FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER THE USE OF COLOR IN THE 119143 VERSE OF THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF ARTS, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE, OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY ALICE EDWARDS PRATT CHICAGO The University of Chicago Press 1898 INTRODUCTION. The use of color in literature has, in the last half century, attracted the attention of many eminent scientists. Philologist, anthropologist, and physicist have alike found in this subject a fruitful field for investigation. As yet, however, study has been largely confined to ancient writings such as the Rig- Veda, the Zend Avesta, the Iliad, and the Eneid; and the character of these investigations may be inferred from the fact that the results have been published chiefly in philological and anthropological journals. The possible æsthetic value of such study, and its significance in the interpretation of the author himself, have been but cursorily touched upon; while the color-terms of modern English poets have never received serious treatment. A few brief articles or sections of articles on this latter division of the subject have, it is true, been published within the past twenty years; but Mr. Grant Allen's book on The Colour Sense is written from the anthropologist's point of view, and devotes only a few pages to the English poets. E. W. Hopkins, in an article on "Words for Colour in the Rig-Veda" (American Journal of Philology, 1883), has mentioned the color-range of the Paradise Lost as essentially the same as that of the Rig- Veda. The only deliberate attempt to examine and compare the colorterms of English and other poets, made from an æsthetic and literary point of view, is that of Mr. Havelock Ellis in the Contemporary Review, May, 1896, filling sixteen pages, and ranging rapidly over a broad and varied field, from the Völsunga Saga and Isaiah to Pater and Olive Schreiner. Mr. Ellis's article is extremely interesting, and, to the average reader, full of suggestive stimulus. At the time of its appearance, however, the The discussion of the point raised by Mr. Gladstone (loc. cit., p. 367), that color was little known to the ancients and that the sense of it has been gradually developed, is well summed up by Mr. Lubbock (loc. cit.). |