en 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.

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 wage