The unmistakable trend of our time is the civilisation—which, in its modern form, is largely urbanisation—of the whole habitable globe. From its centres outwards it is thrusting itself upon places, men, processes—ultimate sanctuaries, never before reached by alien trespassing. Most men are looking on at its destruction of the old order with shrugging acceptance of the inevitable, or hailing the chaotic stuff of the new in its making with so far unjustified joy. With a wit worn somewhat threadbare with use they invariably counsel the few eccentrics who deny its inevitability and question its beneficence to quit the hopes and mops of Mrs. Partington for the discreet submission of the wiser Canute. Then they grow properly grave, and declare that this modern civilisation, for all its shortcomings, has been well described as a banquet, the like of which, for those below as for those above the salt, has never been spread before. However that may be, there is no question that here and there a guest is sometimes moved to look round on the company and scan its several types with a sudden sense of their significance. Some of these, good and bad, are common to all late civilisations, he perceives, others as hatefully peculiar to our own as certain diseases. Where, in God's name, were there ever till now men like these, who bend a complaisant spectacled gaze on a world going under, content if they may but first secure their museum sample (including one carefully chosen, perfectly embalmed, stuffed and catalogued peasant) of every species? Or their younger kindred—men whose intellect obeys no inspiration save curiosity nor law save its own limit, whose inventions, therefore, cannot foster good and beauty but only spoil these in Nature and men's souls? As for that splendid group beyond, one may question if Athens, Rome, or Byzantium, whose sumptuous culture of brain and body achieved an almost criminal comeliness by Christian standards, ever equalled them: question, too, whether their selfish perfection or the travesty of it in this mob of women dull with luxury, of men brutalised by the scramble of getting it for them—be less desirable for the race! Thankfully his eye passes from them to those who turn such a cold shoulder upon their vulgarity: a little company, fine-edged, polished and flexible with perpetual fence of wit and word, hardly peculiar to our day perhaps, but rather such as might have played their irresponsible game on the eve of any red revolution. Now and again they lend an amused ear to various gassy gospels over the way, where, as he perceives, he is once more among the children of this latter day alone: notably certain insignificances who, because they have raised their self-indulgence to the dignity of a problem play, are solemnly mistaking themselves (as actors and audience too) for pioneers of social progress; and some earnest women who have slammed the front door on their nearest and dearest stay-at-home duties and privileges, to go questing after problematical rights. It looks, too, as if the same types, modified for worse and better by class conditions, were repeated below the salt; but there the multitude is so great that the individuals are soon lost in a far-off colourless mass—sometimes a menacing mass—by no means so content with stale bread as the others with caviare.

Is then this civilisation to become the universal order? he asks himself; and must the world it has laid waste be repeopled from these? The very fear of it summons a shadowy memory of fathers' fathers among Sussex sheepfolds, Highland crofts, Tuscan vineyards, or German forests. After that the banquet grits in the teeth like husks, and there is nothing possible but to get up and go out from it, sick with longing for those simpler, saner people. To them, it is said, fatherhood, motherhood, home, were chiefest of prides and sanctities outside Heaven. They either kept or consciously broke the ten commandments, but they never set up the Seven deadly Sins in their place. They won life out of the earth, sometimes with difficulty enough, but the struggle bred a muscle and fortitude only now failing their descendants in hyper-civilisation. They laboured, and took their pleasures too, under open skies and in quiet places where the divine voice could clearly be heard at times, and unperplexedly obeyed.

Between fear and hope these famished feasters come at last to the ancestral places; only too often to find them ruined, or sheltering some sad survival unaware of his own splendid history. On the cold thresholds they stand, stricken with the sense of the world's irreparable loss in a virile and faithful race.

Just so far have many thinking people come to-day, and there remain, needing a leader who can turn regretful retrospect to rational hope. Such a one is Peter Rosegger, whose life is a type of our own day and a prophecy of better. He, too, left the land for the city, and now, because all his culture and experience do but confirm his faith that Bauernthum is as necessary for the world's soul as the bread which the peasant grows for its body, he has gone back to it. When he wants new vigour for daily life, or for his mission of protecting and pleading for a vanishing folk, he touches earth and gets it. Peasant-born, in most of his books he is Peasantry grown conscious and articulate,—he gives us that life from within. But culture has enabled him to see the peasant in his true relation to the world as well, to measure the life he was born into with the civilisation whose guest he has been. And so in one invaluable book, Erdsegen, he writes of the folk life from without, and that with great truth and consistency. The story is given in a series of letters from a city journalist, who for a frivolous wager goes to live "the simple life" as a peasant among peasants for one year. Looking through the townsman's eyes, we find there no stage-peasant's Arcady, no rose-bowered cottages pleasantly ready for week-end lodgers; rather we stare aghast at the coarse food, rough work, some very unwholesome conditions, and obstinate superstitions. The journalist's earlier letters treat of these things with humorous realism, and we respect his pluck for putting up with them. Gradually the tone of the letters changes, and we see the innate fineness—not the cultured refinement—of the townsman, responding to the strong faith behind the superstition, to the beauty of the traditional labours, the heroic endurance of their undoing by storm and bad fortune, and the acceptance of good and ill alike as from the hands of a good if sometimes incomprehensible Father. The faint sneer, even the amused smile, die from the townsman's face; dirt and discomfort are lost sight of in the divine realities which draw him, humbly enough at last, to throw in his lot with these humble people.

Rosegger is a true prophet, he never disguises truth in defending it. His passion for essential Peasantry is too great for sentimentalities, too honest for whitewash; and so while he exhilarates us with its elemental force he does not fear to show where this merges into brutality, nor when its simplicity opens the door to superstition. And yet in the end we are one with his faith in Bauernthum and the world's need of it. The land-folk who emigrate to cities, and their children there born, are fast losing and will soon quite lose what no money or experience can compensate them for. Age after age, great shaping influences from the forest, the mountain and the waters of the mountain, the solitudes, the mastery and love of beasts, the disciplinary tragedies and triumphs of agriculture, came and wrought upon the humanity in their midst, gradually creating the customs, traditions, lore and art—everything except religion in its Church sense—which is part of the collective soul of Peasantry. Whatever these uprooted land-folk gain in the city, though they gain the whole world, they certainly lose their own soul—the soul special to Peasantry and until now the fullest spring of the world's imaginative life.

At times, perhaps when he has stayed too long in Graz, Rosegger writes of Bauernthum as of something irrevocably passing; at others he utters his faith—for it is deeper than hope—that it will come again. To him his own life is racially prophetic. He has had the best of civilisation, intellectual intercourse, fame, travel, wealth: but from these and all others of its benefits or lures, he has again and again run back, mastered by a Heimweh which saved him. Sometimes, in terrible trouble, once at the point of death, he went back, and every time the touch of the earth renewed him, body and soul. Signs of this saving Heimweh he sees here and there among those who remain at the banquet, actually starving in satiety, some of them; and from the quiet valley where his genius, long since the consecrated champion of the ancient peasantry, does its best work, he calls upon these to come back and make possible a new. His loyal traditionalism does not hinder his belief that a new peasantry, not born, but becoming such from a choice inspired by heart's hunger and a surfeit of civilisation, must have a strong redemptive value of its own among the decadent nations.

Of the earth he writes as he wrote of the stern tender woman who bore him in the Forest Farm,—with a worship that makes a town-bred creature drag at his chain or break his heart to run home to her. She has never failed him, he says, in any need of spirit or flesh, nor will she ever fail her prodigals. When they come back in a hundred or a thousand years they will find her patiently waiting to teach them all the vital forgotten things over again: and, even if she take the gewgaws and lumber out of their hands, she will leave them whatever of learning she can with her ancient processes and gift of wonder transmute into wisdom.

M. E. K.