The Happy Prince and Other Tales

Oscar Wilde

4 ideas

1. The Happy Prince and the Swallow

   A gilded statue of a prince who lived a sheltered, pleasure-filled life sees the city's poverty from his pedestal and asks a swallow, delayed on his migration to Egypt, to strip away his ruby, sapphire eyes and gold leaf and carry them to the poor. The swallow stays past the season out of love, dies of cold at the statue's feet, and the prince's lead heart cracks. The town councillors melt down the shabby statue as no longer beautiful, but God names the heart and the dead bird as the two most precious things in the city.

2. Sacrifice is wasted on those who cannot value it

   In 'The Nightingale and the Rose' a nightingale presses her breast against a thorn all night so her blood can color a red rose for a student's love. The girl rejects it for jewels, and the student throws it in the gutter and goes back to his books. The claim is that the worth of a gift is fixed by the giver's cost, but its effect depends on the receiver's capacity to value it, and a romantic or rationalist who talks about love may be unable to recognize it when it is paid for in full.

3. Exclusion freezes the excluder's own world

   In 'The Selfish Giant' a giant walls off his garden from children, and spring refuses to come: only snow, frost and north wind remain while the rest of the land blooms. Warmth returns only when children creep back in and he knocks the wall down. The lens is that hoarding a shared good does not preserve it; the enclosure itself produces the barrenness the owner suffers.

4. Friendship rhetoric as a tool of exploitation

   In 'The Devoted Friend' the rich Miller lectures at length on true friendship while taking flowers and labor from poor little Hans and promising him a broken wheelbarrow in return. Hans drowns running an errand for the Miller, who then presents himself as the chief mourner. The mechanism is that a taker who controls the language of loyalty can make one-sided extraction feel like mutual devotion to the victim, while any self-importance, as in 'The Remarkable Rocket', fizzles unwitnessed.

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