A Primary Question

I LIVE in the tropics. Every day, above my head, passes the vertical sun of the equatorial regions. Throughout the year there extends an unbroken heat; day after day I wear the same white clothing, proved by experience to be the coolest clothing a man can wear and keep within the conventions. In April, when the sun goes north to the Tropic of Cancer, and in the fall, when he returns south to cross the equator, we have our hottest seasons, two of them; but these are merely intensifications of the always-present. The rains bring comparative coolness, but we still wear white and sweat (not perspire) at the slightest physical exertion. Along the water front, where the ships come to load sugar and hemp and copra and kapok and our other tropical raw materials, the glare of the sun is terrific. Some sort of protection for the eyes is a necessity — Crookes’s glasses, or colored glasses of some description. A friend of mine whose work keeps him there most of the day and who neglected this precaution has only just managed to save his sight at much trouble and expense.

The effect of exposure to the unremitting daily glare of the tropic sun is jagged nerves. By the end of the day they are worn and frayed, and men do queer things. Even the natives, with their pigment protection against the excessive light, do queer things. This is the land where men run amuck, slaying right, and left all living things that come in their way until they themselves are stopped by death. This is the land of the siesta, where not only ‘foreigners’ like myself but also the natives sleep through the midday hours, and the darkness of night comes as a welcome relief. How the natives love to sit hour on hour and talk in the moonlight, so cool after the heat of the day!

These general conditions of excessive heat and light are characteristic of the tropics. We learned this in school, of course, and no one needs to be told. But we also learned some things about colors that, in my experience, I do not, find to be true. Did we not learn, were we not taught, that the inhabitants of tropical countries love gaudy colors, reds, yellows, and greens, and that red is a color peculiarly irritant to the nerves? For example, if we wish to make two people quarrel, we have only to put them together in a red room and the desired result will surely follow, for the red color will irritate them beyond restraint. Does not red make the bull in the field chase us out of it? And does not red affect the appetites and passions, raising them to a high pitch of excitement?

But here my experience is just the reverse. I have noticed with surprise t hat, when my self-control is worn thin by the excessive light to which I am exposed, there is nothing so soothing, so restorative of calm and wholesomeness, as to be able to gaze awhile at a square of red cloth hung on the wall near by. And this red is no pale, incipient shade. It is the red of the red hibiscus that grows in the tropics; the red of the canna lily known as the Spanish flag; the pulsating red of that most gorgeous of all flowers, the double poinsettia; the strong, the primary color. It draws my spirit together, which has increasingly felt ready to fly asunder like a bursting shell, tearing those about me in bursts of temper as the fragments of a bursting shell would tear the flesh of their bodies. But the glorious red of that piece of cloth eases the strain as I gaze at it: the bursting pressure relaxes; the outer casing of my self-control is — as it were — kept whole. I have found it a wholesome color; it brings relief without reaction.

Now the laborers in my bodega must find red affecting them in much the same way, for they love to dress themselves in red. Red trunks, red shirts — they are very popular. Sometimes it is but one of these garments, sometimes it is both. But they love to have something red about them, especially those least affected by imported customs.

When I was at school and learned that the inhabitants of the tropic zone were addicted to bright colors, particularly red, I always understood the explanation to be that it was because they were nearer the primitive than we, nearer the child state of the human race; that this was a mark of the savage. For the love of bright colors is usually taken to indicate an undeveloped taste, a discrimination not yet grown nice. But I have come to doubt the truth of this dictum. I have come to suspect that there are deep and fundamental principles behind this love of bright colors so characteristic of the sunny lands.

Red seems to be the predominating color of the tropics. And man, in his propensity for red, is only responding to a rule laid down by nature. There are flowers here in flaming red that are red nowhere else. The hibiscus is one. We have trees, full-grown trees as high as a two-story house, which, in the proper season, are covered with flowers of an intense red. Perhaps in other tropical countries the exuberant growth of plant life has produced trees with flowers of other colors, but here there are none, so far as I know. Except some shrubs with pale yellow flowers, there are none but red.

Now the point is this: if you travel northward, into the high latitudes of the temperate zone, you will find the prevailing color among the wild flowers to be no longer red, but blue. Even before I came to the tropics I had noticed this predominance of blue among the wild flowers of north China. There were flowers of other colors, of course. The wild chrysanthemums I picked on my walks among the rocky China hills were yellow; the wild azaleas were a lovely pink. But down among the grasses were myriads of small, inconspicuous flowers tinged with blue, like forget-me-nots. And, as if to emphasize them, the blue gentians bloomed in profusion. As one walked through the grassy plains, it often seemed as if he walked in fields sprinkled with powdered blue from heaven.

Now in north China, although the light is remarkably clear, so that tourists to such places as Peking find it necessary to use an extraordinarily small stop when making snapshots, the light there is not so nerve-racking as the light of the tropics. Perhaps it is the changes of season that afford relief, the alternation of heat with cold, and of bright with the dull skies of winter. Perhaps from the same cause, the people are not so nervous; they are more stolid and steady-going. And the color almost universally affected by the Chinese for clothing is not red, but blue.

Nature, it appears, has zoned her colors to correspond with climate, and man’s predilections respond. I wish some capable scientists could explain this. Meanwhile, I have to be content with my own unlearned explanation, though it runs counter to the usual.

Red, as we know, is a color of low vibrations, the lowest in the visible spectrum. Why Nature has colored the flowers of the tropics a prevailing red I do not know. But in so doing she has given tropical man a valuable hint. When, his nerves racked by exposure to excessive light, he feels his self-control disintegrating under the bombardment, he has only to turn his eyes to the bright red flowers Nature has provided and he feels his selfcommand restored. He is made whole again by the low vibrations proceeding from that pulsating color, which offset and nullify those of the harmful violet rays. Thus Nature provides and offers him relief, that he may live. Tropical man has found the medicine good and has accepted it gratefully. He makes use of it and plants his garden with red flowers; he clothes himself in red; he puts red in his house, making pillows and curtains, or simple hangings, of it. And thus man finds relief for that part of him which suffers most in the tropics, his nerves.

All around the earth, in the region of the equator, live peoples who love red. In that predilection for the flaming color are they betraying a lack of taste and discrimination, or are they pointing a lesson in things we have not thought of before? And when we so glibly quote axioms on the physiological and psychological effects of color, ought we not first to ask, Where do you live?