VILÉM MATHESIUS (1882-1946)

Vilém Mathesius

Bohumil Trnka

When the Prague Linguistic Circle honored the sixtieth birthday of Professor Vilém Mathesius with a lecture and the publication of some articles four years ago, we did not suspect that Czech Anglistics and Czech science in general would so soon deplore his death. That was because the scientist, though in ill health, continued to surprise everyone through the brilliance of his publication activity (which would have done credit to even a researcher enjoying complete health) and continued to prepare new scientific plans for the future. He viewed his surroundings with such a firm will and with such equanimity that all who visited him in his retreat at Kolin (where he was confined to bed) came away with renewed strength and confidence in their own work, lives, and futures. It seemed as if he, by the strength of his will power, were repulsing Death, who only furtively, in sleep, was able to steal in to him and put an end to a life dedicated to scientific work and thought.

Here are some brief data from that brilliant life. His native region was the banks of the Labe River. He was born on August 3, 1882, in Pardubice, but spent his youth in Kolin, to which he was tied by his earliest and most joyful memories in life. In this adoptive home town, between the years 1893 and 1901, he completed his studies at the gymnasium [classical eight-year secondary school], where he associated with his contemporary Otokar Fischer and where he was especially influenced, as he himself relates in his reminiscences printed in Naše doba [Our Time], by the Evangelical pastor Čeněk Dušek. It was to Dušek, who gave him private English lessons in the higher grades, that he was probably indebted for the fortunate selection of his future profession, a profession greatly attuned to his character and also enticing him at that time by its pioneering novelty. Already his goal in life was to bring Czech culture nearer to the English and toward this goal he progressed deliberately and directly. After his graduation from the Kolin Gymnasium there followed four years of Germanic and Romance studies at Charles University and then only four years of assistantship at the reálka [nonclassical seven-year secondary school] in Plzeñ and in Prague’s Old Town quarter. His subsequent career (from 1909) was entirely dedicated to scientific and teaching activities at Charles University, where in 1912 he became its first professor of Anglistics after three years as docent. Prepared by his indefatigable private studies carried by the energy of youth, he built Czech Anglistics almost from its foundations during his 30 years of activity in the Faculty of Philosophy and trained entire generations of able researchers and secondary-school teachers. In literary history and especially in linguistic science he pioneered, through his works, new trends and methods which received international recognition.

His fruitful scientific activity may be divided into approximately three periods, of which the first extends to about 1926, the second includes the decade of 1926-1936, and the third occupies the last portion of his life. The main distinction between these three periods is that in each of them a different kind of subject prevails and interest in the problems of general linguistics gradually becomes more and more pronounced. There is no noticeable difference as regards scientific maturity. His first work, a review of Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the English Language, written for the Vëstnik Ceské akademie [Bulletin of the Czech Academy] in 1906, shows the same maturity of thought as do publications from his last years. In the time of his enforced seclusion in Kolin perhaps only his style became more perfect, his sentences more lucid and pliant, the unity even more compact.

Mathesius is the prototype of a rare kind of scholar whose thought right from the beginning relies on simple lines of evident general principles, exactly and broadly conceived, which have only to be developed and organized into a more and more complex structure without having to change their basic traits, which remain forever constant. He is the opposite of the scholar-romanticist who constructs his world view by observing individual phenomena and who keeps changing this view because it is not based on the totality and because he, from a personal or other predilection, is always shifting to observe different phenomena. Those changes that occurred in the course of time in Mathesius’ hierarchy of values were caused by the change of objective reality itself, which he was able to observe in all its unity as well as in its ramifications into individual concrete phenomena. Using this sense of logic he was therefore well able to trace the core of the complexes he investigated and he could identify the results of his observation with the objective phenomenon itself.

In the first period of his scientific activity interest in general linguistics and literary history are combined in equal proportion. Impulses for his first grammatical studies came from the pioneering ideas of Sweet and Jespersen, of Wegener and Gabelentz; in his studies of literary history he appears as the disciple of Scherer, Heinzel, Fischer, and Liddel. The combination of the interest in language and the interest in literature, which was rare at that time, resulted from his placing in the foreground of his scientific analysis the continuous text of literary works: this he could then analyze either from the point of view of language function or of esthetic structure. In either direction Mathesius is a pioneer of structuralism. Already in his first contribution to literary history, ‘ Tainova kritika Shakespeara’ [Taine’s Criticism of Shakespeare], that appeared in those volumes of the Věstník České akademie [Bulletin of the Czech Academy] in which also were printed the first chapters of his inaugural dissertation on word order, he set himself the question of ‘ integral ‘ elements of the literary work and of the possibility of analyzing them. To Mathesius, a literary text was always something primary, and theories, with which he liked to acquaint himself, he valued only insofar as they could seize reality, dissect and penetrate it without distortion or simplification. He rightly blamed Taine’s theory of literary history and his analysis of Shakespeare’s work especially for the a priori approach which Taine used to force facts into the formula of race-environment-time, and he saw Taine’s mistake in logic in that he passed off his theory, at which he arrived through one-sided speculation, as a result obtained through induetion.

Mathesius was attached to facts, which he gathered constantly and which he tried to understand in all their broad connections. He did not believe in the unity of events nor in general laws and for that reason he rejected the explanation of literary development through psychology, either individual or collective. His own theories were always in direct contact with the observation of reality and of its immediate relation to life and if they do not have the bold one-sidedness of the conceptions of other investigators, they are characterized by persistent solidity and sound judgment, which he esteemed so much in the nation whose culture he represented in the Faculty of Philosophy. Besides, even he, with his respect for multiform reality, emphasized the necessity of simplifying it through theory but saw the correctness of a theory in that it could be verified in individual cases and not because it would comprise all facts without remainder into a hierarchically ordered system determined by laws. Constructing such theories was outside his scientific interest. His position was that of common sense, not removed from the ‘ facts ‘ and at the same time flexibly taking over from theories everything that contributes to understanding the reality under observation. Respect for facts, hard and unyielding facts with which one has to struggle, was a requirement that he demanded as a necessary condition for making Czech research work more profound.

His other contribution to Czech scholarly tradition was his endeavor to reveal problems. Both of these common traits are already clearly announced in his ‘ Studie к dejinám anglického slovosledu ‘ [Studies in the History of English Word Order] (Věsinik České akademie [Bulletin of the Czech Academy] 16-19), in which he presents an extensive survey of works beginning with WeiPs inspiring book De l’ordre des mots dans les langues anciennes comparées aux langues modernes (1855) and in which he tries to capture, using a statistical method, relationships between word order and sentence rhythm in the actual speech of the educated social strata of London, with which he became acquainted during his stay in England. His foremost interest—if we pass over his shorter articles on nominal compounds and constructions in contemporary English and on English generation dialects in the first volume of the Sbornik filologický [Philological Studies]—is always the sentence, and especially the relationship between subject and predicate. He dealt with these problems in his contributions on ellipsis and English nonverbal sentences ; on apposition, which he conceived as a nonverbal sentence ; on nominal tendencies of Modern English predication ; on the passive ; and finally on Modern English qualifying sentences.

In all these sketches of syntax which appeared in volumes 2-6 of the Sbornikfilologický [Philological Studies], he proceeded from function to form, as did Georg von der Gabelentz (e.g. in the work Über das Passivum, published in 1861), i.e. from the communication and expression necessities of speech to the forms that they actually use. As opposed to Brunot, who in his noted work La langue et la pensée groups sentence forms from the viewpoint of various categories not justified linguistically, Mathesius relies on exact definitions of the grammatical categories with which he deals. Thus in his treatise on the passive he considers as a passive construction every predication which expresses that its subject is affected or concerned in some way by an action which it either does not perform at all or does not perform intentionally ; that is, every predication whose action does not originate purposely from the subject but comes from some other source. According to this definition English constructions such as this book reads well would be passive in spite of their active form, as contrasted with the sentence my brother reads an English book. In Mathesius’ progression from the meaning to the form perhaps there was missing the regard to the marked and unmarked character of the members of morphological categories, but one has to point out that it was precisely this method that showed the richness and the niceties of speech in their full extent and revealed also the structural differences through which languages are diversified and which he called tenden- cies. In the abundance of English forms of indirect passive (/ was told) he saw an extreme consequence of a tendency which was manifested already in the formation of the Indo-European passive, the tendency to change the conception of the subjective verbal sentence which, from the narrower meaning of actor plus act, passes to the broader meaning of subject plus occurrence.

Mathesius did not believe in laws without exceptions ; he arrived at statements of tendencies rather than laws in his analysis of actual individual speech (not simplified artificially) and he considered such an analysis as the foremost task of linguistic science. He was not concerned, as a historical linguist would be, with the meaning-based identification of forms changed by a dynamic factor, time ; on the contrary, he was concerned with the fine differentiation of the forms within language by their function and meaning and for that purpose he needed statics, a stationary position of the system. He did not approach dynamic structural linguistics, since he would have evidently had to rely on the sphere of abstract historical laws, which lay outside his scientific interest.

Scientific justification of static analysis and static comparison of languages, an approach wholly unusual in the linguistics of that time in our country, was defended in his lecture ‘O potenciálnosti jevů jazykových’ [On the Potentiality of Language Phenomena], This study, delivered in February, 1911, at the meeting of the Královská učena společnost [Royal Learned Society], has fundamental significance in the history of our linguistic science. Mathesius points out that many important problems emerge only in a static investigation of language or dialect, no matter if we conceive it as a homogeneous whole or as the sum total of concrete speeches, and the progression from statics to dynamics is therefore a condition of further development of linguistic science. It manifested its fruitfulness in the influence of phonetics on increasing the profundity of historical phonology. Even for the question of static mutability, which is the subject proper of this study, statics brings valuable advice because it demonstrates that the historical development of a language is to be conceived as a constant fluctuation and selection among forms which in the language existed side by side. In this essay Mathesius anticipates the Saussurean dichotomy of speech and language, but at the same time arrives at still another differentiation, which proved fruitful in later linguistic studies : from stylistics, which in his conception of that time is the same as ‘ parole,’ he distinguishes ‘ styles ‘ of speech, i.e., speeches of individual social groups or of individual functions of language, therefore in reality those formations of speech that Bohuslav Havránek called functional languages.

As docent and later professor of English language and literature at Charles University, Mathesius was confronted with a responsible task : to give firm foundations to Czech Anglistics, which until then was cultivated outside the university without much profound knowledge. He laid these foundations with the publication of his Dějiny anglické literatury [History of English Literature], whose first volume, dedicated to the Old English period, was published in 1910, and whose second, which covered the period up to the Renaissance, was published five years later. In both volumes a synthetic picture of English medieval literature is presented on the basis of extensive reading and supported by a solid knowledge of all specialized writings, with which he acquaints his readers in numerous notes. He set the individual literary periods into the framework of cultural and political circumstances and the pioneering significance of Mathesius’ synthesis, so highly praised by Václav Tille, lies in his shifting literary types into the foreground and in his effort to penetrate into the composition of literary works as a departure from the psychologizing or purely topic-oriented concerns of contemporary scholars. His aptitude for sharp and illuminating characterization of literary monuments little known in our country at that time is especially apparent in the chapters on Old English poetry and Middle English novels in verse ; his sober judgment, which does not seek popularity, appears especially in the commentary on Wycliffe. One who is not an Anglicist, upon perusing the 470 pages of both volumes, does not even suspect how much energy and scientific preparation was necessary to write them. Carefully polished style and form do not, however, as Tille pointed out in his review, allow one to realize the hard work that gave the book an immediately scientific basis.

After the publication of the second volume of the Dějiny angìické literatury [History of English Literature] Mathesius was entirely absorbed in the preparations for the year of Shakespeare’s Jubilee (1916). To its harvest he himself contributed seven studies, a survey of Czech Shakespeareana, and a comprehensive, still very valuable report on recent Shakespearean literature (in the following volumes of the Casopis pro moderni filologi¿ [Journal for Modern Philology]). Among these seven contributions, particularly welcome was a treatise on the Elizabethan theater (Věsinik České akademie [Bulletin of the Czech Academy] 25) which received Chudoba’s praise and acknowledgment, and an essay on Shakespeare of which the only predecessor was a monograph by Jakub Malý Shakespeare a jeho dila [Shakespeare and His Works] published in 1873. Jn the 47 pages of this small but solid book Mathesius tells about the life of the English dramatist, describes the situation of the English theater of his time, and concludes by giving a summary characteristic of his work. Mathesius’ selection of subjects for his other two contributions to the Shakespearean Jubilee typifies his relationship to literary history.

In the first, ‘ Shakespearovy hry v poměru к Plutarchovi י [Shakespeare’s Plays in Relation to Plutarch] (Osvěta [Enlightenment] 46), he deals with the technique of Shakespeare’s production. He shows that the greatness of the English dramatist does not consist in the invention of subjects but in his transforming the subject matter, taken over from other sources, for his dramatic aims ; in his simplifying or expanding it after a longer stretch of action ; or finally changing it so that it throws reflections of important events upon various groups of participants, as opposed to Corneille’s method of concentration by focusing. In the second essay, in which he discusses Shakespeare the philosopher (Naše doba [Our Time] 23), he solves the problem of Shakespeare’s philosophy by observing the way the poet transformed the story which he took as the basis of his dramatic work. Mathesius emphasized that the transformation of the story depends in the first place on the need for artistic structure of the work itself, but on the other hand he sees in it the only means leading to the solution of the problem. On Hamlet, to which he later returned in his treatise ‘ Shakespearův Hamlet ‘ [Shakespeare’s Hamlet] (Věda a život [Science and Life] 8) in order to analyze it from the point of view of the author’s artistic intention, he then showed that Shakespeare does not regard the world from the narrow angle of a definite philosophical doctrine of his time and that he does not solve his time’s concrete problems. What could be called Shakespeare’s philosophy is merely a broad tolerance and an affirmative attitude toward human nature and social order.

The Shakespearean Jubilee, which found the world in the midst of a world war, deferred Mathesius’ plan to continue the history of English literature on the scale of the first two volumes, and the eye ailment which afflicted him in 1922 pushed it even farther into the background. So it happened that, except for a condensed outline of English literary history from the 15th to the second half of the 18th century which was mimeographed (in 1933), we have from him only a series of contributions to individual literary personalities such as Defoe, Wells, Shaw, and Galsworthy, reflections on English renaissance and on the development of English cultural tradition. But the fact that he did not neglect literary history even in the last period of his publishing activities is attested not only by his treatise on Hamlet and a large number of reviews and notes in various volumes of the Casopis pro moderni filologii [Journal for Modern Philology], whose Anglistic division he directed since 1922-23, but also by his concise history of English literature, in which he reached the period of romanticism and which will be published as soon as possible.

In the second period, Mathesius became more and more interested in the new linguistic trends, whose rate of development was speeded up by the First World War and which were moving in the same direction as Mathesius’ own scientific work. He states this changed situation in his second lecture delivered in the Královská učená společnost [Royal Learned Society] and printed in the miscellany of Professor Josef Zubatý in 1927. As opposed to historical comparativistics of the 19th century, which, to be sure, laid solid foundations for linguistics but which, at the same time, confined its outlook almost entirely to phonology and comparison of genetically related languages, the new linguistic science discusses the laws of language phenomena and emphasizes syntax and semasiology, while extending the comparison also to languages genetically unrelated. It uses the static method and tends toward comparative characterization of languages. In this paper static linguistics becomes, to Mathesius, structural linguistics ; he conceives language as a fixed system and structure of opposing values whose historical movement is to be followed from the viewpoint of system and structure. He conceives this movement essentially as an incessant fluctuation between the individual and the collective, since an individual must express his experiences, which are always unique, through conventional means so as to be understood. That is the reason for an incessant adaptation and creation of new forms which, when generalized, become permanent changes. Also in this paper he reproaches nonstructural historical linguistics with artificial simplification of complex reality. For his opinion on the development of sounds he finds support in the theory of the English linguist H. C. Wyld, according to which historical changes do not occur in a rectilinear fashion but rather so that one of the parallel class pronunciations expels another class pronunciation in colloquial speech. One more important trait of the new linguistic science was pointed out by Mathesius in this paper : whereas traditional linguistics was formal and interpretative and started from the point of view of the hearer or the reader, the new linguistics observes language also from the point of view of the speaker and investigates different forms in relation to the idea expressed through them.

The Pražský linguistický kroužek [Prague Linguistic Circle], which in 1926 grouped around Mathesius and in which were established firm foundations of structural linguistics equally valid for the historical development of language, also gave him valuable incentive and turned his attention for a whole decade toward problems of functional phonetics, i.e., phonology, which he incorporated into linguistic characterology (cf. his treatise Ό funkční linguistice ‘ [On Functional Linguistics] in the Sborník pŕednášek pronesených na sjezdu československých profesorů filosofie, filologie a historie o velkonocích r. 1929 [Papers Delivered at the Congress of Czechoslovak Professors of Philosophy, Philology, and History at Easter, 1929] and a treatise ‘ Linguistická characteristika a její místo v moderním jazykozpytu ’ in the Časopis pro moderní filologii [Journal for Modern Philology] 13. of which a version in the English language, ‘ On Linguistic Characterology,’ appeared in the same year in the Actes du Premier congrès international de linguistes held at The Hague). He explained the goals and the tasks of phonology on typical examples in the studies in honor of Professor Kraus and Professor Janko (Xenia Pragensia, 1929), but his own contribution to phonology was his observation of functional load and combination capability of phonemes. In this respect he compares Czech with other European languages (‘ La structure phonologique du lexique du tchèque moderne,’ Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague 1), then in an article in the 4th volume of the Travaux he calls attention to the frequency of phonemes and groups of phonemes in actualized speech, and in others he examines foreign elements in the phonology of Czech and other linguistic systems or occupies himself with the expressiveness of sounds (Casopis pro modernifilologii [Journal for Modern Philology] 15, 18 ; Englische Studien 70 ; Slovo a slovesnost [Word and Literature] 1 ; Naše ŕeć [Our Language] 15). In these writings on the load and combination capacity of phonemes, which subject formerly was treated solely without scientific refinement for the special purposes of the theory of stenography, he preceded Trubetzkoy, who did not deliver his lecture on these questions until the Amsterdam International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in 1932—three years after the first contributions of Mathesius.

Of course, each of the two scholars came to this research through an independent way. Whereas Trubetzkoy arrived at it in an effort to build systematically a new branch of linguistics starting from the explanation of the Polish linguist Baudouin de Courtenay and his school and placing them in the contemporary trends of phenome- nology and Vienna logistics, Mathesius reached it simply by expanding the characterology of the content side of language to include the sphere of sounds. It was not so much his purpose to build phonology for phonology’s sake, but rather to enrich, through observation of phonological diversities in the construction of the word and the text, the characterology of languages, which he now understood as an attempt at a hierarchy of inventoried linguistic phenomena according to their importance (‘ O funkční linguistice ‘ [On Functional Linguistics], Sborník prednášek . . . [Papers . . .], p. 126). Like Hjelmslev, he did not analyze phonemes into combinations of relevant properties but rather traced their functions in the word that they compose.

In the third period of his scientific activity, beginning approximately in the year 1936, Mathesius returned to his former studies of functional grammar, which he made more profound and unified. In his treatise written in English ‘ On Some Problems of the Systematic Analysis of Grammar ‘ (Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague 6, 95-107) which was published in Czech form (‘ O nčkterých problémech soustavného rozboru mluvnického ‘) in the 8th volume of Slovo a slovesnost [Word and Literature] he revived his earlier linguistic theory according to which, in every act of linguistic communication, two separate processes, naming and correlating, operate simultaneously. By naming, lexical elements of language are consti- tuted ; by correlating, the results of the first process are organized into relations within a sentence. Onomatology, the science of names, is the counterpart of functional syntax, the science of correlations. Morphology, which deals with groupings of the means of expression on the basis of formal rather than semantic affinities, has no place in this dichotomy ; it cuts across the field of onomatology and the field of syntax so that its parts may have onomatological as well as syntactic functions. On the one hand, naming concerns objects (category of substantives) ; on the other, it concerns qualities which may be permanent (category of adjectives) or temporary (category of verbs), and these categories are also carriers of the main syntactic relationships. They are modified in two basic ways : so that the modification affects radically the whole meaning of the word (modification of category) or only partially (modification of aspect, e.g., a difference in number).

Functional syntax must start, as was rightly emphasized, from the sentence, whose definition he had already advanced in his article ‘ Několik slov o podstatě věty’ [Some Words on the Substance of the Sentence] (Ćasopis pro moderní filologit [Journal for Modern Philology] 10). According to him the sentence is a speech utterance, through which the speaker, actively and in a way that from the formal point of view looks habitual and subjectively complete, reacts to some fact or group of facts. The moment of active interest, from which Mathesius starts in an accidental agreement with Stern’s definition (cf. his book on child language), is certainly an important feature by which the sentence differs from the word, which in itself completely lacks this moment, and Mathesius has the distinction of having called attention to it. Like the word, he rightly considers the sentence also as a component of the linguistic system and not as an element of speech, i.e., of the Saussurean ‘ parole,’ where it was included by Brøndal and Gardiner, for example. Mathesius devoted a special treatise to outstanding syntactic relationships, such as the subject, the agreement and the negation, the actual segmentation of the sentence and the word order. Other contributions of his, such as the treatise on the distribution of the rhythm and emphasis in the Czech and the English sentence, on the emphasis as a phenomenon of language system, and on the structure of the English vocabulary, may be included in the field of onomatology, eventually morphology. Altogether and in a different connection, he explained his views on common problems of grammatical analysis in a longer paper, ‘ Ŕeć a sloh ‘ [Language and Style], published in the first volume of the Ćtení 0 jazyce a poesii [Reading on Language and Poetry], The core of this essay, which certainly belongs to our best writings on style, consists of advice on achieving clear, appropriate, and fluent narrative style by observing the most important functional constituents of language and speech. In a departure from the earlier, purely individualistic, conception, he defines style as a significant manner in which expressive linguistic means are used or are customarily used for a concrete purpose. His concern for style came from the knowledge, expressed in the article on functional linguistics, that good style in the last analysis merges with good language and there, where it becomes individual instinct, it is the supreme guardian of the correctness of language. He never made any direct pronouncement, so far as I know, on the exact relationship of style to speech (as defined by Saussure).

These essays also illustrate another important section of Mathesius’ scientific interest, in his interest in Czech. Mathesius constantly dealt with Czech. In his early contributions in the Věstník českých profesorů [Bulletin of Czech Professors] (1908-1910) concerning modern languages in the secondary school, he demanded that the teaching of foreign languages should be based on the native language and that also, at the same time, the functioning of the native language should be more thoroughly understood and its style mastered. Some of his studies already mentioned were based on the comparison with Czech, but a direct contribution to Bohemistics is represented only by his articles on characteristic phenomena of contemporary colloquial Czech, such as on the nominative case functioning as the vocative (Naše ree [Our Language] 7), on the pronominal subject (in the Pastrnek miscellany, 1923), on verbal tenses of the perfect type (Naše ŕeć [Our Language] 9), on the attributive pronoun ten, ta, to (Naše ŕeć [Our Language] 10), on word order (Naše ŕeć [Our Language] 14 and Slovo a slovesnost [Word and Literature] 7), on the dynamic contour of the Czech sentence (Ćasopis pro moderní filologii [Journal for Modern Philology] 18 ; the Chlumský miscellany), on time measure in speech (Slovo a slovesnost [Word and Literature] 3), on aspects (Slovo a slovesnost [Word and Literature] 4), on emphasis (ibid.), and on the passive (Listy filologické [Philological Papers] 67 ; the Hujer miscellany). These are smaller analyses of language but every one of them is firmly embedded in a broader context of ideas from which they cannot be separated. I see their main importance in that they liberated the colloquial Czech language from the stigma of corruption and inferiority attributed to it by older Bohemistics because they removed the question of the origin of its elements and demonstrated how these elements are used for expressing fine shades of thought and feeling. Written language was for Mathesius something secondary, which must always be distinguished from the living stream of the colloquial language, and which may be evaluated only on the basis of the latter. Mathesius’ viewpoint, which reverses older opinions on the relationship of the two functional languages, makes possible the development of a true language culture. The literary language, which is artificial and linguistically secondary, is placed by him in the appropriate light.

Another merit of his Bohemistic articles lies in his putting on a completely new track the question of correctness of language. Whereas earlier the care of correct language was limited almost entirely to preaching against Germanisms, he emphasized in his article ‘ O jazykové správnosti י [On Correctness in Language] (Pŕehled [Survey] 1912) that poets and writers are the real creators of the literary language and the grammarians’ task is to codify the usage after it is created. Disapproving of the one-sidedness of Noreen’s criterion, according to which only that form of communication is correct which the hearer can comprehend as precisely as possible and which the speaker can express as easily as possible, he stresses the requirement of expressive effectiveness achieved through its own means by every language as an individual and collective instrument of thinking (assuming it is stabilized and refined). After the First World War, when this problem became timely as a result of Zubaty’s rectorial speech and ErtFs articles, he discussed it again in his lecture on functional linguistics (1929) and formulated it in more detail with classical clarity in the miscellany Spisovná ćeština a jazyková kultura [Literary Czech and Language Culture] published in 1932 by the Prague Linguistic Circle. Also in this paper (‘ O požadavku jazykové stability י [On the Requirement of Language Stability]) he rejects the criterion of historical purity and poses against it the principle of language refinement, in which is included also the moment of stability and expressive effectiveness. Linguistic usage must not be under- mined, either in the name of a better knowledge of language or in the name of an artificial systematization of linguistic elements, and trespasses against it are to be stigmatized not as ignorance of grammar but as negligence of style. He recommends its codification, which is the task of the linguist, in a handbook dictionary where one would consider synonymy and antonymy ; in a synchronic grammar based on principles of linguistic oppositions ; and lastly in a Czech stylistics, in which would be demonstrated how Czech satisfies the requirements of the main functional styles.

Mathesius was essentially a structuralist long before the formation of the Prague Linguistic Circle ; he contributed to the evolution of thought on the sentence in which elements of a logistic, nonpsychological character won a decisive position. While some reproached him of a lack of historical orientation in his early contributions on syntax, one has to say that the static conception, which was able to see language as it really is, was a necessary step in the development of linguistics—now concerned with an explanation of how a given total linguistic situation, squeezed between the past and the future, is solved or was solved. This solving of a linguistic situation—perhaps there are general laws for the possibilities of these solutions, at least for certain segments of linguistic reality admissible to our investigation—can never be predicted or predestined in its full and true realization for the advancing future. In this sense and with this limitation, one can also agree fully with Mathesius' ideas of linguistic tendencies.

Mathesius was a cultural activist with every nerve of his dynamic personality. In the field of science his great objectives were described approximately in the introduction to the third volume of Atheneum, which he, with a circle of co-editors, resuscitated, at least for a time, to new life after the First World War : to raise the level of spiritual life ; to further critical thinking, the sense of justifying one’s ideas ; and to cause science to govern public as well as private life. In all respects and with a spontaneous matter-of-course attitude, Mathesius fulfilled the tasks with which he was faced. Although he knew well the significance of theory and abstraction as indispensable conditions of the dynamic progress of science, he was not the type of scientist who would limit himself ascetically to special problems in his field and let life pass by. He always had a direct relationship to concrete things of his time and environment, to which he was attached with affable equanimity and on which he always had something to say without bitterness or sentimentality. In his reflections on our cultural situation, some of which he incorporated in the two volumes Kulturni aktivismus [Cultural Activism] (1925) and Možnosti, které čekají [Possibilities That Await] (1944), he touched some sore spots, but always conducted himself like a doctor who touches a patient’s wound only with the aim of bringing him recovery. Against an unfounded belief in the force of external conditions and against racial explanations and skepticism, he emphasized the influence of national cultural atmosphere which evolves through the will of individuals and which must rely on the hard ground of living conditions, must be strengthened by a positive relationship to reality, and must draw, if possible, upon a healthy national tradition, i.e., from accumulated spiritual values of generations of builders from time past.

Although he was active in a relatively narrow circle—or just because of that—his influence was very intensive. Because of his broad outlook, his sense of problems, and his need of communicating to others the results of his thinking and studies, Mathesius was one of our best scientific educators. He always devotedly took care of his seminar and conducted it with a firm, reliable hand on the way to scientific ascent, seeking neither gain nor honors. But this is outside the scope of this posthumous remembrance. Mathesius, belonging equally to Bohemistics and to Anglistics, was not a systematizer of Gebauer’s kind who would work with an adopted method on one work, but rather a pioneer of new directions, new also for other countries, and he developed these directions through independent work in contact with world trends in linguistics and in contact with multiform reality. He brought back to Czech linguistics a sense of dealing with problems and placed it in the foreground of international interest. In this respect, Mathesius represents an ideological corrective and a culmination of Gebauer’s work.

Source : Bohumil Trnka, ‘ Vilém Mathesius,’ Časopis pro moderni filologi¡ 29.3-13 (1946). Translated by Vladimir Honsa. By permission of the author.