mental fellows) talking
about the gray streets and the gray lives of the poor. But whatever
the poor streets are they are not gray; but motley, striped, spotted,
piebald and patched like a quilt. Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be
monochrome; and there is nothing of the Celtic twilight about it. As a
matter of fact, a London gutter-boy walks unscathed among furnaces of
color. Watch him walk along a line of hoardings, and you will see him
now against glowing green, like a traveler in a tropic forest; now black
like a bird against the burning blue of the Midi; now passant across a
field gules, like the golden leopards of England. He ought to understand
the irrational rapture of that cry of Mr. Stephen Phillips about "that
bluer blue, that greener green." There is no blue much bluer than
Reckitt's Blue and no blacking blacker than Day and Martin's; no more
emphatic yellow than that of Colman's Mustard. If, despite this chaos
of color, like a shattered rainbow, the spirit of the small boy is not
exactly intoxicated with art and culture, the cause certainly does not
lie in universal grayness or the mere starving of his senses. It lies in
the fact that the colors are presented in the wrong connection, on the
wrong scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive. It is not colors he
lacks, but a philosophy of colors. In short, there is nothing wrong with
Reckitt's Blue except that it is not Reckitt's. Blue does not belong to
Reckitt, but to the sky; black does not belong to Day and Martin, but to
the abyss. Even the finest posters are only very little things on a very
large scale. There is something specially irritant in this way about the
iteration of advertisements of mustard: a condiment, a small luxury;
a thing in its nature not to be taken in quantity. There is a special
irony in these starving streets to see such a great deal of mustard to
such very little meat. Yellow is a bright pigment; mustard is a pungent
pleasure. But to look at these seas of yellow is to be like a man who
should swallow gallons of mustard. He would either die, or lose the
taste of mustard altogether.

Now suppose we compare these gigantic trivialities on the hoardings
with those tiny and tremendous pictures in which the mediaevals recorded
their dreams; little pictures where the blue sky is hardly longer than
a single sapphire, and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch of gold.
The difference here is not merely that poster art is in its nature mo