THE word “text” properly denotes a literary work, conceived of as a mere thing, as a texture woven of words instead of threads. It designates neither, on the one side, the book which contains the text, nor, on the other side, the sense which the text conveys. It is not the matter of the discourse, nor the manner of it, whether logical, rhetorical, or grammatical. It is simply the web of words itself. It is with this understanding that the text of any work is concisely defined as the ipsissima verba of that work.
The word, which came into Middle English from the French where it stands as the descendant of the Latin word textum, retains in English the figurative sense only of its primitive, yet owes it to its origin that it describes a composition as a woven thing, as a curiously interwoven cloth or tissue of words. Once a part of the English language, it has grown with the growth of that tongue, and has acquired certain special usages. We usually need to speak of the exact words of an author only in contrast with something else, and thus “text” has come to designate a composition upon which a commentary has been written, so that it distinguishes the words commented on from the comments that have been added. Thus we speak of the text of the Talmud as lost in the comment. And thus, too, by an extreme extension, we speak of the text of a sermon, meaning, not the ipsissima verba of the sermon, but the little piece of the original author on which the sermon professes to be a comment. By a somewhat similar extension we speak of texts of Scripture, meaning, not various editions of its ipsissima verba, but brief extracts from Scripture, as for example proof texts and the like;—a usage which appears to have grown up under the conception that all developed theology is of the nature of a comment on Scripture. Such secondary senses of the word need not disturb us here. They are natural developments out of the ground meaning, as applied to special cases. We are to use the word in its general and original sense, in which it designates the ipsissima verba, the woven web of words, which constitutes the concrete thing by which a book is made a work, but which has nothing directly to do with the sense, correctness, or the value of the work.
There is an important distinction, however, which we should grasp at the outset, between the text of a document and the text of a work. A document can have but one text; its ipsissima verba are its ipsissima verba, and there is nothing further to say about it. But a work may exist in several copies, each of which has its own ipsissima verba, which may, or may not, tally with one another. The text of any copy of Shakespeare that is placed in my hands is plainly before me. But the text of Shakespeare is a different matter. No two copies of Shakespeare,—or now, since we have to reckon with the printing press, we must rather say no two editions,—have precisely the same text. There are all kinds of causes that work differences: badness of copy, carelessness of compositors, folly of editors, imperfection of evidence, frailty of humanity. We know what the text of Karl Elze’s Hamlet is. But what is the text of Hamlet? We cannot choose any one edition, and say that it is the text of Hamlet; it is one text of Hamlet, but not necessarily the text of Hamlet. We cannot choose one manuscript of Homer, and say that it is the text of Homer. It is a text of Homer, but the text of Homer may be something very different. We note, then, that the text of a document and the text of a work may be very different matters. The text of a document is the ipsissima verba of that document, and is to be had by simply looking at it; whatever stands actually written in it is its text. The text of a work, again, is the ipsissima verba of that work, but it cannot be obtained by simply looking at it. We cannot look at the work, but only at the documents or “copies” that represent it; and what stands written in them, individually or even collectively, may not be the ipsissima verba of the work,—by exactly the amount, in each case, in which it is altered or corrupted from what the author intended to write, is not the ipsissima verba of the work. If, then, the text of a document or copy of any work is the ipsissima verba of that document or copy, the text of the work is what ought to be the ipsissima verba of all the documents or copies that profess to represent it,—it is the original, or, better still, the intended ipsissima verba of the author. It may not lie in the document before us, or in any document. All existing documents, taken collectively, may fail to contain it. It may never have lain, perfect and pure, in any document. But if an element of ideality thus attaches to it, it is none the less a very real thing and a very legitimate object of search. It is impossible, no doubt, to avoid a certain looseness of speech, by which we say, for example, “The text of Nonius is in a very bad state;” and thus identify the text of a work with some transitory state of it, or it may be with the permanent loss of it. What we mean is that the text in this or that document or edition, or in all existing documents or editions, is a very bad and corrupt representation of the text of Nonius,—is not the text of Nonius at all, in fact, but departs from, and fails to be, that in many particulars. The text of Nonius, in a word, is just what we have not and are in search of.