I had decided, after college had given me a solid foundation
in the classical languages, to study the Romance languages
and particularly French philology, because, in my native
Vienna, the gay and orderly, skeptic and sentimental, Catholic
and pagan Vienna of yore was filled with adoration of the
French way of life. I had always been surrounded by a French
atmosphere and, at that juvenile stage of experience, had
acquired a picture, perhaps overgeneralized, of French litera-
ture, which seemed to me definable by an Austrianlike mixture
of sensuousness and reflection, of vitality and discipline, of
sentimentality and critical wit. The moment when the curtain
rose on a French play given by a French troupe, and the
valet, in a knowing accent of psychological alertness, with his
rich, poised voice, pronounced the words "Madame est
servie," was a delight to my heart.

But when I attended the classes of French linguistics of
my great teacher Meyer-Lübke no picture was offered us of
the French people, or of the Frenchness of their language:
in these classes we saw Latin a moving, according to relentless
phonetic laws, toward French e (pater 〉 père); there we
saw a new system of declension spring up from nothingness,
a system in which the six Latin cases came to be reduced to
two, and later to one--while we learned that similar violence
had been done to the other Romance languages and, in fact,
to many modern languages. In all this, there were many facts
and much rigor in the establishment of facts, but all was
vague in regard to the general ideas underlying these facts.
What was the mystery behind the refusal of Latin sounds or
cases to stay put and behave themselves? We saw incessant
change working in language--but why? I was a long while
realizing that Meyer-Lübke was offering only the pre-history
of French (as he established it by a comparison with the
other Romance languages), not its history. And we were
never allowed to contemplate a phenomenon in its quiet being,
to look into its face: we always looked at its neighbors or at
its predecessors--we were always looking over our shoulder.
There were presented to us the relationships of phenomenon
a and phenomenon b; but phenomenon a and phenomenon b
did not exist in themselves, nor did the historical line a - b.

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