Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/255

 to adapt his wares to it as far as the police will permit. To this lamentable lack of taste and culture (in the broad sense) officials and moralists are entirely indifferent as long as the comédienne does not refer to the seventh commandment. The public may be as ignorant and vulgar as they like, but they must not give expression to a natural effect of this.

The music-hall and the bioscope are the great academies of our people to-day, and their work is largly stupefying. Sentimental songs of the most vapid description alternate with patriotic songs of a medieval crudeness and humorous songs which might have appealed to a prehistoric intelligence. Bloodthirsty melodramas, sensational scenes, and infinite variations of “The girl who did what we are forbidden to talk about,” evoke and inflame elementary emotions at the lowest grade of culture. Clergymen give certificates of high moral efficacy to crude representations of passion in high life which are designed to appeal to raw feelings. The posters alone—the eccentric costumes and daubed faces and attempts at novelty in the way of leering—warn away people of moderate taste or intelligence. The bioscope is almost as bad. Apart from a few excellent travel and scenic and scientific pictures, the show is a mass of crude faking and boorish horse-play which presupposes an elementary intelligence in the spectators. Pictorial post-cards add to the monstrosities and puerilities of this kind of public education, and a large proportion of the