THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE ROSE...

a Passiontide song of Jesus's love and death from the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde


At the end of this article there is a link to a free online copy of Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose. But first...

Many years ago, I came upon The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) by chance in a bookstore. I had studied some of Wilde's plays in my drama classes (The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windemere's Fan, Salome, and so forth), during my short ambition to be an actress, but what I actually knew about he life of Oscar Wilde then was what is generally known about him even now; he was a brilliant playwright/poet, wrote one novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), was witty, eccentric, something of a dandy, a genius, a homosexual. He was imprisoned for two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol for homosexual activity and from that experience he wrote his great poem The Ballad of Reading Goal. As far as I knew, 'fairy tales' seemed far from his milieu. Intrigued, I bought the book.

The first story I read was The Nightingale and the Rose. When I came to the end I was tearful, at least inside, as I vaguely remember. I sat back mentally for a moment to absorb the rush of discovery before it flew away. I was stunned by the beauty and profound lessons within the simplicity of the story. and also by the realization I had never felt the death of Jesus so painfully before in all my cradle-Catholic belief -- for there was not a doubt in my mind that the loving little nightingale was a haunting metaphor for Jesus.

The 'fairy tale' stayed with me over the years. I returned to it to re-swell the heart with a re-awakening to the pain and suffering and sacrifice of the nightingale-Jesus. I often felt I had to shout out this discovery to the world, to overcome, in some small way, the dullness of the way we read The Passion in church, or live daily with it in the far background of our busy lives.

Here is a brief synopsis of The Nightingale and the Rose. Early Christians used symbolic figures of Christ, including animals.

     The daughter of a professor promises a young student who loves her, that she will dance with him at the prince's ball if he will bring her a beautiful red rose. But there is not a red rose to be had in all of the student's garden, and he throws himself on the grass, burying his face in his hands, weeping in despair. From her nest in an oak tree, the nightingale has overheard everything. She pities the student's plight and loves him for his true love. She flies from tree to tree, searching for a red rose to give him, and promises all the trees to sing her sweetest song if they will give her a red rose. But all the trees reply that there is no red rose to be found--unless, one tree of white roses explains...unless the nightingale is willing to do one terrible thing. If she presses her breast against a thorn of a white rose and sings her songs, the rose will become red with her blood... and the nightingale will die...

You know how it ends. The nightingale sings her song of love all night with the thorn painfully in her breast. She sings, the pain deepening, until she falls to the ground, dead.  In the morning the student finds the rose and presents it to the professor's daughter. She is not pleased with the rose because others have promised jewels instead. The student tosses the rose away in a pique of annoyance and it falls in the gutter. A cartwheel goes over it. . .

I had learned many surprising things about Oscar Wilde after reading the story. Despite what we think we know about him, Oscar Wilde, though not Catholic, was in love with Catholicism. From youth to the very end of his life Catholicism was Oscar Wilde's constant fascination, like a pulse. When he was nineteen he was about to convert to Catholicism but his father threatened to disinherit him. As one who lived for art and writing, he needed the income and canceled his conversion. But the impulse never left him. He often attended Mass, and he nearly converted again later on, for he was drawn with longing to the Catholic Church. One need only read the following passage from his novel, The Picture of Dorial Gray, to see his fascination at work. He is describing Dorian in a Catholic church.

     It was rumored of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jeweled, lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the “panis caelestis,” the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice and smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming censers that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers had their subtle fascination for him. As he passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives. But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail.

Wilde denied that the character of Dorian Gray, who had become hedonistic, was himself; and in many aspects Dorian was not Oscar (Dorian was cruel, Oscar showed compassion) except in the fascination Dorian feels for the liturgy and mysticism of the Catholic Church, as did Oscar Wilde. When Dorian looks longingly at that confession box, like Wilde, Dorian pulls away from the temptation.

Wilde loved his wife; indeed one could say he was enraptured with her and with married life, according to some of his letters, and by all accounts he was a wonderful father. He wrote the fairy tales for his two sons. He and his wife both wrote for children and were happy in their small dream world. There is speculation about how and why things began to change, but supposedly sometime after the birth of their second child, Wilde began a homosexual relationship with a close friend, who was always about the Wilde's house, and the attraction took hold. Wilde was thereafter drawn to the life. Although he was one of the most celebrated playwrights and wits of the Victorian era, and was certainly doing well financially, it all came crashing down with the scandal of the trial for his "gross indecency". It was his downfall and he never overcame it. In prison, he read Cardinal John Henry Newman, St. Augustine --both converts to Catholicism -- and Dante. When Wilde was released from prison he fled to Paris and wrote to the Jesuits asking permission for a six-month retreat with them. He cried bitterly in front of his friends when the Jesuits replied and refused his request. He wrote to his former companion, Lord Alfred Douglas, who had been involved in the scandal, "I know at any rate that Christ would not turn me out." The heartbreak must have been very great, for Wilde lapsed into his former habits, but still pursued the Catholic faith.

Six months before Wilde died, he spent time in Rome:

     Wilde thought of Rome as “the one city of the soul”. He arrived on Holy Thursday. On Easter Sunday, he squeezed his way forward to “the front rank of the pilgrims in the Vatican, and got the blessing of the Holy Father”.[Pope Leo XIII, "The Rosary Pope".]
 . . .
     He continued to haunt the Vatican at every opportunity.“I do nothing but see the Pope. I have already been blessed many times, once in the private Chapel of the Vatican. . .  I spend all my money in getting tickets. . . My position is curious: I am not Catholic: I am simply a violent Papist.

He died of meningitis in exile in Paris, bankrupt and broken-hearted. On his deathbed he entered the Catholic Church he loved, repeating as best he could after Father Cuthbert Dunne, a Passionist priest, the Acts of Contrition, Faith, Hope and Charity. Oscar Wilde died a Catholic.

The complexities of Oscar Wilde require long, researched biographies, and I have merely grazed his life. His two major passions were the physical enslavement of his lifestyle, and the divine 'lights on!' in his heart and soul. He seemed to have lived in a spiritual grip that never let go. Something like Francis Thompson's The Hound of Heaven. There are many biographies and articles about him, and although writers have called attention to the fairy tales for their touching and Christian content, I seem to detect in some of them a lack of spiritual knowledge and understanding of the Catholic mystery, and therefore downplaying, or possibly not seeing, its strong beckoning in Wilde's life.

In his book, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde Wilde, biographer Joseph Pearce (a convert himself, a former activist and agnostic, and author of many books about Britain's literary converts) has insight into Wilde's Catholicism and points out the hovering Christ figure in much of Wilde's writing. Here are a few of his comments from an interview with him.

     Wilde had a lifelong love affair with the Catholic Church. His art is always overtly moral and the morality is overtly Catholic in nature. He is a timeless Christian writer. . . .Wilde was such a religious man that when he enters the Church on his deathbed, it really is the logical end and culmination of his life. 

. . .

 Some of his poetry is profoundly Catholic. The surprise to be found in Oscar Wilde is someone who loved the Catholic Church, but for various reasons was unable to sacrifice himself to his beliefs. As a result he had a disastrous downfall in 1895. He had an inner war with his moral battles and often lost. He later gained an inner peace, but could never deal with being very poor and being in exile. He learned a very hard lesson. As he wrote in his 1898 poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, "How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in." 

                                   Oscar Wilde, Irish-born playwright 

Wilde wrote of Jesus “One always thinks of him “as a lover for whose love the whole world was too small." It's a perfect description of the world of the professor's shallow daughter and the student who carelessly tosses away the nightingale's blood-rose -- the sacrifice of Jesus cast aside, not deeply felt by many people and not much appreciated. 

That fullness of the nightingale's burning, suffering love is an astonishing and unexpected Wildean evangelization gift, if more people were to read it. Of course, surely not planned by him, but there was a medieval myth that when Jesus died all white roses turned red. Wilde, a lover and scholar of the classics, might well have known this. Whatever Wilde wanted to pass on with the story, It was simply his heart speaking...He wrote: 

     The nightingale is the true lover, if there is one. She, at least, is Romance, and the Student and the girl are, like most of us, unworthy of Romance. So, at least, it seems to me, but I like to fancy that there may be many meanings in the tale, for in writing it I did not start with an idea and clothe it in form, but began with a form and strove to make it beautiful enough to have many secrets and many answers. (Letters 218) 

So why all this about Oscar Wilde? Because he loved Jesus. He has taken us to the moment and made our hearts see and feel... (Read the comments on Amazon) If one read the touching fairy tales -- maybe even more for adults than for children -- it would seem a partaking in Christ's sorrows and Wilde's redemption. If one felt the Passion of Jesus in The Nightingale, one might then know what is missing in our church readings. 

Maybe it comes from my experience in drama so long ago, but I am always sad and sorry to hear the dull and lifeless readings in monotone voices of The Passion during Holy Week, when religious and laity portray what Fulton Oursler called "the greatest story ever told". Telling the greatest story in a drone is nothing more than unfeeling. When one feels, one proclaims, and that is what is required if one is to ignite love. On one occasion in my experience long ago, a priest reading the part of Jesus missed his cue. A momentary silence befell the church, and when the priest realized it was his turn, he snapped to -- and read his Passion lines quickly. 

We need drama coaches. We need nightingales. . . 

Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman, soon to be canonized, said in a sermon: 

Unless we have a true love of Christ, we are not His true disciples; and we cannot love Him unless we have heartfelt gratitude to Him; and we cannot duly feel gratitude, unless we feel keenly what He suffered for us. (Newman Reader - Parochial & Plain Sermons 7 - Sermon 10) 

. .. . .And this Oscar Wilde has evoked in The Nightingale and the Rose. Here is your online copy.... 

                              The Nightingale, singing her song of Love... 

                                                           

                                                            Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
                                                            What sweet thoughts are thine:
                                                            I have never heard
                                                            Praise of love or wine
                                                            That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. 

                                                                                Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark, 

Note: A good, brief summary of Oscar Wilde's Conversion