In defending Henry Irving against William Archer’s criticism that he neither spoke nor moved naturally on stage, Edward Gordon Craig forges a critical language which encourages us to reformulate our perceptions of what mattered in late eighteenth— and nineteenth-century acting. His words provide a fitting epithet for those actors whose physicality, presence and fire enlivened a stage increasingly under pressure to follow a potentially reductive route towards realism and restraint. For Craig, the artificial and the natural were in opposition, yet strangely complementary. Indeed, from the late eighteenth century onwards discussions of acting were often conducted in binaries: the real versus the ideal; art versus nature; inspiration versus study; passion versus mannerism; imagination versus observation. Behind such debates lies the influence of Diderot, whose Paradox of Acting, in which he argued that consistently good acting depended on intellect rather than sensibility, engendered the heart-versus-head debate. They find more sophisticated expression in the dramatic criticism of James Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt and G. H. Lewes, while they are subsequently formulated in the Coquelin—Irving—Boucicault discussions of acting in the second half of the nineteenth century and in William Archer’s Masks or Faces?