"Ludicrous" because it betrays such complete ignorance of life all
given over to men industrious with muck-rakes: "Gadarene swine," as
Carlyle called them, "busily grubbing and grunting in search of
pignuts." "Pathetic" for it is boldly ingenuous as youth itself with a
touch of youthful conceit and exaggeration. Another eager human soul
on the threshold longing to find some suitable high work in the world,
all unwitting of the fact that ideal strivings are everywhere despised
and discouraged--jerry-built cottages for the million being the day's
demand and not oratories or palaces of art or temples for the spirit.

Not the time for a "professor of æsthetics," one would say, and
assuredly not the place. One wonders whether Zululand would not be
more favourable for such a man than England. Germany, France, and
Italy have many positions in universities, picture-galleries, museums,
opera houses for lovers of the beautiful, and above all an educated
respect for artists and writers just as they have places too for
servants of Truth in chemical laboratories and polytechnics endowed by
the State with excellent results even from the utilitarian point of
view. But rich England has only a few dozen such places in all at
command and these are usually allotted with a cynical contempt for
merit; miserable anarchic England, soul-starved amid its creature
comforts, proving now by way of example to helots that man cannot live
by bread alone:--England and Oscar Wilde! the "Black Country" and
"the professor of æsthetics"--a mad world, my masters!

It is necessary for us now to face this mournful truth that in the
quarrel between these two the faults were not all on one side, mayhap
England was even further removed from the ideal than the would-be
professor of æsthetics, which fact may well give us pause and food for
thought. Organic progress we have been told; indeed, might have seen