de of cattle is to
ask us to believe in a bull writing a diary or a cow looking in a
looking-glass. Intensely sensitive by their very vitality, they are
certainly conscious of criticism and not merely of a blind and brutal
appetite. But the peculiar point about them is that it is this very
vividness in the self that often produces the similarity. It may be that
when they are unconscious they are like bulls and cows. But it is when
they are self-conscious that they are like each other.

Individualism is the death of individuality. It is so, if only because
it is an 'ism.' Many Americans become almost impersonal in their worship
of personality. Where their natural selves might differ, their ideal
selves tend to be the same. Anybody can see what I mean in those strong
self-conscious photographs of American business men that can be seen in
any American magazine. Each may conceive himself to be a solitary
Napoleon brooding at St. Helena; but the result is a multitude of
Napoleons brooding all over the place. Each of them must have the eyes
of a mesmerist; but the most weak-minded person cannot be mesmerised by
more than one millionaire at a time. Each of the millionaires must
thrust forward his jaw, offering (if I may say so) to fight the world
with the same weapon as Samson. Each of them must accentuate the length
of his chin, especially, of course, by always being completely
clean-shaven. It would be obviously inconsistent with Personality to
prefer to wear a beard. These are of course fantastic examples on the
fringe of American life; but they do stand for a certain assimilation,
not through brute gregariousness, but rather through isolated dreaming.
And though it is not always carried so far as this, I do think it is
carried too far. There is not quite enough unconsciousness to produce
real individuality. There is a sort of worship of will-power in the
abstract, so that people are actually thinking about how they can will,
more than about what they want. To this I do think a certain corrective
could be found in the nature of English eccentricity. Every man in his
humour is most interesting when he is unconscious of his humour; or at
least when he is in an intermediate stage between humour in the old
sense of oddity and in the new sense of irony. Much is said in these
days against negative morality; and certainly most Americans would show
a positive preference for positive morality. The virtues they venerate
collectively