This is perhaps my favourite of all Oscar Wilde’s short stories. It is a tale that concentrates all his best qualities into a deeply emotional fable of the most perfectly realised nature. I may as well admit that I find it almost impossible to read without crying.
All of Wilde’s great qualities are here: satirical wit at the expense of aldermanic and academic pomposity; colour and physical description conveyed in the most luscious ‘Mandarin’ language; a deep sympathy and understanding of poverty and the provenance of riches; and a tender and affecting depiction of love and friendship between two impossible principals—a grand golden statue and a good-hearted little swallow.
The sacrifice of the swallow in this story might be compared to that of the nightingale in The Nightingale and the Rose, but where that bird is given to us as an already wise, good and almost too perfect saint, the swallow is introduced as a flirtatious, foolish, flawed and, well, flighty personality who has a lot to learn and a long way to go in the small reach of a short story.
The Happy Prince is essentially the same character as the Young King but without the benefit of the latter’s epiphanic dreams. He has lived and died in luxury, in the Palace of Sans-Souci (which is the French for carefree) and now his transformation into a high and glorious statue is in fact a kind of afterlife in hell for him. It would be hell indeed if for eternity we were all forced to watch the suffering we were too careless to attend to in life. That thought, simply enough, is the moral of the story.
What lends it such richness, pathos and memorable power, however, is the relationship between the Prince and the Swallow. The story has the incantatory repetition of a great fairy story; instead of ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall’ or ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair’ we have the Prince’s repeated calls of ‘Swallow, swallow, little swallow…’ (and how magically powerful is that word ‘little’ here). Only when the gold and jewels are stripped from him does the Prince achieve the beauty and perfection of a simple bird.
Read and sob…