The Gazette - Saturday, April 6, 1895

THE PASSING OF WILDE.

The Marquis of Queensberry's prosecution of Oscar Wilde is an illustration of the curious ways in which decency is sometimes avenged on those who outrage its canons. The Marquis is not, generally speaking, counted a noble specimen of the British aristocracy. He is neither intellectually nor morally a shining light. The cheers that greeted him as he left the court room at the close of the trial were probably the first the public have accorded him. As a father fighting for the moral welfare of his son his position appealed to the best sentiment of the English people, and for once he appears in almost a heroic attitude. Out ot his action, however, there will come more than his family's good or personal revenge. Oscar Wilde is a man of great intellectual powers. He used them to debase virtue and exalt vice. He was a chief among a new class of writers, whom it has become the evil fashion to worship, and with whom the moral law was only a subject of mockery. They were those who won applause by sneering at an able and honest and clean lived statesman as "Old Morality." They use the best and most elegant English to spread the worst and most demoralizing doctrines. They include women as well as men. Their heroines begin with Dodos and end with Gallias, who think the marriage tie a conventional restriction on human liberty which only fools pay any attention to. The effect of their unchecked movement would be to establish in England the moral conditions that St. Paul pictured in his letter to the Romans and that had their natural effect in the downfall and degradation of that onetime nation of world conquerors. Wilde was the most brilliant, the most admired, the most quoted, of these concemners of the Decalogue. He is become the most despised of men. He has failed in his attempt to vindicate his character when accused of things that have no name in the English tongue. He may be worse in his practices than others of the school to which he belongs. It is sincerely to be hoped that he is an exception to the rule. There will be many who will think, however, that his case is the legitimate outcome of the teachings of his writings, and of the writings ot those who set him up as a prophet. They have received a set-back that can hardly fail to have an effect in curtailing, for a time at any rate, the volume of evil literature that the press has for years now been turning out, and in causing the writers thereof to court a kindly obscurity.

[...] The referee has awarded a knock-out against Oscar Wilde under the Queensberry rules.