MAX LEOPOLD WAGNER (1880-1962)

Max Leopold Wagner

Y[akov] M [alkiel]

In the budget of any flourishing discipline there must be, to say the least, some balance between loss and accretion of talent. As regards the well-being of Romance linguistics, it is a sad symptom indeed that one has these days so few opportunities to welcome newcomers of truly impressive promise or actual accomplishment and such numer- ous occasions (one almost fears, increasingly frequent) for com- memorating deceased scholars of spectacular achievements. The death of Max Leopold Wagner in Washington, D.C., on July 14, is, unfortunately, no exception to this trend, which, if it continues unchecked, threatens to deprive our domain of the last vestiges of intellectual splendor.

Wagner belonged to that important, hard-working generation of Romance linguists from Central Europe (the oldest member of the group was Jaberg, the youngest is Rohlfs) which has dominated the scene for over a half-century and which may be briefly characterized by a number of recurrent distinctive features. All the scholars in question had their academic training before or, at worst, during the First World War ; all, including the Swiss, were firmly rooted in the tradition of German culture, in general, and German philological thinking, in particular ; all revered Schuchardt, evinced enthusiasm for Gilliéron’s dynamic approach to linguistics and for such familiar concomitants as field-work, dialectology, and cartography, and developed a powerful side-interest (or more) in material civilization (‘ Wörter und Sachen י) ; all refused to declare bankrupt or to jettison the traditional historical grammar, but clearly subordinated their concern with such disciplines as phonology and morphology to lexical studies (etymology, onomasiology, toponymy) and, in most instances, skirted syntax and remained aloof from stylistics, though not from cultural history ; all veered away from time- honored textual criticism and, except for an occasional interlude, from straight literary studies. After all these deductions of pre- eminently negative hallmarks have been duly made, there still remained a spectrum of possibilities which allowed Wagner to be quite unlike the aforementioned two scholars among his peers or, for that matter, such near-contemporaries as Jud, Wartburg, and Krüger.

Thus, it has been correctly asserted that, as a plain polyglot, Wagner boasted a thorough or working knowledge of more numerous and more diversified languages than any other Romance scholar, at least of his generation. This statement requires a qualification : for all his virtuosity, Wagner did not become a leading comparatist, first, because of his reluctance to engage in any free-wheeling reconstruction on a large scale and, second, because even within the Romance precinct he showed, from the start, very definite tokens of predilection and distaste. The readers of this journal need not be reminded of the magnitude of our debt to Wagner as an explorer of Sardinian ; this lifelong interest, incidentally, traceable to his student years, especially in Munich and Würzburg, grew out of his participation in an academic contest the subject of which had been felicitously suggested by a professor who could not have anticipated a veritable chain-reaction of responses. Less frequently mentioned is the fact that Wagner has shown a strangely consistent reluctance to engage in French and Provençal studies or even to bring in Gallo-Romance collaterally, an attitude (doubly unusual in one who had studied, if briefly, at the University of Paris) which, in conjunc- tion with others, has disqualified him from seizing the helm of comparative studies. One conjectural explanation is that French and Provençal were at that time heavily overstressed in the university curricula of German-speaking countries, so that those striking out on their own sought greener pastures. An alternative is to assume that Wagner, who enjoyed musing in CONCRETE terms, preferred the visually identifiable unit of Mediterranean culture (including its Greek, Turkish, and Arabic components) to any abstract unit (‘ language family ‘) carved out through genetic reconstruction. A simpler argument is that Wagner became quickly surfeited with teaching French, probably until 1924, as a secondary-school subject.

Wagners long life, rich in vicissitudes and trials, has taken a course fairly atypical of the average career professor’s ‘ curriculum ‘. Its start was unusual enough : instead of rising through the ranks at one of his native country’s focal points of advanced teaching and research, as assis- tant to some influential professor (his brief, inconsequential assistantship at Hamburg was a mere interlude), Wagner readily accepted first a modest collegiate position, for a few years, in Constantinople, and later, for a shorter period, an ethnologic research assistantship in Mexico, reserving his summer vacations for leisurely trips through his beloved Sardinia, or through Spain, or else through European and Asiatic Turkey. In this fashion he could afford to see, if not the whole world, at least such charac- teristic areas as were of special concern to him, establish direct, casual contacts with ‘ Land und Leute ‘, and free himself, as enterprising younger philologists of that generation were pathetically eager to do, from the heavy liabilities of living and laboring as a mere ‘ Kabinettgelehrter ‘.

Up to this point Wagner’s career bore a measure of resemblance to those of F. Hanssen and R. Lenz before him, two scholars who, saturated with Germanic learning, had accepted modest teaching positions in Chile, but soon discovered avenues to fruitful and original researches of their own, stimulated by their new exotic environment. Unlike them, however, Wagner before long was persuaded to accept a post of considerable prominence as Dozent (1915-21), then as adjunct professor (1921-24), at the University of Berlin, in charge of Romance linguistics and, especially, of Spanish. His activities there fall into that peculiar interregnum which separates the clearly delineated regimes of Tobler and Morf, on the one hand, and of Gamillscheg, on the other ; additional locally influential names that come to mind from that restless post-bellum period are those of E. Lommatzsch (who later was to move to Frankfurt) and of G. Ebeling (destined to reach the pinnacle of his career in Kiel).

An incident neither political in nature nor connected with science is rumored to have put an abrupt, premature end to Wagner’s academic teaching in Germany as well as to his concurrent pedagogical activity at the Fichte Gymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf ; one of the last direct students in whom he kindled sustained interest in lexical research was Henry R. Kahane. Many years later Wagner served twice, each time for a few years, as Visiting Professor at Coimbra and, for just one semester, on the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois (1948-49). As a pensioned civil servant, Wagner, free from family obligations, could afford to devote the remaining thirty-eight years of his life to pure, unshackled research, shifting his headquarters from Berlin to Rome and Naples, and, ultimately, to Washington, D.C.

Given Wagner’s status as ‘ Privatgelehrter ‘ unhampered by residential restrictions and formal academic responsibilities, plus his enviable capacity for concentrated research, it is small wonder that his output, in terms of sheer bulk and many-pronged directions, should have been formidable. A first brief bibliographic guide to his researches appeared in Mexico’s IL, III (1935), 231-235 : 88 items. Considerably richer is the volume of information poured out by H. Kröll in Orbis, II : 2 (1953), 532-540, as a supplement to his vignette : 147 pieces of original inquiry. The most extensive listing (397 items, including book reviews) we owe to G. Manuppella, BF, XV : 1-2 (1954-55), 39-124, a record timed to the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s earliest publication (in RL), but even this compilation is now outdated and clamors for a supplement. The scope of the recognition which Wagner enjoyed at the peak of his scholarly activities can be gauged from the Tabula included, at Karl Jaberg’s behest, in the Historische Wortbildungslehre des Sardischen (RH 39 ; Bern, 1952).¹ This esteem, for many decades, was practically universal ; among scholars who concurred in it there were not a few of otherwise almost incompatible tastes—a testimony to the quality of Wagner’s performance, but also a result of his aloofness from dogmatism and theoretical commitment alike. Meyer-Lübke relied very heavily on Wag- ner’s critical remarks in revising (1930-35) his REW ; Vossler referred to him admiringly as the purely motivated explorer par excellence in an oft-quoted passage of a letter to Croce (Carteggio, ed. 1951, p. 254) ; a not yet soured Spitzer unstintingly heaped praise on Wagner in the annotations to his anthology (Meisterwerke, II [Munich, 1930], 344). Among younger workers, Wagner decisively influenced J. Hubschmid, who dedicated to him, in 1953, his Sardisehe Studien (cf. also the ‘ laudatio ‘ in RJb., Ill [1950], 23-25), G. Nencioni, who lent his not inconsiderable stylistic talent to the effective translation of La lingua sarda, and Kröll ; in this country, even a critic so hard to please as R. A. Hall, Jr. has for years extolled Wagner’s virtues, with E. Pulgram, for once, chiming in (Lg., XXXVI [1960], 419-421).

Because the best two among the existing Wagner bibliographies—and the unsigned but authorized bio-bibliographic statement in Orbis, 1:2 (1952), 592-593—are chronologically slanted, there may be some point in highlighting the range of his curiosity by breaking down topically, and dating parenthetically, the more characteristic of his writings, with little attention to their varying size. Over the years, publications from his pen have borne on such diversified subjects as Latin, viewed as the fountain- head of Romance lexicon (1917, 1936, 1942) and phraseology (1951) ; relics of African Latin, esp. in Berber (1936), and, conversely, remnants of Punic and other substrata in Romance territory (1931, 1943) ; Gypsy languages, in general (1936), and with special reference to Gypsy ingredients in Italian (1936) and in Spanish (1941, 1949, 1951) ; the study of argots, with particular attention to Mexico (1919), jointly to Mexico and Asturias (1930), to Colombia (1950), to Europe in general (1942-43, 1946), to Turkey (1933, 1943), to Sardinia (1934), and to Portugal (1937, 1949) ; all manner of borrowings, e.g. such Arabisms as percolated into Hispano- Romance (1934, 1941), including loan-translations (1941), or into Sicilian and South Italian (1932), Greek elements in Sardinian (1920), etc.—an interest that broadened out into concern with bi- and multi-lingualism, with cross-family linguistic areas such as the Balkan peninsula (1919)— note a separate prong extending into Rumania (1943)—, and with sub- stratal agency as in the case of an indigenous suffix absorbed into C.-Amer. Spanish (1950). A marked early leaning toward folkloristic studies was later visibly nourished by continued etymological activity ; witness Wagner’s probings of historical legends (‘ King Wamba ‘), superstition (e.g. malocchio), miscellaneous categories of folk song (1914), features of material civilization (1932), pristine symbols (1937), metaphors rooted in folk-beliefs (1933), and folk-beliefs etymologically relevant (1934), beside literary works, even some of known authorship, composed in a popular vein, such as the Andalusian Gaspar Fernández y Ävila’s ten Christmas plays (early 18th century ; from a copy preserved in Tlacotál- pam, Mexico ; 1922) and a castigating mock-sermon from Sardinia (1942). Less characteristic of Wagner’s ability was systematic com- parative analysis, though he did trace individual Italo-Sardo-Hispanic isoglosses (1919), busied himself with the exact status of such oddly located dialects as Gallurese and Sassarese (1943), distilled peninsular Italy’s influences on the Tyrrhenian islands (1932), and occasionally offered contrastive sketches such as one, almost essayistic, between Spain and Sardinia (1953). Least typical of Wagner’s work was popularization, to which he stooped only in the late ‘forties, probably forced by temporary impecuniousness. Among his rare bibliographic surveys—as against his numerous and exceptionally substantial book reviews—let me point out one on Judeo-Spanish (1909) and one, of distinctly later vintage, on American-Spanish (1950).

As regards favored languages, the two hard cores of Wagner’s long- range research seem to be, at first glance, (a) Sardinian and (b) Ibero- Romance in all its varieties and disguises, including some known as exotic. Upon closer examination, however, the sharp disparity of Wagner’s actual achievements in the two related domains becomes all too clear. In a middle-sized island such as Sardinia there was, in all likelihood, hardly a nook that to Wagner remained unfamiliar from repeated personal inspection, and the materials harvested on his persistent trips, which went back to 1904, were supplemented by the fruits of the splendid field-work which he carried out, in the late ‘twenties, as a member of the AIS՝ exploratory team directed, from their Swiss strongholds, by his close friends Jud and Jaberg. Moreover, Wagner’s detailed knowledge of terrain, climate, ethnology, material civilization, folklore, prehistory, and later political vicissitudes all blended harmoniously into a perfectly balanced whole, making him an expert fully as thorough and many-sided as were, say, Leite de Vasconcelos in Portugal, C. Salvioni and C. Battisti in the Alpino-Lombard zone, G. Rohlfs in South Italy, J. Haust in the Walloon section of Belgium, G. Weigand in the Balkan peninsula, and S. Pu§cariu in Rumania. Above all, Wagner had thoroughly analyzed and assimilated the evidence of older insular texts (esp. 1939-40), thus managing to see every feature, with equal sharpness, in the synchronic and the diachronie perspectives. Small wonder that we owe to his diligent pen an astounding succession of seemingly unsurpassable mono- graphs and syntheses bearing on Sardinian (to say nothing of countless minor articles, notes, and book reviews) ; e.g. Das ländliche Leben Sardiniens im Spiegel der Sprache (1921) ; La stratificazione de! lessico sardo (1928) ; Studien über den sardischen Wortschatz : I. Die Familie ; II. Der menschliche Körper (1930) ; Historische Lautlehre des Sardischen (1941) ; La lingua sarda (n.d. [1946]) ; and many more. The Sardinian etymological dictionary, easily Wagner’s most ambitious venture, started publication a few years ago and seems to have been left completed, possibly even in definitive shape, as is, I understand, also true of the parallel treatise on syntax, which, for more than one reason, titillates our curiosity.

In the far-flung Luso-Hispanic field the situation was radically different : Wagner had no opportunity to crisscross as a hiker the entire Peninsula, still less to do field-work in two-thirds of the Western Hemisphere, so that he was forced to operate, at best, with felicitously chosen samples, of, say, Barcelonese, Lisbonese, Mexican, Peruvian, and Brazilian—specimens culled more often than not from printed sources, not quite ‘authentic’ and less than fully dependable. To this unavoidable liability he added, on his own, the arbitrary overemphasis on colorful, bizarre varieties (Gypsy-Spanish, Hispano-Arabic, argots of large urban centers), at the unwarranted expense of a truly intimate familiarity with the all-important medieval and the classical stages of the scripta. To put it squarely, Wagner’s Hispanic ficheros simply turned out to be meager, as regards the kernels of numerous problems ; and the results of his elucubrations, almost entirely in the province of etymology, hence unmistakably atomis- tic, were uneven, as I took pains to demonstrate here a few years ago (IX, 50-68). Except in regard to Portuguese, with which his changes in residence afforded ever new ‘ vital ‘ contacts at first hand (cf. here VI, 316-335), one may even hint—reluctantly—at a gradual deterioration in the standards of his performance, doubly pathetic in view of some younger workers’ brisk advances throughout these very years. Thus, along the axis of Judeo-Spanish, Wagner’s trail-blazing monograph, sponsored by the Vienna Academy, on the dialect of Constantinople (1914) manifestly overshadowed all earlier researches, even J. Subak’s (1906), which had by no means been negligible ; the three Madrid lectures of later vintage, issued in expanded form as a booklet (Caracteres generales . . .), marked little additional progress (1930), and the ‘ Espigueo ‘ of 1950—a series of palpably old annotations hastily and superficially brought up to date and almost indifferently phrased and proof-read—give such an impression of staleness as to mark a real anticlimax. Such early studies as grew out of Wagner’s short stay in Mexico were stimulating, and the most ambitious article, ‘ Spanisch-Amerikanisch und Vulgärlatein 1920) י), created a temporary stir, was translated into Spanish in 1924, and deemed an anthology piece as late as 1930 ; but his late attempt at a synthesis (Lingua e dialetti dell՝America spagnola : 1949) proved mildly disappointing, particularly if contrasted with the vastly superior writings of A. Alonso, Henriquez Ureña, M. A. Morinigo, and their closer associates, or, for that matter, of B. Malmberg and C. E. Капу. Equally disillusioning, in retrospect, is Wagner’s, shall we charitably say, superfluous venture into the popularization of straight literary history (Die spanisch-amerikanische Literatur in ihren Hauptströmungen, 1924). By 1950, Hispanic studies had assumed a volume of output and a degree of specialization, sophisti- cation, and plain precision that made it henceforth impossible to cultivate them concomitantly, as a foil to serious Sardinian researches. Instead of a graceful withdrawal from an evident overcommitment, Wagner inelegantly extricated himself in clumsy and boisterous fashion.

If one categorizes and assesses Wagner’s output not by languages, but by linguistic disciplines at issue, then the preeminence—over almost sixty years—of etymology and derivation becomes at once as patent as his relative neglect of inflection (except in the 1938-39 monograph—of which there exists a revised German version, still unpublished—on Sardinian declension and conjugation) and of syntax, i.e., of the two nuclear disciplines of grammar proper ; in fact, Wagner may serve, in V. Bertoldi’s company, as the prime example of a linguist exuberantly active as ‘ Kulturforscher ‘ who remained stubbornly, almost studiedly averse to acting as a grammarian. More important, perhaps, yet less frequently mentioned, is the fact that his actual accomplishments as etymologist, i.e., as student of individual growth, have been incomparably greater than his achievements in the field of word-formation, where such narrow growth and the crystallization of broader patterns are known to interact. As etymologist Wagner toyed successfully with every legitimate technique—without, it is true, devising any of his own—, starting, as circumstances demanded, from a given meaning (say, ‘ Expressions for “fox”, “weasel”, “marten”, “lady-bird”‘) or a set of kindred meanings (‘ Names of birds of prey ‘, 1953), tracing descendants of a given ancestral base across time and space, responding to a cluster of cognates as the original stimulus (1934), concentrating on some individual word of more than ordinary significance (Log. komo, Sic. dàgala, Am.-Sp. pibe, pebete, S.-It. pernacchio, And. alcobaila, all between 1935 and 1941) or on an individual lexical isogloss of comparable appeal (1949, 1953), examining critically the lexicon of a single dialect newly made accessible (1951), combing through a batch of recent dialect monographs (1953), or dissect- ing, not always, alas, in a patient mood, the conjectures of fellow etymologists (1941-43). In a few semitheoretical articles, Wagner, by precept and practice, has deftly exemplified commendable etymological habits and attitudes (1915-20, 1943, 1948) ; but such was his recoil from truly abstract thinking that he never bothered to assign to etymology a place within the total edifice of knowledge and cognition.²

Wagner’s second life-long interest, in derivation, has given rise to a succession of inquiries, some almost discouragingly short and sketchy like the note on Sp. -al, others more elaborate, even of book-length, all of which deserve praise only with serious qualifications. The two summits of this particular activity were, unquestionably, the Historische Wort- bildungslehre der Sardischen and a somewhat earlier string of articles (loosely organized and scattered over various journals) which examined Hispano-Romance suffixes characteristic of untutored folk speech. The former venture, one gathers from Jaberg’s perceptive Prefatory Note, represents, in the last analysis, the long-delayed outgrowth of a student paper submitted in partial fulfillment of prerequisites for a Bavarian teaching credential (1904), approved by a far-sighted H. Schneegans, and for nearly half a century left unpublished. Its eventual appearance was, needless to say, preceded by thorough expansion and meticulous, unhurried distillation, on the etymological level, making each paragraph, consulted in isolation, a veritable cameo. But Wagner showered no comparable share of attention on his grand strategy, and the methodologi- cally revealing sequence of sections is, in essence, the same as is found in Meyer-Liibke’s Romanische Wortbildungslehre (1894), which that author himself boldly modified in his more imaginative Französische Wort- bildungslehre (1921), not to speak of Gamillscheg’s probing Grundzüge of that same year, a valuable complementary piece within the same reformed tradition. There is pathos in the fact that Wagner, in 1952, was trailing thirty years behind the very scholar—distinctly his senior, but also more versatile and inventive to the end—whose pioneering Studien zur Kenntnis des Altlogudoresischen, so witnesses report, had, in the first place, converted him to Sardinian researches. As for Luso- and Hispano-Romance (Ptg. -adela and -ice, Sp. -uno, the -ƒ- and -p- suffixes, etc.), the field, by 1940, had lain fallow for so many decades that Wagner’s contributions were indisputably valuable, to say the least, as a preliminary clearance ; yet in my own investigations of related subjects I have, after independent microscopic inspection of the evidence, often had occasion to disagree with Wagner quite sharply on the selection of sources, on the neatness of the data adduced, and on their interpretations.

A few remarks seem in order on Wagner’s astounding fecundity as book-reviewer. Not unlike Jud, he must have realized early in life that whatever greatness Romance linguistics has attained in the past was in no small measure due to the readiness of its leading exponents, Schuchardt and Meyer-Lübke included, to volunteer their services, again and again, for the unglamorous task of appraising the endeavours of other workers, in most instances less experienced and less exciting. Wagner remained available to editors as critic even at an age when other celebrities, less altruistic in this respect, might excusably have begged off ; and his assess- ments were at all times made in methodic, unhurried fashion, with so many addenda thrown in for good measure as to make the reviews not seldom meatier and almost invariably more authoritative than the works examined. Thus, to limit myself to a single volume of RF, LXX (1958), Wagner turned in exemplary appraisals of such, shall we say, middle-brow books as M. Pittau, Studi sardi di linguistica e storia, Pisa, 1958 (159-172) ; W. Beinhauer, Spanische Umgangssprache, 2d ed., Bonn-Hanover, 1958 (174-179) ; and R. J. Slaby-R. Grossmann, Wörterbuch der spanischen und deutschen Sprache, 5th ed., Wiesbaden, 1955 (174-197). Yet it does not take a jaundiced eye to notice certain long-range flaws in such a vast program of excessive generosity. Take the dual problem of economy of effort and speed of orientation : many workers eager to find out Wagner’s broad thinking on the origin and diversification of Romance speech will wonder why, of all places, the extended review (1948) of a mediocre book by H. Meier should have been chosen as the depository for a seasoned scholar’s ideas on fundamentals. Another vulnerable spot : much as was the case with F. Krüger, the authors of books which Wagner made it a point to review in such touching detail were, with rare exceptions, not his intellectual peers, but amateurs, autodidacts, and assorted ‘ outsiders ‘, also degree candidates of rural or small-town back- ground, with whom the ranks of dialectologists have unavoidably teemed from time immemorial. As a result, the reviews very seldom marked dramatic encounters between equals ; the outcome of each duel was, as it were, predetermined from the start. This odd selection of readings made Wagner’s filing cards and excerpts swell with precious additional data, but in a way blunted his mind and thwarted any desire to explore genuine methodological innovations or alternatives ; basically, his methods in 1962 were the same as in 1904, despite the tremendous increase in his erudition ; his writings show scant awareness of the powerful shifts of emphasis in general linguistics. In the rare instances where Wagner decided to come to grips with a formidable wrestling partner, the results were disappointing for the onlookers, as when he chose one minor, all told, inconsequential detail in Wartburg’s controversial ‘ fragmentation theory ‘, instead of subjecting the whole complex hypothesis to a searching —and, if necessary, devastating—critique. One is almost reminded, as regards the absence of a sense of proportion, of Spitzer’s carping and, after all, petty criticism of A. Castro’s monumental essay España en su historia. But weakness can likewise manifest itself in markedly favorable reviews : those, wholly uncritical where penetrating analysis, balanced judgement, and sweeping perspective were called for, that an ill-advised Wagner wrote, in close succession, of Vidos’ introductory Handbook and of A. Kuhn’s Decennial Report (Die romanischen Sprachen)—two books rich in loose shreds of factual information, but lacking a thoroughly integrated structure and any real message—approach, I regret to state, banality and imply, on the critic’s part, a mind utterly unphilosophical and irretrievably immersed in a closed narrow-meshed world of its own making.

This comment leads us to the innermost chamber of Wagner’s hidden limitation. With the passage of time, the quest for inde- pendence became for him nothing short of a pose, if not an obsession, second in intensity only to the poignant quest for the aberrant and the exotic, though not necessarily the prurient (indicative of this propensity is the title he chose for a note : ‘ Bedeutungsmonstrosi- täten ‘ [1933]). In reality, this search for, and enjoyment of, complete independence was, at least on the intellectual side, Wagner’s deepest and most lasting delusion. Actually, his was, from start to finish, a case of complete dependence—often via complementarity (as where his own expertise in Sardinian and Portuguese squared with his colleagues’ prowess in French and Italian)—on a specific milieu and climate of opinion, on a set of assumptions and preferences (for the most part, tacit, but nonetheless neatly identifiable), and, not least, on a circle of congenial and very helpful friends, or possibly two such circles : one, on the level of like-minded and appreciative academi- cians ; the other, on the level of informants and aficionados, with whom he had an enviable knack for ‘ mixing ‘ exceedingly well. The professorial circle, which highly esteemed Wagner for carrying on serious research in the face of a severe personal setback, was hard hit by that avalanche of disasters which has befallen Germany and its neighbors since 1914 and by the gradual exhaustion of intel- lectual resources among dialect geographers the world over ; it finally disintegrated with the death of Jakob Jud, whose awareness of total and ultimate responsibility (engagement) for an endangered discipline had been singularly acute. No theorist himself, in contrast to the incomparable Schuchardt whom he tried in vain to emulate and even to imitate, Wagner adopted from forerunners and con- temporaries the entire apparatus of early-20th-century scholarship as it flourished in and around German-speaking Europe. His margin of originality consisted in choosing, not unlike G. Weigand and Th. Gartner before him (but on a more spectacular scale), neglected languages and cultures, including some that merely flanked, or lay athwart, the main stream of Latin-Romance tradition, and in relating these excursions into rarely visited territories to the findings catalogued in the headquarters of Romance research—a feat that in his lifetime no native scholar of, say, Greece, Turkey, Morocco, or Mexico could expect to duplicate. For sixty years, Wagner worked hard and stubbornly, immured in his own, inexorably shrinking world ;³ outside research—and such travel as was apt to feed for scholars research—life to him must have been meaningless. Scholars of comparable devotion to a self-imposed duty are becoming scarce in our ranks.

Source : Y[akov] Mfalkiel], ‘ Necrology : Max Leopold Wagner,’ Romance Philology 16.281-289 (1963). By permission of the author.

¹ The list of American scholars circularized on that occasion was prepared for Jaberg by this necrologist, who also personally retyped, polished, and, to increase their accuracy, patiently checked against primary sources two major contributions of Wagner’s to this journal, courteously secured the author’s approval of all editorial improvements, and persuaded the publisher to grant Wagner, who was then sounding out colleagues about vacancies in American universities, an extra- large number of reprints. Just how Wagner recorded his appreciation of these efforts can be seen in ZRPh., LXIX (1953), 348-354, and particularly in RF, LXVHI (1956), 443-450. I recommend warmly the reading of the latter item, as well as of L. Spitzer’s earlier scholium (ibid., LXII [1950], 227-234) on which it was obviously based (see esp. pp. 446, 448).

² On the logicality of Wagner’s arguments, where unsupported by his flair, see Wartburg, Die Ausgliederung der romanischen Sprachräume (Bern, 1950), pp. 24-26.

³ Counter to a widespread myth Wagner’s command of English was severely limited ; his joke in RF, LXVIII, 450 (‘ genial insights ‘, obviously meant to suggest, in a sarcastic vein, ‘ geniale Einsichten ‘), may have amused a few Continental readers, but can only have puzzled speakers of English, who do not use genial in this fashion. Wagner’s mentor Spitzer (see fn. 1, above) similarly equated G. trainieren and E. to train, two verbs of totally different connotations, then drew far-reaching metaphysical consequences from this initial elementary error. In other polemic passages Wagner remained unaware of the Second World War, which, in the early ‘forties, made it difficult stationed here to keep abreast of the latest German output (cf. Wortbildungslehre, p. 116, fn. 1). It is refreshing that after 1956 he reverted to constructive work and put an end to a most infelicitous flow of unmotivated polemic outbursts.