Stephen Fry on Wilde and Chekhov

Stephen Fry has written a new blog post about Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov, having just done audio recordings of some of their works. He writes of Wilde's underrated short stories with the kind of passion that should help greatly in getting these works read more wildly. Wilde's fairy tales are, for me, on a par with The Picture of Dorian Gray in terms of beauty, genius, and even wit. In them Wilde holds back nothing, as you feel he is sometimes doing with his plays; he is unafraid to be honest and sincere about the beauty of the world and the flaws of the world. "Beauty" is the term I keep using for I find the fairy tales are saturated with it, even when describing the aspects of life that are ugly. I must agree with Stephen Fry when he says:

Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales continue to exert the same pull over the imagination and emotions as they did when he first read them to his children in the 1880s. Written with inspired poetic intensity and sudden flowerings of the matchless wit for which he is so well remembered, the stories combine the wisdom of parables with the impact of drama. I have loved them since I was a child: indeed they continue to make a child of me.

To illustrate, perhaps a quote from one of the stories, hard as it is to pull a suitably pithy one at random. From close to the end of "The Happy Prince":

‘I am glad that you are going to Egypt at last, little Swallow,’ said the Prince, ‘you have stayed too long here; but you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you.’

‘It is not to Egypt that I am going,’ said the Swallow. ‘I am going to the House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not?’

And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet.

At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two. It certainly was a dreadfully hard frost.