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In The Happy Prince, the statue in downtown used to be a prince without knowing any sorrow or pain. His body and accessories are made of jewelry but he distributes them to the poor person or family in need in the help of a swallow as a messenger who has to go to Egypt to live through winter. Finally, all the jewelry on the Happy Prince is given out to people so he lost his beauty and people in town decide to pull it down. The swallow also dies.
The devotion shows more obviously in this fairy tale both on the Happy Prince and swallow. What should be noticed is the reaction from the Mayor and Town Councilors’. At the beginning when the Happy Prince is intact, the Town Councilor said “He is as beautiful as a weathercock…only not quite so useful.”(Wilde, 2009, p23) In the end, the Mayor said: “How shabby the Happy Prince looks!...he is little better than a beggar.”(Wilde, 2009, p 32) The Councilors do not do any good to people. Compared with the Happy Prince and the swallow’s devotion, their words and behaviors seem more selfish and decayed.
If it is hard to tell whether the nightingale’s death is worthwhile in the first fairy tale, this one is apparent. In the end of the story, God demands the Angles to bring him the two most precious things in the city, the Angle bring him the lead heart of the Happy Prince and the body of a swallow. People take their life as the most precious thing, but in this fairy tale it suggests that death for love and devotion leads to Paradise and that’s what one should go after.
The Devoted Friend is mostly about the friendship between Hans and big Hugh the Miller, which told by the Linnet to a Water-rat. The Miller can speak all kinds of beautiful things about friendship and do nothing to help Hans. Even more, he always asks Hans for help, which gives no time for Hans to work in his garden. One day, a son of the Miller falls off the ladder and hurt himself. The Miller wants Hans to go for the doctor. But he won’t give Hans the lantern at night for fear that Hans would break it. On the way back, Hans is drowned in the moor and dies.
Oscar Wilde advocates that arts should not involve with moral (Wu, 2006, p 159). This story goes with this view. Hans’s generous behavior makes his own life a mess and misery. He devotes himself fully to the friendship but get no rewards. On the contrary, the Miller is a selfish friend who only requests but not devotes anything. However, The Miller does not get any punishment. The storyteller, Linnet doesn’t care about what happens to the Miller. Character with a high moral not having good ends seems be accordance with Wilde’s arts principle.(Jones, 2011, p891) But it delivers a feeling that Hans is a good devoted friend that people should learn from and the Miller who doesn’t get any bad results, is not a good model, though. This contrast makes the ethics even more obvious. The death of a good person raises anger. If the Miller dies, it would arise himself some degree of sympathy from others. However, his good ending evokes nothing but anger for selfish. In this way, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale does not separate from moral preaching. And his preaching is in a hidden but strong way.