GROWING GRAZE FOR MORBID

Evening Star, Issue 19786, 9 February 1928, Page 5

GROWING GRAZE FOR MORBID

THE HANGMAN MAKES HiS BOW A professional hangman has become a , professional actor. At a Gravesend theatre he has executed nightly that prince of murderers, Cliarlcs Peace, to the delight of a crowded house. It is a sign of a jazz age, an age in which not only the drama but art and literature arc being misused (writes Sir Edward Parry, in the Sunday Chronicle’). Sir Frank Dick see, president of the Royal Academy, gave the students of flio schools at Burlington House some straight talk. It is good to find a citizen in high office pi caching against the abuse of the age we live in, and upholding what is honest and good. It is but too true that we have among us a pushing group of painters and sculptors who have abandoned the old standards of beauty and seek to replace them by negroid and barbaric abominations.

No longer arc we content with the scent of our native sweet lavender, but our nostrils are choked with the heavy odor of patchouli, borrowed from the bagnios of the East. It is the same iu the realms of sound, and you cannot enter a restaurant without being deafened by the rowdy rhythms of uncivilised negroes. We are encompassed about by the cult of ugliness. “ NO PLACE CLEAN.” You find the same disease attacking literature and the drama.

You pick up a novel at a respectable library and find yon are invited to entertain yourself with the intimate details of the seduction of a. feebleminded girl by a waster of unpleasant propensities. The authoress gushes about art and music. Her message to the world seems to lie that if a man honors his father and mother and is true to his wife he cannot be a great artist. Another author specialises on the psychopathic misconduct of an insane tjpo. You feel inclined to say in your haste: “Their tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean,” There is comfort in the words of the old prophet. They remind you that older nations have been up against similar poisonous tendencies in tlie past, and have conquered them and returned to the paths of sanity and wisdom. LUST OF CRUELTY.

It is difficult to be hopeful about the future iu the face of the renewed instances of degeneracy and vulgarity that meet you at every corner. What is the use of a censor of drama who permits a play to be staged with a real retired hangman featuring in a gruesome but accurate reproduction of an execution ?

We read that an actor is pinioned, the rope is put round his neck, the bolt is drawn, and the actor disappears through the trap to the satisfaction of a delighted audience. It is difficult to comprehend the state of mind of individuals to whom such a spectacle is an entertainment. Is it healthy to pander to the morbid curiosity of the feeble-minded with scenes of this nature? There is a lust of cruelty and an appetite for horrors in all classes. Do not women of fashion crowd our criminal courts to gaze at a murderer on trial for his life? Our ancestors abolished public executions as being degenerate to public morals. It is left to modern art to restore to the swinish multitude the pleasure of seeing a man banged in the mimic drama of the stage. TWO MAXIMS. As Sir Frank Dickseo says, the unpleasant mentality of people who seek after these tilings is one of the sinister signs of the times. The toleration of what is foul and of ill repute must be limited. No one wants to-day io touch the liberty of art and literature, but it is not beyond the wit of man to distinguish between decency and indecency, sanity and insanity, and right and wrong, in the public portrayal of Hie facts of life.

The two maxims wc must bear in mind are: “ There is a moon in all tilings,” and, what is even more important, “ the greatest reverence is duo to youth.” I fancy the whole business is really more a matter of sanity of manners than wilful immorality. An ash-pit, for instance, is not in itself morbid, bub a sane man does not want to place it, in liis drawing room, and does not seek to entertain Ids guests with the contents of it. LIKE THE INSANE. It’ is a curious fact, worth considering, that the drawings and paintings of the insane arc afflicted with the want of sense of proportion, exaggerations pushed to extremes, and degenerative vagueness that is typical of modern artistic cults. When you look at the work of some of the ultra-moderns in art and literature, and listen to their ccstacies of self-praise, as they “oil each other’s little heads with mutual flattery’s golden slime,” yon wonder whether they ought not perhaps rather to bo pitied than blamed for their painful exhibitions of perverse imagination. This is a, question for science, but Sir Frank Dicksoo is within his rights in warning Jus students from enrolling themselves in the ranks of these artistic Bolshevists. Like all good men who preach a sane gospel, ho will be spattered with abuse, and 1 see that already he has ben dubbed a Philistine.

Personally, 1 have always gloried in the title, for 1 have, a great regard for the Philistines. Their business seems to have been to sally forth and slay the chosen people whenever they went astray and worshipped false gods. AS TOMMY ATKINS SANG. Thq Philistines were a hefty fighting race, and there is no instance recorded of the chosen people getting the better of them when the chosen people had been misbehaving themselves. The misuse of art and literature is no now thing. Moses had a similar trouble over the Golden Calf, but lie forbade his people to allow the sense of beauty to sink into tlio servant of lust. And Sir Frank Dicksec is rigid in believing that wo shall take the same course. Nevertheless, if wc really believed that the great majority of our people loved the first tilings he describes, and no longer worshipped the old standards of beauty, then, indeed, we might throw up our hands in despair. But this would be to admit that our beloved country was played out. Even better men than ourselves have feared that at moments of stress. What did Mr Thomas Atkins sing to comfort himself and us? If England was what England seems, An’ not the England of our dreams, But only putty, brass, and paint, ’Ow quick we’d chuck ’er! BUT SHE AIN’T!