The Happy Prince 6.1

and the Mathematical Master frowned and looked very severe, for he did not approve of children dreaming.
~     Oscar Wilde: Stories for Children. Illus. P.J. Lynch

Very much in the style of Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde writes moving and imaginative fairytales full of a troubling kind of Christian symbolism and pathos.

I had no trouble deciding that this story, and most of the others in the same volumes, belong behind the Empty Child. The reader is often very clearly intended to identify with the child-figures, animals, or inanimate objects while also allegorically identifying them as Christ-figures, or reading them as parables. The idealized figures have or learn very generous self-sacrifice. The Happy Prince gives up his gold and jewels (his skin and eyes) to help the poor of his city, and the bird gives up his plans, and finally his life, to aid him. The giant opens his garden to children, especially the Christchild.

My favorite copy of these stories off my own shelves is illustrated by P. J. Lynch, an artist of innocence and genius.

The stories contain moments, smaller stories that elucidate more commonplace scenarios. For instance, the swallow in The Happy Prince begins the story in love with a reed, and as the reader reads, she wonders what this has to do with a prince at all. The setting is entirely different - a "talking animals" story, in the Aesop vein, with some saucy social commentary, while the last part of the story feels much more like Andersen's "The Little Matchgirl," full of pathos and compassion in a cityscape.

The Romantic ideas here, though, that I wish to capture with the epigraph, is the opposition between adults/education and childhood/children. The Math Master would wish to prevent children from doing what they naturally do, while the reader is meant to understand that what they are doing is not incorrect, and indeed, laudible - they hold an inherent innocence and purity that education is meant to train out of them. I suspect that the adult/child opposition will characterize many of the stories in the empty child wing, though it sets up an interesting kind of opposition between the adult reader and the child s/he is meant to occupy in a given instance. I suspect that education does not always oppose childhood, but that (Narnia?) sometimes natural maturity (Wordsworth?) wears away the heavenly glimmer.