Degeneracy or Decadence?

Here are two volumes to add to the spate of literature concerning Wilde and Douglas. Every detail that the muckraker can provide or the microscope anatomize continues to fascinate readers and harass publishers. Wilde’s bibliography exceeds any other of the Victorian era. Other nations reckon him the greatest of Englishmen after Darwin and Dickens. The problems of that scientist and that novelist are long settled but the moral question unsettled by Wilde has become an agonizing dilemma—should the homosexual be treated as an open criminal or as a secret invalid? Reaction from the crudity of Wilde’s trials and the cruelty of his imprisonment led to humane views toward that unfortunate class until dramatic revelations show them as seedbed for higher forms of international spying.

That is what lies at the base of the present tumult and furious self-inquiry throughout England today. The English ask: “To what extent are we a homosexual society? Are we becoming degenerate, and what is the decadence which we attribute freely to others but generally conceal at home?”

SL

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Sir Shane Leslie

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Here are two volumes to add to the spate of literature concerning Wilde and Douglas. Every detail that the muckraker can provide or the microscope anatomize continues to fascinate readers and harass publishers. Wilde’s bibliography exceeds any other of the Victorian era. Other nations reckon him the greatest of Englishmen after Darwin and Dickens. The problems of that scientist and that novelist are long settled but the moral question unsettled by Wilde has become an agonizing dilemma—should the homosexual be treated as an open criminal or as a secret invalid? Reaction from the crudity of Wilde’s trials and the cruelty of his imprisonment led to humane views toward that unfortunate class until dramatic revelations show them as seedbed for higher forms of international spying.

That is what lies at the base of the present tumult and furious self-inquiry throughout England today. The English ask: “To what extent are we a homosexual society? Are we becoming degenerate, and what is the decadence which we attribute freely to others but generally conceal at home?”