my head, and I'm strung up. I might do something--this afternoon. But it
won't last. YOU--you have pride in your bones. My pride will vanish at
a laugh. My honour will go at a laugh. I'm just exalted by a crisis.
That's all. I'm an animal of intelligence. Soul and pride are weak in
me. My mouth waters, my cheek brightens, at the sight of good things.
And I've got a lickerish tail, Benham. You don't know. You don't begin
to imagine. I'm secretive. But I quiver with hot and stirring desires.
And I'm indolent--dirty indolent. Benham, there are days when I splash
my bath about without getting into it. There are days when I turn back
from a walk because there's a cow in the field.... But, I spare you the
viler details.... And it's that makes me hate fine people and try so
earnestly to persuade myself that any man is as good as any man, if not
a trifle better. Because I know it isn't so....”
“Billy,” said Benham, “you've the boldest mind that ever I met.”
Prothero's face lit with satisfaction. Then his countenance fell again.
“I know I'm better there,” he said, “and yet, see how I let in a whole
system of lies to cover my secret humiliations. There, at least, I will
cling to pride. I will at least THINK free and clean and high. But you
can climb higher than I can. You've got the grit to try and LIVE high.
There you are, Benham.”
Benham stuck one leg over the arm of his chair. “Billy,” he said, “come
and be--equestrian and stop this nonsense.”
“No.”
“Damn it--you DIVE!”
“You'd go in before me if a woman was drowning.”
“Nonsense. I'm going to ride. Come and ride too. You've a cleverer way
with animals than I have. Why! that horse I was driving the other day
would have gone better alone. I didn't drive it. I just fussed it. I
interfered. If I ride for ever, I shall never have decent hands, I shall
always hang on my horse's mouth at a gallop, I shall never be sure at a
jump. But at any rate I shall get hard. Come and get hard too.”
“You can,” said Billy, “you can. But not I! Heavens, the TROUBLE of it!
The riding-school! The getting up early! No!--for me the Trumpington
Road on foot in the afternoon. Four miles an hour and panting. And my
fellowship and the combination-room port. And, besides, Benham, there's
the expense. I can't afford the equestrian order.”
“It's not so great.”
“Not so great! I don't mean the essential expense. But--the incidentals.
I don't know whether any one can realize how a poor man is hampered by
the dread of minor catastrophes. It isn't so much that he is afraid of
breaking his neck, Benham, as that he is afraid of breaking something he
will have to pay for. For instance--. Benham! how much did your little
expedition the other day--?”
He stopped short and regarded his friend with round eyes and raised
eyebrows.
A reluctant grin overspread Benham's face. He was beginning to see the
humour of the affair.
“The claim for the motor-bicycle isn't sent in yet. The repair of
the mudguards of the car is in dispute. Trinity Hall's crockery, the
plate-glass window, the whip-lash and wheel and so forth, the hire of
the horse and trap, sundry gratuities.... I doubt if the total will come
very much under fifty pounds. And I seem to have lost a hat somewhere.”
Billy regarded his toes and cleared his throat.
“Depending as I do on a widowed mother in Brixton for all the
expenditure that isn't covered by my pot-hunting--”
“Of course,” said Benham, “it wasn't a fair sample afternoon.”
“Still--”
“There's footer,” said Benham, “we might both play footer.”
“Or boxing.”
“And, anyhow, you must come with me when I drive again. I'm going to
start a trotter.”
“If I miss another drive may I be--lost for ever,” said Billy, with the
utmost sincerity. “Never more will I get down, Benham, wherever you may
take me. Short of muffing my fellowship I'm with you always.... Will it
be an American trotter?”
“It will be the rawest, gauntest, ungainliest brute that ever scared the
motor-bicycles on the Northampton Road. It will have the legs and stride
of an ostrich. It will throw its feet out like dealing cards. It will
lift its head and look the sun in the eye like a vulture. It will have
teeth like the English spinster in a French comic paper.... And we will
fly....”
“I shall enjoy it very much,” said Prothero in a small voice after an
interval for reflection. “I wonder where we shall fly. It will do us
both a lot of good. And I shall insure my life for a small amount in
my mother's interest.... Benham, I think I will, after all, take a
whiskey.... Life is short....”
He did so and Benham strolled to the window and stood looking out upon
the great court.
“We might do something this afternoon,” said Benham.
“Splendid idea,” reflected Billy over his whiskey. “Living hard and
thinking hard. A sort of Intelligentsia that is BLOODED.... I shall, of
course, come as far as I can with you.”
13
In one of the bureau drawers that White in this capacity of literary
executor was examining, there were two documents that carried back
right to these early days. They were both products of this long wide
undergraduate argumentation that had played so large a part in the
making of Benham. One recorded the phase of maximum opposition, and one
was the outcome of the concluding approach of the antagonists. They were
debating club essays. One had been read to a club in Pembroke, a club
called the ENQUIRERS, of which White also had been a member, and as he
turned it over he found the circumstances of its reading coming back to
his memory. He had been present, and Carnac's share in the discussion
with his shrill voice and stumpy gestures would alone have sufficed to
have made it a memorable occasion. The later one had been read to the
daughter club of the ENQUIRERS, the SOCIAL ENQUIRERS, in the year after
White had gone down, and it was new to him.
Both these papers were folded flat and neatly docketed; they were rather
yellow and a little dog-eared, and with the outer sheet pencilled over
with puzzling or illegible scribblings, Benham's memoranda for his
reply. White took the earlier essay in his hand. At the head of the
first page was written in large letters, “Go slowly, speak to the man
at the back.” It brought up memories of his own experiences, of rows of
gaslit faces, and of a friendly helpful voice that said, “Speak up?”
Of course this was what happened to every intelligent contemporary, this
encounter with ideas, this restatement and ventilation of the old truths
and the old heresies. Only in this way does a man make a view his own,
only so does he incorporate it. These are our real turning points.
The significant, the essential moments in the life of any one worth
consideration are surely these moments when for the first time he faces
towards certain broad ideas and certain broad facts. Life nowadays
consists of adventures among generalizations. In class-rooms after the
lecture, in studies in the small hours, among books or during solitary
walks, the drama of the modern career begins. Suddenly a man sees
his line, his intention. Yet though we are all of us writing long
novels--White's world was the literary world, and that is how it looked
to him--which profess to set out the lives of men, this part of the
journey, this crucial passage among the Sphinxes, is still done--when it
is done at all--slightly, evasively. Why?
White fell back on his professionalism. “It does not make a book. It
makes a novel into a treatise, it turns it into a dissertation.”
But even as White said this to himself he knew it was wrong, and it slid
out of his thoughts again. Was not this objection to the play of ideas
merely the expression of that conservative instinct which fights for
every old convention? The traditional novel is a love story and takes
ideas for granted, it professes a hero but presents a heroine. And to
begin with at least, novels were written for the reading of heroines.
Miss Lydia Languish sets no great store upon the contents of a man's
head. That is just the stuffing of the doll. Eyes and heart are her
game. And so there is never any more sphinx in the story than a lady may
impersonate. And as inevitably the heroine meets a man. In his own first
success, White reflected, the hero, before he had gone a dozen pages,
met a very pleasant young woman very pleasantly in a sunlit thicket;
the second opened at once with a bicycle accident that brought two young
people together so that they were never afterwards disentangled;
the third, failing to produce its heroine in thirty pages, had to be
rearranged. The next--
White returned from an unprofitable digression to the matter before him.
14
The first of Benham's early essays was written in an almost boyish hand,
it was youthfully amateurish in its nervous disposition to definitions
and distinctions, and in the elaborate linking of part to part. It was
called TRUE DEMOCRACY. Manifestly it was written before the incident of
the Trinity Hall plates, and most of it had been done after Prothero's
visit to Chexington. White could feel that now inaudible interlocutor.
And there were even traces of Sir Godfrey Marayne's assertion that
democracy was contrary to biology. From the outset it was clear that
whatever else it meant, True Democracy, following the analogy of True
Politeness, True Courage, True Honesty and True Marriage, did not mean
democracy at all. Benham was, in fact, taking Prothero's word, and
trying to impose upon it his own solidifying and crystallizing opinion
of life.
They were not as yet very large or well-formed crystals. The proposition
he struggled to develop was this, that True Democracy did not mean an
equal share in the government, it meant an equal opportunity to share in
the government. Men were by nature and in the most various ways unequal.
True Democracy aimed only at the removal of artificial inequalities....
It was on the truth of this statement, that men were by nature unequal,
that the debate had turned. Prothero was passionately against the idea
at that time. It was, he felt, separating himself from Benham more and
more. He spoke with a personal bitterness. And he found his chief ally
in a rigorous and voluble Frenchman named Carnac, an aggressive Roman
Catholic, who opened his speech by saying that the first aristocrat was
the devil, and shocked Prothero by claiming him as probably the only
other sound Christian in the room. Several biologists were present, and
one tall, fair youth with a wearisome forefinger tried to pin Carnac
with questions.
“But you must admit some men are taller than others?”
“Then the others are broader.”
“Some are smaller altogether.”
“Nimbler--it's notorious.”
“Some of the smaller are less nimble than the others.”
“Then they have better nightmares. How can you tell?”
The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and the talk went on over
his prostrate attempts to rally and protest.
A second biologist seemed to Benham to come nearer the gist of the
dispute when he said that they were not discussing the importance of
men, but their relative inequalities. Nobody was denying the equal
importance of everybody. But there was a virtue of this man and a virtue
of that. Nobody could dispute the equal importance of every wheel in a
machine, of every atom in the universe. Prothero and Carnac were angry
because they thought the denial of absolute equality was a denial of
equal importance. That was not so. Every man mattered in his place. But
politically, or economically, or intellectually that might be a lowly
place....
At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping and great violence, and
a volley of obscure French colloquialisms.
He was understood to convey that the speaker was a Jew, and did not in
the least mean what he was saying....
15
The second paper was an altogether maturer and more characteristic
production. It was no longer necessary to answer Prothero. Prothero had
been incorporated. And Benham had fairly got away with his great idea.
It was evident to White that this paper had been worked over on several
occasions since its first composition and that Benham had intended
to make it a part of his book. There were corrections in pencil and
corrections in a different shade of ink, and there was an unfinished
new peroration, that was clearly the latest addition of all. Yet
its substance had been there always. It gave the youth just grown
to manhood, but anyhow fully grown. It presented the far-dreaming
intellectualist shaped.
Benham had called it ARISTOCRACY. But he was far away by now from
political aristocracy.
This time he had not begun with definitions and generalizations,
but with a curiously subjective appeal. He had not pretended to be
theorizing at large any longer, he was manifestly thinking of his own
life and as manifestly he was thinking of life as a matter of difficulty
and unexpected thwartings.
“We see life,” he wrote, “not only life in the world outside us, but
life in our own selves, as an immense choice of possibilities; indeed,
for us in particular who have come up here, who are not under any urgent
necessity to take this line or that, life is apparently pure choice. It
is quite easy to think we are all going to choose the pattern of life we
like best and work it out in our own way.... And, meanwhile, there is no
great hurry....
“I want to begin by saying that choice isn't so easy and so necessary as
it seems. We think we are going to choose presently, and in the end we
may never choose at all. Choice needs perhaps more energy than we think.
The great multitude of older people we can observe in the world outside
there, haven't chosen either in the matter of the world outside, where
they shall go, what they shall do, what part they shall play, or in
the matter of the world within, what they will be and what they are
determined they will never be. They are still in much the same state of
suspended choice as we seem to be in, but in the meanwhile THINGS HAPPEN
TO THEM. And things are happening to us, things will happen to us, while
we still suppose ourselves in the wings waiting to be consulted about
the casting of the piece....
“Nevertheless this immense appearance of choice which we get in the
undergraduate community here, is not altogether illusion; it is more
reality than illusion even if it has not the stable and complete reality
it appears to have. And it is more a reality for us than it was for our
fathers, and much more a reality now than it was a few centuries ago.
The world is more confused and multitudinous than ever it was, the
practicable world far wider, and ourselves far less under the pressure
of inflexible moulding forces and inevitable necessities than any
preceding generations. I want to put very clearly how I see the new
world, the present world, the world of novel choice to which our youth
and inexperience faces, and I want to define to you a certain selection
of choices which I am going to call aristocratic, and to which it is our
manifest duty and destiny as the elect and favoured sons of our race to
direct ourselves.
“It isn't any choice of Hercules I mean, any mere alternative whether
we will be, how shall I put it?--the bridegrooms of pleasure or the
bridegrooms of duty. It is infinitely vaster and more subtly moral than
that. There are a thousand good lives possible, of which we may have
one, lives which are soundly good, or a thousand bad lives, if you like,
lives which are thoroughly bad--that's the old and perpetual choice,
that has always been--but what is more evident to me and more remarkable
and disconcerting is that there are nowadays ten thousand muddled lives
lacking even so much moral definition, even so much consistency as is
necessary for us to call them either good or bad, there are planless
indeterminate lives, more and more of them, opening out as the possible
lives before us, a perfect wilderness between salvation and damnation,
a wilderness so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the
way to either hell or heaven would be lost in its interminable futility.
Such planless indeterminate lives, plebeian lives, mere lives, fill the
world, and the spectacle of whole nations, our whole civilization, seems
to me to re-echo this planlessness, this indeterminate confusion of
purpose. Plain issues are harder and harder to find, it is as if they
had disappeared. Simple living is the countryman come to town. We are
deafened and jostled and perplexed. There are so many things afoot that
we get nothing....
“That is what is in my mind when I tell you that we have to gather
ourselves together much more than we think. We have to clench ourselves
upon a chosen end. We have to gather ourselves together out of the swill
of this brimming world.
“Or--we are lost....”
(“Swill of this brimming world,” said White. “Some of this sounds
uncommonly like Prothero.” He mused for a moment and then resumed his
reading.)
“That is what I was getting at when, three years ago, I made an attack
upon Democracy to the mother society of this society, an attack that I
expressed ill and failed to drive home. That is what I have come down
now to do my best to make plainer. This age of confusion is Democracy;
it is all that Democracy can ever give us. Democracy, if it means
anything, means the rule of the planless man, the rule of the unkempt
mind. It means as a necessary consequence this vast boiling up of
collectively meaningless things.
“What is the quality of the common man, I mean of the man that is common
to all of us, the man who is the Standard for such men as Carnac,
the man who seems to be the ideal of the Catholic Democrat? He is the
creature of a few fundamental impulses. He begins in blind imitation of
the life about him. He lusts and takes a wife, he hungers and tills
a field or toils in some other way to earn a living, a mere aimless
living, he fears and so he does not wander, he is jealous and stays by
his wife and his job, is fiercely yet often stupidly and injuriously
defensive of his children and his possessions, and so until he wearies.
Then he dies and needs a cemetery. He needs a cemetery because he is so
afraid of dissolution that even when he has ceased to be, he still wants
a place and a grave to hold him together and prevent his returning to
the All that made him. Our chief impression of long ages of mankind
comes from its cemeteries. And this is the life of man, as the common
man conceives and lives it. Beyond that he does not go, he never
comprehends himself collectively at all, the state happens about him;
his passion for security, his gregarious self-defensiveness, makes him
accumulate upon himself until he congests in cities that have no
sense of citizenship and states that have no structure; the clumsy,
inconsecutive lying and chatter of his newspapers, his hoardings and
music-halls gives the measure of his congested intelligences, the
confusion of ugly, half empty churches and chapels and meeting-halls
gauge the intensity of his congested souls, the tricks and slow
blundering dishonesties of Diet and Congress and Parliament are his
statecraft and his wisdom....
“I do not care if this instant I am stricken dead for pride. I say here
now to you and to High Heaven that THIS LIFE IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME.
I know there is a better life than this muddle about us, a better life
possible now. I know it. A better individual life and a better public
life. If I had no other assurances, if I were blind to the glorious
intimations of art, to the perpetually widening promise of science,
to the mysterious beckonings of beauty in form and colour and the
inaccessible mockery of the stars, I should still know this from the
insurgent spirit within me....
“Now this better life is what I mean when I talk of Aristocracy. This
idea of a life breaking away from the common life to something better,
is the consuming idea in my mind.
“Constantly, recurrently, struggling out of the life of the farm and
the shop, the inn and the market, the street and the crowd, is something
that is not of the common life. Its way of thinking is Science, its
dreaming is Art, its will is the purpose of mankind. It is not the
common thing. But also it is not an unnatural thing. It is not as common
as a rat, but it is no less natural than a panther.
“For it is as natural to be an explorer as it is to be a potato grower,
it is rarer but it is as natural; it is as natural to seek explanations
and arrange facts as it is to make love, or adorn a hut, or show
kindness to a child. It is a folly I will not even dispute about, that
man's only natural implement is the spade. Imagination, pride, exalted
desire are just as much Man, as are hunger and thirst and sexual
curiosities and the panic dread of unknown things....
“Now you see better what I mean about choice. Now you see what I am
driving at. We have to choose each one for himself and also each one for
the race, whether we will accept the muddle of the common life, whether
we ourselves will be muddled, weakly nothings, children of luck,
steering our artful courses for mean success and tawdry honours, or
whether we will be aristocrats, for that is what it amounts to, each
one in the measure of his personal quality an aristocrat, refusing to be
restrained by fear, refusing to be restrained by pain, resolved to
know and understand up to the hilt of his understanding, resolved to
sacrifice all the common stuff of his life to the perfection of his
peculiar gift, a purged man, a trained, selected, artificial man, not
simply free, but lordly free, filled and sustained by pride. Whether
you or I make that choice and whether you or I succeed in realizing
ourselves, though a great matter to ourselves, is, I admit, a small
matter to the world. But the great matter is this, that THE CHOICE IS
BEING MADE, that it will continue to be made, and that all around us, so
that it can never be arrested and darkened again, is the dawn of human
possibility....”
(White could also see his dead friend's face with its enthusiastic
paleness, its disordered hair and the glowing darknesses in the eyes.
On such occasions Benham always had an expression of ESCAPE. Temporary
escape. And thus would his hand have clutched the reading-desk; thus
would his long fingers have rustled these dry papers.)
“Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him....
“The old habitual life of man is breaking up all about us, and for the
new life our minds, our imaginations, our habits and customs are all
unprepared....
“It is only now, after some years of study and living, that I begin to
realize what this tremendous beginning we call Science means to mankind.
Every condition that once justified the rules and imperatives, the
manners and customs, the sentiments, the morality, the laws and
limitations which make up the common life, has been or is being
destroyed.... Two or three hundred years more and all that life will be
as much a thing past and done with as the life that was lived in the age
of unpolished stone....
“Man is leaving his ancestral shelters and going out upon the greatest
adventure that ever was in space or time, he is doing it now, he is
doing it in us as I stand here and read to you.”
CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN
1
The oldest novel in the world at any rate, White reflected, was a story
with a hero and no love interest worth talking about. It was the story
of Tobias and how he came out from the shelters of his youth into this
magic and intricate world. Its heroine was incidental, part of the
spoil, a seven times relict....
White had not read the book of Tobit for many years, and what he was
really thinking of was not that ancient story at all, but Botticelli's
picture, that picture of the sunlit morning of life. When you say
“Tobias” that is what most intelligent people will recall. Perhaps you
will remember how gaily and confidently the young man strides along with
the armoured angel by his side. Absurdly enough, Benham and his dream of
high aristocracy reminded White of that....
“We have all been Tobias in our time,” said White.
If White had been writing this chapter he would have in all probability
called it THE TOBIAS STAGE, forgetful that there was no Tobit behind
Benham and an entirely different Sara in front of him.
2
From Cambridge Benham came to London. For the first time he was to live
in London. Never before had he been in London for more than a few days
at a time. But now, guided by his mother's advice, he was to have a flat
in Finacue street, just round the corner from Desborough Street, a flat
very completely and delightfully furnished under her supervision. It had
an admirable study, in which she had arranged not only his books, but
a number of others in beautiful old leather bindings that it had
amused her extremely to buy; it had a splendid bureau and business-like
letter-filing cabinets, a neat little drawing-room and a dining-room,
well-placed abundant electric lights, and a man called Merkle whom
she had selected very carefully and who she felt would not only see to
Benham's comfort but keep him, if necessary, up to the mark.