Of course this was what happened to every intelligent contemporary, this encounter with ideas, this restatement and ventilation of the old truths and the old heresies.  Only in this way does a man make a view his own, only so does he incorporate it.  These are our real turning points.  The significant, the essential moments in the life of any one worth consideration are surely these moments when for the first time he faces towards certain broad ideas and certain broad facts.  Life nowadays consists of adventures among generalizations.  In class-rooms after the lecture, in studies in the small hours, among books or during solitary walks, the drama of the modern career begins.  Suddenly a man sees his line, his intention.  Yet though we are all of us writing long novels—­White’s world was the literary world, and that is how it looked to him—­which profess to set out the lives of men, this part of the journey, this crucial passage among the Sphinxes, is still done—­when it is done at all—­slightly, evasively.  Why?

White fell back on his professionalism.  “It does not make a book.  It makes a novel into a treatise, it turns it into a dissertation.”

But even as White said this to himself he knew it was wrong, and it slid out of his thoughts again.  Was not this objection to the play of ideas merely the expression of that conservative instinct which fights for every old convention?  The traditional novel is a love story and takes ideas for granted, it professes a hero but presents a heroine.  And to begin with at least, novels were written for the reading of heroines.  Miss Lydia Languish sets no great store upon the contents of a man’s head.  That is just the stuffing of the doll.  Eyes and heart are her game.  And so there is never any more sphinx in the story than a lady may impersonate.  And as inevitably the heroine meets a man.  In his own first success, White reflected, the hero, before he had gone a dozen pages, met a very pleasant young woman very pleasantly in a sunlit thicket; the second opened at once with a bicycle accident that brought two young people together so that they were never afterwards disentangled; the third, failing to produce its heroine in thirty pages, had to be rearranged.  The next—­

White returned from an unprofitable digression to the matter before him.

14

The first of Benham’s early essays was written in an almost boyish hand, it was youthfully amateurish in its nervous disposition to definitions and distinctions, and in the elaborate linking of part to part.  It was called true democracy.  Manifestly it was written before the incident of the Trinity Hall plates, and most of it had been done after Prothero’s visit to Chexington.  White could feel that now inaudible interlocutor.  And there were even traces of Sir Godfrey Marayne’s assertion that democracy was contrary to biology.  From the outset it was clear that whatever else it meant, True Democracy, following the analogy of True Politeness, True Courage, True Honesty and True Marriage, did not mean democracy at all.  Benham was, in fact, taking Prothero’s word, and trying to impose upon it his own solidifying and crystallizing opinion of life.