LEO SPITZER (1887-1960)

Leo Spitzer

Y[akov] MĮalkiel]

Spitzer may not have been the greatest Romance philologist of all times, though he himself not infrequently gave the impression of believing he was. But even his staunchest opponents and bitterest personal enemies—who were legion—would have hesitated to deny that he had few rivals in the academic world as regards, first, irrepressible vitality ; second, range—if not necessarily intenseness— of intellectual and artistic curiosity ; third, sheer versatility, in the not unequivocal sense of Virtuosentum ; and, fourth, an inexhaustible supply of colorfulness, in part spontaneous, in part, one suspects, cultivated. Dreaded, despised, lionized, and revered in turn by different groups and sometimes, at intervals, by the same acquaintanees with whom he contrived to maintain contacts from his headquarters in three continents (including his three-year stay in Turkey, but not his short trip to Buenos Aires), over a singularly stormy period of half a century, he gained a modicum of perspective, serenity, and resignation only in the concluding years of a life rich in vicissitudes, reverses, and disappointments, as a reluctant witness to the decline of humanistic learning in general—as he himself had experienced it and as he passionately wished others to experience it—and of a cherished scholarly discipline in particular.

The question has sometimes been raised as to why a person of Spitzer’s sustained brilliancy, rebelliousness to any manner of constraint and restraint, and—let us candidly admit—insatiable ambition should, in the first place, have elected teaching, even on Central Europe’s once exalted university level, as a lifelong career, then chosen, within its rich chromatic spectrum, a speciality seemingly so inconspicuous and, by present-day standards, materially and morally so unrewarding as Romance philology. A partial answer to this two-pronged query lies in the fact that in the climate of opinion surrounding Spitzer’s adolescence there prevailed a totally different scale of values. For a few fleeting decades, in some favored centers of learning—notably Vienna (Spitzer’s alma mater) and Paris (where he engaged in postdoctoral work)—Romance philology not only flourished in terms of steady intrinsic refinement, but enjoyed sufficient recognition to pass as a very glamorous pursuit of academic knowledge. Such indeed were its inner magnetism and its outer glitter that a ‘ darling of the gods ‘ and spoiled idol of discriminating theater audiences of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s stature for a while seriously pondered the wisdom of professing ‘ Romanistik ‘ ex cathedra. If, then, Spitzer’s fiery temperament and sweeping diversity of interests, in retrospect, seem to have favored the choice of some such hectic, flamboyant activity as that of an art or drama critic in a tone-setting metropolitan daily, an activity affording unlimited possibilities for outbursts of enthusiasm and indignation, for incisive admonitions, sparkling side-remarks, stunning retractions, and witty repartees, it must be remembered that the philological and linguistic events of those years (etymological duels between master fencers like Schuchardt and Thomas, also the chivalrous emulation between the former and Meyer-Liibke and the wrestling bouts between the latter and a tempestuous Gilliéron ; finally, the guerrilla—rich in dramatic skirmishes—between ‘ positivists ‘ and ‘ idealists ‘ in the first period of an inter belta Germany) offered boundless possibilities of excitement for venturesome participants and of amusement for the lucky holders of choice ringside seats.

Ironically, Spitzer was never in full command of an influential philological journal (late in life, as a consultant or associate editor of two New World periodicals he played a fairly subordinate rôle). Otherwise his vast scope of sensitivity and his feverish imagination might have enabled him to crowd into the Review Section of a single issue countless sharply pointed comments on the length and breadth of his readings and musings, which ranged, topically, from historical grammar via stylistics to literary history and criticism ; chronologically, from dying Antiquity to bustling modernity ; territorially, from Greece and Rome to America’s Western frontier and to distant Russia. Such laconic bits of editorial criticism, even if occasionally spiced or caustic or pungent, would quite possibly have been keenly appreciated and might have acted as powerful stimulants. What actually happened was that Spitzer, deprived of such a legitimate outlet for his overflowing energy, availed himself of every accessible channel of philological dissemination to spread a veritable barrage of corrections, elaborations, complaints, reprimands, refutations, and rebuttals—in short, obtrusive footnotes by an uninvited commentator to other scholars’ patient researches ; to make things worse, footnotes often colored by a peevish or sarcastic tone. As might have been foreseen, such an indefensible course of action produced a good deal of friction and irritation on both sides of the Atlantic. This polemics which, to Spitzer’s lasting detriment, made him far more famous or, at least, newsworthy than any positive contributions from his pen, had a number of unfortunate consequences : It added to the general deterioration of standards and mores in the shrinking household of Romance scholarship ; seduced some younger scholars, less talented than Spitzer but not one whit less splenetic, into lamely imitating his mannerisms ; tended to discredit—as unoriginal, pedestrian travail de patience—the less feuilletonesque achievements of reserved, scrupulous workers ; created the damaging impression that a scholar so recklessly splitting (not to say squandering) his time and energy clearly lacked any well-defined, independent, slowly maturing projects of his own. While some readers continued to admire Spitzer—and to egg him on—for his journalistic verve and prowess, it became, after the early ‘forties, downright hazardous to pronounce his name—except deprecatingly—in several respectable American quarters.

In this public image, there was a good deal of exaggeration and injurious distortion. Spitzer was indisputably the author of several book-length monographs, not only of ‘ a thousand and one articles ‘ (S. Gilman, HR, XXV, 120). As the well-informed editor of the masterly Hugo Schuchardt Brevier, he can hardly have gleefully contended that the venerable writer of the three volumes of Vokalismus des Vulgärlateins had never bothered to produce a major book, an opinion which a hasty necrologist attributed to Spitzer only a few months ago. Nor was Spitzer’s critical work consistently negative ; aside from several doctoral dissertations which he successfully piloted at Cologne (whose university he joined after leaving Vienna’s, Bonn’s, and Marburg’s) and, starting with the year 1936, at Johns Hopkins (which was to remain his operational base in this country), one may turn, for a fine example of tolerance and fair play toward a wide circle of fellow-scholars of varying persuasions, to the two-volume set of the deceased’s boldest editorial experiment, his annotated collection of Meisterwerke der romanischen Sprachwissenschaft (1930)—truly a gem of its kind. But in the following quarter century the proportion of violently partisan tracts and articles and vitriolic book reviews became alarmingly great and began to cast a deep shadow on the entire American phase of Spitzer’s activities.

Only after the fires have been extinguished and the smoke has scattered will it be possible to arrive at a detached appraisal of Spitzer’s performance and legacy. Some of the successes that he has scored and many of the difficulties that he has encountered will then probably be analyzed as stemming from his personality : his undaunted cosmopolitanism in an age of national prejudice, his incessant quest for new frontiers, mainly in stylistics, the intemperateness and personal flavor of his criticism, an almost morbid flair for picturesque details assembled, at best, in mosaic-like fashion (hence his addiction to ‘ atomistic ‘ etymology, his aversion to abstract structuralism), a quixotically hostile or cavalier attitude toward established customs and canons, the ever-present willingness to reexamine and, if necessary, to modify his own position (note his abandonment of psychoanalytic arguments in literary analysis) clashing with a deplorable reluctance to grant younger men the same privileges of independence which he himself had unhesitatingly enjoyed to the hilt. Though he frequently spoke and wrote of himself, he never quite succeeded in seeing his own œuvre in a meaningful perspective : Witness the belated recognition of the magnitude of his own debt to those hard, unpretentious toilers previously decried as ‘ positivists ‘ or the a posteriori establishment of a method in stylish analysis (‘ philological circle ‘), where obviously no rigid, transmissible method was either possible or even desirable. Other apparent idiosyncrasies turn out, upon closer inspection, to have been inherent in the peculiar situation in which many intellectuals have been placed. The painfully difficult adjustment to new environments, the exposure to a frequently brutal disavowal of philology by numerous avantgarde linguists and critics alike, the mounting difficulty of dividing one’s time between grammatical, lexical, and esthetic studies (which not so long ago formed a perfectly harmonious blend), the nefarious effects of progressive compartmentalization of capsulated knowledge—these are some of the constants operative in every Romance scholar’s life at this mid-century point, constants which Spitzer’s hypersensitivity and verbal pyrotechnics may have exaggerated, but neither created nor abolished.

Against this background, future generations may yet judge Spitzer’s performance, with its soaring flights and embarrassing falls, the way a mature Goethe judged that brilliant Silesian writer, Christian Günther (1723) : ‘ Ein entschiedenes Talent, begabt mit Sinnlichkeit, Einbildungskraft, Gedächtnis, Gabe des Fassens und Vergegenwärtigens, fruchtbar im höchsten Grade, rhythmisch bequem, geistreich, witzig und dabei vielfach unterrichtet.. .. Das Rohe und Wilde gehört seiner Zeit, seiner Lebensweise und seinem Charakter. Er wußte sich nicht zu zähmen, und so zerrann sein Leben wie sein Dichten.’

Source : Y[akov] M[alkiel], ‘ Necrology : Leo Spitzer,’ Romance Philology 41.362- 364 (1960-1961). By permission of the author.