Defining the Pastoral: From Idyll to Eclogue, from Theocritus to Virgil

The German idyll of the eighteenth century represents the final efflorescence of the European pastoral tradition. In contrast to the enormous vitality pastoral displayed in the previous four centuries, the success of the German idyll with Gessner is much more modest. The list of pastoral writers from the earlier period represents a virtual honor role of figures instrumental to the development of European literary culture. The allegorical tradition, sanctioned by the range and variety of the Virgilian bucolic, allowed the imagination of the humanist scholars and poets and their successors in the seventeenth century ample scope to pursue their own interests. The modern pastoral soon spread to include significant works in all genres: lyric, drama, and the novel.

The scholarly consequence of this enormous pastoral output has rightly been to focus on this period for a sense of generic definition, with of course some qualification for the link to the ancient bucolic. However, this scholarship frequently does so by adopting a critical overlay that stems from the eighteenth century and Schiller. In his busy essay Über naive und sentimentale Dichtung Schiller develops a concept of the idyllic (as the pastoral had become in his day) that is no longer based on genre but instead represents a mode. The idyllic embodies a particular configuration of the sentimental in relation to the naive.