are very active virtues; cheerfulness and courage and vim,
otherwise zip, also pep and similar things. But it is sometimes
forgotten that negative morality is freer than positive morality.
Negative morality is a net of a larger and more open pattern, of which
the lines or cords constrict at longer intervals. A man like Dr. Johnson
could grow in his own way to his own stature in the net of the Ten
Commandments; precisely because he was convinced there were only ten of
them. He was not compressed into the mould of positive beauty, like
that of the Apollo Belvedere or the American citizen.

This criticism is sometimes true even of the American woman, who is
certainly a much more delightful person than the mesmeric millionaire
with his shaven jaw. Interviewers in the United States perpetually asked
me what I thought of American women, and I confessed a distaste for such
generalisations which I have not managed to lose. The Americans, who are
the most chivalrous people in the world, may perhaps understand me; but
I can never help feeling that there is something polygamous about
talking of women in the plural at all; something unworthy of any
American except a Mormon. Nevertheless, I think the exaggeration I
suggest does extend in a less degree to American women, fascinating as
they are. I think they too tend too much to this cult of impersonal
personality. It is a description easy to exaggerate even by the faintest
emphasis; for all these things are subtle and subject to striking
individual exceptions. To complain of people for being brave and bright
and kind and intelligent may not unreasonably appear unreasonable. And
yet there is something in the background that can only be expressed by a
symbol, something that is not shallowness but a neglect of the
subconsciousness and the vaguer and slower impulses; something that can
be missed amid all that laughter and light, under those starry
candelabra of the ideals of the happy virtues. Sometimes it came over
me, in a wordless wave, that I should like to see a sulky woman. How she
would walk in beauty like the night, and reveal more silent spaces full
of older stars! These things cannot be conveyed in their delicate
proportion even in the most detached description. But the same thing
was in the mind of a white-bearded old man I met in New York, an Irish
exile and a wonderful talker, who stared up at the tower of gilded
galleries of the great hotel, and said with that spontaneous m