A man who is absorbed in useful work, and therefore has few impulses to depravity, can encounter such Wildeness with indifference; but the average man, who is never sure of his own self-control, and who has sons and daughters to train in as much decency as he can, is made frantic by such perversity, the deliberate bedeviling of the wits of our blindly struggling humanity. These “epigrams” of Oscar Wilde are like the snapping of a whip-lash in the face of men’s everyday moral sensibility. So naturally this too-clever young esthete was cordially loathed, and his enemies whetted their knives for him. Oscar came over to America to exhibit his whimsicalities to the wives and daughters of our steel kings and pork packers. To the custom’s officer he remarked: “I have nothing to declare but my genius”; and so his success was assured. He went back to London and wrote more plays, one of them, “Salome,” assuredly the most cruel, cold, and disgusting piece of lewdness in the English language. Its heroine is the young daughter of King Herod, who attempts to seduce John the Baptist to her sensual desires, and when he repels her, has him executed, and has his head brought in upon a platter, and strips herself as nearly naked as stage-customs allow, and dances before this bloody object and fondles and kisses it. The climax of modern art depravity was reached when Richard Strauss set this drama to elaborate and costly music. When I saw audiences of bedizened and bejewelled fat beasts, male and female, having their sick nerves thrilled by this “grand” opera, I knew that European capitalism was ready for the slaughterman’s ax. Out of these plays Oscar reaped much money, and spent it in eating too much, drinking too much, and pursuing his cultured vices. Among his favorites was a young heir of the nobility, who has since become Lord Alfred Douglas, assuredly the most disagreeable little wretch that ever displayed himself in the British world of letters. Lord Alfred’s father, the Marquis of Queensbury, made an effort to separate his son from Wilde, and in so doing he wrote letters concerning Wilde which brought about a great literary scandal. It is the privilege of elegant British gentlemen to pursue their vices without interference; but they must display discretion, and not step upon the toes of marquises. Oscar Wilde brought suit for slander against Queensbury; and his lordship rallied his aristocratic friends, defended himself successfully, and then had the audacious playwright arrested and prosecuted for sodomy.