At any rate I found it quite difficult to shake my feelings free from beliefs which my reason had rejected .sx Fortunately for me my mother was unusually liberal-minded .sx I do not recall her ever attempting to implant any kind of rigid doctrine or fearful religious truth into her children's minds .sx Her aim was that we should not have peculiar views and that we should grow up mildly orthodox , so that at a later age we could discard as much or as little of conventional religion as might suit us .sx I suspect that my father had been a sceptic and certainly my maternal grandfather was a convinced one .sx Agnosticism , as Huxley called it , was becoming respectable , and I welcomed that mental attitude of being free to think for myself .sx It is not very surprising that presently I earned the family nickname of the 'the youngest infallible' , for I knew all the answers though not , as yet , many of the questions .sx These came my way later in life .sx Perhaps because of my secret ambitions I was curious to see what eminent people looked like .sx At Clifton College , I had often seen the immortal W. G. Grace watching his son at the wicket , and I , like other boys , had stared at the vast bearded celebrity , sometimes even having the privilege of seeing him play on the Close and smiting the ball for six .sx A heavenly spectacle !sx At University College , the discoverer of argon , Sir William Ramsay , looked disappointingly ordinary .sx We were often given tickets to soire@2es of the Royal Geographical Society where we could feast our eyes on great men and hear them talk ; Sir William Crookes lecturing on those magical tubes of his which produced X-rays , Stanley on his African explorations , Nansen and his ship the Fram , George Nathaniel Curzon who had just explored the Pamirs , and others famous then but now forgotten .sx It seemed to me that these celebrities were much like ordinary folk to look at ; why shouldn't I become one too ?sx During the first half of 1896 my mother was visiting her sisters in New Zealand and I became a boarder in a relative's family in Hampstead .sx It was very uncongenial and I was desperately unhappy there , living in mental solitude without friends of any kind .sx On my mother's return in the summer of that year a much brighter prospect opened .sx She took a house in Cambridge and there I made a fresh start as a non-collegiate student , with a view ultimately of obtaining my medical degree .sx CHAPTER =2 .sx Cambridge .sx The Medical Student at Cambridge took the Natural Science Tripos ( in Anatomy and Physiology ) as the first stage of his training but in those three years my chief interests lay in other directions .sx I worked hard at studying dramatic technique and in seeing plays whenever I could .sx In addition there were theological and philosophical works to be read and then problems to be discussed with anyone who would listen .sx At eighteen it is easy to settle the affairs of this world and to arrange those of the next to one's own satisfaction ; but among undergraduates there are so often some whose minds are fixed in error , evidently afflicted by the sin of invincible ignorance , from which one is oneself happily free .sx In those years at Cambridge I was reaching the stage in self-education where questions become more exciting than answers .sx Sermons by eminent divines , preaching on Sundays in Great St. Mary's , provided me with abundant specimens of theological conundrums ; and it was instructive too , in view of a possible political career , to hear examples of oratory .sx I found Father Maturin the most remarkable and Bishop Gore the most profound .sx I also heard Bishop Temple ( the great , not the less ) , Archdeacon Farrar ( of Eric or Little by Little ) , Mandel Creighton , Scott Holland , and others who figured largely in the ecclesiastical world of the nineties .sx Yet in spite of them :sx ~There was a Door to which I found no Key :sx There was a veil past which I could not see .sx Among undergraduates my greatest friend was a theological student with whom I argued interminably many a long evening ; we had nothing whatever in common and we remained intimate friends for fifty years .sx I had reached the age when sexual questions pester the imagination and supply undergraduates with an absorbing topic for discussion .sx Nature demands information .sx How to obtain it ?sx One heard vaguely that 'they order this matter better in France' , but aesthetic principles coupled with an element of Puritanical shyness in my case , forbade practical experiments , and happily an alternative source of knowledge was available , namely the kind of literature which was commonly condemned as 'improper' , 'pornographic' or 'obscene' .sx I am amazed to recall how mild were the books which , in the nineties , served to provoke a young man's furtive blush ; the Decameron , Contes Drolatiques and Zola's novels , in atrocious translations ; Oscar Wilde's Dorian Grey and the like which I suppose would today make schoolgirls yawn .sx Doubtless there are modern equivalents which serve youth equally well as psychological sedatives , satisfying for the time being those unruly impulses which might otherwise interfere with scholarship .sx I must not forget to remind myself that among other subjects at Cambridge I studied Anatomy and Physiology as a preliminary stage to medicine and as an exercise in viewing the naked truth without flinching .sx For the English mind this is curiously distasteful .sx It was the custom among us students to attend Addenbrooke's Hospital to watch operations , as a hardening process .sx I found this had the drawback that as soon as an operation had started I fainted ; the power of suggestion- or the dislike of the naked truth- was such that eventually I even began to faint as I entered the hospital gates .sx Clearly I should have to abandon all hopes of becoming a doctor .sx Or was there a cure ?sx Making one more attempt , which I vowed should be the last , I went early to the torture chamber , sat in the front row from which escape was impossible , and spent the morning fainting and coming round over and over again .sx That effectively cured me ; it also taught a useful lesson , applicable to many things in life .sx As a non-collegiate student I found myself meeting a range of other undergraduates much more varied than at most of the colleges .sx There were men of all ages , creeds and races .sx I recall a room full of us , fourteen in number and no two of the same nation , all jabbering English .sx We happened to mention how some English families boast of Norman blood .sx Then a Greek claimed for his family a much longer descent and then among those from the East the 'bidding' rose by thousands , until an Icelander capped all by claiming direct lineal descent from Odin .sx Evidently Norman blood is mere 6vin ordinaire .sx I seized the opportunity afforded by Cambridge of starting to collect books ; I still have my eighteenth-century editions of Swift , Pope , Hudibras and the Spectator which I bought in 1897 off Mr. David's famous stall in the Market Place .sx Whilst at Cambridge I was taught by my mother to appreciate Gothic architecture , a subject she had much studied , and during the vac we visited the glories of Normandy .sx From her too I began to learn something about pictures , especially those of the Old Italian Masters .sx Names like Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi and Botticelli came to have a friendly significance , filling a gap in my raw sceptical mind .sx I was beginning to realize that it doesn't matter much whether a legend is true so long as it is beautiful .sx At the end of my time at the University I had learnt that a properly trained aesthetic sensibility was a more reliable guide in life than any system of theological dogmas , though I would admit that this might not apply to all people .sx For me , however , aesthetics seemed to be a more civilized mode of guidance than theology .sx In order to develop aesthetic tastes it would be necessary to familiarize oneself with as many forms of art as possible , but how in the world could one do all this if one had to waste so much time learning to become a doctor ?sx How much easier it would be to belong to some Puritanical sect that stifles all expressions of beauty , hates arts and is the sole possessor of the key which unlocks the Heavenly Gates !sx How simple just to worship ugliness and call it God !sx But as it was , Science and Art were making rival demands on my time and thoughts ; and it seemed that while Art added to the joy of life , Science added only to its comforts .sx I suppose it is common enough to look back later in life and to say what was the most valuable of the gifts one gets from three years at the University .sx In my case certainly , it was a keener appreciation of the beauty of things , ranging from the pictures of van Eyck which I heard Professor Waldstein expound in lectures in the Fitzwilliam Museum , to the shape of the buildings of the Colleges .sx Make your way along the Backs on a May morning to the Wilderness , penetrate passages and archways , cross bridges and gaze again and again at the Great Court of Trinity :sx this , believe me , is what education means , real education , for through appreciating the beauty of things you come in time to appreciate the beauty of ideas .sx CHAPTER =3 .sx Bart's .sx After Cambridge , I entered at St. Bartholomew's Hospital , London , at the beginning of 1900 .sx My mother and I lived in the suburbs and we were so fortunate as to have as a neighbour the late J. W. Allen , lecturer ( later Professor ) in History at Bedford College for Women .sx He supplied me with what I most required at that phase of development ; he became a guide to my reading and an admirable critic of my attempts to write plays ; and he had enormous enthusiasm for good literature .sx I recall his lending me , one evening , the poems of D. G. Rossetti .sx I sat up all night until I had read the volume from cover to cover .sx I have not read any of it since !sx I received that night an exhilarating shock to my sensibilities in appreciating the strange beauty words can present when arranged in particular patterns .sx If , with a taste for literature one happened to have grown up about the beginning of this century , one almost certainly would be conscious of that quality called 'style' .sx For then books were admired chiefly for their 'style' and writers laboured in pursuit of 6le mot juste .sx As you read those slender greenish volumes of the Pseudonym Library , pausing to discover the peculiar merits of Some Emotions and a Moral , you felt that however obscure the meaning , the style was superb .sx There was , too , The Yellow Book , a veritable storehouse of literary style and if one were in doubt what the word implied , there was Walter Pater's essay on Style to settle the matter .sx It was in fact a kind of literary 'class distinction' , a superior quality which only the select were capable of appreciating .sx It was not the matter presented by the author so much as the manner that counted .sx The reader learnt to be sensitive to the shape of a sentence , to the use of 'master words' round which an author like Stevenson would build significant paragraphs ; and to admire those splashes of colour that were almost purple .sx How gratifying to one's self-esteem to patronize an art so exclusive !sx But alas !sx - already in those Edwardian years the hoofs of democracy were trampling over the flower beds .sx A more plebeian mode was in demand and authors proclaimed their views in loud , level tones .sx About that time I experienced another shock at an exhibition of Romney's portraits , many of Lady Hamilton .sx No one , I thought , could ever have really looked as beautiful as that ; it must be a trick .sx I sat , watching that magical creature casting a spell over me , extraordinarily exhilarating ; but later came the shock of realizing that this kind of knock-out blow might happen to me in real life some day .sx