The Play of Man. Karl Groos
“The first delight in coloured objects is hardly distinguishable from the primordial delight in brightness.”118 Raehlmann thinks, however, judging from the child’s positions and actions, that one can—though not till considerably later than the fifth week—be sure that it perceives a difference between objects of similar form and complementary colour.119 And it is probably quite safe to assume that there is pleasure in gay colours by the end of the first three months.
Here we are met at once by the question, Does the child prefer any particular colours? Most observers agree that the child displays more interest in the warm colours—red and yellow—than in the colder ones.120 Baldwin, on the contrary, found from his experiments with a baby nine months old (not using yellow, however) that blue was chosen oftenest.121 Although Preyer denies the validity of Baldwin’s experiment, it seems to me quite possible that here, as well as elsewhere, there is room for the manifestation of individual preference.122 The choice of yellow and red can hardly be a necessary one. For example, I find Grosse’s rule, that children will always empty the vermilion cup in a paint box first and will, when allowed to choose, always take a flaming red, by no means invariable. Marie G—— (five years old) turns oftener to the blue in her paint box than to the red. She herself pointed out lilac as her favourite colour, and weeks before my question she persisted in using bits of lilac silk in her embroidery, though her mother had taken them away from her. Having chosen the lilac, she however added, after a pause for reflection, “Red is pretty, too.” Another little girl, Deti K——, at the same time answered the question as to what colour she liked best, “Lilac too, but bright.” Still another named first lilac, then rose, and after these red and yellow. I consider it not improbable that in many children of fine sensibility the stimulus of crude red and yellow is too strong to be particularly agreeable. This supposition perhaps explains the exceptions to the rule, and also seems to interfere with the likening of children to savages, which was formerly so useful. Observations of the children of such tribes have never been made, to my knowledge.
Before going on, however, to consider the case of savages, we must look briefly into the problem suggested by the fact that there is choice of any colour. The child’s susceptibility to the cooler colours, and even its perception of them, especially blue and gray, has been questioned. Preyer says: “The inability of my two-year-old child to recognise blue and gray can be argued not only from his occasional failure to do so, but also from the evident difficulty he encounters in connecting the commonly used and familiar names ‘blue’ and ‘gray’ with any special sensations, while ‘yellow’ and ‘red’ were correctly applied several months ago. Were the sensations of blue and gray as clear as those of red and yellow there would be no failure to recognise the colours. The child does not know what green and blue mean, though he does know red and yellow. … Even at four years blue was oftener called green in the morning twilight, though to me it was clearly blue. The child was greatly astonished to find that his blue stocking had become gray overnight. For years very dark green was called black.”123 These striking observations seem indeed partially to confirm the hypothesis of Geiger, Gladstone, and Magnus, who came to the conclusion, from the study of ancient picture writing, that primeval man distinguished only the three primary colours (the Young-Helmholtz theory)—red, green, and violet. From these were derived orange and yellow, while blue was the very last to be discovered. Yet, indeed, so far as any philological support is concerned, the hypothesis can hardly be maintained either in regard to the ancients or to modern low-standing tribes.
In the remains of buildings and plastic works, which are older than any picture writings, traces are found of all the colours of the spectrum, and the philological test, when applied to civilized peoples, does not yield the confirmation which advocates of the theory desire. While it is true that the Esthonians have no word of their own for blue (their sini is borrowed from the Russian), but the apparent deduction from that fact is rendered doubtful, to say the least, by this passage from Raehlmann: “Some time ago I tested an old Esthonian peasant woman with a gray starling. She was not quite sure of the name of the colour, and changed it often. On closer questioning about her ideas of colour, she seemed to have the spectral series correctly in mind, distinguishing the colours as blood, wax, grass, and sky. She had never needed other terms with which to express her sensations, but she took pains to convince me that she had perfectly clear ideas on the subject of colour.”124
But how is it with the savage tribes? Here we find, indeed, that for the painting of their bodies, as well as for other ornaments, the warm colours are almost exclusively chosen. Besides black and white, hardly any other colours than red and yellow are found at all. “The Australian has always, in his bag of kangaroo skin, a supply of white clay and of red and yellow ochre. For ordinary occasions he contents himself with dabs on cheeks, shoulders, and breast; on holidays he paints his whole body.”125
Bushmen rub their faces and hair with red ochre; red is the Fire Islander’s favourite. Other savages use, with deep blue-black, a blazing vermilion, a combination which imparts to their faces the wildest and most forbidding expression. Among the famous discoveries which Fraas has described so well126 was a lump of kneaded paste about as big as a nut, compounded of iron rust and reindeer fat, and intensely red in colour. Probably every huntsman of the Ice period had one of these to colour his body with. The same colours are chosen for their other ornaments as well. The Australians stripe their girdles and neck and brow bands with red, white, and yellow, and the same or similar colours are in demand with the Bushmen and Fire Islanders. Among the Botoku red feathers, as the most costly decoration, form the insignia of rank. Others wear yellow feathers in the hair, and the same ornament floats above the brow of the Australian hunter. The cool colours are scarcely ever seen in primitive ornamentation, even in combination with red and yellow. Blue decorations are extremely rare, and the Eskimo’s lip wedge of green nephrite is quite unique in colour.127 From this brief survey we reach the conclusion that primitive man is not so sensitive as we are to the stimulus of the colder colours. In the painting of the body and some other ornamentation the prevalence of red and yellow may be partly attributed to the more general distribution of these pigments, but such a reason can not be assigned in the case of feathers, and we can not therefore deny the probability that for the savage simple green and blue lack the charm which they possess for the cultivated eye.128 That the cooler colours are imperfectly perceived, however, is an unwarranted supposition in the provisional stage which our knowledge of the subject has up to the present time attained.129 With them, as with children, probably the cooler colours fail to arrest their attention and excite their interest as they do ours. Whether this is the result of a kind of colour blindness or whether it is due solely to the intensive emotional effect of the warm colours it is difficult to say. The extraordinary want of susceptibility to reflected colour displayed by educated adults proves that the lack of æsthetic interest may assume the form of partial colour blindness. There are thousands, for example, who have never noticed the intense blue of a shaded cement road under a clear sky, although they may have seen it a hundred times. And they will complain bitterly of the gross inaccuracy of a picture which faithfully reproduces what is actually before them.
We may not dwell on the pleasure that is derived from colour in natural scenery, in ornament and in clothing, in the arts and industries, for the theme is practically inexhaustible, and we would hardly have space for even the baldest enumeration of its leading divisions. It would, for example, be well worth while to trace the historical development of the various standards of taste in such matters, to which this pleasure has at different times conformed. The special emphasis given to colour in the last decade has deeply influenced our poetry, and is characteristically illustrated in the writings of Jacobsen and G. Keller. The following passage from Martin Salander could hardly have been written in any century before the present one: “The setting sun, whose level rays shone through the handsome dining room, glittered on the golden lining of a large beaker, which stood before him, freshly filled with ruddy wine. The yellow gleam shot with indescribable beauty through the heart of the rich red transparent fluid. Martin raised his eyes from the glowing colour picture, which, coming direct from the open sky, was like a flaming seal for his thoughts. A sprightly lady sitting opposite him noticed that a rosy shimmer from the cup spread over his animated face, and begged him to sit still, for he looked beautiful. Flattered, he kept his face unmoved while the reflection vibrated with the wine in the cup, for a slight tremor