ADALBERT STIFTER (1805–1868), the son of a provincial linen weaver and flax merchant, was born in the rural Bohemian market town of Oberplan, then part of the Austrian Empire but today in the Czech Republic. When Stifter was still a child, his father was crushed under an overturned cart; the family was left poor, but Stifter’s grandfather sent him to school at the the Benedictine Monastery of Kremsmunters and he proved a brilliant student. Stifter attended the University of Vienna, where he studied law but failed to obtain a degree. Instead he supported himself as a much sought-after tutor to the children of the high Viennese aristocracy while also acquiring a small reputation as a landscape painter. For a number of years Stifter eagerly courted the daughter of a rich businessman, but his lack of worldly position turned her family against him, and in 1835 he married Amelia Mohaupt, a milliner. In 1840, he published his first story, the success of which started him on a career as a writer, and in 1850, after working as an editor on two newspapers, he was appointed supervisor of elementary schools for Upper Austria. Stifter’s works include numerous stories and novellas, as well as Witiko, a historical novel, and Indian Summer, considered one of the finest examples of the German bildungsroman. Stifter’s mental and physical health deteriorated in his final years. In 1868, suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, he committed suicide.
W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973) was born in North Yorkshire, England, the son of a doctor. He studied at Oxford and published his first book, Poems, in 1930, immediately establishing himself as one of the outstanding voices of his generation. Auden emigrated to New York in 1939, where he became a United States citizen and converted to Anglicanism. He wrote essays, critical studies, plays, and opera librettos for such composers as Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, and Hans Werner Henze, as well as the poems for which he is most famous.
ADALBERT Stifter is generally considered one of the great German stylists. The son of a linen weaver, Stifter was born in the Bohemian village of Oberplan in 1805, educated in a Benedictine monastery and at the University of Vienna and became an inspector of schools. All his life he suffered from fits of depression and anxiety; one of his adopted daughters died of typhus, the other, for no apparent reason, drowned herself in the Danube; in 1868, ill and discouraged by the public indifference to his two big novels, Nachsommer and Witiko, he cut his throat.
As might be expected from a man of his temperament, he loved tradition, order, childhood and the limpid serenity of the classical style. He never traveled without a volume of Goethe in his pocket and shared his master’s interest in natural history and geology; he was also a charming landscape painter. His prose may remind an English reader of W. H. Hudson.
The plot of Rock Crystal is simple enough. Two children walk from one mountain valley to visit their grandparents on Christmas Eve. On their way home it starts to snow; they miss the path and when night falls they are far out on a glacier. They take shelter in an ice cave and are saved from falling asleep and freezing to death by some black coffee extract their grandmother has given them to carry home, which stimulates their bodies, and by a wonderful discharge of electric flashes in the sky which excites their minds. In the Christmas morning they are found by a search party and brought down the mountainside home to their rejoicing parents.
To bring off, as Stifter does, a story of this kind, with its breathtaking risks of appalling banalities, is a great feat. What might so easily have been a tear-jerking melodrama becomes in his hands a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature.
He achieves this result by a sort of fugal repetition of descriptive details. The two valleys with their inhabitants, the road over the col past the baker’s memorial, the way up to the mountain and the glacier are first presented objectively as if to a tourist or a historian, so that the reader knows where everything is and what everybody does. He knows, for instance, that love for the daughter of the wealthy dyer of Millsdorf made the restless young cobbler of Gschaid settle down to making mountain boots, but that she, who came over the hill to marry him, is still regarded as an outsider.
The same road over the col is traveled again, and again in the daylight, but this time by young children who have never been up the mountain. Consequently, when the crisis comes, while the appearance of the mountain by night is as unfamiliar to the reader as it is to the children, he has been there before with a guide, he knows where and how they are lost, and this knowledge heightens his awareness of Conrad’s courage and common sense and Sanna’s simple faith in her brother which overcomes all fear.
Finally the story returns to the panorama from which it started, but though everything looks the same, the eye that sees them is full of memories and no longer disinterested. The mountain is not only beautiful, but dangerous and lovable because its dangers have been met with courage. The road over the col is no longer taken for granted, but is seen as a triumph of the human will to neighborliness over an indifferent or hostile nature which would keep men estranged. Home has become really home for the first time, through the experience of being lost. The community, through having responded in common to a threat to some of its members, has realized itself completely:
Only from that day on were the children really felt to belong to the village and not to be outsiders. Thenceforth they were regarded as natives whom the people had brought back to themselves from the mountain. Their mother, Sanna, was now a native of Gschaid, too.
The children, however, can never forget the mountain and earnestly fix their gaze upon it when in the garden, when as in times past the sun is out bright and warm, the linden diffuses its fragrance, the bees are humming, and the mountain looks down upon them as serene and blue as the sky above.
The translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore reads like an original: that they should have managed this with an author who, like Flaubert, worried over every word, is testimony to their patience no less than to their skill.
— W. H. AUDEN
November 1945
THE CHURCH observes various festivals that are ever dear to the heart. What more gracious than Whitsuntide: more sacred or of deeper significance than Easter. The portentous sadness of Holy Week and exaltation of the Sunday following, accompany us throughout life. One of the most beautiful of Church festivals comes in midwinter when nights are long and days are short, when the sun slants toward earth obliquely and snow mantles the fields: Christmas. In many countries the evening that precedes our Lord’s nativity is known as Christmas Eve; in our region we call it Holy Eve, the day following Holy Day, and the night between, Holy Night. The Catholic Church observes Christmas, birthday of our Saviour, by magnificent and holiest ceremonial. In most places, midnight as the very hour of his birth is solemnized by ritual of great splendor, to which the bells ring out their heartsome invitation through the still darkness of the wintry air; then with their lanterns, along dim familiar paths, from snow-clad mountains, past forest-boughs encrusted with rime, through crackling orchards, folk flock to the church from which solemn strains are pouring, — the church rising from the heart of the village, enshrouded in ice-laden trees, its stately windows aglow.
Associated with the religious festival is a domestic one. In Christian lands far and wide it is the custom to portray for children the advent of the Christ-child — a child himself, most wondrous that ever dwelt on earth — something joyous, resplendent, exalted, an ever-present influence throughout life that sometimes in old age, for one lost in sad or tender memories, revives bygone days as it passes on wings of fair colors, through the cheerless expanse of desolate night.
It is the custom to present children with gifts the Blessed Christ-child has brought; given usually on Christmas Eve when dusk has deepened into night. Candles are lit, generally a great many, that flicker together with the little wax lights on the fresh green branches of a small fir or spruce tree that has been set in the middle of the room.
The children must wait till the sign is given that the Blessed Christ-child has come and left his gifts. Only then is the door thrown wide for them to enter, and the sparkling radiance of the candles reveals objects hanging from the tree or spread out on the table, things beyond anything the children have imagined, things they dare not touch but which, after they have received them as gifts, they will carry about in their little arms and afterwards take with them to bed. If later in their dreams they hear the midnight bells calling the grown-ups to church, it will perhaps seem to them that the angelic host is winging its way across high heaven, or that the Christ-child is returning home after visiting children everywhere and bringing to each, a wondrous gift.
Next day, when Christmas comes, how festive it is early in the morning to be there in the warm room dressed in their prettiest clothes, and later when Father and Mother put on their Sunday best to go to church; or when at noon comes Christmas dinner — finer than any other in the whole year; and in the afternoon or toward evening, when friends call and, sitting about on chairs or benches, visit together as they look out at the wintry scene of falling snow or at the gray mist wreathing the mountains, or at the blood-red sun going down. Here and there about the room on stool or bench or window sill, lie the magical gifts of the evening before — now familiar and all their own.
After this, the long winter departs; spring comes, then lingering summer — and when the mother again tells the story of the Christ-child, saying that his birthday is now to be celebrated and that he will visit the earth again, it seems to the children that his last coming has been inconceivably long ago, and as though the joys of that distant time lie veiled in remoteness.
Because this festival has such enduring power over us, with an afterglow reaching even into old age, we love to be with children when they joyously celebrate Christmas.
Among the high mountains of our country there is a little village with a small but needle-fine church-spire. Conspicuous above the green of abundant fruit-trees, this spire — because the slates are painted vermilion — can be seen far and wide against the faint blue of the mountains. The hamlet nestles in the very center of a fairly wide valley that is an almost perfect ellipse. Besides the ward church, a school-house, and a parish-house, there are a few stately homes around a square with four linden-trees and a stone cross in the center. These are not simple farmhouses, but a haven of handicrafts indispensable to humanity, providing the mountain people with essential commodities. In the valley and scattered along the mountain-sides are many little huts of a sort common to such regions — whose inhabitants belong to the village, use its church and school, and support its craftsmen by buying their wares. Even more distant huts are now also part of the village, but, hidden away in the mountains, cannot be seen from the valley; the people rarely come down among their fellow-parishioners. Often, indeed, they are obliged to keep their dead with them over the winter till they can bring them to the valley for burial after the snow has melted. The great man of the village is the priest. The villagers regard him with veneration and he, after a protracted stay in the valley, usually becomes used to isolation, stays on not unwillingly, and then just goes on living there. At least since time immemorial no priest in the village has ever craved a change, none has been unworthy of his calling.
There are no highways in the valley, merely cart-roads with double wheel-tracks, along which the crops are brought home on one-horse carts. Accordingly, few strangers come to the valley; among these an occasional wanderer, a nature-lover who lives for a time in the prettily-painted upper room of the inn, enjoying the mountain-view; or possibly an artist who sketches in his portfolio the delicate church-spire and beautiful rocky peaks.
The village people thus constitute a separate world, they know one another by name and are familiar with all the grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ tales. All mourn when anyone dies; all know the name of the new-born; they speak a language which is different from that used in the plain; they have their quarrels and settle them; they help one another, and if anything unusual happens, come flocking together.
They are steadfast, ever adhering to the ancient ways. If a stone is dislodged from a wall, that very stone is put back; the new houses are built like the old ones; damaged roofs are mended with shingles just like those they replace. If the cows on a farm are brindled, the calves on that farm must always be brindled; the color never changes.
South of the village you see a snowy mountain with dazzling horn-shaped peaks, rising, as it seems, from the house-tops themselves, but actually quite far away. All year round, summer and winter, there it is with its jutting crags and white expanses, looking down upon the valley. As the most prominent feature of the landscape and ever before the eyes of the villagers, the mountain has been the inspiration of many a tale. There is not a man, young or old, in the village who has not something to tell about its peaks and crags, its caves and crevasses, its streams and torrents — either something that has happened to himself or that he has heard about from others. This mountain is the pride of the village, as though the people had made it themselves, and with due respect to their honesty we can’t swear to it that once in a while they would not fib for the honor and glory of their mountain. Besides being notable in itself, the mountain is actually profitable, since on the arrival of a party of mountain-climbers to make the ascent from the valley, the villagers serve as guides; and to have been a guide — had this or that experience, known this or that spot — is a distinction which affords anyone great satisfaction. When they sit together in the common room at the inn, they are always talking about their feats and strange adventures, never failing to mention what this or that traveler said and how much he had given for their labors. The mountain also sends down from its snowy flanks streams that feed a lake in the forest, from which a brook emerges and flows merrily through the valley, driving the saw-mill, the grist-mill, and small machinery of various kinds, providing cleanliness for the village and watering the cattle. The forest tracts afford timber and also break the force of the avalanches. Through subterranean channels and loose soil at these altitudes water filters and, coursing veinlike through the valley, comes to the surface in little fountains and springs from which the people drink. And as time and again they offer strangers this unrivalled, much extolled water, they never stop to think how useful it is, accepting it simply as something that has always been there.