The long laugh that sometimes keeps the business of the stage waiting is only a sign of the exchange of parts that in the theatre every night takes place.  The audience are the players.  Their audience on the stage are bound to watch them, to understand them, to anticipate them, and to divine them.  But once known and their character established in relation to a particular play, the audience—­what is called the audience—­need give no further trouble.  They themselves cannot alter; they are fixed and compelled by the tremendous force of averages.  The most inexorable of laws, and the most irresistible of necessities are upon them; they cannot do otherwise; they are out of the reach of accidents; they are made fast in their own mediocrity.  They are a thousand London people; and no genius, or no imbecility, amongst them has any effect upon that secure sovereignty of a number.

The long laugh generally means that the house—­by its unalterable majority—­has laughed at one joke three times.  The stage waits upon the audience, and the audience rehearses its collective and inevitable laugh.  It performs.  It communicates itself, and art is a communication.  A small and chosen party is made up, behind the footlights, to see a thousand people, given helpless into the hands of destiny and subject to averages, so express themselves.

The audience’s audience (the people on the stage) are persuaded into applauding the laugh too long and too often.  The author is, of course, one of them, and he applauds by making too many such translations.  They are perhaps worth making, and even worth renewing in acknowledgement of a smile; but it is surely to encourage the house unduly to make them so important.  The actors applaud their audience by repeating—­and not once or only twice—­a piece of comic business.  Does the Average laugh so well as indeed to deserve all this?

The Average does little more than laugh.  It knows that its own truest talents are indubitably comic.  We have no real tragic audiences.  This is no expression of regret over legitimate audiences, or audiences of the old school, or any audiences of that kind, whose day may or may not have had a date.  It is a mere statement of the fact that audiences have lost, or never had, a distinguishing perception of emotion, whereas they have every kind of perception of humour, distinguishing and general.  Their laugh never fails.  If their friends behind would really care to improve them, it might be done by exacting from them a little more temperance in their sense of comedy.  We shall never have a really good school of audience without the exercise of some such severity.

For obviously when we call an average unchangeable, we mean that it is unchangeable for its time merely.  There might be a slow upraising of the level.  It would still be a level, and there would still be a compelling law upon one thousand that it should do the same thing as another thousand; but that same thing might become somewhat more intelligent.