Transcribed from the 1897 John Lane edition , emailccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Contents:
The Colour of Life
A Point Of Biography
Cloud
Winds of the World
The Honours of Mortality
At Monastery Gates
Rushes and Reeds
Eleonora Duse
Donkey Races
Grass
A Woman in Grey
Symmetry and Incident
The Illusion of Historic Time
Eyes
Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence,or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeedthe colour of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the actof betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret of life, and not themanifestation thereof. It is one of the things the value of whichis secrecy, one of the talents that are to be hidden in a napkin. The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of thecovered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart andthe pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.
So bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentle colour of lifeis outdone by all the colours of the world. Its very beauty isthat it is white, but less white than milk; brown, but less brown thanearth; red, but less red than sunset or dawn. It is lucid, butless lucid than the colour of lilies. It has the hint of goldthat is in all fine colour; but in our latitudes the hint is almostelusive. Under Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than old ivory;but under the misty blue of the English zenith, and the warm grey ofthe London horizon, it is as delicately flushed as the paler wild roses,out to their utmost, flat as stars, in the hedges of the end of June.
For months together London does not see the colour of life in anymass. The human face does not give much of it, what with features,and beards, and the shadow of the top-hat and chapeau melonof man, and of the veils of woman. Besides, the colour of theface is subject to a thousand injuries and accidents. The popularface of the Londoner has soon lost its gold, its white, and the delicacyof its red and brown. We miss little beauty by the fact that itis never seen freely in great numbers out-of-doors. You get itin some quantity when all the heads of a great indoor meeting are turnedat once upon a speaker; but it is only in the open air, needless tosay, that the colour of life is in perfection, in the open air, “clothedwith the sun,” whether the sunshine be golden and direct, or dazzlinglydiffused in grey.
The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to thelandscape the human colour of life. He is allowed to come outof all his ignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummernorth-west evening, on the borders of the Serpentine. At the strokeof eight he sheds the slough of nameless colours—all allied tothe hues of dust, soot, and fog, which are the colours the world haschosen for its boys—and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright anddelicate flush between the grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky. Clothed now with the sun, he is crowned by-and-by with twelve starsas he goes to bathe, and the reflection of an early moon is under hisfeet.
So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature. They are so quickly restored. There seems to be nothing to do,but only a little thing to undo. It is like the art of EleonoraDuse. The last and most finished action of her intellect, passion,and knowledge is, as it were, the flicking away of some insignificantthing mistaken for art by other actors, some little obstacle to theway and liberty of Nature.
All the squalor is gone in a