If you have read The Nightingale and the Rose you might be prepared for the sad agony of this story. It is quite exquisitely written, combining Wilde’s genius for physical description with especially notable and funny anthropomorphic inventions. Here not only the animals and flowers, but even a sundial, are given human characteristics of pomposity, preciosity and spoilt petulance.
There is something extraordinarily painterly about The Birthday of the Infanta, and one cannot but suppose Wilde had been looking at a lot of Spanish art, particularly Velázquez, at the time of its composition. Indeed the whole story could be said to be inspired by one of that Spanish master’s most famous works, Las Maninas, whose central figure is a beautiful young Infanta, and who is attended by not one, but two dwarfs. Every scene in Wilde’s story seems to be a painting in itself. Wilde’s love of the pictorial arts is well known—he attended private views, vernissages and public exhibitions as often as he could—indeed I am lucky enough to be the owner of a letter of his which he wrote to a young man called Saville: ‘Let us go one afternoon and look at pictures,’ he writes, ‘there is no finer occupation.’ He scrawled on the accompanying cabinet photograph of himself: ‘The secret of life is in Art.’ The pictorial in language was an effect for which Wilde was always striving, and I do not think he achieves that quality better than in this pathetic (in the best sense) story. The flowers, the fruit (always the pomegranates, Oscar! No wonder you called the whole collection The House of Pomegranates!), the architecture, the interior decoration, all are painted with astounding skill and that faultless ear for rhythm and verbal quantity that marked Wilde out as a great writer of what Cyril Connolly christened the Mandarin style—which is to say an ornate, highly charged language about as opposite to Hemingway as you could possibly imagine.
The Birthday of the Infanta is a story worth reading twice, for when you know how it ends, the dwarf’s dance before the Infanta takes on a terrible new note of tragedy.