The Significance Of
pp. 39-40 · Read in the full issue
Colours
By Arthur J. Vogan, F.R.G.S., Etc.
VV/HEN artist here for the Illustrated ’ ’ London News, in the ’eighties, I was soon impressed with the great and uni versal power of the symbolism of the various colours.
Civilisation having commenced in Nor thern Asia, we might expect that it would give the rest of the world its colour scales and harmonies, just as it did its musical regulations and science; and so we find it. And nowhere better than in that Home of Colour, the Pacific, are these facts illustrated—for its inhabitants were originally derived from Asia; and here the old language of colour-meaning may be studied in its primitive attributes.
To-day, we are experiencing a passing fever of commercialism and mechanism; but tomorrow we will return, as before, to much we now neglect. It is not, then, useless to keep in touch with sources of joy and historic information such as the study of colour-symbolism gives us. To get the mind into tune with the subject, one cannot do better than read, once more, Sir Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia, or Mrs. E. B. Browning’s Aurora Leigh.
Let us take red. Erckmann-Chatrian’s wonderful boys’ books of my youth used always to picture. the heco as “a fine young man, with good red ears;” and all my life I have been choosing parties of men for energetic work, with that formula in mind—more and more im pressed, each year, with its value! The intrepid Sir J. H. P. Murray and others, following his example, including myself, have found the wearing of a red shirt lessens the risk of poi-nted attentions from jumpy “jungle-jingos.” Red is a sacred colour universally. The wearer shows that he is not approaching sur reptitiously, but in the full consciousness of his right to approach, which is half the battle with primitives, as with our selves.
Even in Shakespeare we read, in Mac beth, how the lack of colour in the face is a token of lack of courage:— “Go prick thy face and over-red thy fear Thou lily-livered boy!”
Red is the colour of cheerfulness and battle-fitness all through the Islands: and when we discovered the Strickland River in Papua, Turkey-red was found to be the best “trade.” In my home-land, Wales, red robes showed honourable rank; and Robert Burns sang “My love is like the red, red rose.” Maori maidens receive the welcome proposal of their best boy who bears the message of the Kowhai in his eager hand—for love and courage go ever hand-in-hand. Red berries all over the Islands have the same significance.
Yellow is the universal symbol of the sun; and gold first drew its value from this fact. Yellow is the colour of unity.
Buddha, with his yellow robe, practised “Yoga,” which means Union; whilst Dante sings of “Into the yellow of the Rose Eternal, me Beatrice drew!” The pope presents, on the fourth Sunday in Lent, a “Golden Rose” as a spiritual bles
sing, to persons beloved by the church.
All through the Islands a bunch of yellow blooms, in the old days, were car ried by messengers of peace, or union.
From Malaya to Japan and Fiji, the Mundane-egg was a golden one; and the Greeks, originally from the same part of Northern India, whence came the ances tral New Zealander, had the Golden thread and Golden bough that drew the favoured up to heaven.
Green has ever been the symbol of Hope and Faith; and the Islands traveller who knows his Shelley will often have recalled those lines: “Many a green isle needs must be In the deep, wide sea of Misery.”
The Druids, who, I think, came of the same race that have left their traces in Borneo, the Carolines and Fiji, gave Robes of Hope to their “ovates,” who were hoping to become bards, later.
The “Fortunate Isles” of the Greeks, and of the North American Indians, were green; and green is the colour of the turbans worn by Mohemmedans about our Islands who have visited Mecca, “in hope of a blessed resurrection.”
Blue is the colour of heaven. Ships in mourning denote same by a blue streak.
But. curiously, it cannot be used in hos pitals, for certain of the mentally af flicted—it irritates them!
There was a heavy demand for the special Coronation issue of Papua postage stamps, released on May 14. The denomi nations are Id, 2d, 3d, and sd.
Madamoiselle Josephine Niau, author ess of “Pacific Paradise,” who has been travelling in New Guinea for over a year gathering material for another book, arrived in Sydney from Rabaul by the Malaita on May 21.