To escape this disheartening sight, I go to my cabin and to bed. Head to the wind, the boat lifts to the surge; and every once in a while the enormous hull, with its iron plate and boilers, its armament and storerooms filled with coal and projectiles, settles back upon the waves like a rider who gathers himself, gripping tightly with his knees, before a leap.
Then a little calm comes, and below me I hear the screw continue its feeble and homely sound.
But before the day which follows is ended, our ship enters the lonely port enclosed like a reservoir by a mountain range. Here is Life again! Touched with an artless joy, I may resume my survey of the brisk and lively spectacle, of the spontaneous play of common interests, of this assiduous, multifold, intermingled activity by which all things exist together.
Just as we drop anchor, the sun, through a gap in the mountains which hide it, shoots toward the earth four jets of fire so intense that they seem emissions of its very substance. Before raising them vertically to the illimitable sky, this king, appearing upon the highest ridge (Eye of our eyes, in the merciful possession of the Vision made visible!) makes, at this supreme hour, a majestic exposition of distance and origin. For a welcome I have this farewell, richer than a promise! The mountain is vestured in rose and violet, the marriage of light and night. I am overcome with a deep, strong sweetness. I lift to God my gratitude still to be alive, and my whole being expands in the realization of my reprieve.
This time I shall not drink the bitter waters!
ON LIGHT
I do not think—I entirely reject the idea that colors constitute the first element, and that the sun is only the synthesis of their spectrum. I cannot see that the sun may be white, and that each color gives a share of its own virtue to it, and that their accord determines it. There is no color without an extrinsic support; from which we learn that it is itself an exterior thing, the diverse witness that matter renders to the pure source of indivisible splendor. Do not pretend to separate light; since it is light which divides darkness, producing seven notes according to the intensity of its effort. A vase of water or a prism, by the interposition of a transparent and thick medium and the refractive play of facets, allows us to watch this in the act. The free direct ray remains invariable, but color appears as soon as there is a captured refraction, which matter takes to itself as an especial attribute. The prism, in the calculated dispersive powers of its three angles and the concerted action of its dihedral triple mirror, encloses all possible play of reflections, and restores to the light its equivalent in color. I compare light to a woven substance,—where the rays constitute the warp, and where the wave of color, always implying a repercussion, is the woof. Color is nothing more than that.
If I examine the rainbow or the spectrum projected on a wall, I see a gradation in the nature of the tints, as well as in their relative intensity. Yellow occupies the center of the spectrum and permeates it to each edge, where the outer tones exclude it by degrees of obscuration. We can understand it to be the most immediate veil of light, while red and blue are reciprocal images of light metamorphized into two equally balanced tones. Light plays the rôle of mediator; it prepares the mixed colors by blending them in neighboring bands, thus provoking complementary tones. In it and by it, extreme red combined with green—as blue combines with orange—disappears in the unity of white.
Color, then, is a particular phenomenon of reflection, which the reflecting body, penetrated by the light, appropriates and restores in an altered form. This form is the result of the ray’s complete and ruthless analysis and examination which will not be denied.
And the intensity of tones varies, following a gamut of which yellow is the keynote, according to the more or less complete response of matter to the solicitations of the light.