94
PARTISAN REVIEW
Blackburn beamed. "I'm so glad you feel that way about it, sir.
I was worried you might think I had stayed away because I was influ·
enced by --" He stopped and lowered his eyes.
Astonished, Howe said, "Influenced by what?"
"Well, by --" Blackburn hesitated and for answer pointed to the
table on which lay the copy of
Life and Letters.
Without looking at it,
he knew where to direct his hand. "By the unfavorable publicity, sir."
He hurried on. "And that brings me to another point, sir. I am -vice–
president of Quill and Scroll, sir, the student literary society,· and I
wonder
if
you would address us. You could read your own poetry, sir, and
defend your own point of view. It would be very interesting."
It was truly amazing. Howe looked long and cruelly into Black·
burn's face, trying to catch the secret of the mind that could have con·
ceived this way of manipulating him, this way so daring and inept-but not
entirely inept-with its malice so without malignity. The face did not
yield its secret. Howe smiled broadly and said, "Of course I don't think
you were influenced by the unfavorable publicity."
"I'm still going to take--regularly, for credit-your romantic poets
course next term," Blackburn said.
"Don't worry, my dear fellow, don't worry about it."
Howe started to leave and Blackburn stopped him with, "But about
Quill, sir?"
"Suppose we wait until next term? Pll be less busy then."
And Blackburn said, "Very good, sir, and thank you."
In his office the little encounter seemed less funny to Howe, was
even in some indeterminate way disturbing. He made an effort to put
it
from his mind by turning to what was sure to disturb him more, the
Tertan letter read in the new interpretation. He found what he had
always found, the same florid leaps beyond fact and meaning, the same
headlong certainty. But as his eye passed over the familiar scrawl it
caught his own name and for the second time that hour he felt the race
of his blood.
"The Paraclete," Tertan had written to the Dean, "from a Greek
word meaning to stand in place of, but going beyond the primitive idea
to mean traditionally the helper, the one who comforts and assists, cannot
without fundamental loss
he
jettisoned. Even
if
taken no longer in the
supernatu;al sense, the concept remains deeply in the human conscious–
ness inevitably. Humanitarianism is no reply, for not every man stands
in the place of every other man for this other's comrade comfort. But
certain are chosen out of the human race to be the consoler of some
other. Of these, for example, is Joseph Barker Howe, Ph.D. Of intellects
not the first yet of true intellect and lambent instructions, given to that
which is intuitive and irrational, not to what is logical in the strict word,
what is judged by him is of the heart and not the head. Here is one
chosen, in that he chooses himself to stand in the place of another for
comfort and consolation. To
him
more than another I give my gratitude,
