"Fairy Play"

FOR LOVE OF THE KING--Oscar Wilde--Putman ($1.50). Oscar O' Flahertie Wills Wilde once meditated writing a novel "as beautiful and as intricate as a Persian praying rug." He would spend hours at the Middle Temple and in a punt on the Thames absorbing atmosphere from a certain distinguished barrister, a Mr. Chan Toon, whose "long and luminous" converse ran much on the exotic customs of his native country, Burmah. Mrs. Chan Toon was a childhood friend of the poet, and one day, having neglected to acknowledge a book she had sent him, he despatched to her, not a novel laid in Burmah, but this masque or scenario for a "fairy play." Mrs. Toon guarded the manuscript. For Love of the King was not published until 1922 in England, not until now in the U. S.

Mrs. Toon received it in 1894, during Wilde's most voluptuous period. Long known for a wit and esthete, he was by then known as a full-blown decadent, approaching notoriety. The symbols of his cult were familiar to London's streets and salons--peacock feathers, sunflowers, dados, blue china, long hair, velveteen breeches. He was suffused with and satisfied only by the cloyingly sensuous in image, thought and deed. He told Mrs. Toon in his note that he was "bathing his brow in the perfume of waterlilies." The season previous his play, Salome, had been refused a license. In a few months he was to publish The Sphinx, a poetic catalog of "amours frequent and fine," dedicated to one Marcel Schwob. He had played and acted many variations upon his epigram, "Industry is the root of all ugliness." The next year, 1895, he was to be branded publicly and sent to prison for perverted practices.

Whether or not this Burmese fragment was written in 1894 or dates to an earlier, simpler time, Wilde enthusiasts may decide for themselves. It is very much in the manner of his first fairy tales (The Nightingale and the Rose, The Happy Prince, etc.) which he wrote in 1888, and has not the suggestive undercurrent of his later fairy tales (House of Pomegranates), which appeared in 1892 with the explicit statement that they were "intended neither for the British child nor the British public."

Wilde's imagination was never "fired," but of all stimulants to its lucubration the Orient was most potent. The masque concerns a charming maiden, Mah Phru, who consoled King Meng Beng while he awaited the coming of his Cingalese bride from Ceylon, bearing him two sons in the interim. When he returned to his palace she followed as a white peacock, watched her sons grow up, adored Meng Beng mutely. When he was dying, she revived him, at the cost of her own life, with the aid of "the only magician the world knows--Love." The properties include: howdahed elephants, "myriad golden and jewel-encrusted bells," colored glass balls, cheroots, a betel-nut box, "dragons of gold with eyes of jade," "Buddhas of gigantic size with heads that move," parrots, crows, peacocks, etc., etc.