The public remonstrated loudly in the cause of Python: "He had been so yellow, quiet, and pleasant a creature; what meant these azure-shafted arrows, this sudden glare into darkness, this Iris message; Thaumantian;--miracle-working; scattering our slumber down in Cocytus?" It meant much, but that was not what they should have first asked about it. They should have asked simply, was it a true message? Were these Thaumantian things so, in the real universe? It might have been known easily they were. One fair dawn or sunset, obediently beheld, would have set them right; and shown that Turner was indeed the only true speaker concerning such things that ever yet had appeared in the world. They would neither look nor hear;--only shouted continuously, "Perish Apollo. Bring us back Python." § 5. We must understand the real meaning of this cry, for herein rests not merely the question of the great right or wrong in Turner's life, but the question of the right or wrong of all painting. Nay, on this issue hangs the nobleness of painting as an art altogether, for it is distinctively the art of coloring, not of shaping or relating. Sculptors and poets can do these, the painter's own work is color. Thus, then, for the last time, rises the question, what is the true dignity of color? We left that doubt a little while ago among the clouds, wondering what they had been made so scarlet for. Now Turner brings the doubt back to us, unescapable any more. No man, hitherto, had painted the clouds scarlet. Hesperid Æglé, and Erytheia, throned there in the west, fade into the twilights of four thousand years, unconfessed. Here is at last one who confesses them, but is it well? Men say these Hesperids are sensual goddesses,--traitresses,--that the Graiæ are the only true ones. Nature made the western and the eastern clouds splendid in fallacy. Crimson is impure and vile; let us paint in black if we would be virtuous. § 6. Note, with respect to this matter, that the peculiar innovation of Turner was the perfection of the color chord by means of _scarlet_. Other painters had rendered the golden tones, and the blue tones, of sky; Titian especially the last, in perfectness. But none had dared to paint, none seem to have seen, the scarlet and purple.