Nur raselos bethätigt sich der Mann.”
Contemplative natures, not given to activity, have a tendency to play with their suffering, and by a strange division of consciousness stand as on some rocky height, beholding with pleased appreciation the foaming torrent of their own feelings. In the closing chapter of my Play of Animals I treated the subject of divided consciousness at some length, and will not here repeat what is said there. For a specific instance we need only point to the artist who brings a tragic tale to a close with real regret, and, in spite of the suffering it has caused him, is filled with the joy in being a cause, in his power to create. When Kleist finished Penthesilia in Dresden he went to his friend Pfuel in tears. “She is dead!” he wailed, and yet, in spite of his deep and genuine grief over the death of his heroine, in the depths of his soul he was conscious of joy in his creation. This is a good example of play with mental suffering, and Marie Bashkirtseff furnishes another illustration which I have cited in my earlier work. “Can one believe it?” she writes in her journal, at the age of thirteen; “I find everything good and beautiful, even tears and pain. I love to weep, I love to despair, I love to be sad. I love life in spite of all; I wish to live. I must be happy, and am happy to be miserable. My body weeps and moans, but something in me that is above me enjoys it all.” By these words she reveals most clearly that division of consciousness in which, behind the suffering I, another seems to stand, which has the power to change the grief to bliss. Goethe, too, seems often to have felt the same. His Werther blames himself because he is prone to cower before petty ills. Further than this there is such a thing as emotional pessimism founded on temperament. For Schopenhauer it was an evident satisfaction to work himself up to a condition of the utmost indignation over the evils of the world. Kuno Fischer has sharply exposed this playful characteristic of his pessimism. It is true, he says, that Schopenhauer takes a serious and even tragic view of the world, but, after all, it is only a view, a spectacle, a picture. “The world tragedy is played in a theatre; he sits in the audience on a comfortable divan commanding the stage, using his opera glass with discretion. Many of the spectators forget the suffering world at the buffet, none follow the tragedy with such close attention, such deep earnestness, such a comprehensive glance as his. Then, deeply moved and soul-satisfied, he goes home and writes down what he has seen.”[345] Melancholy, too, in the ordinary sense, not the pathological, belongs here, the melancholy of lovers, poets, and artists, the condition typified by the phrase “dégustation complaisante de la tristesse.”[346]
Finally, pleasure in the tragic, of which we have spoken in another connection, should be mentioned here. Augustine, the great prober into the problems of the soul, has set forth this question with inimitable clearness in the third book of his Confessions. “Why,” says he, “should a man sadden himself by voluntarily witnessing what is painful? The spectator does undeniably feel sad, and the very sadness is a pleasure. How can we explain this sympathy with unreal, theatrical sorrows? The hope of ultimate rescue is not the only thing that appeals to him—it is the actual accumulation of misery as well, and he praises the play in proportion as it moves him. When common woes are so represented as not to affect the hearer, he goes away dissatisfied and complaining. If he is affected, on the contrary, he listens attentively, and weeps with delight.” If I understand Augustine aright, he finds the solution of the puzzle in the idea of a sort of sympathy which he distinguishes from real or moral sympathy, and which is at bottom nothing else than the play of inner imitation, that æsthetic feeling of fellowship of which we shall hear more later. He puts his finger on the real reason why fellow-feeling for the sufferer has a special charm when he admits that tragic representation affected him with sharp, creepy sensations, like the scratching of a finger nail. Thus he concludes, as we have done, that the foundation of enjoyment of tragedy is the result of intensive stimuli. As Du Bos[347] remarks, we take the pain accompanying the emotion in the bargain because we like the emotion, the agitation of feeling, so well. This recalls the Aristotelian dogma of the catharsis, but the objection to this theory lies, as its name implies, in the fact that it seeks a practical end for the play of æsthetic pleasure. For Aristotle the question is to establish the purifying effects of a thunderstorm, not the enjoyment of its grandeur, and for this reason the doctrine of the catharsis, however clear it may be, does not directly answer our question. Delight in the tragic element is not concerned with the lull after the storm, but only with the surging might of the tempest itself, in which we are playfully involved. Weil and Bernays seem to me to have the right idea when they speak of the need for violent emotional play, and of enjoyment of ecstatic conditions. And Lessing also, when he says that strong passion gives more reality to feeling. But it is doubtful whether Aristotle considered this side of the question in forming his theory.
3. Surprise
Surprise is connected with fear, and for this reason is in itself a disagreeable sensation; yet, on account of its strong psychophysical effect—namely, the shock which it produces—it becomes highly enjoyable in play, and displays, perhaps more clearly than any of the other cases, the charm of strong stimuli. Children indulge very early in play involving the shock of surprise, and its effectiveness as a means of giving pleasure becomes more and more intense. Darwin relates that his son, from the one hundred and tenth day, was wildly delighted when a handkerchief was laid over his face and then suddenly withdrawn, or when his father’s face was hidden and revealed in this way. “He then uttered a little noise, which was an incipient laugh.” I referred to this in speaking of expectancy, which, indeed, goes hand in hand with surprise, however opposed they may appear, since surprise which is entirely unexpected is of course no part of play. There is always playful experimentation with the shock when we expect it, but do not know when or in what form it will appear. It is just this combination which makes the emotional effect of surprise greater than it would otherwise be. When, for example, we hold a lighted match over a lamp, we are the more startled by the slight explosion because we have attentively awaited it; and there are many games for children in which the combined effect of expectation and surprise furnish an essential part of the pleasure, such as those where persons or objects are hidden. The excitement, too, which is caused by loud and sudden sounds is of the same character. M. Reischle, in his fine paper on child’s play, distinguishes a special group of expectation and surprise games, and points out that the little ones peek while their comrades are hiding, and yet are overjoyed to find them, and apparently surprised. In many throwing and catching games both elements are influential in heightening the stimulus, and special plays grow out of them, such as “Hide-and-Seek,” “Blind-Man’s Buff,” “Drop the Handkerchief,” as well as many games of chance. Indeed, in the last named the stimulus of surprise is often of special importance,[348] and one of the chief sources of pleasure is the tension of expectancy followed by the sudden decision on the fall of dice.
Yet more interesting is the significance of surprise in relation to the comic. While the latter is more than a play with surprise, this feature becomes a factor that should by no means be overlooked in studying comic effects, especially when we reflect that previous efforts to explain this modification of aesthetic enjoyment have proved abortive, possibly through failure to give due weight to this very element. E. Hecker advances the theory, it is true, that laughter from tickling accounts for the origin of enjoyment of the comic, but in this purely physiological explanation he seems to overlook the fact that as a rule we laugh only when we are tickled, not when we tickle ourselves—that is to say, that contact with finger tips becomes tickling only when the hand is a strange one. Even in physical tickling, then, there must be some psychic factors, of which surprise may be one, even though it is inadequate alone to explain the phenomena. The fact that surprise not carried far enough to frighten is one of the first causes of laughter in children gives colour to this idea. Zeising has shown conclusively that there is a double surprise in the comic, the first being the intuitive start at something unusual, and contrasted with what is normal and typic, be it occasioned by some anomaly in the object itself or depending only on the momentary milieu—such, for instance, as the ridiculous appearance of a tiny cottage in a row of palatial residences.[349] This first shock is followed by a moment of suspense. “When the entirely unexpected happens,” says Goethe in Tasso, “the mind stands still for a moment,” which again is interrupted by the new surprise of finding the first one negatived or reversed.[350] Here we have the counter shock, whose pleasurable effect is strong enough to more than neutralize the first, and render their combined result agreeable.[351] As Kant, with his unrivalled penetration, has remarked, we play with the error as with a ball, tossing it back and forth and looking after it each time; in this way we are hurried through a succession of tensions and relaxations.
While this illustration shows clearly how the essence of comicality is due to the peculiar character of the double shock, yet it remains true that even in this case surprise as such is pleasurable, and plays its part in the complicated effect.
4. Fear
That even fear, the most abject of all affections, may become the object of playful experimentation is one of the riddles of soul life. Here, too, we can only apply the theory of pleasure in intense stimulus to that of divided consciousness. When Lukrez dwells upon the pleasure of gazing on a stormy sea from the vantage ground of a rocky crag he illustrates this state, only here the soul is both in the midst of the storm and on the rocks as well. Apart from and above the terror-stricken personality stands another, safe and free, and enjoying the fascination of painful excitement. For the power of fear is fascinating, even benumbing in its effect. Souriau says: “I remember, as a child, seeing a snake, cut in two by a spade, convulsively writhing on the garden walk. The sight filled me with terror, which rooted me to the spot. Fascinated, I stood perfectly still, my eyes following the agonized twisting of the creature while I felt waves of pain surging through my own body.”[352] Of course, such a condition can be playful only in case of an æsthetic illusion when the fear is but apparent, and may be dispelled at will, and when pleasure is stronger than pain in the experience. Nevertheless, there are transitions between real and apparent fear which are particularly operative when curiosity becomes the counter irritant. Every one’s childhood will furnish an example of this. George Sand tells us how she as a little girl tried with a playmate to get a glimpse into the spirit world by means of mystic oaths and incantations. The children waited long in fear and trembling, for blue flames, protruding devil’s horns, etc. This was only a play, “but a play that set our hearts beating.”[353] Although fear in this instance has more the character of a necessary accompaniment than of an object of play, real delight in the gruesome is undeniably evident in the world of art. In the first place, there are legends and stories with horrible fantasies. The child is wrapped in breathless interest in accounts of ghosts, wicked magicians, werewolves, etc., and while safe in his own home enjoys the terrors which these ideas excite. As a small boy I listened with nameless horror to the crude account of the fate of Faust secretly read to me by our gardener out of a popular book. I remember how, when the devil led Faust through the ceiling, his skull was broken and his brains spattered on the wall. For some time after that I was afraid to pass shady places in the garden, even in the daytime. With older boys descriptions of battles and adventures, and, above all, Indian stories, take the place of fairy tales. The Leather Stocking Tales were my chief delight, especially The Pathfinder, and I can still recall the rapt attention with which I followed the frightful perils which threatened my hero, whenever I could get a quarter of an hour off. How meagre is our capacity for æsthetic enjoyment in later years compared with the absolute, unconditional surrender to it of a youthful soul! Adults enjoy the gruesome in poetic creations such as those of Hoffman and Victor Hugo. When we read of the struggle with the polypus in Toilers of the Sea the strong stimulus imparted by fear is certainly the chief source of pleasure. My grandfather in extreme old age liked nothing better than to read such thrilling tales of hairbreadth escapes, and the strong preference for detective stories evinced by the masses is based on the same grounds. Savages, too, like children, always prefer tales which deal with demons and magic.
Finally, we must notice an æsthetic phase which is related to fear—namely, exaltation. Since Kant’s thoroughgoing elucidation the principle is fixed that exaltation is the result of a rebound from fear. First depression, then exaltation. At first, the object of our reverence oppresses us, and for a moment we are painfully conscious of our impotence and nothingness; then comes a reaction; we throw off the oppression and begin to study the revered object with serious pleasure. In my Einleitung in die Aesthetik I did not attribute the first part of this process to æsthetic pleasure, because I found that inner imitation on which I based my investigation only in the second stage.[354] While I still regard it as the highest and most important element in æsthetics, yet I am aware that my view as there presented was somewhat one-sided, as is almost unavoidably the case if one attempts to carry out a theory systematically. As I shall return to this point, let it suffice to say here that probably the depression itself is pleasurable, and so forms a part of the æsthetic satisfaction. It is characteristic of our complex natures that along with our demand to control our surroundings we also feel the need of the domination of a higher power. When we encounter an incontestably overpowering force we gladly surrender unconditionally, and take pleasure in acknowledging that we are insignificant and helpless. The significance of this spirit for religion is apparent. Schiller has designated awe as the noblest human trait, and Schleiermacher found the springs of religion in the feeling of dependence. The first stage in the satisfaction derived from exaltation is akin to this when we enjoy our self-abasement in order to render more conspicuous the subsequent expansion of an individuality, in the second stage when by the exercise of inner imitation we identify ourselves with the revered object, thus partaking of the greatness which at first overawed us. While it is true that only the second part of this process attains the summit of enjoyment, the first, too, is playful. “How felt I myself so small—so great?” asks Faust, and attributes both sentiments to the selfsame moment. This play with depression is facilitated by repeating the whole process frequently. The mind is not only attracted to the object, but alternately repelled from it, and in this process of repetition depression assumes more and more the character of play.