San Francisco Chronicle - Monday, May 27, 1895
This report was originally published in English. Machine translations may be available in other languages.
The sentence of Oscar Wilde, if carried out with the usual rigor of the English law, will mean the early death of the esthete. Wilde is in poor physical condition, and as he has probably never done a stroke of manual labor in his life, work will be fatal to him. No romance writer ever conceived a more dramatic climax than that presented by Oscar Wilde's fortunes in the last three months. Before he brought the fatal suit against Queensberry he was at the height of his success, with a new play just produced an a half dozen old plays from which he was receiving a large revenue. In a fortnight all this was changed. He was exposed as a moral pariah, ruined, and brought within the shadow of the prison. Now he has entered that shadow, from which there is small chance that he will ever emerge. He played a game which those who insist that morals have no real bearing on literature or art may well observe with profit.