avelling in Switzerland, arrested and imprisoned: second series,
independent of the former. Now let Tartarin be manacled to Bonivard's
chain, thus making the two stories seem for a moment to coincide, and
you will get a very amusing scene, one of the most amusing that
Daudet's imagination has pictured. [Tartarin sur les Alpes, by Daudet.]
Numerous incidents of the mock-heroic style, if analysed, would reveal
the same elements. The transposition from the ancient to the
modern--always a laughable one--draws its inspiration from the same
idea. Labiche has made use of this method in every shape and form.
Sometimes he begins by building up the series separately, and then
delights in making them interfere with one another: he takes an
independent group--a wedding-party, for instance--and throws them into
altogether unconnected surroundings, into which certain coincidences
allow of their being foisted for the time being. Sometimes he keeps one
and the same set of characters right through the play, but contrives
that certain of these characters have something to conceal--have, in
fact, a secret understanding on the point--in short, play a smaller
comedy within the principal one: at one moment, one of the two comedies
is on the point of upsetting the other; the next, everything comes
right and the coincidence between the two series is restored.
Sometimes, even, he introduces into the actual series a purely
immaterial series of events, an inconvenient past, for instance, that
some one has an interest in concealing, but which is continually
cropping up in the present, and on each occasion is successfully
brought into line with situations with which it seemed destined to play
havoc. But in every case we find the two independent series, and also
their partial coincidence.

We will not carry any further this analysis of the methods of light
comedy. Whether we find reciprocal interference of series, inversion,
or repetition, we see that the objective is always the same--to obtain
what we have called a MECHANISATION of life. You take a set of actions
and relations and repeat it as it is, or turn it upside down, or
transfer it bodily to another set with which it partially
coincides--all these being processes that consist in looking upon life
as a repeating mechanism, with reversible action and interchangeable
parts. Actual life is comedy just so far as it produces, in a natural
fashion, actions of the same kind,--consequently, just so f