Читать книгу The Goose-step: A Study of American Education онлайн

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And then the professor of literature. Perhaps you think I should have had some success in classes of literature; but that only shows how little you know about college. A new professor came in just as I reached this class, and I learned in after years that he had got his appointment through the Tammany machine. A bouncing and somewhat vulgar little man, he was an ardent and argumentative Catholic, and his idea of conducting a class of literature was to find out if there was anything in the subject which could in any way be connected with Catholic doctrine and history, and if so, to bring out that aspect of the subject. Thus I learned that Milton, though undoubtedly a great poet, had cruelly lied about the popes; also I learned that Chaucer was positively not a Wyckliffite. I had not the remotest idea what a Wyckliffite was, but got the general impression that it was something terrible, and I was quite willing to believe the best of Chaucer, in spite of his perverse way of spelling English words. As part of the process of disciplining our taste in literature, we were required to learn poems by heart, and this professor selected poems which had something to do with Catholicism. Seeing that most of us were Jews, this was irritating, but we got what fun we could out of our predicament. At that time there was a popular music-hall song, with a chorus: “Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay”; so we used to go about the corridors of our college chanting to this lively tune a poem by Austin Dobson: