The Peasants
by Translated by Professor Michael H. Dziewicki. Volume III: Spring. Volume TV: Summer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1925. 12mo. vi+326 + 286 pp. $2.50 a volume.
The Peasants continues. The reader turned from Winter, the second volume, expecting the drama to mount, assured that a great catastrophe was under way. Nothing of the sort. Like the life it pictures, the book moves nowhither with incredible slowness. Monotony is so unrelieved that we are startled to find ourselves now and again confronting passion at its height of joy or its depth of desolation. The river flows on — and, as Jusserand said of Old English literature, one doubts which way it flows.
In these days of nerve-tense fiction, where experience springs visible like electric light when one touches a button, and as swiftly lapses into the dark, Reymont’s work almost appalls by the breadth of its deliberate leisure. But it may possibly survive when our Constant Nymphs and Passage to Indias are forgotten. For its way is the way of nature after all. Life’s drama is smothered in details; it is largely composed of irrelevancies — our selective instinct supplies emphases and suppresses the irrelevant. But the art which best conveys the sense of reality gives the impression that no selective process has been at work. Such is the art of Reymont. Episode follows episode. The men are in prison, the women burdened with the heavy labor of tilling the fields; there is menace that neighboring lands will pass into the alien hands of the Germans; the Government forces a school on the reluctant people. Personal relations come to a focus, to diverge, to recombine. There is no central personage, unless it be the wanton Yagna. with her kind heart, her helpless sensuality, her impulse to create beauty. We leave her in the hideous state to which the angry justice of the village has reduced her; but we know that her sweet devastations are inevitable as the behavior of the beasts. Roch, the political agitator, holy, beloved, benevolent; Hanka, the admirable woman; the young priest; the witchlike Dominikova; the Tolstoyan brother of the squire — they arrest our attention for a moment, they disappear; the tale flows on.
We are close to the flesh in this book; and all flesh is grass. Earth is the theme, and the little creatures who cling to her are merely a transitory mood of her enduring life. The fragrance of her breathes through every page —smell is most in evidence in the sensory equipment of Reymont. They think, the peasants, that they invoke Mary as they circle their spring lands joyfully, follow ing the Cross and the chanting priest: but the ‘most beloved Mother’ whom they invoke in the hymn that ‘smote on the forest with darts of fiery jubilation’ is none other than Demeter. ‘How their eyes doated over that land, their true fostermother! Some even saluted if with doffed caps; all knelt down in spirit, mutely and fervently worshiping Her, the hallowed Her, the much desired.’ ‘O native soil, O holy soil, most holy!’ cries Hanka, bending down to kiss the nurturing earth she serves so faithfully. One questions whether these peasants are not presented as unnaturally aware of the tie that binds them to that soil. But this deep sentiment lends dignity to an existence otherwise gross enough, albeit further redeemed by reverence for labor.
Sordidness, cruelty, brutal lust - they are all present, unblurred, these evil things. Yet the chief impression of this folk-life is patience and tenderness. It is a life charged with pathos. The most powerful pages are the death-scenes; and this is as it should be, for Nature lives only as she dies under our eyes forever. The death of Borynka is a great prose-poem. Paralyzed for months, he rouses, creeps forth in the ‘charmed world of night and spring,’ gathers earth in a fold of his shirt ‘like seed corn in a sower’s bag,’ makes the sign of the Cross; then ‘bent down beneath the burden he went slowly, step by step, sowing the field with that semicircular sweep of his arm, like a priest’s benediction.’ He falls and dies, despite the mighty voice of Earth pleading with him to remain; and as he dies his eyes behold a vision of the Everlasting Father, seated on a throne of wheat-sheaves. Amazing pages! Yet even more touching is the death of old Agata the beggar. Her trembling ambition is granted; for she dies in childish delight, lying on her very own feather-bed in her very own village; dressed in a new chemise and a pair of shoes that have never been worn; dies as it had been the dream of her life to die. the real death of a notable goodwife, ‘smiling as she gazed into the depths of heaven, on the vast expanse of fields, dotted with ringing and glittering scythes and heaped with sheaves of rye heavy and ripe.’
Writing of the centre, these scenes.
VIDA D. SCUDDER