Into the Blue: A short excursion into the semantics of colours
Caroline Patey

"All great writers are great colourists;" thus wrote Virginia Woolf in her essay on the artist Walter Sickert, an undisguised invitation to pursue and refresh the age-old ut pictura as a tool of critical investigation and the source of an unashamedly visual pleasure. Her claim is supported by the very Conradian conviction (is there awareness in this near quotation?) that "the novelist after all wants to make you see" and by the attractive vividness of her arguments:

Let us hold painting by the hand a moment longer, for though they must part in the end, painting and writing have much to tell each other: they have much in common...Gardens, rivers, skies, clouds changing, the colour of a woman's dress, landscapes that bask beneath lovers, twisted woods that people walk in when they quarrel - novels are full of pictures like these. The novelist is always saying to himself how can I bring the sun on to my page? How can I show the night and the moon rising? And he must often think that to describe a scene is the worst way to show it... All great writers are great colourists, just as they are musicians into the bargain; they always contrive to make their scene glow and darken and change to the eye. Each of Shakespeare's plays has its dominant colour. And each writer differs of course as a colourist. Pope has no great range of colours; he is more draughtsman than colourist; clear washes of indigo, discreet blacks and violets best suit his exquisite sharp outlines... Keats uses colour lavishly, lusciously, like a Venetian. In the Eve of St. Agnes he paints for lines at a time, dipping his pen in mounds of pure reds and blues. Tennyson on the other hand is never luscious...The Princess is illuminated like a monk's manuscripts; there are whole landscapes in the curves of the capital letters. You almost need a magnifying glass to see the minuteness of the detail... The best critics, Dryden, Lamb, Hazlitt, were acutely aware of the mixture of elements, and wrote of literature with music and painting in their minds. Nowadays, we are all so specialized that critics keep their brain fixed to the print, which accounts for the starved condition of criticism in our time, and the attenuated and partial manner in which it deals with its subject. [1]

Woolf's words delineate a critical landscape in which Italian scholarship feels at home: in the course of the never-ending conversation between the sister arts and in the intellectual story of their interbreeding or the critical cross-fertilization these lead to, the towering figure of Mario Praz - adventurer into the visual, art and cultural historian, theoretician and collector among much else - still stands as a landmark, and a welcome reminder that the huge chapter of what is known today as visual studies is firmly rooted in Italy! And indeed, Woolf's chromatic approach to novel writing - as with her novelistic reading of paintings - calls for a dialogue with the important achievements owed to the pursuers of 'eloquent colours' in Italy: Raimondi's Il Colore Eloquente, Brusatin's Storia dei colori, Castoldi's Bianco, all build an ideal bridge between Woolf's insight and contemporary research, and weave a web between different critical methodologies, national idioms and discursive practices. Colour and verbal sign are thus envisaged as two liminar countries joined - or divided - by an unstable border that begs to be constantly crossed and redrawn:

Among many kinds of artists, it may be there are some who are hybrid. Some, that is to say, bore deeper and deeper into the stuff of their own art; others are always making raids into the lands of others. Sickert, it may be, is among the hybrids, the raiders. His name itself suggests that he is of mixed birth. I have read that he is part German, part English, part Scandinavian perhaps; he was born in Munich, was educated at Reading, and lived in France. What more likely than that his mind is also cosmopolitan; that he sings a good song, writes a fine style and reads enormously in four or five different languages? All this filters down into his brush. [2]

A crosser of borders in many ways - national, linguistic and discursive - Ford Madox Ford shares with Sickert, whom apparently he never met, German origins, a taste for life in France and a cosmopolitan mind. He also is a constant raider into the world of visual arts, for both work and pleasure, and his findings trickle down his pen in the form of pictures, visions, lights, shades and shapes. And while Pope, Woolf reminds us, is mostly violet and black, and Keats lavishly Venetian, the Ford of The Good Soldier is resolutely a colourist in blue. A blue brush that has a lot to tell about the textual and visual grammar of modernity.

Blue of Memory, Blue of chivalry

Unflinchingly blue, for a start, are the good soldier's eyes; and in this context, the blueness combines with the medieval aura in which Ashburnham is immersed. Such a stern blue gaze makes Edward similar to one of his models, the Chevalier Bayard; it is somehow the banner of chivalry as well as a sign of dedication to love and women, the badge of the man "who wanted to be looked upon as a sort of Lohengrin." [3] More crucially, blue is also the colour of the troubadours, a universe in which Ashburnham is well versed since he has long been a compulsive reader of French medieval poetry: "Even when he was twenty-two he would pass hours reading one of Scott's novels or the Chronicles of Froissart." [4] Thanks to both poetic and historical reasons, blue is a strong chromatic presence in Froissart, as a knightly prerogative that echoes, for example, in the Dit du Bleu chevalier, composed between 1361 and 1367; and, in a more general ethical context, as the emerging archetypal colour of love, loyalty, truthfulness. Clearly, the increasing medieval presence of blue symbolism is linked to a change in the economic and agricultural asset of medieval Europe in the thirteenth century:

At this time, cultivation of the woad plants shifted from the once-fertile fields of Northern France to Languedoc, where it created the proverbial wealth of the region around Toulouse. As the quality of blue improved, taste for the colour red lessened, and a new sensitivity to colours and their attributes began to accord a privileged position to blue. It was at this time that the mantle of the Virgin became blue in paintings. The robes of the king of France, which were traditionally red, also changed to blue. The madder merchants tried in vain to reverse this tendency. [5]

The cultural historian Michel Pastoureau confirms: "The blue knights were born in the course of the thirteenth century, characters endowed with courage, loyalty and truthfulness. At first and for a few decades, they were knights of secondary rank that gradually moved centre stage and became primary figures." [6]

Colours, that had long been apprehended in western culture according to basic structures of opposition -cold/warm, light/dark- are now organized in a scale of values, from the most noble to the most vulgar: and in the new order of things chromatic, blue is the king of colours as well as the colour of kings and gods; it tinges equally the cloak of King Arthur and the dress of the Virgin.

Intriguingly, Ford's narrative intersects the moral and cultural history of the colour blue. To begin with, the geography of woad coincides with important locations of The Good Soldier, a novel where the plot unfolds, albeit partially, between Carcassone and Nimes and is moreover tightly interwoven with the medieval lore of the troubadours:

Do you know the story?... Peire Vidal the Troubadour paid his court to La Louve. And she wouldn't have anything to do with him. So, out of compliment to her ... he dressed himself up in woolfskins and went up into the Black Mountains. And the shepherds of the Montagne Noire and their dogs mistook him for a wolf and he was torn with fangs and beaten with clubs. [7]

To Ford, the blue mood of medieval culture was close at hand: Francis Hueffer's The Troubadours: A History Of Provençal Life and Literature in the Middle Ages was rich in details and anecdotes that his son undoubtedly treasured. As a character, Edward Ashburnham seems to owe a lot to the typology of the medieval knight-lover found in the pages of Ford's father; like Peire Vidal lacerated by the hounds, of course, he is tortured by the women he loves; and his lifestory altogether resembles very much the medieval vicissitudes of the trouvere as described by Hueffer:

The Conte de Poitiers was one of the most courteous men in the world and a great deceiver of ladies; and he was a brave knight and had much to do with love affairs; and he knew well how to sing and make verses and for a long time he roamed the land to deceive the ladies.... We hear of frequent and rapid changes of abode, mostly in consequence of some imbroglio with a lady. But Provençal poets were naturally a restless tribe, ever in search of new lands and new loves. [8]

Blue-eyed Edward - so desperately eager to perform the duties of a feudal gentleman, disastrously involved in erotic or sentimental scandals which invariably force him to drift around the world - harks back comically to his medieval ancestors, whose poetry and thoughts were suffused with knightly blue; and, together with virginal Nancy, who chooses to dress in Marian blue for the school party, he conjures up the picture of a colour symbolically and culturally charged with ideal meanings: a medieval image firmly planted in the knowledge Ford owed to his father's scholarly research. Had Ford not found food for medieval thought in his father's work, his friend Ezra Pound's essay on "Troubadours, their Sorts and Conditions," published in the Quarterly Review in 1913, would have provided him with a harvest of Provençal plots as well as sound philological and critical background:

No student of the period can doubt that the involved forms, and the veiled meanings in the 'trobar clus', grew out of living conditions, and that these songs played a very real part in love intrigue and in the intrigue preceding warfare. The time had no press and no theatre. If you wish to make love to women in public, and out loud, you must resort to subterfuge; and Guillaume St Leider even went so far as to get the husband of his lady to do the seductive singing.... Miquel de la Tour gives us to know that such and such ladies were courted with greater or less fortune by such and such minstrels of various degree for one man was a poor vavassour, and another was King Amfos of Aragon; and another, Vidal, was son of a furrier, and sang better than any man in the world ... and Uc Brunecs was a clerk and he had an understanding with a borgesa who had no mind to love him, and who became mistress to the Count of Rodez. [9]

No far cry, certainly, from the sentimental and erotic entanglements at the heart of The Good Soldier! The colour blue thus attaches itself to the medieval plot and designs, as it were, an area of chromatic memory where the pre-modern cultural past of Provençal culture intersects on one hand Ford's private history and reminiscences of his father; and on the other, critical investigations that were to pave the way of modernist aesthetics. Nor should it be overlooked that blue was also instrumental in the medieval revival in art, as a far away echo of its thirteenth-century forefathers; a fact probably significant to Ford, since he encodes in the novel a slightly cryptic allusion to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. As Martin Stannard remarks, Florence's apparently casual words, "And so the whole round table is begun" [10] hark back to Rossetti describing the disintegration of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, "So the whole round table is dissolved." [11] How then not remember that Rossetti is the painter of a set of watercolours entitled The Blue Closet (1857)?

The Blue of Melancholy

The Good Soldier's blues also resonate in other directions and depict different landscapes, more closely connected to Ford's origins and the strong affinity he felt "with his father's homeland that had never been his home" [12] , and fed, it would seem, by his uncommon knowledge of German culture. In an essay that captures the 'mood indigo' in Germany, the colour historian John Gage reminds us that, from Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800) to Goethe's Farbenlehre (1810) and down to the next century and Kandinsky's writings, the colour blue embodies the hue of nostalgia and stands for the desirable that may not be reached: "As we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," writes Goethe in 1810. [13] As to Heinrich's yearnings for the mysterious blue flower a stranger has told him about, they transport the readers from bluish light to dark blue rock and skies until the dream-love is revealed through the light blue eyes and the blue veins of Heinrich's beloved: "Everything is blue in my book," claims Novalis [14] . In the steps of Werther, who finds it impossible to survive without the blue coat he was wearing when dancing with Lotte for the first time, Romantic culture is contaminated by the blue mood of unrequited love and nostalgia.

Goethe's variations on the colour blue as a force that stands "on the negative side of the polarity of colours, where deprivation, shadow, darkness, weakness, cold, distance ... are to be found;" or again as a "stimulating negation" that evokes contradictory feelings of excitement and repose [15] were to stamp a deep mark on German culture, from the Nazarenes to Friedrich Nietszche. About the latter, let it be remembered the many synaesthetic allusions to Wagner's 'blue music,' the effects of which are compared, in The Gay Science, to the influence of opiates and narcotics [16] . The seductions and contradictions of the colour blue surface again, not without neo-romantical flavours, in Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art and of course in the choice of 'Blue Rider' as the title for the almanac of his group:

The inclination of blue towards depth is so great that it becomes more intense the darker the tone, and has a more characteristic inner effect. The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and finally for the supernatural.... Blue is the typically heavenly colour. Blue enfolds in its lower depths the element of tranquillity. As it deepens towards black, it assumes overtones of a superhuman sorrow.... Represented in musical terms, light blue resembles the flute, dark blue the cello ... while in a deep, solemn form the sound of blue can be compared to that of the deep tones of the organ. [17]

True to his German roots and culture, Ford never forgets that blue is the supremely romantic colour in the country of his ancestors and therefore endows his character with an appropriate quantity of chromatic emotions. When he searches Florence's "very blue, dark pebble blue eyes," or inquires into the Kilsyte girl's blue eyes again, or indeed charts Nancy's even bluer eyes, not to mention Leonora's, Ashburnham reenacts, however comically, Heinrich von Ofterdingen's quest for the inaccessible blue flower. Heinrich, an undaunted romantic hero unlike Edward, eventually finds his beloved's sky-blue eyes, in the middle of a landscape punctuated by forget-me-nots and immersed in an azure atmosphere [18] . The many blue eyes to be met in Ford's novel are especially talkative: "With the answering [blue] gaze of Edward into Florence's blue and up-lifted eyes, she knew that it had all gone. She knew that that gaze meant that those two had had long conversations of an intimate kind." [19] As dictated by Goethe's grammar, blue associates equally with the pangs of love and the abyss of dismay: "Her blue eyes were full of horror.... In her eyes the whole of that familiar great hall had a changed aspect" [20] . Around Edward Ashburnham, the semantic area of romanticism weaves its intertextual fabric; no surprise, then, if the hero carries his stories in "a high romantic fashion" [21] , rushing from extreme passion to intense agony that conjure up yet other blue visions, such as the palms "dancing grotesque dances in front of the blue sea" [22] or the pleasure of a beautiful blue dress: "Yes, that is how I most exactly remember her, in that dress, in that hat, looking over her shoulder at me so that the eyes flashed very blue, dark pebble blue...." [23] Whether aesthetic or emotional, blue is at work in the Fordian landscape, and clearly, no random colouring to a writer who knew his Novalis and his Goethe and was at home in German culture.

The Blue of Artifice

Beyond its romantic association, however, blue often acquires more dissonant tones which open up other kinds of vistas:

I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a certain type of box of matches.When you looked at them carefully you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of his complexion, running perfectly level to the brick pink of his inner eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister expression - like a mosaic of blue porcelain set in pink china. And that chap, coming into a room snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls. [24]

The incongruous reference to a box of implicitly sulphurous matches, combined with the anatomical attention to the eyelid and the similitude with the inanimate matter of porcelain, locate this blue in the entirely different context of artificial colourings and chemistry. Edward's matchbox eyes lead us in the world of synthetic blues, manufactured since the end of the eighteenth century, though discovered quite a while before:

In Berlin in 1704, two other practicing alchemists, a paint manufacturer named Diesbach and a pharmacist named Johann Konrad Dieppel (1673-1734), accidentally discovered a dark blue, made from cyanide, potassium, and iron, with exceptional colouring strength, which acquired the name Prussian blue.... Chemists all over Europe made variants, some of which were simpler or more stable, such as Parisian blue or Antwerp blue. [25]

The blue of artifice soon contaminates the realm of fiction in general and of The Good Soldier in particular. Time and again, the blue of chivalry and of the absolute is seen to collapse into the opposite semantic area of louche practices and mercantile negotiations: a fact not to be ignored by Ford's readers, since the narrator reminds us that Florence knew how to set mercenary value to her eyes; the shift of meaning is conveyed even more convincingly when the ever-present adjective 'blue' capsizes into the colloquial verb, 'to blue': Edward "did not know how much money he had, as he put it, 'blued' at the tables" [26] . But the most sinister of the various blue threads woven in the fabric of The Good Soldier is the one that leads from the little image of the blessed virgin, the tawdry scarlet and "Prussian blue affair" Ashburnham implores for help and kneels to in despair [27] ; from this Prussian blue, then, to the prussic acid, otherwise known as hydrogen cyanide, and used by Florence to commit suicide. 'Cyanide' preserves the memory of its greek root, kyanos, dark blue; and when it surfaces in nineteenth-century novels, the word has lost the magic and quiet happiness resounding in the name of Novalis's character, Cyana: from Prussian blue to prussic acid, the way is a short one, and it is paved with death and misery.

In the filigree of Florence's death, Emma Bovary may soon be distinguished, as a partner in frustration and, most important, as a literary model. True indeed to his destiny as "the finest French novel in the English language" [28] , The Good Soldier appears as both a revisitation of and an homage to Flaubert. Starring the colour blue, sometimes treated by Flaubert in the traditional mode of seduction and attraction:

Elle portait une petite cravate de soie bleue, qui tenait droit comme une fraise un col de batiste tuyauté ; et, selon les mouvements de tête qu'elle faisait, le bas de son visage s'enfonçait dans le linge ou en sortait avec douceur. [29]

Similarly, for Emma in love, Leon's eyes are an object of undisguised sensual desire:

Léon s'avança d'un pas ... entre sa cravate et son cou, le col de sa chemise, un peu lâche, laissait voir la peau ... et son grand oeil bleu, levé vers les nuages, parut à Emma plus limpide et plus beau que ces lacs de montagne où le ciel se mire. [30]

While to Emma's naive appetite of beauty and luxury, Léon's "pantoufles de velours bleu" retain an attraction shared by the "robe en cachemire bleu" she orders in Rouen - a dress echoed in Ford by Florence's "very simple dress of blue-figured silk, a chinese pattern" [31] - Flaubert leaves his readers in no doubt about the provincial triviality of her taste [32] . Soon, blue is at the centre of an even more disturbing cluster of associations, noted rather for the bitterness of its hue in the sky - "la lumiere âpre du ciel bleu" [33] - or the metamorphosis of romantic chromatism into pure domestic commodity - "le pétrin occupait le coté de la fenêtre, dont une vitre était raccommodée avec un soleil de papier bleu" [34] . When Emma watches the marketplace at Yonville, the blue ribbons floating gaily in the wind are deflated by the gross haberdasher-ware and the pyramids of stinking cheese-boxes [35] . Similarly, Emma's daughter's eyes have none of the usual charm or innocence of childhood, smothered as they are by the crudity of the adjective 'gros' and the vision of saliva dripping from the girl's mouth: "La petite fille ... levait vers elle son gros oeil bleu, pendant qu'un filet de salive pure découlait de sa levre sur la soie du tablier." [36]

Blue soon undergoes a sort of chemical metamorphosis, in tune with Flaubert's dissecting eye and the symbolic and physical presence of pharmacy and chemistry in the novel; a transformation completed when Novalis's precious flower undergoes a radical perversion in the vision of blue flowers floating in a cup of sclerotic milk: "La syncope de Justin durait encore, et ses prunelles disparaissaient dans leur sclérotique pale, comme des fleurs bleues dans du lait." [37] The new artificial status of blue is translated verbally by the adulteration of the word into the repulsive bleuâtre which eventually tinges everything in Flaubert's world, the air, the incense of the church, animate and inanimate objects alike. Then comes Emma's death, clearly a model for Ford and Florence's suicide:

Elle saisit le bocal bleu, en arracha le bouchon, y fourra sa main, et, la retirant pleine d'un poudre blanche, elle se mit à manger à même.... Des gouttes suintaient sur sa figure bleuâtre, qui semblait comme figée dand l'exhalaison d'une vapeur métallique [38]

The emblematic and allegorical blue/white chromatism and the imagery of the Virgin are revived here as pure derision, turned upside down in the context of a violent self-inflicted death and downgraded to a mere chemical partnership: bocal bleu, poudre blanche, that Emma eats from the very container, as indeed rats would do. The agonizing Emma seals the new cultural status of the colour blue: corrupted into bluish, intensely artificial and violently poisonous. And while this process of chemical and cultural adulteration is less intense in Ford, the silent dialogue with Flaubert is ineluctable, as indeed is the profound transformation of the blue flower dear to Romanticism. Interestingly, Ford was well aware of synthetic colours, since he had them in mind in his analysis of Madox Brown's famous Work and no less so The Last of England :

The colour too is not a colourist's colour, at least as I understand the words; it is wanting in harmoniousness, disturbing and what not. One might almost say that both pictures had been painted with the then newly discovered aniline dyes. [39]

Coming across the "blue blue sky" of Provence depicted by Dowell, it is tempting to connect the intensified chromatic quality, created by the repetition of the adjective, to the abnormal skies of almost violet blueness Ford disapproved of in his grandfather's paintings, especially in a picture he did not like, as Pretty Baa-Lambs [40] . As with Flaubert's blues, Ford's do not appear to know the measure of harmony nor the felicity of balance; they are either too blue, verging on the unnatural and the synthetic, or, on the other hand deprived of vitality and affected with a sort of deficiency, a lack of energy; the life of colours is constantly threatened by decay, colonized by death, disfigured by the rottenness at the core of the apple of existence, as Dowell says, or, in Flaubert's words, by "cette insuffisance de la vie, cette pourriture instantanée des choses." [41]

The Blue of Modernity

These different co-existing blues, however, alert us, in spite of their deadly connotations, to the modernity of Ford's treatment of chromatics. Not one hue only, but a variety of them; no unified scale, but the vibrancy of juxtaposition and contrast. A fan and connoisseur of modern art, as well as a scholar of the past one, Ford appears to have learnt the lesson of pointillisme, a technique hinted at in Dowell's vision of the world as "spots of colour on an immense canvas." [42] He may or may not have read the foundation texts of neo-impresssionism, such as Ogden Rood's Modern Chromatics or Michel Eugene Chevreul's De le loi du contraste simultané des couleurs [43] , but he had enough visual knowledge of artists as Seurat and Cézanne to capture the expressive possibilities of juxtaposed colours, out of which a third one is born; as a writer, Ford swiftly translates the pictorial data into narrative technique:

The juxtaposition of the composed renderings of two or more actions or situations may be used to establish, like the juxtaposition of vital word to vital word, a sort of fictional current of electric life that will extraordinarily galvanize the work of art in which the device is employed. [44]

The multiple blues may clash and jar, but it is precisely this shock, or the friction of encroaching currents, as Ford chooses to call it, that will generate meaning. Chromatic clashes in The Good Soldier do not terminate with the chemical brilliance of cyanide acid; and after the discordant hues of bleu chevalier, romantic blue and sickly blue, unexpected colours and vistas suddenly flash through the pages of the novel, adding yet another ray to the existing prism; as this vision of a small town in the French Alpilles which conflates, incongruously, medieval buildings, modernist architecture and pastoral surroundings:

We never did take another look at Beaucaire of course - beautiful Beaucaire, with the high, triangular white tower that looked as thin as a needle and as tall as the Flatiron between Fifth and Broadway - Beaucaire with the grey walls on top of the pinnacle surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the tallness of the stone pines. [45]

In the audacity of the Flatiron rising proudly by the Rhone over a field of blue flowers, there is a subversive displacement of customary spatial relationships resulting in a recreation of masses and volumes according to a new visual/verbal grammar - a picture that shows an absolute contempt for realistic (or touristic) commonplaces. A similar desire to overcome the limitations of fiction and appropriate the instruments of modern art is also strongly at work in this abstract, almost geometrical rendering of Leonora's eyes: "I had the feeling that those blue discs were immense, were overwhelming, were like a wall of blue that shut me from the rest of the world." [46] Blue, framed in rectangular and circular shapes, invents here a new language and points to a fresh horizon of writing in which the verb to see, as dear to Woolf as it had been to Conrad, is treated in its most literal sense and even stretched towards non-figurative shores.

Blue was never to lose its special status as the colour of research and pioneering theoretical activity; in the twentieth century, it was intimately linked to many crucial episodes of avant-garde experimentation. Among these, it is worth remembering the Russian circle gravitating around Malevich, an artist to whom blue was crucial in his formulation of suprematism. His close friend and fellow adventurer in the unknown regions of the materiality of languages was Roman Jakobson. In a 1980 interview, Jakobson fondly remembers the group he formed in Moscow with Khlebnikov and Malevich, insisting on the fact that just as he, as a linguist, wanted to liberate the sound pattern from meaning, the painter was doing the same with colour, and adding that the group was much more connected with visual arts than with music. [47] And, years later, blue in Nice, where Yves Klein's blue geometries were first born and shown, blue in Derek Jarman's film and in Krzysztof Kieslowski's, both dated 1993. The wave is not to be arrested...and well Ford knew it. His own blue has travelled a long way in The Good Soldier - from the medieval coat of Virgin Mary to Goethe's and Novalis's investigations into perception and symbolism, through Flaubert's corruptions to the modernist explosion of free colour, eventually exorcising Romanticism and Realism alike, and treading new grounds for the novel. Without colour, the world is impossible, Malevich used to say. Which could, perhaps should, be paraphrased into "without colour, the novel is impossible."

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[47] Stephanie Bannon & Tuchman, Maurice. The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930. New Perspectives (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), p.18.