He says that he saw Garrick pass his head between two folding doors, and in the space of a few seconds, his face went successively from mad joy to moderate joy, from that to tranquillity, from tranquillity to surprise, from surprise to astonishment, from astonishment to gloom, from gloom to utter dejection, from dejection to fear, from fear to horror, from horror to despair, and then reascend from this lowest degree to the point whence he had started.[277] Of course his soul felt none of these emotions.

"If you asked this famous man, who by himself was as well worth a journey to England to see, as all the wonders of Rome are worth a journey to Italy, if you asked him, I say, for the scene of _The Little Baker's Boy_, he played it; if you asked him the next minute for the scene from _Hamlet_, he played that too for you, equally ready to sob over the fall of his pies, and to follow the path of the dagger in the air."[278] Apart from the central proposition, Diderot makes a number of excellent observations which show his critical faculty at its best.

As, for example, in answering the question, what is the truth of the stage?
Is it to show things exactly as they are in nature?
By no means.

The true in that sense would only be the common.

The really true is the conformity of action, speech, countenance, voice, movement, gesture, with an ideal model imagined by the poet, and often exaggerated by the player.