tic 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 necess