Chapter IX: Purple Patches and Fine Phrases

“I am going to sit up all night with Reggie, saying mad scarlet
things, such as Walter Pater loves, and waking the night with
silver silences.... Come, Reggie, let us go to the smoking-room,
since we are left alone. I will be brilliant for you as I have
never been brilliant for my publishers. I will talk to you as no
character in my plays has ever talked. Come! The young Endymion
stirs in his dreams, and the pale-souled Selene watches him from
her pearly car.

“The shadows on the lawns are violet, and the stars wash the
spaces of the sky with primrose and with crimson. The night is
old yet. Let me be brilliant, dear boy, or I feel that I shall
weep for sheer wittiness, and die, as so many have died, with
all my epigrams still in me.”--Esmé Amarinth in _The Green
Carnation_.

Just as the personal revolt of the decadence ran to dandyism, so its literature reached the same goal. There were endless discussions about “style,” and many were of the opinion that the ultimate form of a thought, its manner of word and syntax, was the thing in itself. Words for words’ sake was a kind of gospel, and, following the habit of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poets and prose-poets would devote long hours to word-hunting. They would search through dictionaries and ancient tomes with the hot enthusiasm of the hunter, tracking down the “unique word,” and hoping to capture it alive for exhibition in the gardens of modern literature. Authors with a personal style were cultivated and upheld. The “Purple Patches” in Ruskin, Pater, and in Edward Fitzgerald’s _Rubáiyát_ of Omar Khayyám, were relished with voluble delight. Keats came in for a new admiration, and Rossetti’s poems satisfied the call of the hour by the suggestive ardency of their “vagueness and utterness,” to use words applied by George Moore to the poems of Verlaine. The strong and deep wit of George Meredith, with its subtle surprises, aroused even greater delight, and the meticulous prose of Robert Louis Stevenson, with its almost feminine echoes of Meredith, enraptured those who were just inheriting the newer culture. All this concern for language as language, for the set and balance of words, was not, however, entirely of native origin. It was, as in the case of so much that was new and strange, partially derived from the French decadent movement which was influencing the whole of Europe.

Many years ago Théophile Gautier described the decadent style as “ingenious, complex, learned, full of shades of meaning and investigation, always extending the boundaries of language, borrowing from all the technical vocabularies, taking colours from all palettes, notes from all keyboards, forcing literary expression of that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting outlines; listening, that it may translate them, to the subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of ageing and depraved passion, and to the singular hallucinations of fixity of idea verging to madness. This decadent style is the last effort of language to express everything to the last extremity.” Further, he compares this style with that of the later Roman empire, when language became “mottled with the greenness of decomposition,” in a word, gamy (_faisandée_). But in England literary style developed hardly more than a faint flavour of that _gamy_ expression associated with the work of Baudelaire and Huysmans, and it approximated more nearly to its French influences in, as might be expected, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.

One recalls many a wonderful passage in _Dorian Gray_ wherein Oscar Wilde turned the results of his word-hunting into prose passages entirely new to English literature:

“He would often spend a whole day settling and re-settling in
their cases the various stones that he had collected, such
as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight,
the cymophane with its wire-like line of silver, the
pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes,
carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four-rayed stars,
flame-red cinnamon stones, orange and violet spinels, and
amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. He
loved the red-gold of the sunstone, and the moonstone’s pearly
whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky opal. He procured
from Amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and richness
of colour, and had a turquoise _de la vieille roche_ that
was the envy of all connoisseurs.”

Aubrey Beardsley had so keen a sense of verbal deportment that there is conscious style in almost every sentence he wrote. So insistent is this sense of form that the matter of his slight literary achievement, unusual though it is, retires before his manner. So mannered was he at times that one questions his sincerity. It is as though he adopted a decadent prose as a prank and awoke to find the result a masterpiece. His preciosity is so ordered and elegant, and so deliberate in aim and intent, that it becomes something more than a freakish whim. Could prose, for instance, have more grace than the dedicatory epistle of _Under the Hill_?

“I must crave your forgiveness for addressing you in a language
other than the Roman,” he writes, “but my small freedom in
Latinity forbids me to wander beyond the idiom of my vernacular.
I would not for the world that your delicate Southern ear
should be offended by a barbarous assault of rude and Gothic
words; but methinks no language is rude that can boast polite
writers, and not a few have flourished in this country in times
past, bringing our common speech to very great perfection. In
the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered
authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a
building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, alack! what
boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?”

There we have the polite writer of all time, deftly using the “conceit” of his period with a relish appropriate enough in a writer whose literature was a by-product of a graphic art whose every line was fraught with strutting imagery and elegantly laboured poses. “From the point of a precise toilet,” he writes, in the opening paragraph of the romance, “the fingers wandered, quelling the little mutinies of cravat and ruffle.” Again he speaks of “taper-time” and the “slender voices of the fairies,” and of Venus standing before her mirror, “in a flutter of frilled things,” displaying neck and shoulders “so wonderfully drawn” and “little malicious breasts” which were “full of the irritation of loveliness that can never be entirely comprehended, or ever enjoyed to the utmost.” Master of the Purple Patch, Beardsley knew also how to weave gorgeous tapestries of words delighting by their very richness:

“The place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers
heavy with perfume, dripping with odours. Gloomy and nameless
weeds not to be found in Mentzelius. Huge moths so richly winged
they must have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs,
slept on the pillars that flank either side of the gateway,
and the eyes of all the moths remained open, and were burning
and bursting with a mesh of veins. The pillars were fashioned
in some pale stone, and rose up like hymns in the praise of
Venus, for, from cap to base, each one was carved with loving
sculptures, showing such a cunning invention and such a curious
knowledge that Tannhäuser lingered not a little in reviewing
them.”

In their search for reality, and their desire to extend the boundaries of sensation, the writers of the Eighteen Nineties sought to capture and steep their art in what was sensuous and luscious, in all that was coloured and perfumed. Oscar Wilde never tired of decorating his prose with unfamiliar imagery and incongruous colour words. He mastered every literary fashion of the time, wielding with like skill the methods of purple patch, preciosity, epigram, paradox and conceit. _Dorian Gray_ is a piece of literary jewellery; peacock phrases, glowing periods and verbal surprises embellishing every page. He speaks of the sunlight slipping “over the polished leaves”; of “the green lacquer leaves of the ivy”; and “the blue cloud-shadows” chasing “themselves across the grass like swallows”; of “the stained trumpet of Tyrian convolvulus.” “The green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars,” he says of the clematis. An emotional change in a woman gives him a chance of such literary efflorescence as: “A rose shook in her blood, and shadowed her cheeks. Quick breath parted the petals of her lips.” And the homogenic love of Michelangelo he describes as being “carved in the coloured marbles of a sonnet-sequence.” The following colour phrases are common throughout his works:--“nacre-coloured air,” “apricot-coloured light,” “rose-coloured joy,” “crocus-coloured robe,” and “sulphur-coloured roses.” “Swinging censers” are compared with “great gilt flowers,” and he speaks of the “jade-green piles of vegetables” in Covent Garden.

The keen colour sense of the period manifested itself in many other directions, particularly in certain characteristic book titles, such as _The Yellow Book_, _Grey Roses_, _The Green Carnation_, _A Yellow Aster_, _Green Fire_ and _The Colour of Life_. It would seem as though the Impressionist painters had made the world more conscious of the effects of light, and inspired writers with a desire to seek out colour visions for themselves, although most were content to look at the new prismatic sights through the eyes of Monet and Pissarro. In an earlier chapter I referred to the fashion of yellow, but this colour was not the only fashion. Green had still many devotees. Oscar Wilde had referred to this taste as “that curious love of green which in individuals is always the sign of subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity if not a decadence of morals.” Richard Le Gallienne, probably taking his cue from the foregoing famous declaration, wrote, in _Prose Fancies_ (second series, 1896): “Green must always have a large following among artists and art lovers; for, as has been pointed out, an appreciation of it is a sure sign of a subtle artistic temperament. There is something not quite good, something almost sinister, about it--at least, in its more complex forms, though in its simple form, as we find it in outdoor nature, it is innocent enough; and, indeed, is it not used in colloquial metaphor as an adjective for innocence itself? Innocence has but two colours, white or green. But Becky Sharp’s eyes also were green, and the green of the æsthete does not suggest innocence. There will always be wearers of the green carnation; but the popular vogue which green has enjoyed for the last ten or fifteen years is probably passing. Even the æsthete himself would seem to be growing a little weary of its indefinitely divided tones, and to be anxious for a colour sensation somewhat more positive than those to be gained from almost imperceptible nuances of green. Jaded with over-refinements and super-subtleties, we seem in many directions to be harking back to the primary colours of life. Blue, crude and unsoftened, and a form of magenta have recently had a short innings; and now the triumph of yellow is imminent. Of course, a love for green implies some regard for yellow, and in our so-called æsthetic renaissance the sunflower went before the green carnation--which is, indeed, the badge of but a small schism of æsthetes, and not worn by the great body of the more catholic lovers of beauty.” But an examination of the _belles lettres_ of the period proves that neither yellow nor green predominated, but that the average taste seemed to lead towards the sum-total and climax of all colours--white.

White gleamed through the most scarlet desires and the most purple ideas of the decade, just as its experimental vices went hand in hand with virtue. In midmost rapture of abandonment the decadents adored innocence, and the frequent use of the idea of whiteness, with its correlatives, silver, moonlight, starlight, ivory, alabaster and marble, was perhaps more than half-conscious symbolism. It had also a dash of the debauchee’s love of virginity.

Walter Pater named a noble chapter in _Marius the Epicurean_, “White Nights,” after the name of the house of Marius, with full sense of the symbolic meaning of the word; and he bore out this idea by a quotation from an old German mystic, who said: “The red rose came first, the mystery of so-called _white_ things,” as being “ever an afterthought--the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material--the white queen, the white witch, the White Mass, which, as the Black Mass is a travesty of the true Mass turned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal.” So the idea of whiteness had relationship in the work of decadent writers with the “so-called mystery of _white_ things.” No other poet of the period expressed the idea of the mystery of white innocence so immaculately as Alice Meynell:

“She walks--the lady of my delight--
A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;
She guards them from the steep.
She feeds them on the fragrant height,
And folds them in for sleep.”

The same idea found exponents in other poets. Francis Thompson refers to “a fair white silence.” Ernest Dowson was dominated by a sense of whiteness. One cannot forget his “dancing to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind,” and _The Pierrot of the Minute_ is a veritable symphony in white. He calls for “white music,” and the Moon Maiden rides through the skies “drawn by a team of milk-white butterflies,” and further on in the same poem we have a palace of many rooms:

“Within the fairest, clad in purity,
Our mother dwelt immemorially:
Moon-calm, moon-pale, with moonstones on her gown,
The floor she treads with little pearls is sown....”

And in another poem he sings:

“Mark the day white on which the Fates have smiled.”

The recognition and use of the idea of white was, of course, not always mystical, or even symbolical; in the majority of cases it was frankly sensuous, following in words that delight in whiteness which Whistler had expressed in pictures. W. B. Yeats sings of the “white breast of the dim sea,” Lionel Johnson of

“Cloisters, in moonlight
Branching dark, or touched with white:
Round old, chill aisles, where moon-smitten
Blanches the _Orate_, written
Under each worn, old-world face
Graven on Death’s holy place!”

Oscar Wilde refers often to white things: “She shook like a white narcissus”; “blue petals of flame rimmed with white fire”; and “white vultures with gilded claws.” Nor must we overlook the “milk-white” unicorn in Aubrey Beardsley’s romance. Hubert Crackanthorpe’s purple patches of travel, _Vignettes_, has a reference to some white thing on almost every page--white towns, white houses, white roads and white churches. One of the most charming of Arthur Symons’ more artificial lyrics celebrates whiteness in girlhood:

“White girl, your flesh is lilies
Grown ’neath a frozen moon,
So still is
The rapture of your swoon
Of whiteness, snow or lilies.”

And one of Richard Le Gallienne’s most “precious” _Prose Fancies_ is dedicated, under the title, “White Soul,” to the same theme in womanhood. It is prefaced by these lines:

“What is so white in the world, my love,
As thy maiden soul--
The dove that flies
Softly all day within thy eyes,
And nests within thine heart at night?
Nothing so white.”

In the first paragraph of this essay he demands with quaint conceit the whole gamut of whiteness for the glorification of such innocence: “Whitest paper, newest pen, ear sensitive, tremulous; heart pure and mind open, broad and clear as the blue air for the most delicate gossamer thoughts to wing through; and snow-white words, lily-white words, words of ivory and pearl, words of silver and alabaster, words white as hawthorn and daisy, words white as morning milk, words ‘whiter than Venus’ doves, and softer than the down beneath their wings’--virginal, saintlike, nunnery words.”

But always the outstanding literary accessory of the Nineties was surprise, in the form of paradox, or often little more than verbal. In the latter surprise found expression in the use of strange words, the result of resurrections from old books or from scientific and technical sources, the jargon of special sections of humanity, and the slang of the streets. French words and phrases were also in great favour. Several of the most striking verbal effects of the time were obtained by the transposition of words from one set of ideas to another, after the manner of Baudelaire’s theory of correspondences. Whistler was the earliest to use the method in this country when he named pictures after musical terms, “Symphonies,” “Harmonies” and “Arrangements.” Henley, imitating Whistler, took the idea a step further by naming the poems in his _London Voluntaries_, “Andante con Moto,” “Scherzando,” “Largo e Mesto” and “Allegro Maëstoso.” From such normal manifestations of the theory it spread through all definitely _fin de siècle_ writing from Henry Harland’s reference to a young person who “took to rouge and powder, and introduced _falsetto_ notes into her toilet”; George Egerton’s firelight which picks out “autographs past emotions have traced” on a woman’s face; to Oscar Wilde’s already quoted “coloured marble of a sonnet-sequence.” Aubrey Beardsley’s “décolleté spirits of astonishing conversation,” and Richard Le Gallienne’s “London spread out beneath us like a huge black velvet flower, and rows of ant-like fire-flies moving in slow zigzag processions along and across its petals.”

The use of strange words and bizarre images was but another outcome of the prevalent desire to astonish. At no period in English history had the obvious and the commonplace been in such disrepute. The age felt it was complex and sought to interpret its complexities, not by simplicity, in spite of Oscar Wilde’s statement that simplicity was the last refuge of complexity, but by suddenness of epigram and paradox combined with delicate nuances of expression. Literary style resembled more than anything else a dance in quick time gradually resolving itself into the stateliness of the minuet. So fearful were writers of being convicted of obviousness that they often convicted themselves of obscurity. In the same way they admired what were then considered to be the obscurities of Meredith. Younger writers realised the need of a suggestive note in literature. They agreed with Meredith that “the art of the pen is to rouse the inward vision,” and instead of labouring protracted descriptions they sought to “spring imagination with a word or a phrase.” Literature that had been exposite became apposite. Fine shades of meaning and niceties of observation slipped into swift revealing sentences, and for the first time temperament was studied as a thing in itself. The idea of Impressionism also dominated style, but the best writers end at intensity, suggestiveness, reality and, above all, brightness, rather than novelty, preferring to achieve this last as a by-product. They strove to create what was called “atmosphere,” leaving much to the intelligence of the reader, who, to do him justice, often proved himself worthy of the compliment. Such volumes of studies in Impressionism as George Egerton’s _Keynotes_, G. S. Street’s _Episodes_, Hubert Crackanthorpe’s _Wreckage_, George Fleming’s _Women’s Tragedies_, Henry Harland’s _Mademoiselle Miss_ and _The Lady Paramount_, John Oliver Hobbes’ _Some Emotions and a Moral_, Vincent O’Sullivan’s and--to a lesser degree--the studies of Ella d’Arcy and H. D. Lowry are steeped in this new spirit. Whilst Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, Richard Le Gallienne, Alice Meynell and Vernon Lee distilled their own personality into essays in the same key. The subtle intensity of this style may be illustrated by a quotation from _Keynotes_:

“The paleness of some strong feeling tinges her face, a slight
trembling runs through her frame. Her inner soul-struggle is
acting as a strong developing fluid upon a highly sensitised
plate; anger, scorn, pity, contempt chase one another like
shadows across her face. Her eyes rest upon the empty frame,
and the plain white space becomes alive to her. Her mind’s eye
fills it with a picture it once held in its dainty embrace. A
rare head amongst the rarest heads of men, with its crest of
hair tossed back from the great brow, its proud poise and the
impress of grand confident compelling genius that reveals itself
one scarce knows how; with the brute possibility of an untamed,
natural man lurking about the mouth and powerful throat. She
feels the subduing smile of eyes that never failed to make her
weak as a child under their gaze, and tame as a hungry bird.
She stretches out her hands with a pitiful little movement,
and then, remembering, lets them drop and locks them until the
knuckles stand out whitely. She shuts her eyes, and one tear
after the other starts from beneath her lids, trickles down her
cheeks, and drops with a splash into her lap. She does not sob,
only cries quietly and she sees, as if she held the letter in
her hand, the words that decided her fate.”

Alice Meynell in her essays is equally modern with less emotional themes as, for instance, in the opening essay of her volume _The Colour of Life_:

“Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life.
But the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of
violence or of life broken, edited and published. Or if red
is indeed the colour of life, it is so only on condition that
it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the colour of life
violated, and in the act of betrayal and of waste. Red is
the secret of life, and not the manifestation thereof. It is
one of the things the value of which is secrecy, one of the
talents that are to be hidden in a napkin. The true colour of
life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red,
the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the
pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.”

The arts of epigram and paradox with their repeated surprises were so commanded by the genius of Oscar Wilde that others who followed in his steps tended to appear like imitators. There is something preposterous and irresistibly funny about his wittiest half truth, and the best of his statements were often no more than that. “One of those characteristic British faces that, once seen, are never remembered,” is a good specimen of Wilde’s method, with such sayings as: “Brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect”; and “Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief,” and “In married life three is company and two is none”; and “Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast”; and again “One can resist everything except temptation.” The fun of such sayings does not only depend upon the shock of half truth, they contain also a wild philosophy which is irresistible because it defies immediate refutation by sheer brightness. Wilde created a fashion in such sayings; the word “brilliant” was appropriately used to describe them, and their popularity created a widely practised game of intellectual frivolity. It was not fashionable, as the saying went, “to take yourself seriously,” and the verbal cleverness invented by Oscar Wilde was adopted cheerfully as a mask for the seriousness of life.

One writer whose gifts of wit were at all comparable with those of Oscar Wilde had the courage to use his brilliance to throw light on a definite moral purpose. The attitude he adopted was in the nature of a Puritan reply to the paganism of Wilde, and he used similar weapons with equal skill, drama and fiction, conversation and oratory, flashing sharp with a more solid intention. “Better see rightly on a pound a week,” he said, “than squint on a million.” “Freedom,” he said again, “means responsibility; that’s why most people fear it.” There was something more than cleverness in such sayings, something more than art. Bernard Shaw, who uttered them, brought with him an atmosphere of conviction. That attitude insisted upon art and cleverness being discontented with themselves; it strove to bring intellect back once more from the contemplation of itself to the realisation of a more orderly life.