and the amusing
dialect story, "Ei Faarleg Friing" (A Dangerous Wooing), also belong to
this delightful collection. These little masterpieces of concise
story-telling have been included in the popular two-volume edition of
"Fortaellinger," which contains also "The Fisher-maiden" (1867-68), the
exquisite story, "The Bridal March" (1872), originally written as text
to three of Tidemand's paintings, and a vigorous bit of disguised
autobiography, "Blakken," of which not the author but a horse is the
ostensible hero.

[3] Austin Dobson's poem, "The Cradle."

The descriptive name for all these tales, except the last, is idyl. It
was, indeed, the period when all Europe (outside the British empire) was
viewing the hardy sons of the soil through poetic spectacles. In Germany
Auerbach had, in his "Black Forest Village Tales" (1843, 1853, 1854),
discarded the healthful but unflattering realism of Jeremias Gotthelf
(1797-1854), and chosen, with a half-didactic purpose, to contrast the
peasant's honest rudeness and straightforwardness with the refined
sophistication and hypocrisy of the higher classes. George Sand, with
her beautiful Utopian genius, poured forth a torrent of rural narrative
of a crystalline limpidity ("Mouny Robin," "La Mare au Diable," "La
Petite Fadette," etc., 1841-1849), which is as far removed from the
turbid stream of Balzac ("Les Paysans") and Zola ("La Terre"), as
Paradise is from the Inferno. There is an echo of Rousseau's gospel of
nature in all these tales, and the same optimistic delusion regarding
"the people" for which the eighteenth century paid so dearly. The
painters likewise caught the tendency, and with the same thorough-going
conscientiousness as their brethren of the quill, disguised coarseness
as strength, bluntness as honesty, churlishness as dignity. What an
idyllic sweetness there is, for instance, in Tidemand's scenes of
Norwegian peasant life! What a _spirituelle_ and movingly sentimental
note in the corresponding German scenes of Knaus and Huebner, and, _longo
intervallo_, Meyerheim and Meyer von Bremen. Not a breath of the broad
humor of Teniers and Van Ostade in these masters; scarcely a hint of the
robust animality and clownish jollity with which the clear-sighted
Dutchmen endowed their rural revellers. Though pictorial art has not,
outside of Russia (where the great and unrivalled Riepin paints the
peasant with the brush as remorselessly as Tolstoi and Dostoyefski with
the pen),