Il delitto di Lord Arthur Savile

Like The Importance of Being Earnest, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime is very gracefully beyond Good and Evil. It is the story of a murderer, but the act is perpetrated in a world that by its very frivolity is no less real than the deliberately fantastic world of A Thousand and One Nights. To accentuate this comparison, it would be appropriate to add that the entire tale, which takes place in a dreamlike London, close to Stevenson’s or Chesterton’s London, is ruled by the Islamic concept of Destiny. As in his worldly comedies, Wilde presents us with characters who are stupid, but their stupidity is epigrammatic, since they are amusing disguises of the author. The theme of The Canterville Ghost stems from the Gothic novel genre, but, fortunately for the reader, its development is not. In this amusing tale, Americans do not take the ghost seriously, and neither readers nor Wilde take Americans seriously. The Happy Prince, The Nightingale and the Rose and The Selfish Giant are fairy tales, not conceived in Grimm’s genuine manner, but in a sentimental way reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen, imbued, however, with the melancholic irony that is a peculiar trait of Oscar Wilde’s creations.