anybody, not even to me! Nobody else cared, because nobody understood
him, but I did care. When he discovered that I sincerely admired his
learning and was interested in his puzzling personality he became
more communicative, sometimes almost human. His English accent was
excellent, and I asked his opinion about my accent and he assured me
with childlike frankness that it was rotten, but that it could be
fixed up if I submitted to a course of training prescribed for me by
my Vila on the Delaware farm. “I could not be your Vila, deformed as
I am,” said he, referring to his crippled fingers and to his awkward
walk, “but I will gladly be your satyr and teach you how to imitate
not only the sounds of human language but also, if you wish it, the
melodies of birds and the chirping of bugs. The satyrs are great in
that.” I knew that he could, because many an evening while I was on
the dormitory loft of the factory reading the Mayflower Compact, the
Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, Patrick Henry’s
and Daniel Webster’s speeches, and Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg,
Bilharz, in another part of the building, would be imitating sounds
of all kinds of birds and bugs, after he had grown tired reciting
Greek and Latin poetry and singing ecclesiastical songs. That was
his only amusement, and he enjoyed it when he was sure that nobody
was listening; he made an exception in my case. We finally made the
start in what he called my preparation for Nassau Hall. In the course
of less than a month I finished reciting to Bilharz the Declaration
of Independence, the American Constitution, and Lincoln’s speech at
Gettysburg, submitting to many corrections and making many efforts
to give each word its proper pronunciation, and finally he accepted
my performance as satisfactory. By that time I knew these documents
by heart and so did Bilharz, and he, in spite of himself, liked them
so well that he accused me of conspiring to make an American out of
him. “You are sinking rapidly, my boy, in the whirlpool of American
democracy, and you are dragging me down with you,” said Bilharz one
evening, when I objected to some of the amendments which he offered in
order to harmonize the American theory of freedom with the principles
of German socialism. He admitted that he, a loyal Roman Catholic, did
not care much for German social democracy, but that he often wondered
why the American enthusiasts for democracy did not take German social
democracy and save themselves the trouble of writing the Declaration
of Independence. I called his attention to the fact that American
democracy is much older than German social democracy, and he, somewhat
irritated by that suggestion and by my defense of American democracy,
as I understood it, suggested that he should resign his position as
my teacher and become my pupil. His flippant criticism of American
democracy and my stiff defense of it helped me much to see things which
otherwise I should have missed, but these discussions threatened the
entente cordiale between Bilharz and myself. Finally we compromised and
changed our course of reading, dropping things relating to political
theories and taking up poetry. Longfellow’s and Bryant’s poetry were
my favorites. “The Village Blacksmith” and “Thanatopsis” I knew by
heart and enjoyed reciting to Bilharz, who was greatly pleased whenever
in these recitations I avoided making a single serious break in my
pronunciation. After reading some of Shakespeare’s dramas which Booth
and other famous actors like Lawrence Barrett and John McCullough
were playing at that time, I visited the theatre often, and from my
modest gallery seat I would analyze carefully the articulation of every
syllable which Booth and the other actors were reciting. Booth did
not have a big voice; it was much smaller than the voice of Lawrence
Barrett or of powerful John McCullough, but I understood him better.
Bilharz explained it by saying that Booth had a perfect articulation.
“Articulation is an art which the Greeks invented; big voice is brute
force common among the Russians,” he used to say, protesting whenever
he had an opportunity against mere physical strength, which was natural
considering his scanty physical resources. He hated both the Russians
and the Prussians, because, in his opinion, they both were big brutes.
In those days the southern Germans had no love for the Prussians. He
never missed a single chance to sing the praises of Greek drama and
of the Greek theatre and of everything which flourished during the
classical age. He called my attention to the enormous size of Greek
theatres and to the necessity of perfect articulation on the part of
Greek actors if they were to be heard. “They were great artists,” said
he; “our actors are duffers only. We are all duffers! Give me the
Greeks, give me Homer, Pindar, Demosthenes, Plato, Praxiteles, Phidias,
Sophocles, and hundreds of others who spoke the language of the gods
and did things which only the divine spirit in man can do, and you
can have your Morse, McCormick, Howe, Ericsson, and the rest of the
materialistic crew who ran the show at Philadelphia.” He certainly
told many a fine story when he spoke of the great poets, orators,
philosophers, and sculptors of Greece, and his stories impressed me
much because they were great revelations to me; they were the first
to arouse my interest in the great civilization of Greece. They would
have impressed me even more if Bilharz had not displayed a glaring
tendency to exaggerate, in order to create a strong contrast between
what he called the idealism of classical Greece and what he called the
realistic materialism of modern America. According to him the first had
its seat among the gods on the ethereal top of Mount Olympus and the
second one was sinking deeper and deeper through the shafts of coal
and iron mines into the dark caverns of material earth. “No action,”
said Bilharz, “which needs the assistance of a steam-engine or of any
other mechanism can trace its origin to idealism nor can it end in
idealism.” I suggested that every animal body is a mechanism and that
its continuous evolution seems to indicate that the world is heading
for a definite ideal. Bilharz flew up like a hornet when he heard the
word evolution.
A lively discussion was going on in those days between the biological
sciences and theology, Huxley and many other scientists championing
the claims of Darwin’s evolution theory and the theologians defending
the claims of revealed religion. I was too young and too untutored to
understand much of those learned discussions, but Bilharz followed them
with feverish anxiety. His theological arguments did not appeal to me,
and so far as I was concerned they lost even the little force they had
when Bilharz turned them against what he called American mechanism
and materialism, which he tried to make responsible for the alleged
materialism of the evolution theory. His political and philosophical
theories based upon blind prejudice created a gap between him and me
which widened every day. Here are some illustrations of it.
When I described to him the election day of 1876, telling him that I
and thousands of others had stood quietly and patiently hours and hours
in drenching rain in front of the New York _Tribune_ building waiting
for the returns which would tell us whether Hayes or Tilden was to be
the supreme executive head of the United States during the coming four
years; how the next day some of the newspapers had raised a howl of
“fraud,” accusing the Republican party of tampering with the election
returns in one of the States, but that the people of New York City
and of the whole country had paid no attention, trusting implicitly
to the machinery of government to straighten out crookedness if it
existed, and how this dignity of American democracy thrilled me when I
compared it with the rows and scandals accompanying elections in the
countries of the military frontier of Austria-Hungary, he only laughed
and ridiculed the whole procedure of electing by ignorant voters the
supreme executive head of a nation. He told me a story of Aristides of
Athens, who, being requested by a voter to write upon a shell the name
of the man who was to be condemned for some crime which was not quite
clear to the Athenian voter, wrote down his own name, and Aristides,
the just, the noblest character of Athens, was condemned. But the
condemnation of this just and noble and innocent man was, according to
Bilharz, a condemnation of the Athenian democracy, whose shortcomings
brought the downfall of Greek civilization, and he added that the
shortcomings of American democracy would bring the downfall of the old
European civilization. The Aristides story interested me much, but the
inference he drew from it made me think of Christian of West Street,
and of his blunt remark: “A European greenhorn must have told you
that.” Jim was present at this discussion. He was a strong Presbyterian
and ridiculed on every occasion what he called Bilharz’s Roman Catholic
views. This time he quoted Lincoln by saying “that government of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth.” Then he added for the edification of Bilharz that religion
in the Roman Catholic church is of the church, by the church, for
the church, and that this was the real reason why Bilharz, trained
in this kind of theology, would never understand American democracy.
This shocked me, because I expected a fist fight between my two best
friends, but ... the fist fight did not take place.
I enjoyed taking long walks on Broadway whenever I had free time, going
up on one side and coming down on the other, inspecting every window in
bookstores and art stores and looking at the latest things in pictorial
art, at the titles of the latest things in literature, and at the
photographs and engravings of prominent men of the day. This gave me
quite an idea of what was going on in the American world of intellect.
Bilharz never joined me because, he said, there was nothing worth
seeing on these inspection tours of mine. Once during the noon recess I
managed to take him around the corner of Cortlandt Street and Broadway
trusting to luck to meet a certain great person whom I had seen several
times before and recognized because I saw his photograph in the
shop-windows of Broadway. I succeeded, for there in the midst of the
Broadway crowd appeared before us William Cullen Bryant, the author of
“Thanatopsis”! He was then the editor of _The Evening Post_, which was
located on Broadway not far from Cortlandt Street. I pointed him out;
Bilharz held his breath and, referring to the wonderful appearance of
the great poet, he said: “There is the only man in this materialistic
land of reapers and mowing-machines and chattering telephone disks who
could take a seat among the gods on Mount Olympus and be welcomed there
by the shades of the great idealists of Greece.”
At another time I managed to take him as far as City Hall; it was some
holiday, and the papers had announced that President Hayes and his
secretary of state, William Evarts, would be at City Hall at noon,
and they were there. Bilharz and I stood in a huge crowd, but we had
a good view of the President and of his secretary of state, and we
heard every word of their short speeches. They were dressed just like
everybody else, but their remarkable physiognomies and their scholarly
words convinced me that they belonged to the exalted position into
which the vote of the people had placed them. The New York Sun was a
bitter opponent of President Hayes and published his picture on the
editorial page of every one of its issues. In this picture the letters
spelling “fraud” were represented as branded across the expansive
brow of the President. But as I looked at him standing in front of
City Hall and beheld the light which was reflected from his smooth and
honest brow I knew that the New York Sun was wrong, and I vowed never
to read it again until that picture disappeared from its editorial
pages. Bilharz did not understand my admiration of the scene which we
had witnessed: the democratic simplicity of the highest officials in
the great United States and the very informal reception given to them
in the great metropolis, New York, was all due, according to him, to
a lack of artistic taste on the part of vulgar democracy. I thought
of the multicolored uniforms loaded with shining decorations, of the
plumed hats and long sabres, and of the numerous glaring flags with
imperial eagles displayed on such occasions in the Austrian Empire,
and I told Bilharz that if that monkey business was all due to a
profusion of artistic taste, then give me the simplicity of vulgar
democracy. Bilharz shrugged his shoulders and pitied me, and I pitied
him for having to pass, as he assured me often, the rest of his days in
this--to him--the most uninteresting part of the valley of tears, das
Thraenenthal, as he called this terrestrial globe.
Such were the many differences of mental attitude which widened the gap
between Bilharz and myself. He clung to the notions which were handed
down to the Old World from generations long departed; I, following
Jim’s suggestion, was trying to pick up wherever I could new ideas in
the New World. Much learning hath made him mad, thought I, whenever
I analyzed the strange ideas which Bilharz had of the United States
of America. I came to the conclusion that his term of apprenticeship
as greenhorn would never end. It is a national calamity that the vast
majority of our immigrants never see the end of their apprenticeship as
greenhorns.
I wished to believe that I was no longer a greenhorn, and I certainly
did not wish to listen to opinions of a greenhorn such as were the
opinions of Bilharz in matters outside of Greek and Roman history and
of the civilization which it described. His eyes were continually
turned to a sunset the glory of which had faded long ago; my eyes
watched just as eagerly for the daily sunrise as they did on the
pasturelands of my native village, and each sunrise showed me something
new in this--to me--still unknown land. He contemplated the past, and I
explored the present and dreamed about the future. I thought of Jim’s
prophecy which said that some day I should outgrow the opportunities
of Cortlandt Street, and I felt confident that the day had arrived. My
mind was made up to search for new opportunities, but Jim, and Bilharz
also, in spite of his shortcomings, were still a great attraction, and
I moved slowly.
One day, after leaving Cooper Union library, I walked along the upper
Bowery, refreshing my memories of the hard winter of 1874-1875. In
Broome Street near the Bowery I saw a store with a sign bearing the
name of Lukanitch. The man of that name must be a Serb, thought I, and
I walked in, longing to hear the language which I had not heard for
over three years. It was a hardware store dealing principally in files
and tools made of hardened steel. Behind the desk stood an elderly man,
and he, much surprised, answered my Serbian greeting in the Serbian
language with an accent reminding me of Kos, my Slovene teacher in
Panchevo. Lukanitch told me that he was a Slovene and that in his young
days he was a pedler, a Kranyats, as they called the Slovenian pedlers
in my native village. His annual summer tours took him to my native
Banat. A Kranyats travels on foot hundreds of miles, carrying on his
back a huge case with numerous small drawers, each drawer containing a
different line of goods: pins, needles, and threads; pens and pencils,
cheap jewelry and gaily colored handkerchiefs; cotton, linen, silk,
and all kinds of things which the peasants are apt to buy. A Kranyats
was a familiar sight in my native village, and he was always welcome
there, because he was a Slovene, a near kin to the Serb; and the Serb
peasants of the Banat plains loved to hear a Kranyats describe the
beauties of the mountainsides of little Slovenia on the eastern slope
of the Dolomites. When I disclosed my name to Lukanitch he asked me for
my father’s name, and when I told him that it was Constantine and that
he lived in Idvor, Banat, his eyes looked like two scintillating stars.
He gave me a big hug and a big tear threatened to roll down his cheek
when he said: “Ko che ko Bog?” (Who can fathom the will of God?) After
relating to me that my father had befriended him nearly thirty years
prior to that time and that he had often stayed as guest at my father’s
house whenever his annual tours as Kranyats took him through Idvor,
he begged me to come to his house on the following Sunday and dine
with his family. I did, and there I met his good wife, a fine Slavonic
type, and also his son and daughter, who were born in this country and
who looked like young Slavs with Americanism grafted upon them. His
son was about to graduate from a high school, and his daughter was
preparing for Normal College. They were both American in manner and
sentiment, but father and mother, although deeply devoted to the United
States, the native country of their children, were still sincerely
attached to the beautiful customs of the Slovene land. The children
preferred to speak English, but they delighted in Slovene music, which
they cultivated with much enthusiasm. That made their parents most
happy. Their home was a beautiful combination of American and Slovene
civilization. Once they invited me to an anniversary party and I found
the whole family dressed in most picturesque Slovenian costumes; but
everybody in the party, including even old Lukanitch and his wife
and all the Slovenian guests, spoke English. Most of the guests were
Americans, but they enjoyed the Slovenian dishes and the Slovenian
music, singing, and dancing as much as anybody. To my great surprise
the American girls, friends of Miss Lukanitch, played Slovenian music
exceedingly well, and I thought to myself that a sufficiently frequent
repetition of parties of that kind would soon transform the American
population in the vicinity of Prince Street into Slovenians. This
interaction between two very different civilizations gave me food for
thought, which I am still digesting mentally.
Lukanitch and his family became my devoted friends, and they were
just as interested in my plans and aspirations as if I had been a
member of their family. The old lady had a tender heart, and she shed
many a tear listening to bits of my history from the time when I bade
good-by to father and mother at the steamboat landing on the Danube,
five years before. The disappearance of my roast goose at Karlovci,
my first railroad ride from Budapest to Vienna, my dialogues with the
train conductor and the gaudy station-master at Vienna, and my free
ride in a first-class compartment from Vienna to Prague in company with
American friends amused her and her husband hugely. I had to repeat
the story many a time for the benefit of her Slovenian friends. She
begged me repeatedly to tell the story of my crossing of the Atlantic
and of my hardships as greenhorn, being evidently anxious to have her
children hear it. I did it several times, scoring much success on each
occasion, and as a reward she loaded me with many little gifts and with
many enjoyable feasts on Sundays and holidays. My interpretation of
the American theory of freedom, which I had derived from reading the
lives and the utterances of the great men who made this country and
from my three years’ struggles as greenhorn, found a most appreciative
audience in the Lukanitch family. They applauded Jim’s sentiment, that
this country is a monument to the great men who made it, and not to
a single family like the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary. Old Lukanitch
offered to engage me as his teacher in American history, and young
Lukanitch offered to get me an invitation from the principal of his
high school to deliver an oration on the Declaration of Independence.
The offers were not meant very seriously, but there was enough
sincerity in them to make me believe that my training in America was
recognized as having substantial value by people whose opinion deserved
respect. I saw in it the first real recognition referred to in the
prophecy of my fellow passenger on the immigrant ship who said: “No
matter who you are or what you know or what you have, you will be a
greenhorn when you land in the New World, and a greenhorn has to serve
his apprenticeship as greenhorn before he can establish his claim to
any recognition.” I said to myself: “Here is my first recognition small
as it may be, and I am certainly no longer a greenhorn.”
No longer a greenhorn! Oh, what a confidence that gives to a
foreign-born youth who has experienced the hardships of serving his
apprenticeship as a greenhorn! Then there were other sources of
confidence: I had a goodly deposit in the Union Dime Savings Bank and
it was several thousand times as big as the nickel which I brought to
Castle Garden when I landed. Besides, I had learned a thing or two in
the evening classes at Cooper Union, and my English was considered
good not only in vocabulary and grammar, but also in articulation,
thanks to Bilharz. Young Lukanitch assured me that my knowledge of
English, mathematics, and science would easily take me into college. He
even prophesied a most successful college career, pointing at my big
chest and broad shoulders and feeling my hard biceps. “You will make
a splendid college oarsman,” said he, “and they will do anything for
you at Columbia if you are a good oarsman, even if you do not get from
Bilharz so very much Greek or Latin.” At that time Columbia stood very
high in rowing. One of her crews won in the Henley Regatta, and its
picture could be seen in every illustrated paper. I had seen it many
a time and remembered the looks of every member of that famous crew.
Young Lukanitch was so enthusiastic about it that he would have gone
to Columbia himself if his father had not needed him so much in his
steel-tool business. He did his best to turn my eyes from Nassau Hall
to Columbia. He succeeded, but not so much on account of my prospects
in rowing as on account of other things, and among them was the
official name of that institution: “Columbia College in the City of New
York.” The fact that the college was located in the city of New York
carried much weight, because New York appealed to my imagination more
than any other place in the world. The impression which it made upon my
mind as the immigrant ship moved into New York Harbor on that clear and
sunny March day when I first passed through Castle Garden, the Gate of
America, never faded. My first victory on American soil was won in New
York when I fought for my right to wear the red fez.
IV
FROM GREENHORN TO CITIZENSHIP AND COLLEGE DEGREE
The Columbia boat-race victory at Henley occurred in 1878. By that time
I had already with the assistance of Bilharz finished a considerable
portion of my Greek and Latin preparation for Princeton--or, as I
called it, for “Nassau Hall.” My change of allegiance from Princeton to
Columbia was gradual.
Columbia College was located at that time on the block between Madison
and Park Avenues and between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets in New
York City. One of its proposed new buildings was, according to report,
to be called Hamilton Hall, in honor of Alexander Hamilton. When I
learned this I looked up the history of Alexander Hamilton. One can
imagine how thrilled I was when I found that Hamilton left the junior
class at Columbia College and joined Washington’s armies as captain
when he was barely nineteen, and at twenty was lieutenant-colonel and
Washington’s aide-de-camp! What an appeal to a young imagination! Few
things ever thrilled me as much as the life of Alexander Hamilton.
Every American youth preparing for college should read the history of
Hamilton’s life.
One cannot look up the history of Hamilton’s life without running
across the name of another great Columbia man, John Jay, first
Secretary of Foreign Affairs, appointed by Congress, and the first
Chief Justice of the United States, appointed by Washington, and a
stanch backer of brilliant Hamilton. Chancellor Livingston, another
great Columbia man, administered the first constitutional oath of
office to Washington; he also completed the purchase of Louisiana from
France. The more I studied the history of Hamilton’s time the more I
saw what tremendous influence Columbia’s alumni exerted at that time.
Cortlandt Street being near Trinity Church, I walked there to look at
the Hamilton monument in the Trinity churchyard. This monument was the
first suggestion to me of a bond of union between Trinity Church and
Columbia College. Before long I found many other bonds of union between
these two great institutions.
Every time I passed Columbia College in my long walks up-town and
looked at the rising structure of Hamilton Hall, I thought of these
three great Columbia men. What student of Hamilton’s life could have
looked at Hamilton Hall on Madison Avenue without being reminded of the
magnificent intellectual efforts which two young patriots, Hamilton
and Madison, made in the defense of the federalist form of the new
American Republic? It happened thus that my memory of Nassau Hall at
Princeton gradually faded, although it never vanished. The famous
boat-race victory of a Columbia crew at Henley would not alone have
produced this effect. It was produced by three great New York men of
the Revolutionary period who were alumni of “Columbia College in the
City of New York.” Columbia had at that time a school of mines and
engineering, separate from the college. I was much better prepared for
it than for Columbia College, thanks to the evening lectures at Cooper
Union, and to my natural inclination to scientific studies, but I
imagined that the spirit of Hamilton, Jay, and Livingston hovered about
the academic buildings of Columbia College only.
Bilharz rejoiced when I informed him of my decision to put on extra
pressure in my classical studies preparatory for Columbia College, and
congratulated himself, as I found out later, that he had succeeded in
rescuing me from the worship of what he called scientific materialism.
The good old fellow did not know that at that very time I was spending
many hours of my spare time reading Tyndall’s “Heat as a Mode of
Motion,” and Tyndall’s famous lectures on Sound and Light, which he
delivered in this country with great success in the early seventies.
These popular descriptions of physical phenomena were the poems in
prose to which I referred before. Another book of a similar character
came into my hands at that time through the Cooper Union library. I
have a copy of it now, having received it over thirty years ago as a
present from the late General Thomas Ewing. It is called “The Poetry
of Science,” published in 1848 by Robert Hunt. It starts with the
following quotation from Milton: