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A few years later there, appeared in Hermann Hesse's On the Rack another story of schoolboy martyrdom, and between these two pessimistic works lay two sunshiny novels of childhood, Asmus Semper's Childhood Land , by Otto Ernst, and Gottfried Kämpfer , by Hermann Anders Krüger.
We find another derogatory fling at Sterne himself and a regret at the extent of his influence in an anonymous book entitled “Betrachtungen über die englischen Dichter,” published at the end of the great Yorick decade. The author compares Sterne most unfavorably with Addison: “If the humor of the Spectator and Tatler be set off against the digressive whimsicality of Sterne,” he says, “it is, as if one of the Graces stood beside a Bacchante. And yet the pampered taste of the present day takes more pleasure in a Yorick than in an Addison.” But a reviewer in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek discounts this author’s criticisms of men of established fame, such as Shakespeare, Swift, Yorick, and suggests youth, or brief acquaintance with English literature, as occasion for his inadequate judgments. Indeed, Yorick disciples were quick to resent any shadow cast upon his name. Thus the remark in a letter printed in the Deutsches Museum that Asmus was the German Yorick “only a better moral character,” called forth a long article in the same periodical for September, 1779, by L.
Some contemporary critics maintained a kinship between Matthias Claudius and Yorick-Sterne, though nothing further than a similarity of mental and emotional fibre is suggested. No one claimed an influence working from the English master. Even as late as 1872, Wilhelm Röseler in his introductory poem to a study of “Matthias Claudius und sein Humor” calls Asmus, “Deutschland’s Yorick,” thereby agreeing almost verbally with the German correspondent of the Deutsches Museum, who wrote from London nearly a hundred years before, September 14, 1778, “Asmus .
The great advantage of this kind of fame is that to relate what one has seen, is much easier than to impart one's thoughts, and people are apt to understand descriptions better than ideas, reading the one more readily than the other: for, as Asmus says,
To Sterne’s further enunciation of this joyous theory of life, Young naturally replies in characteristic terms, emphasizing life’s evanescence and joy’s certain blight. But Sterne, though acknowledging the transitoriness of life’s pleasures, denies Young’s deductions. Yorick’s conception of death is quite in contrast to Young’s picture and one must admit that it has no justification in Sterne’s writings. On the contrary, Yorick’s life was one long flight from the grim enemy. The idea of death cherished by Asmus in his “Freund Hein,” the welcome guest, seems rather the conception which Wezel thrusts on Sterne. Death comes to Yorick in full dress, a
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