that they could take.  Unless they had a large fund for butting through all nations for obscure geniuses, and for turning up stones everywhere to look for embryo authors—­unless they had a fund for going about among the great newspapers, the big magazines, and peeping under them through all the world for geniuses—­and unless they had still another large fund for guaranteeing their decision when they had found one, a fund for convincing the world that they were right, and that they were not wasting their forty thousand dollars—­the Trustees have taken a fairly plausible position.  Their position being that, in default of perfectly fresh, brand-new, great men, and in view of the fact, in a world like this that geniuses in it are almost invariably, and, as a matter of course, lost or mislaid until they are dead, much the best and safest thing that Trustees of Idealism could do was to watch the drift of public opinion in the different nations, to adopt the course of noting carefully what the world thought were really its great men, and then (at a discreet and dignified distance, of course) tagging the public, and wherever they saw a crowd, a rather nice crowd, round a man, standing up softly at the last moment and handing him over his forty thousand dollars.  This has been the history of the Nobel Trustees of Idealism, thus far.

But in a way, we are all the trustees of idealism, and the problem of the Nobel Prize Trustees is more or less the problem of all of us.  We are interested as well as they in trying to find out how to recognize and reward men of genius.  What would we do ourselves if we were Nobel Prize Trustees?  Precisely what was it that Alfred Nobel intended to achieve for Literature when he made this bequest of forty thousand dollars a year in his Will, for a work of Literature of an idealistic tendency?

To take a concrete case, I can only record that it has seemed to me that if Alfred Nobel himself could have been on hand that particular year, and could have read Mr. Upward’s book, he would have given the prize of forty thousand dollars to Allen Upward.  He would not have given the prize to Mr. Kipling—­he would have given it twenty years before; but in this particular year of which I am writing, when he saw these two men together, I believe he would have given the prize to Allen Upward, and he would have hurried.

I would like to put forward at this point two inquiries.  First, why did the Trustees not award the prize to Allen Upward?  And second, what would have happened if they had?

First, the Trustees could not be sure that Mr. Upward in his work of genius was telling the truth.

Second, they could not be sure that the world would approve of his having forty thousand dollars for telling the truth.  Perhaps the world would have rather had him paid forty thousand dollars for not telling it.

Third, Mr. Kipling was safe.  No creative work had to be done on Kipling; all they had to do was to send him the cheque.  Great crowds had swept in from all over the world, and nominated Mr. Kipling; the Committee merely had to confirm the nomination.