tastes. What an absurdity it all was! How dared they punish me for what is good in my eyes? .. . ."
"What you call vice, Frank, is not vice. . . . It has been made a crime in recent times. . . . They all damn the sins they have no mind to, and that's their morality. . . . Why, even Bentham refused to put what you call a vice in his penal code, and you yourself admitted that it should not be punished as a crime; for it carries no temptation with it. It may be a malady; but, if so, it appears only to attack the highest natures. . . . The wit of man can find no argument which justifies its punishment. . . . You admit you don't share the prejudice; you don't feel the horror, the instinctive loathing. Why? Because you are educated, Frank, because you know that the passion Socrates felt was not a low passion, because you know that Caesar's weakness, let us say, or the weakness of Michael Angelo, or of Shakespeare, is not despicable. If the desire is not a characteristic of the highest humanity, at — least it is consistent with it. . . . Suppose I like a food that is poison to other people, and yet quickens me; how dare they punish me for eating of it? . . . . It is all ignorant prejudice, Frank; the world is slowly growing more tolerant and one day men will be ashamed of their barbarous treatment of me, as they are now ashamed of the torturing of the Middle Ages."
Harris constitutes himself an apologist for his friend. He outlines a conversation in which he defended Wilde during the time of the latter's imprisonment. After demolishing the argument of a leading English journalist that "any one living a clean life is worth more than a writer
