The Colour of Life

								

sheds the slough of nameless colours--all allied to the hues of dust,
soot, and fog, which are the colours the world has chosen for its
boys--and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush between
the grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky.  Clothed now with the sun, he
is crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and the
reflection of an early moon is under his feet.
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 Eleonora Duse.  The last and
most finished action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is, as it
were, the flicking away of some insignificant thing mistaken for art by
other actors, some little obstacle to the way and liberty of Nature.
All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot, and
the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking colour
of life.  You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he still
shouts with a Cockney accent.  You half expect pure vowels and elastic
syllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness, his
brightness, and his glow.  Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening
midsummer sun, he gives his colours to his world again.
It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature
has lapsed, to replace Nature.  It is always to do, by the happily easy
way of doing nothing.  The grass is always ready to grow in the
streets--and no streets could ask for a more charming finish than your
green grass.  The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless it is
renewed; but the grass renews itself.  There is nothing so remediable as
the work of modern man--"a thought which is also," as Mr Pecksniff said,
"very soothing."  And by remediable I mean, of course, destructible.  As
the bathing child shuffles off his garments--they are few, and one brace
suffices him--so the land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle off
its yellow brick and purple slate, and all the things that collect about
railway stations.  A single night almost clears the air of London.
But if the colour of life looks so well in the rather sham scenery of
Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and grave indeed on a real sea-coast.  To
have once seen it there should be enough to make a colourist.  O
memorable little picture!  The sun was gaining colour as it neared
setting, and it set not over the sea, but over the land.  The sea had the
dark and rather stern, but not cold, blue of that aspect--the dark and
not the opal tints.  The sky was also deep.  Everything was very
definite, without mystery, and exceedingly simple.  The most luminous
thing was the shining white of an edge of foam, which did not cease to be
white because it was a little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine.
It was still the whitest thing imaginable.  And the next most luminous
thing was the little child, also invested with the sun and the colour of