No More Learning

They found
Donne difficult alike to understand and to appreciate, and accordingly
I undertook to read with them a selection from his poems with a view
to elucidating difficult passages and illustrating the character
of his 'metaphysics', the Scholastic and scientific doctrines which
underlie his conceits. The only editions which we had at our disposal
were the modern editions of Donne's poems by Grosart and Chambers, but
I did not anticipate that this would present any obstacle to the task
I had undertaken. About the same time the Master of Peterhouse asked
me to undertake the chapter on Donne, as poet and prose-artist, for
the _Cambridge History of English Literature_. The result was that
though I had long been interested in Donne, and had given, while at
work on the poetry of the seventeenth century, much thought to his
poetry as a centre of interest and influence, I began to make a more
minute study of the text of his poems than I had yet attempted.

The first result of this study was the discovery that there were
several passages in the poems, as printed in Mr. Chambers' edition,
of which I could give no satisfactory explanation to my class. At
the close of the session I went to Oxford and began in the Bodleian
a rapid collation of the text of that edition with the older copies,
especially of 1633. The conclusion to which I came was that, excellent
in many ways as that edition is, the editor had too often abandoned
the reading of 1633 for the sometimes more obvious but generally
weaker and often erroneous emendations of the later editions. As he
records the variants this had become clear in some cases already, but
an examination of the older editions brought out another fact,--that
by modernizing the punctuation, while preserving no record of the
changes made, the editor had corrupted some passages in such a manner
as to make it impossible for a student, unprovided with all the old
editions, to recover the original and sometimes quite correct reading,
or to trace the error to its fountainhead.

My first proposal to the Delegates of the Clarendon Press was that I
should attempt an edition of Donne's poems resting on a collation of
the printed texts; that for all poems which it contains the edition
of 1633 should be accepted as the authority, to be departed from only
when the error seemed to be obvious and certain, and that all such
changes, however minute, should be recorded in the notes. In the
case of poems not contained in the edition of 1633, the first edition
(whether 1635, 1649, 1650, or 1669) was to be the authority and to be
treated in the same fashion. Such an edition, it was hoped, might be
ready in a year. I had finished my first collation of the editions
when a copy of the Grolier Club edition came into my hands, and I
included it in the number of those which I compared throughout with
the originals.

While the results of this collation confirmed me in the opinion I
had formed as to the superiority of the edition of 1633 to all
its successors, it showed also that that edition was certainly not
faultless, and that the text of those poems which were issued only in
the later editions was in general very carelessly edited and corrupt,
especially of those poems which were added for the first time in 1669.
This raised the question, what use was to be made of the manuscript
copies of the poems in correcting the errors of the edition?
Grosart
had based his whole text on one or two manuscripts in preference to
the editions. Mr. Chambers, while wisely refusing to do this, and
adopting the editions as the basis of his text, had made frequent
reference to the manuscripts and adopted corrections from them.
Professor Norton made no use of the manuscripts in preparing the text
of his edition, but he added in an Appendix an account of one of these
which had come into his hands, and later he described some more and
showed clearly that he believed corrections were to be obtained from
this source. Accordingly I resolved to examine tentatively those which
were accessible in the British Museum, especially the transcript of
three of the _Satyres_ in Harleian MS. 5110.

A short examination of the manuscripts convinced me that it would be
very unsafe to base a text on any single extant manuscript, or even to
make an eclectic use of a few of them, taking, now from one, now
from another, what seemed a probable emendation. On the other hand
it became clear that if as wide a collation as possible of extant
manuscripts were made one would be able to establish in many cases
what was, whether right or wrong, the traditional reading before any
printed edition appeared.

A few experiments further showed that one, and a very important,
result of this collation would be to confirm the trustworthiness of
1633, to show that in places where modern editors had preferred the
reading of some of the later editions, generally 1635 or 1669, the
text of 1633 was not only intrinsically superior but had the support
of tradition, i. e. of the majority of the manuscripts. If this were
the case, then it was also possible that the traditional, manuscript
text might afford corrections when 1633 had fallen into error. At the
same time a very cursory examination of the manuscripts was sufficient
to show that many of them afforded an infinitely more correct and
intelligible text of those poems which were not published in 1633 than
that contained in the printed editions.

Another possible result of a wide collation of the manuscripts soon
suggested itself, and that was the settlement of the canon of Donne's
poems. One or two of the poems contained in the old editions had
already been rejected by modern editors, and some of these on the
strength of manuscript ascriptions. But on the one hand, no systematic
attempt had been made to sift the poems, and on the other, experience
has shown that nothing is more unsafe than to trust to the ascriptions
of individual, unauthenticated manuscripts.