“Now you see better what I mean about choice.  Now you see what I am driving at.  We have to choose each one for himself and also each one for the race, whether we will accept the muddle of the common life, whether we ourselves will be muddled, weakly nothings, children of luck, steering our artful courses for mean success and tawdry honours, or whether we will be aristocrats, for that is what it amounts to, each one in the measure of his personal quality an aristocrat, refusing to be restrained by fear, refusing to be restrained by pain, resolved to know and understand up to the hilt of his understanding, resolved to sacrifice all the common stuff of his life to the perfection of his peculiar gift, a purged man, a trained, selected, artificial man, not simply free, but lordly free, filled and sustained by pride.  Whether you or I make that choice and whether you or I succeed in realizing ourselves, though a great matter to ourselves, is, I admit, a small matter to the world.  But the great matter is this, that the choice is being made, that it will continue to be made, and that all around us, so that it can never be arrested and darkened again, is the dawn of human possibility. . . .”

(White could also see his dead friend’s face with its enthusiastic paleness, its disordered hair and the glowing darknesses in the eyes.  On such occasions Benham always had an expression of escape.  Temporary escape.  And thus would his hand have clutched the reading-desk; thus would his long fingers have rustled these dry papers.)

“Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him. . . .

“The old habitual life of man is breaking up all about us, and for the new life our minds, our imaginations, our habits and customs are all unprepared. . . .

“It is only now, after some years of study and living, that I begin to realize what this tremendous beginning we call Science means to mankind.  Every condition that once justified the rules and imperatives, the manners and customs, the sentiments, the morality, the laws and limitations which make up the common life, has been or is being destroyed. . . .  Two or three hundred years more and all that life will be as much a thing past and done with as the life that was lived in the age of unpolished stone. . . .

“Man is leaving his ancestral shelters and going out upon the greatest adventure that ever was in space or time, he is doing it now, he is doing it in us as I stand here and read to you.”

CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN

1

The oldest novel in the world at any rate, White reflected, was a story with a hero and no love interest worth talking about.  It was the story of Tobias and how he came out from the shelters of his youth into this magic and intricate world.  Its heroine was incidental, part of the spoil, a seven times relict. . . .