THIS STUDY HAS SHOWN that Johann Christoph Gottsched's prescriptions about “poetische Schäfer,” harmony, and virtue as the characteristics of good pastoral hardly led to unanimity among writers of German pastoral. Certainly, there were common concerns and common tropes in circulation, but not shared positions. Even in Gottsched's time, the idea that classical sources could provide models for the future of pastoral had been firmly rejected, leading to a proliferation of forms of pastoral spanning poetry, prose, and drama. The texts we have examined show that pastoral tropes were invoked by writers in the most variable of texts, from the sentimental prose idylls of Salomon Gessner to the starkly discordant relationships of Heinrich von Kleist's writing to the sparkling wit of Johann Nestroy. For this reason, I have suggested that attempts to generalize about the nature of the German-language “Idylle” conceal as much as they convey.

For pastoral authors writing in German, the threshold between the supposedly complex, civilized world and the supposedly natural or simple pastoral world was a key point of contention. In Salomon Gessner's Idyllen (1756), the threshold between the oppressive world of urban constraint and the freedom, joy, and virtue represented by the Arcadian world proved highly unstable. Gessner wrote about physical escape from the city as a means of accessing this happy state, while also insisting that he was writing about a lost Golden Age. Gessner's idylls seemed to be accessible to readers too, through their experience of an unspoiled nature. Modern readers seemed at times able to access the idyll by sharing its sensibilities and its rejection of display and acquisition and by embracing communitarian values associated with an emergent middle class of intellectuals and poets. While Gessner's preface frames his Golden Age as a counterimage to the Zurich of his day, its final text, “Der Wunsch” offers an affirmation of the world of hierarchy as the product of providential will. Thus Gessner's idylls, which could be said to be a kind of refounding text for German-language pastoral in the eighteenth century, actually blur the line between the complex and simple, doing so in ways that elicit productive engagement for the writers who follow him.