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 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.
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