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