FOOTNOTES:
[283] “Seeing, they saw not, neither did they understand.”
[284] See Pliny’s “Natural History,” which gives much information on the subject.
[285] E. Curtius, “Greek History;” Engl. Trans., i. p. 438; Blümner’s “Technologie,” p. 216.
[286] Charpentier “differentiates in every normal eye a sensibility for light, a sensibility for colour, and a sensibility for form (a visual sensibility).”—See “Modern Theories of Colour,” The Lancet, August 19th, 1882, p. 276. We can perceive, by studying works of art, how variously these gifts are distributed, or, at any rate, how differently they are received and acted upon by individual minds.
[287] The effect of colour on the brain is a subject only just now beginning to attract attention. Experiments on the insane have been made in Italy, especially, I believe, at Venice; and it is said to be ascertained that red and green are irritants, whereas windows glazed with blue glass alternating with white have sensibly calmed the nerves of the patients.
[288] Let us compare the beautiful creations of the Venetian school with the demoralizing brightness of aniline colours, or the opaque, earthy tints which some call beautiful, mistaking their dulness for softness and sobriety of colouring. But they, too, have their uses.
[289] Black and red are, in ecclesiastical work, the emblems of mourning.
[290] The Bardic rules in early Britain enjoined three simple colours: sky blue, the emblem of peace, for the bard and poet; green, for the master of natural history and woodcraft; spotless white (the symbol of holiness), for the priest and Druid.
[291] The blind man said that red was like the sound of a trumpet, which shows what a soul-stirring colour it was in his mind’s eye.