Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/24

 xiv very few after all—that offend one, but there is no impurity to give offence in the writings of Cervantes.

The text I have followed generally is Hartzenbusch's. But Hartzenbusch, though the most scholarly of the editors and commentators of "Don Quixote," is not always an absolutely safe guide. His text is preferable to that of the Academy in being, as far as the First Part is concerned, based upon the first of La Cuesta's three editions, instead of the third, which the Academy took as its basis on the supposition (an erroneous one, as I have shown elsewhere) that it had been corrected by Cervantes himself. His emendations are frequently admirable, and remove difficulties and make rough places smooth in a manner that must commend itself to every intelligent reader; but his love and veneration for Cervantes too often get the better of the judicious conservatism that should be an editor's guiding principle in dealing with the text of an old author. Notwithstanding the abundant evidence before him that Cervantes was—to use no stronger word—a careless writer, he insists upon attributing every blunder, inconsistency, or slipshod or awkward phrase to the printers. Cervantes, he argues, wrote a hasty and somewhat illegible hand, his failing eyesight made revision or correction of his manuscript an irksome task to him, and the printers were consequently often driven to conjecture. He considers himself, therefore, at liberty to reject whatever jars upon his sense of propriety, and substitute what, in his judgment, Cervantes "must have written."

It is needless to point out the destructive results that would follow the adoption of this principle in settling the text of old authors. In Hartzenbusch's "Don Quixote" it has led to a good deal of unnecessary tampering with the text, and, in not a few instances, to something that is the reverse of emendation. He is not, therefore, by any means an editor to be slavishly followed, though all who know his editions will cordially acknowledge his services, among which may be reckoned his judicious arrangement of the text into paragraphs, and the care he has bestowed upon the punctuation, matters too much neglected by his predecessors. Nor is the valuable body of notes he has brought together the least of them. In this respect he comes next to Clemencin; but the industry and erudition of that indefatigable commentator have left comparatively few gleanings for those who come after him. 