III
I have got ahead of my story and must go back to the fall of 1897, when I registered at Columbia University as a special student. This meant that I was free to take any courses I preferred. As at the City College, I speedily found that some of the teachers were tiresome, and that the rules allowed me to drop their courses and begin others without extra charge. Upon my declaring my intention to take a master’s degree, all the tuition fees I paid were lumped together until they totaled a hundred and fifty dollars, after which I had to pay no more. Until I had completed one major and two minors, I was at liberty to go on taking courses and dropping them with no extra expense.
The completing of a course consisted of taking an examination, and as that was the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do, I never did it; instead, I would flee to the country, and come back the next fall and start a new set of courses. Then I would get the professors’ points of view and the list of books to be read—and that was all there was to the course. Four years in succession I did this, and figured that I had sampled more than forty courses; but no one ever objected to my singular procedure. The great university was run on the assumption that the countless thousands of young men and women came there to get degrees. That anyone might come merely to get knowledge had apparently not occurred to the governing authorities.
In the first year I remember Professor George Rice Carpenter setting out to teach me to write English. It was the customary process of writing “themes” upon trivial subjects; and the dominating fact in my life has been that I have to be emotionally interested before I can write at all. When I went to the professor to tell him that I didn’t think I was getting anything out of the course, his feelings were hurt, and he said, “I can assure you that you don’t know anything about writing English.” I answered that this was no doubt true, but the question was, could I learn by his method. Four or five years later, as a reader for Macmillan, Professor Carpenter got hold of some of my manuscripts; I paid several visits to his home, and he was so gracious as to ask how I thought the writing of English might be taught in colleges. My formula was simple—find something the student is interested in. But Carpenter said that was no solution—it would limit the themes to football and fraternities.
Professor W. P. Trent, a famous scholar, undertook to teach me about poetry, and this effort ended in an odd way. Something came up in the class about grammatical errors in literature, and the professor referred to Byron’s famous line, “There let him lay.” Said the professor: “I have the impression that there is a similar error in Shelley, and some day I am going to run through his poetry and find it.” To my fastidious young soul that seemed lèse-majesté; I pictured a man reading Shelley in such a mood, and I dropped the course.