ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

LETTERS TO THE PRESS (21)

The New Fiction

[There was a series of articles in The Westminster Gazette by ‘The Philistine’ under the title, ‘The New Fiction: A protest Against Sex-Mania’. The articles are available as pdfs below. The letters from a variety of sources including Robert Buchanan. follow.]

The Westminster Gazette (9 March, 1895 - p.2)

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

     SIR,—I do not wish to be allowed to argue in your columns with “The Philistine,” whose very readable “slashing” of a little book of mine has just reached me. But I should like to suggest that he has made two mistakes, which are of wider interest than my own offences. He says I “describe the world as peopled exclusively by licentious men and faded women, whose life is a round of intrigues,” and so forth. It was untrue to say that my book was made up entirely of such people, but that is a valueless detail. What I wish to pint out is the folly of supposing that a writer of a book of short stories “describes the world” at all. If, for the sake of coherence of motive, one chooses to make the majority of a set of sketches deal with one class of emotions, one does not therefore imagine that these emotions are the whole of life. The second mistake is the implication that the opinions expressed by the characters in a book are those of its author. I should have thought these mistakes might have been avoided by this time, but I venture to indicate them, because, while I think “The Philistine’s” exposition of my own poor book as accurate as it is polite, I sympathise very much with the general purpose of his protest.—Your obedient servant,

     3, St. James’s-place, S.W., March 8.                                                            G. S. SIRLET.

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The Westminster Gazette (11 March, 1895 - pp.1-2)

SEX MANIA AND THE NEW WOMAN.

VARIOUS VIEWS ON THE PROTEST OF “THE PHILISTINE.”

SARCASTIC.

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

     SIR,—As a student of literature I should like to express my admiration of “The Philistine’s” remarks as to seriousness in fiction in his concluding article. In an age like the present, when one may stand before a picture and hear those present asking, not “What moral lesson does this picture teach?” but merely “Is it well painted?” some such protest as that which “The Philistine” has made is greatly needed.
     But surely these remarks of his, good as they are, are not to be restricted to the literature of our own days. Not long ago I saw a child—a young girl—battening on a book called “The History of Jack the Giant Killer.” I took it away at once, and gave the child “Robert Elsmere” and “The Woman Who Did,” and proceeded to examine the work she had been reading. At first I was inclined to think that the anonymous author of “Jack” had no conscientious views whatever, the absurdity and nonsensicality of the various incidents being outrageous, but on careful consideration I believe the work to have been written by a victim of megalomania.
     Again, I cannot discover that Robert Burns or Sir Walter Scott wrote with any serious purpose; in the works of the former, indeed, there is a distinct spirit of levity, and the author expresses sentiments which seem radically at variance with the great temperance movement. To turn to a greater author, whose works, I believe, are still to be found on the shelves of our free libraries, I have always thought “Hamlet” and “King Lear” most morbid productions. “The morbid analysis which is the special mark of sex-mania” seems to me rampant in the former play, and in both there is surely something lurid and unwholesome. This dwelling on madness and its dire effects, these riotings of the conscience, the murders of “Hamlet” and the murders and mutilations of “King Lear,” cannot but be demoralising.
     To take a more modern instance: Samuel Pickwick, the hero of a singular work called “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,” does indeed drink too much cold punch, but, so far as we can see, without any sense of gravity or profound conviction. His consequent drunkenness is therefore morbid and revolting in the highest degree, whereas it might have been made edifying and profitable to the reader if Mr. Dickens, the author, had only seriously put forth his opinion that society should be reconstructed on the basis of drinking too much cold punch.—Your obedient servant,

     36, Great Russell-street, W.C., March 9.                                              ARTHUR MACHEN.

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SYMPATHETIC.

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

     DEAR SIR,—My sympathies are so strongly with the writer of the articles on “Sex Mania” now appearing in THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE that I beg to offer you the enclosed verses, in which I have tried to express what I venture to think is still, and will always remain, the prevailing attitude of men towards women.—Faithfully yours,

     4, Charlotte-road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, March 9.                                ALFRED HAYES.

A GUARDIAN ANGEL.

Ambassadress from heaven to earth,
Priestess of all things pure and good,
The meekness of whose maidenhood
         To Christ doth still give birth;

Could sickly sophistries confute
Thine eyes’ celestial eloquence,
Weak man, the struggling slave of sense,
         Would lapse again to brute.

When passion beckons, not remorse,
Nor frown of chill philosophy,
Nor thundered code of Sinai
         Avail to bar his course.

But where the ways of men begin
To slope toward hell, an angel stands,
Whose silent lips and suppliant hands
         Persuade him more than sin.

O thou that makest Springtime sweet,
My Love for thee is pure as prayer,
My kneeling soul doth hardly dare
         To kiss thy gentle feet.

Spirit of dawn, whose breath divine
Doth bid the fiends of night depart,
Accept the worship of a heart
         Whose holiest thought is thine;

Nor deem my love idolatry,
For surely if the Son of God
Yet walks the earth which once He trod,
         ’Tis hand in hand with thee.

                                         ALFRED HAYES.

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PHILOSOPHIC.

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

     SIR,—Much as I sympathise with “The Philistine” in his crusade against sex mania in modern fiction, I cannot help thinking that he attaches undue importance to what is, at the worst, only a passing epidemic, and for the rest, I am inclined to accept gratefully anything in literature which thermometrises the atmospheric condition of modern society—or, perhaps I should rather say, of modern society in great cities. Surely the books produced by the numberless writers of the so-called decadence, and particularly the books produced by women, compare not unfavourably with the novels popular until lately at the circulating libraries? A book, like Miss Dowie’s “Gallia,” for example, with all its eccentricity, with all its futile attempts to enter into the mysteries of the male temperament, could never have been written by any perfervid Laura Matilda; it is straight, honest talking on an unpleasant subject, and, in so far as it is honest, is surely valuable? The New Woman, so curious about the privacies of the great god Pan, is well worth studying whatever she may be, she is no longer a doll or an automaton, and even her emergence in “Yellow Books” and “Pioneer” experiments is, to my mind, a sign of progress. Why not let her alone, to work out her own salvation from the mud of sexuality? She is too eager and too clever to remain there very long, and in God’s good time she will wash herself and resume her clothing. Even as she is, she is more interesting, in my opinion, than Dora Spenlow or Laura Pendennis. Do not let us forget, moreover, that there is a serious meaning at the heart of the present development of sex-literature; that such literature is a consequence, for the most part, of the healing up of old formulas and old superstitions. The New Woman, eager to prove her capacity for independence, for a life parallel with an equal to the life of Man, seizes the subject which lies nearest to her knowledge, that of sex, and reveals, even in her moments of utter impropriety, something that is individual. Her madness, like that of all pure-minded Ophelias, turns innocently to things indecent, but do not let us forget that, even when she was sane and conventional, things indecent must have been well within her knowledge. It is quite right that sentimentalists should realise this—should realise that young women are things of flesh and blood, not saints in a painted window. When Ophelia recovers her reason, which she will most certainly do, she may be a little shocked at having (to put it vulgarly) let the cat out of the bag; but honest men will respect her none the less, and perhaps be interested in her a little more. Any return to her former state of superhuman innocence is now, of course, impossible. Let us be content to lose our superstitions concerning her, to accept her as she is, in all her honest and thoroughgoing nudity; and in the meantime let us welcome her pretty improprieties as a valuable revelation.—I am, &c.,

     March 9.                                                                                                              ROBERT BUCHANAN.

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A RECIPE FOR CERTAIN NEW NOVELS.

(With Respectful Compliments to “The Philistine.”)

Solve of indecency a dozen grains,
Mix them with flippant beastliness (not brains).
A quart of mental bilge-water next take
And into it some sickliest bathos shake;
Stir into this morbidity gone made,
Much cheap agnostic jargon to it add;
Absence of moral sense best flavours it,
And lo! a dish for garbage lovers fit.

                                               M.

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     Preaching yesterday at Holy Trinity, Chelsea, the Rev. Preb. Eyton made a passing allusion to the controversy on the “New Fiction,” which has been going on in these columns, He modified the phrase used in THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE, by speaking of sexomaniacs instead of sex-maniacs.

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The Westminster Gazette (12 March, 1895 - pp.1-2)

“THE NEW FICTION.”

THE PROTEST OF “THE PHILISTINE.”

MORE CRITICISMS—FAVOURABLE AND OTHERWISE.

     We continue to receive a large body of correspondence dealing with this subject. We have only space to give a few of the letters which we select with a view to representing as many different standpoints as possible.

“THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM.”

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

     SIR,—I am, naturally, profoundly flattered that any book of mine should have furnished the text for so long and so eloquent a sermon as that preached by “The Philistine” in your columns. I may say, en passant, that I cordially agree with much of that gentleman’s utterance. That English fiction should continue at its present pass would be most regrettable—were it possible, which I believe it is not. The sudden eruption of “sex mania,” of which your correspondent complains so bitterly, need not disquiet any philosophical lover of English fiction. It is only what is known in politics as the swing of the pendulum.
     If—which I fancy is not the case—the “Philistine” were a writer of fiction, he could hardly fail to know how far the pendulum had swung to the other side. It is not from any desire for self-advertisement, but simply for the sake of employing the strongest argument ready to hand that I quote the case on my first novel, “A Song of Sixpence.” It was finished in June, 1889, and saw the light in January, 1893. During that interval of three years and six months it had been rejected by thirty-six publishers. What there is in the book to hurt or frighten man, woman, or child, Heaven knows; but the fact remains that firm after firm paid me the highest compliments regarding its literary excellence, but declined it on the ground of its “moral tendency.” The late Wolcott Balestier wrote to me:—“The book is impossible, even in America.” It was published at last on the strenuous appeal of my brother, Mr. Christie Murray, and I got ten pounds for it. It had taken me four months to write.
     Let “The Philistine” take heart of grace. The sex element in English fiction will find its level. That it is too prominent for the moment is, no doubt, cause for regret. That it had no place at all only a year or two ago was nothing less than a national disaster and disgrace, inasmuch as its absence belittled our literature, and made it the laughing stock of cultured Europe.—Believe me, Sir, &c.,

     Prince of Wales Club, March 11.                                                           HENRY MURRAY.

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SUPERFICIAL SYMPTOMS AND THE REAL MALADY.

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

     SIR,—With your permission I should like to make one or two remarks upon the breezy articles with which “The Philistine” has been entertaining us.
     The recent swarm of evil-smelling books has disturbed his peace of mind, and he retaliates with very heavy ordnance. But I venture to think he is wasting powder and shot, because he attacks some superficial symptoms of a disease, and not the malady itself. The upper middle class is in a very pathological state, as they are the first to admit. But no amount of justly indignant rhetoric can “touch the spot,” or make a change for the better.
     When a man is brought to a hospital suffering from a complaint which makes him offensive to all who come near, the doctors do not gather round to ask each other solemnly, “Is this Health?” or “Is it Life?” or “Is he Art?” It is all the three gone wrong, and accordingly they say very little, but do a great deal.
     So a section of the population is very far gone wrong, and certain writers have undertaken to supply us with more or less faithful descriptions of the disease. These books may be possibly useful, as are the clinical accounts which fill the weekly columns of the medical papers; but “it would be too ridiculous to go about to prove” that they are Art or Literature. “The Philistine” takes the writer too seriously—as he takes the disease not seriously enough.
     Literature—as opposed to the mere recording “tape” which is always pouring from the Press—of the genuine sort is healthy; but the tragic absence of humour which distinguishes these books is an indication of unhealthiness; and where health is wanting there is no art worthy of the name. Of all men an artist is the healthiest; out of the fulness of his healthy views of life he expresses himself, and his work enchants us because it is tonic, Life in its entirety. An artist is an orchestra, while lesser men are more like single instruments. In this connexion it seems a doubtful excuse to say that the “short story” does not admit of artistic treatment, in the highest sense of the word. A genuine draftsman is as true to perspective in his slightest sketch as in his largest works; and Mr. Kipling’s small but immortal masterpieces are sufficient evidence of this.
     But it is waste of time to discuss what is obvious; and if anyone maintains that such performances are Art or Literature, there is a word called “Walker!” which is quite sufficient argument. As for those “critics” who vex “The Philistine’s” soul by describing the books as “exquisite” or “dainty”—well, even young men must get their living, and they have no time to be particular about the means.
     But I think “The Philistine” is not serious enough in regard to the disease itself, of which these odorous books are a manifestation. As he says, “Life does not present itself thus to any normal human being.” Exactly so; and therefore he should deal in a more sympathetic mood with the case of those fellow-creatures of his who are in such an abnormal state. The disease is not a new one, and is extending every year in the class of society where these books are the vogue.

     In that class are thousands of young Adams and Eves cut off from hope of the first necessity of life—and, in consequence, health is out of the question. Life is for each man nothing if not orchestral; but, in the orchestra of these young people’s lives the leading instruments are missing. It is in vain to tell them that “there are a hundred other interests in life” than that of sex; so in an orchestra are many other instrument besides the first violins; but when these are absent, what becomes of the symphony? And again, when the indispensable is absent, how can we think of anything else? Starving children will hang about the pastrycook’s shop, and till they are fed there is no other world for them. So it is useless exhorting the clarionets or horns to set to work when there is nothing to inspire with dominant melody.
     I fancy most “Philistines” are comfortably married men. Like people safe and sound shore, they fail to realise the feelings of the drowning man—and here we seem to recall some lines of Lucretius. Men on a raft have been known to do strange things, things quite unfit for publication. Still, when considering them our chief emotion is one of pity, however unpleasant the details are. But—as every “Philistine” must know—there are thousands of men of the cultured class turned adrift from the most fundamental need of life; and the rafts are increasing every day. But I will not go on fiddling while Rome is burning.—I am, Sir, yours,

     March 10.                                                                                                                 E. F.

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MR. OLA HANSSON: A CORRECTION.

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

     SIR,—In his article in your issue for the 8th inst., “The Philistine” introduces a new author to the English public, a Mr. Ola Hansson, as a Norwegian writer, and concludes his remarks about him by saying that “in Norway it seems this surgeon of the corrupt soul—Ola Hansson—has failed to find appreciation.”
     Allow me to correct your contributor, and to inform your readers that Mr. Ola Hansson is not a Norwegian, but a Swede, and that he is a well-known and not a little appreciated writer in his own country.—Yours, &c.,

     National Liberal Club, March 9.                                                             H. L. BRÆKSTAD.

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A SHORT WAY WITH DECADENTS.

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

         SIR,—My kinsman “The Philistine”—who, for aught I know to the contrary, may be my next door neighbour in the streets of this antique city—appears to have retired from his mission and to have desisted for a while from preaching the gospel of cleanly life and talk. Already, no doubt, his enemies are boasting themselves that, in ten days or thereabouts, they will triumph over Philistia by delivering to the world literary monstrosities more hideous than those which have gone before. Perhaps they will meet with disappointment; peradventure they will find that the shamelessness with which they are clothed, as in prehistoric times men are said to have been clothed with shame as with a garment, is no protection against the scorn of honest men who are determined to have done with them. Be that as it may, The Philistine of Westminster may feel well assured tat in Gath, in Joppa, and in Ascalon there is great joy in that one of our fellow-countrymen hath smitten them hip and thigh. For we men of Philistia, men who pretend to no special saintliness of character, but do none the less observe a certain modesty and reticence of speech, who believe in purity of manhood as a choiceworthy ideal and in purity of womanhood as a thing to be reverenced above measure, have growled and grumbled these many months at the words which have been written and the pictures which have been printed to illustrate the innermost hearts of men not worthy and of women far less worthy of the title of humanity. We thank “The Philistine,” true son of Dagon, for making our muttered complaint articulate.
     But we are a very practical people. It is not enough for us that a man of sound and wholesome judgment should take up his parable, and prove to demonstration that the latter-day Decadents are no true men and no true women: should show, in such convincing fashion that no man can doubt him, that they are insidious corrupters of youth. Such proof, such scathing exposure, can be effectual only when its subjects are capable of common shame. But when the signification of words as applied to things is changed, a calamity happens not only in times of civil revolution, but in times of moral disturbance only; when he who is convicted of that which is shameful is reckoned glorious among his fellows in shame, there is need for one who will take his fan in hand and thoroughly purge his floor. In short, we are compelled to consider what can be done to prevent men and women from producing, or to punish them for producing, books harmless and even pleasant to look upon, which are not fit to be admitted into any decent household: which, once admitted, must do definite and actual harm. For these books are pitch; no man or woman can touch them without carrying away defilement. Nor is it any answer to say that those who do not like them need not read them, for the simple reason that nobody can know what is inside a book until he has read it. And the mind of a man is not like a child’s slate; you can in no wise wipe off from it the impression of nastiness left by an “Earl Lavender” or a “Theodora.”
     Some of my friends in Gath, rough-and-ready men, hardy of limb and stern of mind, who fight through life as best they may, hold that, as we have an examiner of stage-plays, so we might have an examiner of books. But I remind them that the last examiner of plays is dead, upon which they say, “Judging by the moral quality of some which he permitted, it is no wonder that those which were forbidden killed the poor man outright”; and I remind them also that the books which are written are as the sands of the sea in number, so that no State could afford to maintain an army of scholars sufficient to read them. Then  they turn upon me, saying, “What is the law?” And I look to the book, even unto Archbold, who knoweth all things concerning the way of bringing sinners to justice, and I read unto them the passage ordaining that the publication of a book, obscene in the whole or in part, is a misdemeanour, punishable at law. The they say, “What means this work ‘obscene’ precisely?” I answer that Johnson, the great doctor, defines it to mean “immodest; not agreeable to chastity of mind; causing lewd ideas.” And that, beyond any doubt, is precisely the definition applicable to many of the evil works of the Decadents. In fact, Philistia stands in need of no new law to cleanse her streets of these lewd sorcerers and masters in the Art Magic of Words. The fan is there; it is in the hands of the Public Prosecutor, and a turn of his wrist would purge our floor. Nor need he fear to make martyrs; for to the making of a martyr a backbone is necessary; and in Decadence is no backbone at all.—I am, &c.,

     March 10.                                                                                           A MAN OF GATH.

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The Westminster Gazette (13 March, 1895 - p.3)

“THE NEW FICTION.”

A PUBLISHER IN PRAISE OF HIS AUTHORS.

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

         SIR,—It is not reckoned amongst the duties of a publisher that he should defend the opinions of the authors for whom he publishes, or their methods of expressing their opinions. None the less, it seems to me impossible to pass by in silence the violent attacks that your contributor “Philistine” has made upon at least two of the authors whose books bear my imprint. George Egerton’s “Discords,” of which he first fell foul, doesn’t pretend to be meat for intellectual babes. The author conceives herself bound to declaim against certain wrongs which have aroused her indignation, and for which she believes she sees at least the beginnings of a remedy. She casts her teaching into the form of parable, as have other missionaries before her, because she realises that as ethical tracts they would not reach the classes she aims at influencing. That her treatment of her often difficult subjects is characterised by not merely tact, but real delicacy of touch, is admitted by a very large number of people who are far from endorsing her theories. Those who stigmatise her parables as “unhealthy” or “indelicate” do so, I conclude, for the same reason that “The Philistine” reads into the first “Discord” a meaning which is neither patent or implied. He speaks of the woman in the story having compromised herself with one man, and the written proof of this compromising relation having come into the possession of another man, from whom, to escape exposure of the former disgrace, she accepts a new one by becoming his mistress. There is not, however, a word to convey this meaning; indeed it is rather obvious that the woman acts as a voluntary scapegoat, and had “The Philistine” been really criticising, instead of slogging, he would have simply called attention to the inconsistency of the woman, who declares that everybody should take the consequences of his or her acts, when she has so recently been bearing the burden that should have fallen on another’s shoulders. But now he is determined to prove his case, and so he reads into the story a passage which does not appear in the Bodley Head edition of “Discords,” but only in that circulated among Philistines and their kind.
     Again, he comments on my advertisement of abusive Press notices, for although my name is not mentioned there can be no mistake as to the intention. But what would he have me do? What other means are open to me of pillorying the ignorant, the biassed, and the malicious reviewer, than to contrast publicly their utterances, and those of the writers, far outnumbering them, who express totally contrary convictions? Why should I think the reviewer in the Liverpool Mercury insincere when he says of “Discords” that “mothers might benefit themselves and convey help to young girls who are about to be married by the perusal of its pages”? or the reviewer in the Weekly Scotsman who detects “a refinement and a pathos that lift the book into a region altogether removed from the merely sensational or the merely repulsive,” because the reviewer in the Irish Independent calls the book loathsome, and slangily says that it “makes a record in all the nasty literature which has been produced on the sex question”? And why should I be censured for adding the quotation alluded to to the Press notices of “Discords,” if THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE thinks the advertisement which contains the quotation admissible to its advertisement columns?
     Mr. Arthur Machen, the author of “The Great God Pan,” has been subjected to hardly less violent abuse than George Egerton, but I see he has spoken somewhat for himself. On his behalf, then, I have only to say that “The Philistine,” to justify his strictures on “The Great God Pan,” must put in the same stocks, certainly Poe and Stevenson, probably Le Fanu, Bulwer Lytton, and Kipling.—I am, Sir, yours obediently,

     The Bodley Head, Vigo-street, W., March 12.                                           JOHN LANE.

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A REPLY TO “THE MAN OF GATH.”

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

         SIR,—I have already contributed my note to this controversy, and I should not add another syllable if you had not published in your columns the letter entitled “A Short Way with the Decadents.” If the writer is serious, which I almost doubt, he proposes to restore the spirit of the Dark Ages, and to apply to Literature the falsest and foulest of all remedies, that of suppression and persecution. Surely we have been shamed and humiliated enough in the past, without this fresh appeal, in the columns of a Liberal journal, to the ignorance of the cowardly, the prurient, and the superstitious? Surely the censorship has wrought enough evil to our unhappy Drama, without the barbarous prospect of its intrusion into other departments of English Art? The spirit which yearns to burke any honest utterance unpleasant and inexpedient, would have shorn English literature of some of its greatest glories, would have expurgated Shakespeare and Chaucer, and silenced Byron and Robert Burns. There is, indeed, scarcely a classic in the language which could not, from one point of view or another, be pronounced “obscene,” I should like, nevertheless, for the sake of Liberty, to see the “Man of Gath’s” threat carried into action as an experiment. It would soon be discovered, I think, that even the Decadent had a backbone, and that, in claiming the right to utter the truth as it appears to him, he possessed the sympathy of all sane-thinking men.—I am, &c.,

     March 12.                                                                                                           ROBERT BUCHANAN.

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“THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM.”

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

         SIR,—Mr. Henry Murray seems slightly disingenuous, to say the least. He bases his letter on the statement that his first novel “finished in June, 1889, saw the light in January, 1893,” and that he could find no publisher in the interval. Surely this is the same Mr. Henry Murray whose “Song of Sixpence” struck me as a good and powerful piece of workmanship, when it appeared as a serial in the Sunday Times at a date much more like 1889 than 1893?—I am, Sir, &c.,

     March 12.                                                                                                         IGNOTUS.

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The Westminster Gazette (14 March, 1895 - p.2)

“THE NEW FICTION.”

To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

         SIR,—May I crave space in your valuable columns to whisper in the ears of “A Man of Gath,” and his auxiliaries in Joppa and Ascalon, that if they indeed wish to purge the floor, they themselves can wield the fan? So shall a grateful world be able to test their vigour of wrist and suppleness of cerebral tissue.
     Lord Campbell’s Act is a stiletto ready to the hand of every true son of Dagon, and were I of that noble race, loth should I be to depute the attempted murder of honest literary and other workers in intellectual fields to the half-hearted and perfunctory efforts of a cultured Public Prosecutor.
     I invite “A Man of Gath” to come into the open, and, backed by his friends, to face the shade of poor Henry Vizetelly, if he dare.
     And, as he cannot war with the dead, I will assure him that the authors of such splendidly sane fiction as “Esther Waters” and “The Man of Genius,” men of large hearts and brains as large, will prove of far sterner fighting stuff than was the ill-fated publisher of the noblest contemporary French literature. The heroic light of honest enthusiasm blazing from the eyes of our younger men will never give way, without struggle à l’outrance, to the miserable twilight so soothing to the bleared eyes of dwellers in the plain.
     Give us, and it is not too much to ask, a clear stage and no favour! Then shall it be clearly seen what ethical backbone sustains to-day, as it yesterday sustained and shall sustain  to-morrow, the heartwrung limners of poor humanity’s most sordid and pathetic tragedies. Martyrs they, in truth, by sympathy with suffering.
     Smug uncleanliness may hoot and hiss. When it can summon heart of grace, and, coatless, take its castigation, it shall at least lay claim to obtain respect.—I am, Sir, yours, &c.,

     Petersfield, March 13.                                                        RUDOLF BLIND.

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To the EDITOR of THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE.

         SIR,—I cannot but think that your correspondent “Ignotus” is guilty of a little of that “disingenuousness” with which he twits me in your issue of to-day. I did not “base my letter on the statement that my first novel, finished in June, 1889, saw the light in January, 1893,” but on the vastly more significant fact that English fiction had at that time sunk to so low a pitch of namby-pambyism that a book which “Ignotus” himself describes as “a good and powerful piece of workmanship,” and is, I know, as absolutely pure and harmless a book as ever got itself written, was refused by the entire publishing trade of London on the ground of its “moral tendency”—in plain English, because it treated a sexual question with some approach to honesty.
     Still, my critic’s stricture is just in a certain degree. My first letter should have stated that a version of “A Song of Sixpence” appeared in the Sunday Times, then edited by my old friend Mr. Phil Robinson. But if “Ignotus” will only take the trouble to compare the one-volume edition published by Messrs. Chatto and Windus with the Sunday Times edition, he will see how severely the artistic value of the book was injured by the heavy “cuts,” which—it is only due to Mr. Robinson to state—were necessitated merely by considerations of space. The book was rejected by at least a score of firms, after that partial appearance, before it found a home in the catalogue of Messrs. Chatto and Windus.—Believe me, Sir, &c.,

                                                                               HENRY MURRAY.

[Advert from The Westminster Gazette (26 April, 1895 - p.4).]

The Censorship of the Stage.

The Daily Chronicle (9 March, 1895 - p.3)

THE CENSORSHIP OF THE STAGE.

THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—There is reason to fear that with the death of the late Censor of the Stage a grave crisis has set in, and that the future of the English drama is at this moment trembling in the balance. The question is, practically, whether the drama is to be a free and self-respecting art, developing, like literature, painting and sculpture, in harmony with the conditions of the time, or a Court amusement, regulated from without by the hypocritical “morality” of the upper—shall we say 500?—with its hatred of ideas and its relish for frivolous impurity. Without overestimating the merits of our little group of dramatists, one may safely say that the drama has within the last five or six years become a really appreciable factor in the higher life of the nation. The later works of our living playwrights, as compared with those of the last generation, or with their own early efforts of ten or fifteen years ago, show a very marked advance in intellectual and artistic competence; and there has hitherto been every indication that this movement was only beginning. But with the death of Mr. Pigott the scene has changed. He was a timid and easy-going despot; he struck at the weak, but winked at the strong. This was his “tact”—the famous tact of which we have heard so much. It now appears that this tact has of late been viewed with displeasure in High Places. A certain correspondence with reference to Mr. Haddon Chambers’s “John-a-Dreams” has caused much disturbance in these exalted regions, and one is horrified to learn that several recent productions, and notably Mr. H. A. Jones’s “Masqueraders,” have actually brought the blush of shame to the cheek of Royalty! Now the wisdom of our ancestors (designing, at the moment, merely to check stage satire upon venality in Parliament) has placed the drama in absolute, not to say abject, dependence upon the will and pleasure of her Majesty’s Lord Chamberlain, who delegates his omnipotence to a functionary known in Stable-yard, St. James’s, as the Examiner of Plays. This gentleman, selected, we must hope, like his fellow-servants of the royal establishment, in virtue of a good character from his previous situation, but for whose ability, and even honesty, there is no other guarantee, is endowed with autocratic power to prohibit any play, or any part of any play, designed for production in England or Scotland, giving no explanation and allowing no appeal. If Parliament provides you with a servant thus empowered, it would be mere folly not to see that he exercises his despotism in accordance with your prejudices and hypocrisies. The edict, therefore, has gone forth, and royalty is henceforward to be able to resort to its favourite place of pastime with no fear of having its morals corrupted. Already, since the death of Mr. Pigott, one serious play by a young and very promising dramatist has fallen under the ban. We stand, like a company of soldiers under fire, wondering who will be the next to drop.
     Now, Sir, before a new autocrat is installed, I should like to remove certain misconceptions which may perhaps prevail among those of your readers who have not given close attention to this subject. people who do not go, or go rarely, to the theatre are apt to suppose that the Censorship keeps the stage decent. There could be no greater mistake. On the contrary, it permits managers to make the taste of the worser instead of the better section of their audiences the measure of “becoming mirth”; for it deadens the public sense of responsibility. Throughout the whole reign of the late Mr. Pigott there have always been theatres in which wanton indecency has run riot. At first the fashion was for scabrous French farces, in which, even if the theme happened to be unobjectionable, the adaptors used deliberately to introduce suggestive speeches in order to impart the requisite “spice” to the dish. Then came a period when fetid buffooneries of English manufacture enjoyed a considerable vogue. Latterly there has been a sort of amalgamation of farce with opera-bouffe, in which half the art of the librettists has lain in the adroit introduction of “risky” lines. Space does not permit me to give examples, nor would you, Sir, print them; but, with access to the Lord Chamberlain’s archives for the past three or four years, I should have no difficulty in producing a notable anthology of things spoken on the stage with the Censor’s sanction—such a collection, indeed, as would doubtless ensure a police seizure for the paper venturing to publish it. Of course I should have to supplement the written words with an account of the “business,” and in many cases the “gags” or improvisations, illustrating and accompanying them. These things the Censor cannot check. He does not, officially, go to the theatre at all, and he clearly cannot supervise the performances in a dozen theatres every evening. The public, on the other hand, is always on the spot; and but for the artificial irresponsibility begotten by the very existence of the Censorship, the great majority of the public would certainly protest against these ribaldries, which have generally neither wit nor ingenuity to palliate them. And pray observe that it is not the purveyors of this class of fare that are threatened by the delightful New Puritanism at St. James’s. It is not any “musical farce” which has fluttered the exalted dovecotes. Oh, no! Prurient imbecility is safe, so long as it refrains from such physical excesses as would call for the intervention of the police. A diplomatic manager and an inventive comedian can always “get round” the Censorship. 1t is literature that is in danger. 1t is the work—aye, and the daily bread—of observers and thinkers, moralists and artists. The “gagging” buffoon, whose very leer is an obscenity, will continue to earn his princely income to the music of princely applause. The men who are to be silenced, or taught to restrict themselves to drawing-room babble, are those who were just beginning to remove from England the reproach of possessing no serious drama worthy of the name.
     It is alleged by the supporters of the Censorship that managers do not object to it. Many of them do not; why should they? It leaves them all the license they can possibly desire, and protects them from the only effectual censorship—that of the decent-minded public. Others are naturally chary of expressing their sentiments on the point. When your head is in the lion’s mouth, you think twice about twisting his tail. But, as a matter of fact, there is a certain shrinking, even among the better sort of managers, from the awakening of the public conscience which would assuredly follow the abolition of the Censorship. They are ready to sacrifice a good deal for the sake of peace and quietness, especially as it is the author who has to bear the immediate brunt of the sacrifice. One does not see why the censorship of the public should be more capricious or turbulent here than it is in America, where the official autocrat-censor is unknown. But that is apart from my present purpose, which is to assure those of your readers who think of the Censorship as a bulwark against license, that the managers, on the contrary, look upon it as a safeguard against an over-nice morality on the part of their audiences.
     Surely, Sir, we may demand irrefragable proof of the advantage, nay, the necessity, of an institution so anomalous and un-English as a secret tribunal from which there is no appeal. It is monstrous, on the face of it, that the livelihood and reputation of any class of citizens, however small, should be absolutely at the mercy of one man, selected, not for proved ability or integrity, not even by the suffrages of a representative body, but by private influence in the royal ante-chambers. Why should the drama be thus declared in a permanent state of siege? So far from justifying itself in practice, this flagrant anomaly is found to be a praise to evil-doers and a terror to such as do well. Even those who dislike and disapprove of the theatre as a whole ought to make common cause with those who love it in protesting against the Censorship. The office does not threaten the existence of the theatre, nor even, in any unmistakeable degree, restrict its popularity. It simply checks the higher tendencies of the stage to foster the lower; and since a theatre there must and will be, it cannot be to the interest of religion or anything else that it should be puerile, frivolous, and vicious, rather than virile, serious and self-respecting. I could easily fill columns with illustrations of the alternate noxiousness and futility of the Censorship, but what I have already said may suffice to open your readers’ eyes to the real character and influence of this backstairs despotism.—I am, Sir, yours obediently,

London, March 7.                                                                                 WILLIAM ARCHER.

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The Daily Chronicle (15 March, 1895 - p.3)

THE CENSORSHIP OF THE STAGE.

THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—I am so thoroughly in sympathy with any and every protest against the Censorship of the Stage that I should be quite content to accept Mr. William Archer’s deliverances on the subject as they stand without caring to criticise the puzzle-headedness which invariably characterises that gentleman’s thought and style, even when he is on the right side. Unfortunately, however, I have read in connection with his fairly coherent letter to The Daily Chronicle, the extraordinary article which he has just published, to please the prigs and the Puritans, in the Contemporary Review. In other words, if he were contending that the drama, like all art, should flourish independently of any kind of obstruction, should be absolutely and unreservedly free from any sort of State or civic or critical interference, I should cordially agree with him and wish him “God speed.” But he is doing nothing of the kind. He is merely suggesting that we should exchange one kind of tyranny for another, for one infinitely more dangerous. His contention is that we should turn from the light-handed ministry of the Lord Chamberlain to the heavy-handed ministrations of the County Council, that instead of the late Mr. Pigott we should have a resuscitated Kirk Session!
     Now, as I have already suggested, I have not one word to say in defence of the Lord Chamberlain. The blunders of the late Licenser of Plays were deplorable, from the moment when he first began to forbid the didactic dramas of the Second Empire (now freely re-emerging on our own stage!) to the moment when he refused to license the quasi-pious muse of Mr. Oscar Wilde. He stood for Church and State, and he refused to have God’s documents even named in the devil’s temple; at the same time, he gave the devil himself carte blanche in the way of smutty suggestion and indecent exposure. All this was very sad. But how did it end? Before very long the Licenser began to feel that public opinion was too strong for him. One by one the “masterpieces” discovered by Mr. Archer and his friends did have a hearing. The era of the pathological play and the sepulchral matinée dawned at last, and full noontide was reached when Mr. Pigott, who had refused “Les Lionnes Pauvres,” gave his approval to “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.” Sex-mania, in a hundred forms, invaded the stage, and Mr. William Archer was happy. He himself avows, in both letter and article, that the drama, the real drama, has lately been flourishing; by which he means, I presume, that it has at last reached the same apex of dismal impropriety as the literature of the “Yellow Book” and the art of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. But even this, even the theatrical apotheosis of the great god Pan, does not content him. He fumes and frets because high jinks are still possible in theatres and music-halls, despite his favourite prescription of Ibsen and low spirits. He wants the drama to be free, but he is alarmed when it becomes free and easy.
     Here, in a nutshell, is Mr. William Archer’s argument that the censorship of plays should be taken away from the Lord Chamberlain and given to the County Council. “No one denies,” he says, “that the County Council is a reasonably democratic assembly—that it fairly represents a widely popular electorate. Why then should we fear that a body which expresses the will of the people should tyrannously thwart the will of the people in the matter of amusement? This is the sheer inconsequence of panic.” I won’t stay to inquire what Mr. Archer means by the terms “reasonably democratic” and “fairly represents,” though I protest en passant against the disingenuous use of the qualifying adverbs. What Mr. Archer means generally is that a majority of administrators chosen by the electorate is far more likely to license plays judiciously than a Court official who is guided entirely by his own free judgment. I deny this proposition altogether. Personally, I far prefer one tyrant to many, an d when the power of many tyrants is based merely upon a greater or smaller majority it is the most dangerous tyranny of all. We have very recently had an illustration of the extent to which the ignorance and prejudice of a few “individual citizens,” as Mr. Archer calls them, can infringe on public liberty. Your “crank,” your Puritan, your choice of the electorate, is swayed by no consideration for individual opinion; he holds himself responsible, and rightly, only to the other “cranks” and Puritans, who have elected him and are of his way of thinking. A Court official, on the other hand, having few prejudices, one way or the other, is guided to no little extent by the public sentiment in general, including that of minorities. Mr. Pigott again and again gave his cachet to productions which he personally detested; a Star Chamber of Puritans would license nothing of which it conscientiously disapproved.
     “The will of the people” indeed! Wherever that has conquered, there has been no art whatever. It is not the will of the people that concerns us, but the will of the artist, which should be absolute.
     Mr, Archer is a Scotchman, but he has studied Scottish history to little purpose if he is unaware of the performances of that highly moral and enlightened body, the “Kirk Session”—a body which derived its strength from the will of the people, and which, in the name of Morality and Religion, darkened the national life for many centuries. The members of the Kirk Session were many of them men of noble character, men who began by preaching the gospel of free thought and free speech to a priest-bound generation, but who ended by driving Liberty out of the land altogether; for they loved Liberty as Mr. Archer loves it—that is, as a means to the advancement of their own superstitious ideas. If the Kirk Session had possessed the power of “licensing” Literature, the world would never have heard of Robert Burns, and Scotchmen would never have become the free men of the world. The power by which Mr. Archer proposes to guide the Drama would be simply another Kirk Session. Individual citizens representing the “will of the people,” would deal gently enough, no doubt, with the drama of edification, but the higher drama of life and character would be driven for ever from the stage. There is, in fact, only one way for either Art or Literature—free and unrestricted expression all along the line. Suppression of individual feeling or opinion, under any pretext whatever, is fatal to intellectual progress.
     Even as matters stand at present, England is not a pleasant country for an artist to live in. Mr. Archer would render the artist’s life in it impossible. In addition to the newly-invented tyranny of the Press, which is rapidly silencing by clamour nearly every independent thinker who still survives, we should have the organised tyranny of faddists chosen by an ignorant electorate. We may guess what would be in store for us from Mr. Archer’s tone of rejoicing over recent developments of the drama. He informs us, with unmistakeable jubilation, that the higher drama is developing and emerging. A glance at the advertising columns of the daily newspapers should make him wiser. There never was a period in theatrical history when plays were so few, and variety entertainments, under the disguise of plays, were so many. Does Mr. Archer know why? The reason is, that a Kirk Session of small critics, representing a Cockney electorate, has been insisting that audiences should accept, willy-nilly, the drama of sex-mania, the purposeless play with a purpose. It has been dinned into our ears, from a hundred journalistic pulpits, that Dulness and Dirt are to be the sole study of the dramatist, and that any piece which is pathological is in the nature of a “masterpiece.” Well, the playgoing public, having tried the “masterpieces” and found them wanting, has rushed in sheer despair to the variety entertainment, which is at least lively, which is at least amusing. What the “Holy Willie” of the World demands now is, practically, that a licensing committee chosen by the electorate should render mere amusement impossible—that, in other words, an intelligent “majority,” elected by members of the community who do not like the theatre, should impose its will upon that “minority” by which the theatre and the music-hall are supported. Small wonder that theatrical managers, having their choice between a lesser evil and a greater, prefer the domination of the Lord Chamberlain.
     As I write a case in point occurs, with the production of Mr. Pinero’s new play at the Garrick Theatre, pronounced by some of your contemporaries a “masterpiece.” I have not seen this play, but I yield to no one in my admiration for the cleverness of its author. What occurs to me, however, if I may be guided by the public reports, is that this piece is just such a production as would be freely licensed and rapturously approved by the new Kirk Session. “Surely,” Mr. Archer may say, “an argument in my favour.” By no means. The new Kirk Session, like its prototype, would countenance any treatment of social and religious subjects so long as the argument was on the side of conventional morality and religion; it would laud to the heavens as bold, original, and unconventional, productions which were secretly respectful to the existing formulas; but it would suppress, at the same time, any argument on the other side. The great scene of “The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith” is, I understand, one in which the heroine, after throwing the Bible into the fire, plucks it from the burning, and sobs over it hysterically, preparatory to retiring into the odour of sanctity with “a clergyman and his sister.” Is it necessary to say, to anyone acquainted with life, that such a scene is as gross a caricature of Socialism and Freethought as Lord Tennyson’s picture of “an atheist” in the “Promise of May”? No woman brought up as Agnes had been, no woman who knows what Freethought and Socialism are, could have been guilty of so gross an absurdity. But that is neither here nor there. My contention is that the superficially unconventional play would be approved by Mr. Archer and the Kirk Session, while the really unconventional play would be rejected with horror. Can my reader conceive a scene in which a hero or heroine threw the Bible into the fire, while proclaiming the evils which, to his or her thinking, it had caused to humanity? Yet such a scene would be as defensible as, and possibly less absurd than, the other. If we are to have freedom of utterance (which I, for one, claim) let us have it, I repeat, all along the line. Do not let us be deluded into the belief that the pathological drama, written half-heartedly, in defence of formulas approved by the “will of the people,” is any real advance on the old-fashioned drama written for public amusement. If Mr. Pinero is to have the right to burlesque Freethought and free thinkers (and I, for one, would certainly give him that right), and to beg the whole social question with a religious platitude, let other men also have the right to treat morality and religion as subjects. This, under the supervision of a council founded on “the will of the people,” they would never be suffered to do. In a word, Art need not be free at all, unless it is free altogether.
     One word, finally, on your leading article concerning the new selection for the Licensership of Plays. I think it is a subject for rejoicing, not for wailing, that an unknown man, a man presumably without any kind of intellectual prejudice or vested interest, has been chosen. If we must have a Licenser, it is as well to have one with as small a sense of moral responsibility as possible. God forbid that we should have an intelligent busybody, who imagined it his business either to restrict or to “advance” the drama, in the interest of any formulas whatever.—I am, &c.,

     March 14.                                                                                                     ROBERT BUCHANAN.

[Note:
William Archer’s article in The Contemporary Review, ‘The County Council and the Music Halls’, which Buchanan mentions in his first paragraph, is available at the Hathi Trust.]

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The Dundee Evening Telegraph (15 March, 1895 - p.2)

     Mr ROBERT BUCHANAN, the poet and dramatist, has a characteristic letter in the Daily Chronicle on the new play, “The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith.”
     The play, says Mr BUCHANAN, is as gross a caricature of Socialism and Free Thought as Lord TENNYSON’S picture of an atheist in the “Promise of May.”

. . .

“THE NOTORIOUS MRS EBBSMITH.”
_____

MR ROBERT BUCHANAN ON THE NEW PLAY.

     Mr Robert Buchanan, in the course of a long letter to the Daily Chronicle, says:—The great scene of “The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith” is, I understand, one in which the heroine, after throwing the Bible into the fire, plucks it from the burning and sobs over it hysterically, preparatory to retiring into the odour of sanctity with “a clergyman and his sister.” Is it necessary to say to any one acquainted with life that such a scene is as gross a caricature of Socialism and free thought as Lord Tennyson’s picture of an atheist in the “Promise of May?” No woman brought up as Agnes had been—no woman who knows what freethought and Socialism are—could have been guilty of so gross an absurdity. But that is neither here not there. My contention is that the superficially unconventional play would be approved by Mr Archer and the Kirk-Session, while the really unconventional play would be rejected with horror. Can any reader conceive a scene in which a hero or heroine threw the Bible into the fire while proclaiming the evils which, to his or her thinking, it had caused to humanity? Yet such a scene would be as defensible as—and possibly less absurd—than the other. If we are to have freedom of utterance (which I for one claim) let us have it, I repeat, all along the line. Do not let us be deluded into the belief that the pathological drama, written half-heartedly in defence of formulas approved by the “will of the people,” is any real advance on the old-fashioned drama written for public amusement. If Mr Pinero is to have the right to burlesque freethought and free thinkers (and I for one would certainly give him that right), and to beg the whole social question with a religious platitude, let other men also have the right to treat morality and religion as subjects. This, under the supervision of a Council founded on “the will of the people,” they would never be suffered to do. In a word, art need not be free at all unless it is free altogether.
     With regard to the new selection for the Licensership of Plays, Mr Buchanan continues:—I think it is a subject for rejoicing, not for wailing than an unknown man—a man presumably without any kind of intellectual prejudice or vested interest—has been chosen. If we must have a Licenser it is as well to have one with as small a sense of moral responsibility as possible. God forbid that we should have any intelligent busy body who imagines it his business either to restrict or to “advance” the drama in the interest of any formulas whatever.

_____

     The Times says:—“Like its congener, ‘The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith’ is a painful but on the whole a deeply absorbing play, which under an unpromising exterior, inculcates the highest morality.”
     The Daily Telegraph says:—“It is a tragedy, and a very fine one—a tragedy that brings out in authorship and acting the very best that we have got in English art.”
     The Standard says:—“The one thing certain about Mr Pinero’s new play is that it will create a vast amount of discussion. One phase of the subject certain to be hotly discussed is that of its morality.”
     The Daily News says:—“Mr Pinero’s play is in some respects a really great work, full of wit and lively observation, and capable of moving in a strange degree the innermost sympathies of the spectator.”

[Note:
The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith by Arthur Wing Pinero was revived in 2014 at the Jermyn Street Theatre. There’s a review on The Guardian’s site, and a ‘trailer’ on youtube. The play is also available at the Internet Archive.]

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Oscar Wilde

From The Trials of Oscar Wilde by Michael S. Foldy (Yale University Press 1997, page 59.)

“What is most important is that although private opinion seems to have been divided as to whether Wilde was courageous or foolhardy to have pursued the case against Queensberry, and then to have refused to flee the country after the failure of his prosecution, public support for Wilde was virtually non-existent. The sad fact of the matter was that at this most crucial moment of his life, Wilde had been abandoned by virtually all his friends. The social stigma attached to the alleged crime was so severe that it would have been unthinkable for anyone to defend Wilde’s lifestyle. To do so would have been to invite the panoptic eye of society to examine one’s own life. Efforts to differentiate between the man and his work seemed equally fruitless, which made it virtually impossible for anybody to speak out publicly on his behalf. Any defense of Wilde would necessarily have been construed as implying a defense of Wilde’s lifestyle.
     One of the very few who dared speak out publicly on his behalf was Robert Buchanan, a well-known gadfly, progressive thinker, poet, playwright, novelist, and ‘frequent contributor to the Daily Telegraph’. Courageously, Buchanan became Wilde’s foremost public champion between the end of the libel trial and the beginning of the first criminal trial. However, even Buchanan’s support was limited and qualified. His public defense of Wilde arose out of a deeply felt respect for the democratic principles of equality before the law, and from an admiration for Wilde’s literary contributions to society. Buchanan in no way defended Wilde’s alleged behaviour. Nevertheless, as the lone voice in Wilde’s corner, Buchanan is significant for sparking a spirited debate in the correspondence columns of the Star, an exchange of ideas whose main subject was the issue of Wilde’s pre-trial conviction by the Press.”

___

The Star (16 April, 1895 - p.4)

“CAMERA OSCURA.”

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

     SIR,— Is it not high time that a little charity, Christian or anti-Christian, were imported into this land of Christian shibboleths and formulas? Most sane men listen on in silence while Press and public condemn to eternal punishment and obloquy a supposed criminal who is not yet tried or proved guilty, and, while catchpenny newspapers give space and large type to the banal execrations of “Mothers’ brave Drummer Boys,” still clamoring for blackmail and “breezy” literature, I for one, at any rate, wish to put on record my protest against the cowardice and cruelty of Englishmen towards one who was, until recently, recognised as a legitimate contributor to our amusement, and who is, when all is said and done, a scholar and a man of letters. He may be all that public opinion avers him to be; indeed, he stands convicted already, out of his own mouth, of the utmost recklessness and folly; but let us bear in mind that his case still remains sub judice, that he is not yet legally condemned. Meantime, we are asked by the advocates of orthodox sensualism not merely to trample an untried man in the mire, but to expunge from the records of our literature all the writings which, only yesterday, tickled our humor and beguiled our leisure. “Fling open the windows,” is the cry of the newspaper gamin. Even if one granted for a moment that the man were guilty, would that be any reason for condemning work which we know in our hearts to be quite innocent? All honor to the managers who refuse to yield to the storm from Grub Street, and all honor to the authors who, like Mr. Grundy, speak the word in season on behalf of harmless plays. It would be very easy to show that, if we to judge existing masterpieces in the personal characters of their authors, precious few masterpieces would remain!
     This affair is not yet ended, but already more than one piece of “tainted” evidence has gone to pieces. I is wiser and juster, and at any rate more charitable, to await the issue than to anticipate it with spiteful “sound and fury.” Let us ask ourselves, moreover, who are casting these stones, and whether they are those “without sin amongst us,” or those who are themselves notoriously corrupt.—Yours &c.,    

     15 April.                                                                                                       ROBERT BUCHANAN.

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The Star (19 April, 1895 - p.3)

Letter from Lord Queensberry.

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

     SIR,—My attention has only to-day been called to Mr. Robert Buchanan’s letter in your issue of Tuesday night.
     I have received many anonymous letters, and it is vexatious not to be able to reply to some of them. One this morning called my attention to this letter of Mr. Buchanan. Can it possibly have come from himself? or was it inspired by him? I have not the pleasure of Mr. Buchanan’s acquaintance, but he seems to address a question to myself in this letter to your paper of the 16 April when he says, “Who are casting these stones?” and are they without sin or those “who are notoriously corrupt”? Is Mr. Buchanan himself without sin? I certainly don’t claim to be so myself, though I was compelled to throw the first stone. Whether or not I am justly notoriously corrupt I am willing patiently to wait for the future to decide. Judge not that you be not judged—I would add, until you were qualified to know all the actual facts of a man’s life, and what he really was.—Yours, &c.,

     18 April.                                                                                               QUEENSBERRY.

___

The Star (20 April, 1895 - p.3)

OSCAR WILDE.

LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS APPEALS FOR FAIR PLAY.

SIR JOHN BRIDGE IS ACCUSED OF “FLAGRANT PREJUDICE.”

Lord Queensberry’s “Precious Bit of Cant and Bad Grammar”
Do Not Alienate the Sympathy of Mr. Robert Buchanan, Who
Only Wants to See “Queensberry Rules” Observed in the Trial.

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

     SIR,—When the great British public has made up its great British mind to crush any particular unfortunate whom it holds in its power, it generally succeeds in gaining its object, and it is not fond of those who dare to question its power, or its right to do as it wishes. I feel, therefore, that I am taking my life in my hands in daring to raise my voice against the chorus of the pack of those who are now hounding Mr. Oscar Wilde to his ruin; the more so as I feel assured that the public has made up its mind to accept me, as it has accepted everybody and everything connected with this case, at Mr. Carson’s valuation. I, of course, am the undutiful son who, in his arrogance and folly, has kicked against his kind and affectionate father, and who has further aggravated his offence by not running away and hiding his face after the discomfiture of his friend. It is

NOT A PLEASANT POSITION

to find oneself in with regard to the public, but the situation is not without an element of grim humor, and it is no part of my intention to try and explain my attitude or defend my position. I am simply the “vox in solitudine clamantis” raising my feeble protest; not in the expectation of making head against the wave of popular or newspaper clamor, but rather dimly hoping to catch the ear and the sympathy of one or two of those strong and fearless men and women who have before now defied the shrieks of the mob. To such as these I appeal to interfere and to stay the hand of “Judge Lynch.” And I submit that Mr. Oscar Wilde has been tried by the newspapers before he has been tried by a jury, that his case has been almost

HOPELESSLY PREJUDICED

in the eyes of the public from whom the jury who must try his case will be drawn, and that he is practically being delivered over bound to the fury of a cowardly and brutal mob. Sir John Bridge, in refusing bail to-day, stated that he knew of no graver offence than that with which Mr Wilde is charged. Mr Wilde, as a matter of fact, is charged with a “misdemeanor” punishable by two years’ imprisonment with or without hard labour as a maximum penalty; therefore, the offence with which he is charged is, in the eye of the law, which Sir John Bridge is supposed to represent, comparatively trifling. I should very much like to know how, in view of this fact, Sir John Bridge can reconcile what he said with his conscience, and with his position as the absolutely impartial exponent of the law, and whether it is not obvious that, in saying what he did, he allowed

HIS PERSONAL FEELINGS

on a particular point to override his sense of abstract justice, to the prejudice of the man charged before him. If a police magistrate of 20 years’ experience shows such flagrant prejudice, what can be expected from the men who will at the Old Bailey form the jury of what the law humorously terms Mr Oscar Wilde’s “peers”?
     There are a thousand other things that might be said, but I am not the person to say them, nor is it my place to make any reply to the precious bit of cant and bad grammar which appears over Lord Queensberry’s signature in your issue of to-day, and which I feel I may safely leave to the tender mercies of Mr Robert Buchanan, whom I hereby beg to thank, in the name of justice, of sanity, and of Christian charity, for his noble letter.—Your obedient servant,

     Chalcott House, Long Ditton, 19 April.                                            ALFRED DOUGLAS.

_____

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

     SIR,—I regret that the Marquess of Queensberry, for whose character and opinions (so far as I know them) I have the highest respect, should have misconceived the meaning of my letter to you on the subject of the Wilde prosecution. The conduct against which I protested was not that of the “agnostic” nobleman, who was strictly within his rights in protecting his son and acting in his own defence, but that of those Christian publicists who were pronouncing sentence upon Mr. Wilde before he was even committed for trial. I am sure that Lord Queensberry, who has himself suffered cruelly from the injustice of public opinion, is quite as sorry as I am for his fallen foe, and is quite as anxious as I am that he should be dealt with fairly, justly, and even mercifully. Personally, I would not condemn even a dog on the kind of tainted evidence which has been foreshadowed during the recent preliminary inquiry, but the case, as I said, is still only sub judice, and none of us yet know with any certainty whether or not a jury of Englishmen will pronounce Mr. Wilde guilty.
     This being the case, I should like to ask on what conceivable plea of justice or expediency an accused person, not yet tried and convicted, is subjected to the indignities and inconveniences of a common prison, and denied, while a prisoner, the ordinary comforts to which he has been accustomed when at large? Why should his diet be regulated unduly? Why should he be denied the sedative of the harmless cigarette, more than ever necessary to a smoker in times of great mental anxiety? Why should not his friends visit him? Why, in short, should he not enjoy, as far as is practicable, all the privileges of an innocent man? Innocent he presumably is until he is tried and found guilty. If it be argued that the case is a serious one, in so far as the magistrate refuses bail and the evidence is considered strong against the prisoner, the reply is that many a case which looked far blacker has ended in an acquittal; and, at any rate, we have no right whatever to

ASSUME THE GUILT

beforehand. Assume for a moment that the prisoner is acquitted, what amends can be made for treatment which is as unjust as it is abominable? As matters stand, we may shatter a man's health, torture his mind and his body, drive him into madness or imbecility, and then, finally, if it turns out we are mistaken, all we can do is say, “We’re very sorry!—we beg your pardon!—you can go!”
     I commend this system of things to the attention of the Marquess of Queensberry. It is only possible, I think, in a country where Christianity has got the better of justice and common-sense, and where a man may be lynched by a Christian Press and a Christian public long before he is really put on trial. I have too much sympathy with his lordship's creed to think that the man who holds it would approve of such a system. So far from thinking him “notoriously corrupt,” I think him notoriously brave and honest, anxious that all men should have, under Queensberry and all rules, a fair trial and fair play; and I would certainly be the last man in the world to offer him disrespect.—Yours, &c.,

     19 April                                                                                                        ROBERT BUCHANAN.

___

The Star (22 April, 1895 - p.2)

OSCAR WILDE.

TWO VIEWS OF HIS PRESENT POSITION.

Has he been Unfairly or Prematurely Judged by Magistrate and
Public, or does His Case Illustrate the Need of Prison Reform?

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

     SIR,—After some howls of execration, the expunging of an author’s name from the public playbills, and other acts of Christian charity which have lately been witnessed, it may not be out of place to enter some kind of protest against this very hasty prejudgement of a case still pending. After all, in sexual errors, as in every thing else, the real offence lies, and must always lie, in the sacrificing of another person in any way, for the sake of one’s own pleasure or profit; and judged by this standard—which though not always the legal standard is certainly the only true moral standard—the accused is possibly no worse than those who so freely condemn him. Certainly it is strange that a society which is continually and habitually sacrificing women to the pleasure of men, should be so eager to cast the first stone—except that it seems to be assumed that women are always man’s lawful prey, and any appropriation or sacrifice of them for sex purposes quite pardonable and “natural.”—Yours, &c.,

                                                                                                                       HELVELLYN.

_____

     SIR,—I chanced to read two letters in your issue of this evening, one from Lord Alfred Douglas and another from Mr. Buchanan, in connection with the proceedings against Wilde in the law courts.
     With regard to the sentiments of the first named, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that—because the offence with which Wilde is charged happens to be classified as a misdemeanor—his lordship should characterise it as “comparatively trifling.” The statute at least provides for it a term of two years’ imprisonment with hard labor, this being the maximum period of hard labor, if I mistake not, that our Legislature allows to be imposed for any offence whatever, it being considered the most that any human being is capable of enduring. I apprehend, however, that the majority of decent English folk will fully endorse Sir John Bridge’s sentiments as to the gravity of the offence with which Wilde is charged. Be that, however, as it may, it seems to me that Lord Alfred Douglas is the very last man on the face of creation who is entitled to express any opinion on the case whatever. His allegation of unfairness against Sir John Bridge— one of the kindest-hearted and most just of magistrates that ever sat on the Bench—will be met by your readers with the disdain it merits.
     With Mr. Buchanan the matter assumes an entirely different aspect. His position, disinterestedness, and ability entitle his utterances to receive

RESPECTFUL ATTENTION

at all hands. With any little difference of opinion between him and Lord Queensberry I am not concerned in dealing. If he considers that the régime of our prisons, as regards persons awaiting their trial, is unduly severe, he has every right to say so; and for aught I know there may be much to be advanced both from his and other points of view. As a general question it is one that may very properly be discussed, but why it should in any way be attached to the case of Wilde more than to that of any poor wretch who is awaiting “presentation at court” I altogether fail to see. I am not aware that it has been alleged that Wilde has been subjected to different treatment from that accorded to any other individual in precisely similar circumstances. If there were any such evidence, there might be some grounds for raising the question in connection with this case, but as I believe there is none, I should advocate relegating the discussion of the matter to some more opportune moment. I daresay Wilde misses his cigarettes, but not one whit more than “Bill Sykes” would his “clay.” I confess my sympathies would be rather with the latter; but that, again, is neither here nor there. Of one thing, however, I am convinced, and that is—if there is to be a dispassionate consideration of the merits or demerits of the existing régime of prison treatment, the surroundings of Wilde’s case are peculiarly unfitted for attaining that end.—Yours, &c.,

     London 20 April.                                                                                COMMON SENSE.

     [We have received a host of other letters bearing on the Wilde case, which, for various reasons, we have decided not to publish. — Ed. Star.]

___

The Star (23 April, 1895, p.2)

OSCAR WILDE.

MR. BUCHANAN PLEADS FOR
A BROTHER ARTIST.

And Says That Wilde Has Already Lost Everything That
Can Make Life Tolerable—Another Correspondent
Holds Different Views of “Christian Charity.”

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

     SIR,—Just one word before you close this discussion, in answer to your correspondent “Common Sense.” What I claim for Mr. Wilde I should certainly claim for any untried prisoner, Mr. William Sikes included; and I certainly do not think that a question of the liberty of the subject should be postponed sine die, on any possible plea of inexpedience. When an outrage on liberty is committed or threatened is the right time to protest against it.
     But I will even go a little further. Just in so far as a man has been respected by us, has amused us, has afforded us harmless pleasure, should he receive delicate consideration. Treatment which would not in the least trouble Mr. Sikes may break the heart of a gentleman and a scholar like Mr. Oscar Wilde; and if we who follow his calling do not speak the needful word on his behalf, who is to do so? Whatever he is, whatever he may be assumed to be, he is a man of letters, a brother artist, and no criminal prosecution whatever will be able

TO ERASE HIS NAME

from the records of English literature. That I say advisedly, though we are far as the poles asunder in every artistic instinct of our lives, and though on more than one occasion I have ridiculed some of his opinions. And I say in conclusion that even if he is as guilty as some suppose him, he has already been terribly and cruelly punished; for while Mr. Sikes would lose nothing by conviction, Mr. Wilde would lose everything—has already lost everything—that can make life tolerable. I have hopes that even a British jury will perceive this, and, not for the first time, temper justice with mercy; for already, I think, the public are awakening to the fact that they have gone too far. “Alas for the rarity of Christian charity under the sun!” Now, as ever, the priests of all creeds are dumb, and it is left for an ordinary citizen to write as I have written.—Yours, &c.,

     22 April.                                                                                                       ROBERT BUCHANAN.

_____

SIR,—The two letters which you publish to-day appear to be specimens of the opposite views held on the Wilde case. It is a matter for regret that an epistle like that of “Helvellyn” should be produced as the views of anyone.
     However, that expression carries its own mark with it, and requires no general comment. The two or three points in it will hardly bear touching. That affectation of heavy sarcasm as to Christian Charity is an example of inanity which might hardly have been surpassed by any of the correspondents whose contributions are for various reasons unpublished. To publish a letter like that is hardly charitable to the writer, and there are few who would be deceived by its contents. The writer seems unable to appreciate the fact that in the action at law now concluded, Wilde had tacitly admitted, with the ablest counsel on his side, that he was compelled to abandon the attempt to refute another man’s right to address him in terms of the grossest condemnation.
     When vice cannot be openly palliated the last resort is usually a sneer at Christian Charity. Perhaps “Helvellyn” will learn that Christian Charity does not mean weakness and toleration of Pagan viciousness. Moreover, virtue is something in itself, and is older than Christianity. Everyone who believes in virtue is not tied to Christianity; but everyone who disbelieves in the one is sure to oppose the other. A sneer is not always the fruit of moral or intellectual superiority.
     When a man has offended the ears of all decent people, in the most ordinary sense, by openly flaunting the universal and not too exacting code of this world’s morals, and by posing as

THE APOSTLE OF CORRUPTION,

and all that is opposed to civilisation itself, it is not Christian Charity that has anything to do with it—until he has reversed his ways and rendered some satisfaction to an outraged public. The howls of execration, if they have reached “Helvellyn,” are a healthy sign; and as to the erasure of a name from playbills, I say emphatically that I wonder why the productions themselves have not been withdrawn. Along with broad opinions on many subjects, it is possible to have a narrow aversion to countenancing even the works of the man who has, with diffidence, been compelled to expose himself to the contempt of mankind.
     There is no question as to Sir John Bridge’s treatment of Wilde. Everyone is aware that but for the serious nature of the charge, and that the evidence was in Sir J. Bridge’s estimation “not slight,” he could have been released on bail. With this in mind is it to be supposed that the loss of cigarettes, but with the advantage of good meals—not possible to many others—renders the man a martyr? It is puerile nonsense to suggest he is not well enough treated.
     On the other hand many people are asking why the indictment has been drawn under the Act involving the minor penalties. If rumor is but tinged with truth the reason is a good one—and as bad as it could be.—Yours, &c.,

     Whitehall, S.W., 22 April.                                                                                        DIKE.

[We have received another large batch of letters on this subject, some of them from Liverpool, Middlesbrough, and other far-off centres, but none expresses views different from those which have been published from other correspondents.]

___

The Star (24 April, 1895 -p.2)

OSCAR WILDE.

MR. BUCHANAN REPLIES TO AN
“ANONYMOUS COWARD.”.

And Says That He “Heard From the Marquess of
Queensberry’s Own Lips That He Would Gladly Set the
Public an Example of Sympathy and Magnanimity.”

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

     SIR,—Pray do not let this discussion close with a lying perversion of the truth on the part of an anonymous correspondent. If “Dike” had signed his name we should know what kind of individual it is that snaps and gnaws at a fallen man, thinks that to demand fair play is to utter “puerile nonsense,” and clamors for the destruction not only of an untried prisoner, but of everything that he has ever written.
     Since even utterances like these, which bear the same relation to public opinion as unsigned and scurrilous postcards do to signed letters, may have their weight with those who only read as they run, let me briefly traverse the only serious statement in “Dike’s” letter, viz., the statement that “Wilde tacitly admitted, with the ablest counsel on his side,” that he acknowledged “another man’s right to address him in terms of the grossest condemnation.”
     All that Mr. Wilde did, through his counsel, in the face of quite unexpected evidence, was to withdraw from the prosecution against Lord Queensberry. It could have served no purpose then, it would indeed have been the height of madness to proceed any further. Before evidence of the sort threatened could be dealt with at all, it had to be thoroughly understood and sifted, and inquiry instituted into the sources from which it was gathered. Charges so sudden and so terrible could not be met offhand, if they were to be met at all; and in my opinion Sir Edward Clarke adopted

THE ONLY COURSE POSSIBLE

under the circumstances.
     Let me repeat again, with emphasis, that this case has not been tried, and that all we have heard as yet is a summary of the evidence for the prosecution. In the face of this, your correspondent, assuming Mr. Wilde’s guilt, talks about “pagan viciousness,” and goes further even than Mr. Wilde’s legal accusers in his complaint that the prisoner is only to be tried for “the minor penalty.” “Virtue,” he says, “is something in itself, and is older than Christianity.” To the pagan mind, virtue was virtus, and synonymous with manly “courage,” and so the word is out of place on the lips of an anonymous coward.
     Has even a writer like this no sense of humor? Does he seriously contend that the paradoxes and absurdities with which Mr. Wilde once amused us were meant as serious attacks on public morality? Two thirds of all Mr. Wilde has written is purely ironical, and it is only because they are now told that the writer is a wicked man that people begin to consider his writings wicked. I think I am as well acquainted as most people with Mr. Wilde’s works, and I fearlessly assert that they are, for the most part, as innocent as a naked baby. As for the much misunderstood “Dorian Gray,” it would be easy to show that it is a

WORK OF THE HIGHEST MORALITY,

since its whole purpose is to point out the effect of selfish indulgence and sensuality in destroying the character of a beautiful human soul. But it is useless to discuss these questions with people who are color-blind. I cordially echo the cry that, failing a little knowledge of literature, a little Christian charity is sorely wanted. While we have a whole mob of savages clamoring with “Dike” for lynch-law and retribution, we have not one Christian clergyman to utter a sound. Be the victim either Jean Valjean or Oscar Wilde, “Bill Sikes” or the Marquess of Queensberry, no Bishop Miguel appears (save in romantic fiction), to preach and to practise forgiveness. That, I may add, is left to the “agnostic,” who has most right to feel revengeful. I heard from the Marquess of Queensberry’s own lips that he would gladly, were it possible, set the public an example of sympathy and magnaminity.—Yours, &c.,

     23 April.                                                                                                       ROBERT BUCHANAN.

___

The Star (25 April, 1895 - p.2)

OSCAR WILDE.

Lord Queensberry Defines His
“Sympathy” for the Dramatist

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

SIR,—I must take exception to the word “sympathy” that is placed in my mouth. I never used it. In my time I have helped to cut up and destroy sharks. I had no sympathy for them, but may have felt sorry, and wished to put them out of pain as soon as possible.
     What I did say was that as Mr. Wilde now seemed to be on his beam ends and utterly down I did feel sorry for his awful position, and that supposing he was convicted of those loathsome charges brought against him that were I the authority that had to mete out to him his punishment, I would treat him with all possible consideration as a sexual pervert of an utterly diseased mind, and not as a sane criminal. If this is sympathy Mr. Wilde has it from me to that extent.—Yours, &c.,

     24 April.                                                                                               QUEENSBERRY.

_____

     SIR—As Mr. Buchanan allows his indignation in such a worthy cause to run away with his courtesy and discretion, I claim your indulgence in reply. I need hardly apologise for the grave misfortune of having irritated your correspondent by pure chance—nor do I desire to do so.
     I have sufficient manners not to wish to use expletives which lose all meaning, and terms which merely indicate egotistical intolerance of divergent views. The tone Mr. Buchanan adopts appears to me grotesque. Why does he not discover such abject “cowardliness” in the epistle of “Helvellyn,” to whom I responded directly and only indirectly and accidentally to Mr. Buchanan’s touching appeal for disinterested “charity”? The opinions of a most “ordinary citizen” may be expressed, I presume, even when they differ from those of a less ordinary person of some renown. Everyone does not enjoy or desire the particular notoriety which Mr. Buchanan is accustomed to. It is not desirable for everyone to court it. In the one case it is a not unwelcome necessity; in the other it may be otherwise. My name and address are with the editor; the views expressed are with the public, and stand by themselves.
     I disclaim Mr. Buchanan’s misapplied verbs in his first paragraph; they are as irrelevant as his adjectives, and both are equally undignified. The opinions given in my letter were temperate and free from extravagant verbiage, which is only necessary to cover a weak position. No one disputes the statement that

“QUITE UNEXPECTED EVIDENCE”

caused Sir Edward Clarke to take the only possible course. It was also the last course that would have been taken without the best reasons. Mr. Buchanan can place his own interpretation on the proceedings, but I neither discuss the “case that has not been tried” nor assume guilt. The traversing of my only serious statement is evidently intended to be humorous. At least it appears to be so, and was a very equivocal process if a serious one.
     Virtue—valor, courage, and virtue as we understand it—did exist in pagan times, but I spoke of pagan viciousness. A very slight knowledge of literature elucidates the meaning, and it is not necessary to split hairs. There was no Christian Charity to sneer at and fall back upon as the last resort then, and “courage” was a self-dependent quality.
     Mr. Wilde’s literary efforts have been ironical and harmless, perhaps—to some extent. Can we go further a step, and say they have been elevating and beneficial? Mr. Buchanan’s pen has often adorned the columns of the Daily Telegraph, and he may have read in its columns a leading article which appeared on the day following the conclusion of the Queensberry-Wilde case. That article went far beyond any utterances of mine, and was an admirable expression—

VIGOROUS AND JUSTIFIED.

The fact is Mr. Buchanan drops the affectation of broad, brotherly, generous disinterestedness, and shows that he views the whole business through toned glass, and to remedy it implies that everyone else is color blind.
     I am surprised to learn that I, with others, clamor for lynch law and retribution; it is one thing to expect justice, retribution, and postpone Christian Charity to the time when a man justifies his expectation of it, but quite another to clamor for “lynch law.” That is evidently Mr. Buchanan’s humor.
     Approval of Sir J. Bridge’s judicial fairness can only be reiterated, and the great majority of the public will not question it. It could not be expected that in the circumstances he would allow his impartiality to be warped by weak-minded sentimentality.—Yours, &c.,

     Whitehall, S.W., 24 April.                                                                                        DIKE.

___

The Star (26 April, 1895 - p.3)

SARKASTIK!

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

SIR,—In view of the articles suggested to your contemporaries by the proceedings at the Central Criminal Court during the last sessions, I venture to ask you whether you consider it is likely that they are sending any reporters inside the courts during the present sessions, and if so whether there is any likelihood of the reporters being persons not suffering from intermittent deafness?
     It would much gratify me to know also what sentences your contemporaries have passed in the more important cases, and which of your contemporaries they have appointed to carry them out; also, whether I can be arrested for contempt of the Press on account of this inquiry.—Yours, &c.,

                                                                                                                       MORE ADEY.

___

The Star (30 April, 1895 - p.3)#

Mr. Buchanan Explains His Position.

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE STAR.”

     SIR,—It is stated in the reports of some of your contemporaries that a certain letter to Mr. Wilde was written by me, and that it expressed “the strongest sympathy with Mr. Wilde as to the charges under which he is living.” Thus is somewhat misleading. If the letter in question is mine, it expresses simply my belief in Mr. Wilde’s innocence—a belief which I have maintained in your columns, and which grows stronger daily as I study the sort of evidence brought against him.
     Mr. Justice Charles described the letter as written by a “friend”; whereas my personal acquaintance with Mr. Wilde is very slight, and I have more than once crossed swords with him on literary grounds.
     I shall be very much obliged if you will publish this correction, as the report would seem to imply that I am in sympathy with Mr. Wilde, even on the presumption of his guilt.—Yours, &c.,

     29 April.                                                                                                       ROBERT BUCHANAN.

___

Dundee Advertiser (27 May, 1895 - p.5)

     At the first blush most people will incline to think the sentence on OSCAR WILDE a cruel one. Two years’ imprisonment with hard labour mean more to him than to a misdemeanant of inferior powers and obscure station. WILDE has already fallen under a severity of public condemnation almost immeasurable and, happily, such as comes to few men in a century; his status and his opportunities are destroyed; the very gifts which carried him into the first rank of British writers are doomed to waste. But, on reflection, we believe the sentence to be wholly just and wise. The publicity given to ideas and practices dangerous to social health renders it necessary that WILDE’S offence should be stamped with all the censure that the law allows. WILDE’S unpardonable sin is that, with great powers of mind and a judgment fitted to discern what made for good and what for evil, he has acted as a deliberate corrupter of youth. He has poisoned the atmosphere about him. Apart from this, WILDE has simply to be taken as a sexual pervert of a type familiar enough to students of the pathology of disease; and his immense egotism is but another symptom of a nature off the normal line. Were it not for the social consequences of his conduct and the necessity for a penalty calculated to arrest these, the asylum would be a fitter place for him than the prison. The amazing thing is that so great a virility of intellect should have existed in a nature otherwise capable of living below the plane of sanity. The key to the enigma lies in some obscure recess of the brain as yet unvisited even by the scientific specialist. The whole subject is loathly, and the wholesome mind forced to dwell upon it, if but for a moment, calls for open windows and the fresh air. For the public good nothing is so much to be desired than that a sudden and complete oblivion should fall upon this repulsive case. It is a duty to refrain even from private whispers of WILDE’S name, so that there may be no further spreading of the contagion of evil. For the like reason we trust the pulpit and press will restrain their tendency to ill-considered homilies against such facile dogmas as “art for art’s sake.” This is not the time to discuss the true relation of art to morals, and hasty deliverances called forth by the revelations in Court of a diseased organism will assuredly provoke defences of the half-truths the attacked dogmas cover. There is hardly one of WILDE’S paradoxes but could be justified in some sort by a sane mind and a normally moral nature, and, to tell the truth, there are few sane minds and moral natures but would be proud to call nine-tenths of WILDE’S printed writings their own. Again the enigma—so much brilliance, so much bestiality! Do not let us, therefore, have immature attempts to connect WILDE’S revolting conduct with his critical opinions or to extract lessons therefrom. When an animal with lustful eyes and gross desires shows itself in a nature that might otherwise have been great, we do not study the animal in the market-place—we shut it away.

___

The Age (Melbourne, Australia) (29 May, 1895 - p.6)

OUR LONDON LETTER.

(FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT.)

                                                                                                       LONDON, 26TH APRIL.

. . .

     Mr. Robert Buchanan has written some singularly ill-timed letters to the newspapers in which he virtually sets up a theory that an artist and a man of letters is not responsible to the same laws as those which regulate the lives and conduct of meaner people; and that because Oscar Wilde has written some tolerable novels and some clever plays, therefore he should not be punished for acts which in other persons would be in the highest degree criminal. “But I will go a little further,” says the dramatist and poet, “just in so far as a man has been respected by us, has amused us, has afforded us harmless pleasures, should receive delicate consideration. Treatment which would not in the least trouble Mr. Sikes may break the heart of a gentleman and scholar like Oscar Wilde, and if we who follow his calling do not speak the needful word in his behalf, who is to do so? Whatever he is, whatever he may be assumed to be, he is a man of letters, a brother artist, and no criminal prosecution whatever will be able to erase his name from the records of English literature.” I do not think that English literature or its professors has much cause to thank Mr. Buchanan for his well meant but most injudicious interference.

_____

Robert Buchanan and Oscar Wilde - an additional note

Buchanan’s defence of Wilde is not mentioned in Harriett Jay’s biography and I always wondered whether Oscar Wilde acknowledged Buchanan’s support in any way. When the archives of The Guardian newspaper went online in November 2007 I came across the following item:

The Guardian (27 June, 1929 - p.10)

The Modern First-Edition Craze.

The prices paid at Sotheby’s to-day for first editions of Shaw, Hardy, Barrie, Wilde, and one or two other modern authors will make many more of us think of having our bookshelves “vetted.” It is hard to convince most people who have been buying books off and on for thirty years that they have not some book of value under the new market conditions if they could only spot it. Of course the people who have books with the author’s autograph are likely to know of it, and those are the ones that fetch the top prices. But the ordinary first edition in good condition by about twenty living authors has now high rarity value. The biggest price to-day was £310 paid for a copy of Wilde’s “Salome” inscribed in the handwriting of the author: “George Bernard Shaw, with the author’s compliments. February, 93.” And then presented by Mr. Shaw to “Bertha Newcombe from G. Bernard Shaw, May, 1893.” Another first edition sold by Miss Newcombe was Shaw’s “Widowers’ Houses,” inscribed by the author to the lady in May, 1893. It brought £155, and the “Unsocial Socialist” £142. A first edition of Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was inscribed by the author to Robert Buchanan, and inserted in it was a letter in Wilde’s handwriting about the officials of Reading Gaol, written in Posilipo in November, 1897. It finishes: “For four days I have had no cigarettes—no money to buy them—or no paper.” This book and letter fetched £170, which would have gone a long way to buy cigarettes and notepaper for Wilde.

An email to David Rose of the Oscholars site elicited the information, courtesy of Mark Samuels Lasner of the University of Delaware Library, that Buchanan’s copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol now resides in the Robert H. Taylor Collection at the Princeton University Library. Thanks are also due to Meg Sherry Rich of the Princeton University Library for confirming this and offering the following information:

“It is inscribed to Buchanan by Wilde and dated March ’98. There’s a note penciled in the front, probably by a dealer, about a “very interesting letter about the poem,” but the letter is not laid in or tipped into this volume.”

The fact that the letter (mentioned in the Guardian article) has been separated from the book may mean that the letter was not addressed to Buchanan and, perhaps, was passed on to Buchanan by one of Wilde’s friends after the publication of his first letter in the Star (16th April 1895). In his letter of 20th April Buchanan mentions Wilde’s lack of cigarettes, a fact referred to in the quotation from the letter in the Guardian article, and my feeling is that Buchanan could have been given the letter sometime between the 16th and the 20th April. So, when Harriett Jay (presumably) decided to sell the book, she included the letter with it. But this is all speculation, and whatever the origin of the letter, the important thing is that Oscar Wilde did acknowledge Robert Buchanan’s support by sending him a copy of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

This item ended here originally, but a little more light was shed on the matter when, in 2019, I acquired copies of Buchanan’s letters held in the Charles E. Young Research Library of UCLA, among which were several letters to Leonard Smithers, the publisher of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The first of these, dated 5th March [1898], contains the following:

“Will you kindly forward the enclosed letter to Mr Wilde?  It is merely a line congratulating him on his reappearance in literary life, at which I am more than pleased, as I was almost solitary among men of letters in trying to procure him justice & fair-play.”

The first edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, was published, anonymously, on 13th February, 1898. The third edition, published on 4th March was ‘signed by the author’. Whether Buchanan discovered that Wilde was the author at this point and wrote to Smithers, and Wilde responded to the forwarded letter (presumably now lost) with a copy of the book, or whether Wilde had already sent Buchanan a copy, which then prompted Buchanan’s letter to Smithers, I don’t know.

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Acknowledgements:

I first became aware of Robert Buchanan’s public defence of Oscar Wilde during an internet search when I came across the Court Theatre (Chicago) Playnotes on Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moises Kaufman. David Rose then published my appeal for more information about this connection between Buchanan and Wilde in The Oscholars (the online Journal of Wilde Studies) which prompted an email from Angie Kingston of the University of Adelaide whose research for her PhD thesis, “Wilde Imaginations: Oscar Wilde as a Character in Victorian Fiction” had thrown up several connections between Wilde and Buchanan (including the fact that Buchanan had fictionalised Wilde (as ‘Mervyn Darrell’) in his 1894 play “The Charlatan”) and who suggested several books including Jonathan Goodman’s “The Oscar Wilde File”. When the copies of The Star were finally included in the British Library Newspaper Achive in March, 2026, I revised this page, adding the full transcriptions of Buchanan’s letters and also those of the other correspondents. I also discovered at that point that there is now a Wilde Trials International News Archive, which may have saved me a bit of time.

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