Martha Woodmansee is probably the leading historian of the interaction between copyright law, print technology, and changing notions of authorship. In "The Genius and the Copyright" (Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 [1984]: 446-48), she documents the rise of the romantic view of originality that is still enshrined in our view of authorship:

In advocating originality, Edward Young had made what proved to be enormously fecund suggestions about the process by which this quality is brought about. An original work, he had conjectured,

may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made. Imitations are often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics, art and labor, out of preexistent materials not their own. [44]

Young derogates the craftsman's manipulation of inherited techniques and materials as capable of producing nothing but imitations, "duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before."[45] Original works are the product of a more organic process: they are vital, grow spontaneously from a root, and by implication, unfold their original form from within.[46] German theorists of the genie period spelled out the implications of these ideas.[47] That is, they expanded Young's metaphor for the process of genial creativity in such a way as to effect the new conception of composition that enabled Fichte, in the final stage of the piracy debate, to "prove" the author's peculiar ownership of his work.

The direction in which their work took them is illustrated by Herder's ruminations on the processes of nature in Vom Erkennen and Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (1778). What most inspires Herder is the "marvelous diligence" with which living organisms take in and process alien matter, transforming it in such a way as to make it part of themselves:

The herb draws in water and earth and refines them intd its own elements; the animal makes the lower herbs into the nobler animal sap; man transforms herbs and animals into organic elements of his life, converts them to the operation of higher, finer stimuli. [48]

The ease with which these ideas about the nature of nature could be adapted to rethinking the nature of composition is suggested by the young Goethe's description of writing as "the reproduction of the world around me by means of the internal world which takes hold of, combines, creates anew, kneads everything and puts it down again in its own form, manner."[49] Goethe departs sharply from the older Renaissancc and neoclassical conception of the writer as essentially a vehicle of ideas to describe him not only as transformin those ideas, but as transforming them in such a way as to make them an expression of his ow--uniqu--mind. Herder sums up this new line of thought when he observes that "one ought to be able to regard each book as the imprint [Abdruck] of a living human soul":

Any poem, even a long poem--a life's (and soul's) work--is a tremendous betrayer of its creator, often where the latter was least conscious of be traying himself. Not only does one see in it the man's poetic talents, as the crowd would put it; one also sees which senses and inclinations governed him, how he received images, how he ordered and disposed them and the chaos of his impressions, the favorite places in his heart just as his life's destinies, his manly or childish understanding, the stays of his thought and his memory.[50]

This radically new conception of the book as an imprint or record of the intellectlon of a unique Indlvlduat--hence a "tremendous betrayer" of that individual--entails new reading strategies. In neo-classical doctrine the pleasure of reading had derived from the reader's recognition of himself in a poet's representations (a pleasure guaranteed by the essential similarity of all men). Thus Pope's charge to the poet to present "something, whose truth convinced at sight we find,/ That gives us back the image of our mind." With Herder the pleasure of reading lies instead in the exploration of an Other, in penetrating to the deepest reaches of the foreign, because absolutely unique consciousness of which thefwork is a verbalized embodiment. Herder describes this new and, to his way of thinking, "active" [lebendig] mode of reading as "divination into the soul of the creator [Urheber].[51]

Notes

44. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, p. 274.

45. Ibid., p. 273.

46. see Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 198 ff.

47. The best study of the cult of genius is Edgar Zilsel, Die Geniereligion. Ein Versuch uber das moderne Personlichkeitsideal mit einer historitschen Begrundung (Vienna and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumuller, 1918). See also his Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffs. Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Fruhkapitalismus (Tubingen: Mohr, 1926); and Oskar Walzel, "Das Prometheussymbol von Shaftesbury zu Goethe," Neue Jahrbucher fur das klassische Altertum, XIII (1910), 40-71, 133-65.

48. Herders samtliche Werke, ad. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1892), Vlil, 175 76.

49. Goethe to Jacobi, 21 August 1774, in Goethes Briefe, Hamburg edition in 4 vols. (Hamburg: Christian Wagner, 1962), 1, 116.

50. Herder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele, p. 208.

51. Ibid, pp. 208-9.

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