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V

This brief account of Kane's approach, and the discussion that led to it, may have indicated not only how the old paradigm has given way to a new one in English textual studies but that in a limited way the experience of the old paradigm can be put to use, if in a very different manner from that originally intended (I refer to Kane's use of groups of manuscripts, not to create a tree but to limit support for a reading to the exclusive common ancestor of the group). But it is in that area of textual studies more generally called bibliography that McKenzie launched his attack. Is the current paradigm generally unacceptable here?[35] Have the puzzles become anomalies? The short answer,

so far as I am concerned, is that I do not know. I suspect that the answer is 'no,' or rather 'not quite yet.' Nevertheless I feel concerned enough at the possibility of a shift in our paradigm to prepare the students I teach not only to understand current bibliographic practice but to try to prepare them to respond to a new paradigm.

Of the need for there to be a paradigm, even if its validity is uncertain, I am convinced. A paradigm does not need to be wholly successful:

The most striking example I know of the need being felt for a paradigm when it seems inadequate is in Herman Bondi's response to Heinrich Olbers's paradox that the sky at night, though apparently dark, ought to be light. My concern is not with this paradox but in Bondi's response.[37] Bondi showed that all Olbers's conclusions followed from his assumptions and he then argued that in consequence one of the assumptions must be wrong. Which he chose and why need not trouble us. What is of interest in this context is what Bondi accepted: that the known laws of terrestrial physics (i.e. the paradigm) must apply. To Bondi that assumption could not be usefully rejected since the system of terrestrial physics was all that was known and to abandon it required giving up the whole inquiry. A passage in Bowers's Bibliography and Textual Criticism is relevant here:

It is characteristic of scholars that before taking decisions they require to have "all the evidence." It is this that especially distinguishes the scholar in the pursuit of his studies from the man who must base his decisions upon calculated risk. The bibliographer's and the editor's dilemma is that temperamentally he will think as a scholar but in his actions he will, in Werner Heisenberg's words, "always have to act on insufficient evidence." It is simply not possible to wait until one has all the information before one comes to a conclusion in bibliography or editing. One might wait for ever and attempt nothing. Even when all the evidence is available an 'answer' may still not be scientifically provable. It is exactly as Heisenberg puts it in speaking of life itself: "Even the most important decisions in life must always contain the inevitable element of irrationality. The decision itself is necessary. . . ." The bibliographer and the editor have to realise that their kind of scholarship lies not solely in the collection and arrangement of information (vitally important though that obviously is), nor even in the scientific demonstration and proof of what they have decided (desirable though that is) but in the resolution of problems that are humanistic, not scientific or enumerative. One must, as it were, find the narrow way between Popeian eclecticism and Popperian hypothetico-deduction.[38]

At its highest pitch the work of the bibliographer and the editor is creative. It is not creative in the same way that the original author was creative (and I am not arguing for the continuum of creativity favoured by the Ohio editors of Browning, therefore). Whereas the author, given a certain romantic disposition, can argue that his audience is solely himself, or, hopefully, that it is for all time, the editor's very justification is that he acts in response to the needs, general and scholarly, of his own society, bringing his author's work before the editor's society so that it may be enabled to respond to it. At its simplest this may be no more than a matter of typography (and rarely the editor's responsibility); at a rather higher level it is the provision of matter explicatory and critical; but at its most significant, it is the bringing to bear upon the text of all the scholarship (bibliographical, historical, literary and linguistic) and all the intellectual and aesthetic

insight characteristic of the editor and his age, without being restricted to that age or inhibited by any aspect of it.

It was the new awareness of science and man which developed in the nineteenth century (and which can be seen in the great creative writers as well as the scientists of the time) which came to be applied to textual studies in English literature from the time McKerrow and Greg met at Cambridge in the 1890s. In the work of editors of the twentieth century one can see, covert and unrealised, or explicit and declared, the scientific and socio-realistic concerns of 'the new bibliography' brought to bear on the textual problems posed by the texts they edited. The response to the spirit motivating the understanding of man in society which influences the creative writing of, say, a Zola or a Shaw, or even a Lawrence or a Joyce, influences also that aspect of textual studies which seeks to discover what happened to texts in the societies which produced and transmitted them. This is particularly obvious in the way Kane takes account of the personal involvement of scribes in what they copied and the way this affected the texts that have come down to us.[39] It is this that has led to so many investigations into, say, the Stationers' Company, or Henslowe, and it is precisely this that underlies the second question Bowers poses for editors.[40]