ADDRESSES ON DECORATIVE COLOUR 499

the subject and desired to follow up the study, Mr. Ruskin concluded by stating that the whole of his remarks had been dictated by a desire to impress upon his audience the practicable nature of his suggestions. He had frequently heard himself called a visionary and an unpractical man. Nothing could be more erroneous. His whole life had been devoted to bringing people down from idealisms and fancies to practical truths. He felt certain that if all who had heard him would acquire the habit of drawing everything that came before them, and which they saw with their own eyes, they would soon attain a power which would make them infinitely happy and honoured by all whose esteem they valued, make them capable of doing a vast amount of good, give them a power of communing with nature, and implant in them a reverence for Him who made both nature and their hearts.

III. THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF COLOUR.

[Delivered Saturday, December 9th, 1854.]

29. THE special points of the lecture were-”The general principles of colour; dignity of pure colour; whereon its power depends; the colours which are the basis of illumination are blue, purple and scarlet, with gold; peculiar power of crimson; value of green, white and black, and modes of their necessary introduction; refinements of intermediate hues in delicate work; review of subject.”

The speaker commenced his remarks by broadly stating that the subject upon which he was about to address his audience was one upon which neither he himself nor anybody else could tell anything which would be of the least value, beyond what every person present could find out for himself by the exercise of that noble faculty which taught Falstaff to run away-he meant “instinct.”¹ Under the circumstances in which Falstaff was placed, to run away was undoubtedly the best thing which he could do. By “instinct,” however, he did not wish to be understood as implying that by which an animal performed acts like to those of men, but that peculiar faculty by which all creatures did particularly that which it was their function to do, as the bee built its combs. In the construction of those hexagonal combs philosophers had discovered certain rules, which they had expressed in mathematical and logical formulæ. But, although the bee constructed his cells in such a manner as most successfully to economise the consumption of wax, yet he was perfectly ignorant of the laws of numerical series, by which the principles upon which he acted could be explained and illustrated by the philosopher. The bee did not know, and did not want to know, these rules: he built his cells by a higher and a nobler teaching. Take a bluebottle, and try to make it build a cell, and all attempts would end as they began-in buzz. Why, then, because we were higher animals, should we act differently from the bee in endeavouring to attain our ends? Neither did higher animals ever do any great

¹ [See 1 Henry IV., Act ii. sc. 4: “Instinct is a great matter. I was a coward on instinct.”]

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