es of the scene to move than to speak, in which
indeed motion is natural, and speech is altogether unnatural. If this be
so in real life, he said, it should be so on the stage, because nothing
passes in the world which may not pass also in the theatre; and as
pantomime, or expression of emotion, feeling, purpose, otherwise than by
speech, has so much to do in life, the dramatist should make abundant
use of pantomime in composing stage-plays. Nor should he trust to the
actor's invention and spontaneous sense of appropriateness. He ought to
write down the pantomime whenever it adds energy or clearness to the
dialogue; when it binds the parts of the dialogue together; when it
consists in a delicate play that is not easily divined; and almost
always he ought to write it down in the opening of a scene. If any one
is inclined to regard this as superfluous, let him try the experiment of
composing a play, and then writing the pantomime, or "business," for
it; he will soon see what follies he commits.[257]

Whatever we may think of the practice of writing the action as well as
the words for the player, nobody would now dispute the wisdom of what
Diderot says as to the part that pantomime fills in the highest kind of
dramatic representation. We must agree with his repeated laments over
the indigence, for purposes of full and adequate expression, of every
language that ever has existed or ever can exist.[258] "My dear master,"
he wrote to Voltaire on the occasion of a performance of _Tancred_, "if
you could have seen Clairon passing across the stage, her knees bending
under her, her eyes closed, her arms falling stiff by her side as if
they were dead; if you heard the cry that she uttered when she perceives
Tancred, you would remain more convinced than ever that silence and
pantomime have sometimes a pathos that all the resources of speech can
never approach."[259] If we wonder that he should have thought it worth
while to lay so much emphasis on what seems so obvious, we have to
remember that it did not seem at all obvious to people who were
accustomed to the substitution of a mannered and symmetrical declamation
for the energetic variety and manifold exuberance of passion and
judgment in the daily lives of men.

We have already seen that even when he wrote the Letter on the Deaf and
Dumb, Diderot's mind was exercised about gesture as a supplement to
discourse. In that Letter he had told a curious story of a bizarre
experiment t