r--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.

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 b