"Fear, the First Limitation"--his title indicated the spirit of Benham's opening book very clearly.His struggle with fear was the very beginning of his soul's history.It continued to the end.He had hardly decided to lead the noble life before he came bump against the fact that he was a physical coward.He felt fear acutely."Fear," he wrote, "is the foremost and most persistent of the shepherding powers that keep us in the safe fold, that drive us back to the beaten track and comfort and--futility.The beginning of all aristocracy is the subjugation of fear."At first the struggle was so great that he hated fear without any qualification; he wanted to abolish it altogether.
"When I was a boy," he writes, "I thought I would conquer fear for good and all, and never more be troubled by it.But it is not to be done in that way.One might as well dream of having dinner for the rest of one's life.Each time and always I have found that it has to be conquered afresh.To this day I fear, little things as well as big things.I have to grapple with some little dread every day--urge myself....Just as I have to wash and shave myself every day....I believe it is so with every one, but it is difficult to be sure; few men who go into dangers care very much to talk about fear...."Later Benham found some excuses for fear, came even to dealings with fear.He never, however, admits that this universal instinct is any better than a kindly but unintelligent nurse from whose fostering restraints it is man's duty to escape.Discretion, he declared, must remain; a sense of proportion, an "adequacy of enterprise," but the discretion of an aristocrat is in his head, a tactical detail, it has nothing to do with this visceral sinking, this ebb in the nerves."From top to bottom, the whole spectrum of fear is bad, from panic fear at one extremity down to that mere disinclination for enterprise, that reluctance and indolence which is its lowest phase.These are things of the beast, these are for creatures that have a settled environment, a life history, that spin in a cage of instincts.But man is a beast of that kind no longer, he has left his habitat, he goes out to limitless living...."This idea of man going out into new things, leaving securities, habits, customs, leaving his normal life altogether behind him, underlay all Benham's aristocratic conceptions.And it was natural that he should consider fear as entirely inconvenient, treat it indeed with ingratitude, and dwell upon the immense liberations that lie beyond for those who will force themselves through its remonstrances....
Benham confessed his liability to fear quite freely in these notes.
His fear of animals was ineradicable.He had had an overwhelming dread of bears until he was twelve or thirteen, the child's irrational dread of impossible bears, bears lurking under the bed and in the evening shadows.He confesses that even up to manhood he could not cross a field containing cattle without keeping a wary eye upon them--his bull adventure rather increased than diminished that disposition--he hated a strange dog at his heels and would manoeuvre himself as soon as possible out of reach of the teeth or heels of a horse.But the peculiar dread of his childhood was tigers.Some gaping nursemaid confronted him suddenly with a tiger in a cage in the menagerie annexe of a circus."My small mind was overwhelmed.""I had never thought," White read, "that a tiger was much larger than a St.Bernard dog....This great creature!...I could not believe any hunter would attack such a monster except by stealth and with weapons of enormous power....
"He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and looked over my head with yellow eyes--at some phantom far away.
Every now and then he snarled.The contempt of his detestable indifference sank deeper and deeper into my soul.I knew that were the cage to vanish I should stand there motionless, his helpless prey.I knew that were he at large in the same building with me Ishould be too terror-stricken to escape him.At the foot of a ladder leading clear to escape I should have awaited him paralyzed.
At last I gripped my nurse's hand.‘Take me away,' I whispered.
"In my dreams that night he stalked me.I made my frozen flight from him, I slammed a door on him, and he thrust his paw through a panel as though it had been paper and clawed for me.The paw got longer and longer....
"I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.
"I remember that he took me in his arms.
"‘It's only a big sort of pussy, Poff,' he said.FELIS TIGRIS.
FELIS, you know, means cat.'
"But I knew better.I was in no mood then for my father's insatiable pedagoguery.
"‘And my little son mustn't be a coward.'...
"After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers alone.
"For years the thought of that tiger's immensity haunted my mind.
In my dreams I cowered before it a thousand times; in the dusk it rarely failed me.On the landing on my way to bed there was a patch of darkness beyond a chest that became a lurking horror for me, and sometimes the door of my father's bedroom would stand open and there was a long buff and crimson-striped shape, by day indeed an ottoman, but by night--.Could an ottoman crouch and stir in the flicker of a passing candle? Could an ottoman come after you noiselessly, and so close that you could not even turn round upon it? No!"5
