BY THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, pastoral was increasingly perceived as apolitical and out of touch. The poet and critic Karl Geib's theory of the idyll from 1846 still draws heavily on the commonplaces of theorists from Gottsched to Mendelssohn: it is a portrayal of a peaceful life in nature and of refined emotions, focused on small communities. Its purpose, Geib wrote, was to offer readers “angenehme Bilder” and “reine und harmlose Empfindungen.” Geib's treatment of Gessner and Voss gives no sense of the broadly political implications of their work. As we saw in the introduction, the perceived apoliticism of pastoral led the liberal historian of literature Georg Gottfried Gervinus to suggest that its preference for static scenes corresponded to an age of political lethargy and “einen übertriebenen Schauder vor allem Krieg.” Gervinus's remarks are underpinned by the assumptions of pre-1848 liberalism, which wanted to place culture in the service of national unification, which accordingly looked back to the eighteenth-century idyll as a symptom of a disengaged, fragmented, politically immature nation.

The declining prestige of pastoral in Germany in the nineteenth century has been attributed to several shifts that took shape after 1815, such as the rise of nationalism following the Napoleonic wars, and to the influence of Hegel, who regarded the idyll as an intellectually impoverished genre and as the antithesis of the Greek heroic ideal. Friedrich Sengle also suggests that the idyll falls victim to the increasing rigidity of a tripartite division of literature into prose, poetry, and drama, a scheme into which it does not readily fall. Hans-Ulrich Seeber argues that pastoral comes under intense strain in the nineteenth century in the face of modernization, industrialization, and the rise of new scientific ways of thinking. Faced with growing complexity, pastoral as an established genre goes into decline, while motifs from pastoral become significant as a means of restoring greater “Einfachheit, Natürlichkeit und Überschaubarkeit” to the representation and imagination of the world.

Seeber makes two important points about the development of pastoral in the nineteenth century. First, he notes how pastoral loses its autonomy within texts, as increasingly idylls are portrayed as episodes within larger texts, while, second, the question of what counts as idyllic becomes increasingly a matter of the individual artist or observer's perspective.