Sunnymount, Malone Park, Belfast.—Discusses his review of Greg’s Calculus of Variants.
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Transcript
Sunnymount, Malone Park, Belfast
June 21st 1929
Dear Sir
I am very glad to learn that my review of the Calculus of Variants was pleasing to you. My interest in textual criticism, tho’ deep & of long standing, being purely theoretic and not backed up by practical experience as an editor, I should not of my own initiative have undertaken to review your book, but when a concatenation of circumstances made it practically imperative that I should do so, I was glad of the opportunity of directing the attention of German scholars to your Essay, more especially because I consider it a great advance on the theory of Textual Criticism as expounded and practised in Germany. I am not fond of reviewing but in this case I enjoyed my task.
I confess I was in doubt when I wrote on p. 182 of my review the formula Σ: [(AB)C] [D(EF)], for I felt you would not have approved of it, but I was overpowered by two reasons. Firstly I thought it desirable to try & denote in this way that the grouping shown in the brackets was for the time being not assumed as an actual logical family but was only the product of compounding Σ: AB, ABC:DEF, Σ: EF. Secondly I thought that on the analogy of Σ: C[D(EF)] I could indicate in this way that the underlying variants could be deduced from the compounded formula, namely by extracting each one of the groups in turn so as to form Σ: AB, Σ: DEF or ABC (i.e. ABC:DEF) and Σ: EF. As regards my reasoning in the second paragraph on p. 182, I should have been prepared immediately to defend it when I wrote it more than a year ago, but in the interim I have rather lost the thread and am so busy that I have not time to search for it again in the rather elaborate notes I then made. Perhaps, as your letter has strongly revived my interest, I may write to you again on this matter, tho’ I beg that you will not in that case devote more attention to my remarks than they may seem to you to deserve. May I add that when you write “your formulas . . . . seem to be erroneous. If ABC is a genetic group surely [AB] [C(DEF)] {2} is ruled out as a genetic grouping,” you seem to me to have overlooked the comma after DEF in the sentence: Nehmen wir nun an, daß DEF, nicht aber ABC genetisch ist . . . (= If we now assume that DEF is genetic, but not ABC)? Of course I was ill-advised to depend on a comma to indicate which of two alternatives I meant to convey; I know well enough that the written form is a weak clue to the accent of the spoken words.
Sincerely yours
R. A. Williams
W. W. Greg Esq.
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{1} Beiblatt zur Anglia, vol. xl. See GREG 2/2, p. 77.
{2} There is a bar over ‘EF’.
