jamin Vautier
The Bath. By Benjamin Vautier
In Ambush. By Benjamin Vautier
First Dancing Lessons. By Benjamin Vautier
Fritz Reuter. By Wulff
Bible Lesson. By Benjamin Vautier
Between Dances. By Benjamin Vautier
The Bridal Pair at the Civil Marriage Office. By Benjamin Vautier
Adalbert Stifter. By Daffinger
A Mountain Scene. By H. Reifferscheid
Leavetaking of the Bridal Pair. By Benjamin Vautier
The Barber Shop. By Benjamin Vautier
Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl
An Official Dinner in the Country. By Benjamin Vautier
At the Sick Bed. By Benjamin Vautier
A Village Funeral. By Benjamin Vautier
* * * *
EDITOR'S NOTE
This volume, containing chiefly masterpieces of the Novel of Provincial
Life, is illustrated by the principal works of one of the foremost
painters of German peasant life, Benjamin Vautier. These picture's have
been so arranged as to bring out in natural succession typical
situations in the career of an individual from the cradle to the grave.
In order not to interrupt this succession, Auerbach's _Little Barefoot_,
likewise illustrated by Vautier, has been placed before Gotthelf's _Uli,
The Farmhand_, although Gotthelf, and not Auerbach, is to be considered
as the real founder of the German village story.
The frontispiece, Karl Spitzweg's _Garret Window_, introduces a master
of German genre painting who in a later volume will be more fully
represented.
KUNO FRANCKE.
* * * *
THE NOVEL OF PROVINCIAL LIFE
By EDWIN C. ROEDDER, PH.D.
Associate Professor of German Philology, University of Wisconsin
To Rousseau belongs the credit of having given, in his passionate cry
"Back to Nature!" the classic expression to the consciousness that all
the refinements of civilization do not constitute life in its truest
sense. The sentiment itself is thousands of years old. It had inspired
the idyls of Theocritus in the midst of the magnificence and luxury of
the courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. It reechoed through the pages of
Virgil's bucolic poetry. It made itself heard, howsoever faintly, in the
artificiality and sham of the pastoral plays from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century. And it was but logical that this sentiment should
seek its most adequate and definitive expression in a portrayal of all
phases of the life and fate of those who, as the tillers of the soil,
had ever remained nearer to Mother Earth t
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