(Roughly) Daily

The melancholy Jaques is surely right, at the metaphorical level at which Shakespeare operated. But others have been moved to treat that wisdom much more literally. Mathilde Montpetit offers a fascinating example…

“This is an age of formulations”, the actress Genevieve Stebbins [see here] declared in 1886. Auguste Comte had formulated positivism in science, Henry Thomas Buckle had done the same for history, and Herbert Spencer for culture. Even visual art had had its fundamental theories set out, in John Ruskin’s five-volume Modern Painters (1843–60). “It is as though the world”, she reflected, “growing weary of productive activity, sought to pause and reärrange before plunging into further depths; to rescue from the void and formless mass of collected material a system whose symmetry and beauty should embody all that is worth saving”. And why wouldn’t the dramatic arts deserve — indeed, need — the same treatment? But who would be able to do it?

Such a man did exist, but he had died in 1871, leaving his findings unpublished. Luckily, some of his apostles still lived. Stebbins breathlessly narrates her journey to deepest darkest Nanterre to find the Abbé Delaumosne. “What I can I do for you, my child?” he asks. In the Cathedral of Sainte Geneviève and Saint Maurice, he bestows upon her the holy teachings: the French singer and orator François Delsarte’s system of dramatic expression.

Stebbins had first learned about the Delsarte System from Steele MacKaye [see here], an American playwright and actor who had met Delsarte in Paris and “like a John the Baptist, came back to America to prepare the New World for [His] coming”. In 1876, Stebbins had retired from the stage to devote herself entirely to a Delsartean training at MacKaye’s hands: by 1880, she was teaching it herself. The Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression, first published in 1885, was both a philosophical synthesis and a practical guide, providing both intellectual background and exercises for the cultivation of dramatic genius.

Written in the voice of an ongoing set of lessons, taking place over the course of a year, Stebbins was chatty and encouraging: “Very well; you really are making remarkable progress. I wish all my pupils were as intelligent”.

Delsarte was a strict Trinitarian, in part inspired by the work of the seventeenth-century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg (and, it seems, Charles Sanders Peirce [see here]). For him, everything came in threes, especially movement: “All motion is expansive which is objective, which has relation to the exterior world. So Delsarte has named motion from yourself as a centre, excentric. Again we fold in, contract, concentrate our motion in subjective states of mind. So motion to a centre Delsarte has named concentric. Motion between these two extremes, being well balanced, he has aptly termed normal”. These three types of movement could be combined with the three essences (mental, moral, vital) and multiplied into a “ninefold accord”, within which most movements could be graphed [as above].

Every possible element of a gesture or expression was deconstructed and fit into this rubric, with specific exercises for the “Fingers, Hand, Fore arm, Entire arm, Head, Torso, Foot, Lower leg, Entire leg, Entire body, Eyelids, Lower jaw . . .” Stebbins provided helpful charts, like one that shows the “Simple Combinations of Upper Lid and Brow”. On the next page, she clarified that since both the brow and the lid each have nine possibilities each, there are in fact eighty-one possible combinations (she gave eighteen). The Delsarte System presented here, Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter has shown, was full of Stebbins’ own innovations. She had developed the “energizing” techniques to go along with the relaxation ones, and created a whole set of exercises that are still used today in many acting classes…

… What this system was meant to be, Stebbins repeatedly emphasized, was a training system, a form of “aesthetic gymnastics”. So:

When before the public in the pulpit, on the platform, or the stage, forget all rules, or rather make no effort to recall them. Your motto there should be heart-work, not head-work.

“Then why study art’s rules and formulæ?” I hear you ask.

Because much of your practice will cling to you, without conscious thought; because nature rarely showers all her gifts on one head. Inspiration may be yours without bodily power to express; or you may be virtuosos without “the still small voice within.”

More on — and many more illustrations from — this 19th century manual on systemizing the way in which life is art and art is life: “Genevieve Stebbins’ Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression,” from @mathildegm.bsky.social in @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.

* Shakespeare, As You Like It Act II, Scene VII

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As we rehearse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that Wings premiered at the Criterion Theater, in New York City. A “romantic action-war picture,” it featured Army Air Corps aviators in battle (and in love). While most features at the time were shot on lots or studio-controlled locations with limited casts and budgets, Wings was shot on location at Kelly Field in San Antonio over 8 months; hundreds of extras (including some 300 pilots were involved in the filming, including pilots and planes of the Army Air Corps) on a (then massive) budget of $2 million. The investment paid off: While Wings was recognized for the expressive emoting of its (silent) cast, it was acclaimed for its realistic action sequences and technical prowess, and became the yardstick against which future war– but especially aviation– films were measured. It won the first Best Picture in the inaugural Academy Award ceremony (in 1929), and remains the only fully-silent film to do so. (A “sound” version of Wings was ultimately produced, but has no audible dialogue, only a synchronized musical score with sound effects.)

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