Pagina 288 van 490

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.