re Dame, an unshapely colossus, rudely carven, but between whose legs
we could all pass without our brows touching him."[273] Not very
satisfactory recognition perhaps; but the Saint Christopher is better
than Voltaire's drunken savage.

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 wi