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.