As a rule we know Europe from school, from literature-that is, we do not know it, but judge it a livre ouvert, from books and pictures, just as children judge the real world from their Orbis pictus, imagining that all the women in the Sandwich Islands hold their hands above their heads with a sort of tambourine, and that where-ever there is a naked negro there is sure to be standing five paces from him a lion with a tousled manP or a tiger with angry eyes.
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Our classic ignorance of the Western European will be productive of a great deal of harm; racial hatreds and bloody collisions will still develop from it.
In the first place all we know is the top, cultured layer of Europe, which conceals the heavy substratum of popular life formed by the ages, and evolved by instinct and by laws that are little known in Europe itself. Western culture does not penetrate into those Cyclopean works by which history has become rooted to the ground and borders upon geology. The European states are welded together of two peoples whose special characteristics are sustained by utterly different up-bringings. There is here none of the Oriental oneness, in consequence of which the Turk who is a Grand Vizier and the Turk who hands him his pipe resemble each other. Masses of the country population have, since the religious wars and the peasant risings, taken no active part in events; they have been swayed by them to right and left like standing corn, never for a minute leaving the ground in which they are rooted.
Secondly, that stratum with which we are acquainted, with which we do enter into contact, we only know historically, not as it is to-day. After spending a year or two in Europe we see with surprise that the men of the West do not on the whole correspond with our conception of them, that they are greatly inferior to it.
Elements of truth enter into the ideal we have formed, but either these no longer exist or they have completely changed.
The valour of chivalry, the elegance of aristocratic manners, the stern decorum of the Protestants, the proud independence of the English, the luxurious life of Italian artists, the sparkling wit of the Encyclopaedists and the gloomy energy of the Terrorists-all this has been melted down and transmuted into one integral combination of different predominant manners, bourgeois ones.
They constitute a complete whole, that is, a finished, selfcontained outlook upon life with its own traditions and rules, with its own good and evil, with its own ways and its own morality of a lower order.
As the knight was the prototype of the feudal world, so the merchant has become the prototype of the new world ; feudal lords are replaced by employers. The merchant in himself is a colourless intermediate figure; he is the middle-man between the producer and the consumer; he is something of the nature of a means of communication, of transport. The knight was more himself, more of a person, and kept up his dignity as he under-
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stood it, whence he was in essence not dependent either on wealth or on position ; his personality was what mattered. In the petit bourgeois the personality is concealed or does not stand out, because i t is not what matters ; what matters is the ware, the produce, the thing; what matters is propertr.
The knight was a fearful ignoramus, a bully, a swashbuckler, a bandit and a monk, a drunkard and a pietist, but he was open and genuine in everything: moreover he was always ready to lay down his life for wha t he thought right; he had his moral laws, his code of honour-very arbitrary, but one from which he did not depart without loss of his self-respect or the respect of his peers.
The merchant is a man of peace and not of war, stubbornly and persistently standing up for his rights, but weak in attack; calculating, parsimonious, he sees a deal in everything and, like the knight, enters into single combat with everyone he meets, but measures himself against him in cunning. His ancestors, mediaeval townsmen, were forced to be sly to save themselves from violence and pillage ; they purchased peace and wealth by evasiveness, by secretiveness and pretence, keeping themselves close and holding themselves in check. His ancestors, cap i n hand and bowing low, cheated the knight ; shaking their heads and sighing, they talked to their neighbours of their poverty, while they secretly buried money in the ground. All this has naturally passed into the blood and brains of their descendants, and has become the physiological sign of a particular human species called the middle estate.
While it was in a condition of adversity and joined with the enlightened fringe of the aristocracy to defend i ts faith and win its rights, it was full of greatness and poetry. But this did not last long, and Sancho Panza, having taken possession of his palace and lolling at full liberty without cen·mony, let himself go and lost his peasant humour and his common st>nse; the vulgar side of his nature got the upper hand.
Under the influence of the petit bourgeois everything was changed in Europe. Chivalrous honour was replaced by the honesty of the book-keeper, elegant manners by propriety, courtesy by affectation, pride by a readiness to take offence, parks by kitchen gardens, palaces by hotels open to all ( that is all who have money) .
The former, out-of-date but consistent conceptions of relationships bet\veen people were shaken, but no new consciousness of the true relationships between people was discovered. This
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chaotic liberty contributed greatly to the development of all the bad, shallow sides of petite bourgeoisie under the all-powerful influence of unbridled acquisition.
Analyse the moral principles current for the last half-century, and what a medley you will find! Roman conceptions of the state together with the Gothic division of powers, Protestantism and political economy, salus populi and chacun pour soi, Brutus and Thomas a Kempis, the Gospel and Bentham, book-keeping and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With such a hotch-potch in the head and with a magnet in the breast for ever attracted towards gold, it was not hard to arrive at the absurdities reached by the foremost countries of Europe.
The whole of morality has been reduced to the duty of him who has not, to acquire by every possible means: and of him who has, to preserve and increase his property ; the flag which is run up in the market-place to show that trading may begin has become the banner of a new society. The man has de facto become the appurtenance of property; life has been reduced to a perpetual struggle for money.
The political question since 1 830 has been becoming exclusively the petit bourgeois question, and the age-long struggle is expressed in the passions and inclinations of the ruling class.
Life is reduced to a gamble on the Stock Exchange; everythingthe publication of newspapers, the elections, the legislative chambers-all ha\·e become money-changers' shops and markets.
The English are so used to putting everything into shop nomenclature that they call their old Anglican Church the 'Old Shop.'2