Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/380

 The history of the gifted Irish novelist, essayist and dramatist, Oscar Wilde is a literary tragedy remembered by many contemporaries with grief. Wilde was in early life dionistic-uranistic. As he grew older, he became more and more conclusively uranian, notwithstanding the fact that he was happily married. Wilde's first literary successes were his poems, including the noble "Ave Imperatrix!" His dramatic, novelistic and critical work followed, including the dramas "The Importance of Being in Earnest", "Lady Windermere's Fan", "Salome",etc., and a novel of vague homosexual suggestiveness, "The Picture of Dorian Gray." At the height of his career, Wilde was attacked by a virulent personal enemy, the notorious Marquis of Q—. For a good while, Wilde's eccentric intimacies with young men of far inferior station and even of notoriously venal pederasty, had been whispered around London. Among a set of Wilde's more aristocratic literary friends was Lord Alfred D—, the younger son of the Marquis of Q— mentioned. Of this young man much gossip was current. Presently the Marquis of Q—, in a grotesquely vulgar fashion, publicly charged Wilde with homosexualism. Wilde felt obliged to bring the accusation into a court (April, 1895), as a libel; a step anything but well-taken. The case was not made out, and sentiment went wholly against him. A second criminal charge, from the Crown, was laid and tried. Put into the position of a felon under the English laws relating to homosexuality, Wilde was convicted, and sentenced to a two-years term of imprisonment, at hard labour. The evidence in the case was anything but a credit to the poet's æstheticism, or idealism of male-love. After his release, his wife having divorced him, his career broken, Wilde lived for a time in obscurity in Paris, and there died suddenly, within a year or so after his enlargement. For a considerable time the super-hostile public sentiment of Great Britain ostracised his plays and other writings: but British popular feeling has grown more tolerant of Wilde's name.