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IN THE KEY OF BLUE AND OTHER PROSE ESSAYS - these Essays have not yet appeared in print. Others are republished from the l brtn ht v, Contc npomry, and New Reviews one from the i Century Guild 110 bby-110 rse . There is an irrtetvnl of more than thirty years betwectn the earliest of the senes, Cltyton and a Lads LOLJPa, t a d the latest. I have trj4J to make ilre sekpction representative of the dlft rent ki zds of work in rtrluiclr Z have been phcr ally engageti-GrrcK and Arttaissance Literafut-u, D scr tion of Places, Translatiott, C-itrcism, Originnl 2 c r. s. -- CONTENTS -- CLIFTON AN D A LADS L OVE . . . . . 155 NOTES O F A SOMERSETSH H IR O E M E . . . . 177 IN THE KEY OF BLUE THE nomenclature of colour in literature has always puzzled me. It is easy to talk of green, blue, yellow, red. But when we seek to distinguish the tints of these hues, and to accentuate the special timbre of each, we are practically left to suggestions founded upon metaphor and analogy. We select some object in nature-a gem, a flower, an aspect of the sky or sea-which possesses the particular quality we wish to indicate. We talk of grass-green, apple-green, olivegreen, emerald-green, sage-green, jade-green of sapphire, forget-me-not, turquoise, gentian, ultramarine, sky-blue of topaz, gold, orange, citron of rose and cherry, ruby and almandine, blood and flame. Or else we use the names of substances from which the pigments are compounded as yellow-ochre, burnt-sienna, cadmium, lampblack, verdigris, vermilion, madder, cinnabar. To indicate very subtle gradations, the jargon of commerce supplies us liberally with terms like mauve, magenta, eau-de-Nile, peacock, merdadoca, Prussian-blue, crushed strawberry, Vcnetian-red, gris-de-perle, and so fbrth to infinity. It is obvious that for purely literary purposes these designations have a very unequal value. Some of them are inadmissible in serious composition. The most precise often fail by interpreting what is absent from the readers mental eye thiough what is unknown to his intelligence. Not everybody is familiar with jade, cadmium, almandine, NiIe-water. What the writer wants would be a variety of broad terms to express the species tints of each genus hue. In such terms some of the colours are richer than others. Green, I think, is the poorest of all. After verdant, it has to be contented with compounds of itself, like pea-green and those which I have cited above. The Greeks had no generic name for green except one which also meant pale. Next to this they used an adjective derived from the kek. Blue fares better with its azure, cerulean, celestial, amethystine. Yellow is still more fortunate, rejoicing, in golden, saffron, orange, flaxen, tawny, blonde. Red stands at the head of the list, possessing a copious voca-. bulal-y of ruddy, rosy, russet, crimson, scarlet, pink, sanguine, mulberry, carnation, blushing. It will be noticed that all these words denominating tints are eventually derived from substances which have been accepted into common parlance. In one shape or another, for example, blood and the rose contribute largely to the phraseology of red. The poverty of language upon which I am insisting is not wholly disadvantageous to a stylist. It forces him to exercise both fancy and imagination in the effort to bring some special tint before the mental vision of the reader while all the branches of knowledge at his command, evenheraldry, are laid under contribution in turns. These thoughts were in my mind at Venice, where the problem of colour gradations under their most subtle aspect presents itself on all sides to the artist...