The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets | Page 5

chance to go into the country
when I was a kid, but I remember one day when I had to deliver a
package way out on the West Side, that I saw a flock of sheep in
Douglas Park. I had never thought that a sheep could be anywhere but
in a picture, and when I saw those big white spots on the green grass
beginning to move and to turn into sheep, I felt exactly as if Saint
Cecilia had come out of her frame over the organ and was walking in
the park." Such moments come into the life of the most prosaic youth
living in the most crowded quarters of the cities. What do we do to
encourage and to solidify those moments, to make them come true in
our dingy towns, to give them expression in forms of art?
We not only fail in this undertaking but even debase existing forms of
art. We are informed by high authority that there is nothing in the
environment to which youth so keenly responds as to music, and yet
the streets, the vaudeville shows, the five-cent theaters are full of the
most blatant and vulgar songs. The trivial and obscene words, the
meaningless and flippant airs run through the heads of hundreds of
young people for hours at a time while they are engaged in monotonous
factory work. We totally ignore that ancient connection between music
and morals which was so long insisted upon by philosophers as well as

poets. The street music has quite broken away from all control, both of
the educator and the patriot, and we have grown singularly careless in
regard to its influence upon young people. Although we legislate
against it in saloons because of its dangerous influence there, we
constantly permit music on the street to incite that which should be
controlled, to degrade that which should be exalted, to make sensuous
that which might be lifted into the realm of the higher imagination.
Our attitude towards music is typical of our carelessness towards all
those things which make for common joy and for the restraints of
higher civilization on the streets. It is as if our cities had not yet
developed a sense of responsibility in regard to the life of the streets,
and continually forget that recreation is stronger than vice, and that
recreation alone can stifle the lust for vice.
Perhaps we need to take a page from the philosophy of the Greeks to
whom the world of fact was also the world of the ideal, and to whom
the realization of what ought to be, involved not the destruction of what
was, but merely its perfecting upon its own lines. To the Greeks virtue
was not a hard conformity to a law felt as alien to the natural character,
but a free expression of the inner life. To treat thus the fundamental
susceptibility of sex which now so bewilders the street life and drives
young people themselves into all sorts of difficulties, would mean to
loosen it from the things of sense and to link it to the affairs of the
imagination. It would mean to fit to this gross and heavy stuff the
wings of the mind, to scatter from it "the clinging mud of banality and
vulgarity," and to speed it on through our city streets amid spontaneous
laughter, snatches of lyric song, the recovered forms of old dances, and
the traditional rondels of merry games. It would thus bring charm and
beauty to the prosaic city and connect it subtly with the arts of the past
as well as with the vigor and renewed life of the future.


CHAPTER II

THE WRECKED FOUNDATIONS OF DOMESTICITY
"Sense with keenest edge unused Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire: Lovely
feet as yet unbruised On the ways of dark desire!"
These words written by a poet to his young son express the longing
which has at times seized all of us, to guard youth from the mass of
difficulties which may be traced to the obscure manifestation of that
fundamental susceptibility of which we are all slow to speak and
concerning which we evade public responsibility, although it brings its
scores of victims into the police courts every morning.
At the very outset we must bear in mind that the senses of youth are
singularly acute, and ready to respond to every vivid appeal. We know
that nature herself has sharpened the senses for her own purposes, and
is deliberately establishing a connection between them and the newly
awakened susceptibility of sex; for it is only through the outward
senses that the selection of an individual mate is made and the instinct
utilized for nature's purposes. It would seem, however, that nature was
determined that the force and constancy