The elaborate division of moral preachers[71] into classes may be further mentioned as an adaptation from Sterne, cast in Yorick’s mock-scientific manner.
A consideration of these instances of allusion and adaptation with a view to classification, reveals a single line of demarkation obvious and unaltered. And this line divides the references to Sterne’s sentimental influence from those to his whimsicality of narration, his vagaries of thought; that is, it follows inevitably, and represents precisely the two aspects of Sterne as an individual, and as an innovator in the world of letters. But that a line of cleavage is further equally discernible in the treatment of these two aspects is not to be overlooked. On the one hand is the exaggerated, satirical, burlesque; on the other the modified, lightened, softened. And these two lines of division coincide precisely.
The slight touches of whimsicality, suggesting Sterne, are a part of Timme’s own narrative, evidently adapted with approval and appreciation; they are never carried to excess, satirized or burlesqued, but may be regarded as purposely adopted, as a result of admiration and presumably as a suggestion to the possible workings of sprightliness and grace on the heaviness of narrative prose at that time. Timme, as a clear-sighted contemporary, certainly confined the danger of Sterne’s literary influence entirely to the sentimental side, and saw no occasion to censure an importation of Sterne’s whimsies. Pank’s ode on the death of Riepel, written partly in dashes and partly in exclamation points, is not a disproof of this assertion. Timme is not satirizing Sterne’s whimsical use of typographical signs, but rather the Germans who misunderstood Sterne and tried to read a very peculiar and precious meaning into these vagaries. The sentimental is, however, always burlesqued and ridiculed; hence the satire is directed largely against the Sentimental Journey, and Shandy is followed mainly in those sections, which, we are compelled to believe, he wrote for his own pleasure, and in which he was led on by his own interest.
The satire on sentimentalism is purposeful, the imitation and adaptation of the whimsical and original is half-unconscious, and bespeaks admiration and commendation.
Timme’s book was sufficiently popular to demand a second edition, but it never received the critical examination its merits deserved. Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur and the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften ignore it completely. The Gothaische Gelehrte Zeitungen announces the book in its issue of August 2, 1780, but the book itself is not reviewed in its columns. The Jenaische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen accords it a colorless and unappreciative review in which Timme is reproached for lack of order in his work (a censure more applicable to the first volume), and further for his treatment of German authors then popular.[72] The latter statement stamps the review as unsympathetic with Timme’s satirical purpose. In the Erfurtische gelehrte Zeitung,[73] in the very house of its own publication, the novel is treated in a long review which hesitates between an acknowledged lack of comprehension and indignant denunciation. The reviewer fears that the author is a “Pasquillant oder gar ein Indifferentist” and hopes the public will find no pleasure (Geschmack) in such bitter jesting (Schnaken). He is incensed at Timme’s contention that the Germans were then degenerate as compared with their Teutonic forefathers, and Timme’s attack on the popular writers is emphatically resented. “Aber nun kömmt das Schlimme erst,” he says, “da führt er aus Schriften unserer grössten Schenies, aus den Lieblings-büchern der Nazion, aus Werther’s Leiden, dem Siegwart, den Fragmenten zur Geschichte der Zärtlichkeit, Müller’s Freuden und Leiden, Klinger’s Schriften u.s.w. zur Bestätigung seiner Behauptung, solche Stellen mit solcher Bosheit an, dass man in der That ganz verzweifelt wird, ob sie von einem Schenie oder von einem Affen geschrieben sind.”
In the number for July 6, 1782, the second and third volumes are reviewed. Pity is expressed for the poor author, “denn ich fürchte es wird sich ein solches Geschrey wider ihn erheben, wovon ihm die Ohren gällen werden.” Timme wrote reviews for this periodical, and the general tone of this notice renders it not improbable that he roguishly wrote the review himself or inspired it, as a kind of advertisement for the novel itself. It is certainly a challenge to the opposing party.
The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek[74] alone seems to grasp the full significance of the satire. “We acknowledge gladly,” says the reviewer, “that the author has with accuracy noted and defined the rise, development, ever-increasing contagion and plague-like prevalence of this moral pestilence; . . . that the author has penetrated deep into the knowledge of this disease and its causes.” He wishes for an engraving of the Sterne hobby-horse cavalcade described in the first chapter, and begs for a second and third volume, “aus deutscher Vaterlandsliebe.” Timme is called “Our German Cervantes.”
The second and third volumes are reviewed[75] with a brief word of continued approbation.
A novel not dissimilar in general purpose, but less successful in accomplishment, is Wezel’s “Wilhelmine Arend, oder die Gefahren der Empfindsamkeit,” Dessau and Leipzig, 1782, two volumes. The book is more earnest in its conception. Its author says in the preface that his desire was to attack “Empfindsamkeit” on its dangerous and not on its comic side, hence the book avoids in the main the lighthearted and telling burlesque, the Hudibrastic satire of Timme’s novel. He works along lines which lead through increasing trouble to a tragic dénouement.
The preface contains a rather elaborate classification of kinds of “Empfindsamkeit,” which reminds one of Sterne’s mock-scientific discrimination. This classification is according to temperament, education, example, custom, reading, strength or weakness of the imagination; there is a happy, a sad, a gentle, a vehement, a dallying, a serious, a melancholy, sentimentality, the last being the most poetic, the most perilous.