《快乐王子集（快乐王子和其他故事）》

A gilded statue stands on a column above the city, and everyone who looks up calls it beautiful. Sapphires like blue velvet sit in its eyes, amethyst for the pupils, gold leaf covers it head to foot, and a ruby glows on the hilt of its sword. They call it the Happy Prince, happy in life, when he never knew what suffering looked like, and only after death did he look down for the first time. Once he saw, his eyes never closed again.

This is Oscar Wilde's one widely read fairy tale collection, published in the late Victorian eighteen nineties, five short stories written for the English fairy tale tradition and then bent into another shape entirely. His other collection, A House of Pomegranates, is darker and more hushed; this one has a sharper eye on society. In those years Wilde was both the standard bearer of aestheticism and, in stories meant for children, someone quietly puncturing Victorian respectability. It is remembered because a fairy tale is supposed to end happily ever after, and he wrote instead about death, misunderstanding, and a leaden heart that will not melt.

The five stories stand alone. This is not a novel where one hero threads through every chapter: a statue high above a city and a swallow flying south too late; a nightingale in a university town, pleading a student's case for him; a walled garden in the English countryside; a poor gardener drained dry by a friendship near a country mill; and fireworks doomed to fizzle at a royal wedding. Line the characters up and the pattern shows. The Happy Prince, little Hans, the Nightingale, the Giant all give away their life or their belongings. The professor's daughter, the Miller, the Rocket all guard their own standing and never once notice anyone else's. And two audiences who will not be moved: the Water-rat, unmoved by Hans's death, and the Giant, who in the end has no patience left for a Rocket that only ever cried for itself.

From his column the Happy Prince sees the whole city in one night, the gutters, the slums, the garret windows. The Swallow had only stopped to rest on his way south, eager to reach Egypt. The Prince's first request: carry the ruby from my sword hilt to a seamstress whose child is burning with fever, her hands so cracked from embroidering passion flowers that they no longer bleed. The second: carry the sapphire from my left eye to a poor young man writing a play in his garret, his inkwell frozen solid. The third: carry my other sapphire to a little girl crouched under a bridge, crying, her matches spilled into the gutter. Each flight costs the Swallow another day he should have spent flying south. His feathers dim. He can barely keep his eyes open.

By the time the Swallow has given away the last of the gold leaf, winter has come. I love you better than anything, but you must go to Egypt, the Prince tells him, and urges him on his way. The Swallow kisses the Prince on the lips and falls down dead at his feet. The people of the city think the stripped, ungilded statue is ugly now, and the Town Councillors order it melted down. But when the metal goes into the furnace, the heart will not melt. It is thrown on a rubbish heap with the dead bird. At the end, God sends an angel to bring back the two most precious things in the city, and they are exactly these: the leaden heart, and the dead bird.

The second story is The Nightingale and the Rose. A poor student wants to ask the professor's daughter to dance, and he is told to bring her a red rose first. He weeps aloud in the snow, and a Nightingale in the garden hears him, true love worth more than jewels, which sounds lovely, except what happens next is not lovely at all. The Nightingale asks a rose tree how to grow a red rose. The tree tells her: press your breast to a thorn in the dead of winter, sing to the moon the whole night through, and pay for the color with your life, love that deep draws blood. The Nightingale does sing until dawn, the thorn goes clean through her heart, and by the time the student opens his window, one rose has bloomed, red as a jewel.

The student picks the rose and goes to keep his appointment, but the professor's daughter prefers the real jewels another suitor has sent her, and she throws the rose, bought with a life, into the corridor. The student drops it in the gutter, a cart wheel runs over it, and he goes back to his room to read metaphysics, muttering that love is such a foolish thing. The Nightingale paid with her life for one flower, and the petals are crushed in the street, and no one ever learns what that flower cost. Wilde has already made his point about goodness going unrewarded, and it is a hard one, but he will not even give the Nightingale a line of complaint.

The third story is The Selfish Giant. The Giant comes home after seven years visiting his friend the Cornish ogre and finds children playing in his garden. He builds a high wall and drives them out, with a sign reading TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, and from then on the garden holds only north wind, frost, and snow, even after spring has come everywhere else. One day he sees, through his window, children who have crawled in through a gap in the wall, and he rushes out to chase them off, all but one small boy who cannot reach the branches of a tree. The Giant lifts him up into it, and in that instant the snow melts and the garden bursts into bloom. The Giant repents and quietly knocks the wall down himself. Years later, too old to move, he sees the boy again under the same tree, with the marks of nails in his hands and feet. The boy tells him these are the wounds of Love, and asks him to come that afternoon to his garden. The Giant closes his eyes in a shower of falling blossom.

The fourth story, The Devoted Friend, is a story within a story: a Linnet tells it, in a hole by the river, to a self-important and unfeeling Water-rat. Its subjects are the poor gardener little Hans and the rich Miller. The Miller talks endlessly about true friendship being unselfish, and the one thing he ever promises Hans, his broken down old wheelbarrow, he never actually hands over. In the name of friendship he sends Hans off again and again: to bring flowers, to carry sacks of flour for the Miller's own son, to walk miles through a storm to fetch the doctor, and will not even lend him a lantern for the road. Hans loses his way in the dark and drowns in the moor. He is the only one who freezes to death that night. At the funeral the Miller walks at the head of the procession in black, calling himself chief mourner, and on the way home he starts sighing about the wheelbarrow he meant to give Hans, now too broken to be worth anything, what a pity. The Water-rat, hearing all this, feels nothing at all, and swims straight back to his hole.

The last story is the lightest and the cruelest. There are fireworks planned for a royal wedding, and one of them, the Remarkable Rocket, starts crying the moment it is unpacked, convinced it is being overlooked and unappreciated, and looks down on every firework around it, the crackers, the Roman candles, the squibs, the catherine wheels, all beneath it. While the rest go up gloriously it is still crying, and by the time its own turn comes it has cried so long that its fuse is soaked through, three faint hisses, and not so much as a spark. The next day it is thrown out with the rubbish into a ditch, and a boy gathering firewood picks it up to boil his kettle. Lying in the ashes it is still telling itself it is going to do something remarkable, right up until it is nothing but a burnt, rain-soaked stick that nobody notices.

On the surface these are five stories for children. Underneath, they cut in layers. Gilt statues, jewels, roses, Wilde's favorite aesthetic materials, all get turned into something else here. The gilt has to be stripped away before anyone can be saved. Real jewels replace a rose bought with a life. The Prince's statue ends up as nothing but a leaden heart no furnace can melt. Wilde uses beauty as bait, lets the reader take it, then shows what beauty actually costs underneath. Self-sacrifice is the theme this book keeps returning to: the Swallow strips the statue bare to give it all away, the Nightingale dyes the rose with her own life, little Hans walks into the snow in the dark, three people, each good beyond reason, and none of them gets anything back in this world. Wilde does not let that cruelty curdle into bitterness. In two of the stories he leaves a Christian door open: God sends an angel for the leaden heart and the dead bird, and the boy comes back with nail marks in his hands and feet. That is not the logic of happily ever after. It is mercy from somewhere higher up.

More than a century later, every target this little book hits still rings. Calculation winning out over feeling, vanity standing in for kindness, the good paying the bills for the vain, and the one who profited walking at the head of the funeral calling himself chief mourner, Wilde laid this whole hand of cards out in stories he wrote almost casually for children. His method holds up too: the opening is always sweet enough to taste, the ending turns cold, and right where you think you are safe is exactly where he has already planted the trap. It is a structure that still works today, in web dramas, in comics, in indie games.

These stories are short, but reading them is nothing like hearing them summarized. Wilde writes the Swallow's last kiss without a trace of grand tragedy or weeping. He writes the Miller totting up the cost of that broken wheelbarrow without a word of anger, just a lightness that turns your stomach. He gets through the unmeltable leaden heart in a handful of words. In someone else's mouth all of this is just plot. On the page, you stop on your own, you laugh on your own, go cold on your own, close the book and sit with that heart on your own. Knowing the plot is what gets you to open the book. Opening the book is what gets you to Wilde.