self would have
been a sufficient restraint, but sophistry argued and said, _What is
there in it_?--and so the very strength and prerogative of man hired
itself out to perform the office of making him worse than a beast.
Charmides was unmarried, and it is not to be denied that though his life
as a whole was pure, he had yielded to temptation, not without loathing
himself afterwards. He did not feel conscious of any transgression of a
moral law, for no such law was recognised, but he detested himself
because he had been drawn into close contact with a miserable wretch
simply in order to satisfy a passion, and in the touch of mercenary
obscenity there was something horrible to him. It was bitter to him to
reflect that, notwithstanding his aversion from it, notwithstanding his
philosophy and art, he had been equally powerless with the uttermost fool
of a young aristocrat to resist the attraction of the commonest of
snares. What were his books and fine pretensions worth if they could not
protect him in such ordinary danger? Thus it came to pass that after a
fall, when he went back to his work, it was so unreal to him, such a
mockery, that days often elapsed before he could do anything. It was a
mere toy, a dilettante dissipation, the embroidery of corruption. Oh,
for a lawgiver, for a time of restraint, for the time of Regulus and the
republic! Then, said Charmides to himself, my work would have some
value, for heroic obedience would he behind it. He was right, for the
love of the beautiful cannot long exist where there is moral pollution.
The love of the beautiful itself is moral--that is to say, what we love
in it is virtue. A perfect form or a delicate colour are the expression
of something which is destroyed in us by subjugation to the baser desires
or meanness, and he who has been unjust to man or woman misses the true
interpretation of a cloud or falling wave.

"One night Charmides was walking through the lowest part of the city, and
he heard from a mere hovel the sound of a hymn. He knew what it was--that
it was the secret celebration of a religious rite by the despised sect of
the Jews and their wretched proselytes. The Jews were especially hateful
to him and to all cultured people in Rome. They were typical of all the
qualities which culture abhorred. No Jew had ever produced anything
lovely in any department whatever--no picture, statue, melody, nor poem.
Their literature was also barbaric: there was n