A necessary step to the explanation of our pleasure in
supposedly painful emotions is to make clear how we can feel
any emotion at all in watching what we know to be unreal, and
to show how this emotion is sympathetic, that is, imitative,
rather than of an objective reference. In brief, why do we
feel WITH, rather than toward or about, the actors?
The answer to this question requires a reference to the current
theory of emotion. According to modern psychologists, emotion
is constituted by the instinctive response to a situation; it
is the feeling accompanying very complicated physical reactions,
which have their roots in actions once useful in the history
of mankind. Thus the familiar "expression" of anger, the
flushed face, dilated nostril, clenched fist, are remains or
marks of reactions serviceable in mortal combat. But these,
the "coarser" bodily changes proper to anger, are accompanied
by numberless organic reactions, the "feel" of all of which
together is an indispensable element of the emotion of anger.
The point to be noted in all this is that these reactions are
ACTIONS, called up by something with which we literally HAVE
TO DO.
A person involved in real experience does not reproduce the
emotions about him, for in real life he must respond to the
situation, take an attitude of help, consolation, warning;
and the character of these reactions determines for him an
emotion of his own. Even though he really do nothing, the
multitudinous minor impulses to action going to make up his
attitude appreciably interfere with the reproduction of the
reactions of the object of his interest. In an exactly
opposite way the artificial conditions of the spectator at a
play, which reinforce the vivid reproduction of ideas, and
check action, stifle those emotions directed toward the players,
the objective emotions of which we have spoken. The spectator
is completely cut off from all possibilities of influence on
events. Between his world and that across the footlights an
inexpressible gulf is fixed. He cannot take an "attitude,"
he can have nothing to do in this galere. Since he may not
act, even those beginnings of action which make the basis of
emotion are inhibited in him. The spectator at a play experiences
much more clearly and sharply than the sympathetic observer;
only the proportions of his mental contents are different.
This, I say, accounts for the absence of the real pity and
fear, which were supposed to be directed toward the persons
in the play. But so far as yet appears there is every reason
to expect the sympathetic reproduction of the emotions of the
persons themselves.
Let us briefly recall the situation. The house is darkened
and quiet; all lines converge to the stage, which is brightly
lighted, and heightened in visual effect by every device known
to art. The onlooker's mind is emptied of its content; all
feeling of self is pushed down to its very lowest level. He
has before him a situation which he understands through sight
and hearing, and in which he follows the action not only by
comprehension, but by instinctive imitation. This is the great
vehicle of suggestion. We cannot see tears rise without moisture
in our own eyes; we reproduce a yawn even against our will; the
sudden or the regular movement of a companion we are forced to
follow, at least incipiently. Now the expression which we
imitate brings up in us to a certain extent the whole complex
of ideas and feeling-tones belonging to that expression.
Moreover, the more closely we attend to it, the more explicitly
do we imitate it, by an evident psychological principle. Thus
in the artificially contrived situation of the spectator at a
play, he is forced, not only to understand intellectually, but
also to FOLLOW, quite literally, the emotional movements of
the actors. The process of understanding, raised to the highest
pitch, involves by its very nature also reproduction of what is
understood. The complex of the ideas and associations of the
persons of the play is ideally reproduced. Are not the organic
reactions belonging to these set up too?--not directly, in
response to a situation in which the spectator may act, but
directly, by reproduction of the mental contents of one who
may act, the person of the drama. The final answer to this
question contains, to my mind, the whole kernel of the dramatic
mystery, and the starting-point for an aesthetic theory of
tragedy.