f will, while their
reigning mood is grave or reckless protest against impotence of will,
the little worth of common aims, the fretting triviality of common
rules. Franklin or Cobbett might have gloried in the regularity of
Madame de Wolmar's establishment. The employment of the day was marked
out with precision. By artful adjustment of pursuits, it was contrived
that the men-servants should be kept apart from the maid-servants,
except at their repasts. The women, namely, a cook, a housemaid, and a
nurse, found their pastime in rambles with their mistress and her
children, and lived mainly with them. The men were amused by games for
which their master made regulated provision, now for summer, now for
winter, offering prizes of a useful kind for prowess and adroitness.
Often on a Sunday night all the household met in an ample chamber,
and passed the evening in dancing. When Saint Preux inquired whether
this was not a rather singular infraction of puritan rule, Julie
wisely answered that pure morality is so loaded with severe duties,
that if you add to them the further burden of indifferent forms, it
must always be at the cost of the essential.[62] The servants were
taken from the country, never from the town. They entered the
household young, were gradually trained, and never went away except to
establish themselves.

The vulgar and obvious criticism on all this is that it is utopian,
that such households do not generally exist, because neither masters
nor servants possess the qualities needed to maintain these relations
of unbroken order and friendliness. Perhaps not; and masters and
servants will be more and more removed from the possession of such
qualities, and their relations further distant from such order and
friendliness, if writers cease to press the beauty and serviceableness
of a domesticity that is at present only possible in a few rare cases,
or to insist on the ugliness, the waste of peace, the deterioration of
character, that are the results of our present system. Undoubtedly it
is much easier for Rousseau to draw his picture of semi-patriarchal
felicity, than for the rest of us to realise it. It was his function
to press ideals of sweeter life on his contemporaries, and they may be
counted fortunate in having a writer who could fulfil this function
with Rousseau's peculiar force of masterly persuasion. His scornful
diatribes against the domestic police of great houses, and the
essential inhumanity of the