e inner workings of nat

e inner workings of nat

[McFarling]

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Voluptuous women, and fat, scandalous tenors. The mob, even disregarding
its insatiable appetite for the improper, is a natural hero worshiper.
It loves, not the beautiful, but the strange, the unprecedented, the
astounding; it suffers from an incurable _heliogabalisme_. A soprano who
can gargle her way up to G sharp in altissimo interests it almost as
much as a contralto who has slept publicly with a grand duke. If it
cannot get the tenor who receives $3,000 a night, it will take the tenor
who fought the manager with bung-starters last Tuesday. But this is
merely saying that the tastes and desires of the mob have nothing to do
with music as an art. For its ears, as for its eyes, it demands
anecdotes--on the one hand the Suicide symphony, "The Forge in the
Forest," and the general run of Italian opera, and on the other hand
such things as "The Angelus," "Playing Grandpa" and the so-called "Mona
Lisa." It cannot imagine art as devoid of moral content, as beauty pure
and simple. It always demands something to edify it, or, failing that,
to shock it. These concepts, of the edifying and the shocking, are
closer together in the psyche than most persons imagine. The one, in
fact, depends upon the other: without some definite notion of the
improving it is almost impossible to conjure up an active notion of the
improper. All salacious art is addressed, not to the damned, but to the
consciously saved; it is Sunday-school superintendents, not bartenders,
who chiefly patronize peep-shows, and know the dirty books, and have a
high artistic admiration for sopranos of superior gluteal development.
The man who has risen above the petty ethical superstitions of
Christendom gets little pleasure out of impropriety, for very few
ordinary phenomena seem to him to be improper. Thus a Frenchman, viewing
the undraped statues which bedizen his native galleries of art, either
enjoys them in a purely aesthetic fashion--which is seldom pos

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