“So is a tree or a telephone-pole. No, I’m afraid that will not do. Does the class agree with Mr. Willis?”
“A stick is a piece of wood cut off at a certain length.”
“Then we agree, Mr. Ransom, that a stick is not simply wood with unlimited extension?”
The stunned peasant’s face with its blink of effort.
“I see that Mr. Gant is leaning forward in his seat. There is a light in his face that I have seen there before. Mr. Gant will not sleep of nights, for thinking.”
“A stick,” said Eugene, “is not only wood but the negation of wood. It is the meeting in Space of Wood and No-Wood. A stick is finite and unextended wood, a fact determined by its own denial.”
The old head listens gravely above the ironic intake of their breath. He will bear me out and praise me, for I am measured against this peasant earth. He sees me with the titles of proud office; and he loves victory.
“We have a new name for him, Professor Weldon,” said Nick Mabley. “We call him Hegel Gant.”
He listened to their shout of laughter; he saw their pleased faces turn back on him. That was meant well. I shall smile—their Great Original, the beloved eccentric, the poet of substantial yokels.
“That’s a name he may be worthy of,” said Vergil Weldon seriously.
Old Fox, I too can juggle with your phrases so they will never catch me. Over the jungle of their wits our unfoiled minds strike irony and passion. Truth? Reality? The Absolute? The Universal? Wisdom? Experience? Knowledge? The Fact? The Concept? Death—the great negation? Parry and thrust, Volpone! Have we not words? We shall prove anything. But Ben, and the demon-flicker of his smile? Where now?
The Spring comes back. I see the sheep upon the hill. The belled cows come along the road in wreaths of dust, and the wagons creak home below the pale ghost of the moon. But what stirs within the buried heart? Where are the lost words? And who has seen his shadow in the Square?
“And if they asked you, Mr. Rountree?”
“I’d have told the truth,” said Mr. Rountree, removing his glasses.
“But they had built a good big fire, Mr. Rountree.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Rountree, putting his glasses on again.
How nobly we can die for truth—in conversation.
“It was a very hot fire, Mr. Rountree. They’d have burned you if you hadn’t recanted.”
“Ah. I’d have let them burn,” said the martyred Rountree through moistening spectacles.
“I think it might be painful,” Vergil Weldon suggested. “Even a little blister hurts.”
“Who wants to be burned for anything?” said Eugene. “I’d have done what Galileo did—backed out of it.”
“So should I,” said Vergil Weldon, and their faces arched with gleeful malice over the heavy laughter of the class.
Nevertheless, it moves.
“On one side of the table stood the combined powers of Europe; on the other stood Martin Luther, the son of a blacksmith.”
The voice of husky passion, soul-shaken. This they can remember, and put down.
“There, if ever, was a situation to try the strongest soul. But the answer came like a flash. Ich kann nicht anders—I can’t do otherwise. It was one of the great utterances of history.”
That phrase, used now for thirty years, relic of Yale and Harvard: Royce and Munsterberg. In all this jugglery, the Teutons were Weldon’s masters, yet mark how thirstily the class lap it up. He will not let them read, lest someone find the rag-quilt of his takings from Zeno to Immanuel Kant. The crazy patchwork of three thousand years, the forced marriage of irreconcilables, the summation of all thought, in his old head. Socrates begat Plato. Plato begat Plotinus. Plotinus begat St. Augustine … Kant begat Hegel. Hegel begat Vergil Weldon. Here we pause. There’s no more to beget. An Answer to All Things in Thirty Easy Lessons. How sure they are they’ve found it!
And tonight they will carry their dull souls into his study, will make unfleshly confessions, will writhe in concocted tortures of the spirit, revealing struggles that they never had.
“It took character to do a thing like that. It took a man who refused to crack under pressure. And that is what I want my boys to do! I want them to succeed! I want them to absorb their negations. I want them to keep as clean as a hound’s tooth!”
Eugene winced, and looked around on all the faces set in a resolve to fight desperately for monogamy, party politics, and the will of the greatest number.
And yet the Baptists fear this man! Why? He has taken the whiskers off their God, but for the rest, he has only taught them to vote the ticket.
So here is Hegel in the Cotton Belt!
During these years Eugene would go away from Pulpit Hill, by night and by day, when April was a young green blur, or when the Spring was deep and ripe. But he liked best to go away by night, rushing across a cool Spring countryside full of dew and starlight, under a great beach of the moon ribbed with clouds.
He would go to Exeter or Sydney; sometimes he would go to little towns he had never before visited. He would register at hotels as “Robert Herrick,” “John Donne,” “George Peele,” “William Blake,” and “John Milton.” No one ever said anything to him about it. The people in those small towns had such names. Once he registered at a hotel, in a small Piedmont town, as “Ben Jonson.”
The clerk spun the book critically.
“Isn’t there an h in that name?” he said.
“No,” said Eugene. “That’s another branch of the family. I have an uncle, Samuel, who spells his name that way.”
Sometimes, at hotels of ill-repute, he would register, with dark buried glee, as “Robert Browning,” “Alfred Tennyson,” and “William Wordsworth.”
Once he registered as “Henry W. Longfellow.”
“You can’t fool me,” said the clerk, with a hard grin of disbelief. “That’s the name of a writer.”
He was devoured by a vast strange hunger for life. At night, he
