In Act 2, Scene 2, Lord Goring and Robert Chiltern discuss Chiltern’s impending crisis—Mrs. Chaveley has blackmailed him into giving a speech in support of a fraudulent project to Parliament. As Goring lays out Chiltern’s options, Wilde takes the opportunity to sneak in some acerbic satire of London society:
Besides, if you did make a clean breast of the whole affair, you would never be able to talk morality again. And in England a man who can’t talk morality twice a week to a large, popular, immoral audience is quite over as a serious politician. There would be nothing left for him as a profession except Botany or the Church. A confession would be of no use. It would ruin you.
In a play full of satirical observations on the English elite, this passage is a particularly incisive example. By Goring’s account, moral posturing is so vital to political life in England that anyone who cannot proselytize morality to the general public can hardly be called a politician. This observation relies on layers of verbal irony: first, Goring’s assertion that the general public (the large, popular audience) must be inherently immoral flies in the face of the fact that the politicians themselves—as evidenced by this very conversation with Chiltern—are in fact the most likely to be morally compromised.
Next, Goring presents a humorous juxtaposition of the two supposed recourses left for such a politician who cannot expound on morality to the masses. The first option, according to Goring, is “Botany,” or the study of flowers: a vocation that is practically the polar opposite of politics. The second option would be “the Church”: theoretically, religion would be the career path most invested in morality, but Goring’s ironic twist dismisses such a moral façade and presents the church as the perfect place for a morally compromised politician. There is no group in An Ideal Husband that can escape Wilde’s critique.
