Chapter XVIII: Social Life

Whether man is merely a chemical compound driven by economic energies or something higher and more sublime is a question which from the inexperience of our youth we dare not decide. But that something in human society is apt to go wrong the moment the _homo sapiens_ leaves the straight path between the economic too much and too little is a truth which we are willing to defend against all comers. The trouble during revolutionary times is that the well-worn, old-fashioned, narrow road is no longer visible. The old beacons of proper conduct have been removed, new ones have not yet been provided, and people wander hither and thither, and tumble from one extreme into the other.

In the Batavian Republic in 1795, as the Dutch expression has it, the locks were opened wide. Everybody could do what he pleased. The old rules of polite society were discarded. Batavians were no longer to be slaves neither to certain prescribed masters nor of certain well-defined manners. Of course when almost two million people, rigidly divided into innumerable classes, are suddenly transformed into so many equal citizens, a terrible social cataclysm must take place. During the joyful hysteria of the first few months this was not noticed. The people seemed to forget that all social questions are the result of historical compromises and have a historical growth--that they are not allowed to exist for the benefit of a single class of citizens. A Batavian Republic without titles and official ranks, without coats-of-arms and distinguishing uniforms, was no doubt very desirable and very noble and very highly humane. But the change was too sudden and too abrupt, and in the end it did an enormous amount of harm.

During the fifty years that had gone before, the patriotic press had shrieked contumelies upon the regents, who had refused to commit political suicide for a class which they, however, considered to be their inferiors. In this fight all good manners had finally disappeared. It had become a guerilla warfare of violent pamphlets--a muddy battle of mutual vituperation. The regents, however, although a degenerating class, had maintained until the very end a certain ideal of personal manners which had set a standard for all classes. The political upheaval of 1795 brought a number of men to the front who did not possess these outward advantages of a polished demeanour, and therefore despised them. According to them, the country needed men of pure principles (their principles) and not men who could merely bow and scrape. Any intelligent man could hold an office provided he was sound in doctrine (their doctrine). With the ideal of a cultivated man violently thrown out of the community the standard of the schools had at once suffered. It was no longer necessary to possess a general education to be eligible for a higher position. As a result, the universities had not been able to insist upon the old high standards, and when the universities weakened in their demands the other schools had immediately followed suit. This disintegration soon made itself apparent in all sorts of ways. Why write good books or good poetry when the people asked for and were contented with the cheaper variety? Why keep up an artistic ideal when the people wanted vulgar and cheap prints? The few good novelists of the eighteenth century were no longer read. Their place was taken by a number of scribblers, who, by flattering the commonest preferences and by appealing to the worst taste of the large army of voters, made themselves rich and their books popular. They gave the public what it liked. And the public thought them very famous men indeed. It was the same thing in art. We cannot remember ever having seen or ever having heard any one who had ever seen a single good picture painted during the Batavian days. The prints which commemorated the current events are so bad as to be altogether hopeless.

The sovereign people were flattered with a persistency and a lack of delicacy which would have incensed even the worst and most astute of tyrants. The masses, however, did not notice it, and bought the complimentary pictures with great pride in their own virtue. Posterity has thought differently about it, and whereas the prints of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries are carefully collected, the prints of the Batavian Republic are usually left as food to the industrious domestic mouse.

But aside from these merely ideal considerations (for a nation may be great and prosperous and yet lack entirely in artistic perception) the ordinary daily life of the community suffered a worse blow than it experienced through the loss of the colonies. During the old commercial days there had been a great many slippery customers who had managed to make their living in very questionable ways. On the whole, however, the leading merchants had maintained a fairly high standard of commercial integrity from which no one dared to avert too openly. Now, in the year 1795, all this changed. The new men were not bound to these iron rules of conduct. A good many of the old unwritten rules and regulations of trade were thrown overboard as being antiquated. Army contractors and questionable speculators entered into the field of Dutch politics and introduced the dangerous standards of people who have managed to get rich overnight. Nobody likes to see his neighbour eating a better dinner than he can afford himself. If a purveyor of army shoes could suddenly keep a carriage and pair and yet be respected by the men with whom he associated, why, the people asked, should we criticise his methods? He is not punished by social contempt. He is treated with great respect because he can entertain in such a very handsome way. And soon the young boy next door tried the same trick of speculation and began to feel a deep contempt for the old-fashioned and slow ways of his immediate ancestors.

The better element of the community in the general disorganization which followed the revolution found itself deserted, laughed at for its high standards, looked at with the pathetic interest which enterprising young men feel for old fogies who are behind the times. "The poor old people simply would not look facts in the face. Why insist on living in Utopia? Utopia was such a very dreary place." Until, finally, these excellent people either succumbed, which was very rare, or retired from active life, and within the circle of their own home waited for better days and more ideal times. And the general tone of Batavian society was indicated by a class to whom riches meant an indulgence in all the material things of which they had dreamed during their former days of poverty. Easy come, easy go--in money matters as well as in morals. The new class of rich people, living without any restraint, followed its own inclinations, but obeyed no set rules of conduct. The sudden influx of ten thousand French officers, and Heaven knows how many foreign soldiers, also brought a dangerous element into a single community.

It is true that the discipline of the French soldiers had been exemplary, but the men trained in the happy-go-lucky school of the Paris which had followed the puritanical days of the sainted Maximilian Robespierre did not assist in establishing a deeper respect for good morals. The old days of parsimonious living and respect for one's betters were gone forever. Under the new dispensation no one was anybody else's better, and everybody lived as well as his purse or his credit allowed him to.

During the first years of the republic a number of men had suddenly grown rich. These vulgar personages threw their money out of the windows in the form of empty champagne bottles. Outside of their house of mirth a motley congregation of hungry people hovered. They drank what was left in the discarded bottles; they feasted on the remains of the uneaten pastry; they dreamed of the golden days when luck should turn and they should be inside with the worshippers of the fleshpots. The best part of the nation, however, disgusted with these vulgar doings, retired from all active life. It preferred a dull existence of simple honesty to a roisterous feast on the brink of a moral and financial abyss. And quietly the good people waited for the great change that was certain to come, when the nation once more should return to a sound mode of living, and when the resplendent adventurers of the moment should have been relegated back into that obscurity from which they never ought to have emerged.