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

ROCK CRYSTAL

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.