into things only
through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for
us. When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was
a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man sets
itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that persuasion.

I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these
conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen or
nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as
children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at eighteen months
and some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very little
to do with their subsequent mental quality. So it is with young people;
some will begin their religious, their social, their sexual interests at
fourteen, some not until far on in the twenties. Britten and I belonged
to one of the precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another.
It wasn't that there was anything priggish about any of us; we should
have been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the
theoretical boy.

The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still centres
there; the real and present world, that is to say, as distinguished from
the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic science and the stars and
future time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed the
Channel, but I had read copiously and I had formed a very good working
idea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forests
and all the sorts and conditions of human life that were scattered over
its surface. It was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it
was changing, and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind
beyond measure.

I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to the
Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-deception
write down compactly the world as it was known to me at nineteen. So
far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now at
forty-two; I had practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries and
races, products and possibilities that I have now. But its intension was
very different. All the interval has been increasing and deepening my
social knowledge, replacing crude and second-hand impressions by felt
and realised distinctions.

In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to Cambridge
in September--my vision of the world