s
extending over long periods of time and exerted in many different
places.

=3. Influence of the Audience.=--Thirdly, the very content of the
drama is determined by the fact that a play must be devised to
interest a multitude rather than an individual. The novelist writes
for a reader sitting alone in his library: whether ten such readers or
a hundred thousand ultimately read a book, the author speaks to each
of them apart from all the others. But the dramatist must plan his
story to interest simultaneously a multitude of heterogeneous
observers. The drama, therefore, must be richer in popular appeal; but
the novel may be subtler in appealing to the one instead of to the
many. Since the novelist addresses himself to a single person only, or
to a limitless succession of single persons, he may choose the sort of
reader he will write for; but the dramatist must please the many, and
is therefore at the mercy of the multitude. He writes less freely than
the novelist, since he cannot pick his auditors. His themes, his
thoughts, and his emotions are restricted by the limits of popular
appreciation.

This important condition is potent in determining the proper content
of dramatic fiction. For it has been found in practice that the one
thing most likely to interest a crowd is a struggle between character
and character. Speaking empirically, the late Ferdinand Brunetiere, in
his preface to "_Annales du Theatre et de la Musique_" for 1893,
stated that the drama has dealt always with a struggle between human
wills; and his statement, formulated in the catch-phrase, "No
struggle, no drama," has since become a commonplace of dramatic
criticism. The reason for this is simply that characters are
interesting to a crowd mainly in those crises of emotion that bring
them to the grapple. A single individual, like the reader of a novel,
may be interested intellectually in those gentle influences beneath
which a character unfolds itself as mildly as a blowing rose; but to
the gathered multitude a character does not appeal except in moments
of contention. Hence the drama, to interest an audience, must present
its characters in some struggle of the wills,--whether it be merely
flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice, or gentle, as in
that of Viola and Orsino, or terrible, with Macbeth, or piteous, with
Lear. The drama, therefore, is akin to the epic, in that it must
represent a struggle; but it is more akin to the novel, in that i