Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1923. PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 6

Evening Post. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1923. PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

lhat the Swedish chemist and engineer who invented dynamite and made an immense fortune by the manufacture of this and other explosives and the exploitation of oil-fields should have thought of physics and chemistry when he was making his will is not surprising. Ihe inclusion of literature and the preservation of peace among . the objects of his bounty was not so obvious, and testifies to the breadth of his humanity and even, it might be said, to his sense of humour. For four of five consecutive years there was no award oi the Nobel Peace Prize, and the reason was that men were so busy blowing one another to pieces with the inventions and the manufactures which had supplied the endowment that there were no entries in the peace competition. The International Committee of the Red Cross alone caught the judge's eye during those five deadly years, but when the orgy was over Woodrow Wilson was awarded the Peace Hnze for the labours which culminated at Versailles. It was a double irony that the founder of the League of Nations should be crowned by the inventor of dynamite, and that the peace which won him this honour was afterwards repudiated by his own countrymen. But their action could not upset the award. For the third time—Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Ehhu Root being the previous winners—the award had fallen to America, and once more the British Empire had failed to score.

Let it serve as a solace to our national pride that British idealism has an exact set-off to these American successes. For the. third time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been won for the British Empire, while America has not yet broken her duck's egg. In 1907 the prize fell to Mr. Kipling in 1913 to Mr. Babindranatn Tagore,' and now it has fallen to Mr. W. B. Yeats. The rejoicing is not confined to the lovers of poetry or to the small proportion cf them who can thoroughly appreciate the delicate and elusive qualities of Mr. Yeats's work. The laments over the defeat of Papyrus in America were not confined to those to whom 1 the Derby is one of the great events, of the year. They wer e/ shared by thousands to whom, even on Derby Day, the Turf appears one of the great instruments of national demoralisation. % The British prejudice in favour of a British competitor's getting first past the post took precedence of everything else. A poet is of course not such a beautiful creature as a racehorse, and even the ancient Greeks put a winner in the Olympic Games first and Aeschylus and Sophocles nowhere. A poet who in these days ventured into competition with a jockey or a pugilist, not. to mention a Charlie Chaplin, would deserve the shock that he would get. But when the case is merely one of poets and other literary men competing with one another, of all the writers of the world going "eyes out" for the Parnassus Stakes, there is room for these inferior creatures to attract a little attention, and even a little enthusiasm, if it is only for the national colours that they wear.

Though it does not come within the range of the bookmaker or the totalisator, the Nobel Competition, with its fh*e prizes of about £8000 each, has. certainly a right to be included among the great spotting events of the year. Unless the chemist succeeds in finding the philosopher's stone which is to turn base metal' into gold and in keeping the secret to himself, or the poet can persuade the world not merely to read his verse but to pay him for it on a scale which neither Shakespeare nor Milton nor even Ella Wheeler Wilcox ever achieved, how can either the poet or the man of science hope to attain at a single hit what the Nobel Prize endowment may put within his grasp? And unlike most other competitions, this one involves no special preparations, no diversion from a man's ordinary work to a side-track which will prove a blind one if there is no prize at the end of it. There are no lectures to attend, no set books, and no examinations to pass. A man keeps right on at his life'B work, and if if; is considered good enough he gets a prize; if it is not he can still keep right on.

It may be said that though there are no examinations there are. examiners, and that these are fallible. This source of comfort is always open to those who fail. Infallibility is not given to any human tribunal, and the Swedish Academy of Literature is only human. One at least of its adjudicators is far from infallible if the statement that a few months ago he had never heard of Mr. Thomas Hardy is correct, but we believe that the" selection of Mr. Yeats will be widely approved by the literary judgment of Great Britain. Poet), dramatist, and mystic, he

has never cheapened his wares for the sake of popularity, and he has doubtless learned to associate plain living with high thinking as well as the best of his predecessors. The poet who on the verge of sixty wins a prize of £8000 has made a brilliant departure from the traditions of the tribe/ Milton got £10 for "Paradise Lost." Chatterton sold sixteen songs for 10s 6d. At the age of fifty all Wordsworth's poems had not brought him £130. In one of them he speaks of

C°ldi'lls^ n ' aDd kbour ' and all fleshly An<dead ightyPPetS° etS m thair misery

It would have been a better world for the poets, and a better world for everybody, if the idea of endowing them had been taken up a few centuries ago.