172 THE STONES OF VENICE

distinct and universally apprehended reference to the powers of evil. But I lay no stress on these more occult meanings. The principal circumstance which marks the seriousness of the early Venetian mind is perhaps the last in which the reader would suppose it was traceable;-that love of bright and pure colour which, in a modified form, was afterwards the root of all the triumph of the Venetian schools of painting, but which, in its utmost simplicity, was characteristic of the Byzantine period only; and of which, therefore, in the close of our review of that period, it will be well that we should truly estimate the significance. The fact is, we none of us enough appreciate the nobleness and sacredness of colour.¹ Nothing is more common than to hear it spoken of as a subordinate beauty,-nay, even as the mere source of a sensual pleasure; and we might almost believe that we were daily among men who

“Could strip, for aught the prospect yields

To them, their verdure from the fields;

And take the radiance from the clouds

With which the sun his setting shrouds.”²

But it is not so. Such expressions are used for the most part in thoughtlessness; and if the speakers would only take the pains to imagine what the world and their own existence would become, if the blue were taken from the sky, and the gold from the sunshine, and the verdure from the leaves, and the crimson from the blood which is the life of man, the flush from the cheek, the darkness from the eye, the radiance from the hair,-if they could but see, for an instant, white human creatures living in a white

¹ [Compare Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xiv. § 42, where the love of colour in Dante is discussed as typical of the mediæval mind; vol. iv. ch. iii. § 23, where it is observed that colour is employed in God’s creation “for all that is purest, most innocent and most precious;” and Laws of Fésole, ch. vii., where enjoyment of natural colours is taken as a test of “the rightness of your sense.” See also ch. iv. § 43, p. 109, above, and Appendix 12, p. 457 n., below; and for a “collected system of the various statements made respecting colour in my works,” vol. v. pt. ix. ch. xi. § 8.]

² [Wordsworth: “To the Lady Fleming on seeing the foundation preparing for the erection of Rydal Chapel, Westmoreland,” vi. In the second line, “them” is “him” in the original, and in the fourth, “With” is “In.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]