II

By the word _crowd_, as it is used in this discussion, is meant a multitude

of people whose ideas and feelings have taken a set in a certain single

direction, and who, because of this, exhibit a tendency to lose their

individual self-consciousness in the general self-consciousness of the

multitude. Any gathering of people for a specific purpose--whether of

action or of worship or of amusement--tends to become, because of this

purpose, a _crowd_, in the scientific sense. Now, a crowd has a mind of

its own, apart from that of any of its individual members. The psychology

of the crowd was little understood until late in the nineteenth century,

when a great deal of attention was turned to it by a group of French

philosophers. The subject has been most fully studied by M. Gustave Le Bon,

who devoted some two hundred pages to his _Psychologie des Foules_.

According to M. Le Bon, a man, by the mere fact that he forms a factor of a

crowd, tends to lose consciousness of those mental qualities in which he

differs from his fellows, and becomes more keenly conscious than before of

those other mental qualities in which he is at one with them. The mental

qualities in which men differ from one another are the acquired qualities

of intellect and character; but the qualities in which they are at one are

the innate basic passions of the race. A crowd, therefore, is less

intellectual and more emotional than the individuals that compose it. It is

less reasonable, less judicious, less disinterested, more credulous, more

primitive, more partisan; and hence, as M. Le Bon cleverly puts it, a man,

by the mere fact that he forms a part of an organised crowd, is likely to

descend several rungs on the ladder of civilisation. Even the most cultured

and intellectual of men, when he forms an atom of a crowd, tends to lose

consciousness of his acquired mental qualities and to revert to his primal

simplicity and sensitiveness of mind.

The dramatist, therefore, because he writes for a crowd, writes for a

comparatively uncivilised and uncultivated mind, a mind richly human,

vehement in approbation, emphatic in disapproval, easily credulous, eagerly

enthusiastic, boyishly heroic, and somewhat carelessly unthinking. Now, it

has been found in practice that the only thing that will keenly interest a

crowd is a struggle of some sort or other. Speaking empirically, the late

Ferdinand Brunetière, in 1893, stated that the drama has dealt always with

a struggle between human wills; and his statement, formulated in the

catch-phrase, "No struggle, no drama," has since become a commonplace of

dramatic criticism. But, so far as I know, no one has yet realised the main

reason for this, which is, simply, that characters are interesting to a

crowd only in those crises of emotion that bring them to the grapple. A

single individual, like the reader of an essay or a novel, may be

interested intellectually in those gentle influences beneath which a

character unfolds itself as mildly as a water-lily; but to what Thackeray

called "that savage child, the crowd," a character does not appeal except

in moments of contention. There never yet has been a time when the theatre

could compete successfully against the amphitheatre. Plautus and Terence

complained that the Roman public preferred a gladiatorial combat to their

plays; a bear-baiting or a cock-fight used to empty Shakespeare's theatre

on the Bankside; and there is not a matinée in town to-day that can hold

its own against a foot-ball game. Forty thousand people gather annually

from all quarters of the East to see Yale and Harvard meet upon the field,

while such a crowd could not be aggregated from New York alone to see the

greatest play the world has yet produced. For the crowd demands a fight;

and where the actual exists, it will scarcely be contented with the

semblance.

Hence the drama, to interest at all, must cater to this longing for

contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must

present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be

flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that

of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; or piteous, with Lear. The

crowd is more partisan than the individual; and therefore, in following

this struggle of the drama, it desires always to take sides. There is no

fun in seeing a foot-ball game unless you care about who wins; and there is

very little fun in seeing a play unless the dramatist allows you to throw

your sympathies on one side or the other of the struggle. Hence, although

in actual life both parties to a conflict are often partly right and partly

wrong, and it is hard to choose between them, the dramatist usually

simplifies the struggle in his plays by throwing the balance of right

strongly on one side. Hence, from the ethical standpoint, the simplicity

of theatre characters. Desdemona is all innocence, Iago all deviltry. Hence

also the conventional heroes and villains of melodrama,--these to be hissed

and those to be applauded. Since the crowd is comparatively lacking in the

judicial faculty and cannot look upon a play from a detached and

disinterested point of view, it is either all for or all against a

character; and in either case its judgment is frequently in defiance of the

rules of reason. It will hear no word against Camille, though an individual

would judge her to be wrong, and it has no sympathy with Père Duval. It

idolizes Raffles, who is a liar and a thief; it shuts its ears to Marion

Allardyce, the defender of virtue in _Letty_. It wants its sympathetic

characters, to love; its antipathetic characters, to hate; and it hates and

loves them as unreasonably as a savage or a child. The trouble with _Hedda

Gabler_ as a play is that it contains not a single personage that the

audience can love. The crowd demands those so-called "sympathetic" parts

that every actor, for this reason, longs to represent. And since the crowd

is partisan, it wants its favored characters to win. Hence the convention

of the "happy ending," insisted on by managers who feel the pulse of the

public. The blind Louise, in _The Two Orphans_, will get her sight back,

never fear. Even the wicked Oliver, in _As You Like It_, must turn over a

new leaf and marry a pretty girl.

Next to this prime instinct of partisanship in watching a contention, one

of the most important traits in the psychology of crowds is their extreme

credulity. A crowd will nearly always believe anything that it sees and

almost anything that it is told. An audience composed entirely of

individuals who have no belief in ghosts will yet accept the Ghost in

_Hamlet_ as a fact. Bless you, they have _seen_ him! The crowd accepts the

disguise of Rosalind, and never wonders why Orlando does not recognise his

love. To this extreme credulity of the crowd is due the long line of plays

that are founded on mistaken identity,--farces like _The Comedy of Errors_

and melodramas like _The Lyons Mail_, for example. The crowd, too, will

accept without demur any condition precedent to the story of a play,

however impossible it might seem to the mind of the individual. Oedipus

King has been married to his mother many years before the play begins; but

the Greek crowd forbore to ask why, in so long a period, the enormity had

never been discovered. The central situation of _She Stoops to Conquer_

seems impossible to the individual mind, but is eagerly accepted by the

crowd. Individual critics find fault with Thomas Heywood's lovely old play,

_A Woman Killed with Kindness_, on the ground that though Frankford's noble

forgiveness of his erring wife is beautiful to contemplate, Mrs.

Frankford's infidelity is not sufficiently motivated, and the whole story,

therefore, is untrue. But Heywood, writing for the crowd, said frankly, "If

you will grant that Mrs. Frankford was unfaithful, I can tell you a lovely

story about her husband, who was a gentleman worth knowing: otherwise there

can't be any story"; and the Elizabethan crowd, eager for the story, was

willing to oblige the dramatist with the necessary credulity.

There is this to be said about the credulity of an audience, however,--that

it will believe what it sees much more readily than what it hears. It might

not believe in the ghost of Hamlet's father if the ghost were merely spoken

of and did not walk upon the stage. If a dramatist would convince his

audience of the generosity or the treachery of one character or another, he

should not waste words either praising or blaming the character, but should

present him to the eye in the performance of a generous or treacherous

action. The audience _hears_ wise words from Polonius when he gives his

parting admonition to his son; but the same audience _sees_ him made a fool

of by Prince Hamlet, and will not think him wise.

The fact that a crowd's eyes are more keenly receptive than its ears is the

psychologic basis for the maxim that in the theatre action speaks louder

than words. It also affords a reason why plays of which the audience does

not understand a single word are frequently successful. Mme. Sarah

Bernhardt's thrilling performance of _La Tosca_ has always aroused

enthusiasm in London and New York, where the crowd, as a crowd, could not

understand the language of the play.

Another primal characteristic of the mind of the crowd is its

susceptibility to emotional contagion. A cultivated individual reading _The

School for Scandal_ at home alone will be intelligently appreciative of its

delicious humor; but it is difficult to imagine him laughing over it aloud.

Yet the same individual, when submerged in a theatre crowd, will laugh

heartily over this very play, largely because other people near him are

laughing too. Laughter, tears, enthusiasm, all the basic human emotions,

thrill and tremble through an audience, because each member of the crowd

feels that he is surrounded by other people who are experiencing the same

emotion as his own. In the sad part of a play it is hard to keep from

weeping if the woman next to you is wiping her eyes; and still harder is it

to keep from laughing, even at a sorry jest, if the man on the other side

is roaring in vociferous cachinnation. Successful dramatists play upon the

susceptibility of a crowd by serving up raw morsels of crude humor and

pathos for the unthinking to wheeze and blubber over, knowing that these

members of the audience will excite their more phlegmatic neighbors by

contagion. The practical dictum that every laugh in the first act is worth

money in the box-office is founded on this psychologic truth. Even puns as

bad as Mr. Zangwill's are of value early in a play to set on some quantity

of barren spectators and get the house accustomed to a titter. Scenes like

the foot-ball episodes in _The College Widow_ and _Strongheart_, or the

battle in _The Round Up_, are nearly always sure to raise the roof; for it

is usually sufficient to set everybody on the stage a-cheering in order to

make the audience cheer too by sheer contagion. Another and more classical

example was the speechless triumph of Henry V's return victorious, in

Richard Mansfield's sumptuous production of the play. Here the audience

felt that he was every inch a king; for it had caught the fervor of the

crowd upon the stage.

This same emotional contagion is, of course, the psychologic basis for the

French system of the _claque_, or band of hired applauders seated in the

centre of the house. The leader of the _claque_ knows his cues as if he

were an actor in the piece, and at the psychologic moment the _claqueurs_

burst forth with their clatter and start the house applauding. Applause

begets applause in the theatre, as laughter begets laughter and tears beget

tears.

But not only is the crowd more emotional than the individual; it is also

more sensuous. It has the lust of the eye and of the ear,--the savage's

love of gaudy color, the child's love of soothing sound. It is fond of

flaring flags and blaring trumpets. Hence the rich-costumed processions of

the Elizabethan stage, many years before the use of scenery; and hence, in

our own day, the success of pieces like _The Darling of the Gods_ and _The

Rose of the Rancho_. Color, light, and music, artistically blended, will

hold the crowd better than the most absorbing story. This is the reason for

the vogue of musical comedy, with its pretty girls, and gaudy shifts of

scenery and lights, and tricksy, tripping melodies and dances.

Both in its sentiments and in its opinions, the crowd is comfortably

commonplace. It is, as a crowd, incapable of original thought and of any

but inherited emotion. It has no speculation in its eyes. What it feels was

felt before the flood; and what it thinks, its fathers thought before it.

The most effective moments in the theatre are those that appeal to basic

and commonplace emotions,--love of woman, love of home, love of country,

love of right, anger, jealousy, revenge, ambition, lust, and treachery. So

great for centuries has been the inherited influence of the Christian

religion that any adequate play whose motive is self-sacrifice is almost

certain to succeed. Even when the self-sacrifice is unwise and ignoble, as

in the first act of _Frou-Frou_, the crowd will give it vehement approval.

Countless plays have been made upon the man who unselfishly assumes

responsibility for another's guilt. The great tragedies have familiar

themes,--ambition in _Macbeth_, jealousy in _Othello_, filial ingratitude

in _Lear_; there is nothing in these motives that the most unthinking

audience could fail to understand. No crowd can resist the fervor of a

patriot who goes down scornful before many spears. Show the audience a flag

to die for, or a stalking ghost to be avenged, or a shred of honor to

maintain against agonizing odds, and it will thrill with an enthusiasm as

ancient as the human race. Few are the plays that can succeed without the

moving force of love, the most familiar of all emotions. These themes do

not require that the audience shall think.

But for the speculative, the original, the new, the crowd evinces little

favor. If the dramatist holds ideas of religion, or of politics, or of

social law, that are in advance of his time, he must keep them to himself

or else his plays will fail. Nimble wits, like Mr. Shaw, who scorn

tradition, can attain a popular success only through the crowd's inherent

love of fads; they cannot long succeed when they run counter to inherited

ideas. The great successful dramatists, like Molière and Shakespeare, have

always thought with the crowd on all essential questions. Their views of

religion, of morality, of politics, of law, have been the views of the

populace, nothing more. They never raise questions that cannot quickly be

answered by the crowd, through the instinct of inherited experience. No

mind was ever, in the philosophic sense, more commonplace than that of

Shakespeare. He had no new ideas. He was never radical, and seldom even

progressive. He was a careful money-making business man, fond of food and

drink and out-of-doors and laughter, a patriot, a lover, and a gentleman.

Greatly did he know things about people; greatly, also, could he write. But

he accepted the religion, the politics, and the social ethics of his time,

without ever bothering to wonder if these things might be improved.

The great speculative spirits of the world, those who overturn tradition

and discover new ideas, have had minds far different from this. They have

not written plays. It is to these men,--the philosopher, the essayist, the

novelist, the lyric poet,--that each of us turns for what is new in

thought. But from the dramatist the crowd desires only the old, old

thought. It has no patience for consideration; it will listen only to what

it knows already. If, therefore, a great man has a new doctrine to expound,

let him set it forth in a book of essays; or, if he needs must sugar-coat

it with a story, let him expound it in a novel, whose appeal will be to the

individual mind. Not until a doctrine is old enough to have become

generally accepted is it ripe for exploitation in the theatre.

This point is admirably illustrated by two of the best and most successful

plays of recent seasons. _The Witching Hour_, by Mr. Augustus Thomas, and

_The Servant in the House_, by Mr. Charles Rann Kennedy, were both praised

by many critics for their "novelty"; but to me one of the most significant

and instructive facts about them is that neither of them was, in any real

respect, novel in the least. Consider for a moment the deliberate and

careful lack of novelty in the ideas which Mr. Thomas so skilfully set

forth. What Mr. Thomas really did was to gather and arrange as many as

possible of the popularly current thoughts concerning telepathy and cognate

subjects, and to tell the public what they themselves had been wondering

about and thinking during the last few years. The timeliness of the play

lay in the fact that it was produced late enough in the history of its

subject to be selectively resumptive, and not nearly so much in the fact

that it was produced early enough to forestall other dramatic presentations

of the same materials. Mr. Thomas has himself explained, in certain

semi-public conversations, that he postponed the composition of this

play--on which his mind had been set for many years--until the general

public had become sufficiently accustomed to the ideas which he intended to

set forth. Ten years before, this play would have been novel, and would

undoubtedly have failed. When it was produced, it was not novel, but

resumptive, in its thought; and therefore it succeeded. For one of the

surest ways of succeeding in the theatre is to sum up and present

dramatically all that the crowd has been thinking for some time concerning

any subject of importance. The dramatist should be the catholic collector

and wise interpreter of those ideas which the crowd, in its conservatism,

feels already to be safely true.

And if _The Servant In the House_ will--as I believe--outlive _The Witching

Hour_, it will be mainly because, in the author's theme and his ideas, it

is older by many, many centuries. The theme of Mr. Thomas's play--namely,

that thought is in itself a dynamic force and has the virtue and to some

extent the power of action--is, as I have just explained, not novel, but is

at least recent in the history of thinking. It is a theme which dates

itself as belonging to the present generation, and is likely to lose

interest for the next. But Mr. Kennedy's theme--namely, that when

discordant human beings ascend to meet each other in the spirit of

brotherly love, it may truly be said that God is resident among them--is at

least as old as the gentle-hearted Galilean, and, being dateless, belongs

to future generations as well as to the present. Mr. Thomas has been

skilfully resumptive of a passing period of popular thought; but Mr.

Kennedy has been resumptive on a larger scale, and has built his play upon

the wisdom of the centuries. Paradoxical as it may seem, the very reason

why _The Servant in the House_ struck so many critics as being strange and

new is that, in its thesis and its thought, it is as old as the world.

The truth of this point seems to me indisputable. I know that the best

European playwrights of the present day are striving to use the drama as a

vehicle for the expression of advanced ideas, especially in regard to

social ethics; but in doing this, I think, they are mistaking the scope of

the theatre. They are striving to say in the drama what might be said

better in the essay or the novel. As the exposition of a theory, Mr. Shaw's

_Man and Superman_ is not nearly so effective as the writings of

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, from whom the playwright borrowed his ideas.

The greatest works of Ibsen can be appreciated only by the cultured

individual and not by the uncultured crowd. That is why the breadth of his

appeal will never equal that of Shakespeare, in spite of his unfathomable

intellect and his perfect mastery of the technique of his art. Only his

more commonplace plays--_A Doll's House_, for example--have attained a wide

success. And a wide success is a thing to be desired for other than

material reasons. Surely it is a good thing for the public that _Hamlet_

never fails.

The conservatism of the greatest dramatists asserts itself not only in

their thoughts but even in the mere form of their plays. It is the lesser

men who invent new tricks of technique and startle the public with

innovations. Molière merely perfected the type of Italian comedy that his

public long had known. Shakespeare quietly adopted the forms that lesser

men had made the crowd familiar with. He imitated Lyly in _Love's Labour's

Lost_, Greene in _As You Like It_, Marlowe in _Richard III_, Kyd in

_Hamlet_, and Fletcher in _The Tempest_. He did the old thing better than

the other men had done it,--that is all.

Yet this is greatly to Shakespeare's credit. He was wise enough to feel

that what the crowd wanted, both in matter and in form, was what was needed

in the greatest drama. In saying that Shakespeare's mind was commonplace, I

meant to tender him the highest praise. In his commonplaceness lies his

sanity. He is so greatly _usual_ that he can understand all men and

sympathise with them. He is above novelty. His wisdom is greater than the

wisdom of the few; he is the heir of all the ages, and draws his wisdom

from the general mind of man. And it is largely because of this that he

represents ever the ideal of the dramatist. He who would write for the

theatre must not despise the crowd.