The extract is taken from the eleventh chapter of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890.

The title of the extract, Life as the greatest of the arts, embodies one of the most important principles of Aestheticism: according to Oscar Wilde a Dandy has to devote his life to Beauty.

The text is arranged in five sequences explaining who is a Dandy and how his life has to be, using Dorian Gray as a paradigm.

The first sequence deals with Dorian Gray’s worldly life, parties and dinners he organizes and in particular his “exquisite taste”.

Dorian Gray is the perfect realization of a Dandy, and he is an example for high classes young men, his typical guests.In order to better characterize Dorian Gray, the writer uses a quotation from Dante(l.17) and also from Gautier(l.18).

The second sequence contains the definitions of Fashion and Dandyism. According to Mr.Wilde Fashion  is the universalization of the aesthetic moment; Dandyism “is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty”. In the last part of the sequence the writer introduces the categories of people that are influenced by Aesthetic principles: “the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows”.

In the third sequence Oscar Wilde defines who is a Dandy and underlines that is not only a merely exterior attitude. A perfect Dandy “finds in the spiritualising of the senses its highest realization”.

The fourth sequence puts into better focus the importance of senses and how they are important for a human being.Man has not understood the true nature of the senses: man has to aim senses to a new spirituality instead of submit them.

Dorian Gray finds that the submission of senses had produced degradation. The metaphor of the anchorite underlines human’s degradation of senses.

In the last sequence Lord Henry is the prophet of the new Aesthetic movement (“a new Hedonism that was to re-create life”), that will come against the puritan, and also Victorian principles, that mortifies senses.

The language used is quite simple, with long periods and essentially descriptive parts as the first one.