Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the
true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or of
life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the
colour of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once
fully visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of
betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret of life, and not the
manifestation thereof. It is one of the things the value of which is
secrecy, one of the talents that are to be hidden in a napkin. The
true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the
covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and
the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood. So
bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentle colour of life is
outdone by all the colours of the world. Its very beauty is that it is
white, but less white than milk; brown, but less brown than earth;
red, but less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, but less lucid
than the colour of lilies. It has the hint of gold that is in all fine
colour; but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive. Under
Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than old ivory; but under the
misty blue of the English zenith, and the warm grey of the London
horizon, it is as delicately flushed as the paler wild roses, out to
their utmost, flat as stars, in the hedges of the end of June.
For months together London does not see the colour of life in any
mass. The human face does not give much of it, what with features, and
beards, and the shadow of the top-hat and _chapeau melon_ of man, and
of the veils of woman. Besides, the colour of the face is subject to a
thousand injuries and accidents. The popular face of the Londoner has
soon lost its gold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown.
We miss little beauty by the fact that it is never seen freely in
great numbers out-of-doors. You get it in some quantity when all the
heads of a great indoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker; but
it is only in the open air, needless to say, that the colour of life
is in perfection, in the open air, "clothed with the sun," whether the
sunshine be golden and direct, or dazzlingly diffused in grey.
The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to the
landscape the human colour of life. He is allowed to come out of all
his ignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummer
north-west evening, on the borders of the Serpentine. At the stroke of
eight he sheds the slough of nameless colours--all allied to the hues
of dust, soot, and fog, which are the colours the world has chosen for
its boys--and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush
between the grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky. Clothed now with
the sun, he is crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he goes to
bathe, and the reflection of an early moon is under his feet.
So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature. They
are so quickly restored. There seems to be nothing to do, but only a
little thing to undo. It is like the art of Eleonora Duse. The last
and most finished action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is,
as it were, the flicking away of some insignificant thing mistaken for
art by other actors, some little obstacle to the way and liberty of
Nature.
All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot,
and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking
colour of life. You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he
still shouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure vowels and
elastic syllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness,
his brightness, and his glow. Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening
midsummer sun, he gives his colours to his world again.
It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where
Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature. It is always to do, by the
happily easy way of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to grow
in the streets--and no streets could ask for a more charming finish
than your green grass. The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless
it is renewed; but the grass renews itself. There is nothing so
remediable as the work of modern man--"a thought which is also," as
Mr. Pecksniff said, "very soothing." And by remediable I mean, of
course, destructible. As the bathing child shuffles off his
garments--they are few, and one brace suffices him--so the land might
always, in reasonable time, shuffle off its yellow brick and purple
slate, and all the things that collect about railway stations. A
single night almost clears the air of London.
But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of
Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast. To
have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist. O
memorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour as it neared
setting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land. The sea had
the dark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect--the dark
and not the opal tints. The sky was also deep. Everything was very
definite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple. The most luminous
thing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to
be white because it was a little golden and a little rosy in the
sunshine. It was still the whitest thing imaginable. And the next most
luminous thing was the little child, also invested with the sun and
the colour of life.
In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that
the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the
curious history of the political rights of woman under the Revolution.
On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of
party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle
when you consider how generously she was permitted political death.
She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her
living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted a part in the
largest interests, social, national, international. The blood
wherewith she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be
seen or heard in the tribune, was exposed in the public sight
unsheltered by her veins.
Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies, the last and the
innermost--the privacy of death--was never allowed to put obstacles in
the way of public action for a public cause. Women might be, and were,
duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a
"right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of
the laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear
political responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was
guillotined. Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends.
_Alice Meynell._