The Standard Union - Thursday, May 2, 1895

EIGHT PAGES.
A Lesson in the Morbid.

It was a mistake to suppose, when the disagreement of the jury in the case of Oscar Wilde was announced, to say the trial was probably closed substantially. The English methods are peculiar, in that a misdemeanor is not a bailable offense. Wilde is therefore still in prison.

There has been something morbid in the prosecution of Wilde. He may be guilty of abomination, but there seems to be a streak of lunacy in the accusers, while the witnesses are blackguards and blackmailers of the worst description.

Some strange facts are clear in this mysterious case. Wilde is charged with offenses that one would think must be wholly incompatible with his laborious literary work. There is a theory that we do not think irrational on which we can account for this scandal and hold that the accused is innocent.

Let it be understood that Mr. Wilde is a sort of poser as a man of romantic wickedness. He rather sneers at morals, laughs at earnestness, glosses vice. That attitude is not characteristic of brutish criminals. Crime, as a rule, talks fair and sneaks. Wilde has cultivated a reputation for eccentricity. It has been a part of his capital to be of peculiar fame. Start a story that is hideous and unnatural about that and it will go, and the victim will find himself haunted by a ghastly distortion of himself.

Wilde is a man of dizzy conceits; of epigrams; of paradoxes; of fine frenzies, touched up with an impressive manner. He has dealt in the difficult - the suggestive - and has had a gift of insinuation. He has spun sentences so fine that they seem like cobwebs, sparkling with dew, and he is capable of sneering at himself.

There is a glitter of deviltry in the pen of this curious creature - the clothing of sin in his dramas in clouds as in opera - and there is a sentimentality that is artistically perverse. It has been the habit of many authors to affect the mysterious. Poetry has run mad. But Wilde is not so wayward or so rank as a literary wretch as Walt Whitman or Algernon Swinburne.

Given such a place as London. It is a boast that Babylon was not in it with London; that Sodom and Rome are outdone in the British metropolis. There is a literature about the inner life of the town. There are many persons of social, literary and political celebrity, who have been charged with the incredible, if not the impossible.

There has been encouragement of this sort of slander for anarchial purposes. It is the aim of a school of noisy people who think they have had revelations, not only to destroy public credit but to yell in and out of season of the rottenness of society. It is revolutionary fuel, and the fire must be fed now and forever to boil some rough’s political pot.

There has been a great deal of London gabble about phases of criminality that cannot be defined even for purposes of contradiction. The Marquis of Queensberry, for some unknown reason - and there seems to have been much happiness attained in forming conjectures - has found noisome method of exhaling his sensitiveness. He is the accuser of his son along with Wilde, and has considered it a display of virtue to declare purposes of murder.

Society rose up like a fool to defend herself, and sought a victim. Wilde, the poet, jumped into court to fight a man of the world armed with the potentialities of all the hypocrisies, and he was terribly worsted; but the proof of his guilt has been wanting. There were queer and sinister things twisted out of his writings, and he was held to a fierce cross-examination on them. Fancy Walt Whitman cross-examined by Joseph H. Choate on "Leaves of Grass," or Swinburne on a toasting fork before a British court!

The answer of Wilde on the stand to the questions about his letters and the sonnets and novels was that he did not write as one who was engaged in commercial correspondence. London, however, wants a victim, and there is the accustomed outcry that there is some awful influence at work. This is only a way of boastfulness they have, that the greatest city in the world is the worst, and maybe it is so; but before burning a man at the stake or in court, there should be cool and complete sifting of testimony.