A Traveler from Altruria: Romance

by William Dean Howells

‘Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail’—

his novels probably wouldn’t be worth reading.”

“Ah!” said the Altrurian, as if he did not quite follow this joking; and, to tell the truth, I never find the personal thing in very good taste. “You will understand, then, how extremely difficult it is for me to imagine a condition of things like yours—although I have it under my very eyes—where the money consideration is the first consideration.”

“Oh, excuse me,” urged the minister; “I don’t think that’s quite the case.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the Altrurian, sweetly; “you can see how easily I go astray.”

“Why, I don’t know,” the banker interposed, “that you are so far out in what you say. If you had said that money was always the first motive, I should have been inclined to dispute you, too; but when you say that money is the first consideration, I think you are quite right. Unless a man secures his financial basis for his work, he can’t do his work. It’s nonsense to pretend otherwise. So the money consideration is the first consideration. People here have to live by their work, and to live they must have money. Of course, we all recognize a difference in the qualities, as well as in the kinds, of work. The work of the laborer may be roughly defined as the necessity of his life; the work of the business man as the means, and the work of the artist and scientist as the end. We might refine upon these definitions and make them closer, but they will serve for illustration as they are. I don’t think there can be any question as to which is the highest kind of work; some truths are self-evident. He is a fortunate man whose work is an end, and every business man sees this, and owns it to himself, at least when he meets some man of an aesthetic or scientific occupation. He knows that this luckier fellow has a joy in his work which he can never feel in business; that his success in it can never be embittered by the thought that it is the failure of another; that if he does it well, it is pure good; that there cannot be any competition in it—there can be only a noble emulation, as far as the work itself is concerned. He can always look up to his work, for it is something above him; and a business man often has to look down upon his business, for it is often beneath him, unless he is a pretty low fellow.”

I listened to all this in surprise; I knew that the banker was a cultivated man, a man of university training, and that he was a reader and a thinker; but he had always kept a certain reserve in his talk, which he now seemed to have thrown aside for the sake of the Altrurian, or because the subject had a charm that lured him out of himself. “Well, now,” he continued, “the question is of the money consideration, which is the first consideration with us all: does it, or doesn’t it degrade the work, which is the life, of those among us whose work is the highest? I understand that this is the misgiving which troubles you in view of our conditions?”

The Altrurian assented, and I thought it a proof of the banker’s innate delicacy that he did not refer the matter, so far as it concerned the aesthetic life and work, to me; I was afraid he was going to do so. But he courteously proposed to keep the question impersonal, and he went on to consider it himself: “Well, I don’t suppose any one can satisfy you fully. But I should say that it put such men under a double strain, and perhaps that is the reason why so many of them break down in a calling that is certainly far less exhausting than business. On one side, the artist is kept to the level of the working-man, of the animal, of the creature whose sole affair is to get something to eat and somewhere to sleep. This is through his necessity. On the other side, he is exalted to the height of beings who have no concern but with the excellence of their work, which they were born and divinely authorized to do. This is through his purpose. Between the two, I should say that he got mixed, and that his work shows it.”

None of the others said anything, and, since I had not been personally appealed to, I felt the freer to speak. “If you will suppose me to be speaking from observation rather than experience—” I began.

“By all means,” said the banker, “go on;” and the rest made haste in various forms to yield me the word.