THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
by H. G. Wells (1915)

CONTENTS

THE PRELUDE

ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY

THE STORY

  I.  THE BOY GROWS UP

 II.  THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN

III.  AMANDA

 IV.  THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON

  V.  THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY

 VI.  THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID

THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT

THE PRELUDE

ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY

1

The story of William Porphyry Benham is the story of a man who was
led into adventure by an idea.  It was an idea that took possession
of his imagination quite early in life, it grew with him and changed
with him, it interwove at last completely with his being.  His story
is its story.  It was traceably germinating in the schoolboy; it was
manifestly present in his mind at the very last moment of his
adventurous life.  He belonged to that fortunate minority who are
independent of daily necessities, so that he was free to go about
the world under its direction.  It led him far.  It led him into
situations that bordered upon the fantastic, it made him ridiculous,
it came near to making him sublime.  And this idea of his was of
such a nature that in several aspects he could document it.  Its
logic forced him to introspection and to the making of a record.

An idea that can play so large a part in a life must necessarily
have something of the complication and protean quality of life
itself.  It is not to be stated justly in any formula, it is not to
be rendered by an epigram.  As well one might show a man's skeleton
for his portrait.  Yet, essentially, Benham's idea was simple.  He
had an incurable, an almost innate persuasion that he had to live
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
to terms with the limitations of life, with those desires and dreams
and discretions that, to say the least of it, qualify our nobility,
we take refuge in our sense of humour and congratulate ourselves on
a certain amiable freedom from priggishness or presumption, but for
Benham that easy declension to a humorous acceptance of life as it
is 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 wore his
manifest imperfections turned up about him like an overcoat in
bitter wind.  He was content to be inexplicable.  His thoughts led
him to the conviction that this magnificent research could not be,
any more than any other research can be, a solitary enterprise, but
he delayed expression; in a mighty writing and stowing away of these
papers he found a relief from the unpleasant urgency to confess and
explain himself prematurely.  So that White, though he knew Benham
with the intimacy of an old schoolfellow who had renewed his
friendship, and had shared his last days and been a witness of his
death, read the sheets of manuscript often with surprise and with a
sense of added elucidation.

And, being also a trained maker of books, White as he read was more
and more distressed that an accumulation so interesting should be so
entirely unshaped for publication.  "But this will never make a
book," said White with a note of personal grievance.  His hasty
promise in their last moments together had bound him, it seemed, to
a task he now found impossible.  He would have to work upon it
tremendously; and even then he did not see how it could be done.

This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a
confession, not a diary.  It was--nothing definable.  It went into
no conceivable covers.  It was just, White decided, a proliferation.
A vast proliferation.  It wanted even a title.  There were signs
that Benham had intended to call it THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE, and that
he had tried at some other time the title of AN ESSAY ON
ARISTOCRACY.  Moreover, it would seem that towards the end he had
been disposed to drop the word "aristocratic" altogether, and adopt
some such phrase as THE LARGER LIFE.  Once it was LIFE SET FREE.  He
had fallen away more and more from nearly everything that one
associates with aristocracy--at the end only its ideals of
fearlessness and generosity remained.

Of all these titles THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE seemed at first most like
a clue to White.  Benham's erratic movements, his sudden impulses,
his angers, his unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange
places, and his lapses into what had seemed to be pure