ake some scandalous situation, some low-class
calling or disgraceful behaviour, and describe them in terms of the
utmost "RESPECTABILITY," is generally comic. The English word is here
purposely employed, as the practice itself is characteristically
English. Many instances of it may be found in Dickens and Thackeray,
and in English literature generally. Let us remark, in passing, that
the intensity of the effect does not here depend on its length. A word
is sometimes sufficient, provided it gives us a glimpse of an entire
system of transposition accepted in certain social circles and reveals,
as it were, a moral organisation of immorality. Take the following
remark made by an official to one of his subordinates in a novel of
Gogol's, "Your peculations are too extensive for an official of your
rank."

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

The most common of these contrasts is perhaps that between the real and
the ideal, between what is and what ought to be. Here again
transposition may take place in either direction. Sometimes we state
what ought to be done, and pretend to believe that this is just what is
actually being done; then we have IRONY. Sometimes, on the contrary, we
describe with scrupulous minuteness what is being done, and pretend to
believe that this is just what ought to be done; such is often the
method of HUMOUR. Humour, thus denned, is the counterpart of irony.
Both are forms of satire, but irony is oratorical in its nature, whilst
humour partakes of the scientific. Irony is emphasised the higher we
allow ourselves to be uplifted by the idea of the good that ought to
be: thus irony may grow so hot within us that it becomes a kind of
high-pressure eloquence. On the other hand, humour is the more
emphasised the deeper we go down into an evil that actually is, in
order t o set down its details in the most cold-blooded indifference.
Several authors, Jean Paul amongst them, have noticed that humour
delights in concrete terms, technical details, definite facts. If our
analysis is correct, this is not an accidental trait of humour, it is
its very essence. A humorist