"The Happy Prince," for instance, belongs to the latter group. In many of the fairy tales, Wilde's concern is exactly that of Pater's in Marius - to blend Christianity and the artistic life or aestheticism - with the difference that the emotional content is higher and impresses us more strongly that we are in "the Sanctuary of Sorrow." In others, he is more concerned with the Conclusion to The Renaissance, with its insistent advice that we should devote our lives to the private enjoyment of the best objects of art - advice which he strongly rejects. yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too much occupied with the comeliness of the vessels of the Sanctuary to notice that it is the Sanctuary of Sorrow that he is gazing at" ( Letters 476).
But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator indeed. In De Profundis, Wilde wrote of Marius The Epicurean that in it "Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion in the deep, sweet and austere sense of the word. These tales reveal many influences - Hans Christian Andersen, Blake, Carlyle - but Pater is a chief influence on many of them. Oscar Wilde's mature literary career began in 1886, when he wrote "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" then followed it up with "The Canterville Ghost" and the fairy tales of The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates. In the present essay I propose to study Pater's influence on Wilde's fairy tales, which is quite powerful but which critics have not so far focused on. Marius The Epicurean also had a strong impact on Wilde, and during his imprisonment Pater's Greek Studies, Appreciations, and Imaginary Portraits were among the few books he asked for and received ( Letters 399). Nor is the influence limited to a single book.
In another much-quoted reference, he spoke of it in De Profundis as "that book which has had such a profound influence over my life" (Letters 471). Yeats Wilde called The Renaissance "my golden book I never travel anywhere without it" (p.
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