It is difficult tor us, perhaps, sinoe we live in a period when the literature of rural life is read by a large section of the public, to realise the slow development of what we now term variuusly ...the literature of external nature, of the soil, and of the life lived on the land. All varieties of Nature writing are appearing today, from poetry and the light essay to the novel of country life, and the phrase "return to Nature" is on many lips. To study the origin of this literature of rural lite is to note the gradual growth of a feeling for natural beauty, and its expression in literature, and in particular, the slow appreciation of the life lived by rural folk on their farms or in secluded hamlets. It might be as well, in this short discussion of rural literature, to be guided by a useful distinction made by a modern novelist, Mr. H.E. Bates, between the "earth" and the "land". In The Fallow Land he writes,(!} "The land was something more than the earth; the earth was something vague, primitive, poetic; the land was a (I) Bates, H.E., ··The Fa~low Land; !932 1 p. 7I.oomposite force of actual,living, everyday things, fields and beasts, seed-time and harvest, ploughing and harrowing, wind and weather; bitterness and struggle; the land was an opponent, a master. The earth was sweet in spring and autumn, natural, eternal, yielding flowers and loveliness. The land was eternal also, but a man worked on the land, sweating, breaking his baok, his work never done. Unlike the earth the land never rested or relented." In a sense, the literature of earth has been always with us, since natural beauty first drew men's eyes, and only the attitude or the artist towards the expression of that beauty has changed; the literature of the land is a far more recent creation. Chaucer's parade of mediaeval humanity included rural figures- the hospitable Frankelyn, the sturdy yeoman, the miller with his ribald stories, and the humble parson with his brother the ploughman- but these are rural folk away from their proper environment, off on a holiday. Chaucer was not a rural dweller himself, but like other Londoners of his time, he could welcome "faire fresshe May", knowing that the freedom of the green country lay just outside the city walls. Pier's Plowman's field full of folk in the Malvern Hills contained hones·t and dishonest agricultural labourers whose condition, then as now, seemed to need a remedy. In the general indictment of all classes of society~ the peasants have their place,and their vices are portrayed as they were later in the work .These rare but authentic pictures of country life were superseded in the century befcr e Shakespeare by the taking over into English of the pastoral tradition, and the utilization &I in it of English country settings.
