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Gesamtkunstwerk'* THE ROMANTIC BOOK AS 'GESAMTKUNSTWERK'* ROGER PAULIN TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE An exhibition of around fifty books from the period of German Romanticism will leave very different impressions on the many beholders who visit it. Perhaps there will be a general sense of disparity, reflecting the variety of texts displayed - some plain, some with engravings, some even lavishly illustrated. But others, some once hailed as epoch-making, will in their outward appearance be dull or prosaic. It may be difficult to sum up a general impression, a tenor or feel, of publications that are so discrete. What legitimacy therefore is there in attempting, on the basis of only some of the books on display, to bring in as an explanatory and interpretative aid a word which bespeaks not some mass of varied texts, but the very fusion of the different art forms: 'Gesamtkunstwerk'? I should, I believe, explain my terms of reference. 'Gesamtkunst­ werk' is one of those German words which in English usage we may safely leave in the original; it is, of course, rightly and historically applied to Richard Wagner's endeavours, from the 1840s to the 1880s, to bring on to the operatic stage through poetic text, living visual image, and the ultimately non-representational sensation of sound, an art form which would transcend traditional Aristotelian barriers and emerge as the essential synthesis of man's mimetic capacities. Anyone with only a nodding acquaintance with German Romanticism will know that the theoretical basis of Wagner's total work of art was laid in that earlier movement, indeed that the late eighteenth century fur­ nished him with an aesthetic vocabulary which enabled him to set down in language what the aims and effects of the musical drama should be. Friedrich Schlegel's notions of universal poetry, Novalis' postulation of an all-embracing art-form, 1 August Wilhelm Schlegel's lectures on dramatic poetry, and several dramas by German Roman­ tics (like Tieck's Genoveva or Brentano's Die Grundung Prags, failures in terms of the stage of their own time) prefigure Wagner's later achievement. August Wilhelm Schlegel's famous twenty-fifth Lecture on Dramatic Art and Literature of 1808 says it all: * This paper was originally given at the 'Romantic Occasion' in October 1988 when the author was Henry Simon Professor of German at the University of Manchester. 1 Cf M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford U.P., 1953), esp. 88-94. 48 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY The art and poetry of the ancients strives for strict separation of the disparate; the Romantic on the other hand finds pleasure in indissoluble mixtures; all opposites, nature and art, poetry and prose, grave and gay, memory and intimation, spirituality and sensuousness, the earthly and the divine, life and death, these it fuses together in one embrace . We compared ancient tragedy with a group in sculpture, the figures akin to the character, their grouping to the plot, and on this, as the sole object of representation, is concentrated the concern of both forms of art. But we are to think of Romantic drama in terms of a great painting, where in addition to figure and the manifold movement of groups we have as well depicted the characters' environment, not just that near to hand, but a significant distant perspective, the whole magically illumined, which helps in this way or another to determine the impression.2 Add to this the same August Wilhelm Schlegel's attempts as a prosodist to render the qualities of vowel sounds in terms of colours, in an essay of the 1790s,3 and the historical roots of the 'Gesamtkunst- werk' are at least sketched in outline. I do not wish to block in those outlines. Rather I wish to discuss the Romantic book, about which the literature is sparse4 and over which a certain element of speculation, or not easily substantiated deduction, seems to hover. My contention, my thesis if you like, is that there is in book production in the period 1795-1815 in Germany an element of creative innovation which marks these books out as something special. It would be agreeable and convenient if we had documentation, say in the form of correspondence between publishers and authors, that spoke evidence of new turnings, self-aware beginn­ ings, new aesthetic frontiers. Except for the most famous of all Romantic books, Arnim's and Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn of 1806-08, and then only partially, this evidence is hardly forthcoming.5 Publishers of the Romantic period seem to have been as reluctant to initiate innovation as they ever have been: the main object of the transaction was money. It was international; Byron knew it: And if, as the opinion goes, Verse hath a better sale than prose, - Certes, I should have more than those, My Murray.6 2 August Wilhelm Schlegel, KritischeSchriften undBriefe, ed. Edgar Lohner, vol. 6 (Stuttgart, Berlin, Koln, Mainz: Kohlhammer, 1967), 112f. 3 Schlegel's essay Betrachtungen iiber Metrik, from the second half of the 1790s. 4 See Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens, ed. Karl Loffler and Joachim Kirchner, assist. Wilhelm Olbrich (3 vols., Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1935-37), iii. 145; Lesewut, Raubdruck und Biicherluxus: Eine Ausstellung des Goethe-Museums Dusseldorf Anton-und-Katharina-Kippenberg- Stiftung 26. Mai bis 2. Oktober 1977, ed. Jorn Gores; Friedrich Kapp and Johann Goldfriedrich, Geschichte des Deutschen Buchhandels (4 vols., Leipzig: Verlag des Borsenvereins der Deutschen Buchhandler, 1886-1913), iii. 556-621, iv. 1-51; Der deutsche Buchhandel, ed. Hans Widmann, assist. Horst Kliemann and Bernhard Wendt (2 vols., Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1965), i. 62-102. 5 See Gelehrsamkeit ein Handwerk? Bucherschreiben ein Gewerbe? Dokumente zum Verhdltnis von Schriftsteller und Verleger im 18. Jahrhundert in Deutschland (Leipzig: Reclam, 1982). 6 Byron, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, corr. John Jump (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford U.P., 1970), 109..
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