The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

on not being spooked by the word “bourgeois” 83“cleanliness” = “beauty,” and so “be beautiful” makes sense as an ethicalcommand: be clean, which anyone can achieve. Such an aesthetic can perhapsbe traced in the restraint of Japanese domestic architecture and thesimilarly “clean” lines of high modernism, in which the Dutch came toexcel.Schama notes that the importance of the home to bourgeois society was“not of course peculiar to the Netherlands.” 12 “The family household,” hewrites, “was the saving grace of Dutch culture that otherwise would havebeen indelibly soiled by materialism.” 13 Note the image of soiling by contactwith the world. The moral ambiguity of compromise in the market is seenas dirty, touching a hundred hands. The Dutch home has soap and towelsand moral clarity. The market entails carefully judged degrees of trust,orders of ability, the relativity of a price. At home the man retreats to thesacred absolutes of love, obligation, power. We say it is his castle, Het Slot,where he is no longer required to calculate and deal.In 1652 Owen Felltham stood amazed at the houses of Flanders, “the besteye beauties of their country,” of which “their lining is yet more rich thantheir outside; not in hangings [that is, tapestries] but in pictures, which eventhe poorest are there furnished with.” In probate inventories we learn ofdeceased Netherlanders of quite ordinary bourgeois status leaving hundredsof paintings. A blacksmith would literally hang oil paintings on the wallbeside his forge. Over a million paintings, it has been reckoned, poured outof the workshops of Holland in the Golden Age.“Their houses they keep cleaner than their bodies,” Felltham notes withdisdain, and then adopts a Cavalier and Anglican Protestant and Englishhaughtiness in asserting further that the Catholic Flemings keep “their bodies[cleaner] than their souls.” 14 No: the cleaning of bodies and houses andfront stoops is soul-cleansing, too, said the Dutch and Flemings. The northernEuropean bourgeois home is not in truth a “castle.” It is a temple. Comparethe spiritual character of personal hygiene and housecleaning amongthe Japanese—though there the custom is not at all of modern or bourgeoisorigin.“The effort to moralize materialism” is told in the Netherlands, ofcourse, in characteristically Dutch ways, which Schama persuasively illustrates.The word overvloed, for example, means “abundance, copia.” But theliteral meaning, “over flood,” put Dutch people in mind of seawater surgingonto the rich but low-lying provinces of Holland and Zeeland—“Zeeland”