§ 7. His idea, therefore, of rock color, founded on these experiences, is that of a dull or ashen grey, more or less stained by the brown of iron ochre, precisely as the Apennine limestones nearly always are; the grey being peculiarly cold and disagreeable. As we go down the very hill which stretches out from Pietra-pana towards Lucca, the stones laid by the road-side to mend it are of this ashen grey, with efflorescences of manganese and iron in the fissures. The whole of Malebolge is made of this rock, "All wrought in stone of iron-colored grain."[80]
Perhaps the iron color may be meant to predominate in Evil-pits; but the definite grey limestone color is stated higher up, the river Styx flowing at the base of "malignant grey cliffs"[81] (the word malignant being given to the iron-colored Malebolge also); and the same whitish-grey idea is given again definitely in describing the robe of the purgatorial or penance angel, which is "of the color of ashes, or earth dug dry." Ashes necessarily mean wood-ashes in an Italian mind, so that we get the tone very pale; and there can be no doubt whatever about the hue meant, because it is constantly seen on the sunny sides of the Italian hills, produced by the scorching of the ground, a dusty and lifeless whitish grey, utterly painful and oppressive; and I have no doubt that this color, assumed eminently also by limestone crags in the sun, is the quality which Homer means to express by a term he applies often to bare rocks, and which is usually translated "craggy," or "rocky." Now Homer is indeed quite capable of talking of "rocky rocks," just as he talks sometimes of "wet water;" but I think he means more by this word: it sounds as if it were derived from another, meaning "meal," or "flour," and I have little doubt it means "mealy white;" the Greek limestones being for the most part brighter in effect than the Apennine ones.
§ 8. And the fact is, that the great and preeminent fault of southern, as compared with northern scenery, is this rock-whiteness, which gives to distant mountain ranges, lighted by the sun, sometimes a faint and monotonous glow, hardly detaching itself from the whiter parts of the sky, and sometimes a speckled confusion of white light with blue shadow, breaking up the whole mass of the hills, and making them look near and small; the whiteness being still distinct at the distance of twenty or twenty-five miles. The inferiority and meagreness of such effects of hill, compared with the massive purple and blue of our own heaps of crags and morass, or the solemn grass-green and pine-purples of the Alps, have always struck me most painfully; and they have rendered it impossible for any poet or painter studying in the south, to enter with joy into hill scenery. Imagine the difference to Walter Scott, if instead of the single lovely color which, named by itself alone, was enough to describe his hills,—
"Their southern rapine to renew,
Far in the distant Cheviot's blue,"—
a dusty whiteness had been the image that first associated itself with a hill range, and he had been obliged, instead of "blue" Cheviots, to say, "barley-meal-colored" Cheviots.
§ 9. But although this would cause a somewhat painful shock even to a modern mind, it would be as nothing when compared with the pain occasioned by absence of color to a mediæval one. We have been trained, by our ingenious principles of Renaissance architecture, to think that meal-color and ash-color are the properest colors of all; and that the most aristocratic harmonies are to be deduced out of grey mortar and creamy stucco. Any of our modern classical architects would delightedly "face" a heathery hill with Roman cement; and any Italian sacristan would, but for the cost of it, at once whitewash the Cheviots. But the mediævals had not arrived at these abstract principles of taste. They liked fresco better than whitewash; and, on the whole, thought that Nature was in the right in painting her flowers yellow, pink, and blue;—not grey. Accordingly, this absence of color from rocks, as compared with meadows and trees, was in their eyes an unredeemable defect; nor did it matter to them whether its place was supplied by the grey neutral tint, or the iron-colored stain; for both colors, grey and brown, were, to them, hues of distress, despair, and mortification, hence adopted always for the dresses of monks; only the word "brown" bore, in their color vocabulary, a still gloomier sense than with us. I was for some time embarrassed by Dante's use of it with respect to dark skies and water. Thus, in describing a simple twilight—not a Hades twilight, but an ordinarily fair evening—(Inf. ii. 1.) he says, the "brown" air took the animals of earth away from their fatigues;—the waves under Charon's boat are "brown" (Inf. iii. 117.); and Lethe, which is perfectly clear and yet dark, as with oblivion, is "bruna-bruna," "brown, exceeding brown." Now, clearly in all these cases no warmth is meant to be mingled in the color. Dante had never seen one of our bog-streams, with its porter-colored foam; and there can be no doubt that, in calling Lethe brown, he means that it was dark slate grey, inclining to black; as, for instance, our clear Cumberland lakes, which, looked straight down upon where they are deep, seem to be lakes of ink. I am sure this is the color he means; because no clear stream or lake on the Continent ever looks brown, but blue or green; and Dante, by merely taking away the pleasant color, would get at once to this idea of grave clear grey. So, when he was talking of twilight, his eye for color was far too good to let him call it brown in our sense. Twilight is not brown, but purple, golden, or dark grey; and this last was what Dante meant. Farther, I find that this negation of color is always the means by which Dante subdues his tones. Thus the fatal inscription on the Hades gate is written in "obscure color," and the air which torments the passionate spirits is "aer nero" black air (Inf. v. 51.), called presently afterwards (line 81.) malignant air, just as the grey cliffs are called malignant cliffs.
§ 10. I was not, therefore, at a loss to find out what Dante meant by the word; but I was at a loss to account for his not, as it seemed, acknowledging the existence of the color of brown at all; for if he called dark neutral tint "brown," it remained a question what term he would use for things of the color of burnt umber. But, one day, just when I was puzzling myself about this, I happened to be sitting by one of our best living modern colorists, watching him at his work, when he said, suddenly, and by mere accident, after we had been talking of other things, "Do you know I have found that there is no brown in Nature? What we call brown is always a variety either of orange or purple. It never can be represented by umber, unless altered by contrast."
§ 11. It is curious how far the significance of this remark extends, how exquisitely it illustrates and confirms the mediæval sense of hue;—how far, on the other hand, it cuts into the heart of the old umber idolatries of Sir George Beaumont and his colleagues, the "where do you put your brown tree" system; the code of Cremona-violin-colored foregrounds, of brown varnish and asphaltum; and all the old night-owl science, which, like Young's pencil of sorrow,
"In melancholy dipped, embrowns the whole."
Nay, I do Young an injustice by associating his words with the asphalt schools; for his eye for color was true, and like Dante's; and I doubt not that he means dark grey, as Byron purple-grey in that night piece in the Siege of Corinth, beginning