THE SELDWYLA FOLK.*
Garrnacn KELLER'S "Tales" appear to be the only successful work of imagination which German Switzerland has produced since the death of its great novelist, Bitzius (or " Jeremias Gotthelf "). It originally appeared in two volumes, separated by an interval of several years, and the two first editions were sold at a high price ; but a third and cheaper edition has this year issued from a Stuttgart press. The frame in which the tales are set is that of a supposed small Swiss town, situated a good half- league from any navigable river, enclosed within its old walls and towers, but set in the midst of green hills open to the south, with vines growing round the walls, and forests on the hills above, the property of the commune. For the commune is rich and the citizens are poor ; no Seldwyler has any money, and no one knows whit they live by, although they live in great good-humour and jollity. The young people of from about twenty to six-and- thirty form the ruling aristocracy of the place. They carry on their business by letting others work for them, and running into debt ; when they pass the fatal age they lose all credit, and must either go out into the world in search of adventures, or have to work hard for their living at some inferior kind of work which they have never learnt. They have always wood enough, and the poorest among them are maintained by the commune from the produce of its wood sales. But they are always contented and cheery, and if money is particularly scarce in the town, they still find pleasant occupation in political agitation. For the Seld- wylers are passionate political partisans and constitution-menders, and when their Member in the Great Council brings forward some specially insane motion, or when the call goes forth in Seld- yryla for an alteration in the Constitution, it is well known throughout the country that for the moment in Seldwyla there is no money circulating. Then they are particularly fond -of changing opinions and principles, and on the very morrow of choosing a new Government are always in opposition to it. If the Government is Radical, they flock round the town clergy- man, whom they were making game of yesterday, crowd his church, praise his sermons, and offer all round his tracts and re- ports of the Bile Missionary Society, of course without contri- buting a penny. If the Government is only half-Conservative, they press round the schoolmasters, and the clergyman has long glazier's bills to pay. If Liberal jurists and wealthy men are in power, they rush to the nearest Socialists. Now they will have the veto, direct self-government, a permanent assembly of the people ; to-morrow they are tired, biases, and let half-a-dozen stick-in-the-mud old bankrupts look after the elections. Yester- day they 'weremad for confederate life, and were disgusted that 1848 had not established absolute national unity ; to-day they are quite bent on cantonal sovereignty, and make no choice of representatives to the National Council. When they carry things too far, the general Government generally reduces them to quietness by sending a commission of inquiry, to regulate the management of the communal property.
• Die Leute von Betcheyta. nrhlungen von Gottfried Kellen Dritte AuSage. Stuttgart. Mt
It will be seen that there is a real Aristophanic ring in this picture of a Swiss Demos, which opens the first volume. In the preface to the second, the writer declares that since the first appeared seven towns in Switzerland have been disputing which is Seldwyla, each of which has offered him its freedom if he will declare in its favour. But meanwhile, a greater change has taken place in less than ten years in the real Seldwyla than during cen- turies previous ; or rather, to speak more correctly, the general life of the country has so shaped itself that the peculiarities of the Seldwylers have found a full field for their development, more especially through the growth of speculation in all known and unknown values, an occupation which precisely suits them. They have become dry, sparing of words, laugh less than before, and find no more time for tricks and jokes. They have almost re- nounced politics, and bate like the very devil any possibility of war, whilst formerly over their beer-jugs they were ready to fight the whole pentarchy (of the Great Powers) at once. So he apologises for only being able to glean a few ears more from the harvest of former days.
The tales are ten in number,—five in each volume. What characterises them more especially is a remarkable realistic literal- ness, which compels one, willy-nilly, to see and enter into narra- tives sometimes palpably absurd, so that the scenes are enacted visibly before one's eyes. It is somewhat curious that whilst the range of the writer's powers is of great extent, in one tale only, entitled, "Romeo and Juliet in the Village," has he given his readers a sample of his capacity for arousing emotions of a really tragic character. This tale is in many respects a masterpiece. It begins with a picture, fit to stand beside that of Germain, "le fin laboureur," in George Sand's Mare au Diable, though worked out into more Denner-like detail, of two middle-aged peasants ploughing on a fine September morning the two outermost of three long, sloping, parallel fields, the middle one of which seemed to have lain fallow for years, and was covered with stones and weeds. In the middle of the day a child's cart comes up from the village with the breakfast of the two workers, led by a boy of seven and a tiny girl of five, whose one-legged doll lies among the victuals. The men stop from their work and talk about the middle field, which the Seldwylers want them to take and pay rent for till an owner be found, as no heirs to the last one have appeared ; although a certain black fiddler, who can show no baptismal certificate, and has taken up with the heimathlos folk, is pretty certainly a grandson of his. Meanwhile the children are playing in the wilderness of the de- serted field, and the description of their play is a charming rustic idyll. But their covetousness having been excited by their past talk about the middle field, each of the peasants alternately ends by turning up a furrow within it. From henceforth, harvest after harvest, the ownerleas land becomes narrower and narrower, and the stones, which are thrown from each side on what remains of it, form a ridge, which the boy and girl have to climb before they can meet. At last it has to be sold by order of the Court, and the two peasants, Manz and Marti, are the only serious bidders for it. It is lmocked down to Manz, who now complains that his neighbour has lately cut off a three-cornered piece of it, and claims that the boundary be straightened. Marti retorts that Manz has bought it as it stands, and that it has not changed by a hair's-breadth during the last hour. On the morrow already Manz sets to work to clear out the purchased field. The weeds and shrubs give light work, compared to the atones. All the stones of the world seem to be gathered there. Before Marti has guessed his intention, Manz has them all heaped up on the three-cornered bit which he claims from Marti, so as to make a mighty pyramid. Upon this the two neighbours, hitherto always good friends, go to law, and the lawsuit only ends with the ruin of both. Manz is the first to go to the bad, and sets up as a tavern-keeper in Seldwyla, of course with no better success than as a farmer. In the decline of his fortunes he betakes himself to the usual resource of bankrupt Seldwylers,- fishing. Marti has done the same ; and one stormy day they
meet and come to blows, but are separated by their children, who have accompanied them, and who also meet again for the first time after years. Sali, the boy, now a handsome youth of
nineteen, , sees before him a lovely brown-haired girl, her eyes at first full of tears, when she springs forward to
clasp her arms round her father, but whose arch smile in the midst of her tears, when she sees his astonishment on recognising her, enters into his heart. From henceforth he can think of nothing but Vrenchen, and on the next morning but one he climbs the way to her house, the now desolate condi- tion of which is powerfully depicted. He finds her alone, she
begs him not to come in, but ends by consenting to see him in the field in the evening. Their meeting is disturbed by the ap- pearance of a strange, long-nosed personage—the black fiddler— who tells them that he knows them, that they are the children of those who have robbed him of his land, but that he bears them no ill-will, and will be ready to fiddle for them if they wish to dance. They recover, however, from the fright he has caused them, and each soon finds out that he or she is the other's " sclaatz " (" treasure,"—i.e., sweetheart). Sitting in the high corn, they compare past remembrances ; but the future seems hopeless, when they think of their fathers' enmity. When at last Vrenchen feels it is time to part, and they go forth hand- in - hand, her father, Marti, meets them, overwhelms them with reproaches and insults, and tries to strike Sali, who avoids the blow ; but when he sees the old man turn upon his trembling daughter, box her ears and twist her hair round his hand, apparently for the sake of farther ill-using her, Sali loses all sense of what he is doing, and seizing a stone, strikes the old man on the head with it, so that he falls down apparently dead. He recovers, however, eventually from his hurt (the origin of which Vrenchen has carefully concealed) so far as outward health is cOncerned ; but his brain is affected, and he has to be taken to an asylum, whilst the last of his property is sold for the benefit of his creditors. Vrenchen, who has conducted him to the asylum, returns now to the lonely house, which she has to leave in a couple of days. She makes a fire to cook the last remnant of her coffee, and as she is sitting on the hearth with her head in her hand, thinking of Sali and all her sorrows, he comes in himself. They talk over their blank future ; she must go out to service, though she feels as if she could never leave him; he must do the like or enlist, and yet he cannot tear himself from her. They end by going to sleep on the hearth, without pillow or bolster, "as softly and peacefully as two children in a cradle." In the night she dreams that they were dancing together for hours long on their wedding-day, and she tells him in the morning that the dream has so impressed her, that she feels as if she must have a dance with him before seeking shelter elsewhere. So they agree to spend the whole of the next day together, and the description of this day, which is the last of their lives, is unsurpassable in its literal homely pathos. At the place which they finally select for their dancing, they fall in with the black fiddler, who is one of the musicians, and is most friendly. They give themselves fully up to their enjoyment, but when the hoar comes for their separating, they cannot make up their minds to part. The black fiddler quickly discerns the state of things, works upon their already excited passions, inviting them to join his friends in the mountains, where neither priest, nor money, nor writing is needed for a wedding, and ends by fiddling at the head of a wild bridal procession, which he gets up for them, and which reels madly along in the night, passing before the former homes of the pair. They manage to escape from his party, but how can they escape from each other? The result is, that after a night of unhallowed love on a hay-barge, they fling themselves into the river and are drowned.
The tale is one obviously not told virginibus puerisgue (and indeed a vein of indelicacy crops up in several of the tales), though the end is probably the logical one, and represents the Nemesis for the robbing of the black fiddler's inheritance by the parents of the ill-starred young couple. The author's mastery of his craft lies in the perfect keeping of the story, which never allows us to forget for a moment that it is two young peasants whom we have before us, often very silly and very childish, and yet so thoroughly human that we can enter into all their feelings.
Humour, however, is the quality on which the author appears chiefly to pride himself, and he often makes excellent fooling for us. The "Three Upright Comb-makers" is an absurd extrava- ganza, in which, by dint of sheer literalness of realism, he suc- ceeds in interesting us in the proceedings of personages utterly uninteresting in themselves. "Spiegel the Cat," with some pruning and polishing, would make an admirable fairy-tale for children. Perhaps the beet of the humorous tales is, however, "Clothes Make the Man ;" the story of a poor Silesian journey- man tailor, who, in consequence of a long cloak and Polish cap, and of a coachman's bad joke, is taken for a Polish Count, and ends by winning a wealthy and pleasant bride even when the mistake is discovered. The first and last tales, " Pancraz the Sulky" and "The Lost Laugh," are perhaps the least pleasant. The first contains an utterly preposterous description of the pos- sible relations between an Anglo-Indian commanding officer and his daughter and the officer's soldier-servant. The last, although
some beautiful bits occur in it, has for key-word the reconcile- ment of an estranged husband and wife by their agreeing to live "without religion."
On the whole, though Gottfried Keller cannot be said to exhibit the original genius of Gotthelf, still less his moral power, he is, nevertheless, a true literary artist, endowed with very uncommon qualities,—or perhaps more truly, endowed with certain qualities to a very uncommon degree ; and it may be safely predicted that the Seldwyla Folk will live in the history of Swiss literature, although it may be trusted that the future has other lessons in store for the Swiss people than that conjugal happiness depends on dispensing with religion.
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