as ballyhoos for breakfast foods and deodorants. But now it seems I have the literary snobs against me as well as the manufacturers, and since I have read that the editor of Broom considers the copy of advertising writers more artistically important than the poetry of Elinor Wylie, I am a little timid about asserting in a magazine as cultivated as this one that I am annoyed at seeing theatrical entertainments run as adjuncts to the fur business.
But I will assert without hesitation that Seventh Heaven ought to be censored—if anything is to be censored. I have just seen this play for the first time after its triumphant run of a whole season and I protest that it contains the most frightful moral idea I have ever encountered on stage or screen—and it is only the other day that I saw a movie heroine not only restored to perfect tranquillity herself, but also completely cleared of guilt in the eyes of everybody else by discovering that her husband, whom she had tried to poison, had actually died from some other cause. In Seventh Heaven Mr Austin Strong shows us a faithful little French gamine who falls in love with an atheist street-cleaner. This fellow sneers freely at "le bon dieu" and tries to dissuade his mistress from believing in Him. But Chico goes off to war and the day that the armistice is signed they tell Diane that her lover is dead—whereupon she flies into a fury of grief and turns bitterly upon the good old abbé who has been trying to comfort her: "He was right after all!" she cries, "I know now there can be no bon dieu!" Then immediately Chico appears; he has not been killed at all; and Diane quickly changes her mind. "I know now that the abbé was right!" she sobs. "There is a bon dieu after all!"—Well, my feeling is that this idea, which is presented not merely as the cry of a simple heart, but apparently as the moral theme of the play, would be an excellent subject for suppression. I don't see why the essentially truthful, if rather squalid, tragedy of The God of Vengeance should be banished from the New York stage while it is permitted to teach people that God is good because, in a war where seven million men were killed, He has rescued one woman's lover.
