“This is an age of formulations”, the actress Genevieve Stebbins 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Such a man did exist, but he had died in 1871, leaving his findings unpublished.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, 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). 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.

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.

All came together in “A Gamut of Expression in Pantomime”. Stebbins provided a scene in which the actor might be expected to go through almost every conceivable affect, then, for each emotion, the precise movements of each body part to accompany it. For instance:

IMAGINARY SCENE VII.
Your passion has now passed beyond your control, and you order the object of it to leave your presence.

Pantomime 7.
From final attitude of Pantomime 6, forearm unbends into attitude of arms ex.-ex. Wrist rotates hand into relative attitude ex.-nor. Now make the movement described in Lesson VIII — the command to leave the room, to “Go!” When the arm is executing the last half of the movement “Go!” — i. e., when the wrist is level with the armpit, — change bearing to attitude of legs nor.-ex., animated attention. Right leg strong.

This is indeed true systematization; neither Comte nor Spencer could do better.

It also perhaps goes some of the way to explaining the bad reputation Delsarte’s teaching would later get, as overly systematized and artificial, responsible for the cheesy melodramas of early silent film. Yet Delsarte’s whole project had been to reintroduce naturalism to a stage that had become stiff and bombastic. He had reportedly spent seven years studying Greek statues, but also people in the street, to see what these gestures and inflections really meant to people.

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.”