Exotics and Retrospectives

by Lafcadio Hearn

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.