In Foster’s Alumni Oxonienses, Oscar Wilde described himself on leaving Oxford as a “Professor of AEsthetics, and a Critic of Art”—­an announcement to me at once infinitely ludicrous and pathetic.  “Ludicrous” because it betrays such complete ignorance of life all given over to men industrious with muck-rakes:  “Gadarene swine,” as Carlyle called them, “busily grubbing and grunting in search of pignuts.”  “Pathetic” for it is boldly ingenuous as youth itself with a touch of youthful conceit and exaggeration.  Another eager human soul on the threshold longing to find some suitable high work in the world, all unwitting of the fact that ideal strivings are everywhere despised and discouraged—­jerry-built cottages for the million being the day’s demand and not oratories or palaces of art or temples for the spirit.

Not the time for a “professor of aesthetics,” one would say, and assuredly not the place.  One wonders whether Zululand would not be more favourable for such a man than England.  Germany, France, and Italy have many positions in universities, picture-galleries, museums, opera houses for lovers of the beautiful, and above all an educated respect for artists and writers just as they have places too for servants of Truth in chemical laboratories and polytechnics endowed by the State with excellent results even from the utilitarian point of view.  But rich England has only a few dozen such places in all at command and these are usually allotted with a cynical contempt for merit; miserable anarchic England, soul-starved amid its creature comforts, proving now by way of example to helots that man cannot live by bread alone:—­England and Oscar Wilde! the “Black Country” and “the professor of aesthetics”—­a mad world, my masters!

It is necessary for us now to face this mournful truth that in the quarrel between these two the faults were not all on one side, mayhap England was even further removed from the ideal than the would-be professor of aesthetics, which fact may well give us pause and food for thought.  Organic progress we have been told; indeed, might have seen if we had eyes, evolution so-called is from the simple to the complex; our rulers therefore should have provided for the ever-growing complexity of modern life and modern men.  The good gardener will even make it his ambition to produce new species; our politicians, however, will not take the trouble to give even the new species that appear a chance of living; they are too busy, it appears, in keeping their jobs.

No new profession has been organized in England since the Middle Ages.  In the meantime we have invented new arts, new sciences and new letters; when will these be organized and regimented in new and living professions, so that young ingenuous souls may find suitable fields for their powers and may not be forced willy-nilly to grub for pignuts when it would be more profitable for them and for us to use their nobler faculties?  Not only are the poor poorer and more numerous in England than elsewhere; but there is less provision made for the “intellectuals” too, consequently the organism is suffering at both extremities.  It is high time that both maladies were taken in hand, for by universal consent England is now about the worst organized of all modern States, the furthest from the ideal.