Galignani Messenger - Sunday, April 7, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
PARIS, APRIL 7, 1895
If any proof was wanted of the necessity of encouraging manly sports and defending them from the attacks of unwholesome, flabby faddists, the terrible case just ended at the Old Bailey certainly supplies it.
It is the robust pastimes and manly habits of the English race which have made it what it is. The effect of over-education on an unexercised body will always tend to produce evil consequences, of which there are many types, and the more powerful the intellect affected the more frightful is the result.
Every honest man will sympathise with the Marquis of Queensberry in his anxiety to save his son, and will approve the steps he took to attain that end.
It is difficult to imagine a more dangerous character and influence than a man of the Oscar Wilde type. Gifted, as he undoubtedly is, with rare intelligence, almost amounting to genius, he links a certain real taste for beauty with profligate habits, and succeeded in covering his vices with such a glamour of false philosophy and meretricious wit that the healthy, honest taste of Englishmen was in danger of being perverted.
It will be after all, however, a blessing in disguise if this disgusting trial, which has ended in the extinction of the high priest of aestheticism, serves as a sharp lesson to those youths of this generation who have a tendency to artificiality, vanity, and effeminacy, and stirs up a hearty contempt for the whole school of aesthetes and their methods.
More than ever do we trust that the efforts of the Sporting League will go on succeeding in the way that they have begun, and that the Right Hon. James Lowther and the Earl of Durham will never want supporters in the crusade they have inaugurated against the hypocrisy and cant of the present clique of faddists.