THE CURLEY BULL

Three quarters of a century ago, Boston was acknowledged throughout the country to be the intellectual center of America; Emerson meditated in Concord, and Oliver Wendell Holmes scintillated daily at the breakfast table. It was a period of literary brilliance, and the chilly reaches of the Back Bay were warmed under the sun of national esteem. Of late years, however, Boston has lost much of its quondam glory. Its great ones have departed, and the eiderdown quilt of mediocrity has descended upon its literature and its drama.

If the omens have been correctly diagnosed, this sad state of affairs is about to be remedied. Mayor James F. Curley, bursting from the confines of his office like the well-known Siberian monk, has issued a set of drastic regulations to curb prevailing immoralities and profanities of the stage. No more will delicate Bostonian ears be shocked with such paipable improprieties as "damn" and "hell"; instead, real hemen will be compelied to relieve their bursting hearts with "My gracious!" and "Oh dear!"

The motive behind this reform of Mayor Curley's is splendid, but the action seems a bit severe. In brief, it means that Boston theatres will not only be relieved of questionable dialogue and even more questionable displays; but the stages of the city will also be closed in future to many of the best productions of the older dramatists, and to almost all the works of more recent playwrights. Eugene O'Neill, for example, by the profanity regulation, will be completely barred. Such plays as "Rain" and "Anna Christie", not to mention "Liliom", all recognized as works of unusual merit, could not be produced within the city limits.

Mayor Curley maintains that discriminating Boston audiences expect something better than licentiousness on the stage: if this is so, and they are willing to demand what they wish, the Mayor has hardly been consistent in depriving them, as he has, of the opportunity to exercise this very power of discrimination; and if his original statement is exaggerated, and Boston is really, as the atrical managers assert, a "leg-show town", it seems quite useless to attempt a reformation of character by such superficial means.