In his younger days Benham had regarded Fear as a shameful secret and as a thing to be got rid of altogether.  It seemed to him that to feel fear was to fall short of aristocracy, and in spite of the deep dreads and disgusts that haunted his mind, he set about the business of its subjugation as if it were a spiritual amputation.  But as he emerged from the egotism of adolescence he came to realize that this was too comprehensive an operation; every one feels fear, and your true aristocrat is not one who has eliminated, but one who controls or ignores it.  Brave men are men who do things when they are afraid to do them, just as Nelson, even when he was seasick, and he was frequently seasick, was still master of the sea.  Benham developed two leading ideas about fear; one that it is worse at the first onset, and far worse than any real experience, and the other that fear is essentially a social instinct.  He set himself upon these lines to study—­what can we call it?—­the taming of fear, the nature, care, and management of fear. . . .

“Fear is very like pain in this, that it is a deterrent thing.  It is superficial.  Just as a man’s skin is infinitely more sensitive than anything inside. . . .  Once you have forced yourself or have been forced through the outward fear into vivid action or experience, you feel very little.  The worst moment is before things happen.  Rowe, the African sportsman, told me that he had seen cowardice often enough in the presence of lions, but he had never seen any one actually charged by a lion who did not behave well.  I have heard the same thing of many sorts of dangers.

“I began to suspect this first in the case of falling or jumping down.  Giddiness may be an almost intolerable torture, and falling nothing of the sort.  I once saw the face of an old man who had flung himself out of a high window in Rome, and who had been killed instantly on the pavement; it was not simply a serene face, it was glad, exalted.  I suspect that when we have broken the shell of fear, falling may be delightful.  Jumping down is, after all, only a steeper tobogganing, and tobogganing a milder jumping down.  Always I used to funk at the top of the Cresta run.  I suffered sometimes almost intolerably; I found it almost impossible to get away.  The first ten yards was like being slashed open with a sharp sword.  But afterwards there was nothing but joyful thrills.  All instinct, too, fought against me when I tried high diving.  I managed it, and began to like it.  I had to give it up because of my ears, but not until I had established the habit of stepping through that moment of disinclination.