The Death of a Wandering Scholar

Extract

When a man dies we reflect that he might have lived otherwise and attained to a Times obituary. W. W. Coupe, one of the more reverent of outcasts, would not have been more than mildly amused by a tribute to his spirit in the columns of The Times. But his death should not pass entirely unnoticed. In these days of ‘self-expression’ and gross over-publication we fail to realise just how many unpublished and unpublicised near-geniuses may live and die under the noses of the eminent and accepted arbiters of culture.

Coupe’s work was thinking. He was, in his way, a fine scholar and an interesting philosopher, yet when he died a short while ago only a handful of people knew of his work and were therefore able to recognise the extraordinary brilliance of his analysis. There are many reasons for this, the main one: Coupe. He had no talent for self-advertisement and made little effort at publication. Perhaps he would have enjoyed fame and notoriety, and gained a little happiness from academic distinction, for he was, I imagine, a reckless and ambitious fellow in his youth, and retained to the end an acute sense of humour. But he was by nature observer, analyst, commentator, even perhaps a bird of prey. He did not seek praise, he sought the response of understanding and exchanged ideas. He cared little for the mass, whether of scholars or of newspaper-readers, though he cared always, as every religious man must, for the innocent.