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The indebtedness of Jacobi to Sterne is the subject of a special study by Dr. Joseph Longo, “Laurence Sterne und Johann Georg Jacobi;” and the period of Jacobi’s literary work which falls under the spell of Yorick has also been treated in an inaugural dissertation, “Ueber Johann Georg Jacobi’s Jugendwerke,” by Georg Ransohoff.
[Footnote 4: The letter is reprinted in Jacobi’s Works, 1770, I, pp. 31
Longo was unable to settle definitely the date of Jacobi’s first acquaintance with Sterne. The first mention made of him is in the letter to Gleim of April 4, 1769, and a few days afterward, April 10, the intelligence is afforded that he himself is working on a “journey.” The “Winterreise” was published at Düsseldorf in the middle of June, 1769. Externally the work seems more under the influence of the French wanderer Chapelle, since prose and verse are used irregularly alternating, a
The detail of Jacobi’s indebtedness to Sterne is to be found in these two works.
Johann Christian Bock (1724-1785), who was in 1772 theater-poet of the Ackerman Company in Hamburg, soon after the publication of the Sentimental Journey, identified himself with the would-be Yoricks by the production of “Die Tagereise,” which was published at Leipzig in 1770. The work was re-issued in 1775 with the new title “Die Geschichte eines empfundenen Tages.” The only change in the new edition was the addition of a number of copperplate engravings. The book is inspired in part by Sterne directly, and in part indirectly through the intermediary Jacobi. Unlike the work of Schummel just treated, it betrays no Shandean influence, but is dependent solely on the Sentimental Journey. In outward form the book resembles Jacobi’s “Winterreise,” since verse is introduced to vary the prose narrative. The attitude of the author toward his journey, undertaken with conscious purpose, is characteristic of the whole set of emotional sentiment-seekers, who found in their Yorick a challenge to go and do likewise: “Everybody is journeying, I
Among miscellaneous and anonymous works inspired directly by Sterne, belongs undoubtedly “Die Geschichte meiner Reise nach Pirmont” , the author of which claims that it was written before Yorick was translated or Jacobi published. He says he is not worthy to pack Yorick’s bag or weave Jacobi’s arbor, but the review of the Almanach der deutschen Musen evidently regards it as a product, nevertheless, of Yorick’s impulse. Kuno Ridderhoff in his study of Frau la Roche says that the “Empfindsamkeit” of Rosalie in the first part of “Rosaliens Briefe” is derived from Yorick. The “Leben, Thaten und Meynungen des D.
Among the works of sentiment which were acknowledged imitations of Yorick, along with Jacobi’s “Winterreise,” probably the most typical and best known was the “Empfindsame Reisen durch Deutschland” by Johann Gottlieb Schummel. Its importance as a document in the history of sentimentalism is rather as an example of tendency than as a force contributing materially to the spread of the movement.
Draper, and which appealed to Sterne’s admirers. Pankraz’s new Order of the Garter, born of his wild frenzy of devotion over this article of Elisa’s wearing apparel, is an open satire on Leuchsenring’s and Jacobi’s silly efforts noted elsewhere. The garter was to bear Elisa’s silhouette and the device “Orden vom Strumpfband der empfindsamen Liebe.”
Yet the book has been remembered more persistently than any other work of its genre, except Jacobi’s works, undoubtedly in part because it was superior to many of its kind, partly, also, because its author won later and maintained a position of some eminence, as a writer and a pedagogue; but largely because Goethe’s well-known review of it in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen has been cited as a remarkably acute contribution to the discriminating criticism of the genuine and the affected in the eighteenth-century literature of feeling, and has drawn attention from the very fact of its source to the object of its criticism.
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