AND ALLIED CONDITIONS. HARRIS. 321 



then, the uncoloured thought-form of a concept, and people 

 who have psychograms must be strong visualizers. 



The school of symbolist poets in France to which Ghil, 

 Malarme, Rimbaud, and Verlaine belong, appears to lay 

 a great deal of stress on the so-called meaning of colours. 

 The school evidently includes both coloured hearers and 

 coloured thinkers; but, whereas, the majority of coloured 

 "thinkers derive no particular meaning from their psycho- 

 chromes, the symbolists attach considerable significance to 

 the colours which happen to be associated with their thoughts. 

 The different vowels, for instance, mean to them or represent 

 for them particular emotions or states of mind not in virtue 

 of the sound of the vowel but entirely through the related 

 colour. The particular emotion symbolized by any given 

 colour seems to the ordinary person rather arbitrary if we 

 judge by the details in Rimbaud's poem; but we are aware 

 that there has always been a tendency to represent emotional 

 states in terms of the language of colour. Homer spoke of 

 "black pains"; we constantly speak of a black outlook, a 

 black lie, a white lie, a black record, a grey life, a colourless 

 life, and so on. There is, in fact, growing up in England 

 a school of musicians who hold that it should be pos- 

 sible and pleasurable to represent music chromatically. 

 Whether the general public will ever enjoy silent music 

 seems very doubtful, but it is notorious that most people 

 derive a great deal of pleasure from the display of coloured 

 lights, illuminated vapours, coloured steam, "fairy foun- 

 tains", Bengal lights, a house on fire, and similar exhibitions 

 in the open air. People undoubtedly do like to see great 

 surfaces or masses vividly coloured as in the rainbow, the 

 sunrise or sunset, the afterglow on snowy mountains, 

 the streamers of the northern lights, and so forth. But 

 whether they would care to have audible music suppressed 

 and to have offered them a succession of coloured surfaces 

 or patches of colour even following one another in the se- 



