The Forest Farm: Tales of the Austrian TyrolRosegger, Peter
General
The Forest Farm: Tales of the Austrian Tyrol
Rosegger, Peter
Domestic fiction; Historical fiction; Short stories, Austrian -- Translations into English; Tyrol (Austria) -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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