CHAPTER V.
COLOUR.
“My soul, what gracious glorious powers
To hue and radiance God has given!”
Cautley, “Emblems,” p. 21.
It is my intention to confine myself to the discussion of colour, in as far as it belongs to the dyes of textiles and the materials for embroidery. I will adhere as closely as I can to this part of what is a great and most interesting subject—one which the science of to-day has opened out, and by the test of experiment, cleared of erroneous theories; revealing to us all its beauty and fitness for the use and delight of man.
As through all ages the eye has been gradually educated to appreciate harmony in colour, so dissonance—that is, what errs against harmony—hurts us, without apparently a sufficient reason; and we have to seek the causes of our sensations in the scientific works and lectures of Professor Tyndall and others.
There is no doubt that the appreciation of colour has belonged in different degrees to the eye of every animal, but especially to that of man, ever since light first painted the flowers of the field. The eye is created to see colour, as well as form. But we know that men, being accustomed to acquiesce in the powers with which they find themselves gifted by nature, enjoy and use them, long before they begin to study, classify, and name them.
When we recollect that the circulation of the blood was not known within the last three hundred years, and that Albert Dürer painted the skeleton Death on the bridge of Lucerne, with one bone in the upper and one in the lower arm, we shall be surprised to find that the ancients had named the colours they saw, with some degree of descriptive and scientific precision. The word “purple,” for instance, covered a multitude of tints, which had not as yet been differentiated, either in common parlance or in poetry,[283] though as articles of commerce the purple tints had been early distinguished.