第22章

Yes, the lad was premature.He was gathering his harvest while it was yet spring.The pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was becoming self-conscious.It was delightful to watch him.With his beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at.It was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end.He was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses.

Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.

The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade.Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also.

He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us.As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others.Experience was of no ethical value.It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid.

But there was no motive power in experience.It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself.All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions;and certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results.His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest.There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences, yet it was not a simple, but rather a very complex passion.What there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination, changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous.It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious.It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

While Lord Henry sat dreaming on these things, a knock came to the door, and his valet entered and reminded him it was time to dress for dinner.He got up and looked out into the street.The sunset had smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite.The panes glowed like plates of heated metal.The sky above was like a faded rose.He thought of his friend's young fiery-coloured life and wondered how it was all going to end.

When he arrived home, about half-past twelve o'clock, he saw a telegram lying on the hall table.He opened it and found it was from Dorian Gray.It was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to Sibyl Vane.