LESSON OF THE WILDE CASE

Evening Star, Issue 9773, 1 August 1895, Page 3

LESSON OF THE WILDE CASE

In a brief comment on the close of the trial of Oscar Wilde, the ‘ Daily Chronicle ’ sa : d :

Sal indeed has been the degradation of the feeling for art, for beauty, for refinement, the picture of senseless idleness which a man of great talent, but, of perverted, hayclly one would say of sane, character has paraded before us. The trial forma, indeed, a fresh chapter in Dr Nordatfa indictment of “degeneration,” an appalling picture of the state of mind and heart in which all intellectual and moral perspective becomes blurred and diatfrted. Nothing, however, antes in life without a cause, and we have to consider whether there is not in our educational system some black spot that produces these defacements. If some of our schoolmasters had been a little more courageous, and a great" deal more conscientious, we might have escaped the sickly contamination of these and many preceding scandals. One of the failings of middle class and upper class English life has been the unnatural divorce of parents from their children. The case is otherwise in France, where the influence of mdthers on their sous is much stronger and more continuous than with u». We are far from agreeing with, all the claims of the New Woman, but we are strongly of opinion that in the strengthening of the mother’s influence over her 6hi!d Rea a cure for many of the evils of “civilised ,r life. The herding of boys in great schools, their too early separation from their homes and from association with their mothers and sisters, and the fact that after a certain ago parents become almost total strangers to their children—all these things, coupled with the tasteless luxury that rich parents hold out as a poisonous lure to idle young men and women, afford a terribly wide margin for the gradual peiversion of heart and intellect. It is clear that if we are to tread safely the slippery path of civilisation, if we are not to fall back into decadent paganism, wo must harden and simplify ouf lives. Plain living and high thinking is not only the poet’s watchword; it is tho watchword of the democrat, the good citizen, and the man of sense.

la an earlier section of the article the editor wrote His sentence, enforced ns it will be by the severest rigors known to our abhorrent penal system, is virtually a sentence of death or madness, a fate to which we confess wo hesitate to condemn any human creature whatever.” A correspondent next day asked what this meant, and he was enlightened as follows : “ Two years’hard labor is the severest sentence, while it lasts, known to the English criminal law. Is is a form' of punishment which is never inflicted on convicts sentenced to penal servitude, inasmuch as it is calculated to produce madness amongst them. Nine months’ separate confinement is as much as a convict gets, and is considered as much as his mind oan stand. The Prisons’ Committee report that even nine months’ separation often injuriously affects the nervous system, and recomm?nd a reduction of the time. A prisoner under two years’ hard labor may be kept during the whole time in the solitude of his cell, with the exception of one hour a day. During a portion of his detention be is allowed no ordinary reading books, has a wooden plank as a bed, and has to engage in occupation which the late chairman of the Prison Board declares to be ‘ irritating, depressing, and debasing to the mental faculties, and decidedly Brutalising in its effects.’ So severe is this form of sentence considered to he that many judges will not inflict it at all, and last year in a total of 160,000 short sentences only thirty-four persons were committed • for two years by the ordinary criminal courts.”

It appears that a People’s Version of the New Testament is being prepared by a company of ladies and gentlemen, who think they will improve the Scripture by excluding all words and idioms not in common use. Someone has obtained, and sent to the ‘ Manchester Guardian,’ the following sample of the supposed improvement “ And why do you trouble about clothes ? Notice the wild -lilies, bow they are growing ; they do not toil, nor do they spin. Yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his grandeur did not dress as well as one of these. Now, if God clothes in this way even the wild plants, which to-day are living and to-morrow are to be made fuel for the oven, will He not much rather clothe you, you men of little faith ? Do not then trouble yourselves with such questions as What are we to eat? What are we to drink ? What are we to wear ? For all these things are what the heathen nations make their aim ; for your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.” We are told that the producers of this bald rendering of a poetic passage in the Sermon on the Mount are earnest, practical men and women, who think that the classical Elizabethan English of our present Authorised Version hinders rather than helps.

A provincial paper publishes the following : “ Lost, yesterday, a small, blue morocco pocket book, containing a variety of papers, among the rest a tailor’s bill for £2O. Any person finding the same will please pay the bill, and nothing more will be said.”