Introduction to Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Fairy Tales (1923)

Abstract

When I was lecturing in Boston a little before the War an Arab refugee told me that Oscar Wilde’s works had been translated into Arabian and that his Happy Prince and Other Tales had been the most popular: ‘They are our own literature,’ he said. I had already heard that ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ was much read in the Young China party;1 and for long after I found myself meditating upon the strange destiny of certain books. My mind went back to the late eighties when I was but just arrived in London with the manuscript of my first book of poems,2 and when nothing of Wilde’s had been published except his poems and ‘The Happy Prince’. I remember the reviews were generally very hostile to his work, for Wilde’s aesthetic movement was a recent event and London journalists were still in a rage with his knee breeches, his pose — and it may be with his bitter speeches about themselves; while men of letters saw nothing in his prose but imitations of Walter Pater or in his verse but imitations of Swinburne and Rossetti.3 Never did any man seem to write more deliberately for the smallest possible audience or in a style more artificial, and that audience contained nobody it seemed but a few women of fashion who invited guests to listen to his conversation and two or three young painters who continued the tradition of Rossetti.