ABSTRACT
Mr. Oscar Wilde shows us a very swell world in the entourage of An Ideal Husband, but it is not nearly so wicked as that of The Masqueraders, and in spite of the author’s well-known foible, it is not nearly so abandoned to paradox. In fact, I think An Ideal Husband is not only an excellent piece of art, but all excellent piece of sense: perhaps the two ought never to be thought of apart, but they are. The author handles init very skilfully and very honestly the problem of a most happily married man, who in earlier life (he is still young, though an eminent parliamentary leader) sold a state secret, and got a little fortune for it. The little fortune becomes a great fortune, and just at the joyous moment when he can least bear to be confronted with his sin, a sulphurous female appears with the letter he wrote to a Viennese stock broker telling him the English government was about to buy the Suez Canal, and threatens the parliamentary leader with the exposure of this transgression of the young attaché, unless he will support her scheme of an Argentine Canal. There is money in that, too, but the husband is committed against the scheme as a piece of rascality, for being no longer dependent upon money he can afford to despise it. This often happens in life: men clean up as soon as they have the pecuniary means; but the play does not insist upon the point; nor am I going to insist upon the several points, very neatly and clearly made, by which it reaches an admirably reasoned conclusion. I was not able to convict the author of a single false step in the play (I had no great wish to do so, for I like to like things), and there are some by which he mounts to a pretty wide prospect of human nature; for instance, that where the husband upbraids the wife for idealizing him, and for not counting upon his weaknesses and his potential sins in loving him. This is very well, and it is very well where, when he has been saved from exposure, and she unwisely agrees that he must withdraw from public life, the friend of both makes her see that she is taking from him his sole chance of atonement and retrieval, and creating him a future of hatred for her and despair for himself.
