But as the mind colours, and absolute naturalness is not necessary, it results that there must be a science by which the mind can effect its purpose.
For the cultivation of a sense arises from a want which the mind alone at first feels, and to the mind in that state of desire things speak suggestively that were before mute; discoveries are made into the deeper and previously hidden secrets of nature, and new means are invented of gratifying the awakened senses. Hence all art which is above the merely common and uncultivated sense. All we see and all we hear takes a vitality not its own from our thoughts, mixes itself (as aliment does, and becomes our substance) with our intellectual texture, and is anew created.
Winds might have blown, and wild animals have uttered their cries, but it was the heightened imagination that heard them howl and roar. And it was from a further cultivation of the sense, giving forth, at every step, new wants, that the nature of all sounds was investigated and music invented—science but discovering wonderful mysteries, secrets, and gifted faculties drawing them out of their deep hiding-places, making them palpable, and combining and converting them into humanities whereby mankind may be delighted and improved.
If, then, the ear has its science, so has the eye. There is the mystery of colours as well as of sounds. Nor can it be justly said that we are out of
nature because we pursue that mystery beyond its commonly perceptible and outward signs to its more intricate truths; nay, on the contrary, as we have thereby more of those truths, we have more of nature; and we know them to be truths by their power and by their adoption.
This science of colour has been, perhaps, too much neglected. In conversing with artists, one is surprised how little attention they have paid to it; and even where it has been studied, it is only upon its surface, and by those well known diagrams which show the oppositions.
Few, indeed, consider colouring as a means of telling the story—as at all sympathetic. In an historical subject, more attention is paid to the exact naturalness of the light, the time of day, the local colouring of the objects, as they probably were, than upon those tones and hues which best belong to the feeling which the action represented is meant to convey: by which practice an unnaturalness is too often the result; for there is forced upon the eye a vividness and variety of colours, in dresses, accessories, and the scene, which one present at the action would never have noticed—which, as the feeling would have rejected, so would the obedient eye have left undistinguished; and we know how the eye is obedient to the feelings and withholds impressions, and in the midst of crowds, to use a common expression, will "fix itself on vacancy." It will do even more; it will adopt the colouring which the feeling suggests—will set aside what is, and assume what is not. Thus, in reading some melancholy tale, the very scene becomes
"Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;"
and thus it is that actually the eye aids tile imagination while it
"Breathes a browner horror o'er the woods."