Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

And yet, it is not wholly impossible after all. One evening in Brussels, hearing the strains of a band I looked out of my hotel window, and saw a throng of youth and maidens dancing in a mist of rain down an asphalt pavement that glistened under the electric lights. It was a sight of such innocence, of such simple joy and gayety as one could never behold in our cities, and it occasioned no more remark, was considered no more out of place or unbecoming than it would be for a man to sprawl on one of our sidewalks and look for a dime he had dropped. But I happened to use that phrase about singing in the streets simply because it was one Jones used to employ, just as Johnson used forever to be talking about his city set on a hill. If Johnson’s phrase was in an old poetic strain Jones meant literally what he said. He used to talk of the crowds he had seen along the boulevards of Paris, and the gayety, impossible to us, in which they had celebrated the 14th of July, and he talked of all this to such purpose that Toledo became the first city in America to have a “sane” Fourth of July.

Jones and Johnson, because they had vision, were thinking in sequences far beyond the material conceptions of the communities about them, and utterly impossible to skulking city politicians, with their miserable little treacheries and contemptible and selfish ambitions. They were imagining a spirit which might and perhaps some day will possess a whole people. And when I intimated the pity it was that they had not lived to see that silvery September day when the people of Ohio voted for municipal autonomy, I did not mean in the least to aver that their dream had been realized for us, simply because we had secured an amendment to our fundamental law. Memoranda to this effect had been noted on the roll of the constitution, but these after all were but the cold, formal and unlovely terms that expressed concepts which had been evolving slowly in the public consciousness.

They realized, what all intelligent men must ere long apprehend, that too great stress has been laid on mere political activity. We have counted it as of controlling force in human affairs, the energy behind human activities, the cause, instead of the effect, the motive, instead of a mere expression of our complex life. They saw more deeply than politics, they recognized other and mightier influences at work, affecting the interests and the emotions of men. They knew that there is after all, an unconscious, subtle wisdom in the general neglect of politics by the masses of citizens, who intuitively know that other things are of more importance. They were but seeking to clear the way for the more fundamental expressions of human interest, human emotions, human fervors, human liberties. For of course it is not the city that makes the people free, but the people that make the city free; and the city cannot be free until the people have been freed from all their various bondages, free above all from themselves, from their own ignorances, littlenesses, superstitions, jealousies, envies, suspicions and fears. And it is not laws that can set them free, nor political parties, nor organizations, nor commissions, nor any sort of legalistic machinery. They must themselves set themselves free, and themselves indeed find out the way.

Nor is that freedom to be defined; its chief value lies, as does that of any concept of truth, in the fact that it is largely impressionistic, subject to the alterations and corrections of that mysterious system of incessant change which is life itself. The value and even the permanence of many ideals and many truths—for truths are not always permanent, but are subject to the flux of life—lie in the fact that they are impressionistic. Reduced to formal lines and hardened into rigid detail they become something quite otherwise than that which they were at first or were intended to be.

No, neither for them, nor for us, had the dream come true. But it had come nearer. It had become possible. Many obstacles had been removed; many purifications had been wrought, many deliverances achieved. To Cleveland and to Toledo, those two cities by the lake, the years had brought their changes. Not objectively, perhaps; outwardly they were much the same—without form, inharmonious, ugly, with the awful antitheses of our economic system, and what is worse, the vast welter of mediocrity and banality between. But there had been ameliorations. In each of them there were plans traced for beautiful civic centers with groups of buildings and other public amenities, which, when realized, would render them comparable in that respect to those old cities of Europe where the benison of art has descended on the people from the hands of kings. And these things were coming up out of the people, despite provincialism and philistinism and politics; there was a new understanding of sovereignty, not as a menace descending from above, but as an aspiration coming up from below. And this new aspiration in the people, pressing with the irresistible urge of moral sentiment against old institutions will renovate the cities and recreate the lives in them.

For after all the world grows better. Not as rapidly as we should like, but yet, in a way, better. The immense sophistication of the modern mood, to be sure, is apt to cast contemporary thought in the mould of multifold negation; and sensibilities, long distressed by the contemplation of life in aspects it would not wear were this more of a realm of reason, find their only solace in that pessimism which makes charming so much of modern poetry. Doubtless this is the mood most congenial to the agnosticism of the reflective, contemplative mind in the present phase of its philosophy. It has its undoubted fascinations, its uses, and, indeed, its truth, part reaction though it be from the excessive strain of contemporary life in cities, and the dull orthodoxies of the Victorian age. To one, indeed, who, in eight years’ participation in municipal politics might in that respect have been compared to that character in one of Anatole France’s novels who never opened a door without coming upon some hitherto unsuspected depth of infamy in mankind, it was difficult to avoid that strain. And yet, bad as municipal government has been in this land, it is everywhere better to-day. The level of moral sentiment, like the level of intelligence, mounts slowly, in wide spirals, but it mounts steadily all the time. In not every city has the advance been so marked, for not every city has had such personalities as Johnson and Jones, and without personalities, democracies seem unable to function. The old corruptions, once so flagrant, are growing less and less, and there is left only the residuum of meanness and pettiness and spite, the crimes that require no courage and entail no fear of the law, committed by beings who never could attain the robust stature of the old and brazen and robust offenders. The strain is running out, attenuating, and ere long will be extinct.

Those gentle pessimists of such congenial culture may indeed point to other ages that excel ours, say in speculative thought, and all the five arts, but I think it is demonstrable that upon the whole, and employing long epochs for the comparison, things are growing better. Notwithstanding all the ignorance and all the woe in the world to-night, never before has there been such widespread opportunity for enlightenment, never such widespread comfort, never so much kindness, so much pity for animals, for children, and, above all, never have women been shown such consideration. It needs no very powerful imagination, peering into the shadowy background of human history, to appreciate the tremendous implications of this fact. Indeed the great feminist movement of our time, a movement which in the histories of mankind centuries hence will be given the sectional mark of the beginning of a new age, is in itself the proof of a great advance, in which the ballot will be the very least important of all the liberties to be won.

With all the complications of this vast and confusing interplay of the forces of this age, the city is inextricably bound by its awful responsibility for so much that is bad, for so much that is good, in our time. And in the cities, now as always, the struggle for liberty will go on. The old leaders will pass, and the new will pass, and pass swiftly, for they are quickly consumed in the stress and heat of the passionate and savage struggle. To them must ever come the fatigue of long drawn opposition, of the repeated and unavailing assaults on the cold, solid and impregnable walls of institutions. In this fatigue they may grow conservative after a while, and they should pray to be spared the acquiescence of the middle years, the base capitulation of age.

But always the people remain, pressing onward in a great stream up the slopes, and always somehow toward the light. For the great dream beckons, leads them on, the dream of social harmony always prefigured in human thought as the city. This radiant vision of the city is the oldest dream in the world. All literature is saturated with it. It has been the ideal of human achievement since the day when the men on the plains of Shinar sought to build a city whose towers should reach unto heaven. It was the angelic vision of the mystic on Patmos, the city descending out of heaven, and lying foursquare, the city where there was to be no more sorrow nor crying. It has been the goal of civilization down to this hour of the night, when, however vaguely and dimly, the ideal stirs the thousands in this feverish town going about their strange and various businesses, pleasures, devotions, sacrifices, sins. It has been the everlasting dream of humanity. And humanity will continue to struggle for it, to struggle toward it. And some day, somewhere, to the sons of men the dream will come true.

THE END