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.
Books & Boots 