Dr. Carl Behmer, who has devoted an entire monograph to the study of Wieland’s connection with Sterne, is of the opinion, and his proofs seem conclusive, that Wieland did not know Shandy before the autumn of 1767,[54] that is, only a few months before the publication of the Journey. But his enthusiasm was immediate. The first evidence of acquaintance with Sterne, a letter to Zimmermann (November 13, 1767),[55] is full of extravagant terms of admiration and devotion. One is naturally reminded of his similar extravagant expressions with reference to the undying worth of Richardson’s novels. Sterne’s life philosophy fitted in with Wieland’s second literary period, the frivolous, sensuous, epicurean, even as the moral meanderings of Richardson agreed with his former serious, religious attitude. Probably soon after or while reading Shandy, Wieland conceived the idea of translating it. The letter which contains this very first mention of Sterne also records Wieland’s regret that the Germans can read this incomparable original only in so wretched a translation, which implies a contemporary acquaintance with Dr. Zückert’s rendering. This regret may well have been the foundation of his own purpose of translating the book; and knowledge of this seems to have been pretty general among German men of letters at the time. Though the account of this purpose would bring us into a time when the Sentimental Journey was in every hand, it may be as well to complete what we have to say of it here.
His reason for abandoning the idea, and the amount of work done, the length of time he spent upon the project, cannot be determined from his correspondence and must, as Behmer implies, be left in doubt. But several facts, which Behmer does not note, remarks of his own and of his contemporaries, point to more than an undefined general purpose on his part; it is not improbable that considerable work was done. Wieland says incidentally in his Teutscher Merkur,[56] in a review of the new edition of Zückert’s translation: “Vor drei Jahren, da er (Lange) mich bat, ihm die Uebersetzung des Tristram mit der ich damals umgieng, in Verlag zu geben.” Herder asks Nicolai in a letter dated Paris, November 30, 1769, “What is Wieland doing, is he far along with his Shandy?” And in August, 1769, in a letter to Hartknoch, he mentions Wieland’s Tristram among German books which he longs to read.[57]
The Jenaische Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen[58] for December 18, 1769, in mentioning this new edition of Zückert’s translation, states that Wieland has now given up his intention, but adds: “Perhaps he will, however, write essays which may fill the place of a philosophical commentary upon the whole book.” That Wieland had any such secondary purpose is not elsewhere stated, but it does not seem as if the journal would have published such a rumor without some foundation in fact. It may be possibly a resurrection of his former idea of a defense of Tristram as a part of the “Litteraturbriefe” scheme which Riedel had proposed.[59] This general project having failed, Wieland may have cherished the purpose of defending Tristram independently of the plan. Or this may be a reviewer’s vague memory of a former rumor of plan.
It is worth noting incidentally that Gellert does not seem to have known Sterne at all. His letters, for example, to Demoiselle Lucius, which begin October 22, 1760, and continue to December 4, 1769, contain frequent references to other English celebrities, but none to Sterne.
The first notice of Sterne’s death is probably that in the Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten of Hamburg in the issue of April 6, 1768, not three weeks after the event itself. The brief announcement is a comparison with Cervantes. The Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen chronicles the death of Yorick, August 29, 1768.[60]
Though published in England from 1759–67, Tristram Shandy seems not to have been reprinted in Germany till the 1772 edition of Richter in Altenburg, a year later indeed than Richter’s reprint of the Sentimental Journey. The colorless and inaccurate Zückert translation, as has already been suggested, achieved no real popular success and won no learned recognition. The reviews were largely silent or indifferent to it, and, apart from the comparatively few notices already cited, it was not mentioned by any important literary periodical until after its republication by Lange, when the Sentimental Journey had set all tongues awag with reference to the late lamented Yorick. None of the journals indicate any appreciation of Sterne’s especial claim to recognition, nor see in the fatherland any peculiar receptiveness to his appeal. In short, the foregoing accumulation of particulars resolves itself into the general statement, easily derived from the facts stated: Sterne’s position in the German world of letters is due primarily to the Sentimental Journey. Without its added impulse Shandy would have hardly stirred the surface of German life and thought. The enthusiasm even of a few scholars whose learning and appreciation of literature is international, the occasional message of uncertain understanding, of doubtful approbation, or of rumored popularity in another land, are not sufficient to secure a general interest and attentiveness, much less a literary following. The striking contrast between the essential characteristics of the two books is a sufficient and wholly reasonable occasion for Germany’s temporary indifference to the one and her immediate welcome for the other. Shandy is whimsicality touched with sentiment. The Sentimental Journey is the record of a sentimental experience, guided by the caprice of a whimsical will. Whimsicality is a flower that defies transplanting; when once rooted in other soil it shoots up into obscurity, masquerading as profundity, or pure silliness without reason or a smile. The whimsies of one language become amazing contortions in another. The humor of Shandy, though deep-dyed in Sterne’s own eccentricity, is still essentially British and demands for its appreciation a more extensive knowledge of British life in its narrowest, most individual phases, a more intensive sympathy with British attitudes of mind than the German of the eighteenth century, save in rare instances, possessed. Bode asserts in the preface to his translation of the Sentimental Journey that Shandy had been read by a good many Germans, but follows this remark with the query, “How many have understood it?” “One finds people,” he says, “who despise it as the most nonsensical twaddle, and cannot comprehend how others, whom they must credit with a good deal of understanding, wit, and learning, think quite otherwise of it,” and he closes by noting the necessity that one be acquainted with the follies of the world, and especially of the British world, to appreciate the novel. He refers unquestionably to his own circle of literati in Hamburg, who knew Tristram and cared for it, and to others of his acquaintance less favored with a knowledge of things English. The Sentimental Journey presented no inscrutable mystery of purposeful eccentricity and perplexing personality, but was written large in great human characters which he who ran might read. And Germany was ready to give it a welcome.[61]
[1.] A reviewer in the Frankfurter Gel. Anz., as early as 1774, asserts that Sterne had inspired more droll and sentimental imitations in Germany than even in England. (Apr. 5, 1774.)
[2.] See Bibliography for list of books giving more or less extended accounts of Sterne’s influence.
[3.] Sterne did, to be sure, assert in a letter (Letters, I, p. 34) that he wrote “not to be fed but to be famous.” Yet this was after this desire had been fulfilled, and, as the expression agrees with the tone and purpose of the letter in which it is found, it does not seem necessary to place too much weight upon it. It is very probable in view of evidence collected later that Sterne began at least to write Tristram as a pastime in domestic misfortune. The thirst for fame may have developed in the progress of the composition.
[4.] Fitzgerald says “end of December,” Vol. I, p. 116, and the volumes were reviewed in the December number of the Monthly Review, 1759 (Vol. XXI, pp. 561–571), though without any mention of the author’s name. This review mentions no other publisher than Cooper.