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 than the rest of humankind.

Not suddenly, then, did rural poetry rise into being; but while its origin harks back to remote antiquity it has found its final form only during the last century.  In this its last, as well as its most vigorous, offshoot, it presents itself as the village story—­as we shall term it for brevity’s sake—­which has won a permanent place in literature by the side of its older brothers and sisters, and has even entirely driven out the fanciful pastoral or village idyl of old.

The village story was bound to come in the nineteenth century, even if there had been no beginnings 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 unparalleled 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 thunder clouds 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 hyperculture of dying romanticism, the controversies and polemics of Young Germany, and the self-adulation of the society of the salons.  Neither could the exotic, ethnographic, and adventure narratives in the manner of Sealsfield, at first enthusiastically received, satisfy the taste of the reading public for any length of time—­at best, these novels supplanted one fashion by another, if, indeed, they did not drive out Satan by means of Beelzebub.  And was it wise to roam so far afield when the real good was so close at hand?  Why cross oceans when the land of promise lay right before one’s doors?  All that was needed was the poet discoverer.