Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance

by William Dean Howells

  I

  If I spoke with Altrurian breadth of the way New-Yorkers live, my dearCyril, I should begin by saying that the New-Yorkers did not live at all.But outside of our happy country one learns to distinguish, and to allowthat there are several degrees of living, all indeed hateful to us, if weknew them, and yet none without some saving grace in it. You would saythat in conditions where men were embattled against one another by thegreed and the envy and the ambition which these conditions perpetuallyappeal to here, there could be no grace in life; but we must rememberthat men have always been better than their conditions, and thatotherwise they would have remained savages without the instinct or thewish to advance. Indeed, our own state is testimony of a potentialcivility in all states, which we must keep in mind when we judge thepeoples of the plutocratic world, and especially the American people, whoare above all others the devotees and exemplars of the plutocratic ideal,without limitation by any aristocracy, theocracy, or monarchy. They arepurely commercial, and the thing that cannot be bought and sold haslogically no place in their life. But life is not logical outside ofAltruria; we are the only people in the world, my dear Cyril, who areprivileged to live reasonably; and again I say we must put by our owncriterions if we wish to understand the Americans, or to recognize thatmeasure of loveliness which their warped and stunted and perverted livescertainly show, in spite of theory and in spite of conscience, even. Ican make this clear to you, I think, by a single instance, say that ofthe American who sees a case of distress, and longs to relieve it. If heis rich, he can give relief with a good conscience, except for the harmthat may come to his beneficiary from being helped; but if he is notrich, or not finally rich, and especially if he has a family dependentupon him, he cannot give in anything like the measure Christ bade us givewithout wronging those dear to him, immediately or remotely. That is tosay, in conditions which oblige every man to look out for himself, a mancannot be a Christian without remorse; he cannot do a generous actionwithout self-reproach; he cannot be nobly unselfish without the fear ofbeing a fool. You would think that this predicament must deprave, and sowithout doubt it does; and yet it is not wholly depraving. It often hasits effect in character of a rare and pathetic sublimity; and manyAmericans take all the cruel risks of doing good, reckless of the evilthat may befall them, and defiant of the upbraidings of their own hearts.This is something that we Altrurians can scarcely understand: it is likethe munificence of a savage who has killed a deer and shares it with hisstarving tribesmen, forgetful of the hungering little ones who wait hisreturn from the chase with food; for life in plutocratic countries isstill a chase, and the game is wary and sparse, as the terrible averageof failures witnesses.

  Of course, I do not mean that Americans may not give at all withoutsensible risk, or that giving among them is always followed by a logicalregret; but, as I said, life with them is in no wise logical. They evenapplaud one another for their charities, which they measure by the amountgiven, rather than by the love that goes with the giving. The widow'smite has little credit with them, but the rich man's million has anacclaim that reverberates through their newspapers long after his gift ismade. It is only the poor in America who do charity as we do, by givinghelp where it is needed; the Americans are mostly too busy, if they areat all prosperous, to give anything but money; and the more money theygive, the more charitable they esteem themselves. From time to time someman with twenty or thirty millions gives one of them away, usually to apublic institution of some sort, where it will have no effect with thepeople who are underpaid for their work or cannot get work; and then hisdeed is famed throughout the continent as a thing really beyond praise.Yet any one who thinks about it must know that he never earned themillions he kept, or the millions he gave, but somehow made them from thelabor of others; that, with all the wealth left him, he cannot miss thefortune he lavishes, any more than if the check which conveyed it were awithered leaf, and not in any wise so much as an ordinary working-manmight feel the bestowal of a postage-stamp.

  But in this study of the plutocratic mind, always so fascinating to me, Iam getting altogether away from what I meant to tell you. I meant to tellyou not how Americans live in the spirit, illogically, blindly, andblunderingly, but how they live in the body, and more especially how theyhouse themselves in this city of New York. A great many of them do nothouse themselves at all, but that is a class which we cannot nowconsider, and I will speak only of those who have some sort of a roofover their heads.