We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us… 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…
This set-piece sounds like wisdom precisely because it’s so polished. Henry converts moral struggle into pathology—resistance isn’t strength, it’s illness—so indulgence becomes cure. For an anxious, vain nineteen-year-old, it’s intoxicating permission. The cadence is sermon-like, except the sermon flips the commandments. Wilde’s point isn’t that Henry is right but that beautiful talk can make wrong ideas feel right. The portrait will refute this doctrine line by line. It’s a reminder that eloquence can anesthetize conscience.