A Red Sunset
I
The most stupendous apparition of red that I ever saw was a tropical sunset in a cloudless sky,—a sunset such as can be witnessed only during exceptional conditions of atmosphere. It began with a flaming of orange from horizon to zenith; and this quickly deepened to a fervid vermilion, through which the crimson disk glared like the cinder of a burnt-out star. Sea, peak, and palm caught the infernal glow; and I became conscious of a vague strange horror within myself,—a sense of distress like that which precedes a nightmare. I could not then explain the feeling;—I only knew that the color had aroused it.
But how aroused it?—I later asked myself. Common theories about the ugly sensation of bright red could not explain for me the weirdness of that experience. As for the sanguine associations of the color, they could interpret little in my case; for the sight of blood had never affected my nerves in the least. I thought that the theory of psychical inheritance might furnish some explanation;—but how could it meet the fact that a color, which the adult finds insufferable, continues to delight the child?
All ruddy tones, however, are not unpleasant to refined sensibility: some are quite the reverse,—as, for example, the various tender colors called pink or rose. These appeal to very agreeable kinds of sensuous experience: they suggest delicacy and softness; they awaken qualities of feeling totally different from those excited by vermilion or scarlet. Pink, being the tint of the blossoming of flowers and the blossoming of youth,—of the ripeness of fruit and the ripeness of flesh, is ever associated with impressions of fragrance and sweetness, and with memories of beautiful lips and cheeks.
No: it is only the pure brilliant red, the fervid red, that arouses sinister feeling. Experience with this color seems to have been the same even in societies evolved under conditions utterly unlike those of our own history,—Japan being a significant example. The more refined and humane a civilization becomes, the less are displays of the color tolerated in its cultivated circles. But how are we to account for that pleasure which bright red still gives to the children of the people who detest it?
II
Many sensations which delighted us as children, prove to us either insipid or offensive in adult life. Why? Because there have grown up with our growth feelings which, though now related to them, were dormant during childhood; ideas now associated with them, but undeveloped during childhood; and experiences connected with them, never imagined in childhood.
For the mind, at our birth, is even less developed than the body; and its full ripening demands very much more time than is needed for the perfect bodily growth. Both by his faults and by his virtues the child resembles the savage, because the instincts and the emotions of the primitive man are the first to mature within him;—and they are the first to mature in the individual because they were the first evolved in the history of the race, being the most necessary to self-maintenance. That in later adult life they take a very inferior place is because the nobler mental and moral qualities—comparatively recent products of social discipline and civilized habit—have at last gained massiveness enough to dominate them under normal conditions;—have become like powerful new senses upon which the primitive emotional nature learns to depend for guidance.
All emotions are inheritances; but the higher, because in evolutional order the latest, develop only with the complete unfolding of the brain. Some, ethically considered the very loftiest, are said to develop only in old age,—to which they impart a particular charm. Other faculties also of a high order, chiefly æsthetic, would seem in the average of cases to mature in middle life. And to this period of personal evolution probably belongs the finer sense of beauty in color,—a much simpler faculty than the ethical sense, though possibly related to it in ways unsuspected.
Vivid colors appeal to the rudimentary æsthetic sense of our children, as they do to the æsthetic sense of savages; but the civilized adult dislikes most of the very vivid colors: they exasperate his nerves like an excessive crash of brass and drums during a cheap orchestral performance. Cultured vision especially shrinks from a strong blaze of red. Only the child delights in vermilion and scarlet. Growing up he gradually learns to think of what we call “loud red” as vulgar, and to dislike it much more than did his less delicate ancestors of the preceding century. Education helps him to explain why he thinks it vulgar, but not to explain why he feels it to be unpleasant,—independently of the question whether it tires his eyes.
III
And now I come back to the subject of that tropical sunset.
Even in the common æsthetic emotion excited by the spectacle of any fine sunset, there are elements of feeling ancient as the race,—dim melancholy, dim fear, inherited from ages when the dying of the day was ever watched with sadness and foreboding. After that mighty glow, the hours of primeval horror,—the fear of blackness, the fear of nocturnal foes, the fear of ghosts. These, and other weird feelings,—independently of the physical depression following the withdrawal of sunlight,—would by inheritance become emotionally related to visions of sundown; and the primitive horror would at last be evolutionally transmuted to one elemental tone of the modern sublime. But the spectacle of a vast crimson sunset would awaken feelings less vague than the sense of the sublime,—feelings of a definitely sinister kind. The very color itself would make appeal to special kinds of inherited feelings, simply because of its relation to awful spectacles,—the glare of the volcano-summit, the furious vermilion of lava, the raging of forest-fires, the overglow of cities kindling in the track of war, the smouldering of ruin, the blazing of funeral-pyres. And in this lurid race-memory of fire as destroyer,—as the “ravening ghost” of Northern fancy,—there would mingle a vague distress evolved through ancestral experience of crimson heat in relation to pain,—an organic horror. And the like tremendous color in celestial phenomena would revive also inherited terror related of old to ideas of the portentous and of the wrath of gods.
Probably the largest element of the unpleasant feeling aroused in man by this angry color has been made by the experience of the race with fire. But in even the most vivid red there is always some suggestion of passion, and of the tint of blood. Inherited emotion related to the sight of death must be counted among the elements of the sinister feeling that the hue excites. Doubtless for the man, as for the bull, the emotional wave called up by displays of violent red, is mostly the creation of impressions and of tendencies accumulated through all the immense life of the race; and, as in the old story of Thomas the Rhymer, we can say of our only real Fairy-land, our ghostly past,—
... “A’ the blude that’s shed on earth
Rins through the springs o’ that Countrie.”
But those very associations that make burning red unbearable to modern nerves must have already been enormously old when it first became the color of pomp and luxury. How then should such associations affect us unpleasantly now?
I would answer that the emotional suggestions of the color continued to be pleasurable for the adult, as they still are for the child, only while they remained more vague and much less voluminous than at present. Becoming intensified in the modern brain, they gradually ceased to yield pleasure,—somewhat as warmth increased to the degree of heat ceases to be pleasurable. Still later they became painful; and their actual painfulness exposes the fundamentally savage nature of those sensations of splendor and power which the color once called into play. And the intensification of the feeling evoked by red has not been due merely to later accumulation of inherited impressions, but also to the growth and development of emotions essentially antithetical to ideas of violence and pain, and yet inseparable from them. The moral sensibility of an era that has condemned not a few of the amusements of our forebears to the limbo of old barbarities,—the humanity of an age that refuses to believe in a hell of literal fire, that prohibits every brutal sport, that compels kindness to animals,—is offended by the cruel suggestiveness of the color. But within the slowly-unfolding brain of the child, this modern sensibility is not evolved;—and until it has been evolved, with the aid of experience and of education, the feeling aroused by such a color as vivid scarlet will naturally continue to be pleasurable rather than painful.
IV
While thus trying to explain why a color dignified as imperial in other centuries should have become offensive in our own, I found myself wondering whether most of our actual refinements might not in like manner become the vulgarities of a future age. Our standards of taste and our ideals of beauty can have only a value relative to conditions which are constantly changing. Real and ideal alike are transitory,—mere apparitional undulations in the flux of the perpetual Becoming. Perhaps the finest ethical or æsthetical sentiment of to-day will manifest itself in another era only as some extraordinary psychological atavism,—some rare individual reversion to the conditions of a barbarous past.
What in the meantime would be the fate of sensations that are even now becoming intolerable? Any faculty, mental or physical, however previously developed by evolutional necessities, would have a tendency to dwindle and disappear from the moment that it ceased to be either useful or pleasurable. Continuance of the power to perceive red would depend upon the possible future usefulness of that power to the race. Not without suggestiveness in this connection may be the fact that it represents the lowest rate of those ether-oscillations which produce color. Perhaps our increasing dislike to it indicates that power to distinguish it will eventually pass away—pass away in a sort of Daltonism at the inferior end of the color-scale. Such visual loss would probably be more than compensated by superior coincident specializations of retinal sensibility. A more highly organized generation might enjoy wonders of color now unimaginable, and yet never be able to perceive red,—not, at least, that red whose sensation is the spectral smouldering of the agonies and the furies of our evolutional past, the haunting of a horror innominable, immeasurable,—enormous phantom-menace of expired human pain.