SOURCE: Pascal, Roy. “Jeremias Gotthelf 1797-1854.” In The German Novel: Studies, pp. 101-42, 312-15. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956.

[In the following essay, Pascal offers a historical and biographical perspective on Gotthelf's fiction.]

THE PARSON'S AESTHETIC

If Gotthelf is to be labelled, he must be called a realistic novelist, the first in German literature. A contemporary of Balzac and Dickens, this Swiss writer strikes off from the track of the Romantics, Tieck, Novalis, Arnim, Hoffmann, in whose work the world of fantasy takes precedence over the world of social experience and reality. He also stands in opposition, formally as well as in social attitude, to the ‘Young German’ novelists of the 1830s, with their concern for social theories. Of all contemporary German writers, Immermann comes nearest to the realistic novel in his description of peasant life and industrial conditions, but his realistic bent is fatally twisted by Romantic elements. Gotthelf's work makes a great break in the German tradition, and for this reason it is of advantage to sketch his personal situation and general philosophical outlook, which for all their peculiarity give useful pointers to the genesis and significance of realism in the novel.

Albert Bitzius, who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Gotthelf’, was born and bred in the Canton of Berne. The son of a clergyman of the Established Reformed Church, he studied theology at Berne and (for a year) at the University of Göttingen—his only period of residence outside Switzerland. After two or three rural curacies and a short incumbency in Berne, he was vicar in the lowland parish of Lützelflüh from 1831 till his death in 1854.

His adult life coincides with a period of great social transformation in his Canton and in Switzerland as a whole. In 1830 the old Bernese oligarchical system was replaced by a liberal-conservative régime, which itself was overthrown in the 1840s by a radical movement which laid the basis of the modern democracy and of a new Swiss federal constitution. All social institutions became the subject of violent political argument, including the particular concerns of parish priests, the schools, poor-law, and the Church. Gotthelf, like nearly all his contemporaries, was deeply embroiled in the public controversies. A stout supporter of the earlier liberal reforms, he became dismayed at the success of the radical revolution and the decline of piety towards secular and ecclesiastical authority. From the middle of the 1840s he threw himself heart and soul into the struggle against radicalism, and became notorious for the ferocity of his criticism of popular trends and personalities, opposing to the bitter end the compromise which established a stable liberal democracy.

Confined throughout this period to his parochial work, he sought through his novels to urge his views on a wider public. They were written, frankly and emphatically, to serve moral and practical needs as he understood them; and he was so outspoken and provocative that he was sharply criticised even by those, like Gottfried Keller, who recognised in him ‘a great epic genius’, while the half-century after his death found him unpalatable. A French study of 1913 first showed a full appreciation of his literary quality, and particularly since the publication of Walter Muschg's Gotthelf, numerous investigations, particularly by Swiss, have risen above the limitations of political or religious partisanship. Above all, the magnificent edition of his complete works and his correspondence had made his work accessible in its true form, and has provided the critical apparatus peculiarly necessary in Gotthelf's case.¹

All Gotthelf's novels were written with a direct moral purpose, and nearly all are focused on the peasants of the two Emmental parishes he knew intimately—the weakest of them, Jacob the Journeyman's Travels through Switzerland, the story of an artisan who roams further afield, shows the limitations of his knowledge and sympathy. Round a specific theme, the treatment of village paupers or schoolmasters, the blind trust in quack-doctors, the establishment of a co-operative cheese factory, there collect others, which may be reduced in the end to the essential theme of the maintenance of the peasant farm and family. He denied any purely literary ambition.² In the preface to his late novel, Zeitgeist und Bernergeist, he wrote that ‘he had entered the lists for God and the Fatherland, for the Christian home and the future of minors, knowing that his books would never be products of art’. He had scarcely been conscious of becoming a writer, he told a correspondent, ‘but the poor, the schools were at stake’.³ ‘The world pressed on me so long until it pressed books out of my head, in order to throw them at its head.’⁴ His Swiss friends begged him to moderate his attacks on institutions and persons, his German publisher advised him to cut out politics from his novels; but the polemical intention was the very raison d'être of his writing, and he would not have written had the novels not been a medium for his propaganda.

He carried on a perpetual guerrilla warfare against the ‘cultured’ classes, their aesthetic tastes and their literature. His aim was to become a ‘writer for the common people’, a ‘Volksschriftsteller’. But he saw the great weakness of the usual sort of didactic literature, made up of a dose of religion, a dose of morals, suppressing unpleasant aspects of reality, frowning on the lustier pleasures of life, and often idealising other classes, particularly the educated, as a model for the simple people. He wished to ‘enliven’ as well as instruct, to put the truth of life as fully as possible before his readers, to embrace all aspects of peasant life and other classes or institutions with which they were in contact.⁵ Half a farmer himself in his upbringing, often at loggerheads with the ‘lords of Berne’, he was so deeply persuaded of the dignity and worth of the peasant-class that he neither sought to make its manners conform to some other standard, nor feared to criticise it.⁶ As a parson he was engaged in a constant and sharp struggle with the peasantry; as a countryman he was sufficiently of the peasantry to identify himself with the values of its way of life, and to describe it ‘in its own especial peculiarity’.⁷

To these conscious motives was added a purely subjective impulse, which he noticed from time to time in retrospect. His cousin Carl Bitzius, who greatly admired his work, remonstrated with him for the bitterness with which he attacked people and types of which he disapproved, telling him that these faults lessened his influence. Gotthelf answered in a most important confession. He spoke of the frustrations that he suffered in the rigid, bureaucratic, traditionalist society of Berne:

From all sides I was lamed, held down, I could nowhere find an outlet for free activity. If I could have worked it off by riding, if I could have gone riding every second day, I would never have taken to writing. I now understand that a wild life was surging in me, of which no-one had an inkling. … This life was bound either to consume me or to break out in some way. It broke out in writing.

And he adds that only now does he notice that the heroes of his first two novels, The Mirror of Peasants and The Schoolmaster, are, like himself, ‘thwarted characters’.⁸

To this recognition that his works were not the calculated outcome of a merely moral impulse, but issued out of his own inner turmoil, was added in course of time a further discovery about himself. It is best illustrated by his comment on Anne Bäbi Jowäger. This novel was begun at the request of the Berne Medical Commission, which asked Gotthelf to write a book attacking the common belief in quack doctors, and it sets out to show what damage arises from this habit of mind. But, even from the start of the book, other themes enter in: the harm of false types of religion, the dangers of narrow-minded obsessions, even the value of certain types of superstition; and all these separate themes are swallowed up in the exposition of the characters of the peasant family. When the book was finished, a two-volume work, it was too expensive to be distributed as a popular pamphlet, and in any case did not at all meet the requirements of the Medical Commission (just as so many of his other works found disfavour among Gotthelf's religious colleagues). Reflecting on this problem, Gotthelf wrote:

As soon as I set about a piece of work, a spirit comes into it, and this spirit is mightier than I, and life comes into every person, and this life claims its rights, wants to grow to full stature and assert its rights in all directions. So it happened in this story: the characters asserted their rights and swamped the actual moral intention, pushed it into the background.⁹

Gotthelf's imagination was repeatedly seized by his own creatures. In some of his works, where he was not so captivated, the moral theme dominates to the disadvantage of the work, and the characters fail to take on life, being viewed from without, over-simplified, often harshly and unsympathetically treated: this is the cardinal weakness of Jacob the Journeyman, “Der Herr Esau,” of much of Zeitgeist und Bernergeist, and several of the shorter tales. But where Gotthelf's imagination was seized, the moral theme deepens into the reality and problematic of a character and a whole life; the reader does not deduce a simple moral lesson, with the pat answers of moral superiority, but is made aware of the tangle of qualities that make up a character and a life.

This process of artistic creation produced another contradiction in Gotthelf's work which he failed to face. He wrote expressly for the people he wished to improve, peasants, labourers, villagers in general. But his novels (as distinct from his contributions to almanacs) were little read by such. His own parishioners seem only to have been obscurely and resentfully aware that their parson was using them somewhat ruthlessly as his ‘material’, while he was read above all by the educated classes.¹⁰ This was so even with the earlier works published in Switzerland; his later were published in Berlin by a liberal, Springer, primarily with German and educated readers in mind, though Gotthelf himself never ceased from his vicious digs at Germans, at the educated, at liberals.¹¹ There was then a confusion in his purpose which he never disentangled—and a most salutary one, which saved him on the one hand from an excessive utilitarian parochialism, and on the other from thraldom to the moral and aesthetic conventions of the cultured classes.

The main conscious principle of all Gotthelf's work was that it should ‘strike home’ with the people; for this reason he was contemptuous of all aestheticism and jeered at the accepted formal proprieties. His lack of artistic restraint is only too evident, and injures all his books, even the best, and not only in superficial ways. His most obvious fault is his continual moralising. He interrupts his tales with frequent moral generalisations which often develop into long digressions, even sermons. Hardly has he begun a story than the digressions come, thick and fast, often ponderous and violent. The narrative of his greatest novel, Anne Bäbi, is distressingly interrupted, in the second volume, by a series of long digressions; for instance, the account of the birth of a child is held up by thirteen pages on the whole duties of a midwife, while a little later there is a thirty-page digression on the relative functions of doctor and parson. Sometimes racily written, sometimes rhetorically unctuous, these digressions are the greatest hindrance to a wider appreciation of his quality. More serious, because more injurious to his imaginative conceptions, is the violent prejudice which leads Gotthelf to caricature certain types. Townsmen, particularly officials, are always presented in the blackest light, radicals too, even if they are peasants, schoolmasters and innkeepers often, whom he felt to be the enemies of the parson; with a true peasant's prejudice Gotthelf is often extremely harsh to farmhands, maids and artisans. His social, moral and religious preconceptions often prevent him from penetrating into these characters, and they seem to be possessed of some perverse devil. Most of the novels written in the later years of his life, when radicalism was rampant in Berne, are seriously damaged by these prejudices—the radical agitator, Eglihannes, a poor peasant, and his schoolmaster confederate in The Cheese Factory, the radicals and officials and schoolmasters in Zeitgeist und Bernergeist, are sheer caricatures; the last-mentioned novel has a viciousness in it which is destructive of art—though, like The Cheese Factory and The Peasant in Debt, it is rich in scenes and characters of the best Gotthelf quality, when his sympathy comes into play.

Gotthelf himself was confused in his conception of art. He never emancipated himself completely from the views evident in his diary of 1821, in which he identified beauty, in the popular romantic way, with the picturesque, the idyllic, the exotic. It was only duty, he said at one time, that drove him to contemporary themes; his own taste was for something more remote in time.¹² The artistic quality of his realistic novels entered in as it were by chance, without premeditation. ‘I just flopped into writing novels. … If there is anything artistic about them, it is by instinct.’¹³ His constant polemic against art is due to his identification of art with the faded romanticism of his day. Yet he recognised, too, that his more conventional historical and legendary short stories were his ‘weak side’;¹⁴ even of his best legendary tale, “The Black Spider”, which is framed within a delightful contemporary setting, he wrote that this was not ‘the right path’ for him.¹⁵

He was indeed confronted with a formidable aesthetic problem, the question of the artistic properties of the realistic novel. Most of his remarks on the beauty that he sought to represent in them show a decidedly moral interpretation of beauty. Every man, he writes, can give aesthetic delight if he expresses, in his being and actions, the spirit that ‘moves invisibly within him’. A fence skilfully made can have ‘more spirit’ than many so-called cultural products.¹⁶ Uli's skill as a worker shows that he is ‘a man with a soul’.¹⁷ A fruitful landscape, a well-tended farm, a clean and orderly house, are beautiful. Feeding pigs and painting pictures are equally noble tasks: which is the better ‘is a matter of the loyal spirit’ in which the task is done.¹⁸ In this passage Gotthelf jocularly calls the pigs ‘natural art-products’, and obstreperously takes sides for practical work against ‘art’; but underlying his thought is the belief, which he can hardly find words to justify, that pig-feeding, fence-making, hay-making, can be beautiful: that beauty arises in some manner from the satisfactory accomplishment of human duties.¹⁹ His love of the vital powers of man leads him, in conscious derision of ideals of elegance and propriety, to delight in a coarse, earthy exuberance and grotesque humour that links him with Rabelais and Fischart. He may also be associated with Dickens and Balzac in respect to the immense material richness of their imaginative worlds and their defiance of conventional artistic canons. The words of Georg Büchner might be applied to Gotthelf: ‘I demand in all things—life, vitality, and that's enough; we do not need to ask whether it is lovely or ugly.’²⁰

At the beginning of Les Paysans Balzac writes: ‘I am going to make you dream with real things’, instead of ‘delicious fancies’. This is what Gotthelf sets out to do; but he would add, ‘in order to tell you how you should behave’. He gives us a world which is in many respects a faithful mirror of actual persons and circumstances, admired as such by his contemporaries who knew the actuality. At the same time he gives us characters such as have never existed, which yet have all the substantiality of truth.²¹ With an unrivalled knowledge of peasant psychology and the ‘technique and tactics’²² of peasant life, he has created stories of entrancing ideality, which, for all their faults, have an artistic form in the whole and in the parts which arises out of the very particularity of their conception and intention. We have to seek to define the secrets of his composition and form. But first we have to enquire into the philosophical principles which drove this clergyman to construct his dreams out of the elements of actual social life, and to make an improved participation in real social activity the purpose of the aesthetic experience.

GOTTHELF'S RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK

The themes of Gotthelf's novels are always social. They grow out of the moral, psychological, religious problems and development of his characters, a development which not only takes place in a precise social and practical environment, but is shaped and proven by this environment. Moral qualities are exactly mirrored in the farm, the family and the village community; goodness or badness is expressed in the most tangible forms of well-being or disorder, prosperity or bankruptcy, harmony or discord. Thus social activities enter as a decisive element into Gotthelf's system of values; he gives them a spiritual meaning, he ‘sanctifies’ the practical world, as one critic states.²³ Just as we can find the source of Keller's realism in his materialism, so we can discover the source of Gotthelf's in his religious outlook.

As a student and a clergyman Gotthelf's chief interest was the practical work of a parish priest, primarily in a rural community. He took no part in theological controversies, except to insist that the first responsibility of the Church was to the great mass of the common people. What his actual personal beliefs were cannot be defined with precision. He knew the main trends in modern theology, particularly the ‘scientific’ school of Germany, and had studied the modernist D. F. Strauss. In a letter he darkly hints at unorthodoxy in his private opinions:

There was a time when I was a materialistic rationalist, and many would still call me so, if I were to dispute with them over Balaam's ass, and the prophet Jonah, over the corporeal begetting of Christ, the descent into Hell … Yet I am no rationalist, for such a man only recognises as true what lies within the frontiers of human knowledge. For where would faith come in, surmise? Yet I am also not among the supernaturalists, and would never defend a single so-called miracle with such and in their way … I take miracles as they are given, and use my reason neither to defend them nor to attack them.²⁴

But from the rare remarks about his private beliefs we can construct very little; and in any case to little point. What was important for Gotthelf, and is important in his work, is the religion he preached and advocated for public use. His violent opposition to village sectarians, to advocates of a more inward religion, to the modern philosophical school of theologians, was not based essentially on theological disagreement but on his conviction that these trends were harmful to the moral and practical needs and the spiritual constitution of the common people.

Gotthelf expressed his point of view several times, and with emphasis. In the letter of 1840, already quoted, he goes on to justify the established church as the outward form of a ‘firm faith’, because this form ‘represents the standpoint of the masses’ and is the avenue to the hearts of the people. It would be sin on the part of the preacher to throw his inmost thoughts among the people; he has to ‘hold to and master’ what is established ‘through the people’, and ‘bring life into it’. The people believe in Heaven and Hell; the preacher must not confuse them with more complicated thoughts.²⁵ Thus too he insisted on the necessity of ‘precise ecclesiastical forms’.²⁶

As he grew older, he identified himself more and more with the beliefs and practices of his flock—his partisanship for the traditionalist peasant grew in every way as he grew more alienated from the political movement of reform. In the earlier books, however, the dichotomy between his private and public tenets is consciously grasped and justified, most fully in the behaviour and arguments of the wise parson in The Schoolmaster. As opposed to the parson at Schnabelweide, who ignores both the practical and intellectual interests of his flock, and the rash parson at Gytiwyl, who is always alienating the peasants by his reforming zeal, the wise parson seeks to improve his flock by shrewd tactics, playing on their weaknesses, hiding his own beliefs in order bit by bit to raise the peasants out of their stupid practices and superstitious religion. Thus he tells the schoolmaster, one must not start telling the peasants about natural science, but for the time being must encourage them in their belief that the lightning is sent by God, for if they begin to doubt this sort of thing, they will start to doubt everything, and the whole structure of their morality will collapse.²⁷

To some extent, therefore, Gotthelf's religious principles, particularly as advocated in his homiletic works, in which his novels are to be included, were tactics. Yet here we discover a profound philosophical principle, which has the most direct relevance to his artistic realism. It is the most general form of his recognition of the truth and validity of the outer world. In Anne Bäbi he asserts that there are two holy books given by God to man, the Bible and life, and that true religion arises from the study of both.²⁸ The body is created by God as well as the soul, each penetrates the other, and both need equally careful tending.²⁹ Thus he sharply attacked all excessive preoccupation with the state of the soul, because it injures practical life and with that the soul itself. He shows how an ascetic vicar, with his insistence on sin and contrition, so confuses a simple woman, Anne Bäbi, that she attempts the worst crime, suicide. His continual attacks on sectaries were based on the same principle (continual attendance at prayer-meetings means that dinner is not ready to time, and family-harmony destroyed), and brought his closest friends to expostulate over his injustice to their characters and intentions.³⁰

As a result there is a forthright materialistic, secular flavour to Gotthelf's religion. Moral goodness and badness are rewarded and punished in a direct and tangible fashion in terms of material welfare; rewards come, if not as the direct outcome of hard work and piety, at any rate as ‘poetic justice’, as a gift from Heaven, through the unexpected rescuer like Hagelhans in Uli the Tenant Farmer, the salary-increase at the end of The Schoolmaster, the inheritance in The Mirror of Peasants, the nobleman in The Peasant in Debt; or as a divine punishment like the sudden death of the wicked Hans in Zeitgeist und Bernergeist. The destruction of Uli's crops by the hailstorm is taken by all the characters as a judgement of God. No wonder Keller described Gotthelf's deity as ‘the ancient weather-God’,³¹ though if we examine more closely this and similar incidents we actually see that Gotthelf is careful to show that he is defining the peasant's view, not his own, in such cases. The interweaving of the material and spiritual called forth protests of a more subtle character from Gotthelf's religious colleagues. A correspondent said no one would think the author of the novels was an evangelical clergyman; they smack of pantheism, Hegelianism!³² Religious reviewers wrote that Uli the farmhand was led by circumstances, not by principles. To the latter Gotthelf answered that this is true, but therein lies ‘the higher connection’, i.e. Uli is none the less led by God.³³ Gotthelf not only enjoyed, in a most robust fashion, the achievements and simple pleasures of peasant life, but he also, provocatively, relates them to the highest spiritual values. Thus, in Uli the Farmer, he says the call to the harvest-feast, after the hard days in the fields, is a foretaste of the call to Heaven.³⁴ Anne Mareili, after dropping in on a confirmation class, identifies her lover's home with Heaven ‘in an almost blasphemous manner’, writes a modern commentator.³⁵

It is not my concern to examine here the validity of Gotthelf's religious principles. Keller already noticed how suited his religious conceptions were to the isolated peasantry of whom he wrote. Their greatest shortcoming is that they allow for no change in the peasantry; just as Gotthelf fought bitterly to preserve the peasantry in its old-fashioned mode of life, so he fought bitterly against the new religious ideas which accompanied the modernisation of Swiss society. In his early works, indeed, he is concerned for a gradual and cautious ‘enlightenment’ of his peasants; but with the growth of radicalism, which he more and more interpreted as an anti-religious movement, he fought in the last ditch on the religious as well as the political front. It is, however, the meaning of his religious attitude in relation to his art that concerns us here. His subordination of all other considerations to the practical and social welfare of his flock, his veneration of practical life in its peasant-form, his ‘sanctification’ of practical life, is the philosophical key to his art. No other German writer describes with such love, and such truth, the whole circle of earthly tasks. He is a puritan of the true line, for whom service in this world is service to God:

Who sweeps a room as for Thy sake
Makes that and the action fine.

His realism, in all the complex meaning of the word, springs from this deep respect, this reverence, for earthly life; for all his savage intolerance and his narrowness, which prevented him from writing about other social classes with any truth or understanding, Gotthelf is inspired, with regard to the peasantry of his time and parish, with the humanism which is at the root of all the great German novelists, from Goethe to Thomas Mann. The artistic weakness of his last novels, Zeitgeist und Bernergeist and The Peasant in Debt, must in the last resort be ascribed to the weakening of his faith in man, or more exactly, of his faith in man's capacity to create social forms in which the best human powers can flourish.

THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPOSITION

Gotthelf is justly admired for the brilliance of his ‘scenes from village life’. With an intimate knowledge of rural life, he describes peasant characters, not greatly diverse, in the ever-recurring round of their lives, with an incomparable freshness and humorous tolerance. Yet his purpose was not at all to depict or explain this class to remote townsfolk; he did not, like Auerbach, deliberately exploit a new literary field. Nor did he seek out, like the Romantics, those aspects of rural life which suited certain aesthetic or metaphysical requirements. He stands firmly within peasant life, and his object is to show how this life may be made spiritually and practically a success, a moral problem of dire urgency to him as to his characters. His main novels turn on decisions of vital material and moral importance which face the main characters, through which the personality fully establishes itself. The principle of composition is the development of personality at these points of decision.

Some of his novels are weak precisely because the characters fail to develop. His first novel, The Mirror of Peasants, is unsatisfactory since the hero is too much of an ‘innocent’ to experience any great expansion or deepening of his being (like Oliver Twist or David Copperfield). In Zeitgeist und Bernergeist, the good and the bad peasant and their wives and children all lack inward development and therefore seem rigid and stereotyped. The hero of The Peasant in Debt and his wife, who earn our respect and sympathy by their hard work, owe their material failure largely to their spiritual narrowness,³⁶ and for this very reason the book fails aesthetically. Käthi the Grandmother, lacking spiritual struggle and development, inclines towards the idyll. These stories are in many ways as ‘true to life’ as the great novels; but they are more the story of circumstances than of people, they do not uncover the potential resources of the peasant character. As a rule, Gotthelf seems wisely to have reserved the short-story form, the Novelle, for tales in which the characters are set from the beginning, e.g. excellent sketches like “Hans Joggeli der Erbvetter” or “Michels Brautschau”.³⁷

The development of which Gotthelf's peasant characters are capable is strictly limited within the potentialities of their mode of life. They move, as it were, within two concentric rings, the centre of which is formed by the practical necessities of the farm and family. In the narrower ring they accomplish what is necessary to keep the farm together, to lead a life that is secured and decent. But they can break through to the wider ring, where spiritual needs greater than those of immediate material interest are tended, where the farm is seen as a trust received from the past to be delivered to the children, where marriage is not merely a practical partnership but also a spiritual companionship, where the family becomes a spiritual entity. In both cases, the characters move in a world of clear objective values, and goodness lies in conforming with material and moral necessities. Thus, in the last resort, the theme is the moral energy which this form of life engenders. In some of his characters this moral energy is perilously intense, as with Anne Bäbi, whose almost dæmonic devotion to her family turns her obstinate protective instinct into a fearful threat for her child and grandchildren; Eisi, in The Bankruptcy, has something of the same dæmonism which enables her to come unbroken through the miseries of bankruptcy. As a rule, however, Gotthelf is not capable of depicting, like Balzac, the energy of evil; evil appears usually with him as the outcome of the calculating and petty egoism of radicals, or the foolishness of a Hunghafen Hans, or the weakness of character of the malignant Joggeli and his innkeeper son. He is above all concerned with the resources of good.

In itself, skilful work and management shows this inward power, which Gotthelf unhesitatingly labels as the ‘divine’ element in man. It is Uli's skill as a farmhand, we are told, that marks him as ‘a man with a soul’ instead of a ‘clod’.³⁸ In the first chapter of Uli the Farmer, Gotthelf defines three decisive stages in a man's life, where his inner quality comes to light: first, in the choice of a mate, ‘in the struggle for which the man's divine shape first shines forth’; then, in the struggle for material prosperity, the founding of a secure family existence; then, in the resistance against crude materialism, the recognition that man exists not so much to acquire wealth as to content his soul. Thus most of his stories are love-stories: not in the sense that they lead to a conventional happy end, but in the sense that in his choice of and struggle for a wife a man shows what his quality is; thus too his stories often continue into married life where the struggle is renewed in a different form. Keller pointed out how materialistic are the calculations that lead Gotthelf's peasants to the choice of a wife.³⁹ A cash-dowry may not be essential, but the girl must be healthy, hard-working, sweet-tempered, if Gotthelf is to approve the match; and he is extremely harsh to matches which are promoted by sentiment alone. Keller added that such calculations are necessary in the peasant-class, where the woman must preside over an extremely important group of tasks. But he is wrong in suggesting that ‘love’ does not enter into these matches.⁴⁰ On the contrary, the marriages of Peter Käser, Uli, Jakobli Jowäger, Resli, Felix are true love-matches. But the love of the men is determined not by feeling which is dissociated from or at variance with their practical lives, but by a feeling whose genuineness is due to the fact that their whole disposition is shaped by the obligations and honours of peasant life. That their feeling chooses a suitable girl shows how solid and monolithic is their character.⁴¹ Their calculations are sometimes less true than their feelings, but we are not misled by their failure sometimes to think as clearly as they feel.

The two Uli novels unfold the potentialities and the problematic of peasant existence more fully than the others, for Uli, a destitute farmhand, has to win his way to independent ownership, while most of the other young heroes are well-established by birth. His own good nature leads him to respond with trust to the moral counsel and practical help of his first master, Johannes. Under his guidance he becomes an excellent worker and learns to abjure the normal pleasures of the farmhand—the inn, sports and merry-making, girls. He becomes foreman at a rich but neglected farm, and there establishes order and prosperity. With his savings he may now think of marriage, and he naturally thinks of a peasant heiress, his master Joggeli's daughter, who flirts with him, and then marries a tradesman. In a parallel situation to his, Vreneli, an illegitimate poor relation of the farmer, manages the women's side of the farm, always humiliated by the farmer and his daughter. But though they are close allies and friends, Uli does not think of marrying a poor girl like her. Both, at the end of their patience with their perverse master, decide to leave the farm. The farmer's wife, afraid for the future if they go, conceives the plan of marrying them and handing the farm over to them on lease. She takes them on a two-day excursion to Uli's old master, which itself suggests a wedding-trip. On the way she unfolds her plan, and Uli begins to see how advantageous and agreeable it is; Vreneli, more sensitive than Uli, puts up a stout resistance, for she fears that Uli's readiness is based more on calculation than on love and respect. Only on the morning after their return, when they meet at the water-trough to wash, does their feeling suddenly overcome them both. Even on the wedding-trip, Vreneli has to chide Uli for his concern with money, and though he responds to her spirit, we can detect a source of future struggle.

Uli has made his way to a ‘happy ending’ through hard work and thrift. But the second volume, written some years later, rudely shatters any sentimental illusions the reader might have nursed. After a first prosperous year, Uli shows himself over-anxious at the harvest-feast about the cost of the obligatory hospitality. He becomes obsessed by saving, and begins to cut down expenses, dismissing good workers and engaging poorer ones at lower wages. He quarrels with his wife over her freer hand, for she tries to live up modestly to the charitable obligations of a farmer's wife. He tricks a peasant over the sale of a defective beast and gets involved in a lawsuit, in spite of the plain reproofs of his wife. Vreneli at first, in her customary spirited way, keeps up her end, and they are in a fair way to becoming a ‘typical’ couple, a close-fisted, narrow-minded husband and a nagging wife. But she learns, with the help of the old farmer's wife, to be patient and gentle, and to try to influence him indirectly. He is reformed at the end, but, and this is typical in Gotthelf, only with the help of massive material allies. The peasant he has swindled curses him; and as he hastens home from the law-court, troubled in his conscience, he sees a terrible hailstorm destroy his crops and end his hope of independence. He takes it as a judgement of God, and has a nervous collapse, which is succeeded by a dangerous illness. In his slow convalescence, nursed by his wife and helped by old friends, Uli comes to see that he had almost lost the truly valuable things in his obsession with money, and he resigns himself to a new start as a humble farmhand. Then again, in true Gotthelf fashion, a deus ex machina appears. Vreneli's father, a wealthy peasant, turns up, and sets them finally on their feet; thus virtue is rewarded in the same way as Joggeli's moral failings and those of his son and daughter bring them ultimately to material distress.

It can be seen that Gotthelf in no sense attributes extravagant moral powers to Uli or Vreneli. The first effort Uli makes, to subordinate everything to his goal of becoming a peasant, almost exhausts his moral resources. These exclusive qualities of thrift and labour, so essential to the labourer, threaten the farmer, who needs something more. Uli's success as a farmhand almost fixes his character for ever, and he is rescued for a human existence only by the terrible shock of material disaster and the moral support of Vreneli and his first master. Within this framework the routine of farm life has from year to year a changing character, and appears ever fresh: his various visits to market, buying and selling beasts; the first harvest-feast as a farmhand at Joggeli's, and the first as a farmer; the excursion with Vreneli when they become betrothed, the later wedding-trip, and the trip that Vreneli makes to an old friend, when Uli goes out to meet her on her first absence from their home; the storm at hay-harvest in the first book, and the hailstorm at the end. These are not consciously contrived parallels. The life is so regular and limited in range that its incidents are necessarily repeated, but always in fresh variations because of the change in moral situation and problem.

In the earlier book, Sorrows and Joys of a Schoolmaster, Gotthelf is less successful in showing development in his main character—perhaps because the parson-schoolmaster relationship was in actual life one of extreme difficulty. Peter Käser learns to behave as is fitting in a member of his profession, but he remains to the end perky and conceited, needing sorely the help of his wife, Mädeli, and the counsel of his friends the parson and the somewhat misanthropic Wehrdi. It is Mädeli, the daughter of a ne'er-do-well cobbler, who grows spiritually. She has a high ideal of her husband's calling, and fortifies him in his best impulses. When he asks her to marry him, in desperate need of someone to wash and mend and cook for him, she shyly asks how it is that he has not wooed her in the normal way, that is, by coming to her room at night (‘Kiltgang’). He tells her that he has a higher ideal of courtship. But when her father ridicules his fancy-notions and tells him to spend the night with his daughter, Käser is ready to obey; and now it is Mädeli who insists that he goes home, and from this time it is she who takes the lead, caring for her father and malicious mother-in-law, bringing up the children, reading the Bible and asking her husband what it means, so that he has to reflect over things he has hitherto taught mechanically. Unfortunately the form of this novel is seriously damaged in two ways. The story is told by Käser in the first person, and, as Gotthelf's friends noted, this ignorant little schoolmaster makes comments which are quite out of character. And in the second volume we are taken into extensive details about school reforms in the Canton that have merely an historical interest.

In composition Anne Bäbi Jowäger is the most complex of all Gotthelf's works, and the most dramatic. Here all the characters develop, all actively contribute to a first dire crisis which is solved by the marriage of Jakobli, and beyond it to fresh crises which severely test them all. Anne Bäbi is the devoted wife and mother who rules the household with her sharp and dreaded tongue. She spoils her little son with her suffocating care, and almost kills him through her obstinate belief that his small-pox can be cured by quack remedies; he becomes a suppressed, melancholy simpleton. When a wise woman tells them that marriage will cure him, she sets about contriving a marriage that threatens disaster to them all. Terrified of the strapping would-be bride and her rapacious family, Jakobli manages to thwart his mother's plans by falling ill. With the monosyllabic support of the farmhand Sämeli, and the vociferous help of the old maid, Mädi, who thinks he really wants to marry her, he frees himself and marries a simple affectionate orphan. The father, accustomed to bear his wife's nagging in silence, rouses himself to protect the girl and his son, and Anne Bäbi becomes reconciled to this meek and cheerful daughter-in-law, whom she can favour and bully. When a child is born, she takes charge absolutely, and actually kills the child with her ignorant solicitude. Almost deranged by a young vicar's talk about sin, she attempts to commit suicide. This character develops a baleful power that almost extinguishes the life of the family; and yet she is in essence the very principle of the family. Mädi the maid is a variant of her mistress, for she too only enjoys grumbling and furious outbursts of temper, and yet she too is utterly attached to the family.

The timid, suppressed, pock-marked Jakobli takes the first step to independence almost unconsciously, escaping an unwelcome marriage by falling ill: with the same passive resistance, when the girl's relatives come to try to hold them to the contract, he and his father outwit them by the simple ruse of hiding in the farm-buildings. He can woo Meyeli only because his mother, in high dudgeon, washes her hands of any further plans, and the way in which he wooes and marries his bride gives her the worst forebodings about the treatment she will receive at the hands of his mother. Jakobli can in fact never protect her from his mother. But a process of moral development has actually been set up in him. When the first child is born, Jakobli suddenly starts to think of the future, to buy fresh stock, to build bigger middens, to acquire more fields. For the first time, to the astonishment of his father, he shows initiative. And it is characteristic of Gotthelf's truthfulness that these new interests threaten to drive everything else out of his narrow head, and he begins to neglect his wife, not noticing that she is ailing.

Meyeli is a willing, devoted girl, accustomed to serve and demanding little in return. Less robust than most of Gotthelf's ‘heroines’, and necessarily playing a minor part in Anne Bäbi's household, she develops in a way which has no parallel in Gotthelf's other novels. She gropes after something deeper than the practical relationships of the farm, and strikes up a timid friendship with the country doctor and the parson's family. This friendship cannot take her outside the peasant world; but her grief at the doctor's death reveals spiritual capacities which cannot be satisfied within the practical scope of peasant life. Gotthelf seems not to have been able to find an outward shape for these inner stirrings in Meyeli, for in the later stages of the book the novel takes us into a new sphere, that of the doctor and the parson's family, which stands somewhat apart from the main theme of the novel. The book closes abruptly as Meyeli enters the parsonage to share her grief with the parson's daughter. The ending of other books is abrupt, but in a different way. Readers often wanted to know more about the future fate of his characters, but Gotthelf felt that, having set them on a clear course, he had said enough. In Meyeli's case, however, there is a real indeterminacy; we cannot guess what will come out of these stirrings within her.⁴²

It will have been noticed that the more profound spiritual struggles take place in Gotthelf's women, and in this respect he is true to the social class he is describing. The peasant woman must have many of the characteristics of the man—she is in charge of house and maids, the provider of food, responsible for the vegetable garden, for hemp-patch and flax-patch, for the butter and eggs and pigs; in the smaller households she works in the fields, too, and sells on the market. But she is also responsible for the children, and for the poor: her spirit decides the moral quality of the home. She may become a tyrant and gossip, the variety of her tasks invites her to be a slut, her seclusion makes her ignorant. She must reckon with menfolk who are absorbed in practical tasks and have nothing gentle or subtle in their make-up; and in hardship, for instance on the loss of a child, she may easily become melancholy, or seek comfort in sectarian religion, neglecting her duties. The peculiar task Gotthelf sets his ‘heroines’ is to learn patience and forebearance, to turn from a lion to a lamb like Vreneli, without losing grip on practical duties. It is usually a hard task, needing the sustenance of sanctions and examples bearing a religious, supernatural authority. The peculiar capacity and obligation of the peasant woman provide the dynamic of the first part of Money and Spirit, which deals more expressly than any other of Gotthelf's novels with the religious element in peasant life.

The setting is a harmonious family, a wealthy and honoured peasant, slow and conservative, a wife who is active and bountiful in the traditional way, with their three grown-up children. The husband, Christen, through ignorance and an ‘aristocratic’ self-confidence, loses £250 for which he has been trustee, and he takes the damage to his property and his honour very much to heart. He urges his wife to be less open-handed with the poor, and when she persists, an alienation begins which affects the whole household. The married couple no longer repeat together the Lord's Prayer before going to sleep—communal grace and prayer are always in Gotthelf a sign and means of family unity and well-being. Both feel resentful and injured. On the Sunday before Whitsun, Christen asks for a cake with his coffee, and finds that Aenneli has given the last away to her clientèle. There is a sharp flare-up, the children take sides, and Resli, the heir, asks bitterly what people will say if they hear that they have been quarrelling again, and on a Sunday.

The word strikes home in Aenneli's heart, for in the narrow peasant community public esteem is the touchstone of personal self-esteem. What, she thinks, will people say if no one from their house goes to Church, the public meeting-place, on this Sunday before Whitsun? She goes, alone and miserable, and straightway finds comfort in being among the congregation. The parson preaches on the Last Supper, and exhorts them all to consider each meal as if it were their last. Aenneli goes home pondering what memory she would leave behind if she were suddenly to die.

Her daughter has got dinner ready, Resli is anxiously looking out for her. Christen has spent the morning dully and hopelessly turning things over in his mind. They eat in silence, each thinking the others are resentful and angry, and quickly separate. Aenneli stays in the deserted house and weeps. Roused by a chance visit, she walks round the buildings, sees how the pigs, the flax, the fruit are flourishing, gazes over the goodly fields, and reflects how all this rich beauty comes from the harmonious mingling of sky and earth; and quickly transposes the thought into that of the harmony between Heaven and man, the spiritual harmony that brings blessing to human relationships. She knows she is ‘the hinge on which the fate of the house turns’, and therefore feels that she bears the essential responsibility for the quarrel; with ‘heroic humility’ she decides to take the first step to reconciliation by reciting that night the Lord's Prayer. When the others come home in the evening, she pours out the coffee herself, serving Christen first, and giving him the skim of the milk, which he particularly likes. The atmosphere lightens, and Christen becomes so talkative that the children think he has spent the afternoon drinking. When the others have gone to bed, Aenneli goes round the house, tidies everything, locks the door, sees that the fire is out, and with a beating heart goes up to bed. After a hard struggle, likened to that in the Garden of Gethsemane, she begins to say ‘Our Father’; Christen jerks bolt upright in bed ‘as if the fire-bell had rung’, and joins in. Weeping, they beg each other's forgiveness; peace is restored.

The children discover it indirectly, for the next day Christen is always popping into the kitchen to light his pipe, while Aenneli is always running out to the stables to ask him a question. Christen tells Resli he must go to Berne market to buy some fresh stock, a tremendous privilege for the youngster, while Aenneli starts planning some new dresses for her daughter. On the Saturday evening they tell their children of the wrong they had done, and propose that they all go to Church the following morning. The parson takes as his theme the need to detach oneself from worldly goods and to prepare oneself in spirit for the next world, and they all feel the message is for them, confirming their new harmony.

What has happened? The parson (and Gotthelf) talks in religious terms; but this religious message is embodied and fulfilled in purely secular, practical terms. Aenneli, and her family, are enabled to rise above the immediate, brutish response to the situation; they are lifted out of an unreflecting routine to a high vantage-point with a far perspective. They recognise that they are members of a community; they see the farm as a whole, the year as a whole, the family as a whole. Special circumstances and rites are necessary to enable them to achieve this new and truer view: the special quality of Sunday, the solemnity of Church, the congregation, the deathly, Sunday stillness round the house, the mysterious elevation of sermon and prayer.

And what is the outcome? Immediately, the question of Resli's marriage is raised, to which the rest of the novel is devoted. Readers have often criticised the book for falling, in fact, into two unrelated halves; yet between these two halves there is the closest tie. The religious experience has not turned these peasants away from life, but to it, and in a new sense. The parents recognise that they are growing old, that they must provide for the future, that they must give way to their children. They face the reality of the whole process of life, but gladly, objectively. Aenneli indeed has a presentiment that she will soon die, and is serenely set on seeing that a new mistress shall be there to take over when she goes; the novel closes, not with the marriage of Resli, but with the death of Aenneli, at which the lovers come together: the lesson of their experience is that death and marriage are not an end or a beginning, but productive functions in the life-process of the family. This wonderfully delicate book is the fullest exposition in Gotthelf's work of the function of religion in the peasant family; it is the peasant's philosophy, through which he can rise to understand and control the totality of his life.

The title of the novel, Money and Spirit, Geld und Geist, (‘Geist’ here is a very difficult word to translate), seems at first sight less applicable to the story of Resli's courtship. Resli loves the daughter of a wealthy farmer, and their marriage is entirely suitable from a material, monetary point of view. Anne Mareili's father is a coarse, tyrannical, miserly man, who plans to marry his daughter to an old man so that his family will inherit the latter's property; the two lovers stand in opposition not to any interests of their own, but solely to an avaricious father. But, as Grob has shown, what distinguishes their love-story and gives it its peculiar delicacy is the manner in which they vary from the typical, while remaining within peasant-bounds. On their first meeting at a dance, they do not reveal the ‘famous’ names of the families to which they belong, since they wish to be taken at their own worth. Both are so deeply aware of the significance of marriage that they are slow to admit their love, and Anne Mareili confesses hers by mutely placing her hand in Resli's and bursting into tears. Her father is willing to allow her to marry him, providing a contract is signed by which Resli disinherits his brother and sister, and this Resli refuses to do, even though Anne Mareili bitterly resents his abandoning her. And only after dropping in on a confirmation class does Anne Mareili forgive him, and walk to his home to place herself unreservedly and humbly in his hands. Their marriage is the victory of youth and love, but it has a deep spirituality because it springs from the candour and moral seriousness of their characters. While it conforms with all the essential conditions of peasant life, it shows at all points a victory over the merely practical and conventional.

The later novels are coarser in fibre. Felix, of The Cheese Factory in Vehfreude, the arrogant son of the wealthiest peasant of a village, loves a poor orphan, and bit by bit his love makes him gentler and more respectful to her; but in his social behaviour he remains a tough, class-proud ‘aristocrat’ to the end. In Zeitgeist und Bernergeist all the characters are fixed from the beginning, moral superiority consists in conformity with Gotthelf's political views, and material prosperity is the crass test of morality. In The Peasant in Debt a deus ex machina (a wealthy, crusty, conservative old landowner) ensures that hard work and thrift lead to a happy end.

Individual scenes and characters are as brilliant in these novels as in Gotthelf's best. But he is so involved in denigrating radicals and politicians that he tends to be content simply with static descriptions of the ‘worthy’ peasants, as if their mode of life and character were good in itself. Our sympathy is claimed on principle, and there is only the slightest indication in Felix or Anne Marei of that deepening of character, that development of moral personality, which forms the theme and the principle of composition of the greatest novels.

THE TECHNIQUE OF GOTTHELF'S REALISM

A duality in Gotthelf's artistic quality was recognised from the first by his closest friends, for they admired both the truth of his representation of peasant circumstances and characters, and the ideality of his moral purpose and of certain of his characters.⁴³ He defined his aim as ‘to place conditions clearly and vividly before the eyes of the people’, ‘to reproduce the face of the people’;⁴⁴ yet he commonly omitted from his novels certain aspects of peasant life, and gave a subjective colouring to many others.⁴⁵ He was concerned to create exemplary characters and exemplary decisions, even though he did not cross the frontier of the possible; he was always, and emphatically, a clergyman, writing with didactic and religious intention.

But the ambiguity of his ‘realism’ arises essentially from a vulgar interpretation of this term. If realism is defined as ‘the reproduction of reality’, Gotthelf is no realist: in any case such a phrase is meaningless. Introducing a work which professed to be truthful reportage, The Floods in the Emmental, Gotthelf recognised the limitations of the realistic writer:

The author has described as faithfully as possible what he saw and heard. Those who have experienced such events know how men see with different eyes, how differently they apply colours to what they have seen. Later it is impossible to decide who has seen correctly and told correctly, and all one can do is to eliminate what bears obvious marks of delusion or deceit.⁴⁶

The problem of realism arises, however, from something else than the inevitable partiality of a particular point of view. In this very work of reportage, by far the most illuminating incident is the purely imaginary scene suggesting the drought, where a peasant, disturbed in his sleep by the disconsolate lowing of his beasts, gets up in the dark to count his savings, and sets out with a heavy heart to buy hay. It is this power of abstracting from reality, of condensing it, reducing it to a new shape, that makes Muschg say that Gotthelf ‘creates out of nothing’⁴⁷—a phrase which is patently untrue, and yet usefully calls attention to a creative activity that is common to all the great realists. It is right to call him a ‘realistic novelist’ because of his fundamental and successful effort to present to us, with a deep, often humorous tolerance, the essential characteristics, material and moral, of a social group; because he reaches after no other values than are realisable in social practice, convinced that this social world of the peasantry has a dignity worthy of all human effort. The term involves, too, his whole attitude to his art, which was not for him a means of self-purification, irrelevant indeed to any inward, personal problems he might have had, but directed with great simplicity of intention to the improvement of man within the bounds set by actuality. His artistic technique must be appraised therefore, not in the light of any aesthetic dogma, but in relation to the whole intention of his work.

It is scarcely necessary to observe that Gotthelf treats the passage of time not naturalistically, but according to the needs of his conception of the story. He can pass over a long period rapidly, and expatiate on those moments when a significant event, a significant conversation reveal a moral situation or a crisis. Nor has time for him a value in itself, he does not conceive development as a slow imperceptible growth, as it appears for instance in Wilhelm Meister. His characters are not, like those of the ‘Bildungsroman’ proper, young people who are slowly, obscurely taking shape as they grow up. They are ‘led by circumstances’, they develop through precise outer stimuli. Time is for him a process of connected events, and his theme is events, the concrete substantial events in the process of the year, in the process of a lifetime, through which the characters establish themselves in their rock-like individuality.

Though all the elements in Gotthelf's characters are observed from experience, his characters are never ordinary. These elements are concentrated, and the story is contrived so that they appear, even in their complexity, in pure and essential form. The characters possess an intensity of life which rarely if ever is met with in experience, like the characters of Balzac. Gotthelf said that there are Anne Bäbis everywhere, tyrannous, pig-headed scolds; but his Anne Bäbi is unique, she develops all the potentialities of the type, she is dæmonic. Precisely because the inner logic of her type is developed on such a scale, we come to true knowledge of all the modifications in which it ordinarily appears—just as we can best understand an experimental subject by submitting it to extreme tests. Gotthelf's method corresponds to that normal mode of judgement which leads us to recognise a unique specimen as a type: we say, ‘So-and-so is a typical grandmother’, and we mean that she combines in an extraordinary degree, exceptionally, the various qualities which are usually present only partially in the grandmothers we know. Only the exception is the type.

Similarly, the incidents of Gotthelf's tales have an intensified simplicity that is life-like yet more than life-size. Gotthelf does not attempt to describe the whole year or all the occupations of peasants, but to distil out of them what Muschg has called ‘the forces engendering and consuming life’.⁴⁸ The decisive events of peasant life are few, recurrent, and of great simplicity; but, in presenting them in their peculiar significance as moments of moral testing, Gotthelf gives them an ‘unnatural’ vividness. They absorb and develop the moral energy of his characters; through them the lineaments of personality receive their stamp: nothing in the modern novel is nearer to the spirit of the ancient epic than these incidents.

When Meyeli enters the Jowäger household, the customary formulas of greeting, the attitude at the meal, are tense with meaning and decide future relationships. In betrothal scenes, the girl's shy reserve, and then her rush of speech as she speaks of practical matters, so often repeated in minor variations, sum up that combination of self-esteem and trust that ensures that the marriage is well founded. Uli's love of his wife, in a time when it is threatened by his obsession with money, emerges without conscious expression in that scene when, missing her sorely on her first absence from their home, he goes to meet her and brings her, footsore, back home in the trap. Such scenes are too numerous to mention. They have a poetic intensity which derives from the single-minded concentration of the characters on the event which, maybe trivial in itself, demands all their attention and reveals their innermost powers. Market-days always have this importance for the peasant; in the novels they are thrilling incidents. When the inexperienced peasants of Vehfreude go to the great cheese-market at Langnau to seek a buyer for the first products of the communal cheese factory, the bustle and confusion reaches bewildering, almost terrifying proportions. So too, the subsequent delivery of the cheeses to the merchant is an event of capital importance. All the village is involved in the preparation of the horse-teams and carts, and the young peasants drive through the countryside like young heroes; the drive home develops into a chariot-race. From time to time Gotthelf jocularly compares his peasants with the Homeric heroes, and the comparison bears examination.

Gotthelf's technique in these scenes is not realistic in the vulgar sense. He simplifies or magnifies an incident in order to reveal its meaning to an individual or a community, even though the persons concerned are unconscious of its full bearing. Often, for serious or comic purposes, he allows himself exaggeration. In The Cheese Factory, Felix's protracted bargaining over the sale of a pair of horses, through which he comes into daily contact with the family of his beloved, takes on a monumental character. When Uli and Vreneli, as farmers, give their first harvest-feast, beggars and dependents come ‘snowing’ along, begging for alms and crowding round the kitchen door, and the farmhands themselves eat and drink without end. If a wealthy peasant lad is seeking a wife, the farmhouses buzz with gossip, pedlars chase here and there with messages, mothers and girls go visiting, the whole countryside is agog. Gotthelf's humour often takes a grotesque turn, like that of Rabelais or Fischart; but it is a means to reveal, with a kindly tolerance, the characteristic preoccupations and values of the class he describes.

Because these incidents are conceived dynamically, in relation to a particular moral situation, they have great variety and individuality; yet the underlying purpose of Gotthelf's art is to reveal the typical. His tales are designed as typical events, typical problems, and these again are ordered according to the actual standing of the persons: the wealthy peasant, the small farmer, the labourer, the innkeeper. Often indeed he is unduly sweeping in his summation of individuals under classes, and at times he gives maids and servants, innkeepers, religious sectaries, lawyers and townsfolk only the general abstract characteristics of a disliked type. He has a trick of style, sometimes effective, sometimes irritating, which illustrates this search for the typical. Often he gives in outline, as an ‘author's comment’, a typical occurrence; and then shows his characters conforming to the rule. He describes a peasant home on a Sunday afternoon, the wife disturbed by a visitor, her walk round the farm; and then we see how it actually happens thus.⁴⁹ The course and outcome of Gritli's spa-visit is exactly foretold.⁵⁰ In The Peasant in Debt the innkeeper describes at the beginning how ignorant peasants are cheated by sharpers, and the novel itself simply fills in this framework. Sometimes he will describe a typical reaction, and continue: ‘But it was not so with these people’,⁵¹ indicating two or more typical modes of behaviour.

Behind the vividness and individuality of Gotthelf's scenes and characters, we always discover the typical, and an examination of his style shows how consistently it serves this purpose. Take for instance the opening of Anne Bäbi Jowäger, one of the rare examples of set description in Gotthelf's novels:

Hansli Jowäger was a good sort of man, and Anne Bäbi, his wife, meant well, but in her own fashion. Hansli Jowäger still wore side-of-bacon coats, waistcoats with flaps over the pockets, and even though he did not wear knee-breeches, his trousers were slit up to the knee, and the long slit was rarely buttoned up. His hat had no high crown; but the brim was all the broader, and when he stumped it to market, he liked to rest his chin on his stick while he was bargaining for a cow. His wife Anne Bäbi did not plague him on the score of vanity. On high Sundays she wore her grandmother's wedding-dress, and she saved her own wedding-dress for her offspring. She still wore shoes with solid soles, but cut broad, so that she could hardly hang on with her toes, and she had as yet never spent a penny on fine Aargau aprons. She would be shamed, she said, to slip such a rag on, in which you could not even blow your nose heartily without it poking out on the other side. Hemp and cotton mixture, that was the foundation of a household, she used to say. Hansli Jowäger had married his Anne Bäbi only after the death of his mother, when both were well beyond thirty. He did not want to annoy his mother with a daughter-in-law, he said; everybody knows how it goes, when two stand at the same hearth. The fruit of this marriage was a son, whom they called Jakobli and held dear as their only late scion, and who was to become a paragon of virtue and piety before God and man.

The opening sentence introduces the whole character of these two peasants, not their appearance at a particular moment. Gotthelf tells us what Hansli usually wore, and adds the negative ‘he did not wear knee-breeches’ in order to associate him indirectly with an even older fashion. Straight away he describes a typical activity, bargaining for a cow at market, and a typical gesture. Hansli is a typical small peasant, shrewd in his narrow way, with rigid principles; his misguided piety to his mother foreshadows his forbearance with regard to Anne Bäbi herself, avoiding difficulties rather than meeting them. The treatment is even more selective in the description of Anne Bäbi. She sees the world as fixed for ever, is economical, shrewd in her narrow way, coarse, and her whole wisdom is summed up in a small group of practical, ever-repeated axioms.

Gotthelf uses many local and dialect terms in the passage, and reports the usual phrases of the two, which embody their wisdom. The repetition of their names gives a taste of their obstinate self-assertion. At the same time Gotthelf does not hide his identity as the story-teller; the opening phrase, with the dialect ‘uf sy Gattig’ (‘in her own fashion’), indicates his critical detachment. He approaches his tale with a characteristic sympathetic humour, and he will not be chary with direct comment, guiding our response with value-judgements even in the very adjectives he uses. The last sentence is openly satirical, with the highfalutin ‘scion’ and ‘paragon’, like the word ‘offspring’ earlier on. For all its precision, this opening paragraph does not give a mere static description. It sums up characters already shaped and established, a routine of life and work with which we are already on terms. So, we do not wait for something to happen in order to start the story off; it has already started, and the next paragraph continues, quite naturally: ‘Once, when Jakobli was two years old …’

Description and action are never separate in Gotthelf's work, as Keller pointed out.⁵² He sees all situations under the aspect of the human energies which respond to them, make them, change them. A co-operative cheese factory may not seem promising material for a novel, and in The Cheese Factory Gotthelf does not shirk factual description of its working. But his account of the co-operative contract, the choice of a site, the making of the cheeses, the daily delivery of the milk, the tensions between the cheese-maker and the peasants, the passionate discussions in each home, the buying and selling of cows, the inquisitiveness over other people's deliveries, the watering of the milk, the highlights of the sale of the cheeses and the share-out at the end of the season, all these make a drama of fascinating intensity and often uproarious humour—not to speak of the struggle between wife and husband, for with the establishment of the factory a domestic revolution took place, in that the milk was transferred from the province of the woman to that of the man.

Even the landscape is rarely described, for nature is essentially the material of the peasant's labour, not an object of contemplation. Gotthelf rudely polemised against the romantic delight in picturesque scenes of nature, considering it a typical falsification by the cultured townsfolk. A peasant, he writes, observes on a journey only the practical things—not the landscape or the tints, but the corn, beans, flax, and hemp.⁵³ Gotthelf himself, the story-teller, scarcely ever pauses to observe a scene; such short nature descriptions as he gives are very rare, and merge immediately into action; usually nature and man are mingled.

It was a cold morning, the mouth's breath seemed like heavy smoke, the snow crunched under the feet, glittered and sparkled like a field of diamonds, made the nose tight and cold, and there was scarcely any difference any longer between a delicate maidenly nose and an old brandy-nose.⁵⁴

The gathering of the hailstorm in Uli the Tenant Farmer receives exceptionally full treatment, but it does so because Uli sees it coming as he hastens homewards, anxiously measuring his pace against its speed; there is a similar artistic principle in the description of the storm when they are bringing in the hay in Uli the Farmhand, for the desperate effort to outstrip the storm brings Uli's anger with the slack farmhands to a head.⁵⁵

Nature is described as an integral part of the peasant's active experience. Gotthelf's peasants are not boors, blind to the beauty of the landscape, but they can appreciate its beauty only on very special occasions, when a particular event or situation makes them peculiarly receptive. In the peace of Sunday the peasant likes to lie on a hill, observing the fields and the mountains beyond. The quarrel with her husband makes Aenneli aware not only of the fruitfulness of the earth, but also of its beauty. In a state of acute distress, more or less ostracised by the community, Ankenbenz finds comfort in the sight of the Alps under the moon, as he returns to his home; like Aenneli he sees sky and earth as symbols and lessons of the greatness of God, but it is the beauty which drives the lesson home.⁵⁶ Occasionally there are moments of interruption in the routine of the days, visits to distant friends or wedding-trips, when the peasant lifts his eyes and sees the blue Jura on one horizon, the snow-peaks on the other, and notices the green of the grass, the cry of the migrant birds. When Uli goes with Vreneli and the farmer's wife on the decisive trip which is to end in a betrothal, the whole house is stirring early, excited, in an unusual frame of mind, and as they set out they see the Autumn landscape:⁵⁷

In a splendour of colour the withered leaves hung on the trees, in the lustre of their own evening glow; beneath them stretched the young corn, green and cheerful, playing gaily with the sparkling dewdrops which were hanging on its spikes; the sky extended mysterious and hazy over all, the mysterious womb of the wonders of God. Black crows flew over the ploughlands, green woodpeckers hung on the trees, swift squirrels ran across the road and inquisitively peeped at the passers-by from a quickly gained branch, and high in the air the snow-geese sailed in their well-marshalled triangle towards a warmer land, and strangely did their strange migratory song resound from the far height.

Enlivened by the scene, the travellers begin to speak—about the farmhouses and the crops they pass! The loveliness of the scene enters their souls without comment; its power is indicated at most by the slightly elevated vocabulary and rhythms Gotthelf uses.

The descriptions of human scenes and attitudes are likewise embedded in the action. Gotthelf's resources in this respect seem to be limitless, and every novel abounds in such scenes. He can economically choose a single central symbol for a whole situation, or can be richly expansive. The disaster of the drought in The Floods in the Emmental or The Cheese Factory is brought out by the constant lowing of the distressed cows; the tension between Uli and Vreneli appears subtly, on their wedding-trip, when they argue in friendly fashion over Joggeli's wedding-present. The conversation of Anne Bäbi flows in torrential fashion, overwhelming everything. The discussion of the peasant pair in The Peasant in Debt over the probable price of a meal is miraculously plastic, an example of innumerable conversations in Gotthelf's novels. The Bankruptcy has a whole series of customary scenes, from the funeral of the innkeeper to the selling-up of the inn—for instance, when it comes to selling the wine in the cellar, the village women crowd round the entrance, half-afraid to enter this arcanum, telling one another gruesome stories of the fabulous practices of innkeepers with their wine; they go down and forget their fears in sampling the wine. Carl Bitzius, Gotthelf's cousin and colleague, even had fears because of the brilliance of such scenes in this novel and Käthi the Grandmother. He told Gotthelf that this detail description (we might call it genre painting) should only be there for the sake of the action; too much ‘art’ of this kind would injure Gotthelf's moral purpose, it would appeal to the educated but not to the people for whom the books were written.⁵⁸ Carl Bitzius was over-simplifying the nature of Gotthelf's readers, and had far too narrow a view of his moral purpose, but this comment is valid in the general sense, and corresponds to Gotthelf's practice. These scenes never become, in the novels, an end in themselves, but are the signs and stages of a moral progress. Some of the short stories, on the other hand, seem to be almost sheer genre painting—what distinguishes “Michels Brautschau”, “Erbvetter Joggeli”, and “Wie Christen eine Frau gewinnt” from the novels is precisely the lack in them of spiritual development.

Gotthelf's technique of description is never impressionistic or naturalistic. He frequently uses general, typifying phrases like ‘a lovely house’, ‘in Sunday splendour’, etc. He allows himself the utmost freedom, selecting according to the degree of significance, terse here and expansive there, describing an action here, a gesture there, reproducing actual spoken words, reporting real or even hypothetical conversations; determined only to show the total impact of a situation on characters who themselves are creating it. His method is well illustrated by the following passage from The Schoolmaster. The schoolmaster has been appointed to a new village. On his first visit, when he briefly notices the rich meadows, the mighty houses and muck-heaps (the signs of opulence), he has asked them to send him two carts to fetch his belongings. They ignore his request and he comes, a six-hour journey, to beg for the carts. He describes his arrival:⁵⁹

I walked up to Gytiwyl and in the early morning, by one of the first houses, saw the church-warden watering a horse at the trough. In haste, and without meaning it badly, I asked if they had not received my letter, and why no-one had come. He answered, they wouldn't allow themselves to be ordered by letter; that would be a fine affair, if everyone only needed to order. If I wanted anything of them, I would have to go gently to win them over, and come myself, that's the proper way. A schoolmaster must not think he would be master in the village, they were at home there too. With that he led his horse into the stable, after it had been drying its wet nose for some time on his sleeve, and left me standing outside.

With great deliberation he filled his bucket from the bin, moistened the fodder, and emptied it, well mixed, into the manger, tidied the muck, and came out. There I addressed him again, very humbly: that was what I had come for, to ask for a cart, and he should not be angry because of the letter, I had just not had time, and thought a letter would lose no time, while I should have lost one or nearly two days. He hitched up his trousers and said, he would give a horse, and I should go to such and such, whose homes he pointed out; if they also would go, he would be agreeable. With that he went into his house, without telling me to go with him. It was the same at the second house. As I knocked on the door, someone looked through the peep-hole, but quickly withdrew his head. Probably the head knew me, and inside they began discussing what it could be I wanted, and whether they should tell me to come in or not. The wife will have said: ‘You go out to him, Hans, the sitting-room is not dusted yet, and we've only got warmed-up cabbage and sour milk, and we don't know what sort of a one he is, and so I don't want him to have his nose in everything.’ And the husband will have said: ‘He will wait I expect, I'll just finish my dinner.’ And the wife opened the peep-hole again, first to see me and then to tell me: ‘Someone's just coming.’ And while Hans slowly ate his cabbage with a fork and his curds with a spoon, and finally a piece of bread as dessert, he had to inform his inquisitive wife what could be the reason for my visit.

At last he came outside, gave me the same answer as the former, and sent me on to a third. There, a tall, stalwart woman was just carrying two pig-pails back from the stables, where she had been having her morning's pleasure over the spritely piglets and the colossal porkers, which, as the white pails demonstrated, were fed with as much cream as milk, in any case better milk than the people themselves had on their table. I am ready to bet, the wealthy gentry of Basel do not have such good cream in their coffee as about four thousand Bernese pigs have in their troughs from Martinmas to Shrovetide.

The woman was in good spirits; she had probably just tied her garters together and measured her darlings, and found that in the last month they had again gained by almost a quarter. She asked, forthrightly, ‘What would it be you're wanting?’

The schoolmaster, knowing he is at the mercy of these hard peasants, is in no mood for pictorial description. He gives the substance of the reproofs of the village magnate, indicating his slowness by the nuzzling of the horse. He watches anxiously the deliberate routine of feeding, until the churchwarden, jerking up his trousers, delivers his decision. At the next house he reports a conversation at which he only guesses, a typical conversation, not an actual one, with the typical food and unchanging ritual of eating, acutely conscious of being an outsider and dependant. At the third, it is the pig-milk which sums up the prosperity and dignity of the peasant, and again he tells us of a probable, a typical action, culminating in the abrupt question, more like a command, which issues in a long interrogation and a hospitable meal. The first conversation is given in indirect speech, with just a touch of dialect; he falls into dialect for the conversation of the second pair, using dialect even for his own words here; and Gotthelf allows himself what is really an ‘author's comment’ about the ‘rich gentry of Basel’. The whole description is active, presenting to us in different ways the helplessness of the poor little schoolmaster in face of his future masters, so self-confident and inconsiderate, yet not without hospitableness in the last resort. It tells us of an important occurrence, which not only shows the peasants in their normal behaviour and activity, but also sets the tone of his future relations with them.

The passages quoted give some idea of the quality of Gotthelf's language. It moves on several levels, not all of the same artistic quality. In his moralising digressions he is sometimes rhetorical, heavy, parsonic, using the stereotyped unctuous vocabulary and rhythms of the preacher. The same fulsomeness appears in some of his nature descriptions, where he is only too likely to speak of dew like diamonds, stars going chastely to their beds, the sun ‘drawing the curtain’ like a good mother, caressing the earth, with a plentiful addition of metaphors which turn a natural scene into the text for a sermon on God's goodness.⁶⁰ He uses many of the tricks of second-rate romanticism—the inversions, rhythm, alliteration of idyll-writers like Voss, the weak sentimentality of almanack-writers, of the poorest literary quality. In his metaphors he had a weakness for crude exotic terms like volcanoes, earthquakes, rattlesnakes, etc. Where he seeks a beautiful or pathetic effect he often betrays the fact that his conscious ideal of literary beauty belongs to the feeble romanticism prevalent in his youth.⁶¹ In addition he is often obstreperously crude and clumsy.

But often, too, even the digressions are written in a racy, imaged fashion which is delightful, salted with anecdotes or expressions which present situations and attitudes in their living movement. A short digression on the ‘sulks’ in women vividly and grotesquely evokes a whole variety of attitudes.⁶² The relations between a doctor and peasant patients are put in terms of typical behaviour.⁶³ The discussion of the general relationship of a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law is in fact a group of typical situations, and has all the vividness of a narrative.⁶⁴ Where his imagination clothes his ideas in human shape, where they take on the substantiality of actual existence, the digressions come to life and become an organic part of the story itself, enriching it with numerous parallels and variations.

His style is at its best in narrative, the narrative of the behaviour, thoughts and feelings of his characters. It is dense with material substance, like the stories, and like them full of vitality and movement: there is no clear line of construction, no purity and elegance of diction, just as there is nothing comparable with these qualities in his peasants. His sentences are usually long and tortuous, often clumsy in construction, even containing obvious faults of grammar. But at every turn, with every fresh onset of the sentence, something new in tone is added; the object is not merely more fully described, but with every addition it appears in a new light, it gains the complexity of a real, living thing and seems to have unlimited potentialities. Over and over again we seem to see a whole host of stories which might arise from a particular scene or person. This style is not only suited to the bustle of a market or a betrothal expedition. It can be reticent where need be, and a simple gesture can convey the most intimate and profound feeling. When Anne Mareili places her hand in Resli's and bursts into tears, all her trust and fear, her love and her maidenly reluctance are expressed. The wise master, Gotthelf tells us, knows that he can guide a farmhand best by an odd word of reproof or advice, dropped as they are working together, so that others hardly notice it and Gotthelf himself often uses this method.

The novels are full of direct conversation, for words are consciousness, and however limited the peasants are, they are not creatures of instinct, but rational people seeking to control life. Thus they only fully establish themselves when they speak. Scolds like Anne Bäbi are inexhaustible, of course, but at critical moments all reveal more by speech than could be described, the sly ones as well as the taciturn. Nothing is more profoundly revealing than the sudden loquacity of girls when the man they have chosen offers them marriage. Shy till then, Mädeli or Meyeli suddenly can tell, not of feelings or love, but of their lives, their experiences, with an artless eloquence that tells of their utter trust in the man, of their gladness at being wooed. They speak of material things, like Gretchen in Goethe's Faust, for it is in material things that their spirit takes shape; if Gotthelf tries to describe their feeling, he fails badly as a rule.

Many of these conversations are in dialect. Gotthelf's use of dialect is extremely free. Sometimes all the conversations are in dialect, sometimes part; sometimes dialect is used in reported speech, and it overflows too into the narrative, in odd phrases or connected sentences. He is capable of giving standard German words a Bernese twist, and he may slightly alter a dialect phrase or word to conform in some degree with standard German. Even though he made a great effort, especially in his later work, to make his books easily accessible to German readers, he could not eliminate dialect. ‘I intend never to write in dialect, and little of it may be noticed on the first twenty pages; afterwards I am forced to use it, whether I want to or no’; and he gives the reason, too: ‘I must lay Bernese German aside, I understand; but if I do, I cannot really indicate what I want to.’⁶⁵

One has only to compare conversations rendered in standard German, like many in Uli the Farmhand, and those in dialect, to see the justice of Gotthelf's preference for dialect. He himself produced standard-German versions of Uli and The Schoolmaster which are feeble counterfeits of the originals; his occasional ‘translations’ of dialect words are clumsy and weak. He does not use dialect for folkloristic reasons, for though he transcribes the dialect accurately he often wilfully distorts it, and, as he said, would have liked to standardise it all. But as soon as the peasants speak differently, they become different people, their mode of consciousness becomes distorted. One can see this even in the townsfolk of “Der Herr Esau,” whom he wishes to deride. In their contacts with the peasants their speech is given in a stilted standard German in order to contrast their whole attitude with that of the peasants; but when their speech is given in dialect, their character appears in fact, against Gotthelf's intention, to be much nearer that of the peasants. The dialect forms, syntax, idioms, as well as the vocabulary, closer to medieval German than any other High German dialect, represent a mode of consciousness essentially related to the way of life and moral values of a peasant people. Gotthelf did not write out of a ‘cultured’ interest in dialect, he had no such aim as to ‘preserve’ it; he used it because it was the living speech of the peasants of whom he wrote.

In the totality of his language, Gotthelf tried to do what few other Germans have even attempted: to marry the spoken language with the standard, and to provide a literary language which has the resonance, the plasticity, the multiple suggestiveness of actual speech. If he failed to create an integrated literary language out of the different elements at his disposal, it is because of reasons out of his control: the different rate and type of cultural and in particular literary development in different parts of Germany, the marked difference between the literary cultured language and the actual speech of the peasants, the separation of Berne and Switzerland from the Reich.

GOTTHELF AND THE EUROPEAN NOVEL

Just as the milieu of Gotthelf's novels is off the beaten track, so it is difficult to place him in any German literary tradition. The most obvious influences to be observed in his work are those of the Romantic school, particularly the lesser Swiss romantic writers. Clearly, too, he owes something to the didactic writers for the common people, particularly to Pestalozzi; and his temperament and style link him with the older sixteenth-century writers, with their enjoyment of anecdote, their robust coarseness and taste for hyperbole. Yet these relationships are more misleading than significant, for he evidently belongs most closely to the great nineteenth-century tradition of the realistic novel. The strange thing is that he seems to have been completely oblivious of his great contemporaries in this genre. He knew something of minor writers like Eugène Sue, whose themes and sensationalism he abhorred; but it is questionable whether he knew Dickens or Balzac, and there is no trace of their influence in his works. Yet he is, with all his faults, the greatest realistic novelist in German, the only one whom one inevitably compares with the great English, French, and Russians.

Such a judgement may seem to claim too much, and one must hurry to make qualifications. He is scarcely read outside Germany, and widely appreciated only within Switzerland; even here, apart from Uli the Farmhand, his works appeal only to readers of a somewhat cultivated taste. His faults are glaring and put off the more naïve reader. His moralising is direct, emphatic, ubiquitous and old-fashioned in its rigidity; and he takes it so seriously that it cannot be ignored. A great deal of imaginative tolerance is needed to remain sweet-tempered in face of his violent injustice to townsfolk, professors, lawyers, politicians, radicals and aristocrats, artisans, and his recurrent vicious jabs at Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen and Jews. If one is over-sensitive to these negative aspects of his work, he seems a pig-headed, self-willed, rampageous backwoodsman, a typical product of an out-of-the-way corner, justifying himself by denigrating everybody else. None of the other great writers was so intolerant and narrow-minded.

He is supreme in his representation of the peasantry; no other novels, of any time, can equal his in the richness, depth, inexhaustibleness of the material life and spiritual resources of the peasantry. Yet it is questionable whether even this supreme gift can put him among the greatest writers. The greatness of a writer does not depend simply on artistic accomplishment, but also on the scope of his material; and Gotthelf's sphere is narrow. It does not matter that the area of which he wrote was provincial, and a matter of a few square miles. What is more significant is that the range of idea, problem and passion among these peasants is narrow. Some of the great passions and spiritual problems, of which the great European novelists made their contemporaries conscious, are ignored by him, denigrated even, for he derides any questioning of the values of peasant life and established religion. Political ambition, love, patriotic feeling never have in his works the impassioned, often fatal intensity they may have in those of Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy; the tensions with established morality do not with him throb and vibrate as they do in Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina; to a large extent he ignores the sensitive and imaginative capacities of man. Variations from the norm are treated by him, as a rule, as the result of pettifogging calculation and aberration, not as constituent forces of life in its modern form. The struggle of poor with rich, workers with masters, as he represents it, has no urgency, no moral substance, no fatefulness in it, none of the potency already understood by Mrs. Gaskell or Kingsley or Balzac.

That these qualities are absent, whether by deliberate intention on Gotthelf's part or because of his own temperamental failings, means that his achievement is slighter than that of his great contemporaries. But it means too that he did not, like so many of their German imitators, foist alien themes and characteristics upon his peasants, that he kept to the truth of his chosen milieu, and that within this milieu he could discover, uncover, all the vital resources that belong to it, that sustain and threaten it. Loving life, and concerned to show the dignity and worth of life, to point out how it may be worthily lived, endowed with a superb mimic gift, he has created an imaginative world which interprets the real world out of which it was built. It is a world of narrow range, characterised by simple problems and moving within the confines of a few simple recurrent events; and precisely because it is so, his figures and scenes have a simplicity, clarity, and monumentality that recall the ancient epic.

Notes

1. G. Muret, Jérémie Gotthelf, Paris 1913. W. Muschg, Gotthelf. Die Geheimnisse des Erzählers, München 1931. Jeremias Gotthelf, Sämtliche Werke, 24 vols., ed. Hunziker and Bloesch, Erlenbach-Zürich 1911-54—this edition is referred to below as SW. A useful introduction to Gotthelf is H. M. Waidson, Gotthelf, Blackwell, 1953.

2. That is, in the novels. Many of his shorter tales were inspired by the aesthetic taste of popular romanticism, particularly those with a legendary or historical theme, and their literary quality is poor.

3. 1845. Briefe, SW Ergänzungsband 6, 149-50. ‘It always seems to me as if my literary work were not writing but fighting’—to the Princess of Prussia, April 1850. Briefe 8, 49.

4. 26 December 1838. Briefe 4, 288.

5. For his conception of the popular writer, see the long letter of 28 September 1843. Briefe 5, 331-5.

6. Even in his most ferocious attack on the Berne townsfolk, “Der Herr Esau,” which on the advice of friends he left unpublished, he by no means idealises the peasantry.

7. 29 December 1840. Briefe 5, 107-8.

8. 16 December 1838. Briefe 4, 279-83.

9. 30 October 1842. Briefe 5, 243. There are many similar comments in his letters about this ‘spirit’ that ‘possessed’ him, cf. Briefe 5, 35, 85, 164, 335; 6, 90.

10. He jokingly commented on the fact. Of Uli der Knecht, which was given the sub-title ‘A present for servants and masters’, he wrote that people were puzzled as to whom it was written for—‘it is not for the gentry, not for peasants, not for masters, not for farmhands’. 15 November 1841. Briefe 5, 169.

11. The Berlin publisher could offer him larger editions and royalties than any of the Swiss, and Gotthelf was interested both in driving a hard bargain and in being widely known. Muschg makes much of his love of money, to which he even attributes a pathological character. But there seems as little evidence of an obsession with money as there are grounds for attributing Gotthelf's co-operation with Springer to purely material calculations. It is not insignificant that the Berliner showed so much more tact and understanding in his handling of Gotthelf, and had a keener eye for his quality, than the Swiss.

12. 15 November 1841. Briefe 5, 167.

13. 23 March 1839. Briefe 5, 38.

14. 29 June 1846. Briefe 6, 300.

15. Die schwarze Spinne. 8 December 1842. Briefe 5, 257-8.

16. Die Armennot. SW xv, 159.

17. Uli der Knecht. SW iv, 195.

18. Erlebnisse eines Schuldenbauers. SW xiv, 126.

19. It is certain that Gotthelf would have approved the aesthetic of Ruskin and the later Tolstoy. Ruskin was a great admirer of his novels—see H. M. Waidson, ‘Gotthelf's Reception in Britain and America’, Modern Language Review, xliii, No. 2, April 1948.

20. G. Büchner, Lenz. Werke (Inselverlag), 92.

21. See the comments of his friends Pupikofer and Fröhlich, Briefe 6, 73 and 7, 182; and of Burkhalter, 6, 57.

22. Keller. Review of Uli, 1849.

23. W. Günther, Der ewige Gotthelf, Zürich 1934.

24. 27 October 1840. Briefe 5, 89-90.

25. 27 October 1840. Briefe 5, 92.

26. 7 December 1843. Briefe 5, 361.

27. Leiden und Freuden eines Schulmeisters, ii, SW iii, 281-301, 381.

28. Anne Bäbi Jowäger, ii, SW vi, 63-6.

29. 16 July 1842. Briefe 5, 227.

30. For instance, the reasonable protests of Fueter, 18 May 1842. Briefe 5, 223.

31. Keller, review of Uli, 1849, of Die Käserei in der Vehfreude, 1951, and of Der Schuldenbauer, 1855. With some justice Keller called Die Käserei ‘an excellent field-study to Feuerbach's Essence of Religion’.

32. Xaver Herzog, 1 May 1846. Briefe 6, 287.

33. 10 December 1840. Briefe 5, 101.

34. Uli der Pächter. SW xi, 39.

35. F. Grob, in his excellent study, Gotthelfs Geld und Geist, Olten 1948, 30.

36. Gotthelf's conscious attitude in this work is critical, even harsh, to Hans Joggeli and Anne Marei, and he seems not to realise how in fact he wins us for them—for instance, it is quite unnecessary that he should assure us that though the mother seems narrow-minded and faulty to the reader, she is loved and needed by her family, Der Schuldenbauer. SW xiv, 315.

37. SW xix and xx.

38. Uli der Knecht. SW iv, 195.

39. Keller, review of Die Käserei, 1851. Keller's remarks are particularly true of sketches like Michels Brautschau or Wie Christen eine Frau gewinnt.

40. Lukács repeats this charge. Deutsche Realisten des 19 Jahrh., Berlin 1951, 222.

41. Gotthelf expounds this point in Zeitgeist und Bernergeist where he states that Gretli's love for Benz is more than personal, since it sums up her whole longing to become a ‘Bäuerin’. Zeitgeist und Bernergeist. SW xiii, 82.

42. Hence the strangest misapprehensions have been held on Meyeli's character, as is pointed out by T. Salfinger, Gotthelf und die Romantik, Basel, 1945, 58-60.

43. See the letters of Pupikofer, 21 July 1844, and Burkhalter, 28 May 1844: ‘You are setting up ideals’. Briefe 6, 73 and 57.

44. To Burkhalter, 22 January 1837. Briefe 4, 223. “Der Herr Esau,” Einleitung. SW Ergänzungsband i.

45. Muschg has pointed out that the sexual perversions and crimes that Gotthelf met in the course of his parochial duties are scarcely mentioned in the novels. Gotthelf, 404. The reality of the ‘Kiltgang’ itself is glossed over in the later novels.

46. Die Wassernot, Vorwort. SW xv.

47. Muschg, Gotthelf 260.

48. Muschg, Gotthelf 237.

49. Geld und Geist. SW vii, 86.

50. Zeitgeist und Bernergeist. SW xiii, 244-5.

51. Der Geldstag. SW viii, 57. This negative procedure lends itself rather too readily to direct moralising.

52. In the obituary article, 1855, attached to his review of Der Schuldenbauer.

53. Wie Christen eine Frau gewinnt. SW xviii, 419-20. Similarly Die Käserei. SW xii, 395.

54. Anne Bäbi, ii. SW vi, 386.

55. Uli der Pächter. SW xi, 304-5; Uli der Knecht. SW iv, 190-5.

56. Geld und Geist. SW vii, 88-90. Zeitgeist und Bernergeist. SW xiii, 205-9.

57. Uli der Knecht. SW iv, 310.

58. Carl Bitzius to Gotthelf, 30 January 1848. Briefe 7, 108-9. Carl Bitzius urged Gotthelf to model himself closer on the old chapbooks with their crude morality and sensational and romantic characters and incidents. The romantic and mysterious Hagelhans of Uli der Pächter was much to his taste, ibid., 230-1.

59. Leiden und Freuden eines Schulmeisters, i. SW ii, 320-2.

60. See for instance the descriptions in Uli der Knecht. SW iv, 369-71. Zeitgeist und Bernergeist. SW xiii, 205-10.

61. T. Salfinger gives a useful analysis of the Romantic elements in Gotthelf's style, Gotthelf und die Romantik, Basel 1945, 89-106. Muschg's analysis of style and language is very helpful, Gotthelf, 435-99.

62. Zeitgeist und Bernergeist. SW xiii, 96.

63. Anne Bäbi, ii. SW vi, 224-5.

64. ibid., ii. SW vi, 27-9.

65. 28 September 1843 and 25 February 1839. Briefe 5, 335 and 23.