322 THE COLOUR-SENSE 



Again, when observing little children out in search 

 of wild fruit, first the children of Patagonian savages 

 and later English village children, I have seen them 

 laughing with pleasure at the sight of each other 

 stained red and purple, and then deliberately rubbing 

 the coloured juices over their hands and faces. 



Thus is the love of colour first expressed in us. In 

 the Patagonian this childish expression is continued 

 to the end of life, and men and women paint their 

 faces black and crimson. But it has not stopped there : 

 it has led them to discover and invent permanent 

 mineral dyes with which they dye the bare side of 

 their skin robes with a minute herring-bone pattern 

 in brilliant yellow, red, black and green colours. 



We know how great has been the development in 

 Eastern peoples in this direction, and how perfect 

 their taste, trained for ten thousand years, is in 

 their use of bright colours. This has led a great 

 Englishman to say that Eastern art begins where 

 ours ends — one of the very foolish sayings we are 

 accustomed to receive from our great and wise men. 

 The truth is that most of the art of the East is art 

 arrested, crystallised, in a semi-barbarous state. 



Again, we see in children, civilised and savage, 

 from the polar regions to the tropics and all the 

 world over, whenever a few have met together they 

 chatter like starlings and parakeets about the things 

 that interest them — ^whatever appeals to their sense 

 of fun, of the novel, the grotesque, the beautiful. 

 The little one who mimics his playfellows and elders 

 the best, or gives his relation in the most lucid 



