The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator - Saturday, June 29, 1895

WILDE AND HIS WORSHIPERS
SINS OF A DECADENT CIVILIZATION.
(From Brann's Iconoclast.)

Some years ago Oscar Wilde toured this country as the apostle of aestheticism, the acme of culture, the chef d'oeuvre of nineteenth century civilization. As might have been expected, all the fashionable fools went into ecstasies over their fellow idiot who had invented, as an ennui antidote, a new method of playing the ass. Wilde wore his pants cut short and his hair cut long, adopted the sunflower as the insignia of his particular brand of fin-de-siecle folly and was so ultra-refined, so overly nice that when I suggested a double dose of compound cathartic pills as the proper prescription for his complaint all dudedom suffered an acute attack of hysteria. That a creature so aesthetic that he became intoxicated on the odor of sweet violets could be either puked or purged was regarded by his devotees as a physical impossibility, a self-evident absurdity. And now this pink of perfection, who proposed to so key up the diapason of our souls that we could find ecstatic bliss in the mute contemplation of that floral abortion, the big sunflower, is in hock for the foulest offense known to the criminal calendar of the unspeakable Turk.

The rise and fall of Wilde means to the average American editor no more than a nine days' wonder to be exploited for stray pennies; but to the careful student of history it signifies that the sun of our boasted modern civilization has already passed the meridian—that the Anglo-Saxon race is even now descending to that dark realm of intellectual night from which it has risen by a thousand years of determined effort. The dude is ever the harbinger of moral death and mental decay. "Life is real, life is earnest," to that people who are pressing forward: when it becomes a luxury instead of a battle, then farewell the bays. When the purse of a people is light its sword is keen, its morals severe, its heart strong, its ambition mounts to the very stars; but with great wealth comes slothful ease and dilettanteism to the few, oppression and despair to the many, degradation to all. Greece toiled sword in hand up Parnassus' rugged steeps, and stood poised in midheaven, the exemplar of mankind; then sank, beneath the enervating touch of luxury until she became the servant of a slave. When the pride of the Imperial City was in the forum and her heart was in the field it was greater to be a Roman than to be a king; but when drunk with conquest and corrupted by wealth, it exchanged the severe simplicity of the she wolf's wards for abnormal sybaritism, the flame of genius faded from her seven hills and the sceptre of the world passed from her hand forever.

That Wilde should long reign a popular favorite proves that Europe and America are already rank with that effeminate dilettanteism which marked the decadence of every nation that has forged to the forefront of civilization only to sink back into semi-savagery. True, we seem still to mount, just as did Rome in the Augustan age; but the men who furnish the dynamics now, as then, were bred in simpler time and can leave no successors. The expiring candle ever burns with a brighter flame-Life rallies all her forces at the very gates of death.

The immorality of a decaying is ever more debasing than that of an advancing civilization. Toil, ambition, avarice itself are conducive to continence; luxury and indolence breed licentiousness and pervert the passions; hence, we need not wonder if, a few years hence, the offense of Wilde is regarded as but a venial fault—harmonizing well with that hyper-culture of which he is the apostle. Being on the down grade, with all brakes off, there is really nothing to prevent the Anglo-Saxon surpassing the vices of Rome in heydey of her esthetic degradation, and putting Sodom itself to shame.

Unfortunately, gross immorality among men and the general tendency of the age to luxurious trifling are by no means the only evidence of a decadent civilization. Here in America women have been convicted of undue intimacy with each other, which, we opine, is something of an improvement on anything ancient Pompeii could boast; while every considerable city is now infested with a class of male bipeds whose offenses against the canons of decency are too brutish to be mentioned. But more significant even than this is the tone of the popular literature of the day and the character of plays most popular with the people. Not a dozen novels have defrayed the cost of their publication during as many years that did not, to a greater or less degree, glorify those who had fractured the Seventh Commandment, and theatrical managers can scarce be brought to consider a "society drama" that does not apotheosize some rotten drab. The whole tendency of the art of the age is to sensuality; the daily newspaper that would decline to publish full details of every salacious divorce case and breach of promise suit would soon find itself sans patrons, while the very elect of the Lord will take into their homes and spread before their children journals containing glaring advertisements of panaceas for diseases known only to unlicensed prostitutes and their paramours.

Many socialistic M. D.'s now tampering with the body social are quite sure that salacious art and literature are the cause of the general laxity of morals; but their diagnosis is altogether erroneous. Lax morality is the cause of depraved art and unclean literature. The artist paints, the publisher prints, and the manager stages, not what the public should approve, but what it will pay for. The idea that public opinion is moulded by the press, the pulpit and the stage as the pickaninny shapes mud pies, is all moonshine. They adapt their wares to the market just as does the merchant.

A century ago the American people, united by common dangers and mutual poverty, were battling for political existence, battling with the unconquered forces of nature, battling with the wild beasts and still more savage men of the woods, and the struggle brought out all their strength, made them veritable men of iron and around them grew up sons worthy such heroic sires.

Our progress and our triumphs are due to those bred to toil and privations, not as slaves, but freemen and peers of the proudest in the land—men who had to rely upon their own strong hands to fill their mouths and defend their heads, but could stand in their homespun suits unawed before princes. But these men are passing away, and in their place we find one class bred to luxury, another to industrial slavery, with many gradations between, each aping the one above it—trying to rise in the social scale above that condition to which it was horn, not by the might of worth, the power of intellect, but by fashionable excesses which it can ill afford.

Under such conditions morality fails, and history teaches that mental degeneration must inevitably follow—that no people divided between sybarites and slaves can long remain in the van of human progress.