The Colour of Life

								


Transcribed from the 1897 John Lane edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

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modest colour of the unpublished blood.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