The Colour of Life | Page 3

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Prepared by: David Price, email [email protected]

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

Contents:
The Colour of Life A Point Of Biography Cloud Winds of the World
The Honours of Mortality At Monastery Gates Rushes and Reeds
Eleonora Duse Donkey Races Grass A Woman in Grey Symmetry and

Incident The Illusion of Historic Time Eyes

THE COLOUR OF LIFE

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 It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.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