The Research Magnificent | Page 4

did not occur. He found his
limitations soon enough; he was perpetually rediscovering them, but out of these
interments of the spirit he rose again--remarkably. When we others have decided that, to
be plain about it, we are not going to lead the noble life at all, that the thing is too
ambitious and expensive even to attempt, we have done so because there were other
conceptions of existence that were good enough for us, we decided that instead of that
glorious impossible being of ourselves, we would figure in our own eyes as jolly fellows,

or sly dogs, or sane, sound, capable men or brilliant successes, and so forth--practicable
things. For Benham, exceptionally, there were not these practicable things. He blundered,
he fell short of himself, he had--as you will be told-- some astonishing rebuffs, but they
never turned him aside for long. He went by nature for this preposterous idea of nobility
as a linnet hatched in a cage will try to fly.
And when he discovered--and in this he was assisted not a little by his friend at his
elbow--when he discovered that Nobility was not the simple thing he had at first
supposed it to be, he set himself in a mood only slightly disconcerted to the discovery of
Nobility. When it dawned upon him, as it did, that one cannot be noble, so to speak, IN
VACUO, he set himself to discover a Noble Society. He began with simple beliefs and
fine attitudes and ended in a conscious research. If he could not get through by a stride,
then it followed that he must get through by a climb. He spent the greater part of his life
studying and experimenting in the noble possibilities of man. He never lost his absurd
faith in that conceivable splendour. At first it was always just round the corner or just
through the wood; to the last it seemed still but a little way beyond the distant mountains.
For this reason this story has been called THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. It was a
real research, it was documented. In the rooms in Westhaven Street that at last were as
much as one could call his home, he had accumulated material for--one hesitates to call it
a book--let us say it was an analysis of, a guide to the noble life. There after his tragic
death came his old friend White, the journalist and novelist, under a promise, and found
these papers; he found them to the extent of a crammed bureau, half a score of patent files
quite distended and a writing-table drawer-full, and he was greatly exercised to find them.
They were, White declares, they are still after much experienced handling, an indigestible
aggregation. On this point White is very assured. When Benham thought he was
gathering together a book he was dreaming, White says. There is no book in it. . . .
Perhaps too, one might hazard, Benham was dreaming when he thought the noble life a
human possibility. Perhaps man, like the ape and the hyaena and the tapeworm and many
other of God's necessary but less attractive creatures, is not for such exalted ends. That
doubt never seems to have got a lodgment in Benham's skull; though at times one might
suppose it the basis of White's thought. You will find in all Benham's story, if only it can
be properly told, now subdued, now loud and amazed and distressed, but always traceable,
this startled, protesting question, "BUT WHY THE DEVIL AREN'T WE?" As though
necessarily we ought to be. He never faltered in his persuasion that behind the dingy face
of this world, the earthy stubbornness, the baseness and dulness of himself and all of us,
lurked the living jewels of heaven, the light of glory, things unspeakable. At first it
seemed to him that one had only just to hammer and will, and at the end, after a life of
willing and hammering, he was still convinced there was something, something in the
nature of an Open Sesame, perhaps a little more intricate than one had supposed at first, a
little more difficult to secure, but still in that nature, which would suddenly roll open for
mankind the magic cave of the universe, that precious cave at the heart of all things, in
which one must believe.
And then life--life would be the wonder it so perplexingly just isn't. . . .

2
Benham did not go about the world telling people of this consuming research. He was not
the prophet or preacher of his idea. It was too living and intricate and uncertain a part of

him to speak freely about. It was his secret self; to expose it casually would have shamed
him. He drew all sorts of reserves about him, he