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The possibility of a psychological understanding is always easier in poetry than in any other field of art. We would, therefore, keep this constantly in mind with our esthetic considerations and only occasionally touch upon other kinds of art.
If we propose two fundamental esthetic questions, namely, what kind of enjoyment a work of the art of poetry affords, and in what way it accomplishes this, the first deliberation shows contradictions, which can scarcely be solved so long as the consideration remains limited to the processes of consciousness. For to the first question, we must answer that the content of poems is in great part suited to arouse in us painful affects: calamity and sorrow, the suffering and downfall of noble men are, for tragedy, the only themes, for the epic, the romance, the novel, the most frequent ones; also, where cheerfulness should be awakened, that is only possible when misunderstandings or accidents bring the persons for a while into difficult and unpleasant situations. But we find the acme of pleasure from art, where a work almost takes our breath away, and causes the hair to stand on end from fear, so as finally to call forth tears of deepest suffering and sympathy. All these are feelings from which we flee in life and strangely enough seek in art. The effects of these affects are plainly of quite a different character when they proceed from a work of art than otherwise, although they are received by consciousness as the same; hence, this esthetic alteration of the affective effect, from painful to pleasurable, is a problem in which we may expect assistance from knowledge of the unconscious mental life.
This changed relationship in our affects can in no way be explained by the mere fact that the observer or auditor