Yorick

“ And trust me, Yorick, whenever it is not so, man is false to himself and betrays his own succours ten times where nature does it once. Go to the Duc de C— with the Bastile in thy looks;—my life for it, thou wilt be sent back to Paris in half an hour with an escort.
I believe so, said I.—Then I’ll go to the Duke, by heaven! with all the gaiety and debonairness in the world.—
—And there you are wrong again, replied I.—A heart at ease, Yorick, flies into no extremes—’tis ever on its centre.—Well! well! ”

“ Now, this departure of poor Yorick was disastrous enough. His whole career, indeed, was one of eccentric gambadoes on his hobby-horse; but he never reckoned that after his death, yet another grimly grotesque chapter was to be added to his Shandy record. It was hard enough that so jocund a person should die so miserably—or, as he might have thought it, die at all; and there was a hideous contrast between the crowd which the viveur was always secure of, and this sad desertion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was well known that Yorick had never a good opinion of the treatise which Phutatorius had wrote de Concubinis retinendis, as a thing which he feared had done hurt in the world—and 'twas easily found out, that there was a mystical meaning in Yorick's prank—and that his chucking the chesnut hot into Phutatorius's ***—*****, was a sarcastical fling at his book—the doctrines of which, they said, had inflamed many an honest man in the same place. ”

“ This is all that ever stagger'd my faith in regard to Yorick's extraction, who, by what I can remember of him, and by all the accounts I could ever get of him, seem'd not to have had one single drop of Danish blood in his whole crasis; in nine hundred years, it might possibly have all run out:—I will not philosophize one moment with you about it ”

“ Oh! there is a husk and shell, Yorick, which grows up with learning, which their unskilfulness knows not how to fling away!
—Sciences may be learned by rote, but Wisdom not.
Yorick thought my father inspired.—I will enter into obligations this moment, said my father, to lay out all my aunt Dinah’s legacy in charitable uses (of which, by the bye, my father had no high opinion) , if the corporal has any one determinate idea annexed to any one word he has repeated.—Prythee, Trim, quoth my father, turning round to him,—What dost thou mean, by “honouring thy father and mother?” ”

“ 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 50 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. ”

“ 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 158 L. H. N.,6 vigorously defending Sterne as a man and a writer. The greatness of his human heart and the breadth and depth of his sympathies are given as the unanswerable proofs of his moral worth. ”

“ Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. ”

“ Sterne was not slow in winning her confidence. The sympathy of a distinguished man of letters flattered her vanity. She knew him as the ‘mild, generous, and good Yorick,’ and became a whole-hearted ‘idolater of his worth.’ He opened a correspondence with her in his customary vein, calling her his ‘Bramine,’ in allusion to her Indian connections. He cursed fate that both were married already, sent her his books, and having had her portrait painted, wore it round his neck. ”

“ 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 direct imitations of Sterne are very numerous, a crowd of followers, a motley procession of would-be Yoricks, set out on one expedition or another. Musäus22 in a review of certain sentimental meanderings in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek,23 remarked that the increase of such journeyings threatened to bring about a new epoch in the taste of the time. He adds that the good Yorick presumably never anticipated becoming the founder of a fashionable sect. ”

“ The style of your picturesque artists is very different. Yorick, for instance, by a few careless scratches, as they would seem, often goes beyond the most finished piece of another master. At the slightest of his pathetic touches the tender-hearted dissolve away in sorrow. ”

“ Yorick held up to college or university students as a champion of virtue is certainly an extraordinary spectacle. A critic in the Frankfurter Gel. Anz., August 18, 1772, in criticising the make-up of a so-called “Landbibliothek,” recommends books “die geschickt sind, die guten einfältigen, ungekünstelten Empfindungen reiner Seelen zu unterhalten, einen Yorick vor allen . . . .” The long article on Sterne’s character in the Götting. Mag., I, pp. 84–92, 1780, “Etwas über Sterne: Schreiben an Prof. Lichtenberg” undoubtedly helped to establish this opinion of Sterne authoritatively. ”

“ There is use, too, of mythological figures quite foreign to Sterne, an obvious reminiscence of Jacobi’s Anacreontic experience. He exaggerates Yorick’s sentimentalism, is more weepy, more tender, more sympathizing; yet, as Longo does not sufficiently emphasize, he does not touch the whimsical side of Yorick’s work. Jacobi, unlike his model, but in common with other German imitators, is insistent in instruction and serious in contention for pet theories, as is exemplified by the discussion of the doctrine of immortality. There are opinions to be maintained, there is a message to be delivered. ”

“ Once started on his journey, the author falls in with a poor warrior-beggar, an adaptation of Sterne’s Chevalier de St. Louis,26 and he puts in 130 verse Yorick’s expressed sentiment that the king and the fatherland should not allow the faithful soldier to fall into such distress.
Bock’s next sentimental adventure is with a fair peasant-maid whom he sees weeping by the wayside. Through Yorick-like insistence of sympathy, he finally wins from her information concerning the tender situation: a stern stepfather, an unwelcome suitor of his choosing, and a lover of her own. ”

“ Others who knew nothing of musical expression, and merely lent their ears to the plain import of the word, imagined that Phutatorius, who was somewhat of a cholerick spirit, was just going to snatch the cudgels out of Didius's hands, in order to bemawl Yorick to some purpose—and that the desperate monosyllable Z———ds was the exordium to an oration, which, as they judged from the sample, presaged but a rough kind of handling of him; so that my uncle Toby's good nature felt a pang for what Yorick was about to undergo. ”

“ Timme insists that his attack is only on Yorick’s mistaken followers and not on Sterne himself. He contrasts the man and his imitators at the outset sharply by comments on a quotation from the novel, “Fragmente zur Geschichte der Zärtlichkeit”49 as typifying the outcry of these petty imitators against the heartlessness of their misunderstanding critics,—“Sanfter, dultender Yorick,” he cries, “das war nicht deine Sprache! Du priesest dich nicht mit einer pharisäischen Selbstgenügsamkeit und schimpftest nicht auf die, die dir nicht ähnlich waren, ‘Doch! ”

“ Methinks, said Didius, half rising from his chair, in order to remove a bottle and a tall decanter, which stood in a direct line betwixt him and Yorick—you might have spared this sarcastick stroke, and have hit upon a more proper place, Mr. Yorick—or at least upon a more proper occasion to have shewn your contempt of what we have been about: If the Sermon is of no better worth than to light pipes with—'twas certainly, Sir, not good enough to be preached before so learned a body ”

“ 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 27 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 ”

“ On the 28th of that month he writes to the Earl of —— (as his daughter's foolish mysteriousness has headed the letter) , to thank him for his letter of inquiry about Yorick, and to say that Yorick "has worn out both his spirits and body with the Sentimental Journey. 'Tis true that an author must feel himself, or his reader will not" (how mistaken a devotion Sterne showed to this Horatian canon will be noted hereafter) , "but I have torn my whole frame into pieces by my feelings. I believe the brain stands as much in need of recruiting as the body ”

“ Yorick, were sitting in the 431 parlour, he thought it rather civil to conform to the term my father had made use of than not. When a man is hemm’d in by two indecorums, and must commit one of ’em—I always observe—let him chuse which he will, the world will blame him—so I should not be astonished if it blames my uncle Toby. ”

“ The good-natured lady was always liable to get involved in the fortunes of any of her young students, and though the present one had no claim on her that a hundred others might not have had, she was no doubt a lovable child, and her courage under trial had fairly engaged the affections of the Rev. Athelstan. Now Yorick had always been an idol of Adeline Fossett's from the day when he was first introduced to her, a girl his junior in years, but older than he for all that, as an Eton friend to whom her favourite brother probably owed his life. ”

“ Slop caricature of living persons disappears also; while, after the famous description of Yorick's death-bed, we meet with no more attempts at self-vindication. It seems probable, therefore, that long before the first two volumes were completed Sterne had discovered the artistic possibilities of "My Uncle Toby" and "Corporal Trim," and had realized the full potentialities of humour contained in the contrast between the two brothers Shandy. ”

“ Yet censure is not heard beneath the tomb any more than praise. "De mortuis nil nisi verum—De vivis nil nisi bonum"—would approach much nearer to good sense. After all, the few handfuls of remaining dust which once composed the body of the author of the "Night Thoughts" feel not much concern whether Young pass now for a man of sorrow, or for a "fellow of infinite jest." To this favour must come the whole family of Yorick. ”

“ The call upon epic, tragic, lyric poets, musicians, etc., which follows here is a further imitation of Yorick’s list-making and pseudo-scientific method.
On his way to Leipzig, in the post-chaise, the author falls in with a clergyman: the manner of this meeting is intended to be Sterne-like: Schummel sighs, the companion remarks, “You too are an unhappy one,” and they join hands while the human heart beams in the traveler’s eyes. They weep too at parting. But, apart from these external incidents of their meeting, the matter of their converse is in no way inspired by Sterne. ”

“ The sweeping condemnation which the soberer critics heaped upon the incapacities of his imitators has been exemplified in the accounts already given of Schummel, Bock and others. It would be interesting to follow a little more closely this current of antagonism. The tone of protest was largely directed, the edge of satire was chiefly whetted, against the misunderstanding adaptation of Yorick’s ways of thinking and writing, and only here and there were voices raised to detract in any way from the genius of Sterne. He never suffered in Germany such an eclipse of fame as was his fate in England. ”