"BY COMMON CONSENT THE CONSTITUTION OF an author's text is the highest aim that a
scholar can set before himself."[1] This, as one might guess, is the dictum of a classical scholar, and a
classical scholar is far more acutely conscious than a student of the modern literatures
that for over two thousand years the preservation and elucidation of the texts of the
great writers have been the primary concern of literary study. Yet to many, and not to
lay minds alone, textual criticism is an arid activity, almost synonymous with pedantry.
Nevertheless, the text must be established before a just critical appraisal is possible,
as a simple illustration will make clear.
The 13th of Donne's Holy Sonnets is one of the better known of
his Divine Poems. It begins,
What if this present were the worlds last night?
Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright.
In all the editions before Grierson's the poem concluded:
so I say to thee
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign'd,
This beauteous form assumes a pitious mind,
but Grierson, on the authority of the manuscripts, altered "assumes" to "assures."
"Assumes" gives the poem the flatness of a geometrical demonstration, even though it
might be argued that
the word would come naturally enough from one so
soaked as Donne in the dialectic of scholastic philosophy. "Assures," on the other hand,
alters the whole effect of the poem and brings it to the triumphant climax which Donne
surely intended.
The present disrepute of textual criticism, it would seem, arises from an excessive
faith in our mechanical means of reproducing books. We take our texts on trust. Modern
scholarship, Dr. R. W. Chapman has remarked, seems to proceed on the assumption that the
texts of books published after 1700 are sound, or, if not, that "it is useless, if not
improper, to correct them." But, he continues, "The first position has only to be stated
to reveal its absurdity; every book, every newspaper, reminds us of human fallibility.
The second position . . . arises from cowardice."[2] Whether due to indifference or cowardice, textual
corruption can go unchecked for a surprisingly long time, and can produce some very
disconcerting results. Let me illustrate.
A correspondent in The Times Literary Supplement not long ago
pointed out that the very titles of certain books, quite frequently reprinted, have been
altered, and the original titles almost forgotten. How many readers of Dickens, for
instance, know that The Adventures of Oliver Twist: or, The Parish
Boy's Progress is the title which the author gave his novel? And if title pages
are so unreliable, what can be expected of the text? An examination of modern reprints
of Tristram Shandy revealed widespread divergences from Sterne's
final text:
Errors in punctuation amount on many pages to 15 to 20 to the page. . . .
Modern reprints have frequently set in lower case words which Sterne required to be
set in small capitals. Alterations in spelling have not been confined to
modernizations; . . . errors destroying Sterne's sense and meaning have been
perpetuated, like
area for
aera, clause
for
cause, port for
post, timber for
tinder, catching for
catechising, and
caravans for
caverns.
[3]
Many of these errors
apparently originated in some popular nineteenth-century reprint, and have been repeated
ever since.
Another class of book in which textual laxity is frequent is one in which,
theoretically, it should be rarest: the textbook. Textbooks profess to be edited by
competent scholars, and should
thus be in a class quite apart from the
popular reprint, mass-produced as economically as possible. It would be easy to cite
examples of indifferent, scissors-and-paste editing, and even of culpable carelessness,
but it will be more effective to refer to books otherwise immune from the ordinary
criticism of slipshod work. Within the past year or so two new college
Shakespeares have appeared,
[4] whose editors are perhaps the two most active and distinguished
Shakespearian scholars in the country. For range and interest of material presented in
introductions and notes, the two books are a marked improvement on anything previously
available, and they are bound to exert a strong influence on the teaching of Shakespeare
for a generation or so. Yet both reproduce the Globe text. It is not as if there had
been no advances in the textual study of Shakespeare during the present century, nor are
these two editors ignorant of the work of Pollard, McKerrow, Greg, and Dover Wilson; but
is there any other branch of study in which a teacher would be satisfied to present
students, as these books do, with the results achieved by scholarship up to, but not
beyond, the year 1864?
A third example may be given to show how neglect of textual matters may distort or
nullify an argument. In a recent investigation into the origins and development of what
we call the Victorian attitude of mind the Reverend Thomas Bowdler's Family Shakespeare almost inevitably came up for discussion. In I Henry IV, it was alleged, Bowdler showed a certain squeamishness
about Falstaff's oaths, though, rather surprisingly, he was somewhat erratic in his
elimination of them. "Zounds," "'Sblood," "By the Lord," and "By the mass" are
frequently omitted, and in one place "God" is replaced by "heaven."[5] But such omissions and
substitutions were not due to Bowdler at all. The more forcible expressions are all
found, it is true, in most modern editions, and they also appear in the early quartos,
but they do not appear in the First Folio. This half-hearted censorship of Shakespeare's
text took place in the theatre, and was the result of the Act of 1606 which forbade the
profane "use of the holy name of God or of Jesus Christ or of the Holy Ghost or of the
Trinitie"
on the stage; Bowdler was merely working from an
eighteenth-century text of Shakespeare based on the First Folio, and in actual fact did
not concern himself in any way with Falstaff's oaths.
If, then, we are aware of the value of textual studies, we must pay them more than lip
service, and no scholar is properly trained unless he knows something of the mechanics
of preparing a text. In the remarks which follow I shall confine myself to English texts
from the period of the Renaissance onwards, that is, to the age of the printed book,
since the texts of the manuscript age are to be the subject of another paper in this
series. A distinction between the texts of the manuscript age and those of the age of
the printed book is fully justified. I am aware, of course, that certain early texts and
editions have survived in unique exemplars, and that the twelve surviving copies of the
first edition of King Lear contain ten different combinations of
corrected and uncorrected sheets, so that such texts may present problems closely
analogous to those of texts found only in manuscript. In the main, however, it is true
to say that the printed book presents the text in a fixed and standardized form, whereas
every manuscript is unique, and its value as an authority for the text must be
separately investigated.
Although there have been authors, from Ben Jonson in Shakespeare's day to Housman in
our own, who have been extremely meticulous about the form in which their work has
appeared in print, most of the conventions of English spelling and punctuation are the
creation of printers and compositors, especially in the seventeenth century. Most
authors, provided their words and sense have been accurately reproduced, have been
content to have current printers' usage superimposed upon their writings. In other
words, though a manuscript copied out fair to be sent to the publisher may represent the
work in its final form as far as the author is concerned, it is not necessarily yet in
the form in which it will be offered to the reader, or in which the author expects it to
be offered. Thus Wordsworth sent the copy for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads to Humphry Davy, requesting him before the manuscript went to
press to adjust the punctuation—"a business in which I am ashamed to say I am not
adept." Similarly the manuscript of his Ode on Intimations of
Immortality (first published
in the
Poems of 1807), which is in the handwriting of his sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson
with notes and corrections in Wordsworth's hand, has had emphatic changes in
capitalization and punctuation added, presumably by a reader at the publisher's.
[6] Coleridge's
Friend may be cited for another example. The manuscript is extant, partly in
Coleridge's hand, but mainly in Sara Hutchinson's. It was originally printed by a
provincial printer at Penrith, with the result that the first edition reproduces many of
the eccentricities of spelling, punctuation, italicization, and capitalization of
Coleridge and his amanuensis. A few years later, when a revised edition was brought out
in London, most of these eccentricities were normalized. By comparison with the edition
of 1818 the original edition looks more like a piece of eighteenth than of
nineteenth-century typography, but there is no shred of evidence that Coleridge
concerned himself in any way with the typographical practice of either printer.
Although authors have frequently shown no care for such minutiae, or "accidentals," as Dr. Greg calls them, they are of some concern to
the editor, and his treatment of them will in large measure be determined by the nature
of the edition he is preparing. For our purposes we may distinguish between three
classes of editions: (1) the modern-spelling edition, (2) the old-spelling edition; and
(3) the facsimile edition, sometimes called the diplomatic edition.[7]
There will always be, one hopes, editions in modern spelling of the major English
authors since Spenser. Chaucer can only be modernized by altering his language, and
Spenser, with his deliberately cultivated archaisms, is also separated from us by a
linguistic gulf, narrow and easily crossed, but none the less real. But if ever the day
comes when no modernized editions of Shakespeare and Donne and Milton are available to
the general reader,
our cultural heritage will be in a sad state. The
responsibility of the editor of a text in modern spelling is no less than that of him
who edits in the old spelling; if anything, it is greater. Nor is the task any lighter;
in fact, the editor of one such work, who had no modernized text already made for him,
writes in his preface that the task of modernization had convinced him "that Elizabethan
editors save themselves a vast deal of trouble and risk by adhering to the original
spelling and punctuation."
[8]
Yet, in this particular case at least, the undertaking was well worth while, bringing as
it did a great deal of otherwise inaccessible material within the range of the ordinary
reader, who would have been easily repelled by the apparent remoteness and strangeness
of the originals.
The aim of the facsimile reprint is to provide the most accurate substitute for a rare
original that typography can supply. Those who contemplate the preparation of such a
text will find the principles to be followed set out in the "Rules for Editors" drawn up
for the Malone Society. But with the development of cheap photographic processes the
facsimile reprint will be less and less in demand, except on those occasions where it is
desirable to furnish a literatim transcript of a manuscript,
either to preserve the peculiarities of an individual writer or to aid those unskilled
in palaeography, as in a work like Greg's English Literary
Autographs, 1550-1650.
The old-spelling text is of course requisite in any standard or definitive edition.
After the copy-text has been chosen, the editor reproduces it faithfully except for such
corrections as he finds it necessary to make. The copy-text will usually be either the
first (authorized) edition, or the last to receive the author's revision; the editorial
corrections will involve such matters as the elimination of misprints, the adjustment in
poetry of faulty verse-lining, the correction of inadequate punctuation, the
incorporation of manifestly superior (and authentic) readings from other editions, and
the emendation of corrupt passages. The rationale of such
editorial procedure has been fully discussed and set forth by McKerrow and Greg, and one
can usually find in their writings a solution for one's difficulties.[9]
Thanks to these and to other scholars, current editorial practice is fairly clearly
defined, but I should like to emphasize that many editors will sooner or later find
themselves face to face with problems or with materials that demand treatment different
from that worked out by classical scholars or even by editors of Shakespeare, and I
propose briefly to survey some of these and indicate their consequence for an
editor.
In recent years it has become clear that in the seventeenth century certain authors
cared sufficiently for textual accuracy not to rest content with printed errata slips,
but had manuscript corrections made in as many copies of their works as possible. Such
autograph corrections by Sir Thomas Browne and Izaak Walton are now well known, but they
were by no means the only authors to resort to this device. Even the plays of such minor
court dramatists as Sir William Berkeley and Sir William Lower are known to contain
manuscript corrections by or at the instigation of the authors, and editors should
constantly be on the watch for other instances. Obviously such corrections are of the
highest textual importance.
Other classes of material throw light on the earlier history of a work, and no one,[10] I fancy, will dispute the
fact that one of the functions of a definitive edition is to illuminate as much as
possible the origin and development of the work edited. Every student of the Romantic
Period, for instance, knows something of the fascinating struggle for artistic
perfection revealed by Keats's manuscripts, or of the information about the development
of Wordsworth's thought and art furnished by the new Oxford edition. Many writers, too,
have constantly revised their writings after the first publication; sometimes the extent
of revision can be shown by recording the readings of the successive editions, but often
the revisions are so thorough that there is no alternative but to print all the versions
or, if not all, at least the first and final ones. Examples that come to mind
immediately are Whitman's
Leaves of Grass, whose problems were discussed here several years
ago,
[11] or Fitzgerald's
successive versions of
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. But these
are by no means solitary instances. Among the Elizabethans, Daniel and Drayton revised
throughout their careers. In the eighteenth century Pope wrote
The
Rape of the Lock in two forms, and left two
Dunciads. In
the nineteenth century both Wordsworth and Tennyson completely rewrote some of their
early poems, and Coleridge reworked
The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner from 1798 until his death. Nor are poets the only revisers. While English
literature can scarcely furnish a parallel equal in interest and importance to the case
of Montaigne's
Essays in French, the two versions of Sidney's
Arcadia, the successive editions of Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy, and of Walton's
Lives involve
problems scarcely less complex.
The bulk of authors' manuscripts, first drafts, and work sheets that has survived may
sometimes by very considerable indeed. The most famous of such documents is of course
the collection of Milton's manuscripts preserved at Trinity College, Cambridge. But
there is scarcely a major author since the beginning of the eighteenth century of whose
work some manuscripts have not survived. Such materials are not necessarily of primary
textual authority, since they may consist of early drafts, or the author may have made
his final revisions in proof; but they can be of utmost importance in correcting the
text, as a simple example will make clear. The epigraph to the second chapter of The Heart of Midlothian consists of two stanzas from Prior's The Thief and the Cordelier. In the novel one of the lines reads
There the squire of the poet and knight of the post,
which is nonsense. It should be
There the squire of the pad and the knight of the post.
This example is unusual, because there is the possibility of a double check. Not
only do the texts of Prior give the right reading, but Scott's manuscript, which is
extant, shows that he quoted the passage correctly. Nevertheless this printer's error
was repeated in all editions until 1948.
[12]
Two other similar classes of material that have as yet been scarcely used by editors
should also be noticed: printer's copy and author's proofs. Printer's copy and
proof-sheets have both survived from as early as the fifteenth century; in neither of
these instances, however, was the author involved. But even a brief enumeration of some
of the surviving manuscripts which were sent by the authors to the press is an
impressive one, including as it does Book I of Hooker's Ecclesiastical
Polity, part of Sir John Harington's translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Book I of Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Criticism, the second edition of Lyrical
Ballads, and Wordsworth's Poems of 1807. The Bodleian
manuscript of Herbert's Temple, though not sent to the press, is
the one bearing the imprimatur of the official licenser, and is
therefore of textual authority at least equal to that of the first edition. Of author's
proofs I know of no actual examples earlier than some of Dr. Johnson's in the R. B. Adam
Collection, and the earliest I happen myself to have examined were of works by Hazlitt
and Scott, but there must be many others in existence awaiting full examination by
interested scholars.
A further class of material offering editorial problems of its own is to be found in
those manuscripts, such as letters, diaries, and notebooks, which were never prepared
for the press by the authors, and were never intended for the press. Editors, and
especially biographer-editors, have allowed themselves a latitude in handling such
materials that varies all the way from a naive desire to safeguard the hero's dignity to
flagrant dishonesty. One of the earliest writers to suffer from such editorial
ineptitude was Donne. His son in editing his letters not only showed extreme
carelessness over dates and addresses but, it is now known, altered the names of those
to whom the letters were written, presumably in order to suggest that he had access to a
much greater volume of his father's correspondence than in fact he had.[13] Even Walton was not above
tampering with Donne's letters, so that on one occasion he strung together excerpts from
five different letters, clapped a date on the end, and presented the result as a single
epistle.[14] My colleague
Professor W. M. Sale tells me that Samuel
Richardson's letters were
similarly mishandled by Mrs. Barbauld, and other examples from eighteenth and
nineteenth-century biographies could doubtless be found with little difficulty.
Many of these earlier editorial mutilations are explicable in terms of the standards of
their age. Two of Donne's letters seem to have survived only in the opening and close;
the intermediate news or business communication, or whatever it was, has been
omitted.[15] His
contemporaries were interested in the elegance of Donne's epistolary style and the
ingenuity of his compliments more than in the details of his personal relations with his
friends. Nineteenth-century taboos were responsible for a different kind of excision
altogether; witness those, for instance, in the early editions of Lamb's letters. One
recalls how Lamb wrote to Thomas Manning about the little book on honours and dignities
which he had written for children,[16] and how in the course of it he had envisaged himself advancing
through all the degrees of the peerage, concluding with "Duke Lamb."
It would look
like quibbling [he continued] to carry it on further . . . otherwise I have sometimes
in my dreams imagined myself still advancing, as 9th, King Lamb; 10th, Emperor Lamb;
11th, Pope Innocent, higher than which is nothing upon earth.
At least, that is
what appeared in the nineteenth-century editions; what Lamb actually wrote was "higher
than which is nothing but the Lamb of God."
Coleridge, who left behind him vast stores of marginalia, notes, scattered papers, and
other disjecta membra, has given much trouble to his editors.
Henry Nelson Coleridge, who edited the Literary Remains, did some
very strange things with his uncle's writings, though he was attempting in all sincerity
to impose some order on chaos, and to show his uncle to best advantage. Ernest Hartley
Coleridge, in editing the series of extracts from the notebooks entitled Anima Poetae, had similar problems to face. Not only was the family
still reluctant to reveal the extent of Coleridge's disagreement with his wife and his
attachment for Sara Hutchinson (which entailed various excisions), but the compressed
form of many of the notes, with their disregard for
ordinary rules of
syntax, to say nothing of their highly individual punctuation and capitalization,
produced numerous additional difficulties. Here are two brief examples of E. H.
Coleridge's editorial procedure. In each case the passage is transcribed as accurately
as possible from the original, and then followed by the corresponding passage in
Anima Poetae.
A new year—the old Wants/ The new from God, the old our own/ . . .
Time—3 fold—Future slow—Present swift—Past
unmoveable—No impatience will quicken the Loiterer—no Terror, no delight
rein in the Flyer—No Regret set in motion the Stationary—would'st be
happy, take the Delayer for thy counsellor, do not choose the Flyer for thy Friend,
nor the ever-remainer for thy Enemy—
(Notebook viii, p. 3)
The old world begins a new year. That is ours, but this is
from God.
We may think of time as threefold. Slowly comes the Future, swift the Present passes
by, but the Past is unmoveable. No impatience will quicken the loiterer; no terror, no
delight rein in the flyer, and no regret set in motion the stationary. Wouldst be
happy, take the delayer for thy counsellor; do not choose the flyer for thy friend,
nor the ever-remainer for thine enemy.
(
Anima Poetae, p. 22)
Reviewers resemble often the English Jury and the Italian Conclave, that they are
incapable of eating till they have condemned or crowned—
Pope like an old Lark who tho' he leaves off soaring & singing in the height, yet
has his Spurs grow longer & sharper, the older he
grows.
(Notebook xvii, p. 167)
Reviewers resemble often the English jury and the Italian conclave, they are
incapable of eating till they have condemned or craned.
The Pope [may be compared to] an old lark, who, though he leaves off soaring and
singing in the height, yet has his spurs grow longer and sharper the older he
grows.
(
Anima Poetae, p. 223)
In the first passage I suspect that E. H. Coleridge misread "Wants" as "world," as it
is difficult otherwise to account for the rephrasing; in the second he was certainly
baffled by "crowned," which he rendered by the unintelligible "craned". But the two
notes in the second extract are interesting for another misconception, which would
positively have delighted Coleridge, who was always
fascinated by the
workings of the principle of the association of ideas. In writing the first of the two
notes Coleridge's mind went from the notion of juries condemning before eating to the
line in
The Rape of the Lock,
And wretches hang that juryman may dine,
and thence to its author, who became the subject of the next note; his grandson's
mind, on the other hand, was caught by the phrase "Italian conclave," and he therefore
interpreted the succeeding note as referring to the pontiff instead of the poet.
E. H. Coleridge was for many years a schoolmaster, and his procedure with the text of
the notebooks resembles that of a conscientious instructor correcting a carelessly
written schoolboy exercise. He believed, no doubt, that he was only doing what was
needful to remove unnecessary stumbling blocks from the path of a reader, and he was
preparing a book for the general reader rather than the scholar. But notions of
editorial responsibility have changed within the last fifty years, and such manipulation
of the text is contrary to modern standards. Editors of comparatively recent material
will, no doubt, always have to make excisions out of regard to the susceptibilities of
the family and friends of the author, but what they do print will be printed with
scrupulous fidelity to the wording of the original, and there will be some statement as
to the nature and extent of any necessary omissions.
The problem of fidelity to the minuter details of the author's text—to the
"accidentals"—is a more difficult one and depends, in the last resort, on the
editor's taste and judgment. It is worth bearing in mind, I think, that there is a real
gain in consulting, wherever possible, the reader's convenience. Mr. Harold Williams, in
his recent edition of Swift's Journal to Stella, reproduces faithfully Swift's "little
language" from such of the letters as have survived in manuscript, with the exception
that Swift's "th" and "te" become "the," "y" and "yo" becomes "you," and "yr" and "yrs"
become "your" and "yours." The consequent gain in legibility is considerable, as may be
seen by comparison with the edition which prints these forms as Swift wrote them. As Mr.
Williams points out in his preface:
In these days, when the art of photography has
been enlisted in the student's service, the attempt to reproduce in print
insignificant orthographical peculiarities
has less meaning than it
once had. The result can never be wholly satisfactory, and it may only repel or
distract the reader.
Again, Professor Vinaver's edition of Malory, the most
exciting piece of literary scholarship of the past decade, is not least so because the
editor has made Malory so much easier to read in the original text than ever before.
Compare any page of this edition with the corresponding passage in Oskar Sommer's and
the difference will be apparent at a glance. The paragraphing, the re-punctuation, and
the setting of the dialogue in the manner of the modern novel are all introduced without
any compromising of editorial integrity, and the gain to the reader who is not primarily
a mediaevalist is enormous.
A less successful solution of some of these problems is exemplified in the edition
recently published of Melville's Billy Budd. Two pages of the
original manuscript are reproduced, so that a measure of comparison with the printed
text is possible. Melville's spelling, we are told, has been corrected "to modern
American usage," and any editorial insertions in the text are enclosed within pointed
brackets (instead of the more usual square ones). Thus the editor conceals the fact that
Melville used such spellings as "Judgement," "fellow-man," "innocense," and
"respectivly" (though the last two may have been mere slips of the pen), but if Melville
neglected to close quotations marks or to add a period at the end of a paragraph, the
fact is forcibly brought to our notice by means of pointed brackets. It would be of
little value, no doubt, to record that the um of "circumstances"
is two minims short, but Melville's characteristic spellings are not without interest,
while his careless omission of occasional punctuation marks is of far less significance
and their silent editorial correction would have been perfectly proper.
Further, the textual notes are insufficient to permit an adequate reconstruction of the
original. One discovers, after some initial bewilderment, that what are referred to as
"variants" are in fact words and phrases that have been deleted and on second thoughts
replaced by others; words and phrases said to have been "omitted" are those which in
revision were added, very often above a caret mark. Nor is there
any attempt in the notes to distinguish the various stages of revision. In the phrase
"he could never convert,"
"could" is above the line in ink over a
caret mark, but the fact is not recorded; in the phrase "without first performing,"
"first" is above the line in ink over a caret mark, and here it is recorded as "
om." In the phrase "that hitherto has stood in human record,"
Melville first wrote in ink "that stands in human record," then altered it in pencil to
"that hitherto has stood in authoritative record," but finally deleted "authoritative"
and restored "human." The textual note here merely cites the phrase "that stands in
authoritative record" as the "variant" of the final form, thus telescoping two steps in
the process of revision into one. Thus an editor, however well intentioned, by departing
from established conventions and inadequately describing the state of his original, can
confuse more than he aids the reader, and a student wishing to make a close study of
Melville's method of composition in this tale is still unable to do so without recourse
to the original manuscript.
Though it is a function of the editor to aid the reader wherever he can, it is scarcely
possible to condone the practice of the editors of The Oxford Book of
Seventeenth Century Verse:
Where words or lines might seem ugly to modern eyes [they write], or where a
difference in usage might lead to ambiguity, we have substituted simpler forms, always
taking care (we believe) that the substituted form was actually in
use during the seventeenth century.
This, though the editors disavow it, is
really normalization. One used to get Old English texts normalized to standard West
Saxon of about 1000 A.D., and even normalized texts of Chaucer. But happily such a
practice is out of favour nowadays, for editors know that not until the eighteenth
century was normalization imposed on English orthography, and then by printers rather
than authors.
[17]
There is, however, a real difference between normalization and the expansion of
contractions, or the attempt to reproduce in type scribal peculiarities outside the
range of the printer's case. The value of the facsimile reprint, in other words, is
strictly limited, and photographic aids are diminishing its usefulness. Hence, as a
literary student—as distinct from the historian or the palaeographer—
I deplore the over-meticulous habit of printing legal records and other
old documents with all their contractions, or with the contractions expanded in italics.
The silent expansion of contractions is but a courtesy to the reader. Actually, many of
these documents ought merely to be described and summarized, with a few of the important
phrases quoted; the class of document to which the example belongs may be indicated, if
necessary, through reference to historical source books or to formularies.
Many of the processes in the preparation of a text, such as transcription, collation,
and even proof-correction, involve, it must be admitted, much sheer drudgery, and unlike
some other forms of drudgery they cannot be delegated. They are exacting, and they
demand the unremitting concentration of a highly trained mind. But the less they show
the better; the text's the thing, not the textual notes; and this is perhaps the final
principle that an editor would do well to bear in mind. If he has been brought to his
task by enthusiasm for an author or a book, he will wish above all things by his work to
pass on that enthusiasm. We may fitly conclude with some other words of the classical
scholar with whom we began:
A man is led by some feeling of kinship for what is
greater than himself to devote his life to the interpretation of a poet, philosopher,
or historian, to the elucidation of the language itself on its purely linguistic side,
or to that of the art or institutions of antiquity. Such a man will freely give
himself up to the most arid and laborious investigations. No erasure in a manuscript,
no half-read scholium, no fragmentary inscription will seem unworthy of his attention;
no grammatical nicety or stylistic peculiarity will be passed by as too trivial for
his patient study. All these things will live in his hands; for they are all
transformed by his faith in something to which he can hardly give a name, but which,
to him, is more real than anything else.
[18]