COLOUR THINKING.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 461, 20 March 1909, Page 9

COLOUR THINKING.

A correspondence- interesting for. its own sake as well as for ,its indirect bearing on litorary questions' an English exchange) has -been going on ill a desultory way dunng this month in tbe columns of. the "Scotsman." Its subject -is tho not-unfamiliar one of '"'colour-thinking," and one of tho facts that it' has brought out is that there an appreciable number of people who associate colours with sounds. It does not matter what the sound may . bo —tho sound of distant church bells, the music of flutes and soft recorders, the barking of a spaniel, or flic hooting of a motor-horn —it not only, reaches tho brain as'a sound,'but' awakens thore a 'more or less vivid colour-sensation. In the case of some the sensation is ver,v\ vivid, -that a concort ..is not-, only a gale of. music but a storm of prismatic- and rainbow tints. One may judge so.from this avowal, made by one of tho writers:—"A w;altz played Joy-' a string orchestra...or even by a single violin is-to me a succession of beautiful, tints, rosy and pink and yellow;, dancing to and fro, and mixing' with cach other, forming- exquisite "hues Athat ; exist only .for a fraction of ,- a Second ,and are impossibleVto name."" This, one fancies, must be an extreme, ease. But there may be cases where, the cift—if' it is a gift—may be not permanent, butonly occasional and , momentary, and. instances in literature, where sounds are ; described in terms of colour may be in that way accounted for. Hero is -an i instance from Carlyic. Carlyle, describing tho effect produced on a .Drury La-ira audience, by ail actress in the part _of Emilia, declaiming tKo lines

0, the more angel she .' ' ' ' And; you . the..;Wiacker deyil,, says—"The murmur-swelled up -from ' the' wuoie audience iuto a paisioiijie burst':ofapprotrql, • the voices of'tpe : men rising—in yuur imagination—like a-red mountain,-.-witu che Women's voices tfoatlU(j round it .iko a bluo-vapour, you miglit' say. | 1, hfe'vei' "litirrrf anything'liiiS it:J' . iiere; 'surely, the visualisation of'.tlie deep' voices as a mountain—a red liiountain—and of , the softer voiced as a scarf or' vapour—oluo vapour—is a instance of •'colour-tuinking." »

'ibu' bearing of colour-tmnkiug . on. literature, hoivevtr, becomes much more direct wheu we consider word-souucis, Vord-souuds also have their colour, and tliere are yellow words, chocolate-coloured words, heliotrope words, and so on, and it is, apparently, tub accented • vowel :that determines' tho colour; i'W,; although , the vowel-spectrum—if one may . call lit so—of one "person is not nece's-r sardy that of ■another, yet in the,c'asb,of people shbjeot ■ to this mental , habit, Leach vowel' has its distinct colour, identity and retains it when embodied in a wold. . Moreover, it subdues tho .word to its own colour, even although tho Word itself is the name of colour. Time in some eases "magenta" does not call up the colour so named; it may call up croen or heliotrope. "Black" may suggest grey and "orange'' black, and so on. Olio can well imagine, accordingly, that when colour-sensations thus persistent aro vivid, a page of poetry will, for better or worse, put? on'new values. On this subject one of tho writers has this interesting statement to make:—"ln certain lines of poetry I 'and coincidences of colour-that give tho\ lines an extra charm. Thus, in E. B. Browning's lines

. Sweet, sweet, 0 Pan, . Piercing sweet by the river, the .dazzling whiteness of the 'ee' sound is exactly'the colour produced by tho sound of the top notes of a liute. . . .;A much better exainplo would-be 1 tho last verso of .Robert Louis Stevenson's 'iN'orth-West I'assage':— ; ' The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp, The snadow of the boy who goes to bed, > AH the.-wicked shadows going tramp, tramp, ■ otramp, - •And tiie black night overhead. Here the" very dark colour of tho 'a' sound in •shadow,' 'lamp/- 'tramp,.' "black,' etc., stands out prominently, and the verse, looked at as a whole, has a black and sinister'appearance, very suggestive'of : bogles.' i hud a great many.' passages of this -kind in It.L.S. and in other poets, notably. Keats. Tennyson's vowel music, on the other hand, does not appeal to me so much, e.g., the beautiful lino' iit the • The moan of doves in immemorial elms, loses just a littlo of its charm through the fact "tiiat the predominant-, vowel sound in. it is 'o,' which to' me is chocolate-coloured, whoreis the cooing of doves-is a light blue!"