42 On Architectural Colouring. 
They affect him as though he were a stranger to it. Architecture 
is an intellectual creation. It may delight, attract, and awe the 
multitude, and no doubt it does; but I doubt the power of the 
multitude to penetrate the depth of its poetry. It is too exclusively 
artificial, too abstract, too exclusive of all that is common to external 
nature, to command all hearts. There is a note wanting in its 
scale. One touch might bring all the refinement of its calculated 
symmetry into harmony with nature; one touch might bring the 
abstractions of human mind into harmony with the feelings of human 
nature; one touch alone: and that is, the touch of colour. Acoldsnow- 
white rose flushed with the glow of an autumn sun; a glacier irrides- 
cent in the level rays of evening, as though it were changed into one 
great opal: how such beauty charms and draws out an affection 
warmer than that of mere intellectual admiration. 
A thing of colour is a thing of life—a colourless thing in nature, if 
there be one, savours more of death than life. In art a colourless 
thing is but a passionless abstraction. It may be, in both, pure and 
lovely even though the idea of life may have no part withit. Butas 
life is better than death, so are things which suggest it ; and so it 
results that as nature without colour is inconceivable, so art without 
colour is incomplete. 
How then shall we apply this deduction to architecture? If 
its forms have no precedent in Nature, whence are the princi- 
ples of its colour to be drawn? I grant the difficulty, particularly 
at this time when people’s eyes are so habituated to the poetry 
of Puritan whitewash or to Purist nudity, that colour comes 
upon them as a separate idea, clashing with that of architecture. 
I am not surprised at it. It is often less their fault than the 
artist’s. Incompetent persons are intrusted with an art, of 
the delicacy and difficulty of which they have no more idea than 
their employers. There are few more difficult problems in art than 
the combination of painting with sculpture and architecture. The 
result is often most unsatisfactory, and neither artist nor employer 
knows why, and until the province, not merely ef each art, but of 
each branch of it, be clearly recognised, both by artists and their 
patrons, there can be no hope of rescue from that confusion of ideas 
