As evidence of the irresistibility with which a rhythmical expression may rouse an audience to an almost unvoluntary imitation, one may refer to the familiar effects of the southern dances. The tarantella, as is well known, often entices the unwilling as well as the willing to join in its wild movements. And the same is said of several other Spanish and Italian dances. We need only refer to the apologue of the Fandango, so often used as a motive of ballets, in which the dance, brought into court for causing disturbance, compels judge and jury to yield to its temptations and dissolve the sitting for a fierce gambade.[128] Such stories give an exaggerated yet typical example of the great influence which the sight of dancing exercises on the lively Latin nations. An impassive Northerner can indeed always master the impulse to join actively in a wild dance. But even he cannot avoid sharing the excitement by internal imitation.
It is, however, impossible to decide with any exactitude whether the effects which a dance-performance exercises on the spectators are mainly due to the movements themselves or to the rhythm by which they are regulated. In order, therefore, to estimate at its proper value the importance of time, it is necessary to examine it as it appears when isolated from bodily movement. The lowest types of music, in which the element of melody is of no importance, show us rhythm in its simplest and purest form. Such instruments as drums, tom-toms, and castanets may serve as a most effective means of emotional excitation. The same exaltation or depression, which in a dance is conveyed by a series of varied expressive movements, may be transmitted with almost equal effectiveness by a simple sequence of sounds. Any group of acoustic impressions following each other in a fixed rhythm may, independently of their character, arouse in the listener the same modifications of functions and activities, and hence also the same emotional state, as was originally expressed by this particular time-sequence. Thus pure feeling, as it appears when abstraction has been made of all intellectual elements, can be as it were exteriorised in rhythmical form. And, which is of still greater importance, a pure feeling can in this exteriorisation be fixed down for future repetition. Even in its simplest manifestations art is thus capable of raising an emotional state beyond the limitations of space and time.
It is most natural, when speaking of the connection between feeling and rhythm, to refer to dance and the simplest vocal and instrumental music. But it goes without saying that the effects are the same in kind, although less in degree, when the time-sequence is impressed upon our mind in some more indirect way. Thus, by appropriating the element of rhythm, which enters into all poetry, we may in reciting or reading a verse partake of an emotional state in the same way as we do when joining, actively or “internally,” the movements of a dance. Similarly, the formative and decorative arts may, by compelling our eye to follow a regular arrangement of lines and figures, transmit to us an emotional excitement by the mediation of rhythm. Ornament, that purely popular art, may therefore be compared as to its psychological effects with simple popular dances and melodies.[129]
In these three logically most primordial arts, viz. gymnastic dance, geometric ornament, and unmelodic, simply rhythmical music or singing, the unmotived “objectless” feeling is expressed in a medium which directly conveys to us its accompanying modifications of activity. Notwithstanding the meagreness of their intellectual content, these purely lyrical forms, if we may so call them, are therefore emotionally suggestive to a high degree. General and indistinct moods, such as a feeling of ease, of liberation from restraint, of assurance and power, etc., may by them be transmitted with unsurpassable fidelity. But their expressive power is also confined to such purely hedonic states. Whenever, therefore, the feeling forms a part of a differentiated and fully formed emotion, the impulse to social expression must avail itself of some more adequate means of transmission.
In point of fact there will nearly always, even in the most impulsive outburst of pleasure or pain, enter an element of simple dramatic representation, by which some of the mental qualities distinctive of the various emotions are communicated. With regard to dancing, for instance, we can only speak in the abstract of any simply “gymnastic” forms.[130] Even if the movements originally aim at nothing but enhancement or relief for an indistinct emotional state, they will unavoidably take the character of such movements as have been connected with some emotion, and thereby, in spectators as well as in performers, awaken some faint revival of this complex state of feeling. This process can be very clearly observed in the case of the pseudo-pantomimes which are so general among lower tribes. When a savage is in a high-strung state of feeling, he generally resorts to the same movements which have served him to express the greatest and most frequent excitements of his life. Among warlike tribes the dances of joy, as well as their developments, salutation dances, and complimentary dances,[131] generally have a distinct military character.[132] No doubt it may be contended that the particular character of these pantomimes was originally a result of political considerations. In a military state of society it is perhaps simply a measure of safety to receive strangers with threats. But however important this utilitarian aspect may be, it seems more probable that a great part of these apparently unmotived pantomimes, which are executed when we should expect only a simple outburst of joy, are best interpreted as real instances of borrowed expression, necessitated by the limitations of our means of expression and furthered by associative processes.
In the life of self-contained educated men we do not generally meet with this phenomenon in so distinct a form. But even here the fragmentary pantomimes into which a man often falls when mastered by a quite indistinct feeling—we need only refer to the erotic character of embraces and other gestures of joy—show us that expression always adds an element of definiteness to the psychical state expressed. When treating of the reactions consequent upon bodily pain, we have already had to take into account the species of imaginative materialisation, as though pain were a concrete thing, a shirt of Nessus, by which a sufferer is generally induced to explain his automatic movements. Here we need only point out that a similar, so to speak, mythogenic influence, a natural tendency to personification, results not only from reactions to pain, but also from all expressive activities. An indistinct mood of pleasure thus generally passes over into a joy—that is, a feeling which is referred to some cause, imaginary or real—when the functional enhancement has reached our voluntary muscles. An oppression, which in its origin may be purely physiological, is transformed, when the bodily modifications become more differentiated,[133] into fear of something unknown—for instance, some impending danger.
Since it is so difficult for the individual himself to perceive a mental state as one of pure sensation with no element of thought, we need not wonder that his expression always transmits to the spectator something more than the mere excitement or depression of simple feeling. However strictly we try to isolate the pure rhythm of a lyrical performance, there will always slip into it an element of mimetic expression—we do not know of a better adjective—which suggests a mental state, distincter and better defined than that of pure feeling. In reality, therefore, the dramatic forms of dancing are no less primordial than those purely rhythmical manifestations which the necessities of treatment have compelled us to consider as a separate group.[134] It is also evident that the dramatic or mimetic element will increase in importance as the endeavour to represent mental states and transmit them to outsiders becomes more conscious and deliberate.
We have dealt at sufficient length with the transmission of emotion by mimetic expression. A striking instance of this process has already been found outside the domain of art in the contagiousness of collective states of mind. When art adopts emotional transmission as an end in itself, this contagiousness is naturally increased. On the side of the executant we have to suppose a conscious endeavour to make the mimic expression as easily appropriated as possible; on the side of the spectator an increased readiness to partake of the expressed feeling. A theatrical audience, indeed, unlike a riotous mob, does not generally go so far as to imitate its leader, the actor, by actual movement. Conscious of the fictitious character of the performance, the spectators are able to resist the sub-conscious volitional impulses which they receive. But while thus controlling their outward activity, those who attentively follow the acting may nevertheless appropriate in an almost direct manner the feelings represented. Although they remain passive spectators and preserve an appearance of immobility, they are apt to follow, in a kind of abridgment, the attitudes and facial play of the performers. At the most critical stages of a popular melodrama the audience always falls into an unconscious pantomime, which, as Engel remarked, to the psychological observer is of far greater interest than that enacted on the stage.[135] In the higher forms of dramatic art this direct transmission of feeling no doubt loses a great deal of its importance. But we believe that every attentive playgoer has occasional opportunities of observing, in himself if not in his neighbours, faint traces of an unconscious and involuntary imitation which follows all the movements of the performers. Such imitation will, of course, become more and more pronounced the more the dialogue gives place to pantomimic action, and the more vividly and convincingly this action is represented. As an example of the power with which a good mimic may compel even the most critical spectator to participate in emotional moods, we cannot quote anything better than the description of Garrick in Lichtenberg’s Briefe aus England. “His facial expression is so powerful as to invite imitation. When he is grave his audience is grave. When he frowns the house frowns, and it smiles when he smiles. In his hidden pleasure, and in his intimate manner, when, in an aside, he gives the audience his confidence, there is something so winning that one’s whole soul goes out to this fascinating man.”[136]
It may be thought that the above described processes occur only in those arts which can be called dramatic in the proper sense of the word. If this were the case, the principle of emotional transmission by direct imitation would of course be of very restricted æsthetic importance. We think, however, that a histrionic element can be noticed, with greater or less distinctness, no doubt, in all the various forms of artistic production. It certainly enters into literature, where popular authors, especially of the sentimental class, always possessed the secret of suggesting feelings by representing their manifestations in “contagious” description. And it plays an important part in all the arts of design, formative as well as decorative.
We may often catch ourselves faintly imitating movements or attitudes represented in sculpture. And this influence of suggestion is felt not only, as Professor Lange thinks, in the case of melodramatic sculpture—expressive of the most violent passions—it contributes also, in no slight degree, to our enjoyment of the forms which represent the gentler moods.[137] However calm and impassive the facial expression of a statue may be, the attitude of the body will always communicate to us a feeling of some kind, of strength and assurance, or perhaps of settled melancholy.