by Oscar Wilde
LADY STUTFIELD. Yes; men’s good temper shows they are not so sensitive as we are, not so finely strung. It makes a great barrier often between husband and wife, does it not? But I would so much like to know what was the wrong thing Mr. Allonby did.
MRS. ALLONBY. Well, I will tell you, if you solemnly promise to tell everybody else.
LADY STUTFIELD. Thank you, thank you. I will make a point of repeating it.
MRS. ALLONBY. When Ernest and I were engaged, he swore to me positively on his knees that he had never loved any one before in the whole course of his life. I was very young at the time, so I didn’t believe him, I needn’t tell you. Unfortunately, however, I made no inquiries of any kind till after I had been actually married four or five months. I found out then that what he had told me was perfectly true. And that sort of thing makes a man so absolutely uninteresting.
LADY HUNSTANTON. My dear!
MRS. ALLONBY. Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.
LADY STUTFIELD. I see what you mean. It’s very, very beautiful.
LADY HUNSTANTON. My dear child, you don’t mean to tell me that you won’t forgive your husband because he never loved any one else? Did you ever hear such a thing, Caroline? I am quite surprised.
LADY CAROLINE. Oh, women have become so highly educated, Jane, that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages. They apparently are getting remarkably rare.
MRS. ALLONBY. Oh, they’re quite out of date.
LADY STUTFIELD. Except amongst the middle classes, I have been told.
MRS. ALLONBY. How like the middle classes!
LADY STUTFIELD. Yes – is it not? – very, very like them.
LADY CAROLINE. If what you tell us about the middle classes is true, Lady Stutfield, it redounds greatly to their credit. It is much to be regretted that in our rank of life the wife should be so persistently frivolous, under the impression apparently that it is the proper thing to be. It is to that I attribute the unhappiness of so many marriages we all know of in society.
MRS. ALLONBY. Do you know, Lady Caroline, I don’t think the frivolity of the wife has ever anything to do with it. More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common sense of the husband than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she was a perfectly rational being?
LADY HUNSTANTON. My dear!
MRS. ALLONBY. Man, poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man belongs to a sex that has been rational for millions and millions of years. He can’t help himself. It is in his race. The History of Woman is very different. We have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common sense. We saw its dangers from the first.
LADY STUTFIELD. Yes, the common sense of husbands is certainly most, most trying. Do tell me your conception of the Ideal Husband. I think it would be so very, very helpful.
MRS. ALLONBY. The Ideal Husband? There couldn’t be such a thing. The institution is wrong.
LADY STUTFIELD. The Ideal Man, then, in his relations to us.
LADY CAROLINE. He would probably be extremely realistic.
MRS. ALLONBY. The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.
LADY HUNSTANTON. But how could he do both, dear?
MRS. ALLONBY. He should never run down other pretty women. That would show he had no taste, or make one suspect that he had too much. No; he should be nice about them all, but say that somehow they don’t attract him.
LADY STUTFIELD. Yes, that is always very, very pleasant to hear about other women.
MRS. ALLONBY. If we ask him a question about anything, he should give us an answer all about ourselves. He should invariably praise us for whatever qualities he knows we haven’t got. But he should be pitiless, quite pitiless, in reproaching us for the virtues that we have never dreamed of possessing. He should never believe that we know the use of useful things. That would be unforgivable. But he should shower on us everything we don’t want.
LADY CAROLINE. As far as I can see, he is to do nothing but pay bills and compliments.
MRS. ALLONBY. He should persistently compromise us in public, and treat us with absolute respect when we are alone. And yet he should always be ready to have a perfectly terrible scene, whenever we want one, and to become miserable, absolutely miserable, at a moment’s notice, and to overwhelm us with reproaches in less than twenty minutes, and to be positively violent at the end of half an hour, and to leave us for ever at a quarter to eight, when we have to go and dress for dinner. And when, after that, one has seen him for really the last time, and he has refused to take back the little things he has given one, and promised never to communicate with one again, or to write one any foolish letters, he should be perfectly broken-hearted, and telegraph to one all day long, and send one little notes every half-hour by a private hansom, and dine quite alone at the club, so that every one should know how unhappy he was. And after a whole dreadful week, during which one has gone about everywhere with one’s husband, just to show how absolutely lonely one was, he may be given a third last parting, in the evening, and then, if his conduct has been quite irreproachable, and one has behaved really badly to him, he should be allowed to admit that he has been entirely in the wrong, and when he has admitted that, it becomes a woman’s duty to forgive, and one can do it all over again from the beginning, with variations.
LADY HUNSTANTON. How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.
LADY STUTFIELD. Thank you, thank you. It has been quite, quite entrancing. I must try and remember it all. There are such a number of details that are so very, very important.
LADY CAROLINE. But you have not told us yet what the reward of the Ideal Man is to be.
MRS. ALLONBY. His reward? Oh, infinite expectation. That is quite enough for him.
LADY STUTFIELD. But men are so terribly, terribly exacting, are they not?
MRS. ALLONBY. That makes no matter. One should never surrender.
LADY STUTFIELD. Not even to the Ideal Man?
MRS. ALLONBY. Certainly not to him. Unless, of course, one wants to grow tired of him.
LADY STUTFIELD. Oh! … Yes. I see that. It is very, very helpful. Do you think, Mrs. Allonby, I shall ever meet the Ideal Man? Or are there more than one?
MRS. ALLONBY. There are just four in London, Lady Stutfield.
LADY HUNSTANTON. Oh, my dear!
MRS. ALLONBY (going over to her). What has happened? Do tell me.
LADY HUNSTANTON (in a low voice). I had completely forgotten that the American young lady has been in the room all the time. I am afraid some of this clever talk may have shocked her a little.
MRS. ALLONBY. Ah, that will do her so much good!
LADY HUNSTANTON. Let us hope she didn’t understand much. I think I had better go over and talk to her. (Rises and goes across to HESTER WORSLEY.) Well, dear Miss Worsley. (Sitting down beside her.) How quiet you have been in your nice little corner all this time! I suppose you have been reading a book? There are so many books here in the library.
HESTER. No, I have been listening to the conversation.
LADY HUNSTANTON. You mustn’t believe everything that was said, you know, dear.
HESTER. I didn’t believe any of it.
LADY HUNSTANTON. That is quite right, dear.
HESTER (continuing). I couldn’t believe that any women could really hold such views of life as I have heard to-night from some of your guests. (An awkward pause.)
LADY HUNSTANTON. I hear you have such pleasant society in America. Quite like our own in places, my son wrote to me.
HESTER. There are cliques in America as el
sewhere, Lady Hunstanton. But true American society consists simply of all the good women and good men we have in our country.
LADY HUNSTANTON. What a sensible system, and I dare say quite pleasant, too. I am afraid in England we have too many artificial social barriers. We don’t see as much as we should of the middle and lower classes.
HESTER. In America we have no lower classes.
LADY HUNSTANTON. Really? What a very strange arrangement!
MRS. ALLONBY. What is that dreadful girl talking about?
LADY STUTFIELD. She is painfully natural, is she not?
LADY CAROLINE. There are a great many things you haven’t got in America, I am told, Miss Worsley. They say you have no ruins, and no curiosities.
MRS. ALLONBY (to LADY STUTFIELD). What nonsense! They have their mothers and their manners.
HESTER. The English aristocracy supply us with our curiosities, Lady Caroline. They are sent over to us every summer, regularly, in the steamers, and propose to us the day after they land. As for ruins, we are trying to build up something that will last longer than brick or stone. (Gets up to take her fan from table.)
LADY HUNSTANTON. What is that, dear? Ah, yes, an iron Exhibition, is it not, at that place that has the curious name?
HESTER (standing by table). We are trying to build up life, Lady Hunstanton, on a better, truer, purer basis than life rests on here. This sounds strange to you all, no doubt. How could it sound other than strange? You rich people in England, you don’t know how you are living. How could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don’t know how to live – you don’t even know that. You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life you know nothing, You have lost life’s secret. Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes, and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. It is all wrong, all wrong.
LADY STUTFIELD. I don’t think one should know of these things. It is not very, very nice, is it?
LADY HUNSTANTON. My dear Miss Worsley, I thought you liked English society so much. You were such a success in it. And you were so much admired by the best people. I quite forget what Lord Henry Weston said of you – but it was most complimentary, and you know what an authority he is on beauty.
HESTER. Lord Henry Weston! I remember him. Lady Hunstanton. A man with a hideous smile and a hideous past. He is asked everywhere. No dinner-party is complete without him. What of those whose ruin is due to him? They are outcasts. They are nameless. If you met them in the street you would turn your head away. I don’t complain of their punishment. Let all women who have sinned be punished.
MRS. ARBUTHNOT enters from terrace behind in a cloak with a lace veil over her head. She hears the last words and starts.
LADY HUNSTANTON. My dear young lady!
HESTER. It is right that they should be punished, but don’t let them be the only ones to suffer. If a man and woman have sinned, let them both go forth into the desert to love or loathe each other there. Let them both be branded. Set a mark, if you wish, on each, but don’t punish the one and let the other go free. Don’t have one law for men and another for women. You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a shame in a woman to be infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded.
LADY CAROLINE. Might I, dear Miss Worsley, as you are standing up, ask you for my cotton that is just behind you? Thank you.
LADY HUNSTANTON. My dear Mrs. Arbuthnot! I am so pleased you have come up. But I didn’t hear you announced.
MRS. ARBUTHNOT. Oh I came straight in from the terrace, Lady Hunstanton, just as I was. You didn’t tell me you had a party.
LADY HUNSTANTON. Not a party. Only a few guests who are staying in the house, and whom you must know. Allow me. (Tries to help her. Rings bell.) Caroline, this is Mrs. Arbuthnot, one of my sweetest friends. Lady Caroline Pontefract, Lady Stutfield, Mrs. Allonby, and my young American friend, Miss Worsley, who has just been telling us all how wicked we are.
HESTER. I am afraid you think I spoke too strongly, Lady Hunstanton. But there are some things in England –
LADY HUNSTANTON. My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth, I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important, Lord Illingworth would tell us. The only point where I thought you were a little hard was about Lady Caroline’s brother, about poor Lord Henry. He is really such good company.
Enter FOOTMAN.
Take Mrs. Arbuthnot’s things.
Exit FOOTMAN with wraps.
HESTER. Lady Caroline, I had no idea it was your brother. I am sorry for the pain I must have caused you – I –
LADY CAROLINE. My dear Miss Worsley, the only part of your little speech, if I may so term it, with which I thoroughly agreed, was the part about my brother. Nothing that you could possibly say could be too bad for him. I regard Henry as infamous, absolutely infamous. But I am bound to state, as you were remarking, Jane, that he is excellent company, and he has one of the best cooks in London, and after a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.
LADY HUNSTANTON (to MISS WORSLEY). Now, do come, dear, and make friends with Mrs. Arbuthnot. She is one of the good, sweet, simple people you told us we never admitted into society. I am sorry to say Mrs. Arbuthnot comes very rarely to me. But that is not my fault.
MRS. ALLONBY. What a bore it is the men staying so long after dinner! I expect they are saying the most dreadful things about us.
LADY STUTFIELD. Do you really think so?
MRS. ALLONBY. I am sure of it.
LADY STUTFIELD. How very, very horrid of them! Shall we go on to the terrace?
MRS. ALLONBY. Oh, anything to get away from the dowagers and the dowdies. (Rises and goes with LADY STUTFIELD to door L.C.) We are only going to look at the stars. Lady Hunstanton.
LADY HUNSTANTON. You will find a great many, dear, a great many. But don’t catch cold. (To MRS. ARBUTHNOT). We shall all miss Gerald so much, dear Mrs. Arbuthnot.
MRS. ARBUTHNOT. But has Lord Illingworth really offered to make Gerald his secretary?
LADY HUNSTANTON. Oh, yes! He has been most charming about it. He has the highest possible opinion of your boy. You don’t know Lord Illingworth, I believe, dear.
MRS. ARBUTHNOT. I have never met him.
LADY HUNSTANTON. You know him by name, no doubt?
MRS. ARBUTHNOT. I am afraid I don’t. I live so much out of the world, and see so few people. I remember hearing years ago of an old Lord Illingworth who lived in Yorkshire, I think.
LADY HUNSTANTON. Ah, yes. That would be the last Earl but one. He was a very curious man. He wanted to marry beneath him. Or wouldn’t, I believe. There was some scandal about it. The present Lord Illingworth is quite different. He is very distinguished. He does – well, he does nothing, which I am afraid our pretty American visitor here thinks very wrong of anybody, and I don’t know that he cares much for the subjects in which you are so interested, dear Mrs. Arbuthnot. Do you think, Caroline, that Lord Illingworth is interested in the Housing of the Poor?
LADY CAROLINE. I should fancy not at all, Jane.
LADY HUNSTANTON. We all have our different tastes, have we not? But Lord Illingworth has a very high position, and there is nothing he couldn’t get if he chose to ask for it. Of course, he is comparatively a young man still, and he has only come to his title within – how long exactly is it, Caroline, since Lord Illingworth succeeded?
LADY CAROLINE. About four years, I think, Jane
. I know it was the same year in which my brother had his last exposure in the evening newspapers.
LADY HUNSTANTON. Ah, I remember. That would be about four years ago. Of course, there were a great many people between the present Lord Illingworth and the title, Mrs. Arbuthnot. There was – who was there, Caroline?
LADY CAROLINE. There was poor Margaret’s baby. You remember how anxious she was to have a boy, and it was a boy, but it died, and her husband died shortly afterwards, and she married almost immediately, one of Lord Ascot’s sons, who, I am told, beats her.
LADY HUNSTANTON. Ah, that is in the family, dear, that is in the family. And there was also, I remember, a clergyman who wanted to be a lunatic, or a lunatic who wanted to be a clergyman, I forget which, but I know the Court of Chancery investigated the matter, and decided that he was quite sane. And I saw him afterwards at poor Lord Plumstead’s with straws in his hair, or something very odd about him. I can’t recall what. I often regret, Lady Caroline, that dear Lady Cecilia never lived to see her son get the title.
MRS. ARBUTHNOT. Lady Cecilia?
LADY HUNSTANTON. Lord Illingworth’s mother, dear Mrs. Arbuthnot, was one of the Duchess of Jerningham’s pretty daughters, and she married Sir Thomas Harford, who wasn’t considered a very good match for her at the time, though he was said to be the handsomest man in London. I knew them all quite intimately, and both the sons, Arthur and George.
MRS. ARBUTHNOT. It was the eldest son who succeeded, of course, Lady Hunstanton?
LADY HUNSTANTON. No, dear, he was killed in the hunting field. Or was it fishing, Caroline? I forget. But George came in for everything. I always tell him that no younger son has ever had good luck as he has had.
MRS. ARBUTHNOT. Lady Hunstanton, I want to speak to Gerald at once. Might I see him? Can he be sent for?
LADY HUNSTANTON. Certainly, dear. I will send one of the servants into the dining-room to fetch him. I don’t know what keeps the gentlemen so long. (Rings bell.) When I knew Lord Illingworth first as plain George Harford, he was simply a very brilliant young man about town, with not a penny of money except what poor dear Lady Cecilia gave him. She was quite devoted to him. Chiefly, I fancy, because he was on bad terms with his father. Oh, here is the dear Archdeacon. (To SERVANT.) It doesn’t matter.
