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] and I can willingly believe this, for I have myself often felt very curiously stirred when listening to the jazz-band at young people’s parties. [5] I. A. Richards, _The Principles of Literary Criticism_, page 143.