The ‘Jeweled Style’

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“The Glory That Was Greece”

Alfred Douglas on Wilde’s prose style and his place in the ‘new culture’.

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In September 1893, Lord Alfred Douglas wrote a letter to the poet Charles Kains Jackson in which he used two moderately coded expressions.

The first was an allusion to the “jewelled style” of prose writing, which Kains Jackson thought Oscar Wilde overused. Douglas kindly acknowledged Jackson’s quibble, before responding with a complimentary and insightful counter-argument of Wilde’s writing style.

The second was Wilde’s place in what he referred to as “the new culture“. As we shall see, this expression was relevant to Kains Jackson as he was a member of the ‘Order of Chaeronea’—a secret society for homosexuals.¹ As Wilde did not necessarily subscribe to activism, Douglas defended Wilde’s tacit support as a fellow champion.

Before examining these two terms, here is the relevant part of Douglas’s letter:

With regard to Oscar I agree with you that to a certain extent he overdoes the ‘jewelled style’, but I think for all that he has a very dainty fancy, a great felicity of expression, a sense of the phrase, and an enormous dramatic instinct (I am not thinking of his plays, but of Dorian Gray and the House of Pomegranates). Of course his best things he has never written and I very much fear never will; some of his unwritten stories are astoundingly good, and convincing. Also I think the psychology in anything he writes will always bear the closest inspection which is a thing that can be said of very few people. Everything he writes grows out of an abstract psychological idea; whereas I think in most people that is reversed. I can’t explain what I mean on paper. Only I think the general philistine attacks him quite enough without any assistance from the elect.

Perhaps nobody knows as I do what he has done for the ‘new culture’, the people he has pulled out of the fire and ‘seen through’ things not only with money, but by sticking to them when other people wouldn’t speak to them. He is the most chivalrous friend in the world, he is the only man I know who would have the courage to put his arm on the shoulder of an ex-convict and walk down Piccadilly with him, and combine with that the wit and personality to carry it off so well that nobody would mind.

Lord Alfred Douglas to Charles Kains Jackson
September 10, 1893²

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The Jeweled Style

For a scholarly definition of the Jeweled Style we dust off the OUP Dictionary of Late Antiquity fr0m the Google Books shelf and find this description (here abridged):

Characterization of prevalent stylistic practice in Late Antique poetry in which authors created jewel-like effects by the ordering and juxtaposition of individual elements that contribute colour and brilliance of language. The emphasis on the small-scale, circumscribed compositional unit promotes fragmentation and miniaturization, attention to the refinement of detail. Sometimes such passages are set in a frame by introductory or concluding lines, but their self-contained structure itself is often enough to set them apart. This emphasis finds expression in large narrative poems in their often discontinuous nature, their tendency to break down into independent, loosely connected episodes. The metaphor of jewels/the jewelled for literary style is common in Late Antiquity, as an alternative to flowers/the flowered, showing that elements of a text are understood in terms of light and colour, as multicoloured jewels the poet manipulates like a jeweller to produce striking effects by means of juxtaposition and contrast. ³

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The Wilde Style

For an example of Wilde’s writing in this vein⁴ here is a passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray, (ch. 7) in which Wilde paints an alliterative canvas of light and color onto which Dorian Gray’s moonlit reverie is studded with pearl, jade, opal, and silver:

The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed itself into a perfect pearl. Huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. The air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain. He followed into the market and watched the men unloading their waggons. A white-smocked carter offered him some cherries. He thanked him, wondered why he refused to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly. They had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them.⁵ A long line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and of yellow and red roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge, jade-green piles of vegetables. Under the portico, with its grey, sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over. Others crowded round the swinging doors of the coffee-house in the piazza. The heavy cart-horses slipped and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings. Some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks. Iris-necked and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds. After a little while, he hailed a hansom and drove home. For a few moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round at the silent square, with its blank, close-shuttered windows and its staring blinds. The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver against it.

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The New Culture

In the last issue that he edited of the periodical ‘The Artist and Journal of Home Culture,’ Charles Kains Jackson translated the ‘new culture’ into an essay titled ‘The New Chivalry’. According to Kains Jackson, the New Chivalry would promote “the youthful masculine ideal” over the Old Chivalry’s emphasis on the feminine.

For elucidation of this we must consult the oracle—Neil McKenna—who in his gay-centric biography of Wilde expanded on the ‘new culture’ in reference to The Spirit Lamp:

The Spirit Lamp advertised itself as a magazine for ‘all who are interested in modern life and the new culture’. The ‘new culture’ was code for the new Uranian culture which Bosie, Oscar and many others wanted to see established. Kains Jackson called it ‘the New Chivalry’, while Oscar and Grant Allen named it ‘the New Hedonism’. It was a literary, a poetic and a political moment, a movement where Culture, Chivalry and Hedonism were fermented together in the heady, revolutionary brew of a new sexual order. It aspired to make l’amour de l’impossible, the love of the impossible, possible; to translate the higher philosophy into articulate social and political flesh. It was a strange and powerful combination of passion and politics which used any and all tools at its disposal, invoking the glory that was Greece…⁶

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© John Cooper, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. The Order of Chaeronea: founded by George Ives in 1897 and named for the 338 BCE battle where the Sacred Band of Thebes (allegedly consisting of 150 pairs of male couples) was ultimately defeated. [Wikipedia links.] ↩︎
2. Rupert Croft-Cooke Papers (Manuscript Collection MS-00988). Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. ↩︎
3. The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity, Oxford University Press, 2018. See also: Roberts, Michael, The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity, Cornell University Press (1989). ↩︎
4. For more on Wilde’s decorative style, see also: ‘Stylistic Devices in Oscar Wilde’s Prose’ by Narain Prasad Shukla, The Wildean, No. 35 (July 2009), 74-85. ↩︎
5. We later learn that the “plucked at midnight” metaphor occurred coincident with the suicide of Sybil Vane, whom Dorian has just abandoned. Is that why the carter refused to accept payment for the moon-chilled cherries? ↩︎
6. McKenna, Neil, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography, Basic Books, (2005) 198. ↩︎

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