Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 133, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 June 1918 — LOOKING WITH FAVOR ON ART [ARTICLE]

LOOKING WITH FAVOR ON ART

Public Hastens to Attach Respectable Ity to Favorites, Despite Their Various Shortcomings. The public always tries to make its favorites respectable, those it truly loves. It longs to make them more like itself. It delights to read of happy family life among Its beloved artists, and of the pure summers of the movie star who lives with her mother and has a garden, observes the New Republic. The course of Mary Anderson comforted and justified thousands of housewives for their mild domesticities and their distrust of the stage. Even the public’s favorite romancer lived with his wife throe years ’before he married her, and he did not even suffer from a wasting illness; but they will not have it so, and are fast turning him into a pitiful, cheery saint and martyr as fiat and sweet as their own ideals. The favorite short story writer embezzled and went to the penitentiary and loved poker, but they want to make him an overflowing human heart wandering about taking snap-shots. They have spent more time raking over and clearing up the records of Goethe and Poe and Byron and Shelley than they ever spent on the poems.