The Chicago Tribune - Sunday, April 7, 1895

OSCAR WILDE'S DISGRACE.

The shocking disclosures in the libel suit of Oscar Wilde, the professional representative of so-called estheticism, against the Marquis of Queensberry have led to a sudden abandonment of the case and the arrest of Wilde upon charges which are too indecent for publication or comment. The plaintiff in the libel suit, now defendant in an unspeakable suit, who but a short time since was the admiration of society and the object of silly adulation, however the case may turn, has already been ostracized by society. His name is stricken off from the literary rolls and play posters. He has been disgraced for life. If he is convicted he will serve out his punishment and then will be relegated to well-merited obscurity.

While it is not in order to discuss the offense of Oscar Wilde it is proper to search for the causes of it. First, and perhaps foremost, he plunged into indecency because he belonged to a caste in society which is idle, useless, unproductive, and therefore profligate. He lived in luxury and what happens to nations, once they become idle and luxurious, happens very often to the individual. He and his set were idlers. While not at the top of the social ladder a certain flippant and audacious literary style in his books and an undeserved and unwarranted popularity on the stage gave him access to all classes of English society and kept him constantly surrounded by worthless idlers, who flattered him and ran after him much as it was the custom to do when he made his tour of silliness through this country. That keen and cynical German observer, Max Nordau, in his recent book, "Degeneracy," aptly remarked of Wilde in substance that a man who wrote such stuff as he did could not help but reflect the immorality in his own person. Given a person with such proclivities, surround him with male and female flatterers, and let him lead a life of absolute idleness so far as any useful work is concerned, the temptations will be too strong for such a weak, degenerate nature to resist. There is little doubt that his offense is a common one in the set with which he is associated. More than once revelations of this kind have been made in the records of English aristocratic society, but the offenders have usually fled in time and concealed themselves rather than face the shame as Wilde has done and affect to make light of it.

The condemnation of Oscar Wilde is also a condemnation not only of some of his own writing, but of the whole mass of erotic literature with which the market is flooded. Never has there been a time when so many male and female profligates are busy with their pens writing obscenity of that most suggestive kind. There are books like that of Smollett and Fielding and plays like those of Congreve and even of Aphra Behn which are simply mirrors of their time and in which there is some compensation for uncleanness in the genius of the writers. There is another class in modern days, at the head of which stands Walt Whitman, with whom impropriety takes on such a robust, outspoken shape that it has no element of danger. The modern erotic school, however, is represented by writers who have neither genius nor talent, neither wit nor humour. They are silly, vapid, and turgid. They have a flippant way of dealing with all questions. They write of vice suggestively and for a purpose. They are unclean through and through and their purpose is to defile others. The tendency of these books is to debauche those who read them, and unfortunately the class which reads them is made up of the young and thoughtless, who on the very threshold form low and vicious ideas of life. Oscar Wilde himself has been an offender in this regard, and the name of the others is legion. Every newsstand swarms with their productions. The photographer’s studio furnishes illustrations of them. The stage lends itself to reproductions of their characters, and even art itself has been tainted by them. Such books encourage personal vice. Apparently they are written for that purpose. Nordau is not far wrong when he characterizes the age as one of degeneracy. Estheticism needs to be deodorized.