So leicht wie ein Seufzerchen.”
The angels ask him for news of earth, and the greater part of the poem is occupied with his account of human fate. The relation is quite characteristic of Schubart in its gruesomeness, its insistence upon all-surrounding death and dissolution; but it contains no suggestion of Sterne’s manner, or point of view. The only explanation of association between the poem and its title is that Schubart shared the one-sided German estimate of Sterne’s character and hence represented him as a sympathetic messenger bringing to heaven on his death some tidings of human weakness.
In certain other manifestations, relatively subordinate, the German literature of the latter part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth and the life embodied therein are different from what they would have been had it not been for Sterne’s example. Some of these secondary fruits of the Sterne cult have been mentioned incidentally and exemplified in the foregoing pages. It would perhaps be conducive to definiteness to gather them here.
Sterne’s incontinuity of narration, the purposeful irrelation of parts, the use of anecdote and episode, which to the stumbling reader reduce his books to collections of disconnected essays and instances, gave to German mediocrity a sanction to publish a mass of multifarious, unrelated, and nondescript thought and incident. It is to be noted that the spurious books such as the Koran, which Germany never clearly sundered from the original, were direct examples in England of such disjointed, patchwork books. Such a volume with a significant title is “Mein Kontingent zur Modelectüre.”[77] Further, eccentricity in typography, in outward form, may be largely attributed to Sterne’s influence, although in individual cases no direct connection is traceable. Thus, to the vagaries of Shandy is due probably the license of the author of “Karl Blumenberg, eine tragisch-komische Geschichte,”[78] who fills half pages with dashes and whole lines with “Ha! Ha!”
As has been suggested already, Sterne’s example was potent in fostering the use of such stylistic peculiarities, as the direct appeal to, and conversation with the reader about the work, and its progress, and the various features of the situation. It was in use by Sterne’s predecessors in England and by their followers in Germany, before Sterne can be said to have exercised any influence; for example, Hermes uses the device constantly in “Miss Fanny Wilkes,” but Sterne undoubtedly contributed largely to its popularity. One may perhaps trace to Sterne’s blank pages and similar vagaries the eccentricity of the author of “Ueber die Moralische Schönheit und Philosophie des Lebens,”[79] whose eighth chapter is titled “Vom Stolz, eine Erzählung,” this title occupying one page; the next page (210) is blank; the following page is adorned with an urnlike decoration beneath which we read, “Es war einmal ein Priester.” These three pages complete the chapter. The author of “Dorset und Julie” (Leipzig, 1773–4) is also guilty of similar Yorickian follies.[80]
Sterne’s ideas found approbation and currency apart from his general message of the sentimental and humorous attitude toward the world and its course. For example, the hobby-horse theory was warmly received, and it became a permanent figure in Germany, often, and especially at first, with playful reminder of Yorick’s use of the term.[81] Yorick’s mock-scientific division of travelers seems to have met with especial approval, and evidently became a part of conversational, and epistolary commonplace allusion. Goethe in a letter to Marianne Willemer, November 9, 1830,[82] with direct reference to Sterne proposes for his son, then traveling in Italy, the additional designation of the “bold” or “complete” traveler. Carl August in a letter to Knebel,[83] dated December 26, 1785, makes quite extended allusion to the classification. Lessing writes to Mendelssohn December 12, 1780: “The traveler whom you sent to me a while ago was an inquisitive traveler. The one with whom I now answer is an emigrating one.” The passage which follows is an apology for thus adding to Yorick’s list. The two travelers were respectively one Fliess and Alexander Daveson.[84] Nicolai makes similar allusion to the “curious” traveler of Sterne’s classification near the beginning of his “Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781.”[85]
Further search would increase the number of such allusions indefinitely. A few will be mentioned in the following chapter.
One of Walter Shandy’s favorite contentions was the fortuitous dependence of great events upon insignificant details. In his philosophy, trifles were the determining factors of existence. The adoption of this theory in Germany, as a principle in developing events or character in fiction, is unquestionable in Wezel’s “Tobias Knaut,” and elsewhere. The narrative, “Die Grosse Begebenheit aus kleinen Ursachen” in the second volume of the Erholungen,[86] represents a wholesale appropriation of the idea,—to be sure not new in Shandy, but most strikingly exemplified there.
In “Sebaldus Nothanker” the Revelation of St. John is a Sterne-like hobby-horse and is so regarded by a reviewer in the Magazin der deutschen Critik.[87] Schottenius in Knigge’s “Reise nach Braunschweig” rides his hobby in the shape of his fifty-seven sermons.[88] Lessing uses the Steckenpferd in a letter to Mendelssohn, November 5, 1768 (Lachmann edition, XII, p. 212), and numerous other examples of direct or indirect allusion might be cited. Sterne’s worn-out coin was a simile adopted and felt to be pointed.[89]
Jacob Minor in a suggestive article in Euphorion,[90] entitled “Wahrheit und Lüge auf dem Theater und in der Literatur,” expressed the opinion that Sterne was instrumental in sharpening powers of observation with reference to self-deception in little things, to all the deceiving impulses of the human soul. It is held that through Sterne’s inspiration Wieland and Goethe were rendered zealous to combat false ideals and life-lies in greater things. It is maintained that Tieck also was schooled in Sterne, and, by means of powers of observation sharpened in this way, was enabled to portray the conscious or unconscious life-lie.