In our daily activity voluntary and involuntary attention are always intertwined.

Our life is a great compromise between that which our voluntary attention aims at and that which the aims of the surrounding world force on our involuntary attention.
How does the theater performance differ in this respect from life?
Might we not say that voluntary attention is eliminated from the sphere of art and that the audience is necessarily following the lead of an attention which receives all its cues from the work of art itself and which therefore acts involuntarily?
To be sure, we may approach a theater performance with a voluntary purpose of our own.

For instance, we may be interested in a particular actor and may watch him with our opera glass all the time whenever he is on the stage, even in scenes in which his role is insignificant and in which the artistic interest ought to belong to the other actors.

But such voluntary selection has evidently nothing to do with the theater performance as such.

By such behavior we break the spell in which the artistic drama ought to hold us.