The Sun - Monday, April 8, 1895

A Type of Degeneration.

The complete exposure and the prompt apprehension of Oscar Wilde will have the valuable result of removing an odious creature from the view and the thought of the public. After a little he will disappear and be forgotten, and with him will go the particular school of moral perversion of which he posed as the vain and shameless leader. The proper place for him is a lunatic asylum, to which he should be confined permanently; for the manifestations of intellectual and moral disease and abnormality in him have been constant and unmistakable ever since he began to glory in their public exhibition, twenty years ago. The type of his malady is accurately defined in medical literature, and the symptoms of it as displayed in his case do not vary from those by which it is usually recognized by alienists. He ought to be sequestrated from society like an incurable leper.

Undoubtedly, he is a man of some literary cleverness and artistic perception, and it has been only by means of such abilities that he has made himself tolerable by the public. The plays which he has been writing of late years have proved that he possesses these qualities to a degree unsuspected when he first courted public attention in the guise of a silly coxcomb posing as a languishing æsthete in whom every attribute of normal manliness was lacking. They show that he has facility enough in dramatic construction and in the art of producing a fairly dramatic situation to turn out plays that even the tawdriness and viciousness of the sentiments with which his impertinence charges them do not prevent from becoming successful in England and American theatres of the best class. The subtle moral poison he seeks to inject into them, with the crafty persistence of a mind so perverted, is wholly innocuous so far as concerns normal beings. They listen to his seriously intended provocations to vice as merely the absurdities of fantastic burlesque. Only those already corrupted are capable of understanding or of even suspecting their destructive purpose, unless they be special students of the protean forms in which mental and moral degeneration exhibits itself.

This deterioration is not inconsistent with the possession of a high degree of intellectual brilliancy, of the superficial sort more especially, and it frequently accompanies the refinement carried to an extreme, of which we have so many examples at the present time. People who imagine themselves superior to their fellows in sensitive perception and requirement, so that they turn away from them revolted by healthy expressions of human nature, are really the victims of this decay. They are morbid and hysterical and not of the finer and deeper and more exalted quality of mind and emotion by which they flatter themselves they are distinguished. Very much of the impulse which nowadays is looked upon as reformation comes from that morbid and degenerated source. It has its origin in a diseased discontent with conditions and passions and ambitions which are inseparable from social health and indicative of normal human nature. The natural instincts and the rugged virtues of the people; the invigorating spirit and the hearty sentiment necessary for the preservation of the strength of the race, are treated as the evidences of an inferiority of development. Patriotism is derided as an unreasonable affection and impulse. Partisanship, or the sentiment which binds together kinship and friendship, and brings men into loyal, religious, and political association in great masses is denounced as a vicious instinct to be eradicated. The flag of the country and the symbols of party union are hated and ridiculed.

All this is a symptom of degeneration in minds diluted with the notion that they are of an exalted superiority before which the rest of mankind should bow. It is indicative of moral and intellectual deformity; of variation from the rule upon which depends the perpetuation of the race in sanity and vigor. OSCAR WILDE is an extreme and abominable example of the perverting possibilities of a type of degeneration which must be resisted by all the uncontaminated moral and normal influences of society.