Truth - Sunday, April 7, 1895

OSCAR WILDE.
The Beauteous and the Buoyant.
The Arsenal of Aestheticism.

The aesthetic post of the languorous city of soulless love, the lover of everything limp spineless, delicate and untouchable, has fallen in. He who could lunch on the smell of a lily, and would faint at the sight of a boiled carrot, has been adjudicated by the Court to be something lower than the beasts of the field; a creature for whose peculiar offending in Australia the lash would be the punishment. He charged the Marquis of Queensberry with libelling him. But the Marquis proved the poet was a libertine of the worst type—a man unfitted for association with any but the vilest of his fellows—one of that peculiarly constituted section of humanity for whose offence Sodom was destroyed, and Gomorrah burned with fire from Heaven. Oscar Wilde was one of those implicated in the Cleveland-street Scandals years ago, and only escaped prosecution by the merest accident. He has since been arrested and will be criminally charged.

Oscar Wilde is 39 years old, born in Dublin, his parents being Sir William Wilde, a distinguished surgeon and antiquarian, and Lady Wilde, a well-known poetess and writer. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1880 he came before the public with a volume of poems which attracted some attention. In 1893 he wrote 'Salome' for Madame Sarah Bernhardt, the performance of which in London was prohibited by Lord Chamberlain, as it dealt with scenes and characters from the New Testament. He therefore published it in French in Paris. His latest drama, 'The Importance of Being in Earnest' is now being played at the St. James' Theatre, London, by Mr. George Alexander's Company. In 1884 Wilde married Constance, daughter of Mr. Horace Lloyd, Q.C., and has two sons, Cyril, born in 1885, and Vivian, in 1886.