The Daily Telegraph - Monday, May 27, 1895

The Daily Telegraph.
MONDAY, MAY 27, 1895.

"This is the Marquis of Queensberry, the most infamous brute in London," Oscar Wilde said to his servant, as he was showing the Marquis out a few months ago; "never allow him to come into my house again." By this time the prevalent opinion at both ends of the world will probably be that more than one "infamous brute" is concerned in the disgusting proceedings of the Queensberrys and Wilde. In their catalogue of outrages, the street fight between Lord Queensberry and his son is hardly less vile than those which led to the indictment of Wilde, and the climax of his eccentric but brilliant career—for Wilde, even if he had been acquitted, would certainly have been an outcast from decent society henceforth. Indeed, the only real question about him which remained to be answered was whether he should spend the next few years in exile or in gaol. His exposure, it may well be assumed, has not come to him unexpectedly. It must have been immediately before him during the years in which he was black-mailed by accomplices, dogged by detectives, and relentlessly badgered by Queensberry until his money was all spent and his wit could no longer provide him with devices for staving-off the evil day. In his last play but one ("An Ideal Husband") Wilde seems to have voiced his state of mind when he felt the first pressure of the net. That is a fair interpretation to put upon those parts of the play in which Sir Robert Chiltern speaks of a morbid dread of scandal and shame, of the first appreciation of real terror, and of the acknowledged presence of a stronger personality than his own. The burden of all Chiltern's speeches is an appeal to his wife to stand by him in the time of scandal, if it should ever come; and this play was written, curiously enough, at about the time when, according to Queensberry, Wilde's exposure was coming nearer to him, and when his wife was threatening divorce proceedings.