by Oscar Wilde
But the little dwarf made no answer.
And the Infanta stamped her foot, and called out to her uncle, who was walking on the terrace with the Chamberlain, reading some despatches that had just arrived from Mexico, where the Holy Office had recently been established. “My ugly little dwarf 26 is sulking,” she cried, “you must wake him up, and whip him,27 and tell him to dance for me.”
They smiled at each other, and sauntered in, and Don Pedro stooped down, and slapped the dwarf on the cheek with his embroidered glove. “You must dance,” he said, “petit monstre.28 You must dance. The Infanta of Spain29 wishes to be amused.”
But the little dwarf never moved.
“We must send for the whipping master,” said Don Pedro wearily, and he went back to the terrace. But the Chamberlain looked grave, and he knelt beside the little dwarf, and put his hand upon his heart. And after a few moments he shrugged his shoulders, and rose up, and having made a low bow to the Infanta, he said: “Mi bella Princesa,30 your ugly little dwarf will never dance again.”31
“Why?” said the Infanta, laughing.
“Because his heart is broken,” answered the Chamberlain.32
And the Infanta frowned, and her dainty rose-leaf lips curled in pretty disdain. “For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts,” she cried, and ran out into the garden.
“It is a pity he is dead,” said the Chamberlain, turning him over with his foot. “He is so ugly he might have made the King smile.”33
* First published simultaneously in London, New York, and Paris on 30 March 1889 in Paris Illustré. The Paris edition featured a French translation of the story by Stuart Merrill, who would three years later assist Wilde with the French of his play Salomé. The story was republished with revisions in England in 1891 in A House of Pomegranates, where it was retitled “The Birthday of The Infanta” and accompanied by line drawings and decorations by Charles Ricketts. “In point of style,” Wilde wrote, “it is my best story … I thought of it in black and silver” (quoted in Stuart Mason [Christopher Millard], Bibliography of Oscar Wilde [London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914], 174). The story was inspired partly by Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) depicting the young Infanta Margarita (1651–1673), favorite child of Philip IV of Spain, surrounded by maids of honor, a chaperone, and two dwarves. According to Michael Field, Wilde wanted the story “to give something of the dignity and gloom of Spanish life—like heavy, black-velvet cushions.”
1 On republishing the story in 1891, Wilde altered “the little Princess,” with its stark reminder that the protagonist is a child, to “the Infanta.” In “The Little Mermaid,” Hans Christian Andersen repeatedly calls his little mermaid a little princess.
2 Wilde’s King is based loosely on the impotent, unstable Charles II (1661–1700), the last Hapsburg ruler of Spain, who became heartbroken and incapable of governing effectively upon the premature death of his wife, Marie Louise D’Orléans (1662–1689). Charles II, known as El Hechizado (The Bewitched) in Spain, was the brother, not the father, of the Infanta Margarita, the subject of the Velasquez painting that inspired Wilde. In other respects, Wilde adheres closely to historical fact in this paragraph and the next two. Horst Schroeder conjectures that Victor Hugo’s historical drama Ruy Blas (1838) was one source for Wilde’s historical allusions (Schroeder, “Some Historical and Literary References in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Birthday of the Infanta,’ ” Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 21, no.4 [1988]: 289–292.)
3 My queen! My queen!
4 Literally “act of faith,” the term used by Spanish authorities for the ceremonial execution of heretics after they had been condemned by the Inquisition. Charles II presided over the greatest auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition in 1680, when 120 prisoners were paraded and punished for their heresies, 21 of whom were burned at the stake. On revising the story in 1891, Wilde changed “splendid auto-da-fe” to “solemn auto-da-fe.”
5 The true smile of France. Marie Louise D’Orléans was famous for her joie de vivre.
6 The little princess reacts in typically childlike fashion to the emotional neglect of her widowed father, although her expressions suggest she is repressing traumatized feelings. Her spirit contrasts markedly with her father’s morbidity. For moue, see p. 46 n.16 above.
7 Bullfighters.
8 Brave bull! Brave bull! Wilde’s Spanish terms would have recalled to the story’s earliest readers the detailed, illustrated account “Bull-Fighting in Spain,” by Armand Dayot, that had appeared in Paris Illustré (no. 61, 3 March 1889, pp. 163–171) four weeks before Wilde’s story appeared there.
9 Sophonisba was a Carthaginian noblewoman of the second century BCE. Rather than marry a Roman whom she did not love and be taken in triumph to Rome, she knowingly drank a cup of poison offered her by her Numidian lover. Her tragedy, which Wilde may have known from Livy’s or Polibius’s accounts, was frequently depicted on French and English stages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
10 “while it was only right that heretics and Jews and people of that kind should suffer” deleted in 1891.
11 Wilde viewed puppets highly, seeing them as symbols of the exquisite skill required of actors in order fully to inhabit the roles they must play. Whereas the personality of the actor himself “is often a source of danger” and “may distort” or “lead astray,” there are “many advantages in puppets.… They recognise the presiding intellect of the dramatist.… They are admirably docile, and have no personalities at all” (CL 519–520).
12 The question of whether the princess could be cruel to anybody, while muted here, resonates more powerfully at the end of the story. See p. 176 n.31 below.
13 Here and throughout, Wilde capitalized the “d” of dwarf on republishing the story in 1891, a change that accentuates the objectification and dehumanization implicit in the term dwarf. Long familiar in fairy tales, dwarves occupied “a borderline between the natural and the supernatural” in the Victorian imagination (Carole Silver, quoted in Jessica Straley, “Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales and the Evolution of Lying” in Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood, ed. Joseph Bristow [Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017], 172). But Wilde’s dwarf possesses more humanity and heart than any other characters in the story, and as elsewhere in his short fiction, Wilde invokes a familiar fairy-tale stereotype only to subvert it. As a young boy he probably read or saw a dramatic adaptation of the Countess D’Aulnoy’s “The Yellow Dwarf” (adapted for the stage and translated by the playwright James Robinson Planché shortly after Wilde’s birth in 1854) in which a villainous dwarf is spurned by a young princess in favor of a handsome wealthy suitor who at one point asks him “Miserable monster … hast thou really the audacity to declare thyself the lover of this divine Princess, and to pretend to the possession of so glorious a treasure?” Wilde’s dwarf is also indebted to Hans Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling,” as the words “waddling” and “wagging” in the very next sentence indicate, although once again Wilde refuses Andersen’s happy ending. In Andersen’s tale, ugliness is transitory and happiness is ultimately attainable. In Wilde’s tale, by contrast, ugliness is innate and tragic, since there is no hope for the unloved, infatuated dwarf.
14 In 1699 the Spanish court brought the Italian castrato Matteo Sassano (1666–1737) to Madrid to dispel the gloom of Charles II with his singing. Similarly, in 1737 the Italian castrato Farinelli (1705–1782) was brought to Madrid, where he became a great favorite of the depressive Philip V. The Italian castrato Gaetano Majorano (1710–1783), known as Caffarelli, also performed at the court of Philip V, although he was less favored by the Spanish king than Farinelli.
15 “tea” altered to “the hour of siesta” in 1891.
16 Compare the dwarf’s reaction to the imperious command of the princess to dance, with that of the young princess-heroine of Wilde’
s Salome, in which it is the princess who dances—though not without first exacting from Herod a promise of heavy compensation, which will ultimately lead to the satisfaction of her own desires.
17 This paragraph depicts an idealized pastoral idyll: Wilde imagines the dwarf as a rustic swain, wholly in tune with the world of nature and the forest, but ill-suited to the corrupt world of the city and the court.
18 True to pastoral conventions, the dwarf imagines the princess as a nymph who will be satisfied with the best that nature has to offer. His fantasy of bucolic life with his beloved echoes that of Christopher Marlowe’s “passionate shepherd,” who tells his would-be lover:
I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle …
A belt of straw and Ivy buds,
With coral clasps and Amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
(Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”)
19 There was no Spanish king known as Jean le Fou (John the Mad, in French). Possibly this is Wilde’s amalgam of two different Spanish monarchs: Joanna the Mad, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, who, after ten years as Queen of Castile, ruled the united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon for nearly forty years before her death in 1555; and Charles IV, known as “Charles the Hunter,” who ruled Spain for twenty years before his abdication in 1808 and who was known for his love of hunting as well as his disinterest in affairs of state.
20 Stool.
21 One of the great feats of Renaissance woodblock printing, the Dance of Death, by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), is a series of forty-one wood engravings depicting death’s unexpected, grim intrusion into the lives of thirty-four individuals in various walks of life, from pope to doctor to humble ploughman.
22 The following sentence added here 1891: “She would come with him to the fair forest, and all day long he would dance for her delight.”
23 The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited the existence of a “mirror stage” in psychological development, following the moment when a child first recognizes him or herself in a mirror. For Lacan, a profound transformation takes place in the child when he assumes an image, a transformation partly predicated on the child’s sudden identification with its objectified image as something “other” than its primordial self. For the scholar Katherine O’Keefe, however, the dwarf—like the little princess—fails to reconcile the self with its objectified other: “when the dwarf recognizes himself in the mirror … he comes to the recognition of his own state in relationship to other beings, in which he is not in fact as autonomous as he believes. He literally recognizes his Self as the Other, and in the trauma of his recognition and his refusal to accept this, he actually does struggle to the death” (“Oscar Wilde and G. F. Hegel: The Wildean Fairy Tale as Postcolonial Dialectic,” in Philosophy and Oscar Wilde, ed. Michael Y. Bennett [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017], 169). The moment anticipates that in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray when the novel’s protagonist looks into the “unjust mirror” of his distorted portrait shortly before his suicide.
24 Compare with Sybil Vane’s abjection in the face of unrequited love in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “A fit of passionate sobbing choked her. She crouched on the floor like a wounded thing.”
25 “clapped her tiny hands together” altered to “fluttered her big fan” upon republication in 1891.
26 Altered to “funny little dwarf” upon republication in 1891.
27 “And whip him” was deleted upon republication in 1891, downplaying any suggestion of deliberate cruelty on the princess’s part.
28 Little monster.
29 “Spain” altered to “Spain and the Indies” in 1891.
30 My pretty princess.
31 The following added here in 1891: “It is a pity, for he is so ugly that he might have made the King smile.” This is an adaptation of the final sentence to the present version (deleted in 1891). See n.33 below.
32 “Hearts are made to be broken,” Wilde writes in De Profundis, or else they “live by being wounded” (A Woman of No Importance). In his writings Wilde often views the human heart not merely as the site of personal suffering and torment, but also as an impediment to a life ruled by strictly aesthetic principles. As Mrs. Erlynne remarks in Lady Windermere’s Fan, a heart “doesn’t go with modern dress.… And it spoils one’s career at critical moments.” It is all too easy to condemn the little princess as “a moral monster, repulsive in spite of her dazzling outward appearance” (Christopher S. Nassaar “Andersen’s ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and Wilde’s ‘The Birthday of the Infanta,’ ” The Explicator 55, no. 2 [Winter 1997]: 84): her closing comment “let those who come to play with me have no hearts,” like her instruction to her courtiers moments earlier to whip the dwarf’s corpse, seems definitively to answer the question posed previously (p. 157) of whether the little princess could ever be cruel. However, on republishing the story Wilde deleted the princess’s order to have the dwarf’s corpse whipped, as noted above (n.27), while in both published versions he is careful to characterize her shocking final line as the remark of an overprotected, emotionally deprived child. Like the Happy Prince when he was alive, the princess does “not know what tears [are],” for she “[lives] in the Palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter.” In the single-mindedness of her devotion to pleasure as well as her imperiousness, she anticipates the tragic heroine (also a princess) of Wilde’s play Salome.
33 Wilde deleted the concluding paragraph from the 1891 version so that the story ended with the princess running out into the garden. However, he transposed the Chamberlain’s final sentence, relocating it at the end of the speech beginning “Mi bella Princesa” a few lines above. See n.31 above.
THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W. H.*
I
· · · I HAD BEEN DINING WITH ERSKINE in his pretty little house in Birdcage Walk,1 and we were sitting in the library over our coffee and cigarettes, when the question of literary forgeries happened to turn up in conversation. I cannot at present remember how it was that we struck upon this somewhat curious topic, as it was at that time, but I know that we had a long discussion about Macpherson, Ireland, and Chatterton,2 and that with regard to the last I insisted that his so-called forgeries were merely the result of an artistic desire for perfect representation; that we had no right to quarrel with an artist for the conditions under which he chooses to present his work; and that all Art being to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality on some imaginative plane out of reach of the trammelling accidents and limitations of real life, to censure an artist for a forgery was to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem.
Erskine, who was a good deal older than I was, and had been listening to me with the amused deference of a man of forty, suddenly put his hand upon my shoulder and said to me, “What would you say about a young man who had a strange theory about a certain work of art, believed in his theory, and committed a forgery in order to prove it?”
“Ah! that is quite a different matter,” I answered.
Erskine remained silent for a few moments, looking at the thin grey threads of smoke that were rising from his cigarette. “Yes,” he said, after a pause, “quite different.”
There was something in the tone of his voice, a slight touch of bitterness perhaps, that excited my curiosity. “Did you ever know anybody who did that?” I cried.
“Yes,” he answered, throwing his cigarette into the fire, “a great friend of mine, Cyril Graham. He was very fascinating, and very foolish, and very heartless. However, he left me the only legacy I ever received in my life.”
“What was that?” I exclaimed. Erskine rose
from his seat, and going over to a tall inlaid-cabinet that stood between the two windows, unlocked it, and came back to where I was sitting, holding in his hand a small panel picture set in an old and somewhat tarnished Elizabethan frame.3
It was a full-length portrait of a young man in late sixteenth-century costume, standing by a table, with his right hand resting on an open book. He seemed about seventeen years of age, and was of quite extraordinary personal beauty, though evidently somewhat effeminate. Indeed, had it not been for the dress and the closely cropped hair, one would have said that the face, with its dreamy wistful eyes, and its delicate scarlet lips, was the face of a girl. In manner, and especially in the treatment of the hands, the picture reminded one of François Clouet’s later work.4 The black velvet doublet with its fantastically gilded points, and the peacock-blue background against which it showed up so pleasantly, and from which it gained such luminous value of colour, were quite in Clouet’s style; and the two masks of Tragedy and Comedy that hung somewhat formally from the marble pedestal had that hard severity of touch—so different from the facile grace of the Italians—which even at the Court of France the great Flemish master never completely lost, and which in itself has always been a characteristic of the northern temper.
“It is a charming thing,” I cried; “but who is this wonderful young man, whose beauty Art has so happily preserved for us?”
