The Age - Thursday, May 16, 1895

OUR LONDON LETTER.
[FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT.]
LONDON, 12TH APRIL.

The tables have been completely turned upon Oscar Wilde, and he has been arrested on a charge of having committed the offence hinted at by Lord Queensberry in the alleged libel. Whether he be convicted or acquitted, his career as the leader of a certain school of art and literature is at an end. The world was beginning to get weary of his cynicism and his arrogance, and now that he has entangled himself in the meshes of the criminal law very few people show much pity or sympathy. Two of his plays are still produced every night — The Importance of Being Earnest, at St. James's, and An Ideal Husband, at the Criterion, but the managers have made a sort of compromise with offended morality, and in their advertisements and playbills omit the name of the author. Nearly every newspaper has improved the occasion by a moral lecture on the terrible results of asserting that literature and art were, and ought to be, quite independent of morality, but perhaps the truest remarks about Oscar Wilde, and the Decadent school generally, appeared in the columns of the Paris Figaro. Your French contemporary wrote, "It is the natural and regular physiological result of a literary and æsthetic effort, and from that point of view it demands the reflections of all thinkers. It demonstrates the influence which the deviation of certain literary faculties in the direction of a refined sensualism can exercise over the intelligence and over the morals of men undoubtedly gifted... Fatal degeneracy will ensue when intellectual effort is made the result, and not the principle, of sensations...We must beg our æsthetics to be moderate." Mr. Labouchere in Truth ascribes much of Oscar Wilde's conduct to his craze for notoriety at any cost.