ary 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-of