.

This fact may well give pause to the thoughtful reader. In the middle
ages, when birth and position had a disproportionate power in life,
the Catholic Church supplied a certain democratic corrective to the
inequality of social conditions. It was a sort of "Jacob's Ladder"
leading from the lowest strata of society to the very heavens and
offering to ingenuous, youthful talent a career of infinite hope and
unlimited ambition. This great power of the Roman Church in the
middle-ages may well be compared to the influence exerted by those
whom I have designated as Oscar Wilde's fuglemen in the England of
today. The easiest way to success in London society is to be notorious
in this sense. Whatever career one may have chosen, however humble
one's birth, one is then certain of 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 s