I could have set forth in a Christian country a sane and
liberal view. I had no wish to minimise the offence. No one condemned
unnatural vice more than I, but Oscar Wilde was a distinguished man of
letters; he had written beautiful things, and his good works should
have been allowed to speak in his favour. I wrote an article setting
forth this view. My printers immediately informed me that they
thought the article ill-advised, and when I insisted they said they
would prefer not to print it. Yet there was nothing in it beyond a
plea to suspend judgment and defer insult till after the trial.
Messrs. Smith and Sons, the great booksellers, who somehow got wind of
the matter (through my publisher, I believe), sent to say that they
would not sell any paper that attempted to defend Oscar Wilde; it
would be better even, they added, not to mention his name. The English
tradesman-censors were determined that this man should have Jedburg
justice. I should have ruined the _Saturday Review_ by the mere
attempt to treat the matter fairly.

In this extremity I went to the great leader of public opinion in
England. Mr. Arthur Walter, the manager of _The Times_, had always
been kind to me; he was a man of balanced mind, who had taken high
honours at Oxford in his youth, and for twenty years had rubbed
shoulders with the leading men in every rank of life. I went down to
stay with him in Berkshire, and I urged upon him what I regarded as
the aristocratic view. In England it was manifest that under the
circumstances there was no chance of a fair trial, and it seemed to me
the duty of _The Times_ to say plainly that this man should not be
condemned beforehand, and that if he were condemned his merits should
be taken into consideration in his punishment, as well as his
demerits.

While willing to listen to me, Mr. Walter did not share my views. A
man who had written a great poem or a great play did not rank in his
esteem with a man who had won a skirmish against a handful of unarmed
savages, or one who had stolen a piece of land from some barbarians
and annexed it to the Empire. In his heart he held the view of the
English landed aristocracy, that the ordinary successful general or
admiral or statesman was infinitely more important than a Shakespeare
or a Browning. He could not be persuaded to believe that the names of
Gladstone, Disraeli, Wolseley, Roberts, and Wood, would diminish and
fade from day to day till in a hundred years they wou