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follypersistof those lines that, even keeping the word choice and order entirely intact, can still be misquoted in your heart like a strong misreading, let's dwell here for the length of a page:
"we needs must love the highest when we see it."
When I was young, I was particularly impacted by Oscar Wilde's ephemeral play An Ideal Husband, and its canny game of economics, gender, politics, bribery, and class. It's clumsier than The Importance of Being Earnest, by which I mean that Earnest successfully gets by with no subject whatsoever, whereas An Ideal Husband is full to the brim with themes; it's clumsy the way I am clumsy, always reaching out for another meaning.
Lady Chiltern, the married woman whose mannerism is reserve, and whose husband's past indiscretions for the purpose of gaining his present position set the scene for our story, says this about her husband who she believes to be the height of virtue: "I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love. We needs must love the highest when we see it!" This is the same Lady Chiltern who just minutes earlier has told us that "circumstances should never alter principles!"
One of my favorite things in the human use of language is our constructions, the compound phrases at odds with common speech. From "we needs must love the highest when we see it", I could never learn its ethics, for in my heart a love reserved for only the highest is a love diminished by its own discrimination. But I could learn the construction "needs must", or "we needs must" as a third person iteration of plural first person pronouncement. It's neither that we need, nor that we must, but both.
Of course, this isn't precisely true. Wilde wasn't enacting the most ardent woman in fiction; he was quoting Lord Tennyson's Guinevere entirely:
Which is something of a disappointment. Not a great one, as what is it to trade one old dead poet with another? But it is quite like reading Joyce or Danielewski, where you feel for a moment that you have encountered some new idea put to new words, only to find it is only in reference.
Still, a fin-de-siècle lady of classical mannerism could and should readily quote an impassioned poem rather than speak more deeply from her own heart. Wilde may say "and here, she is making a mistake", but in fact Lady Chiltern's virtue sees her well-rewarded, as every other character schemes schemes and plots plots to make the realpolitik world of compromises inevitably arc back towards her own view of justice.
And on the other side, well, haven't you ever seen something and had your heart say: "I need to love this?" If we take for a moment only our sensibility and none of our sense, if we let ourselves be freely romantic players on this short and tragic stage, perhaps we find the highest not so far away, and when we do... needs must!
Lady Chiltern, the married woman whose mannerism is reserve, and whose husband's past indiscretions for the purpose of gaining his present position set the scene for our story, says this about her husband who she believes to be the height of virtue: "I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love. We needs must love the highest when we see it!" This is the same Lady Chiltern who just minutes earlier has told us that "circumstances should never alter principles!"
One of my favorite things in the human use of language is our constructions, the compound phrases at odds with common speech. From "we needs must love the highest when we see it", I could never learn its ethics, for in my heart a love reserved for only the highest is a love diminished by its own discrimination. But I could learn the construction "needs must", or "we needs must" as a third person iteration of plural first person pronouncement. It's neither that we need, nor that we must, but both.
Of course, this isn't precisely true. Wilde wasn't enacting the most ardent woman in fiction; he was quoting Lord Tennyson's Guinevere entirely:
Which is something of a disappointment. Not a great one, as what is it to trade one old dead poet with another? But it is quite like reading Joyce or Danielewski, where you feel for a moment that you have encountered some new idea put to new words, only to find it is only in reference.
Still, a fin-de-siècle lady of classical mannerism could and should readily quote an impassioned poem rather than speak more deeply from her own heart. Wilde may say "and here, she is making a mistake", but in fact Lady Chiltern's virtue sees her well-rewarded, as every other character schemes schemes and plots plots to make the realpolitik world of compromises inevitably arc back towards her own view of justice.
And on the other side, well, haven't you ever seen something and had your heart say: "I need to love this?" If we take for a moment only our sensibility and none of our sense, if we let ourselves be freely romantic players on this short and tragic stage, perhaps we find the highest not so far away, and when we do... needs must!
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Date: 2024-10-17 09:25 pm (UTC)