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Updated: May 21, 2025
And as no author could afford to be silent on the subject that underlies all subjects, our literature, in so far as it attempted to deal with the most vital phases of human nature, was beneath contempt. The authors who knew they were lying sank almost as low as the nasty-nice purveyors of fake idealism and candied pruriency who fancied they were writing the truth.
We feel as we read these utterances that the seeds of prudery and pruriency are already alive in the popular mind, but yet we see also that some of the most distinguished thinkers of the early Christian Church, in striking contrast to the more morbid and narrow-minded mediæval ascetics, clearly stood aside from the popular movement.
It is true indeed that these were frequently managed and directed by female officers, whose organs were understood to be better disposed for the admission of those oracular gusts, as entering and passing up through a receptacle of greater capacity, and causing also a pruriency by the way, such as with due management has been refined from carnal into a spiritual ecstasy.
There is none of that veiled pruriency which lurks underneath the more conventionally expressed, but really vicious sentiments that are to be found in too many novels of our own day. The novel was well defined in character and well established in popularity when Smollett entered the field so well occupied by Richardson and Fielding.
Monkish ideals of chastity and poverty have never appealed to the hearts of people, priests or prelates of the south; they will endure much fondness in their religion, but not those phenomena of cruelty and pruriency which are inseparably connected with asceticism; their notions have ever been akin to those of the sage Xenocrates, who held that "happiness consists not only in the possession of human virtues, but in the accomplishment of natural acts."
She has here pursued the analysis of character as an end in itself, for in "The Fatal Secret" there is no hint of disguised scandal, nor any appeal to the pruriency of degenerate readers. Sensational in the extreme the story is, but nevertheless the progress of the narrative is delayed while the sentiments of the heroine are examined in the minutest detail.
Should the ICONOCLAST publish such a thing it would be promptly denounced from ten thousand pulpits as a pander to pruriency; yet against the iniquity of the Daily Chippie Chaser, alias the Houston Post, not one preacher has raised his voice in protest! Why? Because the dirty rag does not attack their religious dogma does not strike at their bread and butter!
During the present New York theatrical season several plays have been already censored by the authorities, and either been taken off entirely or so altered as to be still within the bounds of legal pruriency. Whether I am right in attributing it to the influence of the French music halls or not, it is the fact that the tone of our theatergoing public is essentially low.
Such suppression is favourable to corruption: the fancy with a sort of idiotic ingenuity comes to supply the place of experience; and nature is rendered vicious and overlaid with pruriency, artifice, and the love of novelty.
That such a notion should prevail in spite of the clearness of the text on this point is due to the fact that most people can only conceive of a drama as spectacular. They expect incidents, and, finding none, they seek for pruriency.
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