Pagina 411 di 490

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle. Certainly

with hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray shaped and

reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul and sense, till

he had found in them the full expression, as it were, of his

mood, and justified, by intellectual approval, passions that

without such justification would still have dominated his temper.

From cell to cell of his brain crept the one thought; and the

wild desire to live, most terrible of all man's appetites,

quickened into force each trembling nerve and fibre. Ugliness

that had once been hateful to him because it made things real,

became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one

reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence

of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were

more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all

the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song. They were

what he needed for forgetfulness.