It is time, however, to return for a moment to Shakespeare, and to observe in one crucial instance the effect of the quest for logic in a single line. In the fine scene where John hints to Hubert at Arthur's murder, he speaks these lines (in the First Folio text):--
'I had a thing to say, but let it goe: The Sunne is in the heauen, and the proud day, Attended with the pleasure of the world, Is all too wanton, and too full of gawdes To giue me audience: If the midnight bell Did with his yron tongue, and brazen mouth Sound on into the drowzie race of night, If this same were a Churchyard where we stand, And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs: ... Then, in despight of brooded watchfull day, I would into thy bosome poure my thoughts....'
If one had to choose the finest line in this passage, the choice would fall upon
'Sound on into the drowsy race of night.'
Yet you will have to look hard for it in the modern editions of Shakespeare. At the best you will find it with the mark of corruption:--
+'Sound on into the drowsy race of night ('Globe');
'Sound one into the drowsy race of night' ('Oxford').
There are six pages of close-printed comment upon the line in the _Variorum_. The only reason, we can see, why it should be the most commented line in _King John_ is that it is one of the most beautiful. No one could stand it. Of all the commentators, only one, Miss Porter, whom we name _honoris causa_, stands by the line with any conviction of its beauty. Every other person either alters it or regrets his inability to alter it.
'How can a bell sound on into a race?' pipe the little editors. What is 'the race of night?' What _can_ it mean? How _could_ a race be drowsy? What an _awful_ contradiction in terms! And so while you and I, and all the other ordinary lovers of Shakespeare are peacefully sleeping in our beds, they come along with their little chisels, and chop out the horribly illogical word and pop in a horribly logical one, and we (unless we can afford the _Variorum_, which we can't) know nothing whatever about it. We have no redress. If we get out of our beds and creep upon them while they are asleep--they never are--and take out our little chisels and chop off their horribly stupid little heads, we shall be put in prison and Mr Justice Darling will make a horribly stupid little joke about us. There is only one thing to do. We must make up our minds that we have to combine in our single person the scholar and the amateur; we cannot trust these gentlemen.