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.
[Illustration: SKATING ON THE RIVER MAAS AT ROTTERDAM]
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.
[Illustration: TRADES]
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.