Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that
was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely puritanism
that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was to have its
service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to accept any
theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of
passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and
not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the
asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that
dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to
concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either
after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of
death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through
the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality
itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques,
and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one
might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled
with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the
curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb
shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside,
there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men
going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down
from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared
to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple
cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the
forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn
remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back
their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and
beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the
wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had
been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us
changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life
that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there
steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of
energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild
longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a
world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a
world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be
changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have
little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of
obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness
and the memories of pleasure their pain.

It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray
to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life; and in his
search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and
possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he
would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really
alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and
then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his
intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that
is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that, indeed,
according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it.

It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic
communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction
for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices
of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the
evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements
and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize.
He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement and watch the priest,
in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving aside
the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled,
lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one
would fain think, is indeed the "panis caelestis," the bread of angels,
or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host
into the chalice and smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming censers
that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like
great gilt flowers had their subtle fascination for him. As he passed
out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals and long to
sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women
whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives.

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual
development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of
mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for
the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are
no stars and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with its marvellous
power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle
antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season;
and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the
Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing
the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or
some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the
absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid
or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said of him before, no
theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life
itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual
speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that
the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.

And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their manufacture,
distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums from the East.
He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart
in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations,
wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in
ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets that woke the
memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in


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