The churchyard scene with which the journey ends is more openly fanciful, down-right visionary in tone, but the manner is very emphatically not that of Sterne, though in the midst the Sterne motif of nettle-plucking is introduced. This sentimental episode took hold of German imagination with peculiar force. The hobby-horse idea also was sure of its appeal, and Bock did not fail to fall under its spell.[32]
But apart from the general impulse and borrowing of motif from the foreign novel, there is in this little volume considerable that is genuine and original: the author’s German patriotism, his praise of the old days in the Fatherland in the chapter entitled “Die Gaststube,” his “Trinklied eines Deutschen,” his disquisition on the position of the poet in the world (“ein eignes Kapitel”), and his adulation of Gellert at the latter’s grave. The reviewer in the Deutsche Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften[33] chides the unnamed, youthful author for not allowing his undeniable talents to ripen to maturity, for being led on by Jacobi’s success to hasten his exercises into print. In reality Bock was no longer youthful (forty-six) when the “Tagereise” was published. The Almanach der deutschen Musen for 1771, calls the book “an unsuccessful imitation of Yorick and Jacobi,” and wishes that this “Rhapsodie von Cruditäten” might be the last one thrust on the market as a “Sentimental Journey.” The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek[34] comments also on the double inspiration, and the insufficiency and tiresomeness of the performance. And yet Boie[35] says the papers praised the little book; for himself, however, he observes, he little desires to read it, and adds “What will our Yoricks yet come to? At last they will get pretty insignificant, I think, if they keep on this way.”
Bock was also the author of a series of little volumes written in the early seventies, still under the sentimental charm: (1) Empfindsame Reise durch die Visitenzimmer am Neujahrstag von einem deutschen Yorick angestellt, Cosmopolis (Hamburg) 1771—really published at the end of the previous year; (2) . . . am Ostertage, 1772; (3) Am Pfingsttage, 1772; (4) Am Johannistage, 1773; (5) Am Weynachtstage, 1773. These books were issued anonymously, and Schröder’s Lexicon gives only (2) and (3) under Bock’s name, but there seems no good reason to doubt his authorship of them all. Indeed, his claim to (1) is, according to the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen, well-nigh proven by an allusion to the “Tagereise” in the introduction, and by the initials signed. None of them are given by Goedeke. The books are evidently only in a general way dependent on the Sterne model, and are composed of observations upon all sorts of subjects, the first section of each volume bearing some relation to the festival in which they appear.
In the second edition of the first volume the author confesses that the title only is derived from Yorick,[36] and states that he was forced to this misuse because no one at that time cared to read anything but “Empfindsame Reisen.” It is also to be noted that the description beneath the title, “von einem deutschen Yorick angestellt,” is omitted after the first volume. The review of (4) and (5) in the Altonaer Reichs-Postreuter finds this a commendable resumption of proper humility. The observations are evidently loosely strung together without the pretense of a narrative, such as “Allgemeines Perspectiv durch alle Visitenzimmer, Empfindsamer Neujahrswunsch, Empfindsame Berechnung eines Weisen mit sich selbst, Empfindsame Entschlüsse, Empfindsame Art sein Geld gut unterzubringen,” etc.[37] An obvious purpose inspires the writer, the furthering of morality and virtue; many of the meditations are distinctly religious. That some of the observations had a local significance in Hamburg, together with the strong sentimental tendency there, may account for the warm reception by the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent.[38]
Some contemporary critics maintained a kinship between Matthias Claudius and Yorick-Sterne, though nothing further than a similarity of mental and emotional fibre is suggested. No one claimed an influence working from the English master. Even as late as 1872, Wilhelm Röseler in his introductory poem to a study of “Matthias Claudius und sein Humor”[39] calls Asmus, “Deutschland’s Yorick,” thereby agreeing almost verbally with the German correspondent of the Deutsches Museum, who wrote from London nearly a hundred years before, September 14, 1778, “Asmus . . . is the German Sterne,” an assertion which was denied by a later correspondent, who asserts that Claudius’s manner is very different from that of Sterne.[40]
August von Kotzebue, as youthful narrator, betrays a dependence on Sterne in his strange and ingeniously contrived tale, “Die Geschichte meines Vaters, oder wie es zuging, dass ich gebohren wurde.”[41] The influence of Sterne is noticeable in the beginning of the story: he commences with a circumstantial account of his grandfather and grandmother, and the circumstances of his father’s birth. The grandfather is an original undoubtedly modeled on lines suggested by Sterne’s hobby-horse idea. He had been chosen in days gone by to greet the reigning prince on the latter’s return from a journey, and the old man harks back to this circumstance with “hobby-horsical” persistence, whatever the subject of conversation, even as all matters led Uncle Toby to military fortification, and the elder Shandy to one of his pet theories.
In Schrimps the servant, another Shandean original is designed. When the news comes of the birth of a son on Mount Vesuvius, master and man discuss multifarious and irrelevant topics in a fashion reminiscent of the conversation downstairs in the Shandy mansion while similar events are going on above. Later in the book we have long lists, or catalogues of things which resemble one of Sterne’s favorite mannerisms. But the greater part of the wild, adventurous tale is far removed from its inception, which presented domestic whimsicality in a gallery of originals, unmistakably connected with Tristram Shandy.
Göschen’s “Reise von Johann”[42] is a product of the late renascence of sentimental journeying. Master and servant are represented in this book as traveling through southern Germany, a pair as closely related in head and heart as Yorick and La Fleur, or Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim. The style is of rather forced buoyancy and sprightliness, with intentional inconsequence and confusion, an attempt at humor of narration, which is choked by characteristic national desire to convey information, and a fatal propensity to description of places,[43] even when some satirical purpose underlies the account, as in the description of Erlangen and its university. The servant Johann has mild adventures with the maids in the various inns, which are reminiscent of Yorick, and in one case it borders on the openly suggestive and more Shandean method.[44] A distinctly borrowed motif is the accidental finding of papers which contain matters of interest. This is twice resorted to; a former occupant of the room in the inn in Nürnberg had left valuable notes of travel; and Johann, meeting a ragged woman, bent on self-destruction, takes from her a box with papers, disclosing a revolting story, baldly told. German mediocrity, imitating Yorick in this regard, and failing of his delicacy and subtlety, brought forth hideous offspring. An attempt at whimsicality of style is apparent in the “Furth Catechismus in Frage und Antwort” (pp. 71–74), and genuinely sentimental adventures are supplied by the death-bed scene (pp. 70–71) and the village funeral (pp. 74–77).
This book is classed by Ebeling[45] without sufficient reason as an imitation of von Thümmel. This statement is probably derived from the letter from Schiller to Goethe to which Ebeling refers in the following lines. Schiller is writing to Goethe concerning plans for the Xenien, December 29, 1795.[46] The abundance of material for the Xenien project is commented upon with enthusiastic anticipation, and in a list of vulnerable possibilities we read: “Thümmel, Göschen als sein Stallmeister—” a collocation of names easily attributable, in consideration of the underlying satiric purpose, to the general nature of their work, without in any way implying the dependence of one author on another,[47] or it could be interpreted as an allusion to the fact that Göschen was von Thümmel’s publisher. Nor is there anything in the correspondence to justify Ebeling’s harshness in saying concerning this volume of Göschen, that it “enjoyed the honor of being ridiculed (verhöhnt) in the Xenien-correspondence between Goethe and Schiller.” Goethe replies (December 30), in approval, and exclaims, “How fine Charis and Johann will appear beside one another.”[48] The suggestion concerning a possible use of Göschen’s book in the Xenien was never carried out.
It will be remembered that Göschen submitted the manuscript of his book to Schiller, and that Schiller returned the same with the statement “that he had laughed heartily at some of the whims.”[49] Garve, in a letter dated March 8, 1875, speaks of Göschen’s book in terms of moderate praise.[50]