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PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION
and Dumas covers a 4,000-year expanse of human history in his novels. They all have backs strong enough for any burden. "61 When the revolution came in 1848, Dumas published an appeal to the workers of Paris in which he introduced himself as one of them. In twenty years~ he said~ he had written 400 novels and thirty-five plays. He had created jobs for 8,160 people-proofreaders, typesetters, machinists, wardrobe mistresses. Nor did he forget the claque. The feeling with which the universal historian Fuchs Laid the economic basis for his magnificent collections is probably not wholly unlike Dumas' amour-propre. Later, this economic base made it possible for Fuchs to wheel and deal on the Paris market with almost as much sovereignty as in his own private demesne. Around the turn of the century, the dean of Paris art dealers used to say of Fuchs: "C'est Ie monsieur qui mange tout Paris" [Thaes the gentleman who's consuming all of Paris]. Fuchs exemplifies the type of the ramasseur [packratJ; he takes a Rabelaisian delight in huge quantities-a delight manifested in the luxurious redundancy of his texts.
VII Fuchs's family tree~ on the French side, is that of a collector; on the German side, that of a historian. The moral rigor characteristic of Fuchs the historian marks him as a German. This rigor already characterized Gervinus, whose Geschichte der poetischen Nationalliteratur [History of Poetic National Literature] could be called one of the first attempts at a German history of ideas. 62 It is typical for Gervinus, just as it is later for Fuchs, to represent the great creators as quasi-martial figures. This results in the dominance of their active, manly~ and spontaneous traits over their contemplative, feminine, and receptive characteristics. Certainly, such a representation was easier for Gervinus. When he wrote his book, the bourgeoisie was in the ascendant; bourgeois art was full of political energies. Fuchs writes in the age of imperialism; he presents the political energies of art polemically to an epoch whose works display less of these energies with every passing day. But Fuchs's standards a.re still those of Gervinus. In fact, they can be traced back even furthet; to the eighteenth century. This can be done with reference to Gervinus himself, whose memorial speech for F. C. Schlosser gave magnificent expression to the militant moralism of the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary period. Schlosser had been criticized for a "peevish moral rigor." Gervinus, however, defends him by saying that "Schlosser could and would have answered these criticisms as follows. Contra.ry to one's experience with novels and