Book #89: An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde

I read a bit of Wilde back in the day before college, even, but I really haven't revisited him much since. (Except for going to see his grave in Paris! Picture below.) But I have always meant to get around to reading more than just The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, both of which I really enjoyed in the past. In reading An Ideal Husband, I was surprised by how funny and sarcastic and yet how deep this play was. The play is about Robert Chiltern, a supposedly perfect man to everyone--with a perfect record in politics and a wife who almost worships him--who has a secret from the past come back to bite him in the form of blackmail. He gets help from his friend, the resolute dandy Lord Goring, who helps him to figure out what to do and how to save his reputation and his marriage. (I absolutely loved the character of Lord Goring--he's totally cut from the cloth of Percy in The Scarlet Pimpernel, the secretly intelligent and philosophical man who acts like he's only interested in fashion and shallow things.) And through this story, you get bombarded with hilarious quotes about how silly and shallow people are, and then also with these serious, deep quotes about how love truly works and how important charity and forgiveness are to relationships and love.

Some of my favorite quotes, both silly and serious:

"It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. . . . All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon." (Act II)
"Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself." (Act III)
"What is unfashionable is what other people wear. . . . Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people." (Act III)
"Like all stout women, she looks the very picture of happiness." (Act II)
"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." (Act II)

Things work out in the end for Robert Chilton and his wife, and they understand each other much better and how to love each other better in the end. In the end, everyone understands better about what it really means to be an "ideal" husband--and that it's more desirable to be "real." So all's well that ends well in this story. I found the Rupert Everett version of it is available for streaming on Netflix, so I may watch that tonight while Tommy works. And I want to look for more of his works at the library to read!

And in closing, a picture of Oscar Wilde's tomb with its hundreds of lipstick kisses all over it. I can't believe I've actually been there. (And I just looked it up on Wikipedia and apparently we were some of the last people to see it like this--it said in 2011 (the year we went) they cleaned off his tomb and put a glass wall around it to keep people from defacing it. Awesome.)