rowd; _The Two Orphans_,
less weighty in wisdom, is. The second is a play.

The mightiest masters of the drama--Sophocles, Shakespeare, and
Moliere--have recognised the popular character of its appeal and written
frankly for the multitude. The crowd, therefore, has exercised a potent
influence upon the dramatist in every era of the theatre. One person the
lyric poet has to please,--himself; to a single person only, or an
unlimited succession of single persons, does the novelist address himself,
and he may choose the sort of person he will write for; but the dramatist
must always please the many. His themes, his thoughts, his emotions, are
circumscribed by the limits of popular appreciation. He writes less freely
than any other author; for he cannot pick his auditors. Mr. Henry James
may, if he choose, write novels for the super-civilised; but a crowd is
never super-civilised, and therefore characters like those of Mr. James
could never be successfully presented in the theatre. _Treasure Island_ is
a book for boys, both young and old; but a modern theatre crowd is composed
largely of women, and the theme of such a story could scarcely be
successful on the stage.

In order, therefore, to understand the limitations of the drama as an art,
and clearly to define its scope, it is necessary to inquire into the
psychology of theatre audiences. This subject presents two phases to the
student. First, a theatre audience exhibits certain psychological traits
that are common to all crowds, of whatever kind,--a political convention,
the spectators at a ball-game, or a church congregation, for example.
Second, it exhibits certain other traits which distinguish it from other
kinds of crowds. These, in turn, will be considered in the present chapter.

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 turne