Oscar Wilde: The Complete Works. Knowledge house
of love. We needs must love the highest when we see it! [Kisses him and rises and goes out.]
[Sir Robert Chiltern walks up and down for a moment; then sits down and buries his face in his hands. The Servant enters and begins putting out the lights. Sir Robert Chiltern looks up.]
sir robert chiltern
Put out the lights, Mason, put out the lights!
[The Servant puts out the lights. The room becomes almost dark. The only light there is comes from the great chandelier that hangs over the staircase and illumines the tapestry of the Triumph of Love.]
Act-drop.
·63· Second Act.
·65· SCENE—Morning-room at Sir Robert Chiltern’s house.
[Lord Goring, dressed in the height of fashion, is lounging in an armchair. Sir Robert Chiltern is standing in front of the fireplace. He is evidently in a state of great mental excitement and distress. As the scene progresses he paces nervously up and down the room.]
lord goring
My dear Robert, it’s a very awkward business, very awkward indeed. You should have told your wife the whole thing. Secrets from other people’s wives are a necessary luxury in modern life. So, at least, I am always told at the club by people who are bald enough to know better. But 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.
·66· sir robert chiltern
Arthur, I couldn’t tell my wife. When could I have told her? Not last night. It would have made a life-long separation between us, and I would have lost the love of the one woman in the world I worship, of the only woman who has ever stirred love within me. Last night it would have been quite impossible. She would have turned from me in horror … in horror and in contempt.
lord goring
Is Lady Chiltern as perfect as all that?
sir robert chiltern
Yes; my wife is as perfect as all that.
lord goring
[Taking off his left-hand glove.] What a pity! I beg your pardon, my dear fellow, I didn’t quite mean that. But if what you tell me is true, I should like to have a serious talk about life with Lady Chiltern.
sir robert chiltern
It would be quite useless.
lord goring
May I try?
·67· sir robert chiltern
Yes; but nothing could make her alter her views.
lord goring
Well, at the worst it would simply be a psychological experiment.
sir robert chiltern
All such experiments are terribly dangerous.
lord goring
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living…. Well, I am bound to say that I think you should have told her years ago.
sir robert chiltern
When? When we were engaged? Do you think she would have married me if she had known that the origin of my fortune is such as it is, the basis of my career such as it is, and that I had done a thing that I suppose most men would call shameful and dishonourable?
lord goring
[Slowly.] Yes; most men would call it ugly names. There is no doubt of that.
·68· sir robert chiltern
[Bitterly.] Men who every day do something of the same kind themselves. Men who, each one of them, have worse secrets in their own lives.
lord goring
That is the reason they are so pleased to find out other people’s secrets. It distracts public attention from their own.
sir robert chiltern
And, after all, whom did I wrong by what I did? No one.
lord goring
[Looking at him steadily.] Except yourself, Robert.
sir robert chiltern
[After a pause.] Of course I had private information about a certain transaction contemplated by the Government of the day, and I acted on it. Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
lord goring
[Tapping his boot with his cane.] And public scandal invariably the result.
·69· sir robert chiltern
[Pacing up and down the room.] Arthur, do you think that what I did nearly eighteen years ago should be brought up against me now? Do you think it fair that a man’s whole career should be ruined for a fault done in one’s boyhood almost. I was twenty-two at the time, and I had the double misfortune of being well-born and poor, two unforgivable things nowadays. Is it fair that the folly, the sin of one’s youth, if men choose to call it a sin, should wreck a life like mine, should place me in the pillory, should shatter all that I have worked for, all that I have built up? Is it fair, Arthur?
lord goring
Life is never fair, Robert. And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
sir robert chiltern
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
lord goring
You underrate yourself, Robert. Believe me, without wealth you could have succeeded just as well.
·70· sir robert chiltern
When I was old, perhaps. When I had lost my passion for power, or could not use it. When I was tired, worn out, disappointed. I wanted my success when I was young. Youth is the time for success. I couldn’t wait.
lord goring
Well, you certainly have had your success while you are still young. No one in our day has had such a brilliant success. Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs at the age of forty—that’s good enough for anyone, I should think.
sir robert chiltern
And if it is all taken away from me now? If I lose everything over a horrible scandal? If I am hounded from public life?
lord goring
Robert, how could you have sold yourself for money?
sir robert chiltern
[Excitedly.] I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price. That is all.
lord goring
[Gravely.] Yes; you certainly paid a great price ·71· for it. But what first made you think of doing such a thing?
sir robert chiltern
Baron Arnheim.
lord goring
Damned scoundrel!
sir robert chiltern
No; he was a man of a most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met.
lord goring
Ah! I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for