Preface to

“The Happy Prince and Other Tales”

by Everett Shinn

“Spring has forgotten this garden,” said Snow and Frost, “so we will live here all the year round.” Snow covered the grass with a white sheen, and the trees shivered under a silver coat. In the garden a beautiful little flower poked its head above the white blanket and looked about, and it saw a big sign saying: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The sign frightened the little flower, so it ducked its head into the ground and went to sleep.

Inside the house the Selfish Giant sat with his chin buried in his hands, looking gloomily out into his cold, white garden. “I can’t understand it,” he said. “I wonder why Spring is so late this year. I hope there’s a change soon.”

It would not do to tell the rest of the story, how, because of an act of kindness, the flowers did come up and the trees budded and the merry sound of children’s voices filled the garden; and how, one day in the deep of winter, white blossoms covered the peach trees. Most of us, like the Giant, raise a tall wall and put up a sign saying KEEP OUT to the fantasies that delighted our childhood and filled the long winter nights with warm, firelit thought. But Oscar Wilde, like the Giant when he repented and saw what a delight the children made of his cold garden, comes along with his ax – not a real, glistening steel ax - but an ax of words as sharp and glittering and crystal clear, and he tears down our walls of distrust, brings us back into the garden of fantasy, and lets bright sunlight return to our winter souls.

I can remember, as a child, coming in out of the winter cold, after the few hours of playtime and chores left between the end of school and the fall of the dull, gray winter twilight; coming in out of the cold, taking off my shoes, and warming my frozen toes in the oven of the large, black, comfortable kitchen range. Then the family sat around the circular, old-fashioned table that was covered with a white cloth that seemed to turn golden – we had kerosene lamps in those days, and it cast a warm but dull light – and ate supper. Afterwards I was allowed to sit in an old rocking-chair beside the range, basking in its warmth and reading a book. We had few books, and the battered, dog-eared school reader lasted many years: so it was that I sat reading over the magic words of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and other Tales. So familiar were those magic words that often I lay back with my eyes closed, remembering how the story ended, and relishing the joy that was still ahead. And when I opened my eyes and looked around the room, the story that unfolded in my mind was more real than the flickering coals in the range, more real than the white tablecloth that seemed to turn golden, more real, than the brown face of my grandmother who sat across the room, mending my woolen mittens. And somehow, because of those magic words and the joys that lay ahead, that room seemed to partake of a reality, a present, a here and now, that burned itself indelibly upon my memory, so that now I only have to recall the room to remember the stories or the stories to recall the room.

That sense of reality is harder and harder to recapture as the years pile up, and for most of us, perhaps, it is only recaptured through reading the colorful allusive words and the golden visions of a writer like Oscar Wilde. Perhaps we lose that sense of reality because, as we get older and become bogged in the petty details of everyday living, we forget how to read significant meanings into the ordinary happenings of our ordinary lives, or we forget how, and it is essentially the same thing, to use our imaginations.

That ability of the child to see in the same block of wood a knight arrayed in armored panoply or a sheik from the burning Arabian desert, a towered castle or a dirty, salt-encrusted freighter is childhood’s greatest gift. To read these stories of Oscar Wilde is to regain some of that ability.

Beyond the definiteness that every child sees in his image of one thing created from another – the knight in armor from the block of wood – there is his sense of awe, of mystery. It sends excited shivers down his spine to speculate that the shadow-darkened corner hides a pirate chest; and every time he takes a walk he hopes some fame-emblazoned hero will step from behind the nearest tree. More often this sense of mystery arouses fear, and suddenly, all alone in a familiar, lighted house, his heart will sink when he wonders what hidden thing lies lurking in the dark beyond the lighted window. But whether it leads to fear or joy, this sense of mystery accompanies the sense of reality, and reality also becomes possibility, and nothing is certain because anything is possible.

Sometimes, in real life, it is difficult to determine the exact dividing line between good and evil, the word that blesses and the word that hurts. But a writer of fairy stories knows that line; his message is that kindness and generosity are good, and should be admired; selfishness and cruelty are evil, and in the end each finds its reward. Because of that message his work has a Christlike quality.

Few writers, and fewer poets, have had the ability to appeal directly to the child, living in a world of imagination and sense, and the adult, living in a world of memories. Wordsworth was one of them; Wilde another. Oscar Wilde’s tales appeal to the child because he recognizes their reality and their mystery and to the adult because he can recover the memory that he too once recognized reality. The high sense of unselfishness embodied in “The Happy Prince” strikes an answering chord in the heart, for the implications are so direct that he who runs may read. Wordsworth himself could not have surpassed the charm of these stories nor, for instance, the appeal of Wilde’s poem “The Garden of the Tuileries”:

This winter air is keen and cold,

And keen and cold this winter sun,

But round my chair the children run

Like little things of dancing gold.

. . . . .

Ah! cruel tree! if I were you,

And children climbed me, for their sake,

Though it be winter I would break