The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

  And the people did as he commanded them, and in the corner of the Field of the Fullers, where no sweet herbs grew, they dug a deep pit, and laid the dead things within it.

  And when the third year was over, and on a day that was a holy day, the Priest went up to the chapel, that he might show to the people the wounds of the Lord, and speak to them about the wrath of God.

  And when he had robed himself with his robes, and entered in and bowed himself before the altar, he saw that the altar was covered with strange flowers that never had been seen before. Strange were they to look at, and of curious beauty, and their beauty troubled him, and their odour was sweet in his nostrils.28 And he felt glad, and understood not why he was glad.

  And after that he had opened the tabernacle, and incensed the monstrance that was in it, and shown the fair wafer to the people, and hid it again behind the veil of veils, he began to speak to the people, desiring to speak to them of the wrath of God. But the beauty of the white flowers troubled him, and their odour was sweet in his nostrils, and there came another word into his lips, and he spake not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love. And why he so spake, he knew not.

  And when he had finished his word the people wept, and the Priest went back to the sacristy, and his eyes were full of tears. And the deacons came in and began to unrobe him, and took from him the alb and the girdle, the maniple and the stole. And he stood as one in a dream.

  And after that they had unrobed him, he looked at them and said, “What are the flowers that stand on the altar, and whence do they come?”

  And they answered him, “What flowers they are we cannot tell, but they come from the corner of the Fullers’ Field.” And the Priest trembled, and returned to his own house and prayed.

  And in the morning, while it was still dawn, he went forth with the monks and the musicians, and the candle-bearers and the swingers of censers, and a great company, and came to the shore of the sea, and blessed the sea, and all the wild things that are in it. The Fauns also he blessed, and the little things that dance in the woodland, and the bright-eyed things that peer through the leaves. All the things in God’s world he blessed, and the people were filled with joy and wonder. Yet never again in the corner of the Fullers’ Field grew flowers of any kind, but the field remained barren even as before. Nor came the Sea-folk into the bay as they had been wont to do, for they went to another part of the sea.

  *   First published in A House of Pomegranates in 1891, with accompanying illustrations and ornaments by Charles Ricketts. Wilde began the story late in 1889 with a view to publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, but he soon announced himself “unable to finish it” and “not satisfied with it,” eventually casting it aside to commence The Picture of Dorian Gray. “The Fisherman and His Soul” borrows elements from two Hans Christian Andersen stories, “The Little Mermaid” and “The Shadow,” only to rewrite them significantly. In the former, a retelling of the Undine myth of Scandinavian folklore, a mermaid seeks to acquire an immortal soul through her love for a human prince, only to be ultimately betrayed by him. In Wilde’s story, by contrast, it is the mortal human, the Fisherman, who falls in love, shedding his immortal soul in order to be part of the mermaid’s pagan world. In “The Shadow,” the darkest of all of Andersen’s tales, a good man separates from his shadow, which duly grows in power and becomes more evil as it acquires an independent existence, before eventually acquiescing in the man’s murder that it might live freely as a man in its own right. Other important sources are Matthew Arnold’s “The Forsaken Merman,” in which a merman is cruelly forsaken by his human lover and Christendom is depicted unflatteringly relative to the pagan world; Lady Wilde’s poem “The Fisherman,” in which a fisherman falls in love with a mermaid and is lured to his death in consequence; and “The Priest’s Soul,” Lady Wilde’s transcription of an ancient Irish legend in which a Catholic priest denies the soul’s existence and takes a beautiful young girl to wife, only for his soul to depart his body at the moment of his death, in the form of a beautiful, living creature.

  1   The biblical syntax and idiom here and elsewhere in the story inflect it with spiritual seriousness, lending it the air of a Christian homily or parable. Wilde revised the story extensively in manuscript to ensure consistency of biblical syntax, frequently changing “you” to “thee” or “thou,” “your” to “thy,” and “have” to “hast,” etc. See The Short Fiction, ed. Ian Small, vol. 8 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 142–174nn.

  2   According to Scandinavian folklore, the kraken is a legendary sea monster of gigantic size. Tennyson’s irregular sonnet of 1830 “The Kraken” popularized the legend in the English-speaking world.

  3   In an early draft of the story, Wilde wrote “and your body shall be mine, and my body shall be yours, and in the depths of the sea shall the mystery of love be revealed to us,” before deciding to replace this with “and you shall be my bride.… nor shall our lives be divided” in the present sentence. See The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 142n.

  4   In an early draft, Wilde vacillated between “pleasure” and “happiness” in explaining the mermaid’s laugh: he initially wrote “pleasure” but then substituted this with “happiness” only to reverse himself and restore “pleasure.” See The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 142n.

  5   An echo of Lady Wilde’s story “The Priest’s Soul,” whose protagonist asks “Whoever saw a soul? … If you can show me one, I will believe.” Compare with Wilde’s remark, “the faith that others give to the unseen, I give to what one can touch and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with hands, and within the circle of actual experience” (The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Nicholas Frankel [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018], 173).

  6   This sentence, like the story as a whole, constitutes Wilde’s response to Christ’s famous question “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 7:36).

  7   Sweetheart (archaic).

  8   Wilde’s pharisaic priest, with his contempt for earthly pleasure and his dogmatic devotion to scripture, echoes Matthew Arnold’s “Forsaken Merman,” in which Arnold contrasts the loving kindness of the forsaken merman with the cold, “faithless” hearts of devout believers, their eyes “seal’d to the holy book.” In an early draft of the story Wilde wrote that the priest (who was not a “novice” in the first draft) “laid rough hands on him, though he was aged, and drove him from his door” before deciding to replace this with “gave him no blessing, but drove him from his door.” See The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 145n.

  9   Wilde’s witch is indebted to the sea witch to whom Andersen’s little mermaid goes in order that the prince should fall in love with her and that she, in turn, should acquire an immortal soul. But with her red hair, referenced five times, and her love of dancing, Wilde’s witch also incorporates elements taken from Irish legends of the sidhe, or fairies.

  10   The witch’s injunctions are inflected by Irish superstitions: in her Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (1888), Lady Wilde devotes separate sections to superstitions concerning dogs and birds.

  11   In an early draft of the story Wilde added “it may be that he will be mine someday” to this sentence before deciding to delete it. See The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 150n.

  12   In Revelations, death is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. His arrival is traditionally announced by the sounds of a horse’s hooves.

  13   The Devil is a dandy. In his languor, sartorial elegance, and heavy drooping eyelids, he incorporates elements often associated with Wilde himself. Wilde revised this description of the Devil extensively in manuscript draft as well as in page proof. In the early draft he had originally written that the Devil’s face “was melancholy, and its worn, almost haggard beauty was marred by the lines of pride. There was beauty in his finel
y carved lips, and arched nostrils.” Only when the story was in page proofs did he replace this with “His face was strangely pale, but his lips were like a proud red flower.” Similarly, he added “Heavy eyelids drooped over his eyes” only at the proof stages. See The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 151nn.

  14   In his early manuscript draft, Wilde here included the following additional details concerning the Devil’s eyes: “They were eyes whose mystery seemed to mock him. There was passion in them and the weariness of passion. There was laughter in them, and infinite sorrow was in them also. The heavy dark-fringed eyelids seemed burdened with some secret of their own.” See The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 151n.

  15   The Soul mirrors the Fisherman’s outward appearance. By contrast, in Hans Andersen’s “The Shadow,” the man doesn’t recognize his shadow when it appears before him in the guise of a well-dressed man of the world. The separation of the Fisherman’s soul from his body dimly echoes “The Priest’s Soul,” by Lady Wilde, whose protagonist instructs a small child “take this penknife and strike it into my breast, and go on stabbing the flesh.… Then watch—for a living thing will soar from my body as I die, and you will then know that my soul has ascended to the presence of God.” But where the Priest’s soul finally ascends to heaven in Lady Wilde’s story, the Fisherman’s soul, like Anderson’s shadow, remains strictly earthbound.

  16   The Soul’s account of his journey to the East, like his later account of his journey to the South, is designed to make foreign regions seem exotic, sensually enticing, and fantastically “other.” Like the Swallow’s imaginative accounts of Egypt in “The Happy Prince,” it is inflected by what Edward Said famously called an “orientalist” impulse (see p. 122 n.12 above). It is based in part on The Travels of Marco Polo and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, both of which Wilde admired greatly. It also reflects the influence of The Arabian Nights as well as popular travelogues of Wilde’s day such as Hugh Stutfield’s El Maghreb: 1200 Miles’ Ride through Morocco, which Wilde enthusiastically reviewed for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886.

  17   The Soul’s desire to re-enter the Fisherman’s body after a year traveling and discovering wisdom marks a significant departure from Andersen’s “The Shadow.” In the latter, the shadow—who returns to his one-time master many years after first separating from him, now newly enriched and dressed entirely in black—regales the man with an account of how he penetrated a dark apartment across the street which contained a long row of rooms and anterooms, in the innermost of which lived Poetry. There, the shadow tells the man, he remained for three weeks and “saw everything that was to see,” as a result of which he “came to understand [his] innermost nature” and “became a human being.” Upon emerging from the apartment, he says, he stalked the city streets by moonlight and “saw everything that man must not know, but which he most ardently wishes to know—his neighbor’s evil,” whereupon he “wreaked havoc in every city.” Nonetheless, universities gave the shadow honorary degrees, tailors freely gave him fine clothes, and women told him he was handsome. After telling the man of his adventures, far from seeking to be reunited with him, the shadow seeks to buy his own freedom, imagining that he is in the man’s debt, only to be told “What debt could there be to pay? Be as free as you wish. I am only happy to see you again.”

  18   The Soul’s lengthy sojourn in the South, where he discovers the Ring of Riches, marks another departure from Andersen’s “The Shadow,” whose evil protagonist returns newly enriched after his first journey. When he returns a second time many years later, in Andersen’s tale, the shadow has “been concentrating on gaining weight” and disabuses the man of his belief in “all that is true and beautiful and good,” inviting him to travel with him henceforth as his own “shadow” and telling him “You don’t understand the world, that’s what’s the matter with you.” When the man shouts in reply that this proposition is “monstrous,” the shadow leaves abruptly, declaring “But that’s the way of the world, and it isn’t going to change.”

  19   Compare with the “yellow veil” and feet like “little white doves” of the princess Salome as she dances, in Wilde’s play Salome.

  20   In Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” the little mermaid sheds her tail, acquires legs and feet, and dances enticingly for her beloved prince, although he remains faithless.

  21   In Anderson’s “The Shadow,” although the man initially reacts angrily to the shadow’s suggestion that he travel with him henceforth as his “shadow” (see n.18 above), he eventually acquiesces when the shadow returns a third time and repeats his invitation, whereupon they travel together “the shadow as master and the master as shadow.” In the interim between the shadow’s second and third visits, the man’s efforts to spread “the true and the beautiful and the good” are defeated and he grows seriously ill.

  22   “that had the handle of green viper’s skin” was a late addition in manuscript. See The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 168n.

  23   This sentence and the next were a late addition in manuscript. See The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 169n.

  24   “in a cleft of the rock” was a late addition in manuscript. See The Short Fiction, ed. Small, 170n.

  25   The mermaid’s death follows directly from the fisherman’s statement “I would that I could help thee.” The moment is fraught with symbolism: answering to the call of conscience or morality, Wilde implies, amounts to a betrayal of love, since the heart is suddenly opened to strictly alien impulses where previously it was “compassed about with love.” The moment dramatically foreshadows Wilde’s famous truism in The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) that “each man kills the thing he loves.”

  26   A fuller was someone who cleaned and thickened (to make “full”) freshly woven cloth. Because the process required plenty of running water as well as noxious-smelling substances, fulling often took place at a place remote from city life. In the Bible (2 Kings 18:17 and Isaiah 7:3 and 36:2), the field of the fullers is located outside the walls of Jerusalem. Wilde, too, was buried in an obscure grave, at Bagneux, outside the walls of the city (Paris) where he resided. See Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 287. For “leman,” see p. 234 n.7 above.

  27   The priest is a merciless Christian zealot. He anticipates the biblical prophet Iokanaan in Wilde’s play Salome, as well as the unforgiving Chaplain who will “not kneel to pray” by the “dishonoured grave” of the sinner in The Ballad of Reading Gaol. See also p. 234 n.8 above.

  28   The miraculous appearance of beautiful flowers following the Fisherman’s death anticipates the blooming of roses from the corpse of the dead criminal in Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”:

  Out of his mouth a red, red rose!

  Out of his heart a white!

  For who can say by what strange way,

  Christ brings His will to light.

  (The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Frankel, 357.)

  APPENDIX: EXTRACTS FROM THE EXTENDED VERSION OF “THE PORTRAIT OF MR. W. H.”*

  ON MEMORY1

  I was about to leave the room when Erskine called me back. “My dear fellow,” he said, “let me advise you not to waste your time over the Sonnets. I am quite serious. After all, what do they tell us about Shakespeare? Simply that he was the slave of beauty.”

  “Well, that is the condition of being an artist!” I replied.

  There was a strange silence for a few moments. Then Erskine got up, and looking at me with half closed eyes, said, “Ah! how you remind me of Cyril! He used to say just that sort of thing to me.” He tried to smile, but there was a note of poignant pathos in his voice that I remember to the present day, as one remembers the tone of a particular violin that has charmed one, the touch of a particular woman’s hand. The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the s
carlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions.2

  ON THE SONNETS’ CENTRALITY TO SHAKESPEARE’S PERFECTION AS A DRAMATIST3

  Previous to this, in my Lord Pembroke days,4 if I may so term them, I must admit that it had always seemed to me very difficult to understand how the creator of Hamlet and Lear and Othello could have addressed in such extravagant terms of praise and passion one who was merely an ordinary young nobleman of the day. Along with most students of Shakespeare, I had found myself compelled to set the Sonnets apart as things quite alien to Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist, as things possibly unworthy of the intellectual side of his nature. But now that I began to realise the truth of Cyril Graham’s theory, I saw that the moods and passions they mirrored were absolutely essential to Shakespeare’s perfection as an artist writing for the Elizabethan stage, and that it was in the curious theatric conditions of that stage that the poems themselves had their origin. I remember what joy I had in feeling that these wonderful Sonnets,

  Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical

  As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair,5