Reynolds's Newspaper - Sunday, May 12, 1895

OSCAR WILDE AND THE DEMOCRACY.
TO THE EDITOR OF REYNOLDS'S NEWSPAPER.

Sir,--Enclosed are a few specimen of Mr. Oscar Wilde's writings. May I ask you to comment on "the morbidity, cold, heartless brilliance, insolent cynicism, &c.," found in them?

The solution (that is, to the problem of poverty)... is to try and reconstruct Society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. ... Under Socialism . . . there will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags. . . . The security of Society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work. . . . Each member of the Society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the Society, and if a frost comes no one will be practically anything the worse.

(A poor man) . . . is merely the infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding, crashes him and, indeed, prefers him crushed, and in that case he is far more obedient. . . . The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralizing. . . . In the interests of the rich we must get rid of it.

The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted . . . but the best among the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. They feel charity . . . to be ridiculously inadequate partial restitution . . . or sentimental dole . . . . usually accompanied by impertinent attempts to tyrannize over their private lives.

Mr. Wilde goes on to say that the poor are beginning to know that they ought to be seated at to rich man's table and not grateful for crumbs from it; that only brutes would not be discontented with such lives as they lead. He advises disobedience and rebellion.

To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. . . . Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. . . . . No; a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious is probably a real personality and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest.

He also say that people only put up with things as they are because they are too degraded and paralyzed by misery and poverty to know how wretched they are. They will not believe you when you tell them.

What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contended class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent among them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. . . . Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even say express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere. . . . To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went on to die for the hideous cause of feudalism. . . .

The English law has always treated offences against a man's property with for more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship. . . . As property confers immense distinction, respect, to . . . a man aims to accumulate it and goes on . . . after he has got far more than he can want, or can use or enjoy, or perhaps even know of.

Then he points out how all this prevent a man from developing. His strength is wasted in worries, on fiction.

"Know thyself," was written over the portal of the antique world, over the portal of the new world "Be thyself" shall be written.

Christ taught this: ". . . 'Try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. . . . It is a drag upon you. . . . Your personality does not read it." . . . To His own friends He says the same thing. . . . "If a man takes their cloak they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. . . ." "Socialism . . . will make the love of a man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling."

He says, in the future the State will make what is useful. The individual what is beautiful. Man will no longer be the slave of machines. Instead of competing with they will serve him. At present

One man owns a machine which does the work of 500 men Five hundred men are in consequence thrown out of work, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine, and keeps it, and has 500 as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, everyone would benefit by it. . . . All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things and invoices unpleasant condition must be done by machinery. Civilization requires slaves. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the world depends.

The extracts about are from my own notebook on Socialism. The article from which they are taken is "The Soul of Man under Socialism," and it appeared in the Fornightly Review for February, 1891. I have not the article by me at this moment, but believe my note are reliable. Trusting in your sense of justice to at least modify your sweeping denonciation of Mr. Wilde's writings, and only regretting that the enclosed extracts give so meagre an idea of a brilliant and splendid essay,-- I am yours truly,
T. G. ROY.