The Cincinnati Enquirer - Tuesday, April 16, 1895

OSCAR W
And Others Like Him.
All Civilization is Honeycombed With Hypocrisy,
And There Is Much That Could Be Told
Of Great Men Who Have Swayed the World.
"The Doctrine That Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness Means More Than We Thought."

SPECIAL DISPATCH TO THE ENQUIRER.

WASHINGTON, D. C., April 15. — Nearly coincident are three events which solely concern the fashionable world—the death by brain softening of Lord Randolph Churchill, the death of the chief American entertainer of the foreign nobility, and the fall of Oscar Wilde's sunflowsr and cult.

Idle people enriched by the labor of others for their supposititious "standing," cast the baleful influence of their restlessness on the tranquil provinces of man.

The American's knowledge of Europe has been of as little value to him as the German's, the Frank's and the Norman's acquaintance with Constantinople and the Greek Empire following the Crusades,when the Sultan Amurath and the Emperor John Palaealogus found their two youthful sons in such a friendship as that between Oscar Wilde and Queensberry's son, and by the demand of the more virtuous Moslem the eyes of both were put out, only a hundred years before America was discovered.

England's intimate relation with Egypt, Turkey and India must have taught a portion of her people their vices. Transported back to London these vices obscurely work their way through the idle, money-burdened, juvenile set, and between the theaters and the supper rooms, are suddenly disclosed in some audacious, vain instance like Wilde's, whose long Greek hair, familiarity and flesh concealed a civilization old as the Lotus flower he sighed to.

The tendency of poetry is to extol love and passion, and of the theater to recite it, and where the poet captures the stage his ideality runs beyond its reality, his surfeit becomes a further tempation.

SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS.

The sonnets of Shakespeare show an ardor to prevail in love which in that day was checked by no women being allowed to act.

A little later, in the Stuart age, actresses ruled Kings, and Nell Gwynne's bastards quartered upon their shields the royal arms. Byron, who led the latest poetical age, went wandering with a literary nature and its gypsy surroundings to foreign countries, and his excesses with Shelley's sister-in-law, with young Countess Guiccioli, and an abundance of commoner women, flowered in Don Juan and decayed in such unnatural monodies as Cain with its love of brothers and sisters.

No wonder that Mrs. Stowe reported the suspicious Lady Byron as saying that Byron's practices were as bad as his poetry.

The conclusion of the great poet's study of his species was the moral of Don Juan, that respectability and civilization are honey-combed with animality and hypocrisy.

From the religioius life of Seville to the pirate's isle, the Sultan's harms, Queen Catherine's Russian court and English haughty aristocracy, the passion for the outside man be declared to be the rule, and not the exception. Italy, indeed, was so long the home of vices inherited by the Lombards, Greeks and Goths, from the Roman armies, that the German historian of Italy, Ranke, imparts the easy defeat of the Italians by the Spanish, Augarines and Normans to be weakening effects of their bestiality. Yet there literature and poetry were born, with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Dante, each the more or less driveling idolator of some other man's wife.

Monogamous marriage was not man's natural inclination when it was imposed, but the influence of Greek symmetry and commercial thrift. The dialogues and philosophy of the ancients, freely seen in our public and private libraries in the English tongue, describes the politer ancient world as eclectic in its sensuality. The amours of James I. of England for Carr and other of his familiar eleves were so descriptive of the dangers of the race that the English Puritan resolution turned almost entirely upon "sin," and little upon rights and wrongs. Hence the excesses of the New England Puritans to prevent their little world coming under the category of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Had each man watched himself as much as his neighbor and his neighbor's wife their proneness to temptation would not have furnished the last of them, Hawthorne, with the legend of "The Scarlet Letters."

ILLEGAL LOVE.

Literature is to a large extent the fond narration of illegal love. The chef d'oeuvre of every literature is of this nature, from "The Canterbury Tales" to "Manon Lescaut," "Camille" and "Faust." Goethe's baser nature burst forth in his novel of "Eclectic Affinities." Swinburne, the last poet of England, reveled in the Roman legends of Haustine. Latin poetry is, in the main, pitched to Sappho's hysterical key.

The fine arts begin in the nude. The model of Raphael was his mistress. The last resort of man to escape the animal vagrancy of his nature was announced by Benthane: useful occupation is the surest support of morals.

No religious system struck hard at man's chief weakness. The mother of Solomon, a wife of the builder of the temple, was the unprotesting Bath Sheba; the Christian disposition placed the Magdalen and the beggars high toward Heaven; Mohammed set the example and the instinction of earth and heaven for the enjoyment of the faithful, the captives here, the black-eyed houris yonder.

These dispositions add to the conviction that revelation has the weakness of other forms of literature, for the languishing and the sensuous.

Travelers from India, China and Japan, wherever literature, art and theology have spread their warmth, bring back pictorial testimonies of antiquity that mankind is more enamored of the origin of life than of the other mystery of death.

Science throws its testimony upon the scene that selection and perseverence and self-denial are ever what Hamlet conjured Horatio with:

"Give me a man that is not passion's slave. And I will wear him in my heart of hearts.".

Oscar Wilde, a vagrant of the Troubadour profession, has carried his propensities beyond the record. Dickens, it is related, separated from his wife for an intrigue with an actress. Charles Reade lived with the actress he was buried by and to whom he carried his first play. George Sand, whose literary vein came from her bastard descent from Maurice Saxe, repeated the role of Catherine II. in literature and ruined some litterateur or musician every time she was conceiving a new novel.

WILDE'S COLLAPSE.

Following Wilde to America the bric-a-brac and decorative craze broke out in the magazines, which often were edited by men of Wilde's affectations of mind and taste. The great collapse of American business followed the decorative period. Hard, sensible books were no longer read. Every home became a Turkish or Egyptian divan, filled with colors and lights and shadows to steep the senses in the lotus world. Portieres broke the mills. Rugs, the beds of the East, replaced our plain carpets. Every room had its alcoves, every alcove its whisper: the languorous novel was ever in the hands of the listless girl. Knowledge ceased to be a power and became a bore. "Don't bring that man here, he knows something. Oh, it is Mr. Wilde? I don't mean dear Mr. Wilde."

Think of this son of Bellal, this asp upon the arm of civilization, being fondled by our selectest! American literature had no chance beside the erotic. He brought the sunflower, stole the olive shade from Ruskin, lectured, wrote in the albums, and the staid Jewish authors of America sat down by the rivers in Babylon and wept. The Scotchman Gilbert satirized him in Bunthorne, but we were so forest wise that we did not "catch on." We do not know one foreigner from another.

THE WORST OF ALL.

Worst about Oscar Wilde he is Irish. That was always considered a pure race. The weakness of the Irish race, their historian, Taylor, says, was in indiscriminately welcoming strangers, while the English people were jealous of strangers. "America," said Senator Davis, of Minnesota, "is a nation of toadies. Bright, creative men can starve here, while we welcome every species of adventurer."

To think of the pure things we despise, because near at home, while welcoming these errotics!

Paintings as dewy as Corot's, poets as pure as Whittier, prose writers as nobly descriptive as Fennimore Cooper, stand neglected, while Trilby's foot is the sign-effigy of the old Methodist house of Harper. Money corrupts the bourgeoisie to be lewd. Power and money lead the troub—these erotics!

A United States Senator told me a few months ago that in the rolls of English Latin papers, carefully guarded, he read the record of Richard Coeur de Lion's arraignment for crimes like Oscar Wilde's, committed in Normandy. The great crusader was a dirty dog.

Caesar Borgia, son of the Pope who gave America away to the Spanish and Portugese, was a horrible specimen of the genius of the Middle Ages. The trade in books of bestial influence upon character goes on in the greatest of our booksellers' shops, not in one city, but in all. The doctrine that "clealiness is next to godliness" means more than we thought. GATH.