Letter From a Dutch Uncle

To Munson Havens
BRUSSELS, March 15, 1938
MY DEAR FRIEND:—
Years ago I used to say Holland and Belgium had the worst climate in Christendom, and I truly believed it, but after sampling various extra-fancy climates in different parts of the world, I now think they have a very good climate. It is never very hot, never very cold, and you don’t have the killing sudden shifts of temperature which raise Cain with you on our seaboard. It rains a lot, and the wind blows more or less, but you soon get used to that, and it gives you just about enough resistance to keep you fit. Some say that bucking the weather is mostly what makes the Dutch and Belgians so sturdy, while others say that only the sturdy ones survive. I don’t know which is right, so take your choice — both the same price.
Long experience has taught me that when the natives of a country have n’t a single good word to say for it, that country always turns out to be a first-rate place for a civilized person to inhabit. There are not many such, but Holland is one of them. Conversely, I never yet saw a booster’s country that I thought was fit for a dog to live in. Eigenlob stinkt, as the German proverb says, and you go around holding your nose all the time. There is nothing of that in Holland. You have all the faults of the country served up to you by the first Hollander you talk with, and served up good and hot; thereby leaving you free to discover all its merits and beauties for yourself afterwards in the pleasantest way imaginable. Get a Dutchman started on the subject of his native land, and he will roar and belch and growl and carry on frightfully against everything Dutch. If you bear down hard enough on him, as I have been doing on those I met, he may finally admit that Holland has a paltry second-rate virtue or two scattered around out of sight somewhere, but you can see that it fairly makes his teeth ache to say so.
I maintain that this spirit is the very foundation of a decent society. You may take it from me that where individualism is so highly developed that nothing suits anybody and the people kick like steers all the time, you find an interesting life, a life which has savor and depth. A booster’s country insists on a level of tepid mediocrity and glorifies it — runs to it, as the late Earl Balfour said, like water to the gutter — and hence the trouble with life there is that it is uninteresting; it is lived entirely from the surface of one’s being, not from its greater depths, as Madame Sand so truly says our life should be lived. If such great practitioners of the humane life as Plato and Dante were perforce dragged back into the modern world, one imagines they might do about as well in Holland as anywhere, perhaps better. It has been a refuge for such people at one time or another in the past when the rest of the world became dull and inhospitable, and perhaps it might still be a safe one. Such an idea is death on patriotism, you may say; but what is patriotism? How do you define it? Would you say it is the spirit of loyalty to one’s country? Yes, that is easy; but what is one’s country? That is not so easy, when you think it over, is it? I’ll tell you what I make of it. One’s country is where the things one loves are respected, and true patriotism is the spirit of loyalty to that country. I hold that if Mr. Ford and Mr. Rockefeller, for instance, had been born in the Punjab and lived there all their lives, America would still be their country, because America is where the things they love are most respected; and it would be a sin against nature if they ever allowed themselves a spark of patriotic feeling for the Punjab or any other country but America. Conversely, can you give me any sound reason why Emerson, Thoreau, Henry Adams, should have had any sentiment of patriotism towards the United States, where the things they most loved are the least respected? I think beyond doubt they had it, but can you show me any reason in the realm of fact and in the nature of things why they should have had it? I know of none. Think it over, and let me hear what you have to offer, for whatever it is, I ‘ll bet you can’t prove it.
One of the strangest sights I saw in Holland was a full-grown steamship of eighteen or twenty thousand tons apparently walking across a meadow which stretched out green and flat as a billiard table as far as the eye could reach. There was a canal there, of course, but out of view from where I was. You get somewhat the same impression when your steamer pushes up the St. Johns River to Jacksonville through a solid mass of water hyacinth, giving you a perfect illusion of moving over dry land. Aside from the curiosity of the thing, a field of water hyacinth is such a beautiful object that it is worth the trip to see, almost; I had the luck to see it the only time I ever ventured into Florida, so now I don’t need to go again.
Another interesting sight was a new translation of the Odyssey into Dutch hexameters. It made me wonder why English and American translators have been so shy of the original metre, which I should suppose has every reason in its favor. A learned provost of Eton in the last century translated a few lines into excellent English hexameters, but I do not know of any other attempt of the kind, though there may be some; I am shamefully behind the times on translations, whether in prose or verse. Perhaps Longfellow’s hexameters discouraged American aspirants, as they well might. He treated spondees as if they were solitaire diamonds and he dare n’t use them; so you hop into the saddle on the first dactyl of Evangeline and gallop all the way through the poem with the infamous racketty-packetty of quadrupedante putrem jigging in your ears to the very last dactyl, and are darned tired and bored. What struck me about this Dutchman’s translation was his fine understanding of the demands which his metre makes upon the reader, as shown by his workmanlike way of sifting in spondees wherever they would do the most good. Dutch authorities told me that in other respects his translation is an excellent one.
Looking at the sixteenth-century wood carving in the Wester Kerk at Enkhuizen, one gets an impression of the human spirit yearning for a perfection of detail and finish which is possible only by means of the machine. It is the same general impression which one gets — at least, I do — from all late mediæval and Renaissance sculpture, especially things like the filigree work that is appliquéd on the front of the cathedral at Albi. You might say it is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual longing for the machine; the machine, which should be capable of doing all sorts of wonderful and incredible things in the way of finish and detail, and doing them right, doing them perfectly, and duplicating them as often as you like with not a hair’s breadth of variation. So too, when I see the severe plainness of our modern woodwork, its ostentatious abandonment of detail and ornament, — say, for instance, in our new domestic furniture, — I wonder if it may be evidence that the human spirit is pretty well fed up with the machine and its ghastly perfections, and is moving towards something else as blindly and ignorantly as in the sixteenth century it was wavering and wabbling towards the machine.
To my eye, Holland’s chief physical charm is one that I seldom see mentioned, so I suppose most people do not think as much of it as I do. I refer to the exquisite soft light-effects, the exact like of which I have never seen on display elsewhere. What a late afternoon sun can do with a skyful of watery, spongy, white cloud-banks and a bare suspicion of haze in the lower air, is something worth going a long way to see; and when you see it, you get up a deal of respect for the Dutch and Flemish painters’ efforts to capture that peculiar atmosphere and put it on canvas. The two-hour run by steamer between Enkhuizen and Stavoren is likely to put on a good show for you almost any day, but you had better not wait too long if you want to see it, because the thrifty Dutch are shortly beginning to drain the Zuider Zee; a big job, which is expected to add about 560,000 acres to Holland’s arable area, and also to strengthen the country’s great line of defense against its crafty and terrible enemy, the North Sea.
Speaking generally, I would say that the most agreeable sensation which one experiences in Holland is that of a complete and rather easy solvency. You can imagine how pleasant a change it is for one who comes into that atmosphere after a sojourn in countries which seem to be living mostly on the interest of their debts. Hollanders pay their bills, public and private, pay them when due, and pay them in real money dug up on the spot, right out of their pants pockets. They are not much for keeping up their credit by sleight-of-hand or by kiting IOU’s from one pigeonhole in the State Treasurer’s desk to another. Hence their credit is good for anything they want and their creditors do not lie awake nights wondering what kind of poker chips, if any, will be forthcoming when the bills fall due. They also manage to have a spot of cash left over, as a rule, which they lend out to advantage here and there; in fact, at the present time they are the world’s prime lenders. You might not think it when you see the modest structures in which their banks do business, but they are.
I asked a Dutchman, who had been giving me the usual despondent line of talk about Holland for the best part of an hour, whether their jobholders ever cut up any such hookem-snivey capers with public money as ours do. He replied no, he would n’t go so far as to say that; not that they would be above it, but I must remember that Holland was a small country where everybody pretty well knew what was going on, so if a jobholder tried to get away with any pawky bookkeeping, he would be likely to hear about it. The people were very critical, he said, always looking for something to find fault with, and the newspapers were also very critical and outspoken. I told him I had heard that the Dutch newspapers were the best in Europe. Yes, he had heard that too; they had to be fairly good to keep their business, he supposed, for Hollanders read their papers carefully and expected them to get things as straight as they could. Were the papers honest, or did the business office control their editorial policy? Yes, they were honest; the other thing did n’t pay in the long run, because their readers would soon smell them out and would n’t stand for it. Of course there were party papers; that was understood; but while they were expected to play the political game on party lines, they were also expected to play it straight.
This Dutch brother might have been stuffing me, but I got my money’s worth of entertainment out of him, anyway, for his attitude kept all the time reminding me of Caribou Sam’s trial for horsestealing, where ‘the jury brings in a verdict that they’re sorry to say the evidence ain’t enough to convict.’ Still, all I saw and heard in Holland bore him out. Apparently the people do keep a close eye on public affairs, and the newspapers seemed to me the best I had ever seen. This interested me because, as you know, Mr. Jefferson was always harping on those two strings. If the people once become inattentive to the public business, he said, their jobholders ‘shall all become wolves’; and if a free press keeps them well informed, their judgment will always be sound and right.
The good and great old man may have been a little overconfident about this, or he may not; but at all events it struck me that from his point of view on human nature he could find a good deal in Holland that would please him. Holland seems not to be overgoverned; it has few laws, and they are comparatively simple and sensible, and are simply and sensibly administered. I was told that Hollanders are great hands for doing as they please, when and how they please; willing enough to be reasonable about it, but they don’t like to have the police after them all the time. Hence they are suspicious of government, and the less there is of it the better they like it; and that was exactly Mr. Jefferson’s attitude.
Their royal court seems to be run like any other thrifty, well-to-do Dutch household, and its mistress takes her job like any other dignified and selfrespecting Dutch housekeeper of the old school. It is a great privilege to visit a country where the chief executive goes about as she pleases, afoot or on a bicycle, alone and unattended by secretservice men and plug-uglies; and above all, a country where her doing this has no news value whatever. All Hollanders ride bicycles, and all Dutch matrons go forth to market with baskets on their arms whenever they are so disposed, — nothing remarkable about that, — and if the Queen is reputed to be a very close buyer, why, all Dutch housekeepers are close buyers. Thrift is a virtue in Holland; no newspaper could make even a paragraph out of it.
All this brought to my mind the curious fact that the less people have of natural dignity and self-respect, the stronger they are for investing their jobholders with a factitious dignity, and for surrounding them with a prodigious defense-mechanism of frippery and ‘dog.’ The last time I saw the late King of the Belgians, he was getting off a train, alone and carrying a suitcase — well, he could do that. Hollanders raise their hats to the Queen as she passes them on the street, but so they do to any other woman whom they recognize; or, for that matter, to any man. Pomp and circumstance may have had other uses at other times, but they now appear to be merely a part of the great general tribute which vulgarity is always paying, and apparently must always pay, to the real thing. When people know that neither they nor their jobholders are bred to the real thing in dignity and self-respect, they insist on the most grandiose substitute for it that money can buy; and the results are invariably most comical. Conversely, when all hands are more or less bred to the real thing, putting on airs about it would be regarded as mere disgusting nonsense.
I understand that the Queen of Holland is very little beloved, but it is not a Dutchwoman’s business in any capacity to try to make herself beloved of people en masse. It is her business to make herself respected, which can be done only by an unswerving devotion to the great traditional integrities; and Queen Wilhelmina is immensely, almost fanatically, respected. So was King Albert, for the same reason; and he, too, was as little beloved as any good monarch need be, or ought to be. Sentimentalizing weak humanity is poor business in any case, and sentimentalizing jobholders is the world’s worst.
Coming down from Holland, I stopped for a few days in Antwerp to get the feel of a substantial square-toed Flemish town before moving on to Brussels. As a rule the Flemish, like the Dutch, incline to let things stay pretty much the way they are, and are laudably cautious about ripping them up to suit the fashion of the moment. Hence their towns and neighborhoods change mostly by an agreeably slow process of mellowing and erosion which gives a visitor a gratifying sense of stability to go with the equally gratifying sense of solvency which I mentioned a moment ago. When you go back to Antwerp or Ghent, even after many years, you can count on finding it about as you left it, and the life of the people still largely rubbing along in its traditional sequences. Someone has said that if you forget that the bicycle is a modern invention, Holland looks just as it did three hundred years ago. One could say almost as much for Flanders, though now one would have to count in the automobile with the bicycle in both countries, worse luck! I don’t mind saying, if you ask me, that in my opinion the four arch-enemies of the human race were the inventors of the internal-combustion engine, radio, printing, and gunpowder. They have loaded up humanity with more moral responsibility than it would be able to swing after fifty thousand years of normal development. In a word, they have handed out four sticks of dynamite for a baby to play with — and golly, ain’t he playing with ‘em!
The first sight of Antwerp reminds one vividly of the curious fact that almost the scarcest thing in Europe is a church spire that is more than a couple of hundred years old. Generations of incredible enthusiasm, devotion, skill, and labor went into the structure of the mediæval churches, right up to the point of putting on the spires, and then apparently something happened. Perhaps it was at this point that men ceased thinking in a long-established set of theological terms, and their enthusiasm dwindled. Was it so, do you think? Or if not, what did happen? The cathedral at Malines, begun early in the thirteenth century, has no spire. The great collegiate church of St. Gudule at Brussels, begun in the eleventh century, was designed for two spires, like Notre Dame at Paris, and, like Notre Dame, it has none. The cathedral at Antwerp, which was designed for two spires, has one and about one third of another. Work on the second one stopped at some time around the middle of the fifteenth century, and was never resumed.
This suggestive circumstance makes one wonder why cathedrals should be built nowadays. They seem illogical. The mediæval cathedral was an expression of a spiritual activity which was already most intense. The modern cathedral, as well as I can make out, is an instrument for galvanizing a spiritual activity which is extremely feeble and puny, thus putting the cart before the horse. I doubt that this can be done successfully, and I suspect that the modern cathedral will turn out to be more or less of an ornamental folly.
An ancient village near Antwerp bears the remarkable name of Old God (VieuxDieu; Flemish, Oude God). This always interested me. I have sometimes thought of moving there, so I could put that name on my letterhead, but I never got around to it. Would n’t it amuse you to get letters dated from a place called Old God? I have heard say that the name is a corruption of Old Gate, due to a water-gate that was once there; but I fancy no one really knows. One could put in a lifetime on Belgian place names and street names without being much the wiser, probably, but one would have a lot of fun. For instance, Brussels has the Street of the Six Young Men, the Street of the Quarrel, the Street of the Eclipse, among a hundred and more of others equally tantalizing. What young men, what quarrel, what eclipse, and why? No one knows.
About thirty miles east of Antwerp is a village which has maintained a colony for lunatics ever since A.D. 618. This was a religious enterprise, to start with, — the tradition is that it had its origin in some mythical miracle, — but it is now operated mainly by the State. About two thousand lunatics are boarded out among the peasants, and help with the farm work. They are not under restraint, but are contented and stay put. Odd, is n’t it, that thirteen hundred years ago somebody should have discovered that working on the soil is good for lunatics, and that they like it; whereas the medical profession, by and large, seems to have taken up that line of treatment only lately, as far as I have heard. It reminds me of another instance of rediscovery that I ran into a few years ago at Bad Ems. The director of the springs told me that one of his chemists had just discovered that the Ems salts are helpful against pyorrhea, and they were seeing what could be done with working them up into a commercial tooth-powder. Then he showed me a report on the springs, written nearly four hundred years ago, which stated specifically that the Ems waters, held in the mouth, were good for pyorrhea. They had somehow missed that point in the report, and were properly crestfallen about it, as they might well be, for it is not often that German preciseness overlooks a bet like that.
I found the Belgians a little listless and headachy, especially in Brussels, after a two years’ rampage with a New Deal administration which had been fired out shortly before I arrived. It was about as much of a success as our own New Deal at home, but as Belgium fortunately does not have our wretched system of a fixed term for jobholders, it could be got rid of before it did too much damage; nevertheless it did enough. Statistics might show that Belgium is a little better off at the moment than France, but I doubt it. The New Deal here gave most of ‘the benefit of the devaluation ‘ to the banks and industries, thus putting them smartly on their feet, and gave labor a nice lot of attractive promises. M. Blum’s New Deal in France, on the other hand, gave labor too much; and hence production in both countries seems to me to be in a shaky state, what with labor here rapping for a showdown on those promises, and French labor all for hanging tight to what they got. I don’t know how it goes in France, but in this country the spread between wages and prices is so wide that the devil bless me if I see how most wageearners manage to drag on. Moreover, if the purchasing power of Belgian wages two years ago be represented by 100, the pursuit of the More Abundant Life managed to bring it down to the present level of 95.
Why are New Deals? Simply, my dear friend, because of two almost universal superstitions. First, that natural law does not operate in the realm of economics just as inexorably as in the realm of physics — which it does. Second, that a government can work some sort of magic that will nullify or modify the operation of natural law — which it can’t. These two superstitions are as widespread as the belief in witchcraft back in Cotton Mather’s time. We have been brought up in them from infancy as part of the air we breathe, and hence we all firmly believe in government by sleight-of-hand — or should I say, in government by incantation? — and we all squeal like stuck pigs when we have to take the consequences of that utterly silly belief. There is no excuse for this, and no sympathy coming to the victims of their own foolishness, especially in the country of Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine, all of whom gave them warning enough. Eighty years ago Herbert Spencer dissected those superstitions right down to the bone in a volume of essays whereof I’ll make you a small bet that you can’t buy a first-hand copy in the United States to-day without sending to England for it; and a bigger bet that you can’t find an American publisher willing to risk reprinting them, even after five years of our calamitous New Deal, when you would suppose a few of our people, at least, might be glad to read something which would really tell them what is what.
Moreover, since I am in a betting mood, I’ll pay you a liberal bounty for the name of every American man of affairs you can produce who has read those essays or even heard of them. I promise you won’t get purse-proud on the proceeds. Well, then, have I any sympathy with the downtrodden and bedeviled American business man, now that his superstitions have returned to plague him? None that you’d notice; he has had too good warning of what was coming to him. The plain truth is, Havens, that these two superstitions have for years been breeding a choice job-lot of rotten brains among us, and we now have nothing but rotten brains wherewith to meet the consequences. Statesmen like Franklin, philosophers like Spencer, kept telling us that government’s only proper concern with business is to punish fraud and enforce the obligations of contract, and beyond that it should let business strictly alone; but no, that was not good enough. We kept running to the government for subsidies, grants, concessions, franchises, and every imaginable kind of intervention and interference, coaxing it to stick its finger into every pie, until now at last the piedish is so full of fingers that there is n’t room for any pie.
If you were here, you would see at a glance that Europe and America are floundering in exactly the same mess, and if you remembered Mr. Micawber’s arithmetic you would have no trouble about seeing exactly how they got into it. I hear the ’business recession ‘ in America took people by surprise, but why? What could you expect? Taxes, wages, interest, all must finally come out of production; there is no other source for them to come from. Very well: if any one of these items takes too much out of production, the balance set by natural law is destroyed, and production breaks down. For instance, if you try to pay fancy taxes and fancy wages, you can’t pay dividends, and hence you can’t get capital, and hence you can’t produce. Or, paying fancy taxes and fancy dividends, you can’t pay wages, your work people don’t eat right, and you can’t produce; and in either case, that is all there is to it.
In the European countries, with one or two exceptions, the trouble is that the governments are taking more out of production than production will stand. British industry and finance have already been serving notice that taxation has brought the country right up to the margin of diminishing returns. Italy is flat broke, the people don’t eat right, the dead body of Abyssinia hangs on them like the albatross on the neck of the Ancient Mariner, and Mussolini is now looking anxiously around for somebody who will be fool enough to lend him some money to go on with. Look into France, Belgium, Germany, and you will see exactly the same economic disorder in greater or less degree.
In America, I am told, it is estimated that government — Federal, state, municipal, all kinds — will next year levy on production to the tune of ten and onehalf billion dollars. That is not what it will spend, but what it will take. What it raises in addition by note-kiting and similar knaveries is a first lien on production, current and future, but this sum is what it will take directly out of the citizen’s pocket. Now add to this the volume of wages which production will have to bear when Mr. Lewis and Mr. Green get through with it, and then tell me how it is that people who can do simple addition and subtraction are taken by surprise at sight of a ‘recession.’