It
is time to protest against this minute style of editing and commenting
great poets. Gulliver's microscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the
Brobdignagian maids of honor "a mole here and there as broad as a
trencher," and we shrink from a cup of the purest Hippocrene after the
critic's solar microscope has betrayed to us the grammatical,
syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical monsters that sprawl in every
drop of it. When a poet has been so much edited as Milton, the temptation
of whosoever undertakes a new edition to see what is not to be seen
becomes great in proportion as he finds how little there is that has not
been seen before.
Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to modernize the spelling of
Milton, for surely the reading of our classics should be made as little
difficult as possible, and he is right also in making an exception of
such abnormal forms as the poet may fairly be supposed to have chosen for
melodic reasons. His exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the
original editions seems, however, to be the less called-for as he himself
appears to admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme in
these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the
thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by immediate inspiration. Yet
Mr. Masson fills nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds,
in which, as if to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as
men's ears differ, he tells us that the short _a_ sound is the same in
_man_ and _Darby_, the short _o_ sound in _God_ and _does_, and what he
calls the long _o_ sound in _broad_ and _wrath_.
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