Table Talk - Friday, April 12, 1895

"TABLE TALK."
FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 1895.
The Oscar Wilde Episode.

WE are within measureable distance of the time when some young men's clubs in Australia will have to be placed under the strict surveillance of reliable police officers. The Oscar Wilde episode is simply an exposure of abominable vice, whereas in Australia even business is immorally affected by the degraded. One case has especially caused a great scandal recently. However, it would be useless for the Press, no matter how zealous it may be in the interests of public morality to expose anybody in "good" society. Indeed, there is very little chance just now for the law to be enforced in connection with anybody who has plenty of money or social influence, and it would be downright foolhardiness to worry for a thankless public. Besides, it is scarcely the duty of a journalist to sympathise and still less to take the part of one of "the set" who being a victim of vice is compelled to relinquish a mining bonanza under threat of exposure by vicious companions.

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New York Town Topics of March 6 writes pretty plainly. The editor says he has "often been surprised at the peculiar logic adopted by the friends and admirers of Mr. Oscar Wilde whenever that unique and stout gentleman gets into the public eye. They always describe him as a wonderful gentleman, who is amusing himself at the expense of the world. He is awfully superior, they say, just the cleverest chap in the whole world, and nothing that he ever does is serious, but is performed by way of amusement. Town Topics never regarded Mr. Wilde as a beautiful genius, and his actual achievements in literature would hardly dazzle one into mistaking his superlative egotism as the mere pose of a colossus of letters. Instead of continually referring to his brilliant talents, which are, in reality, the ordinary talents of a priggish dilettante, he might better be regarded in the light he continually stands in — that of an effeminate, posturing, self-advertising humbug. His plays are only as clever as a host of old French wits have made them, and his books, dealing mostly with brutal subjects, are written in a language that is not only a ridiculous exhibition of literary pyrotechnics, but also of positively bad English. If to be a genius is to steal other men's ideas and phrases, to dabble in Greek and lecture on wall paper, to employ press agents and exult in the splendours of beautiful boys, then Oscar Wilde is a genius. He is again before the public, and I find that his friends are already attempting to show that his latest adventure is new proof of his originality and talent. The Marquis of Queensberry announces that he hopes to drive Oscar out of England. It is to be hoped that he does not succeed, for in case he did the obese æsthete would be pretty sure to make his new headquarters in New York."