THE PSYCHOLOGY OF YELLOW 461 



. Yellow became the color of jealousy, of envy, of treachery. Judas 

 was painted in yellow garments and in some countries Jews were com- 

 pelled to be so dressed. In France in the sixteenth century the doors 

 of traitors and felons were daubed with yellow. In Spain heretics 

 who recanted were enjoined to wear a yellow cross as a penance and 

 the inquisition required them to appear at public autos da fe in peni- 

 tential garments and carrying a yellow candle. 14 



There is a special reason why Christianity should have viewed yellow 

 with suspicion. It had been the color associated with wanton love. 

 In the beginning the association was with legitimate love ; it has already 

 been noted that in classic times the bride's garments were yellow, while 

 in the Iliad as well as in the Indian Gitagovinda, a bed of saffron is 

 prepared for lovers. But in Greece, and to a still more marked extent 

 in Eome, the courtezan began to take advantage of this association. 

 The Greek hetaira and her Eoman successor wore saffron-colored frocks 

 and dyed their hair yellow. That professional custom of dyeing the 

 hair has to some extent persisted, as we know, among their successors 

 for more than two thousand years, throughout the middle ages to the 

 present, and the injunction of Menander (as quoted by Clement of 

 Alexandria), 'No chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow,' has 

 been a perpetual refrain among the fathers of the church. It was as a 

 reflection of the evolution of yellow in this direction that it became the 

 symbolic color of inconstancy and adultery. 



The outcome of the history of yellow during these two thousand 

 years has been a curious opposition and contrast in the emotions it 

 suggests. On the one hand, the affective tone of yellow in general 

 has slowly become for most people either negatively indifferent or posi- 

 tively unpleasant. But the primitive and classic glorification of yellow 

 has not absolutely died out. It has only concentrated itself around the 

 word ' golden.' We see this mixed attitude reflected in the poets. 

 They use the word ' yellow ' with extreme parsimony as compared with 

 their profuse employment of ' red,' 15 but ' gold ' and ' golden ' con- 

 stantly recur, and always with an emotional suggestion of beauty and 

 splendor and joy. This is, for example, very marked in Keats. Even, 

 however, in the use of ' golden/ it is still possible to trace a latent 

 antipathy to the color yellow. In primitive times — among the Celtic 

 makers of the Irish cycle of legends, for instance — it was the color 

 quite as much as the preciousness of the metal that is felt to be de- 

 sirable. But among our modern poets ' golden ' has come very largely 

 to mean what is beautiful or delightful, with little or no reference to 



14 Lea, ' History of Auricular Confession,' Vol. II., p. 87. 



15 Wordsworth seems somewhat to insist on yellow, and shows a special 

 predilection' for yellow flowers; it was part of his general scheme in rehabili- 

 tating common and despised things. Walt Whitman shows a somewhat similar 

 predilection for ' yellow ' and a disdain of the conventional ' golden.' 



