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