The one sways us only through the imagination, the
other through our senses as well.
Sensitiveness to color as such, so self-evident to one who possesses
it, seems to be wanting, except in rudimentary fashion, in a great
many people. They are probably few, however, who do not feel some
stirrings when they look through the stained glass of a cathedral
window or upon the red of Venetian glass, or who are entirely
indifferent to the color of silk. The reason for emotional
color-blindness is probably not a native incapacity to be affected,
but rather a diversion of attention; color has come to be only a sign
for the recognition and subsequent use of things, a signal for a
practical or intellectual reaction. In our haste to recognize and use
we fail to see, and give ourselves no time to be moved by mere seeing.
But when, as in art, contemplation, the filling of the mind with the
object, is the aim, the power to move of the sensuous surface of things
may come again into its rights.
The emotional response to color, vague and abstract and objectless,
is, like music, incapable of adequate expression in words, and for the
same reason. Words are capable of expressing only the larger and fairly
well-defined emotions; such subtle shadings and complex mixtures of
feeling as are conveyed by color and sound are mostly beyond their
ken. Colors make us feel and dream as music does in the same
incommunicable fashion. Or rather the only possibility of communicating
them is through the color schemes arousing them.
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