My Great and Only by Rudyard Kipling — Read

Whether Macdougal or Macdoodle be his name, the principle remains the / same, as Mrs. Nickleby said. The gentleman appeared to hold authority / in London, and by virtue of his position preached or ordained that / music-halls were vulgar, if not improper. Subsequently, I gathered / that the gentleman was inciting his associates to shut up certain / music-halls on the ground of the vulgarity aforesaid, and I saw with / my own eyes that unhappy little managers were putting notices into the / corners of their programmes begging the audience to report each and / every impropriety. That was pitiful, but it excited my interest.[27]

Now, to the upright and impartial mind -- which is mine -- all the / diversions of Heathendom -- which is the British -- are of equal / ethnological value. And it is true that some human beings can be / more vulgar in the act of discussing etchings, editions of luxury, / or their own emotions, than other human beings employed in swearing / at each other across the street. Therefore, following a chain of / thought which does not matter, I visited very many theatres whose / licenses had never been interfered with. There I discovered men and / women who lived and moved and behaved according to rules which in no / sort regulate human life, by tradition dead and done with, and after / the customs of the more immoral ancients and Barnum. At one place the / lodging-house servant was an angel, and her mother a Madonna; at a / second they sounded the loud timbrel o'er a whirl of bloody axes, mobs, / and brown-paper castles, and said it was not a pantomime, but Art; / at a third everybody grew fabulously rich and fabulously poor every / twenty minutes, which was confusing; at a fourth they discussed the / Nudities and Lewdities in false-palate voices supposed to belong to / the aristocracy and that tasted copper in the mouth; at a fifth they / merely climbed up walls and threw furniture at each other, which is / notoriously the custom of spinsters and small parsons. Next morning the / papers would write about the progress of the modern drama (that was the / silver paper pantomime), and "graphic presentment of the realities of / our highly complex civilisation. " That was the angel housemaid. By the / way, when an Englishman has been doing anything more than unusually / Pagan, he generally consoles himself with "over-civilisation. " It's the / "martyr-to-nerves-dear" note in his equipment.