Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/769

 THE GAMING INSTINCT 755

are so enlarged, and the opportunity for suggestive effects is so increased through the faculty of speech, that to beat a man by superior cunning is more usual than to beat him by superior force, and the interest is no whit diminished by the preponder- ance of mental modes over physical. Indeed, the crafty Odys- seus probably possesses for most minds greater charm than the swift-footed Achilles or mighty Ajax. And when both force and craft can be displayed in working toward an end, we have the possibility of the fullest expression of human interest; and herein lie the richness and fascination of the fields of artistic and mechanical invention. It would be difficult to find in literature or on the stage a work of art in which the interest is not of the conflict type. How much, indeed, would the inter- est of literature and the fine arts amount to if we eliminated love and war?

In the more primitive forms of art the action is simple and direct. In the Iliad and Odyssey, in Beowulf, and in the romances of Lancelot of the Lake and Arthur, you either strike your enemy or lay a trap for him. Beowulf's death in conflict with the dragon, the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles over the cap- tured women, the trick of the wooden horse, the cozening of Sampson by Delilah and of Holofernes by Judith, represent the interests of the world when society was comparatively young, and represent the interests of the young in society nowadays. The efforts of CEdipus to escape Nemesis, the inability of Ham- let to cope with a situation which he did not approve, but which he did not well understand, the machinations of Othello, represent a preponderance of mental over physical action, but still there is no quantitative diminution of the conflict interest. Again, a characteristic change in art motif in the most recent times is an increasing emphasis of the social rather than the per- sonal encounters of the individual. In the stories of Boccaccio and Margaret of Navarre, and in the Italian and Spanish novels of the fifteenth century, there was a nai've acceptance of social arrangements in principle, and merely an effort to elude the wives, husbands, and fathers who represented for the moment these principles ; while in modern fiction and drama there is a