theoryofliteratu00inwell

CHAPTER VI
The Ordering- and Establishing;: of Evidence
One of the first tasks of scholarship is the assembly of its
materials, the careful undoing of the effects of time, the examination
as to authorship, authenticity, and date. Enormous acumen
and diligence have gone into the solution of these problems j yet
the literary student will have to realize that these labors are
preliminary to the ultimate task of scholarship. Often the im-
portance of these operations is particularly great, since without
them, critical analysis and historical understanding would be
hopelessly handicapped. This is true in the case of a half-buried
literary tradition such as that of Anglo-Saxon literature ; but for
the student of most modern literatures, concerned with the
literary meaning of the works, the importance of these studies
should not be overrated. They have either been needlessly ridi-
culed because of their pedantry or glorified for their supposed or
real exactitude. The neatness and perfection with which certain
problems can be solved have always attracted minds which enjoy
orderly procedure and the intricacies of manipulation, quite apart
from any final significance which they may have. These studies
need to be criticized adversely only when they usurp the place
of other studies and become a specialty mercilessly imposed on
every student of literature. Literary works have been edited
meticulously, passages emended and debated in the greatest de-
tail which, from a literary or even historical point of view, are
not worth discussing at all. Or, if they are worth it, have had
only the kind of attention the textual critic gives to a book. Like
other human activities, these exercises often become ends in
themselves.
Among these preliminary labors one has to distinguish two
levels of operations: ( i) the assembling and preparing of a text;
and (2) the problems of chronology, authenticity, authorship,
collaboration, revision and the like, which have been frequently
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