For Benham,
exceptionally, there were not these practicable things. He
blundered, he fell short of himself, he had--as you will be told--
some astonishing rebuffs, but they never turned him aside for long.
He went by nature for this preposterous idea of nobility as a linnet
hatched in a cage will try to fly.
And when he discovered--and in this he was assisted not a little by
his friend at his elbow--when he discovered that Nobility was not
the simple thing he had at first supposed it to be, he set himself
in a mood only slightly disconcerted to the discovery of Nobility.
When it dawned upon him, as it did, that one cannot be noble, so to
speak, IN VACUO, he set himself to discover a Noble Society. He
began with simple beliefs and fine attitudes and ended in a
conscious research. If he could not get through by a stride, then
it followed that he must get through by a climb. He spent the
greater part of his life studying and experimenting in the noble
possibilities of man. He never lost his absurd faith in that
conceivable splendour. At first it was always just round the corner
or just through the wood; to the last it seemed still but a little
way beyond the distant mountains.
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