ovement of
style which is hardly heard except from Irish talkers: 'And I have been
in a village in the mountains where the people could hardly read or
write; but all the men were like soldiers, and all the women had pride.'

It sounds like a poem about an Earthly Paradise to say that in this land
the old women can be more beautiful than the young. Indeed, I think Walt
Whitman, the national poet, has a line somewhere almost precisely to
that effect. It sounds like a parody upon Utopia, and the image of the
lion lying down with the lamb, to say it is a place where a man might
almost fall in love with his mother-in-law. But there is nothing in
which the finer side of American gravity and good feeling does more
honourably exhibit itself than in a certain atmosphere around the older
women. It is not a cant phrase to say that they grow old gracefully; for
they do really grow old. In this the national optimism really has in it
the national courage. The old women do not dress like young women; they
only dress better. There is another side to this feminine dignity in the
old, sometimes a little lost in the young, with which I shall deal
presently. The point for the moment is that even Whitman's truly poetic
vision of the beautiful old women suffers a little from that bewildering
multiplicity and recurrence that is indeed the whole theme of Whitman.
It is like the green eternity of Leaves of Grass. When I think of the
eccentric spinsters and incorrigible grandmothers of my own country, I
cannot imagine that any one of them could possibly be mistaken for
another, even at a glance. And in comparison I feel as if I had been
travelling in an Earthly Paradise of more decorative harmonies; and I
remember only a vast cloud of grey and pink as of the plumage of
cherubim in an old picture. But on second thoughts, I think this may be
only the inevitable effect of visiting any country in a swift and
superficial fashion; and that the grey and pink cloud is probably an
illusion, like the spinning prairies scattered by the wheel of the
train.

Anyhow there is enough of this equality, and of a certain social unity
favourable to sanity, to make the next point about America very much of
a puzzle. It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen
an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy should
produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human
dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty