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

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Another “man of the world” type of professor whom I encountered was Harry Thurston Peck, who gave me a course in Roman civilization of the Augustan age. It was so like America that it was terrifying, but Professor Peck I am sure was entirely unterrified. He was widely read in the literature of decadence, and from him I heard the names of strange writers, from Petronius and Boccaccio to Zola and Gautier. It was a world of grim and cruel depravity, but one had sooner or later to know that it existed, and to steel one’s soul for a new endeavor to save the race. Poor Harry Peck was not steeled enough, and he broke the first rule of the “man of the world,” and got found out. A woman sued him for breach of promise, and published his letters in the newspapers. There were some who thought he should not have been assumed to be guilty, merely because a blackmailer accused him; but the powers which ruled Columbia thought otherwise, and Professor Peck was driven out, and committed suicide.

It was a peculiar thing, which I observed as time went on—every single man who had had anything worth-while of any sort to teach me was forced out of Columbia University in some manner or other. The ones that stayed were the dull ones, or the worldly and cunning ones. Carpenter stayed until he died, and Brander Matthews, and Butler, and Trent, who purposed to read through the works of Shelley to find a grammatical error, and John Erskine, whom I knew as a timid and conventional “researcher,” and who, I am told, has been chosen by Butler as his heir-apparent. But Peck went—and Hyslop, and Spingarn, and Robinson, and MacDowell, and Woodberry.