All these primary impulses are greatly increased in immediate effectiveness when they are ‘pure,’ that is to say, unaccompanied by competing or opposing impulses; and this is the main reason why art, which aims at producing one emotion at a time, acts on most men so much more easily than does the more varied appeal of real life.  I once sat in a suburban theatre among a number of colonial troopers who had come over from South Africa for the King’s Coronation.  The play was ‘Our Boys,’ and between the acts my next neighbour gave me, without any sign of emotion, a hideous account of the scene at Tweefontein after De Wet had rushed the British camp on the Christmas morning of 1901—­the militiamen slaughtered while drunk, and the Kaffir drivers tied to the blazing waggons.  The curtain rose again, and, five minutes later, I saw that he was weeping in sympathy with the stage misfortunes of two able-bodied young men who had to eat ‘inferior Dorset’ butter.  My sympathy with the militiamen and the Kaffirs was ‘pure,’ whereas his was overlaid with remembered race-hatred, battle-fury, and contempt for British incompetence.  His sympathy, on the other hand, with the stage characters was not accompanied, as mine was, by critical feelings about theatrical conventions, indifferent acting, and middle-Victorian sentiment.

It is this greater immediate effect of pure and artificial as compared with mixed and concrete emotion which explains the traditional maxim of political agents that it is better that a candidate should not live in his constituency.  It is an advantage that he should be able to represent himself as a ‘local candidate,’ but his local character should be ad hoc, and should consist in the hiring of a large house each year in which he lives a life of carefully dramatised hospitality.  Things in no way blameworthy in themselves—­his choice of tradesmen, his childrens’ hats and measles, his difficulties with his relations—­will be, if he is a permanent resident, ‘out of the picture,’ and may confuse the impression which he produces.  If one could, by the help of a time-machine, see for a moment in the flesh the little Egyptian girl who wore out her shoes, one might find her behaving so charmingly that one’s pity for her death would be increased.  But it is more probable that, even if she was, in fact, a very nice little girl, one would not.

This greater immediate facility of the emotions set up by artistic presentment, as compared with those resulting from concrete observation has, however, to be studied in its relation to another fact—­that impulses vary, in their driving force and in the depth of the nervous disturbance which they cause, in proportion, not to their importance in our present life, but to the point at which they appeared in our evolutionary past.  We are quite unable to resist the impulse of mere vascular and nervous reaction, the watering of the mouth, the jerk of the limb, the closing of the eye which we share with some of the simplest vertebrates.