“Boys,” asked the school master, “what do you consider the most beautiful
thing in the world?”
“Sunshine,” hazarded one boy.
“Flowers,” ventured another.
Both answers were received with favor, and the turn went to a hefty youth.
“A woman,” announced he gruffly.
“Come out here,” commanded the master, sternly.
A good flogging was administered; and then the offender was bidden to go
home and tell his father that he had been flogged, and why.
Next morning the floggee was again hauled up.
“Did you tell your father that you had been flogged?” asked the master.
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you tell him why?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did he say?”
“Please, sir, dad and I talked it all over between us, and we’ve come to
the conclusion that there’s something funny about you.”
_Whiz Bang Editorials_
“_The Bull is Mightier Than the Bullet_”
Press dispatches recently carried an item to the effect that although
slightly mentally affected, the mother of Charlie Chaplin, upon her son’s
earnest persuasion, had been allowed to enter this country from England.
Mrs. Chaplin, upon reaching New York, stood a chance, it was stated, of
having to return had it not been for quick and effective energies of her
sons and their friends in political power.
Those who know Chaplin well declare that the intense melancholy for which
he is noted is due more than anything else to the affection and concern
for his mother. Such things as domestic troubles, it is said, bear little
weight with the man who daily makes millions laugh. ’Tis the mother.
What have we here! Consider this monumental fun-maker of the screen.
Death is bad enough but when the mind of one very dear becomes clouded,
then indeed does tragedy and sadness smite with a heavy hand.
We read of the circus clown whose wife and children burned to death, and
yet, to keep a date with the world of fun lovers, he went ahead that
night and clowned as never he had clowned before. Have we in Chaplin a
great tragedy also? It will be recalled that when he was a small boy in
London he and his mother and brother lived in a workhouse in order that
the streets might not be their home.
Now his mother is coming home to him, to live amid all the luxury that
great wealth may bring; wealth that came after a sad little fellow with
merry feet, living in a workhouse with his mother, learned to be the
greatest of all fun-makers. Life’s a funny proposition, folks, isn’t it?
* * * * *
Half a century ago the nude in art was strange enough in America to
uplift Puritanic hands in holy horror. Today, among all cultivated
people, the female nude is most matter-of-fact. Our notions of art the
country over have been steadily clarifying, until at last the great
distinction has been recognized and conceded even by pious folk that,
while the human male figure is impossible, the female form is purely
beautiful.
Those rabid for realism and resolutely uncompromising, will have the
assurance to claim innocuousness for the undraped male; but the opinion
today among those who are not extremists is still definitely against the
frank exposition of the male form in plastic or painting.
At worst the mind receives merely a filip of interest; and complete
nudity, to the male fancy, repeated again and again in art, speedily
sates curiosity, and with that, incipient desire. As for the minds
of women, no one would insult them with the suspicion that they find
anything provocative in the portrayal of figures of their own sex.
In every landscape the eye notices at once and unavoidably the hills; it
finds the plains and valleys only by an effort of the will. This fact has
ever been admitted by the modern stage, which is, so far as the ethics of
objective morality go, more conservative than modern art in its advanced
attitude.
* * * * *