Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/557

Rh her. "If I feel that I have not gained it over far enough, I make an intense physical effort to accomplish this. At the climax of emotion, the public appears quite indistinct, like a collective mass; but when my part only half possesses me, I discern the slightest movements occurring in the hall. I have a very clear perception of the silence that denotes that the attention of the audience is fixed, as I have also of its wandering."

We come now to the illusion of the theater as it is felt by the spectators. Taine's description of it as something that is alternately excited and destroyed is not sustained by the persons whom I have interrogated, and so little resembles the reality that I suppose it is a purely theoretical and systematic explanation, invented in all its parts, perhaps unconsciously, by one who was nothing less than he was an observer. As I interpret the teaching of observation, we most clearly and curiously perceive the illusion side of the spectacle when we enter the theater after the curtain has been raised, and are still in the lobbies regarding from a distance what is passing on the stage. At that moment we have a very strange impression that the actors are playing false, and all that there is of the conventional in the theater stands out before us. This impression is strongest at the beginning, and is gradually dissipated as we listen and comprehend the piece. Leaving aside this somewhat exceptional circumstance, and describing what the spectator usually experiences at the theater, we may theoretically, after the manner of Taine, distinguish two different states of consciousness in our minds: we are moved by the piece, and are aware that it is a fiction. But these two states of consciousness in the large majority of cases have not each an independent life, and do not take each other's places by turns. Our real experience is a complex, composite feeling, in consequence of which we are captured by the emotions of the piece while still vaguely aware that it is a fiction. There are not two contrary acts of the mind, two antagonistic attitudes, but everything is mingled and fused. There are at the same time, in our minds, an emotion of the spectator, a feeling of the illusion, a critical judgment on the actor's playing and the merit of the piece, and a good many other things.

About ten years ago, when hypnotic experiments in psychology were in great favor, the thought sometimes occurred of transforming the personalities of subjects and giving them parts to play. M. Charles Richet took the initiative in these ingenious transformations. A woman, a mother of a family, was by his suggestion metamorphosed into a general, an archbishop, a ballet dancer, or a sailor, and we are assured that she acquitted herself in her parts with a perfection which the most accomplished actor could not attain. The superiority of these subjects of suggestion,