|
THE COLOUR OF LIFE
THE COLOUR OF LIFE ALICE MEYNELL Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But
the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence
or of life broken open edited and published. Or if red is indeed
the colour of life it is so only on condition that it is not seen.
Once fully visible red is the colour of life violated and in the
act of betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret of life and not
the manifestation thereof. It is one of the things the value of
which is secrecy one of the talents that are to be hidden in a
napkin. The true colour of life is the colour of the body the
colour of the covered red the implicit and not explicit red of the
living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the
unpublished blood.
So bright so light so soft so mingled the gentle colour of life
is outdone by all the colours of the world. Its very beauty is that
it is white but less white than milk; brown but less brown than
earth; red but less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid but less
lucid than the colour of lilies. It has the hint of gold that is in
all fine colour; but in our latitudes the hint is almost elusive.
Under Sicilian skies indeed it is deeper than old ivory; but under
the misty blue of the English zenith and the warm grey of the
London horizon it is as delicately flushed as the paler wild roses
out to their utmost flat as stars in the hedges of the end of
June.
For months together London does not see the colour of life in any
mass. The human face does not give much of it what with features
and beards and the shadow of the top-hat and chapeau melon of man
and of the veils of woman. Besides the colour of the face is
subject to a thousand injuries and accidents. The popular face of
the Londoner has soon lost its gold its white and the delicacy of
its red and brown. We miss little beauty by the fact that it is
never seen freely in great numbers out-of-doors. You get it in some
quantity when all the heads of a great indoor meeting are turned at
once upon a speaker; but it is only in the open air needless to
say that the colour of life is in perfection in the open air
"clothed with the sun" whether the sunshine be golden and direct
or dazzlingly diffused in grey.
The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to the
landscape the human colour of life. He is allowed to come out of
all his ignominies and to take the late colour of the midsummer
north-west evening on the borders of the Serpentine. At the stroke
of eight he sheds the slough of nameless colours - all allied to the
hues of dust soot and fog which are the colours the world has
chosen for its boys - and he makes in his hundreds a bright and
delicate flush between the grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky.
Clothed now with the sun he is crowned by-and-by with twelve stars
as he goes to bathe and the reflection of an early moon is under
his feet.
So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature.
They are so quickly restored. There seems to be nothing to do but
only a little thing to undo. It is like the art of Eleonora Duse.
The last and most finished action of her intellect passion and
knowledge is as it were the flicking away of some insignificant
thing mistaken for art by other actors some little obstacle to the
way and liberty of Nature.
All the squalor is gone in a moment kicked off with the second
boot and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the
lacking colour of life. You are inclined to wonder that even
undressed he still shouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect
pure vowels and elastic syllables from his restoration his spring
his slenderness his brightness and his glow. Old ivory and wild
rose in the deepening midsummer sun he gives his colours to his
world again.
It is easy to replace man and it will take no great time where
Nature has lapsed to replace Nature. It is always to do by the
happily easy way of doing nothing. The grass is always ready to
grow in the streets - and no streets could ask for a more charming
finish than your green grass. The gasometer even must fall to
pieces unless it is renewed; but the grass renews itself. There is
nothing so remediable as the work of modern man - "a thought which
is also" as Mr Pecksniff said "very soothing." And by remediable
I mean of course destructible. As the bathing child shuffles off
his garments - they are few and one brace suffices him - so the
land might always in reasonable time shuffle off its yellow brick
and purple slate and all the things that collect about railway
stations. A single night almost clears the air of London.
But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery
of Hyde Park it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-
coast. To have once seen it there should be enough to make a
colourist. O memorable little picture! The sun was gaining colour
as it neared setting and it set not over the sea but over the
land. The sea had the dark and rather stern but not cold blue of
that aspect - the dark and not the opal tints. The sky was also
deep. Everything was very definite without mystery and
exceedingly simple. The most luminous thing was the shining white
of an edge of foam which did not cease to be white because it was a
little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine. It was still the
whitest thing imaginable. And the next most luminous thing was the
little child also invested with the sun and the colour of life.
In the case of women it is of the living and unpublished blood that
the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the
curious history of the political rights of woman under the
Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the
fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her but that
seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted
political death. She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the
obscurity of her living hours; but to the hour of her death was
granted a part in the largest interests social national
international. The blood wherewith she should according to
Robespierre have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune was
exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins.
Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies the last and
the innermost - the privacy of death - was never allowed to put
obstacles in the way of public action for a public cause. Women
might be and were duly suppressed when by the mouth of Olympe de
Gouges they claimed a "right to concur in the choice of
representatives for the formation of the laws"; but in her person
too they were liberally allowed to bear political responsibility to
the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. Robespierre thus
made her public and complete amends.
A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY
There is hardly a writer now - of the third class probably not one -
who has not something sharp and sad to say about the cruelty of
Nature; not one who is able to attempt May in the woods without a
modern reference to the manifold death and destruction with which
the air the branches the mosses are said to be full.
But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice
of the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death and
of the dead throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are
they - all the dying all the dead of the populous woods? Where do
they hide their little last hours where are they buried? Where is
the violence concealed? Under what gay custom and decent habit?
You may see it is true an earth-worm in a robin's beak and may
hear a thrush breaking a snail's shell; but these little things are
as it were passed by with a kind of twinkle for apology as by a
well-bred man who does openly some little solecism which is too
slight for direct mention and which a meaner man might hide or
avoid. Unless you are very modern indeed you twinkle back at the
bird.
But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey and
plunder. It is certain that much of the visible life passes
violently into other forms flashes without pause into another
flame; but not all. Amid all the killing there must be much dying.
There are for instance few birds of prey left in our more
accessible counties now and many thousands of birds must die
uncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But if their killing is done so
modestly so then is their dying also. Short lives have all these
wild things but there are innumerable flocks of them always alive;
they must die then in innumerable flocks. And yet they keep the
millions of the dead out of sight.
Now and then indeed they may be betrayed. It happened in a cold
winter. The late frosts were so sudden and the famine was so
complete that the birds were taken unawares. The sky and the earth
conspired that February to make known all the secrets; everything
was published. Death was manifest. Editors when a great man dies
are not more resolute than was the frost of `95.
The birds were obliged to die in public. They were surprised and
forced to do thus. They became like Shelley in the monument which
the art and imagination of England combined to raise to his memory
at Oxford.
Frost was surely at work in both cases and in both it wrought
wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of
a bird and in exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a
soldier - passe encore. But the death of Shelley was not his goal.
And the death of the birds is so little characteristic of them that
as has just been said no one in the world is aware of their dying
except only in the case of birds in cages who again are compelled
to die with observation. The woodland is guarded and kept by a
rule. There is no display of the battlefield in the fields. There
is no tale of the game-bag no boast. The hunting goes on but with
strange decorum. You may pass a fine season under the trees and
see nothing dead except here and there where a boy has been by or a
man with a trap or a man with a gun. There is nothing like a
butcher's shop in the woods.
But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the
wild world. They will not have a man to die out of sight. I have
turned over scores of "Lives" not to read them but to see whether
now and again there might be a "Life" which was not more
emphatically a death. But there never is a modern biography that
has taken the hint of Nature. One and all these books have the
disproportionate illness the death out of all scale.
Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortal
illness. If the man had recovered his illness would have been
rightly his own secret. But because he did not recover it is
assumed to be news for the first comer. Which of us would suffer
the details of any physical suffering over and done in our own
lives to be displayed and described? This is not a confidence we
have a mind to make; and no one is authorised to ask for attention
or pity on our behalf. The story of pain ought not to be told of
us seeing that by us it would assuredly not be told.
...
|
