 Eton or Oxford days, a
type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all
the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. To them
he seemed to be of the company of those whom Dante describes as having sought to
make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty. Like Gautier, he was one for
whom the visible world existed.
    And, certainly, to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts,
and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. Fashion, by which
what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and Dandyism, which, in
its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of
course, their fascination for him. His mode of dressing, and the particular
styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the
young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him
in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his
graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies.
    For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost
immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a subtle
pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the London of his own day
what to imperial Neronian Rome the author of the Satyricon once had been, yet in
his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere arbiter
elegantiarum, to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a
necktie, or the conduct of a cane. He sought to elaborate some new scheme of
life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and
find in the spiritualising of the senses its highest realisation.
    The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried,
men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem
stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less
highly organised forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the
true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained
savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into
submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of
a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant
characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through History, he was
haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! And to such
