The mood of humanity towards the poet is that of the schoolboy towards the butterfly-without pity but without malice. Towards the prophet it is that of the sick child towards the physician,—one of angry resistance.

There is no more pitiful sight than this; mankind suffers under no such curse; it is the tragedy of the world, the stoning of the messenger of good tidings. "Ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them." Alas! it is in sacrifice to the dead prophet that the living prophet is offered up.

There is no instinct much more deeply rooted in the heart of man than this old cannibal one that the suffering of the best man is for the benefit of mankind. "I exiled Dante," exults proud Florence, "and lo! the Divine Comedy". "I hounded forth Moham

med," boasts Mecca, "and here is Islam." It needs a Diagoras to ask where are the votive offerings of those who were wrecked. It takes Nobel to discern the difference to mankind between the labours of Hercules and the agony of the Meriah.

The instinct of hatred is stronger than reason. It is not to be baffled by etymologies. Whatever the uncertainty belonging to the Testator's language, his fourth bequest was taken very differently from the remainder of the Will. It drew to itself the prompt hostility of the two great schools of thought which divide between them the intellectual government of the world. Pharisee and Sadducee both scented danger in the unknown word. Both felt themselves threatened by something more formidable than a literary competition.

The antagonism of both was summed up in the scornful criticism that Nobel had offered a prize for a new religion. Nobel himself was branded as a dreamer. There were those ready to insinuate that he had not been in his right mind.

In the present age more than a hundred millions are paid every year for the repetition of old texts; in England alone there are several custodians of prophecy who each receive every year a sum greater than that here proposed as the life's wage of the prophet. Nobel wished to give eight thousand pounds a year among the writers of new texts. That was his dream. His madness lay there. Humanity is not mad to spend one hundred millions a year on phonographs. Nobel was mad to offer these few thousands for a living voice.

VI

On the whole the feeling aroused most by this bequest was incredulity. It was regarded as a challenge to materialism, a word not really better understood than idealism, but taken to signify the spirit of modern science, triumphant in so many departments of life.

And in these days material science is very great, so that the very word idealist is in some discredit. There is an opinion abroad that while Idealism has been talking, Materialism has been doing. Materialist science has conferred endless benefits on mankind. It has given us new medicines and tools and carriages, and all manner of useful and pleasant things. It has opened up the history of the world and man, and bidden him recast all his beliefs and habits. Inch by inch it has invaded every province of human knowledge; and now it is carrying the war into the very citadel of Idealism, and beginning to measure nerves and brain cells instead of arguing about mind.

Now this bequest does indeed come as a challenge, but not to those very materialists to whom the Testator has given the chief place among his legatees. The challenge is a challenge to the idealists, to show that they also are contributing to benefit mankind. Because of that it must make an era in the history

of philosophy. Three hundred years ago a challenge was addressed by Bacon to the physical sciences, under the name of natural philosophy. His famous substitution of inductive for deductive reasoning amounted to no more than this advice: Learn from the things themselves, instead of from the words about the things. But in asking for fruits he proposed to the philosopher the same end that Nobel has proposed -the benefit of mankind.

It is since that date that the physical sciences have arisen out of their sleep and marched to victory. Height after height has been scaled, and all the glory of creation has burst on our eyes. But still our eyes remain dim eyes. The march of reason has not kept pace with that of knowledge. Men stand before the wonders of the scientific revelation as they formerly stood before the sculptured stones of Egypt, unable to decipher them, and half afraid to try.

Nobel, it seems, has hoped for a Champollion. He has asked for interpretations. Like the Babylonian king of old, he has sent for the magicians and the astrologers, the Chaldeans and the soothsayers, and has bidden them expound anew the meaning of that dream which is called Life.

For thousands of years the metaphysicians and moral philosophers, the theologians and logicians, have been muttering the words of their mystery in corners, now at last a brave man has flung down this bag of gold in the midst of them, and has said: Let us see what it all really comes to. Let us see if you can help men to live.

VII

In the field of Literature the academy and the idealist meet as natural foes. The academy is, by its constitution, the judge of literature, and not of truth. The idealist is only a man of letters by accident-there are no accidents!-by necessity. Of the very greatest teachers of mankind, only two are known to have written anything, and only of Mohammed, the least among them, can it be said that his book affords any measure of himself. To the perfect Idealist, Lao, is attributed the saying-"Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know.

When the idealist enters the field of Literature he does so from the opposite side to that of the academy. For him the spirit is everything, for the academy the form is everything. It would seem easier for the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for the idealist to find grace with the academy. Yet the Testator has placed this endowment in the hands of the illustrious body styled the Swedish Academy.

In doing so he has shown himself not less sagacious than in the rest of the Will. For he is not concerned with idealism as an end, but as a means. The end is still the benefit of mankind. To this end the idealist is called upon to choose speech rather than silence. When he speaks, he is to be judged by his words.