PANIC
Truth, Jan. 16, 1890.
O TRUTH!—Cowed and humiliated, I acknowledge that our Oscar is at last original. At bay, and sublime in his agony, he certainly has, for once, borrowed from no living author, and comes out in his own true colours—as his own “gentleman.”
How shall I stand against his just anger, and his damning allegations! for it must be clear to your readers, that, besides his clean polish, as prettily set forth in his epistle, I, alas! am but the “ill-bred and ignorant person,” whose “lucubrations” “it is a trouble” for him “to notice.”
Still will I, desperate as is my condition, point out that though “impertinent,” “venomous,” and “vulgar,” he claims me as his “master”—and, in the dock, bases his innocence upon such relation between us.
In all humility, therefore, I admit that the outcome of my “silly vanity and incompetent mediocrity,” must be the incarnation: “Oscar Wilde.”
J. A. McN. WHISTLER.
Mea culpa! the Gods may perhaps forgive and forget.
To you, Truth—champion of the truth—I leave the brave task of proclaiming again that the story of the lecture to the students of the Royal Academy was, as I told it to you, no fiction.
In the presence of Mr Waldo Story did Oscar make his prayer for preparation; and at his table was he entrusted with the materials for his crime.
You also shall again unearth, in the Nineteenth Century Review of Jan. 1889, page 37, the other appropriated property, slily stowed away, in an article on “The Decay of Lying”—though why Decay!
To shirk this matter thus is craven, doubtless; but I am awe-stricken and tremble, for truly, “the rage of the sheep is terrible!”
J. A. McN. WHISTLER.