Least common of the colors given by nature to bird, insect, and blossom is bright pure blue. Blue flowers are believed to proclaim for the plant that bears them a longer history of unchecked development than flowers of any other primary color suggest; and the high cost of the tint is perhaps hinted by the inability of the horticulturist to produce blue roses or blue chrysanthemums. Vivid blue appears in the plumage of some wonderful birds, and on the wings of certain amazing butterflies—especially tropical butterflies;—but usually under conditions that intimate a prodigious period of evolutional specialization. Altogether it would seem that blue was the latest pure color developed in the evolution of flower and scale and feather; and there is reason to believe that the power of perceiving blue was not acquired until after the power of distinguishing red and green and yellow had already been gained.
Whether the hypothesis be true or false, it is certainly noteworthy that, of the primary colors, blue alone has remained, up to the present time, a color pleasurable in its purest intensity to the vision of highly civilized races. Bright red, bright green, bright orange, yellow, or violet, can be used but sparingly in our nineteenth-century attire and decoration. They have become offensive in their spectral purity because of the violence of the sensations that they give;—they remain grateful only to the rudimentary æsthetic feeling of children, of the totally uncultivated, or of savages. What modern beauty clothes herself in scarlet, or robes herself in fairy green? We cannot paint our chambers violet or saffron—the mere idea jars upon our nerves. But the color of heaven has not ceased to delight us. Sky-blue can still be worn by our fairest; and the luminous charm of azure ceilings and azure wall-surfaces—under certain conditions of lighting and dimension—is still recognized.
“Nevertheless,” some one may say, “we do not paint the outside of a building skyblue; and a skyblue façade would be even more disagreeable than an orange or a crimson façade.” This is true,—but not because the effect of the color upon large surfaces is necessarily displeasing. It is true only because vivid blue, unlike other bright colors, is never associated in our experience of nature with large and opaque solidity. When mountains become blue for us, they also become ghostly and semi-transparent. Upon a housefront the color must appear monstrous, because giving the notion of the unnatural,—of a huge blue dead solidity tangibly proximate. But a blue ceiling, a blue vault, blue walls of corridors, may suggest the true relation of the color to depth and transparency, and make for us a grateful illusion of space and summer-light. Yellow, on the other hand, is a color well adapted to façades, because associated in memory with the beautiful effect of dying sunlight over pale broad surfaces.
But although yellow remains, after blue, the most agreeable of the primary colors, it cannot often be used for artistic purposes, like blue, in all its luminous strength. Pale tones of yellow,—especially creamy tones,—are capable of an immense variety of artistic employment; but this is not true of the brilliant and burning yellow. Only blue is always agreeable in its most vivid purity—providing that it be not used in massive displays so as to suggest the anomaly of blue hardness and blue opacity.[75]
In Japan, which may still be called the land of perfect good taste in chromatics—notwithstanding the temporary apparition of some discords due to Western influence,—almost any ordinary street-vista tells the story of the race-experience with color. The general tone of the vista is given by bluish greys above and dark blues below, sharply relieved by numerous small details of white and cool yellow. In this perspective the bluish-greys represent the tiling of roofs and awnings; the dark blues, shop-draperies; the bright whites, narrow strips of plastered surface; the pale yellows, mostly smooth naked wood, and glimpses of rush-mattings. The broader stretches of color are furthermore relieved and softened by the sprinkling of countless ideographs over draperies and shop-signs—black, (and sometimes red) against white; white or gold on blue. Strong yellows, greens, oranges, purples are invisible. In dress also greys and cool blues rule: when you do happen to see robes or hakama all of one brilliant color,—worn by children or young girls,—that color is either a sky-blue, or a violet with only just enough red in it to kindle the azure,—a rainbow-violet of exquisite luminosity.[76]
II
But I wish to speak neither of the æsthetic value of blue in relation to arts and industries, nor of the optical significance of blue as the product of six hundred and fifty billion oscillations of the luminous ether per second. I only want to say something about the psychology of the color,—about its subjective evolutional history.
Certainly the same apparition of blue will bestir in different minds different degrees of feeling, and will set in motion, through memory-revival of unlike experiences, totally dissimilar operations of fancy. But independently of such psychological variation—mainly personal and superficial,—there can be no doubt that the color evokes in the general mind one common quality of pleasurable feeling,—a vivacious thrill,—a tone of emotional activity unmistakably related to the higher zones of sentiency and of imagination.
In my own case the sight of vivid blue has always been accompanied by an emotion of vague delight—more or less strong according to the luminous intensity of the color. And in one experience of travel,—sailing to the American tropics,—this feeling rose into ecstasy. It was when I beheld for the first time the grandest vision of blue in this world,—the glory of the Gulf-Stream: a magical splendor that made me doubt my senses,—a flaming azure that looked as if a million summer skies had been condensed into pure fluid color for the making of it. The captain of the ship leaned over the rail with me; and we both watched the marvellous sea for a long time in silence. Then he said:—