<h2><SPAN name="VIII" id="VIII"></SPAN>VIII</h2>
<h3>ST G. B. S. AND THE BISHOP</h3>
<p>There has been a delightful correspondence going
on in the <i>Times</i> 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 Æsop 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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</SPAN></span>
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.</p>
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">But what they fought each other for<br/></span>
<span class="i1">I could not well make out.<br/></span></div>
</div>
<p>Perhaps Mr Shaw himself did not quite know.
But he made during the fight some weird statements
which are well worth examination.</p>
<p>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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</SPAN></span>
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 Gaby
Deslys, whom I, too, have not seen. I made more
than one attempt, but the crush of beauty-lovers
was too great.) It is quite easy to imagine an
actress such as I have described: most of us have,
in the course of many hours misspent in music-halls,
seen her. To say that she may do good as
well as harm is the same as saying that an indecent
photograph may do good as well as harm. If
this is to be the last word on the subject, then
there is no logical reason why we should not
decorate the walls of elementary schools with
indecent photographs instead of maps, and teach
the children limericks instead of <i>Lady Clara
Vere de Vere</i> and <i>The Wreck of the Hesperus</i>.
Mr Shaw may retort that he would allow any
man who did not find indecent photographs and
limericks "objectionable" to have his fill of
them, but that he would not allow him to thrust
them upon children. But this is to pass a moral
judgment. If it is not certain whether the
dangers of the sensual parodies of the arts are
greater than the dangers of religion—or say, of
geography—there is surely no more reason for<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</SPAN></span>
preserving the children from one than from the
other.</p>
<p>Even if we waive this point for the sake of argument,
is Mr Shaw's other position tenable—that,
if we consider any form of entertainment
objectionable, we should show our disapproval,
not by trying to have it stopped, but simply by
staying away from it? Surely even in music-hall
performances, there is a line to be drawn
somewhere. We can no more be sure where good
ends and evil begins than we can be sure where
light ends and darkness begins. But we all have
a good enough notion of when it is dark, and it is
not so very difficult to tell when a music-hall
turn is out of bounds. Some people, it may be
granted, run to excess in their sense of propriety.
They are as delicate as the lady who, when carving
a chicken at table, used to inquire: "Will you
have a wing or a limb?" On the other hand, there
is an equally large number of people who have
no delicacy at all but who are always ready to
greet the obscene with a cheer. Their favourite
meal of entertainment is brutality for an entrée
and sensuality for a sweet. They can even mix
their dishes at times, as, many years ago in Paris,
when a woman stripped to the waist and with her
hands tied behind her back used to get down<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</SPAN></span>
on her knees and wait for rats to be loosed out of
a cage and kill them one by one with her mouth.
Is there no reason for suppressing a show of this
kind except that it is rough on rats? I think there
is. It deserves suppression because it is what we
call, in a vague word, degrading. It is easy
enough for a lively imagination to picture as beastly
a scene in which there would be no rats present,
and which, even if a thousand youths and maidens
were willing to pay night after night to see it,
would still be a case for the police.</p>
<p>One cannot help feeling that, in attacking the
Bishop in regard to the liberty of music-halls,
Mr Shaw has allowed himself to be made angry by
the way in which the Church nearly always concentrates
on sex when it wishes to make war on
sin. Probably he does well to be angry. It is
always worth while to denounce the Church for
making morality so much an affair of abstinences.
On the other hand, the Church and the prophets
have realised by a wise instinct that this planet
on which we live tends perpetually to become a
huge disorderly house, and that the history of the
world is largely the history of a struggle for
decency. At times, no doubt, the world has also
been in danger of being converted into a tyrannous
Sabbath-school. But that was usually an after<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</SPAN></span>math
of disorder. There is no denying that the
average human being finds it far easier to learn to
leer than to learn to sing psalms. The fight against
the leer is one of the first necessities of civilisation.
It may be argued that a policeman cannot be sent
in pursuit of a leer as he can in search of a pickpocket,
and that, if he were, he would more
probably than not run it to earth in some masterpiece
of art or literature. But what about the leer
when it has been isolated—when it has no more
connection with art or literature than with
Esperanto?</p>
<p>Mr Shaw seems to think that even in that case
the attempt to suppress it would be a form of
persecution. But is it persecution to take action
against pickpockets or against employers who
dodge the Factory Acts or against the corrupters
of children? Surely there are offences that are
capable of being dealt with by magistrates. Only
the most innocent optimist can believe that
sweating, for instance, can be put an end to by
public opinion in the abstract as effectively as it
can be stopped by public opinion acting through
the police. It is no argument to say that, if we
suppress certain music-hall turns because we dislike
them, those who object to the theory of the
Atonement have an equal right to try to suppress<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</SPAN></span>
the teaching and preaching of that doctrine.
Might not the same argument be used against
interference with thieves and forgers or still more
extreme criminals in the pursuit of their livelihood?
After all, supposing the Methodists added to the
Calvinist and Wesleyan varieties already in existence
a new sect of, say, Aphrodisiac Methodists,
it is quite easy to conceive not only public opinion,
but the police interfering with it with the approval
of the mass of moral and immoral citizens.
Similarly, if a sect of Particular Baptist Thugs
made its appearance, its religious complexion
would hardly save it from suppression. There
might still be half-a-dozen apostles of religious
freedom who would tell you that you could not
logically take action against the Thugs and the
Aphrodisiacs without preparing the way for the
prohibition of Bible-reading and for burning
psalm-singers at the stake. But common-sense
knows better. It knows that there are certain
things which must be put down, either by public
opinion or by the police, if the world is to remain
a place into which it is worth a child's while to
be born. It knows, too, that the liberty to seek
after truth and beauty in one's own way does
not necessarily involve the liberty to say or to
do whatever beastly thing one pleases, even if<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</SPAN></span>
thousands of people enjoy it. If it did, then the
Censor's interference with <i>Mrs Warren's Profession</i>
would be an act of the same kind as Scotland
Yard's interference with the worst kind of
night clubs.</p>
<p>At the same time, one need not deny that the
difficulty of deciding what should be suppressed
and what should not is immense. I see that in
some part of the world or other Isidora Duncan's
dancing has been prohibited. I myself have met
a lady, who, when she was taken to see Madame
Duncan, was in an agony of blushes till she got
out into the street. But she sat through <i>The
Merry Widow</i> without turning a hair. What, then,
is to be the test in these matters? On the whole
I think it is a good rule to fight against the suppression
of anything that can by any stretch of
the imagination be considered honestly intended
or beautiful. In the arts, one can believe without
casuistry, beauty ultimately transforms the beast.
But there are forms of art, literature and drama
which are nothing else than a kind of indecent
exposure. Let us give them the benefit of the
doubt, so long as there is a doubt. But when
there is no doubt, let them be given the benefit
of the policeman.</p>
<p>I wonder whether Mr Shaw would have argued<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</SPAN></span>
so fiercely on the other side if the Bishop had not
dragged in the Censor. If the controversy had
not got mixed up with the Censorship, indeed,
it would have greatly simplified matters. Mr
Shaw seems to have begun to belabour the Bishop
from a feeling that a blow to the Bishop was a
blow to the Censor, but having once begun, he
seems to have gone on simply because he enjoyed
beating a Bishop. And of the remains there were
gathered up twelve basketsful. But, all the
same, I cannot help feeling that the Bishop
perished in a good cause.</p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</SPAN></span></p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />