Thus, according to Flaubert, the myope looks at things one after another and describes details, while Hearn says the exact opposite. Both are wrong. The oculist will feel constrained to differ somewhat from Hearn in the foregoing article.
In May 1887 he reviews editorially an article of my own which I had sent him during the preceding year. Again, because there has never been a literary artist with a colour-sense so amazingly developed as that of Hearn, I venture to copy his commendation of my views:
COLOURS AND EMOTIONS
(May 8, 1887)
The evolutionary history of the Colour-Sense, very prettily treated of by Grant Allen and others, both in regard to the relation between fertilization of flowers by insects, and in regard to the æsthetic pleasure of man in contemplating certain colours, has also been considered in a very thorough way by American thinkers. Perhaps the most entertaining and instructive paper yet published on the subject was one in the American Journal of Ophthalmology last September. It has just been reprinted in pamphlet form, under the title of "The Human Colour-Sense as the Organic Response to Natural Stimuli;" and contains a remarkable amplification of these theories, rather suggested than laid down by the author of "Physiological Æsthetics." Of course, the reader whom the subject can interest, comprehends that outside of the mind no such thing as colour exists; and that the phenomena of colours, like those of sound, are simply the results of exterior impressions upon nerve apparatus specially sensitive to vibrations—in the one case of ether, in the other of air. Everybody, moreover,—even those totally ignorant of the physiology of the eye—know that certain colours are called primary or elementary. But it has probably occurred to few to ask why,—except in regard to mixing of paints in a drawing-school.
The theories of Gladstone and Magnus that the men of the Homeric era were colour-blind, because of the absence from the Homeric poems of certain words expressive of certain colours, have been disproved by more thorough modern research. The primitive man's sense of colour, or the sensitiveness of his retina to ether vibrations, may not have been as fine as that of the Roman mosaic-worker who could select his materials of 30,000 different tints, nor as that of Gobelin weavers, who can recognize 28,000 different shades of wool. But the evidence goes to show that the sense of colour is old as the gnawing of hunger or the pangs of fear,—old as the experience that taught living creatures to discern food and to flee from danger. There is, however, reason to suppose, from certain developmental phenomena observed in the eyes of children and newly-born animals, that the present condition of the colour-sense has been gradually reached—not so much in any particular species, as in all species possessing it,—just as vision itself must have been gradually acquired. Also showy colours must have been perceived before tints could be discerned; and even now we know through the spectroscope, that the human eye is not yet developed to the fullest possible perceptions of colour. Now the first colours recognized by the first eyes must have presumably been just those we call primary,—Yellow, Red, Green, Blue. Yellow, the colour of gold, is also the colour of our sun; the brightest daylight has a more or less faint tinge even at noon, according to the state of the atmosphere;—and this tinge deepens at sunrise and sunset. Red is the colour of blood,—a colour allied necessarily from time immemorial with violent mental impressions, whether of war, or love, or the chase, or religious sacrifice. Green itself is the colour of the world. Blue,—the blue of the far away sky,—has necessarily always been for man the colour mysterious and holy,—always associated with those high phenomena of heaven which first inspired wonder and fear of the Unknown. These colours were probably first known to intelligent life; and their impressions are to-day the strongest. So violent, indeed, have they become to our refined civilized sense, that in apparel or decoration three of them, at least, are condemned when offered pure. Even the armies of the world are abandoning red uniforms;—no refined people wear flaming crimsons or scarlets or yellows;—nobody would paint a house or decorate a wall with a solid sheet of strong primary colour. Blue is still the least violent, the most agreeable to the artistic sense; and in subdued form it holds a place, in costume and in art, refused to less spiritual colours.
It might consequently be expected there should exist some correlation between the primary colours and the stronger emotional states of man. And such, indeed, proves to be the case. Emotionally the colours come in the order of Red, Yellow, Green, Blue. Red still appeals to the idea of Passion,—for which very reason its artistic use is being more and more restrained. Very curious are the researches made by Grant Allen showing the fact of the sensual use of the red. In Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads "(the same suppressed work republished in this country under its first title, "Laus Veneris"), the red epithets appear 159 times, while gold, green and blue words occur respectively 143, 86 and 25 times. In Tennyson's beautiful poem, "The Princess," the red words occur only 20 times, the gold 28, the green 5, the blue once. With all his exquisite sense of colour, Tennyson is sparing of adjectives;—there is no false skin to his work; it is solid muscle and bone.
Next to Red, the most emotional colour is Yellow—the colour of life, and of what men seem to prize next to life,—Gold. We fancy we can live without green sometimes; it comes third; but it is the hue associated with all the labours of man on the earth, since he began to labour. It is the colour of Industry. Blue has always been, since man commenced to think, and always will be, until he shall have ceased to think,—associated with his spiritual sense,—his idea of many gods or of One,—his hopes of a second life, his faith, his good purposes, his perception of duty. Still, all who pray, turn up their faces toward the eternal azure. And with the modern expansion of the Idea of God, as with the modern expansion of the Idea of the Universe, the violet gulf of space ever seems more mystical,—its pure colour more and more divine, and appeals to us as the colour of the Unknowable,—the colour of the Holy of Holies.
That Hearn wrote not from his own experience, out of his own heart, and with its blood, was due to the fact that life had denied him the needed experience; the personal materials, those that would interest the imaginative or imagining reader, did not exist. He must borrow, at first literally, which for him meant translation or retelling. The kind of things chosen was also dictated by the tragedy and pathos of his entire past life. But as if this pitiful tangling of the strands of Destiny were not enough, Fate added a knot of still more controlling misfortune. His adult life was passed without the poet's most necessary help of good vision. Indeed he had such extremely poor vision that one might say it was only the merest fraction of the normal. A most hazy blur of colours was all he perceived of objects beyond a foot or two away. There was left for him the memory of a world of forms as seen in his childhood; but that fact throws into relief the fact that it was a memory. It needs little psychologic acumen to realize how inaccurate would be our memories of trees, landscapes, mountains, oceans, cities, and the rest, seen only thirty years ago. How unsatisfying, how unreliable, especially for artistic purposes, must such memories be! To be sure, these haunting and dim recollections were, or might have been, helped out a little by pictures and photographs studied at the distance of three inches from the eye. The pathos of this, however, is increased by the fact that Hearn cared nothing for such photographs, etchings, engravings, etc. I never saw him look at one with attention or interest. Paintings, water-colours, etc., were as useless to him as the natural views themselves.
Another way that he might have supplemented his infirmity was by means of his monocle, but he made little use of this poor device, because he instinctively recognized that it aided so meagrely. One cannot be sure how consciously he refused the help, or knew the reasons for his refusal. At best it could give him only a suggestion of the accurate knowledge which our eyes give us of distant objects, and not even his sensitive mind could know that it minimized the objects thus seen, and almost turned them into a caricaturing microscopic smallness, like that produced when we look through the large end of an opera-glass. What would we think of the world if we carried before our eyes an opera-glass thus inverted? Would not a second's such use be as foolish as continuous use? There was an optical and sensible reason for his refusal. With the subtle wisdom of the unconscious he refused to see plainly, because his successful work, his unique function, lay in the requickening of ancient sorrows, and of lost, aimless and errant souls. He supplemented the deficiencies of vision with a vivid imagination, a perfect memory, and a perfection of touch which gave some sense of solidity and content, and by hearing, that echo-like emphasized unreality; but his world was essentially a two-dimensional one. To add the comble to his ocular misfortunes, he had but one eye, and therefore he had no stereoscopic vision, and hence almost no perception of solidity, thickness, or content except such as was gained by the sense of touch, memory, judgment, etc. The little glimpse of stereoscopic qualities was made impossible by the fact of his enormous myopia, and further by the comparative blindness to objects beyond a few inches or a few feet away from the eye. The small ball becomes flat when brought sufficiently near the eye. Practically the world beyond a few feet was not a three-dimensional one; it was coloured it is true, and bewilderingly so, but it was formless and flat, without much thickness or solidity, and almost without perspective.[18] Moreover, Hearn's single eye was divergent, and more of the world to his left side was invisible to him than to other single-eyed persons. Most noteworthy also is another fact,—the slowness of vision by a highly myopic eye. It takes it longer to see what it finally does see than in the case of other eyes. So all the movements of such a myopic person must be slow and careful, for he is in doubt about everything under foot, or even within reach of the hands. Hearn's myopia produced his manners.
[ [18] I have gathered, but must omit, a hundred illuminating quotations from Hearn's writings, illustrating the truth of the formlessness and non-objectivity of his world, and how colour dominated his poorly seen universe.
Intellect, one must repeat, is largely, almost entirely, the product of vision,—especially the æsthetic part of intellect. And intellect, it should not be forgotten, is "desiccated emotion"; which brings us up sharply before the question of the effect upon æsthetic and general feeling, upon the soft swirl and lift and flitting rush of the emotional nature, in a psyche so sensitive and aerial as that of Hearn. In this rare ether one loses the significance of words, and the limitations of logic, but it may not be doubted that in the large, the summarized effect of thirty years of two-dimensional seeing and living, of a flat, formless, coloured world, upon the immeasurably quick, sensitive plate of Hearn's mind, was—well, it was what it was!
And who can describe that mind! Clearly and patently, it was a mind without creative ability, spring, or the desire for it. It was a mind improcreant by inheritance and by education, by necessity and by training, by poverty internal and external. To enable its master to live, it must write, and, as was pitifully evident, if it could not write in obedience to a creative instinct, it must do the next best thing. This residual second was to describe the external world, or at least so much of the externals of all worlds, physical, biological, or social, as romance or common-sense demanded to make the writing vivid, accurate, and bodied. Any good literature, especially the poetic, must be based on reality, must at least incidentally have its running obligato of reality. For the poet, again emphasized, vision is the intermediary, the broad, bright highway to facts. Prosaically, local colour requires the local seer. Barred from this divine roadway to and through the actual universe, the foiled mind of Hearn could choose but one course: to regarment, transform, and colour the world, devised and transmitted by others, and reversing the old ο λογος σαρξ εγενετο rewrite the history of the soul as σαρξ ο λογος εγενετο , for in Hearn's alembic the solidest of flesh was "melted" and escaped in clouds of spirit; it was indeed often so disembodied and freed that one is lost in wonder at the mere vision of the cloudland so eerie, so silent, so void, so invisibly far, and fading ever still farther away. But, chained to the here Hearn could not march on the bright road. He could never even see the road, or its ending. If freed to go, there became here with the intolerable limitation of his vision, the peculiarity of his unvision. The world, the world of the there must be brought to him, and in the bringing it became the here. In the process, distant motion or action became dead, silent, and immobile being; distance was transformed to presence, and an intimacy of presence which at one blow destroyed scene, setting, and illumination. For, except to passionate love, nearness and touch are not poetical or transfiguring, and to Hearn love never could come; at least it never did come. Except in boyhood he never, with any accuracy of expression or life, saw a human face; at the best, he saw faces only in the frozen photographs, and these interested him little.
With creative instinct or ability denied, with the poet's craving for open-eyed knowing, and with the poet's necessity of realizing the world out there, Hearn, baldly stated, was forced to become the poet of myopia. His groping mind was compelled to rest satisfied with the world of distance and reality transported by the magic carpet to the door of his imagination and fancy. There in a flash it was melted to formless spirit, recombined to soul, and given the semblance of a thin reincarnation, fashioned, refashioned, coloured, recoloured. There, lo! that incomparable wonder of art, the haunting, magical essence of reality, the quivering, elusive protean ghost of the tragedy of dead pain, the smile of a lost universe murmuring non dolet while it dies struck by the hand of the beloved murderer.