The Philadelphia Inquirer - Friday, April 12, 1895

BY AN EX-EDITOR.
The Veteran Discusses the Question
of Excluding Oscar Wilde's Books
From the Libraries.

There are always people eager to do the right thing at the wrong time. In the case of Oscar Wilde, it was done in this fashion in many different places and in many different ways, simultaneously. But the managers of the City Library in St. Louis and the Free Library in Newark took the lead in choosing the wrong time for doing the right thing by ostentatiously removing Wilde’s books from their shelves and erasing his name from their catalogues. If their object was to prevent his books from being read, not because they are bad in themselves, but because their author is a bad man their action could only have the effect of arousing an unwholesome curiosity that did not before exist. It is the universal testimony of libraries everywhere that Wilde’s books have had no sort of popularity with library readers and even in the libraries from which they have been excluded they were seldom or never called for. Everybody who knows anything about books and libraries is aware of the fact that those that are really pernicious seldom get into the libraries at all, but they sell by the thousands and are eagerly devoured by the multitude of readers all the same. Bad books have their own market and people who take pleasure in them know where to look for them. But it does not follow that the reading of a bad man's book is to be encouraged even if they are not bad in themselves. It is not true that a man's moral character has anything to do with his books, as some of the New York librarians claim. Every reader feels a lively personal interest in the personality of a favorite author. All the libraries are full of books about the writers of books. Next to fiction there is nothing that people read more eagerly than literary biography. An author's moral character may not enter into his writings, but it enters very largely into the reader's interest in them. I know of no class of men whose virtues and failings are so eagerly scanned or so widely known. The reason is one that touches the heart of every lover of books. When a man's book charms me I put the man into his book as far as I am able and read it again with a fresh delight by the light of his personality.

I know a private library that was gathered with such remarkable skill and taste that it has always seemed to me to be peopled by men who wrote the books it contains. In the selection of this library everything that pertains to the men who wrote the books in it was considered from the standpoint of their personalities. It is a library that vitalizes the faults and follies of men of genius. It is a library whose owner not only knows his books but the men who wrote them with such an intimate, personal knowledge that could not have been greater if he had known them in life. To hear him talk of Keats and Shelley and John Howard Payne and Edgar Allan Poe surrounded by their books and other mementos - first editions, illustrated editions, splendidly printed editions, and editions whose charm is in their execrable badness, but bound with the dainty art of a modern Golier - is to come anear to a group of poets whose fame depends upon their personalities as much as their writings. Neither Keats, nor Shelley, nor Payne, nor Poe was an angel, but while communion with them among such biographical richness cannot glorify their vices, it invests their writings with a peculiar psychological interest, and somehow one is almost compelled to concede that their vices glorify their works. But the failings and even the riches of these men of genius were human and so utterly unlike the megalomania of Oscar Wilde, which makes his books detestable to us because of our detestation of the man.

One of the New York papers yesterday said that Mr. William T. Peoples, the librarian of the Mercantile Library, was inclined to be amused at what he regarded as the nonsensical action of the St. Louis and Newark institutions. "Why, my dear sir," he said, "the fact that Wilde is a rascal does not affect his books. They are apparently all right. There is no reason at all why they should not be published. They may be odd, but they are certainly not immoral." How singularly shortsighted this is. The objection to Wilde is not that he is a rascal, but, in the language of a celebrated English judge who tried an action for libel brought by a similar decadent a hundred years ago. That his touches pollution. The question of the morality of Wilde's books is not involved in the matter - their morality may be conceded and yet nothing is clearer in view of the wide publicity that has been given to his downfall that the immorality of his life stains every page of his writings. I believe above all things in being manly and so I cannot fail to denounce as unmanly any effort to separate the morality of his books from the life of philosophy of such a creature. He belongs to a class of criminals that is inimical to society and I wish that not only his books, but the memory of the man could be buried in a common grave.

If the New York librarians who allowed themselves to be interviewed by the papers yesterday speak for their fellows as well as themselves their ideas of the fitness of books are singularly in harmony with the morality of a city in which I have frequently observed the absence of a sense of shame. "We are careful in the selection of books," said one of them, "but the moral character of the writer does not enter into the censorship save when it shows itself in his writings. We would not allow a book with any evil suggestions in it to be circulated were its author a canonized saint. Neither will we exclude books written by Wilde so long as they do not offend the rules of public morality." There is no arguing with such a fellow. The man who doesn't know that there is harm in Oscar Wilde's books knows so little that to enlighten him would only be to make bad worse.

THE EX-EDITOR.