ry have stood rather less chance of production at a
London theatre than the Dialogues of Plato, not to mention revivals
of the ancient Athenian drama and a restoration to the stage of
Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, was made economically possible
solely by a supply of theatres which could hold nearly twice as much
money as it cost to rent and maintain them. In such theatres work
appealing to a relatively small class of cultivated persons, and
therefore attracting only from half to three-quarters as many spectators
as the more popular pastimes, could nevertheless keep going in the hands
of young adventurers who were doing it for its own sake, and had not
yet been forced by advancing age and responsibilities to consider the
commercial value of their time and energy too closely. The war struck
this foundation away in the manner I have just described. The expenses
of running the cheapest west-end theatres rose to a sum which exceeded
by twenty-five per cent the utmost that the higher drama can, as an
ascertained matter of fact, be depended on to draw. Thus the higher
drama, which has never really been a commercially sound speculation,
now became an impossible one. Accordingly, attempts are being made to
provide a refuge for it in suburban theatres in London and repertory
theatres in the provinces. But at the moment when the army has at last
disgorged the survivors of the gallant band of dramatic pioneers whom
it swallowed, they find that the economic conditions which formerly
made their work no worse than precarious now put it out of the question
altogether, as far as the west end of London is concerned.

Church and Theatre

I do not suppose many people care particularly. We are not brought up to
care; and a sense of the national importance of the theatre is not
born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of the soldiers at the
beginning of the war, does not know what a theatre is. But please note
that all these soldiers who did not know what a theatre was, knew what
a church was. And they had been taught to respect churches. Nobody
had ever warned them against a church as a place where frivolous women
paraded in their best clothes; where stories of improper females like
Potiphar's wife, and erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, were
read aloud; where the sensuous and sentimental music of Schubert,
Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Brahms was more popular than severe music by
greater composers; where the prettiest sort