Table Talk - Friday, April 19, 1895

Without Prejudice.
BY "THE IDLER."

OSCAR Wilde's books are being removed from the shelves of American libraries and burnt.

ONE cannot help feeling some disgust in noticing that a play of Oscar Wilde's is acted in Sydney. Can not this reptile be stamped out utterly? What do we want with plays written by the Devil? To be sure, managers are disastrously affected by having given long prices for Lady Windermere's Fan, The Importance of being Earnest, The Woman of no Importance and An Ideal Husband, and certain it is they will never get the money back, play or no play.

WHAT a splendid chance for a big sensation Mr. Stead has missed. The Wilde-Queensbury exposure is the most revolting one of the century, not even excepting Mr. Stead's own "Maiden Tribute" disclosures in the Pall Mall Gazette. Oscar Wilde is described as a large, raw-boned person, with a face like a horse and an insolent bearing. The present scandal is, after all, only a continuation of the Marlborough-street affair, when the police successfully raided a house devoted to the most pernicious vices and trapped a number of visitors, only to stagger back appalled by the quality of their captives. So high was the rank of one of the personages that the whole business was huddled up as well as possible, the keeper of the house was enabled to escape to the United States, and everybody who could have effectively followed up the matter, said "hush!" Of course, the word went round the world all the same as to what practices the Marlborough-street house was devoted to, and who the young "personage" caught there was. A curious flavor is given by the present exposure of Wilde's proclivities, to some passages in his latest drama - The Importance of being Earnest - which were quoted with delight by enthusiastic critics. "If you can keep a man's love and love him in return, you have done all that we ask of woman." The drama is framed to show that a woman may love a man without idealising him - "without trying to deprive him of his natural sins." It is impossible to avoid speculating what possibilities haunted Wilde's mind when he imagined, as a leading character in this latest of his dramas, a woman who "after the first shock of knowing her husband doomed to disgrace and exposure, places herself by his side in sympathising fellowship, ready to mourn with his sorrow, but not reproach him with his fault."