for colours, you will soon find out how constantly Nature puts
purple and green together, purple and scarlet, green and blue, yellow
and neutral grey, and the like; and how she strikes these
colour-concords for general tones, and then works into them with
innumerable subordinate ones; and you will gradually come to like what
she does, and find out new and beautiful chords of colour in her work
every day. If you _enjoy_ them, depend upon it you will paint them to a
certain point right: or, at least, if you do not enjoy them, you are
certain to paint them wrong. If colour does not give you _intense_
pleasure, let it alone; depend upon it, you are only tormenting the eyes
and senses of people who feel colour, whenever you touch it; and that is
unkind and improper. You will find, also, your power of colouring depend
much on your state of health and right balance of mind; when you are
fatigued or ill you will not see colours well, and when you are
ill-tempered you will not choose them well: thus, though not infallibly
a test of character in individuals, colour power is a great sign of
mental health in nations; when they are in a state of intellectual
decline, their colouring always gets dull.[242] You must also take great
care not to be misled by affected talk about colour from people who have
not the gift of it: numbers are eager and voluble about it who probably
never in all their lives received one genuine colour-sensation. The
modern religionists of the school of Overbeck are just like people who
eat slate-pencil and chalk, and assure everybody that they are nicer and
purer than strawberries and plums.

Take care also never to be misled into any idea that colour can help or
display _form_; colour[243] always disguises form, and is meant to do
so.

It is a favourite dogma among modern writers on colour that "warm
colours" (reds and yellows) "approach" or express nearness, and "cold
colours" (blue and grey) "retire" or express distance. So far is this
from being the case, that no expression of distance in the world is so
great as that of the gold and orange in twilight sky. Colours, as such,
are ABSOLUTELY inexpressive respecting distance. It is their _quality_
(as depth, delicacy, &c.) which expresses distance, not their tint. A
blue bandbox set on the same shelf with a yellow one will not look an
inch farther off, but a red or orange cloud, in the upper sky, will
always appear to be beyond a blue cloud close to us, as i