But if you have a
healthy negro taste in colour, if you choke your garden with poppies
and geraniums, if you paint your house sky-blue and scarlet,
if you wear, let us say, a golden top-hat and a crimson frock-coat,
you will not only be visible on the greyest day, but you will notice
that your costume and environment produce a certain singular effect.
You will find, I mean, that rich colours actually look more
luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a sombre
background and seem to be burning with a lustre of their
own. Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks.
There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret,
like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.
A bright blue sky is necessarily the high light of the picture;
and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a
grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies
are really the red lost eyes of day; and the sunflower is the
vice-regent of the sun.
Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless;
that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence,
especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise.
Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some
other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white
or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded
of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is
grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they
may still remind us of the morning.
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