of pretty pictures of
pretty saints assailed the imagination and senses through stained-glass
windows; and where sculpture and architecture came to the help of
painting. Nobody ever reminded them that these things had sometimes
produced such developments of erotic idolatry that men who were not only
enthusiastic amateurs of literature, painting, and music, but famous
practitioners of them, had actually exulted when mobs and even regular
troops under express command had mutilated church statues, smashed
church windows, wrecked church organs, and torn up the sheets from which
the church music was read and sung. When they saw broken statues in
churches, they were told that this was the work of wicked, godless
rioters, instead of, as it was, the work partly of zealots bent on
driving the world, the flesh, and the devil out of the temple, and
partly of insurgent men who had become intolerably poor because the
temple had become a den of thieves. But all the sins and perversions
that were so carefully hidden from them in the history of the Church
were laid on the shoulders of the Theatre: that stuffy, uncomfortable
place of penance in which we suffer so much inconvenience on the
slenderest chance of gaining a scrap of food for our starving souls.
When the Germans bombed the Cathedral of Rheims the world rang with
the horror of the sacrilege. When they bombed the Little Theatre in
the Adelphi, and narrowly missed bombing two writers of plays who lived
within a few yards of it, the fact was not even mentioned in the papers.
In point of appeal to the senses no theatre ever built could touch the
fane at Rheims: no actress could rival its Virgin in beauty, nor any
operatic tenor look otherwise than a fool beside its David. Its picture
glass was glorious even to those who had seen the glass of Chartres.
It was wonderful in its very grotesques: who would look at the Blondin
Donkey after seeing its leviathans? In spite of the Adam-Adelphian
decoration on which Miss Kingston had lavished so much taste and care,
the Little Theatre was in comparison with Rheims the gloomiest of little
conventicles: indeed the cathedral must, from the Puritan point of view,
have debauched a million voluptuaries for every one whom the Little
Theatre had sent home thoughtful to a chaste bed after Mr Chesterton's
Magic or Brieux's Les Avaries. Perhaps that is the real reason why
the Church is lauded and the Theatre reviled. Whether or no, the fact
remains th