Though it is true that each eye, even when educated, retains its own special appreciation of the colours that gratify its seeing nerve, yet there are certain standards which give almost universal pleasure.[287]
The blind and the colour-blind must remain exceptions for all time; and there are many gradations in colour-blindness, till we come to the normal class of seeing eyes; and passing them by, reach to those few men, gifted beyond all others with that fund of sensitive eye-nerve and mental power, which enables them to create new thoughts in colour.[288] Titian and his school arose from the inherited science and tradition, and carefully prepared pigments of his immediate predecessors, acting on an exceptional eye and mind, imbued with the splendours of the early mornings and the sunsets in the glowing atmosphere of Venice.
Colour has long been supposed to convey certain impressions to the mind. The absence of all colour, which we call “black,” symbolizes in dress, grief, pride, or dignity; according as it drapes the mourner, the Spanish grandee, or the priest.[289] Yellow being the colour of the sun and of corn and gold, represents riches, generosity, and light. Red stands between the dark and the lively colours, and represents warmth and animation, dignity, splendour, life, love, and joy.
The expression of blue is that of purity. It recalls the distant sky, the calm ocean, and has an immortal and celestial character. It ascends to the highest and descends to the lowest tones of chiaro-oscuro. Nothing so nearly approaches pure white as the palest blue; nothing is so nearly black as the darkest.
Green has been assigned by nature the place of the universal background. It is the complementary colour of red, softening and assimilating it by reflected shadows, and setting off the glory of every flower and fruit. The expression of green is gaiety and modesty, light and tenderness, shadow and repose, to both the eye and the mind.[290]
It must be allowed that it is by the earliest associations of the individual, or by those derived from the family, the tribe or the nation, that colours are connected with such attributes welded by art and time into traditional meanings, which they absolutely possess,[291] and from which fashion cannot disconnect them; such, for instance, is the royalty of purple.
The word purple is so indiscriminately used as a poetic epithet, rather than as a distinctive appellation, that much confusion has been caused by it. Historically, among the Persians, Greeks, and Romans it appears to have been simply the royal colour, varying from the purest blue, through every shade of violet, down to the deepest crimson. Sometimes, poetically, “purple” seems to have described only a surface. The breezy or stormy sea was purple; the sky was purple; the hyacinthine locks of Narcissus, the rosy lips of Venus were purple. As a textile, velvet was purple, even when it was white.[292]
The epithets “purple” and “wine-coloured” are often bestowed on the Mediterranean Sea, and are justified by its occasional hue:—
“As from the clouds, deep-bosom’d, swell’d with showers,
A sudden storm the purple ocean sweeps,
Drives the wild waves, and tosses all the deeps.”
Pope’s Homer, “Iliad,” b. xi. v. 383.