OOLOURS OF PAIN.
[To THE EDITOR OF TUE "SpiccrAron."]
SIE,—I am interested in Mr. R. Walker Berry's letter in the Spectator of August 3rd. It carried my thoughts back many years to a conversation in my own home. My mother had remarked that she saw figures in colours, and a young friend who was present said that she saw pain in colours. She dis- tinguished between a " blue pain" and a " red pain," as the case might be, and I think as a child had sometimes complained " I've a blue pain " or "red pain." Personally, though perhaps hardly visualizing pain, yet so true and natural does it appear to me to do so that it seems rather a fact I had overlooked than a novel idea or new speculation. To me the thin, sharp heart pain would be blue, or any venous pain ; while inflammatory pain, as in toothache or bronchial cough, &c., would he red; sickness, or any dull heavy pain, yellow or brown ; while mental anguish would run the whole range of the kaleidoscope from violet, blue, red, yellow, to grey and black. One would like to feel that green is too much the colour of life and hope to be associated with any pain, but is consecrate as spring's livery of promise and Dante's angel of hope, but a friend has just assured me that sea-sickness is undoubtedly green ! If pain is to have this gay attire may not joy also be permitted its colours and vibrations And could we not easily classify them, feeling while we did so that it was not all mere fancy P Comfort, rest, peace, friendliness, tenderness, love, do they not troop before our eyes in their variously coloured or shaded robes ?
The whole subject suggests farther and higher vibrations, those of soul, until the ethical virtues too come forth in their coloured raiment, the preponderance of one or other of these in a particular personality causing that soul to be described as white, blue, red, yes, or even green !—though far from the school boys' sense—for have we not souls brimful of hope and freshness ? Perhaps soul vibration may explain better than the somewhat overstrained theory of telepathy these subtle intuitions, sympathies, and affinities which are so real and strong while so evasive of all our science-artillery, microscope, telescope, spectroscope, &e.
That colour and sound so touch and blend our poets have long whispered to us. One speaks of his lady arranging flowers " In harmonies so vivid that through sight I hear." Another asks of music :
"Is it sound, or fragrance, or vision? Vocal light wavering down from above?"
A third : "The superior seraphim do know
None other music but to flame and glow."
Compare Browning's palace reared of music ; Coleridge's " With music loud and long I would have built that dome in air"; Francis Thompson's "Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky "; Masefield's "I have heard the song of the blossoms " ; or Herrick's "Such pretty flowers . . . to speak by tears before ye have a tongue." Indeed, the whole subject of sense-transference in the poets is deeply interesting, and probably has its roots in a yet unrecognized truth. May it be that our senses disperse, as the prism, one beauty into separate strands, as the world divides goodness, beauty, and truth, disputing their priority and pitting one against the other, while we who know Him know that all true good• nese, beauty, and truth unite, and have their source and home in God P—I am, Sir, &a., A. MADELINE ANDERSON. .1ragask, Newport, Fifeshire.
P.S.—It may interest your correspondent if I add that to my mother the figure 5 appears to have a bluish colour, 3 a whitish grey, 7 a yellowy red, &c. Of course, this figure- colour might be traced back to the nursery and to coloured blocks, but this would seem more likely if the case were one of coloured letters.
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