Oscar Wilde’s Stories for All Ages. Stephen Fry
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you should certainly lecture on Philosophy,’ said the Dragon-fly; and he spread a pair of lovely gauze wings and soared away into the sky.
‘How very silly of him not to stay here!’ said the Rocket. ‘I am sure that he has not often got such a chance of improving his mind. However, I don’t care a bit. Genius like mine is sure to be appreciated some day’; and he sank down a little deeper into the mud.
After some time a large White Duck swam up to him. She had yellow legs, and webbed feet, and was considered a great beauty on account of her waddle.
‘Quack, quack, quack,’ she said. ‘What a curious shape you are! May I ask were you born like that, or is it the result of an accident?’
‘It is quite evident that you have always lived in the country,’ answered the Rocket, ‘otherwise you would know who I am. However, I excuse your ignorance. It would be unfair to expect other people to be as remarkable as oneself. You will no doubt be surprised to hear that I can fly up into the sky, and come down in a shower of golden rain.’
‘I don’t think much of that,’ said the Duck, ‘as I cannot see what use it is to any one. Now, if you could plough the fields like the ox, or draw a cart like the horse, or look after the sheep like the collie-dog, that would be something.’
‘My good creature,’ cried the Rocket in a very haughty tone of voice, ‘I see that you belong to the lower orders. A person of my position is never useful. We have certain accomplishments, and that is more than sufficient. I have no sympathy myself with industry of any kind, least of all with such industries as you seem to recommend. Indeed, I have always been of opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.’
‘Well, well,’ said the Duck, who was of a very peaceable disposition, and never quarrelled with any one, ‘everybody has different tastes. I hope, at any rate, that you are going to take up your residence here.’
‘Oh! dear no,’ cried the Rocket. ‘I am merely a visitor, a distinguished visitor. The fact is that I find this place rather tedious. There is neither society here, nor solitude. In fact, it is essentially suburban. I shall probably go back to Court, for I know that I am destined to make a sensation in the world.’
‘I had thoughts of entering public life once myself,’ remarked the Duck; ‘there are so many things that need reforming. Indeed, I took the chair at a meeting some time ago, and we passed resolutions condemning everything that we did not like. However, they did not seem to have much effect. Now I go in for domesticity, and look after my family.’
‘I am made for public life,’ said the Rocket, ‘and so are all my relations, even the humblest of them. Whenever we appear we excite great attention. I have not actually appeared myself, but when I do so it will be a magnificent sight. As for domesticity, it ages one rapidly, and distracts one’s mind from higher things.’
‘Ah! the higher things of life, how fine they are!’ said the Duck; ‘and that reminds me how hungry I feel’: and she swam away down the stream, saying, ‘Quack, quack, quack.’
‘Come back! come back!’ screamed the Rocket, ‘I have a great deal to say to you’; but the Duck paid no attention to him. ‘I am glad that she has gone,’ he said to himself, ‘she has a decidedly middle-class mind’; and he sank a little deeper still into the mud, and began to think about the loneliness of genius, when suddenly two little boys in white smocks came running down the bank, with a kettle and some faggots.
‘This must be the deputation,’ said the Rocket, and he tried to look very dignified.
‘Hallo!’ cried one of the boys, ‘look at this old stick! I wonder how it came here’; and he picked the rocket out of the ditch.
‘OLD Stick!’ said the Rocket, ‘impossible! GOLD Stick, that is what he said. Gold Stick is very complimentary. In fact, he mistakes me for one of the Court dignitaries!’
‘Let us put it into the fire!’ said the other boy, ‘it will help to boil the kettle.’
So they piled the faggots together, and put the Rocket on top, and lit the fire.
‘This is magnificent,’ cried the Rocket, ‘they are going to let me off in broad day-light, so that every one can see me.’
‘We will go to sleep now,’ they said, ‘and when we wake up the kettle will be boiled’; and they lay down on the grass, and shut their eyes.
The Rocket was very damp, so he took a long time to burn. At last, however, the fire caught him.
‘Now I am going off!’ he cried, and he made himself very stiff and straight. ‘I know I shall go much higher than the stars, much higher than the moon, much higher than the sun. In fact, I shall go so high that—’
Fizz! Fizz! Fizz! and he went straight up into the air.
‘Delightful!’ he cried, ‘I shall go on like this for ever. What a success I am!’
But nobody saw him.
Then he began to feel a curious tingling sensation all over him.
‘Now I am going to explode,’ he cried. ‘I shall set the whole world on fire, and make such a noise that nobody will talk about anything else for a whole year.’ And he certainly did explode. Bang! Bang! Bang! went the gunpowder. There was no doubt about it.
But nobody heard him, not even the two little boys, for they were sound asleep.
Then all that was left of him was the stick, and this fell down on the back of a Goose who was taking a walk by the side of the ditch.
‘Good heavens!’ cried the Goose. ‘It is going to rain sticks’; and she rushed into the water.
‘I knew I should create a great sensation,’ gasped the Rocket, and he went out.
‘I knew I should create a great sensation!’
‘I have put my talent into my work and my genius into my life’, Wilde once declared. A part of that genius, emanating perhaps from a part of that life, can be found in The Nightingale and the Rose, which I think is the most painful and beautiful story he ever wrote—outside the story of his own life. As so often he seems to question, to doubt, even to upbraid the very qualities with which he was most associated. Wilde was a scholar (one of the finest Hellenists of his generation at Trinity College, Dublin and at Oxford) and a passionate advocate of beauty. He was what would now be called the poster child for the aesthetes, decadents and dandies of late Victorian England (and France, come to that). He was also one of the most famous lovers in history. Yet this story has little sympathy with a scholar who affects to worship beauty and to be so deeply in love as to be reduced to a decline worthy of Petrarch. Real beauty, as in The Young King, is seen to flow from pain and sacrifice. The only instance of true love in the story is that of the Nightingale, who is in love with love itself and suffers and dies for it.
Wilde’s high doctrine of the difference between artificial beauty and real beauty is intense in this story. The sacrifice of the Nightingale, its eager, energetic fluttering, its passionate heartbeat and its bright-eyed willingness to leak out its heart’s blood, is as affecting as anything in all Wilde’s work. It is as touching as the casual betrayal of the scholar is distressing.
For many there might be found a sense of religious mystery at the heart of this story: the Sacré Coeur, the holy, bleeding heart is a familiar image in Roman Catholicism. For myself I think it is another example of a story