Hellenic
ideal--to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be.
But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of
the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our
lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to
strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has
done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains
then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The
only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and
your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to
itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and
unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place
in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great
sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with
your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions
that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror,
day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek
with shame----"

"Stop!" faltered Dorian Gray, "stop! you bewilder me. I don't know what
to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don't speak.
Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think."

For nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted lips, and
eyes strangely bright. He was dimly conscious that entirely fresh
influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have come
really from himself. The few words that Basil's friend had said to
him--words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in
them--had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before,
but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses.

Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But
music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another
chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were!
How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet
what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a
plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as
sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real
as words?

Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood.
He understood them now. Life sudd