Another large piece of the dike in front of him gave way and thunderingly the sea plunged in after it; once more he saw below the horse's head the wheels of the conveyance rise up out of the chaotic horror and then disappear in a whirl. The fixed eyes of the rider who stood so solitary on the dike saw nothing further. "The end!" he said softly to himself; then he rode to the edge of the abyss where, below him, the waters rushing uncannily were beginning to flood his home village; he still saw the light shining from his house; he felt that the soul had gone out of it. He raised himself high in the saddle and drove his spurs into the white horse's flanks; the animal reared and nearly fell over backwards; but the man's strength forced it down again. "Forward!" he cried once more as he had so often urged it on to a steady ride. "Take me, God; spare the others!"

Another pressure of the spurs; a shriek from the white horse that rose above the gale and the roar of the waves; then from the plunging stream below a dull splash, a brief struggle.

The moon looked down from above and illumined the scene; but on the dike beneath there was no longer any life save that of the savage waters which soon had almost completely covered the old koog. But still the mound where stood Hauke Haien's home rose up out of the swelling flood, the light still shone from there; and from the upland where the houses gradually grew dark, the solitary light from the church steeple threw its wavering beams across the seething waves.

* * * * *

The narrator ceased; I reached out for the filled glass that had long been standing before me; but I did not put it to my mouth; my hand remained lying on the table.

"That is the story of Hauke Haien," my host began again, "as I had to tell it according to my best knowledge. Our dikegrave's housekeeper, of course, would have made another tale; for this too people have to report: after the flood the white skeleton of the horse was to be seen again in the moonlight on Jevershallig as before; everyone in the village believed he saw it. So much is certain: Hauke Haien with his wife and child went down in that flood; I have not been able to find even their graves up in the churchyard; the dead bodies were undoubtedly carried back through the breach by the receding water out to sea, at the bottom of which they gradually were dissolved into their original component parts--thus they had peace from men. But the Hauke Haien Dike still stands now after a hundred years, and tomorrow if you ride to town and don't mind going half an hour out of your way you will have it beneath your horse's hoofs.

"The thanks Jewe Manners once promised the builder that the grandchildren should give have not come, as you have seen; for thus it is, sir: they gave Socrates poison to drink and our Lord Jesus Christ they nailed to the cross! It is not so easy to do such things as that any longer; but--to make a saint of a man of violence or a malicious bull-necked priest, or to make a ghost or a phantom of night of an able fellow just because he is a whole head above the rest of us--that can be done any day."

When the earnest little man had said that he got up and listened at the window. "It is different out there now," he said, and drew the woolen curtain back; it was bright moonlight. "See," he continued, "there are the commissioners coming back, but they are separating, they are going home; there must have been a break over on the other side; the water has fallen."

I looked out beside him; the windows upstairs, where we were, lay above the edge of the dike; it was as he had said. I took my glass and finished it: "I thank you for this evening," I said; "I think we can sleep in peace!"

"That we can," replied the little man; "I wish you a good night's sleep from my heart!"

In going down I met the dikegrave below in the hall; he wanted to take home with him a map that he had left in the tap-room. "It's all over," he said. "But our schoolmaster has told you a story of his own, I suppose; he belongs to the rationalists!"

"He seems to be a sensible man."

"Oh yes, certainly; but you can't mistrust your own eyes after all. And over on the other side, just as I said it would be, the dike is broken!"

I shrugged my shoulders: "We will have to take counsel with our pillows about that! Good night, dikegrave!"

He laughed. "Good night!"

The next morning, in the most golden of sunlights, which had risen on a wide devastation, I rode along the Hauke Haien Dike down to the town.

TO A DECEASED[2]

But this is more than I can bear,
That still the laughing sun is bright,
As in the days when you were there,
That clocks are striking, unaware,
And mark the change of day and night--

That we, as twilight dims the air,
Assemble when the day is done,
And that the place where stood your chair
Already many others share,
And that you seem thus missed by none;

When meanwhile from the gate below
The narrow strips of moonlight spare
Into your vault down deeply go
And with a ghostly pallid glow
Are stealing o'er your coffin there.

THE CITY[2]

The shore is gray, the sea is gray,
And there the city stands;
The mists upon the houses weigh
And through the calm, the ocean gray
Roars dully on the strands.

There are no rustling woods, there fly
No birds at all in May,
The wild goose with its callous cry
Alone on autumn nights soars by,
The wind-blown grasses sway.

And yet my whole heart clings to thee,
Gray city by the sea;
And e'er the spell of youth for me
Doth smiling rest on thee, on thee
Gray city by the sea.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Translator: Margarete Münsterberg.

THE HEATH[3]

It is so quiet here. There lies
The heath in noon's warm sunshine gold.
A gleam of light, all rosy, flies
And hovers round the mounds of old.
The herbs are blooming; fragrance fair
Now fills the bluish summer air.

The beetles rush through bush and trees,
In little golden coats of mail;
And on the heather-bells the bees
Alight on all its branches frail.
From out the grass there starts a throng
Of larks and fills the air with song.

A lonely house, half-crumbled, low:
The farmer, in the doorway bent,
Stands watching in the sunlight's glow
The busy bees in sweet content.
And on a stone near by his boy
Is carving pipes from reeds with joy.

Scarce trembling through the peace of noon
The town-clock strikes--from far, it seems.
The old man's eye-lids droop right soon,
And of his honey crops he dreams.--
The sounds that tell our time of stress
Have not yet reached this loneliness.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Translator: Margarete Münsterberg.

CONSOLATION[4]

Let come to me whatever may,
While you are with me it is day.

Though in the world I wander far,
My home is ever--where you are.

Your face is all in all to me,
The future's frown I do not see.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Translator: Charles Wharton Stork.

WILHELM RAABE

BY EWALD EISERHARDT, PH.D.

Assistant Professor of German, University of Rochester

Wilhelm Raabe was born on the eighth of September, 1831, in the little town of Eschershausen in the Duchy of Braunschweig. He received his schooling at the Gymnasiums in Holzminden and Wolfenbüttel; from 1849-53 he was employed in a bookstore in Magdeburg; then, while living with his mother in Wolfenbüttel, he prepared for the university, and later went to Berlin, where he studied chiefly history, philosophy, and literature. After the success of his first book, _Records of Sparrow Lane_ (1857), he turned entirely to authorship. In 1862 he married and moved to Stuttgart, where he remained till 1870. From then on until his death in 1910 he lived in Braunschweig. Raabe was an extraordinarily productive writer, yet during the last ten years of his life he entirely gave up all literary activity, and left his last work, _Old Folks in the Old Home_, unfinished.

The underlying theme of Raabe's writings is the inner life of the individual man and his specifically human sphere of family, society, community, nation. With this he combines a strong preference for what is characteristically German, which he loves just as much where it is merely German, in fact, German to the point of being odd and bizarre, as where it merges into the universally human. Raabe believes, however, that both the peculiarly German and the broadly human types are found with greater richness and depth among the Germans of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century than among those of the last third. The period before the development of modern Germany is that in which he loves best to linger. When he forsakes it, he does so to go still farther back, into the realm of history proper.

What was it that interested Raabe in history? Not so much the causal connection of events; not so much historical growth, as historical conditions. And, moreover, to him the outward circumstances are merely the necessary premises for what he really wishes to grasp, the spirit of a period, the constitution of the folk-soul. The great historical figures who led up to a period and stand out prominently in it he pushes into the background. It is the forgotten men and women that he seeks, and he pictures how circumstances or events ordered their lives, whether the individual lived apart from his age and contrasted with the mass, or whether the "milieu" wrought in him a particular condition of mind and heart, so that he was drawn into situations and events, into the "Zeitgeist," without actually exercising any decisive influence. In _Else von der Tanne_ the German peasants, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, are sunk in "brutish stupor," inwardly and outwardly coarsened and demoralized, filled with boundless suspicion. When Else, "the purest, holiest flower in the horrible devastation of the earth," appears among them, they look upon her as something monstrous, they make a witch of her, and under their stoning the gentle miracle falls stricken at the threshold of the house of God. In _Sankt Thomas_ the struggle between Spain and the Netherlands kindles heroism in the heart of a woman who, like a phenomenon, interposes in the fight, in which she perishes after all, without being able to give its course a favorable turn. "That was no longer that Camilla who had swung in the hammock. * * * She now appeared as the beautiful but deadly genius of this island; it was as if the destructive power of the tropical sun had become embodied in her. * * * Camilla Drago, in league with the fire from heaven, defended the castell Pavaosa." In _The Crown of the Realm_ the heroine feels the necessity of making her lover go through the campaigns in Bohemia and Hungary from where he returns afflicted with leprosy. He gives up his happiness for lost, but the girl, from whom he has hidden, finds him, acknowledges her love for him, nurses him until his death and becomes in the end the mother-nurse of the exiled lepers.

We do not really feel this last story to be historical; for the spirit of the age, all the events and even the fate of the hero and heroine are far eclipsed by the triumphant strength of those powers that, standing above all time, are able to determine human life. _The Crown of the Realm_ was indeed written after Raabe had tried in _The People of the Forest_ and in his trilogy _The Hunger Pastor_, _Abu Telfan_, and _The Dead-Wagon_--works round which all Raabe's writings circle as round a pole--to comprehend the eternally problematical in human life and to take up some attitude toward it.

"Gib Acht auf die Gassen!" (Watch the Streets), and "Blick auf zu den Sternen!" (Look up to the Stars), are the mottos at whose point of intersection lies the life-wisdom of _The People of the Forest_. To wrestle with the factors of every-day life, to have a clear eye for the different values of these factors, and in general to respect the dignity of the common are indispensable to every real human life. But, if one is to attain the goals that lie in the land of promise, one's gaze must not remain fixed on the ground. For the universe and the human soul are, in themselves, dark, and receive their light only from the shining spheres that we call stars. In man's sky these are love, friendship, faith, patience, mercy, courage, humility, honor. Still more wonderful, however, than the existence of these stars is perhaps the fact that originally we did not possess them at all, but have only found them in the course of thousands of years. And how did they become ours? Through life's suffering and distress and infamy. Here, indeed, we arrive at the centre of Raabe's thought and work. All that is high in the world has developed through friction with what is low, all that is high requires the low. For just as white is seen in all its intensity only in contrast with black, so, too, depth of love, nobility of mind, strength to aspire are best manifested and unfolded in the conflict with selfishness, baseness, indifference, and every kind of distress and pain. That is why Hans Unwirrsch has Moses Freudenstein for a companion; that is why the author lays so many and such different obstacles in his way; that is why he allows him to attain only to such a modest happiness at last; for the satisfied do not hunger, and hunger for all that is noble is the meaning of our existence. That is why, too, a book like _The Hunger Pastor_ exercises, on the whole, no liberative influence; it does, however, strengthen and edify our souls and warms our hearts with its inner glow.

But how is it? If the antagonism of those elements that increase life and those that weaken it is necessary, must they therefore exist eternally beside each other, and to which side will the final victory incline? "If ye knew what I know, ye would weep much and laugh little:" with these words of Mohammed's _Abu Telfan_ closes. Accordingly the ideal, symbolized in _The Hunger Pastor_ by the cobbler's luminous ball that accompanies Hans Unwirrsch everywhere, here finds only a place of refuge in the secluded "Katzenmühle" (cat's mill). Deep resignation is the predominant mood of this work. And in the _The Dead-Wagon_ the place of the shining ball is taken even by the hearse, and the motto of this book is, "The _Canaille_ is lord and remains lord." Antonie Häusler falls into the power of her rascally grandfather, and attempts to rescue her fail. Nevertheless chevalier von Gläubigern reports to Jane Warwolf: "I got there in time, she is happy! Believe no one who tries to tell you that she died in misery. * * * Pay no attention to Hennig and those others about us, they know nothing * * *" The chevalier is right. Antonie died, but in the triumph of martyrdom, and this triumph, still and unnoticed as it was, continues to burn in the hearts of the three old people whom we leave at the end of the novel in the home for the old and sick in Krodebeck.

The circle of our trilogy is closed. Light and darkness war against each other in all three parts. In _The Hunger Pastor_ love and work finally win both external and internal victory; in _Abu Telfan_ we are left full of worry that light is diminishing more and more; in the _The Dead-Wagon_ the deepest shadows prevail, the noble and the life-affirming forces experience external defeat, but they remain unconquerable in themselves.

Further than in the _The Dead-Wagon_ a wise author who is just to the world may not go in his pessimism, in spite of his study of Schopenhauer, if he would not appear to indulge in mannerism, to be one-sided. Raabe does not fall a victim to his deep penetration into the hardship and infamy of life; it finally becomes to him merely the means to an end. For he thus obtains from his strict conscience the right from now on to develop for its own sake a side of his talent which had already flashed through almost all his works--his humor. In whatever relation good and evil, happiness and suffering may stand to one another, man can not entirely get rid of either of these sides of life. The idealist or pessimist seeks to emphasize one of the two sides, the realist simply takes them as they are and bears them, the humorist tries to reconcile one with the other. This reconciliation must, of course, be subjective in its nature. It takes place in the mind and heart of the man. A humorist like Raabe allows the oppressive a place within him, and is untroubled because he recognizes that it is an integral part of his lot, of humanity's lot. He does not bear it with ridicule or bitterness, indifference or resignation, because he knows he must, but rather he rejoices in the strength of his soul, he rejoices that he can do it. In the consciousness of this ability he has cast away "the fear of the earthly" and looks down smiling on the mysterious play of the forces of life. He smiles at those who allow themselves to be consumed by distress, he smiles at his own distress which he has to overcome again and again, and is yet affected by grief, is full of the deepest sympathy for all creation, for he knows that he is fighting a common battle with it all. Humor is hearty, humor is brave, humor is full of sunny, smiling wisdom. We have works and characters in German literature that are more pronouncedly and purely humorous than Raabe's. But probably in no other German writer has humor become such a controlling mood of life as in him. With no one else do we feel the faithful humorous personality of the author behind and in his works as we do with Raabe. _Horacker_ (1876), _Old Familiar Corners_ (1879), _The Hold-All_ (1890) may be quoted here.

By virtue of its elevation Raabe's humor has a quiet and certain glance, and is apt to spend its all-embracing sympathy on what is overlooked, what is insignificant, and in all it finds greatness and light hidden and operative. The apparently contradictory attracts him whether it appears to be contradictory in itself or contradictory to what is generally accepted and traditional. He makes friends with originals and oddities; he leads us into the isolation of small German towns, and we feel at home in their sociability and narrowness, in their affection for things and customs of olden times, in their solidity and singularity, in all their local joys and sorrows. Among his many stories we may refer in this connection to: _Der Dräumling_ (1872), _Wunnigel_ (1878), _The Horn of Wanza_ (1880).

Even in Germany Raabe became known only slowly. This was due to his quiet character that disdained all striving after effect, to the intentional mixture of various elements in his art which sometimes makes it difficult to grasp the purpose of a work as a whole, to his persistent pursuit of ends that lay outside the ruling interests of his time. When once his countrymen began to come to themselves again, however, he did not lack homage. And so it will probably continue to be. An age whose interests are centered largely in the external side of life will think little of him and pass him by, while one whose gaze is directed rather within will take the pains to understand and appreciate him. May his image never be blotted out entirely! For he belongs to those who feel ever rising within them the question, "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

_WILHELM RAABE_

THE HUNGER PASTOR

TRANSLATED AND ABRIDGED BY MURIEL ALMON