Editorial Comment: Which Scholars Have Received no Festschrift?

Author(s): Y.M.
Source: Romance Philology, Vol. 27, No. 2 (November 1973), pp. 211-213
Published by: Brepols; University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44943631
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 Notes 211

Editorial Comment: Which Scholars Have Received no Festschrift?

The idea of a testimonial or memorial volume in honor of a distinguished scholar seem

have crystallized in mid- 19th-century Central Europe, among historians, classi
Orientalists, Indo-Europeanists, or Germanists. The first Romance venture of note that
be so described is the Florentine miscellany (1886) honoring posthumously two inordinat
promising Italian scholars who died young in quick succession: Napoleone Caix and U
Canello. The organizers of that commemorative volume cast their nets so deftly and
boldly that they brought together, for the first time, the finest experts from a variet
European countries and intellectual climates. Apparently no such response had been
sible a few years earlier, on the occasion of Friedrich Diez's death in 1876 - despite
veneration that surrounded the "Altmeister". This discrepancy is in itself a measure o
rapid, indeed stormy, growth of our discipline in the early and mid 'eighties. At the tu
the century even a land at that point as backward as Spain pulled itself together to prod
an isolated testimonial of real "class" - in honor of her cultural hero Marcelino Menen
Pelayo. The first large-scale American undertakings of this kind, in the realm of Rom
studies, were the collections of articles in honor of A. Marshall Elliott (1911), Jo
Matzke (that same year), and Henry A. Todd (1930).
The tradition has since developed at such a brisk clip that it would be entirely pos
to prepare two accounts of its evolution: one strictly historical, the other typolo
Following the latter approach, one could establish several categories, according to the
sion selected: late wedding, retirement, fiftieth, sixtieth, even sixty-fifth birthday (as i
case of E. Gamillscheg), and, at latest reports, eighty-fifth birthday (as is true of I. Ior
completion of the fiftieth semester or quarter of active teaching (a cut-off point chose
the admirers of W. Meyer-Lübke), the silver or golden wedding anniversary (doubly app
priate where both husband and wife have been actively engaged in university teachin
research), etc. All too frequently testimonials have been so slow in coming into exist
that eventually they have had to be transmuted into memorials; such was the fate o
j Miscelânea... Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcelos over forty years ago and, recently, o
slimmer volume in honor of Tatiana Fotitch. Far more relevant criteria of subdivision would
be the range of the volume's or the set's topical coverage, the length and weight of the
papers elicited, the pattern of selectivity applied to the invitations, and the like. A charming
example of altruism is the Mélanges volume tendered as a joint gift to their teacher by the
Scandinavian students of Gaston Paris. The - more cosmopolitan - Brazilian Homenagem
in honor of M. Bataillon comes to mind, too. There exists also, on the opposite side of the
ledger, examples of political exclusiveness, or of pompously thick Festschriften so planned

rasgos burlescos de horrible fealdad y a ella dirige el caballero cumplimientos de gran cortesía"
(Menendez Pidal, CN, III; repr. Austral #1051, p. 128). In my view, however, the internal
evidence of Juan Ruiz' serranilla makes it clear that we have before us two conflicting descriptions
of the serrana, both from the lips of the knightly poet; the pleasant description is not uttered
directly to her in an attempt to seduce or dissuade her. Although clearly some kind of stylistic
device is involved here, not enough is known about this passage to enable the etymologist to make
use of it in proffering an hypothesis.
The Semeiança del mundo (A) contains the apparent scribal lapsus: "Enfierno es dicho por
que es muy fedo " (p. 70), clashing with the statement a few lines on: "Es en el más bayso logar e
en el más fondo, onde por esta razón es llamado infierno" (72). The B text carries the correct
reading: "Ynfierno es dicho por que es muy fondo. . ." (71), judging from the Latin text of Honorius'
Imago Mundi (Ch. xxxvii): "Internus ideo dicitur internus quia inferius est positus". If the notion
of a switch of allegiance from foedus to foetēre is accurately applied to fedo , the lapse in the
Semeiança is not entirely without motivation, for we find a little later: "Este logar es muy espan-
table, e es lleno de fuego e de piedra suphre", and still later: "Otrosí es llamado este logar «tierra
de tinebras» por que es tenebregoso e lleno de ffumo e de fedor e de neurina"; also, on that same
page, in reference to the river Flegeron: "Este rrío es de muy grand espanto, e es lleno de fuego, e
fiede por mucha piedra sufre que es ý" (72).

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 212 Romance Philology, Vol. XXVII, No. 2, November 1973

that they show little affinity to the work actually accomplished by the beneficiaries and
closest students, or, conversely, of slender and very sharply focused volumes, such
highly selective one presented to L. Hjelmslev and programmatically dedicated t
exploration of the impact of glossematics. From here one could go to a third, totally dif
classificatory approach, based on purely organizational and even promotional consid
tions: the segregation of a full-blown Festschrift (traditionally an independent publ
venture) from the more modest Festnummer (an expanded issue of a learned journal, so
times slanted in an opportune direction); the delimitation of this kind of academic
from rival undertakings, e.g. collections of a given scholar's favorite shorter articles (
ques, Kleinere Schriften, Scritti minori) similarly subscribed to and sometimes, by w
further parallel, preceded by the homenajeado' s bibliography, etc.
While analytical surveys of this sort are entirely legitimate, the main purpose of tod
comment is to draw the reader's attention to the inflationary spiral of the institution
Festschrift and to ask questions that have not been openly and overtly raised
S. Griswold Morley's provocative note, "The Development of the Homage- Volume",
VIII (1929), 61-68 - which the author, incidentally, by his own admission found exc
ingly hard to place in a journal. Since then the number of such collections has increase
dizzying scale, making it advisable for philological sleuths to compile special bibliogr
by way of information retrieval (H. F. Williams, H. H. Golden and S. 0. Simches).
If seventy, sixty, even fifty years ago such collections (e.g. those in honor of Mus
Tobler, Gröber) were, typically, major events, bridging national traditions of schola
and bringing together specialists before regular attendance at annual meetings, congre
and symposia had become fashionable or so much as feasible, today's Festschriften r
scholarly services of comparable magnitude only by way of glorious exception. They
become, by and large, ritualistic; not a few sumptuously printed books have appear
honor of academic teachers no doubt meritorious, but distressingly little-known out
narrow circle of personal friends and direct students; in fact, the entire flow is being
and more controlled by accidental and incidental factors far in excess of the safely tol
margin of randomness of rewards, not to say haphazardness of recognition, characteris
university life.
It is perhaps forgivable to inquire, discreetly, into the reasons why some major fi
have not been so honored. We already know that Diez - unlike Ascoli - lived and di
early to have qualified for such kudos. The Festschrift for Meyer-Lübke, schedu
appear in installments, was curtailed by the outbreak of the First World War. In c
quence of a post-war economic crisis the Miscellanea (1921) offered to Hugo Schuch
turned out niggardly - indeed, ridiculously slender. Joseph Bédier seems to have died
inopportune juncture, by European standards (1938). When this country's most bri
Romanist, the Johns Hopkins scholar David S. Blondheim, committed suicide (1935)
too few persons, apparently, cared for Romance philology in North America. Leona
Olschki - essentially an Italianist, who taught at Heidelberg, Rome, and Berkeley -
somewhat bizarrely, honored by a special issue of a Dutch-sponsored Orientalist jou
The injustice meted out to Elise Richter, who died in a model ghetto (Theresienstadt) at
height of the last world war, and to N. Jokl, who was apparently assassinated (eith
Vienna or in a concentration camp), has so far, to my knowledge, not been redressed on
native ground.
Finally there exists a tiny group of scholars - some of them particularly high-minded -
who, for one reason or another, have declined the honor offered them - because they lived
in exile and were cut off from their roots, or because they were skeptical of the support such a
project would receive from the "logical" institutional or private sources, or because they
were far too modest and too austere to approve any such "extravagance" or concession to
human vanity, or else because they deemed premature and debilitating the plans informally

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 Notes 213

disclosed to t
citizen.

In the matter of Festschriften , as in other academic conventions and pursuits, perfect

justice is doubtless unattainable. But the human and professional implications of this
almost epidemically spreading genre of scholarly "vehicle" can no longer with impunity be
swept under the rug.[Y.M.]

Americana, I: The Year 1917 as a Turning Point

Percival B. Fay's collection of separata and pamphlets included, among its rarer items, a
privately printed and discreetly distributed piece: The Early Life of Professor Elliott by George
C. Keidel (Washington, D.C., 1917; 10 pages, plus frontispiece), which contained a paper read
before the Romance Club of the Johns Hopkins University on October 12 of the preceding year.
That paper embodied an unpretentious biographic sketch of A. Marshall Elliott (1844-1911), the
founder and early promoter of Romance philology in North America.
The information provided by the commemorative booklet is strictly anecdotal and the tone
unabashedly chatty; few listeners and readers today would be deeply interested in such matters as
Elliott's family history, boyhood days, preparation for Haverford (1860-61), escape from the
Confederacy (1862), attendance of Haverford College (1862-66), then again of Harvard College -
where at graduation (1868) he stood third in his class - ; a few years as private tutor in Europe,
university study in Florence and in Munich, and another escape, this time from the Carlists, while
traveling in Spain in the early 'seventies. Perhaps a limited importance attaches to the fact that
young Marshall, as an enterprising traveler, was exposed to the climate of such charming centers
of Romance culture as Lisbon and Barcelona, in addition to Florence, to say nothing of Paris;
that he, independently, became a convert to Sanskrit studies under the influence of Angelo De
Gubernatis; and that during the three years eventually spent in Munich he conceived for the first
time the idea of "becoming a professor of comparative philology upon his return to America" (9).
"Thereafter he spent a portion of almost every summer in Germany" (8).
By no means devoid of interest is, conversely, the fact that Keidel, who was himself a Johns
Hopkins scholar for 21 years (1890-1911), should have engaged in such painstaking archival
research and even made a point of copyrighting his tract. Clearly, in some centers, especially of
the East Coast, Romance scholars were taking themselves seriously; as late as 1917, Romance
philology seemed to have a future in this country. Just what the prospects were follows very
clearly from John L. Gerig's compilation published that same year in The Romanic Review (VIII,
328-340): "Advanced Degrees and Doctoral Dissertations in the Romance Languages at the
Johns Hopkins University The appended bibliography, which lists an impressive number of
dissertations, both published and unpublished, affords an excellent panoramic view of the
Romance research which has been conducted in just one major graduate school between 1881 and
1917. (Of course, some items listed as unpublished at that cut-off-point were eventually expanded
and became famous monographs, e.g., Frederick C. Tarr's M.A. thesis [1917], "Substantive
Clauses Governed by a Preposition in the Novels of Benito Pérez Galdos"). In addition to syn-
tactic themes (C. A. Mathews, " Cist and ciV) one finds evidence of sustained concern with lexi-
cology (G. E. Wisewell, " Bouvier , pâtre , and vacher in Old French"; L. M. Riddle, " Baccalarius
in the Cartulary of St. Victor"), sociolinguistics (W. A. Sto well, "Old French Titles of Respect in
Direct Address"), straight dialectology (F. Bonnotte, "Phonologie et morphologie du dialecte
picard dans le Laonnais et le Soissonnais"; P. J. Frein, "Phonology of the Patois of Pleigne,
Canton de Berne"), folklore - including magic and ceremonies (W. S. Symington, "The Folk-
Lore of May-Day in France"), semantics (R. H. Wilson, "The Preposition à ; the Relation of its
Meanings Studied in Old French"), and, above all, metric.
To be sure, those were very tender and fragile shoots, vulnerable to any violent change in
academic climate. Through one of the strangest paradoxes, the cultural hysteria that gripped
American public opinion in 1917 destroyed almost overnight the first promising seeds of Romance
philology on this side of the Atlantic - just because some vociferous people in positions of in-
fluence associated philology, in any of its manifestations, with Central European culture, which
[Y.M.]
they hastened to declare unpalatable.

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