V
Shortly after I left Columbia, MacDowell left on account of disagreements with Nicholas Murray Butler, the newly elected president of the great university. I had taken a course in Kantian philosophy with Butler and had come to know him well; an aggressive and capable mind, a cold and self-centered heart. In his class I had expressed my surprise that Kant, after demonstrating the impossibility of metaphysical knowledge, should have turned around and swallowed the system of Prussian church orthodoxy at one gulp. I asked the professor whether this might be accounted for by the fact that the founder of modern critical philosophy had had a job at a Prussian state university. I do not remember Butler’s reply to this, but you may be sure I thought of it when Butler declared himself a member of the Episcopal Church—this being a required preliminary to becoming president of Columbia. I am prepared to testify before the Throne of Grace—if the fact has not already been noted by the recording angel—that Butler in his course on Kant made perfectly plain that he believed no shred of Christian dogma.
I divided my Columbia courses into two kinds, those that were worth while and I completed, and those that were not worth while and I dropped. In the years that followed I made note of a singular phenomenon—all of the teachers of the second group of courses prospered at Columbia, while all teachers of the first group were forced out, or resigned in disgust. It seemed as if I had been used as a litmus paper, and everybody who had committed the offense of interesting me was ipso facto condemned. This fate befell MacDowell and George Edward Woodberry, who gave me two never-to-be-forgotten courses in comparative literature; and Harry Thurston Peck, who gave a vivid course on Roman civilization—poor devil, I shall have a story to tell about him; and James Harvey Robinson—I took a course with him on the culture of the Renaissance and Reformation that was a revelation of what history teaching might be. Also poor James Hyslop, kindly but eccentric, who taught me applied ethics; later on he took to spooks and learned that no form of eccentricity would be tolerated at the “University of Morgan.”
On the other hand, Butler himself throve, and Brander Matthews throve—he had made me acquainted with a new type, the academic “man of the world” I did not want to be. W. P. Trent throve—perhaps to find that grammatical error in Shelley’s poetry. George Rice Carpenter throve while he lived, and so did the professors of German and Italian and the instructor of French. I have forgotten their names, but I later met the French gentleman, and he remembered me, and we had a laugh over our failure to get together. The reason was plain enough—I wanted to learn to read French in six weeks, while the Columbia machine was geared to lower speeds.