The really interesting thing to me about this passage is the way that Oscar appeared to equate being a World-Folkie, as we might put it, with devotion to dope and perversion [as seen in 1891] and potential homicidal tendencies [not much later in the novel that he stabs his friend Basil Hallward to death] — equally with these a part of a perverse hedonist sensualism, the outward manifestation of a vicious inner moral decay.

To us the immorality would lie in its peculiar unthinking *racism*, the idea that any alien sort of musical tradition must be in some soul-shattering way decadent, and a taste for it a symptom of depravity.

Now, OW my dear, what was going on in your little head THERE?