One of the most memorable events-of my college career occurred one day at noon when I was walking up a campus path and encountered, coming towards me, one of my classmates whose name was D. T. Jones. D. T.—sometimes known more familiarly as Delirium Tremens—was also a philosopher. And the moment I saw him approaching I knew that D. T. was in the throes. He came from a family of Primitive Baptists, and he was red-haired, gaunt, and angular, and now as he came towards me everything about him—hair, eyebrows, eyelids, eyes, freckles, even his large and bony hands—shone forth in the sunlight with an excessive and almost terrifying redness.
He was coming up from a noble wood in which we held initiations and took our Sunday strolls. It was also the sacred grove to which we resorted, alone, when we were struggling with the problems of philosophy. It was where we went when we were going through what was known as “the wilderness experience”, and it was the place from which, when “the wilderness experience” was done, we triumphantly emerged.
D. T. was emerging now. He had been there, he told me later, all night long. His “wilderness experience” had been a good one. He came bounding towards me like a kangaroo, leaping into the air at intervals, and the only words he said were:
“I’ve had a Concept!”
Then, leaving me stunned and leaning for support against an ancient tree, he passed on down the path, high-bounding every step or two, to carry the great news to the whole brotherhood.
And still I do not laugh at it. We took philosophy seriously in those days, and each of us had his own. And, together, we had our own “Philosopher”. He was a venerable and noble-hearted man—one of those great figures which almost every college had some years ago, and which I hope they still have. For half a century he had been a dominant figure in the life of the entire state. In his teaching he was a Hegelian. The process of his scholastic reasoning was intricate: it came up out of ancient Greece and followed through the whole series of “developments” down to Hegel. After Hegel—well, he did not supply the answer. But it didn’t matter, for after Hegel we had him—he was our own Old Man.
Our Philosopher’s “philosophy”, as I look back upon it, does not seem important now. It seems to have been, at best, a tortuous and patched-up scheme of other men’s ideas. But what was important was the man himself. He was a great teacher, and what he did for us, and for others before us for fifty years, was not to give us his “philosophy”—but to communicate to us his own alertness, his originality, his power to think. He was a vital force because he supplied to many of us, for the first time in our lives, the inspiration of a questioning intelligence. He taught us not to be afraid to think, to question; he taught us to examine critically the most sacrosanct of our native prejudices and superstitions. So of course, throughout the state, the bigots hated him; but his own students worshipped him to idolatry. And the seed he planted grew—long after Hegel, “concepts”, “moments of negation”, and all the rest of it had vanished into the limbo of forgotten things.
It was at about this time that I began to write. I was editor of the college newspaper, and I wrote stories and poems for our literary magazine, The Burr, of which I was also a member of the editorial staff. The war was going on then. I was too young to be in service, but my first literary attempts may be traced to the patriotic inspiration of the war. I remember one poem (my first, I believe) which was aimed directly at the luckless head of Kaiser Bill. It was called, defiantly: “The Gauntlet”, and was written in the style and meter of “The Present Crisis”, by James Russell Lowell. I remember, too, that it took a high note from the very beginning. The poet, it is said, is the prophet and the bard—the awakened tongue of all his folk. I was all of that. In the name of embattled democracy I let the Kaiser have the works. And I remember two lines in particular that seemed to me to ring out with the very voice of outraged Freedom:
“Thou hast given us the challenge— Pay, thou dog, the cost, and go!”
I remember these lines because they were the occasion of an editorial argument. The more conservative members of the magazine’s staff felt that the epithet, “thou dog”, was too strong—not that the Kaiser didn’t deserve it, but that it jarred rudely upon the high moral elevation of the poem and upon the literary quality of The Burr. Over my vigorous protest, and without regard for the meter of the line, the two words were deleted.
Another poem that I wrote that year was a cheerful one about a peasant in a Flanders field who ploughed up a skull, and then went on quietly about his work while the great guns blasted away and “the grinning skull its grisly secret kept”. I also remember a short story—my first—which was called “A Winchester of Virginia”, and was about the recreant son of an old family who recovered his courage and vindicated his tarnished honour in the charge over the top that took his life. These, so far as I can recall them, were my first creative efforts; it will be seen what an important part the last war played in them.