I. SEMANTICS
This idea has had so many uses, and has figured so
variously in different terminologies, particularly during
the modern period, that it can best be approached by
way of its semantic history and lexical record. At the
outset we must note that “motif” is a gallicism, thereby
set apart from the broader implications of its English
cognate “motive.” Ruskin always used the anglicized
expression; but, unlike later writers on the plastic arts,
he broadened and blurred its meaning: “the leading
idea of a composition,” “a leading emotional purpose,
technically called its motive” (Modern Painters,
1843-60). Others have complained that the term
“motif” sounds pedantic (Krappe, 1930); but folklorists
especially have preferred it, perhaps for that very
reason, because they have come to employ it in so
technical a sense. Etymologically, the word is derived
from the Latin verb movere (“to move”) in its past
participial form, motus. This, as Ducange indicates,
formed the basis of the late Latin adjective motivus
(“susceptible to movement”), and hence of the medie-
val noun motivum (“cause” or “incitement”). Thus
“motive” and its related forms in Western languages
originally meant a stimulus or source of movement.
Gradually their connotations shifted from the physical
to the psychological sphere, in effect from motion to
emotion.
That shift is well illustrated by the Oxford English
Dictionary, when it points out that until the nineteenth
century Englishmen habitually spoke of “acting on a
motive” rather than of “acting from a motive.” To
internalize the reason or reasons for any given action
was to open the way for what Coleridge called
“motive-hunting,” and to make the concept of motiva-
tion more widely available for psychology as well as
ethics. Here the German motivieren seems to have
adumbrated the verbal form, leading on to the English
“motivate” largely through the influence of Gustav
Freytag's well-known analysis of dramatic techniques,
Das Technik des Dramas (1863). La Rochefoucauld had
been concerned with internal springs of behavior, as
usual, when he observed that a motive was not an
excuse (Un motif n'est pas une excuse). This remark
maintains a sharp French distinction between psycho-
logical awareness and moral justification, which would
be neutralized by the purport of the more popular
maxim, “To understand everything is to forgive every-
thing” (Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner). What
might be termed the traditional definition of motif,
which stands alone in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie
Française through the fifth edition (1798), emphasizes
moving in both senses: “That which moves and leads
to doing something” (Ce qui meut et porte à faire
quelque chose).
It was not until the sixth edition of its dictionary
(1835) that the French Academy was willing to recog-
nize a more specialized use of motif in relation to
music: “the melodic phrase, the original idea that
dominates the whole piece” (la phrase de chant, l'idée
primitive qui domine tout le morceau). This follows by
two generations the Encyclopédie (1765), which of
course was more advanced in its outlook. It had de-
voted a substantial article, written by Baron Grimm,
to a wholly musical definition oriented toward eigh-
teenth-century opera—going so far as to declare that
motif, “the main idea of the aria” (l'idée principale de
l'air), was “what constitute[d] musical genius most
particularly” (ce qui constitue le plus particulièrement
le génie musical). This usage had its natural birthplace
in Italy, where
motivo long had signified the basic
segment of a melody. Music, because of its quasi-
abstract character, offers the clearest examples of
motifs as structural elements, which are built up into
finished compositions through sundry devices of repe-
tition, modulation, variation, and orchestral elabora-
tion. Therefore it has frequently served as a model for
other arts. The systematic employment of such devices
to convey associated ideas, and consequently to provide
a sort of choric comment on the action of a music
drama or symphonic poem, has been the Wagnerian
Leitmotiv.
Now Wagner, though an eloquent exponent of his
own methods, made no mention of that word; his
personal term was Grundthema (“basic theme”).
Leitmotiv seems to have been coined and popularized
by his critical apostle, Hans von Wolzogen, whose
book, Die Nibelungenmythos in Sage und Litteratur,
was published at Berlin in 1876—the year that saw
the completion and Bayreuth premiere of Wagner's
tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen. In spite of the
farflung reverberations to this event, it cannot be
claimed for Wagner himself that he originated his most
characteristic device. Mozart had occasionally re-
peated musical themes to bring out dramatic situations,
notably with the Statue in Don Giovanni, and Berlioz
had lately dramatized his orchestrations by inter-
weaving certain phrases which he referred to as his
idées fixes. However, Wagner became the most influ-
ential exemplar, not only for musicians but also for
men of letters, of the creative artist who utilizes motif
as the unifying feature of his work. It can be argued,
and will later be amplified, that motif has a place of
its own in literary structure which goes all the way
back to oral literature. Nonetheless it is true that many
leading writers of the earlier twentieth century, deeply
immersed as they were in time-consciousness and a
state of synaesthesia, have made conscious efforts to
echo and emulate Wagner.
Thomas Mann indeed has distinguished between the
early phase of his own stylistic development, which
was more rhetorical in its reiterations, and the thematic
musicality of his more mature style (“Lebensabriss,”
1930). He has often acknowledged his debt to Wagner,
as in the story Das Wälsungenblut, where a decadent
incest of contemporary Munich finds its mythic parallel
in the sibling love between Siegmund and Sieglinde.
Similarly, in The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot quotes from
Tristan und Isolde, while Joyce's Stephen Dedalus—
wielding his ashplant—self-consciously cries out
“Nothung,” the name and the Leitmotiv of Siegfried's
sword. More eclectically, the streams of consciousness
in Ulysses sometimes flow through Leitmotive from
other composers: e.g., the duet from Don Giovanni,
which is sounded at the threat of impending adultery.
But the echoes that make up so much of Ulysses,
though they range from Stephen's scholastic reading
to the advertising copy of Mr. Bloom, come primarily
from printed sources; the most poignant of them is the
remembered title of a monastic tract on remorse of
conscience, Agenbite of Inwit. Proust, though he was
likewise an enthusiastic Wagnerite, invented a com-
poser of his own, the long neglected and suddenly
discovered master Vinteuil. A “little phrase” from
Vinteuil's imaginary sonata furnished the accompani-
ment to Swann's love for Odette, even as Marcel's for
Albertine is orchestrated by a posthumous septet.
When Proust created a synaesthetic frame of refer-
ence for his great novel, he alluded even more to
painting than to music. In both modes of artistic com-
position, the spatial along with the temporal, rhythm
is imposed by the recurrence of some distinctive kind
of figuration. Motif is thus equally germane to the
plastic arts, where it is most obviously discernible in
architectural design and stylized decoration. Some of
the older definitions, stressing the formal component,
allow for this dual application. But there is a larger
conception, as Ruskin sensed, in which an overtone of
“motive” is still present: i.e., underlying idea or final
cause, insofar as it applies to the intentions of the artist,
be he a musician or a painter. Such an enlargement
seems to have been reinforced by the subjective
nuances and the individualistic viewpoints of the im-
pressionist movement. It is significant that F. W. Fair-
holt's Dictionary of Terms in Art (London, 1854) char-
acterizes Motif as “a term lately introduced into the
vocabulary of Art,” whereas it is altogether omitted
from James Elmes's earlier Dictionary of the Fine Arts
(London, 1826). When the emphasis falls on pictorial
representation, critics have shown a tendency to locate
the motif in the subject represented. This is all the truer
of iconology, the study of art history that interprets
visual images in the light of the ideas they symbolize.
