I have spoken again and again in the course of this narrative of Oscar’s enemies, asserting that the English middle-class as puritans detested his attitude and way of life, and if some fanatic or representative of the nonconformist conscience had hunted up evidence against Wilde and brought him to ruin there would have been nothing extraordinary in a vengeance which might have been regarded as a duty.  Strange to say the effective hatred of Oscar Wilde was shown by a man of the upper class who was anything but a puritan.  It was Mr. Charles Brookfield, I believe, who constituted himself private prosecutor in this case and raked Piccadilly to find witnesses against Oscar Wilde.  Mr. Brookfield was afterwards appointed Censor of Plays on the strength apparently of having himself written one of the “riskiest” plays of the period.  As I do not know Mr. Brookfield, I will not judge him.  But his appointment always seemed to me, even before I knew that he had acted against Wilde, curiously characteristic of English life and of the casual, contemptuous way Englishmen of the governing class regard letters.  In the same spirit Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister made a journalist Poet Laureate simply because he had puffed him for years in the columns of The Standard.  Lord Salisbury probably neither knew nor cared that Alfred Austin had never written a line that could live.  One thing Mr. Brookfield’s witnesses established:  every offence alleged against Oscar Wilde dated from 1892 or later—­after his first meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas.

But at the time all such matters were lost for me in the questions:  would the authorities arrest Oscar? or would they allow him to escape?  Had the police asked for a warrant?  Knowing English custom and the desire of Englishmen to pass in silence over all unpleasant sexual matters, I thought he would be given the hint to go abroad and allowed to escape.  That is the ordinary, the usual English procedure.  Everyone knows the case of a certain lord, notorious for similar practices, who was warned by the police that a warrant had been issued against him:  taking the hint he has lived for many years past in leisured ease as an honoured guest in Florence.  Nor is it only aristocrats who are so favoured by English justice:  everyone can remember the case of a Canon of Westminster who was similarly warned and also escaped.  We can come down the social scale to the very bottom and find the same practice.  A certain journalist unwittingly offended a great personage.  Immediately he was warned by the police that a warrant issued against him in India seventeen years before would at once be acted upon if he did not make himself scarce.  For some time he lived in peaceful retirement in Belgium.  Moreover, in all these cases the warrants had been issued on the sworn complaints of the parties damnified or of their parents and guardians:  no one had complained of Oscar Wilde.  Naturally I thought the dislike of publicity which dictated such lenience to the lord and the canon and the journalist would be even more operative in the case of a man of genius like Oscar Wilde.  In certain ways he had a greater position than even the son of a duke:  the shocking details of his trial would have an appalling, a world-wide publicity.