Ach! Hündchen, du beschämst mich sehr,
Denn dass mir Mops von meinem Leben
Drey Stunden stahl, wie schwer, wie schwer,
Wird’s halten, das ihm zu vergeben?
Denn Spinnen werden oben ein
Wohl gar noch meine Mörder seyn.”
This poem is a rather successful bit of ridicule cast on the over-sentimental who sought to follow Yorick’s foot-prints.
The other allusions to Sterne[31] are concerned with his hobby-horse idea, for this seems to gain the poet’s approbation and to have no share in his censure.
The dangers of overwrought sentimentality, of heedless surrender to the emotions and reveling in their exercise,—perils to whose magnitude Sterne so largely contributed—were grasped by saner minds, and energetic protest was entered against such degradation of mind and futile expenditure of feeling.
Joachim Heinrich Campe, the pedagogical theorist, published in 1779[32] a brochure, “Ueber Empfindsamkeit und Empfindelei in pädagogischer Hinsicht,” in which he deprecates the tendency of “Empfindsamkeit” to degenerate into “Empfindelei,” and explains at some length the deleterious effects of an unbridled “Empfindsamkeit” and an unrestrained outpouring of sympathetic emotions which finds no actual expression, no relief in deeds. The substance of this warning essay is repeated, often word for word, but considerably amplified with new material, and rendered more convincing by increased breadth of outlook and positiveness of assertion, the fruit of six years of observation and reflection, as part of a treatise, entitled, “Von der nöthigen Sorge für die Erhaltung des Gleichgewichts unter den menschlichen Kräften: Besondere Warnung vor dem Modefehler die Empfindsamkeit zu überspannen.” It is in the third volume of the “Allgemeine Revision des gesammten Schul- und Erziehungswesens.”[33] The differentiation between “Empfindsamkeit” and “Empfindelei” is again and more accessibly repeated in Campe’s later work, “Ueber die Reinigung und Bereicherung der deutschen Sprache.”[34] In the second form of this essay (1785) Campe speaks of the sentimental fever as an epidemic by no means entirely cured.