The responsibility of writers and speakers has hardly yet been recognized; though illustrations of the dangers of trifling with essential values, or of misusing talents, or indeed of perverting from its right use any function, are actually supplied by some of our brilliant writers, who have recklessly and often ignorantly become apostles of mere degeneracy and powerful instruments for the demoralization of the people. Even those who see the evils scarcely seem to appreciate either the causes or the consequences of the corruption of literature and the confusion of language.
Some recent reviewers, however, have begun to question more closely the character of the influence exercised upon the world by some writers, whose works have excited general or special admiration, even calling some of them defaulters, for that, holding great talents, they have used the light they held to dazzle the eyes and to confuse the minds of others, so as to make them blind to the path of right living, which is virtue or morality.
One of these critics, Paul Elmer More, literary editor of the New York Evening Post, in a study of the influence of Walter Pater, distinctly suggests that the author confused the truth and in fact misrepresented history, reading his own desires and inclinations into the teachings of Plato in one case, and in another of doing the same for Christianity, making them appear to exalt sensuous beauty above spiritual beauty which is the soul of virtue; whereas Plato himself exclaims: "When anyone prefers beauty to virtue, what is this but the real and utter dishonor of the soul?" Mr. More suggests that Christianity is equally misrepresented by this brilliant writer, but in his perversion of the real meaning and purpose of true Christianity he is simply drifting with the tide of so-called Christian civilization, which has been, almost from its first appearance as a politically established religion, a clear departure from those teachings concerning the Christos in man, attributed to Jesus, the supposed founder of the system, and which in their original purity are identical with Universal Theosophy of which they are a part and upon which they are drawn.
Further, Mr. More suggests that the demoralizing effect of Pater may have largely affected that brilliant apostle of decadence, Oscar Wilde, whose tragic collapse in the hour of his literary success drew attention to an evil whose ravages have ruined multitudes of lives and wrecked every civilization that has become tainted with the poison of perversion. For this man exalted perversion into a cult, his wit was entirely based upon it, his ethics steeped in it, and his own life wrecked by it. He himself shows that he was not unaware of the truth, at times, for he wrote:
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God;
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?