in his gay impertinence
which may jar upon our more sensitive moments, when one
considers what he has done in dragging this great issue into the light
and making it clear. He shows that what we have against us is not so
much a system of society or a set of laws, as a definite and
contemptible type of human character.

Democracy may well appear the most hopeless and lamentable
failure in the government of men that history has ever known--but
this is only due to the fact that the working classes have until now
meekly and mildly received from the commercial classes their
notions as to what democracy means.

No one could suppose for a moment that such a thing as the
puritanical censorship of art and letters which now hangs, like a
leaden weight, round the neck of every writer of original power,
would be thrust upon us by the victims of sweatshops and factories.
It is thrust upon us, like everything else which is degrading and
uncivilised in our present system, by the obstinate stupidity and silly
sentiment of the self-righteous middle class, the opponents of
everything that is joyous and interesting and subtle and imaginative.
It is devoutly to be hoped that, when the revolution arrives, the
human persons who force their way to the top and guide the
volcanic eruption will be such persons as are absolutely free from
every kind of middle-class scruple.

There are among us to-day vigorous and indignant minds who find
in the ugliness and moral squalor of our situation, the unhappy
influence of Christ and his saints. They are wrong. The history of
Oscar Wilde's writings shows that they are wrong.

It is the self-satisfied moralist who stands in the way, not the mystic
or the visionary. They spoil everything they touch, these people.
They turn religion into a set of sentimental inhibitions that would
make Marcus Aurelius blush. They turn faith into pietism, sanctity
into morality, and righteousness into a reeking prurience.

After all, it is not on the strength of his opinions, wise and sound as
these may be, that Wilde's reputation rests. It rests on the beauty, in
its own way never equalled, of the style in which he wrote. His style,
as he himself points out, is one which seems to compel its readers to
utter its syllables aloud. Of that deeper and more recondite charm
which lies, in a sense, outside the sphere of vocal articulation, of that
rhythm of the very movements of thought itself which lovers of
Walter Pater catch