CHURCH AND STAGE

would have been impossible. As it was, he was able to sum up the whole genius of his race and country; and by so doing, he and his fellow dramatists worked the Renaissance, doing for England the very thing which was done elsewhere by great religious painters and sculptors. Shakespeare did not portray the Madonna and Child, but his good women are radiant shapes-Madonnas of the British Home. To love them is to better ourselves.

The life of emotion that produced Shakespeare has begun once more to hold sway in England. Puritanism has been in a state of thaw during the last forty years; and now it melts rapidly into the old-time enthusiasm, producing a condition of mind friendly to the old-time religion. The Protestantism that succeeds best to-day is full of vehemence and show, the Salvation Army. Does it not recall to memory the Coming of the Friars?

Where the ruined abbeys now stand, almost forgotten, monks may again chant their offices, but with a new spirit. Though born of Puritan stock, I feel in the air something that preceded the Reformation. Our race has no half-moods when it begins to pass from one ideal to another; and there can be no doubt that Puritanism will soon be dead as a national influence. Will the spirit of St. Columba return to the north? Will the enthusiasm of St. Augustine reappear in the south? Is England's religion in the future to be a compound of the best doctrines which Christian faiths have formed during their passage through the centuries?

CHAPTER IV

HOW THEY BUILT IN OLD ENGLAND

A

"A

N American visitor tells me in a letter that he is puzzled by certain questions connected with English rural districts. good part of England," he writes, ought to be put under glass, like Mr. Chamberlain's orchids, or something else political and rare. I go into a rural neighbourhood, and find myself in a museum of ancient architecture, out in the open in all weather, and crying to us for a roof to cover it. I see remnants of old castles, ruined abbeys, perhaps a cathedral, many old churches within sight of each other, and humbler old buildings by the score, cottages and farms-a thing to bewilder you or me. Then I read a bit, and think, and pass from bewilderment to blank astonishment. Your King Stephen built a pretty little parcel of castles— eleven hundred and more, as though his country had a population of forty million bandits, instead of rather less than three million ordinary folk, the bulk being farmers, labourers, and artisans. Each village, so I read, was a manor with sixty or eighty inhabitants, headed by a lord or his bailiff; and this handful of people had a fine church, large

ENGLISH LANDSCAPES

enough for six or seven villages. The manor next door, so to speak, has another church of the same size; and in your county of Northants I've done five or six old churches in one easy day's walk, and returned home dumbfounded. Bless me, it's the most natural thing in the world that your English country should look so good, full of rest and gentleness; each field, so I tell myself, has a prayer to say, and means to repeat it all day long in fine warm weather. Perhaps your country landscapes were turned into pretty nuns by the dissolution of the monasteries; and hence the piety of their look, and the faithful way in which they cling to the ruined abbeys. To me, mind you, it's very surprising. How was all this architecture put up and kept up by such a tiny population? Where did the money come from, and how was it spent? What was the business method, or did sheer waste and madness rule in these matters? I can't rest till these questions are answered. Let me see the masons lay their courses, tell me how architects were treated, show me how the work was done. Good day."

Perhaps the majority of English people are as puzzled as my American correspondent, particularly in those parts of the country where the wealth of the early times was produced by sheep farms. At a first glance, no doubt, there is something very astonishing in the fact that abbeys, churches, cathedrals, castles, were built and rebuilt, altered and re-altered, as though money came down with the rain ; and yet, lavish as their building enterprise seems, our

ancestors were not thriftless. Their ideals differed from ours, and their work was in keeping with their ideals, but in business method they were thorough, careful, economical. Masterpieces in architecture were made at a trifling cost as compared with our own wild adventures in public buildings. Where the money came from for churches and cathedrals is a question dealt with in Chapter III., so we will pass on at once to the economical methods, and illustrate them in all their principal phases. The tiny population of the Middle Ages certainly excelled our own time in architecture, just as our railway system, when its utility is considered in relation to its total cost of production and maintenance, was excelled by the Roman roads, built by the Legionaries when peace turned their thoughts to politics and troublesome agitation. The building of roads was a form of Roman discipline; it kept the troops out of mischief, and produced at the lowest possible cost in money the highest possible benefits of a public kind. Compare this with the fabulous sums "invested" in our railways, and you will see the difference between the Roman economy and our own business methods—a difference so marked that we now get what we need at a gigantic cost in private speculation to serve public purposes. The system of economy in mediæval England had many points in common with the Roman system; and that is why its work was cheap as well as good.

We preach economy, but we cannot practise it. That art has passed from business into school books;