Every form has its meaning. Every attitude has its meaning. Every motion has its meaning. Every sound has its meaning. Every combination of forms, attitudes, motions, or sounds, has its meaning. These meanings are intrinsic or conventional or both. Their purport, value, rank, beauty, merit, may be exactly determined, fixed, defined, portrayed. The knowledge of all this with reference to human nature, methodically arranged, constitutes the scientific foundation for dramatic representation. Then the art consists in setting it all in free living play. The first thing is a complete analysis and synthesis of the actions and reactions of our nature in its three divisions of intelligence, instinct, and passion; mind, heart, and conscience; mentality, vitality, and morality. The second thing is a complete command of the whole apparatus of expression, so that when it is known exactly what the action of each muscle or of each combination of muscles signifies, the actor may have the power to effect the requisite muscular adjustment and excitation. The first requisite, then, is a competent psychological knowledge of the spiritual functions of men, with a sympathetic quickness to summon them into life; and the second, a correspondent knowledge of anatomy and physiology applied in a gymnastic drill to liberate all parts of the organism from stiffness and stricture and unify it into a flexible and elastic whole.
The æsthetic gymnastic which Delsarte devised, to perfect the dramatic aspirant for the most exalted walks of his profession, was a series of exercises aiming to invigorate the tissues and free the articulations of the body, so as to give every joint and muscle its greatest possible ease and breadth of movement and secure at once the fullest liberty of each part and the exactest co-operation of all the parts. When the pupil had finished this training he was competent to exemplify every physical feat and capacity of man. Furthermore, this teacher arranged certain gamuts of expression for the face, the practice of which would give the brows, eyes, nose, and mouth their utmost vital mobility. He required his pupil to sit before a mirror and cause to pass over his face, from the appropriate ideas and emotions within, a series of revelatory pictures. Beginning, for instance, with death, he ascended through idiocy, drunkenness, despair, interest, curiosity, surprise, wonder, astonishment, fear, and terror, to horror; or from grief, through pity, love, joy, and delight, to ecstasy. Then he would reverse the passional panorama, and descend phase by phase back again all the way from ecstasy to despair and death. When he was able at will instantly to summon the distinct and vivid picture on his face of whatever state of feeling calls for expression, he was so far forth ready for entrance on his professional career.
Such is the training demanded of the consummate actor in that Artistic School which combines the excellences of the three preceding schools, cleansing them of their excesses and supplying all that they lack. The prejudice against this sort of discipline, that it must be fatal to all charm of impulse and fire of genius and reduce everything to a frigid construction by rule, is either a fruit of ignorance or an excuse of sloth. It is absurd to suppose that the perfecting of his mechanism makes a man mechanical. On the contrary it spiritualizes him. It is stiff obstructions or dead contractions in the organism that approximate a man to a marionette. It is a ridiculous prejudice which fancies that the strengthening, purification, and release of the organism from all strictures destroys natural life and replaces it with artifice, or banishes the fresh play of ideas and the surprising loveliness of impulse by reducing the divine spontaneity of passion to a cold set of formulas. The Delsartean drill so far from preventing inspiration invites and enhances it by preparing a fit vehicle and providing the needful conditions. The circulating curves of this æsthetic gymnastic, whose soft elliptical lines supersede the hard and violent angles of the vulgar style of exercise, redeem discordant man from his fragmentary condition to a harmonious unity. He is raised from the likeness of a puppet towards the likeness of a god. Then, as the influence of thought and feeling breathes through him, the changes of the features and the movement of the limbs and of the different zones of the body are so fused and interfluent that they modulate the flesh as if it were materialized music.
“Unmarked he stands amid the throng,
In rumination deep and long,
Till you may see, with sudden grace,
The very thought come o’er his face,
And by the motion of his form
Anticipate the bursting of the storm,
And by the uplifting of his brow