They have eyes like green beryls, and their roar is louder than the roar of the cataract. But he is moved by the Prince's kindness, and agrees to help, even though the cold is fatal to him. In the end, the statue stripped of its beauty is melted down, and the Swallow's dead body lies next to it. The central tenet of his critical essays, published in 1891 in the book Intentions, is that ordinary moral values have no place in art, that beauty occupies a higher sphere than ethics. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art.
Art is a procurer of pure sensation, emancipated from any concern for right and wrong.
As an undergraduate, he almost converted to Catholicism, prevented only by the threat of being disinherited. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich. In a sense, Wilde was reaching towards an apotheosis of Victorian Christianity. Wilde, with his newfound sympathy for human suffering, might have brought that evolution to a new height. That he did not, that he turned away from religion after The Happy Prince and never quite returned to it, is perhaps what guarantees his continuing popularity, while those earnest figures recede into a sepia-toned past.