40 GESSNER AXn THE CUIjMIXATIOX OP THE PASTORAL IIIYL. 



exception so poor and oppressed, that a realistic portrayal of 

 their condition would have attracted no attention. As Gessner 

 puts it: "Was soil der Schafer mit der Wirklichkeit wo der Bauer 

 mit saurer Arbeit unterthanig Fiirsten und Stadten den Uberfluss 

 liefern muss, wo Armuth und Unterdriickung' ihn ungesittet, 

 schlau, und niedertrachtig gemacht haben?"* ^ 



But this feeling of aversion was directed not only against 

 pastoral or peasant life; civilization as a whole was blamed for 

 having produced all the crime and unhappiness in the world. This 

 common sentiment found its best expression in the works of 

 Rousseau. Even in his first great works, - which appeared before 

 the idyls of Gessner, Rousseau appears as the great apostle of 

 freedom from the restraints of civilization, and in tones which re- 

 echoed throghout the world, preaches a return to nature. 



Gessner, m common with his contemporaries, turned away from 

 the present state of the world and of. civilization, which seemed all 

 wrong, to an ideal world which was thought of either as wholty 

 imaginary or as having existed in the past. Such periods they 

 found in an ideal Arcadia, and also in the patriarchal times as 

 pictured in the Bible stories treating of the periods before and 

 after the deluge. Especially did Klopstock and the Swiss turn 

 with religious fervor to depicting the Patriarchal Age. ^ Gessner 

 and his contemporaries entertained an unshakable belief and 

 assurance that such an ideal world had actually existed.* Was 

 not the Bible narrative in itself absolute proof that this earth had 



1 Gessner's Introduction to the idyls, p. 6i, 



'i In 1750 appeared Discours sur les sciences et les arts, which shows 

 Rousseau's "Kulturfeindliche Stimmung;"" it appears still more forcibly in his 

 Discours sur Vinegalite parmi les bowwes 1755, translated by Moses Men- 

 delssohn in the following year. 



3 Gervinus IV. 174, says: "Dass wir die Idyllen von Salomon Gessner aus 

 Ziirich auf eine Linie mit diesen Patriarchaden stellen, wird niemand wundern, der 

 die Geschichtlichen A'erhaltnisse beachtet hat. Er ging aus Klopstock hervor, 

 wie Thomson aus Milton,'" 



* Gessner writes: "Kurz, sie (die Ekloge) sehildert uns ein goldnes Weltalter, 

 das gewiss einmal da gewesen ist, denn davon kann uns die Geschichte der 

 Patriarchen iiberzeugen, und die Einfalt der Sitten, die uns Homer sehildert." 



