Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CRITICISM.
BY HENRY JOHN CHAYTOR, M.A., LITT.D.,
MASTER OF ST. CATHARINE'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
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M. K. Pope an article upon textual emendation in which he
analysed the mental processes incident to the copying of a manuscript, and showed with much penetration how such mistakes
as those classified under the names homoioteleuton ", " dittography " and similar aberrations can occur. But this ingenious
analysis and the diagrams which illustrate it seem to labour under
one defect ; they assume that the medieval scribe adopted exactly
the mental attitude that one of ourselves would assume if he
were occupied in copying a manuscript for his own purposes.
This was certainly not the case, for the reason that we gain the
majority of our information and ideas from printed matter,
whkreas the medieval obtained them orally. " Sound and
sight, speech and print, eye and ear have nothing in common.
T h e human brain has done nothing that compares in complexity
with this fusion of ideas involved in linking
the two forms i f
language. But the result of the fusion is that once it is achieved
in our early years, we are for ever after unable to think clearly,
independently and surely about any one aspect of the matter.
We cannot think of sounds without thinking of letters ; we
believe that letters have sounds. We think the printed page is
a picture of what we say. We believe we ought to speak as we
write, and that the mysterious thing called ' spelling9 is sacred.
The invention of printing broadcast the printed language
and gave to print a degree of authority that it has never lost." a
We do not even read as the medieval scribe read. If we take a
line of printed matter, cut it lengthways in half, so that the upper
half of the lettering is exactly divided from the lower half, and
hand the slips to two friends, we shall probably find that the
man with the upper half will read the line more easily than the
man with the lower half; the eye of the practised reader does
not take in the whole of the lettering, but merely so much as will
suggest the remainder to his experienced intelligence. It is by
visual practice that we master the vagaries of English orthography and so-called bad spellers are often those who are
misled by inability to exclude auditory reminiscences ; people
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THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
" quelsuefois
plus attentif A sa calligraphic qu'au sens de son
" (introd. p. xiv). In vv. 697-701 of the poem he
produced an anacoluthon by writing et three times instead of at.
f i e editor's explanation illustrates the point of this article:
" I1 reste B expliquer pourquoi le scribe a Ccrit et pour est aux
vers 697, 698, et 701. Nous croyons &re en prksence d'un
phdnomkne qui expliquerait mainte faute ' orale ' de copie dans
les manuscrits et qui, du point de vue psychologique, est des
plus vraisemblables : le scribe, en copiant, se prononqait iz luim h e (editor's italics) les mots et ainsi, en quelque sorte, Ccrivait
comme si quelqu'un les lui dictait, en effet ; il voyait est, il
entendait le son approximatif d'e fermC, il Ccrivait et, les deux
mots ayant, A cette Cpoque, trks probablement le meme son.
A cet endroit, un tel fait est rendu plus probable par 1'Ctat m6me
du texte, car la phrase qu'il copiait est si peu claire qu'un scribe
qui n'aurait pas l'original Latin sous les yeux n'y verrait peutetre qu'une sCrie de phrases prCpositionnelles toutes d'une m6me
portCe.
There are other discrepancies in this scribe's
orthography which might be explained upon the same principle.
Instances can be found elsewhere without difficulty; Paul
Meyeis remarks upon the scribe of the unique manuscript of
Guillaume le Markha1 (vol. iii, pp. cxxxvi ff .) show that he was an
Englishman imposing his own orthography upon a French
original which he was copying, and several of his deformations
of place and proper names with which he was not familiar are
due to his reliance upon auditory memory.
Instances in which the difference between auditory and
visual memory can be made a basis for emendation will naturally
vary in frequency with the education and capacity of the scribe.
On the whole, the orthography of texts jn the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is surprisingly uniform and suggests an elaboration of rules and a training of scribes more extensive than might
have been expected at so early a period. But training and experience varied in different cases. Editors have to estimate and do
estimate the capacity of any scribe with whose work they have to
deal ; such work cannot be subjected to fixed rules and the
authors of it must be treated as individuals.
. . ."