第95章 CHAPTER THE SIXTH(3)

So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of this search for "Prejudice." It seemed to White to be at once the most magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises.It was indeed no less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure and disorder...And it was all too manifest to White also that the last place in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the back of his own head.

Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array of influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the purely personal dissensions between man and man.And he developed a metaphysical interpretation of these troubles."No doubt," he wrote in one place, "much of th in a hurry.Life is so short that he thinks it better to err than wait.He has no patience, no faith in anything but himself.He thinks he is a being when in reality he is only a link in a being, and so he is more anxious to be complete than right.The last devotion of which he is capable is that devotion of the mind which suffers partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive thought.He scamps his thought and finishes his performance, and before he is dead it is already being abandoned and begun all over again by some one else in the same egotistical haste...."It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these words should have been written by a man who walked the plank to fresh ideas with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward, and who acted time after time with an altogether disastrous hastiness.

2

Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research Magnificent.You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays and abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale, than you can profess religion and refuse to think about God.In the past it was possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to unexamined things.One could be loyal to unexamined things because they were unchallenged things.But now everything is challenged.By the time of his second visit to Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious and deliberate aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal responsibility had already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he was, as it were, an uncrowned king in the world.To be noble is to be aristocratic, that is to say, a ruler.Thence it follows that aristocracy is multiple kingship, and to be an aristocrat is to partake both of the nature of philosopher and king....

Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no means necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in quality, petty in spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and limited, fall far short of kingship.Nevertheless, there ISnobility, there IS kingship, or this earth is a dustbin and mankind but a kind of skin-disease upon a planet.From that it is an easy step to this idea, the idea whose first expression had already so touched the imagination of Amanda, of a sort of diffused and voluntary kingship scattered throughout mankind.The aristocrats are not at the high table, the kings are not enthroned, those who are enthroned are but pretenders and SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar;the real king and ruler is every man who sets aside the naive passions and self-interest of the common life for the rule and service of the world.

This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary writing.It is one of those ideas that seem to appear simultaneously at many points in the world, and it is impossible to say now how far Benham was an originator of this idea, and how far he simply resonated to its expression by others.It was far more likely that Prothero, getting it heaven knows where, had spluttered it out and forgotten it, leaving it to germinate in the mind of his friend....

This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to Benham as his life went on.When Benham walked the Bisse he was just a youngster resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled in the jungle by night he was there for all mankind.With every year he became more and more definitely to himself a consecrated man as kings are consecrated.Only that he was self-consecrated, and anointed only in his heart.At last he was, so to speak, Haroun al Raschid again, going unsuspected about the world, because the palace of his security would not tell him the secrets of men's disorders.