mething very different from the
quality of a Russian prince, let us say, or an English peer. He meant an
intensity, a clearness.... Nobility for him was to get something out of
his individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a splendour--it is a thing
easier to understand than to say.

One might hesitate to call this idea "innate," and yet it comes soon
into a life when it comes at all. In Benham's case we might trace it
back to the Day Nursery at Seagate, we might detect it stirring already
at the petticoat stage, in various private struttings and valiant
dreamings with a helmet of pasteboard and a white-metal sword. We have
most of us been at least as far as that with Benham. And we have
died like Horatius, slaying our thousands for our country, or we have
perished at the stake or faced the levelled muskets of the firing
party--"No, do not bandage my eyes"--because we would not betray the
secret path that meant destruction to our city. But with Benham the
vein was stronger, and it increased instead of fading out as he grew
to manhood. It was less obscured by those earthy acquiescences, those
discretions, that saving sense of proportion, which have made most of
us so satisfactorily what we are. "Porphyry," his mother had discovered
before he was seventeen, "is an excellent boy, a brilliant boy, but, I
begin to see, just a little unbalanced."

The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the story of him, is that.

Most of us are--balanced; in spite of occasional reveries we do come to
terms with the limitations of life, with those desires and dreams and
discretions that, to say the least of it, qualify our nobility, we take
refuge in our sense of humour and congratulate ourselves on a certain
amiable freedom from priggishness or presumption, but for Benham that
easy declension to a humorous acceptance of life as it is did not occur.
He found his limitations soon enough; he was perpetually
rediscovering them, but out of these interments of the spirit he rose
again--remarkably. When we others have decided that, to be plain about
it, we are not going to lead the noble life at all, that the thing is
too ambitious and expensive even to attempt, we have done so because
there were other conceptions of existence that were good enough for us,
we decided that instead of that glorious impossible being of ourselves,
we would figure in our own eyes as jolly fellows, or sly dogs, or sane,
sound, capable men or brilliant successes, and s