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 Captain39 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. Haym40 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 Bondeli52 writes to Usteri from Koenitz on March 10, 1763, that Kirchberger53 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 Sachen58 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

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 Montaigne7 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 chambre10 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 story11 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 advice12 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 Schmidt17 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 mention30 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 title32 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 Mittelstedt33 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 periodical39 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.