The Adelaide Observer - Saturday, May 18, 1895

ECHOES FROM LONDON.
[BY OXONIAN.]
London, April 5.

The election of the first Commoner, the truth about the Armenian massacres, the Chitral expedition, the Australian cricket scores — all pale before the trial now proceeding at the Old Bailey. A few weeks ago I sketched in outline the events which led to the public rupture between the Marquis of Queensberry and Mr. Oscar Wilde. Those events were then known only to a few, but to-day they are spread broadcast over England. The libel was contained in four words written on a visiting card, and Lord Queensberry has pleaded that they are true, and that the publication is for the public benefit. The prosecution was a matter of a few minutes only. Mr. Oscar Wilde told the Jury the facts of his birth, parentage, and education. Then began Mr. Carson's cross-examination. It lasted eight hours, and concluded yesterday afternoon. At first Mr. Wilde was brilliant, composed, and almost jaunty. His answers, in fact, might have been excerpts from the dialogues of "An Ideal Husband, or the Importance of Being Earnest." By degrees, however, the terrible strain began to tell on him. With terrible insistence on every material fact Mr. Carson laid bare one side of Mr. Wilde's life for the past three years. The power of retort was gone, verve and esprit were confounded. "You sting me, you insult me, and unnerve me in every way by your questions" was at length his apology for a flippant answer to a most serious question. An hour later Mr. Wilde left the box. Could he have foreseen the case for the defence it is hardly possible that he would have pushed matters to this crisis.

At the Haymarket Mr. Lewis Waller impersonates the "Ideal Husband." He is a member of Parliament of great distinction, who in his early days played on the Stock Exchange with the loaded dice of early information, and thus acquired the means of entering the House. The secret is in the hands of an adventuress. She holds a letter which will ruin him. "Think," says Lord Goring to him, "think of the loathsome joy of the leader writer in his den in Fleet-street tracing the lines which to-morrow will ruin you for ever." Those words were written by Oscar Wilde at the very time that a blackmailer had letters in his possession which bid fair to eclipse the man of letters himself. How tragically significant they must have been to turn. To-day, too, they must be present at every turn. He knows well enough that the verdict of the Jury, practically condemning him, having been pronounced, the floodgates of comment will be loosed, and his name will never be fair again. He has been a singular figure in the literary and artistic world. He left Oxford with an excellent record — a "first" in moderations and a "first" in greats, with the Newdegate prize poem thrown in. As one of the leaders of the æsthetic movement he was caricatured at the Savoy Theatre. He acknowledged the compliment as a "tribute that mediocrity pays to genius." He was married in 1884 to Miss Lloyd, and has two sons. A successful novelist, an even more successful playwright, he was sought by many and declined by some. He has the merit of never knowing when he is beaten, and his sallies with Whistler and T.P. O'Connor have delighted vast audiences. One would predict of an ordinary man that he was socially dead after yesterday's revelations. Mr. Oscar Wilde is, however, no ordinary man, and, as he himself would say, what his future will be depends very much on his past. I have purposely refrained from giving you more than the barest outline. The five columns of mud supplied by both morning and evening papers could be well dispensed with, and the example of the St. James's Gazette, which announces that it will report none of the proceedings, is a most wholesome and excellent one.