Colour-Music

Abstract

IT is difficult to give a fair impression of the value of this book. Its author obviously lacks scientific training (hence the inclusion of a chapter “on some scientific opinions”) and adequate knowledge of the “laws” of colour mixture; he fails to describe the apparatus and the methods he employs with sufficient detail; his acquaintance with the psychology of aesthetics is defective; the analogies which he presses between tones and ocolours are unsound. Yet, despite these manifest shortcomings, the book is to be welcomed as the sincere attempt of an enthusiast, who has spent much time and money on his hobby, to give the world some idea of its interest and of its value. No doubt, seeing is here verily believing; but it is easily imaginable, as Sir Hubert von Herkomer states, that to sit at the author's “instrument and improvise for half an hour whilst watching the ever-varying combinations of colour oon the screen produced by the playing is not only an unspeakable delight, but of real health-giving effect on the sense of colour.” Apart from his absurd division of spectral colours on the basis of our musical scale, “the main advantages of colour-music as an art” would, as the author rightly says, “remain unaffected, and the force oof the chief arguments, which can be advanced in support of it as a separate and distinct art, would not be weakened in the least.” It is, as we have said, impossible to describe such aesthetic enjoy ment; one must experience it.

Colour-Music.

The Art of Mobile Colour. By Prof. A. Wallace Rimington. Prefatory Notes by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, M.V.O., and Dr. W. Brown. Pp. xx + 185. (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1911.) Price 6s.