ling
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?