Into spring blossoms white and blue!

During Oscar Wilde’s lifetime there was a great resurgence of interest in art; art took on a new life, and its boundaries widened till poets became painters; painters, etchers; etchers, writers. In this boundary confusion, the writers seemed to come off second best. George du Maurier, a successful illustrator, wrote several best-selling books. Whistler, the great American artist, became the talk of London with his lectures on art and his caustic books; and for several years he and Wilde, who also lectured on art, carried on a half-serious, half-comic acrimonious correspondence.

When I was commissioned to illustrate The Happy Prince and Other Tales, I approached the task with the reborn hunger I had felt for his words when I had first read them. I was prepared to find the subtleties that youth had obscured and I found them in abundance, for Oscar Wilde’s words spread out before me a pattern of beauty over which I laid a transparent sheet of appreciation hoping to keep his word colors vivid as I drew. I have tried to suggest not only the tone value and the colors that Wilde suggests through his words, but also the imaginative and decorative appeal of the stories themselves.

Of Oscar Wilde himself, it would be pleasant to report that he lived a life as long and joyful as the stories he has given to the world, but unfortunately life does not often match literature, for after a brilliant, meteoric career Wilde died penniless and alone in Paris.

He was christened Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, so that it is not necessary to mention that he was born in Dublin. His father, Sir William, was a distinguished Irish surgeon, and his mother, who wrote under the pen-name of “Speranza”, was one of the earliest writers to fan to flame the spirit of Irish independence, and her famous essay “Jacta alea est” led to the suppression of the magazine in which it was printed.

After attending Trinity College, Dublin, where he distinguished himself in classics and won the Berkeley gold medal, Wilde went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he received a first class in Humanities and won the Newdigate prize for his poem, “Ravenna.”

In the next few years he lectured on art in England and America, published a book of poems, and became one of the most widely quoted young men of his time. The Happy Prince and Other Tales was his second book, published when he was thirty-two years old. Other books, novels, and poetry followed in short order, and his brilliant plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, entranced the playgoing public of his day – understandably so, for in reading them today, the wit which made Wilde the most brilliant talker of his time, sparkles just as brilliantly; and now, anywhere one goes in America, he will find these plays performed in dozens of rural playhouses all over the country.

Two years before he died in Paris, neglected by his friends, condemned by the public he had enchanted with his brilliant plays and witty paradoxes and trenchant sayings, Wilde’s most beautiful and haunting poem, The Ballad of Reading Goal was published. Perhaps the world’s neglect was brought upon himself by himself, as he suggested in a verse of that poem:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss

The brave man with a sword!

So the stories and poems that Oscar Wilde has left to the world have brought joy and love to the hearts of all of us, and we can truly say

Out of his mouth a red, red rose!

Out of his heart a white!

For who can say by what strange way,

Christ brings His will to light.

New York, 1940