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.
IV
Since we are dealing with the phenomena of genius, I will tell about the one authentic man of genius I met at Columbia. Edward MacDowell was the head of the department of music, and he was struggling valiantly to create a vital music center in America; he was against heavy odds of philistinism, embodied in the banker trustees of the great university. MacDowell gave two courses in general musical culture. These I took in successive years, and they were not among the courses I dropped. The composer was a man of wide culture and full of a salty humor, a delightful teacher. There were fewer than a dozen students taking the course—such was the amount of interest in genius at Columbia.
Early in the course I noted that MacDowell suffered in his efforts to say in words something that could only be said in music, and I suggested to him that instead of trying to describe musical ideas, he should play them for us. This suggestion he at once accepted, and thereafter the course consisted in a piano rendition of the great music of the world, with incidental running comments. MacDowell was a first-rate concert pianist, and truly noble were the sounds that rumbled from that large piano in the small classroom.
Since I was going in for the genius business myself, I was interested in every smallest detail of this great man’s behavior and appearance. Here was one who shared my secret of ecstasy; and this set him apart from all the other teachers, the dull plodding ones who dealt with the bones and dust of inspirations. Almost thirty years afterward I wrote about him in an article published in the American Mercury (January 1928), and so vivid were my recollections I was able to quote what I felt certain were the exact words of MacDowell’s comments on this and that item of music and literature. Shortly afterward I met the composer’s widow, who told me that she recognized many of the phrases, and that all of them sounded authentic to her.
Here was a man who had the true fire and glory, yet at the same time was perfectly controlled; it was only now and then, when some bit of philistinism roused his anger, that I saw the sparks fly. He found it possible to display a gracious courtesy; in fact, he might have been that little boy in my nursery poem, “who would not even sneeze unless he asked you if he might.” I remember that he apologized to the young ladies of the class for telling a story that involved the mention of a monkey; this surprised me, for I thought my very proper mother had warned me against all possible social improprieties. Some of his pupils had sent the composer flowers on his birthday and put in a card with the inscription from Das Rheingold: “O, singe fort, so suess und fein”; a very charming thing to say to a musician. MacDowell’s story was that on opening the box he had started to read the inscription as French instead of as German, and had found himself hailed: “O, powerful monkey!”
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.”