19
that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it. There is nothing that art cannot express, and I know the work that I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is the good work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious way — I wonder will you understand me — his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden for me before. "A dream of form in days of thought" — who is it whothat says that? — I forget; — but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me. The merely visible presence of this ladboy — for he seems to be little more than a ladboy, though he is overjust twenty,lately summers have shown him roses less scarlet than his life,— his merely visible presence, ah! I wonder can you realize all that that means. Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in itself all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is
