tends to syncopate emotion, does not exist. The characteristic attitude
of art is leisurely absorption in an object, giving time for all the
possibilities of feeling or other experience to develop. Moreover, in
art there is not the same saving need for the substitution of idea for
feeling as in real life. For in art, feeling is not so strong as in
life; even when the artist expresses his own personal experience, he
lightens its emotional burden through expression, and we, when we make
his experience ours, find a similar relief. The emotion is genuine,
only weakened in intensity. In other cases, where the artist constructs
a world of fictitious characters and events, our knowledge that they
are not real suffices to diminish the intensity of the emotions aroused.
For emotions have the practical function of inciting to action, and
when action is impossible, as in the purely ideal world of the artist,
they cannot keep their natural intensity. We cannot feel so strongly
over the mere idea of an event as over a real event. Were it otherwise,
who could stand the strain of _Hamlet_ or _Othello_?

Throughout this discussion of the elements of the experience of art,
I have used the terms emotion and feeling with an inclusive meaning,
to cover impulses as well as feelings in the narrower sense. For in
the aesthetic experience, there are impulses--impulses to move when
action is represented in picture and statue, impulses to act, as when,
in watching a play, we put ourselves in the place of the persons. But
such impulses are always checked through the realization that they
come from sources unrelated to our purposes, and fail to get the
reenforcement or consent of the total self necessary to action. In
reading or singing the "Marseillaise," to cite an example from poetry,
I experience all kinds of impulses--to shoulder a musket, to march,
to kill--but no one of them is carried out. Now an inhibited impulse
is scarcely distinguishable from an emotion. With few exceptions, the