The World’s Tragedy

PREFACE. XXVII At school I was taught to admire Plato and Aristotle, who recommend sodomy to youths. I am not so rebellious as to oppose their dictum ; and in truth there seems no bet- ter way to avoid the contamination of woman and the mo- rose pleasures of solitary vice. (Not that women themselves are unclean ; it is the worship of them as ideals that rots the soul). Again we may say that all the great men of antiquity were sodomites : Socrates, Caesar, Alexander, Martial, Catullus, Virgil, Achilles ; Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Goethe, Shakespeare, Bacon, an unbroken line of English monarchs ; Mohammed, Benvenuto Cellini, Wilde, Symonds, Emerson, Pater, Fitz-Gerald, Leighton, Whitman, Michael Angelo, Leonardo, and a host of others — even unto this hour. But of this hour I will not speak. I am now collecting a great body of evidence similar to that which Herr Harden has gathered in Germany, and invol- ving an even higher class of society. Not in the least to show the corruptions of that class ; but to proclaim sodomy as an aristocratic virtue, which our middle class had better imitate if they wish to be smart. If I have not already published the correspondence in my possession between the late Duke of Clarence and « Boy Morgan » — as well as many other important papers — and a pretty penny they have cost me ! — it is not for any dog- in-the manger reasons, but because it would coincide so dramatically with the moment when, like Socrates, I get into trouble for corrupting morality, and because I never like to leave a job half done. It is almost incredible how