life nobly and thoroughly. His commoner expression for that
thorough living is "the aristocratic life." But by "aristocratic"
he meant something very different from the quality of a Russian
prince, let us say, or an English peer. He meant an intensity, a
clearness. . . . Nobility for him was to get something out of his
individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a splendour--it is a thing
easier to understand than to say.

One might hesitate to call this idea "innate," and yet it comes soon
into a life when it comes at all. In Benham's case we might trace
it back to the Day Nursery at Seagate, we might detect it stirring
already at the petticoat stage, in various private struttings and
valiant dreamings with a helmet of pasteboard and a white-metal
sword. We have most of us been at least as far as that with Benham.
And we have died like Horatius, slaying our thousands for our
country, or we have perished at the stake or faced the levelled
muskets of the firing party--"No, do not bandage my eyes"--because
we would not betray the secret path that meant destruction to our
city. But with Benham the vein was stronger, and it increased
instead of fading out as he grew to manhood. It was less obscured
by those earthy acquiescences, those discretions, that saving sense
of proportion, which have made most of us so satisfactorily what we
are. "Porphyry," his mother had discovered before he was seventeen,
"is an excellent boy, a brilliant boy, but, I begin to see, just a
little unbalanced."

The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the story of him, is
that.

Most of us are--balanced; in spite of occasional reveries we do come