316 COLOURED THINKING 



chromes that is very striking. But it is not alone letters 

 and words that are habitually thought of as coloured, certain 

 coloured thinkers always associate a particular colour with 

 their thoughts about a particular person. 



The author of "The Corner of Harley Street" (^^) remarks 

 (p. 251) "If only we could use colours now to express our 

 deeper attitude on these occasions, as some of your fellow 

 clergy wear stoles at certain seasons, with what pleasant 

 impunity could we write to one another in yellow or purple 

 or red, leaving black for the editor of the Times or the plumber 

 whose bill we are disputing." 



"Our alphabet is not rich enough for the notation of the 

 cockney dialect", writes Mr. Richard Whiting in No. 5 

 John Street, "I can but indicate his speech system by a 

 stray word which, if there is anything in the theory of the 

 correspondence between sounds and colours, should have 

 the effect of a stain of London mud." This is evidently 

 an allusion to coloured thinking. There is, unfortunately, 

 no theory at all as yet, but there is the fact of chromatic 

 conception. Quite recently (1913) there was in the "British 

 Review" (^^)a vivacious article dealing with coloured thinking 

 from the popular standpoint. The literature that contains 

 the most systematic discussion of coloured thinking is that 

 of the decadent poets of France, the symbolists, as they 

 are called. Some account of their psychochromes is given 

 in Lombroso's "Man of Genius"(^°). The eccentric poet, 

 Paul Verlaine, belonged to this school. It evidently includes 

 synsesthetes as well as coloured thinkers for, for them, the 

 organ is black, the harp white, the violin blue, the trumpet 

 red, and the flute yellow. But they think of the vowel "a" 

 as black, "e" as, white, "i" blue, "o" red, and "u" yellow. 

 One of them, Stephane Mallarme, has explained in his 

 pamphlet Traite du Verhe how these things have come 

 to be. 



