y handy. In the lack of these weapons, each man assumes any that
chance may offer. Indeed, for this purpose even articles of household
furniture, such as tables and chairs, are robbed of their supports. In
high favor are also the constituent parts of garden inclosures. Before
the beginning of the conflict the battle song resounds. It is not as
though human throats, but rather as though the spirit of war were
singing. They essay chiefly the formation of wild sounds, and close
their eyes as though thereby to reinforce their utterance. They fight
without a preconsidered plan of battle, each at the place that he
occupies. Of shields they make no employment. The head is deemed a
natural protection, which meets the shock of the attacking enemy and
guards the rest of the body. Many even use the head for the purposes of
attack, when other weapons fail.

In this ridicule of savage pugnacity one cannot fail to see the secret
love of the writer for the uncouth power of his sound-hearted and
sound-limbed compatriots. This same love explains the contempt in which
Thoma holds the sentimental depiction of parlor peasants which is so
often met with in family magazines. He knows no glossing-over, and what
is boorish in his peasants, he leaves boorish. But more and more he has
developed from a satirist to a serious moralist of his native land. In
his stories _Wedding_ (1901) and _Matt the Holy_ (1904) the satirical
purpose predominates. But then, in his great novels, Thoma proceeds to
more serious matters. One, _Andreas Voest_ (1905), which develops to a
magnificent climax the uncompromising rebellion of a stubborn peasant
against the superior resources of a malicious priest, with the
consequent destruction of the poor victim of his own sense of justice,
might be compared with Kleist's masterly narrative _Michael Kohlhaas_,
if in the treatment of the antagonist Kleist's incorruptible
objectivity were not lacking and the whole did not, therefore,
ultimately turn into pleading for a cause. But when satire fails to
amuse for bitterness, and humor fails to conciliate, the pictures
become almost too gloomy and the moral purpose too obtrusive. Thus it
is in the novel _The Widower_ (1911). The folly of a lustful old
peasant who in the toils of a scheming hussy supinely looks on while
his property goes to wrack and ruin and his son becomes a murderer, is
here treated with too harsh a naturalism. The same may be said of the
drama _Magdalena_ (191