Morning journal and courier., 1889-04-15
CONCERNING COLOR.
This World Of Ours Would Be a Sor
 ry Place Without Hs.
From the San Francisco Chroniclel


 What would a world, literally, or life, fguratively, be without color? That is something no one ever stops to think about. He has never known 8 world without color. Color has always been an integral part of his existence, and unless he should be smitten with blindness it does not occur to him that he can ever be deprived of it. There are conditions of nature that involve more or less absence of this important constituent of of nature and physical beauty. On cloudy nights the world is perfectly colorless. On cloudy days even. especially in winter, the landscape presents to the eye only cold neg ative tints, unnameable, inde6nable, with a counterpart overhead where the clouds have built up an "under roof of dolefal gray" Such wintry earth and sky are a sort of return to the original chaos, when all was described in the opening chapters of the Bible, whose writer appears to have had @ dim idea of the nebular theory now accepted by all astronomers. A queer state of things prevailed at this remote epoch. What was to be boundless universe with countless suns, planets, moons and asteroids was dis tributed through illimitable space in the form of a fine mist or ether, which we can only think of as gray, it color had then been was upon the face of the deep" It was only when God said. 'tLet there be light" that is, 'Let suns be evolved" that color became possible. Light came gradually into the un- iverse The vast expanse of nebulous mat ter filling bouudless space slowly concsntra- ted into suns, which were at frat faint lu- minous masses resembling, to compare great things with small, will O the wisps in fog As these became condensed light became more intense, heat was generated and color appeared with wonderful and unimagiuable prismstic effects wasting in space, for there were as yet no eyes to see it's iueffable splen- dors.
 All coler was at first prismatic or element al As soon planet was evolved and enveloped in thin film of atmosphere it had blue sky, for the sky is nothing but the effect of the light filtered through the air. As soon a5 there was sea there ap- peared the various shades of marine color. As planets were developed there were seen the rich greens peculiar to vegetation and to an infinite variety of flowers, most of which, with other tints, were little later repeated in the skins of animals and the plumsge of birds. Then the gamut of color seemed 10 be complete At least it remained stationa- ry for many thousands of years, till tho Greeks and Romans discovered new dyes, and two thousand years later when the dyers of Lyons added new shades and combina tions whose name is legion. IL is curious to remember that though the prismatic eolors were among the earliest revelations of light to an eyeless universe, color till the time of Newton was supposed to be property of objects and not of light itself.
 The first human beings had always about them colors that were intense-the rich greens of rank vegetation, the blue ot fath- omless skies, seas presenting wide range of wonderful hues, crimsons and scarlets that seemed like spots of flame in the plumage of birds and tue petals or flowers, tints of yel- low and gold and orange in such sunsets as the world has since never seen. And the first use that they made of color was to ap- ply 1t in the form of pigments to the face or tD ha n fhapoa tractive in peace or more hideous in war. The Assyrians and Egyptians used pigments in semi-srtistio fashion to color certain ob- jects and dyed their garments. The dyeing of draperies had become almost an art in the time of the Hebrews, who had probably learned it from the Phnnicians
 The Phrygian purple had even then be- come favorite color, though perhaps not all the shades of it known afterward to the Romans. It was obtained iron a kind of shellfsh found in the Mediterranean Pur- pie was the royal color. Purple. blue and scarlet were the principal hues seen in the tabernacle. White-as to be white as wool was in Hebraic times the symbol of iuno- cence, as at present.
 The Greeks knew the leading colors, but we are not we'll informed ss to which they preferred. The rich colors of the sea inn pressed Homer profoundly. Draperies of all colors were worn at Athens White, em- broidered fringed with gold, was favor ite fashion for garments. The Romans were acquainted with even greater variety of colors than the Greeks, all of which are still seen in the remains of Mosaics and frescoes.
 They painted their statues, they wore a great assortment of tints in their garments and applied them in different ways to their dwellings, with decided inclination to pur pie and gold After the fall of Rome came chaos, social and artistic. Color disappeared from human existence literally and figura- lively, and things went long way backward toward the original nothingness from which the universe was evolved. Then came the renaissance or new birth in art and litera- ture, out of which developed such a keen sense of color as the world has not since ex- perienced. The Romans knew colors that were enduring, but for richness, brilliancy and durability no painters have surpassed, and probably none have equalled, some of the pre-Raphaelites, notably Perugino. This feeling for color and skill in it's use ran on into succeeding generations of Ra phaels, Titians, Michael Angelos, Tintoret- tos, Veroneses, Domenichinos, Guidos, Mu- rillos and artists of the Dutch and Flemish schools. It was 8 period that it is to be feared will never be repeated. Lives began and went out in color. Human beings sac- rificed themselves to color. Artists like Guido had specialties of color that lived af- | ter them in thousands of pictures painted in \ all countries, and which still exercise po- | tent influence on art
 But in the Greek phrase art is long, and