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CHAPTER IV.

COLOURS.

AVING alluded to the beauty of Form, we must

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now consider that of Colour. In Mr. Ruskin's fine work on the "Stones of Venice," he has given expression to his high admiration of colour, and the connection between loveliness of colour and purity of thought. "Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay colour and sad colour, for colour cannot at once be good and gay. All good colour is in some degree pensive; the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

"I know that this will sound strange in many ears, and will be especially startling to those who have considered the subject chiefly with reference to painting; for the great Venetian schools of colour are not usually understood to be either pure or pensive, and the idea of its pre-eminence is associated in nearly every mind with the coarseness of Rubens, and the sensualities of Correggio and Titian. But a more comprehensive view of art will soon correct this impression. It will be discovered, in the first place, that the more faithful and earnest the religion of the painter, the more pure and

prevalent is the system of his colour. It will be found, in the second place, that where colour becomes a primal intention with a painter otherwise mean or sensual, it instantly elevates him, and becomes the one sacred and saving element in his work. The very depth of the stoop to which the Venetian painters and Rubens sometimes condescend, is a consequence of their feeling confidence in the power of their colour to keep them from falling.

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hold on by it, as by a chain let down from heaven, with one hand, though they may sometimes seem to gather dust and ashes with the other. And, in the last place, it will be found that as surely as a painter is irreligious, thoughtless, or obscene in disposition, so surely is his colouring cold, gloomy, and valueless. The opposite poles of art in this respect are Fra Angelico and Salvator Rosa; of whom the one was a man who smiled seldom, wept often, prayed constantly, and never harboured an impure thought. His pictures are simply so many pieces of jewellery, the colours of the drapery being perfectly pure, as various as those of a painted window, chastened only by paleness, and relieved upon a gold ground. Salvator was a dissipated jester and satirist, a man who spent his life in masquing and revelry. But his pictures are full of horror, and their colour is for the most part gloomy grey. Truly it would seem as if art had so much of eternity in it, that it must take its dye from the close rather than the course of life ·- -'In such laughter the heart of man is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.'

"These are no singular instances. I know no

law more severely without exception than this of the connection of pure colour with profound and noble thought. The late Flemish pictures, shallow in conception and obscene in subject, are always sober in colour. But the early religious painting of the Flemings is as brilliant in hue as it is holy in thought. The Bellinis, Francias, Peruginos, painted in crimson, and blue, and gold; the Caraccis, Guidos, and Rembrandts in brown and grey. The builders of our great cathedrals veiled their casements and wrapped their pillars with one robe of purple splendour. The builders of the luxurious Renaissance left their palaces filled only with cold white light, and in the paleness of their native stone."

Colours are no doubt intended for the enjoyment of the human race, and without attempting to settle the rival claims of the most eminent painters in browns and crimsons, purple and gold, we may observe that the colours of nature must be the most lovely and precious. Ours would be a strange world if "all flowers were grey, all leaves black, and the sky brown." The Scriptures call attention to colours in the arrangements for the ancient Tabernacle, for the curtains were not to be brown, but "fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet" and gold. In the creation of things the loveliest colours are associated with the purest, most innocent, and precious things. We need but think, as it has been suggested, of rainbows, sunrises, roses, violets, butterflies, birds, gold-fish, rubies, opals, and corals, with alligators, hippopotami, lions, wolves, bears,

slugs, etc., to see that lovely colours are on the side of life and purity, and the others are associated with death and sin.

The sacred chord of colour (blue, purple, and scarlet, with white and gold) as appointed in the Tabernacle, is "the fixed base of all colouring with the workmen of every great age; the purple and scarlet will be found constantly employed by noble painters, in various unison, to the exclusion, in general, of pure crimson;-it is the harmony described by Herodotus as used in the battlements of Ecbatana, and the invariable base of all beautiful missal-painting; the mistake continually made by modern restorers, in supposing the purple to be a faded crimson, and substituting full crimson for it, being instantly fatal to the whole work, as, indeed, the slightest modification of any hue in a perfect colourharmony must always be. In this chord the scarlet is the powerful colour, and is on the whole the most perfect representation of abstract colour which exists; blue being in a certain degree associated with shade, yellow with light, and scarlet, as absolute colour, standing alone.. All men, completely organized and justly tempered, enjoy colour; it is meant for the perpetual comfort and delight of the human heart; it is richly bestowed on the highest works of creation, and the eminent sign and seal of perfection in them; being associated with life in the human body, with light in the sky, with purity and hardness in the earth,-death, night, and pollution of all kinds being colourless."

There is an order running throughout nature in

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respect of colour. Colours are not spread "indiscriminately over the surface of earth and sky, animal and plant;" but according to harmonious principles. Drs. M'Cosh and Dickie, in their very able work on Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation, remark, "We are convinced that, amidst all the apparent irregularities, there will be found some fixed principles in the distribution of colours in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and, indeed, over the whole surface of nature. Seldom, or never, for example, are the two primary colours, blue and red, found on the same organ, or in contact on the same plant. Liable to certain modifications, which are limited, it is probable that there is a fixed distribution of colour for many families of animals and plants, and that this distribution is fixed within still narrower limits for the species. It is certain, whether we are or are not able to seize it and turn it to any scientific or practical purpose, that there are plan and system in the arrangement of colours throughout both the animal and vegetable worlds. Every dot in the flower comes in at the proper place; every tint, and shade, and hue is in accordance with all that is contiguous to it." And "he who can regard nature with the intelligent eye of the colourist, has a boundless source of never-ceasing gratification arising from harmonies and accordances which are lost to the untutored eye."*

It is stated as a fact, that in regular corollas, that is, in flowers where each petal is of equal size and form, the colour is uniformly distributed, whatever

*"Typical Forms," &c., p. 20.

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