APPENDIX 421 



Language, therefore, leaves it alone, at least such language as enters 

 into literature. 



Xenophanes describes the rainbow by the simplest generic 

 words : 



But while this scientific man was so describing it, practical 

 workmen were weaving all the colours of the rainbow into 

 Athene's peplus. Those workmen must have known how to ask 

 for dyes at the colourman's. Perhaps they used phrases like 

 Venetian red, chrome yellow, verditer, epinards vomis, cadmium, 

 burnt sienna, Vandyke brown, merda d'oca, umber, -peacock blue ; 

 phrases, that is to say, which even now scarcely show their heads 

 in literature. 



Persian poetry affords a parallel instance. It deals with colour 

 broadly, by generalities, by salient tones arresting simple attention. 

 Yet Persian carpets exhibit the finest blending of the most subtly 

 matched and graduated tints. And the older these carpets are, the 

 more are they prized for their exquisite solution of problems in the 

 art of colour. 



With the advance of civilisation to the point which we have 

 reached, the nomenclature of colours becomes more rich, but 

 always, as it were, by haphazard. We talk of pink, lilac, mauve, 

 magenta, lemon, faiun, dove, peacock, gris de perle, always using 

 metaphors from natural objects, or the mere lingo of commerce. 

 And even these words to express tints of colour are employed with 

 diffidence in literature, although literature has grown reckless in 

 its exercise of means for appealing through language to the intellect, 

 and summoning up pictures for the mental eye. 



We are at a different point with regard to colour from that 

 which primitive peoples occupied. The art of painting, critically 

 examined and reflected on, has forced us to distinguish hues. 

 Widely extended commerce in articles of dress and furniture has 

 made its language current. Literature has passed into a descriptive 

 and pictorial stage. Science has drawn attention to the value. 

 which colours possess for the discrimination of substances and the 

 analysis of tissues. Lastly, we have discovered that our lives and 

 deaths depend on colour-blindness, through the employment of 

 coloured lights as railway signals. 



It would be little short of miraculous if, under these influences, 

 the susceptibility to tints of colours, and the corresponding nomen- 

 clature to denote them, were not largely augmented. 



