Pagina 324 van 490

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race,

nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and

certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely

conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that

the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not

as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his

imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain

and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those

strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the

world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It

seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been

his own.

The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life

had himself known this curious fancy.