“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 some one 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 to-night 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.