finding distinguished friends and impassioned advocates. If you happen to be in
the army and unmarried, you are declared to be a strategist like Caesar, or an
organizer like Moltke; if you are an artist, instead of having your faults
proclaimed and your failings scourged, your qualifications are eulogised and
you find yourself compared to Michel Angelo or Titian! I would not willingly
exaggerate here; but I could easily give dozens of instances to prove that
sexual perversion is a "Jacob's Ladder" to most forms of success in our time
in London.

It seems a curious effect of the great compensatory balance of things that a
masculine rude people like the English, who love nothing so much as adventures
and warlike achievements, should allow themselves to be steered in ordinary
times by epicene aesthetes. But no one who knows the facts will deny that these
men are prodigiously influential in London in all artistic and literary matters,
and it was their constant passionate support which lifted Oscar Wilde so quickly
to eminence.

From the beginning they fought for him. He was regarded as a leader among
them when still at Oxford. Yet his early writings show no trace of such a
prepossession; they are wholly void of offence, without even a suggestion of
coarseness, as pure indeed as his talk. Nevertheless, as soon as his name came
up among men in town, the accusation of abnormal viciousness was either made or
hinted. Everyone spoke as if there were no doubt about his tastes, and this in
spite of the habitual reticence of Englishmen. I could not understand how the
imputation came to be so bold and universal; how so shameful a calumny, as I
regarded it, was so firmly established in men's minds. Again and again I
protested against the injustice, demanded proofs; but was met only by shrugs
and pitying glances as if my prejudice must indeed be invincible if I needed
evidence of the obvious.