The Otago Daily Times - Saturday, June 15, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
OUR AMERICAN LETTER.
(From Our Own Correspondent.)
LITERARY NOTES.
The downfall of Oscar Wilde is received with feelings of more than ordinary satisfaction by every healthy-minded man who delights in clean literature. Wilde represented a school which has divorced morality, chastity, and purity from every form of art. The whole influence of the men and women who for the past few years have gained wealth and notoriety by their ostentatiously paraded nastiness has been emphatically upon the side of evil. Chivalry, sentiment, honour in men, delicacy in women, have been sneered at in a thousand and one different ways until the author or playwright who presented a work based upon the old-time lines was not only laughed at as being hopelessly behind the age, but made to suffer financially as well. Scott, Dickens, and Thaceray were seemingly buried beneath the diseased carrion mechanically turned out by a Zola, Maupassant, Wilde, Mendez, Saltus, and Amelie Rives; and in the drama the healthy, vigorous tonics served up by H. J. Byron, Boucicault, and Grundy could make little or no head before the rising tide of psychological studies (so-called) of Ibsen, Pinero, and Jones. A book was no longer an encouragement and help in the battles of life, but an epigrammatic dialogue upon morals, no morals, and sex; whilst plays were becoming the vehicle for the playwrights' wishy-washy discussion of some better-left-alone subject of absolutely no interest to the vast majority of men and women. To all this and more we have been compelled to submit. We seemed afraid to protest, or, if we did, were termed straight-laced and deplorably behind the age. It was the same in art. Men might toil a lifetime in the old ruts and barely make a living; but a boy of 21, by twisting and perverting his drawing abilities into such lines as reach their perfection in the "Yellow Book," and conveying the impression that every woman is an abandoned creature, such an one can earn £4000 a year!
The downfall of Oscar Wilde is received with feelings of more than ordinary satisfaction by every healthy-minded man who delights in clean literature. Wilde represented a school which has divorced morality, chastity, and purity from every form of art. The whole influence of the men and women who for the past few years have gained wealth and notoriety by their ostentatiously paraded nastiness has been emphatically upon the side of evil. Chivalry, sentiment, honour in men, delicacy in women, have been sneered at in a thousand and one different ways until the author or playwright who presented a work based upon the old-time lines was not only laughed at as being hopelessly behind the age, but made to suffer financially as well. Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray were seemingly buried beneath the diseased carrion mechanically turned out by a Zola, Maupassant, Wilde, Mendez, Saltus, and Amelie Rives; and in the drama the healthy, vigorous tonics served up by H. J. Byron, Boucicault, and Grundy could make little or no head before the rising tide of psychological studies (so-called) of Ibsen, Pinero, and Jones. A book was no longer an encouragement and help in the battles of life, but an epigrammatic dialogue upon morals, no morals, and sex; whilst plays were becoming the vehicle for the playwright's wishy-washy discussion of some better-left-alone subject of absolutely no interest to the vast majority of men and women. TO all this and more we have been compelled to submit. We seemed afraid to protest, or, if we did, were termed straight-laced and deplorably behind the age. It was the same in art. Men might toil a lifetime in the old ruts and barely make a living; but a boy of 21, by twisting and perverting his drawing abilities into such lines as reach their perfection in the "Yellow Book," and conveying the impression that every woman is an abandoned creature, such an one can earn £4000 a year!
And so it is when men remember these things that there is a hearty "thank God" that one who has been regarded as the head and front of the whole business is exposed before the whole world as an object lesson, and as the miserable interpreter of what the philosophy of the new cult really is when reduced to practice.
And so it is when men remember these things that there is a hearty "thank God" that one who has been regarded as the head and front of the whole business is exposed before the whole world as an object lesson, and as the miserable interpreter of what the philosophy of the new cult really is when reduced to practice.
Wilde is as well known here as elsewhere. When visiting San Francisco, and obtaining by advertisement through putting up a green umbrella to shade himself from the rays of the moon, his vices were noted and commented upon. Few, however, thought he was so utterly lost, and the cry of despair over so much talent turned to such wanton uses is only compensated by the hope that his ruin may be our salvation. At all events, we may believe this tendency that maketh for wickedness will be checked.
Wilde is as well known here as elsewhere. When visiting San Francisco, and obtaining by advertisement through putting up a green umbrella to shade himself from the rays of the moon, his vices were noted and commented upon. Few, however, thought he was so utterly lost, and the cry of despair over so much talent turned to such wanton uses is only compensated by the hope that his ruin may be our salvation. At all events, we may believe this tendency that maketh for wickedness will be checked.
The placing of Amelie Rive's name with that of Wilde and Mendez is, perhaps, the most terrible criticism upon this lady's work I have met. It is pitiable ot see a young, beautiful, rich, well-born, accomplished married lady in such company. But the critics have it so, and I can hardly see how she can be left out. Dr Nordan's work "Degeneration," recently issued, places these writers among the morally and mentally degenerate. They are the criminals of literature.
The placing of Amelie Rive's name with that of Wilde and Mendez is, perhaps, the most terrible criticism upon this lady's work I have met. It is pitiable to see a young, beautiful, rich, well-born, accomplished married lady in such company. But the critics have it so, and I can hardly see how she can be left out. Dr Nordan's work "Degeneration," recently issued, places these writers among the morally and mentally degenerate. They are the criminals of literature.
The Morning Call, of San Francisco, had a blistering article on the Wilde case, the burden of which was that Manchester pauper labour and aristocratic scandals were the sole curses of this great country. There is no doubt, cried our editor, that England's majesty is almost gone—what there is of it is on the surface; her decadence cannot be stayed; her millions swarm in filth in hovels and her nobles rot in their own worse infamies. This country is sick of them both. Americans are moral, manly, healthy, and cannot conceive of such horrors, and so on.
The Morning Call, of San Francisco, had a blistering article on the Wilde case, the burden of which was that Manchester pauper labour and aristocratic scandals were the sole curses of this great country. There is no doubt, cried our editor, that England's majesty is almost gone—what there is of it is on the surface; her millions swarm in filth in hovels and her nobles rot in their own worse infamies. This country is sick of them both. Americans are moral, manly, healthy, and cannot conceive of such horrors, and so on.
The above is an excellent sample of the American editor in his war paint—and he never looks so absurd as when so bespattered. The crime for which of old God brought down fire upon the Cities of the Plain is not uncommon either in San Francisco or New York. Competent authorities aver London slums are not "in it" with those of New York and other great centres. The columns of the press will testify as to the healthiness and purity of the mind and heart of the people, and as for the majesty of the British Empire, it does not, nor does it ever, depend up on the few moral lepers who in every age fester in her midst.