d 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 Brunetiere, 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