The many occurrences of the colour green in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's essay collection Through the Magic Door inspired an investigation into green references and connections in Conan Doyle's life and works.
I came across an interesting statement about the colour green by the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde along the way. His words have inspired yet another article about this colour.
As mentioned in the article about Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and the colour green, Oscar Wilde, who incidentally often wore a green carnation, wrote an essay called Pen, Pencil, And Poison - A Study In Green about an art critic who was a secret poisoner.
The artist, author and suspected serial killer in question was Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who was mentioned by Conan Doyle in a Sherlock Holmes story and was a friend of Charles Lamb.
Wilde's descriptions of the man, his life and his crimes are mostly irrelevant here, but as a matter of interest Wainewright spent his boyhood at Turnham Green, he was educated at the Greenwich Academy, and he later had a pomona-green chair in his library.
Wilde's essay contains these thought-provoking words about Wainewright and the colour green:
“He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.“
Green has always been my favourite colour. Why is this curious? I like the idea of the artistic temperament though!
When it comes to the love of green in nations, Wilde is probably referring to various Islamic countries and what is now the Irish Republic. Both Muslims and Irish Catholics favour the colour green, and Conan Doyle, who like Wilde was an Irishman, was well aware of this.
In Conan Doyle's Green Flag, Arab tribesmen capture the Irish flag. One of their sheikhs says that by its colour it might well belong to the people of the true faith - i.e. Islam.
There is some relevant material in the works of Rudyard Kipling, whose green connections have also been investigated.
In Rudyard Kipling's Kim, he mentions a flag with a great red bull on a background of Irish green. In Without Benefit of Clergy, a story from Life's Handicap, Ameera wears green “as benefits a daughter of the Faith.”
In Kipling's short story collection Soldiers Three, the Irish rebel song The Wearing of the Green is mentioned in connection with Irish soldiers in Love-o'-Women and the green flags of Muslim tribes appear in Drums of the Fore and Aft. Incidentally, The Big Drunk Draf', another story in this book, has a character called Scrub Greene who is probably a former Irish soldier.
Irish and Islamic green:
I wish that Oscar Wilde had listed some examples of the behaviour of those morally lax and decadent nations that favour the colour green and given the sources of his information.
When it comes to moral laxity, it is often Islamic countries that accuse western nations of this!
As for the Irish, John Buchan has this to say about them in The Three Hostages:
“Look at the Irish! They are the cleverest propagandists extant, and managed to persuade most people that they were a brave, generous, humorous, talented, warm-hearted race, cruelly yoked to a dull mercantile England, when God knows they were exactly the opposite."
Rudyard Kipling may have approved of the Irish soldiers who fought alongside British soldiers overseas, but he said this:
“So Ireland never went to school and has been a spoilt child ever since; the most charming of children, indeed, full of beautiful laughter and tender tears, full of poetry and valour, but incapable of ruling herself, and impatient of all rule by others.”
Oscar Wilde's article-inspiring essay:
