The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets | Page 4

of course and had developed
through years of publicity and simple propriety.
The only marvel is that the stupid attempt to put the fine old wine of
traditional country life into the new bottles of the modern town does
not lead to disaster oftener than it does, and that the wine so long
remains pure and sparkling.
We cannot afford to be ungenerous to the city in which we live without
suffering the penalty which lack of fair interpretation always entails.
Let us know the modern city in its weakness and wickedness, and then
seek to rectify and purify it until it shall be free at least from the grosser
temptations which now beset the young people who are living in its
tenement houses and working in its factories. The mass of these young
people are possessed of good intentions and they are equipped with a
certain understanding of city life. This itself could be made a most
valuable social instrument toward securing innocent recreation and
better social organization. They are already serving the city in so far as
it is honeycombed with mutual benefit societies, with "pleasure clubs,"
with organizations connected with churches and factories which are

filling a genuine social need. And yet the whole apparatus for
supplying pleasure is wretchedly inadequate and full of danger to
whomsoever may approach it. Who is responsible for its inadequacy
and dangers? We certainly cannot expect the fathers and mothers who
have come to the city from farms or who have emigrated from other
lands to appreciate or rectify these dangers. We cannot expect the
young people themselves to cling to conventions which are totally
unsuited to modern city conditions, nor yet to be equal to the task of
forming new conventions through which this more agglomerate social
life may express itself. Above all we cannot hope that they will
understand the emotional force which seizes them and which, when it
does not find the traditional line of domesticity, serves as a cancer in
the very tissues of society and as a disrupter of the securest social
bonds. No attempt is made to treat the manifestations of this
fundamental instinct with dignity or to give it possible social utility.
The spontaneous joy, the clamor for pleasure, the desire of the young
people to appear finer and better and altogether more lovely than they
really are, the idealization not only of each other but of the whole earth
which they regard but as a theater for their noble exploits, the
unworldly ambitions, the romantic hopes, the make-believe world in
which they live, if properly utilized, what might they not do to make
our sordid cities more beautiful, more companionable? And yet at the
present moment every city is full of young people who are utterly
bewildered and uninstructed in regard to the basic experience which
must inevitably come to them, and which has varied, remote, and
indirect expressions.
Even those who may not agree with the authorities who claim that it is
this fundamental sex susceptibility which suffuses the world with its
deepest meaning and beauty, and furnishes the momentum towards all
art, will perhaps permit me to quote the classical expression of this
view as set forth in that ancient and wonderful conversation between
Socrates and the wise woman Diotima. Socrates asks: "What are they
doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called love? And
what is the object they have in view? Answer me." Diotima replies: "I
will teach you. The object which they have in view is birth in beauty,
whether of body or soul.... For love, Socrates, is not as you imagine the

love of the beautiful only ... but the love of birth in beauty, because to
the mortal creature generation is a sort of eternity and immortality."
To emphasize the eternal aspects of love is not of course an easy
undertaking, even if we follow the clue afforded by the heart of every
generous lover. His experience at least in certain moments tends to pull
him on and out from the passion for one to an enthusiasm for that
highest beauty and excellence of which the most perfect form is but an
inadequate expression. Even the most loutish tenement-house youth
vaguely feels this, and at least at rare intervals reveals it in his talk to
his "girl." His memory unexpectedly brings hidden treasures to the
surface of consciousness and he recalls the more delicate and tender
experiences of his childhood and earlier youth. "I remember the time
when my little sister died, that I rode out to the cemetery feeling that
everybody in Chicago had moved away from the town to make room
for that kid's funeral, everything was so darned lonesome and yet it was
kind of peaceful too." Or, "I never had a