The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets | Page 6

of the instinct must make up
for its lack of precision, and that she was totally unconcerned that this
instinct ruthlessly seized the youth at the moment when he was least
prepared to cope with it; not only because his powers of self-control
and discrimination are unequal to the task, but because his senses are
helplessly wide open to the world. These early manifestations of the
sex susceptibility are for the most part vague and formless, and are
absolutely without definition to the youth himself. Sometimes months
and years elapse before the individual mate is selected and determined
upon, and during the time when the differentiation is not complete--and
it often is not--there is of necessity a great deal of groping and waste.
This period of groping is complicated by the fact that the youth's power
for appreciating is far ahead of his ability for expression. "The inner
traffic fairly obstructs the outer current," and it is nothing short of
cruelty to over-stimulate his senses as does the modern city. This
period is difficult everywhere, but it seems at times as if a great city
almost deliberately increased its perils. The newly awakened senses are
appealed to by all that is gaudy and sensual, by the flippant street music,

the highly colored theater posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered
hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop
windows. This fundamental susceptibility is thus evoked without a
corresponding stir of the higher imagination, and the result is as
dangerous as possible. We are told upon good authority that "If the
imagination is retarded, while the senses remain awake, we have a state
of esthetic insensibility,"--in other words, the senses become sodden
and cannot be lifted from the ground. It is this state of "esthetic
insensibility" into which we allow the youth to fall which is so
distressing and so unjustifiable. Sex impulse then becomes merely a
dumb and powerful instinct without in the least awakening the
imagination or the heart, nor does it overflow into neighboring fields of
consciousness. Every city contains hundreds of degenerates who have
been over-mastered and borne down by it; they fill the casual lodging
houses and the infirmaries. In many instances it has pushed men of
ability and promise to the bottom of the social scale. Warner, in his
American Charities, designates it as one of the steady forces making
for failure and poverty, and contends that "the inherent uncleanness of
their minds prevents many men from rising above the rank of day
laborers and finally incapacitates them even for that position." He also
suggests that the modern man has a stronger imagination than the man
of a few hundred years ago and that sensuality destroys him the more
rapidly.
It is difficult to state how much evil and distress might be averted if the
imagination were utilized in its higher capacities through the historic
paths. An English moralist has lately asserted that "much of the evil of
the time may be traced to outraged imagination. It is the strongest
quality of the brain and it is starved. Children, from their earliest years,
are hedged in with facts; they are not trained to use their minds on the
unseen."
In failing to diffuse and utilize this fundamental instinct of sex through
the imagination, we not only inadvertently foster vice and enervation,
but we throw away one of the most precious implements for
ministering to life's highest needs. There is no doubt that this ill
adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of vital

energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature manifestations
which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping process.
Every high school boy and girl knows the difference between the
concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would be
hopelessly bewildered by the use of the terms. They will declare one of
their companions to be "in love" if his fancy is occupied by the image
of a single person about whom all the newly found values gather, and
without whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if the stimulus
does not appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are
dispensed over the world, the young person suddenly seems to have
discovered a beauty and significance in many things--he responds to
poetry, he becomes a lover of nature, he is filled with religious
devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience, with young people,
easily illustrates the possibility and value of diffusion.
It is neither a short nor an easy undertaking to substitute the love of
beauty for mere desire, to place the mind above the senses; but is not
this the sum of the immemorial obligation which rests upon the adults
of each generation if they would nurture and restrain the youth, and has
not the