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That, he said, accounted for the clutch. There was a crisis, he continued, in the bank upon which the credit of the League of Europe was founded, and the governments were anxious to sell the scrip of the new loan. The clutch we had seen had, no doubt, been performed that afternoon in the larger towns all over the continent, the language alone being suitably varied; and by this means the bank would be placed on a firm footing once more. My emotion was damped on learning this, for after all, I could have little interest in the finances of a country in which I had no stake: but enough of my feeling was left to make me give a foolishly large tip to the driver of our machine.
I was naturally curious to know by what means the frame of mind had been aroused, and in the evening Fabian was kind enough to enlighten me, going very learnedly into the origins of the form which met with such success. I was very surprised, and not a little proud, to find that a large part of the science had had its starting point in our own day, as he showed from several old books: but he on his part seemed inclined to think we had been wanting in genius to have had so much knowledge to hand, and yet not have been able to use it.
The shape of the theatre had been chosen for acoustic reasons, on account of certain properties of the hyperbola, which I had not the mathematics to understand, but which, Fabian said, had been utilised in the third (1914–1918) of the five great wars of European settlement, for finding out by their report, the exact post of hidden guns. It was this which had enabled the fairfusser to make the last cry seem to come from the void; the other speeches had merely been delivered by variously placed loud-speakers, connected in due turn with a wireless gramophone. I may here say that the phrases I have remembered and written down are only a very small number of those used in the performance, and which, for some reason, seemed familiar. The other words spoken in the clutch were of like great emotive power, chosen or invented by the fairfusser for this reason alone: and though they may seem to have no logical thread, or connection in real life, their place in the scheme was very carefully thought out. The reasons, and the terminology, for all this were too far advanced for me to be able to hold them in my head, but I have since traced some passages Fabian showed me as early sources of the form, and which will give the reader some idea of the great cleverness of the design.
“Thus the indirect methods of hypnotising, like many of the technical procedures used in making jokes, have the effect of checking certain distributions of mental energy which would interfere with the course of events in the unconscious, and they lead eventually to the same result as the direct methods of influence by means of staring or stroking.”[4]
[4] Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, page 97.
From there the high road is plain to see; the phrases of the clutch check or loosen ‘certain distributions of mental energy,’ for art is only a kind of hypnotism: but the perfection which I had ‘felt’ had not been arrived at without much arduous trial. At one time jumbled up words had been tried, or single ones, but even the most striking, such as death, or beauty, or ruin, had not had an effect at all to be put beside that of the shortest sentence. Familiar quotations had also been made use of, but they were put by for two reasons. The first was that all men did not respond in the same way, since all men are not equally noble, some even finding risible “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.” The second was that hardly any quotations were familiar enough to be known by everybody: for example, the words “Till the conversion of the Jews” moved people quite unevenly, some connecting them with religion, others with their pass-books, and a few with an old obscure poem. This, besides preventing many from entering into the proper mood, destroyed that singleness in the audience without which the highest suggestible state cannot be reached: for an emotion is infectious only if the units of the crowd are ready to agree together, as I have often noticed on first nights when the friends of an author try to sweep the critics away on a tide of noisy enthusiasm. And further, emotion caught on the wing is always stronger than when it is the result of deliberate thought.
As to the shadows on the ‘stage,’ these were for fixing the attention of all upon the same thing; and I discovered that every member of the audience had been greatly drawn towards the figure which had seized upon my imagination, and had to some extent made himself one with it, as we now do sometimes with the hero of a play. This had served to transform the loose ‘herd’ into a unified and thus suggestible ‘horde,’ if I do not mistake the terms.
The air being made to throb was merely to create a rhythm, the effects of which had been keenly studied. Again to copy a passage I have traced:
“Among the results of rhythm susceptibility and vivacity of emotion, limitations of the field of attention, marked differences in the incidence of belief feelings closely analogous to those which alcohol and nitrous oxide can induce ... may be noted.”[5]