Parenting & Family Quote by Frank Moore Colby

Colby’s line lands like a compliment that curdles on contact. Calling the New York playgoer “a child of nature” sounds democratic, even wholesome, until the punch lands: this innocent creature has an “honest and wholesome regard” for “whatever is atrocious in art.” The joke is in the moral vocabulary. “Honest,” “wholesome,” “nature” are words you’d expect to crown virtue, but Colby weaponizes them to describe appetite-for-the-worst, as if bad taste were some hardy, uncorrupted instinct.

The specific intent is not merely to scold audiences for liking trash; it’s to mock the cultural machinery that turns sensationalism into a civic virtue. “Atrocious” isn’t casual. It suggests art that shocks, cheapens, or brutalizes, and the audience’s “regard” implies not accidental consumption but a dutiful affection. Colby is skewering a metropolis that flatters itself as sophisticated while rewarding the theatrical equivalent of a car crash: loud, lurid, and impossible to look away from.

Context matters: early 20th-century New York was a booming entertainment market, with Broadway becoming a factory for hits and headlines. An educator like Colby would be especially attuned to how public taste gets trained. The subtext is a warning about cultural selection: when a crowd consistently “wholesomely” prefers the atrocious, producers follow the money, the definition of “what works” shrinks, and mediocrity starts posing as authenticity. It’s satire with a pedagogue’s anxiety underneath: nature, left to itself, doesn’t necessarily refine; it indulges.