William Dean Howells

“ It was very chill that night, with a sharp wind sweeping the street that the Street Department had neglected; but this poor old thing slept on, while I stood by her trying to imagine her short and simple annals; a dim, far-off childhood in some peasant hut, a girlhood with its tender dreams, a motherhood with its cares, a grandmotherhood with its pains—the whole round of woman’s life, with want through all, wound into this [Pg 163] last result of houseless age at my feet. How much of human life comes to no more—if, indeed, one ought not to say how little comes to so much! ”

“ In all, the large leisure, the serene lapse of nature toward decay, seemed to express a consciousness of the hotel’s unhurried dissolution, to wait gently upon it, and to stay in a faithful summer loveliness till the last light should be quenched, of all those that had made it flame like a jewel in the forehead of the sea, and that had faded from veranda and balcony to the glitter of the clustered lamps in the office and dining-room. ”

“ One sign, rather simple and unostentatious, suffices for a large store; a little store will want half a dozen, and will have them painted and hung all over its façade, and stood about in front of it as obtrusively as the police will permit. The effect is bizarre and grotesque beyond expression. If one thing in the business streets makes New York more hideous than another it is the signs, with their discordant colors, their infinite variety of tasteless shapes. If by chance there is any architectural beauty in a business edifice, it is spoiled, insulted, outraged by these huckstering appeals ”

“ This, or something like it, the mind of the dreamer struggles to establish, with a good deal of anxious appeal to the bystanders and a final sense of the hopelessness of the cause.
One may easily laugh off this sort of dream in the morning, but there are other shameful dreams, whose inculpation projects itself far into the day, and whose infamy often lingers about one till lunch-time. Every one, nearly, has had them, but it is not the kind of dream that any one is fond of telling: the gross vanity of the most besotted dream-teller keeps that sort back. ”

“ I am supposing you to have walked down a street of tenement-houses to the North river, as the New-Yorkers call the Hudson; and I wish I could give some notion of the beauty and majesty of the stream, some sense of the mean and ignoble effect of the city’s invasion of the hither shore. The ugliness is, indeed, only worse in degree, but not in kind, than that of all city water-fronts. ”

“ If he did not he would still be unable to understand how the individual liberty that suffers a man to build offensively to his neighbor or to the public at large is not liberty, but is a barbarous tyranny, which puts an end instantly to beauty, and extinguishes the common and the personal rights of every one who lives near the offender or passes by his edifice. We Americans are yet so far lost in the dark ages as to suppose that there is freedom where the caprice of one citizen can interfere with the comfort or pleasure of the rest. ”

“ Of course the reason why we have such a bad conscience in giving is that we feel we ought not to pauperize people. Perhaps this is one reason why we give so little to obvious destitution. I am this moment just in from the street, where I gave alms to a one-armed tatterdemalion, with something of this obscure struggle in my mind. As I came up with him, well fenced against the bitter wind that blew through his ruins, I foresaw that I should give him something, and I took from my outside pocket all the change there was in it—three coppers, a nickel, and a piece of twenty-five. ”

“ A half-grown, baddish-looking boy was arraigned for assault and battery, and took his place at one end of that long table on which rested the clerk’s desk, while a young girl of thirteen or fourteen advanced from the audience, and placed herself at the other end. She was dressed in a well-fitting ready-made suit, which somehow suggested itself as having been “marked down” to come within her means; and she wore a cheap yet tasteful hat, under which her face, as honest as it was comely, looked modestly up at the judge when he questioned her. ”

“ I should think that the dream which has some color of conscience in it was the drowse-dream, and that the dream which has none is the sleep-dream; and I believe that the most of our dreams will be found by this test to be sleep-dreams. It is in these we may know what we would be without our souls, without their supernal criticism of the mind; for the mind keeps on working in them, with the lights of waking knowledge, both experience and observation, but ruthlessly, remorselessly. ”

“ The sidewalks swarm with children, and the air rings with their clamor, as they fly back and forth at play; on the thresholds, the mothers sit nursing their babes, and the old women gossip together; young girls lean from the casements, alow and aloft, or flirt from the doorways with the hucksters who leave their carts in the street, while they come forward with some bargain in fruit or vegetables, and then resume their leisurely progress and their jarring cries. ”

“ It is to see the work-worn look of the mothers, the squalor of the babes, the haggish ugliness of the old women, the slovenly frowziness of the young girls. All this makes you hasten your pace down to the river, where the tall buildings break and dwindle into stables and shanties of wood, and finally end in the piers, commanding the whole stretch of the mighty waterway with its shipping, and the wooded heights of its western bank. ”

“ Some workman out of work, as he trudges aimlessly through its paths must wonder why the city cannot minister to his need as well as his pleasure, and not hold aloof from him till he is thrown a pauper on its fitful charities. If it can give him this magnificent garden for his forced leisure, why cannot it give him a shop where he can go in extremity, to earn his bread? ”

“ I do not know that he was any more characteristic, though, than another printer of ours, who was dear to my soul from the quaintness of his humor and his love of literature. I think he was, upon the whole, the most original spirit I have known, and it was not the least part of his originality that he was then aiming to become a professor in some college, and was diligently training himself for the calling in all the leisure he could get from his work. The usual thing would have been to read law and crowd forward in political life, but my friend despised this common ideal. ”

“ The place has all the attraction of close neighborhood, which the poor love, and which affords them for nothing the spectacle of the human drama, with themselves for actors. In a picture it would be most pleasingly effective, [Pg 253] for then you could, he in it, and yet have the distance on it which it needs. But to be in it, and not have the distance, is to inhale the stenches of the neglected street, and to catch that yet fouler and dreadfuller poverty-smell which breathes from the open doorways. ”

“ Ninety-nine Americans out of a hundred, have never seen a man in livery; they have never dreamed of such a display as this in the Park. Yet with our conditions, I fear that at sight of it ninety-nine Americans out of every hundred would lust for their turn of the wheel, their throw of the dice, so that they might succeed to a place in it, and flaunt their luxury in the face of poverty, and abash humility with their pride. ”

“ We are always talking about human nature and what it is, and what it is not; but we try in our blind worship of inequality to refuse the first and simplest knowledge of human nature, which testifies of itself in every throb of our own hearts, as we try even to refuse a knowledge of the Divine nature, and attribute to the Father of all a design in the injustice we have ourselves created. ”

“ It is like the relation which all the arts bear to the world, and which is peculiarly thankless in a purely commercial civilization like ours; though I cannot pretend that printing is an art in the highest sense. I have heard old journeymen claim that it was a profession and ought to rank with the learned professions, but I am afraid that was from too fond a pride in it. It is in one sort a handicraft, like any other, like carpentering or stone-cutting; but it has its artistic delight, as every handicraft has. There is the ideal in all work ”

“ The great statesman, not the great millionaire, was then the American ideal, and all about in the villages and on the farms the people were eager to know what the President had said to Congress. They are not eager to know now, and that seems rather a pity. Is it because in the war which destroyed slavery, the American Democracy died, and by operation of the same fatal anomaly the American Plutocracy, which Lincoln foreboded, was born; and the people instinctively feel that they have no longer the old interest in President or Congress? ”

“ Here in New York, this valuable principle is so scrupulously respected that the saloon controls the municipality, and the New-Yorkers think this is much better than for the municipality to control the saloon. It is from the saloon that their political bosses rise to power; it is in the saloon that all the election frauds are planned and fostered; and it would be infinitely comic, if it were not so pathetic, to read the solemn homilies on these abuses in the journals which hold by the good old American doctrine of private trade in drink as one of the bulwarks of the constitution. ”

“ But I do not so much object to these ordeals as to some social experiences which I have in dreams. I cannot understand why one should dream of being slighted or snubbed in society, but this is what I have done more than once, though never perhaps so signally as in the instance I am about to give. I found myself in a large room, where people were sitting at lunch or supper around small tables, as is the custom, I am told, at parties in the houses of our nobility and gentry. ”

“ The signs that deface the chief of our cities seem trying to shout and shriek each other down, wherever one turns; they deface the fronts and sides and tops of the edifices; in all the approaches to the metropolis they stretch on long extents of fencing in the vacant suburban lands, and cover the roofs and sides of the [Pg 271] barns. The darkness does not shield you from them, and by night the very sky is starred with the electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty buildings the frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise. ”

“ But once more I must hedge, for sometimes a street is respectable almost to the water on one side or the other; and there are whole neighborhoods of pleasant dwellings far down-town, which seem to have been forgotten by the enterprise of business, or neglected by its caprice, and to have escaped for a time at least the contagion of poverty. Business and poverty are everywhere slowly or swiftly eating their way into the haunts of respectability, and destroying its pleasant homes. ”

“ There is a great air of gayety, a very excited chatter of female voices, a constant flutter of greeting and leave-taking and a general sense of amiable emptiness and bewildered kindness when you come away. The genius of these little affairs is supposed to be informality, but at some houses where you enjoy such informalities you find two men in livery on the steps outside, a third opens the door for you, a fourth takes your hat [Pg 129] and stick, a fifth receives your overcoat and a sixth catches at your name and miscalls it into the drawing room. ”

“ But in New York you come to be glad of anything that will suggest a sweeter and a gentler life than that which you mostly see. The life of the poor here seemed to me symbolized in a waste and ruined field that I came upon the other day in one of the westward avenues, which had once been the grounds about a pleasant home. Till I saw this I did not think any piece of our mother earth could have been made to look so brutal and desolate amidst the habitations of men. ”

“ there would inevitably be less inequality, but inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself. ”

“ I left all this behind when I entered the dark, chill tenement-house, where that dreadful poverty-smell struck the life out of the spring in my soul at the first breath. The sick man’s apartment was clean and sweet, through his mother’s care (this poor woman was as wholly a lady as any I have seen) ”

“ It cannot be that the countless thousands who continually visit it, and share equally in its beauty, can all come away insensible of the meaning of it; here and there some one must ask himself, and then ask others, why the whole of life should not be as generous and as just as this part of it; why he should not have a country as palpably his own as the Central Park is, where his ownership excludes the ownership of no other. ”