The Philadelphia Inquirer - Monday, April 8, 1895

BY AN EX-EDITOR.
The Veteran at Last Compels
Himself to Say a Word About Oscar
Wilde.

Up to this time I have carefully refrained from discussing Oscar Wilde's downfall, but now that his ruin is complete I cannot resist the impulse to express my contempt for some of the men who are loudest in denunciation of the man. There has been no secret about the fellow for years. He lived in that Greater Bohemia in which everybody knows everybody - in which no man's infamy is concealed from the inhabitants thereof. This Greater Bohemia, although it comprises two continents and extends from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, is in reality a very limited world peopled by men and women nearly all of whom know each other personally and where all are known to all the others even in the absence of personal acquaintanceship. It is not a world that is wholly bad, but it has in it a set whose religion is vice and whose vices are hideous. It is from this set that has come much of the literature and art of the epoch - a literature and art that are poisoned at their source. It is no compliment to the great outside world that has no part in this Greater Bohemia that it eagerly drinks the poisons distilled by these votaries of impurity, whether they bear the label of Zola or Ibsen or Sarah Grand or Oscar Wilde. It is because the world at large likes these poisons that such creatures are possible. But there could be no greater sham than that the venders of these poisons do not know the characters of their makers in such a case as that of Wilde. As a matter of fact he has been tabooed for years by every man acquainted with the inner life of Bohemia who held his manhood above the associations that are hideous. I have never consciously read a line that Oscar Wilde ever wrote - I have never seen one of his plays. In themselves it is not likely that his pieces would have offended me very much, although it is probable I should have avoided the plays even if I had not known of the man, but, knowing of the man through those vague whispers that pass like electric currents through the kingdom of Bohemia, I could not insult my manhood by accepting the meretricious brilliancy of such a wretch. Under the circumstances, when I see the producers of his pieces tumbling over each other in their eagerness to remove his name from their playbills I can only express my sentiments with a - Phew!!

The point that I wish to make in connection with Oscar Wilde's downfall is summed up in the name of his farce now running at the St. James’ Theatre, in London, "The Importance of Being Earnest." I so sincerely believe in the importance of being earnest that I can't see why this farce should continue to be acceptable by merely removing his name from the bill. Even if it was acceptable before and is not acceptable now with his name on the bill it is not clear to me that its removal makes a difference. It is absolutely certain that many persons who would have gone to see it before, regardless of the reputation of its author, will not go to see it now in either case. It is because of this that I am insisting so strenuously upon the importance of being earnest. If I had announced my reasons for staying away from Wilde’s plays before his downfall I would have been called a crank. I would have been told that the private character of a playwright has nothing to do with his play. Now the very people who would have thus argued with me are staying away and insisting that a playwright's private character is inseparable from his plays. I acknowledge the fact, but at the same time I am disposed to think that it is the exposure of his wickedness and not his wickedness itself that is creating so much virtuous indignation. If I could have endured the fellows immorality at all, knowing his private character before his downfall, I do not see why I should not be able to endure it now that everybody else knows what I knew before. It is for the importance of being earnest that I am contending and it must be admitted that consistency and earnestness are identical.

It has been a favorite proposition for a good many years that art has nothing to do with morality. This is true in the abstract, but Oscar Wilde went a great deal further and made the impudent claim that immorality and art are inseparable. He turned the immoral into a cult, but I believe that his receptivity was a more important agent in the process than his activity. His whole life was a continuous evolution from the vague impressions of the artistic with which he began to the festering corruption with which his career culminated. At first his philosophy was summed up in the phrase that accompanied Du Maurier's famous caricature – "Let us try to live up to our blue china." He was from the very outset part quack and part rascal, but if he had been left to himself his eccentricities of attire and his affections of devotion to the sun-flower would have had no marked effect either for good or evil. But society took him up because, to use his own phrase, he was "an amusing creature," and the theatres caricatured him because society had taken him up. At that time he was already half bad, and thenceforward his progress from bad to worse was rapid. As the "pure young man" personified in Bunthorne in "Patience," there was a satirical hint of what he would become. After this came his poems and then his plays, and if the rottenness of his life had not eaten away all semblance of shame from his heart he might have occupied a place in the romance of literature as the most intellectual Sybarite not of his own time only, but of all time. As it is, he is likely to end a life that began as a farce as a tragedy that will be both terrible and flippant.

But he has told the climax of his life in words that were prophetic in his introductory sonnet to his "Poems," and I print them as having a deeper meaning than any language I might use:

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute, on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control? -
Methinks my life is a twice written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God:
Is that time dead? Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance -
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?

THE EX-EDITOR.