Читать книгу Oscar Wilde’s Stories for All Ages - Оскар Уайльд, Stephen Fry, F. H. Cornish - Страница 15

‘I have put my talent into my work and my genius into my life’, Wilde once declared. A part of that genius, emanating perhaps from a part of that life, can be found in The Nightingale and the Rose, which I think is the most painful and beautiful story he ever wrote—outside the story of his own life. As so often he seems to question, to doubt, even to upbraid the very qualities with which he was most associated. Wilde was a scholar (one of the finest Hellenists of his generation at Trinity College, Dublin and at Oxford) and a passionate advocate of beauty. He was what would now be called the poster child for the aesthetes, decadents and dandies of late Victorian England (and France, come to that). He was also one of the most famous lovers in history. Yet this story has little sympathy with a scholar who affects to worship beauty and to be so deeply in love as to be reduced to a decline worthy of Petrarch. Real beauty, as in The Young King, is seen to flow from pain and sacrifice. The only instance of true love in the story is that of the Nightingale, who is in love with love itself and suffers and dies for it.

Wilde’s high doctrine of the difference between artificial beauty and real beauty is intense in this story. The sacrifice of the Nightingale, its eager, energetic fluttering, its passionate heartbeat and its bright-eyed willingness to leak out its heart’s blood, is as affecting as anything in all Wilde’s work. It is as touching as the casual betrayal of the scholar is distressing.

For many there might be found a sense of religious mystery at the heart of this story: the Sacré Coeur, the holy, bleeding heart is a familiar image in Roman Catholicism. For myself I think it is another example of a story which shows how Wilde, consciously or not, foreshadowed his own tragedy. Not that you need have any knowledge of Wilde’s fate to read it—it is sweet and sad and strong enough to stand quite on its own.