It is not every dramatist who treats the art of acting as seriously as the art of composition.  The great author of Wilhelm Meister is the most remarkable exception to this rule, and Lessing is only second to him.  It is hardly possible for a man to be a great dramatist, and it is simply impossible for a man to be a great critic of the drama, who has not seriously studied the rules, aims, and conditions of stage representation.  Hazlitt, for instance, has written some admirable pages about the poetry, the imaginative conception, the language, of Shakespeare’s plays, but we find his limit when he says that King Lear is so noble a play that he cannot bear to see it acted.  As if a play could be fully judged without reference to the conditions of the very object with which it was written.  A play is to be criticised as a play, not merely as a poem.  The whole structure of a piece depends on the fact that it is to be acted; its striking moments must be great dramatic, not merely beautiful poetic, moments.  They must have the intensity of pitch by which the effect of action exceeds the effect of narrative.  This intensity is made almost infinitely variable with the variations in the actor’s mastery of his art.

Diderot, who threw so penetrating a glance into every subject that he touched, even if it were no more than a glance, has left a number of excellent remarks on histrionics.  The key to them all is his everlasting watchword:  Watch nature, follow her simple, and spontaneous leading.  The Paradox on the Player is one of the very few of Diderot’s pieces of which we can say that, besides containing vigorous thought, it has real finish in point of literary form.  There is not the flat tone, the heavy stroke, the loose shamble, that give a certain stamp of commonness to so many of his most elaborate discussions.  In the Paradox the thoughts seem to fall with rapidity and precision into their right places; they are direct; they are not overloaded with qualifications; their clear delivery is not choked by a throng of asides and casual ejaculations.  Usually Diderot writes as if he were loath to let the sentence go, and to allow the paragraph to come to an end.  Here he lays down his proposition, and without rambling passes on to the next.  The effort is not kept up quite to the close, for the last half dozen pages have the ordinary clumsy mannerism of their author.

What is the Paradox?  That a player of the first rank must have much judgment, self-possession, and penetration, but no sensibility.  An actor with nothing but sense and judgment is apt to be cold; but an actor with nothing but verve and sensibility is crazy.  It is a certain temperament of good sense and warmth combined, that makes the sublime player.[274] Why should he differ from the poet, the painter, the orator, the musician?  It is not in the fury of the first impulse that characteristic strokes occur to any of these men; it is in moments