92. So that the world is really a liquid prism, and stream of opal. And
then, last of all, to keep the whole history of it in the fantastic
course of a dream, warped here and there into wild grotesque, we moderns,
who have preferred to rule over coal-mines instead of the sea (and so
have turned the everlasting lamp of Athena into a Davy's safety-lamp in
the hand of Britannia, and Athenian heavenly lightning into British
subterranean "damp"), have actually got our purple out of coal instead of
the sea! And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced on us the doubt
that held the old word between blackness and fire, and have completed the
shadow, and the fear of it, by giving it a name from battle, "Magenta."
93. There is precisely a similar confusion between light and color in
the word used for the blue of the eyes of Athena--a noble confusion,
however, brought about by the intensity of the Greek sense that the
heaven is light, more than it is blue. I was not thinking of this when I
wrote in speaking of pictorial chiaroscuro, "The sky is not blue color
merely: it is blue fire and cannot be painted" (Mod.
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