I may not be right in anticipating the eventual opinion of Allen Upward’s book; but even if I am wrong, it will have helped perhaps to call attention to the essential failure of the Nobel Prize Trustees to side with the darers and experimenters in literature, to take a serious part in those great creative, centrifugal movements in the souls of men in which new worlds and the sense of new worlds are swept in upon us.  For the Sciences, which are more matter of fact and tangible, the Nobel Prize is functioning more or less as Mr. Nobel intended, but certainly in Literature it will have to be classed as one more of our humdrum regular millionaire arrangements for patting successful people expensively on the back.  It acts twenty years too late, falls into line with our usual worldly ornamental D.D., LL.D. habit, and has become, so far as Literature is concerned, a mere colossal, kindly, doddering Old Age Pension from a few gentlemen in Stockholm.  It adds itself as one more futile effort of men of wealth—­or world owners to be creative and lively with money, very much on the premises with money, after they are dead.

CHAPTER IV

PAPER BOOKS, MARBLE PILLARS, AND WOODEN BOYS

I have sometimes wished that Mr. Carnegie would post the following sign up on his Libraries, on the outside where people are passing, and on the inside in the room where people sit and think: 

    A MILLION DOLLARS REWARD.

    WANTED, A GREAT LIVING AMERICAN AUTHOR FOR MY LIBRARIES IN THE
    UNITED STATES.  AT PRESENT OUR GREAT AUTHOR IN AMERICA APPEARS
    TO HAVE BEEN LOST OR MISLAID; ANY ONE FINDING HIM, OR ANY ONE
    THAT MIGHT DO FOR HIM TEMPORARILY, PLEASE COMMUNICATE WITH ME.

    ANDREW CARNEGIE.

Mr. Carnegie’s Libraries must be a source of constant regret to the author of “Triumphant Democracy.”  They are generally made up of books written in the Old World.  It would be interesting to know what are the real reasons great Libraries are not being written for Mr. Carnegie in America, and what there is that Mr. Carnegie or other people can do about it.  They are certainly going to be written in America some time, and certainly, unless the best and greatest part of the Carnegie Library of the future is to be the American part of it, the best our Carnegie Libraries will do for America will be to remind us of what we are not.  Unless we can make the American part of Mr. Carnegie’s Libraries loom in the world as big as Mr. Carnegie’s chimneys, America—­which is the last newest experiment station of the world—­is a failure.

It has occurred to me to try to express, for what it may be worth, a point of view toward Triumphant Democracy Mr. Carnegie may have inadvertently overlooked.