No More Learning

The Grolier Club edition[37] was constructed on a different principle.
For all those poems which _1633_ contains, that edition was accepted
as the basis; for other poems, the first edition, whichever that
might be. The text of _1633_ is reproduced very closely, even when the
editor leans to the acceptance of a later reading as correct. Only
one or two corrections are actually incorporated in the text. But the
punctuation has been freely altered throughout, and no record of these
changes is preserved in the textual notes even when they affect the
sense. In more than one instance the words of _1633_ are retained
in this edition but are made to convey a different meaning from that
which they bear in the original.

The edition of Donne's poems prepared by Mr. E. K. Chambers[38] for
the _Muses Library_ was not based, like Dr. Grosart's, on a casual
use of individual manuscripts and editions, nor like the Grolier Club
edition on a rigid adherence to the first edition, but on an eclectic
use of all the seventeenth-century editions, supplemented by an
occasional reference to one or other of the manuscript collections,
either at first hand or through Dr. Grosart.

Of these three methods, that of the Grolier Club editor is, there can
be no doubt, the soundest. The edition of 1633 comes to us, indeed,
with no _a priori_ authority. It was not published, or (like the
sermons) prepared for the press[39] by the author; nor (as in the case
of the first folio edition of Shakespeare's plays) was it issued by
the author's executors.
But if we apply to _1633_ the _a posteriori_ tests described by
Dr. Moore in his work on the textual criticism of Dante's _Divina
Commedia_, if we select a number of test passages, passages where
the editions vary, but where one reading can be clearly shown to be
intrinsically the more probable, by certain definite tests,[40] we
shall find that _1633_ is, taken all over, far and away superior to
any other single edition, and, I may add at once, to any _single_
manuscript.

Moreover, any careful examination of the later editions, of their
variations from _1633_, and of the text of the poems which they print
for the first time, shows clearly that some method more trustworthy
than individual preference must be found if we are to distinguish
between those of their variations which have, and those which have
not, some authority behind them; those which are derived from a
fresh reference to manuscript sources, and those which are due to
carelessness, to misunderstanding, or to unwarrantable emendation.
Apart from some such sifting, an edition of Donne based, like Mr.
Chambers', on an eclectic use of the editions is exactly in the same
position as would be an edition of Shakespeare based on an eclectic
use of the Folios, helped out by a quite occasional and quite eclectic
reference to a quarto. A plain reprint of _1633_ like Alford's (of
such poems as he publishes) has fewer serious errors than an eclectic
text.

It is here that the manuscripts come to our aid. To take, indeed, any
single manuscript, as Dr. Grosart did, and select this or that reading
from it as seems to you good, is not a justifiable procedure. This is
simply to add to the editions one more possible source of error. There
is no single manuscript which could with any security be substituted
for _1633_. Our analysis of that edition has made it appear probable
that a manuscript resembling _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ was the source of
a large part of its text. But it would be very rash to prefer _D_,
_H49_, _Lec_ as a whole to _1633_. [41] It corrects some errors in that
edition; it has others of its own. Even _W_, which has a completer
version of some poems than _1633_, in these poems makes some mistakes
which _1633_ avoids.

If the manuscripts are to help us it must be by collating them, and
establishing what one might call the agreement of the manuscripts
whether universal or partial, noting in the latter case the
comparative value of the different groups.