42 On Architectural Colouring. 



They affect liirn as though he were a stranger to it. Architecture 

 is an intellectual creation. It may delight, attract, and awe the 

 multitude, and no doubt it does; but I doubt the power of the 

 multitude to penetrate the depth of its poetry. It is too exclusively 

 artificial, too abstract, too exclusive of all that is common to external 

 nature, to command all hearts. There is a note wanting in its 

 scale. One touch might bring all the refinement of its calculated 

 symmetry into harmony with nature; one touch might bring the 

 abstractions of human mind into harmony with the feelings of human 

 nature ; one touch alone : and that is, the touch of colour. A cold snow- 

 white rose flushed with the glow of an autumn sun ; a glacier irrides- 

 cent in the level rays of evening, as though it were changed into one 

 great opal : how such beauty charms and draws out an affection 

 warmer than that of mere intellectual. admiration. 



A thing of colour is a thing of life — a colourless thing in nature, if 

 there be one, savours more of death than life. In art a colourless 

 thing is but a passionless abstraction. It may be, in both, pure and 

 lovely even though the idea of life may have no part with it. But as 

 life is better than death, so are things which suggest it ; and so it 

 results that as nature without colour is inconceivable, so art without 

 colour is incomplete. 



How then shall we apply this deduction to architecture ? If 

 its forms have no precedent in Nature, whence are the princi- 

 ples of its colour to be drawn ? I grant the difficulty, particularly 

 at this time when people's eyes are so habituated to the poetry 

 of Puritan whitewash or to Purist nudity, that colour comes 

 upon them as a separate idea, clashing with that of architecture. 

 I am not surprised at it. It is often less their fault than the 

 artist's. Incompetent persons are intrusted with an art, of 

 the delicacy and difficulty of which they have no more idea than 

 their employers. There are few more difficult problems in art than 

 the combination of painting with sculpture and architecture. The 

 result is often most unsatisfactory, and neither artist nor employer 

 knows why, and until the province, not merely ef each art, but of 

 each branch of it, be clearly recognised, both by artists and their 

 patrons, there can be no hope of rescue from that confusion of ideas 



