DIDEROT’S “PARADOXE.”

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XIII, Issue 763, 20 October 1904, Page 21

DIDEROT’S “PARADOXE.”

We hear the Paradoxe of Diderot often alluded to, but not everyone has clear idea of the meaning of the French author’s theory. Its thesis may be stated, as a writer in the “Westminster Review” once remarked, in a few of Diderot’s own sentences. “Sensibility is only in a slight degree the equality of a great genius. He will love justice ; but he will exercise that virtue with no perception of its sweetness (douceur). It is not his heart ; it is his head which does all.” “It is extreme sensibility which makes mediocre actors ; it is mediocre sensibility which makes the multitude of bad actors ; and it is the absolute lack of sensibility ' which qualifies (prepare) sublime actors.” That is the gist of the “Paradoxe,’ and it certainly justifies the title. Indeed, it may be at once conceded that the paradox is loosely framed ; it being impossible to -accept any one of the three propositions precisely as it is put. It is only fair, however, to show how Diderot supports them ; and the exposition will go far to bring out the fundamental rightness of his views. He knew many actors apart from his acquaintance with the profession through his plays (he gives a Frenchly frank account of how and why lie once wished to go on the stage himself), and he studied their art with all the eager interest he felt in the industrial processes ' he described for the Encyclopedic. Accordingly he is able to support his doctrine with anecdotes as well as arguments. As thus : —A certain actor and his wife had to play Eraste and Lucile together in Moliere’s “Le Depit Amoureux” at a time when they had a fierce quarrel on hand ; and in the third scene of the fourth act they played with such brilliancy as to win loud applause : all the while they were keeping up, sotto voce, a series of bitter recriminations, the

wife murmuring angry comments on the words addressed to her by Eraste in nis quality of Lucile’s lover ; and the husband revenged himself by physical means immediately on their exit. At another time this French actress kept up an un-der-breath talk with another actor, her lover, each speaking low while the other declaimed. On another occasion the French actress pacified, in a series of asides, another lover who, having been deceived, placed himself at the side of the stage with the intention of putting her out of countenance ; and this in a scene in which her pathos moved the audience to tears. Diderot vouches for the truth of his stories, and asks triumphantly whether these players felt what they played. Again he tells how he saw Garrick, whose acquaintance he made, pass his head through a doorway, and, in the space of four or five seconds, cause his countenance successively to express extravagant joy, moderate joy, tranquility, surprise, astonishment, sadness, despondency, fear, horror, and despair, and then go back through the same phases. Could any mind, he asks, have passed through the sensations thus suggested in such a space of time ? He has yet other stories, of how an actor, while representing the extremest emotion, could deftly put out of the way something which had fallen ; and how, on the first production of “Ines De Castro,” Duclos, by an indignant protest, silenced the parterre when it laughed on the appearance of the children, and then went on successfully with her part. “ What, then ?” asks the paradoxer. “Is it that one can thus pass and repass from one profound sentiment to another ; from grief to indignation, and from indignation to grief ? I cannot conceive that : but what I do conceive is that the indignation of Duclos was real, and the grief simulated.” When put thus, the principle contended for looks fairly plausible. The word “ simulated ” is apt to be unthinkingly accepted ; and in that case Diderot’s position is made good. The discussion here tends to divide, some simply holding that the actor must have felt the situation to begin with, in order to be able to represent it ; others steadily maintaining that to exhibit grief effectively the actor must needs have a sympathetic grief in his heart. The first issue had better be disposed of before the second is tried.

It is obvious that a great deal depends on what is meant by sensibility. The word, says Diderot, signifies “ that disposition, accompanied with (compagne de) weakness of the organs, and followed by (suite de) mobility of the diaphragm, vivacity of the imagination, and delicacy of the nerves : which inclines to be compassionate, to tremble, to admire, to fear, to fret, to weep, to faint, to succour, to fly, to cry. to lose presence of mind, to exaggerate, to despise, to disdain, to have no precise idea of the true, the good, and the beautiful, to be

unjust, to be crazy ” —a definition more copious than satisfactory. On the understanding, however, that sensibility is only asserted to incline the subject more or less to such manifestations of feeling, the term may provisionally stand. At once the question arises whether the actor must not have the capacity for a great many of these very forms of emotion. Must he or - she not possess a “ mobility of the diaphragm ” for purposes of sobbing : a vivacious imagination ; an organisation of considerable sensitiveness ; the power of pity ; the ability to tremble and conceive fear, to feel admiration, to weep, to be extravagant, to be scornful ? Diderot's great array of terms does not save him. Apart from the act of playing, the great actors, as a matter of fact, may be confidently expected to possess in some measure most of the capacities mentioned. Garrick, of whom Diderot says it was worth while to go to England merely to sec him act, must, one would think, have had considerable “sensibility ”of temperament. Is then the proposition as to the great actor being devoid of sensibility to be read as merely meaning that his emotional capacities shall not be exercised while he is playing *? Rather Diderot seems to have held that an actor’s power of feeling is to sensibility proper somewhat as to the appreciation of fine poetry is to the faculty of composing it. “It is,” he says, “that to be emotional is one thing, and to feel is another.” (C’est qu’etre sensible est une chose, sentir est une autre) “The one is an affair of the soul (ame), the other an affair of the judgment. There is nothing to be said of this but that it is a rather crude sample of eighteenth century literary psychology. The solution seems to be that the notion of feeling as distinct from sensibility is Diderot's account of the quality of a temperament in which the emotions are usually exhibited in moderation, being cither naturally feeble or controlled by the judgment ; and that his formula of the “ absolute lack of sensibility ” in a great actor simply covers the conception of a display of violent emotion based on no corresponding sensation—as in the case of Garrick’s rapid series of facial expressions.

There is (says a London exchange) practically no limit nowadays set upon the noise enthusiastic playgoers may make when a play or a player pleases them, but it was not always thus. In a description of the old “Vic,” immortalised by the famous “Mrs Brown” as “the Queen’s own Theayter,” written close upon forty years ago, it is stated that among officials attached to that playhouse was a gentleman in a blue coat and silver buttons and a glazed hat whose duty it was “to rap violently with a cane on the back of an orchestra stall whenever the occupants indulged in more than the permitted amount of noise.” The office would be a somewhat trying one in these times.