iumph of doing safe things--things that they could
not be criticised for; and they could well reply to this present
criticism that there was no other course that they could take. Unless
they had a large fund for butting through all nations for obscure
geniuses, and for turning up stones everywhere to look for embryo
authors--unless they had a fund for going about among the great
newspapers, the big magazines, and peeping under them through all the
world for geniuses--and unless they had still another large fund for
guaranteeing their decision when they had found one, a fund for
convincing the world that they were right, and that they were not
wasting their forty thousand dollars--the Trustees have taken a fairly
plausible position. Their position being that, in default of perfectly
fresh, brand-new, great men, and in view of the fact, in a world like
this that geniuses in it are almost invariably, and, as a matter of
course, lost or mislaid until they are dead, much the best and safest
thing that Trustees of Idealism could do was to watch the drift of
public opinion in the different nations, to adopt the course of noting
carefully what the world thought were really its great men, and then (at
a discreet and dignified distance, of course) tagging the public, and
wherever they saw a crowd, a rather nice crowd, round a man, standing up
softly at the last moment and handing him over his forty thousand
dollars. This has been the history of the Nobel Trustees of Idealism,
thus far.

But in a way, we are all the trustees of idealism, and the problem of
the Nobel Prize Trustees is more or less the problem of all of us. We
are interested as well as they in trying to find out how to recognize
and reward men of genius. What would we do ourselves if we were Nobel
Prize Trustees? Precisely what was it that Alfred Nobel intended to
achieve for Literature when he made this bequest of forty thousand
dollars a year in his Will, for a work of Literature of an idealistic
tendency?

To take a concrete case, I can only record that it has seemed to me
that if Alfred Nobel himself could have been on hand that particular
year, and could have read Mr. Upward's book, he would have given the
prize of forty thousand dollars to Allen Upward. He would not have given
the prize to Mr. Kipling--he would have given it twenty years before;
but in this particular year of which I am writing, when he saw these two
men together, I believe he would have giv