THE CLOUDS 85 



most closely, say how or when the change has taken 

 place. Yet these changes are slow and their motion 

 abrupt as compared with those that proceed in the 

 tinting of the clouds. To watch the tropical dawn 

 unfolding, from the appearing of the first pale sug- 

 gestion of light overhead, the first hint of the daily 

 miracle about to recur, to note breathlessly how the 

 sombre violet of the night becomes suffused with 

 nameless gradation of colour, rather an infinite series 

 of shades than of positive colour, is to the trained eye 

 at once a delight and a profound sense of impotence, 

 of inability ever to comprehend what colour is or can 

 be. Can you not imagine the artist standing palette 

 on thumb and pencil poised, hardly breathing because 

 of suppressed excitement, the dauntless human soul 

 within determined to endeavour the impossible, until 

 the wearied eye droops in the attempt to convey its 

 impressions to the receptive brain in the presence of 

 such fleeting, such elusive loveliness? And as he 

 gazes entranced there steals into another corner of his 

 brain the sense of defeat, coupled with the assurance 

 that, be his power ever so great, his perceptions ever 

 so keen, he will never be able to satisfy himself that 

 he has grasped, even remotely, the beauty being poured 

 out so lavishly before him, and that however far short 

 his best efforts have fallen of the palpitating reality, 

 the beholder of his picture will scout it as extravagant 

 exaggeration. 



We are told that the Greeks, though their sense of 

 form was perfect, had but little perception of the 

 wonderful gradations of colour. May it not have 

 been rather that, looking upon the sky, they felt in 

 their acutely logical minds the utter impossibility of 



