TWENTY-FIRST HEAD

THE HEIR

The Swedish Academy. 1. The Palm.

The task to which the Trustees of this bequest are called is the highest and the most difficult yet offered by a man to men.

If this Will is to be carried out it can only be in spite of many mistakes. Many an impostor, many a charlatan, must receive the Nobel Prize. Others, again, must seem to receive it. The prize must be denied to yonder stately Aeneid swelling with the majesty of Rome, and must be given to what incoherent argument, written in what slave's dialect, by this tentmaker of Tarsus.

For the prophet is only against his will a writer. His utterance is most often broken and disjointed. His words are hints, not definitions, and parables rather than commandments. The spirit that moves him is beyond his own control, and when the virtue has gone out of him he is no more, often he is less, than other men.

The Trustees cannot rely on any aid from outside themselves. For the prophet is not without honour save in his own country, and in his own generation, and in his own Academy.

They cannot carry out the Will without taking the place once held by General Councils, and by Colleges of Pontiffs, whose seat was on another sea. They must, by their bestowal of this legacy, choose between the books of hope, and draw up the canon of the scriptures of the new world. The last canon was drawn up by mobs of howling bishops only kept by Roman soldiery from shedding each other's blood. The new one is to be drawn up by a committee of men of letters meeting quietly in the far North to dispose of a sum of money not their own, and thereby helping to shape the new hope of mankind.

Was not something like this in the mind of the Testator; and did it not form part of his purpose that his country should renew her old renown, and become in the new age of peace, as once and again in the past ages of war, the sword and buckler of mankind against the enslavers, of the spirit as of the frame? Did not his vision show him the new Hall of the Aesir, rebuilt in the White City of the North, the City of Hope, to be a refuge and a place of comfort for the exiles of the spirit, whither as to a lighthouse voyagers from all lands should turn their eyes in longing; a hearth of glory—

"Whither, as to a fountain, other stars
Repair, and in their golden urns draw light.

I

Gentlemen of the Swedish Academy,

If you should ever so far honour these struggling words as to read them, and, if it may be so, find in them anything not written altogether vainly, you may allow me a last word face to face.

It is written in the book of Mang the Learner, whom we are taught to call Mencius, that the great man is he who has kept his child's heart. You are great men, and therefore you have kept your child's heart, and it is to that heart that I am writing, and not to those great men before whose company I have no title by which I may appear. Give me leave to wrestle with the Child in the Swedish Academy on behalf of a child outside.

The child is my client in this case. I have nothing more to say on behalf of the Idealist. He enters into this matter as the Testator's hireling, and not as his heir. The labourer is worthy of his hire, according to his labour. It is for you to mark out the work, and bestow the hire when it is earned. ask you now to think of the child.

I

To spell the word childhood with a capital letter, and make of it a new idol such as that word human

ity, would be to bring a new folly into a crowded world. For the child is only the coming man; and the question is how he can be helped most to become the best man.

Let us ask him. And listen!-that which we call education, the child himself calls cramming.

When you are setting about the drawing up of that great canon of the books of hope, I ask you not to forget the lesson-books of the child. I know of no books of a more materialistic tendency than most of them are. Think it not too far beneath the dignity of letters to begin the new literature where the child begins. It is the first book that counts. By the time you have written the child's catechism you have half written the man's creed.

Deem it not wrong to think a little of the brightest child, as your Testator thought of the brightest man; the child who is to lead the other children, and, by leading, serve them. Let him be your first care. Give light to him. Let his brain grow. Tear off the bandages that will not let it grow. Unscrew the iron clamps. Give the child freedom to become

a man.

Before we can have hopeful books we must have hopeful words. That is the gist of all my argument. Let me leave off with one such word.

It shall be the word palm, which lexicographers tell us is the Latin palma, and means a tree that grows in Africa and the Levant. And on a day called in our kalendar Palm Sunday, African-minded men are taking children into their Latin buildings, and putting into their hands dead leaves from the

Levant, and bidding them think of children in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. But the country folk on that day take living flowers, and place them on the tombs of their dead, as a sign of the new life, and they call the day Flowering Sunday.

Now one day in spring, while I was first pondering what I should write to you, I had been reading a book by a foreign writer, the name of which was The Cathedral. The writer begins by praising the atmosphere of his cathedral, as he says, with its mild, flat air as of a cellar, and its faint smell of oil. And laying down the book, I walked out in the fields with some friends of mine, and presently we came to a stream, in whose bed I saw some bushes budding and growing; and I happened to ask my friends what they were.

The answer was that they were palms.

I was puzzled. With my Lathamised mind I could not understand this answer. I could only think of the Mediterranean palms. I asked my friends again; and they told me,-"When they are like that the country people call them palms."

As soon as I heard of the country people I knew of course that I was listening to a greater authority on the English language than Doctor Latham. Ι questioned my friends further, and learned that this name was given, not only to the bushes by the stream, but to others; that it was not the name of the plants, but of the branches, and even more of the buds; that it was not only a noun but a verb, since the country folk say that the willows are palming, when the life within them begins to swell forth. And thus I saw that I was dealing with an old, old