Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/240

214 attained, and the individual's loss from obedience. He states with fairness, but his own choice is never in doubt. He goes to what directly pleases him. "Shall I dare to talk of the bases of morals? From the accounts of my comrades I believe that there are as many deceived husbands at Paris as at Boulogne, at Berlin as at Rome. The whole difference is that at Paris the sin is caused by vanity, and at Rome by climate. The only exception I find is in the middle classes in England, and all classes at Geneva. But, upon my honour, the drawback in ennui is too great. I prefer Paris. It is gay." His tastes, his sympathies, are unhesitatingly with the Roman in the following judgment: "A Roman to whom you should propose to love always the same woman, were she an angel, would exclaim that you were taking from him three-quarters of what makes life worth while. Thus, at Edinburgh, the family is first, and at Rome it is a detail. If the system of the Northern people sometimes begets the mono tony and the ennui that we read on their faces, it often causes a calm and continuous happiness." This steady contrast is noted by his mind merely, his logical fairness. His mind is judicial in a sort of negative, formal sense; judicial without weight, we might almost say. He does not feel, or see imaginatively, sympathetically, the advantages of habitual constancy. He feels only the truths of the other side, or the side of truth which he expresses when he says that all true passion is selfish: and passion and its truth are the final test for him. This selfishness, which is even more self-reliance than it is self-seeking, which has his instinctive approval in all moods, is directly celebrated by him in most. The more natural genius and originality one has, he says, the more one feels the profound truth of the remark of the Duchesse de Ferté, that she found no one but herself who was always right. And not only does natural genius, which we