Yes! the stage ruins many—still more than the novels. It looks so well! With a little gold tinsel and paper lace, things can be made so attractive. For children, that is to say; and for people who are not in business. Even when they want to represent poverty on the stage, the picture given is always a false one. A girl, whose father has gone bankrupt, is working to keep the family. Very good! There she sits, then, sewing, knitting, or embroidering. But just count the stitches that she takes in the course of the whole scene. She talks, she sighs,—she keeps running to the window,—but she does not work. The family who can live on such work as this, must have few wants indeed! Of course a girl like this is the heroine. She has thrown several villains down the stairs. She continually calls out, “Oh! my mother! my mother!” and thus represents virtue. What sort of a virtue do you call that, that takes a year to finish a pair of woollen socks? Does not all this give people wrong ideas about virtue and working for their living?
Then her first lover—he was formerly a clerk at the copying-book, but now a millionaire—suddenly comes back and marries her. Lies again. A man with money will never marry a girl from a house that has failed.... And then—virtue rewarded! I have had plenty of experience in my time; but still it shocks me terribly when I see truth perverted in this way. Virtue rewarded! Isn’t it just like making a traffic out of virtue? It is not so in this world, and a very good thing it is that it is not. Where is the merit of being virtuous, if virtue is to be rewarded? Now, I am as virtuous as most people, but do I expect to be rewarded for it? If my business goes on well,—which, in fact, it does;—if my wife and children keep in health, so that I have no worry with the doctor and chemist;—if, year by year, I can put away a little sum for my old age ...;—if Fritz grows up a good man of business, so that he can step into my shoes when I retire and go to live at Driebergen, ...—well, if all these things are so, I am quite content. But all that is a natural result of circumstances, and of my attention to business. I don’t ask for any special reward for my virtue.
That I am virtuous, is quite evident from my love for truth. This—next to my attachment to our orthodox belief—is my ruling passion. And I should like the reader to be quite convinced of this, because it is my excuse for writing this book.