Given to exaggeration in its feelings, a crowd is only impressed by excessive sentiments.An orator wishing to move a crowd must make an abusive use of violent affirmations.To exaggerate, to affirm, to resort to repetitions, and never to attempt to prove anything by reasoning are methods of argument well known to speakers at public meetings.
Moreover, a crowd exacts a like exaggeration in the sentiments of its heroes.Their apparent qualities and virtues must always be amplified.It has been justly remarked that on the stage a crowd demands from the hero of the piece a degree of courage, morality, and virtue that is never to be found in real life.
Quite rightly importance has been laid on the special standpoint from which matters are viewed in the theatre.Such a standpoint exists no doubt, but its rules for the most part have nothing to do with common sense and logic.The art of appealing to crowds is no doubt of an inferior order, but it demands quite special aptitudes.It is often impossible on reading plays to explain their success.Managers of theatres when accepting pieces are themselves, as a rule, very uncertain of their success, because to judge the matter it would be necessary that they should be able to transform themselves into a crowd.[6]
[6] It is understandable for this reason why it sometimes happens that pieces refused by all theatrical managers obtain a prodigious success when by a stroke of chance they are put on the stage.The recent success of Francois Coppee's play "Pour la Couronne" is well known, and yet, in spite of the name of its author, it was refused during ten years by the managers of the principal Parisian theatres.
"Charley's Aunt," refused at every theatre, and finally staged at the expense of a stockbroker, has had two hundred representations in France, and more than a thousand in London.Without the explanation given above of the impossibility for theatrical managers to mentally substitute themselves for a crowd, such mistakes in judgment on the part of competent individuals, who are most interested not to commit such grave blunders, would be inexplicable.This is a subject that I cannot deal with here, but it might worthily tempt the pen of a writer acquainted with theatrical matters, and at the same time a subtle psychologist--of such a writer, for instance, as M.Francisque Sarcey.
Here, once more, were we able to embark on more extensive explanations, we should show the preponderating influence of racial considerations.A play which provokes the enthusiasm of the crowd in one country has sometimes no success in another, or has only a partial and conventional success, because it does not put in operation influences capable of working on an altered public.
I need not add that the tendency to exaggeration in crowds is only present in the case of sentiments and not at all in the matter of intelligence.I have already shown that, by the mere fact that an individual forms part of a crowd, his intellectual standard is immediately and considerably lowered.A learned magistrate, M.Tarde, has also verified this fact in his researches on the crimes of crowds.It is only, then, with respect to sentiment that crowds can rise to a very high or, on the contrary, descend to a very low level.
4.THE INTOLERANCE, DICTATORIALNESS AND CONSERVATISM OF CROWDS.
Crowds are only cognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions, ideas, and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected as a whole, and considered as absolute truths or as not less absolute errors.This is always the case with beliefs induced by a process of suggestion instead of engendered by reasoning.Every one is aware of the intolerance that accompanies religious beliefs, and of the despotic empire they exercise on men's minds.
Being in doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and having, on the other hand, a clear notion of its strength, a crowd is as disposed to give authoritative effect to its inspirations as it is intolerant.An individual may accept contradiction and discussion; a crowd will never do so.At public meetings the slightest contradiction on the part of an orator is immediately received with howls of fury and violent invective, soon followed by blows, and expulsion should the orator stick to his point.
Without the restraining presence of the representatives of authority the contradictor, indeed, would often be done to death.
Dictatorialness and intolerance are common to all categories of crowds, but they are met with in a varying degree of intensity.
Here, once more, reappears that fundamental notion of race which dominates all the feelings and all the thoughts of men.It is more especially in Latin crowds that authoritativeness and intolerance are found developed in the highest measure.In fact, their development is such in crowds of Latin origin that they have entirely destroyed that sentiment of the independence of the individual so powerful in the Anglo-Saxon.Latin crowds are only concerned with the collective independence of the sect to which they belong, and the characteristic feature of their conception of independence is the need they experience of bringing those who are in disagreement with themselves into immediate and violent subjection to their beliefs.Among the Latin races the Jacobins of every epoch, from those of the Inquisition downwards, have never been able to attain to a different conception of liberty.
