As children and men we enjoy the color-effects of fireworks against the blackness of night, and we enjoy the darkness and the shadows about us, the sudden light upon expectant faces, the dark-moving figures in the intervals. All this is delight in color,--color without sentiment, color without story, color without other thought or reflection than pure sensuous enjoyment; and we even feel the tawdry cheapness of the attempt when by set arrangement the features of some local or national celebrity are presented. But when an artist who sees such a night-scene and paints it in such manner that the color-scheme is preserved and its beauty enhanced in translation, we demand something more. We demand, as did Burne-Jones, “detail and composition,”--in short, we demand the features of our local celebrity. Until we learn to love color, as we love music, for its own sake, there will never be any decorations of homes and public buildings that will be worth while. * * * * * In days long gone by, in Italy during the Renaissance and before, in Greece during the Golden Age, color was enjoyed for the sake of color, regardless of the dictates of nature. If an Italian felt like making a background of blue or gold, he did so; if a Greek felt like painting and gilding his sculpture, he did so, until the Parthenon and its contents must have been gorgeous with color, laid on, not after the precepts of nature, but for the most part arbitrarily, to please the eye. All decoration begins with nature and ends in convention. In this progress from birth in the imitation of natural forms and colors to death in the rigidity of a hard and lifeless convention there is a maturity wherein lines and contours and colors play with perfect freedom, original forms and models being absorbed in the finer creations of the imagination. * * * * * Ruskin habitually confused the use of _color_ with the painting of _light_; while in truth there is no necessary connection at all between colorists and _lightists_,--to coin a word that will very legitimately mark a distinction. The painting of light is the distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century art, and Turner was the apostle crying in the wilderness of darkness; he was the first to successfully attempt the realization of sunlight. He keyed his palette up with the sun as the objective point, while the Italians who had influenced him had keyed theirs up simply to produce color-effects. They decorated walls and altars and painted pictures--as a potter decorates his earthen bowl--to please the eye. Although Ruskin habitually speaks of Turner as a colorist, and undoubtedly says a great many fine things concerning color, he did not care at all for color apart from the delineation of form. To him color was useful only as a mode of drawing; in itself it was as nothing at all. Speaking of his so-called “truths” of color, he says: