27 October 1967
From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 1, file x. Most of the last paragraph was published in D.I.B. Smith’s Introduction to the conference papers, Editing Eighteenth-Century Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 3. Frye’s remarks were given to the third annual conference on editorial problems at the University of Toronto; according to a hand-written annotation on the typescript, he spoke from notes and wrote the remarks out later at Smith’s request.
It is a privilege, and a genuine pleasure, to be able to speak in the name of the University of Toronto and welcome you, most cordially, to this conference on editorial problems. A conference of editors seems to me a central part of the conception of a community of scholars. I am thinking of what a late colleague of mine once told me about a teacher of his, a Biblical scholar who had been invited by the headmistress of a girls’ school to address her young ladies, mostly aged eleven to fourteen. He spoke for an hour on “Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament,” after which he offered prayer. In the prayer he thanked his Creator, not only for the revelation through his Word, but, he added, “for the power to emend it according to thy will.” The contempt for one’s audience displayed is impressive, but it is also a trifle solipsistic, and I can think of no area of scholarship where solipsism is more dangerous than in editing. This conference is, I understand, concerned mainly with editorial problems of the later eighteenth century: perhaps if editorial conferences had got under way early enough in that century, Bentley might have been deterred from attacking the text of Paradise Lost as though it were a Classical manuscript; and we might have been spared those hundreds of conjectural emendations of Shakespeare which give us, not what Shakespeare wrote, but what he might have written if he had thought of it.
Editors, it seems to me, are in many ways very like elemental spirits. They can be compelled by certain verbal formulas; they ought to be, and sometimes are, for the most part invisible; and, on their own, they have a propensity to, and an unrivalled opportunity for, mischief-making. I am not thinking here of such spectacular examples as Collier and T.J. Wise,1 but of much more routine procedures. In our day every publisher of books and learned journals employs functionaries whose duty it is to see that every twentieth-century text shall be corrupted at its source. This is a part of the editorial zeal for improvement and consistency which in the past has straightened out the metres of difficult poets, brought spelling and punctuation into line with a “policy,” altered syntax, and substituted usual for unusual words, not to speak of such larger matters as bowdlerization and ideological revision. The editorial improvers were already going strong in Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557, and I have occasionally wondered whether the Adam Scriveyn whose incompetence Chaucer cursed so fervently was not, from his own point of view, improving Chaucer’s text instead of corrupting it. Perhaps he too had been guided by some fourteenth-century style manual which instructed him to put commas wherever they were most likely to spoil the rhythm and blur the sense.
The struggle to “establish” something so essentially Protean, even whimsical, as the written word is of course full of frustrations, and it is only fair to say that there is at least as much mischief-making in the authorial process as in the editorial one. Still, the editor’s education is an education in humility, precisely paralleling the education of the critic. The youthful critic starts out full of enthusiasm for the metaphor of the judge: it is he who has been singled out to evaluate the greatest writers of the past, to decide precisely what in them is relevant to our concerns and what must be considered the relative failures in their achievement. Many bitter years later, he discovers that if he judges he will be judged, and not favourably: that the person the critic criticizes is not the poet but himself, and that his function is to interpret his poet and pass judgment only on his own ignorance and insensitivity. The ultimate aim of critic, teacher, and editor alike is to become a transparent medium for whatever one criticizes, teaches, or edits. The first step in achieving such scholarly transparency is to learn to see through oneself and one’s colleagues, which brings me again to welcoming this conference and extending the best wishes for its success.