The Colour of Life | Page 4

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.

A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY

There is hardly a writer now - of the third class probably not one - who
has not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of Nature; not
one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a modern
reference to the manifold death and destruction with which the air, the
branches, the mosses are said to be full.
But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice of
the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death