.BOOKS OF THE DAY
A Scholar's Memories
Fourscore Years. By G. G. Coulton. (Cambridge University Press. 2
ONE reason why there is so much that is admirable in Dr. Coulton's autobiography is that there is so much that is admirable in Dr. Coulton's life. It gave no early promise of being a distinguished life. Born at Lynn, in Norfolk, of a not too affluent middle-class family, Coulton went to a dame's school and the local grammar school and then to Felsted, whence, after failing in attempts at Wadham and Trinity Hall, he got the first classical scholarship at St. Catherine's in 1877. Cats was a small college, and the anec- dotes with which Coulton fills the chapters dealing with his undergraduate years mainly concern men, since famous, of other foundations, and excellent anecdotes most or all of them are. Cambridge ended disappointingly with an aegrotat degree, not the best of qualificaiions for the years of teaching that followed—at a preparatory school at Malvern, at Llandovery, at Heidelberg, at Sherborne, at Sedbergh, at Dulwich, and finally, so far as school- work was concerned, at a preparatory school at Eastbourne. Early in that career Coulton had taken deacon's orders, largely under Dean Vaughan's influence ; but questionings about points in the Thirty-Nine Articles and other canons of orthodox belief combined with Coulton's almost abnormal honesty of mind to turn his activities into other channels after he had held curacies for a couple of years. In 1903, at the age of forty-five, he married (like H. A. L. Fisher) a daughter of Sir Courtenay Ilbert.
Life from then on has consisted for Coulton of lecturing and writing, with late rewards, just the rewards he would have desired most and least expected, in the surprise offer of a Fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge, after the end of the last war, with no conditions attached except the execution of his own self-imposed tasks in the field he had made his own, mediaeval history, par- ticularly ecclesiastical. As a Fellow of John's, with a home that was all he would wish it and an income which in a peak year rose to D,5oo, Coulton had attained to what is revealed in chapter after chapter of his book as a characteristically Horatian happiness. That is what gives the book its charm. Life has brought no wealth, no academic honours above the average, no hold on the ear of a large public—for Coulton's learned and authoritative works are mainly books for scholars—but he has drawn from it at every point and in every field all the best it had to offer, and his autobiography (he writes from across the Atlantic, whither he went at eighty, not for a moment as one who pines by Arno for his lovelier Tees) is charged with a quiet satisfaction that to those who will take it so may serve both as lesson and inspiration.
That does not mean for a moment that Coulton's life has been passed in backwaters. On the contrary, he had an almost uncanny knack of striking against people worth knowing, even at private schools. At Sherbome, L. N. Parker, the future pageant-master, was teaching music ; at Sedbergh there was H. W. Fowler, of
Modern English Usage fame ; at Eastbourne there was Laurence Oates, commemorated for ever in his death by Captain Scott's diaries ; at Eastbourne, too, there were walks on the Downs with C. M. Doughty and others. Everywhere he has gone in life Coulton has gained something by his contacts, and found something in them to hand on to readers of this most satisfying book. That is true particularly of his two periods, more than a human generation apart, at Cambridge. One remarkable piece of history, handed down from Henry Jackson via McTaggart, is that the Latin Prize Poem in 1863 was awarded to F. W. H. Myers for the second year in succession ; but the award was cancelled because it was found that out of about a hundred lines of the composition some twenty-five had been taken from Oxford prize poems. But the book is full of anecdotes, most of them new and all of them entertaining. Through it all is revealed a gallant spirit, taking life as life comes, combative if need be in controversy, unambitious for material things, and in the ninth decade tranquil and content. WILSON HARRIS.
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