62 PROSERPINA. 



for a week, and could force him to try to copy a feather by 

 Bewick, or to draw for himself a boy's thumbed marble, his 

 notions of feathers, and balls, would be changed for all the rest 

 of his life. But his ignorance of good art is no excuse for the 

 acutely illogical simplicity of the rest of his talk of colour in 

 the "Descent of Man." Peacocks' tails, he thinks, are the re- 

 sult of the admiration of blue tails in the minds of well-bred 

 peahens, and similarly, mandrills' noses the result of the 

 admiration of blue noses in well-bred baboons. But it never 

 occurs to him to ask why the admiration of blue noses is 

 healthy in baboons, so that it develops their race properly, 

 while similar maidenly admiration either of blue noses or red 

 noses in men would be improper, and develop the race im- 

 properly. The word itself c proper ' being one of which he haa 

 never asked, or guessed, the meaning. And when he imagined 

 the gradation of the cloudings in feathers to represent succes- 

 sive generation, it never occurred to him to look at the much 

 finer cloudy gradations in the clouds of dawn themselves ; and 

 explain the modes of sexual preference and selective develop- 

 ment which had brought them to their scarlet glory, before 

 the cock could crow thrice. Putting all these vespertilian 

 speculations out of our way, the human facts concerning col- 

 our are briefly these. Wherever men are noble, they love 

 bright colour ; and wherever they can live healthily, bright 

 colour is given them in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures. 



On the other hand, wherever men are ignoble and sensual, 

 they endure without pain, and at last even come to like 

 (especially if artists,) mud-colour and black, and to dislike 

 rose-colour and white. And wherever it is unhealthy for them 

 to live, the poisonousness of the place is marked by some 

 ghastly colour in air, earth or flowers. 



There are, of course, exceptions to all such widely founded 

 laws ; there are poisonous berries of scarlet, and pestilent skies 

 that are fair. But, if we once honestly compare a venomous 

 wood-fungus, rotting into black dissolution of dripped slime 

 at its edges, with a spring gentian ; or a puff adder with a 

 salmon trout, or a fog in Bermondsey with a clear sky at 

 Berne, we shall get hold of the entire question on its right 



