The Methodist - Saturday, June 15, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
OSCAR WILDE.
We are "awfully" glad that he has gone to gaol. It is in his own interest, and still, more in the public interests that he has been hurled from the mount of Æstheticism into the rough environment of a prison. That a man who posed as the Great High Priest of the Beautiful should have been living such a filthy life, and inciting others to the same, is a scandalous fraud, bad as that of Jabez Spencer Balfour. The Californian Christian Advocate says that "the utter collapse of such a creature as Oscar Wilde is a public benediction. His books are unspeakably vile." He says, does this Apostle of the new æsthetic cult, "To commit a perfect sin is to be great, just as to produce a perfect picture, or to compose a perfect symphony is to be great." This is a new doctrine of Perfection, and falls short of the standard of John Wesley. "The man who invents a new sin is greater than the man who invents a new religion." Here is the old beast Tiberius come to life again in this blessed nineteenth century, with its telephones and railways, electric light and wonderful newspapers.
There is a book in circulation just now, which need not be named, for those who have read it will understand the reference, and those who have not would only rush off to get it, but it is a clever expose of the sham and nonsense and dirty villainy of this Art-hypocrite. At first one is startled by what seems gravely meant paradoxes, until at last the satire is perceived, and a lot of light thrown in upon that case which has lately occupied a fair share of the cablegrams from Home. Our law authorities in England, we are glad to see, are not disposed to tolerate the existence of a state of things which marked the decadence of ancient Rome, and contributed to the darkest picture in the New Testament, the latter part of the 1st chapter in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. May the wholesome roughness and unpicturesque realities of gaol discipline prove a tonic to the emasculated soul of the eccentric æsthete. As Dr. Parkhurst of New York lately said:—"Though the wicked flee when no man pursueth, yet they make better time when they know they are being chased."