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 12

Getting the Blues: Vision and Cognition in the Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary study of medi-

Getting the Blues

eval color. By integrating scientific and literary approaches, it revises our current understanding
of how people in medieval Europe experienced color and what it meant to them. This book
insists that the past perception of the world can be recovered by joining timeless universal con-
straints on human experience (discovered by science) to the unique cultural expressions of that
experience (revealed by literature).
The Middle Ages may evoke images of the multicolored stained glass of gothic cathedrals,
VISION AND COGNITION
the motley garb of minstrels, or the brilliant illuminations of manuscripts, yet such color often IN THE MIDDLE AGES

GETTING THE BLUES | Reilly

goes unnoticed in scholarly accounts of medieval literature. Getting the Blues restores some of
the most important literary works of the Middle Ages to their full living color. Particular con-
sideration is given to the twelfth-century Arthurian romances by Chrétien de Troyes and the
thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail Cycle.

MEDIEVAL INTERVENTIONS
Getting the Blues engages debates within the humanities and the sciences over universalist
and relativist approaches to how humans see and name color. Scholars in the humanities often
insist that color is a strictly cultural phenomenon, eschewing as irrelevant to the Middle Ages
recent developments in cognitive science that show universal constraints on how people in all
cultures see and name color. This book contributes to the recent cognitive turn in the human-
ities and sheds new light on some of the most frequent and meaningful cultural experiences in
the Middle Ages: the perception, use, and naming of color.

Brian J. Reilly is Assistant Professor of French at Fordham University and Associate Director
of the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College. He holds a PhD in French
from Yale University. He has taught at Yale, Dartmouth, and Johns Hopkins University.

www.peterlang.com
PETER LANG

Cover image: Moira R. Dillon BRIAN J. REILLY

 12

Getting the Blues: Vision and Cognition in the Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary study of medi-

Getting the Blues

eval color. By integrating scientific and literary approaches, it revises our current understanding
of how people in medieval Europe experienced color and what it meant to them. This book
insists that the past perception of the world can be recovered by joining timeless universal con-
straints on human experience (discovered by science) to the unique cultural expressions of that
experience (revealed by literature).
The Middle Ages may evoke images of the multicolored stained glass of gothic cathedrals,
VISION AND COGNITION
the motley garb of minstrels, or the brilliant illuminations of manuscripts, yet such color often IN THE MIDDLE AGES

GETTING THE BLUES | Reilly

goes unnoticed in scholarly accounts of medieval literature. Getting the Blues restores some of
the most important literary works of the Middle Ages to their full living color. Particular con-
sideration is given to the twelfth-century Arthurian romances by Chrétien de Troyes and the
thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail Cycle.

MEDIEVAL INTERVENTIONS
Getting the Blues engages debates within the humanities and the sciences over universalist
and relativist approaches to how humans see and name color. Scholars in the humanities often
insist that color is a strictly cultural phenomenon, eschewing as irrelevant to the Middle Ages
recent developments in cognitive science that show universal constraints on how people in all
cultures see and name color. This book contributes to the recent cognitive turn in the human-
ities and sheds new light on some of the most frequent and meaningful cultural experiences in
the Middle Ages: the perception, use, and naming of color.

Brian J. Reilly is Assistant Professor of French at Fordham University and Associate Director
of the Institute of French Cultural Studies at Dartmouth College. He holds a PhD in French
from Yale University. He has taught at Yale, Dartmouth, and Johns Hopkins University.

www.peterlang.com
PETER LANG

Cover image: Moira R. Dillon BRIAN J. REILLY

Getting the Blues
 MEDIEVAL INTERVENTIONS
New Light on Traditional Thinking

Stephen G. Nichols
General Editor

Vol. 12

The Medieval Interventions series is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list.
Every volume is peer reviewed and meets
the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG
New York  Bern  Berlin
Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw
 Brian J. Reilly

Getting the Blues

Vision and Cognition

in the Middle Ages

PETER LANG
New York  Bern  Berlin
Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2018034708

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

ISSN 2376-2683 (print) | ISSN 2376-2691 (online)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5752-3 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-5753-0 (ebook pdf)
ISBN 978-1-4331-5754-7 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-4331-5755-4 (mobi)
DOI 10.3726/b14148

© 2019 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
To My Teachers
 table of contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements xi
Preface xiii
Introduction: Color, Cognition, and Criticism 1

Part 1. Seeing Color15

Chapter 1. Thinking About Seeing, Fast and Slow 17
Chapter 2. The Colors of Irony 75
Coda to Part 1: I See a Blityri!101

Part 2. Naming Color143

Chapter 3. Britain’s Missing Shade of Blue 145
Chapter 4. Blue Mythology 173
Coda to Part 2: Mood Bloi 225

Index 243
 illustrations

Figure I.1: The Life of Saint Alexis, St Albans Psalter 4

Figure I.2: Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière, Notre-Dame de Chartres 9
Figure C.1: A Necker Cube 102
Figure C.2: Based on Figure 3a in Xu and Carey, “Infants’
Metaphysics,” 125 122
Figure C.3: Based on Figure 1 in Xu, “The Role of Language in
Acquiring Object Kind Concepts in Infancy,” 230 123
Figure C.4: Based on Figure 2 in Dewar and Xu, “Do 9-Month-Old
Infants Expect Distinct Words to Refer to Kinds?,” 1231b 124
Figure C.5: Example of the Simple Object Test, Based on Figure 2 in
Imai and Gentner, “A Cross-Linguistic Study of Early
Word Meaning,” 180 126
Figure 3.1: The Munsell-Chip Color Space of the World Color Survey 156
Figure 3.2: The Lexical Color Space of a Language (Culina)
With 4 Basic Color Terms 157
Table 4.1: Manuscripts of the Alpha Merlin Vulgate Continuation181
Table 4.2: Bloie Bretaigne in The History of the Holy Grail 203
Table 4.3: Bloie Bretaigne in the Merlin Vulgate Continuation 209
 acknowledgements

Let me acknowledge from the start that this book would not exist were it not
for my partner Moira R. Dillon. These pages are the direct result of her personal
support and intellectual drive. Lawrence D. Kritzman, who was my teacher and
has since been my close friend, got me into French Studies in the first place, and
his passion for the field renews my spirits with every chat. He and Janie Kritzman
have been so open in their welcome and care that I feel like mishpocheh. The
editor of this series, Stephen G. Nichols, has also been a sustaining role model
as I explore medieval literature. He is a mensch, and I always look forward to
our next conversation, all the more so when Edie Nichols is there. This book
began when my dissertation advisor, R. Howard Bloch, handed me an article
by Steve on optics and the Roman de la rose. I am grateful for such mentorial
insight and for the infectious curiosity he has for medieval literature. Elizabeth
S. Spelke has shown me personal and pedagogical generosity, and her seminar
on cognitive development changed the very course of my thinking about “the
medieval mind.” A Faculty Research Grant from Fordham University allowed
me to begin looking into the manuscripts studied in these pages, and then a
Faculty Fellowship gave me the time to put my thoughts together and on paper.
I dedicate this book to my teachers; I wish I could name them all. They
inspire me daily to be like them. Finally, my family is full of educators, and
those in other professions too have been my teachers. My dedication of this
book is to them as well.
 preface

Getting the Blues: Vision and Cognition in the Middle Ages argues for a humanist
approach to literature and illustrates that approach by exploring our under-
standing of medieval color vision. I have found that the description of my
approach as humanist invites dismissal from my colleagues in the literary
Humanities. This is the age of the Post-human, of Ecocriticism and Animal
Studies. I don’t believe that any of these emerging fields is necessarily incom-
patible with the humanism put forth in these pages. Indeed, to take them in
reverse order, humanism relies on: our shared evolutionary inheritance with
other animals; our perception of and interaction with the external world; and
our human ability to exceed, at least in imagination and with technology, the
constraints our human nature puts upon us. There are many levels at which
one can investigate human achievement, and I have simply limited myself to
exploring the literary and cultural achievements of the Middle Ages as they
reflect, derive from, or struggle with those constraints.
My humanist aim as a medievalist is to access the individual world-views
expressed in the texts that survive to us from the European Middle Ages. By
world-view, I do not just mean the sometimes pithy summations of a gen-
eral attitude toward or understanding of the world, like Social Darwinism or
Direct Realism. To be sure, such guiding principles existed in the Middle Ages,
xiv getting the blues

like Neo-Platonism. And, to be sure, medieval individuals, like their modern

semblables, held such world-views with relative consistency and unique
inflections—no two Neo-Platonisms ever being identical. But in addition to
these Weltanschauungen, I shall also take world-view more literally to mean
how people see (and think they see) the world.
Separated from us by a millennium, medieval minds may seem inaccessi-
ble to us or utterly other. But we have better access to medieval world-views
than we often think, and this is thanks to the exciting and startling findings
of contemporary cognitive science about how the mind works. The mind,
the human mind, in any age. Where individual minds differ uniquely or by
culture, they do so against a background of shared, evolutionarily inherited
capacities. To see those individual differences we need that background.
Explaining in full even one medieval world-view is far-fetched, beyond
the reach of any single study. This book has its limits: I focus mainly on the
phenomenal and intentional aspects of medieval world-views as they concern
color vision and as they are expressed in literature. Getting the Blues is not
a cognitive approach to medieval literature, but a literary study of human
cognition as it can be seen in that unique literature from the twelfth- and
thirteenth-century francophone world.
 introduction
Color, Cognition, and Criticism

Nothing should be easier than to talk about color in the Middle Ages. This
period is perhaps the first moment in our collectively imagined Western his-
tory that seems colorful. From the yellow sands of Egypt to the white marble
of Greece to the ocher stone of Rome, prior history seems at best monochro-
matic. Whereas when we think of medieval France, for example, we see the
luminous polychromatic stained glass of its great cathedrals, the shining illu-
minations of medieval manuscripts, the chromatic designs of heraldic shields,
the motley garb of the jongleur. Not bad for an age otherwise darkened by our
prejudice towards it!
We have reason, of course, to be wary of such views of the past: Egypt,
Greece, and Rome were colored well beyond our imagination—indeed at times
somewhat garishly, shocking our sense of classical beauty. Historians of the art
and architecture of these earlier ages must spend their time coloring in what we
have left out of our imagined past. In the case of the Greeks, this work of color-
ing in the past began at least as far back as the early nineteenth century, when
the idea of and first evidence for ancient polychromy sparked a great deal of
debate. And yet, as the French art historian of the medieval Gothic cathedral,
Roland Recht, has noted, the “question of medieval polychromy did not cause
a comparable controversy […].”1 The reason for this is clear: What is medieval
is, to our collective imaginations, already quite colorful.
2 getting the blues

Nevertheless, our image of the Middle Ages is not quite colorful enough,
for the study of its polychromy has been made difficult by centuries of neglect
or even whitewashing, not to mention the necessity of making inferences
from meager samples. As the historian of color Michel Pastoureau points out,
our documentation until recently has been in black and white, perhaps leav-
ing our ideas about the Middle Ages desaturated as well.2 For literary study,
such colorless documentation might not have seemed much of a problem.
If the text was the object of study, then could it not be found in black and
white on the printed page of some critical edition? Such an approach caused
us to miss what Stephen G. Nichols has called the medieval text’s “multi-
disciplinary elements”3—not just the color of the text as in rubrication, but
also the images, the layout, the glosses, etc.
The irony in the case of color is that even a study of the black and white
text of one of the earliest monuments of medieval French literature should
have warned us that its color was missing. Consider the edition in black ink
of The Life of Saint Alexis (La vie de Saint Alexis) in a 2014 critical edition by
Maurizio Perugi.4 There we read that text’s famous opening, which looks more
or less as follows:

Bons fut li secles al tens ancïenur,

Quer feit i ert e justise ed amur,
S’i ert creance, dunt ore n’i at nul prut :
Tut est müez, perdut ad sa colur,
ja mais n’iert tel cum fut as anceisurs. (3:1–5)
[Good was the world in the time of our ancestors,
For in it there was faith and justice and love,
And in it there was belief, of which today there is little:
All is changed, has lost its color,
Never will it be as it was for our ancestors.]

The decline of the world is not an uncommon motif in medieval literature,

and the loss of color seems like an apt metaphor to describe that decline. It
is not uniquely medieval, but ancient, as in Lamentations 4:1 “How gold has
become tarnished, the finest color is changed!” (“Quomodo obscuratum est
aurum, mutatus est color optimus”).5 Yet the situation for the medieval poet is
more dismal: The color has not just been changed, but lost.
Color can be lost in several ways. Remove the hue and color goes to
white; remove the brightness and color turns to black. This latter sense of a
dark decoloring is the one chosen by the online translation into English of
the St Albans Psalter, which contains perhaps the most famous version of The
 introduction 3

Life of Saint Alexis. At line 4, it reads: “The world is all changed, it has lost its
brightness.” Here we seem to have testimony from the Middle Ages that they
were indeed Dark Ages.
Nevertheless the author of the closely related Romance of Saint Alexis
(Li roumans de Saint Alessin), a twelfth-century text preserved in a thirteenth-
century manuscript (BnF fr 12471), made a slight change, a flick of the quill
that changes everything about that text’s medieval color:

Bons fu li siecles au tans ancineour

Quar fois i ert et justice et amour;
Si iert creance dont or n’i a mais pro[u];
Si est mués, perdue a sa valour. (10–3)6
[Good was the world in the time of our ancestors,
For in it there was faith and justice and love,
And there was belief, of which today there is little:
It is changed, has lost its worth.]

At first glance, there is little change. But the text has moved from colur to
valour. That a c and a v could be easily mistaken in a manuscript exemplar
allows us to think that this is just a common scribal error. And yet we might
also come to wonder whether this was a deliberate change. Did the scribe
want to stop the world from losing its color?
This quick, purely textual study in black and white gets us to the possi-
bility that the scribe did not believe that his world had lost its color, and so
he instead made the text lose its colur. And if we look back to the St Albans
Psalter, we might see why. I give an image of its opening to The Life of Saint
Alexis in Figure I.1.
If we had opened the manuscript to this page’s recto (page 57), we would
have been struck by a series of multicolored images with multicolored text
and many of the other multidisciplinary elements mentioned by Nichols.
But even if for some reason the manuscript was opened directly to the start
of the Alexis proper, as in the image here, we would not be able to read the
text without noticing its color. In fact three colors, with mostly red and blue
text in alternation, interspersed with some green. Reading such a colorful text
about the loss of color becomes a performative contradiction, a medieval
Stroop effect in which the content of the text interferes with its color.
The world of the twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-centuries may have
been worse off than in a prior golden age, but, looking at this manuscript
page, it could not be thought to be any less colorful. Might such manuscript
polychromy have prompted a later scribe to overcome the text’s semantic
4 getting the blues

Figure I.1: The Life of Saint Alexis, St Albans Psalter

With Permission of the Dombibliothek Hildesheim, St Godehard.
 introduction 5

interference and emend it to better suit the polychromatic world in which it

was read?
The color of the Middle Ages has gotten lost before. But, with a sim-
ple textual change or inspired error, a scribe of The Romance of Saint Alexis
was able to restore it. By removing colur from the text, a chromatic injustice
was undone. At several moments throughout this book, I too shall remove
color from the Middle Ages in order to restore it. Just as the scribe may have
thought that the world was fallen but no less colorful than before, so I will
argue that color and its perception were not much different then and now.
Granted, we have to be careful to account for changes in lighting and tech-
nology. Even if the medieval world was not “A World Lit Only by Fire,”7 it also
did not have artificial illumination of varying spectra, etc. The light shows
recently introduced at some of the gothic cathedrals around France, for exam-
ple, invert the medieval experience of cathedral color: Whereas we moderns
get to see a restored polychromy by light at night but see a blanched facade
by day, people in the Middle Ages would have seen their cathedral’s color by
day and a dark facade at night. Still, even if we have precious few examples of
medieval color, as in the St Albans Psalter, and even if it is now a subset of the
colors available to our digital age, the color of the world and our perception
of it have not changed radically over time. Just as that anonymous scribe may
have refused to believe that the world had lost its color over the first millen-
nium of the Common Era, I refuse to believe that over the last millennium we
have lost access to that color.
And yet such a belief governs the study of medieval color today. In an
otherwise engaging study of medieval attitudes towards color (which, as you
might expect, ranged from pro- to anti-color), the historian Herman Pleij
could nevertheless suggest the following: “Everything changes. A green tree
in the Middle Ages was surely not perceived the same way as a green tree
today.”8 When I first read this line I assumed Pleij was using perceive in a
metaphorical sense of understand. But no, his radical relativism is made clear
in the very next line: “It differed in a variety of ways, because observers then
were physically and psychologically different from observers now.” I was so
struck by this line I had to see if this was the translator’s doing. I hoped that
the traduttore was indeed a traditore. But the original Dutch confirmed Pleij’s
words and meaning, which unwittingly echo William E. Gladstone’s long
since discredited claim that “the organ of colour and its impressions were but
partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.”9 Pleij’s physiolog-
ically flawed understanding of medieval color vision becomes scatologically
6 getting the blues

absurd when he moves from the color of medieval trees to that of medieval
goose droppings: “In any case, ‘goose-turd green’ is doubtless a different hue
now than it was then.”10
The case of goose-turd green (French caca d’oie or merdoie) is an interesting
one, and Pleij was right to note that the author of the text at issue was trying
to be as precise as possible in the description of color. When trying to be really
specific about a color, we often refer to a colored object, much as we might
say tomato red rather than just red. There is still inevitable ambiguity: Not all
tomatoes are the same color red, and there may be regional variations of what
tomatoes look like. I’ll even grant Pleij that, on my example, a diachronic dif-
ference might exist, with tomatoes getting redder and more uniform in color
over time to conform to the expectations of modern consumers. But goose
turds? Why should they have changed color over the centuries? Perhaps geese
have changed their diet as thoroughly as we have since the Middle Ages. But
then, what about … merd’homme? Mutatusne est color?
A less egregious but still erroneous view of medieval color might distin-
guish between the sensation and the perception of color, allowing the former
to be universal—the human eye-brain complex not having evolved signifi-
cantly in the past millennium—while admitting relativism based on language
or culture for the latter. A recent book On Color by the Shakespearean David
Scott Kastan makes this claim for culture:
Color vision must be universal. The human eye and brain work the same way for
nearly all people as a property of their being human—determining that we all see
blue. But the color lexicon, meaning not merely the particular words but also the
specific chromatic space they are said to mark, clearly has been shaped by the particu-
larities of culture. Since the spectrum of visible colors is a seamless continuum, where
one color is thought to stop and another begin is arbitrary. The lexical discrimination
of particular segments is conventional rather than natural. Physiology determines
what we see; culture determines how we name, describe, and understand it. The
sensation of color is physical; the perception of color is cultural. [original emphases]11

Kastan slips here from one incorrect claim to another. If what is meant is that
the continuous spectrum of color can be arbitrarily segmented in natural lan-
guage, then this is empirically denied by studies that have shown constraints
on how languages name color, as well as universals across languages for how
we humans divide up that spectrum. (I discuss these in Chapter 3.) We can
nevertheless grant that languages divide up the spectrum differently, though
not arbitrarily. Some languages, for example, distinguish green and blue, while
others have a single “grue” term for both. From such linguistic differences,
 introduction 7

however, there is little to no evidence for the linguistic determination of color

perception.
It is surprising in 2018 to hear such echoes of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s infa-
mous statement that has come to define the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of lin-
guistic determinism (aka, Whorfianism): “We dissect nature along lines laid
down by our native languages.”12 In the first half of the twentieth century,
until the early 1970s even, the major example of such conventional segmen-
tation was of the color spectrum by color terms, just as Kastan would have
it. Since that time, however, our understanding of the relation between lan-
guage and perception has advanced. Indeed, from being the supposed evidence
for Whorfianism, color has become, as the psychologists Dedre Gentner and
Susan Goldin-Meadow put it, “the bête-noir of the Whorfian hypothesis.”13
Gentner and Goldin-Meadow titled their essay “Whither Whorf.” If
that was a question, the unfortunate answer is: the Humanities. I suggest
that Whorfianism is a cognitive illusion based on substituting a correlate of
thought, language, for thought itself. I choose the term substitution for two
reasons. First, it allows us to put the charge into a framework for substitu-
tion set out by Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick involving targets and
heuristics.14 We ask the target question, What is thought?, but we answer the
heuristic question, What is language?; the latter supplements and comes to
replace the former, with us unaware. The latter question is still hard! But it
yields more intuitive, easier cogitation when we are thinking about thought
in language. And this leads to my second reason for using the idea of substitu-
tion: Such linguistic determinism may be a particular hazard for the literary
Humanities, because the intellectual work done by our texts is often the work
of substitution through figurative language. Our poets, for example, sometimes
wish to overcome the limits of language to give us a world directly. But this is
only ever a substitution, an illusion. We engage it as fiction, but we ought to
be wary when we take it to describe the world, whether today’s world or that
of the Middle Ages.
Getting the Blues insists throughout that unique cultural differences can be
seen best against the background of shared cognition. As Nichols noted, the
manuscript page is multi-disciplinary, and I insist that so too are the words on
it and the worlds behind them. I believe that an understanding of medieval
color requires a thoroughly interdisciplinary investigation. On this point, I am
in agreement with Michel Pastoureau when he says “color is by its nature a
transdocumentary and a transdisciplinary terrain.”15 But I shall argue against
his refusal to admit cognitive universals into that terrain when he says: “There
8 getting the blues

is no transcultural truth to color perception, despite what many books based

on poorly grasped neurobiology or—even worse—on pseudo-esoteric pop
psychology would have us believe.”16
Claims like the ones made Pleij, Kastan, and Pastoureau too have their pop
versions. In a 2010 op-ed for the New York Times, the linguist Guy Deutscher
argued that “As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall paint-
ing actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for
blue.”17 This does sound strange to me. I readily believe that having a word for
blue influences how we talk about a Chagall painting. But does the experience
of looking change by language? Consider one of the great works of medie-
val art, the stained glass window known as Our Lady of the Beautiful Window
(Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière; Figure I.2). It can be found in the cathedral
Notre-Dame at Chartres.18 You will notice immediately that there are two
very different blues in this window. The central panels are a light blue and the
framing panels are a dark blue. This difference is due to the different ages of
the glass: The lighter blues were made in the twelfth century; the darker blues
in the thirteenth. Whether this is due to changes in taste or technology, I do
not know. Probably both.
But now consider the implications of Deutscher’s claim about Chagall
when we come to this window. In English and in French, we hear talk of the
famous bleu de Chartres. And the windows have lovely blues. But in Russian,
you cannot just call those blues blue. You have to distinguish between lighter
blues (goluboj) and darker blues (sinij). A Russian speaker would find the poly-
chromy of our single light/dark blue term blue just as strange as we find that
of a green/blue term like grue. While we might jump at the opportunity to
find the latter culturally and linguistically exotic, and from there posit exotic
perception, we might hesitate to do so if told that Russians, thanks only to
their linguistic color-splitting of blue, “experience” Chartres’s stained glass
differently than we can. Such is the thinking that results from sliding from
linguistic to perceptual relativity: We end up at perceptual and thus aesthetic
incommensurability.
Getting the Blues transcends such illusory divides. By starting from the
allowance that there are transcultural truths of color perception revealed not
in “pop psychology” but in the best scientific journals out there today, I see
what happens to medieval color when we remove these relativists’ color from
the Middle Ages. Getting the Blues thus participates in the cognitive turn in
literary studies, which has been going on now for some time now.19 As I stated
in the preface, my fundamental claim is that contemporary cognitive science
 introduction 9

Figure I.2: Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière, Notre-Dame de Chartres.

10 getting the blues

gives us better access to medieval world-views by revealing how the mind

works. Where minds differ uniquely or by culture, they do so against a back-
ground of shared, evolutionarily inherited capacities. I usually get annoyed
when I read the phrase “the medieval mind,” for it strikes me as suggesting
that the intellectual life of the Middle Ages was monolithic. But if we keep
our understanding of mind limited to that object of study by the cognitive sci-
ences (including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, etc.), then we are free to
say both that the medieval mind was the modern mind and that every individ-
ual mind is afforded both a richly unique and universally shared world-view.
This insistence on shared cognition and individual uniqueness is why I do not
call my approach merely cognitive or literary, but humanist.
Getting the Blues is an exploration of medieval color vision that unfolds in
two parts. It progresses chronologically: Part 1 primarily analyzes mid- to late-
twelfth-century texts from the medieval francophone world (in French and
Latin), while Part 2 moves into the thirteenth century. Each part comprises
two chapters and a coda.
Part 1, “Seeing Color,” explores vision and the meaning of what is seen.
Chapter 1, “Thinking about Seeing, Fast and Slow,” is a slow reading of Chré-
tien de Troyes’s second Arthurian romance, Cligès. In that twelfth-century
romance, one character gives what seems to be a scientific analysis of how
humans see. Some scholars have argued that this passage is a precocious bell-
wether of the thirteenth-century origin of modern optical science. They argue
that we should have expected Chrétien and his characters to be thoroughly
Platonic, thinking that we see by light shining out from the eye to the world
around (extramission). They claim that the passage shows instead evidence of
a more modern understanding that we see by light coming into the eye (intro-
mission). But did Chrétien leave Plato behind earlier than his contemporaries
and anticipate the Aristotelian and Arabic science that would revolutionize
medieval visual theories? I give two answers to this question: one from the
history of science and one from literary analysis. I show that the doxographic
tradition accompanying the Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus by Calcidius
gave twelfth-century writers like Chrétien access to a wider variety of visual
theories than often recognized. Twelfth-century writers and thinkers were not
limited to Platonic accounts of color and vision, but in fact probed visual
cognition in new ways with new figurations. In this way literature not only
reflects but participates in scientific discourse. My second and more extensive
response to the scientific reading of Cligès is to show how Chrétien ironizes
such scientific readings, whether by his characters or his readers. If the passage
 introduction 11

is thoroughly ironic, that irony seems to catch us in its snares as well. The
result is that Chrétien leaves us with less a theory of vision than a universal
lesson of cognitive empathy through irony.
Chapter 2, “The Colors of Irony,” returns to Chrétien de Troyes’s corpus
to demonstrate the literary implications of his exploration of how we see on
what we see. In particular, I probe his own use of color to convey literary
meaning. While other scholars have found deep symbolism in his use of
color—like the green stripe down the heroine’s horse in Erec and Enide or
the red drops of blood on white snow in Perceval—I suggest that Chrétien
often leads us off the deep end with such colorful descriptions. Rather than
being designed as an expression, say, of Islamic theosophy, as one scholar
has argued, Chrétien’s use of color is designed as a trap of irony, waiting
to catch not only his characters but also his readers. If we dig deep into
Chrétien’s shallow color symbolism, we fail to see the true colors of his irony,
no better than Perceval who himself gets lost in the empty symbolism of
blood on snow.
In the Coda to Part 1, “I See a Blityri!,” I consider a theme common to
both Chapter 1 and Chapter 2: What it means to be the first thinker or writer
to put forward a new idea. In this coda, I provide a new way of looking at firsts.
I consider the suggestion by Jean Jolivet that the twelfth century witnessed
the spontaneous rise of Platonism in the field of grammar. To explain how old
ideas can recur spontaneously throughout history, I join Gerald Holton’s the-
matic analysis of the history of science to recent studies in cognitive science
that suggest ways in which the intuitions underlying such Platonic theories,
whether of grammar or vision, can be born anew in every individual and in
every generation.
Part 2, “Naming Color,” explores color naming in three chapters. In
Chapter 3, “Britain’s Missing Shade of Blue,” I investigate the curious way
in which color was named in Old French. Why can a term like bloi, which
is related to the Modern English blue and Modern French bleu, nevertheless
mean a gamut of colors, from white to yellow to black, defying how we think
color terms normally work? I argue against such dictionary-based polysemy,
in which bloi can mean any of these colors depending on context. Instead,
using findings from cognitive science, I show how bloi could have been mono-
semous all the while being polychromatic: As strange as it may sound to our
modern ears, bloi could mean many different colors at the same time. Old
French color terms are strange to us not because medieval perceptions of color
were different. Rather, languages carve up the visible spectrum differently in
12 getting the blues

ways structured by universals of human language and vision. The chapter con-
cludes by exploring the full network of possible symbolic meanings associated
with bloi when it comes to qualify Britain as Bloie Bretaigne in the thirteenth-
century Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Understanding bloi’s polychromy thereby
enriches our understanding of color as used in one of the great achievements
of medieval French literature.
Chapter 4, “Blue Mythology,” continues this exploration of Bloie Bretaigne
by returning to its specific literary context. I ask not what color but what
geographical space Bloie Bretaigne referred to. Scholars today are divided,
with some claiming that it can mean either Britain or Brittany depending on
context—much in the way that they say bloi can mean any number of colors
depending on context. I demonstrate instead that the authors of the Lance-
lot-Grail Cycle may have exploited the ambiguity of both the color term bloi
and the toponym Bretaigne. If so, Bloie Bretaigne functions as a metalepsis that
conflates geographies and chronologies to make the remote, legendary past
come alive in literature as the present tense of the reading experience. Met-
alepsis is a literary trope that is as fugitive as the color term bloi; it is often
used to collapse time, to blend or even swap cause and effect. By calling the
Britain of King Arthur Bloie Bretaigne, the authors of this part of the Lance-
lot-Grail Cycle are able to collapse the past, present, and future of British
history. Rather than being confused by the ambiguity of Bretaigne, medieval
authors exploited it to create otherwise impossible connections between dif-
ferent lands and different times.
The Coda to Part 2, “Mood Bloi,” closes the book by returning to the
discussion of cognitive empathy from Part 1 in light of my reading of Bloie
Bretaigne in Part 2. The question of what Bloie Bretaigne meant gets raised
because an unknown medieval scribe did not understand the expression and
so added an explanation to the text. Part 2 explored the range of possible
meanings as originally intended, first chromatic (Chapter 3) and then poetic
(Chapter 4). But on the scribe’s own account, the meaning is clear: Britain
was bloi because Britain was blue and sad. Why did the scribal author choose
this particular meaning? I suggest that he had cognitive empathy for the future
readers of his text who would not understand the past, original meaning of
the colorful toponym. Faced with such a failure of language, the scribal author
attempted to substitute phenomenality for intentionality. To explain this sub-
stitution I call upon the theory of cognition found in the work of Elizabeth
S. Spelke. In her studies of cognitive development, Spelke has shown that
 introduction 13

all humans have competing representations of others either as “agents,” who

have intentionality, or as “social beings,” who have phenomenality. Color
allows for a metalepsis across that divide, because color exists in the world,
in our language, and in our phenomenal experience of the world. By giving
his particular explanation of Bloie Bretaigne as Sad, Blue Britain, the medieval
scribe taps into the fundamental act of literature, that attempt at substitution
to overcome the limits of language. Bloie Bretaigne becomes a model for a truly
humanist understanding of medieval literature.

Notes
1. Recht, Believing and Seeing, 177.
2. Pastoureau, Bleu, 7–8.
3. Nichols, From Parchment to Cyberspace, 2.
4. Perugi, Saint Alexis, 617–42.
5. The Latin text is from Weber, Biblia Sacra.
6. Elliott, The Vie de Saint Alexis, 93–150.
7. This is the title of William Manchester’s book on “the” medieval mind. He forgot the sun
and the moon.
8. Pleij, Colors Demonic & Divine, 2; Van Karmijn, 11.
9. Gladstone, “Homer’s Perceptions and Use of Colour,” 488.
10. Pleij, Colors Demonic & Divine, 9; Van Karmijn, 24. The original says that goose excrement
(ganzenmest) looks completely different now.
11. Kastan, On Color, 9.
12. Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, 213.
13. Gentner and Goldin-Meadow, “Whither Whorf,” 8.
14. Kahneman and Frederick, “Representativeness Revisited.”
15. Pastoureau, Bleu, 10: “[L]a couleur est par essence un terrain transdocumentaire et trans-
disciplinaire.” Translations from Pastoureau’s books on color come from those done by
Markus I. Cruse.
16. Pastoureau, Bleu, 7: “Il n’y a pas de vérité transculturelle de la couleur, comme voudraient
nous le faire croire certains livres appuyés sur un savoir neurobiologique mal digéré ou—
pire—versant dans une psychologie ésotérisante de pacotille.”
17. Deutscher, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”
18. Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière is window 30A in the Corpus Vitrearum for Notre-Dame de
Chartres. See Manhes-Deremble, Les vitraux narratifs, 296–7.
19. The expression itself is not recent. Siegfried J. Schmidt in 1983 was already surveying some
work following the “cognitive shift” or “cognitive turn.” “Interpretation Today,” 72 and 73.
The bibliography of cognitive literary studies has since grown beyond easy summation. See
the recent collections: Jaén and Simon, Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New
Directions; and Zunshine, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“It had been apparent for some time that the next great feat in the air
would be a continuous flight from the mainland of America to the
mainland of Europe. Two courageous Frenchmen made the reverse
attempt and passed to a fate that is as yet unknown.
“Others were speeding their preparations to make the trial, but it
remained for an unknown youth to attempt the elements and win. It
is the same story of valor and victory by a son of the people that
shines through every page of American history.
“Twenty-five years ago there was born in Detroit, Michigan, a boy
representing the best traditions of this country, of a stock known for
its deeds of adventure and exploration.
“His father, moved with a desire for public service, was a member of
Congress for several years. His mother, who dowered her son with
her own modesty and charm, is with us today. Engaged in the vital
profession of school-teaching, she has permitted neither money nor
fame to interfere with her fidelity to her duties.
“Too young to have enlisted in the World War, her son became a
student at one of the big State universities. His interest in aviation
led him to an Army aviation school, and in 1925 he was graduated
as an airplane pilot. In November, 1926, he had reached the rank of
Captain in the Officers’ Reserve Corps.
 © Wide World Photos

NEW YORK CITY—THE PARADE PASSING THROUGH

CENTRAL PARK WHERE OVER 400,000 PEOPLE WERE
GATHERED. A SOLID BANK OF HUMANITY FLANKED OUR
PASSAGE
 © Wide World Photos

NEW YORK CITY—PARADE IN CENTRAL PARK AS SEEN FROM

A NEARBY SKYSCRAPER

“Making his home in St. Louis, he had joined the 110th Observation
Squadron of the Missouri National Guard. Some of his qualities
noted by the Army officers who examined him for promotion, as
shown by reports in the files of the Militia Bureau of the War
Department, are as follows:
“‘Intelligent,’ ‘industrious,’ ‘energetic,’ ‘dependable,’ ‘purposeful,’
‘alert,’ ‘quick of reaction,’ ‘serious,’ ‘deliberate,’ ‘stable,’ ‘efficient,’
‘frank,’ ‘modest,’ ‘congenial’ ‘a man of good moral habits and regular
in all his business transactions.’
“One of the officers expressed his belief that the young man ‘would
successfully complete everything he undertakes.’ This reads like a
prophecy.
“Later he became connected with the United States Mail Service,
where he exhibited marked ability, and from which he is now on
leave of absence.
“On a morning just three weeks ago yesterday this wholesome,
earnest, fearless, courageous product of America rose into the air
from Long Island in a monoplane christened ‘The Spirit of St. Louis’
in honor of his home and that of his supporters.
“It was no haphazard adventure. After months of most careful
preparation, supported by a valiant character, driven by an
unconquerable will and inspired by the imagination and the spirit of
his Viking ancestors, this reserve officer set wing across the
dangerous stretches of the North Atlantic.
“He was alone. His destination was Paris.
“Thirty-three hours and thirty minutes later, in the evening of the
second day, he landed at his destination on the French flying field at
Le Bourget. He had traveled over 3,600 miles, and established a
new and remarkable record. The execution of his project was a
perfect exhibition of art.
“This country will always remember the way in which he was
received by the people of France, by their President and by their
Government. It was the more remarkable because they were
mourning the disappearance of their intrepid countrymen, who had
tried to span the Atlantic on a western flight.
“Our messenger of peace and good-will had broken down another
barrier of time and space and brought two great peoples into closer
communion. In less than a day and a half he had crossed the ocean
over which Columbus had traveled for sixty-nine days and the
Pilgrim Fathers for sixty-six days on their way to the New World.
“But, above all, in showering applause and honors upon this genial,
modest American youth, with the naturalness, the simplicity and the
poise of true greatness, France had the opportunity to show clearly
her good-will for America and our people.
“With like acclaim and evidences of cordial friendship our
Ambassador without portfolio was received by the rulers, the
Governments and the peoples of England and Belgium. From other
nations came hearty messages of admiration for him and for his
country. For these manifold evidences of friendship we are
profoundly grateful.
“The absence of self-acclaim, the refusal to become commercialized,
which has marked the conduct of this sincere and genuine exemplar
of fine and noble virtues, has endeared him to every one. He has
returned unspoiled.
“Particularly has it been delightful to have him refer to his airplane as
somehow possessing a personality and being equally entitled to
credit with himself, for we are proud that in every particular this silent
partner represented American genius and industry. I am told that
more than 100 separate companies furnished materials, parts or
service in its construction.
“And now, my fellow-citizens, this young man has returned. He is
here. He has brought his unsullied fame home. It is our great
privilege to welcome back to his native land, on behalf of his own
people, who have a deep affection for him and have been thrilled by
his splendid achievement, a Colonel of the United States Officers’
Reserve Corps, an illustrious citizen of our Republic, a conqueror of
the air and strength for the ties which bind us to our sister nations
across the sea.
“And, as President of the United States, I bestow the Distinguished
Flying Cross, as a symbol of appreciation for what he is and what he
has done, upon Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.”
Upon completing this address the President then conferred upon
Lindbergh the Distinguished Flying Cross.
A new burst of cheering went up as the medal was being pinned on
by the President. It was at this point in the proceedings that the
Secretary of the Navy, ordinarily most placid of men, is alleged to
have waved his arm in the air like a college cheer leader and
hurrahed as loudly as any. When quiet came again Lindbergh rose
and replied to the President. What he said was brief. But had he
uttered a hundred times as many words, he could scarcely have
conveyed a more important message to those about him.
He said: “On the evening of May 21, I arrived at Le Bourget, France.
I was in Paris for one week, in Belgium for a day and was in London
and in England for several days. Everywhere I went, at every
meeting I attended, I was requested to bring a message home to
you. Always the message was the same.
“‘You have seen,’ the message was, ‘the affection of the people of
France for the people of America demonstrated to you. When you
return to America take back that message to the people of the United
States from the people of France and of Europe.’
“I thank you.”
This is no place to dwell upon the minutiæ of that great day. The
picture must be sketched in with bold strokes and stippled
background. But it is impossible to pass this one short speech of
Lindbergh’s and not cajole the reader to gather something of its
significance. In a sentence it tells the story of the flight; it gives what
the speaker considered his immediate and outstanding achievement;
and it phrases that achievement in words so touching and so
eloquent that France and America, half-estranged through wretched
debt, rang with them for days.
The final touch of the miracle was that this speech was
extemporaneous.
Just as when Lincoln finished his Gettysburg address his listeners
sat stunned at the very brevity of it, so was there a curious silence
immediately following Lindbergh’s utterance. Then came long
applause. Hats were not thrown in the air. But men and women
clapped until their palms were numb. Again many wept. A radio
announcer whose stock-in-trade was routine emotional appeal,
broke down and sobbed.
More and more people were beginning to realize that something was
happening far greater than just the celebration of a mechanical
triumph over the ocean separating Europe from America.
The ceremony ended as simply and quickly as it had begun. The
President’s own car whisked Lindbergh away to the temporary White
House in Dupont Circle. A curious and eager crowd lingered there
behind police lines throughout the afternoon. From time to time their
demanding cheers could be silenced only by Lindbergh’s smiling
presence at the door or balcony.
President and Mrs. Coolidge entertained members of the Cabinet
and their wives that night. Lindbergh sat on Mrs. Coolidge’s right. He
wore conventional evening dress and was distinguished by the ease
and simplicity with which he met both sallies and inquiries of the
imposing guests.
It is one of the cruelties of social lionization that we search for the
peculiarities of our specimen. In Lindbergh’s case his peculiarity lay
in the fact that neither by word, nor look, nor deed was he in any way
grotesque. His eyes were clear, his smile quick; like a practised
diplomat he eluded entangling discussion; and he had a ready reply
for every intelligent inquiry put to him within his range of knowledge
or experience.
It is at risk of dampening the ardor of our narrative that we
repeatedly point to this trait of simplicity that lies in Lindbergh. We do
so because it was from close within the nucleus of this trait that there
sprung the incredible emotional reaction towards his personality.
After the President’s dinner Lindbergh attended a meeting of the
National Press Club in the Washington Auditorium. This was his first
public appearance “under roof” in America. Six thousand people
risked imminent heat stroke by crowding into every seat and cranny
of the building.
The program opened with an address on behalf of the Press Club by
Richard V. Oulahan. Because this address illuminated the feelings of
the “Fourth Estate,” proverbially cynical toward notoriety, we give it
here in full:
“In your journalistic flight of the past three weeks,” said Mr. Oulahan,
you must have learned that much may be read between the lines of
what is printed in newspapers. So even a novice in newspaperdom
like yourself would have no trouble in reading between the lines of
this journalistic expression an intimate note of sincere affection.
“We of the press rub elbows with all manner of mankind. We see
much of good but we see much of self-seeking, of sordid motive, as
we sit in the wings watching the world’s procession pass across the
stage. If it is true that through our contacts we are sprinkled with a
coating of the dry dust of cynicism, that dust was blown away in a
breath, as it were, when our professional brethren who greeted you
overseas broadcast the news of your peerless exploit. To Americans
it brought a spontaneous feeling of pride that you were of their
nationality.
“The whole world was carried off its feet by an accomplishment so
daring, so masterful in execution, so superb in achievement, by the
picture presented of that onrushing chariot of dauntless youth,
flashing across uncharted heavens straight through the storm’s
barrage.
“But if the press, with such an inspiration, performed its mission well,
it found equal inspiration. It performed as fine a mission in
chronicling the subsequent conduct of our young Ambassador of
Good Will. His words and bearing dissipated vapors of
misunderstanding. He personified, to a Europe amazed at the
revelation, the real spirit of America.
“The press should be proud then, if in telling the story of this later
phase in the career of the American boy, it brought to the peoples of
the world a new realization that clean living, clean thinking, fair play
and sportsmanship, modesty of speech and manner, faith in a
mother’s prayers, have a front page news value intriguing
imagination and inviting emulation, and are still potent as
fundamentals of success.”
Postmaster General New then stepped forward and gave Lindbergh
the first special air mail stamp. As he handed it to the flier he said:
“It is as a pilot in the service of the Air Mail that I greet you. There is
no public service devoted to the peace time of the public whose past
and present are attended by the romance that are attached to the
history of the Post Office Department of the United States.
“From the single couriers of the early days, who followed the
uncertain trails through wood and fen on horseback and on foot, the
picturesque riders of the pony express of a later day, who risked their
lives at the hands of savage foes in the wilderness, the drivers who
serve amid the rigors of the frozen North with dog teams and sleds,
to those intrepid pilots who pierce the night with the air mail and of
whom you are a worthy representative, the whole story is set in an
atmosphere of most engaging romance.
“It has no titles to bestow—no medal it can add to those that have
been given in recognition of your splendid achievement. There is one
thing, however, it can do that will everywhere be regarded as most
appropriate. It has issued a stamp designed for special use with the
air mail which bears your name and a representation of the other
member of that very limited partnership in which you made your now
famous journey across seas. It is the first time a stamp has been
issued in honor of a man still living—a distinction which you have
worthily won.
“It is my great pleasure to be privileged to present to you, and to the
mother who gave you to this service, the first two copies of this issue
as the best evidence of the enduring regard of the Post Office
Department of the United States.”
These speeches are quoted because better than almost any other
capturable entity of those days they reflect the wide scope of the
effect Lindbergh’s success had on both governmental and business
routine. Surely it is difficult to conceive of a military victor shaking so
many foundations, no matter what the might of his mailed fist.
Secretary of State Kellogg next presented Lindbergh with a memorial
volume consisting of a compilation of diplomatic exchanges between
the State Department and the Foreign Offices of the world in
connection with the flight. His words lined in a little more of the
bewildering picture of the world’s admiration enfolding before
Lindbergh’s frankly astonished gaze.
“Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh,” he slowly and ponderously began,
staring hard at the object of his eulogy. “On May 20th and 21st,
1927, the world was electrified by the news of your non-stop flight
from New York to Paris. It was a marvelous accomplishment
requiring the highest courage, skill and self-reliance. Probably no act
of a single individual in our day has ever aroused such universal
enthusiasm and admiration. Your great deed is a mile-stone marking
scientific advancement.
“You have been congratulated by Kings and Presidents. You have
listened to the plaudits of thousands and thousands in Europe and
you know the tributes which have been justly paid to you by millions
more. You do not now realize the thousands who have expressed
their congratulations in letters and telegrams. I have had printed in
this little volume only the official telegrams which passed through the
Department of State and I take pleasure in presenting to you this
volume in commemoration of your epochal achievement.
“Along the highway of human progress, as we look back over the last
half century we marvel at the progress in science, the arts and
invention. Truly this is a marvelous age and your daring feat will pass
into the pages of history.”
Then came Dr. Charles G. Abbott, Acting Secretary of the
Smithsonian Institute who informed Lindbergh that the Institute had
decided to award him the Langley “Medal of Pioneers.” This honor
has in the past been bestowed upon a small but distinguished group
such as Orville Wright, Glenn H. Curtiss and Gustave Eiffel. Thus
was added to the tribute of press and state the commendation of one
of the oldest and finest scientific bodies in the world.
Followed next a medley of messages from special organizations.
Greetings from cities touched by Lindbergh in his historic flight from
San Diego to Paris were read. St. Louis sent a moving reminder that
her people were “waiting for you now impatiently ... waiting since that
gray morning when you launched out over the clouds and the sea for
Paris.”
There was one from the British Government, something almost
without precedent when it is considered that its recipient was a
private citizen on a private enterprise. The official bearer read:
“I have been desired by the British Government to express to
Colonel Lindbergh on this occasion in behalf of all the people of
Great Britain their warm congratulations on the safe return home
after his historic flight across the Atlantic. The British people regard
Colonel Lindbergh with special admiration and affection not only for
his great courage and resource, but also for his equally great
modesty in success and generosity in giving their due to other
aviators who have gone before.”

© Wide World Photos

NEW YORK CITY—SPEAKING AT THE CEREMONIES IN

CENTRAL PARK. GOVERNOR SMITH OF NEW YORK BEHIND
THE “MIKE”
 © U. & U.

BROOKLYN, N. Y.—SPEAKING AT THE CEREMONIES IN

PROSPECT PARK

At the end of this bewildering array of orations and gifts the speaker
of the evening was announced. One has only to put oneself in
Lindbergh’s place after reading some of the eloquence listed above
to admire the moral courage it took to face that huge audience and
once more speak with directness and precision of the things nearest
his heart—things often furthest from the burden of the discourse:
“I want to express my appreciation of the reception I’ve met in
America and the welcome I have received here tonight.” It was plain
the flier was going to cover another field than the infinitely delicate
one he had touched earlier in the day. “When I landed at Le Bourget
a few weeks ago, I landed with the expectancy and hope of being
able to see Europe. It was the first time I had ever been abroad. I
had seen a number of interesting things when I flew over Ireland and
Southern England and France. I had only been gone from America
two days or a little less, and I wasn’t in any particular hurry to get
back.
“But by the time I had been in France a week, Belgium a day and
England two or three days—by that time I had opened several
cables from America and talked with three Ambassadors and their
attachés and found that it didn’t make much difference whether I
wanted to stay or not: and while I was informed that it was not
necessarily an order to come back home, there was a battleship
waiting for me.
“The Ambassador said this wasn’t an order, but advice,” the aviator
added.
“So on June 4 I sailed on the Memphis from Cherbourg and this
morning as I came up the Potomac I wasn’t very sorry that I had
listened to it.
“There were several things I saw in Europe that are of interest to
American aviation. All Europe looks on our air mail service with
reverence. There is nothing like it anywhere abroad.
“But, whereas we have airlines, they have passenger lines. All
Europe is covered with a network of lines carrying passengers
between all the big cities. Now it is up to us to create and develop
passenger lines that compare with our mail routes. For this we have
natural advantages in the great distances here that lend themselves
to rapid transportation by air. Moreover, we can make these long
trips without the inconvenience of passing over international
boundaries.
“The question comes up, ‘Why has Europe got ahead of us in
commercial airlines?’ The reason is, of course, that the Governments
over there give subsidies. I don’t think we want any subsidies over
here. Of course, if we had them they would create passenger lines
overnight, so to speak, but in the long run the airlines, the distance
they covered and the routes would be controlled entirely by the
subsidies.
“What we need now more than any other one thing is a series of
airports in every city and town throughout the United States. Given
these airports, in a very few years the nations of Europe would be
looking toward our passenger lines as they now look at our mail
routes.”
Sunday was another full day. Under able guidance of the Chief
Executive, Lindbergh did the things every good American would
expect him to do. And, as one who has seen the lad at close range,
we can say that he did them gladly and with profound appreciation
for the privilege of doing them. After you come to know him you find
out that’s the kind he is.
He went to church with President and Mrs. Coolidge. Accompanied
by his mother he laid a wreath upon the tomb of the Unknown
Soldier in the great memorial amphitheatre in Arlington Cemetery.
He drove to Georgetown and visited the wounded soldiers at Walter
Reed Hospital. He attended a celebration in honor of the 150th
anniversary of the American flag, for which services were held on the
steps of the Capitol and presided over by Charles Evans Hughes.
It was at this last ceremony that Lindbergh received the Cross of
Honor. His response to the honor was brief and typically to the point.
He declared that credit for his flight should “not go to the pilot alone
but to American science and genius which had given years of study
to the advancement of aeronautics.”
“Some things should be taken into consideration in connection with
our flight that have not heretofore been given due weight. That is just
what made this flight possible. It was not the act of a single pilot. It
was the culmination of twenty years of aeronautical research and the
assembling together of all that was practicable and best in American
aviation. It represented American industry.
“In addition to this consideration should be given the scientific
researches that have been in progress for countless centuries. All of
this should have consideration in apportioning credit for the flight.
Credit should go not alone to the pilot, but to the other factors that I
have briefly enumerated. I thank you.”
This was the day well worthy of what Lindbergh had done and what
he stood for. And again, by the spiritual values it comprised, it struck
the inspirational note which had dominated almost everything the lad
has done or said from the moment of his landing at Le Bourget to the
moment of this writing.
Is it any wonder that the populace responded as it did?
 V
NEW YORK

ON Monday morning, June 13, Lindbergh rose at dawn and reached

the Mayflower Hotel at 6:45 a.m. for breakfast with the National
Aeronautical Association, which conferred a life membership upon
him.
He reached Bolling Field outside Washington at about 7:30 a.m.
Here rose the only incident to mar his otherwise flawless happiness
in the welcome he had received. His plane refused to “mote.” It didn’t
actually rebel. But there was sufficient irregularity in its engine to
discourage him from risking delay when New York City was almost
every minute voicing its impatience that he hurry to the celebration
awaiting him there. A pursuit plane was quickly obtained from an
army field and he was soon in the air with his escort of more than a
score of ships.
The course of the group led them over Baltimore, Wilmington and
Philadelphia. Eyewitnesses later reported that demonstrations took
place at every one of these places as the air cavalcade went by. Of
course those in the planes, thousands of feet in the air and deafened
by the roar of their motors, heard nothing of the bells and whistles
that saluted them as they passed.
Lindbergh arrived at Mitchel Field about noon. As he had flown in a
land plane and was to be met in the lower harbor by the mayor’s
yacht, he had to make a quick change to an amphibian. This ship
happened to be the San Francisco which had but recently returned
from her “good-will” flight to South America.
She took-off from dry land and a few minutes later volplaned down to
the water just above the Narrows.
Here a sight met Lindbergh’s eyes that old harbor inhabitants
declare was absolutely without precedent in the marine annals of
New York. Even the famous Hudson-Fulton Exposition with its vast
water parades and maneuvers was exceeded.
In the sparkling sunshine of a perfect June morning was gathered
half a thousand vessels of every kind and description. Excursion
boats, yachts, tugs, motor boats, launches, fireboats, even dredges,
formed the spectacular array of shipping gathered to meet the man
who had made the proudest of surface craft, the ocean liner, a back
number on the sea.
A police launch swung up to the San Francisco and took Lindbergh
aboard. He was brought to the Macom, yacht of the Mayor of New
York, amid a deafening chorus of whistles. Indeed, so great was the
din that conversation among the welcoming committees was quite
impossible and remained so throughout the hour’s voyage to the
Battery.
As the Macom moved forward the huge disorderly fleet of crowding
vessels swung into rough column behind her. Massive ocean going
tugs and fireboats clung close aboard to guard her from too curious
craft who sought to wedge their way in toward the yacht for a better
look at the bare-headed boy standing atop her pilot house.
As in Washington, the air was well filled with planes. Their motors’
roar lent a sort of solemn undertone to the shrieking chorus of
whistles and sirens.
There was an interview below decks. It was not very successful. The
whistles made too much noise and Lindbergh very properly refused
to discuss his “feelings”, which are meat and drink to the writing
man.
It was estimated that 300,000 people were massed in the vicinity of
the Battery when the Macom hove alongside. Lining the streets clear
to Central Park was a multitude that was variously estimated from
3,000,000 to 4,500,000. Scores of people were in their places before
eight a.m. on upper Fifth Avenue. Lindbergh did not pass them until
three p.m. Traffic was disrupted. Police control was strained to its
utmost.
As evidence of the almost unanimous turnout for the occasion, the
Police Department of the City issued special instructions to all
citizens about leaving their houses protected against thieves,
something that hadn’t been done for a generation.
When the cavalcade with Lindbergh leading started up Broadway
there came the famous New York “snow storm” consisting of a
myriad paper bits and confetti streamers floating downward from the
skyscrapers. Photographs do scant justice to the spectacle.
At the City Hall Mayor Walker expressed the city’s sentiments with a
felicity that deserves their record here. He spoke more informally
than most had spoken in Washington; by the same token he echoed
through his easily forgivable eloquence much that the inarticulate
thousands waiting without the lines would like to have said.
He struck right at the heart of things when he began:
“Let me dispense with any unnecessary official side or function,
Colonel, by telling you that if you have prepared yourself with any
letters of introduction to New York City they are not necessary.
“Everybody all over the world, in every language, has been telling
you and the world about yourself. You have been told time after time
where you were born, where you went to school, and that you have
done the supernatural thing of an air flight from New York to Paris. I
am satisfied that you have become convinced of it by this time.
“And it is not my purpose to reiterate any of the wonderful things that
have been so beautifully spoken and written about you and your
triumphal ride across the ocean. But while it has become almost
axiomatic, it sometimes seems prosaic to refer to you as a great
diplomat, because after your superhuman adventure, by your
modesty, by your grace, by your gentlemanly American conduct, you
have left no doubt of that. But the one thing that occurs to me that
has been overlooked in all the observations that have been made of
you is that you are a great grammarian, and that you have given
added significance and a deeper definition to the word ‘we.’
“We have heard, and we are familiar with, the editorial ‘we,’ but not
until you arrived in Paris did we learn of the aeronautical ‘we.’ Now
you have given to the world a flying pronoun.
“That ‘we’ that you used was perhaps the only word that would have
suited the occasion and the great accomplishment that was yours.
That all-inclusive word ‘we’ was quite right, because you were not all
alone in the solitude of the sky and the sea, because every American
heart, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was beating for you. Every
American, every soul throughout the world, was riding with you in
spirit, urging you on and cheering you on to the great
accomplishment that is yours.
“That ‘we’ was a vindication of the courage, of the intelligence, of the
confidence and the hopes of Nungesser and Coli, now only alive in
the prayers and the hearts of the people of the entire world. That ‘we’
that you coined was well used, because it gave an added
significance and additional emphasis to the greatest of any and all
ranks, the word of faith, and turned the hearts of all the people of the
civilized world to your glorious mother, whose spirit was your spirit,
whose confidence was your confidence, and whose pride was your
pride; the ‘we’ that includes all that has made the entire world stand
and gasp at your great feat, and that ‘we’ also sent out to the world
another message and brought happiness to the people of America,
and admiration and additional popularity for America and Americans
by all the peoples of the European countries.
“Colonel Lindbergh, on this very platform are the diplomatic corps,
the diplomatic representatives of all the countries of the civilized
world; but before you and around you are the peoples themselves of
all the countries of the civilized world, foregathered in this city, the
greatest cosmopolitan institution in all the world; the peoples who
have come from the forty-eight States of the Union and from every
country of the civilized world; and here today, as Chief Magistrate of
this city, the world city, the gateway to America, the gateway through
which peoples from the world have come in the search for liberty and
freedom—and have found it—here today let it be written and let it be
observed that the Chief Magistrate of this great city, the son of an
immigrant, is here to welcome as the world’s greatest hero, another
son of an immigrant.
“What more need I call to your attention, in view of the busy life that
you have been leading and have the right to expect to lead? What
more can we say as we foregather in the streets of this old city? And
today, not by the words alone of the Mayor, or the beautifully written
words of a scroll, as you stand here I am sure you hear something
even more eloquent and glorious. You can hear the heart-beats of
six millions of people that live in this the City of New York. And the
story they tell is one of pride, is one of admiration for courage and
intelligence; is one that has been born out of and is predicated upon
the fact that as you went over the ocean you inscribed on the
heavens themselves a beautiful rainbow of hope and courage and
confidence in mankind.
“Colonel Lindbergh, New York City is yours—I don’t give it to you;
you won it. New York not only wants me to tell you of the love and
appreciation that it has for your great venture, but is deeply and
profoundly grateful for the fact that again you have controverted all
the old rules and made new ones of your own, and kind of cast aside
temporarily even the weather prophets, and have given us a
beautiful day.
“So, just another word of the happiness, the distinction and the pride
which the City of New York has today to find you outside this
historical building, sitting side by side with your glorious mother,
happy to find you both here, that we might have the opportunity and
a close-up, to tell you that like the rest of the world—but because we
are so much of the world, even with a little greater enthusiasm than
you might find in any other place in the world—I congratulate you
and welcome you into the world city, that you may look the world in
the face.”
Mayor Walker pinned the Medal of Valor upon the lapel of
Lindbergh’s coat. Whereupon Lindbergh for the first time gave in
some detail his sense of the size of the welcome he had received:
“When I was preparing to leave New York, I was warned that if we
landed at Le Bourget we might receive a rather demonstrative
reception. After having an hour of Le Bourget I did not believe that
anyone in New York had the slightest conception of what we did