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 given 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.