Comprehension
>> Right from the first lines of the extract, the narrator tells us about Dorian Gray's lifestyle: once or twice every month during the winter and each Wednesday evening he holds a party in which he splurges his beautiful house but also he shows off all his richness and his elegance.
>> According to Dorian Gray, Life itself was the first, the greates, of the arts, and for it all the others arts seem to be but a preparation.
>> The character becames an ideal for educated young men, because he is the incarnation of the combination between the real culture of the scholar and the grace, perfect, distinction manner of a citizen of the world. However Dorian Gray doesn't want to be only a mere arbiter elegantiarum. He desires to create some new scheme of life with its philosophy and its ordered principles and find in the spiritualising of the senses its highest realization.
>> The worship of the senses has often been criticized, misunderstood and straved into submission, because men feel a natural istinct of terror about passions and sensations which appear to be stronger than men themselves. The senses so has remined savage and animal merely.
>> Dorian's "new Hedonism"would refer to the intellect, but it would refuse any theory or system which would sacrify any passionate experience. Indeed the experience itself would be its aim: in this way people will learn to concentrate themselves upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

Interpratation:
>> Wilde uses an omniscient, intrusive narrator who knows everything about the character and sometimes narrator's point of view coincides with Dorian Grey's.
>> Life here seems to be made up of a lot of moments which we have to catch and keep in our mind, in order to live all istants of our time, to live immediately the experience and not only its fruits.
>> "Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of the experience, sweet or bitter as they might be", "a life that is itself but a moment".
>> According to Arnold Hauser, the new Hedonism and sensualism of the 1880s allow younger generation to live all pleasure of their time in order to turn every hour into an unforgettable experience.
>> This sort of fin-de-siècle hedonism could be a suitable term for the younger generation: people has to live life in toto, as if every moment could teach you new experience, sweet or bitter as they might be.
>> The ending of the novel can be considered as a criticism of the moral hypocrisy, vulgarity and materialism of the Victorian society.