I have spoken little of town evils, and much of town ideals, primarily
for the reason that even to recognise, much less treat, the abnormal, we
must know something of the normal course of evolution. Hence, the old
and useful phrase by which physiology used to be known, that of "the
institutes of medicine." Sociology has thus to become "the institutes of
citizenship."
Often though philanthropists forget this, diagnosis should precede
treatment. The evils of the city, by the very nature of our hypothesis,
demand special survey, and this no less thoroughly than do the normal
place and work and industry. It is only our most permanent intellectual
impulse, that of seeking for unity, which excuses the cheap unitary
explanations so often current; as, for instance, that social evils are
mainly to be explained by intemperance, as for one school of reformers;
by poverty or luxury, for a second and third; by Tammany or other form
of party government, by socialism or by individualism for yet others;
that they are due to dissent or to church, to ignorance or to the spread
of science, and so on almost indefinitely--doubtless not without
elements of truth in each!
Yet let me offer as yet another explanation of civic evils, this more
general one--distinguished from the preceding by including them all and
more--that not only is our "Town" in itself imperfect, but the other
three elements we have been characterising as school, cloister and city,
are yet more imperfect, since disordered, decayed, or undeveloped anew.
It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our
civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these
complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are
as yet cursed.
Hence, to those who are struggling with disease and pain, with ignorance
and defect, with vice, and with crime, but for the most part too
separately, it is time to say that all these four evils are capable of
being viewed together, and largely even treated together. They are not
unrelated, but correspond each as the negative to that fourfold
presentment of ideals we have hitherto been raising. To this ideal unity
of healthy town, with its practical and scientific schools of all kinds,
with its meditative cloister of ethical and social idealism, of unified
science and philosophy, of imagination and drama, all culminating in
the polity, culture, and art which make a city proper, we have here the
corresponding defects in detail.
The evils of existing city life are thus largely reinterpreted; and if
so more efficiently combated; since the poverty, squalor and ugliness of
our cities, their disease and their intemperance, their ignorance,
dulness and mental defect, their vice and crime are thus capable not
only of separate treatment but of an increasingly unified civic hygiene,
and this in the widest sense, material and moral, economic and idealist,
utilitarian and artistic. Even the most earnest and capable workers
towards civic betterment in these many fields may gain at once in hope
and in efficiency as they see their special interests and tasks
converging into the conception of the city as an organic unity, and this
not fixed and settled, nor even in process of progress or degeneration
from causes beyond our ken, but as an orderly development which we may
aid towards higher perfection, geographic and cultural alike.
Our modern town is thus in a very real sense, one not hopeless, but as
hopeful as may be, a veritable purgatory; that is a struggle of lower
and higher idealisms, amid the respective expressions and outcomes of
these. Indeed, in our own present [Page: 97] cities, as they have come
to be, is not each of us ever finding his own Inferno, or it may be his
Paradise? Does he not see the dark fate of some, the striving and rising
hope of others, the redemption also?
The supreme poetic utterance of the mediaeval world is thus in great
measure, as each thoughtful reader sees, an expression of impassioned
citizenship and this at one of the golden moments of the long history of
city life. This expression--this exiled citizen's autobiographic
thought-stream--is resumed at every level, from youthful home and local
colour, from boyish love and hopes, from active citizenship and party
struggle, to the transfiguration of all these. Hence these mystic
visions, and these world ambitions, temporal and spiritual; hence this
rise from cloistered faith and philosophy into many-sided culture; hence
the transformation of all these through intensest symbol-visions into
enduring song.
Am I thus suggesting the _Divina Comedia_ as a guide-book to cities?
Without doubt, though not necessarily for beginners. Yet who can see
Florence without this, though we may pack below it Baedeker and Murray?
Or who, that can really read, can open a volume of Mr. Booth's severely
statistical Survey of London, with all its studious reserve, its
scientific repression, without seeing between its lines the Dantean
circles; happy if he can sometimes read them upward as well as down?