# Colour-Music: The Art of Mobile Color/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II
THE USES OF COLOUR-MUSIC
Let us, in the first place, consider whether there is likely to be any real use for an art of the kind referred to, and what is the present position with regard to the general feeling for colour.
It may safely be said that hitherto, and especially in modern times, the colour sense has in a very large proportion of people been allowed to lie dormant, and their appreciation of colour in nature and art is extremely limited. This is probably due to there being so few means by which their attention can be directed to colour, apart from the interest it gives to the form of the objects around them. There is, in fact, a general insensitiveness to colour which we will consider more closely farther on.
Supposing an art with colour as its main object were in existence, its other advantages ​and uses, apart from any æsthetic pleasure and satisfaction it might give, are therefore not far to seek.
If any art is practised it tends to develop the faculties upon which it depends for its existence, and a pure colour art would thus help to restore and develop the colour sense. Experiment confirms this assertion.
If the colour sense were stimulated and developed, all those arts into which colour enters would benefit. If the painter had a more sensitive eye for colour, his pictures would be better; the architect, with his colour faculty increased, would deal with colour to more artistic purpose in his buildings; the craftsman would produce better colour patterns in his fabrics, his wall papers, his combinations of decorative tints, his enamels or his glass. If there were better and more harmonious colour in all the arts, the world would at least have gained something. Here, then, apart from its possible artistic and emotional value, per se, is a practical side to a pure colour art and an object for its existence.
It is probable, for various reasons, that at ​the present time any widespread advance in the feeling for colour can only be arrived at by increased special cultivation of the colour faculty, and increased knowledge as to harmonies and contrasts and other qualities of colour; and this cultivation in its wider sense, it is contended, can best be developed by some form of mobile colour art, such, for instance, as that I have called, for want of a better term, "Colour-Music."
Apart from this, there is the increased need of such an art at the present time, because not only has there been neglect of the cultivation of the colour faculty, but because there has been an evident decay of it in most Western nations. Here and there is to be noted some slight revival of the feeling for colour, but in the main there has been a tendency for good colour to disappear from our surroundings, from costume, and from fabrics, from architecture, and from other decorative arts.
This can hardly be denied, and it would almost seem as though an advancing material civilization were inimical to colour, as Nordau and others have asserted. Be this as it may, ​amongst large sections of the population in many nations it is no exaggeration to say that any real feeling for colour has died out. As instances of this, take the working classes of most modern cities and even the peasantry of many European countries, amongst the majority of whom there is no evidence to be found of any real love of colour, and where enjoyment of it, except in its cruder forms, appears to have perished.
This is unquestionably a great loss, and we are only just beginning to realize its consequences and also how much the presence of good colour in our surroundings has to do with our enjoyment of life and even with our mental health. The whole subject of colour as a factor in our lives has been so neglected that its influences are not in the least realized, and it has come to be looked upon by the majority of people as concerning chiefly or solely the painter, the architect, or the decorator, and otherwise as of little importance. The extent to which colour in nature and in art, in its capacity for giving pleasure or pain, in its value for all kinds of ​delicate observations in science, in its artistic and emotional power, and, I might also say, its ethical influence, has been overlooked and neglected is almost beyond belief.
Perhaps this can scarcely be better shown by a single example than by the fact that the Encyclopædia Britannica contains no article upon colour, except from the purely optical and physical standpoint, or as a means of assisting protective devices in animals. There is hardly a word about its uses in art, or upon theories of its harmony and contrast, or those obscure questions of quality, texture, or luminosity, which are so interesting to the artist; still less anything as to the range of its action upon the mind and the emotional faculties.
It is with this emotional side of the subject that the new art of Colour-Music is chiefly concerned, and it is especially through such an art that it is possible to study the influence of colour upon our senses and upon our minds, and, through them, upon our lives.