But not only is the crowd more emotional than the individual; it is also more sensuous.  It has the lust of the eye and of the ear,—­the savage’s love of gaudy color, the child’s love of soothing sound.  It is fond of flaring flags and blaring trumpets.  Hence the rich-costumed processions of the Elizabethan stage, many years before the use of scenery; and hence, in our own day, the success of pieces like The Darling of the Gods and The Rose of the Rancho.  Color, light, and music, artistically blended, will hold the crowd better than the most absorbing story.  This is the reason for the vogue of musical comedy, with its pretty girls, and gaudy shifts of scenery and lights, and tricksy, tripping melodies and dances.

Both in its sentiments and in its opinions, the crowd is comfortably commonplace.  It is, as a crowd, incapable of original thought and of any but inherited emotion.  It has no speculation in its eyes.  What it feels was felt before the flood; and what it thinks, its fathers thought before it.  The most effective moments in the theatre are those that appeal to basic and commonplace emotions,—­love of woman, love of home, love of country, love of right, anger, jealousy, revenge, ambition, lust, and treachery.  So great for centuries has been the inherited influence of the Christian religion that any adequate play whose motive is self-sacrifice is almost certain to succeed.  Even when the self-sacrifice is unwise and ignoble, as in the first act of Frou-Frou, the crowd will give it vehement approval.  Countless plays have been made upon the man who unselfishly assumes responsibility for another’s guilt.  The great tragedies have familiar themes,—­ambition in Macbeth, jealousy in Othello, filial ingratitude in Lear; there is nothing in these motives that the most unthinking audience could fail to understand.  No crowd can resist the fervor of a patriot who goes down scornful before many spears.  Show the audience a flag to die for, or a stalking ghost to be avenged, or a shred of honor to maintain against agonizing odds, and it will thrill with an enthusiasm as ancient as the human race.  Few are the plays that can succeed without the moving force of love, the most familiar of all emotions.  These themes do not require that the audience shall think.

But for the speculative, the original, the new, the crowd evinces little favor.  If the dramatist holds ideas of religion, or of politics, or of social law, that are in advance of his time, he must keep them to himself or else his plays will fail.  Nimble wits, like Mr. Shaw, who scorn tradition, can attain a popular success only through the crowd’s inherent love of fads; they cannot long succeed when they run counter to inherited ideas.  The great successful dramatists, like Moliere and Shakespeare, have always thought with the crowd on all essential questions.  Their views of religion, of morality, of politics, of law, have been the views of the populace,