TEXTUAL CRITICISM
Let us suppose that an author of our own day has written a book: he
sends his manuscript to the printer; with his own hand he corrects the
proofs, and marks them "Press." A book which is printed under these
conditions comes into our hands in what is, for a document, a very good
condition. Whoever the author may be, and whatever his sentiments and
intentions, we can be certain--and this is the only point that concerns
us at present--that we have before us a fairly accurate reproduction of
the text which he wrote. We are obliged to say "fairly accurate," for if
the author has corrected his proofs badly, or if the printers have not
paid proper attention to his corrections, the reproduction of the
original text is imperfect, even in this specially favourable case.
Printers not unfrequently make a man say something which he never meant
to say, and which he does not notice till too late.
Sometimes it is required to reproduce a work the author of which is
dead, and the autograph manuscript of which cannot be sent to the
printer. This was the case with the _Memoires d'outre-tombe_ of
Chateaubriand, for example; it is of daily occurrence in regard to the
familiar correspondence of well-known persons which is printed in haste
to satisfy the curiosity of the public, and of which the original
manuscript is very fragile. First the text is copied; it is then set up
by the compositor from the copy, which comes to the same thing as
copying it again; this second copy is lastly, or ought to be, collated
(in the proofs) with the first copy, or, better still, with the
original, by some one who takes the place of the deceased author. The
guarantees of accuracy are fewer in this case than in the first; for
between the original and the ultimate reproduction there is one
intermediary the more (the manuscript copy), and it may be that the
original is hard for anybody but the author to decipher. And, in fact,
the text of memoirs and posthumous correspondence is often disfigured by
errors of transcription and punctuation occurring in editions which at
first sight give the impression of having been carefully executed.[65]
Turning now to ancient documents, let us ask in what state they have
been preserved. In nearly every case the originals have been lost, and
we have nothing but copies. Have these copies been made directly from
the originals? No; they are copies of copies. The scribes who executed
them were not by any means all of them capable and conscientious men;
they often transcribed texts which they did not understand at all, or
which they understood incorrectly, and it was not always the fashion, as
it was in the time of the Carlovingian Renaissance, to compare the
copies with the originals.[66]
If our printed books, after the successive revisions of author and
printer's reader, are still but imperfect reproductions, it is only to
be expected that ancient documents, copied and recopied as they have
been for centuries with very little care, and exposed at every fresh
transcription to new risk of alteration, should have reached us full of
inaccuracies.
There is thus an obvious precaution to be taken. Before using a document
we must find out whether its text is "sound"--that is, in as close
agreement as possible with the original manuscript of the author; and
when the text is "corrupt" we must emend it. In using a text which has
been corrupted in transmission, we run the risk of attributing to the
author what really comes from the copyists. There are actual cases of
theories which were based on passages falsified in transmission, and
which collapsed as soon as the true readings were discovered or
restored. Printers' errors and mistakes in copying are not always
innocuous or merely diverting; they are sometimes insidious and capable
of misleading the reader.[67]
One would naturally suppose that historians of repute would always make
it a rule to procure "sound" texts, properly emended and restored, of
the texts they have to consult. That is a mistake. For a long time
historians simply used the texts which they had within easy reach,
without verifying their accuracy. And, what is more, the very scholars
whose business it is to edit texts did not discover the art of restoring
them all at once; not so very long ago, documents were commonly edited
from the first copies, good or bad, that came to hand, combined and
corrected at random. Editions of ancient texts are nowadays mostly
"critical;" but it is not yet thirty years since the publication of the
first "critical editions" of the great works of the middle ages, and the
critical text of some ancient classics (Pausanias, for example) has
still to be constructed.
Not all historical documents have as yet been published in a form
calculated to give historians the security they need, and some
historians still act as if they had not realised that an unsettled text,
as such, requires cautious handling. Still, considerable progress has
been made. From the experience accumulated by several generations of
scholars there has been evolved a recognised method of purifying and
restoring texts. No part of historical method has a more solid
foundation, or is more generally known. It is clearly explained in
several works of popular philology.[68] For this reason we shall here be
content to give a general view of its essential principles, and to
indicate its results.
I. We will suppose a document has not been edited in conformity with
critical rules. How are we to proceed in order to construct the best
possible text? Three cases present themselves.
(_a_) The most simple case is that in which we possess the original, the
author's autograph itself. There is then nothing to do but to reproduce
the text of it with absolute fidelity.[69] Theoretically nothing can be
easier; in practice this elementary operation demands a sustained
attention of which not every one is capable. If any one doubts it, let
him try. Copyists who never make mistakes and never allow their
attention to be distracted are rare even among scholars.
(_b_) Second case. The original has been lost; only a single copy of it
is known. It is necessary to be cautious, for the probability is that
this copy contains errors.
Texts degenerate in accordance with certain laws. A great deal of pains
has been taken to discover and classify the causes and the ordinary
forms of the differences which are observed between originals and
copies; and hence rules have been deduced which may be applied to the
conjectural restoration of those passages in a unique copy of a lost
original which are certainly corrupt (because unintelligible), or are so
in all probability.
Alterations of an original occurring in a copy--"traditional variants,"
as they are called--are due either to fraud or to error. Some copyists
have deliberately modified or suppressed passages.[70] Nearly all
copyists have committed errors of judgment or accidental errors. Errors
of judgment when half-educated and not wholly intelligent copyists have
thought it their duty to correct passages and words in the original
which they could not understand.[71] Accidental errors when they misread
while copying, or misheard while writing from dictation, or when they
involuntarily made slips of the pen.
Modifications arising from fraud or errors of judgment are often very
difficult to rectify, or even to discover. Some accidental errors (the
omission of several lines, for example) are irreparable in the case we
are considering, that of a unique copy. But most accidental errors can
be detected by any one who knows the ordinary forms: confusions of
sense, letters, and words, transpositions of words, letters, and
syllables, dittography (unmeaning repetition of letters or syllables),
haplography (syllables or words written once only where they should have
been written twice), false divisions between words, badly punctuated
sentences, and other mistakes of the same kind. Errors of these various
types have been made by the scribes of every country and every age,
irrespectively of the handwriting and language of the originals. But
some confusions of letters occur frequently in copies of uncial
originals, and others in copies of minuscule originals. Confusions of
sense and of words are explained by analogies of vocabulary or
pronunciation, which naturally vary from language to language and from
epoch to epoch. The general theory of conjectural emendation reduces to
the sketch we have just given; there is no general apprenticeship to the
art. What a man learns is not to restore any text that may be put before
him, but Greek texts, Latin texts, French texts, and so on, as the case
may be; for the conjectural emendation of a text presupposes, besides
general notions on the processes by which texts degenerate, a profound
knowledge of (1) a special language; (2) a special handwriting; (3) _the
confusions (of sense, letters, and words) which were habitual to those
who copied texts of that language written in that style of handwriting_.
To aid in the apprenticeship to the conjectural emendation of Greek and
Latin texts, tabulated lists (alphabetical and systematic) of various
readings, frequent confusions, and probable corrections, have been
drawn up.[72] It is true that they cannot take the place of practical
work, done under the guidance of experts, but they are of very great use
to the experts themselves.[73]
It would be easy to give a list of happy emendations. The most
satisfactory are those whose correctness is obvious palaeographically, as
is the case with the classical emendation by Madvig of the text of
Seneca's Letters (89, 4). The old reading was: "Philosophia unde dicta
sit, apparet; ipso enim nomine fatetur. Quidam et sapientiam ita quidam
finierunt, ut dicerent divinorum et humanorum sapientiam ..."--which
does not make sense. It used to be supposed that words had dropped out
between _ita_ and _quidam_. Madvig pictured to himself the text of the
lost archetype, which was written in capitals, and in which, as was
usual before the eighth century, the words were not separated (_scriptio
continua_), nor the sentences punctuated; he asked himself whether the
copyist, with such an archetype before him, had not divided the words at
random, and he had no difficulty in reading: "...ipso enim nomine
fatetur quid amet. Sapientiam ita quidam finierunt...." Blass, Reinach,
and Lindsay, in the works referred to in the note, mention several other
masterly and elegant emendations. Nor have the Hellenists and Latinists
any monopoly; equally brilliant emendations might be culled from the
works of Orientalists, Romancists, and Germanists, now that texts of
Oriental, Romance, and Germanic languages have been subjected to verbal
criticism. We have already stated that scholarly corrections are
possible even in the text of quite modern documents, reproduced
typographically under the most favourable conditions.
Perhaps no one, in our day, has equalled Madvig in the art of
conjectural emendation. But Madvig himself had no high opinion of the
work of modern scholarship. He thought that the humanists of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, in this respect, better
trained than modern scholars. The conjectural emendation of Greek and
Latin texts is, in fact, a branch of sport, success in which is
proportionate not only to a man's ingenuity and palaeographical instinct,
but also to the correctness, rapidity, and delicacy of his appreciation
of the niceties of the classical languages. Now, the early scholars were
undoubtedly too bold, but they were more intimately familiar with the
classical languages than our modern scholars are.
However that may be, there can be no doubt that numerous texts which
have been preserved, in corrupt form, in unique copies, have resisted,
and will continue to resist, the efforts of criticism. Very often
criticism ascertains the fact of the text having been altered, states
what the sense requires, and then prudently stops, every trace of the
original reading having been obscured by a confused tangle of successive
corrections and errors which it is hopeless to attempt to unravel. The
scholars who devote themselves to the fascinating pursuit of conjectural
criticism are liable, in their ardour, to suspect perfectly innocent
readings, and, in desperate passages, to propose adventurous hypotheses.
They are well aware of this, and therefore make it a rule to draw a very
clear distinction, in their editions, between readings found in
manuscripts and their own restorations of the text.
(_c_) Third case. We possess several copies, which differ from each
other, of a document whose original is lost. Here modern scholars have a
marked advantage over their predecessors: besides being better informed,
they set about the comparison of copies more methodically. The object
is, as in the preceding case, to reconstruct the archetype as exactly as
possible.
The scholars of earlier days had to struggle, as novices have to
struggle now, in a case of this kind, against a very natural and a very
reprehensible impulse--to use the first copy that comes to hand,
whatever its character may happen to be. The second impulse is not much
better--to use the oldest copy out of several of different date. In
theory, and very often in practice, the relative age of the copies is of
no importance; a sixteenth-century manuscript which reproduces a good
lost copy of the eleventh century is much more valuable than a faulty
and retouched copy made in the twelfth or thirteenth century. The third
impulse is still far from being good; it is to count the attested
readings and decide by the majority. Suppose there are twenty copies of
a text; the reading A is attested eighteen times, the reading B twice.
To make this a reason for choosing A is to make the gratuitous
assumption that all the manuscripts have the same authority. This is an
error of judgment; for if seventeen of the eighteen manuscripts which
give the reading A have been copied from the eighteenth, the reading A
is in reality attested only once; and the only question is whether it is
intrinsically better or worse than the reading B.
It has been recognised that the only rational procedure is to begin by
determining in what relation the copies stand to each other. For this
purpose we adopt as our starting-point the incontrovertible axiom that
all the copies which contain the same mistakes in the same passages must
have been either copied from each other or all derived from a copy
containing those mistakes. It is inconceivable that several copyists,
independently reproducing an original free from errors, should all
introduce exactly the same errors; identity of errors attests community
of origin. We shall cast aside without scruple all the copies derived
from a single manuscript which has been preserved. Evidently they can
have no value beyond what is possessed by their common source; if they
differ from it, it can only be in virtue of new errors; it would be
waste of time to study their variations. Having eliminated these, we
have before us none but independent copies, which have been made
directly from the archetype, or secondary copies whose source (a copy
taken directly from the archetype) has been lost. In order to group the
secondary copies into _families_, each of which shall represent what is
substantially the same tradition, we again have recourse to the
comparison of errors. By this method we can generally draw up without
too much trouble a complete genealogical table (_stemma codicum_) of the
preserved copies, which will bring out very clearly their relative
importance. This is not the place to discuss the difficult cases where,
in consequence of too great a number of intermediaries having been lost,
or from ancient copyists having arbitrarily blended the texts of
different traditions, the operation becomes extremely laborious or
impracticable. Besides, in these extreme cases there is no new method
involved: the comparison of corresponding passages is a powerful
instrument, but it is the only one which criticism has at its disposal
for this task.
When the genealogical tree of the manuscripts has been drawn up, we
endeavour to restore the text of the archetype by comparing the
different traditions. If these agree and give a satisfactory text, there
is no difficulty. If they differ, we decide between them. If they
accidentally agree in giving a defective text, we have recourse to
conjectural emendation, as if there were only one copy.
It is, theoretically, much more advantageous to have several independent
copies of a lost original than to have only one, for the mere mechanical
comparison of the different readings is often enough to remove
obscurities which the uncertain light of conjectural criticism would
never have illuminated. However, an abundance of manuscripts is an
embarrassment rather than a help when the work of grouping them has been
left undone or done badly; nothing can be more unsatisfactory than the
arbitrary and hybrid restorations which are founded on copies whose
relations to each other and to the archetype have not been ascertained
beforehand. On the other hand, the application of rational methods
requires, in some cases, a formidable expenditure of time and labour.
Some works are preserved in hundreds of copies all differing from each
other; sometimes (as in the case of the Gospels) the variants of a text
of quite moderate extent are to be counted by thousands; several years
of assiduous labour are necessary for the preparation of a critical
edition of some mediaeval romances. And after all this labour, all these
collations and comparisons, can we be sure that the text of the romance
is sensibly better than it would have been if there had been only two or
three manuscripts to work upon? No. Some critical editions, owing to the
apparent wealth of material applicable to the work, demand a mechanical
effort which is altogether out of proportion to the positive results
which are its reward.
"Critical editions" founded on several copies of a lost original ought
to supply the public with the means of verifying the "_stemma codicum_"
which the editor has drawn up, and should give the rejected variants in
the notes. By this means competent readers are, at the worst, put in
possession, if not of the best possible text, at least of the materials
for constructing it.[74]
II. The results of textual criticism--a kind of cleaning and
mending--are purely negative. By the aid of conjecture, or by the aid of
conjecture and comparison combined, we are enabled to construct, not
necessarily a good text, but the best text possible, of documents whose
original is lost. What we thus effect is the elimination of corrupt and
adventitious readings likely to cause error, and the recognition of
suspected passages as such. But it is obvious that no new information is
supplied by this process. The text of a document which has been restored
at the cost of infinite pains is not worth more than that of a document
whose original has been preserved; on the contrary, it is worth less. If
the autograph manuscript of the AEneid had not been destroyed, centuries
of collation and conjecture would have been saved, and the text of the
AEneid would have been better than it is. This is intended for those who
excel at the "emendation game,"[75] who are in consequence fond of it,
and would really be sorry to have no occasion to play it.
III. There will, however, be abundant scope for textual criticism as
long as we do not possess the exact text of every historical document.
In the present state of science few labours are more useful than those
which bring new texts to light or improve texts already known. It is a
real service to the study of history to publish unedited or badly edited
texts in a manner conformable to the rules of criticism. In every
country learned societies without number are devoting the greater part
of their resources and activity to this important work. But the immense
number of the texts to be criticised,[76] and the minute care required
by the operations of verbal criticism,[77] prevent the work of
publication and restoration from advancing at any but a slow pace.
Before all the texts which are of interest for mediaeval and modern
history shall have been edited or re-edited _secundum artem_, a long
period must elapse, even supposing that the relatively rapid pace of the
last few years should be still further accelerated.[78]