Between these two modes of pursuing it, come two modes of refusing it—one, dark and sensual; the other, statuesque and grave, having great aspect of nobleness.
Thus we have, first, the coarse love of color, as a vulgar person’s choice of gaudy hues in dress.
Then, again, we have the base disdain of color, of which I have spoken at length elsewhere. Thus we have the lofty disdain of color, as in Durer’s and Raphael’s drawing: finally, the severest and passionate following of it, in Giorgione and Titian.
5. Color is, more than all elements of art, the reward of veracity of purpose. This point respecting it I have not noticed before, and it is highly curious. We have just seen that in giving an account of anything for its own sake, the most important points are those of form. Nevertheless, the form of the object is its own attribute; special, not shared with other things. An error in giving an account of it does not necessarily involve wider error.
But its color is partly its own, partly shared with other things round it. The hue and power of all broad sunlight is involved in the color it has cast upon this single thing; to falsify that color, is to misrepresent and break the harmony of the day: also, by what color it bears, this single object is altering hues all round it; reflecting its own into them, displaying them by opposition, softening them by repetition; one falsehood in color in one place, implies a thousand in the neighborhood. Hence, there are peculiar penalties attached to falsehood in color, and peculiar rewards granted to veracity in it. Form may be attained in perfectness by painters who, in their course of study, are continually altering or idealizing it; but only the sternest fidelity will reach coloring. Idealize or alter in that, and you are lost. Whether you alter by abasing, or exaggerating,—by glare or by decline, one fate is for you—ruin. Violate truth wilfully in the slightest particular, or, at least, get into the habit of violating it, and all kinds of failure and error will surround and haunt you to your fall.
Therefore, also, as long as you are working with form only, you may amuse yourself with fancies; but color is sacred—in that you must keep to facts. Hence the apparent anomaly that the only schools of color are the schools of Realism. The men who care for form only, may drift about in dreams of Spiritualism; but a colorist must keep to substance. The greater his power in color enchantment, the more stern and constant will be his common sense. Fuseli may wander wildly among gray spectra, but Reynolds and Gainsborough must stay in broad daylight, with pure humanity. Velasquez, the greatest colorist, is the most accurate portrait painter of Spain; Holbein, the most accurate portrait painter, is the only colorist of Germany; and even Tintoret had to sacrifice some of the highest qualities of his color before he could give way to the flights of wayward though mighty imagination, in which his mind rises or declines from the royal calm of Titian.
[4] Compare the deaths of Jehoram, Herod, and Judas.
[5] Thus, the railroad bridge over the Fall of Schaffhausen, and that round the Clarens shore of the lake of Geneva, have destroyed the power of two pieces of scenery of which nothing can ever supply the place, in appeal to the higher ranks of European mind.
[6] “There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, it is enough: the grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire, that saith not, It is enough!”
[7] A bad word, being only “foresight” again in Latin; but we have no other good English word for the sense into which it has been warped.