Yet the mere craving for customary sensations cannot explain those cases of genuine luxury in grief in which pain-sensations and pain-emotions are sought precisely because they are painful. But if we take into account the powerful stimulating effect which is produced by acute pain, we may easily understand why people submit to momentary unpleasantness for the sake of enjoying the subsequent excitement. This motive leads to the deliberate creation not only of pain-sensations, but also of emotions in which pain enters as an element. The violent activity which is involved in the reaction against fear, and still more in that against anger, affords us a sensation of pleasurable excitement which is well worth the cost of the passing unpleasantness. It is, moreover, notorious that some persons have developed a peculiar art of making the initial pain of anger so transient that they can enjoy the active elements in it with almost undivided delight. Such an accomplishment is far more difficult in the case of sorrow. The reactions are here seldom allowed so free a course as to be able to change the feeling-tone of the state. Moreover, the remembrance of the objective cause will always tend to reawaken the original feeling with its accompanying inhibition. Besides, a man of culture and refinement is generally deterred by a kind of respect for his own emotional life from artificially stirring up states of sorrow for his own enjoyment. This reluctance, however, does not seem to exist in lower stages of development. The crying feasts of the Maoris and the Todas—which afford a striking parallel to the ceremonial wailings of ancient Greece—are no doubt, whatever their ritual significance may be, attended with a kind of pleasure.[80] By seizing on some real or fictitious cause for grief—the death of a Linos or an Adonis—the participants succeed, we imagine, in creating a state of sorrow in which the active and stimulating elements outweigh the pain. However barbarous this kind of amusement may seem to us, it is by no means certain that we have completely outgrown such pleasures. The delight in witnessing the performance of a tragedy undoubtedly involves the enjoyment of a borrowed pain, which, by unconscious sympathetic imitation, we make partially our own.[81] And the same phenomenon appears in a yet cruder form in the custom, so general among the lower classes of most countries, of visiting funerals and similar ceremonies where sorrow can be contemplated and shared. Even civilised man is thus able to enjoy the pleasure which may be connected with emotions of sorrow and despair, at least in second-hand reproduction.