Salvationists are more accessible to the religious
character of the drama than the playgoers to the gay energy and
artistic fertility of religion. They can see, when it is pointed out to
them, that a theatre, as a place where two or three are gathered
together, takes from that divine presence an inalienable sanctity of
which the grossest and profanest farce can no more deprive it than a
hypocritical sermon by a snobbish bishop can desecrate Westminster
Abbey. But in our professional playgoers this indispensable preliminary
conception of sanctity seems wanting. They talk of actors as mimes and
mummers, and, I fear, think of dramatic authors as liars and pandars,
whose main business is the voluptuous soothing of the tired city
speculator when what he calls the serious business of the day is over.
Passion, the life of drama, means nothing to them but primitive sexual
excitement: such phrases as "impassioned poetry" or "passionate love of
truth" have fallen quite out of their vocabulary and been replaced by
"passional crime" and the like. They assume, as far as I can gather,
that people in whom passion has a larger scope are passionless and
therefore uninteresting. Consequently they come to think of religious
people as people who are not interesting and not amusing. And so, when
Barbara cuts the regular Salvation Army jokes, and snatches a kiss from
her lover across his drum, the devotees of the theatre think they ought
to appear shocked, and conclude that the whole play is an elaborate
mockery of the Army. And then either hypocritically rebuke me for
mocking, or foolishly take part in the supposed mockery! Even the
handful of mentally competent critics got into difficulties over my
demonstration of the economic deadlock in which the Salvation Army
finds itself. Some of them thought that the Army would not have taken
money from a distiller and a cannon founder: others thought it should
not have taken it: all assumed more or less definitely that it reduced
itself to absurdity or hypocrisy by taking it. On the first point the
reply of the Army itself was prompt and conclusive. As one of its
officers said, they would take money from the devil himself and be only
too glad to get it out of his hands and into God's. They gratefully
acknowledged that publicans not only give them money but allow them to
collect it in the bar--sometimes even when there is a Salvation meeting
outside preaching teetotalism. In fact, they questioned the