at any rate I found it quite difficult to shake my feelings free from beliefs which my reason had rejected . fortunately for me my mother was unusually liberal-minded . I do not recall her ever attempting to implant any kind of rigid doctrine or fearful religious truth into her children &apos;s minds . 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 . I suspect that my father had been a sceptic and certainly my maternal grandfather was a convinced one . agnosticism , as Huxley called it , was becoming respectable , and I welcomed that mental attitude of being free to think for myself . 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 . these came my way later in life . perhaps because of my secret ambitions I was curious to see what eminent people looked like . 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 . a heavenly spectacle ! at University College , the discoverer of argon , Sir William Ramsay , looked disappointingly ordinary . we were often given tickets to soir&amp;eacute;es 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 . it seemed to me that these celebrities were much like ordinary folk to look at ; why should n&apos;t I become one too ? during the first half of 1896 my mother was visiting her sisters in New Zealand and I became a boarder in a relative &apos;s family in Hampstead . it was very uncongenial and I was desperately unhappy there , living in mental solitude without friends of any kind . on my mother &apos;s return in the summer of that year a much brighter prospect opened . 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 . chapter 2 . Cambridge . 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 . I worked hard at studying dramatic technique and in seeing plays whenever I could . in addition there were theological and philosophical works to be read and then problems to be discussed with anyone who would listen . at eighteen it is easy to settle the affairs of this world and to arrange those of the next to one &apos;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 . in those years at Cambridge I was reaching the stage in self-education where questions become more exciting than answers . sermons by eminent divines , preaching on Sundays in Great St Mary &apos;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 . I found Father Maturin the most remarkable and Bishop Gore the most profound . 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 . yet in spite of them : there was a door to which I found no key : there was a veil past which I could not see . 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 . I had reached the age when sexual questions pester the imagination and supply undergraduates with an absorbing topic for discussion . nature demands information . how to obtain it ? 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 . I am amazed to recall how mild were the books which , in the nineties , served to provoke a young man &apos;s furtive blush ; the Decameron , contes drolatiques and Zola &apos;s novels , in atrocious translations ; Oscar Wilde &apos;s Dorian Grey and the like which I suppose would today make schoolgirls yawn . 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 . 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 . for the English mind this is curiously distasteful . it was the custom among us students to attend Addenbrooke &apos;s Hospital to watch operations , as a hardening process . 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 . clearly I should have to abandon all hopes of becoming a doctor . or was there a cure ? 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 . that effectively cured me ; it also taught a useful lesson , applicable to many things in life . as a non-collegiate student I found myself meeting a range of other undergraduates much more varied than at most of the colleges . there were men of all ages , creeds and races . I recall a room full of us , fourteen in number and no two of the same nation , all jabbering English . we happened to mention how some English families boast of Norman blood . 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 . evidently Norman blood is mere vin ordinaire . 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 &apos;s famous stall in the Market Place . 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 . from her too I began to learn something about pictures , especially those of the old Italian masters . names like Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi and Botticelli came to have a friendly significance , filling a gap in my raw sceptical mind . I was beginning to realize that it does n&apos;t matter much whether a legend is true so long as it is beautiful . 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 . for me , however , aesthetics seemed to be a more civilized mode of guidance than theology . 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 ? 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 ! how simple just to worship ugliness and call it God ! 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 : 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 . chapter 3 . Bart &apos;s . after Cambridge , I entered at St Bartholomew &apos;s Hospital , London , at the beginning of 1900 . 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 . 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 . I recall his lending me , one evening , the poems of D G Rossetti . I sat up all night until I had read the volume from cover to cover . I have not read any of it since ! I received that night an exhilarating shock to my sensibilities in appreciating the strange beauty words can present when arranged in particular patterns . 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 . for then books were admired chiefly for their style and writers laboured in pursuit of le mot juste . 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 . 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 &apos;s essay on style to settle the matter . it was in fact a kind of literary class distinction , a superior quality which only the select were capable of appreciating . it was not the matter presented by the author so much as the manner that counted . 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 . how gratifying to one &apos;s self-esteem to patronize an art so exclusive ! but alas ! - already in those Edwardian years the hoofs of democracy were trampling over the flower beds . a more plebeian mode was in demand and authors proclaimed their views in loud , level tones . about that time I experienced another shock at an exhibition of Romney &apos;s portraits , many of Lady Hamilton . no one , I thought , could ever have really looked as beautiful as that ; it must be a trick . 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 . 