I do not say that this is true, or that it would be true of Allen Upward.

But I have read his book.  I should think it might be true.

What Alfred Nobel had in mind, his whole idea in his Will, it seems to some of us, was to put in his forty thousand dollars at the working end of some man’s mind, at the end of the man’s mind where the forty thousand dollars would itself be creative, where the forty thousand dollars would get into the man, and work out through the man and through his genius into the world.  It does not seem to me that he wanted to put his forty thousand dollars at the idle, old remembering end of a man’s mind; that he meant it should be used as a mere reward for idealism.  I doubt if it even so much as occurred to Alfred Nobel, who was an idealist himself, that idealism, after a man had managed to have some in this world, would be rewarded, or could possibly be paid for, by any one.  He knew, if ever a man knew, that idealism was its own reward, and that it was priceless, and that any attempt to reward it with money, to pay a man for it after he had had it, and after it was all over, would make forty thousand dollars look shabby, or at least pathetic and ridiculous.  What he wanted to do was to build his forty thousand dollars over into a Man.  He wanted to feel that this money that he had made out of dynamite, out of destruction, would be wrought, through this man, into exultation, into life.  He had proposed that this forty thousand dollars should become poetry in this man’s book, that it should become light and heat, a power-house of thought, of great events.  What Alfred Nobel had in mind, I think, with his little forty thousand dollars, was that it should be given a chance to become an intimate part of some man’s genius; that it should become perhaps at last a Great Book—­that great foundry of men’s souls, where the moulds of History are patterned out, and where the hopes of nations and the prayers of women and children and of great men are, and where the ideals of men—­those huge drive-wheels of the world—­are cast in a strange light and silence.

I wondered if they could have thought of this when they voted on Allen Upward’s book that day three years ago—­those twenty grave, quiet gentlemen in frockcoats in Stockholm!

* * * * *

I have picked out Mr. Upward’s book because it is the most difficult, the most hazardous, and the least fortunate one I know, to make my point with; and because a great many people will get the reaction of disagreeing with me, and feeling about it probably, the way the Nobel Prizes Trustees did.  I have wanted to take a book which has the traits in it for which men of genius are persecuted or crucified or ignored—­our more modern timid or anonymous form of the cross.  If Mr. Upward had been given the Prize by the Nobel Prize Trustees, it will have to be admitted a howl would have gone up round the world that would not have quieted down yet; and it is this howl that Mr. Nobel intended his Prize for, and that he thought a man would need about forty thousand dollars to meet.