[30]

"I cannot admit that," I answered. "First of all, let us leave
Shakespeare out of the question, or I should have to ask you for proofs
of his guilt, and there are none. About the others there is this to be
said, it is not by imitating the vices and weaknesses of great men that
we shall get to their level. And suppose we are fated to climb above
them, then their weaknesses are to be dreaded.

"I have not even tried to put the strongest reasons before you; I should
have thought your own mind would have supplied them; but surely you see
that the historical argument is against you. This vice of yours is
dropping out of life, like cannibalism: it is no longer a practice of
the highest races. It may have seemed natural enough to the Greeks, to
us it is unnatural. Even the best Athenians condemned it; Socrates took
pride in never having yielded to it; all moderns denounce it
disdainfully. You must see that the whole progress of the world, the
current of educated opinion, is against you, that you are now a 'sport,'
a peculiarity, an abnormality, a man with six fingers: not a 'sport'
that is, full of promise for the future, but a 'sport' of the dim
backward and abysm of time, an arrested development."

"You are bitter, Frank, almost rude."

"Forgive me, Oscar, forgive me, please; it is because I want you at long
last to open your eyes, and see things as they are."

"But I thought you were with us, Frank, I thought at least you condemned
the punishment, did not believe in the barbarous penalties."

"I disbelieve in all punishment," I said; "it is by love and not by hate
that men must be redeemed. I believe, too, that the time is already come
when the better law might be put in force, and above all, I condemn
punishment which strikes a man, an artist like you, who has done
beautiful and charming things as if he had done nothing. At least the
good you have accomplished should be set against the evil. It has always
seemed monstrous to me that you should have been punished like a Taylor.
The French were right in their treatment of Verlaine: they condemned the
sin, while forgiving the sinner because of his genius. The rigour in
England is mere puritanic hypocrisy, shortsightedness and racial
self-esteem."

"All I can say, Frank, is, I would not limit individual desire in any
way. What right has society to punish us unless it can prove we have
hurt or injured someone else against his will? Besides, if you limit
passion yo