The Daily Inter Ocean - Sunday, April 7, 1895

The Fall of Oscar Wilde.

Another idol has fallen. Oscar Wilde may be said to have gone to join Theodore Tilton. With the unseemly trial in London last week the public has no concern except as it bears on an important phase of current intellectual development. The fallen idol of the aesthetes, or, as they are called in France, the decadents, was a distinct and unwholesome force in what Morel, Caesar Lombroso, Max Nordan, and their school of investigators and writers call "degeneration." In his great work on this subject, noticed in the literary columns of THE INTER OCEAN quite recently, Nordan introduces what he has to say of aesthetes in England with this personal observation:

The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomania for men, and its exaggeration of the importance of art have found their English representative among the aesthetes, the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde.

The key to aestheticism, as that term is applied in this connection, is furnished, or at least suggested, in one of Wilde's prose rigmaroles. "Whatever actually occurs," he says, "is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to obvious is to be inartistic." His constant endeavor has ever been to violate the proprieties, to turn his back on common sense. The thread running through all his teaching is that aesthetics is higher than ethics. Even a color sense, he insists, is more important in the development of the individual than a sense of right and wrong.

A mind constantly dwelling on ideas so abhorrent to reason and right could not remain sound and wholesome. Notions unhealthy and immoral poison the springs of life. That an apostle of such perverse and degrading opinions should be hold up to execration and loathing is clearly in the interest of sound morals. The abnormal, the unnatural, whether strewn with roses or grinning deathheads, is the path that leads to Sodom and Lesbos, and in domestic life is the modern Biuebeard whose only apparent object in bringing home a wife is to kill her. What has been looked upon by people of sound thinking and wholesome living as silly affectation is really fraught with the greatest danger to the well-being of society. For some years Guiteau was regarded by those who know him as a harmless crank. Happily in the case of Wilde the crank himself was the victim of his own degeneration.

Nordan sums up his practical suggestions as to the proper treatment of degeneracy, the great disease of the age, in these words:

Characterization of the leading degenerates as mentally diseased. Unmasking and stigmatizing their imitators as enemies to society ; cautioning the public against the lies of these parasites.

These mental invalids are divided into two general classes, "inferior degenerates and superior degenerates." It is not clear to which class Oscar Wilde belongs, but Nordan classes Rosetti, Ibsen, Tolstoi, and Wagner as superior degenerates, and among the notables of history, Charles the Bad, the Borgias, and Napoleon. It requires many new terms to discuss intelligently degeneration in its latest meaning, but at least a bird's-eye view of the entire field is suggested by the familiar word, morbid.

Happily for America the superiors of our country have not been "degenerates." Never were there healthier minds, minds freer from every form of taint or morbidity, than those of Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, and Grant, or those of Irving, Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell. Whether we turn to public affairs or to literature our men of genius have been singularly free from every form of degeneracy. Even Poe, with all his infirmities, seems an angel of light and sanity as compared with the "superior degenerates" of current European literature.