CHAPTER III
MR. NOBEL TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE WRITE
Not unnaturally, of course, I turned to see what had already been done by the more powerful men the planet had produced, in the way of arranging for the necessary seers and geniuses to run the world with, and I soon found that by far the most intelligent and far-seeing attempt that had been made yet in this direction had been made by an inspired, or semi-inspired, millionaire in Sweden, named Alfred Nobel, an idealist, who had made a large but unhappy fortune out of an explosive to stop war with. His general idea had been that dynamite would make war so terrible that it would shock people into not fighting any more, and that gradually people, not having to spend their time in thinking of ways of killing one another, would have more time than they had ever had before to think of other and more important things. It was the disappointment of his life that his invention, instead of being used creatively, used to free men from fighting and make men think of things, had been used largely as an arrangement for making people so afraid of war that they could not think of anything else. Whichever way he turned he saw the world in a kind of panic, all the old and gentle-minded nations with their fair fields, their factories and art galleries, all hard at work piling up explosives around themselves until they could hardly see over them. As this was the precise contrary of what he had intended, and he had not managed to do what he had meant to do with making his money, he thought he would try to see if he could not yet do what he had meant to do in spending it. He sat down to write his Will, and in this Will, writing as an inventor and a man of genius, he tried to express, in the terms of money, his five great desires for the world. He wished to spend forty thousand dollars a year, every year forever, after he was dead, on each of these five great desires. There were five great Inventors that he wanted, and he wanted the whole world searched through for them, for each of them, once more every year, to see if they could be found. Mr. Nobel expressed his desire for these five Inventors as people often manage to express things in wills, in such a way that not everybody had been sure what he meant. There seems to have been comparatively little trouble, from year to year, in awarding the prizes to some adequate inventor in the domain of Peace, of Physics, of Chemistry, and of Medicine; but the Nobel Prize Trustees, in trying to pick out an award each year to some man who could be regarded as a true inventor in Literature, have met with considerable difficulty in deciding just what sort of a man Alfred Nobel had in mind, and had set aside his forty thousand dollars for when he directed that it should go—to quote from the Will—"To the person who shall have produced in the field of Literature the most distinguished work of an idealistic tendency."
Allen Upward, for instance, an Englishman unknown in Stockholm, invented and published a book four years ago, called the "New Word," which was so idealistic and distinguished a book, and so full of new ideas and of new combinations of old ideas, that there was scarcely a publisher in England who did not instinctively recognize it, who did not see that it would not pay at once, and that therefore it was too strange and original and too important a book for him to publish, and after a long delay the book was finally printed in Geneva.
A copy was sent to the Nobel Prize Trustees.
One would have thought, looking at it theoretically, that here was precisely the sort of situation that Alfred Nobel, who had been the struggling inventor of a great invention that would not pay at once himself, would have been looking for. A book so inventive, so far ahead, that publishers praised it and would not invest in it, one would have imagined to be the one book of all others for which Alfred Nobel stood ready and waiting to put down his forty thousand dollars.
But Mr. Nobel's forty thousand dollars did not go to a comparatively obscure and uncapitalized inventor who had written a book to build a world with, or at least a great preliminary design, or sketch, toward a world. The Nobel Prize Trustees, instead of giving the forty thousand dollars to Allen Upward, looked carefully about through all the nations until their eyes fell on a certain Mr. Rudyard Kipling. And when they saw Mr. Rudyard Kipling, piled high with fame and five dollars a word, they came over quietly to where he was and put softly down on him forty thousand dollars more.
I do not know, but it is not inconceivable, that Kipling himself would rather have had Allen Upward have it.
I am not quarrelling with the Trustees, and am merely trying to think things out and understand. But it certainly is a question that cannot but keep recurring to one's mind—the unfortunate, and perhaps rather unlooked-for, way in which Mr. Nobel's Will works. And I have been wondering what there is that might be done, the world being the kind of world it is, which would enable the Nobel Prize Trustees to so administer the Will that its practical weight on the side of Idealism, and especially upon the crisis of idealism in young authors, would be where Mr. Nobel meant to have it.