Possibly the wave of pleasurable emotion excited by a glorious vision
of blue is not more complex than the feeling aroused by any massive
display of any other pure color;--but it is higher in the quality of its
complexity. For the ideational elements that blend in the volume of it
include not a few of the noblest,--not a few of those which also enter
into the making of Cosmic Emotion.
Being the seeming color of the ghost of our planet,--of the breath of
the life of the world,--blue is likewise the color apparent of the
enormity of day and the abyss of the night. So the sensation of it makes
appeal to the ideas of Altitude, of Vastness, and of Profundity;--
Also to the idea of Space in Time; for blue is the tint of distance and
of vagueness;--
Also to the idea of Motion; for blue is the color of Vanishing and of
Apparition. Peak and vale, bay and promontory, turn blue as we leave
them; and out of blue they grow and define again as we glide homeward.
And therefore in the volume of feeling awakened in us by the sensation
of blue, there should be something of the emotion associated with
experience of change,--with countless ancestral sorrows of parting. But
if there indeed be any such dim survival, it is utterly whelmed and
lost in that all-radiant emotional inheritance related to Summer and
Warmth,--to the joy of past humanity in the light of cloudless days.
Still more significant is the fact that although blue is a sacred color,
the dominant tones of the feeling it evokes are gladness and tenderness.
Blue speaks to us of the dead and of the gods, but never of their
awfulness.
* * * * *
Now when we reflect that blue is the color of the idea of the divine,
the color pantheistic, the color ethical,--thrilling most deeply into
those structures of thought to which belong our sentiments of reverence
and justice, of duty and of aspiration,--we may wonder why the emotion
it calls up should be supremely gladsome. Is it because that sensuous
race-experience of blue skies,--that measureless joy of the dead in
light and warmth, which has been transmitted to each of us in organic
memory,--is vastly older than the religious idea, and therefore
voluminous enough to drown any ethical feeling indirectly related to the
color-sensation? Partly so, no doubt;--but I will venture another, and a
very simple explanation:--
* * * * *
_All moral pulsations in the wave of inherited feeling which responds to
the impression of blue, belong only to the beautiful and tender aspects
of faith._
* * * * *
And thus much having been ventured, I may presume a little further.
I imagine that for many of us one of the most powerful elements in
this billow of pleasurable feeling evoked by the vision of blue, _is_
spiritual, in the fullest ethical meaning of the word;--that under the
fleeting surface-plexus of personal emotion empirically associated
with the color, pulses like a tide the transmitted religious emotion
of unnumbered ages;--and that, quickening and vivifying all inherited
sense of blue as beauty, is the inherited lucent rapture of blue as the
splendor mystical,--as the color of the everlasting Peace. Something
of all human longing for all the Paradises ever imagined,--of all
pre-existent trust in the promise of reunion after death,--of all
expired dreams of unending youth and bliss,--may be revived for us,
more or less faintly, in this thrill of the delight of azure. Even
as through the jewel-radiance of the Tropic Stream pass undulations
from the vaster deep,--with their sobbings and whisperings, their
fugitive drift and foam,--so, through the emotion evoked by the vision
of luminous blue, there may somehow quiver back to us out of the
Infinite--(multitudinous like the billion ether-shiverings that make the
blue sensation of a moment)--something of all the aspirations of the
ancient faiths, and the power of the vanished gods, and the passion and
the beauty of all the prayer ever uttered by lips of man.