re
hasty than illumination art; it is not even merely that the ancient
artist was serving the Lord while the modern artist is serving the
lords. It is that the old artist contrived to convey an impression that
colors really were significant and precious things, like jewels and
talismanic stones. The color was often arbitrary; but it was always
authoritative. If a bird was blue, if a tree was golden, if a fish was
silver, if a cloud was scarlet, the artist managed to convey that these
colors were important and almost painfully intense; all the red red-hot
and all the gold tried in the fire. Now that is the spirit touching
color which the schools must recover and protect if they are really to
give the children any imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing. It
is not so much an indulgence in color; it is rather, if anything, a sort
of fiery thrift. It fenced in a green field in heraldry as straitly as a
green field in peasant proprietorship. It would not fling away gold
leaf any more than gold coin; it would not heedlessly pour out purple or
crimson, any more than it would spill good wine or shed blameless blood.
That is the hard task before educationists in this special matter; they
have to teach people to relish colors like liquors. They have the heavy
business of turning drunkards into wine tasters. If even the twentieth
century succeeds in doing these things, it will almost catch up with the
twelfth.

The principle covers, however, the whole of modern life. Morris and the
merely aesthetic mediaevalists always indicated that a crowd in the time
of Chaucer would have been brightly clad and glittering, compared with
a crowd in the time of Queen Victoria. I am not so sure that the real
distinction is here. There would be brown frocks of friars in the first
scene as well as brown bowlers of clerks in the second. There would be
purple plumes of factory girls in the second scene as well as purple
lenten vestments in the first. There would be white waistcoats against
white ermine; gold watch chains against gold lions. The real difference
is this: that the brown earth-color of the monk's coat was instinctively
chosen to express labor and humility, whereas the brown color of the
clerk's hat was not chosen to express anything. The monk did mean to say
that he robed himself in dust. I am sure the clerk does not mean to say
that he crowns himself with clay. He is not putting dust on his head, as
the only diadem of man. Purple,