Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/763

 A THEORY OF SOCIAL MOTIVES 749

military performances."'^ The brutality of the amusements of the Romans was due to the fact that their chief occupation was war. A favorite enjoyment of the rural population is the fair at which are exhibited the methods and fruits of their toil. The art patronized by the state today consists of portraits and statues of men who have been pre-eminent in the building of the nation. Of poetry, Gummere writes:

Described in its simplified form, the quality of modern poetic imagina- tion seems to be a power, by suggestive use of musical and figurative human speech, to put the solitary reader into the mood which would arise naturally in him under the pressure of certain actual events or of a certain actual scene .... even primitive poetry was an idealization, an abstraction, a narcotic, a kind of waking dream ; modern poetry is also a dream, but with deeper and wider issues, and with a purpose far more clearly defined.'

The same author points out that this poetic imagination is in origin and development a product of social life :

Now the great passages of poetry, such as those which Matthew Arnold used as tests of excellence, easily fall into one of two categories ; they revive, even create, the mood felt either in the pressure of actual events or in the presence of an actual scene. That beautiful line which Arnold quotes from Dante is simply the imaginative and conventionalized sense of beatific worship such as all men have felt in varying degree; while for the thousand cases where nature is treated, there can be no doubt whatever of the tie which binds even the most imaginative and solitary poet to the old singing throng.*

Music also is an expression of the expansive movement of life experiences. Thus Ribot quotes Schumann: "Je me sens affecte par tout ce qui se passe dans le monde : hommes, politique, litterature, et cela trouve un issue au dehors sous forme de musique ; tout ce que I'epoque me fournit de remarquable, il faut que je I'exprime musicalement."^" It is more difficult to show the relation of music than of poetry to life experiences because "tout sentiment precis depend d'idees concretes qui restent in-

'' Origin of Art, p. 251.

37-42.
 * Beginnings of Poetry, pp. 468-69. See also Raymond, Art in Theory, pp.

» Ibid.

^° La logique des sentiments, p. 142. See also, The Creative Imagination, pp. 214-17.