order to teach them who made them and how easily it can
unmake them. Aristophanes derided all which was serious in the Athenian
social system. Long before Don Quixote was written chivalry was treated
with derision. Satire is a reversal of respect and admiration.

+627. The popular taste. Realism. Conventionality. Satire.+ That which
is realistic and graphic appeals to the popular and uneducated taste,
not that which is conventional, regulated, and refined according to rule
and standard. That which is realistic reproduces all the facts of life.
If the mirror is held up to nature it will show some nasty things. The
social taboos began in superstitious fear, but they formed a series of
conventional folkways under which some acts and facts of life were
veiled from sight, knowledge, speech, and publicity. Other lesser
conventions were grafted on these, and produced the great mass of usages
within which our lives are passed. That which is artistic is the highest
form of conventional refinement. Realism antagonizes and breaks through
all these conventions and taboos, which are always a strain upon those
who are not brought up in them from infancy. Therefore we hear demands
for realism and naturalness from those who weary of the strain and do
not want to submit to it. The conventionalities define respectability,
and respectability has always been sneered at. In all comedy it is made
ridiculous. The husband was possessed of conventional rights in which he
was protected by society so that he had a secured and uneventful status.
In comedy his rights have been violated and his security has been
broken. The crowd has always enjoyed this. It rejoiced to see the wife
deceive the husband, and the adulterer fool him. The latter represented
freedom and cleverness at war with philistinism. On the other hand, all
the taboos and conventions which have penetrated the masses and become
familiar to them from infancy are fiercely defended by them (e.g. female
dress and the taboo on man's dress for females). The popular magazines
and the "great moral shows" religiously respect the standards of the
crowd. That which is broad is funny, but there is always a limit of
toleration. What is prudish, puritanical, fastidious, affected,
pharisaical, etc.? These adjectives are in use, and they apply to things
which are beyond a line which is undefined and indefinable. It depends
on the codes and standards of the group. Realism presents everyday
experience,