HYMN TO COLOUR

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 132, 5 June 1937, Page 26

HYMN TO COLOUR

A BRIGHTER WORLD

THAN GOOD NEWS"

CORONATION REFLECTIONS

for the "Evening Post" by

A.M.) If you look along a certain street Sn Wellington you will see at the end of it a tall new building coloured pink. Framed in the street-end on a bright day it catches the eye more then than it does when you pass it. Its design is striking, but not so striking as the architect's deliberate choice of colour. The arrested beholder may think of that one line by which alone an English poet lives—"Some rose-red city half as old as . time." A generation ago—less than that—the building would have shown a plain stucco front as a matter of course. The new railway station is : warm with colour, and nearby the gradually developing form of a new hotel is taking on an unconventional light green. In its domestic architecture the city is showing more and more brightness;, we are blossoming, if not in purple and red, like the meadows in "Maud," at any rate in reds and greens and oranges. Taste is changing. We are rediscovering colour. .•' :. ' ■ :"- THE CORONATION BLAZE. Into the time of discovery the Core* nation burst, in triumph. What the colour of the London scenes must have been like we, at this distance, can only imagine, but those are helped jn the process who have seen the changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace or Whitehall,' or a musical ride at the Military Tournament. The climax came in the Abbey itself when dress, vestment and uniform,- ribbon and cloth of gold, blazed in the marvellous setting of the Abbey's dim religious light, its immemorial history, its-loveliness and mystery. The world has no sight comparable to it—this mixture of colour with architectural •beauty and the history of Church and State. But all over the Empire we sang our hymn to colour that day. Troops marched and banners were hung out. "Terrible as,an army with banners"; might not we say also "beautiful as an army with banners ? Perhaps it depends on the mood. I think we all felt better for Coronation wee*. We had expressed our loyalty to a living Sovereign and to a mystical ideal, and we had shared a common emotion. But more than that; we, had enjoyed colour. Wellington was something to remember that Wednesday, with its blue sky, the stabbing beauty of its hills and sea, and the ■bright gestures.of its decorations. The city was steeped in colour. COLOUR RESURRECTED. I Have already quoted in this col-umn,the-verse from Chesterton s Trie Ballad of the White Horse," which the author wrote out for me as his lavourite. Her face was like an open word ■When brave men speak and choose. The very colours of her coat Were better than good news. It is too apt to my present Purpose not to be quoted again. "Better than good news." Colour can be good news; that is the rediscovery we see today The industrial revolution of nSenth-century England buried colour under palls of smoke and heaps "dland slag. I. am no violent reiecter of the Victorians, perhaps because I was born and brought up in the end of that much-maligned age. No one, however, would dispute that Sde^age^wK^elsn^ as dress. We have even Pa^edttg Chinese and the Japanese to shed their picturesque, dignified, and comfortable attire and dress themselves in •Western tubes. v 1 NOT RESPECTABLE. But Britain today is a much more colourful country than it was in the middle' of /last century. Later than Sat, when.l was a-boy. colour was downed upon.. Our furniture was drab,' and so were our clothes. Our houses were ugly or at best nondescript, and to paint them m bright ■ colours would have been regarded as sinful. For a woman to wear red was regarded as not quite respectable. Today, well,; look at any crowd. Look at^the' stands at a tennis^match and note the .delightful patches of colour. Women wear colour as if a right, and men are haltingly following their example, even if they do put some of " the colour; into the ugliest garments ever designed-plus fours. Our homes are'brighter, inside and out. We put bright colours on walls. We sport green and red doors. We paint roofs green We live in yellow houses. Our gardens and parks are much gayer, and if we cannot.grow flowers we buy them. We plant great splashes of bright red and orange. I remember when I first came to Wellington being Struck by the "distant sight of a huge orange patch on Mount Victoria, which I thought at first was the roof pi a large house. It was somebody's garden. Auckland has a street planted with Australian red gums; Wellington has added to its colour by wise planting of pohutukawal WRITERS AND ARTISTS. This new appreciation we owe largely to the poet and the artist. In the Victorian age they revolted against the neglect and condemnation of colour. They told Mr. Gradgrind that man did not live by facts alone. They went back, past the Puritanism that was partly responsible for Victorian drabness, to the childlike love of colour of the Middle Ages. As painters the pre-Raphaelites left less of a mark than they hoped, but they influenced taste. Against the background of much-vaunted industrialism their pictures glowed like Crown regalia. William Morris, in Cheste: .h's phrase, brawled for art, as some men brawl for beet. He 'wrote and painted in tapestry. In his passion for colour he plunged his arms into dyeing vats. Even the ascetic Christina Rossetti let her love of colour run riot: Raise me a dais of silk and down; .Hang X with vair and purple dyes; jCarTe it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes, jvork it in gold and silver grapes. In leaves and siK-r fleurs-de-lys 1 Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me. PRIMARY. COLOURS. The aesthetic school of Wilde and Whistler broke away from primary colours and used the intermediates that ar^ satirised in "Patience." The uniforms of the dragoons were too crude for the maidens' taste. • Duke: We didn't design our uniforms, but *Vn°e" Vo e° w^dn' Ct oUlrsm,, 'TZZt a Velvet 'with' a tender bloom like cold gravy, which made Florentine fourteenth century, trimmed with Venetian leather and Spanish lace, and -surmounted with something

bo early English I

Primary colours, however, are not to be denied. In the last generation they have come into their own again. There is a directness, a simplicity about them, which no mixture can supply. Indeterminate colours would not have satisfied the Nicaraguan patriot in "The Napoleon of Notting Hill," who walked in London clad in a uniform of brilliant green, splashed with silver facings, and added to it his country's colours by tearing a strip of yellow off a hoarding and soaking his handkerchief in his own blood.

Can you not understand the ancient sanctity of colours? The Church has her symbolic colours. And think of niiat colours mean to us—think of the position of one like myself, who can see nothing but these two colours, nothing but the red and the yellow. To me all shapes are equal, all common and noble things are in a democracy of combination. .Wherever there Is a field of maristolds and the red cloak of an old woman, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a field of poppies- and a yellow patch of sand, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a lemon and a red sunset there my heart beats. Blood and a splash of mustard can be my heraldry. If there be yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is belter lo me than white stars. SYMBOLISM OF COLOURS. In England there is a body called the British Colour Council, and shortly beiore the Coronation .it issued a treatise on the psychological significance of basic colours. Red, so says this publication, is the colour of fire and blood, and denotes action and enthusiasm'—also danger and revolution. It might be added that it signifies both sin (see "The Scarlet Letter") and redemption. Blue is said to have an intellectual and spiritual appeal. It represents truth and reflection—and, on its'bad, side, hardness and cruelty and lack of affection. You may have noticed that there is a type of hard blue eye. Yellow is the colour of splendour and radiance, or, on the opposite, account, sickness and separation. Orange combines the virtue of red and yellow; green combines the wisdom and peace of-blue with the unity and eternity of yellow. Purple, combining red and blue, blends, -the; .physical with the spiritual. COLOUR AND MAN. This is the individuality of colour. The general relation of colour to life was treated by a great Victorian, George Meredith. In his splendid "Hymn to Colour" he says:— Look.now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes The house of heaven splendid for the bride. To him as leaps a fountain she awakes. In knotting arms, yet boundless: him beside, She holds the flower to heaven, and by his power Brings heaven to < the flower. He gives her homeliness in desert air, And sovereignty in spaciousness; he leads Through widening chambers of surprise to where Throbs rapture near an end that aye recedes. Because his touch is infinite and lends A yonder to all ends. That is the way with the Victorians: when you think you have them, they can produce witnesses to the contrary. There was not a weakness,or a vice in that age that was not denounced by his prophetic voices, which makes generalising about the Victorians dangerous. This Victorian voice may have the last word. The householder who paints his front door a vivid green or spreads creepers with orange flowers over a bank in the garden may not philosophise about bridegrooms and brides, but he is in the great tradition of colour-worship. Like the preRaphaelites at one end of the scaie. and the window-gardening slum-dwel-lev at the other, he seeks beauty.