ngers 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 imaginary
person in a book or on the stage unable to feel sympathy for the real
suffering which exists all around them. The story is told of a lady at
the theater who wept over the suffering of the hero in the play; and at
the moment she was shedding the unnecessary tears, her own coachman,
whom she had compelled to wait for her in the street, was frozen to
death. Our seemingly prosaic environment is full of suggestions to the
emotional life, and books and plays should only help to develop in us
the power rightly to respond to t