When his first novel Der Bauernspiegel (The Peasants’ Mirror) appeared, he was thirty-nine years old, a married man with three children, and Protestant minister in the quiet village of Lützelflüh, some twenty miles to the east of Berne. His was, or appeared to be, essentially a practical temperament. He was indifferent to theoretical theology, and saw religion as something to be experienced and to be lived. Keenly interested in education, social welfare and politics, settled and happy in his family life, with a first-hand intimate knowledge of the farming community in which he worked, it might seem strange that he should turn to novel-writing and, after the publication of his first novel, pour out during the next sixteen years a varied succession of imaginative writings with a power and fluency that only ceased with his death. A man of immense vitality, he continued to be pastor of his large and scattered parish as well as to be an educationist and freelance journalist during these years, when he wrote his twelve long novels and some forty shorter tales, and in addition one extensive novel fragment, some essays and briefer works.
