One must hasten to admit that Mr. Upward's book is open to question; that, in fact, it is the main trait of Mr. Upward's book that it raises a thousand questions; and that it would be a particularly hard book for most men to give a prize to, quietly go home, and sleep that night. I must hasten to admit also that, judging from their own point of view, the Nobel Prize Trustees have so far done quite well. They have attained a kind of triumph 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 given the prize to Allen Upward, and he would have hurried.