Through the Eye of the Needle

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THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

A Romance

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY
W. D. HOWELLS

1907

INTRODUCTION

Aristides Homos, an Emissary of the Altrurian Commonwealth, visited the
United States during the summer of 1893 and the fall and winter
following. For some weeks or months he was the guest of a well-known
man of letters at a hotel in one of our mountain resorts; in the early
autumn he spent several days at the great Columbian Exhibition in
Chicago; and later he came to New York, where he remained until he
sailed, rather suddenly, for Altruria, taking the circuitous route by
which he came. He seems to have written pretty constantly throughout his
sojourn with us to an intimate friend in his own country, giving freely
his impressions of our civilization. His letters from New York appear to
have been especially full, and, in offering the present synopsis of these
to the American reader, it will not be impertinent to note certain
peculiarities of the Altrurian attitude which the temperament of the
writer has somewhat modified. He is entangled in his social sophistries
regarding all the competitive civilizations; he cannot apparently do full
justice to the superior heroism of charity and self-sacrifice as
practised in countries where people live _upon_ each other as the
Americans do, instead of _for_ each other as the Altrurians do; but
he has some glimmerings of the beauty of our living, and he has
undoubtedly the wish to be fair to our ideals. He is unable to value our
devotion to the spirit of Christianity amid the practices which seem to
deny it; but he evidently wishes to recognize the possibility of such a
thing. He at least accords us the virtues of our defects, and, among
the many visitors who have censured us, he has not seen us with his
censures prepared to fit the instances; in fact, the very reverse has
been his method.

Many of the instances which he fits with his censures are such as he
could no longer note, if he came among us again. That habit of
celebrating the munificence of the charitable rich, on which he spends
his sarcasm, has fallen from us through the mere superabundance of
occasion. Our rich people give so continuously for all manner of good
objects that it would be impossible for our press, however vigilant, to
note the successive benefactions, and millions are now daily bestowed
upon needy educational institutions, of which no mention whatever is made
in the newspapers. If a millionaire is now and then surprised in a good
action by a reporter of uncommon diligence, he is able by an appeal to
their common humanity to prevail with the witness to spare him the
revolting publicity which it must be confessed would once have followed
his discovery; the right hand which is full to overflowing is now as
skilled as the empty right hand in keeping the left hand ignorant of its
doings. This has happened through the general decay of snobbishness among
us, perhaps. It is certain that there is no longer the passion for a
knowledge of the rich, and the smart, which made us ridiculous to Mr.
Homos. Ten or twelve years ago, our newspapers abounded in intelligence
of the coming and going of social leaders, of their dinners and lunches
and teas, of their receptions and balls, and the guests who were bidden
to them. But this sort of unwholesome and exciting gossip, which was
formerly devoured by their readers with inappeasable voracity, is no
longer supplied, simply because the taste for it has wholly passed away.

Much the same might be said of the social hospitalities which raised our
visitor's surprise. For example, many people are now asked to dinner who
really need a dinner, and not merely those who revolt from the notion of
dinner with loathing, and go to it with abhorrence. At the tables of our
highest social leaders one now meets on a perfect equality persons of
interesting minds and uncommon gifts who would once have been excluded
because they were hungry, or were not in the hostess's set, or had not a
new gown or a dress-suit. This contributes greatly to the pleasure of the
time, and promotes the increasing kindliness between the rich and poor
for which our status is above all things notable.

The accusation which our critic brings that the American spirit has been
almost Europeanized away, in its social forms, would be less grounded in
the observance of a later visitor. The customs of good society must be
the same everywhere in some measure, but the student of the competitive
world would now find European hospitality Americanized, rather than.
American hospitality Europeanized. The careful research which has been
made into our social origins has resulted in bringing back many of the
aboriginal usages; and, with the return of the old American spirit of
fraternity, many of the earlier dishes as well as amenities have been
restored. A Thanksgiving dinner in the year 1906 would have been found
more like a Thanksgiving dinner in 1806 than the dinner to which Mr.
Homos was asked in 1893, and which he has studied so interestingly,
though not quite without some faults of taste and discretion. The
prodigious change for the better in some material aspects of our status
which has taken place in the last twelve years could nowhere be so well
noted as in the picture he gives us of the housing of our people in 1893.
His study of the evolution of the apartment-house from the old
flat-house, and the still older single dwelling, is very curious, and,
upon the whole, not incorrect. But neither of these last differed so
much from the first as the apartment-house now differs from the
apartment-house of his day. There are now no dark rooms opening on
airless pits for the family, or black closets and dismal basements for
the servants. Every room has abundant light and perfect ventilation, and
as nearly a southern exposure as possible. The appointments of the houses
are no longer in the spirit of profuse and vulgar luxury which it must be
allowed once characterized them. They are simply but tastefully finished,
they are absolutely fireproof, and, with their less expensive decoration,
the rents have been so far lowered that in any good position a quarter of
nine or ten rooms, with as many baths, can be had for from three thousand
to fifteen thousand dollars. This fact alone must attract to our
metropolis the best of our population, the bone and sinew which have no
longer any use for themselves where they have been expended in rearing
colossal fortunes, and now demand a metropolitan repose.

The apartments are much better fitted for a family of generous size than
those which Mr. Homos observed. Children, who were once almost unheard
of, and quite unheard, in apartment-houses, increasingly abound under
favor of the gospel of race preservation. The elevators are full of them,
and in the grassy courts round which the houses are built, the little
ones play all day long, or paddle in the fountains, warmed with
steam-pipes in the winter, and cooled to an agreeable temperature in a
summer which has almost lost its terrors for the stay-at-home New-Yorker.
Each child has his or her little plot of ground in the roof-garden, where
they are taught the once wellnigh forgotten art of agriculture.

The improvement of the tenement-house has gone hand in hand with that of
the apartment-house. As nearly as the rate of interest on the landlord's
investment will allow, the housing of the poor approaches in comfort that
of the rich. Their children are still more numerous, and the playgrounds
supplied them in every open space and on every pier are visited
constantly by the better-to-do children, who exchange with them lessons
of form and fashion for the scarcely less valuable instruction in
practical life which the poorer little ones are able to give. The rents
in the tenement houses are reduced even more notably than those in the
apartment-houses, so that now, with the constant increase in wages, the
tenants are able to pay their rents promptly. The evictions once so
common are very rare; it is doubtful whether a nightly or daily walk in
the poorer quarters of the town would develop, in the coldest weather,
half a dozen cases of families set out on the sidewalk with their
household goods about them.

The Altrurian Emissary visited this country when it was on the verge of
the period of great economic depression extending from 1894 to 1898, but,
after the Spanish War, Providence marked the divine approval of our
victory in that contest by renewing in unexampled measure the prosperity
of the Republic. With the downfall of the trusts, and the release of our
industrial and commercial forces to unrestricted activity, the condition
of every form of labor has been immeasurably improved, and it is now
united with capital in bonds of the closest affection. But in no phase
has its fate been so brightened as in that of domestic service. This has
occurred not merely through the rise of wages, but through a greater
knowledge between the employing and employed. When, a few years since, it
became practically impossible for mothers of families to get help from
the intelligence-offices, and ladies were obliged through lack of cooks
and chambermaids to do the work of the kitchen and the chamber and
parlor, they learned to realize what such work was, how poorly paid, how
badly lodged, how meanly fed. From this practical knowledge it was
impossible for them to retreat to their old supremacy and indifference as
mistresses. The servant problem was solved, once for all, by humanity,
and it is doubtful whether, if Mr. Homos returned to us now, he would
give offence by preaching the example of the Altrurian ladies, or would
be shocked by the contempt and ignorance of American women where other
women who did their household drudgery were concerned.

As women from having no help have learned how to use their helpers,
certain other hardships have been the means of good. The flattened wheel
of the trolley, banging the track day and night, and tormenting the
waking and sleeping ear, was, oddly enough, the inspiration of reforms
which have made our city the quietest in the world. The trolleys now pass
unheard; the elevated train glides by overhead with only a modulated
murmur; the subway is a retreat fit for meditation and prayer, where the
passenger can possess his soul in a peace to be found nowhere else; the
automobile, which was unknown in the day of the Altrurian Emissary, whirs
softly through the most crowded thoroughfare, far below the speed limit,
with a sigh of gentle satisfaction in its own harmlessness, and, "like
the sweet South, taking and giving odor." The streets that he saw so
filthy and unkempt in 1893 are now at least as clean as they are quiet.
Asphalt has universally replaced the cobble-stones and Belgian blocks of
his day, and, though it is everywhere full of holes, it is still asphalt,
and may some time be put in repair.

There is a note of exaggeration in his characterization of our men which
the reader must regret. They are not now the intellectual inferior of our
women, or at least not so much the inferiors. Since his day they have
made a vast advance in the knowledge and love of literature. With the
multitude of our periodicals, and the swarm of our fictions selling from
a hundred thousand to half a million each, even our business-men cannot
wholly escape culture, and they have become more and more cultured, so
that now you frequently hear them asking what this or that book is all
about. With the mention of them, the reader will naturally recur to the
work of their useful and devoted lives--the accumulation of money. It is
this accumulation, this heaping-up of riches, which the Altrurian
Emissary accuses in the love-story closing his study of our conditions,
but which he might not now so totally condemn.

As we have intimated, he has more than once guarded against a rash
conclusion, to which the logical habit of the Altrurian mind might have
betrayed him. If he could revisit us we are sure that he would have still
greater reason to congratulate himself on his forbearance, and would
doubtless profit by the lesson which events must teach all but the most
hopeless doctrinaires. The evil of even a small war (and soldiers
themselves do not deny that wars, large or small, are evil) has, as we
have noted, been overruled for good in the sort of Golden Age, or Age on
a Gold Basis, which we have long been enjoying. If our good-fortune
should be continued to us in reward of our public and private virtue,
the fact would suggest to so candid an observer that in economics, as in
other things, the rule proves the exception, and that as good times have
hitherto always been succeeded by bad times, it stands to reason that
our present period of prosperity will never be followed by a period of
adversity.

It would seem from the story continued by another hand in the second part
of this work, that Altruria itself is not absolutely logical in its
events, which are subject to some of the anomalies governing in our own
affairs. A people living in conditions which some of our dreamers would
consider ideal, are forced to discourage foreign emigration, against
their rule of universal hospitality, and in at least one notable instance
are obliged to protect themselves against what they believe an evil
example by using compulsion with the wrongdoers, though the theory of
their life is entirely opposed to anything of the kind. Perhaps, however,
we are not to trust to this other hand at all times, since it is a
woman's hand, and is not to be credited with the firm and unerring touch
of a man's. The story, as she completes it, is the story of the
Altrurian's love for an American woman, and will be primarily interesting
for that reason. Like the Altrurian's narrative, it is here compiled from
a succession of letters, which in her case were written to a friend in
America, as his were written to a friend in Altruria. But it can by no
means have the sociological value which the record of his observations
among ourselves will have for the thoughtful reader. It is at best the
record of desultory and imperfect glimpses of a civilization
fundamentally alien to her own, such as would attract an enthusiastic
nature, but would leave it finally in a sort of misgiving as to the
reality of the things seen and heard. Some such misgiving attended the
inquiries of those who met the Altrurian during his sojourn with us, but
it is a pity that a more absolute conclusion should not have been the
effect of this lively lady's knowledge of the ideal country of her
adoption. It is, however, an interesting psychological result, and it
continues the tradition of all the observers of ideal conditions from Sir
Thomas More down to William Morris. Either we have no terms for
conditions so unlike our own that they cannot be reported to us with
absolute intelligence, or else there is in every experience of them an
essential vagueness and uncertainty.

PART FIRST

Through the Eye of the Needle

I

If I spoke with Altrurian breadth of the way New-Yorkers live, my dear
Cyril, 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 allow
that there are several degrees of living, all indeed hateful to us, if we
knew them, and yet none without some saving grace in it. You would say
that in conditions where men were embattled against one another by the
greed and the envy and the ambition which these conditions perpetually
appeal to here, there could be no grace in life; but we must remember
that men have always been better than their conditions, and that
otherwise they would have remained savages without the instinct or the
wish to advance. Indeed, our own state is testimony of a potential
civility in all states, which we must keep in mind when we judge the
peoples of the plutocratic world, and especially the American people, who
are above all others the devotees and exemplars of the plutocratic ideal,
without limitation by any aristocracy, theocracy, or monarchy. They are
purely commercial, and the thing that cannot be bought and sold has
logically no place in their life. But life is not logical outside of
Altruria; we are the only people in the world, my dear Cyril, who are
privileged to live reasonably; and again I say we must put by our own
criterions if we wish to understand the Americans, or to recognize that
measure of loveliness which their warped and stunted and perverted lives
certainly show, in spite of theory and in spite of conscience, even. I
can make this clear to you, I think, by a single instance, say that of
the American who sees a case of distress, and longs to relieve it. If he
is rich, he can give relief with a good conscience, except for the harm
that may come to his beneficiary from being helped; but if he is not
rich, or not finally rich, and especially if he has a family dependent
upon him, he cannot give in anything like the measure Christ bade us give
without wronging those dear to him, immediately or remotely. That is to
say, in conditions which oblige every man to look out for himself, a man
cannot be a Christian without remorse; he cannot do a generous action
without self-reproach; he cannot be nobly unselfish without the fear of
being a fool. You would think that this predicament must deprave, and so
without doubt it does; and yet it is not wholly depraving. It often has
its effect in character of a rare and pathetic sublimity; and many
Americans take all the cruel risks of doing good, reckless of the evil
that may befall them, and defiant of the upbraidings of their own hearts.
This is something that we Altrurians can scarcely understand: it is like
the munificence of a savage who has killed a deer and shares it with his
starving tribesmen, forgetful of the hungering little ones who wait his
return from the chase with food; for life in plutocratic countries is
still a chase, and the game is wary and sparse, as the terrible average
of failures witnesses.

Of course, I do not mean that Americans may not give at all without
sensible risk, or that giving among them is always followed by a logical
regret; but, as I said, life with them is in no wise logical. They even
applaud one another for their charities, which they measure by the amount
given, rather than by the love that goes with the giving. The widow's
mite has little credit with them, but the rich man's million has an
acclaim that reverberates through their newspapers long after his gift is
made. It is only the poor in America who do charity as we do, by giving
help where it is needed; the Americans are mostly too busy, if they are
at all prosperous, to give anything but money; and the more money they
give, the more charitable they esteem themselves. From time to time some
man with twenty or thirty millions gives one of them away, usually to a
public institution of some sort, where it will have no effect with the
people who are underpaid for their work or cannot get work; and then his
deed is famed throughout the continent as a thing really beyond praise.
Yet any one who thinks about it must know that he never earned the
millions he kept, or the millions he gave, but somehow made them from the
labor of others; that, with all the wealth left him, he cannot miss the
fortune he lavishes, any more than if the check which conveyed it were a
withered leaf, and not in any wise so much as an ordinary working-man
might feel the bestowal of a postage-stamp.

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

II

Formerly the New-Yorker lived in one of three different ways: in private
houses, or boarding-houses, or hotels; there were few restaurants or
public tables outside of the hotels, and those who had lodgings and took
their meals at eating-houses were but a small proportion of the whole
number. The old classification still holds in a measure, but within the
last thirty years, or ever since the Civil War, when the enormous
commercial expansion of the country began, several different ways of
living have been opened. The first and most noticeable of these is
housekeeping in flats, or apartments of three or four rooms or more, on
the same floor, as in all the countries of Europe except England; though
the flat is now making itself known in London, too. Before the war, the
New-Yorker who kept house did so in a separate house, three or four
stories in height, with a street door of its own. Its pattern within was
fixed by long usage, and seldom varied; without, it was of brown-stone
before, and brick behind, with an open space there for drying clothes,
which was sometimes gardened or planted with trees and vines. The rear of
the city blocks which these houses formed was more attractive than the
front, as you may still see in the vast succession of monotonous
cross-streets not yet invaded by poverty or business; and often the
perspective of these rears is picturesque and pleasing. But with the
sudden growth of the population when peace came, and through the
acquaintance the hordes of American tourists had made with European
fashions of living, it became easy, or at least simple, to divide the
floors of many of these private dwellings into apartments, each with its
own kitchen and all the apparatus of housekeeping. The apartments then
had the street entrance and the stairways in common, and they had in
common the cellar and the furnace for heating; they had in common the
disadvantage of being badly aired and badly lighted. They were dark,
cramped, and uncomfortable, but they were cheaper than separate houses,
and they were more homelike than boarding-houses or hotels. Large numbers
of them still remain in use, and when people began to live in flats, in
conformity with the law of evolution, many buildings were put up and
subdivided into apartments in imitation of the old dwellings which had
been changed.

But the apartment as the New-Yorkers now mostly have it, was at the same
time evolving from another direction. The poorer class of New York
work-people had for a long period before the war lived, as they still
live, in vast edifices, once thought prodigiously tall, which were called
tenement-houses. In these a family of five or ten persons is commonly
packed in two or three rooms, and even in one room, where they eat and
sleep, without the amenities and often without the decencies of life, and
of course without light and air. The buildings in case of fire are
death-traps; but the law obliges the owners to provide some apparent
means of escape, which they do in the form of iron balconies and ladders,
giving that festive air to their facades which I have already noted. The
bare and dirty entries and staircases are really ramifications of the
filthy streets without, and each tenement opens upon a landing as if it
opened upon a public thoroughfare. The rents extorted from the inmates is
sometimes a hundred per cent., and is nearly always cruelly out of
proportion to the value of the houses, not to speak of the wretched
shelter afforded; and when the rent is not paid the family in arrears is
set with all its poor household gear upon the sidewalk, in a pitiless
indifference to the season and the weather, which you could not realize
without seeing it, and which is incredible even of plutocratic nature. Of
course, landlordism, which you have read so much of, is at its worst
in the case of the tenement-houses. But you must understand that
comparatively few people in New York own the roofs that shelter them. By
far the greater number live, however they live, in houses owned by
others, by a class who prosper and grow rich, or richer, simply by owning
the roofs over other men's heads. The landlords have, of course, no human
relation with their tenants, and really no business relations, for all
the affairs between them are transacted by agents. Some have the
reputation of being better than others; but they all live, or expect to
live, without work, on their rents. They are very much respected for it;
the rents are considered a just return from the money invested. You must
try to conceive of this as an actual fact, and not merely as a
statistical statement. I know it will not be easy for you; it is not easy
for me, though I have it constantly before my face.

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