“P. 8, l. 8, distinguished not only] Wilkin (T) read ‘not only distinguished.’”
And this is weirder still:
“P. 59, l. 4, antimetathesis, C to M; antanaclasis, A, B; transposition of words, N, O.”
It may easily be surmised that eighty-eight pages of such concentrated and deadly erudition weigh very heavily on the unscholarly soul. We are reminded forcibly of the impatience manifested by Mr. E. S. Dallas, in The Gay Science, over Person’s notes on Euripides, from which he had hoped so much and gleaned so little; which were all about words and less than words—syllables, letters, accents, punctuation.
“Codex A and Codex B, Codex Cantabrigiensis and Codex Cottonianus, were ransacked in turn to show how this noun should be in the dative, not in the accusative; how that verb should have the accent paroxytone, not perispomenon; and how, by all the rules of prosody, there should be an iambus, not a spondee, in this place or that.” The lad who has heard all his college life about the wonderful supplement to the Hecuba turns to it with wistful eyes, expecting to find some subtle key to Greek tragedy. “Behold, it is a treatise on certain Greek metres. Its talk is of cæsural pauses, penthemimeral and hephthemimeral, of isochronous feet, of enclitics and cretic terminations; and the grand doctrine it promulgates is expressed in the canon regarding the pause which, from the discoverer, has been named the Porsonian—that when the iambic trimeter after a word of more than one syllable has the cretic termination included either in one word or in two, then the fifth foot must be an iambus. The young student throws down the book thus prefaced and supplemented, and wonders if this be all that giants of Porsonian height can see or care to speak about in Greek literature.”
But then be it remembered that Euripides, as edited by Porson, was intended for the use of scholars, and there exists an impression—perhaps erroneous—that this is the sort of food for which scholars hunger and thirst. Sir Thomas Browne has, happily, not yet passed out of the hands of the general reader, whose appetite for intellectual abstraction and the rigors of precision is distinctly moderate, and in whose behalf I urge my plea to-day.
After the oppressively erudite notes come those which interpret trifles with painstaking fidelity, and which reveal to us the meaning of quite familiar words. In Ferrier’s admirable edition of the Noctes Ambrosianæ, for example, we are told with naïve gravity that “wiselike” means “judicious,” that “glowering” means “staring,” that “parritch” is “porridge,” that “guffaw” is a “loud laugh,” that “douce” is “sedate,” that “gane” is “gone,” and that “in a jiffy” means “immediately.” But surely the readers of Christopher North do not require information like this. “Douce” and “parritch” and “guffaw” are not difficult words to understand, and “in a jiffy” would seem to come within the intellectual grasp of many who have not yet made the acquaintance of the alphabet.
It may be, however, that there are people who really like to be instructed in this manner, just as there are people who like to go to lectures and to organ recitals. It may even be that a taste for notes, like a taste for gin, or opium, or Dr. Ibsen’s dramas, increases with what it feeds on. In that tiny volume of Selected Poems by Gray which Mr. Gosse has edited for the Clarendon Press, there are forty-two pages of notes to sixty pages of poetry; and while some of them are valuable and interesting, many more seem strangely superfluous. But Mr. Gosse, who has his finger on the literary pulse of his generation, is probably the last man in England to furnish information unless it is desired. He knows, better than most purveyors of knowledge, what it is that readers want; he is not prone to waste his precious minutes; he has a saving sense of humor; and he does not aspire to be a lettered philanthropist fretting to enlighten mankind. If, then, he finds it necessary to elucidate that happy trifle, On the Death of a Favorite Cat, with no less than seven notes, which is at the rate of one for every verse, it must be that he is filling an expressed demand; it must be that he is aware that modern students of Gray—every one who reads a poet is a “student” nowadays—like to be told by an editor about Tyrian purple, and about Arion’s dolphin, and about the difference between a tortoise-shell and a tabby. As for the seven pages of notes that accompany the Elegy, they carry me back in spirit to the friend of my childhood, Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond, who was expected to understand every word of every poem she studied. What a blessing Mr. Gosse’s notes would have been to that poor, dear, misguided little girl, who rashly committed the Elegy to memory because, in honest, childish fashion, she loved its pretty sound! Who can forget the pathetic scene where she attempts to recite it, and has only finished the first line,
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,”
when Godfrey, whom I always thought, and still think, a very disagreeable boy, interrupts her ruthlessly.