The Psychology of Theatre
Audiences_. At present it is sufficient for us to note that every great
play that has ever been devised has presented some phase or other of this
single, necessary theme,--a contention of individual human wills. An actor,
moreover, is always more effective in scenes of emotion than in scenes of
cold logic and calm reason; and the dramatist, therefore, is obliged to
select as his leading figures people whose acts are motivated by emotion
rather than by intellect. Aristotle, for example, would make a totally
uninteresting figure if he were presented faithfully upon the stage. Who
could imagine Darwin as the hero of a drama? Othello, on the other hand, is
not at all a reasonable being; from first to last his intellect is
"perplexed in the extreme." His emotions are the motives for his acts; and
in this he may be taken as the type of a dramatic character.

In the means of delineating the characters he has imagined, the dramatist,
because he is writing for actors, is more narrowly restricted than the
novelist. His people must constantly be doing something, and must therefore
reveal themselves mainly through their acts. They may, of course, also be
delineated through their way of saying things; but in the theatre the
objective action is always more suggestive than the spoken word. We know
Sherlock Holmes, in Mr. William Gillette's admirable melodrama, solely
through the things that we have seen him do; and in this connection we
should remember that in the stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from which
Mr. Gillette derived his narrative material, Holmes is delineated largely
by a very different method,--the method, namely, of expository comment
written from the point of view of Doctor Watson. A leading actor seldom
wants to sit in his dressing-room while he is being talked about by the
other actors on the stage; and therefore the method of drawing character by
comment, which is so useful for the novelist, is rarely employed by the
playwright except in the waste moments which precede the first entrance of
his leading figure. The Chorus Lady, in Mr. James Forbes's amusing study of
that name, is drawn chiefly through her way of saying things; but though
this method of delineation is sometimes very effective for an act or two,
it can seldom be sustained without a faltering of interest through a
full-grown four-act play. The novelist's expedient of delineating character
through mental analysis is of course den