The facts and considerations we have passed in review fairly indicate
the physiological and psychological preëminence of red among the colors
of the spectrum to which we are sensitive. What is the cause of that
preëminence?
It seems to me that two orders of causes have coöperated to produce
this predominant influence, one physical and depending on the special
effects of the long-waved portion of the spectrum on living matter,
the other psychological and resulting from the special environmental
influences to which man, and to some extent even the higher animals
generally, have been subjected. It is possible that these two
influences blend together and cannot at any point be disentangled; it
is possible that acquired aptitude may be inherited or that what seem
to be acquired aptitudes are really perpetuated congenital variations;
but on the whole the two influences are so distinct that we may deal
with them separately.
On the physical side the influence of the red rays, although there is
much evidence showing that it may be traced throughout the whole of
organic nature, is certainly most strongly and convincingly exhibited
on plants. The characteristic greenness of vegetation alone bears
witness to this fact. The red rays are life to the chlorophyll-bearing
plant, the violet rays are death. A meadow, it has been justly said, is
a vast field of tongues of fire greedily licking up the red rays and
vomiting forth the poisonous bile of blue and yellow. An experiment of
Flammarion’s has beautifully shown the widely different reaction of
plants to the red and violet rays. At the climatological station at
Juvisy he constructed four greenhouses--one of ordinary transparent
glass, another of red glass, another of green, the fourth of dark blue.
The glass was monochromatic, as carefully tested by the spectroscope,
and dark blue was used instead of violet because it was impossible to
obtain a perfect violet glass. These were all placed under uniform
meteorological and other conditions, and from certain plants such as
the sensitive plant, previously sown on the same day in the same soil,
eight of each kind were selected, all measuring 27 millimetres, and
placed by two and two in the four greenhouses on the 4th of July. On
the 15th of August there were notable differences in height, color
and sensitiveness, and these differences continued to become marked;
photographs of the plants on the 4th of October showed that while
those under blue glass had made no progress, those under red glass had
attained extraordinary development, red light acting like a manure.
While those under blue glass became insensitive, under red glass the
sensitive plants had become excessively sensitive to the least breath.
They also flowered, those under transparent glass being vigorous and
showing buds, but not flowering. The foliage under red glass was
very light, under blue darkest. Similar but less marked effects were
found in the case of geraniums, strawberries, etc. The strawberries
under blue glass were no more advanced in October than in May; though
not growing old their life was little more than a sleep. It appears,
however, that the stimulating influence of red light fails to influence
favorably the ripening of fruit. Zacharewiez, professor of agriculture
at Vaucluse, has found that red, or rather orange, produces the
greatest amount of vegetation, while as regards fruit, the finest and
earliest was grown under clear glass, violet glass, indeed, causing the
amount of fruit to increase but at the expense of the quality.
Moreover, the lowest as well as the highest plants participated in this
response to the red rays, and in even a more marked degree, for they
perish altogether under the influence of the violet rays. Marshall Ward
and others have shown that the blue, violet and ultra-violet rays, but
no others, are deleterious to bacteria. Finsen has successfully made
use of this fact in the treatment of bacterial skin diseases. Reynolds
Green has shown that while the ultra-violet rays have a destructive
influence on diastase, the red rays have a powerfully stimulating
effect, increasing diastase and converting zymogen into diastase.
While the influence of the red rays on the plant is thus so enormous
and easily demonstrated, the physical effects of red on animals seem
to be even opposite in character, although results of experiments are
somewhat contradictory. Béclard found that the larvæ of the flesh fly
raised under violet glass were three fourths larger than those raised
under green glass; the order was violet, blue, red, yellow, white,
green. In the case of tadpoles, Yung found that violet or blue was
especially favorable to the growth of frogs; he also found that fish
hatch most rapidly under violet light. Thus the influence that is
practically death to plants is that most favorable to life in animals.
Both effects, however, as Davenport truly remarks in his ‘Experimental
Morphology,’ when summing up the results of investigations, are due to
the same chemical metabolic changes, but while plants succumb to the
influence of the violet rays, animals, being more highly organized, are
able to take advantage of them and flourish.
At the same time the influence of violet rays on animal tissue is by no
means invariably beneficial; they are often too powerful a stimulant.
That the violet rays have an influence on the human skin which in
the first place, at all events, is destructive and harmful in a high
degree, is now clearly established by the observations and experiments
of Charcot, Unna, Hammer, Bowles and others, while Finsen has made
an important advance in the treatment of disease based on this fact.
The conditions called ‘sun-burn,’ ‘snow-burn,’ ‘snow-blindness,’ for
instance, which may affect even travelers on snow-fields and Arctic
explorers, are now known to be wholly due to the violet and not to the
red rays. Unna’s device of wearing a yellow veil, and Bowles’s plan of
painting the skin brown, thus shutting off the violet rays, suffice to
prevent sun-burn. The same effect is also obtained by nature, which
under the stress of sunlight, and largely through the irritation of the
violet rays themselves, weaves a pigmentary veil of yellow and brown on
the skin, which thus protects from the further injurious influence of
the violet rays and renders the sunlight a source of less alloyed joy
and health.
That the presence of the red rays, or at all events the exclusion
of the violet, is of great benefit in many skin diseases seems to
be now beyond doubt. This has been shown by Finsen in his treatment
of smallpox in red rooms; it appears that it was also known in the
Middle Ages as well as in Japan, Tonquin and Roumania, red bed-covers,
curtains or carpets being used to obtain the effect. Under the
treatment by red light not only is the skin enabled to heal healthfully
without scarring, but the whole course of the disease is beneficially
affected and abbreviated, the fever is diminished and also the risk
of complications. Another physician has discovered that a similar
beneficial effect is produced by red light in measles. A child with
a severe attack of measles was put into a room with red blinds and
a photographic lamp. The rash speedily disappeared and the fever
subsided, the child complaining only of the absence of light; the
blinds were consequently removed, and the fever, rash and prostration
returned, to disappear again when the blinds were resumed.
Whether red light, or the exclusion of violet, exerts a beneficial
influence on the hæmoglobin of the blood and on metabolism generally
has not been distinctly proved, but it seems to me to be indicated by
such experiments as those of Marti published a few years ago in the
_Atti dei Lincei_. This investigator found that while feeble irritation
of the skin promotes the formation of blood corpuscles, strong
irritation diminishes the blood corpuscles and also the hæmoglobin;
at the same time he found that darkness also diminishes the number
of red corpuscles, while continued exposure to intense light (even
at night the electric light, which, however, is rich in violet rays)
favors increased formation of red corpuscles, and in some degree of
hæmoglobin. Finsen has shown that inflammation of the skin caused by
chemical or violet light leads to contraction of the red corpuscles.
This brings us to the consideration of the influence of the red rays
on the nervous system. From time to time experiments have been made
as to the influence of various colored lights, chiefly on the insane,
as first suggested by Father Secchi in 1895. Even yet, however, the
specific mental influences of the various colors are not quite clear.
It has been found by some that the red rays are far more soothing and
comfortable, less irritating, than the total rays of uncolored light,
and Garbini found that angry infants were soothed by the light through
red glass, only slightly by that through green and not at all by other
colored light. On the other hand, it is stated that a well-known dry
plate manufacturer at Lyons was obliged to substitute green-colored
glass in the windows of his large room for the usual red because the
work people sang and gesticulated all day and the men made love to the
women, while under the influence of green glass (which also allows
yellow rays to pass) they became quiet and silent and seemed less
fatigued when they left off work. We need not attach much value to
these statements, but in this connection it is interesting to refer
to the results obtained some years ago by Féré and recorded in his
‘Sensation et Mouvement.’ Experimenting on normal subjects as well
as on nervous subjects, who were found more sensitive, with colored
light passed through glass or sheets of gelatine, he found notable
differences in muscular power, measured by the dynamometer, and in the
circulation as measured by plethysmographic tracings of the forearm
under the influence of different colors. He found in this manner with
one subject whose normal muscular power was represented by 23 that blue
light increased his power to 24, green to 28, yellow to 30, orange
to 35 and red to 42. The dynamogenic powers of the different colors
were thus found to rank in the spectral order, red representing the
climax of energy, or, as Féré puts it, “the intensity of the visual
sensation varies as the vibrations.” Féré found that colors need not
be perceived in order to show their influence, thus proving the purely
physical nature of that influence, for in a subject who was unable to
see colors with one eye, the color stimulus had the same dynamogenic
effect whether applied to the seeing or the defective eye. Increase of
volume of blood in the limbs, measured by the plethysmograph, so far as
we can rely on Féré’s experiments, ran parallel with the influence on
muscular power, culminating with red, so that no metaphor is involved,
Féré remarks, when we speak of red as a ‘warm’ color. On the insane
the results attained by the use of colored glass do not seem to be
quite coherent. Some of the earlier observers described the beneficial
effects of blue glass in soothing maniacs. Pritchard Davies, however,
was not able to find that red light had any beneficial effect, though
on some cases blue had, while Roffegean found that, in the case of a
somber and taciturn maniac who could rarely be persuaded to eat, three
hours in a red-lighted room produced a markedly beneficial effect, and
a man with delusions of persecution became quite rational and was even
in a condition to be sent home after a few days in the same room. He
also found that a violent maniac wearing a strait jacket, after a few
hours in a room with blue glass windows became quite calm and gave no
further trouble. Osburne has found, after many years’ experience, that
in the absence of structural disease violet light (for from three to
six hours) is most useful in the treatment of excitement, sleeplessness
and acute mania; red he has found of some benefit, though to a much
less degree in such cases (it must be remarked that violet light as
usually applied is not free from red), while he has not found any color
with which he has tried experiments (red, orange or violet) of benefit
in melancholia. The significance of these facts is not altogether
clear; the influence, as Pritchard Davies concluded, seems to be
largely moral, though it may be that the colors of long wave-length are
tonic and those of short wave-length sedative.
So far I have been chiefly concerned to point out that the immense
emotional impressiveness of red has a basis in physical laws, being by
no means altogether a matter of environmental associations. It is true
that the two groups of influences overlap, and that we can not always
distinguish them. We can not be sure that the greater sensitiveness
to the red rays may not have been emphasized in the organism, not
necessarily as the result of inherited acquirement, but probably as
the perpetuation of a variation of sensibility, found beneficial in
an environment where red was liable to be especially associated with
objects that were to be avoided as terrible or sought as useful. In
this way the physical and environmental factors would run in a circle.
We have to bear this consideration in mind when we take into account
the susceptibilities of animals, especially of the higher animals,
to red. The color sense, it is well known, is widely diffused among
animals; indeed this fact has been brought forward, especially by
Pouchet, to prove that there can have been no color evolution in man;
this it can scarcely be said to show, since evolution does not run in a
straight line, and it is quite conceivable and even probable that the
ancestors of man were less dependent than many lower animals, for the
means of living, on a highly developed color sense. Thus a color sense
that among some creatures is so highly developed as to include even the
ultra-violet rays, was among our own ape-like ancestors either never
developed or partially lost.
Graber, in his important investigation into the color sense of animals,
showed that of fifty animals studied by him forty showed strong color
preferences in their places of abode. In general he found, without
being able to explain the fact, that animals which prefer the dark are
red lovers, those which prefer the light are blue lovers. The common
worm, with head and tail cut off, still preferred red to blue nearly
as much as when uninjured. (This would seem to indicate the same kind
of susceptibility to unaccustomed violet rays which we have already
encountered in the phenomenon of sun-burn.) The triton and cochineal,
with eyes removed and heads covered with wax, still had delicate sense
for color and brightness. The flea infesting the dog had a finer color
sense than the bee, while nearly all the animals Graber investigated
were more or less sensitive to the ultra-red rays.
Among insects it scarcely appears, nor should we expect that there
would be any peculiarly marked predilection or aversion for red.
Cockerell and F. W. Anderson, from observations in various parts of the
United States, believe that yellow (_i. e._, the brightest color) is
the most attractive to insects, and the former doubts whether insects
can distinguish red from yellow. Among the higher animals, and even
among fishes and birds, there is not only a color sense, but a highly
emotionalized color sense, and red appears to be usually the color
that arouses the emotion. There is a proverb, ‘Women and mackerel
are caught by red,’ and perch is also said to be caught by red bait.
Sparrows appear to be repelled by red; the case is reported of a hen
sparrow, kept in captivity for ten years, which though otherwise a
fearless bird ‘would on seeing scarlet show painful signs of distress
and faint away.’ The lady who records this observation has noted the
same repugnance to red, though in a less marked degree, in other
sparrows, one of which showed a predilection for blue objects, and she
remarks that when feeding outdoor sparrows from the window they flew
away when she wore a red jacket, while a blue jacket inspired them with
confidence; other birds, she found, except a cockatoo, were unaffected
by colors. Red, it is well known, is very obnoxious to turkey cocks,
while the fury aroused in various quadrupeds by red was known at a very
early period; Seneca referred to it in the case of the bull, the most
familiar example; it is seen in buffaloes, sometimes in horses, and
also, it is said, in the hippopotamus.
The phenomena of color aversion and color predilection among insects
may possibly be in some degree a matter of physical sensibility,
varying according to the creature’s tissues, habitat and needs, but as
we approach the vertebrates and especially the mammals there can be
little doubt that it is mainly a matter of environment and association;
in other words, that it is accounted for by the color of food, the
color of blood and the color of the chief secondary sexual characters.
Let us, however, confine ourselves to man, and consider what are the
chief colored objects that are of most vital concern to the human and
most closely allied species.
One of the earliest groups of such objects--some would say the most
important group in this connection--is that of ripe fruits. Certainly
among the frugivorous apes and among many races of primitive man, the
color of fruits must be a powerful factor in developing a sensibility
for red rays, and in associating such sensibility with emotional
satisfaction. The color of fruits is most generally red, orange or
purple, and since purple is largely made up of red, it is clear that
the influence of fruits will almost exclusively bear on the rays
of long wave-length. We may reasonably suppose that the search for
fruits acted as an important factor in the development of a special
sensibility for red.
A later factor in the predilection for the red, orange and yellow
rays, though scarcely a factor in their discrimination, lies in the
fact that these are the colors of fire. Flame, apart from its beauty,
on which certain poets, Shelley especially, have often insisted, is a
source of massive physical satisfaction. Even under the conditions of
civilization we are often acutely sensitive to this fact, while under
the conditions of primitive life, in imperfect shelters, caves or
tents, where no other source of artificial light and heat is known, the
satisfaction is immensely greater. At the same time fire is associated
with food, it is a protection from wild beasts and the accompaniment of
the festival. It may even take on a sacred and symbolic character, and
the Roman goddess Vesta was, as Ovid said, simply ‘living flame.’
While fruit or fire would tend to make the emotional tone of red
pleasant, another very powerful factor in its emotional influences,
though this time as much by causing terror as pleasure, is the fact
that it is the color of blood. That ‘the blood is the life’ is a belief
instinctively stamped even on the emotions of animals, and it has not
died even in civilized man, for the sight of blood produces on many
persons a sickening and terrifying sensation which is only overcome
by habit and experience or by a very strong effort of will. It is
not surprising that in some parts of the world, and even in our own
Indo-European group of languages, the name for red is ‘blood-color.’
It is evident, however, that at a very early period of primitive
culture the blood had ceased to be merely a source of terror, or even
of the joy of battle. We find everywhere that blood is blended into
complex ritual customs, and thus associated with complex emotional
states. Among the ancient Arabians blood was smeared on the body
on various occasions, and in modern Arabia blood is still so used.
Everywhere, even in the folk-lore of modern Europe, we find that
blood is a medicine, as it is also among the primitive aborigines of
Australia, so carefully investigated by Baldwin Spencer and Gillen.
Among these latter primitive people we meet with a phenomenon of very
great significance. We find, that is, that blood is the earliest
pigment. There can be little doubt that the earliest paint used by
man--no doubt by man when in a much more primitive condition than even
the Australians--was blood. In the initiation rites of the Arunta
tribes, as described by Spencer and Gillen, the chief performer is
elaborately decorated with patterns in eagle-hawk down stuck to his
body with blood drawn from some member of the tribe. It was estimated
that one man alone, on one of these occasions, allowed five half-pints
to be taken from him during a single day; at the same time the blood is
not regarded as sufficient pigment and the down is also colored red and
yellow with ochre. Red ochre, Spencer and Gillen remark, is frequently
a substitute for blood or is used with it. Blood is a medicine, and
when any one is ill he is first rubbed over with red ochre, it being
obvious to the primitive mind that the ochre will share the remedial
properties of blood; in the same way ceremonial objects may sometimes
be rubbed over with ochre instead of blood. They associate this red
ochre especially with women’s blood; and it is said that once some
women after long walking were so exhausted that hemorrhage came on and
this gave rise to deposits of red ochre. Other red ochre pits, also,
they attribute to blood which flowed from women. It appears also that
the blood with which sacred implements used in the ritual ceremonies of
these Central Australians were smeared must be drawn from women.
Far from Australia, among the hill tribes of the Central Indian hills,
we find the same blood ritual and the same tendency to substitute
pigments for blood. Among some of the Bengal tribes, says Crooke, blood
is drawn from the husband’s little finger, mixed with betel and eaten
by the bride. A further stage is seen among the allied Kurmis who mix
the blood with lac dye. Lastly come the rites, common to all these
tribes, in which the bridegroom, often in secrecy, covered by a sheet,
rubs vermilion on the parting of the girl’s hair, while the women
relations smear their toes with lac dye. It is a sacramental rite, and
after the husband’s death the widow solemnly washes off the red from
her hair, or flings the little box in which she keeps the coloring
matter into running water.
Some of the foregoing facts, both in Australia and India, suggest the
transition to another factor in the emotional potency possessed by red.
Red is not only the color of fire and of war and of ritual pigment; it
is the color of love. This is certainly an ancient and powerful factor
in the emotional attitude towards red. Secondary sexual characters,
even among birds, are often red; many fishes, also, at the epoch of
the oviposit show a red tint on the orifice of the sexual apparatus;
patches of red, sometimes very brilliant, but only appearing when the
animal is mature, are perhaps the commonest adornments of monkeys.
In man the color of the hair and beard, the most conspicuous of the
secondary sexual characters, is most usually brown, or some other
variety of red. The lips are crimson, the mucous membrane generally a
dark red; the scarlet of the blush, among all fair races, whatever
other sources it may have, is always regarded as especially the
ensign of love. The rose is the flower of love, as the pale lily is
of virtue. This association is quite inapt, and many people who are
sensitive in such matters feel that the lily and many white flowers
are far more symbolical of rapture and voluptuousness than the rose.
It is, however, the color and not the scent or other qualities that
has exerted decisive influence on the choice of the symbol. In the
Teutonic symbolism of fourteenth century Europe red was the color of
love, as also, with yellow, it was the favorite color for garments. In
more modern times this last tendency has survived. Sardou decides, it
is reported, the color of the dresses to be worn in his plays, on the
ground that if he did not the actresses would all wear red to attract
attention to themselves, as once occurred at the Odéon. Eighteen
hundred years earlier, Clement of Alexandria had written: “Would it
were possible to abolish purple in dress, so as not to turn the eyes
of the spectators on the faces of those that wear it!” He proceeds to
lament that women make all their garments of purple (the classic purple
was really a red) in order to inflame lust--those ‘stupid and luxurious
purples’ which have caused Tyre and Sidon and the Lacedæmonian Sea
to be so much in demand for their purple fishes. Similar phenomena
are noted on the other side of the world. Thus the Japanese, as the
Rev. Walter Weston informs us, have a proverb: ‘Love flies with a
red petticoat.’ Married women are not there supposed to wear red
petticoats, for they are too attractive, and a married woman should be
attractive only to her husband. The æsthetic Japanese may be thought
to be specially sensitive to color, but in Africa also, in Loango, as
Pechuel-Loesche mentions, pregnant women are forbidden to wear red, and
it would doubtless be possible to find many similar indications of this
feeling in other parts of the world.
We have now passed in review all the influences which, by force
of their powerful attraction or repulsion, have during countless
ages impressed on man, and often on his ancestors, the strong and
poignant emotions which accompany the sensation of the most vividly
and persistently seen of all colors. We find evidence of the reality
of the influences we have traced--especially those of fire, blood
and love--in Christian ecclesiastical symbolism, according to which
red variously signifies ardent love, burning zeal, energy, courage,
cruelty and bloodthirstiness. To the antagonism and complexity of these
influences we must doubtless attribute the disturbing nature of the
emotion aroused by the group of red sensations and the fluctuations in
the predilection felt towards it. It is at once the most attractive and
the most repulsive of colors. To enjoy it we must use it economically.
The vision of poppies on a background of golden corn, the glint of
roses embowered in green leaves, the sudden flash of a scarlet flower
on a southern woman’s dark hair--it is in such visions as these that
red gives us its emotional thrill altogether untouched by pain. If the
‘multitudinous seas’ were indeed ‘incarnadined’ for us in ‘one red,’
if the sky were scarlet, or all vegetation crimson, the horror of the
world would be painful to contemplate for nervous systems moulded
to our vision of nature. Our eyes have developed in a world where
the green and blue rays meet us at every step, and where we have in
consequence been almost as dulled to them as we are to the weight of
the atmosphere that presses in on us on every side. It is under the
clouded skies of northern lands that blue is counted the loveliest of
colors; it is in the desert that green becomes supremely beautiful and
sacred.