Then RUTH HALE, who visualizes glowing opportunities for feminine
achievement in the functionings of inhibited society. "If the world
outside the home is to become as circumscribed and paternalized as the
world inside it, obviously all the advantage lies with those who have
been living under nonsenseorship long enough to have learned to manage
it."
WALLACE IRWIN is irrepressibly jocose (perhaps because he sailed for
unprohibited England the day his manuscript was delivered), breaking
into quite undisciplined verse anent the rosiness of life since the red
light laws went blue.
"I am not sure, as I write, that this article ever will be printed,"
says ROBERT KEABLE, the English author of "Simon Called Peter." (It is).
Mr. Keable, a minister from Africa, wrote of the war as he saw it in
France, and in a way which offended people with mental blinders. He
declares that the war quite completely knocked humbug on the head and
bashed shams irreparably. "Rebels," says he, meaning those who speak
their mind and write of things as they see them, "must be drowned in a
babble of words."
And then HELEN BULLITT LOWRY, the exponent of the cocktailored young
lady of today, averring that to the pocket-flask, that milepost between
the time that was and the time that is, we owe the single standard of
drinking. She maintains that the debutantalizing flapper, now driven
right out in the open by the reformers, is the real salvation of our
mid-victrolian society.
No palpitating defense of censorship would be expected from FREDERICK
O'BRIEN of the South Seas, who contributes (and deliciously defines)
a precious new word to the vocabulary of Nonsenseorship, "Wowzer." The
nature of a wowzer is hinted in a ditty sung by certain uninhibited
individuals as they lolled and imbibed among the mystic atolls and white
shadows:
"Whack the cymbal! Bang the drum!
Votaries of Bacchus!
Let the popping corks resound,
Pass the flowing goblet round!
May no mournful voice be found,
Though wowzers do attack us!"
DOROTHY PARKER gives vent to a poignant Hymn of Hate, anent reformers,
who "think everything but the Passion Play was written by Avery
Hopwood," and whose dominant desire is to purge the sin from Cinema even
though they die in the effort. "I hope to God they do," adds the author
devoutly.
From England, through the eyes of FRANK SWINNERTON, we glimpse ourselves
as others see us, and rather pathetically. In days gone by, lured by
reports of America's lawless free-and-easiness, Swinnerton says he
craved to visit us. But no more. The wish is dead. We have become
hopelessly moral and uninviting. "I see that I shall after all have to
live quietly in England with my pipe and my abstemious bottle of beer.
And yet I should like to visit America, for it has suddenly become in my
imagining an enormous country of 'Don't!' and I want to know what it is
like to have 'Don't' said by somebody who is not a woman."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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