Folkways / A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals

610. Dedication by vows. The connection between child sacrifice and the temple consecration of girls is in the substitution of the latter for the former, as a ransom. The girl devoted to death belonged to the goddess in one way, if not in the other. Vows made in illness sometimes included such substitution. In the historic period, after child sacrifice had ceased in the Euphrates valley, many variations occurred. Barren women made vows. Children were vowed to the goddess for life or for a time. They were redeemed by money which they earned in the temple life. The accumulation of a dowry was only a variation.1981 In later times (second century A.D.) we find the sacrifice of a woman's hair as a substitute for herself.1982 Men were also dedicated in sex perversion.

611. Degeneration of the customs of consecrating women. Evidently vicarious sacrifice and expiatory sacrifice are very ancient heathen ideas. They contain deductions and assumptions about the nature of the deity which are of the first theological importance. The cases of custom which have been described also show the power and persistency of theological dogma to override for centuries the strongest interests and sentiments. Evidently the variations in the custom marked the breaking down of the boundaries which held it firm in the religious mores. The Babylonian custom described by Herodotus seems to be a variation by which every woman was held bound to the goddess. Then sensuality, priestcraft, greed, and frivolity easily used such a custom until it became a root of corruption. This is what happened, and forms of the custom which had no sense but the gratification of licentiousness spread around the Mediterranean. The old female sex mores were very simple and austere, but they were corrupted after the middle of the second century B.C. Those of Roman Carthage, if we can trust Salvianus, became more corrupt than those of Punic Carthage ever had been. They were less ferocious and more frankly voluptuous. Salvianus's description of southern Gaul makes it as bad as Africa. According to him the Vandals were pure-minded, and their mores were so pure and firm that they successfully resisted the Roman corruption and put the sex relation back again on the basis of the "law of God."1983

612. Our traditions from Israel. If now we turn back to the Israelites we can see the stream by which our own mores have come down to us. There arose amongst the Israelites, in the tenth century B.C., an opposition to the religion which was common to the west Semites. It was like the reform of the Iranian religion by the magi, who produced a religion which was too severe and exacting for any but priests to live by it. There have also been many attempts to reform Islam from within. They have taken the form of throwing off later additions and returning to primitive purity, that is, to the mode of life of Arabs in Mohammed's time. In some cases (e.g. the Wahabees of the nineteenth century) the reforms have originated with people who were on a lower grade of life than the mass of Moslems. Present-day scholars find the origin of the resistance of Israelitish prophets to the prevailing religion of western Asia in the hostility of a rustic population, with a primitive mode of life and archaic mores, to the luxury of Tyre and Sidon, wealthy cities of commerce and industry.1984 The conflict was between two sets of mores. The biblical scholars now tell us that Jahveh was a Baal amongst other Palestinian Baals until this antagonism arose. Then he was made the god in whose name the ancient mores of Israel were defended against the introduction of luxury and licentiousness. The antagonism was between simple, rustic, largely pastoral modes of life and the ways of cities with wealth, culture, and luxury. This is a permanent social antagonism, but it carried with it the antagonism of simplicity to sensuality, materialism, formal manners, and luxury. For four or five centuries a succession of "prophets" developed the antagonism between the Jahveh religion and heathenism. They maintained that Jahveh was not only the single god of the Hebrews but the sole God of all the earth. Other gods were nullities. The prophets condemned idolatry, and all sensuality, licentiousness, and bestiality, with which they connected all sorcery and divination. They insisted on a broad and firm sex taboo and denounced sacral harlotry and child sacrifice together. It must be remembered that the peoples of that age generally regarded sex usages which seem to us the most abominable as trivial, unworthy of notice, matters of personal liberty and choice. Brahmins, a century ago, held that view of pederasty.1985 The prophets also set in opposition to their own traditional ritual religion a doctrine of righteousness, by which religion was made ethical. It was a marvelous product for an insignificant hill people. It is, however, to be noticed that in the Zend-Avesta there was also a great revolt against sex vice.1986

613. How the Jewish view of sensuality came to prevail. The religious system of the Jewish prophets never has become the actual popular religion of any people. The Old Testament contains the story of the protests and failures of the prophets. Their work did not issue from the mores of the Jewish nation, and did not influence the mores before the captivity. The prophets were trying to introduce a new world philosophy by virtue of its ethical value and by interpretations of current political history. In Jer. xliv we see the latter argument turned against the prophet. The people cite their own experience. When they served the Queen of Heaven they fared well. In the rabbinical period the Jews emphasized everything which could differentiate them from heathen, and in the New Testament we find that idolatry and sensuality are presented as the two great heathen characteristics which Christians are to avoid. It is impossible for us to know to what extent the mores of the masses, in the western Roman empire, were marked by the ancient Roman austerity in the sex mores. It is, however, reasonable to believe that the ancient mores prevailed most in the class amongst whom Christian converts were found. Salvianus also gives to the German nations very remarkable testimony as to their freedom from sensuality and sex vice. The experience of societies also went to prove that such vice can corrupt the finest brain and the most cultivated character; also that, if it becomes current in a society, as pederasty and prostitution did in the Greco-Roman world, it will eat out all manly virtues, all coöperative devotion, the love of children, the energy of invention and production, of an entire population. Thus by the syncretism of the mores of the nations, and by experience, the conviction was produced that the view of sensuality and sex vice which the Jewish prophets taught was true, and that that view was the most important part of the mores and of religion for the welfare of mankind.

CHAPTER XVII

POPULAR SPORTS, EXHIBITIONS, AND DRAMA

Limits. The cases of public amusement and entertainment which shall here be mentioned are such as were within the limits of usage and accepted propriety at the time. They are not cases of vice or of disputed propriety at the time. Drunkenness, gambling, bull baiting, cockfighting, and prize fighting are amusements which have entered into the mores of groups and subgroups, as bullfighting still does in Spain, but they were limited to classes or groups, or they were important on account of the excess, or they were disapproved by great numbers or by the ecclesiastical authorities. They would, therefore, lie outside the mores, to which the cases to be noticed belonged. The theater in England in Charles II's time testified to a depraved taste and a low standard of morals, but it was temporary and indeed limited in time. In different groups also the moral standards are unequal at the same time, and the mores are on different levels. There is a wider limit now for romances and dramas in France than in English-speaking countries. The cases which now interest us are those of long and wide currency, which the mores have firmly established according to current standards, even though moralists may have inveighed against them sometimes, as the same class now sometimes denounces all dancing.

The cases here to be noticed are further illustrations of the fact that the mores can make anything right, and can protect anything from condemnation, in addition to those in the last two chapters.

614. Literature and drama in ethology. Poetry, drama, and literary fiction are useful to ethology in one or the other of two ways: (1) they reveal facts of the mores; (2) they show the longings and ideals of the group,—in short, what the people like and wish for. The second division includes mythology, fairy tales, and extravaganzas. The taste for them, if it exists, is a feature of the mores, but in fact such a taste is hardly ever popular. It is a product of culture. Myths, legends, proverbs, fables, riddles, etc., are popular products.

615. Public amusements of the uncivilized. Reversion to archaic, "natural" ways. We find in savage life, almost universally unless the group has been crushed by conquest or misfortune, festivals, games, dances, and orgies, which are often celebrated with masks and dramatic action. The motives are fidelity to the traditions of ancestors, entertainment, sex excitement, war enthusiasm, and occult influence in aid of the food quest. The dramatic representation of sex attraction and of the ways of animals is often intensely graphic, and it gives great pleasure to the spectators. An occult effect, to bring about what is desired in war or the chase by enacting it in a dance or play, involves demonism, the existing form of religion. Therefore religion, dramatic dances, music, songs, emotional suggestion, and sex stimulation are intertwined from low barbarism or savagery. Experience of the perils and pains of sexual excess and overpopulation force the development of folkways of restraint, which are customary and conventional regulations of primary natural impulses. At the recurring points of time at which the festivals are held there is often a reversion from the moral status created by the later mores to the ancient "natural" ways, because the later ways are a reflection on the ancestors who were "uncultivated." Their ghosts will be displeased at the new ways and will inflict ill fortune on the group. The festival is not a time at which to emphasize the novelty, but to set it aside and revert to old ways. How far back shall the reversion go? What is "natural"? As no one ever has known from what depths of beastliness, rendered more acute by some intelligence, man came, no one has ever known what "nature" would be. Men reverted actually to some ancient custom of their ancestors beyond which they knew nothing, and which therefore to them seemed primitive and original. The festivals were always outside of the routine of regular life. We, for a holiday frolic, relax, for ourselves and our children, the discipline of ordinary life; for instance, on the Fourth of July. In the theater we make allowances for what we would not tolerate in the street or parlor. That a thing is in jest is, and always has been, an excuse for what is a little beyond the limit otherwise observed. It was a favorite Arab jest to fasten the train of a woman's dress, while she was sitting, to the waist of it, so that when she arose her dress would be disordered.1987 She must learn to guard herself.

616. Chaldean and Mexican myths of reproduction dramatically represented. In the mythical period of Chaldea the worship of the Great Mother Ishtar (the patroness of sex attraction, but a goddess whose love was a calamity to all her husbands,1988 perhaps a mythical representation of the perils and pains of sex) was a setting loose of sex passion from the later societal ("moral") regulations, in favor of the original passionate impulse of sex and reproduction. The festival was, therefore, a period of license. The seat of the licentious rites, and of sacral prostitution, was Uruk, the city of the dead (i.e. of ancestors), where men liked to be buried (in order to join their ancestors).1989 The Tammuz (Adonis) worship was connected with the worship of Ishtar, the relation between the god and the goddess being different in different myths. The Tammuz worship was a dramatic enactment of the death and resurrection of the god (connected with the decay and renewal of the world of vegetation), with corresponding lamentations and rejoicings of the worshipers.1990 In Mexico we find a parallel pantomime of the nature process at a religious harvest festival, the pantomime being used for occult magic, in order to get good crops in the next season. Obscene figures and rites were used. There is a maize goddess who is the "Mother of the Gods." The union of the sun god with the earth gives fertility, so that the food supply is at stake in these rites and notions.1991 This most absorbing interest of mankind drove men's minds along the same lines of world philosophy. The "Mother of the Gods," by her sex activity, brought about growth on earth and became goddess of lewdness and filth, just as the German Corn-mother became a harlot. So the goddess by whose activity the earth bears flowers was honored at a festival at which boys and girls nine or ten years old became senselessly drunk and perpetrated sex vice. This was at a religious festival.1992 Here then we find reversion to more primitive sex mores, and dramatic representation of a myth, conjoined in religion, on the very threshold of the higher civilization. The reversion to primitive sex mores to satisfy notions of duty to religion and ancestors comes to us as an incomprehensible violation of "primary instincts," which we have inferred from ideas that we can trace back beyond any known origin, which we suppose to be universally accepted, and which seem to us axiomatic as to social welfare. The only way to understand the case is to take the standpoint of the mores of that time. The mores contained the answer to the questions: How far back shall we go? What shall be the degree of license at the festival? At the limit fixed by custom the mores extend their sanction over the function and make it "right." Another source of barbaric festivals may be noticed. Men won victories over the elements and over beasts before they won victories over each other. This is true of remote antiquity and of primitive society. It is also true of the Middle Ages. The destruction of great beasts, demons, and other monsters led to dramatic and religious festivals. Magnin1993 thinks that he could make a cycle of beasts, of which Reineke Fuchs would be the last link, anterior to the cycles of Arthur and Charlemagne.

617. Limit of toleration for propriety in exhibitions. Therefore: What shall be the limit of toleration in theatrical and other exhibitions with respect to dress, language, gesture, etc., in order to define propriety, is altogether a matter of the mores. It is not conceivable that the Lysistrata of Aristophanes could be presented on any public stage in Christendom. The whole play is beyond the toleration of modern mores. We meet with jugglers in Homer,1994 also mountebanks and tumblers.1995 The kubisteteres spun around on the perpendicular axis of the body, and are compared to the wheel of the potter. Then they pitched down head-foremost, like plungers or tumblers turning somersaults. Some archæologs have thought that the play of these persons had some analogy with that of the cubic stones which were so prominent in the cult of the Phrygian Cybele. If that analogy is accepted, then the pyramidal dance must be regarded as originally hieratic and consecrated to Cybele. That dance was at first aristocratic, but speedily became popular and descended to the mountebanks.1996

618. Origin of Athenian drama. The theater originated in the Dionysiac mysteries of the Greeks, in which dramatic action and responsive choruses were employed. Sex symbols were used without reserve. Intoxication and ecstasy belonged to due performance. In later mysteries dramatic action was employed to present myths and legends, or religious doctrines, in order to get the powerful effects in suggestion which dramatic action exerts. Many myths presented acts such as later mores could not tolerate. Allowance had to be made for the representations, as we now make allowances for Bible stories and Shakespeare. We know that the mysteries were often in bad repute for their indecency and realism, even in an age of low standards. Anybody who is not in the convention can scoff at it, however low his own code may be. The Greeks described the Phrygian mysteries as abominable and immoral, while they praised and admired the Eleusinian. "The former were introduced by slaves and foreigners, and participated in by the superstitious and ignorant. They were celebrated for money by strolling priests, and any one who paid a fee was initiated without preparation, except some ritual acts. There was no solemnity in the surroundings, and no dignity in the ceremonial, but all was vulgar and sordid."1997 The Athenian drama, in the fifth century B.C., went through an amazing development and reached high perfection. The art of the theater was especially cultivated. As to the effect of the dramas on the character of the spectators, it is to be noticed that they were presented only once in the year, at the greater festival of Dionysus in the spring, and that then a large number of plays were represented. The spectators, at Athens, were a very mixed assemblage and included the populace, "who remained populace in spite of any beautiful verses which they might chance to hear." They cared only to be amused, "just like modern audiences."1998

619. Dramatic taste and usage in worship. Customs derived from the mysteries. About the time of Christ, by syncretism all the religions took on a dramatic form in their ritual, with liturgies and responses, on account of the attractiveness of that form for worshipers. The Christian year was built up as a drama of the life of Christ. The ceremony of the mass was produced by an application of modes of worship which, so far as we can learn, were devised and used in the mysteries. "There is unmistakable evidence that a marriage ceremony of a religious nature existed, and that this ceremony stood in close relation to a part of the ritual of the mysteries. In fact, the marriage was, as it were, a reproduction by the bride and bridegroom of a scene from the divine life, i.e. from the mystic drama. The formula, 'I escaped evil: I found better,' was repeated by the celebrant who was initiated in the Phrygian mysteries; and the same formula was pronounced as part of the Athenian marriage ceremony. Another formula, 'I have drunk from the kymbalon,' was pronounced by the initiated; and drinking from the same cup has been proved to have formed part of a ceremony performed in the temple by the betrothed pair." "It is an extremely important fact that the human marriage ceremony was thus celebrated by forms taken from the mysteries; and the conclusion must be that the human pair repeat the action in the way in which the god and goddess first performed and consecrated it, and that, in fact, they play the parts of the god and goddess in the sacred drama. This single example is, as we may be sure, typical of a whole series of actions."1999

620. The word "god." "That man when he dies becomes a god was considered already in the fourth century B.C. to be part of the teaching conveyed in the mysteries."2000 This meant no more than the earlier notion that when a man died he became a ghost. The word "god" was used in senses very strange to our ears,2001 and to quote an expression of any writer of the beginning of the Christian era in which he uses the word "god," and to give to that word our sense of it, is to be led into great error. The age was one which put all its religion in dramatic form and acted it out. It was an age with a gift for manufacturing rites and liturgies.

621. Kin yields to religion as social tie. This was due to a great ethnological change which was then coming to its culmination. The kin tie, which had been the primitive mode of association and coherence of groups, began to break down in the sixth century B.C. in Greece. It was superseded by the social tie of a common religious faith and ritual. The Pythagorean and Orphic sects developed this tie. They had a revelation of the other world, a system of mystic and cathartic rites, which cleared men of ritual uncleanness, purified them, and "saved" them. The cathartic rites were a means of warding off evil spirits and did the work of the old shamans.2002 The sectarian brotherhood of the initiated, the "church," the faith, the contrast of ordinary life with the ecstatic emotions of the mysteries, the consequent antagonism of the "flesh" or the "world," and the "spirit," were easy deductions from the teaching and ritual of the sects.2003 It was all concentrated in the godlikeness, divinity, or immortality of the human soul, with the mystic notions of union between the soul and God. "Mysticism, as doctrine and theory, grew up from the soil of a more ancient practice in worship." "The worship of Dionysus must have furnished the first germ of the belief in the immortality of the soul."2004 The idea of the Orphic mysteries was that humanity is suffering and sinful, and must be initiated in order to wash away its stains and be redeemed from its sins. Initiation puts a man in communication with the divinity. The soul is raised by ecstasy to feel its own divinity, which is the deepest element in all mystic religion. In all this compound of rites and notions the great antecedent philosophy was not the same as ours. It was demonism, superstitious anxiety about the world of demons, who floated around men and stretched their hands out of the surrounding darkness to seize them. It was from these that men wanted to be "saved." Atonement was to be made to the chthonic gods, for they were displeased at ritual uncleanness, and the chthonic cults had the other world in view.2005 The uncleanness was ritual, and hence it came from anything far out of the regular order, either by abomination or holiness. The rabbis held that the handling of the Scriptures defiled the hands and called for ceremonial washing (Num. xix. 8, 10).2006

622. Combination of religion and drama. Syncretism. The interest of all this for our present purpose is the combination of religious ideas with dramatic representation. Processions of all kinds easily turn into such representations. Rites and ceremonies are but a form of drama. Symbols and emblems have the same character. The old religions were subjected to criticism, which means that they had lost their authority. They did not verify when the attempt was made to use them for societal needs. Slaves, merchants, soldiers, etc., afloat in the world, associated from choice and contributed traditions from the whole known world. Then syncretism began, and a body of sectarian notions was formed. There was a new totemism, a breaking down of national religion, a spirit of propaganda, and a setting forth of the whole in all dramatic forms.2007 In the sects women were admitted, a fact of double significance. It was an emancipation for the women and a peril for the sect. The doubt with which the mysteries are now regarded is due to the uncertainty as to the relations of the sexes in them. The word "orgy" originally meant worship, or rites, then secret rites, that is, mysteries. The sense in which the word has come down to us shows the notion about secret meetings which became commonly accepted.

The customs which had grown out of religious interest had reached the desire for entertainment and pleasure. They satisfied it and stimulated it, and the religious element might be forgotten.

623. Beginnings of the theater at Rome. The Floralia were instituted at Rome in 240 B.C. They were celebrated by courtesans with processions, lascivious pantomimes, etc. They are said to have come from Greece.2008 In the same year Livius Andronicus presented at Rome the first play translated from the Greek. In 154 the first permanent theater was established there against great opposition. In 146 the first theater outside the circus, with seats, was provided.2009 All mimic actions were foreign to the austere mores of the early Romans, but in the second century B.C. the mores changed through the growth of wealth and contact with other nations. Young Romans learned from actors to sing and dance, acts which their ancestors thought unworthy of free persons. The earliest plays were called saturae, because they were mixed dialogues, music, and dances. The sense of the word was closely that of "farce" in the Middle Ages,2010 i.e. an episode or intermezzo of a comic character interjected into a drama. The saturae contained an Etruscan element, but atellans were entirely Etruscan. They were comic and grotesque, and got their name from Atella (i.e. Aversa or Santo Arpino) in Campania. They could be played by persons who did not on that account lose their places in their tribes or their right to serve in the legion. No personalities at all were allowed on the Roman stage. Cynicism and obscenity characterized the Oscan style.2011 In 55 B.C. the younger Cato was present at the Floralia. The populace hesitated to call, in his presence, for the stripping of the mimae. He left in order not to hinder the celebration from taking its usual course.2012 Valerius Maximus2013 says that the pantomime was brought to Rome from Etruria, the Etruscans having brought it from their old home in Lydia. We see from the epigrams in the first book of Martial that at the Roman theater in the first century of the Christian era incidents of the Roman mythology were made into dramas and represented in pantomime.

624. Gladiatorial exhibitions. The gladiatorial exhibitions are supposed to have been of Etruscan origin in the form of funeral games. Games to rejoice the ghosts, sacrifices of prisoners, a chance given to a prisoner to fight for his life, are steps of a development of which we find many examples. The Romans showed the pitilessness and inhumanity of their mores in the development they gave to the gladiatorial exhibitions. "Campanian hosts used to entertain their guests at dinner with them in the days before the Second Punic War. It was in Campanian towns that in the first century was displayed most glaringly the not unusual combination of cruelty and voluptuousness."2014 Some murmurs of dissent arose from the philosophers of the first and second centuries of the Christian era,—Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius,2015—but at that time the popular sentiment had not faltered at all in its love and zeal for the gladiatorial shows and beast contests on account of any doubt whether the exhibitions were "right." Tertullian, at the end of the second century, wrote a tract, Ad Nationes, in which he criticised the theater, and also another, De Spectaculis, against the public entertainments. Although the latter is chiefly controversial against heathen and heathenism, it contains direct and noble arguments against the games of the arena on account of their inhumanity. He says that the games were at first connected with funerals, and that the theater was a temple of Venus, under cover of which the games won a footing. That would mean, then, that they were at first under a convention of time, place, occasion, and religion. Correctly understood, therefore, what happened at Rome was that the convention was broken over and the exceptional rite was made the everyday usage, the religious sentiment being disregarded and the sensual entertainment alone being valued. When we have reached this point we can understand the original place of the games within the intellectual horizon of the nation, and also the deep demoralization which they caused in later times. They were consonant with early Roman mores which were warlike. Cicero thought them an excellent school to teach contempt for pain and death. He cited gladiators as examples of bodily exercise, courage, and discipline. He seems to have known that some disapproved of the exhibitions, and he was disposed to agree with them if the gladiators were others than criminals condemned to death.2016 A usage which is consonant with the tastes, mores, and world philosophy of a people need work no corruption on them, for it is under taboos and conventions; but if all the restraints are taken away it enters into their life for just what it is in its character,—sensual, cruel, bloody, obscene, etc. What had been savage and bloodthirsty when the Romans were warriors became base and cowardly when they never risked their own blood in any way. Condemned criminals were compelled to take rôles in which they suffered torture and a frightful death, in order to entertain the Roman crowd. Such rôles were Prometheus, Dædalus, Orpheus, Hercules, and Attys; Pasiphae and the bull, and Leda and the swan were also enacted. In Martial's Epigrams, Book I, the cases are mentioned where a woman fought with a lion; Laureolus, a robber, was crucified and torn, as he hung on the cross, by a bear; Dædalus, when his wing broke, was precipitated amongst bears who tore him to pieces; and Orpheus was torn by a bear. These exhibitions were recognized as indecencies.2017 Later the exhibitions had no limit.2018 "From father to son, for nearly seven centuries, the Roman character became more and more indurated under the influence of licensed cruelty. The spectacle was also surrounded by the emperors, even the greatest and best, for politic reasons, with ever growing splendor."2019 "It is a grave deduction from the admiring judgment of the glory of the Antonine age, that its most splendid remains are the stately buildings within whose enclosure for centuries the populace were regaled with the sufferings and the blood of the noblest creatures of the wild animal world and of gallant men. The deserts and forests of Africa and the remotest East contributed their elephants and panthers and lions to these scenes."2020

625. Spread of gladiatorial exhibitions. The Romans carried gladiatorial exhibitions wherever their conquests extended. "The Teutonic regions of the North and Greece were almost the only provinces in which the bloody games were not popular. The one Greek town where the taste for them was fully developed was the mongrel city of Corinth, which was a Roman colony. In the novel of Apuleius we meet a high Corinthian magistrate traveling through Thessaly to collect the most famous gladiators for his shows. Plutarch urges public men to banish or to restrain these exhibitions in their cities. When the Athenians, from an ambition to rival the splendor of Corinth, were meditating the establishment of a gladiatorial show, the gentle Demonax bade them first to overturn their altar of Pity. The apostles of Hellenism,—Dion, Plutarch, and Lucian,—were unanimous in condemning an institution which sacrificed the bravest men to the brutal passions of the mob."2021 At Byzantium the lack of any standard of decency and propriety in the exhibitions was even more complete, and they lasted indefinitely.2022 Constantine in 325 A.D. absolutely forbade gladiatorial exhibitions, because bloody shows were unfit for a time of peace. He forbade the condemnation of criminals to be gladiators. His laws, however, failed of effect.2023 At the end of the fourth century Symmachus, "who was regarded as one of the most estimable pagans of his age," collected some prisoners to fight in honor of his son. They committed suicide to escape the destiny for which he designed them. He lamented the misfortune which had befallen him from their "impious hands," but endeavored to calm his feelings by recalling the patience of Socrates and the precepts of philosophy. He will not, he says, use such people any more, but Libyan lions, more docile than men.2024 He serves to point a moral on the mores of his age.

626. The folk drama. The culture classes pass by the sports of the "vulgar" with contempt; but the student of the mores cannot do so. The tastes of the crowd are manifested in them. We read the great dramas which have become a part of the world literature, and we form from them our ideas of the current intellectual interest of the time of their origin and of the society in which they were produced. Such inferences need to be corrected. They are certainly erroneous. The Greeks were not all of them, nor any of them all the time, on a plane of classical severity and correctness. Far from it. They were realistic, egoistic, cold, cruel, and fond of sensual pleasure.2025 The great dramas, epics, etc., were enjoyed only by the real upper strata of the society, just as is the case in regard to Shakespeare amongst us. The great populace of no society has ever found its amusement in purely intellectual suggestions. With us popular amusement is found in the circus, negro minstrels, the variety show, opera bouffe, the spectacle, and ballet, and it attaches to parody and burlesque, "knock-down business," buffoonery, and broad allusion. Stupidity is always funny. Everything which breaks over the social taboo is funny. A violation of propriety, accidental disorder of the dress, grotesque postures, vulgar gestures of derision or defiance, blows, painful accidents and mishaps,—if not too serious,—deformations of the body (humpbacks), epithets and nicknames, slang and other abuses of language (like mispronunciation by foreigners), vituperation, caricature and burlesque of respectable types like the pedant, dandy, Puritan, imbecile, or the rich and great, always raise a laugh in the crowd and are relished by the crowd. They are constant elements of farce and fun. They have been so for three thousand years. Jugglery and feats of strength and skill excite wonder until they become familiar. They are proofs of individual capacity. They do not give amusement like the points which have just been mentioned and which have been repeated to generation after generation. The crowd always delights in any degradation of the things which the selected classes prefer and try to impose on all. They rejoice to see the restrictions trampled upon which they hear preached as the rules of life. In opera bouffe classical heroes, gods of the classical mythology, royalty, nobles of the mediæval type, feudalism, dominies, are turned to ridicule. The crowd worships its heroes fanatically while they are in fashion, but it likes to turn about and roll them in the mud of satire, in order to teach them who made them and how easily it can unmake them. Aristophanes derided all which was serious in the Athenian social system. Long before Don Quixote was written chivalry was treated with derision. Satire is a reversal of respect and admiration.

627. The popular taste. Realism. Conventionality. Satire. That which is realistic and graphic appeals to the popular and uneducated taste, not that which is conventional, regulated, and refined according to rule and standard. That which is realistic reproduces all the facts of life. If the mirror is held up to nature it will show some nasty things. The social taboos began in superstitious fear, but they formed a series of conventional folkways under which some acts and facts of life were veiled from sight, knowledge, speech, and publicity. Other lesser conventions were grafted on these, and produced the great mass of usages within which our lives are passed. That which is artistic is the highest form of conventional refinement. Realism antagonizes and breaks through all these conventions and taboos, which are always a strain upon those who are not brought up in them from infancy. Therefore we hear demands for realism and naturalness from those who weary of the strain and do not want to submit to it. The conventionalities define respectability, and respectability has always been sneered at. In all comedy it is made ridiculous. The husband was possessed of conventional rights in which he was protected by society so that he had a secured and uneventful status. In comedy his rights have been violated and his security has been broken. The crowd has always enjoyed this. It rejoiced to see the wife deceive the husband, and the adulterer fool him. The latter represented freedom and cleverness at war with philistinism. On the other hand, all the taboos and conventions which have penetrated the masses and become familiar to them from infancy are fiercely defended by them (e.g. female dress and the taboo on man's dress for females). The popular magazines and the "great moral shows" religiously respect the standards of the crowd. That which is broad is funny, but there is always a limit of toleration. What is prudish, puritanical, fastidious, affected, pharisaical, etc.? These adjectives are in use, and they apply to things which are beyond a line which is undefined and indefinable. It depends on the codes and standards of the group. Realism presents everyday experience, no humbug, the world as it is. It must, therefore, be cynical and ruthless to all conventions. It shows the meanness of greatness, the other side of virtue, the weakness of heroes. No doubt it is great fun to pour scorn and ridicule on all who assume to be better than we are, and to look down on us. The easiest way to do it is to show up their weaknesses, follies, and sins. Here is another task for the satirists. Satire in comedy may be a gratification of envy. The rôle of Pierrot is dangerous to him who exercises it. In fact no man is fit for it. Where does any one get a charter to be censor of all the rest? He will certainly become proud, arrogant, self-seeking, and tyrannical. Each one satirizes follies which are not to his taste, or sins to which he is not tempted. Satire to be artistic and permanently effective must be marked by light and shade. It always exaggerates what it wants to impress on the attention, but to do this artistically it must subdue other elements. This is very difficult to accomplish when for popular effect it must use big brushes and glaring colors.

628. Popular exhibitions. From the time of Homer we can trace popular exhibitions which accompanied the theatrical forms above described as an inferior class of the same species. The popular exhibitions were marked by the features which have been described (sec. 626), to which we may add bloodshed and cruel rites.