Word: smile
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...elephants are"the biggest brutes that breathe." Miss Bertha Beeson is "positively and obviously the most sensational high wire artist of all time," Mile. Leitzel " breaks every law of gravity," and the circus advertises its clowns as being so funny that they "would even make a prude smile." It seems never to have occurred to the press agents, barkers and ballyhoo men of Barnum and Bailey's that anybody might ask "Well, what of it?" or "Who cares?" With an unerring understanding of popular psychology, they realize that what the American wants is quantity- all the measurements of time...
However, when our journalistic art comes of age (which there are signs that it is already beginning to do) it will no doubt take an entirely different form from that of France. French cartoons tend to make the observer wince or smile, the American to make him laugh or frown. Forain is of the first type of French cartoonist; sombre, mordant, much wit and little humor...
...American likes to do his crying alone. He will lock himself in his own room, equip himself with smelling salts or a bottle of gin and a sponge, and have a good quiet weep. In the same way, he dislikes rising to high pitches of public hilarity. A reserved smile, or at most a genteel snicker is all he will permit himself in the presence of his associates. But under the sheltering darkness of the playhouse, he will be trapped into any extreme of emotion, and when the lights surprise him in his emotional decollette he will find fellow victims...
Still clinging tenaciously, in our material way to ideas of bulk, we may smile knowingly and say, "Ah, it is a question of relativity. The whale has the largest brain, but his body is much larger, in comparison with the dog, the monkey or man. Arrange everything according to the ratio of brain to body, and you have the order of intelligence." Babies, then would outrank us all, confirming Charles Kingsley. And the elephant, who is declared to be one of the craftiest of beasts, would come out nowhere...
...Gatti-Casazza, of the Metropolitan, is full of surprises. His latest was a performance, for the first time in America, of Schilling's Mona Lisa. The opera is an ingenious attempt to explain the smile on the face of Da Vinci's famous portrait. The prologue and epilogue present a young wife with her old husband, sight-seeing in Florence. Both parts are taken by newcomers to the Metropolitan - Barbara Kemp, of the Berlin Opera, and Michael Bohnen, of the Munich Opera. The roles are dual. In the two acts of the piece they appear as Mona Lisa...