Laurence Sterne in Germany Part 3

[Footnote 27: This article is not to be confused with Garve's well-known article published in the same magazine, LXI, pp. 51-77 (1798).]

[Footnote 28: IV, St. 2, pp. 376-7.]

[Footnote 29: This is from the February number, 1767, of the _Monthly Review_. (Vol. x.x.xVI, p. 102.)]

[Footnote 30: The seventh and eighth volumes of Shandy, English edition, are reviewed in the first number of a short-lived Frankfurt periodical, _Neue Auszuge aus den besten auslandischen Wochen und Monatsschriften_, 1765. _Unterhaltungen_, a magazine published at Hamburg and dealing largely with English interests, notes the London publication of the spurious ninth volume of Shandy (Vol. II, p. 152, August, 1766). _Die Brittische Bibliothek_, another magazine consisting princ.i.p.ally of English reprints and literary news, makes no mention of Sterne up to 1767.

Then in a catalogue of English books sold by Casper Fritsch in Leipzig, Shandy is given, but without the name of the author.

There is an account of Sterne's sermons in the _Neue Hamburgische Zeitung_, April, 1768.]

[Footnote 31: Mendelssohn's Schriften, edited by Prof. Dr. G. B.

Mendelssohn. Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1844. Vol. V, p. 171.]

[Footnote 32: Kurschner edition of Lessing's works, III, 2, pp.

156-157. See also "Lessing und die Englander" by Josef Caro in _Euphorion_, VI, pp. 489 ff. Erich Schmidt made the statement in his life of Lessing in the edition of 1884, but corrected it later, in the edition of 1899, probably depending on parallel pa.s.sages drawn from Paul Albrecht's "Lessing's Plagiate" (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1888-1891), an extraordinary work which by its frequent absurdity and its viciousness of attack forfeits credence in its occasional genuine discoveries.]

[Footnote 33: Lessing. "Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften." Berlin, 1884, I, pp. 174, 465. This is omitted in the latest edition.]

[Footnote 34: Perry (Thomas Sargeant) "From Opitz to Lessing."

Boston, 1885, p. 162.]

[Footnote 35: Quoted by Lichtenberg in "Gottingischer Taschenkalender," 1796, p. 191. "Vermischte Schriften," VI, p. 487.]

[Footnote 36: Lachmann edition, Berlin, 1840. Vol. XII, p. 240.]

[Footnote 37: XIII, pp. 209-10.]

[Footnote 38: XVII, pp. 30-45. The article is reprinted in the Hempel edition of Lessing, XVII, pp. 263-71.]

[Footnote 39: Nicolai uses the German word for colonel, a t.i.tle which Uncle Toby never bore.]

[Footnote 40: R. Haym. "Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken." I, p. 413.]

[Footnote 41: Haym, I, p. 261.]

[Footnote 42: Herder's "Briefe an Joh. Georg Hamann," ed. by Otto Hoffmann, Berlin, 1889, p. 25, or "Lebensbild" II, p. 140.]

[Footnote 43: "Briefe an Hamann," p. 27.]

[Footnote 44: Lebensbild II (I, 2), p. 256; also in Hamann's Schriften, ed. by Roth. Berlin, 1822, III, p. 372. Hamann asks Herder to remind his publisher, when the latter sends the promised third part of the "Fragmente," to inclose without fail the engraving of Sterne, because the latter is absolutely essential to his furnishings.]

[Footnote 45: See Suphan I, p. 163; II, p. 46.]

[Footnote 46: Suphan III, pp. 170, 223, 233, 277, 307.]

[Footnote 47: Briefe an Hamann, p. 49.]

[Footnote 48: . . . . in Auszug aus den Werken verschiedener Schriftsteller von Friedrich Just Riedel, Jena, 1767. The chapter cited is pp. 137 ff.]

[Footnote 49: I, p. 106.]

[Footnote 50: Pp. 91-96; see also p. 331.]

[Footnote 51: Pp. 118-120, or Sammtliche Schriften, Wien, 1787, 4ter Th., 4ter Bd., p. 133. A review with quotation of this criticism of Shandy is found in the _Deutsche Bibliothek der schonen Wissenschaften_, II, p. 659, but after the publication of the Mittelstedt translation of the Sentimental Journey had been reviewed in the same periodical.]

[Footnote 52: See "Julie von Bondeli und ihr Freundeskreis," von Eduard Bodemann. Hannover, 1874.]

[Footnote 53: Nicholas Ant. Kirchberger, the Swiss statesman and philosopher, the friend of Rousseau.]

[Footnote 54: Behmer, "Laurence Sterne und C. M. Wieland," pp.

15-17.]

[Footnote 55: "Ausgewahlte Briefe," Bd. II, p. 285 f. Zurich, 1815.]

[Footnote 56: V, pp. 345-6. 1774.]

[Footnote 57: See Lebensbild, V, p. 107 and p. 40.]

[Footnote 58: 1769, p. 840.]

[Footnote 59: See Behmer, p. 24, and the letter to Riedel, October 26, 1768, Ludwig Wielands Briefsammlung. I, p. 232.]

[Footnote 60: P. 856.]

[Footnote 61: These two aspects of the Sterne cult in Germany will be more fully treated later. The historians of literature and other investigators who have treated Sterne's influence in Germany have not distinguished very carefully the difference between Sterne's two works, and the resulting difference between the kind and amount of their respective influences. Appell, however, interprets the condition correctly and a.s.signs the cause with accuracy and pointedness. ("Werther und seine Zeit." p. 246). The German critics repeat persistently the thought that the imitators of Sterne remained as far away from the originals as the Shakespeare followers from the great Elizabethan. See Gervinus, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, I, 184; Hettner, "Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert," III, 1, p. 362; Hofer, "Deutsche Litteraturgeschichte," p. 150.]

CHAPTER III

THE PUBLICATION OF THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

On February 27, 1768, the Sentimental Journey was published in London,[1] less than three weeks before the author's death, and the book was at once transplanted to German soil, beginning there immediately its career of commanding influence and wide-spread popularity.

Several causes operated together in favoring its p.r.o.nounced and immediate success. A knowledge of Sterne existed among the more intelligent lovers of English literature in Germany, the leaders of thought, whose voice compelled attention for the understandable, but was powerless to create appreciation for the unintelligible among the lower ranks of readers. This knowledge and appreciation of Yorick were immediately available for the furtherance of Sterne's fame as soon as a work of popular appeal was published. The then prevailing interest in travels is, further, not to be overlooked as a forceful factor in securing immediate recognition for the Sentimental Journey.[2] At no time in the world's history has the popular interest in books of travel, containing geographical and topographical description, and information concerning peoples and customs, been greater than during this period.

The presses teemed with stories of wanderers in known and unknown lands.

The preface to the _Neue Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen_ of Leipzig for the year 1759 heralds as a matter of importance a gain in geographical description. The _Jenaische Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen_, 1773, makes in its tables of contents, a separate division of travels. In 1759, also, the "Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wa.s.ser und zu Lande"

(Leipzig, 1747-1774), reached its seventeenth volume. These are brief indications among numerous similar instances of the then predominant interest in the wanderer's experience. Sterne's second work of fiction, though differing in its nature so materially from other books of travel, may well, even if only from the allurement of its t.i.tle, have shared the general enthusiasm for the traveler's narrative. Most important, however, is the direct appeal of the book itself, irresistible to the German mind and heart. Germany had been for a decade hesitating on the verge of tears, and grasped with eagerness a book which seemed to give her British sanction for indulgence in her lachrymose desire.

The portion of Shandy which is virtually a part of the Sentimental Journey,[3] which Sterne, possibly to satisfy the demands of the publisher, thrust in to fill out volumes contracted for, was not long enough, nor distinctive enough in its use of sentiment, was too effectually concealed in its volume of Shandean quibbles, to win readers for the whole of Shandy, or to direct wavering attention through the mazes of Shandyism up to the point where the sentimental Yorick really takes up the pen and introduces the reader to the sad fate of Maria of Moulines. One can imagine eager Germany aroused to sentimental frenzy over the Maria incident in the Sentimental Journey, turning with throbbing contrition to the forgotten, neglected, or unknown pa.s.sage in Tristram Shandy.[4]

It is difficult to trace sources for Sterne in English letters, that is, for the strange combination of whimsicality, genuine sentiment and knavish smiles, which is the real Sterne. He is individual, exotic, not demonstrable from preceding literary conditions, and his meteoric, or rather rocket-like career in Britain is in its decline a proof of the insensibility of the English people to a large portion of his gospel.

The creature of fancy which, by a process of elimination, the Germans made out of Yorick is more easily explicable from existing and preceding literary and emotional conditions in Germany.[5] Brockes had prepared the way for a sentimental view of nature, Klopstock's poetry had fostered the display of emotion, the a.n.a.lysis of human feeling. Gellert had spread his own sort of religious and ethical sentimentalism among the mult.i.tudes of his devotees. Stirred by, and contemporaneous with Gallic feeling, Germany was turning with longing toward the natural man, that is, man unhampered by convention and free to follow the dictates of the primal emotions. The exercise of human sympathy was a goal of this movement. In this vague, uncertain awakening, this dangerous freeing of human feelings, Yorick's practical ill.u.s.tration of the sentimental life could not but prove an incentive, an organizer, a relief for pent-up emotion.[6]

Johann Joachim Christoph Bode has already been mentioned in relation to the early review of Zuckert's translation of Shandy. His connection with the rapid growth of the Yorick cult after the publication of the Sentimental Journey demands a more extended account of this German apostle of Yorick. In the sixth volume of Bode's translation of Montaigne[7] was printed first the life of the translator by C. A.

Bottiger. This was published the following year by the same house in a separate volume ent.i.tled "J. J. C. Bodes literarisches Leben, nebst dessen Bildnis von Lips." All other sources of information regarding Bode, such as the accounts in Jordens and in Schlichtegroll's "Nekrolog,"[8] are derivations or abstracts from this biography. Bode was born in Braunschweig in 1730; reared in lowly circ.u.mstances and suffering various vicissitudes of fortune, he came to Hamburg in 1756-7.

Gifted with a talent for languages, which he had cultivated a.s.siduously, he was regarded at the time of his arrival, even in Hamburg, as one especially conversant with the English language and literature. His nature must have borne something akin to Yorick, for his biographer describes his position in Hamburg society as not dissimilar to that once occupied for a brief s.p.a.ce in the London world by the clever feted Sterne. Yet the enthusiasm of the friend as biographer doubtless colors the case, forcing a parallel with Yorick by sheer necessity. Before 1768 Bode had published several translations from the English with rather dubious success, and the adaptability of the Sentimental Journey to German uses must have occurred to him, or have been suggested to him directly upon its very importation into Germany. He undoubtedly set himself to the task of translation as soon as the book reached his hands, for, in the issue of the _Hamburgische Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten_ for April 20, is found Bode's translation of a section from the Sentimental Journey. "Die Bettler" he names the extract; it is really the fifth of the sections which Sterne labels "Montriul."[9] In the numbers of the same paper for June 11 and 15, Bode translates in two parts the story of the "Monk;" thus, in but little over three months after its English publication, the story of the poor Franciscan Lorenzo and his fateful snuff-box was transferred to Germany and began its heart-touching career. These excerpts were included by Bode later in the year when he published his translation of the whole Sentimental Journey. The first extract was evidently received with favor and interest, for, in the foreword to the translation of the "Monk," in the issue of June 11, Bode a.s.signs this as his reason for making his readers better acquainted with this worthy book. He further says that the reader of taste and insight will not fail to distinguish the difference when so fine a connoisseur of the human heart as Sterne depicts sentiments, and when a shallow wit prattles of his emotions.