s, whether he goes with
his author into the dark and solitary places or into the sheltered and
smiling gardens of the sun.

VIII

ST G. B. S. AND THE BISHOP

There has been a delightful correspondence going on in the _Times_
about Mdlle Gaby Deslys. It owed not a little of its charm, I suspect,
to the fact that none of the correspondents had seen Gaby. The Bishop
of Kensington had not seen her; Mr H. B. Irving had not seen her; Mr
Bernard Shaw had not seen her. So they quarrelled furiously over her
as men have always quarrelled over the unseen, and if AEsop had been
alive, he might have got a fable out of the affair. The Bishop made
the mistake at the beginning of calling upon the Censor to suppress
Gaby. Mr Shaw, at mention of the Censor, immediately saw red, and Gaby
of the Lilies presented herself to his inflamed vision as a beautiful
damsel who was about to be made a meal of by an ecclesiastical
monster. He at once challenged the Bishop to battle--a battle of
theories. The Bishop unfortunately had no theory with him. He took his
stand upon the law. After the manner of Shylock, he insisted upon his
pound of flesh. Mr Shaw, of course, who bristled with theories could
not stand this. So he gave the Bishop his choice of theories and even
put several into his mouth, and forced a conflict upon him. And it was
a famous victory.

But what they fought each other for
I could not well make out.

Perhaps Mr Shaw himself did not quite know. But he made during the
fight some weird statements which are well worth examination.

One of these was that, in regard to sex as in regard to religion, it
is very difficult to say what is good and what is evil, and more
difficult still to suppress the one without suppressing the other. So
much is this so according to Mr Shaw that "one man seeing a beautiful
actress will feel that she has made all common debaucheries impossible
to him; another seeing the same actress in the same part will plunge
straight into those debaucheries because he has seen her body without
seeing her soul." But why choose a beautiful actress for the argument?
This matter can only be debated fairly if we take the case of an
actress whose lure is not beauty but some indecency of attitude,
gesture or phrase, which is meant to awaken the debauchee keeping
house in the breast of each of us with the ineffectual angel, and
which either does this or bores us into the bar. (I do not, I may say,
refer to G