Dr. G. G. Coulton and the Middle Ages

Extract

The Editor has courteously asked me to reply, and I do so with great pleasure, though in unavoidable haste, since it is almost all I can do to clear up the term’s work before a necessary holiday. Again, I welcome his request that my reply should aim rather at construction than at destruction, if only I may be permitted first to deal very plainly with the two cases which Mr. Clayton quotes as reflecting discredit upon a University which has chosen me for its Lectureship in English. I know the requirements for a Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society, having more than once been asked to stand sponsor to young pupils for that distinction; and even if I had imagined beforehand that these would necessarily include a mastery of the niceties of our language, Mr. Clayton’s article would have disabused me. In my first incriminated sentence, he has been puzzled by a very ordinary construction; after mentioning ‘the serf’ (singular) and ‘the negro’ (singular) I proceed to sum them up in the plural as ‘those simple minds.’ His second point is, that I blunder by speaking of a current as running and as creeping in the same sentence. It is plain that he has forgotten the proverb ‘Still waters run deep,’ and that he is not sufficiently familiar with our standard writers to realize that run, of liquids, does not necessarily imply rapidity. But he might at least have consulted a good dictionary before jumping to the conclusion that my University has blundered in appointing a man whose limitations do not exactly coincide with his own.