V
The product of that summer’s activities was the novel Prince Hagen, story of a Nibelung, grandson of the dwarf Alberich, who brings his golden treasures up to Wall Street and Fifth Avenue, and proves the identity between our Christian civilization and his own dark realm. The tale was born of the playing of the score of Das Rheingold to so many squirrels and partridges in the forests of the Adirondacks and in the Fairy Glen on the Quebec lake. The opening chapter was sent to Bliss Perry, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who wrote that he was delighted with it and wished to consider the completed work as a serial. The hopes of the little family rose again; but alas, when the completed work was read, it was adjudged too bitter and extreme. “We have a very conservative, fastidious, and sophisticated constituency,” wrote the great editor, and the disappointed young author remarked sarcastically that one could have that kind of thing in Boston. The truth was that the story was not good enough; the writer was strong on emotions but weak on facts.
King Midas had failed wholly to produce the hoped-for effect; it had sold about two thousand copies and brought its author two or three hundred dollars. So now the publishers were not interested in Prince Hagen, and no other publishers were interested; they would take the manuscript and promise to read it, and then manifest annoyance when a hungry young writer came back after two or three weeks to ask for a decision.
Thus occurred the painful incident of Professor Harry Thurston Peck, told with much detail in The Journal of Arthur Stirling. Besides being professor of Latin at Columbia, Peck was editor of the Bookman and literary adviser to Dodd, Mead and Company. He read Prince Hagen for his former pupil and called it a brilliant and original work, which he would recommend to the firm. Then began a long siege—six weeks or more—the culmination of which was the discovery that the firm had never seen the manuscript they were supposed to be reading.
The cries of rage and despair of the young author will not be repeated here. Poor Harry Peck has long been in a suicide’s grave; President Butler kicked him out of Columbia after some widow had sued him for breach of promise and given his sweetish love letters to the press. Perhaps the reason he neglected the young author’s manuscript was that he was busy with that widow, or with some other one. Harry was a devotee of decadent literature, and he broke the one law that is sacred—he got caught.