ose fostering
restraints it is man's duty to escape. Discretion, he declared, must
remain; a sense of proportion, an "adequacy of enterprise," but the
discretion of an aristocrat is in his head, a tactical detail, it has
nothing to do with this visceral sinking, this ebb in the nerves. "From
top to bottom, the whole spectrum of fear is bad, from panic fear at
one extremity down to that mere disinclination for enterprise, that
reluctance and indolence which is its lowest phase. These are things of
the beast, these are for creatures that have a settled environment, a
life history, that spin in a cage of instincts. But man is a beast of
that kind no longer, he has left his habitat, he goes out to limitless
living...."

This idea of man going out into new things, leaving securities, habits,
customs, leaving his normal life altogether behind him, underlay all
Benham's aristocratic conceptions. And it was natural that he
should consider fear as entirely inconvenient, treat it indeed with
ingratitude, and dwell upon the immense liberations that lie beyond for
those who will force themselves through its remonstrances....

Benham confessed his liability to fear quite freely in these notes. His
fear of animals was ineradicable. He had had an overwhelming dread of
bears until he was twelve or thirteen, the child's irrational dread
of impossible bears, bears lurking under the bed and in the evening
shadows. He confesses that even up to manhood he could not cross a
field containing cattle without keeping a wary eye upon them--his bull
adventure rather increased than diminished that disposition--he hated a
strange dog at his heels and would manoeuvre himself as soon as possible
out of reach of the teeth or heels of a horse. But the peculiar dread of
his childhood was tigers. Some gaping nursemaid confronted him suddenly
with a tiger in a cage in the menagerie annexe of a circus. "My small
mind was overwhelmed."

"I had never thought," White read, "that a tiger was much larger than
a St. Bernard dog.... This great creature!... I could not believe any
hunter would attack such a monster except by stealth and with weapons of
enormous power....

"He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and
looked over my head with yellow eyes--at some phantom far away. Every
now and then he snarled. The contempt of his detestable indifference
sank deeper and deeper into my soul. I knew that were the cage to vanish
I should stand