Confess that
everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are
pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity--everywhere the
youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe--everywhere an abnormal
libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed,
chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood
decreasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of
manners, or rather lack of manners (considering the advantages enjoy'd)
probably the meanest to be seen in the world." [Footnote: "Democratic
Vistas," in his "Complete Works," pp. 205, 206.]
But it is no such desperate hope that the cities we have seen spring from
French fort and portage keep in their hearts. It is not even a confession
that one would have to make to-day in the American cities which Whitman
had in mind in his gloomy, foreboding vision. I have seen on the streets
of one of the Whitman cities [Footnote: New York City.] those same
grotesques, malformations, and meaningless antics, that flippancy and
vulgarity and cunning, that foppishness and premature ripeness, that
painted, bad-complexioned, bad-mannered, shallow-beautied humanity; but
touching, as I have had opportunity to touch, three of the great agencies
of its aspirations--its philanthropies, its literature, and its schools--I
know that no body of five million people, whether huddled in tenements or
scattered over plain and mountain and along rivers and seas, has with more
serious or sacrificing purpose aspired, though constantly disturbed in its
prayers, its operations, by people of every tongue, nearly a million
strong, who are emptied at her port every year from Europe and Asia,
besides the hundreds of thousands who come up from the country.
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