53 



CHAPTER V. 

 The Kealistic Idyl. 



With the middle of the eighteenth century the day of a new li- 

 terary era began to dawn upon German3^ The foreign forms and 

 materials which had dominated German literature for centuries were 

 overthrown by destructive criticism and by the impetuous onsets 

 of the Storm and Stress period, whereupon followed the most 

 remarkable development of a classic national literature which 

 modern times have witnessed. In the idyl we can see the same 

 successive stages which German literature as a whole passed 

 through, namely: 1. the theory of the idyl perfected in the era of 

 criticism; 2. the rough naturalistic idyl in the Storm and Stress 

 period represented by Maler Miiller; 3. the idyl in its German 

 classic perfection, at least as to form, in the works of Voss. 



The critics immediately following Gessner, especially Schlegel^ 

 and Eamler, ^ find only words of approbation for Gessner, con- 

 sidering his style and conception of the idyl al- 

 Advance in the ,. -r, , . 



^. r^. ... most perfect. But with quickenmg literary life 



theory of the idyl. ^ i & j 



in Germany, men began to doubt whether the 

 idyl in Germany had been developed along right lines. Was this 

 idealized description of a Golden Age the highest possible devel- 



1 A. J. Schlegel in his edition of Batteux, 1751, still characterizes Scb&fer 

 dicbtuDg a,s follows: "Ihr wesentlicher Inhalt sind die sanften Empfindungen 

 eines gluckseligen Lebens, die vermittelst einer einfacheu weder heroischen noch 

 lacherlichen, sondern natiirlichen Handlung entwickelt werden, und in der fiir sie 

 gehorigen Scene, in der reizenden Scene der Natnr, aufgestellt werden." He lays 

 stress, then, upon action as the essence of the pastoral, but action that includes 

 no ordinary labor. In the second edition, 17.59, however, in the article Von dem 

 eigentlichea Gegenstande des Schilfergedichts he accepts and approves of 

 Gessner's descriptive idyls with their moral reflections as a new kind of pastoral. 



3 In the second edition of Raniler's Batteux, 1762, Ramler says that Gessner 

 had written in the true spirit of Theocritus: "Man findet hier gleichg Siissigkeit , 



