And again he wrote:  “Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too eager to get into action.  There is our deepest trouble.  He takes conclusions ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry.  Life is so short that he thinks it better to err than wait.  He has no patience, no faith in anything but himself.  He thinks he is a being when in reality he is only a link in a being, and so he is more anxious to be complete than right.  The last devotion of which he is capable is that devotion of the mind which suffers partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive thought.  He scamps his thought and finishes his performance, and before he is dead it is already being abandoned and begun all over again by some one else in the same egotistical haste. . . .”

It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these words should have been written by a man who walked the plank to fresh ideas with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward, and who acted time after time with an altogether disastrous hastiness.

2

Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham’s from the cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research Magnificent.  You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays and abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale, than you can profess religion and refuse to think about God.  In the past it was possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to unexamined things.  One could be loyal to unexamined things because they were unchallenged things.  But now everything is challenged.  By the time of his second visit to Russia, Benham’s ideas of conscious and deliberate aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal responsibility had already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he was, as it were, an uncrowned king in the world.  To be noble is to be aristocratic, that is to say, a ruler.  Thence it follows that aristocracy is multiple kingship, and to be an aristocrat is to partake both of the nature of philosopher and king. . . .

Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no means necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in quality, petty in spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and limited, fall far short of kingship.  Nevertheless, there is nobility, there is kingship, or this earth is a dustbin and mankind but a kind of skin-disease upon a planet.  From that it is an easy step to this idea, the idea whose first expression had already so touched the imagination of Amanda, of a sort of diffused and voluntary kingship scattered throughout mankind.  The aristocrats are not at the high table, the kings are not enthroned, those who are enthroned are but pretenders and SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar; the real king and ruler is every man who sets aside the naive passions and self-interest of the common life for the rule and service of the world.