Celestial roundsmen under the aegis of the 'New England Watch and Ward Society' inaugurated a virulent campaign against 'lewd and ...indecent' books and plays. What is salacity? It was like the time-honored stickler: How old is Ann? Other cities indulged in loud guffaws over the antics of the Boston censors as the latter grew hotter and hotter and more and more bothered over the perplexing problem. 'Banned in Boston' came to be the novelist's and dramatist's dream of successful publicity--'a natural' in advertising.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For public opinion does not admit that lofty rapturous laughter is worthy to stand beside lofty lyrical emotion and that there is ...all the difference in the world between it and the antics of a clown at a fair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers, The exuberant voices of music,... Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness That makes beauty; the mind Knows, grown adult.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If tragedy is made effective by provoking the phenomenon which psychology calls "empathy"Mby causing us, that is to say, actually ...to participate in the feelings of another--pure comedy must achieve its effects by completely inhibiting that phenomenon and by establishing a sense of separateness from the creatures whose antics we observe. Such sympathy as we feel for them is lofty and patronizing, like our sympathy for a child whose sorrows we know to be (however intense for him) transitory and trivial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »