the feeling itself fades away. On the other hand, the emotions which we wish to
suppress are to be refused expression. The unkind and cutting word is to be left
unsaid when we are angry, and the fear of things which are harmless left
unexpressed and thereby doomed to die.
The Emotional Factor in Our Environment.—Much material for the
cultivation of our emotions lies in the everyday life all about us if we can but
interpret it. Few indeed of those whom we meet daily but are hungering for
appreciation and sympathy. Lovable traits exist in every character, and will
reveal themselves to the one who looks for them. Miscarriages of justice abound
on all sides, and demand our indignation and wrath and the effort to right the
wrong. Evil always exists to be hated and suppressed, and dangers to be feared
and avoided. Human life and the movement of human affairs constantly appeal
to the feeling side of our nature if we understand at all what life and action
mean.
A certain blindness exists in many people, however, which makes our own little
joys, or sorrows, or fears the most remarkable ones in the world, and keeps us
from realizing that others may feel as deeply as we. Of course this self-centered
attitude of mind is fatal to any true cultivation of the emotions. It leads to an
emotional life which lacks not only breadth and depth, but also perspective.
Literature and the Cultivation of the Emotions.—In order to increase our
facility in the interpretation of the emotions through teaching us what to look for
in life and experience, we may go to literature. Here we find life interpreted for
us in the ideal by masters of interpretation; and, looking through their eyes, we
see new depths and breadths of feeling which we had never before discovered.
Indeed, literature deals far more in the aggregate with the feeling side than with
any other aspect of human life. And it is just this which makes literature a
universal language, for the language of our emotions is more easily interpreted
than that of our reason. The smile, the cry, the laugh, the frown, the caress, are
understood all around the world among all peoples. They are universal.
There is always this danger to be avoided, however. We may become so taken
up with the overwrought descriptions of the emotions as found in literature or on
the stage that the common humdrum of everyday life around us seems flat and
stale. The interpretation of the writer or the actor is far beyond what we are able
to make for ourselves, so we take their interpretation rather than trouble
ourselves to look in our own environment for the material which might appeal to
our emotions. It is not rare to find those who easily weep over the woes of an