THE COLOUR OF LIFE(生命之色)

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THE COLOUR OF LIFE

Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the true

colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or of life broken

open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the colour of life, it is so

only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the colour of

life violated, and in the act of betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret of

life, and not the manifestation thereof. It is one of the things the value of

which is secrecy, one of the talents that are to be hidden in a napkin. The

true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red,

the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is

the modest colour of the unpublished blood.

So bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentle colour of life is

outdone by all the colours of the world. Its very beauty is that it is white,

but less white than milk; brown, but less brown than earth; red, but less

red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, but less lucid than the colour of lilies.

It has the hint of gold that is in all fine colour; but in our latitudes the hint

is almost elusive. Under Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than old ivory;

but under the misty blue of the English zenith, and the warm grey of the

London horizon, it is as delicately flushed as the paler wild roses, out to

their utmost, flat as stars, in the hedges of the end of June.

For months together London does not see the colour of life in any

mass. The human face does not give much of it, what with features, and

beards, and the shadow of the top-hat and chapeau melon of man, and of

the veils of woman. Besides, the colour of the face is subject to a

thousand injuries and accidents. The popular face of the Londoner has

soon lost its gold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown. We

miss little beauty by the fact that it is never seen freely in great numbers

out-of-doors. You get it in some quantity when all the heads of a great

indoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker; but it is only in the open

air, needless to say, that the colour of life is in perfection, in the open air,

"clothed with the sun," whether the sunshine be golden and direct, or

dazzlingly diffused in grey.

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to the

landscape the human colour of life. He is allowed to come out of all his

ignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummer north-west

evening, on the borders of the Serpentine. At the stroke of eight he sheds

the slough of nameless colours - all allied to the hues of dust, soot, and fog,

which are the colours the world has chosen for its boys - and he makes, in

his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush between the grey-blue water and

the grey-blue sky. Clothed now with the sun, he is crowned by-and-by

with twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and the reflection of an early moon

is under his feet.

So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature. They

are so quickly restored. There seems to be nothing to do, but only a little

thing to undo. It is like the art of Eleonora Duse. The last and most

finished action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is, as it were, the

flicking away of some insignificant thing mistaken for art by other actors,

some little obstacle to the way and liberty of Nature.

All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot,

and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking

colour of life. You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he still

shouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure vowels and elastic

syllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness, his brightness,

and his glow. Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening midsummer sun,

he gives his colours to his world again.

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature

has lapsed, to replace Nature. It is always to do, by the happily easy way

of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to grow in the streets - and

no streets could ask for a more charming finish than your green grass.

The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless it is renewed; but the grass

renews itself. There is nothing so remediable as the work of modern man

- "a thought which is also," as Mr Pecksniff said, "very soothing." And

by remediable I mean, of course, destructible. As the bathing child

shuffles off his garments - they are few, and one brace suffices him - so the

land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle off its yellow brick and

purple slate, and all the things that collect about railway stations. A

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

single night almost clears the air of London.

But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of

Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea- coast. To

have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. O

memorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour as it neared setting,

and it set not over the sea, but over the land. The sea had the dark and

rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect - the dark and not the opal

tints. The sky was also deep. Everything was very definite, without

mystery, and exceedingly simple. The most luminous thing was the

shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to be white because

it was a little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine. It was still the

whitest thing imaginable. And the next most luminous thing was the

little child, also invested with the sun and the colour of life.

In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the

violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the curious

history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution. On the

scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party.

Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you

consider how generously she was permitted political death. She was to

spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but to the

hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests, social, national,

international. The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre,

have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune, was exposed in the public

sight unsheltered by her veins.

Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies, the last and the

innermost - the privacy of death - was never allowed to put obstacles in

the way of public action for a public cause. Women might be, and were,

duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a

"right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of the

laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear political

responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined.

Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends.

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY

There is hardly a writer now - of the third class probably not one - who

has not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of Nature; not

one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern reference

to the manifold death and destruction with which the air, the branches, the

mosses are said to be full.

But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice of

the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death and of the

dead throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are they - all the

dying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide their

little last hours, where are they buried? Where is the violence concealed?

Under what gay custom and decent habit? You may see, it is true, an earth-

worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a snail's shell; but

these little things are, as it were, passed by with a kind of twinkle for

apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly some little solecism

which is too slight for direct mention, and which a meaner man might hide

or avoid. Unless you are very modern indeed, you twinkle back at the

bird.

But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey and

plunder. It is certain that much of the visible life passes violently into

other forms, flashes without pause into another flame; but not all. Amid

all the killing there must be much dying. There are, for instance, few birds

of prey left in our more accessible counties now, and many thousands of

birds must die uncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But if their killing is

done so modestly, so then is their dying also. Short lives have all these

wild things, but there are innumerable flocks of them always alive; they

must die, then, in innumerable flocks. And yet they keep the millions of

the dead out of sight.

Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed. It happened in a cold

winter. The late frosts were so sudden, and the famine was so complete,

that the birds were taken unawares. The sky and the earth conspired that

February to make known all the secrets; everything was published.

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

Death was manifest. Editors, when a great man dies, are not more

resolute than was the frost of `95.

The birds were obliged to die in public. They were surprised and

forced to do thus. They became like Shelley in the monument which the

art and imagination of England combined to raise to his memory at

Oxford.

Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong.

There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in

exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier - passe encore.

But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death of the birds is so

little characteristic of them that, as has just been said, no one in the world

is aware of their dying, except only in the case of birds in cages, who,

again, are compelled to die with observation. The woodland is guarded

and kept by a rule. There is no display of the battlefield in the fields.

There is no tale of the game-bag, no boast. The hunting goes on, but

with strange decorum. You may pass a fine season under the trees, and

see nothing dead except here and there where a boy has been by, or a man

with a trap, or a man with a gun. There is nothing like a butcher's shop in

the woods.

But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the wild

world. They will not have a man to die out of sight. I have turned over

scores of "Lives," not to read them, but to see whether now and again

there might be a "Life" which was not more emphatically a death. But

there never is a modern biography that has taken the hint of Nature. One

and all, these books have the disproportionate illness, the death out of all

scale.

Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortal

illness. If the man had recovered, his illness would have been rightly his

own secret. But because he did not recover, it is assumed to be news for

the first comer. Which of us would suffer the details of any physical

suffering, over and done in our own lives, to be displayed and described?

This is not a confidence we have a mind to make; and no one is authorised

to ask for attention or pity on our behalf. The story of pain ought not to

be told of us, seeing that by us it would assuredly not be told.

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

There is only one other thing that concerns a man still more

exclusively, and that is his own mental illness, or the dreams and illusions

of a long delirium. When he is in common language not himself, amends

should be made for so bitter a paradox; he should be allowed such solitude

as is possible to the alienated spirit; he should be left to the "not himself,"

and spared the intrusion against which he can so ill guard that he could

hardly have even resented it.

The double helplessness of delusion and death should keep the door of

Rossetti's house, for example, and refuse him to the reader. His mortal

illness had nothing to do with his poetry. Some rather affected objection

is taken every now and then to the publication of some facts (others being

already well known) in the life of Shelley. Nevertheless, these are all,

properly speaking, biography. What is not biography is the detail of the

accident of the manner of his death, the detail of his cremation. Or if it

was to be told - told briefly - it was certainly not for marble. Shelley's

death had no significance, except inasmuch as he died young. It was a

detachable and disconnected incident. Ah, that was a frost of fancy and

of the heart that used it so, dealing with an insignificant fact, and

conferring a futile immortality. Those are ill-named biographers who

seem to think that a betrayal of the ways of death is a part of their ordinary

duty, and that if material enough for a last chapter does not lie to their

hand they are to search it out. They, of all survivors, are called upon, in

honour and reason, to look upon a death with more composure. To those

who loved the dead closely, this is, for a time, impossible. To them death

becomes, for a year, disproportionate. Their dreams are fixed upon it

night by night. They have, in those dreams, to find the dead in some

labyrinth; they have to mourn his dying and to welcome his recovery in

such a mingling of distress and of always incredulous happiness as is not

known even to dreams save in that first year of separation. But they are

not biographers.

If death is the privacy of the woods, it is the more conspicuously secret

because it is their only privacy. You may watch or may surprise

everything else. The nest is retired, not hidden. The chase goes on

everywhere. It is wonderful how the perpetual chase seems to cause no

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

perpetual fear. The songs are all audible. Life is undefended, careless,

nimble and noisy.

It is a happy thing that minor artists have ceased, or almost ceased, to

paint dead birds. Time was when they did it continually in that British

School of water-colour art, stippled, of which surrounding nations, it was

agreed, were envious. They must have killed their bird to paint him, for

he is not to be caught dead. A bird is more easily caught alive than dead.

A poet, on the contrary, is easily - too easily - caught dead. Minor

artists now seldom stipple the bird on its back, but a good sculptor and a

University together modelled their Shelley on his back, unessentially

drowned; and everybody may read about the sick mind of Dante Rossetti.

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

CLOUD

During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to see

the clear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by the rest of

England, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not to see the clear sky is,

elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in London. You may go for a

week or two at a time, even though you hold your head up as you walk,

and even though you have windows that really open, and yet you shall see

no cloud, or but a single edge, the fragment of a form.

Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled

glass towards the sky when you open them towards the street. They are,

therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other windows were

used in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or even knew so

much as whether there were a sky.

But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world knows.

Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it; but

the celestial scenery journeys to them. It goes its way round the world.

It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds. The terrestrial

scenery - the tourist's - is a prisoner compared with this. The tourist's

scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden, with earth's

diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves. And for its changes it

depends upon the mobility of the skies. The mere green flushing of its

own sap makes only the least of its varieties; for the greater it must wait

upon the visits of the light. Spring and autumn are inconsiderable events

in a landscape compared with the shadows of a cloud.

The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or fade

according to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to foot, the

luminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that their own

local colour and their own local season are lost and cease, effaced before

the all-important mood of the cloud.

The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds. It is the

cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful of

spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground shine.

Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends and

partakes in the landscape obviously, lies half-way across the mountain

slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of the view

by the rough method of standing in front of it. But its greatest things are

done from its own place, aloft. Thence does it distribute the sun.

Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteries

than a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception. Thence it writes

out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils of the sun

renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, it sheds deep

colour upon the forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from the hills, all the

country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight.

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world.

Its own beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to improve. It

is always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-works

and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses - the painted

surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise light,

as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate gloss.

This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street.

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above some

little landscape of rather paltry interest - a conventional river heavy with

water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies; and

thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists always have it,

with "autumn tints." High over these rises, in the enormous scale of the

scenery of clouds, what no man expected - an heroic sky. Few of the

things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be done under

such a heaven. It was surely designed for other days. It is for an epic

world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the

distances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear and

cloudless sky? The very horizons of the landscape are near, for the round

world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are

unmeasured - you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the star

itself is immeasurable.

But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther, with

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THECOLOUROFLIFE1THECOLOUROFLIFETHECOLOUROFLIFE2THECOLOUROFLIFERedhasbeenpraisedforitsnobilityasthecolouroflife.Butthetruecolouroflifeisnotred.Redisthecolourofviolence,oroflifebrokenopen,edited,andpublished.Orifredisindeedthecolouroflife,itissoonlyonconditionthatitisnotseen.Oncefullyvisible,redisthec...

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