All these units, these atoms, so
marvellously distinct, are incorporated into one grand whole; though each
be more, by and of himself, than ever before, yet the great power, the
great motor, is the mass. The mass is made powerful by the added importance
given to each individual. And you may trace without conceit a state of
things behind the scenes very similar to this in front of the
footlights. In the theatre, also, the many workers contribute to a grand
result. The manager would be as powerless in his little empire, without
important assistants, as a monarch without ministers and people. What makes
the French army and the American so irresistible is the thought that each
private is more than a machine, is an intellectual being, understands what
his general wants, fights with his bayonet at Solferino or his musket at
Monterey on his own account, yet subject to the supreme control. And the
theatre, with all its actors and scene-painters and costumers and
carpenters and musicians, is only an army on a different scale. The forces
of the stage answer to the generals and colonels, the marshals and
privates, all marching and working and fighting for the same end. Those
splendid dramatic triumphs of Charles Kean were only illustrations of the
principle of association,--only illustrations of the readiness of the stage
to adapt itself to the times, to seize hold of whatever is suggested by the
outside world, to appropriate the discoveries of Layard and the revelations
of Science to its own uses,--illustrations, too, of the importance of the
individual Kean, as well as of the crowd of clever subordinates.
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