tead of accommodating itself to things. And so the play
upon 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 certain
playfulness of the mind which ends at playing upon words. The comic in
TRANSPOSITION is much more far-reaching. Indeed, transposition is to
ordinary language what repetition is to comedy.

We said that repetition is the favourite method of classic comedy. It
consists in so arranging events that a scene is reproduced either
between the same characters under fresh circumstances or between fresh
characters under the same circumstances. Thus we have, repeated by
lackeys in less dignified language, a scene already played by their
masters. Now, imagine ideas expressed in suitable style and thus placed
in the setting of their natural environment. If you think of some
arrangement whereby they are transferred to fresh surroundings, while
maintaining their mutual relations, or, in other words, if you can
induce them to express themselves in an altogether different style and
to transpose themselves into another key, you will have language itself
playing 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 acquainted
with the natural one--the one which we should have chosen
instinctively. So it will be enough if the effort of comic invention
bears on the other, and on the other alone. No sooner is the second set
before us than we spontaneously supply the first. Hence the following
general rule: A COMIC EFFECT IS ALWAYS OBTAINABLE BY TRANSPOSING THE
NATURE EXPRESSION OF AN IDEA INTO ANOTHER KEY.

The means of transposition are so many and varied, language affords so
rich a continuity of themes and the comic is here capable of passing
through so great a number of stages, from the most insipid buffoonery
up to the loftiest forms of humour and irony, that we shall forego the
attempt to make out a complete list. Having stated the rule, we will
simply, here and there, verify its main applications.

In the first place, we may distinguish two keys at the extreme ends of
the scale, the solemn and the familiar. The most obvious effects are
obtained by merely transposing the one into the other, which thus
provides us with two opposite currents of comic fanc