Forschungsstelle "Westfälischer Friede": Dokumentation

DOCUMENTATION | Exhibitions: 1648 - War and Peace in Europe
Essay Volumes > Tome II: Art and culture

KLAUS GARBER
Pax pastoralis - On a Peaceful Genre in European Literature

Into the 18th century, European literature was a well-tended garden. Each plant had its ancestral place; some were royal and some domestic, and no one would have dreamed of appropriating those to which he was not entitled. In literary terms, these flowers are known as genres. For over two thousand years, they regulated the process of literary communication, a process whose rules were familiar to all who participated in the game. The rules, moreover, governed far more than simply formalities. The choice of genre always implicated a particular stylistic and intellectual pitch as well, a kind of speech and form of thought. Only with the literary revolution of the 18th century did these principles lose their hold. That revolution postulated the solitary genius, establishing his own laws and creating unique and unmistakable works from his unique, unmistakable self. When the image of the revealed God had been eclipsed by confessional conflicts, the artist as "second maker" set about assuming his place. From there, the path to the religion of art and the communion of its worshipers was not long. The 19th century trod it a hundred times, and in its name the 20th has perpetrated the maddest crimes as well.

On the ladder of European literature, the genre of bucolic poetry occupies one of the lower rungs. From the days of its founder, it has quite consciously refrained from the genus grande, the epic gesture. When Theocritus - the greatest poet of the Hellenistic age next to Kallimachos - first wrote pastoral songs, he did so from a desire to infuse the literature with fresh, unused material. His songs are a product not of the early period, but of the late one, and thus exhibit all the refinements of an artistic exercise that has reached its end. When the shepherds in their singing contests, their vanities and gibes, appropriate the hexameters reserved for the Homeric epic and the Pindarian victory song, bucolic poetry takes on the character of a travesty. Only a trained audience is capable of appreciating this kind of subtle literary play, and it was for just this sort of audience that the genre was devised at the courts of Alexandria and Syracuse. This refinement, in fact, has been its salvation, for it is this that has fitted it to serve as forum and organon for the highest thoughts and aspirations.

It was Virgil, Theocritus' successor and the greatest poet of the Romans, who elevated it to this rank. Once again the lowly bucolic appears in opposition to the high epic. Now, however - and with infinite consequences! - it no longer hesitates to adopt the epic theme as a national one and to wed it to the ignoble subject of the shepherd's life. While the high genre of European literature is entrusted with singing the heroic path of national self-discovery - Homer holds this place for the Greeks, Virgil with his Aeneid for the Romans - it belongs to bucolic poetry to transpose the heroic theme into a meaner, lowlier, indeed pastoral milieu. This, however, means nothing less than identifying the meaning and goal of the process of history. Equipped with this license, the lower genre was able to approach the higher as its equal. It was permitted to utter things forbidden to the higher. In this way, bucolic poetry assumed a place complementary to the epic, and in this function was not only ennobled, but became indispensable as well. Until the time of Goethe, it accompanied high poetry as its eloquent and subtle interpreter.

Virgil's ten Eclogues fall in the period of the civil wars at the end of the Republic. The rise of imperial rulership was already in the offing; the star of Augustus was ascending. By inscribing these history-making trends into his poetry, Virgil elevated them far beyond the horizon established by Theocritus. War signifies suffering, symbolically illustrated in the exiled, dismayed, wandering shepherds of the first Eclogue - a literary archetype that was to exert its influence up to the very threshold of the 20th century, as the old Europe of the previous two millennia sank into political and cultural decay.

Since Virgil's day, pastoral poetry has not ceased to incorporate political catastrophes, to serve as the advocate and artistic representative of an oppressed people. For this reason too, it never blossomed more luxuriantly than in the period of the national and confessional wars between 1550 and 1680 in Europe.

At the same time, however, bucolic poetry since Virgil has been a literary forum in which solutions to the crises have been sought, where signs of hope were explored and raised up. The shepherd's existence is a musical one: already in Homer we find shepherds with reed-pipes, while the god of the Muses, Apollo with the lyre, was also a shepherd on Delos. The legendary figure of Orpheus, whose song pacified both man and nature, is likewise allied with the Muses. Virgil wove allusions to these and many other mythological traditions into his Eclogues. The musical shepherd symbolically embodies what man would become if he could master his aggressions, cease from destruction and hate, become amicable toward himself and his neighbors, and incorporate nature into his existence - indeed, if he were willing and able to live in peace. This vision, too, finds its archetypal form in the first Eclogue of Virgil, which accompanied generation upon generation of readers, students, and imitators: Thus it is two shepherds from Virgil's first Eclogue - the hounded Meliboeus and Tityrus, leisurely blowing his shepherd's pipe - who mark the beginning of pastoral poetry in Europe. If they had thousands of successors, it was because their creator made them transparent for the great historical movements of his time. Paradoxically, art outlives its time to the degree that it is filled with time, with the experience of history. Conflict must not be allowed to have the last word. Tityrus, who is spared, sees himself as a protector. In him, the life of the future is anticipated. When the emperor, Octavian, has put an end to civil war, an age of peace will dawn. This peace is symbolically signified in the peaceable figure at the beginning of the book of Eclogues. Just as the one shepherd is the victim and representative of the old era of civil war, so the other is saved, and represents the age of peace. For the Romans, the only peace that was conceivable was a political one. For Virgil, it was bound to the sole ruler, the Caesar Imperator. The problematic nature of the Augustan model, in whose formation Virgil played an essential role, is obvious. Republican aspirations are foreign to him; the Republic had exhausted itself, and unlike Horace, Virgil left it no monument. Instead, in his three monumental creations, the Bucolica, the Georgica, and the Aeneid, he places the victorious Augustus under obligation to preserve the peace. Under the sign of the Pax Augustana, pastoral poetry entered the literary world and began its epoch-making career. A comprehensive history of the genre, embracing all of Europe, has yet to be written.

The birth of pastoral poetry in the modern age is marked by an illustrious name as well, that of Dante. No one in European literature had more reason to revive the lowly genre, the genus humilis. Dante is the creator and theorist of a vernacular literature, including realistic prose. He acquired his knowledge as a layman, and wished to speak and make poetry for laymen, for those ignorant of Latin. In a spirit of liberality, he wanted to contribute to education, to the dissemination of knowledge among the people. He entrusted this vernacular program in encoded form to the lowly genre of pastoral poetry, the eclogue. In so doing, he secured the great history-making themes as the province of this unassuming literary form on the threshold of the modern age. His two famous successors, Petrarca and Boccaccio, dealt with the papal schism, the corruption of the curia, the desolate political situation of Italy, and countless other questions in their books of eclogues. They could and were permitted to do so because, as a "singer", the shepherd of literature represented the role of the poet, and was thus always already more and other than a mere keeper of animals. The entire host of European humanists played along: there was no event that did not find entrance into literature in bucolically encoded form. For this reason, pastoral poetry after Virgil remained topical and critical, and thus also a poetry that explored alternatives.

As such, its heyday occurred during the modern civil wars, conflicts whose significance equalled those of the Romans. The Peasants' War in Germany had provided the overture. The fate of those abased and deprived of rights was a genuine accusation for the pastoral poets. Eobanus Hessus, Euricius Cordus, Joachim Camerarius, and others were at hand to bucolically interpret the political, social, and human drama so closely associated with the Reformation. The slogan Friede den Hütten sounded here more than once. Soon, however, the flame spread to all of Europe with the militarization of the confessions after the mid-16th century. France, the Netherlands, Germany, and finally England were set ablaze, and everywhere nations that had only just been born were on the verge of dissolution. No history has yet been written detailing the way in which the national literatures of Europe, likewise in their infancy, reacted to this European catastrophe. Correspondingly, we also lack a history of bucolic poetry in the confessional age, one which would describe for us the unmistakable contribution of this literary genre in particular. All the great writers - Ronsard and du Bellay in France, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and later Milton in England, Heinsius and Vondel in the Netherlands - adopted this form to illustrate and interpret these incomprehensible occurrences. The calls and proposals for peace associated with precisely this genre are innumerable; and where states such as Italy or Spain were spared the test of confessional fragmentation, it was once again the greatest writers - Sannazaro and Pontano, Tasso and Guarini in Italy, Lope de Vega and Calderón, indeed even the poet of Don Quijote himself - who attempted to use pastoral image and discourse to capture the upheavals visited upon the world in unimaginable force with the decay of faith and the division of Christendom in the 16th century.

Germany came late to the circle of national languages; the first halting attempts occur around 1600. Yet bucolic poetry played a role in this process from the beginning; it had become indispensable wherever the substantial concerns of a nation were at stake. Georg Rudolf Weckherlin revived the genre from the spirit of the French Renaissance. Once again, it exuded the splendor and magic of human fulfillment, until its bloom faded with the outbreak of war and the poet fled his home in Württemberg to England, never to return. In the splendid residence at Heidelberg, a kindred spirit, Julius Wilhelm Zincgref, tried his hand at the genre. And in the fruitful literary triangle between Strasbourg, Mömpelgard, and Basle, there appeared the first great translations of the definitive works of Romania.

It was the ingenious literary strategist Martin Opitz, however, who drew all the threads together and supplied inspiration for an entire century. In his youth, he entrusted his poetic aspirations to the Neo-Latin eclogue and wooed the greats of his time as patrons and protectors of the new poetry. Nor did he refrain from pastoral lyric love poetry, though he used it to ennoble the lover who tames Eros and prudently regulates his passions. Like Horace, he devoted his pastorals to the leisured, learned existence amid a circle of sympathetic protectors and patrons. Through his translations, moreover, he naturalized the monumental forms of the novel, drama, and opera. Yet the future was to belong above all to that handcrafted narrative jewel, loosely constructed of poem and prose, and once again opened wide for the poet and his circle of friends, like the political situation itself in which they had to make their way and prove themselves. Schäferei von der Nymphe Hercinie is the title of the small, epoch-making narrative published in 1630, which found hundreds of successors everywhere in German-speaking lands. In the Hercinie, the poet strolls in the Riesengebirge around Warmbrunn at his home near the Bohemian border with other lyrically-minded colleagues, disposed toward jest and conversation, song and riddle, biographical interjections and praise of the local nobility. Overshadowing all, however, is the war that has broken out in nearby Bohemia, a war which affected the poet's life in reality as well, putting an abrupt end to his promising start in Heidelberg and sending him on an uncertain and often desperate journey in search of bread in the service of an ever-changing series of noble patrons. Such is the image of war as it is reflected in the pastoral. In the neighboring genre of the epic - the poetry of consolation amid the adversity of war - it shines more brightly, but in accord with the laws of the bucolic genre, the opposite of the atrocities is continually evoked. Amid the unrest and uncertainty, it was the small, quick sketch of the type of the Hercinie that was in demand. None of the great writers disdained it, neither Gottfried Finckelthaus in Leipzig nor David Schirmer in Dresden, Paul Fleming to the north in Baltic Reval or Philipp von Zesen in Hamburg, Michael Kongehl in Königsberg or Daniel Czepko in Silesia. But it was only in Nuremberg at the end of the war - the jewel of the Holy Roman Empire - that the pastoral became a mania, the literary fashion for two generations. A circle of Nuremberg writers even assumed a pastoral name in the "Pegnesischer Hirten- und Blumenorden" (Order of the Pegnitz Shepherds). For them, too, war and peace once again constituted all-pervasive themes, cast in a language that within a generation had elevated itself to the highest virtuosity and refinement. And once again, the centuries-old allegorical mechanism of the genre proved its worth. For what is the "melancholy shepherdess Pamela" if not the representative of war-torn Germany, racked with conflict and desperately longing for peace? Thus it was no coincidence, but in a higher sense the fulfillment of the pastoral on German soil, when, at the end of the war, the long-awaited peace was both ceremonially and pastorally concluded in and around the walls of the honorable old imperial city. In the rich musical, visual, and symbolic language of the Nuremberg peace celebrations, this newborn German literature had at the same time already reached its zenith.




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LITERATURE/FOOTNOTES

Literature:
a) sources: Vergil 1952; Opitz 1969; Opitz 1968a, Harsdörffer/Birken/Klaj 1966

b) scientific literature: Böschenstein 1977; Effe/Binder 1989; Faber 1976; Garber 1974; Garber 1976; Garber 1982; Garber o.J.; Gerhardt 1950; Jürgensen 1990; Krautter 1983; Lohmeier 1981; Longeon 1980; Mähl 1994; Newman 1990; Voßkamp 1977; Wade 1990

Notes:
1. trans. Berg 1974, p. 31.

2. trans. Berg 1974, p. 27.



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