Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/476

458 the silence by singing a measure or two of an air, and then stop. Instantly the strain would be taken up and carried on by another student working in another part of the room. The person who continued the song, when questioned on the subject, did not seem aware that he had followed any definite impulse. Is there not in this often unconscious suggestion something that casts a light on those ideas that come up, one knows not why or how, in mobs that come, no one knows whence, and spread with dizzy rapidity?

An audience in a theater suggests similar remarks. While it is the most capricious of publics, it is also the most sheeplike, and it is as hard to foresee its caprices as to reform its habits. Its ways of expressing approbation or blame are usually the same in the same country; then it must always be shown what it is accustomed to see on the stage, no matter how artificial it may be; and it is not safe to show it what it is not accustomed to see there. Still, it must be remembered that the theater audience is a seated mob—that is, only half a mob. The real mob—that in which electrification by contact reaches its highest point of rapidity and energy—is composed of people standing and, better yet, in motion. Yet the most effective agents of mutual suggestion, especially the sight, still exist among seated spectators; and, no doubt, if they did not see one another, if they were witnessing the play as prisoners in cells hear mass in little grated boxes whence it would be impossible to look around, each of them, influenced by the action of the piece and the actors, free from all mixture with the action of the public, would be more fully controlled by his own taste, and the applause or hissing would be much less unanimous. It rarely happens at a theater, a banquet, or any popular manifestation, that one—even if he at heart disapproves the applause, the toasts, or the hurrahs—dares to withhold his applause, or not to raise his glass, or to keep an obstinate silence in the midst of enthusiastic cries. At Lourdes, in the processional and praying throng of believers, there are skeptics who, on the morrow, thinking over all they have done to-day—the crossing of their arms, the expressions of faith uttered by some and repeated by all the others, and the prostrations—will jest about them. They will, nevertheless, not laugh or protest to-day, but will themselves kiss the ground, or pretend to, and if they do not actually hold their arms crossed, will make the gesture of it. They are not afraid, for there is no force in these pious throngs: but they do not wish to be scandalized. And what, at the bottom, is this fear of scandal except the extraordinary importance attributed by the most dissenting and most independent of men to the collective blame of a public composed of individuals, for the personal judgment of each one of whom he would not care a whit? This, however, is not always sufficient to explain the