[Illustration]
I
Least common of the colors given by nature to bird, insect, and
blossom is bright pure blue. Blue flowers are believed to proclaim for
the plant that bears them a longer history of unchecked development
than flowers of any other primary color suggest; and the high cost
of the tint is perhaps hinted by the inability of the horticulturist
to produce blue roses or blue chrysanthemums. Vivid blue appears in
the plumage of some wonderful birds, and on the wings of certain
amazing butterflies--especially tropical butterflies;--but usually
under conditions that intimate a prodigious period of evolutional
specialization. Altogether it would seem that blue was the latest pure
color developed in the evolution of flower and scale and feather; and
there is reason to believe that the power of perceiving blue was not
acquired until after the power of distinguishing red and green and
yellow had already been gained.
Whether the hypothesis be true or false, it is certainly noteworthy
that, of the primary colors, blue alone has remained, up to the present
time, a color pleasurable in its purest intensity to the vision of
highly civilized races. Bright red, bright green, bright orange,
yellow, or violet, can be used but sparingly in our nineteenth-century
attire and decoration. They have become offensive in their spectral
purity because of the violence of the sensations that they give;--they
remain grateful only to the rudimentary æsthetic feeling of children,
of the totally uncultivated, or of savages. What modern beauty clothes
herself in scarlet, or robes herself in fairy green? We cannot paint
our chambers violet or saffron--the mere idea jars upon our nerves. But
the color of heaven has not ceased to delight us. Sky-blue can still be
worn by our fairest; and the luminous charm of azure ceilings and azure
wall-surfaces--under certain conditions of lighting and dimension--is
still recognized.
“Nevertheless,” some one may say, “we do not paint the _outside_ of a
building skyblue; and a skyblue façade would be even more disagreeable
than an orange or a crimson façade.” This is true,--but not because the
effect of the color upon large surfaces is necessarily displeasing.
It is true only because vivid blue, unlike other bright colors, is
never associated in our experience of nature with large and opaque
_solidity_. When mountains become blue for us, they also become
ghostly and semi-transparent. Upon a housefront the color must appear
monstrous, because giving the notion of the unnatural,--of a huge blue
dead solidity tangibly proximate. But a blue ceiling, a blue vault,
blue walls of corridors, may suggest the true relation of the color to
depth and transparency, and make for us a grateful illusion of space
and summer-light. Yellow, on the other hand, is a color well adapted to
façades, because associated in memory with the beautiful effect of dying
sunlight over pale broad surfaces.
But although yellow remains, after blue, the most agreeable of the
primary colors, it cannot often be used for artistic purposes, like
blue, in all its luminous strength. Pale tones of yellow,--especially
creamy tones,--are capable of an immense variety of artistic employment;
but this is not true of the brilliant and burning yellow. Only blue is
always agreeable in its most vivid purity--providing that it be not
used in massive displays so as to suggest the anomaly of blue hardness
and blue opacity.[75]
In Japan, which may still be called the land of perfect good taste in
chromatics--notwithstanding the temporary apparition of some discords
due to Western influence,--almost any ordinary street-vista tells the
story of the race-experience with color. The general tone of the vista
is given by bluish greys above and dark blues below, sharply relieved
by numerous small details of white and cool yellow. In this perspective
the bluish-greys represent the tiling of roofs and awnings; the dark
blues, shop-draperies; the bright whites, narrow strips of plastered
surface; the pale yellows, mostly smooth naked wood, and glimpses of
rush-mattings. The broader stretches of color are furthermore relieved
and softened by the sprinkling of countless ideographs over draperies
and shop-signs--black, (and sometimes red) against white; white or gold
on blue. Strong yellows, greens, oranges, purples are invisible. In
dress also greys and cool blues rule: when you do happen to see robes
or _hakama_ all of one brilliant color,--worn by children or young
girls,--that color is either a sky-blue, or a violet with only just
enough red in it to kindle the azure,--a rainbow-violet of exquisite
luminosity.[76]