by Oscar Wilde
‘“Oh! they will come to you,” said the Miller, “but you must take more pains. At present you have only the practice of friendship; some day you will have the theory also.”
‘“Do you really think I shall?” asked little Hans.
‘“I have no doubt of it,” answered the Miller, “but now that you have mended the roof, you had better go home and rest, for I want you to drive my sheep to the mountain tomorrow.”
‘“Poor little Hans was afraid to say anything to this, and early the next morning the Miller brought his sheep round to the cottage, and Hans started off with them to the mountain. It took him the whole day to get there and back; and when he returned he was so tired that he went off to sleep in his chair, and did not wake up till it was broad daylight.
‘“What a delightful time I shall have in my garden,” he said, and he went to work at once.
‘“But somehow he was never able to look after his flowers at all, for his friend the Miller was always coming round and sending him off on long errands, or getting him to help at the mill. Little Hans was very much distressed at times, as he was afraid his flowers would think he had forgotten them, but he consoled himself by the reflection that the Miller was his best friend. “Besides,” he used to say, “he is going to give me his wheelbarrow, and that is an act of pure generosity.”
‘So little Hans worked away for the Miller, and the Miller said all kinds of beautiful things about friendship, which Hans took down in a notebook, and used to read over at night, for he was a very good scholar.
‘Now it happened that one evening little Hans was sitting by his fireside when a loud rap came at the door. It was a very wild night, and the wind was blowing and roaring round the house so terribly that at first he thought it was merely the storm. But a second rap came, and then a third, louder than any of the others.
‘“It is some poor traveller,” said little Hans to himself, and he ran to the door.
‘There stood the Miller with a lantern in one hand and a big stick in the other.
‘“Dear little Hans,” cried the Miller, “I am in great trouble. My little boy has fallen off a ladder and hurt himself, and I am going for the Doctor. But he lives so far away, and it is such a bad night, that it has just occurred to me that it would be much better if you went instead of me. You know I am going to give you my
‘He took down his great fur coat, and his warm scarlet cap, and tied a muffler round his throat, and started off.’
wheelbarrow, and so, it is only fair that you should do something for me in return.”
‘“Certainly,” cried little Hans, “I take it quite as a compliment your coming to me, and I will start off at once. But you must lend me your lantern, as the night is so dark that I am afraid I might fall into the ditch.”
‘“I am very sorry,” answered the Miller, “but it is my new lantern, and it would be a great loss to me if anything happened to it.”
‘“Well, never mind, I will do without it,” cried little Hans, and he took down his great fur coat, and his warm scarlet cap, and tied a muffler round his throat, and started off.
‘What a dreadful storm it was! The night was so black that little Hans could hardly see, and the wind was so strong that he could scarcely stand. However, he was very courageous, and after he had been walking about three hours, he arrived at the Doctor’s house, and knocked at the door.
‘“Who is there?” cried the Doctor, putting his head out of his bedroom window.
‘“Little Hans, Doctor.”
‘“What do you want, little Hans?”
‘“The Miller’s son has fallen from a ladder, and has hurt himself, and the Miller wants you to come at once.”
‘“All right!” said the Doctor; and he ordered his horse, and his big boots, and his lantern, and came downstairs, and rode off in the direction of the Miller’s house, little Hans trudging behind him.
‘“But the storm grew worse and worse, and the rain fell in torrents, and little Hans could not see where he was going, or keep up with the horse. At last he lost his way, and wandered off on the moor, which was a very dangerous place, as it was full of deep holes, and there poor little Hans was drowned. His body was found the next day by some goatherds, floating in a great pool of water, and was brought back by them to the cottage.
‘Everybody went to little Hans’ funeral, as he was so popular, and the Miller was the chief mourner.
‘“As I was his best friend,” said the Miller, “it is only fair that I should have the best place”; so he walked at the head of the procession in a long black cloak, and every now and then he wiped his eyes with a big pocket-handkerchief.
‘“Little Hans is certainly a great loss to every one,” said the Blacksmith, when the funeral was over, and they were all seated comfortably in the inn, drinking spiced wine and eating sweet cakes.
‘“A great loss to me at any rate,” answered the Miller; “why, I had as good as given him my wheelbarrow, and now I really don’t know what to do with it. It is very much in my way at home, and it is in such bad repair that I could not get anything for it if I sold it. I will certainly take care not to give away anything again. One always suffers for being generous.”’
‘Well?’ said the Water-rat, after a long pause.
‘Well, that is the end,’ said the Linnet.
‘But what became of the Miller?’ asked the Water-rat.
‘Oh! I really don’t know,’ replied the Linnet; ‘and I am sure that I don’t care.’
‘It is quite evident then that you have no sympathy in your nature,’ said the Water-rat.
‘I am afraid you don’t quite see the moral of the story,’ remarked the Linnet.
‘The what?’ screamed the Water-rat.
‘The moral.’
‘Do you mean to say that the story has a moral?’
‘Certainly,’ said the Linnet.
‘Well, really,’ said the Water-rat, in a very angry manner, ‘I think you should have told me that before you began. If you had done so, I certainly would not have listened to you; in fact, I should have said “Pooh,” like the critic. However, I can say it now’; so he shouted out ‘Pooh’ at the top of his voice, gave a whisk with his tail, and went back into his hole.
‘And how do you like the Water-rat?’ asked the Duck, who came paddling up some minutes afterwards. ‘He has a great many good points, but for my own part I have a mother’s feelings, and I can never look at a confirmed bachelor without the tears coming into my eyes.’
‘I am rather afraid that I have annoyed him,’ answered the Linnet. ‘The fact is, that I told him a story with a moral.’
‘Ah! that is always a very dangerous thing to do,’ said the Duck.
And I quite agree with her.
THE STAR-CHILD
Introduction
This marvellous fairytale is perhaps of all Wilde’s stories the closest in style to the Grimm and Andersen tradition, as well as owing quite a little to the style of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, whose translation by Sir Richard Burton had taken the English-speaking world by storm in 1885, just seven years before the publication of The House of Pomegranates, the collection in which this story first appeared. There is even more of that element in the story called The Fisherman and his Soul as we shall see.
All the desiderata of a good fairytale are here in The Star-Child: mysterious birth, betrayal, repentance, a quest (one that follows the obligatory Rule of Three) followed by expiation, revelation, transformation and redemption. Wilde makes fun of the traditional ‘and they all lived happily ever after’ ending in a triumphantly cynical closing paragraph that I shan’t spoil for you.
If you are familiar by now with other Wilde fairytales, you will recognise his habit of serving up witty, epigrammatical exchanges at the beginning of a story, as a way of easing children (and adults) into what will often be a serious and soulful story. He does that here to great effect, with a set of very pleasing animal moralists. The Woodcutter’s wife is somet
hing of a philosopher too. She complains about starvation and cold and when her husband offers the standard sententious religious consolation: ‘but God careth for the sparrows even, and feedeth them’, she replies with the excellently practical and unarguable: ‘Do not the sparrows die of hunger in the winter?’
As so often, knowing Wilde’s own story tempts one into all kinds of interpretations. Was there ever such a star-child as Lord Alfred Douglas, whose aristocratic beauty (‘like sawn ivory’!) concealed an often cruel, capricious and treacherous heart too. But the story prefigures Wilde’s own experiences of course, and stands on its own, delivering the universal satisfaction of a fine moral fable. Be kind, not just to your fellows, but to your parents, to animals and to strangers in need. Such kindness will be rewarded. It will make you beautiful; it will make you a true star-child…
THE STAR-CHILD
ONCE UPON A TIME two poor Woodcutters were making their way home through a great pine-forest. It was winter, and a night of bitter cold. The snow lay thick upon the ground, and upon the branches of the trees: the frost kept snapping the little twigs on either side of them, as they passed: and when they came to the Mountain-Torrent she was hanging motionless in air, for the Ice-King had kissed her.
So cold was it that even the animals and the birds did not know what to make of it.
‘Ugh!’ snarled the Wolf, as he limped through the brushwood with his tail between his legs, ‘this is perfectly monstrous weather. Why doesn’t the Government look to it?’
‘Weet! weet! weet!’ twittered the green Linnets, ‘the old Earth is dead and they have laid her out in her white shroud.’
‘The Earth is going to be married, and this is her bridal dress,’ whispered the Turtle-doves to each other. Their little pink feet were quite frost-bitten, but they felt that it was their duty to take a romantic view of the situation.
‘Nonsense!’ growled the Wolf. ‘I tell you that it is all the fault of the Government, and if you don’t believe me I shall eat you.’ The Wolf had a thoroughly practical mind, and was never at a loss for a good argument.
‘Well, for my own part,’ said the Woodpecker, who was a born philosopher, ‘I don’t care an atomic theory for explanations. If a thing is so, it is so, and at present it is terribly cold.’
Terribly cold it certainly was. The little Squirrels, who lived inside the tall fir-tree, kept rubbing each other’s noses to keep themselves warm, and the Rabbits curled themselves up in their holes, and did not venture even to look out of doors. The only people who seemed to enjoy it were the great horned Owls. Their feathers were quite stiff with rime, but they did not mind, and they rolled their large yellow eyes, and called out to each other across the forest, ‘Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! what delightful weather we are having!’
On and on went the two Woodcutters, blowing lustily upon their fingers, and stamping with their huge iron-shod boots upon the caked snow. Once they sank into a deep drift, and came out as white as millers are, when the stones are grinding; and once they slipped on the hard smooth ice where the marsh-water was frozen, and their faggots fell out of their bundles, and they had to pick them up and bind them together again; and once they thought that they had lost their way, and a great terror seized on them, for they knew that the Snow is cruel to those who sleep in her arms. But they put their trust in the good Saint Martin, who watches over all travellers, and retraced their steps, and went warily, and at last they reached the outskirts of the forest, and saw, far down in the valley beneath them, the lights of the village in which they dwelt.
So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold.
Yet, after that they had laughed they became sad, for they remembered their poverty, and one of them said to the other, ‘Why did we make merry, seeing that life is for the rich, and not for such as we are? Better that we had died of cold in the forest, or that some wild beast had fallen upon us and slain us.’
‘Truly,’ answered his companion, ‘much is given to some, and little is given to others. Injustice has parcelled out the world, nor is there equal division of aught save of sorrow.’
But as they were bewailing their misery to each other this strange thing happened. There fell from heaven a very bright and beautiful star. It slipped down the side of the sky, passing by the other stars in its course, and, as they watched it wondering, it seemed to them to sink behind a clump of willow-trees that stood hard by a little sheepfold no more than a stone’s-throw away.
‘Why! there is a crock of gold for whoever finds it,’ they cried, and they set to and ran, so eager were they for the gold.
And one of them ran faster than his mate, and outstripped him, and forced his way through the willows, and came out on the other side, and lo! there was indeed a thing of gold lying on the white snow. So he hastened towards it, and stooping down placed his hands upon it, and it was a cloak of golden tissue, curiously wrought with stars, and wrapped in many folds. And he cried out to his comrade that he had found the treasure that had fallen from the sky, and when his comrade had come up, they sat them down in the snow, and loosened the folds of the cloak that they might divide the pieces of gold. But, alas! no gold was in it, nor silver, nor, indeed, treasure of any kind, but only a little child who was asleep.
‘No gold was in it, nor silver, nor, indeed, treasure of any kind, but only a little child who was asleep.’
And one of them said to the other: ‘This is a bitter ending to our hope, nor have we any good fortune, for what doth a child profit to a man? Let us leave it here, and go our way, seeing that we are poor men, and have children of our own whose bread we may not give to another.’
But his companion answered him: ‘Nay, but it were an evil thing to leave the child to perish here in the snow, and though I am as poor as thou art, and have many mouths to feed, and but little in the pot, yet will I bring it home with me, and my wife shall have care of it.’
So very tenderly he took up the child, and wrapped the cloak around it to shield it from the harsh cold, and made his way down the hill to the village, his comrade marvelling much at his foolishness and softness of heart.
And when they came to the village, his comrade said to him, ‘Thou hast the child, therefore give me the cloak, for it is meet that we should share.’
But he answered him: ‘Nay, for the cloak is neither mine nor thine, but the child’s only,’ and he bade him Godspeed, and went to his own house and knocked.
And when his wife opened the door and saw that her husband had returned safe to her, she put her arms round his neck and kissed him, and took from his back the bundle of faggots, and brushed the snow off his boots, and bade him come in.
But he said to her, ‘I have found something in the forest, and I have brought it to thee to have care of it,’ and he stirred not from the threshold.
‘What is it?’ she cried. ‘Show it to me, for the house is bare, and we have need of many things.’ And he drew the cloak back, and showed her the sleeping child.
‘Alack, goodman!’ she murmured, ‘have we not children of our own, that thou must needs bring a changeling to sit by the hearth? And who knows if it will not bring us bad fortune? And how shall we tend it?’ And she was wroth against him.
‘Nay, but it is a Star-Child,’ he answered; and he told her the strange manner of the finding of it.
But she would not be appeased, but mocked at him, and spoke angrily, and cried: ‘Our children lack bread, and shall we feed the child of another? Who is there who careth for us? And who giveth us food?’
‘Nay, but God careth for the sparrows even, and feedeth them,’ he answered.
‘Do not the sparrows die of hunger in the winter?’ she asked. ‘And is it not winter now?’
And the man answered nothing, but stirred not from the threshold.
And a bitter wind from the forest came in through the open door, and made her tremble, and she shivered, and
said to him: ‘Wilt thou not close the door? There cometh a bitter wind into the house, and I am cold.’
‘Into a house where a heart is hard cometh there not always a bitter wind?’ he asked. And the woman answered him nothing, but crept closer to the fire.
And after a time she turned round and looked at him, and her eyes were full of tears. And he came in swiftly, and placed the child in her arms, and she kissed it, and laid it in a little bed where the youngest of their own children was lying. And on the morrow the Woodcutter took the curious cloak of gold and placed it in a great chest, and a chain of amber that was round the child’s neck his wife took and set it in the chest also.
So the Star-Child was brought up with the children of the Woodcutter, and sat at the same board with them, and was their playmate. And every year he became more beautiful to look at, so that all those who dwelt in the village were filled with wonder, for, while they were swarthy and black-haired, he was white and delicate as sawn ivory, and his curls were like the rings of the daffodil. His lips, also, were like the petals of a red flower, and his eyes were like violets by a river of pure water, and his body like the narcissus of a field where the mower comes not.
Yet did his beauty work him evil. For he grew proud, and cruel, and selfish. The children of the Woodcutter, and the other children of the village, he despised, saying that they were of mean parentage, while he was noble, being sprang from a Star, and he made himself master over them, and called them his servants. No pity had he for the poor, or for those who were blind or maimed or in any way afflicted, but would cast stones at them and drive them forth on to the highway, and bid them beg their bread elsewhere, so that none save the outlaws came twice to that village to ask for alms. Indeed, he was as one enamoured of beauty, and would mock at the weakly and ill-favoured, and make jest of them; and himself he loved, and in summer, when the winds were still, he would lie by the well in the priest’s orchard and look down at the marvel of his own face, and laugh for the pleasure he had in his fairness.
