A CURIOUS strategy common to most studies of Oscar Wilde is the omission of his fairy tales, prose poems, and, more often than not, his criticism. The avoidance of these stories and articles suggests an unwillingness to treat material which is prima facie more serious and more moral than the amoral hedonism, the "studied triviality" so long associated with both Wilde's life and his art. Even a recent book, Christopher Nassaar's Into the Demon Universe (1974), characterizes Wilde's literary art as demonic, or, at best, as an exploration of the latent evil impulses which reside in all of us. Wilde's consistent indictment of selfishness, his celebration of love, his compassion for suffering—all evident both in well-known and unsung works—rarely receive attention today, just as they did not (for the most part) during Wilde's lifetime.

To be sure, several scholars have noted a moral intent in Wilde's art. Holbrook Jackson, Edouard Roditi, George Woodcock, Epifanio San Juan, and Hesketh Pearson, Wilde's English biographer, at least mention this moral dimension, even if they consider it an anomaly in view of Wilde's personal habits. But largely critics have emphasized aestheticism, Satanism, decadence, and degeneration in Wilde's work and have hesitated to allow that the real Oscar, underneath the masks and poses, was a Victorian gentleman who could not altogether escape a Victorian predilection to preach—indeed, to be moralistic.

It is too great a task here to cover Wilde's entire canon, underscoring all the while the moral argument of individual works. Rather, I would like to review the unheralded fairy tales, and claim that the moral direction so obvious in them is analogous to the morality Wilde espouses throughout his art, from the early poetry to his Epistola to Alfred Douglas (popularly known as De Profundis). Further, some of the tales reflect significant personal tensions regarding art and morality or art appreciation and religious obligation which also appear throughout the range of Wilde's work. These tensions reveal a critical instinct that goes beyond clever aphorisms and self-indulgent paradoxes. They also illustrate a moral dimension in Wilde that is generally unexamined.