The subject of the Homeric numbers has been discussed at considerable length, on account of its connection with important questions of history. That of colours may, even on its own merits, deserve a careful examination. This inquiry will resemble, however, the former discussion in the appearance of paradox, which the argument may seem to present. Next to the idea of number, there is none perhaps more definite to the modern mind generally, as well as in particular to the English mind, than that of colour. That our own country has some special aptitude in this respect, we may judge from the comparatively advantageous position, which the British painters have always held as colourists among other contemporary schools. Nothing seems more readily understood and retained by very young children among us, than the distinctions between the principal colours. In regard to one point, the case of numbers is here reversed. There the idea becomes indefinite as we ascend in the scale, here it is as we descend. Colour becomes doubtful as it becomes faint, more and more clear as it is accumulated and heightened. But the facility with which we discriminate colour in all its marked forms, is probably the result of traditional aptitude, since we seem to find, as we go far backward in human history, that the faculty is less and less mature.
I am conscious that the subject, which is now before us, in reality deserves a scientific investigation, which I am not capable of affording to it: and also that we are, as yet, far from being able to render the language of the ancients for colour into our own with the confidence, which we can feel in almost every other department of interpretation. My endeavours will be limited, firstly, to a collection of ‘realien,’ or facts of the poems, in the case of Colour: and, secondly, to pointing out what appears to be the basis of the ideas and perceptions of Homer respecting it, and the relation of that basis to the ideas of the later Greeks.
Among the signs of the immaturity which I have mentioned, the following are found in the poems of Homer:
I. The paucity of his colours.
II. The use of the same word to denote not only different hues or tints of the same colour, but colours which, according to us, are essentially different.
III. The description of the same object under epithets of colour fundamentally disagreeing one from the other.
IV. The vast predominance of the most crude and elemental forms of colour, black and white, over every other, and the decided tendency to treat other colours as simply intermediate modes between these extremes.
V. The slight use of colour in Homer, as compared with other elements of beauty, for the purpose of poetic effect, and its absence in certain cases where we might confidently expect to find it.
Each of these topics will deserve a distinct notice.
Homeric adjectives of Colour.