Fourth, Mr. Upward, like all idealists, like all men who have the power of throwing this world into the melting-pot and bringing it out new again partly unrecognizable (which, of course, is the regular historical, almost conventional, thing for an idealist to do with a world), bewildered the Nobel Prize Committee.  They could not be sure but that Mr. Upward’s next book would be thought in the wrong, and make their having given him forty thousand dollars to write it ridiculous.

* * * * *

What would have happened if the Trustees had given the prize to Mr. Upward?

First, practically no one would have known who he was, and twenty-five nations would have been reading his book in a week, to see why the prize was given to him.  The book would have been given the most widespread, highly stimulated, forty-thousand-dollar-power attention that any book in any age has had.

Only now and then would a man go over and take down his old Kiplings from the shelf and read them, because he had heard that Mr. Kipling had forty thousand dollars more than he had had before.

Secondly, Mr. Upward’s new book would have the stimulus of his knowing while he was writing it that every word would be read by everybody.  All the draught on the fire of his genius of the whole listening world would result in a work that even Mr. Upward himself perhaps would hardly believe he had written.  As events turned out, and Mr. Upward did not get the prize there might be many reasons to believe that his next book might be out of focus, might be a mere petulant, scolding book, his exultation spent or dwindled, because his last tremendous wager—­that the world wanted the truth—­was lost.

Scolding in a book means, as a rule, either juvenility or it means relapse into conscious degeneration of the soul—­the focussing and fusing power in a man.  I have sometimes wondered if even Christ, if He had not died in His thirty-third year, made His great dare for the world on the cross early, would not have stopped believing so magnificently in other people at about forty or forty-five or so, and would not have spent the rest of His days in railing at them, and in being very bitter and helpless and eloquent about Rome and Jerusalem.  I have caught myself once or twice being glad Abraham Lincoln died suddenly just when he did, his great faith and love all warm in him, and his great oath for the world—­that it was good—­still fresh upon his lips!

Writing a book like Allen Upward’s for a planet with a vision of a thousand years singing splendidly through it, and then just reading it all alone afterward when he has written it, and going over the score all alone by himself, would seem to be a good deal of a strain.  To be contradicted out loud and gloriously by a world might be inspiring, but to be contradicted by a solid phalanx of silent nations, trooping up behind one another, unanimous, impervious, is enough to make any radiant, long-accumulated genius pause in full career, question himself, question his vision as a chimera, as some faintly lighted Northern Lights upon the world, that would never mean anything, that was an illusion, that would just flicker in the great dark once more and go out.