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.
At this election I was one of a group of Columbia students who
volunteered as watchers in the interests of the reform ticket. I was
assigned to a polling place over on the East Side, a strong Tammany
district; all day I watched to prevent the stuffing of the ballot box,
and after the closing hour I saw to an honest count of the votes that
had been cast. I had against me a whole set of Tammany officials, one or
two Tammany policemen, and several volunteers who joined in as the
quarrel grew hot. I remember especially a red-faced old police
magistrate, apparently summoned for the purpose of overawing this
presumptuous kid who was delaying the count. But the great man failed of
his effort, because I knew the law and he didn’t; my headquarters had
provided me with a little book of instructions, and I would read out the
text of the law and insist upon my right to forbid the counting of
improperly marked ballots.
I was probably never in greater danger in my life, for it was a common
enough thing for an election watcher to be knocked over the head and
dumped into the gutter. What saved me was the fact that the returns
coming in from the rest of the city convinced the Tammany heelers that
they had lost the fight anyhow, so a few extra votes did not matter. The
ballots to which I objected were held for the decision of an election
board, as the law required, and everybody went home. The Tammany police
magistrate, to my great surprise, shook hands with me and offered me a
cigar, telling me I would be all right when I had learned about
practical politics.
I learned very quickly, for my hero-knight, Jerome, was elected
triumphantly and did absolutely nothing, and all forms of graft in New
York City went on just as they always had. They still went on when the
speakeasy was substituted for the saloon, and the night club for the
brothel. The naked women are now on the stage instead of in private
rooms; and the drinking is out in the open.
There is one story connected with this campaign that I ought to tell, as
it came home to me in a peculiar way. It was known during the campaign
as “Jerome’s lemon story.” Said the candidate on the stump to his
cheering audience: “Now, just to show you what chances there are for
graft in a city like New York, let us suppose that there is a shortage
of lemons in the city, and two ships loaded with lemons come into port.
Whichever ship can get its cargo first to the market can make a fortune.
Under the law, the city fruit inspectors are required to examine every
box of lemons. But suppose that one of them accepts a bribe, and lets
one cargo be landed ahead of the other--you can see what graft there
would be for somebody.” Such was the example, made up out of his head,
so Jerome declared; the story appeared in the morning papers, and during
the day Jerome chanced to meet a city inspector of fruit whom he knew
intimately. “Say, Bill,” demanded this official, “how the hell did you
find out about those lemons?”
The story impressed me especially for the reason that I happened to know
this particular inspector of fruit; he was the brother of an intimate
friend of my mother’s. We knew all the family gossip about “Jonesy,” as
we called him; we heard not merely the lemon story but many others, and
knew that Jonesy was keeping a wife in one expensive apartment and a
mistress in another--all on a salary of two thousand dollars a year.
Bear this gentleman in mind, for when we come to the days of _The
Jungle_, I shall tell a still funnier story. In a serious emergency I
had to get Jonesy on the telephone late at night, before the morning
papers went to press; the only way this could be managed was to call up
his wife and ask her for the telephone number of his mistress. Let no
one say that romance is dead in the modern world!
X
It was at this time that I was writing the half-dime novels, or killing
Spaniards. I spent the summer in the home of an old sea captain, in the
little town of Gananoque, Ontario, on the St. Lawrence River. The old
captain was ill of tuberculosis, and his wife fed me doughnuts for
breakfast and ice cream left over from the night before, and whenever I
caught a big pike, we had cold baked fish for three days.
I did my writing late at night, when everything was quiet; and one night
I was writing a vivid description of a fire, in which the hero was to
rescue the heroine. I went into detail about the starting of the fire,
portraying a mouse chewing on a box of matches. Just why a mouse should
chew matches I do not know; I had heard of it somehow, and no guarantee
went with my stories in those days. I described the tongues of flame
starting in the box and spreading to some papers, and then licking their
way up a stairway. I described the flames bursting from a window; then I
laid down my pencil--and suddenly the silence of the night outside was
broken by a yell of “Fire!”
For a moment I wasn’t sure whether I was still in my story or outside
it. I looked out of the window and sure enough, there was a cottage in
flames. I helped to rouse the people in it, and watched, with the amused
superiority of a New Yorker, the efforts of village firemen to put out
the blaze. I remember how they squirted the hose in at one window, and
the jet came out at the opposite window. I will leave it for specialists
in the occult to explain whether the fire was caused by the excessive
vividness of my writing, or whether it was a case of clairvoyance, or
possibly telepathy from the mind of a mouse. (Perhaps I ought to explain
that the above is meant as humor, lest someone cite it as one more
example of my credulity.)
Early that spring I had taken a fishing trip to the far north of
Ontario, traveling on several railroads and then on a bicycle, and
staying in a pioneer cabin near a tiny jewel of a lake. I did not get
many fish, for the reason that I absent-mindedly left my tackle behind
in a railroad station along the way, and it did not arrive until the day
I departed; but I saw wild geese and a bear, which was a grand thrill;
also I saw mosquitoes in clouds that darkened the sky and made me run
through the swamps for my very life. On my way back to the railroad I
came upon that field of deep clover in the twilight, and experienced the
ecstasy I have described.