[This text] uses utf-8 (unicode) file encoding. If the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that your browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font.

Typographical errors are shown in the text with mouse-hover popups. Some general notes on corrections are given at the [end of the text].

LAURENCE STERNE
IN GERMANY

A Contribution to the Study of the
Literary Relations of England and
Germany in the Eighteenth Century

BY

HARVEY WATERMAN THAYER, Ph.D.

SOMETIME FELLOW IN GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND
LITERATURES, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Copyright 1905, Columbia University Press, New York

NOTE

Mr. Thayer has undertaken to write, in detail and from the sources, the history of Sterne’s vogue in Germany. As thus broadly defined the task had not before been attempted, although phases of it had been treated, more or less thoroughly, in recent monographs. The work here submitted, the result of careful research in a number of American and European libraries, is in my judgment an interesting and valuable contribution to our knowledge of the literary relations of England and Germany at the time of the great renascence of German letters.

Calvin Thomas.

Columbia University, May, 1905.

PREFACE

The following study was begun in the autumn of 1901, and was practically finished now more than a year ago. Since its completion two works of interest to lovers of Sterne have been issued, Czerny’s study of Sterne’s influence upon Hippel and Jean Paul, a work which the present author had planned as a continuation of this book, and Prof. Cross’s new definitive edition of Sterne.

I desire here to express my thanks to Prof. W. H. Carpenter, Prof. Calvin Thomas and Prof. W. P. Trent, under whose guidance my last year of University residence was spent: their interest in my work was generous and unfailing; their admirable scholarship has been and will continue to be an inspiration. I am indebted to Prof. Carpenter and Prof. Thomas for many helpful suggestions regarding the present work, and the latter especially has given freely of his valuable time to a consideration of my problems. I am grateful also to several other friends for helpful and kindly service, and to many librarians in this country and in Europe for their courtesy.

New York, May 1, 1905.

[ CONTENTS]

[ CHAPTER I]
INTRODUCTION

The indebtedness of German culture to other peoples has been the theme of much painstaking investigation. The history of German literature is, in large measure, the story of its successive periods of connection with the literatures of other lands, and hence scholars have sought with industry and insight to bound and explain such literary inter-relations.

The latter half of the eighteenth century was a period of predominant English influence. The first half of the century had fostered this ascendency through the popularity of the moral weeklies, the religious epic, and the didactic poetry of Britain. Admiration for English ideals was used as a weapon to combat French dominion in matters of taste, till a kind of Anglomania spread, which was less absolute than the waning Gallomania had been, only in such measure as the nature of the imitated lay nearer the German spirit and hence allowed and cherished a parallel independence rather than demanded utter subjection. Indeed, the study of English masters may be said to have contributed more than any other external cause to the golden age of German letters; to have worked with untold beneficence in bringing faltering Germany to a consciousness of her own inherent possibilities. This fact of foreign awakening of national greatness through kinship of inborn racial characteristics removes the seeming inconsistency that British influence was paramount at the very time of Germany’s most individual, most national, outburst.

The German literary world concerned itself zealously with each new development across the channel. The German literary periodicals were diligent and alert in giving their subscribers adequate intelligence concerning new books in England,[1] and various journals[2] devoted exclusively to a retailing of English thought for German readers are by their very existence eloquent testimony to the supreme interest in things British. Through the medium of these literary journals, intelligence concerning British literary interests was disseminated, and the way was thus prepared for the reception of the British authors themselves. Every English writer of eminence, every English literary movement was in some way or other echoed in the literature of the German fatherland. English authors were read in the original, and in numerous and popular translations. A German following is a well-nigh certain inference from an English success. Sometimes the growth of German appreciation and imitation was immediate and contemporaneous, or nearly so, with the English interest, as in the case of the German enthusiasm for Bishop Percy’s “Reliques.” At other times it tarried behind the period of interest in England, and was gradual in its development. The suggestion that a book, especially a novel, was translated from the English was an assurance of its receiving consideration, and many original German novels were published under the guise of English translations. Hermes roguishly avoids downright falsehood, and yet avails himself of this popular trend by describing his “Miss Fanny Wilkes” upon the title page as “So gut als aus dem Englischen übersetzt,” and printing “so gut als” in very small type. Müller in a letter[3] to Gleim, dated at Cassel, May 27, 1781, proposes to alter names in Liscow’s works and to publish his books as an English translation: “Germany would read him with delight,” he says, and Gleim, in his reply, finds the idea “splendid.” Out of this one reads clearly how the Germany of that time was hanging on the lips of England.

As has been suggested, conscious or unconscious imitation in the home literature is the unavoidable result of admiration for the foreign; imitation of English masters is written large on this period of German letters. Germany is especially indebted to the stirring impulse of the English novel.

The intellectual development of a people is observable in its successive periods of interest in different kinds of narration, in its attitude toward the relation of fictitious events. The interest in the extraordinary always precedes that in the ordinary; the unstored mind finds pleasure only in the unusual. An appreciation of the absorbing, vital interest of everyday existence is the accomplishment of reflective training, and betokens the spiritualized nature. Yet it must be observed in passing that the crude interest of unschooled ignorance, and undeveloped taste in the grotesque, the monstrous, the unreal, is not the same as the intellectual man’s appreciation of the unreal in imagination and fancy. The German novel had passed its time of service under the wild, extraordinary and grotesque. The crudities of such tales of adventure were softened and eliminated by the culturing influence of formal classicism and by a newly won admiration for the everyday element in life, contemporaneous with and dependent upon the gradual appreciation of middle-class worth. At this point the English novel stepped in as a guide, and the gradual shaping of the German novel in the direction of an art-form is due primarily to the prevailing admiration of English models.

The novel has never been a characteristic method of German self-expression, while if any form of literary endeavor can be designated as characteristically English, the novel may claim this distinction; that is, more particularly the novel as distinguished from the romance. “Robinson Crusoe” (1719) united the elements of the extraordinary and the everyday, being the practical, unromantic account of a remarkable situation; and its extensive vogue in Germany, the myriad confessed imitations, may be said to form a kind of transition of interests. In it the commonplace gains interest through the extraordinary situation. Such an awakening assures a certain measure of interest remaining over for the detailed relation of the everyday activities of life, when removed from the exceptional situation. Upon this vantage ground the novel of everyday life was built. Near the mid-century comes another mighty influence from England, Richardson, who brings into the narration of middle-class, everyday existence, the intense analysis of human sensibilities. Richardson taught Germany to remodel her theories of heroism, her whole system of admirations, her conception of deserts. Rousseau’s voice from France spoke out a stirring appeal for the recognition of human feelings. Fielding, though attacking Richardson’s exaggeration of manner, and opposing him in his excess of emotionalism, yet added a forceful influence still in favor of the real, present and ordinary, as exemplified in the lives of vigorous human beings.

England’s leadership in narrative fiction, the superiority of the English novel, especially the humorous novel, which was tacitly acknowledged by these successive periods of imitation, when not actually declared by the acclaim of the critic and the preference of the reading public, has been attributed quite generally to the freedom of life in England and the comparative thraldom in Germany. Gervinus[4] enlarges upon this point, the possibility in Britain of individual development in character and in action as compared with the constraint obtaining in Germany, where originality, banished from life, was permissible only in opinion. His ideas are substantially identical with those expressed many years before in an article in the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften[5] entitled “Ueber die Laune.” Lichtenberg in his brief essay, “Ueber den deutschen Roman,”[6] is undoubtedly more than half serious in his arraignment of the German novel and his acknowledgment of the English novelist’s advantage: the trend of this satirical skit coincides with the opinion above outlined, the points he makes being characteristic of his own humorous bent. That the English sleep in separate apartments, with big chimneys in their bedchambers, that they have comfortable post-chaises with seats facing one another, where all sorts of things may happen, and merry inns for the accommodation of the traveler,—these features of British life are represented as affording a grateful material to the novelist, compared with which German life offers no corresponding opportunity. Humor, as a characteristic element of the English novel, has been felt to be peculiarly dependent upon the fashion of life in Britain. Blankenburg, another eighteenth-century student of German literary conditions, in his treatise on the novel[7], has similar theories concerning the sterility of German life as compared with English, especially in the production of humorous characters[8]. He asserts theoretically that humor (Laune) should never be employed in a novel of German life, because “Germany’s political institutions and laws, and our nice Frenchified customs would not permit this humor.” “On the one side,” he goes on to say, “is Gothic formality; on the other, frivolity.” Later in the volume (p. 191) he confines the use of humorous characters to subordinate rôles; otherwise, he says, the tendency to exaggeration would easily awaken displeasure and disgust. Yet in a footnote, prompted by some misgiving as to his theory, Blankenburg admits that much is possible to genius and cites English novels where a humorous character appears with success in the leading part; thus the theorist swerves about, and implies the lack of German genius in this regard. Eberhard in his “Handbuch der Aesthetik,”[9] in a rather unsatisfactory and confused study of humor, expresses opinions agreeing with those cited above, and states that in England the feeling of independence sanctions the surrender of the individual to eccentric humor: hence England has produced more humorists than all the rest of the world combined. There is, however, at least one voice raised to explain in another way this deficiency of humor in German letters. A critic in the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften[10] attributes this lack not to want of original characters but to a lack of men like Cervantes, Ben Jonson, Butler, Addison, Fielding.

There is undoubtedly some truth in both points of view, but the defects of the eighteenth century German novel are due in larger measure to the peculiar mental organization of German authorship than to lack of interesting material in German life. The German novel was crushed under the weight of pedantry and pedagogy. Hillebrand strikes the root of the matter when he says,[11] “We are all schoolmasters, even Hippel could not get away from the tutorial attitude.” The inborn necessity of German culture is to impart information, to seek recruits for the maintenance of some idea, to exploit some political, educational, or moral theory. This irresistible impulse has left its trail over German fiction. The men who wrote novels, as soon as they began to observe, began to theorize, and the results of this speculation were inevitably embodied in their works. They were men of mind rather than men of deeds, who minimized the importance of action and exaggerated the reflective, the abstract, the theoretical, the inner life of man. Hettner,[12] with fine insight, points to the introduction to “Sebaldus Nothanker” as exhibiting the characteristic of this epoch of fiction. Speculation was the hero’s world, and in speculation lay for him the important things of life; he knew not the real world, hence speculation concerning it was his occupation. Consequential connection of events with character makes the English novel the mirror of English life. Failure to achieve such a union makes the German novel a mirror of speculative opinions concerning life.

Hence we have Germany in the mid-eighteenth century prepared to accept and adopt any literary dogma, especially when stamped with an English popularity, which shall represent an interest rather in extraordinary characters and unusual opinions than in astounding adventure; which shall display a knowledge of human feeling and foster the exuberant expression of it.

Beside the devotees of any literary fashion are those who analyze philosophically the causes, and forecast the probable results of such a following. Thinking Germany became exercised over these facts of successive intellectual and literary dependence, as indicative of national limitations or foreboding disintegration. And thought was accordingly directed to the study of the influence of imitation upon the imitator, the effects of the imitative process upon national characteristics, as well as the causes of imitation, the fundamental occasion for national bondage in matters of life and letters. The part played by Dr. Edward Young’s famous epistle to Richardson, “Conjectures on Original Composition” (London, 1759), in this struggle for originality is considerable. The essay was reprinted, translated and made the theme of numerous treatises and discussions.[13] One needs only to mention the concern of Herder, as displayed in the “Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Litteratur,” and his statement[14] with reference to the predicament as realized by thoughtful minds may serve as a summing up of that part of the situation. “Seit der Zeit ist keine Klage lauter and häufiger als über den Mangel von Originalen, von Genies, von Erfindern, Beschwerden über die Nachahmungs- und gedankenlose Schreibsucht der Deutschen.”

This thoughtful study of imitation itself was accompanied by more or less pointed opposition to the heedless importation of foreign views, and protests, sometimes vigorous and keen, sometimes flimsy and silly, were entered against the slavish imitation of things foreign. Endeavor was turned toward the establishment of independent ideals, and the fostering of a taste for the characteristically national in literature, as opposed to frank imitation and open borrowing.[15]

The story of Laurence Sterne in Germany is an individual example of sweeping popularity, servile admiration, extensive imitation and concomitant opposition.

[1.] This is well illustrated by the words prefaced to the revived and retitled Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen, which state the purpose of the periodical: “Besonders wird man für den Liebhaber der englischen Litteratur dahin sorgen, dass ihm kein einziger Artikel, der seiner Aufmerksamkeit würdig ist, entgehe, und die Preise der englischen Bücher wo möglich allzeit bemerken.” (Frankfurter gel. Anz., 1772, No. 1, January 3.)

[2.] Elze, “Die Englische Sprache und Litteratur in Deutschland,” gives what purports to be a complete list of these German-English periodicals in chronological order, but he begins his register with Eschenburg’s Brittisches Museum für die Deutschen, 1777–81, thus failing to mention the more significant, because earlier, journals: die Brittische Bibliothek, which appeared first in 1759 in Leipzig, edited by Karl Wilhelm Müller: and Bremisches Magazin zur Ausbreitung der Wissenschaften, Künste und Tugend, Von einigen Liebhabern derselben mehrentheils aus den Englischen Monatsschriften gesammelt und herausgegeben, Bremen and Leipzig, 1757–1766, when the Neues Bremisches Magazin begins.

[3.] Briefe deutscher Gelehrten aus Gleim’s Nachlass. Bd. II, p. 213.

[4.] “Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung,” V, pp. 184 ff. The comparative inferiority of the German novel is discussed by l’Abbé Dénina in “La Prusse Littéraire sous Frédéric II,” Berlin, 1791. Vol. I, pp. 112 ff. See also Julian Schmidt, “Bilder aus dem geistigen Leben unserer Zeit.” Leipzig, 1870. IV, pp. 270 ff.

[5.] III, pp. 1 ff.

[6.] Vermischte Schriften, II, p. 215.

[7.] “Versuch über den Roman.” Frankfort and Leipzig, 1774, p. 528. This study contains frequent allusions to Sterne and occasional quotation from his works, pp. 48, 191, 193, 200, 210, 273, 351, 365, 383, 426.

[8.] There is a similar tribute to English humor in “Ueber die moralische Schönheit und Philosophie des Lebens.” Altenburg, 1772, p. 199. Compare also Herder’s opinion in “Ideen zur Geschichte und Kritik der Poesie und bildenden Künste,” 1794–96, No. 49, in “Abhandlungen und Briefe über schöne Literatur und Kunst.” Tübingen, 1806, I, pp. 375–380; compare also passages in his “Fragmente” and “Wäldchen.”

[9.] Second edition, Halle, 1807, II, pp. 309 ff. The definition of humor and the perplexing question as to how far it is identical with “Laune,” have received considerable attention at the hands of aesthetic critics; compare, for example, Lessing in the “Hamburgische Dramaturgie.”

[10.] VII. p. 353. 1761.

[11.] “Deutsche Nationalliteratur,” II, p. 535. Hamburg, 1850.

[12.] “Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im achtzehnten Jahrhundert,” III, 1, pp. 363 ff.

[13.] See Introduction to “Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur” in Seuffert’s Deutsche Litteraturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. The literature of this study of imitation in the Germany of the second half of the eighteenth century is considerable. The effort of much in the Litteratur-Briefe may be mentioned as contributing to this line of thought. The prize question of the Berlin Academy for 1788 brought forth a book entitled: “Wie kann die Nachahmung sowohl alter als neuer fremden Werke der schönen Wissenschaften des vaterländischen Geschmack entwickeln und vervollkommnen?” by Joh. Chr. Schwabe, professor in Stuttgart. (Berlin, pp. 120; reviewed in Allg. Litt. Zeitung. 1790. I, pp. 632–640.) Perhaps the first English essay upon German imitation of British masters is that in the Critical Journal, Vol. III, which was considered of sufficient moment for a German translation. See Morgenblatt, I, Nr. 162, July 8, 1807. A writer in the Auserlesene Bibliothek der neusten deutschen Litteratur (Lemgo, 1772–3), in an article entitled “Vom Zustande des Geschmacks beim deutschen Publikum,” traces the tendency to imitate to the German capacity for thinking rather than for feeling. (III, pp. 683 ff.) “Das deutsche Publikum,” he says, “scheint dazu bestimmt zu seyn, nachzuahmen, nachzuurtheilen, nachzuempfinden.” Justus Möser condemns his fellow countrymen soundly for their empty imitation. See fragment published in “Sämmtliche Werke,” edited by B. R. Abeken. Berlin, 1858. IV, pp. 104–5.

[14.] Herder’s sämmtliche Werke, edited by B. Suphan, Berlin, Weidman, 1877, I, 254. In the tenth fragment (second edition) he says the Germans have imitated other nations, “so dass Nachahmer beinahe zum Beiwort und zur zweiten Sylbe unseres Namens geworden.” See II, p. 51. Many years later Herder does not seem to view this period of imitation with such regret as the attitude of these earlier criticisms would forecast. In the “Ideen zur Geschichte und Kritik der Poesie und bildenden Künste,” 1794–96, he states with a burst of enthusiasm over the adaptability of the German language that he regards imitation as no just reproach, for thereby has Germany become immeasurably the richer.

[15.] The kind of praise bestowed on Hermes’s “Sophiens Reise” is a case in point; it was greeted as the first real German novel, the traces of English imitation being hardly noticeable. See Magazin der deutschen Critik, Vol. I, St. 2, pp. 245–251, 1772, signed “Kl.” Sattler’s “Friederike” was accorded a similar welcome of German patriotism; see Magazin der deutschen Critik, III, St. 1, p. 233. The “Litterarische Reise durch Deutschland” (Leipzig, 1786, p. 82) calls “Sophiens Reise” the first original German novel. See also the praise of Von Thümmel’s “Wilhelmine” and “Sophiens Reise” in Blankenburg’s “Versuch über den Roman,” pp. 237–9. Previously Germans had often hesitated to lay the scenes of their novels in Germany, and in many others English characters traveling or residing in Germany supply the un-German element.

[ CHAPTER II]
STERNE IN GERMANY BEFORE THE PUBLICATION
OF THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

It is no exaggeration to assert that the works of Yorick obtained and still retain a relatively more substantial position of serious consideration and recognized merit in France and Germany than in the countries where Sterne’s own tongue is spoken.[1] His place among the English classics has, from the foreign point of view, never been a dubious question, a matter of capricious taste and unstable ideals. His peculiar message, whether interpreted and insisted upon with clearness of insight, or blindness of misunderstanding, played its not unimportant part in certain developments of continental literatures, and his station in English literature, as viewed from a continental standpoint, is naturally in part the reflex of the magnitude of his influence in the literature of France and Germany, rather than an estimate obtained exclusively from the actual worth of his own accomplishment, and the nature of his own service as a leader and innovator in English letters.

Sterne’s career in German literature, the esteem in which his own works have been held, and the connection between the sentimental, whimsical, contradictory English clergyman and his German imitators have been noted, generally speaking, by all the historians of literature; and several monographs and separate articles have been published on single phases of the theme.[2] As yet, however, save for the investigations which treat only of two or three authors, there has been hardly more than the general statement of the facts, often inadequate, incomplete, and sometimes inexact.

Sterne’s period of literary activity falls in the sixties, the very heyday of British supremacy in Germany. The fame of Richardson was hardly dimmed, though Musäus ridiculed his extravagances in “Grandison der Zweite” (1760) at the beginning of the decade. In 1762–66 Wieland’s Shakespeare translation appeared, and his original works of the period, “Agathon,” begun in 1761, and “Don Silvio von Rosalva,” published in 1764, betray the influence of both Richardson and Fielding. Ebert (1760—) revised and republished his translation of Young’s “Night Thoughts,” which had attained popularity in the previous decade. Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” (1766) aroused admiration and enthusiasm. To this time too belongs Ossian’s mighty voice. As early as 1762 the first bardic translations appeared, and Denis’s work came out in 1768. Percy’s “Reliques,” published in England in 1765, were extensively read and cited, a stimulating force to parallel German activity. A selection from the “Reliques” appeared in Göttingen in 1767.

The outlook maintained in Germany for the worthy in British thought, the translatable, the reproducible, was so vigilant and, in general, so discerning that the introduction of Yorick into Germany was all but inevitable. The nature of the literary relations then obtaining and outlined above would forecast and almost necessitate such an adoption, and his very failure to secure recognition would demand an explanation.

Before the publication of Tristram Shandy it would be futile to seek for any knowledge of Sterne on German soil. He had published, as is well known, two sermons preached on occasions of note; and a satirical skit, with kindly purpose, entitled “The History of a Good Warm Watchcoat,” had been written, privately circulated, and then suppressed; yet he was an unknown and comparatively insignificant English clergyman residing in a provincial town, far, in those days very far, from those centers of life which sent their enlightenment over the channel to the continent. His fame was purely local. His sermons had, without doubt, rendered the vicar of Sutton a rather conspicuous ecclesiastic throughout that region; his eccentricities were presumably the talk of neighboring parishes; the cathedral town itself probably tittered at his drolleries, and chattered over his sentiments; his social graces undoubtedly found recognition among county families and in provincial society, and his reputation as a wit had probably spread in a vague, uncertain, transitory fashion beyond the boundaries of the county. Yet the facts of local notoriety and personal vogue are without real significance save in the light of later developments; and we may well date his career in the world of books from the year 1760, when the London world began to smile over the first volumes of Tristram Shandy. From internal evidence in these early volumes it is possible to note with some assurance the progress of their composition and the approximate time of their completion. In his wayward, fitful way, and possibly for his own amusement more than with dreams of fame and fortune,[3] Sterne probably began the composition of Shandy in January, 1759, and the completion of the first installment is assigned to the summer or early autumn of that year. At the end of the year[4] the first edition of the first two volumes was issued in York, bearing the imprint of John Hinxham. Dodsley and Cooper undertook the sale of the volumes in London, though the former had declined to be responsible for the publication. They were ready for delivery in the capital on the first day of the new year 1760. Sterne’s fame was immediate; his personal triumph was complete and ranks with the great successes in the history of our literature. On his arrival in London in March, the world aristocratic, ecclesiastic, and literary was eager to receive the new favorite, and his career of bewildering social enjoyment, vigorous feasting and noteworthy privilege began. “No one”, says Forster, “was so talked of in London this year and no one so admired as the tall, thin, hectic-looking Yorkshire parson.”[5] From this time on until his death Sterne was a most conspicuous personage in English society, a striking, envied figure in English letters.

And yet it was some time before Germany learned of the new prodigy: for reasons which will be treated later, the growth of the Sterne cult in Germany was delayed, so that Yorick was in the plenitude of his German fame when England had begun to look askance at him with critical, fault-finding eye, or to accord him the more damning condemnation of forgetfulness.

The first mention of Sterne’s name in Germany may well be the brief word in the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent[6] for January 19, 1762, in a letter from the regular London correspondent, dated January 8. In a tone of particularity which would mark the introduction of a new and strange personality into his communications, the correspondent states the fact of Sterne’s departure for Paris in pursuit of lost health. This journal may further be taken as an example of those which devoted a remarkable amount of space to British affairs, since it was published in the North German seaport town, where the mercantile connection with Britain readily fostered the exchange of other than purely commercial commodities. And yet in Hamburg Sterne waited full two years for a scanty recognition even of his English fame.

In the fourth year after the English publication of Shandy comes the first attempt to transplant Sterne’s gallery of originals to German shores. This effort, of rather dubious success, is the Zückert translation of Tristram Shandy, a rendering weak and inaccurate, but nevertheless an important first step in the German Shandy cult. Johann Friedrich Zückert,[7] the translator, was born December 19, 1739, and died in Berlin May 1, 1778. He studied medicine at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder, became a physician in Berlin, but, because of bodily disabilities, devoted himself rather to study and society than to the practice of his profession. His publications are fairly numerous and deal principally with medical topics, especially with the question of foods. In the year after the appearance of his Shandy translation, Zückert published an essay which indicates the direction of his tastes and gives a clue to his interest in Tristram. It was entitled “Medizinische und Moralische Abhandlung von den Leidenschaften,”[8] and discloses a tendency on the part of the author to an analysis of the passions and moods of man, an interest in the manner of their generation, and the method of their working. This treatise was quite probably written, or conceived, while its author was busied with Shandy, and his division of the temperaments (p. 53) into the sanguine or warm moist, the choleric or warm dry, the phlegmatic or cold moist, and the melancholy or cold dry, is not unlike some of Walter Shandy’s half-serious, half-jesting scientific theories, though, to be sure, it falls in with much of the inadequate and ill-applied terminology of the time.

Zückert’s translation of the first six parts[9] of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1763, and bore the imprint of the publisher Lange, Berlin und Stralsund. The title read “Das Leben und die Meynungen des Herrn Tristram Shandy,” the first of the long series of “Leben und Meynungen” which flooded the literature of the succeeding decades, this becoming a conventional title for a novel. It is noteworthy that until the publication of parts VII and VIII in 1765, there is no mention of the real author’s name. To these later volumes the translator prefaces a statement which contains some significant intelligence concerning his aim and his interpretation of Sterne’s underlying purpose. He says he would never have ventured on the translation of so ticklish a book if he had foreseen the difficulties; that he believed such a translation would be a real service to the German public, and that he never fancied the critics could hold him to the very letter, as in the rendering of a classic author. He confesses to some errors and promises corrections in a possible new edition. He begs the public to judge the translation in accord with its purpose “to delight and enliven the public and to acquaint the Germans with a really wonderful genius.” To substantiate his statement relative to the obstacles in his way, he outlines in a few words Sterne’s peculiar, perplexing style, as regards both use of language and the arrangement of material. He conceives Sterne’s purpose as a desire to expose to ridicule the follies of his countrymen and to incorporate serious truths into the heart of his jesting.

Since the bibliographical facts regarding the subsequent career of this Zückert translation have been variously mangled and misstated, it may be well, though it depart somewhat from the regular chronological order of the narrative, to place this information here in connection with the statement of its first appearance. The translation, as published in 1763, contained only the first six parts of Sterne’s work. In 1765 the seventh and eighth parts were added, and in 1767 a ninth appeared, but the latter was a translation of a spurious English original.[10] In 1769, the shrewd publisher began to issue a new and slightly altered edition of the translation, which bore, however, on the title page “nach einer neuen Uebersetzung” and the imprint, Berlin und Stralsund bey Gottlieb August Langen, Parts I and II being dated 1769; Parts III and IV, 1770; Parts V, VI, VII and VIII, 1771; Part IX, 1772. Volumes III-VIII omit Stralsund as a joint place of publication. In 1773, when it became noised abroad that Bode, the successful and honored translator of the Sentimental Journey, was at work upon a German rendering of Shandy, Lange once more forced his wares upon the market, this time publishing the Zückert translation with the use of Wieland’s then influential name on the title page, “Auf Anrathen des Hrn. Hofraths Wielands verfasst.” Wieland was indignant at this misuse of his name and repudiated all connection with this “new translation.” This edition was probably published late in 1773, as Wieland in his review in the Merkur gives it that date, but the volumes themselves bear the date of 1774.[11] We learn from the Merkur (VI. 363) that Zückert was not responsible for the use of Wieland’s name.

These are the facts of the case. Meusel in his account of Zückert gives the date of the first edition as 1774, and the second edition is registered but the date is left blank. Jördens, probably depending on the information given by the review in the Merkur, to which reference is made, assigns 1773 as the date. This edition, as is shown above, is really the third.

This Zückert translation is first reviewed by the above mentioned Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent in the issue for January 4, 1764. The review, however, was not calculated to lure the German reader of the periodical to a perusal either of the original, or of the rendering in question: it is concerned almost exclusively with a summary of the glaring inaccuracies in the first nineteen pages of the work and with correct translations of the same; and it is in no sense of the word an appreciation of the book. The critic had read Shandy in the original, and had believed that no German hack translator[12] would venture a version in the language of the fatherland. It is a review which shows only the learning of the reviewer, displays the weakness of the translator, but gives no idea of the nature of the book itself, not even a glimpse of the critic’s own estimate of the book, save the implication that he himself had understood the original, though many Englishmen even were staggered by its obtuseness and failed to comprehend the subtlety of its allusion. It is criticism in the narrowest, most arrogant sense of the word, destructive instead of informing, blinding instead of illuminating. It is noteworthy that Sterne’s name is nowhere mentioned in the review, nor is there a hint of Tristram’s English popularity. The author of this unsigned criticism is not to be located with certainty, yet it may well have been Bode, the later apostle of Sterne-worship in Germany. Bode was a resident of Hamburg at this time, was exceptionally proficient in English and, according to Jördens[13] and Schröder,[14] he was in 1762–3 the editor of the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent. The precise date when Bode severed his connection with the paper is indeterminate, yet this, the second number of the new year 1764, may have come under his supervision even if his official connection ended exactly with the close of the old year. To be sure, when Bode ten years later published his own version of Shandy, he translated, with the exception of two rather insignificant cases, none of the passages verbally the same as the reviewer in this journal, but it would be unreasonable to attach any great weight to this fact. Eight or nine years later, when undertaking the monumental task of rendering the whole of Shandy into German, it is not likely that Bode would recall the old translations he had made in this review or concern himself about them. A brief comparison of the two sets of translations suggests that the critic was striving merely for accuracy in correcting the errors of Zückert, and that Bode in his formal translation shows a riper and more certain feeling for the choice of words; the effect of purposeful reflection is unmistakable. Of course this in no way proves Bode to have been the reviewer, but the indications at least allow the probability.

As was promised in the preface to Parts VII and VIII, to which reference has already been made, the new edition was regarded as an opportunity for correction of errors, but this bettering is accomplished with such manifest carelessness and ignorance as to suggest a further possibility, that the publisher, Lange, eager to avail himself of the enthusiasm for Sterne, which burst out on the publication of the Sentimental Journey, thrust this old translation on the public without providing for thorough revision, or complete correction of flagrant errors. The following quotations will suffice to demonstrate the inadequacy of the revision:

This last astounding translation is retained in the second edition in spite of the reviewers’ ridicule, but the most nonsensical of all the renderings, whereby “the momentum of the coach horse was so great” becomes “der Augenblick des Kutschpferdes war so gross” is fortunately corrected.[15]

These examples of slipshod alteration or careless retention contrast quite unfavorably with the attitude of the translator in the preface to parts VII and VIII, in which he confesses to the creeping in of errors in consequence of the perplexities of the rendering, and begs for “reminders and explanations” of this and that passage, thereby displaying an eagerness to accept hints for emendation. This is especially remarkable when it is noted that he has in the second edition not even availed himself of the corrections given in the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent, and has allowed some of the most extraordinary blunders to stand. These facts certainly favor the theory that Zückert himself had little or nothing to do with the second edition and its imperfect revision. This supposition finds further evidence in the fact that the ninth part of Shandy, as issued by Lange in the second (1772) and third (1774) editions, was still a translation of the spurious English volume, although the fraud was well known and the genuine volume was read and appreciated. Of this genuine last part Dr. Zückert never made a translation. It may be remarked in passing that a translation bristling with such errors, blunders which at times degrade the text into utter nonsense, could hardly be an efficient one in spreading appreciation of Shandy.

A little more than a year after the review in the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent, which has been cited, the Jenaische Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen in the number dated March 1, 1765, treats Sterne’s masterpiece in its German disguise. This is the first mention of Sterne’s book in the distinctively literary journals. The tone of this review is further that of an introducer of the new, and the critique is manifestly inserted in the paper as an account of a new book. The reviewer is evidently unaware of the author’s name, since the words which accompany the title, from the English, are nowhere elucidated, and no hint of authorship, or popularity in England, or possible far-reaching appeal in Germany is traceable. The idea of the hobby-horse is new to the reviewer and his explanation of it implies that he presumed Sterne’s use of the term would be equally novel to the readers of the periodical. His compliment to the translation indicates further that he was unacquainted with the review in the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent.

A little more than a year later, June 13, 1766, this same journal, under the caption “London,” reviews the Becket and de Hondt four-volume edition of the “Sermons of Mr. Yorick.” The critic thinks a warning necessary: “One should not be deceived by the title: the author’s name is not Yorick,” and then he adds the information of the real authorship. This is a valid indication that, in the opinion of the reviewer, the name Yorick would not be sufficiently linked in the reader’s mind with the personality of Sterne and the fame of his first great book, to preclude the possibility, or rather probability, of error. This state of affairs is hardly reconcilable with any widespread knowledge of the first volumes of Shandy. The criticism of the sermons which follows implies, on the reviewer’s part, an acquaintance with Sterne, with Tristram, a “whimsical and roguish novel which would in our land be but little credit to a clergyman,” and with the hobby-horse idea. The spirit of the review is, however, quite possibly prompted, and this added information supplied, by the London correspondent, and retold only with a savor of familiarity by this critic; for at the end of this communication this London correspondent is credited with the suggestion that quite probably the sermons were never actually preached.

The first mention of Sterne in the Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen is in the number for November 15, 1764. In the report from London is a review[16] of the fifth edition of Yorick’s Sermons, published by Dodsley in two volumes, 1764. To judge by the tenor of his brief appreciation, the reviewer does not anticipate any knowledge of Sterne whatsoever or of Shandy among the readers of the periodical. He states that the sermons had aroused much interest in England because of their authorship “by Lorenz Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, a book in which a remarkable humor is exhibited.” He mentions also that the sermon on the conscience had already been published in the novel, but is ignorant of its former and first appearance. Three years later, July 20, 1767,[17] the same periodical devotes a long critical review to the four-volume London edition of the sermons. The publisher’s name is not given, but it is the issue of Becket and de Hondt. The restating of elementary information concerning authorship is indicative of the tardy progress made by Yorick in these years in gaining recognition in Germany. The reviewer thinks it even necessary to add that Yorick is the name of the clergyman who plays a waggish (possierliche) rôle in Shandy, and that Sterne cherished the opinion that this designation on the title-page would be better known than his own name.

In the meantime Swiss piety and Swiss devotion to things English had been instrumental in bringing out a translation of Sterne’s sermons,[18] the first volume of which appeared in 1766. The Swiss translation was occasioned by its author’s expectation of interest in the sermons as sermons; this is in striking contrast to the motives which led to their original publication in England. The brief preface of the translator gives no information of Sterne, or of Shandy; the translator states his reasons for the rendering, his own interest in the discourses, his belief that such sermons would not be superfluous in Germany, and his opinion that they were written for an increasing class of readers, “who, though possessed of taste and culture and laying claim to probity, yet for various reasons stand apart from moral instruction and religious observance.” He also changed the original order of the sermons. The first part of this Swiss translation is reviewed in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek in the first number of 1768, and hence before the Sentimental Journey had seen the light even in London. The review is characterized by unstinted praise: Sterne is congratulated upon his deviation from the conventional in homiletical discourse, is commended as an excellent painter of moral character and situations, though he abstains from the use of the common engines of eloquence. His narrative powers are also noted with approval and his ability to retain the attention of his hearers through clever choice of emphasized detail is mentioned with appreciation. Yet in all this no reference is made to Sterne’s position in English letters, a fact which could hardly have failed of comment, if the reviewer had been aware of it, especially in view of the relation of Sterne’s popularity to the very existence of this published volume of sermons, or if it had been expected that the fact of authorship would awaken interest in any considerable number of readers. The tone of the review is further hardly reconcilable with a knowledge of Sterne’s idiosyncrasies as displayed in Shandy. A brief consideration of the principles of book-reviewing would establish the fact indisputably that the mentioning of a former book, some hint of familiarity with the author by open or covert allusion, is an integral and inevitable part of the review of a later book. This review is the only mention of Sterne in this magazine[19] before the publication of the Sentimental Journey. A comparison of this recension, narrow in outlook, bound, as it is, to the very book under consideration, with those of the second and third volumes of the sermons in the same magazine during the year 1770,[20] is an illuminating illustration of the sweeping change brought in by the Journey. In the latter critique we find appreciation of Yorick’s characteristics, enthusiastic acceptation of his sentiment, fond and familiar allusions to both Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. In the brief space of two years Sterne’s sentimentalism had come into its own.

The Bremisches Magazin,[21] which was employed largely in publishing translations from English periodicals, and contained in each number lists, generally much belated, of new English books, noted in the third number for 1762, among the new books from April to December, 1760, Mr. Yorick’s Sermons, published by Mr. Sterne, and then, as customary in these catalogues, translated the title into “Herrn Yorick’s Predigten ans Licht gestellt von Hn. Sterne.” Four years later, in the first volume of the Neues Bremisches Magazin,[22] announcement is made of the third and fourth volumes of Yorick’s Sermons. During this period sufficient intelligence concerning Sterne is current to warrant the additional statement that “This Mr. Sterne, the author of the strange book, Tristram Shandy, is the author himself.” The notice closes with the naïve but astounding information, “He took the name Yorick because he is a preacher in York; furthermore, these sermons are much praised.” No further proof is needed that this reviewer was guiltless of any knowledge of Shandy beyond the title. The ninth volume of Shandy is announced in the same number among the new English books.

In 1767, the year before the publication of the Sentimental Journey, we find three notices of Tristram Shandy. In the Deutsche Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften[23] is a very brief but, in the main, commendatory review of the Zückert translation, coupled with the statement that the last parts are not by Sterne, but with the claim that the humor of the original is fairly well maintained. The review is signed “Dtsh.” Another Halle periodical, the Hallische Neue Gelehrte Zeitungen, in the issue for August 10, 1767[24] reviews the same volumes with a much more decided acknowledgment of merit. It is claimed that the difference is not noticeable, and that the ninth part is almost more droll than all the others, an opinion which is noteworthy testimony to its originator’s utter lack of comprehension of the whole work and of the inanity of this spurious last volume. The statement by both of these papers that the last three volumes,[25] parts VII, VIII and IX, of the Zückert translation, rest on spurious English originals, is, of course, false as far as VII and VIII are concerned, and is true only of IX.

In the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, the last number for 1766[26] contains the first mention of Sterne’s name in this representative literary periodical. It is an article entitled “Ueber die Laune,”[27] which is concerned with the phenomena of hypochrondia and melancholia, considered as illnesses, and their possible cure. The author claims to have found a remedy in the books which do not depress the spirits with exhibition of human woes, but which make merry over life’s follies. In this he claims merely to be following the advice of St. Evremond to the Count of Olonne. His method he further explains by tracing humor to its beginnings in Aristophanes and by following its development through Latin, new Latin (Erasmus, Thomas Morus, etc.), French and English writers. Among the latter Sterne is named. Unfortunately for the present purpose, the author is led by caution and fear of giving the offense of omission to refrain from naming the German writers who might be classed with the cited representatives of humor. In closing, he recommends heartily to those teased with melancholy a “portion of leaves of Lucian, some half-ounces of ‘Don Quixote’ or some drachms of ‘Tom Jones’ or ‘Tristram Shandy.’” Under the heading, “New English Books,” in the third number of the same periodical for 1767, is a brief but significant notice of the ninth volume of Tristram Shandy.[28] “The ninth part of the well-known ‘Life of Tristram Shandy’ has been published; we would not mention it, if we did not desire on this occasion to note at least once in our magazine a book which is incontestably the strangest production of wit and humor which has ever been brought forth. . . . The author of this original book is a clergyman by the name of Sterne, who, under his Harlequin’s name, Yorick, has given to the world the most excellent sermons.” The review contains also a brief word of comparison with Rabelais and a quotation from an English critic expressing regret at Yorick’s embroidering “the choicest flowers of genius on a paultry groundwork of buffoonry.”[29] This late mention of Sterne’s great novel, and the manner in which it is made are not without their suggestions as to the attitude even of the German literary world toward Yorick. The notice is written in a tone of forced condescension. The writer is evidently compelled, as representative of British literary interests, to bear witness to the Shandy craze, but the attitude of the review is plainly indicative of its author’s disbelief in any occasion for especial concern about Yorick in Germany. Sterne himself is mentioned as a fitful whim of British taste, and a German devotion to him is beyond the flight of fancy.[30]

Individual authors, aware of international literary conditions, the inner circle of German culture, became acquainted with Tristram Shandy during this period before the publication of the Sentimental Journey and learned to esteem the eccentric parson. Bode’s possible acquaintance with the English original previous to 1764 has been already noted. Lessing’s admiration for Sterne naturally is associated with his two statements of remarkable devotion to Yorick, both of which, however, date from a period when he had already become acquainted with the Journey. At precisely what time Lessing first read Tristram Shandy it is impossible to determine with accuracy. Moses Mendelssohn writes to him in the summer of 1763:[31] “Tristram Shandy is a work of masterly originality. At present, to be sure, I have read only the first two volumes. In the beginning the book vexed me exceedingly. I rambled on from digression to digression without grasping the real humor of the author. I regarded him as a man like our Liscow, whom, as you know, I don’t particularly fancy; and yet the book pleases Lessing!” This is sufficient proof that Mendelssohn first read Shandy early in 1763, but, though not improbable, it is yet rather hazardous to conclude that Lessing also had read the book shortly before, and had just recommended it to his friend. The literary friendship existing between them, and the general nature of their literary relations and communications, would rather favor such a hypothesis. The passage is, however, a significant confession of partial failure on the part of the clever and erudite Mendelssohn to appreciate Sterne’s humor. It has been generally accepted that Lessing’s dramatic fragment, “Die Witzlinge,” included two characters modeled confessedly after Yorick’s familiar personages, Trim and Eugenius. Boxberger and others have stamped such a theory with their authority.[32] If this were true, “Die Witzlinge” would undoubtedly be the first example of Sterne’s influence working directly upon the literary activity of a German author. The fragment has, however, nothing to do with Tristram Shandy, and a curious error has here crept in through the remarkable juxtaposition of names later associated with Sterne. The plan is really derived directly from Shadwell’s “Bury Fair” with its “Mr. Trim” fancifully styled “Eugenius.” Those who tried to establish the connection could hardly have been familiar with Tristram Shandy, for Lessing’s Trim as outlined in the sketch has nothing in common with the Corporal.

Erich Schmidt, building on a suggestion of Lichtenstein, found a “Dosis Yorikscher Empfindsamkeit”[33] in Tellheim, and connected the episode of the Chevalier de St. Louis with the passage in “Minna von Barnhelm” (II, 2) in which Minna contends with the innkeeper that the king cannot know all deserving men nor reward them. Such an identity of sentiment must be a pure coincidence for “Minna von Barnhelm” was published at Easter, 1767, nearly a year before the Sentimental Journey appeared.

A connection between Corporal Trim and Just has been suggested,[34] but no one has by investigation established such a kinship. Both servants are patterns of old-fashioned fidelity, types of unquestioning service on the part of the inferior, a relation which existed between Orlando and Adam in “As You Like It,” and which the former describes:

“O good old man, how well in thee appears

The constant service of the antique world,

When service sweat for duty, not for meed;

Thou art not for the fashion of these times.”

Tellheim recognizes the value of Just’s service, and honors his subordinate for his unusual faithfulness; yet there exists here no such cordial comradeship as marked the relation between Sterne’s originals. But one may discern the occasion of this in the character of Tellheim, who has no resemblance to Uncle Toby, rather than in any dissimilarity between the characters of the servants. The use of the relation between master and man as a subject for literary treatment was probably first brought into fashion by Don Quixote, and it is well-nigh certain that Sterne took his cue from Cervantes.

According to Erich Schmidt, the episode of Just’s dog, as the servant relates it in the 8th scene of the 1st act, could have adorned the Sentimental Journey, but the similarity of motif here in the treatment of animal fidelity is pure coincidence. Certainly the method of using the episode is not reminiscent of any similar scene in Sterne. Just’s dog is not introduced for its own sake, nor like the ass at Nampont to afford opportunity for exciting humanitarian impulses, and for throwing human character into relief by confronting it with sentimental possibilities, but for the sake of a forceful, telling and immediate comparison. Lessing was too original a mind, and at the time when “Minna” was written, too complete and mature an artist to follow another slavishly or obviously, except avowedly under certain conditions and with particular purpose. He himself is said to have remarked, “That must be a pitiful author who does not borrow something once in a while,”[35] and it does not seem improbable that the figure of Trim was hovering in his memory while he was creating his Just. Especially does this seem plausible when we remember that Lessing wrote his drama during the years when Shandy was appearing, when he must have been occupied with it, and at the first flush of his admiration.

This supposition, however undemonstrable, is given some support by our knowledge of a minor work of Lessing, which has been lost. On December 28, 1769, Lessing writes to Ebert from Hamburg: “Alberti is well; and what pleases me about him, as much as his health, is that the news of his reconciliation with Goeze was a false report. So Yorick will probably preach and send his sermon soon.”[36] And Ebert replies in a letter dated at Braunschweig, January 7, 1770, expressing a desire that Lessing should fulfil his promise, and cause Yorick to preach not once but many times.[37] The circumstance herein involved was first explained by Friedrich Nicolai in an article in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, 1791.[38] As a trick upon his friend Alberti, who was then in controversy with Goeze, Lessing wrote a sermon in Yorick’s manner; the title and part of the introduction to it were privately printed by Bode and passed about among the circle of friends, as if the whole were in press. We are entirely dependent on Nicolai’s memory for our information relative to this sole endeavor on Lessing’s part to adopt completely the manner of Sterne. Nicolai asserts that this effort was a complete success in the realization of Yorick’s simplicity, his good-natured but acute philosophy, his kindly sympathy and tolerance, even his merry whimsicality.

This introduction, which Nicolai claims to have recalled essentially as Lessing wrote it, relates the occasion of Yorick’s writing the sermon. Uncle Toby and Trim meet a cripple in a ragged French uniform; Capt. Shandy gives the unfortunate man several shillings, and Trim draws out a penny and in giving it says, “French Dog!” The narrative continues:

“The Captain[39] was silent for some seconds and then said, turning to Trim, ‘It is a man, Trim, and not a dog!’ The French veteran had hobbled after them: at the Captain’s words Trim gave him another penny, saying again ‘French Dog!’ ‘And, Trim, the man is a soldier.’ Trim stared him in the face, gave him a penny again and said, ‘French Dog!’ ‘And, Trim, he is a brave soldier; you see he has fought for his fatherland and has been sorely wounded.’ Trim pressed his hand, while he gave him another penny, and said ‘French Dog!’ ‘And, Trim, this soldier is a good but unfortunate husband, and has a wife and four little children.’ Trim, with a tear in his eye, gave all he had left and said, rather softly, ‘French Dog!’”

This scene recalls vividly the encounter between Just and the landlord in the first act of “Minna,” the passage in which Just continues to assert that the landlord is a “Grobian.” There are the same tactics, the same persistence, the same contrasts. The passage quoted was, of course, written after “Minna,” but from it we gather evidence that Corporal Trim and his own Just were similar creations, that to him Corporal Trim, when he had occasion to picture him, must needs hark back to the figure of Just, a character which may well originally have been suggested by Capt. Shandy’s faithful servant.

Among German literati, Herder is another representative of acquaintance with Sterne and appreciation of his masterpiece. Haym[40] implies that Sterne and Swift are mentioned more often than any other foreign authors in Herder’s writings of the Riga period (November, 1764, to May, 1769). This would, of course, include the first fervor of enthusiasm concerning the Sentimental Journey, and would be a statement decidedly doubtful, if applied exclusively to the previous years. In a note-book, possibly reaching back before his arrival in Riga to his student days in Königsberg, Herder made quotations from Shandy and Don Quixote, possibly preparatory notes for his study of the ridiculous in the Fourth Wäldchen.[41] In May, 1766, Herder went to Mitau to visit Hamann, and he designates the account of the events since leaving there as “ein Capitel meines Shandyschen Romans”[42] and sends it as such to “my uncle, Tobias Shandy.” Later a letter, written 27–16, August, 1766, is begun with the heading, “Herder to Hamann and no more Yorick to Tobias Shandy,” in which he says: “I am now in a condition where I can play the part of Yorick as little as Panza that of Governor.”[43] The same letter contains another reference and the following familiar allusion to Sterne: “Grüsen Sie Trim, wenn ich gegen keinen den beleidigenden Karakter Yoriks oder leider! das Schicksal wider Willen zu beleidigen, habe, so ist’s doch gegen ihn und Hartknoch.” These last quotations are significant as giving proof that Shandy had so far forced its claims upon a little set of book-lovers in the remote east, Herder, Hamann and a few others, that they gave one another in play names from the English novel. A letter from Hamann to Herder, dated Königsberg, June 10, 1767, indicates that the former shared also the devotion to Sterne.[44]

In the first collection of “Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Litteratur,” 1767, the sixth section treats of the “Idiotismen” of a language. British “Laune” is cited as such an untranslatable “Idiotism” and the lack of German humorists is noted, and Swift is noted particularly as an English example. In the second and revised edition Herder adds material containing allusion to Hudibras and Tristram.[45] The first and second “Kritische Wäldchen” contain several references to Sterne and Shandy.[46] Herder, curiously enough, did not read the Sentimental Journey until the autumn of 1768, as is disclosed in a letter to Hamann written in November,[47] which also shows his appreciation of Sterne. “An Sterne’s Laune,” he says, “kann ich mich nicht satt lesen. Eben den Augenblick, da ich an ihn denke, bekomme ich seine Sentimental Journey zum Durchlesen, und wenn nicht meine Englische Sprachwissenschaft scheitert, wie angenehm werde ich mit ihm reisen. Ich bin an seine Sentiments zum Theil schon so gewöhnt, sie bis in das weiche innere Mark seiner Menschheit in ihren zarten Fäden zu verfolgen: dass ich glaube seinen Tristram etwas mehr zu verstehn als the common people. Nur um so mehr ärgern mich auch seine verfluchten Säuereien und Zweideutigkeiten, die das Buch wenigerer Empfehlung fähig machen als es verdient.” We learn from the same letter that Herder possessed the sermons of Yorick in the Zürich translation. Herder’s own homiletical style during this period, as evinced by the sermons preserved to us, betrays no trace of Sterne’s influence.

Riedel, in his “Theorie der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften,”[48] shows appreciation of Shandy complete and discriminating, previous to the publication of the Sentimental Journey. This book is a sort of compendium, a series of rather disconnected chapters, woven together out of quotations from aesthetic critics, examples and comment. In the chapter on Similarity and Contrast he contends that a satirist only may transgress the rule he has just enunciated: “When a perfect similarity fails of its effect, a too far-fetched, a too ingenious one, is even less effective,” and in this connection he quotes from Tristram Shandy a passage describing the accident to Dr. Slop and Obadiah.[49] Riedel translates the passage himself. The chapter “Ueber die Laune”[50] contains two more references to Shandy. In a volume dated 1768 and entitled “Ueber das Publikum: Briefe an einige Glieder desselben,” written evidently without knowledge of the Journey, Riedel indicates the position which Shandy had in these years won for itself among a select class. Riedel calls it a contribution to the “Register” of the human heart and states that he knows people who claim to have learned more psychology from this novel than from many thick volumes in which the authors had first killed sentiment in order then to dissect it at leisure.[51]

Early in 1763, one finds an appreciative knowledge of Shandy as a possession of a group of Swiss literati, but probably confined to a coterie of intellectual aristocrats and novelty-seekers. Julie von Bondeli[52] writes to Usteri from Koenitz on March 10, 1763, that Kirchberger[53] will be able to get him the opportunity to read Tristram Shandy as a whole, that she herself has read two volumes with surprise, emotion and almost constant bursts of laughter; she goes on to say: “Il voudrait la peine d’apprendre l’anglais ne fut-ce que pour lire cet impayable livre, dont la vérité et le génie se fait sentir à chaque ligne au travers de la plus originelle plaisanterie.” Zimmermann was a resident of Brugg, 1754–1768, and was an intimate friend of Fräulein von Bondeli. It may be that this later enthusiastic admirer of Sterne became acquainted with Shandy at this time through Fräulein von Bondeli, but their correspondence, covering the years 1761–1775, does not disclose it.

Dr. Carl Behmer, who has devoted an entire monograph to the study of Wieland’s connection with Sterne, is of the opinion, and his proofs seem conclusive, that Wieland did not know Shandy before the autumn of 1767,[54] that is, only a few months before the publication of the Journey. But his enthusiasm was immediate. The first evidence of acquaintance with Sterne, a letter to Zimmermann (November 13, 1767),[55] is full of extravagant terms of admiration and devotion. One is naturally reminded of his similar extravagant expressions with reference to the undying worth of Richardson’s novels. Sterne’s life philosophy fitted in with Wieland’s second literary period, the frivolous, sensuous, epicurean, even as the moral meanderings of Richardson agreed with his former serious, religious attitude. Probably soon after or while reading Shandy, Wieland conceived the idea of translating it. The letter which contains this very first mention of Sterne also records Wieland’s regret that the Germans can read this incomparable original only in so wretched a translation, which implies a contemporary acquaintance with Dr. Zückert’s rendering. This regret may well have been the foundation of his own purpose of translating the book; and knowledge of this seems to have been pretty general among German men of letters at the time. Though the account of this purpose would bring us into a time when the Sentimental Journey was in every hand, it may be as well to complete what we have to say of it here.

His reason for abandoning the idea, and the amount of work done, the length of time he spent upon the project, cannot be determined from his correspondence and must, as Behmer implies, be left in doubt. But several facts, which Behmer does not note, remarks of his own and of his contemporaries, point to more than an undefined general purpose on his part; it is not improbable that considerable work was done. Wieland says incidentally in his Teutscher Merkur,[56] in a review of the new edition of Zückert’s translation: “Vor drei Jahren, da er (Lange) mich bat, ihm die Uebersetzung des Tristram mit der ich damals umgieng, in Verlag zu geben.” Herder asks Nicolai in a letter dated Paris, November 30, 1769, “What is Wieland doing, is he far along with his Shandy?” And in August, 1769, in a letter to Hartknoch, he mentions Wieland’s Tristram among German books which he longs to read.[57]

The Jenaische Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen[58] for December 18, 1769, in mentioning this new edition of Zückert’s translation, states that Wieland has now given up his intention, but adds: “Perhaps he will, however, write essays which may fill the place of a philosophical commentary upon the whole book.” That Wieland had any such secondary purpose is not elsewhere stated, but it does not seem as if the journal would have published such a rumor without some foundation in fact. It may be possibly a resurrection of his former idea of a defense of Tristram as a part of the “Litteraturbriefe” scheme which Riedel had proposed.[59] This general project having failed, Wieland may have cherished the purpose of defending Tristram independently of the plan. Or this may be a reviewer’s vague memory of a former rumor of plan.

It is worth noting incidentally that Gellert does not seem to have known Sterne at all. His letters, for example, to Demoiselle Lucius, which begin October 22, 1760, and continue to December 4, 1769, contain frequent references to other English celebrities, but none to Sterne.

The first notice of Sterne’s death is probably that in the Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten of Hamburg in the issue of April 6, 1768, not three weeks after the event itself. The brief announcement is a comparison with Cervantes. The Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen chronicles the death of Yorick, August 29, 1768.[60]

Though published in England from 1759–67, Tristram Shandy seems not to have been reprinted in Germany till the 1772 edition of Richter in Altenburg, a year later indeed than Richter’s reprint of the Sentimental Journey. The colorless and inaccurate Zückert translation, as has already been suggested, achieved no real popular success and won no learned recognition. The reviews were largely silent or indifferent to it, and, apart from the comparatively few notices already cited, it was not mentioned by any important literary periodical until after its republication by Lange, when the Sentimental Journey had set all tongues awag with reference to the late lamented Yorick. None of the journals indicate any appreciation of Sterne’s especial claim to recognition, nor see in the fatherland any peculiar receptiveness to his appeal. In short, the foregoing accumulation of particulars resolves itself into the general statement, easily derived from the facts stated: Sterne’s position in the German world of letters is due primarily to the Sentimental Journey. Without its added impulse Shandy would have hardly stirred the surface of German life and thought. The enthusiasm even of a few scholars whose learning and appreciation of literature is international, the occasional message of uncertain understanding, of doubtful approbation, or of rumored popularity in another land, are not sufficient to secure a general interest and attentiveness, much less a literary following. The striking contrast between the essential characteristics of the two books is a sufficient and wholly reasonable occasion for Germany’s temporary indifference to the one and her immediate welcome for the other. Shandy is whimsicality touched with sentiment. The Sentimental Journey is the record of a sentimental experience, guided by the caprice of a whimsical will. Whimsicality is a flower that defies transplanting; when once rooted in other soil it shoots up into obscurity, masquerading as profundity, or pure silliness without reason or a smile. The whimsies of one language become amazing contortions in another. The humor of Shandy, though deep-dyed in Sterne’s own eccentricity, is still essentially British and demands for its appreciation a more extensive knowledge of British life in its narrowest, most individual phases, a more intensive sympathy with British attitudes of mind than the German of the eighteenth century, save in rare instances, possessed. Bode asserts in the preface to his translation of the Sentimental Journey that Shandy had been read by a good many Germans, but follows this remark with the query, “How many have understood it?” “One finds people,” he says, “who despise it as the most nonsensical twaddle, and cannot comprehend how others, whom they must credit with a good deal of understanding, wit, and learning, think quite otherwise of it,” and he closes by noting the necessity that one be acquainted with the follies of the world, and especially of the British world, to appreciate the novel. He refers unquestionably to his own circle of literati in Hamburg, who knew Tristram and cared for it, and to others of his acquaintance less favored with a knowledge of things English. The Sentimental Journey presented no inscrutable mystery of purposeful eccentricity and perplexing personality, but was written large in great human characters which he who ran might read. And Germany was ready to give it a welcome.[61]

[1.] A reviewer in the Frankfurter Gel. Anz., as early as 1774, asserts that Sterne had inspired more droll and sentimental imitations in Germany than even in England. (Apr. 5, 1774.)

[2.] See Bibliography for list of books giving more or less extended accounts of Sterne’s influence.

[3.] Sterne did, to be sure, assert in a letter (Letters, I, p. 34) that he wrote “not to be fed but to be famous.” Yet this was after this desire had been fulfilled, and, as the expression agrees with the tone and purpose of the letter in which it is found, it does not seem necessary to place too much weight upon it. It is very probable in view of evidence collected later that Sterne began at least to write Tristram as a pastime in domestic misfortune. The thirst for fame may have developed in the progress of the composition.

[4.] Fitzgerald says “end of December,” Vol. I, p. 116, and the volumes were reviewed in the December number of the Monthly Review, 1759 (Vol. XXI, pp. 561–571), though without any mention of the author’s name. This review mentions no other publisher than Cooper.

[5.] Quoted by Fitzgerald, Vol. I, p. 126.

[6.] The full title of this paper was Staats- und gelehrte Zeitung des Hamburgischen unpartheyischen Correspondenten.

[7.] Meusel: Lexicon der vom Jahr 1750 bis 1800 verstorbenen teutschen Schriftsteller. Bd. XV. (Leipzig bey Fleischer) 1816, pp, 472–474.

[8.] Berlin, bei August Mylius. 1764.

[9.] Behmer (L. Sterne und C. M. Wieland, p. 15) seems to be unaware of the translations of the following parts, and of the authorship.

[10.] This attempt to supply a ninth volume of Tristram Shandy seems to have been overlooked. A spurious third volume is mentioned in the Natl. Dict. of Biography and is attributed to John Carr. This ninth volume is however noticed in the London Magazine, 1766, p. 691, with accompanying statement that it is “not by the author of the eight volumes.” The genuine ninth volume is mentioned and quoted in this magazine in later issues, 1767, p. 78, 206.

[11.] This edition is reviewed also in Almanach der deutschen Musen, 1774, p. 97.

[12.] “Kein Deutscher, welcher das Uebersetzen aus fremden Sprachen als ein Handwerk ansieht.”

[13.] I, p. 111.

[14.] “Lexicon der Hamburgischen Schriftsteller,” Hamburg, 1851–1883.

[15.] Tristram Shandy, I, p. 107, and Zückert’s translation, I, p. 141.

[16.] In this review and in the announcement of Sterne’s death, this periodical refers to him as the Dean of York, a distinction which Sterne never enjoyed.

[17.] 1767, p. 691. The reference is given in the Register to 1753–1782 erroneously as p. 791.

[18.] “Predigten von Laurenz Sterne oder Yorick.” Zürich, bey Fuesslin & Comp, 1766–69. 3 vols.

[19.] The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek was founded in 1765.

[20.] XII, 1, pp. 210–211 and 2, p. 202.

[21.] For full title see Bibliography.

[22.] Vol. I, p. 460.

[23.] Edited by Klotz and founded in 1767, published at Halle by J. J. Gebauer. Vol. I, Part 2, p. 183.

[24.] Vol. II, p. 500.

[25.] The former says merely “the last parts”, the latter designates “the last three.”

[26.] III, 1, pp. 1 ff.

[27.] This article is not to be confused with Garve’s well-known article published in the same magazine, LXI, pp. 51–77 (1798).

[28.] IV, St. 2, pp. 376–7.

[29.] This is from the February number, 1767, of the Monthly Review. (Vol. XXXVI, p. 102.)

[30.] The seventh and eighth volumes of Shandy, English edition, are reviewed in the first number of a short-lived Frankfurt periodical, Neue Auszüge aus den besten ausländischen Wochen und Monatsschriften, 1765. Unterhaltungen, a magazine published at Hamburg and dealing largely with English interests, notes the London publication of the spurious ninth volume of Shandy (Vol. II, p. 152, August, 1766). Die Brittische Bibliothek, another magazine consisting principally of English reprints and literary news, makes no mention of Sterne up to 1767. Then in a catalogue of English books sold by Casper Fritsch in Leipzig, Shandy is given, but without the name of the author. There is an account of Sterne’s sermons in the Neue Hamburgische Zeitung, April, 1768.

[31.] Mendelssohn’s Schriften, edited by Prof. Dr. G. B. Mendelssohn. Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1844. Vol. V, p. 171.

[32.] Kürschner edition of Lessing’s works, III, 2, pp. 156–157. See also “Lessing und die Engländer” by Josef Caro in Euphorion, VI, pp. 489 ff. Erich Schmidt made the statement in his life of Lessing in the edition of 1884, but corrected it later, in the edition of 1899, probably depending on parallel passages drawn from Paul Albrecht’s “Lessing’s Plagiate” (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1888–1891), an extraordinary work which by its frequent absurdity and its viciousness of attack forfeits credence in its occasional genuine discoveries.

[33.] Lessing. “Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften.” Berlin, 1884, I, pp. 174, 465. This is omitted in the latest edition.

[34.] Perry (Thomas Sargeant) “From Opitz to Lessing.” Boston, 1885, p. 162.

[35.] Quoted by Lichtenberg in “Göttingischer Taschenkalender,” 1796, p. 191. “Vermischte Schriften,” VI, p. 487.

[36.] Lachmann edition, Berlin, 1840. Vol. XII, p. 240.

[37.] XIII, pp. 209–10.

[38.] XVII, pp. 30–45. The article is reprinted in the Hempel edition of Lessing, XVII, pp. 263–71.

[39.] Nicolai uses the German word for colonel, a title which Uncle Toby never bore.

[40.] R. Haym. “Herder nach seinem Leben und seinen Werken.” I, p. 413.

[41.] Haym, I, p. 261.

[42.] Herder’s “Briefe an Joh. Georg Hamann,” ed. by Otto Hoffmann, Berlin, 1889, p. 25, or “Lebensbild” II, p. 140.

[43.] “Briefe an Hamann,” p. 27.

[44.] Lebensbild II (I, 2), p. 256; also in Hamann’s Schriften, ed. by Roth. Berlin, 1822, III, p. 372. Hamann asks Herder to remind his publisher, when the latter sends the promised third part of the “Fragmente,” to inclose without fail the engraving of Sterne, because the latter is absolutely essential to his furnishings.

[45.] See Suphan I, p. 163; II, p. 46.

[46.] Suphan III, pp. 170, 223, 233, 277, 307.

[47.] Briefe an Hamann, p. 49.

[48.] . . . . in Auszug aus den Werken verschiedener Schriftsteller von Friedrich Just Riedel, Jena, 1767. The chapter cited is pp. 137 ff.

[49.] I, p. 106.

[50.] Pp. 91–96; see also p. 331.

[51.] Pp. 118–120, or Sämmtliche Schriften, Wien, 1787, 4ter Th., 4ter Bd., p. 133. A review with quotation of this criticism of Shandy is found in the Deutsche Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, II, p. 659, but after the publication of the Mittelstedt translation of the Sentimental Journey had been reviewed in the same periodical.

[52.] See “Julie von Bondeli und ihr Freundeskreis,” von Eduard Bodemann. Hannover, 1874.

[53.] Nicholas Ant. Kirchberger, the Swiss statesman and philosopher, the friend of Rousseau.

[54.] Behmer, “Laurence Sterne und C. M. Wieland,” pp. 15–17.

[55.] “Ausgewählte Briefe,” Bd. II, p. 285 f. Zürich, 1815.

[56.] V, pp. 345–6. 1774.

[57.] See Lebensbild, V, p. 107 and p. 40.

[58.] 1769, p. 840.

[59.] See Behmer, p. 24, and the letter to Riedel, October 26, 1768, Ludwig Wielands Briefsammlung. I, p. 232.

[60.] P. 856.

[61.] These two aspects of the Sterne cult in Germany will be more fully treated later. The historians of literature and other investigators who have treated Sterne’s influence in Germany have not distinguished very carefully the difference between Sterne’s two works, and the resulting difference between the kind and amount of their respective influences. Appell, however, interprets the condition correctly and assigns the cause with accuracy and pointedness. (“Werther und seine Zeit.” p. 246). The German critics repeat persistently the thought that the imitators of Sterne remained as far away from the originals as the Shakespeare followers from the great Elizabethan. See Gervinus, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung, I, 184; Hettner, “Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert,” III, 1, p. 362; Hofer, “Deutsche Litteraturgeschichte,” p. 150.

[ CHAPTER III]
THE PUBLICATION OF THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

On February 27, 1768, the Sentimental Journey was published in London,[1] less than three weeks before the author’s death, and the book was at once transplanted to German soil, beginning there immediately its career of commanding influence and wide-spread popularity.

Several causes operated together in favoring its pronounced and immediate success. A knowledge of Sterne existed among the more intelligent lovers of English literature in Germany, the leaders of thought, whose voice compelled attention for the understandable, but was powerless to create appreciation for the unintelligible among the lower ranks of readers. This knowledge and appreciation of Yorick were immediately available for the furtherance of Sterne’s fame as soon as a work of popular appeal was published. The then prevailing interest in travels is, further, not to be overlooked as a forceful factor in securing immediate recognition for the Sentimental Journey.[2] At no time in the world’s history has the popular interest in books of travel, containing geographical and topographical description, and information concerning peoples and customs, been greater than during this period. The presses teemed with stories of wanderers in known and unknown lands. The preface to the Neue Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen of Leipzig for the year 1759 heralds as a matter of importance a gain in geographical description. The Jenaische Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen, 1773, makes in its tables of contents, a separate division of travels. In 1759, also, the “Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande” (Leipzig, 1747–1774), reached its seventeenth volume. These are brief indications among numerous similar instances of the then predominant interest in the wanderer’s experience. Sterne’s second work of fiction, though differing in its nature so materially from other books of travel, may well, even if only from the allurement of its title, have shared the general enthusiasm for the traveler’s narrative. Most important, however, is the direct appeal of the book itself, irresistible to the German mind and heart. Germany had been for a decade hesitating on the verge of tears, and grasped with eagerness a book which seemed to give her British sanction for indulgence in her lachrymose desire.

The portion of Shandy which is virtually a part of the Sentimental Journey,[3] which Sterne, possibly to satisfy the demands of the publisher, thrust in to fill out volumes contracted for, was not long enough, nor distinctive enough in its use of sentiment, was too effectually concealed in its volume of Shandean quibbles, to win readers for the whole of Shandy, or to direct wavering attention through the mazes of Shandyism up to the point where the sentimental Yorick really takes up the pen and introduces the reader to the sad fate of Maria of Moulines. One can imagine eager Germany aroused to sentimental frenzy over the Maria incident in the Sentimental Journey, turning with throbbing contrition to the forgotten, neglected, or unknown passage in Tristram Shandy.[4]

It is difficult to trace sources for Sterne in English letters, that is, for the strange combination of whimsicality, genuine sentiment and knavish smiles, which is the real Sterne. He is individual, exotic, not demonstrable from preceding literary conditions, and his meteoric, or rather rocket-like career in Britain is in its decline a proof of the insensibility of the English people to a large portion of his gospel. The creature of fancy which, by a process of elimination, the Germans made out of Yorick is more easily explicable from existing and preceding literary and emotional conditions in Germany.[5] Brockes had prepared the way for a sentimental view of nature, Klopstock’s poetry had fostered the display of emotion, the analysis of human feeling. Gellert had spread his own sort of religious and ethical sentimentalism among the multitudes of his devotees. Stirred by, and contemporaneous with Gallic feeling, Germany was turning with longing toward the natural man, that is, man unhampered by convention and free to follow the dictates of the primal emotions. The exercise of human sympathy was a goal of this movement. In this vague, uncertain awakening, this dangerous freeing of human feelings, Yorick’s practical illustration of the sentimental life could not but prove an incentive, an organizer, a relief for pent-up emotion.[6]

Johann Joachim Christoph Bode has already been mentioned in relation to the early review of Zückert’s translation of Shandy. His connection with the rapid growth of the Yorick cult after the publication of the Sentimental Journey demands a more extended account of this German apostle of Yorick. In the sixth volume of Bode’s translation of Montaigne[7] was printed first the life of the translator by C. A. Böttiger. This was published the following year by the same house in a separate volume entitled “J. J. C. Bodes literarisches Leben, nebst dessen Bildnis von Lips.” All other sources of information regarding Bode, such as the accounts in Jördens and in Schlichtegroll’s “Nekrolog,”[8] are derivations or abstracts from this biography. Bode was born in Braunschweig in 1730; reared in lowly circumstances and suffering various vicissitudes of fortune, he came to Hamburg in 1756–7. Gifted with a talent for languages, which he had cultivated assiduously, he was regarded at the time of his arrival, even in Hamburg, as one especially conversant with the English language and literature. His nature must have borne something akin to Yorick, for his biographer describes his position in Hamburg society as not dissimilar to that once occupied for a brief space in the London world by the clever fêted Sterne. Yet the enthusiasm of the friend as biographer doubtless colors the case, forcing a parallel with Yorick by sheer necessity. Before 1768 Bode had published several translations from the English with rather dubious success, and the adaptability of the Sentimental Journey to German uses must have occurred to him, or have been suggested to him directly upon its very importation into Germany. He undoubtedly set himself to the task of translation as soon as the book reached his hands, for, in the issue of the Hamburgische Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten for April 20, is found Bode’s translation of a section from the Sentimental Journey. “Die Bettler” he names the extract; it is really the fifth of the sections which Sterne labels “Montriul.”[9] In the numbers of the same paper for June 11 and 15, Bode translates in two parts the story of the “Monk;” thus, in but little over three months after its English publication, the story of the poor Franciscan Lorenzo and his fateful snuff-box was transferred to Germany and began its heart-touching career. These excerpts were included by Bode later in the year when he published his translation of the whole Sentimental Journey. The first extract was evidently received with favor and interest, for, in the foreword to the translation of the “Monk,” in the issue of June 11, Bode assigns this as his reason for making his readers better acquainted with this worthy book. He further says that the reader of taste and insight will not fail to distinguish the difference when so fine a connoisseur of the human heart as Sterne depicts sentiments, and when a shallow wit prattles of his emotions. Bode’s last words are a covert assumption of his rôle as prophet and priest of Yorick in Germany: “The reader may himself judge from the following passage, whether we have spoken of our Briton in terms of too high praise.”

In the July number of the Unterhaltungen, another Hamburg periodical, is printed another translation from the Sentimental Journey entitled: “Eine Begebenheit aus Yoricks Reise fürs Herz übersetzt.” The episode is that of the fille de chambre[10] who is seeking Crébillon’s “Les Egarements du Coeur et de l’Esprit.” The translator omits the first part of the section and introduces us to the story with a few unacknowledged words of his own. In the September number of the same periodical the rest of the fille de chambre story[11] is narrated. Here also the translator alters the beginning of the account to make it less abrupt in the rendering. The author of this translation has not been determined. Bode does not translate the word “Sentimental” in his published extracts, giving merely the English title; hence Lessing’s advice[12] concerning the rendering of the word dates probably from the latter part of the summer. The translation in the September number of the Unterhaltungen also does not contain a rendering of the word. Bode’s complete translation was issued probably in October,[13] possibly late in September, 1768, and bore the imprint of the publisher Cramer in Hamburg and Bremen, but the volumes were printed at Bode’s own press and were entitled “Yoricks Empfindsame Reise durch Frankreich und Italien, aus dem Englischen übersetzt.”[14]

The translator’s preface occupies twenty pages and is an important document in the story of Sterne’s popularity in Germany, since it represents the introductory battle-cry of the Sterne cult, and illustrates the attitude of cultured Germany toward the new star. Bode begins his foreword with Lessing’s well-known statement of his devotion to Sterne. Bode does not name Lessing; calls him “a well-known German scholar.” The statement referred to was made when Bode brought to his friend the news of Sterne’s death. It is worth repeating:

“I would gladly have resigned to him five years of my own life, if such a thing were possible, though I had known with certainty that I had only ten, or even eight left. . . . but under the condition that he must keep on writing, no matter what, life and opinions, or sermons, or journeys.” On July 5, 1768, Lessing wrote to Nicolai, commenting on Winckelmann’s death as follows: “He is the second author within a short time, to whom I would have gladly given some years of my own life.”[15]

Nearly thirty years later (March 20, 1797) Sara Wulf, whose maiden name was Meyer and who was later and better known as Frau von Grotthus, wrote from Dresden to Goethe of the consolation found in “Werther” after a disappointing youthful love affair, and of Lessing’s conversation with her then concerning Goethe. She reports Lessing’s words as follows: “You will feel sometime what a genius Goethe is, I am sure of this. I have always said I would give ten years of my own life if I had been able to lengthen Sterne’s by one year, but Goethe consoles me in some measure for his loss.”[16]

It would be absurd to attach any importance to this variation of statement. It does not indicate necessarily an affection for Sterne and a regret at his loss, mathematically doubled in these seven or eight years between Sterne’s death and the time of Lessing’s conversation with Sara Meyer; it probably arises from a failure of memory on the part of the lady, for Bode’s narrative of the anecdote was printed but a few months after Sterne’s death, and Lessing made no effort to correct an inaccuracy of statement, if such were the case, though he lived to see four editions of Bode’s translation and consequently so many repetitions of his expressed but impossible desire. Erich Schmidt[17] reduces this willingness on Lessing’s part to one year,—an unwarranted liberty.

These two testimonies of Lessing’s devotion are of importance in defining his attitude toward Yorick. They attest the fact that this was no passing fancy, no impulsive thought uttered on the moment when the news of Sterne’s death was brought to him, and when the Sentimental Journey could have been but a few weeks in his hands, but a deep-seated desire, born of reflection and continued admiration.[18] The addition of the word “Reisen” in Bode’s narrative is significant, for it shows that Lessing must have become acquainted with the Sentimental Journey before April 6, the date of the notice of Sterne’s death in the Hamburgische Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten;[19] that is, almost immediately after its English publication, unless Bode, in his enthusiasm for the book which he was offering the public, inserted the word unwarrantably in Lessing’s statement.

To return to Bode’s preface. With emphatic protestations, disclaiming vanity in appealing to the authority of so distinguished a friend, Bode proceeds to relate more in detail Lessing’s connection with his endeavor. He does not say that Lessing suggested the translation to him, though his account has been interpreted to mean that, and this fact has been generally accepted by the historians of literature and the biographers of Lessing.[20] The tone of Bode’s preface, however, rather implies the contrary, and no other proof of the supposition is available. What Bode does assert is merely that the name of the scholar whom he quotes as having expressed a willingness to give a part of his own life if Sterne’s literary activity might be continued, would create a favorable prepossession for his original (“ein günstiges Vorurtheil”), and that a translator is often fortunate enough if his selection of a book to translate is not censured. All this implies, on Lessing’s part, only an approval of Bode’s choice, a fact which would naturally follow from the remarkable statement of esteem in the preceding sentence. Bode says further that out of friendship for him and regard for the reader of taste, this author (Lessing), had taken the trouble to go through the whole translation, and then he adds the conventional request in such circumstances, that the errors remaining may be attributed to the translator and not to the friend.

The use of the epithet “empfindsam” for “sentimental” is then the occasion for some discussion, and its source is one of the facts involved in Sterne’s German vogue which seem to have fastened themselves on the memory of literature. Bode had in the first place translated the English term by “sittlich,” a manifestly insufficient if not flatly incorrect rendering, but his friend coined the word “empfindsam” for the occasion and Bode quotes Lessing’s own words on the subject:

“Bemerken Sie sodann dass sentimental ein neues Wort ist. War es Sternen erlaubt, sich ein neues Wort zu bilden, so muss es eben darum auch seinem Uebersetzer erlaubt seyn. Die Engländer hatten gar kein Adjectivum von Sentiment: wir haben von Empfindung mehr als eines, empfindlich, empfindbar, empfindungsreich, aber diese sagen alle etwas anders. Wagen Sie, empfindsam! Wenn eine mühsame Reise eine Reise heisst, bey der viel Mühe ist: so kann ja auch eine empfindsame Reise eine Reise heissen, bey der viel Empfindung war. Ich will nicht sagen, dass Sie die Analogie ganz auf ihrer Seite haben dürften. Aber was die Leser vors erste bey dem Worte noch nicht denken mögen, sie sich nach und nach dabey zu denken gewöhnen.”[21]

The statement that Sterne coined the word “sentimental” is undoubtedly incorrect,[22] but no one seems to have discovered and corrected the error till Nicolai’s article on Sterne in the Berlinische Monatsschrift for February, 1795, in which it is shown that the word had been used in older English novels, in “Sir Charles Grandison” indeed.[23] It may well be that, as Böttiger hints,[24] the coining of the word “empfindsam” was suggested to Lessing by Abbt’s similar formation of “empfindnisz.”[25]

The preface to this first edition of Bode’s translation of the Sentimental Journey contains, further, a sketch of Sterne’s life,[26] his character and his works. Bode relates the familiar story of the dog, but misses the point entirely in rendering “puppy” by “Geck” in Sterne’s reply, “So lang er ein Geck ist.” The watchcoat episode is narrated, and a brief account is given of Sterne’s fortunes in London with Tristram Shandy and the sermons. Allusion has already been made to the hints thrown out in this sketch relative to the reading of Sterne in Germany. A translation from Shandy of the passage descriptive of Parson Yorick serves as a portrait for Sterne.

A second edition of Bode’s work was published in 1769. The preface, which is dated “Anfang des Monats Mai, 1769,” is in the main identical with the first, but has some significant additions. A word is said relative to his controversy with a critic, which is mentioned later.[27] Bode confesses further that the excellence of his work is due to Ebert and Lessing,[28] though modesty compelled his silence in the previous preface concerning the source of his aid. Bode admits that even this disclosure is prompted by the clever guess of a critic in the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent,[29] who openly named Lessing as the scholar referred to in the first introduction. The addition and prominence of Ebert’s name is worthy of note, for in spite of the plural mention[30] in the appendix to the introduction, his first acknowledgment is to one friend only and there is no suggestion of another counselor. Ebert’s connection with the Bode translation has been overlooked in the distribution of influence, while the memorable coining of the new word, supplemented by Böttiger’s unsubstantiated statements, has emphasized Lessing’s service in this regard. Ebert is well-known as an intelligent and appreciative student of English literature, and as a translator, but his own works betray no trace of imitation or admiration of Sterne.

The final words of this new preface promise a translation of the continuation of the Sentimental Journey; the spurious volumes of Eugenius are, of course, the ones meant here. This introduction to the second edition remains unchanged in the subsequent ones. The text of the second edition was substantially an exact reproduction of the first, but Bode allowed himself frequent minor changes of word or phrase, an alteration occurring on an average once in about three pages. Bode’s changes are in general the result of a polishing or filing process, in the interest of elegance of discourse, or accuracy of translation. Bode acknowledges that some of the corrections were those suggested by a reviewer,[31] but states that other passages criticised were allowed to stand as they were. He says further that he would have asked those friends who had helped him on his translation itself to aid him in the alterations, if distance and other conditions had allowed. The reference here is naturally to his separation from Ebert, who was in Braunschweig, but the other “conditions” which could prevent a continuation of Lessing’s interest in the translation and his assistance in revision are not evident. Lessing was in Hamburg during this period, and hence his advice was available.

Bode’s retranslation of the passage with which Sterne’s work closed shows increased perception and appreciation for the subtleness of Sterne’s indecent suggestions, or, perhaps, a growing lack of timidity or scruple in boldly repeating them. It is probable that the continuation by Eugenius, which had come into his hands during this period, had, with its resumption of the point, reminded Bode of the inadequacy and inexactness of his previous rendering.

At almost precisely the same time that Bode’s translation appeared, another German rendering was published, a fact which in itself is significant for the determination of the relative strength of appeal as between Sterne’s two works of fiction. The title[32] of this version was “Versuch über die menschliche Natur in Herrn Yoricks, Verfasser des Tristram Shandy, Reisen durch Frankreich und Italien, aus dem Englischen.” It was dated 1769 and was published at the “Fürstliche Waisenhausbuchhandlung,” in Braunschweig. The preface is signed Braunschweig, September 7, 1768, and the book was issued in September or October. The anonymous translator was Pastor Mittelstedt[33] in Braunschweig (Hirsching und Jördens say Hofprediger), whom the partisan Böttiger calls the ever-ready manufacturer of translations (der allezeit fertige Uebersetzungsfabrikant). Behmer tentatively suggests Weis as the translator of this early rendering, an error into which he is led evidently by a remark in Bode’s preface in which the apologetic translator states the rumor that Weis was engaged in translating the same book, and that he (Bode) would surely have locked up his work in his desk if the publisher had not thereby been led to suffer loss. Nothing was ever heard of this third translation.

This first edition of the Mittelstedt translation contains 248 pages and is supplied with a preface which is, like Bode’s, concerned in considerable measure with the perplexing problem of the translation of Sterne’s title. The English title is given and the word “sentimental” is declared a new one in England and untranslatable in German. Mittelstedt proposes “Gefühlvolle Reisen,” “Reisen fürs Herz,” “Philosophische Reisen,” and then condemns his own suggestions as indeterminate and forced. He then goes on to say, “So I have chosen the title which Yorick himself suggests in the first part.”[34] He speaks of the lavish praise already bestowed on this book by the learned journals, and turns at last aside to do the obvious: he bemoans Sterne’s death by quoting Hamlet and closes with an apostrophe to Sterne translated from the April number of the Monthly Review for 1768.[35] In 1769, the year when the first edition was dated, the Mittelstedt translation was published under a slightly altered title, as already mentioned. This second edition of the Mittelstedt translation in the same year as the first is overlooked by Jördens and Hirsching,[36] both of whom give a second and hence really a third edition in 1774. Böttiger notes with partisan zeal that Bode’s translation was made use of in some of the alterations of this second edition, and further records the fact that the account of Sterne’s life, added in this edition, was actually copied from Bode’s preface.[37]

The publication of the Mittelstedt translation was the occasion of a brief controversy between the two translators in contemporary journals. Mittelstedt printed his criticism of Bode’s work in a home paper, the Braunschweiger Intelligenzblätter, and Bode spoke out his defense in the Neue Hamburger Zeitung. That Bode in his second edition adopted some of the reviewer’s suggestions and criticisms has been noted, but in the preface to this edition he declines to resume the strife in spite of general expectation of it, but, as a final shot, he delivers himself of “an article from his critical creed,” that the “critic is as little infallible as author or translator,” which seems, at any rate, a rather pointless and insignificant contribution to the controversy.

Bode’s translation of the third and fourth volumes of Yorick’s Journey,[38] that is, the continuation by Eugenius, followed directly after the announcement in the preface to the second edition of the first two volumes, as already mentioned. Böttiger states that Bode had this continuation from Alberti and knew it before anyone else in Germany. It was published in England in the spring of 1769, and was greeted with a disapproval which was quite general, and it never enjoyed there any considerable genuine popularity or recognition. Bode published this translation of Stevenson’s work without any further word of comment or explanation whatsoever, a fact which easily paved the way for a misunderstanding relative to the volumes, for Bode was frequently regarded as their author and held responsible for their defects. Bode himself never made any satisfactory or adequate explanation of his attitude toward these volumes, and the reply to Goeze in the introduction to his translation of Shandy is the nearest approach to a discussion of his position. But there Bode is concerned only with the attack made by the Hamburg pastor upon his character, an inference drawn from the nature of the book translated, and the character of the translation; in the absence of a new edition in which “Mine and His shall be marked off by distinct boundaries,” he asks Goeze only to send to him, and beg “for original and translation,” naturally for the purpose of comparison. This evasive reply is Bode’s only defense or explanation. Böttiger claims that the review of Bode’s translation in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek did much to spread the idea of Bode’s authorship, though the reviewer in that periodical[39] only suggests the possibility of German authorship, a suspicion aroused by the substitution of German customs and motif and word-play, together with contemporary literary allusion, allusion to literary mediocrities and obscurities, of such a nature as to preclude the possibility of the book’s being a literal translation from the English.

The exact amount and the nature of Bode’s divergence from the original, his alterations and additions, have never been definitely stated by anyone. The reviewer in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek is manifestly ignorant of the original. Böttiger is indefinite and partisan, yet his statement of the facts has been generally accepted and constantly repeated. He admits the German coloring given the translation by Bode through German allusions and German word-plays: he says that Bode allowed himself these liberties, feeling that he was no longer dealing with Sterne, a statement of motive on Bode’s part which the latter never makes and never hints at. The only absolute additions which Böttiger mentions as made by Bode to the narrative of Eugenius are the episode, “Das Hündchen,” and the digression, “Die Moral.” The erroneous idea herein implied has been caught up and repeated by nearly everyone who has mentioned Bode’s translation of the work.[40] The less certain allusion to “Die Moral” has been lost sight of, and “Das Hündchen” alone has been remembered as representing this activity on Bode’s part. In fact this episode is only one of many pure creations on Bode’s part and one of the briefer. In the first pages of these volumes Bode is faithful to the original, a fact suggesting that examination or comparison of the original text and Bode’s translation was never carried beyond the first two-score pages; yet here, it would seem, Bode’s rendering was less careful, more open to censure for inaccuracy, than in the previous volumes.[41]

This method of translation obtains up to page 48, then Bode omits a half-page of half-innocent, half-revolting suggestion, the story of the Cordelier, and from the middle of page 49 to page 75, twenty-five pages, the translator adds material absolutely his own. This fiction, introducing Yorick’s sentimental attitude toward the snuff-box, resuming a sentimental episode in Sterne’s work, full of tears and sympathy, is especially characteristic of Yorick, as the Germans conceived him. The story is entitled “Das Mündel,”[42] “The Ward,” and is evidently intended as a masculine companion-piece to the fateful story of Maria of Moulines, linked to it even in the actual narrative itself. An unfortunate, half-crazed man goes about in silence, performing little services in an inn where Yorick finds lodging. The hostess tells his story. He was once the brilliant son of the village miller, was well-educated and gifted with scholarly interests and attainments. While instructing some children at Moulines, he meets a peasant girl, and love is born between them. An avaricious brother opposes Jacques’s passion and ultimately confines him in secret, spreading the report in Moulines of his faithlessness to his love. After a tragedy has released Jacques from his unnatural bondage, he learns of his loved one’s death and loses his mental balance through grief. Such an addition to the brief pathos of Maria’s story, as narrated by Sterne, such a forced explanation of the circumstances, is peculiarly commonplace and inartistic. Sterne instinctively closed the episode with sufficient allowance for the exercise of the imagination.

Following this addition, the section “Slander” of the original is omitted. The story of the adventure with the opera-girl is much changed. The bald indecency of the narrative is somewhat softened by minor substitutions and omissions. Nearly two pages are inserted here, in which Yorick discourses on the difference between a sentimental traveler and an avanturier. On pages 122–126, the famous “Hündchen” episode is narrated, an insertion taking the place of the hopelessly vulgar “Rue Tireboudin.” According to this narrative, Yorick, after the fire, enters a home where he finds a boy weeping over a dead dog and refusing to be comforted with promises of other canine possessions. The critics united in praising this as being a positive addition to the Yorick adventures, as conceived and related in Sterne’s finest manner. After the lapse of more than a century, one can acknowledge the pathos, the humanity of the incident, but the manner is not that of Sterne. It is a simple, straight-forward relation of the touching incident, introducing that element of the sentimental movement which bears in Germany a close relation to Yorick, and was exploited, perhaps, more than any other feature of his creed, as then interpreted, i.e., the sentimental regard for the lower animals.[43] But there is lacking here the inevitable concomitant of Sterne’s relation of a sentimental situation, the whimsicality of the narrator in his attitude at the time of the adventure, or reflective whimsicality in the narration. Sterne is always whimsically quizzical in his conduct toward a sentimental condition, or toward himself in the analysis of his conduct.

After the “Vergebene Nachforschung” (Unsuccessful Inquiry), which agrees with the original, Bode adds two pages covering the touching solicitude of La Fleur for his master’s safety. This addition is, like the “Hündchen” episode, just mentioned, of considerable significance, for it illustrates another aspect of Sterne’s sentimental attitude toward human relations, which appealed to the Germany of these decades and was extensively copied; the connection between master and man. Following this added incident, Bode omits completely three sections of Eugenius’s original narrative, “The Definition,” “Translation of a Fragment” and “An Anecdote;” all three are brief and at the same time of baldest, most revolting indecency. In all, Bode’s direct additions amount in this first volume to about thirty-three pages out of one hundred and forty-two. The divergences from the original are in the second volume (the fourth as numbered from Sterne’s genuine Journey) more marked and extensive: above fifty pages are entirely Bode’s own, and the individual alterations in word, phrase, allusion and sentiment are more numerous and unwarranted. The more significant of Bode’s additions are here noted. “Die Moral” (pages 32–37) contains a fling at Collier, the author of a mediocre English translation of Klopstock’s “Messias,” and another against Kölbele, a contemporary German novelist, whose productions have long since been forgotten.[44]

Eugenius’s chapter, “Vendredi-Saint,” Bode sees fit to alter in a rather extraordinary way, by changing the personnel and giving it quite another introduction. He inserts here a brief account of Walter Shandy, his disappointment at Tristram’s calamitous nose and Tristram’s name, and his resolve to perfect his son’s education; and then he makes the visit to M’lle Laborde, as narrated by Eugenius, an episode out of Walter Shandy’s book, which was written for Tristram’s instruction, and, according to Bode, was delivered for safe-keeping into Yorick’s hands. Bode changes M’lle Laborde into M’lle Gillet, and Walter Shandy is her visitor, not Yorick. Bode allows himself some verbal changes and softens the bald suggestion at the end. Bode’s motive for this startling change is not clear beyond question. The most plausible theory is that the open and gross suggestion of immoral relation between Yorick, the clergyman and moralist, and the Paris maiden, seemed to Bode inconsistent with the then current acceptation of Yorick’s character; and hence he preferred by artifice to foist the misdemeanor on to the elder Shandy.

The second extensive addition of Bode’s in this volume is the section called “Die Erklärung,” and its continuation in the two following divisions, a story which unites itself with the “Fragment” in Sterne’s original narration. Yorick is ill and herbs are brought to him in paper wrappings which turn out to contain the story of the decayed gentleman, which, according to Sterne’s relation, the Notary was beginning to write. It will be remembered that the introduction in Sterne was also brought by La Fleur as a bit of wrapping paper. This curious coincidence, this prosaic resumption of the broken narrative, is naïve at least, but can hardly commend itself to any critic as being other than commonplace and bathetic. The story itself, as related by the dying man is a tale of accidental incest told quietly, earnestly, but without a suggestion of Sterne’s wit or sentiment.

In the next section, emanating entirely from Bode, “Vom Gesundheitstrinken,” the author is somewhat more successful in catching the spirit of Sterne in his buoyancy, and in his whimsical anecdote telling: it purports to be an essay by the author’s friend, Grubbius. The last addition made by Bode[45] introduces once more Yorick’s sentiment relative to man’s treatment of the animal world. Yorick, walking in the garden of an acquaintance, shoots a sparrow and meets with reproof from the owner of the garden. Yorick protests prosaically that it was only a sparrow, yet on being assured that it was also a living being, he succumbs to vexation and self-reproof at his own failure to be true to his own higher self. A similar regret, a similar remorse at sentimental thoughtlessness, is recorded of the real Yorick in connection with the Franciscan, Lorenzo. But there is present in Sterne’s story the inevitable element of caprice in thought or action, the whimsical inconsistency of varying moods, not a mere commonplace lapse from a sentimental creed. In one case, Yorick errs through whim, in the other, merely through heedlessness.

Bode’s attitude toward the continuation of Eugenius and the general nature of his additions have been suggested by the above account. A résumé of the omissions and the verbal changes would indicate that they were made frequently because of the indecency of the original; the transference of the immorality in the episode of M’lle. Laborde and Walter Shandy, if the reason above suggested be allowed, is further proof of Bode’s solicitude for Yorick’s moral reputation. Yet the retention of the episode “Les Gants d’Amour” in its entirety, and of parts of the continued story of the Piedmontese, may seem inconsistent and irreconcilable with any absolute objection on Bode’s part other than a quantitative one, to this loathesome element of the Eugenius narrative.

Albrecht Wittenberg[46] in a letter to Jacobi, dated Hamburg, April 21, 1769, says he reads that Riedel is going to continue “Yorick’s Reisen,” and comments upon the exceedingly difficult undertaking. Nothing further is known of this plan of Riedel’s.

[1.] Various German authorities date the Sentimental Journey erroneously 1767. Jördens, V, p. 753; Koberstein, III, p. 463; Hirsching, XIII, pp. 291–309.

[2.] The reviewer in the Allg. deutsche Bibl. (Anhang I-XII, vol. II, p. 896) implies a contemporary cognizance of this aid to its popularity. He notes the interest in accounts of travels and fears that some readers will be disappointed after taking up the book. Some French books of travel, notably Chapelle’s “Voyage en Provence,” 1656, were read with appreciation by cultivated Germany and had their influence parallel and auxiliary to Sterne’s.

[3.] In the Seventh Book of Tristram Shandy. III, pp. 47–110.

[4.] III, pp. 210–213.

[5.] The emotional groundwork in Germany which furthered the appreciation of the Journey, and the sober sanity of British common sense which choked its English sweep, are admirably and typically illustrated in the story of the meeting of Fanny Burney and Sophie la Roche, as told in the diary of the former (“The Diary and Letters of Frances Burney, Madame D’Arblay,” Boston, 1880, I, p. 291), entries for September 11 and 17, 1786. On their second meeting Mme. D’Arblay writes of the German sentimentalist: “Madame la Roche then rising and fixing her eyes filled with tears on my face, while she held both my hands, in the most melting accents exclaimed, ‘Miss Borni, la plus chère, la plus digne des Anglaises, dites—moi—m’aimez vous?’” Miss Burney is quite sensibly frank in her inability to fathom this imbecility. Ludmilla Assing (“Sophie la Roche,” Berlin, 1859, pp. 273–280) calls Miss Burney cold and petty.

[6.] So heartily did the Germans receive the Sentimental Journey that it was felt ere long to be almost a German book. The author of “Ueber die schönen Geister und Dichter des 18ten Jahrhunderts vornehmlich unter den Deutschen,” by J. C. Fritsch (?) (Lemgo, 1771), gives the book among German stories and narratives (pp. 177–9) along with Hagedorn, Gellert, Wieland and others. He says of the first parts of the Sentimental Journey, “zwar . . . . aus dem Englischen übersetzt; kann aber für national passieren.”

[7.] Michael Montaigne’s “Gedanken und Meinungen über Allerley Gegenstände. Ins Deutsch übersetzt.” Berlin (Lagarde) 1793–5. Bode’s life is in Vol. VI, pages III-CXLIV. For a review of Bode’s Life see Neue Bibl. der schönen Wissenschaften, LVIII, p. 93.

[8.] Supplementband für 1790–93, pp. 350–418.

[9.] The references to the Hamburgische Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten are as follows: 1768, pages 241, 361 and 369 respectively.

[10.] Pp. 71–74.

[11.] Pp. 101–104. “The Temptation” and the “Conquest.” The Unterhaltungen is censured by the Deutsche Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, III, p. 266, for printing a poor translation from Yorick when two translations had already been announced. The references to Unterhaltungen are respectively pp. 12–16, and 209–213.

[12.] See below, p. 42–3.

[13.] It was reviewed in the Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent, Oct. 29.

[14.] I, pp. XX, 168; II, p. 168.

[15.] Lachmann’s edition, 1840, XII, p. 199.

[16.] See Goethe-Jahrbuch, XIV (1893), pp. 51–52.

[17.] “Heinrich Leopold Wagner, Goethe’s Jugendgenosse,” 2d ed. Jena, Frommann, 1879, p. 104.

[18.] It is not possible to date with absolute certainty the time of Lessing’s conversation with Sara Meyer, but it was after the publication of “Werther,” and must have been on one of his two visits to Berlin after that, that is, in March, 1775, on his way to Vienna, or in February, 1776, on his return from Italy.

[19.] Bode must have come to Lessing with the information before this public announcement, for Lessing could hardly have failed to learn of it when once published in a prominent Hamburg periodical.

[20.] Böttiger in his biographical sketch of Bode is the first to make this statement (p. lxiii), and the spread of the idea and its general acceptation are directly traceable to his authority. The Neue Bibl. der schönen Wissenschaften in its review of Böttiger’s work repeats the statement (LVIII, p. 97), and it is again repeated by Jördens (I, p. 114, edition of 1806), by Danzel-Guhrauer with express mention of Böttiger (“Lessing, sein Leben und seine Werke,” II. Erste Abtheilung, p. 287), and by Erich Schmidt (“Lessing, Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften,” Berlin, 1899, I, p. 674). The editor of the Hempel edition, VII, p. 553 claims Lessing as responsible for the translation of the Journey, and also of Shandy. The success of the “Empfindsame Reise” and the popularity of Sterne are quite enough to account for the latter translation and there is no evidence of urging on Lessing’s part. A similar statement is found in Gervinus (V, p. 194). The Frankfurter Gel. Anz. (Apr. 21, 1775), p. 267, credits Wieland with having urged Bode to translate Shandy. The Neue Critische Nachrichten, Greifswald, IX, p. 279, makes the same statement. The article, however, in the Teutscher Merkur (1773, II, pp. 228–30) expresses merely a great satisfaction that Bode is engaged upon the work, and gives some suggestions to him about it.

[21.] See Bode’s Introduction, p. iii, iv. Also Allg. deutsche Bibl., Anhang, I-XII, Vol. II, pp. 896–9.

[22.] Strangely enough the first use of this word which has been found is in one of Sterne’s letters, written in 1740 to the lady who subsequently became his wife. (Letters, p. 25). But these letters were not published till 1775, long after the word was in common use. An obscure Yorkshire clergyman can not be credited with its invention.

[23.] Böttiger refers to Campe’s work, “Ueber die Bereicherung und Reinigung der deutschen Sprache,” p. 297 ff., for an account of the genesis of this word, but adds that Campe is incorrect in his assertion that Sterne coined the word. Campe does not make the erroneous statement at all, but Bode himself puts it in the mouth of Lessing.

[24.] See foot note to page lxiii.

[25.] For particulars concerning this parallel formation see Mendelssohn’s Schriften, ed. by G. B. Mendelssohn, Leipzig, 1844. V, pp. 330, 335–7, letters between Abbt, Mendelssohn, Nicolai.

[26.] The source of Bode’s information is the article by Dr. Hill, first published in the Royal Female Magazine for April, 1760, and reprinted in the London Chronicle, May 5, 1760 (pp. 434–435), under the title, “Anecdotes of a fashionable Author.” Bode’s sketch is an abridged translation of this article. This article is referred to in Sterne’s letters, I, pp. 38–9, 42.

[27.] See p. 47.

[28.] “Dass ich das Gute, was man an meiner Uebersetzung findet, grössten Theils denen Herren Ebert und Lessing zu verdanken habe.”

[29.] Hamburgischer Unpartheyischer Correspondent, October 29, 1768.

[30.] “Verschwieg ich die Namen dieser Männer.”

[31.] See p. 47.

[32.] Jördens gives this title, which is the correct one. Appell in “Werther und seine Zeit,” (p. 247) calls it “Herrn Yoricks, Verfasser (sic) des Tristram Shandy Reisen durch Frankreich und Italien, als ein Versuch über die menschliche Natur,” which is the title of the second edition published later, but with the same date. See Allg. deutsche Bibliothek, Anhang, I-XII, Vol. II, pp. 896–9. Kayser and Heinsius both give “Empfindsame Reisen durch Frankreich und Italien, oder Versuch über die menschliche Natur,” which is evidently a confusion with the better known Bode translation, an unconscious effort to locate the book.

[33.] Through some strange confusion, a reviewer in the Jenaische Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen (1769, p. 574) states that Ebert is the author of this translation; he also asserts that Bode and Lessing had translated the book; it is reported too that Bode is to issue a new translation in which he makes use of the work of Lessing and Ebert, a most curious record of uncertain rumor.

[34.] See p. 31, “In the Street, Calais.” “If this won’t turn out something, another will. No matter,—’tis an essay upon human nature.”

[35.] Monthly Review, XXXVIII, p. 319: “Gute Nacht, bewunderungswürdiger Yorick! Dein Witz, Deine Menschenliebe! Dein redliches Herz! ein jedes untadelhafte Stück deines Lebens und deiner Schriften müsse in einem unsterblichen Gedächtnisse blühen,—und O! mögte der Engel, der jenes aufgezeichnet hat, über die Unvollkommenheiten von beiden eine Thräne des Mitleidens fallen lassen und sie auf ewig auslöschen.”

[36.] Jördens, V, p. 753. Hirsching, Historisch-litterarisches Handbuch, XIII, pp. 291–309 (1809).

[37.] It has not been possible to examine this second edition, but the information concerning Sterne’s life may quite possibly have been taken not from Bode’s work but from his sources as already given.

[38.] “Yoriks empfindsame Reise, aus dem Englischen übersetzt,” 3ter und 4ter Theil, Hamburg und Bremen, bei Cramer, 1769.

[39.] See Allg. deutsche Bibl. Anhang, I-XII, Vol. II, pp. 896–9. Hirsching (Hist.-Litt. Handbuch) says confusedly that Bode wrote the fourth and fifth parts.

[40.] See Neue Bibl. der schönen Wissenschaften, LVIII, p. 98, “Im dritten Bande ist die rührende Geschichte, das Hündchen, ganz von ihm.” Also Jördens, I, 114, Heine, “Der deutsche Roman,” p. 23.

[41.] The following may serve as examples of inadequate, inexact or false renderings:

[42.] Bode’s story, “Das Mündel” was printed in the Hamburgische Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten, 1769, p. 729 (November 23) and p. 753 (December 4).

[43.] There will be frequent occasion to mention this impulse emanating from Sterne, in the following pages. One may note incidentally an anonymous book “Freundschaften” (Leipzig, 1775) in which the author beholds a shepherd who finds a torn lamb and indulges in a sentimental reverie upon it. Allg. deutsche Bibl., XXXVI, 1, 139.

[44.] Bode inserts “Miss Judith Meyer” and “Miss Philippine Damiens,” two poor novels by this Kölbele in place of Eugenius’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Böttiger comments, “statt des im englischen Original angeführten schalen Romans ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress.’” Bode, in translating Shandy several years later, inserts for the same book, “Thousand and one Nights.” In speaking of this, Böttiger calls “Pilgrim’s Progress” “die schale engländische Robinsonade,” an eloquent proof of Böttiger’s ignorance of English literature.

[45.] Pp. 166 ff.

[46.] Quellen und Forschungen, XXII, p. 129.

[ CHAPTER IV]
STERNE IN GERMANY AFTER THE PUBLICATION
OF THE SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

The publication of the Sentimental Journey, as implied in the previous chapter, brought Sterne into vital connection with literary impulses and emotional experiences in Germany, and his position as a leader was at once recognized. Because of the immediate translations, the reviews of the English original are markedly few, even in journals which gave considerable attention to English literary affairs. The Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften[1] purposely delays a full review of the book because of the promised translation, and contents itself with the remark, “that we have not read for a long time anything more full of sentiment and humor.” Yet, strangely enough, the translation is never worthily treated, only the new edition of 1771 is mentioned,[2] with especial praise of Füger’s illustrations.

Other journals devote long reviews to the new favorite: according to the Jenaische Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen[3] all the learned periodicals vied with one another in lavish bestowal of praise upon these Journeys. The journals consulted go far toward justifying this statement.

The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek reviews both the Bode and Mittelstedt renderings, together with Bode’s translation of Stevenson’s continuation, in the second volume of the Anhang to Volumes I-XII.[4] The critique of Bode’s work defines, largely in the words of the book itself, the peculiar purpose and method of the Journey, and comments briefly but with frank enthusiasm on the various touching incidents of the narrative: “Nur ein von der Natur verwahrloseter bleibt dabei kalt und gleichgültig,” remarks the reviewer. The conception of Yorick’s personal character, which prevailed in Germany, obtained by a process of elimination and misunderstanding, is represented by this critic when he records without modifying his statement: “Various times Yorick shows himself as the most genuine foe of self-seeking, of immoral double entendre, and particularly of assumed seriousness, and he scourges them emphatically.” The review of the third and fourth parts contains a similar and perhaps even more significant passage illustrating the view of Yorick’s character held by those who did not know him and had the privilege of admiring him only in his writings and at a safe distance. “Yorick,” he says, “although he sometimes brings an event, so to speak, to the brink of an indecorous issue, manages to turn it at once with the greatest delicacy to a decorous termination. Or he leaves it incomplete under such circumstances that the reader is impressed by the rare delicacy of mind of the author, and can never suspect that such a man, who never allows a double entendre to enter his mind without a blush, has entertained an indecent idea.” This view is derived from a somewhat short-sighted reading of the Sentimental Journey: the obvious Sterne of Tristram Shandy, and the more insidiously concealed creator of the Journey could hardly be characterized discriminatingly by such a statement. Sterne’s cleverness consists not in suggesting his own innocence of imagination, but in the skill with which he assures his reader that he is master of the situation, and that no possible interpretation of the passage has escaped his intelligence. To the Mittelstedt translation is accorded in this review the distinction of being, in the rendering of certain passages, more correct than Bode’s. A reviewer in the Hallische Neue Gelehrte Zeitung[5] treats of the Sentimental Journey in the Mittelstedt translation. He is evidently unfamiliar with the original and does not know of Bode’s work, yet his admiration is unbounded, though his critique is without distinction or discrimination. The Neue Critische Nachrichten[6] of Greifswald gives a review of Bode’s rendering in which a parallel with Shakespeare is suggested. The original mingling of instruction and waggery is commented upon, imitation is discouraged, and the work is held up as a test, through appreciation or failure to appreciate, of a reader’s ability to follow another’s feelings, to understand far-away hints and allusions, to follow the tracks of an irregular and errant wit.

The Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent for October 29, 1768, regards the book in Bode’s translation as an individual, unparalleled work of genius and discourses at length upon its beneficent medicinal effects upon those whose minds and hearts are perplexed and clouded. The wanton passages are acknowledged, but the reviewer asserts that the author must be pardoned them for the sake of his generous and kind-hearted thoughts. The Mittelstedt translation is also quoted and parallel passages are adduced to demonstrate the superiority of Bode’s translation.

The Germans naturally learned to know the continuation of Eugenius chiefly through Bode’s translation, designated as the third and fourth volumes of the work, and thus because of the sanction of the intermediary, were led to regard Stevenson’s tasteless, tedious and revolting narrative with a larger measure of favor than would presumably have been accorded to the original, had it been circulated extensively in Germany. After years the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung[7] implies incidentally that Bode’s esteeming this continuation worthy of his attention is a fact to be taken into consideration in judging its merits, and states that Bode beautified it. Bode’s additions and alterations were, as has been pointed out, all directly along the line of the Yorick whom the Germans had made for themselves. It is interesting to observe that the reviewer of these two volumes of the continuation in the Neue Critische Nachrichten,[8] while recognizing the inevitability of failure in such a bold attempt, and acknowledging that the outward form of the work may by its similarity be at first glance seductive, notes two passages of sentiment “worthy even of a Yorick,”—the episode “Das Hündchen” and the anecdote of the sparrows which the traveler shot in the garden: both are additions on Bode’s part, and have no connection with the original. The reviewer thus singled out for especial approval two interpolations by the German translator, incidents which in their conception and narration have not the true English Yorick ring.

The success of the Sentimental Journey increased the interest in the incomprehensible Shandy. Lange’s new edition of Zückert’s translation has been noted, and before long Bode[9] was induced to undertake a German rendering of the earlier and longer novel. This translation was finished in the summer of 1774, the preface being dated “End of August.” The foreword is mainly concerned with Goeze’s attack on Bode’s personal character, a thrust founded on Bode’s connection with the Sentimental Journey and its continuation. At the close of this introduction Bode says that, without undervaluing the intelligence of his readers, he had regarded notes as essential, but because of his esteem for the text, and a parental affection for the notes, he has foreborne to insert them here. “So they still lie in my desk, as many as there are of them, but upon pressing hints they might be washed and combed, and then be published under the title perhaps of a ‘Real und Verballexicon über Tristram Shandy’s Leben und Meinungen.’” This hint of a work of his own, serving as a commentary to Tristram Shandy, has been the occasion of some discussion. A reviewer in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek,[10] in an account of Bode’s and Wichmann’s renderings of “Tom Jones,” begs Bode to fulfill the hopes thus raised, saying he could give Yorick’s friends no more valuable or treasured gift. Böttiger in his biographical sketch of Bode expressed regret that the work never saw the light, adding that the work contained so many allusions to contemporary celebrities and hits upon Bode’s acquaintance that wisdom had consigned to oblivion.[11] A correspondent, writing to the Teutscher Merkur,[12] minimizes the importance of this so-called commentary, saying “er hatte nie einen Kommentar der Art, . . . auch nur angefangen auszuarbeiten. Die ganze Sache gründet sich auf eine scherzhafte Aeusserung gegen seinem damaligen Freund in Hamburg, welchen er oft mit der ihm eignen Ironie mit diesem Kommentar zu drohen pflegte.”

The list of subscribers to Bode’s translation contained upwards of 650 names, among which are Boie, Claudius, Einsieder, Gerstenberg, Gleim, Fräulein von Göchhausen, Goethe, Hamann, Herder, Hippel, Jacobi, Klopstock, Schummel, Wieland (five copies), and Zimmermann. The names of Ebert and Lessing are not on the list. The number of subscribers in Mitau (twelve) is worthy of note, as illustrating the interest in Sterne still keenly alive in this small and far away town, undoubtedly a direct result of the admiration so lavishly expressed in other years by Herder, Hamann and their circle.

The translation was hailed then as a masterly achievement of an arduous task, the difficulties of which are only the less appreciated because of the very excellence of the performance. It contrasts most strikingly with its clumsy predecessor in its approximation to Sterne’s deftness of touch, his delicate turns of phrase, his seemingly obvious and facile, but really delicate and accurate choice of expression. Zückert was heavy, commonplace, uncompromisingly literal and bristling with inaccuracies. Bode’s work was unfortunately not free from errors in spite of its general excellence, yet it brought the book within reach of those who were unable to read it in English, and preserved, in general with fidelity, the spirit of the original. The reviews were prodigal of praise. Wieland’s expressions of admiration were full-voiced and extensive.[13]

The Wandsbecker Bothe for October 28, 1774, asserts that many readers in England had not understood the book as well as Bode, a frequent expression of inordinate commendation; that Bode follows close on the heels of Yorick on his most intimate expeditions. The Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen[14] copies in full the translation of the first chapter as both Zückert and Bode rendered it, and praises the latter in unqualified terms; Bode appears as “Yorick’s rescuer.” Several years later, in the Deutsches Museum, the well-known French translation of Shandy by Frenais is denounced as intolerable (unerträglich) to a German who is acquainted with Bode’s,[15] an opinion emphasized later in the same magazine[16] by Joseph von Retzer. Indeed, upon these two translations from Sterne rests Bode’s reputation as a translator. His “Tom Jones” was openly criticised as bearing too much of Sterne,[17] so great was the influence of Yorick upon the translator. Klamer Schmidt in a poem called “Klamersruh, eine ländlich malerische Dichtung,”[18] dilating upon his favorite authors during a country winter, calls Bode “our Sterne” and “the ideal translator,” and in some verses by the same poet, quoted in the article on Bode in Schlichtegroll’s “Nekrolog,”[19] is found a very significant stanza expressing Sterne’s immeasurable obligation to his German translator:

“Er geht zu dir nun, unser Bode!

Empfang ihn, Yoriks Geist! Auch dein

Erbarmt er sich,

Errettete vom Tode

Der Uebersetzer dich!”

Matthison in his “Gruss aus der Heimath,”[20] pays similar tribute in a vision connected with a visit to Bode’s resting-place in Weimar. It is a fanciful relation: as Bode’s shade is received with jubilation and delight in the Elysian Fields by Cervantes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Fielding and Sterne, the latter censures Bode for distrusting his own creative power, indicating that he might have stood with the group just enumerated, that the fame of being “the most excellent transcriber” of his age should not have sufficed.

In view of all this marked esteem, it is rather surprising to find a few years later a rather sweeping, if apologetic, attack on the rendering of Shandy. J. L. Benzler, the librarian of Graf Stolberg at Wernigerode, published in 1801 a translation of Shandy which bore the legend “Newly translated into German,” but was really a new edition of Bode’s work with various corrections and alterations.[21] Benzler claims in his preface that there had been no translation of the masterpiece worthy of the original, and this was because the existing translation was from the pen of Bode, in whom one had grown to see the very ideal of a translator, and because praise had been so lavishly bestowed on the work by the critics. He then asserts that Bode never made a translation which did not teem with mistakes; he translated incorrectly through insufficient knowledge of English, confusing words which sound alike, made his author say precisely the opposite of what he really did say, was often content with the first best at hand, with the half-right, and often erred in taste;—a wholesale and vigorous charge. After such a disparagement, Benzler disclaims all intention to belittle Bode, or his service, but he condescendingly ascribes Bode’s failure to his lowly origin, his lack of systematic education, and of early association with the cultured world. Benzler takes Bode’s work as a foundation and rewrites. Some of his changes are distinctly advantageous, and that so few of these errors in Bode’s translation were noted by contemporary critics is a proof of their ignorance of the original, or their utter confidence in Bode.[22] Benzler in his preface of justification enumerates several extraordinary blunders[23] and then concludes with a rather inconsistent parting thrust at Bode, the perpetrator of such nonsense, at the critics who could overlook such errors and praise the work inordinately, and at the public who ventured to speak with delight of the work, knowing it only in such a rendering. Benzler was severely taken to task in the Neue Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek[24] for his shamelessness in rewriting Bode’s translation with such comparatively insignificant alterations, for printing on the title page in brazen effrontery “newly translated into German,” and for berating Bode for his failure after cursing him with condescension. Passages are cited to demonstrate the comparative triviality of Benzler’s work. A brief comparison of the two translations shows that Benzler often translates more correctly than his predecessor, but still more often makes meaningless alterations in word-order, or in trifling words where nothing is to be gained by such a change.

The same year Benzler issued a similar revision of the Sentimental Journey,[25] printing again on the title page “newly translated into German.” The Neue Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek[26] greets this attempt with a similar tart review, containing parallel quotations as before, proving Benzler’s inconsiderate presumption. Here Benzler had to face Bode’s assertion that both Lessing and Ebert had assisted in the work, and that the former had in his kindness gone through the whole book. Benzler treats this fact rather cavalierly and renews his attack on Bode’s rendering. Benzler resented this review and replied to it in a later number of the same periodical.[27]

Now that a century and more has elapsed, and personal acrimony can no longer play any part in criticism, one may justly admit Benzler’s service in calling attention to inaccurate and inadequate translation, at the same time one must condemn utterly his manner of issuing his emendations. In 1831 there appeared a translation of Tristram Shandy which was again but a revision of Bode’s work. It bore on the title page “Neu übertragen von W. H.,” and contained a sketch of Sterne’s life.[28]

In the nineties there seemed to be a renewal of Yorick enthusiasm, and at this time was brought forth, at Halle in 1794, a profusely annotated edition of the Sentimental Journey,[29] which was, according to the anonymous editor, a book not to be read, but to be studied. Claim is made that the real meaning of the book may be discovered only after several careful readings, that “empfindsam” in some measure was here used in the sense of philosophical, that the book should be treated as a work of philosophy, though clad in pleasing garb; that it should be thought out according to its merits, not merely read. Yorick’s failure to supply his chapters with any significant or alluring chapter-headings (probably the result of indolence on his part) is here interpreted as extraordinary sagacity, for he thereby lessens the expectations and heightens the effect. “Eine Empfindungs-reise” is declared to be a more suitable name than “Empfindsame Reise,” and comment is made upon the purpose of the Journey, the gathering of material for anatomical study of the human heart. The notes are numerous and lengthy, constituting a quarter to a third of the book, but are replete with padding, pointless babble and occasional puerile inaccuracies. They are largely attempts to explain and to moralize upon Yorick’s emotions,—a verbose, childish, witless commentary. The Wortregister contains fourteen pages in double columns of explanations, in general differing very little from the kind of information given in the notes. The Allgemeine Litteratur Zeitung[30] devotes a long review chiefly to the explanation of the errors in this volume, not the least striking of which is the explanation of the reference to Smelfungus, whom everyone knows to have been Smollett: “This learned Smelfungus appears to have written nothing but the Journey which is here mentioned.”[31] As an explanation of the initial “H” used by Sterne for Hume, the note is given, “The author ‘H’ was perhaps a poor one.”[32]

Sterne’s letters were issued first in London in 1775, a rather surprisingly long time after his death, when one considers how great was Yorick’s following. According to the prefatory note of Lydia Sterne de Medalle in the collection which she edited and published, it was the wish of Mrs. Sterne that the correspondence of her husband, which was in her possession, be not given to the world, unless other letters bearing his name should be published. This hesitation on her part must be interpreted in such a way as to cast a favorable light on this much maligned gentlewoman, as a delicate reticence on her part, a desire to retain these personal documents for herself.[33] The power of this sentiment must be measured by her refraining from publishing during the five years which intervened between her husband’s death and her own, March, 1768 to January, 1773—years which were embittered by the distress of straitened circumstances. It will be remembered that an effort was made by Mrs. Sterne and her daughter to retrieve their fortunes by a life of Sterne which was to be a collaboration by Stevenson and Wilkes, and urgent indeed was Lydia Sterne’s appeal to these friends of her father to fulfill their promises and lend their aid. Even when this hope had to be abandoned early in 1770, through the faithlessness of Sterne’s erstwhile companions, the widow and daughter turned to other possibilities rather than to the correspondence, though in the latter lay a more assured means of accomplishing a temporary revival of their prosperity. This is an evidence of fine feeling on the part of Sterne’s widow, with which she has never been duly credited.

But an anonymous editor published early in 1775[34] a volume entitled “Letters from Yorick to Eliza,” a brief little collection, the source of which has never been clear, but whose genuineness has never been questioned. The editor himself waives all claim to proof “which might be drawn concerning their authenticity from the character of the gentleman who had the perusal of them, and with Eliza’s permission, faithfully copied them at Bombay.”

In July of this same year[35] was published a volume entitled “Sterne’s Letters to His Friends on Various Occasions, to which is added his History of a Watchcoat with Explanatory Notes,” containing twelve letters (one by Dr. Eustace) and the watchcoat story. Some of these letters had appeared previously in British magazines, and one, copied from the London Magazine, was translated in the Wandsbecker Bothe for April 16, 1774.[36] A translation of the same letter was given in the Gothaische Gelehrte Zeitungen, 1774, pp. 286–7. Three of these letters only are accepted by Prof. Saintsbury (Nos. 7, 124, the letter of Dr. Eustace, and 125). Of the others, Nos. 4–11 have been judged as of doubtful authenticity. Two of them, Nos. 11 and 12 (“I beheld her tender look” and “I feel the weight of obligation”) are in the standard ten-volume edition of Sterne,[37] but the last letter is probably spurious also.

The publication of the letters from Yorick to Eliza was the justification afforded Lydia Sterne de Medalle for issuing her father’s correspondence according to her mother’s request: the other volume was not issued till after it was known that Sterne’s daughter was engaged in the task of collecting and editing his correspondence. Indeed, the editor expressly states in his preface that it is not the purpose of the book to forestall Mme. Medalle’s promised collection; that the letters in this volume are not to be printed in hers.[38] Mme. Medalle added to her collection the “Fragment in the manner of Rabelais” and the invaluable, characteristic scrap of autobiography, which was written particularly for “my Lydia.” The work appeared at Becket’s in three volumes, and the dedication to Garrick was dated June, 1775; but, as the notice in the Monthly Review for October[39] asserts that they have “been published but a few days,” this date probably represents the time of the completion of the task, or the inception of the printer’s work.[40] During the same year the spurious letters from Eliza to Yorick were issued.

Naturally Sterne’s letters found readers in Germany, the Yorick-Eliza correspondence being especially calculated to awaken response.[41] The English edition of the “Letters from Yorick to Eliza” was reviewed in the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften,[42] with a hint that the warmth of the letters might easily lead to a suspicion of unseemly relationship, but the reviewer contends that virtue and rectitude are preserved in the midst of such extraordinary tenderness, so that one may interpret it as a Platonic rather than a sensual affection. Yet this review cannot be designated as distinctive of German opinion, for it contains no opinion not directly to be derived from the editor’s foreword, and that alone; indeed, the wording suggests decidedly that source. The Gothaische Gelehrte Zeitung[43] for April 15, 1775, reviews the same English edition, but the notice consists of an introductory statement of Eliza’s identity and translation of parts of three letters, the “Lord Bathurst letter,” the letter involving the criticism of Eliza’s portraits,[44] and the last letter to Eliza. The translation is very weak, abounding in elementary errors; for example, “She has got your picture and likes it” becomes “Sie hat Ihr Bildniss gemacht, es ist ähnlich,” and “I beheld you . . . as a very plain woman” is rendered “und hielt Sie für nichts anders als eine Frau.” The same journal,[45] August 5, reviews the second collection of Sterne’s letters, but there is no criticism, merely an introductory statement taken from the preface, and the translation of two letters, the one to Mistress V., “Of two bad cassocs, fair lady,” and the epistle beginning, “I snatch half an hour while my dinner is getting ready.” The Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, 1776, p. 382, also gives in a review information concerning this anonymous collection, but no criticism.

One would naturally look to Hamburg for translations of these epistles. In the very year of their appearance in England we find “Yorick’s Briefe an Eliza,” Hamburg, bey C. E. Bohn, 1775;[46] “Briefe von Eliza an Yorick,” Hamburg, bey Bode, 1775; and “Briefe von (Yorick) Sterne an seine Freunde nebst seiner Geschichte eines Ueberrocks,” Hamburg, bey Bohn, 1775. The translator’s name is not given, but there is every reason to suppose that it was the faithful Bode, though only the first volume is mentioned in Jördens’ account of him, and under his name in Goedeke’s “Grundriss.” Contemporary reviewers attributed all three books to Bode, and internal evidence goes to prove it.[47]

The first volume contains no translator’s preface, and the second, the spurious Eliza letters, only a brief footnote to the translation of the English preface. In this note Bode’s identity is evident in the following quotation: He says he has translated the letters “because I believe that they will be read with pleasure, and because I fancy I have a kind of vocation to give in German everything that Sterne has written, or whatever has immediate relation to his writings.” This note is dated Hamburg, September 16, 1775. In the third volume, the miscellaneous collection, there is a translator’s preface in which again Bode’s hand is evident. He says he knows by sure experience that Sterne’s writings find readers in Germany; he is assured of the authenticity of the letters, but is in doubt whether the reader is possessed of sufficient knowledge of the attending circumstances to render intelligible the allusion of the watchcoat story. To forfend the possibility of such dubious appreciation, the account of the watchcoat episode is copied word for word from Bode’s introduction to the “Empfindsame Reise.”[48]

In this same year, an unknown translator issued in a single volume a rendering of these three collections.[49] The following year Mme. Medalle’s collection was brought out in Leipzig in an anonymous translation, which has been attributed to Christian Felix Weisse.[50] Its title was “Lorenz Sterne’s Briefe an seine vertrautesten Freunde nebst einem Fragment im Geschmack des Rabelais und einer von ihm selbst verfassten Nachricht von seinem Leben und seiner Familie, herausgegeben von seiner Tochter Mad. Medalle,” Leipzig, 1776, pp. xxviii, 391. Weidmanns Erben und Reich.

Bode’s translation of Yorick’s letters to Eliza is reviewed in the Gothaische Gelehrte Zeitung, August 9, 1775, with quotation of the second letter in full. The same journal notes the translation of the miscellaneous collection, November 4, 1775, giving in full the letter of Dr. Eustace and Sterne’s reply.[51] The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek[52] reviews together the three Hamburg volumes (Bode) and the Leipzig volume containing the same letters. The utter innocence, the unquestionably Platonic character of the relations between Yorick and Eliza is accepted fully. With keen, critical judgment the reviewer is inclined to doubt the originality of the Eliza letters. Two letters by Yorick are mentioned particularly, letters which bear testimony to Yorick’s practical benevolence: one describing his efforts in behalf of a dishonored maiden, and one concerning the old man who fell into financial difficulties.[53] Both the translations win approval, but Bode’s is preferred; they are designated as doubtless his. The “Briefe an Elisa” (Bode’s translation) are noticed in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen, October 3 and 6, 1775, with unrestrained praise of the translator, and vigorous asseveration of their authenticity. It is recognized fully that the relation as disclosed was extraordinary among married people, even Sterne’s amazing statement concerning the fragile obstacles which stood in the way of their desires is noted. Yet the Yorick of these letters is accorded undisguised admiration. His love is exalted above that of Swift for Stella, Waller for Sacharissa, Scarron for Maintenon,[54] and his godly fear as here exhibited is cited to offset the outspoken avowal of dishonoring desire.[55] Hamann in a letter to Herder, June 26, 1780, speaks of the Yorick-Eliza correspondence quite disparagingly.[56]

In 1787 another volume of Sterne letters was issued in London, giving English and German on opposite pages.[57] There are but six letters and all are probably spurious.

In 1780 there was published a volume of confessedly spurious letters entitled “Briefe von Yorick und Elisen, wie sie zwischen ihnen konnten geschrieben werden.”[58] The introduction contains some interesting information for the determination of the genuineness of the Sterne letters.[59] The editor states that the author had written these letters purely as a diversion, that the editor had proposed their publication, but was always met with refusal until there appeared in London a little volume of letters which their editor emphatically declared to be genuine. This is evidently the volume published by the anonymous editor in 1775, and our present editor declares that he knows Nos. 4–10 were from the same pen as the present confessedly spurious collection. They were mere efforts originally, but, published in provincial papers, found their way into other journals, and the editor goes on to say, that, to his astonishment, he saw one of these epistles included in Lydia Medalle’s collection. This is, of course, No. 5, the one beginning, “The first time I have dipped my pen in the ink-horn.” These events induced the author to allow the publication. The book itself consists mostly of a kind of diary kept by Yorick to send to Eliza at Madeira and later to India, and a corresponding journal written by Eliza on the vessel and at Madeira.

Yorick’s sermons were inevitably less potent in their appeal, and the editions and translations were less numerous. In spite of obvious effort, Sterne was unable to infuse into his homiletical discourses any considerable measure of genuine Shandeism, and his sermons were never as widely popular as his two novels, either among those who sought him for whimsical pastime or for sentimental emotion. They were sermons. The early Swiss translation has been duly noted.

The third volume of the Zürich edition, which appeared in 1769, contained the “Reden an Esel,” which the reviewer in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek[60] with acute penetration designates as spurious. Another translation of these sermons was published at Leipzig, according to the editor of a later edition[61] (Thorn, 1795), in the same year as the Zürich issue, 1769.

The Berlinische Monatsschrift[62] calls attention to the excellence of the work and quotes the sermons at considerable length. The comment contains the erroneous statement that Sterne was a dissenter, and opposed to the established church. The translation published at Thorn in 1795, evidently building on this information, continues the error, and, in explanation of English church affairs, adds as enlightenment the thirty-nine articles. This translation is confessedly a working-over of the Leipzig translation already mentioned. It is difficult to discover how these sermons ever became attached to Sterne’s name, and one can hardly explain the fact that such a magazine as the Berlinische Monatsschrift[63] should at that late date publish an article so flatly contradictory to everything for which Sterne stood, so diametrically opposed to his career, save with the understanding that gross ignorance attended the original introduction and early imitation of Yorick, and that this incomprehension, or one-sided appreciation of the real Sterne persisted in succeeding decades. The German Yorick was the champion of the oppressed and downtrodden. The author of the “Sermons to Asses” appeared as such an opponent of coercion and arbitrary power in church and state, an upholder of human rights; hence, possibly, the authorship of this book was attributed to Sterne by something the same process as that which, in the age of heroic deeds, associated a miscellaneous collection of performances with a popular hero. The “Sermons to Asses” were written by Rev. James Murray (1732–1782), a noted dissenting minister, long pastor of High Bridge Chapel in Newcastle-on-Tyne. They were published in London in 1768 and dedicated to G. W., J. W., W. R. and M. M.—George Whitfield, John Wesley, William Romaine and Martin Madan. The English people are represented as burden-bearing asses laden with oppression in the shape of taxes and creeds.[64] They are directed against the power of the established church. It is needless to state that England never associated these sermons with Sterne.[65] The English edition was also briefly reviewed in the Hamburgische Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten[66] without connecting the work with Sterne. The error was made later, possibly by the translator of the Zürich edition.

The new collection of Sterne’s sermons published by Cadell in 1769, Vols. V, VI, VII, is reviewed by Unterhaltungen.[67] A selection from Sterne’s sermon on the Prodigal Son was published in translation in the Hamburgische Adress-Comptoir-Nachrichten for April 13, 1768. The new collection of sermons was translated by A. E. Klausing and published at Leipzig in 1770, containing eighteen sermons.[68]

Both during Sterne’s life and after his death books were published claiming him as their author. In England contemporary criticism generally stigmatized these impertinent attempts as dubious, or undoubtedly fraudulent. The spurious ninth volume of Shandy has been mentioned.[69] The “Sermons to Asses” just mentioned also belong here, and, with reservation, also Stevenson’s continuation of the Sentimental Journey, with its claim to recognition through the continuator’s statement of his relation to Yorick. There remain also a few other books which need to be mentioned because they were translated into German and played their part there in shaping the German idea of Yorick. In general, it may be said that German criticism was never acute in judging these products, partially perhaps because they were viewed through the medium of an imperfectly mastered foreign tongue, a mediocre or an adapted translation. These books obtained relatively a much more extensive recognition in Germany than in England.

In 1769 a curious conglomerate was brought over and issued under the lengthy descriptive title: “Yoricks Betrachtungen über verschiedene wichtige und angenehme Gegenstände. Nemlich über Nichts, Ueber Etwas, Ueber das Ding, Ueber die Regierung, Ueber den Toback, Ueber die Nasen, Ueber die Quaksalber, Ueber die Hebammen, Ueber den Homunculus, Ueber die Steckenpferde, Ueber das Momusglas, Ueber die Ausschweifungen, Ueber die Dunkelkeit im Schreiben, Ueber den Unsinn, Ueber die Verbindung der Ideen, Ueber die Hahnreiter, Ueber den Mann in dem Monde, Ueber Leibnitzens Monaden, Ueber das was man Vertu nennt, Ueber das Gewissen, Ueber die Trunkenheit, Ueber den Nachtstuhl, Betrachtungen über Betrachtungen.—neque—cum lectulus, aut me Porticus excepit, desum mihi, Horat.” Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1769, 8^o. The book purported to be a collection of Sterne’s earliest lucubrations, and the translator expresses his astonishment that no one had ever translated them before, although they were first issued in 1760. It is without doubt the translation of an English volume entitled “Yorick’s Meditations upon interesting and important subjects,” published by Stevens in London, 1760.[70] It had been forgotten in England long before some German chanced upon it. The preface closes with a long doggerel rhyme, which, the translator says, he has purposely left untranslated. It is, however, beyond the shadow of a doubt original with him, as its contents prove. Yorick in the Elysian Fields is supposed to address himself, he “anticipates his fate and perceives beforehand that at least one German critic would deem him worthy of his applause.”

“Go on, poor Yorik, try once more

In German Dress, thy fate of yore,

Expect few Critics, such, as by

The bucket of Philosophy

From out the bottom of the well

May draw the Sense of what you tell

And spy what wit and Morals sound

Are in thy Rambles to be found.”

After a passage in which the rhymester enlarges upon the probability of distorted judgment, he closes with these lines:

“Dire Fate! but for all that no worse,

You shall be WIELAND’S Hobby-Horse,

So to HIS candid Name, unbrib’d

These meditations be inscrib’d.”

This was at the time of Wieland’s early enthusiasm, when he was probably contemplating, if not actually engaged upon a translation of Tristram Shandy. “Thy fate of yore” in the second line is evidently a poetaster’s acceptation of an obvious rhyme and does not set Yorick’s German experience appreciably into the past. The translator supplies frequent footnotes explaining the allusions to things specifically English. He makes occasional comparison with German conditions, always with the claim that Germany is better off, and needs no such satire. The Hallische Neue Gelehrte Zeitungen for June 1, 1769, devotes a review of considerable length to this translation; in it the reviewer asserts that one would have recognized the father of this creation even if Yorick’s name had not stood on its forehead; that it closely resembles its fellows even if one must place it a degree below the Journey. The Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek[71] throws no direct suspicion on the authenticity, but with customary insight and sanity of criticism finds in this early work “a great deal that is insipid and affected.” The Deutsche Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, however, in a review which shows a keen appreciation of Sterne’s style, openly avows an inclination to question the authenticity, save for the express statement of the translator; the latter it agrees to trust.[72] The book is placed far below the Sentimental Journey, below Shandy also, but far above the artificial tone of many other writers then popular. This relative ordering of Sterne’s works is characteristic of German criticism. In the latter part of the review its author seizes on a mannerism, the exaggerated use of which emphatically sunders the book from the genuine Sterne, the monotonous repetition of the critic’s protests and Yorick’s verbal conflicts with them. Sterne himself used this device frequently, but guardedly, and in ever-changing variety. Its careless use betrays the mediocre imitator.[73]

The more famous Koran was also brought to German territory and enjoyed there a recognition entirely beyond that accorded it in England. This book was first given to the world in London as the “Posthumous Works of a late celebrated Genius deceased;”[74] a work in three parts, bearing the further title, “The Koran, or the Life, Character and Sentiments of Tria Juncta in Uno, M. N. A., Master of No Arts.” Richard Griffith was probably the real author, but it was included in the first collected edition of Sterne’s works, published in Dublin, 1779.[75] The work purports to be, in part, an autobiography of Sterne, in which the late writer lays bare the secrets of his life, his early debauchery, his father’s unworthiness, his profligate uncle, the ecclesiastic, and the beginning of his literary career by advertising for hack work in London, being in all a confused mass of impossible detail, loose notes and disconnected opinion, which contemporary English reviews stigmatize as manifestly spurious, “an infamous attempt to palm the united effusions of dullness and indecency upon the world as the genuine production of the late Mr. Sterne.”[76]

In France the book was accepted as genuine and it was translated (1853) by Alfred Hédouin as an authentic work of Sterne. In Germany, too, it seems to have been recognized with little questioning as to its genuineness; even in recent years Robert Springer, in an article treating of Goethe’s relation to the Koran, quite openly contends for its authenticity.[77]

Since a German translation appeared in the following year (1771), the German reviews do not, in the main, concern themselves with the English original. The Neues Bremisches Magazin,[78] however, censures the book quite severely, but the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften[79] welcomes it with unquestioning praise. The German rendering was by Johann Gottfried Gellius, and the title was “Yorick’s Nachgelassene Werke.”[80] The Deutsche Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften[81] does acknowledge the doubtful authorship but accepts completely its Yorick tone and whim—“one cannot tell the copyist from the original.” Various characteristics are cited as common to this work and Yorick’s other writings, the contrast, change, confusion, conflict with the critics and the talk about himself. For the collection of aphorisms, sayings, fragments and maxims which form the second part of the Koran, including the “Memorabilia,” the reviewer suggests the name “Sterniana.” The reviewer acknowledges the occasional failure in attempted thrusts of wit, the ineffective satire, the immoral innuendo in some passages, but after the first word of doubt the review passes on into a tone of seemingly complete acceptation.

In 1778 another translation of this book appeared, which has been ascribed to Bode, though not given by Goedeke, Jördens or Meusel. Its title was “Der Koran, oder Leben und Meynungen des Tria Juncta in Uno.”[82] The Almanach der deutschen Musen[83] treats this work with full measure of praise. The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek[84] accepts the book in this translation as a genuine product of Sterne’s genius. Sammer reprinted the “Koran” (Vienna, 1795, 12^o) and included it in his nine volume edition of Sterne’s complete works (Vienna, 1798).

Goethe’s connection with the “Koran,” which forms the most interesting phase of its German career, will be treated later.

Sterne’s unacknowledged borrowings, his high-handed and extensive appropriation of work not his own, were noted in Germany, the natural result of Ferriar’s investigations in England, but they seem never to have attracted any considerable attention or aroused any serious concern among Sterne’s admirers so as to imperil his position: the question in England attached itself as an ungrateful but unavoidable concomitant of every discussion of Sterne and every attempt to determine his place in letters. Böttiger tells us that Lessing possessed a copy of Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” from which Sterne filched so much wisdom, and that Lessing had marked in it several of the passages which Ferriar later advanced as proof of Sterne’s theft. It seems that Bode purchased this volume at Lessing’s auction in Hamburg. Lessing evidently thought it not worth while to mention these discoveries, as he is entirely silent on the subject. Böttiger is, in his account, most unwarrantedly severe on Ferriar, whom he calls “the bilious Englishman” who attacked Sterne “with so much bitterness.” This is very far from a veracious conception of Ferriar’s attitude.

The comparative indifference in Germany to this phase of Sterne’s literary career may well be attributed to the medium by which Ferriar’s findings were communicated to cultured Germany. The book itself, or the original Manchester society papers, seem never to have been reprinted or translated, and Germany learned their contents through a résumé written by Friedrich Nicolai and published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift for February, 1795, which gives a very sane view of the subject, one in the main distinctly favorable to Sterne. Nicolai says Sterne is called with justice “One of the most refined, ingenious and humorous authors of our time.” He asserts with capable judgment that Sterne’s use of the borrowed passages, the additions and alterations, the individual tone which he manages to infuse into them, all preclude Sterne from being set down as a brainless copyist. Nicolai’s attitude may be best illustrated by the following passages:

“Germany has authors enough who resemble Sterne in lack of learning. Would that they had a hundredth part of the merits by which he made up for this lack, or rather which resulted from it.” “We would gladly allow our writers to take their material from old books, and even many expressions and turns of style, and indeed whole passages, even if like Sterne . . . . they claimed it all as their own: only they must be successful adapters; they must add from their own store of observation and thought and feeling. The creator of Tristram Shandy does this in rich measure.”

Nicolai also contends that Sterne was gifted with two characteristic qualities which were not imitation,—his “Empfindsamkeit” and “Laune”—and that by the former his works breathe a tender, delicate beneficence, a character of noble humanity, while by the latter a spirit of fairest mirth is spread over his pages, so that one may never open them without a pleasant smile. “The investigation of sources,” he says, “serves as explanation and does not mean depreciation of an otherwise estimable author.”

By this article Nicolai choked the malicious criticism of the late favorite which might have followed from some sources, had another communicated the facts of Sterne’s thievery. Lichtenberg in the “Göttingischer Taschenkalender,” 1796, that is, after the publication of Nicolai’s article, but with reference to Ferriar’s essay in the Manchester Memoirs, Vol. IV, under the title of “Gelehrte Diebstähle” does impugn Sterne rather spitefully without any acknowledgment of his extraordinary and extenuating use of his borrowings. “Yorick,” he says, “once plucked a nettle which had grown upon Lorenzo’s grave; that was no labor for him. Who will uproot this plant which Ferriar has set on his?” Ferriar’s book was reviewed by the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften, LXII, p. 310.

Some of the English imitations of Sterne, which did not actually claim him as author, also found their way to Germany, and there by a less discriminating public were joined in a general way to the mass of Yorick production, and the might of Yorick influence. These works represent almost exclusively the Sterne of the Sentimental Journey; for the shoal of petty imitations, explanations and protests which appeared in England when Shandy was first issued[85] had gone their own petty way to oblivion before Germany awakened to Sterne’s influence.

One of the best known of the English Sentimental Journeys was the work of Samuel Paterson, entitled, “Another Traveller: or Cursory Remarks and Critical Observations made upon a Journey through Part of the Netherlands,—by Coriat Junior,” London, 1768, two volumes. The author protested in a pamphlet published a little later that his work was not an imitation of Sterne, that it was in the press before Yorick’s book appeared; but a reviewer[86] calls his attention to the sentimental journeying already published in Shandy. This work was translated into German as “Empfindsame Reisen durch einen Theil der Niederlande,” Bützow, 1774–1775, 2 Parts, 8^o. The translator was Karl Friedrich Müchler, who showed his bent in the direction of wit and whim by the publication of several collections of humorous anecdotes, witty ideas and satirical skits.[87]