2), in which a rustic Virginius makes of himself
the judge of his daughter who has fallen into a life of public shame.

The life of the closely related peasant stock of Austria has found
hardly at any other hands than those of the Tirolese Karl Schoenherr an
equally unadorned depiction. Rosegger's Styrian peasants are, in spite
of the pessimistic _Sylvan Schoolmaster_, drawn after all with much
more extenuating gentleness. More recent literary products of Styrian
writers are, however, no whit inferior in local patriotism to the works
of the still living first master. The warmest praise of his home land
has been sung by Rudolf Hans Bartsch who, born in 1873 at Graz, lived
for many years as an officer in Vienna, until in 1911 he returned
as a retired captain to his native city. After an historical novel
_When Austria Disintegrated_ (1905), which dealt with the epoch of
Forty-eight, and was reissued under the title _The Last Student_,
Bartsch celebrated his greatest triumph with the novel _Twelve Men of
Styria_ (1908), a book of inexhaustible, exuberant youthfulness and
contagious optimism. The careers of the twelve youths who meet on the
common ground of love for the beautiful Frau von Karminell, and who set
out together on the stormy path of life, are only loosely connected;
and yet the book achieves a unified effect, thanks to the wonderful
musical atmosphere which is its element, and to the pivotal position in
it of province and city: "Graz, city lost in the expanse of nature, so
still, so receptive and yet fulfilled as no other is with soft
impressiveness; the green-dreaming, tree-rustling, gentle-singing city
of Graz, animate beyond all great cities with the soul of nature." The
next novel, _The Sons of Haindl_ (1908), a collection of similar types
of character in Viennese surroundings, is too much of a repetition not
to have proved a disappointment; as was also _The German Sorrow_
(1911). In the later Viennese novels _Elisabeth Koett_ (1909) and _The
Story of Hannah and her Four Lovers_ (1914) Bartsch lost much of his
original vivacity and purity of style, and the novel _Schwammerl_
(1912), which revolves about the figure of the composer Schubert, falls
in with the vogue of that novel of the artistic life which has of late
been cultivated in somewhat routine fashion and to which--to mention
only a few names--Goethe, Schiller, Grillparzer, Lenau, Wagner, and
Heine in his last years, succumbed. Bartsch was indeed led t