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 when the theatre could compete successfully against the amphitheatre.  Plautus and Terence complained that the Roman public preferred a gladiatorial combat to their plays; a bear-baiting or a cock-fight used to empty Shakespeare’s theatre on the Bankside; and there is not a matinee in town to-day that can hold its own against a foot-ball game.  Forty thousand people gather annually from all quarters of the East to see Yale and Harvard meet upon the field, while such a crowd could not be aggregated from New York alone to see the greatest play the world has yet produced.  For the crowd demands a fight; and where the actual exists, it will scarcely be contented with the semblance.

Hence the drama, to interest at all, must cater to this longing for contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd.  It must present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; or piteous, with Lear.  The crowd is more partisan than the individual; and therefore, in following this struggle of the drama, it desires always to take sides.  There is no fun in seeing a foot-ball game unless you care about who wins; and there is very little fun in seeing a play unless the dramatist allows you to throw your sympathies on one side or the other of the struggle.  Hence, although in actual life both parties to a conflict are often partly right and partly wrong, and it is hard to choose between them, the dramatist usually simplifies the struggle in his plays by throwing the balance of right strongly on one side.  Hence, from the ethical standpoint, the simplicity of theatre characters.  Desdemona is all innocence, Iago all deviltry.  Hence also the conventional heroes and villains of melodrama,—­these to be hissed and those to be applauded.  Since the crowd is comparatively lacking in the judicial faculty and cannot look upon a play from a detached and disinterested point of view, it is either all for or all against a character; and in either case its judgment is frequently in defiance of the rules of reason.  It will hear no word against Camille, though an individual would judge her to be wrong, and it has no sympathy with Pere Duval.  It idolizes Raffles, who is a liar and a thief; it shuts its ears to Marion Allardyce, the defender of virtue in Letty.  It wants its sympathetic characters, to love; its antipathetic 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”