e 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.

I might have taken any one of several other books, and they would have
illustrated my point snugly and more conveniently; but just that right
touch of craziness that Nobel had in mind, and that goes with great
experiment of spirit--the chill, Nie