We share
the joy of the happy lover and the grief of the despondent mourner, we
feel the indignation of the betrayed wife and the fear of the man in
danger. The visual perception of the various forms of expression of
these emotions fuses in our mind with the conscious awareness of the
emotion expressed; we feel as if we were directly seeing and observing
the emotion itself. Moreover the idea awakens in us the appropriate
reactions. The horror which we see makes us really shrink, the happiness
which we witness makes us relax, the pain which we observe brings
contractions in our muscles; and all the resulting sensations from
muscles, joints, tendons, from skin and viscera, from blood circulation
and breathing, give the color of living experience to the emotional
reflection in our mind. It is obvious that for this leading group of
emotions the relation of the pictures to the feelings of the persons in
the play and to the feelings of the spectator is exactly the same. If we
start from the emotions of the audience, we can say that the pain and
the joy which the spectator feels are really projected to the screen,
projected both into the portraits of the persons and into the pictures
of the scenery and background into which the personal emotions radiate.
The fundamental principle which we recognized for all the other mental
states is accordingly no less efficient in the case of the spectator's
emotions.
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