[87.] II, 2, p. 127.
[88.] These two cases are mentioned also by Riemann in “Goethe’s Romantechnik.”
[89.] See Frankfurter Gel. Anz., May 8, 1772, p. 296.
[90.] III, pp. 276 ff.
[ CHAPTER VI]
IMITATORS OF STERNE
Among the disciples of Sterne in Germany whose literary imitation may be regarded as typical of their master’s influence, Johann Georg Jacobi is perhaps the best known. His relation to the famous “Lorenzodosen” conceit is sufficient to link his name with that of Yorick. Martin[1] asserts that he was called “Uncle Toby” in Gleim’s circle because of his enthusiasm for Sterne. The indebtedness of Jacobi to Sterne is the subject of a special study by Dr. Joseph Longo, “Laurence Sterne und Johann Georg Jacobi;” and the period of Jacobi’s literary work which falls under the spell of Yorick has also been treated in an inaugural dissertation, “Ueber Johann Georg Jacobi’s Jugendwerke,” by Georg Ransohoff. The detail of Jacobi’s indebtedness to Sterne is to be found in these two works.
Longo was unable to settle definitely the date of Jacobi’s first acquaintance with Sterne. The first mention made of him is in the letter to Gleim of April 4, 1769, and a few days afterward,—April 10,—the intelligence is afforded that he himself is working on a “journey.” The “Winterreise” was published at Düsseldorf in the middle of June, 1769. Externally the work seems more under the influence of the French wanderer Chapelle, since prose and verse are used irregularly alternating, a style quite different from the English model. There are short and unnumbered chapters, as in the Sentimental Journey, but, unlike Sterne, Jacobi, with one exception, names no places and makes no attempt at description of place or people, other than the sentimental individuals encountered on the way. He makes no analysis of national, or even local characteristics: the journey, in short, is almost completely without place-influence. There is in the volume much more exuberance of fancy, grotesque at times, a more conscious exercise of the picturing imagination than we find in Sterne. There is use, too, of mythological figures quite foreign to Sterne, an obvious reminiscence of Jacobi’s Anacreontic experience. He exaggerates Yorick’s sentimentalism, is more weepy, more tender, more sympathizing; yet, as Longo does not sufficiently emphasize, he does not touch the whimsical side of Yorick’s work. Jacobi, unlike his model, but in common with other German imitators, is insistent in instruction and serious in contention for pet theories, as is exemplified by the discussion of the doctrine of immortality. There are opinions to be maintained, there is a message to be delivered. Jacobi in this does not give the lie to his nationality.
Like other German imitators, too, he took up with especial feeling the relations between man and the animal world, an attitude to be connected with several familiar episodes in Sterne.[2] The two chapters, “Der Heerd” and “Der Taubenschlag,” tell of a sentimental farmer who mourns over the fact that his son has cut down a tree in which the nightingale was wont to nest. A similar sentimental regard is cherished in this family for the doves, which no one killed, because no one could eat them. Even as Yorick meets a Franciscan, Jacobi encounters a Jesuit whose heart leaps to meet his own, and later, after the real journey is done, a visit to a lonely cloister gives opportunity for converse with a monk, like Pater Lorenzo,—tender, simple and humane.
The “Sommerreise,” according to Longo, appeared in the latter part of September, 1769, a less important work, which, in the edition of 1807, Jacobi considered unworthy of preservation. Imitation of Sterne is marked: following a criticism by Wieland the author attempts to be humorous, but with dubious success; he introduces a Sterne-like sentimental character which had not been used in the “Winterreise,” a beggar-soldier, and he repeats the motif of human sympathy for animals in the story of the lamb. Sympathy with erring womanhood is expressed in the incidents related in “Die Fischerhütte” and “Der Geistliche.” These two books were confessedly inspired by Yorick, and contemporary criticism treated them as Yorick products. The Deutsche Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, published by Jacobi’s friend Klotz, would naturally favor the volumes. Its review of the “Winterreise” is non-critical and chiefly remarkable for the denial of foreign imitation. The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek,[3] in reviewing the same work pays a significant tribute to Sterne, praising his power of disclosing the good and beautiful in the seemingly commonplace. In direct criticism of the book, the reviewer calls it a journey of fancy, the work of a youthful poet rather than that of a sensitive philosopher. Wieland is credited with the astounding opinion that he prefers the “Sommerreise” to Yorick’s journey.[4] Longo’s characterization of Sterne is in the main satisfactory, yet there is distinctly traceable the tendency to ignore or minimize the whimsical elements of Sterne’s work: this is the natural result of his approach to Sterne, through Jacobi, who understood only the sentimentalism of the English master.[5]
Among the works of sentiment which were acknowledged imitations of Yorick, along with Jacobi’s “Winterreise,” probably the most typical and best known was the “Empfindsame Reisen durch Deutschland” by Johann Gottlieb Schummel. Its importance as a document in the history of sentimentalism is rather as an example of tendency than as a force contributing materially to the spread of the movement. Its influence was probably not great, though one reviewer does hint at a following.[6] Yet the book has been remembered more persistently than any other work of its genre, except Jacobi’s works, undoubtedly in part because it was superior to many of its kind, partly, also, because its author won later and maintained a position of some eminence, as a writer and a pedagogue; but largely because Goethe’s well-known review of it in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen has been cited as a remarkably acute contribution to the discriminating criticism of the genuine and the affected in the eighteenth-century literature of feeling, and has drawn attention from the very fact of its source to the object of its criticism.