Such was the atmosphere, absolutely new and somewhat overheated, in which the influence of women developed and flourished. The revolution was a profound one: hitherto the social system had turned entirely on the principle of the good and the true, from which a practical and utilitarian morality was derived. The idea of the beautiful was utterly mistrusted, and, far from believing in its purifying force, many people saw in it only a cause of moral enfeeblement. Men had preached a religion of gloom and manifold observances; it seemed that there was no mean in life between the virginal precepts of a catechism of Perseverance[5] and the lowest stages of vice. And now the new generations were no longer willing to regard earthly happiness as an illusion, nor the love inculcated by the Gospel as a snare, and flattered themselves on finding a means of building life upon liberty. A mysticism, compact of snow and mist, had glorified self-repression, scepticism in regard to earthly things, the joys of suffering or at least the quest of happiness through resignation; and its effect had been to raise a select few to a state of ethereal perfection, and to unloose the mass of mankind to an unbridled savagery. The moral pendulum had oscillated violently between ether and mud, mud and ether, a condition of instability like that described by M. Huysmans to-day. And on the other hand people wished to live henceforth under a calm and radiant sky; they talked of taking the gifts of God as they found them, denying neither body nor soul, but idealising everything. They contented themselves with affirming the pre-eminence of the soul; apparently the science of happiness was to consist in abstracting themselves from the material and the personal and in going straight back to ideas. From that time it truly belongs to women to govern the higher world, the realm of sentiment. They will lull the appetites to sleep; they will charm men of dull burdened soul subdued to earth by daily toil; they will choose out the refined, the buoyant in soul, to form them into an intellectual aristocracy: the others will at least be lifted a little above themselves. The refined are recognised by their thirst for the ideal. At first blush one might suppose they will be met especially among men of the upper classes, or at least among men of leisure, for these are fortunate in being able to look into their own hearts and to follow their own bent, and in opportunities for gaining impressions. They are not deformed by drudgery, they have bathed their souls in the great sights of Nature; the Mediterranean, delicious and bewitching, has cradled them on her kindly bosom, and has already accomplished for them half of the task by reflecting the sky in her feminine smile. But no; for lack of discipline, the idle tend toward sensuality. Consequently, women will address themselves more especially to the men who can work.