o forth--practicable
things. 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.

For this reason this story has been called THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. It
was a real research, it was documented. In the rooms in Westhaven Street
that at last were as much as one could call his home, he had accumulated
material for--one hesitates to call it a book--let us say it was an
analysis of, a guide to the noble life. There after his tragic death
came his old friend White, the journalist and novelist, under a promise,
and found these papers; he found them to the extent of a crammed
bureau, half a score of patent files quite distended and a writing-table
drawer-full, and he was greatly exercised to find them. They were,
White declares, they are still after much experienced handling, an
indigestible aggregation. On this point White is very assured. When
Benham thought he was gathering together a book he was dreaming, White
says. There is no book in it....

Perhaps too, one might hazard, Benham was dreaming when he thought the
noble life a human possibility. Perhaps man, like the ape and the hyaena
and the tapeworm and many other of God's necessary but less attractive
creatures, is not for such exalted ends. That doubt never seems to have
got a lodgment in Benham's skull; though at times one might suppose it
the ba