Human Traits and their Social Significance

by Irwin Edman

An extraordinary degree or a decided hypertrophy of emotional susceptibility is as dangerous a trait as its possession in a reasonable degree is a utility and an enrichment of life. It results in the hysteria or sentimentalism which adds to the real evils and difficulties of life fancied grievances and disasters. Such temperaments when confronted with any good or beautiful action dissolve into ecstasy, and when faced with a problem or a difficulty dissolve into tears. Doctors will not treat their own children because the overplus of sympathy is a hindrance to action. Sentimental ladies are not the most efficient charity workers or prisoner reformers.

While there is a general tendency to experience sympathetically the feelings of others, this becomes specialized in most people, and one tends to experience most immediately and intensely the emotions of one's own kind, physically, socially, and intellectually. Sympathy is a specialization of man's general gregariousness, and becomes more specialized as one becomes habituated exclusively to a small group. Within this small group, individuals not only experience the emotions of others, but like to share and communicate their own emotions.

The nearer people are to us in mode of life, social status, and intellectual interests, the closer is community of feeling and "consciousness of kind." Two Americans meeting in a foreign country have a quick and sympathetic understanding of each other. Two alumni of the same college meeting in a distant city have a common basis of interest and feeling.

This easy give-and-take of feeling and emotion makes the deep attractiveness of intimate companionship. Our companion has but to mention a name or a place, and we experience the same associations, the pleasures, or antipathies which he does. A gesture, a curious glance of the eye, a pause, we understand as quickly as if he had spoken a sentence. But not only do we understand his feelings; he (or she) understands ours. And for most people, all their interests and enjoyments are heightened by the presence of an intimately known companion.

Many children manifest very clearly this tendency of active sympathy; they demand that their every emotion shall be shared at once. "Oh, come and look!" is their constant cry when out for a walk, and every object that excites their curiosity or admiration is brought at once, or pointed out, to their companion.... On the other hand, another child, brought up, perhaps, under identical conditions, but in whom this impulse is relatively weak, will explore a garden, interested and excited for hours together, without once feeling the need for sympathy, without once calling on others to share his emotions.[1]

[Footnote 1: McDougall: loc. cit., p. 172.]

In adult life, few people care to go to theater or concert alone, and a man at a club will wander half through the dining-room until he will find some one with whom he will feel like sitting through a dinner conversation.

The fact that emotions exhibited in one individual are readily aroused in another makes art possible and makes it interesting. A poet by a phrase, a musician by a chord or melody, can suddenly reproduce in us his own feeling of gayety or exaltation. A painter by disposition of line and color can suggest the majesty of mountains, or the sadness of a sunset as he himself has experienced it. In novels and dramas we can relive the feelings that the writer imagines to have been experienced by others. It is testimony to the easy excitability of sympathy as well as to an artist's skill that this can sometimes be done in a few lines or paragraphs. Witness the famous opening of Poe's Fall of the House of Usher:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium; the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?

To Aristotle tragedy seemed to afford a cleansing or "katharsis of the soul" through the sympathetic experience of pity or fear. To Schopenhauer music was the greatest of the arts because it made us at one with the sorrows and the strivings of the world. All the representative arts are vivid ways of making us feel with the passions or emotions that stir mankind. And those men are poets, painters, or musicians who, besides having a unique gift of expression, whether in word, tone, or color, have themselves an unusually high sensitivity to the moods of other men and to the imagined moods of the natural scenes among which they move.[1]