March asks, “I wonder how long one could be a stranger here.” “Oh, indefinitely,” replies March. At its worst, this city of strangers turns its back on newcomers like the Dryfooses—the neighbors don’t help you mourn your dead—or robs and mugs them. At its best, the sea of strangers coalesces into a Whitmanesque paradigm of democracy, Humanity itself. Howells speaks of “some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level, that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface the deeply underlying nobody.” His spokesman, March, observes himself undergoing in New York “almost [a] loss of individuality at times,” but this dissolution of the ego is felt as a potential relief. In any case, there is no going back to the peaceful life of Boston: “He owned it was very pretty, but he said it was not life—it was death in life.” New York might not have “inner quiet,” to use Mrs. March’s phrase, but it was the real thing, modern life.

Some of the most lyrical passages in the book are given over to the Marches’ enthusiastic trips on the elevated train, at the time still a novelty. The elevated (the El or L train, for short) offered the perfect voyeuristic medium: to peer in on the decor, habits, physiognomies, and physiques of one’s fellow citizens at a protected distance, sweeping by them in transit, without fear of incurring any human obligation—all in the form of a panorama, that quintessential nineteenth-century visual spectacle—what could be better?

Walter Benjamin had some pointed things to say about how the nineteenth-century feuilletonist (newspaper essayist), adapting “the gaze of the flâneur” or sidewalk connoisseur, “still bestowed a conciliatory gleam over the growing destitution of men in the great city.” In this novel, Howells shows he is well aware of the dangers of having a purely aesthetic response to human suffering. He gives us March’s hesitations on that score and also throws in the foolish minor character, Kendricks, who is all too apt to construe people’s hurt as raw material for a future novel. While Howells was loath to aestheticize suffering, the literary artist in him was also averse to muckraking propaganda. March tells his wife: “I confess I was a little ashamed... for having looked at the matter so entirely from the aesthetic point of view. But of course, you know, if I went to work at those things with an ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should spoil them.” Howells’ extreme fair-mindedness and reluctance to let his big novel degenerate into radical agitprop may be witnessed by the pains he took in drawing the millionaire Dryfoos, not as some capitalist villain, but as a basically decent man who has mislaid a piece of his soul in the money-speculating game.

Still, he could not indefinitely evade the dilemma that informs the central moral questions of the novel: What is our brotherly responsibility for our fellow man, especially the stranger who is suffering? How can we hope to alleviate all the misery we see by individual acts of charity? And yet, is this an excuse to do nothing? (In a fascinating essay he wrote at the same time, “Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver,” Howells wryly analyzes the act of giving money to street beggars in New York. Torn between wanting to give and not wanting to “pauperize” the needy, he reflects: “I hate a bad conscience, and of the two bad consciences, I always choose the least,” namely, giving. But, intending to give the beggar a dime, he finds in his pocket only half a dollar, which seems too steep a contribution. He ponders: “Shall we always give to him that asketh? ... What is a deserving case of charity—or rather, what is not? Is a starving or freezing person to be denied because he or she is drunken or vicious? What is desert to the poor? What is desert to the rich, I suppose the reader would answer.” In the novel, March runs after a garbage-picker who looks like a gentleman and hands him some money, and is almost shamed by the profuse thanks this modest gesture evokes.)

The Marches’ attitudes, particularly Basil’s, go through many subtle shifts. Shortly after their arrival in their new city, they debate: How much misery is there actually in New York? Then they try to reassure themselves that the poor don’t feel it as keenly as they might, being used to no other existence. Then they try to make it into a colorful spectacle, even envying the poor their dramatic flair. A century later, we cannot help wincing at Isabel March’s patronizing love for blacks, say. But remember, Howells is way ahead of them: showing step-by-step how this touristic response to the Other is an inevitable stage in the ongoing process of acquiring a deeper understanding.

 

Their point of view was singularly unchanged, and their impressions of New York remained the same that they had been fifteen years before: huge, noisy, ugly, kindly, it seemed to them now as it seemed then. The main difference was that they saw it more now as a life, and then they only regarded it a spectacle; and March could not release himself from a sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien, or critical, attitude he took. A sense of the striving and the suffering deeply possessed him, and this grew the more intense as he gained some knowledge of the forces at work—forces of pity, of destruction, of perdition, of salvation.

 

So March achieves that ethical high ground, complicity, acknowledging an implication in the wrongs around him. He feels called upon to do something more than watch—but what? Conrad and Margaret Vance are actively working in the ghetto, part of a generation of society reformers or “do-gooders,” as they were then called. But they are not an entirely attractive exemplar, for activism may carry with it a certain humorless, fanatical narrowing (“The man of one idea is always a little ridiculous,” Beaton says disparagingly). March tries to be generally helpful, to take principled stands whenever possible, but they don’t finally matter a great deal. The point is that he now understands—is “complicit” with the mystery of suffering and knows how wrong poverty is. By the end of the novel he is railing against the fact that a workingman may slave all his life and still not be secure at the end from hunger and destitution. This may seem cold comfort to the destitute, but as Alfred Kazin put it: “What interested Howells at this point was the education of men of goodwill—the slow and painful growth of a few sensitive minds in the face of materialism and inequality.”

Other critics have taken Howells to task for his inability to inhabit the lives of the poor; that is, for his cleaving to the perspective of the middle class looking at the poor (and for that matter, at the rich). But not every great novel can take in all of society convincingly: This one has the strength of its honesty in x-raying the limitations of a determinedly middle-class perspective, thereby “mirroring for Americans their own complacency and revealing the nature of the society for which they are ultimately responsible,” as William Alexander remarks. The Marches’ illusions about poverty, that “somehow it existed for their appreciation,” may undergo a shift, but it cannot undo a lifetime spent “self-enwrapt”—to use Howells’ nice term for middle-class narcissism.

“The whole spectacle of poverty, indeed, is incredible.