The common mixture of much reflective morality in theory with much light-hearted immorality in practice, never entered so largely into manners.  We have constantly to wonder how they analysed and defined the word Virtue, to which they so constantly appealed in letters, conversation, and books, as the sovereign object for our deepest and warmest adoration.  A whole company of transgressors of the marriage law would melt into floods of tears over a hymn to virtue, which they must surely have held of too sacred an essence to mix itself with any one virtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitably letting all do as they please.  It is much, however, that these tears, if not very burning, were really honest.  Society, though not believing very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching, and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man, and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts, their lives remain worth having.

It is true that cynicism in the case of some women of this time occasionally sounded in a diabolic key, as when one said, “It is your lover to whom you should never say that you don’t believe in God; to one’s husband that does not matter, because in the case of a lover one must reserve for one’s self some door of escape, and devotional scruples cut everything short."[215] Or here:  “I do not distrust anybody, for that is a deliberate act; but I do not trust anybody, and there is no trouble in this."[216] Or again in the word thrown to a man vaunting the probity of some one:  “What! can a man of intelligence like you accept the prejudice of meum and tuum?"[217] Such speech, however, was probably most often a mere freak of the tongue, a mode and fashion, as who should go to a masked ball in guise of Mephistopheles, without anything more Mephistophelian about him than red apparel and peaked toes.  “She was absolutely charming,” said one of a new-comer; “she did not utter one single word that was not a paradox."[218] This was the passing taste.  Human nature is able to keep itself wholesome in fundamentals even under very great difficulties, and it is as wise as it is charitable in judging a sharp and cynical tone to make large allowances for mere costume and assumed character.

In respect of the light companionship of common usage, however, it is exactly the costume which comes closest to us, and bad taste in that is most jarring and least easily forgiven.  There is a certain stage in an observant person’s experience of the heedlessness, indolence, and native folly of men and women—­and if his observation be conducted in a catholic spirit, he will probably see something of this not merely in others—­when the tolerable average sanity of human arrangements strikes him as the most marvellous of all the fortunate accidents in the universe.  Rousseau could not even accept the fact of this miraculous result, the provisional and temporary sanity of things,