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.
VI
That dreadful winter Corydon went back to her parents, while Thyrsis lived in a garret room, and haunted publishers and editors, and wrote potboilers that he could not sell. He did sell a few jokes and a few sketches, book reviews for the Literary Digest, and articles for the Independent. He wrote a blank-verse narrative called Caradrion, portions of which are in Love’s Pilgrimage; also a novelette, The Overman, an attempt to portray ecstasy and speculate as to its source. Many critics have quarreled with Thyrsis because of so much “propaganda” in his books; but here was a work with no trace of this evil, and the critics never heard of it, and it existed only in the Haldeman-Julius five-cent books.
The literary editor of the Independent, who had the saying of thumbs up or thumbs down on book reviews, was Paul Elmer More, of whom Thyrsis saw a great deal before the days of More’s repute. A man of very definite viewpoint—as oddly different from his young contributor as the fates could have contrived. Thyrsis, always eager to understand the other side, was moved to a deep respect for his cold, calm intelligence, akin to godhead, subsequently revealed to the world in the series of Shelburne Essays. More never made propaganda, nor carried on controversy; he spoke once, and it was the voice of authority. The hothearted young novelist would go off and ponder and wish he could be like that; but there were too many interesting things in the world, and too many vested evils.
There are two factors in the process of growth that we call life; the expanding impulse and the consolidating and organizing impulse. In the literary world these impulses have come to be known, somewhat absurdly, as romanticism and classicism. Both impulses are necessary, both must be present in every artist, and either without the other is futile. Paul Elmer More spoke for the classical tradition and carried it to the extreme of condemning everything in his own time that had real vitality. Many times I pointed out to him that his favorite classical authors had all been rebels and romantics in their own day; but that meant nothing to him. He had understood and mastered these writers, so to him they meant order and established tradition; whereas the new things were uncomprehended and therefore disturbing. It was amusing to see More publish essays in appreciation of writers like Thoreau and Whitman, the revolutionists of their time. What would he say about the same sort of writers of our own day? The answer was, he never mentioned them, he never read them, or even heard of them.
The young wife had her baby, and the young husband sat by and held her hand during the fourteen-hour ordeal. Soon afterward he converted the experience into seven thousand words of horrifying prose. He took these to Paul Elmer More, and the cold Olympian intelligence spoke briefly. “It is well done, supposing one wants to do that kind of thing. But it seems to me one shouldn’t. Anyhow, it is unpublishable, so there is no use saying any more.” Said the young writer: “It will be published, if I have to do it myself.” Eight or nine years later this material appeared as the birth scene in Love’s Pilgrimage, and for some reason the censors did not find out about it. Now, being half a century old, it is presumably a “classic,” and safe.
More gave the congé to his tempestuous young contributor; after that I saw him only once, an accidental encounter in the subway at the height of the excitement over The Jungle. I asked, “May I send you a copy?” The reply was, “Some time ago I made up my mind I was through with the realists.” So there was no more to say. Later, the stern critic was forced to return to the realists; in his book, The Demon of the Absolute, I found him condemning Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. Myself he did not condescend to mention.