, who did not see that it
would not pay at once, and that therefore it was too strange and
original and too important a book for him to publish, and after a long
delay the book was finally printed in Geneva.

A copy was sent to the Nobel Prize Trustees.

One would have thought, looking at it theoretically, that here was
precisely the sort of situation that Alfred Nobel, who had been the
struggling inventor of a great invention that would not pay at once
himself, would have been looking for. A book so inventive, so far ahead,
that publishers praised it and would not invest in it, one would have
imagined to be the one book of all others for which Alfred Nobel stood
ready and waiting to put down his forty thousand dollars.

But Mr. Nobel's forty thousand dollars did not go to a comparatively
obscure and uncapitalized inventor who had written a book to build a
world with, or at least a great preliminary design, or sketch, toward a
world. The Nobel Prize Trustees, instead of giving the forty thousand
dollars to Allen Upward, looked carefully about through all the nations
until their eyes fell on a certain Mr. Rudyard Kipling. And when they
saw Mr. Rudyard Kipling, piled high with fame and five dollars a word,
they came over quietly to where he was and put softly down on him forty
thousand dollars more.

I do not know, but it is not inconceivable, that Kipling himself would
rather have had Allen Upward have it.

I am not quarrelling with the Trustees, and am merely trying to think
things out and understand. But it certainly is a question that cannot
but keep recurring to one's mind--the unfortunate, and perhaps rather
unlooked-for, way in which Mr. Nobel's Will works. And I have been
wondering what there is that might be done, the world being the kind of
world it is, which would enable the Nobel Prize Trustees to so
administer the Will that its practical weight on the side of Idealism,
and especially upon the crisis of idealism in young authors, would be
where Mr. Nobel meant to have it.

One must hasten to admit that Mr. Upward's book is open to question;
that, in fact, it is the main trait of Mr. Upward's book that it raises
a thousand questions; and that it would be a particularly hard book for
most men to give a prize to, quietly go home, and sleep that night. I
must hasten to admit also that, judging from their own point of view,
the Nobel Prize Trustees have so far done quite well. They have
attained a kind of tr