The devil dresses himself up in the guise of a Sunday play-producing
society. The play is surreptitiously performed in a theatre to which
admission can be obtained only by members banded together for just such
emergencies. It is very badly acted by actors and actresses who have not
been able to spare sufficient time from their daily work to learn their
parts as well as they should have done. The audience comes full of
a smug self-satisfaction at the thought that it is excessively
intellectual and select, and that it alone can appreciate blasphemy
or the vagaries of neurotic young women. It sits intellectually in the
theatre, and watches the play. The author sits intellectually in his
box, and intellectually accepts the plaudits of the audience. He lives
thereafter in a highly intellectual atmosphere. He is driven to become a
member of the secret play-producing society, and to watch other plays
of a character not suited to the requirements of the censorship. He
is morally a ruined man. He will never any more be a decent member
of society, for he has become an intellectual. He has been taught to
despise ordinary human beings, for they do not want to be wicked or
silly, except in the normal humdrum way, and they have not seen his play
and are not members of his play-producing society. He discovers that the
censored is the only good art. He is driven to the reading of all sorts
of Continental drama. He is made into an anti-English propagandist. He
is like the person in the song, who,
"Praises every century but this, and every country but his own."
He has been lost for human kind, and is wedded to intellectualism and
a sense of superiority to others for the rest of his miserable life. He
institutes a new system of censorship of his own. It takes the form of
sneering at and condemning anything that does not conform to his
own ideas. He sniffs at all sorts of innocently happy people who are
inoffensively pursuing their noisy course through life. He begins to
hate noise. He makes a virtue of his abstention from ordinary pleasures.
He speaks condescendingly of the "hoi polloi." As I said, he is ruined.
He is no longer a man that one can talk to with any comfort, for his
sense of superiority is intolerable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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