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 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. I ask you now to think of the child. To spell the word childhood with a capital letter, and make of it a new idol such as that word humanity, 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. 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. I 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.THE HEIR
Repair, and in their golden urns draw light."
