Department of Classics, UCB

UC Berkeley

Peer Reviewed

Title:
Schiller's Naive and Sentimental Poetry and the Modern Idea of Pastoral

Author:
Alpers, Paul, University of California, Berkeley

Publication Date:
04-01-1990

Series:
Cabinet of the Muses: Rosenmeyer Festschrift

Permalink:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/25986405

Keywords:
Schiller, pastoral poetry, Empson

Abstract:
Pages 319-331 of Cabinet of the Muses: essays on classical and comparative literature in honor
of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, edited by Mark Griffith and Donald J. Mastronarde (Atlanta 1990).

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 SCHILLER’S NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL POETRY
AND THE MODERN IDEA OF PASTORAL

Paul Alpers
University of California, Berkeley

Certain topics figure prominently in most scholarly and critical accounts

of pastoral—nature, the Golden Age, idyllic landscape, innocence, and
nostalgia. For most readers, these are simply the manifest features of pastoral.
But any critical observation or interpretation involves cultural, institutional or
personal commitments. The assumption that pastoral is defined by idealized
nature and the features associated with it derives from a specific poetics, which
so far as it concerns pastoral, has its profoundest statement in On Naive and
Sentimental Poetry. Schiller provides an anatomy of modern thinking about
pastoral and enables us to see connections and implications in a way no later
criticism does.
Schiller’s account of pastoral is embedded in a general theory of poetry,
and particularly of the nature of modern poetry. Its intellectual imperatives and
cultural urgencies come from the analogy between the growth of the individual
and the progress of human history. “This path taken by the modern poets,” he
says at one point, “is that along which man in general, the individual as well as
the race, must pass.”1 Schiller represents man’s original condition—in the
childhood of the individual and historically in ancient Greece—as one of unity
within himself and with the world around him: “Sense and reason, passive and
active faculties, are not separated in their activities, still less do they stand in
conflict with one another” (193). But as man develops and civilization and art
lay their hands upon him, “that sensuous harmony in him is withdrawn, and he
can now express himself only as a moral unity, i.e., as striving after unity. The
correspondence between his feeling and thought which in his first condition
actually took place, exists now only ideally” (194). Nature, which once was
simply the world in which man found himself and acted, is now seen to be
separate from him, and presents itself as the ideal of harmonious existence
which he seeks to achieve.
To these types of man, which are also stages of development, correspond
two types of poetry, the naive and the sentimental:
In the earlier state of natural simplicity [poetry] is the
completest possible imitation of actuality—at that stage man
still functions with all his powers simultaneously as a
harmonious unity and hence the whole of his nature is
Cabinet of the Muses, ed. M. Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde, pp. 319-331
©1990 Scholars Press, ©2005 Dept. of Classics, Univ. of California, Berkeley
320 Paul Alpers

expressed completely in actuality; whereas now, in the state

of civilization where that harmonious cooperation of his
[320]whole nature is only an idea, it is … the representation
of the ideal that makes for the poet. (194)
What might appear a slippage between types of poetry and types of poet
conveys one of Schiller’s deepest insights and contributions to theory. His
attention to structures of temperament and their relation to historical and
cultural situations enables him to reject traditional generic categories of poetry
and instead to classify all poetry by modes of feeling or perception
(Empfindungsweise). Naive poetry is always characterized by simplicity,
whatever its subject or emotional level: “since the naive poet only follows
simple nature and feeling, and limits himself solely to imitation of actuality, he
can have only a single relationship to his subject” (195). From this single
relationship arises our own singleness of feeling as we read Homer and other
naive poets. Sentimental poetry, on the other hand, arouses complex feelings,
because the sentimental poet does not realize himself in his relation to actuality:
He reflects upon the impression that objects make upon him,
and only in that reflection is the emotion grounded which he
himself experiences and which he excites in us. … The
sentimental poet is thus always involved with two
conflicting representations [Vorstellungen] and perceptions
[Empfindungen]—with actuality as a limit and with his idea
as infinitude; and the mixed feelings that he excites will
always testify to this dual source. (196)
From the sentimental poet’s relation to the ideal on the one hand and
actuality on the other, Schiller derives all modes of modern poetry:
Since in this case there is a plurality of principles it depends
which of the two will predominate in the perception of the
poet and in his representation [Darstellung], and hence a
variation in the treatment is possible [as it is not in naive
poetry]. For now the question arises whether he will tend
more toward actuality or toward the ideal—whether he will
realize the former as an object of antipathy or the latter as an
object of sympathy. His presentation will, therefore, be
either satirical or it will be … elegiac; every sentimental
poet will adhere to one of these two modes of perception.
(196)
Schiller here speaks of elegiac poetry in a broad sense—as the kind of poetry in
which pleasure in [Wohlgefallen] and representation of the ideal predominate
over the sense of actuality. This broadly elegiac poetry can take one of two
forms:
Either nature and the ideal are an object of sadness if the
first is treated as lost and the second as unattained. Or both
are an object of joy represented as actual. The first yields
 Schiller and the Modern Idea of Pastoral 321

the elegy in the narrower sense, and the second the idyll.
(200)
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry has been said to “constitute the
intellectual foundation for all modern approaches to pastoral,” on the grounds
that it established modal (as opposed to traditional generic) definitions of the
various kinds of poetry.2 But the essay is more specifically a “mirror for
[321]modern critics,” as the Elizabethans might have said, because Schiller’s
categories of sentimental poetry correspond remarkably to what many critics
still describe as the uses of pastoral. Like Schiller, these critics consider a
longing for the ideal, prompted by a reaction against the ways of civilization, to
be at the heart of (pastoral) poetry. Hence when not indulging in pure
representations of the ideal (Schiller’s idyll), the pastoral sensibility will either
turn to criticism of corrupt or sophisticated ways of life (Schiller’s satire) or
will look back nostalgically to a simpler, vanished past (Schiller’s elegy). The
satiric potentialities of pastoral are a commonplace—to the extent that in some
accounts, satire is not simply an aspect or potential use of pastoral but its main
motive. And the extraordinary emphasis on the Golden Age in modern
accounts of pastoral—far beyond what is justified by ancient or even
Renaissance writers—is due to critics’ accepting a structure of relationships
which makes the elegy, in Schiller’s sense, a definitive manifestation of the
impulse at the heart of this kind of poetry.
However powerful and suggestive Schiller’s theory of modern poetry, it is
unlikely that we would accept the specific terms in which he frames it. But
pastoral still seems to us to be defined by the problem of man’s relation to
nature and the phenomena and issues which Schiller derives from it. Hence we
find modern critics channeling the general issues of On Naive and Sentimental
Poetry into the specific problematic of pastoral. Adam Parry’s well known
essay, “Landscape in Greek Poetry,” develops a framework almost identical to
Schiller’s:
Man in the youth of a culture possesses a kind of confidence
which does not allow him to feel alien from the world about
him. … As long as man, though different from the rest of
nature (using the word in a wider sense), is not of another
world from it, he will not choose nature as a whole, or
nature in a multiple aspect, to figure something of himself.
For this would involve his conceiving nature as something
other.3
Having outlined this version of the naive, Parry goes on to define the later stage
of culture and poetry:
Interest in landscape, or nature, for its own sake could be
best understood as applying to that literary art wherein man
looks to nature for something which he has not within
himself or which exists in an imperfect and adulterated
manner in his daily life. … Nature no longer tells us what
we are: it tells us what we are not but yearn to be. Pastoral
322 Paul Alpers

poetry—and romantic poetry, where it deals with nature—

fits into this category.4
The main difference between this and the original scheme of “naive and
sentimental poetry” is that Schiller’s model of nature is the child and its
maturing, whereas Parry, like most modern critics of pastoral, makes landscape
the chief representative of nature and the issues it raises. The foregrounding of
landscape is evident in the title of his essay (which as much concerns the
representation of heroes and metaphors drawn from nature) and in such other
[322]titles as “Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape,” “Vergil’s
Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience,” “Lycidas: The Poet in a Landscape,”
and “The Landscape of the Mind” (this last an important study of Neoplatonic
pastoral which says almost nothing about landscape). The modern emphasis on
landscapes and settings as the definitive conception of pastoral presumably
reflects a diminished “belief” in childhood and a continuing commitment to
imaginative worlds. Whatever its cause, the shift from childhood to landscape
has an important theoretical and interpretive consequence. It removes time and
its necessities from the model of nature and poetry, and thus conceals from us
the reasons, which were clear to Schiller, why pastoral often seems jejune or
callow.
The point of tracing these modern emphases back to Schiller is to show
that what have seemed obvious ways of understanding pastoral carry with them
a certain poetics and certain attendant emphases. It is not enough to point to the
presence in pastoral of loci amoeni and echoing woods. They are certainly
there, but they have as much to do with establishing a space for song as with
man’s relation to nature. We need a stronger explanation for the fact that
idyllic landscape—or its associated phenomenon, the Golden Age—is often
singled out as the definitive feature of pastoral. Only in Schiller’s terms can we
understand the links assumed when Parry says that pastoral appears in Plato’s
Phaedrus “in the form of both indulgence in natural beauty and criticism of
society,”5 or when Frank Kermode explains “the nature of pastoral poetry” by
moving, in the space of two pages, from “contrasts between the natural and the
cultivated” to the opposition of country and city to the Golden Age to
Juvenalian satire.6 Again, it is not that Schiller’s poetics are espoused as such,
but rather that they in effect predetermine what seem the evident features,
interests, and uses of pastoral. Once you decide that innocence or the Golden
Age or landscape is of the essence of pastoral, you are likely to be drawn into
the field of force represented by On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.
Of course it may be that Schiller’s poetics are appropriate to pastoral. But
if this is so, we must face Schiller’s own argument that pastoral is an inherently
compromised form. After developing the distinction between satire and elegy
as the two main branches of sentimental poetry, he turns to the third type, the
idyll, in which the real and the ideal come together:
The poetic representation of innocent and contented
mankind is the universal concept of this type of poetic
composition. Since this innocence and this contentedness
 Schiller and the Modern Idea of Pastoral 323

appear incompatible with the artificial conditions of society

at large and with a certain degree of education and
refinement, the poets have removed the location of idyll
from the tumult of everyday life into the simple pastoral
state and assigned its period before the beginnings of
civilisation in the childlike age of man. (210)
Schiller has a strong, even a noble sense of the way idyllic poetry expresses
dissatisfaction with modern society and the individual’s desire for harmony
within himself and with his environment. He therefore does not regard idyllic
imaginings as merely reactive or wishful. In a memorable passage, he says:
[323]All peoples who possess a history have a paradise, a
state of innocence, a golden age; indeed, every man has his
paradise, his golden age, which he recalls, according as he
has more or less of the poetic in his nature, with more or
less inspiration. Experience itself therefore supplies
features enough for the depiction [Gemälde] of which the
pastoral idyll treats. For this reason it remains always a
beautiful, an elevating fiction, and the poetic power in
representing it [Darstellung] has truly worked on behalf of
the ideal. (211)
But although the idyll has its source in human nature and the natural
history of culture, there is a “shortcoming grounded in the essence of the
pastoral idyll [Hirtenidylle; Schiller also uses the word Schäferidylle]” (211). It
can be stated in more than one way, in accordance with the various dualisms
which inform Schiller’s thought. He states it first as a conflict between past and
future. If, as he claims, the idyll is not a chimera and holds out a real human
possibility, then its effect should be to make us look to the future in hope: the
condition of harmony which it depicts is the one which civilization “aims at as
its ultimate purpose” (210). Unfortunately, by presenting a state of innocence
in the past, the idyll, precisely by affecting us, leads us backwards and “imbues
us only with a sad feeling of loss” (211). The aesthetic weakness is inherent
and necessary, because idyllic poems do not accept the necessities of time.
“The childlike age of man,” which the idyll depicts, can no more be recovered
than the actual childhood of individual men.
Schiller goes on to develop the contradictions of the modern,
“sentimental” idyll—he explicitly says that he is not concerned with the “naive”
idyll of the Greeks7—in broader historical and cultural terms:
Set before the beginnings of civilisation, [such poems]
exclude together with its disadvantages all its advantages,
and by their very nature they find themselves necessarily in
conflict with it. … Since they can only attain their purpose
by the denial of all art, and only by the simplification of
human nature, they possess together with the utmost value
for the heart, all too little for the spirit, and their narrow
range is too soon exhausted. (211)
324 Paul Alpers

Hence the value of these poems is at the same time their limitation: “We can
love them and seek them out only when we stand in need of peace, but not
when our forces are striving for motion and activity. Only for the sick in spirit
can they provide healing, but no nourishment for the healthy; they cannot
vivify, only assuage” (211).
Schiller’s analysis has a clarity and authority unmatched by any later critic
in his tradition. He gives a persuasive account of the appeal of pastoral, to
which he in no way suggests he is immune, while at the same time his sense of
its spiritual debility is as urgent, broadly based, and decisive as Dr. Johnson’s.
It is also less easily discounted than Johnson’s. Schiller’s argument brings out
and helps us understand the fact that many modern critics of pastoral find it
difficult to take their subject seriously. Bruno Snell represents Vergil’s
pastorals as “the discovery of a spiritual landscape,” prompted by the loss of the
[324]connection, which existed in the Greek city-state, between poetry and the
world of experience and action. This analysis derives, whether consciously or
not, from On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. (The second half of Snell’s essay
is devoted to Horace, whom Schiller called “the founder of this sentimental
mode of poetry” [190]). It is Schiller’s critique of the idyll which explains why
Snell does not treat the Eclogues simply as a form of modern poetry, but makes
them sound peculiarly feeble and self-indulgent:
Virgil needed a new home for his herdsmen, a land far
distant from the sordid realities of the present. … He needed
a far-away land overlaid with the golden haze of unreality.
… [Theocritus] still shows some interest in realistic detail.
Virgil has ceased to see anything but what is important to
him: tenderness and warmth and delicacy of feeling.8
Renato Poggioli, who expended so much wit and intelligence on analyzing the
pastoral ideal, had no qualms about saying that it “shifts on the quicksands of
wishful thought”:
The psychological root of the pastoral is a double longing
after innocence and happiness, to be recovered not through
conversion or regeneration but merely through a retreat
….The pastoral longing is but the wishful dream of a
happiness to be gained without effort, of an erotic bliss
made absolute by its own irresponsibility.9
Rosalie Colie praises Marvell’s “Mower” poems in the same vein:
The pastoral cannot provide a satisfactory working-model
for lives as men and women must live them, complicated
beyond help from the pastoral paradigm. Just because the
pastoral is so “useless” in interpreting human life, it is
important for its recreative, dreaming beauty all the same.10
These uneasy and condescending accounts can be referred to and explained by
Schiller not only because we still discern in pastoral the features of the
sentimental idyll, but also because we measure them by similar criteria. We
share with Schiller ideas of psychological integrity and fullness of experience
 Schiller and the Modern Idea of Pastoral 325

that make pastoral appear callow or self-indulgent, and we share a sense of the
necessities of history that makes it appear escapist.
Modern critics are of course aware that pastoral writing is urban and
sophisticated. But by accepting a Schillerian account of the essential
ingenuousness and debility of “pure” pastoral, they can speak of its
sophistication not as one of its properties, but only as a conflict with itself. One
reason for emphasizing the satiric potentialities of pastoral is to associate it with
a stronger form of poetry that is explicitly ironic and schooled by experience.
But the characteristic way of making pastoral interesting is to claim that it
undermines or criticizes or transcends itself. Thus Harry Berger speaks of
Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender as a critique of “the paradise principle.” In
terms that again remind us of Schiller, he argues that Spenser represents “the
longing for paradise as the psychological basis of the pastoral retreat from life.
This longing may be inflected toward wish-fulfilling fantasy or toward bitter
rejection of the world that falls short of such fantasy.”11 What makes The
[325]Shepheardes Calender worth our attention, in Berger’s view, is that it
takes as jaundiced a view of the paradise principle as we do and proves to be
“an ironic portrait of the tradition it claims for itself.”12 Irony is not the only
way in which pastoral can be interpreted as something other than it seems.
Allegory too has been much favored by modern critics, who often invoke the
tradition that Vergil’s Fourth Eclogue prophesied the birth of Christ in order to
justify their own abstruse or high-minded interpretations.
Such attempts to transcend the felt limitations of pastoral are once again
anticipated and prospectively analyzed in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.
The contradiction in sentimental idylls, Schiller says, is that they “implement an
ideal, and yet retain the narrower indigent pastoral world” (212). In traditional
pastoral, the poetic value of this world derives solely from the naive mode of
representation. The writer of modern idylls therefore “should absolutely have
chosen another world for the ideal” (212), which he should represent in wholly
other terms:
Let him not lead us backwards into our childhood in order
to secure to us with the most precious acquisitions of the
understanding a peace which cannot last longer than the
slumber of our spiritual faculties, but rather lead us forward
into our maturity in order to permit us to perceive that
higher harmony which rewards the combatant and gratifies
the conqueror. Let him undertake the task of idyll so as to
display that pastoral innocence even in creatures of
civilisation and under all the conditions of the most active
and vigorous life, of expansive thought, of the subtlest art,
the highest social refinement, which, in a word, leads man
who cannot now go back to Arcady forward to Elysium.
(213)
This is a call for what our leading witness of Romantic prophecy calls “strong”
poetry. Schiller’s terms are less ironized and embattled than Harold Bloom’s,
326 Paul Alpers

but his words bring to mind such Bloomian heroes as Blake, Wordsworth,
Shelley and Whitman, and he looks back to the same historical antecedent: “A
loftier satisfaction is aroused by Milton’s superb representation of the first
human couple and the state of innocence in paradise: the most beautiful idyll
known to me of the sentimental type” (212). When modern critics of pastoral
emphasize allegorical interpretation, the theme of art and nature, Edenic motifs,
and the higher flights of irony and self-reflexiveness, they assume the authority
of Romantic poetry in its heroic aspect and seek to make pastoral interesting to
it. Not all continue the Romantic tradition as frankly and grandly as Northrop
Frye, who assimilates pastoral to the mode of romance,13 and not all are as self-
aware as Harry Berger, who explicitly seeks a “strong” version of pastoral to
recuperate the “weak”;14 others, like Renato Poggioli and Frank Kermode, have
their own interesting quarrels with Romanticism. But just as accepting a
Schillerian account of pastoral leads to dissatisfaction with it, so embracing
Schillerian solutions leads to implausible claims. If “strong” poetry is our
criterion, there is no avoiding the conclusion that pastoral is “weak.”
*****
[326]The alternative to calling pastoral “weak” is to say, with William
Empson, that “the pastoral process” consists of “putting the complex into the
simple.”15 Though Some Versions of Pastoral is widely recognized as the
profoundest treatment of the subject, its coruscating brilliance and
idiosyncracies of manner have made it as difficult to use as it is easy to admire.
Empson’s view of pastoral has been regarded as either unmanageably inclusive
or narrowly social and political. It in fact lies between these extremes, wide-
ranging indeed but consistent. Empson develops an account of the central and
defining simplicity of pastoral not from the natural model of childhood and
maturity, but from a basic social situation—the encounter of “high” and “low”
persons, the sophisticated and socially privileged confronting (as courtiers and
rustics meet in Renaissance pastorals) the socially and economically humble.
Empson’s view that poetry is rhetorical and social—its permanent forces
unavoidably mediated by the realities of given societies and historical
moments—offers an alternative to Schiller’s view of poetry as psychological
and universal.
One finds ethical, social, and rhetorical emphases in some of the most
valuable interpretations of pastoral written since Empson—notably Thomas G.
Rosenmeyer’s The Green Cabinet (1969) and Richard Cody’s The Landscape
of the Mind (1969). (Note the concession to Schillerian poetics in these titles,
both of which, as Rosenmeyer in his case frankly admits, are irrelevant to the
arguments of the books.) By grounding their accounts of pastoral in intellectual
history—Epicureanism, in Rosenmeyer’s case, and Renaissance Neo-
Platonism, in Cody’s—both these studies imply a pre-Romantic poetics of
pastoral, to which not nature but certain kinds of human beings and human
experience are central. Neither of these studies considers itself “Empsonian.”
But it is Empson who provides a modern poetics that explains why attending to
the human figures of pastoral leads one to find its identifying features in
 Schiller and the Modern Idea of Pastoral 327

elements of voice, style, and representation, and why interpreters like

Rosenmeyer and Cody emphasize ethical stability in one’s present world, rather
than a yearning for one’s past.
The “versions of pastoral” Empson puts on display are everywhere
determined by the ideas encoded in the phrase “putting the complex into the
simple.” For all the variety and unorthodoxy of his examples, he is consistently
concerned with the range of suggestion and implication in apparently simple
effects, whether these are due to humble characters or to certain literary devices
or qualities of style, or to certain words and images (like the “green thought in a
green shade” that absorbs so much of his attention in the chapter on Marvell’s
“The Garden”). The Elizabethan double plot counts as pastoral because it is
“an easy-going device” that “has an obvious effect … of making you feel the
play deals with life as a whole” (25). The point of discussing Paradise Lost
under the rubric of “Milton and Bentley” is to show that Milton’s style prompts
full feeling and reflection because of qualities of suggestiveness, even
vagueness, that elude the grasp of critics who insist—like Bentley in his
notorious rewriting of the poem—that poetry be accountable to the analytic
intelligence alone. Remarks (quoted below) introducing “The Garden” and The
Beggar’s Opera emphasize poetic devices and effects that are both accessible
and inclusive. What makes “the process of putting the complex [327]into the
simple” in these works a pastoral process is shown by a characteristic they all
share. Each contains characters or images traditionally considered “simple,”
sometimes straightforwardly pastoral, to whom or which Empson’s analysis
continually returns: the comic or “low” characters in Elizabethan plays, the
“summer’s flower” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 (“They that have power to
hurt”), Marvell’s “green thought in a green shade,” Adam and Eve before the
Fall, the thieves and Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera, and “the child as
swain” in Alice in Wonderland. The account given of these figures is
continually associated with the effect and presence of the work as a whole and
with the qualities of the mind that produced and the mind that apprehends it.
The difference between these ideas and Schiller’s account of the poetic
mind is implicit in the remarks that begin the chapter on “They that have power
to hurt”:
There is no reason why the subtlety of the irony in so
complex a material must be capable of being pegged out
into verbal explanations. The vague and generalised
language of the descriptions, which might be talking about
so many sorts of people as well as feeling so many things
about them, somehow makes a unity like a cross-roads,
which analysis does not deal with by exploring down the
roads; makes a solid flute on which you can play a
multitude of tunes, whose solidity no list of all possible
tunes would go far to explain. (86)
This “solidity” might at first call to mind the unity of (complex) effect that most
of our critical forebears attribute to poetry. One of Empson’s contemporaries at
328 Paul Alpers

Cambridge tells us that Coleridge’s definition of the poet’s activity—“the

balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities, of sameness with
difference; of the general with the concrete, the idea with the image…, a more
than usual state of emotion with more than usual order”—“could have been
recited by any pupil of Richards as surely as a Presbyterian could recite the
Shorter Catechism.”16 This view of the poet implies, for the critic, that
completeness of understanding is of the essence of imaginative apprehension:
the mind that grasps the literary work holds within it all that can be relevantly
said about it. But though he was I. A. Richards’ greatest pupil, Empson does
not share this view of either poet or critic.17 The unity of a crossroads (such as
it is) is a fact of social existence, with no grounding in nature or analogy to the
human individual; the solid flute suggests the limits of the minds that write and
interpret, for of course no tune can be played upon it.
Most of the chapters of Some Versions of Pastoral begin by remarking
that the poetic forces in question lie beyond individual calculation or control.
Of “The Garden”: “The chief point of the poem is to contrast and reconcile
conscious and unconscious states, intuitive and intellectual modes of
apprehension; and yet that distinction is never made, perhaps could not have
been made; his thought is implied by his metaphors” (113). Of The Beggar’s
Opera: “Some queer forces often at work in literature can be seen there
unusually clearly; its casualness and inclusiveness allow it to collect into it
things that had been floating in tradition” (185). “Double Plots” begins: “The
[328]mode of action of a double plot is the sort of thing critics are liable to
neglect; it does not depend on being noticed for its operation, so is neither an
easy nor an obviously useful thing to notice” (25). Any individual—the writer
as well as the reader—has an essentially pastoral relation to an artwork, in that
he or she cannot, in the strong and literal sense, comprehend it all. The point
with which Empson begins the book, and which leads him to argue that all good
“proletarian” literature is “pastoral,” is that “good writing is not done unless
there are serious forces at work; and it is not permanent unless it works for
readers with opinions different from the author’s” (3). Hence “two people may
get very different experiences from the same work of art without either being
definitely wrong” (5). His reflections on the double plot lead him to say:
“Once you break into the godlike unity of the appreciator you find a microcosm
of which the theatre is the macrocosm; the mind is complex and ill-connected
like an audience, and it is as surprising in the one case as the other that a sort of
unity can be produced by a play” (66). Under these conditions, every figure in
a work and every writer and reader is in the situation represented by literary
herdsmen. The imagined unity of godlike comprehension dissolves into a
social coherence of which each person is only a part. Even the Elizabethan
hero, in Empson’s account, has “a machinery like that of pastoral” (29). (One
of the strengths of Some Versions is that, without saying a word about
Theocritus or Vergil, it grasps the historical fact that pastoral was inscribed
within and a reduction of the heroic.)
 Schiller and the Modern Idea of Pastoral 329

The difference between Empson and Schiller comes out most pertinently
in the ways they construe simplicity and hence the idea that pastoral writing
puts “the complex into the simple.” Schiller speaks of the simplicity [Einfalt]
of naive poetry, but the element of the paradoxical or problematic in Empson’s
formula—its consciousness that “in pastoral you take a limited life and pretend
it is the full and normal one” (110)—does not come into play, since by
definition the naive as a mode of representation is expressive of full human
experience. The tension between the complex and the simple emerges when
Schiller considers simplicity in real life, in a discussion of what he calls
“childish” (kindisch) and “childlike” (kindlich) temperaments and behavior
(182ff.). “Childish” behavior and character cannot compel our unreserved
assent, he says, for they are at the expense of a mature and cultured sense of
reality. Certain individuals, however, have an inner strength and innocence that
enable them to transcend considerations of the world and its ways; in their
presence, our “mockery of ingenuousness [Einfältigkeit] yields to admiration of
simplicity [Einfachheit]” (182). In a rather tortuous discussion, Schiller tries to
reserve the honorific term “naive” for those persons who are genuinely
childlike, and at one point, he represents them as pastoral figures: in their
ignoring of “the artificial circumstances of fashionable society,” he says, they
“comport themselves even at the courts of kings with the same ingenuousness
and innocence that one would find only in a pastoral society [Schäferwelt]”
(184). But his main emphasis is on heroically naive individuals—poets, artists,
even statesmen and generals; the childlike then becomes a characteristic of
genius, whose expressions are “the utterances of a god in the mouth of a child”
(187). This is as paradoxical as Empson’s “complex in simple,” but the terms
are too [329]extreme to have the humbler pole modulate the style of life or art
that expresses it. Schiller’s attitude towards human simplicity is divided
exactly as is his attitude towards the literary idyll—between uneasiness at the
limitations of the childish and admiration of the genuinely childlike, which
proves to be heroic and godlike.
Empson’s idea of simplicity in social presence and behavior has some
superficial similarities to Schiller’s. A defence of the courtly pastoralist’s
pretence of humility—that “in its full form” it is not “merely snobbish”—
sounds some Schillerian notes:
The simple man becomes a clumsy fool who yet has better
“sense” than his betters and can say things more
fundamentally true; he is “in contact with nature,” which the
complex man needs to be, so that Bottom is not afraid of the
fairies; he is in contact with the mysterious forces of our
own nature, so that the clown has the wit of the
Unconscious; he can speak the truth because he has nothing
to lose. (14)
This could be squared with Schiller’s statement that “we ascribe a naive
temperament to a person if he, in his judgement of things, overlooks their
artificial and contrived aspects and heeds only their simple nature” (184). But
330 Paul Alpers

the differences of substance are revealed in the two styles—Schiller’s

philosophical mode of ontological characterization and universal responses,
versus Empson’s flexible play between the complex man and the simple,
jumping from one to the other in the space between “clumsy fool” and “better
‘sense,’” and ending by both facing and assuming as his own the clown’s
forthright speech. Not subscribing to an ideology of Nature and childhood,
Empson can regard the simple person appreciatively, taking on some of his
stances without expecting him to resolve the divisions and dilemmas of
ordinary human experience. On the contrary, “both versions, straight and
comic, are based on a double attitude of the artist to the worker, of the complex
man to the simple one (‘I am in one way better, in another not so good’), and
this may well recognise a permanent truth about the aesthetic situation” (15).
This double attitude responds, and the aesthetic situation corresponds, to what
Empson regards as permanent conditions of life in human societies. Hence, the
pastoral process is not called into question by reality as we know it, nor is it to
be expected to transcend or transform it. Empsonian pastoral lives in the
present, because that is all it has. It can “give strength to see life clearly and so
to adopt a fuller attitude to it” (19), because it includes the self-conscious and
critical, as Schiller’s idyll (unlike other forms of sentimental poetry) does not.
One might argue, in the light of what has just been said, that Empson
conceives the modern writer as ineluctably “sentimental,” and that he therefore
offers less an alternative to Schiller than a latterday development of one aspect
of the critical system and problematic that derive from him and his
contemporaries. This is probably true, if one looks to Empson for theory and a
general poetics as such. But insofar as what matters in literature is represented
by acts of reading and practical criticism, Some Versions of Pastoral is a major
alternative to Schiller’s account of the idyll and its disabilities. The book’s
[330]strength and suggestiveness come from its accepting the imperative to
take a limited life and pretend it is the full and normal one: it gives over
visionary heroism and identifies writing and its human significance with a
fundamentally ironized mode. It makes us think differently about pastoral,
because it is a version of pastoral itself.

NOTES

1. “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” in H. B. Nisbet, ed., German Aesthetic and
Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe
(Cambridge 1985). Nisbet reprints in full (slightly modified) the translation by Julius A.
Elias (New York 1966). Parenthetical page references in the text to “Naive and
Sentimental Poetry” are to Nisbet’s volume.
2. David M. Halperin, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of
Bucolic Poetry (New Haven 1983) 43.
 Schiller and the Modern Idea of Pastoral 331

3. Adam Parry, “Landscape in Greek Poetry,” Yale Classical Studies 15 (1957) 4, 6.

4. Parry (supra n. 3) 7-8. Parry does not mention Schiller, but he is well aware of his
debt to writers in the romantic tradition, notably Wordsworth, Hölderlin, and Ruskin.
5. Parry (supra n. 3) 16.
6. Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry: From the Beginnings to Marvell
(London 1952; repr. New York 1972) 13-15.
7. Schiller does not discuss Theocritus, but he is presumably thinking of him when, in
his critique of the modern idyll (of which German poetry in the eighteenth century
provided abundant examples), he says: “What I am here criticising in the bucolic idyll
applies of course only to the sentimental; for the naive can never be lacking content
since here it is already contained in the form itself” (211). It is to Schillerian poetics, in
the main, that we owe the view of Theocritus as a realist that dominated nineteenth-
century criticism.
8. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought,
trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge, Mass. 1953) 282, 288.
9. Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral
Ideal (Cambridge, Mass. 1975) 1, 14. The phrase about the quicksands of wishful
thought is on p. 2. The easy and sophisticated Poggioli sometimes sounds simply like a
latter-day Fontenelle. But his involvement with Schiller’s problematic (he was, after all,
most importantly a critic of modern literature) is evident in his hostility to Rousseau and
his championing of Goethe. Schiller (188-89) has a striking and brilliant expostulation
with the cultured person who feels the longings Poggioli describes here.
10. Rosalie L. Colie, “My Ecchoing Song”: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism
(Princeton 1970) 41.
11. Harry Berger, Jr., “Orpheus, Pan, and the Poetics of Misogyny: Spenser’s
Critique of Pastoral Love and Art,” ELH 50 (1983) 27. This article has been
incorporated into a monograph on The Shepheardes Calender that forms the second part
of Berger’s Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley 1988).
The sentences quoted above appear at the very head of this monograph (pp. 277-78).
12. “Orpheus,…” (supra n. 11) 53. Berger has to some extent modified this view
(though for the purposes of this essay, its representative force still holds). In
Revisionary Play (supra n. 11) 282 he says, “I think pastoral that criticizes itself rather
than (or as well as) the great world is an enduring element of the mode.” But he still
[331]wants to call this metapastoral, so that the Schillerian “paradise principle” is still at
the heart of the mode.
13. For Frye’s elevation of pastoral, see Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton 1957) 141-
44, 152, 296-97.
14. “Orpheus,…” (supra n. 11) 37; Revisionary Play (supra n. 11) 349. Berger’s
championing of “strong pastoral or metapastoral,” as opposed to “the great quantity of
pastoral that … may be classified as weak pastoral” motivates his excellent essay, “The
Origins of Bucolic Representation: Disenchantment and Revision in Theocritus’
Seventh Idyll,” Classical Antiquity 3 (1984) 1-39. The words quoted are on p. 2.
15. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London 1935; repr. Norfolk, Conn.
1960) 23. In the following paragraphs page references to this work are given in
parentheses in the text.
16. M. C. Bradbrook, “The Ambiguity of William Empson,” in Roma Gill, ed.,
William Empson: The Man and His Work (London 1974) 4.
17. For a fuller account of this aspect of Empson’s thought, see Paul Alpers,
“Empson on Pastoral,” New Literary History 10 (1978-79) 101-23.