OSCAR WILDE, who died one hundred years ago today, accomplished his life's work in a shockingly short time. Prior to 1888, he had published only two failed plays and a mediocre book of poetry; after May 1895, when scandal and ruin engulfed him, he wrote only one poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In just seven years he wrote all the work that continues to be read -- his critical essays ("The Critic as Artist," "The Decay of Lying"); his short novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; his decadent French play, Salome; and his four comedies, of which the last, The Importance of Being Earnest, is perhaps the greatest English play written between Sheridan and Shaw. Yet the book that inaugurated this period is of a very different sort, and remains little read today: The Happy Prince, a book of fairy tales for children. Indeed, if Wilde had somehow never written a word after 1888 -- if the ear infection that eventually killed him had come a dozen years earlier -- he would be remembered, if at all, as a children's writer.

That Wilde was able to write a book of children's stories, and very good ones at that, is one of the keys to understanding the man, his achievements, and his limitations. On one side, Wilde is the nearest thing in the English language to Baudelaire: the decadent, the sensualist, the connoisseur of vice. On another side, he is as close as the English got to Nietzsche: the immoralist, the supreme relativist, the blasphemer. But of course, Wilde was a much smaller figure than either, and the comparison is mainly useful for showing what he did not achieve. The scandal that Wilde cultivated brought him fame, and then infamy; but he does not remain scandalous, because he did not make the radical and truly modern refusal -- of convention, of sentimental piety; above all, of Christianity. And nowhere is the real character of his mind more clearly displayed than in these slight fairy tales. They are perfect in their kind, but entirely orthodox in their morals -- in fact, a great deal more staid than Lewis Carroll. There is no transgression here but edification, no irony but sentiment.

In his definitive biography, Richard Ellmann notes that Wilde was at Oxford during the reign of two renowned professors, John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Each was a celebrated historian of art, but they represented dramatically different approaches to aesthetics; Ruskin joined art with Christian morality, praising the Gothic and medieval, while Pater divorced them, elevating the carnality of Greece and the Renaissance. Wilde's career can be seen as a tug-of-war between these two powerful influences. And the hypothetical Wilde whose career ends in 1888 would be remembered only as a minor disciple of Ruskin or William Morris, an aesthetic moralist. He first came to prominence as a Ruskinian advocate of practical aesthetics and home design. (The subject of his fantastically successful American lecture tour, in 1882, was "The House Beautiful.") In this mode, Wilde sermonized on the ennobling power of art, exhorting the masses to make their dress and their surroundings lovelier. Not until ten years later, at the height of his powers, did he create two Paterian works -- Dorian Gray and Salome -- in which art is shown in a much more doubtful and lurid light, as an ally of corruption and death.

The Happy Prince, published in 1888, was Wilde's first literary success, and marks the culmination of his first, Ruskinian period. The five stories included in the slender volume grew out of the fairy tales he improvised for his sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, but they are not merely children's stories. In at least two of them one hears, for the first time, what would become Wilde's characteristic voice: urbane, epigrammatic, sly. In "The Devoted Friend," the matronly Duck foreshadows Aunt Augusta in The Importance of Being Earnest: "For my own part I have a mother's feelings, and I can never look at a confirmed bachelor without the tears coming into my eyes." And in "The Remarkable Rocket," the title character -- a firework proud of his social position -- talks just like Darlington or Goring, the dandies of Wilde's plays: "As for domesticity, it ages one rapidly, and distracts one's mind from higher things."

But it is in the first three tales of The Happy Prince that Wilde is most eloquent in praise of humility, and explicitly connects that virtue with Christian piety. These stories -- "The Happy Prince," "The Selfish Giant," and "The Nightingale and the Rose" -- are among the most beautiful and perfect things Wilde ever wrote. The ripe descriptive prose that can grow tedious in Dorian Gray and the essays is compressed here into a bright lyricism; the flashes of wit stop short of mere showy paradox, and serve instead to set off the central moral. In each story, that moral is the same: the beauty of self-sacrifice, and its reward by God. The sentimentality is as blatant and deliberate as anything in Dickens, though it comes from the man who said, "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing." And the fact that Wilde was writing for children does not mean that this piety was foreign to him, worked up for the occasion. On the contrary: Here Wilde openly expresses the Christian ethos that is ostentatiously banished from the later works but haunts them nonetheless.

"The Nightingale and the Rose" is the most sensually powerful of the fairy tales. A young student, walking in a garden in winter, laments that the girl he loves will not dance with him at the ball unless he presents her with a red rose. The Nightingale overhears him, and is moved: "Surely love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and clearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace." The catalog of gems is a characteristic touch; in all of Wilde's works, precious jewels and metals are invoked as the ideal of cold formal beauty. But here, Wilde suggests that even jewels are less valuable than love; the Nightingale's speech is a homily, positively biblical in language and sentiment.

The Nightingale decides to help the Student, and visits a Rose-tree in search of a red rose. The tree is barren, and there is only one way it can blossom again: if the Nightingale pours out its lifeblood against the thorns. It is a small, childish image of the Christian sacrifice; like Jesus, who died out of love for the world, the Nightingale believes that "Love is better than Life." But this gorgeous sacrifice is ill requited by the Student. When he finds the rose, he rushes with it to his true love; but she has changed her mind, and now prefers another suitor's gift of jewels to the Student's flower: "Everybody knows that jewels cost far more than flowers." Disgusted, the student throws the rose into the street, where it is run over by a cartwheel.

In the title story, however, sacrifice finds its reward -- though not in this world. "The Happy Prince" is another allegory pitting worldly splendor against the higher beauty of Christian love. Here, too, jewels represent the height of physical beauty: In an unnamed city, the statue of the Happy Prince is covered in gold and decorated with sapphires and rubies. In life, the Prince knew only pleasure: "Round my garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never cared to ask what lay beyond it, evertyhing about me was so beautiful." It is a striking image of the aestheticism Wilde himself was to cultivate. But now that the Prince is up on his pedestal, he realizes how much suffering is in the world: "I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead I cannot choose but weep."