my family.’
‘I am made for public life,’ said the Rocket, ‘and so are all my relations, even the humblest of them. Whenever we appear we excite great attention. I have not actually appeared myself, but when I do so it will be a magnificent sight. As for domesticity, it ages one rapidly, and distracts one’s mind from higher things.’
‘Ah! the higher things of life, how fine they are!’ said the Duck; ‘and that reminds me how hungry I feel’: and she swam away down the stream, saying, ‘Quack, quack, quack.’
‘Come back! come back!’ screamed the Rocket, ‘I have a great deal to say to you’; but the Duck paid no attention to him. ‘I am glad that she has gone,’ he said to himself, ‘she has a decidedly middle-class mind’; and he sank a little deeper still into the mud, and began to think about the loneliness of genius, when suddenly two little boys in white smocks came running down the bank, with a kettle and some faggots.
‘This must be the deputation,’ said the Rocket, and he tried to look very dignified.
‘Hallo!’ cried one of the boys, ‘look at this old stick! I wonder how it came here’; and he picked the rocket out of the ditch.
‘OLD Stick!’ said the Rocket, ‘impossible! GOLD Stick, that is what he said. Gold Stick is very complimentary. In fact, he mistakes me for one of the Court dignitaries!’
‘Let us put it into the fire!’ said the other boy, ‘it will help to boil the kettle.’
So they piled the faggots together, and put the Rocket on top, and lit the fire.
‘This is magnificent,’ cried the Rocket, ‘they are going to let me off in broad day-light, so that every one can see me.’
‘We will go to sleep now,’ they said, ‘and when we wake up the kettle will be boiled’; and they lay down on the grass, and shut their eyes.
The Rocket was very damp, so he took a long time to burn. At last, however, the fire caught him.
‘Now I am going off!’ he cried, and he made himself very stiff and straight. ‘I know I shall go much higher than the stars, much higher than the moon, much higher than the sun. In fact, I shall go so high that—’
Fizz! Fizz! Fizz! and he went straight up into the air.
‘Delightful!’ he cried, ‘I shall go on like this for ever. What a success I am!’
But nobody saw him.
Then he began to feel a curious tingling sensation all over him.
‘Now I am going to explode,’ he cried. ‘I shall set the whole world on fire, and make such a noise that nobody will talk about anything else for a whole year.’ And he certainly did explode. Bang! Bang! Bang! went the gunpowder. There was no doubt about it.
But nobody heard him, not even the two little boys, for they were sound asleep.
Then all that was left of him was the stick, and this fell down on the back of a Goose who was taking a walk by the side of the ditch.
‘Good heavens!’ cried the Goose. ‘It is going to rain sticks’; and she rushed into the water.
‘I knew I should create a great sensation,’ gasped the Rocket, and he went out.
‘I knew I should create a great sensation!’
‘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.
SHE SAID THAT SHE would dance with me if I brought her red roses,’ cried the young Student; ‘but in all my garden there is no red rose.’
From her nest in the holm-oak tree the Nightingale heard him, and she looked out through the leaves, and wondered.
‘No red rose in all my garden!’ he cried, and his beautiful eyes filled with tears. ‘Ah, on what little things does happiness depend! I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose is my life made wretched.’
‘Here at last is a true lover,’ said the Nightingale. ‘Night after night have I sung of him, though I knew him not: night after night have I told his story to the stars, and now I see him. His hair is dark as the hyacinth-blossom, and his lips are red as the rose of his desire; but passion has made his face like pale ivory, and sorrow has set her seal upon his brow.’
‘The Prince gives a ball tomorrow night,’ murmured the young Student, ‘and my love will be of the company. If I bring her a red rose she will dance with me till dawn. If I bring her a red rose, I shall hold her in my arms, and she will lean her head upon my shoulder, and her hand will be clasped in mine. But there is no red rose in my garden, so I shall sit lonely, and she will pass me by. She will have no heed of me, and my heart will break.’
‘Here indeed is the true lover,’ said the Nightingale. ‘What I sing of, he suffers—what is joy to me, to him is pain. Surely Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer
