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Signification couleur des rose3/18/2024 ![]() ![]() Thurgh which he may hise verray freendes see. By constantly regarding the shadows of the picture, and those only, he grows old in his fatal uncharitableness, and is reduced to the unamiable condition of a cynic-a Diogenes but a Diogenes who looks for honest men-not with a lamp, but with a dark lantern-for his vision is obscured with ‘clouded’ spectacles.ġ This is a quotation from The Wife of Bath’s Tale, by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1342-1400): ![]() The darkened spectacles which are substituted as much incapacitate him from enjoying the brightness of the sun, as those he previously wore increased it and he who before saw universal goodness, ceases to believe in benevolence and the character of every human being appears to be shaded with self-interest or other faultiness. ![]() He is what is called a ‘disappointed man.’ His imagination, which at first exaggerated the goodness of mankind, now exaggerates its wickedness. Many a young man, viewing mankind in too glowing a light, has had some act of human frailty (by which, perhaps, he is made to suffer) unexpectedly revealed to him-has had the pink spectacles suddenly dashed from his vision! Then, in proportion as all was before unduly brilliant and beautiful, all appears now as falsely dark. ‘The habitual use of tinted spectacles,’ remarks an experienced optician, ‘gives rise to a succession of violent changes of colour, which are painful to the unpractised, and must be injurious to those who have become inured to them.’ This is exactly the case with the false medium through which the world is often seen by youthful enthusiasm. These spectacles are by far the most dangerous to the real as well as to the mental perception. Such temperaments see everything coleur de rose-they wear pink spectacles. To them all men appear good, all nature seems beautiful. Hence, to the glowing imagination of such natures it is always summer and they do not, as in after-life, enjoy the coming of the spring, because they know no winter. Worldly experience has yet to darken the glowing picture-to give more truthful, and, alas! less favourable views of mankind, but, on the other hand, to exchange for restless and fevered, more permanent and assured sources of happiness. Painful feelings, when excited in the young, are transient, and serve rather to heighten the effect of general enjoyment than to lessen it. Its keen sense of enjoyment, which makes it feel the mere act of existence to be a pleasure, extracts gratification out of whatever is presented to the senses. Ardent and imaginative youth, for example, on first entering active life, wears spectacles which exhibit everything in the brightest colours. These metaphorical spectacles being worn by a large majority of mankind, are in quite as great variety as the spectacles we have already described, and suit themselves to every age and condition. Through which he may his very friends see.’ 1Īnd Dryden, in commenting on the genius of Shakspeare 2, truly observes, that the great dramatist ‘was naturally learned-he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature.’ 3 Thus, as a man is sometimes said to ‘see’ that which is invisible, such as a fine thought, the point of a joke, or the force of an argument, so would we draw attention not to mechanical, but to psychological spectacles-not to those which aid or derange the actual organs of sight, but to those which assist or falsify the mental vision. We seek to give greater currency to the more enlarged, though metaphorical sense in which the word is used by many authors of high repute, both ancient and modern. It is our purpose in this paper to abandon the literal signification of the word spectacles, and to treat the term abstractedly from the actual article which is seen in the shops, in pedlars’ packs, and on the noses of our elderly friends. There are spectacles for daylight, spectacles for candle-light, and spectacles tinted with all sorts of hues, from pleasing pink to a sombre slate-colour. ![]() There are magnifying glasses and diminishing glasses, and glasses through which objects appear of their actual size. To this end, and to suit every sort of visual deficiency, great varieties of the article have been invented. The following reflections on metaphorical pink spectacles are from Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland) of Saturday 24 th February 1844:Īccording to the encyclopædias and dictionaries, spectacles consist of two lenses so arranged in frames as to aid defective vision. The phrase rose-coloured spectacles, and its variants, denote a happy or positive attitude that fails to notice negative things, leading to a view of life that is not realistic. ![]()
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