THEATER CHRONICLE
271
terest in non-belief, just as the Church he has spent his life exposing
has a proprietary interest in belief. "Henry was a fraud," his widow
admits, wearily, after his funeral.
This fraudulence is rendered poignant by the fact of failure. A
shift in fashion has made God popular and Henry unpopular. "Bertrand
Russell to lunch," says the visitors' book of twenty years back, and the
audience chuckles, as if at a rusty joke. A visitor from another century
might ask what was funny about Bertrand Russell, but today's audiences
catch on without being told. Bertrand Russell is funny because he "went
out" with the cloche hat. Henry Callifer's weakness was his inability
to face the truth. In the Callifer home, Jesus was known under the
euphemism of "the great Palestinian leader," and Christmas was re–
christened ''Children's Day." Yet this weakness, these evasions, are al–
most condoned by the playwright on account of their period quality.
If
crusading rationalism is "seen through" as a species of quackery, it
nevertheless, for Graham Greene, as for Angus Wilson, has its lovable
aspect, because it partakes of innocence, of a time before the Fall,
which for these modern English writers seems to coincide with the
literary discovery of evil (circa 1939). Those darling dodos, poor dears,
were not hep to evil; this is the prevailing attitude.
That there were brave men among those old rationalists does not
occur to Mr. Greene, all bravery being reserved for the present genera–
tion, and, in particular, for Catholics, who have dared to acknowledge
God and His corollary, the devil. How much courage this took is
debatable, but Mr. Greene is certain that it took a great deal, and
his work, from beginning to end, is a parade of venturesomeness, to
the accompaniment of a lugubrious prose-music, as of a death march.
Nearly everyone of Mr. Greene's works features a "daring" notion,
verging on blasphemy but redeemed by a sententious piety that seems
to leave it to God to judge whether Mr. Greene is not, after all, a
better Catholic than the Pope.
The Potting Shed
is no exception. The
satire on rationalism, after the first act, yields place to a somewhat
maudlin "Catholic" drama, of faith lost and regained. The miracle,
about which the play centers, proves to be no ordinary miracle, such
as any saint might have performed, but an unsavory, dubious miracle
that was just as well hushed up. The miracle-worker is revealed to be
the familiar "bad" priest of Mr. Greene's work, the convert brother
of the famous rationalist, in this instance-found drinking himself sod–
den in a rectory in East Anglia because he has lost God.
It
was he who
raised the dead boy by prayer. "Take what I love best," he said to God,
when he came upon the lifeless form in the potting shed
l
"and
let
