In Act 4, Part 2, Lord Goring attempts to explain to Lady Chiltern why it would be morally wrong to ask Robert to resign from Parliament. His appeal is essentially an emotional one, and therefore relies on the device of pathos to elicit an emotional response from Lady Chiltern:
Lady Chiltern, allow me. […] Now is the moment when you really want my help, now is the time when you have got to trust me, to trust in my counsel and judgement. You love Robert. Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success?
Goring’s pathos relies on the language of love and loss—he appeals to Lady Chiltern’s love for her husband, to her desire for that love to be reciprocated, and to the emotional devastation that the total destruction of Robert’s political career would likely have on him. At this moment in An Ideal Husband, the rules of London society are being rewritten and Goring emerges as the real moral arbiter of the play: there is room, after all, for forgiveness and reconciliation in a world that would otherwise trade complexity and compromise for artifice and entertainment.
