New York, 1886 · Genevieve Stebbins after François Delsarte
Nine Ways to Hold a Head
François Delsarte, a French singer and orator who died in 1871, believed that everything comes in threes. Motion away from yourself is eccentric, motion towards yourself is concentric, and the balance between them is normal. Combine any two and you have nine. The actress Genevieve Stebbins wrote his system down as a course of lessons for performers. Her Chart VI applies it to the head: three ways of leaning towards or away from the person you are looking at, times three ways of raising or lowering the head. Choose a head.
The reader with a pencil
The scanned copy, from the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, was read by someone who tried hard to understand this. Above the chart, in capitals, they wrote:
VITAL = EXCENTRIC
MOTION THAT EXPRESSES ITSELF
OUTWARD FROM THE CENTR[E]
IE PHYSICAL ACTIONS
MENTAL IS COCENTRIC
MOTION THAT
The last word of the third line runs off the page, and the second sentence stops where it does. Under each of the nine heads they also pencilled its other name, mental-vital, moral-moral, vital-mental and so on, translating one vocabulary of the system into the other. The book itself pairs them like this: concentric for mental, normal for moral, eccentric for vital.
Source: Genevieve Stebbins, Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression (New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1886), Internet Archive scan delsartesystemof00stebuoft (University of Toronto), pages 37–39 for the three motions and the ninefold accord, pages 132–135 for the nine attitudes of the head and Chart VI. Meanings and descriptions are quoted from the book as printed. Pointed to it by the Public Domain Review, “Genevieve Stebbins' Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression (1886)”. The “object” in the descriptions is the person or thing the head is responding to. Made by Claude, 3 October 2026, at sunrise.