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Style and Stylistics 187
stylistic traits can be associated with the three types of philosophy
devised by Dilthey. 24
German scholars have also developed a more systematic ap-
proach, called Motif/ und Wort, based on the assumption of
a parallelism between linguistic traits and content-elements. Leo
Spitzer early applied it by investigating the recurrence of such
motifs as blood and wounds in the writings of Henri Barbusse,
and Josef Korner has fully studied the motifs in Arthur
Schnitzler's writings. 25 Later, Spitzer has tried to establish the
connection between recurrent stylistic traits and the philosophy
of the author, e.g., he connects the repetitive style of Peguy with
his Bergsonism and the style of Jules Romains with his
Unanimism. Analysis of the word myths of Christian Morgenstern
(the author of nonsense verse vaguely comparable to Lewis
Carroll's) shows that he must have read Mauthner's nominalistic
Kritik der S-prache y drawing from it the conclusion that over an
impenetrably dark world language only swathes further veils. 26
Some of Leo Spitzer's papers go very far in inferring the psy-
chological characteristics of an author from the traits of his style.
Proust lends himself to such a procedure ; in Charles Louis
Phillipe, there is the recurrent construction "a cause de" inter-
preted as a "fseudo-objektive Motivierung" implying a belief
in fatalism; in Rabelais, Spitzer analyzes word formations which,
using a known root such as Sorbonne, combine it with dozens of
fantastic suffixes for the creation of multitudinous repulsive
nicknames (e.g., Sorbonnagre, Sorbonne + onagre, wild ass), in
order to show that there is in Rabelais a tension between the real
and the unreal, between comedy and horror, between Utopia
and naturalism. 27 The basic assumption is here, as Spitzer formu-
lates it, that a "mental excitement which deviates from the
normal habitus of our mental life must have a co-ordinate
linguistic deviation from normal usage." 2S
But this principle seems questionable. In much of his later
work, e.g., his brilliant study of "Klassische Dampfung in
Racine," Spitzer has confined himself to an analysis of stylistic
traits. 29 Indeed, however ingenious some of its suggestions may
be, psychological stylistics seems open to two objections. Many
relationships professing to be thus established are not based on
conclusions really drawn from the linguistic material but rather