Mauve

FOR a little while in the late spring, the front of the small brown frame house in which the Old Gentleman Opposite lives is clothed with the glory of blooming wistaria. One sunny day not long ago I saw him sitting out of doors in his tiny front yard, luxuriating in the color and fragrance of the drooping clusters. He was holding his soft hat on his knee, and his hair, which is not too closely cut, stirred in the light breeze.

(‘Really,’ I thought, ‘he is beginning to get quite gray. I shall be sorry when the roan effect disappears.’)

‘Isn’t your wistaria a beautiful color?’ I said aloud.

‘“Lumenque juventæ purpureum,”’ he quoted with relish.

‘I suppose you’d call it mauve?’

He smiled and frowned. ‘I should,’ said he, ‘if the word were not soiled with all ignoble use. You remember Whistler said, “Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.” That was just Whistler trying to be witty. Of course, he did not have to try very hard. You have read The Mauve Decade?’

‘What a brilliant, provocative book it is!’ said I.

‘Unquestionably,’ he responded,‘and quite miraculously packed with condensed history. But I have a bit of a grudge against it. By basing his title on that very saying of Whistler’s, the author has launched, among hasty reviewers, a current cheap sneer at the literary product of the nineties. And that is especially vexing to me in the case of the poetry of that period.’

‘Do you think that effect was intended?’ I asked.

‘Possibly not — but wait a minute.’ He dived in at his front door. As his study on the ground floor is lined with bookshelves, I rightly concluded that he was hunting for the book in question.

‘Now here,’ said he, emerging and rapidly turning the leaves of the book in his hand, ‘is just one sentence in a late chapter which neatly applies the engaging title.’

He read aloud the passage: “’The aspiring decade that tried so hard to be purple, imperially grand, and ended in a compromised, ridiculous tint.” . . . It is true,’ he admitted, ‘that the greater part of the book seems given to a different thesis, the thesis that, in the period treated of, amiable editors and militant matrons required all representations of the world to be impeccably pink, and firmly ignored the existence of a certain ugly and putrescent purple, not to mention a sanguinary scarlet. By the way, it won’t surprise you that I sympathize entirely with those amiable editors, in view of the present-day developments in the matter and diction of fiction. But all that is another story, irrelevant to Whistler’s witticism.’

‘Whistler,’ I repeated musingly. ‘A very modern art dealer told me the other day that if he arranged an exhibit of Whistlers nobody would come to it.’

‘“Nought may endure but Mutability,”’ said the Old Gentleman. ‘But to return to my grievance: the popularity of this clever book has, accidentally or not, fixed upon the entire poetic expression of ten years the undeserved reproach of a pretentious feebleness, striving for unattained effects. Have n’t you noticed the headings of current patronizing reviews — “A Mauve Survival,” “The Recrudescence of Mauve,” and so on?’

I saw his mounting indignation, and endeavored to divert his thought. ‘In spite of Whistler and all his butterflies,’ said I, ‘the color mauve is a delight. I saw some pleasant remarks upon it lately in that charming book byMary Webb containing “The Spirit of Joy.” Her list of lovely mauve flowers is like a flower passage from an Elizabethan pastoral, or something in Bacon’s “Essay on Gardens.’”

‘Some day,’ said he, stubbornly clinging to his grievance, ‘I shall make a very choice little anthology, and call it “Mauve Garden”; and the object of the collection shall be to show that the poets of the derided decade were not striving for false effects of imperial grandeur. They were not trying — ’

‘Though you find that the casual reviewers are,' I interpolated. He took no notice of the petty torpedo I had placed on the track of his mind; and I felt ashamed. ‘By all means, carry out your idea,’ said I. ‘It will be a delightful task to gather your mauve flowers. Now, for instance?’

‘Why, of course,’ said he, ‘one thinks immediately of the poems in A Branch of May and A Handful of Lavender. Even the satirist here’ — he tapped his book — ‘ has a respectful reference to “the quiet lady in Baltimore, with her definite sincerities.”’

‘Long may her cherry branches wave, as they do in White April!’

‘There were a number of others, not with us now,’ he went on, ‘true poets who looked into their hearts and wrote, without a straining effort — though as far as the modern reviewers arc concerned, their names seem to have been writ in water. They were not artificial experimenters; they spoke in their own natural voices, though without the intonation now fashionable.’ He was silent a minute, then resumed with a reminiscent smile. ‘A few years ago, a contemporary and friend of mine collected his verses — all of the old type, written before 1900. A reviewer, presumably young, remarked that it was almost weird to open a book of verse which showed no trace whatever of the recent important influences; he mentioned realism, imagism, the vogue of vers libre, and, I believe, Spectrism. (I hope you recall Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan, the make-believes of that delectable hoax in 1916?) You see, the critics now require that one’s poet ry should not be “ derivative ” from the past; they prefer that it should be derivative from the future.

’Oh, I shall easily enough fill up my garden plots! I could name you offhand a dozen poets of the nineties,’— he proceeded to do so, — ‘accomplished craftsmen in their day, sincere and noble souls —'

‘Ah, that’s the trouble, no doubt, from the standpoint of to-day,’ said I. ‘It’s really bad form now to let one’s noble soul loose in one’s poetry; it is sure to get shot at, like the angel in Wells’s Wonderful Visit! But is n’t it rather absurd, anyhow, now that Time has been authoritatively annihilated, to insist that the product of a given period in time was all of the same color? What color word could you properly apply to the present decade?’

‘If I had to decide that question,’ he answered, ‘I should experience the embarrassment of the legendary chameleon which tried to adapt itself to a Highland plaid.’

’I should like to see your anthology when it is ready,’ said I. ’But what about a publisher?’

He sighed. ‘ We are such dependent creatures!’ said he. ‘Faith, I’ll have it printed myself, and bound in mauve and silver — and you and I and Narcissa will read it.’

PROJECTED PROEM TO ’MAUVE GARDEN’