their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our
race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which
is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of
religion,--these are the two things that govern us. And yet--"

"Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good
boy," said Hallward, deep in his work, and conscious only that a look
had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before.

"And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with
that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of
him, and that he had even in his Eton days, "I believe that if one
man were to live his life out fully and completely, were to give form
to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every
dream,--I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of
joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return
to the Hellenic ideal,-- to something finer, richer, than the
Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man among 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