The Sun - Friday, May 10, 1895

ENGLISH MORALITY.
The Oscar Wilde-Queensberry Code in
France - A London Man of the World on
the Real Value of the Public Indigna-
tion Over Offences Only Too Familiar to
the English Mind - And on the Revela-
tions Made by Lord Queensberry's Letters.

NICE, April 25. - I have no intention of troubling your readers from this place and at long range with any reflections of my own on the obvious and superficial aspects of the nauseous scandal which has been forced upon the attention of all the English reading public by the domestic quarrels of a noble Scottish family, in connection with the agnostic balderdash and "æsthetic" vulgarities of the English "literature" and "art," represented by that priest of the sunflower and of blue china, Mr. Oscar Wilde. But I had a conversation this morning on the subject with a man of the world, and common sense, who knows not a little of all the parties concerned on both sides of this revolting business, or rather on the private squabbles and the public proceedings which have given it such prominence for the time in the life of London; And I think it worthwhile to give you a summary of this conversation. It was suggested by a paragraph in a French newspaper, setting forth a not very accurate or coherent version of the story, as a typical picture of "English morals."

This paragraph had been pointed out to my friend by a London man, as illustrating either the ignorance or the malevolence or both the ignorance and the malevolence of French journalists writing about England to whom my friend, as he told me, had made answer: "French journalists may be as ignorant or as malevolent as you please, but if that story does not illustrate English morals, I should like to know what it does illustrate. Look at it," said my friend to me, "from whatever point of view you will. Suppose Oscar Wilde to be guilty of all the abominations alleged against him, is he the first Englishman against whom such allegations have been publicly made? Is he the most conspicuous Englishman against whom they have been made? You and I know very well that allegations like these have cropped out in quarters of English life of which Oscar Wilde and his small crew of acolytes know next to nothing, over and over again, during every decade of this current century. You and I know very well that practices such as are charged upon him have disgraced the records of the English courts, dealing not with aristocratic debauchees or with ‘æstetic’ profligates, but with the middle and lower classes of English society, time out of mind. To interpret the furious outburst of popular indignation against Wilde, as an explosion of the ‘moral sense’ of the English public, horrified by a revelation of abominations unprecedented and undreamed of in English life, is to show either an absolute ignorance of the social records of England or the most wretched hypocrisy.

"It is not necessary to go back to the days of the Regency, or to the story of the valet supposed to have been murdered by a prince. You certainly have not forgotten the sudden disappearance from England a quarter of a century ago of a man of rare wit and brilliancy, idolized by a set of very conspicuous people, both in London and in Dublin, who was forced to cut short his visit in a country house in Devonshire, and to take passage for America, where, as you will remember, he passed most of his time in a well known New York hospital, thanks to an accident which occured to him on the passage out. And pray how long ago was it that the life of no less a person than Lord Spencer, then Viceroy of Ireland, and now First Lord of the Admiralty, was made a burden to him by the horrible atmosphere of imputations and of innuendos, in which he and his whole household were involved by the scandals of Dublin Castle? Much more recently, what really came of the story of Cleveland street, and what is the position in London life of this man, Oscar Wilde, in comparison with that of some of the persons, who are perfectly well known by you and by me, as well as by the highest authorities in England, political and judicial, to have been implicated in that story? Most assuredly there is nothing in the aspects of the case, as they were intimated during the trial of the libel suit against Lord Queensberry, more revolting than the incidents which led up to and accompanied the trial for conspiracy, in 1871, of Park and Boulton.

"The newspapers tell us now that the photographs of Wilde have been withdrawn from the windows of the London shops. But the photographs of Park and of Boulton, dressed as women, were flaunted as you must remember, in all the shop windows of London during the spring of 1871, and, as you very well know, while the trial ended in acquittal of the accused, it led to the complete disappearance from London and from English life of a young nobleman, the son of a Duke, and of higher rank, though not of more ancient blood than the young Scotchman through whose acquaintance with Wilde all this mess of garbage was originally drawn out of the holes and corners of Chelsea to be spread before the world. It is the most pitiful affectation to pretend that any grown man in London believes the present explosion to be a proof of the normal purity and dignity of British social life. On the contrary, if you look the matter courageously in the face, I think you will have to agree with me that the revelations made by this case of the domestic and family life of the Douglases of Queensberry are much more startling and significant than any ‘so-called apocalypse’ of low and morbid sensuality which could possibly be made in the case of Wilde. Did you read carefully those letters of Lord Queensberry to his son Alfred, which were produced in the court? Do you think they show the writer to have had any decent conception of the maternal relation, its obligations, and its duties? I think you know Lady Queensberry, and perhaps you knew her eldest son, poor Lord Drumlanrig. What can you say of the allusions made in these letters of Lord Queensberry to his wife and to his eldest son: to his wife, who had been driven into legal proceedings against him, and to his eldest son, of whom not a few people believe that the accident which ended his brief and troubled life, on that autumn morning in the field, was no accident at all? Heaven forbid that I should sit in judgment on the differences between Lord Queensberry and his wife, one of whom I know slightly, and with the other of whom I never exchanged a word in my life. But surely the tone of Lord Queensberry's letter to his father in law, which was produced in the libel suit, is very far from showing that the writer was either tender or considerate of the feelings of the wife and the mother about whom he was writing to her own father. I can understand, too, that Lord Queensberry, having lost his seat as a representative peer, because his brother Peers of Scotland objected to what they considered his irreligious and irreverent turn of mind, should have been annoyed, or even exasperated when Lord Rosebery deliberately put his eldest son over his head as a legislator by making him a British Peer. But can that excuse the positive virulence of feeling shown by him to his son? Is not the dismal picture of the possibilities of ‘home’ life in England, amid the most fortunate circumstances, which is held up to mankind by the attitude toward each other of the members of this noble family, at least as important contribution to the ethical and psychological study of British society as anything which has been or anything which can be revealed through the case, as to the pathology of vanity, of self-indulgence, and of æsthetic imbecility

"Now that the Chinese have been definitely thrashed by the Japanese, we shall be favored, of course, by scribes and pandits with endless moralizings upon the corruptions of an effete civilization in China. For my own part, I think it much more to the purpose to look into the lessons which passing events have to give us, as to the actual moral condition of our own race: and when I am confronted with such a disgusting set of realities as make up both sides of this latest London scandal, I am not in the least inclined to be hurried off by any tempest of conventional howling and cheap public indignation, from a cool and merciless investigation of both sides of the story. You will probably agree with me that whatever happens to Wilde and to his entirely insignificant associate, Taylor, no serious attempt will be made to bring to judgment any person of greater social importance than either Wilde or Taylor, who may be indicated as in some way implicated with them. The great upheaval of British moral emotion, exhausting itself upon Wilde, Taylor, and æstheticism, will subside as quickly as it arose. Indeed, it is tolerably plain that the upheaval is mainly due less to the sensitive righteousness of the London public than to the rhetorical skill, energy, and eloquence with which the case for the defence was handled by Mr. Carson. I will not say if Mr. Carson's plea, as the late Lord Houghton said of Sir Alexander Cockburn's charge in the case of the Tichborne claimant, that it ‘was a miracle of talent and of injustice,' for in the main I do not think that Mr. Carson dealt too severely with the tendencies and the tone of Wilde and of his work. But I will say of it that it was a miracle of legal ability concentrated upon moral and ethical criticism, rather than upon the facts of a case for a jury. Even if Wilde should be proved to be innocent of the misdemeanors imputed to him, he is unquestionably guilty of being, as one London journalist calls him, a ‘pestiferous poseur.' Whether for this offence he ought to be sent into penal servitude is perhaps not so clear, and it may not unreasonably be contended that by the emphasis of his forensic eloquence Mr. Carson made it almost impossible for the ordinary jury to see the facts as to Wilde's actual criminality, otherwise than through the lurid atmosphere of Wilde's intellectual an ethical attitude. But this is only of secondary importance, and I don't intend to let it blind me for one moment to the fact that French journalists and all other foreign observers of this wretched episode in London life are quite in the right when they treat it as an illustration not of the morbid effects of this, that, or the other intellectual perversity , but when viewed in all its aspects and relations, as an illustration of the diseased and dangerous condition of English morals, a diseased and dangerous condition confined to no one class of society and to no one special region in the United Kingdom."

AN AMERICAN TRAVELLER.