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An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (1895)

After the country setting of ‘A Woman of No Importance’, Wilde’s third social comedy is set firmly back in the heart of London’s High Society. The four acts alternate in setting between Sir Robert Chiltern’s House in Grosvenor Square and Lord Goring’s House in Curzon Street (0.4 miles and 5 minutes walk apart according to Google Maps) and the society it satirises and the values it mocks are just as circumscribed and limited. And it’s barely started before he is mocking his audience, London high society:

MABEL CHILTERN: Oh, I love London Society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.

London ‘Society’ continues to be mocked and satirised by various characters but, despite the incessant raillery, ‘An Ideal Husband’, like all the other plays, fundamentally accepts this class and its values as the premise of the story and setting.

Plot summary

Act 1. The Octagon Room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house in Grosvenor Square

Sir Robert Chiltern is a Member of Parliament (MP) and junior government minister and his wife, the upstanding Lady Chiltern, are hosting a party. Leading guests are the dandified Wilde avatar, Lord Goring, Chiltern’s sister Mabel, and other guests.

Storming into the party is the smooth-talking, suave but genuinely malevolent Mrs Cheveley. Lady Chiltern recognises her from her schooldays when Mrs C was expelled. Nothing has changed and she waits till she gets Sir Robert alone before bluntly blackmailing him. Mrs Cheveley and colleagues have invested in a blatantly fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina. Sir Robert has been notable for opposing any British involvement in it on the basis of a parliamentary report he’s commissioned (‘a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle.’). Now Mrs Cheveley wants him to completely reverse his position, suppress the report and say he is in favour of the canal!

Obviously Sir Robert refuses to do so which is when Mrs C pull out her blackmailing threat. Turns out that Sir Robert’s vast wealth, name, reputation and influence all stem from a bad thing he did 20 years ago, back at the start of his career. He learned a Cabinet secret – that the British government was about to purchase the Suez Canal company and tipped off a stockbroker acquaintance of his, Baron Arnheim. The Baron bought shares which the British government then purchased at a much higher price, making the Baron three-quarters of a million pounds, of which he gave Sir Robert £110,000, enough capital to commence speculations of his own which brought him to his present dizzy wealth.

Anyway, Mrs Cheveley has a copy of Sir Robert’s letter to Arnheim, shows it to Sir Robert, and threatens to make it public unless he does what she wants. Not only will it ruin him, lose him his job in government, possibly lead to criminal proceedings – but will lose him the love of his life, his upright, morally unbending wife. He has no choice, he has to agree, and Mrs Cheveley leaves the party with his promise to suppress the report.

However, spurred on by Lady Chiltern’s earlier rudeness towards her, Mrs Cheveley cannot resist telling her (Lady Chiltern) about her husband’s sudden change of heart about the canal scheme. When the guests have gone and they are alone, Lady Chiltern confronts her husband with it and, blithely unaware of both her husband’s past and Mrs Cheveley’s blackmail plot, insists that Sir Robert goes back on his promise to her. In fact she stands over him and watches him write the letter doing so which she then summons one of the servants to deliver to Mrs Cheveley’s hotel.

And here is the crux of the play: for Lady Chiltern her husband is ‘an ideal husband’, a model partner in both public and private life who she can trust and worship with no reservations.

Now so far I’ve given the impression that the play is a tragic melodrama but, of course, it’s anything but, seeing as how it’s festooned with witty banter and sparkling repartee, mostly thanks to the Wilde avatar in the play, witty Lord Goring, especially when he is sparring with Sir Robert’s sister, clever young Mabel Chiltern (very similar to the way the Wilde avatar in the previous play, ‘A Woman of No Importance’, Lord Illingworth, fenced with his female equivalent, Mrs Allonby).

In addition there are, as in the previous plays, three or four other guests, mostly older ladies – Lady Markby and Mrs Marchmont, generically referred to as ‘the dowagers’ – who are comic in their own right:

MRS CHEVELEY: Wonderful woman, Lady Markby, isn’t she? Talks more and says less than anybody I ever met.

LADY MARKBY: I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it? With regard to women, well, dear Gertrude, you belong to the younger generation, and I am sure it is all right if you approve of it. In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary. But modern women understand everything, I am told.

But these old buffers also act as foils to the ‘amoral’ and ‘shocking’ and oh-so-modern Lord Goring (‘Young people nowadays, I don’t understand a word they say’ etc). Plus the comic figure of the absurd Vicomte de Nanjac, French Attaché.

Back to the plot, towards the end of the party had been verbally sparring when she spots a diamond brooch one of the guests has left on the sofa. Lord Goring asks for it and puts it away in his pocket, explaining that he gave it to someone many years ago, and asking Mabel to inform him if anyone comes back to the house to retrieve it.

Aha! Could the lost brooch by any chance turn out to be the solution to Sir Robert’s dilemma?!

Act 2. Morning room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house

Next morning Lord Goring is round at Sir Robert’s house, being surprisingly earnest and supportive for such a ‘dandy’, telling him to fight Mrs Cheveley and admit his guilt to his wife. During the conversation Goring also reveals that he and Mrs Cheveley were once engaged, in a characteristically droll way:

SIR ROBERT CHILTON: Did you know her well?
LORD GORING: [Arranging his necktie.] So little that I got engaged to be married to her once, when I was staying at the Tenbys’. The affair lasted for three days…nearly.

He tells Lord Chiltern to telegraph the British embassy in Vienna (where Mrs Cheveley lives) to see if they know any dirt about her. But his efforts to persuade Lord Chiltern to do come clean to his wife fail – the latter is too afraid of losing the only woman he’s ever loved.

After finishing his conversation with Chiltern, Goring indulges in more flirtatious banter with young Mabel. Then, when she exits for some reason, finding himself alone with Lady Chiltern, Lord Goring does a very decent thing and tries to urge her to less morally inflexible and more forgiving. Since it’s the core of the play (and, possibly of Wilde’s work as a whole) it’s worth quoting in full:

LORD GORING: Lady Chiltern, I have sometimes thought that . . . perhaps you are a little hard in some of your views on life. I think that . . . often you don’t make sufficient allowances. In every nature there are elements of weakness, or worse than weakness. Supposing, for instance, that – that any public man, my father, or Lord Merton, or Robert, say, had, years ago, written some foolish letter to some one…
LADY CHILTERN: What do you mean by a foolish letter?
LORD GORING: A letter gravely compromising one’s position. I am only putting an imaginary case.
LADY CHILTERN: Robert is as incapable of doing a foolish thing as he is of doing a wrong thing.
LORD GORING: [After a long pause.] Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.
LADY CHILTERN: Are you a Pessimist? What will the other dandies say? They will all have to go into mourning.
LORD GORING: [Rising.] No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

Lord Goring leaves, having offered both Lord and Lady Chiltern his help. After some comic chat between Lady C and Mabel about the man who keeps proposing to her, one Tommy Trafford, they are interrupted by the return of Mrs Cheveley accompanied by the bufferish Lady Markby. They finally get rid of Lady M, at which point Lady Chiltern coldly tells Mrs C it was she who made her husband write the latter the night before.

At which point Mrs Cheverley brutally exposes Sir Robert’s secret to his wife, telling her all about the act of betrayal and corruption which made him his fortune and began his public career – with the result that  Lady Chiltern orders the servants to more or less kick her out. Left alone, Lady Chiltern begs her husband to tell her it is not true:

LADY CHILTERN: You sold a Cabinet secret for money! You began your life with fraud! You built up your career on dishonour! Oh, tell me it is not true! Lie to me! Lie to me! Tell me it is not true!

But Sir Robert cannot tell a lie, tells her it is all true, this crushing her worship of him, thus wrecking their marriage, for she denounces her husband and refuses to forgive him. At which point Lord Chiltern delivers another iteration of the play’s moral:

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive.

Act 3. The library of Lord Goring’s house in Curzon Street

There’s a lot of hectic coming and going in this scene. It opens with Lord Goring doing the Wilde avatar thing with his monosyllabic manservant, Phipps.

LORD GORING: Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, Phipps.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.

Lord Goring receives a letter from Lady Chiltern who, having learned about her husband’s error, wants to take him up on his offer of support. This letter is, however, ambiguously worded:

‘I want you. I trust you. I am coming to you. Gertrude.’

So he expects her to arrive at any minute and tells the servants to take her into his drawing room. Instead the master and servant banter is interrupted by the arrival of Lord Goring’s father, Lord Caversham. The old man makes a sustained attack on Lord G, telling him he must get married.

While he’s getting rid of his father, instead of Lady Chiltern, Mrs Cheveley arrives and, as arranged, is shown into Lord Goring’s drawing room. Lord Goring manages to get ride of his father but, on the doorstep of the apartment, as Lord Caversham is leaving, Sir Robert arrives. He has come to tell Lord Goring that his wife knows everything and beg for his help.

While Chiltern and Goring converse in another room, Mrs Cheveley finds Lady Chiltern’s letter open on a table before sneaking back into the drawing room. The two men come back onto the main stage and it is here that Sir Robert overhears a chair being banged in the drawing room and realises that someone is there! Someone has been eavesdropping while he pours his heart out! He makes Goring swear on his word of honour that there is no-one in there, but nonetheless storms in and, of course, sees Mrs Cheveley.

He comes out onto the main stage disgusted with Lord Goring who a) lied to him on his word of honour and b) he jumps to the conclusion is having an affair with the woman. Lord Goring, still under the misapprehension it is Lady Chiltern in the other room, makes a series of claims which are either comic or tragic, depending on how it is acted, claiming that the woman in there is blameless and loves him dearly.

Outraged, Sir Robert storms out at which point Mrs Cheveley enters the main room with a broad smile on her face. They revert to Wildean banter:

LORD GORING: I am glad you have called. I am going to give you some good advice.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh! pray don’t. One should never give a woman anything that she can’t wear in the evening.

Lord Chiltern discovers Mrs Cheveley in the drawing room and, convinced the two former lovers must be having an affair, he storms out of the house.

When Mrs Cheveley and Lord Goring confront each other, she makes a proposal. Claiming to still love Goring from their early days of courtship, she offers to exchange Chiltern’s letter for Goring’s hand in marriage. Lord Goring declines, accusing her of defiling love by reducing courtship to a vulgar transaction. Also, he can only despise her for evilly wishing to ruin the Chilterns’ marriage.

Then two dramatic things. 1) Mrs Cheveley says she never went back to the Chilterns’ house to taunt Lady Chiltern, but simply to retrieve the brooch she thought she must have lost there. This reminds Goring that it is in his possession and he takes it out. He charmingly points out that it can also be used as a bracelet and slips it onto Mrs Cheveley’s arm where it clicks fast. It is now that he reveals his plan. He reveals that he recognises this brooch because ten years earlier he gave it to his cousin, Mary Berkshire. At a country house weekend it went missing, presumed stolen, and the finger of blame pointed at a servant who was sacked. Now he has the evidence that Mrs Cheveley stole it. He is going to get his servant to call the police and present Mrs Cheveley with the incriminating bracelet on her arm. Furiously, she tries to claw it off but Lord Goring says it has a hidden spring which only he knows how to operate. He will remove the bracelet if she gives him Sir Robert’s letter. At first she refuses but then gives up, hands it over, Lord Goring burns it and then unclips the bracelet. Phew. Everything sorted, right?

BUT 2) earlier Mrs C had spotted Lady Chiltern’s note to Goring and, while he is offstage instructing his servants, she steals it from his desk. When he returns, she announces that she has it and plans to take revenge on Lord G by presenting it to Sir Robert as a love letter from Lady Chiltern to Goring. Goring tries to grab it back but a servant enters and one does not argue in front of the servants. And so Mrs Cheveley exits the house in triumph.

Act 4. Back to the morning room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house

Lord Goring is at Sir Robert’s house, waiting to see any of the family but they are all busy.

His father arrives and 1) there is the paternal badgering of him to get married; Goring jokes that he will be engaged by lunchtime which his father doesn’t know is a joke or not. But 2) his father brings a copy of the Times which reports Sir Robert’s speech in the House of Commons the night before, a thundering attack on the Argentine canal scheme and modern finance in general.

Mabel Chiltern arrives from her ride in the Park, the one which Lord Goring absolutely positively promised to meet her for and she comically ignores him for a while before relenting into banter. He announces that he is finally going to propose to her which she turns into banter by pointing out that it’s her second proposition that morning since Tommy Trafford has already made one.

MABEL CHILTERN: It is one of Tommy’s days for proposing. He always proposes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, during the Season.

Lady Chiltern appears, and Lord Goring tells her that Chiltern’s letter has been destroyed but that Mrs Cheveley has stolen her note and plans to use it to destroy her marriage. They are just planning how to get his secretaries to intercept the letter (written on pink paper) before it gets to Sir Robert when he enters reading it.

At that moment Lord Chiltern enters while reading Lady Chiltern’s letter, but as the letter does not have the name of the addressee he is assuming it was meant for him, and reads it as a letter of forgiveness. The two are reconciled. (To be honest I was expecting a lot more complication to be caused by this letter. All the possible complications it could have caused seem to be conveniently swept under the carpet.)

This leaves one last Big Issue, which is whether Sir Robert should remain in public life. He tentatively suggests to his wife that, although the evidence against him has been destroyed, maybe he should leave public life to which she replies: ‘Oh yes, Robert, you should do that. It is your duty to do that.’

With heavy dramatic irony it is at this moment that Lord Goring’s father, the egregious Lord Caversham appears again, having come hot foot from Number Ten bringing news that the Prime Minister has offered him a seat in the cabinet! He is astonished, thrilled and then…downcast, as he catches Lady Chiltern’s look. Very reluctantly he tells Caversham he will have to reject the offer and that he is giving up public life and goes into another room to write his letter of refusal.

Which, of course, allows Lord Goring to deliver a long speech saying forcing her husband to quit public life will not only ruin his life but kill his love for her, ruining both their lives. But he actually couches his argument in stupefyingly sexist terms:

LORD GORING: A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses.

Which is why she must forgive him, because women must forgive their men.

LORD GORING: Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.

As I’m always saying, the provocative paradoxes in some of the banter, the slightly camp attitude of some of the men, none of that supposedly ‘transgressive’ discourse can hold a candle to the thumpingly sexist, gender stereotyping which the plots of the plays absolutely rely on. Suffice to say that when Lord Chiltern re-enters the room, Lady Chiltern has changed her mind and tells him to remain in public life directly quoting Goring’s ‘A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s’ speech.

Right. So everything’s sorted, is it? Not quite. One last issue. Lord Chiltern has barely finished thanking Lord Goring for saving his career and his marriage, when Goring follows up by asking for his sister (Mabel)’s hand in marriage. To everyone’s surprise Sir Robert refuses! Why? Because he still thinks that he discovered Mrs Cheveley in Goring’s rooms at 10.30 last night (the lateness of the hour is crucial and is referred to by all the characters as the clinching argument) because they are still in love.

When Goring denies this, Sir Robert doesn’t believe him. It takes Lady Chiltern to overcome her scruples and reticence and confess to her husband that it was she who planned to visit Lord Goring to ask his help about what to do in her marriage, and that Lord Goring honestly thought he had her waiting in his drawing room, which is why he said those absurdly inappropriate things about Mrs Cheveley. This has the incidental effect of making clear that the letter on pink paper wasn’t a loving reconciliation addressed to Lord Chiltern but a cry for help addressed to Lord Goring.

Anyway, this sufficiently explains Goring’s behaviour the night before and Sir Robert smiling relents and awards Goring his sister’s hand. So, to conclude:

  • Lord and Lady Chiltern are reconciled and now live on a new, more realistic basic to their marriage in which both recognise the frailties and fallibility of the other
  • Mabel and Goring are engaged to be married
  • Lord Caversham is delighted that his son is finally doing the right thing
  • and lunch is served, a pale echo of the feasts which ended comic plays from the time of the ancient Greeks

The old couple reconciled, the young couple newly engaged. What could be more thumpingly conventional?

The journey from rectitude to sympathy

The moral storyline is the same as the previous two. A woman of rigorous, unbending, inflexible moral rectitude is forced to realise, through her own suffering, that people are more complicated, more fallible, and more deserving of understanding, compassion and sympathy, than she previously thought.

In the ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ and ‘A Woman of No Importance’ the stern unbending female moralists were Lady Windermere and the young American, Miss Worsley. In this play it is stern Lady Chiltern:

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: Lord My wife! Never! She does not know what weakness or temptation is. I am of clay like other men. She stands apart as good women do – pitiless in her perfection – cold and stern and without mercy.

It is Lady Chiltern who must learn to abandon her unbending morality and forgive her husband. The author’s message is delivered by the Wilde avatar in the play, raffish Lord Goring.

LORD GORING: No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

And:

LORD GORING: Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.

When you know how his own marriage was wrecked by the trial which revealed his secret gay life, it’s is hard not to be distressed at how little the charity and forgiveness promoted in his plays were available in his own tragic fall.

Wilde avatars

In all of these stories there is one male character who echoes, mimics or acts as the Wilde surrogate, or as the figure Wilde would like to be, so I call him the Wilde avatar, avatar being a Sanskrit word which means ‘an incarnation, embodiment, or manifestation of a person or idea’, and so the embodiment, in the plays, of the ideal Wilde protagonist:

  • in his 30s (and so younger than Wilde, who turned 40 in 1894)
  • a genuine member of the aristocracy
  • an unattached man-about-town with a reputation for ‘wickedness’ i.e. saying the most outrageous things (not actual wickedness)
  • rich and idle
  • overflowing with witty and ‘shockingly’ unconventional repartee

These avatars are:

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray – Lord Henry Wotton
  • Lady Windermere’s Fan – Lord Darlington
  • A Woman of No Importance – Lord Illingworth
  • An Ideal Husband – Lord Goring
  • The Importance of Being Earnest – Jack Worthing

Apparently, Wilde added the elaborate stage directions and character descriptions after the play had been premiered. He really goes to town with the description of Lord Goring at the start of Act 3:

Enter Lord Goring in evening dress with a buttonhole. He is wearing a silk hat and Inverness cape. White-gloved, he carries a Louis Seize cane. His are all the delicate fopperies of Fashion. One sees that he stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it. He is the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought.

Apothegms, one-liners, facetious remarks and

As I worked my way through the third Wilde play it struck me that the banter sometimes descends to pointless wittering welded onto a plot of stock melodrama (husband’s dark secret revealed to noble wife), something many critics pointed out at the time (I particularly like the contemporary critic William Archer’s view that ‘An Ideal Husband…simply suffers from a disproportionate profusion of inferior chatter’).

However, in a good production in the theatre, the welter of one-liners and bons mots – if well delivered – can carry the audience along, especially the repartee between witty Lord Goring and his sparring partner and beloved, clever young Mabel Chiltern.

Mocking their own high society milieu

LADY MARKBY: Ah, nowadays people marry as often as they can, don’t they? It is most fashionable.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?
LORD GORING: Most pretty women do. But there is a fashion in pasts just as there is a fashion in frocks.

Politics

LADY MARKBY: Sir John’s temper since he has taken seriously to politics has become quite unbearable. Really, now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

LADY MARKBY: Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.
MRS CHEVELEY: The higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so sadly.
LADY MARKBY: They do, dear. But I am afraid such a scheme would be quite unpractical. I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it?

The importance of artifice

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: May I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I’m neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?
MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Casual mockery of expected sentiments

In this case sending up the Victorian expectation of filial piety.

LORD GORING: Really, I don’t want to meet my father three days running. It is a great deal too much excitement for any son. I hope to goodness he won’t come up. Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings.

Men and women aka gender stereotyping

As I’ve noted in the first two plays, it is ironic that this hero of the LGBTQIA+ movement (which has made such efforts to question, undermine and subvert gender stereotypes) relies so heavily in these plays on the stereotyping of men and women in both the plot itself and in the endless conversation gambits  based on sweeping generalisations about men and women, husbands and wives – what often feels like endless riffing off utterly conventional stereotypes, that there are two genders, that they behave like this, think like this, and so on.

MRS CHEVELEY: Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women . . . merely adored.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women?
MRS CHEVELEY: Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: And women represent the irrational?
MRS CHEVELEY: Well-dressed women do.

LORD GORING: No man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out. Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.

MRS CHEVELEY: My dear Arthur, women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes.
LORD GORING: Women are never disarmed by anything, as far as I know them.

MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, there is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

Husbands and wives

LADY MARKBY: They do, dear. But I am afraid such a scheme would be quite unpractical. I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it? With regard to women, well, dear Gertrude, you belong to the younger generation, and I am sure it is all right if you approve of it. In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary. But modern women understand everything, I am told.
MRS CHEVELEY: Except their husbands. That is the one thing the modern woman never understands.
LADY MARKBY: And a very good thing too, dear, I dare say. It might break up many a happy home if they did.

You don’t have to be non-binary to find this kind of thing gets pretty wearing, pretty quickly.

Lord Goring, the Wilde avatar, posing as a wicked man

MABEL CHILTERN: How very selfish of you!
LORD GORING: I am very selfish.
MABEL CHILTERN: You are always telling me of your bad qualities, Lord Goring.
LORD GORING: I have only told you half of them as yet, Miss Mabel!
MABEL CHILTERN: Are the others very bad?
LORD GORING: Quite dreadful! When I think of them at night I go to sleep at once.

LORD GORING: My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don’t see why I shouldn’t give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

LORD CAVERSHAM: Do you always really understand what you say, sir?
LORD GORING: [After some hesitation.] Yes, father, if I listen attentively.

A basic conceit repeated at:

LORD CAVERSHAM: Humph! Never know when you are serious or not.
LORD GORING: Neither do I, father.

Why this is tiresome is that Lord Goring perfectly well does know when he’s being serious. When he makes his plea to lady Chiltern to forgive her husband and let him continue his public career, he is very consciously serious. This ‘I never know when I’m being serious’ trope is just a joke or a pose, which is dropped the second it has to be.

Author’s message

Same message as in ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ and ‘A Woman of No Importance’, in both of which the stern unbending moralist (Lady Windermere and Miss Worsley) is taught compassion and forgiveness by realising their own fallibility. In this case it is stern unbending Lady Chiltern who must learn to abandon her unbending morality and forgive her husband, who learns that love is not holding people accountable to the highest standards, but forgiving people for their weakness and sins.

LORD GORING: No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

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Posted by Simon on August 14, 2024

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Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young by Oscar Wilde (1894)

Factual background

In mid-1891 the poet Lionel Johnson introduced Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, Johnson’s cousin and an undergraduate at Oxford at the time. Friendship turned to intimacy and by 1893 Wilde was infatuated with Douglas. In 1894 Douglas and some Oxford friends founded a journal, The Chameleon.

Wilde had been introduced to these friends and had been involved in the meeting which chose the magazine’s title. To support his young lover’s venture, he contributed a set of 35 witty paradoxes and epigrams, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, which he had originally intended for the Saturday Review.

Six months later, in May 1895, Wilde was involved in his two trials and this set of epigrams and his involvement in The Chameleon were brought up and used against Wilde. The Chameleon was, indeed, a magazine conceived as promoting what were called ‘Uranian’ i.e. gay themes. All but two of the thirteen items in the first issue concerned homosexuality. As well as Wilde’s (relatively harmless) epigrams, there were two poems by Douglas, including ‘Two Loves’ which contrasts heterosexual and homosexual love, and refers to gay love by the now-famous phrase ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.

The magazine also included ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’, a short story which describes the sexual affair between an 28-year-old priest and a 14-year-old boy, which ends with their discovery and joint suicide. Because all the items were anonymous, Wilde was charged, in court, with writing this clearly illegal and immoral story when, in reality, he had actually disapproved of its inclusion in the magazine.

(Wilde refers to the way his generous help and support was turned against him, in his long letter De Profundis, page 170 of the Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, 1979 OUP paperback edition.)

Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.

It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others.

Only the shallow know themselves.

Time is a waste of money.

One should always be a little improbable.

There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.

The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

To be premature is to be perfect.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right and wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

The ages live in history through their anachronisms.

It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.

The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

Commentary

The most obvious thing about this list of smart epigrams is their similarity to the list of apothegms he added as the Preface to the book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891. Scholars point out that many of his critical essays began as collections of apothegms which he arranged into a ‘logical’ or at least rhetorical order, and then created prose to link them together. It indicates the way the epigram was the basis of his way of thinking and writing.

As to the content, the epigrams include many variations on familiar Wilde themes, namely that 1. the aim of life is to become an individualist, to be yourself, 2. the most important thing in life, more than all the Victorian shibboleths of sincerity and duty and honour and all the rest of it, is to be stylish and this involves the maximum amount of artifice.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.

As in the Preface, some are more effective than others. For example, ‘Time is a waste of money’ strikes me as barely worth the ink, whereas ‘One should always be a little improbable’ strikes me as being sly and stylish and true.

Something like ‘Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions’ clearly addresses issues of great importance in the late nineteenth century, which not many of us care about these days. Science is clearly science and dominates 21st century society; and if people want to have religious beliefs, that’s fine. But the two no longer clash head-on as they did for so many Victorian and Edwardian social thinkers.

‘The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated’ has the polished confidence of the product of a good public school and Oxford, and the reference to exams indicates the eternal undergraduate: ‘In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.’

Wilde studied Classics at Oxford and the late-Victorian aesthetes were obsessed with their suave version of Greek mythology, so there are the usual references to classical myth: ‘It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.’

It was hardly original in 1894 to lump together industry, factories, serious work, the philistine middle class, bourgeois earnestness and oppose them to the stylishness of the aesthete and dandy. These themes had been developed, in their different ways, by Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater as long ago as the 1870s. High-minded Latin-quoting poets who despised anything which smacked of industry, hard work and earnestness had been around for decades. Wilde’s contribution was to take the attitude to its logical extreme and create an entire worldview, worked out across essays, stories, fairy tales, fiction and plays, going out of his way to mock bourgeois earnestness and turn all its values on their heads.

  • Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
  • Industry is the root of all ugliness.

And by contrast valuing only the utterly artificial, paradoxical, whimsical and unearnest:

  • The condition of perfection is idleness.

You can see how many of these snappy sayings would appear when read out by an extremely earnest and literal-minded prosecuting lawyer in a Victorian court. Disastrous. Moreover note the second part of the title – ‘for the young‘ and published in an undergraduate magazine. Wilde could hardly have done more to play into the hands of those who accused him of consciously and deliberately setting out to corrupt the nation’s youth.

Having read them half a dozen times, I think the improbable one is my second favourite. My favourite is:

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.

I think what Wilde is implying is that the only important things go on in the life of the mind i.e. the imagination, whereas the real world is ultimately trivial. I find that a sympathetic idea. But I take it at a deeper level, too: Nothing really matters. You’re going to die, I’m going to die, our children and grandchildren will die. Things matter for a bit, maybe, while anyone remembers them. But eventually all of us will be compost on an over-heated planet and all these words and the thoughts they record will have disappeared like morning dew, like grains of sand lost in the boiling desert which the earth is destined to become. For the time being, though – enjoy.

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by Simon on August 7, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 7, 2024

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Reginald by Saki (1904)

Hector

Hector Hugh Munro was born in 1870 in Burma, then still part of the British Empire. He was the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police, and Mary Frances Mercer, daughter of Rear Admiral Samuel Mercer. Her nephew, Cecil William Mercer, later became a famous novelist under the pen-name ‘Dornford Yates’. So a posh and bookish family.

His mother died when Hector was just two and he, along with his siblings, was sent to Devon to be raised by their grandmother and aunts in a strict and puritanical household. As a result, eccentric or mean aunts loom large in Saki’s fiction and often come to a sticky end.

Susan Mebberley was a charming woman, but she was also an aunt. (The Chronicles of Clovis)

Hector was tutored by governesses until sent to boarding school in Bedford. When his father retired from Burma, he returned to England and took Hector and his sister on tours of fashionable European spas and resorts, which also crop up in Saki’s stories.

In 1893 Hector followed his father into the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma. Two years later, having contracted malaria, he resigned and returned to England.

Back in England Hector developed a new career as a journalist and began writing for newspapers like the Westminster Gazette, the Daily Express, the Morning Post, and magazines such as the Bystander and Outlook.

In 1900 he published a serious historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire. From 1902 to 1908 Munro worked as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkans, Warsaw, Russia (where he witnessed Bloody Sunday on 22 January 1905) and Paris. He then gave up foreign reporting and settled in London.

Saki

In 1904 Hector published a slender volume of stories and sketches under the pen name ‘Saki’. Nobody is certain where this comes from: it could be a reference to the cup-bearer in the popular Victorian poem, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. Or it might be a reference to the South American monkey of the same name. Or it might be that his stories are laced with dry sarcasm. Or maybe he just liked the sound of the word.

Reginald

Saki’s first volume, Reginald, is extremely short, comprising twenty short texts of barely two pages each, which had all been first published as snippets in the Westminster Gazette. They are not really stories: each one is more like a topic on which we hear the divine fop, dandy and man-about-town, Reginald, giving his langorous, witty opinions, sometimes to the unnamed narrator, sometimes in dialogue with ‘the Duchess’ or just ‘the Other’, sometimes in plain declamatory prose.

The only thing Reginald cares about is his appearance. He fusses about ties and buttonholes. Even the thought of holding extended conversations exhausts the poor dear. He delights in scandalising aunts and a recurrent character, The Duchess, with deliberately paradoxical and unconventional opinions.

After a few hours in the company of the camp and calculating frivolousness of young Reginald, it comes as no surprise to learn that Saki was gay. Reginald’s character, style and flow of witty epigrams is saturated in the persona and style of Oscar Wilde.

Reginald closed his eyes with the elaborate weariness of one who has rather nice eyelashes and thinks it useless to conceal the fact.

By far the best, the funniest, and the most complete sketch is The Woman Who Told The Truth which contains probably his most quoted line: ‘The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.’

The brief pieces are titled:

1. Reginald

The unnamed narrator takes Reginald to an upper-class garden party where he scandalises everyone he comes in contact with, teaching the children how to make cocktails, mocking the Colonel’s story of how he introduced golf to India, discussing a scandalous French novel with the Archdeacon’s wife. By the time the narrator catches up with him:

I found everyone talking nervously and feverishly of the weather and the war in South Africa, except Reginald, who was reclining in a comfortable chair with the dreamy, far-away look that a volcano might wear just after it had desolated entire villages.

The narrator plays his trump card by telling Reginald a sea-mist is coming in. Reginald sits bolt upright and agrees to beat a hasty retreat to their carriage, for fear that the mist might undo the elaborate curl of hair over his right eyebrow.

2. Reginald on Christmas Presents

Why people are so lamentably bad at giving presents. Really, there ought to be special training in the art of gift-giving:

Then there are aunts. They are always a difficult class to deal with in the matter of presents. The trouble is that one never catches them really young enough. By the time one has educated them to an appreciation of the fact that one does not wear red woollen mittens in the West End, they die, or quarrel with the family, or do something equally inconsiderate. That is why the supply of trained aunts is always so precarious.

3. Reginald on the Academy

Meaning the Royal Academy of Art, for which Reginald affects a fashionable disdain, its sole purpose being to have something to talk about to the tedious country cousins when they come up to Town. As to the actual pictures:

‘The pictures are all right, in their way; after all, one can always look at them if one is bored with one’s surroundings, or wants to avoid an imminent acquaintance.’

In his continual effort to scandalise with unexpected paradox, Reginald reminds the reader of a slightly cut-price Oscar Wilde:

‘What were you talking about? Oh, pictures. Personally, I rather like them; they are so refreshingly real and probable, they take one away from the unrealities of life.’

4. Reginald at the Theatre

A dialogue between Reginald and the Duchess, in which she asks the questions and he supplies the punchlines:

‘Of course you are quite irreligious?’
‘Oh, by no means. The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediæval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.’

Which leads into the Duchess’s earnest defence of the British Empire and Reginald’s debonaire mockery of it.

5. Reginald’s Peace Poem

A mockery of poetry as Reginald explains how he’s setting about writing a poem for peace.

‘You must have angels in a Peace poem and I know dreadfully little about their habits.’

6. Reginald’s Choir Treat

The vicar’s grown-up daughter in the village where Reginald’s unworldly family still live, is encouraged to undertake his moral reformation. Obviously she fails when it comes to verbal exchanges and so shifts tack and asks him to help with the village children’s choir. Unfortunately, she then takes to her bed with a cold. With a glint in his eye, Reginald leads the children to a stream, gets them to strip off and bathe, then decorate each other with flowers, and process mostly naked through the village leading a goat, in a delightful homage to the pagan world. Nude Greek paganism.

7. Reginald on Worries

To my mind, education is an absurdly over-rated affair. At least, one never took it very seriously at school, where everything was done to bring it prominently under one’s notice. Anything that is worth knowing one practically teaches oneself, and the rest obtrudes itself sooner or later.

8. Reginald on House-Parties

One never gets to know one’s hosts and one’s hosts never get to know you and if they do then quite often, as in the unfortunate affair of the peacock, they take a decided turn against you.

So I got up the next morning at early dawn—I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it had been left out all night…

9. Reginald at the Carlton

Discussing travel with the Duchess:

‘And, after all, they charge so much for excess luggage on some of those foreign lines that it’s really an economy to leave one’s reputation behind one occasionally.’

As usual, even in comedy, these old stories reveal that some social issues are with us forever.

‘And the youngest daughter, who was intended for the American marriage market, has developed political tendencies, and writes pamphlets about the housing of the poor. Of course it’s a most important question, and I devote a good deal of time to it myself in the mornings.’

10. Reginald on Besetting Sins (The Woman Who Told The Truth)

There was once (said Reginald) a woman who told the truth. Not all at once, of course, but the habit grew upon her gradually, like lichen on an apparently healthy tree. She had no children—otherwise it might have been different. It began with little things, for no particular reason except that her life was a rather empty one, and it is so easy to slip into the habit of telling the truth in little matters…

This ironical inversion of the usual values is conceived and delivered with style and aplomb. And talking of how some things never change, Southern trains were, apparently, as proverbial for their lateness in 1900 as they are in 2020.

The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time.

11. Reginald’s Drama

Reginald plans a play which would open with the sound and scent of wolves wafted across the footlight such as to make nervous Lady Whortleberry scream, It would then become a tragedy such as that of the mismatched Mudge-Jervises, where he was always absent at sports and she was always absent doing Good Works for the Poor, and when they did finally meet up after 18 months of marriage, they discovered they had nothing in common. If and when the characters could think of nothing brilliant to say about marriage or the War Office, they could open a window and listen to the howling of the wolves. ‘But that would be very seldom.’

This harping on about wolves is one of the first appearances of the large wild animals which would become the signature note of his most effective stories.

12. Reginald on Tariffs

Talking about tariffs, the lift-boy, who reads extensively between the landings, says it won’t do to tax raw commodities. What, exactly, is a raw commodity? Mrs. Van Challaby says men are raw commodities till you marry them.

13. Reginald’s Christmas Revel

Reginald describes a perfectly beastly Christmas he spent as a house guest at the Babswolds’ once, where he took his revenge by playing a particularly corking practical joke.

I don’t like to play games of skill for milk-chocolate, so I invented a headache and retired from the scene. I had been preceded a few minutes earlier by Miss Langshan-Smith, a rather formidable lady, who always got up at some uncomfortable hour in the morning, and gave you the impression that she had been in communication with most of the European Governments before breakfast. There was a paper pinned on her door with a signed request that she might be called particularly early on the morrow. Such an opportunity does not come twice in a lifetime. I covered up everything except the signature with another notice, to the effect that before these words should meet the eye she would have ended a misspent life, was sorry for the trouble she was giving, and would like a military funeral. A few minutes later I violently exploded an air-filled paper bag on the landing, and gave a stage moan that could have been heard in the cellars. Then I pursued my original intention and went to bed. The noise those people made in forcing open the good lady’s door was positively indecorous; she resisted gallantly, but I believe they searched her for bullets for about a quarter of an hour, as if she had been an historic battlefield.

14. Reginald’s Rubaiyat

Reginald outrages the Duchess with steadily more outlandish versions of verses he composes for her album.

15. The Innocence of Reginald

Reginald announces he is going to write ‘a book of personal reminiscences’ and leave nothing out, which prompts an absolute panic among his acquaintance. It prompts a prolonged argument with Miriam Klopstock all the way through a play at His Majesty’s Theatre.

She leaned back and snorted, ‘You’re not the boy I took you for,’ as though she were an eagle arriving at Olympus with the wrong Ganymede.

Bons mots

Reginald in his wildest lapses into veracity never admits to being more than twenty-two.

‘People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.’

‘To have reached thirty,’ said Reginald, ‘is to have failed in life.’

‘I agree with you.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t. I’ve a sweet temper, but I can’t stand being agreed with.’

No really provident woman lunches regularly with her husband if she wishes to burst upon him as a revelation at dinner. He must have time to forget; an afternoon is not enough.

‘Lift-boys always have agèd mothers; shows such nice feeling on their part, I think.’

‘There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one’s own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.’

‘I always say beauty is only sin deep.’

‘You promised you would never mention it; don’t you ever keep a promise?’ When people had stopped glaring in our direction, I replied that I’d as soon think of keeping white mice.

‘Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent. So public-spirited of
her. I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she’s so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.’

‘A woman who leaves her cook never wholly recovers her position in Society.’

‘I hate posterity — it’s so fond of having the last word.’

Saki and Kipling

A few years ago I read most of Kipling’s works and was interested to see him referenced a couple of times in these brief skits. As the son of an Imperial official, born in India and sent to prep school in Devon and forced to stay with uncongenial ‘carers’, Hector’s early life was eerily similar to Kipling’s and they were only five years apart in age (Kipling born 1865, Saki 1870).

And yet Saki was of a completely different temperament and instead of respecting the older writer, he enjoys satirising him and his earnest embodiment of Imperial values.

Kipling or someone has described somewhere the look a foundered camel gives when the caravan moves on and leaves it to its fate. The peptonised reproach in the good lady’s eyes brought the passage vividly to my mind.

In Reginald at the theatre the Duchess tries to provoke the sceptical Reginald into admitting that, despite his pose of elaborate cynicism, he at least believes in patriotism. What’s interesting is the way she expresses herself in Kiplingesque clichés and quotes.

‘But there are other things,’ she continued, ‘which I suppose are to a certain extent sacred even to you. Patriotism, for instance, and Empire, and Imperial responsibility, and blood-is-thicker-than-water, and all that sort of thing… Oh, well, “dominion over palm and pine,” you know,’ quoted
the Duchess hopefully; ‘of course we mustn’t forget that we’re all part of the great Anglo-Saxon Empire.’

In among her jumble of platitudes she is quoting Kipling’s most eminent poem, Recessional –

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

It’s interesting evidence of the way Kipling’s phrases had penetrated the culture; the way in which a sub-Kipling Imperial worldview was just part of the respectable mindset of the day.

Elsewhere, Reginald jokes about a couple who lived very happily apart, him serving overseas, until they accidentally met one day and discovered they profoundly disagreed on ‘the Fiscal Question’ (a reference, I think, to Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign for tariff reform designed to bind the British Empire together into one trading bloc) and so are divorcing and trying to agree custody of the Persian cats. Reginald is considering turning the story into a drama mockingly titled ‘The Price They Paid For Empire’. In other words, part of the comedy derives from deliberately ridiculing and belittling everything Kipling held dear.

Elsewhere Saki elaborately guys Kipling’s genuinely creepy horror story, At The End of The Passage, when Reginald sneaks off from an after-dinner party game of charades to go and gamble with the servants, later giving his excuse that he was at the end of the passage. ‘I never did like Kipling,’ comments his hostess, Mrs Babwold, so it is assumed that not only the characters but the reader will recognise that phrase, the end of the passage, as the title of a Kipling story.

There are quite a few references to ‘the war’ – for example, the peace poem Reginald is composing relates to the ongoing conflict, and elsewhere he jokes:

‘And nowadays there are always the Johannesbourgeois, who bring a Cape-to-Cairo atmosphere with them — what may be called the Rand Manner, I suppose.’

In a play on ‘the Grand manner’. These are all references to the Boer War (1899 to 1902) and show that Saki’s stories are very aware of their times, are more full of topical and contemporary references than people think.

‘There’s lots more about the blessings of Peace, shall I go on reading it?’
‘If I must make a choice, I think I would rather they went on with the war.’

In its studied frivolity and its awareness of contemporary British politics and international affairs, Saki’s stories are a kind of antidote to everything earnest and manly about Kipling and his circle of Imperial visionaries.

Saki and Oscar Wilde

It’s easy to accuse Saki of being a poor man’s Oscar Wilde and it feels like Reginald owes more or less everything to the dandies of Wilde’s plays and Dorian Grey, except that most of his bon mots are not quite as polished and silvery as Wilde’s. Wilde is an incomparable prose stylist, Saki a lot less so.

Also Saki, despite appearance to the contrary, is firmly embedded in his times, as the references to the Boer War or Tariff Reform suggest, a topicality which becomes dominant in his invasion novel, When William Came. Completely different from Wilde who set his stories in an upper class fairyland. Saki’s stories always have this element of topicality about them.

But this was just the very start of his career. Soon it was to become clear that Saki’s real métier wasn’t wit alone, but the macabre and gruesome dressed as comedy. The Reginald strain remains, and some later stories still consist entirely of dandyish wit, but the best ones are known for the bizarre inclusion of wild animals and the black comedy of bullying aunts coming to grisly ends.

Related links

Saki’s works

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by Simon on June 21, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 21, 2021

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