Illustration 1: Oscar Wilde.
‘ … you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery’ – ‘The Happy Prince’.
What an extraordinary statement to be found in a children’s tale! Wilde’s story channels a primitive form of Christianity into the ideas of The Aesthetic Movement.
Illustration 2: ‘The Happy Prince’ – illustrator, Walter Crane (1888).
A swallow becomes devoted to a public monument, ‘The Happy Prince’, in a corrupt town, and under its command proceeds to divest the statue of his jewels and finery, giving them away to the poorest inhabitants. This results in temporary happiness for them, but disaster for the bird and its master.
Illustration 3: ‘The boy is so thirsty, and the mother so sad’ – illustrator, P. Craig Russell (2012, comic book).
Illustration 4: ‘My eyes are all that I have left … pluck out one of them and take it’ – illustrator, Kaj Beckman (1977).
Illustration 5: ‘The living always think that gold can make them happy’ – illustrator, Grahame Baker-Smith.
Wilde subverts an ethical convention of the fairy tale: that goodness is rewarded in this world. His latent attack upon Utilitarianism, propounded, for example, by William Morris – ‘As he [the statue] is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful’ – results in a moving defence of kindness for its own sake. Underpinning this is an indictment of an hypocritical Victorian society; a culture that eventually brought about the author’s downfall, too. Wilde was denied access, because of accusations of homosexuality, to his sons – Cyril and Vyvyan (for whom ‘The Happy Prince’ was written) – and later commented on how his life had been ‘prefigured’ in the story.
Illustration 6: Cyril and Vyvyan Wilde.
A ‘deus ex machina’ effect in the penultimate paragraph is startling for its pathos and seething moral indignation: “‘Bring me the two most precious things in the city’, said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart [of The Prince] and the dead bird.”
Illustration 7: ‘The two most precious things in the city’ – illustrator, Amy Su.
Art and Culture 