Part 6

This experience, repeated, made me more of a solitary than ever. I wanted to be free to behave like a lunatic, and yet not have anybody think me one. I remember a highly embarrassing moment when I was walking down a lane bordered with wild roses in June, and two little girls seated on a fence, unnoticed by me, suddenly broke into giggles at the strange sight of a man laughing and talking to himself. I became a haunter of mountaintops and of deep forests, the only safe places. I had something that other people did not have and could not understand--otherwise, how could they behave as they were doing? Imagine anyone wanting a lot of money, or houses and servants, or fine raiment and jewels, if he knew how to be happy as I did! Imagine anyone becoming drunk on whisky when he might become drunk on poetry and music, sunsets, and valleys full of clover!

For a time it seemed to me that music was the only medium in which my emotions could be expressed. I longed to play some instrument, and began very humbly with a mandolin. But that was not enough, and presently I took the plunge and paid seventy-five of my hard-earned dollars for a violin. In my class at college had been Martin Birnbaum, a Bohemian lad, pupil of a really great teacher, Leopold Lichtenberg. Martin played the violin with an ease and grace that were then, and have remained ever since, my life’s great envy. Each of us wants to do what he cannot.

With all my potboiling and my work at Columbia University, I could find only limited time for practice in the winter. But in the summer I was free--except for three or four days in each fortnight, when I wrote my stories and earned my living. I took myself away to a summer hotel, near Keeseville, New York, on the east edge of the Adirondacks, and I must have seemed one of the oddest freaks ever seen outside of an asylum. Every morning I got up at five o’clock and went out upon a hillside to see the sunrise; then I came back for breakfast, and immediately thereafter got my violin and a book of music and a stand and went out into the forest and set up my stand and fiddled until noontime; I came back to dinner, and then sallied out again and practiced another four hours; then I came in and had supper, and went out on the hillside to sit and watch the sunset; finally I went upstairs and shut myself in a little room and practiced the violin by the light of an oil lamp; or, if it was too hot in the room, I went down to the lake to watch the moon rise behind the mountains.

The wild things of the forest got used to this odd invasion. The squirrels would sit on the pine-tree branches and cock their heads and chatter furiously when I made a false note. The partridges would feed on huckleberries all about me, apparently understanding clearly the difference between a fiddlebow and a gun. Foxes took an interest, and raccoons and porcupines--and even humans.

The guests from the cities arrived on an early morning train and were driven to the hotel in a big four-horse stage. One morning, one of these guests arrived, and at breakfast narrated a curious experience. The stage had been toiling up a long hill, the horses walking, and alongside was an old Italian woman with a couple of pails, on her way to a day of berry picking. She was whistling cheerily, and the tune was the _Tannhäuser_ march. The new arrival, impressed by this evidence of culture in the vicinity, inquired through the open window, “Where did you learn that music?” The reply was, “Dey ees a crazy feller in de woods, he play it all day long for t’ree weeks!”

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.

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.”

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.

VI

My experience with the college teaching of foreign languages became the subject of two magazine articles in the _Independent_, which attracted some attention. Professor William Lyon Phelps once recalled them in his department in _Scribner’s Magazine_, acknowledging this as one service I had performed for him. I can perhaps repeat the service here for a new generation.

For five years at the City College I had patiently studied Latin, Greek, and German the way my teachers taught me. I looked up the words in the dictionary and made a translation of some passage. The next day I made a translation of another passage, looking up the words for that; and if some of the words were the same ones I had looked up the day before, that made no difference, I looked them up again--and never in the entire five years did anyone point out to me that by learning the meaning of the word once and for all, I might save the trouble of looking it up hundreds of times in the course of my college career.

Of course it did happen that, involuntarily, my mind retained the meanings of many words. At the end of five years I could read very simple Latin prose at sight; but I could not read the simplest Greek or German prose without a dictionary, and it was the literal truth that I had spent thousands of hours looking up words in the dictionary. Thousands of words were as familiar to sight and sound as English words--and yet I did not know what they meant!

At Columbia I really wanted to read German, for the sake of the literature it opened up; so I hit upon the revolutionary idea of learning the meaning of a word the first time I looked it up. Instead of writing it into a translation, I wrote it into a notebook; and each day I made it my task to fix that day’s list of words in my mind. I carried my notebook about with me and studied it while I was eating, while I was dressing and shaving, while I was on my way to college. I took long walks, during which I reviewed my lists, making sure I knew the meanings of all the words I had looked up in the course of recent readings. By this means I eliminated the drudgery of dictionary hunting, and in two or three weeks was beginning to read German with pleasure.

In my usual one-track fashion, I concentrated on German literature and for a year or so read nothing else. I went through Goethe as I had once gone through Shakespeare, in a glow of delight. I read everything of Schiller and Heine, Lessing and Herder, Wagner’s operas and prose writings. I read the Golden Treasury collection of German poetry so many times that I knew it nearly by heart--as I do the English one to this day. I read the novelists down to Freitag and even tried my teeth on Kant, reading the _Critique of Pure Reason_ more than once in the original.

VII

Next I wanted French and Italian. I am not sure which I took first, but I remember a little round Italian professor and a grammar called _Grandgent’s_, and I remember reading Gerolamo Rovetta’s novel, _Mater Dolorosa_, and getting the author’s permission to translate it into English, but I could not interest a publisher in the project. I read _I Promessi Sposi_, a long novel, and also, oddly enough, an Italian translation of Sienkiewicz’s _Quo Vadis_. But a few years later I ruined my Italian by studying Esperanto; the two are so much alike that thereafter I never knew which one I was trying to speak, and when I stepped off a steamer in Naples, in the year 1912, and tried to communicate my wants to the natives, they gazed at me as if I were the man from Mars.

With French I began an elementary course, along with a class of Columbia freshmen or sophomores, and stayed with it just long enough to get the pronunciation and the elements of grammar; after which I went my own way, with a text of the novel _L’Abbé Constantin_ and a little notebook to be filled with all the words in that pretty, sentimental story. In six weeks I was reading French with reasonable fluency; and then, according to my custom, I moved to Paris in spirit. I read all the classics that are known to Americans by reputation; all of Corneille, Racine, and Molière; some of Rousseau and Voltaire; a sampling of Bossuet and Chateaubriand; the whole of Musset and Daudet, Hugo and Flaubert; about half of Balzac and Zola; and enough of Maupassant and Gautier to be thankful that I had not come upon this kind of literature until I was to some extent mature, with a good hard shell of puritanism to protect me against the black magic of the modern Babylon.

Since then, such depraved literature has been poured in a flood over America, and our bright young intellectuals are thoroughly initiated; they have no shells of puritanism, but try fancy liquors and drugs, and play with the esoteric forms of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and commit suicide in the most elegant continental style. Those who prefer to remain alive are set down as old fogies. I must be one of the oldest.

VIII

My Uncle Bland was in the habit of coming to New York every now and then, and I always went to the old Holland House or the Waldorf-Astoria to have lunch or dinner with him and my aunt. One of these visits is fixed in my mind, because I was proud of my achievement in learning to read French in six weeks and told my uncle about it. It was then that he made me a business offer; he was going soon to have a Paris branch of his company, and if I would come to Baltimore and learn the business, he would put me in charge of his Paris branch, starting at six thousand a year. I thanked my good uncle, but I never considered the offer, for I felt sure of one thing, that I would never engage in any form of business. Little did I dream that fate had in store for me the job of buying book paper by the carload, and making and selling several million books; to say nothing of a magazine, and a socialist colony, and a moving picture by Eisenstein!

At this time, or a little later, my uncle was occupied in establishing the New York office of his bonding company; this played an important part in my education. To his favorite nephew the president of the great concern talked freely, and he gave me my first real knowledge of the relationship between government and big business in America. This Baltimore company, desiring to break into the lucrative New York field, proceeded as follows: one of the leaders of Tammany Hall, a man by the name of O’Sullivan, became manager of the New York office; Richard Croker, the “big chief,” received a considerable block of stock, and other prominent Tammany men also received stock. My uncle explained that, as a result of this procedure, word would go forth that his company was to receive the bonding business of the city and all its employees.

It was the system that came to be known as “honest graft.” You can see that it was no crime for a Tammany leader to become manager of a bonding company; and yet his profits would be many times as great as if he were to steal money from the city treasury. Some time afterward my uncle told me that he planned to open an office in Albany, and was going to get the business of the state machine also; he had just named the man who was to be elected state treasurer on the Democratic ticket--and when I asked him what this meant, he smiled over the luncheon table and said, “We businessmen have our little ways of getting what we want.”

So there I was on the inside of America, watching our invisible government at work. The pattern that my uncle revealed to me in youth served for the arranging of all the facts I later amassed. I have never found anything different, in any part of America; it is thus that big business deals with government at every point where the two come into contact. Every government official in America knows it, likewise every big businessman knows it; talking in private, they joke about it; in public they deny it with great indignation.

The fact that the man from whom I learned this secret was one of the kindest and most generous persons I have ever known ought to have made me merciful in my judgments. With the wisdom of later years, I know that the businessmen who finance political parties and pull the strings of government cannot help what they do; they either have to run their business that way or give place to somebody who will run it no differently. The blame lies with the system, in which government for public service is competing day by day with business for private profit. But in those early days I did not understand any of this; I thought that graft was due to grafters, and I hated them with all my puritanical fervor.

Also, I thought that the tired businessman ought to be an idealist like myself, reading Shakespeare and Goethe all day. When my uncle, thinking to do me a kindness, would buy expensive theater tickets and take my mother and myself to a musical comedy, I would listen to the silly thumping and strumming and the vulgar jests of the comedians, and my heart would almost burst with rage. This was where the world’s money was going--while I had to live in a hall bedroom and slave at potboilers to earn my bread!

It happened that at this time I was taking a course in “Practical Ethics” under Professor James Hyslop at Columbia. The second half of this course consisted of an elaborate system that the professor had worked out, a set of laws and constitutional changes that would enable the voters to outwit the politicians and the big businessmen. From the very first hour it was apparent to me that the good professor’s elaborate system was a joke. Before any law or constitutional change could be made, it would have to be explained to the public, which included the politicians and their paymasters. These men were quite as shrewd as any college professor and would have their plans worked out to circumvent the new laws a long time before those laws came into operation.

IX

At this time the graft of Tammany Hall was only in process of becoming “honest”; the main sources of revenue of Richard Croker and his henchmen were still the saloonkeeper and the “madam.” There came forth a knight-at-arms to wage war upon this infamy, a lawyer by the name of William Travers Jerome. He made speeches, telling what he had seen and learned about prostitution in New York; and I went to some of these meetings and listened with horrified soul. No longer could I doubt that women did actually sell their bodies; I heard Jerome tell about the brass check that you purchased at the counter downstairs and paid to the victim of your lust. I heard about a roomful of naked women exhibited for sale.

Like many others in the audience, I took fire, and turned out to help elect Jerome. I went about among everybody I knew and raised a sum of money and took it to the candidate at the dinner hour at his club. He thanked me cordially and took the money; but my feelings were a trifle hurt because he did not stay to chat with me while his dinner got cold. Having since run for office myself, and had admirers swarm about to shake my hand, I can appreciate the desire of a public man to have his dinner hour free.