g 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