LAUGHTER

AN ESSAY ON THE MEANING OF THE COMIC

BY HENRI BERGSON

MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE

AUTHORISED TRANSLATION

BY CLOUDESLEY BRERETON L. ES L. (PARIS), M. A. (CANTAB) AND FREDROTHWELL B. A. (LONDON)

TRANSLATORS' PREFACE

This work, by Professor Bergson, has been revised in detail by theauthor himself, and the present translation is the only authorised one. For this ungrudging labour of revision, for the thoroughness with whichit has been carried out, and for personal sympathy in many a difficultyof word and phrase, we desire to offer our grateful acknowledgment toProfessor Bergson. It may be pointed out that the essay on Laughteroriginally appeared in a series of three articles in one of the leadingmagazines in France, the Revue de Paris. This will account for therelatively simple form of the work and the comparative absence oftechnical terms. It will also explain why the author has confinedhimself to exposing and illustrating his novel theory of the comicwithout entering into a detailed discussion of other explanationsalready in the field. He none the less indicates, when discussingsundry examples, why the principal theories, to which they have givenrise, appear to him inadequate. To quote only a few, one may mentionthose based on contrast, exaggeration, and degradation. 

The book has been highly successful in France, where it is in itsseventh edition. It has been translated into Russian, Polish, andSwedish. German and Hungarian translations are under preparation. Itssuccess is due partly to the novelty of the explanation offered of thecomic, and partly also to the fact that the author incidentallydiscusses questions of still greater interest and importance. Thus, oneof the best known and most frequently quoted passages of the book isthat portion of the last chapter in which the author outlines a generaltheory of art. 

C. B. F. R. 

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS ANDMOVEMENTS--EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC

CHAPTER II

THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC ELEMENT IN WORDS

CHAPTER III

THE COMIC IN CHARACTER

CHAPTER I

THE COMIC IN GENERAL--THE COMIC ELEMENT IN FORMS ANDMOVEMENTS--EXPANSIVE FORCE OF THE COMIC. 

What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable?What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, aplay upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene ofhigh comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably thesame essence from which so many different products borrow either theirobtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which has aknack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only tobob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation. Ourexcuse for attacking the problem in our turn must lie in the fact thatwe shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confineourselves to watching it grow and expand. Passing by imperceptiblegradations from one form to another, it will be seen to achieve thestrangest metamorphoses. We shall disdain nothing we have seen. Maybewe may gain from this prolonged contact, for the matter of that, something more flexible than an abstract definition, --a practical, intimate acquaintance, such as springs from a long companionship. Andmaybe we may also find that, unintentionally, we have made anacquaintance that is useful. For the comic spirit has a logic of itsown, even in its wildest eccentricities. It has a method in itsmadness. It dreams, I admit, but it conjures up, in its dreams, visionsthat are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a socialgroup. Can it then fail to throw light for us on the way that humanimagination works, and more particularly social, collective, andpopular imagination? Begotten of real life and akin to art, should itnot also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?

At the outset we shall put forward three observations which we lookupon as fundamental. They have less bearing on the actually comic thanon the field within which it must be sought. 

I

The first point to which attention should be called is that the comicdoes not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN. A landscapemay be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; itwill never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only becauseyou have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You maylaugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is notthe piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it, --thehuman caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that soimportant a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to agreater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined manas "an animal which laughs. " They might equally well have defined himas an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or somelifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of someresemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to. 

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, theABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems asthough the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless itfell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm andunruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has nogreater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at aperson who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out ofcourt and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pureintelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhapsthere would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tuneand unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentallyprolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is beingsaid and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel withthose who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: asthough at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest ofobjects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Nowstep aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a dramawill turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to thesound of music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers atonce to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similartest? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To producethe whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like amomentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pureand simple. 

This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with otherintelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should bedrawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourselfisolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-definedsound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberatingfrom one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue insuccessive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, thisreverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide acircle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. It may, perchance, havehappened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d'hote, to hear travellers relating to one another stories which must have beencomic to them, for they laughed heartily. Had you been one of theircompany, you would have laughed like them; but, as you were not, youhad no desire whatever to do so. A man who was once asked why he didnot weep at a sermon, when everybody else was shedding tears, replied:"I don't belong to the parish!" What that man thought of tears would bestill more true of laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughteralways implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, withother laughers, real or imaginary. How often has it been said that thefuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience!On the other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comiceffects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular socialgroup! It is through not understanding the importance of this doublefact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in whichthe mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolatedphenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity. Hencethose definitions which tend to make the comic into an abstractrelation between ideas: "an intellectual contrast, " "a palpableabsurdity, " etc. , --definitions which, even were they really suitable toevery form of the comic, would not in the least explain why the comicmakes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that this particularlogical relation, as soon as it is perceived, contracts, expands andshakes our limbs, whilst all other relations leave the body unaffected?It is not from this point of view that we shall approach the problem. To understand laughter, we must put it back into its naturalenvironment, which is society, and above all must we determine theutility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say atonce, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter mustanswer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIALsignification. 

Let us clearly mark the point towards which our three preliminaryobservations are converging. The comic will come into being, itappears, whenever a group of men concentrate their attention on one oftheir number, imposing silence on their emotions and calling into playnothing but their intelligence. What, now, is the particular point onwhich their attention will have to be concentrated, and what will herebe the function of intelligence? To reply to these questions will be atonce to come to closer grips with the problem. But here a few exampleshave become indispensable. 

II

A man, running along the street, stumbles and falls; the passers-byburst out laughing. They would not laugh at him, I imagine, could theysuppose that the whim had suddenly seized him to sit down on theground. They laugh because his sitting down is involuntary. 

Consequently, it is not his sudden change of attitude that raises alaugh, but rather the involuntary element in this change, --hisclumsiness, in fact. Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He shouldhave altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of that, throughlack of elasticity, through absentmindedness and a kind of physicalobstinacy, AS A RESULT, IN FACT, OF RIGIDITY OR OF MOMENTUM, themuscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstancesof the case called for something else. That is the reason of the man'sfall, and also of the people's laughter. 

Now, take the case of a person who attends to the petty occupations ofhis everyday life with mathematical precision. The objects around him, however, have all been tampered with by a mischievous wag, the resultbeing that when he dips his pen into the inkstand he draws it out allcovered with mud, when he fancies he is sitting down on a solid chairhe finds himself sprawling on the floor, in a word his actions are alltopsy-turvy or mere beating the air, while in every case the effect isinvariably one of momentum. Habit has given the impulse: what waswanted was to check the movement or deflect it. He did nothing of thesort, but continued like a machine in the same straight line. Thevictim, then, of a practical joke is in a position similar to that of arunner who falls, --he is comic for the same reason. The laughableelement in both cases consists of a certain MECHANICAL INELASTICITY, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and theliving pliableness of a human being. The only difference in the twocases is that the former happened of itself, whilst the latter wasobtained artificially. In the first instance, the passer-by doesnothing but look on, but in the second the mischievous wag intervenes. 

All the same, in both cases the result has been brought about by anexternal circumstance. The comic is therefore accidental: it remains, so to speak, in superficial contact with the person. How is it topenetrate within? The necessary conditions will be fulfilled whenmechanical rigidity no longer requires for its manifestation astumbling-block which either the hazard of circumstance or humanknavery has set in its way, but extracts by natural processes, from itsown store, an inexhaustible series of opportunities for externallyrevealing its presence. Suppose, then, we imagine a mind alwaysthinking of what it has just done and never of what it is doing, like asong which lags behind its accompaniment. Let us try to picture toourselves a certain inborn lack of elasticity of both senses andintelligence, which brings it to pass that we continue to see what isno longer visible, to hear what is no longer audible, to say what is nolonger to the point: in short, to adapt ourselves to a past andtherefore imaginary situation, when we ought to be shaping our conductin accordance with the reality which is present. This time the comicwill take up its abode in the person himself; it is the person who willsupply it with everything--matter and form, cause and opportunity. Isit then surprising that the absent-minded individual--for this is thecharacter we have just been describing--has usually fired theimagination of comic authors? When La Bruyere came across thisparticular type, he realised, on analysing it, that he had got hold ofa recipe for the wholesale manufacture of comic effects. As a matter offact he overdid it, and gave us far too lengthy and detailed adescription of Menalque, coming back to his subject, dwelling andexpatiating on it beyond all bounds. The very facility of the subjectfascinated him. Absentmindedness, indeed, is not perhaps the actualfountain-head of the comic, but surely it is contiguous to a certainstream of facts and fancies which flows straight from thefountain-head. It is situated, so to say, on one of the great naturalwatersheds of laughter. 

Now, the effect of absentmindedness may gather strength in its turn. There is a general law, the first example of which we have justencountered, and which we will formulate in the following terms: when acertain comic effect has its origin in a certain cause, the morenatural we regard the cause to be, the more comic shall we find theeffect. Even now we laugh at absentmindedness when presented to us as asimple fact. Still more laughable will be the absentmindedness we haveseen springing up and growing before our very eyes, with whose originwe are acquainted and whose life-history we can reconstruct. To choosea definite example: suppose a man has taken to reading nothing butromances of love and chivalry. Attracted and fascinated by his heroes, his thoughts and intentions gradually turn more and more towards them, till one fine day we find him walking among us like a somnambulist. Hisactions are distractions. But then his distractions can be traced backto a definite, positive cause. They are no longer cases of ABSENCE ofmind, pure and simple; they find their explanation in the PRESENCE ofthe individual in quite definite, though imaginary, surroundings. Doubtless a fall is always a fall, but it is one thing to tumble into awell because you were looking anywhere but in front of you, it is quiteanother thing to fall into it because you were intent upon a star. Itwas certainly a star at which Don Quixote was gazing. How profound isthe comic element in the over-romantic, Utopian bent of mind! And yet, if you reintroduce the idea of absentmindedness, which acts as ago-between, you will see this profound comic element uniting with themost superficial type. Yes, indeed, these whimsical wild enthusiasts, these madmen who are yet so strangely reasonable, excite us to laughterby playing on the same chords within ourselves, by setting in motionthe same inner mechanism, as does the victim of a practical joke or thepasser-by who slips down in the street. They, too, are runners who falland simple souls who are being hoaxed--runners after the ideal whostumble over realities, child-like dreamers for whom life delights tolie in wait. But, above all, they are past-masters in absentmindedness, with this superiority over their fellows that their absentmindedness issystematic and organised around one central idea, and that theirmishaps are also quite coherent, thanks to the inexorable logic whichreality applies to the correction of dreams, so that they kindle inthose around them, by a series of cumulative effects, a hilaritycapable of unlimited expansion. 

Now, let us go a little further. Might not certain vices have the samerelation to character that the rigidity of a fixed idea has tointellect? Whether as a moral kink or a crooked twist given to thewill, vice has often the appearance of a curvature of the soul. Doubtless there are vices into which the soul plunges deeply with allits pregnant potency, which it rejuvenates and drags along with it intoa moving circle of reincarnations. Those are tragic vices. But the vicecapable of making us comic is, on the contrary, that which is broughtfrom without, like a ready-made frame into which we are to step. Itlends us its own rigidity instead of borrowing from us our flexibility. We do not render it more complicated; on the contrary, it simplifiesus. Here, as we shall see later on in the concluding section of thisstudy, lies the essential difference between comedy and drama. A drama, even when portraying passions or vices that bear a name, so completelyincorporates them in the person that their names are forgotten, theirgeneral characteristics effaced, and we no longer think of them at all, but rather of the person in whom they are assimilated; hence, the titleof a drama can seldom be anything else than a proper noun. On the otherhand, many comedies have a common noun as their title: l'Avare, leJoueur, etc. Were you asked to think of a play capable of being calledle Jaloux, for instance, you would find that Sganarelle or GeorgeDandin would occur to your mind, but not Othello: le Jaloux could onlybe the title of a comedy. The reason is that, however intimately vice, when comic, is associated with persons, it none the less retains itssimple, independent existence, it remains the central character, present though invisible, to which the characters in flesh and blood onthe stage are attached. At times it delights in dragging them down withits own weight and making them share in its tumbles. More frequently, however, it plays on them as on an instrument or pulls the strings asthough they were puppets. Look closely: you will find that the art ofthe comic poet consists in making us so well acquainted with theparticular vice, in introducing us, the spectators, to such a degree ofintimacy with it, that in the end we get hold of some of the strings ofthe marionette with which he is playing, and actually work themourselves; this it is that explains part of the pleasure we feel. Here, too, it is really a kind of automatism that makes us laugh--anautomatism, as we have already remarked, closely akin to mereabsentmindedness. To realise this more fully, it need only be notedthat a comic character is generally comic in proportion to hisignorance of himself. The comic person is unconscious. As thoughwearing the ring of Gyges with reverse effect, he becomes invisible tohimself while remaining visible to all the world. A character in atragedy will make no change in his conduct because he will know how itis judged by us; he may continue therein, even though fully consciousof what he is and feeling keenly the horror he inspires in us. But adefect that is ridiculous, as soon as it feels itself to be so, endeavours to modify itself, or at least to appear as though it did. Were Harpagon to see us laugh at his miserliness, I do not say that hewould get rid of it, but he would either show it less or show itdifferently. Indeed, it is in this sense only that laughter "correctsmen's manners. " It makes us at once endeavour to appear what we oughtto be, what some day we shall perhaps end in being. 

It is unnecessary to carry this analysis any further. From the runnerwho falls to the simpleton who is hoaxed, from a state of being hoaxedto one of absentmindedness, from absentmindedness to wild enthusiasm, from wild enthusiasm to various distortions of character and will, wehave followed the line of progress along which the comic becomes moreand more deeply imbedded in the person, yet without ceasing, in itssubtler manifestations, to recall to us some trace of what we noticedin its grosser forms, an effect of automatism and of inelasticity. Nowwe can obtain a first glimpse--a distant one, it is true, and stillhazy and confused--of the laughable side of human nature and of theordinary function of laughter. 

What life and society require of each of us is a constantly alertattention that discerns the outlines of the present situation, togetherwith a certain elasticity of mind and body to enable us to adaptourselves in consequence. TENSION and ELASTICITY are two forces, mutually complementary, which life brings into play. If these twoforces are lacking in the body to any considerable extent, we havesickness and infirmity and accidents of every kind. If they are lackingin the mind, we find every degree of mental deficiency, every varietyof insanity. Finally, if they are lacking in the character, we havecases of the gravest inadaptability to social life, which are thesources of misery and at times the causes of crime. Once these elementsof inferiority that affect the serious side of existence areremoved--and they tend to eliminate themselves in what has been calledthe struggle for life--the person can live, and that in common withother persons. But society asks for something more; it is not satisfiedwith simply living, it insists on living well. What it now has to dreadis that each one of us, content with paying attention to what affectsthe essentials of life, will, so far as the rest is concerned, give wayto the easy automatism of acquired habits. Another thing it must fearis that the members of whom it is made up, instead of aiming after anincreasingly delicate adjustment of wills which will fit more and moreperfectly into one another, will confine themselves to respectingsimply the fundamental conditions of this adjustment: a cut-and-driedagreement among the persons will not satisfy it, it insists on aconstant striving after reciprocal adaptation. Society will thereforebe suspicious of all INELASTICITY of character, of mind and even ofbody, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as wellas of an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swervefrom the common centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of an eccentricity. And yet, society cannotintervene at this stage by material repression, since it is notaffected in a material fashion. It is confronted with something thatmakes it uneasy, but only as a symptom--scarcely a threat, at the verymost a gesture. A gesture, therefore, will be its reply. Laughter mustbe something of this kind, a sort of SOCIAL GESTURE. By the fear whichit inspires, it restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and inmutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which mightretire into their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens downwhatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanicalinelasticity. Laughter, then, does not belong to the province ofesthetics alone, since unconsciously (and even immorally in manyparticular instances) it pursues a utilitarian aim of generalimprovement. And yet there is something esthetic about it, since thecomic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed fromthe worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works ofart. In a word, if a circle be drawn round those actions anddispositions--implied in individual or social life--to which theirnatural consequences bring their own penalties, there remains outsidethis sphere of emotion and struggle--and within a neutral zone in whichman simply exposes himself to man's curiosity--a certain rigidity ofbody, mind and character, that society would still like to get rid ofin order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree ofelasticity and sociability. This rigidity is the comic, and laughter isits corrective. 

Still, we must not accept this formula as a definition of the comic. Itis suitable only for cases that are elementary, theoretical andperfect, in which the comic is free from all adulteration. Nor do weoffer it, either, as an explanation. We prefer to make it, if you will, the leitmotiv which is to accompany all our explanations. We must everkeep it in mind, though without dwelling on it too much, somewhat as askilful fencer must think of the discontinuous movements of the lessonwhilst his body is given up to the continuity of the fencing-match. Wewill now endeavour to reconstruct the sequence of comic forms, takingup again the thread that leads from the horseplay of a clown up to themost refined effects of comedy, following this thread in its oftenunforeseen windings, halting at intervals to look around, and finallygetting back, if possible, to the point at which the thread is danglingand where we shall perhaps find--since the comic oscillates betweenlife and art--the general relation that art bears to life. 

III

Let us begin at the simplest point. What is a comic physiognomy? Wheredoes a ridiculous expression of the face come from? And what is, inthis case, the distinction between the comic and the ugly? Thus stated, the question could scarcely be answered in any other than an arbitraryfashion. Simple though it may appear, it is, even now, too subtle toallow of a direct attack. We should have to begin with a definition ofugliness, and then discover what addition the comic makes to it; now, ugliness is not much easier to analyse than is beauty. However, we willemploy an artifice which will often stand us in good stead. We willexaggerate the problem, so to speak, by magnifying the effect to thepoint of making the cause visible. Suppose, then, we intensify uglinessto the point of deformity, and study the transition from the deformedto the ridiculous. 

Now, certain deformities undoubtedly possess over others the sorryprivilege of causing some persons to laugh; some hunchbacks, forinstance, will excite laughter. Without at this point entering intouseless details, we will simply ask the reader to think of a number ofdeformities, and then to divide them into two groups: on the one hand, those which nature has directed towards the ridiculous; and on theother, those which absolutely diverge from it. No doubt he will hitupon the following law: A deformity that may become comic is adeformity that a normally built person, could successfully imitate. 

Is it not, then, the case that the hunchback suggests the appearance ofa person who holds himself badly? His back seems to have contracted anugly stoop. By a kind of physical obstinacy, by rigidity, in a word, itpersists in the habit it has contracted. Try to see with your eyesalone. Avoid reflection, and above all, do not reason. Abandon all yourprepossessions; seek to recapture a fresh, direct and primitiveimpression. The vision you will reacquire will be one of this kind. Youwill have before you a man bent on cultivating a certain rigidattitude--whose body, if one may use the expression, is one vast grin. 

Now, let us go back to the point we wished to clear up. By toning downa deformity that is laughable, we ought to obtain an ugliness that iscomic. A laughable expression of the face, then, is one that will makeus think of something rigid and, so to speak, coagulated, in the wontedmobility of the face. What we shall see will be an ingrained twitchingor a fixed grimace. It may be objected that every habitual expressionof the face, even when graceful and beautiful, gives us this sameimpression of something stereotyped? Here an important distinction mustbe drawn. When we speak of expressive beauty or even expressiveugliness, when we say that a face possesses expression, we meanexpression that may be stable, but which we conjecture to be mobile. Itmaintains, in the midst of its fixity, a certain indecision in whichare obscurely portrayed all possible shades of the state of mind itexpresses, just as the sunny promise of a warm day manifests itself inthe haze of a spring morning. But a comic expression of the face is onethat promises nothing more than it gives. It is a unique and permanentgrimace. One would say that the person's whole moral life hascrystallised into this particular cast of features. This is the reasonwhy a face is all the more comic, the more nearly it suggests to us theidea of some simple mechanical action in which its personality wouldfor ever be absorbed. Some faces seem to be always engaged in weeping, others in laughing or whistling, others, again, in eternally blowing animaginary trumpet, and these are the most comic faces of all. Hereagain is exemplified the law according to which the more natural theexplanation of the cause, the more comic is the effect. Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained, areclearly the causes why a face makes us laugh. But this effect gains inintensity when we are able to connect these characteristics with somedeep-seated cause, a certain fundamental absentmindedness, as thoughthe soul had allowed itself to be fascinated and hypnotised by themateriality of a simple action. 

We shall now understand the comic element in caricature. Howeverregular we may imagine a face to be, however harmonious its lines andsupple its movements, their adjustment is never altogether perfect:there will always be discoverable the signs of some impending bias, thevague suggestion of a possible grimace, in short some favouritedistortion towards which nature seems to be particularly inclined. Theart of the caricaturist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, and in rendering it visible to all eyes bymagnifying it. He makes his models grimace, as they would do themselvesif they went to the end of their tether. Beneath the skin-deep harmonyof form, he divines the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter. Herealises disproportions and deformations which must have existed innature as mere inclinations, but which have not succeeded in coming toa head, being held in check by a higher force. His art, which has atouch of the diabolical, raises up the demon who had been overthrown bythe angel. Certainly, it is an art that exaggerates, and yet thedefinition would be very far from complete were exaggeration alonealleged to be its aim and object, for there exist caricatures that aremore lifelike than portraits, caricatures in which the exaggeration isscarcely noticeable, whilst, inversely, it is quite possible toexaggerate to excess without obtaining a real caricature. Forexaggeration to be comic, it must not appear as an aim, but rather as ameans that the artist is using in order to make manifest to our eyesthe distortions which he sees in embryo. It is this process ofdistortion that is of moment and interest. And that is precisely why weshall look for it even in those elements of the face that are incapableof movement, in the curve of a nose or the shape of an ear. For, in oureyes, form is always the outline of a movement. The caricaturist whoalters the size of a nose, but respects its ground plan, lengtheningit, for instance, in the very direction in which it was beinglengthened by nature, is really making the nose indulge in a grin. Henceforth we shall always look upon the original as having determinedto lengthen itself and start grinning. In this sense, one might saythat Nature herself often meets with the successes of a caricaturist. In the movement through which she has slit that mouth, curtailed thatchin and bulged out that cheek, she would appear to have succeeded incompleting the intended grimace, thus outwitting the restrainingsupervision of a more reasonable force. In that case, the face we laughat is, so to speak, its own caricature. 

To sum up, whatever be the doctrine to which our reason assents, ourimagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every humanform it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul whichis infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law ofgravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. This soulimparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: theimmateriality which thus passes into matter is what is calledgracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws toitself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fainconvert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mereautomatism. It would fain immobilise the intelligently varied movementsof the body in stupidly contracted grooves, stereotype in permanentgrimaces the fleeting expressions of the face, in short imprint on thewhole person such an attitude as to make it appear immersed andabsorbed in the materiality of some mechanical occupation instead ofceaselessly renewing its vitality by keeping in touch with a livingideal. Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of thesoul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, itachieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic. If, then, at this point we wished to define the comic by comparing it withits contrary, we should have to contrast it with gracefulness even morethan with beauty. It partakes rather of the unsprightly than of theunsightly, of RIGIDNESS rather than of UGLINESS. 

IV

We will now pass from the comic element in FORMS to that in GESTURESand MOVEMENTS. Let us at once state the law which seems to govern allthe phenomena of this kind. It may indeed be deduced without anydifficulty from the considerations stated above. THE ATTITUDES, GESTURES AND MOVEMENTS OF THE HUMAN BODY ARE LAUGHABLE IN EXACTPROPORTION AS THAT BODY REMINDS US OF A MERE MACHINE. There is no needto follow this law through the details of its immediate applications, which are innumerable. To verify it directly, it would be sufficient tostudy closely the work of comic artists, eliminating entirely theelement of caricature, and omitting that portion of the comic which isnot inherent in the drawing itself. For, obviously, the comic elementin a drawing is often a borrowed one, for which the text supplies allthe stock-in-trade. I mean that the artist may be his own understudy inthe shape of a satirist, or even a playwright, and that then we laughfar less at the drawings themselves than at the satire or comicincident they represent. But if we devote our whole attention to thedrawing with the firm resolve to think of nothing else, we shallprobably find that it is generally comic in proportion to theclearness, as well as the subtleness, with which it enables us to see aman as a jointed puppet. The suggestion must be a clear one, for insidethe person we must distinctly perceive, as though through a glass, aset-up mechanism. But the suggestion must also be a subtle one, for thegeneral appearance of the person, whose every limb has been made rigidas a machine, must continue to give us the impression of a livingbeing. The more exactly these two images, that of a person and that ofa machine, fit into each other, the more striking is the comic effect, and the more consummate the art of the draughtsman. The originality ofa comic artist is thus expressed in the special kind of life he impartsto a mere puppet. 

We will, however, leave on one side the immediate application of theprinciple, and at this point insist only on the more remoteconsequences. The illusion of a machine working in the inside of theperson is a thing that only crops up amid a host of amusing effects;but for the most part it is a fleeting glimpse, that is immediatelylost in the laughter it provokes. To render it permanent, analysis andreflection must be called into play. 

In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies withspeech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker'sthought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but thenit must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases of itsdevelopment. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripensfrom the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, neverrepeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for to cease tochange would be to cease to live. Then let gesture display a likeanimation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life, which is thecomplete negation of repetition! But I find that a certain movement ofhead or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regularintervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, ifI wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, theninvoluntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have before me a machine thatworks automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatismestablished in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic. 

This is also the reason why gestures, at which we never dreamt oflaughing, become laughable when imitated by another individual. Themost elaborate explanations have been offered for this extremely simplefact. A little reflection, however, will show that our mental state isever changing, and that if our gestures faithfully followed these innermovements, if they were as fully alive as we, they would never repeatthemselves, and so would keep imitation at bay. We begin, then, tobecome imitable only when we cease to be ourselves. I mean our gesturescan only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and thereforeexactly in what is alien to our living personality. To imitate any oneis to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep intohis person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is nowonder that imitation gives rise to laughter. 

Still, if the imitation of gestures is intrinsically laughable, it willbecome even more so when it busies itself in deflecting them, thoughwithout altering their form, towards some mechanical occupation, suchas sawing wood, striking on an anvil, or tugging away at an imaginarybell-rope. Not that vulgarity is the essence of the comic, --althoughcertainly it is to some extent an ingredient, --but rather that theincriminated gesture seems more frankly mechanical when it can beconnected with a simple operation, as though it were intentionallymechanical. To suggest this mechanical interpretation ought to be oneof the favourite devices of parody. We have reached this result throughdeduction, but I imagine clowns have long had an intuition of the fact. 

This seems to me the solution of the little riddle propounded by Pascalin one passage of his Thoughts: "Two faces that are alike, althoughneither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh whentogether, on account of their likeness. " It might just as well be said:"The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable byitself, excite laughter by their repetition. " The truth is that areally living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there isrepetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism atwork behind the living. Analyse the impression you get from two facesthat are too much alike, and you will find that you are thinking of twocopies cast in the same mould, or two impressions of the same seal, ortwo reproductions of the same negative, --in a word, of somemanufacturing process or other. This deflection of life towards themechanical is here the real cause of laughter. 

And laughter will be more pronounced still, if we find on the stage notmerely two characters, as in the example from Pascal, but several, nay, as great a number as possible, the image of one another, who come andgo, dance and gesticulate together, simultaneously striking the sameattitudes and tossing their arms about in the same manner. This time, we distinctly think of marionettes. Invisible threads seem to us to bejoining arms to arms, legs to legs, each muscle in one face to itsfellow-muscle in the other: by reason of the absolute uniformity whichprevails, the very litheness of the bodies seems to stiffen as we gaze, and the actors themselves seem transformed into automata. Such, atleast, appears to be the artifice underlying this somewhat obvious formof amusement. I daresay the performers have never read Pascal, but whatthey do is merely to realise to the full the suggestions contained inPascal's words. If, as is undoubtedly the case, laughter is caused inthe second instance by the hallucination of a mechanical effect, itmust already have been so, though in more subtle fashion, in the first. 

Continuing along this path, we dimly perceive the increasinglyimportant and far-reaching consequences of the law we have just stated. We faintly catch still more fugitive glimpses of mechanical effects, glimpses suggested by man's complex actions, no longer merely by hisgestures. We instinctively feel that the usual devices of comedy, theperiodical repetition of a word or a scene, the systematic inversion ofthe parts, the geometrical development of a farcical misunderstanding, and many other stage contrivances, must derive their comic force fromthe same source, --the art of the playwright probably consisting insetting before us an obvious clockwork arrangement of human events, while carefully preserving an outward aspect of probability and therebyretaining something of the suppleness of life. But we must notforestall results which will be duly disclosed in the course of ouranalysis. 

V

Before going further, let us halt a moment and glance around. As wehinted at the outset of this study, it would be idle to attempt toderive every comic effect from one simple formula. The formula existswell enough in a certain sense, but its development does not follow astraightforward course. What I mean is that the process of deductionought from time to time to stop and study certain culminating effects, and that these effects each appear as models round which new effectsresembling them take their places in a circle. These latter are notdeductions from the formula, but are comic through their relationshipwith those that are. To quote Pascal again, I see no objection, at thisstage, to defining the process by the curve which that geometricianstudied under the name of roulette or cycloid, --the curve traced by apoint in the circumference of a wheel when the carriage is advancing ina straight line: this point turns like the wheel, though it advanceslike the carriage. Or else we might think of an immense avenue such asare to be seen in the forest of Fontainebleau, with crosses atintervals to indicate the cross-ways: at each of these we shall walkround the cross, explore for a while the paths that open out before us, and then return to our original course. Now, we have just reached oneof these mental crossways. Something mechanical encrusted on theliving, will represent a cross at which we must halt, a central imagefrom which the imagination branches off in different directions. Whatare these directions? There appear to be three main ones. We willfollow them one after the other, and then continue our onward course. 

1. In the first place, this view of the mechanical and the livingdovetailed into each other makes us incline towards the vaguer image ofSOME RIGIDITY OR OTHER applied to the mobility of life, in an awkwardattempt to follow its lines and counterfeit its suppleness. Here weperceive how easy it is for a garment to become ridiculous. It mightalmost be said that every fashion is laughable in some respect. Only, when we are dealing with the fashion of the day, we are so accustomedto it that the garment seems, in our mind, to form one with theindividual wearing it. We do not separate them in imagination. The ideano longer occurs to us to contrast the inert rigidity of the coveringwith the living suppleness of the object covered: consequently, thecomic here remains in a latent condition. It will only succeed inemerging when the natural incompatibility is so deep-seated between thecovering and the covered that even an immemorial association fails tocement this union: a case in point is our head and top hat. Suppose, however, some eccentric individual dresses himself in the fashion offormer times: our attention is immediately drawn to the clothesthemselves, we absolutely distinguish them from the individual, we saythat the latter IS DISGUISING HIMSELF, --as though every article ofclothing were not a disguise!--and the laughable aspect of fashioncomes out of the shadow into the light. 

Here we are beginning to catch a faint glimpse of the highly intricatedifficulties raised by this problem of the comic. One of the reasonsthat must have given rise to many erroneous or unsatisfactory theoriesof laughter is that many things are comic de jure without being comicde facto, the continuity of custom having deadened within them thecomic quality. A sudden dissolution of continuity is needed, a breakwith fashion, for this quality to revive. Hence the impression thatthis dissolution of continuity is the parent of the comic, whereas allit does is to bring it to our notice. Hence, again, the explanation oflaughter by surprise, contrast, etc. , definitions which would equallyapply to a host of cases in which we have no inclination whatever tolaugh. The truth of the matter is far from being so simple. But toreturn to our idea of disguise, which, as we have just shown, has beenentrusted with the special mandate of arousing laughter. It will not beout of place to investigate the uses it makes of this power. 

Why do we laugh at a head of hair which has changed from dark to blond?What is there comic about a rubicund nose? And why does one laugh at anegro? The question would appear to be an embarrassing one, for it hasbeen asked by successive psychologists such as Hecker, Kraepelin andLipps, and all have given different replies. And yet I rather fancy thecorrect answer was suggested to me one day in the street by an ordinarycabby, who applied the expression "unwashed" to the negro fare he wasdriving. Unwashed! Does not this mean that a black face, in ourimagination, is one daubed over with ink or soot? If so, then a rednose can only be one which has received a coating of vermilion. And sowe see that the notion of disguise has passed on something of its comicquality to instances in which there is actually no disguise, thoughthere might be. 

In the former set of examples, although his usual dress was distinctfrom the individual, it appeared in our mind to form one with him, because we had become accustomed to the sight. In the latter, althoughthe black or red colour is indeed inherent in the skin, we look upon itas artificially laid on, because it surprises us. 

But here we meet with a fresh crop of difficulties in the theory of thecomic. Such a proposition as the following: "My usual dress forms partof my body" is absurd in the eyes of reason. Yet imagination looks uponit as true. "A red nose is a painted nose, " "A negro is a white man indisguise, " are also absurd to the reason which rationalises; but theyare gospel truths to pure imagination. So there is a logic of theimagination which is not the logic of reason, one which at times iseven opposed to the latter, --with which, however, philosophy mustreckon, not only in the study of the comic, but in every otherinvestigation of the same kind. It is something like the logic ofdreams, though of dreams that have not been left to the whim ofindividual fancy, being the dreams dreamt by the whole of society. Inorder to reconstruct this hidden logic, a special kind of effort isneeded, by which the outer crust of carefully stratified judgments andfirmly established ideas will be lifted, and we shall behold in thedepths of our mind, like a sheet of subterranean water, the flow of anunbroken stream of images which pass from one into another. Thisinterpenetration of images does not come about by chance. It obeyslaws, or rather habits, which hold the same relation to imaginationthat logic does to thought. 

Let us then follow this logic of the imagination in the special case inhand. A man in disguise is comic. A man we regard as disguised is alsocomic. So, by analogy, any disguise is seen to become comic, not onlythat of a man, but that of society also, and even the disguise ofnature. 

Let us start with nature. You laugh at a dog that is half-clipped, at abed of artificially coloured flowers, at a wood in which the trees areplastered over with election addresses, etc. Look for the reason, andyou will see that you are once more thinking of a masquerade. Here, however, the comic element is very faint; it is too far from itssource. If you wish to strengthen it, you must go back to the sourceitself and contrast the derived image, that of a masquerade, with theoriginal one, which, be it remembered, was that of a mechanicaltampering with life. In "a nature that is mechanically tampered with"we possess a thoroughly comic theme, on which fancy will be able toplay ever so many variations with the certainty of successfullyprovoking the heartiest hilarity. You may call to mind that amusingpassage in Tartarin Sur Les Alpes, in which Bompard makes Tartarin--andtherefore also the reader to some slight extent--accept the idea of aSwitzerland choke-full of machinery like the basement of the opera, andrun by a company which maintains a series of waterfalls, glaciers andartificial crevasses. The same theme reappears, though transposed inquite another key, in the Novel Notes of the English humorist, JeromeK. Jerome. An elderly Lady Bountiful, who does not want her deeds ofcharity to take up too much of her time, provides homes within easyhail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have beenspecially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honestfolk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them oftheir failing, etc. There are comic phrases in which this theme isaudible, like a distant echo, coupled with an ingenuousness, whethersincere or affected, which acts as accompaniment. Take, as an instance, the remark made by a lady whom Cassini, the astronomer, had invited tosee an eclipse of the moon. Arriving too late, she said, "M. DeCassini, I know, will have the goodness to begin it all over again, toplease me. " Or, take again the exclamation of one of Gondiinet'scharacters on arriving in a town and learning that there is an extinctvolcano in the neighbourhood, "They had a volcano, and they have let itgo out!"

Let us go on to society. As we are both in and of it, we cannot helptreating it as a living being. Any image, then, suggestive of thenotion of a society disguising itself, or of a social masquerade, so tospeak, will be laughable. Now, such a notion is formed when we perceiveanything inert or stereotyped, or simply ready-made, on the surface ofliving society. There we have rigidity over again, clashing with theinner suppleness of life. The ceremonial side of social life must, therefore, always include a latent comic element, which is only waitingfor an opportunity to burst into full view. It might be said thatceremonies are to the social body what clothing is to the individualbody: they owe their seriousness to the fact that they are identified, in our minds, with the serious object with which custom associatesthem, and when we isolate them in imagination, they forthwith losetheir seriousness. For any ceremony, then, to become comic, it isenough that our attention be fixed on the ceremonial element in it, andthat we neglect its matter, as philosophers say, and think only of itsform. Every one knows how easily the comic spirit exercises itsingenuity on social actions of a stereotyped nature, from an ordinaryprize-distribution to the solemn sitting of a court of justice. Anyform or formula is a ready-made frame into which the comic element maybe fitted. 

Here, again, the comic will be emphasised by bringing it nearer to itssource. From the idea of travesty, a derived one, we must go back tothe original idea, that of a mechanism superposed upon life. Already, the stiff and starched formality of any ceremonial suggests to us animage of this kind. For, as soon as we forget the serious object of asolemnity or a ceremony, those taking part in it give us the impressionof puppets in motion. Their mobility seems to adopt as a model theimmobility of a formula. It becomes automatism. But complete automatismis only reached in the official, for instance, who performs his dutylike a mere machine, or again in the unconsciousness that marks anadministrative regulation working with inexorable fatality, and settingitself up for a law of nature. Quite by chance, when reading thenewspaper, I came across a specimen of the comic of this type. Twentyyears ago, a large steamer was wrecked off the coast at Dieppe. Withconsiderable difficulty some of the passengers were rescued in a boat. A few custom-house officers, who had courageously rushed to theirassistance, began by asking them "if they had anything to declare. " Wefind something similar, though the idea is a more subtle one, in theremark of an M. P. When questioning the Home Secretary on the morrow ofa terrible murder which took place in a railway carriage: "Theassassin, after despatching his victim, must have got out the wrongside of the train, thereby infringing the Company's rules. "

A mechanical element introduced into nature and an automatic regulationof society, such, then, are the two types of laughable effects at whichwe have arrived. It remains for us, in conclusion, to combine them andsee what the result will be. 

The result of the combination will evidently be a human regulation ofaffairs usurping the place of the laws of nature. We may call to mindthe answer Sganarelle gave Geronte when the latter remarked that theheart was on the left side and the liver on the right: "Yes, it was soformerly, but we have altered all that; now, we practise medicine inquite a new way. " We may also recall the consultation between M. DePourceaugnac's two doctors: "The arguments you have used are so eruditeand elegant that it is impossible for the patient not to behypochondriacally melancholic; or, even if he were not, he must surelybecome so because of the elegance of the things you have said and theaccuracy of your reasoning. " We might multiply examples, for all weneed do would be to call up Moliere's doctors, one after the other. However far, moreover, comic fancy may seem to go, reality at timesundertakes to improve upon it. It was suggested to a contemporaryphilosopher, an out-and-out arguer, that his arguments, thoughirreproachable in their deductions, had experience against them. He putan end to the discussion by merely remarking, "Experience is in thewrong. " The truth is, this idea of regulating life as a matter ofbusiness routine is more widespread than might be imagined; it isnatural in its way, although we have just obtained it by an artificialprocess of reconstruction. One might say that it gives us the veryquintessence of pedantry, which, at bottom, is nothing else than artpretending to outdo nature. 

To sum up, then, we have one and the same effect, which assumes eversubtler forms as it passes from the idea of an artificial MECHANISATIONof the human body, if such an expression is permissible, to that of anysubstitution whatsoever of the artificial for the natural. A less andless rigorous logic, that more and more resembles the logic ofdreamland, transfers the same relationship into higher and higherspheres, between increasingly immaterial terms, till in the end we finda mere administrative enactment occupying the same relation to anatural or moral law that a ready-made garment, for instance, does tothe living body. We have now gone right to the end of the first of thethree directions we had to follow. Let us turn to the second and seewhere it will lead us. 

2. Our starting-point is again "something mechanical encrusted upon theliving. " Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from thefact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, itseemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection ofsuppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. Butthis activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body. It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higherprinciple and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. Whenwe see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it isbecause we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of itsvitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principleof intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that ourattention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far fromsharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it isanimated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersomevesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a souleager to rise aloft. Then the body will become to the soul what, as wehave just seen, the garment was to the body itself--inert matter dumpeddown upon living energy. The impression of the comic will be producedas soon as we have a clear apprehension of this putting the one on theother. And we shall experience it most strongly when we are shown thesoul TANTALISED by the needs of the body: on the one hand, the moralpersonality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything withits machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeatedthese claims of the body, the more striking will be the result. Butthat is only a matter of degree, and the general law of these phenomenamay be formulated as follows: ANY INCIDENT IS COMIC THAT CALLS OURATTENTION TO THE PHYSICAL IN A PERSON WHEN IT IS THE MORAL SIDE THAT ISCONCERNED. 

Why do we laugh at a public speaker who sneezes just at the mostpathetic moment of his speech? Where lies the comic element in thissentence, taken from a funeral speech and quoted by a Germanphilosopher: "He was virtuous and plump"? It lies in the fact that ourattention is suddenly recalled from the soul to the body. Similarinstances abound in daily life, but if you do not care to take thetrouble to look for them, you have only to open at random a volume ofLabiche, and you will be almost certain to light upon an effect of thiskind. Now, we have a speaker whose most eloquent sentences are cutshort by the twinges of a bad tooth; now, one of the characters whonever begins to speak without stopping in the middle to complain of hisshoes being too small, or his belt too tight, etc. A PERSON EMBARRASSEDBY HIS BODY is the image suggested to us in all these examples. Thereason that excessive stoutness is laughable is probably because itcalls up an image of the same kind. I almost think that this too iswhat sometime makes bashfulness somewhat ridiculous. The bashful manrather gives the impression of a person embarrassed by his body, looking round for some convenient cloak-room in which to deposit it. 

This is just why the tragic poet is so careful to avoid anythingcalculated to attract attention to the material side of his heroes. Nosooner does anxiety about the body manifest itself than the intrusionof a comic element is to be feared. On this account, the hero in atragedy does not eat or drink or warm himself. He does not even sitdown any more than can be helped. To sit down in the middle of a finespeech would imply that you remembered you had a body. Napoleon, whowas a psychologist when he wished to be so, had noticed that thetransition from tragedy to comedy is effected simply by sitting down. In the "Journal inedit" of Baron Gourgaud--when speaking of aninterview with the Queen of Prussia after the battle of Iena--heexpresses himself in the following terms: "She received me in tragicfashion like Chimene: Justice! Sire, Justice! Magdeburg! Thus shecontinued in a way most embarrassing to me. Finally, to make her changeher style, I requested her to take a seat. This is the best method forcutting short a tragic scene, for as soon as you are seated it allbecomes comedy. "

Let us now give a wider scope to this image of THE BODY TAKINGPRECEDENCE OF THE SOUL. We shall obtain something more general--THEMANNER SEEKING TO OUTDO THE MATTER, THE LETTER AIMING AT OUSTING THESPIRIT. Is it not perchance this idea that comedy is trying to suggestto us when holding up a profession to ridicule? It makes the lawyer, the magistrate and the doctor speak as though health and justice wereof little moment, --the main point being that we should have lawyers, magistrates and doctors, and that all outward formalities pertaining tothese professions should be scrupulously respected. And so we find themeans substituted for the end, the manner for the matter; no longer isit the profession that is made for the public, but rather the publicfor the profession. Constant attention to form and the mechanicalapplication of rules here bring about a kind of professional automatismanalogous to that imposed upon the soul by the habits of the body, andequally laughable. Numerous are the examples of this on the stage. Without entering into details of the variations executed on this theme, let us quote two or three passages in which the theme itself is setforth in all its simplicity. "You are only bound to treat peopleaccording to form, " says Doctor Diafoirus in the "Malade imaginaire". Again, says Doctor Bahis, in "L'Amour medecin": "It is better to diethrough following the rules than to recover through violating them. " Inthe same play, Desfonandres had previously said: "We must alwaysobserve the formalities of professional etiquette, whatever mayhappen. " And the reason is given by Tomes, his colleague: "A dead manis but a dead man, but the non-observance of a formality causes anotable prejudice to the whole faculty. " Brid'oison's words, though. Embodying a rather different idea, are none the less significant:"F-form, mind you, f-form. A man laughs at a judge in a morning coat, and yet he would quake with dread at the mere sight of an attorney inhis gown. F-form, all a matter of f-form. "

Here we have the first illustration of a law which will appear withincreasing distinctness as we proceed with our task. When a musicianstrikes a note on an instrument, other notes start up of themselves, not so loud as the first, yet connected with it by certain definiterelations, which coalesce with it and determine its quality. These arewhat are called in physics the overtones of the fundamental note. Itwould seem that comic fancy, even in its most far-fetched inventions, obeys a similar law. For instance, consider this comic note: appearanceseeking to triumph over reality. If our analysis is correct, this notemust have as its overtones the body tantalising the mind, the bodytaking precedence of the mind. No sooner, then, does the comic poetstrike the first note than he will add the second on to it, involuntarily and instinctively. In other words, HE WILL DUPLICATE WHATIS RIDICULOUS PROFESSIONALLY WITH SOMETHING THAT IS RIDICULOUSPHYSICALLY. 

When Brid'oison the judge comes stammering on to the stage, is he notactually preparing us, by this very stammering, to understand thephenomenon of intellectual ossification we are about to witness? Whatbond of secret relationship can there be between the physical defectand the moral infirmity? It is difficult to say; yet we feel that therelationship is there, though we cannot express it in words. Perhapsthe situation required that this judging machine should also appearbefore us as a talking machine. However it may be, no other overtonecould more perfectly have completed the fundamental note. 

When Moliere introduces to us the two ridiculous doctors, Bahis andMacroton, in L'Amour medecin, he makes one of them speak very slowly, as though scanning his words syllable by syllable, whilst the otherstutters. We find the same contrast between the two lawyers in Monsieurde Pourceaugnac. In the rhythm of speech is generally to be found thephysical peculiarity that is destined to complete the element ofprofessional ridicule. When the author has failed to suggest a defectof this kind, it is seldom the case that the actor does notinstinctively invent one. 

Consequently, there is a natural relationship, which we equallynaturally recognise, between the two images we have been comparing witheach other, the mind crystallising in certain grooves, and the bodylosing its elasticity through the influence of certain defects. Whetheror not our attention be diverted from the matter to the manner, or fromthe moral to the physical, in both cases the same sort of impression isconveyed to our imagination; in both, then, the comic is of the samekind. Here, once more, it has been our aim to follow the natural trendof the movement of the imagination. This trend or direction, it may beremembered, was the second of those offered to us, starting from acentral image. A third and final path remains unexplored, along whichwe will now proceed. 

3. Let us then return, for the last time, to our central image:something mechanical encrusted on something living. Here, the livingbeing under discussion was a human being, a person. A mechanicalarrangement, on the other hand, is a thing. What, therefore, incitedlaughter was the momentary transformation of a person into a thing, ifone considers the image from this standpoint. Let us then pass from theexact idea of a machine to the vaguer one of a thing in general. Weshall have a fresh series of laughable images which will be obtained bytaking a blurred impression, so to speak, of the outlines of the formerand will bring us to this new law: WE LAUGH EVERY TIME A PERSON GIVESUS THE IMPRESSION OF BEING A THING. 

We laugh at Sancho Panza tumbled into a bed-quilt and tossed into theair like a football. We laugh at Baron Munchausen turned into acannon-ball and travelling through space. But certain tricks of circusclowns might afford a still more precise exemplification of the samelaw. True, we should have to eliminate the jokes, mere interpolationsby the clown into his main theme, and keep in mind only the themeitself, that is to say, the divers attitudes, capers and movementswhich form the strictly "clownish" element in the clown's art. On twooccasions only have I been able to observe this style of the comic inits unadulterated state, and in both I received the same impression. The first time, the clowns came and went, collided, fell and jumped upagain in a uniformly accelerated rhythm, visibly intent upon affectinga CRESCENDO. And it was more and more to the jumping up again, theREBOUND, that the attention of the public was attracted. Gradually, onelost sight of the fact that they were men of flesh and blood likeourselves; one began to think of bundles of all sorts, falling andknocking against each other. Then the vision assumed a more definiteaspect. The forms grew rounder, the bodies rolled together and seemedto pick themselves up like balls. Then at last appeared the imagetowards which the whole of this scene had doubtless been unconsciouslyevolving--large rubber balls hurled against one another in everydirection. The second scene, though even coarser than the first, was noless instructive. There came on the stage two men, each with anenormous head, bald as a billiard ball. In their hands they carriedlarge sticks which each, in turn, brought down on to the other'scranium. Here, again, a certain gradation was observable. After eachblow, the bodies seemed to grow heavier and more unyielding, overpowered by an increasing degree of rigidity. Then came the returnblow, in each case heavier and more resounding than the last, coming, too, after a longer interval. The skulls gave forth a formidable ringthroughout the silent house. At last the two bodies, each quite rigidand as straight as an arrow, slowly bent over towards each other, thesticks came crashing down for the last time on to the two heads with athud as of enormous mallets falling upon oaken beams, and the pair layprone upon the ground. At that instant appeared in all its vividnessthe suggestion that the two artists had gradually driven into theimagination of the spectators: "We are about to become . .. We have nowbecome solid wooden dummies. "

A kind of dim, vague instinct may enable even an uncultured mind to getan inkling here of the subtler results of psychological science. Weknow that it is possible to call up hallucinatory visions in ahypnotised subject by simple suggestion. If he be told that a bird isperched on his hand, he will see the bird and watch it fly away. Theidea suggested, however, is far from being always accepted with likedocility. Not infrequently, the mesmeriser only succeeds in getting anidea into his subject's head by slow degrees through a carefullygraduated series of hints. He will then start with objects reallyperceived by the subject, and will endeavour to make the perception ofthese objects more and more indefinite; then, step by step, he willbring out of this state of mental chaos the precise form of the objectof which he wishes to create an hallucination. Something of the kindhappens to many people when dropping off to sleep; they see thosecoloured, fluid, shapeless masses, which occupy the field of vision, insensibly solidifying into distinct objects. 

Consequently, the gradual passing from the dim and vague to the clearand distinct is the method of suggestion par excellence. I fancy itmight be found to be at the root of a good many comic suggestions, especially in the coarser forms of the comic, in which thetransformation of a person into a thing seems to be taking place beforeour eyes. But there are other and more subtle methods in use, amongpoets, for instance, which perhaps unconsciously lead to the same end. By a certain arrangement of rhythm, rhyme and assonance, it is possibleto lull the imagination, to rock it to and fro between like and likewith a regular see-saw motion, and thus prepare it submissively toaccept the vision suggested. Listen to these few lines of Regnard, andsee whether something like the fleeting image of a DOLL does not crossthe field of your imagination:

. .. Plus, il doit a maints particuliers La somme de dix mil une livreune obole, Pour l'avoir sans relache un an sur sa parole Habille, voiture, chauffe, chausse, gante, Alimente, rase, desaltere, porte. 

[Footnote: Further, he owes to many an honest wight Item-the sum twothousand pounds, one farthing, For having on his simple word of honourSans intermission for an entire year Clothed him, conveyed him, warmedhim, shod him, gloved him, Fed him and shaved him, quenched his thirstand borne him. ]

Is not something of the same kind found in the following sally ofFigaro's (though here an attempt is perhaps made to suggest the imageof an animal rather than that of a thing): "Quel homme est-ce?--C'estun beau, gros, court, jeune vieillard, gris pommele, ruse, rase, blase, qui guette et furette, et gronde et geint tout a la fois. " [Footnote:"What sort of man is here?--He is a handsome, stout, short, youthfulold gentleman, iron-grey, an artful knave, clean shaved, clean 'usedup, ' who spies and pries and growls and groans all in the same breath. "]

Now, between these coarse scenes and these subtle suggestions there isroom for a countless number of amusing effects, for all those that canbe obtained by talking about persons as one would do about mere things. We will only select one or two instances from the plays of Labiche, inwhich they are legion. 

Just as M. Perrichon is getting into the railway carriage, he makescertain of not forgetting any of his parcels: "Four, five, six, my wifeseven, my daughter eight, and myself nine. " In another play, a fondfather is boasting of his daughter's learning in the following terms:"She will tell you, without faltering, all the kings of France thathave occurred. " This phrase, "that have occurred, " though not exactlytransforming the kings into mere things, likens them, all the same, toevents of an impersonal nature. 

As regards this latter example, note that it is unnecessary to completethe identification of the person with the thing in order to ensure acomic effect. It is sufficient for us to start in this direction byfeigning, for instance, to confuse the person with the function heexercises. I will only quote a sentence spoken by a village mayor inone of About's novels: "The prefect, who has always shown us the samekindness, though he has been changed several times since 1847. .. "

All these witticisms are constructed on the same model. We might makeup any number of them, when once we are in possession of the recipe. But the art of the story-teller or the playwright does not merelyconsist in concocting jokes. The difficulty lies in giving to a jokeits power of suggestion, i. E. In making it acceptable. And we only doaccept it either because it seems to be the natural product of aparticular state of mind or because it is in keeping with thecircumstances of the case. For instance, we are aware that M. Perrichonis greatly excited on the occasion of his first railway journey. Theexpression "to occur" is one that must have cropped up a good manytimes in the lessons repeated by the girl before her father; it makesus think of such a repetition. Lastly, admiration of the governmentalmachine might, at a pinch, be extended to the point of making usbelieve that no change takes place in the prefect when he changes hisname, and that the function gets carried on independently of thefunctionary. 

We have now reached a point very far from the original cause oflaughter. Many a comic form, that cannot be explained by itself, canindeed only be understood from its resemblance to another, which onlymakes us laugh by reason of its relationship with a third, and so onindefinitely, so that psychological analysis, however luminous andsearching, will go astray unless it holds the thread along which thecomic impression has travelled from one end of the series to the other. Where does this progressive continuity come from? What can be thedriving force, the strange impulse which causes the comic to glide thusfrom image to image, farther and farther away from the starting-point, until it is broken up and lost in infinitely remote analogies? But whatis that force which divides and subdivides the branches of a tree intosmaller boughs and its roots into radicles? An inexorable law doomsevery living energy, during the brief interval allotted to it in time, to cover the widest possible extent in space. Now, comic fancy isindeed a living energy, a strange plant that has nourished on the stonyportions of the social soil, until such time as culture should allow itto vie with the most refined products of art. True, we are far fromgreat art in the examples of the comic we have just been reviewing. Butwe shall draw nearer to it, though without attaining to it completely, in the following chapter. Below art, we find artifice, and it is thiszone of artifice, midway between nature and art, that we are now aboutto enter. We are going to deal with the comic playwright and the wit. 

CHAPTER II

THE COMIC ELEMENT IN SITUATIONS AND THE COMIC ELEMENT IN WORDS

I

We have studied the comic element in forms, in attitudes, and inmovements generally; now let us look for it in actions and insituations. We encounter, indeed, this kind of comic readily enough ineveryday life. It is not here, however, that it best lends itself toanalysis. Assuming that the stage is both a magnified and a simplifiedview of life, we shall find that comedy is capable of furnishing uswith more information than real life on this particular part of oursubject. Perhaps we ought even to carry simplification still farther, and, going back to our earliest recollections, try to discover, in thegames that amused us as children, the first faint traces of thecombinations that make us laugh as grown-up persons. We are too apt tospeak of our feelings of pleasure and of pain as though full grown atbirth, as though each one of them had not a history of its own. Aboveall, we are too apt to ignore the childish element, so to speak, latentin most of our joyful emotions. And yet, how many of our presentpleasures, were we to examine them closely, would shrink into nothingmore than memories of past ones! What would there be left of many ofour emotions were we to reduce them to the exact quantum of purefeeling they contain, by subtracting from them all that is merelyreminiscence? Indeed, it seems possible that, after a certain age, webecome impervious to all fresh or novel forms of joy, and the sweetestpleasures of the middle-aged man are perhaps nothing more than arevival of the sensations of childhood, a balmy zephyr wafted infainter and fainter breaths by a past that is ever receding. In anycase, whatever reply we give to this broad question, one thing iscertain: there can be no break in continuity between the child'sdelight in games and that of the grown-up person. Now, comedy is agame, a game that imitates life. And since, in the games of the childwhen working its dolls and puppets, many of the movements are producedby strings, ought we not to find those same strings, somewhat frayed bywear, reappearing as the threads that knot together the situations in acomedy? Let us, then, start with the games of a child, and follow theimperceptible process by which, as he grows himself, he makes hispuppets grow, inspires them with life, and finally brings them to anambiguous state in which, without ceasing to be puppets, they have yetbecome human beings. We thus obtain characters of a comedy type. Andupon them we can test the truth of the law of which all our precedinganalyses gave an inkling, a law in accordance with which we will defineall broadly comic situations in general. ANY ARRANGEMENT OF ACTS ANDEVENTS IS COMIC WHICH GIVES US, IN A SINGLE COMBINATION, THE ILLUSIONOF LIFE AND THE DISTINCT IMPRESSION OF A MECHANICAL ARRANGEMENT. 

1. THE JACK-IN-THE-BOX. --As children we have all played with the littleman who springs out of his box. You squeeze him flat, he jumps upagain. Push him lower, and he shoots up still higher. Crush him downbeneath the lid, and often he will send everything flying. It is hardto tell whether or no the toy itself is very ancient, but the kind ofamusement it affords belongs to all time. It is a struggle between twostubborn elements, one of which, being simply mechanical, generallyends by giving in to the other, which treats it as a plaything. A catplaying with a mouse, which from time to time she releases like aspring, only to pull it up short with a stroke of her paw, indulges inthe same kind of amusement. 

We will now pass on to the theatre, beginning with a Punch and Judyshow. No sooner does the policeman put in an appearance on the stagethan, naturally enough, he receives a blow which fells him. He springsto his feet, a second blow lays him flat. A repetition of the offenceis followed by a repetition of the punishment. Up and down theconstable flops and hops with the uniform rhythm of the bending andrelease of a spring, whilst the spectators laugh louder and louder. 

Now, let us think of a spring that is rather of a moral type, an ideathat is first expressed, then repressed, and then expressed again; astream of words that bursts forth, is checked, and keeps on startingafresh. Once more we have the vision of one stubborn force, counteracted by another, equally pertinacious. This vision, however, will have discarded a portion of its materiality. No longer is it Punchand Judy that we are watching, but rather a real comedy. 

Many a comic scene may indeed be referred to this simple type. Forinstance, in the scene of the Mariage force between Sganarelle andPancrace, the entire vis comica lies in the conflict set up between theidea of Sganarelle, who wishes to make the philosopher listen to him, and the obstinacy of the philosopher, a regular talking-machine workingautomatically. As the scene progresses, the image of theJack-in-the-box becomes more apparent, so that at last the charactersthemselves adopt its movements, --Sganarelle pushing Pancrace, each timehe shows himself, back into the wings, Pancrace returning to the stageafter each repulse to continue his patter. And when Sganarelle finallydrives Pancrace back and shuts him up inside the house--inside the box, one is tempted to say--a window suddenly flies open, and the head ofthe philosopher again appears as though it had burst open the lid of abox. 

The same by-play occurs in the Malade Imaginaire. Through the mouth ofMonsieur Purgon the outraged medical profession pours out its vials ofwrath upon Argan, threatening him with every disease that flesh is heirto. And every time Argan rises from his seat, as though to silencePurgon, the latter disappears for a moment, being, as it were, thrustback into the wings; then, as though Impelled by a spring, he reboundson to the stage with a fresh curse on his lips. The self-sameexclamation: "Monsieur Purgon!" recurs at regular beats, and, as itwere, marks the TEMPO of this little scene. 

Let us scrutinise more closely the image of the spring which is bent, released, and bent again. Let us disentangle its central element, andwe shall hit upon one of the usual processes of classiccomedy, --REPETITION. 

Why is it there is something comic in the repetition of a word on thestage? No theory of the ludicrous seems to offer a satisfactory answerto this very simple question. Nor can an answer be found so long as welook for the explanation of an amusing word or phrase in the phrase orword itself, apart from all it suggests to us. Nowhere will the usualmethod prove to be so inadequate as here. With the exception, however, of a few special instances to which we shall recur later, therepetition of a word is never laughable in itself. It makes us laughonly because it symbolises a special play of moral elements, this playitself being the symbol of an altogether material diversion. It is thediversion of the cat with the mouse, the diversion of the child pushingback the Jack-in-the-box, time after time, to the bottom of hisbox, --but in a refined and spiritualised form, transferred to the realmof feelings and ideas. Let us then state the law which, we think, defines the main comic varieties of word-repetition on the stage: IN ACOMIC REPETITION OF WORDS WE GENERALLY FIND TWO TERMS: A REPRESSEDFEELING WHICH GOES OFF LIKE A SPRING, AND AN IDEA THAT DELIGHTS INREPRESSING THE FEELING ANEW. 

When Dorine is telling Orgon of his wife's illness, and the lattercontinually interrupts him with inquiries as to the health of Tartuffe, the question: "Et tartuffe?" repeated every few moments, affords us thedistinct sensation of a spring being released. This spring Dorinedelights in pushing back, each time she resumes her account of Elmire'sillness. And when Scapin informs old Geronte that his son has beentaken prisoner on the famous galley, and that a ransom must be paidwithout delay, he is playing with the avarice of Geronte exactly asDorine does with the infatuation of Orgon. The old man's avarice is nosooner repressed than up it springs again automatically, and it is thisautomatism that Moliere tries to indicate by the mechanical repetitionof a sentence expressing regret at the money that would have to beforthcoming: "What the deuce did he want in that galley?" The samecriticism is applicable to the scene in which Valere points out toHarpagon the wrong he would be doing in marrying his daughter to a manshe did not love. "No dowry wanted!" interrupts the miserly Harpagonevery few moments. Behind this exclamation, which recurs automatically, we faintly discern a complete repeating-machine set going by a fixedidea. 

At times this mechanism is less easy to detect, and here we encounter afresh difficulty in the theory of the comic. Sometimes the wholeinterest of a scene lies in one character playing a double part, theintervening speaker acting as a mere prism, so to speak, through whichthe dual personality is developed. We run the risk, then, of goingastray if we look for the secret of the effect in what we see andhear, --in the external scene played by the characters, --and not in thealtogether inner comedy of which this scene is no more than the outerrefraction. For instance, when Alceste stubbornly repeats the words, "Idon't say that!" on Oronte asking him if he thinks his poetry bad, therepetition is laughable, though evidently Oronte is not now playingwith Alceste at the game we have just described. We must be careful, however, for, in reality, we have two men in Alceste: on the one hand, the "misanthropist" who has vowed henceforth to call a spade a spade, and on the other the gentleman who cannot unlearn, in a trice, theusual forms of politeness, or even, it may be, just the honest fellowwho, when called upon to put his words into practice, shrinks fromwounding another's self-esteem or hurting his feelings. Accordingly, the real scene is not between Alceste and Oronte, it is between Alcesteand himself. The one Alceste would fain blurt out the truth, and theother stops his mouth just as he is on the point of telling everything. Each "I don't say that!" reveals a growing effort to repress somethingthat strives and struggles to get out. And so the tone in which thephrase is uttered gets more and more violent, Alceste becoming more andmore angry--not with Oronte, as he thinks--but with himself. Thetension of the spring is continually being renewed and reinforced untilit at last goes off with a bang. Here, as elsewhere, we have the sameidentical mechanism of repetition. 

For a man to make a resolution never henceforth to say what he does notthink, even though he "openly defy the whole human race, " is notnecessarily laughable; it is only a phase of life at its highest andbest. For another man, through amiability, selfishness, or disdain, toprefer to flatter people is only another phase of life; there isnothing in it to make us laugh. You may even combine these two men intoone, and arrange that the individual waver between offensive franknessand delusive politeness, this duel between two opposing feelings willnot even then be comic, rather it will appear the essence ofseriousness if these two feelings through their very distinctnesscomplete each other, develop side by side, and make up between them acomposite mental condition, adopting, in short, a modus vivendi whichmerely gives us the complex impression of life. But imagine these twofeelings as INELASTIC and unvarying elements in a really living man, make him oscillate from one to the other; above all, arrange that thisoscillation becomes entirely mechanical by adopting the well-known formof some habitual, simple, childish contrivance: then you will get theimage we have so far found in all laughable objects, SOMETHINGMECHANICAL IN SOMETHING LIVING; in fact, something comic. 

We have dwelt on this first image, the Jack-in-the-box, sufficiently toshow how comic fancy gradually converts a material mechanism into amoral one. Now we will consider one or two other games, confiningourselves to their most striking aspects. 

2. THE DANCING-JACK. --There are innumerable comedies in which one ofthe characters thinks he is speaking and acting freely, and, consequently, retains all the essentials of life, whereas, viewed froma certain standpoint, he appears as a mere toy in the hands of anotherwho is playing with him. The transition is easily made, from thedancing-jack which a child works with a string, to Geronte and Argantemanipulated by Scapin. Listen to Scapin himself: "The MACHINE is allthere"; and again: "Providence has brought them into my net, " etc. Instinctively, and because one would rather be a cheat than be cheated, in imagination at all events, the spectator sides with the knaves; andfor the rest of the time, like a child who has persuaded his playmateto lend him his doll, he takes hold of the strings himself and makesthe marionette come and go on the stage as he pleases. But this lattercondition is not indispensable; we can remain outside the pale of whatis taking place if only we retain the distinct impression of amechanical arrangement. This is what happens whenever one of thecharacters vacillates between two contrary opinions, each in turnappealing to him, as when Panurge asks Tom, Dick, and Harry whether orno he ought to get married. Note that, in such a case, a comic authoris always careful to PERSONIFY the two opposing decisions. For, ifthere is no spectator, there must at all events be actors to hold thestrings. 

All that is serious in life comes from our freedom. The feelings wehave matured, the passions we have brooded over, the actions we haveweighed, decided upon, and carried through, in short, all that comesfrom us and is our very own, these are the things that give life itsofttimes dramatic and generally grave aspect. What, then, is requisiteto transform all this into a comedy? Merely to fancy that our seeming, freedom conceals the strings of a dancing-Jack, and that we are, as thepoet says, . .. Humble marionettes The wires of which are pulled by Fate. [Footnote: . .. D'humbles marionnettes Dont le fil est aux mains de laNecessite. SULLY-PRUDHOMME. ]

So there is not a real, a serious, or even a dramatic scene that fancycannot render comic by simply calling forth this image. Nor is there agame for which a wider field lies open. 

3. THE SNOW-BALL. --The farther we proceed in this investigation intothe methods of comedy, the more clearly we see the part played bychildhood's memories. These memories refer, perhaps, less to anyspecial game than to the mechanical device of which that game is aparticular instance. The same general device, moreover, may be met within widely different games, just as the same operatic air is found inmany different arrangements and variations. What is here of importanceand is retained in the mind, what passes by imperceptible stages fromthe games of a child to those of a man, is the mental diagram, theskeleton outline of the combination, or, if you like, the abstractformula of which these games are particular illustrations. Take, forinstance, the rolling snow-ball, which increases in size as it movesalong. We might just as well think of toy soldiers standing behind oneanother. Push the first and it tumbles down on the second, this latterknocks down the third, and the state of things goes from bad to worseuntil they all lie prone on the floor. Or again, take a house of cardsthat has been built up with infinite care: the first you touch seemsuncertain whether to move or not, its tottering neighbour comes to aquicker decision, and the work of destruction, gathering momentum as itgoes on, rushes headlong to the final collapse. 

These instances are all different, but they suggest the same abstractvision, that of an effect which grows by arithmetical progression, sothat the cause, insignificant at the outset, culminates by a necessaryevolution in a result as important as it is unexpected. Now let us opena children's picture-book; we shall find this arrangement already onthe high road to becoming comic. Here, for instance--in one of thecomic chap-books picked up by chance--we have a caller rushingviolently into a drawing-room; he knocks against a lady, who upsets hercup of tea over an old gentleman, who slips against a glass windowwhich falls in the street on to the head of a constable, who sets thewhole police force agog, etc. The same arrangement reappears in many apicture intended for grownup persons. In the "stories without words"sketched by humorous artists we are often shown an object which movesfrom place to place, and persons who are closely connected with it, sothat through a series of scenes a change in the position of the objectmechanically brings about increasingly serious changes in the situationof the persons. Let us now turn to comedy. Many a droll scene, many acomedy even, may be referred to this simple type. Read the speech ofChicanneau in the Plaideurs: here we find lawsuits within lawsuits, andthe mechanism works faster and faster--Racine produces in us thisfeeling of increasing acceleration by crowding his law terms evercloser together--until the lawsuit over a truss of hay costs theplaintiff the best part of his fortune. And again the same arrangementoccurs in certain scenes of Don Quixote; for instance, in the innscene, where, by an extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, themule-driver strikes Sancho, who belabours Maritornes, upon whom theinnkeeper falls, etc. Finally, let us pass to the light comedy ofto-day. Need we call to mind all the forms in which this samecombination appears? There is one that is employed rather frequently. For instance, a certain thing, say a letter, happens to be of supremeimportance to a certain person and must be recovered at all costs. Thisthing, which always vanishes just when you think you have caught it, pervades the entire play, "rolling up" increasingly serious andunexpected incidents as it proceeds. All this is far more like achild's game than appears at first blush. Once more the effect producedis that of the snowball. 

It is the characteristic of a mechanical combination to be generallyREVERSIBLE. A child is delighted when he sees the ball in a game ofninepins knocking down everything in its way and spreading havoc in alldirections; he laughs louder than ever when the ball returns to itsstarting-point after twists and turns and waverings of every kind. Inother words, the mechanism just described is laughable even whenrectilinear, it is much more so on becoming circular and when everyeffort the player makes, by a fatal interaction of cause and effect, merely results in bringing it back to the same spot. Now, aconsiderable number of light comedies revolve round this idea. AnItalian straw hat has been eaten up by a horse. [Footnote: Un Chapeaude paille d'Italie (Labiche). ] There is only one other hat like it inthe whole of Paris; it MUST be secured regardless of cost. This hat, which always slips away at the moment its capture seems inevitable, keeps the principal character on the run, and through him all theothers who hang, so to say, on to his coat tails, like a magnet which, by a successive series of attractions, draws along in its train thegrains of iron filings that hang on to each other. And when at last, after all sorts of difficulties, the goal seems in sight, it is foundthat the hat so ardently sought is precisely the one that has beeneaten. The same voyage of discovery is depicted in another equallywell-known comedy of Labiche. [Footnote: La Cagnotte. ] The curtainrises on an old bachelor and an old maid, acquaintances of longstanding, at the moment of enjoying their daily rubber. Each of them, unknown to the other, has applied to the same matrimonial agency. Through innumerable difficulties, one mishap following on the heels ofanother, they hurry along, side by side, right through the play, to theinterview which brings them back, purely and simply, into each other'spresence. We have the same circular effect, the same return to thestarting-point, in a more recent play. [Footnote: Les Surprises dudivorce. ] A henpecked husband imagines he has escaped by divorce fromthe clutches of his wife and his mother-in-law. He marries again, when, lo and behold, the double combination of marriage and divorce bringsback to him his former wife in the aggravated form of a secondmother-in-law!

When we think how intense and how common is this type of the comic, weunderstand why it has fascinated the imagination of certainphilosophers. To cover a good deal of ground only to come backunwittingly to the starting-point, is to make a great effort for aresult that is nil. So we might be tempted to define the comic in thislatter fashion. And such, indeed, seems to be the idea of HerbertSpencer: according to him, laughter is the indication of an effortwhich suddenly encounters a void. Kant had already said something ofthe kind: "Laughter is the result of an expectation, which, of asudden, ends in nothing. " No doubt these definitions would apply to thelast few examples given, although, even then, the formula needs theaddition of sundry limitations, for we often make an ineffectual effortwhich is in no way provocative of laughter. While, however, the lastfew examples are illustrations of a great cause resulting in a smalleffect, we quoted others, immediately before, which might be definedinversely as a great effect springing from a small cause. The truth is, this second definition has scarcely more validity than the first. Lackof proportion between cause and effect, whether appearing in one or inthe other, is never the direct source of laughter. What we do laugh atis something that this lack of proportion may in certain casesdisclose, namely, a particular mechanical arrangement which it revealsto us, as through a glass, at the back of the series of effects andcauses. Disregard this arrangement, and you let go the only cluecapable of guiding you through the labyrinth of the comic. Anyhypothesis you otherwise would select, while possibly applicable to afew carefully chosen cases, is liable at any moment to be met andoverthrown by the first unsuitable instance that comes along. 

But why is it we laugh at this mechanical arrangement? It is doubtlessstrange that the history of a person or of a group should sometimesappear like a game worked by strings, or gearings, or springs; but fromwhat source does the special character of this strangeness arise? Whatis it that makes it laughable? To this question, which we have alreadypropounded in various forms, our answer must always be the same. Therigid mechanism which we occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in theliving continuity of human affairs is of peculiar interest to us asbeing a kind of ABSENTMINDEDNESS on the part of life. Were eventsunceasingly mindful of their own course, there would be nocoincidences, no conjunctures and no circular series; everything wouldevolve and progress continuously. And were all men always attentive tolife, were we constantly keeping in touch with others as well as withourselves, nothing within us would ever appear as due to the working ofstrings or springs. The comic is that side of a person which revealshis likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through itspeculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, ofautomatism, of movement without life. Consequently it expresses anindividual or collective imperfection which calls for an immediatecorrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singlesout and represses a special kind of absentmindedness in men and inevents. 

But this in turn tempts us to make further investigations. So far, wehave spent our time in rediscovering, in the diversions of the grownupman, those mechanical combinations which amused him as a child. Ourmethods, in fact, have been entirely empirical. Let us now attempt toframe a full and methodical theory, by seeking, as it were, at thefountainhead, the changeless and simple archetypes of the manifold andtransient practices of the comic stage. Comedy, we said, combinesevents so as to introduce mechanism into the outer forms of life. Letus now ascertain in what essential characteristics life, when viewedfrom without, seems to contrast with mere mechanism. We shall onlyhave, then, to turn to the opposite characteristics, in order todiscover the abstract formula, this time a general and complete one, for every real and possible method of comedy. 

Life presents itself to us as evolution in time and complexity inspace. Regarded in time, it is the continuous evolution of a being evergrowing older; it never goes backwards and never repeats anything. Considered in space, it exhibits certain coexisting elements so closelyinterdependent, so exclusively made for one another, that not one ofthem could, at the same time, belong to two different organisms: eachliving being is a closed system of phenomena, incapable of interferingwith other systems. A continual change of aspect, the irreversibilityof the order of phenomena, the perfect individuality of a perfectlyself-contained series: such, then, are the outwardcharacteristics--whether real or apparent is of little moment--whichdistinguish the living from the merely mechanical. Let us take thecounterpart of each of these: we shall obtain three processes whichmight be called REPETITION, INVERSION, and RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE OFSERIES. Now, it is easy to see that these are also the methods of lightcomedy, and that no others are possible. 

As a matter of fact, we could discover them, as ingredients of varyingimportance, in the composition of all the scenes we have just beenconsidering, and, a fortiori, in the children's games, the mechanism ofwhich they reproduce. The requisite analysis would, however, delay ustoo long, and it is more profitable to study them in their purity bytaking fresh examples. Nothing could be easier, for it is in their purestate that they are found both in classic comedy and in contemporaryplays. 

1. REPETITION. -Our present problem no longer deals, like the precedingone, with a word or a sentence repeated by an individual, but ratherwith a situation, that is, a combination of circumstances, which recursseveral times in its original form and thus contrasts with the changingstream of life. Everyday experience supplies us with this type of thecomic, though only in a rudimentary state. Thus, you meet a friend inthe street whom you have not seen for an age; there is nothing comic inthe situation. If, however, you meet, him again the same day, and thena third and a fourth time, you may laugh at the "coincidence. " Now, picture to yourself a series of imaginary events which affords atolerably fair illusion of life, and within this ever-moving seriesimagine one and the same scene reproduced either by the same charactersor by different ones: again you will have a coincidence, though a farmore extraordinary one. 

Such are the repetitions produced on the stage. They are the morelaughable in proportion as the scene repeated is more complex and morenaturally introduced--two conditions which seem mutually exclusive, andwhich the play-writer must be clever enough to reconcile. 

Contemporary light comedy employs this method in every shape and form. One of the best-known examples consists in bringing a group ofcharacters, act after act, into the most varied surroundings, so as toreproduce, under ever fresh circumstances, one and the same series ofincidents or accidents more or less symmetrically identical. 

In several of Moliere's plays we find one and the same arrangement ofevents repeated right through the comedy from beginning to end. Thus, the Ecole des femmes does nothing more than reproduce and repeat asingle incident in three tempi: first tempo, Horace tells Arnolphe ofthe plan he has devised to deceive Agnes's guardian, who turns out tobe Arnolphe himself; second tempo, Arnolphe thinks he has checkmatedthe move; third tempo, Agnes contrives that Horace gets all the benefitof Arnolphe's precautionary measures. There is the same symmetricalrepetition in the Ecole des marts, in L'Etourdi, and above all inGeorge Dandin, where the same effect in three tempi is again met with:first tempo, George Dandin discovers that his wife is unfaithful;second tempo, he summons his father--and mother-in-law to hisassistance; third tempo, it is George Dandin himself, after all, whohas to apologise. 

At times the same scene is reproduced with groups of differentcharacters. Then it not infrequently happens that the first groupconsists of masters and the second of servants. The latter repeat inanother key a scene already played by the former, though the renderingis naturally less refined. A part of the Depit amoureux is constructedon this plan, as is also Amphitryon. In an amusing little comedy ofBenedix, Der Eigensinn, the order is inverted: we have the mastersreproducing a scene of stubbornness in which their servants have setthe example. 

But, quite irrespective of the characters who serve as pegs for thearrangement of symmetrical situations, there seems to be a wide gulfbetween classic comedy and the theatre of to-day. Both aim atintroducing a certain mathematical order into events, while none theless maintaining their aspect of likelihood, that is to say, of life. But the means they employ are different. The majority of light comediesof our day seek to mesmerise directly the mind of the spectator. For, however extraordinary the coincidence, it becomes acceptable from thevery fact that it is accepted; and we do accept it, if we have beengradually prepared for its reception. Such is often the procedureadopted by contemporary authors. In Moliere's plays, on the contrary, it is the moods of the persons on the stage, not of the audience, thatmake repetition seem natural. Each of the characters represents acertain force applied in a certain direction, and it is because theseforces, constant in direction, necessarily combine together in the sameway, that the same situation is reproduced. Thus interpreted, thecomedy of situation is akin to the comedy of character. It deserves tobe called classic, if classic art is indeed that which does not claimto derive from the effect more than it has put into the cause. 

2. Inversion. --This second method has so much analogy with the firstthat we will merely define it without insisting on illustrations. Picture to yourself certain characters in a certain situation: if youreverse the situation and invert the roles, you obtain a comic scene. The double rescue scene in Le Voyage de M. Perrichon belongs to thisclass. [Footnote: Labiche, "Le Voyage de M. Perrichon. "] There is nonecessity, however, for both the identical scenes to be played beforeus. We may be shown only one, provided the other is really in ourminds. Thus, we laugh at the prisoner at the bar lecturing themagistrate; at a child presuming to teach its parents; in a word, ateverything that comes under the heading of "topsyturvydom. " Notinfrequently comedy sets before us a character who lays a trap in whichhe is the first to be caught. The plot of the villain who is the victimof his own villainy, or the cheat cheated, forms the stock-in-trade ofa good many plays. We find this even in primitive farce. LawyerPathelin tells his client of a trick to outwit the magistrate; theclient employs the self-same trick to avoid paying the lawyer. Atermagant of a wife insists upon her husband doing all the housework;she has put down each separate item on a "rota. " Now let her fall intoa copper, her husband will refuse to drag her out, for "that is notdown on his 'rota. '" In modern literature we meet with hundreds ofvariations on the theme of the robber robbed. In every case the rootidea involves an inversion of roles, and a situation which recoils onthe head of its author. 

Here we apparently find the confirmation of a law, some illustrationsof which we have already pointed out. When a comic scene has beenreproduced a number of times, it reaches the stage of being a classicaltype or model. It becomes amusing in itself, quite apart from thecauses which render it amusing. Henceforth, new scenes, which are notcomic de jure, may become amusing de facto, on account of their partialresemblance to this model. They call up in our mind a more or lessconfused image which we know to be comical. They range themselves in acategory representing an officially recognised type of the comic. Thescene of the "robber robbed" belongs to this class. It casts over ahost of other scenes a reflection of the comic element it contains. Inthe end it renders comic any mishap that befalls one through one's ownfault, no matter what the fault or mishap may be, --nay, an allusion tothis mishap, a single word that recalls it, is sufficient. There wouldbe nothing amusing in the saying, "It serves you right, George Dandin, "were it not for the comic overtones that take up and re-echo it. 

3. We have dwelt at considerable length on repetition and inversion; wenow come to the reciprocal interference [Footnote: The word"interference" has here the meaning given to it in Optics, where itindicates the partial superposition and neutralisation, by each other, of two series of light-waves. ] of series. This is a comic effect, theprecise formula of which is very difficult to disentangle, by reason ofthe extraordinary variety of forms in which it appears on the stage. Perhaps it might be defined as follows: A situation is invariably comicwhen it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series ofevents and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely differentmeanings at the same time. 

You will at once think of an equivocal situation. And the equivocalsituation is indeed one which permits of two different meanings at thesame time, the one merely plausible, which is put forward by theactors, the other a real one, which is given by the public. We see thereal meaning of the situation, because care has been taken to show usevery aspect of it; but each of the actors knows only one of theseaspects: hence the mistakes they make and the erroneous judgments theypass both on what is going on around them and on what they are doingthemselves. We proceed from this erroneous judgment to the correct one, we waver between the possible meaning and the real, and it is thismental seesaw between two contrary interpretations which is at firstapparent in the enjoyment we derive from an equivocal situation. It isnatural that certain philosophers should have been specially struck bythis mental instability, and that some of them should regard the veryessence of the ludicrous as consisting in the collision or coincidenceof two judgments that contradict each other. Their definition, however, is far from meeting every case, and even when it does, it defines--notthe principle of the ludicrous, but only one of its more or lessdistant consequences. Indeed, it is easy to see that the stage-mademisunderstanding is nothing but a particular instance of a far moregeneral phenomenon, --the reciprocal interference of independent series, and that, moreover, it is not laughable in itself, but only as a signof such an interference. 

As a matter of fact, each of the characters in every stage-mademisunderstanding has his setting in an appropriate series of eventswhich he correctly interprets as far as he is concerned, and which givethe key-note to his words and actions. Each of the series peculiar tothe several characters develop independently, but at a certain momentthey meet under such conditions that the actions and words that belongto one might just as well belong to another. Hence arise themisunderstandings and the equivocal nature of the situation. But thislatter is not laughable in itself, it is so only because it reveals thecoincidence of the two independent series. The proof of this lies inthe fact that the author must be continually taxing his ingenuity torecall our attention to the double fact of independence andcoincidence. This he generally succeeds in doing by constantly renewingthe vain threat of dissolving partnership between the two coincidingseries. Every moment the whole thing threatens to break down, butmanages to get patched up again; it is this diversion that exciteslaughter, far more than the oscillation of the mind between twocontradictory ideas. It makes us laugh because it reveals to us thereciprocal interference of two independent series, the real source ofthe comic effect. 

And so the stage-made misunderstanding is nothing more than oneparticular instance, one means--perhaps the most artificial--ofillustrating the reciprocal interference of series, but it is not theonly one. Instead of two contemporary series, you might take one seriesof events belonging to the past and another belonging to the present:if the two series happen to coincide in our imagination, there will beno resulting cross-purposes, and yet the same comic effect willcontinue to take place. Think of Bonivard, captive in the Castle ofChillon: one series of facts. Now picture to yourself Tartarin, travelling in Switzerland, arrested and imprisoned: second series, independent of the former. Now let Tartarin be manacled to Bonivard'schain, thus making the two stories seem for a moment to coincide, andyou will get a very amusing scene, one of the most amusing thatDaudet's imagination has pictured. [Tartarin sur les Alpes, by Daudet. ]Numerous incidents of the mock-heroic style, if analysed, would revealthe same elements. The transposition from the ancient to themodern--always a laughable one--draws its inspiration from the sameidea. Labiche has made use of this method in every shape and form. Sometimes he begins by building up the series separately, and thendelights in making them interfere with one another: he takes anindependent group--a wedding-party, for instance--and throws them intoaltogether unconnected surroundings, into which certain coincidencesallow of their being foisted for the time being. Sometimes he keeps oneand the same set of characters right through the play, but contrivesthat certain of these characters have something to conceal--have, infact, a secret understanding on the point--in short, play a smallercomedy within the principal one: at one moment, one of the two comediesis on the point of upsetting the other; the next, everything comesright and the coincidence between the two series is restored. Sometimes, even, he introduces into the actual series a purelyimmaterial series of events, an inconvenient past, for instance, thatsome one has an interest in concealing, but which is continuallycropping up in the present, and on each occasion is successfullybrought into line with situations with which it seemed destined to playhavoc. But in every case we find the two independent series, and alsotheir partial coincidence. 

We will not carry any further this analysis of the methods of lightcomedy. Whether we find reciprocal interference of series, inversion, or repetition, we see that the objective is always the same--to obtainwhat we have called a MECHANISATION of life. You take a set of actionsand relations and repeat it as it is, or turn it upside down, ortransfer it bodily to another set with which it partiallycoincides--all these being processes that consist in looking upon lifeas a repeating mechanism, with reversible action and interchangeableparts. Actual life is comedy just so far as it produces, in a naturalfashion, actions of the same kind, --consequently, just so far as itforgets itself, for were it always on the alert, it would beever-changing continuity, irrevertible progress, undivided unity. Andso the ludicrous in events may be defined as absentmindedness inthings, just as the ludicrous in an individual character always resultsfrom some fundamental absentmindedness in the person, as we havealready intimated and shall prove later on. This absentmindedness inevents, however, is exceptional. Its results are slight. At any rate itis incurable, so that it is useless to laugh at it. Therefore the ideawould never have occurred to any one of exaggerating thatabsentmindedness, of converting it into a system and creating an artfor it, if laughter were not always a pleasure and mankind did notpounce upon the slightest excuse for indulging in it. This is the realexplanation of light comedy, which holds the same relation to actuallife as does a jointed dancing-doll to a man walking, --being, as it is, an artificial exaggeration of a natural rigidity in things. The threadthat binds it to actual life is a very fragile one. It is scarcely morethan a game which, like all games, depends on a previously acceptedconvention. Comedy in character strikes far deeper roots into life. With that kind of comedy we shall deal more particularly in the finalportion of our investigation. But we must first analyse a certain typeof the comic, in many respects similar to that of light comedy: thecomic in words. 

II

There may be something artificial in making a special category for thecomic in words, since most of the varieties of the comic that we haveexamined so far were produced through the medium of language. We mustmake a distinction, however, between the comic EXPRESSED and the comicCREATED by language. The former could, if necessary, be translated fromone language into another, though at the cost of losing the greaterportion of its significance when introduced into a fresh societydifferent in manners, in literature, and above all in association ofideas. But it is generally impossible to translate the latter. It owesits entire being to the structure of the sentence or to the choice ofthe words. It does not set forth, by means of language, special casesof absentmindedness in man or in events. It lays stress on lapses ofattention in language itself. In this case, it is language itself thatbecomes comic. 

Comic sayings, however, are not a matter of spontaneous generation; ifwe laugh at them, we are equally entitled to laugh at their author. This latter condition, however, is not indispensable, since the sayingor expression has a comic virtue of its own. This is proved by the factthat we find it very difficult, in the majority of these cases, to saywhom we are laughing at, although at times we have a dim, vague feelingthat there is some one in the background. 

Moreover, the person implicated is not always the speaker. Here itseems as though we should draw an important distinction between theWITTY (SPIRITUEL) and the COMIC. A word is said to be comic when itmakes us laugh at the person who utters it, and witty when it makes uslaugh either at a third party or at ourselves. But in most cases we canhardly make up our minds whether the word is comic or witty. All thatwe can say is that it is laughable. 

Before proceeding, it might be well to examine more closely what ismeant by ESPRIT. A witty saying makes us at least smile; consequently, no investigation into laughter would be complete did it not get to thebottom of the nature of wit and throw light on the underlying idea. Itis to be feared, however, that this extremely subtle essence is onethat evaporates when exposed to the light. 

Let us first make a distinction between the two meanings of the wordwit ESPRIT, the broader one and the more restricted. In the broadermeaning of the word, it would seem that what is called wit is a certainDRAMATIC way of thinking. Instead of treating his ideas as meresymbols, the wit sees them, he hears them and, above all, makes themconverse with one another like persons. He puts them on the stage, andhimself, to some extent, into the bargain. A witty nation is, ofnecessity, a nation enamoured of the theatre. In every wit there issomething of a poet--just as in every good reader there is the makingof an actor. This comparison is made purposely, because a proportionmight easily be established between the four terms. In order to readwell we need only the intellectual side of the actor's art; but inorder to act well one must be an actor in all one's soul and body. Injust the same way, poetic creation calls for some degree ofself-forgetfulness, whilst the wit does not usually err in thisrespect. We always get a glimpse of the latter behind what he says anddoes. He is not wholly engrossed in the business, because he onlybrings his intelligence into play. So any poet may reveal himself as awit when he pleases. To do this there will be no need for him toacquire anything; it seems rather as though he would have to give upsomething. He would simply have to let his ideas hold converse with oneanother "for nothing, for the mere joy of the thing!" [Footnote: "Pourrien, pour le plaisir" is a quotation from Victor Hugo's MarionDelorme] He would only have to unfasten the double bond which keeps hisideas in touch with his feelings and his soul in touch with life. Inshort, he would turn into a wit by simply resolving to be no longer apoet in feeling, but only in intelligence. 

But if wit consists, for the most part, in seeing things SUB SPECIETHEATRI, it is evidently capable of being specially directed to onevariety of dramatic art, namely, comedy. Here we have a more restrictedmeaning of the term, and, moreover, the only one that interests us fromthe point of view of the theory of laughter. What is here called WIT isa gift for dashing off comic scenes in a few strokes--dashing them off, however, so subtly, delicately and rapidly, that all is over as soon aswe begin to notice them. 

Who are the actors in these scenes? With whom has the wit to deal?First of all, with his interlocutors themselves, when his witticism isa direct retort to one of them. Often with an absent person whom hesupposes to have spoken and to whom he is replying. Still oftener, withthe whole world, --in the ordinary meaning of the term, --which he takesto task, twisting a current idea into a paradox, or making use of ahackneyed phrase, or parodying some quotation or proverb. If we comparethese scenes in miniature with one another, we find they are almostalways variations of a comic theme with which we are well acquainted, that of the "robber robbed. " You take up a metaphor, a phrase, anargument, and turn it against the man who is, or might be, its author, so that he is made to say what he did not mean to say and lets himselfbe caught, to some extent, in the toils of language. But the theme ofthe "robber robbed" is not the only possible one. We have gone overmany varieties of the comic, and there is not one of them that isincapable of being volatilised into a witticism. 

Every witty remark, then, lends itself to an analysis, whose chemicalformula, so to say, we are now in a position to state. It runs asfollows: Take the remark, first enlarge it into a regular scene, thenfind out the category of the comic to which the scene evidentlybelongs: by this means you reduce the witty remark to its simplestelements and obtain a full explanation of it. 

Let us apply this method to a classic example. "Your chest hurts me"(J'AI MAL A VOTRE POITRINE) wrote Mme. De Sevigne to her ailingdaughter--clearly a witty saying. If our theory is correct, we needonly lay stress upon the saying, enlarge and magnify it, and we shallsee it expand into a comic scene. Now, we find this very scene, readymade, in the AMOUR MEDECIN of Moliere. The sham doctor, Clitandre, whohas been summoned to attend Sganarelle's daughter, contents himselfwith feeling Sganarelle's own pulse, whereupon, relying on the sympathythere must be between father and daughter, he unhesitatingly concludes:"Your daughter is very ill!" Here we have the transition from the wittyto the comical. To complete our analysis, then, all we have to do is todiscover what there is comical in the idea of giving a diagnosis of thechild after sounding the father or the mother. Well, we know that oneessential form of comic fancy lies in picturing to ourselves a livingperson as a kind of jointed dancing-doll, and that frequently, with theobject of inducing us to form this mental picture, we are shown two ormore persons speaking and acting as though attached to one another byinvisible strings. Is not this the idea here suggested when we are ledto materialise, so to speak, the sympathy we postulate as existingbetween father and daughter?

We now see how it is that writers on wit have perforce confinedthemselves to commenting on the extraordinary complexity of the thingsdenoted by the term without ever succeeding in defining it. There aremany ways of being witty, almost as many as there are of being thereverse. How can we detect what they have in common with one another, unless we first determine the general relationship between the wittyand the comic? Once, however, this relationship is cleared up, everything is plain sailing. We then find the same connection betweenthe comic and the witty as exists between a regular scene and thefugitive suggestion of a possible one. Hence, however numerous theforms assumed by the comic, wit will possess an equal number ofcorresponding varieties. So that the comic, in all its forms, is whatshould be defined first, by discovering (a task which is already quitedifficult enough) the clue that leads from one form to the other. Bythat very operation wit will have been analysed, and will then appearas nothing more than the comic in a highly volatile state. To followthe opposite plan, however, and attempt directly to evolve a formulafor wit, would be courting certain failure. What should we think of achemist who, having ever so many jars of a certain substance in hislaboratory, would prefer getting that substance from the atmosphere, inwhich merely infinitesimal traces of its vapour are to be found?

But this comparison between the witty and the comic is also indicativeof the line we must take in studying the comic in words. On the onehand, indeed, we find there is no essential difference between a wordthat is comic and one that is witty; on the other hand, the latter, although connected with a figure of speech, invariably calls up theimage, dim or distinct, of a comic scene. This amounts to saying thatthe comic in speech should correspond, point by point, with the comicin actions and in situations, and is nothing more, if one may soexpress oneself, than their projection on to the plane of words. So letus return to the comic in actions and in situations, consider the chiefmethods by which it is obtained, and apply them to the choice of wordsand the building up of sentences. We shall thus have every possibleform of the comic in words as well as every variety of wit. 

1. Inadvertently to say or do what we have no intention of saying ordoing, as a result of inelasticity or momentum, is, as we are aware, one of the main sources of the comic. Thus, absentmindedness isessentially laughable, and so we laugh at anything rigid, ready-made, mechanical in gesture, attitude and even facial expression. Do we findthis kind of rigidity in language also? No doubt we do, since languagecontains ready-made formulas and stereotyped phrases. The man whoalways expressed himself in such terms would invariably be comic. Butif an isolated phrase is to be comic in itself, when once separatedfrom the person who utters it, it must be something more thanready-made, it must bear within itself some sign which tells us, beyondthe possibility of doubt, that it was uttered automatically. This canonly happen when the phrase embodies some evident absurdity, either apalpable error or a contradiction in terms. Hence the following generalrule: A COMIC MEANING IS INVARIABLY OBTAINED WHEN AN ABSURD IDEA ISFITTED INTO A WELL-ESTABLISHED PHRASE-FORM. 

"Ce sabre est le plus beau jour de ma vie, " said M. Prudhomme. Translate the phrase into English or German and it becomes purelyabsurd, though it is comic enough in French. The reason is that "leplus beau jour de ma vie" is one of those ready-made phrase-endings towhich a Frenchman's ear is accustomed. To make it comic, then, we needonly clearly indicate the automatism of the person who utters it. Thisis what we get when we introduce an absurdity into the phrase. Here theabsurdity is by no means the source of the comic, it is only a verysimple and effective means of making it obvious. 

We have quoted only one saying of M. Prudhomme, but the majority ofthose attributed to him belong to the same class. M. Prudhomme is a manof ready-made phrases. And as there are ready-made phrases in alllanguages, M. Prudhomme is always capable of being transposed, thoughseldom of being translated. At times the commonplace phrase, undercover of which the absurdity slips in, is not so readily noticeable. "Idon't like working between meals, " said a lazy lout. There would benothing amusing in the saying did there not exist that salutary preceptin the realm of hygiene: "One should not eat between meals. "

Sometimes, too, the effect is a complicated one. Instead of onecommonplace phrase-form, there are two or three which are dovetailedinto each other. Take, for instance, the remark of one of thecharacters in a play by Labiche, "Only God has the right to kill Hisfellow-creature. " It would seem that advantage is here taken of twoseparate familiar sayings; "It is God who disposes of the lives ofmen, " and, "It is criminal for a man to kill his fellow-creature. " Butthe two sayings are combined so as to deceive the ear and leave theimpression of being one of those hackneyed sentences that are acceptedas a matter of course. Hence our attention nods, until we are suddenlyaroused by the absurdity of the meaning. These examples suffice to showhow one of the most important types of the comic can be projected--in asimplified form--on the plane of speech. We will now proceed to a formwhich is not so general. 

2. "We laugh if our attention is diverted to the physical in a personwhen it is the moral that is in question, " is a law we laid down in thefirst part of this work. Let us apply it to language. Most words mightbe said to have a PHYSICAL and a MORAL meaning, according as they areinterpreted literally or figuratively. Every word, indeed, begins bydenoting a concrete object or a material action; but by degrees themeaning of the word is refined into an abstract relation or a pureidea. If, then, the above law holds good here, it should be stated asfollows: "A comic effect is obtained whenever we pretend to takeliterally an expression which was used figuratively"; or, "Once ourattention is fixed on the material aspect of a metaphor, the ideaexpressed becomes comic. "

In the phrase, "Tous les arts sont freres" (all the arts are brothers), the word "frere" (brother) is used metaphorically to indicate a more orless striking resemblance. The word is so often used in this way, thatwhen we hear it we do not think of the concrete, the materialconnection implied in every relationship. We should notice it more ifwe were told that "Tous les arts sont cousins, " for the word "cousin"is not so often employed in a figurative sense; that is why the wordhere already assumes a slight tinge of the comic. But let us go furtherstill, and suppose that our attention is attracted to the material sideof the metaphor by the choice of a relationship which is incompatiblewith the gender of the two words composing the metaphorical expression:we get a laughable result. Such is the well-known saying, alsoattributed to M. Prudhomme, "Tous les arts (masculine) sont soeurs(feminine). " "He is always running after a joke, " was said inBoufflers' presence regarding a very conceited fellow. Had Boufflersreplied, "He won't catch it, " that would have been the beginning of awitty saying, though nothing more than the beginning, for the word"catch" is interpreted figuratively almost as often as the word "run";nor does it compel us more strongly than the latter to materialise theimage of two runners, the one at the heels of the other. In order thatthe rejoinder may appear to be a thoroughly witty one, we must borrowfrom the language of sport an expression so vivid and concrete that wecannot refrain from witnessing the race in good earnest. This is whatBoufflers does when he retorts, "I'll back the joke!"

We said that wit often consists in extending the idea of one'sinterlocutor to the point of making him express the opposite of what hethinks and getting him, so to say, entrapt by his own words. We mustnow add that this trap is almost always some metaphor or comparison theconcrete aspect of which is turned against him. You may remember thedialogue between a mother and her son in the Faux Bonshommes: "My dearboy, gambling on 'Change is very risky. You win one day and lose thenext. "--"Well, then, I will gamble only every other day. " In the sameplay too we find the following edifying conversation between twocompany-promoters: "Is this a very honourable thing we are doing? Theseunfortunate shareholders, you see, we are taking the money out of theirvery pockets. .. . "--"Well, out of what do you expect us to take it?"

An amusing result is likewise obtainable whenever a symbol or an emblemis expanded on its concrete side, and a pretence is made of retainingthe same symbolical value for this expansion as for the emblem itself. In a very lively comedy we are introduced to a Monte Carlo official, whose uniform is covered with medals, although he has only received asingle decoration. "You see, I staked my medal on a number atroulette, " he said, "and as the number turned up, I was entitled tothirty-six times my stake. " This reasoning is very similar to thatoffered by Giboyer in the Effrontes. Criticism is made of a bride offorty summers who is wearing orange-blossoms with her wedding costume:"Why, she was entitled to oranges, let alone orange-blossoms!" remarkedGiboyer. 

But we should never cease were we to take one by one all the laws wehave stated, and try to prove them on what we have called the plane oflanguage. We had better confine ourselves to the three generalpropositions of the preceding section. We have shown that "series ofevents" may become comic either by repetition, by inversion, or byreciprocal interference. Now we shall see that this is also the casewith series of words. 

To take series of events and repeat them in another key or anotherenvironment, or to invert them whilst still leaving them a certainmeaning, or mix them up so that their respective meanings jostle oneanother, is invariably comic, as we have already said, for it isgetting life to submit to be treated as a machine. But thought, too, isa living thing. And language, the translation of thought, should bejust as living. We may thus surmise that a phrase is likely to becomecomic if, though reversed, it still makes sense, or if it expressesequally well two quite independent sets of ideas, or, finally, if ithas been obtained by transposing an idea into some key other than itsown. Such, indeed, are the three fundamental laws of what might becalled THE COMIC TRANSFORMATION OF SENTENCES, as we shall show by a fewexamples. 

Let it first be said that these three laws are far from being of equalimportance as regards the theory of the ludicrous. INVERSION is theleast interesting of the three. It must be easy of application, however, for it is noticeable that, no sooner do professional wits heara sentence spoken than they experiment to see if a meaning cannot beobtained by reversing it, --by putting, for instance, the subject inplace of the object, and the object in place of the subject. It is notunusual for this device to be employed for refuting an idea in more orless humorous terms. One of the characters in a comedy of Labicheshouts out to his neighbour on the floor above, who is in the habit ofdirtying his balcony, "What do you mean by emptying your pipe on to myterrace?" The neighbour retorts, "What do you mean by putting yourterrace under my pipe?" There is no necessity to dwell upon this kindof wit, instances of which could easily be multiplied. The RECIPROCALINTERFERENCE of two sets of ideas in the same sentence is aninexhaustible source of amusing varieties. There are many ways ofbringing about this interference, I mean of bracketing in the sameexpression two independent meanings that apparently tally. The leastreputable of these ways is the pun. In the pun, the same sentenceappears to offer two independent meanings, but it is only anappearance; in reality there are two different sentences made up ofdifferent words, but claiming to be one and the same because both havethe same sound. We pass from the pun, by imperceptible stages, to thetrue play upon words. Here there is really one and the same sentencethrough which two different sets of ideas are expressed, and we areconfronted with only one series of words; but advantage is taken of thedifferent meanings a word may have, especially when used figurativelyinstead of literally. So that in fact there is often only a slightdifference between the play upon words on the one hand, and a poeticmetaphor or an illuminating comparison on the other. Whereas anilluminating comparison and a striking image always seem to reveal theclose harmony that exists between language and nature, regarded as twoparallel forms of life, the play upon words makes us think somehow of anegligence on the part of language, which, for the time being, seems tohave forgotten its real function and now claims to accommodate thingsto itself instead of accommodating itself to things. And so the playupon words always betrays a momentary LAPSE OF ATTENTION in language, and it is precisely on that account that it is amusing. 

INVERSION and RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE, after all, are only a certainplayfulness of the mind which ends at playing upon words. The comic inTRANSPOSITION is much more far-reaching. Indeed, transposition is toordinary language what repetition is to comedy. 

We said that repetition is the favourite method of classic comedy. Itconsists in so arranging events that a scene is reproduced eitherbetween the same characters under fresh circumstances or between freshcharacters under the same circumstances. Thus we have, repeated bylackeys in less dignified language, a scene already played by theirmasters. Now, imagine ideas expressed in suitable style and thus placedin the setting of their natural environment. If you think of somearrangement whereby they are transferred to fresh surroundings, whilemaintaining their mutual relations, or, in other words, if you caninduce them to express themselves in an altogether different style andto transpose themselves into another key, you will have language itselfplaying a comedy--language itself made comic. There will be no need, moreover, actually to set before us both expressions of the same ideas, the transposed expression and the natural one. For we are acquaintedwith the natural one--the one which we should have choseninstinctively. So it will be enough if the effort of comic inventionbears on the other, and on the other alone. No sooner is the second setbefore us than we spontaneously supply the first. Hence the followinggeneral rule: A COMIC EFFECT IS ALWAYS OBTAINABLE BY TRANSPOSING THENATURE EXPRESSION OF AN IDEA INTO ANOTHER KEY. 

The means of transposition are so many and varied, language affords sorich a continuity of themes and the comic is here capable of passingthrough so great a number of stages, from the most insipid buffooneryup to the loftiest forms of humour and irony, that we shall forego theattempt to make out a complete list. Having stated the rule, we willsimply, here and there, verify its main applications. 

In the first place, we may distinguish two keys at the extreme ends ofthe scale, the solemn and the familiar. The most obvious effects areobtained by merely transposing the one into the other, which thusprovides us with two opposite currents of comic fancy. 

Transpose the solemn into the familiar and the result is parody. Theeffect of parody, thus defined, extends to instances in which the ideaexpressed in familiar terms is one that, if only in deference tocustom, ought to be pitched in another key. Take as an example thefollowing description of the dawn, quoted by Jean Paul Richter: "Thesky was beginning to change from black to red, like a lobster beingboiled. " Note that the expression of old-world matters in terms ofmodern life produces the same effect, by reason of the halo of poetrywhich surrounds classical antiquity. 

It is doubtless the comic in parody that has suggested to somephilosophers, and in particular to Alexander Bain, the idea of definingthe comic, in general, as a species of DEGRADATION. They describe thelaughable as causing something to appear mean that was formerlydignified. But if our analysis is correct, degradation is only one formof transposition, and transposition itself only one of the means ofobtaining laughter. There is a host of others, and the source oflaughter must be sought for much further back. Moreover, without goingso far, we see that while the transposition from solemn to trivial, from better to worse, is comic, the inverse transposition may be evenmore so. 

It is met with as often as the other, and, apparently, we maydistinguish two main forms of it, according as it refers to thePHYSICAL DIMENSIONS of an object or to its MORAL VALUE. 

To speak of small things as though they were large is, in a generalway, TO EXAGGERATE. Exaggeration is always comic when prolonged, andespecially when systematic; then, indeed, it appears as one method oftransposition. It excites so much laughter that some writers have beenled to define the comic as exaggeration, just as others have defined itas degradation. As a matter of fact, exaggeration, like degradation, isonly one form of one kind of the comic. Still, it is a very strikingform. It has given birth to the mock-heroic poem, a ratherold-fashioned device, I admit, though traces of it are still to befound in persons inclined to exaggerate methodically. It might often besaid of braggadocio that it is its mock-heroic aspect which makes uslaugh. 

Far more artificial, but also far more refined, is the transpositionupwards from below when applied to the moral value of things, not totheir physical dimensions. To express in reputable language somedisreputable idea, to take some scandalous situation, some low-classcalling or disgraceful behaviour, and describe them in terms of theutmost "RESPECTABILITY, " is generally comic. The English word is herepurposely employed, as the practice itself is characteristicallyEnglish. Many instances of it may be found in Dickens and Thackeray, and in English literature generally. Let us remark, in passing, thatthe intensity of the effect does not here depend on its length. A wordis sometimes sufficient, provided it gives us a glimpse of an entiresystem of transposition accepted in certain social circles and reveals, as it were, a moral organisation of immorality. Take the followingremark made by an official to one of his subordinates in a novel ofGogol's, "Your peculations are too extensive for an official of yourrank. "

Summing up the foregoing, then, there are two extreme terms ofcomparison, the very large and the very small, the best and the worst, between which transposition may be effected in one direction or theother. Now, if the interval be gradually narrowed, the contrast betweenthe terms obtained will be less and less violent, and the varieties ofcomic transposition more and more subtle. 

The most common of these contrasts is perhaps that between the real andthe ideal, between what is and what ought to be. Here againtransposition may take place in either direction. Sometimes we statewhat ought to be done, and pretend to believe that this is just what isactually being done; then we have IRONY. Sometimes, on the contrary, wedescribe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done, and pretend tobelieve that this is just what ought to be done; such is often themethod of HUMOUR. Humour, thus denned, is the counterpart of irony. Both are forms of satire, but irony is oratorical in its nature, whilsthumour partakes of the scientific. Irony is emphasised the higher weallow ourselves to be uplifted by the idea of the good that ought tobe: thus irony may grow so hot within us that it becomes a kind ofhigh-pressure eloquence. On the other hand, humour is the moreemphasised the deeper we go down into an evil that actually is, inorder t o set down its details in the most cold-blooded indifference. Several authors, Jean Paul amongst them, have noticed that humourdelights in concrete terms, technical details, definite facts. If ouranalysis is correct, this is not an accidental trait of humour, it isits very essence. A humorist is a moralist disguised as a scientist, something like an anatomist who practises dissection with the soleobject of filling us with disgust; so that humour, in the restrictedsense in which we are here regarding the word, is really atransposition from the moral to the scientific. 

By still further curtailing the interval between the terms transposed, we may now obtain more and more specialised types of comictranspositions. Thus, certain professions have a technical vocabulary:what a wealth of laughable results have been obtained by transposingthe ideas of everyday life into this professional jargon! Equally comicis the extension of business phraseology to the social relations oflife, --for instance, the phrase of one of Labiche's characters inallusion to an invitation he has received, "Your kindness of the thirdult. , " thus transposing the commercial formula, "Your favour of thethird instant. " This class of the comic, moreover, may attain a specialprofundity of its own when it discloses not merely a professionalpractice, but a fault in character. Recall to mind the scenes in theFaux Bonshommes and the Famille Benoiton, where marriage is dealt withas a business affair, and matters of sentiment are set down in strictlycommercial language. 

Here, however, we reach the point at which peculiarities of languagereally express peculiarities of character, a closer investigation ofwhich we must hold over to the next chapter. Thus, as might have beenexpected and may be seen from the foregoing, the comic in words followsclosely on the comic in situation and is finally merged, along with thelatter, in the comic in character. Language only attains laughableresults because it is a human product, modelled as exactly as possibleon the forms of the human mind. We feel it contains some living elementof our own life; and if this life of language were complete andperfect, if there were nothing stereotype in it, if, in short, languagewere an absolutely unified organism incapable of being split up intoindependent organisms, it would evade the comic as would a soul whoselife was one harmonious whole, unruffled as the calm surface of apeaceful lake. There is no pool, however, which has not some deadleaves floating on its surface, no human soul upon which there do notsettle habits that make it rigid against itself by making it rigidagainst others, no language, in short, so subtle and instinct withlife, so fully alert in each of its parts as to eliminate theready-made and oppose the mechanical operations of inversion, transposition, etc. , which one would fain perform upon it as on somelifeless thing. The rigid, the ready--made, the mechanical, in contrastwith the supple, the ever-changing and the living, absentmindedness incontrast with attention, in a word, automatism in contrast with freeactivity, such are the defects that laughter singles out and would faincorrect. We appealed to this idea to give us light at the outset, whenstarting upon the analysis of the ludicrous. We have seen it shining atevery decisive turning in our road. With its help, we shall now enterupon a more important investigation, one that will, we hope, be moreinstructive. We purpose, in short, studying comic characters, or ratherdetermining the essential conditions of comedy in character, whileendeavouring to bring it about that this study may contribute to abetter understanding of the real nature of art and the general relationbetween art and life. 

CHAPTER III

THE COMIC IN CHARACTER

I

We have followed the comic along many of its winding channels in anendeavour to discover how it percolates into a form, an attitude, or agesture; a situation, an action, or an expression. The analysis ofcomic CHARACTERS has now brought us to the most important part of ourtask. It would also be the most difficult, had we yielded to thetemptation of defining the laughable by a few striking--andconsequently obvious--examples; for then, in proportion as we advancedtowards the loftiest manifestations of the comic, we should have foundthe facts slipping between the over-wide meshes of the definitionintended to retain them. But, as a matter of fact, we have followed theopposite plan, by throwing light on the subject from above. Convincedthat laughter has a social meaning and import, that the comicexpresses, above all else, a special lack of adaptability to society, and that, in short, there is nothing comic apart from man, we have mademan and character generally our main objective. Our chief difficulty, therefore, has lain in explaining how we come to laugh at anything elsethan character, and by what subtle processes of fertilisation, combination or amalgamation, the comic can worm its way into a meremovement, an impersonal situation, or an independent phrase. This iswhat we have done so far. We started with the pure metal, and all ourendeavours have been directed solely towards reconstructing the ore. Itis the metal itself we are now about to study. Nothing could be easier, for this time we have a simple element to deal with. Let us examine itclosely and see how it reacts upon everything else. 

There are moods, we said, which move us as soon us as soon as weperceive them, joys and sorrows with which we sympathise, passions andvices which call forth painful astonishment, terror or pity, in thebeholder; in short, sentiments that are prolonged in sentimentalovertones from mind to mind. All this concerns the essentials of life. All this is serious, at times even tragic. Comedy can only begin at thepoint where our neighbour's personality ceases to affect us. It begins, in fact, with what might be called a growing callousness to sociallife. Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own waywithout troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of hisfellow-beings. It is the part of laughter to reprove hisabsentmindedness and wake him out of his dream. If it is permissible tocompare important things with trivial ones, we would call to mind whathappens when a youth enters one of our military academies. Aftergetting through the dreaded ordeal of the examination, he finds the hasother ordeals to face, which his seniors have arranged with the objectof fitting him for the new life he is entering upon, or, as they say, of "breaking him into harness. " Every small society that forms withinthe larger is thus impelled, by a vague kind of instinct, to devisesome method of discipline or "breaking in, " so as to deal with therigidity of habits that have been formed elsewhere and have now toundergo a partial modification. Society, properly so-called, proceedsin exactly the same way. Each member must be ever attentive to hissocial surroundings; he must model himself on his environment; inshort, he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar characteras a philosopher in his ivory tower. Therefore society holds suspendedover each individual member, if not the threat of correction, at allevents the prospect of a snubbing, which, although it is slight, isnone the less dreaded. Such must be the function of laughter. Alwaysrather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughteris, really and truly, a kind of social "ragging. "

Hence the equivocal nature of the comic. It belongs neither altogetherto art nor altogether to life. On the one hand, characters in real lifewould never make us laugh were we not capable of watching theirvagaries in the same way as we look down at a play from our seat in abox; they are only comic in our eyes because they perform a kind ofcomedy before us. But, on the other hand, the pleasure caused bylaughter, even on the stage, is not an unadulterated enjoyment; it isnot a pleasure that is exclusively esthetic or altogetherdisinterested. It always implies a secret or unconscious intent, if notof each one of us, at all events of society as a whole. In laughter wealways find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently tocorrect our neighbour, if not in his will, at least in his deed. Thisis the reason a comedy is far more like real life than a drama is. Themore sublime the drama, the more profound the analysis to which thepoet has had to subject the raw materials of daily life in order toobtain the tragic element in its unadulterated form. On the contrary, it is only in its lower aspects, in light comedy and farce, that comedyis in striking contrast to reality: the higher it rises, the more itapproximates to life; in fact, there are scenes in real life so closelybordering on high-class comedy that the stage might adopt them withoutchanging a single word. 

Hence it follows that the elements of comic character on the stage andin actual life will be the same. What are these elements? We shall findno difficulty in deducing them. It has often been said that it is theTRIFLING faults of our fellow-men that make us laugh. 

Evidently there is a considerable amount of truth in this opinion;still, it cannot be regarded as altogether correct. First, as regardsfaults, it is no easy matter to draw the line between the trifling andthe serious; maybe it is not because a fault is trifling that it makesus laugh, but rather because it makes us laugh that we regard it astrifling, for there is nothing disarms us like laughter. But we may goeven farther, and maintain that there are faults at which we laugh, even though fully aware that they are serious, --Harpagon's avarice, forinstance. And then, we may as well confess--though somewhatreluctantly--that we laugh not only at the faults of our fellow-men, but also, at times, at their good qualities. We laugh at Alceste. Theobjection may be urged that it is not the earnestness of Alceste thatis ludicrous, but rather the special aspect which earnestness assumesin his case, and, in short, a certain eccentricity that mars it in oureyes. Agreed; but it is none the less true that this eccentricity inAlceste, at which we laugh, MAKES HIS EARNESTNESS LAUGHABLE, and thatis the main point. So we may conclude that the ludicrous is not alwaysan indication of a fault, in the moral meaning of the word, and ifcritics insist on seeing a fault, even though a trifling one, in theludicrous, they must point out what it is here that exactlydistinguishes the trifling from the serious. 

The truth is, the comic character may, strictly speaking, be quite inaccord with stern morality. All it has to do is to bring itself intoaccord with society. The character of Alceste is that of a thoroughlyhonest man. But then he is unsociable, and, on that very account, ludicrous. A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigidvirtue. It is rigidity that society eyes with suspicion. Consequently, it is the rigidity of Alceste that makes us laugh, though here rigiditystands for honesty. The man who withdraws into himself is liable toridicule, because the comic is largely made up of this very withdrawal. This accounts for the comic being so frequently dependent on themanners or ideas, or, to put it bluntly, on the prejudices, of asociety. 

It must be acknowledged, however, to the credit of mankind, that thereis no essential difference between the social ideal and the rule, thatit is the faults of others that make us laugh, provided we add thatthey make us laugh by reason of their UNSOCIABILITY rather than oftheir IMMORALITY. What, then, are the faults capable of becomingludicrous, and in what circumstances do we regard them as being tooserious to be laughed at?

We have already given an implicit answer to this question. The comic, we said, appeals to the intelligence, pure and simple; laughter isincompatible with emotion. Depict some fault, however trifling, in sucha way as to arouse sympathy, fear, or pity; the mischief is done, it isimpossible for us to laugh. On the other hand, take a downrightvice, --even one that is, generally speaking, of an odious nature, --youmay make it ludicrous if, by some suitable contrivance, you arrange sothat it leaves our emotions unaffected. Not that the vice must then beludicrous, but it MAY, from that time forth, become so. IT MUST NOTAROUSE OUR FEELINGS; that is the sole condition really necessary, though assuredly it is not sufficient. 

But, then, how will the comic poet set to work to prevent our feelingsbeing moved? The question is an embarrassing one. To clear it upthoroughly, we should have to enter upon a rather novel line ofinvestigation, to analyse the artificial sympathy which we bring withus to the theatre, and determine upon the circumstances in which weaccept and those in which we refuse to share imaginary joys andsorrows. There is an art of lulling sensibility to sleep and providingit with dreams, as happens in the case of a mesmerised person. Andthere is also an art of throwing a wet blanket upon sympathy at thevery moment it might arise, the result being that the situation, thougha serious one, is not taken seriously. This latter art would appear tobe governed by two methods, which are applied more or lessunconsciously by the comic poet. The first consists in ISOLATING, within the soul of the character, the feeling attributed to him, andmaking it a parasitic organism, so to speak, endowed with anindependent existence. As a general rule, an intense feelingsuccessively encroaches upon all other mental states and colours themwith its own peculiar hue; if, then, we are made to witness thisgradual impregnation, we finally become impregnated ourselves with acorresponding emotion. To employ a different image, an emotion may besaid to be dramatic and contagious when all the harmonics in it areheard along with the fundamental note. It is because the actor thusthrills throughout his whole being that the spectators themselves feelthe thrill. On the contrary, in the case of emotion that leaves usindifferent and that is about to become comic, there is always presenta certain rigidity which prevents it from establishing a connectionwith the rest of the soul in which it has taken up its abode. Thisrigidity may be manifested, when the time comes, by puppet-likemovements, and then it will provoke laughter; but, before that, it hadalready alienated our sympathy: how can we put ourselves in tune with asoul which is not in tune with itself? In Moliere's L'Avare we have ascene bordering upon drama. It is the one in which the borrower and theusurer, who have never seen each other, meet face to face and find thatthey are son and father. Here we should be in the thick of a drama, ifonly greed and fatherly affection, conflicting with each other in thesoul of Harpagon, had effected a more or less original combination. Butsuch is not the case. No sooner has the interview come to an end thanthe father forgets everything. On meeting his son again he barelyalludes to the scene, serious though it has been: "You, my son, whom Iam good enough to forgive your recent escapade, etc. " Greed has thuspassed close to all other feelings ABSENTMINDEDLY, without eithertouching them or being touched. Although it has taken up its abode inthe soul and become master of the house, none the less it remains astranger. Far different would be avarice of a tragic sort. We shouldfind it attracting and absorbing, transforming and assimilating thedivers energies of the man: feelings and affections, likes anddislikes, vices and virtues, would all become something into whichavarice would breathe a new kind of life. Such seems to be the firstessential difference between high-class comedy and drama. 

There is a second, which is far more obvious and arises out of thefirst. When a mental state is depicted to us with the object of makingit dramatic, or even merely of inducing us to take it seriously, itgradually crystallises into ACTIONS which provide the real measure ofits greatness. Thus, the miser orders his whole life with a view toacquiring wealth, and the pious hypocrite, though pretending to havehis eyes fixed upon heaven, steers most skilfully his course herebelow. Most certainly, comedy does not shut out calculations of thiskind; we need only take as an example the very machinations ofTartuffe. But that is what comedy has in common with drama; and inorder to keep distinct from it, to prevent our taking a serious actionseriously, in short, in order to prepare us for laughter, comedyutilises a method, the formula of which may be given as follows:INSTEAD OF CONCENTRATING OUR ATTENTION ON ACTIONS, COMEDY DIRECTS ITRATHER TO GESTURES. By GESTURES we here mean the attitudes, themovements and even the language by which a mental state expressesitself outwardly without any aim or profit, from no other cause than akind of inner itching. Gesture, thus defined, is profoundly differentfrom action. Action is intentional or, at any rate, conscious; gestureslips out unawares, it is automatic. In action, the entire person isengaged; in gesture, an isolated part of the person is expressed, unknown to, or at least apart from, the whole of the personality. Lastly--and here is the essential point--action is in exact proportionto the feeling that inspires it: the one gradually passes into theother, so that we may allow our sympathy or our aversion to glide alongthe line running from feeling to action and become increasinglyinterested. About gesture, however, there is something explosive, whichawakes our sensibility when on the point of being lulled to sleep and, by thus rousing us up, prevents our taking matters seriously. Thus, assoon as our attention is fixed on gesture and not on action, we are inthe realm of comedy. Did we merely take his actions into account, Tartuffe would belong to drama: it is only when we take his gesturesinto consideration that we find him comic. You may remember how hecomes on to the stage with the words: "Laurent, lock up my hair-shirtand my scourge. " He knows Dorine is listening to him, but doubtless hewould say the same if she were not there. He enters so thoroughly intothe role of a hypocrite that he plays it almost sincerely. In this way, and this way only, can he become comic. Were it not for this materialsincerity, were it not for the language and attitudes that hislong-standing experience as a hypocrite has transformed into naturalgestures, Tartuffe would be simply odious, because we should only thinkof what is meant and willed in his conduct. And so we see why action isessential in drama, but only accessory in comedy. In a comedy, we feelany other situation might equally well have been chosen for the purposeof introducing the character; he would still have been the same manthough the situation were different. But we do not get this impressionin a drama. Here characters and situations are welded together, orrather, events form part and parcel with the persons, so that were thedrama to tell us a different story, even though the actors kept thesame names, we should in reality be dealing with other persons. 

To sum up, whether a character is good or bad is of little moment:granted he is unsociable, he is capable of becoming comic. We now seethat the seriousness of the case is of no importance either: whetherserious or trifling, it is still capable of making us laugh, providedthat care be taken not to arouse our emotions. Unsociability in theperformer and insensibility in the spectator--such, in a word, are thetwo essential conditions. There is a third, implicit in the other two, which so far it has been the aim of our analysis to bring out. 

This third condition is automatism. We have pointed it out from theoutset of this work, continually drawing attention to the followingpoint: what is essentially laughable is what is done automatically. Ina vice, even in a virtue, the comic is that element by which the personunwittingly betrays himself--the involuntary gesture or the unconsciousremark. Absentmindedness is always comical. Indeed, the deeper theabsentmindedness the higher the comedy. Systematic absentmindedness, like that of Don Quixote, is the most comical thing imaginable: it isthe comic itself, drawn as nearly as possible from its very source. Take any other comic character: however unconscious he may be of whathe says or does, he cannot be comical unless there be some aspect ofhis person of which he is unaware, one side of his nature which heoverlooks; on that account alone does he make us laugh. [Footnote: Whenthe humorist laughs at himself, he is really acting a double part; theself who laughs is indeed conscious, but not the self who is laughedat. ] Profoundly comic sayings are those artless ones in which some vicereveals itself in all its nakedness: how could it thus expose itselfwere it capable of seeing itself as it is? It is not uncommon for acomic character to condemn in general terms a certain line of conductand immediately afterwards afford an example of it himself: forinstance, M. Jourdain's teacher of philosophy flying into a passionafter inveighing against anger; Vadius taking a poem from his pocketafter heaping ridicule on readers of poetry, etc. What is the object ofsuch contradictions except to help us to put our finger on theobliviousness of the characters to their own actions? Inattention toself, and consequently to others, is what we invariably find. And if welook at the matter closely, we see that inattention is here equivalentto what we have called unsociability. The chief cause of rigidity isthe neglect to look around--and more especially within oneself: how cana man fashion his personality after that of another if he does notfirst study others as well as himself? Rigidity, automatism, absent-mindedness and unsociability are all inextricably entwined; andall serve as ingredients to the making up of the comic in character. 

In a word, if we leave on one side, when dealing with humanpersonality, that portion which interests our sensibility or appeals toour feeling, all the rest is capable of becoming comic, and the comicwill be proportioned to the rigidity. We formulated this idea at theoutset of this work. We have verified it in its main results, and havejust applied it to the definition of comedy. Now we must get to closerquarters, and show how it enables us to delimitate the exact positioncomedy occupies among all the other arts. In one sense it might be saidthat all character is comic, provided we mean by character theready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element whichresembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and capable ofworking automatically. It is, if you will, that which causes us toimitate ourselves. And it is also, for that very reason, that whichenables others to imitate us. Every comic character is a type. Inversely, every resemblance to a type has something comic in it. Though we may long have associated with an individual withoutdiscovering anything about him to laugh at, still, if advantage is ttaken of some accidental analogy to dub him with the name of a famoushero of romance or drama, he will in our eyes border upon theridiculous, if only for a moment. And yet this hero of romance may notbe a comic character at all. But then it is comic to be like him. It iscomic to wander out of one's own self. It is comic to fall into aready-made category. And what is most comic of all is to become acategory oneself into which others will fall, as into a ready-madeframe; it is to crystallise into a stock character. 

Thus, to depict characters, that is to say, general types, is theobject of high-class comedy. This has often been said. But it is aswell to repeat it, since there could be no better definition of comedy. Not only are we entitled to say that comedy gives us general types, butwe might add that it is the ONLY one of all the arts that aims at thegeneral; so that once this objective has been attributed to it, we havesaid all that it is and all that the rest cannot be. To prove that suchis really the essence of comedy, and that it is in this respect opposedto tragedy, drama and the other forms of art, we should begin bydefining art in its higher forms: then, gradually coming down to comicpoetry, we should find that this latter is situated on the border-linebetween art and life, and that, by the generality of itssubject-matter, it contrasts with the rest of the arts. We cannot hereplunge into so vast a subject of investigation; but we needs mustsketch its main outlines, lest we overlook what, to our mind, isessential on the comic stage. 

What is the object of art? Could reality come into direct contact withsense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion withthings and with ourselves, probably art would be useless, or rather weshould all be artists, for then our soul would continually vibrate inperfect accord with nature. Our eyes, aided by memory, would carve outin space and fix in time the most inimitable of pictures. Hewn in theliving marble of the human form, fragments of statues, beautiful as therelics of antique statuary, would strike the passing glance. Deep inour souls we should hear the strains of our inner life's unbrokenmelody, --a music that is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintiveand always original. All this is around and within us, and yet no whitof it do we distinctly perceive. Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: aveil that is dense and opaque for the common herd, --thin, almosttransparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil?Was it done in malice or in friendliness? We had to live, and lifedemands that we grasp things in their relations to our own needs. Lifeis action. Life implies the acceptance only of the UTILITARIAN side ofthings in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions: all otherimpressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred. I lookand I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and Ithink I am reading the very depths of my heart. But what I see and hearof the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my sensesto serve as a light to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comesto the surface, what participates in my actions. My senses and myconsciousness, therefore, give me no more than a practicalsimplification of reality. In the vision they furnish me of myself andof things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, theresemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced outfor me in advance, along which my activity is to travel. These ways arethe ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things have beenclassified with a view to the use I can derive from them. And it isthis classification I perceive, far more clearly than the colour andthe shape of things. Doubtless man is vastly superior to the loweranimals in this respect. It is not very likely that the eye of a wolfmakes any distinction between a kid and a lamb; both appear t o thewolf as the same identical quarry, alike easy to pounce upon, alikegood to devour. We, for our part, make a distinction between a goat anda sheep; but can we tell one goat from another, one sheep from another?The INDIVIDUALITY of things or of beings escapes us, unless it ismaterially to our advantage to perceive it. Even when we do take noteof it--as when we distinguish one man from another--it is not theindividuality itself that the eye grasps, i. E. , an entirely originalharmony of forms and colours, but only one or two features that willmake practical recognition easier. 

In short, we do not see the actual things themselves; in most cases weconfine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them. This tendency, the result of need, has become even more pronounced under the influenceof speech; for words--with the exception of proper nouns--all denotegenera. The word, which only takes note of the most ordinary functionand commonplace aspect of the thing, intervenes between it andourselves, and would conceal its form from our eyes, were that form notalready masked beneath the necessities that brought the word intoexistence. Not only external objects, but even our own mental states, are screened from us in their inmost, their personal aspect, in theoriginal life they possess. When we feel love or hatred, when we aregay or sad, is it really the feeling itself that reaches ourconsciousness with those innumerable fleeting shades of meaning anddeep resounding echoes that make it something altogether our own? Weshould all, were it so, be novelists or poets or musicians. Mostly, however, we perceive nothing but the outward display of our mentalstate. We catch only the impersonal aspect of our feelings, that aspectwhich speech has set down once for all because it is almost the same, in the same conditions, for all men. Thus, even in our own individual, individuality escapes our ken. We move amidst generalities and symbols, as within a tilt-yard in which our force is effectively pitted againstother forces; and fascinated by action, tempted by it, for our owngood, on to the field it has selected, we live in a zone midway betweenthings and ourselves, externally to things, externally also toourselves. From time to time, however, in a fit of absentmindedness, nature raises up souls that are more detached from life. Not with thatintentional, logical, systematical detachment--the result of reflectionand philosophy--but rather with natural detachment, one innate in thestructure of sense or consciousness, which at once reveals itself by avirginal manner, so to speak, of seeing, hearing or thinking. Were thisdetachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any ofits perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the worldhas never yet seen. It would excel alike in every art at the same time;or rather, it would fuse them all into one. It would perceive allthings in their native purity: the forms, colours, sounds of thephysical world as well as the subtlest movements of the inner life. Butthis is asking too much of nature. Even for such of us as she has madeartists, it is by accident, and on one side only, that she has liftedthe veil. In one direction only has she forgotten to rivet theperception to the need. And since each direction corresponds to what wecall a SENSE--through one of his senses, and through that sense alone, is the artist usually wedded to art. Hence, originally, the diversityof arts. Hence also the speciality of predispositions. This one applieshimself to colours and forms, and since he loves colour for colour andform for form, since he perceives them for their sake and not for hisown, it is the inner life of things that he sees appearing throughtheir forms and colours. Little by little he insinuates it into our ownperception, baffled though we may be at the outset. For a few momentsat least, he diverts us from the prejudices of form and colour thatcome between ourselves and reality. And thus he realises the loftiestambition of art, which here consists in revealing to us nature. Others, again, retire within themselves. Beneath the thousand rudimentaryactions which are the outward and visible signs of an emotion, behindthe commonplace, conventional expression that both reveals and concealsan individual mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, towhich they attain in its undefiled essence. And then, to induce us tomake the same effort ourselves, they contrive to make us see somethingof what they have seen: by rhythmical arrangement of words, which thusbecome organised and animated with a life of their own, they tellus--or rather suggest--things that speech was not calculated toexpress. Others delve yet deeper still. Beneath these joys and sorrowswhich can, at a pinch, be translated into language, they graspsomething that has nothing in common with language, certain rhythms oflife and breath that. Are closer to man than his inmost feelings, beingthe living law--varying with each individual--of his enthusiasm anddespair, his hopes and regrets. By setting free and emphasising thismusic, they force it upon our attention; they compel us, willy-nilly, to fall in with it, like passers-by who join in a dance. And thus theyimpel us to set in motion, in the depths of our being, some secretchord which was only waiting to thrill. So art, whether it be paintingor sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush asidethe utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially acceptedgeneralities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in orderto bring us face to face with reality itself. It is from amisunderstanding on this point that the dispute between realism andidealism in art has arisen. Art is certainly only a more direct visionof reality. But this purity of perception implies a break withutilitarian convention, an innate and specially localiseddisinterestedness of sense or consciousness, in short, a certainimmateriality of life, which is what has always been called idealism. So that we might say, without in any way playing upon the meaning ofthe words, that realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and that it is only through ideality that we can resume contact withreality. 

Dramatic art forms no exception to this law. What drama goes forth todiscover and brings to light, is a deep-seated reality that is veiledfrom us, often in our own interests, by the necessities of life. Whatis this reality? What are these necessities? Poetry always expressesinward states. But amongst these states some arise mainly from contactwith our fellow-men. They are the most intense as well as the mostviolent. As contrary electricities attract each other and accumulatebetween the two plates of the condenser from which the spark willpresently flash, so, by simply bringing people together, strongattractions and repulsions take place, followed by an utter loss ofbalance, in a word, by that electrification of the soul known aspassion. Were man to give way to the impulse of his natural feelings, were there neither social nor moral law, these outbursts of violentfeeling would be the ordinary rule in life. But utility demands thatthese outbursts should be foreseen and averted. Man must live insociety, and consequently submit to rules. And what interest advises, reason commands: duty calls, and we have to obey the summons. Underthis dual influence has perforce been formed an outward layer offeelings and ideas which make for permanence, aim at becoming common toall men, and cover, when they are not strong enough to extinguish it, the inner fire of individual passions. The slow progress of mankind inthe direction of an increasingly peaceful social life has graduallyconsolidated this layer, just as the life of our planet itself has beenone long effort to cover over with a cool and solid crust the fierymass of seething metals. But volcanic eruptions occur. And if the earthwere a living being, as mythology has feigned, most likely when inrepose it would take delight in dreaming of these sudden explosions, whereby it suddenly resumes possession of its innermost nature. Such isjust the kind of pleasure that is provided for us by drama. Beneath thequiet humdrum life that reason and society have fashioned for us, itstirs something within us which luckily does not explode, but which itmakes us feel in its inner tension. It offers nature her revenge uponsociety. Sometimes it makes straight for the goal, summoning up to thesurface, from the depths below, passions that produce a generalupheaval. Sometimes it effects a flank movement, as is often the casein contemporary drama; with a skill that is frequently sophistical, itshows up the inconsistencies of society; it exaggerates the shams andshibboleths of the social law; and so indirectly, by merely dissolvingor corroding the outer crust, it again brings us back to the innercore. But, in both cases, whether it weakens society or strengthensnature, it has the same end in view: that of laying bare a secretportion of ourselves, --what might be called the tragic element in ourcharacter. 

This is indeed the impression we get after seeing a stirring drama. What has just interested us is not so much what we have been told aboutothers as the glimpse we have caught of ourselves--a whole host ofghostly feelings, emotions and events that would fain have come intoreal existence, but, fortunately for us, did not. It also seems as ifan appeal had been made within us to certain ancestral memoriesbelonging to a far-away past--memories so deep-seated and so foreign toour present life that this latter, for a moment, seems something unrealand conventional, for which we shall have to serve a freshapprenticeship. So it is indeed a deeper reality that drama draws upfrom beneath our superficial and utilitarian attainments, and this arthas the same end in view as all the others. 

Hence it follows that art always aims at what is INDIVIDUAL. What theartist fixes on his canvas is something he has seen at a certain spot, on a certain day, at a certain hour, with a colouring that will neverbe seen again. What the poet sings of is a certain mood which was his, and his alone, and which will never return. What the dramatist unfoldsbefore us is the life-history of a soul, a living tissue of feelingsand events--something, in short, which has once happened and can neverbe repeated. We may, indeed, give general names to these feelings, butthey cannot be the same thing in another soul. They are INDIVIDUALISED. Thereby, and thereby only, do they belong to art; for generalities, symbols or even types, form the current coin of our daily perception. How, then, does a misunderstanding on this point arise?

The reason lies in the fact that two very different things have beenmistaken for each other: the generality of things and that of theopinions we come to regarding them. Because a feeling is generallyrecognised as true, it does not follow that it is a general feeling. Nothing could be more unique than the character of Hamlet. Though hemay resemble other men in some respects, it is clearly not on thataccount that he interests us most. But he is universally accepted andregarded as a living character. In this sense only is he universallytrue. The same holds good of all the other products of art. Each ofthem is unique, and yet, if it bear the stamp of genius, it will cometo be accepted by everybody. Why will it be accepted? And if it isunique of its kind, by what sign do we know it to be genuine?Evidently, by the very effort it forces us to make against ourpredispositions in order to see sincerely. Sincerity is contagious. What the artist has seen we shall probably never see again, or at leastnever see in exactly the same way; but if he has actually seen it, theattempt he has made to lift the veil compels our imitation. His work isan example which we take as a lesson. And the efficacy of the lesson isthe exact standard of the genuineness of the work. Consequently, truthbears within itself a power of conviction, nay, of conversion, which isthe sign that enables us to recognise it. The greater the work and themore profound the dimly apprehended truth, the longer may the effect bein coming, but, on the other hand, the more universal will that effecttend to become. So the universality here lies in the effect produced, and not in the cause. 

Altogether different is the object of comedy. Here it is in the workitself that the generality lies. Comedy depicts characters we havealready come across and shall meet with again. It takes note ofsimilarities. It aims at placing types before our eyes. It even createsnew types, if necessary. In this respect it forms a contrast to all theother arts. 

The very titles of certain classical comedies are significant inthemselves. Le Misanthrope, l'Avare, le Joueur, le Distrait, etc. , arenames of whole classes of people; and even when a character comedy hasa proper noun as its title, this proper noun is speedily swept away, bythe very weight of its contents, into the stream of common nouns. Wesay "a Tartuffe, " but we should never say "a Phedre" or "a Polyeucte. "

Above all, a tragic poet will never think of grouping around the chiefcharacter in his play secondary characters to serve as simplifiedcopies, so to speak, of the former. The hero of a tragedy represents anindividuality unique of its kind. It may be possible to imitate him, but then we shall be passing, whether consciously or not, from thetragic to the comic. No one is like him, because he is like no one. Buta remarkable instinct, on the contrary, impels the comic poet, once hehas elaborated his central character, to cause other characters, displaying the same general traits, to revolve as satellites round him. Many comedies have either a plural noun or some collective term astheir title. "Les Femmes savantes, " "Les Precieuses ridicules, " "LeMonde ou l'on s'ennuie, " etc. , represent so many rallying points on thestage adopted by different groups of characters, all belonging to oneidentical type. It would be interesting to analyse this tendency incomedy. Maybe dramatists have caught a glimpse of a fact recentlybrought forward by mental pathology, viz. That cranks of the same kindare drawn, by a secret attraction, to seek each other's company. Without precisely coming within the province of medicine, the comicindividual, as we have shown, is in some way absentminded, and thetransition from absent-mindedness to crankiness is continuous. Butthere is also another reason. If the comic poet's object is to offer ustypes, that is to say, characters capable of self-repetition, how canhe set about it better than by showing us, in each instance, severaldifferent copies of the same model? That is just what the naturalistdoes in order to define a species. He enumerates and describes its mainvarieties. 

This essential difference between tragedy and comedy, the former beingconcerned with individuals and the latter with classes, is revealed inyet another way. It appears in the first draft of the work. From theoutset it is manifested by two radically different methods ofobservation. 

Though the assertion may seem paradoxical, a study of other men isprobably not necessary to the tragic poet. We find some of the greatpoets have lived a retiring, homely sort of life, without having achance of witnessing around them an outburst of the passions they haveso faithfully depicted. But, supposing even they had witnessed such aspectacle, it is doubtful whether they would have found it of much use. For what interests us in the work of the poet is the glimpse we get ofcertain profound moods or inner struggles. Now, this glimpse cannot beobtained from without. Our souls are impenetrable to one another. Certain signs of passion are all that we ever apperceive externally. These we interpret--though always, by the way, defectively--only byanalogy with what we have ourselves experienced. So what we experienceis the main point, and we cannot become thoroughly acquainted withanything but our own heart--supposing we ever get so far. Does thismean that the poet has experienced what he depicts, that he has gonethrough the various situations he makes his characters traverse, andlived the whole of their inner life? Here, too, the biographies ofpoets would contradict such a supposition. How, indeed, could the sameman have been Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and many others? Butthen a distinction should perhaps here be made between the personalityWE HAVE and all those we might have had. Our character is the result ofa choice that is continually being renewed. There are points--at allevents there seem to be--all along the way, where we may branch off, and we perceive many possible directions though we are unable to takemore than one. To retrace one's steps, and follow to the end thefaintly distinguishable directions, appears to be the essential elementin poetic imagination. Of course, Shakespeare was neither Macbeth, norHamlet, nor Othello; still, he MIGHT HAVE BEEN these several charactersif the circumstances of the case on the one hand, and the consent ofhis will on the other, had caused to break out into explosive actionwhat was nothing more than an inner prompting. We are strangelymistaken as to the part played by poetic imagination, if we think itpieces together its heroes out of fragments filched from right andleft, as though it were patching together a harlequin's motley. Nothingliving would result from that. Life cannot be recomposed; it can onlybe looked at and reproduced. Poetic imagination is but a fuller view ofreality. If the characters created by a poet give us the impression oflife, it is only because they are the poet himself, --multiplication ordivision of the poet, --the poet plumbing the depths of his own naturein so powerful an effort of inner observation that he lays hold of thepotential in the real, and takes up what nature has left as a mereoutline or sketch in his soul in order to make of it a finished work ofart. 

Altogether different is the kind of observation from which comedysprings. It is directed outwards. However interested a dramatist may bein the comic features of human nature, he will hardly go, I imagine, tothe extent of trying to discover his own. Besides, he would not findthem, for we are never ridiculous except in some point that remainshidden from our own consciousness. It is on others, then, that suchobservation must perforce be practised. But it; will, for this veryreason, assume a character of generality that it cannot have when weapply it to ourselves. Settling on the surface, it will not be morethan skin-deep, dealing with persons at the point at which they comeinto contact and become capable of resembling one another. It will gono farther. Even if it could, it would not desire to do so, for itwould have nothing to gain in the process. 

To penetrate too far into the personality, to couple the outer effectwith causes that are too deep-seated, would mean to endanger and in theend to sacrifice all that was laughable in the effect. In order that wemay be tempted to laugh at it, we must localise its cause in someintermediate region of the soul. Consequently, the effect must appearto us as an average effect, as expressing an average of mankind. And, like all averages, this one is obtained by bringing together scattereddata, by comparing analogous cases and extracting their essence, inshort by a process of abstraction and generalisation similar to thatwhich the physicist brings to bear upon facts with the object ofgrouping them under laws. In a word, method and object are here of thesame nature as in the inductive sciences, in that observation is alwaysexternal and the result always general. 

And so we come back, by a roundabout way, to the double conclusion wereached in the course of our investigations. On the one hand, a personis never ridiculous except through some mental attribute resemblingabsent-mindedness, through something that lives upon him withoutforming part of his organism, after the fashion of a parasite; that isthe reason this state of mind is observable from without and capable ofbeing corrected. But, on the other hand, just because laughter aims atcorrecting, it is expedient that the correction should reach as great anumber of persons as possible. This is the reason comic observationinstinctively proceeds to what is general. It chooses suchpeculiarities as admit of being reproduced and consequently are notindissolubly bound up with the individuality of a single person, --apossibly common sort of uncommonness, so to say, --peculiarities thatare held in common. By transferring them to the stage, it creates workswhich doubtless belong to art in that their only visible aim is toplease, but which will be found to contrast with other works of art byreason of their generality and also of their scarcely confessed orscarcely conscious intention to correct and instruct. So we wereprobably right in saying that comedy lies midway between art and life. It is not disinterested as genuine art is. By organising laughter, comedy accepts social life as a natural environment, it even obeys animpulse of social life. And in this respect it turns its back upon art, which is a breaking away from society and a return to pure nature. 

II

Now let us see, in the light of what has gone before, the line to takefor creating an ideally comic type of character, comic in itself, inits origin, and in all its manifestations. It must be deep-rooted, soas to supply comedy with inexhaustible matter, and yet superficial, inorder that it may remain within the scope of comedy; invisible to itsactual owner, for the comic ever partakes of the unconscious, butvisible to everybody else, so that it may call forth general laughter, extremely considerate to its own self, so that it may be displayedwithout scruple, but troublesome to others, so that they may repress itwithout pity; immediately repressible, so that our laughter may nothave been wasted, but sure of reappearing under fresh aspects, so thatlaughter may always find something to do; inseparable from social life, although insufferable to society; capable--in order that it may assumethe greatest imaginable variety of forms--of being tacked on to all thevices and even to a good many virtues. Truly a goodly number ofelements to fuse together! But a chemist of the soul, entrusted withthis elaborate preparation, would be somewhat disappointed when pouringout the contents of his retort. He would find he had taken a vast dealof trouble to compound a mixture which may be found ready-made and freeof expense, for it is as widespread throughout mankind as airthroughout nature. 

This mixture is vanity. Probably there is not a single failing that ismore superficial or more deep-rooted. The wounds it receives are neververy serious, and yet they are seldom healed. The services rendered toit are the most unreal of all services, and yet they are the very onesthat meet with lasting gratitude. It is scarcely a vice, and yet allthe vices are drawn into its orbit and, in proportion as they becomemore refined and artificial, tend to be nothing more than a means ofsatisfying it. The outcome of social life, since it is an admiration ofourselves based on the admiration we think we are inspiring in others, it is even more natural, more universally innate than egoism; foregoism may be conquered by nature, whereas only by reflection do we getthe better of vanity. It does not seem, indeed, as if men were everborn modest, unless we dub with the name of modesty a sort of purelyphysical bashfulness, which is nearer to pride than is generallysupposed. True modesty can be nothing but a meditation on vanity. Itsprings from the sight of others' mistakes and the dread of beingsimilarly deceived. It is a sort of scientific cautiousness withrespect to what we shall say and think of ourselves. It is made up ofimprovements and after-touches. In short, it is an acquired virtue. 

It is no easy matter to define the point at which the anxiety to becomemodest may be distinguished from the dread of becoming ridiculous. Butsurely, at the outset, this dread and this anxiety are one and the samething. A complete investigation into the illusions of vanity, and intothe ridicule that clings to them, would cast a strange light upon thewhole theory of laughter. We should find laughter performing, withmathematical regularity, one of its main functions--that of bringingback to complete self-consciousness a certain self-admiration which isalmost automatic, and thus obtaining the greatest possible sociabilityof characters. We should see that vanity, though it is a naturalproduct of social life, is an inconvenience to society, just as certainslight poisons, continually secreted by the human organism, woulddestroy it in the long run, if they were not neutralised by othersecretions. Laughter is unceasingly doing work of this kind. In thisrespect, it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity islaughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughable isvanity. 

While dealing with the comic in form and movement, we showed how anysimple image, laughable in itself, is capable of worming its way intoother images of a more complex nature and instilling into themsomething of its comic essence; thus, the highest forms of the comiccan sometimes be explained by the lowest. The inverse process, however, is perhaps even more common, and many coarse comic effects are thedirect result of a drop from some very subtle comic element. Forinstance, vanity, that higher form of the comic, is an element we areprone to look for, minutely though unconsciously, in everymanifestation of human activity. We look for it if only to laugh at it. Indeed, our imagination often locates it where it has no business tobe. Perhaps we must attribute to this source the altogether coarsecomic element in certain effects which psychologists have veryinadequately explained by contrast: a short man bowing his head to passbeneath a large door; two individuals, one very tall the other a meredwarf, gravely walking along arm-in-arm, etc. By scanning narrowly thislatter image, we shall probably find that the shorter of the twopersons seems as though he were trying TO RAISE HIMSELF to the heightof the taller, like the frog that wanted to make itself as large as theox. 

III

It would be quite impossible to go through all the peculiarities ofcharacter that either coalesce or compete with vanity in order to forcethemselves upon the attention of the comic poet. We have shown that allfailings may become laughable, and even, occasionally, many a goodquality. Even though a list of all the peculiarities that have everbeen found ridiculous were drawn up, comedy would manage to add tothem, not indeed by creating artificial ones, but by discovering linesof comic development that had hitherto gone unnoticed; thus doesimagination isolate ever fresh figures in the intricate design of oneand the same piece of tapestry. The essential condition, as we know, isthat the peculiarity observed should straightway appear as a kind ofCATEGORY into which a number of individuals can step. 

Now, there are ready-made categories established by society itself, andnecessary to it because it is based on the division of labour. We meanthe various trades, public services and professions. Each particularprofession impresses on its corporate members certain habits of mindand peculiarities of character in which they resemble each other andalso distinguish themselves from the rest. Small societies are thusformed within the bosom of Society at large. Doubtless they arise fromthe very organisation of Society as a whole. And yet, if they held toomuch aloof, there would be a risk of their proving harmful tosociability. 

Now, it is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency. Its function is to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt theindividual to the whole, in short, to round off the corners whereverthey are met with. Accordingly, we here find a species of the comicwhose varieties might be calculated beforehand. This we shall call thePROFESSIONAL COMIC. 

Instead of taking up these varieties in detail, we prefer to lay stressupon what they have in common. In the forefront we find professionalvanity. Each one of M. Jourdain's teachers exalts his own art above allthe rest. In a play of Labiche there is a character who cannotunderstand how it is possible to be anything else than a timbermerchant. Naturally he is a timber merchant himself. Note that vanityhere tends to merge into SOLEMNITY, in proportion to the degree ofquackery there is in the profession under consideration. For it is aremarkable fact that the more questionable an art, science oroccupation is, the more those who practise it are inclined to regardthemselves as invested with a kind of priesthood and to claim that allshould bow before its mysteries. Useful professions are clearly meantfor the public, but those whose utility is more dubious can onlyjustify their existence by assuming that the public is meant for them:now, this is just the illusion that lies at the root of solemnity. Almost everything comic in Moliere's doctors comes from this source. They treat the patient as though he had been made for the doctors, andnature herself as an appendage to medicine. 

Another form of this comic rigidity is what may be called PROFESSIONALCALLOUSNESS. The comic character is so tightly jammed into the rigidframe of his functions that he has no room to move or to be moved likeother men. Only call to mind the answer Isabelle receives from PerrinDandin, the judge, when she asks him how he can bear to look on whenthe poor wretches are being tortured: Bah! cela fait toujours passerune heure ou deux. 

[Footnote: Bah! it always helps to while away an hour or two. ]

Does not Tartuffe also manifest a sort of professional callousness whenhe says--it is true, by the mouth of Orgon: Et je verrais mourir frere, enfants, mere et femme, Que je m'en soucierais autant que de cela!

[Footnote: Let brother, children, mother and wife all die, what shouldI care!]

The device most in use, however, for making a profession ludicrous isto confine it, so to say, within the four corners of its own particularjargon. Judge, doctor and soldier are made to apply the language oflaw, medicine and strategy to the everyday affairs of life, as thoughthey had became incapable of talking like ordinary people. As a rule, this kind of the ludicrous is rather coarse. It becomes more refined, however, as we have already said, if it reveals some peculiarity ofcharacter in addition to a professional habit. We will instance onlyRegnard's Joueur, who expresses himself with the utmost originality interms borrowed from gambling, giving his valet the name of Hector, andcalling his betrothed Pallas, du nom connu de la Dame de Pique;[Footnote: Pallas, from the well-known name of the Queen of Spades. ] orMoliere's Femmes savantes, where the comic element evidently consistslargely in the translation of ideas of a scientific nature into termsof feminine sensibility: "Epicure me plait. .. " (Epicurus is charming), "J'aime les tourbillons" (I dote on vortices), etc. You have only toread the third act to find that Armande, Philaminte and Belise almostinvariably express themselves in this style. 

Proceeding further in the same direction, we discover that there isalso such a thing as a professional logic, i. E. Certain ways ofreasoning that are customary in certain circles, which are valid forthese circles, but untrue for the rest of the public. Now, the contrastbetween these two kinds of logic--one particular, the otheruniversal--produces comic effects of a special nature, on which we mayadvantageously dwell at greater length. Here we touch upon a point ofsome consequence in the theory of laughter. We propose, therefore, togive the question a wider scope and consider it in its most generalaspect. 

IV

Eager as we have been to discover the deep-seated cause of the comic, we have so far had to neglect one of its most striking phenomena. Werefer to the logic peculiar to the comic character and the comic group, a strange kind of logic, which, in some cases, may include a good dealof absurdity. 

Theophile Gautier said that the comic in its extreme form was the logicof the absurd. More than one philosophy of laughter revolves round alike idea. Every comic effect, it is said, implies contradiction insome of its aspects. What makes us laugh is alleged to be the absurdrealised in concrete shape, a "palpable absurdity";--or, again, anapparent absurdity, which we swallow for the moment only to rectify itimmediately afterwards;--or, better still, something absurd from onepoint of view though capable of a natural explanation from another, etc. All these theories may contain some portion of the truth; but, inthe first place, they apply only to certain rather obvious comiceffects, and then, even where they do apply, they evidently take noaccount of the characteristic element of the laughable, that is, thePARTICULAR KIND of absurdity the comic contains when it does containsomething absurd. Is an immediate proof of this desired? You have onlyto choose one of these definitions and make up effects in accordancewith the formula: twice out of every three times there will be nothinglaughable in the effect obtained. So we see that absurdity, when metwith in the comic, is not absurdity IN GENERAL. It is an absurdity of adefinite kind. It does not create the comic; rather, we might say thatthe comic infuses into it its own particular essence. It is not acause, but an effect--an effect of a very special kind, which reflectsthe special nature of its cause. Now, this cause is known to us;consequently we shall have no trouble in understanding the nature ofthe effect. 

Assume, when out for a country walk, that you notice on the top of ahill something that bears a faint resemblance to a large motionlessbody with revolving arms. So far you do not know what it is, but youbegin to search amongst your IDEAS--that is to say, in the presentinstance, amongst the recollections at your disposal--for thatrecollection which will best fit in with what you see. Almostimmediately the image of a windmill comes into your mind: the objectbefore you is a windmill. No matter if, before leaving the house, youhave just been reading fairy-tales telling of giants with enormousarms; for although common sense consists mainly in being able toremember, it consists even more in being able to forget. Common senserepresents the endeavour of a mind continually adapting itself anew andchanging ideas when it changes objects. It is the mobility of theintelligence conforming exactly to the mobility of things. It is themoving continuity of our attention to life. But now, let us take DonQuixote setting out for the wars. The romances he has been reading alltell of knights encountering, on the way, giant adversaries. Hetherefore must needs encounter a giant. This idea of a giant is aprivileged recollection which has taken its abode in his mind and liesthere in wait, motionless, watching for an opportunity to sally forthand become embodied in a thing. It IS BENT on entering the materialworld, and so the very first object he sees bearing the faintestresemblance to a giant is invested with the form of one. Thus DonQuixote sees giants where we see windmills. This is comical; it is alsoabsurd. But is it a mere absurdity, --an absurdity of an indefinite kind?

It is a very special inversion of common sense. It consists in seekingto mould things on an idea of one's own, instead of moulding one'sideas on things, --in seeing before us what we are thinking of, insteadof thinking of what we see. Good sense would have us leave all ourmemories in their proper rank and file; then the appropriate memorywill every time answer the summons of the situation of the moment andserve only to interpret it. But in Don Quixote, on the contrary, thereis one group of memories in command of all the rest and dominating thecharacter itself: thus it is reality that now has to bow toimagination, its only function being to supply fancy with a body. Oncethe illusion has been created, Don Quixote develops it logically enoughin all its consequences; he proceeds with the certainty and precisionof a somnambulist who is acting his dream. Such, then, is the origin ofhis delusions, and such the particular logic which controls thisparticular absurdity. Now, is this logic peculiar to Don Quixote?

We have shown that the comic character always errs through obstinacy ofmind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short, throughautomatism. At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity whichcompels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straightalong, to shut their ears and refuse to listen. In Moliere's plays howmany comic scenes can be reduced to this simple type: A CHARACTERFOLLOWING UP HIS ONE IDEA, and continually recurring to it in spite ofincessant interruptions! The transition seems to take placeimperceptibly from the man who will listen to nothing to the one whowill see nothing, and from this latter to the one who sees only what hewants to see. A stubborn spirit ends by adjusting things to its own wayof thinking, instead of accommodating its thoughts to the things. Soevery comic character is on the highroad to the above-mentionedillusion, and Don Quixote furnishes us with the general type of comicabsurdity. 

Is there a name for this inversion of common sense? Doubtless it may befound, in either an acute or a chronic form, in certain types ofinsanity. In many of its aspects it resembles a fixed idea. But neitherinsanity in general, nor fixed ideas in particular, are provocative oflaughter: they are diseases, and arouse our pity. 

Laughter, as we have seen, is incompatible with emotion. If thereexists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible withthe general health of the mind, --a sane type of madness, one might say. Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in everyrespect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do inlunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is thatof dreams. So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capableof being stated in the following theorem: Comic absurdity is of thesame nature as that of dreams. 

The behaviour of the intellect in a dream is exactly what we have justbeen describing. The mind, enamoured of itself, now seeks in the outerworld nothing more than a pretext for realising its imaginations. Aconfused murmur of sounds still reaches the ear, colours enter thefield of vision, the senses are not completely shut in. But thedreamer, instead of appealing to the whole of his recollections for theinterpretation of what his senses perceive, makes use of what heperceives to give substance to the particular recollection he favours:thus, according to the mood of the dreamer and the idea that fills hisimagination at the time, a gust of wind blowing down the chimneybecomes the howl of a wild beast or a tuneful melody. Such is theordinary mechanism of illusion in dreams. 

Now, if comic illusion is similar to dream illusion, if the logic ofthe comic is the logic of dreams, we may expect to discover in thelogic of the laughable all the peculiarities of dream logic. Here, again, we shall find an illustration of the law with which we are wellacquainted: given one form of the laughable, other forms that arelacking in the same comic essence become laughable from their outwardresemblance to the first. Indeed, it is not difficult to see that anyPLAY OF IDEAS may afford us amusement if only it bring back to mind, more or less distinctly, the play of dreamland. 

We shall first call attention to a certain general relaxation of therules of reasoning. The reasonings at which we laugh are those we knowto be false, but which we might accept as true were we to hear them ina dream. They counterfeit true reasoning just sufficiently to deceive amind dropping off to sleep. There is still an element of logic in them, if you will, but it is a logic lacking in tension and, for that veryreason, affording us relief from intellectual effort. Many "witticisms"are reasonings of this kind, considerably abridged reasonings, of whichwe are given only the beginning and the end. Such play upon ideasevolves in the direction of a play upon words in proportion as therelations set up between the ideas become more superficial: graduallywe come to take no account of the meaning of the words we hear, butonly of their sound. It might be instructive to compare with dreamscertain comic scenes in which one of the characters systematicallyrepeats in a nonsensical fashion what another character whispers in hisear. If you fall asleep with people talking round you, you sometimesfind that what they say gradually becomes devoid of meaning, that thesounds get distorted, as it were, and recombine in a haphazard fashionto form in your mind the strangest of meanings, and that you arereproducing between yourself and the different speakers the scenebetween Petit-Jean and The Prompter. [Footnote: Les Plaideurs (Racine). ]

There are also COMIC OBSESSIONS that seem to bear a great resemblanceto dream obsessions. Who has not had the experience of seeing the sameimage appear in several successive dreams, assuming a plausible meaningin each of them, whereas these dreams had no other point in common. Effects of repetition sometimes present this special form on the stageor in fiction: some of them, in fact, sound as though they belonged toa dream. It may be the same with the burden of many a song: itpersistently recurs, always unchanged, at the end of every verse, eachtime with a different meaning. 

Not infrequently do we notice in dreams a particular CRESCENDO, a weirdeffect that grows more pronounced as we proceed. The first concessionextorted from reason introduces a second; and this one, another of amore serious nature; and so on till the crowning absurdity is reached. Now, this progress towards the absurd produces on the dreamer a verypeculiar sensation. Such is probably the experience of the tippler whenhe feels himself pleasantly drifting into a state of blankness in whichneither reason nor propriety has any meaning for him. Now, considerwhether some of Moliere's plays would not produce the same sensation:for instance, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, which, after beginning almostreasonably, develops into a sequence of all sorts of absurdities. Consider also the Bourgeois gentilhomme, where the different charactersseem to allow themselves to be caught up in a very whirlwind of madnessas the play proceeds. "If it is possible to find a man more completelymad, I will go and publish it in Rome. " This sentence, which warns usthat the play is over, rouses us from the increasingly extravagantdream into which, along with M. Jourdain, we have been sinking. 

But, above all, there is a special madness that is peculiar to dreams. There are certain special contradictions so natural to the imaginationof a dreamer, and so absurd to the reason of a man wide-awake, that itwould be impossible to give a full and correct idea of their nature toanyone who had not experienced them. We allude to the strange fusionthat a dream often effects between two persons who henceforth form onlyone and yet remain distinct. Generally one of these is the dreamerhimself. He feels he has not ceased to be what he is; yet he has becomesomeone else. He is himself, and not himself. He hears himself speakand sees himself act, but he feels that some other "he" has borrowedhis body and stolen his voice. Or perhaps he is conscious of speakingand acting as usual, but he speaks of himself as a stranger with whomhe has nothing in common; he has stepped out of his own self. Does itnot seem as though we found this same extraordinary confusion in many acomic scene? I am not speaking of Amphitryon, in which play theconfusion is perhaps suggested to the mind of the spectator, though thebulk of the comic effect proceeds rather from what we have alreadycalled a "reciprocal interference of two series. " I am speaking of theextravagant and comic reasonings in which we really meet with thisconfusion in its pure form, though it requires some looking into topick it out. For instance, listen to Mark Twain's replies to thereporter who called to interview him:

QUESTION. Isn't that a brother of yours? ANSWER. Oh! yes, yes, yes! Nowyou remind me of it, that WAS a brother of mine. That's William--BILLwe called him. Poor old Bill!

Q. Why? Is he dead, then? A. Ah! well, I suppose so. We never couldtell. There was a great mystery about it. 

Q. That is sad, very sad. He disappeared, then? A. Well, yes, in a sortof general way. We buried him. 

Q. BURIED him! BURIED him, without knowing whether he was dead or not?A. Oh no! Not that. He was dead enough. 

Q. Well, I confess that I can't understand this. If you buried him, andyou knew he was dead--A. No! no! We only thought he was. 

Q. Oh, I see! He came to life again? A. I bet he didn't. 

Q. Well, I never heard anything like this. SOMEBODY was dead. SOMEBODYwas buried. Now, where was the mystery? A. Ah! that's just it! That'sit exactly. You see, we were twins, --defunct and I, --and we got mixedin the bath-tub when we were only two weeks old, and one of us wasdrowned. But we didn't know which. Some think it was Bill. Some thinkit was me. 

Q. Well, that is remarkable. What do YOU think? A. Goodness knows! Iwould give whole worlds to know. This solemn, this awful tragedy hascast a gloom over my whole life. But I will tell you a secret now, which I have never revealed to any creature before. One of us had apeculiar mark, --a large mole on the back of his left hand: that was ME. THAT CHILD WAS THE ONE THAT WAS DROWNED! . .. Etc. , etc. 

A close examination will show us that the absurdity of this dialogue isby no means an absurdity of an ordinary type. It would disappear werenot the speaker himself one of the twins in the story. It resultsentirely from the fact that Mark Twain asserts he is one of thesetwins, whilst all the time he talks as though he were a third personwho tells the tale. In many of our dreams we adopt exactly the samemethod. 

V

Regarded from this latter point of view, the comic seems to show itselfin a form somewhat different from the one we lately attributed to it. Up to this point, we have regarded laughter as first and foremost ameans of correction. If you take the series of comic varieties andisolate the predominant types at long intervals, you will find that allthe intervening varieties borrow their comic quality from theirresemblance to these types, and that the types themselves are so manymodels of impertinence with regard to society. To these impertinencessociety retorts by laughter, an even greater impertinence. So evidentlythere is nothing very benevolent in laughter. It seems rather inclinedto return evil for evil. 

But this is not what we are immediately struck by in our firstimpression of the laughable. The comic character is often one withwhom, to begin with, our mind, or rather our body, sympathises. By thisis meant that we put ourselves for a very short time in his place, adopt his gestures, words, arid actions, and, if amused by anythinglaughable in him, invite him, in imagination, to share his amusementwith us; in fact, we treat him first as a playmate. So, in the laugherwe find a "hail-fellow-well-met" spirit--as far, at least, asappearances go--which it would be wrong of us not to take intoconsideration. In particular, there is in laughter a movement ofrelaxation which has often been noticed, and the reason of which wemust try to discover. Nowhere is this impression more noticeable thanin the last few examples. In them, indeed, we shall find itsexplanation. 

When the comic character automatically follows up his idea, heultimately thinks, speaks and acts as though he were dreaming. Now, adream is a relaxation. To remain in touch with things and men, to seenothing but what is existent and think nothing but what is consistent, demands a continuous effort of intellectual tension. This effort iscommon sense. And to remain sensible is, indeed, to remain at work. Butto detach oneself from things and yet continue to perceive images, tobreak away from logic and yet continue to string together ideas, is toindulge in play or, if you prefer, in dolce far niente. So, comicabsurdity gives us from the outset the impression of playing withideas. Our first impulse is to join in the game. That relieves us fromthe strain of thinking. Now, the same might be said of the other formsof the laughable. Deep-rooted in the comic, there is always a tendency, we said, to take the line of least resistance, generally that of habit. The comic character no longer tries to be ceaselessly adapting andreadapting himself to the society of which he is a member. He slackensin the attention that is due to life. He more or less resembles theabsentminded. Maybe his will is here even more concerned than hisintellect, and there is not so much a want of attention as a lack oftension; still, in some way or another, he is absent, away from hiswork, taking it easy. He abandons social convention, as indeed--in thecase we have just been considering--he abandoned logic. Here, too, ourfirst impulse is to accept the invitation to take it easy. For a shorttime, at all events, we join in the game. And that relieves us from thestrain of living. 

But we rest only for a short time. The sympathy that is capable ofentering into the impression of the comic is a very fleeting one. Italso comes from a lapse in attention. Thus, a stern father may at timesforget himself and join in some prank his child is playing, only tocheck himself at once in order to correct it. 

Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, itmust make a painful impression on the person against whom it isdirected. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties takenwith it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathyor kindness. 

Shall we be told that the motive, at all events; may be a good one, that we often punish because we love, and that laughter, by checkingthe outer manifestations of certain failings, thus causes the personlaughed at to correct these failings and thereby improve himselfinwardly?

Much might be said on this point. As a general rule, and speakingroughly, laughter doubtless exercises a useful function. Indeed, thewhole of our analysis points to this fact. But it does not thereforefollow that laughter always hits the mark or is invariably inspired bysentiments of kindness or even of justice. 

To be certain of always hitting the mark, it would have to proceed froman act of reflection. Now, laughter is simply the result of a mechanismset up in us by nature or, what is almost the same thing, by our longacquaintance with social life. It goes off spontaneously and returnstit for tat. It has no time to look where it hits. Laughter punishescertain failing's somewhat as disease punishes certain forms of excess, striking down some who are innocent and sparing some who are guilty, aiming at a general result and incapable of dealing separately witheach individual case. And so it is with everything that comes to passby natural means instead of happening by conscious reflection. Anaverage of justice may show itself in the total result, though thedetails, taken separately, often point to anything but justice. 

In this sense, laughter cannot be absolutely just. Nor should it bekind-hearted either. Its function is to intimidate by humiliating. Now, it would not succeed in doing this, had not nature implanted for thatvery purpose, even in the best of men, a spark of spitefulness or, atall events, of mischief. Perhaps we had better not investigate thispoint too closely, for we should not find anything very flattering toourselves. We should see that this movement of relaxation or expansionis nothing but a prelude to laughter, that the laugher immediatelyretires within himself, more self-assertive and conceited than ever, and is evidently disposed to look upon another's personality as amarionette of which he pulls the strings. In this presumptuousness wespeedily discern a degree of egoism and, behind this latter, somethingless spontaneous and more bitter, the beginnings of a curious pessimismwhich becomes the more pronounced as the laugher more closely analyseshis laughter. 

Here, as elsewhere, nature has utilised evil with a view to good. It ismore especially the good that has engaged our attention throughout thiswork. We have seen that the more society improves, the more plastic isthe adaptability it obtains from its members; while the greater thetendency towards increasing stability below, the more does it force tothe surface the disturbing elements inseparable from so vast a bulk;and thus laughter performs a useful function by emphasising the form ofthese significant undulations. Such is also the truceless warfare ofthe waves on the surface of the sea, whilst profound peace reigns inthe depths below. The billows clash and collide with each other, asthey strive to find their level. A fringe of snow-white foam, featheryand frolicsome, follows their changing outlines. From time to time, thereceding wave leaves behind a remnant of foam on the sandy beach. Thechild, who plays hard by, picks up a handful, and, the next moment, isastonished to find that nothing remains in his grasp but a few drops ofwater, water that is far more brackish, far more bitter than that ofthe wave which brought it. Laughter comes into being in the self-samefashion. It indicates a slight revolt on the surface of social life. Itinstantly adopts the changing forms of the disturbance. It, also, isafroth with a saline base. Like froth, it sparkles. It is gaietyitself. But the philosopher who gathers a handful to taste may findthat the substance is scanty, and the after-taste bitter. 

[THE END]