In Act 2, Part 1, Sir Robert Chiltern recalls his meeting with Baron Arnheim—the aristocrat to whom he sold the secret of the Suez Canal in order to jumpstart his own political career. In his description of Arnheim and his lavish residence, Wilde goes wild with literary devices; the sequence is laden with metaphors and the visual imagery of wealth:
…with a strange smile on his pale, curved lips, he led me through his wonderful picture gallery, showed me his tapestries, his enamels, his jewels, his carved ivories, made me wonder at the strange loveliness of the luxury in which he lived; and then told me that luxury was nothing but a background, a painted scene in a play, and that power, power over other men, power over the world, was the one thing worth having, the one supreme pleasure worth knowing, the one joy one never tired of, and that in our century only the rich possessed it.
The rich visual description of Arnheim’s surroundings underscores the passage's central metaphor that this excess, extraordinary though it may seem, is only a “painted scene in a play.” Wealth is the background set design for the real drama of life: the power to manipulate, to control, and to rule over other people. By this metaphor, Arnheim appears to think of himself as a sort of theatrical director or puppet master—and that this is the “natural” way for the rich and powerful to behave. Robert’s account of Arnheim’s worldview self-consciously toys with its own setting within an actual work of theater: even as Robert describes the artifice of Arnheim’s life, he is himself a character played by an actor within a fictional environment created by Wilde. Throughout An Ideal Husband, Wilde uses the inherently artificial nature of theatrical drama to reveal and critique the more insidious artifice of London society—a world that, Wilde argues, is no more real than a play.
In Act 2, Part 1, Sir Robert Chiltern woefully describes how Baron Arnheim seduced him with talk of power and wealth—talk that ultimately convinced Robert to sell a government secret to Arnheim in order to give momentum to his own political career. With considerable verbal irony, he recounts his experience of Arnheim’s persuasion using the language of philosophy and religion:
With that wonderfully fascinating quiet voice of his he expounded to us the most terrible of all philosophies, the philosophy of power, preached to us the most marvellous of all gospels, the gospel of gold. I think he saw the effect he had produced on me, for some days afterwards he wrote and asked me to come and see him.
In the Christian culture of England at the time of Wilde’s writing, the gospel would have been seen as the message of the opportunity to find salvation through Jesus Christ. Robert’s use of the term "gospel" to describe the avaricious ideology of Arnheim, an ideology that is diametrically opposed to that of the gospel, thereby gains considerable verbal irony: at the point at which he tells this story to Lord Goring, he is consumed with regret over his actions. Τhe effect of this irony, and the tension between Christian virtue and Arnheim’s worldview, is therefore to underscore the religious fervor with which Arnheim spoke of wealth and power. It also shows the pull that Arnheim’s words must have had on Robert for him to be convinced to illegally sell information on the Suez Canal.
In light of Wilde’s own personal ambivalence toward religion, however, this passage may gain another level of irony: in highlighting how Arnheim and Robert both embraced this alternative "gospel," Wilde shows how fickle and arbitrary—if not downright damaging—humanity’s most fervent beliefs can be.
At the end of Act 2, Part 2, Sir Robert laments that Lady Chiltern, his wife, has prevented him from acquiescing to Mrs. Cheveley’s request that he present a falsified report on the Argentine Canal before Parliament. As Robert explains how obeying Mrs. Cheveley would have kept his shameful secret safe, he uses an extended metaphor that personifies the secret:
What this woman asked of me was nothing compared to what she offered to me. She offered security, peace, stability. The sin of my youth, that I had thought was buried, rose up in front of me, hideous, horrible, with its hands at my throat. I could have killed it for ever, sent it back into its tomb, destroyed its record, burned the one witness against me. You prevented me. No one but you, you know it.
Robert’s wordplay relies on the double meaning of “bury”—literally, to bury is to inter a dead body in a grave or tomb, but “to bury” can also mean to cover something up like a salacious news story or scandal. Robert’s personification, the original “sin” of his youth, his sale of insider information on the Suez Canal to Baron Arnheim, is a zombie of sorts: a once-buried corpse come horrifyingly back to life through Mrs. Cheveley’s blackmail. To “kill” this secret once again would be to bury it back into its tomb of obscurity.
This scene, including Robert’s larger appeal to Lady Chiltern, is a turning point in the play: Robert can no longer hide his past from his wife, and their future together relies on her ability to forgive him—to break from the social expectations of the London elite and see Robert as a complex, flawed human being worthy of love.
At the beginning of Act 3, Part 1, Wilde again uses his stage directions as an opportunity to describe his characters and their behavior. In this expository sequence, Wilde uses a combination of allusion, hyperbole, metaphor, and personification to describe Phipps, Lord Goring’s butler:
Phipps, the Butler, is arranging some newspapers on the writing-table. The distinction of Phipps is his impassivity. He has been termed by enthusiasts the Ideal Butler. The Sphinx is not so incommunicable. He is a mask with a manner. Of his intellectual or emotional life, history knows nothing. He represents the dominance of form.
By alluding to the sphinx—the monster of Egyptian myth who poses deadly riddles to its beholder—Wilde establishes Phipps’s practiced indifference in hyperbolic terms of the sphinx’s legendary inscrutability. Wilde also adds in a dose of personification with the metaphorical comparison between Phipps and a living mask or disguise—is a “mask with a manner.” This makes him a perfect butler for Goring, who can rely on Phipps to help out in the background without any distraction. In some ways, Phipps is also the ultimate embodiment of the satirically conceited Wildean archetype: everything about Phipps is a façade, a constantly maintained act that never lets slip his “intellectual or emotional life” within—even Mrs. Cheveley could hardly aspire to more.
