PRESENT PROBLEMS IN ROMANCE PHILOLOGY 269 



exploring, analyzing, comparing, classifying, describing, abstracting, 

 and appraising the unknown wealth of Romance manuscript litera- 

 ture in the libraries, monasteries, and chateaux of France, Italy, and 

 England, and in publishing the results of his investigations in scien- 

 tific form for the benefit of scholars, not to speak of much accom- 

 plished in other directions, has far surpassed the similar work of any 

 other man. Much of the vast store of data thus made available to 

 the philologist and the literary historian still remains to be utilized, 

 and will furnish the rising generation of Romance scholars with an 

 almost inexhaustible supply of information for the further prosecution 

 of their researches. 



Concerning the great body of Italian, French, Provencal, Spanish, 

 Portuguese medieval literature that has already seen the light of day, 

 the point of fact that must here be emphasized is that only a com- 

 paratively small part of it, namely, that which has been published 

 in the past twenty-five years or so, has been edited in accordance 

 with the critical standards of modern scholarship, especially as em- 

 bodied in the canons of textual criticism involved in the classifica- 

 tion of manuscripts and the scientific constitution of texts. There 

 is, by way of example, no critically constituted text of so important 

 a poem as the Old French Roman de la Rose, and even the preliminary 

 work of paving the way, amid the multiplicity of widely scattered 

 manuscripts, for the preparation of such an edition has, if under- 

 taken, never been carried out. In this direction lies an immense 

 amount of useful work for the scholars of the present and the future. 



But still another phase of the work to be done in this direction is 

 becoming one of the most interesting and characteristic manifest- 

 ations of present-day philological scholarship. This consists of the 

 successive reworkings by the original editor, aided by the critical 

 acumen contributed by the world's best scholars, of texts critically 

 constituted at the outset. The most notable recent examples of this 

 are to be seen in Foerster's successive editions of the works of Chretien 

 de Troyes, in which through a long series of years the editor has 

 brought to bear, stroke upon stroke, the resources of his almost 

 incomparable critical scholarship upon the problem of perfecting to 

 the utmost possible degree the condition of his chosen texts. Yet so 

 highly developed has become the critical training of a number of his 

 colleagues that the contributions of the latter to these ameliorations, 

 through the learned periodicals, have become scarcely less numerous 

 and important than those of the editor himself. So that what may 

 be called, at least in degree, a new manifestation of critical scholar- 

 ship that of the cooperative amelioration of philological work 

 has become a recognized condition of the times. 



Of that domain of philology which covers the investigation of 

 obscure literary sources, and the tracing of literary influences through 



