In artistic creation we are not concerned with an intentional or unintentional effort to overcome feeling. On the contrary the aim is here to keep the strongest possible hold of it in order to give it the most effective embodiment. So irreconcilable, however, is the conflict between emotional excitement and intellectual activity, that the latter, even when it expressly serves the purposes of emotional enhancement, must neutralise the excess of feeling. A state of strong pleasure or pain can never be rendered intelligible to outsiders, unless its expression is bridled and disciplined by thought. By being thus embodied in a fixed form the feeling gains in conceivability as well as in infectious power. But while the effect on spectators and listeners is in this way increased, the artistic form influences the feeling subject himself in a quite different way. Its very clearness and distinctness necessarily brings something of that calm which all excitement seeks as relief. The immediate reaction which the work of art exercises on its own creator is of course most easily seen and understood in the “higher” art-forms with their pronounced intellectual elements. Literary instances of the “poetic cure” for harassing or oppressing emotion are too numerous to be mentioned. The only point we need dwell on is the question how these instances are to be interpreted. When a poet seeks to give shape and form to his own sufferings by means of fiction, the relief he obtains is no doubt in part an effect of the diversion of activity into the channels of expression. But to a still greater degree it may be a result of the healthful influence exercised by the contemplation of objective reality in the finished work of art. Such an influence is unmistakable in the most illustrious instance of artistic production as a life-preserving expedient: Goethe’s _Leiden des jungen Werther_. In his memoirs the old poet frankly and unreservedly describes how, when lacerated by the conflict between hypochondriac, suicidal thoughts and an ineradicable love of life and cheerfulness, he resorted to the old homely remedy of writing down his sufferings. He lays especial stress on his desire to give definite form and body to his vague feelings of distress. And as we read that afterwards, when the work lay finished before him, “bound in boards, as a picture in its frame, so as to prove the more convincingly its individual and concrete existence,” he could feel “free and joyful, and entitled to a new life,” we cannot but explain this renewed courage to live as a result of the sensation of security and support which the beholding of external form affords.[140]