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From

Infamy

to

Honor

By Joseph Wood Krutch

Author, "The Modern Temper," "The Measure of Man"; Professor of Literature, Columbia University

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EARLY sixty years ago, Oscar Wilde went to prison, sentenced by a judge who had been his neighbor but who remarked from the bench that the maximum twoyear sentence was "inadequate.”

Wilde's books were removed from the bookseller's shelves; his household goods, previously seized by bailiffs, were auctioned off for a pittance; a characteristic newspaper comment called him "damned and done for"; a friend who applied to the Court of Bankruptcy for appointment as literary executor was told that "Wilde's works will never command any interest whatsoever." His two pre-adolescent sons were hurried off to the Continent. given new names, and forbidden ever to mention their father in public on any

pretext. His wife died some three years later, and some three years after that he himself died squalidly in Paris.

Hardly more than half a century passes. This year, the centenary of his birth, Trinity College, Dublin is displaying the manuscripts of its former student; the London County Council will mark the house in which he lived and from which he was driven with a memorial plaque. Scores of articles will assess and reassess his work, and it is not likely that even the least favorable will call him "damned and done for."

We are no longer surprised to "See nations, slowly wise and meanly just,

To buried merit raise the tardy bust."

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