The Methodist - Saturday, April 13, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
NOTES & COMMENTS.
The Modern Æsthete.
The well-known apostle of modern æstheticism, Mr. Oscar Wilde, is in trouble. Whatever may be his taste in matters æsthetic, his boon companions seem to have been morally disreputable; and unless the affair which has brought him into greater notoriety than his well-known craze is hushed up, we have not heard the last of his doings. The telegrams which have appeared in the morning papers, relative to the libel case are sufficiently obvious in their reticence to shew the famous leader of the new cult at a great moral disadvantage. At Oxford, Mr. Wilde is said to have been greatly under Mr. Ruskin's influence. It has been stated that "he had the honour of filling Mr. Ruskin's especial wheelbarrow" and that it was the author or "Modern Painters" himself who taught him to trundle it. It would have been well for him if he had likewise learned something of Mr. Ruskin's religion and sturdy moral sense. Art is a divinely beautiful thing, but we have many illustrations of the fact that when it is divorced from religion, it can wallow in the mire with the lowest of the low.