In Shandy fashion the story doubles on itself after the introduction and gives minute details of young Kurt’s family and the circumstances prior to his birth. The later discussion[56] in the family council concerning the necessary qualities in the tutor to be hired for the young Kurt is distinctly a borrowing from Shandy.[57] Timme imitates Sterne’s method of ridiculing pedantry; the requirements listed by the Diaconus and the professor are touches of Walter Shandy’s misapplied, warped, and undigested wisdom. In the nineteenth chapter of the third volume[58] we find a Sterne passage associating itself with Shandy rather more than the Sentimental Journey. It is a playful thrust at a score of places in Shandy in which the author converses with the reader about the progress of the book, and allows the mechanism of book-printing and the vagaries of publishers to obtrude themselves upon the relation between writer and reader. As a reminiscence of similar promises frequent in Shandy, the author promises in the first chapter of the fourth volume to write a book with an eccentric title dealing with a list of absurdities.[59]
But by far the greater proportion of the allusions to Sterne associate themselves with the Sentimental Journey. A former acquaintance of Frau Kurt, whose favorite reading was Shandy, Wieland’s “Sympatien” and the Sentimental Journey, serves to satirize the influence of Yorick’s ass episode; this gentleman wept at the sight of an ox at work, and never ate meat lest he might incur the guilt of the murder of these sighing creatures.[60]
The most constantly recurring form of satire is that of contradiction between the sentimental expression of elevated, universal sympathy and broader humanity and the failure to seize an immediately presented opportunity to embody desire in deed. Thus Frau Kurt,[61] buried in “Siegwart,” refuses persistently to be disturbed by those in immediate need of a succoring hand. Pankraz and his mother while on a drive discover an old man weeping inconsolably over the death of his dog.[62] The scene of the dead ass at Nampont occurs at once to Madame Kurt and she compares the sentimental content of these two experiences in deprivation, finding the palm of sympathy due to the melancholy dog-bewailer before her, thereby exalting the sentimental privilege of her own experience as a witness. Quoting Yorick, she cries: “Shame on the world! If men only loved one another as this man loves his dog!”[63] At this very moment the reality of her sympathy is put to the test by the approach of a wretched woman bearing a wretched child, begging for assistance, but Frau Kurt, steeped in the delight of her sympathetic emotion, repulses her rudely. Pankraz, on going home, takes his Yorick and reads again the chapter containing the dead-ass episode; he spends much time in determining which event was the more affecting, and tears flow at the thought of both animals. In the midst of his vehement curses on “unempfindsame Menschen,” “a curse upon you, you hard-hearted monsters, who treat God’s creatures unkindly,” etc., he rebukes the gentle advances of his pet cat Riepel, rebuffs her for disturbing his “Wonnegefühl,” in such a heartless and cruel way that, through an accident in his rapt delight at human sympathy, the ultimate result is the poor creature’s death by his own fault.
In the second volume[64] Timme repeats this method of satire, varying conditions only, yet forcing the matter forward, ultimately, into the grotesque comic, but again taking his cue from Yorick’s narrative about the ass at Nampont, acknowledging specifically his linking of the adventure of Madame Kurt to the episode in the Sentimental Journey. Frau Kurt’s ardent sympathy is aroused for a goat drawing a wagon, and driven by a peasant. She endeavors to interpret the sighs of the beast and finally insists upon the release of the animal, which she asserts is calling to her for aid. The poor goat’s parting bleat after its departing owner is construed as a curse on the latter’s hardheartedness. Frau Kurt embraces and kisses the animal. During the whole scene the neighboring village is in flames, houses are consumed and poor people rendered homeless, but Frau Kurt expresses no concern, even regarding the catastrophe as a merited affliction, because of the villagers’ lack of sympathy with their domestic animals. The same means of satire is again employed in the twelfth chapter of the same volume.[65] Pankraz, overcome with pain because Lotte, his betrothed, fails to unite in his sentimental enthusiasm and persists in common-sense, tries to bury his grief in a wild ride through night and storm. His horse tramples ruthlessly on a poor old man in the road; the latter cries for help, but Pank, buried in contemplation of Lotte’s lack of sensibility, turns a deaf ear to the appeal.
In the seventeenth chapter of the third volume, a sentimental journey is proposed, and most of the fourth volume is an account of this undertaking and the events arising from its complications. Pankraz’s adventures are largely repetitions of former motifs, and illustrate the fate indissolubly linked with an imitation of Sterne’s related converse with the fair sex.[66]
The journey runs, after a few adventures, over into an elaborate practical joke in which Pankraz himself is burlesqued by his contemporaries. Timme carries his poignancy and keenness of satire over into bluntness of burlesque blows in a large part of these closing scenes. Pankraz loses the sympathy of the reader, involuntarily and irresistibly conceded him, and becomes an inhuman freak of absurdity, beyond our interest.[67]
Pankraz is brought into disaster by his slavish following of suggestions aroused through fancied parallels between his own circumstances and those related of Yorick. He finds a sorrowing woman[68] sitting, like Maria of Moulines, beneath a poplar tree. Pankraz insists upon carrying out this striking analogy farther, which the woman, though she betrays no knowledge of the Sentimental Journey, is not loath to accede to, as it coincides with her own nefarious purposes. Timme in the following scene strikes a blow at the abjectly sensual involved in much of the then sentimental, unrecognized and unrealized.
Pankraz meets a man carrying a cage of monkeys.[69] He buys the poor creatures from their master, even as Frau Kurt had purchased the goat. The similarity to the Starling narrative in Sterne’s volume fills Pankraz’s heart with glee. The Starling wanted to get out and so do his monkeys, and Pankraz’s only questions are: “What did Yorick do?” “What would he do?” He resolves to do more than is recorded of Yorick, release the prisoners at all costs. Yorick’s monolog occurs to him and he parodies it. The animals greet their release in the thankless way natural to them,—a point already enforced in the conduct of Frau Kurt’s goat.
In the last chapter of the third volume Sterne’s relationship to “Eliza” is brought into the narrative. Pankraz writes a letter wherein he declares amid exaggerated expressions of bliss that he has found “Elisa,” his “Elisa.” This is significant as showing that the name Eliza needed no further explanation, but, from the popularity of the Yorick-Eliza letters and the wide-spread admiration of the relation, the name Eliza was accepted as a type of that peculiar feminine relation which existed between Sterne and Mrs. Draper, and which appealed to Sterne’s admirers.
Pankraz’s new Order of the Garter, born of his wild frenzy[70] of devotion over this article of Elisa’s wearing apparel, is an open satire on Leuchsenring’s and Jacobi’s silly efforts noted elsewhere. The garter was to bear Elisa’s silhouette and the device “Orden vom Strumpfband der empfindsamen Liebe.”