504 APPENDIX TO PART II

part a disobedient leaf suddenly appeared out of the ordinary and expected line, and all who saw the change could not but feel thankful to the unruly leaf for the excellent effect it had produced.

37. Passing from the laws affecting the management of colour, he proceeded to point out what colours ought to be used. The best lesson in colour to which he could point was a sunset. The clouds were scarlet, golden, purple, white, grey, but not crimson, except in stormy weather. Crimson was a colour which rarely occurred,-when it did, almost always giving the idea of a bloody hue; and it was curious to notice how, in the cactus speciosissimus and some other flowers, the purple, passing from scarlet, rarely, if ever, touched crimson. But one, at least, of the most beautiful of flowers in nature was crimson-viz., the rose; and the blush on the cheek was the most beautiful of colours, but the crimson which they displayed was always associated with the idea of life.¹ There were undoubtedly cases in which crimson could be used with the greatest success, and one of the finest windows which he had ever seen was one at the western end of Chartres Cathedral,² of the twelfth century, upon which “gouts” of blood appeared to have been dropped. Nothing could exceed the richness and beauty of this window beneath the gorgeous rays of the sunset. Blues, whites, scarlets, yellows, and greys were all colours of the clouds-of heaven; fixed green and a particular kind of ashy buff were the colours of the earth. All that was calculated to attract the mind in this peculiar art of illumination was to be found in the colours of heaven. The golden, scarlet, white, russet, purple, and grey colours all kept to the sky; the greens and the buffs to earth. There was, too, a sort of bluish green in the sky; and, as a general rule, greens should be always tinted and tempered with blue. The earthy, ashy, buff colour of earth-the ugliest of all colours-was pre-eminently the one used in this boasted nineteenth century. Some attempts of a most praiseworthy nature were being made to improve the colour of the ordinary tiles for architectural purposes, and a manufacturer of those tiles had covered the whole front of his house with them, where they would have had a most excellent effect, had he not, with the worst possible taste, made the ground of the whole of them this ugliest of all colours.

38. The purple was a colour to which great importance was attached by the ancients.³ The old Greek purple was unquestionably not of a scarlet hue, but a deep and sombre colour. In the Odyssey, Menelaus, in his interview with the sea-king Proteus, when told of the assassination of Agamemnon, is represented as going away sad. Homer says his mind became purple.⁴ Many persons would suppose it meant “crimsoned” over with blood. But this was not the meaning intended to be conveyed; for in one part of the Iliad he describes the sinking and darkness which came

¹ [Compare Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. iii. § 24.]

² [See Letters, above, on “Painted Glass,” p. 438.]

³ [Compare Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xiv. §§ 43, 44 and Queen of the Air, §§ 91 seq.]

⁴ [polla de hoi kradih porfnre kionti: Odyssey, iv. 572. The following references are Iliad, v. 83 (porfnreoV qanatos); xiv. 16 (wo d ote porfurh pelagoV); xiii. 703 (boe oinope); i. 350 (oinopa ponton); iv. 141 (wo d ote tis t’ elefanta gunh foiniki nihnh MhoniV he Kaeira). Ruskin quotes this last passage in Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 130 n.]

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