This volume containing masterpieces of Novel of Provincial Life is illustrated by Principal works of one of the foremost painters of German peasant life, Benjamin Vautier. These pictures have been so arranged s 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. 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 sentiments itself is thousands of years old. It had inspired the idylls of Theocritus in the midst of the magnificence and luxury of the courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. It made it 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 than the rest of humankind. The Village story was bound to come in the nineteenth century, even if there had been no beginning of it in earlier times, and even if it did not correspond to a deep-rooted general sentiment. The eighteenth century had allowed the Third Estate to gain a firm foothold in the domain of dignified letters; the catholicity of the nineteenth admitted the laborer and the proletarian. It would have been passing strange if the rustic alone had been denied the privilege. An especially hearty welcome was accorded to the writings of the first representatives of the new species. Internationalism, due to increased traffic, advanced with unparallel strides in the third and fourth decades. The seclusion of rural life seemed to remain the quiet and unshakable realm of patriarchal virtue and venerable tradition. The political skies were overcast with the thunderclouds of approaching revolutions; France had just passed through another violent upheaval. Village conditions seemed to offer a veritable haven of refuge. The pristine artlessness of the peasant’s intellectual, moral, and emotional life furnished a wholesome antidote to the morbid hyper culture of dying romanticism, the controversies and polemics of Young Germany, and the self-adulation of the society of the salons. CONTENTS OF VOLUME VIII “The Novel of Provincial Life.” BERTHOLD AUERBACH (Pages 10-172) “Little Barefoot.” JEREMIAS GOTTHELF (Pages 173-274) “Uli, The Farmhand.” FRITZ REUTER (Pages 275-355) “The Brasig Episodes from Ut mine Stromtid.” ADALBERT STIFTIER (Pages 356-403) “Rock Crystal.” WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL On the whole, inclusion of Riehl among the most eminent German writers of the nineteenth century is due far less to his works of fiction than to a just recognition of his primacy among historians of culture, on account of the extraordinary reach of his influence. This influence he certainly owed as much to his rare art of popular presentation as to his profound scholarship. Nevertheless the intrinsic scientific worth of these more or less popular writings vouched for by the consensus of leading historians and other specially competent judges who, regarding Riehl’s work as epoch-making and in some and in some essential aspects fundamental, recognize him as one of the organizers of modern historical science and in particular as the foremost pioneer in the exploration of the widest area within the territory of human knowledge; in fine, as the most efficient representative of the History of Civilization. Notwithstanding this rather dogmatic attitude of which, among other things, a sweeping rejection of “Women Emancipation,” was one corollary, Riehl’s organic theory of society as explicitly stated in the Civic Society has a great and permanent usefulness for our time because of its thoroughgoing method and its clear-cut statement of problems and issues. The leader of the most advanced schools of modern historians, Professor Karl Lamprecht, goes on far as to declare that the social studies of W.H. Riehl constitute the very corner stone of scientific Sociology. In this achievement, to which all of his scholarly endeavors were tributary, Riehl’s significance as a historian of culture may be said to culminate. WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL (Pages 404-478) “Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.” “Field and Forest.” “The Eye for Natural Scenery.” “The Musical Ear.” “The Struggle of the Rococo with Pigtail.” Keywords: The German Classics Volume 8, Wilhelm, Berthold, Fritz, Pigtail, Gottheld, Life, Rousseau, Riehl, Stifter, History, Field, Musical, Farmland,

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