ABSTRACT
Mr. Oscar Wilde might have given a second title to his highly entertaining play at the Haymarket, which we all enjoyed very nearly as much as he himself did. He might have called it An Ideal Husband; or The Chiltern Thousands. There were eighty-six of them-£86,000 was the price paid to Sir Robert Chiltern, then private secretary to a Cabinet Minister, for betraying to an Austrian financier the intention of the Government to purchase the Suez Canal Shares. The thousands have increased and multiplied; he is wealthy, he is respected, he is Under-secretary for Foreign Affairs, he is married to a wife who idolises and idealises him; and, not having stolen anything more in the interim, he is inclined to agree with his wife and the world in regarding himself as the Bayard of Downing Street. The question which Mr. Wilde pro-pounds is, ‘Ought his old peccadillo to incapacitate him for public life?’—and, while essaying to answer it in the negative, he virtually, to my thinking, answers it in the affirmative. On the principle involved, I have no very strong feeling. It is a black business enough; no divorce-court scandal could possibly be so damning; but one is quite willing to believe it possible that a sudden yielding to overwhelming temptation may occur once in a lifetime, and may even steel the wrong-doer against all future temptation and render him a stronger man than he would otherwise have been. This, I repeat, is possible; but unfortunately the first thing Mr. Wilde does is to show that Sir Robert Chiltern is not a case in point.
